City Girl, Country Girl

by Liz Harfull

  She also found solace sitting outside and taking in the landscape, and the tall trees growing around the waterhole. ‘It made me feel there was something bigger, that there was a God,’ she says. Having the other children to care for helped to ground her enormously, too. She and John had planned on having six children, but Paul’s death reminded them of the richness that children brought to their lives, so they stopped counting and welcomed four more.

  Bridget, Jonathon, Gerard and Nicholas were born after they moved to Bunginderry. The house was only small given the size of their growing brood, but there was a large, well-equipped shearers’ quarters close by. With no school in easy driving range, Wendy engaged a governess to help teach the older children for the first two years with support from School of the Air, but after that she took the task on herself, encouraged by her mother-in-law. ‘She taught her own children and she was confident that if she could do it, I could do it,’ Wendy says.

  Meanwhile, there was the house and the garden to look after. Keeping the garden alive in hot weather was always a challenge, and so was the endless amount of cooking required to feed her voracious sons. She tried hiring someone to help with the house but the first two employees didn’t last long, so Wendy found a way to manage. ‘I’d do the housework at night and then I could wake up in the morning and everything was done,’ she says. On more than a few occasions she worked until one o’clock in the morning. ‘Then I would have a bath in that dirty water, and do a cryptic crossword when everyone else was asleep.’

  When the Tullys bought Bunginderry, the station covered about 22,260 hectares. As time passed and they were rewarded with a few good seasons, they scrimped and saved to buy more land from adjoining holdings, gradually expanding the property to 74,000 hectares. One of the blocks John purchased was part of Pinkilla. Its rambling old homestead became Annabel and Stephen’s first home after they married at the beginning of a wet, green January in 1999.

  Back in the early 1880s, Pinkilla belonged to an English aristocrat turned drover. Lord Henry Phipps was a son of the third governor of Queensland, the Marquess of Normanby. He sold the place in 1883 and refocused his attentions on a property at Beaudesert just south of Brisbane, but for much of its history since 1904 it has been in Tully hands.

  When Annabel and Stephen moved there during what turned out to be a lush, wet summer, the homestead had been empty for some time. It was surrounded by an enormous number of disused outbuildings, all once an essential part of running a large property that employed as many as fifty people. Men’s quarters, storehouses, slaughter yards, a pigsty and chook runs all stood empty, but with many of the old fittings like gun racks and flour bins still in place. It was like living in a ghost town. Out in the middle of a clay pan, there was even a concrete cricket pitch where Quilpie used to compete against Pinkilla every year, when the station had enough employees to field its own team.

  The newlyweds set to work renovating the house and garden, starting at one end of the old timber homestead and working their way to the other. During the first year, their energies were restricted to weekends because Annabel had a full-time job at the one-teacher school at Eromanga. She would leave Pinkilla at seven o’clock on a Monday morning, and then come home on Friday night. The routine made it difficult to settle into her new life so after a year she turned to casual relief teaching instead.

  Extremely happy in Stephen’s company, Annabel loved going out on the property to work alongside her husband whenever she could, and she had no trouble coping with the basics of living at Pinkilla. By comparison with generations of women before her, the amenities were more than adequate. The house was connected to mains power, there was plenty of water and even a dial-up internet connection. It was a reasonably easy run into Quilpie on a good dirt road when she needed to travel into town, and mail was delivered twice a week. Once a week she faxed a grocery list to the supermarket in Quilpie and the supplies would come out on the mail run.

  ‘I never really felt physically isolated. It was more about my sense of self. The hardest thing was making friends, stepping into someone else’s world where I didn’t have any go-to’s or back-ups. Family and friends were a long way away, and all of my new friends were Stephen’s friends. So Annabel Pettigrew may as well have been wiped off the planet. I was Annabel Tully, Stephen’s wife. No-one really knew me. I had no identity,’ she says.

  She remembers asking Stephen when she first moved to Pinkilla how he made friends out here, but it was a question he couldn’t answer. He was living in the place where he grew up and his friends were people he had known most of his life. The situation was made easier for Annabel when Stephen’s brother Gerard returned to the district with his wife, Jody, and moved onto the property next door. ‘Gerard and Jody are beautiful. I really love having her next door, but their house is still an hour and twenty minutes away and I might only see her once a month.’

  Getting involved in the Quilpie and District Show Society helped Annabel begin to feel like she was part of the local community. As a child, she had entered competitions in the Brookfield Show for everything from art and cookery to chooks. While she was working at Dirranbandi, someone even convinced her to sign up for the Miss Showgirl competition, still a popular part of country shows in Queensland. ‘I don’t know why I did it, actually. I was such a naughty party girl,’ she says. During the interview process that every entrant must undergo, they asked her how she spent her weekends. ‘I go to B&S’s and the pub,’ she told them. ‘They would have just looked at me and gone pap-pow!’ she says, imitating the game-show buzzer noise that indicates failure.

