Some of it looks edible, like a candied jelly.
‘It just plops out from the sandstone,’ says Rebel.
Some of the most extraordinary pieces look as if they have just been found and lovingly rubbed and then left strictly alone—this is the free-form jewellery which seems to be saved for the biggest of the black opals. Per carat, some are worth more than diamonds. Their colours sparkle out against the natural backing of black-and-grey potch. Had I dollars enough I could purchase an opal holding a night of fireworks, or one containing my very own piece of tropical reef, or a Bollywood-set piece of silk-clad dancers, or a flight of glittering budgerigars, or even an ever-living enchantment of wildflowers shifting on the wind.
Behind me Vicki and Rebel have started talking marketing, and this is clearly a conversation that has been going for years. Without a big player (such as De Beers) and big dollars, marketing opal requires an ingenious approach. Once Vicki contributed black opal to adorn a tall and beautiful hat that was on display at all the big fashion shows around the world. Opal mining and selling is a cottage industry in some ways, albeit the most glamorous cottage industry I have ever heard of.
None of the challenges deter Michael—not the mines barren of opal, the opal ratters, poor opal prices nor the built-in barriers to its marketing. To him all opals have an intrinsic value, but for Rebel they are opportunities waiting to be taken in rural repair and regeneration. She’s another kind of true believer altogether: she believes in the power of the human spirit and is always looking for ways to give it wings.
In addition to her involvement with opal and her online community, Rebel has two new enterprises underway. As I write she has just featured on national television in a piece looking at food security in the Australian outback. This passion for production methods that heal the land is another heritage from her farming childhood—and she’s expressed it by establishing a hub for social entrepreneurs in Lightning Ridge.
On the two-hectare site that once housed their restaurant, Rebel is inviting entrepreneurs to establish a business connected to food or land or community. In this venue she is holding permaculture, sustainability and food-security workshops.
‘Three years ago people said to me you should bring people to Lightning Ridge to learn gardening and traditional wisdom. I was saying, “Who would drive that far?” I couldn’t see it then, but now I see that anyone who sees the value in those things for their own lives will drive. And they are. The marketplace hasn’t changed, I have.’
She’s increasingly feeling that the word ‘sustainability’ is the wrong one—her permaculture teacher suggested an alternative. ‘If we just sustain, we run the risk of staying the same,’ she says. ‘We need to regenerate and evolve. Regeneration implies improvement and revitalisation and evolution is moving—that’s what we need, not more of the same.’
The other enterprise Rebel is adding to her stable is a healing practice. This was born of her own experience of ill-health. For many years Rebel’s health had been in decline.
‘I thought, what is wrong with me? That had been the quest from when I’d been about twenty-one or twenty-two, to find out what was wrong with me. And I’d gone to everyone, I’d seen gastroenterologists and had allergy tests. And I started using food as a way of trying to fix it, and I did that for about a decade. I was gluten-free, sugar-free, lactose-free. I didn’t eat red meat, watermelon … there was a long list.’ By the time she had been on this quest for a decade she was sick and depressed.
‘Finally I found a GP who actually listened. She said, “I think there’s something psychosocial going on—have you ever looked at emotional freedom technique or NLP?”’ These words unlocked in Rebel a life-changing insight.
‘I realised I’d been searching for what was wrong with me. I’d seen myself as a problem to be fixed. It was a light-bulb moment, and I thought: “Start looking for what is right with you!” I’d spent years thinking that food would fix the problem and it didn’t. I had to be open to the emotional and the spiritual—to living and healing the whole. This was really the gateway to self-love.’
As Rebel began answering this question for herself she noticed a new beauty and depth in the love between her and Michael.
‘When you love yourself you can allow others to love you. Any sort of resistance that Michael’s and my relationship had over the years was not in the context of the relationship we had, but in the context of the relationship I had with myself. So while I could not like myself, or love myself, for many days, how the heck could he? How could I even see that he loved me like that? Whereas now I can see how much he loves me, and he hasn’t changed: I look back over the years and his expression of love to me has not changed—my willingness and ability to receive it has.’
