Love In a Sunburnt Country (22 page)

Lightning Ridge is famous throughout the world for two things—opals and fossils—and to showcase them properly the town is building a new Australian Opal Centre. ‘It's a centre of excellence in all things opal: science, education, research, value-adding and telling the stories of the people of the opal fields in all of Australia,' Rebel explains. ‘There's a collection that's been accrued—still is accruing. This collection is worth about three million dollars. Opalised fossils, opal and heritage items from the opal fields have been donated by people from across the world: miners, collectors, buyers and retailers. Opals are Australia's version of the crown jewels and they're also natural treasures.'

‘Who wants the crown jewels when you've got opal,' says Michael, who has just emerged from the shower and caught the tail end of what Rebel is saying. He is completely serious.

So is the opal community of Australia and Lightning Ridge. They need thirty million dollars to complete the construction of the Australian Opal Centre. They want this place not just as a focus for the town's endeavours, but as a catalyst for regeneration across the region. Rebel is the chairperson for the project.

‘We have partnerships with universities, people that are studying our collection. The dinosaurs in Australia—particularly the dinosaurs here—are turning our understanding of dinosaur evolution on its head. Opal miners are finding new species here often. The centre we have already fills a vast number of functions, but the new building will also have space for conferences, a theatre, discovery rooms, labs and gallery space for exhibitions. It's thirty metres by a hundred metres, two storeys, built underground, fully off the grid—it's a Glen Murcutt building, designed for this landscape. There are people all over the world waiting for this building. I'll take you and show you the big hole in the ground we've dug already. We're very proud of our hole!

‘And it won't be just for the visitors or the people of the opal fields, it's going to be a beacon for the kids who live out here, the ones who never leave their town,' Rebel says. ‘I want them to know they can dream big and make it happen; that they can be scientists or palaeontologists or opal miners or jewellers or engineers or architects. This building and the project will inspire all of these things and some we haven't even thought about!'

‘Have you seen much opal?' Michael asks.

The only opal I've handled was sent to me as a gift by a reader of another of my books: it's a tiny black opal. The giver had been told it came from Cue, my closest town, but research suggests that this isn't possible, although black opal was once mined in Coolgardie, and so perhaps it came from there. However, even this little piece of black opal seems to hold a world, if I just look close enough. Carl Jung wrote that the very best symbol for the human soul was stone. Surely then, the very best stone to symbolise the soul is the precious opal, with its play of colour, its fluid nature and the way each opal feels like some miniscule, exotic planet.

‘No two are the same,' says Michael, liking the idea of opal as the soul stone. ‘Every single one is its own creation by Mother Nature.'

Michael also brings out some fossils to show me. Here are yabby buttons, minute pine cones, a lungfish jawbone, a shark's tooth, twigs, the bones of some dainty marsupial, a plesiosaur tooth, mussels, bird bones, land snails, dinosaur bones—all from ancient times long before ours.

‘A lot of people who dig opal throw this away, it's not worth a dollar to them,' says Michael.

He reverently tips the fossils out onto a white dinner plate and hands me a jeweller's loupe for better viewing. They are so prettily delicate. I pick up the fossil of a land snail, an elegant spiralling twist no longer than the nail of my little finger. I can just see the facets on the shell, the careful turnings where this tiny builder ensured her house met the peculiar mathematical criteria of her species so very long ago. A fish vertebra, over one hundred million years old, gleams as freshly as if it had just been filleted. When I fit the loupe to my eye, lean closer, I can see a roseate glow, a run of violet colour. If only it were brighter! ‘I want to lick it—is that okay?' I say.

‘Just do it. We're all rock lickers here,' says Rebel.

So I lick it, and it comes to brighter life. I'm looking past the glistening fresh surface now, I'm looking in. The veins and nerve supplies of the bone are picked out in shifting three-dimensional colour: a palaeontologist's dream.

