"Draw a wire fence and a few ragged gums, and add some scattered sheep running away from the train. Then you'll have the bush all along the new south wales western line from Bathurst on"
-- Henry Lawson, Australia's most famoustest poet.
I arrived in the middle of the night, so it wasn't until the beautiful neon pink sun rise over the sparse gumtree silhouettes that I discovered where I was. A town consisting of; a small handful of houses and properties, and the hotel, which also served as a grocery shop, post office, pharmacy, counselling service, cashpoint and general social hub. Population: around 18. Other than the eccentric middle aged married publicans, an Irish backpacker named Ash shared my job. She was a straight talking hardworking pillar of common sense, who took everything that was thrown at her quietly but squarely on the chin, and drank like a dying fish.
We were cleaning the rooms early that first morning when I met Piggo. Ash greeted him jovially as he pulled up outside the hotel. This huge muscular figure stood in the clear pale blue morning wearing a t shirt drenched and spattered with blood, a black dead pig strapped to the back of his ute. I asked him, not unreasonably, how he came to be covered in blood. He gave me his characteristically bashful grin and laughed his baritone school girl's giggle. He'd carried the dead creature across his shoulders after his well trained pig dogs had mauled it to the ground, and he'd finished it by slitting its throat with a knife. Such was the way most men carried out this most popular of outback recreations, the alternative being the rifle. Like fox hunting in England, rural folk maintained that these non native animals, along with the feral goats, were pests. They called it 'conservation hunting'. Also similarly, the activity was carried out with a relish unbecoming to chores. Pig hunting occupied a different class stratum however, and lacked the pomp and ceremony of the red suited hunt. Groups of bored young men from the suburbs of Sydney drifted through the pub, nervous and excitable, on self confessed primal adventures. School teachers, brick layers, accountants, civil servants, all turned hunter gatherers for the long weekend. Looking, like me, to feel different and alive. They took cartons of beer and plenty of country music and tore around the scrub in ridiculous looking camo gear. They left the corpses where they lay after rounds of morbid self congratulatory picture taking and told me endless stories with childish fervour. Though a distinct couple of friends, one of whom I remembered for sharing his habitual post dinner kitkat with me every evening, claimed with stony faced sincerity that they offset the killing with a series of rituals intended to convey respect, including laying the foxes in dignified positions. One Sydney dweller, good humoured and easy going, came in after a days hunting all cut up around the face, but looking tremendously pleased with himself. He explained with no small amount of delight that he'd thrown his arms around the neck of a boar and attempted to wrestle it to the ground. The thing had taken off and dragged him along a little. In his eyes this had fulfilled all of his mystic expectations and he went home happy. This dilettantism was scorned by the serious, more rural and frequent practitioners who saw the activity as a duty, though fulfilled it with no less drunken relish.
Piggo was a serious pig hunter, though not a serious man. In that first week he treated me with more warmth and accommodation than almost anybody else. He laughed his hilariously discrepant laugh at everything. He sat at the bar with his head dipped shyly between his huge shoulders, bashful smirk never far from his good natured face. He talked endlessly about his beloved niece.
At the end of the first day, a standard 15 hours long, I write a letter to my friends that I will never send. 'I feel bizzarely disconnected from the rest of the world already', I tell them, and that same disconnectedness grew with every day I saw nothing but windows framing scrub. It's a seven day week, each day lasting 12 - 18 hours, I'm told. I will eat every meal in the pub, see and talk to nobody else but my customers and co-workers, see nothing but pub and scrub, camels and carcasses, and goats, goats, goats.
