Love In a Sunburnt Country

by Jo Jackson King

  ‘Frances and I love our story,’ Luke tells me during the afternoon, accurately reading my sudden qualms about being intrusive and wanting to reassure me.

  All through the day it has grown warmer, the sky cloudier, and now it is raining sweetly and steadily outside as inside Dad and I listen.

  ‘I grew up with a strong farming influence and struggles, much like Frances’s family. It’s made us similar people. We both know how to do without,’ says Luke.

  Luke’s mother steered her son out of school and into paid work early as his restlessness in the classroom began to distract other students. At eighteen, with his body developed well enough for the long days of hard work, he was finally able to enrol in shearing school as he’d wanted to do for so long. There, in addition to learning to shear, he discovered that there was a world-wide demand for shearing skills.

  ‘I started as a rouseabout, then I picked up the handpiece. I had an instructor—a very respected person in my life, he was like a father figure—who pulled me aside, helped me out. By my third and fourth years, I was off, travelling and shearing. I’d been away for seven months, came home, and then I was asked if I’d shear at this station. And there was a governess there, and that was Frances.’

  Frances too has a passion for wool and sheep, and like Luke she was a traveller.

  ‘I didn’t want to be a governess again, I wanted to do a wool-classing course, but Ally and Miles talked me into working for them for just six weeks—and I ended up working for them for eighteen months.’

  Being a governess is a difficult job in a School of the Air family: you are paid by the family and you must work to their satisfaction, but you must also work to the satisfaction of the School of the Air teachers who provide the learning program. As with any teacher, much of a governess’s time is spent preparing work so that the day flows smoothly: she must be familiar with what will be covered and have everything ready for every activity, whether it be a science experiment such as making volcanoes with tomato sauce, bicarbonate of soda and vinegar, or playing a maths game which needs counters and dice.

  Frances’s room was at the shearers’ quarters: a nice room with a carpet, well set up. It was April 2004.

  ‘I rocked up with another guy. We were both footloose, we arrived at the shearers’ quarters and we did the lap around—like a male dog marking his territory,’ says Luke, his voice full of lazy humour. ‘There was a light on, and we looked through the window and there was Frances in a lounge room, lying on the floor doing some bookwork.’

  On the same evening the shearers arrived Frances walked out of her room to find everyone sitting in the dark (in order to avoid attracting insects) and she went along and shook hands with everyone politely, and chatted, politely.

  ‘Was there only four of you? It seemed like hundreds,’ she says, deadpan.

  There’s a playfulness to these exchanges, which I had missed earlier.

  The next day, they say, Luke turned up to go shearing in a suit, tie and white shirt. Finally, I am going to learn just why Luke shears in a suit and tie. ‘Now, was this standard practice?’ I ask earnestly.

  Luke and Frances stare at me, as well they might. I did, after all, grow up on a wool-producing property. ‘No, absolutely not,’ they say.

  ‘Was it standard practice, though, for you, Luke?’ I clarify, still wondering if Luke might have worn a suit as a way of demonstrating his professionalism.

  ‘No!’ says Luke, baffled. ‘The weekend before I had been to a gourmet weekend at Clare with friends. It was a themed weekend—we had to wear a school uniform, and I’d gone into an op shop and picked up a suit, pants, tie and white shirt. I still had it with me and I didn’t plan to ever wear it again. And on Monday morning I thought, “Why not? I’ll go to work in my … suit.”’

  Even now it makes them both chuckle, and I laugh too.

  ‘Instantly,’ says Frances, ‘the story is that he’s doing this to impress the governess.’

  It is not clear to me if Luke did or did not wear the suit partly for the purpose of catching Frances’s attention. They are still teasing each other about this, but they agree that the real connection between them begins in a conversation some days later.

  ‘Isn’t it funny,’ says Frances, suddenly serious, ‘how sometimes something seemingly unimportant at that time and in that moment and in that headspace turns out to be the most massive moment in your life.’

