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I read in the paper recently that NSW Roads Minister is considering cunning plans to help truckers concentrate on the route ahead. One idea is to install a camera that monitors driver’s eyelids and how many times they look away from the road. If they are deemed to be tardy in this regard, an alarm will sound, and the seat will vibrate. A more extreme idea is to administer an electric shock via a bracelet if the driver looks away from the windscreen for more than two seconds. I’d be interested to see how these ideas are received by truckers!
I cruise around Winton’s wide sunny streets looking for coffee, finally parking in the main drag and wandering over to a young guy who’s climbing onto his Suzuki DR 650, a bike similar to mine. He’s a fellow cross-country man by the look of his gear. It’s plain that he sees me heading over for a chat but just pulls away, eyes front. Ah, well, it takes all sorts I suppose. The pretty young girl who makes my coffee is from Exeter in Devon and says she can’t understand people who want to live in cities. I sip my flat white, swat flies, listen to Stevie Wonder on the radio, and stare out at the almost-empty main street, expecting a tumbleweed or two to blow down it.
The North Gregory Hotel in Winton is where Banjo Patterson performed Australia’s unofficial national anthem Waltzing Matilda for the first time in 1895. Winton is also the centre for dinosaur country, as thousands of huge fossilised footprints are to be found in the nearby Lark Quarry Conservation Park. Tourists are reminded of this by plastic rubbish bins on the pavement made in the shape of dinosaur feet.
I phone Mick, who’s kindly offered talk to me and put me up on his nearby cattle station, and ask him for directions. He’s busy mustering but tells me to come up anyway and make myself at home. The ride out to Windermere Station is marvelous. A couple of kms out of town I turn on to a red dirt road and soon find myself riding across a huge dusty plain following tire tracks towards a collection of buildings in the distance. Mick’s wife Anne, is expecting me and I’m soon dumping my gear in the cosy spare room. The farmhouse is built on tall piles to allow for the regular floods, allowing Mick to build his own bar under the house. It’s here that I now find myself, beer-in-hand with Anne and Mick’s off-sider Dan. Mick plays barman. He asks me what I’d like and when I say, “VB please,” they all laugh and hi-five each other. “At last we can get rid of that shit!” he says, Queensland XXXX drinker to the core. Percy is parked in the bar next to us.
Cattleman Mick Seymour
I place my dictaphone on the bar and tell Mick, tanned, blue eyed, and as solid as a bull, not to be intimidated by it. “The last time I had one of them pointed at me, it was a policeman,” he says, and I realise that Mick wouldn’t be intimidated by much at all. I start by asking if he’s always been ‘on the land.’
“Most of the time,” he replies, “although I wasn’t born on the land. I was born in Cloncurry – my father was a shearer, a slaughterman and a butcher.” He sips his XXXX and puts my can of VB into a ‘Pub in the Bush’ tinny-holder. His hands are big, and work-worn. “You haven’t moved far then,” I say.
“Well I have – I’ve just gone in a big circle.”
“Well tell me of your journey,” I say in my most corny interviewer voice, half Parkinson, half Oprah, which makes everyone smile.
“I left school at 15 and took off on my own, working on cattle stations all over Queensland. I worked for Stanbroke, a big cattle company for over a decade.” Another sip of beer. “I wasn’t much good at school. I wasn’t stupid, I just didn’t like school work. I hated homework, so I’d get this girl I knew, to do it for me.”
It was while contract mustering around Clairmont in the Central Highlands that Mick met Anne. The couple, in their early twenties were soon married and had purchased their own property, a little 5,000-acre place near Clairmont. “We also looked after the property next door which belonged to a Doctor, which we bought off him,” Mick says
They then purchased Riversleigh Station in the Gulf of Carpentaria, which was around a million acres in size. I once again marvel at the sheer scale of properties in Australia. “At the time,” Mick says, “the station was undergoing a clean-up programme – TB eradication, feral cattle, etc – so was a good buy. But interest rates were 20% and it was tough going.”
Mick and Anne then fought a legal battle with the Government that would result in 200,000 acres of the property becoming part of the Boodjamulla (Lawn Hill) National Park and a World Heritage Site, containing fossil deposits that tell the evolutionary history of some of the most distinctive and isolated mammals in the world, dating back 25 million years.
Mike isn’t very forthcoming on the details, saying simply that it’s ‘a long story’ and I don’t press him. “I think we were the first station to have land forcibly taken from us. But the Governor General signed the papers and that was that. The compensation was a piddle-up-a-post. Like I say, it’s a long story and hurtful one,” he dismisses it with an, “anyway it was a good fight. Then the lead and the zinc mines came up there and the Aboriginals moved in. They were never that interested when we were just mustering cows, of course,” he says with pursed-lips and a shrug.
Then in 1996 they sold up and purchased the 165,000-acre Split Rock Station, 160 kilometres to the south. “It was largely undeveloped, so for the next eight or nine years we went contract mustering and droving to supplement the place.”
Mick and Anne would take all their horses, trucks, camping gear and seven or eight employees to go muster other people’s cattle for a daily fee, he explains.
“We’d go up into the Gulf, to places like Cliffdale, Beesbrook and Escott. Some pretty wild places, but it was exciting. We’d round them up, move them to the yard, brand ‘em, do pregnancy testing and weening – all the normal things. So, after all the expenses there was a bit of cream and this paid to develop Split Rock.”
“And three kids at boarding school,” adds Anne. I ask Mick how many people it takes to run a property of that size. “Not many,” he says, “you just have to work harder, day and night when you’re still young,” he says and hands me another VB.
Then, when one of their sons decided he wanted to become a butcher, Mick and Anne bought the butcher shop in the town of Camooweal, not far from Split Rock Station and while they were at it, bought two more in Mt Isa. Mick would slaughter his own cattle at Camooweal and take them to Mt Isa for sale.
“So, you’re a bit of an entrepreneur then?”
“Well,” replies Mick, nodding in acknowledgement, “we did that for about ten years, and meanwhile had bought another two properties at Tambo.”
With Anne now living and working in Mt Isa as a councillor, and Mick constantly travelling between Split Rock and Tambo, they decided to a buy property half-way between, which is how they ended up near Winton at Windamere Station. “It’s an ideal situation. If we’re trucking cattle from Split Rock, where we breed, to Tambo, we can give ‘em a blow for a couple of months here. So, there it is George, that’s our life,” says Mick as he opens another can of XXXX for him and his mate Dan who hasn’t taken off his battered akubra and has been silent so far.
Mick and Anne have
