Outback Heroines

by Sue Williams

  CONTENTS

    Map

    Foreword, by Georgie Parker

  1.  Pumping the Adrenalin

    Janelle Pugh Victoria River, Northern Territory

  2.  Beauty on the Inside

    Belinda Green Cowra, New South Wales

  3.  Never Begin to Give Up

    Frauke Bolten-Boshammer Kununurra, Western Australia

  4.  For the Love of Adventure

    Di Zischke Coominya, Queensland

  5.  Standing by Her Man

    Sarah Cook North Tanami, Northern Territory

  6.  The Outside of a Horse

    Lyn Litchfield Marree Region, South Australia

  7.  Dust and Snow

    Ann Ward Mirima, Western Australia

  8.  Crossroads in the Desert

    Jo Fort Birdsville, Queensland

  9.  Working in Harmony with Nature

    Libby Maulder Liffey, Tasmania

  10. Bridging the Divide

     Deb Bain Stockyard Hill, Victoria

  11. Doing it for the Kids

     Lynne Sawyers Darbys Falls, New South Wales

  12. A Driving Force

     Heather Jones Karratha, Western Australia

  13. Compassion Rations

     Jeanette Brown Cherbourg, Queensland

  14. Poddies and Pearls

     Marie Muldoon Douglas Daly, Northern Territory

  15. The Worst Disaster Since Cyclone Tracy

     Sister Theresa Morellini Warmun, Western Australia

  16. Long Way Home

     Lurlene Ebborn Gympie, Queensland

    Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Sue Williams is the author of a number of bestselling books, including Father Bob: The Larrikin Priest, Women of the Outback, No Time For Fear, the story of shark attack survivor Paul de Gelder, Mean Streets, Kind Heart: The Father Chris Riley Story, Outback Spirit and Peter Ryan: the Inside Story.

  She is also the author of Left for Dead, about police officer Samantha Barlow’s fight to reclaim her life after being brutally bashed, Welcome to the Outback, and And Then The Darkness, the story of murdered British backpacker Peter Falconio, which was shortlisted for a Golden Dagger and a Ned Kelly award.

  Also an award-winning journalist, Sue was born in England, and worked in print and television in the UK and New Zealand before coming to Australia in 1989, and writing for the country’s leading newspapers and magazines. She lives in Sydney’s Kings Cross with her partner, writer Jimmy Thomson.

  suewilliams.com.au

  In memory of the fabulously feisty Molly Clark of Old Andado and the simply irrepressible Mitjili Gibson Napanangka of the Western Desert. The Outback, and Australia, is so much richer for their enthusiasm, entrepreneurial zeal and passions.

  Belinda Green hasn’t looked back since swapping city life for living on the land near Cowra, New South Wales. (Photo by Kristy White)

  FOREWORD

  Georgie Parker

  The Outback is a definitive part of what makes Australia such a unique place, just as the people who live there add something very special to what makes us all Australians.

  It’s wild, it’s beautiful and it can be a terribly harsh environment, but many of its residents are even more extraordinary – taking each fresh challenge in their stride, and overcoming countless hurdles to build great lives for themselves and their families.

  I’ve always loved the country ever since I was a little girl growing up in what were then the outer suburbs of Sydney. On trips to the bush, I’d always relish its exhilarating sense of freedom, of space and of untamed splendour. It was the start of a lifelong love affair with the country, and the Outback.

  Since then, I’ve had the good fortune to work on a number of projects set in the Australian bush. My first-ever role was in the 1988 TV movie Danger Down Under, with American star Lee Majors. The project itself might have been forgettable, but the experience of working on it never was! After that came The Man from Snowy River and the long-running classic A Country Practice – both periods of my life I came to truly cherish.

  I’m lucky enough to be able to visit the country regularly, too, as my sister is a community nurse, married to a farmer, and has lived on the land for around 25 years. So I was thrilled at being given the chance to write the foreword to Outback Heroines, after admiring the amazing cast of the first two books, Women of the Outback and Outback Spirit. I come from a family of strong women, and the women in this latest book simply took my breath away with the kind of courage, daring and resilience that have seen them live in some of the most remote parts of this earth and overcome sometimes crushing difficulties just to keep going.

