The other professional train drover was Roy—a small thin man who spent most of his time rolling tobacco. When he started to talk it lasted forever, but he didn’t bore me. I sat there spellbound at his tales of the war against the Japanese in New Guinea. He had been a sniper. It must have been a lonely and spine-chilling task. On one occasion he waited in a tree for five days near a Japanese company camp. He waited for that one shot at an officer—the best way to demoralise the troops. ‘I was almost out of range,’ he said. ‘When I got him he was taking a drink from a pannikin. He tilted his head back to drink the last of the fluid and I fired. The bullet went through the bottom of the pannikin and into his mouth.’
Rolling another cigarette as though he were telling me about a hole in one, he recalled the next few hours. Soldiers ran around like ants, spraying trees with bullets and he knew if he were discovered a bullet through the heart was the best he could hope for.
Roy was still younger in 1965 than I am now. He had fought for freedom and virtually given up four years of his life. Addicted to heavy smoking I doubt he would be alive today and that might be a blessing, for Australian farmers have lost their freedom without a shot being fired. Foreign companies have taken over the vital components of the beef export industry. They can manipulate the prices. Grain growers are not only vulnerable to world supply and the weather, but now must bow before a new element—massive trading on futures. The market can be manipulated to inspire heavy planting and then sent into a spin at harvest time. At home, banks charge farmers exorbitant interest rates and the government scavenges on what’s left. Farming in Australia is possibly the most exposed industry in the western world. Modest subsidies would lead to better protection of the environment and pump lifeblood into inland towns. The denial of this assistance has led to the destruction of the Australian inland culture. Farmers have lost out to subsidised commodities and the corporate takeover has already begun.
During my six months away, the banks in all the small towns had closed. At Binnaway the post office had closed and the business transferred to the newsagent. The race club looked like folding and if it were not for the enthusiasm of a handful of people the annual show would have folded as well. Sal was show secretary that year and show day must have been the only bright day that little town had seen in twelve months.
For the next three months Sal and I went back and forth to Queensland from home to inspect the cattle and the water situation. With the cooler weather the waterhole hung on and Scalp kept the water up to the supply tank. He was pulling timber close by in the months of April, May and June.
On one of our brief autumn trips we had met Gil Campbell’s wife, Eunice, at the Mitchell hospital. She was a sister there. I’d had to go to the hospital to enquire about x-rays taken in January. I had already met Eunice briefly at Muckadilla with Gil and her young family. She had asked Sal and me to call in at their home, Claravale Station, the next time we went to inspect the cattle, which happened to be the, following day. Instead of taking the Maranoa road we took the old Injune road. It was about morning tea time when we arrived and we were lucky to strike Gil looking for a half-hour break. Gil was one of those typical western Queensland stockmen—lean and hard with direct blue eyes. He rarely ever took his hat off and he finished off every sentence with an ‘ay’, which has been a form of dialogue in Queensland’s outback ever since I can remember.
I didn’t waste much time in raising the subject of the October raid. Gil was reticent to begin with. Eunice became pale and momentarily silent, and I began to realise it was more than stolen cattle that bothered them. In reality they were as vulnerable as the white farmers in Kenya in the 1950s, only it was not the indigenous people terrorising them, but outlaws from another time. They feared for their home, their bores and even their children. The fear I knew had gone. It had been unfounded, or at least I had convinced myself of that, but for these people there was always the possibility of the unthinkable. They were too remote for conventional two-way radio which would enable them to call for help. Their satellite linkup could be tampered with and their road out could be closed in five minutes with a powersaw. The odds of such an incident were indeed remote, but like a ghost that never leaves, the fear hung on and I saw it in their eyes and their pensive expressions.
Meanwhile, there were lots of cookies and scones—and even cream for the scones. Gil milked cows at daylight and Eunice cooked on a wood stove. Their hot water came from an old donkey furnace outside. It was a home in the bush. A breeze stirred from the north that morning and I caught the sweet scent of the cattle yards. The Campbell children were taught by the Charleville School of the Air and by the way they gazed at Sal and me I knew they didn’t see people often. Having reared four boys Sal has a natural leaning to children and she soon broke through that shy barrier. There were two boys, and a girl at the toddling stage.
We had been chatting for a while at the kitchen table when an old gaunt man appeared on the front verandah. Anything sweet was hurriedly removed from the table.
‘Gil’s dad,’ whispered Eunice. ‘Got a serious sugar problem.’
Stuart Campbell entered the kitchen and in the old-fashioned way he shook hands with Sal as well as me. Without asking, Eunice put a large mug of tea in front of him and some scones. I got the impression he sat in the same chair about the same time every morning and ate Eunice’s scones. He was a delightful old character and asked a lot of questions.
‘You got horses?’
‘A racehorse in Mitchell,’ I said. ‘Quiet, but useless when the pressure’s on with cattle. A very old one at Echo Hills and one lame.’
‘That’s no good,’ he said. He thought for a while and nodded to himself. ‘We’ve got plenty.’
