Love In a Sunburnt Country

by Jo Jackson King

  ‘Their creation story is that this land was all flat, until the snake came along. The snake is the creative spirit that moved through the landscape. And water is the creative and destructive force in this landscape.’ The snake Tim is referring to is the creator deity in Aboriginal myth. It has as many names as there were tribes, but it is more popularly described as the ‘Rainbow Serpent’. The Dreamtime stories—and ‘Dreamtime’ is not then or now or at some future time but means rather ‘throughout’ all times and all spaces—have the snake deity as an all-powerful water spirit, digging into the land, lifting it or levelling it, nourishing life and occasionally dealing death and destruction.

  ‘The Dreamtime stories make complete sense in scientific terms. I’ve discovered situations where the Dreamtime story is exactly the story I’ve had to figure out through a scientific route. It’s how the landscape works, what’s important and what’s not. Some hills don’t matter and some do. Some hills have a lot of control over where the water goes and what the river does. The sacred hills in the Marble Bar, the spirit hills, are the critical hills in the landscape for the control of the water. The waterholes that are sacred are also important holes in the river. It isn’t surprising these guys figured it out. They’ve been here for fifty thousand years.’

  The wealth of Indigenous Australia was in their observations and their understanding: the rest of us are beginning to know just enough to value that wealth as we should. We have pre-existing maps for water movement in these landscapes, and this is going to be of critical importance. Time, after all, is running short.

  ‘So when I talk with pastoralists we talk about Mother Nature—how she works, how we bugger her up, how if we understand what she’s doing we can get around and help her recover the landscape. If I was talking with the mob, we’d talk about the snake. It’s the same story. Where we stuff things up we stuff up the water cycles,’ says Tim.

  With the knowledge we now have we can reverse injuries to the water cycle and grow more plants, and thus return carbon to the soil. The massive rains in Australia’s central rangelands in 2011 produced a discernible drop in the carbon dioxide in the biosphere: in fact, sixty percent of the extra carbon the world stored that year was in our outback. Unfortunately, because that storage was only in grasses (and could only be in grasses because the type of land management and rewards for carbon sequestration Tim advocates are not in place) most of that carbon is back in the atmosphere again. Yet that event has taught us that with political will on our side—and with all we can learn from our land-rehabilitation pioneers and our scientists, including those who are Indigenous—the Australian rangelands could play a central role in cooling our planet.

  In 2015 Tania and Tim reluctantly left Marble Bar and moved back to Broome where it all began. Tim is continuing to work with pastoralists and Tania is working back in health. They are grandparents now: David has three children, Sophie two, and both of them are warm and caring parents. This brings Tim real joy, and he and Tania are equally proud of the other two. Scott, with courage and patience, has achieved his goal of supporting himself despite the difficulties presented by a severe illness. Jade has just finished a degree in Speech Pathology and is looking for her first job.

  All Tania’s little brothers—whom Tim considers also to be his own little brothers—have had children of their own. Broome is not the same place it was when they met all those years ago, but of course, neither are they the same. When Tim met Tania two worlds collided. It happened in the slowest of slow motion, and it is still happening as I write.

  They could not have been further apart when it all started: in one corner of our stratified social landscape stood the hard-nosed, well-regarded white male agricultural scientist. In the other was the black girl in tune with the land, into seeing the connections and weaving herself and others into that living fabric, who had spent religion classes learning how to fill out dole forms. Even in those first moments of attraction they both began changing. Tim’s trained-in reductionism met Tania’s gift for seeing how everything interacts. Tania’s inculcated acceptance of low Indigenous achievement met Tim’s utter irreverence for authority. Falling in love in this case was far more than an exchange of hearts. Each has opened up to the other an Australia they’d never suspected could be theirs, but more even than that, in their love for each other, in their two Australias colliding and slowly merging, in their changing, in Tania’s cultural brokering, in Tim’s making scientific sense of Dreamtime stories, they have been helping into life a third way of being Australian.

  This new way is one where non-Indigenous people in Australia talk about the Indigenous spirit of the land, share ownership of it, believe it and feel part of it, and where, knowing that they are valued as equal, our Indigenous people again feel part of the rest of the country. The price is that we must give up our old stories and make new ones, but this is an investment which returns us far more than we ever pay. We regain a feeling of security in our better connection to place and find peace in a more intense experience of nature. In feeling more connected to the planet we also feel more connected to other people. In Tim and Tania’s passionate, disruptive way of being Australian, there’s just more love.

  Home Again

  It is now the beginning of 2016 as I bring this book to an end. The people in it feel like family to me. I have just asked everyone to choose a song that reflects their story and Bill has instead sent me a film clip of him singing that song. It’s the one he sang to Cissy on her sixtieth birthday. I’ve been by myself for eight days—one of the great love stories in my immediate family has ended without warning and the best thing I can do to help at this tragic time is mind the homestead—and it has been lonely. Listening to Bill sing, hearing his love for Cissy in his rich warm voice, has lifted my spirits. Love is the heavy lifter of the outback.

