The Woman on the Mountain (10 page)

Then I spotted the halter and lead rope on a verandah chair. I rang. They were very sorry she hadn’t stayed; the little boys had cried; they’d all fallen for her cute looks. Their mother said, ‘She’s the sort of animal Walt Disney would make a movie about. I kept waiting for her to say something!’

I was stuck with her. No fence could keep her in. And no amount of appeals from her big brown eyes, peeping up at me through her long lashes and thick chestnut fringe, would make me think she was anything other than a pain.

To fence off the orchard section from the horses would be a lot of work—and then I’d have to mow it. A moveable electric fence would be fine, and there are the makings of one in the shed from an early attempt by my ex-partner at keeping possums out of the house yard, only I don’t know how to do it.

I remember the first night the electrified yard fence was activated. It was a last resort, as we’d tried all suggestions—chilli spray, quassia chip spray, garlic chive surrounds—and still the possums were stripping the roses and the citrus trees. That night we watched as a bevy of possums conferred just outside the bottom corner. It appeared as if they were drawing straws, after a heated discussion—‘You go!’ ‘No, you go!’—had proved fruitless. But none of them was game to try it and the disgruntled group broke up and waddled off into the trees.

Yet the next night, and every night after for a few years, one battered old warrior climbed the fence without visible reaction. He had tattered ears and tufts of fur missing from fights past—and an addiction to roses. Knowing what the ‘Zap!’ feels like, I deemed such effort heroic; the garden could cope with one possum having a well-earned rose munch.

He’s gone, but the local possums must have passed on the word about the ‘Zap!’ because I don’t see many in here, even though the fence hasn’t been electrified since the last fires. Or maybe my resident carnivorous quoll deters them.

So what the horses deliver is a grazed, semi-razed garden rather than the cropped lawn I ordered. And while they do a lot of unauthorised pruning, on the other hand they don’t fancy eating tussocks or weeds, so I still have to do some sporadic mowing if I want to stop the house yard regressing to a wild paddock where bush rats would tunnel and nest, and snakes lurk.

In the year after I was hit with arthritis that’s how it was, since I couldn’t mow it, my partner couldn’t find the time, and I hadn’t yet resigned myself to sacrificing my garden. The bush rats ate through the bird netting we put over the fruit trees, not to mention invading the house and shed. I want to keep my patch unappealing to them.

Now, instead of collecting lawn clippings, I shovel up horse manure for compost and for mulch around the chewed fruit trees. I’ve been given a wonderful self-propelled mower that even I can start, so in the warmer months, before the sun hits the orchard, I occasionally do a little bit of easy mowing, but only where needed as anti-rat precautions. I don’t mow the native grasses when they’re seeding, for the next season’s growth, and because the Crimson Rosellas like to poke about in them, sampling the crop one-legged, one-handed, each stem bent double and nibbled along, much as we do a cob of corn.

Most mornings the horses turn up at one of the gates into the house yard. I hear them from my bed, stamping to shoo flies, maybe a bit of a scuffle as they jockey for position. To keep them domesticated I try to give them something when they turn up. For up to an hour they’ll wait to be let in or offered carrots, before Zack decides I’m not home or I’m being mean today and leads them off elsewhere.

To get them out of the house paddock is a matter of bribery. It’s my last daily task and I can’t relax with a glass of home-brew on the verandah until I’ve completed it. I wait until they’re all near each other, and walk towards them bearing carrots, two each, calling ‘Feedo!’

Sabbath, being the greediest, neighs eagerly and starts trotting after me as I walk briskly to the nearest gate. Once he neighs, they all take notice. I must get there first and open the gate so they can push past instead of treading on my heels. It’s quite an adrenaline rush to distribute the carrots fairly for them and safely for me as they jostle and snort around me, and then to nick back through the gate and close it.

Once the whole gang refused to fall for the carrot trick, and after cajoling, and then cursing, at different gates, I gave up, though worried about what they might eat when they got bored during the night. At about 2a.m. Zack began neighing loudly and racing round the yard at full pelt, demanding to be let out—NOW! Sabbath followed his lead, as did Shari, who has a chip on her shoulder about being so small and likes to throw in a bucking or two in her mad gallops, as if to say, ‘Look at me, see, I’m a real horse!’ I had no choice but to get up, take the torch and do as I was told, in nightie and gumboots, before their skidding hooves had carved trenches everywhere.

