Two-Week Jillaroo

“She’s a good jillaroo,” says Kathy, the farmer’s daughter. She’s talking about me, a 30-something former office worker from Chicago. And she’s talking about cowgirls. Jillaroo and jackaroo are what they call a cowgirl and cowboy in these parts--these parts being a 3000-head cattle farm in the heart of the Australian Outback.

On Waite River Station

Her compliment puts me at ease--no small feat considering we’re standing in the middle of a paddock carpeted with red dust and cow piles, under a blistering midday sun and surrounded by a herd of anxious cattle and their crying calves. They’re all milling around waiting to be branded or castrated or have their ears tagged and clipped. And we’re here to get the work done--myself, Kathy, her partner Mick, her brother Craig, and their father Alan Coppock, the owner of this farm and patriarch of the family that runs it.

I’m nervous, being more used to standing amongst towering but immobile skyscrapers than potentially stampeding cows. The cattle seem nervous too. And worse, I’ve just made one of them mad.

It was my attempt at ear tagging that did it. The others had made it look so easy, so fast to do. But when I took the pair of clippers, a hand-held device that punctures a small hole through a cow’s ear and attaches a numbered identification tag to it, I could barely squeeze it through even the thinnest part of the ear. It took three tries, and a good deal of teeth gritting, to get it done. Meanwhile the cow, laying on her side and captured within a steel double-sided contraption to keep her still, moaned and groaned--no doubt from impatience as much as discomfort. What could I do but apologize? That and assure her “It’ll be over soon, cow, it’ll be over soon!” as I struggled and squeezed. My apology made the Coppocks laugh. Laugh and tease. “I’d watch your back now, René,” Mick jokes now after the cow is released and let to run off to the other end of the paddock. “She’s eyeing you there. Just waiting for the chance!”

Josie  (Alan and Sue's daughter) branding a cow

The Coppocks have been running this property--Waite River Station, over 200 km from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory--for over 20 years. They’ve been welcoming backpackers to the station, and to the chance to experience real Outback life, for almost as long. This explains their patience and good humor with a foreign city slicker like me.

I connected with the Coppock family through a work exchange organization called HelpX. I signed up for the opportunity blind, a month before leaving Chicago for Australia. I spent my first few weeks in Oz exploring the streets and beaches of Melbourne and Adelaide, touring the Great Ocean Road, taking camel rides at sunset through the Flinders Ranges--all the while wondering what was ahead for me on the cattle station far out in the bush. What would be expected of me there? What would the life and work be like?

Beach on the Great Ocean Road

Sunset camel ridin' fun in the Flinders Ranges

My Outback adventure begins when Craig picks me up at a hostel in Alice Springs in a Land Rover with a storage trailer attached to it, full of supplies for the cattle station. On the two-hour drive to Waite River, Craig makes my eyes pop with stories of sneaky scorpions and deadly snakes, spiders’ nests wider than your head, and termite hills taller than a toddler, all to be found on the station. “Aw, no worries,” he says after seeing my jaws drop with fear. “We know how to handle the snakes. And we’ve never had any backpackers die on us. Not yet anyway.”

Spider's nest on left, termite hill on right

I get my first bit of work soon as we arrive at the station. Along with raising cattle, the Coppocks run a store that serves Utopia, a neighboring aboriginal community. The supplies that Craig picked up in Alice Springs are partly for themselves and partly for the store, and meant to last for two weeks, when Craig will make another run into town. I help unload the supplies and get a bit of look at the store, a dusty and casually arranged place where I’ll be doing some of my work for the next two weeks. The store sells everything from canned goods and clothing to gasoline and fresh meat from the Coppocks’ own stock. The only thing not sold here is alcohol, which is prohibited at Utopia.

After unloading the supplies, a young Filipino woman with a toddler in tow--Craig’s wife Mary Ann and their daughter Suzy--shows me to a trailer beside the store. This is my little home for the next fortnight, complete with a bed, a gas cooker and toaster oven, a fridge, an air conditioner, and even a couch and TV (which I won’t make any use of, not in such a startling place as the Australian bush). There’s an outhouse across the yard and a shower behind Craig and Mary Ann’s house, which is right by the trailer. So Craig’s family will be my nearest neighbors--not counting the ducks living in the small hut just behind the store and the goats who like to hang out there during the day.

