Love on Forrest Downs Read online

  Suddenly out of the scrub emerged army folk sporting wild-looking guns, demanding to search inside the vehicle and the boot too.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ I hollered. ‘I’ve got to get to bloody town!’

  I hopped out of the Mercedes, waving my arms about, while the army personnel searched for whatever it was they were looking for. Once they were satisfied that the vehicle was empty except for Sandy and myself, we were allowed to drive on.

  Feeling a little frustrated, I planted my foot on the Merc’s accelerator pedal and took off, spinning wheels and leaving dust behind. But it wasn’t long before I found out just who they were looking for.

  Not 500 metres further down the road a handsome young man, wearing only black boxer shorts and perspiring profusely, jumped out of the wattle scrub in front of me, coming terribly close to riding on my bonnet. The lad seemed anxious and in a hell of a hurry, and he asked me for a lift to town.

  I’m not one to pick up strangers on the roadside, so I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ Then, out of curiosity, I asked, ‘Who are you, anyway, and what are you doing here?’

  He didn’t answer that; instead he said that all he wanted was ‘a lift to town’.

  Sandy kept putting in her two bob’s worth by suggesting I give the gentleman a lift, saying he looked as if he was battling with the heat.

  ‘Are you a baddie?’ I said. His skin did look terribly white for someone who might have been working on a station, and in places that skin was red and sunburnt, so to me he looked suspiciously part of the army exercise instead of a worker I just didn’t recognise. But again he wouldn’t answer.

  It didn’t take much to work out that this young fellow’s strong, lean frame had caught Sandy’s eye, and by this time he was also clutching tightly to the rear passenger-door handle.

  ‘Can I get in?’ the stranger asked.

  ‘Are you a baddie?’ I said again. By now I strongly suspected that this nice-looking young gentleman had to be playing the part of the enemy in the army’s exercise, and I really didn’t want to get wrapped up in that. But no sooner had I finished speaking than Sandy told the stranger to jump in, and quick as a flash the young man was sitting up in the cool air of my Mercedes.

  I guess I was as cautious as any mother, and kept my eye on him in the rear-vision mirror while feeling very uneasy about the whole episode.

  Then, not a hundred metres from the Kimberley Downs front gate on the Gibb River Road, this stranger made the fatal mistake of winking at me.

  I slammed my foot on the brake pedal, flung open my door, pulled open the back passenger door and demanded, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ I was convinced he was the enemy.

  As the young stranger leapt out and galloped across the flat in front of us, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, as he was soon being chased by army men and their tanks.

  ‘Well, Sandy,’ I said, ‘would that be classed as sleeping with the enemy?’ And we continued on our way into Derby.

  There was another army exercise on the station, only this time our local Norforce boys – the North-West Mobile Force, deployed throughout northern Australia – were the enemy. The Norforce boys put it over the regular army personnel on Kimberley Downs by borrowing the station’s bull buggy and posing as my ‘donkey shooters’. They drove right into the regular army’s camp and took it over, proving how valuable local knowledge can be.

  There were some fun times during those army exercises. Once I was resting in the lounge room of the station homestead when I heard a strange noise coming from the cookhouse. It sounded like boots dragging on the cement of the kitchen floor so I pulled on my own boots in a hurry and immediately headed out to investigate. As I reached to pull open the kitchen door, a gun was pointed straight at me by a soldier.

  Considering I hadn’t fully woken up from my siesta, and wasn’t too sure what was going on, I automatically slammed the rifle out of my face. Then I walked past the soldier to the coolroom to get myself a jug of cold water – except I was stuck up again. By this stage I couldn’t help but feel I’d had just about enough of this army crap, even though I understood that the training was needed for our services and I did want to do my bit.

  Just then Terry and Mick, two of my larger-framed stockmen, walked into the cookhouse, looking tough and rugged.

  The devil in me said, ‘Hey, Terry and Mick, let’s catch this fella and any others that come around the homestead, and lock them up in the meat house. Let’s give the army a run for their money!’

