An Alice Girl

by Tanya Heaslip

  Eventually the sun slipped towards the ranges and the glow of gold and pink and purple highlighted their ridges. We mounted our horses regretfully—it was always hard to leave our personal world, where we revelled in the freedom and fun we created. Then we meandered back along the old cattle pad towards the house creek as the shadows lengthened, telling jokes and talking about cattle-duffers again. They were the stuff of legends and bush poems and songs. We could talk about cattle duffers forever. As we could about the old saying: ‘Got an eye for a neighbour’s calf …’

  That was because it wasn’t just professional cattle duffers who stole cattle. It was easy to ride across a far-flung boundary fence, pick up any young unbranded heifers and micky bulls (uncastrated young male cattle) you could find, and ride them back across the fence to safety. In these vast spaces, no one would ever know they were gone.

  Well, not on our watch! Dad’s cattle were safe with us.

  I wondered if anyone down south would understand cattle duffing.

  We crossed the house creek and all turned in our saddles to take in our last glimpse of House Hill, the scene of our last good works where the goodies beat the baddies.

  The orange tree stood proud and silhouetted against the darkening sky. All around it, the ancient landscape folded onto itself into dusk. It was so beautiful, it took my breath away.

  The thought of losing my home stabbed my heart. And yet I knew that leaving here next year was just the start of a long journey. The land would go to the boys when they grew up—that’s just how it was in the bush—and I would have to find somewhere else to live, something else to do. So would M’Lis.

  My hands trembled on the reins as I contemplated my unknown future.

  ‘Righto—let’s race along the creek.’ M’Lis’s command cut through my thoughts. With more than a year to go before she faced boarding school, she was still happily living in the present. ‘Last one to the yards has to make up all the feeds for the horses tonight.’

  And so it was on. Under the dusky skies we raced through the dry creek bed, waving our hats, shouting and laughing, doing everything we could to draw out the last precious moments of the day.

  As the house yards came into view, I thought of Dad constantly instructing us, teaching us, to become better at everything we did, and a terrifying thought crept into my mind.

  Who will I be, if I’m not here, on this land, under these skies?

  How would I find the answer to this question? I had no idea.

  Then another thought replaced it. A strong, powerful thought.

  I will go away and live in the other places I’ve read about in my beloved books. I will do exciting things. Then, one day, I will write about this life and this land, so it’s always with me, forever.

  We galloped into the yards in a dead heat.

  1

  Where It All Began

  My life as a cattle duffer chaser came about because, once upon a time, a beautiful woman named Janice married a handsome man named Grant. They left the safety and security of South Australia to take up a small cattle lease in remote Central Australia.

  Mum and Dad were just twenty-six years old, I was three, M’Lis was two and Brett was one. It was the middle of a ten-year drought that had destroyed the country, and everyone thought they were crazy.

  But we loved it. As far as our little eyes could see were miles upon miles of emptiness, huge blue skies and bare earth. We heard pink cockatoos squawk in the gum trees, and crickets click and clack at night. But it was also a place of silence. There was not a person or town to be seen. We could shout into the hills and hear our voices echo back to us. We could lie on our backs at night and imagine the sky of stars swallowing us whole. We knew we could die out here under the savage summer sun and our bones would turn white and dissolve in the dry winds, just like the bones of the kangaroos and dingoes. Nobody would ever know we’d been there. We thought that was kind of exciting.

  Our property was called Bond Springs Station. It was first settled in the 1870s by two men who walked all the way from Adelaide to get there. It took them a whole year. I often thought how tired they must have been by the time they arrived, but how happy to discover this beautiful land.

  Each sunrise and sunset, the high mountains filled with the colours of the sky. Colours so soft and beautiful after the harshness of the day that it always made my heart sing. Shades of red would turn to apricot, then soft pink, layers of purple, and finally black as the hills dissolved into the night. Every morning, the skies and hills would light up again, changing colour in reverse. It was like magic, and I would try to draw it with coloured pencils but could never capture its true beauty. Nature had its own special paint set.

