When the Dust Settles

by Cook, R

  ‘Go fuck yourself, I’ve finished working for you,’ I responded curtly. ‘You can take your job and shove it up your arse.’

  At the time, I was oblivious to the effect that those ten seconds would have on our relationship. The next Monday, Dad had to return to work one man down – well, perhaps half a man – but still I didn’t realise I shouldn’t have left him in the lurch. I had hurt him, but failed to understand it.

  My regret from that moment came after a long, protracted period of time, but it did come. It started when Dad told me to find somewhere else to live and get a job to pay for it. He was being fair about the situation, but he was being fair dinkum at the same time.

  ‘I’m staying here at home,’ I said defiantly.

  ‘You can only stay here if you pay rent. So you best find yourself a job,’ said Dad firmly.

  Knowing the hole I had dug for myself, Mum took me into town to go job hunting. I walked the main street of Miles from business to business, copping rejection after rejection. It wasn’t until I got to the butcher’s shop, right up the end of the street, that I found a willing employer. I was put on as an offsider, or ‘shit kicker’, at the princely sum of $2.10 an hour to clean the abattoir, move carcasses and cut meat. Each day I would catch a lift with Sonia, who was also working in town, at the hardware store. It was hard to see the $350 a week wage offered by Dad disappear and be left in a position where I could hardly afford to buy cigarettes. I still did manage to buy them, though, and smoke them in front of my parents. The young boy inside me figured if I had a job and was paying rent, then I was a man who could smoke at home. It didn’t sit well with my family. The young boy also wanted to have a beer with his Dad and ask for advice about girls, but those privileges were gone. After everything Dad had done for me, I was throwing it back in his face. I got the feeling I was no friend of his, and he treated me as such. If he acknowledged my existence with a ‘Hi’, then that was a good day. Other than that, we didn’t speak again for some time.

  While my family life was in trouble, my love life was powering ahead unaffected. The girls had continued to come and go, until the very last day of school. Sarah Canning was tall, skinny and athletic with a contagious smile; a beautiful brunette. She was in the year below me and someone I’d always admired but never dated. Out of all the girls, she was ever the cool one, a little eccentric and bit of a hippy. I liked her style. She didn’t care about the latest clothing or the latest sayings; Sarah didn’t have to fit in, she was cool without trying. Her parents, Graeme and Lois, owned a cattle and grain property near Dulacca and she would take the bus into Miles each day for school. We had a lot in common and it made sense to me that I should ask her out. After leaving school I eventually managed to work up the courage to do so by phone, an offer she accepted. Little did I know at the time that it was probably the best move on a girl I would ever make.

  ‘If you want to be a ringer and move to the Territory, pack your bags,’ said Dad. ‘We’re leaving in the morning.’

  It was the end of 1996 and he had walked up to me on the stairs, standing over me while I sucked back on a smoke. It was the first time I’d heard my parents were considering leaving Queensland as they certainly hadn’t confided in me. Perhaps he didn’t care whether I went or not. We had visited my grandparents at Suplejack a few times over the years so I understood where they were going. Being a stockman was something I had always dreamt about, but did I really want to be a ringer? I knew there were wild, bucking horses and cleanskin scrub bulls, which excited me. But I didn’t consider the isolation of living there for an extended period or the fact I didn’t really know my grandparents, Bob and Lillian Savage. As I threw away that cigarette, I knew I had to go, so I hurriedly packed my bags for the Top End. I shouldn’t have been surprised by Dad the next morning. On the back of the two-door ute he had loaded a large dog cage and stuffed all the swags and bags into it, leaving just a small crawl space. As he opened the back door he simply said, ‘Get up.’

  So like a mongrel, flea-bitten dog, I crawled up into the cage, knowing there was plenty of room in the front between my parents. I wasn’t happy about it, but what could I do? Dad shut the door and that’s how I travelled to the Territory, the rest of the family stayed at home. He refused to elaborate on why we were going to Suplejack or for how long. Unbeknown to me, his plan was to take me there, leave me and return to Miles. Initially I thought perhaps Mum and Dad were going to ask my Grandad Savage whether I could stay there with him, discussing the prospect with me in a consultative process. But knowing Dad, I should have known better.

