A year after becoming Travel Editor at the Examiner, I went to Australia to attend a travel conference with my wife and two-year-old daughter. This was my first trip to Australia, and while I didn’t have time to undertake an ambitious journey throughout the land, I was determined to find some compact way to get outside the cities and experience rural realities. The Outback—that vast, mysterious, mostly unpeopled expanse—was magnetically alluring, its name alone seeming to promise unimaginable adventure. When I researched ways to get there, I discovered the day trip I describe in this story, and the friendly farmer who guided me indelibly into the heart of the country.
PETER RENDALL SHIELDED HIS EYES from the midmorning sun and looked out over the green-brown wheat fields and scraggly eucalyptus trees of Dubbo. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s about what you get here in Dubbo: sheep, a few cattle, some fields of wheat, oats, and barley—and lots of wide-open space.”
We had stopped for a “morning tea” of delicious homemade sandwiches, cake, and tea on a dirt road by a dirt field somewhere on the outskirts of Dubbo, a town of 24,000 perched precariously on the edge of Australia’s vast and largely uninhabited Outback. After two and a half hours of bumping and bouncing over mostly unpaved roads and along dusty fields, I was taking some time to get used to the stillness.
Suddenly the ringing in my ears stopped—and I was stunned by the silence. The music of no sound, after the clamor of Sydney and San Francisco, was so sweet it was almost overwhelming. Then, like an orchestra tuning before a concert, isolated notes touched my ear, one by one: the trill of a far-off bird, an engine revving on a distant road, a vagrant breeze rustling the grasses, the splash of tea into a plastic cup.
“Yeah, life’s a lot slower here,” Rendall said, ambling over. “Up with the sun, down with the stars. Not much to do except work the fields and the flocks. Mind you, with the machines breaking down and the crops coming in, dogs messing with your sheep, the planting and the harvesting, the shearing, we’re never wanting for things to do.”
He looked toward the shimmering hills on the horizon and shook his head. “I couldn’t live in the city. It’s too busy there, all those tall buildings and the people rushing down the street. It’s a different pace there, that’s right, a different scale. I like it better here.”
I had come to Dubbo on a day tour operated out of Sydney by a company called, dashingly enough, Jolly Swagman Tours.
The tour had begun early that morning, the sun squinting over the horizon at newspaper boys and milk delivery trucks while I squinted out a taxi window at the splendid sandstone buildings, tree-lined streets, and ornate grillwork fences on the way to the Sydney airport.
The Sydney-Dubbo flight was an education in itself. We passed over fairly dense communities for about ten minutes, then the roads and buildings began to thin out. Soon we were flying over spare, desolate, rolling brown hills, uninhabited and uninhabitable, from the look of them. After some time a farm appeared, then a scattering of houses. What seemed to be the outlines of a settlement were silhouetted on the horizon. Otherwise, all I could see from horizon to horizon were those brown, rolling hills, stuck here and there with green trees and crossed by a red road that ribboned over the crests and occasionally dipped into hidden valleys. What do people do for groceries out here? I wondered.
At about 7:20, fifty minutes into the flight and ten minutes before we were due to land, cultivated fields and scattered twelve-house communities began to appear. Then the outskirts of Dubbo became discernible, a great green and brown quilt of hills and crops, dotted with white sheep, seven-structure farmsteads, and bushy, scraggly trees that cast distorted shadows. A paved road came miraculously into sight, then the town itself—red roofs and gray metal roofs, black, multi-lane highways.
It was strangely disjunctive to see all this roof-and-road civilization, this very orderly and ordinary-looking town, in the middle of the Australian version of nowhere. We descended over grassy oblongs and semicircles that seemed to be used for sporting events, a river, a wheeling flock of birds, sheep, cows, sheep, fields, sheep—no golf courses out here, I thought—and suddenly we were bumping and skidding to a stop.
I was greeted at the airport by Rendall’s Outback-open smile, hardy handshake, and “How do you do, mate.” (He did not, I hasten to add, say “G’day.”) Jolly Swagman’s Dubbo tour can accommodate up to forty-five people, but on this day I was the sole participant, so, Rendall said, we would follow the trip’s basic itinerary, but could also do essentially whatever I wanted to.
