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Red Dirt Talking

Fremantle Press

Let me tell you, there's a lot of stories going around about that girl. Lotta stories. Stories from the local rag. Stories from the townies, the station folk, the mob. Then there's the police. Plenty stories there. No one can work it out, everyone's gotta theory and with my job, I get to hear them all, whether I like it or not.

The truck's reversing signal wakes Stirling on my run past Ransom Council. Stretching and yawning on the green wedge of lawn, he pushes the ten gallon hat from his face. 'Here, let me help you with that, Maggot!' he says jumping up, and shouldering the last of the bins. Then hops into the cab and joins me for the rest of the run. By the time we reach the roadhouse, he's given me the drum on the girl as he knows it. Reckons she got taken by the wild dog living in a waterhole.

'Musta been a pretty big dog to go eating up an eight year old girl like that,' I say pulling into a parking bay.

'Ya better believe it,' he says scratching his head. 'When the dog gets outta that there water it's only about the size of a pussy cat, see? But it climbs up the bank, growin' and growin' 'til it's as big as a bullock.'

'True?'

He nods. 'That there little girl? Well, she never did listen to her time-to-go-home voice.' His hair sticks up like some riled cockatoo as he stares out of the window into the shimmer of the Western Desert. 'Time to go home, time to go home,' he whispers menacingly to himself. Fights a few demons he does, the old Stirling.

Over bacon and egg sandwiches and milky coffee at the roadhouse, Bob — Two-Bob, that is, not Fearless Bob — scoffs. 'It was a dog all right but not the four-legged variety.'

'No?' I shovel a few million spoonfuls of sugar into my cup.

He lowers his voice, 'It's a suicide.'

I think about a girl that young taking her own life and I shake my head.

'You don't get to hear what I hear in the courtroom, Maggot.'

'I just can't see it, you know.' But there's no telling Bob.

Fearless Bob reckons Two-Bob's suicide story is a crock. He chucks a handful of chook heads over the fence to the seven metre crocodile and his female companion. 'I don't want to let the cat out of the bag or anything, but I know what happened.'

'Let me guess,' I say. 'She got taken by a salty?'

'No way! She was topped by her uncle.'

Fearless isn't the sharpest tool in the shed but regardless I just have to ask. 'Why'd he wanna do that?'

He cites jealousy as the main motive. 'Couldn't handle the fact that his mother put him up for adoption yet kept her second baby, so he hit the old girl where it hurts the most and murdered her one and only granddaughter.' He watches the male crocodile moving with unexpected speed to savage the female. 'Hey Maggot, do ya reckon you can take the bits of beast lying out the back with you? The crocs won't even touch it and now the punters are beginning to complain.'

And I can't say I blame them. The whiff I cop when I back the truck up to the hopper makes even my stomach turn.

I'm about to pull out when he whistles me back. 'You wouldn't know where I could get hold of some old beer bottles?'

'King browns?'

'Thought I'd have a go brewing my own beer.'

'See what I can do.'

'Thanks, I'll shoot a few your way when I bottle them up.'

'You'd be doing me a favour if you didn't,' I say slipping the truck into gear.

'A bourbon man.' Fearless tuts and shakes his head.

'A cautious man,' I say to myself, turning right and onto the highway.

Next stop is the Land Council which sits on the saltflats halfway between the old part of town and the new part of town. I call at reception on the off- chance Lori's got any cake going.

'Disappeared, bullshit,' she taps the local newspaper on her desk. 'The girl's been front page news for two weeks straight now. Her uncle snatched that little girl away into the desert, that's what.'

'Well, Fearless says he murdered her.'

Lori laughs infectious big belly laughs. 'He's as sharp as paint, that Fearless!' She wipes her eyes. 'Not that uncle. I'm talking about Tommy Mutton Junior. Her great-great-uncle.'

I'm not sure about this either. Tommy's a senior Lawman but I just can't see him snatching a small kitten away, let alone an eight year old girl.

Lori reckons it's deadly that a tribal man took his brown-skinned niece after all these years of it being the other way around. 'Kuj could be the first in a line of recovered children,' she says, smiling.

'Hey, what's happening with that bath out the back?' I change the subject. 'Can I take it off your hands?'

She narrows her big blue eyes and retrieves a ringing phone 'Marntu Jarranyjanu Lalyku Putiputi Ngankawili.' It rolls off her tongue like flowing water. 'Yes, this is Ransom Desert Community Land Council ... Just a minute and I'll put you through.' She punches a few buttons. 'Shithead for you,' she says into the receiver before hanging up. 'I dunno, I was thinking about turning it into a pond. The old people sit outside when they come for meetings and I wanted to make it pretty for 'em.'

'Lori, take a good look at whose leg you're pulling here. No one's gunna sit outside in the sun come the wet season. I'll swap you ten metres of shadecloth for the bath.'

'Only ten metres!'

'Twenty then, give or take a few holes. I'll even organise a few palms for you from CD, and there's your garden.

'Gorn then,' she smiles, tossing her head.

