Stars over Shiralee

by Sheryl McCorry

  It was good to have Leisha and the children around. I didn’t know whether it had a physical or emotional cause, but suddenly I felt extremely low again. My bones ached and I had a fever. I felt miserable because I had thought all this was over; I had not thought Terry could still reduce me to such a state.

  Then one evening, while standing under the shower, I was in for an even ruder shock.

  ‘Leisha, Leisha!’ I called out in a panic.

  She came running, and I cried, ‘Come here, love, look,’ pointing to the plughole which was full of my blonde hair. I ran my fingers through my hair and looked down in horror to find my hands full of my own hair. What was happening to me? Not even my cancer treatment had taken this much hair from my head.

  A few days later I drove with Terry to Perth so he could fly back to Broome. Again he reminded me of threatening to do away with his ex-wife’s solicitor if they didn’t agree to what he wanted.

  I suggested that maybe he needed some help at the park. ‘Why?’ he demanded, and I answered, ‘Because you’re always so angry and stressed.’ He tensed up even more, so I tried again. ‘What’s really wrong, what’s worrying you, Terry?’ I should have known better, he had never given me a straight answer before. His face stiffened, his jaw twisted and he slammed the steering wheel. Leaning over towards me while driving with one hand, he shook a fist in my face, angrily jerking the steering wheel from side to side. We were on the highway and the traffic was heavy. I was terrified he might kill other motorists, let alone us.

  ‘Keep this up, Terry,’ I said, ‘and I’ll go to the solicitor myself with all your threats and aggression.’ This stopped him; he went quiet and remained calm until we got to the airport. As he got out of the vehicle he fumbled while taking out his suitcase and I saw him standing on the curb, looking suddenly lost and lonely. He could switch moods in a split second. I felt so sorry for him, but still I drove away as fast as I could.

  The next week I went to see my doctor about my hair loss. He ruled out physical causes, and at his first kind words suggesting I must be in a pretty bad way for my hair to be falling out like this, I burst into tears, apologised profusely, then told him I needed help, I needed to talk. All of a sudden the penny had dropped and I realised I couldn’t sort this out by myself. I had always felt that I had to be able to, but if I couldn’t do it now with all my renewed confidence, I knew I never would be able to.

  Something about Terry kept hooking me back. He knew just how to play me, and every time I fell for it. I don’t think he once felt guilty for the way he treated me, and yet I couldn’t help seeing that picture of him, lost and alone as I drove away from the airport. I felt guilty, as though turning away from him, despite how difficult he was, was turning my back on the chance to add a little more love to the world, instead of misery and confusion.

  My doctor let me talk it all out, and by the time I’d finished I felt so much better. He thought I’d do very well with a short course of counselling, but he didn’t push it. I walked out of his room feeling much lighter. I would go and see someone, soon, but for the moment all the talking had let the pressure out, and I didn’t need it straightaway.

  Yes, I was still putting it off. In the cold light of day, needing that kind of help still felt like telling the world I couldn’t cope. And maybe deep down I was still afraid of talking about what was going on. I didn’t know why I was afraid, though; it didn’t make sense to me. But it also didn’t make sense that I could be a successful author one minute and a nervous wreck the next.

  *

  Diamonds and Dust had taken on a life of its own. By January 2008 it had already gone into its fifth reprint and was still in the top ten in some bookstores. Letters and cards poured in at the farm from people who had enjoyed my book. Many people wrote because they had similar stories to mine. Some were struck by my staying with McCorry through his depression, not abandoning him. ‘Your book is a revelation for all the women who married older men, had a good life earlier on, and are now shadowed by the older men with chronic depression,’ wrote one.

  Another, who had also lost a child, wrote, ‘But I have not written to you to talk about grief, but to say I admire your courage in writing your story. I rejoiced in your frankness as I live in a small town and I know that what people don’t know, they make up.’ One woman finished her letter with: ‘On bad days I tell myself, if Sheryl McCorry can do it with two million acres, what do I have to complain about with two hundred! Your book has been not only inspiring but also very healing.’

