‘One of the first events I clearly remember was the space shuttle Challenger exploding. I’d never really seen the news. Then to see that in real time felt like an earth-shattering event. It felt like the world had changed. I had that same feeling when the aeroplanes smashed into the World Trade Center,’ he said.
All those years of living remotely heightened the power of this event in Bill’s consciousness. Once Bill would have only heard about such events at the Borroloola Races. Now he was watching, connected to everyone else, as the world abandoned one era and embarked on the next—he was part of the whole world taking the corner and rushing onward, leaving behind the never-again attainable past.
Bill’s diagnosis was never forgotten by Cissy: she knew it was likely that at some point he would become very ill.
‘I probably wouldn’t have managed it as carefully if it wasn’t for Ciss: not drinking or smoking or eating the wrong things, or gaining weight,’ says Bill.
Despite these careful measures it became clear Bill was going to need a kidney transplant. His life was changing again, he could do less with his body and he began to focus more on exercising his mind: reflecting, writing and cataloguing his thoughts.
The years when Bill became sicker were hard ones for Cissy. For the first time she had stopped enjoying life.
‘When Bill was ill I forgot to find the good in life. I was too busy trying to make money because I knew the time would come when I couldn’t. I forgot all the important things,’ says Cissy of these years.
They had purchased fifty-two acres in Warwick, Queensland, close to both medical facilities for Cissy and Bill, and campdraft facilities for Jackie. On this acreage stood a grand old lady of a house, fading and dilapidated in her tatty dress in the sun. With care Cissy stripped back all that was decrepit and peeling, added rooms, polished and painted. She built into the running of the home the high standards and welcome to all that she had learned at Brunette Downs.
The old lady is glorious again. In 2005 Bill and Cissy sold Kiana, staying on as managers until 2007. When they had purchased the property it had been destocked, disorganised and degraded. Now fully restocked, with all plant and management systems in place, it was worth a great deal more. And so the little girl who’d felt so deeply the discrimination against her family’s poverty, and the young man whose dad had been so unlucky in the pastoral business, the best friends who’d met in the Territory, both dreaming of making millions in the cattle business, had done it together. They had gone from poor to rich in twenty-eight years.
In 2008 Bill and his sister, Patch, were both operated on: a kidney from her to him. Since then Bill and Cissy have done all kinds of things with that gift from his sister—‘My wonderful sister,’ says Bill—but particularly they have focused on enjoying the journey.
The bonds between Bill and his siblings, always close, have tightened and deepened through the years. ‘Ken and Patch were both willing to be donors—and here’s another twist for you,’ Bill says cheerfully. ‘Cissy’s daughter from her first marriage, Vickie, married my brother, Ken.’
This is in the very best traditions of romance. When Vickie left Ascham School, she moved to Darwin to work in hospitality.
‘She worked at the Beaufort: a big hotel in Darwin, a big international complex. She had that job through her contacts and she really excelled at that work. And Ken was a commercial helicopter pilot at this stage. And they connected there. It was quite a surprise to Cissy and me! In no way was it a bad surprise, because I think Vickie is a wonderful person and I think Kenny is a wonderful person. They are two very good people.’
The Bright family team is made even stronger by Vickie and Ken’s love story. Bill’s delight in their happiness together is very apparent. Not unnaturally, this most unusual set of relationships is much discussed.
‘We were all at the campdraft at Chinchilla. There was Ciss, Ken and I, all sitting on our horses at the cut-out pen. There were these two old fellas talking about our family relationships and how everything works in the grandstand. A friend of ours was sitting behind them and one old fella said, “No, no, the story is that two brothers married a mother and a daughter,” and he pointed at Ciss and said, “and I think this girl here is the daughter.” Ciss loves that story.
‘Now Vickie and Ken live on the property we have at St George and they have their own helicopter-mustering business, and manage the property for Ciss and me as well,’ says Bill.
