Year in the Valley

by Jackie French

  It is frightening to be so powerless – something we’re not used to as humans – knowing that weather is irrevocable and has no malice, hears no appeal.

  September 13

  Sue is back, her hair a bit wild. She walked down the mountain to visit us – about four kilometres – but she likes the walk. We sat in the kitchen, drinking tea. She propped her feet up on a kitchen chair so I could see the silver ankle-bracelet she bought in Singapore, and told me about last month’s adventures as a shearers’ cook in Nyngan.

  ‘There was this one shearer. “Cookie…” he said to me, sounding really worried. Shearers can never remember your name when you’re the cook, they see so many of them. I looked up from the gravy and said: “What’s up, Gary?”

  ‘He said: “Cookie, how would you feel if a bloke was undressing you and he fell asleep halfway through?”

  ‘So I said: “Well, tell me more, Gary, give me details.”’

  Sue held out her mug for more tea.

  ‘What happened then?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, it turns out they’d all gone into town, the whole mob of them after the shed was finished for the day, and they were all drunk as skunks. Turns out he’d found two girls, was trying the old “two birds in the hand” trick, but then he got so drunk one of them gave up on him, so he took the other one up to the hotel bedroom and it was three o’clock in the morning by then, and he’d been shearing since 7.30 the morning before…

  ‘“And I was in the middle of undressing her and I reckon I must just have fallen asleep. I mean, Cookie, how would you feel if a bloke did that to you?”’

  ‘I just looked at him, and said: “At three o’clock in the morning? Gary, it’d be a blessed release.” And he laughed, and it was all right after that.’

  This was Nyngan, 45 degrees Celsius in the shade as long as you don’t have the stove on. It’s a flat, orange world according to Sue, where the main topic of conversation is how far up the walls the flood marks have gone, and there are emus instead of trees.

  Sue, Richard and the boys came from Manchester to Australia eighteen months ago. Their house in Major’s Creek burnt down – it was underinsured, and now they’re building their own out of stone, very slowly.

  It’ll be a palace when they’re done – not at all like the wood and fibro one that burnt down (they’d lit a halloween pumpkin and thought the candle was out but it wasn’t and it burnt through the floor), but even a house that you build yourself out of stone from local paddocks and quarries costs money.

  So Sue has gone cooking for shearers so she and Richard can finish the place, while he looks after the boys at home. Her boss rang her on the Thursday night and said she had to be in Nyngan to give the men dinner on Sunday. She’d only just got her P plates, and the only driving she’d done in Australia had been into Canberra a couple of times for a modelling job. It’s more than 1000 kilometres to Nyngan.

  ‘That first Sunday was the worst. I stayed in town the night before, and all the men on the street looked at me as though I was from another planet…there’s no way a woman could go into a pub by herself without having a few blokes join her. I went into a Chinese restaurant, and the bloke at the next table started talking to me, and I thought, well, he’s another human being, so I said hello back. He wanted to know where I was from and what I was doing. He didn’t have a good word for shearers, he’d have you believe it was going to be gang rape and the overseer looking on. I didn’t believe it, though. I mean I was necessary to them if they wanted to eat. I didn’t think it could be that bad.

  ‘He asked me how much I was getting, then he offered me $100 a day to go with him instead. I said no thanks. At least I only had to cook for the shearers.

  ‘I drove out to the shed next day wondering what I’d got myself into. I wondered even more when I got there. They promised me the stores’d be there by 8 a.m., and they weren’t there by 4 p.m., and I was panicking, thinking: “There are seventeen men going to rush in here at 6.30 and they’ll all want to be fed and what am I going to give them?”

  ‘They’d promised someone would have two carcasses ready for me, that they’d have killed them the day before, but they hadn’t, and all I could lay my hands on were two great frozen legs of mutton. So I chopped them with a cleaver and we all had chops and mashed potatoes and frozen peas for dinner. It was eleven o’clock by the time I’d cleaned up, and the sweat was still running down my back and the flies were still into everything. Then, when I opened my bedroom door, eight swallows flew out, and I remembered I’d forgotten my torch – there wasn’t any light of course – and by the time I’d gone back and got it the swallows were in again, and every time I’d push a couple out, three more would fly back in. So there I was, trying to sleep with eight swallows hanging over my face, and it was too hot to sleep much anyway, even though I was exhausted, and I knew I had to start cooking again at 4.30.’

