Love In a Sunburnt Country (15 page)

‘I had the idea that this place was something like you would see in the film
Gone with the Wind
: a massive house with lots of servants, green rolling fields and hills surrounding the house, and on the hills, fat animals grazing happily. I thought it would be hard to see much of the sky past the hills and the big old trees dotted everywhere. Of course, this same sky would seldom be blue as it rains so much.' The foundations of these pictures were, of course, the green and grey of her own land.

John returned to Australia to take up a new life on the family station. In these first years on Marmboo, John was not yet seeing what would become painfully apparent in time—that his father was not going to be able to willingly share the business decision-making. John was focused instead on developing the physical skill set that pastoralism requires, and on enjoying the experience of getting to know the property as an adult. Children, even teenagers, see loved land differently to adults. Returning to a property means that you have to grow new knowledge around old perceptions: in childhood a fence extends forever, but working on it is easier as the responsibility doesn't rest with you. As an adult, the fence is simultaneously shorter and more work.

He wrote to Mary, and she wrote back. They also corresponded by tape for the pleasure of hearing each other's voices.

‘John would send these long tapes about the workings of the property, cattle and sheep, and then right at the end, talk about how he missed me. I didn't care much about the cattle and sheep, I'd just fast-forward the tape and listen over and over to what he said at the end,' says Mary.

‘One of our sons once complained about a few hours of driving to get to see the girl he was interested in,' John says. ‘I said to him, “Son, I courted your mother from halfway round the world, do not give me that rubbish about 120 kilometres if you're really keen!”'

In Belfast Mary was in her final year of study and thoroughly enjoying the opportunity that being a trainee teacher of home economics provided to really get to know the students.

‘With teaching cooking or sewing you are moving around the classroom, you are chatting to these young people, and so you hear about their lives and what they have been up to,' she says.

Mary was fascinated by these teenagers whose lives were so different from her own safe and tidy growing-up years. On one occasion she was teaching a class of fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls. ‘Two of them will be late,' she was told by the head of home economics. ‘You are not to ask them about where they have been, just accept that they will be late.' But Mary, in her chatting with the two girls after they turned up, did find out why they were always late to her class. They had been servicing the British soldiers stationed up the road from the school.

‘They said, “We go up every day. We go from eight to ten.” I was horrified. I couldn't believe that this was going on, part of their everyday life,' says Mary, still unable to fathom that this prostitution by schoolgirls had been accepted, even by the school. She wonders now if the school was actually threatened or even if the school was getting a reward for their silence.

‘Every one of these children would have a story to tell. And some of them had such hatred. I couldn't believe that such hatred existed in such young people. I was teaching thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-olds in the poorer areas of Belfast. I didn't come across this hatred so much in the more affluent areas. I wonder if it is like this all over the world: that a lot of the fighting, a lot of the antipathy, happens in the poorer areas. People are out of work, they sit around, they tell stories, urge each other on and probably find themselves doing things they had never envisaged—being part of an army, servicing an army …'

Mary was also exploring the cultural differences between North and South. The North, under British rule, was very ‘English'. The South, having gained its independence from England in 1916, was very Irish.

‘The English are very matter-of-fact, and everything has its place and goes back in its place. The Irish have a casualness—if the thing is not back in its place, it doesn't matter. It'll be fine, don't worry about it. You do enjoy that. But I was feeling that living in Southern Ireland wasn't what I wanted. I'd enjoyed being in Belfast and since leaving for boarding school at thirteen I had spent my time coming and going from my home town so I didn't feel I really fitted in there either. I wanted to somehow keep the freedom I experienced in Belfast, even though I did have to be careful where I went.'

Mary declined the opportunity to spend her next summer holidays on a kibbutz (a communal farm or settlement in Israel and the ‘in thing' for vacations at that time), and instead decided she would visit Australia, and John. The summer holidays came, and Mary had made herself ready to go to Australia—the visitor's visa was stamped on her passport and she was immunised—while somehow knowing very little about where she was actually going.

