‘If you kids hadn’t been late, I wouldn’t have had to stand around like this with this colt getting narky. If you kids had been here on time, we’d have been gone by now, and I wouldn’t have got chucked off.’
We quickly stopped laughing.
Going anywhere with Mick and the horses was a learning experience for us. Apart from that colt, he was rarely thrown off horses and we admired his riding style. He always sat loosely in the saddle, his long legs pushed out in the stirrups, stockwhip looped over one shoulder, completely at ease.
I would often get tense and nervous before getting on a horse, particularly if I wasn’t feeling confident. The horse would inevitably sense it and react badly.
‘They can read yer, Tanya, feel yer,’ Mick would click his tongue. ‘Yer gotta be calm and yer gotta be the boss with ’em. Otherwise they’ll play up on yer and yer’ll never get ’em to do what you want. Remember, your horse will work well with you if you control ’em.’
Once I felt cheeky enough to say, ‘Like you did with the colt?’ but just before that smart-alec response reached my lips, I swallowed it right back down. Getting the Head Stockman offside was not worth it. And besides, he knew what he was talking about. The colt had been a one-off. Mick was always the boss and horses obeyed him and he therefore got the best out of them.
I never remember a time when Mick was not working. Even when we weren’t on horseback or dealing with stock, he’d be tinkering with the Land Rover. He could repair anything. If any of the workshop tools came apart, Mick was so resourceful he could work out how to mend them with very little. One day he lost the handle off an axe, so whittled a piece of wood to replace it. Good as new!
At night, he plaited belts, made ropes out of hide; he made stockwhips, and counterlined saddles and bridles. He had an old Singer machine that was built for sewing leather and used it to fix bridles and saddles. We’d crowd around him and watch open-mouthed as he put the leather under the needle and pushed it through. Magically, the broken bit of bridle would soon be joined again.
He was self-taught, so if anybody wanted to learn anything from him, he was gruff. ‘Learn the right way—or don’t waste my time,’ he’d say.
Mick would get cranky when things went wrong. And things went wrong, regularly. We were always losing cattle during musters, despite our best efforts, which meant we wouldn’t have the numbers for Dad when we got back to the yards. That would delay trucking because we’d have to go back out and get them in again. Sometimes we’d box cattle in the yards by mistake, which meant they were mixed up and had to be re-drafted, delaying trucking yet again. Worst of all was when the horses got hurt or went lame. Mick was incredibly protective of his horses. It also delayed proceedings if we were a horse down. All of these problems affected Dad’s end objective, which was having the right numbers of the right cattle at the right time to truck to market, so there would be money for the station.
The worst was when Dad applied too much pressure on Mick, which Dad was wont to do on a regular basis. On those bad days, Mick would stride around, short-tempered, yelling at anyone who got in his way.
But we kids were conditioned to being yelled at by tough men, and we were pretty tough ourselves, so we were never offended by Mick. That was just how blokes on the land were: of few words, tough and uncompromising. And because we didn’t really know many other kinds of blokes, we assumed that was normal behaviour. His words slid off our backs, because we knew deep down he was deeply kind and caring. If we were ever in trouble, he was always there for us. He reminded us of Charlie in many ways. Both men were different, but they each looked out for us.
Mick had a great sense of humour underneath, and he had a special kind of chuckle, which was contagious. If he chuckled, we always laughed out loud. It made working with him fun. It helped pass the endless hours.
We were very sad when Mick told us that he and his family would be leaving at the end of the mustering season to return to Witchitie. However, Dad brought in a number of other stockmen to ease the transition. We were then happy about that, because more workers meant more support for M’Lis, Brett and me, and potentially more fun having new people around.
The overlap with the new stockmen took place a month before the Schmidts’ departure. Mum and Lorna barely left the kitchen during that time.
Lorna was a wonderful cook, and in the afternoon the kitchen would be filled with the fragrance of the puddings and tarts and casseroles she was baking. Mum was so relieved to have Lorna’s skill and presence that it eased the burden that fell on her shoulders. Helen still worked side-by-side with them, and Miss Thiele helped when we weren’t at school. But Lorna really did transform the kitchen and our lives during her time at Bond Springs.