In the late Cretaceous period, Lightning Ridge was a freshwater billabong, fringed in Wollemi pine—type ferns, on the edge of the inland sea. It was a bright, watery place that maintained not only all the animals we no longer see, but those we still find today. There are the glittery-winged dragonflies, so beautiful and yet so insatiable and voracious, both in larval and adult form. The water beetles, the scarlet fairy shrimps and the shovel-headed shrimps—hunting and hiding, multiplying after rain, dying in the dry times—would have been food for the yabbies, and the yabbies the food for the monotremes (like platypus and echidna) of the Australian Cretaceous period.

‘At Coober Pedy they find lots of fossilised plesiosaur bones, but here we find fossilised plesiosaur teeth. Like modern-day sharks they swam up to the fresh water to mate, to drop lice, and then swam back to the sea. The behaviour was the same. That's what the palaeontologists think anyway,' says Rebel.

All opal is old, old, old. It was formed as water dripped down from massive inland seas through the bed into the earth, and on the way collected silica. This silica-laden gel eventually would reach a cavity or creep out along a hard bed or infiltrate and ultimately replace another mineral. Some of that water remains in the stone: three to ten percent of their content is water.

I say that I've heard there are three different theories on finding opal, and am about to start talking about box trees, which are considered to be one of the main markers of opal below.

‘Probably all three theories are wrong,' says Michael. ‘You're far better off reading what you can see in the land. It's all to do with what was.' He has a geologist's eye for deep time and he reads the land not from above, but from within it, interpreting the red-and-purple shadings of iron, the fall of the different soil types, imagining the sliding and settling of the silica gel under the pull of gravity. Michael puts away the fossils and brings out a cracked sandstone rock. He lets it fall open in his hand: two halves of a holographic crystal in blue and green, radiant and flaming. This is an opal nobby, and Michael cracked it in half with his pick. The opals are packed up: it is time for dinner.

We are sitting around the table eating Rebel's extraordinarily good cooking. Food can be all kinds of things, but this food is the cleanest, most delicious fuel for the human body. The savoury sprinkles, the homegrown vegetables, the Murray River cod caught by Michael and Rebel's handmade chocolates are all restaurant quality, which is not surprising as the couple used to own a restaurant.

‘When Rebel's cooking,' says Michael with deep satisfaction, directing his sweet smile at Rebel, ‘the food's always good.' Rebel smiles back at him with pure delight. Her competence on a range of fronts does not mean that she has no need of appreciation—a mistake people can often make when meeting someone like Rebel. It is too easy to forget that people try hardest when they care most—and caring most means you are also at your most vulnerable. Rebel cares a great deal, does many different kinds of work, and appears intimidatingly competent no matter how much she tries to show her journey with all her failures. But she is sustained in her work by Michael, who sees what it all costs, how hard she tries, how bravely she risks and how deeply she feels. Michael's loving praise is vital to her.

Their restaurant, Dig In, won state awards for innovation in tourism and it won regional awards for the excellence of the food. When they tell me they gave the restaurant away, it is clear to me that I have only scratched the surface in my understanding of what motivates Rebel and Michael.

Rebel is clearly multi-talented. I find I can cast her like a great character actor—those women who play the unusual and eccentric characters but are almost unrecognisable from part to part. Her bone structure is of the grand-dame type, but her colouring is soft—she's not a redhead, not blonde, nor brunette, but between them all. Her eyes are a rich Mediterranean blue. I'd happily cast her as the journo with deep networks, the too-smart-for-her-own-good kid, the fired-up self-starter flying by the seat of her pants, the soft-eyed wise woman, the lonely girl, the business guru, the powerful community organiser and advocate, the wild child, the timely hostess who can add grace to any occasion, the spirited cook-gardener—and all of these things she's been and is. It is no wonder that figuring out who she was meant to be, and what she was meant to do in the world, were so very difficult for her.

