“Otto, God help us, mate, what have you gorn and done? Are you off yer rocker? You’re telling me you never even bothered to look over the place?”
“I did see it from the roadside, not the house, but the land and I liked it straight away. It’s a lot of land, Tom.”
Henty sounds as though he’s talking to a twelve-year-old. “Otto, now please tell me, have you ever had any farming experience, any at all?”
“My grandfather had a farm in Germany, near Weimar. When I was a boy I used to help him; they were good times.”
“I daresay they were, but you’ll find Garigo a different game altogether. The property’s bloody useless, mate. It had belonged to the old Fuller family since the mid-1800s. The Fullers were a bunch of no-hopers; all of them, right down the generations. It started with sheep – all the stock got foot-rot – then the family went on to beef cattle, but they were too mean to keep to the breed. They even tried to grow deciduous fruit and white grapes, but, of course, they let everything go wild. The last generation began to live like bushies, until they finally went broke and had to foreclose.”
“You are not very encouraging, Tom.”
“Well, there’s one thing you’ve done right.” He puts down his fountain pen and smiles. “At least you’ve had the sense to become an Australian citizen. We were there among the crowd at the ceremony, and I must admit I thought you looked good, so did my wife.” He picks up the pen once more and resumes his habitual despondency. “Now let’s see what you’ve actually done with all that Snowy money.” He spreads the title documents over his desk. “Let’s start with the homestead.” He runs his eyes down the sales inventory and whistles softly. “They say it’s ‘fully furnished’, but that could mean anything. A right load of junk, I’d say. At least you’ll have plenty of kindling wood. What else have we got?”
He unfolds a large-scale survey map, traces the topography of the property with his finger and whistles again. “Just as I thought, five thousand acres, but a third of it in the alpine zone – a waste of tussocks and snow grass. In spring it’s a swamp, in summer it’ll all be dried up and the rest of the year it’s under snow drifts. I’ll grant you a bit of mountain cattle grazing or agistment.”
“What is an ‘agistment’?”
“It means hiring out your land to some other bloke who needs more acres for his stock – there’s not much else you can do with it.”
“Very well, that’s the alpine zone, but what about the rest of the land?”
“That’s probably not so bad. You find one helluva difference once you come down from the plateau. But it’s arable land that hasn’t been farmed for years; it’ll be overrun with weeds, snakes, mozzies, rabbits – you name it.” His finger stops abruptly on a hard fence line. “Well, bugger me.”
“What have you found?” Brandt’s eyes follow the plump finger, which squats on a cleared, orderly expanse of enclosed paddocks, stockyards and terraced dams.
“You’re bordering on Tumbledown.”
“Tumbledown?”
“Don’t be put off by the name. Tumbledown is one of the grandest properties between Cooma and Tumut. It’s Milo’s place; bloody good, I can tell you.”
“And who is… Milo?”
“Mr Milo Hudson-Beck, son of the late Sir Alfred Hudson-Beck. Milo will be your next-door neighbour. There’s his homestead, right there.” The finger leaps to a scattering of black dots surrounding a large house. “Milo has more than a hundred thousand acres. He employs about twenty stockmen and any number of roustabouts according to the season.
“He’s an odd bloke, is Milo; he might be one of our bush aristocracy, but you won’t think so when you meet him. He’s a bit of a philosopher turned animal lover, and that’s not so good when you’ve inherited a beef-cattle station. I think there’s something crook about that part of the world, maybe it’s in the water. I reckon you’ll fit in beautifully, Otto, because everyone there’s stark crazy. Milo’s one of the worst; he’s as mad as a snake. When he’s not leaping fences on his grey thoroughbred, you’ll see him haring around the bush in his late father’s Rolls Royce or looping the loop in his deadly little plane at the Tumut flying club. They say he drinks like a barramundi too.”
“But not when he’s flying?”
“Especially when he’s flying. I warn you, Otto. Whether he’s been drinking or not, never go flying with Milo Hudson-Beck; the man’s a maniac.”
