Craft For a Dry Lake Page 2

  There is a fine, fearless quality about my young parents. When they married, my mother owned a motor bike and a camera, my father a swag and a guitar. They had attempted, on the plea of my mother’s family, to save two hundred pounds before they married. My father took a job with the stock and station firm of Wesfarmers in Perth, while my mother worked as a journalist with Hoofs and Horns in Adelaide. In my mother’s absence a doctor’s daughter in Perth made a play for the handsome young ex-ringer, inviting him to concerts and dinners, introducing him to the local social set. My father innocently accepted the invitations and told my mother about them in his regular letters. Deducing the intentions of the doctor’s daughter, my mother sent the engagement ring back. She also threw in her job and caught the train to Alice Springs.

  Wesfarmers reluctantly gave my father two weeks’ leave when he threatened to resign. He flew to Adelaide, discovered my mother had already decamped, and flew to Alice Springs, where he met the train. My mother was resolute in her refusal to listen to his explanations. She hitchhiked north. My father followed. Sometimes they caught lifts on the same truck. In Katherine, his two weeks’ leave expired, my father sent a telegram to Wesfarmers saying—Back next Monday. My mother went west to Humbert River to visit her sister, who was working as a governess. My father went too. He sent his employers another telegram—Back next Monday. When the Humbert River residents travelled to Katherine for the races, my parents went with them. In Katherine my father, carrying the stuffed crocodile he had bought as a gift for his future mother-in-law, hailed the local taxi driver. He explained to my mother that if she would not marry him here, immediately, he and the crocodile would take the taxi to Darwin and she would never see him again. My mother, with the encouragement of most of Katherine’s population, said yes. A white dress, several sizes too large, was located in a hawker’s van and altered to fit. A wedding ring was loaned for the occasion. My father’s hair was trimmed, and white shirt and trousers bought at the store. The Salvation Army padre performed the second marriage ceremony to take place in Katherine and a grader driver took the wedding photographs. A slightly flustered congratulatory telegram arrived from my grandmother in Perth, addressed to Marie and Joe, Northern Territory. My father sent Wesfarmers another telegram saying—Back next Monday.

  It was fortunate, after five weeks absence, that my father still had his job, since the combined finances of my parents when they arrived in Perth was twelve pounds, ten of which were owed in back rent. But the job was merely an interim. My parents were Territorians. Shortly before I was born my father took a position as acting superintendent on the recently established Aboriginal settlement of Hooker Creek, seven hundred miles south-west of Darwin. When my mother attempted to send a telegram from the local post office to tell my father of my arrival, she was informed that there was no such place. A few weeks later she set out, baby in tow, for the nonexistent place, five hundred dirt track miles from the nearest town of Katherine.

  My mother has written of these early years when my father was employed by the Department of Native Affairs. It was the fifties, an era of government rationing and the policy of assimilation for Aborigines. It was also an era of entrenched bureaucratic inefficiency. In the first months of my father’s employment, the settlement was left without rations for the Aborigines, who fortunately were traditional Warlpiri people only recently in from the bush, still efficient hunters and gatherers. There was no kerosene to run lights and refrigerators, medical supplies consisted of aspirin and sulphur tablets, and for much of the time there was no vehicle. The vehicle, apart from providing transport, was also needed to maintain the bore, the settlement’s only water supply, and to recharge the battery for the radio, the only means of communication. During this time my father became seriously ill with malaria, and several Aborigines died of it. My mother, without medical training or quinine, dosed and cared for her sick husband and half the population of the camp.

  It is difficult these days to imagine an Aboriginal community (not to mention a young couple with a small baby) being abandoned for months without food, medical supplies, electricity, refrigeration, transport, radio contact and potentially without water. My father’s brief, under these conditions, was to build housing for the people, break in horses and train stockmen in order to establish a cattle operation, carry out medical services and do the necessary administration and paperwork involved in running a community. All this he did, and worried that it was his own inadequacy that made the job so difficult. He wired up torch batteries to run the radio, planted a vegetable garden, took horses to the cattle station of Wave Hill to borrow flour, stitched wounds and splinted broken limbs after the frequent battles of the volatile Warlpiri. His suggestion that the type of housing he was expected to build was not appropriate for traditional Aboriginal people was ignored. So was his suggestion that standardised spelling of Aboriginal names would eliminate the confusion as to how many individuals actually lived on the community.