  There were plenty of rest stops along the way, so I was allowed to jump out and relieve myself near a tree, but the most memorable break was at Mt Isa, 1600 kilometres into the journey. Having had plenty of time to think by myself in the dog space, it struck me that I hadn’t actually told my new girlfriend, Sarah, about my Territory adventure. I had got so caught up in the excitement that I had left Miles without even speaking to her. Not the best decision, so early on in a relationship. But it was my uncertain future that forced me to break up with Sarah. While Dad was paying for the fuel, I had asked Mum if I could use his mobile phone, which in those days, was big enough to have its own carry bag. So making a quick phone call I told Sarah how it was.

  ‘So you know how we’re going out?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ came Sarah’s cautious response.

  ‘Well I’m headed to the Territory and I’m not sure when you will see me again so I think we’re finished,’ I said bluntly.

  Sarah probably thought it was great. It wasn’t as though there was a shortage of blokes keen to take her out. It would be my loss. So squashing myself back into the dog box we continued on to Suplejack via Tennant Creek and Alice Springs. Once we turned off the Stuart Highway and onto the Tanami Highway, the dust was almost unbearable. The road is often called the Tanami Track or sometimes the Tanami Goat Track because most of the road is in a terrible state. The bitumen only runs one lane for a few hundred kilometres and then it’s just sand, dirt and clay corrugations for the remainder through to Halls Creek. Each year the wet season washes away much of the road and irresponsible drivers will often tear wheel tracks through the dirt while it’s still wet. During the dry season the corrugations are enough to shake every tooth from your head. The council graders try to keep up with levelling the road, but by the time they finish grading, it’s time to start again. I could only just cope with the agonising 750 kilometres from Alice Springs to Suplejack. That highway would become the bane of our existence in the desert.

  4

  COLD ARRIVAL

  ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing?’ someone screamed, rousing me from the beauty of my sleep. I flinched as a bright light shone in my face and my eyes struggled to adjust.

  ‘You can’t sleep in here! Get out now!’ the woman yelled at me as I slowly sat forward.

  It took me a few moments to realise where I was, wrapped in my warm sleeping bag. Breathing in a sickly smell of fresh meat and stale air, I looked to my left to see a kangaroo carcass lying on the floor. On either side of me were shelves of various foods, including fruit and vegetables. It was the station cold room and Grandma Savage had discovered me sleeping on the floor.

  “I’m sorry,’ I muttered. ‘I won’t do it again.’ Forlornly, I took my pillow and sleeping bag back to my room.

  I had never heard of humidity before moving to the Territory. The heat at Suplejack was unbearable, especially at night when it came time to sleep. My parents were long gone. They had dropped me off a few weeks earlier, having stayed just a week themselves, and left me in the care of Grandad and Grandma Savage. They were family, but I didn’t know them, having only spent a few holidays with them before. Dad had continued his silent treatment towards me up until the day he left with Mum, simply saying, ‘We’re going, and you’re staying.’

  I was not told when or if they would come back. My parents had long discussions with my grandparents through the days the
y were there, while I was given odd jobs outside. At no point was I privy to those conversations. It was a scary feeling for a fifteen-year-old, although I would never have admitted it at the time. There I was on the most remote property in Australia, with two bush stalwarts who I barely knew, being forced to accept a new life for myself. What struck me the most on the day we arrived was the age of my grandparents: Bob was seventy-one and Lillian sixty-nine. I immediately decided the place wasn’t for me, stuck out there in the bush. However, I had no choice in the matter, having come this far, so I decided to explore what was around me. I hadn’t yet realised I was to stay there long term.

