Stars over Shiralee Read online

  One night her drink was spiked in a Perth nightclub when she was out on the town with her girlfriend Jenny. Thank goodness Leisha had heard of drink spiking, because she handled it amazingly well, but I shudder to think of what might so easily have happened. The girls had a rule never to leave their drinks unattended or with a stranger. So when the drug hit her leaving her immediately heavy and dizzy, she knew the trouble had to have come from behind the bar. Catching the bouncer and barman with sickening smirks on their faces, she battled to help Jenny, who had also been drugged, down the corridor to the bathroom, to vomit up the substance before it effectively paralysed them.

  Leisha willed herself not to black out. The drug affected her speech so that the people she asked for help thought she was drunk. It was my girl’s steely determination that kept her awake and got the two of them out of the nightclub. In the street, they hailed a taxi and luckily got a compassionate driver who delivered them home safely. The girls recovered, but that ordeal was something Leisha did not forget in a hurry.

  ‘Why didn’t you report it to the police?’ I cried when she finally told me about it a couple of weeks later. She said she thought no one would be interested; she’d heard this sort of thing was impossible to prove.

  Living in Perth, she may as well have been on another planet, the distance from the Shiralee seemed so great. One beautiful crisp morning when she was visiting the farm, we were sitting on the back verandah with Robby, having a quiet moment together. It was so peaceful there, listening to the birds, and my body slowly relaxed, letting go some of the pent-up feelings I was carrying. The early morning sun warmed me, giving me strength, and I seized on the opportunity to speak.

  ‘Leisha, do you realise the worry your brother and I go through when you’re up there drinking and partying?’ She raised her eyes and looked at me to show she was listening; I was grateful for that at least. ‘When I get a phone call from you miles away, upset and emotional, it tears me up. It brings terrible thoughts to mind. I often end up unable to sleep, frightened that at any moment a police officer will come to the door bearing bad news. Please,’ I begged my girl, ‘Daddy wouldn’t want this, nor would Kelly. We have to try and find our strength again and get it together, for all our sakes.’

  ‘I know, Mum, and I will,’ said my girl.

  ‘We need to think of good memories of Daddy. Remember how he was when we visited him at Sleepy Hollow,’ I said. No matter how sick he was in those last months, and bent over and slow, McCorry would always make us tea and toast us steak sandwiches. He never let us do anything, but treated us as his treasured princesses. He really mellowed in those last months before he died.

  ‘You’re right, Mum, that’s a good memory to hold. I can just picture him there, having us over to tea.’

  Remembering the good times with her father must have helped Leisha deal less destructively with her grief, because gradually she stopped living such a wild life and started to settle back into herself.

  How different my life was now from the life I had in the Kimberley. When we managed Oobagooma there was a woman who lived in the far corner of the property, on a small lease called Kimbolton. She was only in her late twenties, and ran this rough area of country with her older partner and two boys. We held this girl in high regard for she was a battler and, like me, loved the wild outback life she was leading. She had a great spirit. One day when our stock camp men drove the old station truck to a tidal creek on Kimbolton to go fishing, they stopped a little too close to the homestead and she came out with a .303 rifle. ‘Piss off!’ she told them: the stockmen did, and from that day on, the men nicknamed her Geronimo.

  At the start of the next dry season Geronimo asked some Aboriginal stockmen to help her put a mob of cattle together. They moved down from the homestead to Cone Bay in the saltwater region where they picked up about three hundred head of cleanskins (unbranded and therefore unclaimed cattle). Then they walked the cattle back, following the Stuart River to where it joined the Robinson. Both of these rivers were tidal at this point, but there was a freshwater spring just off the Stuart on Oobagooma country, with good green buffalo grass all around it.

  There has always been a rule in the mustering game which states that if your cattle are in need of a drink, you may walk them into your neighbour’s country and water them there, as long as you remain close to the boundaries. Geronimo’s mob of cattle were thirsty and so this is what she did. Across the outback, there were no boundary fences at that time. We all knew where the boundaries were — you lined them up along prominent points in the landscape.

