Year in the Valley

by Jackie French

  (‘It broke my heart to sell them,’ said a man in the bank on Friday. ‘But the bastards have been pushing through the fences for the last month…I’ve had them on the road for the past week to get some pick…I just couldn’t hold onto them any longer.’)

  Last drought, the one that ended in ’83, many of the farmers round here took their stock on the ‘long paddock’ – had them trucked to wetter areas and kept them moving along the roads.

  (‘We lived in a tent,’ a farmer’s wife reminisced last week. ‘The water we washed in went to the dogs next and when they’d finished to the horses. Our biggest luxury was Saos and cheese at morning tea. You just kept moving and looking at the sky.’)

  No one I’ve talked to will do it again. In a long drought there’s finally nowhere left you can take them. The philosophy this drought seems to be: sell, then wait.

  (‘It seems like I’ve been watching the sky for sixty years,’ said a friend last week. ‘It either dries up on you or you’ve got a flood. It’s wearing me down too much this time. I reckon this time I’ve had enough. I’m selling the whole place this time. I’m going to retire.’)

  Droughts aren’t sudden things. They creep up on you. You’re lulled by the still-green grass and don’t notice the lowering water table till the clay starts glaring at the edges of the dam or a day’s hot spell shrinks the creek and the cooler night doesn’t bring the water back.

  The ground water seems to have gone much faster this drought than in the last – wells which survived for years last time are mud now. Springs that seeped till ’82 last time are dry. Maybe it’s because there are more people now depending on the ground water. Maybe as the land is cleared there is just less water stored in the litterless soil. I suspect we use more water now, too – nearly all houses round here have flush toilets, using enough water to keep a sheep every time they’re flushed; there are more lawns and gardens…just more people living on the land.

  Some people seem to know there’s going to be a drought even when it’s raining – the pattern of the rain is wrong. I think the roos around here knew first – they came down from the ridges last spring, even though the grass was still soft up there. They haven’t done that since the last drought.

  Roos stop breeding in a drought. There are quite a lot of roos about a year old, peering out of the bushes or panicking as you walk past – but there aren’t any bulging pouches, even though there’s still a bit of feed down here. It’s too early yet to tell if the wombats have done the same – you usually start to see young ones round here in late spring – but there probably won’t be many.

  There are wild ducks in the creek again and white-faced herons. This seems to be their drought refuge. It’s been ten years since they were last here. I wonder if they have a memory of safe places or if every time it’s dry they have to search for water.

  Someone’s suggested teaching the school kids rain dances just on the off-chance.

  It begins to seem eerily like the drought and depression of the 1890s, when after every scattered fall of rain farmers would plant corn and hope to get it through to feed the horses.

  My grandmother remembered how her mother bought bottles of lemonade to keep her plants alive (her husband wouldn’t spare any water for the garden – so she wangled extra lemonade from the housekeeping) and clothes were stiff from washing in brown water and your bloomers chafed your legs. All you saw or heard was drought in those days.

  Now you’ve got the unreality of TV at night – soap operas where water always comes from the tap and lawns are green and nothing depends on the weather, just the whims of the people next door. (There’s much bitterness now about the proposed Welcome Reef Dam which will occupy a lot of this shire – properties and bush lost so Sydney people can keep lawns green – and locals won’t get any of the water at all.)

  A lot of my grandmother’s stories have become funny over the years, like the one about her warning the gardener at lunch that the tank’s tap was dripping, then my uncle (aged three) coming in proudly at afternoon tea, announcing: ‘Well, I reckon them taps won’t be dripping again’ – he’d left the tap on till the tank was empty. Then there was the time he pulled up all her dahlias and dipped them in the sink ‘to get their roots wet’. There were games of ping-pong and Scrabble – the winner got first bath – and my grandmother has been unbeatable at ping-pong and Scrabble ever since.

