Stars over Shiralee

by Sheryl McCorry

  ‘You got a new old man?’ Katie asked me one day. I would try to hide my unhappiness in my marriage from them, but they always knew. ‘Yes Katie, I’ve got a new husband,’ I said. ‘What for you need old man?’ she questioned, sounding worried for me. I didn’t want the third degree, so I said, ‘Maybe to chop the wood or something.’ Katie burst out laughing. ‘You should come and visit me,’ she said. ‘I will, Katie, I promise you,’ I replied, feeling more homesick than ever for my old life in the Kimberley.

  One Saturday evening I was sitting on the verandah, contemplating how good life could be when it was free of tension. The phone rang through the stillness; it was Terry suggesting I turn the television on to the ABC. ‘It may interest you,’ he said. Across the screen was the face of an Aboriginal man who had grown up in my stock camp on Napier Downs. Terrence Dann had murdered his two small stepchildren in the Derby graveyard and tried to kill his partner as well. I wanted to throw up.

  Back in the seventies Terrence’s parents had arrived at the homestead looking for work. Although they came over from Brooking Springs and had not worked on Napier Downs before, it was apparently their home country. They were a young couple in an old faded blue Holden sedan that was packed with a tribe of young children, Terrence among them.

  The family settled in and the children played happily around the camp and on the homestead lawns with their dingo pups, shyly hiding behind me or a parent when a visitor arrived at the station. I remember them one corroboree night throwing all inhibitions to the wind as they pounded the soft red pindan with their bare feet to the powerful rhythm of the didgeridoo. The camp fire crackled as it burnt down, throwing the dancers’ shadows up against the backdrop of the Napier Range. Bodies shiny with sweat glistened in the smoky night light, their tribal markings stark in white ochre. The kids fitted in beautifully. So what had happened to Terrence?

  Only twelve months ago I had seen him at a pub in Derby. Pubs have never been my scene, but it was the only place we could get an evening meal on Derby race weekend. I was very glad to see Terrence though: he was looking great, well dressed in country and western gear. He had become a country music entertainer and sang with a slight Yankee twang. He came up and introduced his wife to me, and then dedicated most of his songs that night to me, publicly acknowledging me for treating his family right all those years ago on Napier Downs.

  There was a whole mob of people from Napier Downs, many of whom I knew from when I was managing the station. There were plenty I didn’t know, but those I did know were bringing the strangers to meet me, introducing me as ‘the missus who grew me up’. There was a constant stream of people coming up to the table, and beyond, I could see eyes on me, fingers pointing at me.

  I had not realised before this just how much I meant to the Aboriginal people I had worked and lived with. I knew Bob and I treated them far better than they were treated on many stations, but still, this was unexpected. It was lovely to see them all, though I felt faintly embarrassed at all the attention. Terry was lapping it up, which was a surprise to me, but he wasn’t well known in Derby, there were none of his friends around, no one he had to prove anything to, so maybe it was all right for me to be the centre of attention for once. And I was introducing him to everyone — he was shaking their hands and having a great time. If he’d always been the way he was that night, I could have loved him.

  But still, it seemed he felt he had to be the big man here, and was buying grog for all the men and women. I wished he wouldn’t, and told him so, but while that didn’t trigger a nasty reaction, he wasn’t going to stop. I had a horror of alcohol and Aboriginal people — they just didn’t mix, the combination only brought heartbreak. Which is why every station I ever owned or managed was dry. I had a blanket ban on alcohol. And still we always had the biggest stock camps of any of the Kimberley stations.

  Thinking back to that night, I wondered if alcohol (and maybe drugs) played a part in bringing Terrence to the point where he could kill his own children. I don’t mean that as an excuse for what he did. But he was clearly not the person I knew; he had changed.

  I remembered the time when another Aboriginal family came to Napier Downs. I had been woken in the middle of one sultry night by the barking of Sally, our blue heeler. I threw on my jeans and shirt, grabbed a torch and went to the front door. Outside in the dark of night I could just make out a large gathering of people by the homestead gate.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I yelled out from the front verandah.

