Bush Legends: ‘The Keepers’ of Onslow Dawn McAullay and Margie Sweeting give insight into Pilbara town

Meet “The Keepers” of Onslow. Schoolmates in the 1950s and friends for 70 years, Dawn McAullay and Margie Sweeting have endured terrifying cyclones, atomic bomb testings and, at times, debilitating weather conditions while developing a deep affection for their Pilbara town. But tragedy has also never been too far away as their number of family members and other “oldies” — known as the coastal town’s keepers — has gradually thinned. “I’ve got more mates and family out at the cemetery than I have in the town now,” Mrs McAullay lamented. “We’ve had a lot of tragedy in our lives, but it’s part of living and it’s what happens as the years go by.” “It’s been pretty bloody good,” she blurted. “We’ve had our bad times and sad times and things like that, but we’ve spent a lot of time out in the bush fishing and doing other stuff. “There have been some really good times here and we all got to know one another a fair bit. “And if anything goes wrong, the whole town is at your door.” The rising 83-year-old friends were born just six months apart in 1938. Mrs McAullay is a godparent to two of Mrs Sweeting’s three sons. An aunt of Darren McAullay, WA’s voice of thoroughbred racing, Mrs McAullay was 11 when she moved from Bullsbrook to Onslow in 1950 with her parents Bill and Nell and older sister Jackie in a Chevrolet truck after her father secured a job in the local lead mine before buying the local garage. “It was the first of April and Dad said years later when times were bad, ‘Gawd, a man was a fool wasn’t he’,” she recalled. “The streets were just dirt and that was good for running on as a kid because it wasn’t as hot as bitumen. But you’ve got to have progress.” Onslow is known as “Cyclone City” — and for good reason. Some of the events Mrs McAullay recalled were indeed catastrophic. In particular, while Dwellingup was burning down in the State’s south in 1961, Onslow was being rattled in the north by three separate cyclones. “We had nearly a metre of water through the house in the night during one of them and my dog woke me up with his wet paws on my chest,” she recalled. “I was pregnant with one of my babies and had two little boys, two cats and a dog and we were all on the kitchen table. It was weird to see it come in and when the tide went out, the water went out. “Then in 1963, we lost the roof off the house ... that was a big cyclone. It was dreadful on your ears, the pressure nearly blew your eardrums out.” She also clearly recalled the buzz in Onslow when the British came to town for nuclear weapon tests at the nearby Montebello Islands in 1952 and 1956. “I remember in 1952 how all the things in Mum’s old kitchenette all rattled,” she said. “You knew the bomb had gone off so down the beach we all ran and you could see the cloud coming up. “A bomb went off, then we all went back to school and life went on as normal. It was good for the town.”Mrs McAullay, whose former Ashburton Shire vice-president husband Darral (or Darby) died in 2009, has four children, nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. But a trip to the well-kept cemetery at the entry to Onslow reveals a heartbreaking past for a big family that should have been bigger. Mrs McAullay’s son Kim, an apprentice plumber, was just 17 in 1976 when the car he was passenger in was T-boned in Roebourne and he was killed instantly. It was the same year her mother had a stroke. She died six years later in 1982 just three days after Mrs McAullay had found her father dead from a heart attack after his daily visit to see his wife in hospital. A joint funeral was held soon after. Two sons, Les and Mark, of her late butcher brother Ray died aged 46 and 42 respectively — the first with alcohol-related illness and the latter took his own life. Twin daughters, Margaret and Rayleen, from the same family had previously died at birth after Ray’s wife had suffered blood poisoning from helping him with a beef carcass while pregnant and being pricked in her finger by a spinifex. Jesse, a five-year-old son of her niece Leonie, also died too soon after a brief battle with leukaemia. Named after WA’s third Supreme Court chief justice, Sir Alexander Onslow, the town has some surprising and quirky tourist highlights. Tours run by Onslow Visitor Centre manager Jan Bevan include the extraordinary shell collection of Neil and Judy Baker, the result of 60 years’ work, and “The Cartoon Shed”. The latter is a unique collection of chalk drawings created in the mid-1980s on the inside of a World War II furnace oil tank by former resident Robyn Stein, who was living in a nearby tent and needed a pastime to entertain her three young children. The visitor centre also houses an exceptional museum (co-founded by Mrs McAullay) of past relics and the town is home to great fishing, a thriving salt-mining operation and WA’s best view of the “Staircase to the Moon” phenomenon. The nearby Mackerel Islands, Thevenard Island, Direction Island and Montebello Islands are also major drawcards. Mrs McAullay, treasurer for most of Onslow’s groups and institutions, vividly recalled a 1956 visit by Lord and Lady Mountbatten and said Chevron’s “Wheatstone” project, which was sanctioned in 2011, had more recently given the town a significant financial boost. She is also a close friend of former Onslow resident and fellow “Bush Legend” Lorraine Sartori, who featured in The West Australian in October for her Carnarvon-based role in the 1969 moon landing. But she said the pair had clear differences. “She helped put a man on the moon, I’ve just been around,” she said. “I’m just happy I’ve lived here in the time that I did. They were the good old days.”

Bush Legends: ‘The Keepers’ of Onslow Dawn McAullay and Margie Sweeting give insight into Pilbara town

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