The Tartan Touch (14 page)

Andrew shook his head. “Only the women have the knack of yandying,” he told me, his eyes laughing at me because I so plainly didn’t understand what he was talking about. “They won’t mind your taking a look
.
” We walked over to where a group of women were working. They were all very pleased to see Andrew. Some of them came running over the desolation where they worked to greet him.

“To
Boss Cocky!”

“Hullo, Jenny,” he answered at once
.
Apparently he knew every one of them by name, and most of their children as well. “I’ve brought my wife to see you!”

The women laughed. “Miz Fraser,” they said dutifully. “Miz Kirsty,” they added. They were very well informed.

But they wouldn’t take long away from their work. In a few minutes they were back, gathering the alluvial tin crystals together with the dust and separating the crystals by yandying. From time immemorial, going ri
ght
back to Dreamtime, the women had used the same method to separate the yandy grass seeds from the husks. Now they used it on metals, with immense skill, using this same technique which had been passed on from mother to daughter all through the generations.

It looked simple enough. They used a piece of tree-bark, about two feet long, or any convenient substitute that came to hand, which was called a coolamon. The woman would stand, with her feet slightly apart, filling her coolamon with some of the brown dust. Then she would revolve the dish, with a subtle, dexterous action forcing the lighter dust out of either end of the coolamon.
The
cassiterite tin ore is of a high specific gravity and is more apt to stay in the dish of bark and, with a quick twist of
the
wrist the heavier, black tin is deposited into an empty fruit can, and the woman starts all over again with another coolamon full of earth.

“You want try?” Jenny asked me.

She handed me her own coolamon and I did try, thinking that it couldn’t be much different from spinning yam on the end of a spool. My fingers were stiff, however, and most of the dirt fell out of the piece of bark, falling to the ground.

“It’s a skill you have to be
born
to,” Andrew consoled me. “Even their men are clumsy and unable to yandy like the women can.”

Jenny nodded, her black eyes gleaming. “Gins yandy good, men very bad,” she confirmed. “ ’Sides,” she added, “yandy tin easy, much more easy than yandy seeds!”

It was strange, hard work, but as Andrew had said, there was no other. He paid them for each fruit-tin full of the alluvial tin crystals that they gathered. Although the weight varied from one ‘fruit’ to another, the women preferred it to any other system. They could earn more than a dollar for each ‘fruit’ and this went a long way to
supporting their families in the humpies where they lived, shacks which consisted of a single room with a hardened dirt floor and walls of the same rusty colour as the ground where they worked by day.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Andrew said as we walked away from the mine.

“It’s sinful!” I agreed.

“They’ve been given a crook deal, no doubt about that! But new ways are being tried now. It’s too late for them to go back to their own ways. If they went back into the desert they would die, for they’ve forgotten most of the ways of their ancestors.”

“Except how to yandy,” I said, as cheerfully as I could
.

“My word, yes. But they live on tinned meat now, not the fresh kangaroo meat they used to eat.”

I scratched at the brown dust with the toe of my boot, noting with satisfaction that my new hat already looked less new than it had.

“Do the humpies where they live have to be quite so dreary?” I wondered aloud. “Are they just feckless?”

“No,” Andrew said finally. “They’re a lost people, and it’s mostly our fault
.
”

I sighed, nodding my head wisely. Hadn’t I seen the way the crofters were leaving the land at home
?
“
Ay,” I said, “it always is the fault of those who don’t live on the land. But dirt poverty is dirt poverty and has to be changed.”

Andrew gave me an outraged look. “I live on the land!” he objected.

I laughed softly to myself. “So you do,” I smiled. “So you do!”

“I suppose it’s different,” he said.

“Well, it is,” I insisted. “You can decide your own future for yourself, can’t you?”

“I’m beginning to wonder,” was all he said.

We drove away from the mine shortly after that, both of us silent and saddened by the hopelessness that followed in the wake of the dying mines and the ghost-towns.

We headed straight for Meekatharra, which like Cue has survived the decline that followed the Murchison Gold Rush. There is still some mining there, but the town’s interests are now mainly pastoral. Here, the single track railway from Perth comes to an end. In a way, it’s the end of civilisation. Only the real Outback lay beyond.

Andrew drove straight on, stopping only for further supplies of petrol and water
.

“It’s eight hundred miles from here to the Northern Territory,” he told me lazily, as we waited in the dying sun for the garage to finish filling the extra tanks in the back of the old ute.

“And how many people?” I asked him.

“Maybe a full score of white people.” His eyes met mine. “Are you afraid to be so alone with me?”

“Of course not!” I exclaimed.

“The MacTaggart courage?”

I looked down at my Fraser shirt. “No,” I said briefly. “But there isn’t anything you want from me, is there?”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” he asked gently.

“Well, you know what I mean,” I said reasonably.
“F
our years, you said, and then I’d be
free
!”

“Is freedom so important to you?” I thought he sounded a shade bitter and wondered why. Didn’t everyone want to make their own decisions and their own way in life? Most people, I amended, for I knew now that I did not. I would have been quite content to follow Andrew’s decisions for the rest of my life.

“I—I’ve never tried it,” I stammered.

He slapped the bonnet of the ute. “No,” he said. “I suppose it was a daft idea!”

“What was?” I asked, puzzled.

“Oh, nothing.”

He took a wad of notes out of his pocket and paid for the petrol and water, “Anything else, sport?” the attendant asked him. Andrew shook his head. He leaped into the driving seat and started the engine, so that I had to scramble into the seat beside him in case he drove off without me.

