Stars over Shiralee

  STARS

  OVER

  SHIRALEE

  Also by Sheryl McCorry

  Diamonds and Dust

  STARS

  OVER

  SHIRALEE

  SHERYL McCORRY

  with JANET BLAGG

  Some of the people in this book have had their names changed to protect their identities.

  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 2009 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Shiralee Enterprises Pty Ltd 2009

  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, 1949–

  Stars over Shiralee / Sheryl McCorry.

  9781405039604 (pbk.)

  McCorry, Sheryl, 1949–Ranch managers—Western Australia—Kimberley—Biography. Ranches—Western Australia—Kimberley—Management. Breast—Cancer—Patients—Western Australia—Kimberley—Biography.

  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 2009 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.

  Stars over Shiralee

  Sheryl McCorry

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  978-1-74198-664-8

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  978-1-74198-776-8

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  978-1-74198-720-1

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  978-1-74198-608-2

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

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  For Leisha and Robby

  The best and most beautiful things in the world

  cannot be seen or even touched. They must

  be felt with the heart.

  — Helen Keller

  Contents

  Prologue: Autumn 1999

  Chapter 1 The End of an Era

  Chapter 2 The Importance of a Holden Statesman

  Chapter 3 My Wedding is Upstaged

  Chapter 4 Anstey House

  Chapter 5 Back to the Shiralee

  Chapter 6 Things Turn Ugly

  Chapter 7 Lift the Bloody Plank Yourself

  Chapter 8 A Dark Shadow

  Chapter 9 Back to the Shiralee Again

  Chapter 10 Hitting the Road

  Chapter 11 Bad to Worse

  Chapter 12 The Wind Beneath my Wings

  Chapter 13 Writing the Story of my Life

  Chapter 14 Reclaiming Wildwood

  Chapter 15 More Homecomings

  Chapter 16 Someone Wants my Story

  Chapter 17 Like Mother like Daughter

  Chapter 18 The Nightmare is Over

  Chapter 19 Stars over Shiralee

  Chapter 20 Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  Autumn 1999

  Squawking mobs of black cockatoos circle the ghost gums by the shed before settling themselves in the branches, their agitated screeching loud and piercing. I’m standing alone in the brown paddock, staring up at them blankly. A lazy breeze swirls around me — it ruffles the autumn leaves at my feet, but chills me to the bone. I feel cold and lonely. Some kind of change must be on the way!

  I have lived in the southern country of Western Australia since 1996 — long enough to realise the elements are preparing me for winter — but my mind has a deeper pattern etched in it. I shut my eyes and see the reds and ochres of my beloved Kimberley, many thousands of kilometres away to the north, the rugged country strewn with sprawling cattle stations, many of them covering more than a million acres. I see brolgas dance on the claypan flat by the old stockyards, where the palette is blended with the many shades of pindan dust that drift above a stockyard full of cattle.

  Napier and Kimberley Downs, Louisa and Bohemia, Oobagooma, Blina, Ellendale, Mount Hart and Silent Grove, Fairfield and Kilto — all stations I once managed or owned with my husband Bob McCorry and the help of a loyal Aboriginal stock camp. I was their yumun — ‘boss missus’, they called me — before we sold up and moved the family to the southern country. But there is no going back. McCorry always drilled that into me: we can never go back.

  But McCorry is dead now. Dead, I have to keep reminding myself. He will never again turn up at the homestead with guidance or advice, or to reassure me that I am still travelling in the right direction with my plans for the land, as he did all those years our lives were entwined. The deep feeling of security, of knowing McCorry was there for the children and for me, is gone. He is gone. I can’t get used to it; the fact of his death keeps tripping me up, even though we’d been divorced three years when he died.

  I had been married to this tough old cattleman for twenty-two years. A deep-thinking man of few words, he suffered serious depression for most of those years, and for many of them I felt I had suffered with him too. These were tough years of hard work in primitive conditions and fierce heat while we were trying to resurrect a couple of dilapidated Kimberley cattle stations for the Australian Land and Cattle Company, which was always in a state of financial struggle, and at the same time trying to keep the Burke Labor government from resuming the properties.

  In the seventies we had found cases of TB amongst our cattle, but it was the mid-eighties before the government got serious about it. They threatened to take over the properties if the TB wasn’t eliminated. Australian Land and Cattle managed to retain Kimberley Downs and Napier Downs, and with me as manager we went on to complete one of the largest, and most successful, TB eradication programs in the history of the west Kimberley.

