‘I know what you did with your gabardine,’ she said. ‘You stuffed it in the attic.’ The attic was just the sloping eave of our Cape Cod house.
‘Why would I do that, Mother?’ I took the bundle and shook it out. The coat was quite different from mine, rather better quality in fact. ‘Mine had a brown and green check flannel lining. This has red silk. This has been up there for years.’ We had bought the house only a year before.
‘Don’t lie,’ said Mother unabashed. She turned to Tony. ‘She’s such a liar,’ she said conspiratorially. ‘A foul-mouthed liar.’ Tony did not doubt the foul-mouthed, but he had painful reason to disbelieve that I was a liar. He held my hand under the table and squeezed it so hard that my eyes smarted. Dear Tony. In pace requiescat.
Queensland, December 1987
What shall I do here, blind and fatherless?
Everyone else can see, and has a father.
MARINA TSVETAYEVA, THE POET. 3
There was still one stone left unturned. When I asked my mother about the legend of my father’s jackerooing, she came up with two incantations. ‘Googie Bassingthwaighte,’ she said, ‘Thargomindah and Jackson.’ Thargomindah is a town in southwestern Queensland and the Bassing-thwaightes are sheep-farmers in the Darling Downs. My mother didn’t know why she remembered these names or what they could refer to, so I went to Australia again to find out.
Googie Bassingthwaighte, or Muir as he was christened, known to all as Googie for reasons that no one can remember, got to dreaming of being a cattle baron in the early twenties, and decided that he’d like to try for a big cattle lease up in the Warrego. ‘You’d better find out what it’s all about,’ said his dad and packed him off from the family sheep farm at Jinghi Jinghi, where the native grasses grow feathery and tall, to the red dust country up near Longreach. Goog was small, ‘born in a drought,’ he says, ‘never had much condition on me’, but he was wiry and strong. He rode in the picnic races at nine stone seven and won more than his fair share of them. If you ask him what his best day was he has trouble remembering whether it was the day he rode six winners or the day he won three races on the same horse.
Nowadays he keeps no horses and he doesn’t raise cattle in the west of Queensland, for he bought a farm near his father and his brothers when he got married and he called it after a long-submerged memory of the Bassingthwaightes in England, ‘Marnhull’. The Bassingthwaightes are unlike the Greers. They are calm and steady and continuous. Googie looks through the long windows of his weatherboard house out under the galvanised iron verandah to where his nephew’s sheep graze on his land because his nephew’s pasture has gone dry, and his grandson’s utility truck roars past on his way down to the gate. His nieces and granddaughters drop in to leave treats in his refrigerator. But since Googie’s wife died the grape-vines are slowly withering in the garden on the north side of the house and the flower beds have disappeared. Googie keeps no horses now. His brother is the secretary of the Racing Board and regularly tours all the country race tracks, but since drugs and big money took over Australian racing Googie has no interest. He keeps no dog, which might seem odd, but people who have worked with dogs, and loved the dogs they worked with, don’t like lapdogs.
If you pet a drover’s dog you’ll get the rough side of his tongue. Petting will ruin a good dog, they say. An Australian kelpie, called after the first breeding bitch of the strain, will work until it drops, and it won’t drop, they say, until both the drover and the mob have been dead a week. Drovers and musterers are attached to their dogs, I think, but they never pull their ears or pat them, or give them treats. Showing affection to a good dog ruins it, turns it into a flatterer and a fawner, a slobberer and a groveller, which is what most of the dogs you meet have become. A dog will rule you if you let it. If you die, of course, it’s just as likely to stay by your corpse until it starves to death, when if it had any sense it would eat you and move on. Man and dog are supposed to have a wordless attachment. Perhaps my father thought of me as his kelpie. Maybe he believed a rough caress or a word of praise would have ruined me. I think it’s no truer of a dog than a woman, actually.
The dogs got their revenge. They went bush and bred and now they run in packs throughout central Australia. The graziers who abandoned sheep-farming ‘when the dogs got bad’ blame the blacks who made no attempt to keep down their numbers on the central Australian reservations. They forgot the truth of the adage, ‘Every dog will have its day.’
