Queen Tara

Tara loves her life on the land and seeing the green of a crop surrounding the house. But when you marry a farmer, you also marry the farm. That means sometimes he’s on a tractor hundreds of kilometres away when you’re having a medical emergency. 

This episode discusses pregnancy loss, so if that’s sensitive territory for you, please take care.

• Red Nose Grief and Loss: Provides 24/7 support for pregnancy loss, stillbirth, baby, and child death, offering a helpline (1300 308 307) and resources. 
• Beyond Blue: Offers confidential counselling services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 
• Lifeline: Offers 24/7 crisis support, including a phone line (13 11 14). 

Brought to you by The Queensland Writers Centre and supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

Produced by F&K Media.

Transcript

Telling Our Stories to the World is a series from Queensland Writer Center. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast was made. Heads up. There's a bit of language in this episode, so if you have little big ears listening in, pop on your headphones.  Welcome to Queens of the Land, a series about women carving out their best lives on the land.

Brought to you by Queensland Writers Center. I'm Jane Holtgren. And I'm Helen Roche. Today we are meeting someone I've known for quite a while. She's a good mate, actually. She's the head of performing arts at Dalby State High School. A teacher who'd been there for years said to me. Have you met Tara yet?

You'll love her because everybody does and it's just stayed with me and it is so true.  I like a little chat. And she's been through some tough stuff living on the land. Heads up. We are going to be talking about pregnancy loss. Tara's had two daughters and a son. Her son Adam is growing up fast. It just happened to be his birthday on the day I was there.

Have some cake darl. Okay. Happy birthday. Oh, thank you.  Jane, how did Tara end up on the land? Okay, so Tara, she went to university with a lady named Janet and a lifelong bestie friendship was formed. Tara got posted out to Dalby, and then Janet would go and visit Tara in Dalby, and that's where Janet met John, who is a Dalby man and an agronomist.

And so Janet married John, and John had a best friend, Kieran, and then, yeah, the rest is history. And then all four of them - Janet and John and Tara and Kieran - just lived their best double dating lives for the next 30 years. When I first came out, before we even got married, Kieran had a piggery and I, and I did, actually used to help in the piggery.

Did you? This is when we were dating. I know. To be impressive. And then once we got married, those pigs stink. And the thing is, if you've ever been with someone who works in a piggery. You cannot get the smell out of their clothes or out of their skin. It is, it is you. Well, what does it smell like? Like what is it?

Like an abattoir. Oh, basically. Oh. And on hot days, and he'd try to get a breeze through, but you can just imagine the stink, 'cause the, the poo and the wee basically fell through slats into like sludge underneath and then, which then could be used as fertilizer. But yeah, they were very stinky. That's not making me feel very happy at all.

No, that is. I would never eat pork again I don't think. I can smell that smell that she's describing. For example, Tara's having a hysterectomy next week, but Tara looks at everything like it's an adventure. So she's like, I'm quite looking forward to it. And we're like, what the, what the fuck? Like, are you, you having what?

She's like, yeah, I've never had a hysterectomy before. You only ever get one. Wonder what it's gonna be like. And I'm like, we're all like. Cool. Cool. Cool. Like she's optimistic to a fault. When I heard that story, I'm like, my god, that's so you. She's like, I'll love helping with the piggery. Yeah. Yeah. I've never, I've never worked with shit all weekend, so let's have a go.

Eventually they got rid of the piggery. I think Kieran farm's about a thousand acres. The farm is like, it's almost, it's too big for one person to manage, which Kieran has been doing all these years, but not big enough to get other people in. Yeah. Right. So many of the medium to smaller size farms are just being driven out of business and being, because it's too expensive and, and it's not sustainable.

There are certain like families that have lots of branches of the same family. Yeah. that have got big family businesses. Yeah.  Right. They're running it as a business, not as a family farm. And I think that's what we think with Adam. You know, if he wants to be a farmer. Does he wanna be a farmer? I think so. Yeah.

Probably. Yeah. What we've got is not gonna be enough. Yeah. You know, here we will have to use it as a start, uh, and then try to build. So size really does matter. Yeah, it really does. So many of the people I talk to share a similar story to what Tara just did then. So the wife doesn't necessarily work on the farm, but they have to go and get an income outside of the farm to kind of keep everything afloat because the farm is getting paid, maybe twice a year. Wow. I'd never considered that. I hadn't actually thought about when money comes into a farm. But of course, if they're growing things or they're selling pigs, you're only getting paid when you do that. That's, yeah, and it was so interesting to think about recent history and women not having rights and the gender pay gap and all of those things.

