A Day in the Country: Chris Ferguson recalls her Christmas during the Millennium Drought.
THE FESTIVE SEASON BRINGS A MIXED BAG OF EMOTIONS AND MEMORIES FROM CHRISTMASES PAST FOR CHRIS FERGUSON.
THE WAY I see it, taking bad days with the good is simply life. Our journey is made up of wins and losses, happiness and sadness, laughter and tears — the yin and yang of life.
So it is with Christmas. As the years roll by we can all look back and remember Christmas days that were euphorically happy, as well as those that were tinged with sadness, or heart-achingly lonely and left us tired and empty.
The first 30 years of my life were lived in close proximity to my family. Memories of childhood Christmases are sweet and echo with the hauntingly beautiful sound of music. As my grandfather played the fiddle, I was spun in the circle of laughing older siblings and cousins playing Ring a Ring o’ Rosie. There were games of hide-and-seek while my mother’s calloused hands moved over the piano and her sister sang.
Christmas became a different beast entirely when in 2001 my husband and I with our two children moved to an isolated station in outback NSW. Swept up in our adventure, I had no real idea of what we were getting ourselves into.
Christmas came 11 months after our move. The Millennium Drought was making its presence felt and as the demand from livestock on our water supply increased, we had to look our first solitary Christmas in the eye. Our families were 855 kilometres away, and we were on our own among the red dirt and mulga trees, a little family of four, trying to make a go of it. I remember that Christmas vividly. In my innocence, I didn’t know that Christmas could be so lonely.
The photograph you can see above is of my children and I on that first Christmas and is a poignant reminder of our aloneness in a vast landscape. We were all tired from the constant work of clawing a run-down station into life as a viable business; there had been few days off all year.
I declared Christmas to be a pyjama day, figuring that if we didn’t get dressed, we couldn’t work. So here we are in our boxers on Christmas afternoon, on our way to check water for livestock and to fix a leaking tank, because that’s just how it is.
When I asked my now grown children what they remembered of Christmas on the station, they recounted sitting together in the pre-dawn dark waiting for the sun to show itself on the flat and bare horizon so that they could wake us up and see what Santa had bought. They remembered water fights and swimming in dams on the way to check water for livestock. They remembered me trying too hard.
Last year my extended family gathered at our new farm near Grenfell in Central West NSW and we had ourselves a proper happy Christmas. I’d put a sign at the front gate saying,“we don’t want to talk about rain!” and just for a little while we forgot the seasonal difficulties and the accumulating debt. We laughed and played and there was no room for loneliness.
This Christmas will be a tough one for many people living in Australia’s drought-affected areas. Some will be battling with the worst affliction — the loss of hope. Let’s remind ourselves that everything changes, let’s reach deep down and find some strength and reach out to share it with others.
Country Australia could use a little mercy now.
Chris Ferguson shares her life in the outback at @lifeinthemulga on Instagram.