Stepping Out

I was 77, couldn’t find my way to the more distant parts of the Creewah labyrinth like a year or two before and couldn’t easily keep up with the demands of the raspberry patch because the weeds were growing twice as fast and the days were half as long. Years before I had picked out a suitable high cliff to jump off when my body started complaining unnecessarily. Sadly, the cliff was at the end of a stiff walk which I now couldn’t reach by walking. If I had thought it through properly, I could have made it wheelchair accessible and built a nice tipping ramp at the top. I could have then hired it out and made lots of money. But it’s a bit late for that. I had to think of a plan B.

‘I’m thinking of going to live in Bega’, I said. ‘That’s a good idea‘, she replied. ‘Then I can come and visit. I like Bega’. ‘OK that’s settled’, I said. ‘Somebody else can come and live here. There’s a bit of enjoyment left that we haven’t used up’.

78 Walking the labyrinth

Many people go to Chartres Cathedral to walk the labyrinth and thereby calm their soul. It’s quite strange that some travel half way around the world at great cost just to walk around in circles on a marked out Cathedral floor. We all walk around in circles but generally that’s free and a necessary part of life. At Chartres you enter the path and just follow it left and right and back and forth until you get to the middle. There you rest and take stock and then walk out reversing your way in. There are some rules like in every game. You aren’t allowed to talk while en route. Laughing is frowned on but frowning is allowed. You can smile at other travellers as long as the smile is not lascivious intimating that you will meet at the coffee shop just around the corner or in the cathedral gifts area when you get out. You must take off your shoes and if your socks are smelly or likely to leave wet imprints on the floor as you stride, they must be left behind too. You are in effect on a pilgrimage to your holy land wherever that may be.

I know this stuff because I heard an ABC radio program about it with a noisy background of wooden floorboards creaking and groaning under the weight of many feet walking the twists and turns. Some people in Adelaide had marked out a copy of the Chartres labyrinth on a big piece of canvas that they laid out in a big hall. After the walkers finished walking the canvas, somebody rolled it up and stored it in their garage until next week when it was rolled out again.

This seemed to me pretty funny until she told me she had walked the labyrinth, which made it pretty serious, but she did it in a tennis court which made it funny again. The tennis court was marked out using pebbles. What was it like, I asked? She thought for a while. ‘It was really surprising that it made me feel really calm though I had to focus to keep on the path, and more surprising was the sense of achievement when I walked out about 20 minutes after starting. It was like getting to the end of a long trip’. This was more or less what the ABC people had said; the slow walk focussed the mind on the inner self, putting external sometimes difficult issues into a diminished and manageable context. Everyone interviewed said the walk was relaxing mentally and physically. How weird.

We had to do some analysis here. She said ‘Yoga has the same sort of effect (she does yoga). You focus your mind on something simple and repetitive like your breathing in and out. This sort of shuts out the world and its complexities become less relevant. Maybe the slow rhythmical walk of the labyrinth works the same’. I added that perhaps walking with other people saves you from feeling like an idiot.

This all made me think a bit about Creewah; not that we should mark out a labyrinth at Creewah on the tennis court because that would be stepping backwards, as we would have to make the tennis court first, but about my daily bush walks in Creewah. I wondered if perhaps my walks were the original labyrinth, predating those like at Chartres Cathedral designed for city folk with people-crowded minds who had foolishly cleared their bush and planted something boring like wheat. Certainly the main effects of relaxation and mind washing as described for the Chartres walk were the same for me in my Creewah walks. Some said I had a vacuous mind to start with.

I have walked in many places around the world without getting the Chartres results. In Old Delhi we walked in the narrow twisting maze of streets near the JamaMasjid, sardined against other sweating bodies buying their food and wares. I thought about people and how claustrophobic it all was, and didn’t feel relaxed and better. In Rome, also walking a circuitous route in the early morning chill, I checked out the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, walked by the tiny Smart cars parking sideways between bigger vehicles, bought a banana at a pavement stall for lunch and thought about people and the city. I enjoyed it but didn’t feel mentally uplifted.

In New York I looked up at the Chrysler Building, tramped through the suburbs, was gobsmacked by the amazing museums, Central Park with its children and youths doing clever things on wheeled skates and people playing games with bats and balls. I was walking in a park amongst trees but I still thought about people and didn’t feel calm.

In Tunisia, we walked through the narrow ancient streets of the extensive Roman ruins at Dougga. The town was perched on a small hill in peaceful farmland with not a soul in sight. It was a breadbasket for the then world almost 2000 years ago. I thought about people and their achievements and abilities to dramatically change the world in very little time. Remarkably, it did have a sense of calm, maybe because the bustling throngs had long since been spirited away.

In Canberra I walked around the suburbs and saw the big and small houses and their various gardens and wondered how many used a Hill’s Hoist and how many electric tumbling clothes driers. I thought about people and was comfortable with the thoughts but felt no sense of uplift.
There are few places where we can walk that aren’t in some way dominated by the vibes of human activities, human worries, human struggles, human achievements. At least, as humans, that’s the way we perceive the world. Rosellas maybe see it differently, that is, as a landscape full of competing rosellas with humans as a subordinate species created by the Great Rosella for the benefit of rosellas.

In the bush humans don’t dominate and control and don’t even feature in the really wild parts; there the bush is preeminent. It’s messy. It drops sticks and debris of all shapes and sizes all over the ground and doesn’t clear them neatly aside, it makes holes that may be ankle breaking shape or simply large pits that must be climbed through, it locates its trees and shrubs entirely randomly to our eyes but always in the way and insists on putting large rocks up to obscure the view. It makes everything slippery, thorny and generally uncomfortable. It’s awkward and antisocial. Bush is a nuisance to humans. But maybe it’s because it is so foreign to most of us, it enables us to reassess our existence as we struggle through it, where we are in the scheme of things, what might be important and what might be trivial in the bigger picture. It puts us in a different perspective, and sometimes we seem very small.

Maybe it’s the same with the Labyrinth, and with yoga and religions we don’t know anything about. They separate us from our natural comfort zone. They make us step outside ourselves and look back at the construction we have made and are making. They help us to assess ourselves a little impartially.

I enjoy being lost in my Creewah labyrinth trying to get to the breathing space in the middle. It costs nothing in airfares to get there. I don’t have to pay to get in. It is overflowing with interest that’s entirely free and it even smells OK. Best of all, there are lots of floating ideas eager to be caught and they are free too.

One day I will step out.

77 Paying for power

She got her first electricity bill after adding her lovely solar panels. To this stage it had all been a very positive experience because it included boasting rights on the local Canberra TV news and looking very green standing in front of her solar array. She was carbon neutral to envious watchers.

The bill was interesting. Naturally the first thing she looked for was the graph of greenhouse gas production which she had expected to now be negative. It had risen more than 2-fold since pumping her power into the grid. This didn’t seem logical but was carefully explained by the local electricity authority spokesperson. It’s based on total electricity at your house, uploaded and downloaded and then that number is converted into greenhouse gas equivalents. We don’t differentiate between green and non-green power in the calculation. Really quite simple.

She hadn’t looked at the charges at this stage which should have declined. After all she was now generating more electricity than she used. They had gone up quite substantially. Again this was carefully explained. You have to pay to upload power to the grid the spokesperson said. It’s a fixed amount every bill. Unfortunately, this charge is greater than the value of the power you are uploading.

At that rate, she would never ever pay off her bright sparkling solar panels. And she was apparently a much bigger polluter than before. The feel-good feeling didn’t now seem quite as warm.

76 More feel-good power

That bit of rain was to remind us how nice the past had been to us. The present and future was back to dry. Surprisingly the price of electricity started to rise and the blame was placed squarely on the drought. Apparently conventional coal-fired and gas power stations need lots of water for cooling purposes and steam generation. Nuclear power stations are very hungry for water too but not as hungry as our green Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric scheme. It was pretty clear that as well as the price of power rising, it was going to become increasingly scarce in proportion to rainfall.

