Stars over Shiralee Read online

  Somewhere along the way, however, Penny’s farrier got hold of Little Blue. First, without my permission, he put her in foal to a quarter horse stallion. Then he sold her to a girl from an area north of Perth. Brian Singleton called the farrier and asked if he had proof of ownership. By the end of the conversation the farrier was apparently a little worried. ‘Who are you, a lawyer or something?’ he said.

  Brian laughed as he told me he replied, ‘I’m a QC.’ And when the farrier said, ‘What’s that?’, Singleton responded, ‘I reckon you best find out!’ Hearing that gave me a good laugh too.

  It turned out that the farrier was married to a young woman I had known since she was a small girl. As much as I wanted the return of Little Blue, I could not bring trouble on this young woman. With a heavy heart I let the matter drop.

  At about this time, Kristy moved and took up riding track for Bart Cummings’s racing stables. This was something she’d had her heart set on since she was a little girl. I was proud of her for sticking to her guns and following her dream.

  Shortly after this I decided to sell McCorry’s old place, Sleepy Hollow. I didn’t want to let it go, but none of the children wanted to work it or live there, so we sold it to some horse breeders. At the time, Leisha wanted a place of her own. McCorry had basically left it to me to decide how to settle his estate, but with the stipulation that I wasn’t to hand over large amounts of cash to the children. So we sank the money into bricks and mortar, and I bought her a house in Albany.

  The cows and calves on Sleepy Hollow were sold and Terry put his hand up to purchase our Blonde d’Aquitaine bull, promising to pay the price others had offered, which was $2400. This beautiful bull had produced magnificent calves on Sleepy Hollow, and we had him trucked to the Wildwood farms where he worked the following two seasons, still producing excellent calves. In his next season, however, the bull damaged a foot and Terry sent him to the meatworks. At this point he had still not paid for the bull, and at the end of the day he gave me only the meatworks’ price of $900 — and it took a lot of persistence and one hell of an argument to get that.

  My smooth-talking husband had prevailed once again — but not completely. If he had had his way, the Shiralee would have been sold as well, but I wasn’t having that. The proceeds would probably have vanished into the park, never to be seen again. Terry loved money and hated parting with it, to anyone. Once I entertained the wicked thought that if he died before I did, I would fill his grave with bucket loads of his money so that he could carry on partying, drinking and gambling to his heart’s content.

  One day Robby asked if he could move into an old caravan that was lying empty in the park. It wasn’t fit to rent: it was so old, the power shorted out when it rained, and it leaked like a sieve. I was worried he would be electrocuted, but Terry grudgingly let him use it. Robby was fifteen, and the tension between Terry and I made it so uncomfortable in our household that I thought he’d be better off in the caravan, even with the risk of it going up in smoke! Besides, like me, he had no privacy in the house. I fully understood his need for a place of his own.

  It wasn’t only the tension between his mother and stepfather that was difficult for my boy. Robby was working for Terry in the caravan park, and Terry delighted in playing mind games in front of the other workers and humiliating the underdog, which, I discovered all too late, turned out to be my son. Robby was reluctant to burden me with the hard time he was having with the men in my life, and I am still angry with myself for not seeing it much earlier and making a stand on my son’s behalf.

  There was one very bright spark in my life at this time — I picked up my mobile one day to a call from Leisha. ‘Hello Mum,’ she said, her voice bubbling with happiness. ‘I’ve got some news for you.’ There was silence for a moment, then she blurted out, ‘It’s good news, I’m pregnant!’ I hesitated for only a split second as I counted up the months that she had known Adam — four — then said the only words I could in response to her joy. ‘That’s wonderful, you’ve really made my day. I’m the happiest nan-to-be.’

  I was going to be a grandmother!

  In December Leisha had returned to the city, where she had met a Adam, country boy from Moora. He was a tradesman working for a big steel company, a very decent boy. They had moved in together pretty quickly, and now their first child was coming. I prayed it wasn’t too soon and that they’d treat each other well.

