Love In a Sunburnt Country (6 page)

Out in the cold evening air, a little down the hillside from me, Frances is standing holding her latest find, a tiny piece of apricot-coloured ceramic. Her neat cameo profile is pale against the homestead in the darkening valley far below. ‘Look,
more
porcelain pipe,' says Frances to Luke, holding up the pale fragment. He is instantly intrigued.

‘So, what's that, sixteen pieces so far? We hadn't found any until a few months ago,' he adds in an aside to my father. Archaeology has become part of everyday life here. With her children, Frances is constantly digging up, sorting and storing pottery pieces, bottles, tools and wire. Three-year-old Stella, says her father, is like a bower bird, always spotting and then tugging at mostly-buried treasures from the earth, and taking them home to wash and store.

Like so many people on a quest Frances has a sense she's ‘being helped' to find certain things or particular information: the timeliness of a find, the way details suddenly connect. It has been too serendipitous and has occurred too frequently for coincidence. She and Luke are clearly both waiting for an explanation for the use of porcelain pipe to emerge.

It's twilight now. We drive back down from Woolshed Hill to where Frances and Luke's house has settled itself, between the deep creeks that run through the Holowiliena homestead in South Australia's Flinders Ranges.

It's been a week since we left Holowiliena, driving back out along the windy road in the rain. Frances has written to tell me that Todd was digging near the schoolroom and found a much larger piece of pale porcelain pipe. Naturally, Frances, eaten up with curiosity and hopeful of finally discovering what this pipe was used for, stopped everything to dig alongside him. Next from the earth was the item in its entirety—stem and bowl, a pipe for smoking tobacco! Now, of course, she is wondering just whose pipes they were, and what stories could be told by the smoker.

And I left Holowiliena with a number of mysteries of my own to think about. The first of these resulted from something that happened on our first night there, just before the children's bedtime. Luke and Frances had together moved their children through all the bedtime rituals. It was time for saying goodnight when suddenly Todd made an announcement. Tonight was the night for Lamba to be put away. I saw Frances and Luke's eyes meet and a shared decision instantaneously made.

‘Tom, Jo, I'm really sorry, but this has to happen now,' said Frances, turning to us. ‘He's been talking about doing this for weeks and if tonight's the night he's chosen, well, we have to go with it. Nothing is more important.'

Lamba was another sheep teddy—not the rainbow sheep teddy with which Stella planned to console herself in Luke's absence, but a rather frail teddy, with a gentle sheep-face and worn-away patches in his woolly coat. Lamba belongs to Todd: and it is Lamba that he has always slept with and particularly loved. Luke brought out a video camera to record this moment. Into this camera Todd, with Lamba clasped to his chest, told the story of their shared life together and explained just why Lamba needed to be put away. His face shone with intensity and conviction as he spoke: if Lamba isn't put away he will just fall apart and then Todd wouldn't have him at all. With ceremony, with grief, Todd placed Lamba in a white box. There are friends for Lamba in the box, other toys that are being kept safe forever and can be taken out for brief careful plays and loves.

The following morning Frances reported that Todd's first night without Lamba was very hard. Like me, she has wondered just what triggered Todd's decision to act on that particular night. It was certainly not a tactic for avoiding bedtime, or in order to out-compete the guests in the house. With Frances I puzzled over it while I was at Holowiliena, and I have continued to turn it over in my mind ever since.

Now that I have written it all down I can see on the page the moment that crystallised Todd's thinking. It was the moment when Stella showed Dad and me the rainbow sheep. I believe that in that moment Todd's mind flicked ahead through time to a place when he needed to leave a child of his own with someone special to love and hold. Lamba was clearly the very best candidate for the role and so Todd needed to act, to make sure that Lamba would still be in good-enough condition to take the job on when the time came.

