Lives and Livelihoods

Outstanding achievements by outstanding Individuals

Max and Jacquie Lines

It’s one of the Northern Territory’s most far-flung cattle stations, fringing the edge of the Tanami Desert, and it’s a comparative minnow alongside most of its neighbours on the sweeping rangeland grazing country of Central Australia - but if Coniston Station ever went on the market again, it would be snapped up immediately.

The reason is water! Coniston has thrived through its 80-year history on the envied surety of a sustainable natural water supply, fed by the huge underground basin over which it lies. That was why pioneering Central Australian pastoralist, Randall Stafford developed the property here in the first place, back in 1923.

Today’s owners, Max and Jacquie Lines, constantly reflect on their good fortune at being in the right place at the right time to buy Coniston ‘for a song’ when it came up for sale in 1976. Their daughter Kylie and two sons Andrew and Chris were raised on the station through both good and difficult times. While only Chris works there full time at the moment, the others live not far away in Alice Springs and visit with their children as often as possible.

The Lines acknowledge that they are sitting on a ‘goldmine’ because of the station’s water resources. They say it’s better than gold and believe the water they have under the ground would have to make their station worth at least one million more than anywhere else. Water is a particularly precious commodity in Central Australia where many pastoralists have battled year after year of severe drought conditions that have forced them to reduce their herds drastically or agist in other areas to get them through the bad times.

Max and Jacquie say they will never sell Coniston, because they’ve put so much of their lives into it - and their kids wouldn’t let them, anyway, but they reckon the combination of a priceless sustainable water supply and their ability to produce premium organic beef in a clean natural environment makes their station a valuable package indeed.

Picturesque Coniston, named by founding pastoralist Stafford after a town in his native England, lies 300 km northwest of Alice Springs - about two hours drive up the Stuart Highway then along the often-rugged gravel road leading from Pine Hill to the Territory’s remote Yuendumu Aboriginal community and western desert destinations beyond.

The 2178 sq km (840 sq mile) property has the Tanami as its western boundary, and .Mount Leichhardt and Mount Stafford present a spectacular backdrop to the east.

Coniston is in mulga country, well endowed with buffel grass and interspersed by the Lander River, creeks, waterholes and wetlands that have been classified as significant for conservation purposes. Greening Australia, has approached the family about fencing off these special areas to preserve them for use by native birds and other wildlife. The Lines are happy to oblige. They adhere to the edict that ‘the country owns us’ rather than vice-versa, and are passionate about keeping Coniston’s natural resources in top condition for their children and grandchildren who will tread in their footprints here.

Coniston’s fascinating mixed granite and quartzite landscape has enticed geologists here to study for many years. “The geologists reckon the mountains around here, millions of years ago would have been like the Himalayas are today,” says Max, whose great passion when not working the cattle, is fossicking for crystals and gems.

The station’s chequered history has been dominated by the fact it was the site of Central Australia’s infamous Coniston massacre. The sorry event saw a number of local Aboriginal people killed by a police party on horseback after district pastoralist Fred Brooks was murdered in a hostile flair-up in the 1920s. Accounts have conflicted throughout history on who and what caused the trouble. For its part, Coniston and its various owners have respected the local Aboriginal people and their superior cattle handling skills and have always been keen to employ them on the station.

By all accounts, Randall Stafford operated Coniston as a profitable cattle grazing venture in his time but the station had fallen into disrepair by the time the Lines took over the property in 1976.

The family faced enormous hurdles in bringing the station back into production but both Max and Darwin-born Jacquie have always thrived on hard work and a pioneering spirit.

Jacquie moved to Alice Springs when she was two. Her builder Dad planned looking for jobs on outback stations while working his way back towards his native Western Australia. He advertised for work in the local Centralian Advocate but any responses went up in smoke when the newspaper premises burnt down before he arrived in town. He ended up in the laundry game instead and established the first Alice Springs dry cleaning business.

Jacquie grew up at the tail end of the cattle droving days and used to watch the drovers riding past the family property. She got her first horse when she nine, met Max while she worked tailing cattle by horseback at the local cattle yards, and was a willing partner in station life when the couple married in 1970. She came to Coniston as a highly skilled horsewoman who held her own with the best in the stock camps during horseback mustering in earlier days. She retains a fierce passion for horses and has several top quality horses in her stables near the station homestead. She rides as often as time permits.

Max descends from pioneering white settlers who owned Aileron Station and other properties in the Aileron district north of Alice Springs. He was born in 1938, when making history was not unusual in outback Central Australia. He was the first white baby delivered in Alice Springs Hospital and attended Anzac High School in the town two years before that school was officially opened.

