by Di Morrissey
‘You probably won’t make much money.’
‘I know that. It’s not the object.’
Lara smiled. ‘Good thing you and Jeff sold your house at the right time. Did your nest egg play a part in this jump off the cliff?’
‘Of course. I have a son to look after. And child support doesn’t mean I can really afford to stop work.’
‘Jeff will probably think you’re indulging yourself at his expense.’
‘I don’t care what he thinks. And we both lost out on the settlement. Fifty-fifty still had lots of holes in the final shakeout.’
‘Like he picked out the valuable books and pictures?’
Dani took a deep breath to help control a rising sense of frustration. ‘Mum, I don’t want to go over that. I’ve moved on.’
Lara sipped her tea, thinking, Well, thank the lord for that then. Dani had gnashed her teeth for weeks over her ex-husband getting first pick of their supposedly mutually shared possessions. She changed tack. ‘Do these people you’ve worked with for the past two years know you’ve drawn, sketched and painted since you could walk?’
‘Of course not. The paper degree is all they care about. Anyway, I suppose they also had the art bug since they were old enough to pick up a pencil and doodle.’
Lara thought back to Dani’s two-year-old efforts with finger painting and colouring in. At first she assumed it was motherly pride but by the time Dani was four Lara knew she had a definite talent. Dani would lie on the floor staring out the front door of their house in South Dakota sketching street scenes, people, dogs, cars in bold bright crayons or delicate detailed pencil. Lara still had most of her pictures tucked away. As Dani grew so her drawing and painting had blossomed.
‘Do you have any regrets about not doing art at university?’ asked Lara. Dani’s academic choices had caused a bit of family debate. Deep down Lara had felt Dani should pursue and develop what was a God-given talent. Her father Joe had dismissed it as no way to get on in the world and argued that she should regard art as a ‘hobby’. He urged her to concentrate on communications and journalism at university. Lara had ended up supporting the same line, as that’s what she would have done, given the chance. Lara still harboured a desire to write ‘something’ some day.
‘No . . . no regrets really,’ sighed Dani. ‘You hear stuff about academia cramping your natural style. I don’t know. Anyway, all I want to do is fumble along on my own, explore a bit of the unknown, see what comes up. I’ve had enough of art schools, painting camps and life classes. It’s not like I haven’t had any instruction or experience,’ she added defensively.
‘Do you see yourself making a living from it though?’
‘Mum, like I said, that’s not why I’ve quit my job. For once I can afford to take some time out to just paint and experiment. When the money runs out I’ll see where I’m at. I’ll just have to go back to work of some kind.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Lara brightly. ‘It’s a great idea.’ She was trying to visualise space for a studio in Dani’s tiny Paddington terrace house. ‘So where will you paint?’
‘I haven’t decided. I do need something like a garage with good light. I’d like to do some big canvases. And as you know, painting is messy.’
Lara’s house didn’t have space, and it would be expensive to rent a studio. ‘You can’t very well move too far, what about Jeff’s access to his son? . . . Something will turn up,’ she added, deciding it was no time to be negative, but she foresaw problems taking Tim too far from his father.
Dani didn’t answer. Sometimes her mother’s positive and cheerful slant on life was annoying. Dani liked to plan everything and know what she was walking into and how she expected things to turn out. But for once she was doing something with no set plan in place. It was as if her long-suppressed talent had recklessly pushed its way to the forefront of her mind, making everything else seem irrelevant, unimportant. Painting was all she could think about. Now everywhere she looked she framed her interpretation of the scene as a finished picture. Her hands itched to hold a brush, she longed for the smell of oil paint, the feel of a stretched canvas, the sensation of losing herself in what she was doing with no sense of time or the world outside her art – just her and the gliding brush.
They finished their tea.
‘I’d better get the Jolly Roger and dry her off. What are your plans for the rest of the day, Mum?’
‘Oh, I’ll go for my walk when it stops raining. I foolishly started a big project, the proverbial rainy day thing, and now it’s going to take ages to finish,’ said Lara putting the cups in the sink.
