The Woman on the Mountain (11 page)

‘Birrarung’ is what the Aborigines called the Yarra River, which lay hidden, brown and log-ridden, just across the road. It was sullen there, so I walked to find the Laughing Waters of the road’s name—only they didn’t. The deeper falls boomed like distant planes, echoing against the semi-cleared hills above, while the shallower ones said ‘glue-er, glue-er’ over and over, very busily. Or were they saying ‘birrarung, birrarung’?

People came there to swim in the wide pool, which was defined by cascades above and below, with weathered rocks reaching out into the river, full of hollows and holes and rounded ridges—and cigarette butts. The banks and edges of the river here had been much used, and many introduced plants had gone feral—blackberries, giant plantain, thistles, wandering jew, ivy, rye grass. A familiar rural story.

There was another Knox-designed mudbrick house on the property, Boomerang, although I thought it curved more like a cooked fat sausage. Never having been approved for habitation, it was only a day studio ‘residency’, which had been won by Leanne Mooney, a sculptor who mainly used found natural materials. Boomerang was out of sight, uphill through the dry bush. Although we didn’t interrupt each other’s daily work, Lee and I became friends.

My output was more intangible, but Lee’s eerily telling creations gradually filled the odd house up the hill, until her final exhibition. I remember the opening primarily for the fabulous fresh cheeses her husband Ben contributed from his family’s Yarra Valley Dairy—their Persian Marinated Fetta was sublime!

I wrote her an artist’s statement and CV, and in return she gave me a tall triangular lamp of elegant simplicity, made of driftwood and handmade paper. It was lucky to survive the long trip back here in the laden Peugeot. One of my most cherished artworks, it softly lights a mud wall corner each evening. Lee and I stay in touch—a review of her latest exhibition recently quoted some of my words, so I am pleased that, like her lamp, they remain of use.

The eccentric house, the isolation, the silent evening presence of an empty house on the hill above, and the unfamiliar surrounding bushland, combined to create a distinctly strange atmosphere. Yet I was at ease there, even at night.

I didn’t mind the spider webs—hundreds of daddy-long-legs had laced the high ceilings and skylights with dense and intricate webs to be turned silver by sun or moon. I did
not
like it when I found a dead centipede in my bed; or big black spiders of unknown venom on my mat or wall; or shredded offerings of insect origin on my pillow, fallen from the gaps in the boards above. Nor was I pleased that mice clearly dominated the swallows’ end of the house, and the pantry. I left it to them, shut those doors and did not enter, kept all my food in the fridge, my crockery in plastic bags.

I don’t know how a city person would have coped there, especially if alone.

Three months is a strange amount of time to live in a place. Knowing it’s not permanent yet feeling it’s too long for temporary. It took a week to settle in, and then there was Dad. Returning soon after, perhaps too soon, Birrarung’s empty spaces echoed with my sorrow, my anger at those whom I felt had not cared enough, done enough, and the futile self-punishment of‘ if only’ and ‘what if . Yet its bushland peace and the fireside comforted, and the privacy allowed me to grieve unhindered by convention.

For the whole spring I rattled around that big house on my own, crossing the empty expanses of brick floor to sit each day at my laptop, drifting between the fictional world of the village I was writing about and the real world outside my window. I managed another 30,000 words on the novel while I was there. But by the end of my time I was both sad and restless.

My own place wasn’t being cared for. It had been threatened by fires almost since I left. My heart was there, but part of me had bonded to Birrarung and its bushland. I knew I’d miss waking in a dim bedroom to dawn mist in the timbered gully and hill beyond the bursarias, and to the generous morning birdsong of this bush.

Being there made me more aware of the need to preserve what bushland survived close to civilisation. Even if degraded, once left alone the bush can fight back, resume dominance, as the Yellow Boxes and the swallows were clearly doing! People can experience such near places more easily, gain a taste of what their particular local world was like before it became the bright green of‘ civilisation’, manicured, sterile, anonymous. A rose is a rose is a rose—but a Manna Gum is not an ironbark or a boab, and a unique ecosystem thrives around each.

