Aboriginals passing through would ask our lubras about that ‘different kine dog you got here’, and she would be paraded in a possessive kind of way while her attributes were lauded. The finishing touch of, ‘E can’t swim, this kine dog, you know,’ would bring forth exclamations of awe and disbelief. All the while the Russian stood by coolly with her usual superior attitude.
CHAPTER 46
Heading Bush
After Les MacFarlane relinquished his share in the Limmen grazing licence and settled into working Moroak, his station out from Mataranka town, we became the sole proprietors of the Limmen River Pastoral Company and decided it was time to move out there.
We bought a Chevrolet Blitz truck from army disposals, stocked up on building materials and whatever else our limited resources would allow, and prepared to head out bush.
Those who heard just where we were going thought us quite mad, and Ken heard from all sides, ‘You can’t take a woman and baby out there,’ but we were ready, packed and set to go.
After final preparations we left very early on a sweltering hot morning, just before the start of the wet season. We headed into Limmen River country where we would make our home for the next 30 years.
Loaded beyond the hilt as usual, we drove slowly out of Borroloola and into dense bush—from there we had to clear our own road. Jackinabox was sent ahead on horseback to blaze trees, marking out a navigable track for us through country without so much as a horse pad to follow. He had no experience with motor vehicles, so he blazed his trees up stony hills littered with large rocks and down through impassable creeks, setting a track where only a horse could travel.
Ken had to ignore much of his marked track, set off on foot to find a suitable route through this tangle of virgin scrub, sometimes cut down trees to widen our road, then return and drive on. It was a snail’s pace journey; the sun beat relentlessly down on the unlined metal cab of our cumbersome army relic. There were no doors on the cab, which wasn’t such a bad thing, as it allowed us whatever breezes the slow progress created.
Dominique came to look forward to her frequent showers, from a billy-can of water poured over her head.
The big Blitz wheels laboured up over rocky outcrops, then lurched and crashed down the other side, often delivering a hard blow to the head on the cab’s steel roof, or causing the steering wheel to whip around out of hand and deliver a jarring crack to the arm of the driver. We lost count of the number of times the wallaby-jack was unloaded to deal with yet another puncture of the huge tyres.
It took several days to negotiate the final 200 kilometres to Grasshopper Plain, a wide black-soil plain stretching out from the banks of the Limmen. It was bordered by rugged hills interspersed with permanent waterholes, fed from springs that bubbled up through sandstone on the plateau above then cascaded down to cool shaded pools. On Grasshopper you could swim beneath a waterfall and say to yourself, ‘I am the first white woman ever to be in this place.’
The name Grasshopper is a bastardised version of an Aboriginal name long disappeared with the old bushmen, so Grasshopper it remained.
We unloaded by a creek and made camp, then set up Dominique’s cot. This had been built to our own design: high enough for her to stand, wide enough for her to roam a little and fully enclosed with wire gauze, a safe haven from mosquitoes and all else that crawled or flew.
That first night camped by the creek, a violent storm saturated much of our stores and I gave an uneasy thought to the approaching wet season, but we had reached the end of our road and I was relieved we’d made it thus far without too many setbacks.
Our first need was permanent shelter. We cut ironwood posts, as no termite could put a mandible through them, and in our loading we had corrugated roofing iron. A floor of flattened ant-bed went down, then the kerosene refrigerator, woodstove and a bed of saplings laced with a greenhide base—but no clock or watch, as we worked on sundown and daylight. We hadn’t thought to bring a calendar, so time and dates became muddled as the year progressed.
At night we still had no electricity, just carbide light: a cylinder containing lumps of carbide is fitted into a jug-like metal container, about 30 centimetres high, filled with water to create a gas, then lit from a burner on top.
It gave a good flame, but on occasion an ominous bubble erupted due to a gas build-up, and the cylinder could shoot skyward like a rocket. At first bubble I would rush outside, my nightgown flying, to deposit the whole contraption on the ground and await the explosion. Although I never did experience the rocket act, I’d heard so many frightening stories that it scared the wits out of me!
