No such difficulties intruded when working with Eddie. The capable Aboriginal worked consistently, quietly, efficiently. With him there was no chatter, no distractions. His inscrutability intrigued me; one morning as we worked linking yard panels I decided to probe.
“So how old a man are you, Eddie?”
“Not really sure. Probably mid 30s, I reckon.”
“Really? Well, when’s your birthday?”
“July 1.”
“Oh, you’re a Cancer.” The reflexive cultural conceit tumbled unbidden from by lips.
“Cancer? What do you mean I’m a cancer?” The dark man had uncharacteristically paused in his work and looked directly at me.
“In astrology! I mean your astrological sign! I am a Taurus, the bull. Your birthday falls in the constellation of Cancer, the crab,” I said weakly. I don’t give a moment’s credibility to astrology; I was just making conversation. “I didn’t mean cancer, like a medical thing.”
“White folks give me this birthday. Now you tell me I’m cancer.” He chuckled dismissively.
“Forgive me, Eddie. I meant no harm. This is not my land; talk of astrological signs is common back home. I didn’t even think about being misunderstood. Truly, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Dave,” he said quietly as he returned to the work.
As the Europeans spread across the Australian continent they worked to integrate indigenous Australians into the European paradigm. Those aboriginal children who entered European-style schools therefore needed a birth date in order to be sorted into the appropriate grade level. In aboriginal communities birth was noted according to season, undifferentiated by day and month. So it was common for the white schoolmasters to designate July 1 as a birth date for youngsters who reported being born in winter. Fully a quarter of aboriginal people born before practices changed in 1967 were assigned a July 1 birthdate. That Eddie had no great connection to that date is understandable.
After a period of silence I opened a topic which I thought might be less fraught with minefields.
“So do you have family, Eddie?”
Again, the native stock hand paused his work and looked directly at me. “I only have family, Dave.” He held my eyes a moment, then returned to his work. Though I wasn’t entirely certain what his answer meant I again let the subject lie.
Stumpie had joined the stock camp at Twenty-Two mile with his bushman’s cooking set up to prepare our meals for us on site. Fried biscuits with butter and jam, salted beef, billy tea — the food was rustic and satisfying. I typically sat with Charlie and the girls to eat my meal. Denny separated himself a bit so he could smoke. Eddie also sat a ways away from us, serving himself a meal only after the rest of us had filled our plates with chow. Trepidatious after my early stumbles but still intensely curious about this man so different from me, I asked him about his lunchtime habits.
“I can’t just go in and please myself, step over the girls. I give them room, wait until they finish.”
“So Arunda men and women always eat separately?”
“Of course. Respect.”
“I like that, Eddie. Does that make it difficult for you to work with women, though?” I’d sensed in him a hesitancy when dealing with the outspoken women of Bullo.
“Woman is the boss at home. Man should be the boss in camp.”
I did not need to share this comment with the girls in order to know that Marlee and Danielle would have found this sentiment unbearably sexist. Though Bullo was far removed by geography from civilization, the currents of contemporary thought nonetheless flowed through the place. These were liberated women, in the sense of the word which stipulates strength and independence. For Eddie to so plainly state an idea anathema to what I took to be a given highlighted for me the distance in culture between him and me.
This recognition made his secrets even more intriguing. I’d noticed what appeared to be a geometric pattern of ritual scarification on his arms. I summoned my courage and asked gently about the marks.
“It’s not to say,” he said in his clipped and accented manner. “You lose your father, you lose your blood. But you be careful. A stranger talks about this and they can be hurt. They can be killed, even. This is not for you. You are not a stranger to me. But this is not for you.”
My mind flashed back to the scene I’d witnessed on my bus ride up, when the young man was abusing the female pool players.
“I appreciate that, Eddie. Thank you for helping me understand the boundaries. I mean no disrespect, certainly. Let me ask you this. On my ride up I saw a young aboriginal man disrespecting a couple of aboriginal women. Part of me wanted to step in and defend the girls, but there were several aboriginal adults nearby, so I didn’t. Did I make the right move?”
