Love on Forrest Downs

by Sheryl McCorry

  However, Michael found that Orrie, our cattle-buying agent, had been able to purchase another seventy head of cattle at the right price, so that night I returned with Michael to give him a hand loading them. Arriving back at Forrest Downs at midnight, we were shocked to see overhead power lines clashing together in the high breeze, sending sparks onto the dry, brittle grass below. How the farm had not gone up in flames was beyond me.

  Frightened and afraid for our farm animals, we also feared for our neighbours’ sheep properties. Michael hurriedly reversed the truckload of cattle to the ramp so I could start unloading them, then he jumped on a tractor with a huge bucket on the front and immediately got to clearing away all the dead grass and debris from around the power poles.

  Eventually, in the early hours of the morning, with the cattle unloaded into the homestead yards and the dry grass cleared away, we made it to bed, dog-tired, hoping that the property would be safe for the remainder of the night. In the morning we contacted the appropriate authorities and, after much prompting, they arrived at Forrest Downs and fixed the problem.

  *

  It was a Saturday morning. Leisha was driving the LandCruiser, and my grandsons had came along for the ride to Manjimup to collect cattle drench and inoculations before the store closed. Meanwhile Robby and Tara were driving from the Shiralee to help with the cattle work, and Nigel would be arriving late that afternoon to spend some time with Leisha.

  Upon arriving home we found that Michael had already put a mob of 130 head through the yards for treatment, and Robby and Tara had arrived. You couldn’t miss Tara, as she was a healthy six months pregnant. There was no way her growing baby would allow her to squeeze through the yard panels or over the top rail if she needed to escape an angry beast in a hurry, but there were still things she could do to help with the cattle work. Tara was happy not to be left out just because she was pregnant, and we kept an eye out for her at all times. We all pulled together and soon we were moving cattle in and out of paddocks, pens and cattle yards, inoculating and recording weights and numbers, and by dusk Michael worked out that we had handled over 700 head of cattle. And I thanked God that with the beautiful cerise-pink and blue of the sunset came a much cooler evening.

  That night Michael and I had all the family together at the farm. The evening couldn’t have been much better. With the thick, heavy yard dust showered off, country-and-western music playing loudly and beers passed around, the men took it in turns to barbecue huge steaks and prawns while Leisha, Tara and I tossed together a salad and made garlic bread. The day before I had found the time to whip up a large pavlova that also came in handy, topped with thick fresh cream and assorted tangy berries drizzled with syrup. Our night together finished on a high – ‘A sugar high at that,’ Leisha informed me as my boisterous young grandsons bounced off the walls, not wanting to go to bed.

  What more could a mother want, I thought, than all her children together and happy? I felt blessed.

  That night, while we were all sleeping, our cattle rushed out from the large feedlot – foxes probably spooked them again. The next day was also stinking hot; no sane person would choose to move cattle on such a day, but we had no choice if we were to save them from dehydration. We had to find the cattle and gently walk them back to water.

  It was as hot as only hell could be, I thought, sitting astride my motorbike, watching the cattle mosey along picking at the odd tuft of barley that was still standing. My face under my new Akubra red from the heat, my oversized shirt wringing wet with perspiration, the only relief came when a light breeze cooled my body through the wet shirt. At that moment I briefly perked up and felt much better about the situation.

  Michael and I strove to keep a positive outlook about the farm, but the incredible heat in January didn’t help. The lawns surrounding the homestead had become so brittle from the intense dry heat that they crackled and crumbled when walked on. Even with a good water supply from the dam, the lawn eventually died.

  One day Michael and I woke early to see the sky heavy with cloud. We carted eight road-train loads of hay to the shed and Michael stacked it neatly. The following day he went to the Mount Barker cattle sales while I remained at Forrest Downs to start pumps and check cattle, and to catch up with some odd jobs around the house.

  My old aches and pains had surfaced again and now grew worse – my knees, elbows, wrists and shoulders hurt – and then I was hit by squeezing chest pains that went into the right side of my neck. I felt as though I’d been hit in the chest by a Mack truck. Gradually the pain eased, but I told myself that I would see a doctor when I had the time.

