Love In a Sunburnt Country (16 page)

They borrowed a friend's car—Mary had only a motorbike—and travelled down through Dublin (stopping off to buy an engagement ring) so that John could meet Mary's father. He had already met Mary's mother.

‘My mother hadn't thought—I mean, who'd have thought—that John and I would marry. When I phoned my parents to tell them of my intention to marry this Australian fellow I felt my mother wasn't sharing in my joy. There was something there, but she wasn't dampening the joy either. I didn't have the nerve to ask her what it was, maybe because deep down I didn't want to know. It wasn't until years later, on one of her many visits out to Australia, that she told me what it had meant to her when I got engaged. I never knew until years afterwards that to her, my engagement meant losing her eldest daughter and it had broken her heart.'

Twenty-two, madly in love, flying high on adventure and with no children of her own, Mary simply couldn't guess how her parents felt. But Vera knew what it was to say goodbye to loved ones and not see them again. Her brothers had left for England and America and effectively vanished out of her life.

On 26 August 1977 John and Mary were married in the little parish of Affane, close to Cappoquin. Marrying an Australian briefly made Mary a celebrity. Australia was regarded as the other end of the world. She might as well have been marrying the man who lived on the moon. There were lines of people outside the church to see the beautiful girl who was marrying a lovely Australian boy and going to live in that faraway country. John's mother and one of his sisters came, and in all there were thirteen guests who had at some time visited Marmboo.

‘Nowadays weddings are these great big fanfare events, but I made my own dress. I also made my sister's dress and the flower girl's dress. There was none of this getting makeup and nails done that you have now. On the day, John drove me to Cork city, where I just went into a salon and said I was getting married that afternoon, and they just washed and blow-dried my hair. That was all. John dropped me home, went on to get changed and said, “See you at the church.”'

On the day they left Ireland, Mary's mother, Vera, was to drive them to catch the plane, and Mary said goodbye to her father at the farm, adding, ‘You will come and visit me in Australia, won't you, Dad?' Mary felt very much as if her apprenticeship in farming had been served with her father. He had offered her excellent advice on her new life: ‘Be happy. Get to know the workings of the place so when your husband comes home you will be able to share in his day's activities, and don't take on a job that you don't want to continue as it will be your job for life.' She was naturally confident that he would be keen to visit her. But John Curran was a simple man, and he had never been on an aeroplane.

‘Dad said, “Don't expect me to hop on an aeroplane to come to Australia, because I won't.” It was just awful. I don't have to add, this didn't make for an easy parting.'

By mid-September Mary was meeting for the first time many of John's friends and family. Through it all John was by her side, quick to understand that she felt alien, that he was not just her lover and her husband but her sole support in a new land.

The trip from Brisbane to Marmboo in late spring was Mary's first intimation of just how hot it would be in summer. The temperature was then in the mid-twenties.

‘I was asking, “John, does it get any hotter than this?” and he would say, “Oh, it does a bit, it does a bit.”'

The actual length and the degree of heat in Mary's first Australian summer was a dreadful shock.

‘That first Christmas we'd been given a candelabrum with three European candles. We came back from a Christmas Eve dinner at my parents' house and found the three candles had just laid over in the heat,' says John.

‘I couldn't believe it, I cried when I saw the candles,' says Mary. ‘That first Christmas was awful. I wanted so much to talk to my mum and dad and wish them a happy Christmas. Our telephone system was shared by two other neighbours so it was a very faint line. To make an overseas call you had to book days in advance, nominate a day and time you wanted the call to go through and then wait. All Christmas Eve I was waiting for the operator to ring to say we could speak. Then when the call came, I couldn't hear my parents and they couldn't hear me. It was a disaster, which was followed by tears.

‘I spent that first summer sitting on the toilet—I will never know why the toilet—crying. It was so hard, going into that summer. Where was the green grass? Where were all the cows? Where was the rain? It was just so, so different. But I did stick it out. Sometimes I wonder how I did it, it was so hard—no family, no friends and living in the middle of nowhere—but I did do it, and I'm probably a better person for it.'

What kept Mary at Marmboo was John and her very real enjoyment of their life together. And she isn't a person who looks back. She had left Ireland behind, this was her new life and it was that simple.

Before children arrived Mary wanted to understand the workings of the property. She had to feel confident driving the hundred kilometres into Longreach. She learned to ride a horse, to help build fences, drive the vehicle to service subartesian bores and to play a part in all the different activities that make up a pastoralist's year as her father had advised her.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s many of the health and safety precautions and equipment which are now standard on rural properties simply didn't exist.

‘We're so conscious of these things now but, in those days, if you took a bottle of water you were a softie. We didn't wear sunscreen.'

She revelled in working alongside John despite these tough conditions, just as she revelled in the slow process of building a home.

‘We had nothing in the house here—little furniture, two single beds that were tied together with rope and a wedding present from John's parents of a massive deep freeze with two loaves of bread and some butter. I suppose you could call these the essentials! Everything we bought just came gradually and we worked hard for it. And we appreciated it so much. In Ireland before I left there were some of my friends with big mortgages and they had everything in their house. We had two fold-out chairs, and they were our sitting-room chairs, but they were very versatile as they came everywhere with us for the first eighteen months.'

Mary began finding out all she could about how children in remote areas learn to read and write.

‘I had heard about children doing correspondence and I had no idea as to what it entailed. So I went over to a neighbouring property one day a week to teach the boy there. I think he ended up teaching me. He was a clever boy.'

