area rich in spiritual significance. A place of intense racism on the part of the whites living there. The town is deeply divided and violence is frequent within and between communities.
Mullewa is surrounded by, and services, massive farms. During the seventies my father managed a thirty-thousand-acre spread there, owned by a notorious Perth (and international) millionaire. It is a gun culture out there. In this relatively low rainfall area, the huge sandplain farms rely on large acreages to yield enough to make farming profitable. It’s also a large sheep running area. My brother shears there year-in year-out, being based in the region. He and I went to high school in the regional center, Geraldton, positioned on the coast and about seventy kilometers from Mullewa.
When the paddocks aren’t sand, they are a red dirt almost the color of blood. The vegetation is low and scrubby, with patches of taller trees along the waterways and places where more moisture accumulates. In spring the entire region, at least the uncleared bits and along roadsides, erupts with wildflowers. Tourists drive through at that time of the year, but don’t stay.
The town is still strongly Catholic, and not too far away is Devil’s Creek. Names mean so much, and hide so much. The town has some superb architecture by the Catholic missionary architect Monsignor Hawes, whose churches and associated buildings can be found throughout the northern wheatbelt.
It could be argued that the nonindigenous “side” of the town and the region still perceive themselves as pioneers in many ways. As a kid I got trapped here in a silo with my brother, and met hard, gnarled farm workers who told me about booze, and from whom I learnt that women could piss standing up. Guns were never far away; it was the home of many rooshooters. I started to understand what real horror was. I used to stare into the blank centers of starflowers and wonder. I also used to trap parrots that bit through my fingers.
acknowledgments
ABC Radio National, The Advertiser, The Age, Agni, Antipodes, Best Australian Stories 2006 (edited by Robert Drewe), Best Australian Stories 2007 (edited by Robert Drewe), Best Australian Stories 2010 (edited by Kate Kennedy), Crazyhorse, Families: Modern Australian Short Stories (volume 6, edited by Barry Oakley), Griffith Review, Island, Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Meanjin, The Reader, Southerly, StoryQuarterly. Also to the Literature Board of the Australia Council for a two-year New Work grant to assist in the writing of these stories, and special acknowledgment to the University of Western Australia for a Professorial Research Fellowship and its ongoing support. Thanks to my editor at Ohio University Press, Gillian Berchowitz, for her hard work, sharp insights, and good advice.
Ben gets on the phone immediately and rings his brother, who farms two hours’ drive away. It’s raining! he yells. Really raining. It’s raining! What’s it like at your place? Nothing here, replies his brother in a subdued tone. Ben then rings his neighbor, whose three thousand acres share a boundary with his three thousand acres. How’s it comin’ down at your place? he asks. It’s not, replies the neighbor . . . I can see the black clouds in the distance, about over your place, I reckon, but nothing here at my house yet. Not even sure that it will rain here . . . not much of a breeze, but what there is, is blowin’ away from my place.
Ben hangs up and rings his neighbor on the other side, whose property doesn’t actually join his property—there is a large granite nature reserve between them—but is the next on down the road. Not a drop, mate, and it doesn’t look like it’s coming our way. And I’m starin’ at the wall barometer, and nothin’s changed. Same as yesterday, the day before, last month. There’s bitterness on the other end of the phone, and Ben doesn’t know what to say, so he just hangs up and walks back to the window to watch the rain bucket down.
It continues to rain. It rains all day and through the night into the next morning. And into the afternoon. He rings around again. Same story. We’re not even seeing any runoff, mate, your place is like a sink, all flows into the middle and then down the creeks into the river. By the time it hits that dry riverbed it sinks into the sand. You’re the only bloke gettin’ weather, and the runoff stops at your boundaries!
What starts as a joy, a reason for celebration, becomes disturbing. Ben has stayed inside during the rain, having been a bit crook of late. But he is feeling better, and decides he’ll go and check over his property. He kits up in his wet-weather gear and heads out through the back door to make his way over to the machinery shed where the ute is parked. He checks the rain gauge. An unbelievable fifty points! Then it dawns on him that the rain has suddenly stopped—that it stopped the moment he stepped out into the open. A few drops hit his hands and then it stopped. He looks up at the sky and it starts to clear. It swirls and convulses and the sun breaks through the clouds. Then he notices that where the rain has touched his skin the skin burns slightly, guiltily.
Driving along the fence line of paddock after paddock, he finds it’s the same story everywhere. A strong green carpet of growth has appeared on his side of the divide. He will start seeding immediately. There’s been no serious thought of it for the last couple of years. He’s put crops in, like everyone else, but other than some short, light falls there’s been nothing. His immediate neighbors have culled their sheep flocks for want of feed. Distant neighbors have auctioned off plant to meet bills. Ben has hung in there, bringing feed in from his brother’s place, which has managed to yield enough hay for that purpose—enough to feed his own animals and to sell to friends to keep theirs alive—but that’s it. He’s held on to all his machinery.
Ben sees a measure of how much it has rained when he arrives at the salty ground in the dead center of the property. It is, indeed, a sink, with the two creeks that branch out of its heart winding their way down through the rubbish dumped as “landfill” there over the years, like a rush of blood through clogged arteries—an arteriosclerosis of the farm. Rolls of fencing wire, old spray drums, wood, even a seized truck motor. It doesn’t look healthy, Ben whispers to himself, so quietly he can hardly hear it.
Arriving back at the house paddock, he starts planning the seeding. He has enough seed grain, and the machinery is all in good working order. He has had nothing much to do other than mess around with it and keep it working. He will lightly work the soil then seed and fertilize. He heads back up to the house.
But the moment he steps inside, he hears the rain on the roof again. It spooks him, because he glanced up at the sky before he stepped onto the verandah, and it had pretty well entirely cleared. Barely a cloud.
Now he stares out of the window at the black swollen skies and the hard driving rain. Harder than during the days before. A deluge. He feels giddy. He sees the farm under water. He sees the green carpet become the algal floor of a fetid ocean. He sees the corpses of a thousand sheep marooned on the granite outcrop, with the ocean of his farm lapping at their hooves. He collapses into a chair and cries. He hasn’t cried since he was a small child. His mother forbade him to cry because his father found it embarrassing and she never liked to see her husband, whom she loved so much, upset. Your father is such a good provider, she’d say again and again, a mantra. It’s unbecoming to cry, son. Ben’s tears rain down over the slightly greasy tablecloth, and he can’t hold them back. A deluge.
I must stop, he yells, to no one but himself. He pauses. Then he cries: It! It It! I must stop it! The house resounds with the words, the gravel out of his throat. The lampshade vibrates overhead, disturbed. The lampshade he’s done so many farm accounts under; that he did his school homework under while his mother prepared the dinner in the kitchen before telling him to set the table because father was due in from the paddocks . . . I must stop it!
Ben tears his clothes off piece by piece. He can hear the rain driving into the tin roof so hard
