Time has brought me full circle. Luella and I, with our kids a similar age as we were when clanking beer mugs to Slim, discovered a definite ‘edge’ to our kids’ speech. There was a ‘living out the back of whoop-whoop’ slant to their words and diction. For fun and in a bid to raise our kids’ awareness of how to speak ‘correctly’, we decided to create ‘Manners Monday’ each week. Here, after school, we got out Luella’s grandmother’s Wedgwood china tea set with delicate cups, set down on the table by our chunky work-worn hands, encouraged the children to ‘take tea’ and enunciate and articulate properly, with little pinkies out and backs straight. Never mind the horse-manure-smeared dog under the table and the little black dots of flies stuck to the strip of sticky paper above the tea table.
‘Gawd, Mum!’ came the ocker protest. ‘Do we hafta?’ But the kids joined in. Manners Mondays didn’t last long, but at least Luella and I gave it our best shot. These days I’m unapologetic about my twang . . . in words and my taste in music and clothing, despite what they tried to teach me during the ‘brown years’. My kids will grow up proud to be ‘Straylian’ and know that country’s where it’s at.
The other day Auntie Susie offered me a rabbit. Not the cute, floppy-eared kind you put in a hutch. No! It was a skun carcass, still bloody in a plastic bag, wrapped like a gift in brown paper and nestled in a cardboard wine box, along with some homegrown garlic and onions. Apparently the retirees in Auntie Susie’s seaside village like to ‘pop’ a few bunnies on the lawn from their verandahs – with silencers so they don’t disturb the neighbours. Courteous bunch. I can only hope that in my mentioning this, the local cops turn a blind eye. Those who understand our island culture know we rural Tasmanians like our guns for food harvesting. They used to be everyday items until some crazy bugger went bonkers with one at Port Arthur a couple of decades ago and ripped apart people’s lives for generations to come. After that dreadful, heartbreaking, peace-shattering day, our gun laws understandably and thankfully changed.
But as a Tassie kid I grew up with gunpowder in my nostrils and unlocked guns racked on the wall. Instead of Saturday morning cartoons at Granno’s beach shack we got to shoot Cascade tinnies from the flat surface of stumps, shrieking when we hit one, watching them dance and flip into the crisp seaside air, a bullet hole punctured in their side. In our family it was stock-standard practice to teach your kids to handle a gun, set a trap or a snare, bait a line or a cray pot, start a fire and cook with it, sow and grow a seed. I think it was a legacy of convict white folk trying to survive, find a meal and build a life in a new but stolen, and oftentimes scary, land.
So here I was, rinsing this little bunny under the kitchen tap, its raw fleshy body unlocking thoughts in me as I began to ponder what it is to be a mother cooking for her children, making food choices for them. I had found myself struggling with the knowledge that the feminists in the 1970s fought hard to ‘free women from the kitchens’, yet I sensed within me a constant niggling feeling that I wanted to spend time there. On other days, when I didn’t want to, I knew that I had to for the health and wellbeing of my family. The inner conflict annoyed me. Something about my gender seemed to lock me into cooking for my little darlings no matter what – even with no men in the house hovering saying, ‘What are we having for dinner?’ as if it was always my responsibility. There was also the compulsion to lure the children into the kitchen with me to teach them the basics – ahead of doing homework. Somehow, to me, learning about food seemed more important than spelling or maths.
Even with our severed little family of just three, most nights on the Heavenly Hill and now in the flystrike house, the kids and I sit up at the table for meals. Our shared dinners are a place for cultivating conversations, gently pointing out manners, allowing much laughter and a load of silliness, along with a chance to discuss the food we have before us. How it is grown. How it is precious, and how there is a compelling need to be grateful for it, and to bless it as it enters our bodies. Even in the early days of setting up a new home on the Heavenly Hill, when my nerves were stretched to capacity and my heart still felt so cracked it might shatter onto my plate with a crash, I kept our family ritual of peaceful mealtimes sacred. As I set down our meals, I tried to steer my focus away from the laminate plastic-fantastic table that had been bought hastily out of necessity. It felt soulless and tainted with factory toxins and was a poor echo of the massive old wooden kitchen table that remained in my former home that was imbued with age, memories and nature’s warmth.
