August 1994
The wind was up again. From the tree top I stared at the high cloud, hoping to see just a hint of moisture. The cloud was white—too white—like splayed cotton wool removed from an old bandage. Up there, maybe four thousand metres, a gale blew. There was no moisture. For six months not even a single scud of fine rain had reached the ground.
My eyes gravitated to the horizon. More like the skeletal remains of a Dreamtime monster than a mountain range, the Warrumbungles stood impervious to all elements of nature. In thirteen million years they had lost only altitude. With a sudden wave of nostalgia I realised they were the only part of my life that remained unaltered.
On the left, all alone, towered the Tonduron. Dangerous and strikingly beautiful, this thousand-metre spire is Australia’s Matterhorn. Nestled in the foothills below, the Mountain View Hotel in Tooraweenah is still the source of climbing tales going back a hundred years.
A little to the right the summit of Crater Bluff seemed to be taking a peep through a saddle high in the mountains. With a shiver I remembered my ascent of the south wall in 1960. Further to the right loomed Burrumbuckle—a giant monolith of trachyte rock that resembled a crouched lion.
To look out on those mountains was just an escape, I suppose. It never lasted long. The cows had spotted the vehicle near the tree. They were running and some were calling out. The dust from the bare reddish ground rose from their feet and looking through the rich green branches of the kurrajong tree I wondered what droughts this continent had seen to evolve such an extraordinary tree. If there is a tree anywhere in the world with the characteristics of the kurrajong, I have never heard of it. Cattle and sheep find the leaves as palatable as lucerne hay. The protein content is lower than that of good hay, but given sufficient quantities dry cattle will fatten on kurrajong.
The tree itself has no lateral roots. Moisture is extracted from the soil by a single tap root. In large trees this tap root is thought to descend up to ten metres into the ground, and proof of this hypothesis is that the tree will continue to flourish in a drought when all other plant species are struggling to survive.
I always start lopping branches for fodder at the top of the tree. If you slip and fall the lower branches will cushion you. But sometimes this method creates a tangle of branches before any reach the ground. On this occasion the first branch fell all the way. Within seconds it was torn to oblivion. One of the disadvantages of lopping kurrajong for stock is that the strong are always best fed. The weaker animals must wait until their stronger cousins have had a tummyful. If I am fit I can match it tree to tree with my axe with a powersaw operator. It seems to me that technology has introduced as many problems as it has solved. For the kurrajong tree it has been a disaster. The tree lopper of the 1990s is fast and ruthless. A powersaw in a tree is extremely dangerous and the operator minimises the risk by savagely cutting back the tree. Five to ten percent of the trees fail to recover, and those that do will not provide stock fodder again for more than two decades.
In 1957 my father had an Aborigine and a German immigrant do the drought lopping. They used tomahawks and skilfully pruned the trees. In 1965 the trees were bursting with foliage and were lopped the same way. Today the landscape of the kurrajong belts that cling to the old lava flow soils from the Warrumbungles throws up a sad picture. The lopping in the 1994 drought has left thousands of trees resembling overgrown rose bushes. For anyone who may ponder over the future, it diminishes any confidence in the will of ordinary men to restrain their greed. Yet there are farmers who put aside time, energy and funds to plant trees. For them, the lopping of 1994 must have been a scene of despair.
The dreaming was over. The tally chase had begun. Below me, two hundred cows were streaming in for a mouthful of leaves. None had calved yet, but when I looked down on those bloated stomachs and protruding backbones I knew the first calf would come before the end of the month. There were too many. The mob should have been split in half, but already some of our dams were dry. We were forced to run the herd in just three mobs.
It would take ten trees to feed this mob. The first tree in the morning was the worst. The muscles stiffened overnight and I moved from limb to limb with a slight hesitancy. Then the sweat formed, the jumper came off which I tied around my waist, and I drifted into a world of wind, leaves and the sound of ravenous eating. By the third tree I moved with the ease of a monkey.