32
Bush Life—Lost and Found
Janie Joseland loved Everard Park with all her heart. Her Aboriginal friends were there. She belonged to that land. It had shaped her very being. But when she was ten, her life changed. Her parents moved on from Everard Park. As they drove away from the homestead for the last time, Janie couldn’t speak. She sat in the back seat of the station wagon staring up at the ranges, a last glimpse of gold in the morning light. Her soul split with grief, her inner being howled like a wounded animal. Mr Joseland was moving to a station called Mittiebah in the Barkly Tablelands far to the north. Mrs Joseland would stay in Alice Springs so that Janie could go to school.
Mrs Joseland and Janie moved to a block of land to the east of Alice in what was called the ‘farm area’. There was room for Janie to have her horses. They were coming up on a truck soon. She could then join the pony club and start competing seriously in the many different horse events in and around Alice. In the holidays, she would go straight to Mittiebah to the stock camp. Her new life would revolve around horses to keep her sane and happy.
I couldn’t believe it. I’d lost my best friend on School of the Air. But now I could see her in Alice Springs, in person. She could even visit me at Bond Springs and become part of our family too. It was a time of mixed emotions.
I thought about what it would be like to be in Janie’s shoes. To be told I had to leave Bond Springs. That the only life I’d known was over. It was impossible to comprehend, but I did try. Would it be like going to boarding school? Would this be how I would feel in a few years? Transported to a new world, far away from my existing one, the place that was part of me, that owned me?
No, Janie’s situation was much worse than boarding school. She could never go home, whereas I could return for holidays. The hazy horizons of blue and curving lines of the ranges would still be there, the ridges and circles of waterways, the sunrises and sunsets, the night skies full of stars, the endless horizons. My favourite creeks and valleys and horses, the house and my bed would always be there to welcome me back. My world wouldn’t be ripped away, as it was for Janie.
Janie’s pain haunted me. Yes, I hated long musters and fantasised about overseas lands, but this landscape was home. It was the place where I was me. My body and soul were this country.
I wanted to wrap Janie in my arms and whisper, ‘It’ll be all right, it’s just a bad dream, soon you’ll be safely back at Everard Park.’ I longed for there to be a happy ending for her, but I saw in Mrs Joseland’s eyes there would not be. Janie couldn’t even talk about what had happened.
In her dreams, the spirits of her land called her back, night after night. But when she woke, she had to get up and put on a school uniform and shoes that pinched her toes and get on a bus and go to a school with people she didn’t know. Until that moment, she’d lived in jeans and boots, wild and free. She’d had a governess and Aboriginal friends. Her schoolroom had looked out onto the horse yards and Everard ranges.
Janie’s move made me think long and hard about my own departure to boarding school. In just a year and a half I would be sent south. Dad and his whole family had gone to boarding school in Adelaide, and we’d all been booked in the year we were born. Years ago, Dad had even bought blocks of orang
e trees in Waikerie, South Australia, to fund future school fees.
Mum didn’t want us to go south to boarding school and leave her, or our home, but there were no strong high-school options in the Territory. The NT government even paid bush people a subsidy to send their kids south for a proper secondary education.
But Janie wasn’t going south. She was stuck here, in some dreadful no-man’s land.
Instead of the sked, Mum could meet Mrs Joseland face-to-face to arrange catch-ups. In the early days, Janie visited almost every weekend, and we enfolded her into our family. Mum felt the depth of Janie’s grief as only someone as sensitive and intuitive as Mum could, and she cared for her with all the love she had. Dad adored her too. At Bond Springs Janie was safe, and we loved her with all our hearts and protected her as best we could.
In town, Janie had to develop survival strategies. Her loss was so beyond words, she pushed it deep down where she couldn’t see or feel it. In true Janie form, she gathered all that she had learned in her life to date to build a new one. She was not going to go down with her grief; she was going to outshine it.
