Black Bones, Red Earth

There had been no respite from the dry the day I arrived at Cutaway Creek. One day rolled into the next with the same op-pressive heat, offering no promise of change, no chance that the day would bring the big wet to this strange and desperate land. The creek had shrunk to isolated pools of muddy brine, a dwindling lifeline for the cockatoos that had gathered in great numbers along the banks. They squawked, argued and com-plained, performed somersaults and hung upside down from the limbs of river gums, wings spread wide like restless albino bats. Perhaps, with their aerial contortions, they hoped to im-press the rain gods, or maybe they performed for me, a grand circus greeting for the new girl with the lily-white skin, as pale as their snowy feathers. A lazy monitor tasted the air with its flicking tongue and examined a leathery carcass of hide and bones. Blowflies buzzed and harassed the lizard, persistently irritating the creature, hoping perhaps that it would lead them to food. They swarmed over the parched carcass while the liz-ard looked on, but not even the blowies could find nourishment on the dried-out remains. I watched as the lizard moved slowly beyond the fence line, the blowflies following. This world was as foreign to me as were the mountains of the moon.

The wind pump stood idle, stark against the azure sky, looking for all the world like a lonely black flower. Someone should paint it yellow, I thought. Father Donahue had disappeared inside the house, leaving me to wait beside his dust-covered motorcar, a blanket of russet hues covering the once-shiny black metal. Silence. I scanned the vast landscape and wondered how something so big could look and sound so empty. I traced a heart in the dirt with my fingertip and thought of Archie. ‘I’ll find you!’ My brother’s last words, called across the train station as they dragged him kicking and screaming to a different destination, a different opportunity. Three years older than me, Archie had always been there to lead the way. I tried to follow, but I had no chance, and was plucked from the ground and bundled into my carriage by an irritated woman who slapped me so hard I could hear nothing in my right ear for several hours into the journey. ‘Ungrateful little bitch,’ said the woman with the pig eyes and the hard slap. I didn’t cry.

The Cutaway Creek homestead sat in the centre of the com-pound. With windows like eyes peering out beneath the low steel roof, it looked to me like a fat cat wearing a tin hat pulled snuggly over its ears. It smiled at me. Not a welcoming smile but a sly grin that said, don’t even think of running away, little girl. ‘Where would I run?’ I asked the cat with the hat. I looked out over the parched wasteland. Red soil, a foil for the tussocks of straw-coloured grass, stretched as far as the eye could see, all the way until it melted on the horizon. Where would I run?