Boyhood lacking in bones, or anything resembling a dinosaur

I’m doomed to darken the stony plains of Queensland’s far west looking for the dinosaur I should have found when I was six.

A pliosaur found in far west Queensland. Photo: Toryn Chapman.

Popular legend has it that ghosts exist because they have unfinished business with the living. One hears stories of spirits who hang around because of unrequited love or ­revenge or perhaps because they died before they got the washing in, which would explain the sheets, anyhow.

My issues are reversed in that I have unfinished business with the dead and I’m doomed to darken the stony plains of Queensland’s far west looking for the dinosaur I should have found when I was six.

This is a story of a cosmic near-miss so cruel in its geographic fundamentals that even 17th-century cartographers eaten by natives would have called it bad luck.

I spent much of my early childhood on a 1000sq km cattle station five hours west of Charleville in Queensland. It was a long way from anything but very close to the kind of earth that has been thrust up over 65 million years to be ­exposed again. The kind of earth in which one could find, God willing, a dinosaur.

I did not know any of this and neither did I show any particular aptitude for beef cattle, combining these two gaps in my knowledge in spectacular fashion by bringing the thigh bones of recently dead bullocks to Mum and Dad for ­inspection.

“Is this a dinosaur?” I would ask them.

Mum found increasingly patient ways to tell me that, no, these femurs and vertebrae and ribs and whatever else I hauled back were, yet again, the remnants of some of the 10,000 head of cattle on the property. Whatever passion I might have had for fossils added up to a somewhat efficient modern bone collection service and nothing else.

I thought I wanted to be a palaeontologist, after a brief and underwhelming stint as a budding opera singer, but a singular lack of success on my boyhood dinosaur hunts turned me on to journalism, where you get to write about people who manage to do the things you never could.

Outback Queensland, it turns out, is precisely the place you’d want to be looking for dinosaurs. The ground is ancient and along a certain line from Eromanga up through Winton and beyond, the shores of a long-gone inland sea perfectly preserved these dying beasts.

I grew up, never quite losing the feeling that I had been wronged. In my early 20s I was reading the newspaper from my office in Brisbane when I came across a lovely photo of our old neighbours on the cattle station next to ours.

And there they were, holding the thigh bone — bigger than a man — of the largest dinosaur found in Australia, Cooper. The McKenzie family had stumbled on to the bone while mustering and have since found at least three other species.

How rude, I thought, that Cooper didn’t have the foresight to die a little closer to where I would begin my hunt tens of millions of years later. My secret dinosaur was never mine at all. I phoned Mum and she laughed a little too hard. Her reaction was, broadly speaking, not helpful. I stewed on this for years.

In December I emailed Robyn Mackenzie at the Eromanga Natural History Museum. I explained my story and that I, too, had been looking on our station Mount ­Howitt.

“Oh, Mount Howitt most likely does have a dinosaur or two lying out there somewhere,” she said, casually destroying my childhood. Part of me wants to take extended leave to find it. The station is only one million acres, how hard can it possibly be?

Just before Christmas I was ­interviewing a grazing family on a station outside Barcaldine and mentioned my unfinished dinosaur business. The grazier paused the conversation and returned with the perfectly preserved jawbone of what appears to have been an extinct giant kangaroo. I mean, of course he did.

In the 40C heat we walked through the bone-dry paddocks of the property and the grazier yelled to his son.

“Tom, go find Rick a fossil,” he instructed.

Tom is 10 and I thought the ­request cute, if ambitious. I thought of ways to console the boy when he failed, just as I did, and readied reserves of empathy. Within 15 minutes Tom was back from his hunt with two fossilised shellfish and the imprint of an old plant in rock. Just like that.

I am not a very big fan of Tom.