A Town Like Alice

  The driver said, ‘Staying in Willstown?’

  ‘I wanted to see Joe Harman, but they say he’s away. I’m staying here till next week if Mrs Connor can have me, and going on to Cairns in the Dakota.’

  He looked at her curiously. ‘Joe Harman’s gone to England. You’re English, aren’t you?’

  The truck moved off down the wide tarmac runway. ‘That’s right,’ she replied.

  He beamed at her. ‘My mother and my dad, they both came from England. My dad, he was born in Lewisham, that’s part of London, I think, and my mother, she came from Hull.’ He paused. ‘My name’s Small,’ he said. ‘Sam Small, like the chap with the musket.’

  The truck left the runway and began bumping and swaying over the earth track leading to the town. Dust rose into the cab, the engine roared, and blue fumes enveloped them; every item of the structure creaked and rattled. ‘Why did Joe Harman go to England?’ she shouted above the din. ‘What did he go for?’

  ‘Just took a fancy, I think,’ Mr Small replied. ‘He won the Casket couple of years back.’ This was Greek to her. ‘There’s not a lot to do upon the stations, this time of the year.’

  She shouted, ‘Do you know if there’s a room vacant at the hotel?’

  ‘Oh, aye, there’ll be a room for you. You just out from England?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s the rationing like at home, now?’

  She shouted her information to him as the truck bumped and swayed across the landscape to the town. A wooden shack appeared on one side of the track, and fifty yards on there was another on the left; there was another some distance ahead, and they were in the main street. They drew up in front of a two-storeyed building with a faded signboard on the first-floor veranda, AUSTRALIAN HOTEL. ‘This is it,’ said Mr Small. ‘Come on in, and I’ll find Mrs Connor.’

  The Australian Hotel was a fair-sized building with about ten small bedrooms opening on to the top floor veranda. It had wooden floors and wooden doors; the whole of the rest of it was built of corrugated iron on a wood framework. Jean was accustomed by that time to the universal corrugated iron roofs, but a corrugated iron wall to her bedroom was a novelty.

  She waited on the upstairs veranda while Mr Small went to find Mrs Connor; the veranda had one or two beds on it. When the landlady appeared she was evidently only just awake; she was a tall, grey-haired determined woman of about fifty.

  Jean said, ‘Good afternoon. My name’s Jean Paget, and I’ve got to stop here till next week. Have you got a room?’

  The woman looked her up and down. ‘Well, I don’t know, I’m sure. You travelling alone?’

  ‘Yes. I really came to see Joe Harman, but they tell me he’s away. I’m going on to Cairns.’

  ‘You just missed the Cairns aeroplane.’

  ‘I know. They say I’ll have to wait a week for the next one.’

  ‘That’s right.’ The woman looked around. ‘Well, I don’t know. You see, the men sleep out on this balcony, often as not. That wouldn’t be very nice for you.’

  Sam Small said, ‘What about the two back rooms, Ma?’

  ‘Aye, she could go there.’ She turned to Jean. ‘It’s on the back balcony, looks out over the yard. You’ll see the boys all going to the gents, but I can’t help that.’

  Jean said, ‘I expect I’ll survive that.’

  ‘You been in outback towns before?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve only just come out from England.’

  ‘Is that so! What’s it like in England now? Do you get enough to eat?’ Jean said her piece again.

  ‘I got a sister married to an Englishman,’ the woman said. ‘Living at a place called Goole. I send her home a parcel every month.’

  She took Jean and showed her the room. It was clean and with a good mosquito net; it was small, but the passage door was opposite the double window opening on to the balcony, giving a clear draught through. ‘Nobody don’t come along this balcony, except Anne – she’s the maid. She sleeps in this other room, and if you hear any goings on at night I hope you’ll let me know. I got my eye upon that girl.’ She reverted to the ventilation. ‘You leave your door open a chink, prop your case against it so that no one can’t come barging in by mistake, and have the windows open, and you’ll get a nice draught through. I never had no difficulty sleeping in this place.’

