We drove to the workshop in silence. Under Danielle’s instruction I put several shovels and a long metal digging bar into the truck. She retrieved an unusual looking homemade mechanism from a corner and added it to our stockpile. This was to be used for pulling old pickets out of the ground. In essence it worked like an old-time water pump. It’s set next to the picket. A handle is raised, lowering a chain. The chain fits over the top of the picket. As the handle is pulled down the picket pops out of the ground. Easy peasy lemon squeezy — in theory.
The last addition to our motley load were two pipes, about three feet long and four inches in diameter. Dick had welded a heavy cover on one end of each. These pipes were used to drive new pickets into the ground, which explained their substantial weight. Pretty clever things, I came to realize, likely contrived after going through countless sledgehammer handles broken on errant swings at narrow picket heads.
Danielle approached carrying a hand tool. “These are to be your fencing pliers. See this number ‘5’ scratched in? They’re yours while you’re here. If you lose them, the thirty-five dollars they’ll cost you will be the least of it. Okay?”
I nodded.
“Do you want gloves?”
“I need to toughen my hands. I’ll do without.”
“Let me see your hands.” I showed her my fleshy pink palms, blotched and sore where the ropes had worn them during the horse branding.
“Right. Use these.” She dropped a pair of canvas and leather train-engineer gloves in my open hands. “Your hands will get tough anyway. We don’t want the barbed wire taking them clean off, though, before that happens.” I put the gloves in my pocket. “They cost four dollars,” she added as we drove off.
Fencing proved no easier than anything I’d yet done. I’d expected it to be more benign, more meditative, than the work with animals. It was different assuredly, but had its own demands, and dangers.
We began our renovations on the fence that ran along the treacherous thicket of several days before. A ten foot track had once been cleared along both sides of the fence, but the intervening years of neglect had invited all manner of plant growth. It was a rough ride as we bumped along to our starting point despite Danielle’s slow pace. When we reached the corner she killed the engine. The silence of the outback settled upon us.
“First, we have to undo the ties holding the wire to the pickets. When each wire is free I’ll cut one end and we’ll lay it on the ground – bottom wire closest to the picket. Then we’ll clear the plants from the fence line, replace the pickets, and re-strain the wires, adding one more.”
“How far are we going?” I asked.
She pointed to another corner about 200 yards away. It seemed manageable. The rest of the day we spent moving slowly to that opposite corner. About every sixty feet, or five pickets, stood a stout wooden post. These strainer posts marked our progress as we moved along the line.
The old fence really showed its age. The pickets were bent and rusted from years of assault by animals. The cracked gray posts strained to do their jobs. The surest sign of age, however, was the saplings that had grown up along the fence, intertwining the wires in an organic crochet.
“There is more of these than I expected,” said Danielle. “Should have brought the chainsaw.”
“Who needs a chainsaw?” I asked, seeing the opportunity to earn some man points. “We have the axe, right?”
“Too many of them. It’ll take too much time.” She objected.
“Watch!” I said, retrieving the axe with naive bravado. My first swing felled a two inch sapling. “See?”
“Keep going,” she said, unimpressed.
I dispatched a few more small trees, then attacked a four inch trunk. After a dozen blows it fell, then another, and before long I was beginning to feel a mite less game. A stubborn streak kept me from showing it, though. I kept swinging, but after another several minutes I had to take a break. I’d cleared eight feet of the scrub.
“Okay. Let me have a go, eh. I’m hopeless with an ax though.” Danielle took the instrument and uncorked some effective if not graceful strokes. She handed the ax back to me, saying, “This is your idea. You go ahead. I’ll start laying the wire out.”
I hacked away for a few more minutes and started feeling foolish for pushing the point. The cool of the morning had evaporated, leaving behind the familiar heat and leaden humidity. By the time I’d cleared two of the ten sections it was time for lunch. Every bit of energy had drained from my body with the sweat that soaked my clothes and ran down my legs, soaking my socks. Danielle had gone ahead in the truck to untie the ties all the way to the corner. I leaned weakly on my axe as she bumped her way back to me.
“Say, you don’t have a chainsaw around here, do you?” I asked with a defeated smile.
“You know, I think we may,” said the lass with a knowing smirk. “You have your lunch. I’ll be right back.”
