Love In a Sunburnt Country (11 page)

In Melbourne Cathy also spent time with her family. She had been anxious about telling her parents that she was leaving the church, and particularly anxious about telling her father. He had been so proud of having a daughter in the congregation, and he helped out the local sisters with maintenance and sports coaching. In fact, both her parents were supportive. Her siblings felt rather more strongly—they'd been having sisterly intuitions of a disruption in Cathy's world. They were utterly delighted by her romance with David and they cheered her on.

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Cathy returned from Melbourne to Mt Magnet in late August. She'd been counselled, she'd lived once more in the convent, and now she was back to trial living out in the world. This was complicated by the fact that emerging from religious life meant Cathy had to establish herself in the way an eighteen-year-old does.

Within the order you don't need such things as a tax file number. You haven't accumulated savings. You haven't accumulated ‘stuff' either, not even the basics for setting up a house. The Mother-General, the head of Cathy's order, had asked that she go to the Catholic Education Office in Geraldton and apply for work there. Geraldton is a four-hour drive from Boogardie, so in addition to somewhere to live, she would need a car and, of course, Cathy had almost no possessions and no money. She was utterly dismayed at the thought of setting up a house—before she left Melbourne her sister Bernadette's husband had, as a joke, given her a little present, a green vegetable peeler that she still treasures.

On returning to Mt Magnet she emptied out her room at the convent and, with the intention of it being just for a week, she went to stay in Josie and Henry's house at Boogardie, where David also lived.

‘Josie showed me into my room. David's room, of course, was on the other side of the house!' This was the beginning of Josie's careful supervision of the rest of this courtship. She was determined that David and Cathy's behaviour should remain within the boundaries decided by the Catholic Church—and, after all, Cathy was only on leave. She was still to decide whether or not she would marry David and renounce her vows.

Cathy now says that religious life was right for her: it was just not right for her life long.

‘I am sure I was meant to be in religious life for a time. I went on retreat in early 1992 and the priest presenting was saying that he felt a change was coming in the Catholic Church, where people will commit for a period of time rather than for life. And I thought that was interesting, but I didn't think it was particularly relevant to me. One of the things they asked us to do was to go off and draw ourselves in religious life—they gave us oil pastels and paper. And I divided the paper into four and what I drew was each of the seasons: summer, autumn, winter, spring. I didn't think about it at the time, but when I looked back it was almost as if I knew I'd completed the full cycle of my religious life.'

If there was a Bible text for this time of confusion in Cathy's life, it was surely 1 Corinthians 13. This contains one of the best-accepted definitions of love in human literature, not as a feeling, but as an umbrella term for principled action: it describes love as patient and kind; it does not keep a record of wrongs, rejoices in truth, protects, always trusts and hopes, and it always perseveres. A great deal of the Bible tells us that love is action—and in reading about this I came across the frequently debated question of what was more true—love as action or love as feeling?

Cathy was ‘in love' with David, but she needed to know if she could translate that feeling into doing. She needed to know how well she fitted with David, with the rest of his life and with the rest of the family, because this is the way of things in station families: business, family life and recreation are tangled together. And, despite the request from the Mother-General that she should move to Geraldton, life conspired to keep her with David and his family at the station, and there she served another kind of novitiate.

She could find no work in Geraldton, but she was offered teaching work in Mt Magnet without even looking.

‘I rang Mt Magnet School to enquire about teacher registration and the principal said, “Can you do relief teaching?” and I said, “Well, yes,” and he had me in there immediately.'

The shops and main street of a small town like Mt Magnet act like antennae for gossip—rumour is refined in homes and on the backstreets, travels in with the daily business of shopping and posting and is exchanged in conversation in the shops, taking new forms with each speculation. All small towns are like this. Few small towns ever have a love story like the one of Cathy and David to wonder at—so on the day Cathy started at the school there was hardly a person who didn't know some of her story. This, naturally, included the students.

Cathy's first class was with three high-school boys who needed help with written language. Shocking the pants off the new teacher is the first tactic of struggling students. Of course, this new teacher would be delightfully easy to shock—only last week or the week before, she was a nun! What would she know about ‘life'! At the start of the lesson, in a gleeful chorus, they began: ‘You know what we did on the weekend, Miss? We got pissed, Miss! We smoked dope! And we had … sex!'

Teachers need to direct and shape the relationship with the children—and when teachers are rattled or offended by this kind of behaviour from children it means the children become the ones in charge. Cathy knew this.

‘I just said, “Well, I don't think those were good ideas, but that was the weekend. Let's do some work now.” If I'd allowed them to get to me it would have been the end of my teaching there.'

In Cathy's years of teaching she had found that for a child to be prepared to learn, first they needed to know that the teacher cared for them as a person—not as an outcome to be demonstrated, but as a child living their life every day. The greater your capacity to care and to consistently show that, the deeper the wells from which you give and invest your time, the faster the children will come to care for you—and from there, to learn from and with you. Without those capacities a teacher can cope with the easy student, but has nothing to offer the student kept in the classroom only through the law and the relationship with the teacher. A teacher like Cathy is a gift in a school full of such students.

Not only was Cathy suited for a teaching life in the bush, her years of living ‘in community' proved a wonderful training ground for the challenges of living in a multi-generation pastoral business.

‘It was very good training. I thought at the time: “If I hadn't done that, I might not have been right for this.” I had to work out if I could live with him, and also with his parents and the rest of the family, because we were obviously going to be closely connected. One of Josie's gifts is her ability to accept a person for who they are—even if she doesn't like what you are saying or doing, she'll accept you. And so, despite times of tension between David and me, and family tension, I decided that I could live with them all.'

The next step was for David to meet Cathy's family.

