The Woman on the Mountain (3 page)

Here, after years of denial, our federal government suddenly changed its tune in late 2006. As water restrictions bit deeper, and unseasonal snow followed unseasonal bushfires, and after millions of dollars of agricultural drought relief had to be announced, it became politically correct to admit the existence of climate change. With a federal election looming in 2007, the token mumblings and token fundings began—but did not extend to a national target for greenhouse gas emissions or penalties for the polluters, to putting a price on carbon.

Hats off to Arnold Schwarzenegger for leading California to major cuts in greenhouse emissions, for disregarding his president’s head-in-the-sand policy. Other US states are following. Here, South Australia is taking genuine steps—its premier called climate change ‘a bigger threat than terrorism’ in 2005. But for the overwhelming majority of politicians the issue is driven by the polls rather than a sense of urgency, with no one in power standing up to say, ‘Hey, Rome
is
burning! Let’s quit fiddling NOW!’

They’re still debating what would be the most popular tune to play next.

They’re still putting profit before the planet and its people, tinkering at the edges of the problem while trying not to inconvenience Big Business.

After all, they don’t want to be accused of being greenies. ‘Sorry, kids, ’ ancient ex-pollies might say to future generations scrabbling for food in a dried-up and drowning world, ‘we were too busy with Economic Progress to stop climate chaos.’

Yeah, right. I wonder if they’ll hold tribunals for crimes against the human race, against the planet?

My dad found it hard to understand us giving up our ‘riches’ stage of that grand house for a second-hand tent, especially when we weren’t even going to run cattle on the land we’d bought instead. What else was grass for? When he saw this place, he reckoned it’d be quite a good block—if we cleared most of the trees.

Attitudes to land aside, Dad influenced several major directions in my life. When I was seven he moved my mother, my twelve-year-old sister and me from the house he’d built in the fibro heaven of Rydalmere, a western Sydney suburb so new in the 1950s that we’d kept a milking cow in the paddock next door. From then until I left to go to university at sixteen, home was a 10-acre orange orchard and market garden, at Erina, near Gosford.

The saying, ‘You can take the girl out of the western suburbs but you can’t take the western suburbs out of the girl’, could be true, since my older sister did not transplant well, and moved back as soon as she left school at fifteen. My voice usually betrays my working-class westie origins—no one would accuse me of sounding posh, of being from Potts Point or Pymble. The move put the country into my soul for good. Dad got me out of the suburban jail first.

My parents were poor when I was growing up. It was the norm to look in the shed first for bits and pieces that might be cobbled together to fix anything that was broken, from a saucepan to the tractor. Going to town to buy a new part or new item was the last resort. We were taught to make do instead of making demands, to recycle and repair. With hindsight, that was sustainability in practice, and I’ve never lived otherwise since.

Mum had only reluctantly agreed to move to the farm to keep Dad out of the pub, a standard Aussie blue-collar male’s after-work habit, but one that had been a major source of argument. They must have got along better for a brief time, because within three years I had two new sisters. But the farm was a financial failure and Dad was forced to restrict it to weekends, and return to carpentry. And to the pub after work—where he got his contacts, he said. The arguments resumed.

Since he was never hard enough to be a businessman, hated asking for money owed, Dad would take a case of peaches in lieu of payment. That sort of thing would drive my mother, struggling to find money for basics, into a fury. It wasn’t easy for them to keep me on at school for an extra two years so I could win a scholarship and go to university. This was a first in our family. How and why I was different—a bookworm—I don’t know, but I was finally allowed to be so, which in those days was not an assumed right. The thought of having to do ‘Commercial’ and be a secretary was a fate worse than death to me.

I do remember making a statement of choice about being different in one way, when I was fourteen. Having given up hope of myself as ugly duckling ever being transformed into beauty, one Saturday morning I bought a pair of thick stockings, multi-coloured, zig-zag patterned. They were eye-catching, to say the least. This was 1962, when teenagers hadn’t long been invented, and rebellion as an intrinsic part of that stage was hard to put into action in a small town, especially for a convent girl. And Gosford
was
small then.

