The Big Country

The land was flat and yellow and old and empty after the harvest, and the road was straight. It was hot and the light was harder than granite.
In Kadina almost nothing moved, and when it did it did so very, very slowly. It was a town given too much space: it had struggled to hold itself together. I walked along the hot, empty streets and felt the sun pressing on my back and very quickly tarmac gave way to gravel, and then to dirt, and then the roads faded away altogether. There were heat-cracked houses built of wood with flaking, bolted window shutters standing in patches of tall yellow weeds. There were no people though I saw one horse picking in an overgrown paddock of yellow dust. It had been fitted with a leather hood and its eyes were covered. But it heard me walking by and lifted its head, ears turning, and stood there, twitching and shivering in the yellow heat, blindly following my course along the gravel road.
Then the town gave way altogether. There were more of the one-storey warped-wood houses with cobweb porches, but the yellow scrub-weeds had grown so high around them that you knew they were abandoned. There was rusting farm machinery and old cars with the windows all broken out and then hard, thorny red-earth scrub, and then nothing. It was as if the town had, after an initial expansive moment, suddenly lost its nerve in the great emptiness of the country around it and retreated. The whole of Australia was like that.
I spent the night in a room above a pub. No one had slept there for a long time and the corridor was dusty.

In the morning I waited for the bus to Moonta. A thin youth with the sides of his head shaved and his lean, hollow-chested torso bare to the hard, hot morning light was drinking liquor from a bottle in a brown paper bag in the little square of coarse-cropped grass over the road.
There were two other men waiting for the bus. One of them had a fishing rod. Their conversation moved so slowly that after a moment I was struck by a strange kind of despair and had to stop listening.
"I catch loads of fish mate. First year I was in Wallaroo I didn’t eat nothin’ but fish."
"Nothin’ but fish…"
"No meat…"
"Didn’t like meat…"
"Nah, not that mate, didn’t need to…"
"Didn’t need to…"

In Moonta – another tiny, slow-moving place – the town had only managed to run in three directions; the fourth was bounded by the sea. I walked down to a hopeless jetty. The water was flat and blindingly bright, and utterly empty. It looked different from other seas: other seas ran busy with ships; other seas led somewhere. Even the great broad yawn of the Atlantic back home in Cornwall led, eventually, to America. This blank yellow sea led nowhere.
The light was so intense I wanted to cower beneath it.
There was a shop in a low building with white walls at the stump of the jetty. The light was a heavy murk inside and there was an aborigine girl in a pink and yellow dress behind the counter. I bought two bottles of water and started walking up the empty coastline.

***

In my grandmother’s house, on the bottom shelf of the bureau in the corner of the living room, there were three books. They were old hardback books with the covers wrapped in cellophane, full of photographs, black and white or pale-candy aquatinted. The books were about Australia.
I used to love leafing through them, sitting cross-legged on the green-white-patterned sofa. There were pictures huge coastlines, and grinning men with beards and big boots and broken hats sitting beside camp fires. There were shots of sheep under tall trees on empty plains, and country towns with broad streets and wood-boarded shop fronts where it was very obvious that nothing was moving. There was a picture too of a thin white woman cooking in a dark farmhouse kitchen, while a pair of heavy-boned aboriginal girls in limp and dirty dresses scrubbed pans in the shadows behind her. The serving girls had no shoes and the white woman was wearing incongruous high-heels. There were rabbit hunters and buckaroos, and strange, open landscapes where the contours of the land did not seem to conform to those of other places.
The books had belonged to my great-grandmother. My grandmother never left the country, but her mother – a working class widow in her mid-fifties – had taken a ten-pound passage on a steamship to Australia, and had worked on a sheep station in a place called the "outback".
There was too, in my grandmother’s loft, a brown cardboard box tied with coarse string. In it, brittle and hard and rough to touch, there were the pieces of coral that my great-grandmother had brought back from the Great Barrier Reef. Sometimes grandma would get it down from the loft and untie the string, and I would sit at the high table, carefully handling the bone-white pieces, fingering the sharp edges. Grandma said that her mother had told her that when it was alive in the water the coral was vividly coloured.
My great-grandmother was, by all accounts, a very difficult woman. But later, when she had come back from Australia and was running a guesthouse in Penzance with my grandmother, she would, every winter, take the train to Dover and catch the cross-channel ferry. She would disappear for a month, riding third class trains to strange places in Eastern Europe. This was fifty years ago. She wrote no diaries and the box of coral has been lost, though I still have the books. I would like to have met her.

***

I walked on along the top of the empty beach, sweating and bothered by flies. The tide was out and the sea was a long way away and there were five black swans out on the flats. They took off as I watched, beating low upwind and barely off the ground, then they banked suddenly and went away north with the breeze, very fast.
The wind was coming from behind me and here was a weather front going over in a long bank, arcing out to the horizons, into sea to my left, into flat land to my right. There was cloud chased out thin in the clear air ahead of it. It was hot. There were banks of dried weed all along the top of the beach, with dense, dry scrub behind it. At one point, miles from anywhere, a broken windmill, rusted and creaking, rose from the bush.
I stopped to take a photograph. The scratch of the shutter noise was both very loud and very tiny in the vast, emptiness around me, and I was suddenly unnerved and unsettled and even oppressed by it, and I understood that you could very easily panic for no reason in a place like this.
There is no country as foreign and strange and unsettling as Australia for someone from England.

At the head of the long, empty beach there was a low, scrubby point, cut across with sandy tracks. The hot yellow breeze was blowing harder behind me and the running water was wind-cut in blinding white to my left. Lying in one track was the dried-out carcass of a little Port Jackson shark. It was just a rigid piece of hide with the little spiky roller they have instead of teeth very white in the dry gape of its mouth.
The flies crowded around my face and the straps of my rucksack cut into my shoulders. I was a little higher above the sea now and I could see the great, empty scrubland running inland, and far ahead, flickering in pale haze, there were the grain silos at Wallaroo.
I walked on. The sun fell away over the empty sea but the land got no smaller. I came stumbling through the scrub in the dusk. Wallaroo was the same as Kadina, but this time I came in from the edge, not out from the centre, and there was rusting metal and abandoned huts in the yellow scrub, then a dirt track and then tarmac, still warm after sunset. There were houses but there were no people and nothing was moving. The flies were still following me. I spent the night in a room above a pub where no one had slept for a long time.

© Tim Hannigan 2008