Shearers' Motel (5 page)

The dented aluminium kettle of boiling water he carried over to the shed twice a day sloshed everywhere. Sandwiches came apart, fruit bruised, biscuits crumbled, cake squashed, the four-litre teapot lost its lid. He packed morning smoko into cardboard boxes on the tray of his truck, and was running late, always running late. Wheel-tracks crossed over like dinosaurs' hip bones in the yards, and today the truck hit them hard.

Only items intact: jar of International Roast instant coffee, tin of Milo, tin of sugar, clutch of teaspoons, a two-litre pack of Diploma UHT milk. Tea slops clogged the bottom of the rockmelon dish. Splotches of gritty wet were everywhere, like blots of rain from a dry storm. The waxed sides of the milk carton were smeared ochre. What was the point of it?

He wiped things down with a Chux Superwipe, reshaped the sandwiches, rinsed the melon, regunned the motor, and went more carefully. He probed and surged across the remaining red sand of the half-kilometre route, leaving coils of dust around the meat house, through the doors of the twin-doored pit toilet, dust drifting ahead of him through stands of spindly,
thin-leaved gidgee near the sheep yards. On the last hump he slowed to a crawl.

He always seemed to be running late. But when he got there he was early.

Dogs raced over to greet him, tails flicking, eyes shining. They knew who he was. They were after sandwich crusts, stray rounds of Fritz, pickings of cold mutton and maybe a dish of milk. If they were impatient, and grabbed too soon after smoko started, they'd get lofted away by a soft-shod boot stinking of sheep-grease.

‘Git away, yer hound!'

In the sheep yards the owner's sister yelled and flapped a feed bag at stubborn, panicky sheep refusing to enter the narrow race for branding — her hat jammed low over her ears, her shirt-tail flying. It was too hot for sheep to move, but humans were hard at it. The slightly built, dust-smudged, hard-working Fiona Holgate was always active somewhere. In their time off, the team sat in doorways watching her. There she'd go, tearing down sidetracks on a motorbike with a kelpie perched on the handlebars, or cantering past bareback on a pale horse, or glancing down at the fellas from the side window of her brother's Cessna as it banked over the shearers' quarters at first light, heading off to locate mobs for the next day's shearing. At knock-off time she tipped sheep, angled their necks, and cut their throats for dogs' meat. Most of the year she was an art student in Sydney. Now she financed herself by dabbing spots of paint on the backs of sheep in the race, branding the culls to indicate which would spend another year ambling around the paddocks of Leopardwood Downs ripping at shrubs and disdaining weeds, and which would go for slaughter, maybe ending their days on sand again, in Saudi Arabia, through the live sheep trade.

Freshly shorn naked, the sheep were bewildered from being held hard against shearers' knees in positions they'd never assumed in nature — legs flapping uselessly as if broken, eyes locked back in their heads — sheep confused from being tumbled down a chute into a pen of
jittery brothers, a sudden transition from gloom to stark daylight. As he circled the yards he glanced at their gaunt white backs and piss-stained bellies. No raw gashes, no blood, no cuts. Early in the day, and the workers were taking it steady.

He backed the truck up to the shed. Unpacked the smoko boxes.

Wool bales were stacked across the mouth of the loading bay, two metres above ground level. The presser, Davo, seeing him coming, reached down to lift the boxes inside, placing them on the curved tops of bales. As fast as he could haul himself up after them Davo was back at the press, gathering armloads of wool from the bins, balancing them high, face almost hidden, then striding across the floor, tucking the bundles under the descending plate of the Stevlon woolpress. Power came from an 11 h.p. Honda petrol motor. Pounding as the pressure came on, it sent out exhaust fumes, multiplying the early heat. It had been forty degrees yesterday; it would be forty-four today. Centimetres away from having his arms torn off, Davo poked stray bunches of wool back in, and laughed as he watched the pressure plate bearing down. Any worries were off-beam. The plate disconnected with a sudden clunk, hissed up again, and the needle of the pressure gauge returned to zero. Newer-style presses had automatic sensors and in-built digital scales, but Davo didn't hanker for one, not really, why should he, he'd never made a mistake, and it added a charge to the job — to have this constant challenge as he stuffed the last corners of the bale, pulled out the pins, and watched the wool puff back into the top; then rolled the bale to the platform-scales with a flick of a twin-pronged bale-hook, and assessed the weight.

