Love in the Age of Drought

by Fiona Higgins

  ‘I’m going away this weekend with my dad,’ he announced.

  ‘Oh?’ I replied, unsure what this might involve.

  Stuart and his father had been business partners since he first acquired the farm. While their relationship was good, it had rarely extended to whole weekends away together.

  ‘We thought we might drive up north and see what kind of properties are on the market. Dad’s looking to buy a seaside shack for his retirement,’ Stu explained.

  ‘Sounds great,’ I said.

  ‘I’d ask you to come, but we’ll be talking business …’ He trailed off with an apologetic shrug.

  ‘Not at all,’ I replied, sensing something was afoot. Stuart obviously needed to be alone with his father; it was not the time to press him for further information.

  ‘You just do what you need to do,’ I said.

  One week later, Stuart disappeared for three days with his father. I imagined them fishing and cooking outdoors in tiny seaside hamlets, laughing together by a roaring fire, or sitting in comfortable silence as they traversed miles of rural roads. I didn’t expect to hear from Stuart at all and hoped that he’d return refreshed from the break.

  I was bringing in the washing early Sunday evening when I heard the familiar rumble of Stu’s ute. It sped along the Warra–Marnhull Road, turned into our driveway and rolled to a stop beside the house.

  The driver’s door opened and Stuart stepped out. He strode across the grass towards me.

  ‘How was your trip?’ I smiled, unpegging a pair of football shorts.

  Without a word, Stuart enveloped me in a crushing embrace. He lifted me off my feet, holding me so tightly I could hardly breathe.

  ‘I love you,’ he murmured into my hair.

  I pulled away from him and searched his face. What had prompted this intensity?

  ‘Is something wrong?’ I asked.

  Stuart released me and stared at the ground. His distant, wounded expression brought to mind an injured animal.

  ‘What’s the matter, Stu?’ I asked with alarm. ‘Did you fight with your father?’ Stuart shook his head, unable to speak. I reached out and touched his cheek.

  ‘Look over there, Fi,’ he said softly, pointing towards the eastern horizon.

  The moon had risen over the Bunyas, a giant ball of orange reflecting the fiery western sunset. A solitary star hung above the mountains, suspended in the bush stillness. We stood in silence for several minutes. Eventually, Stuart cleared his throat.

  ‘My weekend away …’ he began, ‘… it wasn’t just about father–son bonding.’

  I frowned, a pit of anxiety in my stomach.

  Stuart rubbed his hands over his eyes.

  ‘We’re going to sell the farm,’ he declared. I blinked, struggling to comprehend his words.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘You’re a fantastic farmer.’

  Stuart sighed. ‘Remember when we first met you wanted to know if I’d always be a farmer?’

  I nodded, recalling that glamorous evening in Melbourne. At the time, with no understanding of Stuart’s vocation, it had seemed a natural question to ask.

  ‘Well, I told you then I wouldn’t be a farmer forever. The business isn’t working out as we’d hoped, Fi. Dad and I went through the figures over the past five years and it just doesn’t add up. Too much risk for such an unpredictable return. I could try to improve the situation by expanding and getting better economies of scale. You know, buying more country, planting more crop. But I’m not that sort of farmer; I don’t want to get bigger. I won’t even plough up my own grass country.’ He stared unhappily towards the eastern horizon.

  ‘If I loved farming that much,’ he continued, ‘we could just stay here and wait for those three good years in ten. But the drought’s taken so much out of me that even when it rains, I’m like a beaten dog. I’m just waiting for the next whipping.’ He looked at me with weary eyes. ‘And that’s no way to live.’

  I nodded robotically, shell-shocked. I knew that the past two years had been difficult, but I hadn’t imagined it would come to this. ‘Every year I hope it’ll get better, but it just doesn’t seem to happen,’ Stu continued. ‘There’s an old saying in agriculture – what’s a farmer thinking about when he’s harvesting this season’s crop? How good next year’s crop will be.’ He looked up at the evening’s first stars, distant and pale. ‘There’s a fine line between courage and stupidity, Fi. Enough is enough.’ He closed his eyes.

