Nymagee – A place of gunmen, crooks and wild animals

‘We can give you lots of stories’, Anita said. And Nymagee - a little town, smack-bang in the middle NSW - sure did deliver the goods for a crime writer. There’s a seedy underbelly to the place. Ken, half of the husband-and-wife team who owns the sheep station where we stayed, was held up at the letterbox. A gun under his chin. The full shebang. Livestock-thieving is rife and it’s nothing for an enterprising local to pop a piece of machinery on a large trolley during the night and drive off with it.

On the way there, we drove through Goulburn – is anyone else obsessed with the ethereal light of Wiradjuri Country? - through Dubbo, past silos, endless silos, and storage sheds the size of ocean liners. Past telecom towers, which made all the bars on my phone stand up, then melt away. Through Nyngan, past trucks heaving with huge wheels of cotton. It floats through the air and settles on the side of the road, like fairy floss. Then somewhere after Nyngan, the soil switched from brown to red. And boy, is it red. It settles on your skin, your hair and in your clothes.

We arrived in pitch black. I didn’t realise how black the outback is. No streetlights, no headlights… just the stars. We later found out that you don’t trust Google Maps in the outback. Not enough signal.

The next day, Ken told us to hop in his ute and we were off for a guided tour. Now, Ken deserves a moment. He’s 80 years old, still working and tough as teak, (seven- years -working- in- the- Simpson- Desert kind of tough) and it’s nothing for him to go out in the searing heat for the day with only chewing gum (no Powerade or Carmen’s muesli bars for this guy). The only thing that ever got him scared in the outback is the Min Min lights. For the uninitiated, (like me) they are glowing, jetting orbs of colour that light up the night sky and spook even hardened farmers. (There are also fabled yowies and yetis – but I wasn’t nearly as interested in them.) His ute deserves a mention, too. It’s 28 years old and is about to clock up a million kays (!). Ken services it himself. When I couldn’t open the passenger-side door he yelled: ‘Give it a pull, it’s worn out from no one usin’ it.’

Wild goats roam the property. (Fun fact: goat meat is the most eaten meat in the world.) The owners make a living from trapping and selling goats. I got out of the ute to pat a newborn kid, which prompted Ken to shout, ‘Don’t pick ‘em up.’ He told me later that ‘the mother won’t mother them’, if I did. That brought on an attack of the guilts which lasted most of the day. Ken’s take on that was, ‘ya don’t get attached to animals out here.’

There are predators, aplenty: wild dogs, cats, snakes and spiders. Wild pigs maraud around the property and can corner sheep, ten at a time, slice through them with one of their tusks like a can opener and return to feed on them later.

Time moves so slowly in Nymagee. When locals cross each other on the road, they stop in the middle, chat, pause, chat, pause… then there’s a long pause and a final, ‘hooroo.’. Ken can’t understand ‘why everyone’s in a hurry. Like they haven’t got tomorrow.’. He prefers paper maps to Google Maps (remember, there’s not enough signal) and analogue phones to ‘the new tech’.

The property was in a ‘green drought’, which means that the grass is so close to the ground that the livestock can’t get hold of it. During the real drought, it was nothing for Ken to shoot 10 cows in a day. (‘Once they go down, they can’t get up.’)

Blink and you’ll miss the main street of Nymagee: it has a pub and a post office. Speaking of the pub, we were made really welcome by the two Irish backpackers who run it. It was great eavesdropping on a convo about how ‘bush justice’ works. This is how it went:

Local 1: ‘Hey, I saw X’s name in the court list the other day.’

Local 2: ‘Yeah, he poisoned Y’s dogs.’

Local 1: ‘Why?’

Local 2: ‘They took three of his chooks. Cost 600 bucks, they did.’

Local 1: ‘Well, it serves him right for letting them roam around town.’

I listened to this as I was busy demolishing half a pig on my plate - It’s no place for veggos. – and thought could you imagine the uproar if someone poisoned a dog in the city for a misdemeanour.

Cobar, the nearest large town, isn’t just another mining town. Sure, there was all the usual things you’d expect in a country town…shops selling high-vis and flannelette shirts, a Memorial Services Club. But there were heaps of places for crime scenes…. like mine shafts and a place called ‘Devil Rock’ that local Indigenous people consider evil. By far the highlight of Cobar was being interviewed by Sharon Harland, Managing Editor of The Cobar Weekly. When I told her that I was setting my next book in the area, she gave me some back copies of her newspaper, turned on her phone and said, ‘And now I’m going to interview you’.

I’m really looking forward to returning in the summer. Readers don’t want to hear about ‘pleasantville’. They want to feel the searing heat for the full immersive experience. But Ken has warned me that the temps can get as hot as 50 degrees.

What did I learn from my time in the centre of NSW? If you want to make an emu come to you? Lie down with your legs in the air. And if you’re lost in the outback on horseback? Let the reins go and the horse will take you home.