Occasionally Lurlyne, who still lived in Perth, would visit Snowy at the home and take him a packet of boiled lollies. Snowy would have to hide the sweets in the rafters for safekeeping, and when he was hungry he would ration out the lollies between himself and his mates, one at a time. Tragically, Lurlyne couldn’t take her son home as she had also remarried and her new husband needed a carer to look after him. Even though his mother’s visits to the home were few and far between, Dad said he was so grateful that she did come to see him in that terrible place.
Dad recalled one time when he’d had enough of being flogged by one of the priests, that the first chance he got he ran away and found his mother’s new house. Lurlyne helped him, keeping him hidden in the rafters. Before too long, though, a priest tracked him down. The priest promised Lurlyne faithfully that the Brothers would not punish her young son for running away from the home, and Lurlyne persuaded Snowy to come down from the rafters and return to the boys’ home.
The priests did not keep their word. It was winter and Snowy was put in a cold, grey, brick room far away from any other children, stripped naked by a priest then flogged repeatedly. It didn’t stop there: the priests then had two of the other boys throw my father under an icy-cold shower, where the floggings continued.
These priests flogged my father to the point that he lost all control of his bodily functions; urine and excrement would run down his legs. He would be terrified and humiliated; the tears flowed freely down his face, and his little body was covered in blood, cuts and welts. Dad told me that after these floggings he would again be thrown under an icy-cold shower then sent to bed without any food.
Dad said that this treatment was repeated many times, and he believed it was probably because he was strong enough to resist the sexual advances of one of the priests. Many years later, the names of the boys whose job it was to throw Snowy under the freezing-cold shower came up in sexual abuse cases against that very priest.
Snowy eventually ran away from the home again, and fortunately this time he wasn’t made to return to it. Even though he was still a young boy, he was taken under the wing of a prominent shearing contractor who had a lot of work throughout the north-west, including the Kimberley and Gascoyne regions of Western Australia.
During this time Snowy was taught the art of wool classing, which gave him a job and enabled him to have some form of independence. Some of the sheep properties Dad visited in the Kimberley with that shearing team were Blina, Ellendale, Calwynyardah and Paradise. Then they were million-acre sheep stations, but de-stocked of the sheep herds in the 1960s, they became cattle stations – stations that McCorry and I would later manage.
I had always believed that Dad had hit a brick wall somewhere at some time in his young life. Now that he had spoken of the abuse to me, and even named the priests involved, so much that had been mysterious in my father’s life now made sense. For one thing, Dad had never trusted the Catholic Church – or any other religious group, for that matter – and had hinted that it was safer to have my own children educated locally than to send them away to boarding school.
Listening to my father talk of his treatment by certain priests of the boys’ home made my blood boil – and I mean really boil. In my mind these priests had been nothing but paedophiles of the worst kind: using and abusing young innocent children who were entrusted to the care of the Catholic Church. What a mockery they had made of the church.
As my father’s daughter, I don’t intend to let this matter of the boys’ home rest easily. I plan to fully investigate it, and I wonder how much more of this gross violence and abuse was handed out to the young boys who had the misfortune of being placed in one of those hellholes. While it was very hard to hear these stories of my father’s childhood, I was glad he had told me – that he was able to let it out at last. I can’t imagine keeping a secret like that for so long, and I can’t imagine what he went through all those years.
CHAPTER 23
Old Dunnet
I love the way nature paints the seasonal changes in the Great Southern. Autumn blends the palette of yellows, browns and pindan reds together, while the cool whispering wind rustles the dry leaves as they crackle and crumble back into the ground. It’s nature’s way of telling us to get the fertiliser on the ground and be ready for the coming winter rains.
In May Michael ordered a truckload of fertiliser to be delivered every week to the farms, until we had the whole 4000 acres covered. He lives by the theory that ‘you’ll only get out of the land what you put into it’. So to pull my weight on the farm I would rise early, have breakfast with him, make a thermos of coffee and a round of corned-beef sandwiches; then, with the tractor and a fully loaded fertiliser spreader in tow, disappear to the paddock furthest from the homestead and begin to spread the fertiliser, only returning when I had an empty bin. Michael worried that I was spending too much time on the tractor, and some days I came home and fell from the tractor feeling bent and buggered – but I was happy, and I just loved the freedom of working outdoors.
While I was away spreading the fertiliser, Michael was still attending the local cattle sales each week, buying and trucking hundreds of head of cattle home to Forrest Downs. We were lucky to have Leisha, Nigel, Robby and Tara to come over and give us a helping hand when the new cattle were brought onto the farm. The mustering, drafting and weighing of cattle – which we did with the help of our agents, Orrie and Chats – hadn’t slowed down, and an average of 180 head of ‘fat’ or grain-fed cattle were still going out to the butchers every week.
In between the farm jobs I had decided to do one speaking engagement a month without payment, mainly because I believed that the funds raised at these events went to good causes, whether breast cancer research or domestic violence prevention or supporting underprivileged children. The cause could be one supported by women’s clubs or Rotary clubs, and these clubs also promoted and sold my books on these special occasions.