‘Spot-on,' he boasted.

Still a few minutes to go before smoko. From deeper inside the shed came the steady metallic whirr of handpieces, the hectic competitive shouts as the shearers raced to their nine-thirty smoko break. The noisy pitch of the handpieces with their combs and cutters clattering
rose to a percussive complexity, playing against the ear intricately, a steel chorus.

He stepped over piles of fleece and bits of wool spilling from the wool bins. Made his way past the classing table to the end of the shearing board. Wedged himself into a gap in the wall struts, barely fitting.

He came here to watch the work sometimes. He had a stated reason for this: cooking for workers was a case of restoking burnt-off energy. Who worked the most deserved the most. He'd heard that said. He'd heard a lot of things said. If there was a ration on certain luxuries — chilli and garlic sauce, say, which Bertram Junior seemed to think the cook had ordered, when he hadn't — or some hard worker (shearer) was delayed for a meal and a slouch (rouseabout) tried to get his share or a second helping, then the cook ought to know. This was the fine-tuning end of the cook's art, so it was said — standing by with a wooden spoon to belt the knuckles of slackers.

But really he came here to watch people and see what was happening in their lives.

Here where he stood, the two rousies, Pam and Louella, could usually squeeze past him — just. Today they were not even trying. They dragged their brooms around as if they were made of lead. Something was going on he didn't understand. Usually they scooted along the board noisily wielding their brooms. (Instead of bristles the brooms had stiff scrapers of white plastic.) Usually they went in under the shearers' feet, grabbing the wool as it dropped to the floor, anticipating every next blow. Right now they were moping. Fleece was piled in mounds like dirty laundry, getting in the way. Barbara appeared to be doing a rousie's job as well her own classing work. She strode around the table skirting, flinging wool into the bin behind her in controlled accurate fistfuls. When Louella threw, she missed, and the wool slid down the wall. Then she leant on her broom listlessly, giving him a sad, shy smile from her lustrous Maori eyes.
Oh, boy, Cookie, ef you only knew the trouble I was havin here you wouldn't believe et
.

At the farthest end of the board Old Jake shore in bare feet, a pair of old jeans, no shirt. A red headband kept sweat from his eyes, and held his long grey hair in place. He was deaf, which emphasised his aura of isolated privilege. With sweat shining on his flat, honey-complexioned face, and with broad lips that hardly moved when he spoke, he looked like a Polynesian king in exile. Then he plucked another sheep from the holding pen and hauled it back to his stand, overtaking the younger shearers with long, clean, sweeping blows, creaming the belly wool to the floor and repositioning the sheep, then curling back the rest of the fleece in one smooth piece, making this demanding, difficult contortion look easy. Old Jake was sixty. Back in the shade near the shearers' quarters his air-conditioned Landcruiser was loaded up with possessions — electric typewriter, tape player, video unit. He carried everything from shed to shed. He was a man whose every motion implied application to the task: which was to shear the maximum tally (climbing towards two hundred a day plus, even after a two-month lay-off in New Zealand), pocket his money without waste, ease his bones with a hot shower and a cold bottle of beer after work, eat well and on time, and get to bed early. When Old Jake arrived at Leopardwood Downs he handed over a loaf of sweet, compact Maori bread the size of a barrow wheel. It had been sewn into a flour bag, and brought from New Zealand on the plane. ‘I do like that bread of yours, Cookie,' he nodded quietly.

When the minute hand of the clock jumped to half-past nine the next shearer in line, Bertram Junior, dropped his handpiece, slipped out of his shearing harness and buckjumped his last wether down the chute without straightening his back. The rumble of the old diesel shearing engine died away. A fading scrabble of hoofs, then, as Bertram Junior eased himself upright, mopped his face with a scrap of towelling, reached up to a drum Esky, which hung by a nail on the fascia board above his stand, and drew a half-litre of ice-cold lemon
cordial from the spigot into his tin cup. Bertram Junior rarely ate during the day. Instead, he sank litres of sweet fluid — lemon, lime, orange, tropical punch, orange-mango, raspberry — ate no lunch, and only piled his plate at the evening meal. He wanted to lose weight but couldn't seem to at present, even in these sauna-like conditions. Sugary cordial was not the only reason. He loved boiled rice with milk, sugar, and cream. Hated sultanas, though. He ate bread and butter pudding with stolid patience, separating the sultanas from the custard, making a neat stack beside his plate.

