The Unforgiving Shore Read online

  The dining room curtains were closed; she parted them and looked out across a shaded veranda with deck-chairs, to a well-watered green lawn and, a hundred yards away, a barrier of blue gums. She could see beyond the line of trees. The land fell away slightly and then stretched across bare acres to a horizon in a bronze infinity.

  She went back to the lounge; there was a rich smell of scented wood and the sparkle of small ornaments on tables. Her eye was drawn to a piece of stone several feet high and wide, which dominated the room with its line drawings of fishes and lizards in yellow, blue and red. At first sight, she thought that the stone was a strange and arresting decoration; she knew that there was much art that was incomprehensible to her. She would learn later that the two dancing figures on the stone were said to be linked to the morning star which was guiding them to the land of the dead, where their souls would rest.

  Whatever it might be like in the oven outside, she felt that she could enjoy living here. She drifted around that morning like a child, not thinking, picking up beautiful things carved in wood and stone, trinket boxes, crystals, polished shells, fragments of coral. Everything was unaccountably different from the world she knew.

  In the bathroom, she bathed in a sunken tub with gold taps. In her trunk, which had been delivered to the suite, she found a cotton dress which hadn’t creased too much and put it on.

  When she ventured out of the suite, she saw that it was a separate wing of the house. There was an entrance lobby with a pink granite floor, a tropical fish pool and climbing plants and a passage which led to the other wing where she assumed the general manager lived.

  She let herself out of the front door into a wall of humid air. She was breathless for a moment and felt the sweat start under her dress. She stood in the shade of the veranda trying to take in the house; it was on a rise, surrounded by green, watered lawns and eucalyptus trees which stirred in the breeze. After a moment she could see dashes of blue and red in the trees, to be named for her later as lorikeets and princess parrots. She had not got over her disappointment that they had come to Mirabilly while all the excitements of Sydney beckoned, but she felt attracted by what she had seen of the place.

  *

  A few weeks later Ellen and John had a flight in one of the station’s de Havilland Rapides, with Dave Bundy, a Mirabilly pilot, at the controls. The plane hammered down the runway sending up clouds of orange dust. The noisy cabin with its hard seats wasn’t welcoming, but Dave was. He was a big, smiling, sunburned man in shorts and a floral shirt. He looked like a holiday-maker from the beach at Manly. “This is the way to go!” he shouted, as they bucked over the potholes in the runway before takeoff. Ellen wasn’t afraid, but they were racing toward a row of pines and it was a relief when Dave pulled the plane into the air, a sudden upward surge and a lightness.

  When John asked Dave to go higher so that he could see more of the country, Dave said, “Strewth! There’s damn all between here and the ocean except goannas and a coupla manky towns!”

  But it wasn’t true. Below was the enormous carpet of Mirabilly, hard, brown-green rolling country with scattered low trees, wooded gorges and curious rock formations in red stone. At this time, the end of the wet summer season in February, occasional thin waterfalls spilled over cliffs. Dave pointed to an escarpment a hundred feet high in places, splitting the land in a more or less straight line as far as Ellen could see. “That’s the eastern boundary. It beats fencing.”

  Jim Farrell, the general manager, had already proudly given Ellen a summary of the history of the station; it was first acquired in 1850 by a Captain Heron, an eccentric ex-officer whose commission in the New South Wales Corps had expired. Heron received a land grant before Queensland was founded. A childless widower, he enticed a wife from a Townsville bar, started a family and successfully multiplied his holding on the cattle-friendly Barkly Tableland. After two generations the Heron family fell out over their rich inheritance. A shipowner from England named Charles Marchmont bought all the leases and freeholds and added more to make over two million acres. He saw the advantage of supplying his own refrigerated vessels in the meat trade with Europe and North America. An abbatoir and freezing works were built near the Village, as the station settlement was called and Mirabilly Station, with dozens of workers became like a town or a country in its own right.