I had always read late into the night. To enjoy stress-free lighting, I gave up on the carbide lamp and took to lying on the floor close by the light from the burner of our kerosene refrigerator, which was not without some discomfort.
A nearby area of smooth flat stones seemed a likely place to settle our laundry; tubs and copper boiler were moved in, all set for wash day.
Sometime later, when our household was well settled, Tom Hume, an old part-Aboriginal man who knew this country well, revealed that our laundry stones covered the grave of a long-ago traveller, a white man whose bush journey had ended right there on the bank of the creek. How he’d died, no one remembered, but those travelling with him had done the best they could with his grave.
He lay there undisturbed through the years, until he became part of our household and shared wash days with Dinah. Endowed with an Aboriginal’s fear of those departed, she would certainly have been wary of sharing space with a dead man, however long gone. We decided not to tell her and wash days rolled on without anything of a debil-debilish nature taking place.
I wondered sometimes about the white man who lay under the hard earth just a step outside my kitchen door. I had good feelings toward him and the fanciful idea he welcomed this family who’d come to relieve his loneliness. In his lifetime, our very existence in this place would have been impossible.
When our house was completed, Ken built a horse paddock with help from the stock boys. Much of the barbed wire came from old fences on Brunette Downs Station, exchanged for posts of cajuput, a broad-leafed ti-tree, cut on the Limmen and carried down on the Blitz.
Tools were still basic: the old cross-cut saw, crowbar, axes, adze, brace and bit, and that was about it. What Ken could have done with a chainsaw!
Forty head of our horses were paddocked at Cresswell Downs Station on the Barkly Tableland. Roy and two Borroloola boys, Jack William and Larry Boy, mustered them and walked them 300 kilometres back to Grasshopper.
This all meant that just before the monsoon set in, Ken had yards, paddocks and working horses—and out there stretched hundreds of kilometres of country with wild cleanskin cattle to be mustered and branded with our new brand LTK.
The Aboriginals had settled their camp beside a big billabong. All through the night, millions of frogs croaked so deafeningly the air seemed to vibrate with the monotonous sound. While the other workers prepared to leave for walkabout during the wet, Jackinabox and Dinah decided to stay.
They were used to sleeping on the ground as bush people had always done; now they had swags and a tent fly, but it can be an uncomfortable night in the rainy season even under canvas, so we gave them the good bed and mattress that we had brought in to replace our own greenhide bed.
Calling at their camp early one morning, Ken found the two of them camped on the ground in their swags, their four dogs comfortably settled on the bed with its fine mattress. They never did use it—old habits die hard!
When Dominique was born, I had serious misgivings about how I would cope with a baby out bush. In fact, the responsibility of caring for a baby in any situation daunted me.
Dr Benjamin Spock was the baby doctor of the day, and to mothers of that period his was the last word—and you listened, my dear. His book was on every nursery shelf, so I purchased one and bowed to his words of wisdom.
Dr Spock was very straightforward, his advice covered
every imaginable crisis and—the best thing for me—his words usually came with a consoling air: everything is manageable, there’s nothing that can’t be cured, never worry. I loved him! I became so reliant on his advice—or was it his authoritative reassurance I sought?—that I turned the dog-eared pages of his little book for advice on every ill and treated every one accordingly.
At the end of that first year, when all the stock boys left with Ken in the Blitz for walkabout, I was left alone with eighteen-month-old Dominique. Before they’d gone, I’d cut my hand on barbed wire, so Ken was going to bring back some sulfa tablets, which were early days on the antibiotic scene.
While he was away, the infection became worse, with a red line running arm’s length and a swelling in my armpit—all indications of serious poisoning.
I was very sick and turned the pages of dear old Dr Spock for his usual comforting advice. No comfort was forthcoming this time, however: all he had to say was, ‘If this occurs, go see a doctor, even if you must travel all night.’
No way could I travel anywhere and there was no hospital nurse here to chattily ask me, ‘Who is your next of kin, my dear?’ Ken was possibly bogged in black soil a hundred kilometres out; Dominique was sitting imperturbable in her cot; my mother was abroad somewhere—perhaps in Europe, maybe Asia; my father could have been anywhere. Such were the conditions of an outback life of isolation.
