The scones Sal made in the camp oven were so delicious I suggested to Richard we move the big round boulder another metre in the morning. He had done two-thirds of the work and gave me the ‘go to hell’ look. Yarramin’s nose picked up the scent of the freshly baked scones as well. The yard was at least thirty metres from the fire, but the faint drift of crisp morning air was enough. He whinnied and none of us could resist it. Richard took three over to him and he said they went down so fast he wasn’t sure it was a kind act after all.
After morning tea we left for Claravale, turning the bore off on the way. I drove the truck and Richard and Sal followed in the Brumby ute. The plan was to borrow two horses and while I floated them back to the camp Richard would drive to Mitchell and buy a ute load of hay. Sal planned to buy some groceries.
When we arrived there were about twenty horses in the yards. It was good luck in one respect. But it also suggested Gil may have been about to embark upon a mustering campaign. Under hard mustering conditions horses are changed every day and the release of two good saddle horses might be inconvenient.
Gil and his family were away and it was his cousin, Rowan, who met us on the front verandah. I had met Rowan before. A wiry man not much bigger than me, he looked to be in his late thirties. He told us he was staying for a couple of weeks and had run the horses in to re-handle four or five young ones. He explained he did most of the breaking since Gil had been injured. Gil rode as well as ever, but with a steel plate in his leg it was a simple matter of eliminating risk.
We were yarning away when old Stuart arrived.
‘You want more horses?’ he asked, before we had even shaken hands. I could have hugged him. It broke the ice. More than that, it prompted me to ask Rowan if he would help with the mustering. I explained my cash situation and told him if the muster was drawn-out, running into two or three weeks, I would approach Wesfarmers in Roma. The branch had already agreed to finance my bull purchase for the season and in Albury, Geoff White had authorised the payment of agistment and cartage. It was Wesfarmers Dalgety that saw me through my cash-flow crisis and I will never forget them. The bank’s response had been to bounce a hire-purchase payment, the only cheque ever bounced on me.
Rowan was optimistic the job could be done in a week. He knew the country. In any event he could only give me about a week. He had commitments in the Northern Territory. I felt with his help there would only be stragglers to collect after a week. What further impressed me was his total lack of concern about the rangeland mob. Provided they didn’t shoot at him, he wasn’t interested.
While we were talking Sal made a reverse-charge call to Sydney to stop the boys coming up. She wasn’t long and we all walked over to the yards. The Claravale yards were not just another set of stockyards. They were built in the 1890s and only rails had ever been replaced. In the early days the station covered a bigger area and ran more cattle. Two of the yards had been let go, but the rest had been kept in impeccable order. The same hardwood timber had been used to build the harness shed, the milking bales and the calf lock-up pens. For me it was a bush gallery of the Australian stockman.
Rowan told us to pick the two horses we wanted from the mob. He already had one saddled. I hadn’t noticed it before. It was a leggy pale-skinned gelding with dark, striped patches down one side. He was in a yard on his own and a bit fractious. His neck was wet from sweat. Rowan said he had saddled him not long before we arrived and had then gone over to have a cup of tea.
We all watched while Rowan mounted. The horse ran sideways and lifted its head high, but didn’t show any inclination to buck. Richard opened one of the gates and Rowan took his mount out into the paddock to trot and canter.
I gave Richard one of the bridles and we focused our attention on the mob. They had all been ridden at different times, but just run in from the ranges none looked too quiet. Richard saw Black Cotton and we both agreed on him. The black gelding had been taught to cut. We edged him into a corner and Richard managed to get the reins around the gelding’s neck and slip the bridle on.
I looked carefully through the rest. The big snorty bay was among them. I didn’t think he would be any good for cutting. In fact most of the horses were big, showing a marked infusion of thoroughbred. My eyes eventually fell on the dark bay Tommy had ridden. He still looked sour, but at fourteen and a half hands I thought he had potential for campdrafting. I caught him and led him over to the harness yard.