After a speaking engagement in Perth came Daffodil Day for breast cancer in the small country town of Nungarin, north of Merredin. Seeing that the speaking event was a midday luncheon, Michael and I had left Forrest Downs the day before and travelled via Katanning, Narrogin, Corrigin, Bruce Rock and Merredin; we saw with our own eyes how the farming country had been doing it tough due to the long and drawn-out drought in the area. I truly felt for those people and their families, as their parched land and wilting crops were badly in need of rain that showed no signs of coming in the near future. Only the most resilient folk survived in that country, wondering if they would have enough funds to do it all over again the next year.
It’s one thing to talk and write about our drought-affected country, but to be in the shoes of a hardworking farmer and their family, to experience the psychological and emotional stresses in those hard times, is indescribable. In some of the places I have visited for speaking engagements the people have been very, very down. Many members of the community were suffering from depression, and there had been suicides, which are often not reported because people who don’t live on the land can forget that those who do have feelings too. Those of us living in those areas knew what was going on, though, so I wrote something into my talks to let these folks know that they’re not alone, to tell them that you get hit in different ways with these difficult periods in your life but you can survive. I said to them, ‘Just look at me – I’ve pulled through it and now I’m happy. So don’t let it beat you, because you are alive – you’re not dead. You’re still got to have fight in you.’
Still, help is desperately needed in the bush. When I was in the Kimberley a travelling nurse and doctor visited the stations to check on the health of the Aboriginal people living there. I knew this was funded by the government, so I used to make them visit every cattle station I managed, every fortnight. And the medical people told me that the Aborigines on my stations were the healthiest in the country. As far as I was concerned, I was making the government do their job and look after the people.
The same thing should be done for the farmers now. A nurse and a psychologist, or someone similar, should be funded and given a vehicle so they can travel out to the farms. The people who need to open up and talk won’t necessarily go into town to get help and they certainly won’t walk into a room with a sign on the door saying Psychologist. Just providing them with someone to talk to would be a good place to start to help some of these people on the land who are really suffering.
I know that people in the cities care about this issue too. I’ve seen so much, giving my talks – people have come up and put their arms around me and hung onto me, some of them crying. So I know from personal experience that people do want to talk about this issue. It just has to be in a way that helps them preserve their pride and their privacy.
*
I was booked to give a talk in Bunbury; the event was a morning tea held at St Augustine’s Church in aid of Save the Children, and I was excited to do it because I believe that if I hadn’t been living on the land and involved with the pastoral industry, I would somehow have been working with underprivileged children.
Tuesday 12 October 2010 came around, and after pushing ourselves on the farm with feeding and tending the feedlot cattle, Michael drove with me to Bunbury. As we drove I wondered if St Augustine’s Church would collapse on top of me – I see myself as a ‘Bush Baptist’, more spiritual than religious. We drove around Bunbury and found the church; at the sight of the overflowing car park and the street just chock-a-block with parked vehicles, I began to panic and asked Michael to drive around the block for a minute while I gathered myself.
As we did this he assured me, ‘You can do it – look at them as friends and tell them your story.’ With that, he handed me back my confidence, so away we went – only to find there was no room left anywhere for us to park! Michael let me out of the car, and I was immediately met at the door by the organiser, Joyce Taylor, who was obviously looking out for me and promptly organised for Michael to park the vehicle only metres from the front door.
We soon discovered that the venue was packed to the rafters and around the edges with guests. As Michael and I walked into the room I whispered to one of the organisers, ‘My goodness, how many people do you have in here?’
She answered that there were approximately 200, if not a few more. Seeing all those good people turn out to help raise funds for a great cause made me feel comfortable as I began to speak.
Afterwards, while I signed my books and greeted the many people who had read them, Michael was put ‘on the block’ by a couple of old-timers from the surrounding farming district. One was saying, ‘Make sure you look after that girl’, and another was telling him, ‘You’re lucky to have her – take good care of her.’ Michael said to me later, ‘I hope they realise I’m not Terry.’ I assured my dear husband that his loving attitude towards me would show them that he was certainly not Terry.
Just as Michael and I were about to get into our black and dusty LandCruiser, which was parked in a spot normally reserved for hearses, I jokingly suggested that we check in the back just in case a corpse had ended up in there by mistake!
*
It was mid-afternoon on a Wednesday in April 2011 when Old Ian delivered a truckload of forty head of young cattle from his Walpole farm to our stockyards on Forrest Downs. Old Ian, a big man with a touch of a stutter, and Michael were mates, and every time they met they took the mickey out of each other. Both were burnt brown from working outside in the roasting sun; their clothes were coated in yard dust and their big feet adorned in worn or ill-fitting stockyard boots covered by a spattering of wet cattle dung. Michael wore his battered Akubra like a crown, but half the brim was gone so it only partially shaded his face from the midday sun. They wouldn’t have looked out of place in Ned Kelly’s gang, if they’d been around at the time!
Ian fumbled his way down from the driver’s side of his cattle truck. On this particular day he looked as if his best days were far behind him: he was covered in bruises and battered from the cattle he’d been delivering, as it’s a pretty physical process to draft and load cattle into a truck as Ian had to do by himself.
