the…continuations

Bore-pulling camps must dream of beeps. On the Barkly Tablelands, on the grasslands, there are two sources of water, one from above, one from below. Water is everything. The more water, the more cattle. The rain came, and the Rankin River flowed, and every dip and fold of the landscape became a water source. The cattle were hard to muster, not just because of the mud, but because they were spread out, and had no need of the permanent water sources. But soon the puddles dried up, the river stopped flowing, broke up into a series of waterholes of varying depth and lifespan. The carrying capacity was thus restricted. Bores were the answer. From memory, there were more than a hundred of them on Alex, and a dozen or so on Soudan. I know, because I ran them for quite a while, in my little, white, light 4WD ‘zuki. Each bore had a tripod, about eight metres high, so the bore-pullers could pull up the pump in sections, with pulleys, with a truck. That’s all they did, travel around the station pulling and servicing pumps. The truck would pull up a section of pipe, or shaft, they’d clamp the top of the next one, then unscrew that section. The truck would come forward and they’d lay out that section and attach the cable to the next. Forward and reverse, forward and reverse, beep, beep, beep. I couldn’t have done it. The reverse warning would have driven me mad.

Tripods could be discerned through the heat- and dust-haze only indistinctly at first, like Omar Sharif riding his camel to the well through mirage. Often you weren’t clear if you were seeing it or not, let alone how far away it might have been. In the ‘zuki, I could watch them clarify as I approached, the resolution marking the passing of time and distance. When the season got hot, and the camp was ‘shiftin’ cattle’, moving them from boggy, dried-up waterholes to permanent water at a bore, the tripod was the aim-point. It was a vision of hope, clarity, relief, survival. Sometimes it was illusory, delusional, a product of wishful thinking. The pace of the cattle determined how long it took to get there. The mob controlled the passage of time. The end result was guaranteed; only the duration was uncertain. One hoof in front of the other, sometimes dazed with dehydration, our being was subsumed in this pursuit of the shimmer.

Bos taurus indicus cattle walk better, but they’re wilder, you lose bos taurus cattle to heat, and bos indicus to the scrub. Sometimes the small, red shorthorns (bos taurus) at Soudan walked alright, especially if the wind was blowing the right way and they could smell water ahead. The time of day made a big difference. Only a few times did I see ‘the cattle slowly stringing’. Brahmans (bos indicus), maybe, not shorthorns.

I filled my head with memorising poetry. I owe my rendition of The Geebung Polo Club to recalcitrant shorthorns. I swapped Jabberwocky for that and The Man from Snowy River, exchanging lines with Jamie, the literate head stockman, as we met at the end of each run up the wing or along behind the swaying tails. You can decide if it was a good deal. The rhythm of hoofbeats made learning lines easier.

There’s this hiatus, when you’re not even sure you can see the tripod. One day, in the hiatus, they just stopped, so we stopped, so time stopped. The waterhole that had sustained the cattle for six months was behind them. It was a mud-puddle, a deadly bog. Ahead was water as clear as diamond. Every now and again, I thought I could see a tripod. Maybe. It was hot. The cattle couldn’t see the tripod and wouldn’t have known what it meant. All they knew was that the water was behind them, and it was the time of day for them to drink, and to camp. Even bos taurus taurus cattle have siesta-time. So, we were jammed.

I think I lived a lifetime, and the tripod did not become any more distinct. Our heads throbbed and we worked the tail and the wings and cracked our whips, and that one would take a few steps, but when you turned your attention to another, it would stop, and when you turned back to it, the other one would stop. They looked at you in a puzzled sort of way, as if to say, “’Mad dogs and Englishmen’, much?”. Perfect for a clean shot, but we were keeping them alive that day. The ones in the middle of the mob were oblivious to our blandishments and threats. Pressure doesn’t transmit far through a motionless crowd of bulky animals. Inertia ruled.

I don’t recall the tripod resolving itself that day. All I remember is the hazy, half-seen ghost of it, and the bovine refusal to put one hoof in front of the other in search of some resolution. Sometimes I’m still there, and all I have left is hope that the hazy, shimmery thing I think I can see is real. When pushing one beast ahead a few steps is about all you can hope for and the beasts of the mind seem to block the passage of time. Shiftin’ cattle, there was no possibility of simply abandoning the job. Nowadays, wistful memory is the treatment. These moments evoke horse sweat and dust and working leather, and a peculiar cavern of deep, deep despair. But now I know that beyond, if you just continue, powerless, lies serene acceptance, sublime resignation, and poetry, to the steady rhythm of the saddle. I don’t remember getting to the tripod but, hey, here I am, so I must have survived, that day and all the others.

Wedgie. Taken by fir0002 | flagstaffotos.com.au Own work, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3209915

Life doesn’t happen in stories. Or maybe it does. We take a bunch of fleeting images and half-remembered sensations and form them into stories to make sense of them, or perhaps events follow natural trajectories, and our genres and forms emerge therefrom.

Form is a cage. Chronological narrative oppresses. If it was an essay, there would be a clear thesis statement, and no ambiguity. Here, the episodic memoir form enjoins backstory: I was at Wentworth in the Brigalow scrub in Central Queensland for five and a half months, then Alexandria, on the Barkly tablelands in the Northern Territory, killing and working in the butcher ‘shop’, for three months, then at Soudan, an outstation, down where the Ranken River crosses the Barkly Highway, for another thirteen. Two years in all. I don’t want to go through all that, it’s a chore. I want to evoke the thermal to heaven at Ranken Store and, most of all, the blacksoil plain.

