After another full day of fencing we were feeding ourselves when the discussion turned to a trip into Kunnunarra, Western Australia – at eight hours distant the nearest town to Bullo. Marlee and Charlie were planning on leaving early the next morning. Marlee would shop for supplies while Charlie stepped in for a few days as a flight instructor at the local helicopter pilot school.
“And I need some new riding boots, Marlee,” said Danielle “my old ones have had it.”
“I’ll say,” exclaimed Sara. “Your feet are hanging out of the ones you’ve got. I followed some footprints yesterday. It was a boot heel and four toes and it led right to your room.”
“Maybe I should pick up some more feed. How are we on all the bags? Do we have what we need for the horses? And the cows?”
“We don’t,” said Danielle, “I’ll give you a list after supper.”
“And check the chicken feed as well,” quipped Peter. “I’m hoping to get paid.”
“Dave, anything you want from town?” asked Marlee, ignoring Peter’s impertinence.
I never could have predicted my answer to that question a month earlier. I’d been drinking voluminous quantities of milk and water for two weeks now, and when Mike had come by the other day he brought along a six-pack of his favorite beverage. He’d generously offered me one and the change of pace had been stirring.
“Yes. I’d love a case of Coca-Cola,” I said with a gusto that surprised me. I’d always turned my nose up at the sugary fizzy stuff – and the people who drink it – while smugly sipping on my fruit juice or Perrier water, a true Los Angelino. “Maybe two – how much are they?”
“I think they’re about $1.25 per can.”
Hmmm… More than a day’s wages per case. I reached to my calf and ran my raw hands across the bite I’d received in gator creek the day before.
“Just one, thanks. And a Time magazine if you can find one.”
“You don’t want to read that trash,” interjected Sara.
“I enjoy politics; it’s a decent magazine to get an idea of what’s going on in the world.”
“No, it’s not. It’s rubbish. We used to have a friend who’d worked for them. He said they changed his stories all the time.”
“Well, the editor has the right to shorten an article to make it fit or something,” I speculated.
“No he doesn’t. He doesn’t have the right to change the facts.”
“No, that’s definitely no good. I think Time’s pretty reliable, though. Of course, the editor does have the right to even change the facts, if he wants to for some reason. I mean, theoretically…”
“No, he doesn’t. Nobody has the right to lie,” she said emphatically. I was surprised by the vociferous tone of the woman’s conviction.
“Well, in theory, he does. I mean, he can say red is blue if he wants to. Then his readers can assess his truthfulness.”
“No he can’t. That’s called lying. They shouldn’t be allowed to.”
“Yes, it is lying, but the idea is if someone lies, then he will eventually be exposed in a free speech system, a marketplace of ideas.” This breezy assertion came courtesy of the Communications Law class I’d taken at UCLA not long before departing for Australia.
“Hooey. A person shouldn’t be allowed to lie. Most people have no sense, and they’ll believe it.”
“Right, that’s why it’s the responsibility of citizens in a democracy to expose themselves to a wide range of sources, so they’re not duped.”
“Who’s got time for that? People simply shouldn’t be allowed to lie.”
“Well, it sounds good. But who’s to decide who is lying and who is telling the truth?”
“Nobody has to decide. You just have to look at the truth. When something happens and someone says something else happened, that’s lying. That shouldn’t be allowed.”
“Great, except that we all see things differently. Ask five people at a car crash what happened, and you’ll get five different stories. Perception is subjective.” I was on a roll.
“Maybe so, but four of those people are lying.”
“No, they’re not,” I noticed everyone other than Sara had grown silent, but I persisted. I love these kinds of conversations. “Look, there’s no such thing as objective perception. We’re all locked into our own private viewing booths in this world. What you see and what I see are always different, even if only by a small bit.”
Marlee spoke up to defend her mom’s point of view, “Well, say a bull were to throw you thirty feet in the air, Dave, then walk all over your face. You mean maybe it didn’t happen?”
