Outback Heroines

by Sue Williams

  ‘I couldn’t play very well at all, but they welcomed me,’ says Frauke. Slowly, she started to see the positives. ‘Germany was a highly stratified society and there, I would have just met other farmers. But here, I met people I wouldn’t have met otherwise, anywhere else in the world. There was a big variety of people – even one other German – and it felt like a fruit salad. I realised Kununurra could be a wonderful place to make friends.’

  One of those neighbours, Judy Hughes, remembers clearly the day Frauke and Friedrich came over for dinner. ‘I just thought, New people . . . we should extend the hand of friendship,’ she says. ‘That kind of thing perhaps happens more readily in places like this than elsewhere. It was difficult for her in that she’d come from a lovely home from a good farm in Germany. And, back then, she was very much the little wife. Friedrich was definitely the one in charge.’

  After all, Friedrich was the reason they’d come to Australia in the first place. He’d always had an adventurous streak, one of the personality traits that had proved so attractive to the then Frauke Seemann. She was a home-loving girl, born in Flensburg, a small town in northern Germany near the Danish border, two years after the end of World War II, on the day, 3 October, that was later to become the country’s national holiday, marking the reunification of the two Germanys in 1990. She grew up on a 100-hectare dairy, pig and grain farm in nearby Kappeln on the Baltic Sea, the youngest of three siblings. It wasn’t the happiest of childhoods, however. When she was two, her mother died, leaving her sick father bereft and totally unable to cope with three small children. They’d been married just seven years.

  He remarried six years later, but there was no love in the union, and the atmosphere at home further deteriorated. Frauke helped as much as she could on the farm but, when she left school, started an apprenticeship in housekeeping to become a home economics teacher. ‘Years ago, there weren’t a lot of opportunities for women, but doing that kind of work suited me fine,’ she says. ‘It taught me to cook, run a hotel or a hospital, and was ideal for becoming a farmer’s wife.’ She met Friedrich when she was 18 years old, through his mum, with whom she did her apprenticeship. ‘Love came later,’ she says. When she was 21, they married and had their first two children, Fritz and then Margaret, living in their own house on Friedrich’s family’s dairy and grain farm.

  He was restless and in 1971 took them all to what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, to work on a farm in the old gold­mining town of Shamva in the country’s north-east for a year. ‘He was a real pioneer and liked to do new things,’ says Frauke. ‘It was quite primitive and I was very homesick as I didn’t have enough to do there. You had to employ servants so we had a nanny for the children, who also did all the washing in the bathtub, a gardener and a cook. It was nice to get back home afterwards.’

  Six months later, Friedrich moved the family again, this time to a bigger grain farm near Lubeck, the largest port on the Baltic Sea. Frauke wasn’t keen, but went along with it, having the couple’s third child there, a son called Peter. ‘I am in one way like a plant that doesn’t like to be planted anywhere else,’ she explains. ‘I think because of my mum dying, if I found somewhere or something I liked, I didn’t want to give it up. But when my husband wanted to move, we moved.’

  The farm became extremely successful, but Friedrich was still looking for fresh adventure. In 1980 he travelled to Australia with a group of German and English farmers to take a look. He’d heard of a town called Kununurra, with a good source of fresh water, conserved by the main Ord River Dam and the Ord River Diversion Dam completed in 1963 to irrigate all the surrounding land. He flew there alone, fell in love with the region and returned to talk Frauke into uprooting and moving again. The couple even borrowed money to buy land in Kununurra. ‘He loved the sun and the very good soil and the good water and I think the seed of the idea came when he was in Africa,’ Frauke says. ‘He was a man with a vision. He could see the units of farms becoming bigger and bigger and he wanted a big farm.’

  But now they were here, things weren’t working out quite as they’d hoped. The real problem was that they were German farmers, trying to farm Australian land. Although Friedrich was ambitious, and bought three more farms, giving them a total of 1500 hectares, they didn’t really know what to grow, or how to grow it. They started out with mung beans and soy beans and, that first Christmas, Friedrich finished planting on 23 December. The next day, there was a massive storm that sealed the soil so heavily, the seeds couldn’t push through. And then the weeds came.

