Another bloody Pommie Jackeroo
For two hundred years, a steady stream of young Brits - mostly young men to begin with, but more recently young women too - have been making the 10,000 mile trip around the world to work on outback cattle and sheep stations in Australia. Nobody seems to be able to explain why they're referred to in Australia as jackeroos, but they are, and because they're from Britain, they're pommie jackeroos or jilleroos as well. Nobody knows what pommie really means either, but you can bet that it isn't entirely complimentary.
The tradition is alive and well today, and a few years ago I joined that long line of pommie jackeroos, past and present. I thought it was a good omen that the Qantas jumbo I flew out of England on was named after my local city, the City of Newcastle, but it turned out they meant Newcastle, New South Wales. It also turned out that I'd picked a particularly bad moment to go looking for a job as a jackeroo in Queensland. Pretty much the day that I stepped off the plane in Brisbane the bottom fell out of the Australian beef market, and a large proportion of Queensland was declared drought stricken.
As the driver of the school bus from Bowen scathingly pointed out on the second to last leg of my three day journey into the bush, the last thing any cattle station owner in Australia wanted right then was another bloody pommie jackeroo. But I was very lucky. One owner did need someone who could ride a bit to help with an urgent muster, and trying to find a way to save the cattle on Cockatoo Creek from the drought added a vivid extra dimension to the already extraordinary experience of living and working on an outback station.
Water shortages have become an increasingly acute problem in many parts of the country in recent years, but in the vast and empty spaces between the tropical wetlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria and the icy waters of the Snowy River, Australia is one of the driest places on the planet, and drought has alway been a persistent hazard for everyone who tries to make a living from stock raising down under. The Australian outback is littered with the shattered dreams of hopeful stockmen and the bones of drought stricken cattle, sheep and horses in their unknown millions. There is always a drought somewhere in Australia, and wherever it is at present the station owners will be struggling to keep their cattle alive and praying for rain right now just as we did then on Cockatoo Creek.
As the driver of the school bus from Bowen scathingly pointed out on the second to last leg of my three day journey into the bush, the last thing any cattle station owner in Australia wanted right then was another bloody pommie jackeroo. But I was very lucky. One owner did need someone who could ride a bit to help with an urgent muster, and trying to find a way to save the cattle on Cockatoo Creek from the drought added a vivid extra dimension to the already extraordinary experience of living and working on an outback station.
Water shortages have become an increasingly acute problem in many parts of the country in recent years, but in the vast and empty spaces between the tropical wetlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria and the icy waters of the Snowy River, Australia is one of the driest places on the planet, and drought has alway been a persistent hazard for everyone who tries to make a living from stock raising down under. The Australian outback is littered with the shattered dreams of hopeful stockmen and the bones of drought stricken cattle, sheep and horses in their unknown millions. There is always a drought somewhere in Australia, and wherever it is at present the station owners will be struggling to keep their cattle alive and praying for rain right now just as we did then on Cockatoo Creek.
Britain suffers drought occasionally, but these are minor inconveniences compared to an Aussie dry, and it is some years since we were last banned from using hosepipes or told to share our bathwater. For the past three summers farmers in the UK have been praying for two dry days together, and the word drought has grown rusty from disuse.
It’s raining again today here in England. But the moment I think of Cockatoo Creek I can feel and smell the heat and dust of an outback evening as though I was sitting on a horse on the bank of our bone dry creek, watching a stampede of cows and calves hurrying anxiously towards the water troughs in the house yards, bawling and bellowing in the sudden tropical dusk,
It’s raining again today here in England. But the moment I think of Cockatoo Creek I can feel and smell the heat and dust of an outback evening as though I was sitting on a horse on the bank of our bone dry creek, watching a stampede of cows and calves hurrying anxiously towards the water troughs in the house yards, bawling and bellowing in the sudden tropical dusk,
I can feel the sudden heart in your mouth thrill of chasing wild cattle through the bush. I can smell the sweat drying on my horse’s neck as the baking day cools into dusk. I can feel the bruises on my backside from a twelve hour day in the saddle. I can hear the mad, mocking cackle of a kookaburra and the soft early morning song of the butcher bird; the invisible dingoes singing in the dark on the far side of the house dam; the laughter of a handful of people sitting on the verandah after supper in a tiny pool of light, surrounded by the infinite, uncontaminated starlit darkness of the outback night.
The outback is a tough and unforgiving environment. It isn’t a place that has much room for sentimentality. But my time as a pommie jackeroo left me with a deep affection and respect for the people and animals I lived and worked with there, hanging on with quiet determination in the hope that the drought would break before they did.
It also introduced me to an outback legend called Sid Kidman, whose fame as the largest landowner in the world in the early years of the 1900s may have had something to do with luring young Englishmen out to see for themselves the vast open spaces where The Cattle King had forged an empire. Kidman started his working life aged thirteen with five shillings in his pocket and a one eyed horse that had seen better days, and forty years later he owned or controlled an area of Australia larger than the combined acreage of the whole of the United Kingdom.
The station I worked on would have been a mere horse paddock to Sid Kidman, and the efforts we made to overcome the drought would have been nothing to a man who was estimated to have lost over 100,000 head of cattle in the big dry of 1901 alone. But even half a century after his death I think he would still have recognised much of our way of life on Cockatoo Creek. He would definitely have recognised some of the wild horses and even wllder cattle I encountered in the bush, and a few of the old boys in the bar of the Noree Hill Hotel. I think he would have waved his hat as we went past with a mob of cattle bound for the yards, and he would have known the value of every one of them down to the last cent.
It also introduced me to an outback legend called Sid Kidman, whose fame as the largest landowner in the world in the early years of the 1900s may have had something to do with luring young Englishmen out to see for themselves the vast open spaces where The Cattle King had forged an empire. Kidman started his working life aged thirteen with five shillings in his pocket and a one eyed horse that had seen better days, and forty years later he owned or controlled an area of Australia larger than the combined acreage of the whole of the United Kingdom.
The station I worked on would have been a mere horse paddock to Sid Kidman, and the efforts we made to overcome the drought would have been nothing to a man who was estimated to have lost over 100,000 head of cattle in the big dry of 1901 alone. But even half a century after his death I think he would still have recognised much of our way of life on Cockatoo Creek. He would definitely have recognised some of the wild horses and even wllder cattle I encountered in the bush, and a few of the old boys in the bar of the Noree Hill Hotel. I think he would have waved his hat as we went past with a mob of cattle bound for the yards, and he would have known the value of every one of them down to the last cent.
Living and working in Queensland left me with with a million fantastic memories,
and a huge debt of thanks that I’m sure I left unsaid to all the people who kindly put up with that callow jackeroo. I’ve changed their names here and the names of local places to protect privacy, but I’ve done my best to be as truthful as I can in every other way.
If you happen to read this and remember me, I hope you will forgive me for all the things I have misremembered or forgotten. And if I didn’t say it then… many, many thanks.
read more... A Good Place To Start
read more... A Good Place To Start