Due to the drought, for the first time ever, this past winter I’ve had to supplement their grazing with feed, hay one day, a special feed mix the next. I catch and tie up the two greedy males outside the fence before even showing the buckets, or there’s pandemonium.

Annoying and unpredictable as they can be, the horses are company of a sort. And we’ve been through a few dramas together. In the 2002 fires, there was only Jess and a plump grey mare called Jasmine here. How they survived is a tale in itself, but it belongs in the bigger story of those catastrophic fires.

After the fires, since all the fences in the area were burnt, we’d sent the horses elsewhere. When our fencing was complete again, we brought all my daughter’s horses over here. She didn’t have Zack then, just Jasmine, Jess, Shari and Sabbath, who was thus the only male.

One day when I called the horses to the gate for carrots, Sabbath didn’t come to get his share, but pranced about at a distance. This being most unlike him, I was puzzled. Later that day I saw what seemed to be two Sabbaths—two chestnut horses with white forehead stars and white socks—racing flat out across the far paddock, one chasing the other.

The chaser returned alone and joined the mares. He was not Sabbath—more robustly built, slightly different markings—and from the way he was keeping Sabbath away from the mares, I guessed he was probably a stallion. A few phone calls confirmed that an unbroken chestnut stallion had been bothering other properties; the reputed owner, whose fences were all down, wasn’t interested. ‘Shoot it, ’ I was told, by all and sundry, as if this was no big deal.

My daughter came up on the weekend. We found where the stallion had broken the newly repaired fence to get to our mares, and we fixed it in our less-than-professional fashion. He was seen mounting Jasmine, and we worried about too-small Shari and too-old Jess. Poor Sabbath was hunted and bitten whenever he appeared. We had to get this vicious intruder out. With difficulty we enticed our horses into the house yard, Sabbath first, and then the mares.

The stallion raced round and round the fence, neighing so frantically, at such a high pitch, that he was literally screaming. This state of siege continued while I tried to get various authorities to help. It appeared I had to catch this uncatchable creature first and take it to town where they would shoot it. My house yard wasn’t big enough to feed four horses for long. We had to deal with him ourselves, get him off the property.

The following weekend my daughter returned, resolute. Taking a whip as protection, she caught Shari and ran with her up the track to the main gate, with the stallion following slightly higher up the hill, galloping and neighing. He was fiercely possessive, and my daughter, while scared of him, was very brave. I followed in the car. Once we, and the stallion, were outside the gate, she ran back inside with Shari and tied her to a tree, while I slammed the gate shut.

She chased the stallion along the track, cracking the whip and yelling, while I followed in the Suzuki, blowing the horn and generally trying to scare him far away. He was having none of that idea, and veered off the track at the end of my 30-acre fenced-in section. That fence comes very close to the house at one corner, where my yard fence forms part of it.

Now the stallion was galloping all round that 30 acres, wearing a deep track, crashing through my regeneration area, screaming for the mares. We weren’t game to let them out of the netted house yard, in case he got at them through the plain wire fence with his teeth or hooves, and in any case Shari would go through it.

Hoping he’d give up and go find some mares elsewhere, as there were brumbies out in the national park, my daughter returned to home and work. Each night I’d be woken by his piercing calls, only 50 metres away, setting the mares whinnying and panicking. It was truly frightening, as I imagined him breaking down the fence. For days this went on. I was afraid he’d skid into the fence or down the slope and break a leg as he continually raced around the perimeter, wearing a track into the mud. So much stamping and wheeling went on in that corner closest to the house that three years later the ground is still bare.

National Parks had recommended a professional shooter who would come up here, do the deed humanely and take the body away—for dog meat. I hated the idea, but finally I rang him. He came with a large covered trailer and a winch, was extremely sensitive about where he did it, and took his time so as to be sure that his first shot would be the final one. I heard the shot; saw nothing. I felt deeply sorry for this animal that had paid for its owner’s irresponsibility, but I’d had no choice.

