From Strength to Strength

by Sara Henderson

  I was joking, but the pause was too long. The agency was indeed a few blocks away from a rehabilitation centre for patients recovering from nervous breakdowns. Both our cooks had been out on six-week trial periods. We changed our employment agency. In fact, to be on the safe side, we went interstate.

  The rate of staff turnover at Bullo was unbelievable. In the first year alone about 160 were hired, and some were fired, departed or just plain walked away. We only needed a staff of about twenty so that was an almost complete turnover of staff every five weeks. There were many reasons for this. It was very isolated, beer was rationed, food was mostly beef, cooks were mostly lousy, work was endless, weather was very hot, there was nowhere to go and, of course, there was Charlie. Some employees might have put up with all the rest, but Charles was another problem altogether.

  Charles ran the station along the lines of a battleship. He told them how long they could have their hair, what clothes they had to wear, when to go to bed, how much grog they could have to drink, what they could do with their time off, and so on.

  He also managed to instil the ‘fear of God’ into most of them. This was illustrated one day when we were loading the plane with the meat cartons. He usually taxied the plane down to the abattoir for loading, but Homestead Creek had flooded overnight and washed away part of the plane’s taxiing ramp. So we had to form a human chain across the fast-flowing section of the creek and pass the cartons of meat along till they reached the plane on the other side. Charles supervised this operation from the plane, and shouted directions to everyone within hearing distance.

  ‘Hurry up, don’t drop the cartons, don’t wet the cartons!’ he bellowed.

  One chap in the middle of the current was reaching to hand the carton to the next person, when he stepped into a hole and went underwater. He uttered a terrible gurgling sound as he went under, but held the carton up in the air at full arm’s length. Everyone stopped and watched the meat carton teetering and then steady.

  ‘Oh, well done, you didn’t drop the carton!’ said Charles.

  ‘Charles, he’s underwater, he can’t hear you and if someone doesn’t take that forty-pound weight off him, he’ll drown!’

  Hands from all directions grabbed the carton and dragged the poor fellow out of the hole. He came up coughing and spluttering. When he’d finally recovered, the first thing he said was, ‘Did the carton get wet?’

  I know if I had applied for a job, I would not have been there long. But unfortunately I was the wife, so I just had to keep working.

  Many pilots came to Bullo to build up their hours so that they could go into jets. Often, when flying Ansett or Australian Airlines, I hear the name of a pilot who cut his teeth delivering meat for the Bullo River Family Abattoir to some remote mission in the north of Australia in the seventies. I am sometimes tempted to ask the hostess to tell him I am on board, but refrain for fear the name Henderson might make him throw the plane into a nosedive.

  One top-class pilot we were fortunate enough to have with us for a while was Les Wright. On his first day on Bullo, Charles introduced him to Bertha, our Beaver De Havilland aircraft. She was sadly overloaded with boxes of meat and Les politely pointed out this fact.

  ‘Now, boy, just get in and fly the thing. Leave everything else up to me.’

  Boy, if I had a dollar for every time I heard that ‘Leave everything up to me’, I would be a multi-millionaire. Being his first day on the job, Les followed orders.

  Charles had told him to circle the mission and buzz the store and the store manager would then drive out to the airstrip and unload the cartons of meat. Les did this and flew on to the airstrip, which was about six miles from the store. He lined up the plane and, remembering the heavy load, made a careful touch-down. He stopped the engine, got out of the plane and turned to watch for the store manager. Just then a large spear embedded itself in the closed door of the plane right under his nose. For a few seconds he stared at the spear in disbelief, then as another whistled over, he jumped into the plane, gunned the engine and flew out as fast as overloaded Bertha could manage.

  While he was on the two-hour flight back to Bullo from Hooker Creek, the irate store manager got on the phone to Charles wanting to know why the plane buzzed the store and then took off with the meat as he was driving to the airstrip.

  When Les arrived back, Charlie was on the airstrip waiting.