Problem is, this means skipping half a year of stories from Wentworth: the first day running fences with my lips so dry they hurt. (I already had the idea that drinking water is weakness, from the early scenes of Lawrence of Arabia. It was to be reinforced.) Discovering J.E. McDonnell and participating in thrilling naval engagements in the enclosed verandah of the ringers’ quarters from Sunday Too Far Away. Six weeks off-siding for Cec, fixing and servicing windmills. The lessons of Bigfoot and Quiver, the young palomino. There would be an arc, then, see? A climactic moment in which I learned how to try. You would be familiar with the historical context. But ‘the caged bird sings of freedom‘. Forms can be twisted without breaking, or melded, or ignored, and become more of an ark than an arc.

Backstory might be a chore, but it is all wonderful stuff. Cec was a character made to be immortalised. A cantankerous, racist, methodical old cunt with a strong sense of social hierarchy. He could take a busted, rusted, fucked-up old windmill and make it into a smooth, pumpin’ mama, sending water from dams to turkey’s nests and troughs miles away. I nursed for him, servicing a dozen windmills. Me, up at the pointy end with galvanised-iron blades like something out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. There was no metropolis in sight, out in the lonely Brigalow scrub, but I wouldn’t have noticed if there were, fifty feet up on a windmill, with the blades spinning a few inches from my nose and Cec yelling at me to tie it off. Imminent decapitation has a way of focussing the senses.

But, bugger that. Fuck the form. We’ll get back to Cec. I want to tell you about the blacksoil, and the blood in it. At Ranken Store, not long after I got to Alex, I saw a column of birds, thousands of them. At least a dozen enormous wedgies. The rest were those mid-size kites with the crescent tails. An empty sky, a featureless plain, except for the store buildings and the river-crossing. You might have expected Michael Caine to turn up, ready to fend off the Zulu impi at Rorke’s Drift. God, it was hot! And for no reason I knew about, this hypnotic, unfathomable weirdness rose up out of sight into the sky, wheeling and dodging and cruising like a crowd on a three-dimensional skating rink, all in one direction. Birds heat-shimmered into barely-discernible ghosts in the heavens. It was a thermal, of course, and they were using it to get some height. I watched my brother do it many times in hang-gliders in later years.

The thermal was being blasted up out of the blacksoil plain. The store was at another river-crossing, and had been there since before the fences. “Fencin’ this country’s fuckin’ it,” the old blokes used to say. Actually, it was a young bloke who said it to me, Horny, the head stockman who didn’t want to be, whose ambition in life was embodied by the itinerant ringers who were everywhere, working the camps during the mustering season and drinking their cheques at some relative’s place in Camooweal or the Isa when it was too hot, then wet, to drive cattle.

The blacksoil is the reason people are there, white people, at least. On the six-hour drive down from Alex to Soudan, Ranken Store was about half way. From the back of a four-wheel drive, where the jackeroos ride, you could tell the store was coming, and a break, because a line of trees came slowly into sight. You first saw it away out on the left, east, and over the course of an hour the road and treeline converged on Ranken Store. Later, I murdered a calf there with the back of an axe.

The plains were far bigger than a mob of cattle could walk before perishing. There was no need for fences because the mobs could be controlled with water sources. In the roving stock camps on the Ranken Plain, they didn’t muster paddocks (‘paddicks’, always), they mustered waterholes or bores. That was before the TB and brucellosis eradication campaigns, which was most of what we did at Soudan. For that they needed paddocks, and fences, and they fucked the country to fix the cattle and please the export market. The Ranken Plain became East and West Ranken paddocks, still mammoth, but limited. Caged. Formed.

After the boss had said g’day to the bore runner who was now the sole occupant of the abandoned store, and given him his bit of fresh and bit of salt meat, and maybe had a cuppa tea, and everyone had had a drink of water, we would pile in the back of the vehicle again. There was no order given for this. The boss simply walked over and got in the vehicle, and by the time he’d done that, started it up and taken off, everyone was aboard, even the jackeroo so recently mesmerised by a brown-feathered spiral of life and leisurely activity.

Then the trees slowly took leave of the road, going westward this time, until, once again, there was just the blacksoil plain. Once the tree-line of the river hazed off, as it had hazed into view on the north side, nothing changed. For another hour or more, in a Toyota Landcruiser doing eighty or a hundred kmh on a fairly good dirt road, the view was exactly the same: the tussocky Mitchell grassland that could run a beast every ten acres. If you were dreamily inclined, you might imagine you were streaking along the outside of some gigantic ball of rock and dust and soil, itself hurtling through a nothingness to which the unimaginable monotony of the view attested. But that would be crazy.

When I saw the birds, I thought, “people will think I’m exaggerating, when I tell them about this.” The problem is, thirty-five years later, maybe I am. But I’m sure it was me who drove the horse truck back to the station the day the black cloud came. We took a bunch of fencing gear, posts, wire, star pickets, out to where we were going to make a laneway in 81 paddock. It wasn’t just a black cloud. It wasn’t like the squalls that marched around in the build up to the wet season, like lightning monsters patrolling the tablelands. It was a massif of roiling, climactic transformation, as if emerged from Mordor, as black as the depths of space, filling the massive sky. “That’s a fuckin’ big storm,” I said, when Bob Wales got there in the Toyota. “That’s not a storm,” he announced briskly.  “That’s the wet.”

We hurriedly dumped all the stuff there for when we could get back, and by the time I was behind the wheel of the 7-tonne truck – at least I think it was me; I definitely drove one of the vehicles – the blacksoil had turned from a greyish dust into slime.

