Life after death

Living on the land and her love for her children helped trailblazer Emily Brett cope with the heartbreak of losing her husband. Susan Chenery reports.

- Susan Chenery

His hands. She closes her eyes and remembers his hands. She doesn’t ever want to forget those hands and how they held hers. All the memories – the fragments of a life – of a person who was loved. She wants to keep him close, so he doesn’t fade away. “I almost worry that I will forget. And I want to hang onto those memories for as long as I can,” Emily Brett says of her beloved late husband, Dougal.

When she reads the letters and birthday cards he gave her, she can still hear his voice. “He was very affectionate and I miss his sense of humor,” she adds. “He had a lovely way with words and he wrote to me many, many words.”

Speaking to The Weekly, Emily can’t help but reminisce about her years with Dougal. Both cattle farmers, steeped in the station life of the Northern Territory, were thrust into the national limelight in 2011 when they led the legal challenge against the federal government’s suspension of live cattle exports to Indonesia. It was a grueling battle that took a toll on both their lives and their livelihood.

Emily describes her husband as a man of wide horizons – part of the red dust and untamed landscape that curves to the earth’s outline as it meets the sky on the Brett family’s cattle station, Waterloo, one of the westernmost homesteads in the NT. “If there was a God,” Dougal once told Channel Nine, “this is his country.”

Described as the “quintessential cowboy on both land and air”, Dougal drove road trains of cattle across the rugged, inhospitable outback. He flew helicopters too, mustering 20,000 head of cattle on their 600,000 acre property. He said he had “a good office seat up here”.