We had a day together in Sydney before we left and I caught up with all the station news. It seemed cupid had been busy again and we had another love match on Bullo. This was getting to be an annual event. One romance every year for four years running was pretty amazing! I don’t think dating agencies get that percentage! I keep saying it must be something in the water, but I drink a lot of water and nothing has happened to me yet! I guess I must be either immune to this love bug or that old bastard Charlie is up to his old tricks again!
On Marlee’s way through Darwin she had made a few last-minute arrangements for the latest wedding; nice little touches like a small bouquet of flowers and a horse and carriage to take the lovebirds to the registry office. A wedding cake had been made at Bullo and iced by the other girls there and Marlee took it to Darwin and added some finishing touches. Franz and Marlee were the witnesses for the ceremony and the cake was presented to the newlyweds in the registry office. And so another Bullo River love knot was tied and all in the few hours before Marlee’s flight to Sydney. Our long flight to San Francisco passed with us catching up on plans for the next few months and mapping out the future of the station. In between this and dozing, I was writing notes for my next book.
We stayed in a new hotel so massive, it had four floors of conference rooms alone. The hotel was so big it was frightening. When we finally found our room there was a two-page list of instructions attached to the back of the door telling us the dangers of being in San Francisco! Rules like not to answer your door to anyone, and double locking your door after entering the room. The rule of having to check with reception before opening your door if there was a fire had me seriously thinking that maybe we should get on the next plane home!
We read in the information folder that when all the guest and conference rooms were full, added to hotel staff of a few thousand, there would be ten thousand people in the building. I didn’t sleep much, visualising how all those people could get out of the hotel, having to check with reception first!
The first morning I was a handed a business card by a conference manager of a reporter who wanted to interview me for the local paper. Marlee and I went along and met the reporter in the foyer, and he immediately complained it was too noisy to interview me on tape, and suggested we go up to our room where it would be quiet. Immediately all the rules on the back of the door flashed before my eyes and I said no! It took a good few minutes to get through to him he was not going to get into our room, under any circumstances. He finally settled for an appointment in the foyer after lunch.
Just before I left the room for the interview there was a phone call from reception. Our intrepid reporter had told them he had an appointment with me and could they give him our room number. He was definitely persistent, but I had had enough of his games, so said no and told them to get security to check him out.
He did a bunk before security reached reception and no-one saw him again.
Marlee had not been well for a few days during this holiday and so I was back on the phone to reception. I was given the telephone number of what they called their ‘house doctor’. I told him Marlee’s symptoms and asked if he could come and see her. He told me what that would cost, and after picking the phone up off the floor, I said maybe I could get Marlee into a cab to come and see him. He asked me if she had health insurance then suggested we could meet him at the hospital. He said he would probably have to operate straight away.
I wasn’t too impressed with a doctor who didn’t even want to examine a patient before he decided to operate and with his major concern being whether we had health insurance so I slammed the phone down and called our doctor in Australia. After I pushed Marlee many times in the stomach area, following his instructions, he said it sounded like a slight attack of appendicitis. She was to rest, and as the attack didn’t seem severe and there was no pain in her side as yet, it might pass. If she didn’t improve after twenty-four hours and pain developed we were to find another doctor, one less gung-ho than our ‘house doctor’.
When faced with these alarming facts, I think Marlee willed herself better. She lay in bed feeling miserable with me watching her every breath, and asking her how she felt every hour. We saw a wide variety of American television, and I did a lot of work on my manuscript, with one eye always on Marlee. She told me later, she improved after a day and a half just to stop me asking the question, ‘How do you feel now?’
San Francisco had changed greatly since the last time I was there, many years before, and was now very commercialised. I liked the old San Fran better, but who can stop progress?
We heaved a deep sigh of relief as we stepped on board our Qantas flight. This was not our kind of country and we were keen to get back to the bush, and Australia, where we had some idea of the system. We flew into Sydney and had a day together before Marlee boarded a plane for Darwin and I continued on the conference trail.
I was off to Perth this time and back to Sydney the same night on the red-eye flight to speak the next day. Then it was onto Canberra late that night for a director’s meeting early the next morning. The following day I flew to Brisbane and had two days off in Caloundra to write and catch up on messages and business. The next round of travel was much shorter with only one speech, a book signing in a downtown bookstore in Adelaide and home the next day! I made it back to Bullo on the 25th September. I also had a birthday somewhere in the middle of all that. I had forgotten, but the girls remembered; Marlee and Danielle sent me lovely flowers and chocolates.
I was home for three days, but needed all that time to pack my clothes for the next round of travelling. It was a rather long journey this time—all of October. I started with the New Zealand Women’s Book Festival. So I found myself touring around New Zealand for the second time that year.
October was a perfect example of how I had slipped back into overbooking my every moment. When an engagement fitted nicely into a timeslot, was convenient and I was in the same city or nearby, I would think, ‘Yes, I can do that easily.’