We decided to do something that we had talked about for years, we would go solar. Solar power generation is a dry operation so should remain reliable despite the drought. What stimulated us was that the government, operating through the Australian National Greenhouse Office, would provide $8000 towards a solar electricity installation at any property occupied by the owner. In effect this grant would be half the price of a 1 kW grid-connect system. A 1 kw system at our latitude provides about 1800 kwh per year, so averaging 5 kwh per day. This would be half requirements when all the freezers were running, but that applied for only two months, and cover all our use allowing for one freezer. Grid-connect means you take power out of the grid when you don’t have enough and feed back when you have too much. You don’t need batteries.
We worked out that we would pay off the system through savings on electricity use in about nine years, but if electricity prices doubled in the short term as forecast, payback time would be under five years. There were also rumours that uploads to the grid were soon to be paid out at twice downloads, making payback time only 3 years. Everything was working in the right direction. The feel good issue about being greenhouse neutral was additional. According to the suppliers, the panels themselves became greenhouse neutral after just three months of electricity generation.

She decided to do the same at her house in Canberra, using a different contractor so we could compare approaches, but the overall cost should be about the same. In Canberra they put the panels on the house roof because there they were not shaded by trees. Roof installation was cheaper than my free-standing system so for our decided price they could use different and more panels. The consequence was that she won the solar grid-connect competition because her system generated 22% more than mine and more than covered all her use. Together for the two dwellings we were producing all our electricity by solar. Theoretically we wouldn’t have any electricity bills for the rest of our lives.

75 More raspberries

A remarkable 10 inches of rain splashed down on us in just three weeks washing debris accumulated over several seasons down the river and dropping trees that had expired during the dry period. All around, the forest was full of the tympani of crashing trees. But the younger, stronger saplings were bursting upwards with quieter sounds.

Our raspberries joined the party and flourished. They couldn’t really complain because the water had always been provided right through the drought. Maybe they had been embarrassed showing off their wares when less fortunate native plants nearby were struggling, but whatever the reason, they had performed poorly in the drought. They now produced 600 kg of excellent fruit which in picking terms means 150,000 individuals had to be held, removed, and placed in a container hanging around the picker’s neck; that neck was mine. RSI is an understatement. The old freezers were cranked up after removing the Huntsman spiders, the round parcels left by Cunningham skinks that lived in the walls of the freezer shed, and the dried up rusty stains of ancient water. A new freezer was also bought and we were into business again.

74 The stepping Backwards law

We started to worry about our availability of drinking water. Nimmitabel and Cooma both had to truck water in from the Murrumbidgee for general use and Goulburn had run out altogether, but we had no option but to look after ourselves and not depend on any authorities. There was still some water in stagnant pools in the river which the platypus could almost walk on, that we could tap off. Also, we had about 4000 litres of rainwater stored, and that’s a lot of drinks, but we didn’t know how many more years might pass before the next rains. Others had many more tanks than us in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some even collected tanks to store their firewood in, out of the rain.

We ordered a new tank. It was 18,000 litres capacity and about 2.8 metres high, but would unfortunately be delivered empty. I calculated the rainfall needed to fill it. It went something like this: one mm rain on 1 square meter of roof is 1 litre of water. The roof I was going to collect from was around 10 m by 10 m, so 100 square meters and a second slightly higher roof 30 metres from the tank would give me another 80 m², totalling 180 m². I was going to need 100 mm rain to fill the tank, just 4 inches. In a normal year we might get that in 2 months but this period was not normal. Still we would be able to collect any dew that formed on the corrugated iron rooves and that would be worthwhile.

I had to work out how to move the water from the distant roof to the tank. John suggested taking it to ground level in a down pipe and running it in a trench the 30 metres to the tank and then raising it back in an up pipe. This would work well as long as there were no very low temperatures to freeze the residual columns of water in the up and down pipes that would be 2.8 metres high when the tank was full. I decided to keep the pipes above ground and falling all the way to the tank. If it really rained hard and the 30 m long 100 mm plastic sewer pipe was full, it would be carrying over 200 kg water; that’s a pi (22/7)*radius squared(5*5)*length (3000) thing, all in cm remembering a 1000 cubic centimetres is a litre and that weighs 1 kg. With so much weight the pipe would bend and break in the first downpour. This meant it had to be strongly supported by a bridge along its length.

I followed my principle of don’t buy new if you can adapt old so started the bridge project by looking through my piles of rubbish for adaptables. Up came a good number of steel star posts that I had recycled when I dismantled a fence. I could fasten three end to end but overlapped together, using bolts through the holes that normally take fence wires. Putting two of these three-long droppers side by side and attaching them 30 cm apart with bolts and some bits of recycled dexion angle iron would give me one upright for a bridge structure to carry the pipe. I made two of these paired uprights in about 20 minutes and erected them first hammering each bottom single dropper into the ground. Using the sheds as end supports the overhead pipe looked pretty stable on its four props joined by a couple of lengths of fencing wire. Of course it wouldn’t have passed any regulation. I decided to sit back and wait for the rain.

Close in importance to ‘Sod’s Law’ which says that anything that can go wrong will, is the ‘Stepping Backwards’ Law. The stepping backwards law says that if you start a job, you won’t be able to complete it until you have fixed something else that is needed for the job. Gordon had the lost-tool-problem that prevented completion of many jobs. He had to go to Bombala to buy a replacement. He might run out of petrol on the way or have a flat tyre and someone had borrowed the spare. The primary job might have ten other jobs stacked under it.

My amazing water collecting system followed the stepping backwards principle. First the gutters on both sheds needed significant attention as they ran the wrong way and leaked as quickly as they filled. I had to rebuild the roof on one of the sheds and the wall that carried the guttering because the timbers had rotted in places. Step backwards one square. When I started on the guttering on the second shed I found it was full of fine white fibres. These were from the eight full-width fibreglass skylights or windows that were no longer letting much light through. From ground level they just looked dirty, but at eye level they were so deteriorated that I could push my finger through. Step backwards one square.

I quite like eating foods that have a little crunch, except green beans, but rainwater with crunch had no appeal. The skylights had to be replaced with clear polycarbonate. This meant a trip to Canberra but at least I also learnt that the only way to fasten polycarbonate sheets to the top of the car is in a tight lengthwise roll; then they don’t buckle and blow away but act like a strong pipe. There is so much to know.

The standard lengths of polycarbonate were 20 cm short, a consequence of going from imperial measurements to metric so that required some adaptations to the plan and a further step backwards.

Once all the skylights were replaced it seemed I had stepped backwards far enough and forward movement was suddenly meteoric as I fell off the ladder. But there were no consequent problems. In fact it started to rain. It rained just gently to test and savour the feeling, more like a mist than rain. Apparently it liked softly touching the dry crackly grass and after a while it decided to search out more dramatic sensations. It poured. Three inches were delivered then it became bored. I have no idea why it always rains in inches here, but it really does. It stops at half an inch, or an inch, or multiples of an inch, but never at millimetres unless it is being coy when maybe 2 mm might fall.

I tapped on the tank to see whether my calculations were correct. It should be three quarters full. At three quarters it sounded deeply hollow, at half it sounded slightly less deeply hollow but at a third it sounded dead. It was one third full and my calculations were way out. Still who cares, we had 1000 gallons of captive pristine rainwater, worth $4000 if we could sell it in those tiny plastic bottles that are in the supermarket. Better still the river was starting to flow and the platypus no longer had to walk on water. The drought is over some said very quietly to themselves.

73 Double Decker Buses

In the drought rusting seems to go more slowly. The old cars that country dwellers like to accumulate in neat rows or untidy piles take a breather from their slow browning process during drought. The bush applauds this by folding back its green curtains just a little to display the proud wrecks a little more clearly. The pinnacle of wreck collection must be a Double Decker bus and in the case of Richard Branson it was a fleet of buses that started him off. Now he collects planes that hopefully aren’t wrecks, at least when I fly on them.

It is a strong conversation mover to have a Double Decker in the home paddock. You can only talk about the weather for an hour or so but when it gets to a bus the rules are different. By the time you have admired the outside, checked out the tiny engine, sat on the top deck to take in the expansive view with a coffee and then a beer or two, the hours have flown.

We had one that we could see from the bedroom window. It had been parked for years on a small hill completely devoid of trees so it could be seen in all its glory. It never blew over in the strong winds or sank into the ground when it rained. It just stood patiently waiting for passengers who wanted to go to Coogee Beach, the destination advertised on the front wind-over display. It must have eventually got bored or found a passenger because it disappeared. Maybe the owner had run out of people to share a beer with.