  In 1997, Suplejack was still a fledgling cattle station. About 8000 Shorthorn cattle grazed on the desert plains. Because my grandparents were very much at the mercy of the weather and local and interstate markets, they’d had many hard times running the business but also some good times. As we’d driven in along the final section of the driveway, a wonderful slate-rock garden bursting with the different colours and aromas of wildflowers framed the entrance of the modest homestead, which faced west. But it wasn’t the only smell to take in as I walked towards the front door; there were plenty more to come. Out the front of the timber and masonite house, the small cold room and meat house area smelt like a butcher’s shop. It was the same stale smell of raw flesh I had become accustomed to during my work in Miles. Then came the whiff of fermenting beer, as I passed Grandad’s special homebrew room. Walking through the front door and into the living room, there was an eerie stillness to the home. It was dark with fading photos on the wall like vague memories slowly disappearing, and there were cabinets with no doors, only curtains hanging to cover the front of them. An old rectangular dinner table with trimmed, curved corners stood near the closest wall. Away from a small kitchen, pantry and lounge room, a narrow corridor led to four bedrooms and an office. My grandparents slept in another bedroom on the far south-east corner of the house. A shower and toilet were in a bathroom, also on the southern end. Electricity was provided by the generator for a maximum three hours each day, just enough to keep the cold room cool. It was started in the late afternoon so that we could watch the evening television news and cook dinner. But after that, there were no lights, fans or air-conditioning units for the remainder of the night. We would often listen to a battery-operated short-wave radio on which I remember Slim Dusty playing. Luckily, Mum had taken pity on me during the drive over from Queensland and had bought me a small CD player with earphones. Before she left, she slid it into my bag, quietly telling me to leave it there until she and Dad were long gone. She had also bought me some country music CDs to play, including one called Slap and Leather and another by Garth Brooks. Later, as an adult, I would listen to those songs and be reminded of those times, when I lay in bed at night trying to sleep. My cold room brainwave struck on one of those hot, sleepless nights, and I crept down the corridor to that cool paradise. I couldn’t see any problem with sleeping in there, it was so nice and cool, and it opened from the inside so I couldn’t lock myself in there either. But Grandma Savage was adamant, when she found me at 6 a.m., that I was wasting the cool air. Despite the reprimand that had cut me deep, it remained the sweetest eight hours sleep that I’d ever had at the station, cuddled up next to a dead kangaroo.

  Initially, my grandparents were very strict and formal towards me. I often wondered if my Dad would have told them about my recent obnoxious behaviour, but deep down I knew my parents wouldn’t do that to me, and I later discovered it was just my grandparents’ nature. I was not accustomed to living in a house where there wasn’t frequent hugging, kissing and talking through problems. I knew Grandma and Grandad loved me, but they were different. Grandma, in particular was very stuck in her ways. Wearing her beautiful floral dresses, sandals and floppy white hat, she would lay down the law. When she said it was lunchtime, I sat down and I ate lunch until she decided I was finished. At dinnertime, I had to show up on time, showered with brushed hair. Once dinner was finished I was to leave and get out of the house. Small talk was not an option. Grandad was also strict, but he tended to relax a little outside the house. He would be wearing stubby shorts with a low-hanging knife belt, short-sleeve work shirts, T-Boots and a little green felt hat cocked sideways on his head. I could tell Grandad was slowly warming to me the more time we spent together. After a hard day working alongside each other, we sat out the back, him with a tin cup of home brew and me with a cup of Milo, having a yarn about the good old days. Grandad was a big believer in reminiscing and telling stories, in a way that’s a bit like the Indigenous Dreamtime stories, where information is passed from generation to generation. It was during these early conversations that a great relationship began to develop, along with deep respect for the man who pioneered Suplejack Downs Station.

  I was taken aback when Grandad told me that his own father, James Savage, had died when young Bob was just fifteen years old. Things with my own Dad weren’t exactly rosy, but I couldn’t imagine him not being there at all for me as a teenager. I quickly discovered Grandad and I were very much alike in many ways. As I listened to his stories, I found that rodeo and women were also two of his loves as a youth. He was born in 1926 at Rockhampton in Queensland, into a family renowned for its pioneering activities. His father dabbled in several different jobs throughout his life but spent most of his time training racehorses, holding a professional licence for thirty years. As a three-year-old, Bob would meet his Dad at the front gate after track work in the early morning and ride the racehorse back to the house and stables. He was introduced to horses early too, he told me.

