by Kim Mahood
The young single women, home helps and governesses for the most part, moved in a haze of prurient conjecture and sexual innuendo (generated mainly by the men) which was only displaced when they struck up a permanent liaison with one of the men. The married women treated them with hostility and suspicion, which was frequently justified as there was a steady turnover of wives being displaced by nubile governesses. As a growing adolescent, to be a young female had a secret and forbidden potential. It offered the prospect of being bad without even trying. It was necessary for me to slide around and between the prohibitions, capitalising on a chameleon androgyny which concealed a lively and very female sexual curiosity.
It was not good to be plain, or opinionated, or overtly sexual, or incompetent. The women were, on the whole, as inclined to reinforce these prohibitions as the men, with the exclusion of the first.
There were women who were beyond reproach. These were usually older and married, strong decent women who took care of their husbands and children, never complained and could rise to an occasion when necessary, fighting bush-fires, delivering their own babies, holding drunken intruders at bay. There were feisty women who did not take things lying down. The manager’s wife at a neighbouring station had been one of these, and the row of bullet holes in the door of the station Toyota was frequently pointed out admiringly as evidence of her lively temper. Her husband had been in the vehicle at the time, driving off after a particularly fierce argument. Women like this usually developed into characters and made a niche for themselves as part of the local folklore, or became alcoholics and shrews, or walked out and never came back.
But most of the women I knew exhibited one or several of the undesirable characteristics and were judged accordingly. There was Esther, who was English, and did not wash. Esther was travelling, financing her passage by taking whatever work was available on stations along the way. This usually meant governessing, housework or cooking. Since she did not like children, was an indifferent cook and had a fairly cavalier attitude to dirt, she tended to move on fairly quickly.
Esther also liked men and was not backward in signalling her intentions towards them. My father, whose habit was to deliver an early morning cup of coffee to all the female members of the household, was confronted one morning with her large bare breasts greeting him exuberantly above the bedclothes. She had to forgo her morning coffee for the rest of her stay. Malley, who was head stockman at the time, came back from taking her riding looking pale and shaken. She had fallen off her horse, and her shirt had somehow been torn off in the fall. What he could not understand was how her brassiere had also managed to come off. She was a big woman, and the sight of her half-naked six-foot frame was too much for Malley, who bolted, leaving her to get back on her horse and find her own way home. Esther was simply too big and too predatory. There wasn’t a man on the place over five feet nine. Her sexuality was too visible for the sex-segregated culture of the bush, which preferred its activity to be covert or clandestine.
As for Albertine, she was homely and ridiculous from the start. She had patently come to the Outback to find a husband. I suffered for her because I liked her, but it was through her I understood the unassailable nature of misogyny towards the unattractive woman. Albertine was skinny, beaky and plain. She was also good-natured, kind and intelligent. She had a voice like a flock of galahs, and with all the affection of memory I cannot make her attractive. She found a husband no-one else would have. She was cheered for her success, and despised for it. She was pitied, because it was taken for granted that she would suffer and tolerate various forms of abuse. Knowing her husband, it is possible that people did him a disservice. I like to believe that Albertine’s life was on the whole a happy one, within the limitations of what she expected from it.
How did it look to me, back then? How did I read the patterns and codes and hierarchies of the world as I experienced it? I remember a moment of vertigo, a jolt like a plane encountering turbulence. A young French woman was working on the station at the time. She was opinionated and forthright, not in the least flirtatious and entirely impervious to the local codes of behaviour. She stated her opinions without apology and frequently without tact. There was a particular occasion when she was holding forth about something, and the men were looking uncomfortable, when I thought—Doesn’t she know to keep her mouth shut?, and in the same moment of feeling deeply embarrassed on her behalf I thought—What am I thinking? How has it happened that I am thinking this?
I might read the same moment differently now. It may have been that she was offering an opinion on something about which she knew very little. She may have been making a fool of herself and the men were too polite to contradict her. But my fifteen-year-old concern was for the breaking of rules which I had not understood existed until that moment. This was the taint I had smelled on my own skin, that we could not be relied upon, as women, to understand the rules properly, that our unruly bodies and emotions might force into the open things which would then have somehow to be dealt with.
MY MOTHER INSISTS THAT SHE was happy out here, most of the time. Her father came to visit once, a lovely Scotsman whose accent had hardly muted from forty or more years in Australia. Looking at her life, which seemed to be entirely taken up with managing the homestead and teaching children, he asked her if it was enough for her. Although he had been absent for most of her childhood, as a prospector and soldier and prisoner of war, he must have wondered at the transformation of the radical student and journalist who studied Arabic and Russian with the intention of becoming a spy, who defied her stepfather to go to university, who rode a motorcycle to her prenatal checks during her first pregnancy.
