by Paula Heelan
In 1983 the station owners, the Emanuel family, decided to sell their cattle stations. The process took some time and Joy and Jim decided they didn’t want to work for the new owners. ‘At the same time, a couple of smaller properties came on to the market through the WA government. There was nothing on them, but they were made affordable for ordinary people to buy and develop. We put in for one and got it.’ Bulka Station was half a million acres and about 40 kilometres from Cherrabun as the crow flies. It was closer to Halls Creek, but 130 kilometres from Fitzroy Crossing. By this stage, Joy’s son Clinton was working and John was still at school.
‘Jim managed to get contract mustering work and with no house on the place I decided to go back to full-time nursing as a community health nurse in Fitzroy Crossing. I got a flat and worked five days a week, going home on weekends. I did that for the next fifteen years. It was quite different to my earlier years working at the hospital. I worked in a community and a school at Junjuwa. I held clinics, checked eyes and ears, anything that came my way. I concentrated largely on mothers and babies. Because I was a female I didn’t see too many men. But most people in the community knew Jim and me and that helped. They felt quite comfortable about coming to see me and I was doing a lot of preventative work, taking blood pressures, checking baby weights, giving injections – that kind of thing.’
One morning a young girl came in to Joy for her eighteen-month immunisation needle. ‘The family had been teasing her about having to have a big needle. Understandably, the child arrived kicking and screaming – she didn’t want to have a needle. So her grandmother and aunty hung on to her and I gave her the needle. As soon I took it out, the child stopped screaming, looked up at me and said, Fuck you. I wasn’t sure what to think, I just started laughing. Then the other women burst out laughing, too. That helped cover the embarrassment.’
Joy also had a lot of people coming in to discuss personal matters. She was older and well known in the community. A lot of troubled young girls came in to see her. ‘Sadly, some had been abused when they were younger and couldn’t tell anybody. When I finished at midday, people would leave the clinic, but often a few would hang around to talk to me. Having someone to talk to helped, even though by this stage the damage had been done. The girls didn’t want me to do anything – just listen. They’d get it all out and then find it wasn’t such a weight after airing whatever had happened to them. Then I’d knock off at 4.30 and people would arrive at the hospital office to talk. I guess I was an unofficial counsellor – someone they could bare their souls to. I got a lot of that. I just had to listen and they’d sort it out themselves from there.’
Professor Donna Mak worked in the Kimberley with Joy for eleven years, from 1989 to 1992 when she was in the Fitzroy Valley, and then from 1995 to 2002, when she was based in Derby as a public health physician for the region. Now the head of Population and Preventive Health at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Donna says in a place where staff turnover was high, with some nurses staying only a few weeks or months, having a long-term community health nurse like Joy was invaluable. ‘Joy knew all the patients, in particular the Aboriginal patients and how they were related to each other. She had an excellent working relationship with the Aboriginal health workers and taught me a lot about how to work with Aboriginal people. Not just by being willing to answer my countless questions and share her wisdom and experience with me, but by being an example and a role model. I would watch and listen to see how she did things and try them out for myself. Joy was highly respected by everyone who knew her. She could balance the fine line of being an active member of the local community and keeping the professional distance, when required to be a trusted and confidential health professional. She was extremely hard-working and would put in a full week’s work at community health, while looking after her sons, who stayed in town to attend high school. On Friday afternoons she would drive two hours back out to Bulka to work all weekend with Jim on the station. At that stage the house wasn’t even built. On Monday morning she would be at community health by 7 am ready to work again.’
After leaving the Kimberley, Donna asked for Joy’s help to establish a teaching program, where medical students could live with and work for lay people in remote Australia for a week to learn first-hand about the social determinants of health and develop skills and attitudes required to live out bush. ‘Joy’s support for the program and participation as a community host from the program’s inception in 2006 until she retired from Bulka was instrumental in securing the involvement of pastoralists throughout the West Kimberley. I am very grateful to Joy for all she has taught me and all the smiles, laughs and occasional sad times we shared. I am privileged and blessed to have her as a friend.’