Richard had already collected the saddles from the truck. He saddled his mount and got on. There were no problems and we didn’t expect any.
Sal had been watching Rowan hack his mount through the timber at the front of the yards. When she made her way back she had to walk through the mob and they all ran to one end of the yard. Horses are very much aware of the different sexes and I suspect none of them had been touched by a woman.
‘We should be getting a contract team to go in and get them,’ she said, watching me saddle up. ‘It’s ridiculous.’
‘No money,’ I said. ‘They cut it off.’
‘Well Rowan’s coming with us on a zebra and I’ve been watching you on that leg. You couldn’t ride a loosely bolted rocking horse on a merry-go-round in kids’ corner.’
‘It’s weak,’ I agreed. ‘Not that bad.’
‘Get Richard to lunge him for a few minutes off Black Cotton.’
I glanced to where I had last seen Richard. He had taken Black Cotton outside for a canter. I waved my hand, in a manner of dismissal. ‘Look at him,’ I said of the horse I’d chosen. ‘He’s nearly asleep. Don’t take any notice of the ears. They’re always back.’
I took the dark bay into the next yard, a big yard about forty metres by twenty. Before mounting, I led him around the yard once and checked the girth. He was very much aware of me, but there was not a sign of playing up. Quiet horse this fella, I thought.
I reached the saddle a bit like an old man would and sat loose, not wanting the horse to feel any tension. We walked down one side of the yard and when I turned him every muscle in that animal’s body went rigid, as though he’d been poked with an electric prodder. I spoke to him quietly and urged him to walk on. The hump in his back grew. A horse thinking about a pigroot or two doesn’t necessarily hump up, but one bent on the real thing transmits a sensation to the rider of being astride a forty-four gallon drum on the crest of a wave.
The bugger caught me in the first move. Ninety-nine times from a hundred a bucking horse’s head will go down accompanied simultaneously by a skyward thrust of the rump. Instead this fella reared high, close to the point of overbalancing, and I was loose in the saddle before he recoiled into the first buck. Coming out of it I still had my feet in the stirrup irons but my bottom was on the edge of the saddle and I knew the best I could hope for was a safe landing. However, this fella intended to pelt me as high as the top rail before gravity took over. I left cleanly. The yard was spinning and I looked for the ground, arms wrapped in. Manure dust filled my mouth and through the fine powder of the same dust floating above, I saw the wild thrashing of hind legs.
There had been a thump on my back before I hit the ground. No pain, just a thump. The horse, still bucking, had moved on. I thought I had escaped injury.
It hit me with such force my mind reeled in confusion. I gasped for air and none would go in and I found myself clawing the ground with one arm. Down my right side there was a feeling of water, as though someone had doused me with a bucket of it. Sal was staring into my face, her lips moving and her hands clutching my shoulders. Slowly her voice came. I had heard her before, but the shock of pain was so consuming, my brain seemed to be locked in trauma.
Gradually I could breathe, then speak. The sudden onslaught of pain gave way to an overwhelming sensation of weakness. Sal and Richard helped me stand and I remember asking them to let me stand alone. Through the confusion I struggled against the consequences, the dark inevitability of shattered plans. Like the day at Echo Hills when I took the scalpel blade through my hand. Deep
down in my subconscious there was a voice telling me the injury was bad and I might as well accept it.
There was no blood. The bleeding was all internal. Old Mrs Campbell—Stuart’s wife—was trying to spoon hot sweet tea into me and a towelful of ice cubes appeared from nowhere. They lay me down in the shade and there was a brief conference about an ambulance. Mrs Campbell had been a nurse in her young days and said first aid could do little for haemorrhaging and it might be two hours or more before an ambulance arrived. Also, she was worried that if an ambulance was called they could get lost. The roads were little more than tracks and the few sign posts only indicated towns. There were no facilities for an air ambulance and even if there were, regulations were in force for safety purposes. A patient had to be transferred to a recognised aerodrome.