  Michael too suffers from chronic pain. Some years ago, down on his family’s Scott River property on the south coast, he was mustering cattle alone on horseback when he had a run-in with a rogue bull. He was trying to push the beast towards a mob of cattle grazing on the plain when suddenly the bull swung around and charged towards him, taking out the stockhorse from under Michael. The beast wasn’t satisfied with that: as Michael tried in vain to drag himself from underneath the stockhorse and out of the saddle the bull charged him again.

  Michael was in such severe pain that he forgot about the bull and attempted to stand up. The enraged animal raked the ground with its front hooves, throwing sand high into the sky, then charged at Michael, knocking him to the ground again. The beast then rolled him into the ground, in the process smashing two vertebrae in his lower back. For many years since Michael has suffered constant lower-back pain – and some days are worse than others. Every six to eight weeks we travel to Albany so Michael can be given two injections, one on either side of his damaged vertebrae, to help reduce the pain. Sometimes he gets relief from this treatment, other times not.

  You’re probably wondering, ‘Why don’t you get a hired hand on the farm?’ It’s because Michael and I are both bull-headed, and we still think we are in our forties, not our early sixties. We still believe we are very capable of doing what makes us happy, even with the gripping pain that one or the other of us suffers at times. Moreover, no one we hired would ever work the property as hard as we do.

  CHAPTER 14

  Boss Hog

  Michael’s mate Neil, known as ‘Boss Hog’, was a man who liked to have his fingers in many different pies. His newly acquired farm, Condowie, was not too distant from Forrest Downs, and he was interested in having a go at getting into the sheep industry.

  Now, Boss Hog’s not a bad sort of fellow; he walks with a bit of a limp as a result of contracting polio as a child, but has never let his disability get between him and his way of making a dollar or three, or stop him moving forward with new projects and schemes – and now sheep farming was one of them.

  One day while Boss Hog was visiting Forrest Downs, he asked Michael to give him a hand with the drenching of recently arrived sheep. After much consideration Michael reluctantly agreed to help him out; he also thought he might be able to pick up some sheep management experience. Due to the depressed cattle prices at the time, Michael had been toying with the idea of dabbling in the sheep industry, but with his limited – and not all great – experiences with sheep in his youth, he was cautious.

  It was a Saturday and hot as Hades when Michael arrived at Condowie dressed in his cattle-farming attire. While Boss Hog took refuge from the heat under the lean-to off the shearing shed, Michael donned the drenching backpack and was ready to start on the sheep; after all, the sheep-drenching advertisements on local television made it look so simple and hassle-free. Ready for business, Michael entered the sheep race and immediately grabbed a sheep in a headlock, lifting its forequarters off the ground and trying to shove a drench gun down the uncooperative animal’s throat while telling it to ‘open up – this drench will do you the world of good’.

  After several attempts Michael bellowed, ‘It won’t open its mouth!’

  Boss Hog’s sidekick, Griff, yelled, ‘Eh, Mick, try using the existing hole instead of making a new one in the side of its head.’ All the while Bo
ss Hog offered advice from the shade of the shearing-shed veranda.

  Eventually Michael got the hang of drenching sheep and soon the job was completed, with no casualties to sheep or men. However, since that experience he has never shown any inclination to go into the sheep industry, despite plenty of encouragement from his helpful sheep-farming neighbour.

  *

  One morning in January we woke to discover our weaner cattle breaking free from the homestead yard, which was about all Michael needed: ‘dollars on the hoof’ floating about the countryside. We purposely held these cattle behind strong steel yard panels to prevent breakouts while they settled down and realised that they no longer had their mothers’ udders full of rich milk to suckle on. Clearly, though, something had happened to make them kick through the panels.

  Michael was ropeable. ‘Calm down,’ I urged. I couldn’t blame him for getting upset but it wouldn’t help matters. ‘At least the weaners are all earmarked.’ As earmarks indicate ownership of cattle, I hoped this would console Michael somewhat as he surveyed the damage to the yard panels and railway-iron posts, which had been forced over on an angle – enough of an angle for the weaners to escape.

