He added, “They take care of me, and I take care of them.”
The few cows we passed threw up their heads when they saw us and disappeared into the scrub. Sarus cranes hefted up from swamp grasses on great gray-blue wings, masks pulled over their heads. Ibis clung to dead tree branches, their long hooked bills like sickles. Whistler ducks huddled at the edges of the murky waters. Wild boars rooted along the swamps, one sow with squealing piglets, one male with his head buried in the water, eating water-lily tubers and freshwater mussels. Paperbark tea trees wept along rivers and water holes while the bloodwoods bled down their shallowly ridged bark stained black with sap. Carbeen gums with white trunks and broad leaves; ghost gums with white bark and narrow leaves; ironbarks with poisonous leaves and dense heavy wood; black tea trees, low and almost bushy-topped; broad-leaf tea trees with elongated wide leaves and sparsely foliated short branches. Kapok trees grew almost naked with a few yellow flowers.
“What were you before you were a security man?”
“I was a cop. I was also a livestock inspector. I didn’t have such a benevolent reputation.”
As the hours of our station tour passed, he offered more information. He described different stations in the region and wove stories of people and families who had lived for generations in the sparsely populated wilderness, raising and stealing cattle and horses, slipping in and out of human tangles. He had a family in Cairns, a wife who waited for him through all his escapades and four sons who were better off when he was gone, he said; they were about as independent and strong-willed as he was. He preferred long intervals of solitude with short respites in the ocean air and civility of the eastern coast.
He started asking me a few questions then. Where had I worked before? What were my plans after Australia? I could see for myself, even as I began to answer his questions openly, how he gathered his information. He made me feel a sense of camaraderie, showing me his favorite places on the station, talking about his family, telling me what it was like to work alone and apart, to be a sea hawk over a long stretch of open plain. He said he knew everyone and was a friend of no one, preferring the distance afforded by an air of enigmatic malevolence. He liked Stilwater because it was the farthest away, the quietest. He liked inhabiting a world where urban laws of social interaction had no place and weren’t tolerated anyway.
We drove to a point on the Powder River where it was joined by another creek, the plain opening up suddenly into a wide tidal flux that carried jellyfish and crocodiles clear from the gulf. The water cut high along the banks, still swollen from the previous wet season. A white sandy beach and a band of trees on the opposite side separated the blue of the river from that of the sky. Stephen knew a crocodile that haunted this confluence. We crawled down the mudstone ledges sculpted with patterns of watermarks and onto an outlook of rocks that jutted into the river to look for it, but the monster never surfaced. Then Stephen drove me to another place, where a freshwater seep flowed into the brackish water. He’d seen crocs there numerous times, he said, waiting to prey on the wallabies that came down for a drink.
“Walk up quietly,” he murmured.
We did not see any crocodiles lying on the bank, so we climbed down to the water’s edge. He picked up a big stick in case of a sudden attack, though I wondered if it would only provide the beast with a bit of fiber in its lunch. I followed him to the seep, where he pointed out a carnivorous plant, lime green with sticky hairs exuding a droplet of sap, to which ants and bugs had become glued. He showed me a print in the mud—tail, body, nose, feet, and all—just under the high-tide line, with only the nose out of the water. I could see the entire story of the ambush pressed like hieroglyphs into wet clay. As soon as we had climbed the bank again and turned back to look, Stephen pointed to a crocodile that had lifted its head above the water. The croc followed us as we walked upstream along the high bank, keeping low in the murky water and surfacing one more time. Stephen called it a cheeky bastard. “Sly,” he said, “those crocs are sly.” I couldn’t believe we’d actually walked to the water.
He showed me a water hole, dammed to keep fresh water in and the inquisitive tide out. He said it had hundreds of crocs. We saw five or six lift their heads—just bulb eyes and nostrils above the water’s surface—and sink again. Long-stemmed, multiple-petalled white water lilies made the water hole seem like a Japanese tea garden, gum trees dropping long leaves toward the water, the setting serene. Then the outline of a crocodile head would appear and the water would seem suddenly murky and deadly. We headed back late in the day, churning up dust while the repeater, retransmitting a signal weakened by distance, announced itself over the CB radio.
As we neared the station compound, I asked Stephen how far we had driven.
“About two hundred kilometers.”
“Have we seen most of the station then?”
“Not even a corner.”
Stephen deposited me at the station compound with mild warning and encouragement: “They don’t get much drama out here, so they have to make their own; you’ll be fine.”
The Mustering Crew
AT THE BEGINNING OF FALL, just before I arrived, Angus had devised a plan to muster the entire station. He would start with the paddocks close to the house and bring all of the nearby cattle in to be worked—drafted, branded, vaccinated, and tick-dipped—at the house yards. This permanent set of pens for working and shipping cattle lay several miles up the road from the station compound. He would then send the mustering crew out to a middle set of yards, called Carter Yards, an hour or so away on a dirt track. They would commute from the compound each day with their motorbikes, vehicles, and horses, working the middle swath of the station. He would need a big cattle-hauling truck, called a road train, to bring the shippers—all of the cull cows, weanlings, orphan calves, steers, and old bulls—back to the station. Finally, he would send the mustering crew out to Soda Camp, a makeshift camp at the far northern reach of the station. A set of portable panels there could be made into an operable yard. The crew would have to move their camp entirely for the month or so he thought it would take them. He hoped that by the time they got out there the weanling calves, young steers, and cull cattle would be bringing in the needed income and the outlook would be favorable.
Angus found a mustering crew to begin the cow work and livestock inventory of the station—gathering, working, sorting, and shipping the cattle. A mustering crew sets up portable yards and camps and moves from paddock to paddock. They come in, they work the cattle, they leave. The head stockman of a mustering crew brings his own ringers and supplies them with food, petrol for their motorbikes, and horses, or horse feed if they bring their own. When they arrive, their world arrives with them: makeshift tents, strung-up tarps, forty-gallon drums of petrol and diesel, large stock trucks, packs of dogs, a herd of horses, motorbikes, four-wheelers, bull-catching vehicles, extra tires and wheels, long chains, short chains, saddles, guns, bridles, halters, catch ropes, bags of dog food, small generators, refrigerators, a portable sink, a portable washing machine, horse trailers—called floats—pots, pans, billycans, swags—bed rolls—unrolled on foam pads or rusty folding cots, spare batteries, truck parts, cans of fruit and vegetables, peanut butter, Vegemite, bags of white bread, and a folding table and chairs. All these items appear suddenly at the camp and then disappear when they move on. A cook usually comes along too.
On many stations, crews work with experienced efficiency, covering
