Tracks (3 page)

Some of the men would be hanging around the doors at opening time and, after a full twelve hours of saturation, leave reluctantly, and often on all fours, at closing time. Others had their set hours and set places and set friends and swapped yarns for a while, always the same stories, always the same reactions. Others sat on their own in a corner dreaming of god knows what. Some were crazy, some were mean, and some, oh those few rare gems, were amiable, helpful and humorous. By nine p.m. some would be in tears over lost opportunities, lost women, or lost hope. And while they wept, and while I held their hands across the counter saying there there, they pissed silently and unselfconsciously up against the bar.

To really come to grips with the Australian cult of misogyny, one has to plod back through all two hundred years of white Australia’s history, and land on the shore of the ‘wide brown land’ with a bunch of hard-done-by convicts. Actually, the place where they landed was relatively green and inviting, the wide brown stuff was to come later. Life was none too easy in the colony, but the boys learnt to stick together and when they’d done their stretch, if they were still sound of limb, they ventured into the forbidding country beyond to try to scratch a pitiful living. They were tough and they had absolutely nothing to lose. And they had alcohol to soften the blow. By the 1840s it began to dawn on the residents that something was missing — sheep and women. The former they imported from Spain, a stroke of genius that was to set Australia on the economic map; the latter they brought over in boats from the poor-houses and orphanages of England. Since there were never enough to go round (women, that is) one can visualize only too clearly the frenzied rush on the Sydney wharves when the girls came bravely sailing in. Such a traumatic racial memory is hard to blot out in a mere century, and the cult is sustained and revitalized in every pub in the country, especially in the outback where the stereotyped image of the Aussie male is still so sentimentally clung to. The modern-day manifestation is almost totally devoid of charm. He is biased, bigoted, boring and, above all, brutal. His enjoyments in life are limited to fighting, shooting and drinking. To him a mate includes anyone who is not a wop, wog, pom, coon, boong, nigger, rice-eye, kyke, chink, Iti, nip, frog, kraut, commie, poofter, slope, wanker, and yes, sheila, chick or bird.

One night in the pub one of the kinder regulars whispered to me, ‘You ought to be more careful, girl, you know you’ve been nominated by some of these blokes as the next town rape case. You shouldn’t be so friendly.’

I was devastated. What had I done but patted the odd shoulder or helped out the occasional paralytic or listened in silence to some heart-breaking hard luck story. I felt really frightened for the first time.

On another occasion I had taken over from someone in the Inner Bar. There were maybe half a dozen men drinking in there quietly, including two or three policemen. Suddenly an old dishevelled drunken Aboriginal woman came in and started yelling abuse and obscenities at the cops. A big burly policeman went over to her and started banging her against the wall. ‘Shuttup and get out, you old girl,’ he shouted back. I was about to deparalyse my limbs, leap over the bar and stop him, when he dragged her out to the door and shoved her into the street. Not a person moved off their stools and presently everyone went back to their drinks with a few cracks about the stupidity of coons. I shed some tears behind the bar that night when no one was looking, not of self-pity but of helpless anger and disgust.

Kurt, meanwhile, had overcome his fierce pride and popped in occasionally to talk me into going back. Gladdy, whom I was much more eager to see, came in from time to time, to check on my progress and secretly to urge me to accept. After two or three months at the hotel I had saved enough to make that idea once again feasible, if not attractive. It was obvious that Kurt’s was the best place to learn anything and if that meant putting up with his eccentric ways then perhaps it was the best solution. Besides, he had been charming on these visits, and had lulled me into thinking I might have made a tactical mistake.

So I began spending my spare days out there, sleeping the night, this time inside the house at Gladdy’s insistence, and going back to work early in the morning. It was on one of these occasions that the pub dealt me its final blow.

I returned to my little dungeon in the wee hours of the morning to find a large, well-moulded lump of excrement snuggling almost lovingly on my pillow. As if it belonged there. As if it had found its final resting-place at last. I had the most absurd notion that I should address it in some way — let my presence be known as if I were the trespasser. Something like, ‘Excuse me, I think you have the wrong bed.’ I gazed at it, mouth open, hand poised upon the door, for at least five minutes. My sense of humour, my self-confidence and my faith in humanity were all doing a perceptible fade. I handed in my notice and fled to the relative sanity of the ranch.

