However, maybe the animals realised all the trouble they were causing because the next morning, much to Charlie’s surprise, they walked quietly onto the truck.
More surprises were in store. When they stopped for lunch, all the animals were sitting down on the hay. Granted, they were still in their respective corners, but they were sitting. After that it was easy. Some nights when Charlie opened the crate, they would look at him from their reclining positions and not even move. The end of the trip found them all true friends. Henry and Rastas would sit in the middle of the crate back to back, using each other for support, and the cows would sit on Henry’s side.
For the next few months, the animals stayed in the garden, until they became acclimatised. Their friendship never wavered. When Henry fell into the swimming pool one day they all rushed anxiously to the side and watched every move of the rescue operation. And when he was safely on land, the cows sniffed him all over to make sure he was alright—even Rastas gave him a casual inspection.
CHAPTER 20
1986-1987
From July 1986 to September 1987 I played the stock market. In July 1986 I had listed all the debts I knew, and Marlee, Danielle and I had had a directors’ meeting.
‘We have three choices,’ I said. ‘We can sell and probably walk away with nothing, we can struggle on for the next twenty years in the same half-baked way we have for the last twenty years, or I can try to make some money on the stock market to get us through to next year at least.’ In fact, we really didn’t have three choices because there was not enough money to get through to next year and there was no way I could ask the bank for more.
I told them I would sell everything we had except the station and cattle, but that we needed money in the meantime to operate and pay the large outstanding loans. The only way to get some money quickly was to gamble, either on horseraces or the stock market. Horseraces were out, but the stock market seemed very good at present, and Charles had said gold was going to move soon. So, if we bought gold shares, we might just pick up some extra cash. Enough to help us survive for the moment.
The girls looked at me. Not knowing anything about the stock market, it didn’t mean much to them.
‘However,’ I continued, ‘I know nothing about the stock market and I could blow the only money that stands between us and food for the next six months. If I lose it, the game could be over.’
With complete blind faith they said, ‘Go for it, Mum.’
In the next twelve months, Bullo River made one hundred and fourteen thousand dollars in trading shares, and a little less the following year. It was the most remarkable run of luck. No matter what I touched, it turned to money. If I had not been so unsure of myself, I could have made ten times that.
The first share I bought was Chillagoe. I purchased these shares because a mining geologist who had been drilling for oil on Bullo the year before had come from the town of Chillagoe. I saw the name ‘Chillagoe’, the shares were very low-priced and Chillagoe was a goldmining company.
Within a week of me buying my shares, the managing director went to Europe and bought the patents on a new system for producing washing powder in condensed form—a kilo packet of washing powder would now be the size of an aspirin packet. Apparently the publicity was endless, but of course we missed the lot.
We had no television, no radio and no newspapers. Our only contact with the outside world was limited to the radio telephone and sometimes it took days for people calling in to get through. Calling out usually took about a half-day. So I knew nothing of the patent purchase, or the price rise, or the change in the company name.
The broker finally reached me by phone. He said he thought I should sell my Viking shares. They were having trouble with the patent in Europe and if it could not be resolved soon, the shares would start to drop.
‘But I don’t have any Viking shares,’ I said. There were a few ‘Yes you do’, ‘No I don’t’ exchanges and then he told me what had happened.
‘So your fifteen cent Chillagoe shares are now Viking and at present, they are trading at . . .’ pause as he clicked keys on the computer, ‘seventy-eight cents.’
Did I want to sell? Until now, I had been very hesitant in this stock market venture, but that win had a marvellous effect on my confidence and I immediately ploughed back in. I bought all low-price shares and sold as soon as they moved a reasonable margin. This was my little plan. I suppose this is done by professionals on a larger scale but I don’t really know.
I would buy ten thousand shares, hold them for ten days and sell with a three thousand dollar profit. I achieved this about two or three times a month, not all the time of course, but fairly regularly, for about eight months.
I bought Esmeralda shares because I once had a mythical maid called Esmeralda. Charles used to say, ‘Why isn’t this clean? Why hasn’t that been put away? Where is my lunch?’ and so on, and I would say, ‘Good heavens, you just can’t rely on staff today. I distinctly told Esmeralda to do that. I really must take that girl in hand.’
When I saw Esmeralda listed in the mining shares, it was a must.
‘What did you buy today, Mummy?’ the girls asked when they came in that night from the yard.
When they heard ‘Esmeralda’, they both laughed. They had grown up with Esmeralda, the mythical maid.
Another big killing was a complete mistake. A friend gave me a tip that something big was about to happen and Elders shares would really rise. I think it was when they were going for a brewery in England. But their shares were five dollars plus. This was getting way out of my depth. I anguished over it for days. I usually bought ten thousand shares, my plan being if the share rose ten cents, I made one thousand dollars. With five and ten cent shares, this was fine, even up to eighty cent shares, but five dollars? That would be fifty thousand dollars I was gambling. But then there was the other side of the argument—you also made big money. I wrestled with it for another day. We needed the money, no two ways about that. I decided I would go in, take a reasonable profit, and get out quickly. I didn’t say anything to the girls.