'Speak of the devil,' I say opening the door for the snatching-away uncle. Tommy Mutton Junior is long and lean, with a shock of white hair and stubble to match. He shuffles his way forward and clasps my shoulder with his stiff gnarled hand. I'm buggered why they call him Tommy Junior. If he's Junior, then the Senior Tommy must be as old as the hills you drive through on your way out to Yindi Community. He's got a nice way about him, this old man. Ancient he may be, blind as a bat, but nuthin' gets past him. When he finally decided to sit down in one place, he sat down at Yindi and started drawing these unreal pictures. Though it beats me how he even finds the page, his eyes being like they are. Tommy shakes my hand, turns those milky eyes onto me and hits me for silver and tobacco and a lift out to Eight Mile Camp.

I tell him I gotta pick the young fella up at the depot and then I'll drop him there on my way to the tip.

'Ngani one?' he asks.

You know, the new trainee we've taken on? Jason ... Jay he calls himself. Gotta show him the ins and outs of that beautiful, big hole in the ground.'

Jay's hanging outside the depot when we arrive.

'Uncle,' he nods to Tommy, plonking himself between the two of us and grinning widely. He loves the tip run, the young fella, and it heartens me to see it. When we pull up at the bridge, I ask Tommy if there's any news on Kuj but it's hard to pick any sense out of the language he speaks.

'He's asking about Stirling,' Jay translates.

'Just dropped him off at the roadhouse. Looks as though he had a big night.'

'Dunno what way my young fellas are lookin' today,' Tommy says, shaking his head.

'Not me, Uncle!' Jay protests but Tommy still looks sad.

I remember the axe head I found a few weeks ago and reach behind the seat. 'You want it?' I show it to him. 'You'll need to cut yourself a handle.'

'Palya,' he says smiling and running his finger along the blade.

'Lotta bush tucker out Yindi way?' I ask and know I've hit a hot topic, the way he tells me about all the bush honey, riverside, miming how to chop it out as he goes.

At the tip face, we run into the Mullet brothers. They're on the scrounge for green waste having just embarked upon another new venture: worm farm, commercial scale. Sounds too easy but the catch is that worms eat heaps. Just imagine eating your own body weight in food every day.

Loading up a trailer with grass clippings and palm fronds, they chat away about that girl. They've been living with each other that long they talk on top of each other. It's tricky keeping up with them but I get the general gist that they aren't interested so much in what happened to Kuj, more the nitty-gritty of the disappearing itself. They say her destiny is a foregone conclusion. Bodies disappear fast in these parts.

'How's about that one-legged body the Mt Edgar station worker found in a car?' Jay manages to get a few words in edgeways. 'When he opened the door a big, fat goanna crawled out licking his lips. Thought it'd eaten off his leg but he found out later that he only had one leg to begin with!'

'Between the worms —'

'The birds —'

'The ants —'

'And the dingoes —'

'There wouldn't be too many clues left if they don't find her body soon,' they chorus.

Mick pulls in alongside us in the Yindi loading truck.

'Now here's a man who might shed a little light on the subject,' Mullet One remarks. 'Hey, Mick, you know what happened to that girl?'

He's a man of few words, is Mick Hooper. Always was, but since he left all that bad business behind him and took up the job as project officer for Yindi Community, the words are fewer.

'She must be somewhere,' he says, scanning the 360-degree horizon. We all follow his gaze and watch the kites wheeling around in the thermals for a few moments before the Mullets ask, 'So ya reckon she's still alive then?'

Mick wipes the sweat from his brow, reaches into the cab and pulls out a bully beef sandwich.

'Want some?' he offers, but no one's game.

Jay wanders off picking through the rubbish while the Mullet brothers and I watch him chew through half his sandwich before realising that's about as far as this conversation's going to go. Mick starts frisbeeing sheets of corrugated iron into the pit.

I ease a perfectly good hose and a stack of plant pots from beneath a pile of disposable nappies and slide them into the cab of the truck.

Jay swings himself up into the cab. 'Check these out!' He opens up a grubby notebook to a page stuffed with drawings of demons, crosses, dripping blood and a hangman's noose. 'How deadly are these?'

I shrug.

'I'm gunna frame them.'

'Why waste the frame?'

Jay kicks at the hose and plant pots by his feet wrinkling his nose with disdain. 'You know the saying ... one man's shit is another man's treasure. I reckon someone famous done them and one day I'm gunna sell to that joint in France for a squillion.'

'It's poison,' I say.

'It's art,' says Jay looking closely at the drawings.

'No, the saying, it's "One man's meat is another man's poison".'

'Yeah, whatever,' says Jay tracing the jawline of the demon with his finger.

'Might be I catch ya later,' Mick shouts as I pull out, and we head back into town none the wiser.

Even at knock-off it doesn't stop. I've got neighbours to the right and left of me chewing my ear. Take CD for example, out watering the garden. He feeds me a few cold beers and a story about the Assembly of God mob brainwashing her and shipping her south to serve soup to city deros.

CD says he'll swap the pots and hose for some plants for Lori. 'Folk chuck out all sorts o' grand stuff,' he says, shaking his head in wonder. 'Any road, ar'll get you those plants.'