There’s a family of dogs too, hens and roosters, a white-feathered yellow-crested cockatiel who lives and squawks in a cage…and no cats. Alan doesn’t like cats, explains Sue, Alan’s wife, whom I meet when I’m taken into the Big House across the yard from Craig’s for lunch. Like Mary Ann, Sue married into Outback life, having been raised in the greener pastures of South Australia. Even after over 30 years in the bush, she still hasn’t reconciled herself to the dry, searing hot summers here. She doesn’t expect her backpacker guests to be used to them either, and is quick to tell me to by all means rest and stay out of the sun during the midday and make sure I have enough water.

With Sue looking out for me, I get eased into my work, starting with simple household tasks. Washing dishes, sweeping the ever-present red dust out of the Big House’s front hall and kitchen, chasing away the geckoes that sneak into the outhouse and Big House bathroom, watering the painfully parched lawn, and hanging the laundry that only takes 10 minutes to dry in such heat.

Sue and Mary Ann work in the store, which is open only a few days a week. There I do more sweeping, stock the shelves, and collect the few fresh eggs that a couple of the hens have gotten in the habit of laying amongst the canned goods and packages of toilet paper and boxes of laundry detergent every morning. As soon as the store opens and the first customers start wandering in--the men mostly in t-shirts and shorts, the women and girls in long skirts, and all in bare feet--I stand behind the counter beside Sue and Mary Ann as they ring up the customers. A large fan blows hot air on us as I man a couple microwaves and heat up the hot tucker--the packages of convenience food that the customers purchase and eat while they wait their turn to pay. Many of the local aboriginals pay with a government stipend, and there are limitations on how much they can spend in one shopping visit and on things such as tobacco. The result is a somewhat complicated procedure for both ringing up and keeping track of how much each customer has left to spend on which products, involving both a computer and a set of thick account books. So in the time Sue and Mary Ann sometimes take to help one customer or family, the other customers have often wandered outside and completely forgotten about their hot tucker, leaving me to run to the entrance every 15 minutes or so waving the hot food in hand and shouting “Tucker! Tucker!” until the hungry owner shows up.

In the store

But this is the easy work, work that can be done in almost any city or town. The hard work, the jillaroo work, the work that can be learned only in the Outback, is the cattle work.

On my third day Alan comes knocking on my trailer door in the morning to collect me for a cattle drive. A real-life cattle drive is nothing like in the movies--meaning it’s not done on horseback anymore. These days cattle are driven by utility vehicles (or utes), pickup trucks, and 4WD quad bikes. It’s been decided that I’m riding along with Alan in the older ute, while Kathy, Mick, Craig, and even a few of their children take the other vehicles. Sue is there and Mary Ann is along too, hanging back in a van with her parents, who have just arrived in Australia from the Philippines for the first time, with not a word of English between them. (I am so glad they are here. It feels comforting to have others nearby who are as new to the Outback as I am, bumbling around in the Aussie bush same as me.)

We all meet at a spot about a half hour from the homestead, near a pond where a couple hundred head of cattle are enjoying the morning, laying about, lowing, and grazing. There we’ll begin the drive, the process of rounding up the cattle and steering them into a kind of wide, gated path through which they can run along and be pushed towards a paddock closer to the homestead.

 

Beginning the drive

Driving the cattle

It sounds simple enough. Especially since cows are said to be “stupid,” perfect for domestication and for being told what to do. But apparently no one has convinced a certain stubborn brown weaner (a calf old enough to be weaned from its mother) of that, and about 40 minutes into the roundup he decides he wants no part of this cattle drive nonsense and suddenly bolts away from the herd.

