Daughter of the Territory

by Jacqueline Hammar

  Whenever the stock camp left the station Willie remained and informed all who cared to ask that he must stay to take care of the Missus.

  In fact, it’s possible Willie did save my life once when he, Syd and I were returning from the stock camp. It was raining buckets that day and our vehicle became hopelessly bogged, so we set off to walk home in the rain.

  At the creek crossing we paused and, with some trepidation, took in the branches and debris wildly churning in the rising floodwater.

  ‘I’m not going in there,’ I said in tones that brooked no argument.

  The alternative? Three people tightly packed in the cab of a truck, all through a rainy night. So I did go in!

  The creek was rising fast and there was no way I could actually swim through the racing current. We clasped hands, with me between the two men. The water was way up to tall Willie’s chest. Syd, a little fella, couldn’t swim a stroke. We eased in and carefully began to wade behind Willie’s long strides.

  Then, just as we were almost across, where the water was deepest, my legs were swept from under me and I shot off. I would surely have been taken along by that swirling floodwater and drowned or been injured by the debris, but despite his slippery hands, Willie—stalwart as a bloodwood tree—held on, clutching a handful of my shirt. But Syd lost his hold and careened into Willie, clinging to him like a desperate waterlogged possum.

  There could be a dramatic, detailed description here of our emergence from a watery maelstrom. But although we were truly endangered, it is enough to say that Willie brought us both out. So Willie was the hero of that day.

  After Willie and Kathleen had been with us a few years, one day Willie came and quietly told me he had ‘that bush sickness’.

  ‘Do you feel sick, does your head hurt?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said and lifted his shirt to show the white patches on his back that told of leprosy. I had never known an Aboriginal person to come forward and admit this disease, but then Willie had spent most of his life at the stations.

  He was taken to Darwin, where treatment was much advanced from the old days when years could be spent in isolation. In a few months he returned from the leprosarium. Although he’d been a teetotaller all his life, he came back a drinking man. The two cans of beer given each evening to the patients was his downfall, and alcohol of any kind became his weakness.

  Soon Kathleen was drinking too.

  At the Borroloola picnic race meeting, our house girls came hurrying to me. ‘Quick, Missus, Kathleen dancing!’

  Shy, gentle Kathleen—dancing? Never!

  But sure enough, when I went with the house girls there was Kathleen, loud and drunk, within a dense circle of male onlookers. I elbowed my way through and led Kathleen away just before the last ‘veil’ was cast.

  Kathleen became blind in her last years, and she and Willie have both since died. Did that son from another world care? Did he even know? If not, he is not to be thought of too harshly, for life had set them on very different paths.

  CHAPTER 59

  ‘Just Shoot the Bloody Thing’

  Race meetings, rodeos and social gatherings were all timed to take place when the children came home on school holidays.

  Fanny would get out her fishing lines and keep up a steady chatter about the children’s imminent arrival. Almost as the plane landed, shoes were discarded, then home to an extravagantly enthusiastic welcome from Fanny and everyone on the station, as well as dogs and other pets.

  Usually on return to school, there was some drama to relate in gripping detail to city friends—a buffalo attack, the race ball, a major fall from horseback—all crammed into two weeks of holidays.

  For Dominique, the race ball involved a new dress and everything special. Once she was dancing very decorously with Peter, our stock inspector. The dance floor was crowded, music slow, when Peter excused himself in a most courtly way, stepped aside and had a fight.

  Fisticuffs over, he stepped back on the floor and calmly continued to dance. All over in a few minutes, an opportunity presented to repay an old grievance—nothing like a bush dance to keep the party lively.

  A rodeo and gymkhana made our race a two-day meet, and Dominique won the open bullock ride there in 1977—much to the ire of the men in competition.

  Dominique got an even better story to take back to her school-friends on one holiday. ‘There’s an old bull buffalo in the paddock,’ said Ken. ‘We’ll go take a look. He’s a quiet old fella, so we won’t shoot him.’

