Ken can add flying fox, porcupine—and budgerigars.
He and some Aboriginal boys out bush without food resorted to a meal of the small birds. With a hungry night looming, they armed themselves with strips of fencing wire and waited in bushes by a waterhole. When a dense flock of budgerigars made a graceful wide swoop to water, Ken and the boys hurled their wire strips into the flock in the manner of throwing sticks. Placed whole on hot coals, feathers and guts removed, the birds made quite an acceptable fowl.
Speaking of fowl—we once came upon two eagles having a fiery tug of war with a magpie goose, and joined the battle. They didn’t give up easily and were inclined to join forces against us. The prize was a goose stew for dinner.
PART III
‘Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though chequered by failure . . . than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.’
TEDDY ROOSEVELT
‘Over and above all is a splendid almost prodigal hospitality.’
J. MURY, 1897
CHAPTER 42
Managing McArthur River Station
‘
Whither thou goest, I will go.’ So sayeth Ruth and so wenteth I, out onto the wild McArthur side, as the poem written by a jackeroo goes:
The Big McArthur Side
Out on the big McArthur run,
Out where there’s action, thrill and fun,
Out where the monthly mail comes through
From Camooweal to the distant ’Loo,
By the big McArthur side.
Out where there is no strife or fuss,
Where the outside world don’t trouble us,
We ride to muster, draft and brand,
And stick to jobs we understand
By the quiet McArthur side.
Not long after the Cora’s departure, Frank McMahon—who managed Cresswell Downs Station—took his last trip for the year, before the wet made the road impassable, to McArthur River Station, one of the earliest settled stations in that part of the Territory. This was the only road to McArthur and Borroloola, unsealed and lonely.
McArthur has quite a romantic history. It was formed by an infamous old cattle thief, Harry Redford, for the McCansh family in the late 1880s, when the entire area was at its most wild and lawless. It was named in honour of the famous John Macarthur family, the first Merino breeders in New South Wales.
When Frank offered Ken the job of managing McArthur River Station at the grand wage of £12 per week, we were delighted at the idea of a haven for the wet season and set about moving there as soon as possible.
We loaded our worldly possessions onto our borrowed truck, turned our backs on the mud bricks that had taken so long to put together, and went off in the best of spirits to take up residence in the station homestead. It was slow travelling over a road deeply rutted with dried tracks after recent storms.
It was almost dark when we reached the river crossing, then onto a road that led to where the homestead had stood for the last 70 years.
Vague and shadowy movements on the roadside caught our attention. The truck’s lights swept over a large herd of the most extraordinary huge goats, their strange cat’s eyes flashing in our lights. They made no move to rush away but clustered close together, horns clacking, obviously resentful of this intrusion into their untended lives. Too many had the long beards of billy goats. They were clearly the station’s herd turned feral, and should have been a warning that all was not as it should be.
The night fell down around us as it does in the bush. We unrolled our swag to camp in the middle of the road, the goats still inquisitively standing their ground close by.
At daybreak, intending to settle into our first home together, we drove on to the homestead, but there was no homestead. What a shock that was for us homeless newlyweds. Exactly like the Borroloola pub, the house had collapsed into a huge termite-riddled heap. It never took long for hungry white ants to gnaw their way through timber uprights, and these ones had been of Oregon pine, shipped at great expense from the south years before—perfect fodder.
We stumbled on through the debris in a disbelieving haze and came upon a lean-to of sorts where part-Aboriginals had earlier set up camp. A kerosene refrigerator stood there—that was promising!
We opened the door and staggered back from the stench of rotting beef. The refrigerator had been carefully stacked as full as possible with raw beef weeks before, probably just after a recent kill. The burner hadn’t been lit; obviously someone believed that closing the door was all that was necessary to render it cold, so count this fridge out.
As if in compensation for this unnerving find, dangling incongruously on a cord from a beam was a plump pink leg of ham: smoked, dried, encased in cotton gauze, the only old-fashioned kind found in the bush then.
We stared at it. Such a luxury! Everything is relative, you know, and for us it was like finding gold on a rubbish tip. Who’d brought it there and how long it had dangled, unmolested by man or beast, remained a mystery. My guess is that no one there knew what it was or what to do with it. We decided to keep it as a treat for Christmas.
Making our way through the sad remains of this famous old homestead, we discovered a small roofed section that was rickety but erect. It provided a faint flicker of hope that we might find something useful in its dark, shuttered interior—anything would do.
In near darkness we pushed the door open on its rusted hinges and brushed away its decorations of thick hanging cobwebs. We carefully stepped inside, feeling rather like intrepid adventurers entering the lost tomb!
We knocked open the old propped windows for some light, which set off a soft, papery rustling. Gentle and whispery at first, it increased to a frenzy of movement—the floor was carpeted with thousands of fat brown cockroaches that crunched under foot and scuttled up our legs.
On a rod along the wall hung a row of army overcoats, each on its own hanger. An attempt to lift one down began a domino effect of disintegration.
On a shelf beneath the coats, in a neat row, were a number of good-quality riding boots, but on inspection they all proved to be for the left foot. No one knew of a one-legged stockman, so they remained a mystery too.
