Love In a Sunburnt Country

by Jo Jackson King

  We step further into the room and my eyes are instantly drawn past the forge and into a cut-out inlet. There crouches a set of bellows, twice the size of a garden wheelbarrow, reminding me irresistibly of a little leathery-winged dragon. It has been carefully mended by a friend of Frances who, like her, has inherited his great-grandfather’s business: in his case, upholstery. I am enchanted and astonished, both by their size and the fact that they are still here and because Luke has not just restored the blacksmith’s shop, he’s returned it to life. Visitors can watch Luke draw out iron and then beat, twist and twirl until it becomes a poker or a candlestick.

  ‘You want a high steady heat—no sparks!’ Luke says. ‘Frances’s great-great-grandfather William Warwick was a master blacksmith and his father-in-law was too. So it ties into the history. But I can only do relatively simple, decorative things at this stage.’

  We come to another restoration, this one using the original pug and pine. This method required minimal materials, time and effort at the outset, but needed constant renewal: more pug, more pine to fill in the cracks created by the contracting cold and expanding heat.

  ‘When we looked back through the history we found these old notebooks by Alexander Goyder. In there he called it “Scalp Hut” but we don’t know why. We do know that Holowiliena was a depot for wild dog scalps. People travelled to bring the scalps here and collect their government bounty. The family here was responsible for destroying the scalps so they couldn’t be bought back to claim another bounty.’

  In looking at the restorations we are seeing too the steady progress in Luke’s skill. Next on the list is the cellar which, like Scalp Hut, was filmed as part of the ABC production. Rock and mortar are set in the deep creek wall, and a wooden frame is fitted into the rock, wooden door precisely fitting into the frame—inside are river red gum beams and shelving, and on the shelves are bottled fruit and preserves. There are bottled grapes, cauliflower (which looks good but apparently tastes precisely as one would expect cauliflower and vinegar to taste), plums, peaches, pears and apricots, jams, marmalades and relishes—all made by Frances. The jars, the bottles and the red gum, all in the rich subdued colours of Rubens and Titian, glow against the walls of grey creek stone.

  The two pieces of work that Luke is most pleased with are his most recent: the pizza oven (near the cellar in the creek bank, and designed to cook with ambient temperature: the fire is lit the day before the pizza or roast is cooked) and Janne’s new kitchen. We gather there for tea and coffee with Janne and Richard, to learn more and to see some more of the family treasures. One of these is written and the others are worked in wood and metal.

  Luke hands us a beautifully finished wooden chain with swivel and turnbuckle, at the end of which is the bark-clad stick from which it was carved. This is some of Uncle Frank’s work.

  ‘Uncle Frank also tried to carve chain out of matches,’ says Richard. I find both ambition and attempt hard to credit, but perhaps Frank was inspired by a family-held curiosity of unknown origin: so minute and finely made that it looks like fairy work.

  In a tiny transparent box, nested in cotton wool, sit a carved peach stone, plum stone and cherry stone, each with a tiny neat plug. Richard pulls out the miniscule plug from the delicate cherry stone and carefully tips the mouth over a sheet of white paper. Tiny identical metal shapes spill out.

  ‘Don’t anyone sneeze,’ says Frances.

  Careful not to breathe, I lean closer. The tiny shapes are teaspoons, their shallow bowls and their handles plain against the white paper.

  How are these tiny spoons to be returned to their cherry stone? With the dexterity and grace which is surely one of the chief family gifts, Richard touches his work-roughened index finger to a spoon and then to the mouth of the tiny vessel. We fall silent watching him until every spoon is out of sight and the plug back in.

  The written treasure is a letter of proposal.

  ‘It’s from my great-grandfather Robert, who was 52, to his 31-year-old next-door neighbour, Edith Davies,’ says Frances.

  The letter has been lovingly typed out for modern eyes, including the original misspellings, but the Warwicks have (of course) also preserved the original.