  All the women featured in the pages of this book are remarkable. Australia is a country that defines you, so it’s astounding that they’ve managed to make their mark – and what a mark! – in such an unforgiving environment.

  Together they make up the backbone of our nation today, and exhibit the kind of fortitude, daring and entrepreneurial spirit that will keep the Outback rich and colourful for the future of all Australians. Respect!

  1

  PUMPING THE ADRENALIN

  Janelle Pugh, Victoria River, Northern Territory

  It’s a pitch-black night, deep in the heart of saltwater crocodile country, when Janelle Pugh steers her boat into the thick, velvety shallows. She ducks down to avoid trailing branches, and peers into the murky depths and across to the muddy riverbank. A few days before, the petite blonde had spotted a family of monster crocs scaring the locals around this area, and already she senses their menace in the night air.

  She cuts the engine, and there’s a sudden, uneasy silence. Nothing moves. From a few metres away, she can occasionally hear the soft, ragged breathing of the little clutch of men in the next boat – a BBC TV documentary crew who’ve flown over from the UK especially to film Janelle in action. They’re obviously nervous, and they’re nowhere near where the crocs will be, if they’re here. Janelle smiles to herself and continues surveying the water carefully for any telltale signs.

  Her next movement is so quick that, afterwards, the men confess they never saw a thing. Janelle has spotted a giant croc blinking in the mud, the harpoon gun has been fired and it’s scored a direct hit. The croc sinks slowly in the water and there’s a gasp from the men in the other boat, who only now, with the wave of displaced water heading for their boat, realise what a giant he must be.

  But now comes the hardest part: the wait. A crocodile can stay comfortably submerged for an hour, slowing its heart rate to between two and three beats a minute to reduce oxygen consumption and closing valves to redirect blood to where it’s most needed. Until that time is up, it’s too dangerous to check to see if it’s dead. The minutes tick by agonisingly slowly, and Janelle can tell the men in the next boat are getting restless.

  After half an hour, Janelle’s husband, Blue, takes out a spear and plunges it into the water to see what’s happening. Suddenly there’s what feels like an explosion at their feet. There’s a rush of water, a flash of green and the croc is lashing out with his tail to try to knock everyone from their boats. There’s a shriek of fear from the Brits.

  ‘But they were fine,’ laughs Janelle now. ‘They’d just all got a bit on edge. Crocs do sometimes knock the boats around with their tails, which can be dangerous, but I was keeping a close eye on them.’

  More worrying for Janelle, however, is the hole the croc has ripped in the side of her boat. Water starts gushing in and she knows if it sinks here, she’ll end up little more than a tasty snack for the family they’ve disturbed. The boat ramp is a long way back, and she siz
es up the hole and makes a rough estimate that if she leaves now and travels at a steady speed, she might just make it. Hoping no one can see through the darkness what a dire position she’s in, she keeps her voice casual as she calls out to the second boat that they’d better get going back now. They’re all far too busy discussing the amazing action shots they’ve got to notice how low her boat is suddenly sitting in the murky water, and are also eager to get back to examine their footage. She makes it to the ramp with barely a minute to spare.

  Such near misses are simply par for the course in her line of work – managing a croc farm and hunting down wild crocs that have strayed close to human settlements, posing too much of a danger for their inhabitants. It’s just like the time she dropped Blue off on a riverbank, so he could sneak back to a croc they’d seen basking in the shallows near an Aboriginal community. He’d crept back without incident and shot the croc right on the edge of the water. A little too casually, he then stepped into the water to grab the croc only to find himself in the middle of a whirlpool of frenzied splashing. Both Janelle and Blue assumed the croc wasn’t yet dead . . . until Janelle spotted a second croc heading right for Blue. Without a moment’s hesitation, she raced the boat in to wedge herself between the angry croc and her husband as he leapt faster than he’d ever moved before to safety from the water.

