Shearers' Motel
Authors: Roger McDonald
Roger McDonald was born in rural New South Wales in 1941 and educated at country schools and in Sydney. His writing career began with poetry, moved on to fiction, and encompasses travel writing, essays and screenplays. His books have been published in Australia, the UK and the US.
His first novel
1915
won the
Age
Book of the Year and the South Australian Government Biennial Prize for Literature in 1979, and his most recent novel
Mr Darwin's Shooter
won the 1999 NSW Premier's Award for Fiction, the 1999 Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction, the 2000 National Fiction Award and the 2000 SA Premier's Literary Award.
Shearer's Motel
won the 1993 National Book Council Banjo Award for Non-Fiction.
Also by Roger McDonald
FICTION:
1915
Slipstream
Rough Wallaby
Water Man
The Slap
Mr Darwin's Shooter
AS EDITOR:
Gone Bush
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Shearers' Motel
9781742754673
A Vintage book
published by
Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060
http://www.randomhouse.com.au
Sydney New York Toronto
London Auckland Johannesburg
First published 1992
This Vintage edition published 2001
Copyright © Roger McDonald 1992
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
McDonald, Roger, 1941â.
Shearers' motel.
ISBN 978 1 74051 051 6.
ISBN 1 74051 051 8.
1. Sheep shearers (Persons) â Australia â Social life and customs. 2. Sheepshearing â Australia. 3. Australia â Description and travel. I. Title.
636.30833
âWe wish we were leaving here. We wish we were packing up and going over to the next shed. And we're thinking, Why? It's the same as this one. Bound to be. But we still want to go
.'
Dedicated with affection and respect to
Hemi and Rewi
and the teams I worked for in 1989 and 1990.
The author thanks the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts and the Literature Board of the Australia Council for fellowships assisting the research and writing of this book. Two sections originally appeared in different forms in
Gone Bush
(Bantam Books) and
The Independent Monthly
. The work was completed while I was (honorary) writer in residence, English Department, University of Sydney.
Considerable thanks are owed to many friends who helped with background: notably Hemi, Kere, Marama, and Rewi Taurau; Bruce Lambeth; Ihaia Pattison; Paul and Marlene Rowe; Susie McIlveen; Samson and Wilson Te Whata; and Susan Mulcahy. Also Debbie Jackson; Erina Scia Scia; Talmadge Harris; Whiti Raharuhi; Ross Tua; John Cain; Brian Clarke; Megan, Mary Rose and Don Bell; Olive and Ross McInerney; Bob Tully; Jane Scale; Lindsay Pitcher; James Morgan; Royce Lloyd; Mark Kenney; Alan White; Ben and Paula Martin; Bernice Daly and ABC-TV âBig Country'; Sally McInerney; Jack Hodgins; Rhyll McMaster; and some few who asked not to be named.
âA young farmer used to ride past a lake and he saw a woman's image in the lake and he wished that she'd come out and she did come out on condition he never touched her with anything that was steel. Anyway, they got married. They went to a funeral and she laughed and he said, “Why are you laughing?” and she said, “Well, now his problems are over.” And everybody was taken aback. Then she went to a wedding and she cried. They wanted to know why she was so sad, and she said, “Well, now their problems begin.” Eventually he touched her with a walking stick with a steel cap and she went back to the lake.'
Shed
to separate, divide
throw off, repel, scatter
Shed
to shelter
Shed
to pour out, let flow
send forth as an emanation
Shed
(Aust. & N.Z.)
a shearing shed
âAn old Maori lady once said, “Never touch the handpiece. If you once touch the handpiece, then you're gone.”'
FIRSTCOMER
He wanted to say no to melons like Bertram Junior had. He wanted to lie all day on a mattress, chin on his hands like Louella. He wanted to be hard like Lenny, drinking everyone under the table and still be pulling another West End from the fridge when the breakfast bell rang. He wanted to name who liked work, and who was afraid of work. He wanted to give Betty the lowdown on unions, and withstand the glare of her husband, who only needed to shift sideways to crush him.