The vehicle just slid, no traction. It was fun, and very good driver training. You had to steer into the skids and nudge the thing to stay on the road and moving in the right direction, even if it was sideways. The gates were the trickiest. Brakes were completely useless, so you went slow, low gear. The blokes could sometimes hop off, open the gate, watch the behemoth glide through, close it, catch up and hop back on again, without the truck ever stopping.

We made it home just before the slime thickened into bog. Within hours, the blacksoil took the rain to its lovin‘ breast and swelled and burgeoned and the world was utterly remade. You’ll think I’m exaggerating, but this stuff, dust the day before, was so gloopy it would gather four inches thick on your soles after a few steps. You couldn’t walk, let alone drive, over it, after the wet had come and gone. It would suck the boots off your feet, then your socks, then trap you in its moist embrace.

You get quite good at cracking them on the head in just the right spot with the back of the axe, if you haven’t got a rifle and they’re bogged, or perishing. Done properly, it turns them off like a light, but I missed with the first swing with the calf at Ranken Store. I was its only friend. That was in the dry. Blood flooded copiously out of its nose and mouth and soaked into the desiccated blacksoil beside the waterhole, where I had it tied up, because I was trying to feed it, because without its mother it was fucked. We found it trapped by a fence after the rest of the mob had been released into the big paddock and I carried it on my saddle back to the camp. It would suck on your finger instinctively, and if you stuck your hand under the surface it might get some milk. But it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t drink the fucking powdered milk, and anyway it’s the wrong kind of milk, and everyone said you can’t feed a poddy calf on camp. It scoured. The watery, light-tan smear under its tail was a death warrant. So after a few days I murdered it. I hit it properly the second time, motivated by horror. The appalling squall it made between hits, and the look on its face, image and sound, continue clear as clear in my otherwise faulty recollection, another form of cage. Walesy got me to take the body out in the paddock, away from the waterhole, and I threw it on the Mitchell grass for the wedgies. I wrote a story about it a few years later, trying to make sense of it. Didn’t work.

Life emerged from the blacksoil plain, with a thousand thousand thermals, as it went from dead, dusty grey to black black to green, vast green, humid and impassable. You couldn’t see it. Not beyond the station and the bitumen. Walesy got me to drive him up and down the highway once or twice, the only solid path through the ocean of fecundity, but that was it. You couldn’t go anywhere. Death may have been up-front in the dry. After the rain, life obliterated it under a relentless, lush shroud of renewal. The blacksoil drank the remains of everything and spawned it anew. It took the blood and the water and made them into a garden. Other calves drank the milk their mothers made from waist-high grass. The river beds filled, the waterholes were flushed of bones. The kites, no cage in sight, pecked banquets from clouds of insects, and the wedgies cropped the new season of small mammals and, with lazy spirals, entranced green jackeroos. What form is this? It still makes no sense, but at last, perhaps, it doesn’t need to. Am I free now?

This is not brigalow, but you get the idea.

Writers like details. So much can be evoked by, say, the glow of a gidgee ember-pile at dawn. The smell of an approaching squall. The calloused hands of Tom Joad, or  the masterful passage describing the journey of a turtle across the highway, in The Grapes of Wrath. The intricate evocations of cloud colourscapes in Das Boot.

Perhaps it’s because memory works that way. Often, it’s just the fleetest image or impression that stays with you. A dismissive glance; a few words; a sunset. When I was a kid we did this trick where you get someone to take ten deep breaths and hold, then bear hug them around the chest until they pass out. We did it, I think, for the sake of the altered consciousness that accompanies coming to. The texture of the carpet left a deep impression not only on my cheek but in my memory. Tiny, easily overlooked moments, colours, textures, that you carry around for no particular reason, when a thousand thousand others have disappeared.

Then there’s careening wildly at flat gallop across a tussocky paddock, headlong toward a creek, with a thick tree-line on the other side looming rapidly, able only to hang on to this mammoth creature, whose overwhelming strength and determination are matched only by your complete helplessness. Bigfoot had a way of leaving an impression.

It could be a question of loyalty, but mustering horses is different from mustering cattle. Horses know cattle are of a lower order. Other horses might be mates. The horse you’re riding may transfer its allegiance to the mob you’re trying to catch. Also, the musterees can travel as fast as you can.

Simon told me horses have intelligence roughly equivalent to a three year-old child. Anyone who’s had anything to do with three year-olds knows that they are canny, observant, skittish, innovative and occasionally malevolent. Later, at Soudan, a horse I was breaking damn near drove two-thirds of my spine out of my arse by charging at full gallop under the large branch of a tree. He knew exactly what he was doing.  Since breakers had naming rights, I called him Arbor.

He got his tongue over the bit. A bit doesn’t work on a horse’s lips, but fits in a bony gap between the front incisors and the rear molars of their lower jaw. Simon would encourage empathy and gentle persuasion by getting you to put a teaspoon on the bridge of your nose and press. “I don’ wanna ever see you jerkin’ the reins”, he said, and I spent long periods on the young horse he gave me, the palomino, Quiver, just gently putting pressure on the bit, until she put her head down and took a step backwards. Now, generally within minutes of getting on a new horse, I can make it walk backwards, and still be my friend.