Back in Ireland her father was ill. In fact, not long after Mary had left he had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease, a particularly awful neurological condition which sees a person inexorably lose movement after movement until, finally, they can't breathe. Mary's mother had only told Mary that her father was sick. She didn't know how to share over the phone the news that such a tragic and terminal diagnosis had been given. She was further deterred by the fact that Marmboo was on a ‘party line', which meant that the whole district used that telephone line and no private conversation was possible.

John and Mary had carefully saved to pay for return tickets for both her parents to visit. (The financial control of the property was in John's father's hands: if something was not able to be saved for, Mary and John would have to go ‘cap in hand' to request the money. It was a situation they did not like.) The ticket being paid for ensured that Mary's father would indeed take the huge step of getting on an aeroplane for the very first time.

‘That was in 1979 and John and I went to Brisbane to meet them. At the airport I couldn't figure out why my parents were not coming out in arrivals, and then out they came with Mum wheeling my dad. When I said goodbye to my father two years before, he'd been a healthy farmer. Then to see him at the airport, in a wheelchair … I'll never forget it.'

The shock of that moment has never left Mary. This was a day in which she expected only joy, but what she was seeing heralded tragedy and loss. And yet, the memory of her father's first and only visit to Marmboo is such a happy one now. That plane ticket and three months with them were the very best presents they could have given him.

‘He came in a wheelchair, but he got out of the wheelchair when he was at Marmboo. He was able to get around very well. We had a little old car here that belonged to John's sister. He used to drive the car anywhere on the property and he never got lost. It was incredible that this man, who had never left Ireland, could find his way around a 95,000-acre property! And he loved it. He loved the open spaces. He loved the work the men were doing, although he couldn't participate himself. It was lovely that he was able to be here and to see where I was living as I think from my letters going back home they both thought I lived in the Simpson Desert! For a man who was never going to leave Ireland he did very well.

‘They left in August and once he knew he was returning to Ireland he was back in the wheelchair. He didn't have the strength, he knew he was going back to die. For the first month after getting home he would go into the local pub and entertain the locals with his stories of his visit to the outback of Australia. My dad was a good storyteller and I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall to hear his tales.'

Mary went over in February 1980 to help her mother with nursing her father at home, and to say goodbye to him. She returned to Australia in March.

‘Ten days after I left Ireland, I woke in the middle of the night. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I woke up. I thought it was John who had touched me so I called, “John?”, but John was asleep. I closed my eyes again and I was holding my father's hand in mine and we were walking along a dark driveway, with a lot of sheltering trees. He said to me, “You'd better stay now where you are, because I'm just to walk on a little bit further.” And I woke up again and I knew my father had died.'

When Joan came to tell Mary the news early the next morning, Mary discovered he had died at the time of her dream.

The relationship between father and daughter was strengthened by his time at Marmboo—and her father's last visit at the moment of his death celebrated a bond Mary had always felt to be special. This was not to be the case for John and his father, Jack.

John has had to come to terms with the dominance and inflexibility on his father's part, the uncertainty and remorse on his own part and the barrier that tragically grew between them. The honesty of the exchanges between Mary and John on this subject is a testament to the ease between them, because this is not something on which they completely agree. Listening to them both talk of his father, I wonder when the dementia Jack was eventually diagnosed with began. It is an illness that changes people in small ways before it eventually strips them of the ability to find the particular memory they need to make sense of the world or to imagine themselves in someone else's shoes. The brain begins to change some twenty years before the diagnosis can be made. With hindsight, families often realise there were signs well before the decline in thinking became apparent.

Jack's was always an autocratic character. This had excellent results in some ways. John and Mary admire how fairly and cleanly he planned the succession onto the property, and how provision was also made for John's brother and sisters. There was no bitterness, no hatred, no loss of sibling relationships, no family torn asunder—something all too common in farming.

‘We four children are all still talking because of how my father arranged the estate. The critical thing was that he invested off-farm,' says John. ‘And there were no secrets about the will.'

John and Mary have replicated this with their own three children. Since Ashling, their youngest, was in boarding school at the age of twelve, all their children have been privy to the will, how things are going in the business, and how it will be left.

‘Every time we can get them together, we all go along and we have a financial adviser to mediate. It's up to the five of us to talk it through. The financial adviser recommends that children's spouses aren't involved—it's up to that person to tell their spouse what has been agreed. The adviser has complimented John and me for doing this. It has been the salvation of the te Kloot family and John's father led the way in this,' says Mary.

In the management of his will, Jack's dominance ensured the friendship and love between his children would be lifelong, but on Marmboo that same trait drove a wedge between father and son that was not fully bridged at the time of his death in 1997.

‘We just did what we were told. We just slotted into what was here, we didn't question,' says Mary.

‘In hindsight it's all very clear. Dad was in his early sixties and he wanted someone to take over the physical work. The office was his comfort zone. I always remember the occasion when there were 10,000 sheep being sold up north and we heard about them early. I said to Dad, “Let's get up there. Let's buy them, tidy them up and sell them.” But he wouldn't. It was a lot of work, and he wasn't a young man, but I was. If I'd pushed it enough he might have agreed, and we'd have made a few dollars. But I didn't push it. The very things he did, he never allowed me to do.'

John regrets now that he didn't insist, that he let it go. This has, in part, driven the messages given to his children: get out there, have your own adventure, make your own way in the world.

Mary has a slightly different take on their first twenty years on the property.

‘If you had been the same kind of person as your father, we wouldn't have survived living there,' she says. Meaning if John had been as autocratic as his father the arrangement would have failed at the outset. ‘We are who we are,' she says. ‘If we had to live it over again we'd do the same things—we might wish that we wouldn't, but I feel sure we would.'