No matter how much writing work I had due, or how rugged the road had been in our uprooted lives, I stuck to my kitchen commitment even when the kitchen was cold with unfamiliarity and I barely had a pot. I remember my darling friends Rod and Leanne gifting me a spud masher and a set of kitchen scales and me crying from their act of kindness. It was such a symbolic gesture of caring. All my familiar beautiful cooking items, some held by my grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s hands, were still in my old world. I now found myself in the ‘refuge house’ where the oven door had to be jammed shut with the back of a chair and only two of the four hotplates worked. For a year or so, all I could do was cook lopsided cakes and smoke the kitchen out with roasts, but still I cooked, and even when the recipe didn’t require salty tears, they still ended up in our dishes. When the chickens came into the house to poop on the ugly brown linoleum I would gather up my gratitude and think to myself there were plenty worse off and more war-torn than me. It was up to me to find all the funny parts in this fog of change. If I ran it as a comedy, life was so much easier.
Now at another stranger’s sink in our new rental, as I tugged the little bits of remaining fur from the rabbit’s legs and plucked a few blobs of red bits from it, I wondered why I was doing this. Sure, I had to be very careful with money on my stop-start author income, but I hated rabbit. However, I was raised to be frugal and never to refuse free food. In my childhood household, if you didn’t eat what was put in front of you, the crime of turning your nose up at good food was met with harsh punishment. Broad beans made me vomit, yet still I was made to eat them, with old-style punishments that many children of the era endured. Leather belts and wooden spoons hold so much more meaning to kids of my generation beyond their actual purpose of keeping trousers up or stirring cake mix.
In my own parenting, I’ve never laid a hand on my kids. We are a cultured, egalitarian lot, and maybe I’ve raised them to be too soft . . . time will tell, but for a sensitive child like me, such mealtime dominations were often too much for me to handle. It became ingrained in me that rabbits in the pot also came with physical shock and dinnertime drama. No wonder I didn’t like rabbit. But I was raised not to waste food, and a rabbit offered was not to be turned down, plus it was a chance for my kids to give it a go. No harm in that. I didn’t want my children being limited by my own childhood beliefs and experiences.
I remember the first time I saw Dad skin a rabbit on the back step of that shadowy solemn house near the university, when I was about four or five. I puked then from the smell, the death stare of that glassy eye and the incomprehensible tragedy that the soft gentle creature had been turned inside out – its pelt now pink slime instead of pretty mottled soft grey fur. But with time I got used to it. It was food.
Dad always kept a gun under the seat of our Ford Falcon station wagon and he’d drag out that handy .22 on any road, anywhere, any time, if it meant getting a bunny for the pot, or nabbing a pesky lamb’s-eyeball-pecking crow that was bothering a farmer’s flock. Dad was into eating the guts of things too. A legacy of his own raising. I once saw him sawing a pig’s head in half on the kitchen bench to get to the brains. No, he wasn’t a sociopath, he was just raised in an era where nothing was wasted. Feeding eight kids on labourer’s wages meant rabbit and rhubarb were often on the menu for his clan. Dad, the uncles and aunties still speak of wearing undies and singlets stitched from old flour bags by their pint-sized, gracious but tough little mother, my Nanna.
As a kid, I witnes
sed my mother cooking whatever Dad brought home from the farm. She was masterful at it, even though she juggled that kitchen craft with her own education studies and teaching work. As a result of the Depression-era fare, I was raised on sheeps’ kidneys and livers in stews. Offal that made me retch. However, over my little blondie-girl head loomed that belt or spoon, so I would eat it, crying and slobbering. I can understand Dad’s rationale and strict ways, and I can forgive it and be thankful for it: it taught me to eat in season, cook from scratch, and eat simply and healthily – most of the time.
Few in this country nowadays have ever known real hunger. We get to have our strong platforms of belief on diets: vegan versus vego, versus paleo versus keto, and some hardcore people feel the need to slam meat-eaters, leather- or fur-wearers – all because most of us have never known the ache of hunger or the bite of cold. We have never had to watch our children starve or freeze in front of us. We are raised with full bellies and warmth, so we have time and energy to pontificate and judge others’ diet choices or animal-by-product clothing.