Todd, like everyone in his family, empathises not just with the family he lives with now, but the family who lived here before now, and also with family members who are yet to come. This was the same impulse that moved Richard and Janne to turn the storeroom into a museum, and the same impulse that motivates Frances and Luke to restore the old buildings of Holowiliena. And this sense of an empathic connection through time is not something the Warwicks extend just to family. They often tell stories of people whose lives have been touched by Holowiliena in some way: Frances calls them ‘the Holowiliena alumni'. I realise now that Todd's putting away of Lamba is yet another illustration of this family's ability to see their possessions not as theirs alone, but as a shared heritage that it's their responsibility and honour to preserve.

The other mystery I've been thinking about is just where the heart of a property like Holowiliena is located, and how love, even more than rain, is responsible for ‘land being in good heart'. My first thought, encouraged by the topology of Holowiliena, was that the homestead is the heart. But for Frances it is the old office, where many of the keys to understanding, stewarding and living with the land have been recorded. Alongside these two possibilities I am now wondering about a third.

Holowiliena has always been in good heart because it has always been loved. That ability to love the land and connect deeply to a place is part of the human condition—a trait that is stronger in some people than others, but as much a part of being human as making things from wood or writing poetry. It flourishes when people have time, when they are content, when they are not fighting to survive—and when they are in deep engagement with the land. For every generation of Warwicks to have loved Holowiliena so well, they needed first a deep contentment and ease in their relationships.

Is the heart of Holowiliena, then, not in a place at all? Is the land's heart inextricably connected with the hearts of the people of Holowiliena? I think so. Care for land springs from the same well as care for children, for the traditions of welcome-back and welcome-in, for the history of the place—from the strength of the loving bonds of the people living there. The heart of Holowiliena dwells in those relationships: in marriages, between parent and child, grandparent and child, and even in relationships across time. When all is well with those, the land receives the best of care and is, of course, quite literally, in ‘good heart'.

Anything But Mine

Robina and Aaron Meehan, Outback Gypsies

Waterholes are the churches of the outback; everybody's place, and sacred. Often we picture these pools as small and deep and round. They are not. Long and curving, they traverse miles of country and seem to love human company: the cool mud is comforting, laughs echo down the water and up into the trees, and the fish hunt around your toes. They are the deepest part of a creek, holding water months after rain has gone, with lines of trees screening them from the outside dry. It was to the waterhole at Epenarra, a pastoral property in the Northern Territory, that Robina Hergenhan came at the end of a long shift. It was 2004 and she was on the last placement of her nursing degree.

She wasn't quite sure nursing fully satisfied her, but no other calling had appealed just yet. She could feel that disenchantment and cynicism were close but these weren't the feelings that she wanted: she wanted to live unconstrained, adventurously and with hope. She couldn't quite see how to get free to feel those things and, instead, her days ran to the rhythm of her work ethic and determination to do the right thing.

On the love front she's closed her heart down to make repairs.

There is an Aboriginal community as well as a nursing post at Epenarra. The nursing post is staffed with just one other nurse for anywhere between 250 and 400 people living in the community. In addition to running cattle, the pastoralists on Epenarra also run an outback store, as most station properties once did throughout Australia. Epenarra is managed by Aaron Meehan, who left his home farm at just sixteen to see what he could do in the world. This has occupied his attention to such a degree that there hasn't been time for girls, but, like so many people who work with stock, he is a great reader of body language.

A good stockman, for example, can be driving up to the yards and from that distance discern the flighty, twitchy heifer with a huge flight zone (even if you are two or three hundred metres away from her, she'll panic) from the ebullient, confident animal who will allow you to stand close to her and happily explore a new terrain to see what it offers. From outside the yard this kind of stockman can see the leaders and the animals who will always look for a lead from another. His job is to make every animal feel safe enough to explore happily: and he does this by watching what they say with their ears and heads, how fast they are moving and how quickly they respond to whatever he does.

Robina had told the nurse who dropped her off at the waterhole that she would walk back, as it was only three kilometres.

