by David Mason
I was the only customer for a bed. After a mixed grill I took off upstairs for a hot shower. Even after 30 minutes its plumbing remained mysterious. After a turn of the tap, a troubled prostate dribble, then nothing. Just wet enough to lather and rinse. The hotel towel changed from a bleached grey to the dull brown of the water.
Well before dawn I was awake, I could not get back to sleep and kept thinking about the future and the road ahead. I knew I was getting physically and mentally tired; the need to keep moving having its effect on me. If possible I was becoming more and more obsessed about getting along. The broken bedsprings did not help, particularly the one that stabbed my right shoulder blade.
I waited outside the cafe next to the pub until it opened and ordered sausages, eggs and toast. It was run by two Germans who smoked More Menthol Mild cigarettes and had the wet coughs of smokers. By 7 a.m. they were already chain smoking. There were place mats at every table, kindly donated – or provided at a cheap rate – by the company pedalling More cigarettes. It was bloody terrible. As the cook brought the plate out from the kitchen he coughed and spluttered and I imagined parts of his lungs jellying among the eggs.
It took me some time to pull myself together, to cross the road and go back to the camels to load them up. Lifting and placing blankets on camel backs, then saddles and gear, I wondered at the nature of obsession, how it can be such a creator and such a destroyer at the same time.
As I was saddling up the camels and reflecting on obsession a young man named Greg introduced himself. He drew himself up and proudly told me he was seven years old. He sat on the steel upper railing of the cattle yard and plied me with questions about camels and my trip. I asked him what he wanted to do with his life. ‘I want to be a shearer and a roo shooter,’ he said. When I asked him about school he gave me the look of someone many years his senior. He held his arms up and embraced the land around us. ‘This is my school,’ he said and he laughed.
Later that day, camels and I camped at the 541 marker in the railway reserve. There was no dew and it was very cool. Not long after midnight, a freight train passed, pulling trucks of livestock destined for the hamburger market in the east. It rolled on for too long and the fragrance of fear and shit hung like a fog.
At 4.30 a.m. I woke with a start. Over the sound of rain hitting the canvas of my swag I heard Kashgar crying out for help. Her sound was the deep throaty bellow of a distressed milking cow, though a pitch or two deeper, with a resonance and urgency that was hers alone. Scrambling from the swag I fell into the mud and cried out in pain. My left knee locked, I twisted and fell into the mud. I lay on my back, with the sky wet on my face, gripped my thigh and pressed down toward my knee. I had hurt myself, but I had to help Kashgar. I could not stop so I pulled on boots and otherwise naked, with the rain sluicing down my muddied body, I hobbled to where she was crying.
Kashgar stood trembling and patient, waiting for me. It was a simple thing to untangle her from the rope. I felt the warmth of her body against mine and her breath on my neck. I told the shine of her wet eyes that everything would be fine. Wet, cold, sticky and slippery with mud, I slumped down into the warmth of the swag.
By the next morning my knee seemed to have recovered. I lay in the swag and brought my knee to my chest. Not a click, crunch or a spasm. I had no idea what had brought on the pain but I was very glad it was gone. It was one of the things that happened now and again. For some reason my body would rebel and not perform as I wished. Though I hurt it and abused it, my body never really let me down – or at least not for long.
True to a weather report yesterday morning, it rained in the afternoon and I was wet through again! My shirt hung from my now bony shoulders and was greasy, sticky and warm against my back. My pants hung heavy from the leather belt at my waist. My buttocks had shrunk to hard round balls and I did not like to sit for too long on the hard tops of the food tins when preparing a meal.
As we moved along, the country was changing again. From the richly grassed black soil plains of the Darling Downs, the country was becoming red. We were moving into mulga country. The skin of the soil I was walking on was hard, less giving and there were fewer crops, sheep, cattle or people. There was less wheatgold in this country and the grey-green crowned mulga was starting to crowd out the blue of the sky.