  We drove off in the old, unreliable cabinless utility. Dominique was standing with Juno on the flat tray back. We drove up close to where the lumbering old buffalo with enormous horns was placidly feeding.

  Without warning he charged at high speed, his great horns giving a tip to the truck tray with every step. The dog flew off to attack and Dominique very nearly went with her, as she lost her grip on the collar and was on her back on the wheeling vehicle.

  The dog was jousting with the vicious old beast when Ken shot it. Not such a ‘quiet old fella’! We used its hide and beef; kept the horns as a reminder of Juno’s brave attack in our defence.

  Ken, like most countrymen, had high hopes his children would ride well. He declared to an unconvinced Dominique that his big stockhorse, Nipper, was an ‘old gentleman’ who would never throw a woman. Dominique mounted carefully, Nipper gave a great buck and my daughter made a spectacularly high, rather graceful exit from the saddle. ‘Old gentleman’ indeed.

  Sympathy on such occasions was always in short supply and likely to be along the lines of ‘What did you do to the poor old fella? Maybe you had perfume on, or something else that upset him.’

  Nipper was a champion camp-drafting horse, but there was that certain sly glint in his eye and he was always on the lookout for an easy win.

  Whenever I heard Ken say, ‘We’ll get a killer here at the station. I’ll bring the cattle up to the bauhinia tree at the gate,’ before riding off on horseback, my spirits would sink. This was my least favourite thing to assist with.

  Most of our killers were shot and butchered out on the run, then brought in to the beef-house or cold-room. But occasionally, usually during the wet season, we killed at the station. Someone on horseback would herd the cattle to a tree or some other place where a shooter could wait out of sight. If there was no one else available, I was the one up in the branches, rifle in hand.

  I was a good shot, but this was something I really disliked doing because orders, not always given in a good humour, could be tersely snapped out—something like, ‘Get the roan cow!’ Then, with cattle jostling about, the horse stepping nervously and no shot fired, there’d come an exasperated: ‘What in hell are you doing up there? Just shoot the bloody thing!’

  There was definitely an expectation that you would take one shot and you would not miss, and this could test the soundest of female nerves. For me, there was the anxious possibility that, with the milling about of cattle, I might not only miss the beast, but make the disastrous mistake of shooting the man on the horse.

  I cannot resist the boast that I never missed my kill, first shot, but praise for so ordinary a thing was never forthcoming. It was expected that ‘you just shot the bloody thing’.

  CHAPTER 60

  Our New Homestead

  Around this time we started to build a new homestead, as life in our little bush house remained sadly lacking in home comforts. Ken and the boys carted endless loads of rock to the building site, and Ken began the task of smashing it with a sledge hammer to create a base above the underlying seepage from the stony hill behind.

  John Sanders settled in for two years as resident carpenter to build the house and separate guest quarters. The kerosene refrigerators were retired and a new cold-room installed that could hold several sides of beef. An electricity generator arrived that, as far as I was concerned, was magically started with the touch of a light switch in the house; no more swinging that crank handle in the distant engine room. And our new bedroo
m was larger than our old bush house.

  From Thailand we imported impressively carved teak furniture. In keeping with the somewhat carefree services of the day, a large buffet marked ‘N.T. Australia’ sailed off to northern Tasmania. Some months later it arrived without drawers; later still, these made their appearance wrapped in newspaper on a cattle truck.

  Quite some years since we’d ridden into Borroloola from the Limmen with Hurtle, the old horse pads through bush were barely visible, rarely travelled, so a motor car was the way to go. We bought the first Toyota LandCruiser wagon sold in the Territory, leaving the old Blitz truck abandoned and rusting.

  A radio telephone was to be installed to replace outback radios on remote cattle stations. This was a long time before mobile phones and there was great excitement on the station.