After a big lunch and a catnap in the cab we set to work repairing the sections of fenceline I’d cleared by hand. My first chore was cutting twelve-inch sections off the plain wire to serve as ties. These were cut using my new fencing pliers and required a strong squeeze to accomplish. After cutting the needed ties my grip was weakening; I was glad to move on to our next stage. Danielle scuffed a line in the dirt, took twelve strides, then scuffed another. “See how many steps that is for you.” I took ten strides to cover the distance. “That’s how far apart the pickets go. I’ll drive along slowly. You take the new pickets from the truck, pace the distance off, then drop ‘em where they belong.”
This we did for the entire run of the fence line. Before the new pickets could be driven into the ground, however, the old ones had to be removed.
I hauled the bulky picket puller from the truck, hoisted it over my shoulder, and had no trouble easing the first few pickets out of the ground. On the fourth, when I leaned on the handle it didn’t move at all. I pulled harder, with no success. I leaped in the air and directed my entire weight upon the sturdy metal handle–to no effect.
“Danielle! I think I need a hand here!” She was a few sections away chain sawing the remaining foliage. Under the strain of our dual exertions the picket moved, slowly. With an explosion of dirt the picket popped from the soil, exposing the source of its reticence. Over the twenty or so years it had been planted a layer of clay had aggregated itself to the metal pole. In order to extract the bent and twisted picket we’d brought the nascent rock to the surface as well.
This proved an indication of things to come. While about half the pickets slid out easily the others were gripped in a subterranean vice by the sedimentary tableau underlying Bullo River station. This rock was the source of the cobbles used to build the homestead and formed the ragged craggy bluffs I’d seen from the highway. On this day it was an intractable nuisance, soon to become my sworn enemy when it came time to dig holes for new strainer posts.
With great relief I pulled the final picket out of the ground; many had required the digging bar to free them from the grippy substrate. The next step in the project involved pounding the new pickets into place. For this step Danielle and I worked together. She’d hunch down, her back to the first fence post, sighting with one eye closed as she directed me to move either forward or backwards to get the picket I was holding in line with the corner fence post.
“Away. Away. Too much. More. Another hair. Nope, too much. Half a post away. That’s it.”
I’d then slide the homemade driver over the top of the picket and thrust the heavy pipe up and down until the picket was seated to the proper depth.
I quickly came to appreciate what a clever instrument this pipe was. Before the picket was planted it stood six feet tall. A sledgehammer would have been useless; even with a proper striking angle a narrow picket head provides too meager a target. But aim was not a factor with the pipe–just slide it over the top of the pole and bang the sucker home.
For the rest of the afternoon we swapped between the two duties. One of us would sight the line while the other held a fresh picket in one hand, then raised the heavy basher with the other and smashed the picket into the rocky ground, which allowed entry in small increments only.
Often, a single picket required twenty or twenty-five smashes until it sunk to the necessary depth. Not infrequently, a solid subterranean rock would prove impenetrable, forcing us to withdraw the picket and re-sight it a foot away up or down the fence line. It was tedious and exhausting work.
I was struck by the thumbnail nature of the engineering. When sighting, I’d guestimate the location of the relevant picket in relation to the rest of the fence as it stretched towards the horizon. I suppose precision wasn’t critical; with the constant re-sets required in the hard soil and the various angles at which the seated poles stood exactitude was out of our reach.
So it went for the next few days – heading down to the workshop in the new day’s light, the dogs frisking and nipping at each other as we walked, loading the truck with the days supplies, then untying and pulling and bashing and re-straining the new wires, finishing at dusk, then looking upon the new fenceline we’d built that day. We were unknown Mason and Dixons, stripe painters on a deserted highway eyeballing mark after mark, leaving a trail that swept to the horizon as it split the vastness into imperfect halves.
I was thankful for the gloves. Barbed wire is incorrigible stuff with a malevolent will to snag clothing and flesh. After a few days it had crosshatched my arms and legs with scratches and thoroughly perforated my clothing.
One night I had an unsettling dream. I’d been tasked with building an S-shaped fence, an impossible task. Barbed wire is made taut by a simple but ingenious device called a strainer. Small levers hook onto the barbed wire with one set of jaws while plain wire affixed around the fence post is held by another. The handle on the strainer is then jacked back and forth and slack disappears. Strainers can tighten any length of wire in a straight run but would be useless trying to tighten anything S-shaped.
