Stars over Shiralee

by Sheryl McCorry

  Robby and Leisha were outside somewhere, looking over the grounds, and I had to get out too. The noise and the claustrophobic crush were making me agitated. I was trying to juggle my suitcases through the overcrowded dining area out towards the back door when, pausing for a moment to get my breath, I had a sudden memory of McCorry at the luxurious Parmelia Hilton in Perth. I was managing Kimberley Downs at the time and we were taking a rare annual holiday. The doorman was bowing graciously to receive our dusty suitcases from the waiting cab as the children stood in awe, taking in the magnificent structure and noting staircases with a potential for entertainment.

  Old McCorry, legs bowed and back bent, wrestled for ownership of the luggage. He was not well. ‘They’re not pinching it,’ I whispered. ‘Let the doorman get it delivered to the room.’ The memory made me smile, but then I noticed Terry smiling at me from across the room and I lifted my cases again. I needed time away from this circus atmosphere to clear my head and think. I was apprehensive and needed space to see the real picture. At forty-nine years old I had no intention of getting caught up in a disastrous relationship. I would rather be alone, I told myself, though in fact I’d never really been on my own. I suddenly felt very vulnerable and unsure what the hell I was doing.

  As if he could read my mind, Terry came over and wrapped his arm around me, pulling me close while guiding me towards a bedroom; his, as it turned out. He proudly pointed out the beautiful bedroom suite, newly bought, he said, covered in crisp new linen and on the bed a beautiful bunch of roses. It was such a lovely gesture, one of those things I really appreciated in him, and I felt my worries and confusion slide away. Then another call came from the office needing his attention, and Terry had to go. I was left standing alone, immediately apprehensive again, when I felt a presence in the room with me.

  I turned around to see Lauren standing there. She was a slim girl about my height, with golden tanned skin and fine blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. She wore short tight shorts and a white halter top that left her tummy bare. She looked not unlike my own girls, in fact she was probably their age. She looked puzzled, a little wary of me.

  It was rather a strange and awkward way to meet, I thought.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked me bluntly, and I could have said the same thing to her. Where was my privacy? But at that point I did wonder what the bloody hell I was doing there. I was definitely on the back foot. ‘I’m here on holiday,’ I said lightly. ‘How about you?’ and I turned and walked out of the bedroom before she could respond.

  That evening Terry took me to dinner at the Mangrove Hotel. He was bubbly and happy and introduced me to the many people he knew there. He seemed to know everyone, and they all seemed pleased to see him. He was so enthusiastic about having me there with him that I could almost enjoy feeling so wanted and appreciated. But the business with Lauren was niggling me, and I told him about my strange encounter with her. ‘Something’s going on between you, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Why would she come in like that otherwise?’

  His eyes opened wide in surprise. ‘She came into the bedroom?’

  ‘Yes, your receptionist came into the bedroom and was standing there interrogating me as though she had every right to. What’s going on?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing is going on. But you’re right, her behaviour is unacceptable. I’ll give her notice. She’ll be gone in three days.’

  ‘You don’t have to sack her on my behalf,’ I said, wishing I hadn’t said anything. But he was adamant. ‘There’s plenty of people who want work around here,’ he said. ‘Now let’s get on with enjoying the evening.’ He raised his glass and proposed a toast, ‘To us!’

  It was a night when the beam of the full moon stretched across the bay. There was nothing between us and the glorious golden ‘stairway to the moon’, and I sipped my champagne and let the magic work on me. It was a perfect balmy Broome evening, when the air seems to caress your skin.

  Still, when I went to the ladies room a little later, I found my mind buzzing again. There were practical things to work out, and our first romantic evening in Broome hardly seemed the place to decide where the children and I were going to stay. I had left it to Terry to book us into the Mangrove. He hadn’t, deciding on my behalf that we’d be better off with him. Broome was in the height of the tourist season, and finding last-minute accommodation would be a problem. What to do? I couldn’t think. Come on, Sheryl, I said to myself, you’re not a girl of twenty. Get a grip on yourself. Terry is a decent man and he’s doing his best to make you comfortable. But I was still uneasy.

