by Cook, R
Could this be the best cattle station in the Territory? he asked himself.
It was a question he wanted answered, and he would devote the rest of his life to that patch of country. In 1964, he applied for and was granted an annual grazing licence to run cattle in the area (in fact, he applied for the same grazing licence for the next thirteen years, as his application for a full pastoral lease was repeatedly rejected). The adventurous couple loaded up the family’s green Bedford truck and trailer with supplies and possessions to make the three-day journey to their new home in the desert. Their six young children, Linda, Veronica, Jamie, Letty, Robert and William, were also bundled into the load (young Mark arrived later). It was a gruelling trip, crawling along the Tanami Track for around 600 kilometres before turning right at Rabbit Flat and heading north-east for another 130 kilometres. Eventually, the family arrived at a site previously chosen by Grandad. A slight rise in the landscape stood out on the vast plains, and there was some surface water nearby. It was just high enough to allow for a view across the red, sandy desert, over the brown grasses and past the tea-trees and bloodwoods. This was the spot the Savage family would make their own. For the first three months, everyone slept in a tent before a small shed could be built as a home.
It frustrated Grandad that a Lands Board would meet each year, deny a pastoral lease because it was not convinced it was viable land on which to run cattle, but still demand a fee for an annual grazing licence. The lack of long-term security also prevented him from developing the land with fencing or watering points. Grandad Savage had hit the droving stock routes again, moving cattle and horses from Lake Gregory Station to Alice Springs, and was paid with a portion of the stock: 212 Shorthorn cattle, which he trucked into the station. He also took on mustering contracts to help supplement an income for his fast-growing family. After thirteen long years, in 1978 the Lands Board met again, this time with some cattlemen on the review committee, and the application for a perpetual pastoral lease over Suplejack Downs Station was granted. There was some opposition from Aboriginal elders to the move, so a parcel of land in the top corner was excised from the lease where some houses had been built, but the majority of the area was approved. Grandad would have the run of 3823 square kilometres. Despite the final recognition that the property was a cattle station, the couple had many friends and others who continued to tell them they would never make a living out in the desert. Grandad Savage would often run into stockmen in Alice Springs as he brought cattle into town to be sold, who would raise their doubts with him, but he’d just swear at them and continue on his way. He wasn’t going to be told he couldn’t do it.
Grandad had hired the services of two Aboriginal men to help him in the work, one of whom had a wife and two young girls. Their local knowledge of living off the land would prove invaluable in the early days when Suplejack was nothing more than a campsite. The women would cook goanna, kangaroo and beef, although never beef from the station. No one, in those days, ate their own cattle. Perhaps, some might argue, no one does still. Goat meat, mutton and goat milk were other favourite ingredients. They had bought forty-six goats from another station to run in the house yard. These were locked up at night to keep them from wandering away. In the absence of a fridge, any meat would be salted, laid on bushes on the ground, and covered by more bushes to keep it as cool as possible. Then there were the vegies – it may have been the edge of the desert, but Grandma Savage sure knew how to grow vegetables. She had a massive vegetable garden, which would have been the envy of any neighbour, had they actually had neighbours. There is an old photo of Grandma that could be mistaken for a ‘Fresh Food People’ advertisement. In it, she is pushing a wheelbarrow full of every veg you could ever imagine needing, including potatoes, onions, carrots, broccoli and cabbages. She would speak proudly of an onion she once grew which weighed a whopping 600 grams. Other staple foods were trucked in from Alice Springs every three months.
