Love In a Sunburnt Country (23 page)

Neither Michael nor Rebel was ready for the other person to appear in their life. Sometimes, falling in love happens anyway.

‘For me it was instant connection—I knew, and I knew that he knew,' says Rebel. They became friends in one long night of easy chatting, learning the bare bones of the other person's life. For Rebel it was simple: ‘I just knew I wanted to be around him, even though we were both struggling.'

Although she was younger and hadn't known Michael's kind of grief herself, Rebel's empathy was instant. And she had wounds, too: some people seem to be born feeling an existential grief at the pain and suffering in the world with the accompanying urge to heal as much of it as they can, and Rebel is one such person.

‘I lived next door to Michael's children. He helped me move from my flat, where I couldn't open the window, into the house next door so the kids and I became great friends over the back fence, even without him. They used to sing out to me at six o'clock in the morning, “Come play with us.” Michael and I were friends quite some time before anything else happened. Then the kids moved to the coast and that was pretty sad. I just think there was a lot of pain and unresolved stuff for him—and for me. I was working through who I was meant to be and what was the right thing to do. I was paving my pathway. We were never not going to be together, it just took some figuring out.'

Very gently and with some stopping and starting, they became romantically involved. Michael's sadness eased. In committing to Michael, Rebel stepped away from her self-destructive pathway.

At work Rebel's energy and imagination and networking skills were increasing the size, spread and sales of
The Ridge News
. Networking on behalf of the paper helped her engage deeply with the community of Lightning Ridge.

‘This place is incredibly giving,' she says. ‘Forgiving as well—I think I was quite arrogant and fairly bombastic and I came in a bit like a bulldozer and was on every committee.'

Being acknowledged for the irrepressible bubbling of new ideas that comes with her energy, skills and drive was important to Rebel, but sometimes she found that though her work ethic and skills were welcome, her ideas were not. Being appreciated for your work ethic and your skills but being disqualified from offering new ways to do things can feel as though you are being used. When only some aspects of your character are considered to be ‘socially acceptable' it hurts. Rebel continued to share her skills, but found that she was sharing her ideas less, as if the spring from which they bubbled had been capped by the disapproval of others. Rather than becoming closer to who she wanted to be, only fragments of that whole person were being let through—the closest to being all of herself was achieved when she was with Michael and the children.

‘Michael has never not believed in me and rarely said no to crazy, outlandish ideas,' she says. ‘I'd done a leadership program and I said to the others doing the course, we'll have the reunion in Lightning Ridge and we'll cook the meal for you in our new outdoor restaurant.'

There was at this stage no restaurant. Michael was mining and Rebel was working full-time as an Arts Development Officer. (In fact, all through the years the restaurant was open both were working full-time: Michael mined and Rebel worked in community development.)

‘So we built it. We built the kitchen out of shipping containers and five tables out of concrete. We decided it would be a camp-oven restaurant, and the night before we opened I thought I'd better have a crack at using a camp oven. It was slightly nerve-racking, but no-one got food poisoning.'

Dig In opened in 2004, three years into their relationship. They launched with capital borrowed from their parents and ran on Rebel's experience in restaurants from several years before, but the whole thing was new to Michael.

‘The restaurant was my dream—I came back from a night at the foothills of the MacDonnell Ranges listening to the didgeridoo playing under the stars. I said to Michael, “We have to do this—it's a gaping great hole in the whole of New South Wales,” and he said, “Oh, okay.” He wasn't convinced, but he built it, and he cooked every night, not enjoying most moments I'm sure. He did a great job. The old ducks loved him, the old guys loved him. It just wasn't his passion, but he did it.'

The restaurant, even though it only opened by prior arrangement, was made more complex by the limitations under which they operated.

‘We did the first three years without a stove. I prepped everything on butane burners. We did a wedding for a hundred and twenty on butane burners. Michael's mother was amazing, she knew people, food, production lines, fast prep. Whenever we had a group bigger than ten she was there helping us—my mum helped, too, and Michael's dad was the builder. We couldn't have done it without the support of our family.

‘We ended up with a set menu—always golden syrup dumplings for dessert. They're good, bloody easy and cheap. There's such a small margin in food so you have to be smart.'

Rebel and Michael's restaurant was about much more than food. They employed elders to tell Dreamtime stories, local singers to perform and their staff were eclectic and interesting.

Listening to Rebel talk about business models is illuminating. She loves the constraints of business as a spur to creativity the way a poet loves the limitations of a ballad or a haiku. I'd understood that running a business meant that you catered to the consumer, but Rebel doesn't think so. She believes instead in finding a way to locate the consumer who is interested in what it is you can do.

In terms of business she is bold. She simply commits.

In 2008, and using all the skills developed at the restaurant, Michael and Rebel carefully designed an enchanting, never-to-be-repeated evening for their loved ones. They married at Never Never Creek in the Promised Land. (So magical are these names I had to look them up: it really is a place.) Rebel was to receive the most meaningful of wedding presents on her return from their honeymoon—what she describes as a ‘deep learning'.

‘We decided to surprise the children, and they were so excited to see us and Tori said to me, “I really missed you,” and I just broke down inside. It had never occurred to me that I was much more than someone who cooked food and cleaned up for them. I loved them, but I hadn't realised that they loved me.'

Rebel and Michael closed the restaurant just as it was starting to really hit its stride. This was mostly because there were other things they both wanted to do more, but Rebel feels there was another element to her decision as well. She has thought deeply about this as interrupting a pathway to success is not something Rebel wants to ever do again. She talks often about mindsets: that a belief or a story can underpin a set of behaviours that can prevent you gaining something you want. In this case, she suspects she partly closed the restaurant because her mindset was that life was too hard to allow quick success. Their restaurant had been such a swift hit and if she had recognised that at the time, she says, she'd have had to change much of what she believed, to find new stories to tell herself about how life works. (Of course, she's gone to find and tell those new stories anyway.)

