Whilst staying in the Hamilton region, we saw the landscape’s warnings were the same as in our home state. We could feel its sickness and its decline. A decline that moves so slowly most don’t see it. We could also feel its beauty though. A tenacity that says to me that Mother Nature will win in the end. Just give Her time. It was crop-stubble burning month and as we drove along, I saw the ribbon rows of black that swept across the landscape in straight lines. Organic matter all gone to the sky through the lick of flame. Tidy.
A few days into our stay, Ian told me he was going to be on hand to help his neighbours when they fired up the brittle stems of a harvested wheat crop over the fence. It was Ian’s job to patrol the boundary and make sure the fire didn’t jump onto his farm. He asked me along for the ride. Pump and water on the back of the ute in case of runaway flames, Ian and I set off. In the paddock he introduced me to his local neighbours. Lovely blokes. Ian, masterful in his way with handling people, knew I had a book to write on landscape and the changes in how we manage it. He was always up for a bit of a ribbing too, so he set off prompting a conversation between me, the starry-eyed future farmer, and the practical old-school male farmer who exuded blokeyness.
‘Tell Rachael why you burn the stubble,’ Ian poked at his friend. The farmer’s eyes slid across to me. Was he summing me up as one of those ‘greenie’ types? From his tone I think he was.
‘We do it because of the problem we have with the slugs,’ he said, a little defensively, perhaps. ‘We have a moisture problem in the winter months, so we’re prone to slug attack.’
A moisture problem, I silently repeated, looking around at the blank paddocks. I saw it as a soil structure problem, not a moisture problem. There was our point of difference in how we read the land.
‘They’ve stopped stubble burning in the lighter country,’ he continued, ‘but we have heavier soils here, so we still burn.’
My mind ran off down the farming pathways I’d learned. The ‘lighter’ country was that way not just because of soil type, but also because of management. I knew that right across Australia our ‘heavier’ soils were getting lighter and lighter . . . and with it, losing the ability to hold moisture. Looking around, it was hard to see the district had a moisture problem. Rainfall events are altering dramatically around the country. Climate is changing. As it has done for millennia.
‘I don’t know a lot about cropping in this area. We do things differently down in Tassie,’ I said, hoping to let him know he wouldn’t get an argument from me. I wasn’t judging him in any way, because I’d learned long ago there’s no point in judging others. I wanted to switch off his defensiveness, but Ian was on a roll. I caught the twinkle in his eye.
‘Rachael, tell him why the slugs are a problem,’ Ian prodded again. Stirrer.
How could I say to that proud and now prickly man that the slugs are only a problem because the ecology is out of balance, without him taking it personally? That’s the problem with change. It makes us feel that what we have done is wrong; that we are wrong.
With this man, I got the sense that his tension came from within – a deep knowing that what they were doing was actually harming the microbiology of the soil. He was simply yet to seek other ways, ways that were kinder to the soil, and ways that, over time, offered more profit.
It was funny-bugger Ian who kept digging, not me. I won’t tell you where the man went with his comments but just know it was a blunt racist jab at the genocide this country has at its heart. Even if said in jest he clearly had no time for cross-examination by a woman about his farming practices, even though it was being conducted by my shit-stirring interpreter Ian. I smiled at Ian when the man got up into his truck and roared away to set the landscape to flame.
‘That went well, Ian,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
‘He’s actually a really good bloke,’ Ian said.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘I could see that.’ And I meant it. He was a good bloke. A contributor to his community. His family. His farm. He just didn’t see the colour of the world the way I did. Nothing wrong with that.
We do what we do because of those unconscious roads that stretch back as far as time that condition our way of being. We forget why we do things. We don’t question it. Yes, fire is a cleanser. We innately love it – the controlled version of fire at least. The practice of burning things lights us up within. And we love big, red, shiny fire trucks that used to send us into a frenzy of excitement when we were little. Burning is a ritual. It’s a right of passage for a man to burn. And as a woman it gets my blood pulsing. I loved fire as a child, lighting up tussocks, and later on farms burning stubble.
