by Susan Duncan
A month or so later, the final approvals for the house plans arrived and we met the builder for the first time. He didn’t say much. Nor did he remove his hat – an incongruous straw pork-pie affair positioned at a jaunty angle. Tanned, compact, with eyes that kept you at a distance. I had no idea what to make of him.
Afterwards, I said to Bob, ‘His name’s Cross. Same as Norm’s. Do you reckon they’re related?’
‘You wouldn’t get long odds on it,’ he said.
‘He didn’t put in much of a pitch for the job,’ I said.
‘He knows it’s in the bag. I’ve met him before. He built the brick kiln. Thought he was an arrogant prick at first. But he’s not afraid of work and he does things right. No cutting corners. Kind of bloke you trust.’ He paused: ‘The engineers in Taree? The ones we’re using for the steelwork? They’re his first cousins.’
I wriggled my nose: ‘Better not offend anyone then. Insults could go right down the line and we’d end up a bit lonely on site.
‘Yeah,’ Bob said.
Meanwhile, the framework for a raised timber floor for Bob’s shed office – which would be our cosy winter abode – was set out. As usual, it looked too small to me, but Bob said it was more than adequate. He wouldn’t be doing much engineering work in future anyway.
The day arrived when the shed was watertight. Bob moved our increasingly shabby but stalwart tent into the south-west corner, bolting it into the concrete so it became a permanent fixture. One less job every time we arrived on site. We lost the soft give of the earth under our feet but we gained shelter from rain and wind, although it was still draughty as hell. There was an unsuspected downside. The sun couldn’t finger its way into the corner to burn off the chill and damp. Then a family of swallows set up house in the rafters above. Poo rained down, slid along canvas in chalky white trails. The knock-on effect, again. Bob discouraged the swallows with a large broom while I scrubbed away the poo.
Norm, who felt like a member of our family by now, scraped out a site for a water tank behind the shed. A truck arrived with clean, soft sand to lay the base. A couple of days later, two self-contained and efficient blokes installed a one-hundred-and-fifteen-thousand-litre steel tank, panel by panel, lining it with a plastic sheath before plonking a slightly curved corrugated lid on top. The tank men politely declined a campfire cuppa, pointing at their iceboxes, and departed to complete another installation on a distant farm.
Bob and Gazza connected a PVC pipe to the shed guttering to feed run-off water into the tank. It was completed in less than a day. Bob pulled out a calculator to work out how much water we would collect from an area of one hundred and fifty square metres. One hundred and fifty litres for every millimetre of rain that fell. We had our own catchment area at last. Which meant independence from the kindness of the brickworks, where we’d been filling our jerry cans from the beginning. Late in the afternoon, a truck delivered ten thousand litres of water at a cost of a hundred and eighty dollars.
‘Flattens the plastic and holds the tank down,’ Bob explained. ‘Otherwise we could lose the lot in a high wind.’
‘Shouldn’t we get a second delivery?’ I asked, feeling anxious. The tank water level had reached a single bar. It didn’t seem like much.
‘Nah. It’ll rain.’
But it didn’t. Suddenly, after weeks and months of water falling from the sky so regularly we thought it was part of a reliable pattern, each day dawned in sunny yellow dryness. It was as though the gods were determined to make us understand who was the real boss. Got a fancy tank and think you’re set for life? Won’t do you any good without rain. Got a flushing dunny and think you’ve hit the comfort zone? Won’t make any difference until you have water. Think you control the elements? Think again. Everything, as my father would have said, was in the lap of those pesky, nameless gods.
All the basic necessities we not only took for granted but considered a democratic right were no longer available at the flick of a switch, the turn of a tap. Sustainable living, even with the mod cons of roofs, walls, plumbing and heating, was not for sissies. After too many dry weeks to count, it was all I could do to nod and grin with rictus insincerity when anyone applauded the sunny weather.
Then the winds came. Dust, the inevitable legacy of construction, kicked up and took ownership of every new nook and cranny. Once or twice, willy-willies erupted furiously out of nowhere and then collapsed into nothing. Despite the long dry, I planted grevilleas to hide the septic tank. Bob and I carted every drop of used and spare water in a plastic bowl, determined to keep the young trees alive.
