Year in the Valley

by Jackie French

  Turn it over and cook for another 30 minutes to brown the other side.

  Wrap in foil till cool.

  November 9

  I walked up to the Dragon Pool with E this afternoon. The sun is high enough now to reach between the cliffs, so the clamminess of winter has disappeared and the gorge is full of dapples.

  There is a place there, a flat stone among the maidenhair under the backhousia trees, where I go to sit and think, or not to think really, just to absorb. It’s just up from the cascades, smooth rock and smoother water which is a special place for E; memories of years of tobogganing down the waterslide, into the deep round pool under the native figs – the rock is slippery with waterweed and ten thousand years of floods, and you can slide for hours till your bum gets raw.

  I don’t know if the cascades mean more to E than that – special places aren’t things you talk about, especially to your parents.

  When I was a child I had a place I dreamed about, especially during maths lessons or on the way to school. It was a headland rising from the beach, half cut off from the land, carpet green beneath the wind. The sea around was purple blue, as though it sucked the colour from the sky. The rocks below were very black. As you walked closer you could see rabbit tracks in crossword puzzles up the slope. Wallabies blinked from salty bushes.

  You had to walk to it. It seemed a long way when I was a child. My mother lugged the basket with towels and sandwiches and my brother and I rolled the watermelon over the sandhills. It should have been easy to roll it down, but it wasn’t. It kept on burying its head in the sand.

  There seemed to be miles of sandhills, all held together by spider webs of grass. We’d heave the melon up one slope and kick it down the next. As far as I remember it never shattered; there were no rocks till you reached the tiny beach hidden in the elbow of the headland.

  It was a very small beach for Queensland – a sharp sickle. The sand was very white and there was never the debris of shells and seaweed like other beaches had in a series of ripples from successive high tides. I suppose the headland sheltered it. There was no surf either, just dandruffy ripples that my younger brothers and sister battered their bums against while I climbed the headland.

  It was the first natural area I ever explored by myself, probably because the entrance was so narrow. If bodgies or bikies arrived I suppose my mother could have barricaded the entrance with driftwood, Horatius like, wielding the watermelon rinds or slapping the intruders with sandy towels till I came down. It wasn’t likely though. There was nothing there that would tempt anyone who didn’t love the place, as we did.

  I’ve never felt as free as I did on that headland, not even in the early years here, without house or family, wandering with a hat, hot feet and not much else from rock to rock; but even then I knew that place was mine (or I was its) and the responsibility to keep it safe was always lurking.

  Back in my childhood there was only the balloon of the sky above, the wind and the sand, the seagulls, and the white tongues of the sea below, curling into the black rocks. If you kept your back to the land there was nothing landbased at all; even if you turned round there was nothing human to be seen. Even our picnic was hidden by the bulk of grass.

  I went back there six years ago. I’d told my friend to expect a sacred place. Of course it wasn’t.

  The sandhills had been levelled by mining. You could park right above the bay, opposite a shop that sold fish and chips and magazines and black bananas. There was broken glass where we’d eaten our watermelon and tepid corned-beef sandwiches and my brother had lost a tooth in the white sand (and we couldn’t find it, white on white, and he howled because the tooth fairy mightn’t come, and we couldn’t reassure him without spilling the beans that the fairy didn’t exist). The sand was wrinkled and grey; another residue of mining. Even the rocks no longer looked as black.

  We climbed the headland among the chip cartons and beer cans. There were black scars from fresh bonfires and eroded bald patches from older ones.

  I tried to pretend the sea was still the same, but it had changed too. Oil slicks and sewerage outlets and algae blooms had made us both lose our innocence.

  I suppose everyone has a sacred place, one they had in childhood that seemed magic; one that was associated with happiness, kept sentimentally in memory. I wonder how many sacred places survive a lifetime. I remember my mother taking me to one of hers, on Lake Macquarie, once bush (there was a hollow tree, she told me, big enough to climb into). It was holiday houses and bitumen now and I was incredulous: how could anyone possibly have felt anything there?

