I wasn’t surprised to find the highway exactly as I’d left it; lonely as a widow, quiet as a broken man. Danielle and I sat in the ute, our limbs strewn loosely around the cab, watching the flies crawl across the windshield, watching everything else stand perfectly still. It was a day with no wind. What noises there were – insects, our own breath – heightened my senses to where I swear I could hear the sunlight bouncing off the hood of the truck. The single asphalt strip before us led straight to the inert horizons to our left and right, splitting nothing in half so much as accentuating the uniformity of the landscape.
Once in twenty minutes a vehicle would rocket by, loaded with spare tires and camping gear, a crew of aborigines, hypnopompic bus passengers. None left any sign of their passing; not an empty plate at a diner, a twenty dollar bill for gas, friendly words of hello and goodbye. Nothing was expected of those passing except that they continue on, and we offered them no more than a warp in their horizon before we vanished from each other’s consciousness.
The hypnotic quality of the emptiness was such that I began to feel that a circus could appear from the left, proceed by in full regalia, then disappear into the right-hand void without having any effect upon the scene, or upon me, as though I would be able to see right through it the entire time, onward to the timeless scene beyond, a scene which had once hosted an ocean as temporary guest.
The truck was supposed to have arrived before we did, giving us enough time to load up and return home before dark, within an hour of darkness at the latest. Charlie had instructed Danielle not to wait too long, forty-five minutes perhaps. After we’d been waiting a little over an hour, after we’d finished our sandwiches, the freckled girl said matter-of-factly, “let’s go.”
Our engine disturbed the late afternoon stillness as we pulled a U-turn and headed back into the hills, empty-handed. As we rose up that first steep jump-up a truck appeared on the narrow thread of black now well behind and below us. A cloud of dust revealed that it had pulled off the road.
“That’s probably it,” said Danielle. “We are fifteen minutes out though. If we go back that’s fifteen minutes each way plus at least another fifteen to load up the pipe.” She looked at me, her lips pursed. “He’s just going to have to unload it himself. We can’t be just heading home at dark.”
“Would Charlie and Marlee come looking for us?”
“Yes, I think so. Especially since it’s you and me.”
“Whaddya mean?” I asked, though I really meant, “Do you mean what I hope you mean?”
“Come on. We’re not really able to take care of ourselves, are we?”
“Well, I might be a bit out of my environment,” I said, hiding my disappointment that she didn’t mean anything close to what I hoped she meant, “but you can take care of yourself, can’t you?”
“Not if we get bogged in the river, or have a break down someplace, no. It’s easy to get in trouble to where you need help, period.”
“Sure, but that’s true of anyone. Everyone needs help some time. Surely Charlie needs to be pulled out occasionally.”
“Charlie is his own help,” she said with finality.
I thought of the recent helicopter mishap but didn’t say anything. Her dependent tone bothered me; this girl was as capable as anyone I’d ever met – much less any nineteen-year-old – so why didn’t she give herself more credit?
As I thought about it I realized there wasn’t a whole lot of backslapping going on at Bullo River. Tasks were finished, and finished meant finished properly, or they weren’t considered finished. Excellent work was the lowest bar acceptable. Given the nature of the obstacles they faced the price for failure was onerous, at best, fatal at worst.
Charlie had mentioned to me once that if you ask the typical station hand if he knew how to do a particular task, the most common answer was, “I know a little bit.” He explained that this was the typical attitude expressed even if the person was an absolute master of that particular duty. A man might know how to disassemble into its constituent parts the clutch on a D9 dozer, then reassemble it in the dark, and when asked if he knew anything about dozer mechanics would say, “I know a little bit.” An electrician, a veterinarian, a horse man – they may know a whole lot about their world compared to other people, but in the face of the obstacles and challenges the Australian outback presents, in contrast to the potential humility the Top End can impose at any given moment, there is a deep-seated recognition that what they know is only “just a little bit.”
Early the next morning Danielle and I reprised our Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas-scale roadie. At that hour we surprised quite a few sleepy wallabies, who would shoot crazily into the scrub with great hops and erratic turns as we approached, but, unfortunate for me, we saw no more dingoes. I was hoping to redeem myself.
It was still a dewy hour as we descended the jump-up to the broad tablelands outside Bullo valley. As we neared the road we were surprised to see, not a pile of PVC pipe, but an entire road train parked alongside the road. In a chain behind a massive diesel cab were three full-length tractor-trailers, the outback’s famous sixty-eight wheeled behemoths. Crouched alongside the fearsome cab a roughhewn couple was boiling water in a billy can. The wiry male of the couple rose and smiled as we approached. He was wearing the bushman’s uniform – elastic side pull-on boots, schoolboy shorts, a sleeveless T-shirt. His heavier wife wore a simple print dress.
“How was your sleep?” asked Danielle in greeting.
“Aw, not too bad. Plenty room in there for the lot of us,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder towards the cab.
“What time did you get in?”
“A bit before sunset.”
