One for the Road Read online

  Like many of the Aboriginal clans in this part of the country, the Kooma once ranged across the bush, following the supply of game and water. When living off the land became difficult, they’d settle at the fringes of white civilization, taking jobs as drovers and housemaids, or collecting food and blankets distributed by the government. By the 1930s, this camp outside Cunnamulla had become a permanent home to a few hundred of Hazel’s people.

  Ever since, the Kooma have had one foot in their traditional culture and one foot in the white man’s world.

  “See that cedar tree over there?” Hazel says. “That’s where I was raised. We had a hut made out of posts and calico.” It is the first time I have ever seen someone point to a stand of timber and call it home. A little farther on, Hazel shows me a “scarred tree” that has a cavity in its soft mulga trunk where wood was cut out and carved into a clublike weapon, called a “nulla nulla.” There are bits of flake and flint on the ground, and grooves in the rock where axes were honed. It all has the feel of an archeological site, except that the cultural remains are still above ground.

  Hazel, like many Aborigines, went to work as a housemaid at a white station when she was twelve. At sixteen, she married an Aboriginal drover, by arrangement, and began raising eight children while her husband followed herds of stock through the bush of southern Queensland. The family would travel for four or five months at a time, building huts like the one in Cunnamulla, or as Hazel puts it, “living from tree to tree.”

  If the life-style was traditional, the schooling was not. Hazel taught her kids by correspondence, sending away for books and lessons from the Queensland government. She’d help the children study, then send the books in to be graded.

  And between droving trips, the family returned to the camp outside Cunnamulla, where the lean-to by the cedar tree was always there waiting for them.

  “If you caught an emu, the neighbor got a leg,” Hazel says. “Then maybe there’d be some mulga apples or kangaroo. That was a big night then, a real party. No one worried about going uptown in them days.”

  Uptown was Cunnamulla, the white fellas’ place, where the Kooma kept to the fringes. Blacks could go to the pictures, but they had to enter through a side alley and sit in front, cordoned off by a rope barrier. Otherwise, the two societies kept to themselves.

  Then, in the 1960s, the government began moving the Kooma into fibro houses in town as part of the grander scheme of assimilating Aborigines. In 1975 the government bulldozed the camp and turned it into the town dump. After an initial period of unease, Cunnamulla’s blacks now live peaceably beside their white neighbors, in identikit houses with identikit lawns. The shops and workplaces have all been integrated, though an informal separation survives at the local pubs.

  Hazel isn’t sure how to feel about the change. On the one hand, her children have prospered in the white man’s world, as schoolteachers, public servants, and wool classers. They don’t have to worry about educating their children by correspondence, or wonder if the white fella will suddenly bulldoze their home.

  But Hazel fears that the Kooma’s communal life-style has been lost. “People still help each other,” she says, “but it’s not automatic, like in the old days.” The move into town has also severed the Kooma’s link to the land and traditional belief. Only the elders remember. For years after the camp was bulldozed, old men took their tucker boxes and hiked from town to picnic amidst the broken metal and twisted glass. It was still yumba to them.

  Hazel has also held on. She talks to the old people and writes down what they know of the “Matya-Mundu,” the time long ago. Sometimes the stories are legend, telling of the mundugatta, a rainbow serpent, who made waterholes along the Warrego River and filled them with yellow-belly, catfish, and cod. At other times it is day-to-day practices that she records; how to gather the sweet fruit of the wilga tree, known as “snorty gobble,” or the best way to get emu eggs and hunt goannas.

  Often, though, the memory is bitter, telling of the brutal ways of the white man. One curious tale concerns a German doctor who came to study a small group of hairless Kooma men in the 1880s. He wanted to take skin samples back to Germany, but the Aborigines refused. Later, a Kooma corpse was mysteriously shipped to Berlin. Hazel thinks it had something to do with the scientist’s research.

  Hazel also clings to the rituals of her people. Traditionally, a death among the Kooma was followed by the “smoking” of the relatives’ homes. Hazel continues the custom by walking through the house with a bucketful of burning dogwood leaves. She says it clears away the bad spirits and calms the young ones.

