Love In a Sunburnt Country (30 page)

‘I remember telling Mum that Tim had told me he loved me and she said, “Oh that's good, he must really love you because I don't think he would say something like that otherwise.”'

Their attempts to understand each other's culture flowed in on the tide of their fascination with each other. In Australia there are many cultures, but all are in flux on a continuum between two extremes: traditional and modern Western culture. Traditional culture focuses on family, on the basics of food and surviving, and having faith in its particular social and religious beliefs. Modern Western culture emphasises independence and individualism rather than family, on pursuing interests rather than surviving and earning the money to pursue those interests rather than ‘having faith'. Where Tania grew up in a multicultural setting where people were determined to hang on to their various traditional values, Tim grew up in a monoculture where traditional values were giving way to the prevailing Western ethos.

‘I'm a Meckering boy. It was a great little town, but very narrow culturally. Everyone had the same history. Mostly bloody Irish convicts: and then everyone had been in the town for generations.'

Tania is Maori by birth, but like her mother and her brothers, she had benefitted from the inclusiveness of the Australian Indigenous culture.

‘Because I grew up in the road camps at Fitzroy Crossing, all the people I went to school with were Aboriginal people, so I've always had that Aboriginal culture in my background,' she says. Aboriginal culture is the closest and most important culture to her, the warp through which the diverse cultural threads of Broome are weaved, whereas in Meckering the warp and weft of the cultural cloth were all made of the same thread.

‘Growing up in a community where everyone's the same, you think everyone speaks like you,' says Tim. ‘The first time I heard an Italian speak English was a bit of a culture shock—I had no idea that everyone didn't sound the same. And then, when you as a kid think, “Maybe we are the different ones,” it's a real insight. You can't hear your own accent and I don't think you can see your own culture, you can only see it reflected in someone else's.'

From these early thoughts grew Tim's lifelong interest with what is divergent, what is new, what isn't known yet. Whereas such a gulf in culture can sever some relationships, for Tim the contrast between their backgrounds simply added to his fascination with Tania.

‘Indigenous culture is very different—confusing, until you start figuring it out. I like that extended culture of belonging. We have an exclusive culture where we do things for our kids but not necessarily for our cousins' kids. It's not wrong, it's just culture. Indigenous people try to build their families and include more people. We try to exclude people from our nuclear families,' says Tim.

Even agriculture in Broome has little in common with the farms of relatives and friends Tim knew from childhood. If Tim saw a pastoralist in the south, he wasn't in town with a seeder in for repairs, but with the nose cone of his plane. Even the hats here are distinctive: down south they are worn low and dark, in the north hats are pale and high-domed.

Tim's interest in the gulf between Broome and the Australia he knew best was contagious: in short order Tania wanted to see the Australia which had produced someone so intriguingly like and unlike herself, and any other Australias that were out there, too.

‘I'd barely been out of Broome or the Kimberley. Our plan was to work our way around Australia, but we had to go and see his children and family first. So we went in that direction,' says Tania.

‘I wanted the family to meet the new woman—and that went great. But Dad was crook. He had cancer and he was on the way out …'

‘So we just didn't go any further,' says Tania.

‘We were staying at Mum and Dad's and I wasn't working. I don't handle not working at all well, so I applied for some jobs and I ended up getting one with the Agricultural Department in Moora.'

The bewilderment Tim had felt in his first weeks in Broome, Tania felt in the inland country just north of Perth. Surely she'd left Australia! These undulating soft plains, covered in paddocks full of larger-than-she-had-expected livestock or strangely uniform heavy-headed grass—which was in fact wheat—didn't belong to the Australia she knew.

When they moved to the country town of Moora life revealed yet more cultural differences.

‘We had a discussion and decided we'd have a baby. We didn't actually think beyond that. There was no intention or discussion around getting married. We just thought, “Let's have a baby,”' says Tania.

‘I was keen on the baby, but I wasn't sure about the marriage bit, having had one experience that wasn't great,' says Tim. ‘I was committed, I had decided that this was the woman for me, that was it, but I felt we could do without the bit of paper.'

At least, that's how he thought he'd feel. Children do hold up a mirror to their parents every bit as much as being immersed in another culture does: suddenly Tim knew that he wasn't having his child considered a bastard.

‘Then I fell pregnant and I remember Tim looking at me and saying, “We'll have to get married now.” I'd have done fine without the marriage bit. It was part of how he grew up and where he came from: you can't have a child out of wedlock.'

They went for a traditional country wedding: in fact, the very first wedding Tania, country girl though she was, had ever attended.

‘We had the wedding my mother wanted but didn't have—I'd have been happy with a pig on a spit in the backyard,' says Tania.

Tania thought she knew what the traditional country wedding involved. It had to be a full-on rellie bash, a bang-up meal, all the trimmings and hullabaloo and she would wear a white dress and Tim a suit, and they'd drive away in the HQ ute.

‘So all my aunties, uncles and cousins, everyone's there,' says Tim, who is setting the scene for me.

‘My grandparents came over for it,' says Tania.

‘Joan is a master chef, she and her mates have done all the cooking and the food is in the hall. We get married. Photographs have been taken. Tania's about six months pregnant and she's hungry. So we sit down and have a feed. Then we finish and Tania says, “That's it, we're going.”'

Tim had one moment of utter confusion. Then he got it: the gulf between their disparate heritages had opened up again. Although Tania looked the part in her white dress, these were his traditions and not hers.

‘I had to explain—at our own wedding—that you can't just walk out at that stage of proceedings. The best man's got to toast the bridesmaids, I'll give a speech, then we've got the bridal waltz.'

Tania's deep immersion experience in Tim's social mores at her own wedding is a story Tim loves to tell. He's still laughing about it twenty-five years later.

