by Thea Hayes
Bundidgerry is now owned by his son, Greg Carr, an engineer married to an American woman, but they live in the US and only visit occasionally. On Greg’s last visit he was looking for someone to lease Bundidgerry. Tom Dawson had been the caretaker for some years. One day Tom asked us over for a drink and showed us around the large rambling house on the slope of the hill looking over the Bundidgerry Canal. It was getting a little dilapidated, but you could see what a marvellous show place it had been with an enormous ball room, billiard room and numerous lounges and bedrooms.
Bryce Courtenay’s novel Jessica is centred on the Wiradjuri region and Noel Beddoes’s novel The Yalda Crossing also explores Wiradjuri history from an early settler perspective in 1815.
Andy Kissane’s poem, The Station Owner’s Daughter, and Ngurrumbang, a finalist in the 2013 Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films, bring to life a massacre that occurred in the 1830s in the Narrandera area.
Kathleen Gorman, the ballerina, was born in Narrandera. Kathy danced overseas for the Borovansky Ballet and later joined the new Australian Ballet in 1962. As a devoted ballet student, I remember being taken by my mother to the ballet in Sydney to see Kathy Gorman, who was always the beautiful leading ballerina during that period.
On 3 September 1945 a Royal Australian Air Force Bristol Beaufighter crashed into the canal at the western end of the town during a joy flight, killing all seven people on board.
And while we were living in Narrandera, the Honourable Marie Bashir, who was born and bred in Narrandera, was the Governor of NSW.
43
Nine lives or more?
Annually at Carraman, 600 to 800 acres of the farm were planted with oats, lucerne and clovers for hay production, early cattle feed and pasture rejuvenation. Brian employed Peter Royal, who relieved us at Christmas, to do the ploughing, seeding and weed control. Peter would turn up after 9.30 a.m. each morning to plough the paddocks, after taking care of his invalid wife.
Bob would complain to me about the much-needed crops. So, Bob started getting up at 3.30 a.m. to go out to start the ploughing until breakfast time, when he handed over to Peter. He would still have all his other duties: feeding the bulls, which involved manually lifting buckets of grain on to the vehicle and then off the vehicle to the feed troughs, moving cattle and attending to calves. As Brian said to him, ‘I’m paying you to look after the cattle.’
It’s okay to be dedicated but sometimes you can take it too far.
A week after he started this routine, he returned to the house a little quieter than usual. I asked him, ‘You okay?’
‘I feel a little breathless.’
‘Well, darling, you better lie down for a while.’
And then I suddenly had a thought, and asked, ‘You haven’t got a pain in the chest, have you?’
And you know what the answer was. I was on the phone in a wink, ringing the hospital to speak to the Matron, who I had spoken to about work just a few days before. She said she would send the ambulance out, but I assured her it was quicker for me to take him straight in, particularly as our cottage is hard to find when you don’t know the layout of the property.
We arrived at casualty, where a wheelchair was ready and waiting. Bob was put straight into a bed, an ECG was done and then the doctor said, ‘Yes, you have had a heart attack.’
We looked at one another in shock, with tears in our eyes. We hadn’t even been together for a year.
After treatment and tablets, he was raced off to Wagga Wagga. I rang Penny from my car while I sat waiting to follow the ambulance. I saw the ambulance take off, and there in the ambulance was not only the Matron but the doctor as well. I thought, he must be in a very critical condition. I rang Penny again and had another weep before taking off to follow the ambulance for the 100 kilometre trip.
After seeing the cardiac specialist, we were so relieved to find that the blockage in Bob’s heart was only 40 per cent. A blockage of at least 70 per cent would require a stent; Bob only had to go on medication.
On our next holiday from Carraman we went to Straddie as usual. Stewie our neighbour came over for a cup of tea and biscuits. After he left Bob said, ‘I think a piece of biscuit is stuck in my oesophagus.’
