by Thea Hayes
It rained all night. The next morning it was still raining heavily. I had this ‘no good’ feeling that I needed to get out of Toowoomba quickly. I was booked into Beaurepaires to get four new tyres later in the day, but I had a strange sense of urgency. I threw my suitcase and handbag into the car and went off to get my new tyres. While having the tyres fitted, I heard from a local that the road could be shut at Goondiwindi! Trying to stay calm, I drove south, just making it to Goondiwindi, with floodwaters closing in behind me. What a relief!
Two days later, back at Carraman, we saw on TV the extraordinary tsunami that hit the central shopping centre in Toowoomba, causing several people to drown. Later we saw the devastating flooding in the Lockyer Valley and Murphy’s Creek areas that washed away houses, cars and people in its path. If I hadn’t changed my appointment with Dr Lumley I would have been on the road coming back to Toowoomba and passing through the Lockyer Valley, at that very time. How lucky was I?
34
Our first home
Back at Carraman, Bob was busy cleaning up fences with the bobcat and forks, lifting the fences to free them from debris. The cows and calves had stayed at Bundidgerry until enough fences were repaired to hold the cattle. We were staying in Brian’s house, as the ‘House on the Prairie’ still needed complete re-cleaning after the previous manager’s poor effort.
I did a lot of walking and exploring around the area. A hundred metres from our house was a Bailey bridge, one end having collapsed but still usable by vehicles and cattle. A Bailey bridge is a type of portable, prefabricated truss (triangular system) developed around 1940 in England during the Second World War. This bridge went across the creek to another sand hill paddock. Also, in the creek nearby were the remains of an ancient wooden bridge structure that could have been a pier or a part of the Old Wagga Road. These historical structures intrigued me.
Brian had had the floors in the cottage repolished and installed air-conditioning in the lounge, kitchen and bedroom. The cottage came with only a few pieces of furniture, and as we had brought none of our own, I started to do them up, sanding and restoring two tables that had been left covered in dirt and grease. One was an old eight-foot-long oak table which I knew would look great in the dining room with my paintings scattered around the walls. Some of the paintings I had bought in Sydney when buying the furniture for the new Wave Hill, and others I’d bought at the Downlands College Art Exhibition in Toowoomba, where I used to help on the opening nights. The only problem with the dining room was it was a closed-in veranda, which had been built with timber and gauze, and when the mosquitoes in their millions found their way through the gauze, someone put Perspex up—which was much cheaper than glass—the result being no air-conditioning in the dining room.
It was several weeks after the flood before we could drive into town. Walking down the street in Narrandera, the townspeople smiled and greeted us like long lost friends.
At Mass at the Catholic Church in Narrandera, I was amazed by the friendliness of everyone.
‘You’re new.’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘Welcome.’
‘Come and have a cup of coffee with us.’
‘Can we help you with anything?’
My reply to the latter: ‘We need to buy some furniture.’
A cuppa and a chat later we knew the ropes. After a visit to the furniture shop in Narrandera, a garage sale and an antique shop at Matong later, we had furnished our cottage.
We had been told to visit Laura, a lover of antiques and the owner of a store crammed with memorabilia and antiques in Matong, a practically deserted town thirty-seven kilometres from Narrandera on the Old Wagga Road. We had a wonderful time rummaging through her shop and the shed at the back which was full of more old furniture.
Outside the shop were large pots of geraniums, pelargoniums, succulents and bougainvillea. I asked Laura if I could take a cutting of each and the next thing we knew we were invited up to her property to have free reign in her garden.
‘Take whatever you like,’ said Laura. Her cuttings were the first plants in our garden.
Our cottage, when we arrived, was just a house surrounded by a fence, with one fig tree still wet from the flood. Over the following months we planted grape vines around the entrance patio; plum and peach trees on each side of the house; mowed and tidied the grass to make a lawn and started a vegetable garden around the boundary fence.