I felt quite ill when I put the phone down. My hands were shaking. I had just gambled fifty thousand dollars.
A few days later my friend called.
‘Bad luck about our Elders shares.’
My heart hit the floor. ‘What happened?’ I croaked.
Apparently the shares had dropped by dollars and were still dropping—they had lost the brewery deal and further trouble was rumoured.
I stopped listening. All I could think of was that I had just wiped out around twenty-five thousand dollars. I was sick for days. What was I to do now, sell and take the loss, hold on and hope that maybe they would pull off the deal? I decided to wait.
I went back to my ten cent shares and my little regular profits. I had a lot to make up.
I was buying another ‘hunch share’ about three weeks later when the broker said, ‘You certainly made a smart move with your Elders shares. Are you going to hold them much longer, or take the profit now?’
‘Are you being sarcastic?’ I asked. He hesitated, so I said, ‘What do you mean “profit”?’
‘Well they’ve gone up substantially since you bought them last month.’
I was completely mystified. I had the listings in front of me from a three-day-old paper and unless some miracle had just occurred on the floor this Monday morning, I was twenty-eight thousand out of pocket.
‘How much have they gone up?’
‘About one dollar twenty.’
I nearly dropped the phone. ‘What shares did you buy me?’
‘Elders Resources, of course.’
Because I only bought gold shares, when I told him to buy Elders, he didn’t even think of Elders in the industrial shares, which of course were the shares I was told to buy. I had been worried sick over the last month watching the shares drop and thinking of all the money we were losing when we were making money all the time. Bullo ended up making about twenty thousand
dollars out of that mistake. But I had learned my lesson—no more tips from the experts. My stockbroker gave me a few good suggestions, but my regular profits stayed with the hunches.
The market was moving so fast that I could buy one hundred thousand five cent shares, the price would move five cents in a few weeks and I would sell and make five thousand dollars. It was heady business for me, so I can just imagine what those big guys were doing.
Another big profit was a share I bought because it had the same name as our dog. I found out later it was an aluminium share. I bought these shares a week before trade sanctions were imposed on South Africa. South Africa had been the world’s biggest producer of aluminium, now it was Australia. The price went up.
The luck was not only in buying the shares. Sometimes a company announced an issue, and I made money. One day I bought a share and the price went up the very next day. I asked the stockbroker if he knew any reason—were they about to announce a good result in the mine, or was it a merger? His reply was, ‘I really don’t know why these shares are improving Mrs Henderson, maybe they found out you bought some.’
One day he said to me, ‘Mrs Henderson, in the last ten weeks, out of the shares you have bought, there have been four mergers and three share issues.’ He then asked me if I knew that insider trading was illegal and that receivers of information were also guilty.
I asked him what insider trading was. He gave up. I guess he finally believed that my amazing luck was just that, luck.
But our really big win has to be laid at Charlie’s feet. About twenty months before his death, he had told me he wanted to buy some shares. He thought the share market was about to move, especially gold. This was my first introduction to the stock market. We were in Sydney and we had lunch with the stockbroker, then we visited the stock exchange. Charles, with introductions from the right quarters in Sydney, opened a share trading account.
He wanted to buy into a certain company. A friend’s father was the managing director, and Charles had met him at lunch and was very impressed. In Charles’s usual form, he had most of the facts wrong or had forgotten them, but he told me to call our new stockbroker and buy the shares.
‘The name is North . . . North . . . North something, the mine is in the Northern Territory, they’re mining gold, and it’s a fairly new company.’
I told Charles I couldn’t buy shares when I didn’t know the name of the company, but he said there couldn’t be many gold companies in the Territory with a name starting with ‘North’. I gave him one of my, ‘Oh come on Charles’ looks.
‘Don’t be cheeky.’
‘What if there are four?’ I asked patiently.
‘Buy the lot.’
‘Charles, why don’t you just ask Peter the name?’
‘What, and let him think I wasn’t paying attention?’
‘Well obviously you weren’t.’
I called our new stockbroker with our first order and told him what I knew.
‘Buy shares like this often?’ he asked.
The stockbroker came back and said there was one company that fitted the description and the name was North Flinders. I told him to buy. This done, we forgot all about it.
Now, two and a half years later, this sudden and short urge of Charlie’s was about to surface and help lift us out of our deep hole of debt. Well, not right out, but it was a rope for us to climb.
It happened a few days after my arrival back in Sydney from America. The broker tracked me to my brother’s house and called, wondering if I wanted to sell my North Flinders shares. I said I didn’t think I had shares in that company and he said I had bought them in 1984. I then remembered the great first share purchase. He said the shares had improved and made a good profit and I should sell. Indeed, the shares had doubled in price. I suppose I should have been delighted to find this nice little nest egg in a sea of debt, but my instincts said ‘no’. The broker seemed to have gone to just a little too much trouble to track me down. I said I would call back if I changed my mind. I called my friend of the ‘Elders tip’. He lived and breathed shares.
