Mary picked up a billy can, swung it around her head a few times and let fly at the bullock, hoping to frighten him off. It only enraged him. He charged her, but after a few steps began to stagger. The bullock then focused on Missy, my white bull terrier, and came through the camp, hooking billy cans, flour drums and camp ovens with his sharp horns. Mary, Missy and I ran for our lives up the riverbed. I could see about half a dozen young gum saplings ahead, no thicker than my arm. Up we went – it was like trying to claw your way up a 3-inch water pipe, but it’s amazing what strength you can find when you need it. Although she was close to 60, Mary’s screams and yells were as strong as a young woman’s. The mad creature kept charging and staggering, determined to get us. Missy continued barking at him from the rear, heroically trying to draw the old fella’s attention away from us. Then, suddenly, the bullock fell in a heap.
‘Him proper mad bugger, Missus,’ said Mary as she climbed down from the tree. With feeling, I agreed.
The bullock was still sleeping there while Mary and I put the camp into some order again, collecting wood for a fire, refilling the billies with water and retrieving the plates and pannikins that the old bullock had sent flying all over the riverbed. McCorry and the stockmen arrived on sundown and Mary told them about the afternoon’s events. I suggested to McCorry that we might move. I could not see myself sleeping too well with this beast in the middle of the camp, and it wasn’t as if we had the inconvenience of a houseful of furniture to move. But McCorry couldn’t or wouldn’t understand why I was upset. He seemed tired that night, and his ‘horseman’s walk’ seemed more obvious than usual. I suspected he had back pain.
‘He’s got red water, he’s nearly dead,’ rapped McCorry. I was trying to say that he might have red water, or tick fever, but he wasn’t dead yet and he was in the middle of the camp.
‘Please, can we move the bullock or move the camp?’ I asked again. He tried to calm me, saying the beast wouldn’t be going anywhere. So McCorry had the last word – we had to camp with the bullock. Uneasy, I gave the bullock a wide berth and headed off in the direction of the camp fire for my ration of beef and damper and a pannikin of black tea.
It took some time for me to fall asleep that night, and when I did I slept with one eye open. About two o’clock in the cool of the morning, the bullock hit his feet, sized up the situation, then charged towards the glowing camp fire. I flew out of my swag with a blood-curdling scream before realising it wasn’t me he was after. All hell broke loose in the camp. The stockmen were trying to claw their way out of their swags in the moonlight and the bullock was charging into the fire. There were stockmen, swags, flour drums, the old wire stretcher bed with our cooking gear on, plates and pannikins flying in every direction. Then, as quick as the old warrior had had risen from the night air, he dropped in his tracks, dead, right in the middle of the camp.
As usual we were all up before sunrise. The billy was boiling and I was helping Mary with the flapjacks for breakfast. I couldn’t help overhearing the Aboriginal stockmen talking among themselves about the night’s events. They were very quiet and whispering that something bad might happen today, because the bullock had died in our camp.
‘No’, I whispered, ‘no, we haven’t done anything wrong.’
I noticed we were all talking very quietly. The men were going about their breakfast much slower and quieter than usual; they seemed to have lost their happy selves. A little frightened, maybe? I was starting to feel their uncanny fear myself.
It was nearly an hour later when it happened. Malki and the boys were drafting out their horses for the day’s work when one colt, the biggest of all, hit the gum sapling rail in the round yard, catapulting it out of the wire ties and straight into Malki’s temple with the force of a spear. With an almighty crack Malki went down in a heap. McCorry tuned in the Flying Doctor radio and alerted Derby Hospital. While he was on the radio, Monty, our station owner who had just flown in from Sydney, picked up our medical call on his Cessna’s radio.
There were no roads or airstrips nearby and the closest the Flying Doctor plane could get would have been the station airstrip, close to 80 kilometres from where we were. McCorry packed the side of Malki’s head with a clean towel as he took instructions from the doctor over the radio. Monty called in and said he was on his way in the Cessna. We selected a good claypan flat for Monty to land on. With axes, shovels and tools improvised from the bush, the men put everything they had into clearing away anthills, tufts of grass or anything they thought might endanger the landing. McCorry said that if anyone could land under these conditions in this country, it would be Monty.
