“Too much about each other, down to the last carbuncle and lovers’ tiff!” her husband interrupted, and Maisie gave him a quick reproving glance.
They were probably thinking of Steve’s broken engagement, Jane realised, but he seemed oblivious to the momentary tension.
Susan was saying to Lisa, “I heard you talking to Dr. Banjo, too. He said he was coming on to see you at the Blue River. Did he come? Isn’t he nice? I love him. I’d’ve died if he’d said I couldn’t go to the races.”
“He did come, and he is very nice, and he is letting me have fun, too,” Lisa replied contentedly.
“Can you ride and swim, if you can’t walk?” Sue demanded next, with interest, and Lisa explained how these feats were possible if your arms were strong enough.
Art came through from the cockpit and spoke to Steve.
“We’ll be passing over Marjorie soon. That right, you don’t want to drop down and pick up Joan and Andy?” he asked as if something were giving him secret amusement.
“That’s right,” Steve answered equably. “They’ll have made their own arrangements by now.”
Mrs. Newbery added quickly, “Didn’t you notice that Oonga couldn’t raise Marjorie these last few days? Either the Blackmores are away or something’s wrong with their set.”
Tom laughed. “Likely. Andy’s probably waiting for someone with know-how to drop by and put it right for him. He seems to be going combo lately. Manana ... tomorrow will do—”
Lisa asked what combo meant, and repeated her question about the pedal-wireless. “You’re way ahead of an English village in most things, but ‘pedal-wireless’ sounds a bit old-fashioned even to me!”
Maisie Elliot laughed. “ ‘Combo’ means gone native ... it’s not hard to understand, when you’ve got a station like Marjorie. Andy’s sort of unlucky. The bores he sinks don’t bring up water, he loses more stock every dry than he takes to the railhead, and he doesn’t seem able to keep his stockmen.”
Tom said uncomfortably, “It’s not all Andy’s fault. That station never has had enough water. I guess he has a struggle to scrape a living off it.”
Mrs. Newbery said thoughtfully, “You’d think Joan would stir him up about the transceiver, though. It must be bleak at Marjorie when they’re out of contact.”
“They’ll be in town for the races, you’ll see. And I bet Andy gets someone to go home with him and fix it for him.” Tom, sitting with his legs sprawled out in the gangway beside his silent son, who was staring down at the plain below the aircraft, grinned in a mocking way at Steve and Lisa. “We’re not all lucky enough to have a deep-water river running through our land, and about a dozen working bores,” he said slowly, “and when we call a transceiver a pedal-wireless, Lisa, it’s a sort of testimony to the old days. A sort of tribute to the Reverend John Flynn and Alfred Traeger—Alf invented a wireless set that could receive and transmit Morse, with a small generator that the operator could charge by pedalling.”
“That was in operation in 1928,” Maisie contributed, “I’ll never forget that date. I was born prematurely in June, and my dad pedalled like a lunatic, sending out one of the first-ever SOS’s to the new Flying Doctor Base at Cloncurry.” She laughed again richly. “He always said the advice he got saved my life. I was so small he thought I’d never make it. They told him how to make a sort of incubator, and to feed me with a fountain-pen filler.”
“So you’re a part of the history of the R.F.D.S., Mum, aren’t you?” Vince gave his mother a boyish grin. “They should’ve put you in that film they made about it.”
“What—show me forty-five years after? Not likely, Vince. But that’s why you’ll often hear the transceiver called a pedal-wireless still, Lisa. Of course they’re all battery-operated now and we don’t have to use Morse.” She turned to the older woman with a friendly smile, “You remember the old pedal-wireless, don’t you, Mrs. Newbery? Most people in the Inland didn’t have generators to charge batteries in those days, or the regular aircraft services to bring the recharged battery out from town.”
