Craft For a Dry Lake

by Kim Mahood

  Bob hit offsider. Bill hit Bob. Good evening was had by all.

  Definitely a dry camp.

  ‘A dry camp’ is the colloquial term for a place where alcohol is banned. My father did not follow through with his intention on this occasion, and it was some years later, when my father gave up drinking himself, before the station was declared dry.

  It is impossible to talk about men in the Outback without talking about alcohol. I was in my twenties before I realised that drinking could be a civilised and moderate activity. My experience of drinking was of a process in which the men became progressively cheerful, aggressive, maudlin and violent, while the women, with a few exceptions, became cheerful, angry, aggrieved and frightened. There was usually a point where the women and children cleared out, either to go home, to take refuge with someone or simply to hide out in the darkness, out of range of the stumbling violence beginning to erupt among the men.

  The episode described in my father’s diary happened before the family moved to the station. My mother drove out during the school holidays with the older of my brothers and I. It was her first visit, and mine. The camp was a large bough shed, with an open campfire protected by a corrugated iron windbreak, and a rough timber bench for cooking. Dangerous Dan the drilling contractor was in residence, with his wife and a young child. We had been there for a few days when the visitors arrived. The drinking must have started in the afternoon. At some point Ferdie’s young offsider, who was from Adelaide, took the motor-bike for a ride. After some time it became evident that he was either lost or had had an accident. The men tracked him down easily enough and found him weeping and hysterical as darkness was beginning to fall. He had become disoriented and panicked, unable to follow his own tracks back to the road. He was hit, I think, because he was weeping and afraid.

  Bill hit Bob presumably because Bob hit the boy. I know everyone hit someone because they were drunk. I remember the darkness closing in around something fractured, an outrage on the brink of grief. The men’s voices were husky and congested with drunkenness and anger. The children and the women pulled back, out of range. Isolated between them was the young man from Adelaide, whom I remember only as a shape sobbing in the dusk.

  THERE WERE MEN SCATTERED all through the country whose lives seemed forever on the verge of being overtaken by fate. Their business partners disappeared with the chequebook, their wages didn’t get paid, often there was a woman lurking in the background in a dangerous and unpredictable state. They seemed always to be injuring themselves. Bits of windmills fell on them, horses kicked them, bad food and too much rum poisoned them, minor extremities were torn off by ropes and machinery. They lost their swags and their dogs and their jobs. They got stranded in Queensland with no money and broken-down cars and pregnant girlfriends. They walked into brawls without looking and got charged with disturbing the peace. They got picked up by girls when they went to town and found themselves in compromising situations with fifteen year olds. Their lives ran along an edge that threatened constantly to cut them to pieces. They seemed unbearably foolish and fragile, and my child’s heart suffered torment that they seemed always in such danger.

  But they were full of humour and panache. There was a sheer exuberant physicality about them that was about being male and young. Broken collarbones and broken ribs didn’t stop them pulling down a recalcitrant steer or riding a rough horse. They picked themselves up laughing out of the dirt. Physical courage was a given. What their inner lives consisted of, I have no notion. The articulate among them described their adventures more often than not with self-deprecating humour. The best stories were usually the ones of which they were the butt. The inarticulate had stories told about them and sometimes came off the better for it, since it was acceptable to eulogise the style and skill of others.

  There wasn’t much mercy extended to the foolish or the incompetent. Ironic nicknames stuck. If someone was referred to as the Ringer it usually meant he wasn’t. The Kiwi Ringer was passing through from somewhere to anywhere and needed a job. He rode very badly, to the huge entertainment of the Aboriginal stockmen, particularly Scotty. Scotty was small and strong, with a head of matted fair ringlets, and he rode a big hammer-headed wall-eyed horse called Woolly. Scotty laughed so hard at the sight of the Kiwi Ringer bouncing around in the saddle that he nearly fell off his own horse, setting off the other stockmen. He kept his head turned away out of politeness, but the shrieks and cackles bubbled out of him every time he rolled his eyes back at the stubby, uncomfortable figure.