Henty pauses as if he’s just remembered something, he looks a little embarrassed. “Yet come to think of it, Otto, I may have been a bit too hard on Milo. I’ve been told that recently things have changed. They say he’s reformed – not much, but it’s a start. Apparently he’s taken up with an English sheila who lives down in Tumut. They say she’s keeping him in line, off the drink, I mean, but I wouldn’t bet on it. And by the way, Otto, you won’t tell people that I’ve been gossiping about Milo, will you, I’ve probably said too much already.”
“I think you might have, Tom, but no. I won’t say a thing.”
Henty grunts then returns to the map. “Now let’s get back to your land below the alpine zone.” He points to a scattering of riotous contours. “Well, I see you’ve got no shortage of steep gullies, swamp grass, treacherous ridges… and your own private billabong; here, do you see it? It’s right by the house and probably breeding up big fat mosquitoes; not good, Otto.
“And, hang on, what’s this?” He unscrews his fountain pen and uses the nib as a pointer. “I see you’ve got a good stand of pine trees.” Henty jabs at the map and looks up more cheerfully. “Those little beauties will be mature by now and should bring you in some sort of income to get you started. With the Sydney building boom, timber’s selling pretty well now. And, here we go, a couple of barns, three sheds, an outhouse and stables. By the way, can you ride a horse?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’ll need to. That Land Rover won’t get you around in the High Country snow, and when it rains in the autumn you’ll be forever bogged.”
Brandt hears his own voice lapse into monotone. “Yes, I can see that I’ll need to buy a horse.”
“Hello…” Henty’s nib settles like a bee on a tiny hatched square on a ridge at the highest tip of the tree zone. “What does it say here? I can’t make it out.”
Brandt squints over the tiny print. “Fuller’s Hut,” he says.
“Oh, is that all? Just a hut, so probably nothing more than a cattleman’s night shelter, rotten with white ants and infested by bush rats, snakes and huntsmen spiders. Which reminds me, white ants. They’re right little buggers. Don’t forget to check the stumps of your house. The place is more than a hundred years old, remember. If the stumps are original the place could fall down around your ears.”
“I see,” says Brandt in a despondent voice. He stands up and parcels up the documents for Henty to put in the bank’s safe. “Thanks for your advice, Tom, I should be getting back now.” He shakes his hand.
The bank manager gives him a pitiful look. “Sorry, Otto, but I think you’ve bought yourself a right load of trouble.”
Brandt pulls his shoulders back and tries to sound confident. “I’m an Australian now, Tom, with my very own bit of Australia. I may even surprise you.”
“Rather you than me, Otto.”
*
Outside, the sunny street does nothing to lift his spirits. If Henty had phrased his remarks with the deliberate intention of depressing him, he succeeded, but it’s not just Henty. The thought of farming evokes his youth: picking apples on his grandparents’ farm, long summers of hay bailing and picnics in the beech woods, and afterwards, when the academy had put him through the equestrian course, he remembers cantering through the Schwarzwald with Brigitte. They talked about buying a farm in Franconia, a mixed farm with hops, winter wheat, potatoes and sugar beet, and wide clover meadows for dairy cows. They planned an apiary in an orchard where th
ey’d plant apple, pear and walnut trees; perhaps even a vineyard.
He shuts his eyes and grinds his back teeth.
What might have been.
He diverts his thoughts to practicalities. At first, he plans to stay at the homestead only during weekends and holidays. Later, he will reduce the hours of his contract with the Authority and spend the extra time on his land. At the moment, he is relieved to be away from Henty’s stuffy office, his criticism and his platitudes. Tomorrow there’s another labour strike on the Snowy Scheme, so he’ll have the day off and, for the first time, walk on his own land.
Next morning, he loads the Land Rover with a bottle of chicory coffee, sugar, dried milk powder, tinned food, spare boots and a portable kerosene stove to boil water.
Brandt takes the Tumut Road past the gold camps and windswept slopes, with their scatterings of mountain white gentians, tiny snowy violets, eyebrights and paper daisies. Late skins of ice are cracking in the cattle troughs and the creeks are rippling with melt water. It is a clear breezy day with a few blobs of cloud speeding away like crazed sheep.
