It also placed our recent concerns in an interesting setting. There were no applications involved in the storm’s progress across the ranges, although I doubted that observation would have helped at a border checkpoint. For the moment, the forms were dealt with and the van was parked. We could watch the rain without working out what it meant for the next hundred kilometres.
The Places We Found and the Things We Never Went Looking For
Shaun was happy for us to use his home address, provided we understood that if we caught Covid we were to stay well away from it. This seemed a fair enough condition, although it did give the address a rather unusual function. We could use it to help establish where we were going, just so long as circumstances did not arise which made it necessary for us to go somewhere else.
Travelling around Australia had acquired that sort of complication. State borders, which on previous trips might have warranted a photograph beside a sign, had become places of police barricades, applications and questions about where you had been and where you intended to stay. We were still travelling within our own country, but there were days when that appeared to be a technicality of diminishing importance.
I kept thinking of Sam Neill’s character in The Hunt for Red October, imagining the freedom of travelling from state to state without papers. It was a fine ambition for a man aboard a Soviet submarine, and an increasingly ambitious one for a couple of Australians towing a caravan. There was something unsettling about having to establish our eligibility to cross a line we had previously passed with scarcely a thought.
For one crossing, a caravan park or motel would not satisfy the requirement for a physical address. We were already intending to spend time with Shaun, initially at El Questro and later at his home in Wyndham, so we asked whether we could use his. He agreed, with the qualification about keeping any infection to ourselves, and another piece of our travelling paperwork found its way into place.
The address was useful, but the visit meant considerably more. Shaun belonged to this country in a way that we, passing through with a van and an assortment of plans, could only begin to appreciate. Wyndham was home, and working for part of the year as a ranger, tour and fishing guide at El Questro gave him ample opportunity to share the surrounding country with others.
Actually catching up with him required some flexibility. El Questro’s closing date had changed, keeping him there longer to help with the shutdown, and lightning strikes had caused fires which threatened residences and needed fighting. When we eventually arranged to meet at his house around noon, he was helping a mate harvest mangoes. The next estimate was closer to five o’clock, which left us with a portion of Wyndham to occupy ourselves in and no pressing reason to complain about it.
With the van parked, we found an agreeable place to begin in the bakery. The barramundi and crocodile pies we remembered were off the menu until the dry season returned, but there were enough alternatives to prevent any serious disappointment. We spent a comfortable hour eating, talking with the staff between customers and reading the local paper, while the air conditioning made a persuasive argument against leaving.
The paper offered a more intimate account of the town than a visitor brochure could have managed. There was a page of newborn babies and an apology from the police for the absence of their usual contribution, the officer responsible being in quarantine after crossing the border on official duties. Even the people administering the arrangements could find themselves caught up in them. For our two dollars, we had obtained both local news and a small measure of reassurance that the complications were being shared around.
Even we could not reasonably make lunch last until Shaun got home, so at his suggestion we found the local bowling club. Robyn and I still had work to catch up on, and travelling with laptops meant that a suitable table could become an office with very little ceremony. We set ourselves up near the entrance, opened the computers and began dealing with the things which had followed us to Wyndham despite having no apparent interest in the scenery.
Our position offered a good view of the comings and goings. The patrons were all Indigenous, and as they left, they seemed to take turns bidding us farewell. Each departure brought another polite acknowledgement, interrupting the work briefly but pleasantly.
It began to seem that the entire club had taken polite pills before we arrived. We were two strangers sitting over laptops near the door, yet people were making a point of including us in their departure arrangements. We had found somewhere comfortable to work, and apparently the use of the table included a succession of personal farewells.
What we did not know was that Shaun had put the word out to his adopted family to keep an eye out for us. While we were settling into our temporary office, there were people who already knew enough about us to recognise whom they were looking at. We might have been strangers to Wyndham, but our arrival had not gone entirely unannounced.
That knowledge later gave the afternoon a different character. The greetings had been friendly in their own right, but they also belonged to a connection which had reached the club ahead of us. Shaun was still elsewhere, yet being his friends had already begun to introduce us to his town.
