After university, I thought I should see a bit of the World and felt very lucky to land a job as a junior stockman on a cattle station in the Northern Territory of Australia, a modest sized ranch of one million acres!
I always had a fascination for the Australian Outback and admired the tough characters that live out there, probably from watching the likes of Les Hiddens, the Bush Tucker Man, popular on TV in the 1980s. One of my favourite movies is "The Man from Snowy River" and this inspired me to see if I could hack-it as an Aussie-style cowboy for six months or so.
It turned-out to be the toughest thing I have ever done, but also the most rewarding in terms of how I felt about myself, having braved the true hardship of the outdoors. It was often incredibly hard work, dawn to dusk, in the blazing sun and oppressive heat, with only a wide-brimmed hat to prevent your brain from frying. The Aussie characters, both white and blackfellas that I worked with were remorseless in their teasing of a young Pom, straight off the boat, but also shared a beer and a laugh over the barbie when the sun went down.
One day I was tasked with driving to Alice Springs to pick-up the boss's daughter who had flown-in on holiday from university in Melbourne. It was a nine hour drive along rough gravel and corrugated, sand tracks in an old Holden Ute, fantastic vehicle with a V8 engine. I had plenty of time to chat to the lovely Mattie on the long journey back to the station, entranced by this really pretty, fit and tanned blond and I could tell she fancied me a bit too.
In the next few weeks, I would see Mattie around the stockyard and we would smile and flirt a bit with each other. She was almost always riding a fine horse and looked gorgeous on her roan, arabian mare, which apparently was worth a small fortune.
One evening, the boss held a barbecue at the main house for the stockmen and jackaroos, which Mattie also attended. At one stage, conversation strayed to the subject of finding gold and the whereabouts of the mythical Lasseter's Reef, which apparently was located somewhere in the wider area, perhaps even on the station. This was an incredibly rich deposit of gold, allegedly discovered by a chap called Lasseter in the 1920s, but lost and never found again when he died.
As I was due to ride fences the following morning, Mattie said that she would come with me and show me some gold-bearing, quartz deposits in hills ten miles away and some evidence of prospectors that had once lived up there. "You never know", she said: "we might even find that Lasseter's Reef".
We departed at sunrise the next morning, me on my hardy, bay stock-horse and Mattie on her thoroughbred mare. After those many months, I looked very much the tough Aussie cowboy, rough and tanned, with a battered Akubra hat, bone coloured moleskins, checked shirt and scuffed, blundstone boots. She looked fabulous in her snowy river hat, pink polo shirt, beige jodhpurs and tall, brown leather boots.
After a couple hours of riding and chatting, we left the fenceline and started to ascend into some red, sandstone hills, where indeed you could see some bright, white deposits of quartz stone.
We had just reached the brow of a hill with Mattie slightly in front of me and to the right, when all of a sudden her horse whinnied loudly and reared backwards; fortunately my stock-horse was made of calm stuff and I kept my saddle as Mattie and her mount crashed against us. I just managed to catch the girl around the waist as she was thrown, preventing her from a hard impact on the rocks. The arabian bolted away some distance as I lowered Mattie to the ground.
"Did you see the snake?" she said breathlessly to me: "there was a Mulga, a King Brown snake on the track right in front of us".
After we had rounded-up her somewhat skittish mare, we decided to stop for an early lunch and to calm down from the shock of our experience. I laid down a horse blanket on some soft red sand and we sat close to each other eating our tucker, with a wonderful view of the outback before us.
