THE ART OF MAKING MISTAKES

EMMA MOSS FACED PLENTY OF HURDLES – BOTH PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL – ON HER FIRST-EVER MUSTER IN THE KIMBERLEY, WA.

Jillaroo Emma Moss on the upside of challenges.

THE ART OF MAKING MISTAKES is a tough one to master. The stuffing up bit is easy, but owning up, copping it and accepting it are the difficult parts, especially for someone like me – I’m very hard on myself and used to be a people-pleaser (often at my own peril).

This, as well as the price of cheese, is one of the hardest life lessons for many school leavers. School protected us from making major mistakes, thanks to the guidance we received. This help enabled us to develop self-confidence, but when I left school to start work on a cattle station, the shelter that school had created rapidly tumbled and crashed down. As if any of us believed it when our parents spun the old yarn about “school is the easiest time of life”.

Ever the perfectionist, for the first couple of months, any mistake I made on the station really got to me. I internally beat myself up a lot. The amount that I didn’t know was magnified because I was the only first-year there. I was lucky to have a brilliant head stockwoman, Zarrah. She knew how much of a perfectionist I was and never yelled at me. If I made a mistake by letting a cow through the wrong draft gate, she knew I was already yelling at myself. She would give me time to reflect and help me fix it, or talk it through so it wouldn’t happen again.

I don’t tell many people about one of my first and dumbest mistakes – partly because of pride, and partly because I think they would wonder how I even finished high school, let alone a second bachelor’s degree.

During my first muster, we made it about two-thirds of the way and into the start of the laneway, where there was a trough. We put the coacher mob in the yard and waited for the choppers to blow in more cattle from other parts of the paddock. We pushed the – now larger – mob of the watering square up the laneway towards the cattle yards.

Over the radio, Zarrah asked me to open the gate into the other paddock. So I trotted over to the gate – a “cocky’s gate”, which is a small fence that can be dragged and tightened when they’re fixed to a post with a steel picket. I’ve seen plenty in my life. But, being so focused on not stuffing up, I wasn’t thinking about the task at hand.

The gate post I trotted up to had four wires attached. “That’s not practical to undo all the time,” I thought. Luckily, I had my Leatherman pliers with me to help undo them. I dragged the gate back against the fence, hopped on my horse and cantered to catch up with the rest of the mob.

I didn’t think any more about it. That is, until the next day, when Zarrah asked me to drive down to the water square with her. I saw my mistake straight away – I had unhinged the gate. So focused on not stuffing up, I only looked at one side of the gate and undid it, by the hinge. That’s the equivalent of looking at a door, ignoring the door handle that you have used for the past 10 years to open it, and screwing off the hinges to get through.

I was embarrassed and, worst of all, I knew there’d be endless gate jokes to come. This is when I was introduced to ‘spit tins’. These are a tally system of stuff-ups. Every time someone falls off a horse or bike, they receive a spit tin. Every time someone gets bogged or forgets their girth, they get a spit tin. All of which I’ve done, by the way. Some stuff-ups are worth one tally; some are worth more. I got five for the gate. Each tally is worth $5, and at the end of the year, people pay for their tins and we throw a spit-tin party and reminisce on the great year and funny faux pas.

I like how it normalises mistakes. As long as you learn from them, mistakes can be valuable. Some advice that one boy gave me that year will stick with me forever: “You’re only a screw-up if you keep screwing up the same way. Learn from it, ’fess up, suck it up and move on. And remember, gates need to stay on their hinges.” Follow Emma on Instagram @life_on_a_station