The Woman on the Mountain

by Sharyn Munro

  Being a full-time mum gave me the chance to practise cooking so much that it became instinctive. One morning each week, during the kids’ nap time, I’d leaf through my cookbooks and plan a week’s menu of dishes I hadn’t tried, making a list of ingredients to be bought on the weekly shopping trip.

  ‘Vegetarian cooking’ was then disgustingly bland, promoted for health, not taste, and the recipes were derived from British-type meat dishes deprived of the meat, rather than being inspired by the vegetables themselves. So from my books I chose traditional ethnic meatless dishes—Indian, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Indonesian—with which I’d already been experimenting because they were cheap.

  I also read books on vegetarian nutrition, on what food combinations provided complete protein, especially important because of the children. My mother-in-law muttered about iron and blood and anaemia for years, and every time she did I got a mental vision of Mia Farrow guzzling raw liver in the film Rosemary’s Baby. Meanwhile my children grew on—healthy, strong, bright and beautiful.

  In Newcastle then there were hardly any ethnic restaurants, apart from glutinous Australianised ‘Chinese’ and the great saving grace of Hamilton’s Italian community. Few foreign foods could be bought. I was making ingredients like tofu or pesto, and dishes like samosas or falafel, before I’d ever seen or tasted them. I learnt to have a go at anything; I learnt to love cooking, and still do. Nor has cooking for one diminished the pleasure or driven me to baked beans on toast.

  Despite great advances—even pub counter lunches will now toss a token vego dish on the menu—vegetarians are still a misunderstood minority in many places. For example, if I double-check with a waiter whether a dish has any meat in it, the reply could be, ‘No, just a bit of ham.’ When I therefore politely decline it, I often spot a rolling of eyes, a raising of eyebrows, an implied ‘as if that’d matter!’—as if I am being so-o-o difficult.

  On hearing I was a vegetarian, one woman exclaimed, ‘Oh, I could never do that. I love food too much!’ As if I don’t? Perhaps it’s a muddling of clichés, where vegetarian=trippy hippies eating nothing but steamed vegetables and brown rice. Peace, love and mung beans? Not me—I love food too much.

  When my father retired, his main interest was his backyard vegetable garden, especially his few annually cherished tomato plants. The progress and welfare of our respective plants was a primary topic in our phone conversations. I missed a few tomato summers, but now that I am more confident about how to manage my arthritis, I do grow just a few heritage tomato plants—for the taste, for keeping the varieties going, and for Dad. Nothing like the amounts I used to grow, for Vacola bottling, making tomato sauce and paste and chutneys.

  I let most of my vegetables go to seed, both to self-sow and be saved. I belong to the Seed Savers Network, a good way to swap non-hybrid and heritage seeds. Like Good Evans, a plum-sized, thin-skinned, sweet and juicy tomato, seedlings of which I was first given by my Uncle Brian. My uncle is gone and so, I expect, is Mr Evans, but their tomatoes are a constantly renewed memorial.

  My dad and his younger brother Brian had a lot in common: both had been carpenters, union men and Labor voters, both liked growing vegetables, and both ended up with prostate cancer. They used to compare symptoms. When John Howard’s Liberal government was re-elected for a second term, my uncle rang Dad in distress and disbelief.

  ‘Frank, ’ he said, ‘do you realise this means we could die under a Liberal government!’

  As they did. They’d be wondering what they’d fought for if they’d lived to see the recent Industrial Relations changes. At least my tomatoes are still up to their standard.

  Dad is responsible for two of our family’s breakfast habits that strangers consider odd. The first is to slice tomatoes onto toast spread with peanut butter. Salted and peppered as a matter of routine for him, it was—is—a delicious combination of tastes and textures. My contribution is to add a thick layer of chopped parsley, or basil in season, under the tomato slices.

  Over this tomato season I have eaten very few compared to what I used to; my knees are aching a little, but is that because the ground was so dry in autumn, and I had to jab my foot harder on the spade when planting my trees? You can see what I mean about the difficulty of a scientific experiment. But the lovely tomatoes are finished and I’ll be off them again until next year.

