DANNY AND I SET out early, left Hazel standing in the doorway. When we crossed the town boundary, I lit up a smoke, threw some Pigrum Brothers onto the stereo and gave the massive turbos their head. The car leapt down the highway like a beast uncaged.
We reached the Gunshot Road in a couple of hours, turned west. Drove past the roadhouse without stopping.
The country grew drier, harder, the vegetation more sparse. We drove past perished cattle, puffed, primed, ready to explode. Dead trees, lonely fenceposts ringbarked by time’s fire. Hot again; it was going to be hot for months.
Eventually we came to the rusty bones of an ancient Bedford truck with an arrow and the words Stonehouse Creek painted onto its remaining door. We followed the arrow, turned south. Spent the next three hours slogging across a slew of corrugations, bulldust and sump-crunching termite mounds.
Proper bush work for Cockburn’s car. It seemed to be coping.
I was feeling anxious as we drove into the camp: somebody else’s country, somebody else’s dreams. Rocking up in a police car, I had to be careful not to stir up old ghosts. The last police punitive expedition swept through Kantulyu country within living memory. Those men, intent upon revenge for the spearing of a white prospector who couldn’t keep his penis in his pants, rampaged through the countryside for weeks on end, killing whoever they came into contact with. Hundreds of Kantulyu died. The survivors fled in terror and ended up on the missions and settlements.
Now a handful of people wandered out to greet us. Suspicious at first—the car, I assumed—then enthusiastic, as Danny emerged. He drifted off to join the other boys, and I found myself standing awkwardly in the middle of the community.
The most prominent object in sight was an old club lounge, the stuffing knocked out of it but the fabric a faded, evanescent blue against the white sand.
For the rest, Stonehouse Creek was the usual remote community cluster of hairy hovels and rundown shacks, with a hand pump for water and a shovel for a shithouse. But beautiful, in its own way, nestled at the foot of a sail-shaped crimson pillar and fringed by ghost gums and a dry creek.
The camp’s gross domestic product consisted mainly of dogs, and an unusually gross collection they were. Flea-bitten, flyblown, covered in scabs and scars, sick-pink, skinny bald, they raised their weary heads. Decided I wasn’t worth the bother, went back to sleep.
An unholy trinity of donkeys wandered about the place: reformed ferals with wall eyes and sneaky teeth, they were furiously devouring any plant foolish enough to raise its head above the sand.
One old man—skinny, with a cowboy hat and a set of bulletproof spectacles—rose from a card game, shot a wad of tobacco into the dust and marched in my direction, his legs wondering where the horse had gone.
‘Why hello there, sergeant!’ he shouted.
Excellent; a promotion already.
We shook hands, or at least palms. I only just managed to conceal my discomfort at the touch of leprous stumps where there should have been fingers.
He immediately launched into a story—as far as I could tell, which wasn’t far since his English was poor, my Kantulyu worse and the twain didn’t look like meeting. The narrative hopped about like a flea on a hot dog. Something about a copper, a camel and a mischievous spirit, a little hairy man much given to toying with sleepers’ dreams and nose hairs who may or may not have been my interlocutor in another incarnation.
The tale could well have been the funniest ever told—certainly its raconteur seemed to think so—but after a confusing four or five minutes I began searching for an escape route.
I was rescued by Meg Brambles, who came over, limping and grinning. ‘Shut up you old fool,’ she laughed—a sentiment with which he expressed hearty agreement.
‘It’s that outfit you wearin,’ she explained. ‘Mister Watson used to be a police tracker—got you mixed up with some other policeman he met along the way.’
She showed me the remnants of the stone house for which the community had been named. Not much more than a tumbledown chimney now, but seventy years ago it was the residence of a Spanish missionary who’d started out on canticles and altar wine, ended up a roaring drunk and father to half a dozen little yellerfellers.
Meg drew me into the circle of women sitting under a mulga tree, and I spent the next hour or two in their company—scratching away at a scrawny garden of watermelon and grapes, lugging water from the pump, helping decipher a Wordfind book somebody had scavenged from the Bluebush tip.
I met one woman about my own age: Kitty O’Keelly, tall and slim, with deep-set eyes and generous hair, beautiful when her mouth was shut—which it hardly ever was. After listening to her round up—and on—the kids, I prayed to god she never got stuck into me.
There was one old man I sensed to be the centre of something. He was nestled under a wirewood tree, eyes half shut against the glare, legs crossed. People cast tentative glances in his direction, as if they were waiting for him to give the all-clear.
He was fiddling with a tinny cassette player from which the unctuous tones of Garth Brooks fluttered and wowed. Eventually, he climbed to his feet and hobbled over with the aid of two sticks, stooped so low you’d have thought he carried his father on his back. Danny went out and helped him in; they were close, it was clear.
When they drew near I realised the problem wasn’t that the old feller’s eyes were half-shut against the glare, it was that they were fully shut against the world. The poor bastard was blind. Sandy Blight they call it out here: trachoma, a disease that affects a lot of our old people.
His name was Eli Japanangka Windmill. He was wearing baggy pants and a baggier beard, a stockman’s hat and a pigeon-coloured singlet. His handshake was soft, but there was a reflex energy about it that suggested he must have been powerfully built before age and affliction laid him low.
‘You welcome, Missus. Where your mob from?’
‘Grew up at Moonlight Downs but my mum, she come from the Gulf.’
‘Saltwater country.’ He nodded thoughtfully.
‘Yuwayi.’
‘You be stoppin ’ere tonight?’
‘If that’s okay?’
‘Yuwayi, you welcome. Kurlupartu, innit?’ he enquired.
‘Copper? Yeah, sort of.’
He seemed to find this amusing, then said, ‘Blackfeller missus one all right—bringin back this boy bilonga we.’
Giving Danny a lift had been a smarter move than I realised.
‘Yeah, he wanted a bit of peace and quiet; too much trouble in town.’
‘Yuwayi.’ He turned his sightless eyes to the north, shook his head. ‘Drink—make a man mad.’
He didn’t say much more; indeed, I suspected he knew everything about me before he’d opened his mouth. But when Danny led him back to his nook, I felt like I’d been given an imprimatur.