Love In a Sunburnt Country (29 page)

In mustering, she says, they would inevitably accidentally muster in a few of the wild cattle, the water buffalo. Hairy, snorting, impossible to domesticate, all they wanted was to get out of the mob of cattle. Unerringly, they would choose Cissy and her horse as the most permeable part of the barrier created by the musterers.

‘They used to pick me out because they must have smelt I was frightened of them. They used to chase me everywhere. I just got tired of all those things. I think I've broken thirteen major bones in my body. I've broken my shoulders, legs, shoulder blades. I've been kicked in the jaw …'

Sitting in her beautiful house, bringing precision and care to the art of making a friend lovely—this is what Cissy wants to do at this time in her life. But she still loves campdrafting, as does Bill.

Just recently their campdraft training has expanded to involve two types of wild cattle: not water buffalo, but American bison and Indonesian banteng. It is with these that she and Bill practise their campdrafting. Where domesticated cattle will learn the course and therefore no longer provide any challenge to the campdrafter, these wild cattle will respond day after day in the same way. Bison and banteng don't want to separate from the herd and won't be directed or work with the horse.

‘A friend of ours breeds them and he gave us some. These animals give you confidence because they do the same thing every day.'

Cissy is working to become competitive again in campdraft.

‘I don't get nervous in campdraft,' she says. After all, compared to bull-catching or accidentally mustering wild buffalo along with a herd of cattle, it is a tame pursuit. ‘Bill reckons he needs to make me a bit nervous so I'll concentrate more. I like to be competitive now, just so I don't look like the silly old lady who should have stopped ten years ago. It's not an easy thing to do, but I still don't get nervous.'

Partly underlying their persistence in this high-speed, unpredictable sport is the desire to stay relevant in and connected to the lives of their children and grandchildren and to the wider campdraft community.

‘When we go we take all the kids with us, we all go together as a family. If I don't keep riding I'll have no horses for my grandchildren to ride and campdraft. I want to make sure my grandchildren want to come and see me and that we have something in common! We're all going away next week. My daughter is riding and both my granddaughters, too. One granddaughter is five and one is fifteen. We're all doing it together,' she says. ‘While I can climb up and hop on my horse I'll be campdrafting.'

Bill is still working in the family team into which he was lucky enough to be born. ‘It has just got bigger,' he says. ‘And we all work very hard at maintaining a very good relationship with each other. We all value the relationship we have.'

With all of this in their lives Cissy and Bill are satisfied.

‘Success is often defined in the narrowest possible terms,' says Bill. ‘For some people accruing wealth is success, but I think satisfaction is a better definition. If you are genuinely satisfied with your circumstances—if you are living on a river somewhere and hunting all your food and looking after your children and you are genuinely satisfied with that, you genuinely don't want anything different—that's as good as it gets.'

In deciding to marry it appears to me that Cissy ‘followed her gut' (as she always does) and Bill used something approaching a due diligence procedure (as he always does). ‘It seemed to me we had the basis for a relationship, and history has subsequently vindicated that judgment. When you are young, most people wrongly believe that love is the starting point for a successful long-term relationship. Love is the end result, I believe, of a successful long-term relationship. Friendship should be the starting point. We had the same aspirations, we both wanted a long-term relationship with someone we could be best friends with, and business partners and parents,' says Bill.

Bill's parents had talked to their children about the choice of life partner and just how very significant that choice was, and what criteria to consider in making your choice. Cissy's parents hadn't.

‘We don't go to school and have a subject called “life” and learn how to find the best person to marry—and we don't have experience in that either. Unless you have good parents who actually put some time into you, you don't know these things,' says Cissy.

After listening to her I wonder if we need to add a subject called (possibly) ‘Life, Love and Mate Selection' to the school curriculum.

Bill and Cissy's kind of love story is told often in Regency romances. Friends decide to marry for reasons other than love. Then comes the dangerous situation where they must rely utterly on the other person. From that close camaraderie grows love. It is all rather more condensed in these books than in Cissy and Bill's case, but it is the same story. I am charmed to find that this kind of beginning to a marriage works every bit as well in real life as it does in fiction. ‘Bill has the loveliest smile I've ever seen. He's a genuine, honest, good person and he brings out the better in me. A lot of people look at their partner and take them for granted. I try to find something nice to say, not every day, but often—something that is true. You can't say to someone, “Oh, I love you,” every day, because you might not feel it that day or even that week,' says Cissy.

‘I always reckon friendship is the most important part of it. When the emotional and physical heat lessens, as it inevitably will over a number of years, then what you are left with is friendship, so you'd better make sure you get that right. If you've been with someone for twenty years and you still like them and enjoy being with them and talking to them and doing things together, you can call that love. That's what I call love,' says Bill.

There was a pot of gold at the end of Cissy and Bill's rainbow, but despite the hard years spent growing that gold, that isn't where their attention goes. They focus instead on the wealth of good relationships they've built up. They are still each other's ‘best mate'.

When I think of Bill and Cissy I imagine them when they first met, a good-looking couple in the roughest of station utes. The girl has her foot on the accelerator and her heart in the moment. The man holds a map and has his mind tracking a multitude of possibilities. The terrain is rough, the dangers real. As we watch, the ute takes off for the future—and when it arrives it is no longer a ute but a helicopter and the couple within love each other all the more for the chance to share the journey.

Never Tear Us Apart

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

Western Australia's coastline echoes the rugged outlines of a giant's ear: Perth is decorously located on the lobe, whereas Broome is studded on the tip of the upper ear in rebellious competition. They might share a coastline and a state, but each metropolis offers a different Australia. Broome's streets do have some names that reflect Anglo culture (Dampier, Kennedy), but many also reflect the fact that multiculturalism is old news here—so many British divers died in this place that the White Australia policy was waived in order to allow Japanese divers to work alongside those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent. So there is Wing Place, Tang Street, Matsumoto Street and Johnny Chi Lane.

