II
So they went on, receiving a rough and generous hospitality from, one or another of Tom’s or Jack’s relations, of whom there were astonishingly many, along the grand bush track to Geraldton. If they weren’t direct relations, they were relations by marriage, and it served just as well. There were the Brockmans, there were the Browns, and Gales, and Davises, Edgars and Conollys, Burgesses, Cooks, Logues, Cradles, Morrises, Fitzgeralds and Glasses. Families united by some fine-drawn connection or other; and very often much more divided than united, by some very plain-drawn feud. Their names like brooks trickled across the land, and you crossed and re-crossed. You would lose a name entirely: like the Brockman name. Then suddenly it reappeared as Brackman, and “Oh yes, we’re cousins!”
“Who isn’t cousin!” thought Jack.
Some of them had huge tracts of land fenced in. Some had little bits of poor farms. Sometimes there were deserted farms.
“And to think,” said Tom, “that none of them is my own mother’s relations. All Dad’s, or else Ma’s. Mostly Ma’s.”
It was queer the way he hankered after his own real mother. Jack, for his part, didn’t care a straw who was his mother’s relation and who wasn’t. But you would have thought Tom lived under a Matriarchy, and derived everything from a lost mother.
It was not wet enough yet to be really boggy, though camping out was damp. However, they mostly got a roof. If it wasn’t a relation’s, it was a barn, or the “Bull and Horns” by Gingin. And to the boys, all that mattered was whether they were on the right road: often a very puzzling question; or if the heavy rain would hold off; if there was plenty of grub; if the horses seemed tired or not quite fit; if they were going to get through a boggy place all right; if the packs were fast; if they made good going. The inns were “low” in every sense of the word, including the low-pitched roof. And full of bugs, however new the country. With red-nosed, grassy-whiskered landlords who thumbed the glasses when there were any glasses to thumb. And there were always men at these inns, almost always the same kind of brutal, empty roughs.
“Look here,” said Jack, “wherever we go there are these roughs, and more roughs, and more. Where the devil do they come from, and how do they make a living? Apart from farm labourers, I mean.”
“A lot of them are shearers,” said Tom, “drifting from job to job, according to climate. When shearing season’s over here, they work on to the south-west, where it’s cooler. And then there are kangaroo and ’possum snarers. That young fellow we saw rooked of all his sugar last night was a skin-hunter. They get half-a-crown apiece for good ’roo skins, and it’s quite a trade. The others last night were mostly sandalwood getters. There’s quite a lot of men make money collecting bark for export, and manna-gum. That rowdy lot playing fifty-three were a gang of well-sinkers. Then what with timber-workers, haulers, teamsters, junkers—oh, there’s all sorts. But they’re mostly one sort, swabs, rough and rowdy, an’ can’t keep their pants hitched up enough to be decent. You’ve seen ’em. They’re mostly like the dirty old braces they wear. All the snap gone out of ’em, all the elastic perished. They just work and booze and loaf, and work and booze. I hope I’ll never get so that I don’t keep myself spruce. I hope I never will. But that’s the worst o’ the life out here. Nobody hardly keeps spruce.”
Jack kept this well in mind. He too hated a man slouching along with a discoloured face, and trousers slopping down his insignificant legs. He loathed that look which tramps and ne’er-do-wells usually have, as if their legs weren’t there, inside their beastly bags. Despicable about the rear and the legs. The best of the farmers, on the contrary, had strong, sinewy legs, full of life. Easu was like that, his powerful legs holding his horse. And Tom had good, live legs. But poor Dad had not been very alive, inside his pants.
“Whatever I do, I’ll never go despicable and humiliated about the legs and seat,” said Jack to himself, as he pressed the stirrups with his toes and felt the powerful elasticity of his thighs, holding the live body of the horse between his muscles in permanent grip. And it seemed as if the powerful animal life of the horse entered into him, through his legs and seat, and made him strong.
“What’s a junker, Tom?”
“A low, four-wheeled log hauler, with a long pole.”
“I thought it was a man. A swab is a man?”
“Yes. He’s any old drunk.”
“But a swaggy is a tramp?”
“It is. It is one who humps it. If he’s got a pack, it’s his swag. If he’s only got a blanket and a billy, it’s his bluey and his drum. And if he’s got nothing, it’s Waltzing Matilda.”
“I suppose so,” said Jack. “And his money is his sugar?”
“Right-O! son!”
“And Chink is Chinaman?”
“No, sir. That’s Chow. Chink means prison. An’ a lag is a ticketer: one who’s out on lease. Now what more Child’s Guide to Knowledge do you want?”
“I’m only getting it straight. Jam and dog both mean ‘side’?”
“Verily. Only dog is sometimes same as bully tinned meat.”
“And what’s stosh?”
“Landin’ him one.”
Jack rode on, thinking about it.
“What’s a remittance man, really, Tom?”
“A waster. A useless bird shipped out here to be kept south o’ the line, because he’s a disgrace to England. And his family soothes their conscience by sending him so much a month, which they call his remittance, ’stead o’ letting him starve, or work. Like Rackett. Plenty o’ money sent out to him to stink on.”
“Why don’t you like Rackett?”
“I fairly despise him, an’ his money. He’s absolutely useless baggage, rotting life away. I can’t abear to see him about. Old George gave me the tip he was leaving our place, else I’d never have gone and left him loose there.”
“He is no harm.”
“How do you know? If be hasn’t got a disease of the body, he’s got a disease of the soul.”
“What disease?”
“Dunno.”
“Does he take drugs?”
“I reckon that’s about his figure. But he’s an eyesore to me, loafin’, loafin’. An’ he’s an eyesore to Ma, save for the bit he teaches Lennie. An’ when he starts talkin’ on the high fiddle, like he does to Mary the minute she comes down, makes you want to walk on his face.”