  The others dipped themselves in two inches of water that got progressively thicker as the night went on. You wore a handkerchief over your nose on the way to school to block the smell of dead animals round the dam – a friend dyed her hanky blue to match her dress and the dye ran into the sweat on her face and she was stained for days, too embarrassed to go to school…

  People don’t seem to make jokes about droughts like they do about other misfortunes. Maybe it’s tempting fate.

  You don’t realise how used you are to seeing cattle on the hills till they’re gone.

  (‘Hell,’ said a man looking at the cakes at the Braidwood Show last year. ‘It’d make more sense if they had a recipe to make it rain.’)

  October 28

  We could see the first blush on the peaches on the way down to the school bus this morning, E dragging the comb we keep on the dashboard through his hair and checking his shoes for goosedung, me hoping I didn’t have to get out of the car so no-one would see my purple socks. (Not that there’s anything wrong with purple socks, but my skirt is red and green and they don’t match.) The new paddocks are full of little green dots – capsicums. I had wondered what they were as we drove past last week – they were too small and too late for new peach trees.

  Back at the house the scent of magnolia hit me like a wave – evergreen magnolia, the tiny purple flowers hidden in the dark green leaves, but the scent is overwhelming. It’s a good time of year for scents: the hot breath of curry bush just starting to waft down from the terraces (on a midsummer day it’s so strong and tempting it’s often sent me up to Braidwood for fixings for beef vindaloo); roses of course, fifty different scents (each rose has its own perfume, all different, sweet, citrussy or fruity, not just the whiff of Woolies’ perfume-counter bath salts smell); and of course the orange blossom.

  Why have we forgotten orange blossom? Middle Eastern countries of course still celebrate it. Even our culture used to strew it in front of brides, scent cakes with orange-flower water, rinse linen in it, mix it in perfumes. It’s the most exquisite scent.

  I try to remember to keep some of it, just squashing the flowers down in a jar and topping them up with vodka (you can use brandy but then you get the brandy flavour too). One day I might even get my own distillery but till then there’s always Orange Blossom Jam.

  Orange Blossom Jam

  You can use this recipe with any fragrant flowers – roses (strong stinky ones), dianthus for a clove scent (good with cold meat and especially with hot turkey), primrose flowers or violets and any of the citrus – but orange blossom is my favourite.

  2 kilograms apples (different apples give different flavours, but all are good)

  2 litres water

  2 kilograms white sugar

  8 cups orange blossom (fairly well packed down)

  Chop the apples (don’t core or peel). Simmer in the water till soft, add the sugar and simmer for another 10 minutes, stirring well so the sugar dissolves. Cool, then strain into a pan. For straining, I use a sieve lined with an old clean tea towel. You need to make sure as much of the pulp is strained away as possible.

  Add the flowers to the liquid in the pan and simmer for 10 minutes. Cool again, strain again, then simmer till a little just sets in cold water. Bottle and seal.

  This jam should be pale green or pale pink – depending on whether you used red- or green-skinned apples – with the most gentle fragrance you can imagine. Too good to bruise the scent with bread – just spoon it up by itself, or eat it with cream on scones or pikelets – cream buffers the fragrance from the coarser smell of flour.

  One anno
yed wombat on the back doormat – Chocolate. He hasn’t had any carrots or wombat biscuits for three days, mostly because he hasn’t come out till midnight, by which time we’re asleep – or trying to be, amid the geek geek geek and tearing up of cardboard boxes and other ways wombats have of attracting your attention. I sprinkled some wombat biscuits under the grape vine and he almost ran me over to eat them.

  Gabby joined him. Chocolate still doesn’t object to Gabby – maybe she doesn’t put out the right signals to say she’s a wombat. She shared the biscuits then went to sleep in the herb bed. I’ll have to wake her up when the sun comes over the ridge. You can’t rely on Gabby to wake up to save her life.

  November 1

  The sky was thick as mushroom soup this afternoon, the thunder rolling like a helicopter up the gorge. But the clouds had purple knees, not green – not hail clouds, thank heavens. The crop’s still safe. Hail at this stage would be disaster.