If living in the bush and off the land was the challenge, this family was never going to be defeated. They kept in touch with the rest of the world via HF radio, with which they could also receive and send telegrams. But as well as their own, they could also hear everyone else’s gossip on the service, usually on a Sunday. These eavesdropping moments were humorously referred to as the ‘Sunday Galah Sessions’. Meanwhile, the older children, including Mum, were packed up and sent to boarding school at St Phillip’s College in Alice Springs. Grandad continued to work from daylight to dusk developing the station. There were hundreds of kilometres of fencing required, but he could only dig holes in the wet season when the ground was softer. So while it was pouring rain, he would be out with the crowbar and shovel knocking in wooden posts 4.5 metres apart. He was also able to put down some boreholes with the help of a business partner who owned a drilling rig. Once suitable watering points were established, another thousand Shorthorn cattle were trucked onto the property from Lake Gregory Station. Over the next twenty years, my grandparents would continue to slog it out in the hope of turning a patch of desert country into a thriving and profitable cattle station, running more than 8000 head.
I was in awe as I sat and listened to the tales told by my Grandad. He was one of the last great Aussie drovers. I was fifteen and this life, the life he had described, was the one I wanted and had always dreamt about.
If only I could have been born sooner to have experienced that life, I would think to myself. To pack up a horse and live off the land.
But alas, I was born too late. Perhaps I didn’t realise just how tough the life of a drover was. It didn’t matter, though, I wanted to be there with them, walking cattle for thousands of kilometres across the country, for months on end. It wasn’t long before I was begging Grandad to find me a horse because if I couldn’t be a drover, I wanted to be a ringer. He was coming around to the idea, but first I had a lot to learn about the bush and how to read the landscape. One day, as we were driving the old Toyota on a bore run, he pulled to a stop at an intersection of the main road and Suplejack driveway.
‘Get out Rob,’ he said. ‘Go look at those tyre tracks in the dirt and tell me which way that car was going.’
I squatted down for a closer look at the tracks, which looked fresh to me. I was thinking left but looking right, not really having a clue on how to determine it, stupidly thinking the brand of the tyre may be imprinted on the ground; if I could find the imprint perhaps I could work out the direction the wheel was turning. I was naive, but of course at that age I thought I knew everything. Finally I conceded defeat: ‘I’m buggered if I know.’
‘Well, have a close look at which way the rocks are pushed,’ Grandad said patiently. ‘If the rocks are pushed one way, then the car is travelling in the opposite direction.’
This was one small lesson in an education that continued throughout the usual workday. As we got closer to the water trough he stopped again, pointing to cattle pads.
‘Which way would the cattle walk to get to water?’ he asked.
Again, despite some serious thought, I couldn’t provide him with a reasonable answer.
‘You just need to follow them for a little way,’ he said. ‘If the pads begin to spread out, then you are walking away from water, but if the pads are all leading towards one main pad, then you are headed straight towards water.’
It was all about attention to detail, which, as a teenager, was a foreign concept to me. Grandad was a good teacher; a patient teacher. He, like Grandma, was very set in his ways, so I had to do it his way or not at all. I would later understand the value in the knowledge he was passing on to me, including the skill of shooting a gun. He was a big believer in shooting to kill, not just hitting the target. Using a gun on a station is very common and on this particular day, one was being used to collect dinner.
‘You’ve got to taste the bush turkey around here, Rob,’ he said convincingly. ‘There’s nothing like a bush turkey.’
As we were checking a watering point called Olympic, Grandad pulled to a stop
again. About forty metres away, out the driver’s window, a turkey was scratching around in shrubs. At that stage in his life Grandad was three-quarters blind so even seeing the bird in the bushes was an achievement in itself. He then pulled out his open-sight .22 Magnum rifle, with a matchstick stuck in the end of the barrel to help him sight the gun. Within a few seconds he shot the turkey, with feathers flying into the air.
‘Go on Rob, go and get him,’ he instructed.
So I jogged over to where the bird had been and was shocked to find not one but two turkeys lying there in the grass, both shot through the neck. Picking the dead turkeys up by their heads I carried them back to the ute.
‘You hit two with one shot!’ I exclaimed.
‘Yeah, well I aimed at the bastards, didn’t I?’ he replied casually.
