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Sharing their bonuSLyLe and Madonna ConnoLLy have overCoMe a raft of ChaLLenges over two deCades to Make southern QueensLand’s Bonus downs a suCCessfuL CattLe operation. StorY + PhotoS ANNABELLE BRAYLEY
Bonus Downs, a 13,500-hectare cattle operation
south of Mitchell, Qld.
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Santa-Brahman cross cows, which are joined with Red Angus bulls to build the station’s mob; a sign created from windmill blades identifies a bird’s bower, one of many signs Gabrielle Connolly has constructed to mark points of interest for guests at Bonus Downs; boots and gaiters rest on top of one of the station’s many artefacts; the homestead’s spacious verandah, which bears little resemblance to the fragile, broken wreck it was when the Connollys bought the station in 1990.
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TipToeing across the f ragile, broken verandah floorboards of the old Bonus Downs homestead in 1990, Madonna connolly wondered briefly if their friends were right when they said she and husband Lyle were mad to buy
such a wreck of a place. The knowledge that no woman had lived there since 1957 and no one at all had lived there in recent years did little to allay her apprehension. But they were committed to the property in Queensland’s Maranoa and, with two small children in tow, Madonna and Lyle rolled up their sleeves and got to work.
a year later the Queensland government resumed the connollys’ new home and business for use as a national park, a blow they didn’t see coming. They went into battle and won, increasing their determination to succeed at Bonus, despite the seemingly endless challenges.
over the years on the property, which lies 46 kilometres south-west of Mitchell, they have rebuilt fences, pulled and cleared scrub, planted seed, cleaned and deepened dams, re-equipped bores, resurrected the homestead and renovated the big old jackaroos’ quarters. Their goal was to construct a viable enterprise that their son and daughter might eventually have a part in, if they so chose. When they renovated the homestead, which was built in 1911 by sir samuel Mccaughey, Lyle and Madonna opted to restore and furnish it authentically, mostly with old furniture inherited from Lyle’s grandmother, Doris
pulbrook, who had owned “auburnvale” in charleville, Qld. according to Madonna, “We’ve always operated on a shoestring budget. it was one of the reasons we bought this place; it suited our purse. and we were both brought up on the adage, ‘Waste not, want not’. consequently, we’ve recycled everything we can and we’ve done most of the work ourselves, with help from a few angels along the way.”
in between helping Lyle, Madonna tutored both of their children, grant and gabrielle, through charleville school of Distance education. required to do a project about the history of his home, grant, with the help of Madonna, set about researching the background of Bonus Downs and was astonished to discover a richness of information that reflected the social, cultural and economic dimensions of life in the outback in the early 20th century. The connollys learned that sir samuel was one of the trendsetters of his time and considered by many to be one of the most influential and innovative landowners in australia’s history. grant’s project holds a significant place in the vast collection of information, photographs, records and paraphernalia that form a backdrop to the connollys’ determination to live their history. The dining room of the jackaroos’ quarters is a showcase for a century’s worth of rural enterprise and a source of fascination to visitors.
Bonus Downs was chronicled as 300,000 acres (121,410 hectares) of cattle country when sir samuel bought it in 1908. Firmly convinced the country was better suited to sheep, he
Station owners Madonna and Lyle Connolly with son Grant and daughter Gabrielle at the Bonus Downs homestead, which will be the focus of the station’s centenary celebrations.
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ABOVE: Sir Samuel McCaughey, the man responsible for building the homestead on Bonus Downs, was considered one of the most influential landowners in Australia’s history and (right) his application to lease Bonus Downs, sent in 1908. OPPOSITE: Lyle Connolly sees that nothing goes to waste, not even the old Telstra dish that now shades his courtyard and (below) drafting his son Grant’s starter mob.
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converted the station, building a 42-stand shearing shed and shearing 130,000 Merinos within five years. Before he started erecting the homestead, he began a water program, sinking bores and building dams to ensure supply. after his death in 1919, the property passed through several hands, decreasing in size to 13,500 hectares before being purchased by the connollys.
The property had been allowed to deteriorate over many years, so Lyle and Madonna had their work cut out for them. They continued to run sheep and converted a shed to replace the old shearing shed, which had been sold with one of the many parcels of land that had come off the original holding. although at that time they were still confident in the future of wool, Lyle and Madonna agreed they needed to go on breeding the cattle they had brought with them from their previous enterprise on the paroo river, north-west of cooladdi. Low wool prices contributed, but it was drought that finally forced them out of sheep in 2004.
With grant and gabrielle away at boarding school, the same drought forced Madonna to learn to drive a bulldozer. “We brought grant home once for a couple of weeks to help, but i still had to learn,” Madonna says. “i was terrified i would do something to wreck the tractor [a Komatsu 355] but we had starving stock to feed. Lyle showed me what to do and let me go. By the time it eventually rained, i’d got the hang of it and actually missed it for a while, but you never miss the droughts or the gut-wrenching despair.”
searching for an alternative source of income, Madonna set about establishing a small farm-stay business utilising the jackaroos’ quarters they had so carefully restored in 2002. Lyle and Madonna consider it a subsidiary to their core business and mostly adopt their guests as lifelong friends, but they also recognise its potential as a separate enterprise. Lyle and a couple of friends have built a big smokehouse for the farm-stay. grant and his mates pitched in as labourers, laying the foundations for a generation of visitors who keep coming back to Bonus. With an open fire and spit, the smokehouse is the setting of long, leisurely evenings during which both Lyle and Madonna tell the history of their predecessors and the story of Bonus.
an amusing raconteur, Lyle also entertains guests with a wide range of stories from his 61 years of living and working across the outback. sent to st Joseph’s nudgee college in Brisbane for his secondary schooling, in Year 10 Lyle executed a well-planned escapade and ran away, managing to get himself all the way to his grandmother Doris on auburnvale. avoiding his parents, Lyle had chosen his destination well. Doris was amused by his initiative and welcomed him to stay with her for seven weeks until he finally went home to cunnamulla, Qld. (Doris had been responsible for blowing up the dunny with dynamite at the convent in charleville as an act of mutiny in her younger days, so apparently the streak of rebellion is ingrained.)
