City Girl, Country Girl

by Liz Harfull

  14

  THE RIPPLE EFFECT

  Meeting Mark at Beaut Blokes created an extraordinary ripple effect. When their first January together came around, Mark insisted that Sherryn visit for the B&S ball. Once again, it sounded like her worst nightmare, but he was president of the organising committee and it meant a great deal to him. To help her cope, Sherryn roped in her sister Rachel and another friend. When they arrived, Mark was so sick with tonsillitis that he was confined to bed.

  Not wanting to disappoint her companions after driving all the way from Melbourne with expectations of spending the weekend partying, Sherryn went without him. Deciding to make the most of it and have fun, the girls adopted a timehonoured B&S tradition, and pretended to be someone else. ‘We met these two guys and my friend and I told them we were gynaecologists, and they told us they were multi-millionaires in the seed sprayer business,’ Sherryn admits. ‘Rubbish was flying but they completely believed us, and we believed them.’

  Sherryn has never been allowed to forget it because her sister married one of them. Now settled on a farm near Natimuk, Rachel and Dale have three young children and Rachel is working as a business development adviser at the Horsham City Council. In fact, Rachel ended up moving to the Wimmera about a year before Sherryn did.

  Their parents weren’t far behind. Jean and Geoff sold their house in Blackburn and moved to Horsham. ‘Dad has always loved the country. Mum was terrified but for the first thirty years of their married life Dad had agreed to live where she wanted, so she decided to suck it up,’ Sherryn says. The added bonus is that they are closer to their two youngest daughters and most of their grandchildren.

  Among those grandchildren is Rhianna. It took two years and ten attempts using in-vitro fertilisation techniques, plus a lot of physical and emotional stress, and a considerable amount of money, before she was conceived. It’s one of the reasons Sherryn and Mark haven’t married yet. They want to do it properly, and much of their savings went towards the treatments.

  Apart from immediate family, only Sherryn’s boss and a couple of close friends knew they were attempting to have a baby. That made it difficult when someone asked when they intended to start a family, but Sherryn didn’t think she could cope with well-meaning people constantly inquiring how it was going and dealing with their reaction every time the procedure failed. ‘I spent enough time feeling sad and sorry for myself,’ she says.

  ‘As part of the deal, we had to go and see a psychologist, who warned us it was going to be a rollercoaster, but I don’t think there is anything that could have prepared us for what was involved. Just the emotional want of it, and then the crushing defeat of it. You tell yourself not to get as excited the next time because it probably won’t happen, but you can’t help yourself. No matter how much you try to keep a lid on it, you get excited again, and we went through that nine times.’

  Sherryn and Mark used a clinic in Ballarat for the treatment—a six-hour return trip for what was often a fifteen-minute consultation. After all the initial form filling, tests and consultations, Sherryn began taking fertility drugs to stimulate egg production. The eggs were harvested from her womb while she was under anaesthetic and then placed in a culture dish with thousands of Mark’s sperm. Twelve embryos formed, giving the couple twelve opportunities.

  Monitoring to decide the best timing to transfer each embryo involved Sherryn having frequent blood tests. The Bush Nursing Centre at Harrow couldn’t guarantee same-day results, which is what her doctors required, so she drove to Horsham. She would set off early to be at the clinic as soon as it opened at eight o’clock and then rush to work after the test.

  Sherryn felt like her body was in training, making progress with each embryo transfer, but after nine failed attempts she was physically and emotionally exhausted. ‘I got to the point where I couldn’t do it anymore, so I took four months off, which probably wasn’t a bad thing. I had a great summer, and that spread into autumn, and then it was winter.’ She told Mark: ‘If we’re going to have another go, I’m feeling pretty good so let’s give it a crack.’

  They only had three embryos left and realised there was a limit to how many more attempts they could make. ‘We talked about drawing a line in the sand. At what point did we just admit defeat and accept that it is just the two of us. Mark was adamant it would all be fine, and he didn’t want to look at fostering or adoption.’ So Sherryn headed back to the clinic for the tenth attempt.

