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

them to be this much fun.’
    Robina and Aaron are now modern gypsies. In their caravan with their two little boys they travel the Australian outback. Aaron’s fascination is with the land. Robina’s is with the human heart. Each of them is exploring a different terrain. They observe, they reflect, they deduce. Robina’s heart is an occupied one. Not only occupied by the people she’s known and knows, but occupied by the stories left from the lives of people she would never meet. The story behind Robina’s Number 45 Curry Paste business is this kind of legacy. Some years before she and Aaron purchased their caravan Robina had begun making curry paste, which she was beginning to sell in remote parts of Australia. Number 45 Curry Paste was almost her own personal scholarship fund: among other things, she used the profits to pay for professional and personal development. Robina inherited the recipe from her great-grandparents, and with the recipe comes the story behind it, which is another kind of legacy entirely.
    Robina’s great-grandparents were Anglo-Indians living in Bangalore. They had five children and then came the Depression.
    â€˜They actually couldn’t afford to keep all of their children, to feed them all. Three of them had to go to an orphanage. Can you imagine,’ says Robina, ‘what that would have felt like? How much it would hurt your heart?’
    The desperation to have all their children back with them again drove her great-grandparents into entrepreneurship. They began to make and sell different condiments, including the one Robina makes. It began as ‘meals on wheels’. In her kitchen Robina’s great-granny made meals that her great-grandfather delivered on his bicycle. Then her great-grandmother began making condiments from spices she’d ground up herself. The enterprise grew and eventually they established a factory, and then one day all the children could come home again.
    Robina believes that perhaps the legacy of this family trauma contributed to her unexpected feelings of being unable to cope with a second child.
    In fact, stories like these are known to travel down generations, rather less in words than in shared unspoken feelings, in our most subtle micro expressions and in unspoken family rules. Such stories act like a virus infecting our vision, or a ghost standing between our loved ones and ourselves, and they shape how we respond to a situation without us ever seeing their influence upon us. In psychological literature this is called intergenerational transfer: the author of Anne of Green Gables , LM Montgomery, wrote that ‘no one can be free who has a thousand ancestors’, a phrase that speaks directly to this. These subtle influences often do not bother women and men until we have children of our own, and then reveal themselves when we behave in ways we don’t want to and don’t understand. For example, we may refuse to console a child while knowing that our actions would look heartless to someone else—because a family ghost is whispering that ‘he needs to stand on his own two feet to be safe in this life’ and we are unknowingly listening to that voice rather than the despair of our child. Robina has busted these ghosts, she’s brought these family stories and rules out into the warm light of day and examined them to see if they are true and kept only the stories that help her. She’s happier; the whole family is happier. The caravan has become the Meehan family’s magic carpet. They travel the red roads of Australia’s vast interior—whether dust-devilled or sodden and treacherous—and peer down together at the view flowing past. When they see an adventure to take or an opportunity to earn they can stop where they are and explore it all together. The Meehan family climb hills together, together they paddle in puddles. The little boys are buzzed by the rush and bustle of cattle