“Thought that would be it for the day, huh?
“Yeah. Sorta wanted to make it to Kunnunarra, but it started to feel pretty good after we stopped.”
Danielle was examining the truckie’s load. Our pipe lay coiled in forced ringlets atop two massive industrial machines. There looked to be six or eight of the huge coils, each being 100 feet of two inch diameter black plastic pipe.
The man sprang up on the flatbed trailer, ascended the machinery, and looked down upon us. “Just let go that dog, Danielle, and I’ll slide ‘er off.”
Anxious to see what sliding dogs had to do with the operation I watched my companion. She untwisted a metal wire from around a clamp of sorts hooked onto one of the chains securing the load. The clamp had a handle, and when Dan grabbed it and pulled, the chain slackened.
“How’d that get to be called a dog?” I asked, referring to the clamp. Danielle answered with a look which included at least several species of indifference previously unknown to science.
Once released the coils were easy enough to slide down to our waiting hands. The large circles were about eight feet across – much too wide to lay in the back of the pickup. We found the only way to carry them was to stand them up leaning against the rear of the cab. When all eight were loaded they filled the bed and rose well above the roof of our little red pickup, looking like a giant black insect, or a Brobdingnagian bracelet. We then meticulously tied down our load with ropes and straps. The prospect of losing even one coil and having it bust open on the way home gave me, a fellow whose coiling skills had more than once been defeated by a simple garden hose, considerable anxiety. When we were all strapped down we helped the trucker change a flat tire. This act of reciprocation finished, we shook hands and left for home. No invoice, I noticed, nothing to sign. Such was business in the outback, where people are pretty certain to be easy to find if needed.
The project we’d first heard about the night of the Mother’s Day dinner occupied much of the time for all of us for the next week thereafter. I was a little sad when I first heard about the creation of a laneway in Bull Rush paddock. I loved that real estate’s broad shouldered spaciousness, its uncluttered expansiveness. The proposed laneway called for two roughly parallel fences to run smack through the vast paddock, dividing it into two sections with a broad channel down the middle.
My sentimental objections aside, it was a very useful idea. The laneway would be used in mustering much of the scrub nearest the homestead. Great mobs would be driven out of the low hills onto the flat of Bull Rush, contained, and driven into the gradually narrowing laneway. By the time the animals had reached the far end the distance between the two fences would go from about 300 feet apart to perhaps thirty feet. At the narrow end we’d construct a semi-permanent yard site, complete with piped-in water and a turnaround for the trucks brought in to haul away cattle destined for the meatworks.
The laneway slowly began to take shape. On the first morning, I stood where the yard was to be set up, watching Marlee and Charlie drive off to mark the fence lines. By the time they finally stopped, their truck was no more than a tiny cab floating above the ocean of grass separating us. They were easily a mile distant, and given that the distance was multiplied by two – the two sides of the laneway – we were looking at more than two miles of new fence. With pickets every ten paces, a strainer post every ten pickets, and four wires per fence, our mission was clear – and daunting.
Once the exact line was determined Charlie returned to the workshop and climbed aboard the D8 bulldozer. Within ten minutes he snorted and clanked into Bull Rush, dropped the blade, and began scraping an unnatural brown line deep into the green sea.
Marlee, meanwhile, had returned for the tractor-mounted post hole digger. This piece of machinery was a new addition, and it proved to be a godsend. Charlie and Dick had rejuvenated an old tractor that had for years sat unused behind the workshop. Once they had the relic running they’d constructed a mounting system by which the geriatric toot-snort could hold a giant auger. As well as accounting for the weight of the corkscrew itself they had to project the forces involved in operating the rear mounted device – the torque and downward thrust – and build it in a way which wouldn’t send the old gal and its operator twisting into oblivion. I have to say, I wasn’t dazzled when I first laid eyes on it; it rolled out for its test run looking about as elegant as the Grinch’s dog when saddled with reindeer horns. The ancient, discolored, spare and spindly old tractor fairly gasped under the weight of the bulky auger. But lo and behold it did its job, digging post holes three feet deep just about as easily as little Susie Who eventually won the green curmudgeon’s heart in the classic Dr. Seuss Christmas tale.
But first, lunch. Lunch had become for me a paradox, eagerly anticipated, yet also the most restless part of my routine. Now, Sundays were true days of rest. On those languid days I’d flow about, into and out of the kitchen, unfolding my tired bones onto the overstuffed furniture, my muscles delighting in the ease of domestic exertions such as carving roast beef, swinging my feet onto the ottoman, holding up a book. Sundays were days to watch at leisure the motions of all those things we spent the rest of the week disturbing – the curious-sounding cries of the local birds, the organic movements of the nearby animals. On my days off I most enjoyed watching the horses on the airstrip convene their high-strung community, frisking up and down the grass stripe – the lushest sight around the homestead. They would move in sudden sprints, then graze for a while, before someone would toss their head and they’d all be off again, romping and kicking. Nearby, the milking cows would watch the horseplay with a look of dull superiority.