They have their own daughter now, Abbie, who is both cousin and niece to Bill’s daughter, Jackie, who is herself now married with two children, Riley and Jett. In campdrafting circles Jackie is a celebrity. Campdrafting friends to whom I read some of this story immediately asked—is this Jackie Knudsen? It is. She is as good with stock as her father, every bit as glamorous as her mother and has won the Australian Lady Rider award three times.
‘She won that title right up until she started her family,’ says Bill. ‘And she won the Condamine Bell—one of the biggest events on the campdraft circuit—when she was six months pregnant.’
Bill and Cissy are now based permanently at Warwick. Bill has undertaken various business ventures, and Cissy has added beauty therapy to her extensive repertoire of skills. Obviously, neither of them needs to work. ‘I don’t think you ever really get over being poor,’ says Bill. ‘Unless Cissy is doing something productive she’s not really happy. If we have a day off she generally feels worse at the end of the day than she did at the start.’
Cissy’s interest in the art of beauty resulted from her many years of living where there was no-one with those skills and the fact that she can do it without exacerbating her bad back.
‘I put my finger through a blowtorch and wrecked my fingernail,’ says Cissy. ‘And when my youngest daughter got married I had my nails done. Normally I just had Band-Aids on them because they looked pretty ordinary. And there was nobody where I lived who could do your nails, no-one who could make them look civilised, like a normal person’s. So I thought I’d learn to do them myself.
‘People would say to me: “Oh, your hands look beautiful,” and so I started doing theirs. And I do a new course every year, and that way I meet a lot of nice people, and I have some lovely clients now. I can sit and do it and I’m out of the dust. I’m just about to go and do a makeup course.
‘I enjoy what I do and I enjoy the fact that I see women now. You know, I’ve probably lived a pretty exciting life compared to most people. I don’t want to do any more things that frighten the daylights out of me. Every day it was the speed and adrenaline rush from everything. I don’t care if I don’t get another big adrenaline rush in my whole life. I’ve had so many.’
In mustering, she says, they would inevitably accidentally muster in a few of the wild cattle, the water buffalo. Hairy, snorting, impossible to domesticate, all they wanted was to get out of the mob of cattle. Unerringly, they would choose Cissy and her horse as the most permeable part of the barrier created by the musterers.
‘They used to pick me out because they must have smelt I was frightened of them. They used to chase me everywhere. I just got tired of all those things. I think I’ve broken thirteen major bones in my body. I’ve broken my shoulders, legs, shoulder blades. I’ve been kicked in the jaw …’
Sitting in her beautiful house, bringing precision and care to the art of making a friend lovely—this is what Cissy wants to do at this time in her life. But she still loves campdrafting, as does Bill.
Just recently their campdraft training has expanded to involve two types of wild cattle: not water buffalo, but American bison and Indonesian banteng. It is with these that she and Bill practise their campdrafting. Where domesticated cattle will learn the course and therefore no longer provide any challenge to the campdrafter, these wild cattle will respond day after day in the same way. Bison and banteng don’t want to separate from the herd and won’t be directed or work with the horse.
‘A friend of ours breeds them and he gave us some. These animals gi
ve you confidence because they do the same thing every day.’
Cissy is working to become competitive again in campdraft.
‘I don’t get nervous in campdraft,’ she says. After all, compared to bull-catching or accidentally mustering wild buffalo along with a herd of cattle, it is a tame pursuit. ‘Bill reckons he needs to make me a bit nervous so I’ll concentrate more. I like to be competitive now, just so I don’t look like the silly old lady who should have stopped ten years ago. It’s not an easy thing to do, but I still don’t get nervous.’
Partly underlying their persistence in this high-speed, unpredictable sport is the desire to stay relevant in and connected to the lives of their children and grandchildren and to the wider campdraft community.
‘When we go we take all the kids with us, we all go together as a family. If I don’t keep riding I’ll have no horses for my grandchildren to ride and campdraft. I want to make sure my grandchildren want to come and see me and that we have something in common! We’re all going away next week. My daughter is riding and both my granddaughters, too. One granddaughter is five and one is fifteen. We’re all doing it together,’ she says. ‘While I can climb up and hop on my horse I’ll be campdrafting.’
