The lean German headmaster wore a pair of board shorts and a green singlet, and during this recess stood basking under the eaves of the school. His class looked fairly evenly split between white and black, and Chloe pointed to a rangy boy seven or eight years old, towheaded as young desert Aboriginals often are. The boy was about to hoist himself up onto Roman rings which hung from a steel bar in the playground. He spat freely on the palms of both hands so that the hot steel wouldn’t burn him, and then he jumped and grasped and performed a complete double-jointed somersault of the kind which causes the onlooker to flinch. There was lots of quicksilver athleticism there.
—See that kid there. That’s my husband’s step-nephew. Want to know how? Ask the mongrel bastard’s father. My daughter Helen went off to study anthropology just so’s she could understand her bloody relatives. Then she fell for a bloody anthropologist in Perth and really got to despise her father and me. Mind you, that little bastard there’ll probably turn out better than my crowd. Not much of a scholar. Too much Emptor blood for that. Jacko’s a qualified lawyer of course, but you’d never bloody know it. A solicitor. He certainly solicited that grinning little astrological sister.
Whether we were looking at the sales ring or the mustering yards or the kitchens where Larson might photograph the early morning steak and eggs of stockmen, Chloe was never far away from the subject of the ironies of her motherhood, the betrayals a woman’s progeny were sure to commit, the question of who and where her grandchildren would be. She always spoke as if we had some familiarity with her vanished bairns. Not only Jacko, but Frank and Helen as well.
Reconnoitring the homestead area in the dazzling forenoon, we saw a pillar of dust approaching and heard the sound of aircraft. The smooth whine of a fixed-wing and the lumpy racket of a helicopter.
—There you are, said Chloe. You’ll get your pictures now.
Again, they weren’t pictures she wanted anything to do with, and Larson’s keenness for what was about to happen seemed to her to be a lapse of taste.
And yet it was all wonderful for Larson, and for me. To funnel the cattle into the mustering yards, two great walls of orange-brown hessian, running out some three quarters of a mile in length, had been erected by stockmen to serve as an avenue for the arriving mob of cattle. We had not sighted these walls on our way in earlier that day, so they must have been the quick work of the last few hours. But a genuine work of art. A breeze arrived with the cattle, and the walls of hessian began to vibrate and bellow and flap as sweetly as if Christo had put them there for pure abstract effect. The horsemen, who included Jacko’s bulky brother Peter, turned on sixpences in clouds of saffron dust. Whips cracked, men whistled like whips, the herd protested in full voice. Angular Aboriginal stockmen wheeled their horses amongst nests of cattle horns. Larson would get such a picture for the book: a skinny, big-hatted Wodjiri man, the head of his horse awash in a sea of Brahma horns.
As the mob drew up to the mustering yard, freshly dismounted stockmen sat on the tubular iron railings and swung gates open and shut, admitting so many cattle to each compartment, often – by whistling and the nifty use of the gate – separating one beast from its neighbour in line. It all had a purpose. Some of the animals were cleanskins, Chloe would later tell us without showing much interest, and needed to be branded. They had never till this muster seen a horseman.
The mustering airplane which had driven the herd into the hessian funnel now performed one mad victory roll fifty feet above the horsemen and went climbing away to look for the landing strip. The helicopter stayed.
We saw a startling thing. At the tail of the herd was a young recalcitrant bull, as evilly horned as any of his species. He was tossing his head, and wanted to go back to the unbranded hills to the west. But the madness of the helicopter lay between the beast and its line of freedom. The propeller was cutting the young bull’s vision to ribbons, just as it cut ours. But this was a brave beast and willing to try to fit itself amongst the tatters of air. It rounded on the machine. A reasonable helicopter pilot with a sense of the limits of his machine would have simply hung in the air and looked down on the bull. But Boomer Webb, Stammer Jack’s Vietnam veteran helicopter pilot, wanted to harry it more intimately.
