The following memoir contains snippets from my travel journal of 1981. It represents a few typical days in the life of a Pilbara (Western Australia) station cook — and sometimes station hand — during the busy shearing season. After five months of working and a year and a half travelling the country, I settled in Australia, where I still live.
Another bush dawn approaches as I light the stove. The kettle is on, and the mutton chops are in the pan. My quiet time, time to contemplate. So, how does a 25-year-old girl like me, from a small town in Pennsylvania, end up here, in the West Australia outback, as a sheep station cook?
Stations need extra hands for mustering during the shearing season. Seasonal farm and station work is typically done by travellers like myself and my travel companion Peggy. In early March, after hitching and arranging rides with truck drivers across the Nullarbor from Adelaide, we arrive in Perth, the West Australian capital.
We find ourselves an 18-hour bus ride north of Perth in the Pilbara region on a clear, blue-skied March afternoon. As directed by the pastoral agency that hired us, the Greyhound bus drops us off north of the Nanutarra roadhouse, at the barren T-junction for the Onslow Road. And in a cloud of red dust, the coach speeds north towards Broome. We wait 90 minutes for someone to come and pick us up, not realising that the homestead is that far down a dirt track from the main road.
Three months pass in the blink of an eye.
Now, it’s 6 am. I flip the chops. Just me and the ABC Radio National Country Edition news. Bad reception today, with lots of static. I fiddle with the dial and get something scratchy from a Port Hedland station. Count out the eggs.
Not to self: Fatten up that old chook who stopped laying eggs this week. Chicken sandwiches will make a nice change from cold mutton for the musterers.
I’m in the summer kitchen, a separate building from the main house of the homestead, even though it’s June and the second week of winter here in the southern hemisphere. This kitchen has two long tables with benches seating 20 people. When extra hands are on-board, this is where we eat.
As is my habit, I’ve set the breakfast table the night before so that I can daydream in my half-awake morning fog. I sip my tea and steal a moment against the warm oven where the day’s bread bakes. Soon, the peace will be shattered—first the shuffling, still-slippered feet of the boss followed by the cheery young station hands. I put the giant pot of tea and a jug of milk on the table before they sit.
Talk is of the horses, saddles, and which motorbikes they’ll take out today. Then there’s a list of fences and windmills to repair. The morning chatter is reassuring. I’ve been travelling for nearly two years now, in Europe and the UK. Now I am here, working for the cash to move on to another adventure. After a few months here in the Pilbara, a seemingly barren patch of Western Australia, without warning, I feel roots growing in the cracked red earth.
Breakfast is over, the crew heads out and silence returns. I adjust the station on the radio. On ‘The ABC’ (The Australian Broadcasting Corporation) I catch the end of Tex Morton singing, ‘The Wandering Stockman’. And then Willie Nelson’s making me all weepy with his version of ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’.
I check the flour tin for weevils and measure enough for three dozen scones. The crew will be waiting with a big billy of tea at the shearing shed at 10:45, sharp.
I’m not sure whether my tears are over a recent love lost or knowing the boss won’t need me here soon. The sheep are nearly all shorn. Each day the musterers move more sheep to paddocks along the Ashburton River, where there are still a few deep pools of water (ah, the Sunday swim) with green feed.
The station is situated just inside the Tropic of Capricorn where it’s now the dry season. No town water or electricity serves these parts; we drink, shower, and wash our clothes using bore water (my white T-shirts are now tinged with pale rust).
A generator that runs on diesel fuel gives us a few hours of light at night. Each evening before dinner, one of up goes out into the shed and manually starts the generator with a hand crank. The fridges run on kerosene. Gas bottles fire the oven and stoves.
Behind the summer kitchen, there’s a screened-in gazebo that serves as a butchering area. After the jackaroos have slaughtered and skinned each mutton, one of the fellows comes to the back door of the kitchen calling out ‘quick Miss Lou, liver for the Boss.’ I take the offering from their bare hands. After the first time, when I fumbled and nearly lost the slippery innards, I am always prepared with a bowl. Lambs fry is a special treat when we have newly slaughtered sheep.
The fellows hang the halved animals in the screen house, where I leave them for a day or two. My cutting board is an ancient section of river gum and is nearly a metre in diameter. Years of chopping have left a shallow basin in the middle of the board, like the dry dams in the distant paddocks.
A Country Women’s Association Cookbook, ‘The CWA Cookery Book and Household Hints’, has a chapter on butchery. Diagrams show me how to separate the beast into edible cuts of meat. Imagine, I was a vegetarian for five years before I came here, to a place where I would starve if I chose to refuse meat.
