The White Earth (12 page)

‘National Parks are funding him too,’ the ranger said. ‘There’s talk of an Aboriginal cultural centre up in the park, if we can get enough information.’

The young man smiled ironically. ‘Might be more than that, once these new laws come in. With enough historical evidence, who knows, the land council might put in a claim over the park. It’s Crown land, after all.’

‘Hmm.’ The ranger shifted his cap unhappily. ‘We’ll see.’ He turned to William’s uncle again.‘So, this creek, it ends up running through your property?’

The old man nodded. ‘About a mile from here it turns west and crosses the boundary.’

‘Yeah, we went that far. No holes, I suppose, along your stretch?’

‘No.’

‘Wouldn’t be the water for it, I guess.’

‘Most of the time we hardly get any flow at all.’

The ranger shoved away from the post. ‘I guess that’s that then. ’He gave the student a look.‘It’s back up into the hills for us.’

‘Fair enough.’ The young man addressed William’s uncle. ‘Thanks for your help.’

‘Yeah,’ the ranger added. ‘Good of you to stop. What brings you up this way anyway? Lost a few beasts or something?’

‘Showing the boy around.’

‘Ah. Good. Nice-looking piece of land it is, too. Bit dry, of course.’

‘It’s the times.’

The ranger tipped his cap, and the two men turned away.

‘Let’s go,’ William’s uncle said coldly.

They went back to the utility and climbed in. William remained silent while his uncle started up and drove along the fence for a while. The track curved away from the creek finally, and began to climb another hill. Halfway up the old man slowed the vehicle, then turned it around, the wheels jolting on the rough ground. He switched the engine off. William stared about curiously.

‘Why have we stopped?’

‘Shut up for a minute.’

His uncle was gazing intently through the windscreen. Abashed, William looked too. They were facing back towards the creek. Far off through the trees, William could see the red splash of the tent, and the men moving about it. His uncle was watching them, his hands gripped tight on the steering wheel. William’s head was full of questions, but obviously his uncle wasn’t in the mood to answer them, so he waited. Eventually the tent was taken down. The ranger went to the creek and dipped something into the water. Was he filling a water bottle? Then the two men set off eastwards. They were visible for a while, as they began to climb upwards, but after a few minutes they were lost in the trees.

William’s uncle seemed to relax slightly. Without comment, he started the utility, turned it round once more and continued up the rise. They crested the hill and came down the other side. William saw the creek again. It was flowing west now, having left the national park behind. The banks were fringed with long brown grass and overhanging trees. The track took them down to the waterway, and they drove alongside it for maybe half a mile. Then they came to a flat shelf of sandstone, where the land fell away. A stone bench sat there, looking as old as the rock itself, shaded by the long leaves of a willow tree.

‘End of the line,’ his uncle said.‘We’ll have lunch.’

As the old man unloaded the sandwiches and drinks, William ventured onto the stone shelf. The creek came winding down from his left, its bed rocky between the low banks, the water the merest trickle. On reaching the shelf it spread into a small pool that was maybe a foot deep, before spilling through a worn lip in the stone. William stared over the lip in amazement. For the water fell in a sudden drop, a dozen feet perhaps, into a miracle. Nestled in the dry hillside, hidden by trees and high rocky banks, was a water hole. It was long and wide and, judging by the darkness of the water, deep. The stone bench had been set right on the brink of the shelf, and William crouched there, gazing down. Around the edges of the pool he could see rocks that lay just below the surface, and the ghostly limbs of trees that had fallen in from above. At the far end he could tell that the pool became shallow again, before ebbing over another lip of stone, and winding away along the creek bed once more. But in the middle, and directly below him where the water dripped over the shelf, the depths were pitch black and the bottom was invisible.

His uncle was standing beside him, staring down at the pool, some unreadable emotion in his eyes. William looked up at him in questioning confusion.

‘Well,’ the old man said, ‘you wanted somewhere to swim.’