  Now the guy who owned Oobagooma, who we called ‘city slicker Monty,’ happened to be flying his light aircraft back to the Oobagooma homestead from Sydney at that time and passed directly over the area where Geronimo and her team of stockmen were watering her newly found cattle. He landed at the homestead and dropped off his girlfriend with instructions to bring us the news that the Kimbolton stock camp was mustering Oobagooma country, then flew back to Derby to bring the police out to witness this heinous crime. McCorry and I were to get ourselves out there pronto.

  We jumped into the old Landrover and were out there in no time. We knew Geronimo’s cattle were cleanskins from Cone Bay, as the country hadn’t been mustered before, but we didn’t know if any branded Oobagooma cattle might have been in the mob. If there was even one, then Geronimo could be in trouble.

  What a piece of work this city slicker was! For years McCorry and I had been mustering cleanskin cattle for him, and all we ever got out of it was a very ordinary wage and McCorry’s tobacco. The cattle we were drafting at the Oobagooma yard at the time were cleanskins, just like Geronimo’s, and he had the cheek to turn and pull an act like this — he was doing the same bloody thing! Bouncing around in the Landrover we crossed the bugger-bugger country — an Aboriginal term for rough and rugged black soil country — where we met up with Geronimo. She was holding up the mob of cattle with her stockmen. Without fences, the stockmen ‘hold up’ cattle, or keep them corralled, by riding around them in a circle.

  ‘Monty’s flown to Derby to get the cops,’ said old McCorry. ‘If there’s any Oobagooma branded cattle, you could be charged with cattle stealing.’

  ‘There’s only one old Oobagooma cow in the mob, as far as I can tell,’ replied Geronimo. But before we could do anything about it, the city slicker arrived in his Cessna with a cop we didn’t know. Monty took the Landrover and drove the policeman around and through the mob of bellowing cattle. When he returned and pulled the vehicle up by our side, everyone was quiet and solemn. The cop stepped out of the vehicle and said to Geronimo, ‘I’m going to have to charge you for having an Oobagooma cow in your mob and for mustering Oobagooma country, and now I place a lien on these cattle.’ He was playing it by the book. This meant the cattle had to stay where they were, pending further investigation. It was farcical. There was nothing there to hold a mob of feral cattle up with — no cattle yard, nothing — and all this for one old Oobagooma cow, which looked like it was on its last legs anyway!

  McCorry was looking pleased with himself. He clearly had something up his sleeve. He told Geronimo and her head stockman not to say a word. Geronimo was tall and lean, a bit flat chested and with her long blonde hair twisted up under her hat and wearing a man’s shirt and trousers, she could be taken for a man if you didn’t know better. The cop didn’t know better. He waded in, boots and all. ‘Do I recognise your face mate? Off a wanted poster? You’re a bloody crim aren’t you!’

  At this, old McCorry thought it was time to play his hand. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘I think you had better shut up until you get the facts straight. For a start the person you are talking to is a woman, and a bloody good one at that. Secondly, if you put a lien on these cattle, you do realise that they will be the responsibility of the crown, which in this case is you? That means these people will ride away and you will have to watch the cattle all night until reinforcements arrive from Derby.’

  ‘Hell,’ the co
p said, ‘I can’t do that; I have to get back to town.’

  ‘Well,’ old McCorry said, ‘then you’re wasting your bloody time and ours too.’

  ‘I’ll be back in the morning with the sergeant,’ the policeman said, and climbed aboard the Cessna with Monty. Once the plane had disappeared, McCorry told Geronimo and her stockman to push the cattle inside the Kimbolton boundary and yard them. ‘Before you do,’ he said, ‘put a rope around the Oobagooma cow, put the barrel of your .22 well down into her ear, pull the trigger and then remove the rope. At the first sign of piccaninny daylight, walk the cattle back to the yard at the homestead. There’ll be no case to answer.’

  The next day McCorry and I drove out on the pretext of taking possession of the Oobagooma cow for ‘city slicker’ Monty. He was our boss after all. The policeman and his sergeant arrived, full of importance and pleased to be upholding the law of the land. They looked over the mob of cattle once more. ‘Where’s the Oobagooma cow?’ asked the sergeant. I thought, Heck, here we go.

