A Town like Alice

you'll get water there by digging not a foot below the surface, like as not-even in the middle of the dry." His slow, even tones were strangely comforting. "You go to a place like that and you'll find little diggings all over in the sand, where the kangaroos and euros have dug for water. They know where to go. There's water all over in the outback, but you've got to know where to find it."
    "What do you do at this place Wollara?" she asked. "Do you look after sheep?"
    He shook his head. 'You don't find sheep around the Alice region," he said. "It'd be too hot for them. Wollara is a cattle station."
    "How many cattle have you got?"
    "About eighteen thousand when I come away," he said; "It goes up and down, according to the wet, you know."
    "Eighteen thousand? How big is it?"
    "Wollara? About two thousand seven hundred."
    "Two thousand seven hundred acres," she said. "That's a big place."
    He stared at her. "Not acres," he said. "Square miles. Wollara's two thousand seven hundred square miles."
    She was startled. "But is that all one place - one farm, I mean?"
    "It's one station," he replied. "One property."
    "But however many of you does it take to run it?"
    His mind ran lovingly around the well-remembered scene. "There's Mr Duveen, Tommy Duveen-he's the manager, and then me-I'm the head stockman, or I was. Tommy said he'd keep a place for me when I got back. I'd like to get back to Wollara again, one day…" He mused a little. "We had three other ringers-whites," he said. "Then there was Happy, and Moonlight, and Nugget, and Snowy, and Tarmac…" He thought for a minute. "Nine boongs we had," he said. "That's all."
    "Nine what?"
    "Black boys - black stockmen. Abos."
    "But that's only thirteen men," she said.
    "That's right. Fourteen if you count Mr Duveen."
    "But can fourteen men look after all those cattle?" she asked.
    "Oh yes," he said thoughtfully. "Wollara is an easy station, in a way, because it hasn't got any fences. It's fences make the work. We've got the Palmer River and the Levi Range to the north, and the sand country over to the west; the cattle don't go there. Then there's the Kernot Range to the south and Mount Ormerod and the Twins to the east. Fourteen men is all right for a station like that; it would be easier if we had more whites, but you can't get them. These bloody boongs, they're always going walkabout."
    "What's that?" she asked.
    "Walkabout? Why, an Abo ringer, he'll come up one day and he'll say, 'Boss, I go walkabout now.' You can't keep him. He'll leave the station and go wandering off just in a pair of pants and an old hat with a gun if he's got one, or a spear and a throwing stick, maybe, and he'll be away two or three months."
    "But where does he go to?" she asked.
    "Just travels. They go a long way on a walkabout-oh my word," he said. "Four or five hundred miles, maybe. Then when he's had enough, he'll come back to the station and join up for work again. But the trouble with the boongs is, you never know if they'll be there next week."
    There was a short silence; they sat quietly in the tropic night together on the steps of the atap schoolhouse, exiles far from their homes. Over their heads the flying foxes swept in the moonlight with a dry rustling of leathery wings.
    "Eighteen thousand cattle…" she said thoughtfully.
    "More or less," he said. "Get a good wet, and it'll maybe rise to twenty-one or twenty-two thousand. Then you get a dry year, and it'll go right down to twelve or thirteen thousand. I reckon we lose about three thousand every year by drought."
    "But can't you get them to water?"
    He smiled slowly. "Not with fourteen men. There's enough cattle die of thirst each year in the Territory and Northern Queensland to feed the whole of England. Course, the horses make it worse on Wollara."
    "Horses?"
    "Oh my word," he said. "We've got about three thousand brumbies, but you can't do nothing with them-they're vermin. Wollera used to be a horse station years ago, selling horses to the Indian Army, but you can't sell horses now. We use a few, of course-maybe a hundred, with packhorses and that. You can't get rid of them except by shooting, and you'll never get a ringer to shoot horses. They eat the feed the cattle ought to get, and spoil it, too. Cattle don't like feeding where a horse has been."
    She asked, "How big is Wollara - how long, and how wide?"
    He said, "Oh, I'd say about ninety miles from east to west, and maybe forty-five to fifty, north to south, at the widest part.