The Woman on the Mountain

by Sharyn Munro

  Our renovations were basic but expensive. We did not touch the courthouse or cells, but the rest was totally rewired, and the floors sanded, polished and sealed. We renovated the bathroom and kitchen—the latter mostly done by Dad, who lived with us for six weeks while he built many cupboards.

  A big cost was installing a septic toilet and self-contained drainage system, as there had been none. Until we could turn the old pantry off the breezeway into an indoor toilet, the backyard dunny still had one side in operation under the rather unsavoury pan fill and collect method—although I can’t say the new septic’s frequent odour of boiled cabbage at the back door proved much more appealing. When the outhouse was partly demolished I saved the kauri full-width seat and lid, and it graces my pit toilet here. It’s very smooth, as you’d expect after being polished by more than a century of warm thighs.

  However, when I swapped teaching for motherhood, our income was halved, so for our last five years there we were restricted to low-cost, high-labour jobs, like stripping doors and patching and painting the lime-plastered walls. A few pot plants and hanging baskets turned the exercise yard into a pleasantly sunny, protected courtyard, accessible also from the lounge room via an iron-barred door.

  I’d had to promise not to get pregnant until we’d repaid the loan for the total purchase amount of $6000 (truly!) and even that loan was only possible through personal string-pulling by my in-laws. In the 1960s a wife’s income was not taken into account and women could not borrow. The Pill had arrived, but if bank managers knew about it, they weren’t letting on.

  We loved living in this semi-rural, anachronistic village. We loved the sense of history, the pub just down the road, the publican and his family, and many of the pub-frequenting villagers. I’d joined the Ladies Darts Team, and so got to know another world of women, vastly different from that for which my convent school and university had prepared me. As the locals gradually educated us into acceptable behaviour, we made friends and had many great post-pub parties in the courthouse. I remain in touch with several of those friends, all of whom have left the village, and with whom those party memories still raise more than a giggle.

  So long as you didn’t mind everyone thinking it their right to know your business, the reward of village life was that your neighbours cared. For instance, I’d be asked at the pub about the owner of the green Mini that had been parked outside our gate on the weekend. ‘Stayed overnight, didn’t he? Live far, does he? On his own, wasn’t he? Not married, then?’ No chance of getting away with any illicit affairs round there.

  On the way home from hospital with each of my babies, we had to stop by the pub so the new baby could be passed round the bar, along with the Commonwealth Bank tin money box—a miniature bank building—for the equivalent of the traditional donation of a sovereign ‘to give the nipper a start in life’.

  I would push the big cane pram, a family heirloom that I’d desecrated by painting bright orange, over the bumpy dirt road for a walk, or to fetch the mail from the post office—there was no mail delivery. As I passed, people would appear at their gates or fences to ask how the baby was doing. Was he over the croup that so-and-so had told them about? And proceed to give me the benefit of their experience with croup or wind or babies in general.

  Here I feel obliged also to confess that I painted a beautiful, borrowed, antique cane bassinet and stand with gloss enamel ‘Aquarius Green’, a rather acidic lime. It was the era of the musical Hair, ‘the dawning of the age of Aquarius’, plus that’s my star sign—but neither seems a worthy excuse in retrospect.

  Once I’d become a stay-at-home village mum, I started a local playgroup. The large courthouse room was perfect: chipboard panels from the tip attached to the walls for pinning up blank newsprint paper for painting; overflowing boxes of dress-ups from StVinnies; ice cream containers of violently pink, green or yellow home-made playdough, sparkling with the coarse salt we added on the mistaken theory that then the kids wouldn’t eat it; old carpet to protect tender baby knees from the wooden floor, and that didn’t object to having the above paint and playdough trodden into it; wooden fruit crates, covered with paper, as tables; an old couch or two for the weary mothers from which to referee the toddlers or feed the latest infant.

