Twiggy (3 page)

I saw wealth on a scale which I found completely remarkable as a child. And I always wondered from that time on: how could you be involved in something like that?

—ANDREW FORREST

For Andrew Forrest, the thrills and spills of growing up at Minderoo in the 1960s were straight out of the pages of a Boys’ Own adventure. If the scrawny blond kid
wasn’t swimming in the Ashburton River, which cuts through the vast pastoral station, he was dashing up and down its tree-lined banks trying to catch goannas and snakes – or perhaps a fish for lunch. Enclosed by the Pilbara’s cavernous blue sky, Andrew and his two elder siblings, David and Janie, felt as if they were in the middle of nowhere. And they pretty much were. The nearest population centre
to Minderoo was Onslow, a coastal town forty kilometres away with only a few hundred residents. The only real action was in Perth, but that was 1400 kilometres to the south and, even then, it was the world’s most isolated capital city.

The Pilbara is an ancient land of stark redness that stretches forever, a dramatic terrain of spinifex plains broken by folded orange mountains and deep gorges
formed over hundreds of millions of years. Coated in dust, Forrest would spend his days riding horses and playing in the bush. “We could get on a horse and ride for a day or two at a time in any direction and know we wouldn’t run into anyone else,” he recalled in 2005. Janie had similar memories: “You made your life with the animals and you made your life in the scrub and going out with the
blackfella kids. It was great fun. You’d experiment with survival.”

Until Forrest was eight, he was educated through the School of the Air, via a two-way radio in the Minderoo homestead, and at Onslow Primary School, where 80 per cent of the students were Aboriginal. When Andrew was old enough to attend boarding school, his mother, Judy, couldn’t bring herself to send her youngest child all
the way to Perth, so he went instead to an indigenous hostel at Carnarvon, about 500 kilometres south of Minderoo. It was here that Forrest learned to fight. A debilitating stutter made him a magnet for older bullies, and Forrest responded with his fists. But he also developed a respect for the indigenous students at the hostel. “These kids were smarter than me, they sang better than me, they could
certainly fight better, and all round in sport, to use the words I can hear today, they licked me,” he said in a 2009 speech. Forrest didn’t last long at the Carnarvon hostel. “Mum pulled me out of the hostel because I wasn’t receiving any of the letters she sent,” he recalled. “The housemaster gave the mail to other kids to distribute. They often stole the letters looking for money, and once
opened they would not be passed on.”

Forrest’s identity today is inescapably linked to his experiences growing up in the emptiness of the outback and the friendships he formed with Aboriginal people. As a boy he played with the children from the Thalanyji tribal group and was looked after by Thalanyji adults. “We grew up with a much more extended family that included dozens and dozens of
indigenous kids and their mums and dads,” he recalled. “We all grew up together on the back of an Australian stock horse. We were all taught how to track, how to hunt and to husband animals in the bush, both wild and bred … The parents of my dozens of indigenous mates … mentored me as their own kids grew up with and around me.”

One of these indigenous men, Scotty Black, had a particularly
profound and lasting impact on Forrest. Black, the son of a Scottish man and an Aboriginal woman, came to work as a stockman at Minderoo as a 22-year-old not long after World War II. But he soon walked off the job, along with hundreds of other Aborigines across the Pilbara, as part of the 1946 indigenous stockmen’s strike over their horrendously poor conditions. Black’s half-brother was the legendary
Aboriginal leader Peter Coppin, one of the main agitators behind the dispute. The pastoral strike, dubbed “Blackfellas’ Eureka”, was the first organised industrial action by Aborigines in the nation’s history and is regarded as a key milestone in the battle for rights for indigenous people.

After three years of careful and secretive planning, the pastoral workers walked off the job on 1
May, just as the shearing season approached. They were protesting against laws that effectively made them the slaves of the white graziers. (In his modern and laudable crusade to rid the world of slavery, Andrew Forrest has not mentioned the indentured labour on which his own Minderoo property was built.) The station hands demanded freedom of movement and payment of thirty shillings a week – an amount
still well below the minimum wage. At the time, most received only rations and the occasional clean shirt. In return for their labour, pastoralists had long granted Aborigines the right to permanent residence on the land. During the three-year strike – the longest in Australian history – dozens of Aboriginal strikers were thrown in jail and put in chains. The sheep and cattle stations of the
Pilbara were paralysed without cheap labour and in 1949 some of the stockmen began to return to work with proper wages and improved conditions.

