Craft For a Dry Lake

  About the Book

  In Craft for a Dry Lake Kim Mahood embarks on an extraordinary journey to her heartland – the outback of her youth. Compelled to revisit the haunts of her childhood by the tragic death of her father, Kim seeks to lay his ghost to rest, but instead finds herself faced with many of her own.

  Her adventures are interwoven with the echoes of childhood memories and peopled by an intriguing cast of outback characters. At times the lines between past and present become blurred as a daughter travels in the footsteps of her father, searching for a sense of place in this landscape she once called home.

  In the tradition of Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy, this beautifully written story is an intense and sensitive exploration of identity and family ties, and of black and white relations in Australia. Craft for a Dry Lake is a memoir that will touch the heart and soul of every Australian.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Notice

  More at Random House Australia

  To my father,

  whose death made the book necessary.

  This was my father’s country, or so I thought

  returning on some half-cocked pilgrimage

  to lay old ghosts, eschew old myths,

  or some such middle-life conceit.

  And found country, dry, a dry place

  that resisted memory,

  cattle trodden, beer cans and dead cars along the track,

  a route much favoured by blackfellows on grog runs to Rabbit

  Flat.

  Found country that could not hold the past,

  that was another place.

  The black women gave me my old skin back

  and made it new,

  but I could not wear it.

  The dreaming tracks are not mine.

  I left relieved, believing

  this place held nothing for me,

  a chapter closed.

  And leaving, felt an old wound seep,

  draining griefs too deep

  to be mine alone.

  Felt something reach.

  An old, hard grip, subtle as blood

  closing about the bone.

  1

  WE HAD ALWAYS BEEN CLOSE. He took me with him sometimes on short trips when I was very small, driving along the railway line from Finke because it afforded a better, though bumpier, route than the sandy track through the dunes. I divined my specialness to him early, and it was precious to me. When the drinking began to affect his moods I still felt the specialness, but with it a responsibility to something dark and sad that surfaced in him.

  He drove slowly, his elbows on the steering wheel when he wanted to roll a cigarette. I learned to roll them for him because when he did it he would also be looking out of the window at the country, or cattle, or looking for tracks. He never actually ran into anything, but sometimes it was pretty close. We began then the long conversation which was to continue between us until his death.

  He told me about being a small boy on the outskirts of Sydney during the Depression years. He would take a spud and a billycan and paddle down the river, happy to be by himself, dreaming of the day when he would go bush. There was a strange, heavy young woman who lived alone in a shack near the river. She made an impression on him because of her solitariness, and because she clearly did not belong with those women who became mothers and wives and sisters. He helped her with her horse, riding it and feeding it when she went away. His name was Alec then, short for Alexander, but his brother had already given him the nickname that would stick to him in its truncated version for the rest of his life. Joe Blow the Bushie.

  He told me about the milk run he did when he was ten, seven days a week for a shilling a day, getting up at four a.m. to do four hours work before school. He told of the places where he delivered the milk, the old horse which pulled the milk cart stopping of its own accord at each house. There was the grand house on the hill, which had once been a squatter’s residence, and a kind, quiet woman who gave him a book. There was the house where the fleas jumped into his socks before he got to the door, and when the door opened the stink nearly made him retch. Each week the milkman would count out my father’s pay, day by day, reluctantly—Monday, I think you worked on Monday. What about Tuesday? Were you here on Tuesday?

  My father never missed a day, every shilling counting towards the family’s survival. Grudgingly the milkman would hand over the seven shillings. My father always chuckled, recounting the story. Every week the milkman tempted himself to cheat the ten-year-old boy, and every week he could not quite manage to do it.

  He told me about the lay preacher who was an ex-burglar. The local church was a little solitary building in a clearing in the bush. The burglar would peddle up on his bicycle in the evening with his whizzbang box of tricks and deliver his sermon accompanied by flashes of electricity to signify lightning bolts from God. After the service he would peddle off into the darkness with his toolbox of batteries and screwdrivers, and my father could not help wondering whether the burglar was a truly reformed character or whether the toolbox served a dual purpose. It was about this time that he ceased to believe in the Sunday school God and began to find his own sense of life in the bush which still spread fingers along the river and into the edges of the city.

  During the Depression his father had occasional relief work, and his mother grew forbidden rhubarb in wooden boxes under the house. They lived on the outskirts of Sydney, seven of them in a tiny ramshackle Depression house on which his father did running repairs to keep it habitable. When the kitchen floor rotted out, his father co-opted him and his mother to help steal a wooden tent floor from the nearby army base. After dark, on a weekend when the army was out on manoeuvres, the three of them slipped among the canvas-lined streets to the tent his father had selected. His mother wore a cap and was disguised as a man.