If they put their head up, you lose the pressure on the sensitive part of their jaw. If they get their tongue over the bit, you lose all use of it or the reins. If they’re experienced, they know this. If you’re inexperienced, they know that, too. They’re sensitive like that. Bigfoot had experience, and he knew that if he put his head up high, I would have no way of disrupting his bold bid for freedom. On the other side of the creek he would scrape me off his back under those trees, no worries. I had learned to keep the reins down and loose, but this is hard to do while clinging desperately to them as a life-saving measure. I had not yet learned how to safely decamp from a horse going at full speed.

Flat gallop has a way of clearing the mind. In several hundred metres, including a majestic moment of weightlessness as we crossed the ditch of the creek in a long bound, there was nothing in my mind but pure, essential, ecstatic terror. I could vaguely hear the calls of the boss to let them go, the horses we’d been attempting to muster, whom Bigfoot was now determined to join. When we hit the trees I instinctively put my head down, forward. This manoeuvre saved my life, later, in the Arbor incident. This time it just meant the branch that swept me out of the saddle hit sideways right across the top of my head and knocked me clean out. Instant death.

Coming to from the kid’s game was a serene moment of transition, inducing a flooding sensation in the body and a dream-like sensibility capable of grasping the importance of the texture of carpet. The strange things is, when you’re unconscious you don’t necessarily stop moving. This time, I regained sensation in the bed of another creek, trying to get a purchase in the fluid sand, seemingly attempting unsuccessfully to stand up, spitting blood out of my mouth. The boss, who had ridden up at a more leisurely pace in the interim, was not pleased.

“Fuckin’ useless jackeroo cunts can’t stay on a fuckin’ horse for ten minutes straight.” This wasn’t Simon, this was the manager, a less sympathetic sort of a fella. I had been foisted upon him by his father, the owner of the company. From this speech, and other indications, I suspect he thought of me more as a liability than an asset, with some justification. Instead of arranging for the flying doctor, he told me to walk back through the trees, to where we had initially disembarked from the truck. “Turn off the trough there, and bring the truck around to the other gate.” He gave me directions.

Half the paddock was brigalow scrub, the other half open grassland. We had started at one gate, at the scrub end, and mustered the horses through the trees onto the open part, towards another gate. At some point, as we closed in on the destination, they had decided they preferred the bush life, and weren’t keen on going back to work after their spell. Picking the weakest point in the line, namely yours truly atop the traitor Bigfoot, they broke through it and departed at speed towards the trees with me in involuntary hot pursuit. There was no way they were coming back out of the brigalow that day. If we turned off the water source at the scrub end, they would be around the one in the open grassland next time.

By this time I had recovered enough to realise I wasn’t badly injured. There was a large scratched patch of skin beside my right eye, in which the flies were already taking a keen interest. It’s remarkable how well-protected your eyes are. There a was a fence I could follow to the gate, so I wouldn’t get lost. “Come and pick us up at the other gate. And don’t take too long. That’s half a fuckin’ day we just wasted.”

I continued on foot along the fence. Solitude, the aftermath of panic, the exhilaration of survival and the altered consciousness that accompanies coming to; all contributed to a mystical frame of mind. I noticed details. The flies crawling over the hand I covered my wound with didn’t bother me particularly. The bush is not silent: wind-noise, flies, birds, creaking branches, footfalls. The light bathed me. Dapple. Flutter. Reptiles slithered and crawled. Ants everywhere.  The canopy could be a metaphor for stained glass. Whenever people mention connection to country, I think of that sensation, that half hour of timeless brigalow dreaming.

The grille made it okay at the Great Southern Hotel. The office was shut off from the guests or potential guests, so I felt safe enough. At the place next door they had no such grille, and the reception desk was just a low bench, easily climbed by enraged or deranged clientele. I wouldn’t have worked there. The grille was brass, curlicued, just like the ones you see in old bank-heist westerns. You might equally expect Sam Spade or the Sundance Kid.

The grille was directly across the vestibule, more like a corridor, from the double-doors of the television and smoking room. Everybody smoked everywhere, of course, but that big room had nicotine stains an inch thick on the embossed wallpaper and elaborate plaster cornices. The smell of history: a roomful of emphysema in what had started as a respectable gentlemen’s boarding house in the city, half a century before.

There had been another grill, without the ‘e’, back in the days when breakfast was served, before the old owner died and his son and daughter inherited the property, but not his interest in it. Six stories of jaded grandeur, she was, by the time I met her. Sunset on Spencer Street. I didn’t even discover the dining room until much later, the doors being shut up at the other end of the corridor-foyer. A huge, high-ceilinged, empty space, with kitchen, locked up and shuttered. They held the auction there the day they sold the place.

There was more than one resident who had lived there half their lives. There was one gentleman who had been making the trip in from his home in the country to work weeks in the city for forty-odd years. He wore a hat and suit straight out of Brack‘s anonymous 5pm crowd. An entire family occupied one double room, accompanied by a full set of golf clubs. They must have had mattresses on the floors. Others required rooms only for an hour or so, although they paid for the night. Twenty-four dollars for a single bed in a room about twice the size of the bed, around the corner from Collins Street, the Rialto, and the financial district.

How close these worlds were. In one I was grateful for the grille the day the guy pointed at me, just pointed, as the cops were escorting him out of the TV room. In the other, a gold-braided commissionaire opened the teak doors for you at Georges Department Store, where the true implications of the old slogan came home to me. When you’re outside, staring in the window, property looks a lot like theft. If you were brazen, you could sit on an eight-dollar cup of coffee, contemplating the financial district from the 35th floor of the Regent Hotel for hours, or drink with the stock-brokers at play in Bank Place. Continue round the corner at the end of Collins Street and the fairy-lights disappeared, to be replaced by a streetscape out of Elmore Leonard (who wrote westerns before applying the form to the mean streets) or Ed McBain, complete with elevated train tracks, and a girl with a line of blood running down her arm from inside the elbow.