  In spite of the frustrations, my parents were very happy on Hooker Creek, but my father had established himself as an upstart. After a year he was summarily banished to a mosquito-ridden mangrove swamp on the coast west of Darwin. My health deteriorated, and my parents were relocated to Beswick in Arnhem Land, where my father had the position of deputy superintendent. But his days with Native Affairs were numbered. Promotion was out of the question, and he did not have the temperament for compromise. In Central Australia a legendary character known as Colonel Rose ran a hand-picked team of stock inspectors who were working on eradicating pleuropneumonia and tuberculosis from the cattle population of the region. Although it was a government operation, Colonel Rose was notorious for hurling paperwork and official directives into the wastepaper basket and insisting that his stock inspectors be left in peace to do their jobs. He was outrageous, authoritarian and highly respected.

  In later years he owned a pet eagle and a three-legged retriever, careering about town with both creatures in a Mini-Moke. When he was apprehended for dangerous driving, it transpired that he had not held a driving licence for years.

  After the self-serving inefficient bureaucratic pettiness of the Department of Native Affairs, this was the kind of man for whom my father wanted to work. On learning that my father was employed by Native Affairs, the Colonel snorted in disgust and turned him down out of hand. But he made inquiries, discovered my father was in disgrace with the department, and relented.

  My memories begin soon after this. My father was allocated the southern region of Central Australia as his jurisdiction, with the tiny railway town of Finke as his base. It is at Finke that my own sense of country has its beginnings, on the bank of the wide dry ancient pink river which cuts its way through the sandstone cliffs and red dunes of the Simpson Desert. It was during these years that the Centre succumbed to a drought so relentless that the wild camels died in their hundreds on the edge of stinking pools of mud, and one summer it was so hot that birds died in midflight and fell from the sky like feathered stones. On a trip to Adelaide my mother had to explain to me that the strange green stuff in front of the houses was grass. Finke exists even now in my memory with a hallucinatory clarity, its dust storms and the relentless three hundred and sixty degrees of horizon. Like calves born in times of drought, I did not know anything else, and cherished it.

  Finke briefly gained notoriety after a fancy-dress party in which my parents participated. For some reason it is always thought a good joke for men to dress as women, and the women played their less adventurous part and dressed as men. A band of fettlers from down the line got drunk at the pub and crashed the party, picking a fight with the first man they encountered. He shrieked and bolted, and the fearsome hairy-armed women of Finke removed their high-heeled shoes and waded into the fray. It took a while for the rumour of a band of Simpson Desert Amazons to die down, and Finke chuckled into its beer for months afterwards.

  After four years at Finke we relocated to Alice Springs. By this time I had a brother and a very new s
ister. The years spent in Alice provided a hiatus in the adventurous trajectory of my parents’ lives. It was a domestic period of small children, pony clubs, schools and neighbours. My mother taught French at the local high school, and my father continued to work as a stock inspector, spending much of his time out bush. He brought it back with him on his return, in his dust-covered Land Rover and battered felt hat.

  And then there is the story that took a grip on my father’s life and the life of my family, that continues to retell itself through my own life, full of loose ends and unfinished business.

  2

  MY FATHER’S WORK TOOK HIM all over the southern part of the Territory, and he would take his sketchbook and camp alone in the bush, making watercolour sketches and notes. After his death, among his trunkful of papers, I found the sketchbooks, notations in line and colour of his twin passions for painting and for the empty arid landscapes of the Centre. They record places which these days are tourist glamour spots—Chambers Pillar, Gosse Bluff—easily accessible by four-wheel drive and well-maintained roads. In my father’s time access was via sandy and treacherous station tracks, if there were tracks at all.

