These happenings were cutting into my farm time. I had to get back to the raspberries and the freedom of space uncluttered by humans and human events. She came too.
She took it quietly, taking short walks into the bush and sitting thinking and absorbing the sounds and actions of the wild things. An hour resting on a granite rock in the sun watching a grey fantail going about its business and unconcerned with her was somehow calming. These daily short walks took on a pattern. I’m off up my hill she would say. She always said where she was going in case she couldn’t make it back unassisted. Her hill became quite used to her.
It was only a small hill and was very scrubby being covered mainly in straggly and small Eucalyptus pauciflora trees. It had the significant benefit that its top was wide and had lots of small rocks that were a comfortable sitting height. It was steep enough so that reaching the top was an achievement. The long periods of daily contemplation about the problems and the unknown future became increasingly interrupted by that scrubby bush as the days passed; the hill started to take her over. One day she returned excited. She had discovered some mauve flowers amongst the rocks. The plants had seemed dead but weren’t. We had no idea what they were so looked in our one flower picture book for identification. That was no help. I must get a better book she said.
Remarkably other flowers started appearing amongst the rocks and in the scrappy ground cover and within a week or two she was seeing more than ten different things that had been hiding from her eyes and mine. She might see just one flower of a type and then they were everywhere. It was almost as though permission to view was only granted after you had passed their test; they were there but you couldn’t actually see them until you had the password for that species.
She had worked for two decades at the Canberra and South East Region Environment Centre largely as a volunteer editing and laying out their journal, so that seemed a good place to start to find a book on wild flowers for our place. She talked to her friends Ian, Margaret and Helen there who were putting together just the book she needed but it was not yet ready. She came home after spending a small fortune on alternative books, one by Leon Costermain “Native trees and shrubs of SE Australia” and a second by Alan Fairley and Philip Moore “Native plants of the Sydney district”. These covered thousands of plants and she had discovered just ten that she wanted to identify. It seemed like overkill to me so I told her. Still, anything that got her mind back into gear had to be worthwhile. She was taking time off from being a lawyer so a gap-filler was needed.
The hill continued to take a beating. It was used so much I asked if she wanted me to set it up with wheel chair access for the future. OK it was a joke. She was a strange sight struggling up there with her Sony Walkman permanently plugged in, her 10x botanists’ magnifier dangling from her neck and a plastic bag in her hand for putting specimens into for later identification. The Walkman was her constant friend day and night. It was there to overwhelm the continuous sounds buzzing and ringing in her head. Sleep at night was difficult without it.
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