“Certainly I do.” Nubby shook her head sadly. ‘They had a pedal-wireless at the lumber camp where my husband was killed—a doctor flew out, but Jock was dead before they could do anything—the manager just filled him up with whisky to deaden the pain. He said afterwards that it wasn’t a bad way to go ... Jock was terribly smashed up, they’d have had to amputate both legs, and I can’t imagine what sort of life he would have had then, he was an outdoor man, a hard worker. Not one for office work or reading.”
Steve said quietly, “If that happened to me, I’d prefer to go out full of good Scotch,” and there was a small silence in the aircraft before the children started chattering again and Tom and Steve got into a discussion about the recent musters and the number and quality of the mobs got safely to the railhead. Tom said, “I trucked about five hundred of the fattest, couldn’t afford to truck more. But they do lose weight on the trail.”
“About twelve dollars’ worth per steer, Joel reckons. But we allow for that when mustering. We start them off a bit overweight.”
“Hark to the man!” Tom threw a laughing glance towards his wife. “When you’ve got all the water you need, and the best herd of Herefords and Shorthorns in the shire. You can afford to overfatten while the rest of us are struggling to keep a few hundred pounds of meat on our poor creatures’ bones!”
Steve nodded. “I’m lucky at the Blue River. But it’s impossible to fence a property that size, I’d have to be a multi-millionaire. We have our losses in a drought, Tom, and I get more than my share of Andy’s mickies in my mobs.”
“Mickies?” Lisa asked, thinking she had been left out of the conversation long enough.
“Cross-bred cattle gone wild,” Steve explained patiently, “they’re apt to spoil any attempt at breeding control, at building up a good herd. Fencing’s pretty expensive on our scale, so we don’t have many pure-breds except from the Department of Agriculture studs.”
“Fencing and more bores, and proper roads for trucking to the railhead or the meatworks, that’s what we need,” Tom grinned at Lisa, “the bush tracks couldn’t take that amount of transport.”
Lisa grinned back. “It sounds as if you could do with some big planes like the Concorde for flying them out!” Tom and Steve chuckled. ‘That’ll be the day! Beef-tankers, eh!” Tom did sums on his big fingers, “Let’s see. Steve’d need at least ten at about thirty million dollars apiece. I don’t think even the Blue River fats would bring in that kind of profit.”
“Too right they wouldn’t,” Steve agreed laconically, “my beef won’t fly yet awhile.”
“It’s just an idea,” Lisa said demurely, “to file away for future reference.” She grinned back at Tom. “All you rich graziers could combine, like a sort of co-op, and fly out the—the mobs from each station in turn? Or maybe the meat-processing firms will come to you in turn, one day, like the combine-harvesters go round the English and American farms.”
“My goodness, you certainly have some bright ideas!” Tom said admiringly when he could stop laughing. “Beef killed, processed, canned or deep-frozen on the spot, eh?”
Steve turned and smiled down at her. “When you’ve been here a bit longer, Lisa, you’ll have a better idea of the distances in this country. Distances, climate, and lack of sufficient metalled roads to carry heavy machinery around from station to station.”
“Think of the time it would save in the end!” Lisa was cheerfully undaunted in the face of their amusement. “The Flying Doctor Service was just a bright idea forty-five years ago, wasn’t it? I bet your Reverend John Flynn and Alfred Traeger had plenty of opposition when they thought up that one—and now you all take it for granted.”
“Too right they did.” Maisie looked at the girl with new respect. “Well, for a pommie, you certainly do have some bright ideas, Lisa.”
Tom added drily, “Remember your old friends when there’s a Lisa Lesley Flying Beef Service, won’t you?” Then they
were flying over Oonga and Jane exclaimed, “It looks much bigger from the air! When we came through on Friday I thought it was just one long, wide street... a few shops and houses.”
Art, coming to ask them to fasten their safety-belts, nodded. “We flew in from the other side then. Oonga is just one long, wide street nowadays. What you’re looking at now is a ghost town. Look closer and you’ll see most of them streets and houses is nothin’ but grassed-over ruins.”
The English girls stared down, fascinated and appalled as they realised the truth of his words. The wide, busy main street was still there, girt with trees and houses standing back in their bright gardens—but what must have been the outer suburbs were just grass-grown ruins, with the outlines of streets and houses still plainly visible as green mounds.