‘North Flinders? No, you’re a bit too late for that gravy train. Absolutely no seller at any price, those stocks are about to m-o-v-e.’
It seems the company was about to sign an agreement with the traditional owners and a new mining shaft was about to open. If this happened, and it seemed sure it would, the rumours were ‘Lasseter’s Reef proportions’ in returns. It happened and the price went up and up.
This was the agony and the ecstasy to its fullest degree. During the next day I would calculate, by the hour, our profits, then all night I would have nightmares. They ranged from the stock market crashing due to world problems and gold losing its value overnight, to the mine collapsing and everyone being killed. I would wake the next morning exhausted. Each day as the amount increased, so did the strain. Weekends were really bad.
I chickened out at thirteen dollars, partly because thirteen was Charlie’s lucky number, and partly because I hadn’t slept in three weeks. Also, the bank was wanting the great meeting. The shares continued to increase and so then I worried about all the money I could have made but didn’t! They finally levelled out at seventeen dollars. I calculated the amount I could have made if I had stayed in, and berated myself for weeks.
The really amazing part of this story was revealed to me a year or so later. Charles had bought shares in the wrong company. He had, at a later luncheon, told Peter’s dad he had purchased shares in his Northern Territory gold company, North Flinders, and said what a great company it was. He told Peter’s father to keep up the good work.
Peter’s dad later told Peter of this strange conversation he had had with Charles. It seems Peter’s father had been retired for years. The company he had been a director of was in Victoria, it was not in gold, and it was not a new company. So our biggest stock win was a complete fluke.
It was luck again when I sold most of the shares. It was the end of September 1987, and I was visiting my mother and sister in Queensland. The station needed money to bring in the fuel for the wet season and I was gambling with the money for these expenses. Also, I was on my way back to the station where the radio-telephone made share-trading a nightmare. So, having access to a normal phone, I sold the bulk of my shares and left just a few five cent hunches here and there, hoping they would take off. They did—right off the board when the crash came.
CHAPTER 21
1987
In March of 1987, Marlee’s Charlie decided he had been flying helicopters too long and wanted a break. So he came to Bullo to help us run the station. What a marvellous man. It is said, to really get to know someone, you have to live in the same house with them. It was a privilege to get to know Charlie. He was one of those good, strong, silent men who could always solve the problems. He was big, six foot three, capable and goodlooking. When Charlie walked into the house, you had that feeling, ‘Everything is alright now’.
Charlie was our knight in shining armour. Marlee loved him, Danielle adored him, and if I had ever had a son, I would have wanted him to be just like Charlie.
The mustering season started to move along, we began improvements on the property, repairing machinery and so on, and also looked at our long-term plans for the future. The biggest problem was lack of cows—thousands had been destocked between 1983 and 1985, and no cows meant no babies, no babies no steers, and no steers no money. We had to get breeders.
I wrestled with this problem for weeks—it meant going further into debt. But the choice was clear, either expand, or sell. For years Charles had been running a half-baked programme, always in debt, always behind at the beginning of each year, not a decent bit of equipment on the whole place, miserable cattle. I wanted no more of this way of life. We had all worked our hearts out for years, only to go further into debt. However, there was so much to think about, I put the problem of breeders temporarily back on the shelf.
The 1987 season was good. Marlee, Danielle and Charlie were a wonde
rful team. Charlie and Uncle Dick had all the machinery humming, and the musters, despite some problems, were going smoothly and successfully. In the background I was busily working the stock market to produce what we considered great returns. Things were looking bright.
I was in Sydney with Danielle. She was going to America to visit her grandmother for a few months. Danielle had not been back to Maryland since she was two, so she did not know ‘Bomma’, her grandmother. One of Charles’s many requests during those long months in hospital was that Danielle meet her grandmother, and I promised him I would do my best to get Danielle home to Maryland. Charles’s mother was ninety-six years old so it could not be a long range plan. However, as I write this today, she is approaching one hundred and one years and is hale and hearty.
The visit would be very beneficial for Danielle. Apart from boarding school in Adelaide and school in Bundaberg, she had lived all her life on Bullo, which was a hard, harsh way of life. What she needed was a look at a ‘world’, worlds apart. The beauty of eastern shore Maryland was just the place to send her. She would also meet a whole family she had only heard about and seen in photos.
We rushed around town buying warm clothes. After giving her pages of instructions on what to do and what not to do, and a credit card, I waved goodbye. Within the next few days, the stock market did its amazing plunge, but I had no time to think about my few shares that were also crashing by the minute because my sister called to say Mum had had another massive stroke.
They didn’t think she would come through this one. I dropped everything and flew straight to Bundaberg. There was a terrible storm approaching from the northeast. The sky was a black inky blue. It rushed to meet us as we drove from the airport to the hospital. I was quiet. I knew Mum was leaving us. Ralph was also quiet, so we stayed with our own thoughts as we drove to the hospital.
From Strength to Strength Page 28