  I just needed time to settle my feelings down and get to know him better. Part of the problem was not really knowing him — it was all too easy to fear the worst. It occurred to me that my affair with Heath had shaken me more deeply than I’d admitted. My confidence had taken a battering. Now I wanted to say yes to Terry, who at least seemed to know what he wanted in life, and appeared to really appreciate me, yet at the same time I feared he’d be another two-timing bastard.

  It was no good. I couldn’t keep up this constant tension in my mind. The night was too balmy and mellow. Back at the table I drank my champagne and flashed him my best hundred-watt smile. ‘Let’s dance,’ I said. We danced until my feet ached, and then I went back with him to his bedroom at the caravan park where we spent our first night together.

  My holiday in Broome became an extended stay, with a proposal of marriage from Terry, which, dear reader, I accepted.

  In hindsight, instead of marrying Terry, I should have moved in with him. But I had promised myself that I would not just live with another man after my experience with Heath. Also, I believed that being married meant I would be loved and looked after, that my husband would be there for me, just like McCorry was. My head ached with reservations, but I was vulnerable and I denied any misgivings I had at the time.

  I accepted his proposal, though I told him there was no way I could live in his quarters at the caravan park. ‘I’ve lived most of my life on cattle stations,’ I told him. ‘I can’t live cramped up here.’ I even had to share the bathroom and the kitchen when the office staff were there during the day. The next day he took me out to show me a house he had recently purchased in town. We drove slowly past; it was large and built to suit the tropics. ‘Could you live here?’ he asked me.

  ‘It has polished timber floors.’ The white ants would have a ball, I thought to myself, but I said, ‘Yes, I could certainly live here.’ It would be a couple of months before we could move in, and in the meantime I would be gracious about staying in his quarters.

  I accepted, even though after a month Lauren was still there. When she hadn’t gone after three days I looked at Terry and said, ‘You couldn’t do it, could you?’ He seemed relieved that I understood, and said it would be easier to make it three weeks’ notice. I thought he was a big softy. When she was still there a month later I decided it was not worth fussing over. She had not repeated her bizarre behaviour and we were able to be civil to one another. It was true she and Terry had their heads together a lot, but that was the nature of their work — the reception staff always had messages to pass on to him. It was always noisy, and they couldn’t go shouting at each other. I had to accept that. All his office staff were women, and he was a charming man.

  My initial plan to go home to the Shiralee to prepare for my marriage — which would be in June, only a few weeks away — got put off week by week. Terry just didn’t want me to leave, and secretly that pleased me. It felt good to be wanted. So I enrolled Robby in school in Broome while Leisha returned to the Shiralee. She planned on getting work locally, and in the meantime she would help Kristy keep an eye on the farm.

  Terry’s life was structured around spending six months of the year on the family farms in the south-west and the six months of the tourist season managing the caravan park in Broome. While he was in the south-west, his sister-in-law Jean and her son Jeff, a gentle boy about Leisha’s age, stepped in to manage. I knew there would
always be plenty to do, and I wholeheartedly committed myself to jumping in wherever I could be useful. He seemed to value my ideas too, and wanted my input on decisions. My life could be full of happiness with a great lifestyle. So yes, I would marry Terry. The children were happy with the idea of Mum marrying again, and we would find a way to keep Sleepy Hollow and the Shiralee going.

  I loved being back in the north. A few weeks later I was sitting on Broome’s Cable Beach. The temperature was in the low thirties, and a clear sky met the turquoise blue sea and perfect golden sands. I was watching Robby surf, with my dusty old Akubra pulled firmly down on my head for protection from the sun. I was listening to the crackle of the coconut palm fronds in the breeze when I caught sight of a woman I had known back in the seventies when I was on Napier Downs. Her husband managed another cattle station, and I remembered her well, because she had looked down on McCorry and me for hiring Aboriginal stockmen.