He had read that in 1839 a Polish nobleman had explored this vast High Country, even found Australia’s highest mountain, but he named nothing after himself, took nothing away and went home again, his honour intact.
As he descends to the Murrumbidgee valley, he opens the driver’s window and breathes the warmer air. It is November, a time when the sun draws out new resin from the clean-shaven trunks of the white gums and the air is fragrant with late wattle.
9
Brandt reaches Garigo Homestead just before noon. He swings the big gate open and drives along a farm road narrowed by rampant bracken ferns, and littered with bark, sticks and branches, which snap under his wheels and scare off the fidgeting wagtails.
Framed by a natural tunnel of gangling trees, the homestead looks cheerfully neglected, like a ragged child sitting in the mud. In fact, mud is the dominant feature in the foreground. It spreads itself like black chocolate along the banks and down to the shallows of a deep billabong shaded by curtains of drooping willows. At the approach of the Land Rover, three stately pelicans loosen their feathers to catch the wind and fly to an island of reeds. Brandt parks by the veranda, and, as he climbs out of the vehicle, a trio of peewits fluttering for spring insects fly away in alarm.
Still mindful of Henty’s forebodings, Brandt is relieved to find that the house is a solid Victorian dwelling set not on timber stumps but on solid brick pillars. He spits out a fly, then drags out his rucksack, climbs the steps to the veranda and unhitches from his belt a ring of heavy keys that would do credit to a gaoler. He unlocks the high front door and enters a traditional country weatherboard. The long hall is designed like a fish’s spine, with rooms on either side. Brandt runs his hands over the walls to find they are coated with thin, brittle plaster, which has broken away in parts to reveal stretched sackcloth pasted over with strips of newspaper. The smell of mould competes successfully with the general mustiness of the air.
He strikes a match and he holds it above his head to examine the pressed-tin ceiling, which is painted bottle green and embossed with stylised roses. When the flame goes out and he moves on, his foot knocks over something leaning against the wall. He strikes another match and sees it is an old family photo in a wooden frame. At least four generations are gathered around a bridal couple outside a country church. In the white margin below the group, someone with a neat copperplate hand has pencilled in a quotation:
“We too can love.”
Brandt grunts, then lays the picture face downwards on the hall table and carries on with his inspection. From where he is standing, the gloomy hall looks like the tube of a telescope; at its far end, sunlight glares through the grubby windows of the laundry and bathroom.
Now he starts to unlock and examine every room in the house. The six spacious fireplaces look cleaned out, but before next winter he will probably have to climb onto the roof to sweep the chimneys.
The furnishings that Henty mentioned lie under a coating of fine dust. They look sparse in these huge rooms, but they are more than ample for a man living on his own. Along with the heavy beds, wardrobes, armchairs, high bookcases and an obviously imported rosewood dining table, they include a piano, mantel wireless and a free-standing gramophone.
A huge kitchen houses two cabinets painted duck-egg blue and a fireclay butler’s sink served by two brass taps encrusted with verdigris. He imagines that, in the past, the whole family would have congregated around the bruised and scarred pine table. He runs his finger over its surface and discovers that, beneath the dust, the wood has been scrubbed white. In winter, the kitchen would have been kept warm by the cast-iron stove along the end wall. A maker’s plaque informs him it was cast by Enfields of Sheffield in 1887.
The dust sets him coughing, so he goes back outside to the veranda, then down the steps and across the khaki wilderness of a lawn to a shambolic orchard of unpruned trees, with sprays of blossom lost in the spring growth. Brandt identifies apples, cherries, pears, nectarines, peaches and apricots. Desiccated lichens of the old man’s beard species hang from the branches of a gigantic mulberry tree, planted no doubt when Queen Victoria was still a young woman. The abandoned cobwebs from last summer tremble in the wind like threadbare banners from the Middle Ages, and the garden paths are smothered by blackberry bushes and rampant lantana. The work here for one man looks Herculean, but Brandt tells himself that purgatorial exertion is exactly what he needs.
