Arthur Upfield: Wings above the Diamantina

Giving Sharp the reins of the horse, he walked to the car and climbed in behind the wheel. There, having settled his big, strong body, he proceeded to cut chips from a large plug of black tobacco, the kind which has long gone out of fashion amongbushmen.

“Tell Sanders that I have arranged credit for him at Quilpie, Cunnamulla and Bourke,” he directed. “Ask him to let me know by wire when he has trucked these beasts because there may be enough fats in Bottom Bend for him to lift in January to take to Cockburn for Adelaide. We’re due for a dry time after this run of good seasons, and I don’t want to be caught overstocked.”

“All right! There’ll be fats enough in Bottom Bend, I’ll bet.”

“There should be, provided we don’t get an overdose of windstorms to blow away all the feed. Well, we’ll get on. Want to get back home to-night. So long!”

“So long, Mr Nettlefold! Aurevoir, Miss Eliz’beth.”

Having given the manager a quick salute, the boss stockman was less hasty with the daughter. She eyed him coolly, but her look only made his smile broaden. She laughed at him when the car began to move, and returned his salute with a white-gloved hand.

Twenty minutes later they were across the plain and among the stunted bloodwoods and the mulgas. Here in this imitation forest grew no ground feed of bush and grass, but it provided good top feed in dry times.

A few miles of scrub, and then their way lay across a wide area of broken sand country criss-crossed by water gutters that appeared to follow no uniform direction. It was barren save for far-spaced, thirst-tortured coolibah trees, and here and there patches of tussock-grass. An amazing place, this. It was the studio of the Wind King who had chiselled the sand hummocks into fantastic shapes, a veritable hell when the hot westerlies blew in November and March.

Sixty miles from home they boiled the billy for lunch, the car halted in the shadow cast blackly on the glaring ground by three healthy bloodwoods. The girl set up the low canvas table beside the running board. She busied herself with cut sandwiches and little cakes and crockery ware which her father never thought of bringing when he travelled by himself. Alone, his tucker box furnished with a tin pannikin and a butcher’s killing knife, bread and cold meat, tea and sugar, sufficed him. His wife, and, after her, his daughter, had failed to alter the habits of his youth when he served as a stockman, and later as a boss stockman.

“Ah! By the look of things we are going to do ourselves well to-day,” he said cheerfully.

“Of course,” she agreed emphatically, smiling up at him. “You would not expect me to be satisfied with a thick slice of bread and an equally thick slice of saltmeat, would you?”

“Hardly. What’s sauce for the old gander would be sandstone for the young goose. However, I am not sure that elegant living is good for a man. I have noticed lately a touch of indigestion. I never had that when I lived on damper and salt meat and jet-black tea.”

“Probably not, Dad; but you now have a touch of indigestion because you once lived on those things,” she countered swiftly. “Pour out my tea, please, before it becomes ink-black.”

Nettlefold was happy because his daughter was with him, and she was happy because he was so. Elizabeth was not the bush lover that her father was. The bush had “got” him in its alluring toils, but she had resisted it and, having resisted, escaped it. Paradoxically, she found no love for the bush, and yet hated the city.

The meal eaten, he gallantly lit her cigarette, and, with his pipe alight, began to pack away the luncheon things. She watchedhim, her eyes guarded with lowered lids, and told herself how fine was this simple, generous father of hers. It was understood that when she was out on the run with him she was his guest, staying at his country house, as he put it, and as his guest she was not to do any of the chares.

Then on again, through the gate into the great Emu Lake paddock, a fenced area eighteen miles square. The stock having been excluded for two years, the grasses lay beneath the sun like turned oats. Patches of healthy scrub encumbered the undulating grasslands like dark, rocky islands. Here in this paddock sheltered for two years, the kangaroos were numerous; and, on nearing a bore-head, the travellers were greeted by a vast flock of galah parrots.

Every twenty-four hours seven hundred thousand gallons of water hotly gushed from the bore-head to run away for miles along the channel scooped to carry it. Years before, when the bore first had been sunk to tap the artesian reservoir, the flow was nearly eleven hundred thousand gallons every twenty-four hours.

Day and night, year in and year out, the stream spouted hot from the iron casing to run down the channel now edged with the snow-white soda suds. Not within half a mile of the bore could cattle drink the water, so hot and so loaded withalkalies was it.

Nettlefold drove the car beside the channel for some distance before turning to the north along an old and faint track. About ten minutes after leaving the bore stream they emerged from dense scrub and were on the dry, perfectly flat bottom of a shallow ground depression from which the paddock was named. It was edged, this waterless lake, with a shore of white, cement-hard claypan lying like a bridal ribbon at the foot of swamp gums crowned with brilliant green foliage. The girl uttered a sharp exclamation, and her father unconsciously braked the car to a halt.

In the centre of the lake, and facing towards them, rested a small low-winged monoplane varnished a bright red.

Aerial Flotsam

“THAT’S STRANGE!” Nettlefold said softly, still sitting in the halted car and gazing across the flat surface of the lake. In area the lake was some two miles long and about one mile wide. On it grew widely spaced tussock-grass which, because of its spring lushness, the kangaroos had eaten down to within an inch of the ground. Had Emu Lake been filled with water-as it had been after the deluge of 1908-it would have been a veritable bushjewel. Now the colouring of the lake itself was drab. Without the water it was like a ring from which the jewel had fallen, leaving the mere setting.

“I believe there is somebody in the plane,” Elizabeth said sharply. “Isn’t that someone in the front seat?”

“If there is, then your eyes are better than mine,” her father replied. “The pilot must have made a forced landing. We’ll drive round a bit and then cross to it.”

Nettlefold had to take care when negotiating the steep yet low bank to reach the ribbon of claypan, and then, because the machine was a little to the left, he drove the car along the firm level claypan strip until opposite the aeroplane, when he turned sharply out on to the lake bed.

The heavy car bumped over the tussock-grass butts, the open spaces between them covered with deep sand, and so eventually drew to within a few yards of the spick and span red-varnished monoplane.

Slightly above their level, a girl occupied the front seat. Her pose was perfectly natural. Her head was tilted forward as though she were interested in something lying on her lap. She was quite passive, as though absorbed by an exciting book. No one could be seen in the pilot’s cockpit.

“Good afternoon!” called Nettlefold.

The occupant of the monoplane offered no acknowledgment of the salute. She continued impassively to gaze down at her lap. She made no movement when he called again.

“It certainly is strange, Dad,” Elizabeth said uneasily.

“I agree with you. Wait here.”

John Nettlefold’s voice had acquired a metallic note. Alighting from the car, he walked towards the plane until his head became level with the edge of the front cockpit. He was then able to observe that the girl’s eyes were almost closed. She was not reading. She was asleep-or dead…