‘It was a battle with the rabbits and the markets and drought, and in the end they abandoned the farm and the debt. My grandfather started a new life with eight kids, but that battle and country remained entrenched in his psyche.’ This was true not just of Steve’s grandfather, but of his children, who witnessed the struggle and losses, one of whom was Steve’s father, Bob.
‘My dad was six years old before he saw rain. He saw it when they moved from the Mallee into the north-east High Country. And so Bob always understood and taught us about the rarity of water in the Australian landscape—he became a water-treatment engineer, ensuring safe water supplies for the little country towns,’ says Steve.
Looking for water is the constant adventure offered to those exploring Australia. On weekend trips, through all kinds of landscapes, Bob laid bare for his children the working together of man, water and time. Steve was taught to see the fall of the land, to trace in his mind’s eye where rain would run as it gathered momentum on slopes, to imagine water greedily lifting topsoil, leaf litter and seeds, to recognise the places stripped of their living wealth first by poor management and then by fast-moving water. He also learned how to look further down catchment to find where the water had gone, and to see the beneficiaries of all those nutrients, compost and seed bounty—lakes edged with sediment and grasses, rivers at the heart of valleys, springs, rock pools defying the fall of the land and the magic of river meeting sea. Where water hid beneath the earth fascinated his father, too—the guessed-at caverns and sandy beds, the basins and channels, the chanciness of finding a supply enough for a town, or for a bore to water stock.
Steve’s mother, Pat, had been an only child at a time when this was unusual. Her family home was a quieter one than those of many of her friends. In her own family she wanted something different: more people, more passion. On meeting and loving Bob Baird she also valued the whole boisterous Baird clan. She set about creating a family life that focused on sharing, including and celebrating. In her home there would always be people to play with, to help with the load, to cook with, to talk to and to build alongside. Steve’s parents also valued art. They kept materials for children’s art available, and made time for the children to create. Steve still remembers his excitement at the prospect of drawing. Among the family friends were professional artists (such as Leonard French and Fred Williams). Childhoods show children what is possible or not possible, and alongside his belief that adventures come if you set out, Steve came to see art as everyday, as valuable, as something he could do.
Art had become a habit with him before he left childhood, and on his travels he carried notebooks in which he documented particulars of what he discovered about the natural world and the history of each place.
With the advent of the Vietnam War, Steve experienced for the first time acute pressure to comply with wider society’s values and to ‘do as he was told’. His birthdate was one of those selected in the conscription ballot for Vietnam. But Steve believed he was a brother to all of humanity. Supported by the same tide of thought among family and friends, he successfully objected on conscientious grounds as a pacifist. To do so he had to appear in court. The entire experience left him more determined than ever to lead a life in keeping with his identity and values.
At an even younger age Kath, like Steve, had concluded that the dictates of society must be resisted and that the only discipline is to act with love. Again, like Steve, she came to understand this as a result of living under acute societal pressure. Being a child during the Vietnam War (known as the ‘television war’ as it was the first war to come into people’s lounge rooms) was traumatising for her, as for many children. However, what happened to Kath was a result of the era she grew up in and the malignance of a particular teacher.
‘When my dad came home from World War II all he wanted to do was go to university. And he put himself through, paid for his education himself. That was the Menzies era, you had to work bloody hard to get through uni. Education was so important to him,’ she says.
Kath’s father wanted a good education for his children, too, and felt the best security lay in high academic achievement. Kath understands her father now, and the fact that at all times he was only trying to protect and help his children, to make them ‘safe’, and perhaps particularly protect Kath herself, with her sensitive and creative nature. Sadly, his determination that Kath succeed academically only served to make her more vulnerable at school, and the price she paid for that was a high one.
‘Dad was very tough on us, especially when it came to learning. He had a very busy life, and a busy political life. I actually dreaded him coming home because he was just so strict. He’d come in and say, “Right, what homework have you got?”’
Kath started school very young. She was bright but she was also a child who was passionate and intense. This aspect of Kath meant she was not emotionally ready for the swamping demands of playground politics or the need to please teachers. The idea that starting formal learning earlier creates higher academic achievement in most children is a seductive one. But when a child is not ready it instead teaches them that they are ‘dumb’ and that school is ‘too hard’. With the best motivations in the world Kath’s parents put her into school when she was four and a half.
‘Dad made me go for a scholarship at Mentone Girls’ Grammar. I just didn’t want to go for the scholarship, I knew I wasn’t going to get one! He kept saying to me, “Of course you can get a scholarship.” His expectations of us were just so high. And I didn’t get one, I actually failed the exam and ended up being kept down a grade. I was made to repeat Year Six in the Girls’ Grammar Primary. It crushed me.’
It is known now that keeping children ‘down a grade’ puts them on track for worse educational outcomes and mental health problems—their confidence rarely recovers from this affront and educational outcomes are poorer as a result. Teachers are now advised never to propose it. In Kath’s case it did more than disadvantage her. We speak a great deal of the power of teachers to play a big role in improving a child’s mental health. Of course, the converse is also true. Teachers can also harm a child’s sense of self.