Once Tania had fallen pregnant she had known that preparation for her child's arrival was going to take her into new terrain. Her mother's abusive marriage was also her childhood, and Tania had been abused as well. As Sophie grew in her womb, nineteen-year-old Tania tried to keep pace. A brutal childhood like Tania's too often echoes down the generations, vulnerability and abuse begetting more. Knowing this, she set about creating a new story for her children, and theirs. She did this through counselling and also let-in-the-light talks with a good friend who'd travelled the same path and knew that bringing such wounds into the open was the first step in healing them and then leaving them behind. Her daughter Sophie was born in 1992 and Jade in 1993.

‘Between having the two girls I went from fretting that they might experience my past life to knowing that they will be safe and Tim loved them and could be trusted. I've always been open with my girls about my past and if I had any niggles I accepted them for what they were and worked very hard not to stop the girls having a life with freedom. I gave the kids every protective skill in the world to address anything that was even suggested when it came to their bodies.'

The people best able to talk about how Tania achieved this are Sophie and Jade themselves.

‘I always remember Mum being very honest. What I remember most was not the fact that this past happened, but that the same fate was never going to be an option for Sophie and me,' says Jade.

‘It wasn't a one-time-only speech and leave-it-at-that deal. It was a continuous dialogue that was always open and developed alongside with us,' says Sophie.

‘Mum ensured that we always had a choice and although Dad was quiet-natured in my upbringing, he always supported our decisions as well. I knew I had the freedom to do anything. Mum was very encouraging of us being able to say no if there was something we didn't want to do such as going to the shops with my nanna. This may not have been the intention of the lesson, but I think it's always stuck with me since a young age that I'm allowed to say no and that this was okay and sometimes the right answer. Not only did Mum change the cycle of abuse, she also gave us all the encouragement and support that she never got as a child,' says Jade.

‘The strength my mother had to get through her childhood is something I have yet to see in anyone else and I have serious doubts I ever will,' says Sophie.

The girls are right to be proud. I don't know anyone with more resilience.

Children are powerful change agents. The directness with which the little girls shared their richly emotional lives shaped Tim and Tania's family life.

‘The girls didn't tolerate that Tim couldn't make it to something that was important to them. They would just burst into tears and tell him. At first he struggled to deal with all the emotional stuff in our household, but in the end he relented and just went with the flow and lived his life around us girls,' says Tania.

At work life wasn't quite so rosy for Tim. The role of the Agricultural Department is to support farmers to make more money. Where more money has been made, more support follows. Financially this sounds reasonable, but in practical terms this means that the farmers who most need the support of innovative science attract the least investment by the government. Tim was less interested in refining an established production system to squeeze out more income—it was the frontiers that appealed to him. He was (and still is) drawn most to working with farmers and pastoralists who were trying to turn around land degradation, who were adapting to climate change, who were trying to find new industries and were frontier-thinkers themselves. Quite close to Moora was an innovative group of farmers trying to salvage some of Australia's most marginal farmland: the West Midlands.

This was sandplain country that had once been covered in low shrubs: their dense interlocking roots anchoring the sand together, their leaf litter endlessly composting and humidifying the sand, pulling moisture up towards the surface for the roots of the annual grasses to capture. Overgrazing had seen the shrubs die, the sand loosen and blow, and less and less grass every year. Cropping had only made things worse. On top of the soil it looked bad, but there was a bigger, unseen disaster occurring underneath.

Healthy soil is an enduring carbon trap, but when soil is wrecked, as this soil had been, it not only releases the carbon stored within, it doesn't sequester more. A great deal more carbon is stored below ground than above it: the ratio is for every one tonne of carbon stored above in pasture, bush or trees, there are ten tonnes of carbon below. Degraded, eroded and bare soil is unpleasant to the eye but worse still is that which can't actually be seen: the earth unwillingly releasing additional carbon into our overheating world. Under their breath industry experts were muttering the word ‘basket-case' in relation to the West Midlands, and averting their eyes. Farmers were abandoning their farms—with the best will in the world, you can't make a living when one hectare of land feeds only one sheep.

Abandoning farming land has happened throughout history and it happens in waves. The emotions that go with this are often similar to those experienced on leaving a marriage. What was once loved now repels you. Farmers report feeling ill on some parts of a property—it might remind them of a particularly bad day or a tragic incident. With no hope of an income there's no reason to stay. Just such a wave of walk-offs had started in the West Midlands.

‘It was going to get a lot worse. It was on the brink of collapse. The farming system fails, no-one makes money, the community fails and it all goes to pieces. It's the triple bottom line—it's got to be environmentally, financially and socially sustainable. If one doesn't work, the other two won't. The only thing I thought might work to save the West Midlands was tagasaste,' says Tim.

The question was: could the lost native perennials be replaced? If so, could that heal the land? Tagasaste is a tall perennial shrub (not native to Australia), which is also good stock food. It grows fast. Its roots snake in deep, meaning that it can survive the increasingly erratic rainfall and hot, dry summers. Tagasaste roots capture and store nitrogen. More nitrogen in the soil then helps all other plants grow. The hope was that tagasaste planting could help set off a positive chain reaction in the soil so that it would become progressively healthier over time.

Planting tagasaste was just one part of this project. How stock was managed in the West Midland farms had to be changed as well. When we acknowledge that too many animals grazing for too long is destructive—killing plants and exposing soil—we also have to acknowledge that these animals must be able to contribute to ecosystem restoration. The right number of animals grazing for the right amount of time can till the soil with their hooves, fertilise it with their manure and prune plants down to their grazing points, thus kick-starting more root growth, which then powers better leaf growth. This is what happens in nature. In switching from annual grasses back to perennial shrubs, the grazing methods also had to change to support that type of landscape.