  ‘What’s your problem, son?’

  Les explained what had happened and pointed to the spear still firmly embedded in the door of the plane. To Les’s amazement, Charlie said, ‘Now, boy, that’s nothing to do with us, they’re just warring, you should have gone about your business and ignored them.’

  ‘How could I? The plane was in the middle of the war zone. And if that spear had been a foot to the right, it would be sticking through me, not the door!’

  ‘Now, the store manager is upset. You just go back and park the plane down the south end and the spears won’t bother you. He’s waiting for the meat.’

  So Les took off from Bullo, buzzed the store two hours later, landed at the south end of the Hooker Creek strip, unloaded the boxes in record time and jumped into the plane and took off.

  He always maintained that after that first day, everything else that happened to him at Bullo seemed ordinary.

  In the early days Gus would come to Bullo for Christmas and usually stay for the Christmas week until New Year. The first Christmas he brought with him a beautiful white and gold portable Christmas tree in an old brown suitcase. This beautiful sparkling tree would be assembled in the middle of our bare tin shed. The temperature would be in the high forties with heat waves shimmering across the flat, and yet this small glittering tree would cast its Christmas magic over that harsh and drab Outback setting.

  At night we would light candles around it and sit and sing carols. Our abattoir stockmen in those days came from Port Keats, and our first Christmas they amazed me when they sang Ave Maria in Latin, accompanied by guitars.

  Each year Gus would arrive by plane with Charles just before Christmas day with the brown suitcase and presents. I don’t know who had more fun, Charles and Gus or the children.

  The tin shed slowly, very slowly, improved so that the little tree did not look so ridiculously out of place. Despite the children being as careful as they could, each year the tree became a little more worse for wear. Finally it reached the stage where it was allowed to reside at Bullo permanently instead of travelling back and forth to Darwin. But it became quite forlorn and there came a time when a new tree had to be thought of.

  The children told their dad there were some real trees in the camp paddock that looked just like fir trees, so he said they would cut one down. There was great excitement as they set forth on the first Christmas tree expedition. Horses, rope, packed lunch, billy for tea. They departed into the wilderness, Charles leading. It was a great adventure and they arrived back very proudly with a rather scraggly tree. But after much cutting and manoeuvring, tying and flower arranging, and lots and lots of streamers and hand-made decorations, it looked, well, festive.

  The children thought it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen and sat staring at it for hours. It was quite tall, about seven or eight feet, so what it lacked in style, it made up for in size. I stood the little gold and white tree under the spreading green limbs and it looked strangely out of place. The big spindly, rambling green tree actually suited our tin shed.

  That year Gus could not spend Christmas with us and indeed never did again. Each year the Christmas tree improved in size and appearance to where it now is about twelve feet high and ten feet in width, with decorations that would rival the Rockefeller Center tree.

  Over the years the little white and gold tree has been reduced to nothing more than three tattered and almost bare branches. The gold silk on the balls is all fuzzy and broken, the steel branches almost bare of white artificial snow. But to me that little tree will always be special. It brings the memories of the past yea
rs flooding back, right from that first year in the bare shed, when it seemed to be the centre of the universe, the only evidence of beauty.

  In the long years that followed, the shed became a homestead, the whole valley turned from a vast hostile wilderness into something of beauty. I suppose it is correctly called progress and development, but I would like to still think it was Uncle Gus’s little gold and white Christmas tree that spread its magic each year.

  ‘What’s this crap?’ These words brought me back to the present. One of the boys was picking up my three little branches I had put on the tree when a hand stopped him.

  ‘Don’t touch, Mrs Henderson put them there.’ He turned to me and said, ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t think it was anything special, it looked like rubbish.’

  I smiled. I suppose they did look like something you would throw on a rubbish heap and not decorate with red satin bows, but twenty years ago it was a very different story. To me, they were the only touch of beauty in a hostile wilderness, and they will continue to be a part of our every Christmas on Bullo.

