Sports are a big part of the town’s life, dominated by Australian Rules football, netball, and cricket. This is true of most wheatbelt towns, but there is much more infrastructure in Northam. Our daughter used to bus a seventy-kilometer round trip to school. An historic town, with the legendary, introduced white swans that have been a feature of European colonization here for over a hundred years. It is the starting point of the famed (and environmentally destructive) Avon Descent, the longest whitewater boat race in the southern hemisphere; that’s in years when there’s any water to race along.
After the Second World War, the town housed many European migrants. Their tales of hardship adjusting to the heat and flies and Spartan conditions are told in a commemorative display at the tourist center. Ironically, given this, Northam has a racist history. Many of the Ballardong Nyungar families of the region were broken up, and the place is notorious for the removal from their Nyungar families of children who were considered to have “white blood.” These children were part of the horrendous reality of the Stolen Generations, the damage of which resounds to this day. Many of the children ended up at the Moore River Settlement, several days’ walk away.
Recently, Northam’s racism and bigotry have run out of control with the announcement of a refugee holding center, for Afghan males, to be established at the old army base. You cannot walk the streets without being confronted by signs screaming “Parasites,” or demonstrations with people wearing T-shirts that declare, “Send back their boats” or “Bomb their boats.” There is a more liberal side to the town (though small in number), who call for humanity and respect for all peoples.
But Northam is a divided town; its indigenous inhabitants experience racism on a daily basis. I was one of those who refused to shop at a major supermarket until charges were dropped against one Nyungar boy (and he was clearly labeled “black” as a pejorative in the media) who was threatened with serious theft charges for possessing an unpaid-for chocolate frog (given to him by a cousin).
On the positive side, there is a firm sense of identity in the black community, with two of the town’s primary schools having 40 percent or more indigenous pupils and significant cultural programmes. The Wheatbelt Aboriginal Corporation is also based there, and there are strong bonds across the various communities outside the racist elements.
Northam is a strongly Christian town (Irish Catholics have been an historically dominant group, along with Anglicans; Baptists and other Protestant denominations now have a strong presence), with deeply conservative views on race, sexuality, and ethnicity. It is also the arts center of the region. The banks and government offices are there, and people from a hundred kilometers or more away do their big shopping and essential business there.
Toodyay
Another early inland town, originally called Newcastle, and at first built on a flood area of the Avon River, despite warnings from Nyungar people that the settlers would be washed out in winter. The town was moved, and the name later changed to avoid clashing with one of the same name in the then colony of New South Wales.
“Toodyay” is derived from a Ballardong Nyungar word meaning “place of plenty.” The area around Toodyay remains rich in native bush and wildlife. There are wandoo, marri, and jarrah woodlands, and York and jam tree environments, such as on our own place. We live about fifteen kilometers north of the town, on a bush block that sees many kangaroos pass by on any given day; that has bobtails and western black monitors, mulga snakes and gwarders, and a wide range of birds, including twenty-eight parrots, red-capped robins, eagles, and tawny frogmouths. There’s an echidna on the block—I see its scratchings daily but have yet to come across it. Our place is strewn with granite and “Toodyay stone,” and there are large granite boulders at the top of the block. The soils around the shire vary from infertile sand to a richer red loam (still low in nutrients).
It’s a tough area—shearers (my brother, further north, is a shearer), farm laborers, bikers, fly-in fly-out miners (who fly north for two weeks on at the interior mines, and back for two weeks off), hobby farms and large spreads mixed together. Jack Daniels and beer are the drinks of choice, and the rock band AC/DC rules. Every year there is a jazz festival in the main street of town, and also the Moondyne Festival, named after a bushranger and escape artist who hid in the hills around the town for many years. Toodyay residents often see themselves as outlaws, and indeed some are. It’s a place of bushy beards and raven-haired women with tats. Alternative lifestylers (Orange People, Wiccans, hermits) live alongside horse breeders, middle-class wine imbibers, and weekend farmers traveling up from the city.
Toodyay is at the edge of the Darling Range, and the Avon River cuts through a range of smaller valleys and hills. It is considered picturesque and is much visited, but in many ways it is a hard-living and violent town. Ferociously hot during summer, it is a high fire-risk area because of the large amount of bush still nestled among the hills. Late in 2009, thousands of acres were devastated by fire, with the loss of thirty-nine houses, many sheds, and many animals. There were no human deaths, though a life was lost in a bushfire here two years before.
Mullewa
Another old inland town, but in the Murchison area six or more hours’ drive north of the capital, Perth. Intensely hot and dry. Home of the Yamatji people, also an area rich in spiritual significance. A place of intense racism on the part of the whites living there. The town is deeply divided and violence is frequent within and between communities.
Mullewa is surrounded by, and services, massive farms. During the seventies my father managed a thirty-thousand-acre spread there, owned by a notorious Perth (and international) millionaire. It is a gun culture out there. In this relatively low rainfall area, the huge sandplain farms rely on large acreages to yield enough to make farming profitable. It’s also a large sheep running area. My brother shears there year-in year-out, being based in the region. He and I went to high school in the regional center, Geraldton, positioned on the coast and about seventy kilometers from Mullewa.
When the paddocks aren’t sand, they are a red dirt almost the color of blood. The vegetation is low and scrubby, with patches of taller trees along the waterways and places where more moisture accumulates. In spring the entire region, at least the uncleared bits and along roadsides, erupts with wildflowers. Tourists drive through at that time of the year, but don’t stay.
The town is still strongly Catholic, and not too far away is Devil’s Creek. Names mean so much, and hide so much. The town has some superb architecture by the Catholic missionary architect Monsignor Hawes, whose churches and associated buildings can be found throughout the northern wheatbelt.
It could be argued that the nonindigenous “side” of the town and the region still perceive themselves as pioneers in many ways. As a kid I got trapped here in a silo with my brother, and met hard, gnarled farm workers who told me about booze, and from whom I learnt that women could piss standing up. Guns were never far away; it was the home of many rooshooters. I started to understand what real horror was. I used to stare into the blank centers of starflowers and wonder. I also used to trap parrots that bit through my fingers.
acknowledgments
ABC Radio National, The Advertiser, The Age, Agni, Antipodes, Best Australian Stories 2006 (edited by Robert Drewe), Best Australian Stories 2007 (edited by Robert Drewe), Best Australian Stories 2010 (edited by Kate Kennedy), Crazyhorse, Families: Modern Australian Short Stories (volume 6, edited by Barry Oakley), Griffith Review, Island, Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Meanjin, The Reader, Southerly, StoryQuarterly. Also to the Literature Board of the Australia Council for a two-year New Work grant to assist in the writing of these stories, and special acknowledgment to the University of Western Australia for a Professorial Research Fellowship and its ongoing support. Thanks to my editor at Ohio University Press, Gillian Berchowitz, for her hard work, sharp insights, and good advice.
Ben