  With this the soldier disappeared in a flash and I didn’t see any other soldiers that day. Later I learnt that while I had been resting the ‘enemy’ had apparently taken over the Kimberley Downs homestead, which was a lesson for me to be more vigilant. But I reckon siesta time was as good a time as any to take over a cattle station.

  *

  While my mind is still in the Kimberley I think I’ll tell you of the time Old Tom, the camp cook, gave me a run for my money.

  The camp at Kimberley Downs Station, which McCorry and I started managing in 1976, had had many good cooks over time. Narda and Pommy Elizabeth lasted the longest, while Old Tom – the East Kimberley man with red hair, a camouflage of freckles and a temper to boot – battled to do a three-month-long ‘dry’ stint before hitting the grog and wiping himself out completely.

  It was a Sunday morning, and it really felt like a Sunday – peaceful and reasonably quiet – but for Tom’s constant clanging and banging of the coolroom door. The more times he opened and closed the door, the louder the noise became, until eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  ‘Shut the f— up or I’ll have to choke you!’ I said jokingly. Not even my children were allowed to go around slamming doors.

  Tom was in the cookhouse and I was less than fifty metres across the lawn in the office of the big house, updating the station’s monthly report book. With my head down and tail up I kept at the reports until they were all completed, without realising that the noise from the kitchen area had died down. Come lunchtime there was no banging of the kitchen gong to call staff for their midday meal. In fact, the whole place had gone extremely quiet – too quiet for my liking.

  There was no sign of Tom or lunch, and I could see I would have to throw together a salad and cold meat for the men. I yanked open the coolroom door to search for meat and the makings of the salad, and would you believe it – there was Old Tom the cook, as pissed as a parrot. I doubt he even felt the cold as he straddled a side of frozen raw beef while sucking on a rum bottle. Honestly, Tom looked more like a buggered-up old rodeo rider than a camp cook.

  Once I’d got him out of the coolroom Tom and I had a cup of tea and a yarn about the camp cook’s job, and by the time we’d finished our mugs we both agreed he needed the grog more than the job, and I wished him well. I always felt it was far better to run a dry camp and a non-smoking cookhouse on the station, because that way I could keep an eye on the amount of cigarette ash and sweat that might fall into the bread mix or evening stew!

  It was after Tom’s time on Kimberley Downs had come to an end that Elizabeth, an attractive, very fit and tanned twenty-eight-year-old Englishwoman who was visiting Australia on a working holiday, called and asked if she could ‘give the cook’s job a go’. With her shining jet-black hair cut in a bob, she was also neat and tidy. Elizabeth had no camp cooking experience and had never been in the outback before. I thought this might turn out to be an experience for both of us, but I couldn’t help admiring her guts: before coming to Australia she had lived in the city of London all her life. Plus she was prepared to start immediately.

  Elizabeth got the job and did it well. I spent each morning giving her a helping hand with a basic menu until eventually she got the hang of it. While she did a fine job, she also came close to electrocuting herself once when she went to wash a hand-held electric mixer in a sinkful of soapy water. Thank goodness I was standing close by and was quick to flick off the switch, but we were both terribly shaken for the rest
of the day.

  On one of her better days Elizabeth spent her spare time sunbaking on the homestead lawn wearing an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny tangerine bikini, much to my amusement – because I thought that since she clearly believed there was a beach nearby I would have to act as a bloody lifeguard as well! It wasn’t long before that amusement turned to concern as the station stock boys started arriving on the front lawn, one by one, with the weakest of excuses. One of the boys, who had a regular insulin injection each morning, turned up to ask me for another injection – he was promptly sent on his way with ‘Tell me another one, Craig.’

  At that time the kids had a ‘pet’ freshwater crocodile, Dundee, who spent most of his time in the homestead waterhole, which was surrounded by wild pandanus palms and filled with beautiful flowering waterlilies. Once the wet season came around – between November and May – he got the wanders; I was forever throwing him out of my shower recess or listening to the stockmen complain when he took over theirs. But the person Dundee bothered the most was Elizabeth, particularly when he took to snoozing on the cool concrete floor under her workbench in the cookhouse.

