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?