Dirt Music. Melbourne, Victoria: Penguin Group Australia, 2001.
Wireless programme content in real Australia is pedestrian so when I tuned into the indigenous radio station servicing Fitzroy Crossing and heard dirt music – deceptively simple songs as performed by Son House, Mississippi Fred MacDowell, Sleepy John Estes, Dock Boggs and countless other unpolished bluesmen – it was a delight.
From Fitzroy Crossing I drove to King Sound, taking the Derby road that Luther Fox had travelled when hitching a ride in a delivery van with a group of blackfellahs. He saw a semi-trailer stuck deep in mud, its driver perched on the bull-bar while rolling a cigarette. Fox and friends were there in the Wet; there’d been a cyclone.
Heading in the opposite direction, I topped up with fuel at the Willare Bridge Roadhouse. The bridge spans the Fitzroy River twenty-odd kilometres upstream from its mouth. When Luther Fox was there the river had broken its banks and water covered the land but the bridge was intact despite the felled trees and drowned animals carried beneath it by the seething floodwaters so they were able to cross. In the Dry, the sedate Fitzroy is confined to its narrow banks – as I could see from the bridge.
By Part 111 Luther Fox, like me, has had his fill of caravaners. He’s been adopted by Horrie and Bess, a decrepit pair of grey nomads towing a rundown caravan behind a clapped out 4×4 on a run to the wire through the Kimberley Wet. Bess has incurable bowel cancer so wants to experience the raw power of Nature, to go out with a bang. To top it off, the old boilers’ tinny tape-player is assaulting Luther with Prokofiev or Shostakovich when what he wants is dirt music – stuff that comes out of the ground and might be played on the back porch or around a campfire.
Dirt music’s the natural expression of the Fox clan. Through it they express raw human emotion which disturbs the middle-class preference for respectability, politeness which came of the polishing of coins passed from hand to hand in middle-class commerce during capitalism’s emergence as the mode of production in Western Europe, commerce such as that which lined the pockets of Shover McDougall and Jim Buckridge. Dirt music comes closest to the animal instinct about which Bess sought to engage Luther’s interest.
Bess and Horrie are atypical caravaners, the Nissan Patrol boiling over with fan belt trouble as did the Holdens of days gone by. Typical caravaners head south in 170 horsepower vehicles with a mobile holiday home in tow, pulling in for diesel (and to enquire whether or not their fellow travellers obtained near as good a fuel economy as them) at roadhouses on the Great Northern Highway. A young gold miner dressed to the nines in the standard corporate uniform (logo – de rigueur) with whom Luther Fox spoke thought the nomads pathetic superannuated road hogs following the leader around the coastal strip. Luther Fox’s motto is ‘neither a nomad nor a caravaner be’; he has to take up residence, engage in the routines of a place.
The disgruntled mine employee was describing the clockwise retiree. Those heading south at that truckstop were the anti-clockwise variety. Bess and Horrie were out of season clockwise travellers, kindred spirits with Luther Fox but out of sync, of another time – overtaken. Horrie regularly pulls off the bitumen in order for Bess to deal with the discomfort of a dysfunctional bowel. Fox feels trapped: her discomfit and his classical music are enough to drive a man to drink. So when Horrie put the hard word on him to hang out with them once they hit Broome Luther’s in a cleft stick situation: he needs the Nissan to transport him through the black night across the Roebuck Plains but the first glimmer of town lights is the signal to flee. Within an hour of his arrival in Broome, a cyclone from the Timor Sea touched land and cut off Luther Fox’s escape route for days. Roebuck Plain was flooded. Dirt from the Great Sandy Desert had painted the town red and was swept down through the mangroves to wash over the shore.
Georgie Jutland’s Broome had always been an idyllic tropical paradise, even back when Cable Beach was overrun with hippies. It was Northern Queensland without Skase. Four years had passed since her previous visit and (whilst they may not be white-shoe) crass traders had moved in and dolled-up the place. Historic Chinatown had been expanded, ‘improved’, the pearl industry gentrified; there were shopping centres and a housing development. For me, what should have been the ocean to the west was a sea to the east. Broome, that is to say, is a peninsula town, built on a bay – Roebuck Bay named after William Dampier’s ship.
The Nissan Patrol arrived in town after dark because of radiator and bowel boil overs. I usually don’t drive on outback roads at night to avoid the risk of colliding with nocturnal wildlife. But, as those who have read my review of Peter Carey’s A Long Way From Home will understand, I left Broome at dusk.
