Diamonds and Dust

by Sheryl McCorry

  We were lucky to receive only moderate winds from the cyclone, which turned into a deep rain depression, dumping heavy falls across the station, causing flooding and running the rivers a banker. Only weeks later the whole station seemed rejuvenated, the paddocks flushed with green grass.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Hundred in the Waterbag

  In April 1976, my doctor in Derby advised me not to return to McCorry and the station. ‘You’ll have your baby any time now.’

  Good! I expected this would happen in the next couple of hours. By 10 am on 23 April, the labour pains had started. They continued all afternoon and through the night. On waking the next morning, I decided to start raking some leaves at the house where I was staying, with McCorry’s friends Cynthia and Les Smith. The raking and the pains went on all day until I decided to have a shower at 4 pm and head up to Derby Hospital.

  On arrival I was put into the good hands of a Catholic nun, the midwife. I spent another two hours without much luck in the delivery room. I vaguely remember a rush to theatre on the evening of the twenty-fourth . . . and nothing more. My baby had become terribly distressed and my blood pressure had gone sky high. I remember sometime the following morning opening my eyes to see my husband sitting in a chair at the foot of my bed with tears streaming silently down his face, nursing our baby boy. It was overwhelming. At long last, this old Kimberley cattleman had the son he’d always wanted, this beautiful baby, our baby boy, Kelly McCorry, named after an Irish uncle, a name that we had chosen well before I was pregnant. Kelly was delivered by caesarean section at 7.30 pm on the twenty-fourth. I was told that we’d both had a rough time of it, and it was three days before I could actually hold my dear boy. During this time the old nun was expressing my milk to feed Kelly and she asked me if I’d mind them using my excess milk to feed a premature little Aboriginal baby girl. Years later I found that the mother and her little girl were in our camp at Louisa Downs. The mother never forgot.

  Once back at the station, although slightly sore from the caesarean, I settled into a routine with Kelly of bath, feed time, cuddles with Daddy, and sleep. I always timed the evening feeds so McCorry could sit and nurse his son. Some nights, while having a beer after a hard day in the cattle yards, he would sit for hours just looking at him, informing me of every sigh or burp as I moved around the house. The company’s head office in Perth had given me the okay for a nanny, and we found Nanny Kate in outback Queensland. Kate was a wonderful person. I knew that when Kelly was left with her he was in good hands, which gave me the confidence to keep pulling my weight. Life could not be better. God had given McCorry and me many gifts: our boy, a good nanny, good Aboriginal stockmen and, it seemed to me, a significant life in outback Kimberley.

  Tommy, one of the stockmen, brought me in a dingo pup, a good-looking, dark-red male. I called him Dingy. I gave him no special treatment; he was just another one of the dogs, if a big one, well fed and content.

  I had just turned the lawnmower off when I heard a mob of horses galloping in the distance. I knew it had to be in the horse paddock and now I could see that the dogs, including Dingy and our blue and red heelers, had mustered the horses together and were chasing them down the fence close to where I was standing.

  McCorry had a very staunch rule – no dog was ever to chase horses. I ran towards them, yelling and waving my arms, trying to stop them without getting run over myself. McCorry pulled up in the Land Rover and my stomach dropped. He had the old station .303 rifle. With my heart pounding, I screamed at him, ‘No, no, please don’t shoot, don’t shoot the dogs!’

  Because McCorry had worked with horse plants (teams of working horses) most of his life while mustering cattle outback, horses were his most valuable possession. He lifted the .303 and fired. A blue heeler went down instantly. Dingy, who was in the dogs’ lead group, somehow dodged the first bullet. As soon as he heard the shot he dropped back from being the leader of the pack to about a hundred metres behind and crouched behind the spinifex. My screaming and pleading with McCorry was to no avail. As I turned away, the second shot thundered out. Lifting my head I saw Red stagger, then drop. Dingy could not be seen, though I knew he was still hiding behind the spinifex clump. Picking Kelly up from his cot, I walked into the homestead feeling broken, deflated and in need of a very good cry. Dingy lay low for several days, but he survived.

