The Strength In Us All, page 13
I finally arrived in Sydney in the middle of the night and continued to sleep through what was left of the night in a bed. Sleep was something I couldn’t get enough of lately. Perhaps my body was trying to tell me something. I spoke at the luncheon on the Saturday, had dinner with friends I hadn’t seen for a while, got back to the hotel at a reasonable time and put in a wake-up call for 5 a.m. My flight home left Sydney at 6 a.m.
I got home at 7 p.m., thirteen hours’ travelling. And that was after another so-called ‘direct flight’.
I sat down in the living room, too tired to move. The cook bombarded me with complaints about all the special food that hadn’t turned up on the order. I was very close to saying it didn’t make any difference because he’d have ruined it anyway, but held my tongue. Some day I will find a good cook. Uncle Dick was doing last-minute repairs to the guests’ room and the house girl was following him with a vacuum cleaner, cleaning up after him. She didn’t know it, but by the look on Uncle Dick’s face she was dangerously close to having a vacuum hose tied in a bow around her neck! Marlee and Franz were thirty miles out of our road helping a cattle truck that was stuck on one of our jump-ups.
I went to my bedroom, took a hot shower, locked the door with Jedda inside, so every time someone knocked she attacked it, and drifted off to sleep to the sounds of growling and snarling at the door. However, the locked door didn’t stop Marlee—she came around to the window and just stepped inside. It was around midnight. The cattle trucks were waiting at the yards ready for loading. She would start before first light so the driver could be over our dirt road and onto the sealed highway in the cool hours of the morning. This was better for the cattle. So she’d be gone at 4 a.m. and I wouldn’t see her. We had to talk now.
We sat out under the stars, ate sandwiches and drank cold beer. Franz was in the shower getting the dust and grime off.
Ours were the usual problems—too much to do and not enough people to do it. The running of the house, entertaining the tourists for the next three days, and the general office work were my responsibilities. The cattle were Marlee’s. Marlee said that after they had loaded, drafted and branded they would come back to help me.
She left at 4 a.m. and I was up at five to get some office work done before I started on the staff. There was a note on the desk, from Marlee: ‘Have left Franz in bed. He has a high fever and does not feel well at all. Please look after him till I return. Love, M.’ I just knew it was going to be one of those days!
The tourists arrived at eleven o’clock and I walked out to greet them. All the people we’ve had over the three years have, without exception, been delightful—we still get Christmas cards and letters from many—so I suppose Murphy’s Law dictates we had to strike-out some time. And strike-out we did, in a big way.
There was no pleasing this particular visitor. He complained about absolutely everything. After a few days he announced that he and his entourage were leaving early. I quickly handed him the phone so he could book the plane, and had to tell the staff not to cheer until the plane took off, just in case he heard. He reminded me of ‘Gloom and Doom’ out of Dick Tracy, only Gloom and Doom had more appeal than our guest.
All week we had trouble with cattle trucks breaking down or getting stuck on the road somewhere. It took longer than usual to move the cattle out of the yards, so it was only a few days before the next lot of tourists. We were dreading them, after that last miserable man. But these people were lovely, and enjoyed everything they did. On the last day they asked me to sign a copy of my book which they’d brought to the station with them.
We had a few quiet days before the end of June and another celebration, in a peculiar sort of a way. On 30th June I made the last payment to Trippe. Nothing to celebrate of course, paying out money, but not to have to find that same amount of money again in thirty days took a tremendous load off my sagging shoulders. I could now push that aside until the following year, when I would have to start the battle over the court costs, and would again have to find extra money. But that was a whole year away!
*
By July I was very close to a nervous breakdown. Instead of losing weight when I worry I eat so much I put it on. I weighed more than I had ever weighed in my life, I wasn’t exercising and I worried day and night.
The crops had failed, months and months of backbreaking work had dried out and crumbled before our eyes. You could not believe that green fields as far as the eye could see could just turn into dust. In only a few months there was nothing but bare dirt. Only the ridges of the ploughed ground lay as evidence of all that work. What was left of the sorghum, after lack of rain had dried it out and the grasshoppers had had a feast, we baled. We knew we would need every morsel of feed we could get together for the animals. This was not going to be a good year; any amount of hay would help at the end, especially if the rains were late. Our cavalcade crop had just crumbled and blown away in the wind, in those fields we only had bare ground.
However, the seeds were still there and we were assured that they would regenerate with the next rains. We only had to wait. Still, it does something to you to watch your crops die! The past months of worry, finding and paying the money in an unjust court judgement was still very much affecting me. The pressure of the book tour and the worry that I had to succeed were also taking their toll. And the running of the station for a season was always such a challenge that I needed a rest just from that at the end of each year. For six years there had been no rest at any time. We had been working seven days a week without a break. I was starting to show signs of cracking. The throat infection that started in February at the IBM conference would not go away. And to add to it my ears were now affected. The only time they felt normal was at 30,000 feet, up in a plane. The doctor told me it should be the other way around, and I said I was well aware of that but my ears seemed to think differently.
