Horses Too Are Gone, The Read online

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  The Horses Too Are Gone

  ePub ISBN 9781742742861

  Kindle ISBN 9781742742878

  THE HORSES TOO ARE GONE

  A BANTAM BOOK

  First published in Australia and New Zealand in 1998 by Bantam

  Copyright © Michael Keenan, 1998

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Keenan, Michael, 1943-

  The horses too are gone.

  ISBN 978 0 73380 167 9.

  ISBN 0 73380 1676.

  1. Droughts—New South Wales. 2. Cattle—New South Wales—Feeding and feeds. 3. Cattle—Queensland—Feeding and feeds. 4. Queensland—Social life and customs—1990-.

  I. Title.

  636.2084

  Transworld Publishers,

  a division of Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060

  http://www.randomhouse.com.au

  Random House New Zealand Limited

  18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland

  Transworld Publishers,

  a division of The Random House Group Ltd

  61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

  Random House Inc

  1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  Cover design by Liz Seymour

  Cover and author photographs by Sarah Keenan

  Edited by Amanda O’Connell

  From first seeing the original rough copy, Bantam’s commissioning editor Jude McGee encouraged me to complete the task. Non-fiction is daunting and hellishly difficult to write. I dedicate The Horses Too Are Gone to Jude with thanks.

  Author’s note: characters in the story

  This is a true story. However, the tyranny of distance has made it impossible for me to locate and speak to every character who passes through the following pages so a few fictitious names have been used to avoid embarrassment. Some characters have a distinct role and I felt were more aptly described by a colourful nickname.

  Of the Wild Bunch I know very little. I saw groups of people I couldn’t identify on two occasions. Names given to the Wild Bunch are fictitious and physical appearances have been altered, so any resemblance to any person is unintentional.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Author’s note

  Acknowledgments

  Maps

  Introduction

  1. Myall Plains

  2. Reconnaissance

  3. The First Lift

  4. The Forbidden Mare

  5. The Grass Generals

  6. The High Plains of Death

  7. Race Against Time

  8. The Black Hole

  Photo Gallery

  9. The Wild Bunch

  10. Stake-out

  11. Dwellers of the Rangelands

  12. Bore Crisis

  13. Stampede

  14. An Autumn of Reflection

  15. Tableland Camp

  16. The Shadows of Anxiety

  17. The Dilemma

  18. Gorge Camp Attack

  19. The Dingo and the Omen

  20. Rescue

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Also by Michael Keenan

  About Michael Keenan

  First and foremost a special thanks goes to Sal, who must have spent hours that could nearly be counted in the hundreds at the computer. It really was a combined effort.

  I wish to thank Gil and Eunice Campbell for all their assistance, even to the point of listening to me read out rough copy chapters.

  Donna Lamb typed my first rough copy manuscript and she didn’t even get a kiss for that, but she may have been very relieved too. Donna also supplied me with valuable historical information.

  Scalp, who is so named in the text to fit his formidable reputation as a dingo hunter ($20 bounty paid for each scalp), must be particularly acknowledged for his assistance on geographic locations. He wanted to show me the Kenniffs’ principal hideout and I regret that I never found time.

  Smokie provided anecdotes of history in the Mitchell district, for example the fatal stampede thought to have occurred in the 1890s.

  The Old Boy provided the humour. It was far more than his jokes, it was more his unique style of description. I said to him one day, ‘What’s this bloke like?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you gutted him there’d be nothing left.’

  Noel Hamilton explained in detail a lot of the bushman activities, such as wild bull throwing and pig catching.

  Annette Fuller provided the coffee in her air-conditioned coffee lounge, where the first few chapters were written. I also looked upon her as my casual staff recruitment secretary.

  Despite his poor health, Bill Anderson opened up his stables and looked after two of my thoroughbred horses. His hearty laugh was still rumbling out of that massive chest only days before he died.

  I write quickly and off the cuff, sometimes not analysing too much. The thought arrives and down it goes. It is a free style that makes writing enjoyable, but it requires careful editing and for that I wish to thank Amanda O’Connell and Katie Stackhouse.

  A tableland formed by lava flows over some millions of years, gradually tapers away from the Warrumbungle mountains, running towards the Castlereagh river. The property Myall Plains is located on this tableland. In August 1994 the black basalt soils were as bare as a linoleum floor. The dark red poll Hereford cattle looked pathetic and even more pathetic was our attempt to feed so many. Before the calving began we had 1250 head. My wife Sal bagged the grain from the silo, Greg, who was helping us at the time, lifted the bags onto a truck and I lopped kurrajong trees. For a few months it had worked. By August the cows were heavily pregnant and a couple of kilos of wheat, a smell of hay and a few mouthfuls of kurrajong leaves were hopelessly inadequate. The last semi load of hay was down to five hundred bales and no more was available. We only had enough oats for the horses and if we wanted more we had to freight it across the Nullabor from Western Australia. The Wheat Board couldn’t keep up with demand and introduced quotas at some silos. Wheat’s not very suitable for stockfeed unless hammermilled and blended with roughage. To compound the grim situation, the cattle market in New South Wales had all but collapsed.