I had never felt so relieved as I was to hear the droning of the Cessna. For the first time since the accident, the men started to talk to each other again. Monty dipped his wings to signal he had spotted us. He did one circuit to check out the strip length and condition, and came in without hesitation. By this time I had made Malki as comfortable as I could on the old wire camp stretcher that was used to hold the cook house utensils. He was a very heavy man and we had to lift him from the accident site and carry him about 100 metres to the Cessna. Malki was out cold and losing a lot of blood. Amid a cloud of dust, Monty was slowing the aircraft to a halt at our end of the strip. There was no time wasted on pleasantries. Out came the back seats of the aircraft. Harry, Monty and McCorry helped lift Malki’s stretcher onto the aircraft floor and strapped him down. McCorry sat on the floor beside this good man and held his hand until they arrived at Derby airport where an ambulance and doctor were waiting. McCorry told me on his return that every so often he would squeeze Malki’s hand and he would get a faint squeeze in return.
That night as I lay in my swag, gazing at what stars were about and reflecting on the day’s events, McCorry came and lay with me. He told me he was proud of the way I’d handled myself in the crisis. He was scared of losing Malki.
After six months in Perth hospital, Malki returned to Derby. We were later informed by his doctor that Malki was a very lucky man to have survived the accident at all. If he hadn’t been as strong as an ox, we would never have had him back. He came back to the station, but couldn’t do the work he’d done before; he was never the same man. He moved into Derby town and several years later passed away.
Immediately after we’d evacuated Malki, McCorry ordered us to pack up the camp gear – we were moving back towards the homestead. He estimated we had 350 to 380 head of cattle in hand, including 60 feral bulls.
This was the last big muster for the cattle season. The wet season was charging in, its early storms having already washed clean the grass and leaves. The country was turning green as it shot to life. Most afternoons we’d watch the mountainous thunderheads building up until they exploded. Then the thunder would rumble and the lightning would dance as the monsoonal influences hit the area, torrential rains spreading across our once-scorched earth. The cool helped salvage our sanity from the effects of a long season of gross heat and then humidity.
Once the ‘wet’ set in on Oobagooma, there was no point in being there. The May River would ‘run a banker’, or overflow its banks, and the Robinson would be up at our back door. The road to Derby and the homestead airstrip would turn into quagmires, leaving the station completely isolated for months on end. The wet season’s rainfall would exceed 600 millimetres, starting any time from October and running through to April. The bush would come to life, and the biggest green bullfrogs would dominate the landscape.
Before the rivers ran and the country flooded, the men would race to hit the towns, to renew old acquaintances or just spin yarns and prop up the bars. McCorry and I also took this time to get away from the station. That first wet season, I met his mother in Beaudesert, Queensland. A devout Catholic, she was somewhat surprised to see Bob with a woman, let alone such a young one, at this late date. She and I became friendly and later exchanged letters – once she wrote a poem about Bob. Introducing me to his mother, Bob showed no nerves. I wish I could say the same for mys
elf! But no matter where he was, Bob was Bob.
When we went back to the station after the wet season, Mary and the stockmen’s wives started watching me closely. I knew they were curious about McCorry and me: Mary was forever hinting that I was pregnant and carrying a boy child. She was watching over me closer than ever and would growl at me if I went into a billabong for a swim alone. I asked her why she worried about me so much. Mary’s answer was, ‘We want you safe, Missus, for Boss.’ I certainly wasn’t pregnant, although McCorry stepped in and told Mary he was going to take me away one day and get married. Then we were going to have a boy child, a girl child, then another boy child.
This confession ended all their curiosity and made them all very happy – and me too. I’d come to love Bob’s indirect ways. He might not have been able to make such confessions directly to me, but he arranged things in such a manner that I was sure to know how he felt.
One night after our return I was tired, checking my swag for any unwanted visitors of the eight-legged kind. All I wanted was to sleep. McCorry and I were now sleeping in a double swag, much to the stockmen’s amusement. About 11 pm I was partially woken with a nudge to my back. Grabbing hold of the blanket, I moved over on my pillow. Several hours later I was nudged again. I kept my hold on the blanket as I moved onto the edge of my pillow, this time asking, ‘Is that you, McCorry?’
