An Alice Girl

by Tanya Heaslip

  But Dad’s pluck paid off when almost one year to the day he sold the first lot of steers, bulls and heifers.

  Dad recorded good prices in his diary, scribbling the details down in such a rush they were hard to read. Dad didn’t mention how he felt—nor did he tell us—but, no doubt, he felt huge relief.

  I trembled at the thought of what might have happened to us had things gone wrong. The ever-present fear of failure, and hunger for success, drove Dad forward, relentlessly, as he worked harder than he’d ever done.

  Over time, the pressures would start to show, cracking the surface, taking their toll, shaping and moulding Dad into a man as hard and unyielding as the red, dusty land he was seeking to tame. But, in that first year, his diary recorded all that needed to be said.

  Success.

  And relief.

  3

  Our Very Own Palace

  I loved Bond Springs from the moment we arrived.

  To start with, M’Lis, Brett and I had endless amounts of space to play.

  We had to watch out for big lizards—perenties—and if we ever saw one we could only shriek in awe and excitement at their magnificence and the speed at which they could run and climb. And there were, of course, snakes. Most feared was the king brown, especially after Mum told us about her first encounter with one at Hamilton Downs. We’d had snakes at Witchitie too, so we were trained to look out for them, especially when playing near bushes, shrubs and piles of rocks, all the places we knew they loved to live. From an early age, we were ever alert to danger.

  M’Lis was adorably cute. She sucked her thumb and twiddled the ends of her hair when she was thinking hard, and she had a strong sense of her own self, even as a young girl. Brett’s tiny face was freckly, framing intense blue eyes, and he was full of mischief from the start. We were inseparable.

  Mum was our rock and anchor, ever present. She didn’t stop running from one end of the place to the other, making the house our home, but she always had time for kisses, cuddles and stories. She told us constantly how much she loved us and we felt completely cocooned in that love.

  To me, every part of Bond Springs was a palace. It boasted a rambling stone homestead with whitewashed walls and louvre windows. These were thickly covered in dust from the huge dust storms that rolled in from the southern and western deserts during the drought years. The floors were cement, although the large sitting room was pasted with cracking lino. At the front, French doors opened off a bar room (complete with a real bar) onto a flagstone patio.

  In the heat of the day M’Lis, Brett and I would lie on the cool cement floors of the breezeway, which was right in the centre of the house. The original rooms—a sitting room and kitchen with fireplace—were built in about 1930, and the rest were added in a haphazard fashion over the years.

  The homestead was surrounded by athel pines and pepper trees for coolness, and two beautiful lawns that were hand-watered to survive the drought. They offered the blessing of green against the baked, dry landscape.

  Red-and-white painted posts cornered each side of the lawns. We thought they were wonderful, and Mum agreed, calling them ‘a grand colonial gesture’.

  Lining the patio were pots of brilliant green jade and faded green succulents called ‘pigface’. But apart from the trees, lawns and those few tough plants, there was barely any other garden. Water was not only limited but harsh with chloride and salt and undrinkable. It was bore water, drawn from one of the few bores that had been sunk over the last century, or a deep well situated down near the creek, which we were forbidden to go near.

  All water was precious but none more so than our drinking water. It was taken from the white tank set against the laundry, and the greatest sin was to waste even a drop.

  ‘Our drinking water comes from the rain, and if we run out, we will perish,’ Dad would say with such finality that we were terrified at the very thought. I imagined us drooping around the house, slowly dying a hideous death of thirst, until we were nothing more than grey corpses. It was a constant fear, drummed into us so hard we made every drop count.

  We shared a bath at night, squatting in an old tub with about two inches of the brownish bore water from the grey tank. (It was essential to know the difference between the two tanks. A mouthful of bore water would see us gagging and spitting.)

  Just to the back of the kitchen, and partly hidden by athel pines, squatted a tin shed for the generator. It was tiny, yet it managed to rumble and reverberate through everything and everyone when Dad started it. Nearby, perhaps a little too close for comfort, were two incinerators and a large wood heap.

