The Woman on the Mountain

by Sharyn Munro

  As time went on I came to know them so well that I can’t imagine how I was ever confused. I suppose it was rather like the racist-flavoured platitude about Asian people, lumping all those varied races and nationalities together—‘They all look the same’—hopefully uttered only until the speaker’s ignorance is relieved by actually getting to know some individuals.

  The wallabies’ bigger cousins, the wallaroos, are the Common or Eastern Grey Wallaroos. They prefer rockier country, such as on my lower escarpment. In the Austen social scale, they’d be working-class, peasants, a bit rough—common! The first pair I saw passing through surprised me by their great difference from each other in colour, the male being nearly black and the smaller female pale grey. This is apparently typical. They were both much shaggier of fur and stockier of build than my wallabies, and for years that pair were the only ones I saw here. Since the 2002 fires, I have seen a small family of them, usually drinking at the little dam we put in below the house, but also grazing. They are still quite wary of me.

  The Eastern Grey Kangaroos used to be seen higher up on my ridge, but since those same fires a group of them hangs around here a lot. By anyone’s standards, they’re upper-class—naturally grand, majestic in stature, the males as big as a pony, daunting when they stand fully erect. It’s a chastening experience to see them lope down my track towards the house, only to stop and look imperiously down at me over my yard gate. All that’s missing is the monocle.

  We’re used to seeing big domesticated animals like horses and cows in the landscape, but given that we don’t have elephants or giraffes, these are the biggest native creatures I’m ever going to see. When they’re feeding nearby I often get a fresh shock as one of the males straightens up. The sheer size of him!

  They’re all handsome, with admirable carriage. Straight backs and necks, heads held high as they bound across the paddock or through the trees. The females are smaller, but retain the well-defined facial bone structure of the species; they never look like wallabies. In their dusky greyish-brown coats, paler front fur, black highlights of ears, nose and paws, and their large dark eyes, they are always elegant.

  Their young are just as cute as the wallaby babies—big-eyed, fluffy, uncoordinated, given to twisting themselves back-to-front to scratch at fleas or ticks, or leaning back at an odd angle to scrabble at their tummy fur, or corkscrewing themselves vertically into the air, just for fun. Like the wallaby joeys, they sometimes play at sparring with their mothers, who are very tolerant, literally turning the other cheek until they’ve had enough, when they give the annoying child a cuff and move on. The joey shakes its head several times, as if to clear the stars it’s seeing, then comes back for more.

  I am pleased that the kangaroos now ignore me almost as much as the wallabies do, if I move steadily. As I’m seeing several family groups now, not just one, I’d say they’re here to stay. When I opened the yard gate the other day, a female kangaroo grazing very close by remained so unconcerned that her joey, who’d been dozing on the grass, stayed right where he was instead of panicking.

  Only recently, for the very first time, I have seen a Swamp or Black Wallaby and her joey near my yard. Dark-chocolate velvety fur, small head, usually seen in the ferny forests on the shady southern side of my ridge. I assume the drought is sending them foraging further afield. They eat bracken, so I hope they start on mine.

  I’ll learn more about these newer neighbours when they’re fully at ease with me, when they understand how this refuge works. That is, they’re the occupants; I’m just the cleaner-upper of introduced weeds and bouncer of introduced animals. And protector.

  When a wallaby stands still and looks me in the eye I cannot understand the kind of person that would see this as a chance to shoot it. I don’t want to be classed as the same species as humans who take pleasure in shooting such beautiful and harmless animals, those who like living creatures as targets—not for food or self-protection, but for ‘fun’.

  Here all native animals are protected from shooters. It is not so everywhere, despite what the laws say; especially with some weekenders who like to play at being tough bushmen, huntin’ ’n’ shootin’. Since it’s usually very late on a Saturday night when I hear the distant shots, the toughness is probably out of a bottle and I fear for both their discrimination and their accuracy.