  Through all these challenges, which included bringing up a young and extended family in the outback, I’d long steeled myself not to take my eye from the faint glow at the end of the tunnel. There were deep personal tragedies for McCorry and I, which left us mentally and emotionally broken, but I always kept myself moving forward. For good or for bad, that was the only way I knew, and overall, when I look back, they were wonderful years.

  Since I was a little girl, my dream had been to live on a cattle station in the Kimberley: whether I owned it, worked it or managed it didn’t matter. After years of mustering and managing othe
r people’s properties, McCorry and I bought first Kilto station in 1986, then Fairfield in 1993. I stayed on at Kimberley and Napier Downs stations, managing them, while McCorry moved between Kilto and Fairfield and took whatever contract mustering work he could get. Our lives became more and more separate, and it seemed there were ways in which McCorry resented my independent initiative. Even so, the long history between us helped us stick together through difficult situations. But by the end of 1994 I was exhausted by the constant dramas of our life together. McCorry suffered severe physical pain from various injuries sustained over the years, and for as long as I could remember he had been prone to depression and had no energy for working through things with me. In 1995 I gave up the effort myself. We were divorced and I signed the papers to sell Fairfield so we could all move on.

  For the first time in my life I felt really lost. I was forty-six and I’d been with McCorry half my life. All my adult life.

  Although we were no longer married, the deep bond between us was never truly broken and we shared a lot over the next three years. In 1996 we each bought properties in the south-west that were practically within cooee of each other. And we never stopped looking out for one another. I could always count on McCorry for considered, cool-headed advice.

  After my divorce, I became involved with a younger man for a while. It felt wonderful to be desired, but still, it was probably not one of my better calls, and it was over before long. But now, with McCorry gone, there was another man knocking at my door. He seemed eminently suitable, and in fact he wanted me to marry him. But I had only known him for a few months; we scarcely knew each other. What was I to say?

  I wished I could ask McCorry. I’d faced a lot of difficult things in my life, but losing him was not something I was prepared for. No wonder, as I stood in that chill autumn breeze in 1999, I felt cold and lonely. Some kind of change was certainly on its way.

  I need to go back and start at the time of his death, though, because that is where this story begins.

  CHAPTER 1

  The End of an Era

  On 3 October 1998 I was watching the nurses at St John of God in the Perth suburb of Subiaco push McCorry’s bed down the quiet hospital corridor. It was a chilling sight with all the tubes, bottles and bags connected to it. They put the bed in the observation room directly opposite the nurses’s station, so I should have realised his time with us was coming to an end. He had cancer of the pancreas and liver — diagnosed only a week earlier — and his skin was the colour of cold campfire ashes. Only two days later, on 5 October, our daughter Leisha’s twenty-first birthday, McCorry passed away.

  Leisha and Robby were there as the tough old bushy left our world, leaving me with the three words I had waited twenty long years to hear: ‘I love you.’ Words he had battled to express to the children or to me.

  I sat by his bedside watching the light that filtered through the trees outside dancing across his body. For the sake of the children I tried to pull myself together, but I trembled with the very real fear of being alone, of no longer having the old man to back me. I wasn’t ready for him to die.

  ‘Not now McCorry!’ is what I wanted to scream. ‘I’m not ready yet.’ And neither was he. He was always so full of strategies and schemes and who knows what else. He still had plenty of plans to make. I felt like screaming and pummelling his chest.

  Only days before McCorry had had the strength to refuse a bedpan. He had said to me years ago that he would die before he would ever consent to such an indignity. And since that old cattleman could get me to do just about anything, somehow, with a spider web of tangled tubes, bags and bottles, I managed to walk him to the lavatory and sit him on the throne.

  He was falling forwards, and I was kneeling in front of the pedestal trying to keep him balanced, when I felt myself start to black out. A wave of heat and nausea came over me and I woke up in a chair beside McCorry’s bedside to see a nurse in deep concentration taking his pulse and studying her watch. He was a deep grey colour and very still. I jolted awake and screamed, ‘Wake up, wake up Bob!’ Moments later a bit of colour seeped back into his frail body and his eyes slowly opened. They were vacant, there was no consciousness there, but he was still with me. I breathed again, grateful and relieved that my old cattleman was still with me.

  After that, his pain only worsened, and I realised I should not have called him back to me. I had panicked, when I should have let him go. I was only thinking of myself.

  Now the room was quiet; the machines and life-support equipment had been turned off. Thirteen-year-old Robby sat by his father’s side, looking as if he was trying to take in some impossible fact. There were no tears for him at this point, but soon Leisha’s heart-racking sobs and cries of ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ echoed around the hospital. Before long she had the nurses and other staff in tears. McCorry was liked by all who had attended him for that quiet, fierce dignity of his. I sat silently holding his callused old hand, travelling in my mind back to Oobagooma station, the place where it had all really started for us, so long ago now. Back there we had nothing more than a swag and a couple of working dogs each, but we were happy. The wind of the Kimberley blew around us and kept our marriage fresh for a long time. We could see each other against a wide blue sky; back then the thunder heads were way in the distance.