Chapter Twelve

D
ANIEL MCIVOR DIED DURING JOHN’S SECOND YEAR IN THE mountains. The message came up to the logging camp via a human telegraph line of bullock drivers and timber-getters, and it told John that the burial would be delayed until his return to Powell. He put up his axe, walked down out of the mountains, and caught a ride into town. He found that his mother and sister had been evicted from the hotel and were staying with cousins from his mother’s side. His father — officially bankrupt — had seen out his last weeks in a ward at the Powell General Hospital, dying from a disease of the liver. The only thing he’d left to his son was a chest of personal belongings. John glanced through it once, puzzled over some of the contents, then shut it up and stored it away in a warehouse.

The funeral was small, just the immediate family and a few of the old workers from Kuran Station. There was no representative from the White family, nor any message of condolence. John had no doubt that if his father had died only a few years earlier he would have been buried with honour in the Kuran graveyard, alongside the Whites’ grandiose tombs. Instead, he had a mean plot in the Powell cemetery. Watching the coffin sink, John wondered what it was he should be feeling. Grief? It wasn’t there. His father had failed completely, and his last years had only displayed the shame of it in public. Better that he was dead. As for John’s mother and sister, when he said goodbye after the funeral, he had no expectation of ever seeing them again.

He hitched a ride back to the mountains. If he belonged anywhere now, if there was such a thing as a home in his exile, it was in the Hoops, high in the logging camps with his fellow timber-getters. There amidst the forest they laboured from dawn to dusk, chopping and sawing, their tents set up in clearings stamped out of the undergrowth. And despite the annoyances of ticks and leeches and damp, it was a strangely satisfying life, following its own patterns and laws. The loggers were quiet men, for the most part, like John himself. They could even be called lonely, but there was nothing small or defeated about them. They measured themselves against the giant trees every day. Not even the drovers or shearers of Kuran Station had impressed John so much, and within his own small gang he felt an irresistible sense of acceptance. There was no hint of the boy about him any longer, he was full grown and strong, an equal amongst independent men.

His closest friend through the following years was a fellow logger named Dudley Green. They were the same age, but whereas John was tall and dark and silent, Dudley was short, sandy-haired and smiling. He was the second son of a wheat farmer — one of those very farmers who had taken up a claim on the old Kuran land. But Dudley had no interest in wheat and so had set out to make his own way. He and John formed a team, alternating axe blows or working at either end of the huge saws. At first, John found his partner’s quick tongue and innate cheerfulness almost grating. But in time he saw what lay beneath — a hardy spirit bent on confronting a grim world, and no less determined about it than John himself. Dudley talked more than John, and drank more and swore more and fought more,but each of them recognised the same resilient quality in the other, and admired it.

It was something new for John. He’d never had a close friend before, never shared the pains of his life with anyone. He even found himself telling Dudley about his youth on Kuran Station — about what had been promised, and what had been taken away. And Dudley listened, shaking his head with a ready sympathy, but also with an indifference that spoke more than commiserations. After all, what needed to be said? Everyone had been through difficult times with the depression — why should John be any different? At least he was making his own honest living now, wasn’t he? So what more acknowledgment did the great tragedy need than a rueful shrug? In response, John felt an awakening breeze blow through him. His friend was right. The events of his childhood, the grand betrayal … how trivial it all sounded when told aloud over a campfire.

For a time he lifted his gaze from himself, and regarded the world afresh. It was then that the mountains began to captivate him. Despite years of logging, much of the area was still relatively pristine, especially where the national park had been declared, and it was a place utterly unlike the plains of his youth. Down there it was a flat and featureless world, a great empty space beneath a wide sky. In the mountains the sky was something that was only glimpsed through treetops, or observed as a narrow shard of blue between the hills. There was no horizon. Clouds loomed without warning at any time, sweeping up from below in misty reverse avalanches, or swooping above the mountain tops, their dark bellies pregnant with rain. It was a world of smells. Pine and eucalyptus. Damp earth, rotting leaves,campfire smoke. It was a world of colour too,the deep glistening green of ferns and creepers in the rain forests, dappled with sunlight, the dusty khaki of the bush on the lower slopes, the startling red of a parrot, the raw crimson of split and bleeding wood, the fine white shimmer of a waterfall.

