Love In a Sunburnt Country (17 page)

Her view is that no-one understood better than John his father's fear of debt—how entrenched it had become in his childhood, the fight to have Marmboo debt-free. John let go of the idea of purchasing these sheep, and of other ideas like it, out of this acute understanding of his father. Some of John's underlying regret, Mary feels, is not that he didn't get his own way, but that the ongoing tension destroyed much of the relationship he and his father once had.

‘As he got Alzheimer's he fought every inch of the way. When I got a computer with an accounting package, that was seen as an attempt to do him out of his job—but it was only just in time,' John says. Every conflict separated father and son further. There could be no resolution, as Jack no longer had the insight into the damage he was doing, and John had no choice but to take more and more control as his father's decline accelerated. Alzheimer's robs families of the person they loved, even as the person lives on in their midst. And for the person, Alzheimer's makes them frightened. When you cannot remember, when you cannot trust your perceptions, it is a very short step towards becoming angry or withdrawn.

‘I never discussed death with my father, or the many great and exciting things he'd done in his life. Excuse me if I get a bit emotional—there were things that needed to be said and I didn't say them. There was an evening when my father was in his house and I was in my house, and I'd never had him over for a meal. But there was such a barrier between us because he'd fought tooth and nail. I say to my boys, never let that happen in our family. Fortunately time heals, and I now choose to remember my father for the positive things he did for me, his family, the community and this country.'

With the word ‘family' we are back to what matters most to John and Mary. They had grown closer with every passing year. After three years Mary felt ready (as ready as anyone ever does) to take on mothering on Marmboo. In March 1982 Conor was born, then two years later Cormac, and three years later, a daughter, Ashling. Mary's mother came out to stay for a while with the birth of each child—she was to come out often until her death in 1997—and was quick to see the situation in which the young couple had been placed.

‘My mother could understand what life was like with John's parents being rulers of the property. She could understand that well because that's exactly what she'd had herself with the dominance of Granny Curran. She understood that it wasn't an easy life.'

Though it was sometimes difficult, Mary has no regrets.

‘I had no friends in Australia. I couldn't go down the street with a friend for coffee. John was my husband and my lover, but he was also my best friend. And I treasure that.'

And John feels the same way.

Their close friendship was vital in building what they both, as a result of their own childhoods, felt was the most important thing in the world: a happy home. ‘The children have lovely memories. John and I never fought. They had the freedom of the bush. They would be outside helping John. They were responsible children, like adults, helping where they could with the work, and yet they were children with their playtime. I said goodbye to them at an early age with boarding school. The boys were ten and Ashling was nine and a half.'

Sending a child away to boarding school is an extraordinary act of sacrifice and trust.

‘You're so used to having your children around. They're educated on the property, they work and play here. Then, one by one, they leave home and the nest is empty. When the first one went, it was as if we had lost the child. I remember saying to my mother how awful it was. I felt we had lost our little boy,' says Mary.

Even before Conor went away to school, Mary and John made sure that they valued the times when the whole family was together. The care they took to do this was even more pronounced once Conor had left.

‘We always knew that our time together would only ever be for a few weeks, and we all made the best of it.'

Mary organised the house so that evenings were kept for talking because she says it's ‘the nicest thing you can do over a meal in the evening time'. On Marmboo, even in the middle of a hard workday, if a good conversation begins over morning tea or lunch, that is honoured, too.

‘Don't go back to work—keep the conversation going—work is not that important,' says John.

Despite the drought, Marmboo is not a property that carries any debt: of course, it is nearly twenty years since John's father died and this debt-free status owes much to John's organised and meticulous farming style.

Yet over Marmboo the skies remain obstinately blue. It's drier than they've ever seen it. It is baking in the worst drought anyone can remember. John is in demand to speak to journalists about the drought due to his uncomplaining attitude and ability to speak to the point. In 2015 a photograph of John standing by a wire gate—unsmiling, head slightly bent, before a broad expanse on which grew no grass, no bush, no trees—made the front page of
The Weekend Australian
.

‘Sometimes I get down because it is so dry and John says, “Oh, we'll be fine, we'll get through it,” and then he'll be down and I can say the same thing to him,' says Mary. John and Mary are reflective but, despite the continuing dry, they are not at all grim. With each other's help they have made peace with a great many things in their lives—the fact that you cannot make it rain on your property or stop it raining on your neighbour's property is but one of these.

‘When you're in a drought you're wishing time away. You want tomorrow to come. You wish for a cloud in the sky; you want next week to come for a change in the weather; you want next month to come as you'll be one month closer to the promised wet season. One should never wish time away, especially at our age!' says John. He tells me it is an observation Mary made initially, and that he shares it whenever he can. ‘Nothing else I've ever said on radio has had the reaction that had.'

Drought, like fire and flood, is a direct attack on the soul of a place. Where fire suddenly exposes and flood suddenly suffocates, drought slowly starves. To protect itself the land must seal itself over. And the people who live on the land feel it in much the same way as a family feels it when someone they love withdraws from them—there are many extra burdens that come with drought, but this one is rarely acknowledged. You have existed in a relationship with the land, given to it and received from it, and that rich and satisfying exchange has mostly disappeared. This means that during drought the quality of the other relationships we have becomes a great deal more important. John emphasises the protective effect of high-quality relationships when he talks about drought. This isn't all that he says. Putting relationships first is how he and Mary have always lived.

Mary and John will be all right. They have each other. They have never been afraid of taking on new roles, these two, and they have their sights set on the next stage of life.

‘We both feel it's time to hang up our boots,' says Mary.