  It was fun and games interspersed with tiffs and tears. I introduced excursions, which were welcome on the proviso that we were always back in time for some of the mothers’ daily hit of the TV soapie Days of Our Lives. In the long summer holidays, to give the older kids in the village some activities and stimulation—and the mums a break—I ran craft workshops in the courthouse.

  All this interaction meant that from babyhood my children never lacked for playmates, even though we didn’t have near neighbours. Their birthday party photos show the wide age range of local children, mainly girls, who liked to visit. They came partly to experience the novelty of differences—of this impressively large and solid house compared to the small, flimsy, and mostly askew miners’ cottages in which they lived; and of our lifestyle, with so many books, and original paintings and pottery, a strange world where television did not rule.

  Hence when we moved to ‘the mountain’, my kids swapped a busy social life for each other and the wallabies, just as we did. At least living somewhere without even a corner shop had partly prepared me for bush life, since I’d got into the rhythm of keeping a vegetable garden producing, which is harder than it sounds, and I’d become used to shopping only once a week.

  My decade in the old jail was relived over and over again recently as I wrote my first novel, A Taste for Old, set in a similar ex-mining village in 1972, when, like Australia’s government, it was on the cusp of big changes. ‘It’s time’ ran Labor’s winning slogan, but unlike the nation, my village didn’t think it was.

  In researching its history, I came across a National Trust website for the renovated jail complex when it was last for sale. Much extended, it had become a function and reception centre and restaurant. The playgroup room had become a billiards room—not so different in purpose. As one of its past uses, what I assume was my playgroup was incorrectly described as a crèche, hardly the word to describe our rough DIY set-up. The old place now looks very posh, more redolent of renovation than of history, and has clearly had much more capital sunk into it than we ever could have, or would have wanted to.

  The hollows worn into the slate steps of the old jail had meant more to me than the grand cedar ceilings, because they held a greater sense of history. The building as I knew it was intriguing, mysterious—far more than just a house—and the village was similarly imbued with layers of past lives and events that triggered my imagination. Had we stayed long enough in the jail we’d have ended up with a showpiece, an impressive and historic home, worth a lot of money. So what? It wasn’t a lifestyle destination I wanted—renovating for years, then showing it off, lunches and dinner parties—all that seemed shallow. Aldermen were threatening imminent ‘progress’, housing developments all the way from that last suburb to our village. Houses on the hill overlooking us? Neighbours just over the fence? Our village turned into a suburb? No thanks.

  Although we’d planted over a hundred trees on our large block in the middle of bare paddocks, they would not give real privacy. Also seeking more space, and a greater connection to land than our garden could offer, we bought 100 acres near Merriwa. We camped on it in our new Kombi van every second weekend. Despite spending most of our time collecting and burning prickly pear and trying to stop the kids disappearing down wombat burrows, we loved it.

  Soon we wanted to reverse the time balance, to be living like that for five days a week and going out to earn money two days. As we’d never risen above student levels of consumerism, nor had any desire to, there was no need for a big income.

  Fascinating as I found that Merriwa block’s sandstone ridge vegetation, its flowering small-leaved shrubs, its ironbark and wattle trees, its lichen-encrusted rocks and its sandy wombat world, I knew it was too dry for me to be happ
y living on it full-time. Although my childhood’s Sunday-night-only baths had been due to lack of tanks that didn’t leak rather than lack of rainfall, I never wanted to return to such water restrictions if I could help it.

  We started looking elsewhere, but too often the block on offer was a fenced-in island of degraded land with perhaps one rocky patch of remnant bush, and surrounded by other similar blocks. Rural residential jails. My privacy envelope had expanded and I needed real bush around me that I could walk through unhindered. Eventually we found this mountain, much more remote than we’d intended, but by then we knew how hard it was to find anything so natural closer to civilisation. And it had high rainfall.

  Both the old jail and my mountain have links to the past and a strong sense of place. I can’t imagine living in a place devoid of these qualities, scalped and sanitised free of them, such as a new project home in a new subdivision, no matter how well landscaped, no matter how great the facilities. There would be such a separation from reality as I understand it that I’d feel as if I was constantly short of something vital, like air.