  ‘What did you give them?’

  Sue takes another biscuit. ‘I hardly ate up there,’ she explains. ‘Too hot. Well, at 5.30 I’d start breakfast – chops and more chops and bacon and eggs and sliced tomato and sausages and gravy. Lots of gravy if they wanted it. There was toast too, and cereal. Then I’d start work on the food for lunch – any leftover sausages and bacon and the cake I’d made that morning.

  ‘By then it was 45 degrees and there were no fly screens, no fans, and no way you could store the cooked food. At least the cookhouse had a wooden floor you could sweep.

  ‘The men left at seven o’clock, so I’d spend the rest of the day making cakes for smoko, and peeling buckets of vegetables, and boning meat so I could give them pies, because you couldn’t give them roasts every night. A normal night they’d eat two legs and two shoulders and a bucket full of potatoes and half a bucket of carrots and a quarter of a bucket of frozen peas, which was all I had for greens, then gravy in a big, big pan. I always gave them a proper gravy, I hate the powdered stuff.

  ‘Puddings were almost impossible to make because of the heat – the butter’d melt before I could stir it in – and the puddings were stale almost as soon as they came out of the oven, because there wasn’t anywhere you could cool them down. I made some Chelsea buns the first day and they were like rocks even before they’d cooled down.

  ‘I tried to make them bread and butter pudding once. I think you make it differently in Australia anyway. In England we make it with buttered bread, then another layer and another, with the custard poured on top, so it comes out solid like a cake.

  ‘Well, I tried it up at Nyngan, and they were hysterical, they couldn’t believe such a thing ever came out of a kitchen. I put it on the bench after I took it out of the oven, and it went as hard as concrete, and one of the men said: “What’ve you got there, Cookie?” Well, I wouldn’t show it to him, I was so ashamed of it. He tried to grab it, so I picked it up and ran out into the yard with it, and they all followed me, and there I was running round the yard with this great lumpen pudding clasped to my bosom and they were chasing after me, till finally I started gouging out handfuls and hurled it at them.’

  I must have been looking at Sue in horror, because she grinned.

  ‘It was great,’ she said. ‘I loved it. Can’t wait till the next job. Are there any more of these biscuits?’

  September 14

  I traipsed down to the chooks with the scrap bucket this morning. Bryan usually takes it down when he goes down to the shed, but he had to go to town on fire business.

  Bryan is Captain, Radio Communications, Tallaganda Shire – at least, a title something along those lines. An impressive title – the new reorganisation of NSW Bush Fire Brigades is rich in titles and bureaucracy. Unfortunately they are also alienating many of the stalwarts who have fought fires for forty years and don’t take kindly to newcomers telling them to fill in forms in triplicate, and reallocating ‘resources’ – often equipment the locals have spent years raising money to buy.

  They expect a bad fire season this year – but then I’ve never know
n a year when someone didn’t say: ‘I reckon it’ll be a bad fire season this year all right.’

  In the absence of Bryan I scraped the last of the porridge into the bucket and had a brief hunt through the fridge for leftovers, then wandered down towards the chooks. (Gabby butting my ankles all the way, at least till we got to the chook shed; I think the noise of the chooks confuses her, so she hung about under the elderberry tree till I returned.)

  It’s peaceful watching chooks. I can see why Bryan’s positioned his workbench so he can watch them every day. There’s the sheer stereotypicality (is there such a word? there should be) of their social life – the randy roosters, submissive hens, the odd furtive one dashing off to lay an egg in forbidden ground (i.e. my lavender garden). There’s the cartoon humour when Rodney Rooster tries to mount one of Arnold Schwarzenfeather’s hens, and Arnie chases Rodney around the garden; but mostly they’re just peaceful.

  They enjoy the chook bucket. Scraps to us are fillet steak and bearnaise sauce to them. I realise too how much the chook bucket says about our lives.

