Requiem with Yellow Butterflies Read online

  ‘De onde você é?’ asked the second tenor, giggling. ‘Brisbane.’

  ‘Onde?’

  ‘Queensland.’

  ‘Onde?’

  ‘Australia.’

  ‘Aus-tralia? What are you doing here?’

  That was a good question. It was what Rimbaud asked himself in Abyssinia, and Bruce Chatwin asked himself from London to Tierra del Fuego to the outback. I still didn’t have an answer. All I could say, upon considered reflection, was: ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  But at least I had found the question.

  Don’t Care if It Ever Rains Again

  I had my own land once

  children, cattle, and a woman,

  but my suffering began,

  they cast me out to the frontier –

  and what did I find on my return?

  A ruin, nothing more.1

  – José Hernández, Martín Fierro

  The Spirit of the Outback inched from Roma Street Station into the moonlight. In the sudden darkness, the train on the adjacent line peeled off to the right, carving a curved course into the suburbs. A rattle, a thump, and we accelerated in the opposite direction. Since returning from Argentina, I’d taken to exploring my home state like a foreign country, making long train and bus trips into unknown towns of the interior. I’d pitch my two-person tent away from the grey nomads and backpackers and lie awake on the hard earth listening to cicadas whir. There were no travel agents to tempt me in those little Queensland towns, and I was beyond the reach of Skype calls. But my thoughts still turned and turned to a certain dark-haired psychology major on the pampa. To distract me on the overnight train, I’d brought Martín Fierro, Argentina’s nineteenth-century epic about a gaucho driven from his land into a life of crime.

  I woke to see a scrapyard glinting in early daylight. By the tracks, abandoned sleepers were piled upon the stony red-black earth. A shredded tyre hung from a post near the highway and, beyond it, crooked wire fences divided plains of wind-rippled yellow Mitchell grass. The horizon was smoky, the sky that glassy, cloudless blue that makes you think it will never rain again. But just outside of Barcaldine, the parched country turned green.

  Barcaldine is 1500 people, 700 kilometres from the sea: a grid of streets over an artesian basin at the intersection of two highways. The Capricorn starts near Rockhampton in the east and runs along the northern edge of town; the Landsborough comes from the south, the direction of Tambo and Blackall, and hems the town in from the west. There are six pubs along the main street: the Railway, the Union, the Artesian, the Commercial, the Shakespeare and the Globe. I gazed into their dark interiors, breathing in the reek of beer and steak as I lugged my pack along the roadside past utes and four-wheel drives parked in red gravel. Near the white, wooden railway station, a fountain ran on artesian water pumped from the subterranean lake below. The skyline was dominated by a massive corrugated water tank, a windmill and the big-top tent of the Australian Workers Heritage Centre, a museum set up by the Hawke government to mark the 1991 centenary of the Queensland Shearers’ Strike.

  The Tree of Knowledge, the 200-year-old ghost gum under which the strike leaders once gathered, was missing when I visited in 2008. It had been poisoned by vandals two years earlier. A sign said the trunk was being preserved in a Department of Primary Industries laboratory and described the monument proposed for the site: the mummified stump beneath an artificial canopy. I could only laugh to think I’d travelled this far without sighting so much as the Stump of Knowledge.

  Undeterred, I hiked out to the old fairgrounds on the north side of town, pitched my tent where there was no one else around. Pink-faced galahs squabbled over berries in bushes hung with purple blossoms. Huge white grasshoppers sprung about in spiky knee-length grass. I found a place in the shade of a very old, very beautiful blue gum. It wasn’t the eucalypt I’d come to see, but what difference did it make? Any tree could be the Tree of Knowledge, I figured, if you sat beneath it long enough. I took out a sheaf of papers copied from the library archives and read William Lane, in 1893, imploring Australian workers to join him in Paraguay:

  Let we, who have the strength and courage and can get the means, go out into the wilderness and, forsaking all other things, live in the right way as an example to those who have no faith. And our happiness will be to the wretched as a guiding star.2

  For a few minutes, I banished all thought of Argentina.

  He boarded the train with me in Barcaldine – a weather-beaten face beneath a slouch hat, something squirming in the breast pocket of his blue-and-black checked shirt.

  ‘What you got there, Jack?’ the ticket collector asked.

  ‘Ain’t none of your concern.’

