Love In a Sunburnt Country

Love in a
SUNBURNT COUNTRY

JO JACKSON KING

www.harlequinbooks.com.au

About the Author

Jo Jackson King is the author of the award-winning and bestselling
Station at Austin Downs
. An occupational therapist, she works with remote communities in the outback. A gifted writer with extensive rural women's networks, Jo is a School of the Air mother and veteran of late-night talkfests between women where the conversation veers away from school and land care and becomes about love.

Wishing you love
And on your land a flourishing garden
Our loves and our gardens are all different
And all the same.

Contents

Setting Out

Didn't Know I Was Looking For Love

Frances and Luke Frahn, Holowiliena Station, Flinders Ranges, South Australia

Anything But Mine

Robina and Aaron Meehan, Outback Gypsies

My Love Is Your Love

Cathy and David Jones, Boogardie Station, Mt Magnet, Western Australia

Lovely Boy, Beautiful Girl

John and Mary te Kloot, Marmboo Station, Longreach, Queensland

You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio

Kath and Steve Baird, Kiewa Valley, Tawonga, Bogong High Plains, Victoria

Like a River

Rebel Black and Michael Matson, Lightning Ridge, New South Wales

Holdin' a Good Hand

Cissy and Bill Bright, the Top End, Northern Territory and Queensland

Never Tear Us Apart

Tania and Tim Wiley, Broome–Wiluna–Marble Bar–Port Hedland–Broome, Western Australia

Home Again

Acknowledgements

Setting Out

At the beginning of 2015 I set off on a journey to find and tell some of remote Australia's best love stories and to paint a portrait of not just the lovers, but the endless pattern of how the land transforms those who live on it and how those who live on it transform the land.

I am an outback dweller myself, and I have young children, so I am a School of the Air mother. Parents teach the children a curriculum supplied by the school, and once a day the children speak to their teacher and classmates ‘over the air'—this was once done via radio but now involves virtual classrooms on computer screens. Every so often there is a camp. We drive our children hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres for these gatherings. These are necessary for the children and for teachers, but also, as you might imagine, for mothers. We talk and talk. Late at night, when the children are hopefully sleeping (or, at the least, settled!) we tell the stories of how we came to live where we do. And so often these stories are ones of life-derailing and transformative love. In this book, from all around Australia, are the kind of stories that I hear late at night and into the early morning on School of the Air camps. The outback setting forces couples to rely on each other far more than usual as there is often no-one else—it strengthens marriages or breaks them. And within each love story I wanted to share the other aspects of living remotely—both the smaller and larger stories of our lives, the dangers and comforts, the history and the possible futures we see. I didn't want the love stories to have just a romantic beginning. I wanted to find people with lives about which my readers and listeners would say ‘you couldn't make that stuff up'.

Initially I thought the hardest part of this book would be finding stories from all around Australia. And it was tricky. For example, the first story was found by friends of friends through the bush telegraph that still operates across regional Australia. One of the numbers I was given to call was that of South Australian artist Marie Parsons, mother of another well-known artist Ally Parsons.

I rang Marie. As I spoke the words aloud I could hear for the first time what a very strange request I was making. ‘Even if a love story comes to mind in a few weeks' time, perhaps you could call me …'

‘Oh, no,' she said warmly. ‘A story has come to mind straight away. One of my daughter Ally's governesses from when Ally owned a station. Her name is Frances. Frances and Luke fell in love … well, that took a bit longer … but they met when Frances was working for Ally as her governess, and Luke came to the property to shear sheep. Now they're restoring the historical buildings on the station belonging to Frances's family and the ABC has just made a TV show about what they've done. The story I heard about their meeting was that Luke went shearing in a suit, tie and jacket and all, and that's what caught Frances's eye.' So that became the first story in this book.

But, in fact, finding the stories was the easiest part of writing. When you begin to write a book it feels a great deal as if you are packing for a long, exciting and arduous journey. You hope to have most of what you will need in your suitcase. On first setting out I felt confident I was uniquely qualified to write this book. I was in the midst of the first story when I began to suspect I was missing something vital—something I had not even known I needed to pack. To write this book I needed to understand love, and it had never occurred to me before that I didn't understand how love works and what it is.

My home is in remote Western Australia on a pastoral property with my husband, my parents and my three sons—and together we are regenerating it. We have lived there for sixteen years and Austin Downs is well and truly halfway back to life. I know how land degrades and how it can heal. My family's adventures on Austin Downs are the subject of my first book.

