Across The Sunlit Plains Extended
The Age
Tuesday August 20, 2002
In the year of the outback, Anna King Murdoch joins a cattle drive through western Queensland and tastes life under the everlasting stars.
``And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars."From Banjo Paterson's Clancy of the Overflow.While the British media are determined to portray the outback as a place crawling with murderers, Australia has been celebrating the country that has inspired so much of our most powerful literature, music and art with the Year of the Outback. But despite some publicity in our own national press, it has been an inconspicuous affair. Although modern telecommunications have brought it closer to us now than ever before, for most Australians the outback is still a distant and abstract place.
Most young Australians still prefer to travel long distances to polluted, and overpopulated cities in Europe, America and Asia than to this mysterious world of endless space only a few hours away.
And they have a point: there is still little decent affordable accommodation, the food and coffee are as unpalatable as ever, and petrol prices are high. For many Melbourne people particularly - proudly cultural and epicurean, used to European trees and changing seasons - the outback is best left to the imagination.
But there is a loyal band of Australian romantics who, despite the many frustrations, can't leave it, or can't leave it alone: families who run the properties, people of the small towns, old drovers, and tourists like me.
One of the main events this year has been a three-month drove down through Western Queensland following an old stock route. And, along the way, unknown to people in the major cities, the towns of Aramac, Muttaburra, Longreach, Stonehenge, Jundah, Windorah (population 80), Quilpie, Charleville, Morven, Mitchell and Roma have been celebrating the drove with exultant parties through the night.
Although the droves were open to tourists around the world, most of those interested in riding a horse all day beside hundreds of head of cattle in the middle of nowhere turned out to rural Queenslanders. They included some drovers now in their late 50s and 60s, who took part out of nostalgia for their youthful freedom and contact with nature - what Banjo Paterson called ``the pleasures that townsfolk never know".
Although droving of a kind is going on, Ralph O'Dell, Bob Marshall and Lester Cain were the last of the real thing. As adolescents in the 1950s they would ride, sometimes for months, their supplies in a pack.
I travelled with these men for the 96-kilometre stretch of the drove from Jundah to Windorah in the Channel Country, travelling close to the Thomson River and Coopers Creek. About 400 kilometres north-east of Birdsville, it is Australia's best cattle country.
It is a flat land of brolgas, red-tailed black cockatoos, bustards, finches, hawks, wedge-tailed eagles, kangaroos, emus and wallabies, immense white coolibah trees and the occasional red sand dune, like a warning of the desert further west.
On the morning that the American multi-millionaire Steve Fossett made a forced landing in his balloon on a nearby property, we heard the urban American broadcasters who were interviewing him via satellite struggling to understand just what kind of remote place this was.
Lying in a swag at night, exposed on the freezing plain to the stars reaching from horizon to horizon, there was deep comfort in the sounds of dry logs burning, leather boots on earth, men's voices around the fire, the lid being placed on a cast-iron pot. I never knew that hundreds of cattle and horses go completely silent at night, nor that the sound of a walking mob is a hiss.
Each night, Ralph O'Dell, a 59-year-old ex-drover from Barcaldine in Queensland, sat beside the fire while his wife Jan stood silently behind him. ``My dad was a drover for 40 years and I can remember when I was a little tiny fellow all I wanted to do was go droving," he says.
When his father was gone for months, Ralph's mother was left with seven children. Ralph had to milk 30 goats before going to school. ``I never got to school much. When I left school at 14 I couldn't even read the newspaper. Jan taught me to read."
When he married at 21, his average drove lasted three months and his longest was seven months from Hughenden to Charleville. He might be back for just a week before leaving again. Ralph's kids were four and six when he stopped droving.
During all his long absences Jan was alone with her children, isolated in her home five kilometres out of Barcaldine. ``For years I was terrified on my own after dark," she says. A true drover's wife, she put her bed closest to the door and slept next to her children, ready for any intruder.
Meanwhile, way out, Ralph would come into camp at night and the cook would have dinner ready. Then they went to their swags, warm with four or five woollen blankets and a pillow. The night watch of the cattle never worried him. ``You would watch a star or the moon and you would know when it was time to call the next fella. I just loved being in the bush and everything around the bush."
