by Sue Williams
Di was congratulated in the Queensland Parliament, in a speech by Nanango MP Dorothy Pratt, on her ‘momentous feat’. Pratt told the assembled House, ‘She camped out and hobbled her camels at night and travelled at 5 kilometres per hour. Some days and nights she was unable to light a campfire because of the grass, terrain and fear of bushfires. She then had to throw down her swag and sleep uncomfortably in the long grass. She followed and crossed rivers [and creeks] such as the Diamantina, Cooper, Burke, Cloncurry, Wills, Hamilton, Corella, Flinders and the Bynoe . . . She had maps to follow but was never sure where the next water for her camels would be. Property owners, managers, stockmen and contract musterers along the way were surprised at this woman, her camels and their gear . . . They often asked where her support vehicle was. She answered that she was towing them – the camels.’
It was indeed an incredible achievement, and Di’s family were thrilled for her. ‘I am so proud of her,’ says Lynn. ‘Not many people could retrace the Burke and Wills trip like she did with no back-up vehicle support, and carrying everything she needed on the camels just the same as the original expedition.’
For Di, the venture had finally answered all the questions that had been nagging her about the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition, which set off in August 1860 and ended with their deaths in June 1861. ‘People keep asking why they didn’t live off the land, but when you’re slogging through such rough country, in such isolation, there just isn’t any chance to. And between riding, packing up the camels, unpacking, finding a decent camp, sleeping, and riding again, you don’t have time to go and find a roo to shoot. They would have been worn out. You have to see the deprivations of the country to realise that. I’m very glad to have done it!’
These days, Di, now 68, still loves little more than riding her camels and horses, and continues to compete as hard as she can, as much as she can. At events, locals give up all hope of winning any events she’s entered in. ‘But I have slowed down a bit,’ she says. ‘I used to be able to pick up two jerry cans of water and throw them both onto the camel at the same time, but I can only do one at a time, these days.’
Cedric, 85, doesn’t see her retiring anytime soon, however. ‘She’s so adventurous, I can’t see a time when she’ll sit at home with knitting needles,’ he says with a smile. ‘She’s a game girl. She always wants to see what’s over the next mountain or sandhill.’
With Lynn living on a nearby property, keeping cattle and contract mustering, Jesse also in cattle at Gympie, and three grandchildren she sees regularly, Di still has the hunger for one last big trek, perhaps this time across one of the great deserts of the Northern Territory.
‘I would like to cross the Tanami,’ she says wistfully, undaunted by neither the prospect of another seemingly impossible feat nor her years. ‘I’d have to get the camels there, though. But I do like to take a few camels and ride around the desert for a while. You either love the Outback, or you don’t. And I really do.’
Di on her property with her camels.
5
STANDING BY HER MAN
Sarah Cook, North Tanami, Northern Territory
When the phone rang, Sarah Cook didn’t pay it much attention. The men of Suplejack Downs Station, the most remote property in Australia – and perhaps the world – were all out mustering, using vehicles, helicopters and gyrocopters to find and herd the cattle together. That left just the women and children at home and, knowing the men would be out for a couple of days, they’d all gathered in the main homestead to prepare a meal for lunch.
Sarah’s mother-in-law picked up the phone, listened, and then asked why the second helicopter couldn’t do the job, falling silent at the reply. It appeared that something was seriously wrong with one of the choppers. Sarah suddenly snapped to attention. Her husband, Rob, had been out in one of those copters that morning.
The next moment confirmed her worst fears: Rob’s mother gave his sister a fierce stare that plainly said: Don’t say a word.
‘I knew straight away that something had happened to Robby,’ says Sarah. ‘I didn’t know what or how bad, but I knew it couldn’t be good. A short while later I was told there’d been an accident, and that his chopper had crashed. Of course, immediately I wanted to be with him, but because they’d been mustering in extremely rough and isolated terrain, the only way in or out was by air. So it just wasn’t possible.
‘After the call came in I just sort of walked around numb for a bit, waiting to hear. The others watched over our young sons for me and only brought the baby to me when he needed a feed. And then I started packing. I knew that, whatever happened, Robby would be flying out on a Royal Flying Doctor Service plane. I didn’t know where they’d take him, or for how long, but I went straight into autopilot and prepared as much as I could so I’d be ready as soon as they could get him out. I wanted to be all prepared when the time came, so I could be with him as soon as possible.’
