A Single Tree Page 3

  There was this peak on the western plains, the Virgin Rock, signalling me like a hitcher’s thumb after miles of road through sorghum paddocks, the tumbleweed bowling challenges at my fender as I wheeled through dust. But despite the paddocks of fodder, this was no man’s land, it would appear, the cultivated terra nullius of our founding fathers, a desolation of low hills, and in the last township where I stopped for a sandwich at a greasy spoon the dim hymns of blowflies and the slow decay of the little shops filled me with unspeakable gloom.

  Not there. Not there.

  I drove on towards a humble lavender range on back roads with the second evening coming down, a glassy tension in the breast, and unexpectedly I found it. A funk-hole! Entrenched! Gone to earth!

  There was a piece of land trash, a humpy falling apart in a gidgee clump of forest fringe that kept testing the waters of a creek that ran beside the road. The knockabout town itself was three cooees away. I pulled the van onto the shoulder and went down to the creek that ambled sandily along to lose itself, I discovered later, in the central plains. But now, having filled my water bottles and splashed back through the shallows, I looked up to the far bank to see the late afternoon sun sketch part of a tin roof crouching in the trees and light a diamond sliver of window. I slopped my way to the van and thought about this. I smoked a cigarette. No traffic came along the road. There wasn’t even the sound of voices or dog protest.

  Something decided me. I backed the van down the road to the log bridge I had only half noticed as I drove, rumbled across and nosed the van up a track no more than a suggestion until I came to the screen of gidgee.

  It was here I had detected the giveaway shine on tin, the star flash of glass.

  A roof, a floor, studs still in position and timber siding gapped on one wall only. Three rooms – a palace of a place! A listing water tank loud with frog life and a tap connected to shove its snout inside the shack where it dripped over a brimming tin dish that had watered the floorboards for years. Cobwebs spun probabilities across rafters, knitted themselves into corner maps of places where I might like to hide and barricaded with sticky silk an open back door that revealed a track leading to the dunny. I investigated – a plank slung across a cesspit.

  Everything! My God, the place had everything!

  Here’s an aphorism – or is it a paradox? I have always believed not in chance but in the uncanny certainty of coincidence. Let me illustrate:

  Tucked away from sight with my van, cloistered in the scrub and not even the distant clink of a cowbell or the excited yap of a nosey dog, I inspected my new funk-hole with eagerness. Apart from a crippled table, two chairs (bushman style) and, in the second room (the boudoir), a box bed with wire mattress, a leprous mirror hanging from a nail and a chest of drawers preserving the detritus of washed-up settlers, there were a couple of kerosene lamps, a rusting primus and an assortment of empty canisters. The paucity of what was left behind had the melancholic harmonics of wistful music.

  Someone had poured this concrete floor in a hurry. Whoever it was had used too much sand, insufficient cement. Large areas were crumbling and the dank pieces of matting that hid the rougher spots had the sadness of house-proud optimism. Wherever I looked – through open door, window – there was nothing but a green camouflage that suited me. Had it suited whoever was here before? Behind the back door a stiffened tea-towel hung. I pulled its cardboard pleats apart and found a greeting in German, ‘guten Morgen, guten Abend ’, spelled out below; above, an impossible Rhine castle, and in the right-hand corner the shadowy words Heidelberg, a view of the Neckar. Sad. Sad.

  A rural slum. A camp-site. A dream of a hideaway.

  Pushing my way back to the van through swags of scrub, gorging on invisibility, I fetched my thermos and took it over to the shack for a baptismal session, libation, whatever. Distantly, a cow lowed, a dog barked, and then the silence of leaves and insects.

  In the bedroom I began an unchivalrous rootling through the chest of drawers, poking about in a jetsam of hair pins, bills, letters, bits of ribbon, a bible, a hairbrush still clinging to long red hairs, and dust. Always dust. Above, in the muddied mirror, the previous owner, glimpsed through swirls of cloud and fog, watched me finger these wretched leavings, smiling forgivingly as I stretched a fine auburn hair to its gleaming twenty-inch length.

