The Golden Soak (4 page)

‘No, a refrigerated truck – a cousin of one of the Italians I met on the boat fixed it for me.'

She didn't say much after that. The going had become more difficult and she had to concentrate. Here, between the Ophthalmia Range and Pamelia Hill, we were into a narrow strip of flattish country, the track winding. Later it straightened out and our speed increased again. The air was oven-hot, the scrub thinner, and in the distance I could see a hill, brown like a sugar loaf, rising out of the flat plain.

‘Mount Robinson.' There was sweat on her face, flies crawling and dark shadows under her eyes. ‘The Gap is just to the left; that's where we've been sweating our guts out this past month.'

I asked her whether she'd like me to give her a spell, but she shook her head. ‘I'm not tired. Not really. And in about twenty miles we begin to hit dry watercourses. You need to know the track then. This poor old Landy's over six years old. You have to nurse it.'

Half an hour later we turned a bend and dropped into a gully. I saw her point then. We were into an area of small hillocks, the track winding through them and the surface rough. No sign of Mt Robinson now, though we were within a few miles of it. More gullies and the white boles of ghost gums among the boulders.

We had been driving steadily west, but now the track turned north. We came to an old fence line, the gate sagging on its hinges, the wire rusted and broken, the posts leaning. ‘Welcome to Jarra Jarra.' She said it with a wry smile, sitting tight-faced and very still as she waited for Tom to close the gate behind us. And shortly after that we passed a heap of bones bleached by the sun, the flies hanging in a cloud over the remains of the hide.

She glanced at the carcase, then at me. ‘You'll see plenty of them around the station. About the only things that thrive at the moment are the carrion-eaters – we've enough wedge-tails here now to start an eagle reserve.' She said it angrily and with bitterness, staring ahead of her, her face clouded. ‘All the years I've been growing up here,' she said, ‘it's been one long struggle.' Her voice was barely audible above the noise of the engine, the rattle of the aged vehicle. ‘And now this. If we don't get rain soon …' She gave a little shrug.

‘Haven't you got any water on the place at all?' I asked, appalled at the implication, beginning to wish I hadn't come.

‘Oh yes, we've got water all right – if we could afford to drill deep enough.'

‘But at the house I mean. Surely you could bring the cattle –'

‘Don't be bloody silly.' Her eyes flashed angrily and for a long minute after that she was withdrawn inside herself, her jaw set and that upturned nose of hers lifted as though in rebuke at my stupidity. Then impulsively she reached out, smiling, and touched my arm. ‘I'm sorry. I've lived here all my life, y'see. I'm apt to forget there's any other world.' She took the hill ahead in a rush, her foot hard down. ‘The home bore's still working. Of course it is. My grandfather knew this country better than I shall ever know it – driving his cattle up to the gold camps at Nullagine, opening up new territory, prospecting, mining, fishing. Before the crash came his leases ran to almost a million and a half acres. I'll show you his Journal some time. It's an incredible story – overlanding cattle from Queensland to the Ord, then down across the edge of the Great Sandy to settle in the Pilbara. That was in 1899. He was twenty-one years old and eight years ahead of Canning in opening up that section of the great Stock Route. All through the North West he was known as Big Bill Garrety.' She looked at me, the track easier now, and her eyes alight with a sort of hero-worship. ‘Last year, after I'd fallen off my camel and broken a leg trying to race a motor bike cross-country, I learned to type, copying the whole thing out – four hundred and twenty-seven pages of it. I knew that Journal almost by heart. There's a wonderful description, very sparse, very factual, of how this country was when he first saw it. And the site he chose for his homestead … of course there's water there, always.' She gave a little shrug. ‘But cattle need food as well as water and there isn't much for them to feed on in the gullies of the Windbreak Hills.'

She shifted into four-wheel drive as the track followed the dry bed of a stream. Away to our left a black cloud of smoke billowed skyward. ‘One of the boys signalling. Maybe he's found another bunch.' And she explained, ‘When we want to call to each other in the bush, that's how we do it – set light to the spinifex. The turpentine in it gives off that oily black smoke.'

‘Isn't it dangerous?' I asked, thinking of bush fires and the brittle dryness of the vegetation.