  I had a bit of a laugh to myself thinking back to the 1960s, when I was at the Hawk Stone camp on Oobagooma Station. I was remembering Old Yardie, our horse tailor (whose job was to keep a watch on the stockhorses), and Malki, a stockman. One day old McCorry had instructed Yardie to kill and bone out a beast for the stock camp, as we were in need of meat. I rode up to Yardie and Malki as they were butchering the dead animal on the ground. Naturally I looked to see what mark the animal carried in its right ear, but to my horror the ear was gone.

  ‘Yardie,’ I gasped, ‘where’s that bullika’s [bullock’s] ear?’

  Without lifting his head as he skinned the hide away from the flesh, Old Yardie said quite calmly, ‘Up its arsehole, missus,’ as if I should have known.

  ‘What?’ I studied the beast closely, wondering whether or not it was true.

  That evening as we sat around the campfire I questioned McCorry myself, and of course he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. But over time I learnt that the old saying ‘To eat your own beef, you must eat your neighbours’ came about because they were all doing just that. Of course those days, when the outback could have easily been mistaken for the Wild West, are long gone.

  At Forrest Downs, on a motorbike rather than horseback (as in those old days at Oobagooma), I helped Michael track down a big mob of cattle on the Wandoora Road, another smaller mob in the laneway near the bull paddock, and others who had made their way to the cow paddock. I guess I couldn’t blame them for escaping at night, as the foxes had continued to haunt the homestead and their bloodcurdling cries would frighten the hell out of any person – or cow – in the dark of the night. Even our dogs barked all bloody night long. I knew the time had come for another fox hunt on the farm, as a fox would have no qualms about attacking sick animals.

  *

  My elderly parents were starting to niggle at each other, so they decided to travel down to spend a week with Michael and me on the farm. It amazed me that Dad was still capable of driving such long distances – it was at least 700 kilometres from Northampton to Forrest Downs – although he did feel tired in the days afterwards. Mum didn’t seem to show much sympathy for his tiredness – she just wanted the wheels to keep turning.

  Mum can’t drive, and at this stage in her life it’s best she doesn’t attempt to. Dad tells a story about how, while we were living at Fresh Water Rapid Creek in the 1950s, he gave Mum a driving lesson in his newly acquired Buick. With Dad’s truck-driving work taking him far away from the family, he thought that if there was ever an emergency with one of us children, Mum should be able to drive for help. Back then my mother and grandmother relied on their husbands to do the driving.

  Mum said she tucked me into the back seat of the Buick, excited to start her first lesson. Dad pointed out the clutch, brake and accelerator, and told her to place her foot gently on the brake pedal if she was unsure of anything. Then Mum started the car, travelling slowly at first down the rutted track that wound its way along Fresh Water Rapid Creek. As the corrugations became higher – so high I believed that kangaroos were resting in the shade of them – Mum’s foot became heavier. So much heavier, in fact, that Dad was convinced she had lead in her boots.

  He was too terrified to yell at her to lift her lead foot, so he hung on to the handgrip for dear life while he listened to the Buick’s tyres churning on the gravel road, sending pebbles flying up against the duco of his new vehicle. Ahead he spotted the only bridge for miles around, which crossed Fresh Water Rapid Creek, and with a coaxing voice asked Mum if she would slow down before hitting it. And she did slow down, thank God, but she swiped the car’s side fender on the only solid post left standing in the whole district.

  Frightened, Mum threw her arms in the air. Dad grabbed hold of the steering wheel with his right hand and steadied the Buick across the bridge, again asking Mum nicely to put her foot down firmly on the brake pedal until the car stopped dead. Many words and explanations followed.

  Dad says this was the one and only driving lesson he was ever game enough to give Mum, but Mum’s excuse was that the corrugations were so terribly rough when she slowed down that the Buick wobbled all over the road. Fair enough, I thought – that was sixty-three years ago and the roads were a lot worse then.