So lunch has these same charms; the same largess at the meal table, the same overstuffed homemade furniture to unfold into, the same bucolic entertainments in the pasture. Yet lunch was not the same as Sunday, for shortly after the midday break a person might find himself hoisting quarter ton fenceposts into the air, or bashing 250 pickets into the ground, one hit at a time, five to twenty hits apiece, depending on the rock beneath the thin sand and salt which passes locally for topsoil. It wasn’t possible, really, to let myself sink completely into the soft embrace of downtime Bullo, knowing what the afternoons typically had in store. So I found myself staying braced for action, oftentimes eager, even, to get back to – and done with – the tasks at hand.
Bashing and hoisting is exactly what Peter and I found ourselves doing for the balance of that particular afternoon. For the umpteenth time in its long life the King was driven slowly to the fencing dump and loaded down with a taxing mound of pickets and rolls of barbed wire and plain wire and various accoutrements. Then in her eagle-eyed and methodical manner of driving Danielle ferried the gear out to the worksite.
While Bundy and Danielle distributed the pickets along the fenceline Peter and I had a different job to do. We hopped in the flatbed truck and went on a run to Nutwood for fenceposts. There, we gathered the remaining uncollected and denuded logs laying about the scrub. After about an hour of dancing and fighting with the solid French-vanilla colored logs we’d heaved twenty into a respectable pile on the back of the truck. We needed twice that many for the new laneway, so we threaded through the low-rise woodlands in our ungainly craft until we came upon a stand of trees populated with enough fencepost material to make our presence there worthwhile. Peter fired up the chain saw and attacked the eighteen inch trunk of an Ironbark. The whining engine raced as its teeth bit, then suddenly dove in pitch as the chain stalled.
“Bloody hell! Look here Dave!” cried Peter, craning his neck to look up at me from his hunched position.
I stepped forward and saw a stream of strawberry syrup flowing copiously from the wounded tree, fouling the chain and the broad blade of the saw. It continued to flow thickly as Peter stepped back. He fired the engine on his saw. The chain circled sluggishly and the engine smoked from the viscous intrusion. When it was back up to speed Peter readdressed the opposite side of the tree, and it soon tottered and fell. When it toppled a vein was exposed, about four finger widths wide, a syrupy motherload no longer valuable to its felled master.
The tree’s trunk was straight and long enough to become two healthy posts. I moved in to strip the bark after Pete pieced them and moved on. The stand provided enough nearby fenceposts that Peter managed to fell half a dozen trees by the time I finished debarking the second log. As I worked on the next tree the chainsaw was silenced, and a few moments later I heard his steady thumps answer my own. Between the two of us we stripped clean another twenty posts. Peter was a bit faster, his whacks almost always dislodging a spinning hump of severed bark. Practice definitely helped in this game, though, so I was not much slower than he.
I was pleased that my hands didn’t blister. In fact, I’d not had a blister for several weeks, despite having done many of the repetitive tasks that raise the watery welts. The metal and wood had toughened my hide, and I was glad to see it had happened.
When only a single log lay between us we attacked it from opposite ends, standing on the log facing out, methodically drawing back and dropping our axes to dislodge the bark.
“How ya holding up, mate?” asked Peter solicitously as we finished the log. By that point he and I had been barking for about three hours straight.
“I’m having fun!” I answered. “How about you?”
“I think the sun is getting to you, Dave,” he said with mock concern, then, “Let’s have a blow, then get these up on the truck.”
The day had matured into a late afternoon calm, full of the coming of night and its rhythms. We still had to onload our second crop of posts, secure it, then drive in to meet Danielle and Bundy, who were bound to be glad their wearying day of bashing pickets was over.
Our day was no easier than theirs, physically, yet I had truly enjoyed the afternoon. I found myself with sufficient stamina to go the whole course at a consistent, measured pace. There was something pleasing on an elemental level about barking; we could just as well have been building a log house circa 1820 Appalachia. Peter’s company was part of the fun; I shuddered to think how droll it would be being confined to the company of eight souls and having any of them be insufferable.
We met Danielle and Bundy along the road as we drove in. The low glow in the West was dimming quickly, but we could see the cloud of dust from their approaching vehicle a full mile away across the open field, fringed as it was by the woods we’d plundered. They apparently saw us as well, for they pulled up and awaited our ponderous approach. The dirt track was quite solid, having been nicely reconditioned by the wet season. As the mustering season continued, increased traffic and a lack of rain would pound the lane at times into a powdery bull dust, a plague to the eyes and throat and the cause of the alternate trails around any given dust pit. And where the terrain allowed no room for a detour we were to spend regular sessions pulling one vehicle or another out of the floury quagmires.
For now, only our beefy load and the antiquity of the truck hindered our progress, and we soon pulled up next to the King, killed the diesel, and rode back together in the dark, past the skeletal beginnings of the laneway, on to a cool shower, a big dinner, and a sound sleep.
Barking in Nutwood 