Searching for shacks

 Bird and I went hunting in the bush for shacks.

It's shack country after all, the country of old mining ventures and recent ancient massacres. Anyway, after several wrong leads that ended up being kangaroo tracks, we found the shack I'd come across years before, by the side of the River Steere.

 It'd been built by an idealist and by the tea cup hooks, I'm thinking an aesthetic thinker too. There was a pile of kindling protected from weather by tin, a well, created from an old rain water tank that had a run-off tin, a fish smoking set up and an open rainwater tank with a stick thoughtfully placed in the centre to save bees and other critters from drowning. The sense you get from this shack dweller and their thoughts is that they were profoundly sensitive to their environment, yet wanted to live within it.

Bird and I went down to the river to have a cup of tea from her thermos. We didn't talk about the shack much. We hadn't seen each other for a while and there were more important things to discuss. We drank from paper cups as the pups whizzed around on the river bed.

It's gold country, hard country. It's easy to imagine a man building this shack, smoking fish and panning for gold, living on the edge of the river.

I never saw myself as Davy Crockett when I built a shack about 20 kilometres from where we sat. After we'd had our cup of tea, Bird and I walked back through the flowering hakeas and pooled wheel ruts, got into the four wheel drive and went to my hut that I'd built myself.

 

Precious Bone

I posted the previous yarn ‘Understory’ as a prelude to this one. You can find it here.

This year I taught an Indigenous studies unit at the uni. Living in the bush requires residents to be ‘agile’ as the Prime Minister put it recently, defining our need to have at least three jobs in the gig economy to survive in rural areas.

Anyway, I’ve been working for this department in other capacities for quite a few years and when I was given the new unit I noticed that for the field trip, our remote campus was not afforded the same opportunities as those in the city. They were going to Wadjemup or Rottnest Island where hundreds of Aboriginal men were historically incarcerated in a campaign to remove strong, young Aboriginal men from their communities.

I decided that my regional students would go out to the massacre memorial site at Cocanarup for our field trip, and so a few weeks ago we met below the campus building, breathing early morning mist as we piled into a little bus.

We drove east for three hours. It’s often the flatlands out there, farming country punctuated by the skins and skulls of wild pigs hung on fences, roadhouses peopled by indifferent staff and stubble piled against fences after the last blow. It’s soldier settlement country; land given to returned servicemen after the war. A gift. Here is some hard scrabble country for you to eke out a living, said the Gifters.

We went past there to salmon gum country. I took my students to the old cemetery to show them how Noongar people were segregated in those days, buried in unconsecrated, unmarked graves. There are two graveyards; one for Noongar, the other for the whites. A husband and wife are buried in separate graveyards. She was Aboriginal. He was white.

At this point I began to realise I was responsible for mental wellbeing of my students and also for Swan who’d come along in a cultural awareness capacity. I’d given them all the information – the newspaper archives, chapters from books and reports of the massacre – but this was the first time I’d taken them onto this country. The country is really powerful. It’s both grim and, beautiful. Amongst the garden in the centre of the Noongar cemetery lay the skeleton of a boomer kangaroo.

After fuelling up in town and buying some excellent Chico rolls, we drove back out of town and went down to the river. Since the floods last year, the river’s course has changed and everything looks different. The flood was so violent that it carried the bridge a few hundred metres downstream. It’s difficult to orient yourself when a river course has changed, and when we got down to what used to be a rocky fording, the swathe of deep sand and the enormity of that river flood made us park the bus and walk in to John Dunne’s grave.

John Dunne’s behaviour was the reason for his execution and the subsequent retribution. As I walked past his grave to the riverbed, I asked Swan, ‘What do you think?’ I knew that the massacre started around here somewhere. ‘Just leave things where they are,’ Swan said. ‘Don’t pick up anything.’ This reminded me of one of his colleague’s advice years before. ‘Don’t move anything around out there.’

I could see from the smashed trees above the trickle of water that the river in flood must have been three hundred metres wide a year ago. I began to feel anxious because floods like these reveal all kinds of ghosts and bones. What do we do, if we find bones?

