The Best of Edward Abbey (24 page)

When I return to the pub, it is full of boisterous Aussies. Dick Nunn fills any room the moment he enters. And I don’t mean with his girth. Much of his family is there, too: his subteen daughters Anna, Jane, and Margaret; his sons Stewart, Eddie, and Richard; his niece Sue, the homestead cook.

Most of the young stockmen also are here now, a crowd of teenage cowboys, among them Richard, Nunn’s youngest boy. Though only sixteen, he works as trail boss of the range crews. He has been out “on camp” for a month, hunting, mustering and branding cattle, breaking horses, sleeping on the ground. He seems a friendly though cocky lad, with bright eyes, freckles, an easy grin. He looks something like Huckleberry Finn, but more like Billy the Kid. He wears high-heeled boots with spurs, dusty jeans, an old faded flannel shirt, and on his head a wide-brimmed, filthy slouch hat ornamented with silvery studs and a
tooled leather band. What the Aussies call a “forty-liter” (ten-gallon) sombrero. Like most of the other stockmen, all of whom look like the wildest of desperadoes, Richard is drinking a Coke.

I construct myself a “chuppity-bread” sandwich from the lavish display of makings on the bar—bread, salad, sausages, hamburgers, spareribs, mutton chops, grilled steaks—procure two cold beers and get into talk with one of the few ringers who is old enough to share them with me legally.

His name is Phil, he’s twenty-one, and like so many young Australians, he has chosen the life of a drifter. He appears well seasoned: red beard, gap in his front teeth, a rough hulking fellow in black leather jacket with the stars of a brigadier general on the shoulder straps. His cowboy hat looks as weathered as the Kid’s: The anchor brand of Anna Creek has been burned into and partly through the front of the brim. Though he resembles a refugee from a motorcycle gang, he turns out to be sociable, if slightly shy. How long’s he been working for Dick Nunn? (My guess is maybe four or five years.)

“Two months,” he says.

Two months! Then he’s done this kind of work before? Phil grins his gap-toothed grin: “Never was on a bloody horse before I came here.” So he’s learning? “I’m trying.” What does the syndicate pay him? “Fifty a week and keep,” he says. Since he sleeps on the sand in his own swag, “keep” means he gets all the stewed beef and hamper bread he can eat and all the boiled tea and burnt coffee he can drink. How much time off? “Oh several days every month.” Does he like the job? “Reckon I do,” he says.

The crowd grows thicker in Connie’s pub; the babble of contending voices becomes a steady roar. There must be at least a hundred people in here now—men, women, adolescents, kids, black-skinned and white and various shades in between, sober, half-sober, non-sober, and rotten with the grog. It reminds me of a Saturday night at Eddie Apodaca’s Cantina Contenta in Frijoles, New Mexico. Only the hooded Indians are missing, but their place is more than filled by Aborigine stockmen with eyeballs turning red under Neanderthal brows.

I meet a few of the black men, Brian Marks for one, a big cowboy with round and jovial face. Once each year, at the annual William Creek Race Meet and Gymkhana, he spends his entire month’s wages at the races, buying at the mock auction for one-day ownership one of Nunn’s prize thoroughbreds. (All proceeds from the affair go to the flying doctor service.) What does Brian Marks get out of it? He gets the thrill of sometimes sponsoring a winner, trophy cups, the prestige that goes to a generous man.

Whites and blacks and mixed breeds drink and jabber together in apparent confraternity. Most of them have been working together all year out on the range. Only one discord appears. An Aborigine named George, one of the best of Nunn’s stockmen, keeps badgering Connie and her brother Bill for whisky. He is so drunk he can barely stand: his watery, bloodshot eyes are red as gidgee coals. They refuse to sell him whisky. He persists. They sell him a carton of beer (twenty-four cans), and Bill guides him to the door. In a few minutes George is back, angry now, demanding whisky. Fed up, Dick Nunn grabs him by the collar and the seat of the pants and half-carries, half-throws him out the door, across the road, and into the brush by the railway. This time George does not return.

At some time late in the evening, well after dark, the word is passed around to muster all hands at the railroad siding. Time to load the cattle. I follow the crowd. Geoffrey and Butch, each with a carton of beer under an arm, appoint themselves as guides to the bewildered American tourist. “For Godsake,” I want to know, “why load the cattle now? We’re having a party. And in the dark? Madness.”

Geoffrey tries to explain. Train’s coming early in the morning; won’t be time to do it then. “But half these men are drunk,” I say, “ripped out of their minds, and the other half are children who should have been in bed hours ago.”