I was taken aback. I couldn’t believe that he shot both of them with one bullet, but he has always maintained that’s exactly what he was trying to do. He was an instant hero to me. It was like something I’d seen in a Western movie. We took the turkeys home, and plucked and gutted them for Grandma to boil one and roast the other. It was another fine dinner to mix into the weekly cooking schedule, along with her great kangaroo tail stew and her tripe, which appeared on the table more often than I liked.
5
A FATHER’S SON
It would become my Hollywood moment. Perhaps the closest I’ve come to being a movie star or rather, the closest I’ve felt to being a movie star. The old cast-iron bath tub sat brimming with cool water next to the bore pump, less than a hundred metres from the house on the station. Ochre colours stretched through the sky as the sun set over the endless desert lands. It was out in the open, in the middle of nowhere, the perfect setting for a bath after a hard day’s work. Taking off my work clothes – boots, jeans, shirt and socks – I jumped into that bath tub like it was a swimming pool. Of course, I grabbed my Akubra hat, and tipped it slightly to sit on the back of my head, just like John Wayne.
‘This is the life,’ I said to myself, stretching out to enjoy the cool water over my body.
I had found the tub earlier down at the station’s dump and, seeing its potential, I dragged it over to the bore. Having spent a couple of months working with Grandad at the station, I was beginning to feel more at home. He had finally given me a horse, partly because of my incessant begging. The station only had one old green Toyota ute that ran, but it was strictly Grandad’s vehicle, so he gave me Tonto to ride, a great old campaigner, and we hit it off immediately. He was a well-built brown horse with a white snip on his nose and a couple of white hooves. The only saddle Grandad and I could find was a hybrid stock saddle with a horn and swinging fenders. It didn’t worry me, though, as it looked like a saddle straight out of a Western.
‘I need you to go check the Four Mile fence,’ said Grandad. ‘Take this wire and these pliers, and whatever happens make sure you bring back the bloody pliers.’
So I pulled the roll of wire over my shoulders and put the pliers in a pouch, hanging off the horn of the saddle and off I rode. I was only out there for a few hours, repairing some wires at the far end of the Four Mile, when a typical wet season storm began to sweep over. The thunder and lightning strikes were shaking the ground next to me and poor Tonto was as petrified as I was. The rain looked as though it was going to settle in, so I made for home. They say you should never canter your horse towards home to avoid bad habits, but on that occasion I bolted for the homestead. In record time I made it back safely, put Tonto in the yards, and drenched from head to toe, trudged my way up to the main house to get changed. It was only then I realised my error. The pliers had jolted out of the pouch.
‘Grandad, the pliers fell out on my mad dash home,’ I said sheepishly.
‘Right, well as soon as this storm passes, you’ll be straight back out there to find them,’ he replied.
So later out I went again, trying to retrace my tracks, which had been washed away by the rain. I couldn’t find the pliers.
So my first job as a real ringer didn’t end very well, but luckily I was given plenty more chances to prove myself. Grandad even decided to upgrade my horse to something with a bit more life. This time he picked out a chestnut called Comet, with a square, broad chest and a hint of quarter horse. Comet stood around fifteen hands tall but he looked like he could go all day. Grandad had taken me down to the yards and pointed him out to me.
‘You know, your Uncle Willie broke this horse in all those years ago,’ said Grandad, reminiscently. ‘Now Rob, remember when I explained every time you have anything to do with an animal, he is learning from you?’ he asked me.
I nodded without taking my eyes off the horse as he walked around the yards, so Grandad went on.
‘Well, it seems here that old Comet has got a win on a few blokes that weren’t much of horsemen and as a result the bastard has learnt to buck,’ he said, as I slowly took in what he was saying. ‘But when you get by this bullshit, you’ll have a good horse under you.’