Rebel’s new quest has transformed her life. She reminds me of a choose-your-own-adventure character, writing her own book, and finding herself at a dead end. Perhaps in the back of a cave or deep in a forest, with the way she has come closed behind her and all alone. And then comes that light-bulb moment where she ‘flips’ the problem and looks not for what is wrong, but what is right. And now there are pathways everywhere and companions beside her.
‘We’re not taught this in school. No-one teaches you how to feel love or be loved. And if you don’t have people in your life who will sit you down and say, “Here’s what love is—this is how you receive it and give it,” then you’ll just go on to model what’s around you. People pattern their own relationships on what they’ve seen and witnessed. You have your parents’ marriage essentially: good, bad or indifferent. It’s monkey see, monkey do, unless you decide your own pathway.’
The evidence for Rebel’s metamorphosis is everywhere. She is now well. She can eat everything. The love between her and Michael is rock-steady and joyful. Most noticeable of all is that Rebel is beginning to make the contributions and have the influence on the world she’s dreamed of for so long. She conceives of this as part of her coaching as she sees a negative mindset as something that can be healed. Often, she says, people don’t need to be educated in a business skill set such as ‘time management’ but rather, helped to develop a mindset that empowers them really to use those innate skills.
‘When I work with the mindset first, a woman’s business and life just flows. It just unlocks the person’s innate ability so they get out of their own way. Last year I invested thousands of dollars in business coaching and it was great, but I got to the end of the course and I thought, “I know this stuff. I don’t need someone teaching me how to market my business; I know how to market my business. I’m not marketing my business and that’s the problem!” Many women are the same. They know what they should be doing—so what’s holding them back? That will be their mindset, the limiting belief, the fear. So it’s not about working on strategy or skills, it’s about peeling back the layers to work on the stories behind the negative mindset. With a healing I can do in an hour what might take months of coaching: a negative belief system, life pattern and mindset can be identified and healed easily.’
Rebel’s desire to make the most difference in the least time is very clear. Three years ago she was stampeded by the feeling that there wasn’t enough time, but now she knows it is not necessary to ‘do everything today’. These qualities of waiting, trusting and persisting, when there’s nothing except gut instinct telling you to keep on, are ones that she has long admired in Michael.
We talk of love being a glue, but in the presence of lovers like Michael and Rebel, you realise that ‘glue’ doesn’t quite capture it. You have two individual hearts and minds. Then along comes love and years of living alongside each other and that separation no longer exists. With two people with such separate skill sets and focus, it is in this area of dreams that the overlap has occurred. Rebel never wants Michael to have to stop exploring and mining opal; Michael never wants Rebel to stop exploring and mining for knowledge of the human spirit. They each work towards the other’s dreams—Rebel wants to see the opal industr
y grow, Michael wants to see Rebel’s plan for more people to build meaningful lives in remote places blossom. Of course, this is how things are now in their lives—to begin with, their surface differences meant they had to consciously steer a course between their unrelated dreams.
And I can see now that as well as being dreamers, Rebel and Michael are both explorers. Michael is drawn by the contagious excitement and sparkle that spills out of Rebel as she sets her course for the unexplored and untried, and Rebel draws from Michael’s steadfastness and unwavering focus on what actually does matter most. With the deep ground of their love as a scaffold, Rebel’s and Michael’s vibrant achievements and Australia-wide influence remind us that important lives are being lived out here in the outback. To explore and innovate at the cutting edge you have to live on the frontier: that’s what they do and that’s where they are.
