Tracks (26 page)

When the beliefs of one culture are translated into the language of another culture, the word ‘superstition’ often crops up. Perhaps it was superstition that made me leave that kangaroo intact, or perhaps it was rather that I had seen too much to be quite sure any more where truth and bogus met. Because I wasn’t sure, I didn’t think I was in any position to take chances.

I was right about the people at Glenayle. They were not only the salt of the earth, they were charming, kind, generous, and pretended not to notice my eccentricities, chatting amiably while I belched, scratched, gulped tea and ate home-made scones like a ravenous pig. I pulled up to their front gate in mid-afternoon. On the other side was a grey-haired, genteel woman in a crisp summer dress watering her flower garden and all she said, without even a raising of the eyebrows, was, ‘Oh hello, dear, how nice to see you, won’t you come in for a cup of tea?’

Eileen, Henry and their son Lou asked me to stay for a week. I was delighted. Not only were they pleasant company, but they fed me up and looked after me with true outback hospitality. This generosity and openness is part of the bush code of ethics and I’m sure it is universal. It goes hand in hand with a belief in honesty, hard work, simplicity and love of the land. My camels all needed to pick up a little before we attempted the Canning, and Henry gave me the horse paddock to let them roam in. This horse paddock was a couple of square miles of dead rocks, grey inedible spinifex and dust. But there was a little mulga left alive, a few dull green bloodwoods, and another bright green acacia that presumably did not require any water at all. Either that or its roots went down for hundreds of feet. It would be my camels’ mainstay for the next month.

The more I got to know these people, the more impressed I was by their stoic, irrepressible good humour. They had every reason to be wringing their hands, weeping and bemoaning their fate. Cattle were dropping dead everywhere, horses were bags of bone and air that were now trying to eat spinifex, and there was not a cloud in sight. Glenayle was the furthest station out into the desert, and perhaps it was this very remoteness that made the Wards such a united family. That, and the fact that Henry was an excellent bushman, loved the country, and none of them would have swapped places with a city dweller for all the rain in the world. They took me out mustering while I was there — trying to scrape together a few steers before they died. The money they got for this meat would only just cover the cost of freight, if at all. We would camp at night, eat beef, laugh, and sing along to Slim Dusty, yodelling away about the wonderfulness of mothers.

For those who don’t know, Slim Dusty is Australia’s greatest contemporary country-western bard. Although most of my friends gag when I play him, I put that down to the fact that they have never been to the Mount Isa rodeo. It is not until you have been to such an outback function, and been woken at four a.m. to the sound of Slim over the loudspeakers stirring the participants from a booze-clogged dream to get them cracking on the important things in life like bronc-riding, steer-roping, and drinking; heard him twang and croon all day for a solid week, ventured down the local pub known as the snakepit to drink with your cobber ocker stone-the-crows fair-crack-of-the-whip-mate mates, and danced to the tinny twang of the steel guitar of some cowboy and his tatty tinselly cow girl back-up team playing the Urandangi Dandy; then, wonder of wonders, been part of a hopelessly inebriated audience on the last night of the rodeo when Slim appears in the flesh complete with flash hat and purple silk shirt and surprisingly good musicians, and you’ve sung along with tears in your eyes and in your beer to ‘a tall dark man in the saddle’ — that you can really understand the full emotive force of this Aussie bush poet.

On my last day there, I went out to track up my camels. If they hadn’t gained weight they did seem slightly rounder at the corners and Zeleika looked a little less like Sad Sack. All in all, they were in as fine a fettle as I could hope for. Bub was the first one to come up as usual, snuffling around for hand-outs. I gave him his share and was not watching the others. Dookie, who has always had a jealous streak, who has always considered himself the boss of the outfit, me included, took my whole head between his jaws, which fitted around it like a crash helmet. He slobbered in my hair for a second, then spun on his hind legs and bounded and bucked away, looking extremely pleased with himself. He could have squashed my cranium like a grape had he wanted to. I did not normally allow such transgressions amongst my animals, because how was I to know when they might one day decide amongst themselves that they didn’t like being dragged half way across a continent any more, and mutiny. But what could I say, with Dookie looking at me so coquettishly, trying to see whether I got the joke or not.

Henry went through the maps with me, showing me where to join up with the Canning at well ten, telling me which tracks were there and which were not, and where to turn south. He also told me which wells were usable along the road. Road? I was surprised at this. I had expected a faint or invisible track. I had thought I would have to rely on my compass. Mining was one of the causes of this tracking up of the wild places. Roads would appear from nowhere and disappear to nowhere.