‘Just don’t move anything.’

I told my students as they roamed the riverbed, taking photos and picking up stuff. ‘Please don’t take anything away from here.’

The riverbed was covered in every kind of stone imaginable, every colour, every texture, it was all there. It was like beach combing after a storm where the freakiest shit had washed up.

One of the students found a bone then, sticking out of the riverbed. It looked like a femur, or a human hip bone. She said, does this look like a human bone to you? And I agreed that it did.

I had a stinker of an emotional reaction to her bone find. I know the history of the massacre and I’ve spent a fair bit of time in this country. My sister is the children’s librarian in a nearby town where a patriarch had shot dead his whole family only a few days before. She’d recited baby rhyme time to all of those kids. Somehow, I managed to emotionally conflate these two massacres more than 130 years apart. I felt so angry and useless about our ongoing predilection for human violence. Swan headed up the track towards the bus.

‘People!,’ I exploded to the woman who’d found the bone, as we left the river. ‘Fucking people!’ I was close to tears.

We took photos of the bone and I sent them to someone I know at Aboriginal Affairs. I rang him that night to talk about the process from here on in. He thought the bone looked too ‘robust’ to be human. One of his roles is to organise reburials of Aboriginal remains when bones have been disturbed by floodwaters, industrial earthworks or sand dune shift. He sent the photos to the officer in charge at the local police station. This protocol seems to work well: when somebody finds skeletal remains, the police work out whether the bones are human or animal, and then, whether they are part of a recent crime scene or an historic Aboriginal burial. If they are deemed the latter it’s referred back to Aboriginal Affairs.

I spent a week thinking and dreaming about this bone, this person, thinking about the massacre, wondering how, when Dunne gets his gravestone with white pickets all around it, the people’s bodies were piled in a mass grave on the riverbank. How many more miles might this femur have walked? It’s easy to lose sleep over this stuff and yet the dead no longer care (hopefully). That bone.

A week later my contact at the department said that he’d heard back from the police. It was an animal bone.

Oh. Mixed feelings soundtrack. So, if it wasn’t a human bone then my last week of anguish and raging against humanity was entirely misplaced. I didn’t want to feel disappointed that it wasn’t a human bone, but I did feel disappointed and so I felt bad about that. ‘Well, I guess that is a good thing,’ I replied via text to him. This emotional dissonance plagued me until the next day, when he forwarded me an email from the police department’s forensic anthropologist. She wrote that the bone was not human but quite possibly from … wait for it … a PREHISTORIC QUADRUPED.

In other words, a giant freaking wombat. You know, mega fauna. I got the email right before the next class with my students after the field trip. Not many of them knew about the bone find. I’d kept it quiet because I wanted it to go through official channels. But when I told them the story and read out the email you should have seen the bouncing going on in the room. We went down to the river and found MEGAFAUNA!!!

I rang the officer in charge at the local police station. He was so excited. He’d gone to the river and dug up the bone. When he got the report back, he’d taken his kids down to the river to talk to them about dinosaurs and megafauna. ‘I was here during the floods,’ he said. ‘I was the first to lay hands on the man who drowned here. That river. That river changed its course during the flood.’ He went on to say that it was possibly not a hundred-year flood but a thousand-year flood. He wanted Noongar people to come back here.

‘I just want to take out a shovel and dig up more stuff on the river,’ he said. ‘There must be gold there but prehistoric quadrupeds, that’s amazing!’

‘Don’t go rogue on me, mate,’ I said. ‘Let me sniff around the archaeology department and the museum first.’

At this point there was radio silence from the local Noongar who I’d been in contact with. I began to realise that archaeologists converging on this area, digging up bones, was probably not such a great thing.

‘Just don’t move things around out there,’ he’d said to me all those years ago.

Still. I sent the photos of the copper’s dug-up bones to a paleontologist at the museum. He replied two days later, ‘This is a cattle bone. This is not a prehistoric quadruped bone. This is a cattle bone.’ Those were pretty much his exact words, two weeks after I took my students to massacre country at the river. It was quite a downy, uppity, downy kind of fortnight.