This was great news for Larson, and not bad news for me either. I had already secretly made my mind up that remote and vacant places favoured oddity, and Boomer was proving it for me.
He brought his helicopter down until the skids were nearly at the bull’s forehead. It took that to make the young beast turn. After it had turned, Boomer descended further, sitting in the air at an inadvisable angle and seeming to prod the beast’s rump with the skids. The young bull gave it up and ran off to face the brand and the iron enclosures.
Poor Larson would win some posthumous award for that shot, and you still see it widely reproduced in posters and magazines.
All this before I really knew Jacko. Jacko would later tell me in New York that Boomer was still flying, although he had had a dozen or so crashes if you included the forced landings. The Department of Civil Aviation had been apprised of only one of these incidents.
When the dust had settled a little, Chloe came out and introduced us to Peter and some of the other stockmen who had dismounted by the mustering yards and were smoking before beginning the branding.
Peter said, You know my citified brother eh?
I said I’d met him doing a television interview.
—Can you tell me why anyone wouldn’t want to live up here?
—No. Though he seems happy down there.
—Yeah, well, horses for bloody courses.
And then he said, You blokes’ll have a beer later eh?
His mother said, Course they will. Even if they haven’t done any real work.
Petie was not easy with us, but you could tell he was a happy man. He and the stockmen had been out for a week, erecting the great funnel of hessian every day to move and contain the herd, using the light aircraft and Boomer’s helicopter and the flash horsemen to flush new cattle out of the scrub, and to compact them into a herd which they could then move on in the afternoon. Corralling the mob at night behind those fabric walls, and then, next morning, driving more cattle in again to join the herd and send the numbers up.
It became clear that Petie had not been in the bush solidly for a week. He was, after all, the boss, or at least the young boss, and he could get the pilot to fly him in to the homestead to see Sharon on most evenings. So Petie’s wasn’t quite the lonely drover scenario favoured by balladists.
Larson of course wished he could have been out in the mustering camp, to see the white and black stockmen socializing together around the night fire, sleeping in the same camp. Whereas back at Burren Waters headquarters, they occupied separate quarters of the Emptors’ little city of cattle. Larson would have liked to have exploited, in his gentle way, the ironies of these arrangements.
—What do you reckon next time we’re up here we go on a muster? he asked me.
—Maybe for a few days anyhow, I conceded.
Petie and the stockmen spent the rest of the afternoon letting cattle through some gates and not through others, and then laying the terrible iron to them. We saw a lot of enthusiastic bull-dusting – jumping off fences and wrestling cleanskins to the earth by their horns for branding. Best of all, this seemed to be the specialty of certain skinny Wodjiri stockmen.
A half dozen of the shots Larson took that afternoon would honour the book which would be published eighteen months after his death.
Late in the day I looked across through the dust haze and saw Mum Chloe watching from the homestead verandah, amongst all the beds and all the Thomas Mann. Further along the verandah railing stood a hulking, ample-gutted man who wore only a shirt and had no pants. This was my first sight of Stammer Jack. He had nothing to say to Chloe. If by some chance of destiny I’d been hired to paint the cattle nabob Stammer Jack Emptor and his wife, this is the picture I would have painted. It said, as pictures should,
everything about the casual power, the lasting hostilities, the persistence of marriage. Everything too about Burren Waters ennui. It answered, unposed, all questions.
After a time he was gone from the railing: the suspected hypochondriac Stammer Jack Emptor.
Evening light came in like a tide and turned the earth of Burren Waters’ main pasturage lavender. We went off with the stockmen to the red-brick dining room and ate a thumping meal of steak. In the middle of it Chloe Emptor – who had apparently dined at the homestead – appeared in the room. Working her way towards us, she spoke to various stockmen and then straddled a bench to sit opposite us.
