Cattleman William ‘Bill’ Fordham remembered as a true Territory icon after death aged 83
From tracking down an axe murderer, to besting the biggest buffalo in the world, beloved dad Bill Fordham is being remembered as the stuff of true Territory legends.
Northern Territory
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Cattleman William “Bill” Fordham is being remembered as a beloved dad and a true outback icon after his death from Covid-19 last month aged 83.
Born with Gurindji and British heritage in 1940s Katherine, his life story makes up the stuff of Northern Territory legends – from the manhunt for Larry Boy, to surviving Cyclone Tracy, to besting the biggest buffalo in the world.
Growing up as one of 10 children on Gorrie Station, Bill was put to work young, tasked at age seven with a 22km solo trip to check on the cattle’s water.
“He’d use an anthill to get up on the big horse and wouldn’t make it back until about midnight,” his daughter Candy Stefanidakis says.
“I think that kind of childhood shaped him, and he passed it on to us – doesn’t matter if you were a boy or a girl, you were learning how to change a tire, saddle a horse, and there’s no such thing as a sleep in.
“You’ve gotta be strong in the mind cause the body will then catch up, he’d say.”
Bill could navigate by the stars and was an expert horseman, leaving Gorrie at age 19 to find work as a contract musterer at stations across the NT.
His skills in the outback made Bill a key player in one of Australia’s biggest manhunts – the 40 day and 40 night search for axe-murderer Larry Boy.
In 1968, Aboriginal man Larry Boy Janba found his wife Marjorie in bed with a white stockman, David Jackson, at Elsey Station near Mataranka.
Larry Boy killed Marjorie with a tomahawk and seriously injured Jackson before disappearing into the bush.
Newspaper clippings from the time show NT Police paid Bill $50 a day for seven men and 40 horses to join the search, “most of them broken by himself and his team of expert rough riding stockmen”.
“Bill Fordham has the quiet manner of most bushmen and an uncanny knack of looking neat, tidy and fresh under the most torrid and trying conditions outback,” the NT News wrote at the time.
Larry Boy was eventually tracked to a cave, where the group of stockmen and coppers pulled him out and he was arrested.
In the early 1970s Bill was told his leg needed to be amputated and that he had just 12 months to live after a melanoma was found on his knee.
He refused – “you’re not burying me with one leg” – and defied medical expectations by making a full recovery.
In 1974 Cyclone Tracy razed the Fordham’s family home, where Bill lived with his wife Shirley and their two young children, and they were evacuated to an Adelaide hotel before moving back to a demountable in the Top End.
Working in Gunbalanya in 1981, Bill shot a water buffalo for the community to eat.
Two years later the massive 3.01m span of the buffalo’s horns was officially recognised as the biggest in the world.
In 1988 Bill was part of the infamous Last Great Cattle Drive, where 1200 cattle were mustered over 2000km from the NT to Queensland.
Back in the Territory, Bill and Shirley bought 30,000 acres southeast of Katherine which they dubbed King Valley Station.
At the station the Fordhams ran a program for disadvantaged Indigenous youths, winning awards for their success in helping young people stay out of trouble.
“He could command respect, he was such a dynamic presence,” Ms Stefanidakis said.
Even up to his last days, the family expected him to pull through.
“I visited him in hospital and he says ‘what are you bloody doing here, you should be at work!’. That was Dad.”
Bill is survived by his wife Shirley, children Donna, Billy, Fiona, Candy and Shannon, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
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Originally published as Cattleman William ‘Bill’ Fordham remembered as a true Territory icon after death aged 83
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