I was recently interviewed on a Danish breakfast show and whilst the main topic was my holiday farm out in Charleville, the conversation briefly detoured into my personal life and my relationship with Dolores. I said as little as possible because I've always been cautious of opening the door on your private life but afterwards as we sat in a café in Nyhavn, Dolores suggested that perhaps I should write the story of how we got together.
"It might help to put some demons to bed and give you a fresh perspective."
*****
That's what I love most about Dolores. She seems to be able to drop these little pearls of wisdom without warning. I've heard similar advice over the years, albeit phrased differently but perhaps I was just feeling contented and a little more relaxed. However it's taken me the better part of three months to get around to writing this so without further ado let me fill in the background.
Prior to moving to Australia I had several images that would pop into my mind whenever I thought of Australia and in no particular order they were the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Uluru, Bondi Beach and some film footage of a woman on horseback herding cattle in the outback. The last one is the more poignant because although I don't know her name, she was the first woman I was ever sexually attracted to. That was in my last year at the Gymnasium, the Danish equivalent of Senior High. It took some time for me to come out and it wasn't out of shame, I was always the studious one who put studies before other things.
My name is Elke and I come from a fairly interesting family. My mother is a local politician in Aarhus and my stepfather is an energy consultant who travels frequently throughout Europe and Asia. It's an unusual match when you consider that my mother's politics are very left of centre and Jakob's are very right wing and conservative. I knew he was my stepfather very early in life and yet I can't recall having any great desire to find out who my biological father was and in fact mum did not tell me until I was sent to Afghanistan but more of that later.
For most of my youth I was in the centre because that was the safest place to be in our house, the arguments could become quite animated and as a result I developed a healthy sense of balance that has proved to be far more useful now than it seemed when I was younger.
My life took a distinctive turn however when I finally came out and admitted my sexual orientation, which was a relief to my mother but my father was somewhat bemused, because my girlfriend had just applied to join the army. In hindsight he was probably correct, I followed Birgitte into the army and not long after basic training we broke up when she found someone else. This left me on my own in a place where I felt almost at odds with everything around me and so I did what I usually did when I was feeling out of sync, I threw myself into studies in particular languages and computers. I was soon fluent in Farsi for the simple fact that Danish troops were in Afghanistan.
It wasn't until I was in Afghanistan however that I finally got in contact with Gunnar, my biological father and that was a matter of pure chance. It happened after our unit had been interviewed by a journalist and there was some dispute about photographs. Our commander was insistent that some parts of the base were off limits for photographers but he acquiesced to a few candid shots, one of which was a group photograph. I was at the front near the only other female member of our unit and it was that particular picture that went viral. It was hyped as an example of the Nordic model, which is what they like to promote around the world, equality in action or something like it.
Some two weeks later when I called my mother she had some news for me.
"I got a phone call from your biological father, Gunnar. He recognised you from the picture that was on the Internet."
The fact he recognised me wasn't so unusual, I'm very much a younger version of my mother with blue eyes, long blonde hair and the same heart-shaped face. What was unusual was the fact that he lived in a relatively isolated part of south-western Queensland, just outside of Charleville. Its one claim to fame being that it was the base for Cobb & Co who once made carriages, it has a museum dedicated to the carriage although I've only ever seen it once and that was enough.
To cut a long story short though, I called Gunnar from our base in Afghanistan and although it was a choppy conversation we connected on some superficial level at least, he was very much like my mother. He'd gone to Australia in the aftermath of the counter culture of the '70s and stayed, he had a cattle ranch in south-western Queensland and in the absence of cutting edge technology we reverted to email and snail mail. The latter was especially nice because he didn't just send letters, he sent whole packages, a variety of non-perishable foods, a magazine, a newspaper and some quirky little knick knack. He'll never know how much I appreciated these monthly packages because even though the items were fairly mundane they helped me survive my tour in country.
Despite his monthly packages though, Gunnar was very much opposed to the war, citing previous U.S wars that had been touted as building democracy. Whilst I agreed with him on some points I was still very much of the opinion that we were performing a vital function and yet even as we tried to keep a lid on the situation, it seemed as if no sooner as one fire was put out that we were en route to yet another fire. I look back on my time in Afghanistan with mixed feelings, the best intentions don't always produce the best results and whilst I can be proud of what we did accomplish, there is a part of me that wonders why our government, along with other governments, signed on so quickly to war in a country known as the graveyard of empires.
In hindsight I'm beginning to understand his opposition a little more clearly. Gunnar had the advantage of age and could recall a war much closer to Australia when the powers that be were obsessed with the Communist Domino theory. In this day and age it's the War on Terror and I was to understand the similarity after my return to Denmark. I'd thought that I had escaped relatively unscathed but PTSD is one of those conditions that emerges slowly and over the next six months I found myself withdrawing. One of the most dramatic moments occurred when I was out with my latest girlfriend, Helena and a car backfired. I threw myself to the ground, much to her shock and then amusement. It was only when I went to see a therapist that she told me I was most likely suffering from PTSD.
It was a shock to my system because I'd tried hard to deny that I was any different. Granted we saw action but due to the fact you're part of a tight-knit unit you feel somewhat justified in defending your actions. What came out of my sessions however was an acknowledgement that my time in the army wasn't good for my mental health and so I was discharged. It wasn't a dishonourable thing but it took me a while to adjust. One day you're in uniform and the next you're in civilian clothes and feeling very much like every eye is on you.
Gunnar died suddenly of a heart attack a month after I was discharged, which upset me and even my mother, despite the fact she and Gunnar had only been a couple for a few weeks around about the time I was conceived. What really knocked me for six though was the phone call I got from a lawyer based out in Toowoomba to inform me that I was now the sole owner of Forbes Rest, the farm Gunnar had bought years ago. I remember staring out the window at the grass outside and trying to reconcile this image in my head. I mean I got on well with Gunnar but I'd never been to see him, I might have recognised him in the street but we'd never met and yet here I was, the sole owner of his property.
Mother was a little hesitant at the time, she saw it as an opportunity to put some distance between Denmark and my struggles with PTSD, and a chance to find a new life even if it was a short term thing. On that matter however she's proved to be right on the first thing but when I flew out of Kastrup on a flight to Sydney I took myself and all my problems with me. At first though it really did seem as if I'd landed in the middle of paradise.
Sydney is a bustling metropolis built around the finest natural harbour in the Southern hemisphere even though it has a dark underbelly but even Copenhagen has its own secret world and I was barely there for two days before it was back to the airport for the two hour flight to Brisbane.
Prior to arriving in Australia I'd had little concept of distance, Afghanistan is larger than Denmark but we were constrained to Helmand province and so we didn't really understand distance. This country however was big and after landing at Brisbane I had to transfer to another terminal for the two hour flight via turboprop to Charleville. I remember staring at this antiquated plane and wondering out loud if I'd gone back in time. That feeling was heightened when we landed at Charleville airport, which is literally a dirt strip carved out of the flat scrubland with a nondescript terminal building, there was no airport security, no passport checks, and a total of two ground crew to attend to the plane.
The man who met me inside looked pretty much like one of those Crocodile Dundee or Steve Irwin types, right down to the hat and shorts. He looked me up and down for a full fifteen seconds as if trying to summon up some kind of welcome and then extended his hand.
"G'day, I'm Stan, welcome to Charleville."
"Elke," I shook his hand, "it looks pretty small from up there."