As Gordon Ford said, ‘We must feel part of the land we walk on and love the plants that grow there ... if we are to achieve a spirit in a garden.’ It’s not hard to see why his gardens and his house spoke to me.

The haven of Birrarung was only five minutes from culturally vibrant Eltham. With its beautiful library and a wonderful little bookshop constantly organising literary events, it was far harder to remain a hermit there. Eltham had grown too big but still had elements of what it once was—a great ‘village down the road’.

And it was close enough for me to go early each Saturday to the fabulous St Andrews markets, to buy the freshest of flowers; nuggetty breads dense with flavour; sweet treats like poppyseed strudel; organic fruit and vegies with the great tastes, varied shapes and sizes, odd clump of dirt and sneaky slug of real garden produce—and to lust after crafts and clothes much to my taste but beyond my means.

At Birrarung, I’d also written an
Owner Builder
article, ‘From Knoxie to Now’, about the houses, especially interesting because I met the original builder, Graham Rose, who lives locally. Gordon Ford’s widow, Gwen, a fellow writer, lives at Fülling, their acre and a half of native garden in Eltham, where she runs a truly charming set of B & B mudbrick cottages. Her waterfalls work! Gwen was a good friend to me as well as a source of local information. She winkled me out of my hermitage a few times, but was not pressing.

One occasion of her successful winkling was at the atmospheric Montsalvat, for Michael Leunig’s launch of his book
Sticks.
It was held in an upstairs room above the Great Hall. Backed by leadlight windows, shafts of late sunlight falling onto the table in front of him, every now and then a single swallow’s feather would float down from the rafters high above, circling slowly, past his face, through the sunbeam and onto the table. It couldn’t have been better orchestrated—unless it had been a duck feather.

Just before I left Victoria, I learnt that I was ‘very shortlisted’ in the Boroondara Literary Award, from another of the admirable Victorian Shires who support the arts. The night before my workshops was the presentation night, in Hawthorn Town Hall. I sat with clammy palms and increasing disbelief as the judge, Morris Lurie, worked backwards up the list to the main award of $2000. I’d won! As that story, ‘For Beauty’, was very different to ‘Traces of Life’, I began to believe that the Alan Marshall win might not have been a fluke.

Two national awards in one year! My life as a writer should have been beginning a steep ascendency, but it turned out to be on hold for the next eighteen months. I should have been happy, but I seemed to have lost the ability. Writing seemed a sham; how dare I think my perceptions of life were of any value to anyone when I understood its relationship with death so little?

After his mother’s death, Loudon Wainwright III wrote a song, ‘Homeless’, that includes these lines amongst several that beautifully, painfully, summed up how desolate I felt. They made me cry when I first heard them, two years after Dad died.

With my father gone, there was no longer a person with unconditional, non-judgemental love for me, and there never could be again. As my mother had never taken on such a role, I felt I
was
alone now, and my relationship wasn’t good enough to counter that feeling.

Birrarung had given me a taste of, and for, living on my own. I decided that I would try once more to resolve the problems with my partner, but if that was unsuccessful, I’d make my way in life alone, physically as well as emotionally.

As I eventually did. That leap was only possible because my grief caused the usual priorities, like my need for security and continuity, and my concern for my future, to fall away into nothingness. What counted was being honest with myself.

I made strong decisions at a time when I felt weaker, more depressed and weepy, than I’d ever been. Decisions made under the influence of grief, yes—but I haven’t regretted them.

In the early December the old Peugeot brought me safely back up the Hume Highway from Birrarung, to our house in town. That very night we were rung and told that a serious fire was heading towards my mountain. Smaller fires had been brought under control in the general area while I’d been away, but this one was large—and uncontrollable.

