From Strength to Strength

by Sara Henderson

  The next day we mustered and drafted out all the steers for export. We then booked the trucks to move the cattle to Wyndham wharf for live export.

  The cattle had been loaded and the truck was leaving the yards when I received a fax from the buyer asking us to load two extra steers. I won’t go into the comments this request brought forth, first from me, then from Marlee, then from the truck driver, but we all reasoned he wouldn’t ask for them if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

  The driver turned the big rig around on the flat outside the homestead. As I went back inside he slowly drove onto the causeway that approaches a small bridge near the generator shed. A few moments later, one of the kitchen staff came into the office.

  ‘Would you come and look at the truck, it doesn’t look right.’

  The road train had gone off the side of the causeway and was lying on its side with one hundred and fifty head of cattle on board. ‘That’s not right, is it?’ said the girl.

  We ran from all directions. Marlee found the driver walking around the rig shaking his head in disbelief. But this only lasted for a few seconds, then everyone was galvanised into action. He opened the emergency hatches on the trailers and released the cattle. As amazing as it sounds, not one was hurt. The last trailer had not rolled, but was teetering on the edge of the causeway and shuddered every time the cattle moved. Marlee quickly chained it to the steel culverts under the causeway to stop it rolling as well.

  You normally unload the bottom deck of a double decker first, but of course, normally, half the trailer is not hanging off a causeway. We had to get the top deck of cattle off first. It was a twelve-foot drop from the top deck to the ground, so Marlee piled a huge ten-foot mound of dirt up against the trailer with the front end loader.

  Then we watched as fifty steers one by one did a fantastic swallow dive off the twelve-foot deck into the soft mound of dirt. There was definite Olympic material there. Some of the stockmen jumped on their horses and mustered the cattle back to the yards.

  The road train was standing almost on its head as it was on the slope of a five-foot embankment. It was decided the causeway would have to be bulldozed away to get the truck upright again or too much damage would be done to the truck pulling it up and over the embankment. So Marlee revved up the D8 bulldozer and removed about one hundred and fifty feet of the causeway. With lots of instructions, many chains and the D8, Marlee finally stood the road train upright again.

  Uncle Dick checked the motor, the driver did a few trial runs around the flat, and it was back to the yards. The cattle were loaded again, including the extra two, and they finally arrived at the ship with about five minutes to spare. We had worked all through the night.

  We waved goodbye to the truck at 5.30 a.m. and were just drinking a cup of coffee when three helicopters appeared over the horizon for our next muster. We mustered eighteen hundred head into the yards and then, at twelve noon, I stepped into the four-seater charter plane to fly to catch the jet to Darwin. Then, early the next morning, on to Cairns and Townsville. That night I spoke to the Townsville Businesswomen’s Network.

  People often ask me, ‘What do you find to do, to pass the time out there?’

  A few days after my return we had tourists from Melbourne and, at the same time, about twenty-two army men on a survival course, living off the land for two weeks.

  We waved goodbye to our tourists, a delightful family, at ten on Saturday morning and I had to speak at Carlton Hill Station at about seven that night. It was a six-hour drive from Bullo, I was already exhausted and I still had to write my speech. This life in the fast lane was taking its toll. Jim was driving me to Carlton Hill, so I prepared the speech en route.

  Marlee had left for Carlton Hill the day before because her play was being performed again there, and there were rehearsals on Friday.

  It was a wonderful night. Dame Mary Durack came back to her country to tell us of the early days, Dame Edna visited the Kimberley for the first time, Ted Egan was there, and also James Blundell, to mention just a few. I sat with Neville and Gabby Kennard, who were passing through Kununurra on a flying trip and had dropped by for the night. I had met Gabby at my award luncheon in November and Neville had visited the station earlier in the year. I caught up with many friends, some of whom I had not seen for years.

  We didn’t have time to dally as the ABC crew that covered the night at Carlton Hill was coming on to Bullo to film Marlee and me, and our life away from the stage! The footage of rehearsals, the actual night and our life on Bullo will all end up in a half hour programme of ‘Big Country’.

  We have had many film shoots on Bullo over the years and all the crews have been terrific. Our new friends this time were Varsha, Laurence, Gunter and Colin. They arrived feeling travel-weary and sore, but after a hot shower, a large steak and some good wine, along with a royal greeting from our Rottweilers and Boots our stallion, standing in the middle of the living room, they brightened up considerably.

  We had a great few days filming but soon it was time for the crew to leave. We were truly sorry to see them go—they had settled into the Bullo routine like oldtimers. But we all had to continue on our various paths—Varsha out to Kakadu, Laurence and Gunter to Darwin, and Colin back to Sydney, and the Bullo mob back to work in the bush.

