Outback Heroines

by Sue Williams

  She started work breaking in her new camels, talking to them quietly as she led them around a paddock, and trying to ease a saddle on their backs. For such an obviously tough and competent woman of the land, Noel was impressed by her style. ‘She mightn’t look it, but she’s a real softie inside,’ he says. ‘She cares a lot about her animals and treats them very well, so they respond to her well. She’d never knock an animal around. The animal always comes first with her, and the person second. That’s why she’s so successful with camels.’

  The next year Di went on another camel trek, but this one proved far less successful. It was a huge three-month trip down the Strzelecki Track, through Renmark and Broken Hill to Bordertown in South Australia – and back again – but was led by someone Di found ill-suited to undertaking such an ambitious venture, and she didn’t like the way he treated his camels, either. The two other participants on the trek felt much the same, and dropped out early on. By the time she arrived back home, she and Cedric agreed that if she was going to continue camel-trekking, she should buy more camels of her own, and lead treks herself.

  Overnight, the cattle property started looking more like a camel farm. Camels were brought in from all over the country for Di to break in and train and, at one stage, she had 70. She and Cedric devised their own method of working the animals. Since they had no big, heavy, tame camel to lead the rest, Cedric would lead them on his biggest horse with the camels on halters behind. As soon as one was broken in, it would be put behind the others to calm them and keep them quiet. Little by little, Di managed to produce a great mob of trained camels who were as well behaved around people as they were with each other.

  Feeling confident, she started taking bookings for her first big self-led trek the next year, 1987, a three-month hike across to Noccundra, 140 kilometres west of Thargomindah, and on to Bordertown. In an inspired idea for attracting tourists, she also committed to running her own camel races at Balara around a specially made quarter-mile circular track. For the less daring, there were simple rides, and a chance to get up close and personal with the animals.

  It was then that the unthinkable happened. Di and Cedric’s beautiful second daughter, Jan, who’d just become engaged before her 21st birthday, was killed in a car crash with a truck. Neither driver was at fault; it was just an accident, pure and simple. That, somehow, made it even harder to bear.

  * * *

  As soon as Di spied the cattle grid on the bridge ahead, she knew she’d hit trouble. She was just before the 55 000-square-kilometre Glengyle Station, outside Boulia in remote Central West Queensland, and there was no way on except over the bridge. But the bars on the grid were spaced a good 18 centimetres apart and she knew her camels could never safely walk over. If one of their feet slipped down between the bars, she’d need a truck to haul them out, and if two feet went down, she wouldn’t have a hope in hell of getting them free. She’d be left with no option but to shoot her camel.

  She looked around wildly, wondering how she’d be able to get across the grid. She’d come too far to think of turning back now. So she tied up her camels and walked on over herself, towards the station. The staff working there were shocked to see a lone woman appear as if from nowhere but, once she explained the problem, were happy to help. She asked if they had any old sheets of corrugated iron she could use.

  They found some for her at the dump, and helped her haul them back to the bridge. Once there, she laid them carefully over the grid, then asked the station cook to stand at one side of the bridge and yell at the camels to make them stay over on the narrow edge of the bridge where the grid didn’t reach.

  Di then roped the camels close together and urged her trusted lead camel, Noor, to cross the metal sheets, and shouted at the others to follow. Walkon went forward and Red Paw thankfully followed. At one point, he tried to shy away but was pushed forward by the one behind, Tigerlily. At the last minute, however, Tigerlily tried to jump over the sheets and, in the middle of her enormous leap, swung out wide from the row. Happily, the line held, and she swung back to clatter across along with the others.

  Di gave an enormous sigh of relief. ‘People said afterwards they didn’t know how we could have got over!’ she says. ‘The people from the station said if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes, they would never have believed it.’