  ‘Missus,’ a female voice answered, soft and hesitant. I did not recognise the speaker, and walked slowly out in the dark towards the people. They stood in total silence, and close up I could see that they were strangers to me. I wondered where they had come from at this late hour. A bent, grey-haired old man walked towards me with the aid of a stick. I extended my hand in greeting and introduced myself. His name was Spider, he told me.

  ‘We bin leave that Mount House station, missus,’ he said. Mount House was a hundred kilometres north up the Gibb River Road. It was owned by King Ranch at the time, an American company that bred horses.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, and nodded my head in the direction of the station camp. ‘You can make camp up there.’

  ‘Good, good,’ Spider replied. He then asked if ‘Boss’ (old McCorry) would take him back to the Mount House camp the next day and bring the other old people to Napier Downs.

  There seemed to be some urgency attached to this move in the middle of the night and I wondered why. As I walked towards my outdoor freezer to get some beef for them to cook up, I counted about fifteen to twenty of them, mostly healthy-looking young men and women in their late teens or early twenties, with a scattering of children.

  As they distributed the meat among themselves by the dim light of the freezer I took the opportunity to talk to one of the women. ‘Why did you move camp at night?’ It’s not something I’d known Aboriginal people to do normally; it seemed unusual to me. Hiding her face, her head down, she clearly didn’t want to say anything. I let the matter rest, but went back to my bed slightly worried.

  Early the next morning I woke to the rattle of the kettle coming from the cook house. Katie was leaving me in no doubt that she was up and about the homestead. I knew she would have news for me on last night’s invasion.

  Settling myself by her side with a cup of tea on the front step of the homestead, I asked her about the people who had just joined us. It seemed they were from a different tribal group — they were Wungundin people — and I wondered whether the two groups would accept each other.

  Katie explained what had happened. ‘One girl from that camp and that boss fella make big trouble, missus,’ she said, scratching at the step with a finger. ‘On that boss fella’s table in him office, missus.’ Katie burst into near hysterics, all of a sudden finding it hilarious.

  ‘What?’ I gasped, catching her meaning and pretending to be shocked.

  Then her laughter stopped abruptly and Katie sat up and finished her story. ‘That white missus, boss’s missus, she got a pistol when she come into that office.’ Now it all made sense to me, the immediate upheaval of their camp and the move to Napier Downs in the middle of the night. No shots had been fired, no one had been hurt, but the white missus had threatened the Aboriginal woman with the gun, and that was enough for her whole family group to pack up and leave.

  Later that morning McCorry went up to Mount House with Spider and picked up the old people. The elders never talked to me about the incident, perhaps feeling it brought shame on them. I took their lead and didn’t mention it either. As far as I was concerned, so long as they worked things out with my camp, they were welcome to stay. (They did stay, and moved with me two years later to Blina station.)

  But the troubles for the Mount House people were not over. The next morning a group of them came to see me. They stood waiting at the homestead gate with shaved heads covered with white scarves torn from a calico bedsheet. I realised straightaway that this was a sign that the
y were mourning a death in the family, and I worried that there had been some violence relating to the incident. However, it was not connected. It was an old man, one of their elders, who had passed away in camp in the night, presumably of old age.

  I left them to make their own arrangements, but by mid-afternoon the westerly breeze was carrying the acrid smell of burning towards the homestead. Worried again, I made my way out to the back lawn where I could see smoke billowing towards the heavens. It was coming from the direction of the station camp.

  Bloody hell, was my immediate thought. Please don’t let there be trouble. I didn’t know what I might have set into action by my hasty decision to let the Mount House people stay. There might have been bad history between the two mobs. I was preparing myself to face whatever new catastrophe might be brewing when Katie walked up to me.

  ‘Katie, what’s happening?’ I asked. I could see my job going up in smoke, too, if they burnt the camp down.

