Larrimah, page 32
‘He didn’t tell me if he had a son or a daughter, I didn’t ask him anything about that,’ Tony replies. Then he backtracks. ‘But I’m sure he must have had a daughter.’ He can’t say why he thinks that, just that he does.
Suddenly a loud bell sounds and everyone is on their feet. ‘Last drinks!’ says Tony, downing the end of his can. We thank him for chatting with us and he stops and looks sad for a moment. ‘I miss him,’ he says. ‘He was a good bloke. We would drink together. He was my best mate.’
Back inside the bar everyone is scrambling for final beers and we get caught chatting to another young cowboy. He mentions he once worked on a station in western Queensland, around the same area the Bush Poet works. We casually drop his real name, without the context or what he’s told us.
The young cowboy’s head jolts. ‘How do you know him?’ He sounds a bit panicked.
The Bush Poet knew Paddy, we tell him. They were mates. But the look of horror on the man’s face remains. He shakes his head. It’s like he wants to say something but can’t find the words. So we decide to run the Bush Poet’s name by one of the other guys at the bar. The reaction is almost identical.
‘Be careful,’ he says. ‘He’s a nice guy. But he’s also the kind of guy who would tell you anything, just for his own amusement.’
We sit through dinner—beef—with the words roaring in our heads. It’s impossible to shake an image of the Bush Poet sitting at his local pub, laughing to his mates about how he duped a couple of gullible journalists.
As tempting as the idea of Paddy being alive was, we had always had a healthy level of doubt about it. What we had stopped doubting, though, after those few phone calls, was that the Bush Poet believed it. His conviction was part of what made the idea interesting, especially since he’d known Paddy for more than thirty years and claimed to have seen him not long before he disappeared.
After dinner, we go back to our cosy outback palace and strike Queensland off our itinerary. The move isn’t entirely based on the less-than-flattering character assessments of the Bush Poet. It’s also because we’re running out of time. We’ve had a taste of the vastness of this country, and even if we believed the Bush Poet, we simply don’t know where to start finding a person who doesn’t want to be found, somewhere in a plain of Mitchell grass so wide and flat you can see the curve of the earth.
In the morning, we farewell our gracious hosts and head back into the dust. We have one last shot at excavating Paddy’s Brunette past.
Back when Paddy would have been here—if he ever were—the Wambaya people lived a couple of hundred metres from the homestead. But in the 1990s, a previous owner of Brunette Downs offered them a 16–square kilometre excision at Corella Creek, about forty-five minutes north of the homestead. ‘Excision’ seems such a precise and formal word for returning country to its traditional owners. Not to mention the injustice of being ‘given’ only a small tract of land that already belonged to you. But some of those traditional owners moved to the new site and we’ve been told that Tony’s wife, Kathleen, is somewhat of a local historian, who lived in the community when it was still near Brunette homestead, and she’s apparently chatty. She might be able to help.
We drive about 90 kilometres back up the Tablelands Highway. There’s a huge tin sign on the way into Corella, welcoming us, but when we pull in, the community is entirely silent. Clothes hang on lines and cars are parked outside the dozen or so houses but, except for some lazy-looking camp dogs, there is no sign of movement. The modern little school is deserted. A generator whirs, but that’s the only sound.
We don’t know which house Kathleen lives in, so we stop the car in the middle of the dirt street and cast around, hopelessly, for signs of life, finally spotting a teenager in a yard. We edge the car closer, get out and ask if someone can point us in the right direction. This is Kathleen’s house, it turns out, so the teenager leaves us in the sun by the gate and eventually, an older lady comes out. We tell her what we’re looking for.
‘My husband, Tony, knew Paddy from Heartbreak,’ she says. ‘Talk to him.’ She turns and walks back into the house, closing the door behind her.
If it’s possible, the Corella Creek community looks even more forlorn on the way out. The whole place seems such feeble compensation for what was once a wide, rich existence on this land. The same reasons that have made Brunette so well suited to cattle had also made it a good place to live and hunt for the Wambaya people. The lakes and the Mitchell grass attracted emus, kangaroos and birdlife. But the cattle edged the native animals out, and the station edged the traditional owners out. In a much less brutal and unjust way, there are forces edging out station life as we know it, too.