  Later, when Dad discovered avocadoes, his alternative breakfast became avocado on toast which he’d spread with Vegemite. I am addicted to this, again adding parsley under the avocado topping and I tend to layer, rather than spread, my Vegemite. People have had to leave the room at the sight. A squeeze of lemon, a quick grind of fresh black pepper, and my day starts well. Thanks, Dad.

  The toppings are especially delicious on real bread. I like crunchy, flavourful bread, so to my basic spelt wholemeal I’ll add sunflower and sesame seeds, cracked rye or millet, as well as rolled oats or maize or rye flours. A treat—being healthy is a bonus.

  There’s a John Updike story in which a man is on a long drive to his father’s deathbed and trying to think of some life lesson for which he can thank his father. The only thing he comes up with is that his father taught him how to butter bread, all over, right to the corners and not just in the middle, without breaking it.

  Our fathers. Daily bread. Sharing it even when absent.

  Vegetarianism led me to a new world from the ‘meat and three veg’ of my childhood, where meat was as basic as bread. Doing without my basic tomatoes and potatoes made me even more innovative, with reluctant farewells to many favourite recipes, especially those of my first cooking teacher, Elizabeth David, while making substitutions in others.

  My use of sweet potatoes expanded and my beloved chips were of sweet potato instead; pasta sauces were more inventive, as less tomato-based; oranges and grated fresh beetroot added colour instead of tomato, leading to new salads, new directions in taste; miso pastes were experimented with to avoid tomato paste; fresh ginger and lemons seemed to more often demand a place in my cooking; inspiration flourished in the spaces left by those basics—such as slicing cumquats into a stir-fry.

  The change was liberating, and for special occasions I can always include a forbidden fruit if I want. There are dishes where nothing but a finely sliced fresh chilli will do the trick.

  It’s natural for me to see food as a creative and sensory delight, as well as fuel and oil for maintaining this ‘machine for living’—and to choose food that does not cost the lives of other creatures. I can, therefore I do.

  If I were a Laplander, and there was no choice, I guess I wouldn’t!

  CHAPTER 18

  SNAKES ALIVE ... AND DEAD

  Apart from bushfires, and skin cancer, summer also means snakes. I accept that I can’t live in the bush and expect to avoid snakes, but I’m afraid of them. In the warmer months I walk less through the bush, and when I do, I always wear gumboots and try to stick to the narrow wallaby tracks.

  Most people never have to face snakes in their daily lives and yet are still haunted by a vague fear of their possible presence when anywhere less civilised than a well-kept lawn. In the West at least, our feelings seem to be dominated by fear, motivated by our instinct for self-preservation. That fear is tempered with a token acceptance of the snake’s place in the ecological balance, and underlaid with an almost genetic revulsion for it as the Devil incarnate. After all, there was that business in the Garden of Eden.

  When my dad removed our family from the man-made safety zones of suburban Sydney, he committed us to confrontations with snakes.

  As a schoolgirl, my route to the bus stop included a solitary walk of about a quarter of a mile down our track, which was occasionally mowed, but nevertheless ran like a treacherously narrow alley between the tall grass and weeds—paspalum and kikuyu, Stinking Roger, Farmer’s Friends and Paterson’s Curse—that towered over my head. Beyond these on one side ran our neighbour’s irrigation ditch, providing a cool, moist, well-camouflaged snake haven. I’d
walk nervously in the middle of the track, eyes darting from side to side.

  Sometimes I saw a heart-stopping black tail-tip disappear into the jungle just ahead, or the whole sinuous shape cross the track further on. They were menacingly silent; everything depended on my eyes—a slight wavering of the grasses, an unsticklike black shininess. Dad assured me that these Red-bellied Blacks were not aggressive, except in the mating season, or if you were between them and their young. How was I to know what I was unwittingly in the way of?

  ‘Make a lot of noise, ’ he said, ‘and you’ll be right.’

  So spring and summer saw me stamping my way along the track, chanting bold and brave things to myself, and silently pleading to them, ‘Please let me pass!’

