Jane Grieve - In Stockmens Footsteps: How a farm girl from the blacksoil plains grew up to champion Australias outback heritage

Jane Grieves story of her childhood in rural Australia, her subsequent travels and her pivotal role in the establishment of the Australian Stockmans Hall of Fame, will resonate with all Australians, especially those whose family story is firmly bound to the Australian bush and its heritage.

Tim Fairfax, AM

JANE GRIEVE

Foreword by
Jack Thompson, AM

First published in 2013
Copyright Jane Grieve 2013

Joseph Benjamin Cummings poem, The Men Who Try and Try, is reproduced with
kind permission of his grandson Ian Williams.

Tom Quiltys poem, The Drovers Cook, is reproduced with kind permission of the Quilty family.

Excerpts from the poem Australia Day 1942 are reproduced with kind permission of the family of the late Ian Mudie.

All attempts have been made to locate the owners of copyright material. If you have any information in that regard, please contact the publisher at the address below.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin
Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 74331 099 1

Internal design by Darian Causby
Map by Darian Causby
Set in 12/18 pt Goudy Old Style by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to Barry Hall, Senior English Mistress,
the New England Girls School, Armidale

Jack Thompson, AM

There are many ways of being an Australian. Jane Grieves memoir In Stockmens Footsteps is her own delightful tale of what being an Australian has meant to her.

There is no doubt that Janes double connection, by direct descent to two immigrants on the First Fleet in 1788 (one above decks, one below), is a fairly compelling statement of colonial Australianness.

Jane Grieves love of our wide brown land mirrors my own. It is this connection, through the Australian Stockmans Hall of Fame and Outback Heritage Centre in Longreach, Central Western Queensland, that has brought us into the same orbitJanes with her pivotal role in the establishment of the Hall of Fame during the decade leading up to its opening in 1988, and mine through the role I have played in its more recent Indigenous Heritage Program.

The iconic Australian identity R.M. Williams features strongly in both our personal stories.

Much of my own love of the bush, and indeed bush skills, was learned from the time I spent with Aboriginal stockmen in the Northern Territory as a teenager in the fifties. During that incarnation I was kitted out in the inevitable R.M. Williams bushmans gear, avidly poring over the R.M. Williams mail order catalogues that were an integral part of outback station life.

I developed an abiding respect for the enormous contribution of Aboriginal stockmen and women towards Australias outback prosperity. It was a partnership and an era that has largely disappeared, and was on its last legs at the time when I worked in the Territory. With its demise went a rich history of lifestyles, skills and stories.

The Australian Stockmans Hall of Fames Indigenous Heritage Program has so far collected over 200 precious oral histories, photographs and artifacts from the Kimberley to the Cape.

Janes romantic inclinations led her as a young woman to seek this world. This book tells of her time spent during the last days of horseback mustering on large outback properties in North Queensland, days when station properties were home to small communities of people who each contributed to the life of the station from the kitchen to the stockyards.

As a woman, her role was blurred and encompassed both domains. Like all Australians who lived out west, her R.M. Williams boots and Akubra hat were a fundamental part of her everyday attire.

There is much between the lines in this intriguing memoir of a post-Second World War country upbringing. These years represent a time in Australias history about which little has been written. It was a time of restoration, when those whose lives had been turned upside down by cataclysmic events worldwide wanted nothing more than to live quiet lives. They raised their large families in a time of burgeoning prosperity that had seemed an impossible dream in the recent Depression years; they stoically papered over the wounds left by two world wars.

This is the story of a woman raised by a young couple who had both seen active war service. Jane was the fourth of five daughters. She grew up with her feet firmly connected to the rich blacksoil of Queenslands Darling Downs, while the romantic notion of further out was firmly etched into her consciousness through books and the tales of her elders.

It was a fertile field for her later achievements.

With warmth, wit and clarity Jane takes the reader through the processes of her lifefrom its very origins, which led (seemingly inexorably) to her inevitable meeting and productive partnership with like-minded people.

Born in 1953, Jane has lived through a time of enormous cultural change in Australia. Her vivid and often poignant recollections of her rural childhood in the 50s will resonate with anyone who lived through this era. Likewise the upheaval of the 60s and 70s with its free love, travel and defiance of cultural mores, which so defined all of us who lived through it.

When the opportunity arose to make a difference, especially as it related to the subject which was closest to her heart, Jane grasped it with both hands and devoted ten years of her life to it.

This is a great story, told with freshness and candour through the eyes of one of its central figures, of the creation of an important national Australian monument.

Jack Thompson, AM

CONTENTS

The Men Who Try and Try

I was never a great believer

in the things that men call luck

For it takes hard downright digging

ere the vein of gold be struck.

Dame Fortune may be fickle

but none of us can deny

She loves to lay her treasures

at the feet of those who try.

Ive read the records closely