53 Dam

The bad thing about the Glockemann pump was that when I didn’t irrigate, the header tank overflowed, admittedly slowly. Either I could turn off the pump when the tank was full, a sensible solution, or increase the farm’s water storage. I opted for the silly route. I would make a small dam right by the tank to take any overflow. This would also be an excuse to use the tractor that had been sitting idle with flat tyres for 2 years.

Within an hour of starting it up, following half a day of pumping air, refuelling, greasing, and removing birds’ nests from the cabin and debris leaning against the sides, the tractor had made a dam. I ran the tank’s 8000 gallons of water into the dam to test it. It looked great in mind space reflecting images of wading birds, frogs burping and tadpoles swimming, a jungle of native plants fringing its edges and of course a few floating lily pads iridescent with dragon and damsel flies.

The following day it was empty. The porous gravelly soil was no good. I either had to spend a small fortune on sealing it with clay, estimated cost $500, or lining it with plastic and rubberised sheet, estimated cost $500. I opted for a much cheaper wheat silo-lining plastic sheet with poor UV properties and easily holed by animals like sheep and kangaroos, estimated cost $200. I would use old carpet from the tip held down by rocks to cover the edges of the silo plastic thus avoiding UV and physical damage. These solutions worked well. The overflow from the header tank splashing into around 12,000 gallons of water from a height of 2 metres complemented the scene. Within three years the mind dream became reality.

52 Walking

The weakness of becoming a photographer of botanical things is that you have to find the plants in the wild and that means lots of walking. Some botanical photographers cheat by hanging around their local Botanic Gardens so they can drop into the cafe for a coffee between photo shots. The other tricky thing is that you can never be sure when the chosen specimen is going to flower so you have to keep going back to the same places to check. Her grid system became quite useful, though I admit my GPS with all the little plants marked and jumping up on the screen as I walked was better.

Instead of cycling, I started walking to work through the Canberra Black Mountain Reserve to check on the plants there during the week to complement observations on the farm at the weekends. There were plenty of species in common despite the locations being 200 km apart. With it being warmer, the Black Mountain plants tended to flower a week to two months ahead of those at the farm. Annoyingly, wildflowers had started to play a large part in our lives.

Lots of interesting questions crystallised out of the air during all this walking, competing for time with my chattering brain spirits. For example, I had noticed that clumps of the native Tree Hakea Hakea eriantha always seemed to be around 900 m above sea level at the farm. I strayed off the farm onto all properties in the Creewah area and this seemed a fair general conclusion. So what was special about 900m?

Looking for tree hakeas was useful in that I found that the distribution of superficially similar trees like Black Wattle Acacia melanoxylon and River Lomatia Lomatia myricoides, had no relationship with elevation; they could be anywhere.

The web couldn’t help solve my question so I decided to do an experiment. This experiment was an excuse to buy some technology and to do even more walking. I argued to myself and the ether that Tree Hakeas were in some way limited in distribution by temperature. The only way to check that would be to put temperature sensors with their associated loggers at places where Tree Hakeas grew and places where they didn’t. I chose three slopes in the area that included Tree Hakeas and placed temperature loggers at and above and below them in a simple transect. One transect was on someone else’s place so the farm had finally burst its borders. Hakeas didn’t respect borders. The owners didn’t know so wouldn’t worry. I had already discovered that nobody walked in the local bush except me and Magoo, and Magoo was usually with me. He was the neighbour’s dog.

I downloaded the hourly temperatures from the loggers in situ onto my portable computer every six weeks for three years and so amassed millions of lovely data points, perfect for transforming into complex graphs. I collected photographs of wildflowers while I roamed between sites. I was gradually becoming familiar with the area and its ecology.

It was getting familiar with me too; the kangaroos and wallabies didn’t run away till I was close, the lyre birds sang on almost unconcerned by my nearness and the Granite Tors became less menacing. That’s what was in my imagination, but that’s all it was. One day I had forgotten my GPS and a heavy mist came down. I was lost not 5 km from home. I thought I knew ever creek, every rock, every tree in the area. In the absence of the sun and its direction objects all took on a sameness and I had no idea which way to go. When the mist started to lift I had been heading in exactly the wrong direction. I concluded the area didn’t care about me one bit. When the Chinese shot down all the GPS satellites, I would stay home.