I bathed and fed Dominique, and placed her in her cot with several bottles of water, for I knew Ken wouldn’t be more than a day or two even if he had to walk.
I groggily fossicked about in storage boxes, found a nice skirt and blouse I hadn’t seen in months, tidied my hair, applied lipstick, and lay down to await the outcome. No way was I going to be found untidily expired in unattractive clothes.
I lay in the dark silence of a bush night while fireflies darted excitedly about, flickering their little tail-lights. Without the Aboriginals there was no familiar sound of corroboree down by the creek, only the clicking of the gecko and the desolate cry of the curlew—a sound that does nothing to lift your spirits when you’re alone at night.
If the lubras had been there, they would likely have run off; it was no place for a bush woman to be close by someone who might die. But they’d have taken Dominique for safe-keeping. Such thoughts raced through my mind all night; perhaps they were dreams that the white cockatoo dream-bird of Aboriginal myth carried on fluttering wings.
Next day Ken returned with the sulfa drugs, and after a time tried and true bush nursing worked its magic and tragedy was averted. Although this little tale was made light of—as is usual in the way of the bush—it was a serious situation to be in. I’m sure if Ken had been delayed further, there would be no story to tell—or no one to tell it, anyway.
Did you know King Solomon’s horse was named Monsoon? Monsoon is an Arabic word meaning season.
The rains came early during our first year on the Limmen, and the blue-black soil turned to heavy gluey mud, a nightmare to traverse in any way at all. It sucked at bare feet and built up on boots in gluggy lumps that made it impossible to move any distance. No road out of Grasshopper was passable, so we just had to sit it out. Sitting out the wet was to become an annual exercise in our lives, as it was in the lives of all those in the far Outback of northern Australia.
Fresh, ordinary vegetables became a memory. We cooked pigweed, which could dissolve into a jelly-like mush if overdone—not the most delicious of plants. Later we made do with leaves of the sweet potato vine, or even the new shoots of pumpkin vines; neither would rate a mention in Epicure magazine.
Christmas came! It was too boggy to take a horse with pack-bags out to kill for fresh beef, so Ken, with rifle in hand and a bag over his shoulder, went barefoot through the mud, hoping to bag a plain’s turkey for Christmas dinner.
Hours later he trudged back, layered with a heavy coating of grey mud, with a fine big turkey in his pack-bag, plucked clean, right down to the last pin feather.
I found this surprising because Ken always had a strong dislike of plucking a bird—any bird—so it fell to the lubras to prepare anything caught in the line of fowl. Still, I stuffed and cooked the bird without comment. It made a delectable and festive sight on our lunch table, surrounded by gum leaves and a few gumnuts I’d painted a brilliant red, as a substitute for holly berries, using the dregs of an old nail polish bottle.
It wasn’t, perhaps, the best turkey we’d ever eaten, but was well received in the present situation. Dominique munched happily along the length of an outsize drumstick. A wild bird was nothing to complain about when the alternative was dried corned beef that, in the heat and humidity, was infested with small beetles. It took quite some time soaking the dry beef in water to remove them, and to plump up the salted meat that had hung for a time outside in the beef-house.
At this time of year, brolgas frolicked about the wetlands in large numbers, dancing their dainty pas de deux and, with their long pliable necks stretched skyward, loudly serenading in their rackety, strident voices. Of all the bush birds, the brolga was my favourite.
After Christmas, when it was still too wet to ride out for beef, Ken said he might have to shoot a brolga.
‘Shoot a brolga?’ I said. ‘Never! Not a brolga.’
‘Well, you had one for Christmas dinner!’ he retorted, and right away I had a flashback of that cleanly plucked bird and Dominique munching a mammoth drumstick.
Stores had dwindled over the wet, cattle mustering was soon to start, and we needed to post an order for supplies pretty soon to catch the Cora before she set sail on her northern run.