The bus had only been gone for about two years when new owners moved into the Chook Shed about a kilometre further down the valley. It wasn’t really a chook shed but with its fairly basic grey corrugated iron front and roof it could have been. They brought the usual collection of outside display items that invariably accompany newcomers, and amongst their wrecked cars and ancient trucks, there was a Double Decker bus. It was a different colour from the first one and hadn’t been painted for centuries so had to be a different bus. It was also without signed destination. Somehow without a sign it wasn’t worth a second look and could just crumble away quietly. Its terminus was Creewah. I don’t need a bus because I have my tractor.

72 A lot of hot air

It was a week after the council meeting and the road workers had come to take the tree out of the river in an environmentally sensitive way. After making a mental note I got on with the serious business of eating porridge and forgot them. A few hours later after coaxing the raspberries to grow a little better I checked on progress. The big bridge tree, now on the bank, was going up in flames as its final punishment for causing a nuisance. It was being joined on its journey by the other corpses as well as by the sole still standing ribbon gum. When ribbon gums burn they can look spectacular because the ribbons flare right up their length and send flames shooting out of the top of the tree. This one was burning so nicely the half burnt tresses were rising on the hot air and floating away across the nearby forest like little flaming beacons. The council workers were enjoying the party with a cup of something from their thermos.

My dad was keen on science and practical demonstrations for his students. He would have enjoyed the party as well because it demonstrated the principle that hot air rises. He was teaching one class about how such basic principles could be used in machines. It was a time when Barry was making superb model aeroplanes powered by tiny engines and propellers. I enjoyed watching because the liquid dope used to stretch and strengthen the paper tissue paper applied over the balsawood wing and fuselage struts smelt good. Barry used to call me a dope. I built a few planes as well but never got past gliders and rubber-band wind ups that broke. Anyhow this activity meant we always had lots of plane-making items. Dad set too to build a Montgolfier balloon to be demonstrated to the class tomorrow.

He cut some very long and thin pieces of balsawood and glued them into a hollow globe structure like a happy sack that youths kick around to show off their dexterity to inept watchers. Next he covered it with tissue paper and doped it to make a strong paper balloon that wouldn’t deflate easily. This balloon was about 40 cm diameter and had a 10 cm round opening at the bottom. This was where the hot air would enter to make the imitation Montgolfier Balloon rise. It was never intended to lift Frenchmen into the sky like the original.

When the Mongolfier brothers did their first experiments in around 1780 they made open paper bags and floated them up over their kitchen fire with frequent incinerations, to the cook’s annoyance. In their later version which was approximately 30 metres circumference, though made of cloth and paper, they stuck with the same kitchen atmosphere by lighting bales of wool and straw on the ground under it to make it rise. Luckily this was in a sheep paddock because it took off and flew about two kilometres. Everybody was impressed including the cook.

Dad’s balloon was ready to test. It had a little cage hung beneath it that carried a stub of a candle that was to flame through the opening in the globe. This was more advanced than the earliest Mongolfier machine because it would take its source of heat with it, but then Dad was smarter than them. In spirit with the Mongolfiers however, the test flight was conducted in front of the sitting room fire.

We all watched with the room lights turned off. He lit the candle and held the invention vertically to make sure the hot air went through the globe’s opening. It looked spectacular with its inner light showing off all the balsawood struts in the dark room. He let go. It wobbled up hesitantly some 10 cm then headed straight for the fire. The damp dope caught alight and the incendiary rose dramatically towards the ceiling before dropping to the floor like a Hindenburg. The carpet took a beating. Luckily Dad was quite good at demonstrating with chalk on a blackboard. He didn’t tell the class what happened the previous evening.

Nor did the council workers tell the council what they had done.

The workers understood the world better than the Creewah Greenies. The greenies were informed by the Environment Protection Authority that the EPA had misunderstood the extent of the fellings. They were really only interested to take action if the trees were cleared from an area of hectares. They weren’t interested in the effects of increased wash and bank destabilisation on the river either, as only 50 m of bank was affected. Similarly, our local member, though disturbed by the wanton destruction and sympathetic to us, could do nothing to help. There were many bigger problems elsewhere. He commented how pretty our area is. I will definitely vote for him in the next election.

71 Rowdies enter the Inner Sanctum

About 12 of us rolled up to the meeting and filed into the empty chambers. It was one of those rooms that demands quiet, even when empty. There was something about the embossed wooden board proclaiming names and titles of past mayors hanging above the very large and dominant red mayoral chair, the large u-shaped bench that ran around the room and focused on the red chair, and the closed world-excluding curtains that gave the room atmosphere. We squeezed onto our tiny chairs that were crushed against the three walls that would be in clear view of the mayor.

Half a dozen councillors looking like very ordinary people and not so different from us, wandered into the room at a minute or so before the due time and, after saying hello to the throng, took their seats. The mayor then wandered in, no special gold chain or wig or fawning underlings, except his secretary who seemed to be in charge anyway, and sat down in the big chair. There was hush. I expected a prayer but there were just a couple of coughs like in a musical recital after the strings have finished tuning their AAs. Clearly the erudite presentations were due. I checked the clock. A huge spider stared back at me.

They started the discussions by deciding when they would have their next discussion and who would be able to come. This took around 15 minutes and was quite riveting. All councillors made a contribution. I was starting to wish I had had more tea because I was rumbling uncontrollably and I guessed everybody was hearing the groans. A few more topics were discussed before they moved to our issue, the Creewah Road upgrading. Before the key councillor was asked for his findings there was general discussion with each councillor commenting on the sterling job done by the council on maintaining roads in the shire and the general positive feedback by the community about the methods and outcomes achieved. Some of the congratulations had been in written form so carried weight. Sadly, none of the speakers had been to look at our road in preparation for the meeting as all had been too busy with important issues. The people in the small chairs were moving restlessly by now, dying to interrupt.

At long last, the sole informed councillor was invited to make a presentation. He was a grey-haired, intelligent-looking gent nicely dressed in a suit. He did a bit of nervous paper shuffling. He started by reading aloud a short letter that she and I had sent in. It was beautifully written and totally balanced in viewpoints but quite unsupportive of the tree felling. It used the words ‘Needless destruction’ to describe the situation. ‘I also view the felling as needless destruction’, the councillor said. The mayor interrupted authoritatively. ‘This was not needless destruction as the felling was done in the process of upgrading the road. Furthermore, the word destruction has a subjective connotation. Could we please stick to facts’? The mayor was clearly worried that the word suing might come next. The councillor soldiered on. ‘I propose we should accept that mistakes have been made, because the local community is unhappy, and concentrate on ways that we can alleviate the needless destruction, sorry, consequences. We need to prevent this happening in future. I move that we postpone discussion of details until a later time when we have all had a chance to think more about the bigger issue of how we might upgrade our road maintenance procedures’.

The mayor looked relieved, brightened visibly, and asked for comments from other councillors. They all agreed to a later meeting after again fully supporting current methodologies and reventilating the tree drip problem. Nobody actually said ‘it’s just a few old trees, I don’t know what you greenies are getting excited about, and we’ve got lots of trees here’.

Surprisingly, the mayor opened the meeting to the floor. He pointed out that he would have anyone removed from the meeting who did not show the correct decorum. I whispered to Peter in the next seat, ‘what’s that?’

She stood up. She’s a good speaker cleverly thanking everybody first and saying what a terrific council they were bringing out the smiles and relaxing the room. I was scared she was going to say everything was my fault which is her usual fall-back position, but I didn’t get mentioned. She pointed out that the trees hadn’t needed to come down to improve road visibility as it was a straight section, the trees hadn’t had any falling limbs, were in good health, and that lying down trees are much more likely to jump out and kill drivers than standing trees that have gaps between them; safety on the road had been reduced by the council’s actions. Nice facts and a good thing to discuss logically without red angry faces. She’s quite smart sometimes.

Kim told us about the EPA, the fouling of the river and lots of other things about the environment but didn’t tell the council he would hang them all out to dry. This was because he had calmed down by now and had his stocks and shares to think about. Peter made some nice relaxed comments. Only Old Tom came within five seconds of being thrown out by telling the council loudly and repeatedly what we had all been thinking. He refused to sit down probably because he couldn’t see his small chair so far down below him. He had also been in the Vietnam War so was quite good at handling conflict.

The meeting was brought to a close because things were starting to warm up with the decision that council would clean up the site. In particular they would remove the big tree that had been felled right across the river and put it on the bank with the other corpses. That was a pity because it made a great bridge right into our back yard. I had walked across it several times.

