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.