‘Home,’ I thought to myself. ‘I’ve come home.’
Audrey’s impossible quiche
1 chopped onion
2 rashers bacon, chopped
1 cup of whatever you like (I like to add handfuls of whatever
herbs are in the garden and grated zucchini)
4 eggs, beaten
¼ cup butter (melted)
1½ cups milk
½ cup self-raising flour
1 cup grated cheese
salt and pepper
cayenne pepper
Place sautéd onion and bacon and the whatever you
like in a large bowl. Add eggs, butter, milk, flour
and cheese and mix well. Season. Pour the mixture
into a greased ovenware dish. Cook in a moderate
oven (180°C) for approximately 30 minutes.
Sprinkle with cayenne pepper on serving.
CHAPTER 3
First summer, Tasmania
It was early in the morning when I finally arrived at my new home, twenty minutes’ drive from Launceston. I’d picked up the door key from the agent in town the day before, and stayed the night at Audrey’s.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to head out now?’ she’d pressed.
‘No, it’s late. I want to start out on a brand-new day. I’ll be leaving early so I won’t wake you.’
I packed up my Jeep Wrangler, remembering the bag of cleaning cloths and sprays that Audrey had left out for me. She had never been a champagne kind of mother. It was just on daybreak and I started the engine gingerly so as not to wake her. I’d bought the Jeep from a central Sydney car dealer, the first vehicle I had ever owned new, and travelled down with it on the overnight ferry from Sydney to Devonport. I chose a Jeep because when I test-drove it through Double Bay it roared like a four-wheel-drive rather than purring like a sedan in four-wheel-drive clothing. And I loved its engine power, the chunky lines, and how it reminded me of real army jeeps in M*A*S*H.
As I turned off the main highway into Pipers River Road, I felt tears, joined-up tears of joy and arrival and meaning and heart, as if I were about to meet a new lover after spending weeks apart.
The drive along Pipers River Road was fairly flat and nondescript and the bush mostly scrubby, until I got to a bend in the road where the view opened up and out over the valley and swept right through 270 degrees, taking in the magnificent slopes of Mount Arthur. A sharp downhill right-hand bend overlooked a hillside of emerald-green pastures dotted with black cows; I thought it looked like Switzerland or Ireland before I told myself to stop comparing. YOU ARE HERE, I thought, it means something now. Like Thelma and Louise I felt like driving right off into that green hillside bosom view—but that was just joy talking.
Just get there, I found myself muttering. There was another bend, then another, and finally the right-hand turn into the driveway.
The outside air was still and fresh. I wanted to run up the steps but told myself to slow down, there was no rush, that I should take it all in. As I held the key to the front door in my hand the silence seemed to echo around the small porch. A black-and-white sign was stuck to the front door, like a surgery’s: Please ring. But there was no bell to ring and no knocker. As I put the key into the lock I noticed that it was just a normal silver key. Why not big and old? I stepped inside to open up the doors and windows I’d held in my mind for all those months in London. Breathe in now. And out. Yes, I’m home.
I stood in the large front lounge room. Morning rays were streaming through the enclosed sunroom and hitting the French doors that opened out onto the view of an elbow-like bend and a mile-long road. Through watery eyes I tried to take in the view from the front veranda, broader than my peripheral vision, of a soft green valley like a runway for giant hobbits. Farm fence lines and long gravel driveways intersected with zigzag Pipers River Road, stands of gums were proudly vertical, there was a sweeping eyebrow of low-slung hills, and the omnipresent dolomite rock face of arching Mount Arthur. I knew I was home because I felt it. In part this was because of the view. I could see what was in front of me and I knew where I was.
A friend once introduced me to the English psychoanalyst Darian Leader. I recall his opening small talk. He didn’t ask what I did or where I lived, but, ‘How would you describe the view where you live?’ ‘Well, open and light,’ I replied at the time, intrigued by his unusual approach to conversation, but I guess he’d had a few of them and knew how to sidestep the superfluous. Then, I was living in my small flat by Hammersmith Bridge overlooking the river. Now, here in Karoola, I imagined that, for many of my country neighbours, their view was what they did—farmers who woke with daylight and who lived the day.
