Love on Forrest Downs Page 7

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  I smile to myself as my mind drifts back to the days of mustering on Oobagooma Station in the west Kimberley. To think that to kickstart a muster on Oobagooma meant we had to drive the station’s old red International truck down the two-wheel tracks that led into the little pastoral town of Derby. I rather liked driving the red Inter; its only downfall was that none of the headlights – or any lights for that matter – worked, plus it backfired occasionally and very loudly. Because of these few problems, McCorry said we had to dodge the town’s coppers if we had the truck out at night without its lights on.

  ‘Can’t we have it repaired while we’re in town?’ I asked, thinking to have lights on the truck would be handy in the bush as I’d had enough of hanging out the driver’s window with a torch, trying to light up the track several metres ahead as I drove back to the station behind a mob of cattle at night. It was easy for the cattle and stockmen to weave their way through the evening in the dark, but a lot harder for me to judge the gap between the bohemia trees, boxwood, dead timber and rocky boulders as I followed several hundred metres behind. To have the lights working on the truck would have made my job in the bush much less nerve-wracking and I considered them a necessity rather than a luxury.

  ‘Can we have the lights fixed?’ I asked McCorry again.

  ‘We don’t have time,’ he said. ‘You don’t need them anyway.’ And that was the end of the conversation.

  Once we had parked the truck behind the local stock agent’s shed, McCorry and I ventured forth to discuss the financial backing the stock agents gave the station to get the mustering season going. There was never any money in the station’s kitty, and I should make it clear that McCorry and I did not handle the monetary side of things – we reported back to the owners and it was their job to make sure the station stayed afloat financially. Our job was to find and muster the cattle, which we did, and every mustering season started the same way: on the understanding that we would repay the loan from the stock agents with the first cheque we received after the initial cattle muster.

  Funds were needed to purchase RM Williams Cuban-heeled riding boots – and they weren’t cheap. We also required jeans, Western shirts, Akubra hats and swags, plus a quart pot for each Aboriginal stockman who was hired for the station’s mustering season. Cuban-heeled riding boots were the preferred boots the stockmen and McCorry wore in the 1960s because of their good, strong heel, which allowed the rider to dig in and hang five on a rough horse. The boots were a form of safety and security while riding the station’s horse plant, or mob of working horses. Each mustering season we would start with a handful of newly broken colts or free-spirited workhorses that would test the riding skills of any good stockman.

  The stock saddles back then were just that: there was no such thing as a horn on the front of a saddle, certainly not on Oobagooma Station anyway. McCorry’s theory was that if you couldn’t gallop bareback on a horse, you couldn’t ride, and years later when our children came along, he wouldn’t allow the kids a saddle of their own until they could do just that.

  With the financial backing of our stock agent organised, our mustering team was outfitted and enough stores were purchased to last the month. The stores included several drums of Dingo flour, one hessian sack of coarse salt, a sack of brown onions, one tea-chest of Bushell’s leaf tea and a few jars of pickles. Then what seemed to be classed as essential were seven columns of Log Cabin tobacco, Tally-Ho cigarette papers and matches for McCorry, and a box of sweet-smelling plug or chewing tobacco for the stock boys. There was no alcohol purchased, as McCorry ran a dry camp.

  With the stores loaded securely behind the cab of the truck, we checked the post office for any late mail and then returned to the ration camp on the outskirts of town, where the Aboriginal stock boys would be waiting for us to pick them up. As my mind takes me back over that period in the ’60s, I remember what a terrible, sad sight the ration camp was. Women with new babies – and many with a tribe of young children – lived with their men and extended families in the squalor of this camp, which was also home to drunken ringers who had been dropped off or drifted into town from the surrounding cattle stations. Then there were the fifty or so inbred, blue-eyed mangy dogs that lived there as well.

  The ration camp – it was McCorry who named it that – had several corrugated-iron humpies and a shed with walls made of spinifex for privacy and protection from the drunks who drifted in during the night, but also from the intense heat and wind that blew across the surrounding mudflats. This was where the stockmen, their wives and families were dropped off at the end of each mustering season and collected again at the beginning of the next.

