Now here I am nearly a quarter of a century later living in a town again. I’ve used this time as the perfect way to research urban living for my vocation as a writer and use the experience to compare it to my rural one. To start with, I’ve stacked on the kilos. Food is so accessible from shops! I’ve got myself addicted to coffee. One cup a day. My physical labour is limited to getting in the odd load of wood, so I sense my body weakening, softening, and I feel I have to counter it by running the tubby pony up and down over the bike hillocks at the skate park, trailing after my son on his bike, so the pony and I get some exercise in.
I am also witness to ‘mind viruses’, as Dr Wayne Dyer calls them in his writing, which are messages we catch from society and believe to be true. Like the fact we think we need bigger, better roadways – when in fact we really need new systems of transport. Or that we need bigger, better shopping centres, hardware stores or housing areas, when really we need to reconsider consumerism and environmentally compatible living.
The first few weekends I spent in the village I would wake early and head out to do my chores of the chooks and vegie garden. The township was so silent, I thought there’d been some kind of alien invasion in the night that had removed every living human from their houses and taken them to a parallel universe! So quiet was the place I wondered if I’d missed something in the night. But then, come 10 o’clock, a symphony of lawnmowers would start up and dog walkers bound for the coffee shop would begin strolling past the house. I realised I was adjusting to a new urban time schedule. What baffled me more was how each household exported their soil nutrients from their gardens by putting all their garden clippings into big wheelie bins to be carted away, instead of reusing them as ground cover, worm food or compost.
Every Monday morning when the garbage truck came at 6 a.m. I saw how people had been programmed to put their colour-coded bins out. Yellow lid for recycling material, green lid for garden waste. I would reach to the book beside my bed, Kristin Ohlson’s The Soil Will Save Us, and start to apply some of her discoveries in her home country of America to my own urban experience here in Australia. She begins her book by telling us that 80 billion tonnes of carbon has been lost from the world’s soils from farming, ranching and land practices – especially from modern industrial agriculture. As I read this, and looked out my window at my urban surrounds, where the council gardeners clearly had it in for large trees and long grasses, I wondered why such reported environmental travesties rested entirely on the shoulders of country people and those in rural industry. What about those in towns? People in energy-hungry housing?
In Tasmania we have an army of people protecting ‘Wilderness’ areas and yet I believe every area, every inch of this planet, is sacred. It’s not just the breathtaking forests that are important, it’s also the vacant block, the strip beside the highway, the area of land on which your house sits. We fence these places in, and in doing so we fence off our minds. To many ‘nature’ is a drive away, reached it only when we take annual leave and pack the camping gear into the car. But nature is the everyday. From the bird that alights on your roof, the spider that is carrying out its life purpose under your sink, to the millions of living creatures in the soil that have been smothered by your hosed-down path. Every one of us is already in the natural world, and people in urban areas have as much power as farmers to change the outcomes of our planet.
Ohlson’s book begins by her theorising about soils and humans when she stopped raking her leaves on her lawn so that the nutrients within them could cover the ground and feed the microbes beneath. She, like me, watched the gardening habits of neighbours. In her case, they were hard at it, clawing leaves into great piles. Leaving the soil bare, removing the very thing that would keep the soil breathing and breeding. ‘Tidy’ is a human construct. I too puzzled at the illogical practice of exporting vegetable matter from one’s land. I’ve heard it quoted in various places, but apparently one teaspoon full of healthy soil – from anywhere, city or country – contains approximately 6–7 billion organisms made up of teeny-weeny little fungi, tiny worms and a multitude of microorganisms that science is still catching up on naming.
Given that a huge proportion of people own lawns in Australia, isn’t there potential right there to make massive environmental change? According to Kristin, lawns make up the largest irrigated crop in the US, taking up three times as much space as corn. What we do with our urban green matters, whether it’s in our yards and our parks, or even our highway median strips. She cites studies that support Colin Seis’s theory that if famers improved their community of soil microorganisms by increasing biomass (soil thrumming with life), the amount of carbon sequestered in the soil would offset all our current emissions of carbon dioxide.
