Chapter 4 #2
(Maude) Last year. It’s resolved. Don’t bring it up.
(Ronnie) You should have told me.
(Maude) Why? So you could give her tips?
Back at Upsend Downs the next morning while Rainbow was in school, Ronnie rode in front of the flock carrying a small plastic bucket of grain, driving a thousand ewes and two thousand lambs from one paddock to another.
The flock had to be moved every day.
At the rear, Kazi looked at home in the saddle, having a brilliant time. He was in his element, unconcerned about stragglers. She admired how straight his back was, how lightly he perched on the saddle, and she copied the way he held the reins in one hand and rested the other on his thigh.
Droving was surprisingly relaxing. The way the flock carried her along before it swept forward under its own momentum, enveloping obstacles in its path, swallowing, spilling over, reminded her of surfing.
Dreadnought rocked side to side above the white sheep ocean. When Ronnie tapped the mare’s flanks with her heels the mare broke into a canter.
Sunlight glowed yellow ribbons through dust clouds churned by twelve thousand tear-shaved hooves. More torrential rains would flood the neighbor’s lowlands soon.
From the horse barn and gravel parking lot, Stone House appeared to be a squat, single-story stone box with a wraparound veranda, but it had been built on a hill—the back side was a two-story, open-concept, timber-frame and plaster villa with repurposed wrought-iron railings made of old Singer sewing machines and French doors looking down on a sloping lime-green lawn.
She found Nev in the kitchen fixing lunch. Nev looked like Robert Redford had walked off the set of Out of Africa. Ronnie’s boss was one of those pink, weather-beaten people—old in the face, young in the body—who could be anywhere between thirty and fifty without surprising anyone.
Ronnie washed her hands, checking on the fingernail that had been black since she accidentally hit it with a hammer.
A Christmas card smiled back from the windowsill behind the sink.
On it Nev’s kid sister posed in front of the University of Auckland, surrounded by large handwritten letters: “Happy birthday big sis! I hope you, Ronnie and Rainbow have a happy Christmas and New Year. Love, Taylor.”
The kitchen looked down on Lazy Creek, Boar Pocket Road, and beyond that, hundreds of hectares of open eucalyptus scrub—Nev’s sheep on the left, Johnson’s cattle on the right—reaching down to the marshy shore of manmade Lake Tinaroo. Indigo mountains on the horizon.
Nev garnished with parsley before handing her two plates to carry out on to the veranda. Eating here was always posh. Today, lunch was salmon, wild rice, kale salad, mandolined radishes and baby rocket.
Flecks of hay coated the hair on Ronnie’s forearms. “What’s happening with the sheep in the paddock here?” A group of ewes stood grazing on the other side of an electric fence. One stared directly at them, hoping for a treat like the apple in front of Nev on the patio table.
“Their eyelids are pale. I’ll deworm them after lunch.” Nev walked over to the fence and gave the ewe the apple, scratching behind her ears and between her shoulder-blades. The sheep wiggled her butt and hind legs side to side like a dog.
Ronnie hadn’t grown up on a farm and the idea of parasites still gave her the ick. “How old is Kazi? Who’s replacing him?”
Nev wiped her hands on her pants and returned to the table.
“He’s a dying breed. They don’t make men like him anymore.
” The drover in question was half-naked in the yard wearing nothing but wool, greasy cap and a splash of white hair, back bent at a ninety-degree angle to trim a hoof.
“He got into this before child labor laws, shearing at the big stations with his dad. He would prefer to be a full-time shearer, but he doesn’t have a driver’s license and he’s bollocks at swagging.
You know how he is. Likes his creature comforts. ”
She snorted, trying to decide if she enjoyed the peppery aftertaste of this arugula. Kazi lived by himself in the hayloft. He had worked for Nev’s father, which had always struck Ronnie as sad. The idea of belonging to an estate felt old-fashioned at best and colonial at worst.
Ronnie forked a burger-sized wedge of salmon into her wide mouth and chewed. “No new drover, then.”
“It’s not the life,” Nev agreed. “Stockmen are a dime a dozen and sheep people can’t find work within a hundred kilometers of a city.
It’s not a transferable skill. Don’t end up like that, Dain’y.
Stick with horses and machines, you’ll find work anywhere, Rome to Rio.
If you can manage a barn or fix a car, you can support a family.
It’s called job security. You always want to be moving into a field in high demand, so you can take vertical steps to a higher paid job. ”
“Like you.”
“Do as I say, not as I do.”
Ronnie picked up Rainbow from school again and coached soccer. At her dad’s house that night, Reg and Blaise had a meeting at the fire station, so she made lasagna, salad, rice, and beans for Rainbow. As usual she cooked way too much food for two people. Rainbow wiped tomato sauce off the snake.
