Love In a Sunburnt Country

by Jo Jackson King

  Is the heart of Holowiliena, then, not in a place at all? Is the land’s heart inextricably connected with the hearts of the people of Holowiliena? I think so. Care for land springs from the same well as care for children, for the traditions of welcome-back and welcome-in, for the history of the place—from the strength of the loving bonds of the people living there. The heart of Holowiliena dwells in those relationships: in marriages, between parent and child, grandparent and child, and even in relationships across time. When all is well with those, the land receives the best of care and is, of course, quite literally, in ‘good heart’.

  Anything But Mine

  Robina and Aaron Meehan, Outback Gypsies

  Waterholes are the churches of the outback; everybody’s place, and sacred. Often we picture these pools as small and deep and round. They are not. Long and curving, they traverse miles of country and seem to love human company: the cool mud is comforting, laughs echo down the water and up into the trees, and the fish hunt around your toes. They are the deepest part of a creek, holding water months after rain has gone, with lines of trees screening them from the outside dry. It was to the waterhole at Epenarra, a pastoral property in the Northern Territory, that Robina Hergenhan came at the end of a long shift. It was 2004 and she was on the last placement of her nursing degree.

  She wasn’t quite sure nursing fully satisfied her, but no other calling had appealed just yet. She could feel that disenchantment and cynicism were close but these weren’t the feelings that she wanted: she wanted to live unconstrained, adventurously and with hope. She couldn’t quite see how to get free to feel those things and, instead, her days ran to the rhythm of her work ethic and determination to do the right thing.

  On the love front she’s closed her heart down to make repairs.

  There is an Aboriginal community as well as a nursing post at Epenarra. The nursing post is staffed with just one other nurse for anywhere between 250 and 400 people living in the community. In addition to running cattle, the pastoralists on Epenarra also run an outback store, as most station properties once did throughout Australia. Epenarra is managed by Aaron Meehan, who left his home farm at just sixteen to see what he could do in the world. This has occupied his attention to such a degree that there hasn’t been time for girls, but, like so many people who work with stock, he is a great reader of body language.

  A good stockman, for example, can be driving up to the yards and from that distance discern the flighty, twitchy heifer with a huge flight zone (even if you are two or three hundred metres away from her, she’ll panic) from the ebullient, confident animal who will allow you to stand close to her and happily explore a new terrain to see what it offers. From outside the yard this kind of stockman can see the leaders and the animals who will always look for a lead from another. His job is to make every animal feel safe enough to explore happily: and he does this by watching what they say with their ears and heads, how fast they are moving and how quickly they respond to whatever he does.

  Robina had told the nurse who dropped her off at the waterhole that she would walk back, as it was only three kilometres.

  ‘I was in a string bikini and enjoying the water and sun on my skin when I heard a vehicle coming. I got out, got dressed because the nurse had told me that the local Aboriginal people didn’t like to see too much skin, but it was Aaron coming down, and he’d heard there was a young nurse at the camp, and he’d seen the ambulance dropping me off. He told me he was just checking cattle. It took me twelve months of living and working there to realise that there were no cattle down there and there never would be cattle down there to check.

  ‘We just chatted. People say he doesn’t talk. That’s just how people perceive him. They say things like “how did Aaron even know what to say to a girl?” But our conversation just came so easily.’

  On that day at the waterhole, with the sun on her skin slowly seeping through to her chilled heart, Robina was only months out of a difficult relationship.

  ‘That relationship should only have lasted twelve months, but with infidelities and separation and trying again, it lasted five years,’ she says. ‘And he knew how to talk to me, how to win me back in.’

  As a result Robina could not face the thought of having a boyfriend ever again. She was comfortable with lust and friendship, but never again would she walk the high rope of crazy early love with no safety net.

  Aaron didn’t know this, of course, but he was able to apply the skills he’d gained from years of handling stock. He saw quickly that Robina, just like a skittish heifer, would take flight with any kind of pressure. He applied none at all.

  During the week Robina continued her nursing placement at the Epenarra Community Clinic, but the rest of the time was spent having fun with Aaron.

  ‘So we met at the waterhole on a Saturday, and he invited me to come on a bore run on the Sunday, just to look around. And then we just spent the rest of my spare time, my weekends in the Northern Territory, together. We went to the rodeo at Tennant Creek, got five flat tyres on the truck and had to go to Mt Isa to get new tyres …’

  It was only when Robina found herself taking risks and flying high on the adventure of doing so that she realised that in Aaron’s steady, competent presence she felt safe. She’d not felt that way in a very long time.

  ‘At the rodeo I was drinking fire-engines—normally I don’t drink.’

  On the way back from Mt Isa Robina drove the ute while Aaron slept.

  ‘I sped up and up, until I was driving at 130 kilometres an hour and the feeling was amazing.

  ‘Every afternoon he’d pick me up to go down to the waterhole … and every afternoon the same song would come on the stereo.’