Sarah had no idea but, at that moment, her husband Rob was thinking of her too. He was dangling upside down by his harness inside the damaged cabin of the crashed helicopter, struggling to breathe. He couldn’t move or feel any part of his body. Fuel was dripping from the cracked tank 15 centimetres from his face. Like his wife of just four years, the only thing he could do was wait and see.
‘At one point, I thought, Shit! This is hit and miss. I don’t know if I’m going to make it through,’ he says. ‘That was the point where I seriously started thinking about Sarah and my boys. Then suddenly the pilot’s voice snapped my attention back to the situation I was in. I asked him to undo my seatbelt and try to straighten me up as I was running out of air.
‘I thought about asking him to send my love back to Sarah at home – to tell her I love her. Then I thought that was the gutless way out of it. I thought, I have to get home and tell Sarah myself.’
It ended up taking seven long hours for Rob Cook to be rescued from what was so nearly his coffin. The helicopter had simply lost power and plummeted from the air to land upside down in scrub so thick that, even when they were spotted, nothing else could land close by to help. Instead, the pilot of a second helicopter that had been out mustering flew back to the stock camp, picked up his brother-in-law and father, and then returned to the site of the accident. From the air, they threw an axe down for the miraculously uninjured pilot to start clearing a landing place.
In the meantime, back at the homestead, Sarah, 26, a nurse well used to all kinds of emergencies, was keeping a cool, calm head. From the satellite phone messages, it sounded as if her 27-year-old husband was still alive, but badly hurt. The Royal Flying Doctor Service had been called, and the second mustering helicopter was flying over to the nearest mine to pick up the medic from there. She knew that, if Rob could stay alive, an airlift to their nearest big town, Alice Springs, some 735 kilometres away, was inevitable; if not, it would be to Adelaide, 2000 kilometres to the south.
‘The option of him dying just wasn’t there,’ says Sarah. ‘Giving up wasn’t an option. He had a wife and two young kids. I knew he’d be fighting as hard as he could . . .’
That day in September 2008 changed Sarah Cook’s life forever. Before that, she and Rob had been like any other normal rural couple – except for their location in the absolute middle of nowhere, as part of a strong bush-family dynasty keeping the dream alive, in the face of the starkest isolation imaginable.
Born Sarah Canning, she grew up in Dulacca, a small rural town on Queensland’s Western Downs, 100 kilometres east of Roma. Her parents, Graeme and Lois, had lived there all their lives and, together with Sarah’s older brother, Luke, and younger brother, Joel, Sarah had both sets of grandparents, each farming families, close by. Graeme, a boilermaker by trade, often worked away on oil rigs and later on the Telecom fibre-optic rollout throughout the area. The year Sarah was born, 1982, her parents started a share-farming venture with Graeme’s parents, Bill and Glo, and other family members. By 1992, Graeme and Louis had started to formalise their purchase into
her parents’ farm, Rossmore, a 1100-hectare grain and cattle property near Jackson, originally established by Sarah’s great-grandparents in the early 1930s. For Sarah, feeding the pigs, sleeping on the tractor behind Mum at planting time, clearing the paddocks of sticks and rocks, learning to drive anything with wheels and camping with friends up the paddock all became a treasured part of her life. In 1993, after Sarah’s maternal grandfather, Vince Welsh, suddenly died, the family moved to Rossmore, alongside his widow, her grandmother Helen.
Sarah simply adored it. ‘I grew up with a love of the land and rural lifestyle and a sense of freedom and resilience that only bush kids know,’ she says today. ‘I was lucky to grow up with hardworking, loving and generous parents who instilled strong family values and helped me become the person I am today.’
Her mum Lois says Sarah relished everything about bush life. ‘She was always up for anything, and everything,’ she says. ‘She was always a busy girl, having a go.’
