The Best of Edward Abbey (23 page)

Dick Nunn has been resident manager of the Anna Creek station since 1953. The ranch was founded over a century ago, has passed through several ownerships, and now is the property of the Strangways Peake Syndicate, a corporation of one hundred or so stockholders, with offices in Adelaide. Nunn came here from northern Queensland, where he had worked many years—for most of his life—as a stockman and stock drover. A stockman is a cowboy. A drover is one who helps drive a herd of cattle from home range to shipping point. In most of Australia, before the recent improvement and extension of roads made trucking available, it was often necessary to drive cattle on foot for hundreds of miles, in some places a thousand miles (as on the Canning Track in Western Australia) in order to reach a railroad. These great trail drives would take months to complete, for the cattle had to forage off the land as the drive moved slowly forward from day to day.

Nunn was reluctant to talk about himself; but as I would learn later from others, he had been one of the best of the trail bosses,
acquiring a reputation that eventually brought him the managership of the largest cattle station in South Australia and one of the half dozen largest in the entire nation. Dick is paid a salary and occasional bonuses, but no share of the net proceeds. “We ain’t had any net proceeds anyway for several years,” he said. “The cattle business is null and void these days.” Australia has not escaped the worldwide recession of recent years, that peculiar combination of unemployment and inflation that so baffles the economists. The beef-growing industry has been harder hit than most.

“The frustrating thing,” Nunn went on to say, “is that we’ve had heavy rains the past three years. Even Lake Eyre is full of water now. Our range is in better shape than it’s ever been before.” He glanced around at the rolling plains, covered with tawny native grasses, that surrounded the homestead. “We could raise five times the cattle we’ve got on it now. But there’s no market for them.”

I was curious about various aspects of cattle growing in this part of Australia, which so much resembled my own Southwest and yet was oddly different. “That grass out there looks short and dried up,” Nunn said, “but it’s good sweet feed for stock, the best there is. Up around Alice Springs you’ll see the grass growing up to your waist, but it’s sour. Cattle don’t do well on it.”

What about water? I’d seen a few tanks and windmills around the place, but Anna Creek itself was bone dry, a broad sandy wash lined with gum trees. “We have 150 dams and 120 bores on this station,” Nunn said. Bores: drilled wells. Most of the bores were artesian, he explained, producing water under natural pressure from the great artesian basin that underlies much of South Australia. Only fifteen of the wells required windmills to pump the water to the surface. “But some of that bore water is very hard,” he said, “salty. Stock will drink it, they can get by on it, but to thrive they need fresh water. That’s what the dams are for. They hold the rainwater.”

Dams—in the Southwest we’d call them stock ponds or tanks. I’d seen many of them from the air as I was flying toward
Adelaide: small rectangles of water flashing under the sunlight, caught by the earthen dams built across drainage channels, scattered out at regular intervals across what otherwise looked, from 5,000 feet above, like an empty wasteland of red and brown. How did they manage before bulldozers were invented?

“Not very well,” Nunn admitted. “We used to try to get by with only the bores and the natural springs. And the spring water is usually worse than the bores. It was a chancy business in them days, growing cattle.” He grinned at me. “Still is. Gets chancier all the time.”

And was there enough rainfall to keep those man-made ponds filled? I knew the precipitation in this area of Australia was said to average two to four inches a year. Not much better than Death Valley. Drier than the canyonlands of southern Utah and northern Arizona. “If the rain comes every year,” Nunn replied, “and at the right time of year, we can make it. This station is 100 miles wide and 110 miles long: When it don’t rain in one part, it rains in another. We hope. Some years we never get any rain at all. Then we get too much, all at once. Right now there’s so much water in Lake Eyre that it’s overflowing back down some of the creeks. And that’s salt water.”

Lake Eyre lies fifty feet below sea level, covering 3,000 square miles. Bigger than our own Great Salt Lake. Ordinarily Lake Eyre is so dry, hard, and smooth that its glittering salt flats are used as a racecourse for land vehicles, like the Bonneville Salt Flats of western Utah.

There was one more thing I had to know about the cattle operation here: Did he raise hay? “Don’t need it,” Nunn said. “We run our stock on the range all year round. You see, mate, we don’t have any real winter here.”

How true that statement was, I soon came to realize. May in Australia is Australia’s late autumn. And though I’d wake up many a morning with frost on my sleeping bag, the days were always bright, sunny, warm. Thus the ever-present flies. Thus the flocks and swarms and squadrons of always-yammering birds.

