Love In a Sunburnt Country (31 page)

Tim had been made manager of the Moora office. In short order he'd created an office in the coastal town of Jurien (closer to the Western Midlands). He then demoted himself to take on the tagasaste project and spend his days working alongside the West Midland farmers. Sophie and Jade were just entering primary school when the family moved to Jurien. It was at this time that Tim's sons Scott and David came to live with them. The two boys were just entering high school.

‘Everyone got on great,' says Tania. ‘The boys were keen to join in with everything and they loved the girls, and the girls loved their big brothers.'

It was a very happy time in the Wiley home. The beaches laid out their wealth at the children's feet. The older two cared for the younger two: books were shared, play equipment was made and pictures were drawn.

And at work the tagasaste project was soon successful—once the fertilising schedule was fine-tuned, the tagasaste grew, grass grew, soil stabilised and there was enough grass growing for the farmer to run stock profitably. Less enjoyable was the reaction from the industry experts who had felt nothing would work.

‘Once we started having success, they all got upset. They all expected it to fail. That was really handy initially. Because they did not expect success, they didn't care what I did. But then some of them really gave me curry, they tried to stop the project, tried to stop me talking to farmers …'

Where Tania had shown that the human heart can repair and grow afresh, Tim had shown that the same thing can happen with land. The revitalisation of the ecosystems, economy and community of the West Midlands, beginning with the change in the farming system, is one of the great success stories in Australian agriculture.

One long-acknowledged fact from marriage research is how very similar spouses are in terms of intelligence. At the time Tim was engaged in his world-changing radical-action research, Tania was working in the crayfish factory in Jurien or at the supermarket.

‘I didn't marry my wife for her brains,' Tim says at the beginning of this story. Tania laughs. Of course, when you marry a person you marry all of them—Tania's brains cannot be separated from Tania's quick reasoning, her ability to see when change is required and from there make those changes—but I know what he means. Passion, not rationality, brought these two together.

‘But there's a story that's got to be told. I'm just too old for the computer, ay? I just missed it at high school, just missed it at university and when I worked in private industry I missed it there. I'd never touched a computer. So when I joined the Agriculture Department in Moora they gave me a room with a desk and sitting on the desk was a computer and I'd never used one before. I've got this nice young fellow in the office with me, Tom, and I said, “Okay, how do you work this thing, where's the on button?”'

Eventually convinced that Tim wasn't kidding, Tom taught him how to turn on the computer and operate it. Tim did learn to be competent in using the computer, but when it crashed, as it frequently did, he was undone. Back he would go to the young fellow, or to the nearby vet, who was also a computer nerd.

‘So I could drive it—but I couldn't fix it. A bit like the stereotypical woman who learns to drive a car but has no idea what's under the bonnet. I was like that with a computer. When I escaped to Jurien I had an office at home and a computer there. Tania used to bring me a coffee in the office. It had been there a while when it crashed.

‘I have no tolerance for computers. I tried a few things and got upset, went into a rage and stormed out through the kitchen. Tania said to me, “What are you doing?” I said, “Bloody computers, it won't work, I'm going to use it for an anchor.” So she said, “Can I have a look at it, see if I can fix it?” I said, “Don't be stupid, you've never touched a computer, you won't know what to do.” I had no idea of her talents or capabilities. She said, “Oh, go on, let me,” and she went in. About ten minutes later she came out and said, “I've fixed it.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “I've fixed it.” I said, “You can't have. You've never touched a computer before, you've only watched me with it.”

‘So she'd just watched me use it and she'd figured it out. I couldn't believe it. I'd married a computer genius. So I went down to the pub and I was bragging to all the boys about this smart woman I'd married. And it turns out all these people had bought computers and there was no computer technician in town. She ended up fixing all their computers.'

Nothing in Tania's final years of education had prepared her for this kind of technical work—or, indeed, for work at all.

‘I didn't think Broome was a racist town, but there was this racism in the institutions, this belief that black people are stupid. Coming from outside it really struck me,' says Tim.

Whereas Tim had been encouraged to go to university, no such encouragement was provided to Tania. Her concluding years of school prepared her instead for a future on the dole. And the situation hasn't changed, she says. This lack of expectation on the part of our society is not just the “absence” it is so often described as in the media. It is, instead, an active anticipation by some teachers that black children and teenagers will fail. So marked is this that sometimes a success story right in front of them does not even enter their consciousness.

Tania tells the story of a school reunion she attended with her brother.

‘The principal was asking my brother next to me what he was doing. And my brother said, “Oh you should ask Tania about her work, she's working for the University of Western Australia,” and the principal just wasn't interested.'

Expectations do count. Very rarely does anyone do anything without a cheer squad of family and friends who believe in them. Australian society as a whole tends to believe in the Tims of this world: the white middle-class males. Our expectations of our Tanias—the black women who are unaware of their own potential—are often actively negative. For Tania to learn that society was wrong about her, required the intervention of people powerful enough to dispel her assumptions about herself. Tim's stunned pride in her computer wizardry was the start of her journey of learning what she was capable of. For the first time Tania began to apply for technical and administrative positions.

Not one of these applications was successful.

‘Everyone saw me as a checkout chick or a barmaid or someone who wrapped crayfish. When I applied for another kind of job the assumption was that I wouldn't have a clue. I found it really hard. I knew I could do the other jobs. So I had to stop work for a whole year. Then I started applying again and I got a job working at the telecentre. I messed around with lots of computers there and I really gained skills. If they asked me if I could fix it I would say, “No worries,” and then I'd mess around for forty to fifty minutes and I'd finally work it out. I was pretty much self-taught with computers.'

Tim is still castigating himself for his lack of knowledge of Tania's capabilities.

‘Now I think it's a form of child abuse, these low expectations … all these guys out in the bush who can speak five languages and we call them uneducated,' he says.