Mrs Campbell suggested Sal take me to Roma and go straight to a private doctor’s surgery for immediate attention. She volunteered to telephone the surgery. Hands seem to gather around me and I was put into Richie’s ute. Other vehicles were offered, but the Suburu had four-wheel drive and Sal knew the vehicle. She felt she could gain time by taking the Mount Bindango road. The normal route to Roma was a hundred and fifty kilometres as opposed to one hundred and twenty kilometres.
I recall almost nothing at this point, except old Stuart. He stood there ashen faced and I wondered vaguely about the trip myself. But I knew Roma was the only destination. I was bleeding inside, my breathing was fast and the light seemed sharper than it should have been, which was probably the onset of shock. All I remember of the trip was trying to cushion the pain, for the road was so rough. At Roma a doctor examined me and I was transferred to hospital. For Sal and Richard there must have been an awful moment of uncertainty. At the time we didn’t know where most of the cattle were. The cut fences and the tracks gave clues, but for all we knew they could have been feeding along the tops of the Mt Hutton range or at that very moment held up in a rustler’s break.
On the fourth day after being admitted to the Roma Base Hospital I became a patient of the western Queensland flying surgeon, Dr Tony Paul. I had haemorrhaged quite badly. Heavy internal bleeding in the peritoneum can be fatal, as the source may be the liver, or—slightly less serious—the spleen. He told me he had two options: drain the fluid and risk infection or wait and see if the body absorbed it, which is the option he took. Nothing was said about surgery, but if the haemorrhaging hadn’t stopped he would have had no choice. Doctor Paul spared me the ominous implications at the time and I am very grateful.
The pain was the enemy. At times it put me into shock but at six o’clock each morning it had a humorous side. Before taking to the air and heading west Dr Paul came to see me and as quickly as possible I jammed my leather glasses case into my mouth. He had to examine my back and if I had something to bite on I could take the pain. It was an unusual spectacle, I should imagine, and it made him roar laughing on the first occasion. He said it reminded him of his Flying Doctor days way out in the Channel Country, where the west was raw all the time. Dr Paul was a most energetic man. Sometimes, fourteen hours after he had examined me at the crack of dawn, I would hear his voice somewhere along the hospital corridor. He had cruised through retirement age a decade earlier.
One morning, after the herd had been rescued and Sal spent much of her time reading by my bed, I asked her what had happened. From memory I had simply been thrown and apart from racetrack injuries I have survived about fifty peltings in the past.
‘You got both barrels,’ she replied soberly. ‘The horse’s kick was perfectly timed while you were still airborne.’
‘Someone said I’d get both barrels.’
She smiled faintly and continued with her reading.
Sal’s fate had taken an enormous twist since that day in February when she arrived in Roma. At that moment at the airport, bewildered by the circumstances and fearful of the country, the thought of returning and actually running the whole operation would have been beyond her darkest nightmare. But that’s exactly what happened. Sal had to organise the rescue of the herd.
At Amby she found Smokie sitting on his backdoor step. Judging by the little pile of cigarette butts at his feet, he was bored. Sal had barely introduced herself before he was rolling his swag. Before they left Amby he got her to stop at the corner shop where he collected a dozen packets of tobacco. Sal drove him out to the camp, where Rowan had left a spare horse. Most men would have waited to start next morning, but not Smokie. He saddled up and tracked his way to where Richard and Rowan had made a start.
It was a gruelling time for Sal and Richard, made miserable by saddle soreness. Some horsemen ride so regularly they never experience it. For those thrown suddenly into days of twelve hours in the saddle, a day’s ride is slow torture. The muscles from shoulders to toes are strained, especially the thighs, and the knees stiffen so much the rider struggles to walk after dismounting. Sal was to confide later there were moments when she wept, quietly and out of sight. In the evenings she was the cook.
The Campbell family were fantastic. Gil provided fresh horses and upon realising the hopelessness of our situation mustered his own cattle out of a ten thousand hectare paddock for our herd. When the last of the stragglers had been chased out of the scrub he instructed Rowan to walk the herd to Claravale and turn them into the paddock.