If Grandad was looking to reassure me, he wasn’t doing a very good job. I was beginning to wonder if this was an upgrade to a better horse, or rather a punishment. But it was down at the yards on this day that I first realised my Grandad was anything but over the hill and all the stories he had told me previously had plenty of truth behind them. I was excited and a little worried as I watched my ailing, bow-legged grandfather having trouble catching Comet, jumping back and forward before blocking him in a corner. As he leaned up to put the bridle on, the horse pulled forward and took off with the headstall behind his ears and the bit under his chin, with Grandad holding the reins and skiing along behind on his boots. Comet was jumping sideways and double-barrelling the air as I quickly retreated to the top rail for fear of being run over. Eventually the horse settled down and the bridle was placed correctly before he was bagged-down with a saddle cloth. This is a technique a lot of horse trainers use to let the animal know of their presence and that they’re in charge, but also that they’re not going to hurt the animal. Sliding the cloth over Comet’s legs, belly, neck and rump, Grandad worked him all over. He then started to put the hobbles on his front legs, but Comet again surged forward, knocking Grandad off his feet and rolling him like a turtle on his back. With his patience waning, Grandad regained composure, managed to get the hobbles belted up and held the horse’s head while I threw on the saddle and tightened the girth. It was the first time I had seen Grandad move like that and the first of many confrontations I would experience in life with troubled horses.
‘Come on, jump on,’ said Grandad. ‘He might move around a bit. We’ll see what happens.’
So I climbed on, but with the hobbles Comet couldn’t really buck so he started pig rooting around the yard. I still felt like I was Lane Frost riding the famous bull Red Rock. The horse was doing its best to buck and I was still on top, so I thought I was a gun ringer straight up. But I suddenly felt a little loose in the saddle as Comet planted his feet and sucked back and sent me straight over his ears into the dust. While I was still scrambling to get out of the way, Comet jumped the top rail of the yards and landed on his side, in the next pen. To my disbelief, Grandad met him on the other side with the agility of an eighteen-year-old and jumped on top of the horse, jamming his knee into Comet’s neck while pulling his head back like an old bullock. I had only ever seen the technique used to hold down a calf during branding. But here was Grandad pulling off the move while having a ‘stern word’ with the horse beneath him.
‘Trust me Rob,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘Get over here and get on this bastard.’
He wanted me to get on as Comet stood up, but I was still shaking from being thrown a few seconds earlier. A horse that jumps a 1.8-metre fence with hobbles on its front legs was too good for me. I was shit scared and couldn’t do it.
‘All right, all right,’ said Grandad patiently. ‘We’ll let him go.’
Once Comet had stood back up, Grandad temporarily removed the hobbles and brought him back i
nto the yards where we had started.
‘Now, if you’re going to ride this bastard,’ said Grandad, repositioning the saddle and replacing the hobbles, ‘you’re going to have to get on him.’
So I built up my confidence and climbed back on again. I pulled the nearside rein tight as Comet tried to crow-hop around the yards. Once in the saddle he moved faster and pulled harder, kicking out and jumping around, as I tried to hang on. It was only when I glanced behind that I realised Grandad was chasing us with a bushy branch, flogging the ground behind us. Eventually, the bucking stopped and so did Grandad. All three of us were buggered from the flapping about of the last three or four minutes.
‘Righto, that’s a win,’ said Grandad. ‘Get off while you can and we’ll do the same thing tomorrow.’
We undid the saddle, took off the bridle and kept Comet on some feed in the yards overnight. At daylight the next day we were at it again, and slowly Comet’s behaviour improved and he bucked less, although he would always have a bit of fight in him and never forgot how to buck. Down the track, when a new day started or after a lunchbreak in the stock camp, the horse would put on a great display for everyone else, whenever I got on him. While I tried desperately to hold on, Comet would often dust me, hurling me over his head. I needed help to get on, so if I got off at the waterhole or to relieve myself, I’d have to walk until someone could help. He would let me ride all day and jump off when I wanted, but when it came time to get back on, he wouldn’t have a bar of it. I rode Comet for the first three years at Suplejack, and we ended up renaming him Launchya, because that’s what he was best at. So having to handle up to three bucking sessions from Launchya every day during the season, the horse turned out to be a great training ground for my rodeo career ahead.