Book Bite: Women of a Certain Age

What’s it like to be a woman over 40? In Women of a Certain Age 15 writers including Liz Byrski, Krissy Kneen and Brigid Lowry share their stories of identity and survival, and celebrate getting older and wiser, and becoming more certain of who you are and where you want to be. In this extract, Sarah Drummond shares an adventure she had while researching the story of a man consigned to an unofficial witness protection program in the 1920s.

LIVING AT CLARKIE’S CAMP
Last night I dreamed of the sea eagle. It looked down at me from the spar of a power pole on the overpass into the city. In the morning when I awoke at the inlet it was from the marri tree at the water’s edge that the eagle regarded me. It looked sanguine, interested as I called in its own eerie language. Later I saw the bird cruising the shoreline, hunting, wings tilted up like a dancer’s fingers, as it does every day. I called again but the eagle ignored me. When my youngest child left home, I left the city for a place of gothic, dripping cathedrals of trees. It was winter and the potholed and corrugated track to the inlet was littered with curling strips of fallen karri bark and branches. I rented an off-grid cottage at the end of the track crouched under huge marri trees, knotted limbs crazy dancing against a steel grey sky.

Broke Inlet lies thirty-five kilometres from the tiny farming and national parks town of Walpole on the south coast of Western Australia. If you walked through the bracken and zamia palms from my cottage, past the Creepy Shack with its kicked-in asbestos walls, soaked mattresses and magazines from the 1980s, past the massive burled marri that I call my gateway guardian, you will find the townsite of Camfield. Except that this is not a town but a row of jury-rigged shacks. Corrugated iron, salt-faded weatherboards and face cuts gleaned from nearby timber towns, barred windows and padlocks on anything that can be opened or stolen, rainwater tanks, drop dunnies part way up the primary dune to give run to the septic tank or a decent view. The shacks face out to the inlet in a stoic line. Across the water, a break in the coast hills signifies The Cut, where the sandbar breaches once the inlet has swelled to splitting.

I came here to research the story of Clarke, a man consigned to an unofficial witness protection program in the 1920s. Apparently, he lived at a place called Clarkie’s Camp, on the same property as me. There must be many other secrets out here but my interest was the secret of Clarke: to divine his presence, to listen for him in the deep, heavy silences of the inlet, when the wind drops and even the birds are censured by lack of sound. An oyster pale Sunday. The crack of my axe, splitting the air.

A kind of folk mythology surrounds Clarke’s presence at Broke Inlet.

‘Didn’t someone live out his days at Broke on the run from the cops?’

‘Dad reckoned he was a spy and the government hid him there.’ ‘Wasn’t Clarke that butcher? With the big knife?’

The most common story is that Clarke was stashed at Broke Inlet by the state government, and that, once a month, a policeman would leave him supplies at the turn-off from the main road.

Perhaps my move to the inlet was a bit reckless. I hauled all of my belongings out here on a car trailer. My final act of commitment was to throw my mattress on the back of the ute. I was moving two hundred kilometres from my home and into the wilderness. The dirt track from the highway was 10 kilometres long and flooded on the flatlands where the grass trees and tiger snakes thrived. What was I thinking? No electricity. No internet. No mobile phone range. A dog. No money. This is mad, I thought as the ute thudded along through islands of karri and burnt-out swamps.

I assembled my bed in the lounge room that night, lit the fire and took two benzos; leftover morsels from the panic attacks I experienced after my friend died. I sat up in bed and stared through the big windows into the gloom scrawled with the ancient silhouettes of trees. The moon glowed the water. There was no-one else here but me.

Except there was. My dog burst into hysterical barking at three in the morning. Someone or something was walking around the cottage. I could hear grunts and twigs breaking. Wild pigs? No, because a light flashed. A headlamp perhaps. A gloamy shape walked past the lounge room window. Oh, here we go, I thought.

