My Mate Fleming Jensen

I first met Fleming in the Coober Pedy pub—where else in that dust-blown outback town? He was hunched over a sweating beer with some blokes I’d recently met: Bill Haining with his perpetual squint, Bill Riley who never stopped fiddling with his hat, and Dirty Dick, the town baker whose flour-dusted forearms were tanned dark as saddle leather. I’d just finished hauling flour sacks and cleaning Dick’s ancient oven for cash. Fleming was a stocky, well-built man with shoulders like granite slabs and hands that could crush walnuts. His sun-weathered face crinkled when he smiled. On introduction, we got talking about my life back home in New Zealand. I told him about the rolling green hills of our sheep and beef farm, and my former work as a Meat Inspector. His eyes lit up at that, and he leaned forward, elbows on the sticky table, asking me to come see his cattle on a property he was leasing out past the opal fields.

The next day Fleming rattled up to my dugout at dawn in his ancient Land Rover. No roof and springs that protested every pebble on the track. The outback sun was already fierce as we bounced across the ochre landscape toward a lone corrugated iron water tank that shimmered like a mirage. We filled four dented jerry cans, the water sloshing over our dust-caked boots. The heat intensified to a hammer blow as we searched, sweat trickling down my spine and soaking my shirt collar. After two hours of squinting across the shimmering plains, we found the cattle huddled in the meager shade of ghost gums in a bone-dry creek bed, their ribs showing through dusty hides. We coaxed them out with low whistles and careful movements, following their reluctant plodding along a barbed-wire fence line toward the waiting troughs.

On another trip, a mob of red kangaroos burst from behind a spinifex clump, and Fleming’s eyes lit with manic glee. He wrenched the wheel hard left, sending us lurching across the landscape in pursuit. The Land Rover bucked and shuddered over termite mounds and limestone outcrops that jutted from the red earth like broken teeth. Our chase ended when he gunned the engine through a dry creek bed, where we sank axle-deep in powdery sand that billowed around us like flour. 

Our final trip together took us to Mt Barry Station for more cattle. We set out at first light, the Land Rover’s engine growling as we left Coober Pedy behind, dust billowing in our wake like red smoke signals. The landscape shifted from moonscape opal fields to vast gibber plains where heat mirages danced on the horizon. A hundred kilometers northeast, halfway to Oodnadatta, Mt Barry emerged from the shimmering distance—a sprawling outpost of weathered timber yards and rusted roofs, where even the windmill creaked with thirst under the merciless sun.

Bill Riley

Bill Riley’s hands told a story before his lips ever did. His fingers—gnarled as ancient tree roots—curled at impossible angles, the knuckles swollen to purple knots. I’d watch, mesmerized, as those broken digits performed their nightly ritual: pinching tobacco from a worn leather pouch, arranging it in tissue-thin paper, then somehow coaxing the whole thing into a perfect cylinder with a practiced twist. One night at the pub, eyes distant as the horizon, he explained. Cyclone Tracy, Christmas 1974. The sky turned the color of bruised fruit before unleashing hell on Darwin. As the wind shrieked like a wounded animal and houses disintegrated around him, Riley had spotted an abandoned chest freezer. He’d clawed inside, fingers locked in a death grip around the inner rim, muscles burning as he battled winds that ripped houses from foundations and flung iron sheeting like guillotine blades. For six endless hours, the freezer became his coffin—hurled violently across shattered streets, each impact pulverizing his fingers to bloody pulp between unyielding metal and raw animal terror, his throat shredded raw from screams no human ear would ever register beneath Tracy’s deafening roar.