The final count was only three short. Some exasperating hours were spent catching baby calves, transporting them in the truck and then re-mothering them. It was a great feat of stockmanship to find three hundred cows in wild country and systematically horse draft them from a thousand head of mixed cattle. Richard told me later he learnt more in that nine days about handling cattle that he had in the previous ten years.
The first day out of hospital I insisted we go to ‘Double Bay’ for coffee.
‘You’ll have to write a book,’ the proprietor said, quickly serving the coffee and ducking back into his world of pot plants.
After two tranquil days in Bill and Sandra’s garden I felt well enough to fly. Richard had already returned to Lismore, once again looking lean, dark and fit. Sal had become a veteran of the Blank Space. When she drove out to see the cattle alone, sometimes along the back tracks to save fuel, she always had a shotgun on the passenger seat.
‘I couldn’t use it,’ she confided one night. ‘It just makes me feel safer.’
‘Love to see Frankie’s face if you pulled the sawn-off from a picnic basket.’
‘I threw it into the Maranoa,’ Sal said triumphantly. ‘It was a flavour of Mexico we can do without.’ Ironically the gun had been made in Latin America.
Two years later we were driving on a high treeless desert, west of Taos in New Mexico. The land seemed lifeless and parched and the sage studded the ridges and covered the low valleys from one horizon to the next. To the north the mountains loomed before us, thrusting another two thousand metres into the sharp blue of the sky, as though blocking any escape from the desert. Among the cluster of mud adobe architecture that has made Taos famous, we found a hotel and that evening we watched a Mexican duo sing and click their cuban heels.
‘If only we could import the music as well,’ I remember saying wistfully, well into my second tequila.
‘You don’t need them,’ Sal said. ‘You’d dance on a claypan to a didgeridoo.’
New Mexico is a harsh land, with a history of bloody uprisings against the Spanish and a crushing defeat by the US cavalry. We saw the crumbled ruins of a Spanish church where Pueblo Indians had fled for protection. We could almost hear the blast of cannonfire as we stood by the church fence, looking in on the hundreds of pathetic stick crosses. It was a time when indigenous people suffered atrocities across four continents, and none worse than in New Mexico. Yet this state has stormed ahead with tourism. The invaders and the native American have reconciled their differences. Old ghosts only fade away when the living let go, and many in Australia would do well to think about it.
But back in September 1995, Sal and I were far away from
the romantic notions of Taos and D. H. Lawrence. I flew to Sydney with Sal and we rested at her mum’s place for ten days before returning to Myall Plains. It really was good to go to a genuine Double Bay coffee lounge, sit out on the pavement in French style and watch people who didn’t carry guns and had probably never touched one.
With the cattle held safely in one of Gil’s big forest paddocks I had a feeling the characters of the stock route, the scrub riders of the Blank Space, the Mick Bourkes and the dreamtime dingo would become something of a memory, and despite the ordeals there was a sentimental feeling, as Irish as it may seem, that we were leaving an old friend.
There was a time when New South Wales breathed life under great forests and the fences were few. I never saw it and my father caught only a fading glimpse. But inland Queensland still survives as it once was, with its clean rivers, sweeping plains of native grasses and forests of fading blue on distant horizons. In a world where nature’s resources are diminishing at a frightening rate, Queensland still has a splendid opportunity to combine organically grown beef with tourism. The international tourists of the twenty-first century will not simply be environmentally aware—they will be obsessed with it. Space under smogless skies, great plains rolling off the curve of the earth like the lost American prairies, men mounted on horses to work and Big Reds, the plains kangaroo, feeding out on balmy evenings, will become the symbols of paradise on a dirty and polluted planet.
If any lesson is to be gained from the Queensland campaign, for me or anyone else, it is the folly of overstocking on a dry, drought-prone continent. Since returning home I have pulled half the fences down and now run the breeding herd in one mob, which allows about eighty percent of the property to be unstocked. It does require specific management practices.
Horses Too Are Gone, The Page 33