Love In a Sunburnt Country

by Jo Jackson King

  He was, says Cissy, older than she was in all the ways that counted. Many twenty-year-old men would have been intimidated by her, but Bill was not.

  ‘People say to Bill, “Have I met Ciss?” And he always says, “If you have to ask, you haven’t met her,”’ says Cissy.

  It is true. You could never forget Cissy. You just have to listen to her strong voice, to feel the blast of that warm, courageous personality, to begin to appreciate that a life where you don’t give way to fear often is a better life. Being around Cissy makes me feel more courageous, after I’ve first been astonished at what she thinks everyone could do, if they really tried, if they brought every resource to bear on the task.

  Bill puts it this way: ‘There’s not much of a backward step in her.’

  In 1979 Bill suggested they should leave their respective partners and join forces—and Cissy realised that Bill was now her best friend, and her childhood dream was within her reach. However, they both emphasise that they had not ‘fallen in love’. It was more a realisation that they were a natural team—Cissy’s drive, energy and gut instinct and Bill’s ability to synthesise and apply his family’s legacy of wisdom and knowledge, both of them with extraordinary self-discipline—and knowing that they were in total agreement about what was important in life.

  It was at this time that Vickie was ending her primary years and approaching high school. This usually requires children to leave the bush and attend boarding school.

  ‘Some very good friends of ours, Ken and Sally Warriner, offered to take Vickie for a while. And Vickie liked them, they liked Vickie, and we respected them. Then, when Ken Warriner was working for Kerry Packer, Kerry offered to pay for Vickie to go to Ascham Girls School, with his daughter,’ says Bill.

  Cissy left behind the formality and civilisation of Brunette Downs and joined Bill and Ken in catching bulls. The catching of bulls for export is highly profitable but dangerous. In the vast expanse of the Northern Territory cattle breed up and with just once-yearly handling—sometimes not even that—can only be considered wild animals.

  ‘We’d catch bulls all day and then in the afternoon we’d load them on a truck, and Ken or I (we took it in turns) would drive them to the meatworks at McArthur River. That was a six-hour round trip. And then we’d be back catching again at daylight in the morning.’

  With handling, these feral bulls do become steadier, in a way that the real wild cattle do not, but on first encountering humans they are explosively impulsive. The four-wheel-drive vehicles in which the bulls are caught are customised for the job with bars, and are simply called ‘bullcatchers’.

  ‘Every morning we’d hop in those bullcatchers and I’d close my eyes because I was so frightened,’ says Cissy. But the lonely little girl who had grown up feeling herself to be on the edge of her own family had found a new one—a family in which everyone was valued equally—and she was determined not to let them down.

  ‘I was sure I was going to get myself killed on a tree, every morning. Then I’d say to myself, “If I’m going to die, I might as well die with my eyes open.” And I’d open my eyes.’

  Cissy is exhilarated by the unpredictability of cattle in campdraft and so I know that it takes far more to scare her than to scare me. That bull-catching terrifies her tells me all I need to know about how dangerous it must be. Every day is a journey from trepidation to outright terror and then relief, but a short-lived relief. You will be doing it all again tomorrow. Every musterer would feel the wild tang of adrenaline, the chill of danger and have eyes and ears wide, ready to act—and every bull pinned and yarded and trucked out would grow the team closer. (I suspect that daily exposure to this life-threatening situation also enhanced the romantic attraction between Cissy and Bill: it is something danger is known to do.) Ultimately, bull-catching, like so much of what Cissy and Bill have done and still enjoy doing, is a confidence game.

  You have to be confident that there is a way to avoid getting hurt. You have to believe that even if you do get hurt, it won’t be too bad and you’ll survive even if it is painful for a while. Campdrafting is like that. Riding in rodeos is like that. Buying pastoral properties is also like that. No-one could have understood the risks of pastoral enterprise better than Cissy and Bill, but they had faith in themselves. One day they would buy a station and create a highly profitable cattle business on it. They would work hard, live lean and wait for the chance to come.

  And those waiting years were good ones. They worked side by side out in the bush: bull-catching, contract mustering and saving hard.

  In 1982 Bill and Cissy’s daughter Jackie was born. In 1983 they came in from the bush to celebrate and formalise their commitment to each other in marriage. The wedding was held at the house of friend Jan Darcy, and both Vickie and Jackie attended. And then it was back out to camp and work.

  Instead of a stove with a rangehood the family had a campfire and camp oven and the Territory’s open sky. Baby Jackie grew up with leaves and stars dangling overhead. She grew up without radio or television: at night she heard the voices of the men who worked for her parents and the deep, plaintive calls of cattle settling for the night.

  All through this time Cissy’s standards for presenting herself and her home never slipped.

  ‘You need to try to look nice for the person you’re with. Some people dress up and look magnificent to go into town. Then they come home and put on their old clothes. Their husband never sees them looking stunning. What’s the point of that!’ she says.

  Very early in her competitive riding career Cissy had decided that if she couldn’t win the riding competition she and her horse could at least look the best.

