The Songmaster (18 page)

‘Bigger than Texas,’ she said with a grin.

‘Not quite. You know in the 1950s there were three cattle stations up this way that were so big that together they were bigger than the whole State of Texas.’

‘Really!’

‘That’s the story anyway.’ His voice dropped
a couple of notes and with mock seriousness he intoned, ‘It’s a big country.’

They passed over the boundary fence and he began his descent, swinging the aircraft slightly to line up with the dirt strip that had been cut from the scrub. Susan could see a white Land Cruiser parked by a windsock and a shed that was obviously the hangar. A kilometre or so away was a greener, denser patch of trees, a hint of lawn and several outbuildings around a large galvanised roofed homestead and another group of smaller houses, almost huts, some distance away down by a creek. He reached over and briefly squeezed her hand. ‘Stand by for landing.’

He executed a perfect touchdown and taxied the plane right up to the hangar, did a radio check with flight services, then switched off the motor. ‘Let the dust settle a bit before jumping out,’ he advised, and waved from his window to greet the Aborigine crouched in the shade of the Land Cruiser, smoking a cigarette. ‘G’day, Charley. How’s it going?’

‘Charley one of the faithful retainers?’ she asked quietly.

Andrew wasn’t too sure how to take the remark and it caused him to hesitate briefly with his log book entry. Susan wanted to bite her tongue, realising that it was a remark that could be taken two ways, and she was relieved when he made a joke of it. ‘Yeah, been with us all his life. Putting his name up for the Australia Day honours list. Services to the cattle industry.’

They all helped push the plane into the hangar then piled into the Land Cruiser. Charley got in the back seat. Susan turned and introduced herself. ‘Hi , I’m Susan.’

‘G’day, miss,’ he said, with a little nod of acknowledgment and a big smile of nicotine-stained broken teeth. Susan tried to guess his age. Maybe late fifties she reckoned.

In a few minutes they were on a red gravel driveway that curved through a garden oasis to the porch of the homestead.

It was a low stone building in a U shape around a rear garden, the columns of the wraparound verandah smothered in tangled coils of bougainvillea. The silver of the corrugated-iron roof glinted in the sunlight, its deep eaves shading broad stone steps. As Andrew pulled up, two dogs rushed cheerfully to greet them and a woman came out of the front door and stood waiting.

‘That’s Mum. Her name’s Ellen.’ Andrew led Susan forward.

His mother was in her early sixties, dressed in a simple cool dress with a single strand of good pearls at the V neckline. Her brown hair was cut short following its natural waves. The effect of looking like a senior member of the British royal family at home was relieved by bare legs and flat white sandals. She looked cool, poised and smiled graciously. ‘Welcome to
Yandoo, Susan. We’re delighted you decided to come. But you must be hot and tired. Come inside and have a cool drink.’ She turned to her son. ‘Let Charley do the bags, dear.’

Susan followed Ellen into the cool interior. ‘On your way to the Kimberley, Andrew tells me.’

‘Yes,’ said Susan, relieved this was the understanding of her visit and not as a prospective daughter-in-law. Not that there was any reason Andrew might have hinted at this, but it was something of a detour, and she doubted many girls just dropped in to have a drink and watch a video.

Ellen Frazer opened the door of a guest room. ‘I’ve put you in the wattle room. A good choice, you obviously like yellow.’ She complimented Susan on her mustard pants, cream shirt and the sunflower pinned to the straw hat she carried.

‘It’s lovely,’ declared Susan with delight as she looked at the wallpaper sprinkled with faint sprays of wattle blossom; the yellow and white bedspread and white cushions on the armchair embroidered with more wattle. Sheer white curtains hung at the windows.

‘There’s a fan and an airconditioner if it gets unbearable. Most times, if the sun is too hot, Charley lets down the canvas awnings on the verandah outside. That seems to keep the rooms cool. There’s a bathroom right next door. Perhaps you’d like a shower.’

‘Thank you so much. I might just do that. It’s been a long day.’

‘Come and join us in the sitting room back down the hall on the right. My husband is working in the stockyards. He won’t be back until dinner.’