  His father said—If we meet anyone, I’ll do the talking.

  Between them they lifted the wooden platform intact and stole away unchallenged. By daylight the tent floor had been transformed into a new kitchen floor.

  My father watched his intelligent, angry father flirt with the Communist Party. His father had the eccentric and strongly-held views of the self-educated, and a grievance. At the age of four he had been placed in an orphanage, although his parents were both still living. Conditions in the orphanage amounted to child slave labour, and at fourteen he ran away and joined the navy. For most of his life he believed he was illegitimate, since a younger sibling had been kept at home. It was not until he saw his birth certificate, when he was an old man, that he knew for certain this was not the case.

  One of my father’s early recollections was of being taken by his father to his grandmother’s deathbed. The two small boys, my father and his older brother, were sent in to see the dying old lady, whom they had never seen before, and who presumably had never seen t
hem. Her angry, unforgiving son stayed outside. There was no deathbed reconciliation, and I suppose she died grieving for the son she had left to fate.

  His services to the Party consisted mainly of pasting up posters after dark and occasionally providing a meeting room. Small groups of men and women came to the house, women such as my father had never seen, opinionated intellectuals who smoked and held their own with the men. His own shy gentle mother served them cups of tea and stayed quietly in the background. It seemed to him that these sophisticated aliens exploited his father, giving him menial dangerous chores and excluding him from serious intellectual discussion. The liaison broke down abruptly when a Party speaker at a rally took exception to some of my grandfather’s questions and accused him of never having had it tough. He attacked the orator with a shovel and had to be pulled off.

  My father went sometimes to stay with friends of the family who lived in a cottage on the North Shore. Their house was full of books and music and pleasant conversation, and he found a haven in the unostentatious expression of culture which did not exist in his own home. He would wander about the streets of the leafy suburb, gazing through ironwork gates at the imposing mansions in their islanded calm of flowerbeds and trees. He neither resented nor aspired to the wealth he saw, but he knew with a certainty beyond resolve that he would leave his parents’ world and follow the dream that had begun during his solitary journeys on the river.

  There is a school photograph of my father taken at around this time, sitting among about thirty other children, his classmates at the Western Sydney high school he attended. You don’t see children who look like that in Australia any more. They were drawn from an area hard hit by the Depression, most families including my father’s were on the dole. Many of the children are barefoot. The clothes are ragged, too large or too small. Faces show the marks of poor diet and congenital illnesses. My father’s face, with its jutting ears and bright smile, is one of the few that shines out with a clear hopeful intelligence.

  My father does not seem to have stepped into his real life until he left his family and childhood behind. When I examine the early stories more closely, they are full of waiting, of dreaming. His father looms large, too preoccupied with his own outrage and the vicissitudes of poverty to offer his family much in the way of affection. Younger siblings, a baby brother born with brain damage, absorb most of his mother’s energy. On his first day of high school he discovers that he has his older brother’s larrikin reputation to live down. The headmaster, hearing the name Mahood, says aghast—my God, not another one.

  The headmaster’s fears are unfounded. My father is shy, hard-working and intelligent. He is also somewhere else for much of the time. He rides the bus home after school, so absorbed in reverie that he travels miles beyond his stop. On the return journey he drifts back into daydream, and misses his stop again. His older brother, who has been sent to meet the bus, watches in disbelief as it sails past carrying his brother with it. Around the boy my father the Depression years are overtaken by the War years. In his third year of high school the students are given vocational guidance tests. The brightest boys among them, my father included, are advised to become fitters and turners, to be trained in the manufacture of delicate components for arms technology. No suggestion of finishing secondary school, of higher education, of a life after the war. This piece of cynicism makes a lasting impression on my father. He draws, he learns to play the guitar, and quietly withdraws from the family aspirations for him to acquire a trade, to get a job and to make a safe and unremarkable life for himself.

  His older brother, who has joined the navy with great enthusiasm, comes home on his first leave and tears down all the patriotic posters he has taped to the walls of their shared bedroom. The larrikin sailor and clown lies morosely on his bed and refuses to talk. My father takes a job in a dairy. He is fifteen.

  The mud and milk and cowshit of the dairy, the days regimented to the rhythms of cows’ udders, are not his idea of escape. He throws in the job and goes north.

  From this moment of departure there is a shift in the tempo of the stories. The shy daydreamer retreats and a young man full of vitality takes his place. He has come out into air he can breathe, and relishes it. Cutting cane, jumping trains, being threatened with arrest for vagrancy, he is on the road to his own future.