‘It was amazing how I took off to a country I knew nothing about. I didn't look to see where Longreach was on a map—and my mother and father didn't say to me, “Do you know where you are going? Have you checked on a map?” All I knew about Australia was something an aunt of mine had told me—that there were a lot of sheep in that country.

‘The actual flight over took thirty-two hours. I met with friends of John's in Sydney and had a day there, and then I flew up to Brisbane. In those days the people meeting you were allowed to come onto the tarmac. It was a long time since I'd seen John and I had no photograph of him, so I had no real idea what he looked like. I knew he had curly hair. I knew he had glasses.'

Nothing teaches you about the fragility and inadequacy of human memory like a long separation. You reach into your mind for the other person, but over time their face, hands and smell fade away. In just a few short months their image won't flash up on the screen of your mind. You are left with what feels like an empty description—you might sometimes dream of them, but that can distort memory rather than repair it. And after all, Mary and John had not had a great deal of time together: four evenings, two days and then a long weekend. Mary hoped that her image of a gently spoken man, in whose company she felt an unaccountable ease and joy, was a true one. She was also hoping that he was actually going to turn up.

‘I had a lovely little white suitcase, my hair was done and I felt drop-dead gorgeous! I walked down the stairs of the aircraft with a big smile on my face, but I was absolutely petrified—was he going to be there? I had no phone number for him. I had no idea where Longreach was. There was no such thing as ringing him up or sending him a text. I was just hoping that this guy who had said, “Yes, come to Australia,” was actually going to be there to meet me in Brisbane as he had promised.

‘Then there was this young man coming from the arrivals area onto the tarmac—he had on a long coat, he was running, he was on a mission. And I was thinking to myself, “Is that John? What should I do? Should I put my suitcase down, should I put out my arms?” Fortunately I didn't do anything, this fellow just shot past.

‘I walked into the arrivals area and I didn't see anybody. And my heart dropped. I was thinking to myself, “What'll I do?” I had hardly any money in my purse because I virtually had no money. There was a good friend of my aunt living in Brisbane—the aunt who had told me that Australia was a country with many sheep—and I knew I could go to her. But I was thinking, “I'll have to take the plane out of Brisbane to go back,” and then I saw a hand waving.'

It had been such a gamble, Mary's trip to Australia to spend more time with a young man she had only met a few times. Would whatever it was that had drawn her to John still exist? Would they still be easy in each other's company? In those first few moments of seeing each other after eight months, each felt a deep relief: they did tremendously like this other person after all.

John was as she'd remembered and imagined him—except better. There were no metal chains around his neck and he was dressed, not as a tourist, but for the life he was leading on the station.

After the commercial flight from Brisbane to Longreach, John's father met them at the airport in the four-seater Cessna. As the smallest of the three of them, Mary was squeezed in behind the two front seats. Her first sight of Marmboo was from the air. Nothing less like the emerald land and gunmetal sky of Ireland could be imagined.

Below her were warm ochre plains and around her the bright-blue vault of the Australian sky. Even after quite a lot of rain and plants green and growing, Australia's rangelands look as if they are mostly bare earth from the air. The spaces between plants, which are easy to miss when you are down in the landscape, become painfully apparent when you are gazing down from above. Mary had quite confidently expected to see, if nothing else, thousands upon thousands of sheep, white and fluffy and busy in green paddocks. In pastoral country unshorn sheep are nearly invisible from the air, their fleeces greyed and browned with dust and twigs. Mary could not help wondering where all the sheep were.

But she was excited and fascinated by everything she saw. The incomprehensible thousands of acres, the paddocks at least twenty times the size of whole farms in Ireland, semi-wild cattle handled just once a year, the stock horses, the stables, the corrugated-iron sheds barking in the wind, the thickening of the grasses closer to the big creeks, the smell of the big gum trees after rain, the long days of mustering for shearing, the camaraderie of the shearing sheds.

