One for the Road (24 page)

The Wet sounds rather soothing at the moment. So does the pub. I ask her for directions.

“The Continental sells more beer than any hotel in Australia,” she says. “But everyone goes to the Roebuck.” I nod. Nor’west economics.

She walks me over to a picture of the Roebuck on a wall in the next room. It is an old black-and-white photo of publican Bill “Possum” Ward posing in front of a colonial-style wooden building. He has his arms crossed over his chest, a proud, almost defiant smile on his face, and two flappers in bathing suits standing to either side. The photo is dated 1920.

“The prettiest girls are always at the Roebuck,” she says. It is an odd comment, coming from a schoolmarmish librarian. The wink is even odder. Not knowing what else to do, I wink back, then pull on my pack and head for the pub.

The Roebuck looks as if it hasn’t changed too much since Possum’s day. Low-slung and a bit ramshackle, it is the collection point for all the continental drift that washes up at Broome. A group of well-tanned men—fishermen or sailors, it seems—sip rum and Cokes by the door. Most of them have tattoos; all of them have earrings. They’re watching a woman in a sleeveless cotton dress who is playing pool with another
woman in an orange sarong. In the corner, two hippies dance slowly to a blues song on the jukebox. There is not an unhandsome person in the bar. Taken together, the crowd has a shabby, tropical sort of style, like a Club Med weekend gone to seed.

Disguised beneath the earrings and sarongs is a racial mix unlike any I’ve ever seen. The Aboriginal blood is obvious, but there’s also an Asian influence, or several strains of Asian, and a touch of Spanish as well. What’s more striking, though, is that no one appears to belong to just one ethnic group. There are mocha-colored men with delicate Asian features, and women with Oriental coloring but broad Aboriginal noses or startling blue eyes.

It’s all to do with the pearls, of course. Malays and Japanese and Filipinos and Chinese and Koepangers (Timorese of Portuguese descent, which accounts for the Spanish look) and Thursday Islanders and, finally, a few Europeans—all came here at the end of the nineteenth century to dive for mother-of-pearl. After 1901 immigration policy took a racist turn, and White Australia laws forbade Asians bringing their families along, so the melting pot was stirred a little more. And even before the pearlers came, there were longboats swooping down from Malaysia to ply these shores for a delicacy called sea slug or “bêche-de-mer.” This history is recorded in the Asiatic features of many Aborigines hereabouts and also in the local cuisine. Some Aboriginal clans around Broome still cook their turtles Indonesian style, with chili and garlic.

I order a beer and ask the barmaid whether the pearling fleet is in or out.

“In,” she says. “In here.” She points at the brawny, bronzed mob I’d spotted near the door. Apparently this is all that remains of what was once the biggest pearling fleet in the world. “Guy with the towel’s the best diver in Broome,” she says. “The one he’s talking to is a dealer.”

I sidle up to the diver. The towel, which is wrapped around his bare, bulging pectorals, gives him the look of a prizefighter, except that he has a complete set of gleaming teeth and a long, unbroken nose.

I buy a round and begin quizzing him about pearling.

“Our boat’s out for ten days, in for one, then out for ten again.” He taps the side of his beer glass. “Never really lose our sea legs.” He downs his beer in one swig and heads for the toilet. Apparently one round doesn’t buy very much information in Broome.

I have a go at his companion, a tall, swarthy man with a droopy moustache, jet-black hair, and two gold loops hanging from one ear. His appearance, like the diver’s, begs for a tourist question.

“Where are you from?” I ask him. “I mean, where’s your family from before Broome?” It comes out a bit awkward but he doesn’t seem to mind.

“Koepanger, way back,” he says. “That bloke you were just talking to is from Thursday Island.” What’s curious, though, is that despite their exotic appearance, the men have broad ocker accents. The melting pot has had some time on the fire in Broome.

I forge ahead: “You’re a dealer, right?” The Koepanger’s face goes blank, but I continue. “How does it work? Do you buy from them or do the divers come to you?”

He turns away, as if to talk to the back of a man on the next stool. Then he turns to face me again, with an expression that is quizzical, almost hostile. “You serious, mate? Or you some kind of pig?”

Pig?

“I’m nosey, if that’s what you mean.” His face doesn’t change. “Sorry,” I continue. “It’s just that the barmaid said he was a diver and you were a dealer, so I thought I’d learn a little bit about pearling. That’s all.”