‘What’s that then?’ asked Dani crossing into the dining room. ‘Oh, I see what you mean.’
The long polished table was covered in shoe boxes, albums and loose photographs.
‘All the family pictures I’ve been meaning to sort out since Mum died. So many I don’t know who they are or where they were taken. The early years of my grandparents especially.’
‘These aren’t family pictures.’ Dani studied a pile of sepia prints that looked like they’d once been framed. Each had a printed title under it. There were also yellowing newspaper clippings, piles of letters bundled together with rubber bands and string, and some old books, the one on the top titled Peeps Into the Past.
‘Poppy, your great grandfather, was something of an archivist. He and Nana kept everything. Fascinating reading. Those photos came out of the old passenger trains that went up the North Coast. I remember taking the steam train to visit my grandparents every school holiday. Loved it, even though the smoke and soot penetrated every compartment. There was an old tin foot warmer for winter trips, a big bottle of water and a couple of glasses in a holder above the door, and photos like these on the wall under the luggage rack. The train got in to Cedartown in the early hours of the morning and Poppy was always there to meet me.’
Lara sighed with delight recollecting the detail. ‘We’d hold hands walking across the dirt road to Cricklewood, their house, where a pot of tea was already brewing on the stove, and sometimes warm scones wrapped in a fresh tea towel. I loved those chats over the kitchen table before going to bed and seeing Nana later at breakfast. When I was older and working I’d sometimes just surprise them. Walk in from the sleepout when they were getting up.’ Lara smiled to herself and Dani saw they were warm and happy memories.
Lara had loved those school holiday breaks with her grandparents. Especially slowly waking to the smell of the wood flaring up in the fuel stove, the bang of the oven door as Poppy stored the toast he’d cooked over the fire on the end of a long fork made out of fencing wire. The bread was fluffy white, delivered daily on a horse-drawn baker’s cart. They had an electric jug and a squat little electric toaster with drop down sides, but that first tea and toast in the morning Poppy made the old way. He brought the steaming tea to her bedside with a chunk of toast. The crust was singed crunchy, the middle soft with runny butter. The pleasure on her grandfather’s face as she reached hungrily for the plate and sat up in bed to eat made her realise how much he enjoyed her visits. They’d chat about plans for the day, he’d tell her of something he’d spotted when he went to fetch the fresh milk.
The milkman had a horse-drawn dray loaded with milk urns and in the early morning hours the horse plodded along, stopping automatically at each house for the milkman to pour milk into the clean billycan hung on the front gate. Lara loved it when the thick rich milk was allowed to sit so the cream could be scooped off to whip for Poppy’s famous sponge cake, made to a recipe he said he got from a French soldier he helped at an army hospital during the Great War. Poppy had shown her how to make a sponge many times but all she remembered was him dropping scoops of butter into the mixture, reciting – ‘Du beurre, du beurre, toujours du beurre.’
As she sipped her tea her grandfather would return to the kitchen and pour tea for her grandmother, who rarely arose from bed before getting a cuppa made exactly as she liked it. Eventually there’d be a defining clink w
hen the empty cup was returned to its saucer, a signal her grandmother was getting up and required privacy. She would eventually appear in the kitchen in her best dressing gown with her hair neatly combed to greet Lara as she tucked into porridge soaked overnight and cooked by Poppy on top of the fuel stove.
As Lara recalled these precious memories, Dani browsed through the old photographs: The Government Wharf at Cedartown. The Cedartown Brush. The Valley from The Mountain. Cattle on the Riverwood Flats. Bullock Team Bringing Cedar down the Mountain. The Cedar-Getters’ Hut in the Forest.
Dani spoke, bringing Lara back to the moment. ‘Another world back in those days, Mum. Fascinating stuff.’
