One — Into the Great Empty

“Should I take this as a warning?” I worry, staring upward into a vault of blue sky so immaculate it feels unnatural. I typically welcome clear skies; it’s dark clouds and tumult which have ever preceeded trouble in my world. But here, the barren sky is itself the storm, relentless and unforgiving, its abject vacancy intimating an end to my own presence.

I’ve been rolling parallel to the curved horizon of the Australian Outback for two days now, watching endless shards of sunlight scour with intentional velocity the hardpan otherworld a windowpane away. With each mile the Greyhound bores me into the sun-burned hinterlands of this great continent a voice arises within, questioning how long I ought expect to endure in a landscape where ancient stone alone persists.

I’m heading to work on a cattle station. Though I’d arrived in Australia only recently, a wide-eyed tourist expecting to pet kangaroos and put a shrimp on the barbie, a chance encounter opened the possibility of seasonal employment on a working cattle station. Youthful curiosity had me accept reflexively, naively steamrolling any sightseeing plans — or any sensible contemplation of what “working on a cattle station” might actually involve.

What value I’m bringing to this forbidding place stands as another sensible question. I know nothing of cattle, having been raised amid the suburban comforts of middle-class America. As the Outback reveals itself, I feel a waning confidence I’ve brought along a single resource useful when confronting a place where mere existence is hardly a given. If the youthful grit of innocent determination counts as an asset; well, I’ve packed that, at least. I’ll give all I have to avoid making a hapless nuisance of myself. But even this is an untempered resolve, and as I watch the sun carbonize the armored world outside the bus window I can’t help but worry when within this forge my own melting point might be found.

Under the brilliant light a paradoxical truth reveals itself; this land without landmark’s most visible characteristic is found in the sights I’m not seeing — buildings, streets, towns, human beings. Though I’m a man who enjoys peace and quiet, I’m sensing the Australian Outback offers itself as a place to test that enthusiasm against the abject peace of hermetic self-sufficiency, and deathly quiet. While Australia rivals the United States in square mileage it contains a mere fraction of its population.  European settlers long ago abandoned the unwelcoming interior and its mysterious indigenous population to cluster along the grassy fringes of Australia’s coastlands, leaving the Outback as a refuge for eccentric crackpots — a subset of whom, I’m starting to fear, would introduce themselves as cattle ranchers.

Not to suggest I’ve seen any evidence of that quixotic crowd, however.  The sole concession to animate life I see outside my window remains the occasional convulsed shrub forcing itself upon the unwelcoming earth. The first Europeans in Australia tagged this landscape the Tanami Desert, echoing the Warlpiri Aboriginal word meaning ‘never die”. I can only assume those early explorers succumbed to exposure before learning the Aboriginal word for the much more apt ‘prepare to die’. The native reference is to several life-sustaining oases hidden within the otherwise bakelite geography—a bit of inside baseball likely no more than maddening rumor to those parched early explorers staggering cluelessly about in service of Queen and country.

My own final destination, Bullo River Station, lies within the loneliest area of all: the Northern Territory. Australia’s Top End begins where the last vestige of Queensland’s green forest ends, then extends west as a roughhewn plain for a thousand kilometers before ceding its horizon to Western Australia in unspectacular ceremony. Banjo Paterson — Aussie’s Will Rogers — called the Northern Territory “a vast half-finished sort of region, wherein Nature has been apparently practicing how to make better places.” Australia being some of the oldest dirt on our planet the crumbling and sunbaked Territory might ought be viewed as the childhood handiwork of a tentative God, that clay pinch pot brought home from elementary school which remains on the mantle not for its craftsmanship so much as the inertia of its familiarity, a sentimental historicity which ratifies its worth as time passes.

I comfort myself with the thought that any bones of the departed which lie scattered beneath such merciless skies likely remain in showroom condition — pristine white, disinfected by radiation, fit to be reanimated by whatever marooned spirit might find the artifacts useful in this roasted world of meager. I welcome this strange image as a whisper of self-preservation; the idea some vestige of my being might outlast my adventure here brings a wry smile to my lips.

I pause to study my fellow travelers, to wonder what idiosyncratic impulses led them to join me in fording the pre-Cambrian vastness pressing from all directions upon our foreign capsule. A young teenager wearing a comically over-sized cowboy hat sits nearby, behind a backpacking couple from France, loosely dressed and hairy. An aboriginal woman tends two playful, bright-eyed children. My seat mate—a native of Thursday Island in the Banda Sea north of Australia — occasionally offers asides in a sing-song and barely comprehensible patois which sounds to my ear a mixture of Brixton, Bahasa, and street-corner Beatbox.

Eventually, the sun cedes its tyranny without fanfare, its wake a simple evanescent monotone. The ghostly sunset provokes in me a reflection on the resilient spirit of the Aborigines who’ve made their lives here since time was, itself, an inchoate mist.

At last light the bus pulls two wheels off the pavement. This is not the first time I’ve heard the two tires on my left hit dirt; the paved road long ago merged into a single lane. Mind; I don’t mean one lane each direction, I mean one single lane, period. Whenever oncoming traffic approaches, each vehicle pulls two wheels off the road like jousters on a field of sand, then flashes headlong into the unchartable vastness the other leaves behind.

This time we pull off and stop, however. The French couple has requested a photo op at the border between Queensland, behind, and the Northern Territory, ahead. We tourists clamber into the yet sweltering twilight to find the border delineated by a bullet-riddled sign reading:

“WELC ME TO THE N RTH RN TERRIT RY; AUSTR LIA’S UTBACK.”