Yesterday, we’d been chatting to Rick about Brunette—how pretty it is, how much we’d loved it, how we’d live there if we could. There’s something so familiar about it all, like some lost sense of Australiana we didn’t know we had.
Rick had smiled, maybe recognising something of himself in our enthusiasm. ‘The young ones, they love it too,’ he’d said. But it’s all changing. Even though the ringers love the weeks out at the stock camp, eating and sleeping under the stars, when they come back the first thing they do is log on to the internet.
‘Young people now want to be more like 50 Cent than Slim Dusty,’ is how Rick had put it. It’s hard for stations to recruit. In the past they’d only needed to provide staff with food and water, now wi-fi is considered an essential, too. It’s a shame, Rick had said. He used to think he wanted to keep the bush the bush. But he could also see that stations have to evolve.
We’re a long way from Larrimah, but our thoughts drift back there as we hurtle north again. There’s a whole ecosystem of outback settlements and stations that help keep towns like Larrimah afloat, providing a steady stream of people dropping in for beers or picking up their mail. Towns rely on them for income and news and fresh gossip. But it’s precarious. Brunette has sidestepped most of the idiocy of civilisation. But civilisation is increasingly mobile. It can’t stay unhitched forever.
31
A lost city, a miraculously green lawn and an endangered pygmy hippopotamus
The drive back to Heartbreak is long, and when we arrive, the afternoon is longer. This whole trip we’ve been struck by how hours on the road can fold in on themselves; days either race by or stutter along in spurts. A slow rush. But at Heartbreak, as we wait to talk to Catherine, time just stretches. We find ourselves with nothing to do but watch the sun move across the sky. It’s too hot to walk and there’s nowhere to walk to, anyway. It’s too hot to sit still. The pool sparkles under the fierce sun—just looking at it is enough to give you third-degree sunburn, and the grey nomad floating there is decidedly pink. There’s a huge sign out front advertising helicopter f lights over the Lost City, underneath a picture of a sandstone formation behind a gorge. But the picture is not, in fact, the Lost City—the graphic designer has simply ripped off a generic gorge picture and presented it as local. Plus, however beautiful the real Lost City sounds, it’s too far. By the time we got anywhere, we’d have to turn around and come back.
The thing is, Catherine is here. She’s just not back at work yet. When we find her on the back verandah where staff sit for breaks, she’d already knocked back a few drinks on the charter plane home, and is keen to stretch her last day of holiday out as long as possible. ‘Tomorrow morning, before you go,’ she tells us. So we return to the tourist part of the verandah and sit it out in the heat. In a few hours, the road workers will start coming back, covered in a thick film of orange dust. The grey nomads will emerge from day trips and afternoon naps for happy hour, taking photos of the occasional wallaby on their iPads and drinking sweating glasses of chardonnay. The gap between afternoon and evening widens. We order a beer, then another. It would be nice to have more, but that feels like slipping off the precipice, and so many people slip off the precipice. They pack eskies full of beer to go to work. They drive drunk, they build roads drunk, they sit on verandahs and tell stories, drunk. Everything out here is done drunk, someone tells us. It’s so hot and time is so brutal. It’s almost like people don’t have a choice.
The next morning, Catherine joins us outside with a mug of herbal tea almost the size of her head, but certainly not larger than the hangover she’s nursing. She admits, cheerfully, to being a bit stonkered last night.
Sliding into one of the picnic-style tables across from us, she wraps her ring-covered fingers around the tea.
‘I’m the worst person to talk to about memory,’ she admits, upfront. ‘I’ve just been so busy all my life that I forgot to have children and everything.’
She laughs, even though the context isn’t that funny. ‘I did. I was spewing. I was over forty and I tried IVF and it was too late. Shit, hey? I just got so busy with everything, it was just a whirlwind.’
