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Chapter 1.
Just another day at Bangalore.
It was an hour before dawn; there was a faint streak of grey in the eastern sky. It was hot and stiflingly humid. A galah screeched and a mob of magpies warbled their morning song. In the distance a black crow mournfully replied. He wondered if the crow could read his mind and the galah was laughing at him. The magpies were just being magpies, calling to each other, fooling around, celebrating another day. They didn’t care.
It had been one of those summer nights without end. It had been too hot with the overhead fan off and too noisy with it on. The noise of the fan had never bothered him before.
Grumbling to nobody he went through to the kitchen and made a cup of tea. The effort made him sweat. He took his tea into the shower and let cold water run over his sweaty body. Without drying himself he put on an old khaki sleeveless shirt and faded pair of blue shorts. Eventually he found two matching socks and put them on. Why they had to match he didn’t know. It was that kind of morning.
He put a change of clothes plus a pair of denim jeans into an old canvas holdall; two towels and a ready packed toilet bag out of the linen cupboard completed his needs for the trip. He smiled to himself that Alice had remembered to pack the toilet bag for him. She never forgot.
Back in the kitchen, Angus Lachlan Sinclair sighed. It was going to be a long trip. There were stock-watering points to check and that normally meant with no breakdowns and no windmill repairs, driving all day in the heat on rough tracks and corrugated roads.
This trip was different; it wasn’t going to be normal mill run. There were sheep yards to repair at ‘Queens’, the shearing shed at the other end of the property. A couple of days work at least, and that meant camping out under the stars unless the forecast thunder storms eventuated and then he would camp in the shearers’ quarters.
He went over again in his mind that he’d packed his tucker box and fridge with enough food and supplies and a few cans of beer for an couple of extra days – just in case the unforeseen happened. As he drank his tea he cut a few sandwiches. Home-made bread, cold mutton, and a smear of mint jelly. Then tomato and cheese with plenty of salt and pepper and lastly a hunk of cake for lunch and smoke-o. He packed them into a small Esky with a plastic ice block, leaving just enough room for a couple of oranges.
It was too hot for breakfast so he decided on another cup of tea in his ‘sipper-mug’, which would at least keep him going for the first half-hour of the drive.
The dawn came bright red in the eastern sky as he filled his two canvas water bags from the rainwater tank outside the back door. Angus was ready for the day. He checked the tools and spare parts in the back of his Land Cruiser tray-top for what must have been the umpteenth time. Tools, pipe wrenches, block and tackle, spare pump buckets, bits and pieces for pump-rod repairs, oil and grease. Fencing materials for the yards. Two-stroke petrol and oil for the chain saw. Assorted drill bits, shovels, crowbar, forty litres of water in two old plastic drench drums.
In the vehicle toolbox, fan belts, hoses, Gaffa tape. He knew they were all there but he checked them just the same. He opened the passenger door and his old kelpie, Charlie, jumped in, sat looking through the windscreen ready, as always, for the off. The heat was causing Charlie, to pant and slobber on the canvas seat cover. Angus put the Esky he’d packed on the front seats where he could easily reach it.
Four days later at five-thirty in the afternoon it was still hot. The late February sun shimmered off a red gravel road somewhere in the Gascoyne Region, more than a thousand kilometres north of Perth in Western Australia. Heading for home as fast as the road would allow, his Land Cruiser created swirl of red dust that hung in the still air.
Angus had enjoyed being on his own for a few days. Working quietly, without distraction. The heat of the day had been intense; at night, the storms had stayed away so he’d camped out down by the dry creek, in the same place that he’d camped as a child with his father.
Cooking their evening meal over the campfire. Lying under the stars so bright you could almost touch them, as his father told stories of the old days that he, in turn, had learned from his father. They had talked until he had fallen asleep in his swag to dream of camels and Afghans and droughts. Sometimes, Alice had been there.
Then when shearing time came around his father would wake him with a mug of black billy tea and then it was off to the shearing shed to have breakfast of mutton chops, eggs and piles of toast with the shearers, roustabouts and shed hands as they sat around the big table talking quietly.
The shearers telling ‘lies’ about how many sheep they had shorn, their tally, at the last shed, joking, smoking and trying to get their bodies, their stiff muscles moving for another day of the intense physical effort needed to shear a couple of hundred sheep in an eight-hour day – in the heat.
Then, when the wool classer rang the bell at seven-thirty the shearing shed was transformed. Shearers pulling sheep out of the pens, roustabouts picking up the fleeces and throwing them onto the wool-tables, other roustabouts sweeping the board clean before they got pushed aside by a shearer dragging out another sheep, trying to achieve a tally bigger than the day before.
He remembered how he would rush around with his father, pushing unshorn sheep into the shearing shed and driving the shorn sheep away. Dogs barking and running along the backs of the sheep, nipping ears, pushing them ever closer to the shearers. Dogs lying in water troughs to cool off. How he would stand listening as his father talked to the wool classer about the clip, the quality, and the fleece weights.
Then, at nine-thirty the bell would ring again and the frantic activity would stop. Half an hour for smoke-o. More tea, sandwiches, fruitcake. A good cook meant a happy team. Some of the shearers lay on the floor; others sat and cleaned their shearing gear as the half-hour break ticked away and their bodies recovered. Then, as ten o’clock approached the shearers would line up by the catching pens ready to dash in and grab another sheep as soon as the wool classer rang the bell.
So it went on every day, day after day after day, until it was finished. There were three shearing sheds, fifty thousand or more sheep to be shorn. Four two-hour ‘runs’ a day. Start at seven-thirty finish at five-thirty. At the end of the day he always had to wait until all the shearing team had had their shower, which always meant that the water was cold when his turn came. Clean clothes for dinner with the shearing team, listen to the stories as they drank their beer and then down to the creek to lie under the stars as his father talked him to sleep.
Now forty years on, as he drove north and the sun sank lower in the western sky its rays gradually crept across the cabin of his Land Cruiser. Charlie, to get out of the heat, abandoned the seat for the floor, where he lay panting.
Angus reached down and scratched the dog’s head and got a lick on the hand in return. They had been together for nearly fifteen years and knew each other well. The dog sighed. Angus squinted at a mirage that danced on the gravel road ahead. He thought he saw the dust of another vehicle, but wasn’t sure. It could have been a little whirlwind, a ‘willy-willy’.
A dry, rough creek bed tested the Toyota’s suspension. The steel boxes full of hammers, pipe-wrenches, assorted tools and pipefittings, rattled in the back.
Angus changed down a gear, then another, as he negotiated the steep bank out of the creek; his attention was momentarily distracted by a couple of kangaroos startled by his sudden appearance. They stopped and looked at him. He thought about a feed for his dog and for himself if he shot the young one. The kangaroos sat up and watched him. It was getting late and he couldn’t be bothered spending half an hour butchering, so he took one hand off