  I feel like warning my resident wallabies and wallaroos and kangaroos, anything big enough to be a target: ‘Don’t go down to the woods today’—stay up here with me. I could add, ‘And be glad our state forest is now a national park’, for they are allowing amateurs—‘almost professional but!’—to hunt and shoot feral animals in their/our state forests, without supervision. I’ll bet my local weekend shooters would like a go at that.

  They are calling it ‘conservation hunting’. Who do they think this spin is kidding? Not the wounded feral animals that will escape to painful deaths, and the wounded or killed native animals hit ‘by mistake’, and their babies that starve as a result. Not to mention the odd bushwalker or birdwatcher accidentally potted—but they’re probably greenies anyway, so no great loss to the state.

  Feral animals—deer, cats, dogs, pigs, foxes, rabbits, cane toads, camels, brumbies, introduced birds like starlings and Indian Mynahs— are a problem, but they didn’t ask to be brought here any more than our convict ancestors did.

  If the criteria for extermination were ongoing damage to Australia’s natural environment or displacement of the indigenous species—the destruction of their habitats, food sources and health, even to extinction—I think we’d be top of the hit list of introduced species. We’d hope the culling was humanely done, wouldn’t we?

  For me, the validity and relevance of the books of the world’s religions are not indisputable. In fact, the Bible’s insistence that God gave man dominion over all creatures seems to me to have caused a lot of our problems. Instead, I keep to one rule, and try to follow the admonition of Charles Kingsley’s The Water-babies character, Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby I know Jesus is reputed to have said much the same, but I like the pithy rhythm of Kingsley’s language better. If everyone managed to treat others as they’d like to be treated themselves it’d be a pretty nice world, don’t you agree?

  Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby had an offsider, Mrs Bedonebyas-youdid, but I found her rather Old Testament vengeful and didn’t take her up to the same degree.

  Although mightily impressed by Mrs D’s simple rule as a child, I only thought of it in the context of human relationships. I’m now extending it to all creatures, even—almost—to leeches, based on the premise that being different from humans is not a reason for superiority and exploitation, but rather for learning more.

  We used to kill whales before we realised how intelligent and complex they are, how more like us. ‘How can they!’ we now say of pro-whaling nations. But I don’t feel that the right of a species to survive ought to depend on its degree of similarity to us, or on whether it’s of any use to us. It’s an intrinsic right, as part of the whole wonderful natural world—biodiversity. We simply don’t know enough about how all things were designed to work together—ecosystems—and we usually don’t find out until it’s too late.

  As Dr David Suzuki says, ‘...we tear at the very web of life that makes the planet habitable.’

  This blind blundering is nowhere more evident than in clear-felling our native forests for wood pulp to send overseas. Recycled, plantation and alternative fibres can be used instead, and yet we allow this madness to continue. We lose the plants and animals that lived in those forests and we lose the trees that would have been hard at work absorbing CO2 from our atmosphere, helping to save us from worse climate chaos. Which is clearly not as urgent as the lining of foreign pockets by the cheaper wiping of bottoms, foreign or otherwise.

  And we think we rule the planet because we’re so clever.

  It is said that cockroaches will survive a nuclear war. Imagine if they ended up the dominant species. I’d hope they’d not be wanting reve
nge for all those baits and sprays! But I wonder if they’d even consider the remnants of the human race worth keeping. After all, we’re greedy, aggressive, dangerous, and so stupid we foul our own nests, overpopulate, and self-destruct. What good are we?

  With that humbling thought held firmly in the back of my mind, I’d like to think that many of us are atypical humans and that we do care enough about our world to stop wrecking it and start healing it. I’m not a misanthrope, even if I did choose the daily society of animals over that of men.

  And believe me, I tried both.

  CHAPTER 5

  LIVING FOR WEEKENDS

  Being forced to live in Sydney, amongst millions of other humans, after living here with just ‘my family and other animals’, as Gerald Durrell put it, was a culture shock from which I didn’t really recover, since I always saw my life there as temporary.