  The camp had Third World conditions and was certainly a terrible existence for anyone. A single tap supplied water for drinking and washing and the ablution was the scrub or spinifex on the outskirts of the camp. The place was a real haven for hookworm, I thought.

  Once the stockmen and their women and children were secured on the back of the truck, in and among their brand-new swags and billycans, McCorry was ready to leave town immediately. We were interrupted by a loud banging on the cab of the truck.

  Malki, the head stockman, sang out, ‘Old man’, – meaning McCorry – ‘that old man Churchill, him in that jail.’ Churchill was one of the stockmen who regularly worked the musters on Oobagooma.

  ‘What for?’ asked McCorry. ‘Did that old fella Churchill need a holiday?’

  Malki answered with, ‘Him got drunk waiting for you to pick him up.’ Then he roared with laughter and immediately the others on the truck joined in. They were a happy lot when they were returning to the station, where they knew there was plenty of beef and tea leaf, and the Robinson River, which ran below the Oobagooma homestead, had its fair share of the good-eating barramundi.

  There was no way we would leave town without Churchill, who had always been part of the stock-camp crew. I looked at McCorry and thought, Here we go. He ignored my look and drove off in the direction of the police station, parked the truck right in front of the gate, went inside and bailed Churchill. In no time Churchill was on the back of the truck with the other stockmen, and as we slowly drove out of town I could hear the boys laughing as they took the mickey out of him for ending up in the jail.

  Back at the station the boys took the bull buggy – a short-wheelbase, cut-down Toyota with a sturdy bullbar across the front and sides – and went in search of a beast to kill to replenish the station’s meat supply, while the women and children stayed in camp and collected the firewood. They would build up a good fire, then salvage the coals to cover the camp oven as they cooked one damper after the other, patiently waiting for the stockmen to return with the fresh kill. This had become a ritual in our camps: fresh meat and damper on the return to the station, and then the work would begin.

  That night, after an evening meal of steak and onions, I decided to move myself from the dining room to the veranda and leave McCorry and our head stockman to discuss the coming muster. While relaxing on my old deckchair in the dark of the homestead veranda, I indulged in the peace and tranquillity that came with sundown in the Kimberley outback. Gone were the annoying bush flies and little black native bees that kept us on our toes during the daylight hours. As dusk brought the cool breeze with it, the following darkness carried the distant chorus of a tawny frogmouth and the mournful wailing of the bush stone-curlew. I loved nothing more than to rest in my deckchair, a pannikin of tea by my side, and listen to the various sounds of the Oobagooma evening. And as I sat in the peacefulness of the early evening I heard the chatter and echo of laughter drifting down from the old telegraph station, where the stockmen and their wives and children were camped. As always in the evenings while camped on the station, little pockets of light glowed and flickered throughout the old building: candles, which the Aboriginal people burned each night, ‘to rid the building of bad spirits, missus’, they’d say.

  As the night rolled on I returned my empty pannikin to the kitchen and sh
owered without getting electrocuted by the electrical short in the homestead – the cockatoos had torn the insulation off the wires that ran from the power plant to the homestead. I went into the bedroom I shared with McCorry and his two favourite working dogs, Whiskey and Old Jim. The room was sparsely furnished and reasonably clean, with only two old wartime camp stretcher beds that had more creaks and groans than anything I’d ever heard before, and McCorry was already in one of them.

  I climbed into bed trying to keep the creaks and groans to a minimum, as McCorry blurted out, ‘You’d better get some sleep. We’re going on the run tomorrow.’

  This meant that I would get up at 4 a.m., cook breakfast and put a large lump of beef on the boil for the following day’s lunch on the muster. I would make sure there was enough beef to feed the entire stock camp on our first day out from the station. I would then roll our swags and load what stores we would be taking, not forgetting the old Trafalgar Flying Doctor radio, which would be our only contact with the outside world. The stock boys would add a couple of spare saddles and enough nosebags to feed the working stockhorses their ration of oats at night. Then we’d be ready to set out for another muster.