In Alice she quickly made friends and became popular. Her infectious giggle and charm endeared her to everyone. Her horse skills and general sense of adventure meant she was soon involved in all sorts of activities. She was a natural leader of groups, and a winner in competitions, and people wanted to be around her.
And while her new life only dulled the deep ache, it did help her survive.
Before long, Janie was riding out to Bond Springs every weekend with the friends we’d met at the show, Donald Costello and Joanne Castle (whom we called Jo).
The ride would take a full day, along the long, winding creek beds that had seen Dad bring his first lot of cattle to Bond Springs the night of the wild storm and flood. M’Lis, Brett and I invariably rode to meet the three of them halfway. It was an unmarked trek through the rocky hills and sandy beds, and we always imagined we were cattle duffers as we cantered along. Before leaving, we would saddle up our horses, fill our water bags and tucker bags, ready to meet Janie, Donald and Jo in a hidden tea-tree gully, and have a picnic.
Mostly no one fell off and hurt themselves, or got lost on those long, isolated treks. We had no communication with each other, much less our respective parents, and should anything have gone wrong no one would have known where we were, or at least not without a protracted and difficult search, and it would have taken a long time to find us in those rocky, remote hills.
But Mum encouraged us in our adventures. She knew we knew this landscape better than anyone. By now, we could tell the time from the sun, draw a map of each paddock with a stick in the dirt, tell our location from the shape of the hills or curve of the creeks or line of the fences. We never got lost. We were home.
One winter’s day, we decided to hold our own gymkhana. The stock camp (including Dad) were away on the far boundary, so we planned it for that coming weekend. We had already competed in the MacDonnell Range Gymkhana several times and knew what the events were and what to do. We were just like sponges with ideas.
We invited Janie, Donald and Jo out, and it just so happened that Jacquie and Matthew Braitling were in town, so they came too.
We held the gymkhana on the Saturday morning up on the long flat of the Horse Paddock.
M’Lis, Brett and I had prepared the gymkhana site earlier that week. We lugged up empty drums for our horses to jump over and race around. We collected long sticks to erect for the Bending race. We pulled all the empty hessian chaff sacks out of the feed room, along with buckets, apples, hard-boiled eggs (collected from the chooks by us and cooked by Mum) and spoons (which Mum threatened us with our life if we didn’t return to her), and piled them all in the back of the Toyota. We drove them up there, and arranged them all, ready for the big day.
This was going to be a proper gymkhana; the real deal just like in our Jill and Pullein-Thompson books, just like at MacDonnell Range.
We also persuaded Mum and everyone else at the station to join in. What that really meant was that we needed some grown-ups to help pull it all off. Luckily, we had five of them available: Mum, Miss Thiele, Helen and another couple that Dad had recently employed: a bore man, Harry, and his wife, Carol. They lived in the Gemmells’ old cottage and Carol was very good with her hands (she was building a beautiful stone wall around it). They generously offered to help make ribbons and Harry carried some of the heavy drums for us. He even found a whistle and agreed to be the judge.
Saturday morning, we were up before the sky was light. We all put on jodhpurs, shirts and ties, and hard hats. We groomed our horses, saddled up and cantered towards the long flat of the Horse Paddock for a 10 a.m. kick-off.
Our gymkhana field stood shining in the early-morning sun.
We’d painted the drums for the jumping event in white and red and set them up at a proper distance apart. In the centre we’d stuck up the poles in four lines for the Bending race. At the end of each line was a barrel on which we’d stuck home-made flags on sticks, which would be used for the flag and barrel race. In the far distance we’d laid out the last three drums into a triangle for the barrel race.
M’Lis, Brett and I looked at our handiwork with great pride. It was as good as the MacDonnell Range Gymkhana. Benny, who’d helped where he could, joined us, gleefully.