  Jim Farrell told her that ‘Mirabilly’ was the corruption of an Aborigine phrase which Captain Heron had understood to mean ‘Where the good spirit brings water and winds’.

  *

  Ellen had a small and docile chestnut she sometimes rode. She didn’t feel at home on horseback but the little animal was kind to her. Often she went with John, but occasionally with Pete Djawida, the head Aborigine maid’s seventeen-year-old brother. John had made her promise not to ride alone. It wasn’t that there was any specific danger in the vast spaces, except poisonous snakes and spiders, but rather the possibility of getting lost. Ellen didn’t quite understand how you could get lost when you could see in every direction over the stunted vegetation, but she complied.

  Pete was thin, with black polished skin, knobbly knees, a spread nose and gleaming black eyes. He worked on the station. Ellen liked him because she sensed he was everything that he wanted to be. He smiled a lot and said very little.

  She found the silence and shimmering colour of the outback haunting and mysterious. Little Elly Colbert, who had scarcely been beyond Barton Village in her life, now possessed a vast cathedral of space and calm.

  On one particular day, she rode many miles toward the eastern boundary with Pete. He said he was going to show her the burial ground of his ancestors. They plodded slowly across a dusty, featureless plain, through stands of mulga and spinifex. She began to think they had gone too far but she was keen to see what Pete promised. They refreshed themselves and the horses at streams and water holes. The heat beat on Ellen’s broad-brimmed digger’s hat. The horizon was a fluid line of fire. The sun pricked her skin through her shirt. The flies buzzed continually around the net over her face, occasionally startling her by crawling underneath. Her horse became tired and unsteady. Pete didn’t seem to be troubled but she was on the point of saying they should go back, when he reined in his horse at the top of a rise. “There it is,” he said proudly, pushing back his hat and wiping his brow with a forearm.

  She looked where Pete was pointing. Before them was a long dry rift in the earth, red rock in contrast to the yellow dust of the desert, with a thin covering of saltbush; beyond it the land undulated in irregular ways.

  She had expected a more spectacular view. “That’s the burial ground?” She hadn’t enquired from Pete, but she had been expecting old monuments or at least what she could recognise as a graveyard.

  “Sure. Big fishes. Crocodiles. Giant snakes guarding the road.”

  “What road?”

  “The road to the edge of the earth.”

  Pete spoke matter-of-factly. He wasn’t interested in school learning. He said that he and his ancestors were literally part of this land. He felt the blood in his veins was from the earth and would soak back into the earth one day. It was a revelation so strange to Ellen that she thought it merely fanciful.

  “Also sleeping warriors, fathers of many tribes.”

  To Ellen, Mirabilly was sand and sparse grass, windy cliffs and clumps of brush; to Pete, it was alive with spirits.

  “Let’s get over there, Pete,” Ellen said. “We need to water the horses and rest in the shade.”

  “No, we can’t go there.”

  “Why? It’s what we came for.”

  “You have to look from here.” He clicked his tongue and his horse began to pick a path down the steep bank. “I show you.”

  She had no choice but to follow. Pete dismounted at the bottom of the rift and led his horse to a clump of low palms where there was shade to tether. He secured Ellen’s mount and lifted the saddles off the horses’ wet flanks, dropping them on the grass. Pete led her into a subterranean cave where s
he could hear water. She gulped lung-fulls of cool air. They picked their way forward into a natural amphitheatre. There was enough light from a crack in the roof to see a wall of colourful paintings, fifteen or so feet high and thirty feet in length.

  “It broken,” Pete said.

  A section of the painted rock-face had been broken away.

  “What happened?”

  “In the Big House.”

  “It’s the piece in the lounge room?”

  “Yeah. Dinka told me. I never been there.”

  “You want the stone back?” she asked, because he seemed rueful.

  Pete shrugged. “It will come back.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Pete gave her a distant look as though he could see things she couldn’t see and never replied.

