Free Love In a Sunburnt Country by Jo Jackson King Page A

with your heart.’ These words from generations ago are out of step with today’s knowledge about the risks of teaching children to ignore their feelings. Of course, in some ways we learn to raise children when we are still children ourselves, by watching how our own parents raise us—at a time when perhaps we aren’t able to evaluate how useful a particular parenting practice or belief is. When our own children arrive it is hard not to simply reproduce all that we were taught—not just in what we say, but in our expressions and our actions. This can be positive, but equally it can be negative. Something about the birth of Tully triggered in Robina feelings of being burdened, not coping and not being enough—in thinking about this, Robina discovered that far more people and stories lived in her heart than she had imagined.
    â€˜Aaron had always been okay with me, but I hadn’t been,’ says Robina. She had judged herself too harshly. She would no longer do that. And in accepting herself she found that the dry creek beds of her inner landscapes were once more flowing and that she had energy for her children, for Aaron and for everything else that mattered to her.
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    On the day I meet Robina she is making and delivering her Number 45 Curry Paste to sell at markets all over Australia. Robina makes this secret heirloom recipe mostly traditionally … but not quite. Her hair is extremely short and this reveals the delicate bones of her oval face—at the same time she has perched on her distinctive, sculpted nose the largest, owliest pair of spectacles I’ve ever seen. I suspect Robina has the attractive person’s ambivalence about her appearance. Good looks (like good bank accounts) can get in the way of people seeing and coming to know a person. And Robina wants people to know her, to connect to her, particularly women who are like the woman she once was. Having been helped to heal herself, all Robina wants to do is to see other women heal too. She added to this her particular focus on working with mothers of young children, and also her old dream of taking journeys out to the remote places in which some people live and working with them there.
    So Robina and Aaron made a decision. They purchased a caravan, hung out a virtual shingle (featuring Aaron’s ability to weld, mend, bodgie, work and handle, and Robina’s emotional renovations for women), enrolled five-year-old Darcy at Alice Springs School of the Air (Tully is still too little for school) and metamorphosed into the most modern of gypsies.
    â€˜I had to be free of all those layers of things that don’t matter,’ she says. ‘And when I experienced this, I realised this was my gig. Nursing is not all my heart, but this is. You can be you at a core level—it’s a real place, and that’s what I want to bring to other women.’
    Robina now uses the method that helped her to help other women, particularly those who live in the outback. ‘Those environments are so remote and the pressure on women can become so heightened,’ says Robina. ‘I’ve had women hiding under the office desk doing this work with me just so they can have some space.’ Aaron needs this mobility too. He is earning money on his way to buying his own station in Queensland or the Northern Territory one day, but it needs to be work in the bush. He cannot handle more than two weeks in a town or city.
    It seems to me the most elegant of solutions to the nature of working in the outback—where work is intermittent, seasonal or once-off—and it provides far more time together for families than fly-in, fly-out living arrangements. Whoever is not working looks after the children. More often than not it is Robina, but Aaron is very comfortable with hands-on fathering.
    â€˜I never really thought I’d have kids—not that I wouldn’t have them, but I never thought about it. I didn’t expect