From Strength to Strength

by Sara Henderson

  One bright twinkle was 2nd of January, Danielle’s twenty-first birthday. She had always complained that her birthday was so close to Christmas and New Year that it did not get the proper attention. So I knew I would have to give extra special attention to this one or I would be in strife.

  Danielle had been away since November and because of their workload, she and Martin had not been able to come to Bullo for Christmas. I thought I would plan a lovely dinner and dance twenty-first in Darwin with close friends. But when I presented this plan to Danielle, she said there was too much work on their agenda and there wasn’t enough time for them to go to Darwin. So that was the end of the dinner dance.

  Marlee and I called her on the morning of the 2nd and wished her a lovely day and we sent her three big bunches of flowers hourly for three hours. She liked that. Then, after much talking, Marlee and I decided the best gift we could think of was a Toyota utility. We delivered it a month or so late. Marlee loaded it on our seven-ton truck and took it to Cloncurry in February.

  Between 2nd of January and delivery, there were endless phone conversations about the mystery gift. Questions like:

  ‘Is it wood?’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘Is it useful?’

  ‘Steel?’

  ‘Have I ever had one before?’

  ‘Oh, Mummy, please tell me what it is!’

  I stayed home to look after the animals and pets on the station, so there were many phone calls between Marlee and myself regarding the strategy of delivery. Marlee arrived in Cloncurry and unloaded the Toyota at a trucking yard. I had arranged for a large basket of flowers with long ribbon streamers and Marlee sat this on top of the bonnet. The Toyota was white and the flower arrangement was pink and white, so it looked very feminine, or as feminine as a Toyota can look.

  She then sneaked into the street, parked it in front of the house next door, and went back and got the truck.

  She told Danielle she had to call me to say she had arrived safely. She whispered to me the Toyota was parked outside the house next door and gave the phone to Danielle. Now our Danielle is a very composed type. If you think something is exciting and you tell Danielle, the response is usually, ‘Oh yeah.’ But we got her this time.

  She said hello and I said, ‘Happy birthday, darling, your present is out the front of the house.’

  There was silence and then she said in her usual dry tone, ‘What? The white truck?’

  ‘No, a bit further along the street.’

  Marlee said when she saw the Toyota she just walked out the door with her mouth open. On my end of the phone it was, ‘Where down the street? I . . . Oh . . .’ And she dropped the phone.

  ‘Are you there, Mummy?’ asked Marlee.

  ‘Yes. Does she like it?’

  ‘Does she ever, she’s out there patting it. We did it Mum, we finally got a reaction out of Danielle!’

  The Outback can sometimes make the simplest of chores life-threatening. During the wet of 1989 we had friends staying with us. The rains had been continuous all through December and January and now Homestead Creek had flooded. Uncle Dick and the cook were on the other side, so the problem was how to get their nightly beer rations to them.

  Marlee sweetly asked one of our guests if he would do this small thing for her. John readily agreed.

  ‘But how do I get there?’ he asked, after looking at the one hundred and fifty yards of flowing water.

  ‘Oh it’s quite shallow. The creek is only deep in the middle. Take the Lilo out of the pool and put the beer on it like a raft. Just walk it to the deep part and then swim the last few yards to the other side.’

  He waded into the water. The first fifty yards was easy as it was the quiet backwater of the flooding. Dick and the cook were waiting on the other side, eyes glued to the beer carton.

  ‘Don’t drop the beer!’ they kept shouting. When the Lilo hit the current, it started to buck and weave, and the shouts from Dick and the cook grew louder and louder.

  Terrified of losing the beer, John wrapped his arms around the carton and the Lilo and locked his fingers. He did many complete somersaults and each time he came up, Dick and the cook renewed their shouting, ‘Don’t drop the beer!’ He was kicking with his feet, but with no hands he was at the mercy of the current. He finally bumped into the bank on the other side and willing hands dragged the waterlogged lump from the water and separated him from the beer. They left him sitting on the bank gasping for breath.

