Love In a Sunburnt Country (4 page)

The next morning over a seven-thirty breakfast—with both sets of parents and Luke's grandmother sitting at the table, everyone relaxed and in pyjamas, and Luke and Frances standing together by the sink, they (finally) seize the moment.

‘We've got something to tell you. You know how last night we said we were engaged?' Luke says to them, ‘Well, no-one has asked us when we're getting married.'

Frances's mother Janne looks up at him and says, reasonably, as any practical woman would: ‘We'll get Christmas out of the way first.'

‘No, we won't,' says Luke, also in a reasonable tone. ‘We're getting married at nine o'clock.'

Silence. For at least five seconds no-one says a word. Frances's father Richard's mouth is hanging open. Eventually Luke's father says: ‘Don't you need permission for that?'

‘That's all organised,' says Luke.

Joy follows pandemonium as family realise that Luke and Frances are quite serious: handshakes, hugs and tears—drama about clothes, the order of events, cars …

‘Frances and Richard went to church in the Monaro that we'd used for my brother's wedding. I grabbed a shotgun and let off a few shells as they drove off,' says Luke.

‘Pastor Tim went right through the Christmas service without saying anything, and then right at the end he said: “And now Luke and Frances are to be married, and if you'd like to stay, you are invited.” Everybody stayed.'

No photographer had been organised, but a congregation member and old friend had raced home for his camera, determined that the family would have pictures of this precious, unexpected day. On the family pin-up board, next to drawings by Todd and Stella, is pinned one of his photographs from six years ago—Frances and Luke, their fair hair shining, eyes starry, faces incandescent at their Christmas Day wedding.

*

The previous day …

After breakfast the day before my father and I wander in and around the treasured old buildings of Holowiliena. Holowiliena dates back to the 1850s: the old stone homestead is the heart of the property, but it is surrounded by historic outbuildings, some restored, some not. Some of these restorations were completed as part of the ABC's Restoration Australia program, filmed in 2013 and 2014, but Luke and Frances had begun on this work before the series and will continue it into the future. Frances believes that restoration and preservation is the job for her generation of Warwicks. To restore the buildings will take both time and money, and Frances and Luke are now venturing into tourism in order to ‘make the history pay for itself'.

‘Being asked to be part of Restoration Australia was wonderful luck,' Frances had told me.

It was wonderful luck for the producer of Restoration Australia too. Holowiliena is among the few pastoral properties where the family who took up the lease still runs the property. Add to this the family's passion for sharing, their deep tradition of hospitality and their ability to bring to life family members who are long gone—I imagine the producer was overcome with relief and pleasure.

Rather than charging for accommodation and food, Holowiliena provided it gratis to the ABC production team—and that money saved, Luke tells me, went straight into producing high-quality television on their episode, the seventh and last of the series, which screened in October 2015. Frances and Luke value good craft in the same way they value time spent talking, interacting and eating with guests: it is a good thing in and of itself. They are delighted that the production team crafted a beautiful opening for their episode and pleased to have played such a big part in enabling them to give of their best.

The opening sequence shows the Warwicks arriving at Holowiliena in 1852. Frances plays her own great-great-grandmother, and Luke is William Warwick. With them they brought their ten children and they were to have two more.

Those children grew up in and cooperatively ran Holowiliena when, after sixteen years of life there, William and his wife left to live closer to Adelaide. The youngest child was left behind for the oldest sister to care for. In the end, only three of William Warwick's children married, and only one of the married men had children of his own.

The things these people made and used are all around me, and Frances had talked about her departed family members as if they were just over the next hill repairing a fence; as a result, time here feels less as if it flows and more as if it is draped in layers over the land. In a closed section of shed, behind wire, are wagons with wooden-spoked wheels with metal rims. The skills that were used to make these wheels—to curve the wood, place the spokes, shrink the metal around the wheel, ensure all wheels match and balance—were once commonplace. Every station and small settlement would have had a blacksmith's shop with a forge where this work was done. At the time of colonisation blacksmiths had a place equivalent to today's software and hardware developers, as toolmakers in a high-status profession taken up by those of good intellect, design skills, physical prowess and business sense.