“We could stay at the hotel here if you prefer it to camping out,” he said sternly, as he slipped the engine into gear.

I shook my head. I knew just what it would be, staying in a hotel. The beer was inevitably more palatable than the local bore water, and Andrew would soon find half a dozen people he knew and off they would go to the bar, while I should be left kicking my heels all evening.

“I’d prefer to camp,” I said with decision.

“Okay,” he answered.

“I prefer my own cooking,” I went on uneasily.

“Right,” he said.

“Besides, we have everything with us. And—and Mary didn’t mind!”

He looked puzzled, but he said nothing. We sped along the corrugated surface of Mad Man’s Track, until it began to get dark and sheer fatigue made me want to set up camp before very long.

The mulga had given way to spinifex, a tough kind of grass that grew in tussocks on either side of the road. I thought the soil was mostly clay, but all round the horizon were remnants of some of the oldest rocky mountains in the world, known locally as ‘breakaways’. They were covered with red laterite which has protected the granite beneath from crumbling away, eroded by the sun and wind, as the rest of the granite tablelands which have long since fallen away.

It was desperately hot
.
When we at last came to a stop, even the slight wind the motion of the car had provided was stilled and there was nothing to break up the cloud of heat that settled over us. I sat on the ground and watched Andrew dig a hole in the ground and light the fire in it, where it would cause no damage to the dry grass all round us.

“It gets windy later on,” Andrew grunted. “I brought a couple of windproof sleeping-bags. I don’t think we’ll need much else.”

I wondered if we would even need them.

“Andrew,” I said solemnly, “does Margaret have anything in particular to say to Mary?”

“I think it’s the other way round,” he said.

“Oh. I suppose Margaret still wants Mary to go to Perth?”

He gave me a hard look and I wondered what he was thinking. “Mary has her own life mapped out,” he said at last. “I think she wants to persuade Margaret that she knows what she’s doing.”

“As she’s already persuaded you?” I murmured.

“Right,” said Andrew. “Now can we talk about something else?”

I nodded, feeling quite miserable and not knowing what to do about it. “I’ll get the bags out,” I said.

The old ute had been very well packed. Apart from the cans of petrol and water, there was enough food to keep us going for days, the barrel of apples that Andrew had told me about, sitting precariously on the top. The sight of them made me want to cry. I sniffed hard.

The sleeping-bags were tucked in down one side
.
I pulled them out and laid them neatly out on the ground. One of them was considerably larger than the other.

“That belonged to my parents,” Andrew told me, appearing suddenly round the side of the ute. “They used it whenever they went camping together.”

I looked away from it, thinking it not quite decent to dwell on the matter.

“I think you’d better have it,” I said. “You’re bigger than I am,”

He leaned against the back of the ute and pulled his hat down over his eyes. “So I am,” he said.

I had to push past him to get to the stores of food. He felt very hard, like a coiled spring. I wished he would go away, for I found it unsettling having him so close to me.

He put a hand on the back of my shirt and I jumped visibly.

“Did Mary talk you into it?” he asked me.

“T-talk me into wh-what?”

“I thought you knew. That’s the Fraser tartan you’re wearing!”

For a wild moment I considered denying any knowledge of any tartan except the one I had been
born
to.

“It—It—” I began. “There wasn’t a great choice—”

He felt the cotton material between his fingers, his brow creased thoughtfully.

“I didn’t think you’d mind
!”
I finished.

He leaned forward and his lips met mine in a kiss as light as thistledown.

‘You’re entitled to wear it,” he reminded me. “You’re a Fraser by marriage, or have you forgotten?”

“But there is no marriage!” I protested sharply.

“Not yet!” he admitted with a touch of menace.

I stood up very straight, my heart hammering. “Never!” I said bravely.

CHAPTER
NINE

“NEVER is a very long time,” Andrew remarked. He was smiling again.
“
Even longer than four years.”

“
Perhaps it is,” I agreed. “But it wouldn’t be fair, would it?”

“Wouldn’t it?” His voice was very gentle.

“It would spoil everything!” I insisted. “Absolutely
everything
!”

His smile died. He took a step away from me, letting me go past him to the stores in the u
te. “
A man’s a man for a’ that
,”
he said.

I bit my lip. “I
know
,”
I said.

“
Well? Don’t you think you could be my wife in fact?”

“For four years?
I could not
!”
I exclaimed.

“Why not?” he countered.

I turned my face away from him in case he should see my own longing reflected there. “You know why not!” I said in stifled tones.

“
But I don’t,” he said. “I find it natural for a man and woman to live together.”

“And what about
Mary
?
”

He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me round to face him. “Mary will find her own happiness,” he said. “I’m talking about you and me.”

“I couldn’t!” I said on a sob.

His grey eyes looked deep into mine. “Are you going to say that you couldn’t grow to like me?” he asked me, almost humbly.

I shook my head. That was a lie I couldn’t bring
myself to utter. “I think you can’t understand how I feel,”
I
said instead
.
“What marriage would it be, destined to be terminated in a matter of years? And supposing there were bairns to be considered? What would we do then?”

“What do most married people do?”

“And another thing!” I went on, my indignation now well and truly stirred up. “I don’t consider it a proper proposition at all! Do you think I’m shameless to listen to such a thing!”

Andrew pushed his hat back to the back of his head and whistled slowly. “Ouch!” he said.