Although the house was close to the road, I wanted to live privately, in a sanctuary. At the same time I didn’t want to be shut off like a hermit. I didn’t yet know how I would survive, but I knew I wanted to shed the stuff I associated with cities: suits, masks, labels, credit cards, microwaves, going out, dressing up, being very important or busy or loud. I didn’t want to have to be anywhere, make plans, or be called upon really very much. So, please ring? That sign at the front door had to go. I started chipping away at it, feeling like a vandal.
‘Audrey was right after all,’ I thought to myself with a smile. ‘It starts with cleaning.’
I spent the first day wandering from room to room, taking in the emptiness, contemplating what needed to be done, inside and out, accompanied all the while through open windows by a chirpy family of pretty electric-blue wrens who bounced from fence post to shrub.
The colour spilled out of that first day slowly and it was nearly ten o’clock before the stars came out to play. I took a blanket and lay in the paddock away from the house to view the night sky. Like my smile, those first-night stars were spread from ear to ear. Happy frogs and crickets sounded in the foreground, and I could hear the nearby river flushed and running with early summer rains. Although I was on my own, it felt like I had company. There were at least five homes within sight of the Nuns’ House, a number that seemed to double at night when the lights of farms and houses popped out from distant hills. I didn’t feel the need to make friends, but I did sense that we shared something, living in this landscape, as if we were all in it together, looking after it. It wasn’t like living in a city where you could close a door on the outside world and disappear, or pass a neighbour on a staircase and not say hello, or look out of your window at blocks of flats and not know one soul living in them. It wasn’t anonymous like that. Here, the country made you part of it. I had a sense that I belonged without being born here.
Karoola had a postcode but no shop, and the nearest village was seven kilometres away, at Lilydale. I didn’t want to make too many comparisons, but in London the nearest corner store was a minute’s walk away under Hammersmith Bridge, and there was a choice of three supermarkets within a five-minute stroll. To fetch supplies now I had to get in the Jeep and drive down the long stretch I could see from the front veranda. Turn right at the Karoola Hall, cross the bridge and decommissioned railway, then skirt around the edge of Brown Mountain via Lalla, the slope of Mount Arthur directly ahead, past Providence Vineyard, across the railway again, turn left at the police station and pin-neat war memorial into Lilydale Road, then past the district school, the 1950s memorial hall and the bull paddock. The drive to Bardenhagen’s, the local supermarket in the centre of town, with the year 1888 marked above the front corner doors, took roughly ten minutes.
It seemed like you could get most things here. The people who served behind the counter were busy, kind women and I could tell the genuine locals because the shop assistants greeted them by name. ‘If you can’t see what you want,’ said the friendly lady at the checkout, ‘let us know, we’ll try and get it in.’ How did she know the moment I walked through the door that I was new to the district?
‘Got your shopper?’ she asked. ‘No? Another plastic bag then. I use them for my rubbish so it’s not wasted.’
; At the garage-cum-hardware store up the road, a man with a face the colour of outdoors introduced himself with an Aussie flourish. ‘I’m Rob. They call me the unofficial mayor of Lilydale!’ Along with ‘Full Driveway Service’ Rob seemed to sell mostly what was not at Bardenhagen’s, including fence posts, mushroom compost, paint and kitchen plugs.
‘I’m good for top-ups,’ he said helpfully, placing the petrol cap back where it belonged.
I needn’t even have left the driver’s seat, but as I followed him inside to pay for the fuel, the petrol station and hardware store turned into a museum of memorabilia. Old-fashioned bowsers, oil cans and wheels lined the walls, and vintage posters too. Patsy Cline played on the music system and out of the corner of my eye I noticed a digital-image processing booth. If you asked for a haircut he’d probably give you one.
