First published in 2018

Copyright © Kate Lyons 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

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given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Thanks to Les Murray for permission to use an extract from his poem
‘The Wilderness’ on p. vii.

 Recipient of Government Arts NSW 2006 Writer’s Fellowship

funded by the NSW Government in association with Create NSW

Allen & Unwin

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 CHAPTER ONE

December 2006

R ay was on the edge of things when Delly died. He’d been out
there six days. The only sign of life the odd goat or derelict
windmill, the tracks of his ute girdling the creek. Now and then,
shadow of an eagle, high, hefty, circling, rippling cruciform across
the stave of his fence.
The rest was dust, scrub, gibber. Along old wash lines, blue
bush, black oak, old man saltbush. Tired green tracing lost water,
petering to low mallee, dead mulga. Sly wink of desert varnish,
haloes of salt. Beyond that, across thin hills and iron ridges, more
gibber, great ribs and drifts and spines of it, stepping a glittering
distance, and him with it. Wire falling, hand to horizon, all the
way from north bore soak to the edge of the old mine workings,
where no stock grazed, no fence ruled.
When he stopped for a breather, he could see every taut
and shining hour. Could feel it running through him, a brutal
architecture. Leaving this gaunt shadow at his heel.

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He bent along it. Stepped a run, laid his string line, checked
his level. Stepped it out again.

<

If his memory of high-school history was correct, this creek he’d

been following all morning was one of Sturt’s. He’d tried to pin
it to history, with ducks and diaries, maps and scurvy. Water
like boiled black ink, he’d written, the image slipping bright
down lines of faded copperplate, along the curve of Ray’s pick,
out into the shadow of his hat. Eyes shut and body braced, he
could almost see it, almost feel it. Sweat braiding between his
shoulderblades, a cool ribbon in this sea of stone.
Then he struck, the force shattering up his arm, finding every
leak and tributary in the muscles of his back. History had sailed
on. The only trace of water now the step and rim of ancient crab
holes, what old-timers called dead men’s graves.
Ephemeral, these creeks. He rolled the word round his head
as he worked, letting its fey shape and liquid rhythm carry him,
hand over fist, toward the final ridge.
Halfway there, his line met a low stone well. Necklace of goat
bones round the old pulley. Shadow at the bottom, hair, teeth,
horn, but long gone, like the water. Just the ghost of a smell.
Beyond that, a miner’s hovel, all tumbled sandstone and
orphaned doorways, the inside evil with barbed wire, broken
glass, toilet paper. A black mass, alive with flies. Plotting a wide
arc to avoid it, he crossed trails of other lives. Camel rib, ore
bucket. Horseshoes so ancient, they crumbled underfoot. A wide
leather miner’s belt, notched almost to the point of death.

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In the last stretch before the drop-off, in a bend of dry

creek where shade and water might have grown, his pick hit
a grave railing. The tiny mound was embroidered with paddy
melon, no stone or cross. Instead, like some strange offering,
a fossilised thong.
Digging post holes along the spine of the ridge, he spotted
it finally. A white stone chimney topped with a ram’s skull,
marking the limit of Sam’s new land. In better weather, with
decent equipment and a proper offsider, about three hours’ slog
away. But the last fly-by-night had downed tools well short of the
boundary and this was jump-up country, no flesh to it, what earth
there was flayed with flint, ironstone, mine tailings. Nothing to
work with, not even the bones of a fence. And now the sun was
a hammer overhead.
For an hour, just the ring of his spade, the crunch of his
boots. The sounds shaken out of him, helpless and thorough.
Every thump of the post driver darkened the dirt with sweat. The
dog’s claws ticked back and forth across the ute tray, a ragged
metronome to the heat. Whenever he turned to look at it, he
found it staring back, all ribs, ears, hot toffee-coloured eyes.
He’d considered letting it loose for a bit, but it was too young,
too stupid to even get under the tarp he’d rigged from the cabin
to give it a bit of shade. One sniff of roo and it’d be off, down
into the badlands. If it fell through one of those old mine shafts,
that would be that.
Standing up to swig some water, the red world yawed boot-wise,
shuttered black for a while. He breathed deep, bent down, worked
on. Moving slow as an astronaut, pitting sweat, energy and his

