Karen Harrland –
Leaping into a nature conservation project in the Simpson Desert with your new husband is one thing; coping with the reality of 45-degree heat, drought and isolation in the face of an unplanned and difficult pregnancy is quite another. Fortunately, Karen Harrland survived to tell her tale and to reflect on both the beauties and the hardships of outback living in her book Spinifex Baby.
Karen and her husband Al Dermer were planning on building a house in the cold, lush green climate of Tasmania when an impulse decision on Karen’s part led them to accept a nature conservation position in central Australia. For most of their time on the station, they had only each other for company – even the postman only came out every couple of weeks – and when Karen fell pregnant unexpectedly, things took a turn for the worse. Through a difficult pregnancy and overwhelming post-natal depression, she learnt that the harsh environment was not the biggest challenge she had to face:
‘This desert with its rolling dune fields is an unforgiving land that relentlessly destroys even its own ancient beauty. It is a place where, compared to the age of the landscape, a single life means less than a grain of sand. I could not have known that the biggest challenge I would face would not be from the piercing sun, not from the unforgiving dust, not even from the aching loneliness of isolation, but from the treachery of my own self.’
Karen conjures up wonderfully evocative images of life in the desert, that sit beautifully alongside the minutiae of daily life as a new mother, including her battles to push a pram up a sand dune and coping with the realisation that the first solid food her baby ate was a massive blowfly.