  I don’t suppose urban special spots are any safer. Familiar skylines change. Even if they stay they’re invaded by more cars and more people every year. The feeling changes even if the skeleton remains. My grandmother’s spot, I think, was lunch at David Jones – damask tablecloths and napkins, silver tongs and potatoes baked to snakeskin crispness under shining domes and silver-sauceboat gravy – that’s what a day’s shopping in town was all about. They’ve got a cafeteria there now.

  The Araluen Valley has been a magic place for at least two people I’ve met in the past few years. One was a taxi driver I met in Sydney. He was wounded in New Guinea in World War Two, among the mud and sweat and jungle, and woke up in hospital to see a watercolour on the wall opposite his bed. It showed a green valley with blue hills and a single tree. He asked the nurse where it was, and she turned it over, and it said ‘Araluen Valley, NSW’.

  He reckoned it saved his life. All he had to do was live, and he’d get back there…and so he did live, and bought his wife to see the place after they were married, and then his kids. He told me he was going to bring his grandkids here soon too. They’ll stay down at the pub with Stan and Margaret, and they’ll fossick in the river…

  The other was a woman in her eighties in Victoria. She wrote to me last year after reading a review of one of my books. It mentioned that I lived in Araluen. She’d lived here as a child, and the place has lived in her memory ever since. She wanted to hear about the valley. Had it changed? Did the casuarinas still grow along the river? Were the cliffs still silver when it rained? In her last letter she said that she has been privileged, in her last years, to be able to send her love back to where it began.

  The valley may have been a special spot even before white settlement: it was certainly a place of feasting and ceremonial battles, and variously referred to as the valley of peace, place of waterlilies, place of running water. I suppose it was all three.

  Like many ‘sacred places’ – some far more threatened than here – the valley’s place in people’s hearts has lasted for so many generations, black and white, that it’s frightening to think that this generation might be the crucial one, the one that destroys it. There are so many things that threaten even ‘safe’ areas now – mining or clearing upstream, overgrazing, fire.

  I know fire is supposed to be natural to the bush. It isn’t here, not at this end of the valley anyway. There’s no sign there’s been a major fire in the lifetime of the trees, though there are scars on the ridges above. It’s probably been too moist to burn. But in the past fifty years so much land has been cleared upstream that the ground no longer carries the moisture it used to. There are hundreds of forces too, sucking the water from the world.

  The springs run dry, the moist breeze of the gorge turns to hot wind. It was tree ferns and backhousia forest once, but when the remaining pockets are destroyed they don’t come back again. If a fire came through now the gorge wouldn’t recover, and the surviving wildlife – many of which have disappeared from the more populated bush above – would go as well.

  The fire would almost certainly be man-made too; most likely from the State Forest’s regular ‘accidents’. We’ve eaten smoke here for the last month, from Forestry ‘cool burns’ that turned to Roman candles in the sky, leaving the land as black and dead as any bushfire. Fire could come from a picnicker’s campfire, a farmer’s burning off, a trail-bike’s exhaust, from an e
mpty-hearted arsonist. Only a very tiny proportion of fires are caused by lightning.

  Maybe it’s safer not to have a sacred spot now, unless it’s a church. Churches are man-made and relatively safe. We accept man-made things as sacred. The rest are expendable, easily lost for temporary jobs or profit, or simply from carelessness, worn out before we notice.

  Perhaps I’m wrong to encourage E to love the valley. Maybe banks or ballot boxes are safer love objects. Maybe I should teach him to love a TV screen or admire the evenness of a stretch of asphalt instead. Though I won’t.

  We may be one of the last generations to know many of the sacred spots of the world. It’s too soon to turn our backs on sites in bitterness at their potential loss. And I will continue to take E up the gorge.

  November 11

  Gabby’s skin is suddenly worse, although the hair is growing back. She’s thinner too – a sharp ridge along her back and the ribs prominent under her fur. The flies are annoying her; the vet is stumped; even cortisone doesn’t seem to help.