Once I was chided by a writing tutor who, while praising my style, advised against letting my slip of misanthropy show. I had thought it was a relatively benign contemplation on a party, an exercise in evocation, no more, but she detected a certain contempt for the subject matter, the people. She was right, I think. Can we say the great writers have a great affection for their creations? Cannery Row comes to mind. I confess to some contempt for some of the habitués, both of the Great Southern, and of the Regent, and of Bank Place.

Some were just annoying, though, like Danny. I had no contempt for Danny, whose situation was a result of the great de-institutionalisation of the mentally misplaced in the 1980s. Asylums were such terrible places, it was decided they would be better off independent, fending for themselves on the street or in inner-city flophouses. Danny and I were mates, but he could bend your ear, one elbow on the counter at the grille, and it wasn’t exactly intellectually stimulating. He was okay when sober. One night-shift when, I confess, I had a couple of bottles of beer myself in the back office, I hid there while he called for me, wanting a yarn. I told him. I told him I couldn’t continue. I told him ten times to go watch some TV or something, but we were mates, and you know how you can push things with mates. He was a resident. My only recourse was to stay out of sight of the grille, in the little cupboard area, which led to the huge, empty back office, and the huger, emptier storage space beyond. All this empty space, in the city. I may have been reading an old copy of Atlas Shrugged I’d found in the lost property there. I’ll never forget the sound of his voice. “Ken?” Then with a downward inflection: “Kehn”. Then in a whiny way, as if he knew I was there, and what I was doing, “Ke-en…” I thought he’d give up pretty soon, but excruciating eons elapsed before he finally wandered off. It wasn’t contempt, it was just that I didn’t feel like talking to him then, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

I didn’t despise the rotund lady resident who often occupied the grilled window and could repeat essentially the same sentence several dozen times, with slight variations, as a form of conversation. “I went out to visit the family, my daughter, at Horsham last weekend, for Christmas. Since it was Christmas, and I don’t see them much, I went out to see them, at Horsham. We gave the kids a little puppy. My daughter’s family. Lovely little dog. We gave it to the kids, when I was out seeing the family there, at Horsham, since it’s Christmas time. I don’t get to see them much, so I went out to Horsham and gave the kids a little puppy, you know, because it’s Christmas time.” She could continue at a steady pace like this, in a kind of twisted, unproductive form of the iterations of evolution, for hours. In the end I gave up, and would simply keep reading my book, uttering a murmur of encouragement or agreement, like Winnie-the-Pooh with Owl, every page or two. She didn’t seem to mind. It was a good arrangement.

It was me who called the cops on the guy in the TV room. He wouldn’t leave, and Con, or maybe it was Con’s son, told me about him when we swapped shifts. He had nowhere else to go, but he couldn’t stay there. I told him. I warned him. “I’m sorry mate,” I said from behind the grille, “but you can’t stay here. If you don’t go I’ll have to call the cops.”

“You’re not gonna call ’em,” he said, not slurry, but glazed, dissociated. He knew what was happening, he just didn’t care.

“Won’t I? Why’s that?” Tough guy behind the grille. He was wearing a jacket similar to the one the owner of the hotel had handed on to me, after one of her charity drives. She thought I might like it. It was classy. I wore it for twenty years. His was vinyl.

“‘Coz I’ll revenge ya,” he said, with a lopsided smile and utter conviction. So, naturally, I called them. He couldn’t get at me in there. When they came, the uniform explained to me that they had to witness someone officially tell him he wasn’t allowed to stay, or they couldn’t kick him off the premises or charge him with trespass. So I had to go into the dim TV room, where he sat in a tan cloth-covered lounge chair, and listened to me tell him that he couldn’t stay, even though he had nowhere to go, and even though I knew about the vast empty lands behind the iron-work grille.

I scurried back to the office and watched as they walked him out of the building into god knows what. As they left, he pointed, just for a moment, looking me levelly, loosely in the eye. I was one of the habitués of the Great Southern, and of Bank Place, and of the Regent. A generalised contempt for humanity can’t blind you to the fact that you yourself are a member of the species. I used the skills I had learned from Leonard and McBain to make sure I wasn’t followed as I went home to my warm, safe bed that night.