Even as a kid, Sarah started developing a keen sense of self. Her childhood friend Natalie Henry, says that came out early. ‘She’d make a decision and always stick to it,’ says Natalie. ‘She was always the strongest of all us kids. We’d be playing dress-ups or with our cubby houses and she’d know what to do and tell us the right way – and I was 12 months older! She just always seemed instinctively to know the right thing to do.’
High school was in Miles, a 45-minute bus ride away, and Sarah had a big group of friends, mostly bush kids from around the area. One of her best friends was Helen Ruddy. ‘Sarah was fairly shy as a kid in those early days,’ says Helen. ‘But she was lots of fun, and always very caring and a very good friend.’ In the year above them was Rob Cook, who played football with Sarah’s brother Luke. He was the eldest son of a family with seven children, living on a property 30 kilometres north of Miles.
Rob and his family would turn up at rodeos, all piling out of their Toyota Troop Carrier, and he’d compete in many of the roughstock riding events. Sarah and he became good mates and eventually paired up together at one of their last school formals. ‘He was always a lot of fun, and could be very charming,’ says Sarah. ‘He was very grounded. I remember some girls once making a comment about the shoes I was wearing compared to theirs and he came in and said, “So what? They’re all just joggers!” I thought that was nice of him. He could be very kind-hearted and a loyal friend.’
Rob felt much the same way about Sarah. ‘She was – and still is – very good-looking, and I guess we had similar interests,’ he says. ‘She enjoyed the simple things in life and shared my love for rodeos back in those days. She was a country girl at heart and became a close friend; we lived by many of the same values in life.’
Shortly after they’d got together, their relationship became a long-distance one when Rob’s family moved, in 1996, way out west to their property Suplejack Downs, a vast 3823 square kilometres of red dirt, 730 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, on the north-western extreme of the Tanami desert, close to the Western Australian border. ‘The family joke was always that it was in the Northern Tanami, Southern Kimberley, Eastern Pilbara and . . . the middle of nowhere!’ says Rob.
On leaving school, Sarah worked for a while in the offices, then the laboratory, of the Tanami goldmine so she could be closer to Rob while he worked at the family station. Then she decided to return home to study nursing through TAFE at Roma. The pair endured long separations but corresponded regularly by mail, although Suplejack only had a mail plane once a fortnight. ‘All of his letters finished with the same line,’ laughs Sarah. ‘They all said: “Here’s the mail plane. Bye!” He’d have two weeks to write, but would always leave it to the last minute.
‘It was very much a long-distance romance with many a late night spent on the phone. The longest we went without seeing each other was three and a half months, which, for teenagers, felt like forever.’
Sarah graduated as an enrolled nurse qualified in medication administration and decided to move to Alice Springs to once again be closer to Rob, moving in with his sister, Lillian, and her husband, Shane. At the end of the year she decided to further her nursing studies and began studying Registered Nursing externally through Charles Darwin University. ‘I liked the diversity of nursing,’ says Sarah. ‘The flexibility that comes with nursing and the ability to get a job anywhere and, more importantly, work in rural communities, was what appealed to me. With nursing, you might be in accident & emergency, in surgery or working in community health. There’s so much variety and it also gives you a lot of freedom.’
Rob says it was the perfect choice for her. ‘She’s always been very compassionate and caring,’ he says. ‘She was always thinking of others before herself. She was very diligent with her studies, very determined, and she became an exceptional nurse.’
In the interim, he’d proposed to her, saying he didn’t have enough money to buy a ring, but that a ring was simply a symbol of marriage and was only as strong as a piece of string. It was the commitment of love that made a marriage strong. Would Sarah marry him? When she tearfully nodded, he wound a piece of string around her ring finger to symbolise his love and, as he opened his hand, a real engagement ring slipped down the string. ‘He always was a smooth talker!’ Sarah laughs. The couple married in March 2004 in Miles, where they’d gone to school, before more than 200 of their family and friends. They moved the very next day to Dysart in Central Queensland, 130 kilometres north of Emerald, where Rob got a job in the local mine working in explosives as a licensed shot-firer. Sarah took her final exams the same year and finished her practical nursing training.