And then there's. This kind of situation you've got now where it's women going out and working and having extensive careers of their own, that's the reason that they can still have the farm. Mm-hmm. Like, yeah, it's sort of interesting. I think it's actually a pretty lonely existence for Kieran because I think some farmers do end up pretty isolated.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think the sad thing for farmers like Kieran in situations like we are in, is that I deal with people all day. Mm-hmm. And then I come home and I just want some peace. Whereas he's been on his own all day, so he'd probably like to sit down and have a drink. And have a chat. Yeah.  And your tank is empty.

Empty. And I'm, yeah. And I'm just going, Ugh. And like when your husband's gone with farming? Yeah. Like he's just gone. Oh yeah. Yeah. And when the kids were little, it was like being a single mum, you know, because he would be on the tractor until eight or nine o'clock at night, and then the kids are in bed by the time he gets home.

Mm-hmm. And you've saved his dinner, but you're exhausted. And it's like one of those things where in a way, women, when they marry farmers, I guess they, they, conceptually, you can tell them what they're getting into, but they would not, you don't know until…You don't know until you're there. Yeah. Yeah.

There's such specific timing with getting that crop in the ground. We went to a funeral and he missed the window, you know, and it was me saying, but you had to do that, Kieran. You had to, you had to go to that funeral. Yeah. That was really important. But because of that, that one day window can mean the difference.

Now the ground's not wet enough. There's not enough moisture left, like literally one day. Yeah. And that's why they can't get off the tractor and they can't, they can't help you unless there's an emergency. Yeah. So you just understand that, well, we can't go on holidays. June/July holidays were the ones I would get a bit excited about because that was the downtime. But that's not when you, that's not beach weather and that's not, it's really… it’s the shit holidays. Yeah, that's the shit holiday.  And so like I can't book anything until the week before or we'll go and then Kieran will come home from the, yeah. Okay. So leave us at the beach.

Mm-hmm. That’s really depressing. Come home. Yeah.  And get on the farm. Yeah. Oh my goodness. I know. And see that was the story about Francesca too. Francesca was the baby that Tara lost, and the story of Francesca highlights so many of the things that women in the bush have to struggle with. So I knew a little bit about Francesca and Tara's story having known her for so many years, but I did not know it in this level of detail.

So a heads up, if this is difficult emotional terrain for you, dip out now. So what? What happened was at about eight weeks, I contracted Q Fever, which is from animal sheep, faeces or so it would've been living in the country, cattle truck… it was that fucking piggery. No, that was gone by then. Okay. Cattle truck or sheep truck goes past, if you've gotta actually take it into your lungs. And I was very sick at about eight, nine weeks pregnant. And then at about 12 weeks pregnant, I was leaking this brown fluid. Yeah. I had this horrible, horrible infection. So I was in hospital 'cause it was obviously some horrible infection. So they were trying to kill the infection. Yeah.

But I was leaking amniotic fluid. Oh wow. So they offered us, and they offered us a termination. And said, there's no way this baby can survive. Could they see that? Like at eight weeks, that was just me being really sick. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember saying to mum, I'm really worried.

Yeah. I don't know how this is gonna affect the baby. Yeah. And then at 12 weeks was the bad infection. Holy shit. Then we went to a specialist in Brisbane. Mm. Um, and they did like, you know, one of those very full on ultrasounding thing, and he said there's not enough amniotic fluid, so her lungs aren't gonna develop properly.

And we had to decide whether we would have a termination and we both went, can't do it. Can't end a child's life without knowing for sure what's gonna happen. Mm-hmm. So we. We hung on. Holy shit, Tara. I never knew that. And I thought, well, we are not religious, so we weren't looking at it from a religious point of view.

Yeah. But we are thinking no, if, if it's not meant to be, I'll have a miscarriage. Yeah. If it is meant to be, and if we have a special needs child, which we thought we would probably have, that is what we will have. I think the specialist sent us down to Ronald McDonald House at about 24 weeks. I was doing well.

Kieran thought, oh yeah, he'll come home, do some farming. Mm. And of course I had weird pains in my stomach like, I need to go to the toilet. Went to the toilet and felt her foot in my vagina and put my hand in and went, oh my God, that's a baby's foot. It was four o'clock in the morning, so I didn't ring Kieran.

I told mum, rang the bloody hospital and they said, oh, can you walk down? Obviously every person I talked to was just the night person. I said, I'm at Ronald McDonald House because of this, you know, I really don't think I can walk down the hill to the hospital. So they sent an ambulance and I went in and I took, I was there for ages and it was funny.