  To the south of the house sat an original settler’s hut whose walls were made of logs and filled with straw and daub, built in the late 1880s. I spent hours imagining the pioneers in the early days and what it must have been like for them to live in that hut, especially in the scorching summer, lying on a bed made from gum logs and covered in cattle hide.

  To the east stood a two-room, tin Sidney Kidman cottage built in 1910. This cottage was grand in comparison to the hut, with its very own veranda on two sides. It was raised on stilts, no doubt to limit snake access. Next to the cottage were rooms that had been added sometime in the 1930s.

  In total, the sprawling homestead comprised nearly twenty rooms.

  Definitely a palace!

  Further south again were a series of wooden horse yards and stables, built around the early 1900s. At the bottom of the yards was an old log saddle shed, filled with oiled saddles and bridles, and a blacksmith’s forge—complete with a huge old anvil that had been used to make horseshoes, and other work tools—built almost entirely out of local golden-brown stone brought up from the nearby creek.

  A number of other sheds and horse yards, a meat house and a chook shed made up the working buildings around the house. We spent a lot of time in the chook shed, which we loved, patting the new hens that Mum introduced, collecting eggs and watching for holes in the wire that might indicate the presence of snakes looking for a feed.

  On the other side of the Bond Springs creek, on top of an adjacent hill, was a large, flat area with some empty tin houses with low verandas. Dad told us how Aboriginal people, originally from Napperby Station to the north (which was held by the Chisholms, the family from whom we bought Bond Springs), had lived in these houses during the 1950s and early 1960s but left during the long drought when the station ran out of feed, trees, stock and horses. Some of them, Dad said, moved to Mount Nancy, an Aboriginal camp in Alice Springs, where the four young stockmen had come from.

  Further up the hill, out of sight but not out of hearing, were large wooden cattle yards. Built by Sidney Kidman, it was the place cattle were brought in for drafting, branding and trucking. When there were cattle in the yards, the constant bellowing reverberated through the homestead. I loved that sound from the first moment. It was the sound of our new world.

  Down at the creek were the remnants of a big old wall, built in about 1915 to dam water when it rained. The wall was constructed out of the same beautiful old rocks as the blacksmith forge, and we found it so exciting to play around and on it despite its tumbledown state.

  Summer kicked off about mid-September, grew in intensity from late November to late March, and didn’t subside until mid-April.

  We slept in swags on the lawn during summer because it was suffocating inside the house. Mosquitos would descend like blankets as night fell, leaving us tossing and turning under the canvas of our swags, sweaty and fitful, bitten and itchy. We’d wake at daylight to flies covering our faces, the heat of the desert already seeping through the dry air.

  One night, Mum woke to see the shapes of three dingoes on the lawn, sniffing our swags. There were often dingoes about, howling eerily across the flat and up into the hills. But on our lawn, Mum said they were like silent, watchful hunters.

  ‘Grant!’ she called out, in fear.

  Dad jumped out of his swag and growled, ‘Get out of here!’ They slunk off into the darkness, but w
e were all awake by then, and I was frightened. I imagined them hiding in the bushes, watching us, waiting for their chance to eat us.

  Mum had read us Little Red Riding Hood and I believed that dingoes were just another kind of wolf (only with yellow coats, instead of grey). They gave me nightmares. They came back again and again, at night-time, because, Dad said, the drought was so bad. Luckily, we always woke before they could eat us, but that didn’t stop the nightmares.

  Winters were short but beautiful.

  ‘The wind’s straight off the Simpson Desert this morning,’ Dad would say, rubbing his hands. The house pipes froze at night and frost covered the lawn in sub-zero temperatures. But by mid-morning we’d have taken off our jumpers, and by lunchtime we were often running around in shorts and T-shirts in the warm sunshine. By dusk, the temperatures would have plunged again, and Mum would light a fire in the sitting room hearth every night.