Behind a tractor is hooked an arched contraption with a seat and a long blade beneath. ‘This is still in use!' my father exclaims. He is astonished because this arched contraption is a hand-operated grader which on most properties would have been retired decades ago.

Behind the main shed we find a well-rusted Model-T Ford. Over it grows a vine with a woolly, herbaceous, pastel leaf and white clusters of flowers. I've never seen this plant before.

‘It's horehound,' Luke says, appearing around the shed corner, explaining that it was brought into Australia for flavouring in brewing and has become a weed in South Australia. He shows us the way to the storeroom where Frances and her father Richard are waiting. Richard's hair is dark and the worry lines that financial struggle usually carves aren't apparent on his face. I have difficulty believing he is over seventy years old. Richard bought Holowiliena from his uncle in the 1980s. Janne and Richard, just married, had to go massively into debt to purchase the homestead. The wool boom was over, and that came at the end of a run of dry years. It would have been enormously difficult to repay a debt that big and under those conditions, but Holowiliena had been in the family for four generations, and Richard and Janne wished to hand it over to the next generation.

The storeroom roof was once thatched and now it is tin, but under the pole rafters and lathed purlins, running perpendicular to the rafters, little else has changed. The floor is river-bed stone. The bookkeeper would have stood behind the substantial angled desk and recorded wages drawn, allowances taken in stores and advanced allowances debited. The shelving of local wood held everything needed in the way of stores and more besides: flour, sugar, salt, cigarettes, coffee, boots.

Now the long, high shelves overflow with things that have lost their place in time elsewhere. One of Janne and Richard's first management decisions was to return this building to its original role—it was in use as a shed—and put in it all the someone-might-find-interesting or might-be-useful-again items from houses and sheds. The light and the colours in here are soft, sepia-tinted, and the fine apricot dust of Holowiliena coats everything.

There is a hip bath, roasting covers and many bottles. Some bottles are iridescent, some pearlised, brown or blue or green, dusty from the ground in which they were found, standing like old friends together despite huge discrepancies in age and origin. A hand-held seed and fertiliser distributer, tiny, but with a huge gear ratio to blast out the seed: all done with the minimum of working parts. Cow bells, sheep bells, some still striking a clear early-morning note. A bee smoker, horse castrator, butter paddles, an icing syringe of metal and wood and a perplexing item which turns out to be a homemade fly zapper. The biggest gravy bowl I've ever seen, and the very biggest bread box, testament to just how many had to be fed at every meal—full-time gardeners, transient workers, a tutor, cowboys, shepherds, bookkeepers, people passing through, and family. A bunch of white tin mugs is strung like a bunch of grapes in the foreground. The smell of age rises from the saddlery, held above on the raft mezzanine, and from the hessian bags, which contain leather strapping for cart horses, complete with blinkers.

In the corner waits an ancient vacuum cleaner, still working. We trundle it across the floor and it whirrs and the old fabric bag obligingly inflates, no electricity required. Near it is propped a shepherd's crook in a pale wood of some bush timber, reinforced to support the hook and lovingly polished. This is a family that loves their wood and their metal. Tools have been forged here, wooden handles shaped and polished. There are scales everywhere, but they are not measuring time or, if they are, it is only very gently.

‘There's a family story for everything that is here—why it was made or how it arrived,' says Luke.

A commercial knife, the handle of which must have broken, has been re-handled in local wood, beautiful to hold and detailed with a wheat-head pattern: quite possibly some of Frank Warwick's work. Frank was a great-great-uncle to Frances. In 1908 he was rounding up horses on foot when a rabbit warren collapsed under him and he fell into the dusty hole, breaking both legs. He had the ill luck to see a drunken doctor, who set both broken legs poorly. A shepherd re-broke and reset them, to better effect, but afterwards Frank was never without pain—or, it seems, without his woodwork. His well-used woodworking tools are touchingly kept next to his crutches. Hanging from a rafter is a double-sided pistol holster.