I began to feel uncomfortable. I knew this bloke wasn’t running the station anymore.
‘Naturally we can’t guarantee their behaviour,’ Gil added. ‘But if you’re stuck for two or three don’t hesitate.’
I hate borrowing anything from anyone. Only for the financial position I would have offered to buy three stockhorses.
‘That could happen,’ I replied reluctantly. ‘The second lot of weaners will have to come off soon and I can’t pay independent stockmen anymore.’
Gil brushed away my protestations and Stuart yarned on. The Campbells had taken up Claravale Station in the 1880s, he told us. They were one of the few families in Australia to still occupy their original lease. I took quite a liking to old Stuart and on one of our visits there he showed me where the Aboriginal camp had been. He said his father could speak the local Aboriginal language and in the 1890s had hunted with the black children. He said there was never any trouble between the family and the Aborigines.
‘They slowly dispersed after the turn of the century. Bush tucker and their own ways was best for them, but try and tell them that! Be like asking a townie to go and shoot a fowl for dinner when he can walk into a store and buy it.’
Stuart said the bush skills and crafts from the early days had been handed down through the Campbells. They had all been carpenters and harness makers. Their independence from civilisation survived to the present day, he told me. Stuart himself had not sighted a town until he was twelve.
‘The tracks were so rough. It was a long day in the sulky to Mitchell. Bloody boring.’
Sitting on a wooden bench on Gil and Eunice’s front verandah I sometimes tried to imagine those very early days. The frontier I’d seen as a child had been so different. The men and women were rough, the half-castes sullen—lost and belonging nowhere. The trapping days of the rabbit plague were often ugly. It was a world wounded by the war. The real frontier was something else and when Stuart passes on there may only be a handful left who really know what went on in the early settlement of outback Queensland. Two tribes had once lived in peace here. Black and white children had played happily with one another. There were no flags of the British, no dreaded native police. The white people spoke the Aboriginal language and loved the corroborees as much as
their dark friends. I believe the Campbells learnt from these Aboriginal people, although perhaps subconsciously. For a hundred years they have lived on what nature has provided and until just recently the environment had never been altered. But the pressure of encroaching civilisation, exorbitant annual lease rates and the fear of native title (which clearly doesn’t exist in the Carnarvon region) had forced this family to enter the modern world.
Central and western New South Wales remained in the grip of drought and with the slide towards winter there could be no relief until next spring. Nick and Greg had ploughed up a big area for wheat. The bed was rough, cloddy and dry. The prospects for a crop were not good. When I arrived home Nick had left for Lismore to resume his business/tourism course at Southern Cross University.
The happy occasion during this period was a wedding. James, our eldest son, married Kari. The wedding was in Sydney and with the dancing and laughter at the reception, our preoccupation with the drought was smothered for that night and for two or three days afterwards.
There was sadness too when Bill Anderson, the horse trainer, died. I didn’t know until he had been buried. On our first trip back to Queensland we called on Mary Anderson and found her very distressed. We moved the horses. The three-year-old was known around town as the buckjumper and I dropped him at Echo Hills. Vodka I moved to Mudgee and a local, Sally Rowe, took over the training. She soon ran into the same problems as Bill had and suggested I give him one final run at the picnic races in May. I was lame, but the temptation was too much. I strapped up my leg and Sally legged me aboard in the Collaroy Cup. Vodka flew out of the machine and led the field under a tight hold until the turn. Then he drifted off the track and we came down the outside rail to finish third. I learnt two things from that ride. Vodka was injured deep in the off shoulder and would probably never race again. The other thing concerned my knee. I could barely walk afterwards and immediately arranged to visit an orthopaedic surgeon. He operated in early June.
The depth of gloom weighed heavily enough with the continuing drought, the gradual loss of my horses and the death of a mate. I had only known Bill Anderson for about three months, but I’d seen a lot of him in that time. I used to go and visit him in hospital. You never forget the people who welcome you when times are tough.
To add kilos to an already bursting leadbag there was the estate. The family accountant wanted a settlement or a selling up of the whole property. He was genuine in his concern for all involved, but it was a time when rural properties placed under auction received one bid—a dummy from the rear of the room. Any form of immediate financial settlement was out of the question with the cattle away in Queensland and the prospects of a crop bleak.
The week following my operation James and Kari took a few days off work and drove up from Sydney to help Sal take the weaners off the cows left at Myall Plains. I had been discharged from hospital a couple of days when James came into the bedroom.
‘Reckon you’ll ride again?’ he asked, in jest of course. He knew the answer.
‘Might have to be my own horse,’ I remember saying. ‘At my age you have to ride a winner every time you leave the enclosure.’ I couldn’t take the edge off the disappointment I felt, but that was life, irrespective of the sport.
‘You’ll get back,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You’ve come back from far worse.’
‘I was younger then,’ I said simply.
