Stars over Shiralee

by Sheryl McCorry

  It was hard parting from Leisha, and I did a lot of soul searching when she was gone. I knew she was right, but I couldn’t walk away. Maybe that meant there was something wrong with me, but I couldn’t afford to think about that. Just the thought of going down that road made my brain feel like it was overheating. There were times when I truly did doubt my own sanity, though I’ve talked to enough people to know that this probably won’t make sense to anyone who hasn’t been through something similar. Old friends told me I was one of the sanest people they knew, yet still I doubted myself.

  Certainly, when someone passed on to me the rumour they’d heard that I had attacked Terry before leaving Broome I had to laugh. I’d done no such thing. When I finally sought counselling I came to understand better the characteristics of an abusive personality. Shifting the blame is one characteristic, and Terry was projecting onto me the very things he did and could not acknowledge about himself. As for myself, I was a prime avoidance case. I did not want to seriously look at what I was doing — to myself or to my children.

  It was during this period on the Shiralee that I first decided I was going to write. With Leisha gone, I realised how much I wanted to tell my story for my children — and to reconnect with the woman I knew I was deep down. The fact of my breast cancer spurred me to stick with it, even when I felt quite out of my depth. I rarely let myself consider that the cancer might kill me, but there was a little part of me that was looking ahead to a time when I would not be there for my children, and I wanted to leave something real of myself for them if it happened while they were still so young.

  I had no thought whatsoever that what I was doing would ever become a book that strangers might read. I certainly didn’t feel like a writer; once I began, it was more as if I was just writing a very long letter to my children. I wrote longhand in pencil, in exercise books. As I wrote, the whole process became cathartic — I would feel happiness, anger and sadness.

  The writing comforted me. Going back over my past in the Northern Territory and the Kimberley helped ease the pain and turmoil I was feeling about my marriage. I’d start from the journals I kept during those years, until something would spark memories so real I could smell the dust in them. Like this one.

  I could plainly see the dark clouds buffeted across the sky on the stormy afternoon I was working on a fence line on Kimberley Downs. My Aboriginal crew of Jackie, Yardie and Churchill were helping me construct a secure paddock to move the cattle into after they had been tested for TB. As the men pounded the metal star pickets into the hard dry earth and strained the barbed wire tight, I followed along tying the wire off on each picket. Leisha, who was ten, and young Richard, Jackie’s son, were with me, while Kristy and Robby were in the care of the govy back at the homestead. Our camp was by the windmill on police camp bore, two hundred metres from where we were fencing.

  I had dinner cooking in the camp oven and sent the children to check that the coals were still warm, and if not, to shovel hot coals from the fire around the camp oven. Both Leisha and Richard understood cooking in the bush; they had grown up around it.

  The sky was becoming darker, and the winds were picking up, whipping up the red dust into the air. Every now and then the wonderful aroma of the rain-wet pindan dirt was carried in on the breeze.

  ‘Come on, let’s finish before the storm gets here,’ I called to the stockmen. I looked to the horizon, which was now black, and then noticed with horror that the windmill was turning. It had been tied off earlier in the day as the tank was full — there was a wire rope attached to the mill head, which was wound tight by means of a handle to stop the blades rotating. Somehow the handle had been released.

  Running towards the camp, I never took my eyes off the huge blades — Leisha and Richard were each hanging onto a blade as they slowly rotated ten metres above the ground. My body was screaming in fear but I remained silent. With the stockmen hot on my heels, I lunged for the handle of the windmill and started turning it as fast as I could.

  ‘Jackie, Yardie,’ I called to the men. ‘Climb up to the head and grab them two.’ Inside I was praying, Don’t let them fall, Don’t let them fall, please God, don’t let anything happen to the children.

  As the mill came to a stop the storm was whipping up around us. Yardie grabbed Leisha as Jackie took a firm hold of his son, and they brought them both carefully down the metal steps of the huge Southern Cross windmill. ‘For god’s sake, what were you two doing up the mill?’ I asked Leisha. I was upset that I hadn’t seen the children climb the windmill in the first place and I was terrified of what might have happened.

