Beyond the Jumbuck Ranges, where red dust
swirls and stains,
A boab tree grows, bottle-shaped, on cattle station plains.
It’s stood there for some thousand years, a silent ancient scout,
Observing ever-changing land of fire and flood and drought.
Today, as every other day, a lonely silhouette,
Walks along the fenceline in a haze of flies and sweat.
Towards the boab’s shadow, Clancy makes his daily trek,
To lean against its smooth-shine bark and pay his sad respects.
For beneath the mighty boab and its prehistoric girth,
Clancy’s dear departed mother is buried in the earth.
Clancy’s father chose the spot, he said she’d love it best—
She’d always loved the boab for its peaceful sense of rest.
Clancy sits against the trunk, his boot-clad feet extended,
And tries to do the manly things his father recommended.
‘No more use for tears, my son, the land is parched enough.
Throw yourself into your work—I know these times are tough,
But you and I are of the land, we’re cattle station folk,
And that means battling twice as hard when your spirit’s all but
broke.’
So Clancy hides his sorrow where his father doesn’t see,
And emancipates his heartbreak to the steadfast boab tree.
His tears flow to meet the ground, and soak deep out of sight—
They sound just like his father’s he hears through the wall at
night.
Emotion purged, but red of eye, he stays a little longer,
The dry-hot breeze that stirs the trees, whips into something
stronger.
It shakes the boab’s branches ‘til they rattle like dried bones,
Wind soughing through the foliage sounds like a banshee’s moans.
And on this gust, something is thrust, propelled across the
ground—
A tangled mass of spiky grass, somersaulting round and round.
The tumbleweed rolls faster to where Clancy’s legs are splayed,
And there it halts its tumbling waltz, curtailed by his blockade.
Before Clancy can dislodge it, a whirly-wind spins past,
Knocking Clancy’s bush hat off with a fiendishly strong blast.
And as he reaches to retrieve it from the scrub patch where it
lands,
The tumbleweed, with lithely speed, starts to rapidly expand.
Clancy’s eyes grow rounder as the tumbleweed unfurls.
It elongates and changes shape, until before him stands a girl.
All wheat-hued hair, and spindly limbs, eyes green and desert-wild,
Her ageless face defies all trace she’s either woman or a child.
As Clancy gapes and rubs his eyes, she capers at his feet,
‘I’m free,’ she cheers, ‘After all these years of unrelenting
heat.
Trapped I’ve been, for time untold, in that dreadful spinifex,
Captivity! My fate imposed by a willy-willy’s hex.’
The whirly-wind she speaks of doubles back to Clancy’s tree,
It sees its curse has been reversed—its prisoner is free.
‘You wicked fiend! You mark my words; vengeance will be mine,
I’ll hunt you down, Dust Devil, if it’s a year or ninety-nine!’
The girl’s eyes gleam with anger; she spits out every word
Of her plans for retribution. The Dust Devil, unperturbed,
Simply spins a little faster, and his cackling could be heard,
As he willy-willied out of sight, past Clancy’s cattle herd.
The girl then turns to Clancy; this time he sees her ears
Are pointed at the topmost part; and then begin his fears
That the girl who stands before him, is not a girl of any kind—
Words like ‘pixie’, ‘sprite’, and ‘brownie’ begin to twist across his
mind.
‘Are you real?’ he asks the question. ‘That is … I mean to say,
I mean no offence, but is it pretense, your human-looking way?
The girl locks her eyes on Clancy’s; he feels his heart skip several
beats,
Then suddenly she grabs his hand and pulls him to his feet.
‘What I am’s not your concern; you can’t pronounce it anyway—
I’m of the land, and in the land, and on any given day
You might hear me in a thunderclap, or see me in the haze—
An eagle’s flight or a taipan’s bite, or the grass where livestock
graze.
But, Clancy—yes, I know your name—there’s no need to be nervous,
There’s something I must do for you, to thank you for your
service.
If it wasn’t for those legs of yours, who knows when I’d stop
rolling,
Trapped inside that spinifex—the Dust Devil’s controlling.