‘He and I went over together after Christmas. He got on well with my family and they liked him. And next door were the O'Neils and David got on very well with Mr O'Neil who loved to tinker in the shed. Tinkering in the shed and talking to Mr O'Neil helped David cope with being in the suburbs. I had to take him out into the country every now and then so he could see the green, but he found it really hard. He stayed there two weeks—he came back before me—and I stayed until February. I arrived back in Mt Magnet on Valentine's Day, late at night, and I got off the bus and there he was with a rose picked from his mother's garden. That was the only flower I've had from him—he's romantic in his own way, not flowers, not presents—but it didn't bother me at all, I'd rather have him.'

Cathy and David married in August 1993 in Melbourne.

‘You were the happiest bride I've ever seen,' said one of her sisters. Cathy went from happy bride to happy wife. She and David lived for a year in Mt Magnet itself, with Cathy picking up short teaching contracts at the school and David working off-property on drill rigs, driving trucks and mustering goats. Cathy knew that frequently nuns who had left the order and married had no children, or just one child. She was now thirty-six years old. She warned David that she might not be able to have children, or, if she had a child, she might only be able to have one.

‘I really hoped I could have more than one child and I said to David we can't leave this—we have to get into this straight away,' she said. It was not the worst thing a man can be told. ‘We got married on the first of August and I was pregnant in September, and I was so excited. We had this beautiful boy, Connor James, the following June. I was so happy, and David was over the moon.'

The long trip home from the hospital in Perth to Mt Magnet was made much longer by David's pride in his son. At every homestead where there were friends—and he had many—David called in to introduce his new son to his old friends.

Cathy had terribly missed being a mother and now she had her very own child. She loved being a mother. Like her own mother, Cathy was delighted by the company of children, and the physical work of caring for a child filled her with joy—and she was ready for another baby in short order.

It was a little harder the second time, and Cathy and David worried that Connor would not have a sibling. Eventually, when Connor was two, she gave birth to Gerard. She was thrilled with this second healthy son, but she longed for just one more child. Rhys joined the family one year later. Cathy was overjoyed to have three healthy sons. Then, to her astonishment—‘old' though she was—she found that she had fallen pregnant again. Anthony was born a year after Rhys. Four healthy, lively, loving sons! Cathy, the girl who loved children so very much, the woman who had mourned her chance to be a mother all those years ago, could hardly believe her good fortune. These were the crazy, busy years of parenting little children, but such happy ones! Cathy and David shuttled back and forth between their house in Mt Magnet and living with Josie and Henry on the station—David turning his hand to all kinds of work as well as working on the station, and Cathy working on and off at the school.

‘I only did relief and casual while Connor and Gerard were babies. They'd call and say they were desperate at the school, and so I'd come in. Then I had Rhys, and when he was six or seven months old Janet came and said that the school was desperate, and that she would mind the kids. I did two days a week for a while. Then I'd got pregnant without realising and I just said to the principal that I would be too tired and needed to stop. Then Anthony was born and I took four years off teaching entirely. I said to the school: “I can't keep giving my little kids to other people, I just need to be with them.”'

Cathy had one particular goal in rearing her boys—she wanted them to be able to care for and relate to children. In her listening to them, her playing with them, her working alongside them, her loving touch and her clear rules for how others are to be treated, she was showing them how this is best done. And all their sons have both Cathy's gentleness with children and David's extensive practical skills.

Once Anthony was at kindergarten, Cathy returned to teaching part-time. This, in fact, was when I met both Anthony and Cathy for the first time, as she was a teacher at my local school. All the children were ‘on the mat' looking up at the teacher. Curly-headed Anthony was sitting at the back, beaming vigorously and angelically at his teacher. From my vantage point I could see Anthony had one hand not folded on his lap where all the other children had theirs. That other hand was behind his back, wagging back and forth. It was explained to me that on that day Anthony had chosen to be good, and right then he was being a good little puppy, wagging his tail and being obedient.

Later that day I met Cathy in the staff room, where she invited me to a party—and at that party on Boogardie station I met David for the first time. I still have a picture of them both in my mind from that night. David smiling gently, his long hands still as he watched Cathy. She was holding an enormous tray of food, listening to someone talk, clearly oblivious to the weight of the tray. As always Cathy was truly listening: nodding, echoing, laughing, her pale face alight with interest and reflective emotion. There was a lot going on, as there always is at those parties, with children running, fires being stoked, food, beer, teenagers attempting to just ‘go off somewhere' and parents attempting to monitor them while still trying to attend to the conversation of other adults … but I remember David's outright pride in Cathy very clearly.

Over the next few years, first Connor, then Gerard, then Rhys left to board at Mazenod, a Catholic boys' school in the Perth Hills. Only eleven-year-old Anthony was still at home. Cathy's leadership skills had been noticed at the school and she had moved into working with teachers as well as students. The church community also recognised those leadership skills and Cathy had become the go-to person when the priest was not available for such things as funeral services. David was continuing his mix of station work and off-property work, and on the community front he was a shire councillor and an unobtrusive giver of his time and practical skills.

Then, in August 2011, came David's accident. It was quarter to three in the morning. Cathy was woken by her friend Wendy and her sister-in-law Janet outside the bedroom.

‘They came to the door and said, “You have to get up. We have bad news.” And I thought immediately of David's father Henry. And then I thought: “Why is it my bad news, and not Janet's?” I put on David's big windcheater to keep warm. Anthony had woken up, and I pulled the doona back over him and said, “Shh, back to sleep.” Paul was waiting in the living room and there were two policemen with him and I thought “This is not good—is it David or is it one of the boys?” And they told me straightaway, it was David. And then I wanted to know, was it only David? They said, “There was no-one else.” And I felt some relief that he had not been responsible for another death.'