She has a soft way of speaking that smooths out all the hard consonants, so even though she’s trigger-happy with an F-bomb, it feels somehow lyrical. ‘Especially this mongrel place. It’s a beautiful place but there’s so much work.’ We look around. It’s obvious how much work is being done here; it’s also obvious how much needs to be done.
Catherine is glamorous—a word that we haven’t had much occasion to use on the road. We look thoroughly haggard by the elements but, even hungover, Catherine’s blonde hair is shiny and her smile is warm and even. She first came to Heartbreak in about 1996, when the hotel was an unconventional jewel in the crown of a motley empire of businesses—three cattle stations, a fattening property and a Darwin-based limousine—owned by a man called Don Logan.
As is the way of these outback outposts, it didn’t take long for Heartbreak to get under Catherine’s skin. She eventually based herself between here and Darwin, managing the whole portfolio of businesses, and got her pilot’s licence so she could travel between the properties and ventures.
She still remembers the first time she flew into Heartbreak. The grass was so green it felt like a mirage and there, on the ride-on mower, sporting a hat and a grin, was Paddy.
‘It was better than schmick, mate, it was fucking awesome. Paddy would go round over the wet season and literally hand-pick all the prickles. Unbelievable. He never stopped. Just go all day, we’d have like twelve sprinklers a day going, and it was magic, as he used to call it. Magic.’
Catherine does a good impression of their first encounter, including an Irish accent that was strong in those days. ‘“G’day folks,”’ she says, in imitation of Paddy greeting them from the mower. And then she laughs. ‘Fuck, he laughed all the time, didn’t he?’
There were plenty of things to laugh about, back then. It was an era characterised by mischief and wonder—the sort of thing that, in retrospect, might feel like a life so fantastical it belonged to someone else altogether.
There was the time Catherine flew Paddy into the Tipperary Station wildlife sanctuary, which was kind of like an outback Jurassic Park, if you replaced the dinosaurs with rare African animals and then plopped it down in the midst of a working cattle station. It was the pet project of millionaire property developer Warren Anderson, who somehow got his hands on more than two thousand exotic animals: fallow deer, ostriches, blackbucks, zebras, nilgais, greater kudu antelope, Congo buffalo, cheetahs, chitals, scimitar-horned oryx and South American tapir.
None of it was open to the public (though, apparently, a number of former prime ministers used to holiday there), but Catherine was friends with someone who’d invited them to visit. She remembers flying in with Paddy in the back, green and sweating, because he hated aeroplanes. But even he admitted it was worth it to spend the afternoon looking at giraffes and watching zebra wander in paddocks next to the cattle. Hippos and rhinos and hundreds of birds.
Another time, Catherine flew everyone to Mt Isa for the rodeo, but the accommodation was all booked out, so there were nine of them staying in two beds.
And on slow afternoons at Heartbreak, when they were feeling a little mischievous, they’d wait for a tourist bus to pull in and Paddy would duck out the back and tie a hanky over his mouth. Then he’d leap onto the tour bus, brandishing a toy gun, and tell everyone it was a hold-up. The tourists loved it. They thought he was fantastic.
Catherine is patient with us, as we try to fact-check a series of tall stories from Paddy’s time at Heartbreak. Most of them have come to us third-hand, and the years (plus all the beers that no doubt accompanied the tellings) have stretched them in unexpected directions.
Was there a shootout, we ask, trying not to mention the recent shooting because it’s going through court. The shootout we’re talking about would have been in the 1980s or 1990s. Paddy was supposed to be there, loading the gun, cheering on the shooters.
‘We did have one night with a couple of guys who had guns,’ Catherine says, though it takes a little while before she can call it back. It was a racist attack on an Aboriginal family. A man was beaten so badly with a wheel brace that he lost the use of his arm, and the staff had to shelter his wife and children behind the freezers.
‘Paddy would have been talking about that, probably,’ Catherine says, though the fjord between the two stories is so wide that it makes us squirm. Maybe he’d been talking about the fake touristbus hold-ups? We move on.
