Morton - One Hundred Years of Dirt

To my Earth mother, Deb.
Im so lucky the universe gave me you.

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

mup-contact@unimelb.edu.au

www.mup.com.au

First published 2018

Text Rick Morton, 2018

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2018

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover design by John Canty

Typeset in Janson 11/17pt by Cannon Typesetting

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

9780522873153 (paperback)

9780522873160 (ebook)

M y sister Lauryn has taken up hunting wild pigs, which is a thing that people do. I have decided to join her and in our pre-hunt briefing she has not been able to guarantee my safety. You might end up in hospital but youre not going to die, she says cheerily down the phone from her home in central Queensland. I fail to see how she can distinguish so clearly between the two options.

Later, she sends me photos of people who have been gored by boars. I think I can see the fat from inside their bodies. I am not entirely sure that is something that is meant to be visible, ordinarily. Im thirty-one and have never knifed a pig.

Lauryn likes to impress upon me that I have gone soft since leaving the cattle station she never had the chance to remember. She might be right. Station life was a medley of deathdeath was our life. It wasnt that we were brutal. Quite the opposite. Our mum Deb always told us that if an animal had a name, it couldnt be eaten.

There was a horse graveyard on the station where our father Rodney heaped the remains of the colts and geldings and mares whod kicked the bucket, or in the case of my brothers tiny steed, rubbed up the wrong way against an old power pole. We devised a plan to supplement our income from the tooth fairy by prying the teeth from the skulls and leaving them under our pillows. The teeth being something in the order of ten times the size of our own, we figured wed be rich. All we needed was a steady supply of dead ponies.

We did fill my turtle drum with too much water and my twin subjects climbed over the edge and died in the desert heat. They say a turtle carries its home with it, but unfortunately for mine, their houses did not come with running water.

No news is good news, which was doubly true when the weekly mail truck turned up and consigned our blue heeler Puppity to the benches of life. My other dog Tyson went for a walk before disappearing completely, although I later discovered he had been shot because he was not a good working animal.

I rescued joeys from the pouches of their mothers after they had been culledDad again, with the rifleand hung one in a pillow case beside my bed.

When a brown snake killed one of Mums budgerigars, and she in turn applied the shovel, I retrieved the birds stiff body the next morning and slammed it on the dining table while she was eating breakfast. You didnt bury him, I scolded.

In hindsight, it had been a big night. The snake had made its way through a flyscreen window into the front room of our house and set about menacing the cockatoos, Bert and Ernie, and a fleet of budgies. Dad was away mustering with my older brother Toby when the snake upset mine and Mums evening, and she was a terrible shot with the gun. The shovel was a grand idea until, in a fit of hysteria, Mum threw the shovel at the snake. We had lost our only weapon and the snake was now armed. After prolonging the skirmish, Mum eventually won the shovel back and finished the job, but we were emotionally exhausted and the room, which looked like a crime scene, was left for the morning.

That Mum was a bad shot did not mean she wasnt willing to use a gun in extreme situations. At dusk one evening when we were both in primary school, Toby and I thought it would be funny to do our best dingo howls 200 metres or so away from the homestead, behind the pig pens where we kept Sooty and Boris. The howls were too convincing and in the faint light of the dying day we saw Mum charge from the station house with a bolt-action rifle that she pointed right at us. We knew she couldnt see for quids, nor shoot straight. Our howls transformed into the pleas of small children in the line of fire and we were spared.

Dingoes, especially in times of searing drought, were a threat to our livelihood but it was the wild pigs that kept us busy. Wild pigs dig up root systems with their tusks and have resolutely destroyed the ecosystems in which they are found. They carry diseases, including worms that affect livestock, and they prey on small animals such as newborn lambs. Mostly we shot them, although my sister has upgraded her approach as an adult.

Lauryn goes out with teams of pig dogs fitted with GPS trackers. She tells me over the phone how her hunts usually go down: The dogs smell or hear the pigs and they go after em. And they bring em down by the ears and we go running after the dogs.

So far, so good. Then Lauryn pauses for effect. You might have to run up to one kilometre.

Cross-country was bad enough at school but there is this to be said for it: we werent made to slaughter a wild animal at the end of the course. The Colosseum was big but nobody made the Romans run that far to knife a gladiator.

Because my sisters pursuit is somehow considered a sport, no guns are used. The killing is done at close range, with a knife. The trick, she says, is to approach the animal from behind after it has been pinned to the ground by the dogs. A person, me for instance, then grabs one of the hind legs to move it out of the way and, with their other hand, plunges the knife into the pigs heart.

Basic anatomy helps a little. Youll have to go between its ribs, Lauryn says.

OK.

And wriggle the knife around while its inside.

Yeah Im going to stop you there, I say quietly to myself, without actually stopping her there. This is important, or something. Im the country kid turned city slicker and Lauryn has gone full-blown country. If my sister needs me to physically and personally kill a pig to prove my credentials to her, Im going to do it. Whole civilisations have been built on a similar premise. Why not a little brothersister bonding?

Im just going to say it now, she says. You will feel the blood run all over your hand.

Goddamn it. I dont think I can do this, I tell her.

No shit! The worst part is the squealing. What she means is the worst part forme is going to be the squealing, because she knows what I am like with pain and blood and the theatre of suffering. She loves it, which is why she became a midwife. That and also because this wild pig huntress is absolutely in love with bringing new life into the world. Its a beautiful contradiction.