Understory

Country is never quite what you expect it to be and buying a piece of it can be more than a financial transaction. The West Australian towns of Ravensthorpe and Hopetoun exist in a strange sistership. Ravensthorpe exudes a worn but robust beauty; a highway road train town, born of gold and sheep and nickel. Its mineral booms and busts are reflected in the stolid architecture of the main street’s public bars. The back blocks’ fibro houses were never intended for posterity. Fifty kilometres off the highway, Hopetoun is the charismatic, windswept sister. Run by the same council and serviced by the same dog catcher, Hopetoun’s scrubby Banksia country sits back to let the white sand beaches, turquoise waters and flaming Christmas trees take precedence. Beach shacks are hedged in limestone and shells, their verandas festooned with glass buoys. The Big Miners’ mansions squeeze between them. People work the Ravensthorpe mines and then drive fifty kilometres to Hopetoun to their homes behind the dunes. The sea breeze cools down the evening country. Property prices in Hopetoun can be five times that of Ravensthorpe.

Exactly half way between the two towns, on the edge of Barren Ranges, is Kundip. An odd little place, Kundip is a forgotten town site that flourished three times and finally died with the railway line. When I first visited this abandoned goldmining town, I fell in love with the stillness, the ruins of cellars, the quiet quartzite earth and the ghostly, kerosene tin remnants of past battlers. I lit a fire that night and slept in my swag beside the car, listening to South Australian radio and the sainting of Mary McKillop. It happened that I slept on one of the cheapest blocks for sale in West Australia. I bought it. I built a shack from scavenged cedar and corrugated iron, with the help of a borrowed generator and inspired friends.

On my last journey to Kundip, I grew more and more excited as I neared the place; craning through the bug-splattered windscreen to watch the country change from dried out farming dust lands to deep ranges and salmon gum forests. I arrived after a long drive of lonely roadhouses and the appropriate music: Johnny Cash, The Dubliners and Martha Wainright. I turned off the music. I lit a fire. Sitting alone, towards evening, I began thinking, “What am I doing here? I’m mad. This idea is just stupid.”

But then the sun sank. The white quartz ground turned pink beneath the olive green moorts. The chanting of the crickets slowed to a sleepy dirge. Stars, satellites and meteorites began their sky wheeling. The new mine glowed on the horizon. I’d be mad to be anywhere else, I thought, and stoked the fire.

A lightning storm hung over the Barren Ranges, snagged on its jagged edges. I saw the eerie orange reflection against the clouds; like driving a night time desert highway and seeing the lights of the roadhouse for an age before you get there. That night constant flashes, 'sky sparks' coming from way out to sea off Hopetoun, lit up the sky. The next day was rainful, then blue skies, then the strange clouds announcing more rain, followed by rainbows - doubled and even trebled on the horizon and then more blue skies.

"The light is different out here," Dad said to me, when he made the drive out. The light is indeed different to the southern coast where we come from. It seems more diffused, gentler than the stark blue and white hues of the coast. Kundip trees part to reveal the sky behind them. It is not the solid, waist height scrub or soaring forests of the south. The photographs I have taken of this country always look drab and grey but it is not like that at all. The earth is rich, ochre red or white with quartz and there is water all around and zany emerald native shrubs endemic to this area. The colours are almost too vivid for the naked eye. My pictures don't reflect that and it confused me, until my father said the thing about the light.

After I finished roofing the veranda and attaching guttering with bits of wire and cable ties, I packed up my tools. I wanted to stop in at the tip (always a good lurk in a mining town) and have a bit of a drive around the bush. My plan was to circle through the Ravensthorpe Ranges and back to my shack. I found a paddock full of camels on the way and inadvertently chased some emus down the road. On my way towards Jerramungup I found the Cocanarup road.

I drove down the orange gravel track, heading downhill into the salmon gum forests and the Phillips River Valley. I passed what was obviously an old farm, the stone ground scoured by a century of work, punctuated by wires strung through jam wood posts, the buildings on the hill weathered by wind and not a tree or garden around them; just stones and dirt and wire. Grim country.