Joy’s work in Fitzroy over those years helped pay off the loan for Bulka, and with constant hard work she and Jim developed the property. ‘Our first house was a mining donga [a small, transportable building]. We had a gen set put in, a TV and a few basics. Then we got a roof and verandah and bit by bit we built our homestead.’
When Joy turned 60, she was still living in Fitzroy while Jim was at Bulka. ‘One morning Jim just said, I’m getting sick of living on my own, when are you going to give up nursing? We were still living in this funny old donga, so I said, When we get a house.’ Almost immediately Jim brought in a portable house and set it up and Joy resigned. ‘It was time,’ she says. ‘We’d built a good cattle herd by then and were making an income on Bulka.’
When Joy looks back now to the late 1960s when she arrived at the Crossing, she realises it was the end of an era. ‘We didn’t have electricity, telephones, television or air conditioning. The main roads were unsealed. I was there before all that changed. It’s not as remote now, and with so many improvements and better roads, tourists can move through the region.’
In 2004 Clinton and John left to work away from home and neither one was interested in taking on the family station. ‘It was a big decision, but we decided to sell in 2011.’ Joy and Jim moved to a farming district, Badgingarra, and bought some land. They are now 220 kilometres north of Perth, close to the coast – an idyllic spot. ‘We still have cattle – about 300 cows – and all Jim has to do is hop on a quad bike for an hour or so and he’s seen the whole place. Clinton is a chopper-mustering pilot based out of Broome and is now married. His wife, Rae, flies helicopters, too. We used to say love is in the air. John lives and works in Darwin.’
CHAPTER
7
Lisa Peberdy
The sun was setting on the Torres Strait Islands archipelago north of the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland. From the broad, timber verandah at the Thursday Island (TI) Hospital, Lisa Peberdy looked across the shimmering ocean. The seascape was draped in luminous orange light for as far as she could see. On an afternoon shift, the 31-year-old nurse and midwife was taking a breather when a call came in to let her know a woman from Friday Island (located just behind TI) was motoring across in a dinghy with her father and her husband. She had gone into labour at only 36 weeks pregnant.
Lisa grabbed her little delivery pack, a torch, a wheelchair and the wardsman. They rushed down to Bach Beach behind the hospital where the dinghy would stop. They could see a flickering light heading towards them. As the boat drew near Lisa didn’t give the resident croc a single thought. She waded in to greet them. The three in the boat looked to her with relief on their faces. ‘We had a little chat and I was thankful to see the woman was calm and collected,’ Lisa says. ‘But suddenly, she gave a bit of a push and a soft groan. I thought, Oh dear, something is happening here.’ In the quickly fading light, Lisa asked the woman if she minded her having a look. She smiled at Lisa but wasn’t really paying attention. ‘I lifted her muu-muu and shone the torch to see.’ Astonished, Lisa could see the baby’s hair presenting. ‘It was all on,’ she says. ‘The delivery pack hadn’t been opened – I had no gloves, no nothing. There I was, with my skinny white legs standing knee-deep in the water holding a torch. I turned to the wardsman
to ask for some help, but when he realised a baby was coming – and not wanting any part of it – he reversed up the beach, tripping over his own feet. The two men in the boat were of no help, either. They couldn’t look or hold the light – this was women’s business and no place for men. It’s hard to birth a baby and hold a torch at the same time, so I delivered in the darkness. The mother gave one more push and her baby girl was born.’
Lisa called out to the wardsman to bring down a towel, which he managed to do. As she swathed the baby snugly it sounded out a healthy cry. ‘We wheeled them up to the hospital and while we all wished the boat had come in 30 minutes earlier, everyone was overjoyed. A lot of midwives say they want a carpark birth – that would be the cream of their career. I think I went one better – a dinghy birth in the Torres Strait.’
Born in Mackay, Queensland in 1968, Lisa moved to the Sunshine Coast with her family when she was in the second grade and attended the Woombye Primary School with her older sister, Leanne, and younger brothers, Grant and Paul. When she completed high school a few of her girlfriends went into nursing and she decided to follow. Enrolled at St Andrew’s on Brisbane’s Wickham Terrace to train, she met another country girl, Kerry ‘Parky’ Joseland, who was from a remote cattle property in western Queensland. ‘We became close, lifelong friends. At seventeen and with fun high on the agenda, Parky and I were ratbags on a roll.’
