Bush Legends: Mount Augustus station owner Don Hammarquist reveals stories behind the mountain

The beauty and beast that exists in equal measure at Mount Augustus has for decades captured the intrigue of Don Hammarquist. With his home sitting at the foot of the rock claimed to be the world’s biggest monolith, Hammarquist has a better understanding than most of the dangers that lurk beneath the spectacular natural view that greets him each morning. He admits to have seen more human carnage on the mountain than anyone should have to in a lifetime and remains adamant most of it could have been avoided. “There are some things you can’t legislate for,” he said from his magnificent station homestead, likely to have been referring to the word, stupidity. “You can only feed so much, you can’t do it for them.” Hammarquist’s arrival with his older brother Graeme at the Mount Augustus cattle station and tourist park he now runs, was almost as organic as the mountain itself. Their father Bill Hammarquist and mother Margaret McAllister had separated when they were young and she decided to head from the city to the bush to restart her life. A Kent Street High School student before continuing her studies at Perth Business College, she hooked into the State’s station life and after getting a job as a cook at Mount Augustus, her early-teen boys would visit in the school holidays. Then, when she formed a relationship with station manager and renowned WA horseman Dudley Farrar, they “became part of the furniture”. “From the first time I came here at 11, I thought it was for me,” Hammarquist said. “It was like a brand new world and your adrenaline rushes and you just think, ‘How good is this?’. It was like having your first ice cream and the reality is, I still get the same feeling today. “There were horses there; you could jump in an old bloody Land Rover and go out and do a windmill run. You’d go with the old blokes who were doing the bore runs and they told you so many things and you absorbed it like a sponge. “I’ve said to many people, once you’ve drunk the waters of the Gascoyne, you’ll always return and these outback reaches seem to run through my veins. I’ve always had a romance with the bush, that’s why I’m still here. He described his mother as a supremely capable woman, who helped him carve his dream bush life. He also said Dudley Farrar became like a father to them. “There are still very few days where we don’t make some reference to him because he taught us a lot,” he said. “He was a flamboyant sort of a fellow, very learned, well-respected and one of the best horsemen you’ve seen in your life. He’d capture a brumby he called Patch, taught him to lay down and when he laid on top of him the horse wouldn’t even blink an eyelid. “The affinity the man had with his animals was just unbelievable.” Mount Augustus station was established in 1887 by pastoralist and politician Samuel James Phillips, whose maternal grandfather was WA’s first surveyor-general John Septimus Roe, after it was identified as good grazing land. The rock is known by the Wajarri people as “Burringurrah”, the name of a dreamtime boy who is said to have collapsed and died there after being speared by his tribesmen for running away from an initiation ceremony. The Hammarquist brothers were almost shocked when their tender to assume the 400,000-hectare station, which had been devastated by consecutive droughts, was successful in 1978. Hammarquist and his wife Dot then bought the property from the rest of the family in 1986 and the park, a 490km drive east of Carnarvon, was gazetted three years later. Bunbury-born Hammarquist, who has another property at Walkaway where Graeme heads their horse racing operation, grew up in Bassendean’s Parker Street and could barely believe how Perth’s northern suburb had grown. “There were very few houses there then, now it’s fully suburbia,” he said. “People used to gallop their horses up and down our street, that’s how rural it was.” But it was at his adopted home at Mount Augustus where his zest for life flourished, fuelled by the teachings from some of the station’s Aboriginal stockmen and workers. “Graeme and I were the only two white children here and all the Aboriginal people were our best friends,” he said. “They treated us like their children and we treated them with respect.” And it was the fixed-wing aerial mustering of their cattle which became Hammarquist’s great love. He said watching his sons Matthew and David virtually mimic the station skills he and Graeme had mastered was one of life’s great satisfactions. “They could be roaring along in a vehicle and just like that they could say, ‘Those cattle have gone that way’,” he said. “It’s just like being a tradesman - if they’re the cards you’re dealt, you absorb it and it’s with you for life. A lot of times you wish you were 45 again and enjoying it with them and be working alongside them at a brilliant stage of their lives. “Mustering season is the absolute epitome of what it’s all about. It’s not all beer and skittles, but it’s why you’re here. Just simple things like following a mob of cows and calves along and seeing how a calf relates to its mother and how the cow relates to the calf. “What sounds like a moo to me and you is clearly something different to them. Isn’t nature wonderful?” Hammarquist admitted that watching cattle perish in drought-stricken conditions was a heart-breaking reality of station life. “If you’re tough enough to live in this country, you’re tough enough to bear a bit,” he said. “If you were a softer person, you wouldn’t actually be here.” But dealing with the deaths of people on Mount Augustus was another level _ a fact he had to confront in November when he gave evidence at an inquest into the deaths of four hikers on the rock in the past two years. He said the danger warnings were clear at several points in the park and that many of WA’s adventure-based tourist attractions, including Karijini National Park, Bluff Knoll and the Bibbulmun Track, had also had issues. But he believed many future incidents could be avoided by better management and communication facilities. The State Government has earmarked $10 million to fund improvements at Mount Augustus, which is nudging towards 20,000 visitors annually. “Any of these things that happen break your heart,” he said. “I’ve been there when we’ve found people (dead) on more than one occasion, and we’ve carried others down on stretchers. I’m not saying I’m hardened to it, but I’m realistic enough to work out when things aren’t going to have a good outcome. “A lot of these features are here for people’s enjoyment. We don’t need to be taking that away from them and there are things that can be done through better management and making sure we improve response times when things happen.” Looking at the majestic Mount Augustus, which rises 715 metres from the plain, at sunset makes it difficult to think of anything bad happening on it. And Hammarquist, who is president of the Upper Gascoyne Shire in a stint of more than 30 years on the council and was recently awarded the WA Country Racing Association’s lifetime achievement award, says the view never gets old. “It’s just the magic of the mountain,” he said. “When we see the early mornings, when we see the cloud on the mountain, when we see the moon sitting on the mountain, when we see the sunrises, the sunsets, the waterfalls, the different shades of day and evening ... it is magic.”