After lunch, I joined Charlie in the workshop. I’d mentioned that I rode a motorcycle back home, so he had me bring the station bike in and give it a going over. It had been adapted for its agricultural purpose with a black tubular frame to protect the handlebars, brake pedal, and shift lever from branches and termite mounds. A plastic milk crate was mounted on the luggage rack over the rear tire.
I slipped into mechanic mode and set upon the machine. It didn’t take long before I was finished with the tune-up—not because I was efficient, but because all I knew how to do was remove the spark plug and gap it. I’d told Charlie I knew how to ride motorcycles — I hadn’t claimed I knew how to service them. For him, the two went hand-in-hand. For me, repairing my daily ride was as improbable as my whipping out a socket set and giving the Qantas 747 a going-over before flying back to the States. I leave that kinda stuff to professionals.
Charlie could have serviced the jet had he needed to. In my picture-book understanding of agricultural life farmers were always seen with a pig under one arm and a bushel of corn under the other. Never mind that pigs weigh upwards of seven hundred pounds and corn is found in bushels nowhere except the suburban supermarket – the more accurate depiction of anyone in the agricultural life would be with a wrench in hand and grease-stained clothing. Machinery is the muscle and bone of rural life. Founder at tasks mechanical and all the cows and pigs or acres of fertile soil you might want will do you no good. Trucks and tractors and dozers are extensions of the human component in country living, the tools which bring order to the wild natural world. Remove those mighty tools, let the engines of ag life seize up and fail, and commercial agriculture itself dies in the silence.
During my time at Bullo, in addition to the constant maintenance of the prosaic station machines I saw Charlie pull the clutch from a gigantic D8 bulldozer, and service the rotor bearings in a Bell helicopter. I never saw him consult an instruction manual of any kind (“Read the instructions when all else fails,” he told me once). His understanding of the logic of machinery was complete. He could read the internal needs of inert objects as expertly as he read the intentions in the eyes of an ornery bull, or stroppy horse. Bringing metal and diesel to life simply made sense to him, and I came to see that our success or failure rode very much on those understandings.
Eager to make myself dimly useful I searched for other things to check after the spark plug was finished. I checked the water in the battery. It was fine. I checked the oil—it was full. I checked the spark plug again. I’d screwed it in properly. Then I thought of a duty I’d mastered as a child.
“Charlie,” he was bent over a disassembled engine. “Where do we keep the chrome cleaner?”
The big man popped straight up. “The what?!”
“The chrome cleaner. I thought I’d give the rims a shine. They’re awfully dirty.” They were very dirty.
“Have you set the timing?”
“Ah, no.” I hadn’t even realized the bike had a clock.
“Have you checked the points?”
A Bob Seger song came to mind. “Checked the what?”
“I didn’t hear you fire it up, you couldn’t have set the carburetor.”
“You are right about that.”
“Can you do those things?”
“Well, I do know how to fire it up.”
He arched his eyebrows. “How do you keep your bike running back home?”
“Um, I put gas in it and go, so long as I can find my keys. Honda of Hollywood is just around the corner if something seems wrong. They’re pretty good.”
“But that you have to pay for,” he said, shaking his head. “When I was your age I was building race cars with my mates.”
“Oh yeah? Well, when I was my age I poured gasoline into the fuel-injected carburetor of a limousine to prime it, after running out of gas, and nearly burned the car to the ground.”
He laughed more in disbelief than derision. “Okay, Dave. Let’s give you something away from petrol.” He glanced around the workshop. “Have you ever changed a tire?”
This I had done often. I was delighted to be offered a job that required nothing more than muscle.
“Truck tires?”
That I’d never done before. But they’re like—what; bigger? Shouldn’t be a problem.
“These have split rims.”
Oh. I don’t like the sound of that.
He rolled two great tires into the center of the workshop. “Split rims are tricky. You’ve got to be careful putting them together or they’ll blow up in your face when you inflate them. If one of those rims isn’t seated properly it would take your head right off. These tires have innertubes; the tubes have holes in them. Pull them off these wheels, find the holes, patch them, and put them back on those rims.” He motioned towards two large metal wheels leaning against the wall.
After Charlie showed me the basics of the matter, I began a Sisyphean struggle with the rubber and metal. Back home tires are separated from their wheels on a nifty pneumatic gizmo which breaks the bead, then leverages the rubber away from its industrial-strength grip on the metal rims. Here there was no pneumatic save, just peripatetic Dave, and a couple of prybars.