  Colour came in other surprising ways, too. Even in drought years, mulga trees gave us flowers that shone gold in the sunshine, and thick spinifex that looked like straw, making the plains dance with light.

  It was a land rich with stories of the past. There was the Aboriginal Dreamtime and the sea that had once covered everything here. The powerful forces that had pushed the earth up into the sky, creating huge rocky ranges that ran from east to west, known to locals as the MacDonnell Ranges but to the local Arrernte people as Caterpillar Dreaming.

  Bond Springs was a small block, just north of Alice Springs, nestled inside the MacDonnell Ranges that fell away to the east, with scrubby, red lands to the west.

  I loved the eastern side best. It was magical country, filled with hills of all shapes and sizes, gullies and sandy creeks, and ridges shimmering on the horizon. Dad called it ‘the sweet country’, because that’s where most of the rain landed. I also thought it perfect cattle duffer country. The western side was boring to me, but Dad would say, ‘This is the soil left from the inland sea,’ so I gathered it was also important and useful, and cattle somehow survived, despite it not being as sweet.

  We came here because Mum and Dad were pioneers without even realising it.

  They were born eleven days apart, in 1939, in the mid-north of South Australia, in the shadow of the magnificent Flinders Ranges. Mum grew up in the farming town of Orroroo, and Dad on a sheep property called Glenroy Estate.

  ‘Tell us the stories about you and Dad again,’ we would beg Mum. We were always longing to know about when they were young. In later years we also asked Dad, but Mum’s stories were the best.

  ‘Well,’ she’d say, a big smile on her face, ‘I came up to Alice in 1957 and became a governess on Hamilton Downs Station. I fell in love with this country. I wanted to fly away from my old life.’

  ‘But why? What was wrong with your old life?’

  Here Mum would pause, and then tell us different bits and pieces.

  The outbreak of the Second World War followed the births of Mum and Dad, and it shaped the direction of the rest of their lives.

  First, Mum’s father, Papa Parnell, went off to fight for the Empire. When he finally came home again, Mum was five. She and Nana had to get to know him all over again. Papa had been a hero, one of the Rats of Tobruk, and after a final stint in Papua New Guinea he returned riddled with malaria and trauma. He became an alcoholic to drown his demons, and life was tough.

  Things brightened when Mum’s little brother, John, came along, and she helped Nana care for him. But her schooling ended at fifteen and she felt stifled. She worked at every job she could, and then, aged eighteen, scored herself a one-year office job with the stock and station agent Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort in their Alice Springs branch. It was the perfect way out. She’d read A Town like Alice, and the tiny, dusty frontier town beckoned.

  But it wasn’t easy to leave Orroroo. Friends and family were dismayed. ‘Terrible things could happen to you up there, Janice! The north is wild, savage, untamed.’

  Only our darling Nana Parnell understood Mum’s longing to spread her wings.

  How brave our mum was, we thought, to go against what everyone said, and head off like a pioneer!

  Mum told us that she flew up to Alice in a little
old plane, a trip that took all day, with refuelling stops at Woomera, then Oodnadatta. It was a long, bumpy trip, but she was absorbed by the endless desert plains and wide empty sky.

  When she landed in Alice and saw a landscape framed by enormous red ranges and blue skies, she knew she’d been right to come here. She said to us, ‘This big land was just what I had expected, and almost immediately I felt that I wanted to belong to it.’

  We looked at old photos of Mum from that time. We thought she looked just like Audrey Hepburn: huge brown eyes, an elfin face, cropped brown hair and a twenty-one-inch waist. She lived with another girl in an old Sidney Williams corrugated-iron hut at the back of the Elders’ offices, and wore pretty dresses she made herself. There were card nights and dances, and a world of charming young stockmen who arrived out of the bush in their moleskins, RM Williams elastic-sided boots, press-stud shirts and huge hats. In Central Australia, Mum said, nobody cared who you were, where you’d come from, or what your parents did, and she revelled in her new-found freedom.

  ‘Tell us more about Hamilton Downs,’ we’d beg.

  Mum’s smile would grow. ‘Well, Aunty Dawn and Uncle Bill needed someone to teach Gary, who was just starting school, and to look after little David and baby Wendy.’