As the discomfort didn’t improve, I thought it could be pain in the chest and took him to the Straddie doctor, who took his blood pressure. It was a 54 systolic reading and 97 diastolic reading. His pulse was only 54 beats a minute—so faint it was difficult to get a reading. This made the doctor think it was time to update his blood pressure machine. The decision was made to send Bob to the mainland. When the on-duty paramedic arrived in the ambulance, the doctor asked him if could use his blood pressure machine and that also failed to give a pulse reading, making him think that his machine was faulty as well.
The ambulance delivered Bob to the One Mile Jetty at Dunwich to be transported in the Sea Rescue boat to Cleveland jetty. Once again there was no pulse reading. The paramedics on the boat couldn’t believe that his heart rate could be so low. He was picked up by another ambulance on the mainland and taken to Redland Base Hospital. Finally, a pulse was found—35 beats per minute but very weak. Bob’s life was in danger. After checking Bob’s medications, the cardiac specialist discovered that one caused a lowering of the heart rate. He was then transferred to Mater Hospital, Brisbane for three days. An angiogram and stress tests showed that the previous blockage of 40 per cent had reduced to 10 per cent. Bob was advised to stop all medications, which probably saved his life. He was so lucky.
Bob used to tell me stories of dangerous incidences throughout his life.
As a young seven-year-old, he was feeding the cows and picked up a sheaf of hay with a brown snake inside. He was bitten on the stomach. He ran a kilometre back to the house, where his father criss-crossed each fang mark with a razor blade, and then sucked the venom out. Bob was in hospital for ten days.
When travelling in Cape York, he decided to do some fishing at Captain Billy’s Landing, a quiet beach on the east coast. After casting his lure into the water, and making sure he was at a safe distance, he continued fishing, when he suddenly noticed a dark object in the water coming quickly towards him. Dropping his fishing rod, he took off, running frantically to the top of the beach forty metres away; turning around he saw a huge crocodile standing on the water’s edge—just where he had been standing.
Another time, arriving home from my morning shift at the nursing home one afternoon, Bob greeted me saying, ‘I want to take you up to the yard to show you this tiny calf that a heifer has delivered.’
Up we went and walked into the yard where the heifer was standing quietly beside her calf. As we left the yard Bob decided to go back and move them both out of the yard into the open paddock. He was suddenly hit in the chest by a mad charging mother, throwing him several metres. Before he could get to his feet again, she barrelled him head-first into the base of the metal gate.
I was outside the yard, screaming. I raced to the gate, trying to open it with Bob leaning on it and the cow right behind him. As I struggled to unlock it, I was quite sure Bob and the cow would both come charging out, but thankfully the cow returned to her calf.
Blood was squirting from a wound on his head. Grabbing the scarf from my neck, I wrapped it around and over the wound. One ear was hanging at an odd angle. I could imagine what had happened to his chest—broken ribs for sure. Grabbing my iPhone from my pocket, I tried to ring triple 0, but I was so shaken it took me a few attempts. An ambulance was sent out, but we had locked the front gate to the property, as there had been a few robberies in the district. The key was in the vehicle at home, so I had to drive the quad bike back to the house to pick up the utility, and then out to meet the ambulance. I didn’t like leaving Bob alone in the yard, but I couldn’t do anything else.
‘Keep pressure on that head,’ I said as I drove off.
Thank goodness I had been there. If I hadn’t, that cow would have killed him.
He was taken to Emergency at Narran
dera Hospital, where the doctor on duty had just completed seven years in Emergency at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, the same place I had done my four years training as a nurse. The doctor did a beautiful job sewing Bob’s ear back in place, attending to his wounds and commiserating about his three broken ribs.
There was another nasty little Angus cow that attacked Bob while he was weighing and tagging a newborn calf in the paddock, knocking him to the ground while he still had the calf in his arms. She trod on the back of his thigh, crippling him for a week.
But once again, he survived.