In the postwar years of the forties my Granno would make butter from the cows she milked and swap the butter for petrol rations to get her three girls to school. Anything else that could be produced from the farm would be swapped for other foodstuffs or cloth. Out-of-work vagrants would walk the long drive up to my Grandma’s Kinvarra homestead kitchen door, knocking in search of work. My Granno Joan and Grandfather Archie couldn’t give them work, but instead sent them on their way with bread and dripping to fill their bellies. All three of their girls set about at an early age roaming the farm for rabbits with guns, and wearing itchy woollen blanket-stitch dresses Joan had sewn herself. I often chuckle when I see big business now clutching for market share in a commercial version of the newly styled and marketed trend for ‘environmentally conscious living’ – because it is pretty much how we have always lived down here in Tassie and you don’t need to consume product to achieve that kind of lifestyle. Life is basic. Life is good. Not a scrap of food is wasted in my kitchen. If it doesn’t reach our mouths, it goes to the dogs, the chooks or the worm farm. None of it, not even a grain, goes in the general rubbish. This is not a brag about my state of waste-free living . . . far from it. Sometimes I wish I could scrape whole plates into the rubbish and unplug from the rigid programming that says ‘Waste not’.
Because we have a good vegie garden, freerange eggs and loving friends who give us fresh-caught salmon, wild venison, home-slaughtered pork, kitchen-created sausages and spare sides of lamb, we eat like kings and queens whether the unreliable royalty train arrives or not. I am blessed to have those hunter-gatherer friends, and blessed that after losing all my money in the divorce, I have the capacity to believe I can live on love, laughter, fresh air and trust that all will be well. I’m so grateful to the wise women in my family for teaching me how to make a meal from next to nothing. For a time, when we first moved into the house on the hill and I went to ground, I relied on what was packaged into Aussie Helpers drought-donation food boxes that Janice had urged me to help myself to from the local hall. I still cringe a little in shame at the plight I was in – accepting charity sat at odds with my own identity. I was a bestselling author, living on food donations. I still laugh at the random contents of those boxes. I could never work out why, amidst the tins of corn and peas, there were packets and packets of Mylanta. Why supply farmer charity boxes with indigestion tablets? Maybe the charity providers thought sometimes farming was hard to stomach?
In the cheap little house on our rugged 20 acres, I committed myself to starting a small vegetable garden whilst still grieving the large and loved one I had left behind. I stuck to my guns on the preparation of fresh food from scratch in that tiny, tatty kitchen as if it were a matter of life and death. And, as it turns out, I discovered it is a matter of life and death.
My compulsion as a mother to give my children good food and protect them from danger was presented and explained to me from a scientific perspective by the grooviest and loveliest of professors I’ve ever met. In truth, I’ve not met many professors, but if Fred Provenza from Utah State University is anything to go by, I’d love to meet more like him. As a behavioural scientist, Fred has given me the insight to help my ‘chained to the kitchen sink’ battles that I was having within. Through Fred’s work, I learned to be at peace with and even proud of my culinary commitment to my kids. After living through the era that encouraged women to shatter the glass ceiling in business and politics and turn their backs on home duties, Fred’s science helps explain the torn feeling I had. I realised I had been spanning myself across the divide of the feminine energy of home life, and the masculine energy of work life. It was a constant, confusing juggle without the knowledge to reground myself.
The first time I saw Fred speak, I travelled into Hobart with my bunch of regenerative agriculture devotees from Levendale to his lecture at the University of Tasmania. I remember the trip well because my soils-regeneration friends, all in their sixties but as immature as teenagers, were being side-splittingly funny, acting like eejits as we drove down the sweeping bends of Black Charlie’s Opening mountainside. We were talking about ‘Janice’s flaps’, because my beautiful neighbour had given me the flaps from a batch of home-killed sheep to cook. They’re the bit of skin and selvedge that lines the ribs of a sheep and encases the guts, and it normally goes to the dogs at Janice’s place.
On hearing this I had said to Janice, ‘No – don’t waste them on the dogs! They are really yummy if you cook them right!’
