Outback Heroines

by Sue Williams

  In April 1955, Lurlene set off with her fiancé, Edward Ebborn, and his grandfather, Alf Smith – a sprightly roo-shooter, gardener and fencing contractor in his 70s – in a 3-tonne Bedford truck for the two to three-day trip to Townsville for their wedding. It had been a very wet year and, with most of the roads rough dirt, often little more than two-wheel tracks, it soon became extremely muddy. It was hard even to see the right tracks to take and after 60 kilometres they took a wrong turn and got lost, unintentionally adding an extra 130 kilometres to their journey. After camping out for the night, they started again the next day, but the road soon turned into a battlefield of 30-centimetre-deep muddy ridges, continuing on for kilometres, with one truck already bogged from the previous day. At that point, they gave up and took the goods train from Julia Creek. The railway had come to Lurlene’s rescue again.

  Eventually arriving in Townsville, Lurlene bought some material and sewed her wedding dress and made arrangements to have a cake baked. The wedding breakfast was at a neighbour’s and for the happy couple’s honeymoon, they caught the ferry to Magnetic Island and stayed there for two hours before coming back again.

  Three days later, Lurlene and Edward began their new lives together, with Grandad Smith in tow, setting off in their truck for the Northern Territory, with a plan to make a living shooting kangaroos. They made it back to Cloncurry, then drove off towards Mount Isa, 120 kilometres to the west, planning to head south from there. Camping in the ranges close to where the uranium mining town of Mary Kathleen would later be built, their bed was a fibre mattress thrown over an old door, supported at one end by fuel drums and at the other by the truck’s running board. Dingoes howled around them all night and Grandad Smith told Lurlene chilling tales of past encounters with dingoes, one of which, he swore, had seen him spend a whole night up a tree to avoid them.

  The couple had been promised that kangaroos were so plentiful they wouldn’t be able to drive further without hitting one. That turned out to be not quite the case. From Mount Isa, they drove the 970 kilometres west through the desolate Barkly Tablelands and then south to the Northern Territory settlement of Ti Tree, nearly 200 kilometres north of Alice Springs, without seeing a single roo. ‘When we asked where all the roos were, the proprietor of the roadhouse there told us to go down to Bushy Park, off the track about a hundred miles south,’ says Lurlene. ‘There, we should find lots of roos. He also told us it was no good sitting at waterholes waiting for them to come for a drink because they got most of their moisture from herbage. But we went all that way and still didn’t find any.’ Eventually, they decided it was time to head back to Queensland.

  The trio then took a 500-kilometre unsealed track back towards the Queensland border, through the lonely semi-arid spinifex deserts and the black-soil Mitchell grass plains. They stopped off at one station, Utopia, to ask directions and the owner invited them in for some breakfast. They gratefully accepted. When he asked if there was anything else they’d like, Lurlene asked him for a bath. She’d spent ten days washing from a basin, and couldn’t resist. He was happy to let her have one, even though Edward was mortified at her cheek.

  They passed back into Queensland and set up camp off the road. And there, finally, just 70 kilometres south of Mount Isa – from where they’d set out on their epic journey – they were besieged by kangaroos. Within a week, they had 200 skins.

  Yet roo-shooting turned out not to be the easiest way of making a living. Lurlene, Edward and Grandad Smith would drive around most of the night, Lurlene holding the spotlight till her hands were frozen. They skinned most of their haul that night and finished off after breakfast when the carcasses would then be stiff and a lot harder to work with. Each skin had to be pegged out on the ground with pegs cut from steel wire and hammered into any flat terrain around. Whenever they’d amassed a couple of hundred, they’d go into Cloncurry to sell them.