  ‘See ya’ tomorrow night,’ they called back as they walked off.

  ‘That’s what you think!’ he said.

  The next night John made a small raft out of two flour drums with a loop of baling wire over the top. Uncle Dick and the cook were shouting various instructions to the ‘young city slicker’ as they had dubbed him, when he walked to the edge of the fast current, hurled a weighted rope to them and called ‘Catch!’ They scrambled for the rope and tied it to a nearby tree.

  ‘Okay, pull the guide rope.’ He took his end and tied it to a tree and Uncle Dick and the cook hauled in their beer raft. It was then returned to the supply side, where it was secured until the next supply was due.

  ‘Look at that, only wet to the knees!’ called John. Uncle Dick stopped calling him a ‘city slicker’.

  CHAPTER 25

  1990

  In March 1990 a sudden urge came over me to go to Hong Kong. I am not a sudden urge person, but one morning I woke up and decided. Marlee agreed. I hadn’t had a real holiday for a while and apart from needing the break, I wanted to wander alone for a while.

  I called Peg and Jack and told them I was coming to Hong Kong and in their usual delightful way they welcomed me with open arms.

  It was almost thirty years since I had been in Hong Kong. What a change! As the plane banked to approach the airport, this strange skyline greeted me. Rows and rows of tall apartment buildings covered the shoreline. A new shoreline that didn’t even exist when I was there in 1960.

  Peg and Jack had been in Sydney while Charles was in hospital, and in Brisbane for Marlee’s wedding, so it was not thirty years since I had seen them. They drove me through parts of Kowloon that had not changed at all and then into areas so new and completely different to the old surroundings it was like a time warp.

  We talked non-stop, trying to bridge the long time gap that letters and phone calls never seem to cover adequately.

  During their decades of contribution to the efficient running of Hong Kong, Peg and Jack had lived all over the area. From the White House in Tai Po to the Peak to Kowloon and back again.

  ‘As you know, we moved to this house last year,’ Peg said as we drove in the gates. I just sat there looking across the road. There on the corner stood Grand Court, and there on the top floor was the room where I had spent my first night in Hong Kong thirty years ago, in Dick Kirby’s apartment.

  We drove in and the gates closed. What a beautiful walled garden. The house was only a stone’s throw from one of Hong Kong’s busiest roads, but you would never know. It was surrounded by a high stone wall, with a garden full of big trees and plants bordering a small lawn. The house was also stone, with ivy climbing all over it.

  Inside were the marvellous high ceilings of the tropics, spacious open rooms, parquet floors, and all the beauty of the Orient in paintings, rugs and furnishings. It was a perfect setting of elegance and harmony created by two people whose love for this fascinating place showed in every treasure they had gathered around them.

  The pace and schedule of Jack and Peg’s lives had not changed much in thirty years. They still both had three times the normal workload to achieve daily.

  Peg apologised the next morning at breakfast, saying the next few days were going to be hectic. I said I was quite content to tag along or, if this was not convenient, she could drop me off downtown or I could just sit in the garden.

  She said unfortunately that morning she had to go to a funeral, but I could sit in the park or go shopping. I decided to go along
. Living in the outback 250 kilometres from the nearest town makes attending church slightly difficult, and though nightly I sit and look up at the heavens and stars and have a heart to heart with God about daily events, there is something about a beautiful church. We stopped in front of the Hong Kong Cathedral, where thirty years ago Charles and I had been married. In less than twenty-four hours I had returned to where I had spent my first night in Hong Kong, and to where I was married.

  I sat in that beautiful old church and in my mind’s eye watched the years slip away until I was back at the beginning. I remember thinking, ‘What would I change?’

  It is a strange thing about life—we constantly say, ‘I wish this’ or ‘If only that’, but when faced with a choice, it is difficult to make a decision.

