The Romulus myth

Fuck it! Bloody Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I could do with some freakin help around here, Dad yelled as he climbed off the tractor.

For two days he’d been ploughing the western paddock. Three hundred hectares that we needed to tilth and get under seed before the rains, if they came as forecast.

It’s not a tough job – air-conditioned cab, music, GPS steering the tractor. All of which makes it very boring after a few hours. Grey-red flood plain soil, flat to the narrow horizon, sauntering past endlessly as behind you the double eight discs grind through the dirt, following the tractor for at least 12 hours a day. High thin cirrus clouds streaking an azure sky helmet the monotony.

And that paddock’s a nasty shape – about a thousand metres by three thousand metres to avoid the gully down one side. That’s about 20 minutes in a dead straight slow line before the tractor turns.

No matter how loud you’ve got Doja Cat or The Weeknd in the pods your awareness and concentration evaporate as fast as the rain out here, and the gently bouncing air cushion seat does the rest.

Dad asked Denny to take a shift. He lasted a few hours and went to sleep. Mum took tea out for him and had to throw clods of dirt at the cabin to wake him up and stop it.

It’s not a fucking Tesla you moron, Dad yelled. What if the GPS went or the discs hit a stump. You could’ve put the lot in the ditch.

It’s all automatic, Denny yelled back. It looks after itself. You don’t get this computer stuff. It goes, and if there’s a problem it stops. OK? Don’t ask me to help again.

That was it for Denny. Back to his job. He was desperate to get off the farm and had taken on a mechanic’s apprenticeship at the tractor dealers in town about 90 kilometres away to the northeast. Doesn’t pay much and I don’t think he’s learning a lot, but it keeps him out of Dad’s way for six nights a week. He’s bought himself a $500 ute for the round trip.

And I think he’s hooked up with a girl in town, but he was never one to talk, especially not at home. I’m just guessing from the deodorant and after shave he’s started wearing and the phone calls from Mum he doesn’t answer. I know Mum noticed too, but she never said anything. Her job is to keep Dad calm and happy.

I love my Dad. He’s an honest hard-working bloke, and he’s taught me heaps of stuff. He always comes to my football games and I reckon he’s the loudest barracker. He never gets into the fights that sometimes happen at the senior games when the old blokes drink too much. Just grabs my hand and walks away. I feel proud and warm when he grabs my hand. But all that war and money stuff has messed with his head.

I asked if I could do some ploughing to help get Rome built. Dad smiled at the joke but said no, I’m too young, and Mum just shook her head in agreement. Its poison being 12 and told you can’t do it but then being expected to do adult stuff when needed, like clean up after Dad’s drinking and vomiting, wash the ute and get the horseshit out of the stalls, and throw hay bales around when Denny brings some back from town.

The quip about Rome Dad picked up in the army or on his backpacking days around Asia, and he uses it a lot. Never made sense to me. I go to a one teacher school with just 23 kids and never been out of the district. But I’ve learned to see a bushy joke when it’s on the table.

The farm is small, as wheat farms go: just 540 hectares of quite healthy grey-red soil that returns a good crop in the better - wetter - years. This isn’t one of the better years, and there hasn’t been one since my ninth birthday.

But it’s the only home I’ve known. Mum, Dad and Denny moved here from the city about 13 years ago. I was born soon after. Mum says that was the happiest she’s ever been.

Dad was a builder, near as I can tell, but got crushed in a downturn and lost a lot of money. Mum was doing dad’s books and had squirrelled some away, and that’s how we got the farm. Peaceful but busy, Mum says, best life we can have.

I love the quiet, the endless horizon, and the sunsets in spring. The sun’s real low and there’s dust in the air and the red under the clouds builds to a bright ruby and lingers forever. Mum and I sit on the verandah and watch till the stars come out and I tell her about school and stuff and she tells me about the city. There’s not much wildlife out here after the scrub was cleared a hundred or so years ago to make the farms. Mostly feral foxes and lately a few pigs that Dad shoots. Sometimes a small mob of kangaroos goes through at twilight on their way to our dam.

That was all of my yesterdays.

Today before lunch the GPS system did go down for farmers everywhere. Without that magical guidance tractors just stopped (despite Dad’s yelling at Denny). He disengaged it, drove the tractor home, climbed out of the cab in a bad mood, and started swearing at everyone and everything again.

He sat on the porch on the derelict couch we picked up from a roadside collection and Mum got him a beer, which we knew was adding fuel to a smouldering fire. By late afternoon he was a seething mess and started talking to himself about Vietnam, then to his invisible mates. He abused the sergeants, corporals, lieutenants, captains, majors and anyone else whose name he could remember. But there were days now when he could remember just a few.

Dad once told me when I was picking up empty cans that Denny was named after his best mate in the army. That Denny had stepped on a buried mine on a jungle track and died screaming in pain while they waited for a chopper to take him out. I’m just a simple bush kid but I could feel the hurt as I watched Dad’s tears.

As dark came over the paddocks it came over Dad, too. There was no sunset to mark the end, just a vast creeping grey morass of deep confusion. Mum put me to bed to keep me away from Dad, but she couldn’t hide herself.

The crash of glass, splintering of wood and Dad yelling wakes me some hours later. I creep into the hall. Mum is lying on the kitchen floor under a shattered chair, bleeding. She sees me and raises a hand, telling me to stay back. I hear Dad turn and go out the kitchen door. I run to the phone and call Denny. He doesn’t answer and I leave a message telling him to come home right now.

Mum isn’t badly hurt. She washes the blood from her head and we lie in my bed and she whispers stories to me until I am asleep. The starting tractor wakes me before first light. I’m guessing Dad is getting a very early start on that paddock. He doesn’t need to see yesterday’s furrows.

When I hear Denny’s ute come roaring in about an hour later I’m glad Dad started early.

Mum makes breakfast. None of us feel like talking. What’s left to say? We’ve been close to here before but not this far. And we don’t know where to go or what to do next. Denny says he’ll take tea and biscuits out to Dad, but he’s back 20 minutes later.

I can’t find him, he says. The tractor’s going up and down by itself, but he’s not out there.

I grab my drone and we pile into Denny’s ute out to the paddock. The tractor is still cutting dead straight furrows, eight discs over, with every turn. It’s almost finished and will stop then.

Denny grabs the drone from me and sends it up to skim along the gully on the far side. Nothing shows up on the camera. He takes the drone higher sweeping along the furrows. He does that three times then turns and hovers over a spot about two kilometres down. He won’t let me look and all I glimpse is a fox and a darker patch of soil. Mum turns away.

Looking back on this from years and thousands of kilometres away I see how life is painful and meaningless. You drop into the world with no hopes, dreams or expectations. Those are all laid on you by others and you’re bound to try to fit into some of them. If you don’t make it then it shouldn’t matter to you, but it does to them. There is no basic pattern for life, just born, live, die. Us westerners think its born, education, work, married, kids, retire, die, and that gives it meaning, but it’s just direction, not significance. Most of the world doesn’t even know of that, except perhaps to envy it. My Dad added sacrifice to his mix. At least twice he sacrificed his dreams and the life he was living so we would be safer and happier. And that’s a pretty big thing, but no more than animal parents do when their offspring are threatened.

I guess Denny told the police something. I never asked what. They came out the next morning, went to the paddock, then never came back.

Mum cried for days and then we left. First to the town then maybe to the city, she said. It was scary for me, a sad blurry mess that erased that first simple pattern of my life and had me scrambling to create a new one. And I know now that, for all of us, Rome will never get built.