So now I’ll grant your heart’s desire, then you’ll forget you’ve ever
seen me,
For wishes are my specialty…I’m what you would call a
genie.’
‘Well, stone the crows,’ young Clancy says. ‘I’m full of
gratitude,
But there’s only one thing that I want, and I don’t mean to be
rude,
But the thing I cherished most in life is buried ‘neath this
tree,
And if wishes could restore her, she’d already be with me.’
And though he didn’t like to, his eyes well again with pain,
Tears trickling down his collar to splash the earth like rain.
The genie watches thoughtfully, then looks into the boughs,
Of the boab’s sprawling canopy; then she says out loud:
‘I cannot bring your mother back, that magic’s darkest art,
But I can do the next best thing to help you heal your heart.
‘Take a look up at your tree, with boab nuts it’s full,
I want you to climb up there and give one of them a pull.
It doesn’t matter which you choose, just bring it back to me,
And you will have your mother back, you just wait and see.’
So Clancy swings himself up high, where round nuts bob and sway,
He shakes a branch; an avalanche of nuts fall like grenades.
The closest nut he catches, then jumps back to the ground,
The genie takes it solemnly, and turns it round and round.
Then she holds it to her face and in a sweet but ancient tongue,
The genie gives voice to a spell, the words of which she sung.
Her song floats up to blue-bright sky, and round the cattle
station,
And Clancy feels a sudden surge of warm anticipation.
The genie puts the boab nut in Clancy’s trembling hands,
He takes the nut, his fingers shut. She gives a last command:
‘Hold the nut close to your ear; you’ll hear your mother’s
voice.’
Clancy does as he is told, and then—oh, sweet rejoice!
His yesterdays come flooding back, a tide of memory—
Ma’s gentle wave of laughter from a time when he was three,
And here she is, shouting goodbye, when he worked out in the
shed,
And her cheerful, ‘Hello, Clancy,’ when he first rolled out of
bed.
Her warm-hug words when he broke his arm that time when he was
eight,
And scolding him and Pa at dinnertime, whenever they were late.
Clancy holds the boab nut even closer to his ear,
He hears the words, ‘I love you, son. You’ll always have me
near.’
When finally, his heart a-swell, face tracked with tears anew
Clancy turns back to the genie, and says, ‘However do
I tell you what this means to me? Will it always be like this?
The nut will hold Ma’s words of gold, so I may reminisce?
‘Yes,’ the genie answers. ‘The magic’s powerfully responded—
The boab tree carries the key, with you it’s closely bonded.
Every time you’ve wept here, in your secret grief-filled ruts,
The boab tree’s absorbed your tears, and they’ve travelled to the
nuts.
Only love as strong as yours can perform such potent magic,
And now perhaps, your mother’s loss will one day seem less
tragic.
You will always love her, of that there is no doubt,
But now she’s of the land, and in the land—you’ll never be
without.
And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Dust Devil to find,
He went that way; I’ll make him pay for keeping me confined!’
And before Clancy can say thank you, or any other warm exchange,
The genie’s racing off toward the distant blue-tinged range.
So Clancy takes his boab nut, and heads back to the station,
And he listens to his mother’s voice—a one-sided conversation
That flows from deep inside the nut…although he can’t quite
recollect,
Or take a guess how he came to possess this wonderous object.
And late at night when he hears his Pa cry softly in his bed,
Clancy waits until his weeping stops and snoring starts instead,
And then he takes the boab nut, and tiptoes down the hall,
And gently lays it by Pa’s head, where his pillow meets the wall.
And in the grey-wash light of morning, as they start their daily
chores.
Clancy’s father seems much happier than he did the night before.
And the boab tree still stands there, through seasons wet and
dry,
Absorbing all the feelings held in tears that people cry.
The happy tears, the sad ones, the jealous, and the hurt,
Have filtered down into its roots amid the rust-red dirt.
So if you ever see a boab tree, sit down and share your load,
For just like Clancy, you might find, a boab nut bestowed.