From Strength to Strength

by Sara Henderson

  I didn’t speak to him for weeks and I was still sleeping in the children’s room. I knew this couldn’t continue, but I had no solution. Every night when I thought the children were asleep I cried. But one day Marlee came to me and said, ‘Mummy, do mummies cry all the time?’ I burst into tears.

  ‘No, darling, not all the time.’

  ‘When will you stop crying?’

  ‘I don’t know, darling, I don’t know.’

  Finally Charles came to me.

  ‘I don’t know how to prove to you that I love you.’

  ‘I would think it would be easy—just don’t chase other women.’

  ‘They don’t mean anything to me.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t have too much trouble giving them up. But really, I don’t think it matters any more. I don’t care what you do. I knew in my heart this wasn’t true, but part of me did hope that he would finish it so that I could start putting some sort of life together again.

  ‘To prove how much I love you I’m willing to go back to the station—it’ll be just you and me in the wilderness.’

  Like a fool I believed him. I reckoned that if he was willing to go back into the wilderness, he must love me. Then as proof of just ‘how much he loved me’, he said he would sign the station over to me.

  ‘Now would I do that if I didn’t love you?’

  My trust in Charles had changed over the years. I no longer believed everything he told me—but I had to admit that handing the station over seemed a fantastic gesture and certainly put a lot of power in my hands. However, years later, it was revealed that his gift had an anchor and chain attached to it, and he could haul it in whenever he liked. It seems that he had altered the Articles of Memorandum of the company, and if I ever had told him to get out, I would not have ended up with the station.

  A few weeks after I returned to the station, I likewise found out that his declaration of love in the wilderness had also been a statement of convenience. Just after the fateful party, he had received a letter from John saying that things were not too good on the station and he had better return quickly. The deciding factor was that John could not send any more funds from cattle sales. Because there weren’t any more. Funds or cattle sales.

  Our departure was much the same as our arrival—trouble prone! We had a shocking drive to the airport through a blizzard, and were down to five miles per hour most of the way. We checked in late and were rushed on board. We had just settled down after all the tears and farewells, when I noticed that the hostesses were doing a lot of running back and forth. It turned out there had been a telephone call to say the plane had a bomb hidden on board. All the passengers disembarked and an army of detectors went over the plane from tip to tail. No bomb. It was a very nervous group of passengers that quietly filed back on board after going through the detector screen. And there were quite a few empty seats. Even with dinner, wine and a movie I could not relax, and was very relieved to leave the plane in Los Angeles.

  On arrival we walked for miles through the tunnels that connect local with overseas airlines. After many wrong tunnels we found our flight and handed over our luggage, passports and papers. It was while the attendant was checking our papers that I saw the mistake. I went as white as a sheet and Charles immediately wanted to know what was wrong. I managed to put him off and the clerk handed back our passports and told us our flight would leave in two hours.

  I quickly dragged Charles and the children to the coffee lounge, where he demanded to know why I was acting so strangely. I took out our passports and showed him. The travel agent had attached all the necessary travel papers to our outdated passports. Fortunately the checking clerk had missed the expiry date on our passports. After many cups of coffee, we decided to worry about the passports when we reached Sydney. Somewhere in our luggage was a bundle of passports marked ‘out-of-date’. At least I hoped so.

  It was January 1971 and we discovered at boarding time that we were on the first Jumbo flight to Sydney, and of course the whole plane was booked! There was very tight security, so more luggage-searching and detector screens. This is all part of air travel now, but twenty years ago it was very new and quite unnerving.

  By this time it was two a.m. east coast time and we were getting extremely tired, especially the children. We were standing in line waiting to file through the screen when a man in front of us set off the alarm system. There he stood on the raised platform, with red lights flashing and bells clanging! All three hundred plus passengers were looking at him. He was a small man with glasses and looked as if he wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  The officer in charge of security stepped up to the little guy. ‘Do you have anything to declare?’ he asked in a deep, dramatic voice.

  ‘No,’ the little guy croaked out.

  They asked him to step down and they put his briefcase on the stand—no alarms. They put him back—alarms! With red lights flashing and awful clanging noises everywhere, the security man asked again, ‘Do you have anything to declare?’

  ‘I want to go home!’

  They took his coat, he stepped onto the stand—alarms! They took his shirt—alarms! They took his shoes and socks—more alarms! By this time the poor man was shaking from head to toe. They took off his belt and, clutching his pants, he once more headed for the screen. He slowly went up the ramp, took a deep breath, and stepped onto the platform. Silence. He nearly collapsed with relief. Apparently the metal in the buckle on his belt was the same metal used in bullet and bomb casings. The man never did board the plane. He grabbed all his clothes and while the security guard was trying to apologise, ran from the building with clothes flying in all directions.

  We eventually made the plane and were all seated waiting for takeoff when the air was once more shattered by alarms. Oh no, not again! Everyone was jumping up and down in their seats when the captain announced that everything was fine. Because there were so many doors on the Jumbo, the hostesses had to go through a door drill, and if any of them didn’t follow the steps in order, it set off an alarm. By the colour of the hostess’s face next to us, I would say she missed a step.

