Bronco branding was the only method of branding in those days on Brunette. The most calves Ken had seen branded in one day were 740 head at Rocky 2 Bore in 1949.
On the Tableland stations, bores supplied much of the water and were overseen by men known as ‘pumpers’, one to each bore. Diesel engines pumped water into big turkey-nest dams, from where it was directed into troughs. At that time there were eight or nine pumpers on Brunette whose job was to start the engines and keep watch on the troughs—nothing more, as maintenance was done by station mechanics who did a bore run each week. Pumpers were mostly solitary older men, with pasts hazy or unknown; the lonely bush life suited them well.
There wasn’t much a young ringer didn’t experience on the old stations. When Pumper Mick was found in his swag, quite blue and very dead from alcohol poisoning, the responsibility for his burial fell to Ken. The weather was hot, so a hasty burial was necessary.
Mick was a big man with no friends nor kin anyone knew of. Sewn into his canvas swag cover like a body prepared for burial at sea, placed on a truck with two Aboriginal men, Pudden and Willie, to steady him on his last journey, Mick was driven to where his grave had already been dug; Eric Barnes, the station manager, went along as a witness.
Over the rough road, the body began to roll in its canvas shroud, which sent Pudden and Willie into a panic. They leaped off the truck and set off at high speed to put as much space as possible between themselves and the dead man.
With helpers gone, there was no way Mick could be gently lowered into such a deep hole. Eric looked over at Ken, raised an eyebrow, nodded toward the grave, and they rolled Mick in.
‘God bless you, Mick,’ from Eric.
A harsh burial perhaps, but Ken engraved Mick’s name onto a large rock. Sixty years later, unlike many in the bush, he has the dignity of a marked grave.
Ken’s second year on Brunette was shaping up to be dry, no rain, not a drop—until March. Then, with the usual feast or famine conditions of the Outback, it rained and rained, and then some, and the country was inundated. Lake Sylvester, Lake de Burgh and Corella Creek merged into one huge body of water, estimated from the air to be about 300 kilometres around.
The stock camp had 4000 head ready for the road, with drovers standing by to take delivery, but the water rose so rapidly that the cattle were released back into paddocks. All those weeks of work were for nothing.
In the course of a muster, the stock camp moved its site every few days as the men advanced with the round-up. When the rains came, the camp was settled close by the lake. A brand-new truck loaded with fresh provisions arrived that evening, but with the continuing rain and the heavy black soil, the truck, still fully loaded, was going nowhere.
It was imperative they move to higher ground, so they began carrying what they could up onto a stony ridge. Almost dark, the rain still pelting down, they prepared to unpack a tarpaulin from its bag—someone’s big mistake: the bag contained only leather hobble straps, resulting in a miserable night, with soaking swags and little tucker.
Next morning the country, usually an expanse of waving dry grass, was an inland sea as far as the horizon; the truck and its load were 6 feet under. The men needed tucker fast, and it fell to Ken to dive down and retrieve something edible—the prizes were a bag of blue-boiler dried peas and a sack of flour.
As luck would have it, a valuable Aberdeen Angus bull from the stud of Anthony Lagoon Station had the misfortune to be taking refuge on the high ridge as well, which proved his undoing; he was quickly dispatched and cooked on the fire they’d managed to light. Even with everything soaked, a fire can always be lit in the bush; wax matches in small flat tins will light in any weather, and dead wood soon burns with sheets of iron shielding the flames.
The bull saved the day, along with the pre-soaked peas and flour, which was edible within a deep crust. Years before, in my father’s day in the bush, a consignment of flour, usually in 20-kilogram calico bags, was immediately immersed in a waterhole and left until water had penetrated just far enough to form a hard crust that protected the inner flour from infestation by weevils.
As the water rose higher, my father and his stock camp could only return to the station. Crossing Corella Creek was full of problems: two horses drowned, and the cook was no swimmer and had to be dragged across, mostly under water, with three bronco ropes around his chest. The poor man nearly drowned, but with rough resuscitation he rallied; upon arrival at the station, he collected his gear and departed, swearing never to return.