No answer. I was too tired to check. Near daybreak I turned over and was confronted with the ugliest face ever. Old Jim, McCorry’s bull terrier dog, his breath rank and coated in dried blood from a day’s work, was my night-time visitor. He’d been successfully stealing my swag from me, little by little, throughout the night. Jumping up and grabbing my pillow, I proceeded to belt him out of my swag. I loved this old working dog, but not enough to share my pillow with him. McCorry thought it was hilarious.
We’d had a good wet season with 600 millimetres of rain falling around the homestead. Now the terrain was covered in billowing spear grass, their golden heads near bloom and their sharp spears ready to spread havoc through the property. Not even the donkeys would eat it.
McCorry suggested we go for a drive around the country to find where the cattle were hanging. The sweet grass areas always attracted them first. Without fences, we had a million-acre paddock to deal with. If we could spot stock in sufficient numbers, there might be a chance of an easy muster and an early shipment to the meatworks.
With grass towering above us, we travelled by bull-buggy: McCorry, Charlie and me, with Jim and Whiskey, McCorry’s favourite bull terriers. Charlie sat on the bull bar guiding us through the thickets, dodging antbeds and pointing out dangerous breakaway gullies.
‘Little bit this way,’ he called. ‘Little bit that way, Old Man.’
We were steadily weaving our way towards a billabong when we came upon a mob of coarse-haired feral pigs with piglets. Jim was the first dog out of the buggy, diving into the mob in full flight, setting off the squeals and screams of protective sows and aggressive boars. Within seconds we’d lost Whiskey as well.
McCorry powered the buggy ahead, without thought for me or his head man. The old bastard was driving like a madman, caring only for his dogs and to hell with the rest of us. This sudden change of attitude frightened me, if only for a moment. Sometimes I think McCorry loved his dogs more than me.
We tracked the squealing mob to a watercourse fringed with young saplings. There, old Jim had a death grip on the ear of a mean-looking black boar. The two of them were locked in a dance of death, flying around in circles and sending the grass spraying about them.
McCorry drove the buggy towards the boar, yelling for the dog to let go. But Jim wasn’t about to give it up. In an instant both McCorry and Charlie jumped out of the buggy waving tyre levers, but it was too late. The tough old boar had slit the dog from groin to throat, literally spilling his guts on the ground. As Jim released the boar, it bolted.
I emptied the butcher’s knives from a hessian bag in the buggy, slit the bag lengthwise and wrapped the wounded dog in it. Whiskey turned up a minute later, unhurt.
McCorry turned the buggy around and we began the slow, sad journey home.
I was sure Jim would die. How could any creature survive being gored like that? At the station, McCorry carried Jim, guts spilling and saturated in blood, to the radio room, where we kept the medical kit. He laid down his beloved dog and we went to work on him. McCorry washed the dog’s intestines with antiseptic and gently pushed them back into his body. After covering the wound with antiseptic powder, he stitched him up.
For three days there were few signs of life from the old dog, and everyone was miserable. He was so well loved as a working dog and companion, he had many visitors, including most of the stockmen. On the evening of the third day, McCorry came in from a horse muster, tethered his horse and headed straight for the radio room. The tap-tapping of McCorry’s spurs on the bare floors of the homestead blended with another sound, which seemed to get stronger the closer the spurs came to the sick room. It was the whimpers of the embattled dog, trying desperately to lift his head in greeting.
It took many weeks but Jim miraculously survived the accident and returned to working with the scrubber bulls in the stock-camp. What they say about dogs was definitely true in this case. He was man’s best friend, in particular McCorry’s.
At the end of another busy day at the station, McCorry and I were lounging in our favourite Queenslander chairs on the front veranda with a pannikin of tea each, watching the sunset and letting our bodies soak up the cool of the evening. Monty’s Cessna buzzed the airstrip, panicking the two retired packhorses who scattered to one side. Then he came in to land.