Sometimes, by the time we returned to Pittwater for a week of respite, I felt hammered.
By mid-winter, Bob’s office was close to completion. Only the plywood walls were missing. Pears, who’d been stoic about even the smallest, seemingly inconsequential details, finally cracked when he learned Bob wanted a black stripe in the half-inch gap between each panel of plywood. ‘I hate painting,’ Pears moaned. ‘I bloody hate painting.’
‘It’s just a thin black line. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The timber will hide the edges,’ I said, trying to placate him.
He groaned. ‘Mate, when you hate painting, you bloody hate painting.’
Gazza arrived each day wearing genuine work boots. ‘Wait till I tell Brickworks Michael you’ve been corrupted. Your reputation’s shot,’ I joked.
‘Trench work in winter,’ he responded. ‘Flip-flops and socks just aren’t up to it.’
Then suddenly the shed was completed. Bob’s office, with a raised chipboard floor, boasted a squat little wood-fired heater that sat on a bed of bricks. A bathroom (tiled floor) with a flushing loo, shower and an adequate basin, was conveniently located two steps outside the office area. Towels were stacked on a shelf like the old-fashioned luggage racks on trains. The same gas water-heater we’d used for our alfresco bathing was hooked on an outside wall and plumbed into the bathroom. The sink that once stood alone in the middle of the paddock was now installed with hot and cold running water. I washed and folded the mobile dunny seat, putting it away with a hint of regret. As cold and damp as those night-time forays undoubtedly were, there was also a raw magic in them.
Power came from two solar panels on the roof. Long after the sun dropped below the horizon and the valley was cloaked in darkness, lights burned brightly in our cosy nook and computers fired up at the touch of a button. We could also boast that great game-changer of the twentieth century: a fridge. It meant the end of melting ice, soggy foodstuff and the worry of meat going off overnight. We transferred our camp chairs indoors in front of the pot-bellied stove, bought a queen-size bed and laid a Gabbeh rug on the floor. A new bright-white radio took up residence on the windowsill.
Each morning after the news bulletin at 6.30, we tuned into Kim Honan on ABC Mid North Coast Radio for the rural report. The countryside, with its stories of bees and bananas, of tea, turf and tapioca, became part of our new neighbourhood. Some mornings we rejoiced in victories – a bumper year for blueberries, a dairy deal that favoured farmers instead of supermarkets. Some mornings we wiped away tears – a lifetime’s hard labour destroyed in a freak storm; a child lost in an awful farm machinery accident. We listened to weather reports as though our lives were at stake.
In a separate, large area that would be Bob’s workshop, we set up the kitchen and dining area with a large gas ring with three settings. No more cooking over a fire in the rain. Hooks, made from bending leftover fence wire, were lined up along a steel brace. Billies, frying pans, colanders and kettles hung within easy reach on what I now knew were called top-hat sections. I lined up sugar, flour and tea in second-hand enamel canisters. Black plastic containers stored enamel plates, cutlery and supplies, keeping stuff safe from mice, rats and antechinus. Although I would happily have brought down a shovel on the head of a rat, I had a soft spot for antechinus, the cheeky-faced marsupials that moved with lightning speed and seemed to grin and wave as they scampered off.
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sp; To house a growing library, Bob built a couple of small tables out of scrap timber in what seemed like minutes. They were rough and utilitarian, and I treasured them above all else because he’d made the effort when he was busy elsewhere.
It was simple, small-scale and manageable. Wake in the morning, make the bed, sweep the floor, shake the rug, dust three window ledges. Wash up, sweep the kitchen floor, wash tea towels, wipe plastic tablecloths. Quite quickly we bought a washing machine. No more hauling laundry back to Pittwater but, even more significantly, we kept a permanent set of clothes on site.