  Love lifts us. It gives us energy. In the outback, where there is much to be done, we need every bit of human energy and wisdom possible. These are landscapes of extraordinary complexity. Plants, water, animals, life in the soil, temperature and the length of days, disaster, the shape of the land, the spirit of the land, all we’ve built and changed, our stories and rules, the markets and politics a world away … the landscape might suggest rugged individualism, but here interdependence rules. Each interaction ripples through the landscape. Lay a finger on one part and you touch it all. And yet this complexity must not frighten us out of taking action to regenerate and heal: people have been part of this landscape for a very long time. In recent times we’ve added too much and taken too much away for these places to heal by themselves. Our heartfelt engagement with them is more necessary than it has ever been before.

  The Australian outback is facing multiple threats, some are local, some national and some global. I’ve only touched on a few of these in this book, but I believe the biggest threat of all is that we will not find a way for us all to work together to solve them. The processes that we have accidentally harnessed to degrade the landscape are powerful but we can as easily harness them to heal. Solutions exist. It is the working together that is so hard. The easiest thing to do would be to stay locked within our camps of opinion, ego, profession, policy or social group. It can be very hard to transcend such barriers or even to build a professional relationship with someone in another camp. But it is vital that we do so. Stories such as that of Tim and Tania—of another kind of relationship which transcends such boundaries—show us why. When love dissolves the barriers between and recreates two people from very different worlds, the rest of us are offered a remade future too, and not just a new future for us but for the interwoven-with-us wrapped-around-us world.

  We work on, for and in this landscape, and in return it works on, in and for us. Rebel learned to love Michael and to be loved in turn in his home town of Lightning Ridge with its ingenious, paradoxical landscape. In her multi-faceted projects I can see echoes of the Lightning Ridge landscape. To live where they dig, the miners grow new kinds of houses: to work where she live
s, Rebel grows new kinds of business. The opal miners cooperate where other mining businesses compete, and just as paradoxically, Rebel uses distance and isolation to draw women closer. Somehow, along with Michael, this landscape seems to me to have become part of Rebel’s soul.

  The people in this book have taught me that, when it comes to falling in love, real life outstrips fiction. The ways we meet too often rely on an absurd series of improbable coincidences that can look oddly like destiny. When we meet we might talk our way into love, or play, or laugh, or simply look. We can fall with the speed of light or make the journey over decades. Our stories are held in those of our parents and our children’s love stories within ours. Love stories start before we are born and continue after we die. I’ve found this learning fascinating, but, after all, how we fall in love is not the most important thing. How we treat the people we love the rest of the time is the most important thing.

  How we treat each other is made more visible in the outback because of the lack of distractions, of other consolations and comforts, and, frequently, the lack of any other people. You can’t miss the importance of love when you live here. The people in this book are successful because of their focus on relationships—not just relationships with each other, but also with their parents, children and siblings—but also because of their ability to relate past the barriers behind which most of us hide. They are people who are comfortable navigating complexity in the world they inhabit and in the people they love. Bill has just this moment written to me again to emphasise that we can do other things in the world but our first priority must be to the people in our everyday lives. As evidence that Bill is right, I just have to think of Cissy, making sure that her bush camp is the very best it can be; Luke and Frances putting all else aside for Todd’s farewell to Lamba; Cathy’s unstinting giving of her best to her students; Mary and John’s rule that a good conversation takes priority over the work on the property; and Rebel and Robina’s message that to love others women must also love themselves … this is a book about love in everyday life.

  So what is love? It gives us energy, so is it energy itself? Do we make it? Does everything make it? Is it a field that simply exists, that we can allow in, and that we can both draw from and give to? Can I find in this both Cathy’s God and Kath’s belief that love is the only divinity? Can this explain the strange gravitational tug of love which entangles the orbits of people who would normally never meet? Can it explain the exchanges we have with the landscape itself? I ask Rebel for her opinion. She says (hesitantly) she suspects it is something ‘we interpret in our different ways’, and then she describes love as a feeling that is made manifest in action.

  So what do I think love is? I am still thinking about this, and I suspect I will be for a long time. It is far easier for me to say what love does. Love connects us, and it changes us—and in doing so, it changes the world.

  Jo Jackson King, 2016

  Acknowledgements

  First I’d like to thank the people who trusted me to tell their story: Frances and Luke Frahn, Catherine and David Jones, Robina and Aaron Meehan, Mary and John te Kloot, Kath and Steve Baird, Rebel Black and Michael Matson, Bill and Cissy Bright and Tania and Tim Wiley. I thank their families too, and I must particularly mention here Janne and Richard Warwick, Ashling Turner, Lin Baird, Vickie Bright, Jade Wiley and Sophie Wiley.