Letting our horses out of the yard, I tried not to think of what plants I’d lost over the time it had been their intensive feedlot. Sometimes a garden seems a futile thing to persevere with, an unwinnable battle between me and the creatures, both wild and domestic, with whom I live. I am often tempted to give it up, as it’s our only cause of conflict, but I’m stubborn enough to think I’ll eventually win.

I am also foolish, as I keep forgetting that finding a solution to any problem here is only an invitation for my neighbours to come up with a fresh challenge.

In 2002 I went away from my mountain for an entire spring. For family reasons, my partner had been living in town that year, in a cottage we’d mortgaged this place to buy New partners over 40 usually come with ‘baggage’, which can drastically re-route your shared plans, sometimes fatally I’d been dividing my week between the two places, but his work didn’t permit that.

Firewise, it was a bad time for me to go away, since there’d be nobody here to keep the yard grass short and watered green, the gutters clear of leaves. But I had to go. Opportunity was knocking loudly.

The Alan Marshall Award gave me a financial boost, but even more importantly it gave me national validation as a writer, and priceless encouragement in the praise from judge Gillian Mears, who’d won the award herself the year before. Being an admirer of Gillian’s writing, I could hardly credit what I was hearing when her comments were read out at the award presentation, since they began with ‘It was a rare privilege to read “Traces of Life”. There was never any doubt that this was the winning story...’

As if this wasn’t enough to send me soaring, I was then offered a paid three-month artist’s residency by the award funder, Nillumbik Shire, Victoria. This shire encompasses Eltham, where Alan Marshall lived, and the wonderfully faux-gothic Montsalvat, built by artists for artists.

The residency was to be taken in Birrarung, an historic mudbrick house on a bushland property now owned by Parks Victoria, who jointly sponsor the residency. The house had been designed in the 1970s by Alistair Knox, the famous architect associated with mudbricks, heavy timbers and cathedral ceilings, for Gordon Ford, equally famous landscape designer and builder, associated with ‘natural’ gardens of native plantings, rocks and water flows. Temptingly, its address was Laughing Waters Road, being right by the Yarra River. Montsalvat was a ten-minute drive away.

This was the first time a writer had been offered the residency; visual and installation artists had enjoyed it before. For me it meant three months of enforced break from daily duties and interruptions, apart from any copywriting work that came in by email, but otherwise with nothing to do but write. In return, only a day of workshops at the end of it. But it had to be taken that spring.

My partner having reluctantly agreed it was an opportunity not to be missed, I took the plunge, said ‘Yes’, packed the car with the essentials—barely started novel manuscript, computer, printer, fax, desk chair, books, juicer, warm clothes—and went, fingers crossed that my partner’s spare but smoky old Peugeot would make it to Victoria and back.

Birrarung proved to be a fantastic place in the true sense of the word, and a great experience, though darkly transformed by the fatal illness of my father after I’d been there only a week. I flew back just in time to say goodbye.

The novel was never the same after that. Nor was the world.

Yet living in such a different environment
was
inspiring. Birrarung was no ordinary house; it had its own personality, and gave off emanations as mysterious as the bush that surrounded it.

The feeling of Gordon’s house was older than its years. Minor manorial—with oddities. Like the glass-walled room, brick-floored, empty but for a tiny iron fireplace, scrolled and fanciful, in one corner. Inches away from the glass walls, at floor level, there was a pond, but looming just beyond it, filling the view, was a rock wall higher than the roof. One glass wall thus framed a picture of giant granite boulders, while the other two walls of glazed doors overlooked and accessed the garden and bush.

It was built onto the house as an afterthought, for up close waterfall viewing and nature watching, no matter what the weather. Only I couldn’t make Gordon’s waterfall work. Despite the ‘natural’ magic it would effect, it was man-made, dependent on machinery, with which I have a long history of bad communication. The water wouldn’t pump up, so wouldn’t fall for me.

Apart from rock watching, the room’s other function seemed to be stunning and killing birds. The large expanses of glass in the doors fooled many, who tried to fly through them. I’d hear a ‘thunk’ of varying loudness from my desk, and leap up to see what had been hurt now, anxious to see how badly. I became a voyeur of the flightless, temporary or final. Small thunks: a Welcome Swallow, a Little Weebill. A big thunk—so big and so hard that tufts of soft grey underfeathers were left on the glass: a Little Cuckoo-shrike.