Just across from the farm, the land turns a salmon gum green. It is a different eco-system in the valley, the air is cooler, the light is greener. Once again, there is the stillness. The forest reminds me of our southern karris but for the absence of leatherwoods – that soft understory of perfect Australian emerald. Here there is no understory, only blood red resin dripping onto fallen bark. Any waist height foliage is bound to be prickly.

I was about three kilometres, as the crow flies, from my shack when I stumbled upon John Dunn’s grave.

The grave is bound with freshly painted white pickets and stands among the wispy casuarinas and red rocks above a dry river course. Below, and once upon a flood, the relentless water had pushed branches against the gums to almost three metres above its grainy bed. Emus, snakes, bungarra and kangaroo tracked this riverbed. At the grave, my mental translation of the epitaph was ‘You never know when they are gonna get yer’ (Matthew 24:42).

‘I heard there was some nasty business out there,’ Dad had said to me, when I bought the land.  I’m still unsure whether he meant the 1880 spearing of John Dunn, or the aftermath. It is a difficult story, the story of a settlers’ right to country in 19^th century Australia. Aboriginal people from the Ravensthorpe area are part of the Noongar nation. Their acts of resistance to being chained up, their grounds over-run by sheep and their women stolen or lured away, were often swift and violent. Generally, these acts were seen by colonial administrators as a criminal issue. For the Dunn brothers, living on the farm I had just passed, the police were a week’s ride away.

The men who lured John Dunn into the bush killed him with single spear to his neck. His brother Walter could scarcely ‘put his finger into’ into the wound and yet blood drenched the dead man’s body. Three years later John’s other brother James was also attacked but he survived. James Gunn’s injuries bore all the hallmarks of retribution, rather than the execution-style killing of his brother. There was talk of ‘maltreatment’ of Noongar women.

An anthropologist at the local Indigenous affairs department surmises that the reprisal killings probably took place in several stages. Originally documented in diaries of white colonists and police records, contemporary Aboriginal historians and writers have revisited John Dunn’s spearing and its aftermath. They continue the history from the day of John Dunn’s death. It is a horrific story and no wonder anecdotes exist of Noongar winding up their car windows on their way through Ravensthorpe and never, ever driving through there at night.

Oral histories of Noongar people, and occasionally Europeans, testify that the Dunn’s pay back murders amounted to a massacre.  All parties agree that Noongar people were driven to Esperance or Bremer Bay by the Dunn brothers and their mates on horseback. One day’s ride away, at Fanny Cove, was another farm. The owner Muir had been killed by Aborigines three years before John Dunn and so his farm probably proved a friendly place for the Dunn’s party to refresh horses and glean news of the fleeing Noongar people. It is generally agreed that the Dunns and their accomplices poisoned the water holes on their return from Bremer Bay and Esperance, so that Noongar could not return to their own country.

An anthropologist recently charged with investigating the site of the massacre, in a report for a mining company who wants to move into the West Kundip area, wrote that if men on horseback were chasing and shooting people, bodily remains could be scattered all over the country, rather than buried in a single mass grave. This practical statement is almost mythical in its ramifications and always reminds me of Isis searching for the dismembered parts of her Osiris.

That the Cocanarup massacre even happened is still quietly argued among the European descendants in Ravensthorpe. In many local history publications of the region, the story ends with John Dunn’s spearing death. However, most histories do acknowledge that Noongar people died in conflict during the settlement of the area. Australian massacres during frontier conflict are still filtering into mainstream consciousness, partially because of an historical denial of Aboriginal resistance in our national narrative and because our darker histories were never really on the page unlike other colonial administrations of the same era. This observation is not to discredit the Ravensthorpe residents’ sentiments but to acknowledge that accounts of massacres of Aboriginal men, women and children were not generally reported to police as a crime and are therefore are often unrecorded.

According to some white and Noongar oral histories, many bodies are buried within metres of John Dunn’s grave, marked with a circle of stakes. I stood there on the riverbank, on the day I found the grave. It was summer and I only had thongs on my feet. I worried about snakes. I had a vague knowledge of John Dunn’s death and what happened afterwards. I wasn’t sure how I felt. I just knew that it was not somewhere I wanted to hang around.