  I had spent thirty years saying ‘I wish this’ or ‘If only’, but when I asked myself ‘What would I change?’, I could not make up my mind. How can you change anything? The knowledge you gain from your experiences, good or bad, would not have been gained if you had not had the experiences! You must experience to grow, with growth comes knowledge, and with knowledge you change. I interrupted this philosophical debate with myself. What was the point in going back to ask what I would change? What has happened has happened; it is now in the past. Think about the present and the future.

  So I did. I looked at it as a new beginning. Thirty years before, I had started out in this church to build a life with a very unusual man. Now, thirty years later, I was back again, alone. Did I have another thirty years to live? Would I be alone? This time around I was captain of the boat, so all the decisions were mine. Would my decisions be good ones? What would I do with the years remaining to me? What lessons had I learned from the past?

  When I walked out into the sunlight, I walked out in both person and spirit—I felt I had found the sun again. Since Charles’s, Mum’s and Charlie’s deaths, I had been digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole, burying myself in work, shutting out the world, hiding in my grief. Now I was ready to start again.

  The next morning, Peg said, ‘We may as well make it three out of three—would you like to go to Repulse Bay today?’

  The road to Repulse Bay had changed drastically, a few old landmarks showed their faces as we whizzed by, but there were many more new faces. I closed my eyes briefly to conjure up a picture of Repulse Bay as it had been on the day of my wedding. I saw the curved hills and the Repulse Bay Hotel nestled at the bottom of the hills on the water’s edge. A little piece of England in a tropical setting. The hotel had dominated the bay, not by size, but by being almost the only thing there. Peg brought me back to the present.

  ‘Brace yourself! It’s changed.’

  By comparison to my mental picture, it was like stepping out into the French Riviera! The entire shoreline was wall to wall highrise. It saddened me to see the change.

  The hotel itself had been a magical place, but it was gone, replaced by yet another huge concrete block, this one in shades of pastel. A small attempt had been made to recapture the romance of the past: the old hotel’s famous verandah, the scene of many gin and tonics, brilliant debates and wild and fanciful dreams, had been recreated on similar lines. But it was new, out of place with the rest of the buildings, something tacked on as an afterthought.

  We finished the day with a four out of four. We went to Tai Po to see the White House. Again the picture in my mind was of a lovely white house on the side of a hill with a long flight of steps to the top, a train track at the foot of the hill, and a sleepy bay with a fishing village along the shore.

  The bay was completely gone! Filled in and covered with tall white apartment buildings. Where the train track had wound around the bottom of the hill, there was now a six-lane expressway to Canton. The White House is still there, but trees have covered the view and I could only get a glimpse as we streaked past. Peg asked if I wanted to get off the freeway and drive back, but I said no. We went on through the New Territory, which thirty years ago had been all farms and dirt roads. Now we whizzed along highways all the way back to Hong Kong.

  The following days were filled with long chats, meeting friends, some old but mostly new, then all too soon it was time to go back to my wilderness.

  It was a very bracing visit, weatherwise and mindwise, but I felt for Hong Kong. It is changing. I could see it on the faces, I could feel it in the air. My flight home was occupied with sobering thoughts of Hong Kong, past, present and future.

  On my return home, one familiar face was missing from the welcoming committee, my German shepherd, Donna. She was very old and I knew in my heart when I left for Hong Kong that she might not be there to greet me on my return.

  Marlee had put her body in our special pet area and even though we had said goodbye when I left, I wandered over and had a few words to her again. She was a special dog. She started out as a Christmas present to Danielle from Uncle Gus. She was one of a litter from his German shepherd.

  Like all children, Danielle played endlessly with Donna as a pup, but as the puppy grew into a dog, the interest was not there and I found I was feeding and brushing and caring for her so much, she became my dog. She was the family dog, but I suppose really she ended up my dog. When those beautiful eyes said goodbye to me when I left for Hong Kong and thanked me for her life, I felt I should have been thanking her. Always faithful, tolerant of my moods, silent companion in my sadness, wonderful walking mate, faithful guard, she was part of my life for well over a decade and I knew I would miss her very much.

