Stars over Shiralee Read online

  Broome was in full swing with the racing season (and Terry never missed a race day); the park was overflowing and running on overload. Invariably Lauren answered the phone. She spoke to me as if I were any other caller and I followed her lead, maintaining a cool politeness, even when she left me hanging interminably. She did this more often that not, coming back on the line with, ‘Oh I am so sorry, I can’t seem to find him anywhere.’ Sometimes the line would simply be cut off. She was hardly more than a kid, yet she had it all over me. I felt she was playing with me. There was a faint air of self-satisfaction in her voice that made me wonder why I bothered. I have my faults, but guile isn’t one of them, though I was determined I would not let her see how badly her games were affecting me.

  One day Rachael, the other receptionist, picked up and put me through to Terry straightaway. I told him, ‘Do you realise Lauren isn’t putting my calls through to you?’ He had no answer for me. Maybe he knew what was going on but was too gutless to do anything about it. Or, for all I know, he was standing there signalling her to disconnect me. Either way, I got the feeling I was no longer a very important part of his life. Maybe he couldn’t handle my cancer; often he didn’t even ask me how I was. He would tell me about his day, I would listen and let him finish, then we said our goodbyes.

  After my third beautiful weekend at the Shiralee I made the decision that I wasn’t returning to Broome. I’d had a visit at the hospital from a stockman called Mick who had worked for McCorry and me for thirteen years. He came to see how I was coping and catch up on all my news. Actually, he was the one with the news. He had bumped into Terry and Lauren up in Broome — in a compromising position in a dark car park behind the Divers Tavern. Terry knew who Mick was, and that he’d been close to me, and Mick told me that my husband had put both hands into the air saying, ‘I’m not here, I’m not here!’ When I told Terry this, he denied it, just as he’d denied having anything to do with Lauren. But I could find no reason to doubt Mick. He wasn’t trying to stir up trouble, I was sure; he just didn’t want to see me made a fool of.

  Although I wasn’t sure I was ready to call it off completely, I knew that once I was convalescing after the radiotherapy I wanted to be in a safe and peaceful place. And that wasn’t the caravan park. Terry obviously had Lauren in his life; for all I knew, she had never left it. I didn’t know why he had married me. I was feeling terribly low at the time, and my tiredness wasn’t helping me think straight, but then again, this wasn’t something I could think my way out of. Emotionally I was a mess. My hair had begun to fall out — every day my comb was full of it — and I cried for the loss of it.

  No sooner had I resolved that I was finished with the marriage than I received a phone call from Terry. He had booked a room for the following weekend at the Kings Park Motel, just down the road from the hospital, and wanted me to meet him there.

  When the day arrived I put all my effort into looking my best, not for him, but for myself; it helped me feel stronger. With cunning styling, I managed to make it look as though I had more hair than I actually did. I drove to the motel feeling sick as a dog, still suffering the effects of my radiation session the day before.

  It was four weeks since I’d seen my husband and, feeling so fragile, I wasn’t sure if I was up to telling him it was over. At the same time, I was wondering just how much more of this pantomime I could take. I was the first to get there, so I picked up the room key from reception — and opened the door into a roomful of lilies. They were gorgeous, a truly beautiful sight, but the perfume was overbearing, it made me feel even more sick, and I had to move most of them into the bathroom in order to breathe freely again.

  An hour or so later Terry arrived, bearing a gift of pearl and diamond earrings, very proud that he had selected them himself. He greeted me more warmly than he had since we married, and insisted I put them on immediately for him to admire. Feeling somewhat like a stranger in my own marriage I greeted Terry with as much affection as my exhausted body would allow. I tried to show some enthusiasm, to show I was grateful for his gifts, but I was confused. And Terry, of course, remained true to form: the next day he left me resting at the motel while he went to Belmont racecourse.

  CHAPTER 5

  Back to the Shiralee

  The days at Anstey House drifted by. If it hadn’t been for the support of my children, it’s hard to say what direction my life would have taken at that time — I could barely see it through what seemed a thick layer of fog. I was kicking myself that I had walked into this marriage. Despite the ardour with which he had given me the pearl and diamond earrings, it was hard to believe my husband had any love for me at all. Certainly, he did not appear to feel for me in the way he had when he begged me to marry him only a few weeks before.

  Still my calls to him were blocked when Lauren answered the phone. And if I did get put through to my husband, after a few words to me he would get drawn into a conversation with some other person in the room and simply forget I was on the end of the line. As often as not, that person would be Lauren — she would call his name, and then they’d both be laughing and chatting about nothing very much, and there seemed to be nothing I could do about it.

  I had gone from being a strong and confident woman who had motivation and direction in her life to someone who seemed to be going round in ever-decreasing circles. It was an effort to make any decisions, but I decided I would not call Terry any more. If he wanted to speak to me, he could call me.

  Towards the end of my radiotherapy I had a visit from Jean, Terry’s sister-in-law. Her husband Jim had only recently died, and she had taken over his role as Terry’s business partner in the caravan park. She was on her way back to her farm in the south-west and came to see how I was. We had not known each other long, but I liked Jean and we respected each other. Over a cup of tea at the hospital cafeteria, she asked me whether I would be going back to Broome. She wasn’t blind: she could see for herself how it was for me.

  The floodgates opened. I had not realised how much pent-up emotion I was carrying — or how strongly I felt about the prospect of returning to Broome.

  ‘No, no,’ I got out between sobs. ‘I’m not going back, not while she’s still there.’

  When I had control over myself again I asked if Lauren was still there. Jean confirmed she was. I don’t know why I’d asked. Of course she would still be there. Why wouldn’t she? Feeling a total fool for crying in front of Jean I begged her not to worry on my behalf. It wasn’t that long since she had lost her own husband to cancer and she had enough to cope with. But I was grateful for her visit. Though I tried to discourage visitors — I didn’t want to see them when I was so worn out — it was good to see someone I knew.

  After six weeks my radiation treatment was complete and I was free to leave, though I had not been given the all-clear from cancer yet. That would take a bit more time. I couldn’t get out of the city fast enough. I just wanted to go home to the Shiralee.

  My body was racked with tiredness, my breast burned from the radiation treatment, but nothing was going to stop me driving the four hundred kilometres home to my Shiralee. My first glimpse of the purples and mauves of the Stirling Ranges, followed shortly by the profile of the sleeping princess lying peacefully along the rugged Porongurups, told my heart I was nearly home, and I felt the familiar calmness descend over my body, the weariness almost vanish. This time the joy was not shadowed by the certain knowledge that I had to go back in a few days to resume my treatment. It was over. It would be months before I got the official all-clear, but in the meantime I felt completely positive. I was home. The Shiralee was my real home and my haven.

  I pulled in just in time for afternoon smoko — tea and scones — with the children on the verandah. It was a glorious homecoming.

  Leisha, Robby and Kristy had mustered the cattle up into the house paddocks so that I could look at them from the back verandah while enjoying a cup of tea. Here Prince, a chihuahua and the latest addition to our household, lay curled up p
eacefully on my lap, while Sally never let me out of her sight. For several days I rested, letting the rhythm of life in this little southern paradise flow back into me. I could sit for hours, gazing at the tiny blue wrens that dominated the bird feeders surrounding the house, and the colourful parrots that fed freely from the orchard.

  Robby and Leisha had recently purchased fifty steers for the farm, and in the weeks that followed I helped the children work the cattle through the yard, administering preventative measures for lice and worms, and delivering mineral boosters via a metal tube down each animal’s throat, then finished them off with a B12 injection in the neck. They were good quiet cattle and looked fine specimens by sale day — a day I was beginning to hate.

  Little Blue, our blue-black quarter horse (a horse that is fastest over a quarter mile), was worth her weight in gold, she was such a calming influence on any flighty young steers. When the new steers arrived on the farm, sometimes weaned, other times not, we would hold them in the cattle yard on hay and water for a few days to give them time to settle into their new surroundings. Then we released them into a paddock with Little Blue. This strategy greatly reduced the risk of a rush of cattle, which could end up in a trail of destruction several properties down the road — not to mention aggrieved and hostile landholders. This was not an idle worry; it didn’t take much to get a rush started, as I knew from the Kimberley.

  I was thinking of a muster I did with an old Aboriginal stockman called Alex while I was managing Louisa Downs. Australian Land and Cattle, the company who owned the station, was well and truly broke and it had been three months since I’d had any money to pay the stockmen’s wages or buy fuel to keep the power plant operating. As it was, I would crank the old Lister engine over, but could only afford to run it long enough to keep the freezer cool, but not icy. That was sufficient to stop the meat from going green, but I needed a better solution.

  I called old Alex to meet me on the back lawn of the homestead, and he came along with two younger stockmen, Ringer and Frank. We all sat down on the ground under the ancient jacaranda for a discussion, which progressed along typically formal lines.

  ‘Yumun,’ old Alex said, ‘that Ringer and that Frank fella here, them ready to talk.’

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ I said. ‘This mob I work for are broke.’ I placed my hands out in front of me, palms open.

  ‘They’ve got nothing, no money, so I need to do a muster to get some money. What do you mob reckon?’

  I looked at all three men for an answer. They took their time, had another chew on their plug tobacco, then one by one spat the excess over their shoulders, placed the wad of tobacco behind an ear, and got down to the business of discussing the muster between themselves. Eventually Alex said, ‘Yumun, we muster them yarriman (horses) piccaninny daylight, draft em, start that muster next morning.’

  ‘Good, old man, thank you,’ I said, shaking his callused hands. He was perfectly right. As soon as we had mustered the stockhorses from the horse paddock, we could begin the cattle muster. And he was offering to work without pay, though I would not let them do that — they would be paid out of the proceeds of the cattle muster. I felt fortunate to have such good people working with me.

  The morning after the horse muster the stockmen selected saddles, blankets and bridles from the saddle room. They saddled up and we started the cattle muster along the Mary River, below the homestead. The little black native bees were giving us hell as they battled for our ears and noses in search of moisture. Throughout the long day the men picked up small mobs of cattle and ran them into the ‘coaches’ (the quiet and steady cattle used to help hold wild or unruly cattle). I sat patiently behind the wheel of the bull buggy, keeping a watchful eye on a moody rogue bull that wasn’t too keen on remaining with the new mob we were mustering.

  Different groups of stockmen were taking it in turns to make mustering runs further afield. We would hold up for a time, wait for the fresh cattle to settle, and then move on again. With a good mob in hand, old Alex turned his sweat-covered brown gelding around and rode over to me, gazing back at the cattle as he placed his plug of tobacco behind an ear.

  ‘Yumun, we turn and yard up?’ he asked, pointing with his chin in the direction of the homestead.

  ‘Yes, let’s go old man, let’s go home and yard up,’ I replied, nodding my head in agreement. It had been a good day.

  We had yarded the cattle and most of the stockmen had unsaddled their weary horses and begun to wash them down when old Biddy, Alex’s wife, called out at the top of her lungs, ‘Coooo-ah, coooo-ah!’

  ‘Coooo-ah, coooo-ah,’ the other women and children took up the call, and I looked over to where they were pointing. The cattle yard gates had swung open and the rogue bull that had been giving us a hard time all day was leading the mob of cattle towards the river and freedom in a heavy cloud of dust.

  Stockmen in saddles and stockmen riding bareback came to the rescue, riding out of the yard as quick as their horses would carry them, galloping in a wide half-circle towards the river to try to put a bend in the wayward mob and herd them back.

  When I heard them cry, ‘Yull, yull,’ I knew they had the cattle in hand and were hunting them back again. Then cries of ‘Yull, yull,’ came from within the heavy dust cloud, and soon the cattle emerged into the open and were pushed back into the stockyard.

  Somehow the chain on the yard gate had come undone and I wasn’t about to risk that again, so I took a head rope (a rope with a noose in it for slipping over the bull’s horns) from the bull buggy and tied it around the yard gates for added security. The dollars were on the hoof and the money was as good as in the bank!

  *

  Having Little Blue down on the Shiralee not only helped settle the cattle but also kept a smile on Leisha’s face. Leisha really is a marvellous horsewoman. Ever since she was a little girl she has broken in and handled her own horses, and Kristy has done the same. Robby, on the other hand, though a natural horseman, prefers his farm bike.

  Being so confident and in control on horseback helped keep Leisha strong through the time I was having my radiotherapy and she was holding the family together. That confidence had not been won without cost, however.

  Back at Kimberley Downs, while I was away from the homestead transferring a trailer load of gear to our new station, Fairfield, fourteen-year-old Leisha took a fall while training her new horse, Cavalier. She had purchased Cavalier — a big bay gelding, eighteen hands, a purebred quarter horse — against my better judgement. I had put all of the child endowment money I’d received for the children in their own passbooks. Leisha had about $10,000 in her account at the time. I told her that if she wanted him, she would have to buy him with her own money.

  Cavalier had already earned himself a formidable reputation by putting two good horsemen in hospital with busted ribs and other broken bones. This knowledge alone was enough for me to give the bay the thumbs down; however, my strong-willed daughter purchased Cavalier after I had walked away. Leisha loved a challenge, and I am sure this was what pulled her towards the horse in the first place. No sooner had I left Kimberley Downs with the trailer than she chose to work her new giant between the stables and the homestead.

  The horse had a very determined disposition and the dangerous habit of throwing his head back, each time very nearly whacking Leisha in the face. It was probably too soon, but she attached a loose, full-length tie-down that allowed the big bay to get his head up, but not far enough to smack her in the face. Then she got into the saddle and began working wide circles. When the horse next tried to throw his head back and realised he couldn’t, he panicked and reared. When that didn’t throw her, he launched himself backwards to land on top of Leisha, pinning her firmly to the ground. Had she taken the time and known her horse better she would have realised it wasn’t in his nature to be so restricted. The big bay tried two or three times to rise, but because of the tie-down was unable to get his head up and repeatedly rolled back down on top of her.


  A panicking Kristy was trying frantically to flog the horse off her sister, but luckily Leisha still had her senses about her. She could see the fear in the horse’s eyes and called out for Kristy to stop. Eventually, with Kristy’s help, Leisha was able to get herself out from under Cavalier. Shaking and trembling, her body bruised, she then helped up the frightened animal. Apologising to Cavalier, she rubbed him down as best she could, checked him over then jumped back on and rode him bareback around the paddock.

  Thankfully this was the end of a tempestuous relationship and Cavalier calmed down. Leisha now knew she could deal with anything the gelding threw at her, and this helped give her a sense of her own power and strength. She would call upon this strength when she needed to hold things together for me.

  I had three months of complete relaxation on the Shiralee, with only the occasional phone call from my husband. Then one day he arrived out of the blue. I was sitting in the lounge room when I caught a glimpse of him belting around the house towards the back door. He let himself in and embraced me passionately.

  ‘Hang on a minute. You don’t come waltzing back into my life just when you darned well please,’ I said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded, the picture of wounded innocence.

  ‘We’ve been married less than six months,’ I said, ‘and I’ve had a major operation for cancer — people die of cancer, you know Terry — but how often did you visit me? I think you went to the races more often. I wanted to put off the wedding, remember, but you insisted we go ahead, you promised me you’d support me. Well I’ve never felt so alone as I have since I married you.’ I hadn’t realised how angry I was.