THE SHEARING SHED

Neddie stood outside the empty shearing shed and thought how it used to smell of sheep droppings, greasy wool and sweat. The only smells now were dust, bleached wood and rusting iron. He closed his eyes in the stilled silence and remembered the excited barking of dogs, the plaintive calls of ewes to lambs, felt the heat under the iron roof pressing on his back; saw the other shearers washing hands and faces in the cement trough at the end of each day.


Neddie might have stood for hours, lost in memories if he hadn't heard a voice calling Ned-die. He opened his eyes and listened with his head to one side. His ears weren't so good these days - he wondered if the spirit ancestors were calling - but no, they wouldn't call him by that name. It's the white fella who calls him Neddie. He rubbed his jaw and screwed his eyes up. He knew he had a proper strong name once. Bestowed by his grandmother. She had tried to make him keep it in his heart, but she died when he was young and he no longer recalled the sounds. They would be foreign now, on his tongue.


Neddie gave up trying to remember his name. It didn't matter anymore, there was nobody left to call him by it. He shrugged, moved into the shade and lowered himself to the ground, easing his bent back into a gap in the timber slats of the shed. He saw John and Simone striding toward the dam and turned his face away. When the young boss introduced them to him yesterday, he had said, 'They're the new owners Neddie, from Sydney, and they've got big ideas for the land.' As they walked away he heard the young boss ask, 'When do you want to demolish the shed? I'd like to tell Ned first.'


Neddie pressed one hand onto the ground and the other against the warm wood of the shed. He was only twenty-two when he asked if he could shear. The old boss had laughed, but your people don't shear Neddie; your people are stockmen. You'd be breaking a family tradition. And last night, when Neddie asked about the shed, the young boss had said, I'm really so sorry, my family can't hold on. He said Neddie must find somewhere else to live, make a new start. The bosses were good blokes, but Neddie could see that, like most white fellas, they would never understand.


Neddie stared at the plain dotted with stands of gums and thought, all my mob lived here since the Dreaming, this land is my tradition even if I lived the white fella ways. He knew he would stay, and wondered what the spirit ancestors would make of him when his time came.


Neddie's only son, young Ned had died at the shed. He collapsed one morning after shearing his twentieth sheep and his spirit flew from his body on the way to the white fella hospital. He had been true, had followed the Dreaming tracks, performed the songs and ceremonies but he was angry too, about things he could not change. The doctor at the hospital said young Ned had a heart defect, said he died from natural causes, and the other shearers - when they thought Neddie couldn't hear - all agreed that young Ned was probably drunk, but Neddie knew young Ned died from all the anger in his heart.


Neddie stretched his stiff legs and watched the sun start its descent. The light softened, the breeze flowed cool against his cheek and he smiled; imagined that it was no longer the shed cradling his back, but his mother. He caught notes of smoke and didgeridoo on the air, felt the stomp of corroboree in his blood and relaxed. He was home.

The new owners were walking back to the house when they saw Neddie slumped beside the shearing shed. His arms were spread, as though embracing the earth on which he lay, and his head was turned toward the plain. His face beneath its shock of grey hair was childlike in repose. John, his visions of pastoral perfection leaking away, touched Simone's arm, 'Why can't he just go away - sleep somewhere else?'


'Maybe he's got nowhere else to go.'


John scowled, 'That's not my problem.'


Simone shrugged and asked 'Whose problem is it then?'


John swatted angrily at the flies, 'Christ, look at these bloody things!'


Shhh,' Simone frowned at the old man near the shed, 'Did you hear that?'


John shook his head irritably, 'What?'


'It sounded like a didgeridoo.'


John snorted at her and cursed the heat. He glared at the silent form in the shade of the shed, and thought it would be just his luck to have bought a legal headache. He itched at a mosquito bite and grumbled, 'There's no way he's staying. No way.'


Simone sniffed, 'Can you smell that? It smells like smoke.'

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