  The family members with whom I live—my husband Martin King, my parents Barbara and Tom Jackson, my sons Timu, Samai and Rafael—provide the best setting I could have in which to write. Martin’s subversive humour and his encyclopaedic knowledge of science and the broad sweep of history kept me glued to reality; Barb’s unfettered empathy and knowledge of Australia’s social history is responsible for much of the insight into people found here; and I’ve tried to infuse Tom’s knowledge of agricultural history, his passion for healing land and his bond with places, animals and plants into these pages. My sons have wielded equal influence. Rafi is ten and any discussion of love is agony for him: but the suggestion to use love song names as chapter titles is his, as is one inspired analogy, and by following his lead in natural history I learned a great deal that has made this book richer. Following Tim and Sam’s lead took me further into understanding military history, Indigenous history, social justice, politics, spirituality and community healing; and my borrowings from their written and spoken thoughts add greatly to this book’s poetry, currency and clarity. In addition to this, these six people have brought me coffee and food, encouraged me to exercise, taken over my roles at home and work and forgiven me as often as has been required (which is often).

  A book like this is the product of thousands of conversations on thousands of topics. Some of these conversations have been online, others many years ago and others were conversations that I wasn’t present for but have influenced this book profoundly. For those conversations I would like to thank Stephanie Degens, Bradley Degens, Elizabeth Jackson, Megan Jackson, Adrian Cutler, Ann Larson, Peter Howard, Cathi Montague, Christine Plaistowe, Canda Reynolds, Cathy Gillzan, Fred Provenza, Greg Brennan, Bruce Maynard, Dean Revell, Peter Andrews, Anna Tierney, Elsa Raubenheimer, Peter Lillenfield, Lyn Hawking, Lachlan Gatti, Annette Evans, Tim Goodwin, Katie Jeffries, Des Thompson, Wanda Flanagan, Fe Waters, Shay Telfer, Emma Hawkes, Janine Binsiar, Pam Mongoo, Art Diggle, Anna Hepburn, Andrew Binsiar, Carolyn Halleen, Mark Halleen, Maggie Dent, Jenny Allen, Janette Roberts, Caroline Thomas, Simon Thomas, Donna Chapman, Rebecca Handcock, Michael O’Brien, Gina Goddard, Terry Chilvers, Sandra Norman, Deb Costello, Liz Bowyer, David Chandler, Lara Hopkins, Karen Moyle, Bevin Rose, Noelene Turner, Cindy Payne, Jo-Anne Burgemeister, Sandy MacDonald, Bridget Bongers, Noel Ferguson, Russell Shaw, Stuart B. Hill, David Bent, Tracy Bent, David Cake, Karen McKenna, Elaine Walker, Pia Kemelle Inverarity-Stone, Kate Williams, Cath Wood, Jennifer Bailey, Deanne Blake, Robin Pensini, Marie Parsons, Debbie Dowden, Kate Hutchison, Jenny Watters, Steph Bateman-Graham, Pam Armstrong, Michael Madlener, Andrew Outhwaite, Rachel Maslen, Amanda Rowland, Elizabeth Mackay, Sally Male, Alma Dender, Tanya Brown, Susan Wilding, Jo Johnson, Tracie Blair, Chris Ward, Bridget Cameron and Ann Anderson.

  I could not have written this book without confidence in the education my sons were receiving. Christine Bevans, Jenny Wilson, Stacey Keating, Pauline Winrow, Narina Christensen, Sue Thompson, Joanne Dobbs, Alwyn Cann, Quita Berry, Noemi Reynolds, Lisa Black, Cathy Jones, David Platt, Gabrielle Garratt, Ian Hardy, Tania Aveling and Karen Woods—thank you all. I was also able to keep writing knowing that I had other people I trusted caring for my sons at critical times: my parents (of course) but also Stephanie, Bradley, Elsa, Peter, Caroline, Simon, Donna and Andrew.

  With no readers there might as well be no book, so I would like to thank the people who are helping me get this book out into the world: Caroline Williams who took the author photo, the cover designer Christa Moffit, the typesetters, Theresa Bray, Adam van Rooijen and all the team at Harlequin.

  Finally, thank you to all my editors: Jacquie Kent, Annabel Blay, Laurie Ormond, Elsa Raubenheimer, Kate James, Alex Nahlous, Julia Knapman and Jo Mackay. Annabel’s faith in the book and in my writing was vital in Jo Mackay’s absence. Elsa provided the first (and most extensive) of the copy and language edits and helped me submit a manuscript far closer to being ready for publication than would have been possible otherwise. Jo commissioned this book, telepathically detected the regular wavering in my confidence, kept me writing, and then took the manuscript to a new level with her vision of stories that unfold as if taking place before the reader’s eyes.

  Even with all of this help, there will still be mistakes, and they will be mine.

  Connect with us for info on our new releases, access to exclusive offers, free online reads and much more!

  Subscribe to our newsletter

  Share your reading experience on:

  Harlequin Books

  Facebook

  Twitter

  Watch our reviews, author interviews and more on Harlequin TV
r />   First published June 2016 by Harlequin Nonfiction

  An imprint of Harlequin Enterprises (Australia) Pty Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth St

  SYDNEY NSW 2000

  AUSTRALIA

  ISBN 978 176037450 1

  LOVE IN A SUNBURNT COUNTRY

  © Jo Jackson King 2016

  Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilisation of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au

  Cover design by Christa Moffitt, Christabella Designs

  Cover photographs © Shutterstock

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au