  Despite exhaustion and a niggling fear of uncovery both here and back there, always the curious opportunist, I took the letters and postcards to the van, heated more coffee on the primus and settled down to track fragments of a life other than mine.

  The letters were few and had been stuffed back in envelopes that bore, I observed, a faded Deutschland postmark. I felt guilty opening them. I stuffed the guilt back in my envelope self.

  Dearest Gerda (began the first I pulled out, dated October ’78, Heidelberg), I wish I was with you in the sensual zones! . . .

  Drylands, Penguin, Melbourne, 1999

  Murray Bail

  1998

  The Narrow Leaf Red Ironbark: now there’s an employment of no-nonsense nouniness. This eucalypt has a straight trunk and hard, deeply furrowed bark. Like a strip of dark-grey clay dried out after being ploughed. The leaves are noticeably narrow. What isn’t described is their ‘weeping habit’ (a technical term); that is, leaves drooping in a shimmer of real melancholy.

  This suspended air of perpetual sadness would be of little consequence, except the Narrow Leaf Red Ironbark is one of the most common eucalypts on earth; certainly they crowd the woodland areas of eastern Australia, all the way up to the top of Queensland. The botanical name recognised this in the very beginning: crebra from the Latin ‘frequent’, ‘in close succession’.

  Imagine the effect of such widespread statements of melancholy on the common mood. Needless to say it has permeated and reappeared in the long faces of our people, where the jaw has lengthened, and in words formed by almost imperceptible mouth movements, which often filter the mention of excessive emotions. It has shaded in khaki-grey our everyday stories, and when and how they are told, even the myths and legends, such as they are, just as surely as the Norwegians have been formed by snow and ice.

  The eucalypts may be seen as daily reminders of the sadnesses between fathers and daughters, the deadpan stoicism of nature (which of course isn’t stoicism at all), drought and melting asphalt in the cities. Each leaf hanging downwards suggests another hard-luck story or a dry line or joke to wave away the flies.

  Only a small number of other eucalypts, those pale and stately beauties that have achieved fame on tea towels, postage stamps and calendars, correct the general impression of melancholy, as put forward by E. crebra and some of the other ironbarks. They bring a glow of light to a paddock, a rockface, a footpath in the city: the two Salmon Gums standing in the traffic island between the university and the cemetery in Melbourne! It only needs a few. Theirs is a majestic statement on what is alive and spreading: continuation.

  And there is a parallel nearby. It may not be exaggeration to say that the formidable instinct in men to measure, which is often mistaken for pessimism, is counterbalanced by the unfolding optimism of women, which is nothing less than life itself; their endless trump card.

  It is shown in miniature by the reverence women have for flowers, at its most concentrated when they look up and in recognition of their natural affinity accept flowers.

  Eucalpytus, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1998

  John Bailey

  2006

  They entered a grassy plain interspersed with thick scrub and completely bare of features or watercourses. They were back in the Tanami Desert. ‘I can see nothing, the scrub being so thick; it is of a nasty, tough, wiry description, and has torn our hands and saddle-bags to pieces.’ For three days, without finding a drop of water, Stuart kept his nerve. The horses suffered dreadfully, especially Polly, whom Stuart used as a lead horse. ‘I got up a tree to look over the top of this scrub, which is about twelve feet [four metres] high, and I could see our course for a lo
ng distance; it appears to be the same terrible scrub, with no sign of creeks.’

  Stuart was forced to retreat, but instead of heading directly back to Bishop Creek he took a roundabout way in the hope of discovering something to drink in a grassy plain he had seen. It was a decision he regretted, for at the end of the day his horses were still unwatered and they were two days away from Bishop Creek.

  Stuart’s party set out for the creek at the first glow of sunrise the next morning. He was particularly worried about three of his horses that could hardly lift their feet, and although he distributed their loads to others, one of them suddenly collapsed. It was a good horse and they did all they could to encourage it to get up. Finally, they accepted that it would never stand again. They left it. Stuart cursed the bad luck of it – if the horse had broken down near water they would have been able to stop and carve out its meat.