  CHAPTER 13

  1974

  The year was 1974. It was a year of many ups and downs, more downs than ups, but by far the most devastating event was the sudden death of my dad.

  To receive the message over a two-way radio that your dad, or indeed anyone you love, has died, is the most gut-wrenching feeling. It is as if something just reaches in and pulls all your innards out. I found myself doubled over gasping for breath, the microphone swinging over the side of the desk and and the speaker saying, ‘SLI, Sierra Lima India, are you receiving? Over.’

  I wandered from the radio room out across the paddock, and found myself next to the creek behind the tin shed. I sat beside the fast-flowing rainwater creek and watched images form in the water.

  Poppa’s face came to me and I smiled. I had only seen him a few times over the last fourteen years. Since my marriage, you could count the times on two hands. He and Mum had visited us twice in the Philippines, but he had never been to the station, or to America, so apart from a few holidays in Sydney during the first years of the seventies, that was it.

  I sat for many hours by the shady creek going back over all the wonderful things that were my father, or as we fondly called him, Poppa.

  Aubrey George Whelan Barton was born on the 23rd of February 1896 at ‘Walton Cottage’, Marlborough Street, Leichhardt. His dad, George Robert Barton, was a civil servant and his mother, Emma May Whelan, was from Turrawan Sheep Station near Narrabri, New South Wales.

  As a young man he was a great athlete and played against the All Blacks at the age of sixteen when at De La Salle. He also played Maher Cup football all through the west of New South Wales.

  His dad went into hotels and by the time Poppa had married my mother, they were moving from hotel to hotel in western New South Wales as owners, checking on the general running of each hotel and building trade. Over the years the hotels stretched from Cootamundra in the southwest, to Coffs Harbour in the north. I remember names like Krumbach, Lake Cargelligo, Bungendore, Gunnedah, Coonabarabran, and many more.

  Dad was the most eligible bachelor in town when Mum married him and, according to her, every girl in town was after him, except Mum, so naturally she was the one he wanted. Mum had been raised in the normal way ladies were in the twenties. She played the piano, had a lovely trained singing voice, did exquisite needlework, was a good cook, a skilled milliner, and wasn’t too bad at sketching. No wonder Poppa wanted her!

  Mum said he would stand across the street from her house, chewing gum. This was considered a disgusting habit and Mum didn’t want anything to do with him. He would walk next to her on her way to church and chatter all the way. He told her he was a football player and loved boxing. That’s why he chewed gum all the time, to strengthen his jaw. Apart from football and boxing he helped his father in their hotel, but the only part of the hotel business he liked was throwing out the rowdy types as he would then have the chance to get himself into a good fight. Mum would run into church very quickly.

  But it seems Poppa had made up his mind that this quiet refined talented girl was going to be his. So he just kept walking her to and from church. Mum was Church of England and Poppa was Catholic, so he waited outside the church. He would visit her at home and sit and talk to her in the parlour. Mum said he would bring her a bag of grapes or sometimes chocolates, but would usually eat them all on the way to the house.

  He finally proposed, and Mum accepted. They were married in St Mary’s Cathedral on the 11th of January 1922.

  The priest told Mum that because she was not Catholic, they could not be married at the main altar. She was also told that all the children had to be raised as Catholics, and that she had to become a Catholic too.

  Mum waited patiently until the priest had finished, and then politely told him that she would only be married at the front altar, would not become a Catholic and that all the boys could be Catholic, but all the girls would be Church of England. ‘If this is not to your liking, please say so and I will make arrangements for the wedding to take place in my church.’

  Poppa was not a churchgoer; he was a great Christian in his everyday life, but not a churchgoer. Mum on the other hand was very religious and attended church regularly. So Poppa left all the arrangements to Mum.

  The priest, no doubt realising that he could lose all, including Poppa, agreed to her terms.