I struggled to extract the innertubes for the next hour, banging on the rubber to break the bead, jumping on them when that didn’t work, using short crowbars to draw the thick rubber over the metal. Anyone who has tried to put a queen-sized fitted sheet on a king mattress may appreciate my frustration that afternoon. I would struggle mightily to seal one edge, then move to the next, only to see the first pop back off the rim.
Modern evolutionary theorists speculate evolution happens, not in gradual small increments, but in occasional spurts of accelerated change, followed by long periods of stagnation. This paradigm of Punctuated Equilibrium describes well my struggle with those tires. I’d sweat and pound for endless minutes with no measurable advancement when alas, the heavens would part, and the bead would break or the rim clear. I would go on to the next step, twist and swear for a fruitless stretch before the cosmic balance would again shift, sliding me suddenly past this next obstacle.
Charlie kept quiet and allowed me to work it out by myself. When I finally stood, drained but triumphant, holding both tubes, he walked me through the patching process. As we were applying the rubber cement, Dick walked into the workshop. He overheard Charlie telling me drying time was critical for proper adhesion.
“I smoke a cig, reckon that’s about the proper time,” he said affably in his garbled Okker accent. He then extracted with bony fingers a cigarette from the pocket of his loose shirt, as if his suggestion sparked a notion of how he might be helpful.
His morning orneriness had worn off. He was a changed man, offering pleasant asides as he moved about the workshop. He was still working on the large metal structure he’d been busy with the past several days.
“What is that, Dick?” I asked, taking a break from reassembling the truck tires.
“It’s a portable gantry. If the dozer or grader ever broke down in the field we’d be able to roll this over and pull the engine without having to tow the great thing back home. Not easy to tow a D8, mate.”
“Sounds useful. Was it your idea?”
“No, Charlie’s. He come up with the design. A good ‘un, this. The whole bloody operation could be buggered for days without it if we ever needed it.”
When I finally had the tires repaired and reassembled I let Charlie know.
“Alrighty. When Dick turns the power on at 5 o’clock we’ll inflate the tires and see how you did,” he said with a big smile.
Given that these were the first split-rim tires I’d ever serviced I was uncertain I’d be around to see 5:15.
He sent me to do some organizing around the workshop. As I tackled the jumble of cast-off pipes and metal and household machinery I was intrigued to find everything made more sense than initial observation indicated. All the corrugated tin was in one place, old plumbing supplies in another, square tubing separate again. Junkyards to city folk are wastelands; the grubby detritus of an auto repair shop or the industrial lot on the corner considered a neighborhood blight. It was fun to discover a logic to the chaos; this oil spot is the site of the oil changes, that stack of twisted metal is a treasure trove of salvageable parts one goes to at specific times for specific things. Somehow, discovering this made everything less of an eyesore.
With a whir and a catch, the power started back up as the evening ripened. I returned to the workshop to test out the quality of my earlier labor on the tires. As I unrolled the compressor hose one image kept reappearing in my mind; that of a dummy being blown sky high by the explosion of an improperly assembled split rim truck tire. It was a National Safety Board film I’d seen aired on a 60 Minutes story about the hazards of split rim tires. The explosion was equivalent to a stick of dynamite, I seemed to remember them saying.
With great trepidation I connected the valve onto the valve stem and, after Charlie gave it a long look over, began inflating the first tire. As I did so, Peter drove up in the pickup. He’d gone out with Bundy and Bill to do some fencing, and the three of them began unloading gear.
Suddenly, the tire made a popping noise. I’d been squatting alongside of it, extending my arm to stay as far away as possible. (Why lose my head when I could only lose an arm, I’d figured). When the tire popped I sprang backwards like a startled frog. Peter, Charlie, Dick, Bundy, and Bill all stopped what they were doing and stared at me. The tire sat innocuously in the same spot it had been.
“Christ! I thought that was the end,” I exclaimed.
“That was just the bead catching,” Charlie explained.
“I thought he saw a King Brown or something,” said Bill, talking to his taller friend.
“If she goes, she goes,” said Peter, “no time to get away. Take your head clean off.” He seemed to enjoy sharing that fact.
“Well, that’s the first rule of station life.” Everyone looked towards Bundy. “Respect your tools, and they’ll respect you,” said the new man in a soupy drawl. He was lighter skinned than his mate, with striking pale-blue eyes.