  ‘Look, those peaches are red already. When will the shed be open?’ demanded E.

  ‘In a few weeks. Maybe,’ I say.

  November 2

  E came home distressed about conversations at school – farmers’ sons talking about roo hunts.

  ‘But why do you kill them?’ he asked.

  ‘Because they eat the grass.’ As though that explained it all.

  ‘Cattle eat grass too,’ said E.

  ‘But we’re not farming bloody roos!’ and the kids laughed, as though it was self evident.

  Wildlife is a luxury that farmers decide they can’t afford in droughts; why should they bear the cost of city sentimentality? (They do have a point – there need to be land tax rebates to repay farmers for any wildlife sanctuaries they support.)

  ‘Joey’s dad’s young oats were all eaten by wood ducks,’ E said. ‘They woke up one morning and the whole paddock had been eaten to the soil.’

  Not that killing roos or wood ducks will make a difference in the long run – there’s not enough grass for stock or wildlife, and if the drought goes on too long both will probably die.

  The peaches are in full leaf now; they’ll never look this good again – they get tatty after peach picking and droop into autumn.

  November 3

  Chocolate had his nose in my shoes when I came out tonight, as though to say: I can smell her, she must be here somewhere. I put them on and he was most disconcerted – as I would be, if someone somehow came apart and joined themselves together again.

  November 4

  ‘They’re out again,’ announced Bryan, and they were…millions of flying termites fluttering through the darkness. I have to keep emptying my underwear – a wingless flying ant wriggling across your nipple is a feeling that is hard to describe. Once they’ve flown they drop their wings and wriggle to a hiding place, like in my bra or under the table (wingless termites in the bed aren’t so crash-hot either), and next morning the floor is thick with wings, so every breeze gusts them into small grey eddies.

  Flying termites usually means rain, but the sky is still clear, stars so near you could almost touch them (maybe I can but am just too lazy to reach up). I’ve decided that birds and insects can foretell rain; but only about as well as we can.

  (Any other year I too would have thought this heat was building up to rain; but I just don’t believe in rain any more.)

  The grass on the hill looks like dry matches that have been stuck among the rocks. Not a single cloud today or yesterday or the day before.

  (And that taxi driver last week in Sydney had the hide to say: ‘Couldn’t be better weather we’ve been having, could it?’)

  November 7

  The ants were right. So were the lizards, rolling and tearing at each other as they often do before a change – and the birds and bull ants…

  It’s been raining for three days. Two days of gentle moistness, just enough moisture to thicken the air and send green shoots above the brown; then a day and a night of real rain, solid and steady, so the creek is washing through the rocks again and the trees look like they’ve been washed – which they have. You forget how much dust coats everything till it’s gone.

  The tree fern at the gate put out seven inches of new frond last night.

  It’s not a drought breaker but it’ll keep us going for a while. At least it might stop the lyrebirds ripping up the garden.

  You could almost see the peaches swell this morning.

  November 8

  Today we harvested our cherry crop, all six of them, which is a hundred per cent improvement on last year, when we got three. (I’m not sure how many the birds got.)

  Possums like cherries too; perhaps our possums are getting short-sighted – or just too stuffed – to have ignored this lot.

  Room-temperature cherries taste different from chilled cherries, and sun-warmed cherries taste different too; and of course there are the different cherry varieties, though I have to admit that for me the bigger and blacker and squishier the better.

  I can never bear to cook with cherries when they’re in season. It’s only later, in winter, that I get cravings for cherry jam and cherry strudel and cherry clafouti. I just don’t have the strength of will to preserve them in their season – all I get my hands on are eaten. A preserved cherry is only a memory of a cherry, anyway, a reminder of the delights of last year and pleasures to come – unlike apricots and plums, which turn into something quite different when they are preserved.