  A couple of years after the move to Alice my father decided to resign from his job as a stock inspector and work full-time as an artist. He was a very good cartoonist and had a number of commercial options to take up. Alice Springs was expanding fast as a tourist centre, with a growing market for local artists. When his friends heard about his intention to leave his job for the sake of his art, the rumour swept Alice Springs. Have you heard about Joe, poor bugger? He’s quitting his job because of his ’eart.

  Shortly before he tendered his resignation, the opportunity arose to be part of a land party which would set out from Alice Springs to search for a stock route from the southern Kimberleys to Central Australia. The Centre was recovering from years of drought. Cattle numbers were severely depleted, and disease-free breeding cows were available in the Kimberleys. The feasibility of the route had long been considered, and the time seemed right to make an attempt at it. In February of 1962 good rains had fallen, and the possibility was raised of bringing cattle overland on surface waters.

  My father was thirty-four. He had a wife, four children and a drinking problem. He was never happier than when he was alone in the bush. The chance of making a trip into unknown country was irresistible.

  In April of 1962 the six-man party set out on a due west compass bearing from the abandoned mine site of the Granites to the Aboriginal mission of Balgo in Western Australia. Although much of the country was wet and boggy, the direct route did not find usable stock water, and at Balgo a light plane was chartered to fly back over the route. Several large claypans which appeared to be fresh water were located to the south of the original traverse. The plane returned to Balgo and three of the party flew back to Alice Springs, leaving my father, Bill Wilson and Milton Willick to make the more circuitous return journey with the vehicles. Bill and Milton were both excellent bushmen, and for my father this part of the trip was pure pleasure. His expedition report is published in the July 1962 edition of a small journal called Australian Territories.

  The country improved as we travelled east the following day and 17 miles from Mt Phyllis we found a lush Bluebush swamp—every type of feed imaginable—with water suitable for horses. We knew we were close to a large redwater claypan and, only a couple of miles further on, we drove straight onto it …

  Our next find was a big white claypan (also containing usable water) which was marked on our map. Because of its shape we called it Bullock’s Head Lake. This was good country with ironstone gravel flats covered in many good grasses and top feed … It was important now to find another water source within 30 or 40 miles of the red claypan. The next couple of days tested all our abilities to read the signs for finding large quantities of water. A symbolic plaque or painting for the entire trip would show a man on the roof of his vehicle, in a sea of spinifex, trying to penetrate the distance with binoculars. We spent a full day following birds and country contours to water, where, in Bill’s words, ‘If you camped on it for three days with a galah and a mouse, you’d have to give them a dry day.’

  Two days later we had largely mapped this area by taking frequent bearings on ‘willy-willys’ off Bullock’s Head Lake. It was 54 miles from the red claypan before we found an excellent waterhole with a hard-packed sandy edge and bottom, hidden among dense tea-tree and huge anthills. We named it Lake Ruth. This lake was about 40 miles west of The Granites, so we knew then that the cattle would make it.

  All this is history. After a couple of days in Alice Springs, Bill Wilson went back and dragged a heavy chain along the route we had followed to give the cattle a track to follow. He met the overland cattle at Mt Phyllis, and delivered them, 1008 cows strong, to Milton and Bill Waudby at the Granites.

  There is nothing in the clear, well-written account to indicate where this journey would take my father, but I remember the spaces that opened up in his voice when he spoke about it. When the idea of applying for a pastoral lease in the Tanami was raised, it did not take him long to make his choice between art and country.

  3

  MY MOTHER IS STILL A TALKER. She is a popular public speaker, a chewer on ears, a deliverer of soap-box harangues at the smallest provocation. She talks, when no-one else is available, to the radio, the bettongs which she feeds on the back lawn, the cat, the magpies, herself. She provides a running commentary on what she is doing, should be doing, will be doing. She does this whether anyone is listening or not. Her talk overflows into the written word. It is often designed to provoke a reaction. It is rich with contradiction, opinion and recollection. She has the stamina of the true talker and has won many arguments simply on the basis of her ability to talk longer than anyone else.

