A Town Like Alice (41 page)

I left London one Monday morning, and travelled through to Sydney on the same airliner, arriving late on Wednesday night. We stopped for an hour or so at Cairo and Karachi and Calcutta and Singapore and Darwin. I must say the aeroplane was very comfortable and the stewardess was most kind and attentive; it was fatiguing, of course, sleeping two nights in a reclining chair and I was glad when it was over. I stayed two nights in Sydney to rest, and took a little drive around in a hired car during the afternoon. Next day I took the aeroplane to Cairns. It was a lovely flight, especially along the coast of Queensland, after Brisbane. The very last part, up the Hinchinbrook Channel between Cairns and Townsville, must be one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world.

We landed at Cairns in the evening, and here I had a great surprise, because Joe Harman met me at the aerodrome. The Dakota, he told me, now ran twice a week to the Gulf country, partly on account of the growth of Willstown, and he had come in on the Friday plane to take me out on Monday, "I got one or two little bits of things to order and to see to," he said. "My solicitor, Ben Hope, he's here in Cairns too. I thought that over the weekend you might like to hear the general set-up of Midhurst, 'n have a talk with him."

I had not heard the slow Queensland speech since he had come to me in Chancery Lane, over three years before. He took me in a car to the hotel, a queer, rambling building rather beautifully situated, with a huge bar that seemed to be the focal point. We got there just before tea, the evening meal, and went in almost at once and sat down together. He asked me if I would drink tea or beer or plonk.

"Plonk?" I asked.

"Red wine," he said. "I don't go much for it myself, but jokers who know about wine, they say it's all right."

They had a wine list, and I chose a Hunter River wine which I must say I found to be quite palatable. "Jean was very sorry she couldn't come and meet you," he said. "We could have parked Joe with someone, but she's feeding Noel, so that ties her. She's going to drive into Willstown and meet the Dakota on Monday."

"How is she?" I asked.

"She's fine," he said. "Having babies seems to suit her. She's looking prettier than ever."

We settled down after tea on the veranda outside my bedroom, and began discussing the business of Midhurst. He had brought with him copies of the accounts for the station for the last three years, neatly typed and very easily intelligible. I commented upon their form, and he said, "I'm not much of a hand at this sort of thing. Jean did these before she went into the hospital. She does most of the accounts for me. I tell her what I want to do out on the station, and she tells me how much money I've got left to spend. She's got the schooling for the two of us."

Nevertheless, I found him quite a shrewd man, very well able to appreciate the somewhat intricate points that came up about the lease and his capital improvements. We talked for a couple of hours that night about his station and about the various businesses that Jean had started in the town. He was very interesting about those.

"She's got twenty-two girls working in the workshop," he said. "Shoes and attache cases and ladies bags. That's the one that isn't doing quite so well as the others." He turned the pages of the accounts to show me. "It's making a profit now, but last year there was a loss of over two hundred pounds -two hundred and twenty-seven. But all the others-oh my word." He showed me the figures for the ice-cream parlour, the beauty parlour, the swimming-pool, the cinema, the laundry, and the dress shop. "They're doing fine. The fruit and vegetable shop, that's all right, too." We totted up the figures and found that the seven of them together had made a clear profit of two thousand six hundred and seventy-three pounds in the previous year. "It’ll pay her to run the workshop at a loss," he said. "She gets it back out of what the girls spend to make themselves look pretty for the ringers, and what the ringers spend in taking out the girls."

I was a little troubled about the workshop. "Can she expand it?" I asked. "Can she lower the overhead by doing a bigger business?"

He was doubtful about that. "She's using just about all the alligator skins Jeff Pocock and two others can bring in," he said. "Wallabies, they're getting scarcer than they were, too. I don't think she can get much bigger in the workshop. She doesn't want to, either. She's got a kind of hunch that in a few years' time the workshop won't be necessary at all, that the town will be so big that a workshop employing twenty girls won't be neither here nor there."

