The radio gave us the bad news: the market at Wodonga in Victoria had dropped. Allowing for time to advertise the Myall Plains weaners and arrange transport, it would be a fortnight before they could be offered for sale. If no rain fell in that time the market would ease further.
‘What will you do?’ Sal asked. She had that little white-faced look I’d seen so often in the wool crash. Only three years before we had lost our property at Capertee. When wool crashed it was the equivalent of BHP disappearing from the stock exchange board. To have something taken from you that you love leaves a scar for life and, worse still, you live forever in fear that the banks and other vultures of our social system will be back again to perch on the front gate.
‘We’ll roadtrain to Queensland and drop them on a stock route with a drover. When it rains we’ll sell them in Roma.’
‘Will your father agree?’
I probably didn’t answer. Sal and I know each other so well just a look says it all. Dad had angina and was very ill. Quietly to myself and no one else I put his life expectancy at about six weeks. To watch someone who had such a zest for life slowly die is a harrowing experience. To add to the trauma we no longer liked each other. If you have never liked someone you feel nothing. It’s when you have shared a great friendship in the distant past that you look inwardly. What went wrong? Above all else I value the friendship of my boys. To rear children and then have it all fall apart negates life itself, for we can take nothing with us and all we can ever leave is a memory.
I left Sal at the table with a sense of foreboding. Dad and I didn’t have many discussions left.
It was only two kilometres to Mum and Dad’s home. We called it the cottage. Sal and I had lived there in the early 1970s with our babies. Since then a number of families had passed through. My parents had only been there two years.
I saw them every day. First job in the morning I lit the fire and filled the wood basket. There was never much said. My mother had cancer and although she never once complained I think pain rarely left her alone. I discussed the drought when decisions had to be made.
This time when I pulled up in the little farm truck I felt uncomfortable. To ask a very sick man to contemplate roadtrains and Queensland stock routes is a big thing. For a few moments I just sat in the truck, looking out on Dad’s withered tomato vines. The frosts would have killed them in the end, but these vines had died in the late autumn through neglect. All his life Dad had grown tomatoes. He loved them. When he no longer had the strength to weed and water his tomato beds I knew the end was near.
I went inside and he was sitting by the fire. Sometimes he read. Mostly he just sat with his memories. Hanging on the wall behind him was a race photograph of Vodka Jack—his last horse. The horse had won a maiden event at Narromine the previous spring. Dad had been on course that day and loved every minute of it. I remember how gaunt and sick he looked, but there was still life in him. Now he was deathly white and almost skeletal.
‘The weaners are on top of the oats,’ I said at last.
‘We better sell them,’ he said simply.
‘We’re too late.’
‘I thought your Wodonga plan was a good one.’
‘The market dropped twenty dollars this morning. By the time we get there it might be back another forty.’
My assessment of the market was not speculation. I had sold the cast for age cows at Dubbo and received the worst price since the cattle crash of the early 1970s. I had not told Dad. He had forgotten they even existed.
He didn’t know what to say. He must have known his days were numbered. To have to concentrate on anything beyond a week would arouse some level of fear.
‘I’m thinking about Queensland,’ I said. ‘Bill says the stock routes are still okay. Water’s good. Feed’s a bit frosted, but plenty of it.’
Bill was from Roma and had married Dad’s niece, Sandra. Dad had a lot of respect for Bill.
‘Go on the road yourself!’ He stared at me now and I could see a trace of alarm.
‘No, we’ll find a drover.’
He was silent for a while. I didn’t expect him to agree. There was only Sal and me to look after them. He hated hospitals. I knew he wanted to die here if possible.
‘We can’t feed them?’ he queried.
‘The kurrajong’s nearly finished. We’ll have to buy truck loads of grain to feed the cows.’ I paused and gave him a moment to think about it. ‘The cows are the problem. They’re about to drop the calves.’
‘The problem too is you’re an adventurer.’
I watched him closely for a trace of humour. It may have been there. He was too sick to smile. Maybe he would never smile again. I just sat and waited. Feeding twelve hundred head of cattle was out of the question. We didn’t have the equipment. We didn’t have the water.
‘Keenan Brothers would have gone on the road.’
He wasn’t looking at me now. He had gone back to the grand old days. When he spoke of the Keenan brothers I thought of the film The Sting. That was how they lived in the 1920s. Poker games on trains where the stakes were measured in thousands of pounds. There were full-time drovers from far western Queensland to Victoria. It was a time when they discussed track form with priests. Dad had seen those days. They were days of great optimism for the small man. The Keenan men had a humble start. Their father died from injuries sustained in a fall from a horse, and their French mother reared them on a farm near Molong. She worked them hard and through her genes she gave them a personality that was later to help them build a land empire, although still small by Australian standards at that time.
‘They made money out of droughts and out of crashes,’ he went on. ‘They trod ground that others drew back from.’
Then he looked at me. ‘But they lost it.’ He paused for a while, just gazing at me. ‘Remember that always. They lost it.’
I waited for a while and then I said simply, ‘I’ll go up and have a look then.’