  She spends some of her day in the wombat hole, but most is spent under the truck to be near to Bryan in the shed, or asleep among the wattle bark in the wood shed. At other times she’s sniffing round the flat trying to find a trace of human scent, till the exhaustion of daylight overtakes her and she falls asleep where she is, often in the middle of the road, and nearly always in full sunlight – so we have to search for her every quarter of an hour, and take her into the shade.

  I think the world frightens her. It’s so much bigger than the kitchen where she grew up. She ignores the other wombats, even the most recent droppings. And, while she eats a little grass, her staple diet is still rolled oats and carrots, wombat nuts and Womba-roo, fed to her from the old shampoo bottle twice a day. She is really too old now to be handfed, but every time I’ve stopped it she has got thinner – even hunger won’t tempt her to a diet of mostly grass, though at least she’s munching it for part of the night.

  November 12

  The kiwi fruit are flowering – fat-fleshed, white petals that turn yellow with age, then drop off into greasy heaps on the paving. There are millions of them and there’ll be millions of the fruit too. But luckily the bowerbirds and the honeyeaters and the silvereyes and red-browed finches will eat most of them, and the ground below will be sodden again, with fruit instead of blossom. We never have to worry about getting rid of the harvest, we just watch the birds’ acrobatic displays as they turn upside-down to poke their beaks into the juiciest end of the fruit.

  No sign of Gabby all day. I’d assume any other wombat had wandered off, investigating other holes. But not Gabby. I’m worried.

  November 13

  No sign of Gabby. I called at the entrance to her hole, and banged the rock at the entrance and stamped my feet so she might hear the vibration in the ground. We searched the flat and the road, but no sleeping wombat.

  I feel guilty, though I’m not sure why – for being human perhaps, of the race that killed her mother, so even with all our best intentions, best attempts, we couldn’t make it up to her.

  I’m speaking as though Gabby is dead. I think she is, though I won’t admit it to E yet. He’s used to wombats wandering off, for food and sex and territory (and maybe the wombat equivalent of adventuring too). I’d rather he thought she’s gone adventuring than died.

  November 15

  Maggots crawling from the hole behind the bathroom; conclusive enough. E ran to tell me and of course he is less upset than I am. He’s grown up with much more life and death than I saw in the suburbs of my childhood.

  ‘Can we look after a kangaroo this time?’ he asked, pouring more salad dressing on his asparagus. ‘Like Fuchsia. Remember how she and I used to race?’

  November 16

  The first day of real heat; the sort of heat that sucks the moisture from the air and the water from the creek and even the leaves seem to pant, and the ants stay deep underground. We sat on a rock at lunchtime and watched the waterline shrink back between the rocks. The water seems to get darker as it retreats, almost as though it has thickened. You’d think the creek would get lighter as it grew shallower.

  I remembered how I’d tried to get Gabby to drink from the creek; but she wouldn’t drink. She just kept walking into the water as though she couldn’t work out what was happening and thought if she kept going she might get away from it, so I’d had to race in, jeans and all, and lift her out before she drowned. She drank from the bowl by the kitchen instead (attached to a thick piece of wood to stop her shoving the bowl over). I miss her terribly; and the sense of guilt remains. [NOTE FROM 2010: I now suspect that Gaby was infected with toxoplasmosis from her carer’s cats. This causes brain damage in wombats.]

  November 17

  Peaches. Finally. We called in at the shed this afternoon on our way home from the bus. E got the first, crunching into it as I drove up the road; I restrained myself till I got to the kitchen; the whole car smelled of peach.

  It’s hard to describe the first taste of peach every year. You forget it till the sweetness hits you – infinitely soft, entirely juicy, succulent green flesh that bruises as soon as you touch it, so you have to eat it, you really have to – it’s no good keeping it for later.

  The first peaches are tiny things. They’re packed like fragile china. No, that’s an understatement – china is much more robust than an early peach. The later ones are tougher, firmer and those later firmer and meatier yet.