  I sat silently by the water tank. The faint high-pitched whine of mosquitoes intruded upon my racing thoughts. Certainly the impetus for change had been building, season after season. Stuart had battled the worst droughts in the district’s history, two unrewarding cotton harvests, the devastating incident with the spray contractor, his right-hand man leaving him, the economic pressures of ‘environmental’ farming and the vicissitudes of the price index. For all these reasons and more, Stuart’s confidence in agriculture had been steadily eroded.

  ‘But what will you do, Stu?’ I asked, uncertain of the kind of life he might envisage outside of agriculture. ‘What will we do?’

  Stuart stared in the direction of the Bunyas.

  ‘Maybe I can focus more on my international work,’ he said. ‘Half of the world’s workforce is farmers, Fi, and they’re mostly in developing countries. My experience base in Australia has proved valuable overseas before. Surely I can be of use somewhere in the world?’

  I reached for Stuart’s hand, my mind reeling. We sat together, hands clasped, attempting to imagine a future beyond the farm.

  Less than six weeks later, Gebar was on the market. It was midautumn and the bite in the midday sun had weakened. As auction day loomed, I fought an overwhelming sense of melancholy by increasing my jogging mileage. I ran in the late afternoons, relishing the rustling sound of wallabies in the nearby undergrowth. Night would close in and my eyes would fail me, yet an imperceptible pull would guide me homewards. Where will I be, if not here? This was my home now.

  One evening during a long training run, I was startled by a massive bolt of green and white light illuminating the clouds above me. I stood transfixed, my breath creating small vapour puffs in the still night air. Eerily, the bright trail of light streaked westwards, comet-like, before vanishing into the surrounding blackness. I marvelled at the sky, wondering if I alone had seen the spectacle. Ancient cultures would have interpreted it as an omen of some kind. What might that light mean, for Stuart and me?

  CHAPTER 20

  The days grew shorter and cooler and the autumn sunshine was replaced by the chill winds of winter. Weekly advertisements were placed in rural newspapers, announcing the prospective auction of Gebar. No rain had fallen for six months and Stuart was functioning in maintenance mode. In the absence of planting rain, the district’s farmers had been unable to sow their regular winter crops. While Stuart had retained some water from the January deluge, he was reluctant to compromise his supplies.

  ‘The water’s worth more to a potential buyer in the dam, rather than on the fields right now,’ he explained to me over breakfast one morning. ‘With water in the dam, the new owners will be able to plant a summer crop. Most of our neighbours aren’t so fortunate.’ He thumbed the pages of an old farm journal.

  ‘Well, let’s hope the water in the Pelican Dam attracts a buyer,’ I replied, with forced optimism. I scanned Stuart’s face. Lines had appeared across his forehead and his eyes were heavy from sleepless nights. Having made the difficult decision to leave the land, Stuart had hoped for a quick, easy sale. Now he faced the daunting prospect of awaiting an elusive buyer, in a time of desperate drought. Please let there be a buyer soon. Not for my sake, but for Stuart’s.

  The weeks collapsed into each other. Stuart spent hours in the shed, tinkering with infrastructure in endless preparation for the moment he might receive a phone call from the real estate agent. The call never came. As an antidote to hopelessness, I oriented my jogging schedule towards a tangible goal �
� the completion of a half-marathon. I’d been running regularly along rural roads for more than a year; distances that initially intimidated me now seemed eminently achievable. I registered for the Gold Coast Half-Marathon, due to occur in the week prior to Gebar’s auction, and committed myself to an arduous training regime.

  The day before the event, on the eve of our first wedding anniversary, we threw our bags into the ute and drove five hours to our destination.

  ‘It’s a pretty unusual way to be spending your first wedding anniversary,’ said Stu, glancing sidewards at me as he drove. ‘I’m proud of you Fi, you’ve put in a big effort.’

  I smiled, recalling our wedding day. I could almost feel the soft sunshine on my skin and the rose petals cascading over me. One year on, the farm was for sale. I’d never dreamed that we’d be selling the farm in our first year of marriage.