  Over the years the track became a minefield, with my heart constricting as I approached every spot where I’d seen a snake, followed by involuntary dashes past. In my teens, when I sometimes had to catch the late bus home from school, it was one long gauntlet of terror, as twilight made it hard to distinguish shape from shadow. I leapt along in a series of grand jetés, figuring that the less I touched the ground, the less likely I was to tread on any possible snake. To make it safely inside the door, to the comforting teatime smell of rissoles and gravy, was always a miracle—Thank you God! I’ll even eat my beans!

  Once, when I was about nine, Dad and I and the leech-burning neighbour were in the bean paddock when we noticed a really big black snake sunning itself on a log beside the track. The practice then was to kill any snake one saw. The neighbour told Dad to throw his hat on the ground in front of the snake, and then run home for the hoe. He reckoned the snake wouldn’t move until the hat did.

  I didn’t believe the snake would be so stupid, while the neighbour and I were standing—living, breathing, and so vulnerable—nearby. But he was right. That powerful, brilliant black creature was mesmerised by the hat and ignored us completely. Dad arrived, panting, and before I could think about it, swung the hoe high above his head and down, with all his strength, onto the motionless enemy. He chopped through the thick body once, twice, seemingly many times, in a turmoil now of thrashing black and red, and pink, until it lay still.

  I think Dad felt as sick as I did.

  Years later, when the first set of traffic lights went in at Gosford, my parents sold up and moved north before the town became ‘like Parramatta’. Dad wanted to have a go at cattle, so bought a property at Terrace Creek near the Queensland border: humid, lush, and even more snakey. It was an old house, with an overgrown garden, and there my mother was to have more to do with snakes than in her worst nightmares.

  I was a mother myself by then. We visited there each Christmas, and whenever we went down to the pebbly creek for a swim we saw at least one black snake slither off into the maidenhair ferns, but my mother didn’t swim, so she missed them. Nor was she involved in the farm, so she missed out too on the opportunities for snake panic presented by the old dairy, where Dad stored the corn beloved by mice beloved by snakes, or the paddocks, where death adders awaited the tread of the unwary walker.

  But she didn’t need them, for the snakes came to her ... in the house. Each Christmas there was a new snake story.

  The first occurred when Dad was in town, so she was on her own.

  Entering her bedroom, she caught a swift movement out of the corner of her eye—unbelievably, a snake! At her gasp, the creature slid up over the sill of her open built-in wardrobe. And there it stayed, its curves gracefully arranged over her good shoes. She ran to the phone and called a neighbour for help. He rushed to her aid and despatched the intruder; a tiger snake, he said. She was so grateful she didn’t even complain about the mess.

  Mum convinced herself that this was an aberration, a lone wanderer that had somehow got inside, until one evening when she and my youngest sister were watching television. Before their incredulous eyes, a tiger snake made its way from under a couch, unhurriedly slithered across the rug in front of the television, and disappeared from sight, never to be found. Every nook and cranny was stuffed and sealed after that, and Dad was made to check under every piece of furniture.

  No wonder Mum hated the country.

  But the worst was yet to come. Late one spring afternoon, the family was congregated on the glassed-in front verandah. This was a post-shower, pre-tea ritual, beginning at 5 p.m. when Dad would open a bottle of his home-brew. Mum and my sister were sitting on a lumpy couch left behind by the previous owners. It was covered in faded cretonne and had a long bolster at the back, lumpy like the seat, probably stuffed with kapok.

  Mum felt a movement at her back and, thinking my sister had her arm there, wriggled impatiently to let her know she found the movement annoying. The movements continued. Then my sister felt the bolster distinctly heave, and turned round to see what was going on.

  The bolster on which they’d been leaning was coming alive! They jumped up, to see a long, languid python emerge from one end. It had probably spent the winter in there, which didn’t bear thinking about even though it wasn’t a venomous type.

  Mum appears to have found refuge from them now, in a hostel. But here in my refuge there are my childhood bogeys, the Red-bellied Blacks, plus the aggressive Eastern Browns, and Eastern Tigers. There are also Diamond Pythons, but they’re harmless apart from the possibility of giving me a heart attack when I see one in the garden. Here I live behind the enemy lines.