‘You telephone the agent,’ he said firmly. ‘Tell him to book you into the hotel at Roma and have him meet you for breakfast each morning.’
I struggled not to smile. In the old days the agents met graziers as the train came in. Dined with them, drank with them; in short, never left their sides. I wondered what reception I would receive if I asked Wesfarmers Dalgety to roll out the carpet like the old AML & F Company did for my grandfather.
Dad had agreed in principle but I felt no relief. Between that moment and when I packed my suitcase that night I asked myself continually if there were no other option. If general rain fell the young cattle would lift a hundred dollars a head almost overnight. We were into August, just weeks from the second-best rain month on the calendar—October. It was gambling on weather—or was it the ghosts of Keenan Brothers that drove me?
In anticipation of being forced to face up to the Queensland option, I’d placed an ad in Roma’s Western Star for agistment and a drover. In the ad I explained agistment was preferred, but if unavailable a drover would be employed to walk the stock routes.
The paper was delivered to the newsagents each Friday and by coincidence the day I had to make the decision was the cut-off time for ads. If I drove to Roma on Friday, Sal could report any phone calls that came through and I would be on the spot to deal with them. Not resolved was who would do the boggy dam run while I was away.
‘If any get bogged why couldn’t I pull them out?’ Sal asked.
‘I’ll be away with the Landcruiser.’
‘Teach me to drive the tractor.’
‘Too dangerous,’ I said, still wondering what to do. The tractor was brand new and the only time it had been out of the shed was to pull cows from a bog. In the hands of an inexperienced operator it would be dangerous work. Dams are surrounded by steep banks and provide very unstable ground for wheel tractors.
There had been no solution to the occasional bogging. Those dams we could do without had been fenced off. Others had to be left so the cattle could get a drink. Before t
hey reached the ever receding water they struggled through putrid silt up to their bellies. For old cows it was a death trap.
‘Let’s do the run early,’ Sal said. ‘Then you go and if I run into real bother I will phone Peter.’
Poor Peter was our nearest neighbour. Too often he had to come to our rescue. He always came in great spirit and never once made us feel uncomfortable, but he was just as busy as us fighting the drought.
‘If only the bugger would ask us to rescue him one day,’ I said, knowing damn well we would have to call on him.
One dam was so bad we had a canoe on standby. Sometimes a cow would get stuck, struggle frantically, become exhausted and move out into the water. If they were not soon rescued their bodies would seize up from the cold and after the trauma of being towed out some never regained their feet.
Early on Friday morning we went to this dam first. It was freezing. No frost, but a face-numbing breeze of about five degrees Celsius. There was a cow stuck and she had moved out into the water.
Sal and I had a routine procedure by this stage. We placed the canoe on the silt and Sal pushed me out as far as she could without getting into the bog and then I used the paddle. Upon reaching the water I would paddle slowly across to the cow. The animal was already terrified by this time and the spectacle of a canoe approaching made some panic. I had to be very careful I didn’t capsize, as the liquid mud beneath the water was as deadly as quicksand. I carried a chain with me which had a large slip ring at one end and at the other end the chain was attached to a rope. Once I had the slip ring end over the cow’s head, Sal took up the slack by pulling the rope. She perceived the whole operation as a potential horror show and always made brave comments to make me laugh.
‘Darling, you must feel you’re on a holiday in that canoe!’
With the chain attached I came in as quickly as possible and hauled the poor thing out with the tractor. We had a high success rate and when the cow regained her feet we walked her to our hospital paddock which was watered by a trough from the homestead bore.
No matter how well each rescue went the scene was distressing and I asked myself many times what could have been done to avoid such a dreadful situation. It had never been in my hands to do anything, but in fairness to my father no dam on Myall Plains had been boggy for nearly thirty years. In 1965 he had cleaned every dam at great expense. The running of cattle on this continent may always be on the edge of calamity and short of utilising the land for other purposes we have to live with it.
We found a cow bogged in another dam. There was no need for the canoe. After her rescue Sal and I went home for coffee and I washed the ‘Noosa sand’ from my legs. In fact the mud was stinking and sticky. If I didn’t have skin to worry about I would have used a wire brush.
I left feeling very uneasy. Three days was too long to be away. My parents were a day-to-day proposition. The ambulance collected my father if he was low and required hospitalisation, but he fought against it and we had to watch him closely. The only days we could relax were when the district nurse came. With the running of the property we were on our own. The tree lopper went home each night. He was a contractor and had nothing else to do with the running of the place. There were no men left in the small towns anymore. Those who wanted work had left long ago. The ones on the dole had slumped into the unemployable syndrome. Sal would be on her own.
The first stock feed I had seen in months was between the border and St George. It looked dry and frost burnt, but the thought of the Myall Plains cows eating it made it seem like prime hay.