  “We can’t go back to what we were,” she says, “but if we keep running after the wayibald—that’s the white fella—we will belong to him, not to us.”

  Hazel seems to have found a way to do more than just preserve her people’s past. When she walks me through the “Bottom Camp,” where the Kooma once hunted echidnas and fished in summer, it is with the simple ease of a woman showing a friend the nooks and crannies of her rambling home. The past is still present for her.

  For the children, who have grown up in the white man’s world, identity is more muddled. Little Man tells me how he won the lizard race in town; apparently, the white fellas can’t compete at that. And one of the little girls teaches me a few Aboriginal words; bread is “muntha” and mouse sounds something like “mangumangu.”

  But when Hazel finishes telling me how Kooma men tapped on the ground to chase out goannas, Little Man and another boy tug at my sleeve and quiz me about The A-Team and Sesame Street. One of the little girls asks me for the names of Americans she can adopt as pen pals. And all of them want to know about black people in the United States. “If I went there, could I be in movies too?” asks a girl of about eleven. “Or would they know I was not really a Negro?” Just a generation removed from the bush, they are as eager to embrace my culture as I am to embrace theirs.

  After a swim in the Warrego, after goat’s milk and tea, Hazel offers me her home as resting place for the night. But I am still impatient to put some distance behind me; after three days, I am not yet six hundred miles from Sydney. So I thank her and promise to stop in if I come this way again.

  In the sharp, shadowed light of late afternoon, I go uptown, through the white fellas’ land, and then out to the wilderness beyond. If I don’t get a ride before dark I’ll camp somewhere out here, beneath a cedar tree perhaps.

  I see the landscape differently now. For the past few days, I’ve kept my eye trained on the distant horizon, hoping for something more interesting than the bleak, monotonous foreground. Hazel has shown me that there’s often a gem right there out the passenger window. All you need is someone to show you how to turn it to catch the light.

  5 … The Sheep’s Back

  It is in the nature of epiphanies that they go “piph” and disappear. The magic glow that embraced me at dusk evaporates in a paddock at dawn with a nudge from a policeman’s boot. “Private property, mate,” the trooper says. I have gone to sleep in Hazel’s yumba and awakened back in the white fellas’ Queensland.

  The officer checks my driver’s license while I pull on pants and shoes. “Carrying any of that funny stuff, mate?”

  I assume he means marijuana. “No sir, Officer. No sir.” This is Queensland after all, Australia’s answer to Alabama. “Mostly just books, Officer.” I hand him T. S. Eliot, Patrick White, Woody Allen.

  His official face falls away. “I’m headed up the road for a cuppa tea,” he says. “Want a ride?”

  So much for big bad Queensland.

  We pull up beside a trucker—called a “truckie” in Australia—who is poking his arms through the wooden siding of a road train, trying to unlock the horns of two butting sheep. I watch him wrestle for a moment, then ask if he’s headed north. He nods. I ask if he’s got room for a rider. He shrugs. I climb into the cab and we rumble off through the mulga.

  There are 160 breeding rams in the two trailers behind us. All must be delivered
by day’s end. Apparently, it is a job requiring intense concentration. For the nine-hundred-mile round-trip from his home in New South Wales, the driver, a part Aboriginal named Paul, carries nothing more than a bedroll, a waterbag, and an Elvis Presley cassette. There is room for me but not for conversation.

  “A bloke has to keep moving when he’s hauling stock,” Paul says after half an hour of silence. It is the last word he utters in the three hours until midday.

  The scenery’s not too lively either, so I start combing the library stacks crammed inside my pack. This time I pass over T. S. Eliot for a more prosaic text—a tourist commission brochure entitled “Outback Queensland.” The first glossy page tells me that Charleville, through which we are about to pass, is home to the Steiger Vortex Gun. Apparently, townspeople became so hot and bothered in 1902 that they fired six homemade cannons to move the air and draw in a raincloud.

  Nothing happened. So they retired to the bar instead. Charleville was already a “ten-pub town” by the turn of the century, the brochure says. A rather strange way to measure population; but then, much stranger yardsticks lie ahead.