We transplanted a television from Tarrangaua and followed the advice of a salesman in Taree who suggested a twenty-five-dollar pair of rabbit ears before committing a few hundred dollars to a full-size antenna. The ears worked perfectly. Every saving helped. But something changed with the introduction of television into our rural lives. We invited in the bigger, more brutal world. The effect was to leave us – well, me; it didn’t have the same impact on Bob – jangly, when not so long ago I’d been soothed and stroked by stars and the night air. Even when it rained and blew, there was a deeply satisfying elemental, visceral connection to the physical world. Those lazy chats gazing into the campfire ceased, struck dumb by the roar of current affairs illustrated with grisly pictures to hammer home the horrors. Wars. Plagues. Floods. Droughts. Economic meltdowns. Political mud-slinging. Death. Destruction. Evil. Freak events that made me wonder over and over: how it was that one person survived and one didn’t.
It was a momentous day when the survey pegs were pounded into the ground to mark the home site. Soon after, Bluey, a hard-working, practical man of few words, arrived with an excavator to scrape a level pitch for the slab. Bob looked worried when he should have been elated.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
He walked me over to a rock in the ground. ‘Not sure whether this is a floater or part of a deep outcrop. Should’ve dug around, checked it out. Basic research and I didn’t do it. If it’s an outcrop, we’re in strife.’
‘What kind of strife?’
‘Money strife.’
It is a terrible truth that building a home from the ground up is like riding the stock market. Every decision has a possible downside and, even if you’re a blue-chip-planner instead of a risk-taker, curveballs scream out of nowhere. Weather impinges on every step – seasoning timber for the floor or outdoor cladding, curing a slab until it’s tough enough to withstand a stampeding herd of cattle without a chip, even deliveries of material. Tradies are resilient, but when torrential rain turns the building site into a clay pit, when gale-force winds spin planks like a whirligig, when heat sucks the last pinprick of oxygen out of the air, tools are packed into aluminium trunks with (mostly) the kind of care and order a surgeon uses for his instruments. They’re loaded onto the tray backs of utes and the men take off. Every day is a dollar. Every week eats into the schedule. Every delay is like standing over a toilet and flushing money down the drain. Even the most sanguine, cashed-up owners, I am certain, cannot be immune to the stress of a vanishing bank balance – and we were neither.
We had a budget, and while we’d blithely proceeded on the basis that at our age saving for my father’s oft-quoted rainy day was pointless, nevertheless, if we hit a rocky outcrop on day one, it signalled the beginning of what already felt like an almost witch-like evaporation of funds. And, yes, we hit a rocky outcrop. Our single, barely visible, comparatively small brown protrusion from a thicket of bladey grass turned out to be part of a large metamorphic knoll thoughtlessly and inconsiderately pushed up by volcanic action in a past millennium. At least that’s how Bob explained it later.
Meanwhile, Bluey stood over the offending boulder. ‘The brown stuff. This,’ he said, reaching down to prise loose a fragment of rock the colour of burnt toffee, ‘breaks up easy. No problem. But see this?’ He kicked at some mean-looking, blue-grey material. ‘Tough stuff. Bloody hard as … a bastard.’ The two men, Bob and Bluey, stood alongside each other, staring at the ground.
‘Any way to guess what you’ll find?’ Bob asked.
‘Not till I get in there,’ Bluey said. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow with the rock breaker. See how we go.’
We’d budgeted one man, one machine, for half a day. In the end, Bluey spent three days being shaken by a large hydraulic jackhammer in a way that you felt must rearrange his vital organs and leave him senseless. He took short meal breaks and only once crabbed with ill temper when his eager young grandson fired up the excavator during the sacrosanct peace of smoko.
‘What do we want to listen to that noise for right now?’ he yelled. The kid, a capable boy less than ten years old who knew his way around the equipment like an adult, killed the engine instantly. But you could see he itched to have a real go.
Quickly, I learned to differentiate the low-throated growl of brittle brown rock from the ear-splitting, high-pitched rage of stubborn blue rock. Rage beat growl by a wide margin and meant that, before we’d even hammered a single nail, the original house plan needed adjustment. ‘Knock-on effect’ was fraught with new meaning. Bluey had to drill so deep we now had a cellar-like space under what would one day be the sitting room, a space that also drifted under what would be my office. Two new underground rooms. More bricks. More concrete. More work. More costs.
Bob is a deeply practical man. Not long after he’d made one of the first cups of tea I shared with his late wife, Barbara, he confessed that he’d done a cost analysis of tea bags versus tea made in a pot with tea leaves.