  ‘And I’m the happiest mum-to-be,’ she enthused. ‘I’m going to have the baby in a natural-birth clinic, no drugs, no interference; Adam will be there. It’s due in September. I’ve already booked the clinic. Now what about you, Mum, how are you?’ She finally paused for breath.

  I wasn’t going to tell her I’d been feeling flat because I was living in a shoebox at my age. And I didn’t want to pour cold water over her plans to have a drug-free birth, though the idea made me uneasy. I wanted every possible measure for her safety and wellbeing, and that of my grandchild.

  ‘I’m great,’ I lied, ‘and I’m so happy for you both. And I definitely want to be with you when the time comes.’

  Kristy wouldn’t be around; she had accepted a three-month job riding thoroughbreds in Malaysia. When that was over she would be relocating to Victoria to resume working for Bart Cummings.

  I was so pleased that the girls were happy, that they were fulfilling their dreams, but it also reminded me that somewhere along the line, I had lost sight of my own dreams. In fact, my life was turning into something of a nightmare.

  CHAPTER 6

  Things Turn Ugly

  It was 24 April 2001, Kelly’s birthday, and nearly twenty years since he had died. He would have been twenty-five, and I still felt his loss so painfully that it could have been yesterday. This year the contrast between that time on Louisa Downs when he was a bright five year old, and the life I was living now, hit me hard. My new marriage wasn’t remotely what I’d hoped it would be, and I was no longer sure that anything could be salvaged.

  When Terry was under pressure I copped the rough end of his moods. One humid April night it was suffocatingly hot and I turned the bedroom fan on very low. I’d have turned it up higher, except that Terry was strangely intolerant of moving air. The room was so small there wasn’t room to swing a cat, and the only window was bolted shut.

  Suddenly Terry was standing beside the bed ripping off the sheets and covers and throwing them to the floor, yelling fucking this and fucking that — I felt sick with anxiety trying to make sense out of what was going on. I sat bolt upright in bed, saying, ‘What’s happening Terry, what’s wrong?’ but he didn’t answer me, he seemed out of control, he was so angry.

  He slammed around the foot of the bed, shut the fan off, then got back into bed and turned his back to me. Soon he was snoring.

  I sat there wondering whether it was my putting on the fan that had made him so angry. It looked like he was throwing a tantrum, but if this was just a childish outburst of temper, I wondered what might be next. I was afraid to move, fearful of what might happen if he woke again. I listened to Terry’s heavy breathing until it sounded like he was in a deep sleep, then I moved quietly from the bed and crept out to the tiny spare room that Robby had recently vacated. It was small and dusty, but there was a bed in it and a lock on the door. I locked myself in, opened the curtains — the window was bolted shut — and lay on the bed, willing my breathing to settle back to normal.

  As the early morning light came through the gap in the curtains I battled to find the energy to get out of bed. I was not just exhausted from a disturbed night — for the first time in my life, including the worst effects of the radiotherapy, I felt no motivation to get up and meet the day. That upset me more than Terry’s bizarre behaviour.

  I did get up, and when I saw him I wondered if it had even registered with him that I hadn’t slept the night with him. If it had, he made no comment, and I made none either. But later that day I said to him I needed my own bedroom, since we had completely different needs for air a
nd it was suffocating for me in his bedroom. I wanted to spruce up the spare room and use it as a little den where I could entertain my friends, but he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Stay in our bedroom,’ he said quietly, ‘we can make it work.’

  ‘Terry, can’t you see I have no space, no privacy? You married a grown woman, not a child.’ He looked at me as though I was speaking another language. ‘And on top of all that, I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night ever again to you swearing at me and ranting and raving. You’ve got a foul temper.’ Again, he just looked at me as if I was the one who’d lost it. And he refused to budge. If I wanted to do anything with the little room, there’d be no help from him.

