OUTBACK SUMMER
CHAPTER 1 DARK RIDER
he Mitchell Highway from Nyngan to Bourke is just so flat and straight – about 200 kilometres of dead, flat, straight, designed with a ruler and the stroke of a pen to lay open the great Australian interior to conquest from the east. Here, on the Mitchell, even at dangerously high speeds, travellers feel as if they are standing still – an optical illusion that has cost many dearly over the years.
Rod Conway eased back on the throttle of his Kawasaki Mach III. He sat poised astride the eve of an outback summer that would leave his life changed forever.
He’d let her rip for a bit along the empty outback highway — something he could never do in the crowded city — craving for the raw thrust of the bike’s 60 horsepower 500cc triple cylinder motor and thrill of its exhilarating top speed — but the weather out here was just too damn hot. He knew the middle piston of that model was notoriously prone to jam in its cylinder, seizing the motor. Rod shuddered, easing further on the throttle as he imagined a 190-kilometre-per-hour rear-wheel lock up, throwing the bike into a violent tailspin and smearing him all over the road. Besides, the smell of road kill littering the edges of the highway served a powerful warning — a stray kangaroo, or a galah in the face, at that speed spelt certain death.
The day had been heating steadily, like the inside of a pressure cooker, since mid-morning. Despite the wind, Rod was sweating in his dark leathers and beginning to feel sleepy. Even the tar of the road seemed to melt upward into a shimmering afternoon heat haze. He sped on, hypnotized by the mirage.
Suddenly, the sharp blast of an air horn and, out of nowhere, a black and chrome motorcycle blurred past, its matching leather-clad rider tucked in low behind a sweeping faring. As the bike overtook, its rider, anonymous with full-face helmet and tinted visor, turned to glare at Rod. He cut in hard, forcing Rod to brake sharply. The rider jabbed the air angrily with his middle finger, before turning forward, gunning his bike into the distance.
‘Damn, what in the hell was I doing, drifting around the road like that?’ Rod’s mind snapped back into the moment, his face colouring at his stupid mistake. ‘He must be doing the ton at least.’ Rod wondered if the rider, fast diminishing into the horizon, might be also heading to Bourke, still a couple of hours to the northwest. He didn’t look like the kind of bloke you’d want to mess around with.
The monotonous countryside sped past, grey-blue salt bush and gidgee scrub stretching like a drab blanket from horizon to horizon, and in the hours of spare boredom, Rod began to reflect on his journey into the unknown and on his 20-year-long life in general. He’d never been this far inland before, in fact he’d barely been anywhere outside of the capitals, Melbourne and Sydney, where he grew up. He was excited, looking forward to the adventure.
Rod crossed the Great Dividing Range yesterday, greeting dawn at Katoomba, pushing north-westwards, via Dubbo, towards the great Australian Outback. He’d overnighted in a ten dollar hotel along the way, picking up a pie and chips for dinner from the milk bar next door. He ate alone on the wooden veranda, sitting on a sagging red velour couch, hidden in the evening shadows, overlooking the main street, as the rhythmic music of endless celebrations, pulsed from the pub below. The comforts and support of home seemed so distant now. Later he walked to the telephone box he’d spotted by the post office, letting mum and dad know he was okay, entertaining them with safe snippets about his journey thus far until his last twenty cents clanked into the coin box. Saying official good byes, he let the conversation drift on past the warning beeps until they were cut off.
Rod had passed second-year geology at Macquarie University, getting the letter in the mail a few days ago — flying colours in all subjects. He was proud of that achievement, and he’d worked damn hard for it too, but it had come at a cost. Before now he’d barely had his nose out of his text books, his family home, or the humdrum existence of daily life on Sydney’s leafy North Shore, a routine broken only by occasional wild revelry at some student party or another. He’d heard the topical news events of the day; the Whitlam reforms and the unprecedented sacking of an Australian Prime Minister; the hanging of Ronald Ryan; the Vietnam Draft; even the murder of Beatle John Lennon or the assassination of President JFK, but somehow none of these felt relevant to him. All these, one after the other, had drifted like vague shadows through the empty space between Rod Conway’s ears, more-or-less unnoticed. Apart from studies and the usual hormone-fuelled turmoil of adolescence, there wasn’t much at all going on inside his head — his mind a blank page waiting for life’s experiences to imprint upon it. Besides, there were more important things for a young bloke journeying into manhood to think about — such as girls for one thing, and motorbikes for another. Proud as he was of his achievements, the journey, the space and freedom out here, were forcing him to think outside the square; there was much yet to do, so much to see and explore.
Rod was heading out west to meet his cousin René Schellekens, project geologist with a mining company exploring the Bourke district. He’d organized him a summer vacation job on the Doradilla Copper Project. Rod wondered what it would be like, working as a field hand for René, his mind drifting back to his aunt and uncle’s house in suburban Melbourne, its ample backyard always a surprise of something in season from well-tended vegetable beds and shady fruit trees, the place of carefree family visits where he’d grown up, playing cowboys or soldiers with his brother and cousins, dressing up in Uncle John’s WWII Dutch uniforms, helmet and gas mask. They were the children of self-reliant Europeans, immigrants arriving in waves upon Australian shores in the aftermath of the war; all young, bright-eyed and eager to forge a new life amongst the boundless opportunities of a growing nation, barely 200 years old. The eldest child, René, should have been leader, but he was quieter, studious, keeping to himself. His bedroom shelves were crammed full of rocks and minerals, plaster of Paris dinosaurs — even a pet blue-tongue lizard, Oswald, coiled and embalmed in a preserves jar after he died. Rod remembered how he’d slip into the room’s museum-like solitude to read the specimen labels, finely-penned in India ink, and their matching catalogue entries; mineral name, chemical formula, locality, physical properties; in neatly-ruled exercise books. Rod hadn’t seen much of him in recent years; not since René graduated and left home to travel the length and breadth of Australia in search of precious ores, nor since Rod’s father moved the family to Sydney; selling house to follow his company’s head office to Sydney. Rod looked forward to meeting his cousin again, hoping he hadn’t changed over the intervening years.
Rod’s mind idled over what he’d read about Bourke area in an encyclopaedia before leaving:
The town, named after the then colonial governor Sir Richard Bourke, was surveyed in 1869, starting life as a garrison, Fort Bourke, set up to deal with the region’s troublesome indigenous inhabitants.
How exciting it sounded, as he imagined the soldiers with their gold-buttoned red jackets, black hats and rifles, firing down from their log-walled stockade upon the bloodthirsty natives threatening the settlement with their spear-throwing savagery. Life would have been hard for the first colonialists in those days. Growing up, he’d seen his fair share of cowboy and Indian movies and wondered if the Aborigines would have been like that? He knew from the NSW Gallery’s colonial art collection, visited on one school excursion or another, that they were coal black, naked apart from skeletal ochre line work painted on their bodies, and they didn’t wear furs or feathers like the red Indians, but he’d never seen any movies about them on the telly. Rod wondered if they scalped their hapless victims like the Apaches did.
He pondered other interesting stuff he’d recently learned about his destination.
Bourke, an inland port town, situated on the Darling River — part of the spidery network of navigable inland waterways that opened up the Australian interior to trade and commerce during the late 1800’s. The Murray-Darling system with some 6,700 km of navigable waterways, carried fleets of paddle steamers laden with cargo from the Murray Mouth near Adelaide as far upstream as the Queensland border.
Rod’s mind began wandering again in the heat as tried to imagine what Bourke looked like, picturing riverboat captains, bulging cargo nets and bustling plank wharves piled high with goods of all sorts …
By the 1880’s Bourke had grown to host a Cobb & Co. Coach terminus, several paddle boat companies running the Murray-Darling river trade, and an Afghan overland camel transport hub.
… Paddle-wheelers and horse-drawn stage coaches; ambushes and highway robberies; gun-toting sheriffs in pursuit of outlaw bushrangers … Rod imagined it just like the Wild West would be. He shut his eyes for a few seconds, savouring the dancing images, the relief from the burning highway glare, relaxing …
Suddenly, in an adrenalin jolt, he snapped them open again, his heart pounding.
“Damn…” He’d lost focus again, drifting across the bitumen towards the red earth table drain. “That was way too close.”
Desperate for sleep, Rod pulled to the side of the road, steering his bike towards the railway line running parallel to the bitumen beyond the trees. He searched for a spot, anywhere to lie down in the shade. Damn ants, they were under every bush, and flies swarmed into his eyes and nose the moment he pulled off his helmet. He’d leave it on, he decided, with the visor down; besides it made a comfortable pillow. Collapsing onto the clearest spot of bare red earth near the railway track amongst the sprawling pademelon vines, he drifted off, figuring it would take the ants, or whatever else came along, more than the few minutes sleep he needed to find their way through his leathers.
Startling to the sound of a goods train clanking slowly along the track, Rod bolted upright wondering how long he’d slept. Not too long, he calculated, glancing at the sun, still high in the afternoon sky. He leapt onto his bike, deciding to race the goods train into Bourke. This railway was important to the region’s development too, he remembered;
By 1885 the Great Western Railway Line reached Bourke making the town far more accessible, but ultimately spelling the end for the earlier coach, river and camel services …
Two hours later, Rod swept around the final bend where the highway snaked its way across the railway level crossing, past the looming abattoirs, an ugly complex of grey tin buildings, and along the final straight into town. Greeted by the first buildings of town, he scanned the signs; ‘Welcome to Bourke’, ‘Lions Club’, ‘Rotary Club’, ‘Speed limit 60 kph’; ‘Population 2,530.’
Rod slowed his bike and pulled over onto the dusty verge by the population sign, relieved to be at his long journey’s end, tired and thirsty from the dry heat.
‘Here at last! My outback home for the summer,’ he thought gratefully wondering at what adventures the town would bring. Glancing up at the bold numbers on the sign above his head, he reflected, ‘Well, I suppose that makes me number 2,531?’ Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled the crumpled mud map René had sent him. Rod hung a right at the Central Australian Hotel on the corner of Mitchell Street, its shady balconies festooned with patrons enjoying a leisurely afternoon, their iron horses angle-parked around the perimeter. A black motorbike on the footpath caught his eye — the same one that passed him a few hours back.