51 Not so free irrigation

It was hotter that summer and the raspberries needed gravity dripping twice a week. A 24-hour drip used 2500 gallons of water. If we also did the chestnuts the 8000 gallon header tank was emptied in one go. Our method for filling the tank at first copied Torsten. It was to carry a petrol-driven fire pump down to the river, join it to our 2” mains feed that ran up the centre of the farm, prime it and pump for about 5 hours. Then the pump was disengaged and carried back to the shed. It was a drag carrying it back and forth and she pretended she couldn’t lift it, so I upgraded to an electric pump with a powerful suction that I could site above flood level.

This had to be a temporary measure because I didn’t like paying the electricity bill. I looked for a green and constantly-running-cost-free alternative. It appeared at a local agricultural show we visited accidently. The Glockemann was brilliant and simple technology so I had to have one. It used the power of a fall in the river to drive a piston that in turn pumped the required water uphill to a tank. It needed a fall of about 1.2 metres and our river had rapids that fell much more than that fairly close to out electric pump inlet. The rapids needed to be slightly controlled by creating a weir of big rocks 1.2 m high. The 10 m long drive pipe for the pump would feed through the weir. The cost of the pump and the labour needed to prepare the site was equivalent to about 5 year’s electricity for the electric pump, but rationality was by now submerged under a froth of excitement.

John thought this was a great idea especially if the excess water from the Glockemann was pumped to his place. Do you need a hand he asked. I ignored him till I found I needed his help. Over the millennia the river had flushed lots of large boulders down our rapids. To create the weir, all we had to do was move these boulders up stream into a pile thus restoring the ecology of the past. At least that was my excuse for blocking the river. I had tried hard to manually lever these boulders up stream, but it was physically too difficult to achieve without pulled muscles and crushed toes.

Like all farmers, John enjoyed playing with tractors. He arrived on his machine pulling a trailer load of hawsers, wire ropes, pulleys and chains, and extra man power in the form of his daughter Jennifer, wife Jill and Basil. The tractor was positioned on a flat piece of ground upstream of the boulders and the wire ropes were threaded through pulleys attached to appropriately-positioned trees so that the pull of the tractor was converted into a force straight up the river. The chains were fastened around the boulders, one by one, and to the wire rope, and the tractor pulled them up to the growing weir. It was brilliant. Manpower was required only to position the boulders within the weir. It took a morning instead of the week I had mentally allocated to the job.

The weir leaked almost as much as if it wasn’t there. But that was largely fixed by putting weed mat on the upstream side of the weir wall and over the stream floor and semi-sealing it with Bentonite clay. I had placed and capped the 10 m long by 15 cm plastic drive tube in the wall before we started. When the cap was temporarily removed the resultant gush looked enough to power the whole Snowy Mountains hydro scheme. This was so much more fun than having an electric pump.

Glockemann came to install the pump at the outlet of the drive pipe and inlet of the 2 inch pipe going up to the header tank some 30 metres higher. It took an hour of wading in the creek, attaching the pump to bed rock with chains. We opened the flow into the drive tube, adjusted the controls on the pump, and hey presto, it worked; free water at our tank and time for a celebratory drink while writing the required cheque.

City and town people just turn on the tap and feel very let down if the water doesn’t come out fast and clean. They get upset when the costs rise. In the country we have the advantage of finding and tapping our own water and maintaining our systems in balance with nature. We are lucky.

50 Experts visit

They did come. The Environmental Tours bird spotters visited in a bus that was a squeeze for our bumpy narrow drive. They identified 26 species before they climbed down the bus steps, just by the calls; clever people. By the time they finished a non-alcoholic lunch it was over 50 added to the list, either seen or heard. They returned to Canberra very happy and our unbuilt on-site motel was booked out for the next five years.

The flower people visited in their campervan from Adelaide. They too were multi-skilled being good on birds as well as flowers. Over breakfast of muesli and toast we were told they had been serenaded at 3:30 am by the low groans of mopokes. These are some sort of bird. The wombats, kangaroos and wallabies had completed the rustling swishing belching sound backdrop for their campervan night.