  What was I to make of this? On one hand he seemed to despise me, and on the other hand he couldn’t bear it if I were away from him. He didn’t want to talk to me, but if anyone was with me he would be constantly in and out, needing to discuss this or that. With the benefit of counselling I now know that this is a common pattern in abusive partners, but at the time it made no sense to me at all. Some men have to keep you on edge. With McCorry, once he became depressed, I was often walking on eggshells, not wanting to upset him, but with Terry it was so unpredictable that the most ordinary thing might set him off. I don’t know if he did it on purpose, but the effect was to keep me on edge all the time.

  He seemed to need people around him all the time. Most nights he would be partying with whoever would join him, mixing red wine with shooters and rum. That was a lethal combination, and when his friends were gone he began more and more often to turn on me.

  Perhaps only someone who has been through a similar situation can understand why I didn’t just pack up and take my boy back to my beloved Shiralee. At the time, I didn’t understand it myself. It was as if I’d lost my will, my motivation. It was no longer a case of wanting to prove my sticking power to myself or my parents; now I simply didn’t have the courage to leave. My confidence had vanished so fast, I didn’t know what had happened to me. I was like a lemming heading for the cliff, passing sign after sign saying, ‘Wrong Way, Go Back!’

  I didn’t know myself any more. I’d lost the strong and proud person I’d been when I was managing stations in the Kimberley. Even though I owned my own farm and had a good sum of money invested, something made it impossible for me to leave my husband. I really didn’t believe I’d survive alone. I was frightened, though if you’d asked me what I was frightened of, I wouldn’t have been able to say.

  My recent brush with cancer was probably a factor in my depressed state. And feeling so low, it was not so easy to maintain my faith that I would remain cancer free. I wanted to be cared for, loved, nurtured, and the man I married was running in the opposite direction. If anything, my health was a source of irritation to him, as if he resented the fact that I was due some TLC. I was doing my best to take some of the weight off his shoulders in running the park, to make him happier; I tried to solve his problems, fix things where I could; if I saw something that needed doing, I’d step in. I just wished he wanted to support me too.

  And the cancer medication wasn’t helping. I had been taking Tamoxifen for eighteen months but now was suffering stomach pain and sometimes internal bleeding. Dr Ingram gave me a new prescription, for Femara, and the pains and bleeding stopped and slowly I began to feel better.

  But in the meantime, I felt vulnerable and frightened and my only real happiness was to receive a phone call from my children or parents — and if it was on the office phone, Terry would be standing over me while I tried to talk, urging me to finish up quickly so he could make some important business calls. He wouldn’t put in a private line for me.

  If I ever challenged him, even mildly, he would invariably respond by challenging my sanity. ‘You’re mad in the head!’ he’d say. ‘You should get out of here, and don’t come back until your head is right.’ No one had ever said anything like that to me before. I wish I could have just laughed at such a crazy line, but I couldn’t. Not then, even though I knew he’d used the same line on his first wife. I had never met Terry’s first wife, but I didn’t believe his nasty comments about her. He constantly put her down to me and told me how much he disliked her. Once he blurted out that she had taken out two restraining orders against him, something he seemed to find quite amusing. Warning bells should have rung for me then. Looking back on it as I write, I feel my temperature rise in fury that he should have tried to convince me I was mad — and that I should have fallen for it.

  It was around this time that I was seeing my doctor about the Tamoxifen, and he asked me, ‘Are you suffering any problems in your marriage?’ I couldn’t bring myself to answer him. But I wondered how he knew. It hurt my pride to think he could tell just by looking at me. If he knew, how many others did too?

  I remembered myself as such a strong and competent person, but I didn’t know, and it had never occurred to me, that if someone is constantly telling you there’s something wrong with you, then a part of you actually starts to believe it. Maybe if I’d talked to a friend about what was happening I would have realised this, but there was no way I could tell anyone, friends or family. I didn’t want people thinking I was some pathetic victim. I didn’t see myself that way at all.