Like it wasn't funny, but at like six o'clock in the morning. Finally, someone comes in for like an internal exam and she says, oh my God, there's a foot. And I said,  oh no,  pretty sure I said that when I came in at 4:00 AM  pretty sure. I said, I have a foot, can I have a hand please?  So then, so then they went into emergency mode and then I said, my husband's hours away in, in Dalby.

Can you please ring him and tell him what's going on? So they rang you just after six, didn't they? And so then poor Kieran missed and poor me because I didn't have him there. Totally. Um,  yeah, you got there  after once. I was in recovery, didn't you? Yeah.  And she was born and it was a pretty, they didn't give me enough in the epidural.

And I could actually feel it too was another thing that. I could, I didn't hurt, but I could feel what, what they were doing. And I think because it was an emergency caesar, they had to cut down instead of across. I think her foot was stuck and they had to be really careful and I could feel 'em trying to get her out and pulling and things.

Anyway, it wasn't very nice. Anyway, and then like she was alive when Kieran got there and we were sort of went back into the the special nursery, special baby where very sick babies are. Yeah. Yeah.  So Kieran, you must have got there by half past eightish or something, or Yeah, I don't know too.  It wasn't too much after.

Mm. Yeah. And that's because you live in the country and you are not, you know?  Yeah. And he couldn't be I imagine for weeks on end at Ronald McDonald house. Just waiting. Just waiting for something to happen. Yeah. And so he came home to do the farm stuff as you do. Tara talked about how Francesca actually lived for 14 hours, and in that 14 hours they got to hold her and sing to her, and that's something that she treasures.

Oh, that's heartbreaking. I've had two miscarriages at 10 weeks, both of them. One between each of my now live children, which was very traumatic at the time, but to have gone through what she's gone through, that takes it to that whole next level. Mm-hmm. It's extraordinarily sad. It's like courageous of them to have made the choice they made for her to be away from her husband through that time.

I just can't imagine how awful that would've been for her. Yeah. Me neither. Yeah. I remember years ago her saying to me, because Francesca's birthday is always around musical time at school, and Dalby State High prides itself on doing an annual musical, mostly Janet and Tara. And so Francesca's birthday is always a musical week, like when it's all happening in every year.

They celebrate Francesca's birthday on their farm, and they get helium balloons and have a cake. And I remember one day Tara said, I give myself that day. Absolutely. Like I do the cake and the balloon with the kids, and then at night I take out her stuff and I let myself cry. I let myself fall apart every year.

I give myself that and she does it on her own. And then she packs it pack up till the next year. Yeah. And then the next morning goes and puts on a show for the thousands of, you know,  that's strength. But I think that thing about grief is it's got its own little room. Mm-hmm. It's a separate room. And you can have that with a door closed for a while, but occasionally you've gotta open that door and let it out.

Yeah. So, you know, you've got her own little space. Yeah. So Francesca's got her own little space in Tara's heart. Yeah.  Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Very powerful story. Yeah. I'm really inspired by those two as a couple. Yeah. That could actually kill some relationships, you know? It does. For if, if he hadn't have given her the emotional support that she needed after that, yeah, she could have shut down and, and vice versa.

Because it was his daughter too. Yeah. When your husband's on the tractor, he is on the tractor and he can't just stop and get off. Yeah. That's just like in everyday life too. When the kids are little, you miss a lot and I'm on my own a lot. Mm. Because you've just gotta be on the tractor. Yeah. That's the thing.

You sort of gotta work with nature. Yeah. And it does its own thing. You've gotta, yeah. You've got a timeframe to get stuff done for all the sacrifices you have to make when you live in the country. There's. Still so much to love about living on the land. I love the quiet, just all that space. And so I can go for a walk in the afternoon and there's no one else, you know, you can breathe and, and like when we had the crop around the house, like I love when there's a crop around the house, you've got a good crop because you just drive home and it's just, oh, that you've done that sort of thing, you know?

Yeah. You know, it's, it's green and it makes you feel good or you look out this way and you see the sunset and then there's the green. Like it is a  a very life affirming way to live. Yeah, it's lovely. And it's funny, Adam on the way to school one day said to me,  I can't ever go to live in the city, mum. I can't ever imagine. 

And I said, you do know how lucky you. And he said, oh yeah. It makes me feel just happy for them. That feeling of gratitude that is just like leaking from her voice. It's like she didn't grow up on the farm and she didn't grow up in Dalby, but it is so much a part of her and her world and she can find peace there.

Absolutely, and that's a nice thing too.  Next week on Queens of the Land, we are meeting one of the few women auctioneers in Australia. You feel like an absolute fool when you're starting. That doesn't go away quickly. And learning how she had to completely reinvent her life. After injury. It bloody hurt.