  ‘We were just having fun, swinging from the blades and they just took off,’ answered Leisha.

  ‘Did you release the blades?’ I asked my girl.

  ‘No Mum, honest, they just started going round in the wind.’ These mills were over twenty years old.

  ‘I believe you, but don’t ever climb a windmill again unless I tell you to,’ I said. Wind slashed at the tarpaulin shelter, ripping it to shreds as Leisha reached the ground. I scooped her up and put her securely in the vehicle. The men jumped in with Richard, and we were off back to the station. It would be safer there.

  Life on the Shiralee kept me busy. I would not let myself fall down in a heap. In the evenings when I wasn’t writing, I was reading, or dressing porcelain dolls in long tasselled gowns and old-world hats, pearls and feathers. I’d make and glue on the clothes as I sat there chuckling — I’d never thought myself capable of sitting still long enough for any form of craft work. More than that, I had spent half my life belting around a paddock covered in mud, and here I was dressing dainty dolls! But maybe there was a part of me that longed to be cosseted and cared for like a doll.

  In the mornings I would ramble around the paddocks and walk through peaceful remnants of bush. There was still a lot of natural timber on the property. I was also planting native trees around the farm, and these attracted the birds.

  Little by little the body pain I had suffered in Broome left me, and I found myself feeling ease and happiness again.

  Did I really want this marriage? I questioned myself. I hadn’t taken a single Panadol since leaving Broome.

  It was wonderful to feel alive again, to want to work, to laugh and feel free of tension and stress. I am sure the writing played an important part in this. As did the cattle work. Robby and I were buying steers in small lots from the Mount Barker saleyard. We would get them home and process them through our new cattle yard, sometimes with the help of Richard O’Connor, but other times by ourselves. We worked well together, pushing our beautiful steers up into the forcing pen, from where they would move steadily along the cattle race into the crush. Here Robby would pull the lever of the head bail, which pinned the beast in a standing position so that we could administer minerals and supplements.

  As Robby worked the head bail I would battle to ear-tag or dispense hormones. Since the breast surgery I’d lost a fair bit of strength in my upper right side, which made cattle tagging frustrating, although somehow we always managed to get the job done between us. The odd one would bellow and yank its head from side to side as I struggled to get a tag in its ear and for the next week I’d be covered in band-aids, looking like I’d just stepped off a battlefield.

  The new cattle would have a night in the yard on water and hay to give them time to settle in their new surroundings, and in the morning we’d sit on the top rail of the yard to admire them and discuss the difference between our Kimberley cattle and these southern beasts. It was good for Robby to connect back to a time when he was just a boy and life was far less troublesome.

  We had been back at the Shiralee for nearly three months when I rang Terry at the caravan park and discovered that he was in Perth. We’d only had occasional phone calls since my leaving, in the course of which Terry had continued to assure me that he did want to make a go of our marriage. Mind you, I had also heard from various folk at the caravan park that Lauren was back, haunting the house late i
nto the night again.

  I called him on his mobile and asked if he’d been planning on coming down to the farm. Silence. It appeared not, and I had a quiet giggle to myself. ‘I’m here for the races,’ he finally said, rather cautiously.

  ‘With Lauren?’ I questioned. Again, there was silence on the line. ‘You’re not fooling me, Terry,’ I said. ‘People have been ringing me from the park, telling me she’s visiting you at night. So I suggest you don’t waste my time or yours. I’m sick of the bullshit.’ And I hung up, feeling very angry and disgusted about it all.

  This had been such a revitalising time, why did I even ring him? I should have known it would be like waving a red rag at a bull. Perhaps that’s what I wanted. He arrived early the next morning in a hire car.

  We went to lunch in Albany, at a restaurant overlooking Princess Royal Harbour. The bay was like a huge pond, uncharacteristically smooth and glassy. Way in the distance the slowly rotating blades of the wind turbines made a picture of peaceful serenity. It felt like a good place to talk. Terry told me he loved me — and then confessed to having rekindled his affair with Lauren. Even though I had heard the rumour, his confession shocked me. It was the first time he’d told me the truth. And it was the first time he didn’t ask me to return to Broome with him. Yet he still wanted me, he said. What he wanted me for, I wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to build a life with me, and he certainly didn’t want me for sex — I had long ago in Broome found a leaflet for Viagra, which obviously was not for my benefit. I hadn’t seen the old fella for years. Well, I thought, watch out you don’t bonk yourself to death, Terry.