‘The restaurant had been closed for a couple of years when we worked out that having it closed broke our hearts. It had a good energy there, everyone had a great time, it was a good little business, it just was that Michael and I had other things to do. And so there was the plan to give someone else a crack.'

It was a wild plan, giving the restaurant away. It didn't work out as they had hoped, as a cost-neutral win-win. They lost money. Rebel and Michael say they've taken from this an enduring lesson: people are less likely to value something given for free.

Getting to know Lightning Ridge and Michael went hand in hand for Rebel. ‘Opal is Michael's passion, his addiction,' she says. ‘It's the love story, really: he's here for the opals and I'm here because he's here.

‘People used to say to me, “What do you live in Lightning Ridge for?”' She mimics the dismissive, critical tone in which this kind of rhetorical question was asked.

The risk for people like Rebel, who have stayed in a place or moved because of a loved one, is becoming a martyr to the situation: choosing not to find a solution, and instead taking advantage of the compassion their circumstance can create.

‘Lightning Ridge always felt like my home, and I adore Michael and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, but there was still a feeling that I should be somewhere else, that I couldn't just be here and love it. I wasn't consciously doing it, but I had bought into that “life is hard” mindset—I'd bought into the story the landscape tells. Once I let go of that people stopped asking me why I live here.'

So many people in rural and remote communities feel like Rebel once did, but not all of them manage to cross over into having meaningful lives in the place life (and love) has planted them. The idea that the worthwhile, important lives can only happen in the big cities—in Sydney, Melbourne, London, New York—so often underlies this. This is counterbalanced by the idea that Australian identity is formed by our wide brown land, with its opal skies. Bush dwellers might not lead the important lives, but it is living in hardship and isolation that creates the culture of place so important to other Australians.

Rebel once bought into these concepts, but no longer. She says instead that rural and remote people can live deeply connected lives, where things work out well, where it doesn't have to be hard, and also that those lives can be every bit as important as a life of making it big in a city. In support of this belief, Rebel co-developed an online community called THE (Thriving Healing Evolving) Rural Woman, in which rural women from around Australia find friendship, inspiring conversations and life and business coaching; it's a place to grow, to thrive—to ‘bloom where you are planted'.

‘My involvement with the Australian Opal Centre is a big way of blooming where I'm planted, and it is also about creating a catalyst for change out here. Through the work I do with rural women I see two very strong beliefs embedded in rural people: “life is hard” and “there's not enough”. And that belief in scarcity means people feel like they're in competition. So the Australian Opal Centre is also about calling out that scarcity culture in a very big way. We can cooperate rather than compete (and there are genuine win-wins) and we are worthy of this investment.'

Rebel is trying to secure the government funding and private sponsorship required for the Australian Opal Centre.

‘From just about every level of government what I hear is, “Your biggest problem is that all the players in your industry don't work together.” And when I workshop that afterwards I think: “What does working together look like? It's showing up, it's investing time and money, having everyone in the room, everyone standing certain in what we're trying to do and contributing. That's exactly what we're doing! What the heck more do they want?” And I realised I'd been telling all levels of government they need to sit around that table with us, yet they tell us that is not how it works. They say that each department works on its own. So while they say, “You must work together,” and we are doing that, they don't know how to work together themselves. So they can't recognise it when we are!'

While Rebel and the rest of the committee are trying to find a new way of communicating ‘working together' with government, they are not stopping there.

‘The community raised the funds to dig the hole for the building. If we could get two or three wealthy individuals to fund the centre, to take the gamble with us, to share the excitement of that part of the opal story …'

Michael also grew up in a culture of giving when you had something to give, helping out when you had time and supporting other people's dreams. Indeed, it is hard to imagine many other places where a character like his could have been formed.

Michael's parents, Lindsay and Heather, moved to Lightning Ridge after Lindsay, then a builder, asked his boss for a pay rise. The answer was no—someone else would take his job for that same wage, so there was no need to pay Lindsay more. This answer struck Lindsay as deeply wrong, so revealing of a society that had stopped valuing the individual that he quit in disgust. This revulsion propelled him to leave not just his job, but Melbourne. He and Heather hit the wide, open road hoping to find black opal and make their fortune, or if not that, then to live life on their terms.

Putting down a mine is hard work now, but it was even harder work then. With Lindsay on the crowbar and Heather on the shovel, they were hand-sinking shafts, down through the soil and shincracker rock laid down in the last few million years on their way to the much older opal dirt, six to eighteen metres below the surface. These days, miners use an auger for this work.

‘There's such hardship that sits around that story at that time in history, but also incredible mateship and camaraderie,' says Rebel.

This was balanced by the darker side of Lightning Ridge: rumours rushing like wildfire from claim to claim, the thieving ‘opal ratters' and the need to protect your find and equipment against their depredations.

That's the thing about Lightning Ridge. It's a place where people have made fortunes and will continue to do so.

‘Anyone can come put a hole down and maybe become a millionaire. People do it, they do the mining course and register a claim and sometimes they're rich and sometimes they're not. It's the last frontier for entrepreneurs,' says Rebel.

Opal mining does make some people rich, but it makes others patient, persistent and philosophical. It makes you these things, or it does your head in or breaks your heart. It is purely the province of the small miner: large industrial methods don't work in opal mining. Added to that, the rules stop empire building, because no-one can hold more than two mineral claims in their name.