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remaining water, against the torn muscle in his back, the weight
of the sun, the distance to the skull.
Stupid to slog through the worst of it, for a job like this. No
feed this far out, so no sheep except dead ones. Putting a fence
here was like planting a flag on the moon. But this was Sam’s
new land and he wanted to mark it and Ray had promised he’d
do it, and just this once he’d been paid ahead. And there’d be
no second chance. By this time tomorrow he aimed to be as far
from here as half a tank of petrol would allow. He wanted clean
clothes, cold beer, food that wasn’t heat-slimed or reconstituted.
Water that didn’t taste of ute. Wanted to walk into a room where
he recognised nothing and was responsible for no one. Order a
meal he wouldn’t have to cook.
That reminded him of the shed. All that meat stuffed into
those unreliable fridges. All those flies. Between midday dinner
and a motley mob of contractors, stock hands and pig shooters,
a Pommy grog artist who’d be drunk by afternoon smoko and a
fourteen-year-old ginger nut who seemed incapable of washing
his hands. Last time Ray left Mick in charge, he had every man
down with salmonella and the rissoles not fit for a dog.
Should have cooked some stuff for the freezer. Should have left
him a note. But there was no time when it came upon him, the
way it always happened. The feeling rising with first light, formless,
grey then silver. The urge running through him like a fuse.

<

By two pm, big heat, dead heat. Heat so vast, it felt solid, some
mineral-toothed prehistoric thing.

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He was too far out for radio here, so no news or music. Just
the work, the dog, his book. Couldn’t see to read once the sun
went, torch was going, but he had a good memory, for songs
and stories, poems and fables. Anything with a shape to it, an
outline to bestow on a place without boundary, except the one
he was making, with sweat and fists.
When it got too hot for words in one place not another, it
was lists of lost cities and dead languages. Grand Latin names
for tiny desert plants. For half an hour, up and down the rigging,
all the sails on a seventeenth-century ship of the line. When
words failed, scrambled by sun, it was maps, old ones, folding
and unfolding, tea brown and intricate, all those spidery, puffing
latitudes that had entranced him well before he’d learned to
read. When he could, even their names were a sort of magic,
to a small boy, alone in the dark. Ptolemy, Ribero, Anaximander.
A chant against the void.
In that boyhood atlas, his mind falling open now to those big
central plates, he traced Australian river systems, their broken
calligraphy. The sepia routes of failed explorers, in glossy fade.
On page 42, a certain nest of creek bends like the bud of a tiny
fern. So small that when he’d put his childish initials there, he’d
erased the home they enclosed.
When he was too tired to see pictures, it was words again, but
old ones, those curled so deep, they required no memory, only
obedience. Hymns, Bible stories, other fairy tales. Recipes. Cup
of this, pinch of that. Mam’s voice in his head. Cream butter
and sugar until light and white. Flour, eggs, vanilla, ratio two
to three, wet to dry. Proper butter, not marg or lard, and get it