Another episode at Carraman: it had been a superb season, in early 2014. The crops had grown well, and now everything was drying off. The hay contractor had done his job, but it did rain a little after the hay was cut and before it was baled. Bob had noted some heat in the bales when he was transporting them to the hay shed. The bales were also very large and required much more drying out. He decided to deposit many of the bales outside on the ground, so the sun and air could dry them out properly. Sam and Harvey were at Carraman at the time and had fun chasing one another through the avenues of hay bales which were taller than themselves. It was a marvellous maze to play in, chasing one another and hiding from Nana.
‘Yoo-hoo, Nana. Come and find us.’
Weeks later, after the bales had all been put in the shed and Sam and Harvey had left and gone home, I had gone to my ‘Writing for Pleasure’ course in Narrandera as usual. I had a phone call. It was Bob.
‘Something terrible has happened—the hay shed is on fire.’
I could hear the stress in his voice; he was crying. I said to the girls, ‘I have to go. Bob needs me. The hay shed has gone up in flames.’
I was so upset that the girls wouldn’t let me drive. Heidi, my book club mate, drove me back to Carraman. When we arrived, there were eight fire brigades and firemen running everywhere. We were in drought conditions; the fire could not be allowed to get away. The shed was completely engulfed in flames.
That was when I was told that Bob, seeing the smoke from a paddock half a kilometre away, had rung the fire brigade and dashed to the shed to find the wheels of the tractor in flames. He’d tried to move it but got catapulted out of the seat when the fuel tank exploded. He had then raced over to the truck with flames licking his legs, and somehow managed to drive it out of the shed.
The ambulance arrived and I was shocked to find they were picking up Bob. The man in charge of the Fire Brigade service had ordered the ambulance for Bob. I had no idea what he had gone through before he was taken off to hospital. It turned out he had smoke inhalation and they needed to check him out. He returned only a few hours later, lucky once again.
44
Rain and more rain
The Murrumbidgee River was the cause of our first flood, but we couldn’t blame the river on the night that seventeen inches of torrential rain fell in twenty-four hours at Carraman. Waking up that Saturday morning, Bob knew that the property—being on a flood plain with nine kilometres of frontage to the Murrumbidgee—would be the epicentre of the water flowing from the north.
‘I’m off to check the situation, darling. I’ll probably have to start moving cattle to the Sand Hill paddocks. Ring the neighbours and see how they are faring and check the river heights on the radio.’
And off he went.
The rain was still pelting down. Looking out the kitchen window, towards the usually unseen Bundidgerry Creek, I was horrified to see water creeping up our lawn. Ridiculous, I thought. Our cottage is in one of the higher paddocks on the property.
As Bob was leaving, our nearest neighbour, Tom from Bundidgerry, arrived seeking help to move a stranded tractor from the path of the oncoming flood. Arriving at the tractor, bogged near the boundary of both properties, they could see an ocean of water half a metre deep flowing across the Bundidgerry paddocks. They both suddenly realised the extreme seriousness of the situation.
Quickly towing the tractor to high ground, Bob and Tom raced off on their quad bikes to move a herd of 120 cows with calves at foot from the River paddock to the Big Sand Hill paddock. As they drove, they could see the water trickling across the farm tracks and paddocks. In the forty minutes it took to muster the cows and calves, the water had risen half a metre, requiring the calves to swim beside their mothers.
After getting the cows and calves to the high Big Sand Hill paddock, sixty stud bulls had to be rescued from the bull pens and taken to the Little Sand Hill paddock where our cottage was.
Tom then left to attend to his own property. Bob had to muster forty-five stud heifers from the West Strip paddock, bordering the river—a difficult muster as there were forests of river red gums all up and down the river. Fortunately, help had arrived with four friends from town. The heifers were rescued by swimming them for 1.5 kilometres to the high Canal Bank Road, with the water level as high as the top wire of the fence. This was the saving grace for the heifers, as the fence stopped them from being washed away.
Light was fading. There were still 120 Angus cows only days away from calving to be moved from the western-most paddocks to higher ground. Luckily, they were only a fence away from the high Canal Bank Road, so Bob cut the fence and pushed them through. By this time the water was two metres deep across parts of the paddock.