  The tourist guide is less effusive about the next dot on the map. “Augathella,” it reports, “is 50 miles north of Charleville.” That’s all. This obscurity is compounded by a new highway having recently bypassed Augathella, which is 750 miles from Sydney and about 500 from Brisbane. A plaintive sign now beckons from the distant road: “Do not pass us—call in!”

  We go one better, depositing ten stud rams in the town’s empty main street. The sheep are earmarked—literally, with red and pink ear tags—for a man named Tony Wearing, who owns a property out of town. He and his son, Clint, are to meet us in Augathella at midday.

  I assume the Wearings will be dressed like New South Wales cockies, in shorts and singlets and elastic-side workboots. Instead I find myself at high noon, face-to-face with Marlboro Man and Marlboro Boy. Lean and ruggedly handsome, the two cowboys saunter toward me in stiff jeans, riding boots, and wide-brimmed hats. I’m not sure whether to say “G’day,” “Howdy partner,” or “Draw!”

  It seems that silence is the appropriate response; sheep herding, like sheep delivering, breeds a certain reserve. Tony tips his Akubra hat at Paul. Paul nods. Clint, who appears to be about twelve, stands slightly behind his father, kicking gravel and staring at his feet. He looks as if he began mustering stock in the stroller and has done little else since.

  The three go about their business so quietly that I begin wondering if there’s something illicit about the whole operation. Then Tony breaks the silence with a flat-toned one-liner.

  “The girls are gonna love these big stud rams.” His wink is so big it lifts one whole side of his face. “And if they don’t, we’ll just have to give ’em a kick in the you-know-where.” Then he and Clint load their bleating cargo inside a truck and disappear into the bush. I suspect Clint won’t see another stranger before the next load of rams.

  My own horizons are about to broaden. Ever since Dubbo, the automobile has been a cocoon against the bleak and arid landscape beyond the windscreen. And north of Charleville, the road becomes so narrow that vehicles drop two wheels onto the dirt shoulder to avoid sideswiping each other as they pass. The travel is as unsettling as it is dull.

  But after Augathella the road plunges into a sweeping grassland that resembles the “big sky” country of the American West. Clouds drift lazily toward a distant horizon, broken only by the occasional flat-topped mesa, or “jump-up,” as they’re called in Queensland. It is the sort of setting that looks naked without a Sioux Indian or two galloping into the middle distance.

  I feel my eye and spirit drawn outward across the open plain. Even Paul is stirred to comment. “Plenty of room to move out here,” he says, stretching his legs. Then silence for another hour.

  The writer Paul Theroux once observed that conversing with strangers is a peculiarly American compulsion. “To get an American talking it is only necessary to be within shouting distance and wearing a smile,” he writes. “Your slightest encouragement is enough to provoke a nonstop rehearsal of the most intimate details of your fellow traveler’s life.”

  He’s right, of course. Whenever I replay my first hitchhiking trip across America, ten years ago, it comes out like a blurry home movie—Rocky Mountains, Grand Canyon, the wet green Oregon woods—with a voice-over of one Middle American after another reciting his life story. That was one of the things I liked so much about hitching: getting a personalized tour of the continent with people I’d never otherwise meet.

  So far on this trip I’ve been lucky to extract a complete sentence from a driver, much less a life story. As a reporter in Sydney, Australians have sometimes struck me as shy, at least by American standards. But I assumed it was a city-bred reticence, or maybe some remnant of English reserve. Now, after riding with so many silent country folk, I’m beginning to suspect that it’s the bush that is the true home of the taciturn Australian.

  Near Tambo, Paul touches my arm and points at an astonishing tree that has a short and grotesquely stout trunk, rising to a bushy head. It looks like a bowling pin with an Afro haircut.

  “Bottle trees,” he says. “Fattest trees in the world.”

  I dig into my rucksack’s library for a paperback guide to Australian fauna and flora. Bottle tree. Brachychiton rupestris. Also known as Australian baobab, or boab. Native to South Africa, Australia, and nowhere else. Girth of up to fifty-nine feet. Sumo wrestlers of the Southern Hemisphere.

