by Liz Harfull
Her faith has certainly given her great strength during the past fourteen years. ‘I think God help me a lot. It must be his help, otherwise there is no way I can do this. On my own, I won’t make it that far but I’m still here,’ she says.
After catching up with a few friends who are very pleased to see her, Daljit heads back to the farm. It’s Saturday afternoon and that means it’s her turn to start the irrigation pump. Despite the warm weather, she changes into a baggy, long-sleeved checked shirt, reminiscent of the flannelette shirts favoured by many farmers long before hipsters made them fashionable. Paired with tracksuit pants and work boots, she looks very different to the traditional Punjabi woman that walked into the temple at Glossop a few hours earlier.
But this version of Daljit is just as real. It is the Daljit that has emerged from years of hard work and struggle to rebuild her life—a confident, self-reliant woman who faces problems head on and is proud of her achievements. Before her husband died, she’d led a generally happy life and could not really understand what people meant when they talked about being depressed. ‘Days with my parents, no problem. Get married, no problem. Come here and start work, no problem. I miss that life. It was easy. Just stay home and spend the money, not make the money,’ she says.
‘The problems come after he passed away. That was a life change. When people say they don’t feel happy, they feel sad, then I know all that. Before I didn’t know. Then I feel how sometimes the days come and you can do a lot of work, and sometimes the days come and you don’t feel like doing anything. I didn’t get the depression but sometimes I worry about things. It was very hard time, but it’s gone,’ she adds softly.
Daljit says no matter how tough it got, she never considered giving up. ‘Giving up was no option,’ she says emphatically. She tried not to dwell on what had passed and instead focused on the future. In the process she has not only survived some critical times for the fruit-growing industry in the Riverland but she has improved and expanded her landholdings, buying part of the orchard next door and saving enough money to purchase a unit in Adelaide. Out in the orchard, she proudly points out the orange trees she grafted over to winter Navels and mandarins after Paul died, the lemon trees she planted three years ago and her new patch of persimmons.
Nurturing the orchard, she has also nurtured her own independence. In the beginning she missed not having family close by who could take over the farm, and guide the decisions she made for herself and her children. ‘Now I’m really glad that we are independent. We can go anywhere. We are not dependent on anyone,’ she says.
Even though it is not the life she would have chosen for her daughter, Mohinder is very proud of her achievements, which means a great deal to Daljit. The two women are exceptionally close. Daljit phones her every morning, for as long as an hour. On Sundays she calls her sisters, and she frequently uses Skype so they can see each other and talk at the same time. A day hardly goes by without speaking to her daughters, too. Looking back on her life so far, Daljit says family remains the single most important thing to her. ‘That’s what keeps me going,’ she says.
19
CREATIVE COWBOYS
It starts with a dot, or maybe a dash, or even an arrow. Then before you know it there are flowing waves of vines and flowers, swirls and circles filling every corner. Forget the craze for adult colouring books sweeping the world, in the Quilpie Shire Hall supper room people are creating their own images to colour. In just a few hours, sixteen would-be artists have set aside their adult inhibitions and reconnected to their childhood selves, playing with marker pens and crayons and pots of paint.
It may seem like a frivolous way to spend a day, but the gathering has a very serious purpose. Quilpie lies at the heart of a community in the far south-western corner of Queensland that is dealing with what is being described as the worst drought in the state’s history—a formidable benchmark for a place with a long record of extreme weather events. By September 2015 more than 80 per cent of Queensland was drought declared, and heading into at least their fourth year of doing it tough.
The ripple effects are far reaching. They spread across every sector, like the fissures that crack open dry mud at the bottom of empty dams and waterholes. Graziers who have been part of the landscape for generations have been forced to sell up, businesses have closed, marriages have crumbled, and lives have been sacrificed to the black dogs of depression and despair.