  Blood tests soon confirmed she was pregnant, but the couple didn’t allow themselves to hope that this time might be different until the pregnancy passed the critical twelve-week point. A month before the baby was due, Sherryn finished work. The same day she travelled to Ballarat with Mark for a routine check-up. The baby was in perfect health but Sherryn’s glucose levels had started to rise at about week thirty and her doctor was now so concerned that he wanted to admit her to the Ballarat hospital immediately and induce delivery. Mark and Sherryn were still in shock when they were told the delivery would have to be delayed a few days because the hospital was full. ‘Crikey! We almost had a kid. Were you ready for that? I wasn’t ready,’ she confessed to Mark during the drive back to Connewirricoo.

  Sherryn went into hospital the following Sunday. She ended up having a caesarean and Rhianna came into the world on St Patrick’s Day. There was no pressure on hospital beds then, so she stayed for a week. Mark was there, too, which gave him a wonderful opportunity to bond with his new daughter. ‘Those extra three days were great, because no-one knew we were there and we had that time to ourselves,’ she says.

  Now a toddler, when she isn’t being cared for by one of her grandmothers, Rhianna loves being outside with her father. They often head off in the ute together to feed the sheep. A chip off the old block, she likes tractors and spending time in the shed, too. On her visits to Melbourne every two months or so, Sherryn occasionally looks at her brother’s child who is growing up in the city and wonders if Rhianna is missing out. ‘Then I come back here, and we spend four hours roaming around outside, and she is digging and splashing and skipping and jumping, and using her imagination.’

  Sometimes Sherryn thinks of the city and the variety of choice it offers—Melbourne’s kaleidoscope of restaurants serving food from all over the world, being able to swim in heated pools year-round, going to the zoo or Luna Park. She has been known to drive to Horsham just to be around more people. What she misses most is waking up on a day with no commitments and knowing there are limitless options about how to spend her time. But she has found that she likes the open spaces, too.

  Interestingly, she recalls that way back in high school, she and her best friend, Katherine, shared dreams of owning farms one day during an exercise in English which involved going through a rural newspaper where they saw advertisements for farms, kelpies and utes. Sherryn sends a text to Katherine every now and then with a photo of the beautiful view of rolling hillsides from the farmhouse. ‘Just watching the sunset over my paddocks!’ she teases. Now a lawyer, living in Canberra, and the mother of three boys, Katherine will reply, ‘Just eating at a fine food restaurant!’

  Sherryn doesn’t mind. After the mocha experience, she has come up with a solution. She and Mark have bought the old bakery in Harrow’s main street and are steadily restoring it. They have plans to one day open a coffee shop, so Sherryn can make her own.

  15

  A LONG WAY FROM HOME

  The first rosy light, undershot with gold, is colouring the dawn sky as Daljit Sanghera pulls away from her house. Following a short sandy driveway lined with grapevines, she turns her vehicle towards the main highway. Within minutes she is passing through dark clusters of citrus orchards, over Gurra Gurra Creek and onto the salt-washed floodplains of the mighty River Murray. A broad expanse of sky evolves into muted pinks and greys, soft as the downy feathers of a fledgling galah, as she crosses the bridge into Berri and doubles back towards the senior citizens’ club.

  While most of the town still sleeps, t
he modern brick hall is a hive of activity. It is Saturday and stallholders for the weekly Riverland Farmers’ Market are setting up in the car park. Country music spills from the door of a large white van, providing the perfect soundtrack as they put up gazebos and unfold portable tables to showcase their produce.

  Daljit bypasses the stalls and drives around to the back of the hall where she unloads a stack of plastic boxes. Tucked inside are dozens of samosas, spinach rolls and pakoras made the day before in her compact home kitchen. She carries them through the back door and into the main auditorium where other stallholders are already preparing for a brisk morning’s trade. Most of them come weekly and set up in the same spot each time.