  Paul turns between two really obese specimens—some kind of signpost, apparently—and enters a sheep station the size of a medieval principality. It is six miles before we reach the manor, a split-level palace with tennis courts and swimming pools girdled round. The lord and lady are in Europe, Paul explains, while the prince and princess are being finished at a boarding school in Toowoomba. But there is a feudal retainer on hand to escort us by motorcycle to a back paddock of the forty-eight-thousand-acre property. Forty-eight thousand acres. That’s bigger than my birthplace, Washington, D.C.—but with a population of five instead of seven hundred thousand.

  Not counting the animals, of which there seem to be several million. But for some reason our sheep don’t want to join this livestock ghetto. As soon as Paul opens the tailgate, the rams retreat into a rugby scrum at the back of the trailer. First in is the caretaker’s sheepdog. He barks and howls and emerges a moment later, butted and bruised. We prod at the animals from the sides of the trailer. Still nothing. Finally, Paul crawls in on hands and knees to drag a ram out by its horns. The others follow, as sheep are wont to do.

  “Bloody dumb beasts,” Paul mutters before catching himself and falling silent. Receipts are exchanged. One vassal nods to another. And a transaction worth several thousand dollars is done without the absentee owners missing a ray of sun on the Riviera. Some among the Lucky Countrymen have ridden far atop the merino’s back.

  From the “rolling down” country of the sheepocracy we drive into the dusty towns of the wool proletariat. Here the homes are modest, the men brawny from wrestling and shearing sheep. It is late in the day, though, and most are hoisting nothing weightier than a pot of beer. Paul has to keep moving stock, so I pile out at a town called Blackall and retire to the Bushman’s Hotel to wash down all that quiet.

  Over a tinnie of Fourex, served outback-style in a Styrofoam holder, I learn that a husky lad named Jackie Howe made shearing history near Blackall in 1892. He clipped 321 sheep in less than eight hours (almost one a minute), a feat that took fifty-eight years and mechanized shearing to surpass. The standard-issue singlet that shearers wear has been known ever since as the “Jackie Howe.”

  The crush of drinkers and the sweaty Jackie Howes give the Bushman Hotel all the jostle and stink of a woolshed. But then, after four days on the road, I’m no rose either. My shorts and khaki shirt are coated in dust. My hair is matted and much too long for soliciting rides, not to mention standing in the outback sun. What better place than B
lackall to get the shearing done?

  The local hairdresser takes one look at my sweaty locks and decides she is closing early. So I hitch a ride with two shearers deeper into sheep country, deeper into sheep history. Barcaldine, an hour farther on, was the site of the “Great Shearers’ Strike” of 1891. When the shearers laid down their blades and manned a picket line, the stationmasters brought in scabs and the Queensland government sent troops. Eventually, the strike was broken and the union leaders arrested under an ancient statute barring “unlawful assemblage, riot and tumult.” But the strike spawned nationwide union meetings, and later, the creation of the Australian Labor Party.

  Northwest of Barcaldine, the land becomes flat and bare again. The map shows almost nothing for some distance after a place named Winton, so just before sunset I hop out at a turn-off to the plainly named town.

  If Blackall is the woolly shoulder of Queensland sheep country, Winton is its neglected dag end. Even at tea time the streets are so scorched and dusty that I feel like Lawrence of Arabia navigating from the highway to the business center. The first sign of impending civilization is the public toilet, labeled “Rams” on the men’s door and “Ewes” on the women’s. I turn on the cold tap and feel my arms scoured by hot artesian water.

  Time to consult my tourist guide. Maybe there’s someplace more inviting a little farther along. There isn’t.

  Anyway, the tourist guide tells me that even wretched Winton has its claims to fame. A “large predator” chased some smaller dinosaurs near town 100 million years ago, leaving tracks that are “a tourist must.” More recently, a plane carrying Lyndon Baines Johnson touched down on a Winton airstrip. It was twenty years before he became president, but in a place like this, even brushes with fame-to-be are worthy of recording.