Max’s grandfather, railway contractor Fred Colson, came to the Alice in 1927 and worked for a while as bushman for the famous gold seeker, Lasseter. His dad, Gordon Lines, who arrived in 1923, built the Aileron homestead and his mother, Ellen Harriet Colson, was a 17 year-old fresh out of Adelaide convent school when she came to Central Australia.

Max came up against stiff opposition when at 15 he decided he’d had enough of his Adelaide boarding school and wanted to come back north and work as a ringer. His parents and grandparents insisted he finish his schooling, go on to university and become a vet. The headstrong Max got his own way, returned to Central Australia and at just 18, had bought his mother’s quarter share in Aileron Station.

Aileron became Max’s home base in his post school years. He started contract fencing in the late 1960s and spent five years working around the VRD (Victoria River District) and at Newcastle Waters Station installing hundreds of miles of fences and post and rail yards before heading back to Aileron to help build up the family property.

When Coniston was offered for a song in 1976 - ‘because the market was depressed and in such a slump then that they couldn’t give it away’ - Max jumped at the chance to go shares with a Darwin businessman in the then badly run-down station. When the partnership crumbled, Max applied successfully for funds through a Northern Territory Primary Industry Department rural finance scheme to buy out the other half of the property and the Lines became Coniston’s sole owners.

“When we took up the block, there was no homestead, just some old ruins left from the days when Randall Stafford was here,” Max says. “There were also no proper roads or any useful infrastructure, but we got around that and in the first two years we managed to truck in 3000 unbranded feral bulls to get our herd up and running.

Jacquie recalls first moving to the station: “Max didn’t want to move the family here at first because there was nothing here,” she says. “But we came with a caravan and tent and there was a pioneering feel to the way we lived. Within 12 months we had a nice homestead. We put in some paddocks and infrastructure for the cattle and sank a few soaks for the water. We worked extremely hard to set up the property but it was good fun and extremely rewarding to see it coming together."

“The lifestyle was wonderful. When the kids were still tiny, we used to camp out all the time while working with the cattle, and someone would go back to the homestead every few days to pick up fresh bread and other supplies. The governess would be back at the homestead feeding the poddie calves and chooks and things."

Like most cattle producers who’ve dedicated their lives to an industry where fortunes change from season to season, the resilient Lines have always risen to the challenges.

“We sat on the breadline for a while there in the early days, when $47 was the top return you could get on your cattle,” Max says. “Then we had the boom times in the early to mid 1980s and in six months we had gone from having nothing to being able to pay off our debts and start building a good strong herd."

In the middle of all that came the impact of the controversial Brucellosis and Tuberculosis Eradication Campaign (BTEC), implemented by the Federal Government in the 1970s to protect Australia’s beef export markets by providing disease-free status for the national cattle herd.

"BTEC was very tough on us, just as it was for many Northern Territory cattlemen,” Max says.. There are lots of very sad and bitter stories associated with BTEC. For us, it took away a fortune.”

Despite the industry’s ups and downs in tune with market whims, regulatory imposts and climatic conditions, things have become decidedly better on Coniston Station since those days.

The Lines bought in Droughtmaster and Charolais cattle to develop their herd at Coniston. The property carries a 6000-strong breeding herd of big-framed animals for the domestic beef sector. The nature of the terrain at Coniston means only 50 per cent of it is suitable grazing land.

At one stage, they introduced some Brahman-cross stock so they could test out the burgeoning live export sector. They found the logistics and economics of trucking live cattle long distances north from Coniston difficult. They have now reverted their full attention to producing for the domestic beef sector, using the traditional pastoral practices suited to Central Australia’s open rangelands environment.

In recent years, Coniston’s emphasis has been on producing organic beef . “The world is demanding organically grown food now, with Japan leading the charge,” Max says. “We got our BFA (Biological Farmers of Australia) organic beef certification four years ago and it took two years to win that status because the audit process is very strict. We are lucky that the nature of the environment out here puts us at a distinct advantage in being able to graze our cattle naturally on clean natural pasture. We have no ticks or worms so we don’t need to use pesticides, insecticides or any other chemicals.

“The challenge for us is the remoteness of our property. Our cattle are presently trucked into Longreach, which is one of the closer markets and we are constantly working on accessing markets not too far away. We also see a big need for an appropriate processing abattoir somewhere nearby. But organic beef production offers excellent prospects for us in the future because everybody wants organic these days.”

Son Chris, aged 29, looks after most of the mustering and cattle handling duties these days while Max concentrates on maintenance of the windmills, bores and other essential equipment. Chris’s natural enthusiasm for cattle work and Coniston’s wide open spaces were enhanced about a year ago when a backpacking German nurse, Julia Winkler, arrived in Central Australia on the hunt for a taste of genuine outback station life. She found just that at Coniston and has stayed on much longer than planned. Chris and Julia have been almost inseparable since they met and they now happily share the hard slog of mustering, loading and unloading the cattle, and camping out on the stock camps.