‘On the first day the teacher said: “I’m going to read the roll out, and anyone doing the second year of sixth grade must stand up.” And I thought, “Oh” and then I thought, “There must be someone else going to stand up, because it wouldn’t just be me, she wouldn’t make just me stand up, surely?” My last name was Viney so there were lots of other names first. And of course no-one else stood up, no-one. Just me. So I had to stand up and say, “This is my second year of sixth grade.” And then she made me move, and come and sit behind her daughter, because she had her daughter in the same class as me. So her daughter was in the front row, and I had to sit behind her, that was my place for the whole year.’ Throughout the year the teacher continued to victimise Kath.
‘I was a good swimmer. It was sports day, and I swam a little harder this year for my house and I was in lots of events, and Mum said, “Do you want some barley sugar?” and I said, “No, Mum, no-one is allowed to go to the kiosk.” Mum said, “Oh, what a lot of rubbish” and bought some barley sugar for me. The next day was the day that man landed on the moon. I was sitting with all the other kids in the television room and I was so excited to see this happen. Well, this horrible teacher told me to come outside. She said to me that she had seen me with barley sugar and that I’d been deliberately disobedient. She said, “You must go and write out: I must not be deliberately disobedient a hundred times,” and I missed seeing man walking on the moon. I cried all day. And that year I started what is called trichotillomania.’
Trichotillomania, or hair-pulling disorder, is one of the most common ways stress overflows into self-harm in children and young people. Like every type of self-harm, it briefly soothes but then quickly leads to a feeling of shame and alienation. While this is a very common disorder, the accompanying humiliation means that sufferers don’t ask for help, and never learn how many peo
ple who feel just like them are in the world.
‘The way I started pulling my hair out was by biting the ends. I had beautiful long wavy blonde hair—I was quite an attractive child—and then I couldn’t reach anymore, the bits were too short to reach in my mouth. So then I started plucking it out. I ended up with these massive bald patches right through my teenage years. I struggled with that for a long time, because I thought, “I’m nutty, there’s something wrong with me.” I had no idea other people did this, too. Eventually, I went to see a psychologist and he was lovely. He said, “Kath, you know why she sat her daughter in front of you, and why she treated you like that?” and I said, “No.” I didn’t understand, I’d never understood. And he said, “It was because she was taking the attention from her daughter, she was making you the scapegoat, so that her own child wouldn’t get bullied by the classroom for being the teacher’s daughter.” But she turned me into quite a rebel, that teacher.’
With nothing left to lose in the way of approval or appreciation, Kath became anti-authoritarian. She’d been bullied and stung into masking her sensitivity and creativity, into hardening her outside and stopping her growth on the inside. To protect herself she became another kind of person. She wore coloured underwear (which was considered terrible at the time) and started smoking. She was cheeky, rebellious and hard to reach.
One of the hardest things about being a parent is doing your very best and finding you’ve had the opposite result to what you intended. Kath understands how parenting her through this unhappy time would have felt for her parents. She also sees the impact of social mores on their parenting decisions, and, keeping that in mind, can find the people they really were despite the shackles of their era.
‘I don’t blame Mum and Dad, it was that era, that generation—they weren’t good at saying “I love you”. They just wanted to bring me up, give me a good education and get me qualified in something, that’s what was most important. I know Dad made mistakes as a parent, but I now know what pressure he was under financially and politically. He was a really amazing person, a visionary, my dad.’
Kath’s parents, Bill and Eleanor, were builders who had a dairy farm on the side, but they were also politically active. They campaigned against capital punishment and conscription. Even when they were doing it tough financially they advocated for and assisted those who were doing it tougher. Later in his political career Bill supported the development of a new educational facility and was elected to the board of directors. Wonderfully, this new facility was to make good a great deal of the damage done to Kath by other schools.
Huntingdale Technical School was a democratic or ‘free’ school. Even now, this type of education is considered radical. In these school communities each child’s voice and vote is treated as equivalent to that of an adult. Children experiment in creating the community, negotiating, planning and doing the work. They see then what happens as a consequence of their actions for themselves. Everything is put to the children’s vote: rules, consequences, innovations, contribution and staffing. And when it comes to the children themselves, each child has full control. They choose what and how many subjects they will do, or if, indeed, they will do any study at all. It can sound like a recipe for disaster, but study after study has shown the opposite: graduates of such schools go on to contribute outstandingly to society.
At Huntingdale Kath could be in charge of herself. She discovered herself anew, what healed her and began the journey of finding what she had to give to the world. To her parents’ delight the hard, rebellious, cheeky mask (so painfully worn) began to lift and underneath they could see again the bright-eyed, spontaneous, lover of life they’d lost years before.
‘Huntingdale saved my life,’ Kath says, ‘I did drama, I did pottery, I did film and television, I put on plays, I did everything I loved. I never finished at Huntingdale Tech, but I was able to tap into that creative part of myself.’
