The Road from Coorain (31 page)

I sometimes toyed with the idea of settling on Coorain myself, but much as I loved it, I knew I would become a hermitlike female eccentric if I settled into that isolation alone, with no company but the odd stockman and a few sheepdogs. Most backcountry boys never finished high school, or, if they did finish, quickly set about forgetting the book learning they’d been forced to acquire. So if I chose the bush, I would be choosing life alone, and that I didn’t want. Moreover, I had a nagging sense that slipping too easily back into the bush code might be my undoing. These ambiguities came into focus for me on one of my drives out to Coorain, in hot November weather. I’d promised to be out by a set day to help with crutching, only to find the night before I was to leave that two dangerously violent prisoners had broken out of jail near Sydney and were reported to be traveling west to Booligal, the next town to Hillston, on my route. I thought briefly about putting things off for a day, but knew that I would never hear the last of “that time you were late coming out because those two jailbirds were on the road.” In the backcountry only cowards were cautious. Deciding that any backcountry felon would be too bush-wise to be caught by the police on the main road, I set out, not made any more relaxed by the news that two people had been killed by the escapees, at points along the route I was to follow.

My journey was routine in blistering summer heat until on an isolated stretch of road between West Wyalong and Rankins Springs I felt a rear tire blow out. I was out of the car almost before it had stopped and underneath it fixing the jack to the rear axle when a car drove up from the opposite direction, and from my prone position I could see two solid pairs of working boots approaching. Shortly two upside-down but genial faces hove into view as the new arrivals bent down to look under my car,
inquiring whether I needed a hand. I slithered out and said, “Yes. I need to change a wheel fast. I’m trying to get to the other side of Hillston by dusk.” My helpers were both familiar types. The elder, wrinkled and burned deep brown by the sun, wore the usual broad-brimmed backcountry felt hat and spoke in a characteristically laconic bush fashion. The younger man was a Scot, clearly recently arrived, his face burned scarlet, his gingery eyebrows seeming blond question marks on a sea of crimson. “Where’re you headed beyond Hillston?” the elder asked. “I’m going to Coorain, Mossgiel way,” I replied. “Coorain? You’re not Bill Ker’s daughter, are you?” the elder questioned. I nodded. “I was with your father on the Menin Road, a long time ago now,” he said. “I always remember what a great horseman he was. Now I look at you, I think you look a bit like him.” The Scot, meanwhile, had changed the back wheel and, kneeling to screw on the bolts, looked up to me to say, “Lassie, you’re crazy. Don’t you know there’s a pair of murderers on this road?” Before I could speak my father’s old A.I.F. friend answered for me. “She was born in the right country, Jock. She doesn’t stop home for any bugger.” Jock was unimpressed. “You need air in this tire. Make sure you stop in Rankins Springs and get the other tire mended. You’ve got a long way to go before you’re home tonight.” Thanking them for their help, I thought privately, Jock’s right. It is silly, what I’m doing. Only someone not part of this culture would have the sense to point it out. It wouldn’t do to slide too comfortably back into this world.

I was puzzling about my future and what world I really belonged in when, in early 1959, I went to spend a week with my brother and sister-in-law after the birth of their first child, a strapping son, to be named David, whose godmother I was to be. They seemed so happy in their tiny house in Charleville that my own life seemed rather empty. Its fulfillments all seemed to lie in the direction of work, because there was no one in any of the variety
of circles in which I moved who could participate with me in all the various worlds I liked to inhabit.

The first night of my stay we went to dinner with a visiting American, Alec Merton, whose company was one of the best clients of my brother’s air charter business. I remembered that, during his bachelor days, Barry had introduced me to a lively and amusing new American friend who was the mobilizer of venture capital for what then seemed a hopeless search for uranium in western Queensland and the Northern Territory. Now, several years later, the search had been vindicated, and the geological team hired by the American speculators had located exploitable deposits in what we had grown up learning was a barren, resource-poor desert. The dinner was by way of celebration of the discovery, and of the birth of Barry and Roslyn’s two-week-old son.