And more than anything else it was a world of noises. The roar of wind as it swept over the hills and set the trees thrumming. The piping of birds, crystal in the high air. The bubble of streams, and the distant rush of water plunging into chasms. The thumps of wallabies as they leapt through the undergrowth, and the scrabble of bush turkeys, clustering around camp sites. And echoes. There had been no echoes out on the plains. But the mountains rang with them, and sounds seemed to travel fantastic distances. The forests reverberated with distant axes at work, the steady clock of steel striking wood or the hungry rasp of saws. Bullocks snuffed and groaned as they laboured in hidden gullies, their drivers’ shouts rising, punctuated by cracks of whips. Trucks whined on the lower mountain tracks. And every once in a while there would come the deep, rumbling rush and crackle that signified the felling of yet another tree, and for a moment the entire range would stand still, hushed, as the echoes rolled back and forth. John would never find another place where sound would seem so three dimensional, so crisp, and so suggestive.

It was a world of secrets, too. On the plains, everything could be seen and only the very curve of the earth could hide you. In the mountains, the land turned in on itself, concealing, and yet revealing something new with almost every step. New vistas, new perspectives. Dark gullies where the sun never shone. Sheer cliffs that dropped away without warning right beneath your feet. Granite boulders that lay piled in creek beds as if torrents had once gushed there. Caves that had been scooped out of bluffs by the wind and rain. Giant strangler fig trees that had trunks hollowed out like spreading tents. Dead tree stumps full of water, alive with swimming creatures. Bizarrely shaped fungi, feeding off the rotting limbs of fallen trees. Spreading fogs that blanketed the hills for days, and sent creeping tendrils under the forest canopy. The strange warmth of the rain forest even in deepest winter. The sheer amazement of snow on the exposed peaks, as alien and impossible as it was fleeting, melting within hours.

The beauty of it all washed cold and cleansing through John, but it was the deeper mysteries of the mountains that called most strongly to him,and awakened some dormant part of his soul. There were the balds, for one thing, here and there on the hilltops, soft grassy pates, often littered with granite boulders and stones. They offered the only unobstructed views of the plains far below, and later, lookouts would be built there for tourists, but for the first wanderers in the mountains, they were strange, windswept, inexplicable places. Were they made by Aborigines in some earlier time? The old timers said they weren’t,but John,circling the clearings and probing the soil with his feet, was not so sure. Maybe they weren’t man-made, but something about them spoke to man all the same.

Then there were the bunya pines. They were tall, straight trees that opened to a conical dome, often rising far above the rest of the forest canopy. For the loggers they promised many thousands of feet of timber, but for the Aborigines, in earlier times, they had promised food, because they bore large, smooth cones that made a superlative meal. These ‘nuts’ ripened every three years, when Aboriginal tribes from far and wide would converge on the mountains to gorge themselves in a great festival. The loggers did the same, roasting the cones and feasting on the almost over-rich, buttery kernels. And whenever they came across one of the old leviathan pines, they would see, running up its trunk to where the cones grew, a ladder of footholds, seemingly cut out by a stone axe, perhaps as much as two centuries earlier. All across the mountains there was no other clear sign that people had been there before white men — no dwellings or middens or cave drawings. There were only these notches hewn in the tree trunks, slowly disappearing.

It wasn’t that John cared about the Aborigines themselves. They were gone and wouldn’t be coming back. But he walked the hills and pondered all he saw, the bunya pines, and the grassy hilltops, and it seemed to him that there was something about these places that those earliest inhabitants must surely have recognised in their turn. Maybe they had not made the clearings; but sensing the atmosphere of those places, had they positioned the stones? Likewise, there were caves, and certain rock outcrops and waterfalls that spoke to John of a long human presence. Of being important to that human presence. He could not define it, but it was there. He talked with men who had lived all their lives in the Hoops. They claimed to remember the last tribes who had roamed the hills, and even to have seen the last of the bunya nut festivals. But according to these old men, the blacks had never lived in the mountains — supposedly they’d believed the upper hills to be haunted by spirits. So they had climbed the range solely in the daytime, to harvest the pine cones, and then had withdrawn to the lower slopes to hold their festivals by night.