We set out to go along the river route to her hill. I thought it was going to be a walk. Walking for me was moving the legs fast enough so you get warm and arrive in a minimum time at your destination. My definition turned out to be inappropriate for serious flower people. We got to the other side of the vegie garden in intense conversation about something. We weren’t walking in an efficient single file but in a group. Beth dropped to her knees right under a big manna gum Eucalyptus viminalis and proclaimed she was looking at a vanilla lily Arthropodium milleflorum .

David was soon lying next to her with his nose against a piece of grass, magnifying it cleverly with his binoculars turned around backwards. It was confirmed, we had a vanilla lily. She was really excited with this tiny arching stalk carrying little whitish pendulous bells along its length. It got its name from a supposed vanilla scent. The related chocolate lily has a chocolate scent. None of us could smell the vanilla but then we had all smoked in our youth.

Half an hour had passed. Some sort of Billy Button Craspedia variabilis was found a few paces further. This was nothing more than a yellow ball on a stalk with a few leaves at the bottom. The funeral march continued. Beth and David were a few steps ahead and a concerned Beth signalled us to stop and move away. It had to be one of our fairly harmless copperhead snakes they had seen. Surprisingly, David with his back to us dropped his pants, then his Y-fronts (they really were), exposing his hairy bottom. This was quite unexpected. He had blood on his Y-fronts. Hanging on his testicles were two lovely black leeches and a third very plump one was cradled in the undies.

She and I had long experience of leeches having lived in the subtropics and walked in damp places. A good solution is a salt application which dehydrates the leeches and makes them loop away and die a horrid death. The other is an extinguished but still hot match that you press against the leech to make it let go. David wasn’t interested. He was as white as a sheet and the gentle administering hands of Beth were all that stopped him from fainting. We had forgotten to mention that lying on the ground in that damp place wasn’t a good idea.

The walk was over. We never made her hill so her bragging rights were intact. David had a little lie down with Beth in the safety of the campervan while I had a coffee alone. She now had 12 different plants in her collection. With an estimated 2000 wild species in the Bombala region, she had less than 2000 to go to complete the album.

She seemed to be stabilising and getting better so she went back to being a lawyer, part time.

49 Farmer or Botanist

The raspberries had to be pruned, the fruit picked, the jam made and I had a fulltime job as well. Picking was always the best. It was a great time for thinking while being enveloped in the sharp almost clinical scents of slightly crushed raspberries. We had several raspberry varieties that all felt and smelt different.

Maybe Chilcotin is best. It has those bright red acid fruits that brighten up the senses when you pop one in and squirt the juices over your tongue. It is so acid that it takes the zinc coating off trellis wires, and it makes magic jam. We propagated it initially because it is from Alaska and might have a little more cold tolerance than other lines. Our place is cold.

Maybe Willamette is best too, but its flavour is more for the less committed raspberry eater. I like it best even though it’s from Oregon where she met leg problems. I know some Americans are strange but among the label notes on their red wine bottles might be “Willamette and blackcurrant scents in a light tannin background”. Flavour-wise it’s then down scale through Glen Clova to bottom out with boring fruits like those on Camby; pink water held around fine particles of sand.

The best thing about picking is that afterwards the fruit can be morphed into numbers that can then merge and interact with others in a computer database. There they grow into graphs, forecasts for yields and above all into excuses for not getting better yields. Only when the fruits are off the canes and categorised and weighed, computerised, and in tidy boxes freezing in the fridges do they really become real and realise their full glory. Those ephemeral little red blobs become part of a bigger picture probing towards the meaning of life.

By contrast pruning is just boring, competing with weeding and mulching for the most boring prize. Even whitewashing rocks or digging holes is better. But if there’s a lot to think about those activities are manageable. I find that I have my best conversations while pruning. I get into serious and deep discussions, even arguments with dead people, the prime minister, God (same thing I suppose), my family members and un-people that bubble up from old dreams.

Remarkably they occasionally come up with good points I would never have thought of. I suspect that solitary confinement in a darkened cell for a couple of weeks might not be so bad if they all came along. Though after two weeks they might start to run out of things to talk about and I might have to say too much. I hate talking.

She wanted me to take photographs of her wild plant discoveries and talk about her identifications using the glossy botanical books. Her idea was to identify and dry and press the specimens then put them and the photographs into a book with display pages. She drew a map of the bits of the farm where she had found plants and added a grid reference system. This was going to be page 1 in the book.

