by Sharyn Munro
For a time a Grey Shrike-thrush was nesting on an open ledge in the top of the glass-room wall. The ledge had lost its wire screen, the nest was old, but the bird appeared to take up her annual lease just weeks after I came.
Her melodious song echoed, ever oddly, in the empty room—wild birds don’t live in rooms! I stayed out of there, as she would startle and fly away as soon as I opened the adjoining door. Then one day some Melbourne friends visited and, hearing of the waterfall that wouldn’t, the male offered to get the pump going. I was so keen for this to happen that I forgot that he’d have to plug the extension cord into the power point in the glass room; I forgot the overly shy nesting bird. He had no more success with the pump than I did, but the songbird never returned.
Much less shy were the Welcome Swallows that had taken over the main bedroom, entering via a small round terracotta pipe vent also missing its screen wire, high under the pitch of the gable. They had built their nest on top of the pipe, inside. The babies were flying too, and I dared not enter the room for the panic it created, with half a dozen birds shrilling and flapping against the skylight and windows. The brick floor was spattered with evidence of their tenancy. They shrieked loudly, dementedly, in the daytime, which I excused because I knew what a roomful of young children sounds like, from my infant-teaching days. My bird book described it as ‘high-pitched twittering’, but theirs was amplified by the brick floor and high ceiling.
I welcomed the coolness of the house eventually, but until my last few weeks it was too cold. All the floors were brick, meant to be warmed by the underfloor electric heating, which nowadays was too expensive to run.
Birrarung was not solar designed. It was a dark house in most rooms, despite skylights, but much of its charm lay in the causes of its defects. The big open living room soared high to the timber-lined pitch of the roof, with stairs leading up to a mezzanine loft like a musicians’ gallery, and massive square central posts of old bridge timbers. There were many windows, all set low so I could see the bush even when sitting, and many French doors, but the ochre mud walls and the dark-stained timbers swallowed the daylight as soon as it crept inside.
The main room was dominated by the very large mud-rendered fireplace, bulging and free-form, with an odd protruding lip, pouting and blackened, below the slab mantelpiece. It was a fireplace for tree trunks rather than logs, oxen rather than marshmallows. As I’d had to buy the load of wood, I was not as generous as was needed to heat very far into the empty, uncurtained room, so at night I pulled the lounge up close to the fire’s maw. It was company.
Of the basic furniture in the house, only the lounge demanded I do something about it for the short time I was there. I didn’t fancy curling up on its pilled synthetic brown fabric, redolent of unknown history, so I went op-shopping in nearby towns. I treated Victoria like a foreign country and relished the differences I found there. One such was a chain of commercial op-shops, with vast well-arranged premises—they even had check-out queues. A percentage of sales went to charity, and the prices were very low.
I bought a pair of heavy cotton watermelon-pink double sheets to drape over the nasty lounge, a thick slub cotton Indian rug to muffle the cold bricks under my trestle table desk, a pair of exotically patterned pillowslips, and a thick Ming blue woollen single blanket—and I paid $20 for the lot. I still have them all; one of the watermelon-pink sheets has been reborn as my 30-year-old cotton sleeping bag’s new sewn-on cover, satisfying my love of finding new uses for old things. The pillowslips are my favourites, and the blanket brings colour and warmth to my spare bed in winter, but I don’t have a room big enough for the Indian rug. It’s biding its time for more house. All of them remind me of Birrarung—I can smell wood smoke, hear bellbirds, feel the brick floor underfoot.
‘Things’ matter for their nostalgic associations more than for anything else. Of my dad, I have his folding carpenter’s yard ruler, much worn and handled, since he’d used it from his apprentice days. It’s precious because when I pick it up and unfold its four boxwood strips, beautifully fitted with brass ends and central swivel, I see his calloused hands, usually with a blood blister under one nail from hammer blows that missed their mark; and I see a very small me, fascinated by this ruler and playing with it for as long as I was allowed; and I see his ever-indulgent smile at what an odd little creature I was. Am.