I drove further into the bush, keeping the Barren Ranges on my right, fording rocky river crossings on a track once trod by horsemen and Noongar clans. Finally. I came out at a mine service road and, just as if I’d whistled him up, a miner roared past me in a spin of dust and red flags, his face set purposefully at the steering wheel. I thought I would back-track him and so I turned onto the big road, changed up to fourth gear and drove for a while, checking out for wheat silos and any sign of a town. I could see both the Barrens and the Ravensthorpe Ranges, but after being in the Phillips River valley and the dark world of the Dunns for so long, I was disorientated and couldn’t find my bearings.

My friend bought the block next to me and asked his Noongar mates about the place.

‘Just don’t move anything around, out there,’ they said.

After discovering the Cocanarup story and its proximity to my new home, I was even more dismayed by this advice and its origins. I’d just spent weeks driving around, looking for rocks. The stone around Kundip is red and white quartz, slid off the ranges over millennia, and it always has good, flat faces. I had gathered a nice pile of stone on my block.

I wanted to build something beautiful on what I thought was my very own patch of earth. The country around Cocanarup and Kundip is a place that, when I arrive, I can breathe deep and say out loud ‘I am here.’ There are plants that grow by my shack that haven’t been named by Europeans yet. The place has sleeping magic. Some nights I sleep for eleven hours. It is off the grid, out of range and clocks don’t seem to work here. Perfect.

Sometimes ignorance can be an unknown friend, who disappears when it comes time to learn the understory. Kundip country enchanted me from the first night I slept upon her skin. Later, discovering the stories of the people who died here; the fear, the running, the blood, the sweating horses and the spears and guns; it changed me. The irony is that after all my whining about being a perennial renter, I bought a patch of earth that I now know I am only borrowing. Understanding this makes me feel lucky, in a strange kind of way.

Phosphorescence

Saturday:

We drank spiced rum. At some point on any night when I’m drinking spiced rum, I say, ‘let’s go out in the boat. The best time out on the water is at night.’

There are few people who will get in a boat with me after drinking half a bottle of rum. I reckon about three. Oh, and Old Salt, but he doesn’t count because he mentored this practice in the first place.

Getting into a riveted aluminium tinny with oars in less than three feet of water with a rum-sodden Toa is not a terribly dangerous exercise anyway, so I picked up our bottle by its pirate handle and we headed for the shore. We turned over the boat, dragged her into the warm water, fitted the oars and rowed into the inlet.

‘Water gets to twenty degrees,’ a meadow man said to me recently, ‘and that’s when you see phosphorescence.’ And it was Fantasia that Saturday night. The oars dripping wild arcs through the inlet, the dogs’ paws illuminated as they swam beside the boat. A wake of glittering fire critters … every move we made was laden with magic.

For a while we were marooned upon a rock and still I rowed because the colours were so beautiful and trippy. Also I wasn’t entirely aware that we were actually perched upon a rock. On the shore, he fell out of the boat while disembarking, which was hilarious because it is usually me who does this. We stamped and danced around in the warm water with punk/ballet moves in the holes made by feeding swans, kicking up the water for more sparkles, the stars all above us and all below.

The fingernail moon had well set by then.

Sunday: I drove to Albany. It was an eerie, beautiful drive through the karri forests, warm slants of light through the trees, smoke everywhere from the burn-offs and bushfires that have been going for weeks. Further north, two days before, a wild fire had razed an entire town in seven minutes. I drove out of the forest and into high, open pastured country. On a long curve of the road I came across a police car and an ambulance. Some motorcyclists stood by their bikes, holding their helmets in their hands. A copper walked a steady trajectory from the road and along the gravel verge, to a marri tree. Everyone looked a bit blank, stunned. The ambulance was staying put, no lights.

Shit… oh shit, I thought, and kept driving, because there seemed no point in stopping.