  There was only one option left remotely open—agistment in Queensland. Upon enquiry I was told there was feed north of the Roma—Charleville line, a huge journey for cattle already weak.

  For most of us life is orderly and reasonably predictable. Heading west or north in search of cattle feed was not something I hadn’t done before. The winters are cold on the tableland and it had always been good business to get the young weaner cattle out onto the warmer plains in the spring. The weaners usually went onto the same properties and were well looked after. When I left for Roma on 8 August I
didn’t expect to be plunged into a desperate struggle for survival, eight hundred kilometres from home.

  I feel it is necessary to write a brief background to this drought, because we hear of so many droughts, people might well ask, ‘What’s new?’.

  This drought began in March 1994 and, according to the Coonabarabran Rural Lands Board, officially ended in August 1996. There were falls of rain between those dates, but never that vital follow-up rain. It was so long that in the end none of us were planning to merely come through it, take a few losses and put the cheque book in the drawer. We were fighting to keep our farms—our homes—and not be forced to abandon everything and end up on the unemployment scrap heap. For those of us with Irish genes the prospect of losing our land is particularly abhorrent. We have this distorted view that land is symbolic of freedom; a sentiment that has its roots buried in the dark ages of British rule in Ireland. Old Irish names are common throughout the Australian farming community and it is interesting to note that all the families I grew up with in the bush are still there. They may have sold and moved, but they remain on the land and it is a tribute rarely given to people of Irish descent.

  I am fifth generation from Ireland. My great-great-grandfather, James Keenan, arrived in Sydney in 1828 and went to Bathurst to break in horses. In the 1840s he took up his own land along Borenore Creek in the Molong district. He must have thought we would hang onto our land, because he built a vault at Orange and in 1856 was the first one in. My father was the last, in October 1994, one hundred and forty years later.

  I have been asked what prompted me to write this book. It is a difficult question for me, because I just started writing when I realised I was mixing with some unique characters, straight out of the brigalow.

  An encounter between characters and circumstances is the source of any story, but something has to spark the desire to write a story. In my case I think the spark came from a love of local history. Wherever I find myself I want to know what happened there. Seconds before I crossed the bridge leading into the Queensland town of Mitchell for the first time, I saw the sign, ‘The Heart of Kenniff Country’. Immediately it stirred interest. I soon discovered that Mitchell’s claim to fame was the escapades of the bushrangers Patrick and James Kenniff between 1891 and 1902. The dramatic horseback shootout in March 1902 against a posse led by Constable George Doyle bears a striking similarity to the final scene of author Rolf Boldrewood’s novel Robbery Under Arms. Months later I found it a bizarre twist of fate that I should find myself in the same vast rangelands, watching out for unknown horsemen.

  In some respects this book is a journey back in time, a story of characters clinging to a way of life that is disappearing in a world committed to progress.

  August 1994

  The wind was up again. From the tree top I stared at the high cloud, hoping to see just a hint of moisture. The cloud was white—too white—like splayed cotton wool removed from an old bandage. Up there, maybe four thousand metres, a gale blew. There was no moisture. For six months not even a single scud of fine rain had reached the ground.

  My eyes gravitated to the horizon. More like the skeletal remains of a Dreamtime monster than a mountain range, the Warrumbungles stood impervious to all elements of nature. In thirteen million years they had lost only altitude. With a sudden wave of nostalgia I realised they were the only part of my life that remained unaltered.

  On the left, all alone, towered the Tonduron. Dangerous and strikingly beautiful, this thousand-metre spire is Australia’s Matterhorn. Nestled in the foothills below, the Mountain View Hotel in Tooraweenah is still the source of climbing tales going back a hundred years.

  A little to the right the summit of Crater Bluff seemed to be taking a peep through a saddle high in the mountains. With a shiver I remembered my ascent of the south wall in 1960. Further to the right loomed Burrumbuckle—a giant monolith of trachyte rock that resembled a crouched lion.

  To look out on those mountains was just an escape, I suppose. It never lasted long. The cows had spotted the vehicle near the tree. They were running and some were calling out. The dust from the bare reddish ground rose from their feet and looking through the rich green branches of the kurrajong tree I wondered what droughts this continent had seen to evolve such an extraordinary tree. If there is a tree anywhere in the world with the characteristics of the kurrajong, I have never heard of it. Cattle and sheep find the leaves as palatable as lucerne hay. The protein content is lower than that of good hay, but given sufficient quantities dry cattle will fatten on kurrajong.

