Coal Creek

Alex Miller

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781743319451
• eBook ISBN: 9781925575347
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

WINNER OF THE 2014 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2014 IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARDS
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 PRIME MINISTER'S LITERARY AWARDS AND THE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 201 4 ALS GOLD MEDAL
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 QUEENSLAND LITERARY AWARDS
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 WESTERN AUSTRALIAN PREMIER'S BOOK AWARDS When his father dies, Bobby Blue decides to leave the Mount Hay cattle station where they worked side by side and take a job in town as the new constable's offsider. Daniel, the constable, his wife Esme and their two girls, Irie and Miriam, are new to the western country and, struggling to understand its inhabitants, invite Bobby to stay in a hut on their property where he is educated alongside their daughters. But there's a simmering tension, building quietly and strongly, beneath the overt goodwill. And when first Irie then Miriam become involved in a dispute that threatens violence, there's an abrupt and ruthless change in attitude from Daniel and Esme towards Bobby. When tragedy strikes at Coal Creek the true nature of the perceived friendship is laid bare with consequences that will haunt Bobby for decades.

PART ONE

ONE

My mother told me and Charley when we was children, Saint Paul said God has chosen the weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base things of the world and those things which are despised. We all hang on the cross, she said. Whenever she seen I was suffering she touched my cheek and smiled her sad smile and said it to me: We all hang on the cross, Bobby Blue. Don’t you forget it. And that is what she always called me, her Bobby Blue. I was the youngest and her favourite of the two of us. Even as a boy Charley was always making off somewhere on his own. He had red hair and the rest of us was all dark-haired. I don’t think he ever felt like he was really one of us. I do still regret even at this time of my life not being with my mother when she closed her eyes for the last time and said her goodbyes to us and to this world, as I know she would have done even though we was not with her to hear her words of love and farewell. They have always burned in my mind, those words I never heard. I hear them now. She died without having no illness first, so there was no warning given me and Dad. By that time I thought I was a man, though I was still only a boy. I was out in the camp mustering the scrubs with Dad, and our Charley had gone off to the coast to get away from Dad’s impatience with him.

Me and Dad learned Mother had died when we rode into town and was yarding the bullocks for Mr Dawson at the railhead. It was George Wilson, the constable at Mount Hay in them days, who come out to the holding yards in that Dodge pick-up truck he had then and told Dad that Mum was dead a week. Old George Wilson with his sagging moustache and his sagging khaki police uniform, which made him look sad, his big Webley revolver holstered on his right hip with the flap of the holster buckled down, which always had me thinking he would not want to get taken by surprise. And that never happened anyhow, except in my imagination, where I seen him shot in the chest and going to his knees, his fingers still fussing with the buckle of that holster. But the truth is I never seen George unholster that weapon and I doubt very much he ever did, but he always wore it. Just in case, I suppose. He stood alongside the chute that day, his sweated-up old police slouch hat in one hand, looking solemn and touching his moustache with the fingers of his other hand. I had noticed before how George was always nervous around my dad and stood back from him, like he feared my dad might blame him for bad news. Giving Dad a bit of room, which was George Wilson’s way with trouble of any kind. Not that my dad was a man for trouble, but he was a silent man and he did not smile a lot, and that made people careful around him.

It was at that time of the late afternoon when the wind used to get up and them long grey clouds come floating in from the desert out west, as if they had once rained somewhere, casting sudden shadows across the stockyards and making the cattle restless. The beasts was setting up one great racket of bellowing and it was hard to hear what George was saying but I knew it was something important. I do not remember Dad answering nothing to George at the time but just pausing to listen, in the way my dad had, respecting the man, until George had finished telling his news, then getting on with dipping the beasts for ticks that we was in the middle of doing.

Dad never did have much to say unless he was angry with you, then you heard from him. If Dad wanted me to do something when we was out mustering he raised his whip hand and indicated. He knew I would be keeping an eye on him, like a man playing in a brass band has one eye on the bandmaster and the other eye on the music. That is the way all them old fellows did it. They indicated. And we understood them. They never had a lot of time for yelling and carrying on like people do today. Rip-tear-and-bust was not their style. Working in the scrubs alongside them there was just the trample of the beasts making their way through the timber ahead of your horse and them cows and calves that was separated bellowing to find each other. It was such a familiar music I believe we stopped hearing it. It was just there in our daily life. They was good days we had together and I will not forget them. If my dad seen the bad way my life and Ben’s went after he was gone over to the other side he would wish he might have had the chance to step in and redirect us with one of those indicating signs of his long before we was too far caught up in that trouble. Dad would have seen the trouble coming to us, the way he seen trouble coming when we was out in the scrubs. He had an ear for it. I seen him raise his head and listen many times when we was at supper around our fire out in the camps, and I would know something was up.

