A section of coastline thirty miles long between the mouths of the Powder and Solomon Rivers defines the western boundary of Stilwater. But in summer, when the ocean moves inland and the flooding freshwater pushes a slurry of mud and land out to sea, who is to say where that line really lies? The eastern end is more clear-cut: a rusted, barbed-wire fence, worn through in places by the corrosive tea tree branches, running a semi-straight course from one river to the other.
The rivers form the other boundaries, the Powder to the south and the Solomon to the north—the S of its name a suggestion of the river’s track across the flat landscape. Stilwater lies in suspense between, its borders ephemeral as the rivers seek out more intriguing courses through the flat savanna. They loop and twist and eventually touch the gulf, two steely blue serpents, so perfect in their meandering that from the air they suggest an artist’s hand at work. Maps show them running straight courses directly to the sea. I decided that the cartographers in this country had never ventured this far; no river here had such a focus, no river in this country was so honest. The result is a hypothetical rectangle of about one thousand square miles.
Stilwater has been a cattle station as long as anyone can remember, but its history has the same ambiguous character as its borders. It was probably part of other stations at one time, and before that known by Aborigines who had better judgment than to draw straight lines across a dynamic landscape. But the British divided the territory and introduced laws of land tenure and enterprise; colonization ran its course and continued to frame existence on the continent. The land still nourished many, but it was owned as a set of resources and operated as a business for the sake of profit.
More recently, a company had used the station as a remote destination for outdoor enthusiasts and Japanese tourists. They built a large kitchen and several bunkhouses for the guests, made a few misspelled signs for the strange geometry of graded tracks across the station, and tried to make a little money off brave and foolish tourists who caught big fish and put stiff saddles on half-wild horses, then struggled to bring in a few cattle. Or so the story came to me.
Eventually they put the place up for sale, left it untended, and waited for years. Drug runners forming a link between Indonesia and Melbourne took over a few fishing camps on a secluded section of the coast and made their own dirt runway. Otherwise, most of the station was left to the wild, and the wild took it back.
At times it seems as if the farther a place is from civilization, the more people try to impose order there. The wild of the outback takes over as soon as anyone stops working. It disintegrates fences in a matter of a few years. Salt water and the oil in the tea trees turn the barbed wire into thin flaking strands, until they rust completely and become part of the soil again. Weather, rot, and termites dilapidate buildings and other structures, whole pieces of them washing away with every flood. Cyclones take down anything still standing and not rooted in deep. Cattle turn feral and old station horses run with the brumbies. Dingoes chew on the water lines. Fires scourge the dry grasslands and-sweep away all that remains.
A thousand square miles, flat but forested enough to make seeing more than a few miles impossible. This is Stilwater Station, such a definitive name for such an undefined place. I lived on Stilwater for a dry season, melded and became part of it, until I wondered if I was half salt water too.
The Sutherland Corporation purchased Stilwater a year before I arrived. Gene Sutherland was a self-made man who had created the largest privately owned, vertically integrated beef business on the continent. The Sutherlands were a sharp-thinking, hardworking, intensely loyal family. One daughter and two sons shared management responsibilities for the operations, which produced and shipped Australian beef to the far corners of the globe. They owned farms and pasture in the South, feedlots in Queensland’s Darling Downs, a meatworks, and millions of hectares in properties spread across the eastern half of the continent. Such geographic diversification of cattle properties provided more options for drought management, cattle dispersal, market flexibility, and access to export markets—meaning they made money regardless of the weather or the market.
They purchased Stilwater to make a profit. As in most enterprises, the wild corner of gulf country represented natural capital: grass grew there, which meant food could be produced to feed thousands with relatively little alteration to the landscape. But before that happened they needed to create an inventory of the stock, clean out the worst animals, and put the station back in operating order. They calculated the costs, the risks, and the needed returns, then proceeded.
No one knew how many cattle still ran on the station, but the guess was somewhere around eleven thousand. No one knew where these cattle were, or if they could still be called domesticated, but the initial plan was to take the station back and make it functional again.
The original buildings stood in the station compound along with the newer kitchen-dining complex, complete with windows and porches to admire the expansive country. Several houses and bunkhouses, an office, outbuildings, barns and shops—all in various stages of decay and disrepair—comprised the human encampment. Many of these sat on the same large lawn: the kitchen, houses belonging to the manager and head stockman, the ringers’ quarters, and a covered barbecue area; between them grew several shade trees, mangoes, and a fig. Beyond the fenced lawn, two long sheds had been constructed for a random mix of machinery that spilled over into two other equipment barns. The station had four cranes. Excess of some things and scarcity of others had yet to find the most efficient combination on the place, or maybe they just made up for each other. A diesel generator throbbed steadily to provide power.
Sutherland Corporation delivered a new tractor and paid for the repair of the old cranes and road grader. They put their personal security man in charge of hiring and firing, finding a manager, and arranging the mustering contractors.
Angus and Claire Sheridan were the first true station managers on Stilwater in more than a decade. They had lived many of their married years on an Aboriginal-owned, two-thousand-square-mile cattle station a few hours to the south along the gulf: a property that ran thirty-seven thousand cattle and took in $4 million a year. The gulf country was etched into their skin and coursed through their blood. They were perfect for the job.
They came to Stilwater Station in mango season, the dripping heat and water immediately isolating them. For six or seven months, Angus had been trying to figure out the bores—wells drilled into the artesian aquifer—and pipelines to water the cattle, the tangle of old fences, the few electric lines running off the generator, the rusting equipment, and the well-being and location of thousands of cattle.
Angus wasn’t tall, and he wasn’t thin. His forehead was engraved with a series of deep wrinkles, and he pulled his brown felt hat low over his eyes. He ambled about with a stiff gait from a previous injury, barefoot sometimes, or in sandals, with his little terrier, Frankie, not far behind. He didn’t get into the brawl and ruckus of cow work much. Instead, he tinkered with equipment, toured every road in his dusty utility vehicle, deciphered old maps and records and developed strategies for the work to be done, and tried to overlay his previous experience with the way things actually were. Once the world began to dry, his first order of business was to find a mustering crew who could handle the cow work, and a station crew to repair the infrastructure and
