Diamonds and Dust Read online

  DIAMONDS

  AND

  DUST

  DIAMONDS

  AND

  DUST

  SHERYL McCORRY

  with BRUCE A RUSSELL

  WARNING

  It is customary in some Aboriginal communities not to mention the names of or reproduce images of the recently deceased. Care and discretion should be exercised in using this book within Arnhem Land, central Australia and the Kimberley.

  First published 2008 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Shiralee Enterprises Pty Ltd 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  McCorry, Sheryl.

  Diamonds and dust

  ISBN: 9781405037754 (pbk.).

  1. McCorry, Sheryl. 2. Ranch managers –

  Western Australia – Kimberley – Biography.

  3. Ranches – Western Australia – Kimberley

  – Management. I. Title.

  636.01092

  Typeset in 11.5 Janson Text by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  These electronic editions published in 2008 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Diamonds and Dust

  Sheryl McCorry

  Adobe eReader format: 978-1-74198-107-0

  EPUB format: 978-1-74198-108-7

  Online format: 978-1-74198-110-0

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  For Kelly

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map of the Kimberley

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 Fresh Water Rapid Creek

  Chapter 2 School Days in Fannie Bay

  Chapter 3 Arnhem Land

  Chapter 4 Spirit Breeze

  Chapter 5 Broome Time

  Chapter 6 Oobagooma Station

  Chapter 7 My Kimberley Man

  Chapter 8 A Hundred in the Waterbag

  Chapter 9 Hide the Cattle Truck

  Chapter 10 Blina and Beyond

  Chapter 11 The Blackest Day of My Life

  Chapter 12 Finding a Future

  Chapter 13 Trouble in the Camp

  Chapter 14 Let It Rain

  Chapter 15 New Life, New Challenges

  Chapter 16 Mango Farm

  Chapter 17 Killer on the Loose

  Chapter 18 My Girls

  Chapter 19 Sadness and Solace

  Chapter 20 Trust in Them

  Chapter 21 The Darkest Dawn

  Chapter 22 Life Goes On

  Chapter 23 The Court Case

  Chapter 24 Fairfield

  Chapter 25 The End of a Marriage

  Chapter 26 Long Yard

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Sitting on the back veranda of my farmhouse, I am watching the evening sun fade behind the Porongurup Range near Mount Barker. Their soft curves outlined against the sky, the hills turn different shades of mauve and purple as they dim. In the foreground I see stands of jarrah trees amid grassy paddocks catching the last golden rays of another day. My cattle – black, fleshy Angus – dot the fields. Faintly I can smell woodsmoke.

  But in my mind I am not seeing miles, but years. My view stretches across the fields and back in time. I love these foothills so much because they remind me of the King Leopold Ranges, thousands of kilometres up north, which overlooked the great cattle stations where I lived and worked. The names come back: Louisa Downs, Bohemia Downs, Blina, Kilto, Kimberley Downs, Napier Downs, Fairfield. The cattle weren’t these glossy well-fed Angus, but tough shorthorns, kicking up bulldust in their tens of thousands. And the sniff of woodsmoke takes me 40 years back, to the crackling glow of a stock-camp fire in the Kimberley.

  I am content, this evening, on my small farm in the south-west of Western Australia – but as I look out over the land I travel back through layers of pain, chaos, heartbreaking loss and triumph, right back to when I was ‘Yumun’, or ‘Boss Missus’, as an Aboriginal elder would name me, of a million acres.

  As a teenager I used to write letters to my grandfather in London. Bruce Watson Wallis had once been editor of the West Australian, the only daily metropolitan newspaper in Perth, and was a descendant of the great Scottish warrior William Wallace. My grandfather Wallis encouraged me to write letters and keep diaries, which I did, never dreaming that I would one day be writing the story of my life.

  In my letters to him I wrote enthusiastically of the outback: its isolation, the smells and creatures, the parched earth the colour of oxblood. I told my grandfather about daily events and my wild ambitions. I told him how the Kimberley could be romantic and poetic, and how at times I had to abandon all civilised ways.

  My grandfather died, and I met a man with a swag and two dogs, much older than me and seemingly unattainable. I remember how he made me forget all my fears and helped me navigate my way through the Kimberley. My 20 years with him were filled with extremes of happiness and tragedy.

  Since those early letters to my grandfather, I have always written to heal myself, to cry away sadness as much as relate my encounters with the outback. Now I have lived the life that I barely thought possible when I was a girl writing to grandfather Wallis. I lived it, and I have written it. This is my story.

  CHAPTER 1

  Fresh Water Rapid Creek

  I’ll never forget the day Gran burned her bum on the toilet seat. It was 1955 and I was turning six the next day. Gran was taking a quick break from baking my birthday cake.