  Old McCorry has been dead four years now, and how my life has changed from the Kimberley days. Despite this confession, despite my growing strength and wellbeing, when October came around and Terry came south again, I joined him at Wildwood farm. I don’t quite know how to explain this, but I still felt that if only I worked hard enough at it, I could save my marriage. I wasn’t yet prepared to accept that no matter how hard I worked I could not make a success of the decision I’d made — even if I had made it out of grief and loneliness and insecurity. I wasn’t prepared to face my own failure.

  CHAPTER 10

  Hitting the Road

  I spent Christmas 2002 in Broome with Robby and Terry. For all the grief Terry gave him, Robby had his mates and cousins up there. He loved the heat and sunshine and the atmosphere. I missed him. My children had been my closest confidants since my marriage. I had divulged too many problems and fears to Leisha and Robby — and worried that I had loaded them with too great a burden.

  With Robby back at the caravan park Richard helped me run the Shiralee again. He would live there and I could come and go as I pleased, knowing my cattle and the farmhouse were safe in his hands. Terry didn’t like this arrangement, but his opinion about how I managed my farm no longer mattered to me. My relationship with Richard was a purely working one, I could speak to him over the phone and he would organise the buying and selling of cattle for me.

  Then Terry and I returned to the Wildwood farm to prepare for a trip to Tamworth in January with Terry’s friends and fellow farmers Bert and Jan. It was a risky thing to go travelling with him — the close quarters and no escape was asking for trouble — but the country music festival really appealed to me, and Bert and Jan seemed to have a positive effect on Terry.

  In many respects it was a good holiday. We even had some fun. There were no set plans and we were never sure where we would end up each night. We just travelled until we found a town where we could get a room, and often ended up absolutely bushed.

  Tamworth was packed with cowboys and cowgirls looking for a country weekend. I enjoyed the music tremendously, but there was too much red wine and before long Terry was being hostile and crude again. But he kept his aggression carefully buttoned when our friends were in hearing range, and with them he was always charming and fun. Later, I realised what this meant — that he was, in fact, in perfect control of his behaviour. It wasn’t that he lost control and didn’t know what he was doing, as he often claimed; he was calculated enough to keep up the pretence in front of our travelling companions.

  He was clever, too, with his refrain of ‘Urgers are worse than bludgers’, which he would slip into the conversation at unpredictable times. The others had no idea of the significance of this, but Terry knew the effect it had on me. It reminded me that he had assaulted me once and got away with it, and he would do it again if I wasn’t careful. I was in the horrible position of being in the company of other people yet feeling terribly lonely and alone. I yearned for someone really strong and understanding to talk to. Yet the Landcruiser was mine; I was free to pick up the keys and drive away. But in fact I was not capable of doing that, just as I was not capable of confiding in Jan, who knew, I’m sure, that things were not great between Terry and me. I doubted myself and my confidence was low and I was afraid. There was a constant knot of anxiety in my belly. I was tiptoeing through a minefield, yet somehow it felt too hard to change things.

  We met up with Kristy in Melbourne, and Bert and Jan flew home the next day. Then Terry and I headed north again, to visit Leisha in Cairns. Travelling up the Queensland coast we stopped at Maroochydore so Terry could visit a Big 4 caravan park. Tension had been building between us ever since Bert and Jan had left, and it reached boiling point that night when my husband referred to me as a ‘dog’ because I hadn’t shown enough interest in the caravan park’s clothes-line construction. His attitude changed in a split second. The terrible look in his eyes, the set jaw and aggression, frightened me and I suddenly felt sick, the pit of my stomach churning.

  In Cairns I tried to hide my state of anxiety from Leisha, but I needn’t have bothered.