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soft first but don’t leave it out all night. Under that tin roof, it’ll
be soup by dawn.
When the loneliness arrived, finding a man and his dog under
relentless sun, it was poetry that returned, rising like the contours
of a river revealed by drought. It told the day in new order. Snake
shimmer, lizard scuttle. Bright angles, tiny agitations. A world all
gleam and shift, himself airy and askance. When he was absent
from it, this place made its own kind of sense.
There was dusk, a ruffled blue moment when earth released
its grip on the heat. There was sunrise, that same heat blooming
from a low spine of hills. There were stars wheeling frozen round
the hinge of his firelight, the only certain thing. Even the hardest
hottest day out here held the ghost of a curve to it, in the long
glitter of a week. A red mouse. A purple flower. Two nights
ago, in the middle of the desert, the sound of the sea. Looking
up, he’d seen, by starlight and torchlight, a vast tide of cockies,
flying a wind of their own making, flowing east. So many, they
blotted the moon.
Seeing that war-shaped underbelly, hearing them cry one to
the other, ragged, urgent, looping the darkness, gathering it like
a wave, he knew he was alone. And it was enough. To feel time
passing and him with it, riding that thready edge of change.
Even this fence wasn’t straightforward, although it was as
plumb as he could make it, following boundaries worked by
other men, accompanied by other dogs, long dead. But no matter
how careful he was with string line and spirit level, earth here
followed its own rhythm, the wire bending through what was
missing, an undulation so slight it could be heat mirage. Beneath

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his feet, the secret mutter of the old mine workings. Old rock
falls, ancient exclamations. Caverns so deep and dark no voice
or rope would reach the end. Tying off, he felt the echo of it.
Held the shape of absence in a palm.
Somewhere out there, another fence joined this one, but
right now, it felt improbable, the place eating up any certainty
except the horizon itself. This wire might loop on and on until
he met himself again.
You’d go mad if you thought about it like that. If you stared
long enough against the heat of midday, you’d start to see camel
trains, sailing ships, company coming when there was none to
be had. Better to stick to the job in hand. After a while, the
heat, the sweat, that web of skin between thumb and forefinger
which took all the punishment, everything slipped away.
There was this patch of dirt banded with the shadow of four
wires. Crows were black notes creaking across it. There was your
own shadow, simple as a cave painting on the ground. There
was this moment, no other. Your hands took hold of it, wrestled
it into place.
Fold in the flour. That’s the hard part, you’re not making
cement. Bit like bathing a baby, swoop and cradle, an easy balance
between precious substance and greedy air. Can’t say how, words
won’t hold it. Like cupping water, something vital always slips
away. A knowledge whorled into gut and brain and fingertips, like
the image of someone standing in such bright morning sunlight,
their outline glows even when you close your eyes.
They’ll stay there forever, kettle steaming, sun pouring
like melted butter through a window. Radio murmuring stock

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prices, a dusty incantation. Flour dappling the fine hairs on a

freckled arm.

<

Late afternoon, no amount of water seemed to replace the sweat

he was losing. On the far horizon of heat haze, a man wavered
toward him, bearing a spear.
With the skull in spitting distance, he was forced to pack it
in. Heading back along the creek bed, he rocked the ute through
dust fine as cornflour, careful to stick to the tracks he’d made
on the way in. One careless turn here and you could end up
buried in one of those hot black arteries underground. A finely
calibrated safety, like walking in small bare feet on top of someone
else’s big steel-toe boots, back and back, toward some familiar
yet frightening place.
Near the chimney, a little gum gave a bare nod to shade.
He tied the dog to it, doused his head and strung the tarp. Sat
beneath it, smoking and sweating, while the kelpie, bug-eyed
with frustration, tried to wrench the sapling from its roots. To
make up for the long hot day it had endured, he threw it the
tail of the roo he’d shot the day before. Stupid thing tried to
swallow it fur and all. He recognised that, how ravenous you
could be, for some rare sweet chunk of life, lived on a grand
and momentous scale.
He had a sudden memory of Tilda, aged three, squatting bare-
bottomed behind the wood pile, intent on something between
her legs. Odd kid Tilly, always peeing al fresco, always taking off
all her clothes. When he’d got closer, he’d seen she’d somehow