  The house we lived in was perched on the banks of Fresh Water Rapid Creek, a little over 30 kilometres south-east of Darwin. Spear grass and pandanus grew robustly during the wet season, bending and folding during the dry. The house seems huge in my memory. Built of unpainted timber with a plain corrugated-iron roof, it was full of louvres that looked out in every direction. Its centre was a kitchen shared by my mother and grandmother – our two families lived in separate parts of the house on either side of the kitchen, and Mum would feed the children early, before the adults came together in the kitchen for their meal.

  Ours was a big, happy, ramshackle household. My mother and father, my four brothers and I lived with Gran and Grandpa Bond, my maternal grandparents. Sometimes my mum’s brother Iva lived there too, as well as
Uncle Jaffa, a Thursday Islander who was the right-hand man in the road-construction gang of which Grandpa was the foreman. Grandpa Bond spent the war years in Darwin, keeping the roads and airstrips operational.

  The homestead was big enough for all of us. It had accommodated RAAF officers as a dormitory for their Darwin base during the Second World War, and as a result had six ‘burning furies’ all standing in a row: the toilets. The ‘burning furies’ were unpredictable and temperamental contraptions, constructed from 44-gallon drums with the bottom cut out and a hole in the top. You would dig a hole and sink half the drum into the ground, leaving enough out for the user to be reasonably comfortable sitting on the thing.

  A 44 dug into the earth was not the cleanest device, so a chimney pipe was set into the back of the drum for burning. We would screw up old papers or cardboard, add some kindling and a good dose of diesel fuel, drop in a match, and the burning fury would come to life, the flames chasing spiders and crows as the smoke rattled up through the chimney. The fires cleaned the toilets, and also kept out the redback spiders. I thought we were quite well off having so many toilets, and in between the burning days my brothers and I would have one each: what a luxury!

  This particular morning, Gran had asked Uncle Jaffa to light up the furies before she went down to the Aboriginal camp. The homestead was on a slight rise, and the camp was on a black soil flat about 200 metres down the hill, sheltered snugly among pandanus palms. There were usually 15 to 20 people living in the camp, some of them transient, some working in the house. When houses were built at that time, Aborigines who were already camping in the area were usually left alone or asked if they wanted to work at the house. Sometimes they moved away. When the RAAF were there the Aborigines on the property had moved, either to Darwin or to a government reserve 6 kilometres away, but since we’d been living there they had gradually re-established themselves. I always remember smelling and seeing the soft smoky haze from their camp fires hanging over the humpies. Something was bothering Gran, I could tell: probably trouble in the camp.

  Something else was bothering her more when she came out of the fury – she was rubbing her hands frantically across her burning backside and yelling at everyone in sight. This was something to behold, as Gran was normally rather regal and imperious, but she had an immediate problem. Her worries about the camp must have made her absent-minded. She’d gone to the toilet and forgotten that the furies were alight.

  The sight of her red and swollen backside scattered the old crows from their usual perch above the 44-gallon drums. Uncle Jaffa and I thought it best to keep out of sight; besides, we were laughing so hard we wouldn’t have been able to help anyway.

  My Grandpa Bond was English, a gentle, quiet man who carved decorative picture frames in his spare time. During the Depression, he had become an itinerant road worker because that was the only way he could support his large extended family. Gran, meanwhile, was Australian-born and lucky to be alive, considering what had happened to her grandmother, Fanny Wannery.

  Born in 1852, Fanny was the daughter of an Aboriginal woman and an English stockman from a sheep station in south-west Western Australia. Fanny’s mother was working in the station’s farmhouse when she fell pregnant to the stockman. Knowing that the baby would be picked up by the English station couple, Fanny’s mother left her close to the homestead, covered with leaves under a low scrubby salt bush.

  The couple who found Fanny reared her as their own. She grew up as an English girl, well spoken and educated, and later, in 1870, married an English gentleman named Ben Mason in Albany, south of Perth. Ben’s mother had worked in Buckingham Palace as a kitchen maid and as a boy he had played with Queen Victoria’s son, the future Edward VII. Arriving in Australia, Ben had jumped ship and changed his name to John.

  He and Fanny would have four children, the third of whom, Dinah, was my great-grandmother. Born in 1879, Dinah married a wealthy Adelaide farmer, Patrick Coleman. Patrick and his twin brother Daniel had brought the first draught horses across the Nullarbor to Perth. Along the way they met the Mason family on Balladonia station, near the South Australian–West Australian border. Patrick and Daniel married Dinah and her elder sister Harriet. Dinah and Patrick settled in coastal south-west Western Australia, living mainly in Hopetown and Ravensthorpe, where my gran, Eva Coleman, and my mother were born.

  At the end of that eventful day when Gran burned her bum, Mother put me into my old wire stretcher bed, pushed up the shutter to let in the breeze, kissed me goodnight on the cheek and went back to the kitchen where Gran, recovering from her injury, was putting the final touches to my baby doll cake.