70 Wheels turn

The felled trees continued to lie along Creewah Road. Because they were on the roadside, more people saw them and more people became angry. Someone must be blamed and then dismembered publicly. We needed a battle plan.

First thing was to get lots of signatures on a piece of paper and send it to someone. We had 60 signatures in no time and that was even without calling in dead people and making forgeries. That number seemed enough to add weight to our argument, whatever that was, though anyone could still point out that the sixty were Creewah Greenies who were crazy anyway.

John and Jill rang up the local member for an audition, were listened to intently and even given tea and biscuits out of a packet. He promised to have a look for himself and take the matter further. Meanwhile, Kim and Gabrielle had contacted the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) who also promised to visit the site and make an assessment. A councillor was also asked to view the situation and report back to Bombala Council at their next meeting. Data were collected. The wheels were turning.

As with most council meetings, the public were allowed to sit quietly in the chambers and listen to proceedings. We were keen to hear what the spokesman councillor would say and how the mayor and other councillors would react to his presentation and our complaints.

Is simple best?

It’s interesting that we tend to see everything outside ourselves as simple. We love and even believe in single factor explanations. We like to think we can cure a disease by a single drug or modify a single gene to fix a genetic abnormality. We can fix obesity by making all children eat an orange a day. We can solve global warming problems by covering the world‘s oceans with a snow of expanded polystyrene. Not only do we focus on single factors, but we like to apply our single solutions everywhere. The more the solution is used the more right it must be.

I guess our single factor minds are a consequence of the way we develop through childhood and our competitive educational system. The better we are at screening information, classifying it quickly into categories defined by a dominant or average feature and rejecting outliers, the more successful we are in our human race. We learn to handle our problems in the same way, typing them mentally then tagging the type with a pertinent solution. This is a much faster and less demanding route to answers than dealing with items as unique. It does mean that we miss many of the more complex answers that are multi-factorial and the answers that are shouting at us from the few outliers that we miss in our haste to average and categorise. These might lead to longer-lasting answers that accept the complexity of living systems.

I had discovered ecology. I had learnt that every bit of scrub is unique. It might have a dominant character shared with other bits of bush, but in detail it would be different. It might be different in its composition, it might be different in the timing of the components doing their thing, or it might be different in the degree of dominance achieved by a component at that time or lots of other things. Generally though, I could be fairly certain it had taken a long time to get to that point and in another year it would have changed fractionally to another point. If the trees were chopped down, it would change rather more quickly; components would disappear because they couldn’t handle the cold in winter or the sun exposure in summer, and other species , possibly introduced weeds like pretty fireweed or thistles, would temporarily become dominant. It would still be scrub, but different scrub.

69 Plants queue to flower

I walk just about everywhere within a several kilometre radius of the yurt but one bit that I tramp regularly is a short section of scrub along New Line Road that has a scrappy over story of bent Snow Gums and a dominant understorey of Bossiaea foliosa (leafy bossiaea). It’s not that it’s my favourite place, it happens to be the way to lots of other places. During winter it looks nothing, just rubbish that should be bulldozed and replaced by Camelias and roses, or at least something that is visually pleasing like a dry stone wall neatly outlining mown grass. Actually at almost any season of the year you would drive past and think the bush in this place is boring and untidy. When the bossiaea flowers it makes a lemon yellow haze that is perhaps worth a second cursory look, but it is still scrappy.

Because I have walked past over several years, and walking is fairly slow so you tend to see more detail, I started to see other things besides the yellow of the bossiaea. I saw bits of blue, orange, pink, mustard, pink and red sometimes joined by the occasional weirdly-coloured toadstool.

The bits weren’t all there at the same time; they spread themselves one by one over the whole spring with the occasional splash of colour into summer and autumn. In some parts there were even tiny pink woolly flowers in winter. It gradually dawned on me that this scrappy bit of bush is quite complicated. All the bits were constantly competing and jostling for space. For community stability each individual could only occupy centre stage for just a few moments like they say for people only having 2 minutes of fame. This fluxing tenuous balance must have taken decades to reach. The bit of bush wasn’t just hanging around doing nothing waiting for me to take in the odd glimpse.

68 It's war

Rose rang and she was agitated. Rose lives at the south end of Creewah with Helen and their horses. Have you seen what’s happened on Creewah Road outside your place, she said. I had been aware of council vehicles working on the road in the distance but that was about it. ‘Yes’, I said, as always trying to appear knowledgeable, ‘the road looks good’. What, she bellowed; they’ve cut down the big trees. Rose is a good talker and I like her because she speaks with sufficient volume for a deaf person to be comfortable. She expanded the recent news to include all the previous crimes the council had committed on her property entrance so it was about 20 minutes before I could put the phone down and wander across the paddock to check out the disaster.

The view across the river from my place to the road had previously been screened by large ribbon gums draping their long tresses from upper branches 30 or 40 metres above the road down to the ground. On windy days the tresses rattled as they flew out and back and struck against their neighbours. Some snapped off to join growing piles of bark on the ground. The trees grew well because they lined the river as well as the road; the road was about 5 metres from the river at the nearest point, more due to history than mismanagement by council.
The new view had a lot more sky. The trees were lying down with their snapped and shattered white branches littering the roadside and the river. Some had flattened the tea tree scrub that had previously blocked the road gravel and mud wash from polluting the river during heavy rain.

I was just sad, accepting the narrow-minded non-thinking nature of humanity, and knowing that the problem was really triggered by the ‘New Line Road Chop-it-Down Contagion’ in the air, but others were angry, even mad. I’m going to bankrupt the council and close them down, Kim said. I can do it. They have failed to meet environmental regulations; trees half this size are ‘Significant Trees’ in towns and put on registers and looked after. Kim had lain down in front of bulldozers and chained himself to trees before in the cause of national parks so his response was expected. The big outcry from everybody else was unexpected. Creewah dwellers are mainly quiet people who want to get on with their lives quietly in their scenic environment. The problem was that their scenic environment, a primary reason for their being in Creewah, was progressively being destroyed. On top of the destruction along New Line Road, and the extensive harvesting by Forestry, this felling was the twig that broke the gum tree’s back. Creewah declared war on the world.

67 Jack

Jack , our bare-footed dancer, visited. He enjoyed walking in the paddock but was horrified at the possibility of stepping on any of the poos. Jane used to avoid walking on the cracks in pavements but Jack’s challenge was much greater. At that stage around 150 kangaroos were visiting our River Paddock nightly and depositing a fair number of large black and hard currants, sadly not suitable for jam, right near the yurt where Jack liked to tippy-toe. The wombats also made regular forays dropping their much larger greenish-brown square cobble stones. His walk became too difficult because to advance 20 metres required a staggering jagged path nearer to 200 m. Wearing gum boots improved the situation slightly in that between-toe-cleaning was redundant. The farm was both a high point and low point of Jack’s stellar life.

He was at that mental stage where people fell into two clear categories, either baddies or goodies. I was one of the latter because he liked my farm for its space, its spirited wild animals and the river that gladly accepted thrown stones with an answering splash. He learnt though that killing animals was bad and all people who had a gun were bad. He also learnt that all farmers had guns. This was perplexing because I was a farmer and I was a goodie.

He had to sort this out. Are you a farmer, he asked. I thought it was safe to say yes. Do you have a gun? Again, yes. Do you kill things? This was starting to lead somewhere so I had to be careful. I had been listening with pleasure to Mr Ruddock, our Attorney General, not answering a simple question put to him by a journalist on the radio, so I wondered if I too could try obfuscation. I didn’t think Jack would know that word. I gave him a 10 minute Ruddock-style answer with 25 sub-sub plots tiptoeing around each other without making contact. Jack wasn’t confused. He just ignored the answer by asking the question again like I was an idiot and hadn’t understood the content. I came clean. I have killed rabbits Jack with my gun but I am such a good shot they didn’t feel a thing and anyway they are vermin. In one sentence I had sunk from Goodie right over the horizon to Baddie. He accepted no further discussion.

Jack was half way to being violently opposed to the old adage of “If it moves, shoot it and if it doesn’t, chop it down”. I didn’t think Jack would ever be able to live in the bush and stay sane.

66 Blackberry Jelly

Before the drought we had occasionally picked local wild blackberries and had turned them into most acceptable jam. Picking blackberries is idyllic when you are sitting near the bushes sipping champagne, nibbling cucumber sandwiches, and watching. The actuality of struggling through the prickly brambles that tear at you from all sides as you reach for the fruit is different. When we saw thorn-free blackberry canes for sale at our nursery we had to have some for the raspberry patch. We ignored the old wives’ tales; ‘never plant raspberries and blackberries together’. The tales didn’t say why; we could only guess that you might get green hair or that cane toads would surface in your porridge at breakfast time.