  The song, ‘Anything But Mine’, is a country song about a just-for-now romance. Robina didn’t expect anything else of her friendship with Aaron. When her placement was over she even rewrote the words to the song for Aaron, to celebrate their friendship and to thank him for their shared time. It was her way of saying goodbye.

  But Aaron had been quick to perceive what Robina had not—how very much they had in common. Robina had been raised on a dairy farm on the south New South Wales coast, Aaron on a cattle property on the north coast. Both came from tight-knit families of strong people who were quick to see what needed to be done and to do it without complaint.

  Aaron had left the family farm to make his own way in the world at just sixteen. His family had felt both dismay and pride. He would have been a great asset in the family business, and yet they could not help admiring his calm dedication to the future he wanted. This was not to have a farm, but to have a pastoral business. The skills required are not quite the same and he had understood that at sixteen. And he’d also understood that to find the right property he needed to have the skills and the dollars ready to go, but also be in the right place at the right time. Aaron believed that meant he needed to be living and working in the station country.

  Robina was awed by Aaron’s unswerving drive towards a future he had visualised in his teens; after all, she was yet to visualise her own. Aaron was far ahead of her, and not just in imagining his own future. He was already imagining a future for the two of them together.

  ‘I thought what happened in the Territory stayed in the Territory. But when he dropped me off at the Wauchope Hotel near the Devils Marbles to catch the bus back home he said: “Can I call you when I come to New South Wales?”’

  Aaron did call, and soon they were talking regularly. When Robina failed a final paper and had to postpone completing her nursing degree, he promptly offered her work on Epenarra. This was a platonic arrangement at the outset, but did not remain so for long—although Robina was extremely uncomfortable with the word ‘girlfriend’ and Aaron could see that earning her trust was a long-haul job.

  Some of this was to do with Robina’s past experience of what she now refers to as ‘limerence’ in relationships.

  Limerence is the nutty, yearning, frenzied, obsessive and unrealistic rush of
early love; it’s a separate state from either lust or love. Psychologists say that limerence has little to do with real love, and neurologists use another name for it entirely. They call it PEA Brain. The P, E and A refer to the phenylalanine that is the neurotransmitter responsible for the ‘high’ of new love: PEA is surging, stewing, vaporising and condensing throughout our bodies.

  Love of this kind is the ultimate mind-messing drug. You will think obsessively about the beloved, agonise over their feelings and pine in their absence. In their presence your heart races, soars, aches and somersaults. When they reciprocate, you are euphoric. When they don’t, you’re despondent. Frequently you swing between the two. Under its influence you will find it hard to focus on anything else, leading generally to poor judgment and impaired memory. Shortness of breath, sweating, stuttering and clumsiness and general anxiety can also be expected.

  Writers often use love potions to show the absolute absurdity that limerence induces. Think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Puck mischievously uses a potion to have each young man reallocate his affections. There can be no clearer statement that this kind of love actually blinds us to the object of our affections.

  As just about every authority is quick to tell you, a powerful experience of limerence is a very poor basis for marriage. In fact, some authorities believe that strong limerence is somewhat of a red flag in terms of the long-term health of a relationship. Limerence lasts from anywhere between nine months to two years—although times away from each other will prolong this. The best-case scenario for limerence is that the PEA Brain hormones gently decay, either setting the scene for a separation or for the next set of hormones to kick in to take the lovers into the next stage. This is the deep, quiet attachment of long-lasting love, and the hormone involved here is oxytocin—as it is between new parents and their baby. The worst-case scenario is for limerence to deepen existing wounds in your psyche, or to open up new ones in a previously healthy person.

  Sometimes limerence is triggered less by your admiration or desire for the other person than by your own vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities may stem from difficult relationships in your family of origin or another psychological crisis in your life. Generally, at the times in our life that we don’t really feel lovable in our heart of hearts we are at greater risk of limerence—it can be easier to fix on someone else as the cure for our hurts than to heal ourselves. If that person then goes on to hurt us in some way, that hurt compounds our earlier hurts. We desperately seek to re-engage with that person—or, if all hope is gone, we might look for someone else to love us. In this way the limerent person can become more and more emotionally dependent.

  Not every couple experiences limerence. There are many reasons for this. For example, a young woman hurt by years in a messy, limerent relationship, such as Robina, might do everything she could to avoid that feeling again. Robina was determined to avoid limerent love, but she missed entirely the significance of the scaffold of fun, friendship and utter dependability that Aaron had constructed beneath her. Limerence is not the only pathway into deep love. Lust coupled with liking also works just fine.

  ‘He was my boss for twelve months and he taught me so many things, and I learnt so much more about him like that.’

  She learned that Aaron could communicate clearly and deliberately without words by watching him work alongside Aboriginal stockmen who have another language of sign, expression and posture. It is a fast and fluent language that conveys volumes to the people who know it, but which the rest of us simply don’t see. She saw that peer pressure didn’t touch him. She came to admire his work ethic and his competence deeply. She learned that while Aaron isn’t traditionally romantic he could make a corned-meat sandwich shared on the back of a Toyota feel romantic.

