Love In a Sunburnt Country (28 page)

This is the same challenge that Bill and Cissy were presented with—staying alive financially in times of no income.

The animals and plants of the Top End are resourceful. Some make it through the long dry by living off extra fat stored in their tails. Others are only alive in the wet and leave eggs and spores to wait for the next big rain, a strategy known as ‘shut down and wait'. There are yet others known as generalists. These animals haven't invested in adapting to a niche in which they flourish but instead adapt to a range of foods and habitats. And all of these strategies, translated into human terms, were found and put into practice by Bill—after Cissy had made clear to Bill that she expected him to find a way.

To begin with, Bill and Cissy are generalists. When one income stream dries, they move their business swiftly to where another is flowing and grow the skills to match. Even after they had purchased Kiana they continued for ten years to contract muster on other properties to earn money. But then the contract work began to dry up. At that time Kiana, although much improved in fences and water, could not support enough cattle to be really profitable. Bill and Cissy needed to get another business or do something profoundly different on Kiana.

The decision to invest further in a marginal business was a risk, and it took five years of trial and error for Bill to succeed, and succeed beyond his own expectations.

‘It lessens your fear of failure,' says Bill, ‘if you know your partner is totally committed and wants you to try it. If you fail it is a team effort. With many of the things we've achieved, if Ciss hadn't been fully on board and encouraging, I wouldn't have taken the risk. Winston Churchill said, “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity; the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” When I shared that with my daughter Jackie she said, “Well, Dad, you're an optimist only when you've exhausted every other possibility.”'

Bill eventually increased the production off Kiana by more than one hundred percent, and he did this by adding a supplement of extra protein, minerals and energy to what his cattle ate. This meant the cattle did well all year round, even in the dry. He had given them a buffer against decreasing food quality to equal the ‘fat tail' with which native animals survive the hard times.

In one recent article on the vagaries of the cattle trade, Bill is referred to as the ‘magician of the Gulf savannah' not for his swag of stockman's skills, but for his ability to handle and seek out multiple incoming streams of data and put into practice good business decisions with time to spare.

‘Many people get themselves into the situation where they invest in infrastructure, for instance, or even genetics in their cattle for the long-term gain. That's all well and good, but it doesn't matter how good the long-term gain is, you've got to be able to pay for it in the short term.' This ability to stop and wait, to resist the impulse to spend, is another key to Cissy and Bill's success.

While Bill and Cissy worked towards their goal of becoming rich, they were also determined to enjoy the journey. The campdraft facility north of the homestead was built to this end.

‘Campdrafting developed in the early days when there were no yards. If you wanted to draft certain animals out you had to do it on horseback. The competition developed because there was a fair bit of different opinion as to who had the best horse. It was designed to see who really did have the best horse,' says Bill.

‘It consists of cutting a single animal out of a mob of eight to fifteen cattle. You show the judge how well you can cut it out. Then you call for the gate, and there are two pegs and a gate that you go around in, in a clover-leaf pattern. The judge assigns a score out of one hundred: a very good score is ninety.'

By ‘cut' Bill means separating out that one animal from the rest. This is challenging because cattle are herd animals and resist being separated initially. With handling, though, they quickly learn to comply. Both rider and horse show off their teamwork, athleticism and cattle-handling skills in this sport. Together rider and horse turn, block, move in parallel, chase and precisely direct the animal.

It was a bush competition that turned into a popular social and recreational activity, not just for people on isolated properties and in rural communities, but for anyone with an interest in horses. Cissy had introduced Bill to it soon after they met and shortly afterwards he was winning competitions.

‘I'd broken my leg and I gave him my horses. He won the first campdraft he ever went in, and then he won the first three, which is almost impossible. But you see, Bill is a cattleman and, if you've got a horse you can put anywhere, a cattleman will get your cow around.'

In a few years campdraft was to become the Bright family's sport of choice.

‘My first daughter, Vickie, when she was about seven, used to ride all the time. Then my other daughter, Jackie, wanted to ride. And I wanted her to have something to do when she grew up so she wouldn't be watching television as people do or be at the pub drinking. Out in the middle of nowhere you can't do ballet, play football or cricket, there are no social activities, so we taught her to ride,' says Cissy.

‘There wasn't much of a social life for our daughter: campdrafting was a way for us all to connect on the same level. It's difficult for parents and children to connect. It gave her an interest too—feeding the horses, training them. If you did everything right at home there was the possibility you could win on the weekend,' says Bill. And attending such an event was reward enough by itself for an isolated child.

‘We would camp out on the flat. We'd be in swags, sit around the fire, cook a steak, tell jokes, sing … it was a very village-like atmosphere.'

Gradually they realised just how good Jackie might be.

‘Jackie's always had a keen interest in horses and Ciss cultivated that interest and gave her every opportunity. There was a lady on the station next door who was on the shortlist to go to the Olympics, a very good rider. She decided to get married, have children and go to the station instead. Ciss used to get her to come over for a few days at a time to teach Jackie to ride.'

Many of these years were lived without television or radio.

‘We've always made a conscious effort not to measure our progress against other people's. Don't worry about what everybody else is doing, just do the best you can with what you've got. Focus your attention on what you're doing,' says Bill.

This is one of the things made easier by isolation. There are not just fewer distractions but less opportunity for comparisons. But there are disadvantages to missing important information and in 1986 Bill decided he wanted a television.

‘You'd spend the whole year in the bush and the news was something you heard through anecdotal reports from people you met. I remember hearing you could get TV in the bush through satellites. I said to Ciss (this was when we didn't have any spare money): “There are a dozen bulls up in the big swamp on the boundary—we might go and catch them and take them to Mount Isa and buy a satellite TV with the proceeds.”

