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4

The Cattle Station

The train line from Sydney wended through mangrove swamps and bays toothed with sharp island outcrops before twisting in on itself and heading north-west into the dry interior.

I had booked onto the New South Wales railway as I would a plane: handed over ID, checked in my luggage, printed out a boarding ticket in advance. The whole aesthetic evoked 1960s air travel: wide, blocky reclining seats, cup holders, metal ashtrays carved into cubby holes in the walls. The buffet car served hot canteen lunches: roast chicken with vegetables or spaghetti bolognaise, $9 each and served in foil-covered TV-dinner trays, ordered from the conductor before 11 a.m. and picked up in person at noon.

My carriage was nearly empty, but an uppity lady steward paced the train, checking and rechecking that no one had moved from their assigned seat or carelessly allowed their belongings to spill into the empty place beside them, as if the headmaster had recently offered her the chance to prove herself as bus monitor. Her silver bob was scraped back under a black velvet Alice band, lending her a waspish look. Every ten minutes she spoke in chiding tones into the intercom. ‘For anyone who was planning to hop out at the next stop for a cigarette – smoking in train stations is prohibited.’

North of Newcastle the lush, thickety vegetation petered out and the land opened out into a wide plain. Abandoned buildings scattered the landscape, collapsed in on their withered beams like elephant carcasses picked over by scavengers. Corrugated-iron roofs were striped with rust the deep red of clotted blood. In the middle of nowhere we came upon an enormous stopped freight train made up of dozens upon dozens of linked cars, an endless centipede of industry. A mining company was stripping the earth of her jewellery. The Australian heartland may be bleak on the surface, but underneath there is endless wealth. Each year mining companies unearth more than A$100 billion (£50 billion)-worth of iron ore, bauxite, uranium, natural gas and other resources.

Outside, the temperature was floating somewhere over 40ºC, warping the tracks and limiting our progress to two-thirds of the normal speed. We trundled listlessly through a succession of towns whose names aroused confused pangs of recognition in me: Lochinvar, Aberdeen, Scone. A route map on the side of the carriage told me that the track would terminate at Armadale. The settlers’ habit of naming their new homes after their old homes struck me as oddly poignant; the reassuring familiarity of the names immediately offset by the clanging disparity between the two places.

I looked out at wide, sun-bleached avenues and backyard swimming pools, but thought of the razor winds of the North Sea, and the rain that slices horizontally through the granite city. I thought of the Armadale ferrymen whiling away long workless days in hotel bars as a freezing gale outside whips the ocean into an impassable fury. What would prompt someone to link these places with those? What a strange and illogical way to help yourself feel at home.

Even weeks later I still felt that odd shock of recognition on spotting familiar names on road signs, the way you feel on meeting someone who shares a name with your brother, or the school bully, or a childhood pet. It doesn’t dissipate; the associations are too deeply ingrained. Mark, an English friend of my brother’s who I met for brunch in Melbourne, had laughed when I mentioned this. ‘Yes, it’s so strange. The names are all so incongruous. Chelsea here is down and out, it’s Camberwell that’s full of the ladies who lunch. Croydon is north of Bayswater. We’re through the looking glass.’

‘And there’s St Kilda,’ I added, referring to the beachside suburb in south Melbourne, newly fashionable after decades of infamy as the city’s red-light district.

He raised his eyebrows, inviting me to continue, so I told him about the tiny, wave-battered island that sits alone far off the west coast of Scotland, about the odd hobbit people who lived there for generations, scrambling barefoot over the rocks, stealing gannets’ eggs and wrenching up limpets, until the British government finally evacuated the island in 1930. The stench of seafowl and rotting fish.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘maybe that one’s not so different.’

I disembarked at Tamworth, the self-appointed ‘country music capital’ of Australia, whose main attractions are an annual music festival and the oversized golden guitar on the outskirts of town. The festival was long gone; the streets were deserted. The few human figures I spotted outside were eerie metal statuettes of country musicians making themselves comfortable on benches or mooching on street corners.

I was to be picked up the next day by Tim Skerritt, the owner of a cattle station an hour’s drive out of town. Tim’s 1,280-acre property offered greenhorns and travellers an opportunity to learn the skills required for station work: aspiring station hands (or ‘jackaroos’ and ‘jillaroos’) might try their hands at mustering sheep and cattle, learn the basics of field and fence care, and take away the all-important letter of recommendation to show potential employers. These incomers would help to fill a growing shortfall of capable station hands in areas where many of the local youngsters have been lured away by the six-figure salaries available in the mines – not so much a brain drain as a brawn drain.

Stockwork is still vital for the Australian economy, which was founded on the proceeds of the wool trade, and it lies too at the heart of the self-image of a country that owes so much of its creation to the never-ending wanderlust of the cattlemen.

When Angus McMillan arrived in Australia he came armed with a letter of introduction of his own, which quickly secured him work as a station manager on the Clifton cattle run owned by a fellow Highlander, Captain Lachlan Macalister, near Camden, New South Wales.

McMillan’s link to Macalister was fortunate: the captain was a prominent settler, local magistrate and former head of the mounted police who had been granted this extensive tract of land in what was then known as the valuable ‘Cowpastures’ district, around fifty miles south-west of Sydney, as a reward for his distinguished military service. He had also acquired a 16,300-acre estate further south, near Goulburn, which he named ‘Strathaird’ after the peninsula on Skye where both he and McMillan were born.

By this time, 1838, the colony of New South Wales had outgrown its original boundaries and spilled over the Blue Mountains to the west into the vast plains the settlers found beyond. The colony was still a wild place, but with increasing numbers of free settlers arriving in their boatloads, drawn by promises of land and opportunity, a fledgling bourgeoisie was forming, and society was beginning to settle into its component layers. Three classes were emerging: the convicts at the bottom, still to be spotted in unhappy rows working the roads, shackled together under the baking sun; the ‘Emancipists’, former convicts who had worked out their sentences; and finally the ‘Exclusives’, free men who had been posted abroad, or had even paid for the privilege of moving to Australia, and who were now at pains to distinguish themselves from the other sorry lot.