The stockings weren’t blue, but they were about as far out as I could go to proclaiming myself an intellectual instead of the only two local options: a surfer chick—peroxide blonde, tanned, bikini, boobs, bad boyfriends, sex—for which I wasn’t qualified; or a nice girl—short perm, twin-set, sensible skirt, fortress step-ins, armoured bra, nice boyfriend, no sex, so early marriage—for which I wasn’t inclined.

I can see those stockings now, and me eagerly trying them on my stick-like legs as soon as we got home from town. Dad took one look, chuckled, and said, ‘I’m afraid they don’t do you any favours, love. You’d look nicer in ordinary ones.’

‘I don’t care, ’ I replied, in full teenage angst, ‘if I can’t be beautiful, I’m at least going to be noticed. I don’t
want
to be ordinary!’

Perhaps I was heading down this path to oddity because I spent much time on my own, as my schoolfriends lived in town. My companions had been the books I devoured, like the C.S. Lewis
Narnia
series, since I’d discovered Gosford library at age nine. But my heroine lived in the only books my family owned and thus the only ones I could re-read. These were four age-mottled and tattered titles from the
Anne of Green Gables
series, by L.M. Montgomery, 1920s and ’30s editions, having belonged to an aunt of my mother’s. Anne related to nature in an excessively romantic way, she wrote stories, she was neither beautiful nor ordinary, and she had an attic bedroom. I’m still hoping for the attic bedroom, but for the rest ... she made me.

By the time I got to university, a little frog in funny stockings didn’t make much of a splash in that bigger pond. Newcastle Uni then was very industrially focused, and there was only one small subpond to which I was attracted, the Arty one, where the girls had long hair like Joan Baez, the men had beards and shorter, but never short, hair—like Oscar Wilde, or Mick Jagger—and they all wore corduroy, wrote poetry, debated philosophy, listened equally knowingly to Bach or Bob Dylan, and drank flagon red wine, lots of it. There were strange rules, unwritten and unspoken, and many of the girls were beautiful
and
intellectual. How to win here?

I never worked that out in time, and the attempts were painful. I took refuge in marriage between university and my Diploma of Education year, partly so I wouldn’t be sent off, alone, to the country to teach. Our group dismissed marriage as a piece of paper that could always be ripped up if it didn’t work out. No big deal. If only I’d had more courage...

Many of the choices I’ve made seem to have been unconsciously influenced by that early desire not to be ordinary. I always wanted to leave more than a record of a mundane, even if well done, daily routine. At ten, I used to agonise only over whether it would be as an artist, an author or a ballerina. In some ways I’m writing this book to show that it is possible to belatedly clamber back onto the path to fulfilling dreams.

Was my desire not to be ordinary just the unrealistic ambition of an egotistical malcontent? Or the striving for meaning in life by a creative but undisciplined mind? Naturally I’ll choose the latter. Others apparently know the answer, for they nod sagely, ‘Ah, an Aquarian—that explains it.’

On my 49th birthday I vowed to take action to regain that creative path, so as to be able to greet 50 with pride and pleasure. By then I knew that life did not usually drop gifts into the laps of we poor sods, no matter how talented. Success, happiness—they all have to be worked for. Even then we might miss out, but the trying brings unforeseen benefits.

Firstly, I would get serious about writing. I did not want writing to be just another ‘if only’ at the end of my life. I’d been dabbling with short stories for too long. I would start treating them as work, getting them up to scratch and sending them out to competitions. Only when they were acknowledged as top standard would I try to get them published. I had my first major win two years later.

Secondly, I would stop dyeing my hair, whose Scottish black had begun greying too soon, after the insanity of my marriage break-up. When I did, there were unexpected side effects, like suddenly becoming invisible as a female. No more wolf whistles. I’d have cherished those last two uncouthly shrilled syllables if I’d known; I might even have taken a bow.