I’ve never seen so many birds in what is supposed to be a
desert region. As Dick Nunn and I talked, the kite hawks soared fifty feet above us, scavengers waiting for leftovers. Flocks of crows flapped about from the trees to the rooftops and back again. They looked like American crows and they squawked like American crows, never stopping, but their cries had a way of falling off at the end. There was something maddening about that incessant yawping and groaning. If I ever came to live in central Australia, I’d keep an automatic shotgun handy and about a carload of twelve-gauge shells.

Nobody else seemed to mind the crows. What the people at Anna Creek did complain about were the cockatoos and their games with the telephone line. I soon saw what the complaint was about. Walking south of the station headquarters one day, I observed parrotlike birds swinging from the telephone line that connected Anna Creek to the exchange at William Creek and points beyond. Taking off, landing again, in well-drilled multitudes, hanging upside down from the wire and swinging back and forth, sometimes flipping clear around, the cockatoos were slowly but surely pulling the line to the ground.

“Goes on all the time,” Dick Nunn told me. “God knows how much time we spend restringing that line for them bloody birds to play on.”

In the evenings we drive the corrugated dirt road to William Creek. The road is ribbed like a washboard and six inches deep in a reddish flour the outbackers call bulldust. We raise a roostertail of the stuff, a mile-long golden plume that hangs above the road, waiting for a breeze to disperse it, a trace of wind that may or may not come. Penny Tweedie, Sydney photographer, with her cameras and meters and filters and lights, and I with my can of bitter beer, are driving to William Creek, population seven. William Creek is the social center and cultural heart of the world of Anna Creek. Dick Nunn may be the boss of Anna Creek, but William Creek belongs to Connie Nunn. His wife. She runs the William Creek store, post office, petrol station, airport, and hotel.

Penny and I buzz along in our little rented Suzuki, which has a
four-cylinder two-stroke engine and sounds like a lawn mower. Like a hornet in a tin can, according to Geoffrey the Road Grader, a man whom we shall soon be seeing again. Must have a few words with him about this traffic artery. We hang a right at the junction with the road to Oodnadatta, drifting around the corner through the soft dust in true Mario Andretti style. Well done, I tell myself. I am driving on the wrong side of the road, of course, but that’s the custom here in Australia; they all do it.

A mile ahead in the clear light of evening appears William Creek. It looks like showdown town out of some classic Hollywood western.
High Noon
. A couple of trees. Windmill and water tank. A couple of buildings. One is a depot of the Central Australian Railway, where five of the seven William Creekers live. They work for the railroad. The other building, a single-story structure with tin roof and rambling white wings, is the William Creek Hotel with its pub, the only beer joint and watering hole within 100 miles, in any direction.

This tiny outlier of what is called the modern world sits alone at the center of an enormous flat, red, empty circle of sand, dust, meandering dry streambeds (like that which gives William Creek its name), and open space. No hills, no woods, no chimneys, no towers of any kind break the line of the clean, bleak horizon.

We cross the railroad tracks. There’s the gasoline pump with the cardboard sign dangling from its neck: “No Petrol Today.” Across the way, beyond a pair of giant athel trees (product of North Africa), are two diesel-powered road graders, a flatbed lorry loaded with fuel drums and other gear, and a small primitive housetrailer—what the Aussies call a “caravan.” When not working the highway, Geoffrey Leinart and his mate Butch do some of their living—cooking, sleeping—in that little wheeled box. Not much. I always find them in Connie’s pub.

We enter. Geoffrey and Butch are sitting there as usual, on stools at the bar, drinking the bitter beer. Brawny, red-faced blokes. Solid. No one else in sight at the moment. “By God,” I say, “good to see some fresh faces in here for a change.” They smile, patiently.

“It’s the bloody Yoink again,” says Butch.

Connie appears, a friendly face behind the bar. Penny orders a Scotch and soda. Connie looks at me.

“I want to buy a beer for every man in the house,” I say. “If any.”

For just a moment, for the finest split hair of an instant, Geoffrey’s smile freezes. I give him my All-American grin to make it clear I’m only kidding. He relaxes. “I mean,” I say, “if any beer.”

“He’s a card, this Yoink,” Geoffrey says.

Butch echoes the sentiment. “Yeah, he’s a card.”

Connie produces three cans of Southwark’s finest. We salute one another and drink. There’s going to be a party here tonight, a barbecue. Through the ceiling of the pub I can see thin slices of the evening sky. A notice behind the bar: “Spirits a Nip.” On the end wall is a big drawing, caricatures of Dick Nunn and Norm Wood standing at either end of Connie’s bar, with Connie behind it. In lieu of a jukebox, the radio—which outback Aussies still call “the wireless”—is playing American country-western songs, broadcast from Adelaide. The nearest city, 700 miles to the south.

Connie and Dick Nunn have been separated, more or less, for ten years and by the ten miles of dirt road that lie between the Anna Creek homestead and William Creek. But they are still good friends. “Better friends now,” Connie would say, “than ever we was when we was bunked down in the same humpy.” Hard to doubt: Connie strikes me as being every bit as shrewd, tough, and independent as the boss himself. Independent as a hog on ice. The sparks must fly when these two cross each other. I tried to imagine Gloria Steinem explaining women’s rights to Connie Nunn. Connie would laugh and pour Gloria a beer. Connie was born liberated.

Now it’s Geoffrey’s turn, his “shout.” He buys me a beer. He asks me about Ronald Reagan: I tell him what I think, and ask him about Gough Whitlam, the recently deposed Labour Party prime minister. He tells me what he thinks. I see we’re not going very far together in politics and change the subject to horses. I
had just missed by a couple of weeks the race meeting at William Creek, which was why Dick Nunn had chided me for arriving late. But we’re all going up to Oodnadatta this weekend for the next round of outback horse racing. Geoffrey speaks with mixed pride and affected scorn of his son Phillip, “that wiry little runt,” who wants to become a professional rider. A small, fierce, handsome boy of seventeen, Phillip works now as one of Nunn’s stockmen or “ringers.” Everybody calls him Jockey. He’ll be here tonight, along with most of the other young Anna Creek cowboys, all coming in from four weeks on the open range. Most of them not even old enough to buy a legal beer at Connie’s pub.

Did I say cowboys? Strictly speaking—Aussiewise, in the Strine lingo—there is only one “cowboy” at Anna Creek. He is the old man named Burt Langley whose principal tasks are tending the garden and milking the Guernsey cow back at station headquarters. He seldom gets on a horse anymore.

I slip outside to inspect the brief outback sunset and the railway installations. The sunset is a red glow on the northwest horizon under a huge aquamarine sky untouched by the hint or whisper of a cloud. Three empty boxcars stand at rest on the siding. Farther up the line is a spur with a string of cattle cars parked on it. Dick Nunn will be loading them tonight—after the barbecue. I climb through the open doors of one of the boxcars and discover a hobo jungle beyond.

A dozen Aborigines, men and women, squat on the ground under an athel tree, making tea in a blackened billycan that rests on the coals of a very smoky wood fire. All seem to be talking at once, loudly and rapidly, with many shrieks of laughter from the women and a constant gesturing of thin black arms. They see me and fall silent.

One man wears a condemned sport coat that looks exactly like the one a girl friend of mine stuffed in a garbage can back in Tucson fifteen years ago; the one she called my “wino jacket.” The whole mob, men and women both, are dressed in skid row castoffs. They are waiting for the next freight train to Oodnadatta. Like the rest of us, they are going to the races. From
Port Augusta up to Alice Springs,
tout le monde
, anybody who is anybody is bound for Oodnadatta.

They stare at me; I stare at them. No one speaks. Their dark faces with the luminous eyes, with the cast of features made from a genetic mold more ancient than that of any other race on earth, seem to withdraw before me as I look at them, receding into the twilight and darkness under the tree. They are a people hard to perceive, even in the sunlight. The losers in one more among a thousand routine historical tragedies. They are the unwanted guests, the uninvited in their own country. They look at me across a gulf of 20,000 years. I turn away, start back to the pub. As I go I hear their voices begin again, the laughter resume.

“Dole bludgers,” one Aussie would tell me later. Welfare parasites. “They won’t work. Or they’ll work for a month and then go walkabout for six months. The only thing those blacks really want to do is sit under a tree and tell stories. That’s about all they
ever
did.” Really? Come to think about it, that’s what I would like to do. Sit under a coolibah tree, drinking wine with friends and telling funny stories, sad stories, old stories, all the day long. And into the night.