  With each experiment, and each failed crop, Friedrich grew more and more depressed. He’d so wanted this move to work out well for his family, and now it started looking doomed to failure. He’d torn them away from a farm in Germany where they’d been making a very good living to a foreign land that was proving so much tougher than he’d imagined. In 1984, Frauke, increasingly worried about his state of mind as she nursed the couple’s fourth child – Maria, born the year before – sent him to the doctor. The doctor declared there was nothing wrong with him, and prescribed Valium for Frauke instead.

  A month later, Friedrich shot himself dead.

  Devastated, but holding herself together for the sake of her children, Frauke tried to decide what to do next. She was sorely tempted to pack up and take them all back home to Germany, but something stopped her. The kids were happy in Kununurra, and it didn’t seem fair to take them away from a life they’d become used to.

  In addition, she feared if she returned, the families might express anger with Friedrich for ‘abandoning’ his wife and children, and she couldn’t bear to have his memory soured in that way. She was also worried his parents would try to smother her with their concern and pity, and insist on her coming to live with them and never allow her to leave again. The families back home even sent over a delegation to try to persuade her to return. She resisted all their entreaties. ‘I thought of packing my bags and disappearing,’ she says. ‘But my kids loved it here and I didn’t want to unsettle them again. I didn’t know I was strong, but sometimes you don’t know how strong you can be until the very worst happens.’

  The first thing she had to do after Friedrich’s death was break the news of what had happened to her eldest son, 15-year-old Fritz, who was over in Germany visiting relatives. It was the hardest phone call of her life. The night before, he’d actually had a dream that his father had died, and woke up in the morning relieved it had just been a nightmare. Then, the relatives told him his father had indeed died, but said it had been as a result of an accident with his gun. Frauke, instead, told him the truth. ‘Thank you, Mutti, for telling me,’ he said quietly. ‘Otherwise I could never have trusted you again.’ Then Frauke, despite her youngest child Maria now being just 20 months old and having no relatives to fall back on for help, decided to continue with that year’s soy crop and then perhaps lease the farm and sell the machinery. After that, who knew? With the two oldest children boarding at their high school in Perth, one option, as a backstop, could always be moving there.

  ‘I was amazed, really, that I coped,’ she says. ‘Death was all my young life. I was ruled by that because my mother had died. When a father dies, there’s often money problems, but when a mother dies, the love goes. I’d had no love as a child, and I was determined my children wouldn’t miss out. I wanted to be strong for them for that reason. My biggest fear was what would happen to the kids if something happened to me. So the first thing I did was to have a tetanus shot. My father had a cousin who nearly died just from cutting roses. I thought at least if something bad happened, I wouldn’t die of that!’

  Six months later, a man working on a neighbouring farm asked to borrow some machinery. Frauke wasn’t sure. She asked some friends whether she should. ‘Who is it?’ they asked her. ‘Robert Boshammer,’ she replied. ‘Oh yes, that will be fine,’ they said.

  The first time she met Robert, she thought he seemed a very nice man. Then she started getting to know him. He was of German descent too,
with great-grandparents who’d arrived in Australia 125 years ago. The pair slowly realised they had more and more in common, but Frauke was nervous about starting any new relationship. The words of her late husband, however, helped. ‘He’d once said that if anything happened to me, he would straight away look for someone else,’ she says. ‘So that helped me. I don’t know what his parents would have thought, but we were a long way away from them. And I believe the Lord helped me not to make a mistake.’ The couple were married in August 1986, just a touch under two years since her first husband’s death.

  Robert proved to be a great support for Frauke. He got on extremely well with her children and, together with Fritz, took over the farm and kept everything running at home. Then, despite being 11 years younger than Frauke, he was incredibly supportive of whatever she might decide she wanted to do. ‘He’s really allowed her to blossom,’ says neighbour-turned-good-friend Judy. ‘He supports her, encourages her in everything she wants to do, and helps her to flourish. I think her decision to stay surprised us all but she’s stronger than she thought.’