As well as the descendants of all those divers and those of the Aboriginal people (and Broome people are frequently descendants of both), there are the tourists, the rich pearl buyers, and those seekers who come to Broome looking for other ways of seeing, and in turn see themselves reflected back in all these different mirrors. In Broome, pearling, pastoralism and parties were layered over the old cultures of the Orient and the cold European North, and under, through and around sits the Indigenous spirit of the land. It announces itself to the visitor, even the one who does not know how to look. The work of ‘Welcoming to Country' is done by the place itself.

This was not always such a cheerfully multicultural place. Cultural and racial difference were at the heart of Broome's early history of exploitation, violence and tragedy. But places, like people, can be resilient: some places can have a history of tragedy and adversity and yet they can overcome it to such a degree that they stand as a testament to the very opposite qualities. Broome is just such a place, owning its shadow—some of Australia's ugliest racial wars occurred here—yet now Broome epitomises the kind of Australia we can have when we celebrate cultural and racial diversity.

It was 1990 when agricultural scientist Tim Wiley arrived in Broome. At twenty-nine he had left both a job and his marriage in the cooler, drier south of Western Australia to hitchhike north. At that time Broome had just started to polish itself in its quest to become a world-class tourist destination. For those of us down south, already puzzled by Broome's comfortable multiculturalism and honesty about its dark and bloody past, this new ambition to glow on the world stage made it seem even more alien than ever. To a southerner like Tim it felt not so much as if Broome belonged in another state, it was more that it belonged to another country entirely. Bali or Broome? The main difference was that he could hitchhike to Broome.

‘This guy, Bob, picked me up in Carnarvon and he gave me a lift up to Broome,' says Tim. Bob knew a woman called Joan Wilson, who was happy to give newcomers to the town a feed. Tim had landed on his feet with Joan as she was a great adopter of strays. He became a frequent visitor in those first few weeks in Broome, where he knew no-one and was bewildered by this very different Australia. Joan was an Australian girl who'd married a Maori man, Tania's father. It was a very unhappy and abusive marriage. After the marriage was over Joan was supported by her strong friends. That support was something she wanted to give back, so Joan's door was kept open and her fridge full.

Joan's open-door policy was very like the one that had operated in the little wheatbelt town where Tim had grown up. ‘Weekends and holidays we kids would roam everywhere. Wherever we rocked up we got fed and put to bed,' Tim says.

So he was made to feel instantly at home with Joan and her sons. The daughter of the house, seventeen-year-old Tania, wasn't there. She was living in Perth with a boyfriend, but her four little brothers missed her, her mother missed her, and so Tim heard a great deal about the big sister of the family.

‘I got on well with the boys—I was missing my own sons, David and Scott. Joan's two youngest ones were the same age as my two. We did boy stuff together: they were like little brothers to me. Fishing, going down the beach … they really enjoyed it, I enjoyed it. They all looked up to big sister—and one day she came home.'

It cannot be said that the first encounter between them was in fact a meeting or that it went well. Tania was cleaning the kitchen when Tim walked in. He did not look at her or speak to her, but kept on walking.

‘My boyfriend and I had split up, and then Mum was sick. So I came back to Broome. Because of Mum's open-door policy with anybody and everybody welcome I was used to people drifting in and out. However, they usually said hello as they walked past you. Tim didn't. He walked past me, straight down to where Mum was. All I thought was, “arrogance”.'

(Years later, Tim is still excusing himself for this: he was crook as a dog, too, he says, and he wasn't feeling talkative.)

Joan's health improved and Tania moved out of home. Tim remained close to Joan and slowly Tania got to know him in that swirling group of people who made up Joan's circle of friends.

‘One evening there was a knock on the door, and it was Tim, he was just back from a party, drunk as anything.'

Tim had spent weeks feeling most uncomfortable about the attraction he had begun to feel towards Tania. His emotions seemed out of joint with reality: Tania was a teenager and he was now thirty. But then there was another reality: she felt like his equal. Her way of considering and then speaking her mind, her subversive sense of humour and her quick, practical compassion—in none of these ways did she seem younger than him. And life had made Tania wise beyond her years. The dark times had taught her (as they so often do) to be a moment-seizer and to laugh when she could. In addition, there were her darkly glowing good looks and her comfort with her curves: with his inhibitions lost to alcohol, Tim had been unable to resist going to see her. ‘My story was the cyclone season was coming and I needed a place to camp.' He was living in a caravan park in a tent annex off Bob's caravan and working as a gardener at the Cable Beach Club. ‘He'd come from a work party. In a typical fashion he showed me how this chick had bitten his bum—'

‘—I was fully clothed and she just bit me,' says Tim.

‘He had a large bruise on his butt,' says Tania.

So Tim arrived at her door that night and he simply never left. At first glance Tim and Tania look very different. Tania is made up of curves and glow—not olive or brown skin but dark gold. Her dark eyes are long ovals and her steep cheekbones the widest part of her oval face. Tim is muscular, with very blue eyes, sun-weathered skin and squared-off features. But there's something similar about them, too, despite the differences in colouring and features. They are robustly made, direct-gazing and energetic people with the air of being prepared to wade through absolutely anything at all to achieve what needs to be achieved.

Tim was far more worried about the age gap than any cultural gap, though.

‘Tania was younger than my car, which was a classic HQ 1970 model. I was uncomfortable with that, but you don't have control over these things. It's not a rational decision, is it? If it works, it works.'

The age gap was irrelevant to Tania. In many ways, the fact that her entire family liked him so much had ‘pre-qualified' Tim in Tania's eyes.