‘Then there was this young man coming from the arrivals area onto the tarmac—he had on a long coat, he was running, he was on a mission. And I was thinking to myself, “Is that John? What should I do? Should I put my suitcase down, should I put out my arms?” Fortunately I didn’t do anything, this fellow just shot past.
‘I walked into the arrivals area and I didn’t see anybody. And my heart dropped. I was thinking to myself, “What’ll I do?” I had hardly any money in my purse because I virtually had no money. There was a good friend of my aunt living in Brisbane—the aunt who had told me that Australia was a country with many sheep—and I knew I could go to her. But I was thinking, “I’ll have to take the plane out of Brisbane to go back,” and then I saw a hand waving.’
It had been such a gamble, Mary’s trip to Australia to spend more time with a young man she had only met a few times. Would whatever it was that had drawn her to John still exist? Would they still be easy in each other’s company? In those first few moments of seeing each other after eight months, each felt a deep relief: they did tremendously like this other person after all.
John was as she’d remembered and imagined him—except better. There were no metal chains around his neck and he was dressed, not as a tourist, but for the life he was leading on the station.
After the commercial flight from Brisbane to Longreach, John’s father met them at the airport in the four-seater Cessna. As the smallest of the three of them, Mary was squeezed in behind the two front seats. Her first sight of Marmboo was from the air. Nothing less like the emerald land and gunmetal sky of Ireland could be imagined.
Below her were warm ochre plains and around her the bright-blue vault of the Australian sky. Even after quite a lot of rain and plants green and growing, Australia’s rangelands look as if they are mostly bare earth from the air. The spaces between plants, which are easy to miss when you are down in the landscape, become painfully apparent when you are gazing down from above. Mary had quite confidently expected to see, if nothing else, thousands upon thousands of sheep, white and fluffy and busy in green paddocks. In pastoral country unshorn sheep are nearly invisible from the air, their fleeces greyed and browned with dust and twigs. Mary could not help wondering where all the sheep were.
But she was excited and fascinated by everything she saw. The incomprehensible thousands of acres, the paddocks at least twenty times the size of whole farms in Ireland, semi-wild cattle handled just once a year, the stock horses, the stables, the corrugated-iron sheds barking in the wind, the thickening of the grasses closer to the big creeks, the smell of the big gum trees after rain, the long days of mustering for shearing, the camaraderie of the shearing sheds.
‘Fortunately, it had rained,’ says John.
There was no Learjet. No castle. Mary was immediately pressed into riding a horse and taking part in the sheep work in the lead-up to shearing. All this meant she was quick to discard any of her prior ideas about a highfalutin lifestyle. John’s mother, Joan, was away seeing her family in England, but there was evidence of her cleanliness, organisation, self-discipline and hard work everywhere. In the next six weeks Mary saw clearly both how much work life on Marmboo would be for a woman, and how very high Joan’s standards were—and she fell irretrievably in love with John.
His physical presence, sleeves rolled up and actively engaged with the land, did all kinds of things for her that it hadn’t in Ireland when he had been on holiday. And working alongside him during the day, talking to him at night: she was finally seeing the whole man in his context, and she loved all of him.
Having Mary with him on Marmboo was heaven for John, but he said nothing to her about marriage and forever. If one person is not happy in a marriage, that marriage isn’t successful. It was going to be for Mary to decide if she could be happy on Marmboo. After all, this was the 1970s and it was a given that it was a man’s work that decided the family’s location. In addition, and this was as much the case in Ireland as it was in Australia, women who married a man with a farming property then afterwards said it must be sold were greatly criticised. The commitment a farmer or pastoralist’s wife made was to a great deal more than the man himself, and it was not just to him and the land, but to the invested work of earlier generations. For a man to sell his inherited property due to his wife’s unhappiness was seen as a forced betrayal of his heritage. Mary, having grown up on a farm, having slowly become aware that her mother felt to some degree stifled in the setting she’d married into but had also felt she must stay there, was only too aware of this.
Mary knew how happy John was in his life on Marmboo, and so, loving him, she wanted him to stay in the life he adored. But was it the life for her? It wasn’t a decision she could make in Australia. She had to go back to Ireland to think it through. And besides all that, Mary had accepted a teaching job in Belfast.
‘I did wonder if I could take that life on. I could see the standards that had been set both inside the house and outside on the station, and I thought, “You’d be so isolated.” I had to come back, I had to look at it from afar, to see whether or not I could take it on,’ says Mary.
Back in Ireland Mary had a few days with her mum and dad in the South before leaving for Belfast. In Ireland were her parents and sister, her friends and all the trappings of civilisation. It is not so much the coffee shops and the clubs that make life easier, but the sharing of the load of all the small jobs that make up our lives. In the Irish towns and cities there was a person for every different job: plumbers, electricians, butchers, nurses, teachers, cooks, gardeners and carpenters … but there was no John.
The weekly correspondence between them continued. They chatted to each other on tape, sharing their lives and how very much they missed the other person. It took just two months for Mary to realise that home for her was now ‘with John’. She recorded a message to John which ended in saying that she thought a shared life would be worth a try.
