Year in the Valley

by Jackie French

  And they were. They just sat there in their box like prize racehorses who know their worth and lift their heads in pride. They’d be stud peaches, if there were such a thing, and I felt like one of the three wise men bringing gold and frankincense to the manger (I bet Mary would rather have had a good box of peaches).

  Later, driving home, we watched the hills of Canberra like golden skulls fading in the dusk, and the Tablelands growing green as the day receded, as though dead grass fades into lushness with the light. The smell of trees and soil was a shock as we plunged down the mountain into the valley with the moon behind us ringed with light, as the moon is when it’s dry. (Not with the misty ring of damper weather.) And there below us were Rod’s fruit-bat-scaring lights, red and yellow flashing through the valley like Christmas ornaments gone mad – no Christmas dinner for the fruit bats tonight. When we got home and opened the front door the smell of ripe peaches washed over us like a tide.

  December 27

  Bryan and I first met at a cafe called the Pot Belly, then ignored each other for the rest of the night. I was dressed in my go-to-town best. He thought I looked very urban and besides I wrote books (the sort he never read), and he told me how he’d been doing some walking in The Netherlands, where he’d been posted for a year (and I thought: ‘Good grief, he thinks that is bushwalking…?’).

  But it was nearly Christmas and that year I was having open house, so I invited the whole table, including him…

  I remember how he walked up the steps as we sat under the kiwi fruit drinking yet another cup of tea. He looked like he belonged to the valley, and he does…

  That was December 26 and we all walked up the gorge with the heat and the golden skinks, and bottles of champagne in our pockets. Bryan slept on the sofa – there were makeshift beds all over the place. And the next day we walked up there again. The others left as the mist rolled down, but Bryan stayed and we went platypus hunting in the mist and moonlight, and that night he didn’t sleep on the sofa.

  Every year after that we walk the gorge on December 27. We call it National Platypus Day…and if neither of us can remember exactly what date we got married (sometime in January, the year after we met), we never forget the anniversary of that day in the gorge.

  And in those months before Bryan and I were married, when I sometimes wondered if I was doing the right thing – one failed marriage behind me, and what did I have in common with this man who loved computers and had never read a novel in his life – I would walk up the gorge with him again, and then I’d know…

  The gorge is a place out of time. The sun glows from the cliffs on either side, the wonga pigeons bellow around the corner, the wind winds across the water and smells of rock and waterfalls, and you could be walking twenty thousand years ago or twenty thousand in the future, and it would still be much the same…

  The local Aboriginal tribe used to feast here, on waterlilies (roots and stems and seeds); but they were hunted out last century with dogs and guns and righteousness, and sent down the coast, though a very few remained.

  They called the last to live in the valley Big Maggie. I don’t know what her real name was. They called her drunk and disorderly, too. Finally they said she had to go. If she left the district, they said, nothing would be done to her, the grave men of the court scribbling compassionately and the hatted, corseted women nodding agreement.

  They say Big Maggie screamed in the court at the just, tidy men and ran down the steps of the Braidwood Courthouse. She was a large woman, but she ran down the mountain road towards Araluen still screaming, yelling in the valley, into the hot air and cicada buzz, over the blue haze as the heat rose from the trees, long wounded shrieks across the country they were exiling her from.

  They found her body two days later.

  There’s an oil dump now at the foot of Jillamatong, the crouching hill behind Braidwood that was once a sacred site perhaps, who knows for certain now. Pine trees crawl up one side of it and joggers pound to the summit on Heritage Day.

  The occasional tourist pamphlet states that Araluen in the local Aboriginal dialect means valley of peace or place of running water or valley of waterlilies.

  Probably it didn’t mean any of those things. There was an Araluen in Scotland and various Araluens are dotted around Australia, including an Araluen National Park. Probably the valley was never called Araluen until white settlers arrived, but a name that sounded a little like it to foreign ears. [NOTE FROM 2010: It is possibly an adaption of ‘Yuin’.]