But he would not speak of it till it was time to speak of it.

. . .

I did not weep out at the yards that day I heard my mother had been dead a week but I wept when I was on my own later. And since that day I have wept for my mother many times, thinking of her love for us all and her special regard for me that I was never to know again from any woman but one. Me and Dad buried my mother up there in the cemetery behind the town reservoir and everyone in town come to her funeral and walked up the hill behind me and Dad and Ben Tobin and his dad who were all carrying her coffin. Which weighed very little. At the graveside I seen my dad was weeping, his hat held in his hands in front of him, his face uncovered to the crowd and his grief at the loss of his beloved companion plain for everyone to see and no shame in him. It was the only time I ever seen my dad weep and it moved me greatly and my grief caught me in my chest and I wept with him. Charley did not get back from the coast for it.

It was ten or eleven years later when I buried Dad up there beside Mum and alongside Ben’s dad, who died of lung cancer. Dad had an accident off his horse and took a while to go. I was home with him holding his hand the evening he went. He was in pain and I believe he was not sorry to leave it behind. The last words he said to me was, I love you, son. It was good to hear that from him and I have cherished them words ever since, hearing him say them often in my mind when I have struck a patch of trouble. My dad believed in me and in my ability out there in the scrubs and nothing made me prouder than to have that belief and trust from him, and to know it in myself. He was the finest horseman I ever knew. I seen him step into a yard with a wild horse and him and that horse working partners together by the end of that same day, and nothing said about it. That is just how it was with him and horses. No one never made nothing of it. He never raised his voice to an animal, nor his whip. He had it from my grandfather, who raised him in the bendee and the brigalow scrubs in the steady way they had in them days. Hard men they were, but with a belief and a grace in them and in their actions that we do not see in men now. It has been forgotten. I do not know why. I had no way of contacting Charley for our dad’s funeral but I said a prayer for him beside the grave so my older brother would not be left out of it. There was a loneliness in me for my mother, knowing Charley was not there. I cannot explain it. That was the way of our family and there is no more to be said of it.

My mother died alone without her sons or her husband at her side, but I do not think the people of Mount Hay thought that circumstance unusual in them days. There was no town further west after Mount Hay, just them two big cattle runs, the Stanbys’ Assumption Downs, and they was English people, and that family out at Preference whose name I never could remember, it was Irish. But no actual town till you crossed the border into the Territory. But I never went that far west and I never heard of no town over the border except what they used to call the Wheel. I am not sure if the Wheel is in the Territory or is still in the state of Queensland. Like I said, I never been out there and I have no picture of the Wheel in my head but only the name. Mount Hay was the end of the line then and still is as far as I know that country.

I never missed visiting my mother’s grave on the anniversary of her death except if we was out in the camps. But I never seen Dad go up there to the cemetery. I think he did not wish to be reminded his wife was dead. It was a sad fact that had come into his life and he could forget it when we was out in the camps. My mother never had been out in the camps with him and it was normal to be without her. He only seen her when we come back into town. It was 1946 or 47 when Dad died. I know the facts but I am not reliable around dates and numbers, so do not hold me to the year exactly. Things changed for me at that time. By then I was twenty years of age, I suppose, and Daniel Collins come out of the army, and that is when this trouble that I am giving an account of here started. With Dad gone and Ben’s dad already dead the old days was over for us and I needed to look around and find a new way for myself to make a living. The stations would have been happy to put me on and I might have stuck with the cattle work but the job with the new constable come up just then and I thought I would give it a go just for a short time. I did not expect things to work out the way they did.

. . .

Daniel Collins had served as a volunteer with the Australian forces in New Guinea during the war and after he come out he joined the Queensland Police Service. When we got Daniel as the new constable at Mount Hay his older girl, Irie, was twelve years of age, or around that, and the younger was maybe nine or ten. I was not sure at the time of their ages. Esme and Daniel soon got close again after the war, which was not how it worked out for every man who come back. Esme was a determined woman and was firm in her high principles. The police in Brisbane, where Daniel done his induction, told him he could apply for the bush but he had to be a horseman. He told them he knew something about horses, but I do not think Daniel Collins ever knew too much about horses. He applied for the constable job out at Mount Hay which come vacant when old George Wilson finally give it away. George was the constable at Mount Hay for around thirty years, and if trouble ever happened in George’s time he always give it a bit of clearance to sort itself out before stepping in. Which usually turned out he had no cause to step in too hard in any case as things had more or less worked themselves out by the time he roused himself. George believed in something he called a natural peace. Which some people said was bone laziness by another name. But to my way of thinking there was a wisdom in George Wilson’s method of policing our town. The gold mining was pretty well played out by that time and there was only a handful of the old hopefuls left fossicking the known seams and mullock heaps, and the stockmen from them big stations seldom come into town more than once or twice in a year and kicked up a bit of a party. George only ever had two murders in his whole time as the Mount Hay constable and there was never a robbery I ever heard of. Cattle duffing was a usual pastime with some of the young fellers on the stations but it never got too serious and everyone knew who was doing it and it was soon put a stop to. Mount Hay was not a troubled town like they say the Isa was. Though I have never been to the Isa and that is only hearsay from me and cannot be trusted for the facts.

