Read an extract of The Campers by Maryrose Cuskelly.
Drovers. Leah had always found the term, with its smug, cliquey undertones, slightly cringy. At the same time, it was a convenient shorthand for the clutch of neighbours who shared their snug suburban tract. An accident of geography, urban planning and historical settlement had created the cosy inner-city pocket that was the Drove: a plot of land that had been subdivided much later than the rest of the surrounding suburb. The site of a slaughterhouse until the 1940s, it was now a single row made up of seven houses, nestled in the lee of a railway bridge and beside a park-lined waterway. After the abattoir had closed down, a market garden had flourished on the plot beside the creek for another twenty years.
‘All that blood and bone.’ It was the drovers’ in-joke when ‘outsiders’ commented on their thriving vegetable patches or the lush growth of the trees on Gideon’s Paddock, where animals awaiting slaughter were once penned. Gideon was the slaughterman, and the name had survived the gentrification of the suburb and the subdivision of the remaining stretch of the creek along which animals had once been herded towards their deaths.
The appellation ‘the Drove’ was a nod to the suburb’s rural antecedents, a drove being a track on which cattle or sheep are driven, and the drovers had successfully blocked the council’s attempts to seal it. It would be such a shame, they concurred, to replace their front yards’ grassy extensions curving gently down to the level of the lane with concrete pavements and neat nature strips. And Leah was in agreement.
Gideon’s was public parkland; but given the half-hidden nature of the short strip of houses, the drovers regarded it proprietorially and found ways to discourage others from using it. Audrey, eighty-one, who lived with her equally elderly but frailer husband, Carl, at number 7, had been known to demand the names of people she didn’t recognise who had the temerity to walk there, and Jon and Lucas would accost anyone who allowed their dogs off-leash or didn’t pick up their pets’ droppings.
Leah had once watched from behind her plate-glass window as Dilsher and Chandra from number 3 questioned four picnickers who had set themselves up with a blanket on the grass on a Sunday afternoon. They had been about to fill champagne flutes with sparkling wine when the couple approached. Leah couldn’t hear what was said, but she was confident that Dilsher was alerting the group to the local by-laws prohibiting public drinking—not that the drovers paid any attention to that dictate when they held their annual Christmas drinks there.
Leah re-read Barb’s post. Most of the messages on the Drove chat group were offers to share excess garden produce—tomatoes, lemons, figs or silverbeet—or requests for referrals for plumbers, electricians or cleaners. Barb and her partner, Wanda, who lived at number 1, the last house in the cul-de-sac, often had eggs to spare from their flock of eight chooks—the girls as everyone on the Drove called them. Links to local council decisions affecting their street and the suburb more broadly were also frequently posted. Less regularly, alerts circulated about suspicious activity related to house break-ins and stolen cars—there had been spates of such incidents in the surrounding suburb and in the Drove itself over the years—or strangers loitering on the reserve, as well as regular callouts to participate in clean-ups or weeding working bees along the creek. A couple of times a year, street picnics were organised.
In the time that Leah and Moses had lived on the Drove, there’d been the occasional rough sleeper dossing down in the bushes beside the creek. Sometimes backpackers looking to save a few dollars camped there for a night or two; they rarely stayed longer. Leah assumed that these campers, like the others, would soon move on. And if they didn’t, no doubt the drovers would find ways to encourage the campers to pitch their tents elsewhere.
The drovers had used their skills and networks before to preserve the amenity of Gideon’s Paddock and the Drove to suit themselves. The building of a half-basketball court on unused space in the lee of the railway bridge had been thwarted, and eighteen months ago they’d blocked an attempt by the absent landlord of number 2 to demolish the house and build a duplex in its place.
Leah’s fingers hovered above the screen, but she switched the device to silent without responding to Barb’s message.
-
In the afternoon, Leah left the house with Harley strapped in behind her on the cargo bicycle Moses had bought from a colleague who no longer had use for it. The bike was slow and heavy and bright orange, but it was the most efficient means to get to Fleur’s primary school, where the lack of parking and its position on a main road made driving there a nightmare. Leah would have preferred an e-bike, had in fact assumed that it was electric when Moses had suggested they buy it. She’d been a little aggrieved but also resigned when Moses presented it to her. The bike was somehow emblematic of the disjunction between them at the moment, a slip of the belt that drove the wheel of their relationship.