  More mature and a lot wiser, she volunteered as a steward for the Quilpie Show and ended up serving as the show society secretary for five years. The experience gave her the opportunity to meet people and become more comfortable talking with older generations. ‘I just didn’t know how to do that,’ she admits. ‘Both sets of my grandparents were dead, and I didn’t know how to talk to older men, or even older women, really. My dad is not a conversationalist and I don’t have any uncles so I found it quite difficult. Men of the land just talk shop, and I used to be terrified of them, so the show society was really good for me. Everybody comes to the show, from babies in prams to grandparents.’

  Another major adjustment after she stopped teaching was going from earning a regular, healthy salary of her own to being financially dependent on Stephen, who was being paid a wage by his parents as well as doing contract work on other properties in the area. ‘It is very hard to put your trust completely in another person to provide money for you, when you have been so incredibly independent,’ she says. ‘Back in those days I wasn’t involved in the decision-making or anything like that on the property, which I didn’t mind at all, but I found it difficult to go from earning a good wage as a school principal to all of a sudden not making any decisions about our financial situation.’

  Annabel and Stephen soon had an awful lot more to worry about. In 2001, their first child, Lachlan, was born. A few weeks before he was due, Annabel travelled to Brisbane so she could be close to her parents and expert medical care. The baby was finally delivered by caesarean section, after a long labour. Then eighteen months later their second child, Sophia, arrived in much more dramatic circumstances.

  About a week before her baby was due, Annabel went to see a lactation specialist. She’d experienced some difficulties breastfeeding Lachlan, and wanted to consult an expert to avoid a similar experience with her next child. She could feel a lump in one breast, about the size of a grape, and wondered if it might be a blocked milk duct. After examining her, the specialist was so concerned that she organised for Annabel to go and see a doctor immediately. ‘That was on a Friday morning. By Tuesday I’d had the baby and been in for surgery.’

  The lump turned out to be breast cancer. The breast surgeon wanted to perform a lumpectomy as a matter of urgency to remove the tumour, and then start chemotherapy, so Sophia was delivered by caesarean section slightly ahead of schedule.
There was no time to take in the diagnosis properly, or to have a natural birth with her second child as she had planned. ‘We just followed instructions and trusted the doctors,’ says Annabel.

  The first night after Sophia came into the world, Stephen stayed with them both at the hospital, and then he took charge, with Annabel’s mother, Ruth, as back-up. Between the caesarean and the lumpectomy, Annabel could not get out of bed, let alone care for a baby. ‘Essentially, Stephen looked after Sophia from day dot. He did a brilliant job,’ she says.

  After her surgery, Annabel went back to Pinkilla to recuperate. Once her wounds healed, she returned to Brisbane every three weeks for chemotherapy, over a period of about four months. ‘I would leave my babies and my husband behind and fly down on a Tuesday and then back on Thursday. Then I’d be in bed for a week, then I’d be okay for a week, and then I’d go back again. It turns out that I have a really low pain threshold. I could handle the nausea, but I was shocking with the pain,’ she says. Throughout this period Stephen ran the house and looked after her, and Wendy helped with the children, although Annabel struggles to remember the details. ‘Isn’t it funny? Obviously I knew that they were alright. I was just so sick, I couldn’t look after anyone.’

  Ali Lamond remembers being very frightened for her friend when she came to stay on the Sunshine Coast for a few days during her treatment. Ali recalls: ‘Her parents had the flu so I went down and collected her, and I brought her home. I was scared that she seemed so vulnerable and so rundown. She sat on the couch and I held her hand, and she took her wig off. That was the weekend that I wondered whether she was going to make it.’

  There was no history of breast cancer in her family but Annabel was only twenty-nine and her doctors wanted to do everything possible to make sure the cancer did not return or spread to other parts of her body. ‘We are going for a cure here. We are going to jam it as hard and as fast as we can,’ they told her. After chemotherapy, they recommended radiation therapy. That meant staying in Brisbane for six weeks and going to the hospital every day so her breast could be treated with targeted exposure to radiation. ‘I’ve still got this big lump with scar tissue from the radium, and it’s still sore to touch. It’s incredible the way it screws your skin, but there is no way anything could grow back in there,’ Annabel says.

  Because she was going to be away for such a long period, Annabel took the children with her and Ruth helped look after them. ‘We stayed down on the coast near Mum and Dad, and Mum would come over at the ugly hour [five o’clock in the afternoon], when the kids were tired, cranky and hungry. Then I would go and do my bit for the next couple of hours. Sophia didn’t bat an eyelid because she was little and her basic needs were being cared for, but it really threw Lachlan. He was at that stage between one and three when separation anxiety is at its peak, and it took him until he was about eight to have any sort of confidence. He would freak whenever I left. While I didn’t put it on myself, the guilt is big-time as a mother. You are trying to do your darnedest and you can see it unfolding in front of you, but I didn’t know what was going on at the time. I was just trying to keep my head above water. I couldn’t do it all. It wasn’t until later when I was feeling better and back on track with being a mum that I could see we had some catching up to do.’