When Andrew’s father, Don, took over the station in the 1950s, Scotty Black returned and went on to become the head stockman and a revered figure at Minderoo. The job of head stockman was one coveted by every white “ringer” who passed through. “I
was in awe of him,” Forrest said of Black in a 2010 interview with Perth’s
Sunday Times
newspaper. “When we’d come back from Onslow Primary or the Carnarvon Hostel or boarding school, you’d leap into his arms and give him a hug and you’d get a huge hug back. We took orders from Scotty and we jumped to it without a problem. We just couldn’t do enough for him. Scotty Black was my greatest mentor
outside my own blood.”

Black could ride like the wind and, as the assistant manager of the station, had responsibility for thirty employees whenever Don was away. Yet he still lived a traditional Aboriginal life as a senior law man, performing initiation ceremonies, circumcisions and corroborees. In the impressionable eyes of the young Andrew Forrest, Black’s ability to walk in two worlds
was proof that Aborigines can balance the professional demands of a white man’s world with their ancient traditions – a belief that would later form the foundation of his thinking on indigenous people.

As Forrest has used his wealth and influence to campaign to end the shame of indigenous disadvantage in recent years, he has repeatedly invoked the name of the late Scotty Black, who has been
elevated in death to the status of outback hero. One family anecdote that has taken on almost mythical proportions is the day Forrest went missing on the station as a toddler, clad only in a towelling nappy. After slipping through a gate and wandering away from the homestead, Andrew fell through a cattle grid and was trapped as heavy vehicles passed overhead and the blazing Pilbara sun beat down
on his pale skin. A search party could find no sign of the boy. Sure enough, it was Scotty Black who discovered the terrified two-year-old under the cattle grid and pulled him to safety. From then on, Black became a second father to Forrest. The boy would sneak into the stockman’s room while he was out working, lie on his bed and wait for him to return.

Several years later, Forrest was on
a cattle muster with Black when they came across a bull that had fallen into a gully and become trapped. Faced with the choice of leaving the bull for two days to return home for an axe to cut the tree roots which had entangled the beast, or trying to free it immediately, Forrest put his whip-cracking skills into action and drove the animal out. Black was impressed with the boy’s actions. “He told
me: ‘Young fella, you’ve just done a bloody man’s job – you can go places, son.’ And I’ve never forgotten. He gave me belief in myself.” To this day, one of Forrest’s most treasured possessions is a photograph of himself with Scotty Black taken on the banks of Ashburton River when he was about nine years old. The pale, skinny kid, wearing only his swimming trunks, is holding tree branches and performing
a mock corroboree with the smiling Black on the parched red earth of Minderoo. The photograph, taken by Don Forrest, shows Black as a tall, bespectacled and fit-looking man in his mid forties. There is nothing in the vast background but a distant haze on the horizon.

Ever since Andrew’s great-grandfather David Forrest established Minderoo in the 1870s, the family has shared the property with
the Thalanyji people, who have continued hunting and performing tribal customs at their sacred sites that dot the 230,000-hectare property. David Forrest was born in 1852 near Bunbury and followed his four older brothers – including John and Alexander – to Bishop Hale’s school in Perth. When the Forrest brothers secured a lease of Pilbara land, they chose David, who had been working with sheep
in the Wheatbelt region in the south of the state, to run it. In 1874, the plucky 21-year-old set out with four Aborigines from the town of Quairading, east of Perth, with 2000 sheep for an epic 1600-kilometre journey that would take them five months.

Towards the end of the gruelling trip, as he pushed into Thalanyji country near the Ashburton River, Forrest was speared by an Aborigine who
had accompanied him on the journey for several days. The motive for the attack is not entirely clear, but the official Forrest family version is that tensions erupted when the Thalanyji, who by that time had befriended David Forrest, ordered the unknown Aborigine to stay out of their country. In retaliation, the “wild native” drove his spear into Forrest’s shoulder one night as he slept on the
ground. Almost unconscious, and with the spear protruding from his shoulder, Forrest killed the attacker with his shotgun and was nursed by the Thalanyji people. When the party reached Roebourne in May 1878, David told the magistrate he had shot the man in self-defence. For Andrew Forrest, this story has been central to his understanding of his family’s relationship with the land and its traditional
owners for four generations: “You kind of felt a real at-oneness with the land and with the [Thalanyji] people, and if they hadn’t saved him, there’d be no Forrests.”