“Sure it happened. But maybe you think it’s a tragedy, and I sort of enjoyed it. You saw a savage attack while I saw a ride in an amusement park.”
“Yeah, if that’s the case,” said Danielle, “that would be because we are normal and you are crazy.”
“And hearing the nonsense you’re talking,” said Charlie, chewing a mouthful of steak, “I’m starting to wonder if I’d think it was such a tragedy.”
I decided at that point not to press the subjective truth issue any further.
“Okay. Let’s just say there is some sort of objective truth. You would like a group of people deciding what that is and what it isn’t?”
“Sure. The truth’s obvious,” said Sara.
“But making those sorts of decisions is called censorship. That’s what they do in communist countries.”
This remark hit close to Charlie’s bone. “No,” he said, “you’re the communist. That’s what they do in Russia. They lie to the people. And that’s what you’re saying we should allow people to do.”
I decided at that point to back off the communism comparatives.
“So what would you do to the people who these censors decided were lying?”
“Shoot ‘em!” said Peter, as the others chuckled in agreement.
Though I recognized that Peter’s remedy carried his customary comic shock value I was also beginning to see that there was little time in this lifestyle for the conceptual fripperies of the salon. Black and white structures of right and wrong have sufficient complexity within when the issues at hand are so often matters of life and death. Obtuse abstractions are a luxury of the air-conditioned classes.
I decided at that point to scratch political theory off the list of conversation topics. I’d had plenty of that gamesmanship at college, anyway. What was being offered me at Bullo was a strong dose of the real world.
Before sunrise the next day Charlie and Marlee loaded Charlie’s personal Jeep with three spare tires, a large toolbox, an ’eskie’ full of food, and ten gallons of water. A two-way radio was mounted inside the cab. Around five am they said their goodbyes and departed.
Peter and I followed in the Toyota. The station’s grader had been left just past the river several weeks ago, and Peter was to bring the earth mover back to the homestead for a tune-up.
The ride out reminded me of the enjoyment I’d experienced on the day I arrived. We whizzed through the green and orange landscape, past the wary cows, past the glistening stands of Ghost gums and voluptuous Baobabs. Our progress halted when we reached the river. Charlie got out and waded into the middle, a grimace overtaking his face.
“River looks high,” Peter explained. “The Jeep is a petrol engine; it bogs more easily in high water than a diesel.” As he spoke, Charlie approached our car.
“You go across first. I’m not sure we’ll make it. If not, you’ll have to pull us out. We have a chain?”
Peter’d put one in the truck that morning in case we needed it with the grader.
“Good. Have a go, then.”
Peter put the Toyota in low four-wheel-drive and entered the Bullo. The water soon covered the side fenders and seeped into the cab. Steam rose from the hot engine. After we were across Charlie crept into our wake. His engine started to sputter as he reached midstream. Charlie gunned it and just managed to emerge on the opposite bank when the engine died.
I remember as a child in Michigan leaving one June for a drive to grandmother’s house in Georgia. For a kid, the long journey on the featureless interstate was already an obstacle to overcome before the gratification of arriving. On this particular trip, however, we weren’t fifty miles away from home when the engine in Dad’s Lincoln Continental suddenly died. The gasoline Pop had filled his tank with had been contaminated with water.
I remember sitting by the side of the road for what seemed like a lifetime before being towed to a country gas station. There I idled restlessly among the fumes and greasy clutter for another lifetime before we were finally again underway.
Ever since that trip I’ve been one to become aggravated by piddling delays during a much anticipated journey. I fuss and moan at the McDonald’s stops and grocery stops and sidetrips to ‘The Largest Hand Dug Pit in the World!’. If the destination is an exciting place I want to be on the road, seeing those yellow lines flashing by, eating Screaming Yellow Zonkers at 90 mph. That’s the way I’m built. I don’t even like to stop for gas; mechanical pit stops find me pacing around like a chicken looking for a place to lay an egg.