Alan knows what to do--chase down the runaway weaner. And it’s at this moment that I figure out what my job is on this cattle drive--hold on for dear life. Chasing the weaner means driving at top speed right over shrubs big and small, between oh-so-narrowly spaced boulders, and straight on into small and not-so-small trees. It means steering, spinning, and turning the wheel of the ute as if it were being operated by a tornado instead of Alan’s hands. It means following the weaner as he runs in circles, leaps over shrubs, darts into ditches, and squeezes himself into and through the tightest little pockets of cover and escape available to him. Wherever he goes, so goes the ute--no space is too small or too tight. There are a few instances when I watch helplessly as we drive straight on into a tree and convince myself we are going to swerve away any second now, any second--and instead we just keep going, knocking over the tree. Inside the ute, objects are bouncing and flying all over, off the dashboard, off the seats, and clouds of cattle dust kicked up by the car wheels begin to make their way inside the cracks of the closed windows and through the front grill. Alan curses the stubbornness of the weaner while I curse my stupidity in not purchasing some kind of travel insurance before coming out to this place, on this crazy drive.

Push

After about 15 minutes the weaner finally gives in and lets Alan press him back to the herd. Never minding my own little panic, the chase is not without its difficulties for Alan. Despite his many years doing this kind of work, he needs to take a break in the middle of the chase to stop the ute and catch his own breath. So many years of inhaling cattle dust out here have left him asthmatic.

In the two weeks I’m here I learn a cattleman’s life is a hard life, and cattlemen’s work is often brutal. The necessary task of dehorning a steer to prevent the horns from growing out then curling under and possibly piercing the animal’s face is a bloody one. Calves in the paddock bawl for their mothers, and bawl some more while being branded or ear tagged. For someone not used to it, the sound can be overwhelming and heartbreaking. And then there are the flies. Flies are everywhere in the Outback. Everywhere. They buzz all around your head, looking for moisture as they try to get in your ears, in your eyes, up your nose, in your mouth and down your throat. Someone makes a joke while in the paddock, you open your mouth to laugh, and--oops--you just swallowed one.

Who could live out here and endure such a harsh life? And why did I come here, to this lonesome and brutal place? Well, I guess I had the notion that the Australian bush would be extraordinary despite its harshness and isolation--maybe even because of these qualities. And you know what? It is.

The land here is stunning as it is severe. Where else does a wide, blue sky meet the bare branches of so many white-bark gum trees, whose roots meet so many acres of dusty, rusty red earth?

Me in the shade of a gum tree

Life here can be as enchanting as it can be lonesome. At night, after dinner, the electricity on the station is turned off until dawn to conserve energy. This blackness not only brings out the brightness of the stars--it also brings the roos up close to the homestead. I’ve been supplied with a large flashlight in my trailer to use if I ever need to cross the yard to get to the outhouse in the middle of the night. One night after dinner Sue and Craig tell me I should go out with the flashlight and shine it towards the fields beyond the homestead. I do…and catch the sight of a half dozen kangaroos bouncing in and out of the shadows.

Waite River Station also has camels, brought in years ago as part of an experiment on co-grazing camels and cattle

Me with Mary Ann's father, feeding Whiska the camel

Me and Alberto feeding Whiska carrots

Craig feeding Whiska potato chips. Whiska loves chips. Who could resist?

The land here is abundant with life even if it spare of humans. My first day on the station, Alan takes me on a bore run. Bore, as in a well--not boar, as in a wild animal. (This had to be literally spelled out for me, as after my first bore run I asked why we didn’t see any pigs.) A bore run is a drive across the station to check the wells and make sure the animals have enough water. For Alan, it’s also a chance to watch the budgies, or budgerigars--beautiful, small, bright green birds that populate a pond on the station by the hundreds. The first time Alan drives me to the pond, he stops the car and tells me to watch. Just wait a moment and watch. In a few seconds a flock of budgies, more dazzling than firecrackers and swifter than the fastest speed skater, erupt out of a tree to alight on the pond. But only for a split-second before turning, all together, and rushing to fill the empty space in the air above the pond, making it sparkle with their brightness. There they turn again to alight on the banks of the pond before flying off back into the trees. Alan loves birds (the very reason he doesn’t like cats--they keep away the birds) and says he could sit and watch the budgies all day. I think I could too. If you saw them yourself, you couldn’t blame us.

Those two weeks were two years ago. I went on to Western Australia, to Perth, after leaving the Coppocks, and then home to Chicago. I never used my jillaroo skills again. And that cow who I made angry? She never tracked me down. She let it slide.


(*I wrote this story some time ago for a travel writing contest to win a trip to Southeast Asia. I didn’t win the contest. So I thought I’d share the story here.)