Annabel Tully is very conscious of the unrelenting pressures that people are facing and the toll they are taking. She knows from personal experience the debilitating effect of serious illness and deep depression. As a mother of five, she understands, too, the overwhelming urge to always put those you love first. So she is here today with a message, clothed in colour and curlicues: ‘It is really critical that we look after ourselves, so we are well enough to look after others,’ she says.
Settling into the familiar role of teacher, Annabel compares the situation to the safety messages delivered before a plane takes off. ‘They tell you that if you have a child seated next to you, in an emergency you need to secure your own oxygen mask before your secure your child’s. That always blew me away. As a mother, it made me feel sick in the stomach to think that I would look after myself before them, but airlines don’t spend millions of dollars on in-flight training for nothing.’
There are nods around the room. People start to lean forward, listening intently, as Annabel shares her own story and the experiences that led to her running workshops that encourage people to explore their creative sides. She has found solace and satisfaction in discovering her inner artist, and she believes strongly in art as a form of therapy to improve mental health and well-being. The concept was central to a project she proposed as a finalist in the Queensland Rural Women’s Awards in 2012. She intended to use the funding that came with the award to set up ‘Creative Cowboys’, a program offering sessions where people could leave their stresses behind them for an hour or two, and rejuvenate their spirits. As far as she knows, it was the first time a project linking mental health and art had been proposed in the agricultural sector.
Annabel didn’t win but she had so much faith in the idea that she decided to run some workshops anyway. She used her own money to get some training in public speaking, and to develop a promotional poster featuring stick figures. The idea was to emphasise that people didn’t need to have any recognisable skills or experience at drawing to sign up. It was all about making time to relax and have some fun.
She travelled to small communities around western Queensland, and ran sessions at a gathering organised by the Queensland Rural Regional and Remote Women’s Network. Recognising the potential of what Annabel was offering, Anglicare funded some workshops at Longreach where the drought has bitten particularly deep. Today’s session has been organised by the Quilpie branch of the Country Women’s Association, with some support funding from the local shire and a Queensland regional arts program.
The CWA branch has never done anything like this before. Michelle, the branch president, wasn’t too sure what to expect but she felt very strongly that her organisation needed to do something to help the local community. So she rounded up the branch members who have used their celebrated baking skills to sweeten the temptation with a morning tea of homemade scones, cake and sausage rolls. The offering has been laid out on trestle tables set beneath a discreet plaque commemorating the supper room’s official opening by colourful National Party politician Wally Rae, a former jackaroo and World War II bomber pilot who was knighted later in life despite his reputation as a bit of a larrikin.
Fierce morning light floods the space where thousands of cups of tea have washed down thousands of scones since Wally did the honours about fifty years ago. It glances off the polished hardwood floor and creates a strong backlight for Annabel as she stands in the centre of the room, a confident figure in a dark blue dress. The workshop participants face her from behind long tables set out in a large u-shape. In front of them are s
mall sheets of white paper and black markers. Basic tools, but Annabel wants to keep it simple while she coaxes people to explore the creative and intuitive parts of their brains.
She starts the session by reading Peter Reynolds’s book The Dot, about a little girl name Vashti who is convinced that she cannot draw until one day an inspired teacher asks her to make a mark on a piece of paper. The reluctant Vashti draws a dot. Then the teacher asks her to sign it. When Vashti returns to class the next week, her dot is framed and hanging on the wall. Imitating the story, Annabel turns to her audience. ‘Make a mark on your paper. Any mark. It doesn’t matter what it is. One dot. One line.’ Everyone obeys. ‘Okay, make another mark.’ They comply again. ‘Now sign it.’ People laugh, but they do it. ‘Hold it up,’ instructs Annabel, raising her hands as if holding a musical triangle. ‘Ting, ting, ting, ting! I would like to officially open the Quilpie Art Gallery.’
It’s a simple but clever ploy that helps people overcome their initial anxiety. Soon everyone is head down, working on more complicated drawings based around repetitive shapes. Annabel urges them on with soft words of encouragement as she walks around the tables, taking time to speak to every participant. A few hours later people are quietly astounded at what they have produced.