  I stewed silently, unable to believe that Bob would shoot our dogs and let the dingo get away with it. But Bob was obsessively old-fashioned about horses. He’d never even wanted to change to bull-buggy and helicopter mustering. Horses were the thing. But the incident rocked me to the core, showing me an unforgiving, even cruel, side to Bob. The silences were thick around the homestead in the next few days.

  Some months later, I arrived home from Derby loaded with stores and noticed a presence of someone, or something, in my bedroom. It wasn’t the first time. My bedroom door was always closed, just as I’d left it, but the flywire screens had been pushed open about 40 centimetres. It was becoming a bit of a mystery. With Kelly on my hip, I headed for the bedroom. He was feeling tired and I always liked to put him down for a sleep as soon as possible. Throwing the bedroom door open, I caught Dingy totally relaxed, stretched out on the bed with his head on my pillow. The fly screen was wide open. I yelled at him, chasing him out the door with a broom in my hand. He propped and stood his ground, baring a fine set of fangs. It was enough to call my bluff. I should have known better than to have reared this dingo. He belonged in the wild, and the sooner he went back to it the better. One of the older camp women warned me to ‘watch that dog, might be milk smell, Missus’. I kept a watchful eye on Dingy and told Nanny Kate under no circumstances to let that dog near Kelly. We stopped looking after Dingy, keeping him out, and some months later we heard he was showing his face at a Department of Main Roads camp on the Gibb River Road. We never saw him again.

  Nineteen seventy-six turned out to be one of the driest years I can remember in the Kimberley. A very late wet season was made more difficult for us with the company very short on funds. Just before the adverse weather, the company had accrued a lot of debt, and was now stricken with a cash shortage.

  Working for this company could never be boring or dull. There were times when there were more pay days than actual pay packets. There were times when we personally had to pay the whole station’s living expenses and registration of the motor vehicles to keep the station together. We had to borrow and steal fuel from the mining companies and sweet-talk local businesspeople into extending credit. At times we had to sign and make ourselves personably responsible for debts the company had incurred. We always guaranteed the fuel account. We never thought for a moment that the Australian Land & Cattle Co. would pull the rug out from under our feet. We knew that the dollars were on the hoof, as did the management. Our capital was right before our eyes, grazing all around us on the fertile black soil plains.

  McCorry and I took over managing Kimberley Downs Station as well as Napier, a total of 2.25 million acres. They had trouble finding good station managers who would work for them without capital in the bank for repairs or improvements, or willing to wait a month or six for their pay packets. There were times when I was convinced that management never really understood the dire straits we were in. But I do know they thought we were capable. There was no point falling in a heap – we could only do what we could, with what we had.

  Kimberley Downs’s bores had been badly neglected, partly due to a lack of funds and partly to mismanagement. Cattle numbers were still too high, a problem we’d inherited. Napier Downs’s water could support about 16,000 cattle, but we estimated that we had closer to 20,000.

  By October all dams, creeks and springs were drying up and with both properties overstocked we were flat-out, day and night, trying to keep the water up to them by dragging a jack pump (a portable pump) from bore to bore and filling up each tank. It was so dry that the last camel on the property was found dead in what was left of the Congra waterhole.
In a good year Congra was full all year around, one of our most reliable waterholes; this year it had all but dried up.

  We were lucky that Bluey and Rita had stuck by us. Between his benders Bluey could be a reliable mechanic, repairman or manufacturer of spare parts from the rubbish dump. He made up two portable jack pumps that we could tow behind a vehicle. With no rain, a dry wind and the temperature ready to blow the thermostat, we had those jack pumps going day and night. We’d tow a pump to a bore, pull the stays off the windmill tower, back the portable pump into place, clamp it onto the column, disconnect the windmill rod, start the pump and hey presto, instant water. With the surface water dried up, we were watering a thousand head or more on each of these bores.

