On January 1st, I learned that January 26th is Australia Day; this isn’t likely the first time I’ve learned this, but it’s the first time I decided to do something about it, and that something was read. And, on this colonial holiday, indeed most of my reading has been by Australian settlers, who weren’t the land’s original inhabitants, but there are some First Nations’ writers—like Kim Scott and Alexis Wright—in my stacks too.

Myrtle Rose White’s No Roads Go By (1932) is a slim volume about the seven years she spent as a young wife at Noonameena (Lake Elder, South Australia) on an 8000-square-mile cattle station, which someone describes to her as “a terrible, terrible place”. She doesn’t mind, she says, but agrees it’s not a place for children. The illustrations by Elizabeth Durack were added to a 1956 reissue, pen-and-ink bringing the sandstorms and camels to life. There’s a lot of love in the family, in which Little’un is the most prominent (a horse-loving daughter with a dog named Bluey) with husband/father Boss mostly off-stage, preoccupied with station concerns. Like Susanna Moodie over here, she has some lucky problems, too, like finding good help, and most candidates are soon exited:

“She was one of those sweet-natured persons who accede to everything you ask, but without the slightest intention of carrying out your wishes. If you have met one of the breed you probably know what it feels like to want to commit murder.”

Another story set on a cattle station is The Lost Hole of Bingoola (1942) by Leila and Kilroy Harris, who worked as a cattle drover while doing newspaper work in Australia. The first half (nearly) is devoted to a “blackfeller” named Binda, one of the Aboriginal (in the authors’ time, now First Nations) men working in exchange for food and security. Binda’s life is full and complete: he attends the ritual which confirms his role as a provider for his people, he teases the young women who launder their fabrics in the waterways, hunts kangaroos—but also comes into conflict with the medicine man, who distrusts the “whitefellers”. One of these is Syd, whose father challenges prevailing prejudices and invites the aborigines to work on the ranch, particularly skilled trackers like Binda, whose abilities ultimately save the station and inhabitants. Unlike White’s book, this is written for children, but the authors confront contradictions and highlight the two cultures’ struggles to survive inhospitable conditions.

“In those few moments it was as if Binda felt all the wrongs which the Australian Aboriginals had endured from the white men. He saw them driven from their towris, the tribal hunting grounds, while cattle and sheep thrived where blacks should have grown fat. He saw them punished by a law which was quick to protect the rights of the white man but seemed to know nothing of the blackfellows’ needs. Somehow, these ideas which he could not have put into words surged through his mind.”

Just before Dora Birtles’ 1946 novel The Overlanders opens, Helen has been pulling cows from a waterhole. (Birtles worked on the film of the same name, with writer-director Harry Watt, and that forms the basis of her novel.) It feels like familiar territory, though Birtles’ style is more lyrical and her narrative more deliberately shaped. Finally, I no longer have to look up mulga to recall it’s acacia, brumbies to know they’re wild horses, and I’m no longer surprised to find a camel. Mud and injuries, drought and mosquitos are all anticipated:

“So, often, through spectacles of supreme interest to the poet or geologist or artist, he rides like a blind man, knowing only the essentials that are important to him, water and grass, and letting the rest go by in a sort of dream, taking notice of each in its course but vaguely; forgetting, when he leaves the forest, what a rain forest looks like; forgetting, when he leaves the semi-desert, the elements that made it so dreary, so numbing to his recollection; forgetting, til he sees and recognises it again, the familiar pattern of long grass waving under wind and dying out under scorching sun; forgetting, till he endures it again, the horror of parched early and panting beasts.”

Even in Alice Springs (1999) by Nikki Gemmell, which is primarily about a daughter’s complicated relationship with her father (and her father’s complicated relationships with everyone), there is a coating of cows. Gemmell’s style is suitably fragmented, though not spare—which often is the case with fragmented perspectives—but abundantly metaphored. When Snip receives an inheritance from her grandmother, she also receives a note instructing Snip to find her father, Bud, which involves returning to an Aboriginal community, where Snip is known but doesn’t exactly feel at home. Stopping to see her mother en route, Snip feels badly that she‘s chronically unable to do what her mother needs her to do (and doesn’t notice that her mother has been chronically unable to do what Snip needed either). In short, everyone comes up short; at first, I didn’t think I was going to connect (and Gemmell orchestrates and sustains that disconnect) but in the end I really wanted Snip to recognize that she was enough—for the guy with whom she travels to Alice Springs, for her parents, and for her own self.

“The place they drive to on the outskirts of the community has ground that’s weary. Snip can hardly see it in the thick dark but she can feel the land’s meanness, she can feel the barrenness thousands of cattle hooves have stamped into it. A twisted bit of muffler rears up at them like a petrified snake.”

The cattle station in Kim Scott’s True Country (1993) occupies only two pages and the cows don’t make an appearance, which is appropriate, given that this Noongar writer is writing about the land’s original inhabitants rather than settlers. This, his debut novel, immediately establishes him as a chronicler of the Aboriginal (at the time of publication, now First Nations) peoples who inhabit what’s today southwestern Australia, and the direct, clear prose combined with rotating perspectives, demonstrates great control and talent. My favourite scene includes an Aboriginal woman telling the story, assembled from her own experience and her ancestors’ memories, of an early meeting of whites and her ancestors. “She pointed to the books on the table. ‘If you find it, it might tell you that way. So I tell people, like I do now, to you, the right way it happened. The true way, and what we people think.’” She suggests the listener could “do that too, maybe” which is an invitation to reconcile and, throughout, Scott presents the panoply of possible responses to that invitation. Alongside some fine descriptions.

  “Earlier that day they had all been there, in the mangroves between the main shops and the high tide mark. There were many people, a couple of flagons. Nearly always, it seems, there are some people there, drinking. Hiding away, trying to disappear from this world, make one where they fit better. That mangrove spot is not bad when the mozzies and midgies stay away. You can catch up with people, everyone will be there some time. Play cards, talk; not all people drink. It is almost only Aboriginal people that go there. There must be some shame to it, then.”

Next time, more talk of Australian literature. Is it AustLit or AusLit?