John received this most welcome message with delight. ‘I had the cue I needed,’ he says, and promptly responded with a formal proposal of marriage before Christmas in 1976.
‘When I look back,’ says Mary, ‘I took on marriage as an adventure. I didn’t take it on as the total commitment that goes with marriage. I thought, “Well, if I don’t make a go of it I’ll pack my bags and come home. But if I don’t try I could regret it.” Fortunately I have no regrets, fortunately it has worked out. But if my children said the same thing to me I would be horrified and probably have given them a lecture on what marriage is about!’
John immediately began planning another trip back to Ireland to see Mary.
‘Of course, as for a lot of people on the land, the animals become number one in your life, and it was after Christmas. This was the time of year when storms are expected so the sheep had to be sprayed against flystrike. All the sheep had to be mustered into the various yards scattered around the property where an insecticide was applied to protect them—and that had to be done before John could leave the place. At the end of March in 1977 he arrived in Belfast. Because it wasn’t his first time he was a little more relaxed. He came for just two weeks. It was unheard of then for people to go overseas for only two weeks.’
They borrowed a friend’s car—Mary had only a motorbike—and travelled down through Dublin (stopping off to buy an engagement ring) so that John could meet Mary’s father. He had already met Mary’s mother.
‘My mother hadn’t thought—I mean, who’d have thought—that John and I would marry. When I phoned my parents to tell them of my intention to marry this Australian fellow I felt my mother wasn’t sharing in my joy. There was something there, but she wasn’t dampening the joy either. I didn’t have the nerve to ask her what it was, maybe because deep down I didn’t want to know. It wasn’t until years later, on one of her many visits out to Australia, that she told me what it had meant to her when I got engaged. I never knew until years afterwards that to her, my engagement meant losing her eldest daughter and it had broken her
heart.’
Twenty-two, madly in love, flying high on adventure and with no children of her own, Mary simply couldn’t guess how her parents felt. But Vera knew what it was to say goodbye to loved ones and not see them again. Her brothers had left for England and America and effectively vanished out of her life.
On 26 August 1977 John and Mary were married in the little parish of Affane, close to Cappoquin. Marrying an Australian briefly made Mary a celebrity. Australia was regarded as the other end of the world. She might as well have been marrying the man who lived on the moon. There were lines of people outside the church to see the beautiful girl who was marrying a lovely Australian boy and going to live in that faraway country. John’s mother and one of his sisters came, and in all there were thirteen guests who had at some time visited Marmboo.
‘Nowadays weddings are these great big fanfare events, but I made my own dress. I also made my sister’s dress and the flower girl’s dress. There was none of this getting makeup and nails done that you have now. On the day, John drove me to Cork city, where I just went into a salon and said I was getting married that afternoon, and they just washed and blow-dried my hair. That was all. John dropped me home, went on to get changed and said, “See you at the church.”’
On the day they left Ireland, Mary’s mother, Vera, was to drive them to catch the plane, and Mary said goodbye to her father at the farm, adding, ‘You will come and visit me in Australia, won’t you, Dad?’ Mary felt very much as if her apprenticeship in farming had been served with her father. He had offered her excellent advice on her new life: ‘Be happy. Get to know the workings of the place so when your husband comes home you will be able to share in his day’s activities, and don’t take on a job that you don’t want to continue as it will be your job for life.’ She was naturally confident that he would be keen to visit her. But John Curran was a simple man, and he had never been on an aeroplane.
‘Dad said, “Don’t expect me to hop on an aeroplane to come to Australia, because I won’t.” It was just awful. I don’t have to add, this didn’t make for an easy parting.’
By mid-September Mary was meeting for the first time many of John’s friends and family. Through it all John was by her side, quick to understand that she felt alien, that he was not just her lover and her husband but her sole support in a new land.
The trip from Brisbane to Marmboo in late spring was Mary’s first intimation of just how hot it would be in summer. The temperature was then in the mid-twenties.
‘I was asking, “John, does it get any hotter than this?” and he would say, “Oh, it does a bit, it does a bit.”’
The actual length and the degree of heat in Mary’s first Australian summer was a dreadful shock.
‘That first Christmas we’d been given a candelabrum with three European candles. We came back from a Christmas Eve dinner at my parents’ house and found the three candles had just laid over in the heat,’ says John.
‘I couldn’t believe it, I cried when I saw the candles,’ says Mary. ‘That first Christmas was awful. I wanted so much to talk to my mum and dad and wish them a happy Christmas. Our telephone system was shared by two other neighbours so it was a very faint line. To make an overseas call you had to book days in advance, nominate a day and time you wanted the call to go through and then wait. All Christmas Eve I was waiting for the operator to ring to say we could speak. Then when the call came, I couldn’t hear my parents and they couldn’t hear me. It was a disaster, which was followed by tears.
‘I spent that first summer sitting on the toilet—I will never know why the toilet—crying. It was so hard, going into that summer. Where was the green grass? Where were all the cows? Where was the rain? It was just so, so different. But I did stick it out. Sometimes I wonder how I did it, it was so hard—no family, no friends and living in the middle of nowhere—but I did do it, and I’m probably a better person for it.’