Carraman was a haven for koalas and birds of every description. While driving the four-wheeled motorbikes mustering the cattle, or in the ute going to feed the bulls, we would often see a flock of pelicans landing on the lagoon; or the white-winged choughs gathering in groups on the ground, pecking and chatting, darting in all directions as we drove closer. The purple swamp hens would scatter along the creek bank or an occasional koala would decide to change trees or Bob would spy one high in the river red gums.
After we moved in and set up house, I started going out on the run with Bob to open the gates when he fed the bulls every morning. At the monthly weighing of heifers and bulls, from weaning to eighteen months of age, I would record their weights against the identity numbers on their ear tags. When Andrew Green came to do the artificial insemination, I would do the paperwork—identifying each cow with the sire of semen used. And sometimes I would make a batch of pumpkin scones and take them to the yard for smoko with a thermos of tea.
We were settling in well.
35
Yamba Stud
Yamba was the name of Brian’s Murray Grey and Angus stud. The property was 3500 acres, with nine kilometres of Murrumbidgee river frontage. Two major creeks and the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Scheme canal were on the northern boundary, making it a very water safe property. It also had many clusters of river red gum trees and a native timber block of 317 acres; a beautiful property with many koalas.
There were about 250 Murray Grey and Angus breeders. The calving times were spring and autumn when Bob was kept very busy on his quad bike patrolling the calving paddock, which was close to the yards, in case of emergencies. Bob would weigh and tag the freshly born calves, while the mother would bellow her head off on the other side of the quad bike, where Bob hoped she would stay.
At weaning time, when calves are removed from their mothers—usually at about six months of age—they are weighed, and data is collected for the Estimated Breeding Values (EBVs) used by the breed and industry to select sires for use in breeding herds.
Those calves that don’t make the grade become steers or heifers to be fattened and sold at a later date.
Artificial insemination was used, as well as embryo transplanting, where fertilised eggs are flushed from donor cows and transplanted into recipient cows. The selected sire bulls are grown out to suitable weights at eighteen months of age and sold on farm or at selected bull sales.
Every year the new crop of bulls and heifers were freeze branded with their permanent identification number and alphabetical code for year of branding.
Every day the sixty to eighty bulls, who were divided into a specially designed complex of fifteen-acre paddocks, eight to ten to a paddock, had to be fed a ration of nuts and grain, with hay made available in hay racks. The Angus bulls were sold on farm and the Murray Greys at the Wodonga Murray Grey sale.
When Bob first took over, the cows were grossly overweight, with many over 1000 kilograms. When he suggested to Brian that the cows needed to lose 200 to 300 kilograms, Brian was horrified and said no—he wanted the cows maintained at that weight. Bob warned him of the calving difficulties with gross layers of fat through the pelvis.
All the cows had been artificially impregnated at the same time, so all were due in the same couple of weeks. Calving started okay with the Angus cows, however the Murray Greys had numerous calving difficulties with calves weighing up to 65 kilograms.
Bob and I, with the assistance of a ‘fast-lock pulley set’, safely removed the calves, who were mostly alive except two breech births who failed t
o survive due to their extreme size.
Thereafter Brian allowed Bob to limit the feeding intake between weaning and leading up to calving. Brian humorously called it, ‘Bob’s Jenny Craig feeding system’.
Because of Bob’s animal health skills, he never once had to get a vet out to Carraman, saving Brian thousands of dollars.
Not long after we arrived, Brian, who loved to show his cattle and who had been very successful at Sydney and Melbourne shows, said he wanted the Murray Greys shown at the Canberra Agricultural show. Andrew Green from Lockhart did all the artificial insemination plus training and showing of the cattle. I would have loved to practise my AI and cattle showing skills, but Andrew was being well paid to do both. We decided to go to the Canberra show too. I loved being in the cattle showing environment again, and when our Murray Greys took out most of the ribbons the crowd looked at us and clapped. Little did they know we had nothing to do with training them.
We also went to the Melbourne Royal Agricultural Show, but we didn’t do quite as well. You can’t win them all.
