Love In a Sunburnt Country (26 page)

Australia's Wild West, as far as Cissy was concerned, was the Northern Territory. It was frontier country, cattle country, a place where horses were ridden every day. In 1966, when Cissy was fifteen, it had been featured (again) in the form of an article in the
Australian Women's Weekly
on the station Brunette Downs.

‘Flat and empty is the landscape, all 4750 square miles, but in some lights movingly beautiful.' A caption read: ‘The station keeps 1400 work horses.'

Only two properties in Australia were bigger, and they, too, were in the Northern Territory. However, it was Brunette Downs that had received the most media attention due to a recent change of hands and half a million pounds of improvements. How Cissy wanted to see it for herself! There were just a couple of hitches in her plan.

‘I had no idea how you got there, and women couldn't go to work on Brunette Downs if they weren't married.'

In 1968, when Cissy was seventeen, she met Max Priest, who came from the Northern Territory.

‘He was head stockman, a top rodeo rider. He was an impressive fella, older than she was, and he wanted to marry her,' says Bill.

‘I thought about it and I said to Max, “Yes, I'll marry you.” I decided to get married and sort it out later. I got married to Max and went to the Northern Territory.'

It became a steadily more unhappy marriage, even though Cissy's dream of living on Brunette Downs had come true.

‘When I left my ex-husband I said, “It was all his fault.” A few years later I stopped and looked back into the circle and said to myself, “It was half my fault.” And it was: I was young, I was naïve and all those little things add up to half the problem! It does take two people to get it right or two people to get it wrong. When you let someone do something, and let them do it over and over, you're teaching them that's okay. If then all of a sudden you've had enough, but you've told them for the last ten years it was okay … well, marriage doesn't work that way.'

What Cissy says now is, ‘If I think no, I will say no.' She is rigorously, ruthlessly honest with everyone, but most particularly with herself.

‘I found myself pregnant at nineteen and I thought, “Oh my goodness, what am I going to do?”' she says. Somehow she had not even considered this possibility.

‘I thought, “It might go away.” I thought, “I'll just ignore it.” I kept riding, I did everything I wanted to do.

‘But I really did have a baby. Vickie is the loveliest girl you would ever meet, but back then I didn't know anything about children. I don't know if Vickie would have survived if there hadn't been the nice ladies at Brunette Downs—there were these old ladies there and I used to give her to them to look after.'

Baby Vickie was beautiful and her parents loved her, but a failing marriage is rarely helped by the arrival of a baby. Cissy and Max's union became increasingly miserable. Despite the difficulties, Cissy still values those years.

‘If it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger. You have to make use of your experiences. You don't make the same mistake twice that way.'

Cissy met Bill while still married to Max and friends is all they were for a very long time. Bill, too, was in a serious relationship.

At this stage Cissy was employed at the homestead at Brunette Downs. She was overseeing the Aboriginal cleaning staff and her supervisor was the manager's wife, Mrs Green, who was to become a major influence upon Cissy.

‘Mrs Green gave her an idea of what sort of a life she wanted,' says Bill. ‘Cissy was very attracted to Mrs Green's cultural standards—far more attracted to that than to the prevailing cultural standard of the husband going down to the pub and drinking with the boys.'

Brunette Downs lived up to Cissy's hopeful expectations. And it was not, of course, the ‘empty landscape' promised by the
Australian Women's Weekly
. Cissy found herself in a world of ceaseless, complex activity with a tiny metropolis at its heart. Looking up, she could see the birds on their journeys between water, food and nest—flocks of budgerigars twisting and glittering like living tinsel hung across the sky, ducks in laboured flight and the graceful predatory arcs of the nomadic kites. At first light, out across the savannah, Cissy could see the cattle moving out to pasture and at dusk she admired their stately return. In her own realm there was the industrious community of men and women travelling in and out from the homestead, some of whom were becoming the kind of friends she hoped to keep for the rest of her life. Most interesting to Cissy was the homestead itself, welcoming and grand, clad in green lawns and tall trees, a city in miniature, with a movie theatre, swimming pool and laboratory, all on the banks of Brunette Creek.

The creation of a homestead like this is the product of many generations, and Mrs Green had all the qualities needed for her turn as custodian. She was a generous and gracious woman. This was revealed in her determination to take every imaginable step to ensure the comfort of all who lived and stayed in her house, and also in the way she gathered Cissy into the heart of Brunette's social life.

‘It was quite a social centre, Brunette, in those days,' says Bill. ‘The Duke and Duchess of Kent went to stay there. The winners of Miss Australia used to go there. And Ciss used to be invited to be part of any celebration that was on in the big house. Max, her husband, was always out in the stock camp.

‘Mrs Green took Ciss under her wing. She told her that the way you present yourself tells people a lot about your standards and Ciss aspired to the high standard that Mrs Green set, from how to dress and present yourself to running a house. That's part of where Ciss's high standards of tidiness and cleanliness come from. When you were cleaning the bathrooms at Brunette, if you found an open cake of soap it had to be replaced. The beds had to be made to a certain standard. If the boots were put out they had to be polished properly. It was very Victorian.'

The old-fashioned and formal way in which the homestead was run owed as much to the manager of Brunette Downs as it did to his wife.

‘Rumour has it that her husband was an ex-prisoner of war who'd vowed to himself that if he ever got back to Australia he would maintain a very high standard. And he did. He put a tie on for dinner every night.'

Then Bill draws out for me the parallel between the station manager and his wife. Just as Mr Green was determined to leave behind him those grim years in a prison camp, Cissy was determined to leave behind her very ordinary beginnings.

