From Strength to Strength

by Sara Henderson

  We were finally told that a virus had lodged in his lungs, and so he embarked on the endless road of pill-taking. I am sure that if, at that point, he had stopped drinking and done some exercise, it could have been beaten. But he continued to drink, he gained a tremendous amount of weight and he refused to do any physical exercise at all. He later had two close bouts of viral pneumonia and from then on his health steadily deteriorated.

  In early 1976 a friend of a friend arrived at Bullo on holidays and just happened to be a doctor. He examined Charles and said he would like to do further tests, could he come to Sydney? He showed me how to drain the lungs so that Charles didn’t exhaust himself coughing up the muck. He also told Charles lots of things he could do for himself, but apart from letting me pound his back and ribs four or five times a day to loosen all the phlegm, he would do nothing.

  We finally went to Sydney the next year. Even Charles had now realised it was not something to be taken lightly. The coughing would not stop, hours in the morning and again at sunset—sometimes he would cough until he dropped.

  We made an appointment with Bill Foulsham, the doctor who had visited us at Bullo. Bill Foulsham was a wonderful person and doctor.

  We arrived at his surgery and after catching up on events since we had last seen him, he examined Charles and arranged for the many tests he wished to carry out. He then turned to me.

  ‘I want to examine you,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I’m alright, just tired.’

  ‘I think you’re more than tired.’

  ‘No, no, just overworked. Anyway, I can’t afford to get sick, and that’s that.’

  ‘Well you are, nothing about “getting”, you’re there.’

  He now had me scared. I really couldn’t be sick. Debts were increasing by the day and it was only the fact that there was a cash flow which stopped the bank from finishing us off.

  I suppose we all tend to think we are indispensable, and in those days I was no different. I was about to find out that life goes on, regardless.

  ‘How long have you been feeling tired?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Oh gosh, I suppose when I stop and think about it, years. Ever since we’ve been on the station.’

  ‘Any other symptoms?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Temperatures? Fevers?’

  I sat and thought. It no doubt would seem strange to some people that I had to actually stop and think if I had been sick, but our days on the station were so full you didn’t have time to think, and when you did, you were so tired you only wanted to sleep.

  ‘Well, this past year I’ve been getting fevers. I’m always tired when I get up. I can live with that, but some days around mid-morning I’m so tired my limbs just refuse to move. It’s been so bad of late that I have to make sure lunch is ready the day before, because when these attacks happen I sometimes fall asleep for hours. The children love it. They wait for me to fall asleep and then sneak out of the schoolroom.’

  Dr Bill smiled, ‘You know you can’t keep up this pace. Your body is already telling you that.’

  ‘Oh, I’m young, I’ll be alright.’

  ‘You’re not alright, and if the tests confirm my diagnosis, you’ll have to have an operation. How old was your mother when she had her gall bladder out?’

  ‘Oh, I guess about thirty-one.’

  ‘Well, you lasted longer. Now let’s not go on about this. When you get your first attack you’ll be in here begging to have the operation. I’ve never yet had to convince a patient to have their gall bladder out, after the first attack that is. I want you to have an x-ray, and that will give us the answer.’

  The x-rays were done and I went back to Dr Bill’s surgery to hear the verdict. The gall bladder was a mess. He said he was surprised it was still together—it was literally pumping poison into my body. He was amazed I was still walking around.

  I had to have the operation as soon as possible. I said maybe at the end of the year. Bill looked very stern and said I was not listening. If I had a first attack and was not close to a hospital and surgeon, I would die in a matter of hours. I could not go back to the station.

  The surgeon Bill wanted was number one on gall bladders, but he was overseas lecturing, so I had to wait. Charles went back to the station and I spent four blissful weeks in Sydney doing exactly what I liked. Then I had the operation and it was not so blissful. I was quite sure I would never raise my arms above my head again. For weeks I walked around holding my hands over the scar, quite sure if I removed them, everything inside me would fall out. It was a horrible sensation.

  After another few months, I was declared fit enough to face the wilderness again. Charles came to Sydney to take me home. It was our wedding anniversary so he arranged for us to have dinner at the Chelsea Restaurant, the restaurant we had gone to on our first date.

  Charles always spoke in a loud commanding voice, as if he were issuing orders from the bridge, so when he lowered his voice to say something intimate, only the surrounding room could hear.

  During dinner he was sharing various personal incidents from our married life with the rest of the restaurant, when I looked across the room and saw Alfred Hitchcock.

  ‘Isn’t that Alfred Hitchcock over there?’

  In his usual booming whisper, Charles asked, ‘Who is Alfred Hitchcock?’

  Mr Hitchcock stood up, turned towards Charles and bowed.

  ‘I am, sir,’ he said, then sat down and completely ignored us.

  As we were leaving, a couple at a table near the door congratulated us on our wedding anniversary.

  ‘I wonder who told them it was our anniversary,’ Charles commented when we were outside.

  He was serious.

  I had expected a mess, but what greeted me on my return to the station almost made me want to end it all. Months of mail piled up, dirt and mess everywhere, no schoolwork done. As far as I could see, the only thing they had done regularly was eat—the state of the kitchen testified to this.