After that, even the rigours of Kurt’s company seemed bearable. Hard physical work out in the fresh air and hot sun, camels to be entertained by, and Gladdy, all made life look promising again. Besides, Kurt, though never exactly kind-hearted, was at least being intermittently civil. He was a wonderful teacher. He forced me to work with the animals in a way that I would have been too cowardly to attempt, but he never pushed so hard that I lost my confidence. The result was that I was fearless. There was nothing those creatures could do that scared me in the least. How I escaped serious physical damage during that time must have a lot to do with guardian angels, Kurt-cleverness and outrageous good luck. He seemed pleased with my progress with the beasts and began introducing me to the secrets of handling them.

‘Remember, alvays vatch de animal, vatch him day and night and see how he tinks. Und alvays, alvays, de camelt’s needs come first.’

Each of his eight animals had a distinct personality. Biddy was the matronly grande dame of cameldom and infinitely superior to anything merely human; Misch-Misch was the highly-strung, vain young aristocrat; Khartoum was the likeable nervous wreck; Ali was the sad and stoic clown; Fahani was a poor senile old lady; Aba was the backward child having trouble with puberty; and Bubby was the eternal practical joker. Dookie was the camel born to be king. I loved them all with an anthropomorphizing devotion. No matter how much I discovered about them, there was always more to learn. They continued to surprise and fascinate me until the day I left my own four on the Indian Ocean coast. I spent hours gazing at them, laughing at their antics, talking to them and touching them. They consumed all my thought and what little there was of my spare time. Instead of watching TV with Kurt and Gladdy of an evening, I would be out in the paddock moon-struck, listening to cud-chewing, and crooning one-sided conversations. And while this love affair was going on I didn’t have to think too much about my proposed trip — it could remain a safe glow at the end of a very long tunnel.

Kurt continued to scream and berate me when I did something wrong but this I could take, even masochistically appreciate, as it kept me on my toes, combated my inherent laziness and made me learn quickly. Besides, when he actually came out with a word of praise, or a rare smile, it brought relief and pride past description. A compliment bled from the master was worth a million given freely by anyone else. There have been many happy slaves.

The ranch itself was fantastic and uncanny perched out there in the middle of the oldest rocks in the world. And it was perhaps the cold desolate lovelessness of the place that threw into sharp focus the magical and life-affirming qualities of the country around it. To enter that country is to be choked with dust, suffocated by waves of thrumming heat, and driven to distraction by the ubiquitous Australian fly; it is to be amazed by space and humbled by the most ancient, bony, awesome landscape on the face of the earth. It is to discover the continent’s mythological crucible, the great outback, the never-never, that decrepit desert land of infinite blue air and limitless power. It seems ridiculous now, to talk of my growing sense of freedom given the feudal situation I was living in, but anything could be mended, anything forgotten, any doubt withstood during a walk through those timeless boulders, or down that glittering river-bed in the moonlight.

I worked sun-up to sun-down and sometimes long after, seven days a week. If we closed the ranch down for a day because of rain or because Kurt had declared a holiday, there was still mending and cleaning to be done. I began to realize that Kurt related to me exactly as he would to a camel in training. He did not, for example, allow me to wear shoes, so an extremely painful process of foot-toughening had to be suffered while my skin learnt to resist burrs shaped like maces and half an inch across. Some nights I could not sleep for the pain in my swollen, punctured and infected feet. If I objected it was taken as insubordination and, besides, my pride did not allow me to complain too often. I had created my own prison and now I had to be able to withstand anything the warder could dish out. Eventually, when my feet became blackened, tough, split and calloused, Kurt allowed me a pair of sandals. He also took a strange pleasure in watching me eat.

‘Eat up, girl, that’s it,’ he would say as I wolfed down a gargantuan meal. ‘You need your strength.’ Indeed I did. He watched me like a hawk, castigated me for mistakes, and patted me and fed me when I had been good.

Drawn closer by our common enemy and our alliance with the people down in the creek, Gladdy and I were developing a deep friendship. Without her, I simply could not have stayed with Kurt as long as I did. She had got a job in town primarily as a respite from her husband and because Kurt was constantly fretting and grumbling about their financial situation. The fact that the ranch was not doing as well as it should have been was due to two things; one was the long-standing feud between Kurt and Fullarton, who, according to Kurt, bribed all the tourist bus drivers into staying away; the other was Kurt’s outlandish contempt for and rudeness towards the people who did come.

‘Vat do you tink you are doing, you bloody idiot, on dat fence? You bloody goddamn tourists, can’t you bloody read? We’re not open today. You tink we don’t haf bloody holidays out here or sometink?’