So when Charlie’s car died I experienced a similar feeling. Oh Christ, I thought, remaining in the truck. Now we’re going to be here the whole damn day, tinkering and puttering, while I’m sitting in the sun watching my skin wrinkle.
Meanwhile, Charlie’d retrieved his toolbox from the Jeep and crawled beneath the car, using an old blanket to lay upon. He didn’t seem the least bit disturbed. Marlee and Peter were examining the engine, sharing a laugh.
I bet we’ll have to drive all the way back for some friggin’ tool or obscure thingamajig, I muttered to myself. Maybe these damn flies will just pick us up and drop us off back at the house. Or maybe if we’re really lucky the heat will just kill us first. I skulked around the periphery, watching dubiously as Charlie removed several substantial pieces of the engine, fiddled with them, then replaced them. He turned over the engine and it caught immediately.
The whole operation had taken barely longer than it takes to fill a tank with gasoline at the local Chevron.
We reached the grader a short while later and as I watched Charlie and Marlee drive into the distance I got a stronger sense of the worth of the big man then I had yet felt. I’d seen him around the workshop and in the yards moving authoritatively and tackling jobs with great assurance. But there it was safer. One had things to fall back upon: other people, a shed full of tools, the radio telephone as last recourse. Out here in the bush, a job needed to be done quickly, with limited tools, at the risk of great inconvenience – or worse – in case of failure.
And he’d approached the job of restarting the engine without kicking the ground or cursing his luck. He’d simply diagnosed the problem, had prepared himself before hand with the tools he’d need. There was such a competence to that, a self-sufficiency quite foreign in my specialized world of stockbrokers who can shuffle billions of dollars but can’t change a light bulb, or hotshots in Ferraris who wouldn’t be able to add antifreeze to their quarter million dollar vehicles no matter how sharply their snippy trophy wives might taunt.
I considered myself, driving around in a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow chauffeuring a Saudi princess between Rodeo Drive jewelry stores. As she’d shop I would lean on the bumper, reek of nonchalant superiority as hayseeds on vacation from Nebraska snapped photos, feeling proud of myself for, what exactly? Borrowing another person’s success as wallpapering over my barely-better-than-minimum wage reality? Yet when left to my own capabilities I’d nearly melted down a $60,000 limousine out of sheer ineptitude. Yeah, we city folk, we’re all quite something, aren’t we – quite impressed with our cosmopolitan sheen – so long as we’re in our own lane. But behind the glare of our shiny objects we sophisticates are screwed if the smallest thing goes awry and we can’t get through to our mechanic, or gardener, or the Roto-Rooter man.
I remember being in traffic one afternoon behind two anarchists with purple mohawks. They’d filled their extended adolescence by spray-painting an old junker with as many offensive symbols as they could conjure – vulgar graffiti, swastikas, the middle finger. “We don’t need you!” they were symbolically screaming, “We don’t care about you or your system! To Hell with your material world!”
Then their proletarian hero bucket-of-bolts crapped out. The punks hopped out and perfunctorily raised the hood, cast an empty glance at the steam rising from within, then desperately looked around for some possibility of aid. They walked towards my car. Suddenly, their message to the world changed dramatically.
“Can you help us, buddy?” they’d implored. “We need a push,” they’d pleaded. “How much is a tow truck?” they’d wondered. “Piece of shit!” they’d moaned. “I don’t see a phone!” they’d kvetched. The antiestablishment warriors had been conquered by a ten dollar radiator hose.
As I watched the long line of dust settle behind the Henderson’s Jeep disappearing towards the horizon it occurred to me that Charlie, and all the people here at Bullo, inhabited a world precisely consonant with their ability to live in that world. There was no time or call for artifice, unnecessary adornments, distracting veneer. The demands of their world filled their schedule entirely, given that they were responsible to handle those demands themselves, in all their depth and variety. By absolute necessity they were masters of all they needed to make their systems run. As they went about their day there could be no voids to fall helplessly into, for there were no safety nets. There could exist no obstacles to expose them as frauds, pretenders, poseurs, only opportunities to learn more, do more, overcome more. Their excellence was manifest in their actions, not their stuff. And humility was imposed by the enormity of the stakes facing them each morning when they rose to face the day.
