Stephen Brook: He of the Never-Never

A city slicker finds it’s not all Banjo Paterson when he becomes a jackaroo on an isolated sheep station.

A more recent Stephen Brook.

This story has been reproduced from the original version which appeared in the January 24-25 1998 edition of The Australian Magazine.

SATURDAY: Rossco Foulkes-Taylor, 30, manager of Tardie and Yuin stations, stops in exasperation at the top of the handling race, slams down the drafting gates, leans over and fixes me with his clear eyes. I stand holding the spurt gun, self-consciously aware that I have, yet again, missed some sheep. Rossco (his real name is Ross) is no longer irritated. He’s incredulous. I’ve never known anyone to miss as many sheep as you, he says. What sport did you play at school?

What? I ask, although I hear him perfectly clearly. Jason Murdock turns, also interested. He wants to know what sport you played at school. Outwardly I remain calm, but internally I recoil. Sport. How has Rossco zeroed in on my weakness so quickly?

He’s waiting for a reply and itching to strike. I could just picture his reaction when I told him I didn’t. So instead I say hockey. It’s the truth. I did play it for a year in high school.

Jason says nothing. Rossco is left without a target, but it won’t be long before he finds something else. Why doesn’t the bastard ask me about my Higher School Certificate results instead?

This is life as a jackaroo. Sheep. Excited by the idea of jumping and flapping your arms about at a mob of them while making farting sounds in the hope they will trot obediently into a shearing shed? Neither am I.

I survey the yards of sheep beyond the shearing shed at Tardie Station, Yalgoo Shire, Western Australia. It’s a far cry from my visions of gallivanting across rugged ranges on a powerful steed, pulling sheep from swollen rivers in a single grab.

Tardie and its neighbouring station, Yuin, are560km north of Perth. We are 240km from the nearest restaurant and cinema and 130km from the nearest supermarket, but the shearing shed is a great place for a party. The Foulkes-Taylor family has been at Yuin since 1929. Their family business employs six people

A young Stephen Brook graces the cover of The Australian Magazine in 1998.

full-time on the two properties. We are surrounded by 192,000 hectares of paddocks and 18,000 sheep, which survive on rainfall of 225mm a year thanks to windmills bringing water up from underground.

Ross, the photographer, and I are bunked down on sagging camp beds in the room next to Jason’s in the shearers’quarters. Tall, thin and with an air of quiet self-sufficiency, Jason is a 17-year-old South Australian who has worked here as a jackaroo since March. It’s a life of nine-hour days, five-and-a-half-day weeks. After a month’s trial, Jason has given a verbal commitment for a year of grinding physical work. He says he’s never bored. No way. There’s always something to do. It’s always busy. You get a day off now and then and you just rest. His pay is $350 per week minus $70 board.

I was 18 and ready for anything. Frank Wittenoom wrote this in his diary when he arrived at Yuin Station in 1874. Frank was the Yuin’s first jackaroo, called up here to help carve it out of the bush and make it the first station in the area.

I, on the other hand, am 24 and not ready for very much at all. I’ve been a city boy through school, uni and lately in between breaks from my reporter’s terminal. I’m also thin but I have filled out only slightly more than Jason. Friends tell me that my school photos made me look like Mr Bean. Nevertheless, here I am, an urban cub reporter on a four-day stint as a jackaroo. The land around the station is gently undulating but the bushes block my view, giving the place a closed-in feel. The colour of the earth changes from red to ochre to orange and back again. It’s sunny but not hot.

My first task is to herd some of the newly-shorn sheep into a long, narrow-roofed race so we can spray them before loading them into a semi-trailer for transport out back to the paddocks. I’m going to treat you just like I would if you were an ordinary jackaroo, Rossco says. I’ll yell at you if you do the wrong thing and tell you when you are doing the right thing.

I approach a group of naked-looking sheep freshly ejected from the shearing shed. They are not particularly interested in me, but obligingly move towards the race before wheeling around abruptly and making like the clappers for the outer limits of the yard along a fence I haven’t covered. Rossco, who once drove his children through the schoolroom on his motorbike, has a direct smoky-blue stare from beneath his wraparound shades. He watches everything like a hawk and likes to let you know he knows what is going on. I’d have thought you would have used up the bottle by now, he says as I slap on yet more sun screen. He even challenges me to get my own back in the article I’m writing.