  The waterlilies that the Aboriginal people feasted on disappeared with the gold miners, when the river was dredged for the small flakes of alluvial gold, and the creek flats turned over to find the gold vein that never existed, and the dark still pools diverted to flush the shining grains from sand and gravel on the lower ridges.

  The water barely flows through the valley now – there’s always a drought or the water is sucked up for peaches or vegetables or gardens of roses and geraniums. Clearing at the headwaters up above the valley means there’s less deep forest litter, less humus to hold the moisture. The creeks flood and dry up more readily now than they did two hundred years ago – or even twenty years ago.

  The old sacred sites have gone with the people they belonged to. Now they are gone it’s safe to call them sacred sites. There’s no one to object to whatever you do to them. A sacred site is just a footnote in a history book or a titbit for the tourists, probably wrong, like Clark’s Lookout on the road above us that was too near town for any self-respecting bushranger to ever have stopped there for a gander, and anyway, you couldn’t see much till the Lion’s Club cut down the trees to improve the view and built the concrete platform. But tourists are meant to park there and imagine the Clark brothers gathered, like them, on a neatly fenced viewing platform waiting for the stage coach to curl up the road from the valley.

  Indigenous sacred sites are accepted now even if we don’t respect them. I wonder how long it will be before our culture accepts there may be white sacred sites too – not man-made ones, not churches or parliaments, but parts of the land that we too hold sacred, that we are part of, that are part of us.

  Conservation battles are often about economics, which is safe – most large projects have mistakes if you look into the accounting close enough – or about preserving resources for our grandchildren, places for them to play or investigate or exploit in their turn. We are rarely prepared to say: ‘This is my land, I am custodian of it, I would rather kill or be killed than have it violated. I am my country, there is no separating us.’

  There is no language to talk about it. Even to say ‘this is my land’ is a simplification, and not quite accurate. It is more identification than ownership.

  It’s not just the land. It’s the patterns around it, the million complexities, the golden skink licking the fat from its lips, the hard bare ant trails up the hill, the arrowheads of fish motionless in the water while the red casuarina roots flash above them. The total of these things can’t be restored. There is no possibility of multiple use with these. You tread softly or you change it all and if your steps are loud enough you may not even notice.

  The rufous bettongs [They’re back!] on the hill behind the house disappeared a few years ago. Their nests and land were trampled by the sheep. Bettongs are soft and small and kangaroo-like. You only see them with quiet luck and waiting – and rarely as you round up sheep. There were no grass orchids this year in the areas where the sheep roam, no sudden flame of indigophora bush sweeping down the cliff in spring. You need to know a place well to see the changes when new animals are introduced.

  Half of me watches my garden here, prunes the roses, glories in ripe apricots and tomatoes, lies on fresh green grass, and plays with words and music. The other half watches the ridges, too steep for more than minimal human impact. Always the gorge behind, waiting.

  Sometimes it is the centre of the world.

  Near the house it is rockpools and rapids and places for kids to laugh. Further up
it is quieter. Sometimes only the water moves; not the air, not us, not the other animals trapped in the silent heat. If a breeze flows it is a local breeze, trapped by the walls of the gorge, and it smells of water and lichen and casuarina and deep forest litter. The wind from above rarely penetrates down here, the heat is trapped in summer and the wet chill in winter. The air is hazy, sheltered by the cliffs – cliffs so high, so deep, so near that the sun enters only at midday. The light is clear green shadows till the sun hits, then suddenly golden haze.

  When the wind does pour down here it gusts, huge buffets that knock rocks from the cliffs and send the lyrebirds cowering. It roars out of the gorge into the wider area near the house, throwing trees and bark and webs of dust. It sounds like a Boeing 747 crashing through the thorn bush.

  The pools are deeper here. The further up the gorge you go, the deeper they get, etched out by floods pounding down the chasm, cracking boulders, carving hollows even in the granite – deep still pools now with smooth cascades or sharper raceways falling into them.