The ten canes were planted and then split into twenty big healthy plants. They bore 120 kg of big bright fruit, perfect for jam because they were a little bit sour and had ample amounts of pectin to produce a firm gel. As advertised they had no thorns. The down side was that they were seedy, not with the soft seeds of boysenberries that provide a nice texture, but with seeds that were like tiny pieces of gravel. The tasty jam could result in a mouth full of loose enamel and a dental bill of $500. People bought the product but I was embarrassed with its imperfection and decided to let the fruit disappear into the ice lining the walls of the freezers.

As the drought stretched into its fourth year and production of raspberries and boysenberries dwindled to a trickle we had to find a way to convert those old blackberries into an acceptable jam to keep the punters happy. Somehow we had to remove those seeds. She refused to pick the seeds out one by one and we couldn’t afford a centrifuge. We could try to strain them out using a pair of old socks, underpants or the muslin curtains that old folk peer through as you pass their place. A piece of fine nylon mesh material that was strong and could withstand heat was rummaged from the rag bag. It would work if anything could.

I put 8 kg blackberries in the pan, heated them to simmering and cooked for half an hour with the lid on till the fruit was broken down and the seeds were separating from the soft parts. I hung a colander by its handles into a plastic bucket and spread the dampened nylon mesh inside the colander so its edges hung over the outside of the bucket like a death veil. I poured the boiling mix into the veil and waited. Juice trickled into the bucket. Around an hour later I had a pile of solid seeds in the veil like sand in a bag and 4.5 litres of purple and scented liquid, as thick as coagulating pig’s blood, in the bucket. All I had to do now was reinvent it as jam.

Years before I had bought an amazing book for $1 on a second hand stall. It was Bulletin 43 from the Department of Agriculture, Victoria, price 1 shilling. It was published in the 1940s and was instructions on how to preserve and use all fruits and vegetables that were in common production at that time. It had a section on jellies. That was what I needed to make, a blackberry jelly. It all seemed fairly complex, particularly the part about sterilising utensils like recycled metal kerosene cans for cooking in, and on maintaining the correct heat over a wood fire. I decided to adapt the methods to our kitchen and start with a 2 litre batch of our juice. The key part, which I didn’t believe, was that the extracted juice should be boiled rapidly for only one minute after the sugar (50:50 by volume) was added. I knew some people who boiled their jams for more than one hour. The instructions also said that pouring into the hot jars should be completed within three to five minutes because setting would start in the pan very quickly.

Though I boiled for 3 minutes, it all happened as the book described. The wobbly gel was a lovely deep red verging on black, with an unusual more-ish sharp flavour, better than wild blackberry jam. My heaped store of frozen blackberries could be turned into money after all if I could chip them from the ice. The rosellas loved the large piles of seeds scattered around the garden like blooded cow pats and fought over them with purple beaks to eat the most.

65 Exodus

Paul reckoned there was a better future in Queensland than in Creewah, so bought a property there and started growing tropical things. He took his tractor, his wombat gun traps, his computers and his wife. His Creewah place was on the market and stayed empty. He and his wife soon split up despite the sun and the warmth. Basil and his wife fell out, there was a divorce, a court battle over who got what, and his property was on the market too. Dave went back to New Zealand to find a wife leaving his property empty. The girls who had disappeared apart from glimpses caught in foreign places had their place up for sale. John and Jill decided the coast might make a pleasant change after 30 years in Creewah. Maybe they could enjoy long walks on the beaches instead of endlessly collecting firewood for their Aga cooker. Their gate joined the string of ‘For Sale’ signs along Creewah Road. Gradually new occupiers appeared for all except John and Jill’s place; strange considering it was the best property.

64 Creewah Broadband

Creewah is a special place. Despite the fact it is a Mecca for landing space ships and a beacon for directing migrating birds on their travels, it is a complete black spot for mobile phones. Telstra and other telephone companies regularly ring in, using crackling land lines, offering free mobile phone handpieces if you sign up for this or that deal. Then you can use the mobile’s broadband links they say. ‘But it’s a black spot’. No it isn’t they reply patiently usually in an accent that is unusual, you are in Bibbenluke aren’t you? No it’s Creewah and that’s north of Bibbenluke; it’s a valley. After a half hour discussion when the chat eventually gets on to the weather in India or other foreign parts we agree that it is a black spot and that Telstra has no plans to circumvent the problem in the short term.

Not only are we in a black spot, our copper connections to the outside world frequently die. When we used the copper for emails some 20 years ago we could push speeds to 8 kbps on a good day. Now with all the clever technology it is up to 28.8 kbps. People on other planets like Sydney complain about 1000 Mbps. I haven’t checked out satellite communications but assume any waves here would be blocked by our local leprechauns. Maybe we could use pigeons or dragonflies or fairies to carry messages.

Back in the 1940s my elder brother Barry concocted an ultra fast communications system. It was a piece of wire connected between two 1920s Bakelite headphones. ‘Come in tree three, do you read me’. His tree was of course called tree one and was a tall one towering over mine. Tree two didn’t exist but by its absence made me and my tree a member of the lower ranks. What did you say Barry I shouted back. Use the radio, don’t just shout he shouted. I climbed down to go and do something more interesting.

He was really smart and knew I was dumb. He was so smart he made a crystal set in a matchbox. Other people could just squeeze their crystal sets into a large Swan Vestas box, but his was in a tiny Bryant and May with the cat’s hair tuner poking through the side. My Tate and Lyle’s treacle tin with lots of loose bits didn’t rank. There was nothing interesting on radio anyway, especially Luxembourg and other off-shore pirate stations that people raved about.

We had an endless supply of radio spares because Dad was a fanatical reader of Practical Radio and made lots of the projects. There were also bits left over from his dad who was a ship’s radio operator during the First World War. I always imagined him on a destroyer creaming at speed through the waves but mum reckoned it was a rowing boat. She wasn’t a fan. In her later years she had even demoted him below the rowing boat. She had had a stroke so had few words left. When asked what grandpa did during the war, she said ‘sick’.

63 Giant's trampoline

The drought strengthened its grip and fruit yields declined further. We talked around what to do. The freezers still had enough fruit over from our really big years to keep the jam trickling out to our retailers, but this would probably be the last season of production if the weather didn’t improve.

She said how about we spray Round Up on the lot and have an overseas trip. I disagreed. ‘Let’s expand our area and try to increase production that way. It’s not just the drought that’s wrong with our crop, we’ve got two spotted mites, black flies, white flies, rusts, root grubs and who knows what else that reduce the yield. Let’s build a new but small enclosure well away from the old one and start it with clean new stock we can multiply and use for any replantings’. She wasn’t impressed.

John needed to go into Bombala. I went along for the drive. We got to chatting about my idea for a new raspberry enclosure. There’s a sale of treated pine logs out at the mill he said. Do you want to look? I would need around 20 logs each 3 m long for what I had in mind. I had no money on me but looking wouldn’t hurt.

‘The sale finished last week’ I was informed by a disinterested yard man. Another employee pointed out there were a few of the left-overs in the adjoining paddock and they might suit my purpose. They didn’t because they were all too short but the price was right. I could always join them somehow. I could never go past a good price. We took 30 because John happened to have a fat wallet that day and the back of his tray-top ute was empty. It was travelling very low as we edged out of the paddock.

The design was going to be clever. Having to join the logs to achieve the height allowed me to factor in something missing on the old enclosure, a snow shedding system. The net over the old enclosure couldn’t carry more than a few centimetres of snow before the weight started buckling and snapping the wooden supports. Over the years I had overcome this by knocking the snow off as it fell but that was unpleasant particularly if it was at night.

