When the Dust Settles

by Cook, R

  My final bull for the event was Red Alert, another strong competitor, who flew out of the chute, bucking forward four times before going around to the left, away from my hand. My spurs grabbed a mark in the bull’s loose skin as my left arm twisted up behind me desperately seeking balance. Again, it was another ride that felt smooth as the bull moved beneath me, bucking and twisting. I pulled the rope to release my hand and off I jumped, landing square on my feet. It was a nice ending to a good ride. Of course, I was ecstatic as the crowd cheered me on, so as in the age-old tradition I went to grab my hat to throw into the air like a frisbee, but I fumbled and dropped it on the ground. No one seemed to really notice, so I kicked it and spat out my mouthguard simultaneously. As usual, after Mad Dog distracted the bull he ran over to give me a high five for my effort, but instead of obliging this time around, I grabbed each cheek and gave him a soft, wet kiss right on his lips. It shocked most of the crowd, including the American announcer and Aussie MC Warren Matotek.

  ‘Oh my God,’ the American said. ‘Did you see that? He kissed Mad Dog right on the lips!’

  So in the end I did get to embarrass Mad Dog and the kiss made the highlights reel on the DVD of the event. Mad Dog went on in 2008 to bullfight at the World PBR Finals in Las Vegas, the highest level a protection athlete – a cowboy who protects riders from the bull – can work. I had ridden three out of my four bulls, which was a good achievement for someone who had been out of the game for some time. The highlight of the rodeo was Troy Dunn’s last ever ride in Australia, winning the round on The Rock with 91 points. I have great respect for Troy as a bull rider, and even more respect on a personal level. Men like Troy, Mad Dog, Shawn Reading, Ryan Frame, Danny Connolly and Maurice Mortensen have always been great mates of mine from the rodeo days, and they remain so. Thus the Townsville event really was my last hurrah riding professional bulls. It was a couple of years before I rode again in some local Territory rodeos.

  After the excitement of Townsville, life resumed as normal at Suplejack. Then in early 2006, we made the move down to Milton Park, 180 kilometres west of Alice Springs. The station had experienced its greatest wet season, registering 1300 millimetres in the rain gauge. Sarah had to catch the mail plane into town and I followed soon after. We lived at the Milton Park homestead alongside a young couple, Richard Hollingsworth and Cody Maynard, who had been working for the Dann family. Ritchie and Cody became close friends of ours and it was a great honour to be there as they prepared for their wedding. Gary Dann had me and Ritchie out fencing and working cattle while Sarah tried to keep herself occupied waiting for the birth. Gary also operated a meatworks, so we were slaughtering cattle and camels at Wamboden, just north of town.

  By the start of March, Sarah’s birthday was approaching and she was heavily pregnant. As usual, I hadn’t organised a present for her. But this time, as we were so close to town, I had no excuse for not being able to get to the shops. Although Sarah was supposed to be resting, she always found something to do, whether it was cleaning or gardening, right up until the night she gave birth. Together we had packed some overnight bags in preparation and finally at 11 p.m. on 2 March, Sarah woke to tell me her waters had broken. Immediately I jumped into action which, for reasons unknown, involved me going to the bathroom to shave. I was halfway through my whiskers when I realised what I was doing. Sarah was going into labour a considerable distance out of town and I was grooming? Getting a hold of myself at last, I put Sarah in the ute and off we went towards Alice Springs.

  ‘I think we should probably hurry,’ she said, having noticed I was driving cautiously.

  In response I opened up the Land Cruiser and began driving like a bat out of hell, taking advantage of the Northern Territory’s open speed limits and praying a cow or kangaroo wouldn’t jump out in front of us. As Sarah put her seat back and placed both her feet on the dashboard, it occurred to me her birthday was the very next day.

  When we finally got into mobile phone range, I rang the ambulance. ‘We’re twenty-five kilometres from town and my wife is well into labour,’ I said.

  ‘We need to know if the baby is crowning,’ the woman on the phone replied.

  ‘Are we crowning, Sarah?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, we’re crowning,’ said Sarah, sounding more distressed by the minute.