  25 May 1860

  My Dear Miss Davies

  I am about to give you one of the greatest and I hope most agreeable surprises you ever get in your life. I can assure you I have thought this all over for a much longer time than you will think and have now made up my mind to know my fate right off and it all ends in this. Will you be my wife. I know you are far too good for me and have waited longer than I should have done to ask you this partly because I have always been afraid your answer might be no and partly to see if any one else was going to step in and be the lucky one. Now I think you know enough about me and all connected with me to be able to decide for your self. You know the life I like and am likely to lead is in the bush. Now I want you to think this all over by your dear little self and decide whether you think you could be happy with me and make your home with me where ever that may be. You must remember this is not a matter to rush into without thought. (For my part I have done nothing but think about it for a long time past) as it is for the remainder of our lives and it means that we must be happy or miserable together for the rest of our time.

  I may tell you that you are the first and only girl I have asked to be my wife and you are going to be the last. If there is anything you want to know write and ask and I will tell you and I can only say no matter what I have gone through in the past it will be gone and done with and it is what I am going to be to you and this will be what every husband should be to his wife. A faithful and loving husband.

  Now I don’t know how you will take this. When I started to write I thought I could put things in a much better form but I find I can only blurt out what is in my mind and anctiously wait for your reply to make me one of the Happiest or most miserable men on earth. You must remember I want you to consider your own feelings above all things and if your answer is to be no I would rather that you will say so right away and never mind me.

  You might think it strange that I did not tell you all this when last we met. I did not because I thought if it was to be no it would be easier for you to write it than say it and it would be much easier for me to take no on paper than from voice.

  Now My Dear Girl I don’t know whither you will laugh at all this or have a good cry but if the latter I hope it will not be through saying no. Above all things I would ask you to give me an answer as soon as you can and let me know my fate as soon as possible. Will you consult your Father and Mother about this before you give me your answer. I would rather you gave me your answer before consulting anyone, then I might know that you told me before anyone knew of it and afterwards you could tell them, but this I leave to you. If I am to be disappointed and you think for any reason this should not to be, do not hesitate, but wire and say so and I will pull through and no one need to be any the wiser or sadder but my self.

  My only excuse for all this paper is that this is the first letter I have ever written on this point and I don’t know hardly how to say what I want to. I did not know till I came to write how hard it is to tell you what I want to on paper and I am sure I would make a greater mess of it if I tried to tell you all I would like to. If I only knew what your answer will be I could get on ever so much better, but this I will have to wait for so long. I cant hear from you by letter before Friday 3rd June or wire via Pooncarie on Wednesday the 1st June this now seems ages to wait.

  Sometimes I think I have been a coward not to have told you all this long before now or at any rate before I came away. Then again I think it is better when I’m away with the uncertainty than have to have draped all the way back with your refusal and the home coming was bad enough with out that to make it ten thousand times worse and if it had been as I wished I might not have been home yet. I have tried to tell you all that you want to know and trust that you will know from this that your answer will mean every thing
to me if you decide to share your lot with me I can only say that I will be or try to be as good and loving husband to you as should one give well to a wife and that you are and will be the only woman in the world to me.

  I hope and trust that you will never regret having taken the step I am asking you to, but at same time you want to be quite sure what ever you do will be for your own happiness, as once you are bound down it is for life and there is no get away from it, and you are far better off as you are than it find out you have made a mistake when it is too late, or to even wish you could undo what you have done.

  As I write this I wonder whither this will be my last letter to you, and an end to my first and only attempt to settle down in life and if this fails I will never wish for another. What ever happens you can always depend on my being

  Your ever Loving and Faithfull Robert Warwick

  P.S. If it is to be No Could you simply wire me No and this will Condemn me to all the misery I deserve, and if we are to become engaged write me a long yes R.W.