Thanking Annabel at the end of the workshop, Michelle confesses that she was a little bit nervous about taking part, but curious too. Despite Annabel living in the area and being well known as an artist, she had never run a Creative Cowboys workshop in Quilpie, and Michelle had not known what to expect. ‘I have thoroughly enjoyed it,’ she says.
An older woman named Pat has tears in her eyes as she speaks up next. It’s clear Annabel’s core message has resonated deeply. ‘We have to be well, so our families will be well. When you get to the lowest ebb in your life, I have found that the only one who can really help you is your mother. You have to look after yourself,’ she says.
Always seeking to do better, Annabel reflects on how the day went as she pulls out of town later that afternoon and heads west towards Bunginderry station, on the eastern edge of what is known as the Channel Country. This vast, ancient landscape takes in a quarter of Queensland’s landmass, but is home to fewer than 1400 people. It’s a place of fearsome heat and shimmering mirages that famously claimed the lives of explorers Burke and Wills, but made the fortunes of legendary cattle kings like Patsy Durack and Sidney Kidman. A place of wide open skies, mulga and Mitchell grass, salt pans and rich red ochres that inspire Annabel and literally seep into her paintings. And it’s the place that became home when she fell in love with a man whose family has been here for five generations and has never been tempted to leave, no matter what life has thrown at them.
Annabel grew up in the semi-rural suburb of Brookfield, on Brisbane’s western outskirts. A dozen or so kilometres from the heart of the city and a world away from the Channel Country, it is leafy and green, with flowing creeks and rolling hills that ring with the sound of bellbirds. Its towering forests of cedar, pine, eucalypts and silky oak were felled to provide timber to build Brisbane in the mid 1800s, clearing the way for dairy farmers and tropical fruit growers who made a living from small acreages of land.
An easy drive from the city, today many of those farms have been divided into even smaller acreages for people wanting to escape true suburbia and maybe keep a horse or two. The area still has the strong sense of community that Annabel remembers growing up, with the locals getting together every Friday night on the verandah of the member’s bar at the showground for a barbecue.
Annabel’s parents, Rodney and Ruth Pettigrew, moved to Brookfield after meeting and marrying in Rockhampton in the late 1960s. Originally from Brisbane and a mechanical engineer by trade, Rod ran the local produce store, which sold horse and stock feed as well as fresh fruit and vegetables. One of Annabel’s fondest memories is going with her father to the Brisbane wholesale produce market at Rocklea to buy the store’s daily supply of green groceries.
A trained nurse from a medical family in Rockhampton, Ruth gave up working after she married and the family came along—first Paul, who was born in Rockhampton in 1969, then Annabel, born in Brisbane in 1972, and eighteen months later, John.
When their daughter was about eight, the Pettigrews relocated from one property to another on the same road so they had more space. Their new home came with eight hectares, an old orchard with a hundred custard apple trees, a large packing shed and a farmhouse that Rod expanded by knocking out a few walls and adding a small extension. ‘It was about as rural as you could get in the city,’ Annabel says.
The ‘rose between two thorns’, as she liked to tease her brothers, Annabel was a bit of a tomboy despite her mother’s best efforts. The three children had horses and bikes to ride, built cubby houses in the old orchard, and there was a large dam where they swam and had mud fights. The biggest draw-card was a flying fox Paul built over the dam. Her brothers loved it and so did their school friends and the neighbours’ children, but Annabel was not allowed to play on it because her mother thought it was too dangerous for a girl. ‘You had to climb about twenty metres up this tree, and then you would fly across about twenty metres of scrub before you came out across the dam wall, to a telegraph pole at the other end. Mum used to let the boys do it, but I was never allowed. It used to drive me mad.’