  ‘She died last night in the yard on the Stuart River,’ old McCorry said.

  ‘Or maybe you shot her,’ replied the surly sergeant.

  ‘Well,’ volunteered McCorry, by this time looking even more pleased with himself than he had the day before, ‘you can check the cow for a bullet hole on the way back to the plane.’

  The sergeant looked uncertainly at Geronimo. ‘I’m going to brand these cattle with the crown brand, the broad arrow,’ he said.

  ‘Have you got the brand with you?’ asked McCorry.

  ‘No,’ said the sergeant, agitated now. ‘We can make one out of some number 8 fencing wire.’

  Old McCorry knew this was not legal, as you can only brand with a registered brand. He also knew that if the fiasco got to court, the sergeant’s ignorance would be the downfall of the prosecution. He walked over to Geronimo and spoke to her privately. ‘Let them go ahead with the branding, don’t say anything, you’re in the clear girl. Once they get back to Derby town and read up on the stock laws, you won’t hear from them again. All you have to do is paddock the cattle for 90 days, then sell the lot.’ And that was the end of that.

  Over the next few months Terry rang frequently, and visited whenever he came down to work on the farm on the Carbunup River. I began to look forward to his visits. We’d drive between his family’s farms, talking away about our common interest in the cattle industry — I could learn from him about farming down there. Sometimes we’d be singing along to old sixties and seventies hits on the radio; we knew the same songs, it seemed like we had a lot in common. Most importantly, the kids liked him. He could be very funny, and he constantly made me laugh. These were happy days, and for the first time since McCorry had died I felt like I really didn’t have a care. Terry was fun. He was big and happy and confident and he liked to have a good time. He’d take me to the races, we’d eat in nice restaurants. He liked having me on his arm; I could see he was proud being seen out with me and, after Heath, that was a real boost to my ego. We made a good-looking pair.

  Yet despite how much I enjoyed his company, I really didn’t know whether he was the right man for me in the long term — and it was clear he was thinking about the long term. It wasn’t long since I’d shown Heath the door, and the bitterness of that ending had left me feeling wary. I wanted to take things easy, see how we were together once the first thrill had worn off. He wanted me to visit him in Broome, the sooner the better, and that seemed like a big step for me. I was dithering, and I suddenly realised I no longer believed in my own capacity to make decisions. I was looking for some guidance, the kind you might expect from an old friend who knows you well, but there was no one like that in my life now that McCorry had passed away.

  In the end, I visited a psychic in Albany. I’d heard someone talking about her, saying she was the real deal. Of course I was ambivalent about seeing a psychic — it hardly seemed the action of a woman who managed cattle stations. And yet I had seen a psychic once before, at Mundijong, south of Perth, after losing Kelly. In that terrible time I was clutching at anything that might give me some relief, and it did. Now I needed to know where I was going, I needed some solid direction in my life, and I convinced myself that no harm would come as long as I didn’t take it too seriously.

  After a few laps around the block I pulled up outside an upmarket-looking house perched high on the hill overlooking Albany. I was met at the door by a well-dressed middle-aged woman. A quiet calmness surrounded her as she led me to a brightly lit room. We sat on opposite sides of a table and I felt quite comfortable. There were two decks of cards in front of her; she shuffled them and asked me to select a pack. I chose the blue pack. She then dealt the cards on the table in front of me. Hell, I thought as soon as I saw them, this doesn’t look good. It was the death card, the same card that had appeared in the reading after Kelly’s death. The psychic said it could mean either a literal death or the death of a relationship. I knew it was both. McCorry’s death, and the recent end of my relationship with Heath.

  I sat in a bit of a daze, not really taking in what she was saying, until I heard the words, ‘A new man is coming into your life.’ This grabbed my attention. I stopped peeling the nail varnish from my fingernails and raised my eyes to look at her. How do you know this? Are you sure? I wondered silently.

  ‘When?’ I asked.

