In their enforced long separations—Robina at some far-flung nursing post and Aaron managing the station—they kept talking. The great secret of long-distance romance is that sometimes it strengthens relationships as, with conversation as the only point of contact, you do really learn to communicate. It can be easy to rely on touch and action alone—particularly when you are by nature a doer, a fixer and maker, which is what both Robina and Aaron are. It was in these long conversations that the subject of marriage finally surfaced. Then Robina’s much-loved grandfather became very ill. As was usual at that time, there were many kilometres between them—Aaron at Epenarra and Robina in Alice Springs. Robina rang Aaron to share the news and to say, ‘I really want Pop to know that I’m going to be married.’
‘So after I told Aaron he said, “Just hang on, I’ll ring you back,”’ says Robina. ‘And then he rang Dad straightaway. Dad was visiting Pop, he was at the bedside. Aaron said, “Can I marry her?”
‘Then Aaron rang me back and said, “Do you want to get married?”’
They were longing to see each other, but it was simply not possible. In the end, Robina was to see Aaron’s parents before she saw him.
‘His parents were coming to visit us, and they were arriving in Alice Springs that day. I just hung out with his mum and dad for two days. Then he called up and we put the phone on speaker and he said, “Did Robina tell you yet?” and his mum said, “Tell us what?” She was tickled pink.’
In March 2009 Aaron and Robina were married. Aaron’s face was clean-shaven, perhaps for the last time, and Robina’s hair was long. The photographs show her looking delicate and at peace. Certainty had been slow to emerge for Robina but knowing Aaron is her man feels like an inspiration from God rather than simply a personal conviction, and that’s what she’s taken to church this day. Aaron looks handsome and happy. There’s an elegant country-and-western look to them both. Robina is in embossed cowboy boots and lace. With his natty morning suit Aaron wears a leather belt made by Robina. The wedding rings are both made from gold found by a prospecting friend on and near Epenarra, and celebrate the land on which they met.
Their wedding day had been one of quiet commitment in a small church, wrapped in her family and his. But the months following were full of drama: by August, Robina was pregnant, and Aaron had been kicked by a bull and had to be flown out by the Royal Flying Doctor Service due to a number of broken ribs and the fear that he was bleeding internally.
Aaron healed, then went back to work, and Robina spent her days on a friend’s neighbouring property. Much of the time she basked in the sun at a waterhole reminiscent of the one at which she’d met Aaron, her attention on the son growing inside her.
‘We did it,’ she said to Darcy as she nursed him for the very first time. As she’d hoped and expected of herself, mothering her beautiful little son came easily to her. He was so very like his easy-going, steady-natured, certain-hearted Dad, not at all like Robina herself. Robina felt confident, she felt enough, and out of that her mothering flowed. But that flow seemed to dry up in the months after her second son Tully was born nearly two-and-a-half years later.
‘Something about becoming a mother to two children …’ she says. Somehow, this once more opened the gateway to ‘must’ and ‘should’, of feeling not enough, not good enough, of needing to do a whole galaxy of things that she didn’t believe in, but having to do them anyway and becoming angrier, more bitter, more resentful. Robina found herself raging at the children, frightening them with her sudden descents into hostility, then breaking her heart over the fact that she was hurting the ones she loved most of all.
‘I was teaching my babies terrible things,’ she says. ‘I was a lovely mummy on the surface, but underneath was all this anger. There were words inside me, all this rot and chaos and I didn’t know how to still it. I was really disconnected from my essence and eventually it was out of control. Aaron was walking on eggshells. He never knew what he’d be coming home to.’
She has insights and solutions now, but at the time, and for quite a long while, she simply felt guilty and isolated. The shame and the ugliness of it all made it too difficult for her to share until the day she realised that preserving her secret would only continue to hurt her sons. She needed help. It was at this point she saw a course on the Gold Coast that seemed to have been written just for her. This course aimed to help women start their relationship with themselves and their history afresh, and in being at peace with themselves, from there create truly loving relationships.
Aaron’s family had welcomed her with open arms years before, even in the days when she and Aaron were ‘just friends’. Now Aaron’s mother took a week off from her work to look after the little boys on the Gold Coast so Robina could attend every day, secure in the knowledge that her boys were in loving hands, and could still breastfeed Tully at night.
The course was directed at healing all that might lie beneath Robina’s unhappiness. And it worked. It reconnected Robina with the easiness she had felt in mothering in Darcy’s early years. She came to understand that she had shut down that loving flow and joyful engagement with the world, that welling-up of soul from deep within the landscape of her being, all by herself. The demon she’d glimpsed, the one who had placed on her the heavy burdens of ‘must’ and ‘should’ and ‘prove’ under which she’d faltered and raged, was simply an aspect of Robina herself.
‘For years I dismissed and minimised myself, until I didn’t know what was okay about me and what wasn’t. And, of course, it is all okay.’
For the first time Robina confronted the fact that in believing that she was not ‘okay, enough, sufficient’ as she was, she’d dethroned her true self. She’d placed in charge another aspect, an ignorant and misguided self, who saw threats where there were none—in the unwitting defiance of a small child, for example—and missed the real threat to family wellbeing: Robina’s disconnection from herself.