In the Charleville heat our host looked mildly incongruous, dressed as he was in an American seersucker suit and bow tie, while everyone else was in shirtsleeves. In all other respects it was plain to see that this mid-thirtyish, mild-mannered man was at home in this world of cattle ranchers and backcountry types. I learned that he was from Arizona, had been educated in the East, had learned his financial skills in New York, but now worked from Phoenix on financing mineral exploration around the world. I was amused that he was able to tell tall tales that were equal to any of the Queensland variety told by the other guests with great gusto and attention to elaborate detail as the party warmed up. It also emerged that when he had first arrived in town he had quickly established his credentials with most of the heavy hitters in the local bar who had planned a cheerful hazing for the visiting Yank. Invited on a bibulous hunting trip which involved heavy rum consumption in the early hours of the morning, while waiting for the dawn and the first flight of ducks, he had acquitted himself with considerable style. While his hosts showed signs of wear and tear and missed many of their shots,
each one of his knocked a bird from the air. He had made a point of ostentatiously delivering his lion’s share of the plump wild ducks to the wives of each of his hosts, to drive home just who was the best shot, and who had been sober.

It wasn’t until one of the cattle-rancher guests suggested a game of poker that our host openly took charge of the evening. Poker was out of the question. He wanted to learn two-up, so that he’d be ready for his future visits to Australian mining camps. A suitable place was found, pennies were produced, and a team of hardy gamblers gathered in a circle. Alec Merton produced a wad of notes and set them in front of me. “Here, Jill, honey. You play for me as well.” The game was fast and furious, the stakes high, and his pithy commentary on this Australian game, only half as good as craps, was uproariously funny. By the time Barry and Roslyn left to relieve their baby-sitter I was one of the half-dozen people left playing, now as hooked as any of the compulsive gamblers at my side. Around midnight I began to have a winning streak. After the third win I started to pick up some of the winnings. “Don’t stop now, for God’s sake, hang in there,” my backer, who was losing heavily, said in my ear. I did as instructed and cleaned out the remaining players after the spinner did his job three more times. “This bloody game’s no good,” one of the losers said cheerfully. “Good Lord, Barry’s sister’s beat the pants off us all. Come on, Jill, you’re the winner. You’ve got to shout for everyone.” Shouting involved sending for more bottles of Scotch from the bar, the closing of which at 1:00 a.m. was never more than a surface legal formality in Charleville. It was 2:00 a.m. when Alec Merton drove me back to my brother’s house during one of the sudden thunderstorms of the Queensland interior. Although I was a little tipsy and still flushed with my winnings, my driver seemed perfectly sober. The high-spirited gambler was gone now and in his place was a man with a startling command of the English language and a more profound view of life than I would have imagined from seeing him egging the game on a few hours before. He talked about the uncertainty of human affairs
and the emptiness of success, recited some lines from the Old Testament apropos the setting forth in life of Barry’s child, said he’d long remember watching my eyes fixed on the spinning pennies, kissed me soundly good-night, and was gone.

Alec later said he was attracted to me by my reckless gambling, my looks, and my brains. Every intellectual woman wants to be loved for her whole self, to be found attractive for mind as well as body, and I fell deeply in love with Alec in return. I hadn’t realized I was looking for an educated male companion who understood my university world, yet was at home in the outback I loved so profoundly. When he came to Sydney to visit me I was astonished to discover that he respected my work and didn’t want his presence to detract from it. When I began hesitantly to explain that I would be teaching an evening class the following night and would not be available till after 10:30, he stopped me in mid-sentence. “Why, Jill, you are a busy professional woman, and must turn in your best performance without worrying about me. I’ll be waiting for you, when you can get to me.” I couldn’t believe it; I’d found a man who respected my work and shared my exacting standards about it.