  Spring and autumn skipped by, lasting about two weeks each, and just as we’d got used to them, they’d be gone again.

  From the start, Dad made daily bore runs, driving all over the property, checking and fixing pumps and dams and fences. We all went with him, squashed into his little Land Rover. Eighteen hundred square kilometres of Bond Springs might have been small in Central Australian terms, but it meant a lot of driving.

  Whenever we stopped for Dad to do something, we’d clamber out and play in the shade of a nearby corkwood or mulga tree. We’d create our own little world in the red dirt, using sticks and fingers to draw winding roads, yards of all shapes and sizes, tilting windmills and cattle. Our little minds were always busy, and for me it was a welcome distraction from the heat and dust of driving.

  Being so young, I couldn’t understand Dad’s desire, and capacity, to drive and drive and drive. I didn’t realise the importance of those early trips for Dad. He was not only checking waters, yards and animals, he was carving the property into his very being with every trip.

  As he drove, he was learning more about Bond Springs. Every curve of the landscape went deep into his memory, each dip of the hill and sweep of the creek, every ridge and mile of scrub, soon seared tightly into his mind. He was determined to know his property at every turn, so that before long he would know it better than anyone else. He was the protector of his piece of earth and the herd he was building. And each season would bring different warnings and challenges, for which he would be ready.

  Over time, we absorbed the importance of his learning. When we weren’t playing, we would sit in the sand and dirt and watch him silently.

  He’d dig the toe of his boot into the dust and draw part of a fence, and describe the section that needed to be fixed. Or he’d use a stick to point which way the gully had washed out and the cattle had headed. Or read the soil and the skies and the trees to understand the seasons and then teach others.

  He was called Boss by the two local stockmen who lived with us on the station, Ross Coop and Colin Ansell. We kids just thought Dad was born that way and bowed to him without question. He might not have seemed old to himself, but as I gazed at his set jaw and listened to his unequivocal directions to others, he seemed as old and wise as time.

  From the start, Dad got straight into meeting the government’s requirements. With Ross and Colin, he replaced the old, rotting wood in fences and cattleyards with barbed wire and steel. He built new fence-lines and sank bores. Because Bond Springs had no permanent fresh water, he had to find other ways to get water for stock.

  His idea was to turn the big paddocks into lots of smaller paddocks to make them more workable, and then put bores into as many of those paddocks as possible. Over the years, however, bore sinking proved expensive and unreliable. Most of the bores on Bond Springs turned out to be duds or unusable, because the water either couldn’t be found, or was undrinkable even for stock. So, Dad built dams to supplement the bores—each named after us, or events that were happening around us—and to make the most of rain when it came.

  During the early years, Dad drove constantly between Witchitie and Bond Springs to keep both places going, and we usually went with him. I hated those drives—four days of heat and boredom along the red, deeply corrugated dirt roads south—and I always got carsick. Dad drove with furious concentration over the ridges and pot-holes, no time for conversation or cranky kids, and Mum tried to keep us occupied so Dad could focus.

  But one trip, M’Lis and I were whinging so much that by the time we stopped for dinner camp we had worked ourselves into a frenzy. We sat on the ground and sobbed. Mum threw up her hands in despair. Eventually Dad strode over to us. He squatted down and put his arm around both of us.

  ‘Tanya and M’Lis, if you don’t stop crying, I’m going to give you both a big smack,’ he said, his voice rough with exhaustion. ‘And then you’ll really have something to cry about.’

  We both heaved and swallowed our sobs as best we could.

  ‘There,’ said Dad, getting up wearily. ‘It wasn’t so hard, was it?’

  It didn’t stop me hating the trips, though. They never got any easier.

  And Dad didn’t get any cheerier.

  Finally, after three years of constant driving and constant working, Mum and Dad met every rule imposed under the lease, and the government said they could keep Bond Springs.

  ‘Jan, it’s here!’