  They set up a tent to live in, picked a spot close by the creek and dug a soak – a hole in the sand to collect fresh water oozing up from the ground – bailing out the first dirty water until clean water appeared. They would then fill their 18-litre kerosene cans to carry them up the steep 3-metre-high bank back to the camp. Lurlene would wash clothes in the creek too, just beyond the soak, laying them on the bushes to dry. She just had to be careful they didn’t fall onto the ground and collect ‘bogan fleas’, the terrible prickly burrs that sheep had brought into the area on their wool. Any fresh meat had to be cooked straight away over an open fire or in a heavy pot – a camp oven – in the flames, but sometimes there’d already be maggots in the meat. ‘You just had to wash them off before cooking,’ says Lurlene. ‘The salt meat dried out like bits of cardboard but tasted nice when it was cooked. Every time I cooked and minced it, it reminded me of minced-up sack bags, but the shepherd’s pie I made was tasty. I tried to make my first sponge cake in the camp oven, but it turned out like Indian rubber. It would be years before I tried another.’

  It rained heavily that year, and when it did the water dripped from any point of the tent anyone touched. The fire had to be covered with a tin sheet and petrol was used to get it going every morning. But they weren’t, by any means, the worst off. A few times they saw other people and one time they bumped into a travelling show that’d run out of both petrol and water. ‘They were from the city,’ explains Lurlene, disapprovingly.

  After a few months, they packed up camp and went to Winton, 350 kilometres south-east of Cloncurry. They asked around for jobs and ended up with a fencing contract at a sheep station 50 kilometres north of Winton on the Winton–Hughenden railway line. ‘And so began my fencing career,’ says Lurlene.

  On that fencing job, the trio set up another camp using a fly sheet rigged up on the back of the truck and erected 8 kilometres of pony fencing – a low fence with three wire strands for keeping sheep in. There’d been a massive flood earlier that year, and there were sheep carcasses hanging rotting 6 metres up in the branches of the Coolibah trees. Their next task was repairing a washed-down tele­phone line but, halfway through, Grandad Smith got his finger caught between the crowbar and wire and had to be taken to hospital. At that, Edward decided that Lurlene should learn to drive in case of future emergencies. The local police constable in town took her round the block doing all left turns. ‘And that’s all it took to get me legally behind the wheel!’ she says.

  The work was always physically arduous, and often dangerous. On one job, they had to cut fencing posts, with Grandad Smith managing to cut 100 a day with his axe. Edward then had to drill them, but he managed to catch his trousers with the drill, which then bore into his leg. Lurlene quickly became the nurse, too, in between digging holes for the posts. It felt like it took forever.

  They camped out on their fencing jobs, battling the cold and fogs of winter, the extreme heat of summers, the mosquitoes and the kangaroo ticks that made it impossible to sit on the ground and, even when they sat on drums, would crawl up their legs. One time, a station missus said there was meat for them in the meat house. Lurlene went in to pick it up – to discover a whole sheep carcass. Hunger was a great butchery teacher. Another time, with Lurlene nine months pregnant, they camped in a town at a football ground where there were toilets and showers, and their neighbours turned out to be country music star Slim Dusty and his wife, who were passing through. That night, they went to the movies, but Lurlene had to leave halfway through to get to the hospital in time for the birth of the couple’s first child, a son called Eddy. They then went straight on to their next fencing job, south of Richmond, between Julia Creek and Hughenden.

  When that job was done, they went to Julia Creek where Edward landed a job as a motor mechanic for six weeks and Lurlene had her first taste of luxury. They camped at the old wool scours – where shearing sheds had been set up to wash the fleeces in the hot water bubbling up from artesian bores. ‘It was great!’ she says. ‘It meant I didn’t need to boil water for the baby’s bottle.’ But then it was back to fencing. Grandad Smith left t
hem the next year when he broke his foot as it hit a tree while he was riding on the back of the truck. That meant Lurlene had to help Edward saw down trees, roll the logs up into the truck and then cut them into posts. She managed fine. On the next contract, to put up dog and rabbit fencing 60 kilometres along the McKinley road from Cloncurry, Lurlene’s job was to tow the digger through the spinifex country behind the truck from hole to hole. The couple hired two young men to help them. After a week, the men quit because the work was too hard and went back to town. Lurlene and Edward finished it off.