  When we got to Sydney the airport was in chaos. Along with the first Jumbo was one 707 from Europe and another from the Far East, all at the same time. By the time we reached the customs officer, he was fit to be tied and not the least bit sympathetic to our problem. He just kept shouting, ‘Back to America!’

  I then asked if I could open our luggage and produce our current passports. Finally, after much arguing, I was allowed into the customs baggage area. There, with customs men peering over my shoulder, I tried as calmly as possible to remember where I had packed the passports. I found them, but the next problem was that we hadn’t even checked out of America on the right passports. Five hours and twenty pages of red tape later, they combined old checkout passports and new check-in passports and we were free to go.

  After a brief holiday with my parents and family, I once more headed for the Outback, this time loaded down with all the requirements for living—sheets, towels, furniture and so on. Our first stay had been strictly camping with a few bare essentials. This time around I made sure I had all the trimmings.

  Charles had a friend send a shipment of rattan furniture to us from the Philippines and this went a long way towards making the tin shed look as if someone lived there. Linen and non-breakables were no problem to bring in by road, but there were some things I had to wait many years for. Large mirrors could not come by road, the trip was just too rough.

  I finally received my first mirror by plane. Many hands carefully unloaded it, but when Dick was attaching it to the wall one of his assistants slipped and dropped one end and we then had lots of odd-shaped small mirrors.

  It was another few years before I got my next large mirror, so we survived on hand mirrors. I didn’t realise how much weight I had gained until the full length mirror arrived.

  Uncle Dick made a lot of steel furniture and I created many coffee tables out of very large slabs of sandst
one with lumps of tree trunks for legs.

  With endless boxes of ‘relief’ packages sent by Mum and my sister over the years, the finishing touches started to appear in the rooms and the tin shed slowly turned into a homestead.

  CHAPTER 12

  1971-1974

  Drought had spread across most of America. Crops failed, the price of corn skyrocketed, and feed lots, closed right across the country. The profit margin between buying store cattle, feeding them corn, and selling the finished produce as table beef, disappeared.

  The American range cattle, which had traditionally gone into the feed lots, were now used for the industrial beef market: small goods, hotdogs, tinned beef, spam and so on. America had imported only two per cent of its beef requirements from Australia, so it was just a short sneeze, but as it was the complete market for the north of Australia, we now had no market at all. So the prices plummeted. The meatworks paid us less for our cattle than it cost to get them there. This cattle depression lasted for seven years.

  We struggled through the first year, but it was evident, even at the beginning of the season, that if the drought in America continued, we were in big trouble. There was no time to discuss private problems. Survival took up all our waking moments. So our private life was put on hold.

  We started supplying Port Keats Aboriginal mission with beef. Port Keats was our next door neighbour, so to speak, across the Victoria River and north a bit. It had a large settlement of Aborigines, around three to four hundred people, and it was run by the Catholic church. The road into it was long, and almost non-existent, so it had difficulty getting supplies. Charles arranged to supply their beef by air, and so the Bullo River Family Abattoir was born.

  Around this time, Charles and John decided they were not suited as partners. John was very hardworking and extremely careful with his money, so being a partner to Charles must have given him constant heart attacks. Charles had no regard for money, his or anyone else’s. In Charles’s eyes, money was to be used, and this he could do very efficiently, much to the horror of any poor person whose money he happened to have his hands on. At this stage, what was worrying John was the debts that Charles was accumulating against the partnership. They settled on splitting the station in half and John moved to a part of the station known as Sandy Creek. Sandy Creek was the southwestern half of Bullo, bordering on the Ord River Irrigation Scheme valley, quite close to the town of Kununurra in Western Australia. Charles kept the Bullo River valley, a stretch of land surrounded on three sides by mountain ranges and on the fourth side by the Victoria River.

  At that stage, Charles and I were not on regular speaking terms, so I was not privy to the events that followed. But letters on file suggest that the running up of debts was a planned exercise, and at the right time Gus offered to buy John out. Around 1972-73 John, after spending months and months in negotiation with Charles and Gus, departed for Queensland.

  Gus then renamed Sandy Creek Spirit Hills and Charles and Gus set about building their empire.

  Charles called it ‘The Victoria Project’, and it involved many stations, an abattoir, a sea port on the Victoria River, ships carrying produce to the Far East—heady dreams for the Outback in the seventies.

  Charles and Gus were unusual business partners. They spent most of their time arguing. However, they also worked very hard and if work had been the only criteria, perhaps their grand scheme would have succeeded. But as it was, the station just kept gobbling up money. The only bright spot was that at least Gus was able to draw tax losses against Bullo for his other companies.

  Of course all these empire-building plans spread over some years. The abattoir was the first step.

  Charles designed and supervised the building of the abattoir and what with the planning, discussions, official visits, permits and forms that went on, I suppose I expected to see something rather large and impressive. For months, trucks lumbered past the homestead loaded down with supplies, depositing tons of bulldust into my tin shed. And, even though this so-called abattoir was apparently going to rescue us from poverty, seeing all that building material go by for another building when the children and I were living in an open tin shed did not sit well with me. I refused to have anything to do with the abattoir construction, and in any case, I would not have had the time. The abattoir was being constructed about a quarter of a mile from the tin shed, and I was fully occupied from five-thirty in the morning until ten at night.