  When the telegram from the government arrived, Dad’s face split into a boyish grin. He waved the yellow paper around, looking like he’d just won Best and Fairest in every cricket and football match of the season.

  ‘We can stay!’

  He put his arm around Mum and twirled her around the kitchen. She sparkled then, too—young and beautiful and carefree—for one precious moment.

  The government had set many rules around stocking and waters and fencing, which were tough, but Mum and Dad had got through those first years, and that was success enough. They still had to repay Elders GM and Papa and Uncle George, and that would take years, but they had a future now they could depend on.

  And even though it meant Dad and Mum would be working harder than ever, we felt safe and protected. We could run free and wild in bare feet without a care. It was a happy life and we knew nothing else.

  4

  ‘I Belong That Country’

  Plenty of naysayers predicted Dad would eventually fail: he hadn’t grown up in the bush, didn’t know cattle or the harsh seasons and had the wrong experience. But Dad had an innate sense of business. And one thing he did know: no stock sales, no money.

  So mustering quickly became our life.

  Station maintenance, such as checking and fixing bores, fences, tanks and yards, continued all year round, but the mustering season took place from April to September, before it got too hot.

  Dad and his stockmen would ride from paddock to paddock, muster the cattle in each one, and drive them towards the nearest yards. Most of the paddocks were large and wild and miles from the house, so the men would ride out as a big expedition, then set up camp next to the yards of each paddock to be mustered.

  Once the cattle were in the yards, drafting would then start; it was a long, hot and difficult process that could take days, even with a lot of men to help.

  Dad would separate out cows, calves, micky bulls (uncastrated young male cattle), heifers, steers and bullocks into different yards, so he could look at the numbers and monitor how the breeding process was going. This was followed by searing the hide of any cleanskins (usually young cattle) with the BST brand, and castrating the young male cattle and any wild scrubber bulls that had got away last muster.

  Then came the business side of it. Dad would arrange to sell the best of the herd (usually steers and bullocks, but sometimes also heifers and cows). Those cattle would then be trucked off to market.

  The men could be gone for weeks, moving from paddock to paddock, coming back in to the homestead only to refresh horses and provisions. Food had to be organised carefully. The men needed enough items that wouldn’t go off in the he
at to last them while away. Luckily, Mum had some experience of this from her time at Hamilton Downs. The men used pack horses to carry large leather bags of flour, tea, sugar, water and salt beef, and they led the horses from camp to camp.

  We loved watching the stock camp head out. Even as little ones, we sensed the theatre and drama of it all as the men prepared.

  Finally, everything in place, swags rolled and the horses saddled, we would gather by the saddle shed for the farewell. Ross and Colin and any other men Dad had hired would sit easily on their horses flicking flies, their eyes shaded by their low-brimmed hats, and wait for the nod from the Boss. The pack horses would stand patiently, ready to be led by whoever drew the short straw.

  If Dad had hired Aboriginal stockmen for the muster, which he started to do more often, they would sit quietly on their horses too, grinning shyly at us, while we looked up at them and grinned shyly back. We’d never seen Aboriginal stockmen before coming to Bond Springs. They wore shiny press-stud shirts and big hats and Dad told us they were the best with horses and cattle.

  We had seen pictures of traditional Aboriginal people in books, hunting with spears, their chests painted with white and red. We thought them bold and fierce and brave. We knew they were also called natives, because they were native Australians, and had lived here for thousands of years, well before the white people came. Mum told us they could track animals through the dirt and throw curved pieces of wood called boomerangs to bring down birds or kangaroos and could go without water much longer than even Dad.

  Mum had learned these things on Hamilton Downs when she was a governess because of the big Aboriginal community that lived there. Her charges, Gary and David, played with the Aboriginal kids and spoke Arrernte as well as they spoke English. Mum saw firsthand how the traditional ways blended with those of the station. Often the camp disappeared on walkabout and no one knew where they’d gone or for how long. Traditional business took precedence over everything else and Aboriginal timing was an ‘unknown’ for the whitefellas.