Dad dying and George Wilson retiring and the war ending all happened around the same time and the way I had been living out in the camps most of the year come to an end. I did not think too much about applying for the constable’s offsider job but just went over and asked Daniel about giving the job to me and we shook hands and he agreed to take me on. George Wilson never had no offsider but Daniel Collins announced at the pub that he was entitled to put one on. We all seen Daniel’s intention was to do the job by the book. Which was the first notice we had of the changes. If I had known what was going to happen between Ben and Daniel I would have thought more about it and kept out of the way. But I just seen it as a job at the time, which I was in need of.

The police in Brisbane laughed at Daniel and told him to be careful not to die of boredom out there in the ranges, which they called the wilderness. But Daniel was interested in all kinds of things and not just in policing so he said he would risk getting bored. He believed he had missed out on some of his best years fighting in the war and wanted to make up for lost time. At least that is what he told me. It was an adventure for him and his family to go out there to Mount Hay and I do not think they was ever intending to spend more than a couple of years in the ranges at the outside, but seen it as something they could look back on and talk about when they was back in the city again. Daniel and Esme seen it as a challenge to improve things in Mount Hay. But they would have done better to hold off a while like George Wilson, till they got a feel for the way things was done. But that was not their way.

To people like the Collins, Mount Hay was what they called the outback, but to us it was just Mount Hay. If they ever heard of it people in Mount Hay did not know where the outback was, but Daniel and Esme seemed to be sure of knowing they was already in it, which was the cause of a good deal of amusement in the bar of Chiller Swales’ hotel. The way I saw it was that Daniel and Esme never thought too much about how it was going to be for them coming in to police a town like Mount Hay from outside the way they did. They surely thought we was a bunch of country hicks and they knew better than we did how to do things and did not think they had nothing to learn. But they had never been out in country like the ranges before and was coastal people. In the ranges everyone knows everyone else for hundreds of miles around. And we always knew if there was a stranger around and would have him pinpointed exactly. Strangers was rare. Old George had grown up in the ranges and knew the way things was done. Daniel knew other things. He had books on the geology of the inland and the local people and history and he was proposing to do some reading of those books he brought with him and become an expert on us.

. . .

Mount Hay main street was just the police office and house at the back, and beside it on both sides there was empty blocks of land with only the stumps of old houses left on them. Down the road towards the west and on the opposite side from the police office was Hoy’s milk bar and grocery store, which was also the postal office. There was a couple of unoccupied shops, both with their front windows broken in and sheets of ripple iron nailed over them, and then come Chiller Swales’ hotel. The picture theatre down the road by the corner before you head out west had been burned down some years before and never got rebuilt. There was the tennis courts, which had not been used since I was a child and was all overgrown with rattlepod, and then the public hall that was sliding off its stumps, its timbers pretty much eaten out by white ants. The only fuel pump in town was at the side of Hoy’s place. That was about it. Except for the school, a hundred yards further along than the burned picture theatre. I do not know why they put the school so far away, but maybe they thought the town would grow out to meet it. But it never did. The kids from the outlying stations come in as well as the town kids. They was like two tribes and was always fighting. It was black kids and white kids at the school in them days but that changed later when the government brought in new ideas. People was generally scattered about the township in timber and fibro cement houses. Like Mum and Dad’s old place. When someone died or left town their place usually stayed empty. There was a few of them abandoned houses around. I rode past our old place one day and seen some town boys had kicked in the fibro panels and shot out most of the windows. Which was usually what happened when a house was left empty. I thought of burning it, but I did not do that and rode on. I suppose it is still there to this day, what is left of the old place.

There was no real centre to Mount Hay like there had once been. Goats come along the street and eat everything. The dogs got sick of chasing them off and just lay in the shade with their head on their paws and give a tired kind of woof if the goats got too close to them. The mail delivery truck went to the coast twice a week and brought in stores and drums of fuel for the town and the outlying people. If you was willing to leave people alone to get on with whatever they was doing, which was what George Wilson always done, then I would say Mount Hay was not a hard town to police.

