Craft For a Dry Lake

by Kim Mahood

  22

  THE DRIVE FROM LAKE RUTH to Wild Potato Bore takes me along the edge of the mulga, the road crossing the limestone spines which break at intervals through the surface of the country. This is where we used to find grinding stones, worn almost through, and the wild potatoes for which it is named. The stockmen showed us how to look for cracks radiating out from the base of the plant, evidence of the tuber growing a metre or so beneath the surface. I have watched an old woman tap with the sharp end of a crowbar, sensitive as radar, and read in the echo the size of the root, to judge whether it is worth digging for.

  A fence line runs now from the bore to the west of the old stock camp, where a few lopsided posts mark the site of the bough shed. It was one of the main stock camps, a short run from the homestead. As children we all began our apprenticeship here, coming out for a few days at a time. It is easy country, open grass plains with pockets of gidgee and mulga.

  THE GIRL IS FIFTEEN, WITH cropped dark hair and a thin bespectacled face. In the blue cotton shirt and jeans she could easily pass for a boy. The horse she rides is tall and black and elegant, with a broad white blaze and one long white sock. She sits him comfortably, relaxed in the heavy stock saddle, riding out on the wing of the small mob. From time to time she glances down at the silhouetted shadow she and the horse make, squares her shoulders and adjusts her hat to a more rakish angle. The spectacles don’t show up in the shadow. Today she is relishing being in charge of a mob, with her brother and his friend as offsiders. The dreamy voluptuary of the lake is banished for the time being, replaced by this straight-backed, square-jawed stockman with eyes narrow and hooded from gazing into the limitless distance. This girl is familiar, but I need the device of the third person in order to see her properly. She inhabits her world uncritically, an intense adolescent world in which every moment and event is self-referential and self-contained. I see her with a kind of appalled insight, knowing what the almost quarter century which separates us holds for her.

  Her brother rides on the other wing, a freckled boy with alert bright brown eyes, small for his eleven years. Already he shows the mark of a good horseman, a certain fluency of movement, a balance perfectly tuned to the gait of the grey horse. She likes him well enough, most of the time, though he has pulled free of his role as younger brother since she went away to school, and already his skill as a stockman equals her own. But today he doesn’t care for the boredom of riding with this little quiet mob and calls to his friend at the tail that he has spotted fresh goanna tracks. Her brother’s friend is older and bigger and quieter. A trace of Aboriginal blood shows in his smooth golden face and gives him a faintly Chinese look. The two boys ride out, away from the mob, to pursue the goanna, and she watches them go with irritation. She can manage well enough on her own but is angered that they treat her so cavalierly, that they are such boys, and irresponsible. If they lose the mob it will be her fault because she has been left in charge. The boys flush the goanna from a clump of grass and pursue it with shouts and yells. The long yellow lizard runs for its life, its reptile head up, eyes bolting, but the boys run it down. Her brother clubs it with a stick and throws it over the pommel of his saddle.

  They bring the mob in to the bore and pull back to the shade of a bloodwood tree while the animals drink. They have been left for several days in charge of the weaners, which must be tailed out each day to feed and taken several miles to the bore to drink, before being yarded for the night in the small holding paddock. The children take it in turns to water their horses, then push the little mob together. The girl takes the lead and the two boys bring up the tail. To ride in the lead is a pleasure she rarely experiences, being usually relegated to the tail with the dust and stragglers. The weaners are docile and follow her readily along the cattle pads and into the holding paddock.

  By sundown the riders are back at the camp, horses rubbed down and hobbled out, the goanna in the coals and the billy simmering. Cooked satisfactorily in its own charred skin, the goanna is broken in pieces and passed around with pieces of damper. For a treat the girl makes custard and stewed fruit for desert. She does not mind cooking on the campfire, in fact enjoys the challenge of cooking in these circumstances. This is a trait she carries into adult life, always happier to cook on an open fire with limited options than in a fully-equipped kitchen with everything to hand.

  Her brother tells of his first time with the droving camp, before the family had moved out to the station. He thought the damper was a kind of magic pudding, constantly renewing itself, eaten at every meal but always there for the next. At last he discovered Long Johnny the cook mixing the dough of flour and water and baking powder, burying it in the camp oven and producing a fresh damper out of a hole in the ground. He made a damper himself then, a boy-sized one in a tobacco tin. There is an old black and white photograph taken of him at that time, a small figure in an oversized hat and boots, standing pensively beside a clump of spinifex, a rein draped over his arm and a horse’s head poking into the picture on the upper right. The stance is self-consciously adult. It could be the prototype image for the Drover’s Kid.

  There is a rat plague moving across the country, followed closely by feral cats. Her brother is determined to catch enough rats to make a rat-skin coat, and sets traps around the camp. He forgets to mention this, until they start to go off like gunshots as the rats make their night-time move on the camp. The girl and the friend look at each other in alarm at the risks they have taken of losing a finger or toe. During the night a big rat comes snuffling onto the girl’s swag. Her brother sees it and throws his boot, which hits the rat. It also hits the girl, so she wakes to the sight of a half-stunned rat stumbling off into the dark pursued by a small boy wearing nothing but a shirt. She threatens him with violence, and he tells her that the rat coat is for her.