I hoped to make it into Charleville to give the camels a rest, to get gear cleaned and repaired, buy food, and rest myself for the next stage to Birdsville. I also wanted to talk with people again, beyond the fragmented conversations of strangers.
Kashgar and a rainbow – not far from Charleville.
4 To the Desert
– 13 May 1998
Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God’s sake go and do it; Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.
Robert Service
A week later we were on the Adavale road about 18 kilometres out of Charleville. There was a marker flanked by three kurrajong trees just off the right-hand side of the track that said:
Captain Sir Ross Smith and Lieutenant Sir Keith Smith landed on this plain on the first England to Australia flight on 23rd December 1919.
Erected by the Murweh Shire Council.
When I looked across the plain I thought it must have been nerve-racking for the two aviators. Even though the plain seemed pretty flat and the grass would have dried off in the summer and made any large obstacles visible, there were still plenty of ant nests up to a foot or so high that could have ripped the undercarriage from the fuselage. These must have been almost invisible from the air.
Charleville was good to me. I had the camels checked by the vet. The local police and officers of the water resources department advised me on the route. I had gear repaired and improved by Eric Burgess the saddler. I even had time to attend the Charleville Show Ball at the invitation of Alan MacDonald who brought me a beer in the main bar of the remarkable Corones Hotel.
This hotel was built over five years and completed in 1929 by Harry Corones, a man with vision. Reportedly costing £50,000, an enormous sum at the time, it had on its ground floor a reading room with copper-topped tables, deep leather lounges and a ballroom. Upstairs, the accommodation included private rooms with ensuite bathrooms. All the rooms had the advantage of opening on to the wide first-floor verandah, which in the height of summer must have been a blessing.
Harry and the hotel played host to Amy Johnson, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and Gracie Fields. On entering the main entrance you can imagine women with hair piled on their heads, jewels at their throats, swaying in silk; their men in dinner suits, collars starched and their foreheads glistening.
Corones Hotel, Charleville.
I spoke on the Charleville School of Distance Education, formerly known as the School of the Air, to tell the schoolchildren, and thus their parents, of the reasons for my trip and the route we would be taking. The school had been operating out of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory from 1951, on the back of recognition that each remote sheep or cattle station in Australia had an HF radio for communication with the Royal Flying Doctor Service network – another Outback institution. In Charleville the School of the Air came into operation in 1966. By 1970 it consisted of four teachers and ran lessons 11 hours a day for more than 200 children.
Sure Charleville was good to me but there was more to it than that. I liked the town, its open spaces and wide shaded verandahs. I learned that the first European in the area was Edmund Kennedy in 1847, that the town was gazetted in 1868 and drawn up with very wide streets to enable bullock teams of up to 14 pairs to turn pulling their wagons. Cobb & Co., the legendary Australian stage coach company that once ran services west from Brisbane, established a coach-building service in the town in 1886. This was very bad timing as the railway arrived two years later and drove the demise of the coach; and of the bullock teams for that matter.
While in town I also picked up parcels, one of which contained a sleeping bag. At last I no longer had to tolerate wet blankets for my bed. Ins
tead they formed a mattress to ease the pain of my back, beginning to ache more and more from the pounding of my footfall on the track.
There had been talk of more rain and no sooner had we walked out of Charleville, along the track to Adavale, than down it came. It was a molten mist, a wet blur covering everything. It rained like this for a few minutes, so that everything was drenched – camels, gear and me.
Later, after the marker to the aviators, I set up an army hootchie, a plastic sheet, and was ready to settle in for the night by 5.45 p.m. With winter drawing closer the days were becoming shorter. And then it rained again. With my swag set out, at least I had a place that was relatively dry. As I lay in my swag I reflected on a meeting earlier in the day – with the Adavale policeman.
He stepped out of his Toyota air-conditioning and onto the dusty track in creased blue shorts. His shining black shoes soon grew a patina of red dust, and as we spoke the dust worked its way up the socks that hugged his calves to his bare knees. He told me he didn’t like metropolitan work, so he volunteered to come out here. He said he and his wife loved the country and the people. They loved the wide open spaces and the sense of freedom that seeing the horizon gave them. Geoff invited me to stay with him in Adavale on my way through to Windorah.
