Grey Keynes - The Flying Bushman: An Australian story of life above the land

READERS
PRAISE FOR
GREG KEYNES

Painting pictures for us of things that most people have never seen/heard and a life that most cannot imagine, really fascinating.

The true story of your near death experience as a child was gripping and very well crafted - it pulls you in and you cant put it down. I could feel it all with you.

The author, in a previous life as a helicopter pilot has unique photographs of the Australian outback seen through the perspex, and sixty years of family history in the region.

The sheep driving the Jeep is priceless and classical outback humour.

Your childhood exploration of the Station rubbish tip on the pony Gypsy as a kid, with all its exciting collection of items of a bye gone era, brings back so many memories for me.

A Gelding Street Press book
An imprint of Rockpool Publishing, Pty Ltd.
PO Box 252
Summer Hill
NSW 2130
Australia
www.geldingstreetpress.com

ISBN: 978-1-925924-55-8

This edition published in 2020
Copyright text Greg Keynes 2020
Copyright images Greg Keynes 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Design by Sara Lindberg, Rockpool Publishing
Cover design by Tracy Loughlin, Rockpool Publishing

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

It had been a pretty ordinary working day. Wed been mustering cattle my pilot Rodney and I upstairs in the two choppers scouting ahead for cattle and mobbing them up for the rest of the crew on the ground on horseback, motor bikes and buggies. Now I was up in the Hamersley Ranges, flying the chopper low and slow, carefully checking the edges of a steep-sided gorge where I planned to camp some cattle overnight. I needed to confirm there were no gaps where they could climb out while we slept. I kept the chopper at around 100 metres above ground level and just far enough away from the rock face to see it clearly. The indicated air speed was only about forty knots when I realised the drive had stopped. I had no power. The machine lost momentum immediately. I felt as if a brick had fallen into the pit of my stomach.

I could see the top of the ridge. It was a great landing pad: flat and free of rocks if only I could reach it. But I was falling like a stone. Without power the machine loses its lift and drive and drops at a huge rate youre in freefall with the surface of the ground rushing towards you and no control of the machine. All I had was the cyclic, which just changes the attitude of the main rotor above the cabin, but it means that even without engine power you can have a limited effect on direction. All I could do was try to pull the aircraft down and back into the base of the gorge, avoiding the cruel cliffs.

So there I was, headed inexorably for the base of the gorge, and then it was as if everything slowed down. I was no longer in charge of what was happening, and yet it was so peaceful. There was no pressure. It was like being in a gravity-free capsule. I could take it easy and relax; I knew Id be taken care of. And all the while there was an intense white light drawing me toward it, so powerful I felt I needed to shade my eyes

C HAPTER 1

A STATION
CHILDHOOD

I grew up on the family property, Curbur Station, in the Murchison region of Western Australia and I was the elder boy of four children. My elder sisters were born in Adelaide, South Australia, and were young children when they moved from Darkan in the south-west of WA to make Curbur the family home for the next sixty-odd years. My eldest sister, Leonie, was five and a half and Carolyn was eighteen months old when my father arrived to manage Curbur in 1951. I was born in 1956 and my younger brother, Keros, was born five years later.

Growing up, there was the usual sibling rivalry between the older girls and me. Leonie always loved her horseriding she taught me to ride while Carrie was more of a homebody, staying with Mum, who needed plenty of help in those early days, as you can imagine. When they reached their teens, they boarded at St Marys Anglican Girls School in Perth which meant that much of the year they were away from Curbur and only came home for school holidays. Looking back, this had quite an effect on our relationship because it seemed just as I got to know them again, they were packing to return to school. That gap was bridged in later years when the girls had a flat in Applecross that I could visit on weekends from my boarding school.

The lovely old homestead at Curbur had a huge pitched roof of green-painted corrugated iron. Built by Angus Copley in 1930, the walls were of local stone from a nearby quarry. Copley owned the property from 1918 to 1948. Before that the Sharpe family from Wooleen Station took up the Kurbur (as it was known then) property lease in the 1880s and ran it as a remote outstation of Wooleen, some days camel and buggy ride away.

My brother Keros got the joke.

My two sisters, Leonie (left) and Carolyn with one of the many family dogs in front of the Curbur homestead in the mid-1950s. This is how it looked before later additions.

Copley built much of the infrastructure including fencing paddocks and an eight-stand shearing shed capable of handling a thousand sheep per day. Most of the records of that time were probably lost with the apparent suicide of Les Williams, the station manager employed by Copley.

Each oblong stone block in the homestead was about 200 millimetres thick. The mortar between the blocks was painted black to outline the beautiful exposed surfaces. The roadmap of fine black lines enhanced the delicate yellows and oranges of the stones bulging from the walls.

The front lawn was surrounded by oleander bushes and jacaranda trees, with a hibiscus hedge forming the boundary on its eastern edge. The hedge hid a large rockery planted with all sorts of cacti. As a small child I remember wondering, Who would ever grow a cactus? Running around barefoot, as we all did, theyd often cause us a great deal of grief.