From its earliest days, Coniston’s owners have relied on skilled local Aboriginal stockmen to help work their cattle, and some now employed by the Lines family are following in their fathers’ footsteps. Billy Stafford was born on Coniston when his Dad and other family members worked here in the 1970s and 1980s. He grew up in the Coniston stock camps, learnt to ride horses when just a young lad and was mustering cattle by the time he was 14.

“It’s good work and a good life and I enjoy it a lot,” says Billy, whose two young sons stay in Alice Springs where they go to school. “They like coming out here too but they have to go to school. We mostly do the mustering on horseback and whenever I go into town, I miss it a lot. I’d like to stay around and work here for a long time.”

Fellow stockman Willie McCormack, who has two young daughters at Mt Allen to the west, is also enjoying following in family footsteps at Coniston. “It’s pretty good and getting work here means I’m keeping with my family’s tradition of working on cattle stations in this area,” he says. “I love this sort of lifestyle - working with the horses and cattle, sitting around the campfires at night when we’re mustering, and sleeping out under the stars. It’s a really good life.”

Like many of the region’s young Aboriginal station workers, Coniston’s stockmen have honed their natural skills through specialist training at the Northern Territory Rural College in Katherine.

In 1985, the Lines family pioneered a regional switch to renewable energy for its substantial power needs, and the initiative has made a remarkable difference to the way that Coniston can be managed today. They were the first Territory station owners to apply successfully for funding through the NT Government-administered Renewable Energy Rebate Program, financed through the federal Renewable Remote Power Generation Program, to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. The funds allowed them to install a 6.4 kilowatt off-grid hybrid solar power system for Coniston’s energy needs.

The impressive set-up, now harnessing the powerful free energy of the desert sun, consists of eighty 80-watt solar panels, sixty 2volt/200Ah (ampere hour) batteries and a 10 kilowatt inverter. The Lines say the switch to solar is saving them 10,000 litres of diesel fuel a year and has drastically cut their carbon emissions.

‘It provides at least 60 per cent of the station’s electricity needs in summer and 100 per cent in winter so we’re very happy with it,” Max says. “It has made a huge difference to our fuel consumption and we’re using only 40 per cent of the diesel we used to for power generation. It has given us the freedom to be able to go away for a weekend when we feel like a break, and know that the fridges are keeping the food cold and everything else is working efficiently back at home. We used to have to run the generator 12 hours a day just to keep the fridges cold and we can now get up at night and turn a bloody light on. If ever things get tough here, it is going to be as huge bonus.”

“We are also now totally solar-powered for water pumping and have never had it so easy. We had a few teething problems with the system at first but, in the main, it has made our lives far less complicated.”

While Coniston’s key industry will always be beef production, the Lines have been keen to diversify and are always looking for ways to test their capacity for other commodities. They have developed a trial orchard, where mangoes, citrus varieties and figs have grown successfully, and they are gradually introducing other lines to test what works best.

Max is keen to grow fodder eventually to boost feed stocks for potential tough times and there is a pilot sorghum plot on the station. About six years ago, older son Andrew, 32, tried extracting and distilling Ti Tree oil from the prolific Melaleuca Alternifolia trees growing along the Lander River running through the station, but abandoned this potential future money maker as unviable because it was so labour intensive.

Max Lines has strong views on the future of Central Australia’s cattle industry and is an active member of the Alice Springs branch of the NT Cattlemen's Association, the effective peak industry body that lobbies governments both at home and in Canberra for better conditions for its members.

“We’re working hard through our branch to make sure the issues of importance to us, the smaller Centralian family owner/operators producing cattle for the traditional beef sector, are kept at the forefront in negotiations and lobbying," Max says. “Overall, I see a solid future for the Territory cattle industry, supported by well targeted marketing to ensure growth and expanding outlets for all local products.”

Max and Jacquie have no plans to pull up stakes on Coniston. “Coniston has been very good to our family and given us a wonderful lifestyle - and where else would we go anyway? We wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.” Jacquie says. Max agrees: “We can be pastoralists one day and out-and-out peasants the next, depending on the whims of the market, but we love it out here,” he says. “It’s pretty remote but we think the lifestyle is as good as you can get anywhere.

“The kids would all be devastated if we sold the place and we hope their kids will decide to stay on and keep it in the family. We’re definitely in for the long haul. There's a theory that you get your third set of teeth when you get to 120. We’ll, I certainly plan to be getting that third set of teeth and I’ll still be here on Coniston when I do.”

Source: Kerry Sharp