One day he asked Bertram Junior if he liked figs. Bertram Junior gazed back and said, ‘What's that?' He knew strawberries, he said, apples, pears, Kiwi fruit, pineapples, oranges, you name it, but had never heard of a fig. ‘What's a
fug
?' He described figs in detail, down to their compressed purple-white inner fibres. But still drew a blank. ‘I don't know em.' Now, collecting his tally book, Bertram Junior ambled along the board, giving him a serene unsmiling look from his large, round eyes. ‘Nothin to do, Cookie?' he taunted as he disappeared out the back to count each shearer's tally for the run, and enter it in the book.

While Barbara drove the reluctant rouseabouts on to finish clearing the board, he went round behind the press, where the wool was stored before being collected by the carrier. Each day's smoko was taken here in a different spot, depending on spaces being filled up. Workers sat or lay on bales, tempting dogs with sandwich crusts, yarning, snoozing. Fiona Holgate came in unobtrusively, selected an apple, stretched back on a bale, munched, and pulled her hat down over her eyes. Maurie Holgate threw his hat in the corner, borrowed cigarette makings from Davo, and eyed the teacake.

‘What have we got today? Lemon icing?'

Maurie Holgate was always on the look-out for what the cook produced. His regular smokos never came fresh from the oven, but year long were peeled from Gladwrap in desperate paddock corners. Every day, on Bertram
Junior's instructions, a cake was baked with Maurie in mind. Few others ate it in such heat. ‘Good PR,' winked Bertram Junior. ‘Keeps the grower happy.' Except it was noticeable the grower wasn't happy. He and Bertram Junior were having words, heads together, points being made with solemn emphasis.

‘I think I'd better ring Alastair to get a fix on this,' said the grower. ‘He thinks a bloke can live on promises.'

‘It's bad, that's all I know,' said Bertram Junior, dropping his head, cautiously edging his eyes around, letting his gaze linger on one person after another, not giving any clues. The shed was another planet where another language was spoken, when it came to a cook trying to follow the life there.

Regarding owners, Bertram Junior said one day: ‘They all want something different — it don't matter what I think, if they want something done you've got to do it, it's their place, it's their business, it's their livelihood, it takes them twelve months to grow up the wool we harvest and, you know, you can't screw it up in three weeks for them because that's their income and you've got to respect them because if you don't, that's it, you're gone. You won't survive. And I'll tell you what, Cookie, that's why I come over here from New Zealand in the first place, because in Australia you can work twelve months of the year if you play it right. You feel safe.'

The last two shearers, Christian T and Willie-boy, picked through the sandwich box for their favourite fillings. Willie-boy, compact, dynamically built like a fly-weight boxer, was a considerate diner. He angled his Velveeta cheese and green-pickle sandwich around to the light: ‘Not bad, not bad at all'. Then he leant over the day's fruit selection, consisting of quartered oranges and chunks of rockmelon. ‘You're spoiling us, Cookie. You really are.' He tipped back his neck and swallowed a crescent moon of dripping melon.

‘Have some more.'

There was always plenty of rockmelon at Leopardwood Downs. Too much of it now. A glut. ‘Here it is. Melon,' he beamed, the day it arrived.

Bertram Junior only stared. ‘I don't like rockmelon.'

It arrived twice weekly on the mail truck following the order placed in Bourke. Carton stacked on carton of graded deckle-skinned rockmelon sat in the empty fireplace in the dining mess, hitting Bertram Junior between the eyes every time he walked in.

Cooks were sacked for less than this.

‘Gee, the rotten old cook, we had to sack him. He cut the tomatoes in hunks instead of slicing them. It wasn't so bad. After he'd cried enough and started his car we felt sorry for him and reinstated him.'

 

He spent a lot of his time imagining what people were thinking. It was part of cooking — the incessant gauging of reactions and making of accommodations. But Bertram Junior always had the drop on him, just by the way he looked at him, slowly shaking his head.

Rockmelons
.

Bertram Junior still wasn't sure of him — who he was, what he was, where he was from, how he fitted, what use he was, or whether he had a future with the team.