She laughed. ‘In this country? There's nothing here to sustain a fire. In the old days, yes. They'd burn off whole tracts. It got the young green going in the spring. But it also burned up the seeds in the ground. In the end they destroyed all the grasses. That's what happened here, sheep tearing the young grass out by the roots and no seed to replace it.' And she added, a note of bitterness in her voice, ‘If we'd known it was going to be taken from us, we'd never have concentrated all our efforts on the Watersnake. But twenty thousand acres was a manageable size, about all we could afford to keep fenced against the neighbours' sheep. We sowed new grasses, improved the waterholes, even got a bulldozer in and had them construct a reservoir.' Again that little helpless shrug. ‘But it's progress, I suppose, and they were offering employment, roads, a railway line to connect with Tom Price, all the infra-structure the politicians down in Perth are so keen on.'

We were getting near now, for she went on, ‘Meeting Daddy, you must remember what it has meant to him – make allowances. He had to rebuild Jarra Jarra virtually from scratch, everything against him, money owing, the land dead and nothing that worked, all the machinery, the bores, the vehicles, the generators, the shearing equipment, everything rusted with neglect. Grandfather …' She hesitated. ‘He was an alcoholic. He was also mad – quite mad at the end.' She laughed, a brittle, bitter little sound. ‘I think maybe I take after him. I'm a little mad myself sometimes.' She gave me a quick, sideways glance. ‘Poor Daddy's had a lot to contend with, y'see.'

A flock of parrots burst in red-green brilliance from a tree beside the track. ‘What about Golden Soak?' I asked, remembering the bright enthusiasm in her voice as she had talked of my coming out and opening up the mine again.

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘There was a time when all Daddy's hopes were centred on it. But then …' She gave a little shrug. ‘Sometimes I think the only thing right about that mine is its name. It soaked up all the money Jarra Jarra produced when wool was booming.' And she added, ‘Daddy's taken the ute up to the Lynn Park homestead to get our stores and mail today. He may not be back yet. But when you meet him …' She glanced at me, something pleading in her eyes. ‘Just make allowances, that's all.'

And after that she didn't say anything until we breasted a rise and caught a glimpse of hills ahead. ‘The Windbreaks,' she said and ten minutes later we were into a flat area at their foot and there was the homestead, a huddle of tin-roofed buildings backed on to the hills, ghost gums white in the gullies either side and the skeletal metal shape of a wind pump lifeless in the torrid heat. We passed through a gap in a fence line, wheels drumming on a cattle grid made of rusted sections of old piping. ‘I wish you were seeing it in the spring,' she said, her eyes creased against the glare and her voice wistful. ‘Not all burned up like this. It was one of the first things Daddy did, sowing the home paddock with special grasses. A sort of pilot operation to see what the station could be like. I've walked through here after the wet with grasses knee-high and the whole paddock a riot of flowers.' And she added, the wistfulness deepening into sadness, ‘You've no idea – this place can be so beautiful.'

I had a momentary picture of her walking bare-legged through lush green grass picking wild flowers, but then it was gone, killed by the ugly reality of what my eyes saw. The track was dusty, the grass sered brown, the hills shimmered in the burning sun. And the buildings all dilapidated, the woodwork starved and flaking paint. It was almost a settlement, but as we drove into it I could see that most of the buildings were empty and unused. Horses stood among the ghost gums away to the left, nose to tail, brushing at the flies, and two dogs, one an Alsatian bitch, the other looking like a dingo cross, ran towards us barking. A cloud of grey and pink birds rose screaming from the branches of three great trees. We stopped in their shade, the leaves hanging listless and a camel couched by the furthest bole, a lather of froth on its rubbery lips.

She took me over and introduced me. ‘Her name's Cleo. Suits her don't you think?' She was laughing, her hand in the animal's mouth, between its huge yellowing teeth. ‘She loves having the roof of her mouth tickled.' The long neck stretched, the strange reptilian head lifted in ecstasy. ‘Beaut, isn't she?'

‘Where did you get her?' I asked.

‘Why here – on the station.' She was bending down, brushing the flies away from its eyes. ‘We've got at least five or six hundred roaming the place. Wild – like the brumbies. But she isn't wild. I've had her since she was a baby. We've grown up together, haven't we, Cleo?' The supercilious head turned, the pale amber eyes staring distantly as though searching some dimly remembered desert horizon. There was a deep rumbling, the noise exploding in a belch that blew a bubble of foam from its lips. ‘She hasn't moved since we left this morning. I wish I could stay motionless like that for hours on end.' She straightened up, her sweat-stained shirt moulded to the swelling line of her breasts, and wiped her hand on her trousers. ‘Come on in where it's cooler and I'll get you a drink. What would you like?'