By the time we caught up with him, the prospect of meeting some of these people properly had grown quite naturally out of the afternoon. Shaun suggested that, assuming it was all right with us, he might invite a few members of his adopted family around for a barbecue that evening. After being so courteously farewelled at the club, we were hardly going to object to the opportunity of saying a more substantial hello.
There was, however, a small condition attached to the invitation. Having agreed that it would be lovely to have everyone around, we discovered that we were also required to go and collect them. Our part in the evening had expanded from guests to transport, a practical detail Shaun’s proposal had not initially brought to the foreground.
It seemed a reasonable enough arrangement. We had the Cruiser, Shaun knew whom we were collecting, and the evening was beginning to take shape beyond anything we could have organised for ourselves. Our temporary office had served its purpose, and there was a much more interesting use for the remaining hours.
Collecting our guests began an evening which gave us considerably more to think about than the usual discussion around a travelling barbecue. Three generations joined us, including the tribe and family’s matriarch, two of her daughters who were next in line, and two younger members of the family. We had arrived in Wyndham to spend time with Shaun, and through him we were being offered an opportunity to sit, eat and talk with people we would otherwise have had little chance of knowing.
Shaun was the connection that made it possible. He was trusted by them and trusted by us, which removed much of the tentative business of strangers working out how to approach one another. We did not have to manufacture common ground before beginning a conversation, because someone we all valued had already supplied it.
We were sharing an evening with a family, Shanun’s family, and the conversations developed with the ease that can occasionally make a new acquaintance feel like someone you have known for years. Around the barbecue, there was room for a question to lead somewhere without everyone having to stop and take part in the same discussion. Shaun had a hundred-day-aged Brahman steak for me, a particularly agreeable contribution to an evening which was already proving generous.
I particularly enjoyed talking with the matriarch. There was time for a proper conversation, including stretches when we could speak one to one without the discussion becoming a performance for everyone around us. Questions could lead somewhere, answers could be considered, and neither of us needed to hurry towards a conclusion simply because another item was waiting on an agenda.
We talked about the difference between helping people up and helping them out. It is an easy distinction to put into a sentence, but a considerably harder one to manage in practice. Immediate assistance might be necessary, yet the longer question remains: what happens afterwards, and does the help leave someone better placed to make their own way?
I had encountered versions of that question elsewhere in life. You can deal with the immediate difficulty and still leave the circumstances which created it largely untouched, ready to produce another difficulty next week. That does not mean withholding help when it is needed, but it ought to encourage some interest in whether the assistance is doing what everyone claims to want it to do.
Here, however, I had the opportunity to listen to someone whose concern involved her own family. These were people she knew, with relationships, obligations and a future in which she had a direct interest. Whatever opinions I brought to the table needed to leave room for that knowledge, which was considerably closer to the consequences than anything I could acquire by passing through.
We also talked about racism, although the conversation did not remain within the familiar boundaries of black and white. There was enough difficulty in that relationship to occupy an evening, including resentment directed back towards white people, but another division emerged which I had understood far less about. We were discussing tensions between Aboriginal groups, and what those tensions could mean for the young people sitting among us.
The matter became immediate when a sixteen-year-old in the group wanted to go out with some mates. It was an ordinary enough request, the sort made around family tables everywhere when a teenager has spent what he considers sufficient time in the company of adults. The evening beyond the barbecue was calling, and permission was being sought to join it.
The matriarch leant towards me and explained that they would be fine as long as nobody from another tribe arrived. If that happened, there would be trouble. What stayed with me was the certainty of her assessment: she had said would, and there was very little room in the way she put it for me to substitute might.
Until that point, a group of teenagers heading out together could have remained a fairly simple picture in my mind. Her comment supplied a condition I would not have known to ask about, one which could change the evening for those young people regardless of how harmlessly it began. She was considering something familiar enough to her to warrant a clear warning, while I was only just being introduced to its significance.
Hearing her speak about people she knew made me realise how much I would miss by treating everyone as a single group with the same interests, loyalties and concerns. Even around one family barbecue, the picture had more detail than the broad categories generally allowed. I had come with a visitor’s understanding, and she was talking about what might happen to her grandson and his mates that night.
It also left me wondering how often people with the authority to make decisions had conversations of this kind. I do not mean whether they visited a town, met representatives or completed the required consultation. I wondered whether they had the time, the trust and the willingness to hear what emerged when people were comfortable enough to speak without first arranging their thoughts for an official audience.