  There were never any scraps in my father’s kitchen, no drifts of spilt flour either. Most houses seem to have much tidier kitchens than ours. Ours is crammed with food and too much furniture. (I’m tempted to say with more living too.)

  I’m always amazed in other people’s houses – foraging for bread or Vegemite or cereal in the morning – how little actual food they have on hand; how many houses keep no flour (plain, corn, arrowroot, wholemeal and self-raising), and no rice (brown and white, long and short grain for risotto or puddings). Not to mention no dried fruit, breadcrumbs, olive oil, strings of garlic, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, vanilla extract, rosewater, cans of emergency tomatoes and tomato paste, asparagus, stock, smoked oysters, tinned salmon, at least six assorted varieties of pasta, four sorts of sugar, and the other essentials of our larder. Fewer and fewer people actually seem to cook nowadays…

  But to get back to the bucket. The gluggy porridge, in horrid greyish lumps. The chooks loved that. Yesterday’s stale bread. The scrapings of last night’s asparagus soufflé, last week’s roast chicken bones (chooks are quite happy to be cannibals either unwittingly or knowingly – they’re savage brutes under those sweet feathers – anyone who thinks chooks are vegetarians hasn’t seen them with a nest of baby rats or a young snake, beetle larvae and the rest), Bryan’s boiled egg shell, three greenish cheese rinds, a mass of silverbeet stalks, outside lettuce (still with slugs attached), beetroot and dandelion leaves, an onion skin, quite a lot of that paper stuff that garlic is naturally wrapped in, a trout head (yesterday’s lunch), Bryan’s potato skins (I eat mine) and a hunk of pumpkin rind, a scrape of hollandaise sauce that I couldn’t bear to throw away till this morning and E’s soggy Vita Brits – he really didn’t want the second bowlful.

  Today’s a normal sort of chook-bucket day. Fridge-cleaning-out days are much more lavish; and once a year or so the cupboards get cleaned out too, usually before we go away for a week and lock up the chooks (for fear of foxes), so I toss out the stale stuff in partial compensation.

  The veg garden gets weeded then too: barrow loads of old turnips and parsnips gone to seed and chickweed and spent bean plants, about a metre deep in the chook run to keep them going till we get home, with the stale Vita Brits (E changes his cereal allegiance with the season, so there’s always packets of stale stuff on hand), breadcrumbs left open too long, soggy Milk Arrowroots, forgotten Saos, the quarter of slightly furry Christmas cake that I’ve finally accepted we’ll never eat, the tin of biscuits a relative gave us as a Christmas present (our friends know we never eat tinned biscuits; I don’t know what even the best taste of, but it isn’t butter, sugar and flour)…

  Sometimes I wonder what households who don’t have chooks do with their scraps. Can they really bear to throw them away?

  But maybe our eating and throwing away habits are just conditioned by having chooks. Nothing is ever really wasted. Perhaps most households don’t have scraps at all.

  September 16

  Spent the morning chasing round, black cattle back down the valley. I discovered the fattest munching my daffodils when I went out to feed the wombats. Water’s getting scarce down the creek, and there’s not much grass either. Not that there’s much water or grass up here, but at least there are a few pickings – and the daffodils.

  Got back to find that Chocolate wombat has dug a large hole under the roses – parsnip hunting. Parsnips go down about twenty centimetres. This hole is about a metre deep – maybe he thought there might be more buried underneath. Or maybe he just had fun digging.

  Gabby has yet to dig anything and still doesn’t graze much either. She mostly sleeps, or follows Bryan’s ankles.

  The bowerbirds are circling the chook run like vultures trying to find a way in to the wheat in the hopper; and the lyrebirds are scratching up any place we put the hose, and not even scampering when you run after them till they’ve got the particular worm they’re after; and I have the feeling there are ten thousand wallabies sniffing the air and saying: ‘There’s greenery that way, mate – let’s go.’

  At least there’s cloud today – high, grey cloud that might have three drops of moisture if you squeezed it. You can almost smell the drought coming, a pervasive horror that’s spread through the whole community. It’s dry now but there’s much worse to come.