  * * *

  Coominya, Queensland, 1987

  Numb with pain after Jan’s death, the family dealt with the funeral as best they could, and then buried her at one of the property’s most elevated points, to make sure she’d still be close to home. But it was hard not to give in completely to the grief. ‘That nearly finished us,’ says Di. ‘The only thing that kept us going, that got us through that time, really, was the camels. We had so many venues booked up, and so many bookings taken, we couldn’t not do them. So we had to get out and get on with it, and then that first day would go, and the second day. And all of a sudden, a year would be gone, then two. It was very, very hard, but the camels kept us busy.’

  Word of mouth was by now spreading about Di’s treks, and they were becoming more and more popular all the time. She was dubbed the ‘Camel Lady’, and her fame reached far and wide. Tourists from all over Australia, and from Europe and the US, began visiting her Bos Camel Farm, and she tailored desert treks for the hardiest of Outback customers to the most unlikely, including a stylish young Frenchwoman who owned an upmarket boutique in Paris and wanted to get Outback and dirty in the bush for a while, and a 67-year-old New Zealand woman, looking for more excitement than city life could offer.

  Some treks lasted just a few days; others lasted up to three months through the roughest of desert country. Participants generally loved exactly what Di had been so passionate about from the start: being able to ride for kilometres every day through vast, open country, eating dinners around a campfire, sleeping in swags beneath the stars and often seeing no one else for days.

  When they did come across other travellers, Di would often use the opportunity to give them letters to post to Cedric, or to ask for them to phone him for her. Sydney maintenance worker Bruce Cook was on a trip through the Outback with his mates when Di emerged out of the desert on her camel along with three other riders. She asked him to pass on a message to her husband: we’ve run out of garlic.

  ‘It was all so strange, we thought that must be a coded message and she was really telling him she’d run out of bullets or something, and she just didn’t want to frighten us by saying so,’ says Bruce. ‘But it turned out to be exactly what she’d said: she’d run out of garlic! The encounter captured our imagination so much that we later contacted her and asked if we could go on a trek with her the next year. We loved it and went on many more over the next years.’

  The treks were rarely without incident. One time, the camels began to get terribly agitated, for no apparent reason, jumping around and eventually bucking one rider off. Later, the group came across ringers rounding up cattle, which the camels had evidently heard from 3 kilometres away. Another time, everyone had been sitting for hours on the camels walking slowly ahead, all the riders and the camels half-asleep with the motion, when one of the camels suddenly farted.

  ‘It startled all of us, and the camels, and they started running,’ says Bruce. ‘One bloke had his foot up on top of the saddle, and he went straight off the back. Someone else caught his foot in a stirrup, and the camel’s back legs kept hitting him.’

  Bruce’s friend, Sydney caryard worker Gary Ward, also came to love their trips out with Di. ‘The first time I met her, I saw this little woman in jeans, with a huge bowie knife hanging off her belt, and I thought, Heavens above! What are we in for?’ he recalls. ‘I just knew you couldn’t mess with her!

  ‘And then on her trips, you just never knew what’d happen next. One time, one of the camels bolted and she went off to look for him. Night fell and she never came back. She walked all night and finally slept in a ditch, and then carried on walking. Nothing ever fazes her. If anyth
ing goes wrong, she simply finds a way to get around it. She never gives up, she never panics and I’ve never even heard her swear. She’s amazing! Meeting her changed my life.’

  Yet the treks weren’t without their privations. Di never much liked cooking and her meals became legendary. One night you’d have chilli con carne, the next pasta with sardines, the next the chilli con carne, the next the pasta. ‘If you didn’t like either of those dishes, you’d get awful skinny,’ says Bruce. Lunch would invariably be German sausage, bread, cheese and jam, which was one day washed down with coffee made with bore water so foul, one participant wondered if he’d survive the day. Breakfast would be muesli Di mixed herself. ‘And that was powerful stuff,’ Bruce reminisces. ‘Usually you’d be travelling and get a bit constipated but as soon as that muesli kicked in, you’d leap up for the shovel with all the other guys telling you to hurry up . . .’ But no one needed to worry about getting sick or injured on a trek. When one man asked if she carried a good first aid kit, Cedric replied, quick as a flash, ‘Don’t worry, if you get too badly hurt, Di has a gun.’