  He threw himself down beside me, knocking my elbow so I dropped my book.

  ‘Scuse me.’ He winked and, leaning forward, offered me a peek into his pocket at the beady-eyed chick he was smuggling down to Brisbane. His long, bony fingers placed a kernel of corn in its beak.

  ‘Present for my grandson,’ he said as the train shunted away from the platform. ‘You from Brissy?’

  I nodded, tried to go back to Martín Fierro.

  ‘What brings you out here?’

  ‘I wanted to see the Tree…’

  ‘The Tree of Knowledge? They poisoned it a couple of years back.’

  ‘I know. I hear they’re turning the stump into a statue.’

  ‘Long way to come to see a stump.’

  Jack’s mouth didn’t stop moving all day. Through Alpha, Emerald and Blackwater, past cattle cars, trainloads of coal bound for port, homesteads in the shimmering heat, he talked on and on, until the railroad turned east at Rockhampton, night fell and we were headed home.

  ‘I lost everything in the nineties. Fifteen-hundred hectare of Mitchell country out on the Downs, six thousand head of cattle. My brother took the old man’s land, my wife took the three boys. Now all I’ve got is an old caravan outside Barcy. It isn’t surviving on the pension that gets to me; when money’s low, I can always hunt roos.

  ‘What gets to me is Mark having the run of the farm.

  ‘Every year, I fly west for a few months to clear the murdering thoughts from my head. I do odd jobs for the blackfellas, up near The Hedland. Headed over there now, after I see my grandkids in Brissy. If the blackfellas have money, they pay. If they don’t, they share their tucker. Dole cheques come on Thursdays so there’s always trouble that night. They’ll all swear at each other and start fighting.

  ‘Jo Jo’s been in prison again for knocking his wife about. Have a look at this.’

  He whisked a pocket watch from his bundle in the rack over the aisle. Cracked glass and faded copper casing.

  ‘Present to celebrate him getting out. We’re going to fix water towers together. Fixing water towers been a speciality of mine these last years. I’ll have to pick up my rifle at the police station so we can get some tucker. Last time I was out west they wouldn’t let me buy bullets on account of little Johnny’s gun laws.

  ‘ “You after a rifle?” asks the shopkeeper.

  ‘ “No, I only want bullets.”

  ‘ “What do you want bullets for if you haven’t got a rifle?”

  ‘ “I have got a rifle.”

  ‘ “Show me your licence and I’ll sell you your bullets.”

  ‘ “It’s a Queensland licence.”

  ‘ “Then you’ve got an unlicensed weapon.”

  ‘ “Licensed in Queensland.”

  ‘ “I think you’d better go to the police.”

  ‘Down the station there’s an old black lady in front of me trying to register her rifle. The officer, young city fella, already been with her half an hour, and he’s rolling his eyes and puffing out his cheeks.

  ‘“Says she can’t see. Not gonna shoot much, is she?” That young cop’s eyes are worse than hers.

  ‘ “She can’t read, you bugger. Here, I’ll fill it in for her.”

  ‘ “Can’t let you do that, I’m afraid.”
>
  ‘So old Auntie leaves hungry and the Law prevails.

  ‘When my turn comes, he tells me I should have registered the gun before I arrived in WA. “You register now, I’ll have to put it in storage for six months. You’ll have to pay a fee. Otherwise, you got a week to take it back to Queensland.”

  ‘“Bugger it, I’ll register,” I say, and the young cop starts reading from the form. Probably thinks I can’t read either.

  ‘ “Sporting? Recreation? Destruction of vermin?”

  ‘ “Food,” I say. “How’s a man supposed to get fed?”

  ‘I’ll have to pick the rifle up before I meet Jo Jo. Can’t rely on the government to feed you nowadays. It’s every bugger for himself.

  ‘Can’t even trust your own brother. Few months before the court kicks me off the farm, Mark sends me out to fix the water tower. The two of us co-managed the property after Dad died. A fifty-fifty split like he wrote in his testament. Dunno how many times I insisted we give Dad a proper headstone under the bloodwood. But Mark reckoned a bushman’s unmarked grave suited the old man fine. He kept making changes round the property without my permission. Even cut down four-hundred-year-old trees that been standing on this country longer than white men, the ones we played under when we were boys. “Improvements round the property,” he called it. Fixing the water tower was his next project. But he was too cheap to pay a tradesman.

  ‘Me and my oldest boy climb the tower early morning before the day gets hot. One minute, Paul’s plugging a hole in the side of the tank, the next he’s jerking back and forward like a kid with palsy. I grab hold of him and I start jerking, too, a sound coming off us like when you throw bacon in an oiled pan and it’s real hot and sizzling and squirting up. I wake on the ground with Paul kneeling over. He’s all right. I’m all right. A neighbour’s there, and the paramedics, but no sign of Mark.

  ‘“You been electrocuted,” said the neighbour. “Doesn’t look like an accident to me.”

  ‘After that I’m three weeks in hospital. They stitch my tongue up and put a metal rod in my back. Never been the same. Fell on a steel pipe. No one will give me a proper job the speed I work now. Only Jo Jo and his mates up near The Hedland, who aren’t in any hurry. Mark never come see me in hospital. Only the neighbour shows up.

  ‘ “I’m off hunting in Alaska for the season,” says he. “They pay you thirty K a month to shoot bear and moose. Maybe you want to try it when you’re back on your feet?”

  ‘When he leaves, I stare at his empty chair, thinking how much I’d like to shoot me a plain old rat.’

  Jack and I sat in the bar as the train rattled through deep night. All the other passengers had retired to their seats. A sickle-shaped moon hung over the dark fields, shuddering with every bump in the rails. My elbows stuck to the tabletop from all the beer we’d slopped. The bartender cleared his throat.

  ‘Well, fellas…’

  Returning to my seat after pissing, I looked at the other passengers’ faces upturned in the moonlight. Jack slept with his hat on and his mouth open; he was as foreign to me as any Argentine or Bolivian. Beyond the window, smudged distances and slumbering earth. I would have loved to sleep with that vast, raw country rolling by. But as soon as I sat down, he woke. And as soon as he woke, he started talking.

  ‘Wasn’t my intention to make trouble. We only went back to the farm to pick up a stack of fencing wire. That old judge wouldn’t believe me, but it’s true. The rifle was just a precaution.

  ‘I’m loading the coil of wire into the back of the truck when Mark’s ute comes rolling down the track towards us. He doesn’t know what to say, just sits there with the window down and the motor idling. We watch a pair of crows in the road picking at the remains of a flattened roo.

  ‘ “You reckon we’re gonna get any rain?” says Mark.

  ‘ “I don’t care if it ever rains again.”

  ‘I sit the barrel of the rifle on the window ledge. He won’t meet my eye. He’s staring at squashed bugs on the windshield, gulping saliva like emu ale. That’s a confession, far as I’m concerned.

  ‘ “You’re trespassing on my property.”

  ‘ “My old man’s buried on this property.”

  ‘Mark slips his truck into gear.

  ‘“If you come here again, I’ll dig him up and throw him at you.”

  ‘The bullet passes within an inch of his nose. It sails clear out the window on the other side. Don’t know if I meant to hit him or meant to miss. Behind me, Paul’s arms are folded and his eyes are wide. He’s shivering though it’s noon and high summer. That’s when I lost him, I guess, and his mum and John and Michael, too. He looks at me like I’m already in jail. And that gets me thinking a life sentence is a long time. I pull my rifle from the cabin and thump on the driver’s side door. Mark spins his wheels in the gravel and the truck’s off up the track, trailing dust. I open the cartridge, pour the bullets in the dirt. As I pass Paul the gun, his hands are shaking.

  ‘ “You reckon I did the right thing?”

  ‘He doesn’t talk to me all the way home.’

  Daylight. Suburban streets, traffic lights, car horns. We were approaching Roma Street Station. Passengers rose, yawning around us to haul their luggage from the overhead storage. We’d out-talked the night.

  ‘Wasn’t long after I lost the farm that I met Jo Jo and his wife at church in Rockhampton. First time I been in years. They’re real religious up that way: Seventh Day Adventists. Place is always full of Islanders singing in big booming voices. The Samoan priest says: “Praise the Lord! Anyone want to repent?”

  ‘Jo Jo gets up: “They just let me out of Capricornia Correctional after two years. I’m not gonna drink no more or knock my wife about.”

  ‘ “Praise the Lord! Anyone else?”

  ‘I figure I’d better get up. I can still see the fear in Paul’s eyes and smell the powder.

  ‘“I hear there’s this fella named the devil,” I tell the Samoan priest and his congregation. “I always figured I’d punch him between the eyes if I saw him. But then I hear there’s this other fella named the Lord. I dunno what I’ll do if I ever see him. Anyway, here’s a song.”

  ‘I sing them “Ode to Joy” because I figure singing is repenting. But my voice is creaky compared to all those Islanders and I lose the tune. They all start laughing. The Samoan priest pats me on the back, a big grin on his face.

  ‘ “Praise the Lord,” he says.

  ‘“Praise the Lord,” I say, and I sit down, and that’s the repenting done.

  ‘Jo Jo was off to see his mob out west.

  ‘ “Any water towers need fixing out there?”

  ‘ “Maybe, brother.”

  ‘And that’s how I started going up The Hedland.’

  On the platform, we mingled with starched and perfumed Brisbane office workers: eyes on their phones, headphones in their ears. Beside me in his slouch hat, a bag slung over his shoulder, Jack checked on the chick in his pocket – still going strong. He shook my hand with iron force, began to move away into the crowd.

  ‘Thanks for listening to an old fella.’

  ‘See you again some time.’

  ‘You will: upstairs.’ He jabbed a lean index finger at the unrelenting blue sky. ‘I’ll be there long before you are.’

  On the bus trip to the western suburbs my head throbbed from lack of sleep. Thoughts of the girl from the Argentine pampa flowed into the vacuum Jack had left. It would take more than a train trip to dislodge her. Hungrily, I returned to Martín Fierro, pushing past the strangeness – the archaisms, the rhyming eight-syllable lines – to a perfectly familiar mythology: poor white men tending rich white men’s cattle on stolen land. At the end of part one, Martín Fierro and his accomplice Cruz flee as fugitives to survive on the pampa with the Mapuche. I pictured them as Jack and Jo Jo, riding out from Port Hedland:

  and soon, without being detected,

  they crossed the frontier.

  On the far side,

  on
e clear morning,

  Cruz told him to look back

  at the last settlements

  and two big tears

  rolled down Martín Fierro’s face.

  And following their true course

  they entered the desert.3

  And the Village Was Fair to Look upon

  Australia…knows so little of other lands, and perhaps less of South America than she does of countries obviously not so much in natural fellowship with her as her sister continent.1

  – Mary Gilmore

  San Miguel del Monte is a pretty little town on the edge of the Argentine pampa: all potholed streets and lowset, white-washed houses. To the east, a freshwater lake; in every other direction, the plains. Ten years ago, I lived there for six months. What does it say about me that I remember Monte more vividly than Macchu Picchu or the Pyramid of the Sun? Mangy dogs roam about barking, kids ride motorcycles too fast, farmhands in gumboots and berets talk soy prices on the broken pavement. Though it’s only two hours south-west of Buenos Aires, most Porteños have never heard of Monte. The town’s one claim to fame is historical. The nineteenth-century caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas kept his ranch nearby. As Governor of Buenos Aires from 1829 to 1852, Rosas oversaw a reign of terror enforced by secret police and assassinations of opponents, but also imposed a fragile peace after a series of civil wars. In 1987, authorities loaded his decaying ranch onto a truck, and transported it 70 kilometres into Monte where, now restored, it enjoys pride of place in the plaza, and still sparks passionate arguments between Rosas’ supporters and detractors. It’s probably untrue that the building’s distinctive pinkish-red hue, the colour of Argentine federalism, was produced by blending milk and cow’s blood. But it’s a good story to tell the tourists from the capital who rent the lakeside cabins in the warm months.

  In the long, slow, spring afternoons, Leonard Barton and I would sit on the back porch of his house on the highest piece of land by the lagoon. Leonard was less interested in Monte’s place in frontier mythology than the history of Argentina’s English-speaking community. We ate apple pie rather than dulce de leche, drank Earl Grey in place of mate, and talked for many hours in our shared native tongue. ‘I like to go back and find out how things started,’ he often said. Despite a six-decade age gap, we struck up a friendship: trading English books and discussing them, slowly making our way through his best bottle of cognac. He told me tall stories about the origins of ballpoint pens, police fingerprinting and the crescent moon–shaped croissants – medialunas – that are an Argentine breakfast staple. But it was the story of his family origins that kept me coming. I thought there might be a book in it.