  At that stage I was cook for the staff and family (about twenty), teacher to the three little girls, secretary/telephonist, first aid officer/nurse, gardener, requisition/purchasing officer and hostess all rolled into one. The answer to all problems was, ‘Go ask the Missus.’

  So when I finally did venture down the road on the opening day of the Bullo River Family Abattoir, I was not prepared for the vision that met my eyes. Charles had insisted I come down to officially open it, press the button, throw the switch or whatever one does to open an abattoir. I had to close my eyes until we stopped in front of the abattoir.

  ‘Okay, we’re there, open your eyes.’ Charles was very excited. I opened my eyes and just stared, speechless.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘Is that it?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘What do you mean, “Is that it?”?’

  ‘All those months to build that?’

  Before me stood a new but forlorn corrugated tin shed. It was very tall to accommodate the electric hoist which lifted the carcasses off the floor, in fact twice the normal height. Silhouetted against the vast natural landscape it looked ridiculous, just an ugly, skinny building.

  I suppose I should not condemn it completely—it did make it possible for us to survive the next six years. Only just—each year we slipped further into debt—but it created a cash How, and that was what the bank was interested in. The fact that cash flowed out a lot faster than it trickled in was not ideal, but at least it flowed.

  Starting an abattoir changed the entire routine of the station. There was now no sleepy rainy season. It was full steam ahead, all day, all year round. And we had a full staff for twelve months of the year.

  We supplied Port Keats Aboriginal mission with quarters of beef. We had no chillers or refrigeration, just the tin shed, so the animals would be slaughtered late afternoon, hung overnight, and at first light Charles would fly the meat to Port Keats. The mission grew and so did our orders. Then Bathurst Island mission was included. The missions had their own butcher’s room where the carcass was boned out, but as butchers became harder to find, we were requested to bone out the quarters, so a boning room was added to the skinny tin shed.

  We were now supplying about twelve carcasses per week, so the necessity for refrigeration became obvious and a walk-in chiller was added.

  As the missions’ populations increased their ‘stores’ were expanded, and we were now requested to package the meat in cuts to be sold in the store. So the boning room was extended to incorporate a packing section and a snap-freeze to freeze the packets. Another extension was required for boxing the cuts, and another holding freezer to stock-pile the finished products.

  By now we were supplying Port Keats, Bathurst Island, Snake Bay, Garden Point, Delissaville, Maningrida, Wave Hill and Hooker Creek. We had started with a little four-seater Tri-pacer plane but when Bathurst Island became a regular customer, the flight was too far for such a small plane so we bought a Piper Cherokee. Well, not one, but many, a long line of them.

  Charles finally said, ‘This is no good, we need a work horse, something rugged, a small freight plane built for rough handling.’ And that was how we ended up with Bertha, our Beaver De Havilland.

  I am sure that stories told to Aboriginal children in the future will include Bertha in them. Sister Fred at Port Keats said that on meat delivery days she could never get the children to settle down, they would be too busy listening for Bertha’s very distinctive sound, the Beaver De Havilland big radial engine.

  When they heard it the children wo
uld run en masse from the schoolroom and wait for Charles to put on a display for them. He never disappointed them. They would squeal in delight and hide behind Sister Fred as he dive-bombed them, and then rush out again as he climbed into the sky, only to dive again.

  For ten years Bertha flew the northern skies and she became something of a legend, or I should say Charles and Bertha. The other pilots called the BR/PK/BI/DWN/BR track—Bullo River to Port Keats to Bathurst Island to Darwin with a return back to Bullo River—the Henderson Highway. Everyone knew when Charles was in the air. ‘Charlie’s up,’ they’d say, and that was enough, everyone on the ground would track him, and everyone in the air would avoid him—he had a disconcerting habit of reading a book while flying and if it was a particularly exciting one, he would often stray off course.

  But although Charles could appear dangerous in the air, he was world-class. One time he took off on a bush strip, a rather dangerous strip, with a telephone wire across one end. Charles always tested fate to the extreme, and this day he had a heavy cargo plus seven children on board. On takeoff the wing struck a sapling growing on the strip and the blow wrenched the wing back from the fuselage, jamming the flaps. He could not bank or land as the pressure of this manoeuvre would rip the wing off completely. He had to fly straight ahead, with no sudden movements, for Kununurra Airport forty miles away. Somehow he kept the plane in the air and lined it up with the airstrip. When he landed, the tip of the wing was almost scraping the ground. Part of the damaged wing had separated about twelve inches from the plane’s body.

  Of course, during those ten years, Bertha also faithfully delivered Charles to all his females around half of the Territory, and dutifully broke down whenever he wanted to stay overnight.

  For me, those were nightmare years—three little girls, a property going broke and a marriage that was floundering. I often wonder, now, how I stayed sane, although when I look back, I realise I was probably on the verge of a nervous breakdown many times. I guess my life had been panic, chaos and unhappiness for so long I didn’t know the difference.