I was still awake at dawn when my dog barked again. More growling. Two dogs the size of lions sniffed at the door. The neapolitan mastiff’s coat was blue, like a burmese cat, his huge head grizzled with folds of skin, a flashing LED light the shape of a bone hanging from his collar. He and the brindle great dane turned and loped away, balls the size of a man’s fist swinging against their scarred haunches.

The next day, driving into town for supplies, I met some pig hunters. The first ute full of men stopped beside me on the track and the driver wound down his window. Skinheaded with a scar down the side of his face and another across his forehead, he chewed as he talked, fast. He looked a bit pinned. His voice was gravelly.

‘Gidday, love, seen any pigs?’

Once I’d wound down the window, my dog peered over my shoulder and all hell broke loose. On the tray of his four-wheel drive, four lean, whiskery lurchers in leather chest harnesses and bristling GPS wires raised a racket at the sight of my dog. Behind the lurchers was the cage of killers: chunky brindled pig dogs with spike collars and teeth like T-rexes.

‘No,’ I said in a small voice.

‘Well. Whaddya up to then, love?’

‘Oh, you know, just heading into town.’

The second ute stopped behind him. Four men and more dogs of the same ilk.

‘She’s a nice-looking dog you got there. Got a bit of rotti in her, ay? She’d be good to have around. We’re going up the Shannon after pigs. Or maybe marron. Seen any marron?’

The dogs were still bellowing, egged on by the ute-load behind them.

‘Shut the fuck up!’

They drove on, and I drove into town, laughing. The last time I saw men like that was in the Northern Territory.

I thought they were extinct on this gentrified south coast. Straight out of Mad Max and here they were on the Broke track. On my return, with shopping bags full of horseradish, cheese, toilet paper, milk, wine and a cooked chook, my internal Deliverance scenarios began to do me in. It was pouring with heavy rain, beginning to feel like it would be inches. What if the hunters decided against the Shannon River, sheltered at the huts and started partying? What if they were at my place?

I put my big fishing boots outside the front door to make it look like a man lived there. I walked the hundred metres to the gate and shackled it shut.

‘Do you get scared sometimes?’ asked Patti.

‘Yeah, I get scared sometimes,’ I said to Patti. She stared at me.

‘Does anyone else live out there?’

‘No.’ Lots of people ask me this. ‘People come out on holidays and weekends though.’

‘A bloke lived at Broke,’ Patti said. ‘Now. What was his name? My husband took food and supplies out to him. What was his name?’

‘Clarke?’ I hardly dared to hope. It would have been more than fifty years ago.

‘Yes! Clarke. Clarkie. My husband, bless him, he used to do the milk run to Manji once a week. Picked up all the milk and cream along the way. He’d come back from town with everything we needed in Walpole, the kids’ shoes, clothes. Took him 10 hours or more, that run.’

‘He was our lifeline,’ Pat nodded, ‘in those days.’

‘He never told me about that, you know,’ Patti said. ‘Just before he died, he told me he’d taken food out to that bloke at Broke for decades. Never said a word.’

So that was how Clarke was sustained and remained a secret: the milkman bound to confidentiality by an arm of the law. I wondered about the policeman who was supposed to have dropped supplies for him. There must have been a quarrel in the mind of that copper – feeding the man who’d helped hide the hacked-up bodies of his two colleagues.

In 1926, Clarke testified that he was in the parlour of a Kalgoorlie pub with two of his mates, Coulter and Treffene. He told the court that Coulter had requested Clarke’s help. While stealing gold at a plant that morning, they were surprised by the gold squad detectives, Pitman and Walsh. To avoid arrest, Treffene and Coulter shot both detectives in the face. They told Clarke that seeing as he was part of their operation and had a car, he should help them dispose of the bodies. Clarke drove them back to the plant where they cut up the bodies with butcher knives from the hotel kitchen. After a failed attempt at a cremation, Clarke drove through the night, with the hessian-wrapped remains of the policemen in the boot of his car, to an isolated mineshaft.