For those on Brunette today, it may be of interest to know a dugout canoe was once paddled 50 kilometres from the station to Lake Bore on a rescue mission, then a further 30 kilometres to Corella Creek.
When the stock camp reached the station, their first priority was to rescue the pumpers. With only the rim of their dam above water, the forlorn pumpers had taken refuge on the highest, driest place available to them. One of these men was Jack Kidston, a quiet little Englishman who had forsaken city life to go bush.
Settled on the rim of his dam, Jack saw a buffalo way out in the water making straight for his small, dry patch of earth, already populated with a menagerie all bent on survival. Sharing his precarious hold on dry land with an irate buffalo wasn’t a happy thought; Jack raised his rifle, took aim—no, it was too far, and he couldn’t afford to miss with ammunition so low. He waited, as pale sunlight shimmering down through cloud created a hazy veil over the water. The buffalo came closer, moving slowly, low in the water. It had a huge horn span. Jack took aim again, was about to fire—when in the nick of time he realised he held in his sights a man, not a beast.
My God! It’s Whiskers Harrington, looking for a spot of dry ground along with everything else in this watery wilderness.
Whiskers had a wide and bushy black beard, and his chest and shoulders were also well-endowed with a thick, woolly black pelt. Across his shoulders he carried a wide yoke with his possessions attached to each end; his bald head, right in the centre, set off the likeness to a swimming beast.
Whiskers was never to know how close to a dead buffalo floating away on the floodwaters he had come.
CHAPTER 26
And That Says It All
After a few years on Brunette, to use his own words, Ken tired of looking at the arse-end of Tableland cows. He broke in a brumby stallion that came into the station plant, made a packsaddle and a pair of greenhide pack bags, and jogged off across the plain.
A paddock he built on Brunette still bears his name—‘Hammar’s Paddock’—and is his contribution to posterity on the downs. Perhaps its origins are forgotten today, 60 years on.
He spent a few months’ horse breaking on Cresswell Downs, where his wage was the equivalent of 14 dollars per week, plus two dollars per head to break and shoe the colts—good money back then!
Moving on in the time-honoured way of the old Territory bagman, Ken eventually rode into Newcastle Waters, where he appeared on my horizon for the first time. Six foot three, sociable and charming, he could ride anything (he would agree, with reservations). Tough, hard as nails (‘sure’). Perhaps not truly handsome, but a touch of Gary Cooperishness there (‘oh, puhlese!’). Definitely someone to keep well within view on any girl’s horizon.
Or, in Ken’s words:
‘North of the Ten Commandments
West of the Barkly Plain
There’s a place called the Ridge
Where there’s beer in the fridge
And oh what a beautiful dame.’
I was at the Brunette Downs race meeting when I heard this and thought I should take a look. After the races I mustered up my horses and headed west to Newcastle Waters.
About 400 kilometres later I got there and walked into the pub. And there she was. The publican’s daughter, Jaqueline Sargeant.
Fifty-six years later I still look at her each day with wonder and appreciation.
And that says it all.
CHAPTER 27
The Old Stockman of the Bush<
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To have known the old stockman of the Territory bush is, I feel, my greatest claim to pioneer status. With the receding sound of hoof beats and distant crack of stockwhip, he has ridden off into the pages of history books and adventure tales.
Find just one word to describe him? I can only come up with ‘hard’. He lived and worked in inhospitable country, with complete indifference to loneliness and danger. He belonged in a culture that regarded fear as an insult, and the synonym for brave was ‘mad’, as in ‘mad bastard’.
He ate hard, mostly dried salted beef from animals he had killed himself, and he looked damned hard too—rugged, lean and muscular. Roughened by the elements, he could have been any age: a boy barely into his teens, yet with years of bush life behind him, or a leathery old veteran of the cattle trails. He may have been a drover, a bushman out of the scrub, or even a cattle station owner.