  Sometimes I think it’s a mistake to get the first peaches of the season in a box – almost excessive. The first peach should probably be plucked and savoured – but a boxful is impossible to resist. [NOTE FROM 2010: The orchards are now owned by Robyn Clubb, but are still calleed Wisbeys – and the peaches are still wonderful.]

  Noel’s shed is the first in the valley to open – still pristine and tidied from last year, the concrete swept, the grass mown, 10,000 virgin boxes piled to the ceiling. There are neat trays of firsts and boxes of seconds out the front to tempt the passing trade – except it rained this weekend, so there weren’t any cars, just Bev and Bess discussing picking times and rosters. Neither knew how much the trays were; whoever was in charge was down the back; but Bess knew how much the seconds were, and that’s what we wanted anyway.

  Seconds are the peaches slightly too ripe to get to market, split peaches, double peaches, ones with just a faint small bruise or those that are too small or too big to fit in the trays. They’re usually excellent, often picked slightly too late so even sweeter than the firsts. The overripeness doesn’t matter as long as they’re going to be hauled straight home or eaten on the way.

  The rejects sit in giant boxes down the back – really squashy ones and very split ones; and on hot days the scent of fermenting peach reaches down to the road. It would be a fruit-fly’s paradise, if any had survived the spraying.

  E fixed his gaze on the nearest box of peaches and didn’t take it off it till he’d got back into the car.

  The wind is sweeping cold and leafy through the shed door, tossing bits of bark onto the sign (in French) ‘In summer it’s a sin not to eat a peach’. Ned picked it up on his tour of Europe a few years ago. It is a little incongruous buying peaches with our jumpers clutched round us. Bev and Bess duck further round, out of the wind.

  ‘Can I eat one now?’ and E sighs ecstatically at the first bite of peach, the biggest and the reddest. He fell in love with it five minutes ago and has guarded it ever since in case someone else got it first.

  He eats another three on the ten-minute drive home and another dozen (at least) during the day; but it doesn’t matter – his digestion has evolved with peaches, it’d take a solid peach diet to make him sick. By mid-afternoon he’d experimented sucking the smooth red skin (Wisbey’s bought a polisher to get rid of the fuzz a few years ago) to make a juice bubble, then sucking it again to make it burst, peeling the whole peach with his tongue so the flesh is smooth before he even tastes it; chilling them first so it’s both cold and sw
eet on his tongue.

  The front lawn is dotted with peach stones; the chooks’ bucket is full of peach skin; Bryan has taken three of the best (he spends minutes poring over them too) down to the shed to eat while he makes a new nozzle for the fountain; the kitchen smells of rotting peach from the box on the kitchen table, right where I put the mail the rest of the year (I’ll have to find another spot now).

  Our peaches won’t be ripe for at least a week – they’re earlier down the valley where they get more light. The first home-grown peach of the season is, of course, for eating warm from the sun, right under the tree, where you’ve discovered it before the birds have, the next peach is one you’ve taken inside, one of a handful grown cold on the dining table; you eat that peeled, on a plate, slice by slice and lick up the drips.

  By the hundredth peach you’re looking for variety.

  Peach season has begun.

  Peaches in Champagne

  This is is an idea rather than a recipe. Some people complicate it with a few drops of Cointreau or Curacao or brandy; but this is a pity, and necessary only if you don’t have very good champagne and perfect peaches – peaches ripened on the tree and so strongly scented your hands smell of peach after you’ve peeled them – and without either there’s really not much point to the recipe.

  Slice your peaches – firm and yellow, soft and white, or green with that sort of sugary stringiness – it doesn’t matter, all are good, though the results will of course differ. Just as it doesn’t matter if you use sweet or dry champagne – whatever is your pleasure.

  Just be sure that the champagne is poured as soon as you slice the peaches; and that it’s drunk as soon as it is poured; and that the slices are fished out (with your fingers) still with the last of the bubbles on them and slipped between your lips.