  Young Bob started school at four years of age and left when he was just eight. Schooling didn’t come naturally and he would often find other distractions to keep him busy. A neighbour had built him a small billy goat cart from a wooden frame and some thin pram wheels. His father then trained a pet goat to pull the cart, which ran faster whenever little Bob scratched its tail. Bob and the goat became inseparable and the other schoolkids thought he was very cool, although he spent more time skipping school and riding off into the bush than he did actually attending. The goat eventually disappeared one day and it was assumed someone had stolen it for some mutton curry, but not before six-year-old Bob had used its popularity to charm a pretty little girl who lived down the street. Lillian Bean was the daughter of Henry and Rachel Bean and the seventh of fourteen kids in the family. She thought Bob was good looking, but like many young men of that era, he had no money. Luckily, Bob had another treasure for wooing the girls, his vocal cords. He was so good at singing people would often comment that he sounded like the famous yodelling cowboy Harry ‘Torrani’ Hopkinson from the United Kingdom. Bob’s singing came to an abrupt end, however, when, at fourteen, he had to have his tonsils out. He soon discovered he no longer had his wonderful singing voice, but of course he was still able to play the harmonica and guitar.

  The Savage family moved to Canoona, forty kilometres north-west of Rockhampton, to live on a 210-hectare dairy farm when Bob was twelve. His father would die there at the age of sixty. Bob had set out a couple of years earlier by himself, at the age of thirteen, to prove he could make a good life. He held various jobs, including in a meatworks and on a sheep station, usually for seventeen shillings a week, before hitting the droving run mostly up and down the east coast of Queensland. On one trip he took 1500 bullocks from Morestone Station near Camooweal to Avon Downs Station near Clermont, a journey of more than 1000 kilometres. It took eighteen weeks and three days for the team of three men and a cook to cover the distance. He would sleep on a ‘pencil swag’, named after its size and lack of warmth, but he assured me the ‘cold wouldn’t worry young fellas like me’. The men would take turns watching the cattle at night, rotating the shift until dawn. Drover Bob soon learnt not to bring his harmonica or guitar on the droving trips, as anyone who did was known as a ‘useless jackaroo’. At first he wore a typical cowboy hat, complete with bashes where the front rim is turned upwards at the sides.
But, as he later joked, he lost a lot of weight just chasing it when it blew off his head in the wind. Soon the cowboy hat was replaced with a more conservative, country broad-brimmed hat.

  To my amazement, Grandad Savage’s introduction to rodeo was also at the age of thirteen, when he rode a bullock in Rockhampton. He then went on to ride buck-jump horses and became well known for his riding in central Queensland. It was inevitable that his interest in horses and stock work would eventually see him end up heading to the Northern Territory and the Kimberley. The isolation, vast distances and hard work were sure to test any young ringer. Twenty-year-old Bob arrived on Flora Valley Station on the Territory–Western Australia border, owned by the Vestey Group, where he ran the mustering stock camp for twelve months. His inherited love for horseracing followed him across the country, and he began riding as a jockey at meets including Halls Creek, Wyndham, Broome, Port Hedland, Onslow, Aileron and Alice Springs. He had many of his own horses over the years and went on to take home a good share of the prize money. His two big winners were Sweet and Tidy and Cloette Gold, one of which won six races straight at its peak. Beyond the racetrack, Grandad longed to own his own cattle property, so in 1949 he went halves with a partner to buy Bohemia Downs Station in the Kimberley. Perhaps it was the loneliness in the stock camp or the desire to settle down, but in 1951 Bob and Lillian married in Queensland and returned to Bohemia Downs to begin raising a family. There they stayed for another eight years before selling out their share and moving to Broome to pioneer banana growing and a market garden on a two-hectare block. The venture was reasonably successful until two cyclones, two years in a row, wiped out the plantation. The Kimberley banana industry has had some good years since, but the cyclones have forced most growers to sell out.

  So Grandad and Grandma were on the road again, this time to the Aboriginal communities of Lajamanu (Hooker Creek) and Yuendumu, back in the Territory and on the edge of the Tanami Desert. Grandad had taken a job with Native Affairs as the manager of stock operations for the region. During his time mustering and managing the cattle on the government land, he had become very familiar with the country and made friends with many of the traditional owners. Although he always felt the area had good grazing potential, it took a vehicle breakdown between Rabbit Flat and Lajamanu for him to truly grasp the opportunity. Around him was flat limestone country, surfaced with red sand and flourishing with more than twenty different species of grass, including mitchell, flinders and spinifex.