  Workmen arrived from Darwin and put up a high aerial mast with ungainly wide stays to support it. Though it was anchored in the middle of my rose garden, we dared not voice a single complaint. Now we could inform friends and family that our telephone number was ‘Radio Telephone 1325’.

  There were some drawbacks, though. You couldn’t just pick up the radio telephone, ring a number and chatter away. Calls had to be booked and a long wait was usual. But we had a telephone link—wasn’t that something.

  The Civil Aviation Department cleared an airstrip for us, which served us very well except in extreme wet weather.

  Our homestead, directly under the highest escarpment, was difficult to spot from the air. There are a dozen tales to tell of lost aircraft in this part of the country before modern navigational aids came into general use.

  Late one day, alone on the station, I heard an aircraft circling. Presuming it was signalling to land, I drove over to the airstrip to find an American pilot in his small plane. He had flown across the Timor Sea to Darwin, refuelled there, and set off for the newly formed mining settlement of McArthur River.

  Flying from Darwin across Arnhem Land to Borroloola covers empty country that seems to go on forever. As you look down from an aircraft window, the continuing sameness of the landscape below can make you feel as though you are stationary in the air. The pilot felt completely lost and was desperate for somewhere to land when there, below him, was an airstrip with windsock flying gaily in the breeze. He couldn’t believe his eyes.

  I found him almost in tears with relief, and took him home, revived him with tea and gave him fuel for his plane. With maps spread out on my dining table he recovered his bearing and the confidence to fly on. ‘This day,’ he said, ‘will forever remain in my memory.’

  He had flown across the sea to land in a foreign city, passing over vast emptiness he could not have imagined, without the navigational aids he was accustomed to in his own country—then to take civilised afternoon tea under a flowering Poinciana in a beautiful garden, while looking out over a couple of thousand kilometres of empty Territory bush.

  He also spent an hour repairing a damaged refrigerator for a woman he had just met and would never see again.

  He took off then and, with a farewell dip over the house, faded into the darkening sky and into what is now just a tale to regale.

  I extended the garden ever larger as time went by, so it spread out over two and a half hectares.

  Each year the Katherine Show Society ran a competition for best Territory station garden, which many stations entered. The judges boarded a plane in Darwin, flew out and landed on the airstrips of the competing stations, and closely considered each garden before flying on to the next. Many, many kilometres were covered in this competition, as it had a widespread number of competitors.

  I won the competition for two consecutive years—I still display my trophies with pride—and Bauhinia became known for its splendid garden. Johnny Festing, the small son of Tas and Pat, referred to Bauhinia as ‘the bot-a-nickle gardens’.

  In the changing times of our later years on Bauhinia, visitors came from all over the world. They included Japanese businessmen whose names grace modern motor cars, and miners from mining groups in France, Italy and India, who prospected in the modern way with helicopters while living in elaborate camps.

  Biologists came too, seeking rare bush animals and birds. John Calaby, an expert in wildlife, was delighted to trap an especially interesting native mouse in my house.

  A large green frog who spent his days quietly settled in a moist place—a bathroom toilet bowl—provoked visitors’ interest too, especially as he was given to leaping at anything that dangled from above, which he would then cling to with little suction feet. Green frogs were a common sight in the toilets of bush households, but city visitors could be unnerved by an encounter.

  One young man visiting from the south couldn’t pronounce his R’s. He came urgently to tell me there was ‘a big gween fwog’ in his toilet. Henceforth, it was referred to in our family as ‘the fwog’. Even when removed and taken a long way off, the very next day Fwog would have settled right back in.

  Bauhinia was no longer an isolated outpost. We mustered all our cattle using helicopters—no one threw wild bulls from horseback now. With good roads, social life in the bush had improved, with camp drafts, rodeos, race meetings and rural shows.

  We sold Broadmere, a 2600-square-kilometre section of our station, which left Bauhinia a mere 1300 square kilometres.