  Dawn and Bill Prior weren’t really our aunt and uncle, but they’d been so much a part of our lives for as long as we could remember, we thought they were. They lived on a cattle station to the north-west of Alice Springs, nestled up against the ranges.

  ‘Aunty Dawn advertised for a governess in the local paper. She had her hands full with cooking for so many stockmen; she didn’t have time to be Gary’s teacher, too. The Priors became my family. There was a big Aboriginal community living there, too. It was a different world to anything I’d ever experienced. Everyone welcomed me in.’

  ‘What about the snake story? Tell us about that again.’

  Mum said she hadn’t been at Hamilton Downs very long when some of the young Aboriginal women told Aunty Dawn, ‘There bin mulga snake in house here, Missus.’

  Mum was standing nearby and nearly dropped the dishes she was wiping up. She already knew that the mulga snake, also known as the king brown, was enormous and deadly.

  ‘Don’t worry, Jan,’ said Aunty Dawn comfortingly, ‘they’re part of life out here.’

  But Mum wasn’t comforted. The following night she was asleep in her cot bed on the enclosed veranda when she awoke to a sound. A slithering sound. In the moonlight she saw a huge snake moving up and down the wall, and the door, obviously trying to get out. She realised she was trapped in there with it. She screamed and screamed, until Aunty Dawn finally woke on the other side of the house.

  ‘The snake!’ Mum kept repeating frantically. ‘It’s in here!’

  Uncle Bill was out in the stock camp, so Aunty Dawn ran to get the bore mechanic, who dragged himself out of his swag. He arrived in shorts and bare feet, cranky, and carrying a huge shovel. As he pushed open the door, he saw Mum standing on her bed. She was still screaming. He shouted, ‘Shut up, Jan! Shut up!’ and took on the enormous snake. When he’d finally killed it, there were bits of bloodied snake all over the veranda.

  Mum was so traumatised, she had to go and sleep with Aunty Dawn for the rest of the night.

  But before long she was able to recount the story as an old hand. ‘You just have to deal with snakes,’ she’d say, firmly. ‘Can’t have them in the house. Even have to be careful in the children’s sandpit.’ And ever since we could remember she kept a large shovel close to the kitchen door, just in case.

  Every morning and every night she saw the raw colours of Central Australia rise and fall over the ancient ranges, and knew station life was for her.

  She stayed there for two years, but finally she was drawn back south. She missed her family. And a young man named Grant.

  ‘Tell us again about meeting Dad,’ we’d say, mischievously.

  Mum’s eyes would again take on that faraway look. ‘We actually met when we were thirteen. He caught the train to boarding school from Orroroo. I would wave goodbye to him.’

  I could imagine Mum, standing in her little school dress, waving her handkerchief at a young boy with a freckly face, dark hair and a cheeky grin. We loved that image: Mum and Dad, young, with their lives ahead of them.

  Dad’s story was harder to piece together. He came from a sheep property, Glenroy, graced with a beautiful old homestead, wide creeks lined with gum trees and a long Heaslip heritage. His family were part Scottish and part Irish, and had been in Australia for five generations. He told us stories about his ancestors often, because he said it was important that we know what they had suffered, and how hard they had worked to give us the chances we now had in Australia.

  ‘Glenroy was named after our family’s home in Scotland. In 1692 our family, the McDonalds, took in the Campbells and showed them hospitality. In return, the Campbells massacred everyone.’

  We weren’t sure what we were meant to take from the story, especially because Mum was constantly taking people in and showing them hospitality, but we always nodded seriously.

  ‘And our Irish side—well, they came from a farm in County Cavan. The Heaslip head was called Ben of the Rock. The family were starving in the Potato Famine. So, they made a decision: one son stayed and one son came to Australia, in 1853.’

  Dad knew dates, names and history off the top of his head.