  Marlee decided a Donna replacement was needed. She asked if I would like a Rottweiler. Marlee’s dog, Hunter, is a Rottweiler and he is a beautiful animal and was almost as big a favourite with me as Donna. At this stage I didn’t think any dog could replace Donna, but I agreed a female Rottweiler would be nice. She called the lady who bred Hunter and the earliest date for a female was November. She ordered one.

  By April the heavens told us the wet was over for another year and we moved into top gear to start the new season. The rains had been good; short, but good.

  At the end of the 1989 season, we had bought a small TB-tested buffalo herd from Tipperary Station. We did this for many reasons: to establish a commercial herd for the future, to save them from being shot under the BTEC programme, and to quieten some of them for the tourists.

  Sceptics said our country was too dry and buffalo would never survive on Bullo. When they first arrived, we handfed them in the yards for a few weeks and gave them showers three times a day. After a month they would stand and lick the water dripping off your foot. We then left the gates open and they grazed in the laneway, coming back into the yards for water. The laneway was an electric fence area. During the next month, they became acquainted with electric fences. They learned to respect them so much that when we wanted to put them into their final home paddock, they would not go through the gate in the electric fence. We left the gate open and it took about six days for them all to convince themselves they wouldn’t get a shock passing through the gate.

  When the ground dried the next season, and we could finally drive into our lower paddocks, we were greeted by fat, healthy buffalo with lots of baby buffalo racing around in the long grass. So much for the sceptics.

  There are four babies that now graze right outside the garden fence. The other day a visitor said whenever she saw photos of the North, there was always a buffalo there somewhere, but since she had been in the North, she had not seen one. I pointed out the window and there were the babies, a mother and a big bull. She grabbed her camera and disappeared out the door.

  When we first mustered the cattle out of their paddock, I wondered if we would have trouble with the buffalo, but they just grouped themselves together and moved politely to one side as the cattle trotted by. Of course I didn’t expect any less from the buffalo. I had seen many in the Philippines, magnificent beasts with massive horns plodding along the road with eight or ten children on their back. It’s all in the training.

  The evidence o
f our purchase of one thousand Brahman breeders and sixty bulls was everywhere. The calves and growing stock were a pleasure to watch walk through the yards. Of course we still had our poor old run-out shorthorns here and there, which had not had the advantage of a cross with Brahman blood. But some of our shorthorn cows had produced some stunning Brahman cross babies. Considering they are the product of a wild herd that had never seen new blood from the time they landed in the valley they are not bad ‘old gals’.

  Each year ‘our girls’ become less and less in number as our herd moves to a more uniform Brahman cross quality. But I will never forget them. They, and their mothers before them, were our foundation herd when we collected them out of the bush over twenty years ago.

  Marlee had stared our weaning programme. The idea of this is to give the cow time to recover—from October to December, when our feed is at its worst, a big weaner calf can mean the difference between life and death for an older cow, indeed any cow. But to wean calves, we had to have more paddocks and more feed, all of which meant time and money.

  In the year before we had weaned two hundred and fifty babies. This year we weaned eight hundred, and as we build more paddocks, we will double that number. Twelve hundred or more calves were left with their mothers as they were too small to wean. With more paddocks and feed, we can do a second weaning and let all of our cows have that vital yearly rest.

  In August, in the middle of mustering, ‘Current Affair’ turned up to do a human interest story on these females battling it out alone in the Outback. I am always very quick to point out that we are not macho female types proving we can do without men. I think man was one of God’s great creations. I didn’t start this adventure, Charles did, it has just been dumped in my lap. So we are not out here without men because we want to be; we are busy saving our home and it doesn’t leave much time for socialising. And of course we employ loads of men every year. So, when the media want to present it other than it is, they don’t make it to the property. ‘Current Affair’ showed it as it is—two females giving their all to save their home and carry on a dream.