We talked about the world of the racetrack for a while. Ever since James turned four it was his life—his dad in the jockey’s room and his grandfather drinking with old friends at the racecourse bar and passing pink lemonades to James, and at home his mother shackled with babies, complaining her eldest son was being exposed to a level of racetrack indoctrination never before known. On Sundays he raided my suitcase and dressed up, silks, cap and even the whip. When his brothers grew up he made a racetrack and every afternoon they raced on bikes, held enquiries for interference and if there was a fall someone would be suspended for the afternoon. To the chagrin of them all, they grew to be big men or, in James’s case, just a shade too heavy to be a jockey. At different times each one would come to me and say, ‘You’re lucky Dad, gee you’re lucky.’
‘To be a little thin guy?’ I used to answer, mockingly. ‘The birds don’t even see me sometimes.’
‘Racehorses I mean. I’ll never ride in a race.’
My answer was always the same. ‘You’re lucky that you won’t. It must be something to do with the speed of a live animal, because everything afterwards is an anticlimax.’
James and I were still talking when Sal came in with the mail.
‘The bank has refused to renew the overdraft,’ she said with anguish. I could see the alarm in her eyes. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘Looks like another manager’s going to have to leave town,’ James said impulsively, with a widening smirk.
With the bank it was not a question of security. I was sole executor of the estate and some months before had appointed a new company director to fill the vacancy left by my father’s death. The new director, when called upon, refused to sign security papers for the bank. The big lift to Queensland had been seen by some as an extreme and dangerous move. They were frightened about the future and I think the bank was onside with them.
‘The crutches,’ I said, feeling suddenly very restless. ‘Sometimes they’re like vultures, the banks. They circle and watch and when the kill’s been done they move in.’
‘It’ll haemorrhage,’ Sal said. ‘It has once already. It’s too early for long walks on crutches.’
‘He’ll be right, Mum,’ James piped in. ‘It’s all a bit of a shock. Do him good to hobble about for a while.’
James went to fetch the crutches and while he was gone Sal repeated her alarm again, her voice low and a trace of anger barely concealed.
‘We’re no more than an entry in the computer today,’ I remember saying quietly. ‘In the cattle crash of ’74 the banks provided sensible packages so that we could trade our way out.’
‘I know what they did then. This is rotten. It’s bullying—call it what you like.’
‘I was just stalling to find the right words,’ I said, forcing a smile. ‘In the world of high finance I should parade myself in a thousand dollar suit and perhaps sneak a little make-up under my eyes, and then, using those impressive words—rationalise, restructure, formula and negotiate—I’m sure I would walk away with a solution.’
‘You do need the crutches.’ Sal smiled at last and I swung my feet to the floor.
‘Where are you going?’ James asked, holding the crutches while I eased myself onto them.
‘Nowhere in particular. I think better when I’m walking.’ I hesitated, gripping tightly. ‘Or crutch swinging!’
There was a pause and James said, ‘Where are the horses?’
‘Didn’t I tell you?’
‘No.’
‘I took them to Queensland. All of them.’
I could see he was very disappointed. He had done nothing but feed cattle the last few days and he was looking forward to a ride.
‘And the horses too are gone,’ he murmured. ‘What a drought.’
Slowly I went over to the old cottage where my parents and I had lived when I was a child. It was about two hundred metres from the homestead on the edge of a little forest of pines. At the rear of the cottage was a huge ironbark and underneath it was the old fowl house. The little yard was still intact, almost smothered in plains grass. Nearly a half century before I had been attacked by a wild cat in that yard. If I concentrated hard enough I could almost smell the purple stuff, probably gentian violet, that my mother painted all over my body and face.
The wild cats were still about, but it all seemed so eerily dead. Not far from the fowl house was the bachelors’ hut. I don’t think anybody had been through its door for twenty years. Whatever paint that little structure had seen had long washed off and it stood grey and forlorn among old pines that no longer dropped seeds. People
had long gone from here. I closed my eyes and after a while I could hear hooves pounding the red earth and the squeak of sulkies. I heard the voices of the bushmen, the fall of an axe on dry box timber and I thought I could smell the smoke from the evening fires. In my imagination I saw the wan light of the lanterns; the lanterns of the trappers.
My world at that time was the creatures of the bush: the husky outbursts of possums at dusk, the sharp bark of the wallaroo, the rasping call of the curlew (known locally as the scream bird), and always the wind in my face, for on the high plains the wind forever stirred the foxtail tops of the plains grass and the thousands of leaves in every kurrajong whispered. Above me was another world—the adult world—I simply looked upon, like any other creature half wild. It was the mornings I remembered best. Dogs barking as horses were rounded up; the crack of a stockwhip; and the familiar clink of milk buckets.
Now it was so quiet. It was as silent as the grave would one day be. The men and women from this period had all gone. Long before them their horses and dogs had gone. Their anguish, their passions, frustrations and elations had gone with them. They had all passed through without so much as a ripple left behind. Gone too were the animals I knew. The foxes had claimed the possums, the curlews and even the poor old goanna is scarcely seen nowadays.
Horses Too Are Gone, The Page 25