Diamonds and Dust

by Sheryl McCorry

  McCorry threw in our one and only bag. We looked at each other and agreed it was time to leave town. But there was one more obstacle. As McCorry reversed, we heard terrible metal crunching and screeching noises. An inspection underneath the car revealed bundles of old cans tied up, an old bushie trick. I grabbed the pliers. We cut them loose and threw the cans in the boot, and away we went, heading out to Napier Downs. I think we both had red faces.

  Because of our age difference, the word was it would never work. McCorry was known as a confirmed bachelor and nobody knew much more about me than what they could see on the surface: makeup and well-manicured, painted nails. But the rumours and gossip didn’t worry me a bit. To me, McCorry was a good, hardworking man with a kind and gentle heart. I knew who I was as well: a girl who had grown up to love the outback life. My plan was to learn all I could from this rugged cattleman of mine. I believed he would be a good father for my children and could think of nothing better than the prospect of working side by side with him and building a future. I loved him.

  McCorry hadn’t been sure about marriage all these years, although he certainly hadn’t ruled it out. He was from a family of 11 children and was brought up during the Great Depression and its aftermath. He often spoke of seeing more dinner times than he had dinners. He could remember the anguish and heartache his mother and father went through when they couldn’t feed and clothe their children. This was the reason he had stayed single. If things got tough then there was only himself to feed.

  This was not to say McCorry couldn’t be romantic. His version went like this: ‘Then fate stepped in, a blonde-haired girl 20 years younger came on the scene. If I had gone to a horse sale and there were 100 horses there, she would have been my pick.’ At least he tried!

  Apart from all these feelings, romantic and otherwise, fate had opened up the perfect opportunity for the beginning of our married life: Napier Downs. I had some regrets about leaving Oobagooma but also excitement for this new adventure. In this outfit we were only a small cog in a big machine. The company we were now working for, Australian Land & Cattle Co., had something like 8 million acres of land. The Napier homestead was actually a nice house – with windows and doors! It was an old transportable nestled back against the limestone range and looking north over a horse paddock towards the picturesque King Leopold Ranges. It wasn’t as isolated as Oobagooma, being only a kilometre or so off the Gibb River Road, a well-maintained gravel road that runs from Derby to Wyndham. The siting of the homestead wasn’t accidental. Two earlier homesteads, the first on a freshwater spring in the Napier Range, the second on the banks of the Barker River, had both been inundated during big wet seasons, when the Barker, Womberalla and Lennard rivers all flooded. Such events were disastrous for the Aborigines and there were stories of people found dead in the forks of river gums after the flood had receded.

  The homestead’s huge walk-in freezer coolroom was full of rotting vegetables, cakes, fruit and bread. Things must be good here, I thought to myself. I made a mental note to put an end to this over-ordering. In the saddle room, most of the saddles and bridles were in need of repair. On Oobagooma, we had absolutely nothing but we were always able to keep the saddles in top condition. Looking around at the other buildings I found we had a good-sized storeroom with four cartons of tinned sauerkraut and not much else, a large workshop and windmill shed and a cottage for a windmill mechanic. Each station in the group had a Flying Doctor radio plus a company radio, which was on all day, crackling with messages and instructions. It sounded like an all-day galah session.

  We read back through the monthly report sheets. Napier cattle figures showed about 24,000 head. We didn’t believe it. The company had been offering an incentive to managers, a trip to America, for the highest numbers of cattle branded during a muster. We reckoned the previous managers must have been counting the cattle with a forked stick – two lines in the ground instead of one – to double their numbers.

  Still, whatever the actual numbers, it was a large operation. The stations had to pre-book killing dates at the meatworks, and if these cattle did not show up it would throw a spanner in the works. We already knew that however many head were on the station, a big percentage were wild and feral cattle. No, let me keep telling the truth; the whole bloody lot were wild and feral cattle. What little fencing there was was in disrepair, so it would be a huge challenge to meet these meatwork dates.