What’s more, I had to finish the fence quickly, for in my dormant fog I knew morning would come soon and I desperately wanted to get some rest. Several times the wire snapped, sending a thorny coil rushing back upon me. The pain was secondary; it was the added effort of redoing it that troubled me. The job finally faded away only moments before the generator forced me out of bed to begin a day of fencing in the waking realm, where, at least, the runs were straight.
After Danielle’s dressing down I had become more conscientious about rising when the generator bid its unwanted welcome in the cool darkness. After a week or so my body adjusted to the early-to-bed early-to-rise regime, but I still wouldn’t classify mornings as joyful. I certainly wasn’t feeling joy as I sat under a blasé cow or over a sodden bowl of Weetabix mush.
This routine was altered when Charlie instructed us to build a new gate halfway along the particular fence line we were working on. This rocky stretch had been causing constant frustration. Bashing pickets was demanding enough in the best of circumstances, but the rocks here had us constantly relocating our pickets when after a few inches of penetration we’d hit an impenetrable sheet of bedrock. Sometimes we’d move the darn pickets four or even five times, effectively turning fifty pickets into 250. It was with great trepidation that we set out to build the gate, then, for the four stout posts would require holes three feet deep.
As Danielle and I pulled up to the build site we grimly eyeballed the exposed slabs of rock covering the area, diving underneath a meager layer of topsoil only sporadically. We knew our shovels would be useless, that the only digging instrument that day would be the heavy six-foot iron crowbars we’d brought.
Danielle sighted along the fence line and we chose as our first hole location a spot that looked, if not promising, at least not impossible. She dusted away the six inches of topsoil before I drove the spiked metal bar into the red rock with mighty thrusts. She took over the heavy pole when I tired and in no time we were both soaked with sweat in the humid 90 degree air. The repeated slams caused hot points to develop on my hands, spots which became eleven separate blisters by that evening.
Our efforts were not without result, however. Within fifteen minutes we’d chipped through a foot of the sedimentary rock. We were a third the way home on this first of the four necessary holes when a well-placed drive broke off a several inch thick piece of rock. Encouraged, I raised the bar high up with both arms, but when it hit the ground it rang like a tuning fork and bounced a foot in the air. We had hit a primary layer of God-only-knows what thickness. With great chagrin, we faced the fact we had no choice but to make another attempt several feet away. The second attempt was just underway when we were again stymied by the same fateful ring. We began anew, exerting great effort before again being frustrated by the impenetrable earth. Finally, on the fourth try, two hours in, we managed to dig a decent hole.
This complicated things in a way, however, for the placement of one hole necessarily determines the location of the next, with decreasing leeway. After two more hours of great effort and greater frustration our site was full of abandoned half-holes. It was time for the heavy artillery. Danielle drove off to get Charlie, who appeared thirty minutes later at the helm of the station’s goliath bulldozer. The Caterpillar D8 clanked and snorted as it rolled our way. I hurriedly moved our ineffectual hand tools aside. At the rear of the dozer two fang-like rippers were poised with powerful menace. Charlie positioned them over our worksite, then, with an hydraulic hiss, sunk them into the ground. The dozer bucked and jumped as the metal teeth broke through the rock layers.
The ground reverberated with the underground discontent. I was awed by the brute collision of metal and stone, the raw elemental force of each against the other battling in a forum completely outside the realm of puny human exertion. The rock would resist, lifting one end of the thirty-two-ton machine fully off the ground, then break with a brutal crunch and explosions of dust, dropping the machine heavily. Charlie would then creep forward, clawing massive slabs of rubble from the earth. The air pulsed with the sound of roaring diesel and the screeching of metal against rock as the two elements vied to discover which was the immovable object, which the irresistible force. The primal struggle left the area broken and strewn with debris. The air smelled of powdered rock and vented exhaust.
When the battle was over Danielle and I moved back in. After witnessing the mechanized show of might I felt ridiculously weak and insignificant as a force tasked with reshaping the broken land to our purposes. But in ant-like increments we made progress over the rest of the morning, and by lunch time four holes sat ready for gate posts.
