by Liz Harfull
‘Well, just come home,’ her mother told her.
‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that. That would be giving up.’
To help lift her daughter’s spirits, Ruth took to sending care packages. Annabel was often bemused by the contents and her mother’s perception of what might be useful. ‘Mum would send a Liberty blouse and toilet paper,’ she says, smiling ruefully at the memory.
As governess, it was Annabel’s job to take the boys through their lessons, which were set by a distance education program for remote families, run out of Charleville. Known as the School of the Air until 1990, it involved sessions in which Beau and Toby could communicate with fellow students and qualified teachers via two-way HF radio. Then, once a year, they would travel into Charleville for a special week of sports activities, when they would get to meet and play with their virtual classmates.
The Lamonds’ schoolroom was on the homestead verandah. Annabel and her two oldest charges spent weekday mornings and early afternoons there, while Harley more often than not sat outside and stirred up ants’ nests. Her biggest challenge was keeping Beau and Toby in the schoolroom and focused on their lessons. On one notorious occasion, she discovered them playing on the roof. ‘They were free spirits,’ Ali admits, but she thought Annabel coped well, most likely because she could draw on her experience of growing up with two brothers. ‘She took to it like she takes to life—full on and no looking back. Everyone loved her.’
Once lessons were over, Annabel and the children were free to join in whatever was happening out on the property. ‘At lunchtime I’d always say to Mac, “Right, what are you doing after school? Can I come?” And that’s how I first learnt to do sheep work,’ she says. It also gave her some fabulous tales to share with friends when she went back east during the school holidays. ‘I probably had the best of both worlds because I was doing exciting things and everyone else was at university. I would come back with all these crazy stories about being stalked by emus and chased by bloody bulls which they thought were pretty amazing.’
At that time the Lamonds did not employ any stationhands. Ali had grown up on Boobara station, on the Paroo River, north-west of Cunnamulla, and she played an active role helping Mac to run the property. Towards the end of the year Annabel spent with them, sheep and wool prices crashed, so Ali was often left to run the place while Mac was in Brisbane where he took on work as a fencing contractor. Ali was also working part-time at the Dirranbandi hospital as a nurse. A governess who was willing to do more than regular teaching duties was very welcome. ‘Annabel liked to get her hands dirty, and nothing fazed her, although it was a bit of a lonely time because there wasn’t a lot of other young people around,’ says Ali.
Annabel remembers one young man, though. A tall, skinny bloke who worked on the property next door, he would take her into town for a drink at the pub. One night he settled into a session with some mates, and Annabel decided to wait for him outside. Spotting his swag in the back of his ute, she rolled it open and lay down. Sometime later he emerged from the pub, ‘full as a tick’, and sped off. ‘I’m rolling around in the back, thinking “I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die”, and then he pulled off the road and tried to jump in. I’m saying, “No, no, no,” and he promptly passes out, so I drove home. Didn’t I learn that lesson,’ she reflects, with a hearty laugh. ‘You don’t roll someone else’s swag open and not expect to get hit on!’
While there may not have been many people her own age in easy range, Annabel didn’t mind. She loved the Lamonds, who were naturally social people and made her feel very welcome. ‘Ali is this little pocket rocket and her husband, Mac, was this huge burly bloke,’ Annabel says, imitating his loud, snorting laugh with obvious affection. ‘They were an awesome team, really good for each other, and they were hard working, salt-of-the-earth people who knew how to have fun.’
The Lamonds eventually moved to the Sunshine Coast, where Mac died in 2013, but Ali remains one of Annabel’s closest friends. ‘She is my second mum. My own mum is beautiful and fantastic, but Ali is a mum for me in this life. She’s the one that taught me when you have your back against the wall, it’s important to have the home sorted. When the boys are busted, just make sure home is fine, so that when they walk in the door they don’t have anything else to worry about. Keep it smooth,’ Annabel explains. ‘And she is bloody good fun!’
When Annabel left Braemore Park at the end of 1990, she took with her a love of gardening, nurtured by Ali, and a book of handwritten recipes. ‘It was all my favourites that she used to cook. It’s falling apart now but it’s still my bible.’
Before her year at Dirranbandi was up, Annabel knew that she wanted to become a teacher and return to the outback. While she was still at high school, she had spent a fortnight in a city architect’s office on work experience. She thought being an architect would satisfy her creative side, but time with the Lamonds reinforced her hankering for adventure and wide open spaces. ‘The idea of sitting in a box and designing other boxes made me want to puke,’ she says, with typical candour.
Back in Brisbane, Annabel devoted three years to studying to become a primary school and physical education teacher, only to find on graduating that there were no teaching jobs available in her beloved south-west. So she signed up to be the first and only carer in a new program funded by the Country Women’s Association. ‘On Fridays I would rock in to see Madge from the CWA, in her little house in Charleville. I would have a cup of tea in bone china, and a chat, which I really loved, and she would give me a cheque.’