‘Busy day today?’ I asked as I paid him.
‘I’m not wearing these shorts for nothing,’ he quipped.
Now that’s what I call service with a smile. As I drove back through the town I noticed a pub with bakery café, a hair salon, a takeaway, Tom Dancer’s post office-cum-estate agency and gift shop, an antiques store, and a patchwork and quilting shop. I stopped at the chemist where I waited while a pensioner paid off fifty dollars on her account: ‘That leaves thirty,’ said the pharmacist, lowering her voice. ‘Pay the remainder when you can manage it, that’s okay.’
For the first week or so, the only furniture I possessed was a single foam mattress I’d borrowed from Audrey. I revelled in the simplicity of having nothing, waking with the sun, working through the day, and sleeping when it was dark. I ripped off the floral padded fabric that covered the pelmets and caught the dust, and pulled down all the old curtains to take to the op shop. There was a musty old dog smell which I worked out came from the carpets, so I started ripping all of them up, too. The rubber underlay was stuck to chipboard, there was ratty lino underneath that, and under all the layers I could see sturdy wooden floorboards. Each day, after pulling and rolling up lengths of carpet, I fell straight to sleep, physically exhausted. Once my furniture arrived in boxes with London stamped on the side, the days just became fuller. I went through the phone book to find a floor sander who could make it before Christmas and booked him.
I liked to leave the front door open to the day, so there was no knock, just a voice. He said his name was Glen and that he’d come to sand the floors. He was unusual looking, a pre-Raphaelite, twenty-something boy-man, tall with long corkscrew curls and fair skin. I played music as he worked—Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong—songs he’d never heard before, so he took his MP3 player out of his ears to listen. He said he liked ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’ and asked me to play it again, so I did. I’m not sure if it was the words that caught him or the voice of Nina Simone: sombre, soulful, measured.
Sanding was hard work. The floors were scraped, peeled, sanded, scythed back, stripped of decades of domesticity and, before that, school life, revealing what’s commonly known as Tasmanian ‘oak’ but is actually beautiful, honey-toned hardy eucalyptus. With bare feet on bare old boards I felt the weight of the house lifted and life grounded. The next day, Glen brought some of his CDs for me to play, but before starting work again he said he had something to tell me.
‘Let’s sit outside,’ I said, not sure what was to come.
‘It wouldn’t be right if I left here today without telling you that I really like you and that I’ve never met anyone like you in my life,’ he said.
I was astonished at his directness, and all I could think to do was thank him for his honesty and the compliment. Every day since being here I’d felt younger. Was this man half my age a reward? Perhaps the house had cast a cheeky spell? I imagined the pent-up temptations of a nun’s life and how they might be rushing in now that the house was being cared for and stripped back, nipped and tucked into new life. I told Glen that my focus, while soft and fuzzy, was on my new home, and it didn’t include a man. Well, not now. Not yet. He said he understood and went back to work.
As I started to colour in the details of my new home, my travels and conversations were shaped by wanting to uncover its secrets. Through visits to local libraries and archives I found out that in the nineteenth century, Karoola had been one of many stations on the North East Railway line, and Pipers River Road was known as ‘the track from Launceston’. The area was first opened up for timber harvesting and in the 1880s there were three licensed hotels in the district. On 16 December 1898, The Monitor, a Catholic newspaper, reported on the opening of the new Sacred Heart Church on the hilltop behind me. The view, it described, consisted of ‘fields of waving corn and well tilled paddocks’ that gave it ‘a picturesqueness difficult to surpass anywhere in Tasmania’.
