Stars over Shiralee Read online

  Now I had to work out how to get the calf out. Luckily, I had recently invested in a set of shiny new calf-pulling chains, so I went and fetched these. The calf’s front legs had broken the birth sack and were now protruding, and I wrapped the chains around the hooves. However, it was a big calf and I couldn’t find the necessary strength to pull the bugger out — and my Angus mother wasn’t helping me at all. I thought, For god’s sake, help me out here, this isn’t a private hospital! I was starting to feel a bit desperate. It crossed my mind to call the vet from Mount Barker but I hesitated as I imagined my profit going out the window in vet fees.

  I ventured into my shed again to see if anything inspired me in there, and returned with the old fence strainers. I figured if they could pull up a fence they could pull a calf out of a cow. I can’t tell you how pleased I was that the heifer didn’t kick up sheer hell and try to bolt at the sight of them. I certainly would have! I wrapped the strainers around the calf’s protruding hooves and looked towards the heavens for help, thinking, Here goes. Then I gently jacked the calf out of the heifer without any further problems. It was a beautiful big male calf. I threw him over a yard rail to pummel the mucus out and watched him take his first breath.

  I spent the rest of the calving season pulling calves. The trusty fence strainers were a blessing, and I always used them when I didn’t have Robby around to help me.

  *

  After McCorry’s funeral, the first big project was to build the new cattle yard. I decided on Witnells panels: I’d used them in the Kimberley and found them exceptionally tough and easy to work with. In no time I drew up a new yard plan and faxed it through to Perth. Witnells promptly built the panels and trucked them down to the Shiralee. Kristy, Robby and I dug the post holes and mixed cement in the wheelbarrow with a hoe. The panels were cemented into the ground and we soon had a strong, safe working yard to be proud of.

  Leisha was living in the city at this time but would come home for a visit every fortnight. Kristy (who is the daughter of my cousin Mary but has been a part of my family since she was four) was nineteen and living at home with me on the farm. She had a job exercising thoroughbred horses for a trainer in Redmond, which was on the way to Albany.

  Robby was at home with me too. On school days he rode his farm bike out to the main road to get the school bus into Mount Barker. Robby loved being on the farm and was a great help to me with the cattle. He spent his weekends trapping rabbits which seemed to thrive between our back paddock and a nature reserve.

  I could understand his passion for trapping. My father had taught me and my younger brother Bruce how to trap dingoes when they were coming into our camp on the bauxite plateau in Arnhem Land — we worried they would attack our little silky terrier Scruffy, who was already favouring a hind leg from a dingo nip. Bruce and I decided to set our trap on the path that ran by the rubbish dump. I disguised the loop of the snare on the track with light branches while Bruce set the remaining wire up in the overhanging tree. ‘We can’t miss,’ I said to Bruce, ‘we’ll get a dingo for sure.’ We headed back for the camp and home and never gave our dingo trap another thought.

  The following afternoon I heard my father calling out to my mother with some urgency. Dad was at the rubbish dump tangled in the noose — he’d very nearly hanged himself in our dingo trap! Bloody hell, I thought, and ran to get Bruce. We waited around the camp long enough to see that Dad was okay, then disappeared to the billabong to give him time to cool off. Later that evening I overheard Dad telling Mum he couldn’t believe how well the trap was set up. He had taught us well! I decided I’d better ask Robby not to set his rabbit traps where he might just catch his mum.

  Everyone needs a home, a place where they feel safe and at ease, and the Shiralee was our home, from the undulating green paddocks to the old farmhouse with its white pillars and old-world charm. When the lounge-room fire was burning, the warmth spread throughout the house, to the furthest of the four bedrooms. I had filled the house with a mixture of Italianate and antique furniture and hung the walls with oil paintings of Kimberley stockmen and indigenous elders. Antique vases were crowded next to framed photographs of the children on horseback. The house was packed with warmth and memories, and the children were surrounded by things they were long familiar with.