I’m sorry I didn’t get to tell him about Birrarung; as a builder he’d have been interested. But he wouldn’t have approved of the bush being so close.
It was a very different bush from what I was used to, as were the birds it attracted. In the remnants of Gordon’s ‘made’ native garden immediately around the house, there were many varieties of hakea, low arching shrubs with pink and ivory, red or orange, deeply curving flowers like sea snail shells. And semi-prostrate grevilleas, with their outstretched fingers the colour of new honeysuckle blossoms. These bushes were constantly bent by honeyeaters, who also hovered in midair, wings beating in a blur, to sip the very end flowers of the branches.
When first I came the air was full of the scent of the Black Wattles’ myriad tiny yellow balls; by the end, the wattles were drooping with great swags of light-green seed pods, long and lumpy as old beans, but daintier. There was much dead timber through this bush, mostly wattles, tall and thin and leaning, dark claws of topmost twigs curving against the sky, or snapped into jagged spars. As they died, they lost their dark-spotted bark in scrolled sections, which clung to the trunks like climbing goannas.
The other trees there were tall and erratic in shape, with patchy, flaky bark of possum-grey and beige, and large circular or heart-shaped bluish leaves. I was told they were Yellow Box, Eucalyptus melliodora. Mostly young, thin and straggly, but several very large and spreading, like the two around which the house was built. These had grown far beyond what nature-loving Gordon must have imagined 30-odd years ago. They were now crushing the roof with their expanding trunks, cracking the mudbrick walls and lifting the timber verandah with their roots.
One window’s entire view was the overgrown tree trunk, lurking so close and scaly it looked less tree than patient monster, a creature marking time, quietly growing in strength and bulk, till it cried ‘Enough!’, shook off this house that had been standing on its foot for too long, and headed off down the gully.
The calls of bellbirds echoed constantly there. The Parks Vic ranger told me that they were actually a sign of a ‘sick forest’, which was disillusioning. At my Gosford convent school, Henry Kendall was a local hero, and we were taught to sing his poem ‘Bellbirds’ to the tune of ‘On Top of old Smokey’. Sounds grotesque, but it works. Try it.
By channels of coolness,
The echoes are calling,
And down the dim gorges,
I hear the creek falling.
And it certainly meant I remembered the words. I’d often heard bellbirds around Gosford, but in tall trees, so I’d never seen them. I discovered that they are honeyeaters, properly called Bell Miners, and have a vivid orange beak and legs, a bright eye and yellowish olive feathers. And they do call like bells ringing, or ‘Tink! Tink!’ as my bird book says.
My mountain forest has no mid-storey, so that Victorian dry bush was surprisingly splendid in the spring. I drank it all in.
There were thousands of Bursaria spinosa, tall, densely branching and deeply graceful small trees, rough-barked and thyme-leaved like tea-trees. Their flowers were white, minute and clustered, the effect starry in the sense of twinkling, and exceedingly pretty. They smelt like honey, and their blooming was gradual, so from a distance it was as if those elegant arching branches were slowly being touched up with delicate white pastel strokes, or lightly dusted with snow.
Another remarkable shrub or small tree—I never know where to draw the line—that was plentiful along the dusty road turned out to be the Victorian Christmas Bush, Prostanthera lasianthos. Its flowers were like bunches of small snapdragons, vivid, Kiwi sandshoe polish white, with maroon dots in their thr
oats. Native cherry trees also abounded there, Exocarpus cupressiformis, with their fir-like bright green foliage, finely furrowed dark trunks and funny little bobble fruit—a cherry with the seed on top.
The hardy Dogwood flowered beside the road too, its long arms reaching up and out, fine, dark-green leaves drooping like terrier whiskers along their length, bearing their white flowerheads only at their very end. Nearer the narrow river flats I could see regrowth Manna Gums, clustered around the streaky trunks of the few parent trees, trailing ribbons of bark as they rose above the massed fairy white of the bursarias.