  Before they had time to proceed, Stuart’s own Polly, normally such an even-tempered animal, suddenly began to run crazily around the camp, frothing at the mouth and kicking out at both the men and the other horses. They ran at her, and after grasping her reins brought her under control. She stood heaving and shivering for many minutes before calming down. It was a disturbing, inexplicable moment for Stuart.

  Later that day he abandoned another horse which ‘has given in’. He was left with seven packhorses. There was a brief shower during the night, to tantalise them – barely enough to ‘wet a pocket-handkerchief’.

  The following morning, Polly gave Stuart more concern. She was wobbling at the knees and looking around with dazed eyes. Stuart lifted the saddle off her back. He would ride another horse for the day. Despite his urging during the morning’s journey, Polly found it difficult to keep up. She repeatedly sank to the ground, and although she rose readily enough when he urged her to do so, it was not long before she was down again. Reluctantly Stuart made the dreadful decision to leave her. He consoled himself with the thin hope that ‘from the number of birds about here, I think there must be water near; I hope she may find it, although I am afraid she is too far gone even to try it’.

  An hour before sundown Stuart, Kekwick and Head arrived back at Bishop Creek. They were so exhausted they scarcely rejoiced at arriving safely. Stuart wrote that his horses had been 101 hours without water and during that time had travelled 180 kilometres. He added that one of the animals was ‘very lame from a kick the little mare gave him in her madness’.

  The party stayed at Bishop Creek for a week. Both men and animals sorely needed time at rest. The three explorers were now haggard stick figures, fatigued and stricken with pains in their joints and muscles. They found native cucumbers growing wild, so they added them to their regular gruel of dried beef and flour. After several days, Stuart began to notice that the pains in his limbs were ‘not so constant’. He began to sleep at night. With his strength slowly recovering, Stuart retraced his path to look for Polly. He found her where he had left her, still alive, lying under the shade of a tree. He hollowed out a basin in the sand, lined it with canvas and poured several canteens of water into it. To his relief she lifted her head and drank. He coaxed her to her feet and then, over the best part of a day, he led her back to the camp at Bishop Creek.

  Mr Stuart’s Track: The Forgotten Life of Australia’s Greatest Explorer,

  Pan Macmillan, Melbourne, 2006

  Sidney J. Baker

  1945

  There was no watertight compartment between outback slang and city slang; they had broken their banks and had begun to merge into the vast sea of words which is our language today . . .

  The first term of significance in bush vernacular was, of course, the word bush itself. Derived from the Dutch bosch it arrived in Australia at the beginning of last century via the Cape of Good Hope – not as Mencken suggests via America – and by 1820 had more or less completely ousted the English “woods” and “forest”. By 1837 it was being used to describe the country in general outside a capital and had already begun to acquire important variations. There are a multitude of these, among which the following are important: to go bush, take to the bush, up the bush, bush apes (rural or bush workers; fruit-pickers in South Australia), bush baptist (a person of doubtful religious persuasion), bush boy, bush bread, bush brother and bush brotherhood (the religious organization), bush carpenter, bushed, bushfire, to bush it, bush lawyer, bushman, bushman’s clock (the kookaburra), bushranger, bush scrubber, bush telegrams, bush telegraph (means whereby rumours and reports are circulated) with its modern variants bush wireless and bush radio, to bushwhack, bushwhacker, bushwoman, bushy (a person who lives in the bush), bushwalker (one who hikes in the bush), and bushytail (crafty).

  Bushed, meaning lost in the bush, has been used since the 1850s, but its meaning has now been extended. In 1885 Mrs R. C. Praed (“Australian Life: Black and White”) described a person lost in the confusion of London’s streets as bushed. We can even – by a strange stroke of literary imagery – be bushed at sea. Charles Barrett shows how this can be done in his “Coast of Adventure” (1941). He asks:

  Had we [i.e. a small ship] gone wide of the light; become bushed in the great Van Diemen Gulf [in the Northern Territory] where a small craft could easily be wrecked in half a gale?

  In addition, a man who is in a quandary or confusion is said to be bushed; and to bush up a person is to confuse him.