I sawed off a half log section 30 cm long from one end of each pole. This allowed me to make a vertical butt joint between each pair of poles that was held together with a bolt. Each pair of poles became one long one with a central knee that bent both ways. Jane used to call that ‘emu knee’ which she got regularly. Because I used a blunt chain saw to do the work to leave a rough finish, the joints didn’t bend easily if the bolt was tight. This result was good but fortuitous; I had been too lazy to sharpen the chain. The lengthened poles were dropped into half metre long augered holes, spaced to enclose an area of 400 metres square, mesh wire was attached starting 30 cm below soil surface to keep out wombats and taken the full height of the poles, and a spider web of fencing wire fastened the tops of the poles together across the enclosed area. It was finished by running a wire outwards from the top of each pole and attaching it in a loose knot to a steel post bashed into the ground. Theoretically, in the event of heavy snow, the knees would all bend inwards because the knots would slip, and the net would gradually collapse onto the raspberry canes growing below. This would destroy the raspberries but preserve the enclosure. Luckily I had remembered to make a door into the new structure.

We went to Canberra to buy replacement canes which had to be Chilcotin. The nursery lady told us they would be coming in next month and each would be $6.50 to $7.50. I wanted 50 so that would be well over $300. This seemed tough because we threw out hundreds of canes every year and burnt them. She said they were organic and nursery people had to make a bit of money just like everybody else. Unlike the lady, Rodney was prepared to negotiate without getting angry and I got him down to $3 each as long as I would pick up the bundles as soon as they were delivered by the grower. This was an OK deal.

I planted them in the newly turned soil watched closely by a pair of robins eager to eat things I couldn’t see. Next season was going to be great.

62 Threatened Orchids

One of the best things about becoming a pretend botanist is that you can talk about threatened plant species. People believe you and listen intently with furrowed brow. It doesn’t have to be threatened on a world scale, there might be lots somewhere else, nor does it have be threatened nationally, but locally threatened is still OK.

I found a locally threatened orchid one day when I was on my early morning walk. My walks were determined by the compass bearing I decided to take. That direction should if possible always be a bit different from before. There are only 360° on the compass but those degrees get quite wide apart the further you walk from the starting point. There was a crazy poet who used to spin around then head off into the unknown along the path directed by where he fell over. I am neither a poet nor crazy but I do fall over.

This day my direction took me through Mary’s property, a prior work colleague who hadn’t visited her place in 20 years. It was quiet that day apart from the chain saws buzzing in the distance. I headed up through majestic Messmate Stringybark towards a 1000 m high hill just above Three Flats. Fully grown Messmates allow very little understorey other than close ground cover, so the finished product looks something like parkland, albeit with lots of granite rocks. I did that silly thing of tripping myself up on a stick and fell flat out on the steep ground. Right in front of me was a strange plant with two wide green leaves spread close to the ground and a central stalk holding a nodding reddish brown almost purple flower. Inside the nodding bit was a shiny black bull ant. It wasn’t really a bull ant but was similar enough for a surprised prostrate to name it ‘A Bull Ant Orchid’ with potential for yarn spinning otherwise called bull.
I was quietly excited and even considered whistling a little tune. I marked the spot by scratching off the outer bark on the nearest Messmate revealing a patch of the lovely reddish woolly undershirt. I would return tomorrow with my GPS and camera.

Tomorrow came two weeks later. As I got closer to the site I started to worry because the tree canopy had disappeared in the distance and maybe my prospective route to fame and admiration had been flattened in the felling. The few orchids, called Chiloglottis valida (Bird Orchid), were still there right on the edge of the newly cleared area, safe on what must be the upper edge of Mary’s private land.

61 The contagion erupts

Within a few months clearing had started 5 km further down the road. It was in an area of old growth forest possibly containing the last koalas to survive on the Monaro; koala sightings from passing cars with their windows steamed up were rare but claimed unequivocal. This clearing was mandatory because a fence was being erected by the landholder to prevent stock from straying onto the road. He had no stock but would one day. A fence generally has a cleared area on either side wider than the height of standing trees. This protects the fence from damage by falling trees. By this action, the 20 metre wide felled strip along the road became 40 m wide. A Mohican fringe of erect roadside trees was left as a token to mark the boundary. They were soon discarded through a combination of strong winds and heavy snowfalls.

The invasive contagious thought wafted over to Forestry Headquarters. They had a big order for chip wood to be filled that season. They were going to be struggling to fill it using their normal felling method of harvesting caches separated by untouched forest. Caching allows any wild things that can move quickly some temporary protection and a nearby food source. Native plants can also recolonise the felled caches from within the intact forest.

They moved into Creewah. There were no caches. Felling was continuous though trees that were significant as nesting sites or refuges for ring tailed possums or greater gliders were left standing. These holey trees stood almost as lonely as Lone Pine on the rise above Anzac Cove. Steep-sided water courses were untouched.

Over two seasons the Forestry juggernaut rolled on sparing little and even taking narrow slices into the National Park where it was permissible. Undergrowth was flattened by the tracked vehicles and useless timber was pushed over to rot and bar animal tracks as the good timber was extracted. Satellite images showed exactly the small extent of private unlogged land in the area. It was sad.

60 Roads to recovery

The Federal Government had a good idea. They decided to do something about the awful dirt roads in the bush. They didn’t realise that the good idea was carrying a contagious bad idea on its back. Under the scheme, Bombala Council received a very nice grant to fix up New Line Road that was narrow and had corners that had to be negotiated slowly. Otherwise you could easily find yourself upside down in a paddock or squashed against a tree. Ben once came close to being squashed but happily lived to become famous.

New Line Road was built in 1868 primarily to enable slow lumbering bullock wagon trains to carry wool from the Monaro to the coast and it hadn’t changed much since those days. It was narrow, picturesque and parts of the road were a shady green tunnel because trees that stood on either side had grown up and over and joined limbs to close the canopy. It was one of those attractions that made visitors to the area all warm inside and want to live in Creewah. Most got over it.

The road was transformed by the grant. Instead of having a 40 kph safe speed it could now be driven at 80 rising to 100 kph in sections. It was great. Bombala Council, managers of the shire and Bombala town, known as the Timber Town because of its expertise in logging, had done an excellent job. On both sides of the widened and smooth gravel road was a 20-metre levelled safety area. This area had a second purpose; on it were piled the hundreds of big trees that had been pushed over during recovery of the road. They made a deep and continuous line about 20 km long, 40 km counting both sides. They also made an impenetrable barrier for kangaroos, wallabies and wombats. Foolish animals that strayed onto the road could no longer get off it and were recycled by vehicles. ‘Bloody kangaroo jumped out at me. Dented me door; all should be shot’.

One of the reasons for moving the trees back from the road was to reduce the likelihood of the trees getting in the way of vehicles and causing crashes, but equally importantly, to break the drip line. Tree leaves condense water from the air particularly at night because they present a cold surface to the sky. They then drip this condensate onto the road that they overhang. This makes soft patches in the gravel which become pot holes. This is well known, frequently described and scientifically proven. Pot holes that appear with even greater frequency on stretches of road without overhanging trees have unknown origins unrelated to science. ‘Probably dug by bloody wombats’.

Her father used to drive on the wrong side of the road in ‘The Pinger’ to reduce the effects on its suspension of unscientific potholes once common in the treeless mallee scrub country of South Australia and Victoria. Potholes are smoother when approached in the wrong direction he explained to the strained passengers watching intently for oncoming vehicles. We need the government to introduce a policy of left hand side on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and right hand side on other days.

Tom had been very pleased to see the trees piled along New Line Road after the road had been recovered. He was a wood carter selling his truckloads of pre-split firewood around the state. His first action was to erect signs on stretches of the wood piles. They said in capitals, ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OFF’. It didn’t take him many months to clear the good wood and sell it. The rubbish wood was left behind to rot or burn in the next bushfire. Now the animals could move through the gaps.

Tom was now woodless so he felled a few extra public trees along New Line Road to keep his business going and got Forestry into one of his roadside properties to clear-fell that area. The system was that Forestry would take out what they needed and leave the rest to him. They would pay him $4000 for their wood and not charge him for the felling. It was a good deal. Basil was similarly tempted because he could use $4000 for a new car, but luckily the flush passed and the trees on his property survived. The felling contagion in our area stopped at Tom for a while but quietly gained strength.

59 Whistling

When I was a kid I used to whistle. It just happened. There were lots of tunes that wanted to get out. They were tunes I had heard but most were combinations of notes that simply needed the air. Maybe they were in love with other free notes that happened to be floating by. My dad used to whistle as did his dad. It was a north of England thing that went with brass bands and beer. My dad always whistled things I sort of knew but he modified them to a minor key, a bit like a blues jazz singer might flatten the notes to give a sad effect. His whistling was a getting-up thing.