David Forrest returned to Perth to recuperate in hospital for several months before making a second trek to Minderoo with another 2000 sheep. A wild storm later destroyed most of the station’s sheep, along with many of the improvements
he had made to the station. But David, still in his twenties, made a fresh start, moving the homestead to a more protected site about forty kilometres south of Onslow, where it stands today.

Life at Minderoo in the 1880s was harsh and often miserable. David’s wife, Mary, was the only white woman in the district and her nearest neighbour was almost 250 kilometres away in Roebourne. The couple’s
first two sons, John and William, both died as infants at Minderoo and were buried beside each other in the red dirt. A third son, David, was born on the remote station in 1889 but died in Perth later that year. The surviving children were two boys, Mervyn and Don, and two girls, Lily and Violet. Don died in World War I, leaving Merv – Andrew Forrest’s grandfather – as David Forrest’s only
remaining son and the sole heir to Minderoo.

Under Merv’s strict management, Minderoo was transformed into a thriving sheep station, with several new buildings, extensive fencing, forty windmills and seventeen dams added to the property. By the 1930s the station carried more than 50,000 sheep and produced an annual wool clip of more than 1000 bales. Years later, at his grandfather’s knee,
the young Andrew Forrest was told of the importance of Minderoo and the Forrest dynasty. “My strongest memory of Grandad,” Forrest said in 2005, “was going into his study and being shown the enormous photograph albums of the opening of the Kalgoorlie water pipeline and the other great endeavours that his uncle and his father had done.”

As the years went on, Merv became as hard as the Pilbara
earth. “I don’t think Dad enjoyed it. I think he found it a hell of a life. He seemed to lose all his gaiety which I know he had as a younger man,” recalled his daughter Shirley. Merv was particularly cruel to his son Don. “He used to tell me what to do, he’d never ask me what I’d like to do,” Don said. “I would have liked to have gone to university. ‘No, you don’t want to go to university, son.
Your life’s on the land.’ He wouldn’t take time with children to explain. That was a bit sad; we never had a friendly relationship, ever.” Shirley Forrest concurred: “Dad was awful to Don, but quite frankly I never felt like tackling my father. His word was law. It was like talking about God.”

On his father’s orders, Don Forrest became the manager of Minderoo in 1951, when he was just twenty-three.
As he toiled in the Pilbara heat, Don felt the burden of his pedigree. “When it was stinking hot the sun’d be on your back and the flies would be worrying you and you’d think, ‘What the hell am I doing in this God-awful country for?’” Don said. “But my grandfather was the pioneer, my father was the developer and I had to just keep it all going.” His wife, Judy, recalled the menacing dust
storms that would roll in almost every afternoon. “I could cope with the heat, but the dust storms: you couldn’t put your hand on anything without it coming up red,” she said. “You couldn’t wipe your arm across a perfectly clean table.” Don and Judy bought the property outright in 1974, a year before Merv died in Perth at the age of eighty-four. Their three children – David, Janie and Andrew –
would be the only direct descendants of David Forrest to retain the famous name. Andrew, in particular, bore a striking resemblance to his great-grandfather as he grew.

Don Forrest had met Judy during a holiday in Perth a few years after taking over Minderoo. The young city-dweller was swept off her feet and soon they were married and living at Minderoo. “I don’t know what I went into,” Judy
recalled. “I just thought Don was the greatest thing on earth so it didn’t matter where we went. In fact, as we drove over the boundary fence for the first time after we were married, I burst into tears because suddenly I was there, and I thought, ‘Wow! What have I taken on?’”

Like his own father, Don Forrest was a strict parent and a strong-willed man. But with his often rebellious and
tenacious youngest son, he had every reason to be firm. When Andrew was about ten, Don forced him to chew a mouthful of soap after he was caught swearing at his sister while saddling up horses. Another time, Andrew was secretly playing with matches and petrol, when he badly singed himself, including his face.