  ‘She always reckons it’s true that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but that the nicer a book looks the more chance there is someone will look inside,’ says Bill.

  Yes, they were living under the stars and out of swags much of the time. There was no running water or electricity. No telephones. But it was still a home.

  ‘When we were first together we spent a lot of time in a swag, or under a tarp in a stock camp, but I guarantee it was the best, tidiest stock camp in the country, because Cissy did the best with whatever she had,’ says Bill.

  They raise each other’s game, these two, both doing their utmost and inspiring the other to further accomplishment.

  ‘Some of my best performances have been achieved trying to live up to Cissy’s high expectations. Sometimes I’ve thought they were unreasonably, even foolishly high.’ But Cissy’s ideas proved not to be unreasonable or foolish at all. In these years Bill learned to trust Cissy’s gut instincts and her wisdom, to evaluate critically every pathway and find the one that would bring Cissy’s expectations to fruition.

  The combination of Bill’s caution and Cissy’s ability to see an opportunity flashing past got them ready in just five years to take the biggest gamble of all: the purchase of their own property. In 1985 they purchased Kiana with the intention of turning it around.

  Operating a cattle station is a tremendous amount of work. Building one from scratch, which is effectively what ‘turning around’ requires you to do, is even more work. This is what Cissy and Bill set out to do on 3313 square kilometres.

  The best cattle country in the Northern Territory is the open black-soil plains of the tablelands. Brunette Downs, where Cissy and Bill met, is located here, on this rich black dirt. Further north there is the Gulf Country and that carries the least cattle per hectare and so is the least valuable. The land between the Gulf and the tablelands is called the ‘transition country’ and this is where Kiana is located. Not great cattle country, but good.

  ‘If you got a map out and drew a line between Mount Isa and Katherine, Kiana is about halfway along that line,’ Bill says. ‘We were lucky. We worked very hard for a long time. The property was available when we had the circumstance to purchase it. We had the skills and ability to catch the wild cattle, to build the fences and do all the things we needed to do to be successful.�
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  Bill doesn’t define the word ‘luck’ in the way most people do. He does not mean ‘good fortune’ but rather ‘opportunity’—in this case, an opportunity to work very hard indeed. Both Bill and Cissy have a genius for understatement, so what was actually done on Kiana in the years after purchase must be deduced.

  From the air many homesteads look higgledy-piggledy: buildings belonging to different time periods compete for proximity to the big house and the main sheds. Not on Kiana. Overhead photographs show the manager’s house with new outbuildings radiating out obediently. There is even a full campdrafting arena with commentator’s box. None of it looks more than thirty years old, and it’s all Cissy and Bill’s work. But fixing up the homestead area is the very smallest part of turning around a station.

  Attention to detail throughout the operation is required. Something like ‘fixing fences’, which sounds straightforward, is not. Poorly thought-out fencing impacts animal health and welfare, mustering ease and, therefore, profits.

  To ‘fix fencing’ Bill and Cissy had to consider the best combinations of land and vegetation types, a reliable set of water sources, ensure that each paddock shape would muster well and include handling yards at a good muster point where required. Then the fence had to be built, when it was actually needed, when putting it in was going to contribute to profits, and not before.

  One fence in a pastoral station paddock may require a hundred kilometres of fencing. This is work done partly on foot. The terrain is rough. There are now thirty paddocks on Kiana. And upgrading the fencing was just one job among many. Wrapped around all the different jobs that had to be done was the development of the business itself.

  ‘The business has to be good enough to withstand a downturn. You’ve got to be able to hold on through the hard times while you’re waiting for the good times. That’s key to it.’

  As Bill speaks I am irresistibly reminded of the different strategies plants and animals use to survive the boom or bust climate of Northern Australia. There is lower rainfall in the transition country (where Kiana is) than there is in the rest of the Top End, but the pattern of a wet summer and a long dry still holds. In the short summer season it rains until the land floods and grass and animal life explode from the hot wet earth. The billabongs first fill and then flood, and out of them peer not just the wrinkled faces of turtles and water monitors, but the goannas, who are generally considered land animals. In the heat everything that possibly can becomes a water dweller.

  In the other months there is little rain. The grasses wither, grey and blow. The once widespread animal life begins to contract into the waterholes. There was abundance, but now it is gone. How to survive this time of little-to-no food and rain?

  This is the same challenge that Bill and Cissy were presented with—staying alive financially in times of no income.

  The animals and plants of the Top End are resourceful. Some make it through the long dry by living off extra fat stored in their tails. Others are only alive in the wet and leave eggs and spores to wait for the next big rain, a strategy known as ‘shut down and wait’. There are yet others known as generalists. These animals haven’t invested in adapting to a niche in which they flourish but instead adapt to a range of foods and habitats. And all of these strategies, translated into human terms, were found and put into practice by Bill—after Cissy had made clear to Bill that she expected him to find a way.

  To begin with, Bill and Cissy are generalists. When one income stream dries, they move their business swiftly to where another is flowing and grow the skills to match. Even after they had purchased Kiana they continued for ten years to contract muster on other properties to earn money. But then the contract work began to dry up. At that time Kiana, although much improved in fences and water, could not support enough cattle to be really profitable. Bill and Cissy needed to get another business or do something profoundly different on Kiana.