  The pools are so green they’re blue. You can see the clouds floating in them, still in the summer heat haze, so to swim across them you are flying as well as floating.

  Here we are predators among other predators, the small dragons scuttling after dragonflies, the foxes scenting frogs, the leeches humping forward for our blood. We are large animals among the small.

  You start up the gorge from the house with backpack and lunch, clothed and hatted and suncreamed. But the cliffs are too sheer for climbing. Finally you have to swim and after swimming clamber from pool to pool.

  You realise that even loose clothes confine you. Your breasts swing out from rock to rock. You need to find a new balance for your body to counter them, a new rhythm for walking; and the sun feels different on the separate parts of your body.

  Some of the wonga-vines are thick enough to swing on, to build a basket or a bridge. They twist around each other, a three- or four-strand rope, perfect circles drooping from trees to cliff to water. The perfume is trapped here when they flower.

  The air is golden with pollen, rich with moisture as the water falls and falls again, as you walk from sun to shadow, slide into the water like white lizards, break the warm surface and the cold water underneath rolls along your stomach.

  The water is never warm. Often bitter, sometimes cool. But the rocks breathe heat, cast it through your bones, radiate it deeply, so lizard-like you’re warm again and the gold flecks glow from the granite.

  You can sit for hours in the gorge. Time is only the darkness growing from the cliffs till only the pale rocks and downward slope guide you back. Watching the leaves slip over the water of the silent pools till they are caught, collected in eddies as the creek falls further. Listening to the sharp alarm calls of the lyrebirds, till they grow calmer, forget you, come to dance, bums up and legs out. Watching rainforest dragons bask in coolness under water, the hot air turning liquid in the dark. Sitting here in the blue light smelling the waterfalls.

  Outside the world spins and rumbles. Here there is sand, air, water and rock and the wildlife of the gorge and you. This is the still heart, the centre of the world.

  Years ago, when I was teaching English to some Aboriginal women, one told me: ‘You forget how to listen in the city.’

  Cities are human. They are simple because they are only human, everything created or modified. There is too much going on, not quite linked together. You have to shut things out. When you finally get back to the bush you have to learn again to use your senses, to learn to listen to everything, not just one or two things that are loudest or most interesting. It took me years of living in the bush to hear again and see. The sudden shock as the peripheral vision widens and you learn to accept and not shut off.

  I am as much ruled, as much modified by this place as it is by me. Probably infinitely more. How many generations does it take for us to become aboriginal?

  January 3

  The hills are brown now, not golden; the last few days’ heat has sucked the last of the green away.

  The maples on the flat are losing their leaves (‘Do you think they’ll die?’ asked Mrs Clyste in Jeremy’s; ‘With luck, no,’ I replied). They lose their leaves as a defence mechanism to save moisture and it’s usually a successful one. If we get rain in the next month or so – and if the temperatures are reasonably kind – they’ll come back.

  ‘Bet you’re getting lovely rain down your way too,’ said Terry at the post office, ‘buckets and buckets of the lovely stuff. I bet you’re knee high in grass down there.’ He shook his head slowly over the stamps. ‘Makes you sick, doesn’t it? All that rain in Melbourne washing out the cricket when we could have done with a bit of it here.’

  We drove home from town through what we regard as traffic: six cars on the road, and another two on the mountain road. (A woman came trembling to the front door yesterday, pursued by gleeful geese – she and her husband had lost their brakes on the mountain road, and could she use our phone. The brakes had recovered by the time the NRMA arrived.)

  The valley is at its busiest now; anywhere you go you pass at least one car. There are more humans than at any other time of year – fossickers hopeful in the dry river bed (if they puddle for a day or two they might just see some colour) or even more optimistic with metal detectors (the only metal down here big enough for detectors are the packing sheds or old tools washed down from Major’s Creek). Some are just perambulating, seeing where the roads go and why, and discovering that once they’ve wandered onto the mountain road (affectionately known as the goat track; and ironically it does attract wild goats), it’s hard to wander off it – it’s a brave driver who’ll do a three-point turn, though I’ve done it a few times when E has forgotten his lunch or the project he just has to have for school.