“Did you talk to the girls?”
“Yes; I asked one young lady what her name was.”
“This was a bad place for you. It’s good you do nothing. You could be hurt, very bad. Very bad.”
A chill went down my spine at the realization that I myself was probably the cause of the fracas, and that I was apparently so close to personal peril. I thought of the abusive storekeeper, and how he had encouraged me to get involved. It felt a betrayal, not of our white “tribal” affiliation, but of decency itself. He, and all the rest of the whites in the room, must have been aware of the thin ice upon which I was treading when I entered the pool room. That none bothered to enlighten the clueless traveler seemed an affront. Were they hoping that my missteps would lead to a brouhaha, a bit of entertainment to break up the dull and humid monotony of their day? The notion struck me as likely, and deeply angering. Eddie must have read the frustration on my face.
“You make good decision. You feel danger, you stop. That good.”
“Thank you. Yes, I try to keep my antenna out. I don’t like danger, and I don’t like to cause people harm. That’s why I feel very bad about our earlier conversation. I fear I hurt you.”
“No, no problem. You not danger. I feel danger. In front and behind. When I wake, when I sleep. I sleep with eyes and ears open. I feel family problems. I know before I hear. It’s important.”
The word “semantics” has become in common use a synonym for “trivia”, but the meaning behind the word is the opposite of trivial. Semantics was the field of a Polish scientist and philosopher named Alfred Korzybski, who introduced me to the profundity of the concept. Korzybski dove deep into the relationship between language and reality. The insight of his which has stayed with me was this formulation: the map is not the territory. Words, like lines on maps, are approximations of the geography they seek to describe. But words, like drawings of mountains, are mere representations of the much richer and deeper reality they seek to convey. Words are no more than the shadows of clouds floating far above the true topography of meaning.
I recognized this dynamic at work in Eddie’s simple utterance. I knew that the type of awareness his clipped phrases sought to capture was beyond words, in the first place, and, further, a description of a universe I would never have the opportunity to explore. But I was glad he shared. Understanding that one cannot understand is understanding nonetheless, and understanding brings people together. Knowing the magnitude of stranger I was working with made me feel closer to him.
Once all the needed materials had been transported to the yard site some of us saved ourselves the trouble of driving back and forth every morning and night. Our stock camp was a “camp” in the loosest sense of the term. My “quarters” consisted of a tarp laid upon the ground, piled with a sleeping bag, a few auxiliary blankets, and a couple changes of clothes. A more elaborate set up would have been nice, but with clear weather and the need to haul, erect, and disassemble any other sort of contrivance, my simple setup was perfectly satisfactory. And when the starry skies are the caliber of brilliance found in outback nights, there’s a definite charm to going to sleep under the Southern Cross. I asked Eddie one night what he made of the Milky Way. He stretched his hand to the sky and traced a pattern, assigning it a name I had never heard before. He said it translates as emu, the large flightless bird and cousin of the ostrich, common throughout Australia. Just how the emu figured in aboriginal cosmology, I had no way of knowing.
He then pointed at the nearly full moon and said, “fat man.”
“In America we say there is a man in the moon. We also say the moon is made of cheese.”
“Fat man eat bad people,” he replied. “He dies, then comes again, strong and thin.” I heard in his description the moon cycle, from full to new, followed by the rising crescent, cycling through again to full.
The indigenous people of Australia are the longest continuously surviving people on this planet, with a history perhaps 60,000 years long. Unlike our contemporary cultures, so absorbed with tinkering with ourselves and our structures in the pursuit of societal perfection, aboriginal cultural traditions are cyclical. Sons do what fathers did, and their fathers did before them, and daughters do what mothers and grandmothers did. In the cyclical paradigm practices and rituals aren’t meddled with; they satisfy need. It’s the animating story behind the traditions, rather than the traditions themselves, which is perfected. So when Eddie shared with me his cosmology I was aware of participating, however peripherally, in a tradition twice as old as the earliest known cave paintings. The Jewish Seder, at 3500 years old, is a toddler in the world of traditions in comparison.