Tom explained that eighty years ago Oonga had been, briefly, a gold town. Where eight hundred people lived today there had been a mushroom city of twenty or thirty thousand prospectors.
“There were thirteen churches and thirteen hotels—pubs—and no one remembers how many camps and travelling salesmen having a whale of a time—it must have been quite a circus. Then, suddenly as it’d begun, the gold gave out. People folded their tents and melted away overnight.” He waved at the grassy ghost town mapped beneath them as the aircraft lost height and approached the runway, beyond which was visible the well-kept semi-circle of the racetrack with its grandstand and the tote and stable buildings. “That’s all we have left. It’s typical of so many mining towns in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, all over the world. The payload gives out, and a town dies almost overnight.”
“Oonga’s not dead,” Steve argued quietly, “eight hundred people don’t think so, anyway. They’ve got a bank, a garage, a stock and station agent, stores, a fine little hospital, a racecourse and an airstrip. They’re a township for a few hundred square miles around—for us. And they’re hoping to expand again into a town that isn’t dependent on a gold boom,” he pointed, and Lisa looked downward. “Macy’s got a grader working on South Street. He’s going to build a new row of houses after the wet.”
“I hope he sells ’em,” Tom drawled lazily, “it’s a nice little town all right, but four days is enough for me. I’m always glad to get back to Warren Downs.”
Maisie gave her comfortable chuckle. “How like a man! I’m the same. But wait till Vince and Susan grow up, Tom—they may prefer living and working in the town.”
The plane taxied to a stop amidst the loud protests of the Elliot children.
Joel was waiting for them at the airstrip with the utility, which he had driven in on Monday, and Tom’s head stockman Billy Rogers was waiting for the Elliots with the Warren Downs utility.
During the short flight Jane felt she had come to know the Elliot family like old friends. She remarked on this to Mrs. Newbery as the Elliots drove away. “Everything seems to happen so quickly here! They still call one a ‘foreigner’ in Devon until one has lived there about twenty years.”
“Aye. But this is still a new country, Jane—and vast. With a population of only eleven million people in nearly three million square miles—and most of those congregated naturally enough in the coastal towns and cities—we still have the pioneering spirit. Especially in the Outback, we are struggling against the same things—distance, climate, transport, water shortage ... you heard them just now.” She smiled at Jane’s thoughtful expression, nodding to where Lisa was laughing with Joel and Steve as they lifted her into the utility. “Your sister makes friends quickly enough, doesn’t she? That will go down well with the folk here—the one thing they cannot abide is any kind of snobbery or standoffishness.”
Jane laughed. “I think Lisa would go down well anywhere, she has no inhibitions.”
“And you have?” Nubby looked at her with her head on one side, smiling a little. “Reserve, maybe. We’re the same in Scotland, it takes us a long time to make friends, but a Scottish friend is your friend for life.”
Jane made a small expansive gesture with her hands. “I couldn’t be reserved here, could I? You and everyone at the Blue River have been so kind to us, and the Elliots are so nice and friendly—” she added shyly, “you all make us feel so truly welcome, and that’s a wonderful feeling!”
“Aye, the Elliots are nice, and so are most of the other station families around, forbye the Blackmores,” Nubby said quietly. “Ye’ll make plenty of new friends ' during the races, my dear. Ye’ll find there’s no’ a lot of social small-talk out here, but when they welcome you they mean it. They want you to feel truly at home.”
“Oh, I do!” Jane exclaimed involuntarily, “I feel as if we’d been here for years instead of five days ... Melcoombe is beginning to seem like a dream, and I’ve spent all my life there except for three years in London.
“Isn’t that—odd?”