  ‘Very soon,’ she replied, and shuffled the cards and placed several more on the table in front of me. ‘He’s your type of man,’ she added after a moment. ‘He’s strong, and he knows what he wants in life.’ Then she offered a rather odd detail: ‘He’ll be driving a Holden Statesman.’ When the reading was over I walked in deep thought out to the car. Well, I said to myself, I guess I’ll see what the future brings. It had been an interesting way to pass an afternoon anyway.

  On his next visit, Terry arrived in a silver Holden Statesman. I had to look twice, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a second-hand Caprice he had taken for a test drive from a car dealership in Busselton. It was pretty hard not to look at him a bit more seriously after that. I am a practical and sceptical person, and had it not been for the detail of the Holden Statesman, I would probably not have taken a lot of notice of the psychic. But I thought about the other things she had said, that he was my type of man, strong, confident, a man of the world who knew what he wanted, and I realised these were the very things I wanted in my life right now.

  I was getting my old sense of self back. I knew what I wanted. Nothing fancy, I didn’t want the world. I didn’t want his status or his money. I just wanted a man who loved me and wasn’t afraid to tell me. And Terry had made that perfectly clear often enough. I wasn’t dizzily in love, and I never felt that animal spark of sexual attraction that existed between me and Heath. But I didn’t want that any more. That sort of passion might be fine when you’re young, but it was no use to me now. On its own, it was no basis for a relationship. I liked Terry. I felt easy and comfortable with him, and able to be myself. I liked the way we laughed and sang together and danced. If a good tune came on the radio at the Shiralee when he was visiting, he’d whisk me away from whatever I was doing and dance me around the kitchen.

  So I said yes to a trip to Broome. He was delighted and I was glad to be finished with dithering. And it would be enlightening to see him on his own turf up there. Besides, we could all do with a holiday. My four brothers — Bruce, Darryl, Eric and Michael — all had mango farms and other businesses around Broome. We didn’t keep in touch very much, but we all got on well when we saw each other, and it meant Leisha and Robby had cousins in town — all my brothers had wives and children. There was also John and Ben, cousins from McCorry’s side of the family, who were skippers and divers for Paspaley pearls. Robby couldn’t wait to hit the surf, though Kristy decided she would remain at the Shiralee — she was still riding trackwork for the trainer at Redmond and she didn’t want to leave.

  We set off early from home, full of confidence and holiday high spirits. The h
eavy grey clouds that seemed to lie like a blanket across the sky would only make for good travelling — better for the tyres and engine too, I thought. But once we had passed Perth and taken the inland road to Meekatharra we were in for a rude shock. Rain pelted down on the thirsty earth in a fury, and what were usually parched creek beds were quickly becoming angry rivers, while the plains between the rivers soon flooded to look like great dirty foaming oceans. It was frightening. I turned on the car radio to pick up the news or a weather report while constantly searching the heavens trying to read the dark racing clouds. The elements were in a hell of a hurry — the clouds, downpours and rising rivers — and I made a decision to turn around and return to Perth. We could fly to Broome for our holiday.

  No sooner were we pointed towards the south when I caught the words ‘Cyclone Vance’ coming from a barely audible radio and knew I had made the right decision.

  Terry met us at Broome’s tiny airport and drove us to his caravan park where he encouraged us to stay, even though my intentions had been to go to the Mangrove Hotel overlooking the turquoise blue bay of Broome.

  I felt very awkward standing in the small kitchen-cumlounge room that was also the office and reception for the caravan park. Terry had ushered us in but had then been immediately dragged off to attend to something. The building was a small timber structure from Lord McAlpine’s days of bringing Bali to Broome. The place was a hive of sweltering activity and I felt hemmed in and uncomfortable with streams of people — staff and friends and acquaintances — coming and going. One of them stood out, it was the young woman Lauren who, I had learned by now, had been with Terry at the Ascot Inn. She was eyeing me up and down in a way that didn’t look very friendly. Was there something going on between the two of them, I had to wonder. I had made it very plain to Terry that if there was another woman in his life there could be nothing between us. He had laughed at my concern and assured me there was no one.