  Speaking invitations were rolling in, as were film offers on Diamonds and Dust. Leisha visited one day and told me she was taking Cohen to the doctor regarding his hips. He was only two years old and suddenly it had become clear to her he had a sway in his walk like a tired old stockman. The doctor ordered X-rays and in a week we were all heading to Perth to see a specialist. The news was terrible. Cohen needed major surgery on both hips, and soon. Our darling boy had not complained of the pain he must have been suffering from his serious hip displacement. And it wasn’t only his hips; his back was curved like the letter ‘C’. The specialist was amazed that Cohen could walk, run and ride a bike.

  My girl broke down in tears and I knew just how she felt. Kelly had to have an operation in Perth at ten months old — that floored me and it was only a minor procedure.

  Cohen had his operation in June 2008, followed by three more over the next ten months. For each operation he was a couple of weeks in hospital. Leisha never left his side, and I moved into her house to take care of Brock until they came home. Between operations, Cohen wore a full cast from his waist to his toes. In a year’s time the specialist will remove the two little metal rods inserted in his hips, but Cohen will have to live with metal plates bolted to his femur for the rest of his life. For now he is home and mobile again, healthy and happy, and we have learned to celebrate the victories and be thankful.

  So much was happening in such a short time. Change was in the air whether I liked it or not. We were in the throes of worry about Cohen when Terry came south to Wildwood again, supposedly to work on the farm, though he spent most of his time at the races in Bunbury. He had a win and a second place with two of his horses, so he should have been happy, but he was full of anger and tension.

  This may partly have been because he wanted to accompany me, smiling at my side, for book signing events and interviews, and I wouldn’t let him. I didn’t want him there, pretending we were happy, when he had no more interest in me or my life than he’d had for all the years of our marriage. Nor did I want to give him the opportunity to upset me or embarrass me in public again. A friend had told me of a recent conversation he’d had with Terry. My friend had read the book and said to Terry he thought I’d had a great life, and that he was fascinated by the stories. Terry apparently replied, ‘Sheryl’s left me now she’s famous. I haven’t read the fucking book!’

  One afternoon, after two weeks of unpredictable and volatile behaviour, Terry came running through the farmhouse covered in dust and cow shit and said, ‘I’m leaving. I’ve got to get back to Broome.’

  He kept running towards the shower while I looked at the lamb casserole I was about to put in the oven for dinner. One of his favourite dishes. He hadn’t given me any inkling that he’d be leaving, and I knew then, finally, that this was the end of our marriage. I turned the oven off, boiled the kettle and made myself a cup of tea, silently willing myself not to shed another tear. It wasn’t worth it.

  I sat alone on the verandah drinking my tea, listening to drawers and wardrobe doors opening and slamming as he collected his belongings from the bedroom. After several hurried trips between the bedroom and car, he came to the verandah where I was sitting gazing across the dry paddocks and said, ‘I’ll have a cup of tea before I go.’

  There must be something he wanted to say to me, I thought as I got up and went to the kitchen to make his tea. But when it was made I found him in the lounge room, his gaze fixed on the racing repeats blaring f
rom the television. I put his cup on the little wooden coffee table beside his chair. There was no ‘thank you’, he simply ignored me; it was as if he was mesmerised by the repeats playing over and over.

  I returned to the verandah to finish my tea in silence, and a few minutes later I watched my husband leave the house in a cloud of dust and flying gravel. There were no goodbyes, just a spectacular display of his leaving. I sat there and I thought, Well, another one bites the dust.

  And that was the last time I saw my husband. Perhaps I had been waiting for him to leave all along, since I was never able to cut the knot myself.

  In March 2009 I applied for a divorce. I expect it to be as nasty and dirty as his treatment of me over the nine years of our marriage. But I’m no longer scared of his threats. Now that the marriage is over, there is no more fear.

  Over the next few months, while I was biding my time at Wildwood, I took up several speaking invitations.

