it could only be with her assistance.
But would she let me? I’d buggered up her life once before. Would she ever trust me again?
She’d be coming back sooner or later, and I wanted to be there when she did. Not at Moonlight—not yet, at any rate. I wasn’t up to Moonlight. The deserted outstation was too much to tackle on my own.
Bluebush was my only option; I’d stay here until I knew what she and I were going to make of each other. She’d said it was about time I came home. Well, we’d see.
I glanced at my watch. Getting on for seven. I’d promised to come in early, help Stan with the twelve o’clock swill, but that still gave me a few hours. I grabbed a book, slipped back under the covers and read myself to sleep. Since Camel’s party had kept me awake half the night and the book was entitled A Delineation of the Precambrian Plateau in North Central Australia with notes on the impinging sedimentary formation —when I’m trying to understand a locality I like to start from the ground and work my way up—that took about ten seconds.
Party girl
THERE WERE two pubs in town: mine, the White Dog, and the Black Dog, which was even worse. The main danger I faced at the White was the constant barrage of marriage proposals to which I was subjected by the old timers in the front bar. When things got frisky at the Black, you were likely to end up with a billiard cue through the skull.
We were generally frantic at lunch time, but I quite enjoyed it. I’d put on my running shoes and sprint from one end of the bar to the other, trying not to skittle Stan, who’d run the White for twenty years.
After lunch the miners and meatworkers scuttled back to their respective holes and sometimes we’d find time to join the regulars for a quiet drink. There was usually a comforting monotony about the conversation: I’d find myself counselling them against blowing their super on time-share apartments and Russian brides, laughing at their stale jokes and reminding them to take their tablets.
Today, however, was not one of those days. We’d been joined by a rowdy mob of blokes who seemed to have wandered into the wrong establishment and showed no signs of pissing off.
‘Be more at home over the road,’ Stan grumbled as I made my tenth trip to the back bar, from where the strangers’ conversation was rising into a crescendo.
‘Hate to tell you this Stan, but they’d probably be there if they hadn’t been banned last night.’
‘Jeez,’ said Stan, looking seriously offended, ‘you mean we’re gettin the Black’s rejects?’
There were eight or nine of them. Station hands, I picked up over the next half hour, though not the kind of station hands I remembered from my childhood. The men who worked the stations back then were unworldly, shy, often awkward blokes who’d take their hats off when a woman entered the room. Country men.
These guys looked like urban refuse: stone-faced teenage mutants, toothless drifters in John Deere caps, a rat-faced Northern Irishman, a couple of leathery bikies looking for a place to lay low and a shifty, swivel-eyed little Pom who called himself a cook and who’d apparently given the entire stock camp an opportunity to lie low when he poisoned them with a green beef casserole. They were, it emerged, from Carbine Creek, a station north of Bluebush. One of Moonlight’s neighbours in fact, though I couldn’t recall ever having been there.
I was pulling another beer when I heard the word ‘Moonlight’.
I tuned into the conversation.
‘…so den the witchdoctor points a bone at em,’ squeaked the Irishman, slapping the table, ‘and the fuckin wallopers dunno whether to shit or swim!’
A wave of laughter erupted as a bloke with a backyard buzz-cut, prison tatts and tropical sideburns took up the tale. ‘They reckon the sarge has called in the army to try and track him down! Choppers and dogs, black-trackers, C-fuckin-I-A, and they still can’t find him.’
‘Shouldn’t
But would she let me? I’d buggered up her life once before. Would she ever trust me again?
She’d be coming back sooner or later, and I wanted to be there when she did. Not at Moonlight—not yet, at any rate. I wasn’t up to Moonlight. The deserted outstation was too much to tackle on my own.
Bluebush was my only option; I’d stay here until I knew what she and I were going to make of each other. She’d said it was about time I came home. Well, we’d see.
I glanced at my watch. Getting on for seven. I’d promised to come in early, help Stan with the twelve o’clock swill, but that still gave me a few hours. I grabbed a book, slipped back under the covers and read myself to sleep. Since Camel’s party had kept me awake half the night and the book was entitled A Delineation of the Precambrian Plateau in North Central Australia with notes on the impinging sedimentary formation —when I’m trying to understand a locality I like to start from the ground and work my way up—that took about ten seconds.
Party girl
THERE WERE two pubs in town: mine, the White Dog, and the Black Dog, which was even worse. The main danger I faced at the White was the constant barrage of marriage proposals to which I was subjected by the old timers in the front bar. When things got frisky at the Black, you were likely to end up with a billiard cue through the skull.
We were generally frantic at lunch time, but I quite enjoyed it. I’d put on my running shoes and sprint from one end of the bar to the other, trying not to skittle Stan, who’d run the White for twenty years.
After lunch the miners and meatworkers scuttled back to their respective holes and sometimes we’d find time to join the regulars for a quiet drink. There was usually a comforting monotony about the conversation: I’d find myself counselling them against blowing their super on time-share apartments and Russian brides, laughing at their stale jokes and reminding them to take their tablets.
Today, however, was not one of those days. We’d been joined by a rowdy mob of blokes who seemed to have wandered into the wrong establishment and showed no signs of pissing off.
‘Be more at home over the road,’ Stan grumbled as I made my tenth trip to the back bar, from where the strangers’ conversation was rising into a crescendo.
‘Hate to tell you this Stan, but they’d probably be there if they hadn’t been banned last night.’
‘Jeez,’ said Stan, looking seriously offended, ‘you mean we’re gettin the Black’s rejects?’
There were eight or nine of them. Station hands, I picked up over the next half hour, though not the kind of station hands I remembered from my childhood. The men who worked the stations back then were unworldly, shy, often awkward blokes who’d take their hats off when a woman entered the room. Country men.
These guys looked like urban refuse: stone-faced teenage mutants, toothless drifters in John Deere caps, a rat-faced Northern Irishman, a couple of leathery bikies looking for a place to lay low and a shifty, swivel-eyed little Pom who called himself a cook and who’d apparently given the entire stock camp an opportunity to lie low when he poisoned them with a green beef casserole. They were, it emerged, from Carbine Creek, a station north of Bluebush. One of Moonlight’s neighbours in fact, though I couldn’t recall ever having been there.
I was pulling another beer when I heard the word ‘Moonlight’.
I tuned into the conversation.
‘…so den the witchdoctor points a bone at em,’ squeaked the Irishman, slapping the table, ‘and the fuckin wallopers dunno whether to shit or swim!’
A wave of laughter erupted as a bloke with a backyard buzz-cut, prison tatts and tropical sideburns took up the tale. ‘They reckon the sarge has called in the army to try and track him down! Choppers and dogs, black-trackers, C-fuckin-I-A, and they still can’t find him.’
‘Shouldn’t
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