The synchronicity of honest voice with capable action is what we refer to as integrity. There was a wholeness of vision, a unified dedication to purpose and an unsentimental judgment about need versus want which radiated from these good people, and this bare-bones place. Bullo River was soaked in integrity, in the most meaningful sense of the term. The folks here had plenty of junkers, yet there wasn’t an offensive symbol to be found on any of them. Nor did any of these good people have purple hair.
That fact went way beyond mere aesthetic choice, that urban obsession least among concerns in the order of things at Bullo River Station.
By now I’d been involved in refurbishing several miles of fencing. I found great satisfaction in looking upon the long, straight lines, in the same way a contractor must take pride when passing a building he’d built. The lines of pickets with their taut wires and fresh wooden strainer posts spoke of hours of effort, fulfilled. As Peter and I drove one day to our worksite I mentioned my satisfaction to him.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s nice. Makes you feel like you haven’t been wasting your life drinking piss and wrecking cars hitting stray livestock on dark roads.”
“That’s what you used to do, is it?”
“Aw, I’ve done my share. Of drinking, anyway. Hadn’t started wrecking cars – yet,” he smiled mischievously, “guess I haven’t found the right cow yet. But yeah, that’s what most of me mates are getting up to back home.”
I’d found a similar self-destructive purposelessness among high-school buddies on a return visit to my own hometown.
“I’m a college boy, though. Half of them dropped out of school at fifteen,” said Peter, this son of a professor.
I’d been astounded when I heard the dropout rate for Australian youth – about 55%; similar to the rate in the inner cities of Detroit or Chicago.
“Why is that, do you suppose?”
“Bloody wankers, most of ’em!” he said as if his buddies could hear the needling. “No, really, I reckon most of them feel like if they stay in school they’re bludging, instead of getting a job and paying for their own piss.”
“Yeah, but what kind of work can anyone get at fifteen, anyway?”
“Aw, plenty. Pick a trade. Start as an apprentice. Join the union. Go on strike. You know; work.”
“You said it there. Plenty of strikes in this country. While I was in Canberra, the garbage men went on strike. You know what they wanted?”
“Air fresheners?”
“The right to say when it’s too hot to work. And after two weeks they got it, too. Including back pay for the time they were out on strike!”
“Let’s try that with Sara; it’s gobs hotter here than in Canberra! Maybe Stumpie can make us some signs!”
“Well now’s our chance, Pete. If we wait to break the news until Charlie returns I’ve got a feeling we’ll find ourselves hanging on a hook in the abattoir.”
“All-you-can-eat Jackeroo steaks! Woohoo!”
That night, the radio phone rang just after nine o’clock. Danielle, Peter, Sara, and I were watching the latest goofy movie brought by the mail plane. It was later than usual for a call. Sara looked worried as she went to answer the phone. She came back with a look that caused Danielle to hop up and turn the TV off.
“What’s the matter, mummy?” She asked anxiously.
“It’s Charlie. He crashed a chopper today.”
“Oh my God! Is he okay?!”
“I don’t know; Marlee’s at the hospital with him. Slingsby called. He’s going to the hospital. He said he’ll call us back.”
It’s hard to describe the feelings bouncing around that remote home for the next thirty minutes. No one spoke much; there were no answers to any of the questions racing through our heads. How could Charlie crash? He’s one of the best chopper pilots in the Top End. Hell, he’s practically a legend. Is he all right? What if he’s not; then what happens to the season? What happens to this family? I kept conjuring in my mind the image of him driving off the day before – level, competent, in control. What could’ve gone wrong?
“He’s gone down before,” Danielle said. “A couple of times he put it down in an emergency when he heard engine trouble developing.” I’d seen his ability to discern potential problems, to hear a single violin out of tune in the mechanical symphony of combustion. What could’ve happened?
