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.