  Word was out and in no time we had a good team of Aboriginal stockmen. The only whites were McCorry and me. We found the Aboriginal stockmen to be smart ringers, good on their horses, good on their feet and happy in their family unit. McCorry and myself were knocked many times for our hiring policies, because we hired only Aboriginal men, and were often called blackfella lovers. But I remember out of the company’s eight cattle stations we were the only one that never had a shortage of stockmen. We made sure our men were paid a healthy living wage, better than the going rate, well before it was made compulsory by award.

  One would think that with the mustering we had done and other experience picked up along the way, we would not have had much trouble meeting the kill dates at the meatworks, but this was not always the case. When mustering with horses, we were able to hold about 50 per cent of the cattle we came across during the day. The other half were galloping away from us, mostly strong, valuable ‘meatworkers’ we’d want to send to Derby. If management had given us a quota of, say, 300 to 400 head for the meatworks and 10 days to get them, we would have to ride the arse out of our trousers. It was hard on the men, hard on the horses and hard on us. These work conditions ratcheted up the pressure and tension.

  The buzz around the Kimberley was that a Yank, an ex-wartime fighter pilot, owned an old Bell 47 chopper and could do just about anything with it. He sounded like the man who could solve our problem. With a ton of guts, and his helicopter, we hoped he would muster cattle into the yard for us – a first for the Kimberley.

  Stuart Skoglund was tall, lean and bow-legged, with a white Stetson pushed back slightly on his head to reveal a weathered, craggy face. With his wonderful smile, he struck me as a man with guts and charm. We agreed to supply the portable yard panels, the race to run cattle into the loading ramp, the men and the bull-buggies. ‘Skogy’ also wanted us to supply the aviation gas and oil for the chopper.

  We set up the portable yard at Billyarra, on the banks of the Lennard River, extending the wings out from the yard by erecting two fences to look like a funnel feeding the yard. We covered these with hessian to stop the cattle taking fright, or spooking, as they ran down the laneway into the yard. We dropped two drums of Avgas on a claypan flat about halfway between the starting point and the yard. The muster was now in Skogy’s hands. McCorry said it was like preparing a racehorse: once you legged up the jockey it was out of your hands. At piccaninny daylight, the faint light just before dawn, with barely enough light to see, the old Bell 47 fired up. It sounded like a scene out of Apocalypse Now. We watched with pride and terror as the Yank lifted off the airstrip in front of the homestead. He could fly a chopper, all right. Since he was the first helicopter cattle musterer in the Kimberley, we had nobody to compare him with, but it was doubtful that we could have found anyone in the world so fitted to the work.

  Of course, no-one’s perfect. After several musters we worked out Skogy had a bad habit of trying to cover too much country in a day and was yarding cattle in the dark nine days out of 10. He was determined to clock up 10-hour days. Since he was paid by the hour, I suppose you couldn’t blame him.

  McCorry and I were in the buggy following the tail of the cattle at the end of another long day. It was pitch black and the dust thrown up by 600 head of cattle wasn’t helping our visibility much. Right at the yard a cunning old scrubber bull broke from the tail at full gallop with one thought on his mind: his home back in the hills. I gripped the Jesus bar tightly as McCorry stamped his foot flat on the accelerator. Whack! Straight into a bloody stump, which drove the front diff housing and everythi
ng connected with it halfway back along the chassis. Nothing but the whites of our eyes showed through the dark and the bulldust.

  We were now on foot and hoping there were no more wild surprises in the dark. Somewhere just ahead, I could hear Skogy landing outside the gate of the yard. I ran like hell and gave the boys a hand to pull the panels across and close it up. We’d done it! The stock boys jumped into the front of the Toyota with McCorry and set out for the homestead. I’d ride with Skogy in his chopper. That way I could shower and get the evening meal well on the way before the men arrived home.

  As I buckled in, the Bell 47 was burning and leaking a hell of a lot of oil. During the day Skogy had poured between three and four gallons into the old chopper and there was none left.

  ‘I had an electrical failure,’ said Skogy. ‘We don’t have any instrument lights.’

  ‘Or any bloody lights at all,’ I said, looking at the instrument panel.