Charlie joined Danielle and me in the truck after a nice lunch and a short rest. We drove to the workshop for the chainsaw and a couple of axes before heading off into the woods in search of our four new gate posts. Charlie soon found a stand of Bloodwoods that suited him. I asked why the ramrod straight Ghost gums didn’t interest him.
“Naw,” the big man said, “Those gums are no good. They rot within a few years.”
Charlie parked the truck among the hardwoods and grabbed the chainsaw. With a buzz and a crack the trees soon fell. He cut one or two eight-foot sections from each of the solid stocky trunks. Danielle and I took our axes and, using the back faces, began knocking the bark off the logs. This is necessary as the bark rots quickly, loosening the fit in the post holes. Also, by knocking the bark off it was possible to treat the bare posts to keep the all-pervasive termites away — for a while, at least.
Debarking was an art I didn’t readily pick up. I watched as Danielle stood upon her log, hitting the bark at just the right angle to send small square chunks of pulpy bark flying. My first blows, though more forceful, pulverized the wood rather than removing it. I could then knock it off, but this required two strokes to cover the same area Danielle cleaned in one.
Eventually I got the hang of it. Rather than striking square I angled the ax head so that it struck along one edge. This sent the water-soaked bark shooting off in the desired chunks. Before long we’d debarked the four posts we needed, along with several smaller bracing posts made from stout limbs. Several cut sections were left lying; they’d be there when needed. Danielle wrapped a chain around two of the logs then attached it to the trailer hitch on the Toyota. The three of us drove the short distance to the gate site, the posts destroying all vegetation in their path as they dragged along. We dropped the posts off, then drove Charlie to the workshop. While there Danielle filled a metal drum with black sump oil, the exhausted oil saved when the many station vehicles receive oil changes.
After retrieving the other two posts we were faced with planting the massive pillars in our dearly won holes. Each was eight feet long and about a foot thick – they would surely have weighed 400 pounds apiece. Danielle decided which post was appropriate for which location, then we rolled the column to its hole. With the bottom overhanging the hole slightly and the long digging bar standing on the opposite side to guide the post we managed the gut busting job of raising the opposite end enough that the bottom slid to the bottom of the hole. I’d then stand it straight while Danielle poured oil all around the wood, below ground level. The oil deterred termites, she said. After the post had been sighted in line with the fence we filled the hole, using a narrow metal plunger to pack it firmly around the post.
By the time all four were in place dusk had arrived, and we were both exhausted. When we got back to the house I took close notice of the dozen or so posts that formed the structural base of the homestead. Each was at least ten feet tall – a few approached fifteen. None were less than two feet thick. All had been raised by hand, Sara said, a Herculean effort that spoke volumes to me about the sweat and agonizing labor that had gone into Bullo River station for many the years before I’d arrived. Some of it, like these massive gray pillars, remained as a testament to the human effort, but the bulk of it had been shipped away to the slaughterhouse each year, or lay dormant in the portable panels stacked outside the work houses, or was barely hinted at in the brands on the horses or the broken down abattoir sitting idly by Stumpie’s place.
I spent the next morning with Danielle constructing the new gate. Once the posts were in place she instructed me as we built a clever gate out of plain wire and pickets. The method is a bit too complex to describe here, but it resulted in a strong wire gate that looked like a continuation of the fence when closed, and was loose as a break dancer when its tension was released to open it.
During lunch we spied a car driving down the road, heading towards the house. Charlie rose to meet the arriving vehicle.
When he returned he’d been joined by three men. A bearish white fellow was introduced to me as Mike. He had something to do with the Northern Territory Roads Department and was apparently well known to the Hendersons, who greeted him warmly. He cracked a wide smile as he said hello in a broad Irish rogue. The two other men were aborigines. Their names were Bundy and Bill and were the stock hands sent by the Commonwealth Employment Service that Sara’d been expecting. Mike had picked them up on his way through Katherine. The new arrivals briefly said hello and picked up a few supplies–some gloves, fencing pliers, a few beers apiece–before Peter took them down to the motel-like stockman’s quarters where Stumpie lived. They both seemed quiet and withdrawn, but I was excited to have these indigenous residents as new workmates in the outback.
Barking in Nutwood 