By lunchtime this lot were fed. Two kilometres to the north the scene was the same. I had hired an experienced tree man from Tooraweenah. This little man lopped for nearly four hundred cows. He was fearless and lopped trees that we called virgins. They were twenty metres high. One slip would be fatal. Interestingly, there was not a kurrajong the Aboriginal women-folk had not climbed for the seed long ago. The trunks of the trees carried scars of stone axeheads. Using stone hand grinders, the women made flour and cooked what we would call scones.
The best thing about lunch in the bush is the company. After four hours lopping it’s nice to hear someone speak. My wife Sal is one of those women with a natural gift of elevating the day above the drab and mundane. She listens to the news. She keeps in regular contact with friends—not for gossip, but for the stimulation of what everyone is doing from day to day. During hard times in the bush the women provide vital support, for men tend to withdraw into a shell.
Sal plays an additional support role, beyond the reach of some. She observes stock and watches paddocks. If a cow hasn’t moved for some hours she makes a mental note of it. She will ask me when I last filled a water tank. Most of us men are on our own now and we need this sort of help. And most important of all, when we come back from some job it’s comforting to hear the word ‘hi’.
This day was a little different. Sal was bright as usual when I entered the kitchen, but her news was not good. She had taken a paddock drive through the weaners and the oats would be eaten into the ground within a fortnight. There were five hundred and forty of them to feed. Even if rain fell almost immediately there would be no feed for weeks. At five hundred and fifty metres above sea level and no protection from the seasonal south-west wind, our property, Myall Plains, was as bleak in winter as the Texas Panhandle.
Sal put my sandwiches on the table and sat opposite with a cup of tea. We waited for the market report on the ABC. I had already made enquiries in the south and it seemed Victoria was the place to sell. There, the reliable winter rain had been below average, but just one good fall would ensure a reasonable spring.
Fighting a drought is like fighting an invisible enemy. It’s there all the time, dug in, and as your resources diminish it tightens its grip. Like a general deploying troops, a cattle grazier makes strategic decisions. Some dig in and feed their stock, besieged but trying to out-wait the enemy. Others move their cattle in an attempt to outflank the drought. Some surrender and sell, taking the prices on offer. Sometimes those who sell are the only winners. Like a fallen city, the fight is over, but when the enemy withdraws you rebuild. The reality, however, is that few are left with sufficient resources to start again.
The radio gave us the bad news: the market at Wodonga in Victoria had dropped. Allowing for time to advertise the Myall Plains weaners and arrange transport, it would be a fortnight before they could be offered for sale. If no rain fell in that time the market would ease further.
‘What will you do?’ Sal asked. She had that little white-faced look I’d seen so often in the wool crash. Only three years before we had lost our property at Capertee. When wool crashed it was the equivalent of BHP disappearing from the stock exchange board. To have something taken from you that you love leaves a scar for life and, worse still, you live forever in fear that the banks and other vultures of our social system will be back again to perch on the front gate.
‘We’ll roadtrain to Queensland and drop them on a stock route with a drover. When it rains we’ll sell them in Roma.’
‘Will your father agree?’
I probably didn’t answer. Sal and I know each other so well just a look says it all. Dad had angina and was very ill. Quietly to myself and no one else I put his life expectancy at about six weeks. To watch someone who had such a zest for life slowly die is a harrowing experience. To add to the trauma we no longer liked each other. If you have never liked someone you feel nothing. It’s when you have shared a great friendship in the distant past that you look inwardly. What went wrong? Above all else I value the friendship of my boys. To rear children and then have it all fall apart negates life itself, for we can take nothing with us and all we can ever leave is a memory.
I left Sal at the table with a sense of foreboding. Dad and I didn’t have many discussions left.
It was only two kilometres to Mum and Dad’s home. We called it the cottage. Sal and I had lived there in the early 1970s with our babies. Since then a number of families had passed through. My parents had only been there two years.
I saw them every day. First job in the morning I lit the fire and filled the wood basket. There was never much said. My mother had cancer and although she never once complained I think pain rarely left her alone. I discussed the drought when decisions had to be made.
