The Drought Paintings. Grandfather Ison expected something recognisable, not fire distortions, wind-twisty bare cliffs, men and women as stripped and spindly as dead trees on the baked earth, sheep’s jaws grinning in the drift sand, carcasses offering up ribcages like tented fingers, bony dogs resembling no dog he’d ever seen in all his years in the station country. He snapped his catalogue against a khaki sky. Have you kids ever seen anything like this in nature? Anna and Hugo shook their heads dumbly: those canvases were their first drought. They trailed behind him through the Gallery’s exit doors and back along North Terrace. After a while, Grandfather Ison said: Pom, pom, pom, for want of anything to say to them. Their mother was waiting outside the Adelaide Club, barred by the doorman, shopping bags at her feet: Hello Dad, hello my darlings! By year’s end Anna had undergone another drought. Locusts darkened the sky, a dusty soup of them, smearing windscreens and ticking, engorged, from leaf to leaf. She stood paralysed in the schoolyard with Maxine, eyes closed, mouth closed, head pulled in, dress gathered tight at the knee, but still those creatures snapped on her arms and crept in her hair. Then the winds bore the topsoil away. Hugo scribbled ‘dust’ on the sideboard, grit particles scratched among the filmy pages of the Methodist Hymnal, and cars crept home from church with their headlights burning. For a brief time in 1967, Anna’s father wrote her two or three letters a week. She imagined the pen barrel balanced awkwardly against the stub of his missing finger: My darling first born. I’m sitting in the ute, pad propped on my knee, in glorious spring sunshine. Kippy’s asleep in his usual place behind the back wheel somewhere. The sheep are spread out between Dead Man’s Corner and the railway cutting, but there’s not much in the way of feed around here. Maybe some maniac will take the corner too fast and put a few out of their misery. Hugo will spell me for a while this afternoon before we take the mob back to the paddock. They’re losing condition fast. It breaks my heart, it truly does, but you don’t want to hear your old man’s tale of woe in the middle of your exams. After the exams Anna answered a newspaper advertisement. So did thirty others, faces she recognised from lectures and the library stacks. A glittering American revealed his white teeth from behind a table-load of encyclopaedias and said: Why, one of our salesmen earned enough money in his first year to buy his own airplane. Now he flies from sheep ranch to sheep ranch in the outback, where they’re hungry for knowledge. Bullshit, Anna snorted. She was contentious, easily excited, easily wounded, her auburn hair crackling around her head. She went home to Pandowie, to work for a handful of dollars and be with Lockie for the summer. Lockie’s friend, Chester Flood, said wryly: We thought we might have lost you to the longhairs. Well, it had been a close thing a couple of times, but Anna would never tell them that. Besides, Lockie and Chester would not be turning twenty for another eighteen months, so the call-up was not yet an issue between them. She fell with relief against Lockie’s flat, flawless chest, his skin stretched brown and hot over flexing bones. Lockie, wild and laughing, and they went on unchanged. When he was forced to shoot two hundred starving ewes Anna whispered hush into his trembling neck. Two years later he was dead, and as Anna recovered from six weeks of blankness, a gap in time lost to her forever, sensations of home and childhood flared in her so vividly that she saw quartz reefs and dry grass, heard bark peeling in the stillness of the hot days, tasted dust from a willy-willy in her mouth, even as mushy snow settled over London. Funny about that, she wrote in an aerogramme home. Travel may broaden the mind but it also sharpens memory. She felt unlocked, better, now. In arthritic sentence fragments separated by dashes, a style best suited to postcards, she described Stonehenge capped with snow, fog on the M4, the mirrors of Versailles, Pozières, where Grandfather Ison had peered over the lip of a trench they called the Sunken Road, and the sea around the Greek islands as blue as the flooded shafts of the Pandowie mine. When she got home she found that every line had been published, unchanged, in the local rag. Mother, how could you, I sound like an idiot. Their first dead lamb, stretched eyeless and discarded in the dirt, distressed Anna’s children. Michael stamped his foot at the crows; Rebecca turned her back on the buzzing carcass. Then Michael was killed, and every year, in the dry months, when scorching winds and willy-willies and barrelling road traffic filled the air with dust, Anna could be expected to suffer. The dust brought back her guilt. She blamed herself for Michael’s death. Her husband blamed her—not in so many words, but she could sense it in him as though he wore a black hood. But he could surprise her. They were in the Land Rover. The door seals had perished and the dust poured in, bringing back her nightmare. She curled into a ball on the seat. The next moment, Sam’s hand floated from the wheel and rested briefly upon her knee: It’s all right, sweetheart. Anna has been gathering information about notable droughts for her Jubilee history. There is a useful quote from Grandfather Ison’s journal in the family reunion book:
11 November, 1929. Isonville is hanging on by one small haystack and a horse trough. It is a starved and silent view we have on those chance days are not shut down by the dust.
There will always be dust in Anna’s life. Even on the coast it will find her: streetlights coming on in the middle of the day; the neighbours discussing the TV news reverently; the famous front-page shot of the cloud closing in on the city. She will sneeze muddily into paper tissues rather than soil her handkerchiefs. She will close up the house and keep a glass of water on hand, for any faint grittiness between her teeth will bring on her panic. She’ll stay indoors, where she won’t have to listen to other old retirees from the bush who have known the real thing.