A Day Freeze Branding (from my diary)
I know I offered to help, because Bob had been working flat out, and it’s always worse when the owner, Brian, comes down and tears around the place on his bike and wants to get everything done in two days while he’s there. I mean to say Bob works ten hours a day anyway. But it’s always easier when I do the paperwork, while the men do the hard yakka in the yard.
It was early, 6 a.m. Cold and cloudy with rain threatening, and there in the yard 300 bulls, to be freeze branded. Oh my God, this is going to take hours. Thankfully I had time to fill the thermos with hot tea, or I definitely would never have survived.
The first bull comes into the crush.
‘What’s wrong with this bloody thing, it won’t hold his head.’
Brian muttered, ‘I’ll just have to hold it shut while you two do the branding.’
It would have been okay if the head crush had been working properly, but it wasn’t, and you can’t brand 600 to 700 kilogram bulls when they’re jumping around like crazy as the freeze brand hits their rump.
Wear and tear, too much use—we needed a new one, and it’s a pity someone hadn’t thought of replacing it earlier.
‘Too expensive, can’t afford it, we’ll make do.’
The first bull comes into the crush. One guy had to hold the crush bale, and do the timing 50 seconds per brand, one shave the rump of the standing animal, the third had to find the right numbered brand in the dry ice, and then apply the brands. There was only me to chase the cattle up the crush, along with looking at the ear tags as the animals came up the crush and finding the number on my sheet and marking it with a pink texta as I yelled out the number to the branders.
‘J124.’
‘Bring the next one up.’
But with three at the crush the animals were not coming up the race. I had to keep chasing them, and the blighters wouldn’t move.
‘Get up there, come on move,’ I said, giving jabs with my polythene pipe.
‘Come on, get up.’
‘He’s turned around the blighter.’
‘Don’t go backwards.’
‘Hey, you guys, give us a hand.’
Bob, however, was able to make an adjustment to the mechanism which corrected the fault and the job thankfully worked more smoothly thereafter.
I was there all day. Half an hour for lunch. We didn’t finish until after 5 p.m. Then it was time to get dinner.
36
Rupert
Every man needs a dog, and every girl on a property does too when her partner is away all day.
I didn’t want a pedigree; no small fluffy poodle types; I didn’t want to spend any money. I just wanted a dog that was big in stature and big in heart.
The guy from the dog pound heard that I wanted a dog.
‘How about this one?’ he asked, showing me a madly yapping bull terrier.
No thank you.
‘Well, here’s a great little fellow.’ He showed me a blue heeler, which jumped down from the truck and immediately started running around in circles.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ I asked.
‘Got hit by a truck.’
No thank you.
One day I came home to find a tall, skinny and timid dog in the garage. A staghound! One of those Scottish aristocratic dogs you see in old paintings of the landed gentry.
He was only a few months old and was given to us by somebody whose uncle’s bitch had delivered a litter of eleven. My little grandchildren Sam and Harvey (Penny and Patrick’s second child) were staying with us, and they ran to him, patting and hugging him, but he was very wary of the adults. By the time Sam and Harvey returned to their parents in Sydney, Rupert, as we called him, had gotten used to us as well.
Every morning, when Bob went out in the utility to feed the bulls, Rupert would want to go too. We would lift him on to the back of the ute. It was not long before he was able to jump up to the tray by himself. He loved playing games with the bulls, or touching noses with the calves.
Then he discovered kangaroos.
He was so fast. He could keep up with any kangaroo, even following them into the river, with us screaming, ‘Rupert! Come back, come back!’
Kangaroos are very clever—they drown dogs who get too close. At first, he didn’t care what size he attacked, and after being ripped open many times in the neck and a string of visits to the vet, we decided no more vet fees—one of us would stitch him up. We found it very difficult without the right instruments and when he had another kick in the neck and a perforated lung, back we went.
