Peter Carey - Illywhacker

I walked sideways down an eroded gully and when I reached the other side I could make out the three O'Hagens on the slope ahead. Two saplings dropped and three rosellas danced a pretty path across the thunder-ink sky. Black cockatoos screeched and scratched at the bark of a big old manna gum as if they couldn't wait to see it done for.

When I climbed the last fence I could see their faces. I remembered, with a shock, how ugly they were. They had heads like toby jugs. They had large square heads with ruddy complexions. Their hair was fair and thin. There was a meanness in their faces that conveyed an unaccountable sense of superiority. They were not easy to like.

The father had ears that stuck out from the side of his head and the youngest boy, who was as tall as me and only fifteen, had inherited his father's ears. They were ugly, of course, but they were quite at home with those square red heads, high, bent noses, and small pale blue eyes. They were faces squeezed from the one lump of clay.

But the eldest son, who was eighteen, had different ears. He had his mother's tiny delicate ears. They sat, flat and lonely, on the side of his great head like beautiful objects stolen by an ignoramus. Although you wouldn't have looked twice at him in the street in Geelong, out here, beside his brother and father, his head was as embarrassing to look at as a withered hand or an ex-soldier with his chin shot off. If the O'Hagens had been butterflies this one would be valuable – a rare exception to countless generations of O'Hagens with big ears.

He was known as Goog, which, until we started to forget our language, was the common name for a hen's egg. I always supposed he was called Goog because the tiny flattened ears did nothing to interrupt the goog-like sweep from crown to jaw.

The O'Hagens (Stu, Goog and Goose) did not stop working as I approached them. They swung their axes and chopped the small trees and scrub off level with the ground. They ring-barked the large trees and those of in-between size were chopped at waist height, after which they belted the bark from them with the back of their axes and piled this bark around the splintered stumps. When the burning season arrived the bark would help burn them to the ground.

They did not acknowledge me. I was a pest, arriving at the wrong time. I squatted with my back to a tree and waited. It was Goose who broke. He came to sharpen his axe with a file. He squatted near me, studying the axe with great care before he pulled the file from a hessian bag (a use for hessian bags I neglected to mention earlier).

"Come to sell us a Tin Lizzie, have you?"

"Come to show it," I said.

A blackwood wattle dropped behind me.

"Should watch where you sit," the old man said, and came over to sharpen an axe that needed no attention at all.

Goog belaboured the stump of a tree with the back of his axe, but when he had finished, and the stump stood wet and naked, he put his axe down and joined the others.

He nodded in the direction of the Ford. "How much do they ask for one of them?" Goog asked.

"He hasn't got two bob to his name," Goose said, handing the file across to his father.

"I never said I did. I was just inquiring."

No one said anything for a while. They watched the old man sharpening his axe.

"What happened to your wonderful flying machine?" old Stu said at last. He was not such a bad fellow, but he couldn't help himself; that whingeing sarcasm came out of his mouth without him even thinking about it.

"It's in Geelong," I said.

"Found someone, did you?"

"I don't follow you?"

"Found someone to buy it?"

"I wasn't trying to sell it."

"Oh yes," Stu said, and the three O'Hagens smirked together like three distorting mirrors all reflecting the one misunderstanding.

"Why did you bring it here," Goog said, "if you wasn't trying to sell it to us?"

Their misunderstanding was so ridiculous, I didn't even try to defend myself.

"We heard you were having a try at motor cars now," Goose said.

"And who told you that now?"

"Patrick Hare told us," said Stu, standing up and putting his hands on his hips. He crooked one knee and put his square head on one side. "He told us how you tried to sell him a Ford. Patrick says the Dodge is a superior machine. That's his opinion."

There was a saying in those days: "If you can't afford a Dodge, dodge a Ford." It was a salesman's lot to listen to all this rubbish. "That's Patrick Hare's opinion," I said.

They stood around me in a semicircle, Goose mimicking his father's stance exactly. They all shared the same smile.

"So tell me," I said, not bothering to stand up, "would you want his opinion on how to plough a paddock?"

"Ah," Stu said, "that's a different matter, a different matter entirely."

I didn't smile, but it was an effort. I'd heard a lot about Stu O'Hagen on the Bacchus Marsh Road. It was said (although I found it hard to credit) that Stu came from behind a shop counter in Melbourne twenty years before. They said he wouldn't take advice from the first day he got there, that he went his own stubborn way and made his own stubborn mistakes. They said he would have spent his life inventing the wheel if one hadn't run over him one winter's morning in Ryrie Street and thus brought itself to his attention.

"Ploughing", he said, "is a different matter to motor cars, an entirely different matter."

I did not turn and look at the eroded hillside behind Stu's house which was easy to see from where we stood. I said not a word about the virtues of contour ploughing. It was not a subject on which Stu had shown himself to be able to benefit from advice.

"So you come to give us a hand, did you?" Stu said. He was being sly, but you couldn't call it nasty.

"Don't mind," I said.

"Use an axe?"

"After a fashion."

"Well," the old man said, handing me his axe, "plenty to use it on."

I was pleased to be using an axe.

You can build a good hut with only an axe and not much else, so I had plenty of experience under my belt. My hands were a bit soft, but clearing scrub is a piece of cake in comparison with making a good slab hut and my eye was good and my rhythm perfect.

If the O'Hagens were surprised to find a salesman using an axe so well, they didn't say it. But when lunchtime came they shared a tin of bully beef with me and gave me a mug of sweet stewed tea.

There was bad weather in the south, so after lunch I walked back across the slippery paddocks and put up the side curtains on the car. When I came back Goog said, "You could have saved yourself the walk -that rain won't come here." He sat on a fallen trunk and assessed the weather with an expert eye.

"That a fact?" I said.

"It's called the Werribee Rain Shadow," Goog said, "so I'm told. It accounts for the lack of rain here."

Stu was driving his "Kelly" axe into the shuddering trunk of a blackwood wattle twenty yards away but his ears were as sensitive as their size suggested.

"Who told you that bullshit?" he shouted.

Goog looked uneasy. He shaved some blond hairs from his arm with the axe. "In at the Marsh," he said at last, "at school."

The blackwood teetered on its wound and Goog looked at his father apprehensively.

"What would they know?" Stu said, stepping back from the tree to admire its fall. "Werribee Rain Shadow." He looked scornfully at the sky. "What sort of bloody shadow is that?"

The southerly caught the tree and tipped it. It fell with a crash, pinning a large brush-tailed possum to the ground.

They stopped work to examine the possum whose shoulder had been speared by a small broken branch. Stu tapped it with the flat of the axe. The possum quivered and a trickle of blood ran from its mouth.

"Rain Shadow," Stu said, "Christ Almighty!"