21

I could hear the ring of axes. The air was still and heavy and smelt of dust and treacle. I guessed, correctly, that Stu O'Hagen and his sons were clearing new land in the scrub to the north.

I knocked on the wooden frame of the flapping fly-wire door at the back of the house while a yellow dog flung itself against its chain in fury.

"Anyone home?"

But even before I entered I knew that Mrs O'Hagen was not inside and had not been inside for many days. It was a man's kitchen. Flies crawled across the unwashed dishes. An open can of bully beef occupied pride of place amongst the crumbs on the oil-cloth table. It stank of depression, like unwashed sheets on unmade beds.

Mrs O'Hagen, stone sober, had danced like a woman drunk on city dreams. I did not doubt that she had left and I knew I would never savour her as I had imagined in all the miles that led here: my mouth at her breast, buried between her sturdy legs, my nostrils filled with warm wet perfumes.

I would have to sell a Ford after all.

I took off my coat and undid my tie. I hung the coat on the back of a chair and placed studs and cufflinks and collar in the inside pocket.

I did not hurry across the stubble-slippery paddocks. I strolled with my hands in my pockets and when the axes became silent I knew the O'Hagens were watching me.

I would have walked properly, but I had come in city shoes, and it is almost impossible to walk across slippery stubble in smooth-soled shoes without moving like a draper's assistant. To walk correctly in a paddock you need boots, and heavy boots at that.

The O'Hagens, having paused to examine me, went back to work. As I listened to the axes I had a sympathy for them and what drove them on. I had hacked at life like the O'Hagens hacked at the bush, ring-barking, chopping, blistering my hands to bring it to heel, always imagining a perfect green kikuyu pasture where life would be benevolent and gentle. But where the bush had been bracken and thistles always appeared and then these had to be conquered as well.

I walked sideways down an eroded gully and when I reached the other side I could make out the three O'Hagens on the slope ahead. Two saplings dropped and three rosellas danced a pretty path across the thunder-ink sky. Black cockatoos screeched and scratched at the bark of a big old manna gum as if they couldn't wait to see it done for.

When I climbed the last fence I could see their faces. I remembered, with a shock, how ugly they were. They had heads like toby jugs. They had large square heads with ruddy complexions. Their hair was fair and thin. There was a meanness in their faces that conveyed an unaccountable sense of superiority. They were not easy to like.

The father had ears that stuck out from the side of his head and the youngest boy, who was as tall as me and only fifteen, had inherited his father's ears. They were ugly, of course, but they were quite at home with those square red heads, high, bent noses, and small pale blue eyes. They were faces squeezed from the one lump of clay.

But the eldest son, who was eighteen, had different ears. He had his mother's tiny delicate ears. They sat, flat and lonely, on the side of his great head like beautiful objects stolen by an ignoramus. Although you wouldn't have looked twice at him in the street in Geelong, out here, beside his brother and father, his head was as embarrassing to look at as a withered hand or an ex-soldier with his chin shot off. If the O'Hagens had been butterflies this one would be valuable – a rare exception to countless generations of O'Hagens with big ears.

He was known as Goog, which, until we started to forget our language, was the common name for a hen's egg. I always supposed he was called Goog because the tiny flattened ears did nothing to interrupt the goog-like sweep from crown to jaw.

The O'Hagens (Stu, Goog and Goose) did not stop working as I approached them. They swung their axes and chopped the small trees and scrub off level with the ground. They ring-barked the large trees and those of in-between size were chopped at waist height, after which they belted the bark from them with the back of their axes and piled this bark around the splintered stumps. When the burning season arrived the bark would help burn them to the ground.

They did not acknowledge me. I was a pest, arriving at the wrong time. I squatted with my back to a tree and waited. It was Goose who broke. He came to sharpen his axe with a file. He squatted near me, studying the axe with great care before he pulled the file from a hessian bag (a use for hessian bags I neglected to mention earlier).

"Come to sell us a Tin Lizzie, have you?"

"Come to show it," I said.

A blackwood wattle dropped behind me.

"Should watch where you sit," the old man said, and came over to sharpen an axe that needed no attention at all.

Goog belaboured the stump of a tree with the back of his axe, but when he had finished, and the stump stood wet and naked, he put his axe down and joined the others.

He nodded in the direction of the Ford. "How much do they ask for one of them?" Goog asked.

"He hasn't got two bob to his name," Goose said, handing the file across to his father.

"I never said I did. I was just inquiring."

No one said anything for a while. They watched the old man sharpening his axe.

"What happened to your wonderful flying machine?" old Stu said at last. He was not such a bad fellow, but he couldn't help himself; that whingeing sarcasm came out of his mouth without him even thinking about it.

"It's in Geelong," I said.

"Found someone, did you?"

"I don't follow you?"

"Found someone to buy it?"

"I wasn't trying to sell it."

"Oh yes," Stu said, and the three O'Hagens smirked together like three distorting mirrors all reflecting the one misunderstanding.

"Why did you bring it here," Goog said, "if you wasn't trying to sell it to us?"

Their misunderstanding was so ridiculous, I didn't even try to defend myself.

"We heard you were having a try at motor cars now," Goose said.

"And who told you that now?"

"Patrick Hare told us," said Stu, standing up and putting his hands on his hips. He crooked one knee and put his square head on one side. "He told us how you tried to sell him a Ford. Patrick says the Dodge is a superior machine. That's his opinion."

There was a saying in those days: "If you can't afford a Dodge, dodge a Ford." It was a salesman's lot to listen to all this rubbish. "That's Patrick Hare's opinion," I said.

They stood around me in a semicircle, Goose mimicking his father's stance exactly. They all shared the same smile.

"So tell me," I said, not bothering to stand up, "would you want his opinion on how to plough a paddock?"

"Ah," Stu said, "that's a different matter, a different matter entirely."

I didn't smile, but it was an effort. I'd heard a lot about Stu O'Hagen on the Bacchus Marsh Road. It was said (although I found it hard to credit) that Stu came from behind a shop counter in Melbourne twenty years before. They said he wouldn't take advice from the first day he got there, that he went his own stubborn way and made his own stubborn mistakes. They said he would have spent his life inventing the wheel if one hadn't run over him one winter's morning in Ryrie Street and thus brought itself to his attention.

"Ploughing", he said, "is a different matter to motor cars, an entirely different matter."

I did not turn and look at the eroded hillside behind Stu's house which was easy to see from where we stood. I said not a word about the virtues of contour ploughing. It was not a subject on which Stu had shown himself to be able to benefit from advice.

"So you come to give us a hand, did you?" Stu said. He was being sly, but you couldn't call it nasty.