And what about escorts? we wonder. Did the hotel ever run escorts, and did Paddy look after the girls? We’ve heard it from so many people who spent time out here, people who knew Paddy and people who didn’t. It’s information that has often been delivered unprompted. ‘Those escort girls used to work out there. They’d work the bar, then at the end of the night, they’d be doing other things,’ an old rodeo clown who stopped in at Heartbreak each year told us. ‘Don Logan would fly them in from Cairns or Townsville or something.’ At least three others have told us the same.
Catherine laughs at the suggestion. ‘That was all shit. That’s all fucking shit. Paddy and Donny used to start all that rot. I said to the pair of them, “Shut your fucking mouth”, otherwise they all thought I was a bloody escort as well … Cheeky buggers. Never had one escort here in our lives. Would have made a fortune if we did. There were just men everywhere.’
The rumours started in the days when the boys from McArthur River Mine used to be able to stay for a few days of big drinking, she tells us. Sometimes, if they didn’t get up in time to drive back, Catherine would drop them back in the chopper.
It’s a credible denial, and Catherine says it good-naturedly, without defensiveness. But the way everyone tells it, Heartbreak has always been a place of exaggeration and shit-talking so it’s hard to know what to believe. The story about the guy with a station full of exotic animals sounds far-fetched but it’s absolutely true. And what came after is even more extraordinary. When Tipperary’s owner went broke, the animals were sold off, mostly to zoos, but there are rumours that a couple of deals fell through and now at least half the Territory is convinced there’s the occasional lion or rhino wandering through the outback. They’re probably right. In 2009, a cattle station manager shot what he thought was a wild pig. Turned out, he’d killed an endangered pygmy hippopotamus.
We spend the rest of the time at Heartbreak hearing things we don’t know what to do with.
First, someone else tells us that even though Paddy is remembered fondly around here, he left on bad terms. It was a bit of a scandal, they say. He ran off in the night with a young girl, about eighteen, legal but only just. Probably, this is the same girlfriend Terry Taylor told us about, the woman who lived with Paddy for a spell at Daly Waters. Terry had said she was young, but we hadn’t known quite how young. There would have been about thirty-five years between them.
Then we spy the guy who saw Paddy, right before he went missing. He’s smoking on the verandah, wearing the same blue singlet, and this time, he’s happy to tell us the whole story. ‘It still creeps me out,’ he says. ‘It was real weird.’
What the man says happened is this: A few days—or maybe it was a few weeks—before he disappeared, Paddy had stopped at Heartbreak. Paddy popped in a lot, and there was nothing remarkable about their encounter, but a few days later, a strange couple showed up at the hotel looking for work. The guy was in his sixties, big belly, not Irish but not Australian. Maybe Dutch. The woman seemed submissive, their relationship a bit off. And one of the things they asked about was Paddy.
‘He told me his dad was supposed to be on the boat out to Australia back in the 1960s, but Paddy took his place. He seemed angry. Really angry. You know, like his resentment had been building for fifty years.’
The man tells us the whole thing made him uncomfortable. The couple hung around for a few days, then took off. But shortly after Paddy disappeared, their car came through again, heading down the Tablelands Highway. The man passed all the information on to the cops. They checked it out and came up with nothing. But as the media around the case built, so did his sense of unease—he still thinks about it, often.
It makes us uneasy, too. We came here chasing Paddy’s past, and now it feels like that past is chasing us. Time is a wily thing, especially out here. We’d always thought the rumours that Paddy was wrapped up in something back in Ireland were far-fetched. But five decades of anger is a powerful thing, a long time to nurse a grudge. And we never did find Paddy’s name on those shipping manifests.
We fuel up and take one last look at the heartbreakingly green oasis in the desolation, wondering what we’ll tell Paddy’s friends about what we’ve found here. We’d come expecting stories of prostitutes and shootouts but it turns out Paddy wasn’t loading a gun to defend the outpost. He was dressing up as a bushranger and holding up busloads of tourists with a fake gun. Running away with a barely legal woman. Maybe even dodging a long-ago past, hiding from something bigger. It’s hard to say what’s a lie, and what’s just reality that has been worn and torn over the years, soaked in booze and withered by bad memories and heat and time.