Monty was always arriving with a new scheme for his station. This time he brought David, a young pilot from New South Wales, who was to stay and fly for us when Monty returned south.
The scheme this time was to muster donkeys for pet meat. The other bright idea, said with tongue in cheek and to shock me, was to sell the donkeys’ pizzles to the sex shops. I thought Monty was rather sick-minded, but on the donkey muster I decided to take a bit of notice. Believe me, those jack donkeys were well hung! But donkey mustering was of no interest to me or McCorry. During the exercise we slipped off quietly to the banks of the Robinson River, where we spent a couple of wonderful hours together making love on a saddle blanket under a pandanus tree. It was strangely erotic to hear the rustle of the pandanus leaves as we lay on the blanket, our eyes open for snakes. Then we were rudely interrupted by the diving and circling of Monty’s Cessna, which we nicknamed ‘Death on Arrival’ after his radio callsign, DOA. Our life was always thrown into disarray when he turned up. I quickly pulled on my jeans and shirt and laughed at McCorry doing the same dance on his side of the blanket. We stuffed the saddle blanket back into the buggy and returned to the big donkey muster, feeling much better about everything and determined to take charge of our own destiny. I thought, fancy asking a cattleman to muster bloody donkeys!
As soon as Monty headed back to the southern country, McCorry asked David to fly to Derby to collect the necessary papers for us to be married. In between the musters throughout the year, we had been receiving messages from the Managing Director of Australian Land & Cattle Co., offering McCorry better money and conditions. McCorry had been such a powerful adversary, they would rather us work for them than against them. At the same time we had a visit from the company’s Kimberley Downs manager, Gordon Bryce, assuring us that things were good on the other side of the boundary. At my urging, McCorry accepted the manager’s position on Napier Downs, but on one condition: that they send over a road train so McCorry could load his faithful coaches and return them to their rightful home on Kimberley Downs, from which we’d ‘borrowed’ them.
Even though the Australian Land & Cattle Co. had been after him for some time, McCorry didn’t really want to go – he’d have been happy spending his whole life in his swag. We’d been paid about 180 dollars a week at Oobagooma, and they were offering to double it
at least. I was the one to push Bob along, and Monty accepted our departure regretfully but readily. Later, he sold Oobagooma to the federal government as an army training reserve.
CHAPTER 7
My Kimberley Man
Bob McCorry and I were married by the Clerk of Courts in Derby on 7 December 1973. It was a balmy, humid evening. At 44, my Kimberley man was 20 years my senior. Some people may have considered it was me who was barmy!
We planned the marriage with military-style precision, with help from the clerk, who was kind enough to open the courthouse at seven o’clock on the evening of 7 December. McCorry had as many wild friends as he had quieter ones, who would have loved to celebrate our happy event. The wild ones, after a dry spell on the stations working, would probably have wrecked the town. But neither McCorry nor I wanted to make a spectacle of getting married, because in our eyes we were already married anyway. This was only the paperwork!
As much as McCorry loved his mother (his father was deceased), and as much as I loved my parents and brothers, neither one of us told a single person. Isolated at Oobagooma, I hadn’t seen my parents for about a year and wasn’t sure what their reaction, or their shock, would be to find their daughter marrying for the second time by age 24 and this time to a man 20 years older. I feared that my father wouldn’t take too kindly to it. It was simpler to just get married than explain it to everyone. Three weeks after the wedding I posted a letter to Mum and Dad telling them the good news and asking for their blessings. They wrote back, accepting my marriage without question, realising I was a maturing woman who would make her own decisions and follow her dreams. Their acceptance took a huge weight off my shoulders. I was confident in McCorry’s and my love for each other and knew I was marrying the man of my dreams. My Kimberley man!
The three-minute ceremony was witnessed by Cynthia and Les Smith, two very good friends of McCorry’s. After a few drinks at home with the Smiths, we retired to the Boab Inn, one of Derby’s two motels. Next morning our black-and-white Valiant had ‘Just Married’ plastered all over the front and back windows and the inside strewn with rice – just in case we’d forgotten what we’d come to Derby to do.
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