"I see," I said thoughtfully. "How big is the town now?"

"There's about four hundred and fifty people living in Willstown," he said. "That's not counting boongs, and not counting people living out upon the stations. The population's trebled in the last three years."

"Is that just because of the workshop?" I asked.

He said slowly, "I think it must be-everything comes back to that, when you look at it. It's not only the workshop, you see. She's got two girls employed in the ice-cream parlour, and one lubra. Two in the beauty parlour, three in the dress shop, two in the fruit shop, three in the cinema. She employs quite a lot of people."

I was puzzled. "But can twenty girls in the workshop provide work for all these other girls?" I asked.

"It doesn't seem to work that way," he said. "We were totting it up the other day. She's never employed more than about thirty-five girls at any one time, but since she started there's been forty-two girls married out of her businesses. They mostly marry ringers. Well, that's forty-two families starting, forty-two women wanting cinema and beauty parlour and fresh vegetables and that, besides the thirty-five girls that she's still got employed. It kind of snowballs." He paused. "Take the bank. There's two girl clerks there that there never were before, because of the bigger business. The AMP have started up an office, and there's a girl in that. Bill Wakeling's got a girl in his office." He turned to me. "It's a fact, there's something like a hundred girls and married women under twenty-five in Willstown now," he said. "When Jean came, there was two."

"And the babies!" he said. "There's more babies than you could shake a stick at. They've had to send a special maternity nurse to the hospital. That's another girl. She got engaged to Phil Duncan, the copper, last month, so there'll be another one."

I smiled. "Are there enough men to go round?"

"Oh my word," he said. "There's no difficulty in getting men to work in Willstown. I've had ringers coming from all over Queensland, from the Northern Territory, too, wanting a job round about Willstown. There was one chap came all the way from Marble Bar in Western Australia, two thousand miles or so. The labour situation's very different now from what it was three years ago."

I went to bed early that night with plenty to think about. We had a conference next morning with Mr Hope, the solicitor, in his office, and wrote a letter to the Queensland Land Administration Board suggesting a meeting to discuss the lease of Midhurst. That afternoon we spent in driving around Cairns to see the sights; it seemed to me to be a pleasant little tropical town, beautifully situated. On Sunday we drove up on to the Atherton Tableland, high rolling downs farmed somewhat on the English style.

We flew to Willstown on Monday morning, in a Dakota. We landed at places called Georgetown and Croydon on the way and stayed on each aerodrome for about twenty minutes, picking up and setting down passengers and freight, as we circled Georgetown for the landing I was able to study the place. It was pathetic in a way, for you could see from the air the rectangular pattern of wide streets that once had been busy and lined with houses, now rutted with the rain and grass-grown. A few scattered houses stood at the intersections of what had once been these streets, and they were clustered rather more thickly around the hotel, the only two-storeyed building in either place. Both of these were derelict gold towns.

The people who came to meet the aeroplane in trucks were bronzed, healthy, and humorous; the men were mostly great big tanned, competent people; the women candid, uncomplaining housewives.

I sat at the window studying Croydon as we took off, till it fell away from view behind us. "I'm kind of glad that you've seen those," said Joe beside me. "Willstown was like that, only a bit worse. It's no great shakes yet, of course, but it's better than Croydon, oh my word it is."

We circled Willstown as we came in to land. It stood by quite a large river, and it was queerly like the other two towns in its layout. There were the same wide streets arranged in rectangular pattern, but the pattern was filling up with houses here. From the air the glint of the sun upon new corrugated iron roofs was everywhere, so that at one point as we circled opposite the sun I had to shut my eyes against the dazzle. All these houses seemed to be new, and a considerable number were still in the process of building. In the main street opposite the two-storeyed building that I guessed to be the hotel, a line of shrubs had been planted in a formal garden down the middle of the road, transforming the wide cattle-track into two carriageways, and tarmac pavements had been made in this part of the town. Opposite the hotel I could see the swimming-pool with diving-boards and cabins and a lawn beside it, just as Jean had described it to me in her letters. Then the town was lost to view, and we were landing, coming in over a brand-new racetrack.