Well, what are we waiting for?
We don’t need a Legoland lawn of one plastic species. What I would like to see is a trend for multispecies lawns and a change in mindset so that lawns can be seen as ‘community carbon collection areas’. A longer, more interesting lawn with wildlife-supporting species of plants would come to symbolise a caring citizen, rather than a lazy gardener. In the same way bare paddocks or bald hillsides ought to be rethought of as being as offensive as smoking over a baby’s cot. When people see a hillside that wavers in the wind with the green of Mother Nature’s blanket covering it, we should sing our praises to the land manager who helped our earth create it. We can try to change people by enforcing laws, but social pressures and positive leadership is the fastest way to inspire change, rather than impose change.
Have you noticed there is a ‘collective consciousness’ in humans and our awareness of our oneness with nature is gaining momentum? Have you noticed how fast holistic ideas are spreading due to the internet? Human thoughts are contagious. A person only has to walk into a room to influence the people in it, without uttering a word. How we act, think and exist in the world impacts on others. Any stockman who works livestock for a living understands how mob dynamics are communicated as if through the ethers. One ‘bad egg’ in a mob can spread that behaviour like wildfire – would the animal break through a fence or split from the herd, taking followers with it? A calm leader can impart wisdom and order to a mob, herd or pack. Even schoolteachers know there are group dynamics in children. When you next walk out in your world, be aware of the mind viruses that infiltrate us all and know you are in control of your own mood and future.
It can be a difficult thing to do because marketers are everywhere. Billboards and buses tell us that we need a new car, a new watch, a new body. News is flashed on big screens and small screens in our palms – most of it mindlessly negative. Like urban living, agriculture is rampant with negative mind viruses too . . . that there’s no future, that to be a farmer is to struggle. We have a belief in ‘the Aussie battler’ doing it hard. But can we be like Joel Salatin and think of it another way? What if we told ourselves a new story about farming? That these are vibrant places of life that sustain many people. That the soil is so healthy that even if rainfall fails to arrive, there is still enough moisture that the plants are sustained? Creating a vibrant new life in agriculture starts in our mindsets.
My way of settling myself into a stillness and strong faith in my world is to meditate daily. Even if it’s just for ten minutes, it centres me again to be committed to a world I want to create.
Nowadays, I have come to be very selective about what I focus on. I no longer watch the news or read the paper. I no longer watch television with advertising about how our bodies let us down and are to be tested and medicated. Not because I don’t care . . . but because I do care. I don’t want to add to those mind viruses and feed my life’s energy into those negative areas.
As our neighbours and I are in the midst of pleading with council about the joining of the road, I had hoped I could write a happy ending to this chapter, to say the decision-makers had heard us and our No Through Road safely remains. But we are all left hanging on an answer with the road half dug up, providing the kids mound
s of dirt to jump bikes over. In the meantime, I’ve committed myself to village living for the moment, and am congratulating myself that I’ve lasted longer here than Dubbo. I’m still practising altering those 70 000 daily thoughts of mine to become thoughts of gratitude, love, forgiveness, joy and hope. Less and less frequently do the thoughts arrive that take me back down that woeful old track I no longer need to go. I began to broaden my horizons to include more self-care: leisurely walks, not just to get fit, bubble baths, not just to get clean, and time to just sit and pat my dogs, not just to train them, but to love them. In this village, I came to see sometimes I am moving and changing the most when I am sitting still.
I must have looked like an Aussie cliché from the 1970s. A typical ocker child wearing a floppy terry-towelling hat with dead-straight wheat-blonde hair emerging beneath it, white zinc smeared across my freckled nose, a red V-neck T-shirt and too-short navy terry-towelling shorts that I was growing out of, fast. I had worn, old thongs that would bust periodically. I’d clumsily tried to sticky-tape them back together from the underside. There I was on the hill at the cricket, dodgy thongs cast aside, sitting under the hot sun on a tasselled, scratchy towel, while Dad, wearing something equally as ocker, sank tinnies out of an esky sloshing with melting ice.
