Queen Em

There’s Farmer Wants a Wife, and then there’s real life. Emma reveals how her husband swept her off her feet with a movie-worthy proposal and the hard yards of making it work. 

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 Writers 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 life on the land.

Brought to you by the Queensland Writer Center. I'm Jane Hultgren. And I'm Helen Roche. Helen, what's the most romantic thing someone has ever done for you? Oh, my husband went and sourced an emerald and had it made into a ring for me all on his own without me knowing anything about it. F— off what? Was this a, you know, anniversary?

Any kind of significant, I love you Helen moment. Wow. I know. My husband's always been very good. He brings me flowers on days when they're not expected.  We've been married 28 years. He's a keeper. I'm keeping him.  Oh,  Helen, what's his name? Jim. Hey Jim.  I bet you're listening. 'cause that's the kind of guy you are. 

Jim. Well, we are all about to get swept off our feet. Today we are meeting Em. So Em grew up in Dalby, but was always dreaming about something bigger. I had a great time, loved my friends, go, but I was leaving. Yeah. Leaving Dalby? Yeah, I was going to Brissie. Yeah. Yeah. So I was, I and honestly, if I had went, I probably wouldn't have come back.

Yeah. If you went to Brisbane. Yeah. People think it would've, city life would've stolen me. 'cause that's what I always wanted. Well, do you reckon 20-year-old Em would say, if she could fast forward and look at, look where you are. Laugh. Yeah, it's the biggest, the biggest family joke that I've married a farmer. So not only did Em move back to Dalby, but she did the last thing she thought that she would do, which is marry a farmer.

So what's a farm like Jane? Think classic farmland, open fields. Big skies. This is gonna be a steep  Hold your fanny. Okay. I'm excited. Go fast! Go fast!  There's wide open fields and then there's like mounds of dirt kind of in the distance. And so we hopped in the ute. We were just chatting and I had no idea, like she said, I'll take you to the dam.

And I was like, I don't, yeah, where is that kind of thing. And we went over one of the mounds of dirt. And then on the way down there was just this like, it was like dam. Like a huge expanse of water.  Who, what the f—? What?  So this is our water supply. This is one of our dams. Well, that's a real creeper, isn't it?

That crept up on me. Sorry. Wow. That is so cool.  The kids. It's like when you go to a hotel and you don't realize there's a giant pool. Boom. Like, look out your window. No.  Um, it's got a beautiful lagoon on it, so I'll take you down there one day. Oh my God. Look at this. The kids will say skiing is probably their funnest thing.

Skiing. Yeah. Yeah. Do you get to go do that? A bit. Yeah. Over summer, like Sam, I was working, I don't know when it was. It was like I just had a, had a day and I couldn't get him. And I was like,  what are you doing? And I rang again. I couldn't get him over. I heard this motor and I was like, that's not, what are you doing?

He's like, it was Friday he was like meet you at the dam. So like there's give and take. He's either very, very busy or he's like, we've worked our asses off. Things are a bit settled. Yeah. I'm gonna knock off, put the boat in. And we skied from four o'clock to 7:30 that night. Oh. And came home and I'm like, I've got no food.

The kids are having toast. Get in bed. Did you have the best time? We do. We do. Yeah. And I think that's what makes up for it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's lots of, it doesn't work. There's a lot of women that get resentful and there's absolutely been moments of resentment in our relationship. Yeah.  But he works really hard to try and give us a lifestyle  and I love him.

Oh, I think that's lovely. You don't often picture in your mind a romantic thing, farming. This is a really nice story about how you can make it work. So, Jane, what's Em’s husband like? Yeah, Sam, he is. Nice. And apparently he's uh, you know, your typical sort of Aussie bloke. He's a bit of a shit-stirrer, loves his footy.

I've only met him once the day I went out there, and I think the way he proposed to her tells you a lot about him. So like Em is a teacher, and there was this one day, it was just a normal work day or whatever. Her teacher friend called her out of class and said, you've got to go to the office right now.

Wow. I would panic. I would think that something, there's gotta be something wrong. Literally. Yeah. Something someone's died or I'm getting fired. Yeah. To pull you out of class is a big deal. Oh my God. Yeah. Huge. Oh my goodness. I'm being marched up to the office middle of a lesson, which never happens. This head was a million miles a minute thinking, what is going on?