  Another job involved fencing the boundary of Coolullah, a property 100 kilometres north of Cloncurry, which ran for 45 kilometres from the Leichhardt River across the mountains and over the river flats to Dugald River. It was a lengthy task, which saw the couple often sinking knee-deep in the black-soil plain, covered in mud from head to toe. On a trip into Cloncurry to pick up Grandad Smith’s pension cheque, Lurlene and Edward set off on a motorbike but were forced to pull over into a mining camp during a storm, and then had to cross creeks in the dark. Realising it was too dangerous and that they should stop and wait for the creeks to go down, they settled under a tree for the night. Immediately, they heard a train whistle and saw lights and, knowing they were close to a railway siding, they walked there to spend a dry night in the railway workers’ camp. The railway had saved her again.

  When Lurlene was eight months pregnant with her second child, life became easier. They switched to carting copper from outlying mines into the smelters at Mount Isa, and then taking freight to the new town of Mary Kathleen. Norman was born in April 1957 in the early hours of the morning, conveniently between runs.

  After that, it was fence-posting again, with Grandad Smith rejoining them and a friend, Noel, they’d met along the tracks. Noel was to stay with them at various camps as they fenced all over north-west Queensland during the next three years, and would make contact again many years later. Grandad Smith stayed with them until his death in 1970.

  In 1961, now with two more sons, David and Colin, to make a total of four, the family moved to Mount Isa for the eldest, Eddy, to start school. They bought a piece of land for 20 pounds and put up a shed made of half a dozen steel pipe posts, a roof, a wall at one end and a tarpaulin down the other. In the front half was a stove, table and chairs, and benches made from boxes.

  Lurlene’s son Colin remembers those days well. ‘She’s certainly done a bit in her time, the old girl,’ says the 52-year-old mechanic and diesel-fitter. ‘I remember living in the tent and her driving, and she’d come back and cook a feed for us kids too. Dad said she couldn’t boil water when he first got her, but she turned out pretty good. She’s done a bit of everything: fencing, bull-catching, driving. She did more work than all of us put together.’

  Lurlene bought her first truck, a 6-tonne Austin Loadstar, for 60 pounds and went to work full-time as a driver, working from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. In her spare time, together with Edward, she sorted scrap metal to take to the coast to sell. Most of the lead had been collected out of old batteries, either by breaking them up with axes or, in one ill-fated experiment, trying to melt the lead in them down. That way collected too much dirt and sand, so it was a return to the backbreaking work with axes.

  When there was enough scrap to take to Townsville, she and Edward loaded up her truck with 6 tonnes of steel, and a second truck with 8 tonnes of lead for Edward to drive. She drove slowly. With so much weight in the back, she had to be careful as she rumbled up and down hills, with all the gullies washed out by recent rain. At one point, she was overcome with fatigue, stopped and got out. Her right foot, in particular, was beginning to ache. Two weeks earlier, she’d stood on a piece of metal that had just been cut with an oxyacetylene torch and had burnt a piece out of the ball of her foot, under her little toe. As a result, she’d been trying to use only her big toe on the accelerator when driving.

  She lay down on the ground to rest, but it started to drizzle. She got up, and started driving again. Night quickly fell and the rain continued, her foot throbbed terribly and the road became stickier and more waterlogged. A couple of times, the truck lurched to a halt, and she had to drive backwards – she’d learnt how to reverse by then – and forwards, to avoid becoming bogged. Then, the headlights showed up an expanse of water spread out for 40 metres either side of the road. She backed up, revved the truck and then raced forward into third gear, changing down to get to the other side. She just made it. That night, they camped in the mud by the side of the road but then made their money on the scrap and Lurlene traded in her truck for a Land Rover. They returned to Mount Isa with the Land Rover perched on the back of the truck Edward was driving, with Eddy and Norman sitting in it as there wasn’t enough room in its cab. ‘Later, Eddy told us he didn’t know if he should jump out and die – or stay in and die,’ chuckles Lurlene.

  From then on, Lurlene earned a living driving, with only short periods in between roo-shooting and occasional jobs, like catching scrub bulls at an Aboriginal settlement at Hermannsburg, 130 kilometres south-west of Alice Springs. She drove, and lived, all over: carting gravel for the streets in Cloncurry; lead from Normanton in the Gulf country, 520 kilometres north-west of Mount Isa; copper from Kuridala, south of Cloncurry; a semi-trailer from Brisbane to Barrow Creek on the Stuart Highway north of Alice Springs; and more gravel for upgrading the Flinders Highway from Julia Creek to Nonda.