  ‘Good to see you’re still smiling,’ Stuart remarked. ‘Being a farmer’s wife must be pretty stressful, I reckon. Selling a farm is even worse. I’ve been worried you might leave me for some metrosexual management guru in Sydney.’

  I snorted dismissively, but could tell he was only half-joking.

  When we next stopped at traffic lights, I leant across the front seat of the ute and wrapped my hands around his neck.

  ‘I’ll never leave you,’ I said, looking into his eyes. ‘And the smell of WD-40 beats moisturiser on a man, any day.’

  As Stuart leant forward to kiss me, the driver behind us leant on his horn.

  The following morning I awoke at five o’clock in a friend’s unit on the Gold Coast.

  ‘Happy anniversary,’ called Stuart from the kitchen. Offering me two slices of toast, he unleashed his pre-race pep talk, courtesy of the iconic Australian film Gallipoli.

  ‘What are your legs?’ he barked.

  ‘Steel springs,’ I replied, repressing a smile.

  ‘How fast can you run?’ he said.

  ‘Faster than a leopard!’

  Thirty minutes later, I stepped out into the pre-dawn chill and headed towards the starting line at Southport. With a number plastered across my chest and a microchip in my sneaker, I joined 4,000 other crazies in the 21-kilometre half marathon.

  The starter’s gun fired and we were off, jostling for space in the bottleneck. My goal for the race was to keep to a steady pace of twelve kilometres per hour (or ‘five-minute ks’ as the pros called it). The first thirteen kilometres were relatively easy – I was high on endorphins and the camaraderie of running in a pack of thousands. At the fourteen-kilometre mark, however, I hit the wall (a phenomenon mysteriously referred to as ‘bonking’ by professional runners) – my legs felt heavy and I began to slow down. Sheer mental fortitude kept me going for the last seven kilometres, and I crossed the line with an official time of 1:45:10. While the record for the female half marathon in my age group was 1:13:20, I was thrilled to have achieved my goal.

  ‘You’ve got a marathon in you, for sure,’ enthused Stu as we left the Gold Coast, victorious.

  ‘That might be a tad ambitious,’ I said, struggling to envisage completing two half-marathons back-to-back. ‘But I’ll think about it.’

  We drove in comfortable silence. The high-rise apartments and man-made canals of the Gold Coast soon gave way to undulating coastal hinterland. Within two hours, we were travelling the familiar, underpopulated plains of the greater west.

  As we passed Jondaryan, marking the halfway point in our return journey, Stuart turned to me and asked, ‘Fi, can we talk?’ I frowned apprehensively. Stuart never sought permission to start a conversation.

  ‘We’ve had our first anniversary,’ he said, ‘so maybe it’s time we think about the future.’

  I grimaced, anticipating what was coming next. He wasn’t referring to any post-farm plan; he had something else altogether in mind. He meant having a baby. Somehow I hoped that my silence might dissuade him from the topic. Did I honestly think he’d forget about this?

  With my eyes trained on the passing landscape, I recalled our lengthy deliberations a year earlier when composing our wedding vows. During our pre-marital sessions with Dorothy, the topic of children had naturally been canvassed. But our responses to the prospect of parenting had differed radically. While I could picture a perfectly satisfying life without the patter of tiny feet, Stuart had always hoped to have children. After debating whether or not to include a reference to children in our wedding ceremony, we’d arrived at a compromise:

  The love that is born among Fiona and Stuart may lead to new life in children and a safe place for their learning and growing.

  Or it may simply enlarge the life of each and emerge as creativity, spreading out into the life of the community, in love for the world and its diverse peoples, modelling grace and justice.

  In reaching that compromise, I’d hesitantly agreed that some time after our wedding, despite my indifference, we would actively try to have children. For Stuart, this seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. Since moving to Jandowae I’d witnessed his formidable talent for relating to children. In fact, Stuart was considered a father figure to countless ankle-biters in the district. Parents regularly dropped their offspring in to Gebar for quality time with Uncle Stu. He kept them entertained for hours with frisbees, cricket, yabbying, kite-flying, treasure-hunting and story-telling. One family in the district even named their son after Stuart. It was all very effortless and endearing: Stuart simply loved children.