Rolled, stuffed and seasoned and tied with string, flaps make a great roast – a little on the fatty side, depending on the sheep, but once in a while they’re a great change from a stock-standard leg of lamb. I best liked them from older mutton, boned with the ribs and cooked slowly in a white sauce, with clutches of parsley thrown on top. My mother had taught me the recipe as she was often left to deal with entire sides of lamb we brought her home, quartered into beer boxes and carted in fresh from the farm. She would cook the flaps dish a day ahead, cool it to set the fat, then dish it up with fresh-dug spud, mashed with drooling dollops of butter. Because of my family’s legacy of making a meal out of what’s on hand, I was determined to show Janice that flaps were worth more than dog tucker. Like with the rabbit, I was up for the challenge of proving my food point.
So during that trip, it was decided with many snorts of childish laughter that we would have a ‘flaps party’, where my friends would come to my house and ‘eat Janice’s flaps’. That statement alone prompted wheezing hysterics, so by the time we rolled into the rather serious atmosphere of the university lecture theatre, we had to tone down our redneck energies amidst the seemingly more sensible young agricultural science students. We picked a row at the front, played a bit with the fascinating swivel desks that university lecture theatres offer, and settled in for some serious science on the topic of ‘Linking Soil and Plants with Herbivores and People’. I wasn’t sure what we were going to get in terms of information, but I sat with an open mind and a hopeful heart that we weren’t going to be blinded by science and bored to death by the American speaker.
Instead, quite the opposite occurred! When I first saw Fred Provenza I did a double take. The fit-looking guy was wearing Wrangler jeans and lace-up rodeo boots as if he had jumped the cattle-yard rails to get here. As soon I heard Fred’s voice, with his super-cool American accent, I detected a deep level of humility and humour. Wise, profound and often funny words were spoken through a handsome, bushy salt-’n’-pepper beard. When he began to talk about our interconnectedness within what he termed ‘the web of life’, and then spoke about the instinctive nutritional wisdom held within mothers, I knew I’d stumbled on yet another key to my own self-awareness. I had also found more information I could weave into my novels to help other women understand their deep biological female function, which the modern world seems to steer us away from. The theme of farming and the feminine had serendipitously landed in my lap yet agai
n. Here I was being given the keys to a greater understanding of how societal change had left many women like me straddling two worlds of work and home life, and feeling depleted and confused by their dissatisfaction despite, apparently, ‘having it all’.
Fred is a member of BEHAVE – a research and outreach program that seeks to understand the principles of animal behaviour. Established in 2001, BEHAVE stands for Behavioural Education for Human, Animal, Vegetation and Ecosystem Management. Based at Utah State University, its work has extended across many ranches, farms and national parks and into science labs and lecture theatres around the world. Its projects don’t just work with sheep and cattle, but concern behaviour in many animals including elk, bison and even bears. Most importantly for me, Fred and his colleagues have studied how leaving animals on their mothers longer leads to greater productivity and greater nutritional wisdom for their young. It was his work on mothers and nutrition that really drew me in and helped me on the home front to leave my boots at the door, computer idle for a time, and plant my bare feet proudly in the kitchen as a woman passing on ‘nutritional wisdom’ to her children.
As the years have passed, Fred and I have become email buddies and he would bless my inbox with thought-provoking gems from some of his 250 publications, or gift me with his keynote slides and other papers he has written. A couple of years ago, Fred bestowed upon me the honour of asking me to read the manuscript of a book he was editing, The Art and Science of Shepherding: Tapping the Wisdom of French Herders, and to give him a support quote for it. Edited by Dr Michel Meuret and Fred, the book seemed to encapsulate all I was learning on my hill about moveable fences and varied diets for livestock. I was fascinated to learn that Fred’s colleague Michel was a Brussels University graduate who researched the value of livestock grazing for improving wildlife habitat and bio-diversity conservation. This was the exact same practical process I’d been part of on the Dargo High Plains with periodic grazing in Alpine regions with the mountain cattlemen, and what I was aiming for on my own 20 acres. Michel and Fred’s book was again a reflection of what I knew to be true, that the synergy and complexity between human, beast, dog and landscape are not simple archaic systems – so often dismissed by many urban dwellers as ‘quaint’ – but instead provide the key to unlocking better societies and better health for all through improved soil and healthy animal grazing systems.
Down the Dirt Roads Page 15