  With hindsight, I was barely holding myself together. The marriage break-up had turned my world upside-down, and as a single parent it was a desperate financial struggle. The kids and I were restricted to visits here at best every second weekend, depending on whether I had petrol money or a suitable vehicle. I was without the consolation of this place where I belonged, and the lack of physical work seemed to leave me out of kilter with myself. There was only stress and worry and no release for it.

  I began smoking again, which I hadn’t done since first becoming pregnant. It didn’t help, but somehow chimed with my desperation. I’ll stop when I’m happy, I promised myself. Which I did, just before I moved back to the mountain again with my new partner. It’s pathetic, I know, but I started rolling the smokes once more when that relationship began to sour. They were roughly nine-year cycles, I’ve calculated, but this time I stopped far sooner, determined not to be so pathetically dependent.

  It helps being so far from the temptation of town. Such a strong addiction is always hovering, waiting for the next stressful situation. It’s ironic when I think how hard I persevered with the damn things as a student, to overcome the nausea, so I’d fit in, look cool. If only we’d known...

  Often it rained on our precious mountain weekends, which we thought most unfair. We’d either leave Sydney on Friday evening or at dawn on Saturday. Sometimes the kids would bring a schoolfriend each. If we’d arrived at night, the visitors wouldn’t know what the outdoors was really like until next morning. I’ve never forgotten the pre-breakfast comment of one nine-year-old, whose home was an inner-city semi on the main Rozelle shopping street, with no front yard and a tiny cement rear yard. Taking in the paddocks, the surrounding forest, the mountains stretching away into the far distance, she said, ‘Gee, you’ve got a big back yard!’

  I’ve found four pages of scribblings from one wet autumn mountain weekend in one very wet mountain year. I’d forgotten them, but the freshness of detail, lost if left to memory alone, says a lot about those years of estrangement...

  Rainbound—a weekend feature of life at the mountain as a visitor—without the compensation of fine weekdays; those are wasted on Sydney days spent indoors at work.

  I light the fire in the fuel stove after arriving and unloading—go through the acclimatisation, the transition ritual of reading the Saturday papers I’ve brought with me, drinking coffee by the stove, letting the glimpses of dripping trees and low cloud swirling amongst the trunks slowly make it sink in—we are not in Sydney

  By lunch the papers are read. I start to think about the cabin I am in; what plans we had, what we didn’t do. By mid-afternoon am feeling relaxed; have a beer to prove that it really is a Saturday, and start to plan anew. Line the roof plug those holes, and even—build that extension. I go back through the Classifieds and pretend I have the money for those cedar leadlight doors or that load of slate.

  I love cooking up here—it feels a pleasure rather than a rushed duty. Because it’s dark so early, we have eaten and the kids are nodding off by 7.30—even though they will stay up to 11 in Sydney, driven in one-hour bursts by TV shows. The dim candlelight and the physical day they’ve had all make it seem later.

  They ride—trailbike and horses—regardless of weather. I watch them from my spot by the stove, through the low-set window put there specifically to see up the track. My daughter, in her brown Drizabone and Akubra hat, walking her horse leisurely ... then my son, after the usual repairs to his second-hand bike—a stranger in wet weather gear and monstrous helmet, flying off in a spurt of mud...

  I let the quiet wash over me. The fire crackles, the wind drives the fine cloud droplets onto the tin roof so it sounds like rain, and faintly the trees above me on the ridge line tell me that it is really windy up there—but it is just a faint roar, nothing threatening or disturbing.

  I browse through all my books—some as old as my first memories—and choose the one I’m going to read this trip.

  As the wet weekends continue I stop being angry at the wasted time, the jobs not able to be done, and begin to look forward to the time on my own, to the peace that I don’t feel in Sydney even when I am alone. It’s a lack of restlessness, a feeling that I am in my home, safe and unworried.

  I love it when I can work physically up here—but I’m no martyr any more, so fit’s cold and drizzly I don’t try. Through my window I can see the odd wallaby feeding his way up the hill; kookaburras on their favourite horizontal branch, keen eyes sweeping the ground for titbits; or flocks of ground-feeding birds like the crimson rosellas, or the tiny fat tits hopping and twittering.

