Love on Forrest Downs

by Sheryl McCorry

  Those jobs couldn’t hold me for long, though. I wanted to be in a stock camp and I knew I had a lot to learn. My goal was to manage a cattle station; in those days that wasn’t seen as an appropriate ambition for a young woman, but right or wrong that was what I wanted to do. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that I had such an ambitious goal – I was always driven to prove myself, maybe because I was the only girl in a family with four boys and I had to prove that I was as capable as they were. In some ways I had to prove myself to my father more than anyone.

  When my parents left for Shark Bay they asked Bob McCorry to keep an eye on me. I’d first met McCorry when he’d visited my father to discuss a walk-in freezer Dad was building for Waterbank Station, which McCorry managed at the time, and he’d come to our house a few times since. I’d only caught glimpses of him, and we hadn’t spoken during those early visits, but he had certainly taken my eye.

  McCorry took me to Oobagooma, a station near the coast five hours’ drive north-east of Broome. Oobagooma was my first experience of station life and soon station life became my life, when McCorry and I married. That land, and that way of life, were in my blood, and the first stages of my dream – to work and manage a cattle station – were finally coming true.

  Although my life went through so many changes – good and bad – after I left Broome and my childhood behind, my love of the land has remained constant. Looking back over my early years, it’s not hard to see why: the life our parents made for us meant it couldn’t have been any other way. We lived in the most beautiful places and my brothers and I had the whole outdoors as our playground. It was completely natural for us to be out in the bush, just as it’s completely natural for me now. The places I have lived in and loved have always meant more to me than just a patch of land with a house to sleep in. They have brought me peace and solace when I needed them most.

  CHAPTER 5

  Arriving at Oobagooma

  When my parents asked McCorry to keep an eye on me they had no idea that ‘keeping an eye on me’ meant me going to Oobagooma Station – they didn’t even know I was leaving Broome. McCorry had told me to turn up at the Derby airport at a particular day and time, which I did. I sensed that this might be my chance to go mustering, which I’d never done before. I would be working with McCorry, seeing him in his own territory, and the prospect thrilled me. He was already on Oobagooma and I was to meet him there. So I just flew out in this little cloth aircraft: myself, a stockman and the pilot. As we flew in to Oobagooma I looked out of the window; all I could see were rugged mountain ranges. Before landing, the pilot had to get the wild pigs off the airstrip by doing a couple of low dives over them. Once the pigs had moved off, the pilot said, ‘She’s right’, and down we went, in among the spinifex, bumping our way along the airstrip.

  Arriving at Oobagooma was the start of the whole adventure that has been my life, and I immediately felt that I belonged there. Like the mountain ranges I’d seen flying in, the whole area was wild; the homestead, when we got to it, was rough – just corrugated iron – and the sheds were slapdash too. A couple of hundred metres from the homestead was a hill, and on the hill was a really old stone telegraph stage where candles were burning. I was told that there had been a massacre of Aboriginal people on that site many years previously; now the local Aborigines kept a little fire burning there all the time to keep the bad spirits away, so that’s what the candles were for.

  The Aborigines who lived on Oobagooma all came to see the new arrival. The sight of the Aboriginal camp at Oobagooma actually made me feel at home, reminding me of my childhood in Arnhem Land, and straightaway I felt as though everything was going to be all right. But more than anything I couldn’t wait to get out in the stock camp – that’s what I had come for. I wanted to be where the action was, to begin to pull my weight around the place.

  Being in the stock camp meant going out for three weeks at a time with just a swag and tuckerboxes. Out there we lived off salt beef and damper, so all we usually took was a drum or two of flour and a bag of coarse salt – which we used for the damper as well as the beef. Whenever a beast was killed we’d have a big feed for about two or three days, then we’d lay out what was left on one of the old wire stretcher beds, salt it all over and let it dry a little bit before putting it in sugar bags and tying them up to the back of the ute. We had to salt the meat because there was no refrigeration or anything like that. When we got to camp we’d take out a lump of the meat and head for the nearest creek or waterhole to wash the salt off it. Then we’d throw it in a bucket of water and boil it. Sometimes we had a frying pan and, if we were lucky, a hotplate. Usually, though, we would grill the meat on a shovel over the coals once the fire had died down, and we’d have some black tea with our damper and meat, and that was our diet for the weeks we were out. For some reason we never suffered from the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables. I always made sure there was plenty of beef and bread for everyone in the camp, and that seemed to keep us all in reasonable health.

  Looking back on it now, I guess it sounds like a strange kind of life for a young woman to want. But it really was what I wanted. And I made the best of the circumstances. When I was in the camp I only had two sets of clothes with me: two men’s shirts, two pairs of jeans, two pairs of socks, and none of the flash bits that went underneath. I would wear a set of clothes for a couple of days straight, depending on the work we were doing. If I was covered in blood and dust and muck I would wash those clothes that night. We didn’t take suitcases or anything that even looked like a suitcase; everything had to be rolled up in a swag. Also in my swag were my toiletries and make-up, because I had promised myself that wherever I lived or worked in the outback, I would try to keep myself attractive and feminine.