In a way, I was disappointed. The Canning was to be the last stretch of non-station country I was to see, and I thought sadly as I saddled up that the heart of the journey was coming to a close. I calculated that it would take me three weeks to reach Wiluna, the first town since Alice Springs.

The first two days were dreadful. The earth was scorched and bare, ugly grey dust covered everything and I got sick twice, the only illness I suffered on the whole trip. I had taken a freezing bore bath in the evening, and walked along naked to dry off. I woke up that night with a severe case of cystitis. Pills for that — thank the Lord I brought them. But it was a sleepless night. A day or two later I found myself suffering acute stomach cramps, doubtless from some bad water I had drunk. It came on me with a sudden uncontrollable rush, and as I struggled out of my trousers, muttering ugh ugh disgusting ugh, I was overcome with — embarrassment. The desocializing process had only gone so far. I burnt the trousers, and wasted a gallon of water trying to get clean.

But after that, the country started to pick up. Whatever rains had occurred in the last four years had swept through this more northerly desert country, bypassing the cattle stations to the south. While it was anything but bountiful, there was at least a meagre picking for the beasts. What would have made me turn my nose up earlier in the trip, now appeared lush to my eyes. It was a magnificent landscape in a fossilized primordial sort of way. A twisted freakish wasteland of sandstone break-aways, silent, and seemingly aloof from the rest of the earths evolution. God’s country it may have been but it was extremely hard on the camels. The stony escarpments strained them and hurt their feet. They were carrying almost a full load of water, and I knew I would have to rest them as soon as I could find suitable water and feed.

From a study of the maps, well six looked promising. I was hot and frustrated, because I kept expecting the creek bed marked on the map to be just a little way on. It wasn’t. The hill to my right was never-ending. I shouted at Diggity and laid a kick at her when she spooked the camels. I was seething with bad temper, poor little Dig had no idea what she had done wrong and walked along disconsolate with her tail between her legs. She had accepted a lot of punishment lately, or what she considered punishment. The Wards had given me a leather muzzle to put on her to protect her from strychnine baits, which were dropped way out in the desert from light aircraft to exterminate the Australian native dog, the dingo. But she had hated it. She had whined and scratched at it and looked such a picture of misery and heart-break that I eventually took it off. She was not in the habit of picking at dead carcasses and I kept her well-fed enough so that she wouldn’t be tempted.

I reached the end of the hill at last, and walked down a rim of high rolling sand-dunes. As I came over the crest I saw an infinitely extended bowl of pastel blue haze with writhing hills and crescents floating and shimmering in it and fire-coloured dunes lapping at their feet and off in the distance some magical, violet mountains. Have you ever heard mountains roar and beckon? These did, like giant lions. A sound meant only for the ears of madmen and deaf mutes. I was paralysed by that sight. Nothing as wildly beautiful as that had I ever seen, even in my dream landscapes.

Here was the confluence of several major types of country. The rolling plains and plateaux covered in spinifex and blue distant mists, the vibrantly coloured sand-dunes, the deep red striated sandstone hills, and through it all, that serpentine stretch of creek-bed, all green and hard, glittering white. We skipped down that last dune and made for the well. The camels could see the feed and were straining to get there. The well itself was difficult to see and overgrown with acacia. It was fifteen feet down and smelled like rotten swamp. But it was wet and would get us by for the necessary few days. It tasted foul — like muddy soup, but with enough coffee I could get it down. Above it was an ancient whip bucket which I had Buckley’s and none
*
of being able to use. Even hauling up five gallons in my own tin drum almost caused me a triple hernia.

That evening the camels played in the white dust, raising balloons of cloud that the fat, red setting sun caught, burst and turned to gold. I lay on a foot-thick mattress of fallen leaves which scattered golden jangles of firelight in a thousand directions. Night calls and leaf sighs floated down to me on the breeze and around me was a cathedral of black and silver giant ghost-gums, the thin sliver of platinum moon cradled in their branches. The heart of the world had been found. I drifted into sleep in that palace and allowed the mountains to fade along the rim of my mind. The heart of the world, paradise.

I decided to stay in that place as long as the water held out. Rick and responsibilities were so far away from me now, so remote, I didn’t give them a moment’s consideration. I planned to enter the sandhills and ride out to those distant mountains. But first the camels must rest. There was feed here to burn. Salt-bush, camel thorn, mulga, everything their little hearts could desire. Diggity and I explored. We found a cave in Pine Ridge which had Aboriginal paintings plastered all over it. Then we climbed up a narrow, treacherous rocky gap, the wind howling and whistling down at us. We pulled ourselves up to the flat top, where freakish rock strata ran in great buttresses and giant steps. The trees up there were gnarled into crippled shapes by the roar of the wind. Along the distant horizon I could see a sandstorm being whipped up into a cloud of red, straight out of
Beau Geste.
Further west, we discovered ancient desert palms, called black-boys. Rough black stumps shooting out fountains of green needles at the top, all huddled together by themselves, like an alien race left behind on a forgotten planet. There was a haunting hallucinatory quality about this place. I felt swelled by it, high as a kite. I was filled with an emotion I had not felt before — joy.