Monday: At about nine in the morning, I received an email to say that two examiners were in and they’d passed my thesis outright, with some minor recommendations for changes. Two out of three ticks means I passed my PhD! That is Doctor Sarah Toa to you, thank you very much. It is still quite unofficial and I have a bit of work to do, but it gave me a real warm fuzzy as I headed into a week of teaching historical fiction. (Which was why I drove from Broke to Albany, right, to spend a week teaching writers how to turn ripping yarns from history into fiction.)

I gave the first class and a lunch time lecture on the Breaksea Island sealing community of 1826. The whole time my head was zinging with ‘The powers that be have granted me a PhD!’

Champagne. I won’t even mention the brand I bought but their ads generally depict beautiful young women laughing and being showered in what looks suspiciously like semen.

Tuesday: Presented another lecture and a class on history and fiction.

‘The Unspoken: Negative Spaces in History’

My sister messaged me. ‘I have bad news, I’m sorry to text you this but Mick has died. He hit a tree on his motorbike near Nornalup. Can you please ring me?’

I rang her.

‘I passed an accident,’ I said. ‘Mum did too. She was coming from Denmark. I was coming from Walpole. I kept driving. Was that really Mick? I saw a motorbike but it was green. Mick’s motorbike wasn’t green, was it? Was it green?’

‘That was his mate Xxxx’s bike,’ she said. ‘I think he was riding with him that day.’

As I had driven by on my way to Albany, I didn’t see Mick’s bike or his body, though I must have passed pretty soon after it happened. Mum saw a body bag. Someone else on the road saw his body lying beside his bike. I dunno. I don’t know. All that I do know is that I didn’t know I drove past a dead friend on the side of the road last Sunday.

Wednesday: presented a lecture and another class on history and fiction. ‘The bolts in Jaws’ teeth: beautiful lies, plot arcs and incontrovertible facts.’ Jaws’ teeth alluded to the unsigned contract that the reader agrees to with the writer … that their suspension of disbelief is a fair swap for escaping the drudgery of their everyday lives … but if for example, when watching the movie Jaws, the watcher sees the bolts holding the robot shark’s teeth together, then that contract is screwed. Even in fiction, there are some ‘facts’ that the writer must get right. That’s my theory anyway.

Thursday: I think I can pass Thursday and Friday except to say that the week’s workshop went well and I was told I was a ‘breath of fresh air’. I also spent a beautiful evening under the stars at Limeburners in a swag and slept, deeply and peacefully for a few hours before driving back into town in the witching, sated and thinking, I love that, that fugue time, it’s like a dream, like it didn’t even happen, except for that it did. Good juice was coursing all through my being.

 Saturday: Loaded up the van (I was using Mum’s purple hippy van all week, as my four wheel drive ute was supposed to be getting fixed in the ‘Pole by the star local mechanic, who ended up in Albany all week, getting fixed himself) with spare beehive frames and drove 350 km to my shack at Kundip to rob hives. My beekeeper mate Ky was feeling ill so I went alone.

I arrived at midday to this: 

Someone’s been pinching stuff from my shack over the last year. The last time they politely unscrewed the padlocked bolt, emptied the spare beehive frames from the plastic boxes and took the plastic boxes. (Why? They are often on special for five bucks for fuck’s sake.) So I screwed the bolt back in and left it unlocked, thinking I’d prefer thieves to walk in than break a window.

Touchwood

This time the door was ripped off its hinges and left in pieces on the threshold. Because that’s what you do, right? If a door to an isolated shack is unlocked, then you rip the door off its hinges and break it into little bits. If you are feeling especially cunty, you may even take the owner’s favourite bucket and her fire twirling stick.

It felt a bit like walking into the chookpen the morning after a fox visitation.

Anyhoo, I collected my seventh generation Toa parsley seeds, ate hommos and crackers for lunch and steeled myself to thieve honey from the bees. I parked the van up the hill so that Selkie could hide. Black and tan she is, and to a bee she looks just like their natural predator, a bear. She’s a clever dog who’s learned quickly to stay the hell away from me as soon as I put on my space suit.

