Arthur Upfield: Death of a Lake

The line went dead, and Martyr replaced the instrument and reached for his wide-brimmed felt. On leaving the office at the side of the house he faced across a two-acre space to the men’s quarters. Backed by a line of pepper trees to his right stood the store, the machinery and motor sheds, the harness room, the stable for the nighthorse, and beyond this line of buildings were the stock and drafting yards, the well and windmill, and the pumping house. The hands were waiting at the motor shed for orders.

There were seven men… five white and two black. The aborigines were flashily dressed, the white men content with cotton shirts and skin-tight trousers which had been boiled and boiled untilall the original colour had gone with the suds.

The overseer called a name, and one of the aborigines came to him and was told to ride a paddock fence fifteen miles in length. The other aborigine he sent to see that sheep had not huddled into a paddock corner. A Swede, who had been unable to conquer his accent despite forty years in Australia, he sent to oil and grease a windmill, and a short, grey-eyed, tough little man namedWitlow he despatched to see if cattle were watering regularly at a creek water-hole. Carney, young, alert, blond, smiling, was sent to White Dam to note the depth of water again. There was leftMacLennon, dour, black-moustached, dark-eyed and with aprognathous jaw. A good man with machinery.

“Want you to look-see over Johnson’s Well, Mac. You’ll have to take the portable pump to lower the water in the shaft. Get the well pump out and inspect. Have a go at the mill, too. Make a note of everything that needs replacement. The truck will be coming out tomorrow.”

“Just as well. The ruddy Lake won’t last much longer by the look of her, Mr Martyr.”

“And send a light down the well before you go down.”

“Oh, she’ll be all right.”

“That’s what the feller said up onBelar,” Martyr coldly remindedMacLennon. “That well is still all right, Mac, but the feller who went down without testing five years ago has been dead five years. You’d better take Lester to give a hand. Use the ton truck. I’ll tell Lester to draw your lunches.”

Lester was coming from breakfast and Martyr met him. He was middle-aged, shrivelled like a mummy by the embalming sun and wind. He affected a straggling moustache to hide his long nose. His pale-blue eyes were always red-rimmed and watery, and he was cursed by a sniffle which deputized as a chuckle. A good stockman, a reliable worker, for the time being Bob Lester was acting homestead rouseabout, doing all the chores from bringing in the working hacks early to milking cows and slaughtering ration sheep at evening.

“Morning, Bob!”

“Mornin’, Mr Martyr!” The watery eyes peered from under bushy grey brows.

“Not up your street. Bob, but would you go with Mac to Johnson’s?” Without waiting for assent, Martyr concluded: “Draw your lunches, and give Mac a hand with the portable pump. By the way, the breaker will be coming out tomorrow.”

Lester sniffed.

“Tomorrow, eh! Do we know him?”

“I don’t. Goes by the name of Bony. A caste, from what the Boss implied. Ever hear of him?”

“No… not by that name. Them sort’s terrible good with horses when they’re good, and terrible bad when they’re crook.” Lester claimed the truism. “You givinghim an offsider?”

“Haven’t decided,” replied the overseer, abruptly distant, and Lester sniffled and departed to ask Mrs Fowler to provide lunches.

Martyr strolled to the shed housing the power plant and started the dynamo. From there he crossed to the stock-yards, where the men were saddling horses. The night horse used by Lester to bring in the workers was waiting, and Martyr mounted the horse to take the unwanted hacks back to their paddock, a chore normally falling to the rouseabout. On his return, he assistedMacLennon and Lester to load the portable pump and saw they had the right tools for the work at Johnson’s Well, and after they had driven away he went into the house and stood for the second time this morning on the front veranda overlooking Lake Otway.

Although Richard Martyr was acknowledged to be a stock expert and a top-grade wool man, it had been said that he didn’t seem to fit into this background of distance and space bared to the blazing sky, but, in fact, he fitted perhaps a little too well. Moody, Mrs Fowler said of him; deep, was the daughter’s verdict. A psychiatrist would have been assisted had he known of Martyr’s secret vice of writing poetry, and could he have read some of it, the psychiatrist might have warned the patient to resist indulgence in morbid imaginings.

Even the coming dissolution of Lake Otway was beginning to weigh upon his mind, and his mind was seeking rhyming words to tell of it. Actually, of course, he was too much alone: the captain of a ship, the solitary officer of a company of soldiers, the single executive whose authority must be maintained by aloofness.

Because he had watched the birth of Lake Otway, he knew precisely what the death of Lake Otway would mean. He had watched the flood waters spread over this great depression comprising ten thousand acres, a depression which had known no water for eighteen years. Properly it was a rebirth, because Lake Otway had previously been born and had died periodically for centuries.

Where the ‘whirlies’ had danced all day, where the mirage had lain like burning water, the colours of the changing sky lived upon dancing waves, and the waves sang to the shores and called the birds from far-away places… even the gulls from the ocean. Giant fleets of pelicans came to nest and multiply. The cormorants arrived with the waders, and when the duck-shooting season began in the settled parts of Australia the ducks came in their thousands to this sanctuary.

All that was only three years ago. Nineteen feet of water covered the depression three miles wide and five miles long. Then, as a man begins to die the moment he is born, so did Lake Otway suffer attrition from the sun and the wind. The first year evaporation reduced the depth to fourteen feet, and the second year these enemies reduced it to eight feet.

It was the second year that Ray Gillen came over the back tracks from Ivanhoe way on his motor-bike and asked for a job. He was a wizard on that bike on all kinds of tracks and where no tracks were, and he was a superb horseman, too. Even now the sound of his laughter spanned the ridges of time since that moonlit night he had gone swimming and had not returned.

He ought to have come ashore. It was strange that the eagles and the crows never led the waiting men to the body, for there were exceptionally few snags in LakeOtway, and no outlet down theTallyawalker Creek that year.

If only a man could strip that girl’s mind and forget her body. She used to catch her breath when Ray Gillen laughed, and when he teased her, her eyes were blue… like… like blue lakes.

The Golden Bitch!

Bony comes toPorchester

ITWASNOTan event to be forgotten by those closely associated with it. The details were recorded by the police and studied by Detective-Inspector Bonaparte many months later.

Ray Gillen arrived at Lake Otway on September 3rd, and the next morning was taken on the books by Richard Martyr. As is the rule, no questions were asked of Gillen concerning previous employment or personal history, the only interest in him by his employer being his degree of efficiency in the work he was expected to do. And as a stockman he was certainly efficient.

Nine weeks later, on the night of November 7th, Gillen was drowned in Lake Otway, and late the following day the senior police officer at Menindee arrived with Mr Wallace, the owner. To SergeantMansell Martyr passed all Gillen’s effects, he having in the presence of witnesses listed the contents of Gillen’s suitcase and the items of his swag.