The Crow Eaters Page 17
With the tanks full and the heat of the day glistening across the runway, we take off again. Our first house call of the morning is Clifton Hills Station, which sits at the junction of the Georgina and Diamantina river systems. We have an armful of today’s newspapers so the station can catch up on some news – going to the newsagent isn’t something they can easily do here. (Since my visit, Clifton Hills has been put up for sale, though, as is the case with many of these mega-stations – Clifton Hills is 17 000 square kilometres and the second largest property in Australia – the owners often employ families to manage the station for them.)
We drop down onto the brown, flat runway. The windsock is limp and this empire seems similar to many other properties I’ve seen – there’s an expanse of hot, flat land, a few cattle trucks around and a collection of buildings where the various trucks, graders, dune buggies, small planes and motorbikes are kept.
Five-year-old Beau, with his gigantic 10-gallon hat, comes out to meet us – he’s recently started School of the Air up here and they’ve flown in a governess from Sydney to look after his education while his parents, Fiona and Pete Nunn, run a property half the size of Belgium with up to 25 000 cattle on it when the conditions are good.
Using the Flying Doctor Service network, the School of the Air was established in Alice Springs in 1951. This radio (and now internet) service still provides children living in remote areas the opportunity to interact with other children, ask questions of their teachers and to supplement their correspondence lessons. Once upon a time it required the students to use a pedal radio, which only relayed the signal once the occupant built up enough power on the bike – it seems like a pretty novel way of learning and getting exercise, though this is the way many of the people on the stations here went to school until voice transmission and car batteries streamlined the system.
We walk over to the main house through red gravel and saltbush clusters. ‘Watch out for snakes,’ Dave says without breaking his stride. We arrive at the homestead and it’s a strange suburban transplant – there is a lush green lawn out front, with a fence and sprinklers going to keep it from drying out. Betsy is miffed at having to carry her doctor’s bag across the hot ground – she’s short and slim and the gear we have to carry across is considerable. Normally there’s someone there to meet the RFDS team with a vehicle, though I kind of like the casualness of it all – it must help to deal with the scale of things here. Yes, we’re travelling on a 1265 kilometre round trip to see them today, though their property is kind of large, so it’s not as big a deal for them that we’ve popped in for a check-up.
‘This isn’t outback hospitality!’ says Betsy as she sets up in one of the worker’s cottages.
Considering the scale here, I’m amazed at how relaxed the Nunns are as they arrive at the cottage, as if doing nothing more significant than popping in on a next-door neighbour for a cuppa. Fiona has a big smile and is heavily pregnant and Pete wears baggy jeans and riding boots and his nose looks like sandpaper from all the sun exposure up here. He grips me in a firm hand-shake and shows me maps of the station and pictures of the falcons and pythons they have on the property while Betsy checks on Fiona’s pregnancy.
I have trouble keeping the weeds down in my backyard, and here they are laughing about their little patch of land as if it’s the same thing. Pete does his stock work in a Cessna 172 rather than on a motorbike in order to cover his 4 million acres (1.6 million hectare) and, despite the tense arrival, they do need and appreciate the RFDS. They have their fair share of incidents here too. Pete was airlifted to Adelaide by the RFDS after rolling his car last year: ‘I blew a tyre coming from Birdsville and the car flipped.’
He tells me that he fractured three vertebrae in his back from the crash. I’m told later that more than half of all of Australia’s road fatalities occur in regional and remote areas such as this.
Betsy comes out of the bedroom, giving Fiona the all-clear for her 30-week check-up. She then lines up Pete and his station hands to examine the skin cancers they’ve all got, or are developing, on their noses.
While the boys get their own check-ups, Fiona offers to take me over to the ‘school’ where Beau has begun his formal education with his governess, Rosie. The bright yellow and air-conditioned room is plastered with pictures of ants and drawings of pirate ships around the laptop where they have to submit Beau’s worksheets every afternoon. As a foil to the isolation, they also have group lessons via Skype where the kids have to give news and do show-and-tell with other School of the Air students. Beau’s learning Japanese at the moment, he tells me, smiling, and he was even in Port Augusta last week for his school swimming lessons, he says of his adventures beyond the station.