I know what it’s like to die instantaneously. The first time I was knocked clean out was when I slipped in a large storm-water drain in Weston, in Canberra, when it was mostly houseless infrastructure. I was utterly unaware of the event, not the worst way to go, I guess. The second time was Bigfoot.
It took some time to exasperate Simon enough so that he finally gave me a buckjumper. The first weeks at Wentworth were spent in other tasks. “We won’t be doing any horsework for another six weeks at least, I reckon.” He wasn’t the manager, but more like a sergeant-major, or stage manager: the one who makes things happen, as opposed to the one who decided what should happen. Head stockmen are highly skilled and highly respected, for the most part. It would be an unwise manager who interfered too closely in the head stockman’s responsibilities. Wentworth was in the process of handing over, and the old managers were still there. The new guy, a younger, more business-oriented, harder-headed fella, had not moved in yet, although it was his wife who had picked me up from the cattle yards at the side of the Peak Downs Highway. Dianne.
Simon decided who rode which horse, who drove the four-wheel-drive. I was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Toyota, about to head off to run a fence with Tim, when Simon strolled over and spoke across me. “You drive, eh, Tim?” “Why?” I protested. I was an uncontrollably ‘drive-hungry’ bastard, a characteristic that drew much criticism during my career on cattle stations. “Best man for the job,” Simon said simply.
This fence-running trip was a revelation regarding my sense of direction. It was a good thing Tim was there at all, or I almost certainly would have ended up hopelessly lost. We went to a junction where several paddocks joined, with a trough, and a confusing system of gates and traps. He knew which paddock we were supposed to run.
“Where’s this?” I said a couple of hours later, and he gave me a look. “It’s where we started.”
“Oh, right. So it is.”
“So you didn’t notice that we just drove around a big paddock?” Sure enough, the regular inside right turns had escaped my attention. So that was that for driving. From then on, I only ever got to do it when there was no-one else.
When it came to horses, Simon was a revolutionary. No-one had heard of horse-whisperers, and I suspect the idea would have been a source of some amusement to him, but he, Jim Cunningham and Jamie McFarlane were the best, calmest horseman I met. There was nothing mystical in it. I thought there must be. I thought the mere presence of preternatural serenity would be enough to calm the horse and bring it under the rider’s control. I can imagine him having a good chuckle about that one too, or maybe not so much. He knew about confidence. I had it, but all the wrong kinds. He kept saying I needed to learn how to try, but I didn’t understand what he meant. Not then. I thought I was trying.
He wouldn’t let us kick them. If you jerked a rein on a jawbone, he’d be up ya. He had books on a subversive, no-pain ideology for training quarter-horses for cutting, and he was a convert. He began to teach me how to tell a good horse from its composition. The shoulder has to be at a good angle, the hindquarters solid for turning. Temperament was important, too, of course. “They’ve gotta have a good eye. You don’t want ’em with wild eyes.”
“Most of the ones you give me, you can’t even make ’em canter.”
“Well y’oughta be able to. When you can do that, you can have a buckjumper. Fucked if I know why you’d want one. Anyway, we’re not doin’ it for fun, you’re s’posed to be workin’ cattle. If ya can’t ride the horse, ya can’t work the cattle.” (‘Ya’ is not right, but neither is ‘yer’, much less ‘ye’, though this last is probably closest. Maybe ‘yuh’. A neutral vowel, a schwa.)
Bigfoot had wild eyes. He was snorting and jumpy and 16 hands in the round yard, where he’d been enough times to know that if they stopped you there, you were in for a working day. Horses are smart and sensitive, and their personalities are as varied and unique as people’s. Bigfoot didn’t like working days. Hadn’t had one for a while, and may have been under the impression that it wasn’t going to happen again.
Simon said, “Ken”, and I got a lesson in brashness and hubris, in the difference between how you think you’re going to feel, and how you do feel, when confronted with actual danger, or, in this case, the slavering, monstrous steed of the Nazgûl (only he was bay, not black). Another difference: between seeing something terrifying, and running away from it, and seeing something terrifying, and having still to go towards and somehow gain control of it. It was a big moment for me, y’know? I stepped into the round yard, an octagon of high railing fence, about five paces across. Thick, round wooden posts and rails, too high for a panicked horse to jump or climb. Of course, that meant they might be too high for a panicked jackeroo to jump or climb, too.
“Talk to ‘im,” said Simon. This was one of his mantras. He and Tim were talking about something else by the time I got to the ground, then they went of to the saddle-shed for something. I approached Bigfoot slowly, hesitant, with arms spread, looking deep into his eyes and seeking a mystical connection through the wild and free in all of us. Murmuring reassurances.
Looking deep into their eyes is the worst thing you can do. Beginners’ mistake. Hesitation terrifies and angers them. I thought my quiet reasonableness was beginning to have some effect. If I’d known more, I probably would have got a better clue from the whites of his wild eyes. The taught neck-muscles, laid-back ears and explosive snorts might have signalled something, too.
“Just walk up and put the fuckin’ bridle on ‘im, willya.” Simon and Tim were back. We had different interpretations of confidence. His worked.
Memory is a terrible thing, and it may be that Simon had to catch him for me the first few times, and saddle him up, a tricky business with a fresh horse. Bigfoot had been spelled. He was experienced, but for all he knew, he was retired. Now here we were putting a saddle on him again, and he knew what that meant. He was well-rested, and charged up. Plenty of energy. He’d been living wild and free for the last half a year, perhaps coming up to the yard with the others now and then, but always to be let go again. Bigfoot wasn’t his real name; he had a formal one in the station horse book, but he’d had some kind of abscess on his offside fore and it bore a mushroom-coloured callus almost as big as his hoof. Didn’t slow him down at all.
Simon expected him to throw a few into me in the round yard, but he didn’t. Simon circled us around a couple of times once I was up. We even trotted a little, I think. “Wait’ll you get ‘im to canter”, he said, as he opened the gate into the cutting yard. It was about fifty metres by twenty, I suppose, and ploughed ankle-deep. (Maybe he was on another horse, or maybe on foot. Am I remembering it or imagining it? Some details are so vivid, and some have vanished forever.) We were getting ready to go mustering, not to teach me rodeo tricks, so there was an element of impatience. The new boss would be here soon. Simon was clicking Bigfoot into a canter, round in circles. “If he bucks, lean back,” he instructed. This was a contrast to his normal admonitions to sit up straight. The horse suddenly picked up pace. In my mind, this is like a Hunter S. Thompson moment, a hallucinatory experience in which suddenly the world erupts. But the soundtrack is Simon repeating “lean back, lean back, lean back!” as I hunched forward and instinctively dug my heels into Bigfoot’s ribs.
It’s a strange thing when a horse bucks. The first thing that happens is that its neck and head disappear. The next is that man and beast become airborne, then momentarily weightless, in freefall. It’s lonely up there in the moment before the four-legged seismic jolt. Then off you go up again, having completely lost any idea of which way that might be. Still no sign of the horse itself, whose nose is between its forelegs. Quite often the rest of the world is not much more than a blur. I think I lasted two of these, before I sensed that the weightless part of the ride was lasting longer than usual. This was because I was now completely detached from Bigfoot. I caught a glimpse of the saddle somewhere under my feet, before it and Bigfoot had gone. He’d thrown me vertically, high enough for my feet to clear his shoulder. I retained the mounted position, just without saddle or horse, as I enjoyed the blissful, predictable fall back to the soft soil. I believe I nearly stayed on my feet.
I’d love to tell you I conquered him that day, but I didn’t. Tim had to ride him. There were cattle to muster, and if you can’t ride a horse, you can’t muster cattle with it. Tim was not pleased with this arrangement. The horse was in my ‘camp’ now, and I was given him every third time we went mustering. After a while, Bigfoot and I came to an interim understanding. He would throw me a few times in the cutting yard, in the morning, just so we all knew he could. Then, as long as he didn’t see any hats too close, he would allow me to ride along while he did his work. He had a thing about hats, for some reason. I learned how to fall.
My confidence utterly shattered, it began slowly to be built anew, as Bigfoot and I learned, incrementally, how to get along with each other. He demanded respect. Beginning from abject terror, I began to give it to him. Later, after some tests, he grudgingly returned the sentiment.
He did knock me clean out once, but I’ve run out of room to tell about that. It’ll have to be continued.