  ‘Him not burning that camp, missus,’ Katie said matter-of-factly. ‘Him smoking the hut that old man died in, smoking them bad spirits away.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good,’ I said, relieved. I should have remembered that this was commonly done when someone died, and I felt a bit silly that I’d thought the worst. I should have known Katie would have told me if there’d been anything to worry about.

  On Wildwood farm I carted and stacked seven loads of wood in the shed, ready for the cold winter months to come. I was looking forward to the change in seasons. I had decided I would stay here awhile. I had contemplated going back to the Shiralee, but Richard was happy there and was keeping everything sweet for me. I didn’t want to disrupt his life at this time. And for all my bad memories of Wildwood, I needed to see something through. I had made a promise to Molly, and I wanted to set the place straight for her. I felt her spirit still restless there, and in a funny sort of a way I needed to do my own version of ‘smoking’ her house so she could move on.

  It was good for me too. As I slowly created a sense of order, I felt myself relax and unwind. Before long Leisha, who was not far off giving birth, came down with Adam and Brock to join me. They had sold their duplex in Cairns and would spend some time with me at the house before finding a home of their own. Adam soon found work in Busselton, and at home Leisha and I took turns with the cooking. We had a great four weeks together.

  I was so happy to have my family around me again. Life was going well and I could feel a smile returning to my face. I was proud that I was staying on my own course, doing what I felt I needed to do.

  I hadn’t cut Terry out of my life completely. He rang quite frequently and we didn’t get into so many arguments. He’d talk about the park, pass on gossip or news from friends. For the first time in many years I felt more or less at home. I wasn’t living out of a suitcase. I had somewhere to sit and enjoy my cup of tea in the morning. I could breathe deeply in the cool clean air.

  Best, I had stuck to my decision of writing my story. Up until this time in my life, I’d had no experience of writing at all, but I looked on it as just another task that needed sound strategies to accomplish my goal. I worked out a schedule and divided my life into years and cattle stations; I read my diaries, placing tags on different events and making many notes. Drinking mug after mug of tea, I would sit by the fire and let my memories, thoughts and feelings flow. I wrote on happy events and sad ones, some days in tears or anger over what I thought were injustices in my life. Sometimes I was so churned up I’d be unable to sleep at night. I can’t say I was analysing what I’d been through, but it seemed to get worked out just the same.

  I have heard it said that writing is good medicine, and for me that was true. In some ways it was as if I had made myself, from the start, just like I had made those little dolls back at the Shiralee. In other ways, to sit alone with the time to go over momentous events in my mind was a luxury. While I was living that life, I never had a moment to sit and think about what was happening. Everything just got tucked away while I got on with the business of living: managing children, animals, stock camps, cattle stations.

  Terry always kept a very clear distance from my writing. He didn’t like me doing it, he hated me even being in conversation with people about my life in the outback. He told me he didn’t want me to write under my married name

  — his name. I assumed he wanted to distance himself from the possibility of my making a fool of myself. In fact I had always intended to write as Sheryl McCorry, the person I had been, that I was deep inside — the person I was beginning to find again. The satisfaction that came with realising that, for the first time in years, I had a fierce grip on my own life only made me more determined to keep at my writing.

  CHAPTER 14

  Reclaiming Wildwood

  At the same time as I was rescuing the Wildwood farm-house from neglect, I was determined that I would not let my beloved Shiralee fall into the same state. Richard was great with the stock, but the Shiralee needed a woman’s touch too. It was a four hundred kilometre round trip, but I just needed to reconnect with it. I would stay overnight and go on with my writing at the kitchen table. Then I could return home to Wildwood content and satisfied, knowing everything was fine.

  Towards the end of the year Robby and Tara drove south. Robby wanted to show Tara the Shiralee, the farm he had grown to love, and they planned to be away from Broome for the whole of the wet season.

