Wake In Fright Read Free

weeks’ pay would cover his air fare to Sydney and back, and there would be four weeks’ pay left, eked out by judicious visits to relatives. Six weeks by the sea, to just lie in the water and soak out the dust that had seeped into his being.
    He finished with the windows and looked around, aware of the smell of the classroom which always seemed stronger when the children had gone. A chalky smell, an inky smell, a suggestion of body smells and stale sandwiches and brown apple cores, all mingled with the smell of the dust which, even in the room, stirred and eddied about his feet as he moved.
    He picked up his briefcase and walked out into the sun. He always winced when the sun hit him. He could not pick up the trick the locals had of keeping their eyes perpetually screwed in a squint. He forced the wooden door into its sagging frame and turned the lock. Then he shook his head and fished out his sunglasses. In a year in the west he had not been able to make up his mind whether the glasses were any use or not. The glare was white with them off and grey withthem on, if glare can be grey, and the shafts of white came in at the side, like little pointed pieces of stone driving at his eyes.
    He tried to keep his lids closed as much as possible as he walked across the schoolyard, past the fiction of a sapling fence that rose out of the white dust in futile protest against the possibility of stray cattle wandering into the playing area.
    The road was distinguishable from the paddocks only by the deep tyre tracks in the dust, and the schoolteacher could feel his feet sinking in it as he walked.
    One hundred yards from the school was the hotel, and near that the railway siding called Tiboonda Station.The three buildings made up the township of Tiboonda. All were timber and iron, all built in the monotonous, low box-form that characterises western architecture; and all were riddled with white ants and dry-rot.They stood in the plain abjectly, as though they no longer made any serious claim to constitute a township.
    The schoolteacher walked slowly, trying not to raise the dust. In all directions little white clouds showed where his pupils, on foot, bicycle, and horseback, were scattering to the railway camps, farmhouses and native shanties where they lived.
    For them the six weeks’ holiday meant six weeks herewhere the creek bed was dry and cracked and the water to drink had to be brought from Bundanyabba by train, and all they could do was play in the dust, or perhaps tease the wild camels whose ancestors formed the inland’s transport system.
    He reached the hotel and walked across the drooping veranda floor into the bar. It was shady in here, but not cool. It was never cool in Tiboonda, except at night in deep winter when the cold bit into your bones. In the winter you wished for the summer, in the summer you wished for the winter, and all the time you wished to blazes you were a thousand miles from Tiboonda. But you had two years to fill in for the Education Department, and if you left before that, you forfeited the bond your uncle had put up for you when you were fool enough to think you wanted to take up teaching for a living. And so you’d stay here for another year, unless by the grace of God you could persuade the Department to move you east before that, and God probably didn’t have that much grace to spare.
    ‘Schooner, Charlie,’ he said to the hotelkeeper, who emerged from his dark back room wearing, for some reason, a waistcoat over his drenched shirt.
    Charlie pulled the beer.
    In the remote towns of the west there are few of the amenities of civilisation; there is no sewerage, there are nohospitals, rarely a doctor; the food is dreary and flavourless from long carrying, the water is bad; electricity is for the few who can afford their own plant, roads are mostly nonexistent; there are no theatres, no picture shows and few dance halls; and the people are saved from stark insanity by the one strong principle of