JENNY Denton saw a town for the first time in her life at the age of 12 when travelling to Ceduna because of a broken arm.
"I fell off a horse at Nullabor Station, where my father was the manager," she said.
"There was nobody on the Nullabor Plains, save a few travellers coming through, so seeing a town was a bit of a shock."
This is one account in her new book My Memories of Pushing Goog's Track, where she documents stories that go back to her early childhood days growing up on the Nullarbor.
She was thrilled to travel out to Cook on the east-west railway line to see Father Christmas arrive on the tea and sugar train, but the real adventures began after she met Stanley, or Goog as he was more frequently known, at Fowlers Bay in 1963.
They married in 1965 and bought 3238 hectares of land north of the dingo-proof fence at Kalanbi near Ceduna.
Goog would often sit on the verandah at their farm, Lone Oak, and say to Jenny as he gazed over the bush beyond, "I wonder what is out there, Mother".
('Mother' was his endearing term for Jenny).
He then set off to find out for himself.
Goog began pushing a road through to Malbooma, south-west of Tarcoola, through scrub. He received no support from the government and spent his weekends during winter working away at the job, initially with a Fordson 500 tractor, with a bucket on the front, but then with a proper bulldozer and three old Land Rovers they built out of scrapped vehicles to help ferry wood and fuel to the workers.
The working party comprised Goog, Jenny, and their three children Martin, Debbie and Jeffery, as well as Jenny's brother, Denis and mother Coral Beattie.
Goog was supported financially by local landholders despite a lack of assistance from the government, with whom conflict eventually erupted when it wanted to create Yellabina Conservation Park on Crown Land before the track was finished.
MLC Arthur Whyte came to the rescue to argue for permission for Goog to finish the track, and so did Ceduna local Ken Wright who had a big interest in the track and built the grader.
Jenny remembers a time when they were working into the bush when Goog decided they would backtrack to some Black Oaks and head to the north a little because sand dunes were proving too big.
"Denis and I looked at each other and said, 'what bloody black oaks?'" she said.
"Anyway, when we got back there we turned north, and then we came back there the next day and Goog stood there thinking and said, 'I think we might build a shack there'.
"So we did."
The shack later had to be removed but there are now two memorials in its place, one for Goog, and one for their son, Martin, or Dinger as he was known.
*Full report in Stock Journal, July 4 issue, 2013.