  I relayed the crucial information, then the lady on the phone told me to pull over: I was going to have to deliver the baby on the roadside.

  ‘Listen lady, I’ve just driven over 150 kilometres,’ I said, irritably. ‘There is no way I’m stopping to deliver a baby.’

  I told her I was making my way to the hospital and that she should let the police know that I wasn’t stopping for red lights along the way. (I did slow down at intersections and check for cars, though.) About a block from the hospital a policeman noticed my disregard for the road rules and began chasing me in his car, siren blaring and lights flashing. I ignored him and continued to the hospital emergency ward, where he disappeared, perhaps having been told I was on my way. When we came to a stop, the nurses ushered Sarah out of the car.

  ‘I’m not moving,’ she said. ‘This baby is coming out.’

  After a short discussion, we lifted Sarah into a wheelchair before she was rushed inside the maternity ward. I was scared shitless about the prospect of Sarah giving birth. It was soon after midnight when the real action started. Luckily, she was in the delivery room for less than an hour before giving birth to our first son, Braxton. Sarah seems to do everything with ease, and bringing a child into the world was no different. Braxton was born at 1 a.m. on 3 March 2006, Sarah’s birthday. Not long after the whole ordeal, we wrapped up the newborn with a blanket, Sarah stood up and we walked to our new room on the maternity ward. After a quick shower, the three of us lay on the bed together.

  ‘Happy birthday Sarey,’ I whispered. ‘I told you I wouldn’t forget to get you a present.’

  Six or seven days later, we returned to Milton Park, where Braxton got his first taste of a mustering plant. It was there I also got my first look at a gyrocopter and a year later would buy my own.

  For our family, we had spent a lot of money on my gyro and, while it was worth every cent at home, I decided it would be worth even more if it were operating in a contract mustering plant. I knew there was a lot of money to be made in offering mustering services to other cattle stations if we could get the gear together. After a few enquiries I quickly came across work on a couple of properties in central Australia, although as it turned out, I didn’t end up using my gyro. Dad had offered me the use of the station’s equipment to take on the contracts as long as I put in the work at Suplejack first, generally at the start or end of the year. The first job I accepted was for the muster of about 2900 cattle on Tanami Downs Station, about 700 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs. As part of the contract, I was to use my own stock camp and manage the job my way. Zebb was my helicopter pilot, and together we did a lot of research before we began mustering by flying the property to inspect yards, fences and bores. It soon became clear that this would be a massive job – ninety portable panels would be needed to support the ailing yards that existed. It was a gamble to take a per-head contract as opposed to a day-rate because if there were only 2900 cattle on the station, I might not cover my costs. However I was fairly confident there were much larger numbers running on the 4200 square kilometre property. Previous musters had missed, for whatever reason, wild scrub bulls, and there were now a lot of cleanskin cattle on the country. By discovering what the other musterers had done in years past, I was then able to do the complete opposite.

  I developed a mustering plan to go ahead in October 2007 with the help of Zebb in the sky, Cam and partner Leza Vallis, and Andrew and Morgan Banister from Queensland. Sarah ran the kitchen while keep an eye on young Braxton. We took all our own gear, including a kitchen and shower; a hole in the ground served as a toilet. Over the next three weeks we would muster 4200 cattle, which included 400 cleanskin bulls and just over 1000 w
eaners. The days passed largely without incident, until we had just a few areas of the property left to cover. I was following a large mob on the motorbike as we headed them towards the yards when I noticed a big black cow, with short, sharp horns.

  ‘I don’t like the look of that cow,’ I told Zebb on the UHF. ‘We should pull that bastard out.’

  What followed was a small argument about this cow, which Zebb thought was leading the herd well. I, on the other hand, thought there was something wrong with her and she looked like trouble, figuring she would give us problems when it came to yarding up. I knew it only takes one cow to lead the whole muster astray, if she baulks at the yard gate.

  I repeated my request: ‘If you get a chance to let her go, cut her from the mob.’

  Zebb left the cow at the front and, just as he’d predicted, she led the rest of the cattle straight into the yards. It worked perfectly, and I was very happy to be proven wrong.