How could I say to that bloke what I really wanted to say? ‘Have you ever thought about not doing it? Have you ever thought about new ways?’
It would get me nowhere. Some are just not ready to hear it, particularly from a woman. I accept that. Nowadays, I get to dance away and sing my new tune and leave others to their song.
As the smoke billowed across the landscape, birds bolted across the sky and hares hot-footed it towards the shelter of trees alongside the highway, I watched as the slivers of ash spiralled across a grey haze sky. They eddied up and over, across the boundary fence, settling like confetti onto Ian’s paddocks.
‘Look! What lovely neighbours,’ I said to Ian cheekily. ‘They are top-dressing your paddock for you with pot ash and organic matter – for free!’
He laughed.
The next day I walked the dogs to that boundary paddock and slipped through the fence so as to get the feel of the baked soil in my hands and study more closely what remained. The crunch under my boots of exposed, torched soil felt sickening to me, like walking on the brittle bones of babies. Quickly, I went back into Ian’s paddocks. A conventional high-input farmer, Ian is a good caretaker. He locks up 90 per cent of his land in dry times, sacrifices 10 per cent to hold his stock on and feeds them well so they look fully in bloom, no matter the season. I walked his pastures that had life, and a good level of plant diversity ready to bolt when moisture arrived. Colin’s is one way. Ian’s is another. Both men know, though, to put their soil and plants first so their animals thrive.
In the last few days of the trip, with the kids off visiting their East Gippsland relatives with their father, I farewelled Ian and Kay, and drove the back roads from Hamilton through Ararat across to Auntie Whiz in Bendigo. She is my Granno Joan Wise’s eldest girl. As the landscape changed, the overgrazing was a constant. Once I was out of the striped land of burnt stubble, I moved through places that were scarred with mining, and into semi-rural fringes where horses were double-stacked on barren blocks.
In Bendigo, my auntie greeted me with tea, and my kelpies settled into the backyard, going from window to window to perve intently on the elderly cat within the cottage. The cat rubbed up against me as I sat on Auntie Whiz’s lounge room floor. Scattered about me were my grandmother’s photo albums and papers of her published stories, the cat walking over them and dribbling as she purred.
‘Puss! These are heritage documents!’ I chided. The dogs at the window whined a little, ears pricked.
I peered at the picture of Granno Wise – Joan – sitting in her tweeds with her golfing gal pals. Hair tightly curled, all in sensible woollen skirts, they wore ladylike pearls, brooches on cardigans and dollops of formal hats.
‘They are dressed so conservatively!’ I said to Whiz, who sat twining her homespun wool on the lounge.
‘Oh, don’t let that fool you,’ Whiz replied, ‘they were all absolutely wicked.’
As I lifted and turned the pages of the giant cardboard book that my grandmother must have bound together with her own hands, I saw the legacy of many lifetimes’ work within. Not just of farms and favourite horses, like Rainbow or Black Sammy, but cows too, in particular three stud jerseys, one silver, one black and one golden, brought from Runnymede House in Hobart. I also found a long-forgotten collection of my grandma’s fictional writing. As I flicked through the documents I sa
w just how our compass on the earth stretches in time both forward and backward. There on the pages of the history books, I discovered my great-great-great-grandfather William Wise. I learned that around 1834 Mr Wise owned most of Richmond Town, right to the paddocks where I now rent that flystrike-green house! It seems my natural compass point did take me to some kind of home after all. In a strange twist, when I turned the pages of the book my own grandmother had created, I saw the black-and-white image of one of the Richmond buildings that William Wise once owned.
