Love In a Sunburnt Country (19 page)

Kath left home and moved to Melbourne. She lived there for two years, working in aged care. But city life palled. At twenty she moved back to the farm and worked both for her parents and in a library. Her parents at that time were leaving the dairy industry. England, previously a big market for Australian dairy products, joined the European Economic Community in the 1970s and prices for dairy products plummeted correspondingly. Oil prices soared and drought gripped much of Victoria. Kath's parents were just one of many small dairy operators—farms with perhaps just seventy cows—who had no choice but to leave the industry.

Kath's parents now needed a new way to make money. For the Vineys, finding a new enterprise was easier than it was for many other ex-dairy farmers. Their farm was surrounded by state forest. The family had a rich heritage of horse skills. The Vineys put the two together. Soon Kath was helping her parents in their new business of taking tourists on trail rides through the forest. A few cows were kept for milking.

Kath's days were built around the work of caring for the family's horses and dogs. She regained yet more of her childhood love of life. The dogs helped return to her the excitement and the fresh, earthy, poignant perceptions of her young self. The horses, with their strength and their desire to explore (which is every bit as strong as that of a dog), reinforced her curiosity, confidence and courage. The city was never to compete for Kath's affections again: in this time her allegiance to horses, dogs and life on the land was secured.

Then, in 1978, at the house of a mutual friend, she met Steve and they fell in love.

‘He smelt of wintergreen oil. He was wearing a beautiful embroidered jacket and he'd done the embroidery himself. And I thought, “Ooh, a man who can sew!”'

Each saw in the landscape of the other person the map they had been charting since childhood. Here were the strangely familiar contours, the underground rivers and upwelling springs, the dreamed-of lost continents. Astonishingly, wonderfully, here was that longed-for partner in adventure. Kath invited Steve to her family farm.

They had an astounding amount in common. They were both beginning artists and creators. They were both from families of social reformers, political activists and artists: families conscious of and active in what was happening outside the small, safe family sphere. Each family was one in which ideas and ideals were discussed, art was appreciated and created, risks were calculated and adventures taken. In each family the doors were flung open to admit people who needed extra support and nourishing.

Steve was twenty-five and looking for something, always on an adventure, learning, reflecting, noting down and moving on. He'd studied architecture, but he didn't want just to design but to build, and to build not just buildings but landscapes. Landscape artists frequently refer to the ‘genius of place', an identity unique to that one part of the earth created by the combination of what is there: the ecology, the land forms, the impact of man and water and time. It was with this that Steve wished to interact, and not just on paper with his mind, but with physical materials and his hands. For that he needed other skills, so he worked in plant nurseries, learned carpentry, helped on building sites and kept moving.

Steve is handsome—a dark handsomeness of the even-featured, steady, calmly in the background type. In contrast, Kath is always somehow in the forefront. Her colouring is of the blonde-bombshell variety and her dazzling, hopeful smile adds a show-stopping glamour to the most prosaic of scenes. Their storytelling is also contrasting. Steve speaks with the purposeful phrasing of the experienced raconteur, Kath with the emotive force of an actor. To convey how she talks in text requires regular use of italics and capitals.

‘He told me he was a vegetarian, and I thought, “Oh, I don't know what I've got for a vegetarian.” So I made what I can only call White Rice and Tomato Stodge cooked up in a frying pan. It would probably be called
risotto
now! Steve came again the
next
weekend, and then the
next
, and then he just
stayed
.'

Kath is wonderfully entertaining to listen to, as is Steve in his entirely different way. Where Kath knew horses, Steve knew water and land.

‘I always say that when I married Kath, I also married horses,' says Steve.

Kath was now, at only twenty, breeding her own horses. She was delighted to share with him all she knew. And he returned the favour, teaching her how to read the movement of water on her own family farm. Steve also brought his habit of investigating the stories that surround any artefact.

