Queen Of The Road

The Age

Saturday August 12, 2006

Greg Bearup

The isolation, the relentless round of chores, the spartan camp life: being a drover is not for everyone. But for Janelle Little it's a wonderful job, even if she gets scant thanks for it. Greg Bearup and photographer Andrew Meares go bush with her.

The Gwydir Highway rolls gently down the western side of the Great Dividing Range, just south of the Queensland border, out through Inverell, Delungra, Warialda to Gravesend. At Gravesend the shop has a shelf devoted to pig-shooting, with Babes and Boars magazines displaying women in bikinis with freshly slaughtered pigs. The woman behind the counter tells us her life story as we wait for breakfast bacon rolls. She's only helping out, she says, because the wife of the owner cleared out of town and left him with four kids to look after. Four school-aged kids, the poor bugger!

Not far west of Gravesend the hills peter out, the start of an unending flatness that runs pretty much uninterrupted for 3500 kilometres or so to the West Australian coast.

It is here, half an hour out of Moree, just past where the hills end, that we find Janelle Little's camp. Stands of ironbark, river gum and box mark the Gwydir River's meander across the flat in the background. Her neat little caravan is parked a couple of hundred metres off the highway and is surrounded by the necessities of her life: half a dozen horses, seven cattle dogs and a couple of pups, horse floats, liberated council bins for feed, rugs, saddles, bags of dog biscuits, hard-plastic hat boxes for the town hats, a motor bike with bent handlebars, a generator and several four-wheel-drives - one with a licence plate that says drover. It is life stripped back to be packed up and moved in an hour or two.

Across the road, grazing on the frost-bleached pastures, is her mob: a thousand head of dark-cherry Santa Gertrudis breeders from someone's giant spread north of the border at Quilpie. While much of the east of Australia is in drought, Moree got good rain early in the season and there are now 33 mobs like this, fossicking through the district's travelling stock routes in search of feed.

Even to people from the bush, droving is an unfathomable life: the loneliness and the relentless monotony of yarding cattle at night, letting them out to graze, watching and warning them off the road, herding them to water, penning them at dusk, feeding dogs and horses and then doing it all again the next day and the next, month after month, without relief. And then there is rushing, or what the Americans call stampeding, where the cattle will get spooked at night, possibly by a feral pig or a truck horn, and break free of the yards. It may take half the night to get them back in and settled. Drovers are always losing dogs and cattle and even horses to careless motorists who ignore the signs. And yet Janelle says it is a wonderful life. "I have no interest in living in a town," she says. "I have no interest in doing anything other than working with horses and cattle. On the road you are your own boss." What you won't see as you hurtle down the highway past her is the joy she gets from teaching a young horse to work with cattle, the pride she has in fattening the herd and caring for the animals.

This life has ingrained itself in her. Her hands are worn and strong. The skin on her neck and face is tanned by years in the sun. She walks with the bow-legged gait of someone who has spent a life in a saddle. Her wardrobe is nearly all practical: jeans and boots and hats - only a couple of dresses, for weddings. And yet, in this harsh environment she is a calm, gentle figure, soft with her horses and patient with her cattle, although occasionally firm with a yapping dog. "Siddown, Darkie, ya bastard."

Janelle has been on the road with this mob since March. Her husband, Billy, left her three weeks ago to pick up another mob, 1600 Brahmans, to walk them a thousand kilometres or so from one farm in Central Queensland to another. She won't see him for many months, but she's used to that, being a drover's wife.

Janelle Little, 44, was one of seven kids born in the Central Queensland town of Roma, where her parents had a small farm. As we sit down in the van she tinks a spoon inside a coffee cup and tells me how she met Billy, then a stockman, at a rodeo in 1984. Both of them were competitors in the campdraft, both beautiful in the saddle. Was it a great romance, I ask? "Yeah, I thought it was," she says. "I thought it was something special." Six or eight months after they met she was pregnant with her first girl, Teneille: "An accident, a beautiful accident." Then, two years later, she had another, Sharna. Billy went droving and she went, too, with a toddler and a baby on the breast, through the great stock routes of Queensland and the Northern Territory, never seeing town for months on end.