  Spring was in the air and the southern country never looked more beautiful. Rolling green hills were dotted with shiny contented cattle, while reserves of native bush were bursting with glorious colour. The air was alive with bird calls, all music to my ears, but my favourite was the little blue wren that came tap-tap-tapping on my bedroom windowsill each morning to join me for my breakfast pannikin of tea. I loved the Shiralee, and increasingly I felt I could grow to settle into this country.

  Keeping cattle in the gentle south-west was a very different proposition from my beloved Kimberley, and in many respects much tamer. But not always! Owning cows comes with the need of a good bull, and at the end of my first year Jan and Gray Williamson, cattle farmers in the Narrikup area, lent me a Simmental bull that was on his way to the meatworks. I was grateful for the favour, but also worried as I watched this tonne of pumped-up muscle eye my paddock fences with serious displeasure. Bulls will go through just about any fence when they want to, and this boy was not going to stick around, I thought. But he changed his mind when a couple of my smart-looking Angus girls walked by like tarts, waving their tails high in the air. Muscles immediately let out a bellow of excitement and dutifully followed to start work servicing my cows.

  But the real excitement began when it was time to return him to the truck to continue on his fatal journey to the meatworks. He must have known. My Landcruiser became the bull buggy as I steadily lapped him around the paddock to show who was the boss of this outfit. Muscles didn’t give up; he fought every inch of the way through the paddocks, right into the yard, charging our every move in an effort to nail at least one of us up against the rail. He was ploughing the ground in anger and sending dust flying high into the sky while blowing snot everywhere, and I had to leap for the safety of the top rail more than once. And I had thought this only happened in the Kimberley — though instead of one aggro bull going down the road, there would have been a hundred or so. Yes, I still missed the excitement of the north.

  Eventually we managed to load the bull onto the truck. His black mood wasn’t changing in a hurry though. He was throwing himself against the cattle crate as I stood and watched the truck disappear into the distance, rocking violently. I felt sorry for Muscles as I knew his fate.

  The following season my bull problem solved itself in a different way. One beautiful misty morning I took myself and my pannikin of tea to the clover paddock to check on my cows, only to be met with a surprising and wonderful vision. Out from behind a clump of natural bush moved a superb-looking Angus bull, accompanied by several of my girls. As I sat and watched him at work, I wondered who could be the owner of this magnificent creature — he wasn’t branded. And no, I had not dropped the back fence to help him over. McCorry might have done something as cheeky as that, but it wasn’t my style. Then several weeks later, after I’d made a lot of phone calls trying in vain to locate the beast’s rightful owner, he jumped the fence and vanished, never to visit again. But the job was done, and the offspring were as good-looking as their father.

  That was my last calving season; it was at this point that I decided to sell my cows and heifers and simply deal with steers. Buy them, fatten them, sell them! This I enjoyed. To collaborate with other cattle men and women, to stand around and talk cattle weight and prices, gave me great satisfaction.

  The southern cattle industry was all new to me, and talking to the locals was the best way to discover what breeds were most suitable for paddock fattening. My choice was well-bred Angus steers, because I like a good clean line of cattle, but many other breeds would have been just as good.

  I found there was a lot more to making a profit in the cattle industry in the south compared to the Kimberley. Huge ove
rheads to start with, firstly with land value — you pay a heck of a lot more dollars per acre — then fertiliser, fencing, haymaking and farm machinery. On top of all that we need to spend a lot on chemicals to control parasites in cattle and insects in pastures. If I’m lucky I’ll get a halfway reasonable rainy season, the grass will grow, and the red mites and lucerne flea will leave me enough to make hay and fatten my steers. But after all that, market prices may leave me wondering if the whole deal is worth the effort.

  Back when I still had my Angus girls, I envied them in one respect. They might have given me trouble calving, but their sex life was straightforward. If only my own was as uncomplicated! I am a woman, with a normal woman’s desires, yet my marriage to McCorry was no ordinary affair. The twenty years between us was not so noticeable at the beginning of our life together when I was twenty-four and he was forty-four, but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t obvious to me some years later when we were making love out in the bright light of day on a worn old saddle blanket under a bauhinia tree. I was lying peacefully by McCorry’s side, looking at him while he sat up to roll a cigarette, when for the first time I registered just how much older he was than me. His skin was burned nearly black and wrinkly from the harsh Kimberley sun; his hands were hard and callused, and his dark hair was turning grey. For all that, his body was still hard and lean: he never carried an ounce of fat on him. Seeing our age difference so suddenly like this shocked me, but it didn’t change the deep love I had for my old cattle man.

  Robby, our youngest, was conceived outdoors like that. This time our saddle blanket was spread in the spinifex country on Louisa Downs and we were serenaded by the call of black cockatoos who were probably wondering what the hell was going on. And that was the last time we ever made love.

  Robby was born on 28 November 1984 in Derby Hospital and McCorry and I were over the moon. Our boy felt like a gift from above after losing our firstborn, Kelly, in a terrible accident on Louisa Downs three years earlier.

  The circumstances could not have been more heartbreaking. McCorry was driving the bull buggy slowly through the homestead paddock gateway when five-year-old Kelly slipped unseen from the bullbar and broke his neck. He died in my arms while we waited for the flying doctor. It was the darkest day of our lives, and maybe even more so for Bob than for me, as he blamed himself for the accident. How could he not? I understood that, I would have blamed myself if I’d been driving the bull buggy. I understood, and I never blamed him, but he tortured himself with it.

  Robby’s birth was a great gift, but even that was not enough to pull McCorry out of the dark hole of depression. He also suffered back pain and some painful problem with his pancreas, and the cocktail of medication he washed down with an abundance of alcohol served to widen the distance between us. He was scarcely able to make love to me any more: the ‘old fella’ just wouldn’t work, he said. For a long time I didn’t know whether McCorry had simply lost interest in me, but whatever the reason, from the time Robby was conceived to our separation eleven years later, I was celibate.

  So when an old friend from the Kimberley showed up at the Shiralee, there was part of me that was ready to respond to a bit of old-fashioned attention and romancing. There was another part of me that had no intention of getting involved with a man — my energy was focused on the children, and on getting the Shiralee into good shape.

  Heath was a truck driver. Tanned, fit and lean, with a distinctive handlebar moustache. And he was only thirty-four — ten years younger than me — a big difference from McCorry. I had known his family a long time — Heath and his father had repaired station vehicles and power generators for McCorry and me for many years. And when I left the station in 1995 and took Robby to Derby, I saw Heath quite often.

  He began as a much-needed friend — I felt vulnerable in Derby; I was way out of my comfort zone, being in town. It was good to be away from McCorry in his darkness, yet still it was a darkness I was familiar with. Heath gave me a friendly shoulder to cry on, and later a strong arm around me.

  There was an undeniable spark between us; I had first felt it back on Kimberley Downs. I was changing all the station’s windmills to solar and Heath had come out to give me a quote on a solar pumping system to pump water from a bore into a dam. The dam was quite isolated, surrounded by claypan flats with the occasional ant hill and bauhinia tree white with cockatoos. While Heath measured the depth of the bore, I walked around the rim of the dam. Overhead a lone eagle circled. I turned once to see how he was doing, and found his gaze fixed on me. I felt an instant surge of desire and was immediately caught between feelings of aroused sexiness and utter fear, for I had not been with a man for more than ten years. That was all that passed between us then; we did not touch each other or remark upon the feelings that had been ignited.

  In Derby, though, it wasn’t long before we slipped into an affair. The hunger in me was more than ready for release and I was no longer the station manager. There was nothing to stop us from taking the physical comfort in each other that we were both seeking. Heath was an intensely sexual man and it gave me an enormous boost to feel desired after so long. In just a short time I could feel the pent-up emotions of years dissolving. I had not realised how much I had longed for this physical connection.

