Håkan Ludwigson’s Balls & Bulldust: shows cattle station life 30 years ago

It’s 1985, and a photographer captures a pensive 18-year-old jillaroo in the Northern Territory. Where is she now?

Adventure: Sarah Wynter, as she was then, pictured in Balls & Bulldust. Picture: Hakan Ludwigson

Swedish photographer Håkan Ludwigson has often wondered about the young men and women he encountered on the Northern Territory’s cattle stations back in 1985: where were they now, and what sort of lives had they gone on to lead?

This month, his 30-year-old images are published for the first time in a book, Balls and Bulldust. Among them is this shot, simply captioned “Sarah Wynter, 18. Beautician from Adelaide who left the city behind.” He wondered, what was her story?

Heart of the nation

Sarah Pollard, as she is now, is driving home from a nursing shift at the Royal Adelaide Hospital when this magazine calls; she pulls over to reminisce happily about her year as a jillaroo. At 18, she says, she was waxing the legs of women with Dynasty hair and hankering for a life filled with adventure and horses. So she wrote to Ted Fogarty at Lucy Creek station, four hours out of Alice Springs, to ask for a job – and that’s how she wound up branding cattle and cooking for Ted and his four sons, a dog-eared copy of The Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbook to hand. In the homestead and on horseback mustering camps, she’d start work at 4am, cooking stews and steaks, and cakes for smoko. Seven days a week. R&R was a dip in the station’s concrete water tank, which, for a resort-like touch, had been painted blue inside. “You were expected to work hard and not ask too many stupid questions,” she recalls. “It was a steep learning curve but a positive experience. I’m so glad I did it.”

She went on to work in Israel and at Madame Tussauds in London, before training as a nurse. Now 49, she’s married to Craig, her schoolyard sweetheart, and they live in the Adelaide Hills. They don’t have kids; their baby is a vintage homeware business that has them fossicking in old sheds all over Adelaide in their spare time. “We’re pickers,” she laughs.

When she sees Håkan’s photos of herself and the Fogarty boys from 30 years ago, the first thing she says is, “How young do we look!” The second thing she says is, “How dirty we were!”

Balls and Bulldust (Thames & Hudson, $100) is out now.