After spending the 1st to the 9th touring New Zealand, I flew to Sydney for a fundraising luncheon on the 11th, conducted business the next two days, flew to Brisbane for a conference on the 14th, spent the 15th and 16th writing in Caloundra then flew to Melbourne to speak on the 18th. Conferences on the Gold Coast, in Brisbane, and Sydney followed and I was back home on the 23rd. I had four days at home for writing full-time and doing only the emergency office work. I had another conference in Brisbane on the 28th then I could spend a whole ten days at home before my next engagement.
My life was not my own again and I had to fall back on the only method of survival: ‘No, sorry I am not available.’
I was determined that after the last engagement on the 30th November, I was going home and not moving out of Bullo for the whole of December. Except, of course, for the yearly Christmas shopping trip to Darwin with Marlee. But before I could do that I still had four conferences, a fundraiser and two days of director’s meetings to attend, all in different cities.
Back at Bullo there was so much unopened mail from readers it now had its own room! I was also only a quarter of the way through writing my next book which had to be finished by the following March. So December would have to see some serious writing. To achieve this I said no to so many last-minute requests for December functions, I lost count. But I had to be tough as one glance at 1995 told me it was already well and truly overbooked.
The undoubted highlight of November was when Danielle gave birth to a beautiful baby girl on the 9th. Natalie Clair Jennings was born at the Mount Isa Base Hospital at 10.18 a.m., weighing in at 4.08 kilos. And of course, even though I only had four engagements that month, she arrived as I was on my way to a conference on Hamilton Island.
I hadn’t made it to Cloncurry once during Danielle’s pregnancy and she was so busy helping Martin with their ever-expanding cement company she couldn’t come home to Bullo or meet me in any city on my travels in Queensland for a break.
When
I finally made it to Cloncurry I took care of my little granddaughter while Danielle rushed off every morning with Martin to yet another urgent job. Just when I was down to the last bottle of milk Danielle would rush in the door, express more milk into bottles, kiss Natalie and disappear again. My visit was a bit like one of my book tours—looking after a baby again after twenty-four years and keeping up with Danielle and Martin’s schedule was totally exhausting!
The other remarkable event in November was that Mrs Henderson, Charlie’s mother, turned 104!
There was bad weather around the world, with floods in Italy and France, violent storms in Victoria and snow in Tasmania. It was reasonable to assume the north wouldn’t get off scot-free. And we didn’t. The fuel truck left Kununurra on a five-hour trip to the homestead. During that time we had a violent storm which dumped a lot of rain on the road out in the mountain area of our road. At the beginning of the rainy season the road can usually take many inches of rain before it is even wet, let alone boggy. But the gravel topping is wearing thin and a large section chopped up by the roadtrains carting the cattle out had turned one part into a deep bog. This section was covered by a thin layer of gravel neatly packed down by the heavy rain and so looked just the same as the rest of the smooth gravel road. The driver couldn’t see anything wrong with the road and it was only when he was halfway across the section that the big rig just started to sink. There was nothing he could do except sit and watch the whole rig behind him sink slowly down to the axles. The prime-mover went down so far into the mud he had to climb up to get out the window!
The driver called his depot on the two-way radio and they called us with the good news!
The depot omitted to mention the rig was bogged down to the axles so when Marlee and Franz arrived on the scene to pull him out with the grader and chains and other equipment, they took one look at the semi and it was back to the workshop, twenty-two miles back down the road, to get the frontend loader and the D8 bulldozer. This was going to be something to move.
Our bank manager was visiting and came to see if he could help in any way. When he wanted to know if Marlee was going to push the rig out, she knew this was his first semi bog, or indeed his first anything bog. He learned a lot that day about removing a trailer and prime-mover loaded with 22,000 litres of fuel in bulk containers and twenty-four two-hundred-litre drums from a sea of mud. He now knows you don’t push, you pull.
It took every ounce of the D8’s horsepower to move the rig. In fact Marlee had to pull it out backwards (she is the expert with the bulldozer), because the cab was so far down in the mud and the road was too boggy at the front end of the rig to get any real pulling power. The chains broke many times as she had to repeatedly jerk the rig to get it moving. The pull was over a fair distance because the ground behind the semi was also boggy and Marlee didn’t want the dozer to end up in the bog along with the semi. After many hours, five long towing chains had become twenty-eight short towing chains, but the rig was finally standing on the hard gravel section of the road, looking very sorry for itself. It was covered in thick mud almost to the top of the cabin and the tankers on the trailer were one big blob. The fuel truck finally delivered the fuel to the homestead and on his way home, the driver avoided the mega bog hole he had created.
December was not all time off. We had Bernie O’Kane, our Bazadaise breeder, Dave Morris the vet and a team of Bernie’s friends from Cobram, Victoria staying for a week or so to transplant embryos, pure Bazadaise fertilised eggs, into some of our cows, making them surrogate mothers. We also had two hundred and fifty cows to artificially inseminate. This was part of our introduction of the French Bazadaise blood into our herd—we aptly named this new Brahman-Bazadaise cross Bullion. Our aim in bringing this new breed into the North was for faster growth rate in our herd, and to turn off three-hundred-kilogram offsprings the same year of weaning. This week was a busy one with Bernie and his mob at the homestead, but I left them in the capable hands of Marlee and Franz and worked day and night on the manuscript, only appearing for meals. I wish I could have spent more time with them down in the yards, but my deadline for the book kept me at my desk.
