When fate calls

“I fell for him instantly,” she says, a little sheepishly. “From then on, I knew we had to be together. It wasn’t what I’d planned, but it felt right. I figured if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”

Three weeks later, however, Donna and Bryant’s magical romance was at risk. The work had finished at the vineyard, the campervan was packed and Melbourne beckoned. Tom was ready to move on and he refused to leave his sister behind. Donna begged and pleaded, but Tom was having none of it. “He said to me, ‘You’ve been waiting your whole life to come to Australia. You’re not staying here and wasting your time in this little town with some guy you’ve only just met’,” says Donna. “He told me, ‘You’ve only been here a couple of weeks. You’ve got to move on and do what you came here to do, which is see the country’.”

Donna knew Tom was right, but when it came time to leave she felt as though she was being torn in two. An exasperated Tom literally pulled her away from Bryant and put her into the van. “As we drove away Bryant was waving to me, and I was crying so hard,” remembers Donna. “I couldn’t stop, I cried for hours. I was surprised by my feelings. We had spent only about a month together at that stage, but I knew we had something.”

In the coming weeks Donna travelled and Bryant continued with his regular life, but the pair spoke on the phone every evening. A month passed when Donna and Tom decided to head to Sydney for a weekend. Donna immediately called Bryant and suggested he come. Bryant agreed. Donna was thrilled, yet also deeply anxious. “I worried it wouldn’t feel the same,” she says, “we’d spent as much time apart as we had together. But once I saw him I knew nothing had changed. My feelings were the same and I could tell his were, too. It didn’t make sense, but that’s just how it was.”

Bryant remembers the moment they saw one another again as though it were yesterday. “I had been worried that she would move on and forget about me,” he says. “But once we saw each other it was as if we’d never been apart.”

The pair spent the next 48 hours wining and dining their way around Sydney and by the end of the weekend, their feelings had intensified, with Bryant declaring he had fallen in love.

“When he told me he loved me I was delighted,” smiles Donna. “We hadn’t known each other for long, but it felt very real. I kept asking other people, ‘what does it feel like to be in love’ and everything I heard was telling me this was the real thing.”

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