Different men have different methods for getting the sheep to move. There are flank men and rump men, others believe a good prod on the backside is the best method. They also have different names for the sheep. Rossco calls the ewes mum and the lambs lambo, even after bashing their brains out on the ground. Jason and Andrew a 25-year-old ex-jackaroo up from Perth to work during busy times prefer to call them bitch, or something unprintable. Once Jason yells out: F … you bitch, if you’re going to be like that you can go to Saudi Arabia before turning bright red when he sees me put it in my notebook.

Around 10am we all stop for smoko the morning tea break where nobody actually smokes. Instead we troop back to the homestead and sit around the veranda table yakking. I sit at the table but barely listen to the voices. I feel elated but exhausted, the hard physical work is immensely satisfying but leaves me feeling slightly drunk. Things could not be going better, but there’s one big problem: I desperately need to crawl under the table, curl up and have a nap.

Beyond the back fence of the holding yard, behind the shearing shed, runs an old disused channel cut into the ground. Flies rise off a dark pool of liquid as we walk past. Old Alby from Geraldton waits for us at the channel edge and gives a hearty greeting.

We begin heaving sheep marked with a blue paint dot over the fence. Alby grabs a sheep from Jason and lays it on the ground. He kneels down beside it for a moment and then tosses something to the side. I look over. It is the sheep’s head. Alby has sliced it off in a trice. It hasn’t even bleated. Before long the row of beheaded sheep stops twitching and lies still. Gingerly I put my hands around the forelegs of one, expecting it to twitch furiously as soon as I touch it. The carcass is warm and floppy. I rush it over to Alby’s truck, trying to ignore the blood and yellowish liquid which gushes onto the ground next to my boot. Some of these sheep are flyblown, sick animals with flies breeding in their wool or even in their skin. Others are unsellable and have patches of black wool ruining their coat.

Death is part of life on the sheep station. Before long I am heaving a plaintive-looking lamb over the fence to see it have its throat slashed, knowing sometimes its only crime is a small black mark which makes its wool resistant to dye. I am helping Larry the lamb to meet its maker but I don’t feel a thing, even when the results end up on the dinner table. It all seems part of the job.

Thank God for lunchtime. By the time it rolls around my forearms ache just below the elbow joint. Pride forbids me asking for a flexi-afternoon, even though I’m ready for bed at half past one.

While the AFL grand final is on I steal away to my camp bed and seek solace in my notebook. The shorthand reads: 2.30pm. I’m on my bed while Ross takes photos of Jason. I can’t go on. What was I thinking of? I have TWO MORE DAYS.

Outside Rossco is on the move. Where’s Stephen? he calls out. Is Stephen doing half a day in the life of a jackaroo? he asks loudly of no-one in particular. The chance of Rossco discovering me laid out on the camp bed is enough to get me off it. I survive my first day. By the end of it I’m smeared with blood, sheep shit, spurt, grease, rust and dust and have learnt how to jack up a car. I have well and truly bloked up.

It’s Saturday night. I think of my friends back home in Perth who will be heading out for the evening. Out here the options are limited. Are you going out tonight? one farm worker asks another. My ears prick up. Is someone having a party? Or is there a nearby pub we have missed? The answer is no. As it happens, they are talking about going roo shooting. I fall into bed exhausted at 9.30pm. The words of Michael, Rossco’s father, are ringing in my ears, Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed the easiest day’s shearing we’ve had in ages.

Sunday: Sheep. They are a stoic lot. You can boot them up the arse, spray them, snap a tiny rubber ring around their tail or their balls, cut off their arses or even their heads without getting so much as a bleat out of them. When you do hear them is at sunrise, when a concerned ewe is separated from her offspring, or when a lonely lost lamb calls for its mother.

I spend the morning cradling lambs, while the others get out a silver claw and snap a tiny green

rubber band around their tails and testicles. The station buys its own rams. Freelance breeders are unwelcome.

Handy farm hint: How to pick up a sheep. Step one: First catch it. Step two: Hug it around the chest and pivot it back onto your thighs. Step three: Bend knees. Step four: Hoist. Step five: Ignore faeces dribbling down hind legs onto you. Step six: Get the hind legs over the fence and roll gently so it lands on all fours.

Sunday draws to a close and I take a shower in the block next to the shearers’ accommodation. As the hot water washes over me, the satisfaction I felt at the smoko floods through. Absurdly, it’s a bit like the feeling of falling in love. I could do this job, I think to myself. In fact, I think I’m going rather well. Outside I hear Michael and Rossco walk past, talking.

Michael: he’s obviously fallen apart a bit today.

Rossco: Hasn’t he just, the poor bugger.

Monday: Having ridden a motorcycle only once before, I don’t expect to be much help in the afternoon muster of 800-odd sheep, but plan to hang around the back, keeping well out of the way. How ambitious. Rossco shouts me instructions but I’m so distracted by the challenge of keeping myself on the bike and the bike upright that I don’t register what he says. He speeds off into the paddock shouting something about spiders and their webs between the bushes. Was that some’ or none’ of the spiders’ bite? I wonder as I drive promptly off into an enormous cobweb.

In just under an hour I manage to:

1. Get lost.

2. Ride into a bush.

3. Fall off while in second gear.

4. Stall (five times).

5. Ride over a log (twice).

6. Get stuck in a creek bed.

Rossco has disappeared ages ago. Michael is piloting the plane overhead, relieving for his wife, Jano, who does most of the flying. Through the walkie-talkie clipped to my shirt I can hear Michael relaying instructions to other motorbike riders. My whereabouts are an occasional topic. I keep speaking into the walkie-talkie but no-one ever seems to hear.

Time passes. I wonder how chilly it would get overnight. Time for action. Maybe if I hold that button down on the walkie-talkie while I speak into it I’m in a clearing, I yell excitedly to Michael as he flies overhead. He replies dryly: Well, there are a few of those about. Back on track, I can still play a part in the final stages of the muster the critical moment when the mob approaches the shearing shed and is herded into the yards. Noisily I burst clear from a thicket. The mob is ahead. Andrew roars in front of me yelling go away in a loud and angry voice. What is going on? The mob is in sight, but why are the sheep running the wrong way? When I finally make my way back to the pens no-one says anything. Rossco is conciliatory when I shuffle forward to apologise.

My reflections on these and other matters in the shower that evening are interrupted when a shearer strikes up a conversation from the next cubicle. He

makes $1.55 for every sheep he shears and can shear 20 in an hour. What do you spend the money on? I ask. Oh, drugs, beer, whores doesn’t everyone? he laughs. The shearers are paid by cheque, which they can collect at the end of the shed. You can get a cheque for $500 and a cheque for $1500 and bank the cheque for $1500 and get the cheque for $500 cashed and then go down to the pub. Another laugh.

After dinner, when the rest of the household drifts off to sleep in front of the telly, Jason comes alive. At Tardie the only female anywhere near his age is Tammy, a 27-year-old traveller from Canada who works around the homestead. They talk about other young people in the area while Tammy shows us photos of her sister’s recent wedding. Has she divorced yet? Jason inquires looking at a snap of the happy couple. Is that your mum, she looks heaps old, much older than your dad, he comments while Tammy smiles thinly and shows him a photo of her having a glass of wine. Is that you? Jesus you must be full there, he says. Jason is chatting up Tammy. His seduction technique consists of insulting her as much as possible, a sophisticated approach for someone his age someone must have been giving him lessons.

Would I be happy in his place? I had planned to write a diary but I felt happy enough to turn it into a love letter. Could I stay on here? Did I want to stay? Would they have me?

Tuesday: Sheep. Herding them requires a deft touch and more than a little of the tactician. Experienced herders would think ahead, make sure they have enough sheep available in the next yard to send through, and ensure everyone is in the right position before they send them off. You design your own strategy, and it is fulfilling to stride towards a tightly packed mob of sheep and watch them part like the Red Sea and flow past you. It makes up for the times you have to wade in and prise them apart as they determinedly face the corner of the pen. Standing around in a yard making farting noises at sheep is turning out to be fun, and feels better than sitting in front of a computer all day. I am actually doing something.

It’s nearly time to leave. I sit with Rossco on the smoko veranda. He says it is very, very satisfying herding sheep around a pen. He then confesses that he really likes sheep, before telling me not to write that because people in Kings Cross will get the wrong idea.

His wife, Emma, manages Yuin with him and runs farm stays in the homestead. They are glad their three children have a chance to experience the very little but very significant incidents which shape life on the station: Killing a sheep for dinner, seeing a lamb born, tying a dog up at night, ants burying food before a cyclone is developing.

I’m feeling warm and happy again. Would he employ me? I ask. Probably not yet, he says. He contemplates the question before straightening up decisively. You wouldn’t stay here because you are too old. I think if you were younger you would.

Would I? I thought about that on the long drive to Perth, when I was back at work, irritated by narrow city spaces, and I thought about it at night in my room, where a twisted branch of sandalwood rested on my chest of drawers and my farm shirt and pants lay unwashed in a bag on top of the wardrobe.