  She wasn’t the only one. I felt the disapproval of plenty of station managers at the time for having stock camps full of black stockmen and their families. Many properties were importing their jackaroos and ringers from Queensland and even New South Wales. But I could see no reason to make a distinction between black and white, except that the black stockmen were probably more reliable — at least they were if you treated them decently — the imported white stockmen rarely stayed for the full muster season.

  The woman I had just spied on the beach was particularly memorable for an event that stuck firmly in my mind. It was Derby rodeo time, August 1977. I had arrived a little late and the air was already filled with the pungent smell of cattle dust, which swirled in a fine powdery mist around the arena. A constant bellow came from the bull pen, added to by dogs barking themselves silly, and above all this noise was the strong and clear clang of the Condamine bell as the stockmen rigged their beasts ready to ride.

  I stepped out of my vehicle with a newborn Leisha in my arms and was greeted by a mob of our Aboriginal stockmen’s wives and their excited children. Chattering and laughing, the children pushed their mothers aside to be the first to check on the new baby. There was a beautiful feeling of togetherness, in stark contrast to the scene on the Toyota Landcruiser tray-back vehicle parked up beside me. Lounging on deckchairs were two neighbouring managers’ wives, Sheila from Yeeda, and Vinegar Tits from Myrodrah (the names have been changed to protect the innocent). Both ladies elocuted perfectly while firmly gripping tumblers of whisky at ten in the morning. As I watched Kelly run off with his Aboriginal mate, Sandy Wungundin, one of the women tottered to her feet and balanced precariously on the edge of the Landcruiser tray while sizing me up with rather bleary eyes.

  ‘How do you put up with those blacks?’ she said, her little finger at right angles to her whisky glass. ‘They stink!’ She screwed up her nose and added, ‘They’re lazy and won’t work.’ I stood with Leisha wriggling in my arms and looked up at Vinegar Tits. Her skin looked like burned leather, and her nostrils were flared and red. I was angry but making a scene wouldn’t change the woman’s attitude. At that moment Betty, an Aboriginal girl from the station, brought Kelly back to my side and relieved my tired arms of the little bundle that was Leisha. She was showing my children off to her extended family and friends. I looked at Vinegar Tits and said, ‘We’ve never had a problem we can’t sort out with the people, they’re top stockmen, and we always have a full stock camp.’

  Her attitude might have had something to do with her husband’s messing about with Aboriginal women. Over the years I got used to having station wives look down their noses at me. But none of them ever went on to manage cattle stations in their own right as I did. And, if they only knew it, I was helping to look after the legacies left behind in our stock camp by their very own husbands. I’m not saying the Aboriginal women weren’t willing participants, they may well have been, but it made my blood boil to see the anguish they went through as they tried in vain to extract some form of financial support from the white managers who were the fathers of their children. Some of these managers went on to have stations of their own, but their offspring are still living in camps on the outskirts of small Kimberley towns, many of them not even aware of the truth of their inheritance.

  I sat soaking up the sunshine on Cable Beach a while longer. I watched Vinegar Tits pack up and load her vehicle and leave. She hadn’t seen me. As her 4WD disappeared down the road among the coconut palms, I wondered whether her attitude towards Aboriginal people had mellowed at all.

  CHAPTER 3

  My Wedding is Upstaged

  Wedding invitations had been ordered and mailed out to family and friends. We were marrying on 12 June 1999 in the new luxury Radisson Beach Resort south of Busselton, Terry’s old stamping ground. We would fly down from Broome just before our big day, which was the anniversary of the day I lost Kelly on Louisa Downs back in 1981. It was obviously not my ideal date, but running a business meant we didn’t have a lot of choice. It had been eighteen years, I told myself. Deal with it. And nothing would stop me honouring my darling boy’s tragically short life.

  There was something else causing me more concern. A few weeks before my wedding day my Uncle Stan, who had worked with Terry some years back, cautioned me. ‘What are you doing with him, Sheryl?’ he said. ‘You don’t need him.’ He and my aunt seemed genuinely concerned and wanted to be sure I knew what I was doing, and they weren’t alone. An old friend said, ‘You’ve only known each other a short time. Do you really think you know him well enough to commit to him as his wife?’