Robina had arrived at the course almost silent under the weight of her sorrow, hidden beneath her long hair.
‘I knew Aaron liked girls with long hair, so I grew it and I grew a big fringe,’ she says. Robina herself liked her own hair short but she had felt that a good wife should suppress such preferences to make her husband happy. She emerged from the five days of intensive therapy totally made over: a change Aaron seems to have taken in his stride.
‘The course took away the rage and the sadness and the anger. The only thing that was left was my hair, and three women there cut my hair. I realised, even if he does like long hair, he still loves me, long hair or not,’ she says.
Her hair was cut to within millimetres of her scalp but the real makeover occurred deep within, and this Aaron welcomed even more. There’s that old saying, ‘if Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy’, and Robina’s rediscovered joy in life was a gift not just to herself but to Aaron and the two boys.
Robina had been taught as a child: ‘There’s right and wrong, you only do right. It doesn’t matter how you feel, you do it; first with your head and then with your heart.’ These words from generations ago are out of step with today’s knowledge about the risks of teaching children to ignore their feelings. Of course, in some ways we learn to raise children when we are still children ourselves, by watching how our own parents raise us—at a time when perhaps we aren’t able to evaluate how useful a particular parenting practice or belief is. When our own children arrive it is hard not to simply reproduce all that we were taught—not just in what we say, but in our expressions and our actions. This can be positive, but equally it can be negative. Something about the birth of Tully triggered in Robina feelings of being burdened, not coping and not being enough—in thinking about this, Robina discovered that far more people and stories lived in her heart than she had imagined.
‘Aaron had always been okay with me, but I hadn’t been,’ says Robina. She had judged herself too harshly. She would no longer do that. And in accepting herself she found that the dry creek beds of her inne
r landscapes were once more flowing and that she had energy for her children, for Aaron and for everything else that mattered to her.
*
On the day I meet Robina she is making and delivering her Number 45 Curry Paste to sell at markets all over Australia. Robina makes this secret heirloom recipe mostly traditionally … but not quite. Her hair is extremely short and this reveals the delicate bones of her oval face—at the same time she has perched on her distinctive, sculpted nose the largest, owliest pair of spectacles I’ve ever seen. I suspect Robina has the attractive person’s ambivalence about her appearance. Good looks (like good bank accounts) can get in the way of people seeing and coming to know a person. And Robina wants people to know her, to connect to her, particularly women who are like the woman she once was. Having been helped to heal herself, all Robina wants to do is to see other women heal too. She added to this her particular focus on working with mothers of young children, and also her old dream of taking journeys out to the remote places in which some people live and working with them there.
So Robina and Aaron made a decision. They purchased a caravan, hung out a virtual shingle (featuring Aaron’s ability to weld, mend, bodgie, work and handle, and Robina’s emotional renovations for women), enrolled five-year-old Darcy at Alice Springs School of the Air (Tully is still too little for school) and metamorphosed into the most modern of gypsies.
‘I had to be free of all those layers of things that don’t matter,’ she says. ‘And when I experienced this, I realised this was my gig. Nursing is not all my heart, but this is. You can be you at a core level—it’s a real place, and that’s what I want to bring to other women.’
Robina now uses the method that helped her to help other women, particularly those who live in the outback. ‘Those environments are so remote and the pressure on women can become so heightened,’ says Robina. ‘I’ve had women hiding under the office desk doing this work with me just so they can have some space.’ Aaron needs this mobility too. He is earning money on his way to buying his own station in Queensland or the Northern Territory one day, but it needs to be work in the bush. He cannot handle more than two weeks in a town or city.
It seems to me the most elegant of solutions to the nature of working in the outback—where work is intermittent, seasonal or once-off—and it provides far more time together for families than fly-in, fly-out living arrangements. Whoever is not working looks after the children. More often than not it is Robina, but Aaron is very comfortable with hands-on fathering.
‘I never really thought I’d have kids—not that I wouldn’t have them, but I never thought about it. I didn’t expect them to be this much fun.’
Robina and Aaron are now modern gypsies. In their caravan with their two little boys they travel the Australian outback. Aaron’s fascination is with the land. Robina’s is with the human heart. Each of them is exploring a different terrain. They observe, they reflect, they deduce. Robina’s heart is an occupied one. Not only occupied by the people she’s known and knows, but occupied by the stories left from the lives of people she would never meet. The story behind Robina’s Number 45 Curry Paste business is this kind of legacy. Some years before she and Aaron purchased their caravan Robina had begun making curry paste, which she was beginning to sell in remote parts of Australia. Number 45 Curry Paste was almost her own personal scholarship fund: among other things, she used the profits to pay for professional and personal development. Robina inherited the recipe from her great-grandparents, and with the recipe comes the story behind it, which is another kind of legacy entirely.
Robina’s great-grandparents were Anglo-Indians living in Bangalore. They had five children and then came the Depression.
‘They actually couldn’t afford to keep all of their children, to feed them all. Three of them had to go to an orphanage. Can you imagine,’ says Robina, ‘what that would have felt like? How much it would hurt your heart?’