  CHAPTER 15

  Light and dark

  In between the cattle work on the farms I found time to do my routine breast check for any unusual lumps and in late 2009 I had been shocked to find I had a lump the size of a marble in my left breast. There were no tears, just anger that I was unlucky enough to have another lump. Quite frankly, I didn’t want to go through the treatment for breast cancer again – I really didn’t have the time for it. I was extremely happy living with and working beside Michael, and we had so much work to do on the farm.

  I had done the right thing – as I encourage others to do in my talks – and seen my local doctor, who referred me to St John of God Hospital in Bunbury to have a mammogram and ultrasound, followed by a needle biopsy. Waiting for the results of these tests had me in a cold sweat. When they came through I could have jumped up and kissed the doctor on the cheek – my lump was ‘nothing of significance’, and I was allowed to return home to the farm.

  When I passed on this good news to Michael and my children, the massive relief that came over their faces made me aware of how much cancer affects not only the patient but all the people closest to that person.

  By then it was February 2010 and still so damn hot, but the heat didn’t stop us from weaning cattle and buying in others for the feedlot. Farming is our livelihood and also a way of life, although there are days when we wish that we could step off the treadmill and simply take a break from it all. There are times when our aches and pains become so unbearable that our bodies feel tired and burnt out and we wonder if we can work another day. But Michael and I remind each other that ‘life wasn’t meant to be easy’ – and intense farming certainly is not. And we step out as smartly as we can while trying to keep those few feet ahead of our bank manager.

  With the shocking heat came cloud cover that built for days until the massive cumulonimbus clouds hovering above finally exploded across the homestead and feedlot, releasing huge forks of lightning followed by enormous claps of thunder that rumbled and crumbled their way into the background.

  My tiny chihuahuas, Bling and Miss, and Michael’s Jack Russell, Jess, were trembling with fear; all three clawed their way up my legs and onto my lap, obviously thinking it would be safer there. Bolts of lightning slashed through the muggy atmosphere and the storm brought strong, gusty winds that had the back veranda shuddering. Then heavy rain and large hailstones pelted the corrugated-iron roof, drowning out all other noise.

  Loving it and hating it at the same time, I wondered how long the storm would last. I watched the rivers of water break through
the ceiling, blowing lights and exploding power sockets. Then the mains power blacked out and, of course, the telephones went out in sympathy, as they did with every damn shower of rain. Within half an hour tree branches lay broken and scattered about, while the icy balls of hail quickly melted on the ground. Michael cursed and blamed the rain for ‘buggering up [his] dry summer feed’.

  At that time we were buying cattle for the farm, spelling cattle on the farm and drafting out sick cattle that found it difficult to settle in the feedlot. Some cattle that were suffering from stress-related diseases and others from grain poisoning just simply blew up and keeled over, much to our distress.

  At sunrise each morning I rode my motorbike slowly among the cattle, singing or talking to them (I have a shocking singing voice but for some reason it calms the cattle) as I looked out for any signs of ill health, such as a snotty nose or joint soreness, or a beast that looked the way I felt at times: just plain lethargic. I found that the sooner we drafted such a beast out from the mob and moved it along gently into a nearby ‘hospital’ paddock, the better, especially for these cattle with weaker constitutions. And they did pick up – which was just as well, as we couldn’t afford to lose them.

  Michael had been buying cattle from both Boyanup and the Mount Barker cattle sales, and then word got around that we would buy direct from the cattlemen themselves. This was a better option for us. Our buying agent weighed the cattle and we paid whatever the market rate per kilo of beef was at the time, direct to the cattle farmer.

  Buying cattle this way meant an enormous reduction in the number of stress-related problems we saw in the animals. These cattle were simply mustered and drafted once, then weighed and trucked to Forrest Downs, where they immediately went into a ‘spell paddock’ for three to four weeks before being handled again. By contrast, cattle purchased through the saleyards are mustered, drafted, sold, moved again, and then trucked to the new owner’s paddocks or to the abattoir. I personally believe the stress factor starts in the saleyards, even with their preventive measures in place. Sometimes it can’t be helped.