  One evening over the nightly ration of beers we had a talk with Bluey. We all agreed that we should split the bore run in half. Bluey would look after the bores on the south and west sides while McCorry and I would take the north and east sides.

  This meant that we had to hook up the jack pump for 12 to 14 hours on each bore. When the circle of bores was completed, we’d start again. You didn’t think about it too much: there wasn’t time. We just kept going day and night. There was nothing more we could do about the situation: there was no money!

  Barnes Bore, on Kimberley Downs, was one of the bores that Bluey had to keep the water up to. At the time there was a mining company prospecting in the area with a basic camp consisting of five men with five little pup tents and a cook tent. In the cook tent they had a freezer and fridges powered by a portable generator. Two days and nights after Bluey had gone out there, I was starting to get worried, as we hadn’t sighted him. In the morning we asked Rita if he’d been in yet, and she said no, but she wasn’t concerned, and was making the most of a few beers while Bluey was away. At 3.30 pm we checked at the station, but still no Blue. At daybreak the next morning we left the station to track him down. Many possibilities were running through my mind.

  At Barnes Bore, we were checking to see if Bluey had pumped the tank full when one of the prospectors arrived. We were disturbed but not really surprised to hear that Bluey had hooked up the jack pump and then decided to visit their cook tent while the miners were out on the job. There he’d decided to have a drink and reflect on how good life could be at times, especially when you had unlimited quantities of someone else’s wine to drink.

  He’d managed to get back to the station – we followed his Land Rover’s tracks weaving from side to side and sometimes off the dirt road, another mark showing the jack pump still attached and bumping along behind it. For a while afterwards Blue kept out of our way. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for the old bugger – he suffered shocking remorse when coming off a binge.

  Face to face, we couldn’t resist teasing him.

  ‘Hell, Blue, it was bad enough you drinking their beer, but you could have left their plonk alone!’ He denied it, as he always did.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘There was something wrong with you when you came back from Barnes Bore. You spent more time crossing the road than you did on it! After that, you nearly tipped the jack pump head over heels several times. There are five of those prospectors and they’re rather tough-looking men, so next time you pump Barnes Bore don’t hang around too long.’

  McCorry wanted to muster closer to the boundaries of our neighbours. Since the properties were well overstocked, we could do with a culling of ‘cracker cows’ – cows that were too old to breed or send to the meatworks – rangy old bulls, and bullocks that had escaped previous musters.

  We set up the portable yards in the usual position, hessian-covered wings leaving an obstacle-free run for the cattle. Again, Skogy flew his helicopter for us. His orders were not to cross the broken-down old fence which marked the boundary, and to muster no more than 600 to 700 head of cattle. Any more made it too difficult to process them through the yard.

  By 10 am, watching the broad cloud of dust rising in the distance, we could see Skoglund had far too many cattle. Waving our arms frantically, we signalled him to cut the tail, usually the weaker and younger cattle, off from the rest of the herd. Oblivious, he kept on coming. It was too much for McCorry. Giving in to his natural hot-headedness, he slammed the buggy into gear and wove in and out of the bulldust and moving cattle, cutting off the last hundred head himself. We closed the yard immediately. As soon as Skogy landed, there were heated words. By now the scene was chaotic. The yard was jammed with bellowing cattle and road trains were pulling up to the loading ramp. McCorry drafted them directly into the trucks, to be dispatched immediately to Demco Meatworks in Broome. Our neighbour, Merv Norton, the manager of Meeda Station, had got wind of the muster and arrived on the scene. Since Kimberley Downs and Meeda were on a party-line phone system, it wasn’t hard to pick up the news and Merv arrived at our yard, all puffed up with managerial importance.

  ‘Why wasn’t I informed?’ he demanded.

  ‘Seeing we were mustering Kimberley Downs and not both sides of the fence, why would you be informed?’ was McCorry’s angry reply.