  Eventually Elizabeth up and left – the combination of a crocodile in close proximity and near-electrocution seemed to have been too much for her to handle. Perhaps life on a station in the Kimberley wasn’t quite what she had been expecting. But Dundee stayed, which kept the kids happy – although Robby had a close call with Dundee once, when he fell off a wattle branch into the waterhole near the croc. The water was freezing cold and Robby got out of it at lightning speed – although it probably wasn’t just the temperature that made him hasty.

  Dundee remained with us for many years and outlasted many staff. He certainly kept all of us on our toes. Just to make sure no one was ever surprised to see him again, I bought a sign that said, ‘No swimming – crocodile’ and attached it to the boab tree near the waterhole. No visitor ever believed that the sign was real.

  *

  When McCorry and I bought Fairfield Station in 1993, I chose the place for a couple of reasons. At the time we were living next door on Kimberley Downs Station and had been there for seven years. I was managing the station and old McCorry was spending a lot of time off mustering. At one stage I’d suggested that we buy Kimberley Downs but McCorry had scoffed at the idea. By then we were at a point in our marriage where he seemed to resent everything I did. For the life of me I couldn’t work out why – maybe he resented me being successful at managing the properties we had lived and worked on – but I still loved the man I’d first spent time with on Oobagooma Station and I thought Fairfield would give us a chance at a fresh start.

  Fairfield was then in the hands of liquidators. It was big, half a million acres, and I’d been fascinated by it since as long ago as 1969, when I’d visited the place with my first husband, Chuck. I’d loved it at first sight, the small house in a beautiful valley surrounded by mountain ranges, and beyond the range some lovely plains. When I told McCorry that I wanted to go and inspect the place, he declined to come with me, suggesting that I do it myself. I could have taken this as a sign that he didn’t care, but deep down I knew it was his way of showing his total faith in me. Even though we’d been having hard times with each other, that faith hadn’t wavered. So, after looking over the place and determining that it was a good purchase, I put down a $40,000 deposit, determined to turn Fairfield into a steer depot for shipping to Asia, and Indonesia in particular.

  Even though it could seem as if we were isolated out on those stations, I always knew what was happening in the cattle market. I had to; otherwise, I couldn’t run the business properly. You always have to keep your eyes and ears open to all the changes and developments in the industry. Live cattle export to Indonesia had started in the 1980s, and this new business stream was an important outlet for our northern cattle. To most Australians it may sound like a long way to ship cattle, but Indonesia is fairly close to the northern parts of Western Australia. Around that time, Demco Meatworks in Broome had closed down, and after that the only other meatworks for our cattle were in Midland and a little place in Kununurra. My decision to look towards Asia wasn’t just a matter of seeing a new market opening up: there simply weren’t enough meatworks left in Western Australia, so I had to start looking overseas; otherwise, we’d have all this cattle and nowhere to send them. Not that I was unhappy about sending the beasts to Indonesia – I got the top price for them, which at the time was $1.35 a kilo. That made a nice change from what we got for the rogue bulls we’d mustered on Kimberley Downs – they were sold to America for mince.

  Fairfield had a cattle dip and good, solid yards, so we wouldn’t have to build either; it was also close enough to Broome that the cattle could be moved from there, and well situated for us to purchase steers and cattle from the east as well as the west. So I didn’t make the decision to purchase Fairfield purely because I loved the place. It had to be a viable business too.