He staggered towards the rear of his truck and opened the back door of the cattle crate to let the animals walk down the solid timbered cattle race and into our stockyard, their new home. Then the old fellow turned and casually asked Michael, ‘Do you have you any more f—ing bulls for sale?’ adding, ‘That f—ing old Dunnet has smashed up my f—ing good sire that I previously had, and now I’m a bull short.’ Old Dunnet was a bull Ian had bought from us the previous year and named after Michael.
Michael assured him that he could help him out with another bull: we had thirty bulls for sale in the bull paddock and they were all raring to go. Michael went on, ‘I suppose you’ll expect a f—ing discount on the next one, then?’ He thought for a moment and added, ‘You won’t need another f—ing bull if the last one I sold you has got that much spirit – he’ll do the f—ing job for you. In fact, he’ll do the f—ing lot – your heifers and your cows too.’
After the bull discussion Ian and Michael took to complimenting each other on their waistlines, each saying how well the other looked. Before Ian left, Michael told him that we would muster a couple of good Angus bulls into the stockyards for him to look at on his next trip up from Walpole.
After Old Ian got in his cattle truck and drove away, Michael and I just cracked up laughing. Although when I had stopped laughing I thought, Bloody hell, that bull we sold him must have had plenty of spirit to have flogged his other good sire. I wasn’t sure whether we should puff up our chests about that or not!
CHAPTER 24
A honeymoon of sorts
That same week I received a phone call from Leisha as she travelled back from the Margaret River Hospital with Nigel and the boys. It was the boys’ school holidays and they had been taking a break, trying out their new caravan at Hamelin Bay, a very beautiful spot on the south coast, just north of Augusta. Nigel and the boys are all keen fishermen, and they’d had word that the fish were running; as the bay had reasonably calm waters, it seemed an ideal spot for Brock and Cohen to fish beside their stepdad.
Leisha planned on walking and wriggling her toes in the beautiful white sands of the beach, as well as reading the latest gossip magazines while relaxing under the shade of a huge, ancient ‘peppy’ tree. Many beautiful shade trees were dotted across the green lawns, and throughout the little caravan park where they were staying. It was an ideal spot to have a honeymoon of sorts, as well as a safe place for the boys to play – but Leisha and Nigel realised that any baby-making had to wait until they returned back home!
Leisha told me that early that morning Nigel had risen and, with the rest of the family still sleeping quietly, gathered his fishing gear and trotted off to join the many other seasonal fishermen who were already spread out, fishing for salmon along the beach. And he did well, bagging two salmon in no time. Then, while cutting up bait to set his line for the third time, Nigel cut deeply into his thumb with his sharp fishing knife. His thumb was left dangling by a thread. Shocked, with his blood spurting out in all directions, Nigel blacked out. Yes, he passed out cold without any warning, and lay sprawled on the sand like a bloody exhausted sea eagle.
Luckily, fishermen tend to keep an eye out for each other while fishing our sometimes-treacherous southern coastline, and several of them noticed that Nigel was flat out on the sand and not moving. Nigel woke to three burly fishermen peering down at him. One had been kind enough to cover him with his fishing jacket to help prevent him from going into shock. Another had used his scarf as a tourniquet to stem the blood flow. They gathered Nigel’s fishing gear together and helped him to his feet.
Between the three fishermen, Nigel was escorted back to Leisha and their caravan in the park, and she was understandably upset to see her husband covered in blood. She got Nigel and the boys in the car and drove to Margaret River Hospital to have his thumb stitched back on. Now that everything was o
kay again, Leisha could hardly stop herself from laughing, telling me, ‘I keep teasing Nigel for fainting at the sight of his own blood, Mum.’ She hoped that he’d be able to handle it when the time came for her to give birth to their baby, should they become pregnant.
Sure enough, four weeks later we had the good news that Leisha and Nigel were expecting their first child together. They were both thrilled, and the boys were excited to think they were going to have a baby brother or sister. I did worry that Leisha would suffer morning sickness, as she had done in the past. While her first two months were rough, her health and general fitness were extremely good, and her pregnancy progressed well.
However, at the six-monthly check-up on the progress of her unborn baby, the doctors found that Leisha had a rather large melanoma in the centre of her back – it was a dark mole that had suddenly begun to grow rapidly and turned malignant. Leisha’s gynaecologist in Dunsborough sent her straight-away to the cancer clinic in Busselton for assessment, where it was decided that it was not safe to operate at this late stage of her pregnancy, so the cancer would be removed soon after she gave birth. It wasn’t until three days after her appointment at the cancer clinic that Leisha called to break the terrible news.
‘Mum,’ my girl said, ‘I need to talk to you, but please don’t panic.’
Of course, I immediately became tense – my heart rate jumped up a cog – but I tried to hide my concern by saying quite calmly, ‘What’s wrong, love?’ Then I waited for the worst. And Leisha went on to explain how the mole had become annoying and very itchy, which is why she’d had it looked at. There actually wasn’t only the one mole but a cluster of them. I was terribly worried for my girl but I also knew how strong she was.
Love on Forrest Downs Page 21