‘That’s Czegs, the coffee shop where I’ve been writing this book after school drop-off!’ I exclaimed to Whiz. For the past year-and-a-half, I’d sometimes escape the scattering of crumbs and dirty plates left hastily on the kitchen bench, turn my back on the silent piles of broody washing and walk my son to school with the two kelpies and my daughter’s bouncing yo-yo poodle. For an hour or so, I’d tuck myself away in the corner of that very same building William Wise once walked through. As I sat looking at the hand-split boards of the ceiling above and the trapdoors hinged on the floor to the cellar below, I had wondered about the history of the place. The deep-set windowsills were crafted from beautiful wood and as I took in how low the door frames were I would ponder about the people who once inhabited the rooms. I had no idea that the plot of my own story was tangled with a great-great-great-grandfather of mine who once carried out his daily life here in this very same building where I typed on my laptop computer.
In Granno Joan Wise’s writing, I saw that she too, like me, wrote of landscape and of the people in them, drovers, rabbiters and the island’s sea. She wrote of burning the stubble too. A practice that my own grandfather Archie did.
Sometimes I don’t want to look too closely into the past. Did my forebears in the 1880s shoot thylacines for the government bounty? Or, God forbid, did those relatives who arrived here first and who are now barely traceable on my fraying family tree target the original people of this place? Is my quest for the restoration of native grassland in this continent born out of a deep saturation of guilt from some dark travesty that lurks in my early settler blood?
As I ponder this question, I arrive at the deep truth that comes to me in a loudly singing conclusion. My passion to inspire us to regenerate our Australian soils, grasslands and food systems comes absolutely from a place of love. Love is the same place that I entered a marriage. Love is the same place I set up a farm business for my father. It’s the same place I bore children. Love. My love for land. Despite my past hurts, I still love. I still believe utopia can be achieved. Fiction and life intertwined. It’s only the diamond crunch of my own crisis that has delivered me to this one glorious conclusion. Love is everything.
It was Christmas Eve and late in the day, the kids and I, droopy with heat, decided to drive to the supermarket. We were singing ‘Rusty Holden Ute’ to the tune of ‘Jingle Bells’ and we were excited by the prospects of the magic that Christmas brings. In typical fashion, I’d left our Christmas food shopping run a little too late. I noticed the apricot roadside stall at Midway Point had shut up shop, the seafood van man was turning customers away due to empty freezers and the new-season pink-eye potato stall had diminished to just one bag. My son spotted a sign painted on a wooden board that read ‘unsprayed cherries’ and instantly I veered my old red ute into the rocky drive. The lady selling them in the shade of a tin shed, and from beneath a floppy hat, said apologetically, ‘There are only some seconds left. They’re fresh but not-so-perfect.’
‘Oh! We are good with not-so-perfect,’ I replied. To me, when it comes to cherries that have never seen a chemical spray, there is perfection right there! They are a rare find in the cropping area where we now live, where spray rigs hooked to the three-point linkage arms of tractors are frequently seen driving over the oldest still-in-use convict bridge in Australia. Booms folded up like vehicles from a Star Wars film, they cruise right past the primary school, on towards the lettuce farms or stone fruit orchards. The kids and I celebrated our spray-free find by chomping on the cherries as soon as they were bagged. There was no waiting for Christmas with this lot. The plump orbs of dark juicy fruit that gleamed with reflections of silver when held up to the light were just too tempting. There was nothing ‘second’ about those beauties! With stained fingertips, we rolled on and into the concrete prefab space of Coles in our nearest major rural township.
The new supermarket sits beside exhausted ploughed paddocks and a repainted and made-to-look-classy KFC. Wind turbines above the concrete, treeless carpark and massive truck bays gave the slightest suggestion that maybe, just maybe, the people who design these sorts of places in Australia are taking small shuffles towards more enviro-friendly principles. The heat from the tarmac rose up to hit us like a furnace. Through the parting automated doors into air-con iced air we ventured and were captured within the fluoro-lit world that promised low prices. It was almost identical to the type of mega-store food shopping offered across the road with ‘the fresh food people’.