  When my husband and I set up camp here all those years ago, we agreed not to kill black snakes when we saw them, as we often did, moving logs and rocks for garden and house, fencing, laying water pipelines. Digging out a rotten log plumb in the middle of the house site, we found a nest of tiny baby black snakes that writhed halfheartedly at us. There was no sign of the mother, so we lifted them on spades into a bucket and carried the wriggling nursery at arm’s length up into the forest. Tipping them out to survive as best they could, we felt much as I imagine Hansel and Gretel’s father did.

  I felt I could cope with the familiar black snakes. The National Parks ranger came to inspect the property after we’d applied for it to become a wildlife refuge. He casually remarked what perfect terrain it was for browns. They were, he said, extremely territorial, and aggressive with it. Despite them being protected, if we saw one near the house we’d need to shoot it, since we had young children. I don’t know what the advice would be now. ‘Don’t even think about trying to kill it with a hoe, ’ he added.

  We didn’t own a gun, and didn’t want to, so I was glad as the months went by and we didn’t see any. One hot day, the kids at school, my husband in town, I was in my vegetable garden, tilling up rows for potatoes. I’d been doing so for ages, lost in heat-drowsed thought as I worked backwards in the warm dust. There being no grass for snakes to hide in, and because of the heat, I was wearing thongs instead of my usual gumboots.

  I don’t know what made me look around as I neared the fence edge, and it took a few seconds to register what I saw, but there, sunbaking in a furrow a foot or two away, perfectly camouflaged in the brown dust, was a huge brown snake. If ever I thought it possible to die from fright, I learnt then that it’s not—or I would have. Sweating, shaking, I backed away slowly until I reached the garden gate, when I ran to the verandah. From there I watched it undulate through the fence and across the grass, and into our timber pile.

  We felt obliged to do as the ranger suggested and buy a gun. Much as we both hated guns, we loved our children more. We chose a shotgun that made it easier to hit a narrow target, and taught ourselves to use it, but we never saw a brown again.

  Yet I am ashamed to admit that, in the weekender post-divorce years, on two occasions I did dispose of black snakes. The first was when we found that the picturesque, gnarled old log embedded in the ground right near the cabin’s front steps was home to a big black. I don’t know if it had lived there for years and we’d just not seen it, or if it was a new resident.

  Having to go outside to the toilet at night, when it would be out and about hunt
ing, we didn’t want to run the risk of sleepily stepping on it, which would evoke a possibly lethal reaction. We reluctantly agreed that it had to be shot. The log being only feet away from the verandah, we took turns watching from there until it appeared at the hole again. As the best shot in target practice, my son was to do the shooting.

  But this was for real, and I felt for him as the snake slowly emerged and he took aim. He fired twice, and with a final flurry of dust and coils and nerves, it subsided into a pulped mass. We all felt ill, physically and morally, at this crime.

  Then we had to draw straws as to who would get rid of the body. I ‘won’, but after a long time trying to work up the nerve to put a shovel under the mess, I realised I couldn’t. I don’t think I ever missed having a husband so much; being Mum and Dad has some very nasty sides to it. In the end, I cheated, and shovelled dirt on top it, burying it where it lay. This left a mound, a reproachful reminder to be gingerly skirted for a year or so until time and weather levelled it.

  The other occasion, again dealt with by my son, with hindsight was a totally wrong decision. We’d gone up to our big dam where, before the reeds had taken over, we liked to swim across to the small central island. From the little jetty that allowed us to launch ourselves or our canoe without sinking into the clay, we spotted a black snake lazing on the island. At the noise of our approach it roused itself and slipped into the water, gliding effortlessly and rapidly to the far bank, its head up and the rest just a swirl in the water behind. It was clear that we’d never outswim one, and none of us wanted to use the dam or the island while it was in the vicinity, so after much discussion and conscience searching on my part, but possibly concealed eagerness on the part of my then teenage son, we agreed it should be shot. Given what I now know about the shyness of Red-bellied Blacks, that death was unnecessary, and I have regretted it ever since. I think being responsible for the children affected my judgement. I have now sold the gun, and will take my chances with snakes, on equal terms.