Stars over Shiralee

by Sheryl McCorry

  The stockmen had tracked the vehicle up the dusty Gibb River Road and into Mount Hart country, through scrub and gullies until they came face to face with the vehicle’s occupant. The driver was a young Aboriginal fellow from Derby.

  The driver flew out of his vehicle and abused Jeffery and Charlie for tracking him up. And when they delivered my message that I wanted to see him, he said he would get into me as well. He reckoned he was doing me a favour, shooting vermin on my property. I thanked the men; they had been very brave, they did not have to be so protective of me and mine, and I was very grateful.

  Well, I waited and waited. I was sure he would come. An hour later he pulled in with his 4WD tray-back. He was a big fellow, and seeing he’d had such a lot to say to my fellows, this time I decided I would have my say first.

  There were four steps up to the back verandah and I stood in the middle of the top step. He had to stay at the bottom.

  I said, ‘Before you open your mouth and say one word to me, you produce your permit or written permission to shoot vermin on this station.’ There was none of course. If there had been, it would have been me who had signed it.

  He opened his mouth to speak but I held up a hand and went on, ‘You shot my pet donkey and our pack mule, for god’s sake.’

  He said, ‘Do you want them?’

  I glanced towards the slaughtered hindquarters protruding from the open tray of his 4WD, then swung back to face him. ‘You must be bloody joking, do you think I’d feed my dogs my pet donkey?’

  He had nothing more to say, only hung his head. I was finished. The pack mule and my jenny donkey were dead, and nothing was going to change that. ‘Get in that bloody car and get the hell out of here and don’t ever come back again, because next time it will be in the hands of the police.’

  This reminded me how strong I once was. How I never used to put up with rubbish from people.

  With only a few days notice, Leisha and young Brock left Broome for Terry’s Wildwood farm. Terry’s son Ken had gone down there to pick up some equipment and had found the house in a terrible mess. There was a mouse plague out of control — the place needed to be occupied. Leisha was still suffering the turmoil of leaving Adam, and it was hard for her to remain in Broome and watch me battle mine, so she volunteered to go down to Wildwood to clean up.

  Leisha called me at the park to say the kitchen was a total mess. The mice had had a field day in the pantry, and that was the least of it. A branch had fallen on the roof and blocked the gutters, sending the water into the house, damaging walls and carpets, flooding rooms and passageways. The house was still full of Molly’s possessions. Even though she had asked me to dispose of her personal contents for her, I’d not been able to bring myself to do so. She was in everything, and the house could never feel like mine. Terry and I might live there when we were working on the farm, but it would never be our home. Terry refused to buy new curtains or carpets or furniture. His racehorses were a far higher priority.

  A few months later, Leisha was travelling with Brock from the Wildwood farm to Perth to meet Adam so they could all spend a week together on the farm. But on the trip to Perth something strange happened. Leisha began to suffer blinding head pain so unbearable that she became disorientated and ended up off the track near the small fruit-growing town of Donnybrook. Pulling the car off the road she called me in tears. ‘Mum, I think I’m lost,’ she cried. I told her just to talk to me. Firstly I wanted to know whether Brock was all right. Leisha assured me he was sleeping in his car seat. She told me the headache was so severe she worried about being able to take care of him. ‘Please Mum, what should I do?’ she cried. I suggested she get back in her car and keep driving until she found a motel to spend the night. I would call her every half-hour until she settled or found some relief from the pain.

  I paced about restlessly, worried that she might have a brain tumour. Eventually she settled for the night and I promised to call her first thing the following morning.

  The next morning she rang before me, in tears again, to tell me about the terrible dream she had woken from. ‘Mum, don’t think I’m mad, but I need to tell someone. The dream was vivid, it all seemed so real, I still don’t know what’s happening.’ She was calling me from Williams. After feeding and bathing Brock, she had driven, dazed and muddled, in the wrong direction, towards Nannup. Realising her mistake she had turned back towards Williams.

