LOVE AND LOSS IN THE OUTBACK:
When Nina Betts found her beautiful four-month-old son lifeless in his cot, she thought things couldn’t get worse, but she was wrong. Nina talks to Samantha Trenoweth about the devastation of her outback dream and how the kindness of strangers helped tran
Nina Betts on the kindess of strangers
Nina Betts has been to hell and back a few times over, but to see her scampering around paddocks, climbing fences, laughing with her three full-of-beans country kids, you would never guess it. In the past 12 years, Nina has lost a child, a husband and a way of life. She is 42, not quite five-feet tall, a single mum, a lawyer and a survivor.
“Corey, my eldest, wasn’t even two,” she begins, casting her mind back to that dusty desert morning, 12 years ago, before which life seemed absurdly simple. “My second boy, Jarred, was four months old and the two of them shared a room. We’d just moved to my husband Luke’s family property, Mungerannie, on the Birdsville Track, 900 kilometres from Adelaide.”
Nina and Luke were planning to raise a bunch of kids and carry on the family cattle business there. “Corey was awake, so hubby went in,” Nina continues. “He picked Corey up, looked at the cot and thought, ‘don’t wake a sleeping baby’.
“I went back a little while later and I knew right away that Jarred wasn’t breathing. He was lying face down.” Nina screamed. Luke and a farm worker were by her side within seconds. Someone began CPR. They called the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) but it was too late.
Nina sat with her son all morning. “We waited all day for the police and the coroner to arrive. Even when his body went cold, I needed someone to be with him. I couldn’t leave him on his own.” Then she and Luke spent a further seven hours answering police questions. Nina had already gone over everything time and again in her mind, looking for clues, blaming herself. It was not until 10 months later that a doctor explained to Nina that her son had died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
There was a funeral in Broken Hill. Nina and Luke carried Jarred’s coffin. Nina remembers it now through a thick fog of grief. She had descended into “that deep dark place that you don’t even talk about with friends”.
The outback dream
Luke had grown up on a beef cattle station called Epsilon, not far from Cameron’s Corner where the Queensland, NSW and South Australian borders meet. Nina had grown up on the road. Her mother was an Aboriginal woman from Queensland. Her father was Sri Lankan. They were fruit pickers and, until she was 10 or 11, they travelled with the work and the seasons, from Queensland down through NSW to Victoria. “The whole family picked and when I say the family, I mean the big, extended family. We all pitched in. My brother, Kalu, and I would be out in the grape paddock picking 50 buckets a day each when we were seven or eight. It didn’t occur to me that other people didn’t do that.
“Then, when I was in Year Five, we spent a season in Victoria, and Mum said, ‘You know what? The kids are doing well at school, we need to stop.’” The family settled just out of Mildura. Nina’s parents worked their way up to farm management and finally saved for a property of their own. Meanwhile, Nina set her sights on university.
“We lived in a pretty racist town. When I got to Year 10 I told the teacher I wanted to be a lawyer and he said, ‘Don’t you think you’re aiming a bit high?’ Mum said, ‘No, she can be whatever she wants to be.’”
After school, Nina studied at Flinders University in Adelaide and Kalu, who was 14 months younger, moved west to work on cattle stations. One year he turned up in Adelaide with a mate from a neighbouring station. He was a young bloke, four years younger than Nina, called Luke Betts. He immediately took a shine to her but it was years later, when Nina had finished her degree and moved north to work as an outback bar girl, that Luke finally asked her out.
“There were a lot of people who thought we were an unlikely couple,” she laughs. “One: I was older than him. Two: I was black. Three: I was a lawyer.” Some people tried to talk him out of the idea. “But he just said, ‘you’d better get used to it.’”
Nina landed her dream job as the Aboriginal Women’s Outreach Solicitor in Mildura, so they juggled a longdistance relationship for a couple of years. Then Luke proposed at a local gymkhana. Luke was a bit of a larrikin. He liked a joke and a drink with his mates and he played guitar in a local band. But he was also an eldest son and he was serious about the family business. When he and Nina married, they moved in with his parents on Epsilon Station. Then, three months after Jarred was born, when Corey was not quite two, they moved to Mungerannie, further west.
The darkest place
“After Jarred’s death, we struggled,” Nina says. “In the 10 months before the coroner’s report I was thinking I’d killed my son. I didn’t know how but I couldn’t sleep for going through every detail of the pregnancy and every day he was alive, trying to find answers.”
Things didn’t improve after the report was released. “I felt like I was in a bubble in the corner of the room with no links to anybody. I see why lots of couples break up after a child dies. You can’t communicate. I wanted to talk about my emotions. Luke didn’t. It takes a toll on your marriage. There was no one else we could talk to about what we were feeling. There was no counselling out where we lived. There was no one I could check in with and ask, ‘Is this normal?’ The only mental health help I could get was from the Royal Flying Doctor Service but they were set clinics every three or four months. It wasn’t enough. So we didn’t get help. It was a dark time.”
A ray of light came in the form of Rev John Dihm, a bush chaplain for the Uniting Church rural support organisation, Frontier Services.
As a young bloke, John had been a Franciscan monk but had left the order to marry the love of his life, Marilyn,
and years later had become a chaplain on the central Australian frontier.
Following a tip-off from Luke’s parents, he stopped by Mungerannie. He could see this young family was in trouble and after that first visit, says Nina, “he just kept dropping in. He knew we weren’t religious but he knew we needed someone face-to-face who would sit with us in our home where we were comfortable and just talk about anything. He would join us for meals or an afternoon drink. He’d watch a game of footy with Luke. It’s hard for men to talk about their emotions but Luke enjoyed just hanging out with John.”
It was a tough decision – whether or not to have another baby – but Nina and Luke had always wanted a big family and a year later, Toby was born.
“I brought him home and right away I knew something wasn’t right,” Nina remembers. “His breathing changed and he went limp when he slept. Everybody thought I was a crazy mother – ‘she lost one so she’s a bit crazy’.
“At two weeks old, we took him to a paediatrician but they couldn’t find anything. We had a monitor to check his breathing and on the way home from the doctor, it kept going off. By the time we were home, he was making this funny noise. I recorded it on my phone, called the medical centre and played it to them. The flying doctor arrived within 45 minutes. They tried to get an IV drip in but couldn’t. So they had to put the drip into his bone. I was holding him, bawling my eyes out, while they drilled into his leg. I turned to the doctor and said,
‘You’re not going to let me lose this baby too, are you?’ And he gave me this look. I’ll never forget it. It was a ‘this is fairly bloody serious and I can’t make that promise’ look.
“Toby stopped breathing more than eight times on the flight to the hospital. He had septicaemia and pneumonia. I was terrified that I was going to lose him.”
Nina spent the next 12 months on high alert. “Every six weeks we were taking Toby to the doctor for some reason. We used to call the flying doctor ‘Toby Airlines’.” Eventually he was diagnosed with sleep apnoea and needed an oxygen mask when he slept.
“I didn’t bond with Toby in that first year,” Nina says, “because I was ready at any moment to lose him.” She was also deeply depressed. “I couldn’t smile, couldn’t talk, couldn’t relate to anybody. There was total darkness in my soul.”
John suggested they get some extra help around the house. Nina thought he must be joking. Who would trek all the way out there to help them?
“Well,” Nina chortles, still with a look of disbelief, “John sent us Tom and Lois Calder. They arrived in a little Suzuki hatch with the tiniest wheels I’d ever seen travel up the Birdsville Track. They stepped out of this tiny car and my thoughts were: ‘Oh my God, they are elderly. How on earth is this going to work? I am going to worry myself sick about taking care of this couple’.
“To my very great surprise, they were a godsend. Lois was like a grandmother to us. She baked up a storm, cooking enough so I could freeze and store some for later. She gave me tips on everything from preserving fruit to my pelvic floor.
“Tom helped out with the mustering and, most importantly, he hung the family photos we’d had taken when Jarred was alive. They were only with us for three weeks but when they left, I felt like our house had finally become a home.”
New beginnings
A year later, Nina suggested to Luke they “try for a girl”.
“Luke,” she says, “was like, ‘No frickin’ way. Haven’t we been through enough?’ But of course he came around.” When Jade was born there was a sense that their luck had changed. There was a three-day party at Epsilon Station to celebrate Luke’s 30th and Jade’s christening.
It wasn’t long after the party that Luke hatched a plan to get his pilot’s licence. Neither Nina nor his parents were keen but he was determined. “He hadn’t finished school,” Nina explains, “so there was some part of him that thought he wasn’t good enough. He felt that if he could get his pilot’s licence he would prove himself, and also save time on the boundary run. He did get his licence and the look on his face – it was his proudest moment. We had to let him be the man he wanted to be.”
It was November 18, 2013, the week of Nina and Luke’s 10th wedding anniversary. “We could talk again,” Nina says. “I was laughing at his jokes. We were trying for another baby. We were in a great place.” Luke had bought her a ring and they were planning to celebrate on Friday night when he came home from mustering.
“He sent the team out early and he was going to follow later in the plane,” Nina remembers. “I was sitting at my desk. Luke was lying on the floor talking to me while I did the bookwork. We were rearranging the budget so we could buy a trailer to take the kids to gymkhanas. Luke had bought them a pony.
“Around three o’clock, Jade and I drove him out to the airstrip. We watched him take off and bank around. The kids called on the UHF and I could hear them talking to him, saying ‘See you, Dad.’ None of us knew it was our last goodbye.”
The phone rang around 6.30 that evening. Luke’s emergency beacon had been activated. She remembers the guy on the phone saying, “These things don’t go off accidentally.” Luke’s plane had gone down at the far end of the property. He’d been killed instantly.
“I felt sick to my stomach, it was a physical, whole-body reaction. I collapsed on the floor,” Nina says.
She called Luke’s parents and later she called John, who was in the Pilbara, his new post in outback Western Australia. He dropped everything and came.
Since then, John has helped Nina move from the station where she found it “too hard to watch station life go on without Luke by my side”.
Four years later, Nina and the kids are settled on a farm not far from Murray Bridge in South Australia. Nina works part-time as a solicitor in a community legal centre, while Corey, Toby and Jade have left their School of the Air days behind and are making friends in a regular small-town school.
“We keep our heads above water,” Nina says “There are still times I’m drowning but there are more head-above-water days than the others now. “I decided to tell my story because Luke and I believed there’s a desperate need for better mental health services in remote areas. There needs to be someone you can ring who knows you, who you don’t have to re-explain your situation to every time. I’d like Luke’s legacy, and my legacy, to be better mental health assistance in the bush.”