  E said yesterday: ‘Why are the gum trees dropping their leaves so early? It’s not that dry yet.’ Then a pause, ‘I suppose they know,’ he said.

  Hot Dried-Peach Salad

  This salad goes well with any rich, fairly plain meat dish, or with potatoes baked in their skins.

  10 dried peach halves

  4 cups boiling water

  juice of 2 lemons

  2 garlic cloves, crushed

  1 firm apple, like Granny Smith, chopped

  1 teaspoon chopped parsley

  1 teaspoon chopped walnuts or macadamias

  4 tablespoons olive oil

  Soak the peach halves in the boiling water overnight. Next day, drain well, pat off excess moisture and leave on a tray in a warm place to dry for at least 2 hours.

  Mix the other ingredients, add the peaches, place in an ovenproof dish and place in a hot oven (220°C) for 10 minutes, or till warm (don’t leave for any longer or the peaches will lose their shape and the apple and nuts will cook). The essence of this dish is the hot soft peaches and the hot crisp nuts and apple.

  Serve hot.

  September something…

  I planted the first tomatoes today – much too early, but the wind was warm on my face and the valley was yelling ‘Plant me, plant me’. So I did.

  I know the old English saying, don’t plant tomatoes till you can sit on the soil with a bare bum, which makes sense, as the soil is where the roots are, and even if the air is warm the soil is still cold, much too cold for me to try the bare-bum trick. But I planted them anyway, and lettuce and rocket and a stretch of lawn thyme that hopefully by next autumn I’ll be rolling on (I’ve always wanted a thyme lawn to gambol on).

  Gabby decided to help plant the tomatoes; which basically meant butting me from every possible angle while treading on the seedlings. She doesn’t like to be more than a whisker length away from my feet, which makes working outside difficult. What she really wants to do is curl up in my shadow and go to sleep, preferably with me stroking her tummy; somehow I have to convince her that wombats sleep in holes, away from the sunlight that can be deadly for them.

  Picked the largest head of broccoli ever today – the stem thicker than my wrist. Also cauliflower (which we’re sick of – boiled, with cheese sauce, stir-fried with almonds, made into soup, cauliflower quiche with hollandaise sauce or garlic and lemon juice or mustardy vinaigrette, or stewed with cumin and tomatoes, or curried).

  I’ll turn this one into potato and cauliflower soup, then give the rest of the crop away. Caulies don’t do well at Giles and Victoria’s up the mountain, for some reason, so they�
��ll like them…and what they don’t eat the chooks can have.

  Potato and Cauliflower Soup

  1 cup cauliflower

  2 potatoes

  4 cups chicken stock

  2 teaspoons chopped dill leaves

  1 glop of cream

  Chop the cauliflower and potatoes, simmer in the chicken stock with the dill leaves. Mash well with a potato masher (the slight chunkiness is nice). Add more dill if the cauli was stale and tasteless, then a drop of cream.

  Serve hot and pretend it isn’t cauliflower.

  September something…

  Just enough rain to sting your face in bitter wind. Everyone in town is making jokes about it:

  ‘Hey, Les, what’s that stuff out there?’

  ‘Dunno, Steve, it’s been so long I can’t remember. What d’yer reckon, snow?’

  The drops were flat, like they really might have been melted snowflakes, and stopped before they’d properly wet the ground. The windscreen was opaque as the last six weeks of dust oozed down the glass. But at least the cool weather is keeping everything from wilting.

  Collected three days’ worth of mail in town, then sat in the cafe and opened it. The menu looked disgustingly familiar – cauliflower quiche and broccoli soup and silverbeet lasagne and chicken and cauliflower curry – all based on local produce that is the same as the stuff we’re eating from our garden. All very well in theory but not if you eat fresh and local all the time. I had good unhealthy scones instead.

  You get the best scones in the world at the cafe. Jenny and Natalie and Angela spent six weeks testing every scone recipe they could find: I think this one dates from 1910. They also tested the best biscuit recipes too, for months before the cafe opened – which was great fun for all their friends.