  ‘It was a terrible, terrible dream, Mum,’ she said. ‘There were two little children. I could see their faces under murky water, they were side by side. I saw them so clearly I could draw them.’ She sobbed while describing the children’s faces, their hair colour.

  ‘Mum, I feel they want me to find them, it’s terrible, what do I do?’ she said. ‘I know it sounds stupid, I know it was a dream, but I feel I can drive right to the place they are. It was so real.’

  Worried for Leisha’s vulnerable state, I said, ‘Love, are they under the murky water?’

  ‘Yes!’ she cried.

  By now I felt like a cot case myself. ‘Leisha, if they’re under the water I feel sure they have passed,’ I said, trying to comfort her. ‘There is nothing you can do now.’ I don’t know why I said that, but I was worried my daughter would go on a wild-goose chase on the strength of her dream.

  After a while she had got her heavy feelings about the dream off her chest and she continued on her journey to Perth. The headache was over too. I watched the news across all the television channels for the rest of the day and was relieved that there were no stories of children drowning.

  Then in the evening of the next day, 4 October 2003, there was a news flash: ‘Two young children drowned as their parents tried to cross a flooded river in the Nannup region.’ The photo of the two children that appeared on the screen exactly fitted the description Leisha had given. I called her up and told her that, and she responded very calmly, ‘I know, Mum, the dream was so clear.’ It was a deep knowing she had, I have no doubt at all.

  Later that month Terry and I drove down to Wildwood. After a year of constant arguing I hoped to find some relief with just the two of us together on the farm. Leisha planned to return to Cairns with Brock to finish work on the duplex she had been renovating. I really wanted this time to put some serious effort into cleaning out Molly’s things. My own farm I had put on hold indefinitely; one day I would go back there, but not yet. I knew it was in good hands. I had called Richard before I left Broome and asked him to do another draft of the larger steers and deliver them to market for me. I wanted to restock with lighter weight steers and try to make a dollar out of their weight gain. It was always a relief to know I did not have to worry about the Shiralee. The pastures were thriving. It was that time of the year when the grasses were strong.

  Robby remained in Broome and worked at the caravan park. My one bit of good news was that a young woman named Tara, who was newly arrived in Broome, had become a friend. The two of them looked set to team up and that seemed like a very good thing to me. Tara was eighteen and worked on a pearling boat as a cook’s offsider, which could be a pretty tough job. She had a quiet strength about her, and a strong determination — something Robby needed around him at this time in his life. Simply knowing the two of them were there for each other relieved me immensely.

  While we were down south I had my annual breast cancer check-up with Dr Ingram at the Mount Hospital. The test results were all negative, so I could breathe a sigh of relief for another year.

  From Wildwood I visited a psychic again, a mother and housewife who worked from a bookshop in the small seaside town of Dunsborough. Her hair was a mass of unruly curls that stuck to her face with perspiration and she wore a free-flowing smock. She asked me if I had a particular question. I said, ‘I’m only looking for reassurance on what my gut tells me.’ I didn’t want to give anything about myself away. She dealt out some cards and began to read them. ‘Your husband’s life is based on money,’ she said. ‘He has deceived you and been unfaithful.’

>   In my bones I already knew this. But then she did surprise me, as she told me I would write a book that would be a bestseller. Reading my final card she said, ‘You’re a good businesswoman.’ I thought if I really had any business sense I’d be on the Shiralee and working it myself, not sitting here. I left the card reader with mixed feelings, but most of all pleased that the death card hadn’t come up. From there, surely life could only get better.

  Driving back to Wildwood with Terry I could not bring myself to look at him or speak to him. Then out of the blue I blurted out, ‘I know you’re seeing someone else again.’ For a moment I thought he would stop breathing and we would crash. He denied it of course, but blind Freddy would have known he was lying. The only time I had ever seen anyone go this colour was old McCorry on his deathbed.