Our major neighbour, National Parks, was fully occupied with fires in other parks, threatening greater numbers of properties, and could send no help to our mountains. I said I’d be there, and drove home at first light. I was alone, as my partner had unbreakable commitments elsewhere, but my son would be going up too.

The mountain grasses were as brown as the pastoral valleys through which I’d driven. Dry leaves and fallen sticks waited like well-set kindling beneath the trees. My house yard was overgrown with long, bleached tussocks, and the usually green grass in between was dead.

Our brigade guys were already there assessing what was needed. There was no chance of turning or containing the fire; it would be a matter of trying to save each cabin or house as the fire reached it. They would send in the bulldozer to clear breaks around my house yard and my son’s near-finished cabin further away, over near the lagoon. A crew from another brigade would be here later. I was to keep an eye on the fire’s rate of approach, ready to call fire-fighter friends on standby to bring their ute and slide-on fire pump to help my son save his place.

I raced about trying to make up for three months’ neglect. I cleared leaves from gutters and plugged them with rags only to find that they sagged forward too much to hold water. Brackets had been undone at some stage, probably to remedy the inadequate fall and drainage, but not refixed. I didn’t have a riveter and there was no time now for fiddling with them. Climbing back down the ladder, I muttered anew about half-done jobs.

My son was busy at his place clearing bracken and tussocks away from the cabin, which, although clad in corrugated iron, was elevated, timber-floored, so vulnerable from below. Nor was it yet fully sealed under the eaves. We had debated the siting for his cabin. He’d wanted to build out on the point where the sunset views were grander; I’d insisted it be much, much further back from the edge, to create a flat distance in which the fire could slow down, lose heat, and allow people to safely defend the cabin from the fire front, which would invariably come up that western slope below. I’d seen fires roar up there; he hadn’t. I held firm. He’d given in, though with an air of humouring rather than believing me. I had a feeling that by tonight he’d be glad he had.

I rang a friend in the next valley, whose place would be first in line of the fire. He reckoned two hours at least before it got to him. I thought how much easier this was than the fire in 1980, before we had phones, when I’d had to keep running down to the escarpment edge to check the fire’s progress. From a rocky point there I’d actually watched the fire sweep over a shed, without realising that this man and another were sheltering on the lee side of that shed. They’d survived, as the fire moved so fast, but he’d had to restrain his companion from panicking and running. So he knew fires; I could trust his judgement.

I turned on the big fixed sprinklers in the orchard so at least the western end of the yard would be soaked. Had I been here those last months I’d have been using them to keep the grass green, but the whole yard was now crackling brown. I began moving smaller sprinklers about to wet other areas, like in front of my glasshouse, but with six agricultural sprinklers going there wasn’t a lot of pressure left. I cursed our stupidity in having installed only one gravity delivery line, and that only 11/4-inch diameter!

Crouching, I raked out the dead leaves from under the verandah, bumping my head often on the spidery floor joists in my haste. I’d done it before I went away, but despite the fine aviary netting across the front of the verandah piers, many more small leaves from the wisteria had found their way in.

Everything loose on the verandah had to be removed so burning leaves wouldn’t lodge behind or amongst them. The big gas bottle had to be disconnected and put somewhere safe—but where? For some reason I decided the toilet would do, and managed to half-roll and half-drag the bottle up there. I think my idea was that, if it blew up, no harm would be done to anything else. I barrowed the verandah things over to the power shed and stacked them in there.

Then I saw the sprinklers’ shining arcs wilt ... stop. Surely it wasn’t possible that I’d run out of water, with 11,000 gallons in those tanks, when I knew my son had pumped very recently to fill them? He came running down the hill—the dozer had cut the buried pipe in two places; he’d turned off the tanks so we hadn’t lost too much water, but did I have any joiners?

I couldn’t find any the right size. This was a nightmare scenario. I rang around and found someone not too far away, much closer than town at least, who thought he had some in the shed, and my son headed off, going fast for good reason for once. Luckily we had a few hours.