  A pretty dark-haired doll stood in the centre, and the cake was her ball gown, the most beautiful I had ever seen. I was too thrilled to sleep; tomorrow was my birthday and I could touch the doll on my cake!

  Soon, the gentle breeze carried some camp fire smoke in through my window. I could hear the distant sound of sticks beating time with the vibrating hum of a didgeridoo. The barking of a dog underscored yells from camp children my own age. The excitement sent cold shivers through my body; nothing could keep me in bed. The smell of smoke and the continuous sounds pulsating from the didgeridoo were calling out to me: Come . . . come . . . come . . .

  I was sharing the bedroom with my three younger brothers – Bruce, Darryl and baby Eric. They were sleeping soundly. I slipped out through the open shutter and let myself fall a metre or so to the ground. I had done this many times during the day, so I was used to it, although this was the first time I had done it at night. Once on the ground, I hugged the shadows and sneaked down towards the corrugated-iron shower enclosure. Staying there to catch my breath and hope like hell Mum wouldn’t miss me, I gathered courage to creep down the slope to a stand of pandanus palms. I wove through the spiked and jagged leaves, giving no thought to the snakes or to the cuts I was copping.

  My steps crackled and crunched on the dry pandanus leaves, seeming to echo into the night. Had anyone heard me? Quivering, I crouched low, poking leaves out of my way to see what was going on.

  The camp was a collection of rough-hewn huts, made of bark and bushes layered up against a centre pole. Fires burned outside each hut. The moon was trying to shine through the smoky haze. Camp kids were running about and playing with the dogs. The gentle clapping of sticks underlined the didgeridoo’s hum. I could see some of the adult men being painted with the white and red ochre. I knew what this meant: there would be a corroboree tonight.

  Crouching among the pandanus leaves, I could hear the odd rustle. I told myself to stay calm. No matter what it was, it would not hurt me. Suddenly the sticks were playing louder; the heavy throb of the didgeridoo was building, and the people were starting to dance around the largest fire. The dance went on and on, but it didn’t feel peaceful, like those I had seen before. The men danced, stopped and shouted, and went around again. Their bodies were glistening in the heat of the fire. They began dancing harder, the didgeridoo belting out louder and louder, faster and faster. There were no women in sight, and the dogs and camp kids had disappeared. I felt very alone.

  The men were dancing at a wilder pace now, the didgeridoo cranking them up. Something was wrong – with no women or children in sight I realised I had better get out of there. I worked my way slowly backwards out of the pandanus, frightened, not wanting to be caught watching.

  Next morning we discovered that Mary Larrikai, the woman who helped Gran around the house and kept an eye on me for my mother, had run away that night. I began to cry. I wanted her back. She was part of the family, a second mother, my friend and teacher of bush culture. My birthday seemed ruined, and not even Gran’s beautiful cake could cheer me up.

  After a day of endless questions from me, Gran sat me down and explained that Mary had had the bone pointed at her. This meant, under Aboriginal law, that she was to be punished. It might have been a death sentence, administered by a deadly bush potion slipped into her food. After having had the bone pointed at them, some p
eople died without even being poisoned and others lingered on like the walking dead – the ritual was punishment enough. But what had Mary done? I was told she had been promised to a much older man, but she preferred a younger man from the wrong tribal group.

  In the weeks afterwards, life seemed to go on as usual, but one day Mum and Gran seemed to be overprotective of Gran’s bedroom. I sneaked inside and discovered Mary hidden under Gran’s bed. Gran had protected Mary; there was no way she could return to her people, who would surely have speared her. To this day I don’t know how Gran found her, but she certainly didn’t look like our Mary. She looked like a very sick, old woman, thin and gaunt, barely able to move. She looked like she was going to die and there were days when she very nearly did. Grandpa said this was the only time he ever had a woman camp under his bed, and I’m sure he felt uneasy about the situation. Gran moved Mary to the safety of the Bagot Compound, a government reserve about 10 kilometres away, which had a doctor and nursing staff. Mary never looked well again, but she survived, living out her final years in and around the compound. Never being allowed to go home to her family was, to my young ears, a very confusing and frightening story.

  One reason we lived with Gran and Grandpa Bond was that Dad was often away working. He was known as Snowy, because of his head of thick blond hair, and from an early age he loved the rugged and warm northern atmosphere of the outback. He had grown up in Cottesloe, Perth, but as a young man in 1939 he travelled north of Derby with a shearing team. He worked the shearing sheds moving across the Kimberley from Liveringa, Ellendale, Paradise and Blina stations, followed by stints in the sheds at Gascoyne as he returned home. After shearing he moved to Darwin and became one of the first long-haul owner-drivers, running his Leyland Hippo truck between Alice Springs and Darwin. They were long days and lonely nights with only a bottle of rum for company – Dad would later say that a little nip of OP rum in the evenings kept him driving throughout the night on the long and isolated Stuart Highway.