Bookshelf
FROM BUSH TO BOOK A Katherine author has released a second memoir about her life in the Territory outback, sharing stories of cyclones, crimes, characters and country from her years spent in the Gulf region
TONI Tapp Coutts’s early years in the outback captivated the imagination of city dwellers and Territorians alike in A Sunburnt Childhood.
The sequel, My Outback Life, begins with the author living in Mansfield, Victoria, where she and her husband Shaun moved after Killarney.
“When I got there I thought ‘oh my god, this is so beautiful — just too beautiful, all these massive hills and green rolling lands’,” Coutts said.
Their eldest son Ben was born in the town of green pastures, but it wasn’t long before the call of the Territory beckoned.
“I always wanted to come home to the vast wide open spaces, to the hot weather, to the unique characters and sense of humour that we have in the Territory,” Coutts said.
After four years the family packed up and headed back up north to McArthur River Station in the Gulf Country, near the Queensland border.
“I think going to the Gulf changed me as a person,” she said. “We were going into a really new wild frontier and, while I obviously knew what living a hard life was on a cattle station, it was different and it already had an amazing history.”
Coutts and her family lived in the Gulf for 14 years before relocating to Katherine, where she still lives.
“I always did want to tell the story of our life in the Gulf Country,” Coutts said.
“I tried to go chronologically through the major events happening in the Territory.”
Those events include the cyclones that ripped through the Gulf, and the high-profile disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain and the ongoing ramifications for her parents Lindy and Michael — plus more personal events, such as wild camp drafts and rodeos, cancer and the loss of friends.
“Once I started writing just so much came back,” Coutts said. “I went back last year to revamp my memories and get a feel for the landscape, and that was absolutely fantastic.
“I was running into people in the street that still knew me even though I’m 25 years older.
“There were aboriginal kids who went to school with my kids showing me all their children. It was beautiful, and that’s the thing about being a Territorian, that sense of belonging, especially from the bush.”
Coutts said she was humbled to have the opportunity to share her experience, and what life is like in the Territory through her two memoirs.
“I’ve had an amazing opportunity and experience to be offered a contract by a major publishing company at the age of 60 and not only write a book, but to be able to write two that tell the story of the Territory,” she said.
“I know in Mansfield people knew very, very little about the Northern Territory, and people were always interested in hearing my story and trying to get a grasp for the distance and how far we lived and how different a life we lived.
“I’ve always wanted to tell the story of the Territory because I think there’s very little that’s being told in a story-telling form, and I’m in the unique position of being born up here and living in this very remote part of Australia for 60 years.”
Through the trials and tribulations of life in the bush and the curve balls of simply being human, Coutts still has a lot of life left in her yet to be jotted down.
She diligently collects newspaper clippings as a record of the social and political history of the Territory and, while she said one day her life in Katherine will be documented in detail, at present she is working on a project to tell the stories of 56 local women for the Katherine Museum.
It is due out on Territory Day this year.