mustering crew could be hired as one mangy lot, contained and self-sufficient; they migrated like Gypsies and charged a flat daily rate for drafting, branding, and vaccinating all of the cattle on the station, and then for turning back out the keepers and shipping the rest for sale or slaughter.
Assembling the station crew, on the other hand, was a piece-meal job. Angus knew many of the free-floating men who crossed that northern swath of outback, and it was a matter of finding a few good hands who would be willing to join the operation and take on the not-so-glamorous work of general station maintenance. Angus would oversee both crews and be responsible to the station owners for their work. He would be responsible for seeing that the place eventually turned a profit.
Angus had a way of spreading out the day, making it move slowly so he could keep up with it. He drifted across the lawn from the manager’s house toward the kitchen with a slow rocking gait, carrying his flashlight, or torch, in the full dark of morning, careful as he placed his steps to miss the cane toads and slithering brown snakes. He gravitated to the same place at the table on the veranda at breakfast, midmorning smoko—a smoke and coffee break—and dinner, that old chair his throne. He had a small, white-china cup for his tea, stained with faint rings of tannins in the bottom.
Every morning he sat with Ross Porter, the new bore man, in the yellow bulb light of pre-morning for a prolonged cup of black tea and a cigarette or two while he ordered and reordered the operation in his mind. By the time he decided on the best tactic for the day, light would be turning the sky milky where it touched the horizon. He then had several hours to drive to some remote set of water troughs, or check on the cattle around lick tubs. Long solitude would swallow him, but he could arrange the hours to emerge from it in time for lunch. If he was in the office, he crossed to the kitchen again for a midmorning cuppa. Later, or sometimes earlier, when he’d had enough, he poured a rum-and-Coke and lay lengthwise on one of the couches, facing the television in the kitchen to watch the horse races.
Claire sorted the books, accounted for the details and kept the compound in order, cooking and cleaning, watering the gardens and lawns—her own way of defying the inherent wildness of the place, and drawing out elements of femininity wherever she could.
The generator kicked on at five every morning when Claire walked across the lawn beneath stars and turned on the lights in the kitchen. On most mornings she served up bacon, eggs, and stewed tomatoes and onions, setting platters out on a table in the large dining room. Knives, forks, plates, and coffee cups filled one end of the long table, and the electric hot-water pitcher, tea bags, milk, instant coffee, jam, butter, bread, and a toaster filled the other. Above the table, a picture of a sinuous river meeting the blue gulf served as a reminder of the surreality surrounding this refuge of human reality.
The crew would filter in, fill plates, and stir hot drinks in ceramic mugs. Afterward they washed their own plates and cutlery and, without rinsing off the soapsuds, dried them and placed them back on the table. Later in the morning, they filed back into the kitchen for smoko, kicking off manure- and mud-covered shoes on the veranda and walking in socks across Claire’s freshly mopped floors. They devoured her baking: Tupperwares of jam-filled biscuits, vanilla cupcakes, chocolate slice. Every evening for tea, the crew piled plates high with beef, potatoes, slices of baked pumpkin, and, on special occasions, mud crab or barramundi caught in the river or salt arms reaching inland from the sea.
Claire occupied the rest of the day with bookwork, keeping tallies of expenses on the computer database in the small office. She knew how many cattle had been shipped and the prices they might bring at market. She kept track of supplies and groceries, paychecks, mail, machine parts, medicine and supplement shipments, money in and money out.
She ordered in her mind the cluster of houses and buildings surrounded by the three-foot chain-link fence for keeping out wallabies and wild pigs. Perhaps she had the details of the place memorized already, the young mango trees, the hoses she stretched to water the lawns, the giant fig tree filled with white, screeching corellas, the palms along the fence near the kitchen.
Beyond the rivers, the neighboring station was twice as big, another to the southeast half as big, another three times as big, and Claire knew the wives of some of the other managers. They talked on the phone every so often. The dirt roads traced between them were thin lines of white chalky soil that boiled into potholes of bulldust, dropping three feet down to swallow entire trucks. The long way leading from the station to anywhere else had burned itself into her memory too. She and Angus were no strangers to the elusive nature of the outback. They both had a quality of resigned patience that would weather just about anything.
They knew that like most cattle stations, Stilwater would function as a world unto itself: mail services were provided by plane and school for the children living on the station, called School of the Air, was taught via radio. Doctors left kits of medicine coded with numbers for protection so they could make diagnoses and recommend treatment over the radio. Equipment and supplies too large or expensive to send by air came in by way of the dirt roads. Cattle were shipped out of the stations on road trains, or by rail or ship.
Angus and Claire’s job was to make the station a hive of domestic, mechanic, and livestock work, with the crew operating across the extensive territory in spokes extending from the compound. The structure of daily chores provided a framework for sanity; the livestock and waters had to be fed or checked, the crew fed at regular intervals, the lawn watered, the generator turned on and off, minor and major problems addressed. In the absence of these chores, in the absence of maintenance, disorder would rule.
Seasonal cycles offered higher order. Cattle had to be mustered and handled, some shipped away, some returned to their paddocks until another season. The wet and the dry negotiated in their turn, one leading inevitably to the other, the promise of a predictable future making life slightly easier to manage.
When cyclones smashed against the coast, the crews would wait for the storms to pass and then repair the damage. When floods stranded them for a month or two at a time, they would ration the fresh food and hunker down to wait. They understood the way place and work cultivate a culture in which humans and the environment mutually shape one another, becoming, despite the modern amenities of air conditioning, good satellite television, telephone, and Internet, two manifestations of the same entity.
Station Horses
I WOKE THAT FIRST MORNING on Stilwater to the metallic ribbons of cricket song outside the window, left open to let in night breezes as the world turned to dry. The smell of rain lingered even though it hadn’t rained and constellations receded into the deep blue of dawn. I stepped out of the bunkhouse, pausing before abandoning its cocoon to face a strange world that now included me. I turned toward the weak gleam of a porch light across the compound and risked the thin lawn and mango trees as I crossed to the kitchen in the dark. The distance was alive with possibility: slithering, thin, deadly brown snakes, taipans, black snakes, and whatever else might have sought out the cool of the grass for shelter. My toes crunched only mango leaves and one squishy brown lump, a cane toad.
As I neared the kitchen, I saw the figures of two men in the pale orange light of the veranda, seated at the small outdoor table. When I came up the stairs and into the light, Angus nodded at me. The other man, with silvery hair and a wide smile, greeted me—“How are you, sweetheart?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“The tea’s inside, hit the button on the kettle to heat up the water again; it’s been a while since it boiled.” This was Ross, the bore man, offering some hope that Angus’ gruffness wasn’t endemic to the people of this place.
When I returned with my tea to sit across the narrow table from Angus, he waited a while before saying, “We’re getting in some horses, reckon we’ll sort them out today.” He looked over at me then for a moment, assessing