  ‘I never panic,’ Janelle grins. ‘I guess we see and do some amazing things and we get used to the dangers and know how to measure them and make sure everyone is safe. It all becomes pretty much second nature.’

  Appearances can be deceptive, and never more so than with 54-year-old Janelle, a trim and dainty-looking 5 foot 3 inches tall, with long, pink-varnished fingernails.

  At first sight, she looks as though she’d be far more at home in the suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne than out in the remote, rough-and-ready Victoria River region of the Northern Territory, 230 kilometres southwest of Katherine, surrounded by majestic mountain ranges and rocky escarpments, and cut off for up to six months every year during the wet season. Yet Janelle is one of the toughest, most capable women you could ever imagine meeting.

  For the last 20 years, she and Blue have run the Coolibah Crocodile Farm, rearing saltwater crocodiles – among the deadliest creatures on earth – to provide skins that are regarded as some of the best in the world. With an intensive feedlot for up to 8000 ‘salties’ of all different sizes and ages at a time, they send the juveniles to the growing number of farms for mature crocodiles throughout Australia, for their skins to be used eventually. And it’s invariably uncomfortable, difficult and often extremely dangerous work.

  When the crocs are young, Janelle and Blue still have to be careful of the reptiles’ razor-sharp teeth, which can deliver a hell of a nip. Janelle will never forget the tourist who insisted on holding one up to his face for a photo, only to have it fasten tightly onto his nose. Then there was the woman who poked her finger through a gap under the door of a cage, cooing at how cute the little ones were. ‘Of course, it bit her,’ says Janelle. ‘She was just lucky it didn’t bite her finger off completely.’

  The junior ones can easily take a sizeable chunk out of a limb, while the bigger ones . . . well, it’s important to treat them with the utmost respect. It’s no accident the ancient, cold-blooded creatures are still with us. Their highly refined survival instincts, coupled with a notoriously unpredictable nature and immense reserves of power and aggression under threat, make them one of humankind’s most lethal foes.

  ‘And the farm crocs are a lot more dangerous than the wild crocs because they’re not frightened of people,’ says Janelle, as she stands on an old oil drum and leans over a highwire fence to feed a great wad of meat to a 5-metre resident. ‘They’re used to us and we feed them so they associate us with food. The wild crocs learn to fear man and they’re not used to strangers in their territory, so they tend to make themselves scarce. It can be quite safe to walk along the river here as they don’t usually jump out and grab people. That kind of thing only happens if people are doing foolish things like filleting their fish and leaving them in the water.’

  By the same token, it can be far more perilous collecting croc eggs from a nest at the farm than from croc nests outside. In the wild, where the eggs are taken under permit in order to keep crocodile numbers under control, their nesting grounds first have to be located, then the eggs – usually 40 to 60 per nest – are carefully marked where they lie to ensure they’re carried out the right way up; if they’re turned upside down, the embryo could drown. It’s a nerve-racking business, with the collectors always on guard against an angry female returning to defend her nest. Finally the eggs are packed up and taken to incubators at the farm until they hatch.

  But taking eggs from the breeding crocodiles at the farm can be much riskier. ‘We don’t allow anyone to go into a cage alone, you have to be in a pair,’ says Janelle. ‘It’s good to take in something that can make a noise to scare them, like a quad bike, so they’ll go to the bottom of the pond. But otherwise one person will carry a stick or a paddle, while the other person has a gun. We then uncover the eggs in the nest, mark them and put them in a basket with nesting material so they don’t rotate.

  ‘We have one female who does like to defend her nest, and she tends to attack when you’re least expecting it. She doesn’t approach straight away, she takes her time and then, when you’re about halfway through the nest, she creeps up. It’s always scary. We have to hit her on the snout a few times for her to go away again. It always pumps the adrenalin!’