  They drank from the stream and Pete filled two canvas bags for the horses which they carried back. Ellen lay on her back in the shade near the horses, with her hat over her face, while Pete watered them.

  The images on the rock shimmered in her mind. She didn’t believe in spirits, but Pete’s certainty that the stone would be returned to the ancestors made her uncomfortable. There wasn’t the slightest sense of a demand or requirement in his manner; only a certainty that somehow the stone would be returned. Ellen was sure that there wasn’t any idea at the Big House that having the stone there disturbed the order of things and that it would have to be returned; it was just an unusual adornment.

  *

  Ellen settled into the coolness and quiet of the Big House over the months. She never imagined that she would live in such luxury. She was content wandering through their rooms, having coffee on the verandah and listening to the birds. And of course reading as part of her active course of self-improvement. The house was entirely serviced by Aborigine maids and gardeners managed by Maureen Farrell, the general manager’s wife. Maureen was devoted to her husband, her children and her duties. She was friendly, but not Ellen’s confidant. However, Ellen was never lonely.

  After her ride with Pete, Ellen kept a wary eye on the stone in the drawing room. If she could have returned it she would. She couldn’t quite have explained why. She told John about her ride. He laughed and said she was in danger of going walkabout. He said she could expect to hear a lot of superstitions from Pete and his family. Ellen thought that as far as the stone was concerned Pete’s remarks were more than superstitions. She suggested to John that taking the stone and then displaying it like a piece of work bought from a dealer, was an act of desecration. He disagreed goodnaturedly.

  “It’s our land and the paintings will never be seen by anybody, buried in a cave. And besides, it’s been here since God knows when.”

  *

  At first, John found plenty to amuse himself. He went out shooting camels and wild pigs, or riding herd with the stockmen. Occasionally, he and Ellen flew together to Tennant’s Creek or Mt Isa or Darwin and shopped in the bright, hot towns. She went with John to parties on the Hill where the senior staff at the station lived, given by people like the station engineer, or one of the pilots. They were rough events and reminded her of the square mile around Blakiston Row, except that they were held in spacious, comfortable and plentifully stocked homes. The men gathered in the kitchen with the keg to drink beer and tell yarns and the women stayed in the front room talking about children, bargains in the mail-order catalogues and vacations. The sexes met at supper. Each hostess as a matter of personal pride tried to outdo the others, producing a variety of cooked meats, salads and sweets – which were actually very tasty.

  Ellen was surprised at how easily John fitted in to these gatherings, which must have been so different from the sedate house parties he was used to. The Aussies were no respecters of rank; they must have imagined that John had rank and John had to accept the crudities and the jokes against himself.

  The wives were curious about Ellen. She continued to conceal that she had been a servant at the Grange when she met John. In answer to the direct question, ‘Where did you meet?’ ‘At dinners in King’s Lynn’ was enough. In answer to the other direct question, ‘What did you used to do?’ she delighted in saying, ‘I worked as a carer.’ She felt very much a lady amongst these brash, big-thighed women. The wives had no moral feelings about John and Ellen not being married, but were always saying that they should marry, or looking for a reason why they weren’t. There were more than echoes of the square mile in the macho family life.

  *

  As the months passed, John became more restive. “The pot is full enough for us to move, Elly,” he said. “I didn’t really intend that we should stay as long as we have, but it’s been a marvellous experience.” Ellen echoed this and would have felt at home if John had been at ease. Sydney was a faded dream. Without being entirely conscious of it, she had passed from a holiday state of mind, a good time that would inevitably end, to one of seeing her future with John, or rather not being able to see a future without him.

  It was more to try to keep up with John than for her own pleasure that she sometimes went riding with him and Jim Farrell in the mornings. They usually left at six or seven, the men with their Winchester Repeaters. She trotted sedately on her chestnut behind the thick, rank-smelling haunches of their two big roans. The horizon was yellow and light green. While it was early, the air was powdery; parrots shrieked in the bush and at times shot past them. By nine the sun was in unrelenting control of a cloudless blue-white sky.