"It was pretty hard, but I never noticed it at the time," Janelle says. She cooked on a steel plate over a wood fire, boiled water to bathe the kids. In those days, there was no pasta on the gas stove or snuggling up to watch Home and Away after the horses and the dogs were fed. "It was get in your swag, stare at the stars and freeze your arse off," Janelle says, with a slow laugh. "You can romanticise about those days, but I'd never give the caravan up to go back to it."

Those two kids, who were brought up on horses and on the road, have come to join her for this job, for a short time until she can employ new ringers. It's the girlie droving camp, they say. Teneille is now 20 and Sharna 18. Teneille is the more girlie of the two, horse-fit with dark wavy hair. Sharna is the tomboy, with a sharp wit and a confident manner. "She's boss material, that one," says her mother. "She's not the taking-orders kind." Sharna's Nissan Navara twin-cab has a Native American dreamcatcher hanging from the mirror and is fitted with pink seat covers and a matching pink number plate: sharna. Tough as she is, Sharna loves pink.

Back in the early days, when it was time for the girls to go to school, Billy stayed on the road droving and Janelle moved back to Roma to give them an education. After a few years she got a job in the Roma saleyards, working long hours drafting and penning the stock that came in for auction.

Each holiday the girls and their mum would hit the road to be with Billy. "It was heaps fun," says Sharna. "We loved it as kids, being out there on the horses and with the cattle." Their father used to bet them a dollar that they couldn't throw a calf, which involved jumping from a horse at a gallop, grabbing the calf by the tail and throwing it to the ground. "It was unreal fun." Or they would play chasies, with their father galloping off at full speed through the scrub, jumping over logs, and them trying to catch him. "It is not until you get to being teenagers that you think, 'Gee, I would like a hot shower every night,' " says Teneille. "And that you want to do stuff and see your friends."

Her parents' house back in Roma, Teneille says, "isn't all that flash" - small and comfortable, on 50 hectares near town, with great stables and sheds and lots of horses. Her dad's shed, she says, would be worth more than the house. "The shed has three truck bays at one end and a fully lit, undercover horse-breaking arena at the other. Dad doesn't relax much when he is home. Just can't, and at night he is out in the shed, breaking horses."

As a family, apart from going to rodeos, they have only ever had one holiday together. "When I was about 10 we conned Dad into taking us to the Gold Coast for three or four days," says Sharna, itching at the chance to tell the family fable. "Dad hated it the entire time. We went to Dreamworld and he was dressed in his cowboy hat. He has never owned a pair of shorts, so he wore a pair of cut-off Wranglers. We took Mum on the Tower of Terror and she was sick for three days with some sort of stress thing. Then we took Dad on this roller-coaster and told him it was a real slow one. It just took off and there were dead Boy Scouts popping out and Dad was screaming, 'Fuck this! Fuck this!' And all the mums were trying to cover their kids' ears."

At 16, when she was in her last year of school, Teneille met a young cowboy called Clancy at a rodeo. His parents own a farm a thousand kilometres north of Roma at Hughenden. She was a champion rodeo rider, a barrel racer, and he a champion steer wrestler and calf roper. Teneille talked her parents into allowing her to go to Clancy's for the holidays, she said, to help with the mustering. She never came back. Her father wasn't all that happy and made inquiries in the district about Clancy's family. "He was pretty strict and when we were young we were never allowed to have boyfriends - and if we did, we kept it secret," Teneille says. "All the boys were scared of him because he used to say he would castrate them." Did he say this to Clancy, when he finally met him? "No, I was scared that he would, but he didn't."

She and Clancy now travel the professional rodeo circuit, and last year she won the Australian title in barrel racing, a title her mum, Janelle, had taken out the year before. Teneille now has a dream to take a horse to the United States to try to make it big on the professional rodeo circuit. Her parents have given her a return ticket for her 21st birthday so she can "go over and sort out a game plan".

When she was 13, Sharna went up north droving with Billy during the school holidays. "A heap of his ringers pulled out, so I just stayed up there a few months," she says. "I missed heaps of school and got a taste for it and I never really went back to school after that."