To lock the gate each evening I walked beneath a row of tall pine trees, planted by earlier settlers; their scent often dominated, as did their carpets of smothering needles, but I couldn’t dislike them despite their incorrectness. A pocket of iris and crab apple, cotoneaster and hawthorn pointed to the site of the original hardwood log cabin, burnt down in the fires of the 1960s. This bush was full of dead wood and kindling, now rapidly heating up as summer approached. The house was near the end of a long, dead-end road. I began to think of fire plans—and water.
‘Birrarung’ is what the Aborigines called the Yarra River, which lay hidden, brown and log-ridden, just across the road. It was sullen there, so I walked to find the Laughing Waters of the road’s name—only they didn’t. The deeper falls boomed like distant planes, echoing against the semi-cleared hills above, while the shallower ones said ‘glue-er, glue-er’ over and over, very busily. Or were they saying ‘birrarung, birrarung’?
People came there to swim in the wide pool, which was defined by cascades above and below, with weathered rocks reaching out into the river, full of hollows and holes and rounded ridges—and cigarette butts. The banks and edges of the river here had been much used, and many introduced plants had gone feral—blackberries, giant plantain, thistles, wandering jew, ivy, rye grass. A familiar rural story.
There was another Knox-designed mudbrick house on the property, Boomerang, although I thought it curved more like a cooked fat sausage. Never having been approved for habitation, it was only a day studio ‘residency’, which had been won by Leanne Mooney, a sculptor who mainly used found natural materials. Boomerang was out of sight, uphill through the dry bush. Although we didn’t interrupt each other’s daily work, Lee and I became friends.
My output was more intangible, but Lee’s eerily telling creations gradually filled the odd house up the hill, until her final exhibition. I remember the opening primarily for the fabulous fresh cheeses her husband Ben contributed from his family’s Yarra Valley Dairy—their Persian Marinated Fetta was sublime!
I wrote her an artist’s statement and CV, and in return she gave me a tall triangular lamp of elegant simplicity, made of driftwood and handmade paper. It was lucky to survive the long trip back here in the laden Peugeot. One of my most cherished artworks, it softly lights a mud wall corner each evening. Lee and I stay in touch—a review of her latest exhibition recently quoted some of my words, so I am pleased that, like her lamp, they remain of use.
The eccentric house, the isolation, the silent evening presence of an empty house on the hill above, and the unfamiliar surrounding bushland, combined to create a distinctly strange atmosphere. Yet I was at ease there, even at night.
I didn’t mind the spider webs—hundreds of daddy-long-legs had laced the high ceilings and skylights with dense and intricate webs to be turned silver by sun or moon. I did not like it when I found a dead centipede in my bed; or big black spiders of unknown venom on my mat or wall; or shredded offerings of insect origin on my pillow, fallen from the gaps in the boards above. Nor was I pleased that mice clearly dominated the swallows’ end of the house, and the pantry. I left it to them, shut those doors and did not enter, kept all my food in the fridge, my crockery in plastic bags.
I don’t know how a city person would have coped there, especially if alone.
Three months is a strange amount of time to live in a place. Knowing it’s not permanent yet feeling it’s too long for temporary. It took a week to settle in, and then there was Dad. Returning soon after, perhaps too soon, Birrarung’s empty spaces echoed with my sorrow, my anger at those whom I felt had not cared enough, done enough, and the futile self-punishment of‘ if only’ and ‘what if . Yet its bushland peace and the fireside comforted, and the privacy allowed me to grieve unhindered by convention.
For the whole spring I rattled around that big house on my own, crossing the empty expanses of brick floor to sit each day at my laptop, drifting between the fictional world of the village I was writing about and the real world outside my window. I managed another 30,000 words on the novel while I was there. But by the end of my time I was both sad and restless.
My own place wasn’t being cared for. It had been threatened by fires almost since I left. My heart was there, but part of me had bonded to Birrarung and its bushland. I knew I’d miss waking in a dim bedroom to dawn mist in the timbered gully and hill beyond the bursarias, and to the generous morning birdsong of this bush.