—I was thinking, I hope you blokes aren’t going to coat all this in bloody sugar. If it wasn’t for the quarter horses we wouldn’t make a decent living eh. As for the Aboriginal stockmen everyone considers too bloody cute for words, they’ve been useless since they unionized. You can’t work with the buggers any more eh. I mean, there’re still a few good ones … Anyhow, you won’t get any points for sentimentalizing us. That’s what’s been on my mind all afternoon, and I thought I’d better out with it.
She took a drag from the can of Carlton Draught she’d picked up in the kitchen and carried in her hand. It was the Territory’s favourite beer, and half a dozen cans had been issued to all hands along with the steak. She turned her can in her hands.
—Anyway, she told me, no reason for someone like you to be writing about us at all eh. There’s got to be a lot that’s more interesting going on in your life.
I explained that the Brits and plenty of Australians wanted to hear about her kind of existence. At least there was a British book packager who thought so, and had put up money for such a book.
Chloe bent forward.
—Yeah, but you’d rather be writing about something else. You’d never find someone like Michael Bickham wasting his time writing about people like us. And you’re not interested in cleanskin bloody cattle eh. Don’t try to tell me that.
—I’m sorry, Mrs Emptor, but I am interested.
—Jesus, I’ve got a verandah full of books, and all the ones I like are by blokes who just write about their own world. About what they know.
—Okay, I don’t have a private income like Michael Bickham. I can’t afford not to do this book. And I am fascinated just the same. I never knew that people lived like this.
—You didn’t eh. Well, it’s quickly discovered. I think you’re wasting your poor bloody talent.
There are always people who say that to a writer, but one doesn’t expect to hear the voice of God, the appeal to higher integrity, in Burren Waters.
—You know your book on Abos? she said. A lot of city liberals liked it eh. But you know bugger-all about Abos. You’d be better writing about when you were a kid or something, or your first love affair.
A few of the white stockmen were sipping from their cans and listening intently. I found that unnerving.
—I’m not trying to be rude or anything, she pursued. But something must have happened to you that you could write about.
—I’m not the sort of writer who writes about himself, I told her. I’d rather visit Burren Waters and that Chloe Emptor.
—No, she said frowning. Take me seriously for Christ’s sake.
Though she was the living judgement that ultimately embarrassed most or all writers, she didn’t have any malice. This gave her even more the air of one who might have been right. Meanwhile, Larson was embarrassed to silence for my sake, and that at last seemed to produce confusion in Chloe.
She stood suddenly.
—God, a woman’s probably said too much eh. Listen, no question you’re welcome. That’s not what I’m saying. Anyhow, I’ve got to get back to the homestead to make a poultice for the mongrel. See you boys later.
She went, looking a little lost, as if she weren’t proprietor of the place. As she passed them, various stockmen asked her how the boss was, and she said, Whingeing bastard.
—That’s a bad ankle he’s got though, a senior stockman named Merv told her. We’d met him that afternoon. He was a wiry little man with a skew-whiff thatch of grey-black hair.
—Don’t give me bad ankle. You’re all a pack of malingering bastards.
—Sit down, Chloe, Merv invited her.
But she wouldn’t. She wandered up and down the trestle tables. At last she stood behind Merv. He could not see her. She pointed downwards at the bald crown of his head. Then she bent her arm and raised a fist, grasping the biceps of that arm with the fingers of her other hand.
In case we didn’t understand this meant Merv was virile, she added to the impersonation a plunging motion of the thighs. And then she winked.
It was not a snide wink. The Emptors were totally lacking in snideness, that morbid rump of envy.
Outside, later, we could hear generators and see the lights shining in the Wodjiri quarter of Emptorville, administrative centre of Burren Waters cattle station.
The universe seemed immensely in evidence as we sat under the open-sided brush shelter by the cookhouse with the white stockmen and Petie and Sharon and watched a television set for news of the wider world. By grace of the satellite saucer in Chloe’s green backyard, there was not only a set at the homestead for wan Sharon to stare at by day, but also one out here on a counter under the brush shelter; a beast on a long lead from an electric socket in the kitchen, the video mastiff from whose first, rare bite Jacko Emptor had never recovered.