‘I always had a strong sense of history, of craft and the skills around making things by hand, so when Kath introduced me to horses I was keen to explore the whole story of the horse, particularly in the Australian bush.'

Kath opened up to Steve the love of the animal, and he opened up to her the heritage and stories created from the interaction between horses, humans and land. It didn't take long for Steve to unearth the story of the Australian stock horse and the heroic effort it had taken to bring them back.

‘The Australian stock horse wasn't a breed to begin with. It was the horse that evolved in Australian conditions, helped along by people who knew horses, culling and selecting and breeding for Australian conditions: not much water, hard underfoot, hot. “Jim, I like the look of your stallion, he's a good type,” that kind of thing. From the 1860s until after World War I there were horse-breeding operations that produced horses for the British Army, coach horses, stock horses,' says Steve.

In
The Man from Snowy River
Paterson wrote a description of the Australian stock horse. In it he dwells on the unflinching courage, the enduring toughness, the dextrous tread and the sympathy of the horse to the rider's goals. Useful, beautiful and brave, they were nearly all gone by the 1930s.

‘The Australian stock horses were sent in their thousands to the British in the Boer War and were used again in World War I. But then the machines took over their work in agriculture, and in war: motorbikes, tractors, utes. To preserve the breed, a loose association formed, and they began by creating a list of characteristics and breeding to it. About forty years later, in 1971, they opened a stud book and decided which horses would be the foundation sires and dams for the breed,' says Steve.

And then Steve found that one piece of horse heritage was disappearing fast. ‘The seventies saw a crisis in keeping the skills and tradition of the packsaddle: the old saddlers were dying, the handlers and riders were going, the knowledge was disappearing from the landscape,' he says. Packhorses were used throughout Australia for many years, most particularly in remote regions: the early mailmen used them, as did station hands on their long runs to build and maintain fences, the drovers and of course, the explorers. Steve was utterly hooked. Here was not just the right girl, but for him the right quest: a race against time to preserve a vanishing and precious heritage. Preserving that tradition, they felt, was a job that somebody needed to do. Without committing to the job of saving the packhorse tradition, they decided to learn as much as they could about it from those willing to teach them.

‘As someone who was always looking for adventures and journeys into the bush, in the grander sense, travelling with packhorses into remote places was a perfect fit,' says Steve. The tradition is a mix of linked skills: saddle design, making and caring for the saddles, packing them with the right things, packing effectively, balancing loads (of up to eighty kilograms per horse), caring for the packhorses, training horses to work together, camping out with horses, planning for safety and managing emergencies.

‘At this time a few of the mountain-cattle families included horse tours in their mix of business and we got involved in riding and working with a Gippsland mountain cattleman, Clive Hodge, of Valencia Creek. Clive held the Moroka Run up on the side of Mount Wellington. He was a hard man, but he was generous with his knowledge of working with horses in the bush. I was like a sponge and probably made a nuisance of myself. Kath and I had some great experiences in those days, before we had kids. We rode the High Country from Kosciuszko to Bunyip with him and learned our lessons the hard way,' says Steve.

The years flew by. Steve worked as a builder locally, and together Kath and Steve helped out her parents with their trail-riding business. They built a house in Tonimbuk. On meeting the Bairds I felt their song must be a sunlit, steady, simple piano piece in a golden major key. They are neat and elegant, as lovers and riders of horses so often are, and practical. Spilling from their smiles is their spirited warmth and hospitality, their interest in their fellow woman and man and child. But that's not all their song. These two have lived big lives. Quite early on in their relationship they found that each separate family tradition of getting caught up in larger events had been somehow multiplied in their shared lives. Their story is peppered with dramatic and tragic incidents, and naturally, this only fed Kath's pre-existing anxiety.

‘Did I tell you about the time,' says Kath, ‘when we were held up by three men?'

