11 p.m.
Over a thousand kilometres to the north of Kanpara – where Grace is uploading videos to TikTok and Walker is thinking about Markovich and the Vandals – the rain has finally stopped. It’s been raining hard in Queensland’s Gulf Country for almost fourteen days, water thumping onto tin roofs like a fist pummelling a steel drum. An unseasonal storm delivering a deluge to the region’s towns and rainforests before retreating and then, unexpectedly, returning for a second round. Replenished by moisture drawn from waters off Australia’s northern seas, the storm dumps torrents of monsoonal rain for another three days; a ferocious return that surprises locals, farmers and forecasters.
These rains will turn out to be the most extensive June precipitation for more than fifty years, some towns receiving more than half a year’s worth of rain in what is typically the dry season. The storm extends further south than it usually does too, several arid outback towns having the wettest winter day in records that go back 101 years, and a couple seeing a tally that turns out to be seven times the June norm.
Some of this excess water is absorbed by the ground: the dusty land, the grassy paddocks, the open plains. But most of it runs off into the Georgina River and the Diamantina and Cooper Creek river systems, which make up Queensland’s Channel Country, one of the last free-flowing desert ecosystems left on earth. Seen from the air, Queensland’s Channel Country looks like the capillaries on a leaf, tiny tributaries, usually nothing more than sandy veins in the red earth of the outback. But in times of flood, these myriad dormant waterways fill with life-giving water and can reach widths of eighty kilometres.
Which is what happens today. A rushing, surging tide of water runs along creek beds and muddy rivers, spills over banks, inundates paddocks, bush and grasslands. Flowing south for thousands of miles, following ancient channels carved over millennia, a billowing mass of water courses towards the inland sea that is Lake Eyre. On its way it widens, spreads and multiplies until hundreds and thousands of small streams, all flooding south, combine to form a broad delta of water. Across the region, the land becomes waterlogged and impassable, roads flood and a host of small communities find themselves cut off, no way in or out.
In Kanpara, there’s no sign of a cloud and it hasn’t rained for weeks. The winter night is chilly and clear – a trillion stars dot the black velvet sky like sequins on a cape. Blankets are pulled higher over shoulders, sleeping couples draw closer together for warmth. But the incoming waters are imminent, because in Channel Country it doesn’t have to rain to flood.
Stewie Charles is out walking. Since he did time, since he spent ten years locked up in the bin, he can’t help it. Freezing-cold nights, burning-hot days, wind or sun or rain, he has to walk. He wakes up every morning, drinks a coffee, and then he walks. Trying to walk off the ten years of containment, ten years spent like a rat in a cage, barely seeing sky, never tasting fresh air. On bad days it can take hours of walking for the need to subside, and this is a bad day.
When he’d got out, raging and lost, they’d come up here, him and Brett, to mine the claim that their dad had bought for peanuts years before they were born. Turned out their dad hadn’t liked the hard work, had given up after one season, moved to Sydney, had a few kids, not liked the hard work of that either and given up on them too. Had started drinking and taking all sorts of shit and ended up killing himself before he was forty. Brett’s like their mum – steady, calm mostly – but he’s more like his dad. Every chance he won’t see forty either.
Brett, the fucking romantic, had thought the claim that had been sitting there untouched for three decades might make them millionaires. Their mum wanted them away from the trouble and temptation of the neighbourhood they’d grown up in, away from bad enemies and worse friends. He’d been so lost that he’d gone with the flow. Couldn’t think for himself after years locked in a cage, doing what he was told, when and where he was told to do it. Couldn’t navigate his way round the city anymore, let alone the bush. But found, even so, that he had to walk. That it was a need that couldn’t be fought.
He’d gotten lost a few times in the early days, found his way back to camp more by luck than anything else, but slowly, week by week, month by month, the land became familiar. What had looked like homogenous sameness – red dirt, dust, spinifex, gum trees – became clear markers. Every sandy creek bed, hillock, valley, even the plains of Mitchell grass, all distinct. He knows the rise that marks Bailey’s claim, the dip and strand of trees that hides Warren’s camp. He can navigate by a host of signs, knows where there’s water in the creek, knows where the termite mound is as tall as a man and where the viscous, sticky, inch-deep web of an eastern tarantula hangs between trees, trapping budgies and little finches in its vast spiral. He’d walked into it once, lost in his thoughts, and the feel of its thick, tacky strands across his cheeks had taken hours to dispel.
When he’s out bush, he walks for miles before his mind is quiet enough to come back to camp, do a bit of work, help Brett with the mining. Usually at night he’s better. Can calm his mind, sedate himself with bourbon or a spliff, but not tonight. Tonight, he’s trying to walk off his rage in town, walking the night streets and along the highway, as angry at himself as he is at that miserable cunt Bailey. He’d come close to stabbing him but the satisfaction of doing that would have been nothing against what it would have meant. He’d have gone straight back inside. And that’d be signing his own death warrant. The sentence he’d served, the years he’d spent locked up, had almost killed him. He knows he can’t do it again. Can’t and won’t. But fucking Bailey, the smug cunt. Even now, alone, the night air chilly, he feels himself heating up at the thought of the bloke and how he’s cheated them.
He thinks back to last Friday, another walk, out at the camp. He’d woken later than usual, head banging and heart thumping from the bottle of bourbon he finished the night before. Had walked as usual but the hangover was making him anxious and nervy. Decided he needed a bit of puff, something to take the edge off. Warren always has some. He buys it from an old bikie mate who passes through from time to time. He’d been almost at Bailey’s camp when the need took hold and he’d decided to head down the hill, past Bailey’s place, then south the three K or so to Warren’s camp by the creek.
As he’d come up to Bailey’s he could hear the excavator at work in the pit. Bailey had bought this piece of land off them last year. Stewie hadn’t wanted to sell – Bailey’s too canny, he’d only offer to buy if he was dead cert he’d find opal there – but Brett had insisted. They were stony broke and needed the cash. And they didn’t have the tools or the knowledge or the energy to mine another section anyway. So they’d taken Bailey’s cash, but Stewie had been watching him all season, mining and digging all day every day and finding jack shit. He’d sniggered to himself at the thought that maybe Bailey wasn’t as smart as he liked to tell everyone he was. But last week, as he’d walked quietly through Bailey’s camp, the engine of the digger had cut out. In the silence he could hear the whistle of the breeze in the leaves and the whirring hum of a bush dove’s wings as it took flight at his approach.
He’d walked towards the edge of the cut and looked over. Down below, Bailey was out of his excavator, inspecting a boulder he’d dug up. A big one, sitting in the bucket of the digger. Bailey had wiped the clay and dust off the top of the stone, and even from up high, from far away, Stewie could see the opal’s colour sparkle in the light. He’d watched Bailey stop dead, then start rubbing harder, start chipping gently at the stone with a little pick. After a minute Bailey had done a little half-dance, looking around, smiling like a lunatic. Stewie had pulled his head back, hadn’t wanted to get seen. But he’d known, had realised in that moment, that Bailey had found a huge stone, that Bailey had cheated them as he’d known he would.
Thinking about it, the heat of his anger flushes through him again. Bailey found a giant opal and he found it on their land. The land he cheated them on. The land they sold too cheap. They’re owed a piece of that opal. No fucking doubt about it.