With the cattle all safe, there was still machinery to be moved. Bob traversed his way to the sheds on the tractor to find water rushing through them but luckily was able to move most of the machinery and vehicles.
Darkness had fallen by the time he reached the yards and the final few hundred metres to the house. Bob’s thoughts turned to me—alone in the cottage. Would the floodwaters have reached the house by now? He had purposely left his phone at home because of the continuous rain.
Wading and feeling his way along the track, with the sound of logs and branches being swept along around him and the water deeper at every step, Bob suddenly realised the dangers of traversing the normal route home. He was now up to his armpits. He decided on an alternative route, with slightly higher ground on his right and a line of trees, that would deflect the debris. This was okay for about 200 metres, but suddenly he was caught by a surge of floodwater, lost his footing, and was washed away, tumbling like a rag in a washing machine. Bob knew he was close to a fence, and fought his way to the surface in time to feel the top wire catch and tear his shirt, as he slid over, but the next minute he was being tumbled over and over again, until he slammed stomach first into the trunk of a river red gum. The weight of the water held him wrapped around the trunk, but the fight for survival had strangely given him a feeling of great calm. He was determined that he was not going to be washed away in the floodwaters and die alone in the mighty Murrumbidgee.
Throwing his right arm up, he felt the underside of a branch and was somehow able to pull his body up and onto it. He swam and jumped from tree to tree until the water pressure was lessened by the build-up of debris, slowing the rush of water. Reaching a hillock just above the flood line, he was finally able to rest and get his adrenaline levels down before the last swim to the cottage—thankfully safely above the flood line.
From the time Bob had left early in the morning, I had been completely unaware of his movements. I knew friends were coming to help him, but once it got dark, I really started to worry. Had he taken shelter in the main homestead, had he gone into town with his friends after being unable to get home, or had something terrible befallen him in those raging floodwaters? Relief came with the sound of the door opening. He had returned: battered, bruised, wet, cold and completely exhausted.
How many lives has that man got left?
The water continued to rise around the Little Sand Hill paddock, getting closer and closer to our house. We moved our caravan to the highest point on the hill, stocking it with food and a few bottles of wine, just in case.
Unfortunately, I had picked up a flu virus. Brian offered to take me in to see the doctor in Narrandera. To get across to Brian’s vehicle, I had to wade across
a flood channel fifty metres wide, and waist deep. And guess where my mobile phone was. Oh yes, in the pocket of my jeans!
I saw the doctor, received a prescription and medication, and drove back with Brian. A few days later, I was feeling worse; unwell, coughing and breathless. Bob got worried and rang the SES, and within no time at all an eighteen-foot rescue boat arrived at our front steps, our house by now being surrounded by water. I felt so embarrassed. It wasn’t as though I was on death’s door. The crew on the boat escorted me to the ambulance parked on the Canal Bank Road and took me into town. It was an amazing service. After seeing the doctor, I was allowed to leave and stay with kind friends in town.
Due to the flood, Carraman was cut off from town for four weeks. The government gave us ‘stranded lot’ free accommodation. It was convenient for me as I was able to get to work at the nursing home. Every couple of days Bob would kayak to our vehicle on the Canal Bank Road and drive in to see me in Narrandera, in between feeding the stock confined to an eighty-acre sand hill paddock.
The floodwater only reached the back stairs at our house but at Brian’s there was six to eight inches of water throughout the house, causing much damage to the wooden floors.
Bob had only just finished repairing fences from the first floodwater when the second flood arrived, causing forty-three kilometres of fencing to be either washed away or covered in debris.
Twelve months later, Lindsay Hayes, a journalist from Narrandera’s Argus newspaper, came out to Carraman to interview Bob about the property’s recovery after the flood.
Floods won’t stop the quest for perfect herd
Nature’s worst efforts won’t halt Bob Black’s drive for excellence at the Riverina Angus Stud he manages.
A NSW Riverina property devastated by floods twelve months ago is today a picture of prosperity with contented cattle grazing lush riverside pastures.
