Sarah's Baby. Margaret Way

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СКАЧАТЬ settlement, it was called O’Connor’s Waterhole in memory of one of the most romantic and foolhardy of explorers, Sweeney O’Connor, a young Irish adventurer who once enjoyed a spell in an English jail before being put on a boat to Botany Bay, where the good colonists were shocked by his howling hotheadedness and lunatic ideas.

      O’Connor, to no one’s surprise, all but perished on the site of the town. This was in the early 1800s when he was well into his doomed trek to find the fabled inland sea. Many Europeans in those days were convinced that a sea lay at the continent’s center when it really lay underground in the Great Artesian Basin. Only O’Connor’s fervent prayers—and he later confessed he had to dig deep to remember any—and the intervention of a great thunderstorm plucked him from the greedy arms of death. Life-giving water filled the dry creek bed where he and his faithful Indian sepoy, Gopal, had made camp, along with their four camels and small herd of goats. Ironically, the lot of them nearly drowned in the flash flood, although they emerged on dry land, smiling and blessing their various gods.

      Instead of the inland sea O’Connor had boasted he would swim in, he found a land of savage grandeur, blazing heat, vivid color and monstrous rock formations that had the power to undergo spectacular color changes. To O’Connor’s eyes, it was “the most violent, most bizarre environment on God’s earth” until it was refreshed and reborn by rain. Hell and paradise as a matter of course.

      That long-ago thunderstorm saved O’Connor’s life although he was to die at the age of twenty-nine, a scant two years later with an Aboriginal spear sunk deep in his belly. A tragic end, the more so since he’d left behind someone he loved with a baby kicking in her womb.

      When the fledgling sheep stations started to prosper and the settlement developed into a service town, O’Connor’s Waterhole, already elevated to O’Connor’s Crossing, reverted to its Aboriginal name. Koomera refers to a stopping place with plenty of moojungs (birds), nerrigundahs (berries) and a rock pool or waterhole (koomera). So Koomera Crossing became a place of safety and promise. A place where a man had the opportunity to make a new life for himself, where he could raise a family. Or hide. These were the men who broke rules. Men who rebelled against the confines of the city. These were the adventurers and the visionaries and—it has to be said—a few out-and-out villains.

      At the present time, some fifteen hundred people call this outback shire home. A relative handful of people with vast, majestic, open spaces to themselves. Everyone in town knows what everyone else is doing; at least they all like to think they do. In any event, gossip whips around Koomera Crossing like the wind in a dust storm. It’s always that way in a bush town, but the community is closely knit, its members unfailingly supportive of one another in time of need.

      The town is located more than one thousand miles northwest of the state capital of Brisbane. It continues to serve this important sheep- and cattle-raising region as a vital transportation point.

      Koomera Crossing has a mayor, a rich woman and handsome, with her thick shock of hair cut like a man’s. Enid Reardon, born McQueen. Enid is a forceful, energetic, out-spoken woman who’s spent her life trying to live up to her mother, the matriarch Ruth, but will never make it. Enid, for instance, has never done an unthinkable thing. Ruth has.

      The McQueens are one of the oldest pioneering families in this vast area, and they all but own the town. The town geographically comes under the heading of the Channel Country. This is an extraordinary part of the world—riverine desert, quintessential outback. Deeper into the southwest pocket, even more remote, is the home of the country’s cattle kings, with their giant sprawling stations that carry the nation’s great herds.

      The Channel Country is immense. Seemingly without end. There, one cannot escape the untamability of the land or fight its powerful allure. To the Aborigines, the Channel Country is a region of magic and mystery rich in Dreamtime legend, many parts of it capable of inspiring fear. The area covers at least one-fifth of the state and is more than twice the size of Texas. The name—Channel Country—refers to the great complex network of braided, interconnecting water channels, billabongs, lagoons and creeks, through which the Three-Great-River system, the Diamantina, Georgina and Cooper’s Creek, make their way to what remains of that fabled lake of prehistory, Lake Eyre. Known as Katitanda to the Arabana, Tirari and Kujani desert tribes who won’t go near it. The lake fills rarely, to the wonderment of man, beast and bird. Only twice in the twentieth century, in 1950 and 1974. Its surface, all four thousand square miles of it, is mostly covered by a glittering pinky-white “polar” salt crust, some fifteen feet deep. It’s as incongruous as the pack ice it resembles in the red heart of the desert.

      Ruth McQueen, already halfway to being a law unto herself, saw the lake fill in 1950 when, as a young woman, she and her husband, Ewan, took a joyride over it in their private plane. Ewan was destined to die in a plane crash years later, when his Cessna came down in very turbulent conditions just outside Alice Springs in the Red Centre. Flying is a tricky business in the outback. The air is so hot there’s little or no feeling of buoyancy, of riding the air currents. It’s almost as if an aircraft could suddenly plunge like a meteorite out of the cloudless cobalt sky.

      This was the fate of the much-loved, much-respected Ewan McQueen, leaving the devastated Ruth alone with two children, Stewart and Enid, to rear. But Ruth is a great survivor. As soon as she could cope with her grief, she took over the reins, running the family’s historic sheep station with all the energy and skill her husband had. A task nothing short of heroic, but Ruth employs something Ewan had never used: a ruthless hand forever poised in the air, ready to slam someone down. This has earned her many enemies. Something else Ewan McQueen never had.

      So the McQueens are held in love and hate. They are the most powerful and influential family in the Northwest, their historic run, Wunnamurra, named after the fiercely predatory eagle hawks that patrol the desert skies. The founder of their dynasty, Dougray McQueen, a Scot who had traveled the world, noticed these birds of prey when he first made camp on the site of his future homestead. This was in the mid-1800s. A man of great strength, McQueen flourished in the harsh, remote environment, so different from anything he’d ever known or ever seen on his travels. It all but defied logic that he chose to build his life there.

      His first bride, Fiona, a cousin and a young woman of breathtaking beauty, was brought out from Scotland to Dougray’s immense pride and joy. Fiona lost her reason within a year of arrival. The heat as good as killed her. The isolation! The primitive, overwhelming landscape! The strange indigenous people with their glistening black skin and incomprehensible language. The terrible taste of creek water. The food. The millions of strange birds with their strange names—kookaburras?—their brilliant plumage, their strident cackles and mournful calls. The deprivations a gently reared young woman was forced to endure. It was all too much to bear. Fiona, in a distressed state of mind and in the absence of her husband, wandered off into the bush and disappeared without a trace, despite a huge search that employed the most skilled trackers on earth, the Aboriginals. A number of people over the years claimed to have seen Fiona wandering the lignum swamps, her long, curly red hair hanging unkempt and tangled down her back, face pale and strained, glittery, staring eyes. She wears a long flower-sprigged dress, the hemline dripping moss and mud. The claimants were not fanciful people, either, but iron-nerved family and tough stockmen already familiar with the eerie nature of the Australian bush and its foreboding moods.

      Dougray remarried a short time later. He wanted sons. Another Scottish girl, Eleanor, not nearly so bonny, but full of fight. This one had the advantage of an adventurous nature. From that point on, with Eleanor willing and able to take over domestic affairs while producing six children (two dying in infancy), Wunnamurra prospered. It rose to a position of great wealth and prestige as Australia emerged as the greatest producer and exporter of wool in the world. Getting rich off the sheep’s back, as the saying goes. Even before wool sales went into a decline, the McQueens diversified, raising cattle as well, growing wheat on their newly acquired properties in the rich highlands of the central Darling Downs, investing in СКАЧАТЬ