This time when I pulled up in the little farm truck I felt uncomfortable. To ask a very sick man to contemplate roadtrains and Queensland stock routes is a big thing. For a few moments I just sat in the truck, looking out on Dad’s withered tomato vines. The frosts would have killed them in the end, but these vines had died in the late autumn through neglect. All his life Dad had grown tomatoes. He loved them. When he no longer had the strength to weed and water his tomato beds I knew the end was near.
I went inside and he was sitting by the fire. Sometimes he read. Mostly he just sat with his memories. Hanging on the wall behind him was a race photograph of Vodka Jack—his last horse. The horse had won a maiden event at Narromine the previous spring. Dad had been on course that day and loved every minute of it. I remember how gaunt and sick he looked, but there was still life in him. Now he was deathly white and almost skeletal.
‘The weaners are on top of the oats,’ I said at last.
‘We better sell them,’ he said simply.
‘We’re too late.’
‘I thought your Wodonga plan was a good one.’
‘The market dropped twenty dollars this morning. By the time we get there it might be back another forty.’
My assessment of the market was not speculation. I had sold the cast for age cows at Dubbo and received the worst price since the cattle crash of the early 1970s. I had not told Dad. He had forgotten they even existed.
He didn’t know what to say. He must have known his days were numbered. To have to concentrate on anything beyond a week would arouse some level of fear.
‘I’m thinking about Queensland,’ I said. ‘Bill says the stock routes are still okay. Water’s good. Feed’s a bit frosted, but plenty of it.’
Bill was from Roma and had married Dad’s niece, Sandra. Dad had a lot of respect for Bill.
‘Go on the road yourself!’ He stared at me now and I could see a trace of alarm.
‘No, we’ll find a drover.’
He was silent for a while. I didn’t expect him to agree. There was only Sal and me to look after them. He hated hospitals. I knew he wanted to die here if possible.
‘We can’t feed them?’ he queried.
‘The kurrajong’s nearly finished. We’ll have to buy truck loads of grain to feed the cows.’ I paused and gave him a moment to think about it. ‘The cows are the problem. They’re about to drop the calves.’
‘The problem too is you’re an adventurer.’
I watched him closely for a trace of humour. It may have been there. He was too sick to smile. Maybe he would never smile again. I just sat and waited. Feeding twelve hundred head of cattle was out of the question. We didn’t have the equipment. We didn’t have the water.
‘Keenan Brothers would have gone on the road.’
He wasn’t looking at me now. He had gone back to the grand old days. When he spoke of the Keenan brothers I thought of the film The Sting. That was how they lived in the 1920s. Poker games on trains where the stakes were measured in thousands of pounds. There were full-time drovers from far western Queensland to Victoria. It was a time when they discussed track form with priests. Dad had seen those days. They were days of great optimism for the small man. The Keenan men had a humble start. Their father died from injuries sustained in a fall from a horse, and their French mother reared them on a farm near Molong. She worked them hard and through her genes she gave them a personality that was later to help them build a land empire, although still small by Australian standards at that time.
‘They made money out of droughts and out of crashes,’ he went on. ‘They trod ground that others drew back from.’
Then he looked at me. ‘But they lost it.’ He paused for a while, just gazing at me. ‘Remember that always. They lost it.’
I waited for a while and then I said simply, ‘I’ll go up and have a look then.’
‘You telephone the agent,’ he said firmly. ‘Tell him to book you into the hotel at Roma and have him meet you for breakfast each morning.’
I struggled not to smile. In the old days the agents met graziers as the train came in. Dined with them, drank with them; in short, never left their sides. I wondered what reception I would receive if I asked Wesfarmers Dalgety to roll out the carpet like the old AML & F Company did for my grandfather.
Dad had agreed in principle but I felt no relief. Between that moment and when I packed my suitcase that night I asked myself continually if there were no other option. If general rain fell the young cattle would lift a hundred dollars a head almost overnight. We were into August, just weeks from the second-best rain month on the calendar—October. It was gambling on weather—or was it the ghosts of Keenan Brothers that drove me?