“Home is where the heart is, they say,” Nubby quoted blandly but with a twinkle in her eye. She was looking at Steve now as he told an excited Jamie that he could not go and see Shiver in the racecourse paddocks until after tea at the hotel. Steve, she thought, had come very much alive again since the Lesleys arrived at the Blue River ... he’d been withdrawn, aloof, working himself almost to a standstill since that unpleasant business with Stewart in June and the breaking of his engagement to Alison. Nubby was delighted to see the change in him but she hoped with all her heart that it was Jane and not Lisa who had wrought it. Lisa was a gay and lovable little thing despite her disability and probably capable of loving faithfully—and Nubby had no use for any other kind of passionate attachment—but she would never in a million years make a grazier’s wife.
She added proudly, “Of course, being friends of Steve’s is a kind of passport. Steve is well liked by everyone except maybe the Blackmores.”
“What is this thing between the Blue River and Marjorie station?” Jane asked idly, beginning to use the idiom. “I can’t imagine Steve having a feud with a neighbour.”
“It isna of Steve’s making, but there’s a feud all right.” Nubby pursed her lips and for a moment her kindly face was stern. “And you are right tae call it a feud between the stations. It all began a long time ago, when Andy Blackmore’s grandfather and Steve’s were given their land grants. They had to draw lots, ye ken that was the fairest way—everyone wanted the better land, the land with water on it. The Blue River was the best for a hundred miles or more—and to cap all, we have more artesian water for the bores than Marjorie, but of course they only discovered that with modern drilling machinery. Anyway, they drew lots and Andrew Forrest got the Blue River and Matthew Blackmore got the Marjorie, and named it after his wife. There’s been considerable—” she drawled out the word meaningly, ‘con-seed-er-able’, “strife and jealousy ever since.”
“I suppose it’s natural in a way,” Jane mused aloud as they began walking towards the utility slowly, where Steve was looking pointedly at his watch, “if the Blackmores are struggling with a poor holding, to look over the fence and see the rich pastures and well-fed cattle of the Blue River!”
“Aye, ’tis natural enough. But remember the Forrests have always been generous folk. In the worst drought of the century David Forrest allowed his neighbours agistment—Marjorie is a Merino sheep station, and Mr. Forrest grazed over a thousand sheep for him while the drought lasted. You canna be more liberal than that, lass, in these parts. Water for the animals and to irrigate pasturelands is like giving the blood from your own veins.”
She added quietly, “If Mr. Forrest had not been so liberal, that would have been the end of Marjorie station. There’d have been nothing for young Andy to inherit.”
Jane stopped walking and turned to look at her companion, entranced yet puzzled by this feud dating back to the early pioneering days. “Then why?”
Nubby shrugged. “Ye heard what Tom Elliot said—Andy’s feckless. Lazy and discouraged. There’s no fences to look ower, Jane—ye canna fence in about two thousand miles of land! And that means we get their mickies—poor cattle—strayin
g into our herds. Mind you, Andy couldna stop them straying, but we seem to get more than our share. And there’s the poddy-dodging ... far too much of that goes on.” And there was Joan and Andy’s friendship for Stewart, she thought; anything to stick another goad into Steve’s side ... but she didn’t know what Steve had told Jane about his cousin and she was not going to rake up any family scandal.
“Poddy-dodging?” Jane smiled. “I can’t guess that one!”
They had come up to the others and Steve laughed suddenly. Jane standing there in her crisp cotton dress and floppy hat, in the afterglow of sunset, talking about poddy-dodging in that clear soft English voice of hers was suddenly amusing.
“It means pinching someone else’s cleanskin calves—before they’re mustered and branded—and putting your own brand on them. Quite a profitable game if the neighbour’s cattle happen to be a deal better than your own!”
When Jane said guilelessly, “But I thought Marjorie was a sheep station?” he shot a quizzical glance at Nubby, who was shooing Jamie into the utility.
“I see you’ve been doing your homework,” he told Jane dryly, “was is the operative word. The last few years their beef mobs have increased and improved out of all recognition. They cut out a few hundred of Tom’s and a few hundred of ours every season.” With a hand under her elbow he helped her into the utility, where extra seats had been fitted into the truck body for the trip.
Wedding at Blue River Page 13