  Kurt and Dominique have a closer relationship as adults than they did as children. They had quite different interests on the station, and although they both went mustering with the stock camp, they had their own ponies and dogs.

  Kurt was a true child of the bush. A very adventurous little boy, as bush children often were, he had endless country to explore, swimming holes, horses and other animals, and the companionable Aboriginals he had grown up with.

  Kurt fished with Fanny and hunted with Juno, who went everywhere with him. He would wield first spear, Juno would perform the coup de grace, then they’d bring home whatever the kill—goanna, snake—to give as a treat to the lubras to cook on their campfire.

  But sometimes he returned with live things to care for, including blue-tongue lizards, which settled down and raised successive families in the garden outside my bedroom door. They greeted the unwary with a wide blue mouth and angry hissing, and fared very well on eggs they stole from the fowl pen. I would rather they had remained in the bush.

  On one of his occasional visits to Bauhinia, my father brought Kurt the kind of scooter you mobilise by pushing off with one foot. Kurt took off right away.

  Not too long later, he returned on foot.

  ‘Where’s the scooter?’

  Kurt gazed off at the horizon, dreamily waved his arm in a wide, slow arc—as the very old Aboriginals did to describe distance—and said, ‘He bin loooongway.’

  In spite of much searching, the scooter was never seen again. Perhaps a thousand years hence it will be dug out of the earth by an eager anthropologist, who will exclaim in excitement at the juxtaposition of Aboriginal relics and a metallic wheeled contraption.

  As he grew older, Kurt developed persistent chest problems. The Flying Doctor treated him, as well as city paediatricians. When he had a particularly frightening attack, we bundled him into the car and drove the 1000 or so kilometres to Mount Isa Hospital nonstop.

  When Kurt went off to boarding school, our only cheering thought was that he’d have access to immediate medical attention. Within a few years he was free of his chest problems and maintained good health. He became a champion runner, excelling at the cross-country competitions, and continued to love hunting and fishing at home.

  Then he became interested in motorbikes, which proved not to be such a good thing. Out bush one evening, he crashed while chasing after a dingo. His leg was broken completely through. He spent all night in the bush, but managed to crawl to the road. Ken found him and the medical plane took him to hospital.

  Many of the young Territorian bush kids we knew have succeeded outstandingly in the cattle industry.

  My friend Peter Sherwi
n, a young drover, took Victoria River Downs cattle through the Murranji Track and in 1984 became the station’s owner. Victoria River Downs is the largest cattle station in the Territory and possibly the world.

  Handsome and charming, Sterling Buntine now possesses one of the Territory’s most prestigious cattle stations, as well as other properties. His name has been included in the list of Australia’s richest men. Can’t do better than that.

  Danny Groves shines as a well-regarded cattleman, successful in every aspect of cattle- and horse-work—a success story of the Territory kind.

  Johnno Keighran, in Ken’s opinion, is one of the best all-round cattlemen in the Territory. His father, Jack, was an old Territorian of my father’s time, and his mother was an Aboriginal woman of the Mara tribe. He mustered Bauhinia with Ken and is one of the few left to reminisce with about the ‘good old days’.

  Our Kurt Hammar is another example of a bush kid made good.

  And the list goes on.

  My good friend Vi grew up on the Mornington Island settlement. Her mother was Aboriginal. Vi married a European cattleman and they worked very hard together, happily to eventual success.

  Vi once said to me, ‘Jack, why do we live up here? We could go south, live an easy life down there in a cool climate, never look at a cow again.’

  ‘We couldn’t bear it, life would be too dull,’ I said. ‘We’ve shared some experiences in the bush together, haven’t we? One day I’ll write a book and you can read about us.’

  ‘God forbid,’ said Vi.

  Epilogue

  Recalling times past has been a sentimental, sometimes sad journey for me. The Territory, a stern country for those who long laboured there, a graveyard of broken dreams for many, has been generous to us. There was an enfolding warmth, a true sense of belonging, living in the old Territory.