And I looked up. And like, probably like 10 meters away from me. I was, Sam was sitting on a bar stool with a guitar and I just looked at him and I was like, whatcha doing here?  And I just panicked. I was like, I've gotta go to the office. I was like, you, you shouldn't be on school grounds. Like you need to leave, I'm gonna get in trouble.

And he goes, no, I've got permission to be here. And I was like. What are you doing? He said, just stop talking.  And obviously he said some lovely things about our relationship and he said, I've got a song I want to sing to you. And he had rewritten the words to the song in the Wedding Singer, the Adam Sandler movie, that he comes out in that final scene on the plane.

I want to grow old with you. 

And so he had rewritten that, that song about our life. In the corner of my eye, I saw one of my best friends at work like come just casually walking out of her staff room to go somewhere, obviously to do photocopying or something. And she had spotted us, gone back into the staff room, got the whole PE staff who were on break, and they had these little heads, like a hundred meters away from me - popped out watching this proposal. And then obviously he finished the song and I like erratically cried and he popped out this gorgeous ring that we had both looked at as an example of a ring that I wanted, but I well knew it was out of our budget. And the cheeky bugger just.  He is. He's all or nothing my sambo. So he just got it and yeah, obviously all the tears. I get a bit teary when I talk about it 'cause it was just so special. What a beautiful thing to do. Sam is a keeper. Oh, a bit teary. Yeah. So lovely. That is so lovely. I also love how she's such a teacher. She's like, I need to go to the office.

He's like, uh, just stay. Are you supposed to be here? I'm in trouble. I'm going to the office. Do you have permission? Show me your out of class pass, Sam. Oh, not wondering why he's sitting on a chair. No. With a guitar. With a guitar. Just that she's gonna be in more trouble. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, it's just beautiful. But marrying a farmer it's not all romance. It's like when there's rain and he's a really heavy sleeper. And I go, babe,  babe, babe. It's really heavy, babe. And then he'll wake up and then he's gone. Oh God, he's gone because he's. On a motorbike or he is in a buggy. Yeah, starting pipe. Starting engines started pumping. Is there part of you in those moments where you're sitting there going, I should ask if I need some help.

Absolutely but when I'm spilling into a bucket and I have temperatures through the roof and I'm breastfeeding a kid with 3-year-old Maggie, and he's in the paddock next to me and I'm on the phone crying so he can come home. Yes. Why can't you come home? It's like there's rain coming. I need to get this crop in Emma. 

That would be so hard. There is there. There's definitely been times of resentment. Mm-hmm. And not resentment, 'cause he is never not doing the best for our family. Yeah. So, for example, on the weekend, he's like, I just wanna get on top of it. I want this season to be right. I'm gonna start at three at three o'clock every morning and work till like nine o'clock when the kids wake.

I'll have a Saturday and Sunday with you.  And I was like, this is very necessary.  Is it really necessary? He said, I just wanna be ready.  I was like, yep, right-o. And then he started work at three o'clock on, but he also didn't, he doesn't like cutting our family time because when he has to cut it, he cuts it.

But if he can get up at work at two o'clock in the morning, work till six o'clock or seven o'clock or eight o'clock,  then he's got the day with us. Yeah. So he will do that. Yep. Yeah. And his, his temperament and his personality, thankfully, like you've got farmers who are just negative, woeful people and he is just like, the sun will come out tomorrow.

Yeah. Wow. It's okay. It's not, you know, he's just got such a beautiful temperament in that we all like to play our own violins at the points. Because, absolutely. It's a pretty demanding lifestyle, Uhhuh.  And I see teaching friends, like teaching friends who have married teachers and go off and they're on beach holidays or you know, taking their kids down to Brisbane or we bought, so we bought that caravan last year to get more balance.

'cause I was just like, we are missing our kids and we just can't afford to just go to the coast for a week here and a coast for a week here.  With this life and you, you just saying like it's the biggest joke in your family that you ended up marrying a farmer and living this life. What are you grateful for in terms of your family values?