  Conversely, I often wonder how people used only to such lives would cope should they be suddenly placed in the position of what millions around the world know as normal, with a sheet of tin, one pot, one spoon and a ragged blanket as ‘Home and Contents’.

  I imagine that for a day or two they’d behave well, as if they were on a reality TV show, but when no one called ‘Cut!’ as their nails chipped, their hair grew greasier, the loved one began to smell like a human animal instead of deodorant, and meals became minimal fuel for the energy to find food and water the next day, rather than an occasion for display ... what then?

  Somewhere in between the riches and the rags is a sustainable way of living that we need to adopt if our grandchildren are not to find themselves without a choice in the matter. That requires urgent attention to global warming, yet what we hear from our major politicians is still as irrelevant as the hollow ‘pock!’ of their party ping-pong.

  Unbiased scientists worldwide have been calling for immediate action, but only a few enlightened governments are acting. The UK is way ahead of us— and it signed the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases. Major polluter, the US, did not. Nor did follow-the-leader Australia, shamefully the world’s highest per capita greenhouse gas emitter. While a small contributor in the global perspective, it all adds up.

  A global problem requires a global solution, as the UK Stern Report, released in October 2006, pointed out. It put the cost of ignoring climate change in economic terms, which is a language the US and Australian governments will at least listen to. They have both reckoned there’s no point in signing Kyoto if the developing polluters, China and India, don’t—but why would they sign, and act, if the big boys don’t? To me it sounds much like the US stance on nuclear weapons: ‘Do as we say, not as we do.’

  Here, after years of denial, our federal government suddenly changed its tune in late 2006. As water restrictions bit deeper, and unseasonal snow followed unseasonal bushfires, and after millions of dollars of agricultural drought relief had to be announced, it became politically correct to admit the existence of climate change. With a federal election looming in 2007, the token mumblings and token fundings began—but did not extend to a national target for greenhouse gas emissions or penalties for the polluters, to putting a price on carbon.

  Hats off to Arnold Schwarzenegger for leading California to major cuts in greenhouse emissions, for disregarding his president’s head-in-the-sand policy. Other US states are following. Here, South Australia is taking genuine steps—its premier called climate change ‘a bigger threat than terrorism’ in 2005. But for the overwhelming majority of politicians the issue is driven by the polls rather than a sense of urgency, with no one in power standing up to say, ‘Hey, Rome is burning! Let’s quit fiddling NOW!’

  They’re still debating what would be the most popular tune to play next.

  They’re still putting profit before the planet and its people, tinkering at the edges of the problem while trying not to inconvenience Big Business.

  After all, they don’t want to be accused of being greenies. ‘Sorry, kids, ’ ancient ex-pollies might say to future generations scrabbling for food in a dried-up and drowning world, ‘we were too busy with Economic Progress to stop climate chaos.’

  Yeah, right. I wonder if they’ll hold tribunals for crimes against the human race, against the planet?

  My dad found it hard to understand us giving up our ‘riches’ stage of that grand house for a second-hand tent, especially when we weren’t even going to run cattle on the land we’d bought instead. What else was grass for? When he saw this place, he reckoned it’d be quite a good block—if we cleared most of the trees.

  Attitudes to land aside, Dad influenced several major directions in my life. When I was seven he moved my mother, my twelve-year-old sister and me from the house he’d built in the fibro heaven of Rydalmere, a western Sydney suburb so new in the 1950s that we’d kept a milking cow in the paddock next door. From then until I left to go to university at sixteen, home was a 10-acre orange orchard and market garden, at Erina, near Gosford.

  The saying, ‘You can take the girl out of the western suburbs but you can’t take the western suburbs out of the girl’, could be true, since my older sister did not transplant well, and moved back as soon as she left school at fifteen. My voice usually betrays my working-class westie origins—no one would accuse me of sounding posh, of being from Potts Point or Pymble. The move put the country into my soul for good. Dad got me out of the suburban jail first.