I ask—and apparently everyone does—if Rebel is her birth name. It is. Her mother thought it sounded both feminine and strong. Neither she nor Rebel's dad shared the view of others that the name has connotations of ‘wildness' and ‘naughtiness' and were surprised by the criticism of their little girl's name that flew around their farming district and friendship circles. However, Rebel isn't rebellious in the ‘naughty' sense. She's a non-conformist, a trailblazer and an innovator, far more proactive than she is reactive.

A country childhood provides a love of nature that will give lifelong comfort and balance, and it teaches children how to work hard and to keep going even when tired or sore. It also teaches children to look for those counterbalances and comforts early, because a farm upbringing means that you know about suffering, compromise, uncertainty and death almost from the beginning. When such a rich, complex life experience is made available to the kind of person Rebel is—perceptive, empathic, passionate, sensitive, motivated—the end result is a child who has seen more, thought more, cared more, felt more and hurt more than other children their age. Such children move into the halfway house between adulthood and childhood much earlier, and are out of synch with their peers. It is therefore no shock to learn that at eight years old Rebel was raising money for charity.

She had a happy childhood on the family farm—and the farm became even more important to her as a teenager. Her parents put their children on the payroll very early and this decision helped meet Rebel's need to be valued for what she could give. The unconditional love of family members and the real physical effort in the natural world gave her a break from the restless emotional long days of unhooking and reweaving her thoughts to see if she could discern who she was. It was not something she seemed able to discover at school. Having friends accept you for who you are is vital for a young person's mental health. When you are innately different—and a child who initiates raising money at the age of eight may be admirable but is certainly unusual—those differences typically are most painful in the teenage years. Finding a ‘tribe' or subculture is the most common way of coping, but sometimes there just isn't a tribe into which you fit, even if you try very hard. Loneliness is something that you accept even as you find ways to blend in, to be silent and to sell an acceptable version of yourself, sometimes, even to yourself.

Occasionally this process of self-discovery is short-circuited by a focus on ‘what you are good at'. Our society so often confuses identity with work role, so this is not surprising. Rebel was good at articulating ideas, at writing, at advocating: surely then, she should be a lawyer. Work role and identity and future all secured in one word! Law also seemed to fit with the conviction others had that Rebel should put her communication and advocacy gifts to work in improving the lives of people who live in rural and remote communities.

Rebel left school in 1996 and then studied law, only to leave university after two years. She didn't know exactly the work she wanted to do, but she did know that law wasn't going to take her there. That was followed by one year of working, partying and generally not living up to her own expectations. ‘Self-destruction was a pathway I was well and truly on, but always with the sense that I was better than that—that it wasn't going to be the rest of my life, but maybe a blip on the road.'

In a resurgence of her farming family values—so rich in adult role and responsibility—she set her sights on rejoining the world of the grown-ups and making her mark there.

She applied for two jobs: one in Lightning Ridge, which had already impressed her as the ‘arse-end of Australia' and where she didn't want to go, and the other in the Kimberley, where she desperately did want to go. To win
The Ridge News
's editorial position required her to perform in spelling and grammar, which she did.

‘On top of this, the boss thought I might stay a bit longer than most and it turned out he was right.'

The job was offered to her and she held off a little while on accepting, in the hope of the Kimberley job. She heard nothing from them. Then, when she'd been at Lightning Ridge a week, living in her uncomfortable flat without air conditioning, the call came that the Kimberley job was hers. She didn't take it: when Rebel takes on a job her commitment to it is real.

‘When I moved here to Lightning Ridge I didn't know anyone, and I'm an introvert—running a newspaper, meeting people I'd never met before, dealing with them all day, it was pretty intense for me. For the first two months, after work, I just sat in my one-bedroom flat and smoked and drank and thought, “What the hell have I done,” and also, “I'm not going to quit.”'

At the age of twenty-one and three months into her first adult job, Rebel met Michael at the pub. Michael was twenty-seven and grieving the loss of his marriage and in particular regretting the implications of that for his two young children, Tori and Kyle. His children, and his ex-wife, too, were still in Lightning Ridge and he saw them often, but it wasn't as it had been.