The desperation to have all their children back with them again drove her great-grandparents into entrepreneurship. They began to make and sell different condiments, including the one Robina makes. It began as ‘meals on wheels’. In her kitchen Robina’s great-granny made meals that her great-grandfather delivered on his bicycle. Then her great-grandmother began making condiments from spices she’d ground up herself. The enterprise grew and eventually they established a factory, and then one day all the children could come home again.
Robina believes that perhaps the legacy of this family trauma contributed to her unexpected feelings of being unable to cope with a second child.
In fact, stories like these are known to travel down generations, rather less in words than in shared unspoken feelings, in our most subtle micro expressions and in unspoken family rules. Such stories act like a virus infecting our vision, or a ghost standing between our loved ones and ourselves, and they shape how we respond to a situation without us ever seeing their influence upon us. In psychological literature this is called intergenerational transfer: the author of Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery, wrote that ‘no one can be free who has a thousand ancestors’, a phrase that speaks directly to this. These subtle influences often do not bother women and men until we have children of our own, and then reveal themselves when we behave in ways we don’t want to and don’t understand. For example, we may refuse to console a child while knowing that our actions would look heartless to someone else—because a family ghost is whispering that ‘he needs to stand on his own two feet to be safe in this life’ and we are unknowingly listening to that voice rather than the despair of our child. Robina has busted these ghosts, she’s brought these family stories and rules out into the warm light of day and examined them to see if they are true and kept only the stories that help her. She’s happier; the whole family is happier. The caravan has become the Meehan family’s magic carpet. They travel the red roads of Australia’s vast interior—whether dust-devilled or sodden and treacherous—and peer down together at the view flowing past. When they see an adventure to take or an opportunity to earn they can stop where they are and explore it all together. The Meehan family climb hills together, together they paddle in puddles. The little boys are buzzed by the rush and bustle of cattle loading onto Dad’s truck; later they are calmed by the silence of desert on a winter’s night. The next day might bring school in a classroom or school high in their bunks under Mum’s eye as she cooks dinner in the nifty, tightly organised caravan kitchen. The next day might bring home their trucking dad, or see their mum out-the-door on one of her solo working voyages: every day they are watching their parents returning from and setting out on adventures, and every day the boys are encouraged to take their own adventures.
‘I love living in the caravan,’ says Robina. ‘It beautifully blends family unity and freedom.’ She likes the combination of a limit on ‘stuff’ with a limitless view. Not only is it the life Robina has always wanted—unconstrained, adventurous and full of family camaraderie—and what Aaron has always wanted—in the bush, independent and physical—but perhaps the best part of this life is that it lets both Robina and Aaron show Darcy and Tully that such adventurous lives are still possible in the twenty-first century.
My Love Is Your Love
Cathy and David Jones, Boogardie Station, Mt Magnet, Western Australia
Cathy Ponton grew up in the Melbourne suburbs, in a family that lacked the money for such things as Girl Guides, but was rich in siblings and friends. Cathy is the third of eight children, and next door were the O’Neils with their seven children. The fence dividing the O’Neil and Ponton backyards (and children) was soon pulled down and never put up again. Cathy’s family was Catholic. They were not great church attenders and the saying of grace was for formal occasions rather than everyday practice, but Cathy’s mother had a deep faith. Her faith was shared from early on with her children, because Mary had the gift of engaging fully with her children in every way. Mary did not leave her children to play by themselves, as many women did at that time. She played
games with her children and chatted to them about all kinds of things. Faith was one of these things, and Cathy’s own faith was a living thing in her life from as early as she can remember.
At the end of her street was the neighbourhood church. At a quarter to seven every morning Cathy got up early, dressed, raced down the street to morning mass, raced home for breakfast and then went to her Catholic primary school—and the same pattern held true for her high-school years at a Catholic school run by the Good Samaritans of St Benedict. She was the only one in her family to go to church every day.
She trained as a teacher and went promptly to work in Catholic schools—her faith deepening all the time.
Faith was the most important thing in her life. Like any other gift, it didn’t come free. Every gift comes with the cost of being different to most other people. So gifts make life rich, give you a sense of purpose, but they can also make life lonely. Like many people born with a gift Cathy longed to develop that gift further, to be mentored, to work within a community that valued and supported her faith and, surrounded by like minds, to lose that loneliness. In one of the quick, clear, untroubled insights that characterise her, Cathy realised that she needed to enter religious life.
‘When I entered in the late 1970s, that was a big decision and it was a bit … counter-cultural. Young women were not really going into religious life. People said to me, “But isn’t religion dying?” and “Don’t you want to get married and have kids?” And I loved kids, so yes! But I felt called—compelled, but not in a bad way—to religious life. I made the decision and I told my parents. My parents were wonderful people. They would just say to us, “If that’s what you want to do, just sort it out.” So I did. I went and sorted it out. I went to the local convent, the Good Samaritans, and said I thought I’d like to enter. The person to speak to was my old high-school principal and she said: “Well, here is what you have to do.” I had to do a psychology test and a medical and then go for a couple of interviews. And then they accepted me.’
Love In a Sunburnt Country Page 6