So by 50 I was ready for the perception of my older age by others, which mattered less and less because I was writing often enough to know I
was
a writer, so I was excited at the years ahead of plunging into that addictive world. The next 50 years, I told myself, re-polishing the thought that Elizabeth Jolley wasn’t published until her fifties.

Now I learn that she only got about half her ‘next 50 years’. My heart hurts whenever I think of her in a nursing home, suffering from Alzheimer’s. All those lost lovely words.

It reinforces my resolve to stay on the path, and it reinforces the message I learnt in September 2002, to maximise ‘now’. For if Dad’s lifestyle choice made me a bushie instead of a westie, his death made me a hermit.

Hermits often hide out on mountains, but I have a particular excuse. My Munro ancestors came from the edge of the Scottish highlands, so it’s in my blood to find valleys rather claustrophobic.

My mountain is about 1000 metres in altitude. In recent years I have discovered that the Scots call any mountain over 3000 feet (914.4 metres) a ‘Munro’, as apparently a Munro first listed such peaks in Scotland, and people who climb them are called ‘Munro baggers’.

Perhaps this also explains why I’m so self-critical—a perpetual bagger of this Munro?

The mountains I face are over 1500 metres. These ranges being so high, we catch a lot of rain. In the 1970s we were told that around 1500 millimetres was the annual average, but an average can allow for great extremes. Our little family had moved here permanently in January 1979, having spent the previous six months visiting, checking out the best sites, noting sun angles and prevailing winds, testing soil. We’d arrived in our overladen Kombi, towing an overladen trailer. Unbeknownst to us the mountains had received about 100 millimetres of rain in a deluge the night before.

We slipped and fishtailed on the dirt road, just made it over the last flooded creek crossing, got bogged and were towed out twice, then were finally trounced by the last steep rise before our gate. Abandoning the trailer, we slid the Kombi back down the hill, took a mighty run-up, and managed to get up the hill and inside the gate. There we left it, since our own track was newly bulldozed, and of soft and treacherous clay

In the drizzle and near dark we stumbled down the track carrying a few essentials. Although we kept telling the kids that this was an adventure, we felt plain miserable. The tent had been erected on a previous trip, so we made a cold dinner and crawled into our beds. At least the tent didn’t leak, but it was not an auspicious start to our new life.

We had to wait two days for the rain to ease enough for us to ferry our gear down, a laborious operation that took another two days. The wheelbarrow, laden to three times its height, was very handy for this. However, to get it over the uneven track and up the inclines, my husband had to run at them, so care of the contents was not his priority. On one load, when we took off the plastic covering, the entire barrowful appeared to be coated in peanut butter, until we worked out that my big glass jar of flour had broken, as had a large bottle of soy sauce above it.

Later that year it became drier than we could have imagined, although the spring in the gully near our camp kept up its small flow from somewhere deep underground, unaffected by surface drought. Yet despite the extremes dealt by the elements, that first year here, living mainly outdoors, remains the happiest of my life.

About seven years ago I found my diary from that year—the only year I have not either stumbled to a halt by March or missed many days. As I’d used a blank page book, I wasn’t restricted in how much I wrote each day, although the entries got shorter and the handwriting more illegible as the year went on.

Re-reading it, I am astonished at our pioneering energy—digging trenches for the house and for laying water pipes, carting rocks for foundations, making mudbricks, erecting fences, digging around and under and burning out huge old stumps, turning a tussocky paddock into a garden, planting vegetables and herbs, fruit and nut trees—and still I was enjoying cooking and teaching the kids, and getting to know my new world.

We may have had our feet in the dust but we remained civilised; we ate and drank well, and never missed reading to the kids at night. Here’s a diary sample, from my 31st birthday evening:

Playing the tape was a treat because it used up the batteries far more quickly than the radio did—and we needed our daily dose of ABC radio. Later we would get smarter, and clip a lead onto the car battery.

