16 Torsten's list

During the hour or so that Torsten and I had spent together prior to our purchase of Wombalano he had told me many things, like how to start and run the fire pump that lifted water from the river to the 8000 gallon concrete tank sitting on a small hill 200 metres away. Like where the 2 inch water pipe ran and how he had dug it in and his plans for linking in to Gordon’s similar line as a fire emergency measure. Like about the kit 4000 gallon tank that had been delivered but never unwrapped and where I would find the thousands of nuts and bolts needed to fasten it together. He told me where the rolls of spare irrigation pipe were, the wire and netting for fencing and explained the tools I was inheriting. They had many expansion plans and had bought in sufficient materials to do them. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel he said.

Over the following months and years I got to know Torsten intimately despite never communicating ever again. He was methodical, so once you learned the method, you knew he would always use it. He spaced things equally, kept his old nuts and bolts separate from his screws and nails and had categorised them in sizes. He overbought everything so there were spares. He made lists. The lists were in neat folders and arranged alphabetically. He obviously went to a different school from me, or perhaps he listened instead of looking at girls.

While browsing through one folder I found an envelope containing the labels from all the plants they had tried to grow. The labels were numbered and there was a diagram of where the numbers were placed on the farm. Very many things had died or soon would. Grapes, many fruit trees that would thrive in Sydney, nut trees like almonds and hazels and a couple of walnuts. They had spent a fortune. Included were 5 varieties of raspberry, 5 plants of each.

We grew a few raspberries in the cold of Canberra so I thought they might be alive somewhere. I followed Torsten’s diagram to the Middle Paddock where there was just long grass. No signs of the bushes. They should have towered above the grass. I started up the enormous trimmer that was part of the walk-in-walk-out deal using the nylon cutter rather than the blade that was big enough to fell a small tree. Sadly, Torsten hadn’t bought the plough attachment. I started cutting the grass and within a few minutes had located a very small raspberry plant. The others were equidistant and due east and west of the first. All 25 had survived the 6 years since they had been planted, but hadn’t grown or spread. They weren’t on a dripper line like the dead and miserable fruit trees and the seriously bored-out blackcurrant bushes. They had got this far so they might as well be rescued and treated nicely with at least a dripper line and a bit of a weed and fertilise.

She said it would be nice to grow raspberries. Then we can make raspberry jam like your mother makes. She didn’t mean my mother who never made jam though she was great on other stuff, but rather her mother. Her family had a strange tradition of referring to their parents by “Yer mother/father”. They were all pretty keen on their parents so it wasn’t an attempt to distance themselves from that relationship. They still do it which is pretty weird. Maybe an Adelaide thing to do with expurgating any convict links which of course they didn’t have.