The aerated sign is the sole prominence upon the slabbed landscape. I chuckle at the Chamber of Commerce for erecting as much a target as a hello, its formalized welcome perhaps fig-leafing a concession to the restless trigger fingers of the locals. I pose for a few snapshots with the other foreigners, our self-conscious shuffle eyed patiently by the locals through the tinted glass of the public coach.

A silent and inky night eventually yields to the pale glow of a spartan sunrise. Within an hour, the incandescent sunlight is again blasting dust off everything it hits, disintegrating all ambient particles along the way. By midday even individual molecules light up with an animated glow, crashing and boiling as they scramble for cover, revealing by their absence unclouded detail of crisp line and subtle color across the landscape. It seems unnatural — an insult even — to be traversing such geography at eighty air-conditioned miles per hour, threading the pitched battle raging between stone and sun in such fervor, and since time beyond memory.

But traverse it we do. At our midday lunch stop I feel for the first time the true weight of the Outback heat. As I descend the bus steps a blast of atomic proportion slams into me, seizes me, permeates me so completely I fear my body is breaking down into its basic elements, prepped to be carried aloft on the heat waves dancing all around. Moisture springs from my brow and within twenty steps beads on my forehead. I remember stories of Arctic explorers whose spittle freezes in the air before hitting the ground; I sense my own bodily fluids having the opposite experience — abandoning me, wafting as a mist into the sodden sky.

We’ve arrived at Timber Creek Wayside Station, home for the moment to a scattering of leathered men hunkered panting over stubbies of Victoria Bitter, a clique of Aboriginal girls circling a pool table, a florid woman leaning wearily behind the counter. With a distinct lack of enthusiasm the sanguine-cheeked woman takes my order. My Foster’s Lager arrives ice cold and dewy but my cheese sandwich proves less pleasing: its two slices of bleached white bread and scrap of synthetic cheese lands in my belly like a soap bubble.

I slake my appetite with a second tinnie of Fosters and turn my attention to my surroundings. The intensity of the heat is impossible to ignore, its presence heightening and dulling the senses simultaneously — I’m keenly aware of every motion but have no enthusiasm for anything demanding effort. A pickup pulls into the gravel parking lot with a scatter of window glare and popping of rubber on rock. A door slams, its sound resonant in the viscous air. Flies march across the counter, drone in my ears. Old men hunched on barstools gasp, and slurp their beer. The muted crack of billiard balls wells in from the native exertions across the room. I warp the matrix to rise and engage with these exotic locals.

I join the dozen or so Aboriginals lounging in limber disarray, watching four girls surrounding the pool table. I’m happy to get my first good look at these native Australians. The men wear simple shirts and dark, rough pants. Most sport cowboy hats. They speak in clipped phrases which intimate at English but whose content I can’t quite discern. They laugh with their bellies. All have beers.

And such extraordinary faces! Clear white eyes shine above broad noses and wide friendly mouths. Thick jaw bones pull their features into strong configurations. Their hair hangs in loose ringlets.

I’m eager to learn their names, anticipating variations of the wonderfully rhythmic place names I’ve seen on my map. One of the pool players pauses near me; I seize my opportunity.

“Hi! My name’s David. I’m from America.”

The woman, likely in her early twenties, glances around before saying quietly, “I’m Ethel.”

Ethel? The people who gave the world Wagga Wagga and Boggabilla and Tedbindilla name their daughters Ethel?

“Is that your real name? I mean, your given name?”

“Aye.” She looks at me with a look which questions whether I’m always rattled by the unremarkable.

“May I ask your last name?”

“White. Ethel White.” She smiles uncomfortably at the odd American with the discordant reaction and resumes her game.

I’m left with the echo of her plain name and the uneasy thought that a people who filled this land with music now inherit names stripped of melody. America’s subjugated first nations still claim names that connect them to their past. Here, only Ethel White is offered by this inheritor of an ancient line, a name I take to be a placeholder where I expected a history would lie.

Sudden drama interrupts my befuddlement. An inebriated young aboriginal male staggers to the pool table and loudly assaults the girls with brusque invective. What provoked him is a mystery—surely my conversation with Ethel had been too innocuous to prompt such a response? He spends several long moments chasing the girls around the pool table, spewing venom with his slurred words and broadcasting the deepest hatred through heavy-lidded eyes. I search for a reaction from anyone in the establishment and find only passive indifference.

After a few moments the pub’s short-order cook resignedly takes action. The employee seizes the smaller man and pushes him with great authority out the front door. When the Aborigine returns several minutes later to rejoin his tirade the bouncer, with an air more of ritual than malice, puts his foot squarely in the teenager’s belly and sends him reeling backwards onto the pavement outside.

“If he comes in again put your fist in his face, mate,” the sweaty man advises before resuming with grim ennui his cooking.

The teenager lies on the sidewalk in a disjointed heap for several minutes before he gets up and, to my astonishment, reenters the building to resume his malicious harangue upon the scowling young women. Despite my disquiet I decline to take the cook’s suggestion. When an older man finally corrals the teen and leads him away the pool game resumes, the air thick with indifference but my mind unsettled, even more a stranger to this land than the alien I was before our stop.

I’m still disconcerted by the episode at Timber Creek when the bus slows and driver Don calls out, “Well, Yank, this’ll be your stop, I reckon.” Out the window to my left stands a slender metal signpost. A cockeyed sign reads “Bullo River Station 77 km”.

To the right, a dirt road stretches its dusty way towards a range of lonely mountains.