It was starting to look like a big project to me. Putting G12 or A5 next to a dried plant or photo meant you were going to want to return to that place and check it out over a few years. This didn’t seem like stamp collecting or bird spotting. With stamp collecting all you do is find the stamp, stick it in the book and forget about it, unless you wanted to brag to someone about having that stamp. My dad had a Penny Black but he never told anybody which seemed to make the owning part pointless. The same applies to birds. Once you see a bird and tick it off in your list or spotters book that is the end of the exercise because the bird has flown away. The bragging rights had been cemented in by the tick.

A plant on a map grid was inviting trouble. Your identification could be checked by others. You could never brag because an expert might be listening and say you were wrong. You would look stupid. That didn’t worry her. My photos of things like the common fringed lily Thysanotus tuberosus looked good though and it was starting to seem I at least could have some bragging rights as a very amateur Botanical Photographer one day. The farm was developing a new dimension.

48 Useless scrub

These happenings were cutting into my farm time. I had to get back to the raspberries and the freedom of space uncluttered by humans and human events. She came too.

She took it quietly, taking short walks into the bush and sitting thinking and absorbing the sounds and actions of the wild things. An hour resting on a granite rock in the sun watching a grey fantail going about its business and unconcerned with her was somehow calming. These daily short walks took on a pattern. I’m off up my hill she would say. She always said where she was going in case she couldn’t make it back unassisted. Her hill became quite used to her.

It was only a small hill and was very scrubby being covered mainly in straggly and small Eucalyptus pauciflora trees. It had the significant benefit that its top was wide and had lots of small rocks that were a comfortable sitting height. It was steep enough so that reaching the top was an achievement. The long periods of daily contemplation about the problems and the unknown future became increasingly interrupted by that scrubby bush as the days passed; the hill started to take her over. One day she returned excited. She had discovered some mauve flowers amongst the rocks. The plants had seemed dead but weren’t. We had no idea what they were so looked in our one flower picture book for identification. That was no help. I must get a better book she said.

Remarkably other flowers started appearing amongst the rocks and in the scrappy ground cover and within a week or two she was seeing more than ten different things that had been hiding from her eyes and mine. She might see just one flower of a type and then they were everywhere. It was almost as though permission to view was only granted after you had passed their test; they were there but you couldn’t actually see them until you had the password for that species.

She had worked for two decades at the Canberra and South East Region Environment Centre largely as a volunteer editing and laying out their journal, so that seemed a good place to start to find a book on wild flowers for our place. She talked to her friends Ian, Margaret and Helen there who were putting together just the book she needed but it was not yet ready. She came home after spending a small fortune on alternative books, one by Leon Costermain “Native trees and shrubs of SE Australia” and a second by Alan Fairley and Philip Moore “Native plants of the Sydney district”. These covered thousands of plants and she had discovered just ten that she wanted to identify. It seemed like overkill to me so I told her. Still, anything that got her mind back into gear had to be worthwhile. She was taking time off from being a lawyer so a gap-filler was needed.

The hill continued to take a beating. It was used so much I asked if she wanted me to set it up with wheel chair access for the future. OK it was a joke. She was a strange sight struggling up there with her Sony Walkman permanently plugged in, her 10x botanists’ magnifier dangling from her neck and a plastic bag in her hand for putting specimens into for later identification. The Walkman was her constant friend day and night. It was there to overwhelm the continuous sounds buzzing and ringing in her head. Sleep at night was difficult without it.

47 Handling grief

How can anybody handle such news? Within a couple of days you learn your friend has died, a friend you had been looking forward to sharing your new and exciting stories with, and simultaneously you find you might have a serious illness that could incapacitate you and wipe you out within a short period. It was very difficult.

The head noises started, tinnitus they called it, the pains got worse spreading to the arm on the same side as the bad leg and she spent a lot of time in deep thought about the present and miserable future.

Sleepless nights were filled writing letters about everything and nothing to her mother. She received no replies.

Physical tests and MRI scans confirmed MS. She had sclerotic dead patches over her brain stem meaning that control signals to and feedback from certain organs were likely to be muffled. It was a matter of course that sclerosis would continue and spread and other functions would be reduced and finally lost. The rate of spread could not be forecast but her positive attitude might help general well-being. Drugs were being developed but at this stage MS was poorly understood. Her case wasn’t all that bad.