It was meant to be

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Unbeknown to them, their lives had always been linked, and Natalie Brailey believes it was more than chance that led her to Richard Chisholm in Gallipoli, Turkey.

At the age of 28, Natalie Brailey was living half a world away from her home town of Adelaide. In the seven years since she‘d left Australia she’d lived in San Francisco, New York and London, loving every minute of the cosmopolitan life she had made for herself. Then everything changed. On a pilgrimage to Gallipolli, Turkey, she met and fell in love with the man she was going to marry. And as fate would have it, Richard Chisholm turned out to be ’the boy next door‘. 

“I wasn’t really looking for a husband,” Natalie emphasises.  She was too busy living life to the full, working and sharing a cottage with flatmates near London‘s newly-refurbished Canary Wharf. In the four years she’d worked for a financial newswire service she had earned enough to explore Europe, the Americas and parts of Asia. She‘d also “dated quite a few guys” during that time but never for more than two weeks at a stretch. “There wasn’t a single one who seemed quite right, or who I could feel really comfortable with.” There was also the nagging concern that if she did marry abroad she might have to live thousands of miles away from her family in Adelaide. With great friends, a well-paying job and every opportunity to travel, finding a man was the last thing on her mind. Yet she could never quite forget what a British fortune teller had once told her. “I know it’s a girl thing to believe what they tell you,” she says, “but this woman was adamant I was going meet someone in strange circumstances, and the encounter would be very comfortable, as if I‘d known him all my life.” Later, when Natalie looked back on the way things turned out, she remembered, too, that a day or two before she and her flatmate, Mel, left for Turkey she caught herself thinking out loud, ‘I wonder what my future husband is doing today?’. “When I remember those two incidents now, it feels as though there was a lot more than just chance at work because it was only a few days later that I met Richard,” she says.

Ten days later, she and Mel were standing in the foyer of the Hotel Ant in Istanbul. From there they would set out on a tour of Turkey that would begin with a visit to Gallipoli for the solemn rites of Anzac Day. While they lingered in the lobby, Natalie felt herself ‘tuning in’ to a fellow traveller who seemed to be having trouble at the reception desk. Something about him compelled her to take notice. “He was friendly-looking but obviously stressed,” she recalls. Navigating foreign ’situations‘ was a skill Natalie had mastered in her many years of travel and without knowing what prompted her, she walked over and shyly asked if there was something she could do. “I was intruding and didn’t want to look too obvious,” she says. “But the hotel couldn’t find details of his booking and I offered to pitch in where I could.” (Not to mention the young man’s crinkly eyes and wide smile had drawn her like a magnet. Or that the casual drape of a corduroy jacket over a T-shirt and jeans gave him an irresistibly rumpled look.) “Okay,
the fact that Richard is attractive was a plus,” she admits, “but to this day, I believe it was more than that. I believe it was fate.”

The two introduced themselves and Natalie learned he was just in from London on his own round-the-world travels. A visit to Gallipoli had long been on his itinerary, but the hotel had lost all record of his reservation. “I told him he could sleep on the floor with our party if he was stuck. Then I rejoined my friends for our first night out,” she recalls. They didn‘t meet again until the touring parties’ ’welcome night‘ two days later. Amid a crush of fellow tourists and belly dancers undulating up and down a catwalk, all the two managed was a brief ’hello‘. Natalie remembers craning her neck to follow Richard as he walked to his table on the other side of the room. As she lost sight of him in the crowd, she wondered if she’d ever see him again.

The next day Natalie and Mel made the long drive from Istanbul to Gallipoli for the Anzac Day services. “We arrived there in the evening and thousands of us, Aussies, Kiwis and even Turks, sat up all night in Anzac Cove, waiting for the dawn.” At 5:30am, the first notes of the service were sounded by a bugler playing the ’Last Post‘. “This was what I’d wanted to do for a long time,” Natalie says. “My great-grandfather fought in World War I, my grandfather in World War II and my great uncle died in Vietnam. Right now, my brother Matthew is serving in Timor.” She had come to Gallipoli to ”thank all those young men who go to war thinking they’re doing the best they can for our country.” That was exactly what they had done in 1915 only to walk into a massacre remembered as one of the worst blunders in military history. The battle had forged a new sense of national unity in Australia, and it was to pay homage to the men who sacrificed their lives in achieving this that Natalie and so many others had come to Gallipoli 88 years later.

After the dawn service, Natalie visited the trenches and battle sites of the conflict and paid her respects at the war graves. At the end of the day, exhausted and wrung out, she climbed back on to her bus only to find Richard was sitting a few seats behind her. “It had been an emotionally draining day,” she recalls, “so we all planned a night out for relaxation when we got back to town.” Much later, she and Richard found themselves next to each other again as people posed for photos. “What I didn’t know was that Richard had already told one of our party that he ’quite fancied me’, but it was only later in the evening that he plucked up the courage to make a move.” While Natalie was dancing, he edged in on her and whisked a rose out from behind his back. He‘d bought it from a street seller and Natalie found herself accepting it with pleasure. “I put that rose on the window ledge of our bus so it would dry out and keep forever,” she says. “But a few days later, the bus driver threw it out.” The rose may not have survived, but by that time, the attraction the two felt for each other had blossomed into much more than a holiday romance.

“The night after Richard gave me the rose, and to the amusement of everyone on the bus, we went on our first date,” she says. And that’s when a number of uncanny coincidences came to light. ”First, we found out that we’d lived barely half an hour away from each other in Australia. Then we discovered our fathers were both air-traffic controllers for Airservices Australia in Adelaide, when we were kids.“ As Natalie pieced together dates, times and places something else came to mind. ”I remembered, as clear as day, an incident that happened when I was just five years old,” she says. “I couldn‘t believe how it suddenly made sense.“ As Natalie recalls, it was 1979 and her favourite time of the year. ”I loved December,“ she says, ”because that’s when I have my birthday. It also meant holidays, seeing friends and family and visiting the Magic Cave at John Martin’s department store.” But the incident Natalie remembers so clearly happened at a Christmas party held that year for members of Airservices Australia at the social club in Adelaide.

Words: Gillian Tucker . Photography: Andrew Lehmann. Hair & make-up: Ruth Sebire.