Standing in splendid isolation on a shelf were a dozen cans of army-issue butter concentrate, their carton dissolved into dust around them. Along with the ham, this was all we salvaged in the way of stores, but we felt quite fortunate; they were luxuries as far as we were concerned. When had we ever had a ham and butter in our pack-bags? We carried off our spoils with great good cheer.
As we wandered about the old place, we had the gradual awareness of an unusual bush silence and soon realised there was a total absence of birdlife.
‘There’s not even a bloody crow around here,’ Ken said.
Somehow you don’t much notice these sounds until they aren’t there, then the silence settles about you, and you pause and wonder about it.
This mystery was solved when Ned, an old bush Aboriginal man, wandered in hoping for a handout of beef, and explained that the piccaninnies had kept up such a barrage of stones and shanghais on anything with wings that the survivors had given the place a wide birth ever since.
‘All gone,’ he said, with a wide sweep of his arm, in that theatrical way of the old bushman when announcing a calamity. ‘Bird all gone, nuddaplace.’
So there we were. Ken was manager of a 15,000-square-kilometre cattle station that ran right down to the Gulf of Carpentaria, with the great river running within its boundaries.
No longer was it the 55,000 square kilometres of pioneer Ernest Favenc’s day. How the mighty had fallen, and what a discouraging outlook for the new manager. No paddocks remained, so at season’s end horses were let go at Goose Lagoon and got a scatter on during the wet. No branded cattle were held on McArthur: those mustered were walked up to Cresswell Downs on the Barkly Tableland. There was no station vehicle,
a scattered plant, and very few supplies to tide us over the wet, which was nearly upon us.
The stock camp residents were Aboriginals from Borroloola: Yellow Fred, Bruce, Big Tom, Johnny Ah One (who was part-Chinese), and several others. They were all excellent stockmen.
It was imperative we have some sort of roof over us, and pretty soon too.
To avoid having to cross the river in flood, Ken decided to settle on the opposite side to the ruined homestead. He built a small one-roomed shed with bush timber uprights, corrugated-iron walls and roof, and an earthen floor; he also constructed a kitchen workbench from a packing case covered with flat iron, and a roomy bed from a frame of ti-tree saplings laced across with greenhide. We rolled our swag out and our first home was complete the day before Christmas.
In the early daylight of Christmas morning, I woke to the clattering of pots and pans, and sat up to take in the vision of a broad backside encased in a vivid pattern of bright red flowers, its owner bent over to light the woodstove in the corner of the room.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked.
‘Well, me H’Alice, ain’t it,’ came the reply, in a who-would-you-think-it-was tone. ‘I work for you, Missus Ken.’ It wasn’t a question, but a statement; I had been told, and that was that.
Alice was Big Tom’s wife. She kept up a bossy clattering among the dishes and made tea, and this she continued to do for the next twenty years.
The ham leg was to feature prominently at our Christmas lunch. The outside boiler was lit early, and everything prepared for its cooking. But alas, tragedy had struck and there was to be no ham that year. It hadn’t been hung high enough in a tree, so the dingoes and wild dogs had fossicked it out during the night and chewed it to the bone. We made do with corned beef and vowed we’d do better the following year.
CHAPTER 43
Our First Wet Season
After Christmas the proper wet set in and the rain was continuous, so there was no chance of moving out and less of anyone coming in. Our shed was as hot as hell under the iron roof, but we were thankful for a dry camp.
With no radio, we had no idea what was happening elsewhere in the world.
When it got too boggy to ride out to kill, we shot a goat from the herd that from long habit still gathered each night on the old station road.
A rival team of feral donkeys, dozens of them, would materialise silently out of the bush just on sundown, and gather opposite the goats. They were the descendants of the old donkey teams that had once hauled heavily loaded wagons. They stood quite still when we passed, their long furry ears twitching at every sound as they stared brazenly back at us with their big shiny, knowing eyes.
Johnny Ah One decided against leaving for Borroloola in the monsoon rains. One morning after a night of torrential rain, Ken went down to see how Johnny had fared through the downpour.
Sleepless in pitch darkness, with light only from the many matches he’d struck, Johnny had spent most of the night dispatching big centipedes of the yellow and black kind, which were intent on sharing his swag. He had gathered about thirty of them and lined them up trophy fashion. His vigilance had paid off: he’d made it through without having to endure a poisonous bite.
It was necessary to send mail away, and we decided a few supplies wouldn’t go amiss, so Ken, Johnny and I prepared to ride the 70 kilometres into Borroloola. I was given the best horse—a big grey, a good goer, with lots of heart. Though unnamed, he was valued in the stock camp for his stamina, as he wasn’t one to adopt that reluctant, martyred air when a little extra was asked of him.
The rain had let up for a bit, but it was fiercely hot, with the temperature hovering around the 50-degree mark. The humid air seemed too heavy to breathe. There was bog everywhere, the road just parallel tracks of yellow muddy water; added to this, clouds of flies kept settling on our sweating bodies and in our eyes.