The day after Lisa graduated, her fifteen-year-old brother, Paul, with whom she was very close, went missing in the surf. ‘Paul was a surf lifesaving nipper and had been training at the Alexandra Headland Surf Life Saving Club for an upcoming surf carnival,’ Lisa recalls.
The well-known Ironman and surf lifesaver Grant Kenny was also a member of the surf club and that was the weekend he married Olympian swimmer Lisa Curry. The senior lifesavers were away for the wedding, leaving just the teenagers on the beach that day. ‘It was fairly rough and Paul was knocked off his board three times – the third time he didn’t resurface. It was presumed he was knocked unconscious and killed.’ Lisa’s family endured a three-day search before finding Paul’s body. The tragedy was the catalyst that made Lisa realise how precious life was and the importance of getting out and living life to the full.
She stayed on the Sunshine Coast after Paul’s death, working at the Nambour Selangor Private Hospital as an enrolled nurse. Later she travelled extensively overseas for almost a year. On her return, encouraged by friend and fellow nurse Kerry Joseland, she found a bush placement in the small town of Barcaldine, in central west Queensland. Kerry was nursing at Blackall, 107 kilometres south of Barcaldine.
Lisa really enjoyed the little community and the diversity of a country hospital. It was a huge change as she had never been that far west before. Barcaldine is 1080 kilometres north-west of Brisbane in Queensland’s central west. The major industries are sheep and beef cattle production. Barcaldine is famous for its role in the development of the Australian Labour Party after the shearer’s strike of 1891. Today it’s a laidback rural town of 1700 people with a lot of pubs, cattle and sheep producers and a plethora of unusual buildings.
There were a few beds for maternity up one end of the building and some for aged care. ‘I was a general nurse and would run a mile if I heard someone was in labour. That end of the hospital was very scary. That was for the midwives and they could have it – I’d take on anything else. I was there for about twelve months and learned a great deal. It was also my first real contact with Indigenous health work.
‘Kerry and I went to every possible bachelor and spinster [B&S] ball, and despite having to drive long distances over unsealed roads to get anywhere, we led a very busy social life. Sometimes Kerry and I would head off to her family’s property near the tiny outback town of Yaraka. Once we went out there in Kerry’s little white Gemini and while we were out there it rained. We both had to get back to work and although we were told not to drive because of dangerous wet dirt-road conditions, we headed off in the Gemini. We spent most of the time sliding sideways or spinning – it took us hours, but we got there. The car was coated in red mud; there wasn’t a speck of white on it by the time we hit the bitumen road.’
At 21, Lisa thought her career options were limited as an enrolled nurse. To build on her one-year course, she returned to Nambour to repeat Year 12 as a mature-age student and then enrolled for a three-year nursing degree at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane and graduated with distinction. She completed her graduate year at the Nambour General Hospital in 1995, which is where she met Min Lene, who took a group of students to Samoa to complete their prac by doing postnatal visits in a community. It was her first exposure to midwifery.
‘On the islands resources are limited and Lisa would go out of her way to compromise and find ways around problems,’ Min says. ‘Later when she was in Sydney doing her midwifery, she rang me. She had gone out to visit a Samoan family with a senior midwife. When they walked into the house there was food on the table and the family invited them to eat. The midwife was standoffish in terms of engagement and told Lisa not to eat anything. They were there for a postnatal check.
‘Lisa sat down regardless to have a cup of tea and a bite to eat with the family. She knew the offering of food was special and culturally significant – like shaking a hand. She had learned how to engage and to form a trusting relationship. I suggested she go back to her teacher and recommend a session in multicultural communication.’
During her time at university, Lisa met and dated Pete. After her year at Nambour, Pete was transferred to Sydney for his work. She was determined to go with him. With an oversupply of nurses in the mid-1990s, Lisa couldn’t find a job as a general nurse in Sydney. Her only option was to apply for a midwifery course. ‘My friends and family fell about laughing,’ she says. ‘They all knew I couldn’t watch a birth on film, let alone help deliver a baby. As far as I was concerned, childbirth was the worst thing in the world. I had only really been involved in postnatal care in Samoa.’