“Now, mate,” says Geoffrey, “don’t worry your silly Yoink head about it; these boys know what they’re doing. These boys are men. Have another beer. Am I right, Butch?”

“That’s the bleedin’ bloody flippin’ truth,” Butch says.

They are right. While Geoff and Butch start a blaze with tumbleweeds and railway ties, adding warmth and firelight to the moonlit scene, the Coke-swilling teenagers in their bandit costumes have already begun to move the cattle. The cattle had been assembled earlier that day in the main siding corral, called a “bronc yard” down here. Now the boys drive them into a series of holding pens, breaking the herd up into manageable bunches. The pens lead to a steel chute and ramp and this to the concrete loading dock.

The boys in the yard are pushing the cattle forward from pen to pen. Butch and Geoffrey throw another wooden sleeper on the fire and open more beers. Their big bellies glow in the ruddy light; no true Aussie would allow himself to be seen, after the age of thirty, without a proper beer gut. Dick Nunn leans against his Toyota truck, sipping beer, conferring with Norm Wood, watching everything. The terrified cattle groan, grunt, bellow, pressed hard against one another inside their bars of planking and iron. The chute is full again. I see one cow with its head caught and twisted between the hind legs of another, unable to extricate itself. Two more cars are loaded. The loading goes on by moonlight, by truck headlights, by the sinister, wavering flare of the burning railway ties. The clamor of cattle, men, boys, tractor engine, the clang of steel gates, the rattle of the cattle cars, goes on and on in a confused, violent uproar. Inevitably I think of the use of cattle cars in Nazi Germany, in Stalinist Russia.

“This is a brutal business,” I mutter in Penny’s ear. “Enough to make a man a bloody vegetarian.” She agrees. But sentimental hypocrites both, we know full well that come tomorrow we’ll be sinking our fangs in beef again. Pouring the gravy on our potatoes. Pulling on our cowhide boots. Everywhere the smell of blood. Everywhere the brutality and the horror. Nor is it all man-made. Hadn’t we seen, only a few days earlier, that cow out on the range, fully alive, with the deformed horn that had curled and grown, somehow, into the cow’s right eye?

The loading goes on for half the night. On the last car, door not properly barred, a frenzied bullock kicks it open; four young steers escape, galloping away into the dark.

On another day, a week before the party, we stopped to visit an Aborigine camp near Anna Creek. It looked like a dump. The huts, or “humpies,” were made of sheets of corrugated iron propped on sticks. Garbage everywhere: paper, beer cans, wine bottles, plastic junk, gnawed bones, disemboweled mattresses, worn-out shoes, broken glass, puddles of grease, ashes, rags, ropes, dung. A few hungry-looking curs snarled at us as we approached. Smoke rose from smoldering wood fires. The camp appeared deserted.

Then three old women scrambled out of their kennels on hands and knees. They looked like the three witches of
Macbeth
. One was blind. One had, instead of a nose, a wrinkled cavity in the center of her face. The third, though structurally intact, was deaf as a stone and gnarled with arthritis. All looked a century old. They wore long, ragged dresses never washed, nothing else. Their feet were bare, crusty with calluses. They waved their claws, their sticklike arms at us, and chattered like birds. I decided all three were insane, crazy as cockatoos, but Penny, who had met them before, said they were simply glad to see us, eager to talk.

Penny introduced them to me as she squinted through her viewfinder: “This is Jean, the blind one; this is Sheila, missing a nose; this is Lily Billy.” Sprawled in the dust and ashes, the witch-ladies gaped at me, including the one without eyes, and jabbered away. They were the most physically hideous human creatures I had ever seen—shrunken, mutilated, gray with filth, pot-bellied, spindle-limbed, crawling with flies to which they appeared supremely indifferent—all of them obviously syphilitic and mad as kookaburras. “My God,” I asked Penny, “what keeps them alive?” And Penny, snapping pictures, talking to the three old women as well as to me, said, “Why, the welfare helps. They get about thirty dollars a week. Their old men are off spending it
right now, I suppose, down at Connie’s pub. But it’s not only the welfare. These old girls are still alive, still kicking. They’re happy, can’t you see?”

I stared at Penny, then again at Jean and Sheila and Lily Billy. The warm autumn sunlight lay on their bodies and faces. The air was clear and fresh. They had nothing important to do and nothing at all to fret over. When the situation is hopeless there is nothing to worry about. I watched their lively hands, their active searching faces, and saw something like gaiety in those irrepressible gestures. Why quit, they were saying. Why quit?