  His first job as a stockman was among the stony ridges and gullies north of Mt Isa, working for a family who had a little property several days ride from the Dobbyn, not far from the Gunpowder River. It was packhorse access only, and the campsites were platforms built in trees, with flour, tea and sugar stored out of reach of floods and predators. The men were constantly on the move, track-riding their own cattle, looking for the tracks of strange cattle, making sorties through the rocky gullies of no-man’s-land. The largest property in the area, owned by a company, was considered fair game. The battlers’ blocks which surrounded it fed like ticks on a fat cow, stealing unbranded stock at every opportunity, building their herds by the grace of the absentee landowner. But the stockmen employed by the company were smart men, and plenty of them had worked at one time or another on the other side of the boundary, and knew all the tricks. My father learned to wipe out tracks with a bush, to break up and scatter the charred sticks from the tiny campfires used to boil the billy. He learned the routes along stony creek beds which slowed wild cattle and showed no tracks. He learned to ride lookout, high along the crests of the hills, and to give the soft hooting cry of warning which carries so far and belongs in kind to the sounds of the bush.

  To a young man of seventeen it was the best life imaginable. Among these half-wild, semiliterate men he discovered a code of behaviour which suited something quietly anarchic in his nature. They lived like bushrangers, stealing from the wealthy company landowners, but treating other battlers with scrupulous fairness. They valued practical skill and native intelligence, had a knowledge of the country so deeply ingrained it was like an intuition, were capable of extravagant acts of physical courage. Uncompromising virtues, uncontaminated with self-reflection. You measured up, or you didn’t. I met one of these characters years later, after my father’s death, an old reptile who looked me over leeringly in the presence of his wife, and asked me if I was single. He also said—He was a smart man, your dad. But drink. He could really put it away.

  My father worked briefly for Mt Isa Mines, around the time of the big strike. His job was to watch the conveyor belt which carried the ore, breaking up the larger chunks as they went past. He used to act it out for us, poised and twitching, an imaginary sledgehammer raised, eyes fixed on an approaching lump of ore. As it got nearer he would tense, make several false starts with the hammer, swing wildly and miss, then pursue the fast-moving rock, taking hapless swipes until it disappeared. He said that gloves and pickaxes frequently came travelling along the conveyor belt, and he was always anticipating the appearance of an arm or a leg.

  He didn’t last long at the job, in spite of the money. Crossing the border into the Territory, he went back to cattle and horses, working his way across the Barkly Tablelands and eventually taking a job on Victoria River Downs. The immense pastoral holding was part of the Bovril empire, owned by an English lord and run along the lines of the English feudal system. It ran several stock camps almost continuously, and in spite of the exploitative conditions attracted top stockmen from all over the north. Most of them were less interested in the money than in the lifestyle, and in measuring themselves against their peers. Stock work required horsemanship and endurance, skill, quick reflexes and physical courage. To be a good stockman meant belonging to an elite. A photograph taken at the time shows my father on horseback, wearing a bandolier of bullets and with a rifle over his shoulder. Scrub bulls made the huge scattered herds difficult to control, and were chased and executed in the course of the work.

  Owing to the size of the operation, working at Victoria River Downs also provided one of the few opportunities to meet young women, several of whom were employed in
various capacities by the station. My mother, travelling on a collision course with my father, arrived from the Kimberleys and was employed in the store.

  MY PARENTS WERE BOTH TALKERS. I know their stories almost as well as I know my own. They came north, my mother from Perth and my father from Sydney, each compelled by a dream of escape, adventure and opportunity. My mother, with a university degree and the beginnings of a career in journalism, was in search of adventure, leaving behind her the conventions and social constraints of the city. In her energetic pursuit of ‘copy’ among the eccentrics and individualists of the Outback, she transformed herself into one of them. She discovered on her return to the city that she could no longer curb and curtail herself to the requirements of city life.

  My father was driven by a dream fuelled by a love of solitude, and the need to escape the poverty and limitations of Sydney. He knew when he left that he would never return.

  And so my parents converged from the western and eastern edges of the continent. They were both fleeing something they had experienced as narrow-minded and restrictive, the creeping conservatism which had settled over the Australian psyche. It was the late 1940s, and they travelled towards a place which had existed powerfully in the imaginations of both long before they set out on their journeys towards it. What they found when they arrived was a kind of frontier, a tremendous and dramatic stage with a handful of players, and the opportunity for everyone to have a starring role, to write the drama as they went along.