I notice six pairs of workers’ blue jeans swinging on the clothesline and a platoon of shin-high leather boots lined up at the back door. They’re cowboys out here – and I mean it affectionately. It’s a life I don’t know at all.
We have a schedule to keep so we say our goodbyes to the Nunns and make the ‘short’ hop across to Cowarie Station. On the 15-minute flight I can see that there is water in the lagoon on the edge of the Derwent Creek, which is flowing near the property that has two houses with another lovely lawn out the front.
This property is run by local legend Sharon Oldfield, though she also has her children and grandchildren on hand to help.
Sharon arrived in Birdsville in the 1980s as a nurse – hoping to do a short stint in the bush before returning to the city and heading overseas on holiday. While she was an outback nurse she met Grant Oldfield at the Jundah Races and they married in 1986, making Cowarie their home. Tragically, Grant’s mustering plane crashed in 1994 and he was killed on the property. Sharon eventually returned to Cowarie – which has belonged to the Oldfield family since 1943 – and she has made it a success by diversifying and introducing organically grown beef cattle.
Ashlee, Sharon’s daughter, has tea at the ready, and plates with Sao biscuits, tomato and cheese on the table when we arrive, and I can see that Betsy is pleased.
‘How good is it?’ Ashlee says smiling about the visitors and her relationship with the RFDS. ‘The last flying doctor we had was the same one for 20 years. He knew about the challenges of the isolation and he was really accommodating. It’s not just like going to the city and waiting for a script,’ she says.
While Betsy does the check-ups in one of the bedrooms down the hall we sit and drink cordial and eat Saos. There is a red dust whirly-whirly twisting outside beyond the lawn. I look out and notice little things that make this much more like my own home than I would have expected: the trampoline outside, the barbecue on the cement under the awning and the Thermomix on the kitchen bench. While I’m daydreaming, tall and blonde Maria Madsen comes across from the other house to say hello to the visitors. She’s from Denmark of all places and has made a life for herself at Cowarie as well.
While Maria was backpacking through the outback here in 2002, she met and fell in love with Ashlee’s brother Craig. Just like Sharon, it seems that those who have no intention of staying are the ones who get drawn in by the outback life.
‘I wanted to be a cowgirl. But I didn’t even speak English when I arrived. We got stuck out here when there was 114 millimetres of rain. I learned how to be a cook and then I met Craig,’ she says.
‘When I finished my nursing degree in Denmark I moved here. The station is bigger than my whole country!’ I ask Maria what the biggest challenge is in dealing with the isolation.
‘You get to know yourself very well here … if you can do it,’ she says, and it seems like a question she still grapples with. ‘Last year there were people all the time – agistment farmers, the pub’s only 50 kilometres away and they have dinner for station owners once a week,’ Maria adds.
The plate of Saos is gone and life on Cowarie continues below us as we take off again.
On the flight to the next station, Dave and I chat about the job. He says that the main issues they’re called out
for are broken limbs and light cardiac issues. ‘Sometimes a stripped finger or a car accident. I also did a few SIDS flights – one on Christmas day,’ he says sombrely.
‘On my first day on the job we had a drunk driver who wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and his head went through the windscreen. He was all bandaged up and I thought, “there’s a bit of blood trickling on his neck, but that’s okay, it’s fine”,’ Dave says as we veer south in the hot afternoon sun over towards Dulkaninna Station. It reminds me that despite Dave’s proximity to all this, he’s not a doctor and might not have the same sort of constitution as the trained professionals for these things. ‘Then the doc hands me an esky. I figured it had blood work in it, so I peeked a look. It was the man’s ears,’ Dave says without a smile. He never peeked again after that. There is an obvious need and social importance to what the RFDS does out here, though from the sounds of some of the stories I hear, the isolation must do strange things to people’s notions of limits as well. I hear of one man who had a broken penis, but had so much alcohol in his system that he couldn’t receive pain relief, and another who had to call the RFDS because he had a bottle stuck where it shouldn’t be.
The plane catches the glint of the sun as it turns – it’s 42°C outside, though much hotter than that here, up high in a small tin box.