But anyway, the job needed doing. You are listening to Queens of the Land, a season of the Telling Our Stories to the World Podcast, brought to you by the Queensland Writers Center and supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland produced by F&K Media.  Stick around to hear what we've got planned for next season of telling our stories to the world. 

Hi, Lori-Jay, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Helen. Thanks for having me. You are the CEO for the Queensland Writers Center. Can you tell us what's in the works for next season of Telling Our Stories to the World? Well, it's fingers crossed at the moment. We are desperately looking for that kind of funding for it, but we are very excited by this one.

It's Mornington Island. We are looking up in the Torres Strait Island. We are looking at Indigenous and First Nations writers, capturing their stories, how they wanna capture them. Really excited. This is, uh, a long way away. So we've gotta get our bums up there, get our writers up there, put the tools up in place for those people to be able to capture their stories and then to disseminate them and share it with people.

Wow, that sounds so exciting and hot. Exciting. And hot and hot. Yes, I'm very excited to be part of that.  Now, what's the idea behind telling our stories to the world and how long have you been doing it for? So this cycle is number three. Mornington will be number four. We started off with Telling Our Stories to the World as social prescription with Department of Health in Queensland.

So we went out into Longreach, Winton, Blackall and Barcaldine and we were looking for people who were struggling with mental health and using the small act of writing to be able to get them talking about their stories. We quickly understood that there's gonna be people who can write a postcard for us or tell us a story.

And then we found a couple of people who are writers, and that was very exciting. We've got a couple of people now who are published authors from that first wave, and that's from finding them, giving them the tools, like I said, and then they're just off and running with their own stories. Uh, so with the postcards, I did this first session.

And we took a book about the Lost Crayons and when the crayons got lost, they sent a postcard back home. So I had all the little kids. And in these towns you've got children from like four years old up to 14, 15 in the same classroom. So you need something that everyone's gonna be able to do. So we had them just write one or two sentences about, I love living in Longreach because, and this is what I do with my family.

We told them we were gonna share this postcards we're gonna post them, uh, around the world. And the first year we went to Germany and Japan and we sent them to classrooms over there and they wrote stories back as well that we then sent back to those schools. So it really was like a postcard exchange, uh, between two different very different groups of children across the world. This allows us to talk to the children and the children. Go, mum, I really liked this. Take me to the library this afternoon where those trainers are gonna be. Then we get to speak to the parents. So it's really a double kind of, you know, it's a folded environment where we start off here with the aim of like, let's speak to the parents about what their worlds are like out here, and do they have any in this particular instant mental health issues that we needed to tackle. 

Second Wave was working with climate deniers, so the Department of Science and Environment. Really exciting. You're talking to kids in schools. Trying to speak to their parents so that we can have that really deep conversation about what does it look like when we tackle climate, when we have to endure it, when we are living with it, it's not going anywhere.

So what are those changes? Using the kids to get their mums and dads down to the libraries. And again, the small acts of writing. And we found some great stories that we shared through anthologies and things like that.  And then last year? Well last year was Helen's year.  We met with camels. We met with women on their farms, women in rural and regional Queensland, in that southeast region.

And I think what's really important here was these stories need to be told in their voices, we haven't homogenized these stories. They are very clearly coming from the land of those, um, people and sharing it with, uh, the rest of the state, the rest of the country. And now on our podcast. We're very excited.

What a wonderful project, Lori-Jay, and I think everyone should get on board with it. Now, if people do have an idea for any seasons, would you like to hear from them? We would love to. In particular, if you know something about your region that the rest of us think we know, but we probably have the wrong end of the stick.

'cause you know, we are from the city, or we're from, you know, the coast or something like that. We really wanna find. Did you know that this is what happens out here? One of the things that was very exciting with the first Telling Our Stories to the World was we asked kids what's it like to live in Blackall?

And they'd be like, I go piggin’ with dad and we have meat and three veg and we are, we will like from the city. We were like, oh really? And is that the same when we send those postcards to the children in Japan? And the kids were like, yes. I'm like, do you think they've got guns?  Oh, wouldn't they? Do you think they go pigging, do you think?

And it was very much this broadening of their world as well as they come in. And that's something we wanna keep their stories, but share them with, uh, the rest of the world and then vice versa. So I think that's one of the most powerful things that this project does is share those stories. Thanks so much for that, Lori-Jay.

It's a really exciting project and I'm very, um, interested in seeing where it goes to next. Well, if anyone calls from Hamilton Island, we are free to also help with those stories. Definitely.