For dining, under the spreading arms of a white mahogany tree we had set up a card table and canvas director’s chairs, with holes dug in the ground for the uphill chair legs so diners didn’t roll down the slope when eating, as several unwary visitors had done. As they were a little tipsy at the time, they rolled easily and didn’t hurt themselves, although the sight was so funny that the sides of the callous and equally tipsy spectators ached for some time.

Our chosen clearing had appeared to be a gentle slope but actually was relentlessly unflat, as each small area that needed to be level soon proved. Everywhere involved walking uphill, to or from, and we got very fit, especially carrying buckets of water up the steep incline from the spring. That was excellent for deportment too; only my straightest back would keep the buckets from bumping into the slope ahead and spilling.

My cooktop was an old fridge rack balanced on four rocks, my cooking equipment was disposal store cast iron—camp oven, frying pan and saucepan—and one heavy aluminium soup pot. (I know, I know, it’s toxic—I don’t use any aluminium now!) From our Merriwa camping weekends I’d developed quite a collection of recipes for one-pot or one-pan dishes. For those weekends I used to cheat a little to compensate for the absence of bench space, like making the dough and rolling the balls for chapatis at home, in which form they’d happily sit until I was ready to flatten them and cook over the fire to accompany the Saturday night curry. Now I had the luxury of the card table as a bench.

The camp oven, buried in hot ashes and coals, worked well, but I could only bake one thing at a time in it. We bought a rusty fuel stove for $10 and set it up close to the big tree above the ‘kitchen’.

The first time I used it I wrote:

Here’s another baking morning.

Was that me, that so-organised, energetic young woman? Where did she go?

In this primitive kitchen I was making soft cheese and yoghurt, since I could buy unpasteurised milk from the dairy about three-quarters of an hour’s drive away, where the tar road started. The top of the $12 kerosene refrigerator, near its rear vent, proved to be an ideal warm spot for yoghurt to ‘clabber’ or bread to rise. Although eating meat didn’t bother my family, cooking it bothered me, and they were happy to eat only vegetarian food at home—it was also much easier to keep fresh safely.

After 32 years I am still a vegetarian; and that flower-painted kero fridge now sits on my verandah, to be pressed into back-up service when I have visitors, like my son, who like their beer colder than I run my small 24-volt fridge. Unfortunately all the dairies are gone, as in the 1980s a large state dam drowned the main valley through which we used to drive from town.

We had thought hard about whether we should have a milking cow and keep poultry, to be really self-sufficient. But we decided against ‘farming’ animals, mainly due to my dilemma about the unwanted male calves or chickens that would inevitably be produced. To give them away would have been sending them to the axe en route to oven and dinner table—second-hand guilt, first-hand responsibility. No.

On the very first night that my husband stayed in Newcastle for work, I had a sense of adventure, being alone in the bush, but wasn’t at all scared. I read the kids to sleep in their double-decker stretcher, then sat out by the fire for a while, listening to the night noises. Feeling tired, I went in and made up the ‘double bed’ on the old carpet with which we’d covered the tent’s plastic floor. This process was simple enough: a double sleeping bag laid over two side-by-side single foam mattresses that were stacked up during the day as a ‘lounge’, to make walking space beside the kids’ bed, as the tent was very small. I fell asleep peacefully

I was awoken by the most fearsome, fierce, ferocious, frightening noise I had ever heard in real life. It seemed to be inches from my ear, just the other side of the fragile canvas wall. I knew there were no savage man-eating animals in the Australian bush, no bears, no tigers, and yet to my movie-fed brain the sound was as if both of those had bred with a rabid dog to produce this offspring. Such a noise had to be accompanied by bared, sharp teeth. One slash of a claw and my children and I would be exposed to this monster of the night!