  I also was off again, this time to present the Northern Territory Businesswoman of the Year award in Darwin. This was a first time for the Northern Territory—I suppose my winning the Australian award inspired a local one. The AMP sponsored the night and a great deal of effort was put into the event. Again I saw old friends, some going back twenty years.

  The next day I flew to Sydney. Sebel Furniture had asked me to be part of their promotion for a new Executive Chair. They wanted an executive with a difference.

  I decided that fate or opportunity had been knocking at my door when I received this phone call. A few years before I had invented a ‘TV exercise chair’ and had been trying to decide which manufacturing firm to approach with my design.

  So I said, ‘I’ll promote your chair, if you’ll manufacture my chair.’

  As I write this book, my chair is in their Research and Development department going through its paces. God willing, by the time these words are in print, the chair will be on the assembly line.

  The photography session gave me a healthy respect for photographic models. My feet ached, my back ached, my face ached, everything ached.

  At one stage the photographer said, ‘Smile!’

  ‘I am,’ I replied.

  I had been smiling for so long, I couldn’t feel my face muscles. I spent most of the day there. Silly me had thought it would be click, click, click, thank you. Six hundred clicks later, it was, ‘Okay, one more smile.’

  The next day I delivered the first two hundred pages of this book to my trusting publisher. I told them I had twenty years to go, and returned to the bush.

  August found us mustering the furthest points of the station. All the stock camp were camping out as it was twenty-five miles one way. It was fairly quiet around the homestead, so, along with the various other jobs that fill my day, I was busily recording the second half of my life. I soon realised it would be a few years before I could finish if I followed the schedule of the past week. There were too many interruptions. So I started to write at five each morning. This was the solution—I could get at least five uninterrupted hours of writing before phones, faxes, two-way radios, and people started functioning. As I am approaching the end of the book, I am writing most of the day, but I still find the first five hours the most productive.

  It is 9.30 a.m. and I have just returned to my desk after rescuing one of the Brahman bulls. Jude, one of the girls helping around the house, came to me and said, ‘There’s a bull over near the hay paddock and he’s lying on his back with his legs in the air—it doesn’t look right.’

  I dropped my pen and rushed out the door. Indeed he did not look right—he was caught in the fence. Jude’s eyesight is not too good ov
er long distances and she could not see that he was caught, only that he was on his back. We drove over. Somehow he had managed to get his back hoof jammed between the straining wire and the top steel rail of the fence. I can only assume he was trying to climb over the fence into the hay paddock, slipped and fell backwards and caught his leg. His hoof was jammed so tight we had to cut the straining wire to release him. He limped away a dazed but happy bull.

  Little events like this constantly intrude into my writing day making it impossible some days after eight a.m. to put words to paper. I now know why writers go alone to the mountains or some remote beach house to write—to get away from hay-stealing bulls. I certainly am remote from the outside world, but alone I am not.

  My publisher called and said he and the editor were very pleased with the first half of the book and to hurry with the second half. It is a great boost to be told you are doing something well and it had the desired effect—I approached the ‘home stretch’ with renewed vigour.

  The rest of August and beginning of September were continued mustering and more tourists. Maybe we have been lucky, I don’t know, but without exception, every tourist who has come to Bullo has been a delight. They do not come in droves and maybe that is the answer. We keep the numbers small and everything has a personal touch to it. They become part of the operation and they seem to enjoy this treatment.

  At the end of August it was back to Darwin to be one of the judges for the Engineering Award for the year. While I was there I also visited our lawyer and barrister to discuss the next step in the Trippe case. The appeal was now scheduled for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of September. We spent the afternoon discussing the plan of attack. After telling them my life and future was in their hands, I departed for the bush again.

  The season was moving to a close and our stock camp was reducing in size as each week passed. We had two more small helicopter musters to go, not the two-and-a-half-thousand-head type we had just finished. We were planning to start them the day after we returned from the appeal. A week before we were to leave, my lawyer called to say the hearing had been changed to the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of September. We went ahead with the muster and rearranged our plans, so that while Marlee and I were in Darwin, the yard could be moved to the next and last site.

  Being in court again was the same nerve-racking experience. At least we didn’t have to go through the cross-examination horror of the trial, but by the time Trippe’s barrister had again described our actions, Marlee and I were still top applicants for the devil’s job. It is very hard to sit all day and listen to derogatory statements about yourself, your actions, your intentions and your daughter. By the end of the day, I was in tears. But our lawyer said not to worry, it was our turn the next day. I couldn’t sleep, and spent most of the night telling the ‘supreme commander’ up above what I thought of the legal system.