The spacious walk-in fridge is opened once or twice a day when we transfer food to the summer kitchen with its ancient kerosene fridge. We can’t afford to let out the coolness supplied by a few hours a day of generator power.
The kangaroo shooter’s wife, Jenny, drives to Onslow once a fortnight and brings back the post plus any magazines and newspapers (The Bulletin magazine and The West Australian newspapers) that get delivered to a PO Box. Two weeks’ worth of papers and magazines make the rounds of the house. If we are lucky, Jenny brings back some fresh fruit and veg.
Most nights after dinner, we retire to the cool tile floors of the main house of the homestead and lounge on cushions. Someone finds crossword puzzles and brain teasers in the papers and magazines. Too many questions are about cricketers and politicians from before my time in Australia, so I prove nearly useless.
Usually passable with crosswords and quizzes, the only subject I can help with, oddly enough, is Australian Literature. I have the luxury of being around the homestead many days during the book-reading timeslot on the wireless radio. If the question refers to Steele Rudd’s On Our Selection or Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, I’m your gal. Peg and I probably have the answer when it's a US state capital.
Station work is physically demanding. Between preparing meals and managing the main house, even I, the cook, find myself repairing windmill fins, dragging a dead sheep out of a dam or running along behind a ute capturing baby lambs who can’t keep up with the mob.
Most nights, by 9:30, the generator slows down and the lamps dim. I look forward to lights out time, hoping to scribble a few lines about this extraordinary outback adventure. Each day in this remote, harsh land, the circle of life and death is thrust at us — from the soft new lambs that we pile into the ute, to a rotting carcass in a dry paddock. I can’t stay awake long most nights — sometimes only long enough to record the date in my journal.
Saturday is a half-day of work for most of the team. But Peg and I keep the chooks fed, the house and garden going, and prepare the meals.
On Sundays, we relax.
On Sundays, everyone finds their own breakfast in the kitchen. In the afternoon we pack up some meat, salad and potatoes. We all don our swimsuits and shorts with a towel slung over one shoulder, then pile into the back of a few utes. The passengers stand behind the cab, hanging on tight over the rutted dirt track, wind in our hair, faces up to the sun, beaming. Within minutes we are covered in red dust, but who cares. We’re headed for a swim in the Ashburton River and a BBQ.
There’s a spot at a bend in the river, close to the house paddock, where the water is deep enough year-round that it doesn’t go stagnant — even when there’s been no measurable rain.
A big ole gum tree with a rope swing teases the guys into action, and soon, one by one, they show off their skill at launching themselves out over the pool and dropping into the water with the biggest possible splash. There are swimming races, first breaststroke, then butterfly. I learn quickly never to win (as if I could) because the winner gets dunked by their opponents for being a ‘bit flash’ — showing off.
We float on our backs and chat. The water refreshes and relaxes tired muscles. I look towards the red ridges to the south, lie back in the water and stare up into the giant gum trees. Above me, a single pink and grey parrot — called a galah — screeches then lifts off to join the pastel flock overhead as they veer north.
I was raised in the verdant green of south-eastern Pennsylvania, in a town just commuting distance from two big cities — a place that could not be more foreign if it tried. I grew up knowing steamy summers, with big clouds and August thundershowers. Winter brought short grey days and snowdrifts up to my third-floor bedroom window.
I feel unexpected propinquity with this place of red dirt, far horizons, azure skies, giant anthills and deep red sunsets. The pace, the open space to dream and imagine without distraction; this feels like a homecoming.
Despite surface appearances, this territory is anything but barren; the longer I stay, the more nuanced the landscape and its people have become. Take Neville, the windmill man, who refers to Peg and me as the ‘Bloody Yanks.’ We know not to take it to heart. This veteran bushman has patiently shown us how to choose the right tools, safely climb a windmill and replace broken or bent fins. Some days we go off-track with Nev to climb a windmill with the best view of the distant ranges. He likes to remind us that ‘Western Australia is the best bloody country in the world.’
The foil-wrapped potatoes are out of the coals. Steaks are sizzling on an old wire rack. Tubs of salad and loaves of yesterday’s bread wait on a tarp in the middle of our happy group.
Three roos bound along the opposite bank and silently pad their way down to the river to drink. Watching from an almost-dry beach towel, this Pennsylvania-born station cook sips from a tin of Swan Lager squints into the low winter sunset and wonders how anyone could disagree with ole Neville.