  She glanced down at Jean’s hand. ‘You ain’t married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, there’ll be every ringer in this district coming into town to have a look at you. You better be prepared for that.’ Jean laughed. ‘I will.’

  ‘You a friend of Joe Harman, then?’

  ‘I met him in the war,’ Jean said. ‘In Singapore, when we were both waiting for a passage home.’ It was nearer to the truth than her last lie, anyway. ‘Then as I was in Australia I sent him a telegram to say I’d come and see him. I didn’t get an answer so I came here anyway. But he’s gone walkabout.’

  The woman smiled. ‘You picked up some Aussie slang.’

  ‘Joe Harman taught me that one, when I met him in the war.’

  Sam Small brought up her suitcase; she thanked him, and he turned away, embarrassed. She went into her room and changed her damp clothes for dry ones, and went along to the bathroom and had a shower, and was ready for tea at half past six when the bell echoed through the corrugated iron building.

  She found her way down to the dining-room. Three or four men were seated there already and they looked at her curiously; a well-developed girl of sixteen whom she came to know as Annie indicated a separate small table laid for one. ‘Roast beef, roast lamb, roast pork, roast turkey,’ she said. ‘Tea or coffee?’

  It was swelteringly hot still. Flies were everywhere in the dining-room; they lighted on Jean’s face, her lips, her hands. ‘Roast turkey,’ she said; time enough to try for a light meal tomorrow, when she knew the form. ‘Tea.’

  A plate was brought to her heaped high with meat and vegetables, hot and greasy and already an attraction for the flies. Tea came, with milk out of a tin; the potatoes seemed to be fresh, but the carrots and the turnips were evidently tinned. She thought philosophically that the flies would probably result in dysentery but she knew what to do about that; she had plenty of sulphatriad to see her through the week. She ate about a quarter of the huge plate of food and drank two cups of tea; then she was defeated.

  She got outside into the open air as soon as possible, escaping from the flies. On the downstairs veranda three feet above the level of the ground there were two or three deckchairs, a little distance from the entrance to the bar. She had seen nowhere else in the hotel where she could sit and she already knew enough about Australian conventions not to go near the bar; she went and sat down in one of these chairs wondering if by doing so she was offending against local manners.

  She ht a cigarette and sat there smoking, looking at the scene. It was evening but the sun was still strong; the dusty great expanse that served as a street was flooded with a golden light. On the opposite side of the road, more than a hundred yards away, there was a fairly extensive single-storey building that had been built on to from time to time; this was labelled – Wm Duncan, General Merchant. There was no sign of any other shop in the town. Outside Mr Duncan’s establishment three coloured Abo stockmen were gossiping together; one held the bridle of a horse. They were big, well-set-up young men, very like Negroes in appearance and, like Negroes, they seemed to have plenty to laugh about.

  Further along the other side of the great street a six-inch pipe rose vertically from the ground to a height of about eight feet. A fountain of water gushed up from the top of this pipe and the water seemed to be boiling hot, because a cloud of steam surrounded the fountain, and the stream running away into the background was steaming along its length. A quarter of a mile away a small hut was built across the course of the stream so that the stream ran into the hut and out the other side, but Jean had yet to discover the purpose of this edifice.

  A low mur
mur of voices reached her from the bar; from time to time a man passed her and went in through the open door. She saw no women in the place.

  Presently a young man, passing by upon the road, smiled at her and said, ‘Good evening.’ She smiled back at him, and said, ‘Good evening.’

  He checked immediately, and she knew that she had started something. He said, ‘I saw you come in with Sam Small this afternoon. Came in the aeroplane, didn’t you?’

  He was a clean-looking young yokel; he walked with the typical swaying gait of the ringer, and he wore the green jodhpurs and the elastic-sided boots that marked his calling. It was no good trying to be standoffish. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I came up from Cloncurry. Tell me, is that water natural?’

  He looked where she was pointing. ‘Natural? That’s a bore. Never seen one before?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve only just come out from England.’