I walked around in a daze; I hardly smiled. I suppose it’s called ‘withdrawal’. I found I avoided people, dreaded meeting anyone, wasn’t interested in the next day. Everything seemed to be piling in on me; the world seemed to be going too fast and I wanted to get off. The doctor suggested anti-depressants. I said no.
I was still working from daylight to dark, every day—as were Marlee and Franz. Marlee was faring much better than me, but I could see that if we both didn’t have a break soon, we would be in serious trouble.
I was now like a robot. I went through the day’s work with one thing in my mind—to get to the end of the day and into bed. Bed became my only sanctuary. Yet I knew everything I had done that year had had to be done to enable us to survive. But to survive I was tearing myself apart. I would crawl into bed at night wondering how we could do all the work required to get to the end of the year. Having paid out all that money I now had to find enough in the next few months for us to get through to the beginning of the next season in April. The income from the next few months of cattle had to last us through the six months’ rainy season. The droughts in Queensland and New South Wales had brought down the price of cattle by fifteen per cent, so on top of losing all that money our income for the season was also down before we even started.
I suppose it’s therefore not hard to understand why I withdrew. But the rest of the year was waiting and my head-in-the-sand approach just didn’t work. I had to get on with living. People wouldn’t stop knocking on my door, and I had to answer.
Whenever my life gets to these darkest moments and my general feeling is, ‘Stuff it! It’s just too hard,’ fate or God offers a hand and pulls me out of the black hole. Little shafts of light flicker through, and before you know it you are back in there fighting. And in the latest shaft of light we saw our next tourist: five-foot, one-inch Katie Barkell from Sydney.
When the travel agent booked Katie in the beginning of the year, he said she was seventy-eight years old. I told him this was very rough country, and that I wasn’t sure a person of that age would enjoy it. He assured me she was very healthy and very determined to come to Bullo. So Katie arrived on a plane with a load of horse feed, beer and food supplies. She walked into the house and I knew it would be A-okay. Katie was just so full of life, eager to find out what the next minute would bring. I’m sure she was very much like Marlee when she was her age; well, she still was, at seventy-eight!
She wanted to experience everything that was going. She even went bullcatching with Marlee and had her photo taken sitting on the trussed up wild bull. And loved every minute of it. She had probably been just as spunky in her younger days. These days she is expending her energy exploring the world. She read about Bullo in a magazine and decided it was one place she wanted to go. The travel agent realised she could not be put off with a trip to sand and palm trees, so she arrived at Bullo.
Katie was a good tonic for everyone, a breath of fresh air. We all loved her and she boosted my spirits considerably. Made me realise that problems were just problems and they would pass, but what I had—my home and family—were there forever. I felt I really had no right to feel sorry for myself. I was healthy, I had people that love me, friends, a home, options in my life, freedom to choose. I had the lot! Self-pity only delays progress. Other friends dropped by for a few days and being surrounded by those who are close to you was good for the soul.
*
We had three days before the next nine tourists arrived, so there was no rest. This group was made up of two families, five children in all. And we were lucky again. They were delightful people and they lived not far from Katie in Sydney. The children had a great time and that is, I think, the measure of a good family holiday: if the children are happy, the parents relax. It was our first batch of young children so it was a challenge for us. But the station so completely captivates youngsters that we really don’t have to do much, just sit back and let Bullo weave its magic. Which it did.
Soon afterwards I had a speech in Coolum at the Hyatt and so I tried the ‘cure’ again. Two days in Darwin, on the magic massage table, under the expert hands of Zelda. I added to this cure by going to stay with Susan and Ralph for a few days’ rest before the conference. I was looking forward to three blissful days staring at the waters of their quiet creek and out to sea, surrounded by bushland. A noiseless retreat from the ‘life out of control’ style of living I was caught up in at the moment …
And that was when I was first introduced to ‘Troubles’.
Susan had not been well for a long period of time over the past year or so. Nothing serious, just different complaints, one after another. Marlee and I had decided she had been too long without a dog. She had always had dogs in the past, and taking care of them occupied a great deal of her time. We felt she now had too much time on her hands and that a new dog would cure this and most of the complaints. That was our opinion, anyway.
We offered her a puppy by Hunter, or a puppy from the same kennels, but she refused, saying she was too old to train a puppy. We offered to train the puppy to the ‘well-trained’ stage and then hand it over, but she felt that this breed of dog, although gorgeous, was just too much for her to handle. I could understand this—there are certain dogs for certain people. Susan was simply not a Rottweiler person. But Marlee couldn’t understand how anyone could not love a Hunter, and was sure that when we gave Aunty Sue a Hunter puppy she would fall madly in love with it. With that, she went ahead and ordered a Rottweiler puppy from the same kennels as Hunter and Jedda had come from.
