Love In a Sunburnt Country (2 page)

But there are trees here, creek bed and valley dwellers, river red gum and native pine. Few trees combine solidity and grace like these river gums: where they touch the sky they are delicate, each twig carefully placed so it doesn't crowd another, maximising light onto leaf, and yet they pour out of the earth with such power held in their massive trunks and low branches. The native pine is a very humble, prosaic tree in comparison, with stubbled bark, trunks of even width, and closely hung dark leaf clusters.

There are well-fed grey-and-black kangaroos at every creek bed. I've been counting them, trying to get a sense of how many there are on the property, but there are too many. In fact the number of roos on the road here has me rattled and I'm finding it hard to concentrate on what Dad, who has been talking for the past few kilometres, has to say. He is braking and swerving intermittently, and glancing at me to check that I am listening. I am silent, braced against everything available to brace against and with my teeth locked together. I cannot help wishing he would simply concentrate on driving and I am relieved and delighted when we find the edge of the shearing-shed yards and turn in to the homestead. We are here to meet Luke and Frances Frahn, who have a story that is one worth telling.

We are met by the family dogs, welcoming and smiling all over their black-and-tan faces. Luke Frahn strolls towards us, gently sending his five-year-old son Todd, who has come out in his dressing gown to meet us, back to finish his dinner. I am curious about Luke. He is a shearer, and the story I have been told is that he does this work dressed in a suit and tie. But tonight he is dressed for visitors and the cold in a plain navy woollen jumper and neat jeans.

In fact, almost all the photographs I've seen of Luke show him costumed for an ABC television episode showcasing the building restorations on Holowiliena. In the photos he looks remarkably comfortable in the kind of clothes that have not been worn in Australia for over a century: high-necked shirt, high-waisted button pants, vest, hat—clothes that even predate those worn by the men in Tom Roberts's iconic painting
The Shearers
. I look for signs of the flamboyance I've more than half-expected. But it is quickly clear that I have misunderstood Luke's character. He is not at all flamboyant or eccentric. He has a rather austere face for such a young man. He looks approachable but not persuadable: clean-shaven, conservatively dressed, thoughtful. (I am soon to realise Luke looked comfortable in the clothes of over a century ago simply because he is at home in his body. A shearer, after all, is a professional athlete. Physical and emotional balance, the skills to reassure a stressed animal or colleague, rhythm, patience, love of craft, learning by doing, team-thinking, enjoying the moment and the work—these are the gifts of the good shearer and Luke, as it turns out, is one of Australia's best.)

In the warm kitchen-dining room, with overloaded bookshelves and an efficient potbelly stove, Todd and three-year-old Stella, Luke and Frances's daughter, gaze up at us speculatively from their dinner. My dad is grandfather to twelve children, many of whom have perfected the art of extending dinner in order to avoid going to bed. ‘It would have been better if we'd been an hour later!' he says apologetically to Frances Frahn.

Frances has remarkable eyes, which are large and lovely. I have read about eyes like these. They are the ‘well-opened eyes' with which Georgette Heyer endowed her heroines, who were of a selfless and giving disposition. She flashes us a glance of warm gratitude and relief. It is a terrible time for us to have arrived. There is no doubt that schemes to suspend bedtime are being hatched and refined, in Stella's mind at least. Her fine hair is bunched into a pigtail, and it shines sparkly gold under the bright light. She is warmly bundled up in a soft dressing gown of greys and pinks made by Janne, Frances's mother. No child could look sweeter. She is smiling at us, but her eyes are alight with plans rather than welcome. I smile back, trying to do so in a way that conveys that I am not to be considered a fellow conspirator. Stella immediately returns my smile with a significant look and slips from the table, leaving her dinner uneaten.

The children's governess, Miss Mikaela, dark-haired, dimpled and from a Queensland bush family, comes in to sort out weekend arrangements. Todd is debating a range of pudding options.

Stella returns holding what I think is a sheep—it can be hard to identify species with some stuffed toys—in all the shades of the rainbow.