It was in Victoria that I saw an effective remedy for this problem: a cork with a feather stuck in it, suspended outside each window. They twirl and sway and behave like birds, and thus warn the kamikaze birds away.

For a time a Grey Shrike-thrush was nesting on an open ledge in the top of the glass-room wall. The ledge had lost its wire screen, the nest was old, but the bird appeared to take up her annual lease just weeks after I came.

Her melodious song echoed, ever oddly, in the empty room—wild birds don’t live in rooms! I stayed out of there, as she would startle and fly away as soon as I opened the adjoining door. Then one day some Melbourne friends visited and, hearing of the waterfall that wouldn’t, the male offered to get the pump going. I was so keen for this to happen that I forgot that he’d have to plug the extension cord into the power point in the glass room; I forgot the overly shy nesting bird. He had no more success with the pump than I did, but the songbird never returned.

Much less shy were the Welcome Swallows that had taken over the main bedroom, entering via a small round terracotta pipe vent also missing its screen wire, high under the pitch of the gable. They had built their nest on top of the pipe, inside. The babies were flying too, and I dared not enter the room for the panic it created, with half a dozen birds shrilling and flapping against the skylight and windows. The brick floor was spattered with evidence of their tenancy. They shrieked loudly, dementedly, in the daytime, which I excused because I knew what a roomful of young children sounds like, from my infant-teaching days. My bird book described it as ‘high-pitched twittering’, but theirs was amplified by the brick floor and high ceiling.

I welcomed the coolness of the house eventually, but until my last few weeks it was too cold. All the floors were brick, meant to be warmed by the underfloor electric heating, which nowadays was too expensive to run.

Birrarung was not solar designed. It was a dark house in most rooms, despite skylights, but much of its charm lay in the causes of its defects. The big open living room soared high to the timber-lined pitch of the roof, with stairs leading up to a mezzanine loft like a musicians’ gallery, and massive square central posts of old bridge timbers. There were many windows, all set low so I could see the bush even when sitting, and many French doors, but the ochre mud walls and the dark-stained timbers swallowed the daylight as soon as it crept inside.

The main room was dominated by the very large mud-rendered fireplace, bulging and free-form, with an odd protruding lip, pouting and blackened, below the slab mantelpiece. It was a fireplace for tree trunks rather than logs, oxen rather than marshmallows. As I’d had to buy the load of wood, I was not as generous as was needed to heat very far into the empty, uncurtained room, so at night I pulled the lounge up close to the fire’s maw. It was company.

Of the basic furniture in the house, only the lounge demanded I do something about it for the short time I was there. I didn’t fancy curling up on its pilled synthetic brown fabric, redolent of unknown history, so I went op-shopping in nearby towns. I treated Victoria like a foreign country and relished the differences I found there. One such was a chain of commercial op-shops, with vast well-arranged premises—they even had check-out queues. A percentage of sales went to charity, and the prices were very low.

I bought a pair of heavy cotton watermelon-pink double sheets to drape over the nasty lounge, a thick slub cotton Indian rug to muffle the cold bricks under my trestle table desk, a pair of exotically patterned pillowslips, and a thick Ming blue woollen single blanket—and I paid $20 for the lot. I still have them all; one of the watermelon-pink sheets has been reborn as my 30-year-old cotton sleeping bag’s new sewn-on cover, satisfying my love of finding new uses for old things. The pillowslips are my favourites, and the blanket brings colour and warmth to my spare bed in winter, but I don’t have a room big enough for the Indian rug. It’s biding its time for more house. All of them remind me of Birrarung—I can smell wood smoke, hear bellbirds, feel the brick floor underfoot.

‘Things’ matter for their nostalgic associations more than for anything else. Of my dad, I have his folding carpenter’s yard ruler, much worn and handled, since he’d used it from his apprentice days. It’s precious because when I pick it up and unfold its four boxwood strips, beautifully fitted with brass ends and central swivel, I see his calloused hands, usually with a blood blister under one nail from hammer blows that missed their mark; and I see a very small me, fascinated by this ruler and playing with it for as long as I was allowed; and I see his ever-indulgent smile at what an odd little creature I was. Am.

I’m sorry I didn’t get to tell him about Birrarung; as a builder he’d have been interested. But he wouldn’t have approved of the bush being so close.