Many miles east of William Creek and Anna Creek we came upon the range crew. Far in advance was the Dogger Man, an old outbacker named Arthur. He drove a Toyota pickup, the front bumper festooned with the scalps and tails of dingoes. This is Arthur’s life work, killing the wild dogs. He shoots, traps, poisons them—any way he can get them. The state government pays him a bounty of four dollars for each trophy. He complained that because of the heavy rains there were too many rabbits. Too many rabbits meant that the dingoes were ignoring his traps and poisoned baits.

We drove on, came to a dry lake bed, and stopped. Coming toward us was a herd of horses, fifty or sixty of them, each with a pair of leather hobbles dangling from its neck. Driving the horses were young Richard Nunn, Jockey Leinart and Phil the Drifter. I pulled the Suzuki off the dirt road. We watched them pass. Penny took pictures. We waited. Presently a dog appeared, followed by two pairs of dromedaries harnessed to a rubber-tired wagon. The “bung cart.” The camels wore padded collars like horse collars but larger. A small, very dark Abo boy drove the camel team, cracking a whip across the rumps of the near pair from time to time. Huddled under his big hat, within the upturned collars of his coat, his face was nearly invisible. His name was Henry. The bung cart carried the camp’s food and cooking gear, bedrolls, two fifty-gallon drums of drinking water, tools, spare ropes, and saddles. What we would call a chuck
wagon. Later, when I asked Henry why it was called a bung cart, he grinned shyly and said, “I dunno. ‘Cause everything in it gets bunged around, I reckon.”

The four camels paced steadily across the flat red lake bed, pulling their wagon. Heads high, they managed to look at the same time both dignified and ridiculous. A fifth camel followed—the spare.

Another gap in the outback caravan, then finally the cattle came in sight. Obscure figures rode back and forth in the dust at the rear of the herd—George the Drunkard, sober now, in charge, and two other Aborigine stockmen.

Penny and I drove south along the railroad and that evening camped with a different crew mustering cattle in a different paddock. On the Anna Creek station, a “paddock” may be twenty by thirty miles wide and long. The “muster” is the roundup, and at Anna Creek these musterings are taking place, somewhere, all year around.

The camp was made near a clump of finish, or finnis, trees, a type of slow-growing desert scrub. Like the mesquite of the American Southwest, the finish makes excellent firewood. On a fire of this fuel the boys were stewing their beef in a pot and heating water for tea. They used the lowered tailgate of their bung cart for a counter, cutting up chunks of salted beef, slicing their camp-baked “hamper” bread. I ate some. Enclosing a slab of stewed beef, it made a substantial sandwich.

A young man named Darrell was the head stockman here. With him were Rodney, and Willie (the son of Norm Wood and his Aborigine wife Jean), and a boy called Froggie (about sixteen), and a little Aborigine boy named Jonesy. Jonesy looked like a child, hardly big enough to climb onto a horse; I would have guessed he was ten years old, but he insisted he was a full-grown fifteen, and the others backed him up. As I would see the next day, Jonesy did a man’s work. They all had been out on the range for five weeks.

Willie, at twenty-one, was the oldest. He was also, among other duties, the camp cook. I asked him what he fed the crew. He
pointed to the pot on the fire. “Stewed beef.” To the wagon gate. “Hamper and jam. Coffee and tea.”

“Right,” I said, “that’s dinner, and what about breakfast?”

“Same thing.”

“And lunch?”

“Same thing.”

Two more Abo boys came into the firelight, carrying their saddles. They had been hobbling the horses. There was much talk of horses around the fire as the crew ate dinner. Some of the boys asked me questions about America, especially about cowboys, Indians, the Wild West. I told them a little of ranch life in the Southwest, explained the differences in technical terminology. They seemed pleased to hear that our West was no longer quite so wild as the Red Centre of Australia. As we talked the battery radio on the wagon played country-western music, most of it manufactured in a city called Nashville. Every hour on the hour came the five-minute news bulletin, exactly as trivial and superficial as the best of NBC, CBS, and ABC.

We were awakened at four-thirty the next morning by that same radio, playing the same music. Fire blazing, water boiling. The Aborigine boys—the best trackers—were out in the dark hunting the horses. When the first faint glow of dawn appeared, the dingoes began to howl, far off in the bush. Arthur the Dogger Man had not got them all. Like coyotes in America, the dingoes seem to thrive under persecution, breeding smarter all the time.