I now understand Betsy’s briskness when we were late at Clifton Hills – people here depend on them and she has to keep a schedule to make sure these isolated stations don’t miss out on things as simple, though as potentially life saving, as getting a mole checked or having a chat about their mental health.
Dulkaninna is the smallest property we visit today at (only) 500 000 acres (202 300 hectares). Daryl and Sharon Bell run the property here, just as Daryl’s great-great-great grandfather did before him – using only Clydesdales to get around then. Daryl’s completely off the grid here – in more ways than one. He uses solar panels, and there’s a wind turbine and two big generators on the property. ‘You really do have to be self-sufficient here – and not in a hippy way either,’ Daryl says, adjusting his Akubra, which is mangled, stained with oil and grease, sweaty and curled over at the front. His hat is spectacular and one of the sure signs of a challenging life lived out here on the Birdsville Track north of Marree.
I walk around the homestead yard and see old stone buildings from Daryl’s ancestors’ time, the remnants of an old teamster wagon in the field and a shed full of more modern machinery – trucks, bobcats, graders and motorbikes – needed to keep the farm going.
Inside I meet Sharon Bell. She came here 40 years ago to see the lake after reading Alan Moorehead’s Cooper’s Creek: The Real Story of Burke and Wills and was inspired to go travelling across Australia. While she was here she met Daryl and ended up staying. This sounds like a familiar story by now. I ask Sharon what kept her in the outback in spite of the challenges of raising a family here, of grocery delivery every two weeks, the RFDS and mail only arriving by plane. ‘I love the diversity. It’s untouched. You can love the place for more than just your house and your family – it’s wonderful.’
We all move into the lounge room and Sharon and Daryl recognise Dave straight away. It’s the first time they’ve seen him since he picked up Sharon on an emergency RFDS flight after she suffered a stroke here on the property last year. ‘There was lightning and it was pitch black,’ Dave says, remembering the night well.
Betsy and Caitlyn check Sharon and Daryl and then their young grandson Cody confidently strides into the lounge room. ‘What’s the problem?’ Betsy asks Cody. He lowers his head and speaks softly to her. ‘I sneezed three times this morning,’ he says, fearing the worst. Despite the isolation, there’s something beautiful about the togetherness of the family here, probably also enhanced out of necessity because of the remoteness, I imagine. It seems as if it would be a pretty idyllic childhood for Cody.
The sun’s heat is beginning to dissipate across the long plains and it’s a sign that we have to leave. Dave is only allowed to be flying for 12 hours at a time, so he has to turn us around and land in Port Augusta before 7 pm, where he’ll be grounded for the day.
Daryl and Cody drive us out to their airstrip to say goodbye. We pass an enormous corridor of scrap metal: old trucks, earthmovers and odds and ends collected from generations living here. ‘That’s our Woolworths,’ Daryl says with a smile. ‘If you can’t find what you need in the shed – we come out here and build something.’
We fly back to Port Augusta as the colours in the sky flare across the brown earth below. Dave, Betsy and Caitlyn will be doing it all again tomorrow: visiting others in South Australia who live similar lives to those on the stations we met today. I look up from my notes to ask a question, though I notice that the cabin is completely silent except for the drone of the engine. Dave has his sunnies on and is staring out the front towards home, Betsy has her eyes closed, lulled by the engine, and Caitlyn seems a million miles away, looking out the window at the Flinders Ranges. It’s very similar to how I am while I’m driving and the time I need to process things along the way. We continue on in silence, all lost in thought, as the purple bruises reappear on the Flinders and we approach the twinkling lights on the edge of Port Augusta.
CHAPTER 11
BOOM AND BUST
Cooper Creek in the dry centre of Australia has been a life force and a focus of human settlement for thousands of years for the Yandruwandha and Yauraworka people. It was named by Charles Sturt in 1845 during his ill-fated expedition to discover the great inland sea. When the Cooper is full, it is abundant with 200 species of bird life, freshwater mussels, fish – including catfish, callop and grunters – and many edible native foods – such as nardoo seeds, moodlu beans and native oranges – to sustain human life. Despite this abundance, the creek became infamous after two men died of exhaustion, malnutrition and starvation on its banks in this stretch of remote north-eastern South Australia in 1861.