So often I am finding it is Bill who helps me understand Cissy, and Cissy who helps me understand Bill. Each enjoys the chance to talk about the circumstances that created this other person that they admire so very much. And I need the help. It is easier for me to understand people of my own generation or younger because I know the Australia into which they were born. Bill and Cissy's early lives were in an Australia more formal on the surface but less rule-bound beneath. In comparison, lives now are cushioned, and there's some barrier or another (from electronic screens to air conditioning to legislation) that takes away some of life's immediacy and its pain.

Nothing makes this clearer to me than Cissy's account of Bill's early years.

‘He was mature far in excess of his years. Bill had buried his father—literally buried him—and then his little sister. He had to dig the holes and bury them both,' says Cissy. ‘It wasn't a nice thing to have to do. He wasn't the usual young fella. He is an exceptionally caring man.'

Remarkable lives (where people's fortunes change substantially and they change them back through their own efforts) seem from the outside to be lived in episodes. Bill's life is one of these.

The first episode was a childhood that was in many ways made golden by the tenderness and warmth of his home life. The Brights were cattle people. His family left Charters Towers for the Territory in 1969, drawn by the opportunity and the freedom. His father had built fences for other people, then became a station manager and had finally been able to purchase Robinson River Station.

His parents' marriage was a good one. They loved each other, they loved to be with their children and to do things as a family. The bonds among them all were very close, as they are when you do everything together: the school, the playtime, the chores, the adventuring. These bonds are still there. Nothing, not time, not adversity, nor the entry of new people on the scene, has ever shaken Bill's family out of their caring for each other.

‘Mum made a special effort to show that there were no favourites. Nobody was more special than the others. We all felt part of the one team. Even us kids would do what we could to save money for Mum and Dad. We were proud to go without if it made things better for them.'

As well as her duties on the station, in the homestead and teaching three children, Bill's mother was also tenderly caring for his youngest sister.

‘The youngest sister got a raging temperature in Hughenden. They took her to the hospital and they didn't know whether she would live or die. It was meningitis and then she developed encephalitis. His mother prayed all night to keep her alive,' says Cissy. ‘She ended up with brain damage and even lost the ability to walk. Before she had been completely normal. It was a terrible, terrible thing to happen. They took her home and they cared for her.'

Despite this tragedy the family remained a happy one. They had not lost heart, and it was in 1974 that Bill's parents purchased Robinson River Station. It had been a whole-family decision to buy. Perhaps if it had been left just to Bill's parents they might have chosen differently—because his father had a debilitating kidney condition. There wasn't a great deal known about it and there was no internet on which to research these things.

‘It wasn't a situation where Dad went around looking for a place and had to have a place at any price. He was managing properties and doing quite okay without owning land himself. This was an opportunity that just came along and smacked him in the face. We talked about it as a family. It was the fact that all of us kids badly wanted to go there. Ours is a family that just likes doing things together—we just couldn't miss it. And any objective assessment of the economic circumstances would have told you you'd have rocks in your head not to do it. But there are many, many things that are well outside our consideration when we're making economic decisions that can affect the outcome.'

Buying a pastoral station is approximately equal parts purchase of land and risk. So much can go wrong, or right. It can rain and you can feed thousands of cattle day after day. Calves are born. It keeps raining. The cattle price can rise and rise, and your cattle can be worth far more at the end of the month than they were at the beginning. Equally, it might not rain. Fewer calves are born. The cattle price might plummet. Hedging against failure is difficult and sometimes, with the best will in the world, the cards are stacked against you.

Yet the gamble is always being taken. It is often said ‘to make a small fortune in the pastoral industry you need to start with a large one'. Even knowing that, people buy. Yearning for such large tracts of land is a very human instinct and a hard one to resist. Here before you is your own giant garden to improve: your dirt, your trees, your fences and feed, places where you need to add water or handling yards or more fences, as well as the dangers, places and mysteries you plan to explore.

With no school nearby the Bright children were placed on a kind of distance education known as ‘correspondence'. Workbooks were posted out, and the children had to work through them. Ensuring the children did so was the role of their mother, made all the harder by the appeal of a new property to investigate.

‘My mother taught the three of us on correspondence in between the many, many other duties she had on the station. Our schooling was not ideal, not because of any lack of trying by Mum, but because we weren't particularly good pupils. We thought we'd be far better off learning the things Dad was doing, out on the run,' says Bill.

Children often do learn more in a good conversation with an adult than in formal study. If, as well as talking, the adult is teaching them a skill that can be used instantly in the real world, no class on the planet can hold their attention better. In these years Bill was able to contribute to building fences, mustering stock and the occasional observation of animal or land health that his parents had missed. Nothing could have been more meaningful to Bill than helping his family and developing his skills, and I am sure his parents loved these times, too.

Having your children working alongside you is another of the great appeals of station life. That close engagement with your children is deeply satisfying. To know also that they have the skills to grow their own food, work a good day and be part of a team is wonderful for a parent. In this, at least, things worked out for the Brights, but in financial terms they lost a lot.

‘The cattle prices at the time were good. Dad knew the property, he'd mustered it and he knew that the cattle were on there. At the prices prevailing when we purchased the place we could have paid for it in twelve months. Dad had borrowed $174,000 to buy the station; 2006 square miles of country, with 12,000 to 14,000 head of cattle on it. It was like winning the lotto. But that was 1974, and the big cattle crash came weeks after we signed the contract. Within six weeks of having the place we had 3000 steers, bullocks and bulls mustered, ready to go, but nobody would come and look at them. They weren't worth the freight. It was a wonderful opportunity but at the worst possible time.'

A new episode had begun in Bill's life. When Bill was eighteen, his 39-year-old father died. His poor health had been caused by a highly heritable condition called polycystic kidney disease.

‘It was in a big rain, the police flew out with a body bag, and said, “Yeah you can bury him,” and they flew back to town,' says Cissy.