  Sleep did not come easily that night. The working dogs were on edge; possibly they were excited as they could sense the coming muster. Their barking was frequently accompanied by the grunting and ear-piercing squeals of the feral pigs that had come up from the river to root up the ground around the homestead in search of yams or anything else they could eat. It was nothing to lose an entire watermelon or pumpkin patch in one of their nightly raids. In the past I had returned to the homestead after a mustering round and found the lawn looking as if it had been ploughed up.

  Eventually it got too much for me and I woke McCorry, saying, ‘I can’t sleep and I’m worried the pigs will get into my vegetable garden.’ I was hoping he would let the dogs loose to hunt the feral animals back to the river, but no such thing happened.

  McCorry answered me with, ‘They won’t each much. Don’t worry, they’ll leave soon.’

  I had put a lot of effort into my vegetable garden and thought, Well, bugger you I got my .410 shotgun out of the wardrobe, poked it through the window and fired high into the evening sky. There was an almighty explosion – the shotgun made a helluva racket.

  McCorry flew off his camp stretcher and very nearly landed in his boots, saying, ‘What’s up?’

  Pigs squealed in the distance as they ran like bloody hell towards the Robinson River. The seventeen bull terriers and blue heelers had returned to their kennels and gone quiet, and soon the homestead was back to normal – or what could be called normal.

  McCorry returned to his camp stretcher and rolled over without saying another word. The kero lamp was still throwing a good light in the bedroom. I took it and went out to the front veranda and sung out towards the camp, ‘Malki, I frightened the pigs away. We can sleep now!’

  He answered, ‘Him good, yumun’, meaning ‘boss missus’, as the Aboriginal people always called me out of respect.

  At least Malki’s pleased, I thought. Now he doesn’t have to spend his night hunting the feral pigs out of his camp.

  I returned to my bed and slept soundly for the remainder of the night.

  The following morning all was well on the home front and the station was a hive of activity as McCorry and his stockmen drafted out the working horses needed for the muster. Old Yardie, with his mass of silvery-white hair and long white beard – which I thought complemented his very upright walk – had always been McCorry’s horse tailor, the man who kept an eye on the working horses and fed and hobbled them at night, often placing a leather strap with a Condamine bell around the neck of his favourite horse before he himself swagged down for the night.

  It was difficult to keep a good horse plant (a team of working horses) together on Oobagooma, because of the crotalaria plant. It thrived in dry times and if the horses ate too much of it they would end up with walkabout: walking blindly, running into gullies and becoming entangled in vines, until they eventually died. At the end of each mustering season the stockmen’s wives, children and I would walk throughout the horse paddock and pick out the crotalaria plant, but sadly we could never beat it and the losses due to the walkabout kept on happening.

  Because of the losses from walkabout, every two to three years we would have to buy another half-dozen green colts and the boys would break them in prior to a muster. Our team of working horses was really the station’s most prized possession, and I quickly realised just how important smart horses and good working dogs were to Oobagooma and McCorry.

  As soon as the stock boys had selected their working horses, McCorry sent Charlie and Raymond, a couple of smart young stockmen (and good mates), on their way with the spare horses to meet up with us at One Tree Camp that evening. The understanding was that they would cross the Robinson River and head north-east. This turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes that McCorry ever made. That morning Yardie, who had always been in charge of the horse plant, had asked McCorry if he could ride along with the stockmen and coaches until we hit the camp that night, where he would take charge of the working horses again.

  McCorry was about ready to leave the station homestead and had rolled himself a cigarette from his tin of tobacco. He whistled up Old Jim and Whiskey, then tapped his horse, Little Arab, on the flank and rode out in the lead of the coaches, which were big, rangy six- to eight-year-old bullocks with speary horns. His spare horse, Lychee, a big brown gelding from Balgo, was being ridden by Malki. The stockmen – with huge smiles on their faces exposing beautiful white teeth – were always happy to be on the move. Their happiness was infectious and it made you feel good to watch the camaraderie among the Aboriginal boys and men as they pushed the coaches along steadily in the early morning breeze, while several newly broken young colts took to pig-rooting and bucking as they set out to test the riding skills of the men on their backs.

  I followed behind the cattle and stockmen, driving the Inter truck with the company of Mary, one of the stockmen’s wives, sitting in the cab beside me. Mary was coming along as a camp cook and I would help her when needed. Harry, who was once our head stockman while on horseback, was now in charge of the station’s bull buggy and was also the driver.

  McCorry’s aim with the muster was to get out to the boundary with the neighbouring cattle stations and then muster our way around and back to the homestead yards. Every muster was another challenge: this was wild, unfenced cattle country. There were no roads or tracks to follow and no paddocks or fences, and after each raging wet season in the north – often with a cyclone or two – the rivers would flood and the structure of the riverbanks would change.

  The Robinson River, which started just south of the King Leopold Ranges, close to Mount Hart and behind Napier Downs Station, ran the length of Oobagooma, emptying into the great King Sound. Oobagooma homestead was situated on the saltwater side of the river. So not only was each muster a challenge, finding a crossing in the river each year – with its wide and sometimes steep banks – added to it. McCorry had no fear, however, and always found a way across the river for the cattle and the truck, just as he navigated Oobagooma by using the landmarks.

  That day we moved along with the mustering team towards camp at One Tree, leaving a track of toppled spear grass behind us on the flats and a startled mob of feral pigs as we skirted the bogs in the low country, while the odd cockatoo with its harsh and far-carrying screech would give our position away. It crossed my mind that it was a good thing we weren’t boundary mustering at this point, as our position stuck out like a sore thumb. I thought McCorry should really be carrying a white flag of surrender as he rode in the lead of the mob of bullocks, because nature sure had its own way of alerting everyone to your whereabouts.

  McCorry’s aim was to hit a neighbouring boundary and muster the cattle hard and fast, take the cleanskins (the unbranded animals) and return to the station to process them for market – it was all legal,
of course, with his motto ‘First in, best dressed’, and his way of making those few extra dollars for the station. No wonder everyone loved these cattle musters of the 1960s – they were like playing a cat-and-mouse game, only for real.

  After a quick lunch of salt beef that I had prepared earlier that morning at the station, and a slice of damper accompanied by a pannikin of sweet black tea, McCorry had the mustering team moving forward again. The stockmen sat up behind the coaches while Harry scouted ahead along the river in the bull buggy looking for a reasonable break in the steep bank where the coaches and the truck could cross with minimal work needed to shovel out a crossing.

  We seemed to have travelled for miles when Harry returned in the buggy and spoke with McCorry, while Mary and I sat patiently in the truck hoping that Harry had found a break in the riverbank where I could cross. McCorry stepped down from his saddle, pulled out his tin of tobacco and slowly rolled a cigarette, and Harry produced his stick of plug tobacco and took a chew.

  The men pointed to the north and south of the river. Old Yardie rode up to meet them. He spoke in language to Harry, got off his grey mare and got in beside Harry in the bull buggy. Then Harry pulled his hat down, put the buggy in gear and took off south back down the Robinson, the opposite direction to that in which we were travelling with the mustering team.

  McCorry got back in his saddle, tapped Little Arab with his spurs and rode towards me while beckoning to Malki.

  ‘Where them plant horses, old man?’ said Malki. ‘No tracks.’

  I thought that if McCorry was worried, he certainly wasn’t showing it, and years later I realised that this undaunted facade was the make-up of the man I was to marry.

  As the mustering team moved along throughout the day, each and every one of us was on the lookout for the plant horses’ tracks crossing the river while hoping that the coaches, buggy and truck could cross at the same point. But no horse tracks were sighted, and now it was mid-afternoon and we had begun to worry. Where had Charlie and Raymond and the station’s team of spare mustering horses got to? Every stockman had to have a spare horse or two for the job.