Burke and Wills embody the most daring, tragic and bull-headed expedition in Australia’s post settlement history. While the story of Burke and Wills is well known, the South Australian chapter, and the place where both men met their sad ends on the banks of Cooper Creek near Innamincka, is less familiar.
I have travelled some of this road before, 600 kilometres from Adelaide to the edge of the Flinders Ranges, past Hawker, Parachilna and then to Lyndhurst. The last 472 kilometres, all on dirt roads and winding sandy paths on the Strzelecki Track, is still largely impassable without a 4WD, and it means that I am hitching a ride with two of the owners of the Innamincka Hotel, Kym and Jo Fort.
We leave before the sun rises, and drive north. There’s not much talk as we drive; just like crossing the Nullarbor, there’s a determination required to chew through this many kilometres in a single day, and everyone braces for the silent unfolding of the road once the radio signal is lost.
Kym and Jo also co-own the Birdsville Pub, and over the past 20 years they’ve been drawn to some of the remotest pockets of Australia. Since 1999 they’ve upgraded the Innamincka Hotel from four dilapidated motel rooms to a largely solar-reliant enterprise with 16 hotel rooms, an enormous restaurant called the ‘Outamincka’ and a front bar complete with the preserved bottles of the various snakes they’ve caught inside the pub, resting on a shelf next to the beer taps. During peak season, there are 14 locals in town, including the managers of the hotel, National Parks staff, and workers from a homestay enterprise and the general store.
‘I had to learn to love Innamincka,’ Jo says, gazing out the window at the desert with her dog Millie sleeping on her lap.
While it is just about as remote as you can get at Innamincka, Jo says that the Santos-owned company town of Moomba, 100 kilometres from the hotel – a gas- and oil-processing and refinery plant for Santos’ operations in the Cooper Basin – has kept them busy during the years of boom and bust here. Reg Sprigg was central to the opening up of the Cooper Basin for the oil and gas fields at Moomba in 1954.
‘One sum
mer I was caretaking the pub and we got a mining contract – 50 miners would stay with us and they’d need a bed and three meals a day. That’s when I thought Innamincka could destroy me. My life was brown – inside in the kitchen all day, and then outside with the dust. I was in the kitchen from 6 am until 10 pm.’
We glide across the hard-packed dirt, past the caravan of a roadworking gang fixing the potholes on this outback track, while we approach the treeless horizon.
‘It feels important to be here now. Who knows what it’ll be in 20 years? In our lifetime out here we’ve gone from using a wind-up phone only in the evenings because of the power cuts, to gradually dial-up internet, then satellite and now fibre. What’ll happen next here?’ Jo ponders to no-one in particular as she stares out the window at the shimmering plains.
We pass the dog fence – it’s much further east, though it’s the same unbroken line as Al’s patch outside of Coober Pedy that I visited earlier in my travels. The landscape is bald, red, hot and parched. Dust swirls on the low hills and we turn left at a dry creek bed. A little way along the track are the ruins of Blanchewater Station. It was one of the first stations established after the arid north of the state was opened up. The former manager, Harry Dean, was implicated in the violent removal of the traditional owners in the 1860s during the station’s early years.
And this was once the place to which cattle rustler Harry Redford drove 1000 stolen cattle from Bowen Downs station in central Queensland, along what is now roughly the same trail as the Strzelecki Track. During a big dry stretch from 1863 to 1865, the station owners lost 12 000 cattle and eventually the station became part of the Beltana Pastoral Company; now all that is left is a stone chimney and the fallen blocks of the homestead’s walls beside a solitary white cross marking a grave at the edges.
Kym tells me that shearers used to ride their pushbikes along here, no tracks or precautions as they travelled to the stations north of Innamincka looking for work. A contact of mine in Paraguay, a descendant of the New Australia utopian settlement – a group of journalists, teachers and shearers from areas like this who later settled in South America – confirmed that his relative was one of those bike-riding shearers in Queensland and South Australia back in the late 19th century.