That particular question had to wait, but the important issue was answered by the next phone call. Charlie was okay. He’d walked away, though the chopper was a write-off. He’d been with a student, who suffered minor injuries. They’d been practicing something called auto-rotations, we learned, when something had gone very wrong.
Being Sunday, and a rare day off, the time went by slowly as we waited for Marlee and Charlie’s return. Peter and I went fishing with Stumpie but had no luck. Darkness came and we shared a quiet meal at the house, joined by Bundy, Bill, Stumpie, and Dick, which was unusual. We were drawing together in the way people tend to in a crisis.
Finally, at about 9 o’clock – about two hours later than expected – the two-way radio in the office crackled.
“Mummy, mummy, mummy. Are you there, mummy?” It was Marlee’s voice. She sounded happy.
“Yes,” Sara answered with relief, “where are you?”
“We’re at six mile. See you in a few minutes.”
Ten minutes later headlights appeared alongside the airstrip. The Jeep drew up to the garden gate, entered, and parked alongside the garage. The back was heavily laden with bags and boxes.
“Well, well,” said Sara, “look who’s returned. And in one piece, yet.” She gave Charlie a big hug while he grinned bashfully.
“I know,” threw in Marlee, joining the hug, “what a big fool, huh?”
“So what happened?” Danielle asked breathlessly, blurting out the question on everyone’s mind.
“I stuffed up,” said the big man with as close to embarrassment as I’d yet seen.
“Too much machine for you, eh?” jabbed Peter gently.
“Guess so,” Charlie pursed his lips.
“So what’s an auto-rotation,” I asked.
“Slow down,” said Marlee. “Let the big drongo breathe.”
“Right,” Charlie said. “Let’s get this stuff unloaded and I’ll tell you all about it.”
After the bags and boxes had been unloaded and taken to the storeroom – including, happily, my case of Coca-Cola – Charlie told us his tale of woe.
“It was late. We’ve been up most of the day. Maybe I was pushing it too hard. Anyway, I wanted to show this bloke one 360° auto-rotation because we were going to be doing those the next day.”
“And a 360° auto-rotation is…what, exactly?” I asked.
“It’s a maneuver, an escape, you use if the engine cuts out on you and the only place you can put it down happens to be directly beneath you. You essentially spiral down to the ground.”
“What, with the engine off?” I asked incredulously.
“Yeah. It’s the only way to practice auto-rotations.”
“You mean the propeller is not turning?”
“No, it’s turning. The force of the air spins it as you fall.”
“Jesus Christ! This is something you do on purpose? Drop from the sky like a stone? You’ve done it before?”
“Hundreds of times.”
“A 360° auto is the hardest maneuver you can do in a chopper,” Marlee added.
“So what happened?” urged Danielle.
“I don’t know. I’ve only felt that feeling once before. It’s like falling in a vacuum. No air rushing up to meet you. I checked my instruments and saw we were going down way too fast. The attitude of the props was right. I don’t know. It was like there was no air.”
“How high were you?” asked Peter. His question had none of the whiff of ganja use it may have had back in LA.
“About 500 feet. I wanted to give us an extra bit of room. It has been a while since I’ve done one. A 360° anyway.”
That sensibility to add extra room in case of trouble probably saved Charlie’s life.
“So you were just losing it. Did you hit hard?” I asked.
“Yeah, it was a good bump. We landed hard on the skids. I thought just before we hit I could save it, but the guy with me pulled up his lever. I don’t know if I could have, but as soon as he did that we were buggered for sure.”
“So after we hit, we bounced pretty hard. We were still going a bit forward, one of the skids dug in and we flipped over onto our right side.”
“I hopped out and gave Gary a hand. We walked to a nearby house and called Slingsby.”
“Neither of you were hurt?”
“Not much. Gary was a bit shaken up. I thought perhaps he’d broken a collarbone.”