  A neighbour in Cloncurry got to know her well. In the early 1970s, Lurlene had just had her fifth son, Alfred, and so had to stay home for a while, becoming very involved in the local Country Women’s Association. ‘She was always a lot of fun,’ says Cleta Mazlin, who met her at one of the meetings. ‘She led a very difficult life at times, but she was always cheerful and never seemed to get down. I remember the story she told me once of taking some fencing down and losing control of it, so the wire sprang back and coiled all around her husband. He accused her of doing it on purpose, but she just laughed. She was always ready to have a go at everything and proved amazingly capable at most things.’

  Life with Lurlene around was always eventful. When cars broke down on the road, Lurlene would usually stop to help and fix them, while her own vehicles often needed running repairs. One day, the bonnet of her truck flew up so she had to stop, take it off and leave it on the side of the road. A couple of days later, she returned, picked it up and she and Edward straightened the hinges and refitted it. Another time, a truck dropped rocks on the road just as she was coming along and one bounced right into the radiator of her truck. She had to plug the hole with a stick. Another memorable morning, young David threw petrol onto the campfire, thinking it was diesel, and some landed on his leg, which caught fire. He spent a week in hospital.

  ‘We had a fair few scrapes between us, but generally things worked out all right,’ says Lurlene. ‘I always remember the time the motor of a truck started over-revving and I quickly hit the brakes and pulled out the stop control but it didn’t stop. I was afraid it would throw a big end. So I put the trailer brakes on, stood on the truck brakes and put it into high-range overdrive and slowly let out the clutch. Thankfully, it stopped. When I got out and lifted the bonnet, there was diesel everywhere, and no nut in the top of the filter. I found the nut on the engine, screwed it in, bled the filter and started it again. I was then back on my way. Gee, I was lucky! I’ve had a pretty good life. I think I’ve been lucky all my life.’

  It’s 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning, and Lurlene’s working in the kitchen of a little railway station in south-east Queensland. She’s frying sausages on the barbecue and cooking pikelets, with the kettle ready for making a few dozen cups of tea.

  ‘Oh, this is my day off!’ laughs the sprightly 77-year-old with the curly grey hair and sparkling brown eyes. ‘This is what I do to relax. I’ve always said, “If you want something done, then do it yourself.”’

  There’s a distant whistle and what sounds like a thunderclap and a roar as an old steam locomotive finally comes into view,
and hisses as it pulls into the station. Lurlene smiles and loads up a tray of pancakes and carries them out to a table set up on the platform. As the doors swing open and passengers climb off the train, they all surge around her. ‘Now, I’ve got tea and coffee, sausages and pancakes,’ she tells the hungry hordes in her broad country-Queensland accent. ‘One at a time, please.’

  Lurlene is now living in the Mary Valley, at Amamoor, a 15-minute drive out of the old gold town of Gympie, 160 kilometres north of Brisbane, close to the annual country music muster site. It’s also a town on the historic Mary Valley railway line, a 40-kilometre stretch of track from Gympie down to Imbil. At its stop in Amamoor, Lurlene is well known for fixing the morning teas and helping organise all the arts and crafts on display and for sale. She has more than a passing interest in those; many of the paintings are hers. Just the other week, she sold one to an American tourist, and another to someone visiting from Japan.

  She took up art back in Cloncurry. She’d seen a card painted by a foot-and-mouth artist – an artist who doesn’t have use of their hands – and thought it would be good to learn to paint in case she was ever confined to a wheelchair. She has been painting ever since. She’s even had a couple of exhibitions, one in Gympie, and has been praised widely for her skill. ‘When she started, they were good in a kind of amateur way, but she certainly applied herself and they really improved over the years,’ says her old friend Cleta Mazlin. ‘She’s enthusiastic about everything and is ready to give everything a go. I remember her being the pavilion manager for our local show, and being the secretary of our branch once.