  Things didn’t improve for the Kiwi Ringer. He proved to be lethargic and slow-witted, lying about the camp reading Deadwood Dicks when the team was not mustering. The head stockman Malley, the most good-natured and amiable of men, was exasperated to the point of shoving him around the fire on a particularly slow-moving morning. When the Ringer learned that he was on the same wage as the Aboriginal stockmen, he was affronted and demanded a raise. My father, initially speechless, told the Ringer that he, the Ringer, should be paying him, the boss, for putting up with him. The Ringer gave notice and then hung disconsolately about the camp for a week before he could cadge a lift back to town with the mission truck.

  Another ringer inhabits the early pages of the station diary. There is no explanation of how he came by his name, but the cryptic diary entries chart his brief career as an employee.

  28th October 1963—Gave the Mad Ringer and G. Dann jobs.

  15th November—Ringer handling the mob and doing a good job. Advised him he could have station job when he finishes with mob.

  25th Nov—Ringer arrived about 3.00 pm, so gave him rest of day to spell. He can now take over job as general handyman around the station.

  26th Nov—Ringer getting the place very tidy and shipshape.

  13th Dec—Sent Ringer into town with Blitz to take boy to hospital.

  14th Dec—Ringer got back late night.

  16th Dec—Found out that Ringer took 4 pigs and an unauthorised trip to Moyles. Also found out Ringer did not deliver the mail to Moyles.

  17th Dec—Dismissed Ringer.

  A pair of contractors earn the names Hydraulic and Trewalla, on the grounds that ‘what one couldn’t lift the other one would’. This does not refer to their physical strength but to their propensity for thieving. The stock-route bore they were contracted to equip, and which they named Sangster’s Well after the girlfriend of one of them, was renamed Gangster’s when my father discovered a cache of stolen tools and equipment stashed in a hole hollowed out of the side of the well.

  Men found their way to the Outback for all sorts of reasons. There were dreamers, like my father. There were misfits and misogynists and escapists and eccentrics and criminals. Some were on the run from wives or the law, some were looking for an opportunity to live out a fantasy. Most of them came north looking for a place where the constraints of society were more elastic, where they could be themselves, or leave behind the selves that had accumulated too much uncomfortable baggage.

  My father was essentially a rather shy man. He was thoughtful, sensitive and somewhat introverted. He was a contradiction in the tough and macho world of the Outback, but when I look back there is hardly a man I can think of who fulfilled the stereotype. They looked the part, lean and sun-browned and sinewy, but the sense I have of most of them is of their vulnerability, their weaknesses, their unsuccessful attempts to conceal their inadequacies. So much of the work they did involved mending things that got broken. Vehicles, windmills, welders, generators, fences, troughs. They spent their time grappling with the recalcitrance of machinery and weather and the sheer intransigence of the country itself. It was a kind of heroism, not of the grand gesture but of mundane perseverance.

  My memory presents the men as much more fragile than the women. Yet it is the men’s lives that attracted me, their lives that lent validity to the Outback myth with which I identified.

  FERDIE WAS A HANDSOME Austrian with a luminous smile, as long as he kept his mouth closed. When he open
ed it his teeth were green and terrible, for he never cleaned them. He ate things which would have destroyed a lesser constitution, and neutralised the dangerous bacteria with overproof rum. A policeman on bush patrol who called at his camp and was offered a meal was confronted with the remains of a partly skinned dingo. When Ferdie applied for a gun licence on the grounds that he shot his own food, the young policeman confirmed the veracity of this claim.

  Ferdie’s profession was drilling for water, and although he was under thirty he had a reputation for living hard and running a tough camp. He came to the Territory at the age of ten, on foot, with his older brother and sister. To these immigrant children some sort of magic must have resonated in the name of Alice Springs, for they abandoned their parents, who had recently settled unhappily in Adelaide, and set off along the railway line, following the route of the Afghan camel traders through the desert. They begged and stole from the fettlers’ camps along the line, cadged lifts, told lies and no doubt had some strange and dangerous encounters. There were some hard-bitten characters among the fettlers, for it was a place where no questions were asked and anonymity was a given. It was common enough for a man to walk away from the railway line and his fellow workers into the great blank of the desert, leaving behind him only an alias and a half-empty bottle of rum. It must have surprised even the fettlers to see a trio of children with hardly a word of English between them materialise out of the mirage into their camps.