The man studies my face for a few seconds, then laughs. “You got it all wrong, mate, I deal hemp, not pearls. But I’m lying low right now, because the town is crawling with narcs.” He points at a man across the bar with a red bandanna and wire-rimmed glasses. “Try that bloke over there.”

It seems like a polite exit from an awkward conversation. So I wander across the bar, which is suddenly crowded with evening traffic. Wire Rims gives me an amiable smile as I approach. What does he deal, I wonder, pearls or grass?

He’s wondering the same thing about me. As I slide onto the next stool, he says out of the side of his mouth: “Buying or selling?”

“Neither, sorry.”

“Shit. I saw you talking to The Man and thought maybe you were on to some dope.” We sit silently for a moment. “Anyway, I’m Mark. This is Gavin. Join the bloody club.”

Mark doesn’t seem to be a club member. Short and balding and a bit anxious, he looks like a frazzled graduate student. But Gavin is as laid-back and handsome as everyone else at the Roebuck: tall and blue-eyed,
with a well-trimmed goatee and thin moustache that are so blond that they seem to be painted onto his deeply tanned face.

In fact, Mark and Gavin aren’t regulars at all. The Roebuck is just a stopover between isolated cattle properties where the two men do odd jobs for a traveling contractor. They get these breaks about once a month, for a few days at the most. And this one is due to end at midnight, when their boss arrives to carry them off to the next remote station.

“One for the road!” Mark yells at the barmaid. Then, giggling, “Two for the road!”

Gavin joins the chorus. “Ten for the road—”

“Twenty—”

“Twenty thousand!”

The barmaid smiles tolerantly. “They’ve been going on like this since yesterday afternoon,” she says to me in a stage whisper. “You’d think they were drunk.”

Getting drunk was originally a secondary mission. Mark wanted to score some grass for the long nights out in the scrub. Gavin just wanted some female companionship.

I’ve been out of circulation for six months,” he says. “It’s depressing.” Unfortunately, he hasn’t had any more luck than Mark.

“Empty-handed,” he says. “Until tomorrow night. Then I’ll have you-know-what in my hand again.”

Mark laughs. “If I wank anymore, my dong will fall off.”

The barmaid returns with three beers. “My shout,” she says.

“I’d like to shout you something,” Gavin says, leaning over the bar. “What’s wrong, is it me or my face?”

“Face is fine,” she says. “Too desperate, that’s all.” She turns and sashays down the bar, leaving Gavin with his face on his arms, moaning.

Mark checks his watch. “Three hours to go, mate. This is looking serious.”

“Back to work.”

“Back to the bush.”

“No girls.”

“No dope.”

“No nothing.”

They collapse against the bar and I can’t tell if they’re giggling or whimpering. Probably both.

I ask them why they don’t quit their jobs. Mark tells me that he will as soon as he’s saved enough money to go back to Melbourne. “I had this delusion that I’d make my fortune swinging a pickaxe somewhere out West.” Gavin suffered from a different fantasy. His catering business in Perth went bust, then his marriage did the same. He figured a few months of hard labor in the bush would “set the boat straight again.”

At the moment, though, he’s about as straight as a plumber’s snake. And things aren’t going to get any clearer. Mark has just caught the eyes of “The Man”; it seems some dope deal may transpire after all. Mark follows him out of the bar.

Gavin perks up; maybe his own chances will improve. He spots a slim Asian woman in a short skirt who is bent over the jukebox, studying the list of songs. Gavin finishes off his beer and tucks in his singlet. “Wish me luck, mate.” Then, just as he slides off his stool, a man comes up to the jukebox and wraps his arms around the woman’s waist. The man begins nibbling at her neck. She flings her head over one shoulder and sticks her tongue out. He takes it in his mouth and they begin kissing, slowly and passionately.

“Jesus fucking Christ, will ya look at that?” Gavin cries. “Jesus fucking Christ. He’s licking her tonsils.” We watch the couple smooch for a minute, then Gavin shouts across the bar.

“For Chrissake’s, mate! Haven’t you ever heard of the privacy of your own fucking home?” No one at the bar even turns a head. The couple keeps kissing. Gavin buries his face in his arms again.

A few minutes later Mark returns. He hasn’t had any luck either. “That dickhead’s been jerking me off all night.” He checks his watch. “Two hours and counting, mate. This is looking serious.”

I leave Mark and Gavin at the Roebuck, looking serious, and head out into the tropical night. Now that the stifling heat is gone there is something very agreeable about Broome. Maybe it’s all the beer. Maybe I’ll lay up for a few days, like the pearl boats. Patch a sail or two, fix a leak, untangle my halyards.

      
O
vernight the heat breaks and the great “king” tide of Broome washes in. Boats that appeared stranded on the mudflats last night are floating now by a wooden jetty a few blocks from the Roebuck Bay Hotel. An island of mangrove a little way offshore is swamped altogether.

It is this remarkable shifting water—up to thirty feet change in depth between high and low tide—that allowed William Dampier’s ship, the
Cygnet
, to drift ashore near here in 1688. “We hal’d our Ship into a small sandy Cove, at a Spring-tide, as far as she would float; and at low Water she was left dry and the Sand dry without us near half a Mile,” the English sailor wrote. “We had therefore time enough to clean our Ships bottom, which we did very well.” The sailors also hunted turtle and dugong in Broome, though it seems Dampier had little success in encouraging his crew to do other labor. “While we lay here, I did endeavour to persuade our Men to go to some English Factory; but was threatened to be turned ashore and left here for it.” Even then, men went troppo as soon as they hit the sun and sand of Broome.

Three centuries later, sailors still use these tides to bring their pearling luggers close to shore. And in the morning when I wander down to the docks, there is much Factory going on. Half a dozen men are off-loading crates of pearl shell and on-loading gas and food before the ebbing tide leaves them high and dry again.

I recognize some of the faces from last night. By daylight, stripped to the waist, they form a rainbow of races stretching down the pier. The crates pass from Chinese hands to Koepanger to black to Japanese to Malay and then to Chinese again. And then to a pair of Caucasian hands—my own. Stepping onto the narrow pier to chat with one of the men, I have a crate thrust into my arms, and so join the human chain. Turn right, receive crate, turn left, hand crate on, turn right, receive crate, and so on down the line. When the crates are off, we change direction to load on food. After so many mornings on the road it feels good to be part of some useful labor.

The boats are as colorful as their crews: two-masted wooden schooners, resembling Chinese junks, with buoys and nets and clothing draped from the halyards. If the boats were not so worn, they would seem almost too quaint, like museum pieces. As it is, tied up at the shaky wooden pier, they give our labor the air of another time and place: colonial Singapore, say, or a whaling port in Massachusetts.

“Pearling’s still an eighteenth-century operation,” the man to my left says, pausing as the dead weight of another crate hits him in the chest. “Great for the tourists. Tough on us.”

He is Malaysian, I think: a big, bronzed oak of a man with thighs like tree trunks and arms as strong as low-lying limbs. I ask him all the questions I’d wanted answers to last night, and in between crates he fills me in.

On “the bends,” for one. The paralysis is caused by the pressure change of rising too fast from the ocean floor. In the old days, before modern equipment and modern medicine, divers died by the dozens—if not from the bends, then from shark attacks or cyclones. A big blow in the 1880s swept away more than 20 boats and 140 men; another cyclone killed the same number in 1935. Some of the men are buried in group graves at a Japanese cemetery outside town. For many years after, descendants filled small bottles with rice wine and set them beside the gravestones for the spirits to drink.

In the 1920s, Broome had 4,000 divers and the town produced something like 80 percent of the world’s mother-of-pearl. But plastic buttons undermined the pearl market. And when World War II broke out, many of the luggers were requisitioned and their Japanese divers interned. Only the development of cultured pearls saved the Broome fleet from extinction, though no more than half a dozen boats survive. “At least no one gets
the bends anymore,” the pearler tells me. “Unless they come up too fast from the bottom of a beer glass at the Roebuck.”

When the crates are loaded on, I wander off through “China Town,” a few wide streets bordered by makeshift shanties of tin and wood. At the beginning of the century this was the heart of Broome’s pearling community and the meeting point for its curious mix of races. “Satay men” worked the footpath with poles slung over their shoulders, balanced like seesaws with strips of beef at one end and charcoal braziers at the other. China Town also had brothels and gaming houses, as well as a movie house, the Sun Picture Cinema, which still operates in a corrugated iron building.