His whistling started in the toilet, continued while he pulled on his flat hat to complement his jamas, and piped around the fire place while he summoned the fire to light. He had a finely timed system. Sticks were placed over pre-rolled fire lighters placed on the cleaned grate; the firelighters were ingeniously rolled tubes of newspaper folded back into a ring. Pieces of coal were then arranged over the wood, and a Swan Vestas match completed the artwork. Not two matches like a boy scout might need.

Now came the good bit. He partially blocked off the front of the fire with a carefully placed short-handled shovel. This forced air to go up through the bottom of the grate to escape finally out the chimney pot. He made the suction even more ferocious by opening a sheet of newspaper across the shovel and fireplace. Still whistling, he then went for a shave. It was all timed to perfection. The fire was blazing and sucking voraciously at the opened newspaper in 3 minutes just the time needed for a quick shave.

One morning he cut himself on his safety razor so his shave took longer than 3 minutes. The newspaper caught fire falling on the carpet which started to burn and burning bits of paper floated around the room. Mum stomped the flames to death and dad later. That was the last time dad ever used the method but he never stopped whistling in that off-key way.

One morning I discovered something very strange. I was on my way to catch the bus to school and was whistling as usual. It was actually a tune that other people knew because somebody I passed was whistling it as well. I always arrived early for things so had to wait a while at the bus stop. It was the terminus because nobody wanted to go further than Diggle anyway. The Oldham bus came and I got in, going straight up the narrow half spiralling metal steps to the top deck. Only girls and old women with walking sticks and crackling raincoats sat down stairs. Upstairs was full of old tobacco smoke and the air got thicker as travellers powered up their Woodbines. Then somebody started to whistle my tune, probably between puffs. At the third bus stop the tune was there again coming out of someone else. Somehow it had stuck in the thick air and was infecting everybody, at least those who could whistle. By the time we got to dirty Oldham and the nicotine-smelling raincoats had disembarked, it had infected seven people.

I now knew that the air is not only full of radio waves and light waves but tune waves that roam around looking for a place to live. I also guessed that waves carrying tune infections could also carry idea infections. Many years later, one of these idea infections came to Creewah and it took a long time and did lots of damage before it went away.

58 The phantom pisser

When it’s cold and frosty and the nights are long, bed is a good place to be. We had bought a merino under-blanket with thick bounce and soft, warm implants of mohair. In winter it is as tempting as the liqueur centres in dark chocolates. You give in, savour the pleasure and fall into deep sleep dreaming of squeezing the icing bag to add the on-top scrolls. Five hours later when the blazing manna gum logs in the wood heater have died it’s different. By then the hard stars poking through the blackness have already made half an inch of ice outside. The only bit of the bed that’s warm is occupied by someone else and your bit has hoar frost at the edges. You lie there quietly, thinking of the warmth of Darwin and camping with the 4 metre crocodiles at Kakadu. Why is there always a down side to night thoughts?

The Darwin thoughts don’t work. You don’t get any warmer even in the distant glow of that otherwise-occupied bit of the bed. You edge closer to the glow. It’s good for a while. At least until the glow morphs into sharpened elbows and telepathic annoyance and ice block feet. The only thing to do is back off, get up, and go for a pee for something to do. You know you are wide awake, as sharp as an upholstery tack, but standing up you can’t work out where you are. The toilet has moved into a different room, even a different house, because every door you aim for is a wall. Door jambs reach out to strike you but at least direct you into the right place.

You sit down because it’s not safe to guess direction and distance in the pitch dark. Shit, somebody left the seat up and the porcelain is freezing on your bare bum. Sitting down on the seat is relaxing and sleep tries to recapture you bringing with it floods of long-dead memories.

The phantom pisser we used to call him. There were 20 of us sharing a large house with one toilet. He used to spray everything every night; the floor, the wall, everywhere but the hole. We took it in turns to catch him but he was too smart. Night owls just accepted they would have soggy slippers or wet feet that needed drying on the hall carpet before getting back into bed. In fact, some of us suspected the others had joined the phantom. Why bother anyway?

Going back is worse. The walls have moved again but the electronic clock is cheerfully telling you it’s, no don’t look, 3:17 am. Too late you looked because knowing is enough to keep you awake for ever even though you are now warm.

Why should she sleep when I’m awake? A few bounces, a gentle flap of the sheet to let in some of that refreshing air. She gets up and throws the sheets, blankets, everything off. Then on returning after negotiating the moving walls without difficulty, she spends several hours sitting up tuning her radio, changing batteries, getting up again for tissues, a drink of water, and letting in draughts. It’s 3:39 am and the warmth starts to build. She says she can’t sleep. Now it’s OK to enter the warm zone and suddenly it’s 7am.

57 The drought

We hadn’t counted on there being a drought. The sky kept looking like it could barely hold the rain in, like you might feel in the middle of the night after a big evening drinking. Up came the black clouds regularly at around midday, the sky would spin with the countervailing currents coming down from the mountains and up from the sea, and then there would be a stand-off agreement and no rain. The river stopped flowing, eventually breaking up into stagnant pools with bare-rock separators. Mr Glockemman’s pump stopped pumping, needing a continuous flow of water through it to provide power, and we had to resort back to the old fuel-hungry water movers we had put aside years before. The pump inlet had to be extended several metres to reach available water. The platypus complained about the noise and fought the suction not wanting to be converted to scrambled eggs.

Let’s sell, she said.

It wasn’t really a big drought, though the gum trees started looking miserable and dropping rattling cascades of leaves and bark. Everybody started talking about 1981. That was a serious drought. Someone could even recall 1941 and during the war to make the dry period even harder. The droughts of the Great War years were worst; they kept on and on. Nobody claimed that memory, though I considered it for a while. We just kept looking at the sky and hoping and double hoping that those black clouds wouldn’t make a dry storm and spot fires.

The raspberries didn’t like it despite being dripped regularly and staying green. Yields fell. Migrating birds thought our place looked better than some others and we finished up with visitors not seen before. One day I discovered the raspberry enclosure alive with silvereyes; hundreds of them like mice crawling over the fruit. They are small so could get in through the coarse wire mesh. They are delicate eaters. They take one segment at a time out of a raspberry. Nevertheless I had to get them out and keep them out otherwise the low yield would be no yield within a few days. I covered all the coarse mesh wire with fine mesh, suspending it like vertical blinds so I could raise it when the silvereyes left. I opened one end of the enclosure and shooed them out with a waving plastic rake and loud shouts that upset the neighbours and the watching kangaroos. It worked. For a day the silvereyes covered the outside of the enclosure searching randomly for holes then they disappeared for good to find other oases.

A few, maybe 10, hung around outside. They decided to become permanent migrants. When I became slack they found their way into the enclosure and nested and the colony began. Only during deepest winter do they go away only to return in spring. Ten is OK. They are very pretty.

The drought had other problems, not always recognised by city people. When it’s drought the stars sparkle more but the frosts are harder. The deep frosts creep further out of the winter into the growing season and petrify the spring flowers prettily, but sterilise them. Lower than minus 4°C and it is goodbye to fruit setting. A week of those temperatures during flowering and a boysenberry or cherry crop is finished till next season even before it has begun.

We had that problem. No boysenberries, no early raspberries and mid season raspberries that developed on branched canes, damaged by the frosts during their formation. And the late season fruits came too early on short canes because they accumulated their cold requirement for flowering too quickly. Jon Fox had been right; frosts are the most difficult problem.

56 Just musing quietly

For a long time the aborigines came here to our bend in the river during summer to catch fish and eels and to harvest the kangaroos and forest goodies. They went back to the coast in winter. For even longer the many species of migrating birds have come here to nest in spring and to depart with their new offspring in autumn using the resources available in the warm season.

Some tough bird species hang out here all year by harvesting other resources. The New Holland and White-cheeked honey eaters feed on the river-side Grevilleas that flower during the winter months, the grey thrushes dig out grubs, comatose with the cold from under bark, and magpies and kookaburras mine the grass roots for sleepy worms, skinks and grubs, the crimson rosellas eat seeds and our fallen hazel and chestnuts, the scarlet, flame and yellow robins just peck around at anything and survive very well. Less tough things that can’t go away through the winter months like many insects, bats, reptiles and snakes just sleep.

Plants live here because they have migrated from somewhere else and found it’s OK. Some like the Mountain Pepper Tasmannia lanceolata, a member of the ancient Winteraceae, settled in when the land masses of the world were all stuck together in one southern continent, called Gondwana. It still hangs out here in old growth forest. At the other end of the scale are the recent migrants, escapees from gardens and from agricultural exploits around the country like thistles and fireweed Senecio madagascariensis. Some say plant introductions outnumber natives two and a half times to one in Australia, but they mean introductions since the Europeans invaded in force. Just about all plants are invaders if the time scale is long enough.
In general, wild things live here because the resources they need are also here and because it’s more crowded and more competitive elsewhere. We Creewah humans fit that description though we think our requirements might be a little more complex.

Most people come here because it feels right, maybe some tenth sense. It’s quiet, except for the distant chatter of occasional chain saws while people collect wood. The skies are blue and the views sharp and distant contrasting with the murky grey and close horizons in industrialised Asia and Europe. The river runs clean because it only starts a few kilometres away in tussock grassland; it hasn’t had the chance to pick up all the pollution of many kilometres of settlements dumping rubbish for millennia like the Rhine. The air is clean and biting, filtered through the lungs of the surrounding forest not the exhausts of thousands of motor cars and mill chimneys. All these things make it feel right for some. Maybe it’s some unrecognised hankering for the past when pressures on the globe by humans were small and nature seemed big and in control.

It doesn’t feel right for all. It can be frightening. It can be threatening particularly if you have never had the opportunity to live without the close proximity of other humans that focus existence on the day to day bustle of human things. That’s security. I had a friend who was scared whenever he left the city, whenever he was alone. He was scared to be faced with nothing but nature; a bigger unknown than unknown people.

We sat on a rock and looked at the gently murmuring view climbing over the tussock grassland into the scrubby bush and trees right up to the granite tors. The view looked back at us.

We are so lucky she said. I agreed.

55 Wombalano; worthless scrub

The sheep were gone, the chestnuts were continuing to be a waste of time and the taxman had given me the choice of having an in-depth desk audit of my farm affairs or of giving up my status as a primary producer, no questions asked. I accepted the tax offer gratefully but now had to further accept that my farm wasn’t. It was certainly doing nicely in producing jam but not at a level that could be considered a business; rather it was more a lowly enterprise. But how could we refer to the farm now? Could it be our country residence which sounds rather grand, our lifestyle property, or just that jam place? None of these seemed right. It had to be referred to by name, by ‘Wombalano’ that supposed aboriginal name dredged from somewhere by Torsten and Victoria.

On top of our business demise, she decided to stop being a lawyer. It was clearly not a health-giving activity. I was extremely jealous of this new idleness. Why should I work when she wasn’t? I gave up working as well; at last leaving the place I had dropped my DNA skin particles for over 30 years. We paid off the debts on our farm, now lifestyle property, and on our Canberra dwelling. We were almost free. I had some problems initially retraining my car which went to work occasionally when I wasn’t concentrating. But we became really free quite soon as a learner driver ran into us at traffic lights on a wet Sydney afternoon; the car was written off and replaced with one that didn’t know the way to my old work.

The useless scrub on Wombalano and by the adjoining river continued to deliver delights in the form of tiny flowers of many species and associated photo opportunities. Her book of flower corpses and photos became two and then three. The walls of the yurt displayed the spill over flower photos and the many fungi that popped up in wet autumns. And the Hakea transects came up with some interesting information.

I discovered that I could hypnotise anybody into a deep trance or sleep by telling them about the Hakeas so I wrote up the findings and put them on the web. The site was visited by a handful of people, all lost in cyberspace. The conclusions, which you can read if you are wearing pyjamas and lying comfortably somewhere nice and warm, went something like this:

1. The basalt rock outcrops were usually around 900 metres above sea level
2. Plants growing in or near rock outcrops didn’t often get frosted because the rocks carry enough heat over into the night from the previous day
3. The temperature under the tree canopy seldom gets to freezing. Where trees were absent at the same location temperatures dropped well below freezing
4. Night temperatures increased at higher altitudes in our valley, this was largely because the slopes drained the cold air down onto the valley floor and higher areas were more windy
5. The coldest places at night were where people lived down near the river. These places got the temperature inversion, were not sheltered under trees and had no rocks to store heat
6. During the years of records, the Hakeas didn’t get frosted because they knew where to live
7. 900 masl wasn’t special. Hakeas on Bull Mountain slopes at 1100 masl survived very well. However, they generally lived amongst rocks and not in areas of temperature inversion and consequently didn’t get frosted.
8. Mature Hakeas that were exposed to frosts by Forestry clearing the canopy grew very well
9. I have no idea what any of this means but guess that seedling Hakeas are killed by frost and also guess that once cleared of canopy, the understory can never recover to its previous species abundance and diversity

54 Basil Faulty Too

Our sheep continued to produce acceptable amounts of wool but prices remained low so I disposed of most of our sheep by sale and gift to local landholders keeping only about 9. These could provide a meal or two in an emergency and would keep the grass down a little in the paddocks. I also used them to graze off everything inside the enclosures at the end of each season and into winter. They were by now organic requiring no drench to keep them free of parasites. Our pastures had been clean for a few seasons.

When shearing time came, the locals clubbed together using the same shearer, Danny, in the shearing shed owned by Davo. We all drove our flocks over to the shed either on foot or by trailer. We helped each other for all processes.

In this year the shearing date was moved forward by a week at the last minute. Neither she nor I could be there. I would be overseas, she in a prior engagement. As usual for our community, someone else would take over in the emergency and handle our few sheep. Basil and John would do the chores. Seven sheep had to be sheared from our place.

Our sheep were by now almost pets. They came when I called and followed me. Sometimes I would have no idea where they were on the property so I would call ‘come on’ though not like Lleyton Hewitt who would have made them hide, and they would appear over the horizon and run to me. This was flock memory because in previous years by I had occasionally fed them with oats which they were crazy about. The whole flock of up to 80 members had associated my voice with oats. By this means I had always managed without a dog. Occasionally they would even respond to her voice.

The evening before the shearing John, Jill and Jennifer came over to collect our sheep, put them in their trailer, and take them to the shed so they would be dry and ready to shear next morning. The sheep refused to be rounded up, they ran away. We’ll get them tomorrow said John.

Tomorrow came and Basil joined the rounding up team. The sheep weren’t any easier and bolted through any gaps the team left. Basil wasn’t very athletic, being slightly overweight and having a small problem with swollen ankles. This hadn’t limited him in his conquests of local and not so local ladies over recent years, but it wasn’t a help when chasing sheep. The sheep were getting more and more frisky with each attempt to get them into the yard. They were big sheep and very healthy. One in panic ran into a power pole and bowled itself over before rejoining the group. Ok let’s make this the last try John said.

The gaps between the humans were made smaller and the sheep were slowly moved up the rise towards the yard. One broke and ran straight for Basil, seeing him clearly only at the last minute. Sheep are quite good jumpers when pushed and very good when at full speed downhill. Picturing its youth, it optimistically tried to jump over Basil’s head but only made his chest; still, not a bad attempt. Basil went down like a sack of sand. His leg had snapped at the hip joint, his wrist had broken and he was badly winded. He couldn’t move. The victorious sheep disappeared back over the horizon. They were missing me.

Everybody except Basil thought ‘shit’ but didn’t say it. Bombala Hospital would send an ambulance but a helicopter from Sydney might be needed. The sheep gatherers would have to prepare a landing site. It might arrive in an hour. Just keep the patient covered and warm they said. Basil didn’t care about anything, he was out of it. There was only one flat area in the paddock away from trees and that was where I was in the process of building a cottage to house all the bird watchers who would make us very rich. The foundations had been prepared and it was waiting for me to attach the floor to the underfloor. The underfloor had to go; it might blow away when the helicopter landed. The three able bodied members of the team worked madly to prepare the site.

Our place is perched between the Snowy Mountains and the sea so it can be cold, hot, or often quite foggy when the two weather systems interact. The fog started to form. The helicopter arrived but was unable to land because the pilot couldn’t see the ground. It left again. Luckily the ambulance arrived soon after. Basil was loaded and driven the 450 km to Sydney.

Though clever people filled him with steel pins and he had treatment for many months, Basil became permanently faulty in his walking after this incident. His life was changed significantly for the worse. Luckily we had insured our property for a million dollars to cover us for accidents. That’s what we had thought. We were wrong; for some complex reason Basil couldn’t be a recipient. He lost out all round. We sold our remaining sheep for $300 and let the grass grow for the many kangaroos.