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