  In deciding to build a new life for herself and her children, Frauke looked around for something she could do. By that time, the Argyle Diamond Mine, just south of Lake Argyle, had opened for business. As well as producing white- and champagne-coloured diamonds, it had also become the world’s primary source of rare pink diamonds, which had fast become its signature stone. Other mines around the world have produced diamonds in a pink colour, but none have ever had the strong, intense pink of those from the Argyle site. Frauke wondered if there was anything to be done around those diamonds.

  After a lot of thought, she came up with the idea of establishing a boutique diamond business in town. It felt an almost impossible dream – Kununurra seemed such a tough, rugged and desolate part of the Outback, how could an enterprise like that possibly succeed, especially when she’d had no experience at all in making, or selling, jewellery? But she refused to be deterred. There were increasing numbers of tourists visiting Kununurra since the ‘discovery’ of an incredible series of towering rust-coloured striped domes, the Bungle Bungle Ranges, by a TV documentary film crew in 1983. As a result, the West Australian government established the Purnululu National Park, which quickly became renowned for its beauty throughout the world and was later to become a World Heritage Area.

  Frauke thought a jewellery showcase could prove popular with tourists, both Australian and international. She crossed her fingers and started out in 1986 with just five rings, a few chains and some bracelets, putting on a display with a friend on the veranda of her home. Tours of the Argyle mine were all also invited to stop off at her house. After a while, her showcases had become so popular that, in 1989, she took over a small part of a friend’s gift shop in town. When her friend left, she set up her own shop, Kimberley Fine Diamonds, in 1991. ‘I was 43, I’d just had a baby with Robert – our daughter Katrina – and I’d never done anything like this before,’ she says. ‘I’d only ever been a housewife and mother. I was nervous but it was a new adventure, and I’d always wanted to do something on my own. I’d married and had kids young and, as a farmer’s wife, I’d always been in the shadow of my husband. But now I wanted to do something alone, for myself.’

  At first, Frauke bought loose stones from Argyle’s office in Perth, and then had the jewellery made up in Perth too, and worked hard doing everything herself, from purchasing the stones, designing the jewellery, selling the finished pieces, handling the bookwork and marketing, and educating herself in diamonds to cleaning the shop. It was a big step to pay for the store and outlay money for the stones, just hoping she’d have customers. But if it didn’t work out, she told herself, she’d swallow her pride, close down and try something new.

  She needn’t have worried. The shop was a success almost from day one, and gradually became a cultural centre for the town, holding exhibitions, hosting functions and sponsoring community events. She soon added a workshop and recruited a jeweller to Kununurra and, within five years, the business had moved to new premises, twice the size of the old, with two full-time master jewellers.

  Everything was going much better than she’d ever dared hope. But then in the evening of Sunday, 9 January 2000, she received a phone call that froze her blood in her veins: her youngest son, 20-year-old Peter, had gone missing.

  Peter had always been a real favourite of the family. Everyone doted on him. A blond, good-looking, happy young man, he could be quiet and was reserved, but that was just a part of his personality. Most of the time, he’d go out of his way to do people a favour, or help in any way he could. He was always friendly, upbeat and cheerful.

  The previous day, the Saturday, he’d gone off fishing in his boat on the Ord River. And he had never returned.

  As soon as dawn broke on the Monday, the police went looking for him. The river was wild, and was home to thousands of saltwater crocodiles. If Peter had fallen in, or had an accident . . . it didn’t bear thinking about. By nightfall, there was still no sign of him.

  The police announced a major search party would go out the next day, and appealed for locals to join. When Frauke reached the riverbank, there were up to 50 locals already assembled, ready to help. It took all her strength not to break down. ‘I knew, at that point, that this was real,’ she says. ‘Something bad may really have happened.’

  They searched all day and finally, towards evening, a body was spotted floating on the surface of the water. It was Peter. And he showed no signs of having been attacked by crocodiles. He had, like his father before him, taken his own life.