  ‘So, there’s all this small talk around the table, everyone’s making jokes, winding down, and here I am, showing Frances some photos—’

  ‘—showing … off,’ says Frances, giggling and then apologising.

  ‘And I say to her, “You don’t speak any German do you?”, as if she’s going to say, “Yes.” I was waiting for her to ask, “Why?” and I was going to say, “Oh I’ve just got a contract written in German here for my next job in Switzerland.” But she said, “As a matter of fact I do.”’

  Luke pulls for me the confounded look that must have appeared on his face all those years ago.

  ‘I’d just spent two years in Europe and I’d learnt German to go and study at a German university,’ says Frances.

  ‘So I got my contract out and she checked it. That really broke the ice between us.’

  This was the moment when these two adventurers worked out that they just might have found a kindred spirit. Frances, who by this stage was helping the shearers’ cook, as she dislikes sitting down when someone else is working, embarked on a gentle tease. To rub in her unexpected knowledge of German, she wrote on Luke’s cling-wrapped bowl of breakfast cereal little notes in that language for Luke to attempt to translate.

  Their sudden enjoyment of each other’s company was not missed, as the property owners and the rest of the shearing team turned matchmaker.

  ‘I was sharing a room with a terrific gentleman in his forties, and at the end of the first week he said to me, “What are you doing for the weekend?”’

  Luke had nothing planned.

  ‘He says, “The Hawker Races are on.” And I say, “Oh are they?” and he says, “The governess is from Hawker.”

  “Ah,” I say.’

  The next evening Luke asked what Frances was doing the following weekend. She wasn’t doing anything. And Luke casually mentioned that he was going to Hawker—and Frances immediately (as he intended her to do) asked if she could catch a ride with him as she lived at Hawker.

  ‘Oh, do you?’ said Luke, gently surprised.

  This is all delightful listening and, after my lack of insight into the business with the suit, I’m pleased that this part of the story is at least much as I’d expected. As we talk, Frances is putting together dinner and glancing flirtatiously at Luke from time to time. I am now confidently waiting to hear of a mutual recognition that this was the right person or something of that nature.

  ‘Now, I didn’t have any sense of any romance coming out of this,’ says Frances.

  ‘Oh come on,’ I say indignantly. ‘You must have.’

  ‘We liked each other—’ says Luke, ‘—but we were living our own lives, having our own adventures.

  ‘The second week we had to knock off early because of rain and I’d gone home to shear sheep at a stud close to home. So I said to Frances, “I’ll pick you up and take you back to Redcliffe, and I’ll bring a meal.” So I purchased pork cutlets with bacon wrapped around them, some strawberries, chocolate sauce, some red and white wine and then, for a joke, I went down to the supermarket and bought the cheapest brand ham and pineapple pizza so I could say “Here’s tea” and throw the pizza down. And I did.

  ‘Frances just looked at the pizza and she said “I’m allergic to pork”, because she is. And what was my other option? Pork cutlets.’

  Luke also brought a posy of daffodils for Frances, picked from a family garden … but both insist that neither of them saw the other in a romantic light until much later: Frances didn’t want a boyfriend or Luke a girlfriend.

  ‘I kept a diary at th
e time, and I know when it first dawned on me that we might be seeing more of each other in the future—I wrote that I wasn’t sure that this was a good idea, because Luke was going to be away for big blocks of time, and it isn’t much fun for the person left behind waiting.’

  Over the next three years, with Luke away so much and Frances having done most of the travelling she wanted to do in earlier years, they kept in touch by letter and seeing each other just for a weekend here and there, making an effort to attend the same functions. Luke wrote to Frances from wherever he was working, sending her beautifully detailed descriptions of the parts of the world he was seeing. Frances shows me a photograph that Luke sent her before leaving on one of these trips, and on the back is written: ‘To a special person, thinking of you while in my travels, love Luke’.

  On reading that I decide then—disregarding anything Luke and Frances go on to say—that deep in the subconscious of each was something like a holding paddock or special shelf for found treasures. The time wasn’t yet right, but each, in the hidden depths of their mind, was considering the other for when it was.