  The children duly reached Alice, where they hid in a warehouse until they were discovered by some local residents and fostered by several families until they were old enough to take care of themselves. Somewhere along the way Ferdie acquired his softly accented English, a partnership in a drilling rig and an affinity with the remote, secretive contours of the country. He spent months alone in it, learning the lie of the land, developing an intuition for the pockets and declivities where water seeped and stayed. He had a dog called Maxie, a lean pink-spotted mutt who had the habit of snapping at the branches of mulga trees from the back of Ferdie’s ute. Often he was left hanging by his clamped jaws from an overhanging branch, the ute speeding on ahead of its banner of red dust. Maxie finally perished while following a small plane which was flying Ferdie into Alice Springs. Somewhere out in the desert the dog gave up, having gone too far to turn back.

  Ferdie was not always alone by choice. His reputation for hard rations and harder work made it difficult to get offsiders, and he was known to have picked up the odd hitchhiker on the way out of town and lied about his real destination. When they reached his camp the traveller’s choice was to stay and work for a month or so, or find his own way out. Relief at discovering he had merely been shanghaied, and was not in the clutches of a maniac or murderer, generally made the hitchhiker philosophical, and no doubt he dined out on the story for years afterwards.

  There was a time when Ferdie called on my mother to rescue him from the clutches of a lady known to the town as ‘the Black Widow’, a reference to the effect she had on the men in her life. Ferdie was neither intelligent nor intuitive about women. But some instinct for self-preservation told him to remove himself from the web of the Widow. He enlisted my mother and us to pose as his wife and family. We hammed it up dreadfully, and I doubt the unfortunate woman was fooled. I remember her, thin and dark and haunted-looking; she took in at a glance the shiny cheerful self-satisfied facade we presented and was defeated without a fight.

  Ferdie epitomised a type of immigrant Australian who discovered in the inland a place where it was possible to abandon all but the basic constraints of society. He was less eccentric than some, who lived in overturned water tanks on the edge of remote towns, or in burrows on the opal fields, or disappeared into the North Queensland rainforest to live like Tarzan. But his life was of a kind with theirs, as if the vast historic weight of European culture was sloughed off on that first encounter with the light and space of the desert, and the makeshift substitute culture he encountered was rendered almost invisible against the hard clarity of landscape.

  RAY REFERRED TO HIMSELF as the green-eyed blackfellow. He was tall and dark-skinned, though in that environment of multiple skin shades he was a long way short of black. He was a member of one of those extended Central Australian families whose heritage crosses most of the available racial boundaries. He had aunts and uncles and cousins who might boast in one direction links with European aristocracy or, in another, a geneology which entitled them to forty thousand years or more of ancestral links to the surrounding country. The slanting eyes of one relative might conjure a Chinese gold prospector, the high-bridged nose and profile of another suggest the legacy of Afghan camel drivers. Ray could easily have carried the blood of camel drivers, for he was tall and hawk-profiled, and his green eyes were remarkable. But as far as he knew he was the standard Centralian cross, white man, Aboriginal woman, and he wore his mixed heritage like a crown of thorns, though cocked always at a rakish angle. Sober, he sent himself up. Drunk, he picked fights. He was tall and lean and tough, but he picked his fights with the biggest, meanest, toughest white men. They enraged him because they were white and he wasn’t, and he flung his Aboriginality in their faces and challenged them to abuse it, which they did. He had been beaten up at one time or another by most of the reputed fighters in the Centre, and the stories of his fights made good telling in his sober rueful phases.

  Ray came back from the Halls Creek races one year with a black eye and a broken nose. This time he had refused to move his swag from the middle of the road, on the grounds that there were too many bindi-eyes everywhere else. The perpetrator of the damage was a truckie who wanted to drive his vehicle along that particular stretch of the road.