At least he’d not be delayed by opening gates. They were all now wide open so that Jess and Jasmine, the two horses, wouldn’t be trapped. They’d have to take their chances. The support tankers had been using my main dam to refill, so that gate needed to be left open anyway. Time was precious with such a raging fire.

To the west the sky was a vast smear of brown, with sporadic higher yellowish billows of smoke. The air was heavy with the sweetish, horribly familiar smell of a eucalypt forest burning. The day was heating up, and there was a westerly wind—the very worst kind for us. I got into my fire clothes of cotton long-sleeved shirt, jeans and boots, with a cotton scarf tied at my neck ready to pull up over my nose and mouth, and goggles hanging ready. I knew how difficult it would be to cope with the heat and smoke otherwise. I pulled my old Akubra down hard on my head to defeat the wind. I’d turn the hose on myself nearer the time.

The small crew from an outside brigade arrived. The captain took one look at my clearing and declared it a safe place from which they could defend my house. I was asked to prioritise buildings for saving, and I chose the house and the power shed as critical. They could pump from my small dam in front, and ran out their long flat hoses to reach beyond the house. I was following them around, apologising for the unprepared state of the yard, ‘I’ve been away for three months, I only got back last night ... sorry, it wouldn’t usually be this dry.’ But they didn’t seem interested. ‘Bloody weekenders!’ they were probably thinking.

The sprinklers sprang into life again. Thank heavens! The captain told me to keep the sprinklers going, and he and his crew drove off to check out my son’s cabin. It was about 2.30p.m.

The phone rang. It was from my friend on the front line. ‘It’s spotting on my place already, ’ he yelled. ‘It’ll be up there in under half an hour at this rate!’ Something had drastically changed in the fire’s route and pace. Two of our brigade members arrived and I rang our standby pair to come urgently. They did, in record time. Once they reached my son’s, the main crew would return here, I presumed.

One helper and I were wetting down what we could, playing our limp hose sprays over the verandah and the plants and grass in front. I was getting anxious that the fire crew wasn’t back here.

Then we saw the fire. Through the tree line on the edge of my escarpment, we could see flames. ‘Where the f—k are they?’ yelled my helper.

I began running to turn off the sprinklers; we were going to need all the pressure here at the house. The shed and workshop would have to be sacrificed. But just then I saw the fire crew’s Toyota tearing across the paddock to us. I ran back to my station by the tap below the bottom north-eastern corner of the house. The Toyota pulled up in cloud of dust; the crew leapt out and began connecting hoses.

‘About f—n’ time!’ said my helper.

I f—n’ agreed.

There was a mighty roar as the fire came over the edge; all the rough-barked tree trunks down the hill from my house began exploding into pillars of fire, well ahead of the actual ground fire, and igniting the grass beneath them as well. This wasn’t crowning, it was radiant heat at its worst. I turned the hose on myself, pulled my wet scarf up over my nose, the goggles over my eyes. Here we go!

Within a minute the fire had travelled uphill several hundred metres, leapt the bare dirt of the dozer break and was inside my house yard. The noise and heat were dreadful. I could hear helicopters somewhere above it all.

The crew were spraying the house and verandah with their big hoses and power nozzles; I was concentrating on putting out the fire in the grass as it came through the fence, but I remember thinking, ‘Hope they don’t aim too hard a jet on the mudbricks!’ My face felt as if it was burning, even though I was backed right up against the house, with the hose jet as full on and as far-reaching as it would go.

Moving so fast, the fire soon leapt the track and was past the house and yard, with the wind whipping flames and sending burning leaves and sparks everywhere, including back downhill. I managed to put out the fire in the back of the bay tree next to my side fence, then ran to see what was happening in the rest of the yard. Spot fires were starting everywhere but the fire crew were racing about extinguishing them.

I saw one right near the toilet. ‘The gas bottle!’ I yelled. ‘There’s a gas bottle in there!’ They were right on to it, although they must have wondered
why
I kept gas in there.

