How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling by Martin Chambers

because at each import he collected and returned the vans to us. Exactly how much of it Palmenter owned or organised directly I didn’t know, but he had something to do with everything, of that I was sure. When the boats reached the coast, the chopper, under cover of the muster going on, flew into the station where the people were put up in the dongas for a few days. This got them away from the coast and out of the areas where authorities might be looking for them. Later on we used this same basic system but I improved it quite a bit.
    They were divided into groups of three, or four, maybe five for one of the bigger vans, and sent south to either Melbourne or Sydney. Only one van would leave in a day, and we gave them each a different route. We had several routes marked out on maps. When they got to the city, the vans were returned to the station ready for the next import. I suspected Palmenter had eyes and ears all along the way, tracking their progress and reporting any problems, and people in the city ready to take back the vans as they arrived.
    Although I was doing the bookwork I had little idea about the import side of things. That was all handled by Palmenter and it was all done in cash, but I did discover that the station was losing money and that Palmenter was feeding just enough cash back in to keep it afloat. At least, that’s what I thought was happening. One time, I added up the amount of musters and the number of cattle supposedly shipped out and sold. I joked with Spanner.
    â€˜Must be something in the grass out there, ’cause they sure are fertile cattle.’
    Spanner was the only person I could talk to. He was my friend but I didn’t want to come right out and say what I suspected. I wanted to see if Spanner would volunteer anything, how much he knew or was prepared to divulge to me.
    â€˜Best if you didn’t notice that one, I think,’ was what he said.
    Earlier on, before Arif, before leaving became so urgent, I was out on a bore run and I noticed the road out along the east boundary was well used. At the time I idly thought it must lead somewhere. Later I calculated that if I drove carefully on my runs I might siphon off some small amounts of fuel, store it in containers some place, and I could leave the station via this back way without Palmenter knowing. So I had followed the road for a way and was surprised when I came back to the cattle yards: this wide road did a big circuit around the property and came right back to where it started. Except for a few very sandy 4WD tracks, the only way onto and off the station was via the homestead so the purpose of this well-formed loop of road was a bit of a mystery.
    Sometimes Arif was only a memory and I could spend content afternoons with Spanner looking through his fishing magazines. Life was as near to normal as it could be. But other times we would sit together and I’d leaf through the magazines angered at how old they were, that Spanner could be entertained by something he had seen or read thousands of times. Or, worse, I’d have something I wanted to know or understand and I would struggle with how to broach the subject.
    It was like that one day when I had been doing some accounts and suddenly it dawned on me. Close to the time of each muster there was a cash deposit, barely enough to keep the place solvent. There was no other income and the amounts varied considerably. I didn’t think cattle prices fluctuated that much and I doubted buyers paid cash. Plus, we were running a muster every month now and there simply couldn’t be that many cattle or I’d have seen them while out on the bore runs. The cattle were mustered up, loaded on trucks, driven around the property, then unloaded again.
    â€˜It’s all a front, isn’t it, to cover the choppers coming and going? The noise and dust and traffic. It hides what he’s really doing.’
    â€˜Best if you don’t go there,’ Spanner