She was there to meet me in her Ford utility, her own car that she had bought for running in and out of town to see to her businesses. She was more mature now than I had remembered her; she had grown into a very lovely woman. She said, "Oh Noel, it
is
nice to see you. Are you very tired?"

"I'm not tired," I said. 'Three or four years older, perhaps. You're looking very well."

"I am well," she said. "Disgustingly well. Noel, it was good of you to offer to come out like this. I wanted to ask you to, and then it seemed too much to ask. It's such a very long way. Come and sit in the utility. Joe's just getting your bags."

They drove me out immediately to Midhurst. We passed through the main street of Willstown and I wanted to stop and see what she had done, but they would not let me. "Time enough for that tomorrow or the next day," she said. "We'll go to Midhurst now, and you can rest a bit."

I knew the sort of scenery that I should see upon the way to Midhurst from many readings of her letters, and it was just as I had expected it to be. There was no road in the usually accepted sense; she picked her way across country in the car following the general line of the tracks but avoiding the deep holes. When we came to the first creek, however, I was interested to see that they had made a sort of concrete bottom or causeway across the river bed, and this causeway was marked by two massive wooden posts upon the bank at either end. "We haven't got as far as having bridges yet," she said. "But this thing is a god-send in the wet, to know that you won't hit a boulder under water."

The homestead was very much as I had expected it to be, but there was a garden now in front of it, bright with flowers, and there were great ranges of log stockades or cattle pens that I had not heard about. "They've gone up in the last two years," Joe said. "We've got three Zebu bulls now, and you want more stockyards when you start breeding." His Zebu bulls were a cross between Indian cattle and English Herefords. He told me that he was keeping a small herd of dairy cows, too, and that meant more enclosures still.

"How many hands have you got now?" I asked.

"Eleven white stockmen," he said, "and ten boongs. It's almost easier to get white than black in this part of the country."

They would not let me walk that day, but put me in a long chair in the veranda with a cool drink, and I sat watching all the work of the station as it went on in the yard below. It was fascinating to sit there and watch it all, the white stockmen and the black stockmen, the cattle, the dogs, and the horses, and a half grown wallaby lolloping about with puppies teasing it by playing with its tail. I could have sat there indefinitely watching it all, and watching the grace of Jean moving round the house attending to her children and her Abo women. I did sit there for three days.

She took me into town one morning, and showed me everything that she had done. She took me to the workshop first, and she made me put a scarf on before we went in because it would be cold. It was not cold as we would know cold, but it struck chilly after the warm day outside, because she kept the air-conditioner going all the year round. "The girls do love it so," she said. "There's always more of them wanting to work here than I can take on, just because of that." They all looked very smart and pretty in their green smocks, working at the leather goods. There was a long mirror at the end of the shop, and a few pictures of hair styles and frocks cut out of illustrated magazines pinned up on the wall. "We change those every so often," she said. "I like them to make the best of themselves."

The workshop stood by itself, but she had arranged her other enterprises all in a row as a little street of shops. She had built a wooden veranda over the broad tarmac pavement to shade shopgazers from the sun or the rain. Here she had the beauty parlour with an Estonian in charge, a dark, handsome middle-aged woman, beautifully got up, with two Australian girls under her. There were four private little booths, and a glass counter and display-case full of women's things; it was all very clean and nice. Next in the row came a little shop with a battery of four Home Laundries, and three young married women sitting gossiping while they waited for their wash. Next was the greengrocer's shop, which sold seeds and garden implements as well as fruit and vegetables, and after that the dress shop. This was quite a big place, with counters and dummies clothed in summer frocks, and I was interested to see a small, secluded part served by a middle-aged woman where the elderly could buy the clothes they were accustomed to, black skirts and flannel petticoats and coarse kitchen aprons.