  ‘Mum, why are you still with him?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you see what it’s doing to you?’ I couldn’t answer. ‘Mum, we love you very much,’ she said. ‘I hate the way he speaks to you and treats you. He has you in tears all the time. Please think about your health. You need someone who cares about your health, not someone who makes you feel worse.’

  I couldn’t say anything to that. She sat beside me and said, ‘Look at me, Mum, you’re the strong woman who told me never to allow a person to dominate me, physically abuse me, intimidate me, manipulate or humiliate me — can’t you see he does all that to you and more.’

  Leisha had bought a new bedroom suite and curtains especially for our arrival, but Terry wanted to stay in the old Tropicana Motel that was managed by his cousin John and wife Robin and he thought it would look bad if I didn’t go with him. I saw Leisha every day, but we were torn apart by Terry’s anger. In the end Leisha said, ‘I’d rather you stayed at the motel with him than have him here and angry and you in tears. I can’t handle that.’

  From Cairns we travelled over grass-covered plains that reminded me of Fairfield station, my last cattle station in the Kimberley.

  We travelled through Longreach and Boulia to Alice Springs, where I went looking in Aboriginal art galleries. I found a good piece for my wall, but at the same time I felt disturbed by an old Aboriginal man I saw sitting on the polished floorboards of a sterile room as he produced a dot painting: the lines on his face could tell a thousand tales but his eyes were distant. It felt wrong. How could this old man of the land draw inspiration within such sterile walls?

  We left Alice Springs in the early morning, heading for Halls Creek in the Kimberley by way of the Tanami Desert and Wolf Creek crater. Coming through Ruby Plains station brought a flood of memories of Mick and Cherrie Quilty, both of whom were now deceased. Mick had been one of those hard-working outback characters who are a special part of the wild west. Mick was wild all right. One day Cherrie and I were making home-brew ginger beer in the kitchen at Ruby Plains when Mick arrived home from a day at the Halls Creek pub with a two metre python inside his shirt. He’d had a bit to drink and came through the door with a handful of snake while the rest of it was trying to wrap itself tightly around his girth.

  He
was doing his best to scare the living daylights out of me and Cherrie, and he was succeeding. When he tripped and lost the snake Cherrie grabbed her .410 snake gun. That was enough for Mick. One look at Cherrie with the gun in her hands and he found that snake pretty fast. He tied it up in a hessian bag, ready to release it out bush the next day. I went to bed and bolted my door for safety.

  We arrived back in Broome in the middle of March 2003 to face the last of the sweltering heat and humidity. Giant thunder heads were hovering high over the horizon, building up the energy to give the red pindan and spinifex country of the Kimberley one last burst of rain. The corrugated-iron roofs and walls of Broome would be washed free of dust for the new tourist season. The giant green bullfrogs that kept us awake through the hot nights with their bellowing would vacate the toilet systems they blocked during the wet season and head for greener pastures. And out on the cattle stations people waited patiently for the wild and woolly knock–’em-down rains to come and flatten the useless spear grass so the stock camps could get out from the homesteads, cross the bugger-bugger plains and move into the magnificent valleys to begin the mustering season.

  I was happy to be back in the Kimberley, and I also felt pleased to have done the trip, for all the unpleasant behaviour and nasty comments. There had been moments of behaving almost like a normal couple, and I held on to these memories rather than the unpleasant ones.

  Robby was still working at the caravan park and being back near him made me very happy. I decided I would stay a while. Robby was flat out spraying weeds in a new section of the park, and then he and his cousin Michael, the son of my elder brother Bruce, started on repainting the bay numbers. I joined them; the numbers needed to be bright and clear for the tourist season.

  Making a store run with the boys to restock the shelves of the park’s shop, which had been near empty through most of the wet season, brought to mind a shopping trip I’d made from Oobagooma station. While McCorry and I were away mustering, visitors from Broome set up camp under a boab tree on the banks of the Robinson River, planning to spend a couple of weeks fishing for the plentiful barramundi. After drafting and trucking the last mob of cattle from the old wooden cattle yards, McCorry and I were heading for Derby on a mail and store run to replenish our supplies. The visitors from Broome — Mary and Tom and the Pom — called at the homestead asking if I would pick up some stores for them. Mary’s order went like this: