Three months after giving birth to her first child, Maddie Staff was offered the job of her dreams.
It would take her thousands of kilometres away from her parents, her friends, and a shopping centre, but she and her partner said yes almost immediately.
“We were like, ‘Oh well, this is exactly what we want to do but not how we expected it to happen,'” Maddie said.
Together, they picked up their life in town and moved to Nicholson Station in the remote Kimberley region of WA, where they began overseeing hundreds of thousands of hectares of cattle country.
“We really wanted to make the most of this opportunity and work to show that we were worthy of this opportunity,” Maddie said.
‘I felt like I was trapped’
Despite the couple holding the same job title, a year into the new role Maddie found herself spending most of her time inside with their baby, Wyatt.
“I wanted to go to the yards and work, but it was hard with Wyatt because I couldn’t leave him for more than three hours because he was breastfed,” she said.
“I felt like I was trapped. I think, in a way, a bit of me wanted to resent Wyatt for that.”
These feelings were only heightened by the physical distance between Maddie and her support network.
With her friends and family a three-day journey away in NSW, she felt herself turn to her partner Joel to fill roles previously held by others in her life.
“Joel became my coffee-date friend, my go-to friend when I needed to have a little whinge, he became everything,” she said.
“That put a lot of strain on us because we didn’t have other people to go to.”
And when her mates did call, Maddie couldn’t get the words out.
“I would tell them I was fine. I was always fine.”
Until one night when things boiled over.
“I was quite upset and I just said to Joel, ‘I’m miserable,” Maddie said.
“I said, ‘I see you going out and doing everything that I want to be doing. And I’m not doing it.'”
Talking about it
It’s a sentence that started a conversation she didn’t think they’d need to have. And one Joel has conceded he still doesn’t feel entirely comfortable sharing his perspective on.
“I wasn’t prepared for it,” Maddie said.
“When you live in town, you have alternatives in childcare — friends, you can ring up Grandma and say ‘Hey, can you come over and mind him?'”
Another reason it was unexpected, Maddie said, was that she couldn’t see women or men involved in cattle stations speaking about these things.
“I didn’t want to bring up that conversation because I didn’t want to seem ungrateful or that I was too much,” she said.
“There is still that stereotypical expectation that the woman is at home.
“That’s still big in this industry at the moment. Not much has changed yet to change people’s minds.”
The topic of gender roles is one Maddie has since brought up with friends in the industry.
“I know [they] struggle with these topics of conversation because their partners don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
“And I think that sometimes women are afraid or unsure how to voice it as well.
“Men don’t want to bring it up and women don’t know how to say it.”
Becoming ‘better as a team’
But the weight dropped from Maddie’s shoulders almost immediately after she spoke those first words to Joel.
“In all honesty, all it took was the conversation, and we sorted it out.
“Within a day we were like, ‘Right, this is what we’re going to do differently.’
“It was never Joel’s intention to have me as a stay-at-home mum, but, unintentionally, he was doing things without realising.”
Now, their day-to-day is played out in a carefully balanced juggling act.
The couple routinely check-in with one another, asking who has the capacity to look after Wyatt and who wants to do which jobs around the station.
“We are so much better as a team now,” Maddie said.
“If there’s something that Joel is doing for the day that he can take Wyatt, he will do that.
“Because we want Wyatt to be out and about. This is the life I want for him.”
Despite the family of three being the only souls for hundreds of kilometres, Maddie thinks life on Nicholson Station feels perfect to her these days.
“We’ve got everything we need. We’ve got our horses, we’ve got our family — it’s a beautiful part of the country,” she said.
“It’s hard to even put into words. It’s just perfect.
“You know, every job has downfalls, everything in life has got a few negatives, but all the positives outweigh the negatives 1,000 times over.”