  Daljit is in the far corner from the hall kitchen, alongside Frances, whose display cabinet of continental cakes and desserts is a market favourite. First-generation Australian with Italian parents, Frances is a neighbour on the land, too, living just down the road from Daljit. ‘This woman here, I tell you. My husband always says, “I don’t know how she does it.” Three kids, and the block, and then to do this,’ says Frances watching Daljit unpack.

  Across the aisle, Kaylene Letton is poking gentle fun at her husband, John. Supposedly retired, his bowls club held their season wind-up the night before and apparently he was slow getting up this morning so they are running a bit late. Their poultry farm at Paringa has been in operation for about fifty years and they have been regulars at the market since it was founded almost ten years ago. Customers love their fresh eggs and they are cheaper than can be found at the local supermarket. ‘We have people come up from Adelaide on a regular basis and take eggs back for the family. We even have one lady who is taking eggs back for a whole street,’ Kaylene says.

  Behind the Lettons is another stall reflecting the family heritage of its trader. Anita has spent most of the week baking the traditional German biscuits and cakes that her mother taught her how to make. ‘I’ve written the recipes down but the thing is to watch how they are made,’ she says. What was an enjoyable pastime turned into a useful money earner when people tasted Anita’s gingerbread biscuits. Based on a family Christmas favourite, they are flavoured with a special blend of nine spices. Anita is not saying what the blend contains, except that there is no ginger!

  Trying to avoid the temptation of eating too many sugary treats, Daljit is more interested in the persimmons she has spotted on a stall just inside the front door. Customers haven’t started arriving yet so she takes time to quiz the trader. It’s very early in the season to see persimmons and as a fruit grower with her own orchard she is curious about the variety. Daljit knows that produce which ripens either early or late in the season tends to attract better prices and she is always on the lookout for opportunities to improve the profitability of her small farm. She has already planted 300 Fuyu persimmons to help diversify her income. This variety has the curiously catchy name of Ichikikijiro. She is offered a piece to try and it proves to be sweet and crisp like an apple, completely different to the old astringent variety which used to be found as a decorative tree in many Australian backyards.

  Pleased with the discovery, Daljit heads back to her stall. The market hasn’t officially started trading but her first customer has appeared. It’s Phil from the dried fruit stand. He loves her samosas and usually has one for breakfast whenever she is there. Daljit tells him they are not quite hot enough yet, but he has already picked up his cup of locally roasted coffee and he’s ready now.

  By eight o’clock shoppers are starting to fill the hall with the sound of friendly greetings, chatter and muted laughter. A group of friends who meet up at the market every Saturday has settled at a large table just in front of Daljit’s stall to have breakfast together. A few of them opt for her spinach rolls after they discover there are problems in the kitchen. None of the power points are working and the staff can’t open the till to give people change.

  Everything is working again by the time someone sits down at the hall piano and starts to play ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’. In a segue that jumps more than half a century, the old-fashioned sing-along classic is swiftly followed by John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. No-one seems to notice the odd juxtaposition, or the music either, as the player finishes up without applause, but it turns out she is not the main act. Live music is a regular feature of the market and today the pianist is there to accompany a small choir. There are smiles when they begin their set with the timeless French song about a sleepy monk. The choir has modified the words appropriately, to begin, ‘Farmers market, farmers market; here we are, here we are . . .’

  Generations of Australian children have grown up learning to sing ‘Frère Jacques’, but Daljit Sanghera was not among them. Her childhood unfolded in a very different place. Daljit was born in 1961 in the small regional city of Nakodar, on the vast alluvial plains of the Punjab, in the far north of India. Set between two rivers in the central north of the state, the town lies at the heart of an area known for its agriculture which takes advantage of rich soils and irrigation to grow crops like wheat, corn, cotton, sugar cane and chickpeas.