The role involved Annabel providing respite support for isolated families with preschool aged children. She was placed with families in need by Frontier Services. A national charity run by the Uniting Church to support families in remote areas, it grew out of the extraordinary work by Royal Flying Doctor Service pioneer Reverend John Flynn and the Australian Inland Mission. The childcare program that Annabel helped kick off was later expanded to become the Remote Family Care Service. ‘So it was pretty special to be at the beginnings of all of that,’ says Annabel.
Newly graduated, and from a caring and supportive family, Annabel often found the work very confronting. ‘I went out to some of the most incredible family situations for a little girl from the city. I’d had one year at Dirranbandi, and then a lovely time during university, coming back out for every single holiday I possibly could, but that was my total experience,’ she says.
Annabel still gets goosebumps, of the unpleasant kind, when she thinks about one situation in particular. She was sent for two weeks to provide an extra pair of hands for a couple on a station, with a six-year-old child doing preschool by School of the Air. Annabel says that every now and then the woman would ‘blank out’ and head towards a river about five kilometres from the house, in an apparent attempt to drown herself. ‘She was a big woman, and I had to get behind her and stop her from going in the water. Then she snapped out of it and just started bawling. There I was consoling this poor embarrassed, terrified woman.’
Annabel was horrified when she discovered what might have led to the woman’s condition. ‘She told me that she had experienced ongoing domestic violence,’ Annabel says. ‘I didn’t tell Mum and Dad about it, because Mum would have freaked out and never let me go back, but I knew I was doing good things. That child was taught every single day I was there, and I cooked good meals for them at night. I stayed well clear of the husband and I was never scared when I was there. He was going through a severe stage of remorse about what he had done to this woman he loved, and she was about to go back to hospital.’
It was by far the most confronting situation that Annabel found herself in, but she came across several other families where education was not considered at all important, and the children were left to their own devices while both parents worked. ‘It was only six months, but it was probably one of the best things I have done, because it gave me a good grounding in life in remote Australia, and a part of humanity that I hadn’t experienced before.’
After six months, Annabel found work as a supply teacher for a cluster of small schools across south-western Queensland, filling in when teachers were sick or away on leave. Her first permanent appointment was to the tiny state school at Windorah. As the only teacher, she was responsible for all twenty students, who covered every grade from year one to seven. ‘I was twenty-three and very new in my career. I’d had one term’s experience doing no more than a week in each classroom, and here I was. I was pretty sassy to be taking it on,’ she admits. ‘I had a supervising teacher, who helped me out over the phone, and because I had no idea what I was doing I planned everything. Planned, planned, planned. I spent hours and hours doing preparation.’
Her time at Windorah reinforced her love of teaching and working with children. ‘I liked the routine, and the kids were spunky and fun. All different little personalities,’ she says. ‘And I really loved the light bulb moments when you’d explain something one way and they have a blank look, and then you’d try something completely different and all of a sudden, you can see the light bulb go off.’
When she needed a weekend break and a bit more social life, Annabel would drive four and a half hours, pass the gate to Bunginderry, through Quilpie and on to Charleville, where she had made quite a few friends. During one of those long drives, she spotted a couple of mates pulled over on the side of the road. They were on their way to a B&S ball at the Eromanga pub. Annabel should join them, they said.
Eromanga is a tiny dot of a place which claims to be the furthest town from the ocean in Australia. Another 100 kilometres west from Quilpie, it’s fast becoming a major tourist destination despite its size and isolation because of the discovery of dinosaur bones in the area, dating back 95 million years. Built in the mid 1880s, the town’s iconic pub was once a staging post for Cobb and Co. With the rather grand sounding moniker the Royal Hotel, it is a low-set building of white-washed stone, which to Annabel felt like an underground cave inside. A crowd of about 200 packed its bars and verandah for the event, which drew people from surrounding stations and bush communities.
Saturday night passed by in a blur of partying and catching up with friends, and it wasn’t until the Sunday morning that she was introduced to Stephen Tully by one of his distant cousins. They chatted for a while, and then parted company. From that point, their relationship was slow to develop. Annabel only became aware of his interest three years later, when she was living in Charleville and teaching at the School of Distance Education. Stephen would come into town occasionally, and doss down on the floor of the flat she shared with a girl from Quilpie, who he knew well.
Stephen finally made his interest clear after he learnt that Annabel intended to head overseas on a prolonged trip around the world. When she did eventually return to Australia, she did not plan to return to Charleville and he sensed that if he didn’t act before she left town, the opportunity to take things further might be lost forever. ‘All of a sudden I had this fellow standing right next to me that I couldn’t quite kick off. For the next four months, we saw each other every single weekend,’ she says.
It started when his weekend visit coincided with the Charleville show. Annabel was volunteering as a steward and he offered to spend the weekend helping her. ‘He was always very quiet, and then he started to talk to me. That’s when I started to notice him. And then we were walking down the street and he held my hand. And I thought, “Oh my God!” His side of the story is that apparently he had liked me for years but I didn’t know anything about it. Whether he wasn’t ready or I wasn’t ready, whatever it was, I don’t know.’