  I had confided in my old friend Joanne, and my mother. But then I had to deal with the fact that they worried terribly for me and for Robby, and so it was better to try to convince them that I was all right. When Joanne or any of my brothers dropped in, we all acted as if everything was fine. I would watch this happening, and it was almost as if we were in a play, acting roles, keeping everything nice. I didn’t know what else to do.

  When it came to arguments, I stood up for myself less and less. Arguing back only made him worse, and it never brought me anything I wanted. One night I was standing my ground about his drinking — we were about to go out and I couldn’t bear the thought of another evening ruined by his overindulgence, getting loud and foul-mouthed — when he raised a clenched fist and said, ‘You need a kick up the arsehole, should’ve had one when you were a kid.’ I hated the gutter way he spoke, but this was something else. I had never felt physically threatened by him before.

  Strangely, and in spite of all this, I often felt a kind of sympathy and sadness for Terry; his father and brother had both died fairly recently and I think he felt a huge weight of responsibility for keeping the family farms and the newly purchased caravan park out of the hands of the bank. In this he was successful, and it is probably a large part of the reason he was so mean about money with me.

  During this low time of my life I found joy where I could. My greatest pleasures have always been in the simple things in life, like crabbing. My younger brother Eric would take me to his secret spot to catch the huge mud crabs that thrive in the mangroves around the Broome coastline. We would collect our crab hooks and buckets — dingo flour drums with handles made from fence wire — and off we’d go. The tide would be out and we’d trudge through oozing, knee-deep mud that constantly fought to suck your boots down with each step you made. The sun would have enough heat in it to boil a billy, but gentle sea breezes would keep our sweating bodies cool.

  One day we were making our way through the mangroves, covered from head to toe in grey mud, my flour drum feeling like a lead weight from the three big crabs it carried. Eric was in front and sang out, ‘Keep your eyes open, a huge croc has been here.’ He was pointing out the tracks to me. I thought he could have picked a better place and time to tell me this. I clung tightly to a mangrove tree and had a good look around, noting that the tide had turned and the sea was rushing in. This would be a terrible place to come face to face with a big croc in its own territory. I’ve lived in the north all my life and have nothing but a healthy respect for the saltwater crocodile, so that dampened my enthusiasm for catching any more crabs that day.

  When I was a girl in Arnhem Land one of the family’s favourite fishing haunts was Dalywoi Bay near Cape Arnhem. It was a picture postcard kind of place with its clean white
sand, aqua blue water and one sturdy casuarina. Every time you dropped a line you caught a fish, and at that time we were the only white family on the bauxite plateau other than the people at the Yirrkala mission. The isolation made it especially tranquil.

  In the tidal river where we fished, a gigantic boulder rose out of the water. One day we motored out to our favourite spot as usual, my father at the outboard motor, my brother Bruce in charge of the anchor at the bow, and Eric and I sitting in the middle. No sooner had Dad stopped the motor and Bruce dropped anchor alongside the rock than out of the water lunged a four metre croc, sending our aluminium dinghy into a dangerous roll. Despite our shock and terror, we remained still and silent while the water around us was in turmoil. I was sixteen, but it never entered my head to start screaming or crying: it was something we just had to deal with, and as calmly as possible. Eric was ten, and appeared to show no fear at all, but I whispered to him, ‘Hang on to the seat, Dad will deal with it.’

  I watched my father level his rifle and fire as the giant salty rose high out of the water for its second assault. It seemed unreal, it was so huge. Fear gripped my body and the blast from the gun deafened me, but my faith in my father shot up even higher. In my young eyes, he was our saviour. I felt that nothing really terrible could happen to my brothers and me as long as Dad was by our side.

  Moving quickly, Dad threw a rope around the beast and strapped it to the side of the dinghy, started up the outboard motor and towed the croc to shore. We needed the power of the Landrover to tow it up onto the beach and there Dad skinned it, planning to distribute the meat among the Aboriginal people camped around the bay. We kids were given a leg each to hold while Dad did the dirty work. Occasionally his knife hit a not so dead nerve, and the tail would give an almighty whack, sending me flying up the beach, convinced the croc was coming back to life.