  In the yards we had the drafting operation running very smoothly. Sarah and Leza would work the head crush (a metal clamp that holds the animal’s head in the race so they can be de-horned and ear-tagged) and bang-tail the cattle (cutting hair from the tail to distinguish them from others) while Cam and I worked the round yard drafting. Young Braxton would sit in the car, or at one set of yards, on top of a little crow’s nest built above the round yard. It was an early introduction to living and working in the bush and one I was proud to have him experience. But on this particular day, Sarah, Braxton and Morgan had returned to Suplejack to do the bore runs, leaving just Cam, Andrew and Leza to help me in the yards while Zebb continued mustering by air. The race was full and there were only a few old cows in the round yard with me, so I was reaching through the round yard gate to move the cattle up the race to allow more room. My back was turned for only a second, but my guard was dropped and the same black cow that I was worried about earlier came roaring in behind me and jammed me against the panel. Before I had time to escape she continued her attack, using her horns to butt me in the backside and toss me over the panels. When I landed on my back outside the yards, my hat flew off and I was furious, more so with the hat than the cow. It was a pet hate of mine, perhaps inherited from my Grandad, that I had towards hats that blow off so easily. If hats don’t stay on someone’s head, then they should live on the ground. Now sitting on the ground with my legs outstretched, I grabbed the poly stick that I’d been using to prod the cattle and flogged my hat resting next to me. After venting my frustration, I went to stand up, but a sharp pain tore through my stomach, forcing me to stop moving. It was only then that I noticed my jeans were ripped open from my crotch through to the fly, where the cow had horned me. With no jocks on, I could also see blood trickling from my scrotum. To my amazement, my left testicle had fallen out and was lying on a leaf on the ground.

  Fuck, this isn’t good, I said to myself, trying to come to terms with one of my pills resting so precariously.

  Earlier that day I had changed a truck tyre, refuelled motorbikes and vehicles and been covered in urine and manure from bang-tailing cattle. My hands were filthy as I tried to brush off some of the dirt. After weighing up my options, I really had only one choice in the end. So I sucked one of my fingers in some futile attempt to clean it and nearly vomited in the process. Grabbing hold of my sack, I pushed the testicle back inside with my cleanest finger, before pinching the skin together to close the wound. It wasn’t really hurting – perhaps that was the adrenaline offsetting the pain – although it was too difficult for me to get to my feet.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Cam, once he realised what had happened.

  ‘I’ll be OK.’ I told him. ‘You just keep working through these cattle, but be careful.’

  My only option was then to bum-crawl my way across the paddock to the Toyota to use the UHF radio.

  ‘Hey Zebb, have you got a copy?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, look I can hear you,’ replied Zebb slowly, in his typically relaxed manner.

  ‘Mate, I’ve been hit,’ I said. ‘When you get a chance can you come back and get me please?’

  ‘Oh, you’ve been hit, eh?’ he played with me. ‘Yeah, well I’ve got some cattle here so I might be a half hour or so.’

  ‘Zebb, when you can, come and get me,’ I said, in no mood to joke.

  Once he arrived we quickly refuelled the helicopter and Cam helped load me in the passenger seat before we took off for the stock camp to grab my wallet and clothes, and then headed for the Granites Gold Mine. Zebb radioed ahead to request a Royal Flying Doctor plane to meet me. The wind in my groin through the open doors of the chopper hurt more than the cow’s horn, but there wasn’t much Zebb could do other than offer me his jacket. He landed about an hour later at the mine and left me there to return to the stock camp before nightfall. I was buckled over in agony as the paramedics drove me to the clinic to await the plane. The female paramedic was very nice and gentle as she felt my nuts to inspect the damage.

  ‘It’s not good, Rob,’ she warned. ‘You know you can die if your testicle is twisted.’

  It wasn’t much comfort, but she gave me some morphine to quell the pain and, although I couldn’t recall ever having morphine for any of my other injuries, I happily agreed. She was a really kind medic with plenty of funny jokes until she injected me with that drug. From that moment, I became so agitated and irritated that I wanted nothing more to do with her. My jaw became clenched and I felt like swearing at someone as the drug took hold. It completely changed my mood into something I’d never experienced before. Something in my body wasn’t responding well to morphine and so I refused to have any more from the RFDS, the ambulance in Alice Springs and at the hospital. I even made them write ‘No morphine’ on my arm, just to make sure the message got across. Finally, in the emergency room in Alice Springs, a doctor approached me. After telling him what had happened, he told me they would have to shave my scrotum before sewing it up.