We don't own a game station yet, and I'm not going there. Yeah. We've got an old wii in there that occasionally I crack out and we've had dust it off. Yeah. Like when it's been really rainy or we need an inside thing and yeah, driving us insane. But that's the only, they don't, we don't have an Xbox and Do you love that? 

Yes. Do you love that your kids are living this? Oh, don't get me wrong, they’re glued to the tv. They love shows and they love stuff. Like Maggie gets on my old, 'cause I don't have computer now we have a farm laptop, but I want them on it. Yeah. My old computer doesn't even connect to internet. They get on Paint and not cool Paint like the old Paint.

Yeah. When I think of that day I spent with her, all I could think of was my kids who are 10 minutes down the road who have a Nintendo switch and like laptops and they're living a completely different life to what Em’s kids are living. And all I could think of was, oh my god, I'm so sorry Lucy and Eli, like if they saw what these kids do on that farm, like they've got their own dirt bikes that they just race around on and their own dam and like it is just like a kid's paradise. But yeah, the flip side is being at the mercy of nature basically. It's like extreme freedom and extreme constraint. Yeah. While they all really, really love this farming life that they're living, they don't have those kind of dreams that you sometimes hear about where Sam or Em, it's really important to them that one of the kids one day takes over the farm and it stays in the family.

So I was in the car one day and Em called me and I just hit record. He would love to see the farm go on. Yeah. Yeah.  But he's a really good dad. He wants their happiness. Yeah. And he wants a wife that looks like happiness. 

I don't want to say when you go up and have the farm, I wanna say you love who you love and you do what you love. And that has no boundaries. Only that it has our love and support for all of that.  So I feel a bit teary.  Yeah.  You know, I hope he’s still my best friend forever.  

We're both pretty hot headed and when we do things, when we fight, it's brazen and it's confrontational and things get said, yeah, but we can work through honesty. But I can't work through deceit. So I’ll tell you when I'm resentful and I tell you I f—-ing hate this farm, it's because I need for you to know where I'm at.

Yeah. 'cause if I hide it,  I don't want it to fester and it to ruin us.  I choose him every day and the day I don't, he'll know it. And  I,  me,  you know, all marriages are complicated. Yeah. All.  In the eight years that we've parented, we've had two nights away from our children together. Yeah, yeah. But we, we lean into making the best of it.

Yeah. That's why we motorbike ride together.  Yeah. And it's just, it's a new skill for me. I'm a 36-year-old woman learning to ride a motorbike. You know, when you all learn to ride a motorbike at our age, Jane it hurts. My god, it does. I dunno,  but I imagine it would. That's love Em. That's love. It makes me feel like weirdly relieved that all the different things that she says about, you know, that they fight, love her honesty where she's like, oh my God, sometimes I lose my shit. And that they are hotheaded, they blow up sometimes and it doesn't look like bloody ideal Mr. Wedding Singer proposal perfect Sam. It looks real.

They've both found their person. And I think when you find your person, you can be honest and you can feel safe in knowing that you can have a fight and it will be all right. And I can be honest with you, and I can say hard stuff, but our love is the most important thing and I know what we can get through this.

Yeah, I know what you mean. And, and to be totally honest with you, this day, this day that, that I visited her farm and she said all of this, I drove away and I realized that. I'm a peacekeeper and I'm a people pleaser. And, and when she said those words, I'll tell you when I'm resentful. And I do that because if I hide it, it will fester and ruin us.

And I love you too much to let everyone else. And I was like, holy shit. Wow. Like woman up sometimes. Hey, even if it is hard, because the consequences are too great. The alternative, yeah. Is that you know, you, yeah. You get sick, you fester. You do. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I love that. I love that. Yeah. Next week on Queens of the Land, have you ever had a sliding doors moment?

Where life could have been completely different. He was saying, right, if you want to come with me, I'm going to South Africa and Mark saying, well, if you wanna come with me, I'm going to Australia. And I thought, shit, which way do I go? 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. 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 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, or 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 myself, 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.

Then 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 beat 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 yeah? 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 homogenised 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 Barcaldine?

And they'd be like, I go pigging with dad and we have meat and three veg. And we, we were 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.