  The puff slowly left the man’s stout little body. McCorry, usually taciturn, could only take so much before exploding. He suggested the manager send a truck over to collect any branded Meeda cattle that might come through the yard and any cow with a bag of milk that he could ‘mother up’ with a weaner.

  Merv left the yard, since there was nothing he could do. But he went home and called the Stock Squad, or cattle police, and had them sit out on the Gibb River Road to pull over our road trains and run checks on brands. God only knows what absurd stories he told them. Possibly he thought we were stupid enough to send unbranded cattle to the meatworks. No – we trucked them to another yard on the property and held them for three days, waiting until our nosy neighbour had given up his surveillance, branded them and then sent them off. All legal, of course!

  Between October and December 1976 we were hit with anxious times. We had been working flat-out trying to keep the tanks full of water and now that the rains were coming, the dams were becoming deathtraps for thirsty animals. The Wombrella, Barker and Congra waterholes turned into bogs. Wading knee-deep in a moving, black, muddy sea of maggots, stretching to put a noose over the horns of a cow that could still be dragged out . . . it was enough to test a saint. One cow’s dark eyes told me she still had plenty of life even as I brushed away the maggots. With the noose around the horns, I slowly moved one leg after another, trying to keep my boots on and not fall over. I clambered onto another dead animal to get out. I untied the rope from my waist and fixed it to the shackle on the Land Rover. Putting the vehicle into reverse, I pulled the cow over the other carcasses and onto the bank. I pulled the noose off her horns and tried to help her up. She had enough strength, after several attempts, to get up. I was lucky that time: at other times they were so weak and poorly that I left them to try by themselves. Some made it, some didn’t.

  We became very frustrated. It was hard to believe that the company fully understood the desperate position the stations were in. They weren’t sending money or coming out to see how bad things were.

  CHAPTER 9

  Hide the Cattle Truck

  While away visiting central Queensland in February 1977, we had some wonderful news: I was pregnant again! I had always wanted to have my children close together so they could grow up not only as brother and sister, but as happy country kids who could be mates and learn to love the outback as I had with my brothers. Overjoyed, we couldn’t believe our luck. McCorry, not one normally to shop for children’s toys, went straight out and bought a pink teddy bear. A bit on the superstitious side – and not one to count my chickens – I hid the teddy until the birth.

  Head office was short of funds again. The company’s other property, Camballin Farm, a couple of hours’ drive away, was growing sorghum. The parent company, while building huge dams and developing the Camballin farming operation, had accumulated massive debts against the cattle stations. Their feed lots were draining the stations of resources and the
push was on for more cattle. Then, during a big wet season, the raging Fitzroy River stormed down through Camballin, wiping out the sorghum operation and dam. This left the company’s dreams in limbo and the debt collectors on the fence. Word was circulating that we might have to hide the cattle truck, grader and even the old station furniture from the spectre of repossession.

  It was one of the years when you still got rain in April, May and a couple of showers in June. The country was far too wet for mustering, but with the company in dire straits we had no choice. We had a reasonably good paddock at Billyarra, about 43 kilometres from the homestead. We gathered the stockmen around us, squatting in a circle, and explained our plan and the difficulties we expected. Our plan was to get Skoglund in to muster the cattle into Billyarra paddock. We would set up the portable yard partly in the paddock and partly on Gibb River Road with the loading ramp on the road itself. The stockmen, on horseback, would walk the cattle about the paddock for several days, enough to quieten them, push them up into the portable yard, then load them into the road train from the road’s firm surface.

  At the station we loaded swags, tucker and fencing gear onto the Land Rover. We’d need the fencing gear, as a lot of the paddock would be covered in debris from the floodwaters. Five men would sit on top of the swags, on top of the Land Rover; not one of them volunteered to stay behind at the station.

  The station had a tractor and we towed a 7-metre trailer behind it. We loaded it with the camp gear and some extra passengers: three Aboriginal women and their four children. They never liked to miss out on a muster and would often get bored if they were left sitting around the station camp.