  Being interviewed was one thing. I simply sat there and answered questions, and the interviewer was usually doing their best to make it easy for me. It was a walk in the park. But to stand up and deliver an address to a room full of strangers — the whole thing terrified me. I’d get out there and be shaking like a leaf. But I soon came to realise that what people really wanted to hear was stories of the outback. And I had plenty of these. Real stories about ordinary people doing things that were very different from what your average city slicker was used to. Or stories about city slickers out of their depth in the bush. That could be very amusing, and not always in a kind way.

  I liked telling the story of the govy from hell.

  I would employ a governess through an agency in Broome to oversee the children’s correspondence schooling. Some were trained teachers, but that wasn’t a necessary part of the job. Govies came and went, some staying longer than others.

  In 1987, when I was managing Kimberley Downs, we had the govy from hell. Most days after their school lessons Leisha and Kristy, who were about ten and eight, rode or swam their horses in Cammera Creek. After a rough week with their latest govy, who had come to the station directly from Melbourne, my girls invited the woman to go with them down to the creek. The govy had not been ‘sparing the rod’, although I did not know this — I do not believe in physical punishment, and never countenanced its use against my children — and Leisha and Kristy had decided it was payback time.

  Leisha was riding her performance horse, Lady; Kristy was on Beauty, and the govy, who didn’t ride, was on foot. As the three rambled in and out of Homestead Creek, which flowed into Cammera Creek, the govy soon had blood-sucking leeches hanging from her legs. In no time she was in hysterics and her screams were frightening the horses.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ chorused the girls, ‘they don’t hurt you.’ That didn’t calm her at all, and when they said, ‘We’ll take you home and burn them off,’ this only brought forth more hysterics. The girls were a little shocked at how effective their payback scheme was proving. They walked her to the cook house where they saturated the blood-fattened leeches with salt so that they quickly dropped off.

  I knew my girls were not always angels, and they weren’t getting away with this. I scolded them for taking the govy for a walk where they knew there would be leeches, and in her defence Leisha said, ‘We didn’t mean to freak her out that much, but it’s not as bad as what she does to us.’ And they both held out their hands, showing me the welts on their wrists. The govy had been sinking her sharp fingernails into the girls’ wrists whenever she wanted to drive a point home.

  Now I thought about it, I could see a dark moodiness to her. She could have been a heavy drinker whose hide was cracking. It wouldn’t have been the first time — a lot of people who are in some kind of trouble, who aren’t dealing with life and its problems, come out to the bush thinking the experience will cure them. She was out of her depth, and she was taking it out on the children.

  Well, that was it, I thought to myself. She’d be off Kimberley Downs by the end of the week. In fact she left earlier than that.

  I woke two nights later from a deep sleep to the smell of burning. In a flash I was out of my bed and flying to the children’s rooms, terrified of losing them in a house fire. Finding the children safe, I realised the fire wasn’t in the house. I ran to the front verandah and immediately saw the flames licking out from the window of the govy’s flat and lighting up the night sky.

  ‘Fire! Fire!’ I yelled as I ran into the building. Govy was out cold on her bed. I thought at first it was smoke inhalation, but as I came closer the sour reek of alcohol overpowered the smell of smoke. I shook her shoulder. ‘For god’s sake, help yourself!’ I screamed. She opened her eyes, looked at me blankly and closed them again. ‘Move,’ I yelled as I tried to pull her out of danger. Thankfully I could hear the stockmen’s voices as they arrived with garden hoses. One of them grabbed the govy from me and dragged her clear, and I got out of the building and stood back to let them fight the fire. The blaze was soon out, though the bedroom was a write-off.

  Govy left the next day, without any prompting from me, hitching a lift with a bull runner passing through from a neighbouring property. She admitted to nothing, but I feel pretty sure she’d been smoking in bed after some dedicated drinking and had fallen into an alcoholic stupor. She certainly looked like a wardrobe drinker.

  One thing about living and working in the outback — you can’t ignore the climate. Sometimes it really can be the difference between life and death. In 1986 the west Kimberley had a dry year, probably not a drought as such, because eventually the wet season did come in, but it didn’t bring the usual abundance of rain.