In anticipation of being forced to face up to the Queensland option, I’d placed an ad in Roma’s Western Star for agistment and a drover. In the ad I explained agistment was preferred, but if unavailable a drover would be employed to walk the stock routes.
The paper was delivered to the newsagents each Friday and by coincidence the day I had to make the decision was the cut-off time for ads. If I drove to Roma on Friday, Sal could report any phone calls that came through and I would be on the spot to deal with them. Not resolved was who would do the boggy dam run while I was away.
‘If any get bogged why couldn’t I pull them out?’ Sal asked.
‘I’ll be away with the Landcruiser.’
‘Teach me to drive the tractor.’
‘Too dangerous,’ I said, still wondering what to do. The tractor was brand new and the only time it had been out of the shed was to pull cows from a bog. In the hands of an inexperienced operator it would be dangerous work. Dams are surrounded by steep banks and provide very unstable ground for wheel tractors.
There had been no solution to the occasional bogging. Those dams we could do without had been fenced off. Others had to be left so the cattle could get a drink. Before they reached the ever receding water they struggled through putrid silt up to their bellies. For old cows it was a death trap.
‘Let’s do the run early,’ Sal said. ‘Then you go and if I run into real bother I will phone Peter.’
Poor Peter was our nearest neighbour. Too often he had to come to our rescue. He always came in great spirit and never once made us feel uncomfortable, but he was just as busy as us fighting the drought.
‘If only the bugger would ask us to rescue him one day,’ I said, knowing damn well we would have to call on him.
One dam was so bad we had a canoe on standby. Sometimes a cow would get stuck, struggle frantically, become exhausted and move out into the water. If they were not soon rescued their bodies would seize up from the cold and after the trauma of being towed out some never regained their feet.
Early on Friday morning we went to this dam first. It was freezing. No frost, but a face-numbing breeze of about five degrees Celsius. There was a cow stuck and she had moved out into the water.
Sal and I had a routine procedure by this stage. We placed the canoe on the silt and Sal pushed me out as far as she could without getting into the bog and then I used the paddle. Upon reaching the water I would paddle slowly across to the cow. The animal was already terrified by this time and the spectacle of a canoe approaching made some panic. I had to be very careful I didn’t capsize, as the liquid mud beneath the water was as deadly as quicksand. I carried a chain with me which had a large slip ring at one end and at the other end the chain was attached to a rope. Once I had the slip ring end over the cow’s head, Sal took up the slack by pulling the rope. She perceived the whole operation as a potential horror show and always made brave comments to make me laugh.
‘Darling, you must feel you’re on a holiday in that canoe!’
With the chain attached I came in as quickly as possible and hauled the poor thing out with the tractor. We had a high success rate and when the cow regained her feet we walked her to our hospital paddock which was watered by a trough from the homestead bore.
No matter how well each rescue went the scene was distressing and I asked myself many times what could have been done to avoid such a dreadful situation. It had never been in my hands to do anything, but in fairness to my father no dam on Myall Plains had been boggy for nearly thirty years. In 1965 he had cleaned every dam at great expense. The running of cattle on this continent may always be on the edge of calamity and short of utilising the land for other purposes we have to live with it.
We found a cow bogged in another dam. There was no need for the canoe. After her rescue Sal and I went home for coffee and I washed the ‘Noosa sand’ from my legs. In fact the mud was stinking and sticky. If I didn’t have skin to worry about I would have used a wire brush.
I left feeling very uneasy. Three days was too long to be away. My parents were a day-to-day proposition. The ambulance collected my father if he was low and required hospitalisation, but he fought against it and we had to watch him closely. The only days we could relax were when the district nurse came. With the running of the property we were on our own. The tree lopper went home each night. He was a contractor and had nothing else to do with the running of the place. There were no men left in the small towns anymore. Those who wanted work had left long ago. The ones on the dole had slumped into the unemployable syndrome. Sal would be on her own.