Annabel was particularly close to her younger brother, especially when Paul left home as soon as he finished high school to join the Royal Australian Air Force. She and John were closer in age, too, and more social by nature, while Paul tended to take after his parents, who were quieter and preferred their own company. ‘Mum was always there for us when we were at home. She is beautiful, and has always prided herself on being fashionable and well spoken, but she is not a social person,’ Annabel explains. ‘We never brought lots of friends home. I had a friend down the road who was one of five children, and we would go over there and there would be kids everywhere, and bikes and horses, and it was really fun, or at least that’s how I saw it.’
Meanwhile, her father preferred to spend his spare time in the packing shed, which he turned into what Annabel thought of as Santa’s workshop. A creative ‘nutty professor’, Rod tinkered with inventions and made the children all sorts of fun things, such as a small motorbike powered by a two-stroke lawnmower engine. He didn’t mind his children playing in the shed, but Annabel knew better than to respond when he called for assistance. ‘If you said yes, you would be holding things for hours, so you didn’t go anywhere near the workshop,’ she says.
For the first five years of her education, Annabel went to a small local state school, and then she moved to St Aidan’s Anglican Girls’ School at nearby Corinda. ‘Education was really important for my parents, and they wanted us to go to private schools,’ she says. Although not necessarily the strongest student academically, Annabel loved high school. ‘I was more enthusiastic than I was clever. I had lots of leadership roles, probably because of that enthusiasm, and I made some great mates, but then when I finished school I needed to get out.’
Her opportunity to escape came when a school friend told Annabel that her aunty was looking for a governess. The job would involve teaching three young boys for a year, on a station about 600 kilometres west of Brisbane. Thinking that it sounded far more exciting than going straight to university, Annabel asked for an interview. Unfortunately, it fell in schoolies week, when she and her friends joined hundreds of other students on the Gold Coast to celebrate the end of their schooling. ‘I had a hoarse voice after a very big party,’ she admits. ‘And I slicked my hair back, put on lots of bright lipstick and a Liberty shirt, trying to compensate and look presentable.’
Despite her initial reservations about employing an eighteen-year-old to look after her rambunctious sons, Ali Lamond was impressed. ‘I’d had a young governess before and it hadn’t been truly successful, but my mother said let’s just meet her,’ Ali recalls. ‘The fact that she was willing to come back from schoolies to meet me says so
mething. She was this lovely girl, open, friendly and out there, and beautifully dressed.’
Duly hired, Annabel packed her bags, hopped on a bus and headed west. Having told all their children they would support them no matter what they chose to do in life, as long as they were happy, her parents tried not to worry. Before she left, her father showed her how to change a tyre and replace a fanbelt, practical skills that might prove immensely useful on isolated outback roads. ‘Mum was a bit sad, but they always encouraged us to be fiercely independent,’ Annabel says.
Ali and Mac Lamond lived at Braemore Park, a 4900-hectare property about forty-five minutes drive from Dirranbandi, south of St George, on mostly dirt roads. Her parents discovered just how treacherous these could be when they bought Annabel a second-hand Subaru station wagon and delivered it. ‘It had rained, and it was heavy, black soil country. They slipped and slid all the way in, and they got stuck in a bore drain so we had to go and rescue them. You can just imagine Mum. “Oh, my God, where is my daughter?” But Mum had always wanted me to marry a rich, good-looking sheep farmer,’ recounts Annabel. ‘I did point out to her that perhaps those three things don’t exist in one sentence!’
While marriage wasn’t on the cards just yet, the next twelve months did change Annabel’s future. She took to teaching and station life like a duck to water, although there were times when the boys tested her to the limit. Beau, then aged ten, and Toby, aged eight, were typical station children, in that they much preferred spending time out on the property than in the school room. Their younger brother, Harley, only five, was not quite old enough to have started his formal education, but Annabel kept an eye on him, too. ‘I had done plenty of babysitting and I knew that I loved being with kids, but it was my first time teaching, and they knew it. I remember crying once to Mum, saying it was all too hard because the boys were playing up,’ Annabel says.