The figure of John Wayne, cowboy, drawled through the culture for half a century so, of course, I was often him. Mostly, though, I wanted to be Shane. When I met Simon Stanhope, I thought he was Shane, with a bit of Atticus Finch thrown in: he didn’t like to kill things. When I told him about Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway’s celebration of the nobility of death in the bullring, he got up me for it. “I see a bullock lyin’ there in the dirt, I see its eyes glaze over, there’s nothin’ noble about it”, he said, unconsciously poetic. He didn’t like to kill things, but it was he who tried out one of his new hollow-nosed .375 rounds on a bush kill on one of the days we decided to take the brains. Warren chopped the beast’s skull open with an axe and a reddish liquid, streaked with grey, ran out of the crack. “Dangerous things, firearms,” said Simon. He had to confirm to me that this was the beast’s brains, liquefied by the hollow-nosed bullet. I got his point about nobility.
He walked loose-hipped, in the manner of denizens of the saddle, in contrast to the actor Wayne’s tight mincing. Simon was a ringer, Head Stockman at Wentworth. He was long and wiry, in the mould of Clancy, and Shane. It’s hard to describe him, or anyone, without falling into cliché, such is the power of archetypes. Shane was the quintessential mysterious stranger come to town to put things right. Reluctantly. There’s a movie, but forget Alan Ladd (wanker!). Read the book. The movie has some of the best cinematography in the genre, but the character is diluted by his loquacity and the uncertainty of the outcomes of his fights. In the book, Shane is quiet, and there is no doubt who will win. This is the way I remember it, anyway, so you’re getting this, gentle reader, through several layers of interpretation and memory. A continuation of the archetype, slightly reworked.
Instead of the movie’s prolonged exchange of punches and near-misses, in the book he lays out the farmer with a simple gesture, a lightning-quick move that removes all doubt. He unemotionally breaks the arm of the thug in the bar, who is clearly not in the same class. He is quiet, right, peaceful and deadly. Thus are young men attuned to the idea of a capacity for violence as synonymous with righteousness. Women too, I guess. This archetype is immensely attractive and protective. It’s the restraint. This hero is reluctant, his power coiled, a potential but controlled potency. The irony is that, in order to restrain this lethality, he must first be deadly.
“But how do you aim without a sight?” asks the boy, after discovering the wrapped-up six-gun in the barn. Shane replies, “You don’t. You just point it, like a finger”. This I did with a Mauser 8mm bolt-action rifle I bought from Tim, the ringer, banker’s son and illegal immigrant. I was walking along the bottom of the creek below the station when a pig broke from cover. I was not reluctant. I swung the rifle round, cocked it, pointed it like a finger, and squeezed the trigger just as the pig disappeared, full-pace, into the waist-high grass at the top of the river bank. It was a fleck of enlightenment, of flow, when thought, movement, and intent were singular. I was deadly. How, though, am I to explain to my teenage son that violence is bad and killing to be avoided, when I have this memory of a moment of sublime selflessness in which the delivery of a mortal wound was associated with ecstasy, however fleeting?
It was fleeting, because I didn’t know whether I had hit the pig or not. I re-cocked the weapon and ran up the steep riverbank, like a fool, forgetting every safety lesson I’d ever heard. The grass was waist-high. I blundered through it, looking for the pig, assuming I’d missed. I was past it before I heard it moving behind me. If the shot hadn’t disabled it, it could easily have caused me a serious wound. The bullet was not hollow-nosed but military ammunition, full metal jacket, and had run through both its hips, and it was floundering, its back legs paralysed. I had to shoot it again to kill it, and again to be sure. I’ve been ashamed of it ever since, though it’s not the worst thing I’ve done, and it was a bloody good shot, and pigs are a pest.
Cowboy has another meaning, of course, of recklessness and a lack of control, and Shane was not a cowboy but a gunslinger. At Wentworth I learned that a cowboy is a kind of station servant, who milks the cow and mows the lawns and assists the manager’s wife as needed. It’s a lowly post, unheroic, often reserved for ex-drunks or the broken men that middle-aged ringers can become. Simon reckoned it took five years to make a ringer, but the career prospects are not good. (These are not shearers, like the one in Click go the Shears, and most of the ringers I knew would not have been seen dead near a sheep.) Jackeroos, such as I was, are apprentice managers, and the object of much contempt from proper ringers. Their trajectory is to find a wife and manage a place of their own. Cowboys, though, are at the bottom of the pile. With this knowledge, I realised I was in Australia, not the Wild West of the movies, that I was on a station, not a ranch, and that this world was populated by real people, not archetypes.
In order to restrain lethality, one must first possess it. Being deadly, while attractive, even sublime, has costs. Warren suggested I take the pig’s tusks, so we went and found the body and chopped off its snout with an axe, a surprisingly difficult job. They told me to put it on an ant’s nest and the ants would eat the meat off, but it just rotted there, and I never was able to pull the big teeth out. I don’t remember what happened to it in the end. Nothing noble.
This is the true meaning of the bullfight. People who think of it as a contest are missing the point. It’s a memento mori. My memory of the look in that pig’s eyes, just before I killed it, is a continuation of sorts. “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”. I took the pig’s life, and now I’m giving it back, if the Bard is correct. I’ve been Wayne and Shane and now I seem to be God. But I killed flesh and blood, and I resurrect only an archetype of ignoble Death.