Well and truly scared now, but acting the grown-up, I grabbed the torch and rushed to unzip the tent door to the tiny annexe of mosquito netting, where we had stored tools and the kero fridge. Here I seized a hammer on my way to unzip the outer netting door. (Note: circular zips are not a quick or silent way to get out or in or to surprise an intruder.)

The noise had stopped long before I emerged into the darkness; the torch beam revealed nothing but the gum tree, looming, and the canvas shower bag, swinging. I zipped my way back to bed and lay in trepidation until nearly dawn. The kids woke me shortly after.

Later that day I lit the fire and boiled the billies for the kids’ shower. We had four billies made from large ex-Golden Circle pineapple juice tins, with fencing-wire handles. From a fairly horizontal branch of the grey gum beside the tent we’d erected a pulley system for the shower bag, which had a luxuriously adjustable copper rose. Four thin poles supported a hessian modesty panel that still allowed great views to the far mountains, and bush rocks prevented muddy feet.

I let down the bag to fill it—a bucket of cold water and two billies of hot water gave a surprisingly long and satisfying shower. I tipped it up to empty out any leaves first. Instead, a handful of black pellets fell to the rock floor.

At that stage I was unfamiliar with the various calling cards of my neighbours, so I couldn’t say who’d left these. Next night, and most nights afterwards, the night monster came to loudly mark its territory, wake us up, walk along the branch of the grey gum, shit in the shower bag, and depart. ‘Take that, you ignorant upstarts, you intruders, you!’

On his return, my husband, who’d grown up in a leafy suburb, had known the noise immediately and had laughed at my terrified descriptions. It was ‘only’ a possum. Perhaps because we’d had a dog but no trees near the house on the farm where I grew up, I’d never heard one.

After a short time of our tent living, the night monster possum began including us on his route earlier in the evening, so he too could sample the dinner. Any dish placed on the ground or on the washing-up stand would be lumbered up to with his full-nappy gait, inspected, and usually cleaned up. Rice was very popular. No matter if the dish happened to be beside our feet; we were of no importance. We didn’t mind because he then ceased to wake us in the middle of the night, and no longer felt the need to mark his territory in our shower bag.

The unpredictable weather often caused us access problems until we got a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Being an ex-teacher (Secondary and Infants) I’d been classed as a registered ‘school’, and on the two days when my husband was away I taught my son. Because we felt it important that he mixed with other children, he went to the nearest school three days a week.

That meant leaving here at 6.45a.m. to make it to the school bus, which turned round near the dairy, at the end of its run. The bus would then take him to the one-teacher school 27 kilometres away. Getting to the bus on time was difficult in winter, when the day began and ended in the dark. The night before, I would boil the billies and fill a large thermos or two with hot water. This was enough for a civilised start, providing a warm wash and warm Weetbix.

It was understood that if my son didn’t show up we were probably rained in. My daughter started the next year, and both my kids loved that little school. The teacher was young and friendly and funny; his wife, a teacher in town, was a delight. We became friends with them—I still am. He reckoned that my kids’ enrolment meant they finally had enough pupils to form a cricket team. He also tells the possibly apocryphal yarn of how the school’s rural area was then so quiet that a car passing was such a big event that the kids would stop a cricket game to watch!

In the May of that year we were truly rained in. My entries complain of the tent starting to leak at the seams, of difficulties lighting the fire, of me holding an umbrella over my husband while he tried. We had a gas lamp and bottle, so why on earth hadn’t we bought a gas ring?

By the third day of nonstop rain I wrote:

That weekend the teacher turned up on his trailbike, bearing brandy like a good St Bernard, to check on us.

We were starting to have setbacks from more than the weather as the realities of our bush idyll sank in. A few days after the sun finally came out again I wrote:

We had netted the perimeter of the vegetable garden to 1.8 metres but hadn’t worried about putting netting over the top against climbing critters. We didn’t think we had to, as the possum had left it alone for months—until the vegetables were worth his trouble. But there was worse to come. In August: