‘Sorry — we should have been here two hours ago, but we’ve no spare and we had a puncture.’
She was smiling, coming towards me, a stocky, practical girl in a faded blue shirt and khaki slacks. The shirt clung to her, dark patches of sweat under the armpits and in the vee of her trousers, her face caked with dust, streaked with runnels of perspiration. But the smile of her greeting had the youthful, exuberant freshness I remembered. ‘Have you been waiting long?’ She shook my hand, a hard, dusty handshake that still managed to convey a sense of excitement. ‘I couldn’t believe it when we got your message. What are you doing in Australia?’ She laughed, a flash of white teeth, freckles showing through the dust. ‘I suppose you’re out here looking for a new Poseidon.’ Laughter bubbled in her eyes, the whites brilliant in the hard sunlight. ‘I’m full of questions, but we can talk as we drive.’
A shadow moved behind her and she turned, ‘Oh, Tom — come and meet Mr Falls.’
He was an aborigine. I had seen pictures of them of course, but I hadn’t expected anything quite so black, so primitive looking — the face broad-nosed with a low brow and ridges of heavy bone above the eyes. ‘Tom is as much a part of Jarra Jarra as we are.’ He came forward and shook my hand, a soft, limp touching of the palms, his thick lips spread in a yellow-toothed grin. The eyes were dark brown, the whites yellow against the wrinkled black of his skin. He was short and broad, and the only part of him that wasn’t black was his hair; his woolly hair, that sat like a skull cap over the low brow, was grizzled, almost white. The thick lips moved below the broad spread of the nose, soft words, guttural in a strange tongue.
‘He’s bidding you welcome,’ she said. Her quick eyes had found the tree where I had sat waiting. ‘Is that all your gear?’ She nodded to the aborigine and he went to get my suitcase. ‘Gosh! This is marvellous — to see you here. When that message came through — the news that you were in Perth and coming up to see us — you’ve no idea — it’s what I dreamed, that some day you’d come out here.’ It came out in a rush of words and then she added, ‘You’re the only mining man I ever met I’d trust a yard.’ She was laughing, bubbling over with excitement, as though my arrival was some great event in her life. ‘How did you come out? Did you fly?’
‘No, I came by ship.’
‘Yes, of course. You wrote me from Capetown. I thought perhaps you’d been having a look at the South African gold mines. But I suppose it’s the nickel boom. Was it the Botany Bay you came on?’
I remembered then that she’d got herself to England working her passage as stewardess on a passenger ship out of Fremantle. ‘No, it was an Italian boat,’ I said.
‘And you hitched a ride up from Perth. You certainly believe in doing things the hard way. That’s real Australian.’ She turned back to the Land-Rover. ‘Come on. It’s hot enough now, but if we stand here talking you’ll be fried before I get you home. You can tell me all about it as we drive.’
My gear was already in the back with Tom. I climbed into the cab beside her and she drove down the dirt road, turned at the junction and headed back up the track, talking all the time as she twisted between the gums, her foot hard down. The track wasn’t really a track at all, it was just a way through the bush that followed in the treadmarks of the first vehicle that had passed that way. It wandered in and out of the scrub, twisting endlessly in a flat plain with glimpses of Mt Newman. I wasn’t really listening to what she was saying. She seemed oddly nervous, talking for the sake of talking — about the dry being worse than usual, a drought and cattle dying. It was as though she were trying to prepare me for something. ‘For near on a month now we’ve been mustering, driving them in bunches through the Robinson Gap, down into the Watersnake.’ She changed down for a stretch of dust. ‘Coming to pick you up is a real break. Tom and the other two boys have hardly been out of the saddle for weeks.’
‘And you?’
‘Me? I’m sore.’ She grinned, wriggling her bottom on the seat. ‘Riding Cleo every day — I must have ridden that damned camel a thousand miles this last month. Feels like it anyway. And Daddy out in the Land-Rover every day. We’re just about all in, both of us.’
The country was more broken now. We were climbing imperceptibly. Mt Newman close and lower hills to our left, a gap opening up ahead. ‘The Ophthalmia Range,’ she said. ‘It’s all iron country here. Dry as a desert.’ And then, abruptly — I’m sorry, I haven’t asked after Rosalind. How is she?’
‘All right.’
‘You haven’t brought her with you?’
‘No.’
She didn’t pursue that line. She hadn’t exactly hit it off with Rosa. ‘So, it’s a business trip.’
‘An exploratory look at Australia, shall we say?’
‘And that includes Jarra Jarra.’ She laughed, a trace of bitterness in her voice. ‘The only thing we have to show you is an old abandoned mine. Not much for you there, I’m afraid.’ And then she looked at me, a quick, searching glance. ‘What really brought you out here? Or shouldn’t I ask?’
This was the moment. I should tell her now if I was going to tell her at all. And I would have done if she’d still been staring at me with those perceptive, rather prominent eyes. But her gaze was back on the track as it snaked through an arm of larger gums. ‘Rosa,’ I said. ‘We’ve separated.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She didn’t sound it and there was no surprise in her voice. ‘So you’ve come out here — to forget her?’
It made sense, and that way I didn’t have to tell her anything more. Not yet, anyway. ‘I suppose so,’ I said.
‘And what about Balavedra?’ she asked.
‘Oh, I expect it’ll get along without me.’ I glanced at her, my mouth dry, wondering whether she’d guessed I was telling her only half the truth. My damned pride, of course, but what else could I say? What the hell else? If I told her the mine was bankrupt, that I was in debt and that was why Rosa had left me, then I’d have to tell her the rest. And I couldn’t do that. Not now, before I’d even seen Jarra Jarra or met her father.
But all she said was, ‘I remember that morning — you showed me where it was, the engine house standing above the cliffs and the Atlantic beyond. You’ve chosen a damn silly time to exchange Cornwall for the Pilbara. Oh, well…’ She laughed. ‘Hitching a ride up the Great Northern at the beginning of summer sure is one way of getting it out of your system. What was it you rode up in — one of the iron ore company cars?’
‘No, a refrigerated truck — a cousin of one of the Italians I met on the boat fixed it for me.’
She didn’t say much after that. The going had become more difficult and she had to concentrate. Here, between the Ophthalmia Range and Pamelia Hill, we were into a narrow strip of flattish country, the track winding. Later it straightened out and our speed increased again. The air was oven-hot, the scrub thinner, and in the distance I could see a hill, brown like a sugar loaf, rising out of the flat plain.
‘Mount Robinson.’ There was sweat on her face, flies crawling and dark shadows under her eyes. ‘The Gap is just to the left; that’s where we’ve been sweating our guts out this past month.’
I asked her whether she’d like me to give her a spell, but she shook her head. ‘I’m not tired. Not really. And in about twenty miles we begin to hit dry watercourses. You need to know the track then. This poor old Landy’s over six years old. You have to nurse it.’
Half an hour later we turned a bend and dropped into a gully. I saw her point then. We were into an area of small hillocks, the track winding through them and the surface rough. No sign of Mt Robinson now, though we were within a few miles of it. More gullies and the white boles of ghost gums among the boulders.