And it was one of the few things I liked about the man. The only time Kurt and I really communicated at all, apart from camel business, was when we chuckled together about the awfulness of what he called the ‘terrorists’. When Kurt was in one of his moods, he took it out on everyone, including his bread and butter. It was the only sign of some innate integrity. That we developed over those months what almost amounted to a friendship I put down to the fact that I still laboured under the middle-class delusion that everyone was a good guy at heart if you could just get to the bottom of their problem, but he was to knock that foolishness out of me eventually. His inner workings were better left untouched. At this stage in my development, I was fatally caught in my desire to understand someone so totally outside my ken, before I came to realize that you can understand and excuse until there is nothing left to hate.

It strikes me as sad, now that I can look back on that era relatively calmly, that Kurt manufactured his own hell, because there were wonderful moments with him, long peaceful rides through the back country and learning to race camels down in the creek-bed. I galloped bareback on these occasions without a thought for the ground whizzing below those pounding legs. It was exhilaration past description. I usually rode a young bull — Dookie. He was my favourite and, I suspected, Kurt’s also. One develops a special attachment to an animal in training, following the fear and concentration and difficulty to see a perfect beast gradually emerge from a frightened and unmanageable one-thousand-pounds of trouble. This was intensified by the fact that I was in training also, and Dookie and I were a team, to be put through the hoops together.

There was one flaw in Kurt’s relationship to the animals: when his temper was up he could be brutally cruel. While it is true that a camel must be dealt with firmly, and bad behaviour must always be countered with severe reprimand and a few resounding clouts, Kurt almost always went overboard. The young camels especially were quite terrified of him. The first time I was witness to this fire and brimstone treatment was shortly after I arrived. Dookie had let fly a kick at Kurt who retaliated with a good fifteen minutes of beating with a chain across that leg until I thought it must surely break. I went inside to Glad and couldn’t speak. I didn’t speak to him for two days, not out of a desire to punish but because I just couldn’t look at him. For the first and only time in our relationship Kurt was contrite. He didn’t want to lose me again. But it was to happen over and over and it seemed as if everyone, including the camels, saw it as unavoidable, to be endured like everything else.

During those first months I was often overwhelmed by such despair that I thought of packing up and going home, beaten. This was countered effectively by a singularly cunning manoeuvre on Kurt’s part. He had given me a day off — a reward I accepted with suspicious gratitude. I could smell a rat. After complimenting me on my work, he informed me of a new financial agreement he had thought up. He would keep me working there for the eight months, then for two or three he would help me build my saddles and gear and prepare for the trip, after which he would give me three camels of my choice, free, to be returned when the trip was finished. It was, of course, too good to be true. I knew that he was playing with me, knew it, and then rejected the knowledge because I needed to believe. I looked into his eyes, through which self-interest shone like a torch, and accepted. It was a gentleman’s agreement. Kurt refused to sign anything, saying that was not the way he did business, but as everyone knew, most of all me, Kurt had never been a gentleman. He had me over a barrel but there was nowhere else to go if I wanted to breathe life into my dream.

I had often told Kurt how I loved crows — they were to me the essence of wild freedom and intelligent survival. I wanted one. This is not as selfish a desire as it sounds. If you are careful, it is easy to steal a baby crow from a nest without disturbing the others or apparently distressing its parents. You can then teach it to fly and to come to you for food and affection and it need never be caged or clipped. It will, after spending an overindulged childhood with you, begin bringing its pubescent wild friends home for afternoon teas and parties and will eventually leave you to begin a new life with its own kind out in the bush. A good system whereby everyone lives happily ever after. Kurt said he would get me a crow if it was the last thing he did. We began watching nests in the creek-bed. The parent birds were feeding several sets of squawking hungry heads forty feet up in the river gums. One hot midday, when every living thing seemed to be drowsing or sleeping, a grey crane flew into the tree opposite one of the nests and began to nod off in the heat. One of the parent crows, who had been laconically chortling to itself and who was by now obviously bored, flew across to the tree and alighted on a branch a little below the unsuspecting crane. It then hopped up on to the others branch and, ever so quietly and nonchalantly, began sidling along it. When it was right next to the sleeping crane, it let out a raucous caw and flapped its wings. The crane shot six feet out into the air in a flurry of feathers before it realized it was the butt of a rude joke and regained its composure. After recovering from our helpless guffaws of laughter, we decided upon that nest.