When fate calls

Australia might have been on the other side of the world and a long way from home for Donna Wall, but her heart told her it was where she belonged. By Kelly Baker.

As a child Donna Wall drifted to sleep at night often listening to feather-soft drops of rain on the roof of her family’s home in Ireland. While the rain pattered down, Donna dreamed of a country where the sun always shone and the light sparkled so brightly you had to squint to see. She didn’t know why exactly, but this vast, dry continent had captured her heart and at just seven years old she knew it was where she was meant to be.

Today, Donna sits in the dining room of the townhouse where she lives in the southern Sydney suburb of Miranda.

At age 22 she’s nothing like the little girl who spent nights dreaming about Australia. Now she’s a grown woman who believes in destiny. For one thing, she’s 100 per cent clear on why Australia was calling to her all those years ago. “It was fate,” she says, tucking a strand of her long, straight hair behind her ear. “Fate brought me here so I could meet him.”

The man in question is 25-year-old Bryant Donlan, an Aussie with work-worn hands and a heart as big as a Mack truck. “Our meeting was just so random,” says Donna. “There we were in the middle of this huge country, but we found one another all the same. There was definitely a little magic involved.”

Donna and Bryant met three years ago in the farming town of Molong, in the hills of the Macquarie Range, in rural New South Wales. Theirs is a true romance, but it’s one that almost never eventuated.

When Donna arrived in Australia in 2004 she was a 19-year-old backpacker looking for a taste of adventure and determined to see as much of her dream country as possible. Understandably, Molong, home to roughly 1,700 people, was not high on her list of must-see destinations. Still, this was to be a working holiday, so after just one week in Sydney she headed to this outback town where she had heard there was work. To say her first impressions weren’t good would be an understatement. “On the first night I stayed by the vineyard where I was going to be working and it was a disaster,” says Donna with a laugh. “I hated it… it was in the middle of nowhere, there were mosquitoes, spiders, snakes... I thought, ‘First thing in the morning I’m outta here’.”

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