  Some strangers drive slowly, watching. Others drive fast – teenage or macho would-be rally drivers who haven’t yet learnt how to drive (from a sub-species perhaps that never will). Sometimes they roll off the corners; more often they hit other people, but usually not locals, who are wary throughout the holidays.

  Ginger Beer

  Homemade ginger beer is perhaps the wettest drink ever on a throat-parching day. (And a great way to trap fruit-fly – just leave it in jars among the tomatoes with a thin film of oil on top; when it stops bubbling it’ll stop attracting, so replace. Note: fruit-fly don’t taste of anything much, just a sort of tickle as they stick in your throat, and don’t add flavour to the recipe.)

  16 cups water

  4 whole lemons, sliced and pips removed

  1 tablespoon grated ginger

  a pinch of dried yeast

  2 cups sugar

  Heat the water. Then boil the lemon with the ginger till soft. Cool to lukewarm; add the yeast and sugar. Leave the lot for 48 hours. Bottle in plastic bottles only. Glass bottles are susceptible to bursting when pressure builds.

  Release the pressure twice every day. The beer should be ready in a week. If it tastes too sweet, leave a few days more.

  [WARNING: This is slightly alcoholic and not suitable for children. Keep for a maximum of three days.]

  January 4

  The cockatoos have arrived – buxom, white and feathery. I can see them out my study window as I write.

  The first one lands in the grey-trunked Araluen gum by the house. It lurches, then falls off. The next one falls off too.

  The third bird stands there teetering, watching its comrades lie on their backs, flapping their wings against the grass and trying to claw their way back into the air. If it was human you’d say it was hiccupping. Maybe white cockatoos don’t hiccup, no matter how drunk they get.

  White cockatoos only get drunk when Christmas is hot. Cool Christmases, when the mist sifts softly over the ridges, mean sober cockatoos. Sultry weather means fermenting peaches down at the dump.

  White cockatoos are fond of fermented peaches. The juice dribbles onto their feathers and their black eyes gleam even brighter. By the ti
me it’s dark they’ve found their way back onto the branch, yelling and snapping at each other’s crests. By midnight they’re asleep, burping gently on their branches. They wake up at about ten, grumbling and bleary; by midday they’re on their way again, winging down towards the peaches.

  The binge takes roughly three weeks, which is about all even a white cockatoo’s constitution can stand; then they’re off for a health cure to the apple orchards up the mountain.

  January 5

  There are people everywhere; the sounds of motors in the distance and light aircraft in the sky; there are cars all down the road and panners in the river (which still isn’t a river, so maybe they’ve brought their own water for panning).

  We spent last night with Giles and Victoria, up at Jambaicumbene, twenty minutes and 1000 feet upwards. They live by a series of swamps that merge into waterholes; it’s only in dry times like these that you can see the real stream itself, deep between high banks of grass. We used to stop on the ‘three bridges’ and watch the platypuses, but not since the wooden bridges were replaced by a concrete one. Two years of damming and heavy machinery eliminated the platypuses, and none has been bold enough to recolonise the spot.

  Giles is French, which is perhaps the reason their house looks like a medieval French farmhouse. All owner-builder’s houses around here announce the character of their owners (Angela’s is a rammed-earth mansion, a hospitable sort of house, with a fireplace large enough to roast an ox, though I don’t think she ever has); mass-produced houses never tell much at all.

  Giles and Victoria built their house of pisé. It’s cool in summer, and in winter it keeps out the wind at least. Jembaicumbene seems always windy or frosty or hot; there are no trees to shield it from any passing weather, except the ones that Giles and Victoria planted ten years ago which are finally rising above the house.