  —It was the middle of the night. I told him to piss off. When he got out of the truck he was built like a brick shit-house. I never even had time to get out of the swag.

  To add insult to injury he had to spend hours picking the bindi-eyes out of his groundsheet.

  From time to time he would go north to Darwin and hang out with the local hippies on one of the beaches, getting stoned and telling lies. He would bring a whole lot of new stories back for us, of his adventures among the misfits and eccentrics of the tropics. Stories were Ray’s currency. He made us laugh. One day he didn’t come back from the north, and we heard he had gone to sleep on the railway line and lost both his legs. We never saw him again.

  THE NIGHT OUTSIDE IS LISTENING. I remember this listening stillness. I listen with it, as I used to do, but all I hear is the confused chatter of my own thoughts. It is so strange to be here. This place has occupied a disproportionate space in my life, and I do not really understand why. Doris Lessing says in African Laughter—Every writer has a myth country. This does not have to be childhood. Myth does not have to be something untrue, but a distillation of truth.

  This is my myth country. There is another quote, this time from Calvino, scrawled in my artist’s notebook.

  The storyteller of the tribe puts together phrases and images: the younger son gets lost in the forest, he sees a light in the distance, he walks and walks; the fable unwinds from sentence to sentence, and where is it leading? To the point at which something not yet said, something as yet only darkly felt by presentiment, suddenly appears and seizes us and tears us to pieces, like the fangs of a man-eating witch. Through the forest of fairy tale the vibrancy of myth passes like a shudder of wind.

  Tonight, out here, that unseen shudder passes through the leaves of the mulga trees. Journeys are a kind of mythmaking. The myths of other places can’t sustain me, but the cool inhuman wind shakes my fortitude.

  PARTICIPATING IN MYTH demands a price, particularly the myth of failure which is so deeply embedded in this country. There is a term which resonates from my childhood, because I heard it first when I was of an age to visualise words literally.

  —He’s a bit of a no-hoper.

  —That old no-hoper feller that lives with the blacks.

  —The miserable bloody no-hoper!


  I tried to imagine how it would be to have no hope, to be no hope. In my child’s eye they looked like the lepers in my illustrated Bible, trailing banners of filthy rags, toothless and covered in weeping sores. My first real no-hoper was something of a disappointment. He was a nondescript fellow with scorched-looking skin and sandy hair. He did have bad teeth. But he was marked, set apart, as I had expected him to be. The place inside him where hope belonged was empty, that was quite clear. It was as if there was a vacuum, an absence at the heart of the country which made itself felt in men like him.

  No-hopers were men. It was never used to describe women. I saw some of the laughing young men slide slowly across the boundary from irresponsible good nature to no-hoperdom. Black or white, alcohol was invariably a component. But the Aboriginal no-hoper was named by white society, measured by his lack of reliability and his loss of self-regard. The term as far as I can establish doesn’t translate. He was generally cushioned by a system of kinship obligations which would never cast him out in the way a white no-hoper is cast out. In fact it wasn’t uncommon for the white no-hoper to throw in his lot with the Aborigines, who treated him with tolerant scorn.

  I once knew the son of a man who was a Territory legend. The old man, the father, was a wild and terrible character who was a law unto himself and had been responsible for the deaths of a number of Aborigines in his time. He had killed his first blackfellow when he was fourteen, by accident, shooting at him to liven him up and put a scare into him. In order to get rid of the evidence of his crime, for he and the Aborigine were alone with a mob of horses in the remote northern tableland country, the boy tried to burn the body on the campfire. As he sat in the darkness with God knows what thoughts going through his mind and the corpse slowly roasting on the campfire, he was treated to an apparition that stayed with him all his life. Up out of the flames came the body, sitting up with its scorching hair and its eye sockets pools of flame and the bones of its skull showing through the charred strips of its face. It was caused no doubt by the heat contracting the muscle and sinews, but the boy thought the dead blackfellow was coming out of the flames to wreak vengeance on him, and bolted howling into the night.