‘With this in mind we hope to sell the property and move to our house in Maleny, Queensland. Change is not easy at the best of times, but as we get older it becomes so much harder and this is our main reason for wanting to make this big move in our lives sooner rather than later, when it could be all too late.'

Even though Mary and John are leaving the industry, their concern for it remains. In his media appearances John has been sharing an idea to help farmers survive drought. Mary and John, out of their own experience of going through drought with minimum debt, believe that if people have less to worry about financially, they will be less stressed. If people are less stressed they'll make better decisions—not just better business decisions, but interpersonal, land-care and animal-welfare decisions. The financial stress resulting from this drought is costing marriages, lives and childhoods. It is this that Mary and John, with their abiding focus on healthy family life, seek to have addressed ahead of all else. John is suggesting the creation of a ‘future farming fund'. This would be partly funded by farmers themselves (at a quarter of a percent levy on farmers' pre-tax income) and enabled by legislation.

In 2015 Mary and John celebrated thirty-eight years of marriage.

‘There's no recipe out there for a successful marriage,' says Mary. ‘There's a lot of good luck, and it's so important to talk to each other about the big and little things that come your way in life.'

That they turned a chance meeting into an intercontinental courtship is testament to them. Mary concludes her first letter to me by saying, ‘our passion of all those years ago has become true love'. For their resulting marriage to not just survive but flourish in Queensland's pastoral country shows how sometimes—not always, but sometimes—that almost painful feeling of being physically drawn to another person is no more or less than a profound intuition. They simply had to be together.

There is a photograph of a courting Mary and John. John with his curls and lion-wide face is smiling at the photographer and on his arm Mary is excited, reckless, on the adventure of her life. She's looking into the distance, the bright Australian sun shining on her wavy hair, her Irish complexion and gentle chin. They are still easily recognisable as the couple in the photograph. Mary's brown hair is creamy white now, but her face still has that pared-down elegance, her skin is clear and bright and she is smiling. John's glasses seem to have changed rather more than he has. There's a deep easiness between them which makes them great fun to be with.

Mary and John are grateful every day for their good health, and their delightful family, for their good luck in meeting at all, for the wisdom of their ardent bodies and hearts all those years ago, and for the easy, unfailing connection they still have with each other that lies at the heart of their happiness.

You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio

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

The Australian Alps of Victoria—the High Country—are the rarest of our rangeland environments. Unlike mountains in other parts of the world, they are ancient, pre–Ice Age, and the soil here is, correspondingly, hauntingly old. On this old soil, living almost in the sky, gathering most of their water not from rain but from snow, plants here cooperate to survive. The taller trees with their shaggy rough outlines create a downdraft, pulling down the snow and stopping it from drifting elsewhere. At the foot of every tree are the ground covers: the grasses and bushes, little plants with many small roots creating pathways into the soil for the snow as it melts. In this way water reaches the tree's own roots. In the highest places the tall trees don't grow. Here the rider on her horse is above everything else on the plains, her gaze, like the light, bouncing from mountain top to sky, with no barrier in between.

‘We call the beautiful open high plains “up top”. Alpine mint grows vigorously up top, and when you brush against the mint it releases the most exquisite smell in the whole world,' says Kath Baird, who with her husband, Steve, has lived at Spring Spur, high in the Bogong Ranges for thirty years now. Kath and Steve have been married for thirty-six years, having fallen in love on meeting and moved in together just three weeks later.

I had first heard of Kath and Steve from their son Lin. ‘I'm looking for great love stories,' I had said. (So often the word ‘love' makes young men uncomfortable, but not this one.) ‘You want to talk to my folks!' Lin said without missing a beat. He could not be more comfortable with the word, or prouder of his parents and their love for each other, which began with that lightning bolt: love at first sight.

Should we trust love at first sight? It is hard to accept that in a fifth of a second (which is all it takes) you can gather enough information about another person to decide to marry them, but people do. Falling in love is a violent sensation—which explains the sayings ‘struck by lightning' and ‘falling off a cliff'—but it also feels timeless. The lightning was striking before you were born. You've been falling for an eternity. It's always been the two of you. It seems hardly a sensible state in which to make a life-changing decision, but for the people for whom it happens there is hardly a decision to make. Everything in you is captivated by this other person, all at once, without your volition. This was the feeling that swept over Steve and Kath.

‘I'd discovered in adult life, as well as the responsibility, there was a lot of fluff and rubbish,' says Steve. ‘There were things you were meant to do and say that weren't important. When I met Kath that all disappeared: here was the person with whom none of that was needed. We just fitted, without the need to explore that fit, without a great deal needing to be said. There was Kath and there was me, and together we made something bigger.'

His description brings to mind Shakespeare's phrase ‘the marriage of true minds'. The people we know best and deepest, the people we most respect, all shape how we respond to the world. As we build their vocabulary into the silent language of our thoughts, as we learn to see the world the way they do, we extend, we enlarge. Even when Kath is not next to him Steve doesn't feel separated from her.

The phrase ‘love at first sight' induces nearly as much cynicism in some psychologists as the related phrase ‘soulmates'. Generally, the research literature agrees that this feeling is not just sexual attraction or the hormonal cocktail of limerence, or a feeling of overwhelming friendship, but all three shouting the news: I want this one! And, if we have a soul, that, too, is shouting the news.

So how can someone know so rapidly that they have met the person with whom they'll have the most fun, the easiest and deepest conversation, the best chance of helping and being helped by? The short answer to this is ‘love maps'. Apparently, from our very earliest years we are building a map of the kind of person we want to love. This isn't something we are conscious of, but nonetheless—unseen, from a potpourri of family members, characters in books, people we meet, family legends, classmates, people on TV, friends and from our growing knowledge of ourselves—this map grows in our mind.