‘This is Daddy's,' she explains. ‘When he goes shearing, I look after him until Daddy comes home again.'

‘He
was
Daddy's,' Todd clarifies for me. ‘From when Daddy was little.'

Luke will be away all of next month, and Stella is getting herself ready to bear it. Luke's earnings from shearing still assist the family budget. This includes his prize money from shearing competitions which is considerable—and about which Luke will say very little, changing the subject instantly to the gentleman who taught him to shear, John Hutchinson. (Luke considers John an important mentor. ‘If I could please him, then I was happy,' Luke says. And he did not just mentor Luke. John was Australia's champion shearer for six years, but found time to work with troubled young people and was eventually awarded an Order of Australia for this.)

Then Luke is finalising dessert plans with Todd, talking to Stella about putting away the rainbow sheep again, prompting her to have her hair brushed before bedtime and explaining to us Frances's role in local government. Frances is on the phone, cooking our dinner and finding Todd's read-aloud book. Children's bedtime is not the time for me to be asking questions—or, indeed, for observing what drew Frances and Luke to each other: because it is their story I am here to explore.

And shortly afterwards it is time for me to go to bed too. I fall asleep still wondering why Luke wears a suit when he is shearing.

By morning, I have developed a new working theory about the suit.

Frances and Luke are serious in all their shared undertakings: within the wool industry (where they've been offered leadership and training roles), in terms of land and animal management, in curating and restoring Holowiliena (for which they've also been well recognised), and in parenting, which is so manifestly their top priority. Luke grew up on a farm, where his parents still farm, and he knew from very early on that he wanted to shear and to farm. Then there is Luke's precision and work ethic, both of which are in tune with his German Lutheran heritage. Luke says grace before meals too, which I take as a demonstration of a pious but also a serious and thoughtful attitude to life. Perhaps, said my ridiculous theory, Luke is such a serious person that he habitually wears a suit to indicate he is a professional shearer?

After breakfast Frances and Luke tell me that they have planned to use the daylight hours for Dad and me to become acquainted with Holowiliena, however, they have set aside this evening to tell us how they met and fell in love. So whatever the story is behind the suit, I know that I am soon to hear it. (The story of all we learned in the daylight hours is told in the next section.)

‘Frances and I love our story,' Luke tells me during the afternoon, accurately reading my sudden qualms about being intrusive and wanting to reassure me.

All through the day it has grown warmer, the sky cloudier, and now it is raining sweetly and steadily outside as inside Dad and I listen.

‘I grew up with a strong farming influence and struggles, much like Frances's family. It's made us similar people. We both know how to do without,' says Luke.

Luke's mother steered her son out of school and into paid work early as his restlessness in the classroom began to distract other students. At eighteen, with his body developed well enough for the long days of hard work, he was finally able to enrol in shearing school as he'd wanted to do for so long. There, in addition to learning to shear, he discovered that there was a world-wide demand for shearing skills.

‘I started as a rouseabout, then I picked up the handpiece. I had an instructor—a very respected person in my life, he was like a father figure—who pulled me aside, helped me out. By my third and fourth years, I was off, travelling and shearing. I'd been away for seven months, came home, and then I was asked if I'd shear at this station. And there was a governess there, and that was Frances.'

Frances too has a passion for wool and sheep, and like Luke she was a traveller.

‘I didn't want to be a governess again, I wanted to do a wool-classing course, but Ally and Miles talked me into working for them for just six weeks—and I ended up working for them for eighteen months.'

Being a governess is a difficult job in a School of the Air family: you are paid by the family and you must work to their satisfaction, but you must also work to the satisfaction of the School of the Air teachers who provide the learning program. As with any teacher, much of a governess's time is spent preparing work so that the day flows smoothly: she must be familiar with what will be covered and have everything ready for every activity, whether it be a science experiment such as making volcanoes with tomato sauce, bicarbonate of soda and vinegar, or playing a maths game which needs counters and dice.