What kept Mary at Marmboo was John and her very real enjoyment of their life together. And she isn’t a person who looks back. She had left Ireland behind, this was her new life and it was that simple.
Before children arrived Mary wanted to understand the workings of the property. She had to feel confident driving the hundred kilometres into Longreach. She learned to ride a horse, to help build fences, drive the vehicle to service subartesian bores and to play a part in all the different activities that make up a pastoralist’s year as her father had advised her.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s many of the health and safety precautions and equipment which are now standard on rural properties simply didn’t exist.
‘We’re so conscious of these things now but, in those days, if you took a bottle of water you were a softie. We didn’t wear sunscreen.’
She revelled in working alongside John despite these tough conditions, just as she revelled in the slow process of building a home.
‘We had nothing in the house here—little furniture, two single beds that were tied together with rope and a wedding present from John’s parents of a massive deep freeze with two loaves of bread and some butter. I suppose you could call these the essentials! Everything we bought just came gradually and we worked hard for it. And we appreciated it so much. In Ireland before I left there were some of my friends with big mortgages and they had everything in their house. We had two fold-out chairs, and they were our sitting-room chairs, but they were very versatile as they came everywhere with us for the first eighteen months.’
Mary began finding out all she could about how children in remote areas learn to read and write.
‘I had heard about children doing correspondence and I had no idea as to what it entailed. So I went over to a neighbouring property one day a week to teach the boy there. I think he ended up teaching me. He was a clever boy.’
Back in Ireland her father was ill. In fact, not long after Mary had left he had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease, a particularly awful neurological condition which sees a person inexorably lose movement after movement until, finally, they can’t breathe. Mary’s mother had only told Mary that her father was sick. She didn’t know how to share over the phone the news that such a tragic and terminal diagnosis had been given. She was further deterred by the fact that Marmboo was on a ‘party line’, which meant that the whole district used that telephone line and no private conversation was possible.
John and Mary had carefully saved to pay for return tickets for both her parents to visit. (The financial control of the property was in John’s father’s hands: if something was not able to be saved for, Mary and John would have to go ‘cap in hand’ to request the money. It was a situation they did not like.) The ticket being paid for ensured that Mary’s father would indeed take the huge step of getting on an aeroplane for the very first time.
‘That was in 1979 and John and I went to Brisbane to meet them. At the airport I couldn’t figure out why my parents were not coming out in arrivals, and then out they came with Mum wheeling my dad. When I said goodbye to my father two years before, he’d been a healthy farmer. Then to see him at the airport, in a wheelchair … I’ll never forget it.’
The shock of that moment has never left Mary. This was a day in which she expected only joy, but what she was seeing heralded tragedy and loss. And yet, the memory of her father’s first and only visit to Marmboo is such a happy one now. That plane ticket and three months with them were the very best presents they could have given him.
‘He came in a wheelchair, but he got out of the wheelchair when he was at Marmboo. He was able to get around very well. We had a little old car here that belonged to John’s sister. He used to drive the car anywhere on the property and he never got lost. It was incredible that this man, who had never left Ireland, could find his way around a 95,000-acre property! And he loved it. He loved the open spaces. He loved the work the men were doing, although he couldn’t participate himself. It was lovely that he was able to be here and to see where I was living as I think from my letters going back home they b
oth thought I lived in the Simpson Desert! For a man who was never going to leave Ireland he did very well.
‘They left in August and once he knew he was returning to Ireland he was back in the wheelchair. He didn’t have the strength, he knew he was going back to die. For the first month after getting home he would go into the local pub and entertain the locals with his stories of his visit to the outback of Australia. My dad was a good storyteller and I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall to hear his tales.’
Mary went over in February 1980 to help her mother with nursing her father at home, and to say goodbye to him. She returned to Australia in March.
‘Ten days after I left Ireland, I woke in the middle of the night. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I woke up. I thought it was John who had touched me so I called, “John?”, but John was asleep. I closed my eyes again and I was holding my father’s hand in mine and we were walking along a dark driveway, with a lot of sheltering trees. He said to me, “You’d better stay now where you are, because I’m just to walk on a little bit further.” And I woke up again and I knew my father had died.’
When Joan came to tell Mary the news early the next morning, Mary discovered he had died at the time of her dream.
The relationship between father and daughter was strengthened by his time at Marmboo—and her father’s last visit at the moment of his death celebrated a bond Mary had always felt to be special. This was not to be the case for John and his father, Jack.
John has had to come to terms with the dominance and inflexibility on his father’s part, the uncertainty and remorse on his own part and the barrier that tragically grew between them. The honesty of the exchanges between Mary and John on this subject is a testament to the ease between them, because this is not something on which they completely agree. Listening to them both talk of his father, I wonder when the dementia Jack was eventually diagnosed with began. It is an illness that changes people in small ways before it eventually strips them of the ability to find the particular memory they need to make sense of the world or to imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes. The brain begins to change some twenty years before the diagnosis can be made. With hindsight, families often realise there were signs well before the decline in thinking became apparent.
Love In a Sunburnt Country Page 12