  ‘You are aware that my pill fell out?’ I asked. ‘It was lying on the ground.’

  ‘Huh,’ the doctor grunted.

  ‘We might need to clean the bastard before you sew it up,’ I told him. ‘I will guarantee it’s got some sort of germ on it.’

  He appeared to agree with me before coming back at me with a razor.

  ‘No, you give me the razor,’ I said protectively. ‘You can stand there and watch, but I’ll be the one to pluck the hairs out of this chicken.’

  Leaning over my groin, I slowly removed all the hairs around the gash, when a young female doctor appeared.

  ‘Can I just get you to lie back?’ she asked, pushing me back on the bed. ‘Just leave that for a moment.’

  I didn’t realise at the time what she was doing, but with gloves on she pushed her finger right up inside my sack.

  ‘Don’t sew this man up,’ she told the nurse next to me. ‘We need to get him into surgery, straight away.’

  It turned out the cow’s horn had gone up through my scrotum, into the muscle and fat in my pelvis and just scraped my stomach lining. I was very lucky the stomach didn’t give way or my intestines would have fallen out the hole below. In surgery, the doctor put a stitch at the bottom of my stomach and replaced the septum in my scrotum with a prosthesis to separate my testicles. The horn had also grazed the inside of my thigh, narrowly missing a major artery. The doctor told me that had the horn dug any deeper into my skin, I would have been dead within minutes. It was another lucky escape for a bloke who was fast running out of second chances.

  14

  FIRST WORDS

  Learning to breathe on my own again was by far the hardest challenge I have ever faced in my life. Weeks had passed since the helicopter accident, all spent in the Adelaide ICU. I now had a tracheotomy, a hole in my neck into which a pipe was inserted directly into my trachea and down to my lungs. This allowed the ventilator to keep my lungs working, without having a tube in my mouth, so I was less likely to get chest infections. A small balloon cuff was inflated within my
trachea to stop air coming out through my mouth or nose, but still allowed me to breathe air in to contribute to what the machine was pumping in. As such I was still not able to talk because air was unable to be exhaled past my vocal cords, however it was a good option for me given how long I was to spend in hospital. The feeding tube through my nose had also been removed and was replaced with a percutaneous endoscopic gastronomy (PEG) which was a pipe inserted through my abdomen and directly into my stomach to supply sustenance. There was a key element to my dependence on the ventilator that I hadn’t realised. Perhaps no one told me or I simply hadn’t listened, but I wasn’t aware that it was up to me to teach myself to breathe again. One of the nurses, Tracey, who was in charge of the equipment and later became my case manager, was the one to break the news to me.

  ‘Rob, if you ever want to get off this ventilator, it’s you who has to do it,’ she told me. ‘You can’t wait for someone else to come and do it for you. It won’t be easy but I promise, Rob, it will be worth it.’

  Until that point, I had just been focused on staying alive, not trying to do anything other than get through each day. I thought I was doing a great job by just smiling and acting pleasant to everyone, but that, however, wouldn’t get me out of ICU. Occasionally, the doctors would come by, switch off the ventilator and leave me to struggle on my own. These were traumatic moments for me, as I desperately gasped for air, slowly suffocating. I understood the doctors needed to know whether I would ever get off the ventilator, so they used this tough love approach to see if I could breathe on my own. In short, it didn’t work. They took me from having a machine do all the work for me, to being left with nothing, which caused me massive anxiety attacks. I had quickly developed a phobia of suffocation. I have since discovered many people share a phobia of drowning and this was much the same (without getting wet). So it came as a surprise to discover it was up to me, not the doctors or nursing staff, to get me out. I had to rely on myself to get out of ICU, simply by teaching myself to breathe. It sounds a lot easier than it actually was. But when Tracey told me that I had the power in this rather powerless situation, a light came on inside and my approach changed. It was a new ball game.