Frances's room was at the shearers' quarters: a nice room with a carpet, well set up. It was April 2004.

‘I rocked up with another guy. We were both footloose, we arrived at the shearers' quarters and we did the lap around—like a male dog marking his territory,' says Luke, his voice full of lazy humour. ‘There was a light on, and we looked through the window and there was Frances in a lounge room, lying on the floor doing some bookwork.'

On the same evening the shearers arrived Frances walked out of her room to find everyone sitting in the dark (in order to avoid attracting insects) and she went along and shook hands with everyone politely, and chatted, politely.

‘Was there only four of you? It seemed like hundreds,' she says, deadpan.

There's a playfulness to these exchanges, which I had missed earlier.

The next day, they say, Luke turned up to go shearing in a suit, tie and white shirt. Finally, I am going to learn just why Luke shears in a suit and tie. ‘Now, was this standard practice?' I ask earnestly.

Luke and Frances stare at me, as well they might. I did, after all, grow up on a wool-producing property. ‘No, absolutely not,' they say.

‘Was it standard practice, though, for you, Luke?' I clarify, still wondering if Luke might have worn a suit as a way of demonstrating his professionalism.

‘No!' says Luke, baffled. ‘The weekend before I had been to a gourmet weekend at Clare with friends. It was a themed weekend—we had to wear a school uniform, and I'd gone into an op shop and picked up a suit, pants, tie and white shirt. I still had it with me and I didn't plan to ever wear it again. And on Monday morning I thought, “Why not? I'll go to work in my … suit.”'

Even now it makes them both chuckle, and I laugh too.

‘Instantly,' says Frances, ‘the story is that he's doing this to impress the governess.'

It is not clear to me if Luke did or did not wear the suit partly for the purpose of catching Frances's attention. They are still teasing each other about this, but they agree that the real connection between them begins in a conversation some days later.

‘Isn't it funny,' says Frances, suddenly serious, ‘how sometimes something seemingly unimportant at that time and in that moment and in that headspace turns out to be the most massive moment in your life.'

‘So, there's all this small talk around the table, everyone's making jokes, winding down, and here I am, showing Frances some photos—'

‘—showing … off,' says Frances, giggling and then apologising.

‘And I say to her, “You don't speak any German do you?”, as if she's going to say, “Yes.” I was waiting for her to ask, “Why?” and I was going to say, “Oh I've just got a contract written in German here for my next job in Switzerland.” But she said, “As a matter of fact I do.”'

Luke pulls for me the confounded look that must have appeared on his face all those years ago.

‘I'd just spent two years in Europe and I'd learnt German to go and study at a German university,' says Frances.

‘So I got my contract out and she checked it. That really broke the ice between us.'

This was the moment when these two adventurers worked out that they just might have found a kindred spirit. Frances, who by this stage was helping the shearers' cook, as she dislikes sitting down when someone else is working, embarked on a gentle tease. To rub in her unexpected knowledge of German, she wrote on Luke's cling-wrapped bowl of breakfast cereal little notes in that language for Luke to attempt to translate.

Their sudden enjoyment of each other's company was not missed, as the property owners and the rest of the shearing team turned matchmaker.

‘I was sharing a room with a terrific gentleman in his forties, and at the end of the first week he said to me, “What are you doing for the weekend?”'

Luke had nothing planned.

‘He says, “The Hawker Races are on.” And I say, “Oh are they?” and he says, “The governess is from Hawker.”

“Ah,” I say.'

The next evening Luke asked what Frances was doing the following weekend. She wasn't doing anything. And Luke casually mentioned that he was going to Hawker—and Frances immediately (as he intended her to do) asked if she could catch a ride with him as she lived at Hawker.

‘Oh, do you?' said Luke, gently surprised.

This is all delightful listening and, after my lack of insight into the business with the suit, I'm pleased that this part of the story is at least much as I'd expected. As we talk, Frances is putting together dinner and glancing flirtatiously at Luke from time to time. I am now confidently waiting to hear of a mutual recognition that this was the right person or something of that nature.