“We’ve always operated on a shoestring budget. it was one of the reasons we bought this place.”
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The national park incident was not the most serious bureaucratic hurdle the connollys have faced. in 2005 Madonna received a phone call from the Department of environment and resource Management (DerM) advising that inspectors would be at Bonus the following day to investigate the claim that they had illegally pulled some of their land. Despite the fact that Bonus Downs was freehold and that the country in question had been pulled several years before the vegetation-management legislation was passed and that it was lawful to clear mulga for fodder in drought conditions at that time, the case proceeded. it was only dropped in December 2010.
six years of insecurity and distress has scarred them all and consensus in the connolly family is that the biggest challenge for landholders in the years ahead is not knowing what rules and regulations will be changed next. Lyle and Madonna consider themselves conservators and custodians, and have worked long and hard to improve the environment around them. Lyle contends that when they arrived, “There was not much grass, very few birds and no wildlife. Having improved two-thirds of the place, there is now a bevy of grass and birds and wildlife everywhere, playing their part in the food chain”.
one of the features of the farm stay is a walk through a belt of ooline trees that grow on a ridge about six kilometres from the homestead. The ooline is a remnant rainforest tree that has survived tens of thousands of years of transition f rom a rainforest/wet landscape to a semi-arid one.
LEFT: Gabrielle Connolly helps out on the family farm, where she hopes to develop her mother’s farm-stay operation. OPPOSITE: Farm-stay guests keep an eye on cattle-yard action from the safety of the loading ramp.
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The connollys have protected them and educate their guests about the plants and animals in the area. There are signs everywhere, created by gabrielle out of old windmill blades, which identify different species of trees and mark special points of interest such as Bowerbird’s avenue, the site of a playground that is home to a large assortment of bits and pieces that the resident male bird has collected to entice a mate. Lyle and Madonna happily share their wealth of knowledge with anyone who has the time to listen and Lyle is particularly adept at teaching the skills that accompany daily life on a working property.
gabrielle, 21, has a vision that includes expanding the farm-stay business. a 2006 winner of aBc radio’s Heywire competition, gabrielle was one of the instigators of the 40 Hour Drought initiative set up to encourage urban australia to briefly experience some of the water challenges faced by their rural and remote countrymen. Having recently moved home from Brisbane to complete her education degree externally, gabrielle is contemplating the possibilities and preparing a case to present to her family when, in the months ahead, they sit down for a roundtable look at succession planning.
Mightily relieved by the outcome of the vegetation prosecution, Madonna says, “Until our barrister rang us in early December to tell us DerM had dropped the case against us, succession planning was wishful thinking as we didn’t know whether we’d even still have the place. going to court to fight a battle we should never have had to wage would have broken us”.
at 24, grant has his own plans in place to enable him to take over Bonus. However, like most young people in the modern australian bush, he’s not expecting to inherit it; he’s working towards buying his parents
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out. in the manner of his generation, he talks about cattle numbers and real estate in the same sentence. “While i’m based here i do casual work around the south-west,” he says. “i’ve started building a small mob of my own cattle and i’m about to buy a gyrocopter to contract-muster. The gyro’s cost-effective both for us and as a way to make money. i need to build up my cattle numbers now, and later i’ll buy the real estate to establish my future. i’d like it to be Bonus because this is where i want to be.
post-drought, the connollys have been carefully restocking and breeding to re-establish their mob that, Lyle says, was decimated by the drought. “We sold most of our stock rather than see them die, but cattle prices being what they are it’ll take us a while to rebuild,” he says.
in the meantime, surrounded by lush grasses that are flourishing thanks to the connollys’ development program and 12 months of good rain, they have supplemented their income by using some of their country for agistment.
grant helps out at home in exchange for agisting his own cattle and he is determined to put his own stamp on the way the station operates. “i spent a couple of years working for cpc [consolidated pastoral company] at “Humbert river” [in the Territory] and Tom shephard, the manager up at Humbert, was into low-stress stock-handling,” he says. “cpc gave us the opportunity to go to one of Jim Lindsay’s low-stress stock-handling schools and i’ve been to another since then. That’s influenced the way we approach stockwork here at Bonus.”
nowadays, Lyle and Madonna are joining their bulls under controlled circumstances. Using red angus bulls over their santa-Brahman cross cows, Lyle says, “We used to leave the bulls in with the cows but we can see the advantages of growing calves of similar age and therefore weight”. Lyle and Madonna listen to reports of rising wool prices with a lingering air of regret and longing, acknowledging that sheepmen never forget the tantalising smell of greasy wool. grant, however, is a cattleman and clearly sees his future in beef.
Two decades on, Lyle and Madonna look out upon their country from their beautiful old homestead and once again consider the future. They are eager to give grant and gabrielle the opportunity to follow their dreams as they live out their own. The connollys are also keen to commemorate all that has gone before them and, to that end, they’re planning a celebration of the centenary of the Bonus Downs homestead in october this year. While they won’t be around for the next one, they have ensured their homestead and story will be.
Lyle and Madonna Connolly at Bonus Downs homestead, where they are finally able to plan for succession with a measure of confidence.
“Succession planning was wishful thinking as we didn’t know whether we’d even still have the place.”
bonus downs centenary Bonus Downs centenary celebrations will be held in october. For information, contact Madonna Connolly, phone: (07) 4623 1573 email: [email protected]