He, and the other men, had one change of clothes, which they washed when the opportunity arose. ``When you would come to a dam or a creek you would walk in and scrub them on you and they would dry on you. They mightn't look so good," Ralph O'Dell says. Sometimes drovers didn't remove their clothes for a month.
He worked long ago with a couple of ``dark fellas. They were really good horsemen, good all round. They were very funny, those fellas, in their own right, they didn't even have to be funny. I have heaps of respect for 'em, for their intelligence and their tradition. And we're losing them".
Ralph eventually joined the police force ``with a bit of tutoring" but decided it wasn't for him. He settled with working for the fire brigade in southern Queensland for nearly 30 years. ``But every year on holidays I would come back out here. I always missed it. It was always part of me." He still doesn't know how to get money out of a bank.
Lester Cain travelled south from his property on the border of Queensland and the Northern Territory. He gave up droving early. ``Didn't like getting up and doing the watching. I didn't like it on the road. I preferred working on the station."
One night, a stranger materialised beside the fire burning in the middle of the plain. Tall and mild, Allen Hubbard owns a 400,000-hectare property through which the stock route runs. He says he knew intimately his 3900 square kilometres. ``It gets smaller all the time."
As for the drought: ``We will come through all right. If you weren't used to it you would find it fairly daunting."
About 12 years ago, a 27-metre tree crashed down on Hubbard's 25-year-old son. It was hours before he received medical attention. His massive head injuries left him completely paralysed down one side. ``He goes everywhere with us," the father says sadly.
The only thing Hubbard is not philosophical about is politicians. With no mains connection, he has to generate his own power and it costs him $1000 a week to run seven houses for his men and their families, with nine deep-freezers, a cold room, and the 16 air-conditioners that battle the 45-degree summer heat.
``I think we are entitled to have power out here. Their attitude is that if you are stupid enough to live out here you deserve what you get. We make a very big contribution to people in the city, to employment. If we closed down production you would find out what food costs. People in the city would feel it within 24 hours. People would be dismissed in their thousands."
Bob Marshall was 15 when he started droving and by 17 was a boss drover with ringers. ``There was very limited grog because of carting it," he recalls.``The best thing to cart was rum. You might have a nip every night but not two nips."
He married when he was 24, but in the mid-1960s, the big cattle trucks started to take away his work. He became a head stockman and property manager before buying a place of his own. The last drove he did was a whole month with his father in 1973 when they walked their 420 cattle 450 kilometres to a new property. ``We averaged 10 miles (16 kilometres) a day. We pulled it off."
He is disgusted by the kind of droving going on now. ``A lot of them are just using the stock routes instead of their own country for feed. They don't even shift their camp for two weeks sometimes. In the days when everybody walked stock you just couldn't do that, there would be somebody breathing down your neck and you would have to move on. That was until the mid-'60s."
Finally, standing on the banks of the Cooper to see the cattle come down to drink, is Sandy Kidd with his sky-colored eyes.
The owner of a 560-square-kilometre station called Mayfield, he is a third-generation Channel Country man from one of the pioneering families. His father, born ``on the banks of the Cooper" with the help of an Aboriginal mid-wife, is buried with his mother on the station under a bloodwood tree. One day Kidd will be buried next to them.
A pilot, he is a hero in this vast district for all his search-and-rescue work over the decades, and was long ago awarded the British Empire Medal. ``I find blokes who have escaped mental homes, people perishing," he says. He is so skilled - once he landed on a sand-dune - that he was employed by the Australian air force to teach pilots how to navigate in featureless country. ``There are no landmarks out here other than the changing river course," he says.
Kidd is also famous out here for his fight to defend the Cooper from cotton cropping. ``No irrigation on the Cooper," he says. ``It's a very, very sensitive land."
Although he hopes some of his five children and grandchildren will remain there, he says there has to be more incentive for people to live in outback Australia. ``One day the eastern seaboard will not be able to support people. The government has to give people encouragement to start up and see the droughts through."
He, of course, would never give up. But even outback heroes such as Sandy Kidd have their weaknesses. He can't work a computer or even a tape recorder. And he will never forget carrying a father to a helicopter crash where his son was dead on the ground. ``If I could've had a woman with me, that would have been good," he says, with the deep softness of a truly rugged man.
Anna King Murdoch is a Brisbane writer.
© 2002 The Age