A local Yidinji artist had handmade the elaborate tile mosaic of the Rainbow Serpent on the kitchen floor.
As a kid, Ronnie had taken her dad’s local art collection for granted, had been surprised when she went over to friends’ houses and they didn’t have Yidinji, Wadjanbarra Yidi artwork on the floors and walls.
More than seventeen traditional owner groups and twenty thousand Aboriginal people lived across the Wet Tropics region.
After dinner, she piled leftovers into plastic containers which Rainbow stacked in the fridge. Teamwork makes the dream work.
“Can we go to the basketball court?” Rainbow asked.
“The one with lights?” It wasn’t raining outside and she didn’t have to return the girl to Gordonvale tonight. Ronnie was sore from lifting weights and exhausted from repotting hundreds of trees at Upsend Downs, but she would rally. “Put on your trainers and grab a ball from the shed.”
At the basketball court, they shot hoops with neighborhood kids. After half an hour Ronnie dragged, barely able to jog around the court after the ball, but the nine-year-old still giggled and jumped, doing cartwheels, begging her over and over to take her camping, and she couldn’t say no.
At bedtime they loaded camping gear into her dented F-150 and drove out into the bush.
No streetlights out here. Upsend Downs was dark except for a floodlight on each of the barns.
In low gear they rolled up the hill, around Stone House—one light on in Nev’s bedroom—then down the hill again to Lazy Creek.
She parked under black trees. Rotten Davidson’s plums littered the ground.
The passenger door slamming interrupted water gargling over mossy stones.
In the plum trees, a kookaburra laughed, ‘ooo-ooo-aaa-aah!’ and an Eastern Whipbird call cut through the twilight like a blaster pistol in a space opera.
Rainbow gasped. “Cool!”
Ronnie smiled and drew a deep breath, filling her lungs with unpolluted air. She would sleep like a baby here. They set up camp in the clearing next to Lazy Creek as they had dozens of times. She didn’t mind the lack of light—they could set up camp just as easily in the dark.
In the Outback, she and her mum had often spent nights staked out with sniper rifles in treetops, hunting feral pigs.
Those nights had been sleepless, but not dreamless.
She had had the wildest dreams in trees, dreams that ran on and on when she recalled them the following day, one improbable fantasy blurring into the next like the snake that swallowed its own tail.
Her mother had taught her how to take a sniper rifle apart, clean it, and put it back together in the dark.
Good fun at the time, but didn’t age well.
In hindsight, letting a child clean your guns was probably illegal.
Ronnie would never take Rainbow hunting at night, when you could only see the world in black cutout shapes, shadow puppets across the horizon.
Her mum had taught her to hunt by sound alone, but that wouldn’t fly here in the real world.
Rainbow helped snap the tent ribs open and raise the nylon tent. While Ronnie hammered in the pegs, Rainbow carried their packs inside and unrolled the sleeping bags.
The tent lit up from within like a blue lantern.
Something in Ronnie relaxed. She drew a deep breath and let it out, before joining her daughter inside.
Rainbow had laid the sleeping bags together on one side of the tent, which made Ronnie feel a certain way.
“You’re so sweet, babe. Thanks for setting this up.
” They brushed their teeth. Snuggled up close at her daughter’s side under the battery-powered lantern, she opened the library book that she and Rainbow were reading together.
She read slowly, pausing after every other word, deciphering her handwritten sticky notes.
When she pronounced a word wrong the nine-year-old corrected her.
“The Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area is a national treasure. Covering an area of 300,000 km2 on Australia’s continental shelf, the Great Barrier Reef is home to vast amounts of biodiversity.
However, sediment and nutrient runoff is damaging the reef, causing coral bleaching and increasing invasive predation, both of which pose serious threats to the future of the Reef. ”
She wondered if her daughter chose difficult books to challenge her as an act of preteen rebellion. Some nights Rainbow made fun of her for pausing and being slow. When that happened, reading became infinitely harder. Tonight, Rainbow didn’t comment. Smart girl.
Rainbow read five perfect pages aloud in a fraction the time, turned off the battery-powered lantern and went to sleep.
The nine-year-old made it look like breathing air.
Ronnie lay awake in the dark. How come her daughter was a genius?
The girl hadn’t inherited that trait from her.
Maybe schools were better at teaching now.
Ronnie hadn’t been reading advanced shit like this in year three in Lionheart.
She had gotten as far as the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books before her mum decided her days of mainstream education were over.
Rainbow was light years ahead of where Ronnie had been at that age. Either Rainbow was performing above grade level or Ronnie must have been under-performing before her mother pulled her out of school and into the Outback.
Something to chew on.
Her mum was out there in the bush now.
The thing about people like that who said they wanted to ‘connect to the land’ was that land was everywhere. You were always on land. What those people actually meant but didn’t say, was that they wanted to get away from other people.