  I COULD NOT GET OUT OF my head the need to come back to this country. I have imagined this trip, many times. In the imagined journey there are no blank spaces. Every minute counts for something, every perception is recorded. It is evident from the amount of artist’s materials I have brought with me that the journey was going to be intensely productive. I was going to draw, paint, record, rub, layer, trace. I was going to document every impression, every fragment that conjured memory and change, anything and everything that might have some relevance to my personal odyssey. There are oil sticks, gouache and watercolour, bitumen and pastels, tissue paper, drawing paper and canvas.

  I have used almost nothing. I have managed to write up my journal, and I have managed to keep the groundsheet going. That is all. The rest of my energy is taken up with simply being here. It is a long time since I have felt anything with this level of intensity. A lot of the time I simply get in the car and drive, so as not to think. There are times when I have neither the will nor the desire to pay attention. I wish I had not given up smoking. Then I could sit still in various places and smoke and not think.

  Now, here, every idea I have ever had seems irrelevant. The women’s ceremony has shaken me out of the notion that I have any real knowledge of, or relationship with, Aborigines and their culture. The stories I have told to city friends, that have given my life a glamorous and exotic edge, seem like flimsy posturing. What is real is the discomfort, the blank space, the awkwardness, the recognition that one earns the right to a relationship through time spent with people and country, and that in recent years I have not spent that time. My relationship with the country belongs to the past. Instead of being shattered by this insight, I am relieved. It lets me off. I do not have to go on wearing the identity I have created for myself. I can decide whether or not to begin to spend the time, to build up a relationship based on the reality of this place as it is now, and the people who live here now. Or I can leave it behind.

  FROM WILD POTATO I HEAD north to Andesite Plain. My father named it after the sandstone outcrops which characterise this part of the country, but I don’t think the name is being used any more. I have ridden this way many times, setting out just after
sunrise from the Wild Potato camp to muster the plains country and the mulga to the north. The horses liked this country, the sweet water from the bore and the open sweep of the grass plains. The stallion mobs ran here for preference, and when the mustering season was over the stock horses formed their small eunuch bands or joined up with the big mobs of mares and colts and foals.

  There are no horses here today. I see from my map that the plains have been fenced in. A wild orange tree stands alone, bearing several large fruit. The black stockmen used to say the fruit was ‘cooked’ when it was ripe. I can’t reach the fruit to tell whether it is cooked, even when I drive the Suzuki close to the tree and stand on the roof. My attempts to knock it down with a shovel are unsuccessful.

  While my attempt to get some bush tucker is being frustrated a big red kangaroo hops slowly across my wheel tracks. He is the only roo I have seen this trip, a measure of the dry time. He echoes the single kangaroo of Davidson’s journal, and again in my father’s stock-route report.

  Just after leaving the solitary hill we sighted a red kangaroo. This was the first and only one we had seen.

  Here we saw our first animal life since Mt Doreen—a kangaroo.

  Their kangaroos were a little further west, but it is clear that each journey must cross the path of a kangaroo. Somewhere I read that there is an ancestral track through this country which is the track of the two kangaroos. As I watch from my vantage point on the roof of the Suzuki the big roo makes steadily towards the fence line, which stretches along the ironstone ridge and away down through the softer sandy country towards the bore. There is an invisible point of intersection, where the dreaming track angles through from the north-east, making for the big salt-lake systems to the south-west.

  The ancestral kangaroo is caught momentarily by the unexpected barbed wire of the fence line, which was not here when he last travelled. Blood spills from a torn thigh, and where it spots the ground small fierce bloody creatures burst forth and scurry away shrieking.

  All over the country are these points of intersection, hot spots where the new maps overlay the old. This is our inheritance. Here the old maps are still visible. The people who know the old maps are building the fence lines now.

  I drive on to Questionmark Bore. It is named for the shape of the mulga scrub which surrounds it. I am reluctant to camp at the bores, as I have been told dingo baits are put out every year. Sam is such a scavenger he is bound to pick up a bait, so I have to keep him tied up all the time. There is a set of cattle yards at Questionmark, which I examine with professional curiosity. From time to time I glimpse another destiny from the one I have chosen, in which I stayed out here. The prospect seduces and appals me. In the gap between this moment and the last time I stood in this place lie all the improbabilities and choices and contradictions that have brought me back to this place and this moment.

  Briefly I stand shoulder to shoulder with the other one, the one who stayed. We eye one another across the top rail of the yards. She looks much older than I do. Twenty years in this climate has a price. Lean and brown, turkey-necked, the perm looking a bit ragged under the Akubra, this other woman has a no-nonsense quality, sure of herself within the boundaries of this world. Sam gives her the once-over, and returns to my side of the fence. He can tell at a glance she wouldn’t let him sleep in the cab of the Suzuki.