‘The cedar went pretty quickly. The Cedartown Brush was just a pocket of rainforest on the river but you can see how it must have been all along the river once. In my day the Brush started to get overrun with vines and the canopy closed over. It was a dark and creepy place but I loved the excitement of going there. Can’t imagine what’s left now.’ Lara paused, thinking back. ‘Poppy always said the Brush was a real treasure. We have a picture of us standing in the buttress roots of a giant fig, probably hundreds of years old. When I went back with you as a baby on my first trip home from America, it was rundown, smothered in vines from the canopy to the ground and stank because millions of fruit bats had made it their home.’ She laughed at the memory. ‘I guess it’s still a bat kingdom.’
Dani was only half listening. She was absorbed by the old pictures, particularly one taken from a hill looking down at neat dairy paddocks strung across rich alluvial flats to a fringe of trees on either side of the broad curving river. It evoked an atmosphere of complete tranquillity. Slowly she shuffled through the pictures again, a strange sensation overcoming her.
*
The sepia image faded, replaced by a dense expanse of grey-green gums with towering straight trunks, and the prized ‘red gold’ cedars splashing their colour across the forested gullies and hillsides. Echoing down the nearest gully she heard the crack of a whip, and the sing-song language of a bullocky’s devising as he urged his team of twenty bullocks down the mountain, hauling a great cedar log with a butt end as wide as a barn door. Metal jangled, wood creaked, the cattle snorted with heavy breaths.
At the cedar-getters’ slab hut deep in the rainforest men paused for billy tea and damper as two possums roasted on the campfire. The men were pale skinned from spending so much time in the green gloom, sheltered from sun as they went about the dangerous business of felling the giants of the forest. Convivial company of other men, and the pleasure of beer, rum and women would come once they made their way to Riverwood when the job was done.
Another image, a raft of floating logs bumping downstream with the fast water from recent rains, heading for the sawmill. The logs had been held beside the upstream bank until the current was strong enough, and then all hands nudged them into the flowing river. The cedar-getters would travel ahead in case of log jams at bends or narrow sections of the stream. Men risked their lives, balancing on the logs, wielding axes and poles to free debris and keep the logs moving. And sometimes an unforeseen swirl of water would toss an unlucky bushman from the logs and into the river to be crushed between rolling tree trunks.
Along the river settler families watched the valuable flotsam pass on its journey to perhaps furnish elegant drawing rooms in England or rich merchants’ homes in Sydney.
‘Dani! Come back down to earth, please. What are you thinking?’
Dani blinked and combed her fingers through her hair as she gave a puzzled grin. ‘Oh, I was just trying to imagine what it was like back then. Those men who worked in the rainforest, how they saw those big old trees as money, furniture, progress. I wonder what they’d think now it’s all gone . . .’
‘It’s a way of life that’s gone. Poppy used to tell me stories of the bullockies hauling logs and drovers bringing in mobs of cattle to the saleyards years ago. So many stories,’ sighed Lara.
‘It’s stuff we never learned about at school in any detail,’ said Dani. ‘How long since you went back to Cedartown?’
‘I haven’t been to the valley for years and years. It probably hasn’t changed much. Seems to have been bypassed. Always was a sleepy country town. Once the dairy and timber industry went there wasn’t much left.’
‘No tourism?’
‘Don’t think so! There’s a nice river, pretty countryside, but nothing for tourists to do. Maybe camp a night, do a spot of fishing, drive up the mountain for a look-see and move on.’
‘Sounds lovely. Are there people still around who knew our family? Would your grandparents’ house still be there?’
‘I haven’t been there for years. Once Gordon and I stopped there when we were driving back to Sydney. He wanted to see where my family roots were. He wasn’t particularly impressed. We had a steak sandwich and a beer at one of the pubs and drove on.’
‘But you’ve always painted such a warm, nostalgic picture of the place.’
Lara shrugged and turned away from the table laden with family memories. ‘When I was a little girl it was special. Only because of my grandparents and it holds my earliest memories. I was born there. I left when I was five and went back for school holidays. Then less frequently. I wanted to travel in the wider world.’