‘Why?’ I asked, dumbfounded that anyone would bother.
‘I was curious, that’s all,’ he replied.
‘And what was the upshot?’
‘Tea leaves are half the price of tea bags.’
My face must have registered disbelief. ‘To keep it in perspective, a tea bag might cost two cents. A proper cuppa costs one cent.’
Many years later, when he recalled that story, I said, ‘You failed to factor in the value of flavour.’
‘Ah,’ he replied, smiling. ‘That’s unquantifiable.’
So Bob pored over the plans, trying to find ways – like governments who inherit budget deficits – to cut and paste to make up the shortfall. But every compromise felt like a sacrifice to the overall concept, a betrayal of the architect’s commitment to give us something wonderful. Again, I felt a pang for Kevin McCloud’s dreamers at the same time as wondering what strange little quirk in the human brain makes us able to ignore unpleasant facts and focus, instead, on the fantasy. I shoved the money issue into a neat little compartment and locked the lid. Shades of my mother. Never too far from the surface. But there were days when all I wanted to do was run for cover. Bob just dug in deeper, thought outside the square, made adjustments and kept up the pressure to find solutions to each new challenge. I might have been wilting, but he was thriving.
Although the rock outcrop created a problem, he told me one night, there were also positives. Instead of erecting tank stands in the open, the water tanks – including the hot-water tank – could now be protected in the large area under the house. The large bank of batteries to store energy from the solar panels would have a spacious home instead of being crammed into a specially designed holding pen.
There was room for a wine cellar, too, in a deep, dark area that remained at a constant, cool temperature. Like the champagne caves in France. Well, not quite, but the thought was there. It would also be shelter if – god forbid – we ever needed to escape from a firestorm.
22
IT BECAME HARDER AND HARDER to wrench ourselves away from Benbulla, especially when the rain came down and ended the long, gut-wrenching dry as winter drifted into spring. It fell softly at first. The ground greedily sucked in the wet. Then it bucketed in torrents so thick and heavy the shed felt like a stage with a curtain drawn tight around it. It was too much too quickly, but the dams filled and, in what felt like no more than an exhalation of breath, whiffs of green appeared on the roadside, the slope leadi
ng to the shed, the paddocks.
‘How quickly the country recovers,’ I said, warm and dry, looking out the window.
‘Want to drive down to check on the floodway level?’ Bob asked. I reached for my boots.
Our track was slick and slippery all the way to the front gate. From there, the bumpy council road held fast, with rough-cut, rocky gutters carrying off the overrun.
‘If this rain keeps up, we could get locked in. Want to hit the supermarket for extra supplies?’ I suggested.
Bob nodded. Turned up the speed on the windscreen wipers. He muttered something, which I didn’t catch.
‘What?’
He dropped down a gear to take a sharp bend. Mud kicked up from the tyres, flicked loudly against the side of the car. ‘Might have left our run too late,’ he said, pointing ahead. The floodway was deep and wide and running fast. On both sides, strong grasses were bent double. Fence posts lay drunkenly, tethered by wires. The high-water mark showed a depth of almost two metres.
‘How about the other way?’ I said. ‘Towards Mt George?’
Bob slid into reverse, engaged four-wheel drive. Backed into a gateway and turned. Water sped down the windscreen. Wipers slapped it away furiously but couldn’t keep up.
About two kilometres further along and heading west from our front gate, we found a raging river where once there’d been a trickling watercourse. We got out of the car to take a closer look. Broken fences. Logs. Branches. Unidentifiable detritus. All spinning and speeding in deep, muddy water to end who knows where.
‘A no-go,’ Bob said, a tinge of awe in his voice.
Back in a car that stank routinely of wet wool, wet plastic, wet leather and underlying all of that, the persistent aroma of cattle shit, we headed home.
In the shed, we settled in for the duration, content to watch clean blue water gush into the tank from the rooftop until the gauge crept out of the red zone, signalling near-empty, and into the black zone. We cheered when it hit the full mark. Then water fed through the overflow pipe and torrents spilled out to flow down the hill. Losing it felt like blasphemy. But in front of our eyes, that first, fragile, patchy film of green pushing through dusty yellow soil transformed into a thick, emerald-green pelt.