  Even though they lived in the town, her family were farmers. Her father, Bawa Singh Purewal, and his three brothers shared thirty-two hectares of land not far beyond the outskirts of Nakodar. Tiny by Australian standards, it was considerably more than the usual two hectares or so that most farmers in the region relied on to make a living.

  The land was first taken up by Daljit’s grandfather, who was forced to move to the area after India gained independence from Britain in 1947. With independence came partition, a process that saw the province of Punjab divided along religious lines. The eastern section, where the majority of the population was either Hindu or Sikh, remained part of India. The western side of the Punjab, which was predominantly Muslim, became part of the new nation of Pakistan.

  Tens of thousands died in the civil unrest that erupted between Hindus and Muslims in the period leading up to independence and negotiations to determine where the final boundaries between India and Pakistan would be drawn. In the extraordinary chaos that followed, up to 15 million people were uprooted from their homes, as Sikhs and Hindus who found themselves on the Pakistani side of the border fled to India, and Muslims in eastern Punjab fled to Pakistan.

  Before partition, Daljit’s grandfather and his four sons had cleared and worked a farm in the west, determined to work hard and improve the prospects for their family. But they were Sikhs so after independence they joined the hundreds of thousands of displaced farmers who walked away from their properties and were allocated replacement land by the Indian government. In an attempt to make the allocations as equitable as possible, a complicated process was set up to take into account not just the area of land that people left behind, but its productivity. Four acres (1.6 hectares) of dry unirrigated land was deemed to be equal to one acre of fertile, irrigated country. With some 500,000 claims for land lodged within a single month and less land to go around than had been left behind, it took a team of almost 7000 civil servants to sort things out.

  The Purewals ended up with thirty-two hectares on the outskirts of Nakodar where the four boys and their father worked together to grow rice, corn and wheat and run a few cattle. When Daljit was a child, they still relied on horses and buffalo instead of tractors to pull ploughs and tow carts. ‘When my father was young it was very hard work,’ she says. ‘All by hand. I didn’t see but my dad is telling me. When I was growing up, Dad got tractors and machines.’

  The entire family set up home in the town, sharing a single house, even as the four sons married and began their own families. Each brother and his wife and children occupied a couple of bedrooms, with a separate outside cooking area where meals were prepared. So Daljit grew up in a typical extended family, with aunties close by to help keep an eye on her and plenty of cousins to play with after school. ‘All people lived like that, you wouldn’t find any different,’ Daljit says. ‘It was a good way to live.’

  Apart from her p
arents, Daljit shared her part of the house with an older sister, Narinder, and two younger sisters, Jaswinder and Rajwinder. She has an older brother, Kulwinder, who went to live in Germany when he was eighteen. There was a younger brother, too, but he died during infancy.

  Most days she saw little of her father, who was usually away working on the farm and would often stay overnight even though it was only a short walk out of town. Although she saw very little of him during her early years, she says he was kind. Daljit laughs recalling that he had trouble remembering the long formal names of all his children, preferring to call them by affectionate nicknames. Hers was Bubbly.

  More particularly, he treated her and her sisters just the same as their brother, which was very unusual in a culture that prizes boys much more highly. Sons were the favoured children who would inherit all of their parents’ property and look after them in their old age. Even though India was being led by its first female prime minister, Indira Gandhi, when Daljit was only five, women in her community were expected to focus on cooking and raising children.

  Daljit’s mother, Mohinder, never worked on the farm, and certainly did not play any role in making decisions about how it was run. However, each morning she would walk out with breakfast for her husband and collect milk produced by the family’s small herd of two or three cows. She would return to the farm again with lunch and dinner. The men might make themselves tea when the women were not there but otherwise they would never think of preparing their own food. ‘They wouldn’t even get a drink of water by themselves,’ says Daljit. ‘But we are used to it,’ she adds matter-of-factly, explaining that for women like her mother, living in rural India, it was very much accepted practice then. ‘It’s the normal thing,’ she says.