‘This fitted over the neck of the horse—here is where you put your shells. I suspect my father sewed this together himself,' says Richard, going on to explain that his father used gunfire in much the way the sound of a motorbike or helicopter is used now: ‘He used to use a firearm as a means of mustering. If he found scrub he couldn't ride through, he'd shoot to start them out.'

As there are just two of us visiting, the family decide to show us the office, which was built in 1856. ‘To me this is the heart of Holowiliena here,' Frances says. ‘We generally don't show it to people because I can't resist handing them the diaries, the catalogues—and it is all too fragile to stand much of that.' These treasures of ink on paper, Frances says, need climate control and they need to be digitised. She is a passionate curator and researcher as well as an archaeologist. In this special room two of Frances's strongest instincts are set at odds: her sense of hospitality versus her passion for preservation.

The opportunity to be hospitable has come to be seen by Frances and Luke as a priceless one.

‘You see a lot of people who say, “Oh, we are too busy to have visitors,” but Richard will drop everything, sometimes to the detriment of the work that needs to be done. He'll drop everything to spend time with people. At first when we came here it would drive us crazy,' says Frances.

‘We'd just moved here ready to make a difference and get in and do some work, but it would be time to pull up and talk to people,' says Luke.

‘Have another cup of tea …'

‘It was wearing on us, but now—'

‘—now we see why.'

‘Richard always spoke to people on the road and said, “Pull in, have a cup of tea with us.” One cup of tea on the road,' says Luke, ‘and we've got lifelong friends out of it, people who have been coming here for thirty or forty years.'

‘Do you know Trove?' says Frances, referring to the National Library of Australia's online archives. ‘I use it quite a bit for my research and it is easy, because Holowiliena is such a unique name. From the late 1800s and early 1900s reporters wrote about the hospitality of the people at Holowiliena.'

In the office are family portraits. One handsome gentleman stares vaguely down from the wall—I think it is William, the son of the original William—and it is not possible to miss the family resemblance. William in the portrait, Richard and Frances all have the same beautifully modelled, patrician nose.

There is a medicine cupboard here, testament to the isolation, with old syringes and ointment jars to hold chemical concoctions including opium.

Frances holds a station supplies catalogue. ‘As far as I can tell it dates from around the turn of the century because you can see the camel train on the cover there.'

‘You could set up a whole station with this,' says Luke. Like Frances, he handles the catalogue with tenderness and pride.

‘I desperately want to republish it—it's a good collector's edition, a good reference for what was available—but I want it printed on paper like this, not generic paper. People need to see what books were like at the time.'

The paper is thin and shiny and the fine black line drawings of stoves, saddlery, rat traps, lamps, firearms, Fowler's bottling equipment, wool presses and hundreds of other items shine off the page. The catalogue is comprehensive and fascinating and I have no difficulty believing it would find a market.

‘I can see a Holowiliena collection of books … one day, one day. I have a lot of “one day” projects. The children's books we have here—with really gorgeous plates—I'd like to see them republished too,' says Frances, her voice by turns self-deprecating, wistful and determined.

Closest to Frances's heart are the diaries, the books that hold the minds and the memories of her kin. I suspect she sometimes feels them beside her as she polishes the wood they've carved or reads the words they've written in exquisite, measured copperplate script. In the work of restoring she has found herself effectively conversing with them: trying to answer the questions of why and how from these diaries.

‘The beautiful thing about the records we have here is that sometimes you think they are just records and history—there, but not useful—but through this project, so many times, we've come back to the diaries and looked things up. We could go back to my grandfather in the 1940s when everyone had gone off to war and there wasn't much concrete available and he wrote about burning limestone for mortar again and his phrase was, “They used to do it in the old days and I don't see why we can't do it now.” And it is the same for us, exactly what grandpa said—there's no reason not to do it.'