Marlee jumped in at this point. “Charlie, you missed the worst part. When they hit,” she said, turning to us, “the blade came down and cut the top of the bubble off,” Charlie’s wife said, hugging him.
“True. About this far.” Charlie held his hands six inches apart. He laughed and glanced at his worried wife.
“Damn you Charlie! You better be careful,” scolded a blanched Sara. “We can’t afford to lose you!”
Sara’s words chilled the room. The thought of losing Charlie was inconceivable. He was the field marshal which kept Bullo on the move. The girls, for all their toughness and deep knowledge in certain areas, didn’t have the benefit of being raised by inheritors of generations of rural life. Sara was a city girl until adulthood, and ex-Army officer Charles Henderson moved forward more on iron will than indigenous understandings. Danielle and Marlee are first-generation station owners, whereas Charlie Ahlers was at least the fourth generation of his family to live off the land. There are things in any holistic lifestyle which must be imbibed osmotically as much as learned via words and practice, and Charlie had access to such knowledge from the cradle.
We eventually learned that a critical cable had failed on the chopper, but that was merely academic. Sara’s fears expressed a poignancy that lingered with all of us as the house darkened, and we drifted off to sleep.
One last stretch of fence required repair before we could turn our efforts to the other tasks which needed completion before the muster. Many of the horses we had earlier released back into Bull Rush paddock had found their way into Rock Hole. Rock Hole was a paddock of perhaps one hundred acres, most of which was exposed shelf rock. This made the fencing tough, for the ground was littered with the rubble of eons of exposure. It was also thick with shallow rooted scrub trees.
Peter, Bundy, and I bounced our way along its eastern fence early one morning. The existing fencing was a parody of a fence, really. It hung in three slack wires, it’s strainer posts rotten and pickets spaced far apart, rather than slammed into the rocky ground where proper architecture required. Our mandate, given by Charlie the night before, was to make a functional fence of it. That meant, of course, bothering to put the pickets where they needed to be, rather than where convenience allowed.
It was a difficult and frustrating morning. The rocky earth rebuffed most of our efforts; often we had to move the picket a foot this way or that four times before finding a spot it could be sunk home. Half a dozen times in the first hundred yards we had to resort to plan B – hanging a large rock from the inadequately deep picket in order to hold it in place. The going was slow, and by noon we covered only a quarter-mile.
“Knockoff time,” Peter called to me as we tied up our new fourth wire. “Let’s have some lunch.” I climbed onboard the truck with Bundy and Peter and drove to a creek crossing a few minutes away.
It was a surprise to discover. From fifty yards away the creek was hidden in its gulch and to the uninitiated eye the land looked flat and dry. But the telltale vegetation at the edge of the creek created a beautiful glade, cool and welcoming.
Peter collected firewood and soon had the water heating for tea. A teapot Down Under is known as a ’billy’, from the tin cans emptied of ‘billy beef’ – the boiled meat carried along on early Outback expeditions. (A competing theory suggests the name comes from the Aboriginal word for water – billi.) Bush poet Banjo Patterson’s poem Waltzing Matilda, the de facto national song of Australia, speaks of a traveler who “sang and he watched and he waited ‘til his billy boiled”, which is exactly what this traveler found himself doing at that moment, humming Waltzing Matilda and anticipating a nice cup of billy tea.
I sat in the middle of the shaded creek to eat my roast beef sandwich, watching minnows nibble my leg hairs. I spent the entire time laughing, as Peter and Bundy worked to outdo each other in casting aspersions upon the others’ handiwork, looks, and general manliness.
This was our lunch spot for the next five days as we made our way around the paddock, rejuvenating the fence where possible, reconstructing it where necessary. The exertions would begin when we arrived in Rock Hole at sunrise and our stiff muscles would loosen up as the day heated and the blood began flowing.
The difficult and tedious work was made quite bearable, however, by the promise of roast beef and billy tea eaten while resting in that lovely, cool, creek come noontime. For those pleasant interludes I surely felt a jolly swagman.
Barking in Nutwood 