‘Tea,' I said, ‘if there is any?'

‘Yes, tea of course. It's what we mostly drink anyway.'

She led me through between two buildings, past an old hand-operated petrol pump and a wooden barn containing an elderly Morris Oxford tourer and the remains of a model-T. And at the side of the house itself there was a sort of patio of quartz slabs half-buried in red dust. There was a sundial in the centre of it, the bronze plaque set on a great block of stone, the white of the quartz shot through with reddish ochre, so that it looked like marble. Around the edges of the patio were the pitiful vestiges of a flower border. A deck chair stood forlornly, the canvas hanging bleached and rotted from the starved wood frame.

The house was a single-storey building with a verandah facing south across what had once been a lawn. It was built partly of reddish stone, partly of wood, and was separate from the kitchen and domestic quarters. She swept a beaded curtain aside and we were in the gap between the two buildings. It was walled off like a tent, with ragged hessian stretched over a double layer of wire mesh that was packed with fibrous vegetation. It was roughly furnished with cane chairs and a scrubbed wooden table. ‘Come on in. We practically live here during the summer.'

‘Ingenious,' I said, and she nodded.

‘Yes, it is, isn't it. It's a design based on the Coolgardie safe in which the old-timers of the gold rush kept their food. The outback station owners adapted it for their own purposes and called it the Bough Shed – I suppose because it was a pretty rough job in the early days, rather like the humpies the aborigines build for shelter. Up here in the Pilbara we call it the cool house.' She smiled at me. ‘I guess it's a bit hotter here, that's why. Cool sounds nice. I'm sorry the sprinklers aren't working, and there's no breeze today. Phew!' She made a face. ‘Expect you'd like a wash. I know I would.'

Tom brought my suitcase in and she told me where to go, along a dim passage – ‘The second door on the left, and your room's at the end.' It was a single room, the shutters closed over the fresh windows and an air of spartan masculinity. The bathroom was almost as big. It was panelled in patterned zinc sheets painted green, the bath rust-stained, the enamel peeling, and the wood of the lavatory seat bare of varnish, the glued sections beginning to pull apart. The bathroom was a museum piece, the product of Golden Soak in its heyday. I thought, as I stripped off with a trickle of water running brown and tepid. Refreshed, I had a shave, put on a clean shirt and went back to the cool house. It was empty except for the Alsatian bitch, who stared at me, hackles raised, but made no move as I seated myself in one of the cane chairs.

I could see the glare outside through the hessian and the wire mesh and furze walls, the room itself dim and relatively cool, the slightest current of air funnelling through the gap between the buildings. An aboriginal girl came in with a tray of tea, silent on bare feet, her cotton dress hanging like a shift. Her big brown eyes darted at me, shy as a wild thing, and then she was gone.

I poured myself some tea and drank it scalding hot, feeling relaxed and at ease, savouring the atmosphere of the place, the sense of continuity. There was a bookcase against the wall to my right. I lit a cigarette and sat staring at the titles. Old editions of Kipling, Galsworthy, Shaw, Forrester's
African Queen
, Shute's
A Town Like Alice
, Henry Handel Richardson, George Johnston's
My Brother Jack
, a battered Shakespeare, Poe, an anthology of Coleridge's poems, Morris West. It was a window into the personalities of three generations of Garrety's. And in a lower shelf there was a row of books on mining.

The Alsatian got up from her guard post by the entrance, her ears pricked. Then she was gone and I heard the sound of an engine, outside in the glare. I poured myself another cup of tea. Hoover's
Principles of Mining
. It was an old book, Presumably it had belonged to the first Garrety, purchased when he began to operate the mine. Truscott's
Mine Economics
was more recent. The Alsatian's barking ceased abruptly and the silence of the bush crept into the room again. Chambers's Encyclopaedia and the Oxford Dictionary filled the bottom shelf. I pulled out the battered, much-thumbed Shakespeare, glanced at the flyleaf –
For Bill: This is the best companion I ever had. Take it with you – and my blessing too
. It was signed:
Your loving father
, and underneath, in the same careful faded hand, was written:
Emerald Downs, 9th March, 1897
.