Lara drew a breath and changed the subject. ‘Come on, Jolly’s sick of being out there. Look at the mess her nose has made on the glass. Though the weather does seem to be clearing up. Do you feel like a walk to clear the head?’
Dani resisted the urge to point out to her mother the change of subject was what her grandmother Elizabeth had done when she didn’t want to talk about something. How it had always annoyed Lara and Dani. ‘Can’t, thanks. Got to run and collect Tim.’
Lara handed Dani an old towel in the laundry to wipe down the damp dog. They chatted and made arrangements to go to a movie later in the week. Dani kissed her mother at the door and halfway down the path to her car, she spun around.
‘I’ve just decided. I’m going up to that valley to look around. It sounds like a place where I might find some ideas about the way ahead. I feel I have a connection with it.’
‘It’s four hours’ drive! You can’t commute!’
‘I’ll just go for a few weeks or so and use up my leave. Can Timmy stay with you?’
‘Of course, darling. And Jolly too. I think it’s a wild goose chase but if you want to get away that’s the place to go.’
Dani settled the dog in the hatchback and gave a happy wave.
Lara watched the car turn the corner, then leaned on the gate, reflecting on the parting announcement. A few weeks in the valley. Silly idea. Dani would probably be back in three days. So why did she feel so unsettled about her daughter visiting the valley and town that held such long forgotten ties and emotions?
Lara returned to the dining room table and picked up a photo. It showed two young boys who looked to be twelve or thirteen, mugging towards the camera. The photographer holding a box camera at waist level was an unseen third person shadowed on the ground before them. The boys wore loose shorts, one had a vest knitted in a Fair Isle pattern over his short-sleeved shirt. They were barefoot with cheeky grins and gave the impression of being good friends or close brothers. She turned the photo over and written in pencil on the back was ‘Clem and best friend, 1932’.
Cedartown, 1932
‘Hey, Clem, you finished yet?’
‘Yeah. Had to clean the milk shed. All done. So what’re we going to do then?’
‘Got some good green weed. Reckon the blackfish might be on.’
‘You beauty. I’ll get my rod.’
Carrying their fishing gear, the two boys walked across the dairy paddocks belonging to Clem’s family, the Richards. It was a small farm by some North Coast standards but the rich alluvial floodplain provided lush grasses allowing his father to run more Jersey cows per paddock than farms further inland. The boys scrambled through the scrubby trees and undergrowth, following the tr
ack to their favourite spot on the river where there was a rough wooden landing jutting from the bank. Next to it an overhanging tree had a rope fastened to a high branch for the boys to swing out and drop into the river.
Late morning and the surface of the broad river was ruffled by a light breeze but the spring sun was warm.
‘Good time for fishin’ I reckon,’ said Clem with authority. Within a couple of minutes of casting, his float gently sank and he gave the rod a sharp flick. ‘Got him,’ he hissed, then let out a gleeful shout. ‘A beauty!’ He landed a plate-sized blackfish. ‘Beat you. First fish gets the prize,’ he chanted, thinking of the extra Minties they had allocated for the prize.
‘You’ve got a good rod,’ grumbled Thommo. ‘This thing of mine is too old.’
‘No, it’s not. Keith said that rod of your grandad’s is special. Came from England, he reckons.’
‘Do they have blackfish over there? Don’t they go after trout and stuff?’
‘Dunno. I’ll ask.’ In Clem’s eyes his older brother Keith was an authority on just about everything. He didn’t ask why Thommo was using his grandad’s old rod when his family could’ve bought him a new one from Davidson’s Store. Thommo’s father was an electrician and had a small operation servicing homes and businesses. In addition Mr Thompson ran the picture shows screened in the Town Hall. To Clem the Thompsons seemed to be relatively well-off townies. Clem’s family had been share farmers until two years ago when they’d got enough together through a small inheritance to buy the farm outright, but it was still a struggle to survive on the land. A lot of people in the town and valley were being hit hard by the long-running Depression and moving on.
