True love in the country: how childhood sweethearts overcame tragedy
They were childhood sweethearts, country kids with their lives in front of them. Then one day, Rob went mustering in a helicopter and ended up a quadriplegic. Yet, as Samantha Trenoweth discovers, true love and innovation ensured that nothing would keep t
Lightning cracks and gunmetal-grey clouds gather on the horizon to the west of Bundaberg in Queensland. Cattle settle under blue gums in vividly green paddocks. Rob and Sarah Cook call their sons, Braxton, 11, and Lawson, nine, in for dinner. Steaks are sizzling in a pan. Life is good.
It hasn’t always been this way. Nine years ago, the helicopter in which
Rob was mustering fell out of the sky, plummeting 90 metres into dense scrub in a remote corner of the Northern Territory. It was eight hours before medics could airlift him to hospital and the accident left him quadriplegic. Yet with courage and determination, Rob and Sarah have not only rebuilt their lives together, they have thrived.
“Growing up with farming families,” Sarah says, “you see heartache and you see resilience. Like anyone, we have good and bad days. We’ve been lucky, though. We’ve got close family and friends, and we have each other. That gets us through.”
“We make the most of every hour,” Rob adds. “That’s how we’ve tackled life since the accident.”
Sarah and Rob grew up on the Western Downs in rural Queensland. Her family were share farmers. His father, Bill, was a farmer, fencer and rode in rodeos, while his mother,
Letty, hailed from a remote cattle station, Suplejack Downs, on the edge of the Tanami Desert.
Rob and Sarah met at school. “He was a loyal friend,” Sarah recalls.
“He stood up for the people he cared about. He was also a bit of a charmer. All the girls in our group wanted to date him or had dated him. I hadn’t.”
Then, at the end of Year 10, Rob asked Sarah to be his girlfriend. They hadn’t even been on a first date when Rob’s father announced that the family was moving to Suplejack Downs. “‘Pack your bags,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving tomorrow’, Rob recalls. “I actually forgot about Sarah until we got to Mount Isa. Then I called her on the satellite phone. I said, ‘G’day, Sarah, it’s Rob. I’m going to the Territory, so we need to break up.’ She said, ‘Okay.’ That was it.”
The Cooks drove the 3000km to Suplejack. “It’s a million acres,” says Rob. “Just that scale blew my mind. You could drive all day in one direction and still be on the same property. There was no shop. We grew and ate our own food. If something broke, you had to fix it. We didn’t have a hot water system – you’d cut firewood and light a fire under a drum of water. At breakfast and dinner time, we’d sit around a kerosene lantern and cook on gas or an open fire. We were working seven days a week from sunrise until sunset.”
For the next two years, Rob worked on Suplejack and studied beef cattle production. The year he turned 18, he bought a car and drove back to Queensland for a holiday. He saw Sarah at a rodeo.
“She was a 16-year-old country girl – independent, very beautiful,” he says. “I fell madly in love. She was dating another bull rider, so I had to act fast to win her heart back, but it didn’t take a great deal of swinging. We’ve been together ever since.”
There were years of long-distance love while Sarah studied nursing and Rob worked as an outback cattleman. He was 24 and she was 22 when they married. They had three years of wedded life on Suplejack before Rob’s accident and those years seem like a gift now. “They’re extremely precious and important to our heritage,” says Rob. “Our kids know every story of those times. We wanted for nothing. We built our house. Sarah fell pregnant. We worked around the clock, but the really romantic side of that was that I got to take Sarah and my kids with me. Sarah often drove the cattle trucks. I carried Braxton in a baby sling when we were mustering on horseback and Sarah would be on the other horse, pregnant with Lawson. I’d have a bottle of milk in case Braxton woke up. That’s just who we were – a family unit – and we loved it.”
That fateful day
Tuesday, September 30, 2008, dawned fine but windy. “I remember the morning clearly,” says Sarah. “We got up early. It was still dark. We were in our bedroom and Rob and I had a hug at the foot of our bed. Lawson was six months old and Braxton was two. Rob put his swag on his shoulder, lifted Braxton up on top and off we went to the main house. Rob started the generator and we cooked breakfast for everyone.”
I was so very grateful that she was there.
Rob began the muster in his gyrocopter, but swapped to one of two helicopters mid-morning to give the pilot some direction.
“We were about 90 metres off the ground when something went wrong with the engine,” Rob explains. “We don’t know what it was. The machine went from flying to falling in a heartbeat. We were 50 kilometres from the homestead, in the middle of nowhere, falling out of the sky.
“When I opened my eyes, the pilot was hanging upside-down directly above me. I was still in my seatbelt, my head was jammed outside the opening of the door and I remember thinking, ‘Jeez, my body’s in a funny position.’ I tried to move and realised I couldn’t.
“The pilot crawled around to me. He shook my arm. It looked like a piece of rope. I remember saying,
‘If this helicopter catches fire, grab whatever part of my body you can and drag me away.’ We had fuel leaks all over – there was one dripping just a couple of inches from my face. He tried calling on the two-way, but it was dead.”
Rob’s breathing became laboured – later, he learned that it was a miracle he was breathing at all – so they decided to move him. “The pilot cut the seatbelt and my body collapsed over my head,” says Rob. “That was scary. I felt these electric bolts screaming down my spine, my body went into shock and everything hurt like hell. Then he grabbed my legs and straightened me out.”
When the pilot of the second chopper couldn’t reach them on the two-way, he went looking and found the crash site. The Flying Doctor Service was called, but the nearest plane was hours away.
Late in the afternoon, the Flying Doctor crew arrived at the scene of the accident, Rob was stabilised as far as possible and, recalls Sarah, “we took off just as the sun was setting. I remember the sky. It was the reddest red, the colour of a Bloody Mary. Being up above the clouds, you could see the sun sinking over the horizon. The crew didn’t speak to me. Every now and then, an alarm would go off on a monitor and I’d just hope we were going to make it to Alice Springs.
“It was good that I’d trained as a nurse because when I walked into the ICU, it wasn’t shock or horror. It was just Robby in among equipment that was familiar to me.”
Rob remained in intensive care for three months. “Sarah virtually lived on the floor of my hospital room,” he says. “She was breastfeeding the baby, with a toddler running around.
“I couldn’t eat, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. My only communication was moving my eyes. I was so very grateful that she was there. I could say a lot with my eyes and just having that love in the room was pivotal to my recovery.”
A turning point came after two months, when Rob overheard doctors talking about the likelihood that he would live the rest of his life on a ventilator. Sarah said, “That’s not the life for our Rob.” Now, Rob says, “I suddenly realised that the only person who was going to fix this was me.”
Sarah found a nurse who was prepared to help them and, day by day, they eased Rob off the ventilator. “It was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life,” he says. “I would spend five minutes off the ventilator and feel like I was drowning. Eventually, I could breathe for six hours on my own, but it was a conscious effort – I had to use my diaphragm and pant like a dog. Finally, I just needed oxygen under my nose at night and we turned off the ventilator. The doctors couldn’t believe what we’d achieved.”
“Your brain still works”
Rob and Sarah no longer live at Suplejack Downs, but they’ve built a rich, rewarding life. In part, that’s a result of Sarah’s dedication, but it’s also due to Rob’s research into innovative ways technology can be applied on farms.
Rob had registered for a Nuffield Australia Farming Scholarship before the accident and, two years later, a former scholar called and asked if he was still interested. Rob said, “I don’t know if you’re aware that I’ve had this accident”, and the scholar said, “But your brain still works, doesn’t it?” It did and Rob was granted a travel scholarship to research new technologies that might help injured Australian farmers continue to lead productive lives on the land.
The results can be seen all over Sarah and Rob’s new paddock-to-plate business, the Rosa Cattle Company, which includes three properties where they breed and fatten beef cattle, and a butcher shop, Tender Sprouted Meats, in Bundaberg. Rob is actively involved in every aspect of production.
“When it comes to mustering, I use a drone,” he says. “I use working dogs with the cattle. My brother, Brad, built yards with a flow pattern like a wagon wheel, so the cattle flow around me. A childhood friend, Ian Talbert, devised an electronic drive, so I can operate the gates. We use ultrasound for pregnancy testing, so Sarah and I do that together, and I operate the weighing system from my computer. Almost everything can be run with voice activation on my computer. Prior to the injury, I’d never even sent an email.”
For Rob and Sarah, the day starts even earlier than it does for the average farmer. They’re up before daybreak for an hour of physio before breakfast. “The kids are pretty good,” Sarah says. “They get themselves up and make their lunch, and then wait for Rob to walk them to the school bus. Country kids are made that way. As parents, we expect more. Rob spends heaps of time with them. He taught them both how to ride a bike and kick a ball from his wheelchair. This is their normal.”
Sarah admits that her workload takes a toll. “I always feel tired now, but when I get overwhelmed, I remind myself that
Rob can’t move, which is pretty grounding when I’m having my own pity party,” she says. “If I’m having a rough day, Rob tries to get me out of it and if he’s having a rough day, I do the same – not that he has many rough days. We don’t drag each other down.”
Sarah doesn’t have a lot of “me time”. “It’s something I might work towards,” she says, laughing. She has spent only two nights away from Rob since his accident. Once to attend her grandmother’s funeral and, in 2015, she flew to Brisbane to see a band.
“The other day, I nearly booked tickets to the Dixie Chicks,” she says, smiling. “Rob asked, ‘Would it be easier if I stayed home?’ But then I know I’d get there and want to share it with my husband.”
Since their first date, when she was 16 years old, Sarah has known that she would stick by Rob, whatever came their way. Nothing, she says, including the accident, could change that. “He’s still the same Robbie,” she says. “He’s the big dreamer. He’s the optimist. I’m happy to be the one who supports him.”
That sense of loyalty and devotion is mutual. “I always knew I had the absolute pinnacle of backstops,” Rob insists. “Sarah is the sole reason we’ve gone on to do all these wonderful things in life. It’s just who she is.”