SOMEWHERE CLOSE but forever unreachable, a curlew is wailing like a soul lost in the night, and as I lay in my swag, I understand that thanks to covid, and all its bullshit, this bird is now singing my song.
The great gift I was gifted by Covid was the honour of attempting to capture the beauty of Australians, populating my time.
Today I’ll be tagging along with Luke and these other ringers as they muster cattle on remote and rugged property lost somewhere behind Mt Isa.
It’s 5.30 am, and today my day starts now.
After taking a piss, the dawn reveals these gum tree covered, iron ore hills that I couldn’t see when we arrived last night. They are the fossilized remnants of a taller range; broken vertebrae that time keeps cracking, but as yet has failed to remove them from the view.
Near the donga, with the camp kitchen inside, the ringers are yawning as they haunt the rekindled fire.
Thinner than bones, they have camp coffees in their hands, red dirt in their skin, and with rollies in their lips, they watch the fire with a reverent silence, their private eyes full of their unanswered questions, as their jacket collars stand erect to shield their necks from the morning chill.
One of them is a helicopter pilot and today I will watch, in awe, as he flies over this range like a dragonfly with a death wish.
Luke told me that these flyers operate in what other helicopter pilots call the death curve. If anything goes wrong, up there, they will be so close to the ground, when it does, that there will be no time to do anything but leave us.
Yet despite a life of constant risk this pilot is a quiet man, even his reactions seem too slow and considered for his line of work, and although he’s friendly and laughs at the wit of these other men and even gracious accepts the few jibes aimed at him, jibes he does not return, the flames reveal that there is a curlew in his eyes, but whatever he’s searching for isn’t hiding in these flames.
Last night I approached him for an interview, but he didn’t want to share his story.
This morning though, he tells me how he can spends upwards of six months living in his tiny flying machine, that doesn’t even doors. Alone he’ll travel all over the upper half of this hard vastness, flying over landscapes that perhaps only he will get to see, for the sun and the rains are constantly repainting it.
His helicopter has no heater, and there is no altimeter or speedo. There is just a stick, a few switches, two plastic seats, himself and a .22 rifle holstered between the seats. That’s for the cattle that falter as they flee from his blades, and or the wild dogs.
He’s licensed to fly several helicopters, including the six seaters they use to fly riggers out to the offshore oil rigs, but he prefers the mustering. Out here he has no one looking over his shoulder and when I ask him, he told me that he never gets sick of the view. That’s one of the main reasons he’s out here, he said; just another lonesome spectator to the glory of God’s more isolated work.
He started flying when he was nineteen, now in his mid fifties, he talks about his business partner, who is also his wife with respect and fondness. She’s out there somewhere, looking after their finances as he stands here huddled in his jacket, half lit by the fire, and a silhouette against the dawn, as he waits for the station owner to arrive with the plans for the day.
Soon I will watch him vanishing over the remnants of mountains, flying through the trees, so close to the ground and at a speed that even though I’ll be watching it, I won’t believe it.
There is a border between life and death and this man spends his working hours tearing across it, back, forwards and up and down; A cowboy in the sky herding more cattle into the pens than all these ringers, in their scratched and dented four-wheel drive buggies, put together.
It’s also his job to chase down the cows that manage to evade these ringers and using fear, coerce these cattle back to the compliant, even defeated, herd.
The only man-made thing I’ve seen fly with greater dexterity is a drone, and that’s what’s coming to replace him.
The cost of his services are steep, as is the cost of petrol, and that is still rising. By comparison, drones are a dime a dozen and if they fall out of the sky no one dies, and for the cost of one helicopter they could replace him with hundreds.
Luke told me later that they on other stations they were already trialing them, and a few days later on the road to Normanton, even our little drone, that we call ASIO, will manage to scare an entire herd of cows.
If that evolution happens most of Australia will never hear about it, and those that do will marvel at the cleverness of the drones and even agree that it’s far safer and cheaper, leaving only these ringers, and others like them on other homesteads, to periodically bring up his name and celebrate his exploits around campfires battling to offset the darkness and the cold.
It makes you wonder why life goes to all this trouble of giving us, not only life, but this stage, only to have history racing up from behind, hungry to devour us all. Even these mountains, gilded with the morning sun, can’t slate it’s appetite.
On a break though he takes one ringer’s sons up for a quick joy flight, zooming him over the trees and the broken hills in a series of moments that will become for the boy, a defining memory, as down here, these dust covered ringers laugh at their envy, as the cattle, in their holding pen, huddle together and they study, through the fence, these men huddled around their buggies, hunting the sky for the returning chopper, unaware, as they roll their cigarettes, to how, in this age of compliance, how rare they are; these descendants of unknown heroes, these apostles of the gums, these hard-working, free loving, cattle mustering, men.
In late afternoon, he will fly off to this next job and come evening, for he is not allowed to fly at night, he’ll either land near the closest homestead, where country hospitality will see them offer him a bed or, if he is too far out, he’ll land out here, in the remote bush, then after pulling out his swag from the passenger seat, he’ll build his own fire, under the dark emu and her pale wash.
I can see him there now, in a mind-image stolen from history. Alone, and with no want to move, he’s studying the flames, with longer eyes as inch by inch they come so close, that if he turned around he’d see them dancing in the eyes of the black men that history already, and forevermore, devoured.
Michael Gray Griffith
It's difficult to imagine how the last 5 years would have been without you. even now, you write about a pilot - you seem to anticipate what's happening in my life - we have a young guest staying in our home, who is a trainee pilot!
love this and wtf in equal measure.