  My mother always believed herself to be plain. In the folklore of her childhood she was the clever one, her blonde sister the pretty one. In fact many women have made themselves into beauties with fewer natural assets than my mother. As a young woman she had dark reddish-brown hair, beautiful green eyes, good cheekbones and a wide mouth which smiled readily. She had a small neat athletic body, which maintained itself, in spite of heavy smoking and the birth of four children, well beyond middle age.

  My mother is not introspective. She was not introspective as a child and she has never been an introspective adult. She is optimistic, opinionated, contradictory, infuriating, courageous and rarely indulges in self-pity. The picture I have of her as a child is not much different. On winter nights in Alice Springs when my father was away on a bush trip she would tell stories of her childhood. They differ from my father’s stories because, although the rather brash tomboy who was my mother is at the centre of the stories, they are in some essential sense not about her.

  They are peopled with a compelling and eccentric cast of characters, they are rich with drama and humour. There is her domineering grandmother (who my mother resembles in appearance), who was rigidly opinionated, loathed men, Catholics and the Irish, in that order, and ruled the lives of her children until she died. There is her gentle and long-suffering grandfather, a surrogate father figure, who was a builder, and who put the garden hose through the bedroom window when Grandma had taken to her bed and was moaning for water. There is Connie, my mother’s mother, who married a Scotsman and had two daughters, divorced him at the instigation of her mother, and ran a boarding house instead. There is my mother’s younger sister, Yellin’ Helen. There are the neighbours, ’Ector and Harthur Giles, Harthur being responsible for the unforgettable description of a local storekeeper—Missus, ’e’s so tight you couldn’t ram a pin hup ’is harse.

  My mother’s story is set during the Depression in a small West Australian country town and moves between York and Perth, as Grandma leaves to become a businesswoman and property owner in Victoria Park, and then returns when she hears rumours that Grandpa is paying court to the glamorous and wealthy daughter of a local landowner. It is through gentle and self-e
ffacing Grandpa Turvey that the story stretches back in a single generation to a convict ancestor. In fact quiet George Turvey the carpenter seems to have had a motley and amoral selection of relatives, including a brother rumoured to be a horse thief and a sister-in-law who was the unintended victim of a seedy and parochial crime passionel, murdered by her fifteen-year-old brother with a bottle of poisoned whisky. Some Turveys were also apparently no respecters of the barrier of race, for there is evidence of Chinese and Aboriginal liaisons, of which my mother was entirely ignorant until she was an adult. It delighted her that Grandma, that paragon of moral self-righteousness, should have inadvertently attached herself to such a collection of villains and social pariahs.

  Connie’s boarding house provided a living, and was responsible for my mother’s lifelong dislike of housework. It also revealed glimpses of the strange and dangerous adventures of other people’s lives. One morning two young men came to the door in great distress, one of them carrying a rifle. They were brothers, and their seventeen-year-old sister had suicided during the night by drinking sulphuric acid. She had been seeing one of the boarders and was pregnant. Grandpa talked quietly to them at the front door while several of the other boarders hustled the offending young man out the back door and away down the railway track.

  My mother used to quote a little refrain she had from her mother, who had it from her mother.

  Girls keep away from the boys

  Give them lots of room

  For you ll find when you wed

  They ll hit you on the head

  With the bald-headed end of the broom.

  A lively and restless girl in her youth, Connie was still young and attractive when she ran the boarding house. She was determined that her daughters should be educated so they could be independent and would not need to marry. But she did not follow her own advice, and the little rhyme became a self-fulfilling prophecy. She remarried when my mother was in her teens, to one of the boarders who was handsome and charming and spoiled and who believed the only suitable professions for women were nursing and secretarial work. Both girls ran away as soon as they could, my mother to university on a bursary, her younger sister to teachers’ college. Their mother eventually escaped from her marriage by going mad in a restrained sort of way and being institutionalised until her death.