  The next step in Annabel’s treatment was hormone therapy. The aim was to switch off her pituitary gland so that it stopped producing oestrogen. The doctors believed it was contributing to the growth of her cancer, because what are known as hormone receptors were found on her cancer cells. Inhibiting the amount of oestrogen her body was producing would reduce the risk of the cancer returning. Another more drastic option was to remove her ovaries because they produce most of the oestrogen in a young woman’s body. Annabel did not want to pursue that alternative because she was only twenty-nine and planning to have more children.

  On the plus side, she didn’t have to go to Brisbane for the hormone therapy. It involved needles that could be given by nursing staff at the Quilpie hospital. On the negative side, the needles were huge, and she had to have them in her belly once a month for two years. Even worse, they triggered menopause. Annabel was only thirty, and the symptoms were full blown. ‘It was pretty foul, but when you have a choice between that and death, you don’t really have a choice, do you?’

  It was at this point that Annabel rediscovered her creative side, and the healing power of art. She started playing with paint and joined the Quilpie Cultural Society, set up in 1972 to develop the arts, and provide activities and a meeting place for isolated women. The society has been extraordinarily successful, with the town today boasting a vibrant arts culture. ‘The girls took me under their wing and encouraged me to be part of their group, which has been really special.’

  Annabel began by signing up for some of the society’s regular tutorials and designating two days a week to painting. Deciding that she wanted to become a professional artist, after experimenting for a couple of years she committed to her first solo exhibition in 2004, at the Quilpie Museum and Visitor Centre Gallery. Titled Nostalgia, it explored the history of the Tully family and their connection to the land, drawing inspiration from old family photos and the landscape around her. ‘It was my way of finding the link between my former life and my new life,’ she says.

  The exhibition was closely followed by winning Queensland’s Brian Tucker Award for regional and emerging artists, but her breakthrough moment came the same year when she took part in a ‘Living the Landscape’ workshop led by Mandy Martin. Then in 2007, Annabel was selected to join Martin in an episode of Painting Australia, an ABC television series in which a different professional artist each week challenged three emerging artists to complete a work interpreting the landscape in two days. Martin took Annabel and two other artists out into the Simpson Desert. ‘It was a pretty cool experience. She just took me under her wing.’

  A professional artist living in New South Wales, Martin has an international reputation for work exploring the Australian landscape and natural environment. She has exhibited in more than a hundred solo exhibitions both in Australia and overseas, and her works are found in many public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Australia and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. ‘She uses found ochres and pigments in her landscapes, and she is just amazing. To me, she ticked all the boxes because I like to paint special places, and we have ochre pits here up in the hills. It all just fell into place then.’

  Landscapes that capture the Channel Country where she lives, using paints made from ochres gathered on the station, have been Annabel’s focus ever since. ‘For the past ten years that’s what I’ve done. I haven’t painted anything else since, and I never get sick of it,’ she says. Annabel quickly found her audience, too, with her work selling strongly at solo and group exhibitions across Queensland, from Brisbane to Longreach. She even established her own gallery at Pinkilla, called Grass Castles. The name was inspired by the famous Patsy Durack quote: ‘“Cattle kings” ye call us, then we are kings in grass castles that may be blown away upon a puff of wind.’ Set up in one of the old worker’s cottages, the gallery drew steady traffic because the entrance to the station was off a well-travelled road that connects outback tourists to Longreach and Birdsville, and they only had to travel seven kilometres on a decent gravel track to reach it.

  The gallery closed in 2006, when Stephen’s parents retired and moved to the farm where Wendy grew up, just out of Kingaroy. Stephen and Annabel leased Bunginderry from them and decided to move in. ‘Pinkilla was a bit closer to town and a great place to live, but Stephen essentially drove away to work every morning, and if you are living in the middle of nowhere you want to be together, and have your kids around you,’ Annabel says.

  Bunginderry homestead was too far off the road, on a track with too many difficult channel crossings, for Annabel to set up another gallery. Instead, she came up with an even better idea, inspired by the Brushmen of the Bush, a group of artists including Pro Ha
rt and Jack Absalom that gathered regularly at Broken Hill, and the Bundanon artist-in-residence program run at Arthur Boyd’s former home on the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales.

  The concept involved running artists’ camps where people could retreat from the distractions of daily life for a week or two, and work side by side with some guidance and encouragement from specialised tutors. The camps took in up to ten participants at a time, accommodating them in the workers’ quarters. Every day they were ferried to different locations on the station, giving them the chance to focus completely on developing their skills while capturing some extraordinary landscapes and connecting to the bush and station life in a much deeper way than is possible for passing tourists. In the evenings they would share a meal with the Tullys and sit around together talking.

  ‘It not only ticked the creative box for me, but Stephen and I love sharing this place with others, so they have an understanding of what life in the bush is really like. We can only do it in a small way, but we are really passionate about getting positive messages back to the city. We wanted to get people in here and staying, not just pulling off the side of the road, camping for the night and then keeping on going like many people do. There were no frills, but they got to live with our staff and be one of us,’ Annabel says. ‘And I loved being able to go to a place on the station, and there would be ten different people and you would all be looking at the same thing, but there would be ten completely different paintings or photographs at the end of it. Seeing your homeland through someone else’s eyes was cool.’