  Just as well I had some extra energy after my rest in Sydney, because it was needed. It took me months to get the house, office and school into running order again.

  Charles was so pleased I was home, he actually gave me a compliment. He said he had needed three girls to get through my workload. Of course now that I was back, they could go. The loving, caring Charles who had come to Sydney to wine and dine me disappeared somewhere along the way.

  To top it all off, I found out that he had taken advantage of my absence to entertain a few of his women friends. It saddened me that he would behave in this way in our home, and in front of the children. But when I took him to task, I was told in no uncertain terms that it was not my place to criticise. I realised then that he really didn’t care what I thought or felt. I also realised, to my surprise, that I didn’t care quite as much as I once would have. I think my love for him was finally starting to die.

  The long stay in Sydney had also brought something else home to me. For years now, I had worked long and hard to save money being spent on extra wages, but no matter how long or how hard I worked, Charles would always find extra work for me. So I slowed down. The operation helped in this—it was a good six months before I was really strong again and the doctor had told me not to lift anything heavy during that time. But after that period, I just continued to require help. To add to the continuous line of so-called cooks, I now had a domestic and someone to help in the office. Of course, Charles complained but I stood firm.

  In the latter part of 1976, Charles arrived home one day and said, ‘Gus and I are going to buy Montejinni Station.’

  And they did. Charles, the girls and I moved to the station to live for the next few months. The plan was to move as many meatworks cattle as possible off the station before the wet season. They had bought the property for a very good price but, as usual, money was tight and as much as possible had to be made before the wet started, as that represented six months of no income.

  We mustered cattle non-stop for
weeks. By October, which was usually the end of the cattle season, the weather was very hot so we mustered the cattle at sunrise, and then put them in large holding areas near the yards during the heat of the day.

  The yards were made of steel and during the day the heat off the rails could be felt from a distance of three feet, so the cattle could not be yarded until just before sunset. We would draft until it was dark and then load by headlights. The loaded trucks would be away around midnight and it would all start again at four a.m.

  Montejinni had not been mustered for around three years and cattle were virtually leaning up against trees. For us it was an amazing sight. On Bullo, if we had a muster all day and ended up with four hundred in the yards, it was cause for celebration. On Montejinni, after the helicopter had mustered for two hours, there were two thousand in the yards with cattle still streaming down the wings and nowhere to go. Of course at that time we had about 5000 head on Bullo and Montejinni was running 20 to 25,000 head.

  Katherine meatworks agreed to stay open past the usual closing date as long as Montejinni could supply enough cattle to get up a full day’s production. This was done well into November.

  We moved back to Bullo for Christmas and the mountain of problems that had accumulated there while we were at Montejinni. Christmas was the only bright spot in a troublesome year. The following year saw the prospect of a recovery in the price of cattle, but not much, just enough to make you hold on by your fingernails hoping you would manage a toe hold.

  Charles and Gus continued to argue, if not face to face, then over the radio, mostly over Montejinni, but I am sure if it had not been Montejinni, it would have been something else. They seemed very at home arguing. They even argued about how much time each one was allowed to argue. The radio telephone was really a private line two-way radio in as much as you had to release a button in order to hear the other person. Gus in Darwin, on a normal phone, could not interrupt Charles until Charles released the button. The phone calls were limited to twelve minutes because of the overload on the system and it was not unusual for them to spend the entire twelve minutes arguing over how much time each one could have, only to have the operator say, ‘Twelve minutes are up, please finish.’

  I came into the office one day to find Charles holding the phone in one hand and a timer in the other. The timer was ringing furiously and Charles was saying, ‘Gus, I know my time is up, but just let me make this point.’ Click. ‘Gus?’ Click. ‘Are you there, Gus?’ Click.

  He looked up at me. ‘Now why do you suppose he hung up?’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t like you going into his time.’

  ‘Bloody hell! Now it will take me ten minutes to get him back and I’ll forget what I was saying. Don’t talk, don’t talk while I write it down.’

  As I walked away, I could hear him saying, ‘Operator, I was talking to Gus and the line was disconnected.’ Pause. ‘No, no, he wouldn’t do that. It’s most important we finish the conversation.’ Pause. ‘I told you, he wouldn’t hang up!’

  I know what the operator was thinking, the same as me, ‘Like bloody hell he wouldn’t!’

  Around this time they bought a ten-thousand-acre irrigated farm complex with its own dam called Kingston Rest. It had been built by an American and it was not a piece-by-piece lean-to affair as most of the North was in those days. It was a well-built, first-class project. With this purchase, the Victoria Project was starting to take shape. They had Bullo River, Spirit Hill, Montejinni for growing cattle and Kingston Rest for finishing and fattening. Montejinni Abattoir for processing was on the drawing board, just waiting for approval.

  So all they needed now were the ships to move the meat to the Far East. They had kept a finger on the pulse of the shipping market and were just waiting for the right moment. It never came.

  CHAPTER 15

  1980-1981

  By 1980 cattle prices were back to the price of seven years before, or a bit higher. We had survived, but back loans and interest had been mounting and our debt was staggering.