Once a sheep district, St George is now a major cotton centre. The town itself is most attractive. Two hotels overlook the Balonne river and offer patrons views across five hundred metres of water alive with ducks, cranes and pelicans. The river is famous for giant Murray cod, but environmental changes over the past twenty years have many of the locals worried. Some say that carp, an introduced species, are taking over and polluting the water. Others say it is to do with intensive chemical run-off from crop spraying. What is known is that the carp feed on a little bug which in turn feeds on blue-green algae, so at present the carp are flourishing. One of the great tragedies of our inland rivers is that the destructive power of the carp fish was recognised more than thirty years ago when the species was still confined to irrigation channels in southwestern New South Wales, but somehow the pet fish lobby managed to block any action.
St George held some old memories for me. In 1957 my father had taken me with him on a sheep buying trip to western Queensland, country that held all sorts of romantic visions for me in those days and I was looking forward to seeing it. When we got to St George, just seventy-five miles north of the New South Wales border, I thought I was in the never-never. We stayed at the Australia Hotel, nearly as grand in those days as its namesake in Castlereagh Street, Sydney. I threw some lines in from the river bank, tied them to trees and planned to get the fish early in the morning. The pelicans, however, must have been watching. They beat me and I was left with lines tangled beyond repair.
At breakfast Dad got talking to livestock agents and other travellers. The hotel was the communication centre and nearly forty years later perhaps little has changed, except the town is larger and some of the other hotels thrive as well. During the course of conversation it became evident (and very disappointing for me) that the road to Surat, our next destination, was just a track. I knew Dad wouldn’t take it on. It was January and very hot. The Wet had already moved into central Queensland. One elderly man said the kangaroos were so bad that two or three travellers every week had their radiators knocked in and were forced to walk miles to a station for help.
For me such news was exciting. Dad, however, was a gregarious man and the possibility of a breakdown and being caught by rain was as unattractive to him as crowds of people were to me. We turned back and I didn’t see the great downs country of western Queensland until I was a young man.
These days the track to Surat is a highway and it took me little more than an hour to reach Surat from St George.
The rolling open downs of scattered myall, box and brigalow in the east and gidgee and boree in the west are distinct from the famous Darling Downs of south-eastern Queensland. The vast downs of western Queensland extend for hundreds of kilometres to Longreach and way beyond. Broken only by low ranges, the fertile soils of the downs would be as productive as the North American prairies were it not for lack of rain.
It was sunset when I saw the Surat watertower in the distance. From the front gate at home I had travelled six hundred and eighty kilometres with just one stop. Before dark I wanted to stroll through the grass on the stock route.
The dominant grass was Mitchell and along a dry creek I waded through patches of Flinders. Flinders is one of the few tall grasses that cattle fatten on. In the west Kimberley the heaviest bullocks I have ever seen were fattened on this native grass. On Myall Plains we have a native grass called whitetop. In late summer and early autumn it will fatten stock faster than lucerne. But the king of all native grasses is Mitchell. In the dead of winter it can appear as lifeless as old stubble, until rain comes. Moisture stimulates sap from the roots and in just a few days the stems will appear green. The net effect is a thoroughly dead-looking grass transformed into first grade hay.
Much of the western downs is still covered with Mitchell grass. On the western plains of New South Wales the species has been a victim of the plough and the ever invading galvanised burr. Areas too far west for wheat production have become an environmental disaster due to the loss of this magnificent and prolifically growing grass.
I passed through Surat and went on to Roma, the heart of the southern Queensland cattle industry. A town of only eight thousand people, Roma is unique. Apart from all the rural back-up industries one would expect, there is a hint of culture quite unexpected in the interior. There are coffee shops as upmarket as the best in Double Bay, Sydney and exactly half the price. The town has a modern cinema. A live band, usually fr
om the Gold Coast, will entertain you at least two nights a week. For clothes it is equal to Brisbane or Sydney and for the outdoor camper there is a shop superior to any I have been in.
Roma has some wild memories for me. The two-day picnic races held there in the sixties were unlike any other horse-racing fixture in the world. The horses were known as grass-eaters. That is, registered thoroughbreds all let loose in a paddock for a month and mustered and dispersed to various stables about ten days before the race meeting. Some were not ridden before race day. My uncle who had a property near Injune heard I had ridden a couple of winners as an amateur jockey. He was a great sport and decided to arrange a full book for me over the two-day programme. The year was 1966 and I was still an apprentice amateur and an ordinary one at that. Dad was very worried, but there was no stopping me. I arrived in Roma the night before with Sal, then my fiancée. The horse owners had booked my accommodation and had already commenced a party in my room. Queensland hospitality can be very rugged. They allowed me to go to bed at 4.00 a.m., dragged me up to the track at 6.30 a.m. to give every horse a pipe-opener and at 11.00 a.m. I started riding them in a ten-race programme. Four threw me in the mounting enclosure, one fell after the start and in the Ladies Bracelet I forgot to pull my goggles down. It was a dirt track and I went the entire seven furlongs (fourteen hundred metres) with my head under the mane. I had to ask the other jockeys where I had finished. During the afternoon the stipendiary steward said I had no judgement of pace. ‘You’re dead right sir,’ I replied. He looked at me strangely.
I won a race the second day and a lady complimented me for looking so neat and still. I thanked her profusely, because it was the only praise I got. I felt like telling her I was so stuffed that sitting still was all I could manage!
Horses Too Are Gone, The Page 2