Clumping about in spurs and leather leggings, a walk on the outer side of his feet gave him a bowlegged look, but he didn’t do much walking, would mount his horse to go even the shortest distance. The elastic sides of his laughin’ boots gaped with age. He wore his trousers low on his hipless frame—from some, an indrawn breath threatened total descent and could cause an onlooker to pause transfixed in expectation of such a calamity. His hat was a fixture, day and night. With stockwhip looped over his shoulder, he displayed an easy grace.
He could shoe a horse, break in a colt, handle wild cattle and cook a fair damper in the coals of a campfire. He had no use for a store-bought cigarette; he learned from necessity to roll his own, rubbing the loose tobacco in a contemplative way in the palm of his hand. A practised flip into rice-paper, a quick flick of tongue along its edge, then with cupped hands and squinting of eye, it was lit and remained adhered to lip.
There could be a needle wrapped in thread in the band of his hat, to mend a tear or stitch a wound. No cologne for him: he smelled of horses, sweat and tobacco. Surprisingly quite a pleasant combination of bush scents.
I never saw an old-time ringer wear gloves. He did all his stock work, fencing and yard-building with rock-hard, calloused bare hands. He was known as a ringer because he rode circling his cattle to keep them together. On an Australian cattle station, a cowboy was a mere rouseabout who worked at odd jobs.
The ringer’s swag was his bedroll, carried on a packhorse that he drove before him; a couple of blankets were rolled in a waterproof canvas sheet, secured at each end with leather swag straps. Everything he owned he carried in his swag: spare trousers, shirt, sometimes a dog-eared collection of bush poems, maybe even Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour. His swag was his home, the place where he slept. An extremely thin swag could be jokingly referred to as a ‘cigarette swag’, while a large one was regarded with misgivings; perhaps its owner spent too much time comfortably lying about instead of up and working.
He had no need of a compass or watch; he looked to the Southern Cross and took his bearings from the stars. He knew the country he rode, however vast the area. He knew the waterholes and how they were holding; what to expect of the country, wet season or dry. His roof, the open sky in any weather.
There was no need for him to acquire a head for hard liquor—he was born with one. When he joined his mates to drink, now they were gargantuan ‘booze ups’ that could and did go on for days—usually at the end of a long hard year, or after dreary months of droving, when enough rum flowed down their parched throats to gladden the heart of any distiller. For days the exploits of the year were exchanged amid laughter and argument.
He was the epitome of the craggy, hard-drinking nomad, riding the cattle trails. ‘What other kind is there?’ he might ask, and the greatest compliment he could receive was that he was a good cattleman. He believed there was nothing else for a real man to do.
Indelibly in my memory, he sits on his haunches, leaning back on his high-heeled boots, elbows on knees in that inimitable, muscle-numbing pose he could hold for hours, his hat tipped back from a weathered face, brown as old saddle leather. This is how I will always see him.
Those who came later, after his time, were more prosaic; they lacked the colourful romantic aura of this man in the saddle, for he was unique, and he has burned his image into the pages of Territory history.
White women were in short supply in the Territory; young, unmarried white women rare creatures indeed. For quite some time I reigned as the only single white female within a thousand miles across the stock route to Western Australia, and it brought the attention one would expect.
My name was bestowed on quite a few fancy equines in horse plants along the track, and often these animals were paraded with pride for inspection and viewed with varying degrees of approval. One of the first big cattle-station transport trucks sailed forth with my name emblazoned like a figurehead. I can only hope it brought the good truckin’ expected.
I wore trousers a good deal, and often ringers would ask my mother why Jack-a-leen couldn’t wear a dress or skirt more often—a touch of femininity was unusual and special in their lives.
At Newcastle Waters, Ken joined the cattleman Elmore Lewis, who was preparing for a contract muster of Montejinni Station, an outstation of Victoria River Downs. They broke in twenty colts to join with Elmore’s horse plant, recruited several Aboriginal stockmen from the local camp, and were ready to ride out.