Holdin’ a Good Hand
Cissy and Bill Bright, the Top End, Northern Territory and Queensland
Every weekend, all across Australia, there are race meets and rodeos, campdrafts and gymkhanas in which you can compete. So while the Northern Territory is huge, there are regular gatherings of horse people and you tend to bump into the same folks over and over. These are the sports of the outback. Isolation is no barrier to success, as long as you have a horse, some makeshift obstacles and some cattle.
Each rodeo or race day lifts our many-hued soils up into the air. Red from the centre, blue-grey from Queensland’s Darling Downs, chocolate from the plains of New South Wales and a soft grey from the powdered limestone of the Nullarbor. People, horses and cattle kick soil particles into the air and in the early morning they spin gold in the light. All through the day and into the evening the dust rises, and as the angle of the sun changes so does the colour of the dust.
Bill Bright first saw Cissy Priest riding through just such a shifting, spinning dusty cloud in a campdraft competition at Borroloola in 1977. ‘Wow! Who is that?’ he said.
There is a difference between the rodeo and campdrafting cultures. Bill was a rodeo man. In rodeo the boots are decorated, the shirts emblazoned and sometimes bedazzled. Presenting well is part of campdrafting, but this is less important than in rodeo, and your campdrafter is a more tightly tailored item. Plain, bright shirt, snug jeans, riding boots: it’s a polished, body-conscious look.
Added to this fine tailoring was the impact of Cissy herself: her questing, elegant profile, the determination and sizzling energy radiating from her slender, strong body, and her sheer good looks. Bill had never seen anyone like her before.
‘She was like something out of a glossy magazine,’ he says. ‘I was very impressed.’
But Bill didn’t get to meet Cissy that day. In fact, they did not meet until 1978 at one of the biggest events in the Northern Territory, the annual Brunette Downs Races.
‘Cissy was there for the campdrafting and at that point I was doing rodeo. I was there for the bull riding and bronc riding,’ says Bill. This was Bill’s recreation, but his paid work was not so very different. At only twenty and seventeen, Bill and his brother, Ken, were working together as mustering and bull-catching contractors.
‘People come from far and wide to the Brunette Downs Races. I was there with my friend Jan Darcy, and Bill and his younger brother, Ken, came to where we were sitting in our tent,’ says Cissy. ‘He knew Jan, and she said to him, “Have you met Cissy Priest?”
‘Bill said, “No.”’
Cissy draws out the ‘no’ as Bill must have done all those years ago, conveying his interest in this particular introduction.
‘Jan said, “This is Ciss.”’
Cissy saw a tall, spare-framed, good-looking kid with a remarkably attractive smile, years her junior.
‘And I said, “What are you doing?”
‘And he said, “I’m just here for the rodeo.”
‘And I said, “Well, could you hold this mirror for me, please, I want to put my makeup on. Just sit there and hold it for me, because we’re going to the ball.”
‘He said, “Okay.”
‘I sat there and did my face, making myself rather glamorous. Jan and I put on our long dresses in our tent in the middle of nowhere. And then I said to him, “What are you doing now?” He said, “Going to the ball.”
‘And I said, “Well, good, you can take us there, please!” He took us up to the dance and I danced with him and talked to him all night. I said to Jan afterwards, “What a nice bloke, what a shame he’s so young. We’ll have to find a nice woman for him to meet. We can’t have him wasted.”’
It was the start of their friendship.
‘It was funny. I met him at the next rodeo and the next campdraft I went to. I thought, “He’s such a nice young fella,” and I just used to sit and talk and go out with him and we’d have fun.’
In this way the difficult discussions which some couples postpone until much later were where Bill and Cissy started. Cissy was married, Bill was much younger, and they simply canvassed each other’s opinions on delicate issues right from the beginning with no thought to impressing or pleasing the other. They were friends and it was a decidedly intellectual friendship. The things they talked about were of interest to them both—such things as how to be successful and what success really was. ‘I liked how he thought about friendship and marriage and relationships, but not for one minute did I think I was ever going to marry him. His mum and dad were a really good example for him. They got along, they worked together. It was all very interesting because he wanted to be like his mum and dad and the last thing I wanted was to be like mine.’