Putting on plays let Kath for the first time understand her rather peculiar creative gift of turning a group of separate people into a team focused on sharing. Her optimism, her understanding of the costs of creative endeavour, her belief that society needs to empathise more, better, deeper and her ability to help people relate to each other, became (and remains to this day) an anchor and a haven allowing others to shine, contribute and learn. Her canvas is place and time, and her media is mixed but always includes other people.
Kath left home and moved to Melbourne. She lived there for two years, working in aged care. But city life palled. At twenty she moved back to the farm and worked both for her parents and in a library. Her parents at that time were leaving the dairy industry. England, previously a big market for Australian dairy products, joined the European Economic Community in the 1970s and prices for dairy products plummeted correspondingly. Oil prices soared and drought gripped much of Victoria. Kath’s parents were just one of many small dairy operators—farms with perhaps just seventy cows—who had no choice but to leave the industry.
Kath’s parents now needed a new way to make money. For the Vineys, finding a new enterprise was easier than it was for many other ex-dairy farmers. Their farm was surrounded by state forest. The family had a rich heritage of horse skills. The Vineys put the two together. Soon Kath was helping her parents in their new business of taking tourists on trail rides through the forest. A few cows were kept for milking.
Kath’s days were built around the work of caring for the family’s horses and dogs. She regained yet more of her childhood love of life. The dogs helped return to her the excitement and the fresh, earthy, poignant perceptions of her young self. The horses, with their strength and their desire to explore (which is every bit as strong as that of a dog), reinforced her curiosity, confidence and courage. The city was never to compete for Kath’s affections again: in this time her allegiance to horses, dogs and life on the land was secured.
Then, in 1978, at the house of a mutual friend, she met Steve and they fell in love.
‘He smelt of wintergreen oil. He was wearing a beautiful embroidered jacket and he’d done the embroidery himself. And I thought, “Ooh, a man who can sew!”’
Each saw in the landscape of the other person the map they had been charting since childhood. Here were the strangely familiar contours, the underground rivers and upwelling springs, the dreamed-of lost continents. Astonishingly, wonderfully, here was that longed-for partner in adventure. Kath invited Steve to her family farm.
They had an astounding amount in common. They were both beginning artists and creators. They were both from families of social reformers, political activists and artists: families conscious of and active in what was happening outside the small, safe family sphere. Each family was one in which ideas and ideals were discussed, art was appreciated and created, risks were calculated and adventures taken. In each family the doors were flung open to admit people who needed extra support and nourishing.
Steve was twenty-five and looking for something, always on an adventure, learning, reflecting, noting down and moving on. He’d studied architecture, but he didn’t want just to design but to build, and to build not just buildings but landscapes. Landscape artists frequently refer to the ‘genius of place’, an identity unique to that one part of the earth created by the combination of what is there: the ecology, the land forms, the impact of man and water and time. It was with this that Steve wished to interact, and not just on paper with his mind, but with physical materials and his hands. For that he needed other skills, so he worked in plant nurseries, learned carpentry, helped on building sites and kept moving.
Steve is handsome—a dark handsomeness of the even-featured, steady, calmly in the background type. In contrast, Kath is always somehow in the forefront. Her colouring is of the blonde-bombshell variety and her dazzling, hopeful smile adds a show-stopping glamour to the most prosaic of scenes. Their storytelling is also contrasting. Steve speaks with the purposeful phrasing of the experienced raconteur, Kath with the emotive force of an actor. To conve
y how she talks in text requires regular use of italics and capitals.
‘He told me he was a vegetarian, and I thought, “Oh, I don’t know what I’ve got for a vegetarian.” So I made what I can only call White Rice and Tomato Stodge cooked up in a frying pan. It would probably be called risotto now! Steve came again the next weekend, and then the next, and then he just stayed.’
Kath is wonderfully entertaining to listen to, as is Steve in his entirely different way. Where Kath knew horses, Steve knew water and land.
‘I always say that when I married Kath, I also married horses,’ says Steve.
Kath was now, at only twenty, breeding her own horses. She was delighted to share with him all she knew. And he returned the favour, teaching her how to read the movement of water on her own family farm. Steve also brought his habit of investigating the stories that surround any artefact.
‘I always had a strong sense of history, of craft and the skills around making things by hand, so when Kath introduced me to horses I was keen to explore the whole story of the horse, particularly in the Australian bush.’
Kath opened up to Steve the love of the animal, and he opened up to her the heritage and stories created from the interaction between horses, humans and land. It didn’t take long for Steve to unearth the story of the Australian stock horse and the heroic effort it had taken to bring them back.
‘The Australian stock horse wasn’t a breed to begin with. It was the horse that evolved in Australian conditions, helped along by people who knew horses, culling and selecting and breeding for Australian conditions: not much water, hard underfoot, hot. “Jim, I like the look of your stallion, he’s a good type,” that kind of thing. From the 1860s until after World War I there were horse-breeding operations that produced horses for the British Army, coach horses, stock horses,’ says Steve.
Love In a Sunburnt Country Page 14