  At the end of the second day, I felt a little better, as it was our day. But I can now see how brainwashing can break a person.

  At the end of the third day it was over. There was the desire to make just that one more point, but that could go on forever. As I write this in October, we are still waiting for the decision.

  The previous January, I had promised to speak for another charity in September, and that date was now upon me, one day after our appeal hearing. I really would have done anything to get out of that speech, but I had said I would do it, so Marlee and I wearily boarded the plane to Perth.

  I was asked if I would like to attend the conference, but had to decline as I still had to write the speech. It was received well—one man even asked for a copy, which I consider a big compliment. I spoke at the dinner on Saturday night and our flight home was on Monday morning.

  Marlee, who had joined me for a few days break and also, I think, to keep me company, as we were still upset by the appeal hearing, insisted we go to the Perth Royal Show. We had a wonderful day looking at cattle and new machinery. Monday morning it was back to the station.

  Our last muster was an area called Paperbark, very wild, very remote. Marlee set the camp up beside Leslie Lake, a particularly beautiful area on Bullo, and a few days later yarded around four hundred cattle; a good result for this area. Catching wild cattle with a helicopter is usually the hardest part of the operation, but, in this muster, it was getting the cattle trucks out of Paperbark. It took close to five days in stops and starts and delays. The first truck came in at night and the wheels of his last trailer slipped over the edge on a tight bend and Marlee had to walk the D8 thirty miles to lift him back on the road. On top of these problems, Marlee sprained her ankle when she turned her foot jumping down from the front end loader. Naturally, the next day the cattle truck got stuck on one of our bad jump-ups. So Marlee had to drive the grader and tow the road train out of trouble while on crutches. Being the great little trouper she is, she pulled it off successfully.

  Now, apart from bull-catching, we are watching the heavens. Almost all our home-grown hay is gone, so I have put in an order to ‘above’ for rain.

  The mail has just arrived from Katherine with our ‘weed men’—the government helps properties with advice for weed control—and I have received an invitation to the 1992 Businesswoman of the Year awards. So in a few weeks time I will no longer be the current Businesswoman of the Year.

  What a year! Although it is drawing to a close, nothing else is—in fact it is all beginning! There are so many opportunities opening up I don’t know which way to turn first.

  I am negotiating for my TV Exercise Chair to go into production, I have the possibility of a speaking tour in America, I have another invention that could help the wool industry, and if all these eventuate, I will be able to move my ten-year plan to get out of debt forward a few years. And all of this has happened in the last year, since Marlee sent that fateful fax.

  So maybe fate has decided to smile on me for a while. I hope it is a fair while. I don’t want the world on a platter and I don’t mind working all my life—like most people, I just need a fair go.

  At fifty-five most women are settling down to knit booties for their grandchildren. When I look at what is on my plate and the possibilities that could be on my plate, it is mind-boggling—the booties will have to go on the back burner.

  I was asked at one of my speeches what I would do at the end of my ten-year plan. I replied that I only hoped to be out of debt in ten years.

  ‘Well after you’re out of debt and after you carry out your plans, what will you do then?’

  ‘Well, I have a time problem, because our plans for Bullo cover about a hundred years. But there’s nothing to stop me working on many things while working towards securing Bullo. And that’s what I’m doing.’

  So as I look at my invitation and wonder who the 1992 Businesswoman of the Year will be, I wonder if her life will change as drastically as mine has. Will she move into new fields, will she achieve her dreams, will she discover all the wonderful people out there that I have, could she possibly be as lucky as I have been?

  For on the 13th of November 1990 in the Regent Ballroom in Sydney, when the words, ‘And the winner is . . .’ brought me back to the present, and I walked towards the stage with feelings of excitement, pride and humility, the winner really was Sara Henderson.

  EPILOGUE

  The first words in this book were dedicated to Charlie, so I suppose the last should be too. He always had to have the last word.

  I certainly would not be the person I am today if I had not married Charles English Henderson III. I still cannot judge if my life to this point has been worth it. But if I can go on and do something that really counts, something that helps make the world a better place, then the pain, unhappiness and tragedy will not have been in vain.

  I know he is sitting up there somewhere, watching me, criticising my every move, but sometimes applauding and saying ‘I taught her that!’ So in closing, I say this:

  ‘Charlie, you put me through the world’s most demanding, humiliating, and challenging obstacle co
urse any human could be expected to endure. It is five years since you left me with this mess and I am still sorting it out! I will survive. Marlee and I will do everything you asked us to, and then I will get on with what I want to do in my life, and you won’t say a word. It’s time to cut the strings, Charlie. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. But God, how I loved you, you son of a bitch, Yankee bastard.’