Here she listened to interminable discussions about stock and waters and mustering and fencing, and the edgy masculine gossip about the foolhardiness and bad practices of neighbours. She prepared or oversaw the preparation of three meals a day for family and staff, ordered the stores, did much of the bookwork and maintained a substantial vegetable garden. She taught her three youngest children, the children of the Aboriginal woman who helped in the house, and her elder son’s friend who came for a holiday and stayed for two years. She came close to assaulting a census official who marked her on the census form as being an unemployed housewife. A born teacher, it was in the schoolroom that she could express all her enthusiasm and inventiveness. To my critical adolescent sensibility, which was trying to identify where it fitted in all of this, she was hostage to the homestead, patronised if she asked questions or attempted to move beyond what was considered her proper domain.
My mother answered her father’s question as she always answered such questions, insisting that her life was full and satisfying. She was an inveterate maker of the best of her circumstances, not out of martyrdom and self-righteousness but out of a belief that since she was living it then it must be good.
13
A FEW MILD-FACED SHORTHORNS wander in for a late afternoon drink at Wilson’s Cave, reminding me that if I am to reach Ngulipi before dark I should get on the road. If I am too late Malley will come looking for me.
When I arrive Malley emerges grease-stained and grinning from beneath the crate of a cattle truck, and greets me as if it has been weeks, rather than years, since we last met.
He has been in this country most of his life and knows it as well as anyone. His father managed Billiluna throughout his childhood and teens. His mother was a part-Aboriginal woman with a soft voice and a retiring, gentle temperament. The Aboriginal children who lived in the big camp near the homestead, people whose traditional country included the cattle station managed by his father, were his peers and playmates. He grew up speaking the language, and his father trained the Aboriginal boys to be stockmen with the same discipline and rigour with which he trained his own son. At eighteen, when my father gave him a job running the stock camp on Mongrel Downs, Malley brought with him the best of the black stockmen from the station which had been his home. They were like brothers and understood each other.
> He was a shy young man, but in the bush and around the stock camp he had a confidence born of intimate knowledge of this world and its necessities. Now, in his late forties, he is a patriarch and a grandfather. His wife Oriel has hardly changed.
The Ngulipi homestead is built of sandstone, quarried locally. It is rather beautiful, low and rambling, with corridors and verandahs. Like many stone buildings it is full of private crannies and secrets. In the exposed red landscape it is a refuge for shadows. It was built by a robust and steadily expanding Catholic family who came to live and work on the mission during our years on Mongrel Downs. At first, advised by the incumbent priest that we were dangerous and not to be trusted, they were suspicious and reserved. A few meetings disposed of the suspicion, and the friendship survived the move of both families to Queensland.
The strained relations between Mongrel Downs and the mission had its origins in an incident which belongs to the early days of the stock route. I know the story by hearsay, but my father’s diary account of the incident is worth recording as a masterpiece of understatement. It was the second big mob to travel the new stock route, and the diary suggests it was a desperate measure to shift thirsty stock from failing waters. The plan, I think, was to shift them only as far as Mongrel Downs, where they would provide the nucleus of the breeding herd.
Station diary. Friday, 25th October, 1963
Bill left with 1000 cows this morning.
Les carrying on shifting cattle between Old Station, Bungabiddy and Len’s.
Wind drought. Cattle dying.
Arrived Bill’s camp late night. Mess.
Saturday 26th
Bill’s mob camped a mile away and perishing.
Discussed the cleanskin angle etc.
Have little hope of Bill’s success in getting the mob through.
Saw them off camp.
Wednesday 30th
Went straight into Bill’s camp and heard details about the smash with the cattle. About 100 perished.
Radio room. whip. radio. fainting blind gin. hospital. pics. sump oil. shower. chapel. big Sunday. tool box. engine room.
Will organise stock camp into getting another mob.
Called at Mission. Father wants his cattle next year now.
This is the story as I know it: the cattle were restive and thirsty, a thousand head of cranky cows who wanted to turn tail and go home. The drover in charge of the mob wasn’t confident about getting them through. The cows weren’t showing any signs of settling down, and the team of stockmen were local Aborigines the drover didn’t know.
The mob began to string out, big strong cows in the lead sniffing the wind and walking out fast, and the tail of older and weaker animals falling further and further behind. Among the stockmen was one who had left his new young wife behind and was sorry now to be in the camp, wanted only to turn around and go back home. So he wasn’t paying attention to the cattle, he was riding along behind the tail with his mind on his new wife and his grievances.
I may have this stockman confused with the one who was responsible for the cattle rushing into the big salt lake to the east, but if I remember rightly he had a wall eye and no wife. These stories always have a bad blackfellow or a mug jack-aroo or a mad priest.
While this particular fellow was thinking about his troubles he wasn’t noticing that some old cows had got onto a cattle pad leading into the mission and the rest of the tail was following behind. Before anyone realised what had happened, the old cows had got a smell of water and had broken into a trot. By the time they reached the mission precincts they were thirst-crazy and galloping. The first dozen or so sniffed out the water in a corrugated-iron communal shower. They crammed into it, licking at the taps and leaking shower roses, until the walls of the building burst apart and they threw up their wild old muzzles and galloped over the flattened sheets of iron and away down the road into the heart of the mission. By now there were a hundred or so cows on the rampage for any taste of moisture. Aborigines ran about shouting, trying to hunt the crazy cows out of their camps and buildings. A young woman abandoned the elderly blind lady in her charge, let go the stick by which she normally led her about, and bolted. A mass of snorting bellowing cows surrounded the old woman, lifting her along on a cloud of noise and dust and horns, so she must have thought that the fire and brimstone god of the Irish priest had got her at last. But the cows galloped on and left her behind, shrieking and cursing and unhurt, and the young woman crept shame-facedly back and took the spindly old arm and led her charge away.