Like all people whose business involves speculative risk, Alec had a talent for living completely in the moment and letting tomorrow’s worries wait. He made no secret of his intention to marry within his faith. I made no secret of my plans for an independent career. Meanwhile we took the time to be happy, to savor the pleasure we took in one another’s company. In many respects he was the first really sane, thoughtful, and mature person I’d known, and as a result he began to set me straight about many of my approaches to life. When I asked him to meet me in a rundown old bush hotel on the route back from Coorain to Sydney, he came, cheerfully uncomplaining about the battered bedrooms and the marginal plumbing. He was curious about what I was doing out there. “Just why are you fussing about this mother of yours, and spending time running a ranch when you ought to be writing history?” he asked. When I mentioned duty and responsibility
to the family, he just shook his head. “Your duty’s to your talents,” he said. “Never forget it. You can pay someone to run that ranch almost as well as you’ll do it. But no one else can develop your gifts.”

He had no patience with Australian stoicism. “You mean you weren’t allowed to cry when your father died?” he exclaimed, when I tried to explain my lack of emotional expressiveness. “Well, cry right now. I’ll sit here and cry with you. It’s a tragic story, and you shouldn’t try to behave as if it hadn’t happened.” I found that once I gave in to tears there was no stopping them, and that I was suddenly sobbing about past sorrows I’d scarcely allowed myself to think about. My upbringing had been based on the rule that one didn’t intrude one’s feelings on anyone else. That was selfishness. Certainly, showing one’s feelings was the worst possible breach of taste. Alec was interested in all of my feelings, whether they were sad or happy, and ready to share intensely in them. I hadn’t known it was possible to be so happy, or so certain that I was loved in every dimension of my being. This knowledge gave me new kinds of courage. The next time I was in Hillston, I didn’t drive right by the cemetery. It was a dry season, the topsoil lifting in a persistent red cloud as I stopped and began my search. It took me a long time to find my father’s grave in a lonely, unkempt corner of the graveyard. I pulled the dry weeds away, dusted off the headstone, polished by fifteen years of blowing sand, and wept over it for a long time.

Alec didn’t approve of my saturnine worldview and my belief that what was important was to manage one’s comportment in life well in the face of inevitable tragedy. “You should read a little less economics and try some theology,” he said. “We were created to be happy on this earth.” I told him I thought the pursuit of happiness not a very noble purpose for the creation. He said there wasn’t a better one, and that I should try to cultivate faith in a benevolent creator.

Whether serious or playful, we were euphorically happy. Alec’s business brought him to Australia for a month at a time four or
five times a year. We came to know our special places in Sydney and its surrounding countryside in every season of the year. Our favorite spot was a small restaurant, set in a tiny garden, perched high on a cliff above one of Sydney’s loveliest beaches. It was a remote, out-of-the-way place, surrounded by eucalyptus forest so untouched that, sitting in the garden, one could sometimes find oneself overlooked by a solitary koala bear, solemnly munching gum tips. On sunny days, the sound of the sea, the smell of ocean mingled with eucalyptus, and the brilliant colors of the garden were intoxicating before one ever sampled the host’s well-chosen cellar. On stormy days, it was just as pleasant to sit inside by the fire, look out at the raging ocean, and eat platefuls of sweet Sydney oysters. Sometimes I would look up from daydreaming, gazing into the fire, to find Alec shaking with laughter. “A professor,” he would repeat unbelievingly. “I’m having an affair with a history professor.” We often lazed away a whole afternoon in the garden, leaving reluctantly as the dusk thickened and the lights of yachts began to twinkle on the ocean.

By the time of our second winter it was clear that we two highly emotional people were in danger of losing control of the situation. We each came to our sickeningly final and sensible judgment at about the same time. It was time to part before our feelings for one another became too deep. We had started out playfully enough but had gotten into something more powerful than we’d bargained for.

When I saw him off for the last time, we were both distraught, speechless with suppressed emotion. We stood by the Pan American departure gate in Sydney Airport in floods of tears. “And you’re the woman who didn’t know how to cry,” he finally got out lovingly before embracing me and then walking very slowly out to the plane, stopping to look back just once.

We were both much stronger people for the beautiful sixteen months. It seemed as though I had been loved enough for a lifetime, and as a result, I was less needy, more able to see and hear others, more confident about my own feelings. Alec, for his
part, had been a little jaded by wealth and success when he met me. Like most men and women who are successful at a relatively young age, he needed a new purpose and a surer grasp on the important commitments of his life.