  The races were equally eventful, with riders often having to bid for a mount to raise more money for charity. Some, having had a fair bit to drink, bid generously and then ended up having to race, much to their consternation. A couple of the more enterprising males insisted their wives take the reins in their place. ‘Whoever was racing just hung on for all they were worth,’ says Bruce. ‘Many of them were out of rhythm from the start to the finish, all the way, which can be painful.’ Di, always the first to don fancy dress as either an Arabian princess or a belly dancer, would always race too, often win easily, then run back over to ask who wanted a cup of tea. ‘She was always up for anything, and we even took her abseiling and kayaking,’ says Gary. ‘But in those races, it was amazing no one got seriously hurt or killed sometimes!’

  Di Zischke (right) competing in a camel race. (Photo by Lyle Radford)

  Yet the triumphs continued to come thick and fast. In 1988, Australia’s bicentennial year, Di competed with her son, Jesse, in the longest camel race in the world, the Great Australian Camel Race, a 3236-kilometre, 84-day race from Uluru, or Ayers Rock as it was then known, to the east coast of Australia, ending on the Gold Coast. It was the idea of Australian millionaire Arthur Earle, who wanted to highlight the role of camels in the development of Australia, and was run like a car rally over six legs and designed both to be a spectacle of endurance and daring and to raise funds for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. It started with people from 11 countries – including one team from the elite Australian Special Air Service Regiment – mounted on a total of 68 camels. Only 38 finished. Naturally, Di was among them.

  ‘She didn’t win, but in my opinion, she should have been declared the winner,’ says Noel Fullerton. ‘A lot of the camels were really knocked about by the race, and injured as a result. But her camels finished as good at the end as they were at the beginning. That’s all credit to her.’

  Six years later, Di finally took out the prized Camel Cup at the Alice Springs races. By then, her camels were in huge demand and there wasn’t anything she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do with them. One time, she flew her racing team over to New Zealand to compete in 100 races over 10 days at the Royal Easter Show in Auckland. Another time, she rode from Quilpie to Boulia with a doctor’s wife to raise money for a cancer charity. Vehicles stopped whenever they were near a road and handed them donations. They ended up raising $74 000.

  The mines up north asked her to organise races for entertainment, and she did, often dressed in Arabian Nights costume. Charity groups regularly asked her to bring camels to functions – including, particularly memorably, one in the ballroom of the Brisbane Sheraton. ‘We put the camel in a lift and brought it out to walk between the tables, and no one could believe it!’ says Di. ‘But once a camel’s been broken in properly and without aggression, there’s nothing they won’t do for you.’

  Yet having always been fascinated by the tragic Burke and Wills expedition through inland Australia, which was undertaken with a group of camels, Di still wanted to take the same journey by herself, on camelback, in their footsteps, to see exactly what they’d faced.

  At first, everything seemed against her. She’d wanted to do the trip in the year 2000, but it was too wet, so she had to put it off for a year. People put up hurdles as well. The ranger in charge of one large wilderness park at the start of her trek refused to give her a permit to travel through solo, adamant that a lone woman couldn’t possibly succeed in such a venture. Unable to sway the ranger, Di eventually reluctantly recruited Cedric, their mate Gary and another friend, to meet up with her for just that short section of her trek each night in their 4WD, so she’d still be doing everything alone. Potential sponsors also felt it was so unlikely to succeed, they weren’t interested. Even Gary worried. A camel could easily be startled and bolt, or fall into a hole and roll over on top of her. ‘She’s very resilient but when you think of all the things that could go wrong, you realised you might never see her again,’ he says.

  But the doubters only made Di even more determined to go. ‘I didn’t want to tell many people what I was going to do as I didn’t really know if I would make it and I didn’t need more people telling me there’s no way I could,’ she says. ‘I just wanted to prove that camels could do that trip, from the Dig Tree to the Gulf, if the people with them knew what they were doing.’