Being there made me more aware of the need to preserve what bushland survived close to civilisation. Even if degraded, once left alone the bush can fight back, resume dominance, as the Yellow Boxes and the swallows were clearly doing! People can experience such near places more easily, gain a taste of what their particular local world was like before it became the bright green of‘ civilisation’, manicured, sterile, anonymous. A rose is a rose is a rose—but a Manna Gum is not an ironbark or a boab, and a unique ecosystem thrives around each.
As Gordon Ford said, ‘We must feel part of the land we walk on and love the plants that grow there ... if we are to achieve a spirit in a garden.’ It’s not hard to see why his gardens and his house spoke to me.
The haven of Birrarung was only five minutes from culturally vibrant Eltham. With its beautiful library and a wonderful little bookshop constantly organising literary events, it was far harder to remain a hermit there. Eltham had grown too big but still had elements of what it once was—a great ‘village down the road’.
And it was close enough for me to go early each Saturday to the fabulous St Andrews markets, to buy the freshest of flowers; nuggetty breads dense with flavour; sweet treats like poppyseed strudel; organic fruit and vegies with the great tastes, varied shapes and sizes, odd clump of dirt and sneaky slug of real garden produce—and to lust after crafts and clothes much to my taste but beyond my means.
At Birrarung, I’d also written an Owner Builder article, ‘From Knoxie to Now’, about the houses, especially interesting because I met the original builder, Graham Rose, who lives locally. Gordon Ford’s widow, Gwen, a fellow writer, lives at Fülling, their acre and a half of native garden in Eltham, where she runs a truly charming set of B & B mudbrick cottages. Her waterfalls work! Gwen was a good friend to me as well as a source of local information. She winkled me out of my hermitage a few times, but was not pressing.
One occasion of her successful winkling was at the atmospheric Montsalvat, for Michael Leunig’s launch of his book Sticks. It was held in an upstairs room above the Great Hall. Backed by leadlight windows, shafts of late sunlight falling onto the table in front of him, every now and then a single swallow’s feather would float down from the rafters high above, circling slowly, past his face, through the sunbeam and onto the table. It couldn’t have been better orchestrated—unless it had been a duck feather.
Just before I left Victoria, I learnt that I was ‘very shortlisted’ in the Boroondara Literary Award, from another of the admirable Victorian Shires who support the arts. The night before my workshops was the presentation night, in Hawthorn Town Hall. I sat with clammy palms and increasing disbelief as the judge, Morris Lurie, worked backwards up the list to the main award of $2000. I’d won! As that story, ‘For Beauty’, was very different to ‘Traces of Life’, I began to believe that the Alan Marshall win might not have been a fluke.
Two national awards in one year! My life as a writer should have been beginning a steep asc
endency, but it turned out to be on hold for the next eighteen months. I should have been happy, but I seemed to have lost the ability. Writing seemed a sham; how dare I think my perceptions of life were of any value to anyone when I understood its relationship with death so little?
After his mother’s death, Loudon Wainwright III wrote a song, ‘Homeless’, that includes these lines amongst several that beautifully, painfully, summed up how desolate I felt. They made me cry when I first heard them, two years after Dad died.
When you were alive I was never alone,
Somewhere in the world there was something called ‘home’.
With my father gone, there was no longer a person with unconditional, non-judgemental love for me, and there never could be again. As my mother had never taken on such a role, I felt I was alone now, and my relationship wasn’t good enough to counter that feeling.
Birrarung had given me a taste of, and for, living on my own. I decided that I would try once more to resolve the problems with my partner, but if that was unsuccessful, I’d make my way in life alone, physically as well as emotionally.
As I eventually did. That leap was only possible because my grief caused the usual priorities, like my need for security and continuity, and my concern for my future, to fall away into nothingness. What counted was being honest with myself.
I made strong decisions at a time when I felt weaker, more depressed and weepy, than I’d ever been. Decisions made under the influence of grief, yes—but I haven’t regretted them.
CHAPTER 11
HOME FIRES BURNING
In the early December the old Peugeot brought me safely back up the Hume Highway from Birrarung, to our house in town. That very night we were rung and told that a serious fire was heading towards my mountain. Smaller fires had been brought under control in the general area while I’d been away, but this one was large—and uncontrollable.
