Shearers' Motel Read Free Page B

he came to an airstrip with a small Cessna parked at the far end. It was poised to float up into a different medium from the afflicted ground, where fallen mulga logs, ant beds, and black clumps of impenetrable woody weeds would make emergency landings suicidal.
    Turning around, he drove back. He was wound up to a pitch of excitement he hadn’t felt for years. What was going on with him? He felt untested. He wanted to be taken on as a stranger on terms that had nothing to do with the life he had left behind him. That was his idea in going cooking. That was it. And he wanted it to happen soon. Then he would be able to look over at himself, and join himself, instead of feeling divided in his feelings all the time. All these tracks splitting off from each other were like him. They would finally dribble out in senseless terminations of impulse. Was he out to get himself lost, slightly crazed and panicky on a geographical scale? The country made the invitation and people obliged with their lives.
    He struck a well-used branch track following a fenceline, and a sign dangling from the reverse side of a gate: Leopardwood Downs Shed 7.5 kilometres . He’d missed it the first time through. His pots and pans, sifters, knives, measuring jugs and bottles rattled around in the back. Something beautiful happened then. The truck slalomed through a spectral near-desert landscape that looked, fora while, untouched by sheep. Here were leopardwood trees, graceful, dreamlike, slender; and bloodwoods, with distinctively shining leaf-heads standing out from the darker jumble of rotting logs and ant beds, prickly scrub and brooding acacias. It was a landscape he remembered from when he came up from Bourke on roads like this with his father, driving ‘on patrol’ through Fords Bridge to Hungerford, back down to Wanaaring, out to White Cliffs, on through Cobar and home to Bourke again. They made campfires of gidgee logs under red sandridges scattered with scarlet tongues of Sturt’s desert pea, boiling the billy and heating tins of Spam on the coals. They had all their shiralee moments together on these tracks. The dark eye of the pea was careless where it looked. Part of who he was today was still the boy there, commenting on everything, imagining into life what he couldn’t understand, and shrinking with embarrassment when his father chose the fullest moments to speak, quoting homilies on solitude, overstating plain feeling under the stars. The boy was amazed when his father drained shandies and accepted whiskies and soda from station owners on wide verandahs after sunset. He must once have led a different life, maybe even a wilder life before he became a Presbyterian minister — because the boy thought only Catholic clergy drank (the priest always disappearing into the public bar of Fitz’s pub). At Brewarrina, he remembered, they camped in the ghostly, broken-into church, clearing their stretchers and blankets out of the way in time for a morning service. No one had come (the Presbyterians had gone to seed in Brewarrina), and his father had spoken a prayer with just the two of them present. It made the skin crawl on the back of the boy’s neck: ‘Dear God, grant us a full life in continuation of the times we have known in Thy loving care’. They drove back to Bourke, the boy steering while his father rolled cigarettes. In his late forties now, he was ten years older than his father had been then. Another ten years, and his father would be diagnosed as having Parkinson’s disease. At the age he was now his father was an invalid. It sharpened his appetite for life to think of that.
    He had driven through Bourke earlier that same morning, searching for the old house, the Presbyterian manse in Mertin Street, finding (after going round the block twice) that it had been demolished to make way for a Budget motel. He hardly slowed as he went past. The old coolabah tree in the front yard, a ladder to the