Bill is still working in the family team into which he was lucky enough to be born. ‘It has just got bigger,’ he says. ‘And we all work very hard at maintaining a very good relationship with each other. We all value the relationship we have.’
With all of this in their lives Cissy and Bill are satisfied.
‘Success is often defined in the narrowest possible terms,’ says Bill. ‘For some people accruing wealth is success, but I think satisfaction is a better definition. If you are genuinely satisfied with your circumstances—if you are living on a river somewhere and hunting all your food and looking after your children and you are genuinely satisfied with that, you genuinely don’t want anything different—that’s as good as it gets.’
In deciding to marry it appears to me that Cissy ‘followed her gut’ (as she always does) and Bill used something approaching a due diligence procedure (as he always does). ‘It seemed to me we had the basis for a relationship, and history has subsequently vindicated that judgment. When you are young, most people wrongly believe that love is the starting point for a successful long-term relationship. Love is the end result, I believe, of a successful long-term relationship. Friendship should be the starting point. We had the same aspirations, we both wanted a long-term relationship with someone we could be best friends with, and business partners and parents,’ says Bill.
Bill’s parents had talked to their children about the choice of life partner and just how very significant that choice was, and what criteria to consider in making your choice. Cissy’s parents hadn’t.
‘We don’t go to school and have a subject called “life” and learn how to find the best person to marry—and we don’t have experience in that either. Unless you have good parents who actually put some time into you, you don’t know these things,’ says Cissy.
After listening to her I wonder if we need to add a subject called (possibly) ‘Life, Love and Mate Selection’ to the school curriculum.
Bill and Cissy’s kind of love story is told often in Regency romances. Friends decide to marry for reasons other than love. Then comes the dangerous situation where they must rely utterly on the other person. From that close camaraderie grows love. It is all rather more condensed in these books than in Cissy and Bill’s case, but it is the same story. I am charmed to find that this kind of beginning to a marriage works every bit as well in real life as it does in fiction. ‘Bill has the loveliest smile I’ve ever seen. He’s a genuine, honest, good person and he brings out the better in me. A lot of people look at their partner and take them for granted. I try to find something nice to say, not every day, but often—something that is true. You can’t say to someone, “Oh, I love you,” every day, because you might not feel it that day or even that week,’ says Cissy.
‘I always reckon friendship is the most important part of it. When the emotional and physical heat lessens, as it inevitably will over a number of years, then what you are left with is friendship, so you’d better make sure you get that right. If you’ve been with someone for twenty years and you still like them and enjoy being with them and talking to them and doing things together, you can call that love. That’s what I call love,’ says Bill.
There was a pot of gold at the end of Cissy and Bill’s rainbow, but despite the hard years spent growing that gold, that isn’t where their attention goes. They focus instead on the wealth of good relationships they’ve built up. They are still each other’s ‘best mate’.
When I think of Bill and Cissy I imagine them when they first met, a good-looking couple in the roughest of station utes. The girl has her foot on the accelerator and her heart in the moment. The man holds a map and has his mind tracking a multitude of possibilities. The terrain is rough, the dangers real. As we watch, the ute takes off for the future—and when it arrives it is no longer a ute but a helicopter and the couple within love each other all the more for the chance to share the journey.
Never Tear Us Apart
Tania and Tim Wiley, Broome–Wiluna–Marble Bar–Port Hedland–Broome, Western Australia
Western Australia’s coastline echoes the rugged outlines of a giant’s ear: Perth is decorously located on the lobe, whereas Broome is studded on the tip of the upper ear in rebellious competition. They might share a coastline and a state, but each metropolis offers a different Australia. Broome’s streets do have some names that reflect Anglo culture (Dampier, Kennedy), but many also reflect the fact that multiculturalism is old news here—so many British divers died in this place that the White Australia policy was waived in order to allow Japanese divers to work alongside those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent. So there is Wing Place, Tang Street, Matsumoto Street and Johnny Chi Lane.
