Logo
Prev
Bookmark
Rotate
Print
Next
Contents
All Pages
Related Articles
Browse Issues
Help
Search
Home
'
National Geographic : 1979 Feb
Contents
(Continuedfrom page 173) single sheep. The old people are ready to sell off, and the young ones aren't interested. Most of 'em aren't worth a spit anyway. You can't mus ter a bloody mob of sheep on a bloody motorbike." The three young men standing at the bar did not take him up on it. They kept flipping coins-three toss until odd man wins. The tall, black-haired one, Jim Conroy, had a decided brogue. "We sheared 150 sheep today," he said, "and the manager swore they paid for the operation of the whole station. Good wool and a good price. Don't cry your eyes out for the capitalists." He took a long look at me over the rim of his glass. "What are you, a bloody pommy?" If there is one antipathy shared throughout the inland and in the country generally, it is toward the pommies, the English. "No, an American." "The bloody Americans," said his friend, a short, dark-bearded man with very thick glasses, "led us to the bloody slaughter in Viet Nam. Like the sheep here." "He's a glass eye from Nam," Conroy said. "He didn't get it from counting sheep if he says 150 pays a station," the old man inter rupted from the corner. "No more than a few kegs of uranium will pay out Australia either, mate," said the third shearer. "The thing is, we don't want bloody plutonium buggering up the world, and we don't want the bloody capitalists turning the world into New York City." " 'Ow about New York, matey?" said the third one. " 'Ow about New York!" "'Ow about bloody England sending all its left-wing labor leaders down here to bug ger up the country?" said the old man. "Well, if the bloody American beef lobby hadn't shut Australian beef out of the coun try, we wouldn't look to bloody uranium to save us now, would we?" said the tall one. "I'll shout you a beer on that one, mate," said the old man. I told Conroy I was on the track of another Irishman, named Burke-from Galway. "Galway is it? Poor as church mice then. He should have learned to shear." Around midnight the three shearers dis appeared in a cloud of dust toward their camp, some sixty miles out, leaving the shadows of Belfast and Saigon behind for the incandescent stars of the outback. LL NORTHBOUND TRACKS lead eventually to one of the gates through the dingo-proof fence that marks the Queensland-New South Wales border, a fence that effectively separates sheep from cattle country by keeping most wild dogs to the north. The Burke party crossed the border at Caryapundy Swamp and marched out the days of late October and early November 1860 on a track that took them through the Bulloo Lake country. They were very fortu nate. The lakes can be either burning salt pans or sheets of rainwater. They found the latter, and a company of sixty or so "black fellows" camped along the shore. All the wide country along the Cooper is the bottom of a vanished sea, endless tan and red sand ridges crossed by thin dirt tracks that show the way to homesteads. We found Epsilon station toward dark, a comfortable metal-roofed house in the cen ter of a little town of sheds and bunkhouses. Harold Betts came out to greet us-a calm, steady man with weathered features and direct eyes. The Bettses came out to Ep silon twenty years ago. "There was drought all the time," Harold recalled. "We sank a 1,300-foot bore, and it came up dry. We had a real battle, but we beat it. There are risky variables in this business. Drought. Fire. Flood. The cattle market." "It's water in the house during flood and sand in the house during drought," Joan Betts added. We sat around the table while she prepared a mutton dinner. "If you can get four inches of rain in the wintertime, it will fatten things up," Harold said. "From 1960 to 1967 we had very little rain. Then, in 1974, we got 42 inches, and it flooded everything. It was three months be fore we could get a truck out, and seven months before we could move stock. "This year we got burned out in Novem ber and again in February. It started by lightning, a big fire that burned all the way from the Tune Gate to the Cooper." To contend with nature on that scale re quires room, and Epsilon spreads over 650 square miles of sandy, often stony expanse NationalGeographic,February1979 178
Links
Archive
1979 Mar
1979 Jan
Navigation
Previous Page
Next Page