Then there's Nancy. She's got some wild story about a snake. Dancing from one foot to the other, trying to hop the gauntlet of ants, she hangs up one of those magic laundry baskets of kids' clothes which fills up as soon as you empty it. As she pegs, she tells us about the big snake grabbing Kuj.

'He was wild, boy! But he'll spit her out, you'll see,' she looks up at the sky. 'He'll pull up trees and drag that horrible old smelter into the sea. And when he's done, it'll rain down on us and give us all back a bitta life.'

I ask Nancy if she wants the bath I scored from the Land Council and she tells me, come next pension day, she could give me twenty dollars for it.

'Nah, you're right,' I say. 'It's a Christmas present for you and the kids.'

See what I mean? There's plenty stories going around all right, some of them really out there. And that's just the half of them.

Annie begins her trip to Yindi Community in the dark hours of a November Tuesday morning armed with a thermos of black coffee laced with rum, and a large pink-iced bun.

Her sense of adventure mounts as she drives beneath the arc of streetlights, over bridges, through suburbs, beside railway lines, supermarkets that never sleep and past the edge-of-city petrol stations. By lunchtime, however, as she slices her way through wheatbelt towns listening to the last few furlongs of the Melbourne Cup being called, this sense falters. Now it's just her, the bun and the long road goodbye. She takes stock of the wonderfulness versus terror and she begins to wonder what in the hell possessed her to embark upon a trip like this?

She had never envisaged that university would take her to the north-western edge of the country. A phrase in a book had led her onto postgraduate studies where she began researching the connection of the dead to the living through public and personal memorial. Massacre stories had been her supervisor's idea. She hadn't been keen to take it up, preferring instead the soft, swollen narratives which the living told about the dead through statues and sculptures, the planting of trees, plaques, roadside shrines, photographs and mementos. She didn't want to touch this national blood-on-her-hands, guilt-by- association narrative. But once Professor Thornleigh had sent her down that path, she was hooked. Systematically, she worked her way through the boxes brought to her from special collections in the belly of the archives and was at once shocked and captivated by mention of a particular massacre at Rumble Crossing. She trawled through field notes hammered out by anthropologists on typewriters or scrawled in ink on the pages of bound, brown-covered notebooks to find more information about it. She gathered that the manager who worked Marda cattle station during the time of the massacre was a God- fearing, law-abiding man. A strict husband and father, someone with business acumen, who ruled with an iron fist. These 'sources' amounted to Constable Fowler's field report, the scrawling hand of the Lutheran minister who ran the food depot, and a published poem penned by a literate stockman. The oral history collection was more helpful, especially when it came to information. 'A rough old bushie' was probably about the kindest thing anyone ever said about him, but from what Annie gleaned from people's stories, if she searched the length and breadth of Australia, she wouldn't find a nastier man. He chained up men like dogs, raped the girls who worked as domestic servants in his house and administered electric shocks with cattle prods as punishment for wrongdoings, but there was little reference to his involvement in the massacre. The only other possible sources she could think of were the personal records of people affected by this incident but Professor Thornleigh reminded her that access to these files was becoming more and more restricted. There was only one thing left to do, he said, and that was to conduct a field trip in the area and speak to the people who were involved directly.

'What you can get from books and records is nothing compared to what you can get from oral history,' he said. For the rest of the meeting he dropped his veil of professionalism to reminisce about his own field work.

'Perhaps we can approach the Institute of Australian Indigenous Cultural Research to finance your trip to the north-west,' he finally suggested.

A few phone calls and a further meeting revealed the institute could indeed provide the necessary funds. But there was a catch, a particularly tasty catch, Annie told her colleague Abby over a Friday afternoon glass of wine. She had to use the data she collected to give a joint presentation with Thornleigh to the United Nations' South Seas Forum for Indigenous Peoples.

'Just think, a trip to New Zealand all expenses paid.'

Abby, whose international business trips were more a hassle than a pleasure, shrugged. 'You've got nothing to lose I suppose.'

Within months Annie had received a letter from the Aboriginal community of Yindi consenting to her visit.

Before she left for Yindi, Thornleigh told her that she was embarking upon 'the opportunity of a lifetime'. So Annie chants the 'opportunity of a lifetime' mantra as she travels north along Highway One. But when the vegetation gives way to red earth, she begins to question her own ability to achieve such a task. 'Can I do it?' soon ousts any optimistic thoughts and, as to answers, none are immediately forthcoming.

She stops counting the hours she has travelled by the time she crosses the first of the dry rivers. Against the advice of her father, she doesn't take the opportunity to sightsee along the way. The only sights she's interested in are roadhouses and designated highway rest zones. She drinks loads of coffee: unlaced, cappuccinoed, free driver coffee, Caterer's Blend, and pulls off the road only when the lights of oncoming cars become alien spaceships.

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Excerpted from Red Dirt Talking by Jacqueline Wright. Copyright © 2012 Jacqueline Wright. Excerpted by permission of Fremantle Press.
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