  We were to return to Broome for a fortnight to relieve Terry’s nephew Jeff, and a few weeks before that I picked up the phone; it was Terry, ringing from somewhere on the farm. He said, ‘Your return air ticket to Broome is nine hundred dollars.’

  What was he saying? Did he want me to pay for it? Or did he want me to refuse? ‘Are you telling me I have to pay for it?’ I asked. There was silence on the other end of the line. ‘Forget it,’ I said, and slammed the phone down.

  I had four hundred and fifty dollars a week housekeeping, with which I had to pay the Wildwood phone account, lawn mowing, stores, my Landcruiser services and registration, any repairs around the house, and anything else that cropped up, including my visits to the doctor.

  I believe now he wanted me to leave him, that he was provoking me, for all that he always said he wanted me back. And wasn’t I the same? I wanted to leave him but I couldn’t go. In the end he paid my airfare and we flew to Broome for five days, leaving the Landcruiser at the airport.

  Oh, the saga of the Landcruiser! In February 2004 I was ready to trade in my current model with the intention of getting a smaller vehicle with better fuel economy, but Terry, who is a big man, wanted me to replace it with the same model. He insisted he would take care of the changeover cost — nearly $33,000 — in payment for his company’s constant use of it over the last five years.

  As we left for the car yard to collect the new vehicle I said, ‘You do have your chequebook with you?’ He nodded and I chided myself silently for having doubted him. But as we got out of the car and the salesman approached, Terry turned away saying, ‘I just have to grab a few things in town.’ And he boldly walked away, leaving me holding the proverbial baby. I entered the sales office and wrote out a cheque for the new vehicle. Not a week later, Terry flew to Perth to buy another horse at the thoroughbred sales. He was very consistent about money, and I knew I’d never see any reimbursement — and of course my new Landcruiser was used daily in the caravan park. I could have stood up for myself, I could have insisted the Landcruiser be only for my own personal use, but I didn’t. I can blame Terry for lots of things, but I can’t blame him for my own inaction.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Wind Beneath my Wings

  I found relief from my poky existence at the caravan park in writing about my life in the outback. I used the tiny spare room, sitting on the bed with my back to the window to take advantage of the natural light that filtered through. Sometimes the writing just flew. I’d be telling a story and I’d feel I couldn’t write fast enough to capture the words.

  Reliving my past was mostly a good thing to do; sometimes, though, it only served to make my current life feel painfully lacking by comparison. And Terry, it seemed, felt particularly threatened by this past, for he hated my taking myself off to write. When I retreated to my room he’d find any number of reasons to call on me, and when I emerged he would make comments like, ‘What, airing the dirty linen?’ Or he’d tell me I was wasting my time. ‘Who do you think would be interested in your story?’ he said one day with a sneer. But, in fact, people were interested in what I had to say, and he knew it.

  If we were out to dinner with friends of Terry’s, or visitors to the park, once they knew of my life in the Kimberley, they would be full of questions. We would be talking away, but within minutes Terry would change the subject, talking loudly over the top of me. I would stop talking and raise my eyebrows at the person I’d been talking to, as a signal to them not to push it.

  When we were among his friends, he didn’t like to share the stage with me. That hurt, because it meant he had no desire for me to connect with people. He didn’t like people engaging with me. It always had to be about him.

  But I kept writing; if I had little else at that time, I had persistence and determination, because at least I kept on writing.

  I have always been determined, and before I met Terry I never shrank from what had to be done. I remember when I was managing Kimberley Downs and we were in need of a killer, which is when you shoot, butcher and bone out one of your own beasts (or one of your neighbour’s, if you think you can get away with it) for the station’s meat supply. It was 1988 and my time on Kimberley Downs was nearly at an end. The tuberculosis eradication program was almost completed and we had reached the point of shooting any potentially infected strays we had missed along the river. The cattle stations on the program were paid by the government for any cattle shot, though it still seemed an enormous waste of beef to me. I’d eaten the same beef all my life, and I believed if we cooked it well, we were safe from TB. That’s the way people had managed in the outback for years.