Peter hooted at the improbable remark. “That’s right, the first rule of station life. And don’t forget, your hat’s your most important tool.” He said, handing me my own, which had flown off my head in my scramble.
“Yup. That’s the first rule of station life. Respect your hat, and it’ll respect you,” said Bundy, as if repeating himself. A wide smile crossed his friendly face. I wanted to point out the contradiction in having two first rules but couldn’t untangle the new man’s intentions in the moment. Uncle Dick simply shook his head at the non-sequitur and returned to his welding.
That night at the dinner table Charlie asked Peter how the two new hands had done.
“They were all right,” he answered. “They seem to know what they’re doing.”
“Tomorrow I want you and Dave to take them to continue on from the new gate we made in Bull Rush. Some of the brood mares went through the fence there and back into Rock Hole paddock. We’ll have to muster it again. I want that fence finished soon, so don’t waste any time tomorrow.”
We didn’t. Sunrise found the four of us at the Bull Rush fence with a full load of pickets and wire, a half-mile of shabby fence stretching towards the open grassy plain.
I was becoming proficient at fencing. I could sight a straight line and use the strainers to tighten the new wire. The most taxing aspect of the job remained bashing the pickets with the heavy basher, but Peter and I traded off every ten pickets, one person sighting while the other bashed, so there were frequent respites. Additionally, the ground became less rocky the farther we got from the new gate.
I was fascinated to see how Peter worked. My lean, well-built friend moved quickly from task to task with great assurance. He seemed to enjoy himself. He was very meticulous. He’d devised a small tool specifically to wrap loose wire ends neatly, rather than bending it sloppily out of the way as I did. He was cheerful and robust, and his good humor infectious.
The other work crew–Bundy and Bill–worked more perfunctorily and with less zeal, less precision. They stopped regularly to smoke a cigarette or get a drink of water. When I saw their handiwork I was disappointed to find it didn’t have the precise quality of ours. Loops were lackadaisically tied, with the old ties tossed on the ground instead of in the pickup for disposal.
A major complication occurred after we’d paced out the new line of pickets. Peter had learned in agricultural school that the most scientifically correct method of installing the metal pickets was directly opposite to the Bullo River method. The difference hinged on which direction the stock pressure is best handled.
The picket, as I’ve mentioned, has three flanges running its entire length. Only one of these flanges has holes to accept the ties supporting the barbed wire itself. Bang the pickets in one way, and the animals push against the wire which pushes against the picket. Put it in the other way and the animals push against wire only.
Peter was convinced the former method was superior. Apparently that went against a strong territory convention, for Bundy and Bill would have none of Pete’s high-falutin’ logic.
“Naw, it’s not done that way,” they protested.
“Go ahead, put them in the way I say. That way, see, the animal pushes against the wire and picket. Besides, my way the wire has only one contact point with the metal. Less chance to rust.”
“I ain’t never done it that way before. Charlie didn’t say nothing about that.” Bundy shook his head while Bill looked at his feet. Peter was the crew boss, but Charlie wasn’t to be trifled with.
“Go ahead. I’ll take the responsibility,” Peter said.
“You’ll get yourself in a mob of trouble, I reckon,” said Bundy. “I ain’t never…”
“Just do it, all right? I said I’ll take the blame.” Peter lacked his usual humor in the moment.
“Maybe you don’t like your job,” Bundy countered.
It went on like this for a few minutes; the boys eventually refused, but Peter and I started bashing the pickets “backwards”.
“See, they only meet the metal once this way. Less chance to rust,” he repeated. He was quite serious. I thought he looked a bit worried. “Besides, the pressure pushes against more metal.”
This was undeniably true. I was convinced, anyway.
Later that evening, Charlie entered the kitchen and strode over to Peter. He caught Peter’s eyes and held them.
“Put the pickets in backwards, eh?” He asked slowly.
“No. Not backwards, really. It’s the way they are made to be put in.” He got up and walked over to the chalkboard Sara used it to list items needed from town. “See, put them this way, the stock pressure is resisted by the construction…” He went on for a few moments, a rustic professor at the lecturn.
“Well, that’s all good in the classroom, but when you put them in the right way the wire is braced at two points on each picket. That’s twice the strength. And our pickets have a galvanized coating – not much rust to worry about.” The big man continued his case as well, bringing his time-earned sensibility into sharp focus.
Both arguments had merit, from where I was sitting. What I perceived was a broader struggle – that age-old friction point where science rubs up against tradition. In a place such as Bullo where one saves one’s own skin day in and day out with quick wits and quicker perceptions, great stock gets placed on practical experience. Books and theories are less reliable than those things which a person has seen with their own eyes, built with their own hands. If a fence has been built a certain way and it seems to work, that’s what matters. The common maxim “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” is the broad back of an agricultural society, supporting the kind of long-term activity which perpetuates a robust and repeatable system.
Of course, the corollary is the attitude which says build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. The old one works; it’s always full. But what about all the other mice skittering about while the dead one fills the trap? This kind of restlessness causes people to leave their not necessarily broken hometown in search of something different, something better. It’s the restlessness of a society which drives progress.
I don’t know whose argument had more merit. But I do know two things for certain: 1. that I did see a frustration and alienation on Peter’s face I hadn’t seen before, and 2. that Danielle was really pissed off that Peter had wrecked “her fence”.
Charlie didn’t make us pull the pickets out we’d slammed home that day, but Peter’s discontent hadn’t eased the next morning when the four of us were back on the fence line.
“Charlie didn’t go for it, eh?” Bundy said matter-of-factly. “I knew he wouldn’t. I ain’t never…”
“All right,” said my sulking friend. “I don’t care. I really don’t care. It’s their bloody station. I’ll put their pickets in upside down if they want ’em that way.”
His face attempted a look of nonchalance, but its failure merely undermined his words. He was genuinely disappointed. I suppose he wanted to impress Charlie, a man he respected and admired, and put his own mark on Bullo River.
“Well,” said Bundy, smiling, “that’s the first rule of station life, don’t you know.” A hint of a smile appeared in Peter’s eyes. “What’s that?”
“Be careful not to use your head too much. You’ll wear it out.” Our small group had a good laugh. “Hey, I thought the first rule of the station life was’ respect your hat and it’ll respect to you’?” I asked, laughing.
“Yeah, it is,” said Bundy, smiling his sly smile. “It’s the most important thing. And you need your head so you have a good hat rack.”
“I don’t know,” said Peter, with a sardonic chuckle, “I thought the first rule of station life was ‘don’t use your head at all, just your body.’” Peter was regaining his familiar mood.
“Which brings us to the first rule of station life,” said Bundy, “use your head only when the boss is around.”
“And make up for it when he’s gone, eh? Don’t use your bloody head at all!” said Peter.
“You got it!”
Later, during a break – charmingly called a smoke–o by the Aussies – I had my first chance to chat one-on-one with Bundy.
“What brings you to this life, Bundy? I mean, there must be easier ways to make a living?”
“Me old lady threw me out,” answered the cinnamon-skinned man. “She’s a good one, though.”
“Oh yeah? She treats you well, huh?”
“No. She treats me like shit. But she’s got five kids.”
“Nice? So you’re a father of five?”
“Oh, no!”
“Wait,” I said with a confused look, “if they’re not your children, why does that make her a good woman for you. What’s that got to do with it?”
“By myself, I only get $115 per week.”
“Working where?” I was still completely lost.
“Working for Bob Hawke. On the dole, mate.” It was Peter seated nearby who set me straight.
“Right,” continued Bundy, “but me old lady gets $700 every two weeks.”
“Yeah, but she’s got all those kids to feed. Comes out about the same, doesn’t it?”
“Naw. The kids don’t cost anything. She takes them to St. Vincent de Paul.”
The plain-faced way in which he revealed this corruption – taking the kids for free charity meals while spending the welfare check on themselves – made me in its sheer blatancy join in with the laughter of the others.
The morning had been demanding, and I was happy to head to the homestead for lunch upon hearing from across the acres the telltale sound of the generator. There’s a primeval satisfaction to splashing a bit of water on a grimy face, then sitting down for a meal amidst hearty camaraderie while looking back on five hours of accomplishment.
Another more tangible reason I enjoyed lunch was because it was Friday, and every Friday around noon the world encroached on Bullo River, however briefly, in the form of the mail plane. I’d been looking forward to it all week with its cargo of mail and supplies, including four VHS movies courtesy of the local rental outfit in tiny Katherine, Western Australia.
I was feeding greedily on a roast beef sandwich when Danielle cocked her head and said brightly, “mail plane!” I focused my ears but heard nothing. I walked out with her to open the large gate into the garden while Peter hopped on the newly tuned (though with chrome unpolished) station bike. He zoomed through our open gate, momentarily drowning out the low aeronautical hum I was now able to perceive in the distance. He tore down the length of the airstrip, clearing the center of the strip of the few animals there grazing lazily.
A small propeller plane dropped from the sky and bumped along the grass airstrip to where Danielle and I stood. It turned slowly, rolled past us, and came to a halt within twenty yards of the house.
A slim young woman in khaki shorts, knee socks, and a khaki shirt with epaulets dropped from the pilot’s seat. She nodded to Danielle and I, who’d closed the gate and stood by the rear cargo door.
“G’day,” she said brightly, opening the cargo door. She handed me a cardboard box and carried a green postal sack as we all walked indoors.
With everyone arrayed around the kitchen counter she handed a bundle of mail to Sara. The Hendersons have a private mailbag which is located in Katherine, as do the rest of the remote properties dotting the vast area.
As Sara distributed the mail Charlie opened the box. It contained a mechanical part he’d been waiting on for a while. As I received no mail I had to sit and watch the others read theirs. Marlee unwrapped the videotapes. I did not recognize any of the titles. These were obviously not the top shelf stuff. I guessed the video store uses the situation to unload some of their slow-moving titles.
This became painfully apparent when we all sat down around 8 o’clock that evening to watch Ghost of a Chance, starring Dick Van Dyke and Redd Foxx. I had no idea those two fellas made a movie together, and after I saw it I wondered why they bothered. It was a formulaic piece of cinematic doggerel, predictable and trite.
I think my perspective may have been a bit hard-boiled, however; it went over well with everyone else. Danielle in particular seemed to enjoy it–she squirmed in her seat, her eyes alight. She squealed at all the right places. It’s a shame producer Sam Strangis wasn’t there to share her joy; it’s likely the only positive review he might have earned with this straight-to-VHS clunker.
Sunrise the next morning found me standing chest deep in Homestead Creek, next to Peter, similarly submerged. It was not easy peeling down to my shorts and walking into the muddy water at that hour – or any hour, considering where we stood was only twenty yards from where Homestead Creek emptied into the opaque waters of the Bullo River, thick with saltwater crocodiles.
“It’s probably okay,” Marlee had said when giving us our instructions, “the big crocs usually won’t swim up the smaller creeks.”
“Usually, huh?” It wasn’t much consolation, despite Marlee’s doctoral dissertation on the creek-swimming habits of saltwater crocodil – wait; what’s that you say? She’d never actually studied the creek-swimming habits of saltwater crocodiles? Anyway, remembering back on their genuine concern when I dipped my toe in the water while fishing I assumed this must be a different situation.
And I was correct on that point; this was totally different – the difference being, fishing is optional, and fencing is mandatory.
For we’d reached the point where our fence crossed this creek and we couldn’t simply drop a post, end the fence, and pick it up on the opposite bank. No; it had to be strung across the creek, for, like the Bullo River, the creek had a strong tide of two or three feet, making it a simple matter for livestock to breach the fence line at low tide. The exposed tidal ground was too muddy to drive the pickets in so when the barbed wire was strung the whole assembly hung suspended above the creek. Peter found a long log and we intended to hang it from the bottom of the fence to cover the gap exposed at low tide.
Rugged and as authentically outback as standing deep in the cocoa-colored water was, the exercise was uneventful – until some unknown monster took a chunk out of my left calf. Given that my incipient destiny to become crocodile chow had occupied at least as much of my attention as the job at hand I was, shall we say, startled by the development. Had it been a big monster there would have been no reaction time. Nope; this was apparently just some innocuous kind of a small biting fish that favors opaque, salty, croc-infested waters, probably nothing more than a kissing cousin of the piranha or one of those deep-sea critters with the fleshy light-bulb illuminating their stalactite teeth.
Regardless, I wasn’t taking chances. When I felt the bite I rocketed straight up and, in a feat of ambiguous physics, walked across ten feet of water to dry land. My understandably jumpy companion followed my lead.
Now, I think myself a rational man; stories of improbable happenings have a limited impact upon me. But had a collared priest, say, happened by at that particular moment, had seen two mortal men walk on water, I’d have to imagine Homestead Creek would have begun a new life as a destination for pilgrims from across the globe.
The only fly in the ointment, the part of the scene which wouldn’t have made it onto the visitor’s center mural, was Marlee standing on the bank, doubled over in laughter.
Barking in Nutwood 