  After McCorry’s death my mother and father moved down from Northampton to stay with me and the children for a while on the Shiralee. I was grateful for their gentle and stoic comfort and support. Mother reminded me of the things McCorry would have expected of me. They were of the same era. ‘Get it together, girl, you’re tougher than that,’ he had drilled into me often enough when the going got rough. It was true. I knew deep inside me it was time to saddle up and get on with our lives.

  The Shiralee was crying out for attention: there was fertiliser to be spread and fences that needed fixing. When I bought the farm it was run down, the old wooden cattle yards a potential death trap — not that this had bothered me, it was part of the appeal. Something I could get my teeth into and make my own.

  After leaving the Kimberley I had travelled through the southernmost part of Western Australia in search of a farm to call home. I felt a deep connection to this part of the world, and made Albany my base as I visited properties.

  One Sunday afternoon early in 1996 I was driving in the Narrikup area, a few kilometres south of Mount Barker. I had been visiting McCorry at his place, Sleepy Hollow. He’d only been there six months; in fact, he’d followed me into the area, even though he had found his place first.

  I followed For Sale signs up a little gravel road, around a bend to a slight rise, to spot a final For Sale sign placed in front of a dilapidated gateway. It was obvious the white ants had had a field day with the wooden post-and-rail entrance to the farm. Rails were broken and posts nonexistent among the kikuyu-covered shambles.

  Suddenly it was as if a light bulb was turned on in my head, I saw past the falling-down front entrance, past the front paddocks that had been ‘flogged to the boards’ by sheep, past the neglected and broken-down fences, and on to the deep purples of the Porongurup Range beyond, the majestic backdrop to this quiet farm.

  Warmth flowed through my body. I had found a home for myself and the children. There was no doubt in me. The ranges beyond reminded me of the Napier and King Leopold ranges in the west Kimberley. They had been a constant source of beauty during my life up there.

  Sitting in my Landcruiser I gazed about the property and wondered if the orange-tiled house at the end of the long tree-lined driveway would be livable. It didn’t matter. If it wasn’t, I would live in the corrugated-iron shed partly hidden among the gum trees while I built a house. I just had to have this place, no matter what.

  Thirty days later it was mine. From the beginning, in my mind, I called it the Shiralee, a name I have loved since I first heard it. The name Shiralee means ‘swag’, which appealed to me. But it also has another meaning — ‘toil’ — which also felt appropriate. I had liv
ed in many homesteads over the years. Now I was going to put down my swag and stay.

  Within six weeks the homestead was gutted, painted, carpeted and I had new curtains and blinds hung. I cut roses and lavender from the overgrown garden and filled crystal vases for the house. I watched the little wrens find the confidence to patronise my new bird feeders.

  And my dreams spread through the paddocks and beyond. I was ambitious. From planning to rebuild fences and gateways, I decided I needed a new cattle yard — the panels and posts were buggered from years of wear and tear and had never been replaced. I wanted to seed the entire farm for better pasture suitable for good quality Angus cattle to graze upon. My dreams didn’t stop there. I would purchase the farms around the Shiralee, making it large enough to support a decent number of cattle. I really wanted this to be a viable enterprise for me and my family.

  Two years on, it was definitely a work in progress and, as on all farms, there was always plenty to do. Now I planned to purchase some weaner steers from the Albany and Mount Barker saleyards. A weaner is a young beast no longer suckling from its mother, and a steer is a young castrated bull — all young bulls are castrated, except for those saved for breeding.

  I had decided to change from breeding calves to fattening steers for market after several near disasters where I ended up having to physically pull calves from the cows. In the meantime, I was in transition and had paddocks full of cows due to calve any day. These big fat Angus cows bore no resemblance to the rangy shorthorns I was used to dealing with in the north. One day I discovered a heavy heifer with her tail raised and the birth sack protruding. The young mum was showing signs of distress and I knew I had to pull the damned calf out somehow.

  This was a new experience for me, something I’d never had to do in the Kimberley, where the cows calved without difficulty. I needed to yard her up if I was going to be able to help her, but I could find only horse panels saved from the girls’ rodeo days. These I placed in the narrow passageway in the old sheep yard by the shed. I gently moved the heifer up into my temporary cattle race, jamming an old wooden fence post in front of her and another behind to keep her steady.