In one of the barns is a veteran Field Marshall tractor, cloaked in dust, which makes it look like a modish sculpture. Again, he starts coughing and he goes back out into the yard. If he is to live at Garigo on his days off, everything will depend on getting firewood. Some rotting logs are heaped beside a rusty shed. The estate agent had told him that warmer weather will bring out the snakes so one of his first jobs will be to get rid of that pile. In this country they take snakes seriously.
Hooked up inside a second barn, Brandt finds two blockbusters, a box of wedges and two sledgehammers, still greased. A heavy axe leans patiently against the wall waiting like a dog for him to take it outside.
After he has wiped the dust and grease from its head, he finds the blade surprisingly sharp. Forty yards from the shed is a dead tree, which he suspects had been ring-barked more than a century before he was born. The tree stands well clear of the house and outbuildings. He takes note of the weight distribution of its remaining branches and the slight lean of its trunk, so he is able to estimate the direction of its fall. On an impulse, he strides over to it, axe in hand.
But he finds that Australian timber is not like the compliant softwoods he used to chop in the Tyrol. At his first blow the axe bounces and the vibration resounds along Brandt’s body from his hand to his pelvis. He steps back and tries again, another bounce. Now he strikes the trunk at an acute angle, but only cuts out a chip the size of a thumb. He goes on chopping, putting his back into every swing. Fifteen minutes later with sweat running into his eyes and his biceps cramping he concludes that at this rate he’ll be lucky to fell the tree in three days.
He pushes the hair back from his forehead and is just considering if he should restrict his wood fuel to fallen branches and rotting stumps when he hears, coming up behind him, the purr of a beautifully tuned engine. He turns round to confront, to his amazement, a classic Rolls Royce Tourer with white-wall tyres and its canvas roof folded well back.
The driver switches off the engine and gets out. He is about fifty, and his cerulean eyes are sunk deeply into a tanned and heavily wrinkled face. With his salt-and-pepper beard and a moustache, he reminds Brandt of photos he’d seen of Ernest Hemingway. He wears a good quality red-checked shirt and an Akubra hat with an ancient line of wear-and-tear rents along its rim. The man gives an awkward smile as he surveys Brandt’s attempt at being an axeman.
“Over-seasoned peppermint gum,” he says. “So
old it’s almost petrified into stone. You won’t even scratch it like that. Either you get yourself a two-handled bush job or, if you’re on your own, one of those new Yankee chain saws. I’d go for the bush saw, if I were you. Anyway, I’ve come to introduce myself. Milo Hudson-Beck. I’m your neighbour. I knew you were home because you are guilty of the worst crime a farmer can ever commit. You left your gate open.”
“Otto Brandt.” He puts down the axe and goes over to shake hands.
“You’re a German?”
“Yes.”
“OK.”
Brandt senses a more cautious tone in Milo’s voice. “Come into the house,” he says, “I’ve got kerosene and a portable picnic stove, so I can offer you some coffee.”
“I drink tea, Otto. I know you continental blokes don’t drink tea, but I think you should.” Milo pauses and looks Brandt so straight in the eye that the German feels uncomfortable. “Now, it so happens I keep my own supply of tea in the boot. I’ve got a proper caddy, a tin of Sunshine milk powder and a jar of sugar, and, just in case you were wondering, I’ve got a billy can too.”
Brandt defers to Milo’s expertise as the Australian commences a brewing procedure rivalling the Japanese tea ceremony. First, he insists on filling the billy can directly from the water tank by the house. “Got to keep the oxygen in,” he says. “Pipes can’t do that.”
Next, he strides into the kitchen, lights the wick of Brandt’s picnic stove and places the billy squarely on the rim. The ‘proper caddy’ he brings in from the car turns out to be a battered tin of Bushell’s tea leaves. “Watch for the boil, Otto,” he says. “If you’re too early, the tea won’t draw, but if you’re too late, she’ll run out of oxygen – and that means no taste. Wait for it.”
Orphaned Leaves Page 9