  One morning they took a new trail. After two hours they were about to turn for home. They stood the horses for a few moments on a rise, listening to them blowing. Ellen’s shirt was soaked with sweat. The endless landscape was spinifex, scrub and stunted acacia. Farrell saw three or four camels in the distance. The men galloped after them and followed them into a dry gulch. She heard a fusillade of shots.

  When she rode down to the bottom of the gulch, John and Farrell had dismounted and were pouring rounds into the bodies of four beasts writhing on the ground, groaning and wimpering like human beings.

  “Bloody murderers!” Ellen shouted.

  When the shooting stopped there was the smell of gunsmoke and the stink of blood and shit. The horses quivered nervously. She turned her mount and rode out of the gulch to the sound of laughter from John and Farrell.

  *

  The New Year barn dance was to be held in one of the sheds at the edge of the Village where hides were usually stored. The shed had been cleared and the wooden floor scoured with disinfectant, but there was still a smell of dead meat and fat with a rancid edge. Ellen stood in the centre of the shed and said to Jim Farrell, “Can you smell it?”

  “Smell what?” He sniffed loudly, his blue-veined nose raised in the air, thumbs in his braces, easing the tightness around his girth.

  “The hides, or whatever you keep in here.”

  He considered her. He was keen to be polite. “It’s not bad. This crowd won’t notice. We’ll have the food at one end and the bar at the other.”

  “What about all this?” She waved her arms to embrace the rest of the stifling, inhospitable space.

  “We’ll put a few chairs round the walls. Build a stage for the band.”

  “How many guests to do you expect?”

  “200. Maybe 250. The Mirabilly New Year bash is the best. Folks come from Tennants Creek, even Darwin.”

  “And stay with friends here?”

  “Hell, they sleep where they fall. Most of the buggers are legless.”

  She looked up at the timbered roof and tried to picture 250 drunks in this smelly void.

  “We hang a few lights up there.”

  She walked out of the shed. From the door she noticed a party of men digging a trench in a field thirty yards away.

  “That’s the kazi. Big, wide and deep,” Farrell said.

  She walked slowly back to the Big House. This was where any likeness to New Year in a pub in the square mile, or a church hall, or the Barton Working Men’s Club, vanished. It was a human cattle-pen for a deba
uch.

  *

  John arranged a party at the Big House before they went to the barn dance. Ellen got the impression that Jim Farrell would rather have left his wife to help with the supper, and gone to the club in the Village to drink with his cronies, but he didn’t like to thwart John. John had no authority at all and never claimed any, but he was a Marchmont and all the senior staff were slightly wary of him. So the Mirabilly bosses were constrained to be on parade at the Big House, the general manager, the chief pilot and other aircrew, the chief engineer, the office manager-radio operator, the head stockman, the representatives of stock and hide agents, trucking firms and meat buyers all with wives or girlfriends.

  John wore a dark blue sports shirt and white slacks which showed off his tan and blondness startlingly. Ellen had a skimpy frock of silver material bought in Sydney which clung to her like a bathing suit. She wore no makeup except lipstick. The sun had added a reddish tinge to the colour of her hair and it reached her shoulders in natural waves; she was able to have it professionally cut on their visits to Darwin.

  Ellen felt awkward because the reception was really hers and John’s; she had to play hostess to people most of whom she hardly knew. The ship-board experience was some help and she knew that the guests weren’t over-fussy provided they had a drink in their hand. Jim Farrell and his wife and Terry Dunn the office manager and his wife, arrived early. There was an awkward silence while they stood in the white lounge feeling conspicuous, but John was relaxed and soon had some talk going. As other guests arrived, Farrell lurched around the room with a whisky bottle filling glasses. Maureen Farrell stood at the fringes, not sure whether she was a hostess or guest and out of place without her children or maids to claim her attention. She tried to smile, but only succeeded in looking as though her bright green dress with puffed shoulders like wings, was pinching her.