He led me to his minivan and outlined the day: touring Dubbo’s downtown and outlying farms; pausing for morning tea somewhere on the road; watching a sheep-shearing; having an Aussie barbecue lunch on a farm (his own, as it turned out); taking in a sheep auction; visiting more farms and the Western Plains Zoo; and finally, if time allowed, touring Old Dubbo Gaol and the Pioneer Museum.
Downtown Dubbo is a pleasant place vaguely reminiscent of a town in the American Midwest: wide, well-swept streets lined with one-story buildings that offer a gamut of services and distractions—a hardware store, a produce market, a movie theater, milk bars and restaurants, gas stations, clothing stores, sewing shops, pubs, a five-and-dime.
There were a few broken windows and vacant buildings here and there, but on the whole it looked to be a clean and contented place. The residential streets showed small, trim houses behind small, trim front lawns—nothing extravagant or ostentatious (Perhaps the Outback stunts all ambitions of extravagance, I thought), but just quiet and orderly, practical, comfortable.
“What are the benefits of living here?” Rendall asked, echoing my question. “The most important thing is there’s a better family relationship; out here you tend to do things as families. Oh, I guess people aren’t as close-knit as they were, not as much as they are still in the smaller towns—but everybody rallies around the schools and the like. Cities don’t seem to have that same feeling.”
He talked encyclopedically as he drove, telling me just about everything I could ever want to know about Dubbo, from the racial composition of the town (“There are a few Greeks and a few Chinese, but the people are mostly of English stock”) to the religious affiliations (“Well now, in order I’d guess you’ve got the Anglican, then the Roman Catholic, the United, Baptist, Seventh Day Adventist, and so on”) to the fact that, as in every rural area I’ve ever visited, the parents’ prime worry is that the kids are leaving the country for the city.
At one point we dropped in on a neighbor farmer and talked about a machine that was being fixed, and about his getting up in the middle of the night to watch over his flock of sheep.
“Why does he have to watch over his sheep in the middle of the night?” I asked when we were on the road again.
“Because a dog’s been messing with ’em,” Rendall answered. “Your domestic dog, once they learn to kill, the only way to stop ’em is to give ’em a little lead.” He looked straight ahead.
“Don’t you have to talk with some authorities or something before you do that?” I asked, my innocence about as wide as the wheat field before us.
“Well, when a dog’s been hassling your sheep, you can do three things,” he said. “You can talk to the owner. If that doesn’t work, you can go out like Joe there in the middle of the night, spot the dog and he doesn’t come back—that takes care of the problem. Or you can talk to the local authorities and they’ll take care of the problem. But once a dog has attacked a sheep, they have it in their blood; they’re gone.”
“Does everyone have a gun?” I asked.
“Oh, sure, you’ve got to have a gun out here.”
I was beginning to think about frontier justice, and how in some situations people just make their own laws. I was thinking that’s fine as long as everyone shares the same laws, and probably that’s how life was in the old American West, when suddenly Rendall said, “Look! Over there!”
I could just make out a two-legged being, bounding, bounding, over the dusty plain. A kangaroo!
“There’s more!” he shouted.
And sure enough, there were three, four, five of them bounding into a grove of eucalyptus trees.
“This is kangaroo country,” he said. “Kangaroos run wild in packs all through here. The kangaroo is nocturnal, you know; it plays and breeds at night and sleeps during the day, so it’s hard to see. And it blurs in with the surroundings, too. But we’ll see more of ’em before the day is out.”
And so we did. But first we would see sheep.
“Grab it by the base of the wool. No, no, not like that. Get your hand in there good and just grab it tight. Now start to run the clippers as close to the body as you can.”
I was thinking of childhood haircuts, of squirming in the barber’s smooth leather chair until I felt the inevitable cool clip of razor to skin. I felt intense empathy with the sheep.
“But I don’t want to hurt it,” I said.
The sheep bucked and baaed, as if in accord.
“Don’t worry about hurting the sheep. The sheep hardly feels a thing, and it’s forgotten about it a moment later,” the master sheep-shearer said.
I gingerly ran the shears over the sheep’s all-too-pink body, wincing in anticipation of a jerk and a bloody gash. As I worried, I was leaving a very fine layer of very expensive wool.
“No, no, look at what you’re missing!” the master sheep-shearer shouted.
So what was I supposed to do?
“Like this,” he said, wrestling the animal to the ground, grabbing an oily handful of wool and expertly skimming the shears just over the raw pink flesh.