Lying in the swag, hands behind my head, the rain drumming on the sheet above me, I was feeling angry, a knot of frustration tightening in my belly. Maybe this was because no matter how hard I tried to make everything perfect for the camels, no matter how I tied the loads, no matter what I did with the sheepskin blankets and rugs, there was always some rubbing, something else that had to be done. I thought that I now knew enough to save myself some time and emotional energy not having to worry so much about gear, load and camels. I had to acknowledge the reality to myself, and there was no getting past it, I still had plenty to learn about the mechanics of camels and their saddles and one other very important thing: patience.
As I rolled over to sleep in the bivvy bag, I felt something run over my neck and across my face. It sensed it stop on the canvas of the swag. Clicking on my headlamp’s light I was greeted with quivering antennae and the largest centipede I had seen in some time, a good 30 centimetres, ceramic green and red, certainly with a painful bite. It was most unwelcome and with a flick of my wrist I sent it into the wet darkness.
Next morning the sky appeared to be clearing, though everything was wet. I spread out the gear to dry over green and sepia mulga bushes and put the camels on long lines to feed. According to reports on the radio, 112 millimetres of rain fell in parts of western Queensland the previous night. The table drains that carried water from the track were silt-laden bogs.
Late in the afternoon I met Julie Moore on her motorbike, out rounding up goats. I saw her coming in the distance, skinny white teenage legs, thin T-shirt and sandshoes but no helmet. In her lap sat a small fox terrier who yapped at the goats and me, but not at the camels. Julie told me she spent five days a week boarding in Charleville going to school, and the weekend at home. I asked her if she wanted to leave the mulga country and she looked at me with a bemused smile and gently shook her head.
She said I could stop by her place; her parents knew I was coming. I did, ‘just for a cup of tea’, and met Richard, who was working on some yards near the house, Liz, who had been working in the garden, and six-year-old Rosemary who scampered down the path from the house. She met me and the camels and was quick to show me her front tooth that was close to falling out. ‘Won’t the tooth fairy love it?’ she asked.
Julie Moore meeting Kabul west of Charleville.
West of Charleville.
As the tea was being poured rain began to fall again. Richard and Liz glanced at each other for a moment and invited me to stay the night. Over dinner, Richard told me that the only way he could keep his place going was through raising and selling goats. There was no money raising sheep and the country could not sustain sufficient numbers of cattle to make the property financially viable. So he ran goats, all the while knowing the damage they do to the land. They grazed any grass they found to the root, and when there was no grass left they climbed into trees to eat the tender shoots of the eucalypt. Later still, when there was little else, they stripped the bark off the trees and killed them too.
Richard trucked the goats to the Charleville abattoir where the animals were butchered and sent overseas, mainly to the Middle East. Richard was caught in a bind, and he knew it. The goats were the things that kept the property in the black. Just. They were also the very things that would slowly, but very surely, kill the land he loved.
Goats were also the prey of unwelcome visitors from the city. Richard showed me a bullet hole in the side of the house. Someone after a good trophy head had shot at a goat from the road, not knowing or perhaps even caring that people lived in the house.
Leaving the Moore family, who headed off to the Charleville Show at around 10, we walked to Langlo Crossing. Langlo Crossing was marked on my map as a village. Maybe it once was, but not now. There was just one house and it looked very lonely and empty to me. I saw it from a way off, the corrugated-iron roof bouncing signals from the sun, the curtains drawn and no sign of people about. I did not even knock on the door.
A little way along to the north-west, we walked down into the river crossing and a narrow wooden bridge. As we approached, the camels became very nervous. They could see through the wooden planks to the brown flowing water beneath them. I told them there was nothing to worry about and tried to reassure them by speaking softly to them. Despite this, we finished the five metre crossing at a camel canter and there was lots of creaking of gear, deep sighing and blowing of cheeks. I turned to see Kashgar squirting liquid shit in a slippery green-brown arc to the east.