She arrived a few months later and we called her Emi. Jedda and Emi were like sisters and had a wonderful time growing up together. Of course everyone fell madly in love with Emi, including me, and I could see the writing on the wall—we wouldn’t want to send her away when the time came. But we followed the plan and sent photos of Emi playing, Emi sleeping, Emi eating, etc, etc. As Emi grew in size and into our hearts there was less and less talk about ‘when she goes to Queensland’. Marlee would say, ‘when she is bigger’, but I knew I couldn’t part with Emi. She was part of our life now. So the departure time was always put back a bit. But fate had decreed Emi was not to belong to anyone.
She was only eleven months old when she disappeared. She and Jedda would race and play for hours in the early morning, before the heat of the day. Then one morning only Jedda came home. She was very upset and shaking and would stand and stare out across the paddock towards the river.
We went looking for Emi after a little while but there was no sign of her. We never found a trace. One of the stockmen who had been repairing fences along the river said he had seen Jedda and Emi playing along the river edge each morning during their playtime. We don’t know for sure but it looks as though Emi was taken by a crocodile. This seems the only explanation for her disappearance—if she’d been bitten by a snake she would have made it home before the poison took effect, or we would have found her during our search. Also, to support the crocodile theory, Jedda got very nervous the next time we took her fishing down by the river, and no amount of coaxing would get her out of the back of the Toyota.
We decided not to tell Susan, because I knew she would immediately blame herself for Emi’s death. She would reason that if she had taken her the dog wouldn’t have died. So we continued to talk about Emi as if she was still with us. And had been following this line of action since the end of the year.
When I called Sue and said I was speaking in Coolum and could I stay with them for a few days, I noticed she was not her usual happy self. I asked if everything was all right and was it convenient for me to visit at that time?
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It has nothing to do with you. I’ll tell you when you arrive.’
When they met me at the airport, there sat ‘Troubles’ in the back seat of the Rolls. This was why Susan had been acting strangely about my visit. They had a new dog, a Great Dane. Susan had been worrying for months about how to tell me and I had been worried how to tell her about losing Emi.
You could see that Troubles had captured Susan’s heart. She was a gentle giant, with big soulful eyes that would melt your heart. I did not mention Emi.
I confused Troubles. I sounded like Susan and acted like her and Troubles would rush up to me and stop and sniff and a puzzled expression would come over her face and you could almost see her thinking, ‘You act like her, you sound like her,’ sniff, sniff, ‘but you are not her.’ And she would rush away to find Susan. But that night, when we sat down in front of the fire, she finally realised there were two of us. She sat for hours staring first at Susan, then at me, and having now solved this dilemma, she went to sleep in front of the fire, happy. If you asked any member of our family or any close friend what they would like to come back to life as, without hesitation their answer would be, ‘Aunty Sue’s dog.’
From an early age Sue and I wanted to spend our lives driving around picking up lost, sick or abandoned animals, nurse them back to health and find new homes for them. Well, it didn’t work out exactly as we planned, the RSPCA took over that dream, but we do our bit for any animal we find. Susan and Ralph have never bought a dog or cat. Lost or abandoned or starving cats and dogs seem to find their way to their door. And they take dogs from the pound. There is one newspaper that prints a photo of the ‘dog of the week’ at the pound. Ralph can’t buy that paper because if Susan saw the picture she’d have to give the dog a home.
They always end up with the large dogs, because they are the hardest to find homes for. But they are always ‘gentle giant’ types rather than strong and muscular. So it has always been Great Danes, German shepherds and Afghans. Status dogs, which people buy as cute puppies and watch in horror as they grow into half a horse or grow a massive coat of hair that requires hours of maintenance per day to keep it in reasonable condition. Or the dog grows to twice the size of the garden, or eats more than the whole family combined. Because of one or all of these reasons the big dogs end up in the pound or out wandering the streets.
Susan and Ralph have been taking these dogs into their home for thirty-plus years. There are endless wonderful stories about the long line of animals that have passed into their loving care over these years, but the most recent lucky dog that has had the good fortune to become the ‘Pet of the Potts’ is Troubles.
Troubles was around twenty months old when she was found wandering the streets of Marsden, a suburb of Brisbane, and was picked up by the pound. The Great Dane Society has an arrangement with the pound that whenever a Great Dane is brought in the Society is to be notified and they take it upon themselves to find the owner or a new home for the dog. When Troubles’ week was up and no owner had been found, one of the people from the Society took Troubles out of the pound and agreed to look after her until a home was found. The Potts were listed as previous owners of homeless Great Danes and so Sue and Ralph were called. Ralph spoke to the man about Troubles and said to just bring her to the house and he was sure Susan would change her mind about not wanting any more dogs. When the dog arrived Ralph told Sue that if the dog could not be placed in a home, she would have to be put down, and Troubles just stood there with doe-like eyes, shivering with fear and generally looking miserable; and Susan was hooked.
As the name implies, it was not an easy transition, even though the dog appeared to have had good training. Susan said the man who was taking care of Troubles while a home was being found must have been very kind, because for days after he delivered her to the house Troubles would go and stand and stare at the spot where the car had been parked. But she soon realised that she had struck it lucky a second time and as she learned to love and trust her new owners she blossomed into her real self.