  Determined to take some of this beef for the station, I arranged with the chopper pilots and shooters to run the strays out onto a claypan flat to shoot them. Then they were to put the chopper down and help with bleeding the beasts for me. With no men about the station — they were contract fencing on Noonkanbah station — I talked Narda the cook and Leisha into coming along and giving me a hand.

  Grabbing the cookhouse butcher’s knives and steel, we left the homestead chasing the choppers, now minute specks buzzing in the brilliant blue sky.

  As the choppers spotted a beast they would gradually work it around and deliver it as close as they could to where we were waiting on the claypan, and then drop it with a bullet. Whoever was closest to the dropped beast would slit its throat and bleed it. If this procedure was not carried out, the meat would become dark with saturated blood. Leisha and Narda covered the tray-back of the Toyota with gum and bauhinia branches, making a bed for the fresh beef to lie on, and with the afternoon sun pounding down on us and the choppers smothering everything in fine yellow claypan dust, we worked furiously to butcher the animals and get the meat to the station’s coolroom fast.

  We had several beasts on the ground at once and at first we battled to butcher out one animal each. Our knives became blunt from the tough cattle hide and needed constant sharpening. Leisha was running from Narda to myself, helping to lift the heavy and bloody hindquarters as we removed them. We soon decided we would be more efficient working together.

  It was heavy work and tough going in among the prickly spinifex, yet in four hours we had taken off twenty-eight hindquarters between us and slung them up onto the back of the Toyota. Our backs were buggered from bending over, and hungry flies feasted on our blood and perspiration-soaked bodies. We were all three of us covered in blood from head to toe; we looked as though we’d been involved in some terrible massacre. We covered the beef with more branches to help protect it from the dust and flies, and as the afternoon sun sank towards the west I headed for the homestead with our payload of beef. More than pleased with our haul I said to Leisha, ‘This will keep us going for weeks; it saves us going out and hunting down a killer.’ The enormous effort was well worth it, because it ran rings around the old salted beef we’d been eating.

  I sometimes wonder whether determination is genetic, because Leisha certainly has it in bucketloads. It was this determination that made her want to work on her relationship with Adam, to be a family for little Brock, and I was so pleased when she announced the two of them were not only back together, but were planning to get married
in August.

  ‘It’s not going to be a big deal, Mum,’ Leisha said. ‘I don’t want an expensive bash. We just want to do it here in Cairns, quietly.’

  Hell, I thought, she’s my only daughter and she wants a three minute wedding. However, thinking back to my own marriage to her father, that was exactly what we did. A three minute ceremony in the Derby registry office. When it came down to it, I didn’t really care how they married. What was important was that they seemed happy to be together again, and feeling so positive about the future, and little Brock was the happiest of all.

  I felt I could put up with just about anything knowing Leisha and Adam and Brock were all together again, but that feeling didn’t last long. Just two weeks later Leisha telephoned me from Cairns. ‘Now stay calm, Mum, and don’t panic,’ she said, and straightaway I felt my heart sink. She explained that the doctor suspected she had cancer of the uterus. She was booked in for an ultrasound and a CAT scan the following day. ‘I honestly don’t think I have cancer,’ my girl told me rather seriously. ‘We’ll just have to wait for the test results and go from there, Mum,’ she said. And that’s what we did, and sure enough, a few days later Leisha was proved right. She was given an all-clear and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief again. But I was left with a terrible fear that cancer was somehow stalking my family, and wondered where it would raise its ugly head next.

  Health wasn’t off my agenda either. Since being back in Broome, I’d fallen into the grip of another bout of Ross River fever. I had never felt so unwell, with constant fever and an aching body; all I wanted was to curl up in a ball and sleep the pain away. Once you have it, you are always liable to recurring episodes. And, as my doctor explained again, I was especially vulnerable because I was living under the stress of a difficult marriage. ‘To a bully,’ were his words. He advised me to ‘stop putting a band-aid over the problem’.