  The tree itself has no lateral roots. Moisture is extracted from the soil by a single tap root. In large trees this tap root is thought to descend up to ten metres into the ground, and proof of this hypothesis is that the tree will continue to flourish in a drought when all other plant species are struggling to survive.

  I always start lopping branches for fodder at the top of the tree. If you slip and fall the lower branches will cushion you. But sometimes this method creates a tangle of branches before any reach the ground. On this occasion the first branch fell all the way. Within seconds it was torn to oblivion. One of the disadvantages of lopping kurrajong for stock is that the strong are always best fed. The weaker animals must wait until their stronger cousins have had a tummyful. If I am fit I can match it tree to tree with my axe with a powersaw operator. It seems to me that technology has introduced as many problems as it has solved. For the kurrajong tree it has been a disaster. The tree lopper of the 1990s is fast and ruthless. A powersaw in a tree is extremely dangerous and the operator minimises the risk by savagely cutting back the tree. Five to ten percent of the trees fail to recover, and those that do will not provide stock fodder again for more than two decades.

  In 1957 my father had an Aborigine and a German immigrant do the drought lopping. They used tomahawks and skilfully pruned the trees. In 1965 the trees were bursting with foliage and were lopped the same way. Today the landscape of the kurrajong belts that cling to the old lava flow soils from the Warrumbungles throws up a sad picture. The lopping in the 1994 drought has left thousands of trees resembling overgrown rose bushes. For anyone who may ponder over the future, it diminishes any confidence in the will of ordinary men to restrain their greed. Yet there are farmers who put aside time, energy and funds to plant trees. For them, the lopping of 1994 must have been a scene of despair.

  The dreaming was over. The tally chase had begun. Below me, two hundred cows were streaming in for a mouthful of leaves. None had calved yet, but when I looked down on those bloated stomachs and protruding backbones I knew the first calf would come before the end of the month. There were too many. The mob should have been split in half, but already some of our dams were dry. We were forced to run the herd in just three mobs.

  It would take ten trees to feed this mob. The first tree in the morning was the worst. The muscles stiffened overnight and I moved from limb to limb with a slight hesitancy. Then the sweat formed, the jumper came off which I tied around my waist, and I drifted into a world of wind, leaves and the sound of ravenous eating. By the third tree I moved with the ease of a monkey.

  By lunchtime this lot were fed. Two kilometres to the north the scene was the same. I had hired an experienced tree man from Tooraweenah. This little man lopped for nearly four hundred cows. He was fearless and lopped trees that we called virgins. They were twenty metres high. One slip would be fatal. Interestingly, there was not a kurrajong the Aboriginal women-folk had not climbed for the seed long ago. The trunks of the trees carried scars of stone axeheads. Using stone hand grinders, the women made flour and cooked what we would call scones.

  The best thing about lunch in the bush is the company. After four hours lopping it’s nice to hear someone speak. My wife Sal is one of those women with a natural gift of elevating the day above the drab and mundane. She listens to the news. She keeps in regular contact with friends—not for gossip, but for the stimulation of what everyone is doing from day to day. During hard times in the
bush the women provide vital support, for men tend to withdraw into a shell.

  Sal plays an additional support role, beyond the reach of some. She observes stock and watches paddocks. If a cow hasn’t moved for some hours she makes a mental note of it. She will ask me when I last filled a water tank. Most of us men are on our own now and we need this sort of help. And most important of all, when we come back from some job it’s comforting to hear the word ‘hi’.

  This day was a little different. Sal was bright as usual when I entered the kitchen, but her news was not good. She had taken a paddock drive through the weaners and the oats would be eaten into the ground within a fortnight. There were five hundred and forty of them to feed. Even if rain fell almost immediately there would be no feed for weeks. At five hundred and fifty metres above sea level and no protection from the seasonal south-west wind, our property, Myall Plains, was as bleak in winter as the Texas Panhandle.

  Sal put my sandwiches on the table and sat opposite with a cup of tea. We waited for the market report on the ABC. I had already made enquiries in the south and it seemed Victoria was the place to sell. There, the reliable winter rain had been below average, but just one good fall would ensure a reasonable spring.

  Fighting a drought is like fighting an invisible enemy. It’s there all the time, dug in, and as your resources diminish it tightens its grip. Like a general deploying troops, a cattle grazier makes strategic decisions. Some dig in and feed their stock, besieged but trying to out-wait the enemy. Others move their cattle in an attempt to outflank the drought. Some surrender and sell, taking the prices on offer. Sometimes those who sell are the only winners. Like a fallen city, the fight is over, but when the enemy withdraws you rebuild. The reality, however, is that few are left with sufficient resources to start again.