BRAVE HEART:
a widow finds her inner strength
When her husband committed suicide, Gurjit Sondhu had three choices. She could return to India, she could buckle beneath the grief or she could manage the farm herself. In the end, the choice was easy. Gurjit revs up the ute and takes Heather Ewart and Karen Michelmore on a tour of her farm.
Gurjit Sondhu is clapping loudly and banging against the side of her white utility. “Hey! Come on! Move it!” She accelerates gently towards the mob of wayward sheep. There are at least 70 standing there, staring at the vehicle. Gurjit blasts the horn. She’s at home behind the wheel of the dusty ute, even in her stylish checked trousers and linen top. She’s wearing dark sunglasses, pretty red lipstick, and an air of calm. It takes a few encouraging honks and the sheep get the message, slowly turning as one and trotting towards the paddock.
It’s an overcast day and thick white cloud hangs low in the sky just above the gum trees lining the fence. Gurjit loves it here on her property, just out of Harrow, in north-western Victoria. She’s been here 42 years now and despite the tragedy and heartbreak she’s suffered, she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. She even loves her misbehaving sheep, and the Black Angus beef cattle which roam around her 2023-hectare property, Jullundur.
It’s been more than a year since the horrific day when Tari, her husband of 40 years, took his own life after his mental illness spiralled out of control. The pain was immense, but Gurjit has found that one day follows and then another, and you find your way.
“The sheep still needed feeding,” she says resolutely. “Actually, work was the only thing keeping me going. So I put myself into feeding the sheep. I didn’t even think about Tari or anybody else. I thought about the farm. I had a choice – what do I do now? Look after this farm or sit down and just be stressed? I’ve put myself into the work.”
Gurjit came to Harrow from India in 1976, which makes her decision to stay and run the property herself, with love, all the more extraordinary. Gurjit was just 17 when she moved to Harrow from the town of Mullanpur in the Punjab. Her parents had arranged her marriage to a man she barely knew. Her knowledge of this massive continent was sparse: it had sheep and cows, and was a dry place – basic information she’d picked up in geography class long before there was any inkling of the significance the country would have in her life.
She had a big family in India – 30 cousinsisters. There were many family get-togethers, full of laughter, shrieking and bright silks. She grew up with servants tending to the cooking, cleaning and washing. She was sitting for her Year 12 exams when her parents told her a young man was visiting from Australia to look for a wife. He was a relative of one of her sisters’ husbands and he was meeting with several
families. His name was Avtar Sondhu – Tari for short.
“I wasn’t even in the picture. I was too young. I was only 17,” Gurjit recalls.
She came home from school one day and the Sondhu family was there. “I saw this young man and never really took much notice, as he was about 26. All I remember is that he was wearing a purple suit. Tari was proud of his pure merino purple woollen suit purchased from Myers. It was the ’70s.”
She heard, a few days later, that the family had liked her, and then things happened pretty quickly. She was married within weeks – all before she’d had time to digest what it would mean.
“My father asked me but I was very naive,” Gurjit says. “If I had to do it again, probably I would say no because I was only 17. I’d never seen life and what life is all about. But when you are 17, it’s yes: getting married, and the jewellery and the clothes and the saris, and it all comes with the wedding. A 17-year-old girl, she’s not thinking about settling in Australia and what she’s going to do for work. I was more thinking about the pretty clothes I would have.
“When I got married, I thought living on a farm would be very romantic, as in the Bollywood movies, dancing and singing in the fields. I thought, oh wow, I’m marrying an Australian farmer. My family said they had a big farm and I thought, if they have a big farm, they would have servants, you know? I get to live the life of luxury. What a dream!”
It took a few months for the visa to Australia to come through, and suddenly Gurjit’s life took a dramatic turn.
“It was pretty hard for me. I didn’t have any idea about Tari, and Tari didn’t have any idea about me. I thought marriage was something, you know, you just live happily ever after. Actually, in real life, things don’t work like that.”
The new couple flew into Melbourne from New Delhi in July 1976. It was bitterly cold and raining when they pulled into the 1600-hectare farm, Mullagh Station, four hours west of Melbourne.