  ‘From England? Oh my word.’ He spoke in the slow manner of the outback. ‘What’s it like in England? Do you get enough to eat?’

  She said her piece again. ‘My Dad came from England,’ he said. ‘From a place called Wolverhampton. Is that near where you live?’

  ‘About two hundred miles,’ she replied.

  ‘Oh, quite close. You’ll know the family then. Fletcher is the name. I’m Pete Fletcher.’

  She explained to Pete that there were quite a lot of people in England, and reverted to the subject of the bore. ‘Does all the water that you get from bores come up hot like that?’

  ‘Too right,’ he said. ‘It’s mineral, too – you couldn’t drink that water. There’s gas comes up with it as well. I’ll light it for you if you’d like to see.’ He explained that it would make a flame five or six feet high. ‘Wait till it gets a bit darker, and I’ll light it for you then.’

  She said that was terribly kind of him, and he looked embarrassed. Al Burn, the Shell agent and truck repairer came by and stopped to join them. ‘Got fixed up all right, Miss Paget?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. I’m staying here till Wednesday and then going on to Cairns.’

  ‘Good-oh. We don’t see too many strange faces, here in Willstown.’

  ‘I was asking Pete here about the bore. Pete, do the cattle drink that water?’

  The boy laughed. ‘When they can’t get nothing sweeter they’ll drink that. You’ll see that they won’t touch it in the wet, but then in the dry you’ll see them drinking it all right.’

  ‘Some bores they won’t touch,’ said Al. He was rolling himself a cigarette. ‘They sunk a bore on Invergordon, that’s a station between here and Normanton – over to the south a bit. They had to go down close on three thousand feet before they got the water and did it cost them something, oh my word. The bore crew, they were there close on three months. Then when they got the water it was stinking with the minerals and the cattle wouldn’t touch it, not even in the dry. What’s more, it wouldn’t grow grass, either.’

  Two more men had drifted up and joined the little gathering about her chair. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘why is this town so spread out? Why aren’t the houses closer together?’

  One of the newcomers, a man of forty that she later learned to know as Tim Whelan, a carpenter, said, ‘There was houses all along here once. I got a photograph of this town took in 1905. I’ll bring it and show you tomorrow.’

  ‘Were there more people living here then?’

  Al Burns said, ‘Oh my word. This was one of the gold towns, Miss Paget. Maybe you wouldn’t know about that, but there was thirty thousand people living here one time.’

  The other newcomer said. ‘Eight thousand. I saw that in a book.’

  Al Burns said stubbornly, ‘My Dad always said there was thirty thousand when he come here first.’

  It was evidently an old argument. Jean asked, ‘How many are there now?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno.’ Al turned to the others. ‘How many would you say now, Tim?’ To Jean, aside, he said, ‘He builds the coffins so he ought to know.’

  ‘hundred and fifty,’ said Mr Whelan.

  Sam Small had joined them on the veranda. ‘There’s not a hundred and fifty living in Willstown now. There’s not more than a hundred and twenty.’ He paused. ‘Living here in the town, not the stations, of course. Living right here in the town, not counting boongs.’

  A slow wrangle developed, so they set to work to count them; Jean sat amused while the evening light faded and the census was taken. The result was a hundred and forty-six, and by the time that that had been determined she had heard the name and occupation of most people in the town.

  ‘Were there goldmines here?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mr Small. ‘They had claims by the hundred one time, all up and down these creeks, oh my word. There were seventeen hotels here, seventeen.’

  Somebody else said, ‘Steamers used to come here from Brisbane in those days – all around Cape York and right up the river to the landing stage. I never see them myself, but that’s what my old man told me.’

  Jean asked, ‘What happened? Did the gold come to an end?’

  ‘Aye. They got the stuff out of the creeks and the surface reefs, the stuff that was easy got. Then when they had to go deep and use a lot of machinery and that, it didn’t pay. It’s the same in all these towns. Croydon was the same, and Normanton.’

  ‘They say they’re going to start the mine in Croydon – open it again,’ said somebody.

  ‘They been talking like that ever since I can remember.’