The hippies at hive #4 was the mother lode, as usual. So beautiful, hardworking and gentle, that mob. Every frame full and perfectly capped. Hive #2 is still being run by the Tyrant Queen. They flew at me. They hit me! Bam Bam Bam! Loads of honey and they never want to give it up.

I love my bee suit.

By two o’clock I was exhausted. Full boxes of honey must weigh an unwieldy thirty kilos and then there is the mid-to-high-level stress of dealing with the rising hum of 20K pissed off individuals, and a smoker that keeps going out. Two more hives to go. I sat down, peeled back the veil and drank a litre of cranberry juice and then a litre of water. Smoked a rollie. Contemplated my shack door. Wondered about my attitude. Took all of the things I didn’t want pinched and put them in Mum’s van: a crow bar and the rib bones of a whale.

I was stung a few times through my suit and gloves (sometimes my gloves are covered in beestings, poor buggers. They die for nothing after leaving their stings in my leather gloves.) When they sting me through my suit not all of their poison gets through and it feels more like a mosquito bite.

But when I was finished with my larceny, I took off my suit and prepared for the drive back to Albany. And that’s when they got me.

The rainwater at Kundip is the cleanest, sweetest water in the world. Truth. The bees know that too because as I was filling my water bottles, dressed in a singlet and jeans, I got hammered. All of my joints (shoulders, wrists, elbows, ankles), my glands (beneath my ear lobes, my throat, back of my knees), oh yes, they got me. I spent two days feeling so toxed. I had enough poison in my veins to blow up the neighbour’s crack house, and that is saying something.

The next day I could hardly move.

I bought an instant coffee in Ravensthorpe. It was dusk. The roadhouse worker gave me the remnants for Selkie, who wolfed down chico rolls, pies and deep fried lasagne in the car park. I took one sip of the coffee and asked her to add another teaspoonful of the Maxwell House. Please.

One hundred kilometres along the highway I saw the first roo, a doe with her joey, hesitating on the verge, the mother wondering whether to cross. I beeped the horn and both of them reeled away from the road. Five minutes later another kangaroo leapt straight in front of the van.

I haven’t hit an animal in a car before; only birds: owls, pigeons and, oh yes sorry, quite a few rabbits. This was positively visceral. I saw the kangaroo lurch into my headlights. That shudder of impact, feeling the wheels struggle over his flesh and bone. I say ‘his’ because when I pulled up and reversed, a young buck was lying on the gravel. I saw his balls. He was all broken bones and panting. It was awful. I thought, okay, a rock or a stick, or something. I looked in the bush for a rock. My headlamp was dimming, running out of batteries. Then I remembered the crow bar I’d salvaged from Kundip. After the violence of a purple Mitsubishi van and a crowbar, I felt between the kangaroo’s forearms and ribs for a heartbeat. Nothing. So I cut off his tail and took it home for dinner.

Sunday: Extracted honey. 40 kg from the hippy hive #4, so far.

On Sunday I learned how to extract the sinew from kangaroo tails. It's amazing stuff, as strong as nylon fishing line. I also skinned the tail, salted it and put it in my mate’s fridge.

Monday: Drove back to the ‘Pole. It’s a busy tourist road at the moment. I got towards the accident site, slowing down, hesitating in the purple van and could feel the angsty tourists or locals behind me as I slowed on that high country curve, indicator flicking.

Then I hauled the van over onto the side of the road. I could see the coppers’ yellow marks. They began at the front of my van. I got out of the car and followed the yellow marks.

He'd hit the gravel and stayed on the verge for maybe fifty metres, then away he went, over the edge, airbourne, shattering a lump of laterite on his way down to the tree. A small tree. A small, hardy old man marri, (“such a small tree” said my sister) with a piece shorn off of one side where it met his body.

A clump of wild flowers bound in plastic, a can of VB, a note from a friend.

A  fatal meeting.

I went straight to work at the fuel station/coffee shop and by then the rain had started; a deluge that went for days and bucketed down inches over a lot of the southwest. It was nearly dark as I drove home to the inlet, and frogs leapt across the road, strips of karri all over the Broke track.

Home.