Nowadays Googie’s a cat man. ‘There’s always a couple round the house,’ he said and grinned. ‘I shoot the kittens when there’s too many.’ I looked shocked. ‘Just put the saucer of milk down, kitten puts his head in, I put the barrel up against his head. Never knows what hit him.’ I thought of the terrified cats I had taken to the vet to be put down, that clung to my sweater as the vet tried to pull them off and take them behind the scenes. I’ve begged the vets to kill them at home in my lap but either the vets won’t come or when they come they prove to be clumsy with the lethal injection. If only I had the courage and the steady hand and the gun, to pour a saucer of milk and steady the barrel against an unsuspecting head. I liked Googie very much. He took himself totally unseriously, but he was game, funny, strong, uncomplaining and unexpectedly tender. He complimented me ironically on my bushcraft, when I didn’t get lost driving through the fenceless properties on the Darling Downs. We both smiled bitterly at the joke, for bushcraft is now map references and sign reading.
I didn’t ask him if he missed the horses, because I knew the answer. Every Australian who lives outside a city, not that there are many of them, misses the horses. The horse has gone from the Australian bush. There’s not an old-timer that doesn’t regret it bitterly. They’ll buttonhole you in the bar and tell you, ‘Two things ruined this country, the road train and the trail bike.’
The road trains are built for the wide highways and vast distances of the United States. European road trains are dinky-toys by comparison. These have enormous tractor engines with huge staring eyes and vast wheels broader in circumference than my car was high. On the narrow metalled roads of rural Australia they blast along spewing empty stubbies out of their windows. Even when I drew as far over on to the soft shoulder as I could get, the side draught lifted my Holden off the road as if it had been made of paper. These enormous gleaming missiles mow down confused kangaroos, wallaroos, wallabies, emus, sheep, and occasionally the feral pigs that feed on the corpses of all of them, even buffaloes, without knocking the ash off the driver’s cigarette.
From Roma to Cunnamulla I drove through an honour guard of dead animals, mostly kangaroos that lay like sleeping schoolgirls with their elegant heads pillowed on the edge of the tarmac and their small hands tucked under their chins. Others had been knocked head first into the ground and pushed along at high speed so that their heads had completely disappeared. Around them lay huge shiny stains like varnish where the blood had dried when the sun came up. There were some that were no more than jigsaws of whitening bones, others that were parchment, some that were blue and gleaming and wore a coronet of flies, others that had been slit open by the tusks of feral pigs, others that had been spread along the road like a carpet of fur. The distance from Roma to Cunnamulla is nearly six hundred kilometres and I reckon there was a dead kangaroo for every kilometre. Sometimes the stink crept into the car and once a sated blowfly came popping out of the air-conditioning duct.
The graziers from Darby were not ruing the slaughter of marsupials and emus, by any means. As they said bitterly, ‘Americans always ask us if it’s true that the kangaroo is becoming extinct. It’s the damn grazier that’s a theatened species!’ Presumably, if Darwin is right, the kangaroos that are fond of investigating the strange lights and noises on Australia’s roads at night will be selected out and the species will become road shy. It is my habit to hit the road just before dawn and drive slowly to see the creatures on their way to bed. None of them seemed to realise how dangerous I was. The male kangaroos would pause
and turn and come towards me as if to ask my business. Major Mitchell cockatoos, corellas, budgerigars, would stop feeding and wait politely till I had passed, raising their crests like incroyables flirting their fans. Lizards would stop crossing the road, and lift their heads to see me pull up beside them, then they would puff up or display their frills or push their tails up like spikes, imagining that their fierce display would make me vail my crest and vacate their territory. They could not understand that I was a human bullet rocketing through their ecosphere. An Australian bustard showed me why he was almost extinct, for he refused to run let alone fly, and stood by the road, a tall bird on short legs, examining me haughtily and shaking his swept-back head locks in disbelief. I pressed the button and my window slid down. ‘Can’t you understand how destructive I am?’ I asked him softly. Again he shook his head. I discovered that if I talked softly to the animals they would pause and listen with their faces towards me. All except the emus that is. The emus would always whirl in a fantastic frou-frou of plumes and dash off, running full tilt through fence wires that parted with a noise like snapping fiddle-strings.
The road train ruined the cattle country because the road train replaced droving. The stock routes now are empty. Instead the cattle are moved east for fattening on truck beds, standing in two tiers, jammed together so they cannot fall, faint with fear and thirst. Petrol is cheap and manpower is expensive. Mostly the animals are on their way to be sold, either to a slaughtering company or to a farmer who has grass or feed lots to fatten them on. They say that when the feed is good you will still find men droving cattle down the old routes, but the people who say that have never seen it. They are the kinds of people who think one article in a Sunday supplement describes reality. ‘Don’t know how to do it any more,’ the locals said to me at Thargomindah. ‘Only a handful of dark boys still work with horses.’ The aboriginal stockman is dying out along with his beloved horses.
The drover might be an extinct species but the jackeroo is not. These days he dashes round in a cloud of dust in a Japanese four-wheel-drive pick-up truck, usually yellow, with his Japanese trailbike stashed on the back. The pick-up is yellow so that it can be more easily seen from the air, for the annual muster these days is made by helicopter. The jackeroo rides his fences and checks his waterholes on his trail bike and he gets his orders by radio. That now you could imagine Reg Greer doing more or less, but the notion of Reg Greer on a horse, or a bike for that matter, is laughable. Still, Reg Greer at thirty-five could well have been a different animal from Reg Greer at eighteen or twenty. Perhaps he tried the jackerooing and perhaps he failed. And perhaps the country people would remember a dark-haired skinny boy with a weak chest who kept coming off his horse. There was one thing that bore out his story, such as it was.
When he was describing his dreams to the forces’ psychiatrist in 1943, Reg Greer told him that he had a recurrent nightmare about cattle running him down, ‘the idea of cattle running him down,’ the doctor said, and then quoted him with mildly satiric intent, ‘Fierce-looking things, you know.’ When I told them this at Jimbour, the assembled country-folk shouted at once, ‘He’s been jackerooing! He’s been in a rush!’
I had simply thought it funny that a man who was frightened of cattle had been sent jackerooing. ‘No,’ they said, ‘everybody’s frightened of cattle.’
‘You can be travelling with a mob, and for no reason they’ll panic and wheel and rush right over you.’
Then I understood. ‘Oh, a stampede,’ I said stupidly.
‘Yes,’ they said but they would not use the fancy word. ‘You can be sleeping out on the track and they’ll rush right over your campsite. There’s no precautions you can take, because it’s completely unpredictable. The cattle can get spooked by a shadow or the weather. Or anything. And then they rush. No. Your Dad had been jackerooing all right. It was the doctor who didn’t know his arse from a hole in the ground.’ As usual.
‘There was a drover called Jackson,’ said Googie thoughtfully. ‘And he used to work Cooper’s Creek way and the channel country. Worked round there for years. He was one of the best. Your father’d remember if he jackerooed with him.’ I reckon he would have and I reckon he’d have told us yarns about it, if he had ridden with Jackson.
Most Tasmanians who came up to central and western Queensland were not young toffs coming for the experience—according to legend one grazier used to charge jackeroos £500 a year—but shearers making the long trek up the wool track, for money. Thousands of Tasmanians crossed to the mainland and travelled north every year. The town of Longford supplied so many men (who stayed on the mainland for nine months out of the twelve) that it was known as the shearers’ widow. The three Greig boys from Longford started travelling the wool track before the turn of the century, and their sons joined them when they left school. There was a Bill and a Bob in that first generation. Young Bill said, ‘You could have as soon stopped me breathing as stopped me going shearing.’ He was off with his father and his uncles when he was fourteen. There were six Greig boy shearers in that generation; perhaps there was a Reg among them. Shearers often worked under assumed names; some were ‘wife-starvers’, others were on the run from the law for one reason or another, others were avoiding creditors. The tradition of changing names came easily to the shearers, especially if they had been involved in industrial disputes and their name was out on the bush telegraph as that of a troublemaker.
It’s not illegal to change your name in Australia. You can be known by any name you like and you are not obliged to register the change. You may marry, vote, take out credit cards, open bank accounts as Mickey Mouse or Albert Einstein, and thereby commit no offence, provided you are not marrying or voting for the second time. Some of the shearing confraternity used so many different names that they had difficulty remembering what name they gave the woolgrower. The publicans cashed their cheques without fuss for most of the money came back into their tills anyway; to their mates the men were known as Lofty if they were short, or Bluey if they had red hair, or Curly if their hair was straight. Those were the names that counted; when the police came looking for a name the men on the track could honestly say that they’d never heard of him, and at the same time send a message on the bush telegraph that only the wanted man would understand.
I was doing something pretty un-Australian riding down my father’s mysterious past. No names, no pack-drill is the Australian way. The ‘Labor’ government of Bob Hawke tried to introduce the ‘Australia Card’, so-called in a crass attempt to deny the fact that it was that most un-Australian thing, an identity card. In a most Australian way Hawke gave the dirty work of presenting this unpopular idea to the voting public to the only woman in his cabinet. It failed and her political career ended abruptly. The information is still stored on government computers, and the cards sit in the government store in Deakin, waiting for the tide of reaction to release them on the world. Meanwhile the real rulers of the country, the media oligarchs, keep up the pressure for the destruction of the last liberty, the freedom to go bush, by reporting every case of working-class fraud, known to Australians as ‘dole bludging’. I sat in my Holden, encumbered with credit cards, driving licence, car-hire agreement, passport, enough identification to satisfy the Kremlin. What if all of it was in a shonky name?
The Tasmanians, completely ID free, went by train to Adelaide and then caught the ‘Ghan’ to the end of the line. With them travelled their Cressy bicycles (made in Longford). Unbelievable as it sounds they rode to the sheep stations on their bikes, first up to Cordilla Downs and then south through some of the most inhospitable country in the world. The distances were huge. One man travelled three thousand miles on his bike in the year. And when they got home they won all the cycle races, as William Martin Greer did at the Caledonian Games in Launceston in 1910. When the tyres wore out or the tubes finally gave way after repeated punctures from the thousand million iron-hard burrs they rode across, they bound the wheel rims with greenhide. The Tasmanians were famous f
or their funny men. Tall stories are a tradition on the track; Ray Watley from Tasmania told Patsy Adam Smith that ‘riding a bike from Bourke my tyre wore out so I killed a tiger snake and wrapped it round the rim, shoved its tail in his mouth and off I pedalled!’ The only marking of the route were the pads left by the camel trains by which the Pathans brought essential supplies to the isolated stations. If there was a dust storm or a wind the pads blew away. If the shearers got lost, they died of thirst. The dust and the glare played merry hell with their eyes.
Nowadays Australians going bush travel in four-wheel-drive leisure vehicles, with winches and cables and spotlights, with water tanks and refrigerators, with dinghies tied to the roof and trail bikes lashed on the back. The outback is tourism now. I can remember laughing when some Americans took me for a trip down a bayou in Louisiana, and winched their aluminium boat into the water and unloaded portable refrigerators and air cushions and god knows what else besides. When I was growing up you didn’t spend a couple of thousand dollars before taking off for the bush; you just shot through. When town life turned too hard, men went walking the track, with nothing but a swag, a blanket, flour, sugar, tea, tobacco and a water-bottle. The swagman is extinct, I think. I’ve driven thousands of miles on the unsealed tracks back of Bourke and Cobar and I’ve never seen a single man walking the track. Nowadays if you saw a man in a bowler hat riding a bike across the spinifex you’d know you were hallucinating.
When the shearers got cars they took off in them with the hoods down, sitting on the backs of the seats like young bloods going on a works picnic. I guess that’s why I took my fancy Holden sedan with no bush extras down roads where leisure vehicles with four-wheel-drive and steel-belted radials fear to go. I didn’t even have any boots with me. Perhaps I am the granddaughter of one of those hard-arsed cyclists of long ago. I’d have been embarrassed to do a trip like that in a land-cruiser with spare wheels and water-cans on the roof. The old Tasmanian shearers would have thought I took myself too seriously by half if I had.