  I offered a pitted cherry to Gabby just to see what she’d do but she ignored it and sat waiting for her carrot, which just adds to my opinion of her intelligence. The mange/eczema is looking better – the new cream did soothe it – in fact there’s hair growing on all the bald patches, so she’s piebald and looks ridiculous, especially when she’s stretched out on the paving eating carrots, toes stretched fore and aft, looking like a doormat someone has shaved by accident. I suppose she likes the warmth on her stomach.

  Every other wombat is down its burrow during the day now the weather’s hotter but Gabby still comes out at lunchtime, and if she suffers mild heat exhaustion maybe she doesn’t notice in the general confusion of her mind.

  It’s easy to laugh, but I think Gabby may be a real tragedy. She’s domesticated, but not really a domestic animal, her life lacking the subtle wombat pleasures, so she really is just the shell of a wombat, no matter how lovable; the joys of soft damp earth and the smell of dusk when the grass is sweetest with the dew, the pleasures of patrolling a territory and leaving your mark, are lost to her. (Gabby leaves her dung in a pile outside the powerhouse door or on the garden steps – somewhere we have to notice it – they’re messages left for us, not other wombats.)

  ‘When will the peaches be ready?’ asks E, bouncing in excitement.

  ‘Soon. Next week. Maybe,’ I say.

  Boned Chicken with Peaches or Cherries

  This is my quintessential dinner-party/picnic/guests-to-impress-for-luncheon dish. If you’ve ever had it at my place you know I’m trying to impress you or I like you or I’m just feeling gluttonous. It’s one of my favourite foods but too fiddly to bother cooking it for myself – which is a mistake. Wasn’t it Norman Douglas who said ‘Nothing is too good for every day?’ And he’s right – life is far too short to be grudging with pleasures…

  To get back to the stuffed chook. It looks impressive; it tastes impressive; it can be made at least three days beforehand; it slices well (but should be carried unsliced to a picnic).

  Serve it on cold days with spuds sliced in a baking dish and covered with cream and slowly cooked till thoroughly brown on top; eat it on hot days with excellent brown bread and a salad of chopped beetroot (not the canned stuff), peeled orange segments, walnuts and mesclun lettuce and an orange vinaigrette (1 part orange juice to 2 parts olive oil; salt and garlic to taste; and a good dollop of French mustard).

  Depending on how thinly you carve it and how substantial the accompaniments are, one stuffed chook feeds four gluttonous or ten abstemious people.

  Use a h
ome-grown, happy-lifed chook if possible. Each battery chook you consume probably sets your karma back two millennia.

  1.8 kilograms large chicken

  1 onion, chopped

  2 tablespoons butter

  4 garlic cloves, crushed

  1 cup breadcrumbs, preferably home-crumbled from good white bread (but we can’t have everything, can we?)

  juice of 1 lemon

  2 tablespoons chopped pistachio nuts

  6 silverbeet leaves, dipped in boiling water for 10 seconds then their stems cut out

  1 cup chopped dried peaches (or 1 cup pitted fresh cherries), covered with boiling water for an hour then drained

  Bone the chicken by placing it breast-side down and cut the skin along the backbone. Gently squeeze the flesh each side of the chicken till you get to the legs and wings. Cut off the wing tips. Slice the outer edges of the wings and legs and peel their flesh back. Now proceed to peel the flesh down to the breastbone on both sides. You now have a messy flap of chicken. Fold the thighs and wings back into the chicken. Set aside while you preheat the oven to 200°C and prepare the stuffing.

  To make the stuffing, sauté the onion in the butter till tender. Add the garlic and stir for 10 seconds. Add the crumbs, lemon juice and pistachios. Mix well.

  Place the chicken in a greased roasting pan. Layer the silverbeet leaves over it. Top with an evenish layer of stuffing. Cover with peaches or cherries. Bring both sides of the chicken up to the middle and tie with string every few inches.

  Leave the chicken stuffing-edge upwards and roast for 1 hour, basting with its own fat at least twice.