Sharing
their
bonus
s tat i o n
Lyle 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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outback
outback
51
s tat i o n
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.
T
ip toeing 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
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outback
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
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.
outback
53
s tat i o n
Australian War Memorial
“We’ve always operated
on a shoestring budget. It
was one of the reasons we
bought this place.”
0
100 km
Q U E E N S L A N D
Charleville
Bonus
Downs
WA R R E G O HW
Y
Roma
Paro
o R
Cooladdi
Mitchell
Cunnamulla
BALONNE HWY
N E W
S O U T H
St George
W A L E S
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.
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.”
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outback
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.)
s tat i o n
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.
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 twothirds 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.
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
T CDHS OB1 4 0 3 1 1 2 0 0 0 . p d f
Pa ge
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s tat i o n
“Succession planning was wishful thinking as we
didn’t know whether we’d even still have the place.”
Lyle and Madonna Connolly at Bonus Downs homestead, where they are finally able to plan for succession with a measure of confidence.
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 stockhandling schools and I’ve been to another since then. That’s
influenced the way we approach stockwork here at Bonus.”
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outback
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.
bonus downs centenary
Bonus Downs centenary celebrations will be held in October.
For information, contact Madonna Connolly,
phone: (07) 4623 1573
email: [email protected]
www.bonusdowns.webls.net