Back then, the main cricket matches in Hobart were played at the old Tasmanian Cricket Association ground on the Queens Domain. A slice of England amidst the bush, with the cream picket fence encircling the ground and an elegant members’ stand with a curved tin roof complete with wrought iron and pretty finial touches. The plebs were kept separate on the hill. Around the ground was Tasmanian wilderness. The bush-covered hill that overlooks the heart of the city and the River Derwent remains pretty much unchanged since then and although ringed with human activity, the area gives us a postage-stamp-size remnant of what Hobart’s grassland was like. I still run my dogs up there on the reserve whilst waiting for school pick-up time, just so I can inhale the scent of bushland soil and drift my fingertips over the remaining native grasses and listen to the thrum of insects in the dappled shade and honour those quieter communities we have displaced with concrete and consumerism. I soak in all the sounds and scents that echo the legacy of the past, before British buildings, bullshit and the sport of cricket was brought to this land.
I can’t look at the sloping hill of the old TCA without thinking of Dad and the bunch of Paul Hogan lookalike yobs who used to cheer on the cricketers. During the hours it took to battle it out over a Sheffield Shield, to pass the time my brother and I invented a game of stacking empty beer cans up into a tall, wavering pyramid. The tins were artfully colour-coded between draught or bitter. Then, when the last can was carefully placed at the top of the stack, the blokes above us on the hill, in between overs, would throw more cans and other objects at it, toppling it and letting out a great cheer when it clattered to the ground. We would repeat the process, making our towers larger and larger as the empty beer-can supplies increased and the overs were bowled and batsmen came and went. There were no recycling wheelie bins back then. The quantity of discarded cans grew and grew, as did the day, into long shadows on the grass. Cricket takes time. And it clearly took a lot of beer.
I’m not sure what my mother would have made of this activity. I don’t remember her being at the cricket with us back then much, even though she is more of a cricket fan than my dad, but maybe in those days the hill wasn’t the place for wives. I do remember the wobbly-booted ‘full as googs’ blokes. It has given me a lifelong unhealthy barometer of accepting men who simultaneously drink beer and stare at sport as normal. Heck . . . I used to find it endearing. Little primary-school me was snuck into that male domain, and being a sponge to the world, I soaked it all in, good and bad.
Once, on a close-played Sheffield Shield final where Tassie stood a chance of victory, the crowd was in a frenzy. My brother and I had the cans stacked high – we were almost to the top. Our structure was so tall we had to ask an adult to place the remaining few. But a group of blokes sauntered past and kicked the cans over before we had finished the stack. Like a tsunami, a sudden wave of aggression flowed forward as the men on the hill swarmed, leaping over their eskies, all of them set on punching the lights out of the offenders. I watched with wide-eyed amazement as I felt the surge of male aggro, fuelled with booze. Within seconds, police came. They busted up the fight. There were bloody noses, bad language and back-slapping from the blokes who came out on top. It was all normal at the time. It was the 1970s! As the scuffle died down, my dad called us kids to heel. It was time to simply sit and watch the cricket.
Despite the male focus of the era, I remember the day I discovered cricket wasn’t just a male sport. I recall almost falling into a photograph with fascination and surprise. The old black-and-white image was of a woman in long skirts wielding a bat. And another showed women in white sitting amidst the men in a team line-up. After seeing these photographs, I couldn’t understand where the women had gone from the game since the 1800s. Like tennis, cricket had started as a mixed-gender sport. Why, then, did it seem so dominated by males at the state and international level? I knew as a kid it was a sport I could play with my brother and succeed in bowling him out, or tonking him over the fence. I was fast, competitive, and honed my catching and throwing to be as good as the boys. I was determined to not be left behind by them. But aside from backyard cricket, there was little support for aspiring female cricketers.
Despite having two country cricket teams in my old farming district of Levendale and Runnymede, women were kept to the sidelines. They sat in the car or on blankets watching the kids. Their job was to provide the sandwiches, maybe keep score if they were short of men to do it, and heat the sausage rolls. There were a few hardcore Jim Beam-kinda gals who made the distance in the clubrooms afterwards, but women actually on the field was something I’ve never seen in those two clubs. I knew the clubs themselves were a good thing for the district, bringing social life to the area, but women’s sport in my rural region was limited to netball, a sport I never warmed to.