  By contrast, I’d always been uncomfortable around them. Unlike most women I knew, my biological clock had never started chiming. I didn’t feel all mushy inside at the sight of a baby flipping food over its shoulder. Children, it seemed to me, were noisy, messy, unpredictable creatures.

  Further, a range of more serious concerns plagued me about child-rearing. Philosophically, I worried about the vast number of parentless children dotted all over the globe. Why have one of your own? Why not adopt an orphan instead? I was suspicious, too, of the environmental consequences of parenting. Why should I add to the world’s ever-increasing population burden, or contribute to the global load of nappies in landfill?

  With Stuart, I’d always been completely upfront about my concerns. He knew I was deeply uncomfortable about the potential repercussions of having a baby. Ultimately, however, he was prepared to feel the fear and do it anyway. And I’d agreed that I would at least try to have a baby post-marriage. But a cold, dark part of me questioned whether this was fundamentally dishonest. I’d desperately hoped that somehow my feelings would miraculously shift and I might start wanting to have a baby.

  Now, one year on, I realised that nothing had changed for me since our weeks of pre-marriage soul-searching.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Stuart, reaching for my hand.

  ‘I’m still ambivalent about having children.’

  I winced; the last time I’d used the ‘a’ word, our relationship had imploded. Stuart nodded, his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

  We continued our journey in silence. We’re grappling with drought, the farm is on the market, and we don’t know what we’ll do when it sells. Why bring a baby into the mix?

  But I knew that the issue couldn’t be avoided. While I refused to feign enthusiasm about parenting, I was a woman of my word. A year ago, I’d vowed that we would try to have a baby. So try we would.

  The farm was passed in at auction. Few potential buyers inspected the property and fewer still placed a serious bid. Locally, there was little optimism. The winter rains, so vital for planting, had never arrived. The district’s farmers now faced the crippling reality of missing an entire season’s production. Globally, commodity markets and the cotton price had slumped to record lows. Confidence in agriculture was plunging, and the world was absorbed in global warming debates.

  Despite the fact that Gebar boasted water in one of its dams, this wasn’t enough to entice bidders. Stuart shook the auctioneer’s hand and straightened his hat. We returned home to Gebar, mute with disappointment. In
the subsequent weeks, several potential buyers circled like carrion birds, hoping to seize a bargain. But Stuart stood firm on a minimum price; he wasn’t about to raffle off the last fifteen years of his life.

  ‘It might take a long time to sell Gebar, Fi,’ he murmured unhappily.

  Somewhere deep inside me, a window in my heart opened and a little bird sang of reprieve.

  Four weeks later, I sat in a doctor’s surgery in Brisbane, shuffling through pamphlets about infertility treatments, pregnancy-related ailments and hereditary foetal illnesses. I knew that I suffered from a reproductive health problem known as ‘polycystic ovarian syndrome’ (PCOS), a condition in which cysts in the ovaries interfere with normal ovulation and menstruation. I’d been diagnosed at eighteen years of age when my erratic menstrual cycle just wouldn’t settle down. At the time, when the specialist advised that the condition would probably impede my fertility, the idea of falling pregnant had been hypothetical.

  I cast aside a brochure entitled ‘Keeping Your Pelvic Floor Intact’ and squeezed my eyes shut. My heart was battering in my chest. A door swung open and a 40-something woman wearing a white coat emerged.

  ‘Fiona?’ she called, in a disinterested tone.

  I sprang up like a startled cat and hurried into her office. After taking my medical history and conducting a physical examination, the specialist confirmed that it would be impossible for me to fall pregnant naturally. As she rattled on about assistive technologies, I wondered whether I just wasn’t biologically cut out for having children.

  ‘We’ll try you on clomiphene as a first step. It’s taken as a tablet; the success rate is 22 per cent per cycle,’ she said. ‘Of course, multiple births are a risk. About fourteen per cent of clomiphene pregnancies are twins. Less than one per cent are triplets.’

  I tried to remain calm as she advised me of the possible side effects of treatment. Abdominal bloating, hot flushes, visual disturbance. All of these paled into insignificance compared with the prospect of having triplets.