  Every night I would bathe – which meant going down to a spring, if there was one. There certainly weren’t any showers out there. Fortunately, I was treated with respect by all the men on that Oobagooma camp. Maybe it was because one or two of the young boys knew my youngest brother, Michael. Whatever the reason, the boys tended to look after me, and if I was going down to the spring for a wash none of them ventured out from the camp to follow me; they all stayed put around the campfire, drinking tea. So I went down to the spring with a pannikin that I filled with water and poured over myself, then I’d lather up and rinse off. If there was no spring and we were short of water I would just have a flour drum with water in it and I would dip the pannikin into the drum, stand on some spinifex and pour the water over me. No matter how little water there was, though, I always made sure I was clean each day. It was important to me to keep up that routine. I used whatever water was left over from washing myself to clean the clothes that I’d had on that day if it was their turn to be washed. The water wasn’t spotlessly clean, by any means – sometimes it was dam water that had a murky or milky colour to it – but it didn’t matter. After washing my clothes I threw them over a bush or a tree branch. They would be dry by morning, and so it would go day after day.

  On the surface, life in the stock camps seemed very different from what I was used to – living with my parents and brothers, and being in town from the age of eighteen. But when I look back, I realise that Dad moved us around a bit. We were almost nomadic; there was never a sense that staying in the one place was what you did. Instead all you had to do was roll a swag or take your suitcase and move on, no worries. So that’s probably where I got it from.

  On Oobagooma there was a lot to think about besides keeping myself clean. Mustering cattle took our attention for most of our waking hours. Leaving the homestead on a mission to find the cattle that were out there on the property, we headed straight out to the boundary, which was unmarked. Because there were no fences, we used landmarks to help us gauge where the fences would be.

  This lack of fencing was the reason why there were so many range wars out in that country – neighbours fought over whose boundary was where, all so they could claim cattle that had been found in a particular area. Cattle being m
oney, of course. Your neighbour would say the boundary was half a kilometre or a kilometre this side and you would say it was a kilometre to the other side. We were blueing over this all the time – there really was no way to prove where the boundary was one way or the other. We all had a rough idea of where the lines were, though, and that’s why the smartest cattlemen got out their stockmen and their camp, went to the furthest point and mustered back in from there.

  None of this is to say that we didn’t enjoy all the argy-bargy that went with trying to work out which boundaries were where! I loved the thrill of the chase, of trying to get the most cattle, of outsmarting our neighbours. After all, we were out on musters for weeks on end, so it probably stands to reason that we needed a bit of excitement. Not that mustering cattle wasn’t exciting in itself, but the added challenge of manoeuvring around our neighbours and their boundaries certainly gave us something else to think about.

  There were a lot of tricks going on, that’s for sure, with everyone trying to get the cattle onto their own land. For example, if you had a cattle trough or tank somewhere close to the boundary, your neighbour would take the float off your cattle trough and empty out all the water from your tank so your cattle would have to go across to their place to find water. Then, of course, they could say that the cattle were on their land so they had every right to claim them. There were other ways to find cattle, too. Just after the wet season ended there would be a lot of old grass; if you burned that grass while the ground was still damp, new shoots would sprout up within three weeks. The cattle were then drawn to those little pockets of new country to graze.

  I remember one particular time on Oobagooma when our neighbour on Kimberley Downs brought in all these flash ringers from New South Wales and Queensland. Of course, he thought his ringers were better than our boys, a team of Aborigines. That year the Kimberley Downs mob got the jump on us and nabbed the cattle. We could see this clearly from the cattle tracks. That night they yarded them all together just on their side of the boundary, then all their flash ringers went back to the homestead area to camp, clearly feeling relaxed with the cattle all yarded up. We camped out on our side of the boundary, and our boys went in and did a swoop and took the lot out again. By daylight we were off through the scrub heading back with all our cattle.

  On Oobagooma I had to learn quickly how to manage feral cattle and what could happen if they got out of control. Out there on the boundaries we were mustering cattle that had never seen a human before, so you can imagine how they took to us when we turned up. We also picked up cattle that we’d previously brought in, taking the weaners off them and letting the cows go again. Those cows didn’t remember us fondly because we’d taken away their offspring, so they wouldn’t behave very well either. If the going got tough, though, we had to keep whatever cattle we found and do the best we could with them, and not worry about the ones we couldn’t get.

  Back then there was no such thing as portable yard panels – they came into being in the 1980s. There weren’t too many fences on Oobagooma at all, come to think of it. The fences on the whole place were the ones close around the homestead – there was a big horse paddock and then another paddock. So it wasn’t as if we could muster the cattle and then whack them into a yard to keep them in the one place. We needed something else to keep them together.