  The script in the original letter shows the anxiety and feeling of the writer. It is not written in the almost mechanically neat copperplate of the station diaries; the loops are heavier and the words seem spilled onto the pages rather than measured out perfectly. You hear of such letters being drafted and redrafted, but I believe Robert simply wrote his heart out on the page just once.

  Phrases like ‘You know the life I like and am likely to lead is in the bush’ make sense. Edith needed to love the life as well as the man. Little has changed in all the years since Robert penned this letter. The person marrying into an outback life is taking on far more than just a partner.

  Robert’s letter brims with his desire that Edith will be happy. This is the very essence of love and as I read and reread it, I understand why she chose to marry him, even while knowing just how hard a life it would be. A photograph of Edith shows a woman with a delicate frame and a fine-featured, gentle face: her expression holds a quiet self-confidence in her wisdom and competence. The daughter of a doctor and one of his few children to have survived, I imagine her to have been clever, and as familiar with loss and suffering as the much older Robert.

  The rightness of Edith and Robert’s marriage is part of the foundations of what we see today. The property is still in the family. The business remains viable—Richard and Janne have paid off the debt. Not just that; under their management the condition of the land has improved.

  The debt is gone, but the maintenance of the buildings is now overdue, says Frances. That, she says, is part of the work for her and Luke.

  ‘Tourism works for us because Dad has done it [informally] for years,’ Frances says, ‘but we are not trying to change the world and make a big business out of it. We just want the history to pay for itself.’

  While the history tourism is only to pay for the restoration and maintenance work, the station must do a great deal more than pay its own way, and this is the biggest challenge facing Luke and Frances. Despite the pressure of a repayment schedule, Richard and Janne took great care not to overstock the property. This is now visible in the good condition of Holowiliena and the abundance of feed.

  ‘If you love the land, it loves you back,’ says Frances. ‘You know the saying, “The country is in good heart”? Holowiliena is always in good heart.’

  We go up to the top of the highest nearby hill to look down at the Holowiliena homestead as the sun sets: houses, gardens, outbuildings, shearing shed, shearers’ quarters, yards, sheds and wells. Hills encircle the homestead and the gently undulating land around it, and there are hills past the hills, and then yet more hills further back. It is like standing on an outer petal of a rose and looking into its deep heart.

  The Holowiliena family refers to this as ‘Woolshed Hill’. On its very top is a shepherd’s cairn. At shearing time, in the days before two-way radio, the shepherd waiting patiently with the next mob to be brought through for shearing would keep his eyes both on the flock and the shepherd’s cairn. When he saw a flag of a particular colour appear atop the cairn he would know that it said ‘Bring ’em up, Fred’ and he would bring the sheep those last few kilometres into the yards to be shorn.

  Out in the cold evening air, a little down the hillside from me, Frances is standing holding her latest find, a tiny piece of apricot-coloured ceramic. Her neat cameo profile is pale against the homestead in the darkening valley far below. ‘Look, more porcelain pipe,’ says Frances to Luke, holding up the pale fragment. He is instantly intrigued.

  ‘So, what’s that, sixteen pieces so far? We hadn’t found any until a few months ago,’ he adds in an aside to my father. Archaeology has become part of everyday life here. With her children, Frances is constantly digging up, sorting and storing pottery pieces, bottles, tools and wire. Three-year-old Stella, says her father, is like a bower bird, always spotting and then tugging at mostly-buried treasures from the earth, and taking them home to wash and store.

  Like so many people on a quest Frances has a sense she’s ‘being helped’ to find certain things or particular information: the timeliness of a find, the way details suddenly connect. It has been too serendipitous and has occurred too frequently for coincidence. She and Luke are clearly both waiting for an explanation for the use of porcelain pipe to emerge.

  It’s twilight now. We drive back down from Woolshed Hill to where Frances and Luke’s house has settled itself, between the deep creeks that run through the Holowiliena homestead in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges.