  There is no evidence in her of the remnants of protracted adolescence which characterise so many of my generation. It is not just the result of time and weather. Her face has a certain cast I have often seen among people who spend their lives on the land. It is a peculiar and rather attractive mixture of philosophical acceptance of the vicissitudes of nature, governments and markets, and an unshakeable faith in the rightness of one’s own point of view. She has not kept her options open. This is life. This is her life. She has made decisions and acted on them and worn the consequences. She knows the weight of responsibility for wrong decisions. She knows what it is to be helpless before acts of nature. The relentless conflagrations of immense spinifex fires, the country reduced again and again by drought. Wet seasons which cut roads for months and lay surface waters which tempt stock away into the desert beyond the point of no return. Market collapses and draconian government policies, the escalation of costs and erosion of income, the inevitable legacy of life on the land, this is all part of her knowledge. And something else. The country has worked on her, pared her down. She is comfortable here in a way that I am not.

  She leans against a timber post in the narrow shadow it provides and pulls out a tobacco pouch, sticks the cigarette paper to her bottom lip while she extracts the tobacco. It is all done with a certain ritual deliberation, which allows for the place and the moment to be quietly acknowledged. When she fits the rolled cigarette into a short holder, the lurch of recognition shocks and amuses me. It is done for practical reasons, but there is no doubt it implies a certain sense of style. The familiar gesture of cupped palms, which was my father’s, protects the lighted match, although for the moment there is no wind. I can taste the smoke of that first inhalation, sharp and aromatic. I can feel the way her body leans more deeply into its propped stance with the exhalation.

  She looks across the expanse of the stockyards to the windmill, which does not turn. There is no hurry. The cigarette burns slowly. Along with the smoke she takes in the stillness of place and moment. After a time she treads the butt under a boot heel, walks over and climbs the side of the tank to check the water level. There is a mess of sodden floating feathers and stinking fragments in the tank. She fishes it out with the long wooden pole that has been left there for this purpose, pulls a face as she has to grab the unsavoury bundle. A brief circuit of tank and trough to check the float valve and to look at tracks. She is reading tracks and signs that I have forgotten. Signs of how many cattle are watering here and where they are feeding out, whether it will be necessary to move some to another bore, whether the dingo population is building up. The dust and the light, the dry grass and the wind that is not blowing carry for her refinements of information at which I can barely guess. Scraps of forgotten knowledge stir in some part of my mind and slide away again, fragments of a language I have lost.

  There is something in the way she takes stock, pays attention, that is familiar. It suggests that she does not often make mistakes. This country is hard on mistakes, people die of them. And there is a moral dimension to it. Mistakes are the results of carelessness and stupidity and loss of nerve. From the time she was a girl she has had to prove that she is fit for the country. The set of her shoulders and the economy of her movements indicate she has proved that fitness. I suspect that she is inclined to judge the mistakes of others.

  She squats in the shade of the stock tank, back propped against the galvanised metal, and produces a small sketchbook. This is evidently a familiar ritual, accompanied by the rolling of another cigarette, a flicking through pages to examine earlier sketches. They are predictable enough. Pencil drawings of carcasses and dead trees, some accomplished lively drawings of drafting and branding, colour notes and thumbnail roughs for paintings. There are hints of John Olsen and Fred Williams in the stretched spaces with their hieroglyphs of trees and anthills.

  I take for granted she has not paid attention to the needs which took me away from this country. The choice of place, and the practical requirements of living here, have taken precedence over the journey away from place and towards the self. She does not submit her divided soul to the process of the work. She does not know about walking blind until the work reveals itself, and the humility it imposes, though she has occasional intimations of it. Her desire to paint is a desire to pay homage to this country and its people. She would like to do more, but there is never the time. She reminds me of my father. She scares the hell out of me. The merest shift and she is me.

  The pages of the notebook flicker. I see that they are covered with words. The woman has become very still, as if watching some wild creature which has revealed itself. The handwriting i
s joltingly familiar.

  The mapmaker walks out onto the surface of the dry lake. She carries with her the tools of her trade, the carved sticks and coloured sand with which to draw this day’s map on the broken surface. In the night the wind has blown away all but a few traces of yesterday’s work, and it still blows. Small powdery drifts of dust fly up from her feet as she walks. She kneels and begins to scoop out a long shallow shape, like a shield, or one of the long boats they used to sail before the lakes dried up.

  The digging is a slow process, with only her hands and the digging stick as tools. When she has completed it to her satisfaction she carefully shapes the mound of displaced sand into the reverse form. From her satchel she takes a powdery block of ochre, deep red in colour, and rubs off a fine layer until both the mound and the hollow are coated with it. Even as she completes it the wind lifts the surface of the mound and begins to disperse it. As she walks away her retreating footprints fill with a fine smear of red-stained dust.

  I stare at the words, and she stares directly at me. Don’t make assumptions about me, her look says. Stick to what you know. She stubs out her cigarette, flips the notebook shut and gets to her feet. I watch her walk away from me into the dappled shade of the mulga, until the blue of her shirt and jeans is lost in the blue afternoon.