Healing land must be rested. This means less stock. Sometimes it means no stock, and therefore no earnings. But you must still live! All the adults in our business work off the property—my husband and father in mining and making fences, solar arrays and monitoring systems, my mother and I as occupational therapists. We don't work in clinics, but out in the communities themselves, and our favourite work is with children. And so my second book was on human development. It lays bare the interconnections between generations and shows how the way love is expressed travels down between generations. It tells the stories of how the forces in wider society shape the interactions between parent and child and how we all transform each other, all the time: bodies, minds, hearts and relationships.

My work as an occupational therapist often brings me close to people during the most painful parts of their lives. So what do I read to recover from vicariously experiencing that pain, to be able to be present with a full heart on the next day? Apart from research about how to do my job better (I am a research junkie, as you will see), I read romance. I read a lot of romance. I am particularly fond of Regency romance. I had assumed that this, combined with my own happy experience of love and marriage, added up to a natural understanding of romantic love. There is a book called
Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels
—but, I was to discover, reading romances had apparently not taught me enough.

I was astonished to discover that some people who were falling in love had no idea what was happening to them. In fact, when I heard this from the first couple I talked to, Frances and Luke from Holowiliena Station, I didn't believe them. In our long discussion of this intimate, extraordinary part of their lives I actually argued with them about their feelings and the sequence of events in their own love story. I am mortified when I think about it now. At the time I just couldn't help myself.

The next interview was with Robina Meehan (‘outback gypsy') who said: ‘Limerence, that patch when you are off your head, that didn't happen with me and Aaron. It was better and deeper than that.'

Then, on the plane journey back from Lightning Ridge to Western Australia, I fell into conversation with Lachlan Gatti, who was in his second year of a Bachelor of Arts and Teaching. At Lachlan's college an expert had been brought in to talk about love and so Lachlan knew all about limerence and he also told me it had another name: PEA Brain.

Back to the research I went, but by now I was becoming aware of how very much I didn't know about love. Talking to each of the couples in this book resulted in me returning to the library to learn more of the neurology, the psychology and the philosophy of love. And I was on another journey too: to better understand the land.

Driving through the Flinders Ranges to meet Luke and Frances, the uncovered hills have me wondering if they have always been so picturesquely, so revealingly bare, or if this is a result of early overgrazing. Once I would unhesitatingly have thought ‘most certainly', but now, I'm learning this is not necessarily the case. Aboriginal people kept the ‘woody weeds' that cover much of Australia to a minimum by use of fire. The ‘parkland cleared' landscape that early painters replicated faithfully in the 18th century was not the original Australian landscape, but the landscape created deliberately by the Aboriginal people. The Australian ‘natural' (not farmed or grazed) landscape of later centuries—dense scrub, forests, woodland plains—is therefore one created by human intervention too, in this case the cessation of the Aboriginal people's efforts.

In fact, the question of whether a landscape is natural or not is similar to that of whether nature or nurture shapes a child. Both questions are based on flawed assumptions: firstly, that ‘nature' is inanimate and static rather than dynamic, responsive and creative; secondly, that change is always human-led; and, finally, that we ourselves aren't part of nature. The truth is that the land and all that live on it, below it and above it are always changing—innovating, responding, adapting—and the idea of an unchanged virgin landscape is nonsense.

How land changes people and how love changes land is the context for this book and to write it I've had to come to a better understanding of what love is, and what land is, and of how they both work, and how love and land work together to create us.

Didn't Know I Was Looking For Love

Frances and Luke Frahn, Holowiliena Station, Flinders Ranges, South Australia

It is evening and early winter, and my father Tom and I have just reached the twisting gravel road that will take us through the Flinders to Holowiliena, one of South Australia's most remote and historic sheep stations. Holowiliena has been in the hands of the Warwick family for 160 years. This long association of family and land is rare, and becoming rarer with every year that passes.

It is a lonely road. For some unknown reason I expected to see the same messily rounded shrubs and short trees and willowy grasses that are found around our own station, but I see nothing of the kind. In this part of the Flinders Ranges the hills are covered in low grasses and small rocks. The complex and self-contradicting form of the land is instantly apparent: soft beginnings, sudden scarps, deep incisions where the water runs, and gently rounding crests. The hill shapes echo each other, travelling further and further back, until I am no longer sure what is range and what is cloud on the far horizon.