Milo wagged his tail hopefully as he stood at the fence, but she didn’t have enough time to walk him before picking up Fleur. Harley had demanded that they feed the ducks on the way, and Leah had shoved a heel of sourdough bread in her pocket before they left the house. She scratched Milo’s ears. ‘Next time, doggo.’
The detour past the ducks wasn’t onerous. Her time with her son was precious; Harley was the love of her life. Not that she had ever—would ever—say so out loud. He had been born during the lockdowns aimed at slowing the spread of the virus, and that secluded, intense time with him, even though Moses and Fleur were in the house too, had forged something subterranean between them.
Rather than taking the longer but more straightforward route via the main road to the spot on the other side of the creek where the ducks could usually be found and the bank was lower, Leah opted to cross at the precarious footbridge. Constructed many years earlier by some former drovers, it was scarcely more than an uneven collection of planks spanning the creek at its narrowest point. The briefest squall of rain was enough to put it under water. Negotiating it was a finicky operation: Leah had to climb off the bike and walk it over to the other side, avoiding the treacherous green slime that permanently coated the timber boards.
Once they were safely across, she pushed the bike up a steep grassy track that led to a pathway shared by pedestrians and cyclists. A few hundred metres on, where the causeway swooped down an incline, a goat track snaked off through the bushes and towards the creek. Worn into the ground by teenagers looking for a hidden spot to smoke weed and by dog walkers whose pets liked to swim in the muddy water, the desire line came to a ragged end at a clearing. Here, the creek widened into a shallow lagoon, screened from joggers and cyclists.
The cargo bike’s wide tyres easily navigated the path to the clearing. It was the hottest time of the day, but the trees by the creek, a mixture of native and exotic species, provided shade. Leah kicked down the bike stand and unbuckled Harley’s harness. Several Pacific blacks, a few mallards and couple of white Pekins that had recently joined the troop were skimming across the water’s surface, flapping their wings and scissoring their webbed feet. When Leah straightened up with Harley in her arms, a scrap of iridescent lime-green on the opposite bank gleamed at the edge of her vision. The far side of the creek was in deep shade, but the taut stretch of brightly coloured polyester glowed through a gap in the vegetation.
‘Not too close to the edge, Mister.’
Leah held the hem of Harley’s T-shirt with one hand and pulled out the bread from the pocket of her dress with the other. She tore it into scraps, handing them to him one piece at a time. He flung them inexpertly towards the ducks quacking below, barely half of the crumbling morsels reaching the water. Several birds heaved themselves resentfully onto the bank to retrieve them, squabbling and shouldering each other out of the way. Harley squealed, hopping from foot to foot when they came too close. The quicker, more assertive birds snatched up the shreds of bread before turning tail and waddling madly back towards the water, their companions complaining and in hot pursuit.
Leah glanced over her shoulder. Barb had an active role in a local group that monitored the creek’s health and the animals that lived there. She had firm opinions about the impacts of human behaviour on the local wildlife and had accosted Leah one day when she’d seen Fleur and Harley feeding the ducks. ‘Bread fills them up, which means they don’t forage for healthier food,’ she’d scolded. ‘It’s like feeding your children pizza every day.’ Leah had paid twelve dollars for that loaf of bread. If it was good enough for her family, it was certainly good enough for bloody birds, she’d thought but hadn’t said. Instead, she’d pleaded ignorance and feigned gratitude for Barb’s suggestion of buying live mealworms from the local pet shop, ‘if you must feed them’.
With two fingers still pinched on Harley’s T-shirt, Leah glanced over again at the opposite bank. More campers must have arrived since Barb’s post. There were now at least three tents erected among the trees.
Harley had tossed all the bread in the approximate direction of the creek, and the ducks were in an uproar, those that had missed out quacking their outrage. Leah, reluctant for the campers to assume she was spying on them, scooped up her son in her arms. He kicked and squirmed, determined on escape.
‘Come on. Fleur will be waiting for us.’
As Leah wrestled Harley into his seat, her eye caught a flash of movement, a quiver of a tent’s polyester membrane. She couldn’t be sure, but in the shadows she thought she saw a figure. All at once she felt vulnerable, exposed. She climbed onto the bike, kicked up the stand and returned to the main path. The skin on the nape of her neck was buzzing.
The Campers
by Maryrose Cuskelly
An engrossing and provocative exploration of privilege, hypocrisy and justice by the bestselling author of The Cane.
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