Mum drove her station wagon up and brought chairs for the ladies to sit on (very thoughtful of her, because otherwise they’d have to squat or sit cross-legged in the red dirt). She also brought lots of oranges, to keep us hydrated and give us something sweet. Harry brought up a big drum of water on the Land Rover, pulled out his whistle and shouted, ‘I hereby declare this Bond Springs Gymkhana officially open.’
‘Hurrah!’ We waved our hats in the air.
The competition was fierce. Harry had to do a lot of refereeing. Janie won most events, as usual, but we all put in a huge effort. And once we’d got through the serious events, there were three fun ones to finish—the egg-and-spoon race, the sack race and the apple-dunking race.
In each of those events, we lined up, waited for Harry to blow the whistle, then galloped several hundred yards towards a long line where Mum stood. That was where we’d set out the buckets and sacks.
For the egg-and-spoon race, we had to gallop up, dismount, pull a spoon and egg out of the bucket, and then run back to Harry at the start line, leading our horse, without dropping the egg out of the spoon. Nobody made it intact but there was a lot of cheering and laughter. Lucky the eggs were hard-boiled.
The sack race was similar. Gallop to the long line, dismount, jump in a sack and, leading your horse, shuffle back to Harry at the start line. This was difficult and everyone kept falling over. The main thing was to make sure your horse didn’t walk over you in the chaos if you and your sack were sprawled on the ground.
Mum divided the water equally into the buckets for the apple-dunking race. Then she dropped apples into them, and Harry blew the whistle. Again, we had to gallop up and dismount, then shove our head in the bucket, and try to get the apple out with our teeth. Everyone was drenched in seconds. Those who got the apple out had to hold it between their teeth, get back on their horse and gallop back to Harry at the finish line.
That was perhaps the hardest event, but it was also hilarious. We did it last because by the end we were all soaking wet, laughing and falling about.
‘You cheated!’ We all yelled at each other, in hysterics.
Only M’Lis and Mr Pip did it properly and won outright.
After the gymkhana, we returned to the house for lunch and the presentation.
We had persuaded Mum to hold this big event on her precious lawn (and let us walk our horses across the lawn to accept our prizes), which she agreed to because of its importance. There, she royally pinned ribbons on the winners amid claps and cheers.
‘What a great day,’ we all agreed, and I was so happy to see Janie shine.
When it was all over, we unsaddled our horses a
nd rode bareback down to the creek. There was some precious water left from recent rains and we spent the next few hours riding around and through it, splashing each other, and then hopping off and letting the horses roll freely. The horses loved it and so did we. Finally, we turned them out into the paddock, and spent the rest of the afternoon planning our next event.
It didn’t occur to us that our lives and games might have been different to those of kids elsewhere, and particularly in the cities. All our friends on nearby stations did the same things and lived the same kinds of lives as we did.
We just thought our life and games were completely normal, because they were to us.
M’Lis, Brett and I took our guitars everywhere with us now. We would sit against our swags and sing in the stock camp at night, or around the lawn at home, or in the sitting room after dinner. During the School of the Air Get-Togethers, our guitars always went, too. We usually had a night camping in the Simpsons Gap creek bed, or the Old Telegraph Station creek bed, and we would sing for the other bush kids. They would always join in because we were singing songs they knew, songs of their own lives. Slim Dusty and Charley Pride were always the favourites, although Olivia Newton-John was on our song list now, too. And John Denver’s ‘Take me Home, Country Roads’ made us all misty-eyed.
Brett had become particularly skilled on the guitar, and M’Lis and I put melodies and harmonies to every tune. Benny was still too young to join in, but he would beat an old stool along in time if he was with us, and then there’d be the four of us, singing along.
M’Lis and I didn’t notice that there were few songs about women in the Australian outback. We never thought about the fact that the fabled bush heroes were men; the wild, romantic ‘Man from Snowy River’ types. They were the ones who took danger in their stride, cracked a stockwhip over their head as they wheeled the mob fearlessly down flinty mountainsides, and never seemed afraid (just like Dad). They were the characters we desperately wanted to be like.
An Alice Girl Page 26