Susan had a quick shower, changed into a light dress and put on fresh lipstick. She examined the family photographs as she made her way back to where she could hear Andrew’s voice and noted the mix of furniture. Some lovely old pieces must have been acquired by Andrew’s grandparents, while in the sitting room newer upholstery did little to disguise the solid fifties lounge chairs.

A silver tray on a sideboard held glasses, a bucket of ice and a jug of fruit juice. Andrew handed her a glass. ‘Thanks. This is just charming.’

‘You wait till you see Mum’s garden. Nearest thing to an English cottage garden in the outback.’

‘I can’t claim the credit. Give anything enough water out here and it will grow,’ said Ellen. ‘And Jilly loves looking after it – now she knows the difference between weeds and flowers.’ She gave a faint smile.

‘Jilly and Charley help around the place,’ said Andrew. ‘Throw your washing in your hamper and Jilly will look after it. Now, how about the tour?’

Susan followed Andrew around the house,
the garden and past the laundry, several sheds and a workshop. ‘What’s that over there?’ asked Susan, indicating an area around a brick chimney covered in shade cloth.

‘It was the original cook-out. Mum’s made it a kind of greenhouse. She has a few orchids and treasures in there. I used to love playing in there as a kid.’

Susan pointed to an old wooden billycart outside one of the sheds. ‘That yours too?’

‘My grandfather made it for Dad. I used to push my brother, Julian, around in it once in awhile.’

‘How’s he going?’

‘Great. Going to come home this weekend. He’s taking the chopper out for a few days. Got to do some work up the river.’ Andrew pointed towards a gully. ‘Down there is the creek where we swim. The main stockyards are over here, and there’s another yard and a dam back over that ridge. We’ll ride out there tomorrow and take a picnic. It’s pretty.’

‘So who else helps run the place? Where are the stockmen?’

‘There’s a manager, Tom, and his wife. They’ve been here since I was a boy. And the blacks, of course. The camp is on the far side of that creek. Charley and Jilly and Earl, the head stockman, and his missus live in smaller houses close to the stockyards. Earl is related to Jilly.’

‘Have they been here a long time?’

‘Yeah. Some are extended family or friends
who drifted in and stayed, but the main group go back to my grandfather’s day. They’ve been as much a part of Yandoo as our family.’

‘So it was their land in the first place?’

‘Depends what you mean by ownership, I suppose.’ Andrew spoke thoughtfully. ‘It’s all pretty much a hot potato these days when you hear the political boys and radicals talk. When my grandfather settled here it became Frazer land. The Aborigines in the area drifted in and grandfather started using them and so that started the Yandoo mob.’

‘Were they a particular tribe? From this area?’

‘I suppose so. There are various families and relatives. They have such a complicated family system. But anyway, they shared the place, helped build it up, they had tucker and a permanent place to camp, though they still went walkabout in the old days. My grandparents looked after all the families as well. It was a tradition and everyone seemed content with their lot and it continued into my father’s day. But then came Wave Hill and things changed.’

‘How did Wave Hill affect Yandoo?’

‘Well, as you probably know, the Aborigines walked off Wave Hill Station south of Darwin in 1966 demanding better conditions and equal pay with white stockmen. They took it to the United Nations.’

‘But they won, didn’t they?

‘Yes. Anyway, eventually the government
passed the Pastoral Award, which meant pastoralists simply couldn’t afford to pay all Aborigines award rates, so many had to go. That’s the trouble with the political activists and some of the Land Council people, they go in and stir up trouble telling Aborigines that they’re being exploited, and that they should be self-sufficient and exercise self-determination.’

‘It was pretty radical stuff in those days,’ commented Susan.

‘Particularly as some old-fashioned Aussie communists were among the whites who helped the Gurindji fight the owners, the British Vesteys. The decision had quite a chain reaction. Station owners everywhere had to lay off Aborigines. They simply couldn’t afford to pay them all. It turned the whole industry upside down.’ He grinned. ‘Some reckoned it was the end of civilisation as we knew it. But it wasn’t, and I reckon we’re all better off in the long run. God, could you imagine today what the world would say if we paid our black workers only a fraction of the white pay simply because they were black?’

