Girlie Goody has run her Central Queensland cattle property solo for 45 years - battling drought, downturns and disbelieving bank managers. But she’s done more than just survive in her tough environment, she’s thrived - cultivating a rich life she reveals to the Weekly.
“Don’t bend that bar,” Girlie Goody teases, as I bounce like a human pinball around the cab of her Toyota LandCruiser with a white-knuckle grip on the safety rail. We’re lurching into a washed-out creek that cuts through the hills of her cattle property near Monto, 150 kilometres south west of Gladstone in Central Queensland, and we’re on the hunt for cattle hiding in the scrub. Peering over the wheel, Girlie reaches down to “add more horses” and knock the ute into four-wheel drive. She’s covered this track every one of her 83 years - first in a saddle, then later on four wheels when her joyrides became matters of business - and she knows the country as well as she knows herself.
Girlie’s property ‘Malakoff’ is a 3,200-hectare tract of land like a handprint on the western side of the Great Dividing Range, that was virgin forestry when her father selected it in 1928. He cleared a pad and built a basic house with scavenged fittings, and with his wife Dorrie, set about filling it with children. Girlie was the fifth of six, born Elma Joyce - the only girl, which is perhaps how she earned her moniker. “I think it was my father who gave it to me,” she says, “probably because he couldn’t remember my name.” She, and just about everyone she knew, existed in his orbit.
“He’d muster all week,” Girlie recalls, “and on the weekend canter into town and get a couple of starts at the races with last week’s sweat all over him. Then he’d come home and do some more mustering.” When Hector died in 1976, everyone was cut adrift. “Daddy had cancer, but he didn’t want us to know, and we didn’t want him to know we knew, so it was never talked about - and that’s just how it was.”
His will revealed he’d left half of ‘Malakoff’ to his 36-year-old single daughter. “Somebody had to be here for mum,” Girlie says. “She would have been left here on her own, so it was accepted that it was my job to see to her. My brothers looked at me and said, ‘well, do you want it?’ And I said, ‘there’s nothing in this world that I want more’.”
But the bank manager was less supportive, as Girlie discovered when she tried to borrow $80,000 to buy a brother out of the other half. It look two years of wrangling, calls to her local member of parliament, and eventually a couple of other brothers acting as guarantors to secure the loan. “If I had to live those years again, I’d jump off a cliff first,” she says.
Girlie swelled to fill the Hector-sized hole in their lives, fracturing and reforming as she became a new version of herself. The beef depression had just ended so cattle were almost worthless, and year after year of drought rolled on. “Then my back went,” she says. “I woke up and it was paralysed - it was a culmination of everything. I was in hospital and had to slow down.” But not for long: she strapped herself into a back brace and got to work - and at the end of ten challenging years threw a party to celebrate paying off her loan. She hasn’t borrowed a cent since.
As life settled into a less fraught pattern, Girlie allowed herself to flourish. She travelled to South Africa to look at cattle, and devoted time to just about every community group in the district - like the CWA, show society and race club. But her best known legacy might be helping to establish a competition for graziers to compare the carcases of their animals against a range of markers like weight, fat distribution and meat colour.
In the heart of cattle country, the Callide Dawson Beef Carcase Competition is hotly contested and Girlie is the one to beat. “I suppose you could say I’m a carcase junkie,” she beams, “and I had a big win last year with champion grain-fed steer and most successful exhibitor.” But still, insecurity flickers. “Some of those big places have hundreds of bullocks to pick from, but I’ve only got a handful - and every time I’ve won, I just didn’t know why.”
We’ve arrived in the back paddock of Girlie’s property, and a mob of pregnant cows is ambling over to greet us - their moos echoing off the rocky hills. Girlie inspects a black cow who looks to be wearing a copper toupee. “This is Alex, a Brangus-cross I hand reared on a bottle,” Girlie says, flip-flopping a matching copper ear. “Her mother was scrubber, the equivalent of a brumby.” She leans down to kiss Alex on the head, who’s well accustomed to the affection.
Cattle are Girlie’s livelihood, but they’re also her companions, and she’ll try any breed once - provided it has a good temperament. “If they blow their nose or look at me sideways though, they’re gone,” she says, and she doesn’t mean on a holiday. There’s Dev the South Devon bull (“a beautiful boy”) who weighs 800 kilograms and lets Girlie lean on his back as he sloths under a tree, Chaser the Murray Grey, who’s “not very pretty but makes bloody good calves,” and Kiss the Nguni cow - so named because of her Gene Simmons-style markings. “My favourites don’t go to the meatworks,” she says tenderly.
For someone so anchored to the land, Girlie is ambivalent about nature - from the “bloody mongrel” Moreton Bay ash saplings and “rotten old” blue gums that line the creek, to her modest garden where she’s “stuck a few things in the ground” vaguely hoping they’ll stay alive without much intervention. She reserves particular vitriol for creeping lantana, an introduced weed that’s strangled her native pasture. “In the last 30 years, it’s cut my stocking rate from 800 to around 500 head,” she says. “It’s ruined this country.” In many ways, creeping lantana represents the forces Girlie has always faced: uncontrollable and relentless. “My biggest challenge has been making a success of this thing,” she says, gesturing widely, “with not a lot of water, and not going into debt. It weighs on me because the welfare of the cattle is most important thing.”
Back at the house, Girlie is off to prepare lunch. “Shut that door behind you” she calls, as we weave through a honeycomb of rooms. “I have it closed to keep the bats out.” She’s practical - always - there’s not a square of carpet in her house and boots are allowed inside - but she’s also deeply sentimental: shelves overflow with photo albums and books, and cabinets are crammed with trophies and colourful show ribbons. Girlie retrieves slices of white bread from the depths of a chest freezer, which she wraps in a plastic bag and defrosts in the microwave. “Do you eat avocado?” she asks while rummaging through the fridge - before retracting the offer when she finds one all brown and squishy. “Stuff dies in my kitchen,” she says, flicking her eyebrows in an act of nonchalance. Her mother was a magnificent cook, but Girlie has no time for homemaking (“not if I can help it,” she giggles). She never married, but has always been surrounded by loved ones. A decade ago, her nephew moved his family into another house on the property - the reason, she says, she doesn’t have the chance to feel lonely.
In early 2021, Girlie and her nephew’s wife Michele set off on a ride. “All of a sudden my pony put her head down and went to town,” she says, “and off I came. I was in a bit of pain, but I didn’t even get a gravel-rashed face. Still, they pulled a fair bit of dirt out of my eye.” She was airlifted to hospital where she spent four days in intensive care and a month in recovery. “I broke several ribs, my right hip and cracked my back in two places.” She credits the brace she’s worn every day since 1986 for preventing a worse injury. “I was also very fit at the time, which I think was a big help.” She came home with a walker, but has now resumed her trademark speed-walking with only the faintest of limps.
Girlie is learning how to work less since the accident. She does more jigsaw puzzles and spends time basking in the morning sun on the deck her grandnephew built at Easter. She no longer rides a horse, but she’ll trek for kilometres through the hills to make sure a bull is returned to the right paddock. “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly,” she says. “And if you’re not going to do it properly, don’t start. Sometimes you get halfway through something and wonder why. But then you think, now I’ve started, I’m going to finish.”
Occasionally she remembers that time she was told to give up, and all those other times when it would have been far easier to. But those thoughts are fleeting - there’s just too much else to do.
