I met Roger in 1975, when I was just 16 and he was 25. Returning home one afternoon, I found him having tea with my parents. He had been living in an artist’s community in Switzerland and had ideas of starting one in Tasmania. My mother is a painter, and my father one of those people who makes things happen. I listened to them talk of buying a farm.
Roger was wearing worn-out Levi’s jeans, Western boots, a blue-grey suit jacket. His blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail. More than six feet tall, he towered over me. He had an enamelled brooch pinned on his lapel and a string of tiny turquoise beads around one wrist. This was country Tasmania. No one looked like this.
That night, I made a note in my diary, a small blue book that I still have:
Today I have met the kind of man I would one day like to marry.
Roger wasn’t “the man”, then, because I was so young – just dreaming of a far-off future. And he seemed so much older than me.
In the years that followed we often crossed paths but never formed a relaxed friendship. Roger eventually returned to Europe. I began a relationship with a boy I knew from high school. He became my closest friend and we were together for several years before we went our separate ways.
One day, out of the blue, Roger arrived back in town. After years of being a sculptor and woodworker, he’d rekindled a commitment to his first career as a film-maker. He invited me, along with a man from my share house, Steve, on a two-day hike into the wilderness. He was doing location surveys for what would one day become the Australian feature film The Tale of Ruby Rose.
I was now 21 and he was 30; the age difference didn’t seem big any more. But there still was a gulf between us. I was in awe of Roger. He knew so much about things like music, literature, philosophy. Whether he was building a house or writing a screenplay, no task seemed to daunt him. And along with his quiet, confident air, he had the good looks of a movie star.
Everyone admired him. Lots of women wanted him. I thought he saw me differently to them, but I wasn’t sure – perhaps everyone felt special under his gaze. For his part, Roger had been single for many years. He seemed shy.
I hoped his invitation to join him on this hike meant something. But as the first day unfolded, things didn’t look promising from a romantic point of view.
“I can still see you,” Roger called out more than once, as he aimed the camera in my direction. “Could you get behind that rock?” I felt vaguely insulted, even though I understood that the purpose of this trip was to photograph locations, not me.
We slept overnight in an old trapper’s hut intended to be a set in the film. I lay between the two men on a wooden platform. When night fell, flames danced in the fireplace and Tasmanian devils scratched at the door.
Steve soon fell asleep. But I stayed awake and Roger did too. I could feel the shape of the space between us. It seemed charged with energy.
As the fire burned down, the air turned velvet black. With every tiny move we made, our feather sleeping bags rustled.
“Are you warm enough?” Roger’s voice floated in the darkness.
“Yes. Are you?”
“Yes.”
Neither of us had much to say. For my part, I could hardly believe the situation was real. After all, this wasn’t just any man lying beside me. He was my vision of a perfect partner.
I knew the night could easily go by with nothing changing between us. It felt like a case of now or never.
I don’t remember deciding to seize the moment, but Roger’s story is that I suddenly rolled over on top of him. I think this must have been true, though it’s unlike me to be so decisive. We started kissing, wrapped in each other’s arms. We didn’t have sex – we weren’t ready for that yet. And we didn’t talk about what this encounter might mean in the clear light of dawn.
Neither of us could have imagined the future that lay ahead: that we’d marry, and start working together, spending most of every day side by side. We’d make dozens of books and films and raise two sons. But I think we both knew that this one night in the trapper’s hut had changed everything.
It was the beginning of a love story that would last for 40 years. In a way, it still goes on, except that Roger is no longer here. In the winter of 2022, after a long struggle with ill health, he died.
Grief can be a very high price to pay for love. But I’ve never doubted it was worth it.