As well as the descendants of all those divers and those of the Aboriginal people (and Broome people are frequently descendants of both), there are the tourists, the rich pearl buyers, and those seekers who come to Broome looking for other ways of seeing, and in turn see themselves reflected back in all these different mirrors. In Broome, pearling, pastoralism and parties were layered over the old cultures of the Orient and the cold European North, and under, through and around sits the Indigenous spirit of the land. It announces itself to the visitor, even the one who does not know how to look. The work of ‘Welcoming to Country’ is done by the place itself.
This was not always such a cheerfully multicultural place. Cultural and racial difference were at the heart of Broome’s early history of exploitation, violence and tragedy. But places, like people, can be resilient: some places can have a history of tragedy and adversity and yet they can overcome it to such a degree that they stand as a testament to the very opposite qualities. Broome is just such a place, owning its shadow—some of Australia’s ugliest racial wars occurred here—yet now Broome epitomises the kind of Australia we can have when we celebrate cultural and racial diversity.
It was 1990 when agricultural scientist Tim Wiley arrived in Broome. At twenty-nine he had left both a job and his marriage in the cooler, drier south of Western Australia to hitchhike north. At that time Broome had just started to polish itself in its quest to become a world-class tourist destination. For those of us down south, already puzzled by Broome’s comfortable multiculturalism and honesty about its dark and bloody past, this new ambition to glow on the world stage made it seem even more alien than ever. To a southerner like Tim it felt not so much as if Broome belonged in another state, it was more that it belonged to another country entirely. Bali or Broome? The main difference was that he could hitchhike to Broome.
‘This guy, Bob, picked me up in Carnarvon and he gave me a lift up to Broome,’ says Tim. Bob knew a woman called Joan Wilson, who was happy to give newcomers to the town a feed. Tim had landed on his feet with Joan as she was a great adopter of strays.
He became a frequent visitor in those first few weeks in Broome, where he knew no-one and was bewildered by this very different Australia. Joan was an Australian girl who’d married a Maori man, Tania’s father. It was a very unhappy and abusive marriage. After the marriage was over Joan was supported by her strong friends. That support was something she wanted to give back, so Joan’s door was kept open and her fridge full.
Joan’s open-door policy was very like the one that had operated in the little wheatbelt town where Tim had grown up. ‘Weekends and holidays we kids would roam everywhere. Wherever we rocked up we got fed and put to bed,’ Tim says.
So he was made to feel instantly at home with Joan and her sons. The daughter of the house, seventeen-year-old Tania, wasn’t there. She was living in Perth with a boyfriend, but her four little brothers missed her, her mother missed her, and so Tim heard a great deal about the big sister of the family.
‘I got on well with the boys—I was missing my own sons, David and Scott. Joan’s two youngest ones were the same age as my two. We did boy stuff together: they were like little brothers to me. Fishing, going down the beach … they really enjoyed it, I enjoyed it. They all looked up to big sister—and one day she came home.’
It cannot be said that the first encounter between them was in fact a meeting or that it went well. Tania was cleaning the kitchen when Tim walked in. He did not look at her or speak to her, but kept on walking.
‘My boyfriend and I had split up, and then Mum was sick. So I came back to Broome. Because of Mum’s open-door policy with anybody and everybody welcome I was used to people drifting in and out. However, they usually said hello as they walked past you. Tim didn’t. He walked past me, straight down to where Mum was. All I thought was, “arrogance”.’
(Years later, Tim is still excusing himself for this: he was crook as a dog, too, he says, and he wasn’t feeling talkative.)
Joan’s health improved and Tania moved out of home. Tim remained close to Joan and slowly Tania got to know him in that swirling group of people who made up Joan’s circle of friends.
Love In a Sunburnt Country Page 22