She was accepted into the University of Western Sydney and studied two days a week for the theory component and was employed three days at the Nepean Hospital.
‘I was excited to be there, but lo and behold on my first rotation roster I was assigned to the labour ward for a straight month,’ she says. The first time Lisa attended the birth of a baby and saw the placenta discharge from the mother’s womb, that was it – she vomited! ‘There I was, training to be a midwife,’ she says. ‘Everybody said Get out now, Peberdy, you’re never going to make it.
‘We were the very first uni students to come through university training and the midwives didn’t agree with the change from hospital-based training,’ Lisa says. ‘But there was a midwife, Anne, of whom everyone – even the experienced midwives – was a bit afraid. But it was Anne who got me through. I was the country girl living away from home in the city and she felt sorry for me. She took me under her wing and that’s how I made it through that first month.’
The last four weeks of the course, and Lisa’s last hurdle, was in the labour ward. In the third week, she experienced the birth of a stillborn baby. ‘It was very, very traumatic,’ she says. ‘I cried and cried. I honestly thought, That’s it, this is not for me, I am out of here.’
The senior midwives stepped in. They walked and talked her through the experience and convinced her not to throw away her hard work.
No longer going out with Pete, who had been transferred to Melbourne, and concerned she might never leave Sydney if she didn’t make a break, Lisa decided to take a placement at Kalgoorlie, which had a strong graduate midwifery program for twelve months. The program was established to encourage midwives to go there because it was hard to recruit staff to Kalgoorlie. ‘I returned to the coast for a brief holiday after finishing my midwifery training. I left for Kalgoorlie from the Sunshine Coast in my Mazda 121 bubble car with my girlfriend Lorrine in 1996. We drove all the way to Kalgoorlie. We laughed our way across the Nullarbor Plain and the flat, tre
eless, arid country of southern Australia. We were two girls with a tiny bubble car packed to the roof with all our worldly belongings, including a bike rack on the back with two pushbikes and a little tent so we could camp along the way to Kalgoorlie. We attracted a lot of comments – the most common being that our pushbikes were our spares.’
It was in Kalgoorlie that Lisa finally overcame her fear of the labour ward. ‘I was working in a small unit and had to work in all areas of midwifery, including the birth suite and ward. I was a slow starter, but I did come to love the labour ward. When you train to birth a baby, the first three times you double-scrub with a senior midwife – which means you place your hands over hers to feel the movement and learn how to guide the baby through the birth canal. You birth the baby together.’
But Lisa was still feeling frightened by the birthing experience after three double-scrubs. She double-scrubbed up to fifteen times. Every time the birth drew close, instead of handling the birth on her own, she’d ask the senior midwife on duty to double-scrub. ‘Before long I was asked how many double-scrubs I’d done. Word had got out. Then one day when I put my gloves on for another imminent birth and called on the midwife who had done the last five births with me to double-scrub, she said no problem.
‘Quick, I called fretfully, I need your hands.
‘No you don’t.
‘Yes I do!
‘Look, she said, you’re doing it on your own. I just had to keep going with her encouraging me all the way. I was terrified throughout the birth, but once the baby arrived, it was exhilarating. I had done it on my own and it was a fantastic feeling.’ The training wheels were off and after that Lisa couldn’t do enough time in the labour ward. ‘To think I originally had no desire or intention to become a midwife, then bang – I was hooked.’
Not long after, Lisa observed a birth of another stillborn baby. A young couple who were in town to work in the goldmine had made friends with Lisa. Like her they were from Queensland. ‘I had been caring for the woman and the couple was excited about the pending birth of their first child,’ Lisa says. ‘They came in when the baby hadn’t moved for a while. We monitored and discovered the baby had died. It was even harder when the young woman had to come back in the next day for an induction. It was a very long labour with a large baby that had to be birthed naturally. They gave the baby the same name as the baby that had died in my midwifery course the year before. It was extremely traumatic and sad. It was the worst of midwifery. You have the best of it when everything goes well and a beautiful healthy baby is born, then you have times like that. You grieve with the parents, push through the sad times and you just have to move on. Another baby comes with another wonderful experience and your faith and strength is restored.’