She worked with her father for a year or so, droving and breaking in young horses on the road, until she got itchy feet and wanted to do something different. At 15 she got a job as a ringer on the Australian Agricultural Company's million-hectare Headingly Station, way up north on the Territory border. "I had to tell everyone I was 17, 'cause you are not meant to be that young." At first, the head stockman, a narky young fella, would try to show her up, "putting me on horses that buck, trying to get me dusted". After a short while she was accepted for her toughness and her extraordinary horse skills. (Two years ago, at the age of 16, she won the Australian ladies' buckjumping championship - an event she entered for a bit of laugh.)

Now her life has taken another twist, and Sharna has moved to Young in NSW, to live with an aunt and finish her schooling at TAFE. She still does a bit of horse work on the side and is waiting in a cafe to pay her way. ("They had to teach me not to say, 'G'day, how you goin'?' to everyone who came in.") She wants another life. She is thinking of perhaps joining the army, or a career in child care, but certainly not one reliant on a man. "In the bush I have seen so many women give up their lives and what they want to do, for men," she says, leaning on a bin of horse feed, outside the van. "Like my grandma, she was a schoolteacher in the city and my grandfather met her when he came down on a holiday and got her knocked up. She went out to the bush and she hated it and was miserable. There was nothing for her to do - she was a station cook. And then Mum comes out and droves for Dad and yeah, she loves it. But she used to love her job at the saleyards, too, but she forgets all that."

It is after lunch, and the girls saddle their horses ready to muster the cattle and bring them back to the river. Sharna's horse is freshly broken and when she puts the saddle on it bucks and snorts across the paddock. She catches him and brings him back, calming him with pats and soothing words. She then puts her arms around his neck and steps into one stirrup, slowly bringing herself up and then down again, and by the time she mounts, it is completely under her control. All of the women look more at home on a horse than they do on the ground.

There are two types of droving permit - a slow permit and a walking permit. The latter is to get stock from one place to another. The former, which is the permit Janelle has, is basically a grazing permit, which allows them to set up camp in the one spot for a few days before they have to move on to the next.

The three women move swiftly around the thousand cattle, with dogs in tow, whistling and making those deep-throated sounds that people make to encourage livestock to travel. "He. He. Ho. Ho. Getup. Getup. "

Cars bank up along the highway as the mob crosses, then the cattle wander languidly to the river to gulp down a day's supply and wallow in the cool waters. After an hour or so, with bellies full, they are driven back to the holding yard to be locked in overnight.

Good ringers are hard to come by, and Janelle has put the word out, looking for cowgirls. She wants to keep it a girlie camp - the camp has a different feel when it's all women, she says. Everything runs smoothly without the bravado. Each time her mobile rings - to the tune of Nancy Sinatra's feminist ode, These Boots Are Made for Walkin' - they all listen in, hopeful that it will bring news of female staff. The girls love spending time with their mum, but are anxious to get back to their own lives.

As light fades and the girls go about their chores, feeding the dogs and rugging the horses, Janelle sits outside and talks. She's so proud of her daughters, she says. She wants to do everything she can to help Teneille make it big, rodeoing in the States. She's proud, too, of Sharna, going back and getting an education.

And what about Billy, how has all this time apart affected your relationship? She stops to light a smoke. "It's not all roses," she says, after a bit. "Love it to be, and could tell lies to make it sound like it is, but it is not. There's too many people know the truth."

She goes to the caravan and pulls out a copy of The Land newspaper, where Billy is quoted talking about droving. "He just never thanks me. He doesn't respect me for what I do or as a human being. I am just always here, like the good old faithful dog."

Billy, she says, does what he likes, when he likes and with whom he likes. She hasn't heard from him since a couple of days after he left the camp three weeks ago.

It seems the girls have both driven 1000 kilometres or more, not just to help out, but to be with their mother during these troubled times. Sharna hints at the turmoil when I am speaking to her. "They are more like work colleagues than partners. Heaps of country women are like that. The husband becomes some famous campdrafter, some famous drover, some famous station manager, and the wife is just there, tagging along. Mum has got a bit of recognition now that she has a mob by herself on the road - but still, she got left here with no ringers. It can't be easy."

Later, she says: "Poor old Mum. Like, she has got nothing else. She does love it, but if she saw a new life and got to take it a bit easy now and then, and got to treat herself to some stuff, I think she would find that she would love that just as much."

For additional photographs, see www.theage.com.au.

© 2006 The Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home