Perhaps some did, and perhaps what they heard struggled to survive the journey back through departments, policies and competing demands. Perhaps the people doing the listening were given too little time to understand what they were hearing. Those possibilities deserved consideration, but so did the less comfortable question of whether appearing to attend to a problem had, in some places, become an acceptable substitute for attending to it.
The amounts of money committed to these difficulties made that question harder to dismiss. Money could fund useful work, but the size of an allocation could not, by itself, tell us whether anyone had understood what needed doing. I found myself wondering how often the success being reported in an office bore much resemblance to the progress a grandmother might recognise within her own family.
I had no way of deciding that from Shaun’s barbecue, and our guests had not invited me to solve their lives over dinner. What the evening did was make me less satisfied with easy explanations. Once you have sat with someone and heard the concerns attached to people they love, a general statement about what ought to be done begins to look rather thin.
For all the serious ground we covered, it remained an especially pleasant evening. The conversation had the warmth and freedom of people enjoying one another’s company, with no requirement to agree on every point before continuing. We could talk at length because Shaun had brought us together in a setting where being comfortable with one another came before any need to establish a position.
Earlier that afternoon, I had wondered whether everyone at the bowling club had taken polite pills. By the end of the evening, those passing connections had acquired relationships and substance. We had gone to collect a few people for a barbecue and been welcomed into conversations we could never have arranged simply by arriving in town with a list of questions. Shaun had started early and eventually needed his bed, leaving us to help clear up before doing the same.
The following day was for fishing. Shaun had rigs to prepare, and we needed provisions and plenty of water because the intention was to be out all day. The supermarket, being in a country town on a Sunday, did not arrange its opening hours around our departure, so the service station took over that part of the preparations.
We joined a group whose qualifications included being mad as cut snakes. One was a former industrial arts teacher who still loved working with his hands despite arthritis, and had made a jarrah cot for an impending grandson. It was the sort of detail which makes someone more than another bloke in a fishing convoy, and I enjoyed the prospect of spending the day with them before we had reached the river.
Getting to the spot involved about ninety minutes of travelling, with considerably more to it than following a road until the water appeared. There was a decision about crossing a salt pan, an option Jason advised against. A vehicle which returned covered in mud provided a useful assessment of his judgement, rain two nights earlier having altered the conditions. Advice from someone who knew the place was worth accepting without conducting our own experiment.
Along King River Road, corrugations gave way to rocky sections, and eventually the gazetted road ended while our journey continued. There were gates to negotiate and a boundary crossing from Diggers Rest into El Questro Station. We passed birds and wallabies along the way, with enough happening outside the vehicle to make the drive part of the day rather than merely the distance before the fishing.
Shaun collected live bait with a cast net, getting what we needed in five casts. There is a particular pleasure in watching someone do a familiar job well, especially when the result improves your own prospects without requiring you to demonstrate any comparable skill. By the time we reached the fishing spot, people already there had been catching barramundi, which did nothing to diminish our enthusiasm.
We set up beside the King River and began getting takes almost immediately. There were periods of excitement, periods when nothing happened and occasional outbreaks of activity which suggested that everyone might need to do something at once. I caught a catfish through the body, an achievement unlikely to establish much of a reputation, then brought a barramundi to the bank only to lose it at the edge.
Ordinarily, a fish coming off within reach can produce an immediate desire to get closer. Here, getting closer to the water was excluded from the available responses. We had crocodiles for company, and no barramundi was sufficiently important to justify overlooking that arrangement.
Two were in sight at all times during the day, giving us something else to keep track of between enquiries about the bait. They could lie sunning themselves nearby while we went about our fishing, but their apparent lack of urgency did not make the riverbank ours to use carelessly. There was plenty of enjoyment available from where we were, and we stayed back from the water.
One of them, known as Brutus, had been watching from concealment before splashing into the river on the other side. The name suggested an individual who had already made an impression on somebody, and I saw no reason to seek a more personal introduction. His entry into the water also settled any temptation to regard the crocodiles as permanent fixtures on the bank. They could change the arrangement whenever they chose.