  On one of these infrequent meet-ups the penny finally dropped for Luke. They were driving back from a party with a friend, and the ute hit and killed a roo. The young men were about to drive on, when Frances said, horrified at the waste and thinking of the family dogs, ‘Aren’t you going to cut its legs off?’ Luke could see the merit of this. But his coordination was somewhat impaired and, to his stunned admiration, Frances, in high heels and pretty dress, took the knife from him and swiftly had both legs neatly severed. ‘This girl,’ he thought, ‘is a keeper.’

  In 2007 Luke went on a shearing trip to the Falklands, and he asked Frances if she would like to come with him. And Frances, who had mortified herself by crying her eyes out when Luke had left the country on a previous occasion, said yes.

  At this point they considered the other person their official romantic interest but no-one, they say, would have been able to predict if they would stay together after this. A working holiday like this is often make or break for a new couple. This one made Frances and Luke—but it went well beyond that, showing them what kind of life they wanted to share. They wanted to live in Australia, but they wanted it to remain a journeying life: for it to offer, as travel does, a never-ending, life-enhancing supply of challenge, stimulation and learning. On their return the safe and financially sensible choice was for Luke to keep shearing and Frances to keep classing wool, but that wasn’t the decision they made.

  ‘We didn’t want to be stuck in that environment—it doesn’t lead to anywhere but another shearing shed. And I wanted a life on the land but, as I said to Frances, I didn’t know how to fix a flat tyre.’

  ‘The manager at Teetulpa Station, who knew what sort of person Luke was and knew what he needed to learn outside the wool industry, offered him a role as overseer,’ says Frances. ‘So Luke went from a shearing wage to an ordinary jackeroo wage, which was hard—but the manager taught him how to kill a sheep, to fix a tyre. It was a perfect apprenticeship.’

  Luke worked and learned the basics of land management at Teetulpa. Frances worked as a contract cook, coming and going from Teetulpa. When she was there she brought her experience of the land to help Luke out where she could.

  ‘We were there for twelve months, and we’d still be there if Richard [Richard Warwick, Frances’s father] hadn’t asked us to come back to Holowiliena,’ says Luke. ‘He was going through a hard patch after having a motorbike accident.’

  It is now time to eat, and Frances and Luke quite deliberately stop the story at the start of dinner.

  ‘We’ve got to tell you about the wedding,’ says Frances, her face lit by mischief. ‘It’s a surprise.’

  Having been surprised by the explanation for the suit and the progression of their relationship, I don’t really know that I want to be surprised again. Then I think, well, I read a lot of romance and I watch romantic comedies. I decide that I am unlikely to be surprised by their wedding.

  We finish eating, and Luke, leaning back from the table and smiling at Dad and me, picks up the tale. There is nothing austere about Luke’s face tonight—as he said to me earlier, he loves their story.

  A year into living together Luke made up his mind that he wanted to marry Frances and commenced planning. He had obtained and measured Frances’s favourite ring and, with the assistance of a good friend who was a jeweller, had the engagement ring ready to go. Next on the list was asking Richard.

  ‘We were driving out to fix the windmill. And I said to Richard—we’re talking about the weather and the sheep, it was a quiet moment—“Do you mind if I marry Frances?” He reached over and shook my hand and said, “Uh, uh … I’d be delighted.” Richard couldn’t concentrate for the rest of that day, but nothing more was said.’

  Nothing more was said for another month, as it turned out. Then, on the weekend before Luke left for a seven-week shearing contract, he and Frances had gone down to the Clare Valley for a birthday luncheon for Frances’s sister.

  ‘It wasn’t very romantic the way I asked her to marry me, waiting for the taxi, sitting out on the lawn. I was a bit nervous about it. I said, “Frances, will you marry me and be the mother of my children?” And she said …’

  Dad and I are riveted.

  ‘She said … “No.”’