  It’s been a week since we left Holowiliena, driving back out along the windy road in the rain. Frances has written to tell me that Todd was digging near the schoolroom and found a much larger piece of pale porcelain pipe. Naturally, Frances, eaten up with curiosity and hopeful of finally discovering what this pipe was used for, stopped everything to dig alongside him. Next from the earth was the item in its entirety—stem and bowl, a pipe for smoking tobacco! Now, of course, she is wondering just whose pipes they were, and what stories could be told by the smoker.

  And I left Holowiliena with a number of mysteries of my own to think about. The first of these resulted from something that happened on our first night there, just before the children’s bedtime. Luke and Frances had together moved their children through all the bedtime rituals. It was time for saying goodnight when suddenly Todd made an announcement. Tonight was the night for Lamba to be put away. I saw Frances and Luke’s eyes meet and a shared decision instantaneously made.

  ‘Tom, Jo, I’m really sorry, but this has to happen now,’ said Frances, turning to us. ‘He’s been talking about doing this for weeks and if tonight’s the night he’s chosen, well, we have to go with it. Nothing is more important.’

  Lamba was another sheep teddy—not the rainbow sheep teddy with which Stella planned to console herself in Luke’s absence, but a rather frail teddy, with a gentle sheep-face and worn-away patches in his woolly coat. Lamba belongs to Todd: and it is Lamba that he has always slept with and particularly loved. Luke brought out a video camera to record this moment. Into this camera Todd, with Lamba clasped to his chest, told the story of their shared life together and explained just why Lamba needed to be put away. His face shone with intensity and conviction as he spoke: if Lamba isn’t put away he will just fall apart and then Todd wouldn’t have him at all. With ceremony, with grief, Todd placed Lamba in a white box. There are friends for Lamba in the box, other toys that are being kept safe forever and can be taken out for brief careful plays and loves.

  The following morning Frances reported that Todd’s first night without Lamba was very hard. Like me, she has wondered just what triggered Todd’s decision to act on that particular night. It was certainly not a tactic for avoiding bedtime, or in order to out-compete the guests in the house. With Frances I puzzled over it while I was at Holowiliena, and I have continued to turn it over in my mind ever since.

  Now that I have written it all down I can see on the page the moment that crystallised Todd’s thinking.
It was the moment when Stella showed Dad and me the rainbow sheep. I believe that in that moment Todd’s mind flicked ahead through time to a place when he needed to leave a child of his own with someone special to love and hold. Lamba was clearly the very best candidate for the role and so Todd needed to act, to make sure that Lamba would still be in good-enough condition to take the job on when the time came.

  Todd, like everyone in his family, empathises not just with the family he lives with now, but the family who lived here before now, and also with family members who are yet to come. This was the same impulse that moved Richard and Janne to turn the storeroom into a museum, and the same impulse that motivates Frances and Luke to restore the old buildings of Holowiliena. And this sense of an empathic connection through time is not something the Warwicks extend just to family. They often tell stories of people whose lives have been touched by Holowiliena in some way: Frances calls them ‘the Holowiliena alumni’. I realise now that Todd’s putting away of Lamba is yet another illustration of this family’s ability to see their possessions not as theirs alone, but as a shared heritage that it’s their responsibility and honour to preserve.

  The other mystery I’ve been thinking about is just where the heart of a property like Holowiliena is located, and how love, even more than rain, is responsible for ‘land being in good heart’. My first thought, encouraged by the topology of Holowiliena, was that the homestead is the heart. But for Frances it is the old office, where many of the keys to understanding, stewarding and living with the land have been recorded. Alongside these two possibilities I am now wondering about a third.

  Holowiliena has always been in good heart because it has always been loved. That ability to love the land and connect deeply to a place is part of the human condition—a trait that is stronger in some people than others, but as much a part of being human as making things from wood or writing poetry. It flourishes when people have time, when they are content, when they are not fighting to survive—and when they are in deep engagement with the land. For every generation of Warwicks to have loved Holowiliena so well, they needed first a deep contentment and ease in their relationships.