While Jackinabox mustered the horses for a trip into town, I settled down with forms and price lists to make out an order that would see us through the mustering season. Only absolute essentials: flour, tea, sugar, hops, potatoes and onions, and horse shoes, nails, leather and the like. Coarse salt, an essential on a station then, was available from salt pans on the coast.
Add all this up—costs far too high! Well now, cut this out, we’ll get it next year. Could I slip in a few kilos of dried fruit? Barley was listed at 10 cents a pound, so we could afford a sack of barley and cancel the rice. It would be curry with barley this year—all good tucker!
Must have tobacco—no Aboriginal stockman would work without his tobacco. I’ve seen a man ride miles in bush to retrieve a plug of tobacco he’d hidden, or smoke dried tea leaves, paw-paw leaves or other foliage you wouldn’t imagine smokeable. White stockmen hungering for a smoke did the same.
Mail was wrapped in waterproof oiled silk, the forerunner of plastic wrap, and Jackinabox left for Borroloola, driving the packhorses ahead of him. It would take him six days to reach the town, perhaps longer if creeks were running high and he had to swim the horses. After a few days socialising with the local tribespeople, he would make tracks for the trip back home.
Rudyard Kipling wrote that, ‘The God who Looks after Small Things had caused the visitor that day to receive two weeks’ delayed mails in one.’ Make that twelve weeks’ delayed mail.
As mail arrivals could be weeks or even months apart, we’d eagerly await the mail day when we received letters from friends and family—and newspapers too, no matter that the events were weeks old. Catalogues from far-off city stores were received and every page was carefully perused.
About two weeks after Jack’s departure, in the quiet of early evening, Dinah’s piercing, high-pitched yackering heralded his return. It was an age-old bush wailing cry—that declaration of some happening or other—to everyone within hearing and to no one in particular, over and over. ‘Packhorse com-m-m-ming! Packhorse im ere nah!’ Dinah called as Jack rode up.
With the horses milling about, Ken went out to help him unpack.
CHAPTER 47
My Unique Household
The country was drying out: time to start mustering! The stockmen and other Aboriginals returned from Borroloola.
Ambrose and Marjorie came that year. Ambrose had leprosy so he hid out bush,
well away from Dr John Hargrave’s medical team, who came periodically to check for the disease. Marjorie was young and unreliable: as she pushed Dominique about in her stroller, she bounced over the roughest ground at a fast pace; both were downcast when made to stop. That stroller had a short life—it fell to bits soon after Marjorie’s arrival.
Spider and Minnie also came that year, and were with us for years. Spider was very much a man of old bush ways. He had quite a reputation among local tribespeople as a skilled and fearless spear fighter, and was accorded a certain deference by younger men in camp.
In keeping with tribal custom of earlier times, Spider had hammered out his two front teeth, which he believed was a sure prevention against death by thirst—and so there wasn’t the slightest possibility that such a terrible death could befall him, however dry the country he hunted. A good hunter and a good-natured man, he smiled his gap-toothed smile and went about life in an amiable way, although he wasn’t so bright with matters that required serious thought and planning.
With an attentive audience, Spider would tell of old spear fights, becoming so engrossed that his eyes glittered with the excitement and danger of it all. His fingers gripped an imaginary spear, the tempo of his story would build and his listeners, feeling the rising tension, instinctively moved back. Then came that final mighty death-dealing cast of his spear and his audience could breathe out.
Well before Spider had come to live at Grasshopper, Ken had once witnessed him in a serious, tribe-arranged fight. He had stolen a young lubra who was already promised, but in that vague way in which the prize was enticingly withheld, while various suitors were assessed as to their worth and just how willing they were to part with any of it. Spider, not even a contender in this ‘bride business’, soon put an end to indecision and ran off with her himself.
Retribution was called for and a meeting place—or battleground—arranged. Spider arrived fully armed, with the stolen girl standing behind him, quite enjoying her moment in the limelight. At some distance stood the opposing spearmen. Tribal custom decreed the pattern of battle: the aggrieved men were to throw the first spear, against which only defensive action was permitted.
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