About that time, thank goodness, it dawned on Rupert to ‘pick the smaller ones’, or catch foxes instead, which was a great relief to our pocket—what with castration fees, inoculations, treatment for rat poisoning, and numerous neck gashes, we had spent over three thousand dollars.
One year we took him on holidays with us to North Stradbroke Island. There are kangaroos on the island, but they aren’t a menace as they are in the Riverina. The tourists here love the kangaroos, which can be seen best at sunset standing in a long row on top of the sand hills, looking out to the ocean or munching on the lawn grass at anyone’s home.
We had to keep Rupert on the chain most of the time at Straddie, as we had visions of him escaping, chasing and killing a kangaroo just in front of the baker shop, where the tourists sit to drink their coffee. One could imagine the screams of horror, the blood and guts spilling over the bitumen. We would end up in gaol.
But we still loved him. I called him ‘Beautiful’, because he had a beautiful nature and was so beautifully ugly.
37
Settling into Narrandera
After our first visit to the Narrandera Catholic Church we received an official welcome morning tea for new parishioners to the district. In the church hall we met Morna Knight, a Murray Grey cattle breeder who ran a property on the road to Leeton. Sadly, Morna’s late husband, who ran a local airline, had been killed with four of his passengers some years before during a freak storm in the Riverina area.
Every year the local Rotary Club welcomed new residents to Narrandera, as well, with drinks and dinner at the golf club. We were called up to the microphone one by one by the president and asked to introduce ourselves. Bob told them how we met at Straddie, and my neighbour said he could be an axe murderer, which brought the house down; how we travelled around Australia in our caravan, and had taken on the management of Carraman Station. Another couple new to Narrandera were Robyn and Steve. Robyn was from America and Steve was an apiarist from NSW, whom we called ‘The Bee Man’. They met in Honolulu, where they fell in love and then moved to Narrandera. Steve often left his bees out at Carraman when the river red gums were flowering. It was delicious honey and we became regular customers.
That evening I was told that I was to be invited to a very ‘exclusive’ ladies club in Narrandera, which turned out to be ‘The Sturt Ladies Club’, run by a dedicated
group of Narrandera ladies.
I was also asked to become a member of the Country Women’s Association with the younger group of ladies! The older group met during the day. We ‘younger’ members met for a dinner meeting every month. The CWA is a great organisation bringing country and town women together and taking on issues affecting the general population. The CWA had been very strong in the Northern Territory and Kimberley when I was there. However, I hadn’t been allowed to become a member, as Tom Fisher, the manager of Wave Hill, believed the two-way radio should only be used for business or medical emergencies, and not for women to gossip on.
Bob, as a previous member of Rotary International, happily joined the Narrandera Rotary Group, attending the Wednesday meeting every week and taking me along for the mixed meetings once a month. Rotary now have female members, but they also have a female Rotary group called Inner Wheel. Money was raised for charity by having sausage sizzles, helping at the Narrandera rodeo and other events. Once a month we all had fun on a Friday night, getting together for a barbeque, called a ‘Rock and Roll’ night, meaning rock in and rock out—bring a plate and drinks—with members taking it in turns to host the event.
Rotary also are very involved in the John O’Brien Festival, which has been held annually since 1994. It is held in honour of the town’s beloved poet and parish priest Patrick Joseph Hartigan (1878–1952) who published Around the Boree Log and Other Verses under the pseudonym John O’Brien. It is a four-day event, showcasing the works of John O’Brien himself, along with other bush poets around Australia. He was one of the first priests in the state with a motor car and in 1911 he took the last sacraments to Jack Riley of Bringenbrong Station, who is said to have been Banjo Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River.
Having been invited to homes of our new friends, I was keen to entertain in return. But with an unsuitable dining room in the cottage, we resorted to entertaining with barbeques at the river. At our first barbeque, we invited our American friend Robyn and her husband Steve—The Bee Man—plus Jan and Garth Strong, who introduced us to ‘The Desert Discovery Group’, a group of people interested in natural resources management in remote areas.