Arthur Upfield: Man of Two Tribes

“You, of course,” Easter smiled.

“Of course,” Bony concurred without a smile. “Look! the day is dawning. The best time for meditation is when day dawns.”

Meditation at daybreak; when the sun rose! Easter stood, scratched his chin, and docilely followed Bony to the veranda. He felt like the man who hopes to win a five-pound prize in a lottery and wins fifty thousand. He had searched for a woman at first thought to have fallen from a train; and now was given a picture of a female spy, mysterious helicopters, rockets and atom bombs.

A Ship at Sea

THEREcan be only one simile when telling of the Nullarbor Plain.

The jeep was like a ship on a completely calm ocean. To the east the sea was softly grey, and to the west it was softly green, and when the sun passed the meridian, the colours would be reversed. Astern of the jeep, three miles away, the tiny settlement of Chifley, despite reduction in size, appeared to be less than half a mile distant. The tiny houses guarded by the water-tower were the focal point of a fence built across the world. The wires could not be seen but the posts could be counted-telegraph posts flanking the ribbon of steel joining East with West Australia.

The track was merely twin marks of tyre-rasped earth and, between the marks and to either side, the foot-high saltbush was the universal covering. Neither ahead nor astern could the motor track be seen beyond fifty yards, and one felt it was an eyesore and ought not to be there. The first exploring vehicle had to avoid rock-slabs and sometimes arock-hole, and every succeeding vehicle had rigidly kept to those same tracks.

“This Mount Singular?” asked Bony.“Large holding?”

“According to the Survey not particularly large, a thousand square miles or so,” replied Easter. “It’s all open country, no boundary fences, and as there aren’t any adjacent holdings, excepting to the south, the Weatherby cattle may graze over a million square miles of country, which varies a lot. Very few permanent waters. A salt-pan wilderness to the west, semi-desert to the north, this Plain to the East. I’ve never been farther north than the homestead, and that was back in ’forty-nine.”

“TheWeatherbys!” pressed Bony.“Old family? How many?”

“The first Weatherby took up the holding in 1900. By all accounts a hard doer who married a woman as tough ashimself. Both died in the thirties and left the property to their two sons, Charles and Edgar. Edgar served up in the Islands during the war, and returned with his wife about the time I visited the homestead. They’d taken on a property in the west of New South which turned out no good, and the brothers decided to run in harness again. There’s no white stockmen employed. Can’t get whites these days. All the hands are aborigines.”

“Where is their outlet point?”

“Rawlinna chiefly. Much farther for them than Chifley but better country to travel in wet seasons. Old Patsy Lonergan must have gone out that way, because he never caught the train at Chifley.”

“Good citizens?”

“Never had the slightest trouble-officially.”

An hour later the scenery was precisely the same, and Bony spoke again of theWeatherbys.

“As you said a while back, theWeatherbys seem to be good citizens, officially. Ever meet them socially, Easter?”

“Oh, yes. When they come to Chifley, which isn’t often, they always spend an hour or two with the wife. Elaine likes the women very much although the wife of the younger brother, Edgar, seems a bit moody. The two men are all right, too. They mind their own business and don’t pry into ours. Never any trouble with theirabos.”

“Eighty per cent of tribal strife has its origin in white interference,” Bony said, and then put another question:

“Whatcommunication have they with the outside?”

“Radio, that’s all.”

“Didn’t they assist in the search for Myra Thomas?”

“Oh, yes. Spent about a week with my gang. Brought a couple of trackers to team with mine. And a side of the best beef we’ve ever lived on. You interested in them extra specially?”

“Only for the same reason that I am interested in the people living at other homesteads to the south and the south-west. If Patsy Lonergan wasn’t mentally unstable due to his solitary life, if he didn’t imagine he saw that helicopter, then that helicopter must have a base, and that base must be on or in the vicinity of the Nullarbor,”

“Well, then, how do you propose to ‘track’ that machine? Search every homestead on the perimeter of the Plain?”

“No. Assuming that we found the helicopter at some homestead, we’d learn nothing excepting that the owner hadn’t registered it with the Civil Aviation Department, and so had been breaking certain regulations. My interest is in the object and purpose for which it is being used onassumably secret missions, and merely locating the base won’t satisfy me if the owner doesn’t choose to talk.”

“You’re right there,” Easter pondered. “What about my first question, about how you intend to ‘track’ that machine Lonergan says he saw?”

“I have letters from Lonergan’s lawyer in Norseman, for the old fellow did own property and a sizable bank account for a prospector-dog-trapper. The letter empowers me, William Black, nephew of the deceased, to take over the camels, equipment and other things once owned by Lonergan and now at Mount Singular. Included in those possessions are the dog traps, and it will be my job to locate them. To do that, I have to back-track the old chap along his trap-line, and locate his camps which he named so peculiarly. And then I have to hope

… hope that I shall see or hear that helicopter, determine where it is going, and learn its business.”

“Hell! What a job!”

“Easier, perhaps, than we think at the moment. So, I am William Black, the old man’s nephew. You will recall that I visited you at your station this morning, as the Norseman policeman advised me, and it just so happened that you had to make the journey to Mount Singular for an official reason you have time to invent, and that you consented to have me accompany you.”

Easter said: “I see,” but Bony doubted it. They were silent during the next hour, at the end of which the scenery was exactly the sameexcepting that all that was left of Chifley was the water-tower looking like a black pebble lying on the horizon.

When Easter suggested lunch, Bony gathered dead brushwood and made a fire, and the policeman filled a billy-can and swung it from the apex of an iron triangle. The tucker-box was unloaded, and while the water was coming to the boil they stood and surveyed the Nullarbor Plain simply because there was nothing else to look at.

“Must be unpleasant when a wind storm is working,” Bony surmised, and Easter told of experiences when he had been glad to lie flat on his chest with a rock slab to anchor him to the ground.

“I understand there are no caves, caverns, blow-holes, north of the railway. Is that correct, d’you think?”

“None have been located,” replied Easter. “But that means nothing to me because the country north of the railway hasn’t been fully explored. It’s all the same country, north or south of where they built the railway. There are other points, too.”

“Such as?”

“It is said that the blow-holes are worked by ocean currents, that the sea tides force the air back into the galleries deep below and so create the underground wind. You know all that, of course.”

“And that the noises underground have been attributed by the aborigines to the stomach rumblings and movements of Ganba the Man-eating Snake,” Bony added.

“Just so. I’ve heard old Ganba roaring and rumbling below the surface and above it well down south of the railway. And I have heard him on the rampage well north of the railway, too. Even farther north than we are now.