  Jean asked, ‘But what happened to the houses? Did the people go away?’

  ‘The houses just fell down, or were pulled down to patch up others,’ Al told her. ‘The people didn’t stay here when the gold was done – they couldn’t. There’s only the cattle stations here now.’

  The talk developed among the men, with Jean throwing in an occasional remark or question. ‘Ghost towns,’ somebody said. That’s what they called the Gulf towns in a book that I read once. Ghost towns. ‘That’s because they’re ghosts of what they were once, when the gold was on.’

  ‘It didn’t last for long,’ somebody said. ‘1893 was the year that the first gold here was found, and there wasn’t many people still living here in 1905.’

  Jean sat while the men talked, trying to visualize this derelict little place as a town with eight thousand inhabitants, or thirty thousand; a place with seventeen hotels and houses thickly clustered in the angles of the streets. Whoever had planned the layout had dreamed a great dream; with people streaming in to take up claims and the population doubling itself every few days, the planner had had some excuse for dreaming of a New York of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Now all that remained was a network of rectangular tracks where once there had been streets of wooden houses; odd buildings alone remained among this network to show what had been the dream.

  As the light faded Pete and Al went out and lit the bore for Jean. They struck half a dozen matches and got it to light; a flame shot upwards from it and lit up the whole town, playing and flickering amongst the water and the steam till finally it was extinguished by a vomit of water. They lit it again, and Jean admired it duly; it was clear that this was the one entertainment that the town provided, and they were doing their best to give her a good time. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that in England.’

  They were duly modest. ‘Most towns around here have a bore like that, that you can light,’ they said.

  She was tired with her day of flying; at nine o’clock she excused herself from their company and they all wished her goodnight. She drew Al Burns a little to one side before she went. ‘Al,’ she said. ‘I’d like to see Jim Lennon – he’s the man at Midhurst, isn’t he? I’d like to see him before I go on Wednesday. Will he be coming into town?’

  ‘Saturday he might be in,’ Al said. ‘I’d say that he’d be in here Saturday for his grog. If I hear of anybody going out that way I’ll send him word and say that you’re in town, and want to
see him.’

  ‘Do they work a radio schedule at Midhurst?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s too close in town, it wouldn’t be worth it. If anyone gets sick or has an accident they can get him into town here in an hour or so, and the sister has a radio at the hospital.’ He paused. ‘There’ll be someone going out that way in the next day or so. If not, and if Jim Lennon doesn’t come in on Saturday, I’ll run you out there in the truck on Sunday.’

  ‘That’s awfully kind of you,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to put you to that trouble.’

  ‘It’s no trouble,’ he said. ‘Make a bit of a change.’

  She went up to bed. The hotel was lit by electric light made in the backyard by an oil engine and generator set that thumped steadily outside her room till she heard the bar close at ten o’clock; at five past ten the engine stopped and all the lights went out. Willstown slept.

  She was roused at five o’clock with the first light with the sounds of people getting up and washing; she lay dozing, listening to the early morning sounds. Breakfast was not till half past seven; she got up and had a shower and was punctual in the dining-room. She found that the standard breakfast in Willstown was half a pound of steak with two fried eggs on top of it; she surprised Annie very much by asking for one fried egg and no steak. ‘Breakfast is steak and eggs,’ Annie explained patiently to this queer Englishwoman.

  ‘I know it is,’ said Jean. ‘But I don’t want the steak.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to eat it.’ The girl was obviously puzzled.

  ‘Could I have just one fried egg, and no steak?’ asked Jean.

  ‘You mean, just one fried egg on a plate by itself?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Food conversation in Willstown was evidently quite a new idea. ‘I’ll ask Mrs Connor,’ said Annie. She came back from the kitchen with a steak with two fried eggs on top. ‘We’ve only got the one breakfast,’ she explained. Jean gave up the struggle.

  She ventured out to the kitchen after breakfast and found Mrs Connor. ‘I’ve got a few things to wash,’ she said. ‘Could I use your washtub, do you think? And – have you got an iron?’