  ‘After nine months together he said: “Can we say you’re my girlfriend now?”—he’d just waited for me to own it.’ Robina hadn’t seen love coming for her, but there was no doubt in her mind now that it was love that she was feeling.

  And it was in this same year that Robina met for the first time what she refers to as a ‘shape-changing demon’.

  Robina first experienced this demon as perfectionism. She was determined to be the ‘perfect station wife’. She wanted to be competent on the property and simultaneously totally in control on the home front.

  ‘It was as if I thought this would be appealing. I wanted to show him,’ she says, mystified at herself all these years later. ‘I’d seen his nana do this, do the men’s work and the other stuff as well, so I thought I could totally slip into this.’

  She was up at dawn to leave the homestead, and when they returned from the day’s work after dark, Robina cooked the evening meal, as well as the breakfast, smoko and lunch for the following day.

  ‘One day in the yard I was drafting. I was on a five-way gate, Aaron was yelling from the back of the race which way the gate needed to go. I was very new to this work, and there were heaps of blokes in the yard. And I let a cow that needed to go back out to pasture in with the cattle to go to market. And Aaron yelled at me, and he swore at me. He’s normally very even-tempered, so I was a wreck by smoko. I’d packed things for smoko and things for lunch, and he asked me which I was going to get out, and I told him, but then I took out the other one. And Aaron said: “What are you doing?”—quite nicely, but that was it. I had to get away, I just cried and cried. And he had no idea how to deal with that with all the men around. And then when we got home I went into the shower.’

  In the shower she cried some more. Aaron came and awkwardly apologised for yelling and swearing at her. Long days working with stock roughens tempers and tongues and forgiveness all round is the only way to be able to work together the following day. Robina and Aaron did forgive each other and kept on forgiving each other and learning about each other through what was mostly a beautiful year. At the end of it, Robina had not just learned a great many practical skills but had also completed her nursing degree. The next step for her was a graduate nursing program and Aaron suggested that she apply for the program run out of Alice Springs. She did this, and from there spent three years working around the Territory.

  ‘I used to work night shift, then I’d finish that, go back to my unit, shower, and drive out to the station. Once I was there I’d find Aaron wherever he was on the station and I’d go blow for blow with him, whatever he was doing—thinking I was such a hero. When we got home I’d get dinner ready and he’d just put his feet up. And I’d get cranky at him.’

  Very slowly Robina realised that her own expectations—that she should, in addition to her own work, help Aaron on the station and also provide him with house-cleaning and cooking services—were not Aaron’s expectations.

  ‘I was putting it on myself. It was a really screwed-up perception. When I dropped those expectations of myself—surprisingly and unsurprisingly—everything became easy between us.’

  It was the first time, although it had been hiding in plain sight, that Robina had caught a glimpse of her demon. She didn’t have a name for it yet but she knew that she would sometimes shut away who she truly was in the endeavour to be someone else, another Robina, who would be more acceptable to the critic within.

  She hadn’t realised yet that this one victory in loosening the grip of her own expectations around what a woman on a rural property does, of asking, ‘who says that?’ and ‘is that even remotely reasonable?’, was only the first battle she would need to fight. She didn’t realise she was travelling through life with ‘should’ sitting on one shoulder and ‘must’ sitting on the other, each looking for an opportunity to whisper in her ear a message that would unleash anger and resentment within her, and then an inevitable self-hatred for harbouring these feelings. Why she was listening to the ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ was the real question, and one she would not think to ask for many years.

  Aaron continued to manage Epenarra and Robina continued to work as a nurse, always returning to Aaron on the station as she could. She loved nur
sing.

  ‘The remote experience is so good because you have to make do with what you have. I imagined, when I became a nurse, that I could fly around solo delivering nursing care in an ultra-light to remote people.’

  She was to realise that this was what the Royal Flying Doctor Service did—but that dream of taking journeys to remotely located clients would never quite leave her. She loved the physical aspects of nursing, the suturing and the bandaging, but most fascinating of all to her was care of mothers.

  ‘I had done a double shift at Tennant Creek and a young girl in labour came in. She was seventeen and this wasn’t her first child. The ambulance had brought her from the post office, but she’d walked from the other side of the town to reach the post office. She was too far gone to get her to Alice and she was on her own. I played the role of father, I stood up at her head and she was reefing at me—pulling me in towards her with each contraction. I was just on a high. It was as if the oxytocin high of delivery overflowed into me as well, it was incredible. The girl delivered the baby safely and then we transferred her to Alice Springs.

  ‘I learnt a lot about mothering and breastfeeding from the Aboriginal people. The children I saw were “on” their people all the time. I remember on night shift seeing one lady in bed with three children—one sleeping on one breast, another who had just come off, and one more further down the bed. They were all just sound asleep, loving each other.’

  However, Robina’s contact with the Aboriginal people she was living alongside was mainly limited to her nursing role.

  ‘I missed out on those people—being on the station there was some divide. I never pursued those relationships and I regret that,’ she says.