‘Ciss is very warm and nurturing,’ says Bill, ‘and that was why she was attracted to my family and my ideas.’
The Bright family culture of ‘one for all, all for one’ and their tight focus on putting relationships ahead of everything else, made great sense to Cissy.
‘If you have to neglect your most important commitments—your personal relationships—then whatever you’re doing is demanding too much of you. I subscribe to my brother Ken’s point of view that “there’s not enough of me to worry about everyone else”. There’s plenty to take up my mental and physical energy just looking after the people I really care about,’ says Bill. Like Cissy, Bill has little interest in succeeding in the eyes of wider society. He cares only for the good opinion and confidence of the people he loves.
The closeness of Bill to his siblings and to his parents, their team approach to life and their habitual sharing of their deepest thoughts with each other was something new to Cissy. For the first time she was hearing and seeing how a happy family worked as she slowly got to know Bill in their long conversations at gymkhanas over eighteen months. Her family had operated very differently.
Both Bill and Cissy grew up with little money but, whereas Bill’s parents had created a family team who all pulled together, Cissy’s parents did not. In addition, the feeling of being needed and wanted that is crucial to a child’s happiness was missing from Cissy’s childhood. Cissy experienced it as sterile. It is often said that children can’t miss what they never had, but of course they can. As soon as Cissy saw affection, she instantly realised it was lacking in her own life. She was the youngest of seven children and didn’t have a particularly close relationship with either of her parents. ‘My parents didn’t show any emotion, any affection to each other. They never argued or raised their voices either. That’s what I thought all parents were like. But I remember one couple who used to come to church holding hands. They used to smile and do everything together. I remember thinking, that’s what I want to be like when I grow up. I want to marry my best friend.’
Cissy did not only feel ‘on the outer’ within her family—not drawn in, not special, not necessary—but also within wider society due to her family’s poverty. While Australia aspired to being a classless society, it was not. A young girl with Cissy’s background would be expected to work in a shop. Desiring to own the shop and employ other people would be ‘getting above herself’
or ‘not knowing her place’. In little country communities like the one Cissy grew up in on the far north coast of New South Wales these social divisions were perhaps more marked than in the cities. If children did not work out what ‘poor’ meant, they would be told.
Having the deficiencies in her grooming ruthlessly pointed out by other children was one way in which Cissy learned how her family was perceived by society. ‘We didn’t have many clothes: just one hat for wearing to Sunday school and church, and at Sunday school and church they used to pick on us for our clothes. They weren’t very nice,’ she says.
This ‘picking on’ was the beginning of Cissy’s discipline in ensuring that her personal appearance conveyed the message that she wasn’t to be ignored. And, just as she had found a marriage to admire other than that of her parents, she found a significant role model in terms of presentation outside her family to copy. In this she was beginning to develop what has become one of her lifelong habits: seeing what works for other people and making that trait her own.
‘I remember another lady from church. She was Dutch and she had five children. And she could have been a model. She was always so neat and well turned out.’
It takes a very strong character to transcend family norms and society’s expectations. But Cissy belonged to that rare breed of child who refuses to allow other people’s expectations to shape their lives.
‘My sister and I used to tell each other we weren’t going to be poor all our lives. We were going to get somewhere,’ she says.
As impoverished children looking for a way out of poverty do, Cissy painstakingly added up her assets. She could present herself well, she had the energy to work hard and she could ride. It is unusual for poor children to have access to horses, but Cissy was already working in her elderly neighbours’ dairy at six, helping with the milking. This elderly couple had a horse.
‘He was an old grey, flea-bitten quarter draughthorse with one eye, the ugliest horse you’d ever see. I thought he was beautiful, I thought he was glorious, he was everything to me. And they gave that horse to me.
Love In a Sunburnt Country Page 19