In the spirit of this fact, the studiously motionless stockmen frowned at the screen, as if it needed to have an eye kept on it.
Larson and I were quartered in an empty room in the brick stockmen’s quarters. Not only was the door not locked, it was not closed. The outer wire screen was pulled across however. Flies were still active. The night was hot and even humid, as if Burren Waters were being asked to pay in discomfort for the lushness which set in a few hundred miles north and north-west. We lay in the dark and could see more stars through the square of window than are seen in an urban month.
—Why did she tell us that about Merv? I asked Larson.
—Well, he said, surer with bush people than I was. To make up for taking you apart over writing.
—Bit of a contradiction, isn’t it?
Larson laughed one of his profound, last laughs.
—That’s no contradiction. Same thing viewed from a different end. But the point is, how would she bloody know?
So we fell asleep with an engorged memory of Chloe Emptor whose day it had been. We had our alarm set for four-thirty in the morning, and it was a little before that time that Chloe appeared again, wearing the morning star on her shoulder and rattling our wire.
—I got the cook up early for you boys. You can’t travel without a breakfast eh.
We opened the door to her, and we brushed our teeth as she chatted with us. She seemed to be trying to feel out and expiate whatever follies she had been guilty of the night before.
She said to me at last, Look I’m sorry for coming the heavy with you like that. None of my business eh. But Jesus, I do like a good read. I wanted to ask you, do you know Michael Bickham?
Bickham was the now aged novelist who had won the Nobel Prize, culturally validating the nation in the mid-1970s.
—I’ve met him, I admitted.
—Have you read The Mother as Aphrodite?
—Yes, I lied. I had at least begun it, and it was customary for people to lie about how much Bickham they’d read. I had read all his early works and found them a revelation. I’d been defeated by the later ones.
—He really knows women eh. The way he writes about that old lady who’s dying in that big bloody house in … what’s the name of the place? Holloglo. And her weird children. I was wondering, if I was ever in Sydney visiting that useless Jacko, d’you reckon you could …?
—I don’t know Bickham that well, I rushed to say. He doesn’t mix with a lot of other writers.
Even his name was a kind of reproach. When I was young I’d bee
n compared to him, but I had – by that night in Burren Waters – disappointed those who had first nominated me to be his heir. I had met Bickham a few times at political events. He never had anything to do with the Sydney literary mafia, but invited people he respected to his house. If you were invited, you were proven to be a person either of taste or of talent. If you were not invited – and most writers weren’t – you could console yourself that you were in some way a challenge, or maybe not epicene enough to fit Bickham’s crowd. Either way, you knew you were telling only half the truth.
Bickham was something of a misanthrope and a gnostic. In rawly democratic Oz, he believed undemocratically in the salvation of only a few chosen and shone-upon souls, and these were the ones he sought to choose for company. In the land of mateship, he despised the herd. That made it hard for his kinsmen to place him in the national pantheon.
But it had to be done. Because the Nobel Committee had spoken … and made him the nation’s Nobel Prize winner, and so an institution, like the Monarchy or the Church of England or Anzac Day.
For a start, he seemed to feel ambiguous about me, and the odds were that Chloe Emptor would lie far outside his list of the redeemed.
—You could ask him to lunch, couldn’t you? she challenged me. He’d come to your place. And I’d bring Jacko eh, but not the astral bloody sisters. I wouldn’t stand for that.
—Listen Chloe, I told her, knowing that I needed to be desperately frank. He wouldn’t come to lunch at my place. He doesn’t like me. Like you, he thinks I’m a journeyman. Not one of the washed. He thinks I’m shit.
Chloe exhaled.
—Then who’s his agent?
—He doesn’t have an agent. He transcends agents.
—I suppose he does. He’s an absolute genius. And I’ve got to ask him some questions.