It was 1982, two o'clock in the morning and Kath was pregnant with Lin. She and Steve were driving along the Princes Highway when they saw a car crashed by the side of the road with a young girl in a chiffon dress standing beside a man, who was waving for help. They stopped to help. When they pulled up the young man was revealed as an aggressor. A gun was put to Kath's head, and, as Steve went to protect her, another gun was swung into Steve's head with force.

‘It would be so easy to kill you,' the man yelled, ‘BANG, BANG!'

As she cradled an unsteady and shocked Steve's bleeding head, Kath was sure they were both going to die.

In fact, the biggest manhunt in Victoria's history was underway at that moment for these men, who were wanted for rape and theft. There had been no car crash. The car had been smashed up to mimic a car crash and thus attract a Samaritan with a new car in which the criminals could escape.

Kath was forced inside the car, where she discovered three young men, all with injuries. Steve, who had a fractured skull, was thrown in on top of her.

All this violent activity caused the interior car light to come on. The young man closest stared at Kath.

‘Hey,' he said, leaving Kath amazed at some people's ability to make small talk no matter the circumstance. ‘Aren't you Kath Viney?'

The men took the young girl with them, and with her as a hostage, escaped in Kath and Steve's vehicle. The manhunt would go on for days, but the girl, says Steve, was brave and clever and escaped, following a spur line of trees down to a river. On the other side were the police searching for both her and her abductors. As she walked into the river, a policeman strode in to collect her, lifting her in his arms, a moment caught by the press in what became one of the best photographs of the 1980s.

Steve followed with difficulty as Kath ran from the car and found a farmhouse and help.

She had coped valiantly, but in the long moments of terror by the roadside the anxiety Kath had kept at a distance for so many years returned. There's no answer to anxiety; it keeps you on the treadmill of trying to find reassurance, and the reassurance only works for a little while, and then you need more. For people living on the land there is no need to invent terrors—such as a carjacking—our loved ones face hazards on the most ordinary of days.

For death to threaten in such a random fashion made all of Kath's other fears appear even more likely. Kath's imagination, which had woven together other people's ideas into performance, was every bit as good at presenting her with nightmare scenarios. This part of our minds—our imagination—partly exists to help us keep our loved ones safe. A wild imagination can work magic in the arts and make us the most intuitive of friends. In the everyday world a wild imagination in overdrive can flood the body with an ugly cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol and make us ill. Kath fought back against anxiety by immersing herself in motherhood, the horses, the Tonimbuk community, and, at that time, it worked for her. Lin was born, then Clay. Kath saw in each boy's birth an opportunity for the family—the whole family—to grow closer. She transformed the arrival of her babies into a whole-family show in her own home, aided and abetted by her doctor.

‘I said to Mum, “I want you to be with me.” She was very anxious about that, and I persuaded Dad, too. I said, “Come on, Dad, you can do it!” I had a midwife and a doctor—it was a responsible homebirth—and the doctor had been to university with my dad, which was so serendipitous. He said to Dad, “You didn't see your own children born. You'd love this.” I held Dad's hand as Lin was born, my first, he turned his head and he was looking right at my dad. I remember just glancing at my dad and he was crying. He had tears streaming down his face, but he was smiling. It was pretty special.'

Kath and Steve grew shared skills in riding, packsaddling, business management and running tourism—but as Kath's skills and confidence grew, she and her father agreed less and less. In particular, they could not agree about something of great value to both of them: the management of horses.

‘They were too alike,' says Steve. The prospect of losing again the warmth of the relationship she had rebuilt with her father was not something Kath could bear. ‘Kath decided the best thing she could do to preserve her relationship with her dad was to move away, and make a new life elsewhere. We decided then that we would preserve the packsaddle tradition and take people into the High Country,' says Steve. In 1986 they left the forested-in farm and their home in Tonimbuk for the open high plains of the Alps.

‘I did a quick road trip with my mate Andrew in an old Toyota driving right up through western Queensland calling into old saddleries and buying bush gear and saddles. We got some war surplus packsaddles that saddler Harry Downs had stored in pig fat,' says Steve.