I ran back down to patrol as much of the fence perimeter as I had hoses to reach. All the trees and shrubs within 3 metres inside the fence were burnt, and the piles of horse manure I’d mulched them with were smoking and smouldering. I raked them out flat to hose them, realising they were just processed dried grass after all, so I should have thought of them as a hazard, but hadn’t. Amazingly, the shadecloth-covered glasshouse seemed intact—the crew must have hosed it at the right time, as it was only about 15 metres from the fire edge. The wind was still strong. Spot fires had even started inside the sodden orchard area, although they hadn’t burnt far.

The fire was well away up the hill. The captain said he thought it was OK here now and they’d better get on to the next place if I thought I could manage the mopping up. I thanked him effusively, and he said, ‘You did well.’ As I’d only held a hose, I wondered what he usually met with—hysteria? I didn’t tell him I’d been through this before, without a hose, nor that I’d done fire crewleader training. He reminded me that if this wind kept up I’d need to keep checking throughout the night for spot fires.

One helper took off on his trailbike to protect his own place on the next ridge. The other, our deputy captain, stayed, anxious to see how my son’s place and its protectors had fared. He kept trying to get across the intervening burnt area on his bike to check, but it was far too hot still. For half an hour he kept trying, as well as putting out smouldering tree trunks and tussocks at my place. I was getting really worried; the fire could have been even fiercer over there, with all that blady grass on the slope below. The slide-on tank was only small—had they run out of water?—but the fire had moved so fast that surely they were OK?

Then I heard the bike again. ‘They’re all right!’ he called. ‘So’s the cabin.’

My heart settled. Through the blackened and smoking bush I saw the ute returning.

I got cold drinks for us all and we plopped onto the ground to recover our wits and our energy, realise our good fortune—this time. Aftermath smokes were lit by some. Only then did I think of my lagoon paperbarks, less than two years old. My son said the fire had roared up the gully to the lagoons even faster than it had towards his. So that would be the end of my regeneration dream.

He also said it had been easy to halt the fire at the dozer break around his place. He grinned at me and raised an eyebrow.

Our helpers moved on to aid others. Then I remembered my spotter in the next valley. I rang, not really expecting the line to be working, but it was. He was fine except for a burnt hand when he’d tried to open the door after it was all over. A helicopter had landed soon after the fire had passed to see if he was OK.

The sudden speed of the fire had surprised everyone, including himself; it had got to his place before any brigade crew could. He’d survived inside his tin shed/cabin, crouched on the cement floor with wet blankets over himself and his dog. I knew what a perfectionist he was; his shed would have been absolutely sealed, spark and ember proof. He said the tin of the shed had become so hot it had glowed blue. Now there’s a man who’s been intimate with fires.

I rang to reassure my daughter, my partner. My son reconnected the gas; we ate something and began our vigils. Every two hours, we agreed, we’d get up and check. He only had a backpack of water and a rakehoe, as there was no water connected at his place.

Checking my four garden hoses, I laid them out to their furthest reach, ready. The wind had dropped a little, but not enough. The thick smoke of active fires was still rising from the valley below and, as dark fell, on the slopes around us we saw the red towers of burning trees, sending bright showers of sparks flying through the night. From the nearer ones I could see that these ‘sparks’ were small burning pieces of fibrous bark, and that many were still alight when they landed.

My bed gave little sense of haven. I kept opening my eyes at every crackle or thud from the forest, so close, so visible, through all my windows. I set the alarm. At 10, at 12, all was well. At 2, it wasn’t. The trunk of the big white mahogany just up the hill—the one we’d set up the stove under, camped near, all those years ago—was alight at the back. So were the tussocks beneath it. I turned on the tap to full pressure, the hose jet as fierce as I could make it. I had to put the fire out before it got much higher up the trunk and set the broad canopy of leaves alight. I alternated my targets, from grass to tree. The fire’s progress through the grass was halted; I stamped on the bases of the tussocks to be sure.