‘Not to mention the work for lawyers like us! But seriously, the miracle is that the industry got away with it for so long.’

‘Anyway, on Yandoo we had to toe the line. Pay them right, just like the whitefellas. Like everyone else, we had to cut the workforce, but technology came to our aid. Better vehicles, helicopters, road trains instead of big cattle drives with stacks of stockmen . . . we coped.’

‘It sometimes takes just one event to change history . . .’

‘Dad told me things were going to pot before that big walkout. There’d been some phasing out of Aboriginal workers as properties got better equipped. The shearers’ union stopped Aborigines working as shearers. And once the white women came and settled on the stations, standards changed.’

‘For the better, one assumes.’

Andrew gave a wicked grin. ‘Depends. The boss had to behave himself, no more fraternising with the pretty black girls. No more half-caste yella kids running round the stations.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘The white bureaucrats and churches just took them and put them in institutions, as they’d been doing for years.’

‘That Aboriginal client I just represented, that happened to him.’

‘Anyway, he got a good education out of it. He was on TV, wasn’t he? Made a lot of money? He wouldn’t have managed that if he’d stayed in the bush.’

‘Andrew! You don’t know that! There are opportunities now for talented Aborigines. And how can you say he’s better off? He has no family!’ Susan’s eyes blazed. ‘How would you feel if it had been you, and not your friend Hunter, who was taken off Yandoo when you were a kid?’

Andrew, ever pragmatic, decided to end the
conversation. ‘T h e fact of the matter is, that didn’t happen, and so I’m getting on with my life.’

Once again Susan dropped the subject of Barwon and the Stolen Generations.

‘So what happened to the Aborigines when the law changed?’

‘Some pastoralists excised a living area on their land but, because many Aborigines were unemployed, they drifted into town and got on the grog or became fringe dwellers and it all became a bit of a mess.’

By now they were walking towards the creek and Susan saw the camp she’d noted from the air. Small corrugated-iron huts, some larger in a dormitory style, and a big communal kitchen and laundry were clustered together, the heat bouncing back at them off the metal walls. They were on high brick piles surrounded by red dirt. One tree shaded a corner where a child’s tricycle was left and a dog lay in the coolness under a water tank. Untidy, hot, depression era. Susan was surprised at the very basic conditions.

‘This wouldn’t make
House and Garden
magazine,’ she remarked.

‘They don’t want anything fancy. They live their way and we live ours and we all get on just fine. They’re healthy, well fed, have jobs and live how they want. I reckon the Aborigines here are better off than a lot of white people.’

‘Where is everybody?’

‘Either working around the place, fishing, or
swimming in the creek. The kids might be having a lesson. Now they do School of the Air up at a room next to the office. Some of the older kids are allowed to use the computer. Jilly and Mum take turns supervising.’

Behind the kitchen and laundry a teenage girl was pegging out washing on a sagging line. A toddler played on the ground by her feet.

‘How’s it, Francie?’

‘Good, Mr Frazer.’

‘Ticker is growing up.’

‘Yeah. He doin’ good too.’ She smiled shyly at Susan and bent down to the plastic wash basket.

As they turned back to the homestead, Susan asked, ‘Is that her baby, or her little brother?’

‘It’s hers. They get married young. The baby isn’t the result of a night out in the long grass,’ Andrew quickly added. ‘Francie fell in love with one of the stockmen but he was the wrong tribe, wrong skin, they call it. So they found her a suitable husband. He seems a good bloke and they’re happy enough. They have a very complicated system of who they can and can’t marry. Stops in-breeding, weakening the blood lines and so on.’

‘Does that apply to white people out here too?’

Andrew ignored the teasing tone in her voice. ‘It does a bit. Country people tend to marry people off the land, their own kind.
Works out better that way. It’s a pretty different kind of life, a city girl would find it hard to adjust.’ He caught himself. ‘Well, some city girls. Depends how tough they are.’