‘One of the first events I clearly remember was the space shuttle
Challenger
exploding. I'd never really seen the news. Then to see that in real time felt like an earth-shattering event. It felt like the world had changed. I had that same feeling when the aeroplanes smashed into the World Trade Center,' he said.

All those years of living remotely heightened the power of this event in Bill's consciousness. Once Bill would have only heard about such events at the Borroloola Races. Now he was watching, connected to everyone else, as the world abandoned one era and embarked on the next—he was part of the whole world taking the corner and rushing onward, leaving behind the never-again attainable past.

Bill's diagnosis was never forgotten by Cissy: she knew it was likely that at some point he would become very ill.

‘I probably wouldn't have managed it as carefully if it wasn't for Ciss: not drinking or smoking or eating the wrong things, or gaining weight,' says Bill.

Despite these careful measures it became clear Bill was going to need a kidney transplant. His life was changing again, he could do less with his body and he began to focus more on exercising his mind: reflecting, writing and cataloguing his thoughts.

The years when Bill became sicker were hard ones for Cissy. For the first time she had stopped enjoying life.

‘When Bill was ill I forgot to find the good in life. I was too busy trying to make money because I knew the time would come when I couldn't. I forgot all the important things,' says Cissy of these years.

They had purchased fifty-two acres in Warwick, Queensland, close to both medical facilities for Cissy and Bill, and campdraft facilities for Jackie. On this acreage stood a grand old lady of a house, fading and dilapidated in her tatty dress in the sun. With care Cissy stripped back all that was decrepit and peeling, added rooms, polished and painted. She built into the running of the home the high standards and welcome to all that she had learned at Brunette Downs.

The old lady is glorious again. In 2005 Bill and Cissy sold Kiana, staying on as managers until 2007. When they had purchased the property it had been destocked, disorganised and degraded. Now fully restocked, with all plant and management systems in place, it was worth a great deal more. And so the little girl who'd felt so deeply the discrimination against her family's poverty, and the young man whose dad had been so unlucky in the pastoral business, the best friends who'd met in the Territory, both dreaming of making millions in the cattle business, had done it together. They had gone from poor to rich in twenty-eight years.

In 2008 Bill and his sister, Patch, were both operated on: a kidney from her to him. Since then Bill and Cissy have done all kinds of things with that gift from his sister—‘My wonderful sister,' says Bill—but particularly they have focused on enjoying the journey.

The bonds between Bill and his siblings, always close, have tightened and deepened through the years. ‘Ken and Patch were both willing to be donors—and here's another twist for you,' Bill says cheerfully. ‘Cissy's daughter from her first marriage, Vickie, married my brother, Ken.'

This is in the very best traditions of romance. When Vickie left Ascham School, she moved to Darwin to work in hospitality.

‘She worked at the Beaufort: a big hotel in Darwin, a big international complex. She had that job through her contacts and she really excelled at that work. And Ken was a commercial helicopter pilot at this stage. And they connected there. It was quite a surprise to Cissy and me! In no way was it a bad surprise, because I think Vickie is a wonderful person and I think Kenny is a wonderful person. They are two very good people.'

The Bright family team is made even stronger by Vickie and Ken's love story. Bill's delight in their happiness together is very apparent. Not unnaturally, this most unusual set of relationships is much discussed.

‘We were all at the campdraft at Chinchilla. There was Ciss, Ken and I, all sitting on our horses at the cut-out pen. There were these two old fellas talking about our family relationships and how everything works in the grandstand. A friend of ours was sitting behind them and one old fella said, “No, no, the story is that two brothers married a mother and a daughter,” and he pointed at Ciss and said, “and I think this girl here is the daughter.” Ciss loves that story.

‘Now Vickie and Ken live on the property we have at St George and they have their own helicopter-mustering business, and manage the property for Ciss and me as well,' says Bill.

They have their own daughter now, Abbie, who is both cousin and niece to Bill's daughter, Jackie, who is herself now married with two children, Riley and Jett. In campdrafting circles Jackie is a celebrity. Campdrafting friends to whom I read some of this story immediately asked—is this Jackie Knudsen? It is. She is as good with stock as her father, every bit as glamorous as her mother and has won the Australian Lady Rider award three times.

‘She won that title right up until she started her family,' says Bill. ‘And she won the Condamine Bell—one of the biggest events on the campdraft circuit—when she was six months pregnant.'

Bill and Cissy are now based permanently at Warwick. Bill has undertaken various business ventures, and Cissy has added beauty therapy to her extensive repertoire of skills. Obviously, neither of them needs to work. ‘I don't think you ever really get over being poor,' says Bill. ‘Unless Cissy is doing something productive she's not really happy. If we have a day off she generally feels worse at the end of the day than she did at the start.'

Cissy's interest in the art of beauty resulted from her many years of living where there was no-one with those skills and the fact that she can do it without exacerbating her bad back.

‘I put my finger through a blowtorch and wrecked my fingernail,' says Cissy. ‘And when my youngest daughter got married I had my nails done. Normally I just had Band-Aids on them because they looked pretty ordinary. And there was nobody where I lived who could do your nails, no-one who could make them look civilised, like a normal person's. So I thought I'd learn to do them myself.

‘People would say to me: “Oh, your hands look beautiful,” and so I started doing theirs. And I do a new course every year, and that way I meet a lot of nice people, and I have some lovely clients now. I can sit and do it and I'm out of the dust. I'm just about to go and do a makeup course.

‘I enjoy what I do and I enjoy the fact that I see women now. You know, I've probably lived a pretty exciting life compared to most people. I don't want to do any more things that frighten the daylights out of me. Every day it was the speed and adrenaline rush from everything. I don't care if I don't get another big adrenaline rush in my whole life. I've had so many.'