  When Janelle and Blue started the farm in 1993, they lived out of the back of their ute with their little daughter, Rainé, their swags and a generator to run a fridge and microwave. Miserably, that first year was the wettest of the past century, with the entire region cut off. No sooner were the early pens finished than they were underwater. Luckily, they had no baby crocs at the time, only one female breeder croc, who escaped by swimming out when the floodwater rose high enough. They never did find her.

  Then they constructed a simple bush camp to live in while they built hatchling sheds for the baby crocodiles and cages for the adults from recycled railway sleepers and parts of the old telegraph line that was being pulled down. ‘We lived there for a few years under the trees while we continued to build the rest of the sheds,’ says Janelle. ‘It was quite rough. The crocodiles got everything. They had hot water; we had cold. They were dry; we endured terrible storms. We built a heat exchange, but just as we were lifting it into a tank, we got a huge storm and it was sent tumbling down the paddock. So we had to start again.’

  But as soon as the dry came, so did their first batch of crocodiles, along with a bunch of human helpers. A friend of Janelle’s, Samantha Taylor, now working for a government Aboriginal justice agency, vividly remembers a visit she made at that time. ‘We slept in swags next to the croc pens, where they’d be waiting to be fed,’ she says. ‘It was a pretty incredible experience, but for Janelle and Blue it was just their way of life. She never seemed to see it as a hardship.’

  Later, the couple moved into a donga – a portable cabin – they put on the station while they built their homestead. They never had much time, however. They had to make regular forays into the wild to hunt feral animals to feed to the crocodiles. With Rainé left in the shade of a tree doing the schoolwork Janelle would set her, or playing with her Barbie dolls, her mum and dad would hunt pigs, buffalo, camels, donkeys, wild bulls and horses, butcher them on the spot and store them in chillers powered by generators, ready to transport out.

  ‘I never really realised what an unusual childhood I’d had until I went to boarding school and met other people’s families,’ says Rainé, now 24 years old. ‘As a kid, I’d want to help my parents, and they taught me how to do the easy jobs. Mum’s always been amazing. I can’t imagine too many other women – or even men – catching crocs, feeding them and working so hard, constantly, looking after so many of them at once, all the while living in such an isolated place tha
t can be cut off for six months at a time.’

  And the crocodiles were never grateful. When Rainé was seven, she went for a swim with some friends one day in the pool her parents were digging out in the backyard of the farm. She felt one of her mates playfully grabbing her leg as she swam and tried to kick him off. ‘But then I turned around and there was no one there,’ says Rainé. ‘And it was at that point, I realised it was a croc.’ Janelle heard her screaming and raced to the pool.

  ‘Some crocs had migrated to the lawn either from the river or maybe escaped from the shed,’ she says. ‘One had hidden in the pool and it had grabbed her and bitten her on the leg. It then tried to do a death roll. But she got away with just a neat jaw print on her leg.’ Clearly shaken, the little girl then asked her parents to get rid of the croc. Blue sat by the water until the croc finally came back up to the surface, and then shot it. That skin is still on the floor of her bedroom today.

  Baby crocodiles can deliver a nasty nip, despite their small size, says Janelle Pugh. Far more dangerous, though, are aggressive mothers protecting their nests. (Photos by Jimmy Thomson)

  Never in Janelle’s wildest dreams did she ever imagine that one day she’d be sharing her life with a bunch of crocodiles in one of the most remote spots in Australia. She grew up a regular country kid in Queensland, the oldest of three children to parents who had a dairy farm in Jambin, a small former railway settlement nearly 600 kilometres northwest of Brisbane, and 29 kilometres from the nearest town, Biloela. It was there she learnt her strong work ethic, helping on the farm and baking in her spare time to take down a smoko snack to share with her dad.

  ‘It was hard work there and you got used to not having any holidays or days off,’ says Janelle, who had two brothers, one who ended up working in the mines, and the other who died aged 19 in a car accident. ‘My dad used to say he should have had all girls as girls take to the work and the mundane tasks better! But there’s not a lot else you can do on a farm, really. If you want family time, you all have to work together.’