Townsville was the nearest airport to Munnobungle, and McIver, the station manager, was there to meet me. I found him in the airport lounge, a craggy, sun-dried Australian in khaki shorts and open-necked shirt. He was in conversation with a black man neatly dressed in a tropical suit that was almost sky blue, a marked contrast to McIver’s sweat-stained bush gear. ‘You want a beer before we start?’ he asked in a grating voice without any friendliness in it.
‘Just as you like.’ He had every reason to resent my arrival, and I was wondering how best to handle him.
‘Well, I bloody do. Had a flat on my way in, so I only just got here in time.’ He went over to the bar and came back with two cans and glasses. The black man had drifted off, and we drank in silence. Finally McIver said, ‘How’s Rowlinson?’
‘All right,’ I said. And because I wanted to get things straight at the start, I added, ‘Look, the fact that he’s selling has got nothing to do with the result for last year. He doesn’t want to sell, but he’s under pressure — from his wife, and from his business associates.’
‘That’s what he wrote, but it’s hard to believe. I liked the bastard, and I thought he understood. You’ll see when you get to Munnobungle. It’s a tough station.’
There were quite a few people waiting in the terminal, many of them black, some very black indeed with frizzy hair. ‘Most of the people here are from Papua New Guinea,’ McIver said, making an effort at conversation. ‘The Port Moresby plane is in, and they’re waiting to board.’
‘Are there many of them in Australia?’ I asked him, thinking of the man Chips had called Black Holland.
‘Not many in Australia, but here in Queensland, oh my word, yes. They come over to work in the sugar plantations. Not that fella I was talking to, he’s a PNG government official. Been down in Sydney buying road-building equipment.’
The loudspeaker suddenly burst into voice, announcing the departure of the Air Niugini flight for Port Moresby. The black men began gathering up their belongings, and I watched them move to the exit. McIver said something, but I didn’t hear it, lost in the knowledge that here I was at the gateway to that primitive world so beautifully depicted on the stamps I had bought, the world that Chips had talked about with such nostalgia. ‘Another year,’ McIver was saying, ‘an’ I reck’n we’d have turned the corner.’
‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ I told him irritably.
‘No? Then why doesn’t he come out himself, tell me what the problem is to my face?’
‘Rowlinson’s got a business to run in England. He hasn’t the time.’
‘So Munnobungle was just a bloody toy. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘If you like to put it that way.’
‘Jesus! An’ I’ve worked my guts out … ’
We finished our beer in silence and went out to the parking lot. The Fokker Friendship was taxiing now. It took off just as we were driving out of the airport, and seeing its wings glinting silver in the sun as it banked eastward over the sea, I was wishing I were in it, not seated in a dirty utility with a disgruntled man who was worried about the future.
We were headed west, and it was a long, dusty ride, gravel rattling against the mudguards, the last twenty miles all dirt. Having seen the deeds and maps, his reports, all the figures, I thought I knew what Munnobungle would be like. But I was wrong. Nothing, not even Chips’s description of it and the fact that three sheep to the hectare was the best they could do, had prepared me for the aridity of the place. They had had almost a month without rain, which was unusual in winter, and the place was little better than a dustbowl, the scrubland running out to a distant view of purpling hills, and everything hazed in the sun’s glare with the leaves of the eucalypts shimmering to a slight breeze.
I spent three days there, driving more than 100 miles in the Land Rover and covering most of the 60,000-odd hectares. And the more I saw of it, the more I wondered how Chips had ever imagined he could make a profit and who the hell would be fool enough to buy it off him. The percentage rake-off he had promised me faded like a desert mirage. ‘Looks different when we’ve had some rain,’ McIver said hopefully that first evening. And his wife, a quiet, solid woman, added, ‘It’s real beaut then, the grass coming green, and the flowers.’ They had two young kids, a boy and a girl. They were a nice family, and I was sorry for them, hoping that whoever bought the station would let them stay on. They seemed to love the place, something it was hard for me to appreciate, seeing it in a dry spell with nothing growing and the sheep looking gaunt and half-starved.
But by the third day Munnobungle was beginning to get under my skin — the wide skies, the sense of space, and the birds flocking round Deadman’s Hole, a pool in a dry tributary of the Burdekin. It was only 5 miles from the homestead and about the only water I saw on the place. I was riding a horse that day and beginning to understand why Chips had so enjoyed the time he’d spent on the station.
It was my last day there, and that evening I persuaded McIver to drive me over to the hotel at Mushroom Rock on the Burdekin, which was the nearest place I could buy him a beer. I still needed clarification on some of the sale details I had prepared, and I thought it would be easier to discuss them away from the homestead. By then he had become resigned to the inevitable, and we were on reasonably friendly terms, so that when I had got the information I required, I began to tell him about my own problems. I think that was when I first saw him smile. ‘So we’re both of us in the same boat, eh, wondering where the hell we go from here?’
He was no help to me, merely repeating what the estate agents had said, but more colourfully and in greater detail. ‘It’s a tough life, a tough country. No place for a Pommie unless he’s got a helluva lot of capital and doesn’t mind how much he loses.’ When I asked him about the islands, he shrugged. ‘There’s the copper-mining and plantations, that’s about it. Some smart boys, Canadians some of them, are doing well selling to the indigenous population. That’s in PNG, government contracts mainly. It’s what I hear anyway. I never bin there. But I might,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘I might pack it in here and try my luck, ‘cept that I got a family to provide for.’
I told him about the Holland Line then, and asked him whether he knew anything about it, or the family. But he shook his head. ‘There was a Holland on Bougainville became something of a war hero. One of the coast watchers. I remember my father talking about him. Stayed on when all the others had left and fought his own private war.’
‘Was that Colonel Lawrence Holland?’
‘Could be.’ He nodded. ‘He was a colonel, that I do remember.’
‘Did Rowlinson mention a man named Black Holland?’ I asked.
‘Yes, that’s right. He did.’ He frowned. ‘I remember now. He came back full of some story about an aborigine he’d met. Tried to sell him a share in a mine. The Dog Weary gold mine. That was it.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Oh, I don’t recall that. Only the name Black Holland. It seems the abo killed him in a brawl over the ownership of the mine. I remember Rowlinson was full of it at the time, thought it a damned funny story.’ And when I asked him whether the killing had happened locally, he said, ‘Oh, dear, no. Cooktown, I think. Rowlinson had just been to Cooktown to see where Captain Cook had repaired the Endeavour after she’d hit the reef.’
He couldn’t tell me anything more, but when we got back to the homestead and I showed him the letter the stamp dealer in Sydney had given me, he agreed the aborigine’s name might have been Minya Lewis. ‘Reck’n that’s it. Welsh and Cornish miners, they were in on all the gold strikes, and the Palmer River was full of the stuff until the Chinks mined it all out.’
He could tell me nothing more except that there was an amazing graveyard out beyond Cooktown that included a Chinese burial place, also an old Edwardian hotel with frosted glass windows and a large wall painting that included some of the old-timers that still hung around the bar. He had been there only once. Took the wife and kids up there, but it’s a helluva journey unless you fly up with Bush Pilots Airways.’