He Brought Them All Back

The road that runs east out of Jindera was new to all three of us, which was most of the reason we took it. We filled both water tanks at the town waterfill point first, on the principle that you never know, and then pointed the convoy towards Canberra. Not that Canberra was close. It sat a fortnight of camps away at least, and between the sports oval at Jindera and the start of Sal's final placement lay the last genuinely loose days we had, the ones with nothing booked into them and no station platform waiting at the end of them. We intended to spend them slowly.

The Murray met us wide. Held back behind the weir it had given up behaving like a river altogether, lying flat and pale right across the country, and we crossed it on the Bethanga Bridge, out of New South Wales and into Victoria. On the far side the road bent around to follow the shoreline. A sign announced it as the Great River Road, which told us plainly enough what it hoped to grow up to be. Victoria already has one famous drive, and the ambition here was not subtle. The country did not need the help.

We followed it for an hour or more, and somewhere along the way the water pulled itself back in. The flat sheet of it narrowed and quickened and became a river again, moving properly, with banks close enough to speak across. We had camped on the Murray before, at Barmah in the first weeks of all this and later at Gunbower and Moama and Echuca, and we had known it there as a slow brown thing in no hurry to arrive anywhere. This was the same water, a long way upstream of ever learning that patience.

The camp we had chosen had been flagged as possibly closed, flood damage, so we drove towards it with a backup already marked. It was closed. The gate was chained and the sign on it had weathered enough to suggest it had been that way a while. We turned around without much ceremony and drove the eighteen kilometres on to the next one, which the maps call Gadds Bend and the signage calls Walwa Camping Reserve, and which was open, empty, and set down close to the water.

Three or four days, we said. At least three or four. The river ran hard past the camp, quick and cold and clean, and there was nobody else in the reserve.

There was, however, a herd of cattle.

They were not wild and they were not shy. They had plainly been camped alongside before and had drawn the reasonable conclusion that people mean interest and possibly food, and they came at the vehicles nose first, the way children come at anything new. A cow leaning its head on the side of the bus at close range sounds precisely like somebody knocking to be let in. Grammy's van got the same attention. Whatever was hers and whatever was ours, they wanted a closer look at all of it, and within the hour the smell of cattle had worked its way into everything we owned.

The portable solar panels were the real trouble. Laid flat on the ground to catch the low winter sun, they sat at exactly the height and angle of something a cow might reasonably decide to stand on. Anth spent the afternoon on his feet. Out of the bus, over to the panels, arms up, watch them amble off four or five metres, back inside, wait, out again.

Grammy was better at it. Several times she went at them properly and they took her seriously, wheeling away up the bank and out into the paddock, and for half an hour at a stretch the reserve would be quiet and ours again.

It was during one of those half hours that Anth walked off up the track to look for a geocache. He was most of the way back before he worked out, from the sound behind him, that he had acquired the entire herd. They came up the track after him in a loose column, unhurried and entirely committed, and he delivered every last one of them back to the bus and Grammy's van. Half an hour of her work, undone in the time it took him to walk home.

By dusk we both understood we were not going to win this, though neither of us said so aloud, because saying it aloud meant giving up the three or four days.

They were still there after dark. We lay in the bus and listened to them breathing on the other side of the panel, to the wet tearing of grass being pulled up somewhere near the front wheel, and to the occasional heavy shift of an animal deciding to lean on something.

We said it in the morning, over coffee. One night. There was another camp an hour further on, and nothing here we could defend, except the river, and the river was not the problem.

Before we pulled out, Anth took his sling down to the shallows. He chose the stones slowly, small ones, smooth ones, turning them over in his palm and rejecting most, and then stood on the Victorian bank and threw them across. Forty-five minutes of it. The stones went up and out and came down into New South Wales, one after another, and not one of them accomplished a single useful thing.

The cattle watched from the top of the bank, entirely unbothered, having already won. Anth picked one more stone out of the shallows, weighed it, and put it into another state. Then we pulled out, and left them the reserve.Read more