Those days were like a crystallization of all that had been good in the trip. It was as close to perfection as I could ever hope to come. I reviewed what I had learnt. I had discovered capabilities and strengths that I would not have imagined possible in those distant dream-like days before the trip. I had rediscovered people in my past and come to terms with my feelings towards them. I had learnt what love was. That love wanted the best possible for those you cared for even if that excluded yourself. That before, I had wanted to possess people without loving them, and now I could love them and wish them the best without needing them. I had understood freedom and security. The need to rattle the foundations of habit. That to be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one’s weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks, and best of all I had learnt to laugh. I felt invincible, untouchable, I had extended myself, and I believed I could now sit back, there was nothing else the desert could teach me. And I wanted to remember all this. Wanted to remember this place and what it meant to me, and how I had arrived there. Wanted to fix it so firmly in my head that I would never, ever forget.

In the past, my bouts of gloom and despair had led, like widdershins,
**
to the same place. And it seemed that at that place was a signpost saying, ‘Here it is,’ here is the thing you must push through, leap free of, before you can learn any more. It was as if the self brought me constantly to this place — took every opportunity to show it to me. It was as if there was a button there which I could push if I only had the courage. If I could only just remember. Ah, but we always forget. Or are too lazy. Or too frightened. Or too certain we have all the time in the world. And so back up the ravines to the comfortable places (the sane ones?) where we don’t have to think too much. Where life is, after all, just ‘getting by’ and where we survive, half asleep.

And I thought I had done it. I believed I had generated a magic for myself that had nothing to do with coincidence, believed I was part of a strange and powerful sequence of events called fate and I was beyond the need for anything or anyone. And that night I received the most profound and cruel lesson of all. That death is sudden and final and comes from nowhere. It had waited for my moment of supreme complacency and then it had struck. Late that night, Diggity took a poison bait.

We were running low on dog food, and I was too lazy, too high to want to go and shoot her game. So I rationed her. She woke me up sneaking sheepishly back into the swag. ‘What’s up, Dig, where’ve you been, little woofing?’ She licked my face profusely, snuffled her way under the covers, and snuggled as usual into my belly. I cuddled her. Suddenly she slunk out again and began to vomit. My body went cold. ‘Oh no, no it can’t be, please, Jesus, not this.’ She came back to me and licked my face again. ‘It’s OK, Dig, you’re just a little bit sick. Don’t worry, little one, you come and snuggle in here and get warm and you’ll be OK in the morning.’ Within minutes she was out again. This couldn’t be happening. She was my little dog and she couldn’t be poisoned. That was impossible, couldn’t happen to her. I got up to check what she had brought up. I remember trembling uncontrollably and droning to her, ‘It’s all right, Dig, everything’s all right, don’t worry,’ over and over. She had eaten some dead animal but it didn’t smell rotten, so I repeated to myself that she couldn’t be poisoned. I forced myself to believe it yet I knew it wasn’t true. My head raced through what you do for strychnine poisoning. You have to swing them around your head to make them get rid of it all, but even if you do it immediately there’s virtually no chance of survival. ‘Well, I won’t do that anyway, because you’re not poisoned, you’re not poisoned. You’re my Dig and it can’t happen to you.’ Diggity started wandering around retching violently and coming back to me for reassurance. She knew. Suddenly she ran away to some black acacia bushes and turned to face me. She barked and howled at me and I knew she must be hallucinating, knew she was dying. Her two mirror eyes burnt an image into my brain that will not fade. She came over to me and put her head between my legs. I picked her up and swung her round my head. Round and round and round. She kicked and struggled. I tried to pretend it was a game. I let her down and she went crashing through the undergrowth barking like a mad dog. I raced for the gun, I loaded it and went back. She was on her side convulsing. I blew her brains out. I knelt frozen like that for a long time then I staggered back to the swag and got in. My body shook with uncontrollable spasms. I vomited. Sweat soaked into the pillow and blankets. I thought I was dying too. I thought that when she licked me, I had swallowed some strychnine. ‘Is this what it feels like to die? Am I dying? No, no, its just shock, stop it, you must go to sleep.’ I’ve never been able before or since to do what I did then. I shut my brain off and willed it into immediate unconsciousness.