  Our resident shingleback lizard rustles out from under the kero fridge to investigate, and remains fixed, pretending not to notice me, till he gets up the courage to waddle (he plainly thinks he’s darting) across the room to safety under the sideboard. As the winter sets in, we won’t see him at all—I wonder where he goes to hibernate? We used to find whole families of these fat hibernating lizards curled up together under a sheet of tin or amongst stored beer bottles—they remained in rigid crescents when we picked them up to relocate them. Ours doesn’t seem to have a family—he has been alone in our cabin for years. I hope he knows there is a world outside it. [He was actually a Cunningham’s Skink.]

  The stove has been going all day and [with the fire door open] is glowing and cosy to look at—not as good as an open fire, but still a pleasure. My feet in double socks resting against the oven door, adding a log now and then, re-adjusting the kettles as they boil, turning the bread in the oven so it won’t burn—enjoying not having to jostle with the kids for the warmest spot and it not yet so cold that your back freezes while your front toasts.

  I like the way our track meanders between the trees and up and over rises and dips on the side of our hill—I like coming here and suddenly seeing the cabin as we lurch over the last rise.

  Right now a Scarlet Robin has landed on the tank—there must be a pool collected on the top—it’s pivoting and swaying as it drinks. The tank stand is getting green and mossy from the dripping of the overflow this wet year. Sometimes I have to run the tap to lessen its burden and it always feels wicked to be wasting this water—but this year has not been like other years.

  At night we’d play board or pen and paper games by candlelight, the kids idly scoring the candles with a matchstick, toying with the flow of wax. They’d make hot Milo drinks, adding so much powdered milk that it was thick enough to eat. I’d have a cask of wine on hand. When my daughter and I could no longer bear it that my son had to win, and he usually did, we’d clean our teeth at the kitchen sink, make a last trip outside by torchlight, and be asleep by 8.30 at the latest. But we didn’t bother much about time up here. Time out.

  Even when we lucked on a fine weekend, it wasn’t often that I could get the kids to stick around and help me with maintenance, let alone start any new projects, and anyway I had no money for materials. When my son was about fourteen, and tall enough to reach the underside of the tin roof from my ladder, we did manage to gradually and very roughly line it with reject plywood, blue builders’ foil stapled on top in an attempt to keep
some of the heat in or out. The battens were ancient hardwood, and we only had hand tools, so nailing the sheets to them from below was a painful process.

  The ply is better insulation than nothing, but not much. Every now and then there’s a creak as a nail pops out and a sheet of ply partly loses its grip. Well, it’s gravity isn’t it? Should have been screwed.

  A few friends, mostly new ones, helped me over those years. One loses track of some possessions and some friends in a marriage split-up. I found it hard to be around cosy couples and avoided them until I was stronger.

  Fences were fixed, water pumped and wood cut with help from visitors, especially one stalwart family friend, Nigel. The wildlife and the horses ate everything except the bay tree, the jonquils and the ferny asparagus leaves. I was often depressed at the place’s abandoned air, but I was often depressed anyway, at my own sense of failure, at having lost my way. Only the children kept me going.

  My Sydney jobs were meant as fillers until I felt up to the stress of teaching. After six frustrating weeks of job seeking I’d realised that an Arts degree was a handicap, stamping me as inexperienced and overqualified, despite my protests that I’d do anything. No one even wanted me as a waitress, because I was over 30 and hadn’t done any since my uni days.

  I’d taken the first job offered, in the storeroom of an architectural hardware firm. Bob, the storeman, the archetypal rough diamond with heart of gold, had originally been very unhappy about having a woman on his patch, but we became real friends. Over two years I worked my way up from the storeroom to scheduling and being a consultant to architects. I also made a friend ‘upstairs’: Susan, the accountant, a single parent like myself, extremely intelligent, with a dry and rather wicked sense of humour.