Poor Rackett! Jack marvelled that Tom had always been so civil.
The two jogged along very amicably together. Tom was hail-fellow-well-met with everybody. At the same time, he was in his own estimation a gentleman, and a person of consideration. It was “thus far” with him.
But whoever came along, they all drew up.
“Hello, mate! How’s goin’?... Well, so long!”
One youth was walking to Fremantle to take a job offered by his uncle, serving in a grocery shop. The lad was in tatters. His blanket was tied with twine, his battered billy hung on to it. But he was jubilant. And now he is one of Australia’s leading lights. Even it is said of him that he never forgot the kindness he received on the road.
But most of the trailers were sundowners, sloping along anyhow, subsisting anyhow, but ready with the ingenious explanation that they “chopped a bit,” or “fenced a bit,” or “trapped a bit.” Perhaps they never realised how much bigger was the bit they loafed.
They were not bad. The bad ones were the scoundrels down from the Never-Never, emerging in their rags and moral degradation after years on the sheep runs or cattle stations, years of earnings spent in drink and squalid, beastly debauchery. Some were hoarding their cheques for coast-town consumption, like the first two rogues, and cadging and stealing their way.
But then there were families driving to the nearest settlement to do a bit of shopping, or visit their relations, or fetch the doctor to “fix up Teddy’s little leg.” Once there was a posse of mounted police, very important and gallant, with horses champing and chains clinking. They were out after a criminal supposed to have been landed on the coast by a dago boat “from the other side.” Then there was an occasional Minister of the Gospel, on a pony, dressed in black. Jack’s heart always sank when he saw that black. He decided that priests should be white, or in orange robes, like the Buddhist priests he had seen in Colombo, or in a good blue, like some nuns.
Gradually the road became a home: more a home than any homestead.
“Let’s get!” was Tom’s perpetual cry, when they were fixed up in the house of some relation, or in some inn. He only felt happy on the road. Sometimes they went utterly lonely for many miles. Sometimes they passed a deserted habitation. But there were always signs of life near a well. And often there were milestones.
“Fifty-seven miles to where?”
“I don’t know. We’re leagues from Gingin. Certainly fifty-seven miles to nowhere of any importance on the face of this earth.”
“Wonder what Gingin means?”
“Better not ask. You never know what these natives’ll be naming places after. Usually something vile. But gin means a woman, whatever Gingin is.”
Gradually they got further and further, geographically, mentally, and emotionally, from Wandoo and all permanent associations. Jack was glad. He loved the earth, the wild country, the bush, the scent. He wanted to go on forever. Beyond the settlements—beyond the ploughed land—beyond all fences. That was it—beyond all fences. Beyond all fences, where a man was alone with himself and the untouched earth.
Man escaping from Man! That’s how it is all the time. The passion men have to escape from mankind. What do they expect in the beyond? God?
They’ll never find the same God! Never again. They are trying to escape from the God men acknowledge, as well as from mankind, the acknowledger.
The land untouched by man. The call of the mysterious, vast, unoccupied land. The strange inaudible calling, like the far-off call of a kangaroo. The strange, still, pure air. The strange shadows. The strange scent of wild, brown, aboriginal honey.
Being early for the boat, the boys camped for twenty-four hours in a perfectly lonely place. And in the utterly lonely evening Jack began craving again: for Monica, for a woman, for some object for his passion to settle on. And he knew again, as he had always known, that nowhere is free, so long as man is passionate, desirous, yearning. His only freedom is to find the object of his passion, and fulfil his desires and satisfy his yearning, as far as his life can succeed. Or else, which is more difficult, to harden himself away from all desire and craving, to harden himself into pride, and refer himself to that other god.
Yes, in the wild bush, God seemed another god. God seemed absolutely another god, vaster, more calm and more deeply, sensually potent. And this was a profound satisfaction. To find another, more terrible, but also more deeply-fulfilling god stirring subtly in the uncontaminated air about one. A dread god. But a great god, greater than any known. The sense of greatness, vastness, and newness, in the air. And the strange, dusky, gray eucalyptus-smelling sense of depth, strange depth in the air, as of a great deep well of potency, which life had not yet tapped. Something which lay in a man’s blood as well—and in a woman’s blood—in Monica’s—in Mary’s—in the Australian blood. A strange, dusky, gun-smelling depth of potency that had never been tapped by experience. As if life still held great wells of reserve vitality, strange unknown wells of secret life-source, dusky, of a strange, dim, aromatic sap which had never stirred in the veins of man, to consciousness and effect. And if he could take Monica and set the dusky, secret, unknown sap flowing in himself and her, to some unopened life consciousness—that was what he wanted. Dimly, uneasily, painfully he realised it.
And then the bush began to frighten him, as if it would kill him, as it had killed so much man-life before, killed it before the life in man had had time to come to realisation.
He was glad when the road came down to the sea. There, the great, pale-blue, strange, empty sea, on new shores with new strange sea-birds flying, and strange rocks sticking up, and strange blue distances up the bending coast. The sea that is always the same, always a relief, a vastness and a soothing. Coming out of the bush, and being a little afraid of the bush, he loved the sea with an English passion. It made him feel at home in the same known infinite of space.
Especially on a windy day, when the track would curve down to a greeny-grey opalescent sea that beat slowly on the red sands, like a dying grey bird with white wing-feathers. And the reddish cliffs with sage-green growth of herbs, stood almost like flesh.
Then the road went inland again, through a swamp, and to the bush. To emerge next morning in the sun, upon a massive deep indigo ocean, infinite, with pearl-clear horizon; and in the nearness, emerald-green and white flashing unspeakably bright on a pinkish shore, perfectly world-new.
They were nearing the journey’s end. Nearing the little port, and the ship, and the world of men.