Still, the cricket clubs were good, fun places, even if just socially. Once when the kids were younger I went for a ride on my old Dargo droving horse, Jess. She’s a palomino who was bought cheaply from the sale yard in Sale, Victoria, years ago, and she comes with an unknown history. Jess was the pony that got me back in the saddle after having my babies and she’s been my comfort ever since. Nowadays she’s loaned out to Riding for the Disabled (also known as Riding Develops Ability), where my daughter rides her each week. Jess gets to work her golden pony magic on other children too, even taking one vision-impaired rider to a State Championship dressage victory, along with my daughter in reserve place. But back in the early days of motherhood, Jess and I would head off down the road to meet my human friend Jess. There we were on the Woodsdale Road, Jess the horse, and Jess the person riding her horse Fergus. Fergus behaved as if he belonged in a Pantene shampoo commercial. He was so convinced he was the most beautiful grey in all the land that he would spend his time tossing his head and long locks accordingly. It was on this summer evening ride that we discovered in the cluster of roadside mail boxes at the end of the road that the new phone books had been delivered. Judging from the pale sky and the dampness of the air, I knew it was going to be a dewy night so I opted to tuck the phone book under my arm and keep riding.
Jess is like a couch – Jess the horse, that is – round and comfortable to ride, with a terrific drover’s horse fast, steady walking pace. You can manoeuvre her with your legs or the press of a rein on her neck, so she’s been dubbed the perfect ‘drinking horse’ because there’s always a hand free to hold a can. On Dad’s farm, I once lugged a heavy old sick wether slung over her shoulders out of the bush as I sat in the saddle. Even though she’d never carried a sheep before, she stood steady as a rock as I lobbed him over her, then climbed aboard myself. As Jess and Jess, Fergus and I rode past hawthorn hedges that lined the road, we soon spotted cars ringing the cri
cket ground. The clubrooms were abuzz with post-cricket victory chatter and the bar was open. We rode right up to the windows and proceeded to settle in on the backs of our horses as the cricket boys put our drinks on the tab and brought them to us from the bar. Now with phone book and Bundy rum in hand upon a horse at the cricket club, life was looking pretty good that afternoon . . . unique, in fact.
According to our old laws, it’s still illegal to be drunk and ride a horse, so by the time the sun began to sink, it was decided our horse keys ought to be confiscated and we should park our horses in the neighbour’s sheep yards overnight. Cars tend not to slow for horses much these days and riding on dusk, with a phone book in hand and a belly full of Bundy rum, was not a good thing. I opted for a lift home instead and was pleased I’d have a reason to ride Jess home again the following day. I was delivered back to my farmhouse into the shadows of disapproval. It seemed on days like that one, I was ‘too much’ for those around me, rather than ‘not enough’, but that rare day of equine freedom from the boundaries of farm and family still makes me smile. It was an ‘Aussie-as’ outing.
Like horses, my love of cricket was put on hold when the kids were really little. For a time, cricket was merely a background noise whilst I raised the babies into toddlers. The local finals were simply a place to drink socially with the local community, but as my son grew and I became a single mum, it was up to me to bowl to him. Through my son, my love for playing the game was reignited. My skills were rusty, and it took me a while to get my eye and arm in, but I mustn’t have been too rusty. One day we were at my daughter’s therapy sports day, organised by St Giles – a non-government group that has helped us with my daughter’s development for many years – and my son and I were getting a little competitive and raucous playing cricket in a giant basketball stadium amidst the St Giles clients. The Tasmanian Roar girls hosting a cricket activity at the event spotted my action and afterwards asked me for my number. A few weeks later, I got a call from the New Town Cricket Club coach inviting me, as a forty-something-year-old, to play for their club! Overcommitted to supporting my kids and animals, I didn’t rise to the challenge. But in some ways I wish I had given myself the time. I’d always dreamed of playing competitively.
Down the Dirt Roads Page 20