We made our way around the worst bog, the horses placing each foot gingerly in front of the other—one could have sunk to its belly. Then we followed along the Abner Range, taking high ground over ridges and hills where possible.
In the late afternoon we rode into Borroloola, my horse still gamely striding out. Heavy with sweat, his hide had changed from light grey to dark gun-metal, his tail swishing and skin quivering to discourage settling flies. The bush belief is that grey horses have a peculiar and very bad smell when they sweat. Perhaps they do, but on that day the great old horse could have smelled just as bad as possible—I was just happy to have him there in those conditions. My shirt was like a second skin; it could have just come out of a washtub. My hair was plastered to my head.
We unsaddled at the welfare house, with Ted and Nettie as pleased with our unexpected company at that time of year as we were to see them. Of course a bath was offered: outback Territory of the past must surely have been the only place in the world where it was customary to offer visitors a bath or shower along with afternoon tea.
It took a painful session under Nettie’s shower for me to separate myself from my trousers. The sweat pouring down my spine had set up a raw, oozing chafing, and the seat of my pants had set stiff and hard as plaster against my skin.
We spent an enjoyable day with Nettie and Ted. Although it was tempting to stay longer, rain was pending and conditions could only get worse on the road.
Early next morning Johnny came up from the Aboriginal camp, then we collected our mail and rode on back to our lonely little home on the banks of the McArthur. Seventy kilometres through heat and bog can seem endless.
Heavy monsoonal rain always brings to mind my father juggling eggs in the kitchen at Newcastle Waters, pretending they were his rain stones and claiming success for the torrential downpour pounding on the iron roof. These antics always had the kitchen girls falling about with gales of laughter.
Cresswell Downs gave us a truck for station use—a huge Dodge of advanced age and decrepitude. It would chug along in forward gear well enough, but a screwdriver was needed to remove the gearbox cover and rearrange the gears if you wanted to reverse, and then to travel forward again.
Ken, Johnny Ah One and I took delivery of a full load of 200-litre drums of petrol and numerous 45-kilogram bags of coarse salt at Cresswell, and then left to return to McArthur. Travel was slow, the weather hot with the steamy feel of impending rain. The old truck protested its load with every rise in the road, and we protested whenever the gearbox rearrangement was called for.
In the late afternoon, just as the first fat drops of rain splattered onto the dusty road, we drove down into the dry creek bed of Top Crossing. The steep opposite bank proved too much to ask of the heavily loaded vehicle, while the rain settled into a steady downpour. Under our repeated efforts to climb it, the bank became slippery as a slide and the radiator, attached to the cab with stays, slid backward onto the fan blade, which chopped out a great chunk.
A steady rivulet of water began snaking down the creek bed, under the truck and over our feet. If the rain continued, the creek would rise fast. The only way out, if we weren’t to lose everything, was to unload as quickly as possible, which was easier said than done.
The drums of fuel came off first and we had to roll them up the steep, slippery bank. Next was the salt, soaked through and tremendously heavy, which had to be manhandled off the truck and stacked high on the bank.
While the two men battled with the load, I struggled back and forth: with hands and toes dug deep into mud, I clawed up the bank and slithered back down, carrying rocks to form a paving to give the truck traction on its way up.
When the last of the load came off, we were sloshing about in the dark of the very early morning in deep, swiftly rising water—it was time to get out fast.
Johnny and I waited on the bank. With rushing water well up the old truck’s sides, Ken coaxed it inch by inch over my stony paving. We held our breath as we watched the slow-turning wheels. Then the truck groaned with effort as it crawled up onto the road, just as day was breaking. Mud covered, soaking wet, hands an
d shoulders rubbed raw, we boiled the billy and had something to eat.
Next we faced the reloading of rain-soaked salt bags and mud-slippery fuel drums. We cut a couple of saplings to make a ramp for the drums, then the salt went on, and finally we were ready to move out. The crossing was swirling with muddy water. Another escape that was due to hard work rather than luck.
Driving past poor Jack Bailey’s lonely, rain-soaked roadside grave, we felt more fortunate than him.
We travelled slowly, stopping frequently to fill the damaged radiator. As luck would have it, we found Fred Ellis, who owned Tawallah Station, camped by the roadside. Fred’s old truck, with its greenhide tray, was hardly in better condition than ours, but he always travelled with two big drums filled with every conceivable spare part. We used all the solder he could dig out to patch our radiator.
We were back at McArthur that night.
CHAPTER 44
End of the Wet
Time drifted on in our isolated world, until one day there was a loud yackering from the Aboriginals’ camp—‘Motor car, motor car coming!’—and we knew the road was open, the wet was over.
Frank McMahon and Bill Taylor, the Anthony Lagoon policeman, made it through—the first of the few who travelled this road throughout the year. We sat around and talked with them till well into the night, catching up on the news of the past five months.
All the while Frank made heavy inroads into my cache of homemade beer, which packed quite a punch. The beer brought out Frank’s generous side and, happily on the way to total inebriation, he decided airily that I should be on my own wage—£14 a week, no less.
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