GRACE BOWMAN
A Cowgirl's Coming of Age
Three perspectives of girls becoming young women on the cattle stations of Northern Australia.
Eilish
The vast landscape with nothing but ant hills and shrubs to the horizon line, was a far cry from the hustle and bustle of Brisbane life. Freshly eighteen, Eilish Francis, was yet to know that in six months she would come back home from 'up north', a changed person.
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Although the 30,000-acre cattle property was “pretty small for up here”, she was told, the expanse of empty space felt like it was going to engulf her whole. As Eilish drove down the red dirt carpet that seemed to stretch on forever, she was surprised to see a patch of life pop up in the distance. Approaching, she could see the homestead’s garden was inviting. It had plush emerald grasses and vibrant native flora, the kind that have evolved to be tough and weather the harsh elements of Cloncurry.
The station manager was leaning against the garden gate as she pulled up and stepped out of her ute. He offered her a firm handshake, locking eyes with her and furrowing his sun-damaged forehead, almost as if he was searching for instant proof that she would earn her keep. He then resumed his leaning position against the post, resting his arms on his protruding beer belly as he precisely lined his paper with tobacco. He twisted and licked the ends to reveal a tightly rolled cigarette.
“So, I ah hear you’re the bird that came up here chasing after that Jesse fella.” The rollie in the side of his mouth muffled his words, but Eilish heard exactly what he was saying. The sting of the reminder was sharp against the fresh wound.
“How do you know about that?” she winces.
“Anything you do, I’ll know about.” He turns towards the rambling, renovated homestead and motions her to follow.
Eilish’s days were spent developing a profound appreciation for what manual labour actually was. Whether she would be fixing a fence, moving cattle or spraying weeds, as the only station hand on the property, all of the jobs, all of the responsibility, and all of the blame lay on her.
“you would be lucky to go up there and not come back an alcoholic or addicted to smoking”.
After a day's work, she would find herself on her veranda of her donga alone, with a beer in one of her callused, aching hand and a durry in the other.
“In the bush, there is such a big drinking culture and I think it is probably because what else is in town besides a pub and a servo? That’s what you do when you go to town or knock-off.”
Anna
Dry dust, the colour of rum, stirred loose from the grounds of the Barkly Downs cattleyards. Lifted by the movements of the hundred head of cattle filtering through, the freed dirt danced, swirled and spat into the eyes of Anna Jarvis, a first-year jillaroo who was now two thousand kilometres away from her precious evergreen highlands of Guyra, New South Wales.
With the “split minute decision to go up north” in late March, she was lucky to even land a job at all, let alone one on the famous two-and-a-half million acre station on the border of Queensland and the Northern Territory. However, within a week of getting the phone call offering her the position, Anna had packed up her belongings into her car, ready to step outside her “comfort zone” and start “the best year” of her life.
It was now early July, but the winter sun was still hot and heavy. Salty beads of sweat seeped into the band of her hat, tainting the crisp cream satin lining to a patchy yellow. Over the constant and varying tones of cows bellowing, Anna could just make out the barking voice and the hand of her headstock woman motioning to join her on the other side of the yard. Even though Anna had worked on her own cattle property her whole life, she still stepped on eggshells as it was made very clear by the people around her. “You don’t get respect until you earn it up here.” So she carefully moved towards the lead hand, sticking closely to the fence and making her movements measured. Despite her best efforts, the cattle still jolted away from her.
As the herd made its way to the gate with pace, Anna’s vision was blurred even more, but one thing was clear, she had done something terribly wrong. The headstock woman threw her hands up in the air and with a pointed aggression yelled, “What the fuck are you doing!” Her gut dropped.
Only when the dust settled, Anna could see what had happened.
“She was trying to calve, you idiot, and you fucked it. Now she’s running around with half a calf hanging out of her, we will probably lose that calf now, because of you,” yelled the lead hand with a sharp exertion.
The acidic surges of anxiety clawed at Anna's insides. She knew losing a calf was a big deal, with cattle prices this high. But had Anna done something wrong? I was only following her instructions, Anna thought. She bit her tongue, would she dare talk back to her superior?
“Fucking useless! Why the fuck did you even come up here?” spat the stock woman.
The word ‘useless’ echoed in Anna’s mind. This time the words pierced behind her eyes, almost forming tears. Was she going to let someone speak to her like that?
Before Anna knew it, “Righto! That’s enough, you told me to come over to you. I did what you said. It’s not actually my fault,” escaped her lips.
Anna’s embarrassment, as well as the dust and sweat, clung to her thick and heavy for the rest of the morning, as she put all her concentration into doing the rest of her tasks with perfection and not another word.
When they met for smoko, the insufferable silence smothered the air just as much as the campfire’s smoke.
Then, the softness of the stock woman’s words caught Anna off guard as she cut the silence with “Sorry.”
Ella
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The smouldering heat of the campfire was just enough to melt the condensation that frosted the canvas of the swags overnight. Ella Baines, a second-year ringer, warmed her hands on the steel cup filled with black tea. Her nose stung, pink from sunburn and steam.
She inhaled the morning freshness laced with smoke and cow manure. It was day three of camp with her crew, somewhere in one of the paddocks of the million-acre property, hundreds of kilometres from the homestead.
She zipped her camel-coloured jacket, folded her hair into a plait, and secured her Circle L, broad-brimmed felt hat onto her head.
As she lifted her saddle onto her chestnut gelding, she fell mechanically into her familiar routine, confident and sure of which leather strap fits into each buckle.
Hoisting up her men’s Cinch jeans to free the denim from her thighs as “they still don’t make women’s jeans tough enough”, one foot stable in the left stirrup, she thrusted her right leg over her steed's back.
Red dirt clung to her horse’s white sock on his back left fetlock as he disturbed the loose ground beneath him.
Following the herd with the rest of her crew, one cheeky steer bolted to a section of shrubbery and fallen trees. As it was her second year on the station, she had assumed more responsibility than last year, so without a moment passing her words of “I’ll get it”, broke the silence the crew had settled into. Exploring the unfamiliar territory, she got off her horse to find the steer. Spinifex and burrs, brushed against her jeans, every so often piercing through the fabric and grazing her skin, as she stepped.
Then, a thought crossed her mind that never quite left.
“Not a single person may have stepped where I am stepping. Not a single person may have seen this patch of land in its entire existence.”
Perhaps she was right. This land was harsh and hard, only cattle men and women made this land their home and before that, the land was too desolate for Indigenous people to maintain a comfortable existence for too long.
Like that feeling when a song swells in your chest as the chords interlace with the vocals and rhythm forming together in perfect harmony, Ella looked to the open sky and the land around her, untouched by man, and witnessed that feeling again. Freedom. Euphoria. Humbled.
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Freedom
Euphoria
Humbled
A year later, the thought entered abruptly into the forefront of her mind again when she walked the pavement of Brisbane’s CBD, pavement that had been touched by a thousand feet that day alone.