Later, a pale log appeared to be travelling against the current. Once a log starts making its own decisions about direction, a fisherman is entitled to reconsider the identification. This was the other crocodile, and another reason to remain interested in what was happening beyond the end of the line.
Yet the day was enjoyable. We were with Shaun and his mates, fishing in country they knew, with enough action to keep us hopeful and enough quiet to appreciate being there. The crocodiles were part of the circumstances, requiring our attention and a firm limit on where we went. Accepting that limit still left a very good day available to us.
Shaun caught a barramundi, and later another. When the bait ran out, he and a mate’s wife went to collect more, returning with larger specimens which encouraged thoughts of metre-long fish. My own contribution included getting tangled in a tree when a fish hit, a useful way of keeping ambition from becoming overconfidence. The river had offered opportunities, but it had not undertaken to make me competent at using all of them.
A storm came and went while we were out, another sign of the approaching wet season. By the time we returned to Wyndham, a puddle around the van supplied evidence that our accommodation had received some attention as well. Whatever else needed doing that evening, watering the ground beneath us was already attended to.
Robyn drove back, beginning with the task of getting us out of the fishing spot. It was a proper introduction to that part of the four-wheel-drive proceedings, followed by the rocky and corrugated journey home. The others designated us to lead, an honour which left me opening gates, while another driving-light mount failed to survive the return. We had acquired fish, photographs and one more item for the repairs list.
Dinner was a simple affair of threadfin salmon pieces, barramundi flaps and leftover salad. The fish from the day remained on ice to be dealt with in the morning, and we exchanged photographs before calling it a night. There had been no need to manufacture entertainment or fill every quiet interval. The day had supplied quite enough of its own.
The following morning, before we left, Shaun filleted the barramundi and gave us a generous share. He ate it regularly himself, but that did not make the gift any smaller from our end. We had come to spend time with him and were leaving with meals to carry that time a little further down the road.
Yet the image I return to most readily belongs to the evening after our fishing trip, when Shaun suggested Five Rivers Lookout for sunset. I have left it until here because, for me, that view holds the visit together. We had come through the border arrangements, found our way into the company of his family and spent a day fishing with his mates, but the memory of standing above Wyndham still has a particular place among it all.
From the lookout, the rivers and their surrounding country spread before us on a scale which made the town below seem a small arrangement within something much larger. There was room for the eye to travel, to follow water and land rather than meet the next building or fence. We had been moving between places for so long that it was a pleasure to stand somewhere and let the country occupy the available time.
We watched a storm making its way across the ranges, the first rains of the approaching wet season adding another dimension to the view. The rivers were reason enough to come up, but the rain gave us something happening within the landscape, something we could stay and watch unfold. Rather than looking over a place and deciding we had seen it, we had an unfolding reason to remain.
At home, rain can be assessed rather quickly according to what it will interrupt. There is washing out, a round of golf to consider or some outside job which had finally reached the point of being started. Here, with no particular claim on the weather and nowhere we needed to hurry off to, we could give it our attention for its own sake. The thunder belonged to country far larger than the immediate patch on which we stood.
It also placed our recent concerns in an interesting setting. There were no applications involved in the storm’s progress across the ranges, although I doubted that observation would have helped at a border checkpoint. For the moment, the forms were dealt with and the van was parked. We could watch the rain without working out what it meant for the next hundred kilometres.
Robyn watched it from inside a large, heavy jacket. We had been dealing with heat around thirty-five degrees and beyond, and even with the evening temperature easing, an overcoat was hardly the obvious clothing choice. The sandflies had supplied the missing explanation, and she had decided that being hot under a substantial layer was preferable to being eaten without one.
There was enough breeze to discourage some of them, but she was taking no chances with the remainder. I could enjoy the oddity of the scene because I was not the one being asked to provide the meal. She had found a way to stay and take in the weather, which was the point of coming, even if her clothing suggested she had been given an entirely different forecast.
At the river, there would be a sensible distance to keep from the water, however close a barramundi came to being landed. Here, there was a jacket to put on if the sandflies were determined to interfere with the view. Neither condition used up the pleasure available, and Robyn had found a way to stay for the rain. With her wrapped against the biting insects beside me, I watched the storm move across the country Shaun called home.
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