We were watching one of the rare craftsmen of a difficult art at work, and I was gaining a whole new appreciation of sweaters. “I suppose there’ll always be sheep-shearers around,” Rendall had said on our way to this farm, “at least until they make a machine to do it—but there are fewer and fewer men to do it, I’ll tell you. It’s pretty good money, but jolly hard work.”
Jolly hard indeed. Beyond the enclosed, wool-littered room where we stood, a pawing, baaing flock of about sixty penned-in sheep waited. And that was just the beginning. By the end of the day, the shearer said, he would have cropped about 150 of the farmer’s sheep—about one-tenth of the total—and shoved them baaing and scrambling out another door into the suddenly cold air. And the wages for this day’s work? About $175 Australian, the equivalent of $140 U.S.
He sheared sheep pretty regularly five days a week, he said, sometimes more during peak periods. And for all that he would make about $35,000 U.S. a year.
“It’s not bad work, but the worst of it is the joints,” he said, rubbing his fingers. “I know a mate lost the use of three of his fingers, just couldn’t work ’em at all. It’s the lanolin, you know; it works into your muscles and sinews until you can’t move ’em anymore. Don’t know who’ll take my place when I go.”
After the sheep-shearing we explored the enlightened and enlightening Western Plains Zoo, where representatives of the wildlife of the world roam more than 700 acres of beautifully landscaped open-range exhibit areas, separated according to continent; feasted on a hearty and delicious barbecue lunch with Rendall’s family at his farm; took in a weekly sheep and cattle auction, wonderfully raucous with competing moos, baas, barks, and bids; and visited another farm, where we walked through the long fields and I bumped along for a few turns in a crop-tilling tractor.
We toured on, moving from tarred streets to dusty byroads and back again, pausing to photograph kookaburras and kangaroos, talking with farmers we met along the way.
Nothing extraordinary happened, and in many ways that was precisely the point: The tour gave me a great feeling for what happens on a day in the life of Dubbo, and in so doing offered illuminating insights into the realities of rural Australian life.
On another level, and equally important, it slowed me down to the rhythm of Dubbo, made me notice the richness of minute things I’d forgotten in the city: a wreath of wire carefully hung on a fence; the dusty, almost musty smell of turned-up soil on a hot, dry day; the pure power of the burning sun; the poignancy of a tractor hookup rusting in isolation at the edge of a field, or of a far-off plume of dust signaling another human’s approach.
The day passed all too quickly, and suddenly it was time to return to the airport and Sydney. As we raced to catch my plane, slanting sunlight colored the landscape a golden orange, a light that somehow seemed to fix the permanence of each blade of grass, each sheep, each tree, each hill. I had been in Australia only three days, and already I had found a place I would never forget.
Over the ensuing week, I explored the chic surprises of Sydney and the sybaritic splendors of the Gold Coast, but in my mind I kept returning to Dubbo. And as I was packing on my last night, I thought back to my first morning in the country, when I had been given a crash course in the Land Down Under at the friendly offices of Tourism Australia.
I remembered staring at a huge map of Australia on one of the office walls, staring as if seeing the country for the first time, although in fact I had been poring over Australia maps for weeks. There was Sydney, there was Dubbo; there was the sliver of civilization that runs along the east coast from Adelaide to Cairns, and the pockets of population around Perth and Darwin. And there, inconceivably beyond them all, was the vast middle of the place, the wide-open, incredible expanse of virtually unpopulated space, the Outback.
Then I recalled Dubbo, how the people had seemed so content despite the toughness of their life, how they had seemed so much closer to the land and the weather. I remembered the astonishment of landing among those roofs and fields in the middle of nowhere, and smiling at the irony of Peter Rendall’s words soon after we’d begun our tour: “We call this ‘the hub of the West.’ You see, the roads from Sydney to Adelaide and from Melbourne to Brisbane pass through here.”
And I thought: There are geographical hubs and there are spiritual hubs, and then there are hubs in a completely different sense—places that center you, that bring you back in touch and balance with something deeply important inside yourself.
On my first encounter with all the vastness of Australia, I realized, I had already found one such hub: hot, dusty Dubbo; sweet, silent Dubbo; Dubbo of sheep and shearer, wheat and wide-open space; Dubbo on the edge of the Outback, at the center of the map in my mind.