  Now I had all my family around me. I felt so grateful that in those terrible years of my life I had not lost my children. I had missed a lot of young Brock’s early years while Leisha was in Cairns, but now I was making up for that, taking him for walks in the surrounding bush and having smoko on the front verandah. He loved our smoko picnics. The little blue wrens found time between courting to drop in on the bird feeders I had scattered throughout the garden; it made my heart sing to see them. A couple of blue-tongue lizards had taken cover in the nearby wood heap and occasionally set my pulse racing when, with a quick glimpse, I mistook them for snakes. I was used to handling king browns on the stations but I found it hard to accept the tiger snakes in the south, particularly when they camped around the back door of the farmhouse. To me the darker colour of the tiger snake made them look more aggressive and sinister, and I would freak out at the sight of them. Yet the king browns have a reputation for being more aggressive and I have always felt I could protect myself and family from them.

  One lovely spring morning with Leisha and Brock on the verandah, I was absorbed in the various bird calls when my mind was distracted by a rustle in the nearby grass. Tiger snake, I thought, and was leaping up to grab Brock when I saw the telltale stumpy leg of the blue-tongue — which brought to mind an encounter with a lizard on Kimberley Downs, a tata lizard.

  It was rodeo time in the Kimberley and I had given my windmill men time off, so it was up to me to check on the boundary bore — which I did, only to find the tank was empty.

  Boundary Bore was an important staging post on the way into Kimberley Downs. There was a large trucking yard, where we kept cattle in paddocks waiting on their sixty day test for TB. A worn old Southern Cross jack pump stood over the bore, black and sooty, and the surrounding ground was soaked dark with heavy black sump oil. The pump had probably earned its weight in gold for the constant supply of water it had produced over many years, but lately it had become a pain in the arse to get it started. I religiously performed all the right procedures. I’d stand over that pump and feed it a little capful of oil, a tiny sniff of petrol and crank my guts out — to no avail. Next, I repeated this strategy, leaving out the oil. I gave it an extra sniff of petrol, again cranked like hell — nothing. When my body was exhausted and my chest heaving from the effort, I lifted my head from the job, only to see a tata lizard watching me intently and revolving its arms like the clappers. It looked exactly as though it was mimicking my cranking. I’d never seen such a thing before, and I often think of that little tata lizard.

  But I still had a pump to get started. Some
years back Ike, a slightly built but very handy windmill man, had worked on Kimberley Downs. He never quite had the strength to crank heavy jack pumps, so a rope in the Toyota had to do. I decided to follow his example. Hooking my rope onto the pulley of the jack pump, I wound it around several times, secured it to the bullbar of the Toyota and reversed at speed. The rope broke and shot backwards, exploding against the windscreen and sending me ducking below the dashboard. On my second attempt, I pulled the rope in two. At this point I made a mental note: buy a new rope! But the third attempt was successful, and I managed to keep the old jack pump working until all the cattle were watered and the tank was full to the brim.

  Terry flew down for a week to check on his racehorses and wanted my company. Of course it wasn’t about me at all, but his need to use my Landcruiser to do the rounds of the stables and agistment centres that were scattered all over the south-west.

  His moods were still dark and angry but I watched my every word and managed to keep from reacting and making things worse. I had realised by now that it was safer to pump up his ego than say anything that he might construe as criticism, as his frustration would easily turn to aggression. When we arrived at the airport with an hour to kill before his departure, I suggested we have something to eat together. We had just sat down in the cafe when Terry suddenly stood up, slamming his chair back in anger. His jaw set in that terrible way and his eyes bulged, and he said, loudly enough for the people around us to hear, ‘I’d rather back horses than buy you lunch. I’ve made money from horses, but nothing from you.’ These were his exact words.

  I was thrown straight back to that old sense of helplessness. I thought I had managed things so well, but still it had led to this. I felt my body burning with shame. But from somewhere I found the strength to say quite calmly that a cup of coffee would do. Then suddenly he was being charming, wanting to order every bloody meal on the menu for me. I was utterly confused. I had no idea what pushed which buttons. I gathered myself together, said goodbye and walked out of the cafe, seeing nothing, feeling nothing.