He wanted to be a non-drinker and a Christian. He wanted to sit on his throne of clouds like Harold. He wanted to let go, laugh, and be like a child. He wanted to tip buckets of water on Bradshaw, and walk in at lunch, look around, make that his meal, as Rocco had. Felled by labour, he wanted the solitude of his pride in the smoko room, speaking to no one. He wanted to put coloured beads in his hair like Jules, and wanted to say, âA man of forty-five should know better'.
At the root of the work-ladder he wanted to be foul as Wade arriving from Charleville, tattered and snarling, beard singed by cigarette ash and full of sandwich crumbs. He wanted his T-shirt moth-eaten by waste. He
wanted to declare: âWrite about me, but only write the truth'. He wanted his hopelessness strewn at the feet of mentors, male and female, mother and dad, uncle, cousin, big brother, teacher-substitutes awaiting his betrayal. He wanted to beat them all at chess. He wanted to be taken under the wing of people whose wisdom was a revelation and whose friendship was love, whose exasperation he could badmouth as know-nothingness. He wanted to journey inwards in destruction. He wanted to finish the year hated by all, Christlike in his truculence, ready to throw in the towel. He wanted to break into a stock agent's office, take the typewriters and computers, a load of unsaleable junk in a stolen van, that he would sell to a passer-by, and get what he wanted, be put under arrest, taken care of at last, a sort of paradise, a kind of death.
He wanted rest â to be the cook who could take no more, who served breakfast and shot through, like Hazel who wanted her life to consume her, leaving nothing else, no trace.
He wanted to find his own story.
He wanted to drive all night under the lip of a thunderhead and the floodwaters' wave in the contractor's Fairlane, to be a shearer, only a fucking shearer, answering a need when it was put to him, to take breakfast if it was offered (but only if it was offered) and slip into his singlet an hour late, and ring the board. He wanted to get drunk for a week with his joints like rubber and climb a metal upright in sight of a thousand people, and scream at the top of his lungs, DON'T FUCK WITH THE KIWIS. He wanted to read the Bible, tread like a cat, lift weights, punch the bag, move like a shadow, fly a plane, own a house, remarry his own family. He wanted to stop looking over the fence and come in from his own anger. He wanted to love Jesus as the only reality, if it was true.
He wanted to remember happy times. He wanted to go south, like Quinn, and find the girl who was there at the start, leaning on a hut wall, her arms full of wildflowers. He wanted to be divorced, alone, arrived in this country for the first time, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and watching
an ant-line outside a wash-house. He wanted to scream,
Look at this everyone
at the most ordinary things. He wanted to see the brilliant birds â budgerigars, rosellas, galahs and white cockatoos â as if they had all been newly painted in colours of blood and milk and torn magazine pages, and to stroll the banks of the lagoon among pelicans, cormorants, ducks, waterhen, dingoes. He wanted to be the one who cut loose from the camp and followed the bush rat, the swallow, living on leftovers, sheltering in ruins.
He wanted to be a teetotaller and when he reached town he wanted to show his stuff. He wanted to walk into the club with a woman, and when the young cops fresh from Sydney shouldered him outside and began beating him against a wall, he wanted to take only so much, and then he wanted to tell them he would kill them if they laid another finger on him. And they would go away.
He wanted to feel the shame of being a newcomer and loving a country at first sight, having that love abused out of him, ending up on a barstool in the Riverina somewhere, just another bum.
He wanted to be chosen. He wanted someone to take the trouble to reach him wherever he was. He wanted a slip of paper passed to him by a man named Clean Team Alastair with a phone number on it. He wanted a horn to be blown in the caravan park before daylight. He wanted arrangements to be made on his behalf, to be sought out, to have the clutch repaired at someone else's expense before he left, the sump welded, the tank topped up.
Following old tyre-tracks through stands of leopardwood and gidgee, he wanted to be the firstcomer.
He wanted to enter a situation as familiar to him as his own face, this being the place where he was born, where the ghost of mother waited in the kitchen shadows and the ghost of father sharpened the butcher's knife on a long steel. At the end of the shed he wanted to say, as Willie-boy had said, âOur little family is breaking up'.