Read Online Love In a Sunburnt Country by Jo Jackson King - Free Book Online Page B

to her nursing role.
    â€˜I missed out on those people—being on the station there was some divide. I never pursued those relationships and I regret that,’ she says.
    In their enforced long separations—Robina at some far-flung nursing post and Aaron managing the station—they kept talking. The great secret of long-distance romance is that sometimes it strengthens relationships as, with conversation as the only point of contact, you do really learn to communicate. It can be easy to rely on touch and action alone—particularly when you are by nature a doer, a fixer and maker, which is what both Robina and Aaron are. It was in these long conversations that the subject of marriage finally surfaced. Then Robina’s much-loved grandfather became very ill. As was usual at that time, there were many kilometres between them—Aaron at Epenarra and Robina in Alice Springs. Robina rang Aaron to share the news and to say, ‘I really want Pop to know that I’m going to be married.’
    â€˜So after I told Aaron he said, “Just hang on, I’ll ring you back,”’ says Robina. ‘And then he rang Dad straightaway. Dad was visiting Pop, he was at the bedside. Aaron said, “Can I marry her?”
    â€˜Then Aaron rang me back and said, “Do you want to get married?”’
    They were longing to see each other, but it was simply not possible. In the end, Robina was to see Aaron’s parents before she saw him.
    â€˜His parents were coming to visit us, and they were arriving in Alice Springs that day. I just hung out with his mum and dad for two days. Then he called up and we put the phone on speaker and he said, “Did Robina tell you yet?” and his mum said, “Tell us what?” She was tickled pink.’
    In March 2009 Aaron and Robina were married. Aaron’s face was clean-shaven, perhaps for the last time, and Robina’s hair was long. The photographs show her looking delicate and at peace. Certainty had been slow to emerge for Robina but knowing Aaron is her man feels like an inspiration from God rather than simply a personal conviction, and that’s what she’s taken to church this day. Aaron looks handsome and happy. There’s an elegant country-and-western look to them both. Robina is in embossed cowboy boots and lace. With his natty morning suit Aaron wears a leather belt made by Robina. The wedding rings are both made from gold found by a prospecting friend on and near Epenarra, and celebrate the land on which they met.
    Their wedding day had been one of quiet commitment in a small church, wrapped in her family and his. But the months following were full of drama: by August, Robina was pregnant, and Aaron had been kicked by a bull and had to be flown out by the Royal Flying Doctor Service due to a number of broken ribs and the fear that he was bleeding internally.
    Aaron healed, then went back to work, and Robina spent her days on a friend’s neighbouring property. Much of the time she basked in the sun at a waterhole reminiscent of the one at which she’d met Aaron, her attention on the son growing inside her.
    â€˜We did it,’ she said to Darcy as she nursed him for the very first time. As she’d hoped and expected of herself, mothering her beautiful little son came easily to her. He was so very like his easy-going, steady-natured, certain-hearted Dad, not at all like Robina herself. Robina felt confident, she felt enough, and out of that her mothering flowed. But that flow seemed to dry up in the months after her second son Tully was born nearly two-and-a-half years later.
    â€˜Something about becoming a mother to two children …’ she says. Somehow, this once more opened the gateway to ‘must’ and ‘should’, of feeling not enough, not good enough, of needing to do a whole galaxy of things that she didn’t believe in, but having to do them anyway and becoming angrier, more