The mission was built on a desolate flat, and the dust lifted and whipped between the buildings, so that when the dust arrived inhabited by red cows, it seemed as though they were some sort of corporeal manifestation of the earth itself. To the nuns, who found the country full of inexplicable things and privately considered it hell on earth, it came as no surprise that the dust should suddenly wear horns and tails. They shepherded together as many children as they could muster and took refuge in the chapel, after the bravest nun evicted a cow which had just guzzled the holy water from the font.
The holy father threw his hat and then an empty whisky bottle at the slobbering beast attempting to get through the door of his office, and used the kind of language only available to an Irishman and a man of God. It worked, for the cow turned tail and rushed down the steps and off to the mechanic’s workshop, where she drank a drum of sump oil and fell down the pit and died.
The rest of the story is concealed in my father’s truncated prose. I don’t know what happened in the radio room; I don’t know the fate of the toolbox or what big Sunday refers to. I do know that this episode cemented the bad relations between the priest, who we always referred to ironically as Father, and Mongrel Downs. For years afterwards it was war. Father was an adversary whose knowledge of the evil that dwells in the human heart provided him with all sorts of devious and underhand strategies to deal with those he saw as interlopers. Yet he and my father retained a reluctant regard for each other, and later my father always spoke of him with a sort of humorous affection.
Father was larger than life, with his own arrangements between the Lord and his whisky habit, and a real regard for the people under his care, whom he felt should be kept entirely protected from the outside world. The stories abound. He had been a boxer in his youth and took with him to the mission a set of boxing gloves and a pair of unpadded exercise gloves. The younger men set about testing the mettle of the new priest, this gingery Australian Irishman. He chose a smart and arrogant fellow and challenged him to a bout of boxing, offering him the advantage of the big gloves. It wasn’t until the priest had landed several punches that the young Aborigine realised he had been tricked. The padded gloves rendered his own punches almost harmless, while his opponent’s stinging blows were unimpeded. His peers were delighted at the cleverness of their new priest, and Father established himself as a man they could respect and admire.
Father moved on, or was moved, south, under a cloud the origins of which are too complicated to recount, and was replaced by Father Heaven (a more fortunate name than one Father Raper, who I believe spent time in New Guinea). Things settled down, and we no longer referred to the western border as the western front. But we missed Father. He was a wonderful villain, and life was not the same without him.
These days Balgo is no longer a mission, although the Catholic presence is still in evidence, mainly among the teachers. The cattle operation is run from Ngulipi outstation, about one hundred kilometres east of the main community, and the Aboriginal stockmen who work with Malley are the traditional owners of that part of the country. From Malley and Oriel’s verandah I can see a campfire and a television set in the bare yard in front of one of the outstation houses, and a few dark figures sitting about watching the flickering screen. We talk of who is left in the country, who has died or moved on. Long Johnny Amaroo lives on Balgo now and has given Malley a message that I am to call in and see him. Johnny was one of the longest-serving of the Mongrel Downs stockmen
, and in the earliest years my father’s only companion.
WHEN I ASK AT BALGO FOR Johnny Amaroo I am told the name is kumunjayi. Someone called Johnny has died, and the name can’t be spoken. It is Emaroo I am looking for. I am directed to the outskirts of the top camp.
Balgo community is located at the northern end of the immense Balwina Aboriginal Reserve, about nine hundred kilometres north-west of Alice Springs. It is set on a barren windy plateau which falls away suddenly into the eroded fortress of the Balgo Pound. The Pound is one of those natural features before which one can only offer silence. Superlatives are too fleshy, language too sensual to provide any meaningful interpretation of its sheer strangeness. It is a place which has been wrought by primordial excess. Everything about it seems fused, stripped, scoured. It is furred with spinifex, a yellowish-grey tinged with acid green. Its reds are burned and blackened, or leached and porous. It has been a sea, and has become a desert. The Pound itself is an extraordinary geological boundary, where one landform gives way precipitously to another. The flat sandstone plateau breaks away in a great arc, forming the edge of a remnant seabed whose fossil fragments are fused in blackened lumps of rock. Here and there on the ironstone plain the ancient plateau still clings to its sandstone cap, forming isolated clusters of mesas. Among the ironstone are hard black bubbles which have been forced by unimaginable heat, which the country still holds like a radiant echo. It is only on its immediate rim that you gain a sense of the depth of the eroded plain—once down on its floor the sheer immensity of the place reduces the scale of the surrounding plateau.
