Ryan Butta - The Ballad of Abdul Wade

Published by Affirm Press in 2022
Boon Wurrung Country
28 Thistlethwaite Street
South Melbourne VIC 3205
affirmpress.com.au

Text and copyright Ryan Butta, 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher.
The author acknowledges that the stories told in this book occurred on Indigenous land and that sovereignty was never ceded.

Title: The Ballad of Abdul Wade / Ryan Butta, author.
ISBN: 9781922806000 (paperback)

Cover design by Luke Causby/Blue Cork
Typeset in Bembo by J&M Typesetting

To my father, a man who was happiest on the big rivers, the black soil plains and the red dirt of western New South Wales

Wade was a flamboyant and stylish entrepreneur, with a passion for horse racing on the country circuits. His employees treated him with such respect that he was known locally as an Afghan prince.

Australian Dictionary of Biography

Contents

Prologue

I n 2018, while travelling to visit my parents in the Hunter Valley, I stopped in at Brewarrina, on the banks of the Barwon River in north-west New South Wales. It had been my fathers home town for decades. The son of Italian migrants, he had moved to the area as a teenager in the early 1950s.

I wanted to see if the local information centre had a copy of The Two Worlds of Jimmie Barker , the memoir of a local Aboriginal man. The book was to be a gift to replace my fathers copy, which he had long since misplaced. When the man behind the desk told me they were out of stock, I instead came away with a colourful three-volume history of the town by local historian John George. I knew my father would enjoy flicking through Brewarrinas past, recognising names of old friends and haunts, most long gone and buried.

A few days later, looking through the books for myself, I came across a black-and-white photo of a long string of camels, standing two abreast on a dusty street in Brewarrina. The caption read, Camel team in Bathurst Street late 1890s early 1900s. Stated this way without further explanation, it was as if the camels had magically appeared of their own accord. I was fascinated. How did they get there? Who owned them? What were camels doing in the main street?

Until that moment, Id thought Id known this country out west. It was the country of my summers. School holidays with flies and fleeces and rouseabouts and cooks. A legendary bronc rider by the name of Splinter Bunyan. The shearing shed on Glenmore station. A red kelpie with liquid eyes staring out of a coat of dust and hair, tongue flapping in the hot, heavy air. One time, a swarm of bees in the beams of the shed and a smoking bucket of gum leaves to chase them out so the shearing could continue. And cat heads, always cat heads. Burrs to some, bindis to town folk, these evil little three-pronged buggers would be so thick on the ground that the walk for an evening piss only extended to the last cement step of the shearers quarters. One stride beyond that onto the unpaved ground, and the tiny spikes of cat heads would pull you up short as if to say, where do you think youre going?

My time here as a boy had shaped me. It was the country of baking hot days and red claypans, burnt like the surface of crme brle. The names of the rivers here were transformed into magical chants. Culgoa, Barwon, Bogan, Namoi, Maranoa and Darling. During term time, conjuring the names on my lips was enough to transport me from a school desk to those clay banks under the river gums, stalking through scratchy stands of head-high lignum.

Even as a ten-year-old, I sensed my own insignificance in this vast land. On the Barwon at Brewarrina, I saw the timeless fish traps, or Baiames Ngunnhu, of the Ngemba people, which had been built and maintained over thousands of years. Above me was always the endless blue sky, too expansive to take in entirely. The best you could do was tilt your head skyward and let that blue flood your body, let the vastness in. You are nothing, the sky seemed to say. You will pass.

After that visit to my parents as an adult, I headed home with the photo of the camels lodged in my mind. I stopped again in Brewarrina, sure that I would find quick answers to my questions. That would be that, and the mystery of the camels would be solved. But as it turned out, that wasnt that at all.

My queries at the information centre led me an hour further west, down the B76 highway to Bourke. Thats where the Afghan camp was, I was told.

I had taken my first step on the trail of Abdul Wade.

Part 1

Before Abdul Wade

Chapter 1

I t grabs you by the agates, Jim said. His weathered hand made a claw, calloused fat fingers pointing skywards. He clenched the claw, and my own agates testicles, to city folk flinched involuntarily. And it doesnt let you go.

Jim (not his real name) was talking about the red dirt we were standing on, about 150 kilometres west of Bourke. The red dirt that stretched east and west and went on until it hit that stark blue sky. It was that red dirt that stains deep: cloth, skin, fingernails and souls. It grabs you and never lets go.

Come on, Jim said, marching toward his four-wheel-drive ute. Well take my vehicle. He shot a disdainful glance at my little Holden Barina, nudged into the shade of a lone mulga tree. Jim didnt even consider it a car not for out there. My father would probably have compared the Barina to the Popes nuts, with a word on the futility of both. This country had had Dad by the agates for sixty years.

I tried to find some legroom in Jims passenger seat, but the place where feet normally go was filled with the mechanical necessities of bush life. There were pipes and tubes and metal thingamabobs, whatsamajigs and doodads. I imagined they were carburettors and dipsticks and spark plugs and all sorts of words that Id heard pronounced by men in oil-stained overalls, as they wiped greasy hands on a greasy rag.

The day before, when Id been asking around town for someone to show me Wangamana Station the vast pastoral holding that Abdul Wade bought in the early 1900s and turned into a camel breeding operation a postman Id met suggested I go see Jim.