It was here on the eve of Christmas I saw a scenario that would be replicated across this whole nation in the giant cavernous spaces that hold our food supplies that we now accept as ‘normal’ . . . supermarkets. The shelves had been stripped bare, as if one day of closed shops would somehow cause starvation. As my son and daughter cruised alongside me with the trolley, we discovered there was no turkey left. The strawberries had sold out. At the bakery section there were no more loaves of bread, save for a lonely Dutch loaf. As a writer, I often watch people as if seeing them from above, like a lone bird, looking down on a vista . . . a vista that is becoming increasingly ravaged by human greed. So as we encountered this Christmas ‘food shortage’ I used it as a chance to teach my kids that supermarkets aren’t really about food filled with good in-season nutrition, or about helping Aussie farmers. They are about money-making and marketing, and mostly conditioning humans to behave as consumers. Then I began my spiel about branding and labelling. Poor kids. They just wanted an ice-cream from their mum on such a hot day. But there I was standing in front of the milk section, where there was only supermarket-branded milk left . . . stuff I won’t buy. I’d just been employed to write an article about the importance of healthy gut microbes in cattle and had attended a cow autopsy to see it for myself. The dairy cow’s owner said it was standard practice in his area to give the milking cows a dose of antibiotics mixed daily into their feed ration – a practice that kills gut microbes. He said he had stopped the antibiotics, but despite his management change, his vats of milk still ended up in the generally branded milk that we buy in the supermarket that are from cows that have the antibiotic ration, and that in turn ends up in my kid’s bellies.
As we drove home with our Christmas shop of possibly antibiotic-infused milk and a present for the emotionally tumultuous poodle, the kids and I knew we wouldn’t starve at Christmas, even though there’d been slim pickings at the supermarket. At home we had eggs that our chickens had gifted us. There was stone-ground flour from the Oatlands’ Callington Mill in the pantry and we could call into Sophie, who has fresh strawberries on her Littlewood Berry Farm down the road. Plus there were lemons in the fridge, grown in a pot on the balcony of my mum’s townhouse. We summed up what we had, and it was decided . . . we would make pancakes for Christmas! An all-day breakfast! I wanted to teach my kids that Christmas was about love . . . not the pressure of a set menu and gorging yourself just because the religious texts said Jesus was born on this day over 2000 years ago.
While I don’t take my children to church, I do teach them that we exist in a blue-sky cathedral and that the message of Jesus, if we are to have a day of celebration for him, is all about love. Not just love for other people, but for all living things. I’ve never understood the stress-filled consumer frenzy of Christmas in Australia when so few of us are religious in any way. Do people ever ask why we do it? To escape the grind of Christmas obligations with my immediate family after our eviction from the farm, I told my mother jokingly to l
et the family know Christmas was against my religion. I was now a practising Wiccan. A white witch. My mum could see the humour written on my face and got the joke. She promptly told me where I could buy some nice plants for my witchcraft friends.
On one level I had been joking, but when I thought about it, I wasn’t far off the truth. I was teaching my children witches weren’t as they are potrayed in modern fairytales. They were medicine women and midwives. I treat ailments with nutritional medicine – be it garlic, lemons, turmeric or honey, or simple chicken soup that feeds the soul. I also can’t do dates and calendars, and instead time my life with seasons and sunrises. Essentially that’s all witches were . . . medicine women who worked with and worshipped Mother Nature’s cycles to find plants to balance or cleanse the body. They didn’t work with antibiotics. They worked with onions that had antibacterial properties, long before modern medicine came about. My children have always enjoyed their home remedies from mother – concoctions I call ‘medicine’ drinks filled with all sorts of goodies and my love. They have also heard their mother speak of eating food in season, only choosing meat where the lives of the animals have been honoured, and being grateful for what the planet gives us. They are rarely ill, and when we do go to see a doctor who is familiar with modern medicines, they are ones like Dr Tomato Plant who ask questions like, ‘Are you getting enough sleep?’ or ‘Are you drinking enough water?’
Down the Dirt Roads Page 23