  My parents were poor when I was growing up. It was the norm to look in the shed first for bits and pieces that might be cobbled together to fix anything that was broken, from a saucepan to the tractor. Going to town to buy a new part or new item was the last resort. We were taught to make do instead of making demands, to recycle and repair. With hindsight, that was sustainability in practice, and I’ve never lived otherwise since.

  Mum had only reluctantly agreed to move to the farm to keep Dad out of the pub, a standard Aussie blue-collar male’s after-work habit, but one that had been a major source of argument. They must have got along better for a brief time, because within three years I had two new sisters. But the farm was a financial failure and Dad was forced to restrict it to weekends, and return to carpentry. And to the pub after work—where he got his contacts, he said. The arguments resumed.

  Since he was never hard enough to be a businessman, hated asking for money owed, Dad would take a case of peaches in lieu of payment. That sort of thing would drive my mother, struggling to find money for basics, into a fury. It wasn’t easy for them to keep me on at school for an extra two years so I could win a scholarship and go to university. This was a first in our family. How and why I was different—a bookworm—I don’t know, but I was finally allowed to be so, which in those days was not an assumed right. The thought of having to do ‘Commercial’ and be a secretary was a fate worse than death to me.

  I do remember making a statement of choice about being different in one way, when I was fourteen. Having given up hope of myself as ugly duckling ever being transformed into beauty, one Saturday morning I bought a pair of thick stockings, multi-coloured, zig-zag patterned. They were eye-catching, to say the least. This was 1962, when teenagers hadn’t long been invented, and rebellion as an intrinsic part of that stage was hard to put into action in a small town, especially for a convent girl. And Gosford was small then.

  The stockings weren’t blue, but they were about as far out as I could go to proclaiming myself an intellectual instead of the only two local options: a surfer chick—peroxide blonde, tanned, bikini, boobs, bad boyfriends, sex—for which I wasn’t qualified; or a nice girl—short perm, twin-set, sensible skirt, fortress step-ins, armoured bra, nice boyfriend, no sex, so early marriage—for which I wasn’t inclined.

  I can see those stockings now, and me eagerly trying them on
my stick-like legs as soon as we got home from town. Dad took one look, chuckled, and said, ‘I’m afraid they don’t do you any favours, love. You’d look nicer in ordinary ones.’

  ‘I don’t care, ’ I replied, in full teenage angst, ‘if I can’t be beautiful, I’m at least going to be noticed. I don’t want to be ordinary!’

  Perhaps I was heading down this path to oddity because I spent much time on my own, as my schoolfriends lived in town. My companions had been the books I devoured, like the C.S. Lewis Narnia series, since I’d discovered Gosford library at age nine. But my heroine lived in the only books my family owned and thus the only ones I could re-read. These were four age-mottled and tattered titles from the Anne of Green Gables series, by L.M. Montgomery, 1920s and ’30s editions, having belonged to an aunt of my mother’s. Anne related to nature in an excessively romantic way, she wrote stories, she was neither beautiful nor ordinary, and she had an attic bedroom. I’m still hoping for the attic bedroom, but for the rest ... she made me.

  By the time I got to university, a little frog in funny stockings didn’t make much of a splash in that bigger pond. Newcastle Uni then was very industrially focused, and there was only one small subpond to which I was attracted, the Arty one, where the girls had long hair like Joan Baez, the men had beards and shorter, but never short, hair—like Oscar Wilde, or Mick Jagger—and they all wore corduroy, wrote poetry, debated philosophy, listened equally knowingly to Bach or Bob Dylan, and drank flagon red wine, lots of it. There were strange rules, unwritten and unspoken, and many of the girls were beautiful and intellectual. How to win here?

  I never worked that out in time, and the attempts were painful. I took refuge in marriage between university and my Diploma of Education year, partly so I wouldn’t be sent off, alone, to the country to teach. Our group dismissed marriage as a piece of paper that could always be ripped up if it didn’t work out. No big deal. If only I’d had more courage...