  He asked me to light a match and check the oil pressure. He also had one control gear playing up and had tied it into position with his seatbelt. We were low on fuel, about 10 minutes short of reserve time. Hell, I thought to myself, I’ve had better days.

  We took off okay and steered in a direct line for the Napier Range, which stood out even on the darkest night. I could see the faint glow of the homestead lights. With one match left and very little oil, we put down on the home strip just in front of the house. This would be a full bottle of whisky night for Skogy, a few cans of beer for McCorry and a decent-sized pannikin of tea for me, the non-drinker. The stock-camps and the Aboriginal camp were dry, but the station wasn’t. This was a change from Oobagooma, and Bob needed and enjoyed a beer after a hard day in the cattle yards – but only after the sun went down. Skogy wouldn’t have worked for us if he couldn’t have a whisky or two.

  There was more pressure and action working for the big company than working for Monty at Oobagooma. Some nights I’d return to the homestead so tired I would flop down and just fall asleep. When this happened, McCorry would suggest I stay behind and rest the next day. It showed he cared about my health, but resting was hard for me – I preferred to be where the action was. I was becoming more confident with each muster, and it never once occurred to me that I was unable to do the job. With McCorry by my side, I felt we could achieve anything.

  Following the tail of the mob all day, we noticed that the big rogue bulls would travel all right from daylight till about 10 am, and then pull up under a shady tree. Skogy could turn the chopper inside out trying to move them, but they would just stand their ground and shake their heads as if to say, ‘This is as far as we’re going.’ Some people used shotguns to scare them out, but we didn’t want to pepper our stock with lead pellets. What we needed was a decent bull-buggy.

  There was a bloke I knew called Jamesey, from around Halls Creek, a tough ex-Queenslander, a hard worker and hard player. Jamesey had caught quite a few bulls in the East Kimberley. There were a few men around the Kimberley that were calling themselves bull catchers, but they were really more like bull killers, breaking legs and badly bruising the animal. Jamesey was the real deal.

  I contacted Jamesey and put our idea to him. He was at the homestead three days later. McCorry rode as strapper with him all morning to check him out. Back home, McCorry pulled me aside.

  ‘This bastard knows what he’s doing,’ he said. ‘You go with him and strap.’

  That evening I could reflect on Jamesey’s skills. He gave me one of the most hair-raising rides in a bull-buggy in my entire life, as he fiercely charged and spun the buggy about the bush. Either he wanted to put the wind up me, trying to impress the little woman, or he was so centred on catching the bull that nothing could distract him. The chase was exciting, but the bulls went down gently, the way we wanted.

  Head office, after some persuasion, eventually gave us the go-ahead to bring Jamesey over. He rolled up with two trucks, a dog trailer and two bull-buggies, and set up camp by Warragee, a waterhole on the banks of the Lennard. He employed two Aboriginal men, one as an offsider to cart the bulls to the yard, the other to cart the bulls to the Derby meatworks each night.

  One morning about three weeks later, Jamesey pulled into the homestead at daylight and said he had to go to Derby to see a doctor, as his penis was all swollen. I knew he had spent a night in Derby town a week earlier, and thought perhaps he’d picked up the pox. It seemed like a good idea to go and check this out with a doctor, as his oldfella (reportedly) looked like it might be ready to explode. The same afternoon he arrived back at the station with a huge grin all over his face. The doctor had found the culprit; a spear grass seed had gone in through the eye of the oldfella and kept travelling. Jamesey was another of that Kimberley breed who saved the underpants for special occasions. Whether he changed his ways after this, I never discovered.

  Every station has one mechanic-cum-windmill man; ours was hardworking, hard drinking, bad tempered, red haired, covered in freckles and skin cancers and at times hard to keep up with and hard to keep track of. Bluey was on rations of four cans of beer per day. We were no longer a ‘dry’ camp, and this allowance was just enough to stop his hide from cracking. This morning Bluey was making the odd joke or two as he loaded his two blue heelers into the back of his new red ute and his wife of many years, Rita, into the passenger seat. They were headed for Derby for some rest and recreation. Rita was a lovely person, a Broome girl of Aboriginal descent, who had inherited a strong Catholic background from her white father. Bluey knew just how lucky he was to have Rita as his wife.