  Luke pauses, while peals of laughter come from Frances.

  ‘“No, you’re not asking me like that!” She wanted me down on my knee and not sitting on the lawn. I got down on my knee real quick and gave her the ring.

  ‘The following day Richard and Janne came down, and Richard’s sort of looking at me. We were probably looking pretty happy, but we didn’t tell them …’

  ‘We wanted to tell all our parents together. We knew everyone from both families would be together at Christmas and we decided to tell them then,’ adds Frances.

  ‘So I was away shearing and she was away on a mining camp cooking. We weren’t really able to be in contact with each other, but we were thinking of each other. The moment I’d finished I was keen to get to the mining camp and see her.’

  ‘We knew we were spending the rest of our lives together by then,’ says Frances.

  In this beautiful, close time after weeks apart, at the remote mining camp on Mulyungarie station, they talked about their lives, beginning with getting married. The date was the tenth of December, and Frances was inspired with the idea that they should marry on Christmas Day.

  Why not? Both families would be together on that day and attending a service at Luke’s family church in a group. Frances’s sister was going away from Australia for a year immediately afterwards. Luke’s brother was back only for Christmas. Almost everyone important was already going to be present.

  I think this idea is delightful. After all, Christmas Day is a wonderful foundation for a wedding! The right food for a celebration is already planned and to hand. Houses are already swept through and made their most beautiful and trees are decked in red, green, silver, gold and fairy lights. People slow down to sing, talk and reflect together and to properly feel the emotions to which we pay scant attention in our daily lives: ethereal joy, belly-deep merriness, the ringing of ritual through the soul. Such days stand out in our lives like polished, lustrous, remarkable jewels—and they are strung on a different kind of thread to the kind we use to link the days making up the rest of our lives. The meanings threaded through a wedding day and Christmas Day are so very much the same—celebrating new life, announcing transformation and connecting with the world.

  ‘Lovely,’ says Dad. I can see he is not surprised by this choice either.

  Luke called Pastor Tim, the pastor at his family church, to see if it was possible for them to marry after the Christmas Day service. Sadly it was impossible, said Pastor Tim—well, impossible without a special dispensation from the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages, as thirty days must elapse between application to marry and the wedding itself. But Pastor Tim,
who knew them well, offered to write a special letter of support to the Registrar. Frances and Luke (still on Mulyungarie station) needed to collect supporting paperwork: her sister’s visa, his brother’s plane tickets.

  They did this—and they did it all covertly. This was because their other idea was that no-one (except Pastor Tim and Frances’s grandfather, who was too unwell to attend but loved to keep the secret) would know.

  ‘What!’ say Dad and I together. We are dumbfounded. We can’t imagine a wedding without every close family member pitching in on the cleaning and decorating, without misunderstandings and sortings out, without photographers, music, flowers, special outfits, people flying in, ensuring parking …

  ‘We didn’t want the fuss and bother,’ says Luke. ‘We just wanted the day to be celebrated for what it was, the joining of two people.’

  Frances’s contract finished, and they returned to Holowiliena on 19 December. On the twenty-third they had an interview with the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Adelaide.

  ‘We left Holowiliena for Adelaide not knowing if we could be married or not,’ says Frances.

  ‘We go up to Level Six. The Registrar walks out, and she looks just like a school principal: glasses on her face, severe expression. We think: “This doesn’t look good.” And she says, “What are your reasons for getting married?” And we go through them all: the brother, the sister, the no fuss—and then she says, “Why have you left it this late? It’s the twenty-third and you want to get married on Christmas Day.” We really thought we’d no chance.

  ‘And I said, “Well, Luke’s been away shearing for two months, and I’ve been cooking at a mining camp at Mulyungarie.”

  ‘And the Registrar blinks, her face lights up and she says, “Mulyungarie! I know Mulyungarie! My son worked there as a jackeroo. He was having some trouble and he went up there, he had the best time and he loved it.”’ Frances transforms her voice to show the passion and gratitude with which the Registrar spoke.