Continuations come from chess, and might also be called possible futures. I’m sure I heard about them once from a book about a chess prodigy who loses her way. Not much of a book, not bad, but a few bits and themes from it have become tropes for me. One was when she decided, in reclusive mood after a catastrophic loss, to really get to know alcohol.

It was the conscious decision that struck me. I’d assumed reclusive alcohol abuse was something that snuck up on people, a state they found themselves in unexpectedly. Like Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses: only able to accept it when confronted with compelling self-awareness. This young woman, though, having lost everything she had lived for (or so she thought, pre-redemptive denouement), actively and consciously chose the gauze, the comforting haze to which a friend of mine once referred, in a room full of empty beer bottles and wine casks in Melbourne. The prodigy deliberately closed the curtains and opened a delivery account with the local booze emporium. This implied that there might be some benefit to such an embrace. At the least, it revealed to me a possible future.

An incidental vignette that has stuck with me was one in which she and her (redemptive, ever-faithful) man played chess without a board, on a road trip. I could almost do this, once. I had a game with Robert Fisher (no, not that one), using salt shakers, peanut bowls and ashtrays on the bar at the Lakeside Hotel. We played the whole thing out, as I recall it. I may have lost, but remember thinking it was a pretty cool thing to be able to do.

But there are whole communities for whom this is normal. The redemptive man was bringing her home by it. When you belong in the elite, you should embrace it. Take your place with aplomb. Don’t apologise for it. Conversely, when you do that, you will find yourself in a community in which you are no longer special: smarter or stronger or more determined or eloquent or fast. Suddenly, you know lots of people who are just as good as you, whatever the game.

These two bits, then, but also this other trope, the continuations, from the game. For every situation, there are more or fewer continuations. If you give your opponent only one, or a few unpleasant options, you have the initiative. Some positions, though, contain within them virtually infinite permutations of possible futures. This, of course, is the essence of Schrödinger’s and Heisenberg’s insights.

So then you have to think. If I move here, it looks okay, and if this continuation followed, why, I’d win in three. But my opponent (Fortune, perhaps) is unlikely to cooperate. So I won’t do that. So the possible future is impossible, really. (Maybe. No-one would be so stupid, right?) Yet, it has a profound effect on present policy. Think Islamic caliphate. Think nuclear holocaust.

That’s a continuation: Armageddon, the last battle, a myth of a possible future. Ironically, the name is derived from Megiddo, the name of the first battle for which we have an account. Chariots played an important but ill-understood role, hundreds of them. They were already, by then, an advanced and ancient technology; a set of interconnected technologies, actually. Well, so some historians have told me. It was in print, from several sources, but still, I don’t know know. I wasn’t there. Lots of different things might have left the same evidence. What happened? What else might have happened, but didn’t? What would I like to have happened? If I make this interpretive knight move here, I can change, by writing, history. History as reverse Continuation, then, if that works.

Or memoir. It’s a possible past. According to Rogers Waters, ‘They flutter behind you, your possible pasts, some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost’. I didn’t quite got this line, but now I think…

Memories adapt themselves to the exigencies of current situations. They are unreliable (sorry, Clive). They are continuations of the present need, and in some situations, infinite memory-sets might fit. I could tell you some stories, some memories, some moments, like when Simon Stanhope sold me my first hat, and fuck me if it wasn’t a Stetson. I was John Wayne then, for a moment, on the fly-wired veranda of the ringers quarters at Wentworth station. At least, I think I was. Makes a good vignette, anyway. Perhaps I’ll tell you a story about it some time.

So, we can relate the personal to the grand-historical, the past to the future, the fictional to the memorial. And all vice versa. Others have done it. Every reference opens up another infinite supply of associations and allegories. Reference entails continued iteration.

There they are, then. History, memoir, cultural referential fractals. Continuations. Then again, they could just stop here. But they don’t.

Let it last.