  Three days later we had a radio call from Meeda Station to say Bluey and Rita were crashed out in the ute by a boab tree, rather drunk and abusive. The nose of the ute was facing towards Derby. Apparently on waking from a drunken sleep, Bluey had started the ute up and driven off in the direction the nose was pointing. Driving down the road he must have sobered up enough, or spotted another landmark, to realise he was heading for Derby again, so he wheeled the ute around and headed for Napier Downs Station once more. On this attempt he made it to a boab tree on Kimberley Downs, and again woke with the nose facing Derby. He set off again in the wrong direction until they realised. Bluey, Rita and the two blue heelers were slowly getting closer to home at Napier.

  On his way up the Gibb River Road, one of the local Department of Agriculture men spotted old Bluey and Rita out cold. He pulled over, woke them and asked if they were okay. Bluey woke, shivering and shaking, and told him to fuck off. Apparently he woke enough to start the ute and take off in the direction of the nose and, would you believe it, towards Derby again! Rita realised they were heading in the wrong direction; old Bluey swung the ute around and headed in the direction of Napier Downs once more. Late afternoon, as the sun was gently sliding down behind the Napier Range, Bluey turned onto the Napier track. Sitting up and concentrating behind the wheel with a tailormade hanging out the side of his mouth as usual, he was cruising very steadily up the dirt track towards the homestead. Then, God only knows how, he clipped the side of the loading ramp at the cattle yards and wrote off the driver’s side of his ute. Shaking his fist in the air, staggering but winning the battle to stay standing, his freckles pale against the red glow his drunken and untidy appearance presented, he abused us all for putting the loading ramp in his way. The cattle yard and loading ramp, needless to say, had been in the same place for 20 years.

  We’d been on Napier Downs for three years when, in July 1975, there was some great news for McCorry and myself – I was pregnant! We’d been married three years and after many, many trips to Derby balancing a urine sample on the dashboard of the car, we were over the moon. God could not have given either of us a greater gift. The outback, which gave me total peace and contentment along with sheer hard work, would be the best place in the world to bring up healthy and happy children. I have to say I enjoyed the effort that we put into becoming parents, although making love under a chuck wagon when the temperature was about a hundred in the waterbag and a few native
bees were biting me on the bum wasn’t one of the better times.

  Our old hatter friend Cec walked into the Napier homestead, after living off the land for the previous 12 months, to a loud welcome from the camp dogs and Aboriginal children. I had just been listening to warnings of Cyclone Wilma, which were being broadcast hourly.

  Cec was dressed in his visiting clothes – worn-out khaki shorts kept up by a twitch of wire. His long grey hair and white beard were clean and combed. Cec had made the most of the Barker River before coming on up to the homestead. I was so pleased to see him and to see that he was healthy and had survived another year out in the Hawkstone Hills alone, with nothing to sustain him except game and what he could beg, borrow or steal. The usual handout was a sugar bag of salt beef and some niki niki tobacco. He told me it was tough out in the hills that last season. He’d had one .303 bullet but found not one beast – donkey or kangaroo – that he could have shot for meat. Instead the grasshoppers were out in their hopper stage by the thousands, so he would bound along with them and pounce and grab what he could, pull their hind legs off and eat them. Cec said they were quite good and tasted like salted peanuts.

  I bundled up the six months’ supply of newspapers and magazines I’d saved to help him catch up with the world. He was hopping from one foot to the other, a man in a hurry to return to the safety of his beloved hills.

  ‘What’s the big hurry?’ I asked.

  It seemed he wanted to cross the Barker River before it flooded and get back to the country he called his own. After loading the drygoods into the bull-buggy I picked four large pawpaws, his favourite fruit. I waited for him to farewell the camp people, then delivered him to a cave he had on the Hawkstone side of the Barker River. I imagine he sat out Cyclone Wilma there, keeping up to date on the news, waiting for the flood to recede.