  Now that I live in the Great Southern, I still think of the Kimberley every day but I’m pleased not to be running cattle there. I have friends up there who own cattle stations – one of them is on Napier Downs, which McCorry and I also ran at one time – and I feel for them because they have no outlets for their cattle. They just can’t sell the numbers they need to in order to make a decent living and keep their mortgages covered. These days Indonesia puts a weight limit of 350 kilograms on their live cattle; once the cattle go over that weight the growers have to start looking for other markets that don’t have the same restrictions. So now those farmers are sending the cattle to the south of Western Australia just so they can can sell them somewhere – it’s the only market left for them. I don’t begrudge them doing this, because I would be doing the same, but now our meatworks and butchers are knocking back Forrest Downs cattle, even when we have contracts with them, because they can pick up the northern cattle for a lower price. Not only that, but there’s a difference between the two types of cattle. The northern meat has no fat at all, and it’s darker and tougher. True, that northern meat was what I ate for most of my life and I never knew it was any different until I came down south. In fact, the smell of grain-fed meat – the southern meat – used to make me feel queasy: I couldn’t walk into a meat section in a supermarket without wanting to heave. I’m used to it now, though.

  All this moving around of cattle is messing with our markets, not just here in the south but generally, and I wonder about the future of our industry if all these practices continue. It’s not like our cattle here in the south can go south themselves – there’s nowhere left! So they get fat here and then we get penalised for the weight gain when we take them to the butchers. There just seem to be penalties left, right and centre for farmers. I don’t know what the solution is, but surely penalising the farmers isn’t the right thing to do.

  CHAPTER 6

  Difficult memories

  When McCorry and I separated, Robby, Leisha and I moved into a little flat in Derby. Readers of my first two books will remember Kristy, the youngest daughter of one of my cousins, who I raised as my own. Kristy stayed with McCorry after Leisha, Robby and I left Fairfield, the cattle station in the Kimberley that McCorry and I bought together.

  Kristy wiped me from her life after McCorry and I divorced. This is something I couldn’t bring myself to write about in earlier books; I tried not to even think about it back then.

  Early one morning McCorry and Kristy arrived at my flat in Derby. A darkness seemed to surround both of my visitors and my gut told me that they were after something – but what, I wondered? Kristy, who was sixteen at the time, hadn’t spoken to me since the children and I had moved out, and when McCorry visited the flat it was usually to try to accuse me of something or other.

  So on this particular day I felt very uneasy about their visit. I was home alone; Robby was at school and Leisha was working. McCorry sat at the kitchen table and proceeded to roll himself a cigarette from his tin of Log Cabin tobacco. Kristy stood about two metres direct
ly behind him and she was watching me intently.

  Once his cigarette was lit, McCorry said, ‘Kristy wants the horses.’

  ‘What horses are you talking about?’ I said.

  ‘The forty quarter horses,’ McCorry said.

  I found it hard to believe that McCorry would consider giving away these valuable horses, which weren’t even his to give away. But he had certainly been acting strangely of late and I thought this was just another example. However, I refused to be treated this way – certainly not by a man I had been married to for twenty-two years, or by my child, because to me that’s what Kristy was.

  ‘Kristy has no more right to the quarter horses than our own two children do,’ I told McCorry.

  Kristy became quite indignant then. She stepped up close behind McCorry, obviously to show that she was backing him up. She was quite a tough young girl, I’ll give her that. And now, with her standing so close and the intense pressure from McCorry, I felt vulnerable.

  Plucking up courage, and speaking with more confidence than I actually felt, I said, ‘The horses are mine. I bought them in my name, and they’ll go to Peter at Napier Downs Station as planned. If Kristy takes them she’ll be horse-stealing.’

  I reminded McCorry it was he who wanted to sell Fairfield Station, not me. Fairfield was the property I had flown over and across by helicopter; once I had seen it I had bought it immediately, hoping it would be the home for my family then and in the future.

  Heated words were bandied around, and if looks could have killed I’m sure that at that very moment I would have paid a high price for not giving in to Kristy and McCorry’s demands.

  In my mind, though, I could not see why Kristy should have more right to anything McCorry or I owned than Leisha or Robby did. After all that we had gone through as a family, this quest did not feel right. Leisha and Robby hadn’t asked for anything, so why was Kristy asking, I wondered.