After Dad passed away and I started as Daniel’s offsider, Esme made me welcome and had me eating with her and Daniel and the girls in the kitchen of the police house. I did not camp in the house with them, but in the fibro two-man quarters at the back of the police block. Which suited me as it was next to the horse paddock and the feed shed, where I spent a good deal of my time. After I started I did not wait to be told by Daniel nothing of what needed to be done but put shoes on the police horses and took care of them without saying nothing to him. Which was the way we always worked when Dad and Ben’s dad were alive. If we seen something needed doing we done it and no one said nothing about it. There was two horses belonging to the police and my two, so I was not kept real busy. Dad’s old packhorse, Beau, was the boss of all the horses as soon as I put him in the paddock. He nearly had them two police horses through the fence in their panic. Beau and my mare Mother was close as brother and sister and them police horses could not get near Mother without Beau driving them. It took them all a week or two to sort themselves out and know where they stood with each other. They never become close friends but they learned to live with each other without going through the fences.

By then I had forgot the little of reading and writing I’d picked up in that school we had in Mount Hay in them days, and being out in the camps with Dad since I was ten my mother never did get the chance to teach me nothing, even though she would have liked to. It was Daniel and Esme’s older girl, Irie, that taught me to read and write properly, or I would not be writing this account of the trouble that come on us now. The young one, Miriam, mocked me for not knowing my schoolwork but Irie never did, she just set to and helped me learn. Irie had brown hair and very pale skin like her dad. If she went out in the sun without her hat she burned to red in no time. She was gentle and respectful when instructing me but there was a steel spring in that girl that would unwind in a flash like a whip when she was pushed. She did not accept advice or criticism from her mother Esme or from Daniel without backing up against them. And she kept to her own thoughts. I seen that at once and admired her for it. I was very soon more than half in love with her though she was yet but a child. I liked the independent way she carried herself and I seen she was soon going to be the kind of woman my mother and father would have had a high opinion of. I wish they had known her. If Charley had been more like her when I was a kid I would have had an older brother as a friend to look out for me and maybe I would not have got so close to Ben as I did. But Charley was always a loner. I never knew what his thoughts was or where he went when he headed off on his own. And I never wanted to be like him. Him and Dad never hit it off and Dad was always rounding on him for something. Charley was not interested in stock work and had no admiration for our dad and his ways. He looked upon our father with some fear and could not be open with him about his thoughts. Dad could not stand that. My mother used to say our Charley was born different, and she would shake her head and say there was no use trying to make him change. Charley is himself, she said and she told Dad he should be content with that. But Dad could not be content in this way about his older son and always remained disappointed in Charley, carrying an anger against him. He was harder on Charley than he ever was on me and I seen how Charley resented that and could not wait for the day when he was grown enough to leave Mount Hay and get out on his own. Which is what he did. I never heard Dad speak of him after that, but my mother used to look up from what she was doing some evenings and say to no one in particular, I wonder where our Charley is now? We did not hear from him. I have wondered if he resented me for being my mother’s favourite. And that has given me feelings of regret that I did not try to help him when the chance was there. I will not look to excuse myself now.

Daniel encouraged me to read them books he had on geology and history but I was not a good enough reader in them days to make sense of them. At first he was always wanting to talk with me about things in Mount Hay and what I thought of this or that family. He come down to the yards where I was tending to the horses and asked me about the old days and my father and all that, but I was never much of a talker. I pretended to him that what he said was interesting to me because I could see he wanted me to enjoy his company, but I never knew what he was talking about most of the time. My dad would have took one look at Daniel Collins and he would have walked away and not looked back. Thinking of the way Dad would have seen him I sometimes had the flicker of what you might call contempt in myself for Daniel, but it was something I rebuked myself for as I only knew him to be a good man and never deserving of anyone’s harsh judgment. Because he and Esme was from the coast did not make them bad people, just different. I remember a photo in one of them books of his. It was of a man standing next to an anthill holding a long stick upright in his hand. I do not know if the photo was to show how tall the anthill was or how tall the man was or how long the stick was, or maybe all three. But I remember looking at that picture for some time and wondering about it. And I still have a good memory of it today. The man was without a hat, which was unusual then and may be why I remember that picture. I do not know who the man was. It did not say and I did not ask. Who he was did not seem like something I would ever need to know.

We never asked too many questions about things we did not want to know about. And even with things we wanted to know about we waited to find o...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• PRAISE FOR ALEX MILLER'S NOVELS
• ALSO BY ALEX MILLER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS