To 29 year-old Nicole,
I’m on the precipice of making a life altering decision without even knowing it. Having just arrived back in Sydney after working in Singapore for three years, I’m excited. I’m grateful for my ex-pat experiences but super pleased to be back in Australia. I’ve been offered a marketing role with the National Trust. It sounds like a really good position in an area I’ve always had a huge interest in, Australian history and genealogy. And I love Sydney. It’s a buzzy place and I have lots of friends here and some family. It seems like a new beginning and I’m ready for it. The only regret I have is that it’s not the bush where I grew up.
Two weeks before I’m due to commence work, the telephone rings. It’s my father. We talk about the bush and our properties, the earliest of which were settled by my great-grandfather in 1893. When dad asks if I’ve ever thought about coming to home to be involved in the family business, instead of being custodian of someone else’s history, I’m already back there in big sky country.
It’s a rash decision, but I’m packing up my Paddington terrace and shipping my belongings 810 kilometres northwards. My Sydney based sister is like, what the ….. . My friends in shock. My mother, worried about my coming home to live in an isolated environment after eight years in big cities.
If I hadn’t been so keen to go home to the station I may well have given a little more thought to what I was letting myself into. Forget MacKellar’s ‘droughts and flooding rains’, the outback isn’t that romantic. It’s tough and it’s hard for a young inexperienced woman to fit in when you’re working with a team of men, even if you are the boss’s daughter. If I’d known then that I’d have to carve a place for myself on the property, that I would eventually learn how to do everything, that it was necessary to do these things to earn respect, both from my co-workers and for my own sense of achievement, that there was a large gender bias towards women working in the field, that I would end up managing such a huge business, that I would fall off bikes, be smashed against yards by cattle… well, I probably would have said no.
But I didn’t know, and in not knowing I seized the opportunity and have never regretted it…. Except when I’ve been in pain!
Good for me
With love and Panadol, from my much older and wiser self! nx
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nicole Alexander is a part-time grazier and author. Her 7th novel, River Run is out now.
Website: http://www.nicolealexander.com.au/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorNicoleAlexander
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To see the list of authors taking part in this letter-writing blog series: CLICK
Wanting to honour the lost art of letter writing through this blog series, I also opened my fourth novel with a character writing a letter. And not just any letter. It’s a story — perhaps the most important he’ll ever tell.
The Other Side of the Season
Life is simple on top of the mountain for David, Matthew and Tilly until the winter of 1979 when tragedy strikes, starting a chain reaction that will ruin lives for years to come. Those who can, escape the Greenhill banana plantation on the outskirts of Coffs Harbour. One stays—trapped for the next thirty years on the mountain and haunted by memories and lost dreams. That is until the arrival of a curious young woman, named Sidney, whose love of family shows everyone the truth can heal, what’s wrong can be righted, the lost can be found, and . . . there’s another side to every story. For more books: CLICK
