Free Beyond the Black Stump by Nevil Shute Page A

fifty-six miles over the bush tracks had a sixteen-millimetre talkie outfit, and gave a show in his garden each Saturday night, on films flown up from Perth.
    “I don’t know. Are you going?”
    “I usually go over. Makes a change.”
    “I don’t know if they’re going over this time or not. Ma sometimes likes to go.”
    “Tell me on the air tomorrow night, in the natter session.I’ll call in here and pick you up if no one else wants to go.”
    She smiled at him. “All right.”
    He drove off in the jeep, and she turned back to the homestead. James Connolly and Joseph Plunkett had finished unloading the drums from the semi-trailer, and had gone back to the stockyard with their father, to go on with the horses. Their mother, the Countess Markievicz, came out of the laundry with a great basket of damp clothes and began to hang them on the wires strung between the laundry and the store, a shapeless, coal-black woman, very ugly, who had been slim and even good-looking in an aboriginal way thirty years before. By the time she had finished hanging out the last garments in the basket the first ones would be ready to take down to iron, which she would do in the verandah of the laundry. That was her daily work for all the days of the year; it did not seem to her monotonous.
    The Judge came out with the letters he had written and showed them to Uncle Tom and Mrs. Regan, who approved them. The letters were sealed up and stamped, and given to Spinifex Joe, now waiting for them at his truck. He dropped them in the mail bag, said good-bye, and got into the cab. The starter groaned, the diesel belched black smoke, the blacks got up on to the tray, and the vehicle moved off upon the next stage of its week-long journey. Life at Laragh Station sank back into its normal, quiet routine. The women cooked and mended, the aboriginal women moved languidly about the housework. Outside, Pat Regan and his half-caste sons broke horses in slow time and rode out quietly to the water-holes to move the sheep around, generally in the cool of the early morning. In the heat of the day they worked in the shade, maintaining the cars and trucks and pumps and lighting system. The Judge taught school in the morning and took a siesta in the afternoon, dreaming perhaps of Waynflete’s chapel or of the cloisters of Dunchester Cathedral, or merely of the incredible and ever increasing current account in the Commonwealth Bank in Perth. Mrs. Regan wrote letters every afternoon in the verandah, rather illiterate letters to each of her children; her main interests lay with them. Nobody at Laragh Station worked very hard; they bred a great many children, drank a good deal of rum, and made a good deal of money thatthey seemed to be unable to dispose of and that was rapidly becoming a responsibility to them, and a nuisance.
    Mr. Bruce and his party arrived in the district a few days later. They came with two closed vans full of electrical recording gear, and a big four-wheel-drive truck containing all their other equipment. These were brand new American vehicles that attracted a good deal of interest at the places they had stopped at on their route. Donald Bruce was the only Australian in the party, and the only one who had taken part in the previous geological survey of the district. He was a public servant from the Bureau of Mineral Resources. The other six members of the party were American employees of the Topeka Exploration Company Inc., headed by a Mr. Stanton Laird. When Mr. Bruce had introduced his party to the pastoralists upon whose properties they were to work he would retire to his office in Melbourne and leave them to their job.
    They had hoped to arrive at Laragh Station on a Saturday afternoon. In fact, they took a wrong track between Malvern Downs and Mannahill which took them fifteen miles out of their way and landed them on the edge of a dry creek that Mr. Bruce could not recognise and knew to be wrong. They stopped and rigged their radio and made