Denny meanwhile was sitting nearby strumming his guitar, reprising his Aussie Bobby McGee.
…windshield wipers slapping time
when I got stuck on the fourteenth line
of the fifteenth verse of Advance Australia Fair…
Between Denny’s lamentations and Eddie’s intimations of ancient mystery, I realized stock camp wasn’t nearly as rough as I’d been led to believe it might be.
In the morning, the boys and I were busy lining the long laneway leading to the yards with what the Australians call hessian, what we back home called burlap. Doing so makes the border fence more visible to the cattle, making them more likely to follow the fence line into the yard. In the afternoon we moved the beastly water troughs in place and filled them with creek water. This required setting up a pump and hose line from the creek to the yards. These were the last duties before the muster, set to begin at daybreak next morning. At sunset I took the opportunity for a bath in Bull Creek. When I hopped out and toweled off, I plucked three leeches off my legs as casually as a valet flicks lint off a tuxedo, then settled under my blanket of stars for a deep sleep.
Before sunrise, I joined Danielle in the King as we drove several miles into the bush. Eddie and Denny did the same with Marlee and Stumpie, respectively, each vehicle fanned in slightly different directions. As always, various mobs of cattle would stop munching as we approached, and eye us suspiciously. Given our agenda for the day, I credited their concern as well-warranted. Danielle parked in a swale and killed the engine. I hopped out to have a squirt. When I closed the door behind me, the metallic sound reverberating through the bush, Danielle wasn’t pleased.
“Quiet, drongo!” She hissed. “Let’s not have all the cattle run from us, eh?”
At daybreak, another sound filled the air. Two helicopters approached from the direction of home, then flew past us beyond earshot.
“Those fellas will begin pushing the cattle. When they reach our position, we’ll start driving behind the mobs and help push them up with the trucks,” Danielle explained. “When we get to the yards you’ll hop out to close the gate, okay?”
In the growing light we began to see cattle in the near distance, walking with a sense of urgency past us. As the morning went on the numbers increased, as did the pace of the animals. After an hour or so we heard the helicopters not far behind us and, for the first time, I witnessed the astonishing acrobatic ability of these bush pilots. Though the tallest trees were no more than 50 feet high the small choppers would regularly drop out of view, then reappear at cockeyed angles, swivel their tails dramatically a hundred eighty degrees, then drop out of sight again. They pitched and weaved and bobbed and turned constantly, masters of the stick and pedal in a battle of wills with the most willful of their four-legged adversaries.
When the nearest chopper reached our position, Danielle fired up the ute and we took our place in the process. Weaving back and forth, we urged the recalcitrant lollygaggers along. Given that we were not on a road, Danielle, not a tall woman, sat ramrod-straight and raised her chin to gain her best view of the terrain. I hung out the window or pressed my nose against the windshield to help her avoid major pits and termite mounds. The majority of the cattle corp’s rearguard were scrub bulls, decidedly less than smitten with the intrusion into their day. Most were veterans of previous musters who’d learned through experience that moving along obediently was strictly voluntary.
When we reached an open grassland near the head of the laneway, several of these bulls made their stand. Two or three easily evaded our pursuit and headed back into the scrub. When Danielle wheeled to get behind one particularly burly specimen, it turned and faced us, paused for a moment, then put its considerable head down and charged. Danielle turned slightly, so that when he contacted the vehicle its horns penetrated neither rubber nor radiator. The angry bull jarred us heavily upon contact, then jostled us in our seats as it attempted to flip the vehicle. Having made its point, it backed off several steps, snorted, and headed for the bush. One of the choppers made a last ditch effort to turn the cranky beast by hovering five feet over its head. The bull spent a moment trying to hook the chopper with its horns, tossing its head and raising its bulk off its front feet. The pilot, a determined fellow himself, was no fool, and recognized the imbalance of losing a chopper versus losing a bull to the bush. He wheeled to turn his attention elsewhere. As she did so, the mighty bull took two or three steps, then fell heavily on its side, dead.