From there, Sarah found a nursing job at the Clermont and Dysart hospitals and the pair spent their weekends and holidays travelling hundreds of kilometres on the professional bull-riding tour, where Rob was fast gaining a reputation as a champion rider. ‘I grew up getting dumped off horses and kicked by cows, so it wasn’t anything out of the normal for me,’ he says. ‘There were a couple of times where Sarah got worried . . .’
It was certainly useful that she’d chosen nursing as her vocation. ‘I remember saying to Rob that, just once, I’d like him to feel as anxious as I always was,’ she says. ‘It was pretty nerve-racking for me when he was either mauled by a bull or kicked by a horse. But he never thought about things like that.’
Yet Sarah never once refused to attend a rodeo with her husband, and won not only his gratitude and admiration, but that of all his mates also on the rodeo circuit. ‘There weren’t many girls who would travel like Sarah did,’ says Rob, who won the Australian bull-riding championship title in 2004. ‘But everyone absolutely loved her. She’d clean up after everyone and look after us all. On the rare occasions she couldn’t come, she would still manage to pack homemade cupcakes, which were always a big hit with the boys. She was always wonderful.’
Then, at the start of 2005, the couple made a momentous decision: they’d go to live on Suplejack Downs, with Rob’s mum and dad, Bill and Letty. They wanted to work together, and hoped for children of their own, and didn’t want to bring them up in a mining town. They longed to provide for their kids the kind of beautiful, carefree Outback childhood they’d both loved growing up.
Suplejack Downs Station had been started by Rob’s grandparents, Bob and Lily Savage, in 1964, when they drove their green Bedford truck with their six children, and one more joining them later, to squat on land out past the Tanami Track. They set up a tent, planted a vegetable garden, started putting up a tin shed to serve as their first real home, and named the property after a native tree that grows in the area.
Their nearest neighbour was at Hooker Creek, 160 kilometres away up a dirt track so rough that it was usually impassable, and they had no power, no mail service and their only link with the outside world was an old HF radio that rarely had decent reception. A trip to town could take six days – but only if the tracks weren’t flooded by rain, cutting the place off completely. Bob and Lily were eventually granted a pastoral lease in 1978
, after years of fighting with the government to get one. Their youngest daughter, Letty, married Bill Cook and settled on the station, where the pair had seven children, with Rob their middle child.
Sarah found a warm welcome awaiting her at Suplejack. She’d known all of the family for a long time, and Letty was terribly fond of her. ‘Sarah’s been one of the family from day one,’ Letty says. ‘She just blended in as one of our daughters. She’s a beautiful girl and we’ve always loved her from the moment we met her.’
The pair moved into a separate house on the property, with Rob eventually taking on more of the management roles on the station, which boasted more than 8000 cattle, and Sarah working around the property to help keep everything going. Like most rural women, her to-do list wasn’t limited to domestic duties around the house; she was just as active outside, from branding and trucking cattle, to mending fences, driving graders and feeding the cattle mineral supplements when needed. Various members of Rob’s family came to live, or do some work, at the station at different times, so Sarah never felt too isolated. She’d never had sisters of her own, so particularly loved being around Rob’s sisters and sisters-in-law. But, most of all, she and Rob relished being able to work together for a common goal. ‘I’d go off early in the morning with the cattle, but then really look forward to seeing Sarah stepping out over the dusty yards bringing me lunch,’ says Rob. ‘We’ve always both loved being out in that kind of country, and being able to work with each other as a team.’
Everyone already realised how capable Sarah could be, but the birth of her and Rob’s first child confirmed it. Suplejack had record rainfall in the January and February of 2006 while Sarah endured the last months of her pregnancy and, with everyone else away, she and Rob moved into the main homestead to keep things going – often joined by the odd snake and scorpion brought in by the floods. Far more of a concern was that flooding had also made the roads outside impassable and everyone fretted Sarah wouldn’t be able to get out to have the baby. Everyone, that is, except her. ‘But I wasn’t too worried,’ she says. ‘Maybe I was naive, but I knew I’d be all right. In the end, I called air medical [services] and explained our situation and they helped me organise a trip into town on the mail plane . . . if it was able to land.’ When it finally stopped raining long enough for the plane to come, there wasn’t enough room for Rob, and he was forced to stay behind and wait for the next mail plane to Alice Springs.