‘I was in a string bikini and enjoying the water and sun on my skin when I heard a vehicle coming. I got out, got dressed because the nurse had told me that the local Aboriginal people didn't like to see too much skin, but it was Aaron coming down, and he'd heard there was a young nurse at the camp, and he'd seen the ambulance dropping me off. He told me he was just checking cattle. It took me twelve months of living and working there to realise that there were no cattle down there and there never would be cattle down there to check.

‘We just chatted. People say he doesn't talk. That's just how people perceive him. They say things like “how did Aaron even know what to say to a girl?” But our conversation just came so easily.'

On that day at the waterhole, with the sun on her skin slowly seeping through to her chilled heart, Robina was only months out of a difficult relationship.

‘That relationship should only have lasted twelve months, but with infidelities and separation and trying again, it lasted five years,' she says. ‘And he knew how to talk to me, how to win me back in.'

As a result Robina could not face the thought of having a boyfriend ever again. She was comfortable with lust and friendship, but never again would she walk the high rope of crazy early love with no safety net.

Aaron didn't know this, of course, but he was able to apply the skills he'd gained from years of handling stock. He saw quickly that Robina, just like a skittish heifer, would take flight with any kind of pressure. He applied none at all.

During the week Robina continued her nursing placement at the Epenarra Community Clinic, but the rest of the time was spent having fun with Aaron.

‘So we met at the waterhole on a Saturday, and he invited me to come on a bore run on the Sunday, just to look around. And then we just spent the rest of my spare time, my weekends in the Northern Territory, together. We went to the rodeo at Tennant Creek, got five flat tyres on the truck and had to go to Mt Isa to get new tyres …'

It was only when Robina found herself taking risks and flying high on the adventure of doing so that she realised that in Aaron's steady, competent presence she felt safe. She'd not felt that way in a very long time.

‘At the rodeo I was drinking fire-engines—normally I don't drink.'

On the way back from Mt Isa Robina drove the ute while Aaron slept.

‘I sped up and up, until I was driving at 130 kilometres an hour and the feeling was amazing.

‘Every afternoon he'd pick me up to go down to the waterhole … and every afternoon the same song would come on the stereo.'

The song, ‘Anything But Mine', is a country song about a just-for-now romance. Robina didn't expect anything else of her friendship with Aaron. When her placement was over she even rewrote the words to the song for Aaron, to celebrate their friendship and to thank him for their shared time. It was her way of saying goodbye.

But Aaron had been quick to perceive what Robina had not—how very much they had in common. Robina had been raised on a dairy farm on the south New South Wales coast, Aaron on a cattle property on the north coast. Both came from tight-knit families of strong people who were quick to see what needed to be done and to do it without complaint.

Aaron had left the family farm to make his own way in the world at just sixteen. His family had felt both dismay and pride. He would have been a great asset in the family business, and yet they could not help admiring his calm dedication to the future he wanted. This was not to have a farm, but to have a pastoral business. The skills required are not quite the same and he had understood that at sixteen. And he'd also understood that to find the right property he needed to have the skills and the dollars ready to go, but also be in the right place at the right time. Aaron believed that meant he needed to be living and working in the station country.

Robina was awed by Aaron's unswerving drive towards a future he had visualised in his teens; after all, she was yet to visualise her own. Aaron was far ahead of her, and not just in imagining his own future. He was already imagining a future for the two of them together.

‘I thought what happened in the Territory stayed in the Territory. But when he dropped me off at the Wauchope Hotel near the Devils Marbles to catch the bus back home he said: “Can I call you when I come to New South Wales?”'

Aaron did call, and soon they were talking regularly. When Robina failed a final paper and had to postpone completing her nursing degree, he promptly offered her work on Epenarra. This was a platonic arrangement at the outset, but did not remain so for long—although Robina was extremely uncomfortable with the word ‘girlfriend' and Aaron could see that earning her trust was a long-haul job.