  For Frauke, this was even harder to bear. Her husband had been going through tough times and had shown classic signs of depression, even though, in those days, depression was hardly known about and rarely discussed. Peter, on the other hand, had seemed perfectly happy, and had everything to live for. ‘He had given us no clue about how he was, or what he’d been thinking of doing,’ says Frauke. ‘It was a complete shock.

  ‘With my husband, maybe you could understand it, as it wasn’t going well enough here, but with Peter . . . no one knows. But we now know there is a connection. If a father has done something like this, then watch your sons! They do it and don’t give any warning. They can be very successful. They often don’t talk to anyone about it, they give no clues.’

  Her eldest son, Fritz, was also shocked to his core. ‘It was harder than when Dad died, and especially as Peter and I had talked about his suicide just the day before,’ he says. He was the most content person I’ve ever known. But I’ve come to the realisation that no healthy individual could hurt themself; I see depression as something similar to cancer, just with stigma attached. His death was very difficult.’

  Frauke had endured enormous pain before in her life, but friends feared this could finally finish her. Her family pulled close behind her, and friends and neighbours rallied round. She’d done so many people favours in Kununurra, she’d helped out at so many community events and donated so generously whenever people needed a hand, everyone was keen to give back in this, her own hour of need.

  Over 300 people attended Peter’s funeral to pay their respects to him and to support her, even though it was held at 6.30 a.m. to avoid the worst of the summer heat. ‘We had so many people here, and I did nothing,’ Frauke says today. ‘Everyone donated the food, they did the cooking. They did everything. Everyone helped out. Even when we were looking for Peter, it was horrible, really horrible. But everyone pitched in.

  ‘In a city, you would never get that. People don’t want to know. They sit in a train, and don’t even look at you – they look into the distance. It’s “Don’t come too close! Don’t touch me!” Here, it’s very different. We are involved, and we come together as a community.’

  Out past the dark fields of freshly sown chia surrounding Kununurra, up a dusty, red earthen driveway and round a clump of trees, a grand driveway suddenly appears leading up to a high, domed, cathedral-like building: the best house in town and
the place where director Baz Luhrmann chose to stay when he came to the Kimberley to film his epic Australia. A big, heavy brass door swings open, and Frauke Bolten-Boshammer stands at the entrance of her home, a petite, elegant, auburn-haired woman, barefoot and dressed in a brilliant pink ruffled-silk dress. There’s been too much black in her life; these days, she likes to wear vibrant colour.

  Her house is a reflection of her meticulous good taste. The ceilings are high, there are floor-to-ceiling glass doors opening up to the veranda overlooking the Ord River, and the walls are hung with big, bold works of art. She points out a painting displayed on an easel at the entrance to the lounge room. It’s of her and Robert laughing, and was painted by their 22-year-old daughter Katrina, who’s studying Fine Art at Curtin University. Frauke’s a very proud mother.

  These days, Frauke is also one of the biggest success stories of the Kimberley. A pioneer entrepreneur and an astute businesswoman, she’s among Australia’s largest suppliers of the rarest diamond in the world, the exquisite pink diamond. Her Kimberley Fine Diamonds now employs three full-time jewellers and two apprentices, and takes up a whole block in Kununurra – a proud landmark of the town.

  ‘She’s an amazing businesswoman with great foresight and she treats all her staff like family,’ says her business manager, Julie Cornish. ‘She has a good relationship with customers too, and always sees the good in people. She’s had so much sadness in her life, and can never think of Peter without tears welling up in her eyes, but she’s so positive all the time. If someone is going through hardship, she always wants to help. She has this saying: “Never begin to give up, and never give up beginning”, and she really lives by that.’

  Fritz agrees and says it was quite amazing that she’d even made that first decision, all those years ago, to stay in Australia. ‘It would have been much easier and safer to pack up and go back to Germany,’ he says. ‘But she was really courageous and didn’t want the pity or to unsettle her children. That was a good decision. She was also brave in being prepared to marry again. Her strength of character has made her a very good role model. I think she’s never recovered from Peter’s death, but has learnt to live with it.’