Washerwoman's Dream Page 24

  When she had protested Ali had said, ‘It’s worse in India. If a woman speaks to a man other than her husband, both the man and woman are killed. It is a matter of honour.’

  ‘Pooh,’ she had replied. ‘It’s barbaric!’

  Instead of arguing with her Ali had walked away in the direction of the mosque, leaving her with the children. She had vowed then that she would never surrender her freedom. She was a British citizen and had rights. Perhaps it was different for the Aboriginal women who married camel-men and had children. Their daughters were brought up in Moslem ways, and if they had never known freedom maybe they did not yearn for it.

  Later, when she wound her arms around Ali, pressing him close, feeling her pulse quickening as he kissed her eyelids and her throat, she knew he still loved her as much as she loved him. She thought that she was different from the other wives and he had come to accept it, loving her more in some perverse way because he could not control her.

  She had asked him if children went to school in India. ‘Only the boys. Girls are taught the things they need to know by their mothers — how to care for children, the home, to be good wives. Most boys only have a few years schooling before they start work. But now I can afford it I want my sons to have a good education.’

  ‘When they are older,’ she said as she twined her fingers through his beard and kissed him on the lips, ‘I don’t want us to be separated.’

  Winifred developed her own ingenious method of teaching her children, so that by the time they started school they would know how to read. Winifred had acquired a small collection of books, including the Bible, which she read aloud to the children, encouraging them to learn passages by heart. She had been given a second-hand copy of The Treasure of Heaven, a romance by the popular English novelist Marie Corelli. Though she pored over the love story, identifying with the heroine, she knew it was not a suitable book for Yusef, so she read him only selected passages describing the scenery, to give him a taste of England. Jam tins and pickle bottles were another substitute for books and she taught Yusef and Rhamat to read by showing them how to make up words from the letters on the labels, as she had done as a child.

  She taught them how to distinguish between east and west by the movement of the sun, and passed on her scant knowledge of the stars from what she had learned from Mr Smithers on the long voyage to Australia, pointing out the constellations of Orion and Scorpio, telling them about Sirius the dog star and the Southern Cross which pointed south. Without an atlas, geography became a game in which Winifred would send the children west to Africa to fetch wood for the fire, or point north to China where the camels were grazing on saltbush. She tried to instill in them the knowledge that across the sea, beyond the sandhills, the gibber plains, the unmarked tracks where they travelled with their camels, lay a vast world where people with different skin colours, languages and customs lived.

  Ali had won a lucrative contract to deliver building supplies for a hospital being constructed in Alice Springs, so, with their own string of twenty camels, they travelled to Oodnadatta, a journey of six hundred miles. With them were two Aboriginal men to help with the saddling and loading of the camels, to guide them across the unmarked track and to lead them to soaks where there was fresh water. The Aborigines brought their wives and children, the women doing their own cooking with the rations of flour, tea, sugar and jam that Ali supplied. When they called at a station Ali would buy half a bullock which he would then share with the Aborigines. Other times they would hunt wild game.

  At dusk, and in the first light of morning, Yusef and Rhamat would run wild with the Aboriginal children. They learnt to track the brush turkey, which sometimes weighed forty pounds, and could creep up on a lizard and grab it by the tail. Though they ate the brush turkey, Winifred made them give the reptiles to the Aborigines, who would toss them live onto the hot coals, skin and all. She was always sickened by the sight and would never allow the boys to eat at the Aboriginal camp, which was positioned away from theirs. Instead, she made them sit quietly while Ali prayed and read the Koran aloud, until Yusef knew long passages by heart, even though he could not understand Arabic. Then they would eat their simple meal together, including bread Winifred had made in the camp oven.

  The life suited the children. The boys’ faces had browned with constant exposure to the sun, so that sometimes from a distance Winifred found it hard to tell them from the Aboriginal children. She had to be careful with Rhamat because he had her fair skin and grey–green eyes. She was always chasing him with his straw hat. It was easy to keep a sunbonnet on Pansy, because of the ribbons tied under her chin. Yusef had a felt hat like his father, which Ali wore in place of a turban when he was working with camels to give him more protection from the sun.

  With the new contract the family based themselves at Oodnadatta, the terminus of the northern railway. If Winifred had expected to see a grand railway terminus like Victoria in London she was disappointed. There were one hundred and fifty residents in the town, housed in forty dwellings. The railway workers lived in the fenced-off railway property. The post office was part of the railway station; nearby was the stationmaster’s residence, a tennis court and a school.

  There were general stores, a butcher’s shop, a blacksmith, plus a number of dwellings known as shacks, which were maintained by the stations further out so that their staff would have somewhere to stay when they came to town. In 1911 the Australian Inland Mission established a hospital not far from the police station. There were few other services. The town only existed because of the railway and to service the sheep and cattle stations further out.

  Oodnadatta had become the terminus of the Great Northern Railway by accident in 1891, when the government of the day decided that the railway workers were needed to help harvest a bumper wheat crop further south. Work on the railway, which was intended to follow the Overland Telegraph Line to Darwin, stopped, and was never resumed.

  At first sight Winifred was disappointed. The town was built on hot dry gibber plains. The gibbers, which averaged the size of a man’s fist, had been polished by wind and sun and reflected the heat. There was no relief from the sun, no distant mountain range to divert the eye, only mirages that shimmered in the heat, giving the impression of vast lakes of water. The tops of the Overland Telegraph poles took on the image of masts on yachts in some great inland sea.

  Most years the area was completely devoid of vegetation because the average rainfall was only three inches per annum. People depended on galvanised-iron water tanks to collect rainwater. When they were dry they drew water from an artesian bore. This had been sunk half a mile west of Oodnadatta and flowed at about 250 000 gallons a day through a standpipe to serve the town, with a branch going to a communal shower room where people could bathe in the warm water. Excess water ran down a drain to where Ned Chong had a market garden to supply the town with fresh vegetables.

  The camel-men lived apart in ghantown, which was north of the main settlement, and the Aborigines camped further out again. The young family made their home in a small iron hut, divided off with a hessian curtain. Close by were date palms, planted by the camel-men for shade, a crude mosque with a tap in front for ablutions, a bore drain for the camel yards, and goats that wandered around foraging for food.

  Winifred and her family arrived ten days before the train was due to arrive with passengers and freight. Even though they were exhausted by the long trip from Birdsville there was work to be done, getting their team ready for the trek to Alice Springs. Camels had to be broken in and branded and saddles needed repairing before they could rest.

  They were to discover that the town came to life on those Fridays the fortnightly train steamed in from Adelaide, six hundred and eighty-eight miles south. The European settlers treated it as a holiday. Dressed in their best they hurried across the dirt clearing to the railway station when they heard the whistle as the train crossed Stony Creek Bridge, a tributary of the nearby Neales River.

  At the same time the c
amels, hundreds of them, were brought in to prepare for the loading, with a race to see whose team could be loaded and away first. There was fat and tar to be smeared on mangy hides, saddles to be adjusted while the beasts snapped and snarled. To add to the confusion there was a pack of dogs barking above the noise of the shunting train as the driver tried to get the loaded carriages as near to the goods shed as possible. All the while the dust rose in suffocating clouds.

  Despite the camel-men clamouring for the unloading of their goods, the stationmaster refused to deviate from his usual practice, which was first to sort the mail and make up the mailbags for the outlying stations. Once this was done the stationmaster removed his shirt, and with a porter went in to check the goods against the consignment notes, before allocating a load to its particular camel train. Soon the packages overflowed out of the shed onto the dirt platform while tempers flared, with drivers yelling and young camels tossing off their loads. Disputes would break out as men argued with the stationmaster over their consignment notes. Winifred found herself pressed into unwilling service by Ali. ‘Many of my countrymen cannot read English. I have told them you will help check their goods.’

  It was this that gave her a special place in the Moslem community. She became expert at checking consignment notes and bills of lading and also helped with correspondence. The role was not an easy one because the camel-men argued about the cost of freight, refusing to accept what was written on their cart notes, expecting instead that she could calculate the freight by looking at the loaded camels. Ali never went to Winifred with his accounts. She was never sure whether this was to save her extra work, or because he did not want her to know how much money he had.

  On that first day she was at the station from the time the train arrived until the last camel train pulled out. Their own loading was timber and iron for the Alice Springs Hospital. It was an awkward load and they were the last to leave. It had been a six-hundred-mile trek to Oodnadatta, and beyond lay Alice Springs, three hundred miles to the north.

  Once the contract for the Alice Springs Hospital had been fulfilled Winifred and Ali ventured further afield, travelling far to the north and almost to the western border. Sometimes they could only spare enough water for a wash in the morning. Other times they came across lush tropical country with lily-covered lagoons where they could bathe and wash their clothes, spreading them on the camels’ humps to dry. At Newcastle Waters there was a lagoon the colour of milk from chalky deposits in the soil, and yet it was fit to drink.

  There were great waterways, like the Katherine River that flowed through Katherine Gorge. There were ferns, acacia trees in bloom, paperbarks with wild orchids in their branches, and other trees festooned with parrots like exotic flowers. It was dusk when Winifred saw the river for the first time and they made camp. She hastened to its banks, sitting there listening to the droning of flies, thinking back to the times she had sat by the creek when her father sent her to get water and how it had soothed her. She was still sitting there when she heard Ali’s voice. ‘There may be crocodiles. I’ve heard they crawl up onto the banks at night. And soon the wild buffaloes will be coming to drink. It isn’t safe.’

  Their life was not without incident. Once Winifred rode under a gum tree for shade and a snake fell, hitting her shoulder, before sliding down the side of the camel and biting it. The beast plunged wildly and Winifred was thrown to the ground. Fortunately, the children were with their father. Winifred was badly bruised but lucky, because the camel died. It cost them a precious three days, waiting for her to recover.

  Sometimes they passed Aborigines bathing in a waterhole covered with pink lotus blossoms. Other times they would pause beside one of the termite mounds which rose higher than the camels, and which had two flat sides facing east and west so that one side was always in the shade. One she christened Canterbury Cathedral because it was formed like a church, with a steeple at both ends that towered over the Overland Telegraph Line.

  Once they met a lonely trooper who came and sat at their camp fire. He was looking for a party of Aborigines with leprosy, who had run away when they heard on the bush telegraph that they were to be sent to the leper colony off the coast of Australia. Once there they would never be released. They were still at large later, because Winifred saw them on the return trip and was horrified at the sight of their misshapen limbs when they came up and begged for ‘bacca’. The encounter alarmed her, especially as they had leaned close to her children. When she returned to Oodnadatta she wrote to the health department and was relieved to find that there was no risk of infection.

  Talking to a group of stockmen around the camp fire she heard about a massacre of Aborigines who had tried to drink from a water trough on a station and had been shot by the manager. ‘They say the cattle smell them and won’t drink the water. He got rid of the evidence by getting his half-castes to chuck the bodies over a cliff,’ the stockmen had said.

  When Winifred tried to find out where it happened they refused to tell her. ‘Best if you don’t know.’ They were drovers, and their livelihood depended on securing contracts to take cattle safely through to Oodnadatta. To interfere risked losing work.

  Though Winifred never witnessed any of the atrocities she heard about, she was always wary when they pulled into a station, looking at the manager and wondering if he was the one who had shot the Aborigines, knowing it was not something she could ask about. She noticed that often there was no white woman on the property, no wife, only young black women who worked in the homestead, with light-skinned children running underfoot. And though they played with her children she never liked to ask who their father was. All she knew was that when she and Ali had dinner with the manager there was usually a young black woman, wearing a neat cotton dress, who waited on the table but never sat with them.

  Gradually Winifred became aware of the conflict over white ownership of the land and the natives who had been dispossessed, their hunting grounds out of bounds and the herbs they used for medicine eaten by cattle. She was disturbed by the sight of the young half-caste women who were caught between two cultures, easy prey for predatory white men.

  She also became aware that there were conflicts among the Aborigines themselves. One evening they had hooshed their camels down by a waterhole. In the distance they could hear an uproar from an Aboriginal camp. One of the women in their train belonged to the same tribe and had gone to visit. The next morning Winifred asked her what the uproar had been about.

  ‘Oh big fella row, missus. Old man Gulliman want younger woman. He bin say old Nelly im bin too old, no good. Can’t see go hunting no more. So im bin tell her clear off. Nelly, im bin yabber. So Gulliman bin beat her and throw fire sticks and by and by she get up and Gulliman chase her away.’

  Later, Winifred heard that the old woman’s body had been found by the river bank, where it was left to be consumed by crocodiles.

  Another time two men rode up to their camp at midday and were served a mug of tea from the black bucket by the fire. They turned out to be the constable and his tracker from Horse Shoe Bend on the border of South Australia and the Centre. ‘We’re looking for a big half-caste called Billy Sticktight. He murdered old Lenin, his native missus and their son. He’s got a gun. Watch he don’t make off with your camels.’

  That night Winifred and Ali kept watch but nothing happened. The following evening Winifred was frying some steak that the boundary rider had given her, when Billy Sticktight appeared. He speared a steak and began to wolf it down. What Billy Sticktight didn’t know, however, was that the constable had not left the area. The wanted man was overpowered, handcuffed and tied to a tree. The next morning the police constable and his tracker set off on the long ride to Port Augusta to hand over the wanted man. He walked behind, a rope around his waist to secure him to the constable’s horse.

  By now Winifred was adept at handling camels. She was still wary, though, because no matter how kind you were to them, or even if you raised them from birth, they were never domestic
ated. She had seen how a bull camel on musth behaved, disrupting the camel train as he tried to get to the females. And she knew of a man in Western Australia who had tried to stop a camel fight and had had his head bitten off. So she was always careful.

  And yet she admired the way the camels cared for their calves. She would put the newborn camel in a sack with holes for its legs and secure it on top of the loading where the mother could see it. Once the mother knew her calf was safe she would settle down and the camel train could continue. At three days the baby camel was able to walk beside its mother, dropping behind when it got weary. When the string was unloaded at night the bull would drive the females back along the trail to their calves, where the herd would feed, making a circle to protect the young from prowling dingoes.

  Because of the distances they had to travel the camel train set off at first light, as soon as the camels had been brought into camp and loaded by the Aboriginal helpers. Their livelihood depended on delivering supplies to the station and picking up the order for the next delivery as quickly as possible. Ali had elected to do the long runs because they paid better than shorter trips. There was barely time for a quick prayer, a cup of tea and a slice of damper and treacle, travelling as far as they could before the sun got too hot. Even so they only paused briefly for prayers, a drink of water and a few dates in the middle of the day.