  The answer to that was that I didn’t, but nor did I appreciate the attitude of such ‘well-wishers’. I’d had my own doubts, I felt satisfied that there was nothing in them, and it distressed me that people would try to stir things up in this way. People change; hell, what kind of world would it be if people didn’t change?

  I was well known in Broome as a strong woman who knew her own mind. I wasn’t going to change it now on the basis of gossip. And I wasn’t going to insult Terry by repeating the stories to his face. I had to make a choice, and I went with my own gut feeling. It had always served me well. There was nothing going on between him and Lauren, and he seemed genuinely committed to me. Sure, he liked the races, but so did lots of people. It didn’t make him an inveterate gambler. The same went for his drinking. He drank wine every night, but I never saw him drunk.

  I had ordered a Vogue-designed wedding gown to be made for me in Sydney. It wouldn’t exactly come in handy for chasing the steers around the paddocks if I changed my mind about the wedding, but I wasn’t going to change my mind, any more than I was going to drop my plans for the Shiralee.

  A week before our wedding day, any doubts I might have had that Terry cared about me were dispelled. I was lying in bed next to him when he put his arm across me to pull me closer to him and accidentally hit me high on the right breast. Absolute shock crossed his face as he noticed the lump for the first time; it was like a hard marble sitting under the skin surface. He flew out of bed to make me a doctor’s appointment for the very next day.

  I felt very touched by his concern and hastened to reassure him. ‘There’s no need to panic,’ I told him. ‘I’ve seen several doctors about this, it’s nothing. There’s no pain with it.’ After Heath’s cavalier attitude, it felt good to have chosen someone who loved me and wanted to help, and to make him feel better I agreed to see a doctor the next day.

  I wasn’t worried. I had been at this point before. In the morning I arrived at the Broome Medical Centre to see Dr Sullivan, a doctor I’d known since I was eighteen years old. If there was anything wrong with me, I was certain he would find it. Sure enough, the very next day I was on a plane for Perth, and the following day I was having mammograms, ultrasounds and needle biopsies at the Mount Hospital. By the time all the procedures were over and I was sitting waiting for the results, Terry and Robby had arrived from Broome. Terry and I were two days away from being married.

  Finally I was called in to the rooms of the sp
ecialist, David Ingram. Terry came in with me. The doctor straight-away explained that I had an aggressive breast cancer. He spoke quietly and calmly, and waited a moment for me to absorb the information. I suppose I was in shock, I didn’t cry. I was wondering how the hell I’d been given an all-clear when I had an advanced aggressive cancer. I damned well wanted to know why it hadn’t been picked up when I’d been pointing to that hard lump every time I saw a doctor. Had anyone been listening? Or was I just another hypochondriac woman? But this was not the time for anger. Right now I needed to concentrate, to decide on the best course of action, so I shut my anger down.

  Looking at the doctor for the next step in this completely alien situation, I asked, ‘Can we take it — my cancer — out?’ He didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes! Of course.’

  ‘Okay then,’ I said. ‘I’ll be returning to the city in three weeks, can you do it then?’ I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. Dr Ingram shook his head and explained to me slowly and clearly that my cancer must come out much sooner than that, preferably the next day.

  He went on to explain the choice I had — mastectomy or lumpectomy. I asked whether he advised one more than the other and he said it really was a matter of choice. Neither was more appropriate for my cancer. I opted for the lumpectomy, with radiation treatment to follow after the wedding. I was pretty sure Terry wouldn’t want a wife with one breast.

  Once that was decided, my main concern was about delaying the wedding, wondering how we’d be able to contact people who’d be coming from all over the country. But Terry wouldn’t hear of it. ‘We don’t need to cancel it, lovey,’ he said. ‘We’ll be all right. I’ll be looking after you and helping in every way I can.’

  When he said that, I suddenly realised that I wanted to call it off — completely — not just postpone it. Here was my ticket out, for the fears I’d scarcely allowed myself to acknowledge. I looked to Dr Ingram for help, but he seemed to think it was theoretically possible to travel the day of the operation. And that was it. I didn’t know what else to do. It all felt bigger than me.