  The life that followed is a book in itself. Stories of the town running out of water and Mum giving my brother beer when he was thirsty and receiving a letter from the schoolteacher requesting her not to send her child to school smelling of liquor, colourful tales of remittance men who lived permanently in the hotels with their bills paid from England, of floods, bushfires, droughts, of balls in shearing sheds, cross-country horse events, and on and on.

  Poppa was a good father, but his life revolved around Mum. The first thing he always said when he walked in the door was, ‘Where’s Mummy?’

  I was thankful for at least one thing, that Mum did not go first. Poppa would have died of a broken heart and I would have lost them both.

  ‘There you are, darling.’ Charles sat down and wrapped his arms around me and I cried and cried. That day I really felt his love for me.

  We walked back to our tin shed with black menacing clouds spitting lightning and thunder all around the valley. It was an appropriate setting for my mood. It was also the edge of a low depression which moved in swiftly that night. When Charles checked with flight service the next morning, the front was all along the coast and Darwin airport was closed to all small aircraft. After three days, Charles couldn’t stand looking at my misery and I was going to miss Poppa’s funeral, so he flew me to Darwin anyway. The weather was so low the only thing Charles could do was fly very low and follow the road. He flew out our road, along the Victoria Highway and turned left at Katherine and up the Stuart Highway. At one stage we were so low he scared a semi driver out of his skin—we were about twenty feet above him as we passed. I looked back to see the truck weaving all over the road. Charles dared not go any higher or we would have been in the clouds and unable to see the highway or the hills. If we lost that white line, we were goners.

  I took the jet to Sydney while Charles went to face an inquiry as to why he had landed at a closed airport, and what he was doing in the air, period, as all small aircraft had been grounded.

  Mum was like a little girl. She had collapsed. Gone was the strong woman I had known all my life. Poppa’s death had devastated her. I was at a loss as to how to handle her. I remembered her solution in a crisis: have a cup of tea.

  I opened the curtains and, ignoring her wails of protest, gently sat her up in bed, washed her face and hands with a hot facecloth, put on her robe and led her downstairs.

  We had many cups of tea and after hours of crying, reminiscing and laughing at memories, we went to bed exhausted. A week of this got her back on the road to living. Everything was, ‘What do you think your dad wou
ld do?’ After another few weeks of talking through the third person, we were ready to step back into the world again.

  I decided to move her out of the two-storey house, into an ocean-side unit. I called an agent and told him what I wanted.

  ‘Do you have a few million to spare?’ he asked.

  The family told him to do the best he could for a lot less. I left Mum at home and did the rounds with him. Some places I wouldn’t even get out of the car.

  ‘You call that waterfront?’

  ‘Lady, if there’s water within a mile, that’s waterfront.

  After three days of saying ‘Drive on’ the man finally accepted that it was waterfront I wanted. After a few units actually on the waterfront, I said, ‘Okay, we’re now on the water, but two problems, the rooms are too small, and the price is too big.’

  He looked at me for a while and I could see him making a decision. He finally said, ‘I think I have just what you want, but there are complications.’

  ‘Let me see it first. If it’s what we want, then tell me the complications.’

  We stopped in a lovely cul-de-sac and stepped up to an intercom-controlled door. Two out of two. We walked into a carpeted foyer with a winding staircase and two lifts. Four out of four. We went up to the second floor. Five out of five. Mum had to be above the ground so she couldn’t be burgled, but not so high that she couldn’t run down the stairs in case of fire. We walked into the living room. It was a big room with ocean views from all the windows, even the kitchen had ocean views, in fact, every room had ocean views.

  ‘Okay, so what’s the problem?’

  ‘The owner.’

  ‘Oh?’

  The unit had been on the market for five years. This was hard to believe, but he told me to believe it.

  ‘My partner and I have given up showing the place, the owner is just so difficult.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Apparently he was one of the foundation members of the body corporate and felt very responsible about who he handed his unit on to. They couldn’t have any children, they had to make a lump sum payment to the body corporate and, most difficult of all, they had to pass his personal evaluation.’