I don’t know whether this bull suffered a fatal injury when it rammed our truck, or whether his heart simply gave out from stress and exertion. I do know that his eventually he would’ve been captured in the bush during bull catching season, tied up, and hauled off to the meat works. Bullo, like all cattle enterprises, needs to be very careful about which animals propagate the herd. So his ultimate fate was to be the same, essentially, as he experienced laying there in the field amidst the muster. But I couldn’t help feeling that his end was tragic, nonetheless. This bull clearly had a big spirit. The vehicles he was willing to engage were more ferocious by comparison to him even than he was to me. Yet there’s no way I would ever take him on, nose to nose, the way he faced up to our machinery. There was a nobility in his act that I admired, and, in its loss, for which I silently grieved.
But there was no time for sentimentality. We in the trucks and the choppers above funneled the last of the mob down the laneway towards the gate. At the very last moment, with the choppers hovering thirty feet above, Eddie and I jumped out of our vehicles and, awash in bull dust and adrenaline, raced to close the gates. When the chain locked in place, we had 2500 cattle contained, every single one of which needed to be categorized and processed. This was to be a long three days.
Being my second time around, the process was familiar. Fill the forcing pen, categorize, castrate, dehorn, ear tag, brand. In the morning and again in the evening we’d fill the water troughs and bust bales of hay in each pen. Evening brought a simple meal, a bit of conversation regarding that day’s accomplishments and the next day’s tasks, perhaps a bath in the creek, then a sound sleep under the stars.
One twist in the routine came from an unexpected source. On the morning of the second day we were joined by the government stock inspector, a ruddy and rotund man named Bluey Edwards. Bluey was a redhead, a coloring not well adapted to the relentless sun of the Top End. Despite his oversize Akubra, the sun had ravaged his bare arms, and the back of his neck above his collar. Bluey was there to certify that the herd’s inoculations were up-to-date and properly administered.
“I saw the damnedest thing the other day,” he said to Charlie and the girls as we sat together for our lunch break. “I was driving on the track a bit east of Kunnunarra when there’s this bloke with a handlebar mustache and wearing a bloody top hat, just rolling down the road on this bloody great push bike. It was the old-fashioned kind, you know, with the great front wheel and the tiny rear wheel. I reckon he was damn near two meters in the air! And he’s just rolling down the road, you know, happy as a dog with a bone. I give him a little wave, and he waves back, and away he goes. I actually pulled off the road in order to look back and make sure it wasn’t a bloody mirage! But no, there he was, wheeling off into the distance. Damnedest thing I ever seen!”
“You’d stopped off to knock back a tinny, I reckon?” Charlie jabbed.
“Or two?” Marlee appended.
“Or three!” Danielle guffawed.
“Bloody hell, mate! I saw the same bastard!” Denny exclaimed. “I tried to tell Dave about it, but he didn’t believe me!”
I locked eyes with Denny in a moment of silent discordance as I absorbed the possibility that the jokester’s fantastical tale upon meeting was true. “Well, I still don’t believe you,” I chuckled. “I believe Bluey, I suppose, but I still have my doubts about you!”
“Well, I’m telling you mate. There he was, plain as day, rolling down the road on his great big push-bike. Bluey saw him, I saw him, and now you’ll do well to believe me when I tell you something,” the troubadour said with a triumphant smile.
“Denny, the day I believe everything you tell me is the day no one else should believe anything I say, because that will be a sign I have lost my mind,” I said with a faux gravity.
“So what do you reckon he was up to?” Charlie wondered.
“No bloody idea, mate. I have no idea at all,” Bluey said, shaking his head.
What none of us knew, and which would have been beyond any of our conception, was that, as we spoke, Phil McDonald was pedaling his penny-farthing bicycle down the single lane of bitumen in this same inhospitable Northern Territory. McDonald’s self-propelled journey around the entire perimeter of the Australian continent in 1988 earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. His 15,000 km ride was a fundraiser for Rotary Australia’s Polio Plus campaign. He raised over $100,000 for the cause, and along the way provided, for a small knot of folks sitting around a cookfire in the wilderness of the outback, a moment of surreal contemplation.
Barking in Nutwood 