“I remember, I had a red sari on. I was dressed up like a bride,” Gurjit recalls, “with all the trimmings. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
“The next morning, Tari got up and he started dressing up in his farming clothes ... He had the patchy trousers on – you know, farmers wear the patchy trousers. I thought, they have a few dollars, why are they wearing that? I had no idea what he was up to. He was going to crutch the sheep.”
Gurjit continued dressing in her bright saris for a few weeks, until she realised nobody was taking notice of her beautiful clothes. Even today, she remembers the desperate anxiety of homesickness – the tight, raw knot deep inside her – in a new country, with only basic English, away from her big, noisy family.
“I had a different view of coming to Australia,” she says. “I probably thought I was going to get pampered by the family; there was going to be a big deal made about me, the bride coming. It was nothing like that. In India it is: when the new bride comes the family make a big fuss, but here nobody did anything. They were just typical Aussie farmers. They were more worried about the shearing coming up than this girl coming from India.”
Tari’s family had come to Harrow from India back in the 1890s. Tari’s great-uncle, Indar Singh Sondhu, had paved the way. He was a businessman who had started with nothing and become an Indian hawker in the region. He bought into general stores, and eventually Mullagh Station in 1939. Twenty years later, as he got too old to run the property alone, he sent for his two nephews – Tari’s father, Swaran Singh Sondhu, and brother, Dharam Singh Sondhu. They left their families in India to make a new life in Harrow and became valued members of the community. Australia’s immigration was still governed by the White Australia policy, and the visas for the men’s families in India took
years. Tari was seven years old when he moved to Australia. The separation from his father had a big impact on him.
By the time Gurjit arrived 20 years later, immigration was easier but life was still hard. A few weeks after she arrived, Tari’s mother suggested Gurjit take lunch to the men in the shearing shed. They were crutching – removing the clumps of manure-laden wool, called dags, from around the rear legs and tails of the sheep. Gurjit remembers walking into the shed and “Tari said, ‘Pick the dag up.’ Just straight away, never thinking this girl would have no idea what a dag is. He said, ‘Clean it. Get the broom and clean it.’ I looked at him. I said, ‘Oh my God.’ He meant to tell me pick this up. It’s disgusting. How could he do that? I had the nail polish on and my hands were pretty nice, and I was absolutely disgusted.”
Tari insisted – despite Gurjit’s tears – and she used a tea towel from the food basket to cover the clump and remove it. “That was my introduction to picking the dags up,” she says. “Now I don’t even think about it.”
Isolated and feeling alone, Gurjit practiced English with Tari’s little brother, David, to expand her vocabulary.
“I could understand English but to speak it was very difficult – I had an accent and was shy, too,” she says. “I would sit in the room and cry. It’s a pretty lonely place here. I’d come from a big family, and in the family you’ve always got something happening: weddings and birthdays, some sort of celebration. But here it’s nothing.”
The couple had their first son, Jason, a couple of years after Gurjit arrived. Two more children, Belinda and Philip, followed, and slowly Gurjit got to know other young mothers at the school, who became her friends. Even so, it took her a good 15 years to shake off the homesick feeling for her old life in India.
Tari and Gurjit moved out of the Sondhu family partnership and started farming on their own in 1989. It was the year the wool price crashed and quite a tough year, but they managed to get through it. “My husband was a very good businessman,” Gurjit says.
These days, Harrow is home. “It took me a long time but now I just feel this is home. This is a real home and this is our children’s home and grandchildren – this is their home, too,” she says.
Tari was much respected in the community, and a generous husband and father, but he had unresolved issues with his own father. Gurjit says Tari couldn’t let go of the past and by early 2016 his behaviour had become erratic. Gurjit didn’t realise it was depression, but in hindsight it seems obvious.
“He was getting short-tempered,” she says. “It was very hard on me because every time something went wrong on the farm, I got the blame. I’m not the argumentative type. I just tried to keep things calm but he would always find a fault ... I did say to him a few times, something’s not right, the way you behave sometimes. I said, when you are good, you are really good; when you get into these moods, it’s not normal.’
When the ABC’s Back Roads filmed in Harrow in September and October 2016, Tari was fine, she says. “He was really good. He was very excited.”
Tari was a generous host, full of humour and stories, and revelling in having his family around him. During the interview with host Heather Ewart, Tari and Gurjit laughed as they shared funny stories from farm life. But by January 2017, his depression had taken hold. Gurjit had gone with him to the doctor just before Christmas and told the physician she was worried. But then he passed a mental health assessment with flying colours. He was proud, and tried to hide his illness in public. But that Christmas, he was spaced out, and he would spend hours lying in bed. This was unusual.
“I think he was feeling very, very anxious,” Gurjit says. “I didn’t realise that was depression, and then his temperament got worse and worse and I just could not cope. He wasn’t happy. I couldn’t do anything right in the end.
“When he was happy, he was a completely different person. He couldn’t do enough for you,” she says. “In public, we were like a perfect couple but when we came home I was always at fault.”
Gurjit couldn’t go anywhere in the house without Tari growing anxious about where she’d gone. She was
exhausted. It was as if she was walking on eggshells, waiting for him to explode. His speech became confused. One minute he’d be telling family or friends about a holiday he wanted to take. The next he was worried about the farm.
“I was scared because I didn’t want to get up in the morning and wonder what sort of mood he would be in,” she says. “I wouldn’t tell anybody. I kept a lot inside. I needed help but I didn’t know which way to go.”
The day before he died, Tari woke up so angry – Gurjit had never seen him like that before. “He wasn’t himself. Now I’m realising it wasn’t my fault or his fault – it was the depression. It’s a disease. It’s happened to a lot of people out there.”
The next day, Gurjit rose early to go to her regular exercise class in Harrow, a 15-minute drive away. When she came home just after 7am, Tari was angry and aggressive. She didn’t feel safe, so she left immediately. She drove to a friend’s place and contacted her children. The police rang the family a short time later to tell them Tari was dead.
“He was a good man; he was a really good man, but he had a problem. He had a really bad problem. Nobody could solve it,” she says.
Tari was a much-loved member of the Harrow community and Gurjit was grateful for the way the community banded together to organise the memorial and make sure she had help on the farm. A week after Tari died, the community gathered in the pub for drinks for Tari, and the screening of the Back Roads episode about the town. The family wanted the program to go ahead, as a reminder of much happier times.
“He was loved by everybody. He loved the community. That was his good side,” Gurjit says. But she admits that she is still angry with Tari. “I haven’t forgiven him for what the family has suffered, but I am sorry for his mental suffering and not being able to help him.”
Gurjit has just returned from her first trip to India in 18 years to visit her family. It was part of her healing process.
“I was telling a friend this morning. I said, ‘I’ve been away for nearly six weeks. I haven’t filled up a glass of water or made a cup of tea or washed my clothes or cooked’.”
It was a life she could have had, had she stayed in India all those years ago. She wanted to go back to India, reconnect with family, and find herself again, but now Australia is home.
“After being a wife, mother and grandmother for 40 years and putting my family first, I had forgotten about my roots. I went back to my family home in India and I connected with my past. It was a peaceful calming of my mind and soul, but after weeks, I started missing my family and home. It is refreshing to be back home at Jullundur. It is good to be back and part of this wonderful community. Jason, Belinda and Philip and their families enjoy coming to Jullundur frequently to catch up and lend a hand on the farm.”
She wants to focus on the farm now – on the wayward sheep and the cattle.
“I said to the kids, now I’m back, this year is all about farming,” Gurjit says. “I’ve got all the nonsense out of my head. My mind is cleaned. I’m focused and this is what I want to do from now on.
“I just feel peace. I feel peace in myself. Life is about forgiveness, love and peace.”
If you or someone you know is struggling, you can reach out for help. Lifeline: 13 11 14, lifeline.org.au; Suicide Call Back Service: 1300 659 467, suicidecallbackservice.org.au; MensLine Australia: 1300 78 99 78; mensline.org.au.