  The best thing to happen in those seven miserable years was that we closed the abattoir. I know having the abattoir made it possible for us to survive during the bad years, but it was one of the happiest days of my life when we closed those doors. We were now back to just a muster camp and when the rainy season started, we had our wonderful quiet period. Not the magic of the first wet—too much water under the bridge for that, and of course there was a lot to do, schoolwork, office work and so on—but we would be down to just a few people and that was bliss.

  With the abattoir closed and the meat not flying out in kilo packs, we were faced with the old system or the normal system of moving the cattle out in trucks. There was only one problem, our road. It meandered over twenty miles of rock, then thirty miles of sand and bulldust. No trucker in his right mind would contemplate putting one wheel off the highway onto the dreaded Bullo River road.

  So began our long asociation with the Department of Roads in the Northern Territory. I am sure they have a whole filing cabinet on the ‘Bullo River Road’, and of course on Charlie. If he had carried out even half the threats he screamed at those unfortunate people over the years, most of the North would have been eliminated.

  Despite Charles, our road did slowly improve with the years, but in the meantime we still had to get the cattle to the highway. Charles’s solution was simple.

  ‘We’ll walk the cattle to the highway,’ he said, something we did before the opening of the abattoir. Of course it was simple for him, he only had to say it, but it was up to the girls and the Aboriginal stockmen to achieve it.

  In those days our cattle were very wild and to walk them fifty miles through trees and over rocks and mountains was no mean feat. I told Charles I would not let the girls go on the road for a week by themselves with the stockmen. He said he couldn’t go, so of course I went.

  It took four to five days to walk the cattle to the highway. On our first journey, Charles arranged for us to walk out meatworks cattle and bring in breeders and some breeding bulls.

  By chance I saw Charles’s plan for the operation:

  ‘Walk 350 m/w [meat workers] to highway, meet trucks, unload breeders, load m/w, walk back 400 breeders.’

  Two lines. It took about twenty hours a day of everyone’s time for ten days to achieve this small notation in his notebook. It entailed rodeo bucking, mad charging steers, mad charging cows, mad charging stockmen and a mad cook. At one stage, everyone had diarrhoea from the cook’s atrocious cooking, and trying to keep a herd of wild cattle together with the entire stockcamp going bush every five minutes was quite an achievement. Somehow we blundered through and arrived at the yards. The small feat of unloading the cows off the trucks, holding them and loading the steers onto the trucks saw another rodeo of cows and steers racing around the flat.

  The big boss, Charlie, then arrived to make sure everything was going according to his plan. His timing was perfect. He landed the plane on the road that is the Victoria Highway and taxied over to the yard just after we had settled the cattle down.

  The plan now was to let the cows rest in the yards for the remainder of the day and then leave early in the morning to get them across the Auvergne flat and up our road and over the pass into Bullo before the sun was up. We didn’t want to walk them over the rocks during the heat of the day.

  But before we could settle down to the first peaceful full night’s sleep in four days, we had to see Charles off. This meant we had to block off half a mile of the Victoria Highway so he could use it as a runway for take off.

  Two of us went and stopped a few cars at one end. The people got out with their cameras and asked if we were crossing cattle.

  I told them not right now, a plane was taking off. They looked down the road and saw the Beaver barrelling towards them. Letting out a yelp, they headed for the bush as Charlie roared overhead.

  Early the next morning we started back with our mob of cows under a full moon across the Auvergne flat. For te
n miles there was not even a bump, then it was hundreds of feet almost straight up on a two-wheel donkey track carved into the side of a sandstone cliff. This was a new mob just on the road, so there was a lot of mooing and battling for position.

  Cattle are very methodical animals and if anything seems out of place, even in the slightest, they all stop and stare. The steers were bad enough, but the cows were hilarious. We had four hundred of the most inquisitive sticky-beaks on four legs. If one of the riders even changed position, they became suspicious. I was the worst rider, so I was the lead. The second morning I changed my shirt and they would not follow.

  It was one of the Aboriginals who told me about the different shirt. ‘Them got a picture of you, Missus, if you change you clothes, ’em don’t know ya!’

  Anything to keep the peace and get the cows home, so I washed the shirt each night and wore it all the way. It was fit for the ragbag when we finally made it home, but ‘lead cow’ was happy and faithfully followed the back of my shirt for fifty miles.

  Sometimes she would walk beside me and I would chat to her or sing. She would look up at me with those warm chocolate-brown eyes as if she understood every word I said. That first hundred miles of droving developed my love for cattle and for cattle droving. We walked cattle for about four to five years before the first cattle truck ventured down our road. I couldn’t go on every drove, but I still managed quite a few in the early years.

  Around this time we had with us a delightful character called Diesel Don. Charles christened him this because he worked in the workshop, and also because we already had two Dons. Don was Yugoslav, a marvellous chess player, very intelligent and thoughtful, not a bad mechanic’s assistant, and a very willing worker. His one big problem was that he could not speak English very well. In fact, it would be safe to say that he could not speak English at all.