‘Fortunately, it had rained,' says John.

There was no Learjet. No castle. Mary was immediately pressed into riding a horse and taking part in the sheep work in the lead-up to shearing. All this meant she was quick to discard any of her prior ideas about a highfalutin lifestyle. John's mother, Joan, was away seeing her family in England, but there was evidence of her cleanliness, organisation, self-discipline and hard work everywhere. In the next six weeks Mary saw clearly both how much work life on Marmboo would be for a woman, and how very high Joan's standards were—and she fell irretrievably in love with John.

His physical presence, sleeves rolled up and actively engaged with the land, did all kinds of things for her that it hadn't in Ireland when he had been on holiday. And working alongside him during the day, talking to him at night: she was finally seeing the whole man in his context, and she loved all of him.

Having Mary with him on Marmboo was heaven for John, but he said nothing to her about marriage and forever. If one person is not happy in a marriage, that marriage isn't successful. It was going to be for Mary to decide if she could be happy on Marmboo. After all, this was the 1970s and it was a given that it was a man's work that decided the family's location. In addition, and this was as much the case in Ireland as it was in Australia, women who married a man with a farming property then afterwards said it must be sold were greatly criticised. The commitment a farmer or pastoralist's wife made was to a great deal more than the man himself, and it was not just to him and the land, but to the invested work of earlier generations. For a man to sell his inherited property due to his wife's unhappiness was seen as a forced betrayal of his heritage. Mary, having grown up on a farm, having slowly become aware that her mother felt to some degree stifled in the setting she'd married into but had also felt she must stay there, was only too aware of this.

Mary knew how happy John was in his life on Marmboo, and so, loving him, she wanted him to stay in the life he adored. But was it the life for her? It wasn't a decision she could make in Australia. She had to go back to Ireland to think it through. And besides all that, Mary had accepted a teaching job in Belfast.

‘I did wonder if I could take that life on. I could see the standards that had been set both inside the house and outside on the station, and I thought, “You'd be so isolated.” I had to come back, I had to look at it from afar, to see whether or not I could take it on,' says Mary.

Back in Ireland Mary had a few days with her mum and dad in the South before leaving for Belfast. In Ireland were her parents and sister, her friends and all the trappings of civilisation. It is not so much the coffee shops and the clubs that make life easier, but the sharing of the load of all the small jobs that make up our lives. In the Irish towns and cities there was a person for every different job: plumbers, electricians, butchers, nurses, teachers, cooks, gardeners and carpenters … but there was no John.

The weekly correspondence between them continued. They chatted to each other on tape, sharing their lives and how very much they missed the other person. It took just two months for Mary to realise that home for her was now ‘with John'. She recorded a message to John which ended in saying that she thought a shared life would be worth a try.

John received this most welcome message with delight. ‘I had the cue I needed,' he says, and promptly responded with a formal proposal of marriage before Christmas in 1976.

‘When I look back,' says Mary, ‘I took on marriage as an adventure. I didn't take it on as the total commitment that goes with marriage. I thought, “Well, if I don't make a go of it I'll pack my bags and come home. But if I don't try I could regret it.” Fortunately I have no regrets, fortunately it has worked out. But if my children said the same thing to me I would be horrified and probably have given them a lecture on what marriage is about!'

John immediately began planning another trip back to Ireland to see Mary.

‘Of course, as for a lot of people on the land, the animals become number one in your life, and it was after Christmas. This was the time of year when storms are expected so the sheep had to be sprayed against flystrike. All the sheep had to be mustered into the various yards scattered around the property where an insecticide was applied to protect them—and that had to be done before John could leave the place. At the end of March in 1977 he arrived in Belfast. Because it wasn't his first time he was a little more relaxed. He came for just two weeks. It was unheard of then for people to go overseas for only two weeks.'