After a busy time of ploughing and cattle work at the beginning of the month, December quietened down. We had a small group of people for Christmas and enjoyed the peace and the short break. As short as my rest was, I took anything I could get. 1995 was looking decidedly busy, with the manuscript to be handed in by March, a book tour of England and then meeting up afterwards with Marlee and Franz in Austria for what I hoped would be some sort of holiday. It was then onto a book tour of South Africa. And before I left for overseas I had to do a television commercial.
The last few days of December were spent getting the house ready for the television crew arriving on the 1st January. There were thirteen people coming so we had to find somewhere for them all to sleep. Two girls were helping in the house and Marlee would be cooking for our staff and the television crew—a total of twenty people. I was to be assistant cook, but we didn’t hold much hope that I would have any spare time away from the camera, except for a few hours here and there.
The two girls working in the house left after just three days of getting ready. I think their departing words were, ‘We weren’t hired to be slaves!’
The next two girls we hired didn’t think cleaning the house, making beds and preparing guest rooms was being a slave. They were very thankful to have a job. They had seen our notice on the job board at the backpacker hostel in Darwin. They hadn’t been able to get a job anywhere in Darwin and were down to their last dollar. Not knowing where your next meal is coming from tends to give you the right attitude in a job, and they were a delight to have around.
I fell asleep in front of the television on New Year’s Eve, completely exhausted from bedmaking, dusting and helping Marlee cook meals for freezing in case there were problems in the following week and Marlee had to be something other than the cook.
I woke up at 11.30 p.m. to find I was alone in the living room—everyone had gone to bed, too tired to wait for the New Year. It was so close to midnight I decided to stay up and welcome the New Year. I took a cold beer out of the chiller and reclined in a deckchair out on the lawn, staring at the beautiful stars in the crystal-clear sky, and reminiscing about the year just about to end.
Daisy, our milking cow, wandered over to investigate the deckchair and the dogs were on alert immediately. I told them to hush and to leave her alone. They settled again and Daisy continued to waddle by, looking all the world like a cartoon character. She was in the garden because she was close to giving birth and we were keeping an eye on her. She seemed restless and looked like a balloon ready to burst and I knew we would see her baby in the next few days. Pumpkin, our other milking cow, had beaten her by about a week—she’d had her calf just before Christmas.
I raised my glass to Charlie on the hill as I thought about the year gone, told him to keep helping us and wandered off to bed knowing the year ahead was going to be a challenge, once again. And it was going to start at a blistering pace on the very first day with the filming of a television commercial.
As I walked to my bedroom, the dogs strolling quietly behind me, a big sigh escaped from my lips, making them stop and look at me enquiringly. I smiled at their loving faces and said, ‘Well, that’s another year over. What do you think this new year will bring us?’
They wagged their short stumpy tails vigorously. I decided that was a good sign and went happily to bed.
During the early hours of the morning I woke to find Daisy standing right outside my open bedroom window, lovingly licking a tiny little baby calf standing very unsteadily on long, wobbly legs. I drifted back to sleep smiling.
CHAPTER 7
January 1995 – March 1995
There was no sleeping in or resting on New Year’s Day, it was up at the crack of dawn as we had thirteen visitors arriving for afternoon tea! The television crew was landing in Darwin around lunchtime and by the time they packed
themselves into a few charter planes and headed down to Bullo, it would be late afternoon. So we had most of the day to finish our preparation and as usual we needed every minute.
I was making the first of the BreastScreen commercials for the Department of Health. The campaign, we hoped, would make people aware of the importance of having a regular mammogram.
About the middle of 1994 I had received a fax from the Department of Health asking me if I would consider being the spokeswoman for a new breast cancer awareness campaign. I asked why me, and was told it was the result of a survey of three thousand women. The women were given the names of ten well-known women and asked to pick the woman they were most likely to listen to. They ended up with my name. So I have my readers to thank, once again, for giving me the opportunity to be part of such a wonderful and worthwhile campaign.
I recently signed a new contract that goes into 1999, so it looks like I will be telling you this important message for a little while longer!
I initially suggested someone who had fought breast cancer and won would be a better choice. But the answer was no, they were trying to get women to have an X-ray to prevent cancer, so they needed someone the women would listen to, and someone, like them, who did not have breast cancer.
I said there was no breast cancer in my family, so I was certainly safe. Then I was quoted a statistic which I found hard to believe—in nine out of ten cases of breast cancer diagnosed, there is no history of breast cancer in the family. This really stunned me as here I was going along thinking whenever I saw anything about breast cancer, ‘Well, that doesn’t concern me, no-one in my family has had this dreadful disease.’
The Strength of Our Dreams Page 8