  * * *

  Friday, 7 September 2001 was the last day of the expedition. Di was hoping to reach the Dig Tree before nightfall but the ground had become a tangle of sharp, jagged rocks along the Cooper Creek.

  She dismounted from Noor and tried leading the camels along, but it was tough going. The intrepid little party of five was just inching along, choosing where to place each foot and each hoof. Sometimes, they’d slip on the surface of the bigger rocks; sometimes the rocks would roll under their weight and they’d stumble and quickly have to adjust to stay upright.

  ‘I looked back at one point and saw the camels stretched out with legs in different directions on different rocks,’ says Di. ‘It was terrible. After such a long trek, no animal should have to be doing this. We’d faced so much together – mud, snakes like the deadly taipans, ironwood trees that are poisonous for camels, thirst, the kind of heat that’d allow me to make tea from the water in my water bottle, the sun beating down on us day after day, even crocodiles. But now, at last, on this ground of jumbled rocks, cracks and hollows, with low branches that hit us as we bent down to pass, and a storm rumbling, I was almost despairing. We didn’t have far to go, but progress was painfully slow.’

  Di knew she couldn’t afford to stray far from the creek itself, as to follow another path by mistake could get them completely lost. Night was beginning to fall, however, as they climbed each rocky ridge to look for better going underfoot, and then descended back to the treacherous rocks below.

  A couple of times they had to cross water, and sank in the mud, having to pull themselves back out. Sometimes they were able to spot feral pig tracks, and followed those. After covering so many kilometres, it would be a tragedy to have to give up almost within sight of their final destination. But gradually, step by step, the ground finally began to grow softer, with fewer rocks, and Di allowed herself to breathe a sigh of relief.

  ‘I think that was my single hardest day,’ she says. ‘There were plenty of tough days, but nothing like that. You had to have a good mental attitude as during the trek you’d ride all day and camp, and then you’d get up the next day, and it was exactly the same horizon. You’d see the same thing, day after day. So you have to be mentally fit to cope.

  ‘But if you have a will to succeed, every day is a day behind you.’

  * * *

  When Di finally rode out and approached the Dig Tree at the end of her journey, she could see Cedric flashing his torch, waiting for her. She slid off the camel, and he hugged and kissed her. Not a man given to elaborate praise, he simply told h
er: ‘You did well! Only you could have done that!’ She smiled, pleased. ‘He always expected 10 out of 10,’ says Di. ‘I lived in a man’s world, and that’s what it was like. You had to prove yourself and do everything as well as you possibly could.’ The couple celebrated that night with pizza and white wine before sleeping in their swags.

  When news of Di’s achievement spread, she was called by journalists from newspapers and radio stations all over the country. All of them asked the same question: Who was in your back-up crew? When she replied that she didn’t have one, no one believed she could possibly have achieved such a feat alone. Despite having put up a small silver plaque at the Dig Tree, and another at the Gulf, she was greeted with complete incredulity.

  Even the Burke and Wills Historical Society could hardly believe it. In 1977, four men, Tom Bergin, Paddy McHugh, a Pitjantjatjara elder called Nugget Gnalkenga and his son Frankie, set out with 10 camels to do the same trek, covered by National Geographic magazine and the subject of an ABC documentary. But it had proved much tougher than they’d predicted. Once they reached the Gulf, they abandoned the idea of heading back down to the Dig Tree.

  Another expedition of three people and 11 camels ended badly after not even reaching halfway to the Gulf. The camels were in such poor condition that the leader of the trek was forced to shoot them to put them out of their misery.

  ‘I think Di Zischke would have received a lot more attention if she’d told more people what she was doing,’ says Dave Phoenix, the President of the Burke and Wills Historical Society, who himself walked from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 2008, retracing the expedition. ‘But it was an amazing achievement. To have gone all the way there and back again on her own . . . she managed to do what Burke and Wills hadn’t, and Tom Bergin afterwards.’