Hammond Innes: Golden Soak

‘Mount Robinson.’ There was sweat on her face, flies crawling and dark shadows under her eyes. ‘The Gap is just to the left; that’s where we’ve been sweating our guts out this past month.’

I asked her whether she’d like me to give her a spell, but she shook her head. ‘I’m not tired. Not really. And in about twenty miles we begin to hit dry watercourses. You need to know the track then. This poor old Landy’s over six years old. You have to nurse it.’

Half an hour later we turned a bend and dropped into a gully. I saw her point then. We were into an area of small hillocks, the track winding through them and the surface rough. No sign of Mt Robinson now, though we were within a few miles of it. More gullies and the white boles of ghost gums among the boulders.

We had been driving steadily west, but now the track turned north. We came to an old fence line, the gate sagging on its hinges, the wire rusted and broken, the posts leaning. ‘Welcome to Jarra Jarra.’ She said it with a wry smile, sitting tight-faced and very still as she waited for Tom to close the gate behind us. And shortly after that we passed a heap of bones bleached by the sun, the flies hanging in a cloud over the remains of the hide.

She glanced at the carcase, then at me. ‘You’ll see plenty of them around the station. About the only things that thrive at the moment are the carrion-eaters — we’ve enough wedgetails here now to start an eagle reserve.’ She said it angrily and with bitterness, staring ahead of her, her face clouded. ‘All the years I’ve been growing up here,’ she said, ‘it’s been one long struggle.’ Her voice was barely audible above the noise of the engine, the rattle of the aged vehicle. ‘And now this. If we don’t get rain soon …’ She gave a little shrug.

‘Haven’t you got any water on the place at all?’ I asked, appalled at the implication, beginning to wish I hadn’t come.

‘Oh yes, we’ve got water all right — if we could afford to drill deep enough.’

‘But at the house I mean. Surely you could bring the cattle — ‘

‘Don’t be bloody silly.’ Her eyes flashed angrily and for a long minute after that she was withdrawn inside herself, her jaw set and that upturned nose of hers lifted as though in rebuke at my stupidity. Then impulsively she reached out, smiling, and touched my arm. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve lived here all my life, y’see. I’m apt to forget there’s any other world.’ She took the hill ahead in a rush, her foot hard down. ‘The home bore’s still working. Of course it is. My grandfather knew this country better than I shall ever know it — driving his cattle up to the gold camps at Nullagine, opening up new territory, prospecting, mining, fishing. Before the crash came his leases ran to almost a million and a half acres. I’ll show you his Journal some time. It’s an incredible story — overlanding cattle from Queensland to the Ord, then down across the edge of the Great Sandy to settle in the Pilbara. That was in 1899. He was twenty-one years old and eight years ahead of Canning in opening up that section of the great Stock Route. All through the North West he was known as Big Bill Garrety.’ She looked at me, the track easier now, and her eyes alight with a sort of hero-worship. ‘Last year, after I’d fallen off my camel and broken a leg trying to race a motor bike cross-country, I learned to type, copying the whole thing out — four hundred and twenty-seven pages of it. I knew that Journal almost by heart. There’s a wonderful description, very sparse, very factual, of how this country was when he first saw it. And the site he chose for his homestead … of course there’s water there, always.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘But cattle need food as well as water and there isn’t much for them to feed on in the gullies of the Windbreak Hills.’

She shifted into four-wheel drive as the track followed the dry bed of a stream. Away to our left a black cloud of smoke billowed skyward. ‘One of the boys signalling. Maybe he’s found another bunch.-‘ And she explained, ‘When we want to call to each other in the bush, that’s how we do it — set light to the spinifex. The turpentine in it gives off that oily black smoke.’

‘Isn’t it dangerous?’ I asked, thinking of bush fires and the brittle dryness of the vegetation.

She laughed. ‘In this country? There’s nothing here to sustain a fire. In the old days, yes. They’d burn off whole tracts. It got the young green going in the spring. But it also burned up the seeds in the ground. In the end they destroyed all the grasses. That’s what happened here, sheep tearing the young grass out by the roots and no seed to replace it.’ And she added, a note of bitterness in her voice, ‘If we’d known it was going to be taken from us, we’d never have concentrated all our efforts on the Watersnake. But twenty thousand acres was a manageable size, about all we could afford to keep fenced against the neighbours’ sheep. We sowed new grasses, improved the waterholes, even got a bulldozer in and had them construct a reservoir.’ Again that little helpless shrug. ‘But it’s progress, I suppose, and they were offering employment, roads, a railway line to connect with Tom Price, all the infra-structure the politicians down in Perth are so keen on.’

We were getting near now, for she went on, ‘Meeting Daddy, you must remember what it has meant to him — make allowances. He had to rebuild Jarra Jarra virtually from scratch, everything against him, money owing, the land dead and nothing that worked, all the machinery, the bores, the vehicles, the generators, the shearing equipment, everything rusted with neglect. Grandfather …’ She hesitated. ‘He was an alcoholic. He was also mad — quite mad at the end.’ She laughed, a brittle, bitter little sound. ‘I think maybe I take after him. I’m a little mad myself sometimes.’ She gave me a quick, sideways glance. ‘Poor Daddy’s had a lot to contend with, y’see.’

A flock of parrots burst in red-green brilliance from a tree beside the track. ‘What about Golden Soak?’ I asked, remembering the bright enthusiasm in her voice as she had talked of my coming out and opening up the mine again.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There was a time when all Daddy’s hopes were centred on it. But then …’ She gave a little shrug. ‘Sometimes I think the only thing right about that mine is its name. It soaked up all the money Jarra Jarra produced when wool was booming.’ And she added, ‘Daddy’s taken the ute up to the Lynn Park homestead to get our stores and mail today. He may not be back yet. But when you meet him …’ She glanced at me, something pleading in her eyes. ‘Just make allowances, that’s all.’

And after that she didn’t say anything until we breasted a rise and caught a glimpse of hills ahead. ‘The Windbreaks,’ she said and ten minutes later we were into a flat area at their feet and there was the homestead, a huddle of tin-roofed buildings, backed up to the hills, ghost gums white in the gullies either side and the skeletal metal shape of a wind pump lifeless in the torrid heat. We passed through a gap in a fence line, wheels drumming on a cattle grid made of rusted sections of old piping. ‘I wish you were seeing it in the spring,’ she said, her eyes creased against the glare and her voice wistful. ‘Not all burned up like this. It was one of the first things Daddy did, sowing the home paddock with special grasses. A sort of pilot operation to see what the station could be like. I’ve walked through here after the wet with grasses knee-high and the whole paddock a riot of flowers.’ And she added, the wistfulness deepening into sadness, ‘You’ve no idea — this place can be so beautiful.’

I had a momentary picture of her walking bare-legged through lush green grass picking wild flowers, but then it was gone, killed by the ugly reality of what my eyes saw. The track was dusty, the grass sered brown, the hills shimmered in the burning sun. And the buildings all dilapidated, the woodwork starved and flaking paint. It was almost a settlement, but as we drove into it I could see that most of the buildings were empty and unused. Horses stood among the ghost gums away to the left, nose to tail, brushing at the flies, and two dogs, one an Alsatian bitch, the other looking like a dingo cross, ran towards us barking. A cloud of grey and pink birds rose screaming from the branches of three great trees. We stopped in their shade, the leaves hanging listless and a camel couched by the furthest bole, a lather of froth on its rubbery lips.