  The decision to invest further in a marginal business was a risk, and it took five years of trial and error for Bill to succeed, and succeed beyond his own expectations.

  ‘It lessens your fear of failure,’ says Bill, ‘if you know your partner is totally committed and wants you to try it. If you fail it is a team effort. With many of the things we’ve achieved, if Ciss hadn’t been fully on board and encouraging, I wouldn’t have taken the risk. Winston Churchill said, “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity; the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” When I shared that with my daughter Jackie she said, “Well, Dad, you’re an optimist only when you’ve exhausted every other possibility.”’

  Bill eventually increased the production off Kiana by more than one hundred percent, and he did this by adding a supplement of extra protein, minerals and energy to what his cattle ate. This meant the cattle did well all year round, even in the dry. He had given them a buffer against decreasing food quality to equal the ‘fat tail’ with which native animals survive the hard times.

  In one recent article on the vagaries of the cattle trade, Bill is referred to as the ‘magician of the Gulf savannah’ not for his swag of stockman’s skills, but for his ability to handle and seek out multiple incoming streams of data and put into practice good business decisions with time to spare.

  ‘Many people get themselves into the situation where they invest in infrastructure, for instance, or even genetics in their cattle for the long-term gain. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t matter how good the long-term gain is, you’ve got to be able to pay for it in the short term.’ This ability to stop and wait, to resist the impulse to spend, is another key to Cissy and Bill’s success.

  While Bill and Cissy worked towards their goal of becoming rich, they were also determined to enjoy the journey. The campdraft facility north of the homestead was built to this end.

  ‘Campdrafting developed in the early days when there were no yards. If you wanted to draft certain animals out you had to do it on horseback. The competition developed because there was a fair bit of different opinion as to who had the best horse. It was designed to see who really did have the best horse,’ says Bill.

  ‘It consists of cutting a single animal out of a mob of eight to fifteen cattle. You show the judge how well you can cut it out. Then you call for the gate, and there are two pegs and a gate that you go around in, in a clover-leaf pattern. The judge assigns a score out of one hundred: a very good score is ninety.’

  By ‘cut’ Bill means separating out that one animal from the rest. This is challenging because cattle are herd animals and resist being separated initially. With handling, though, they quickly learn to comply. Both rider and horse show off their teamwork, athleticism and cattle-handling skills in this sport. Together rider and horse turn, block, move in parallel, chase and precisely direct the animal.

  It was a bush competition that turned into a popular social and recreational activity, not just for people on isolated properties and in rural communities, but for anyone with an interest in horses. Cissy had introduced Bill to it soon after they met and shortly afterwards he was winning competitions.

  ‘I’d broken my leg and I gave him my horses. He won the first campdraft he ever went in, and then he won the first three, which is almost impossible. But you see, Bill is a cattleman and, if you’ve got a horse you can put anywhere, a cattleman will get your cow around.’

  In a few years campdraft was to become the Bright family’s sport of choice.

  ‘My first daughter, Vickie, when she was about seven, used to ride all the time. Then my other daughter, Jackie, wanted to ride. And I wanted her to have something to do when she grew up so she wouldn’t be watching television as people do or be at the pub drinking. Out in the middle of nowhere you can’t do ballet, play football or cricket, there are no social activities, so we taught her to ride,’ says Cissy.

  ‘There wasn’t much of a social life for our daughter: campdrafting was a way for us all to connect on the same level. It’s difficult for parents and children to connect.
It gave her an interest too—feeding the horses, training them. If you did everything right at home there was the possibility you could win on the weekend,’ says Bill. And attending such an event was reward enough by itself for an isolated child.

  ‘We would camp out on the flat. We’d be in swags, sit around the fire, cook a steak, tell jokes, sing … it was a very village-like atmosphere.’

  Gradually they realised just how good Jackie might be.

  ‘Jackie’s always had a keen interest in horses and Ciss cultivated that interest and gave her every opportunity. There was a lady on the station next door who was on the shortlist to go to the Olympics, a very good rider. She decided to get married, have children and go to the station instead. Ciss used to get her to come over for a few days at a time to teach Jackie to ride.’

  Many of these years were lived without television or radio.

  ‘We’ve always made a conscious effort not to measure our progress against other people’s. Don’t worry about what everybody else is doing, just do the best you can with what you’ve got. Focus your attention on what you’re doing,’ says Bill.

  This is one of the things made easier by isolation. There are not just fewer distractions but less opportunity for comparisons. But there are disadvantages to missing important information and in 1986 Bill decided he wanted a television.

  ‘You’d spend the whole year in the bush and the news was something you heard through anecdotal reports from people you met. I remember hearing you could get TV in the bush through satellites. I said to Ciss (this was when we didn’t have any spare money): “There are a dozen bulls up in the big swamp on the boundary—we might go and catch them and take them to Mount Isa and buy a satellite TV with the proceeds.”