I felt pretty low in the morning and soon developed a headache; perhaps I had not been drinking enough. Even so, later in the day I felt better, the best I had for days. As I sat on the swag looking into the fire and beyond to the stars, I thought I could see a little of myself in both. The further west we headed the more connected I felt to the land, as if it was on, in and under my skin. I felt that a part of me was letting go, and another part of me was opening to the country.
I rolled out the swag and slipped inside, put my hands under my head, looked to the stars and sighed. My swag was a wonderful thing. It was my seat and my rip-stop canvas home that rolled up with many of the things I needed inside. I had the swag made to my design, in three parts. The central part was twice the width of my body, its length 60 centimetres longer than me with deep sleeves at the top and bottom and 30 centimetre flaps. A dense mat fitted into the sleeves as well as my shaving gear, small towel, diary, headlamp, spare clothes, small radio and sewing kit. On one side a similar length and width and the other side, double the width and the same length. This meant that when unrolled, the flap supplied a working surface where I could lay out gear and do sewing. Even if I dropped a needle, I could find it. I also had brass eyelets set into the corners of the widest side so that I could use the flap as a lean-to.
Walking the track we encountered the corrugations that reminded drivers they were in the country. For us they were even lake ripples, the height depending on when a breeze blew to freeze the waves before they broke. They were something to be crossed, the boot not able to plant itself squarely on the ground, and every day I felt my tendons stretch and bend, and my lower back jar. I slowed to a stroll to give the camels ample opportunity to feed. Chloe’s small rubs looked like they were healing up and she was looking fatter and fatter.
That night I turned on my small radio to a rugby match and the caller described the contact of men. To cries of ‘he’s got the ball’ I imagined the crowd of colours, cheering, crying and catcalling. It was a world away, of beer in plastic cups and corporate boxes. I lay in my swag looking at the darkness punctured with flickering, blinking light. To lie in my swag, the licking light of the fire, the company of the camels and the trees and watch the pinpricks move against the great dark dome w
as a gift of life and time. I felt so elated, so fortunate and so privileged I felt short of breath and almost guilty I was not sharing it with someone else.
Just after dawn and a night of dreamless sleep, I lay in the swag and looked out onto mulga ants’ nests, small cities raised above the hard red ground with the mulga leaf roofing like a thatch to prevent flooding. There was something about being out in the red soil country, the mulga, something clean about it. I was up and moving early to shift the camels to different trees on their long lines. Once they were happily eating I had breakfast, packed up the camp and moved off again.
Geoff the Adavale policeman, his wife Rhyna, Sam their son, and Tina the blue cattle dog came out to dinner from Adavale, bringing with them quiche, casserole, olives, beer, coffee and good conversation. Their generosity almost overwhelmed me and I simply could not fit it all inside me.
I had the fire going and the camels were tied to mulga trees that they ate in their measured and leisurely way. It seemed to me that Geoff wanted to discuss the nature of things – life and why we do the things we do. His wife, though, was not at all keen to see her man lapse into a discussion of this type. She seemed far too sensible for that and instead insisted on turning the discussion to children, air-conditioning and the quality of water to wash her family’s clothes.
Rhyna and Geoff told me that the route I intended to take north-west from Adavale to Windorah was an old Cobb & Co. track only rarely used, and not in recent memory. I was looking forward to it. They seemed a little dubious about my taking it at all until I convinced them that if I did have a problem I always had an emergency locator beacon close to hand.
In fact, I had plenty of safety items, including a headlamp. I set the Petzl lamp on my head and before the generous and friendly family left I made a brew. Instead of the black stuff I had drunk for so long, Rhyna had brought some milk. As I poured it into my cup canteen, I watched it become an exploding nebula in the darkness of the coffee, spreading like the obsession that my walk had become.