  Clear blue skies, humidity high, it was hot as hell. The natural waterholes were drying up, as were many of the silt-filled dams. These were difficult times for us, as Australian Land and Cattle had gone into receivership. There was no money to spend on improvements for the stations; even repairs to windmills and waterholes were done with patched-up gear. We could have rolled up our swags and left the stations but I loved a challenge. I stayed as manager and helped pull Kimberley and Napier Downs through those tough times.

  Twice a day I drove the bore run on Kimberley Downs, checking that windmills were pumping and looking for cattle bogged in the hungry mud that now filled Telegraph Dam. The air was filled with the stench of decomposing flesh, and eagles constantly circled the dam. Yesterday’s casualty, an old cracker cow (who had missed being mustered and was too old to breed from), didn’t have the strength to stand after I dragged her out of the dam with a rope hooked to the bullbar of my Toyota. There was no hope for her, she was suffering and barely alive. The eagles and scavengers hadn’t waited for her to die, but had begun to feast on her alive, attacking her large eyes. Something had been gnawing on her nose and tongue, dingoes probably, and the maggots had moved in. She was a sad, terrible sight.

  It was one of the rare times I didn’t have my .308 rifle with me in the Toyota, and I had no choice but to cut the beast’s throat. I hated doing that. It’s a lot easier to stand back and fire a gun. But I knew I had to put the cow out of her misery.

  Alone, exhausted and covered in stinking grey mud, I sat for a while afterwards, resting my back against an ancient boab tree, and cried my heart out. It was tough times like this that I wondered what the hell I was doing in such a godforsaken place. Then the rains would come, and the rugged outback would flourish and come to life again, and nowhere was more beautiful.

  *

  And then there are stories that have everything in them: ordinary people doing extraordinary things, wild country, wild weather, wild adventures — and the quiet wisdom of a people who lived in this land long before we arrived.

  A lot of the city people who came and listened to me talk had very little experience of Aborigines or their country. Very few of them had even talked to an Aboriginal person. Their opinions were formed by things they had seen on television or read in newspapers. Yet I have learned so much from the Aboriginal men and w
omen I’ve worked with throughout my station life.

  Up in the Kimberley, the rains would come, and sometimes they wouldn’t stop. Out of my six years at Louisa Downs, two years had record-breaking rainfall. The spinifex-covered desert country usually had an average fourteen inches a year, and then out of the blue we received twenty-six inches in 1983 and thirty-three inches the next year.

  We had more than an inch the day I organised a light aircraft to evacuate two people from the top end of the Louisa Downs airstrip. One was an old Aboriginal woman called Judy and the other was a truck driver with a bad case of food poisoning. Old Judy was well into her eighties. She was thin and always wore a long dress and a jumper, no matter how hot the day. She had a temperature and a rattling cough in her chest.

  The evacuation was accomplished in the rain with no dramas, although we were just in time — it looked as if the airstrip would soon be too wet and soft for a landing.

  Late the following evening, after even more rain, I found we had another sick person in the camp. The old man was an elder who usually lived in Halls Creek, and was the grandfather of several of the station’s stockmen. I was feeling a bit frustrated; if I’d known the night before, we could have flown him out with the others. Now the airstrip was definitely too wet. It seemed I was forever having to make emergency runs to one or another of the region’s hospitals. McCorry was no help — he was away mustering on Roebuck Plains. But my feeling frustrated wasn’t helping anyone. I had one of the largest Aboriginal groups in the area camped by the Louisa homestead; out in the middle of nowhere, I was literally their lifeline in emergencies.

  I went up to the camp and talked to the old man and his family, who told me he had prostate cancer and was unable to pass urine. I took him back to the homestead and made radio contact with the Halls Creek hospital. The doctor on duty asked me questions and I relayed back to him the answers the old man gave me. It turned out the old man hadn’t passed urine for several days. My god, I thought, he must be busting. He had my sympathy — I was pregnant with Robby at the time and knew what it was like to have pressure on my bladder.