It was a very different bush from what I was used to, as were the birds it attracted. In the remnants of Gordon’s ‘made’ native garden immediately around the house, there were many varieties of hakea, low arching shrubs with pink and ivory, red or orange, deeply curving flowers like sea snail shells. And semi-prostrate grevilleas, with their outstretched fingers the colour of new honeysuckle blossoms. These bushes were constantly bent by honeyeaters, who also hovered in midair, wings beating in a blur, to sip the very end flowers of the branches.

When first I came the air was full of the scent of the Black Wattles’ myriad tiny yellow balls; by the end, the wattles were drooping with great swags of light-green seed pods, long and lumpy as old beans, but daintier. There was much dead timber through this bush, mostly wattles, tall and thin and leaning, dark claws of topmost twigs curving against the sky, or snapped into jagged spars. As they died, they lost their dark-spotted bark in scrolled sections, which clung to the trunks like climbing goannas.

The other trees there were tall and erratic in shape, with patchy, flaky bark of possum-grey and beige, and large circular or heart-shaped bluish leaves. I was told they were Yellow Box,
Eucalyptus melliodora.
Mostly young, thin and straggly, but several very large and spreading, like the two around which the house was built. These had grown far beyond what nature-loving Gordon must have imagined 30-odd years ago. They were now crushing the roof with their expanding trunks, cracking the mudbrick walls and lifting the timber verandah with their roots.

One window’s entire view was the overgrown tree trunk, lurking so close and scaly it looked less tree than patient monster, a creature marking time, quietly growing in strength and bulk, till it cried ‘Enough!’, shook off this house that had been standing on its foot for too long, and headed off down the gully.

The calls of bellbirds echoed constantly there. The Parks Vic ranger told me that they were actually a sign of a ‘sick forest’, which was disillusioning. At my Gosford convent school, Henry Kendall was a local hero, and we were taught to sing his poem ‘Bellbirds’ to the tune of ‘On Top of old Smokey’. Sounds grotesque, but it works. Try it.

And it certainly meant I remembered the words. I’d often heard bellbirds around Gosford, but in tall trees, so I’d never seen them. I discovered that they are honeyeaters, properly called Bell Miners, and have a vivid orange beak and legs, a bright eye and yellowish olive feathers. And they do call like bells ringing, or ‘Tink! Tink!’ as my bird book says.

My mountain forest has no mid-storey, so that Victorian dry bush was surprisingly splendid in the spring. I drank it all in.

There were thousands of
Bursaria spinosa,
tall, densely branching and deeply graceful small trees, rough-barked and thyme-leaved like tea-trees. Their flowers were white, minute and clustered, the effect starry in the sense of twinkling, and exceedingly pretty. They smelt like honey, and their blooming was gradual, so from a distance it was as if those elegant arching branches were slowly being touched up with delicate white pastel strokes, or lightly dusted with snow.

Another remarkable shrub or small tree—I never know where to draw the line—that was plentiful along the dusty road turned out to be the Victorian Christmas Bush,
Prostanthera lasianthos.
Its flowers were like bunches of small snapdragons, vivid, Kiwi sandshoe polish white, with maroon dots in their throats. Native cherry trees also abounded there,
Exocarpus cupressiformis,
with their fir-like bright green foliage, finely furrowed dark trunks and funny little bobble fruit—a cherry with the seed on top.

The hardy Dogwood flowered beside the road too, its long arms reaching up and out, fine, dark-green leaves drooping like terrier whiskers along their length, bearing their white flowerheads only at their very end. Nearer the narrow river flats I could see regrowth Manna Gums, clustered around the streaky trunks of the few parent trees, trailing ribbons of bark as they rose above the massed fairy white of the bursarias.

To lock the gate each evening I walked beneath a row of tall pine trees, planted by earlier settlers; their scent often dominated, as did their carpets of smothering needles, but I couldn’t dislike them despite their incorrectness. A pocket of iris and crab apple, cotoneaster and hawthorn pointed to the site of the original hardwood log cabin, burnt down in the fires of the 1960s. This bush was full of dead wood and kindling, now rapidly heating up as summer approached. The house was near the end of a long, dead-end road. I began to think of fire plans—and water.