The bonds of sisterhood

Desley Bartlett and Karen Purvey

At first glance, it's hard to see how a brood of chickens could come to mean so much to a pair of sisters. However, Desley Bartlett, 55, and Karen Purvey, 41, have no doubt their beloved collection of Light Sussex hens represent the story of their journey, and the triumph of life over death.

"The thing people find very surprising about Desley and I isn't that we live together, it's how different we are," says Karen. The sisters live an unconventional life, but one that works. This is all the more remarkable when you consider the series of extraordinarily painful events that led to their current contentment, and the deep bond they share.

Despite their 14-year age gap, Desley and Karen had a close relationship from the moment Karen arrived. The two were inseparable, even when Desley left Brisbane to pursue her career in Sydney and then Melbourne. Then, in her late twenties, Desley met Laurie, the man who was to become her husband. "We met at work in Melbourne and married when I was 28," she says. Yet before they could create a family of their own, Laurie was gone. "He was only 34, and one day he just dropped dead from a cerebral haemorrhage," explains Desley.

"I was at home with the flu when his boss knocked on the door. I fainted when he told me. It was devastating." The one person Desley wanted by her side in her moment of grief was her sister, a need that Karen found difficult to bear. "Desley returned to Brisbane within a week of the funeral," remembers Karen. "She brought this enormous sadness with her. I didn't know how to cope with it. I was fairly self-involved at the time in the way that only 15-year-old girls can be." Desley tried to heal herself within the bosom of her family. "I spent the first five years after Laurie's death living in the family home," says Desley. "I was so young to be a widow and a very important element of my grief was the loss of the possibility of having children. When you've had a truly wonderful marriage and relationship, it's irreplaceable, and I made the conscious decision not to even try."

While Desley tended her wounds, the rest of her family were busy moving on with life. The girls' parents decided to retire to Bundaberg, while Karen secured a job as a flight attendant and moved to Sydney. With her beloved family scattered, Desley decided to change the direction of her own life and enrolled to study journalism at the University of Queensland. All seemed settled, yet life had other plans for the family.

"I'll never forget mum’s diagnosis," says Karen softly, recalling the moment that brought everything to an abrupt halt. "We were all staying with Desley for a family holiday. Mum came into my room and said, ‘I have something on my breast," says Karen. "It wasn’t breast cancer," adds Desley, "It was bone cancer. We nursed her at home and she died 91 days later."

For Karen, the loss of her mother, and the changes it brought about, was deeply unsettling. "I felt guilty," she says flatly. "Mum was a 67-year-old woman living in a country town. She had no breast checks, no pap smears, nothing that could have warned us. I felt as though I should have taken responsibility for that. My generation talked about these things; my sister's didn't. I was the one who could have changed things." Continuing with her life in Sydney after so much sadness proved impossible, and Karen decided to return home.

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