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got hold of Mam’s special biscuit tin, the one with the young
Queen on it, her rouged cheeks and faded diamonds nibbled by
scars of his old disappointments, all those nights spent dragging
a chair across the kitchen, standing on tiptoe to reach the shelf
above the fridge. Thinking, just one, no one would notice, not
if you rearranged the layers, only to find Dad had sealed the lid
shut with an iron fist.
Tilda hadn’t bothered with any of that. She’d just bashed the
tin with a rock, got her little fingers under the rim. By the time
Ray caught up with her, she’d eaten nearly all the biscuits Mam
had baked for Mrs Tangello up the road, who’d had a baby or
whose husband had died, he couldn’t remember which. Delly
McCullough was famous for her biscuits. Won all the local shows.
Wasn’t Tilly’s fault. Too young to know. And they’d all loved
those cockle biscuits, better than sponge cake or even lamingtons.
All that butter and sugar, that terrible richness on the tongue.
Special occasions only, Christmas or birthdays, or swimming
training, when Urs got up with the alarm and did some stealing
of her own. Four am, way early in the season, sun not up, brown
ice on the river and Ray nursing a middle ear infection but Father
O’Reilly wanted that Regional Schools Trophy and nothing
would stand in his way. A cold wobble on top of the town bridge,
big priest face looming, boiled red as football leather. Stink of
old whiskey and stale tobacco, a phlegmy bark of breathe and
blow. The whistle like an electric shock. The dive a clear, brief
moment, the whole town laid wide, silo to highway, crystal at
dawn. Then fierce brown water, the jerk and rasp of the ankle
rope. Nut-clenching cold.

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He swam for hours against the current, until his arms felt
nerveless as tripe. But after, there was always Urs, with her
thermos and blanket and royal biscuits. Nothing tasted so good,
even mixed with mud-flavoured snot.
Dad caught up to him of course. Had a nose for trouble, Dad
reckoned, and though he meant Ray when he said it, what Ray
imagined was Dad himself. Standing on the front verandah, one
foot on the railing, one hand in his pocket. Head high, nose
flared, sniffing Ray down. Dad reckoned he could smell trouble
on Ray before Ray did anything, before the thought of doing
anything had even crossed Ray’s mind. Something in the blood.
Tilly threw up behind the wood pile, where Ray made her
hide. Ray vomited too, in time with Dad’s belt strokes, shame
and acid fizzing in his throat. The salvation of those biscuits, the
very idea of them, ruined forever. Stained by sour disappointment
and too much self-sacrifice. Keen as an oversharp vinaigrette.
In his stints at shearing sheds and pub kitchens, he’d tried over
and over to recapture the taste of those biscuits. Did everything
the way Mam used to, even down to putting a fork mark in the
batter and sticking a silver gee-gaw on top. Couldn’t make them
as dainty as hers were of course. Would have been laughed out
of town. Had to make them thick and shearer sized, like big
yellow pikelets. Maybe that’s why they never tasted the same.
No treats tonight, but he had two beers left in the esky and
the rest of the roo. It was ponging a bit, because he couldn’t
run the car fridge without running down the car battery, but
those explorers he’d spent his childhood with had eaten all sorts,

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hadn’t they? Sheep’s eyes and spoon-soft rabbits, shoe-leather soup.

He’d just chuck on lots of chilli, hold his nose and close his eyes.

<

Six o’clock. Still too hot to light the fire. Even the kelpie had
given up, lying spatchcocked in the shade of the tarp. He lay
down beside it, comforted by the yeasty smell of warm dog.
Watched the sun begin its long slow slide to where he’d come
from, plumping ridges, softening old creek bones, gibbers glowing
like round pale flesh. Night would arrive in a lash of shadow
beneath that rib of sand.
He closed his eyes to wait it out. Was twelve years old again,
Christmas morning, sun just up, sky through sailing ship curtains
already brassy with heat. At the end of his bed, the second-hand
Brittanicas Urs had smuggled in at midnight, as if she was Father
Christmas and he wasn’t awake and still believed. Stacked so
high, they threatened to topple if he moved. Kill him with love
and words.
He wet an imaginary finger, opened the very first volume for
the very first time. Could almost taste it, the dense and serious
joy of those old pages, and while he dozed, he dreamed, in a
place still holding fiercely to the day’s heat, of frozen tundra,
avalanching mountains, husky liver stew.

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