  His family were a strong Methodist clan. They were devoted to the land of South Australia and to hard work, and they adhered to strict rules for living. They also saw developing land and stock as a way to get ahead after the Great Depression and war years. For a long time, they held coupons for fuel and lived frugally (Dad told me that word, which I thought sounded important). They skinned and sold wild rabbits and kangaroos to get by. The only time Dad stopped working was to play football or cricket on Saturday, and go to church on Sunday.

  From an early age, it was drummed into Dad that his family were caretakers of the land. He could have gone on to be a great sportsman, but he set aside those distractions to focus on his duty and his passion for the land—and for one gorgeous Audrey Hepburn lookalike, who could join him in his quest.

  ‘Dad persuaded me to come back from Alice,’ said Mum. ‘And then he asked me to marry him.’

  ‘How beautiful!’ M’Lis and I gazed up at Mum, feeling so happy.

  ‘I said yes, if we could go back to the Territory once we got married.’

  Dad liked the idea of forging a new life. Papa Heaslip controlled Glenroy, so moving north would give Dad independence and the chance to make his own mark.

  But heading back to the Territory didn’t happen immediately.

  First, Mum and Dad nearly didn’t get married.

  ‘Tell us about the night of your wedding, Mum,’ we’d chorus.

  Mum would squirm a bit, then say uncertainly, ‘Well, the night before our wedding, we had a big fight. I threw a bucket of water over Dad. It was winter and cold. He marched off. I cried all night.’

  Silence. ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Dad came back. And we got married. It was the happiest day of my life.’

  We pored over the photos of their wedding, which Mum had pasted into a big white album. She arrived at the church looking like a princess, dressed divinely in a satin gown she’d designed herself. Dad looked so handsome, his black hair combed back like Elvis Presley’s, a huge grin across his face. The love between them bounced off the pages of the album.

  We looked at the proud face of Nana Parnell, her hair beautifully curled, and Papa’s tired but happy eyes. We studied Nana and Papa Heaslip; Nana slim and elegant, Papa handsome with a silver moustache. Both our Nanas wore long gloves and hats.

  Standing next to them were Dad’s younger sister, Aunty June, and Mum’s younger brother, Uncle John. They were both teenagers, seven years younger than Dad and Mum, and they were beaming. We loved them; they were fun.

  ‘As a wedding present, Dad
made me a kangaroo skin blanket,’ said Mum. ‘He used skins that he’d saved, and he sewed them together with a big needle. I’ve had that blanket on our bed ever since.’

  Dad was nothing if not a practical man.

  For their honeymoon, he drove Mum through drought-stricken outback Australia in a little Volkswagen. I didn’t think that sounded very romantic, but they visited the Priors at Hamilton Downs, which must have made Mum happy, and gave Dad the chance to inspect the inland. The Priors promised to look out for properties for them. What Dad thought of that landscape, with its dust and scrawny cattle, I can’t imagine, but he wasn’t put off. If anything, he was inspired by the courage of those he met.

  On his return, he wrote in his work diary, ‘My main appreciation of the trip was to see the way that other people run their places, the way they handle difficult problems, the interest they have in their work, and their outlook on improving their stock and management.’

  At age twenty-two, Dad was a serious young man. What with the Scottish massacre, the Irish Potato Famine and the Methodist work ethic, he didn’t have time for self-pity and never considered giving up. He admired those who pushed on, and cared for the land and their stock, no matter what obstacles were put in their way.

  He would go on to spend the rest of his life trying to condition his wife and children in this way, too. ‘For better or worse,’ Mum would say, faintly.

  ‘Then what happened?’ we’d ask, going back to the wedding and Mum’s happiest day. That was an easier story to listen to.

  Once married, in 1961, Mum and Dad promptly had three children: me, M’Lis and Brett. Their first home was a tiny cottage at Glenroy.

  ‘Dad worked for Papa and graded roads for the council. I cooked for the shearers. We were always trying to earn extra money.’

  I spent my first few years in that little cottage, close to Nana and Papa Heaslip, whom I loved. When M’Lis was just a few months old, we moved to a sheep lease called Witchitie. It was also held by Dad’s father, and was east of Glenroy and deep in the Flinders Ranges saltbush country. A long row of curving purple hills separated the two properties.