Their first serious date was the annual Quilpie Cup race meeting weekend, when Stephen kissed her under the blue light out the front of the local police station. He had already told his parents he was pretty serious about the Brookfield girl, but she didn’t know that at the time. A keen amateur pilot who flew his own plane, his father showed up at the race meeting in a leather aviator hat, with faux fur-lined ear-flaps folded up on top. When a friend spotted John in the crowd, she dug Annabel in the ribs and joked, ‘Future father-in-law over there.’ It didn’t scare her off at all.
Nor did her first encounter of the Tullys en masse at Bunginderry. Because of the twenty-year age gap from oldest to youngest, it was reasonably rare for all nine children to be in residence at the same time. The oldest were away at boarding school and university or starting their careers, leaving a bit more space for the others and a lot less work for their mother Wendy. However, Annabel’s first visit to the station coincided with the school holidays and most of the family was home. Big, noisy, and dominated by active and competitive males with large appetites, they were a completely different kettle of fish to the quiet and cruisy Pettigrews.
‘I was helping Wendy with dinner, and she used to put all the pots out and you would come in and serve yourself. Trying to be polite, I just sat back nicely and waited. By the time I got there, there wasn’t a stitch left and I looked over and here are Stephen and his siblings, head down, wolfing into it,’ Annabel describes with great energy. ‘I’ve told this story to the Tullys and they do not get that this isn’t normal,’ she adds. ‘It was pretty overwhelming but I loved it. And you know what? The second night I didn’t wait. I was in there, too.’
Some months later, Annabel went ahead with her overseas trip, tearful as her plane flew out of the Brisbane airport. By then she and Stephen were in love and not keen on a long separation. After she spent four months travelling by herself in Africa and Europe, they met up in London. Stephen brought a ring with him, planning to propose when they reached Venice. He figured it was one of the world’s most romantic cities and the perfect location, but when it came down to it, he couldn’t wait. After two weeks, Stephen popped the question while they were in Ireland, in the market town of Carrickmacross. It was probably just as well, because he wasn’t all that taken with Venice when they got there. ‘It’s a dirty, stinking sewer of a place. Thank God I didn’t wait,’ he told his highly amused fiancée.
After Stephen flew back to Australia, Annabel travelled on to North America. Her plan was to spend a month in Canada, and then three more months in the United States before flying home. ‘But I missed him. I got all pathetic and decided to come home early,’ she confesses.
The series of events that happened next served as warnings to Annabel both of the disruptive influence nature often generates in Queensland’s south-west, and the practical priorities that can overtake romance when it comes to life on the land. Planning to surprise Stephen with what she thought would be a grand romantic gesture, Annabel changed her bookings without telling him and flew home two months early. Realising that she couldn’t just rock up at the station unannounced, given that he lived there with his parents, she rang Wendy and asked for permission to come and stay. Annabel swore her future mother-in-law to absolute secrecy. ‘Usually she is a very good matriarch of the family and keeps everyone in the know, but she didn’t even tell John,’ says Annabel, clearly impressed. Meanwhile, she worked her way across Canada, lying through her teeth every time she and Stephen spoke on the phone.
After landing in Brisbane, Annabel spent a few brief moments with her parents and then headed west. She got as far as Miles on the Darling Downs, only to be caught up in a long line-up of cars and trucks. Floodwaters were rising over the Warrego Highway and the police had set up a checkpoint. ‘Right. Last chance to get through. We’re shutting the road,’ an officer warned.
‘Bloody hell,’ thought Annabel, who hadn’t checked the weather conditions in her excitement about seeing Stephen again. After all the organising, the secrecy and hours of travelling, she was not going to let a flood stop her. ‘I was in love, heading west, and I couldn’t wait,’ she says. It was clear her little car would never make it, but there was a solution. Taking off her shoes, she hitched up her skirt, waded towards one of the trucks and knocked on the door.
‘Where are you headed?’ she asked the surprised driver.
‘West,’
he replied, looking down at her.
‘Can I come with you?’
‘Yep. Sure.’
So Annabel quickly parked her car, grabbed her backpack and climbed aboard. The truck took her as far as Morven, where they parted ways because it was swinging north. A bus was leaving soon for Charleville, but she had run out of options to complete the rest of her journey. It was about lunchtime so she rang Bunginderry, hoping someone would be inside. A surprised John answered the phone.
‘Do you think you could come and pick me up in your plane?’ Annabel asked him, still hoping that she could keep her impending arrival secret from Stephen.
‘Well, I could, but we’re in the middle of a cattle muster,’ John told her, adding that Stephen might think it odd if he flew off without any explanation during such a major task in the life of the station.
‘Alright, put him on,’ Annabel sighed, realising that she had no choice.
‘Hi, I’m here,’ she told Stephen, breathless with excitement. ‘I’ll be in Charleville in an hour. Can you come and get me?’
There was a long pause. ‘I’ve got cattle in the yards,’ he said.
Annabel was astounded and more than a little hurt. ‘You can stick your fucking cows. I’ve just travelled the whole wide world to see you,’ she yelled.
‘That was my first lesson about life on the land,’ she says now, smiling at her own naivety. ‘If you have mustered for three days, you do not let the cattle out of the yard for anyone, not even your loved one who has travelled around the world to be with you!’