‘But given my history,' says Tania, ‘with how I grew up, I probably didn't think I was capable myself either. It's been other people over the years who have said, “Tarn, you can do this,” and who have eventually got me to the point where I believed in myself, too.'

When Tim ‘discovered his wife had a brain' he was keen that she should have all the opportunities that had come his way—and the same professional experience and success he's had.

‘I came from a fairly poor family because we got wiped out with the earthquake. Lots of my relatives were farmers, lots of my mates were farmers' kids, but my old man was the town mechanic and I realised that I didn't want to be a mechanic. Because I wasn't born a farmer's son I thought I could never be a farmer—that's another kind of cultural barrier—and so the way for me to be in agriculture was to go to university. And I was lucky in that there was free education and the expectation was that some of us would go, even though it wasn't that common.'

Tania had never even considered that university was something she could do—and she didn't start to consider it until she met Professor Ann Larson, who headed the Combined University Centre for Rural Health. This occurred in 2004 when Tim moved to a new job in Geraldton at the successful conclusion of the tagasaste project.

Ann's manner is warm and engaging, but you can also almost feel the air around her pulsing with thought. She holds vast data fields of people and priorities and possibilities in her head and all the time she is juggling them to find the best fit for the best result. And she cares. Her academic background is simply a tool: she never forgets that it is people away from the big cities that she serves. The job she eventually hired Tania for was one she'd never been able to fill satisfactorily.

‘We asked about video-conferencing. Tania told us that she got the youth in different towns to play charades together,' says Ann. The job was Tania's from that moment. ‘Right then and there I knew I wanted someone who would think of things no-one else on my team could think of—and Tania kept doing it.'

‘I was told they interviewed a lot of people with academic backgrounds,' says Tania. ‘I was the only one who didn't have this. But Ann saw something in me and loved my community-development experience. I thank the stars that I was able to meet people like her who gave me the support to help me grow.'

Before long Ann was urging Tania to consider studying at university herself.

‘With Ann's support I started studying externally: an arts degree, majoring in community development.'

Tim had come to Geraldton hoping to find yet more new frontiers in agriculture—to be part of perceiving and taking up new opportunities to revitalise land and the farmers' profits, sustain rural communities and create a healthier planet. In short order he, along with many others in the agricultural community, had identified just such an opportunity. Five years later, in rage, in disappointment so acute he could have wept, it became the issue over which he would resign.

‘It should have been a no-brainer,' he says. The opportunity he saw was for farmers to store carbon in their soil, and to be paid for doing so. More carbon in the soil means healthier soil, and less carbon in the atmosphere.

It can be difficult to understand how one molecule (and a molecule so intrinsic to the creation of organic matter) can do so much good in large quantities in the soil, and such damage in large quantities in the air. The term ‘greenhouse effect' adds to the confusion. In fact, the effect of carbon in the atmosphere is far closer to being a one-way mirror. Carbon dioxide lets in short-wave heat from the sun: it also keeps in long-wave heat radiated out from the earth. The more carbon dioxide, the more heat is both allowed in and kept in. The more the earth heats up, the faster the deserts grow, the faster the deserts grow, the more carbon is released and the hotter it gets.

The carbon in Australian soils is half-gone after two centuries of European farming techniques. Reversing this would be a gift to the world: a vast contribution towards mitigating climate change. But the dollars to support the switch to the right kind of farming methods have long left the agricultural community. The famous phrase ‘riding on the sheep's back' speaks directly to the flow of dollars from bush to city. The heritage buildings in our cities and their surrounding landscaping, the establishment of universities and banks, the cultural life of metropolises: all were brought into being by dollars from the bush. As well as the dollars, what was exported—without ever being replenished—was the health of our soils, our biodiversity and our nutrients.

An emissions-trading scheme that included soil-carbon sequestration would have given farmers the dollars with which to reverse this trend. This was the big opportunity Tim desperately wanted to see made real. It has never happened; indeed the chance has retreated further in recent years. But back then it teetered agonisingly close on the brink of the possible.

While Tim was struggling with barriers to success, Tania, for the very first time, was not. Study was going well. Work was engaging. Now a management position had opened up in the remote desert town of Wiluna. This was a community and country Tania had often visited in working for the university: she felt at home, she felt she could do the work. But it did mean that she would have to live away from Tim and the girls.

‘Tim has never, ever held me back. He's never said you can't,' says Tania.

‘It was a tough year—I wasn't a great mother—but it was Tania's chance,' says Tim.

Wiluna is a country of circles: clay pans, spinifex rings and curves interlacing across the landscape, bushes sweeping their curves on the earth, grass stalks spreading out like bouquets into the welcoming air, ants' nests raised for rain. Close to the town site are the mines: cut deep in search of gold, wide mouths howling into space, with the pastoral lands and the desert hugging up against them like a comforting blanket.

It is in that nearby desert that Australia's most famous version of Romeo and Juliet played out. Passionate romantic love is an anarchic force. It goes against all the other reasons for marriage that societies have generated throughout human history: strengthening business ties or consolidating power bases between two families, reinforcing social class or social prejudice or demonstrating support for the prevailing religion. Traditional Indigenous society was no different. Rule-breaking in the name of passion was every bit as unwelcome in the Wiluna clans.

Passion (or lust) is as distinct from the deep romantic attachment it becomes as prose is to poetry. Whereas the prose writer is engaged in constructing a world in your mind, the poet is better perceived as an electrician. She strips back the protective layer from your nerve and with deft moves wires it to a living thought or perhaps an association you'd never make. Sometimes it's a cataclysm, sometimes just a tingle of contrast. Passion is like this: mind has gone and body has gone—it is just nerves, spirit, energy, touching. It is profoundly disruptive to society.