  One of our tricks, which a lot of people did back then, was to introduce older cattle (known as coaches) into the mob. This helped when mustering wild cattle, as the coaches, usually bullocks, were easier to run back into the mob than the younger cattle, and the younger animals would follow the old bullocks. McCorry and I would leave two or three of the Aboriginal boys with the mob, then we’d run out with the coaches and pick up the wild cattle and run them into the mob with those quiet cattle. We also had a lot of dogs: bull terriers, bitzer red heelers, blue heelers. We had seventeen that first time I went on the camp at Oobagooma but we never took the whole lot out mustering at once. About eight came with us at any one time: we might have two work on either side of the mob, so that would be four on the go around the cattle and four in reserve. If we got a really cantankerous beast that kept breaking out of the mob, we’d chuck a couple of dogs onto the animal and they would chew its ears a bit, then the beast would go straight back into the mob, we’d yell at the dogs, they’d let go and we’d be off again.

  At night-time we lit big fires and the Aboriginal boys would sing and ride around, taking it in turns to work the mob and stop them from wandering off. Those boys also took it in turns to keep watch throughout the night. I remember once we were in some hills right out the back on the Oobagooma boundary near Hawkstone. To block the cattle’s view and keep them quiet we fixed up a bit of a fence using the hessian we always carried with us. But there was no such thing as going to our swags at night and thinking that the cattle were safe; we still had to keep the fires going, because we only needed a dingo to howl or a kangaroo to thump off somewhere, or a mopoke or curlew to sing out, and the cattle would spook – then before we knew it we could lose the lot. Not that we ever lost a whole mob at once. We’d get the odd breakaway lot and the next day the boys went out to track the direction they went in, and then we’d all go after them.

  It wasn’t just cattle that went astray – we lost dogs too. I had a rude awakening on Oobagooma, about all sorts of things. I remember one time when a dog had wandered off; the Aboriginal boys and I wanted to go look for it but McCorry wouldn’t let us. He reckoned that if the dog had gone it was probably worn out or dehydrated, and he said we had to keep moving. That’s when I realised just how tough McCorry could be on all of us, because he wouldn’t let me go back for the dog. I was pretty upset about that – in the early days I would get upset over that sort of thing. In that environment there is no sentimentality about those things, that’s for sure.

  There were no roads to help us get those cattle home. We had to dig down into the banks of creeks to make a path for us to get across, and then we would swim the cattle across. Crossing the Robinson River, which ran past the homestead, was particularly dangerous. There were patches of quicksand in the Robinson – and, of course, you don’t know where they are until you’re already in trouble, because it’s not like you can see the quicksand from the riverbank. If that wasn’t bad enough, there were always big saltwater crocs in the Robinson too.

  After three weeks or so out mustering we would arrive back at the homestead. Once we were back we had to deal with what, speaking bluntly, I can only describe as a busted-arse wooden cattle yard – it was about as rough as that description suggests. These days most people do a four-way draft but that yard was so rudimentary it only allowed for a two-way draft: the cattle that were going to the meatworks and those that weren’t.

  The road train would be parked up ready to take away the cattle that were bound for the meatworks at Derby. We never held up those trucks – we needed them for the drafting process, so they could take those cattle straight out of the draft, which meant we didn’t have to hold them in a separate yard. It was a battle just to get a road train in there in those days, because of the condition of the roads. We used ‘Three Ls’ Transport, which was owned by old man Lucas and Newt Livingstone (two of the L’s); they had the only two road trains in the Kimberley back then. They’d park their single-deck truck – not even a double deck – at the yard and we would draft straight up the cattle race and into the truck. That way we never had to handle the cattle, which meant we didn’t earmark them with our Oobagooma mark. We still had to brand them, because they were cleanskins and we didn’t want anyone – especially the neighbours – to say they weren’t ours, so the boys would get a fire going and then climb onto the top of the crate and put the Oobagooma brand on the cattle. Then the cattle would be on their way. And soon the whole process would start again.

  Of course, before I went to the Kimberley I’d been under no illusions about this way of life. I knew it wouldn’t be easy or comfortable. But from those first days on Oobagooma, I learnt a lot ab
out how the whole cattle game worked and how those stations were run. McCorry was the best teacher I could have had, because he had seen and done everything. So Oobagooma was an education in a tough sort of way. We all had to make do with what we had to be able to survive it all and come out the other end in one piece.

  I realised early on that people who accumulated a lot of gear didn’t survive. The people who were buying big, flash trucks of their own and putting together large teams of stockmen they brought over from Queensland and New South Wales ended up with problems because they couldn’t hold a team of men together. And all the money and gear in the world couldn’t have solved that problem. We always heard of at least one stock camp where the blokes running them used to complain, ‘We can’t hold staff, we can’t get staff, we can’t get stockmen.’ Meanwhile, during my whole time in the Kimberley, we never had a problem with our teams, which were made up solely of Aboriginal or part-Aboriginal men. If those other managers had just treated the Aboriginal people right, they would have had more stockmen than they knew what to do with, because in reality the Aboriginal people wanted to be on the land – they didn’t want to be sitting around town. That’s what our teams used to tell us. It just seemed like we were the only ones who listened.

  There was always something to see, do or learn in those early days on Oobagooma. And, of course, there was McCorry. I initially thought I was only going to Oobagooma for a couple of weeks, but McCorry had other ideas. And I had a crush on him, although I wasn’t sure if it was the man or his connection to the land that I liked so much.