Early next morning we heard them coming, the hooves of 60 shod horses clopping along the hard bare ground of the Ridge, the creak of worn leather tuned with the plop-plop of the horses’ bellies as they jogged on by, the clink of spurs and bridle bits sharp and clear in the still air.
As they rode past the Junction Hotel, Ken, then Elmore, raised the handle of a shouldered stockwhip to hat in a silent bush farewell. In a short while they were enclosed in their own bubble of heavy dust, out onto the Murranji Track, with about 200 kilometres to Montejinni.
I was not to see Ken for another two years.
CHAPTER 28
A Time Long Gone
Rosie was very young—not more than sixteen, I would guess. She was married to an old man of the tribe who kept a very close eye on her. Rosie considered herself somewhat more sophisticated than the other women in camp; she’d been up the track some miles to Mataranka and thought herself much travelled. She worked for a time in the pub’s kitchen and cleaned the bathrooms.
Our shopping was a haphazard affair, with parcel deliveries by bus often crushed in mailbags or affected by heat, so items such as cosmetics were rather treasured and made to last. I kept lipsticks in the bathroom; it was cooler there.
Then they started to disappear, one after another, and I felt I must have been careless and mislaid them. It did not at first occur to me that Rosie was the source of their disappearance. Tribeswomen didn’t know of face painting other than for corroboree, but Rosie it had to be.
I mentioned this to my father, who knew how to deal with most everything.
‘Leave it to me,’ he said.
Next morning, within Rosie’s hearing, he announced with much seriousness, ‘Lipstick bin gone, eh? Well, I hope lubra no more find un, s’pos’n she put um longa face, he kin make for proper sick, make im swell up.’
That was all.
That evening Rosie’s husband brought her up to my mother, drooping like a faded flower over his supporting arm, groaning with pain, her face swollen, appearing quite ill; around her mouth was evidence of removed lipstick.
My father came to take a look at poor Rosie and said, ‘Ay-na-yah, look like lipstick bin on that face, no good belong lubra that one!’
Rosie groaned and gazed up at him with the eyes of a dying spaniel.
He pondered awhile, then said, ‘Might be that one kind special medicine can fix im. I’ll tell Missus about it, uwai.’
An aspirin was carried out on a saucer and carefully transferred onto a spoon, with a glass of fizzy drink to wash it down. Rosie’s cure was miraculous; the swelling went down fast.
From that day on, the bathroom lipsticks remain
ed untouched to the extent that dust was quite thick around their base when all else was sparkling clean. For Rosie, they were to be avoided at all costs.
What brings Bindi to mind I cannot say, but here he is flitting into memories of a time long gone. This Bindi very different to our wizened gardener at Brunette.
In those days it was unusual to see an obese inland Aboriginal person; in the 1950s, the inland people remained lean, hard and hungry. However, my father had a devoted follower—not old, not young, somewhere between, and so enormously fat that his features were crowded out from his bones with puffy overlapping flesh. My mother ordered shirts for him from southern manufacturers: huge, voluminous, tent-like things—‘giant size’, they were marked.
He attached himself unbidden to my father, and forever swayed behind him like a mammoth shadow. He refused to retire to camp or even to sit in the shade to observe all that went on, but followed along, carrying my father’s tools, mumbling and finding fault with the young Aboriginal boys, and loudly repeating the Boss’s orders to workers, with great bossiness.
Upon a step or ladder, panic could set in, and Bindi’s cries for rescue of ‘Boss, Boss!’ caused the piccaninnies to collapse with laughter and my father some annoyance, for Bindi was ordered not to undertake anything too ambitious in his workplace exertions.
I was with my father one day when we came upon Bindi sitting on the floor by the kitchen without a shirt, feasting on an entire roasted goat haunch, greasy fat dripping down his many chins onto his huge chest. We paused at this truly astonishing sight. ‘Behold the Cannibal Chief,’ said my father, with a dramatic sweep of his arm. Bindi smiled and chuckled happily over his feast; he took everything my father said to him as complimentary.
Christopher Morley once said that, ‘No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.’
Daughter of the Territory Page 14