  As pointed out earlier, the original bush telegraph was a confederate of bushrangers who warned them of police movements. Gradually the expression became synonymous with any rumour or false report, and several other terms with similar connotations sprang into use. Among these are bush wire, mulga, mulga wire, gidyea, sugarcane, Tom Collins and, probably best known of all, furphy. Half a century ago Tom Collins was a mythical being to whom rumours and reports of doubtful authenticity were attributed in the Riverina and other country areas in the south-eastern states. Tom Collins was the nom-de-plume chosen by the Australian writer, Joseph Furphy, best known for “Such is Life” (1903). By a strange stroke of destiny it was Joseph’s brother John, through another agency altogether, who gave the word furphy to our language . . .

  Bushfire blonde, a red-haired girl or woman; full of bushfire, full of vim and spirit; Sydney or the bush, a phrase indicating the choice of a final alternative; and the time-honoured chant of derision What’s this, bush week? are a few more expressions we have wrung out of that Dutch word bosch in a little over a century.

  The Australian Language: An Examination of the English Language and

  English Speech as Used in Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1945

  Joseph Banks

  1770

  May 1

  The Captn Dr Solander, myself and some of the people, making in all 10 musquets, resolvd to make an excursion into the countrey. We accordingly did so and walkd till we compleatly tird ourselves, which was in the evening, seeing by the way only one Indian who ran from us as soon as he saw us. The Soil wherever we saw it consisted of either swamps or light sandy soil on which grew very few species of trees, one which was large yeilding a gum much like sanguis draconis, but every place was coverd with vast quantities of grass. We saw many Indian houses and places where they had slept upon the grass without the least shelter; in these we left beads ribbands &c. We saw one quadruped about the size of a Rabbit, My Greyhound just got sight of him and instantly lamd himself against a stump which lay conceald in the long grass; we saw also the dung of a large animal that had fed on grass which much resembled that of a Stag; also the footsteps of an animal clawd like a dog or wolf and as large as the latter; and of a small animal whose feet were like those of a polecat or weesel. The trees over our heads abounded very much with Loryquets and Cocatoos of which we shot several; both these sorts flew in flocks of several scores together . . .

  The Journals of James Cook’s First Pacific Voyage, 1768–1771,

  available from southseas.nla.gov.au/index_voyaging.html

  John Batman

  1835

  Fr
iday 29th May 1835

  ‘I would not not recommend anyone to come in until the tide was running in when the surff is smooth at the mouth – as we were sailing up the Port heard a Dog on the shore howling – cannot think what brought it there just called upon deck to see about 100 Geese flying near the Vessel they seemed very large and flew up the Port before us – we Anchored in a small Bay about 12 miles up the Port, and went on shore before we got into the Boat we saw a Dog on the sand we put off and came up to the Dog which proved to be a Native Dog of N. H – which had surely left the Natives within a Day or so as He came quite close to my Natives and did not appear at all afraid, but would not allow them to take hold of Him – our Dogs after some time took after Him, and ran Him into the water, where we shot Him – He was a large Dog, and much the same I have seen in N. S – Wales we fell in with the tracks of the Natives, which was only a day or two old also Huts on the Bay where they had been eating mussels, it cannot be more than two days back – we then went in the Bush, about 4 miles and passed over some beautifull Land and all good sheep country rather sandy, but the sand Black and rich covered with Kangaroo Grass, about 10 Inches high and as green as a field of wheat, we then went in another direction for about 4 or 5 miles over verry good sheep Land gentle rises, with wattle and oak, with stunted Gum none or verry little of this timber would split – we made the Bay again and crossed before we came to a beautifull plain about 3 to 400 Acres of as rich Land as I ever saw with scarce a tree upon it – the Grass above our ancles, we saw several forest Kangaroo, but our Dogs being on ship board were stiff and could not fetch any saw several Native Huts and the marks on one tree where the Natives had been yesterday – we then came down the Bay, which consists of excellent Land rich black Sand the worst of it the other black soil but all covered alike thickly with Grass, of the best discription – we saw some bare Hills about 6 miles off which appears Grassy Hill – to the top