  For the few months that Robby and I stayed in the unit in Derby, Heath was a frequent visitor. When I left to go south, that was the end of things between us. It was quite amicable. Neither of us had seen it as a long-term affair.

  And so when Heath dropped into the Shiralee as an old friend, it seemed like a good idea to take up where we’d left off. He was doing a local run, and it was only a small detour to call in on me. I felt secure in him being around the children; he was friendly with them, and Robby knew him from Derby. I never thought I’d be with him for the long haul. We didn’t think we were in love. I was very conscious of our age difference and he was too. He was happy spending time with me on my farm, and helped out now and then with the cattle work and building new gates and fences, but he wasn’t so keen on us going out together in public. He didn’t like being seen holding my hand. My pride didn’t like it, but as time went on and I saw more of him, I realised I needed to fill that big gap in my life that had opened up after I left McCorry. Heath helped fill it, and I looked forward to the days he dropped in.

  We were very different. He was an intense sort of man, very passionate, yet he also stood back a bit and was hard to get to know. I don’t think he understood me; why, for instance, I would make myself a pannikin of tea and go and sit alone on a bale of hay in the paddock and watch the cattle feeding. I needed the open spaces and this was my way of finding some peace.

  I also needed time out from him. It was very strange for me, having a lover who was so much younger and with a strong sex drive. At times I found the sexual tension between us almost too much to handle; the air seemed electrified when we were in each other’s presence. It was like living in a Mills and Boon romance novel. Because it was so unfamiliar to me, I didn’t know what it meant: was this what any woman my age might feel after a long sex drought? Was I simply vulnerable?

  After McCorry died Heath moved in with me on the farm. Right from the start, this spelled the end of things being easy between us. I was in a very low space then and would often wake in the middle of the night sobbing. One night when I woke in tears, Heath growled angrily, ‘Get over it, just get over it.’ He really thought it was as simple as that: you just got over it. I felt hurt, though I told myself he had never lost anyone he had loved so he didn’t understand — that was better than thinking he just didn’t care. I lay there in the dark trying to convince myself that Kelly and McCorry were in a better place somewhere, together — if only I could believe it.

  The next morning when Heath had gone I made my way out to the paddock with some hay for my black Angus steers. I had only recently bought these magnificent creatures and was still capable of getting a kick out of seeing them. I warmed myself with a pannikin of tea while soa
king in the beauty that surrounded me. The Porongurups in all their glory stretched out beyond the horizon of natural bush and green paddocks, looking like a sleeping princess lying on her back, her outline formed by the rise and fall of the range. I counted my blessings. Leisha, Robby and Kristy were all healthy, and I was feeling much stronger in body and soul.

  My thoughts turned to Heath and I felt a sudden leap of anger. How dare he tell me to get over McCorry’s death? Who did he think he was? He hadn’t earned the right to speak to me like that. I wanted to send him on his way, but at the same time I knew I wasn’t ready for that, not yet. In one respect we were an excellent match: he kept my reawakened sex drive more than satisfied. The desire to make love was never far from the surface when we were together. I even found myself smiling out there in the paddock as I remembered how, when the urge became too much to ignore, we once ended up balancing on the seat of the four-wheeler motorbike!

  And maybe it mattered to him more than I thought that I was grieving for another man. There were times I felt he was competing with Robby for my undivided attention, and he once told me he wanted to be the most important person in my life, although I hadn’t taken him seriously in this. It seemed to me it was more a matter of ego — he was no more in the relationship for the long run than I was. Once, he asked me to marry him, but I didn’t believe he had thought it through — he still found it difficult being seen in public with me. I told him that I wasn’t ready to think about marriage, that I still needed time to deal with McCorry’s death. I felt he held that against me, as if he thought he was doing me a favour and I was refusing him out of spite.