Karoola orcharding country, published 1 July 1920 in the
Weekly Courier, photograph by F.V. Robinson. (Launceston Local Studies
Collection, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office)
Later that day, after Glen had left, I strolled to the top of the hill to take in the same long view out over the Pipers River valley. As I opened the small gate to the churchyard cemetery, I spotted a fallen vase or two, and stopped to return a spray of plastic roses strewn across a grave. Many of the names were Irish, some families lying together, and I imagined by the dates on the headstones that the McGrees and Connollys, the McCar–thys and Flynns buried here were early pioneers. One sad memorial stone lay outside the graveyard boundary, near a tree by the church, remembered, yes, but not quite as one of them.
I learned the house was built around 1900 and was bought by the Karoola Sacred Heart Church in 1953. It was blessed and opened as a convent for the Presentation Sisters by the Archbishop of Tasmania, the most Rev. E.V. Tweedy. At one stage, the Sisters taught up to seventy pupils here, with the front veranda enclosed and turned into a classroom.
There were no photographs of the house itself. It was enough to know that it had been lived in, once, by single women of an independent spirit and moral purpose, and children had come here to learn. I hoped that the Sisters were kind, imagining how they might have cared for the gardens, that they cooked and sewed while helping to nurture a community’s spiritual needs. In the archives I found a leaflet published in 1993 to commemorate a community reunion.
The photocopied pages told how the Sisters would tour the district in a pony and rig, helping people through everyday hardships, meeting the train to pick up children from remote areas travelling by train to school, and picking up supplies and visitors. Sisters who were ill often came to Karoola to recover in the fresh country air: a sanctuary even then. The leaflet told how the Sacred Heart Convent School was closed in 1958 and moved to a new venue at St Anne’s in Lilydale to expand their teaching. The last nuns stayed on until 1968, when their superiors decided it was better for them to live in a larger community.
Conversations shone more light onto shadows. I met a neighbour who shared the kind of memories neighbours do in the country. Margaret was proud to be born in this valley but uncertain why anyone would want to know about the Karoola General Store, as it had been closed, she told me, for fifteen years. You would never have thought that it had once been the hub of the district, she said, how it sold everything from gentlemen’s suits to a box of nails. With a sparkle in her eye, she recalled the smell of coal from the ‘rail motor’, all cream and green, on its way from Launceston through Pipers River to Turners Marsh, Karoola, Lalla, Lilydale and on to Herrick, busy stations that no longer existed now the railway line was closed. She also told me that my house was built by the Nicholls family, and that they were retirees from the British Raj in India who came here to establish orchards. My heart warmed as she opened up her childhood memories of walking past White Cottage on her way to school and peering into its ‘secret gardens’ surrounded by rhododendrons, camellias and ‘those other lovely flowering trees in spring’.
‘Magnolias?’ I queried.
‘Yes, that’s right, magnolias.’ She smiled. ‘Oh,
and tall macrocarpa trees. It really was quite beautiful.’
The gardens had not survived the decades. The macrocarpas had been cut down—only their stumps were left behind, covered with giant knots of ivy and ferocious blackberry canes so well established they had strangled and brought down small trees. The rough sloping garden seemed a mystery to me, made more out of focus by knee-high grass. The house had been unoccupied for some time and there were three months of spring growth to attend to.
A week after I’d moved in, my father Wilf arrived, as promised, followed by two of my three brothers, Jim and Simon, and Simon’s sixteen-year-old son, Joseph, otherwise known as Joe. Three cars with trailers carting mowers, whipper-snippers and saws were lined up in the driveway. I could see Wilf sizing up the two straggly gutter-high fuchsia bushes at either side of the front porch.
‘I think I’ll get rid of them,’ I said without thinking.
‘They’re warhorses,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t lose those— they’re the few shrubs that have survived! All they need is a good hack.’
Wilf had always had an overreaching abundance of energy. It’s probably what brought us to Tasmania all the way from sixties Bristol to the small north-east village of Derby where he worked as a country doctor while Audrey looked after four children, all of us aged under ten. To me his drive had always been at the heart of the family, while Audrey’s quiet resistance must have been a force to be reckoned with. Now, while the three boys got to work slashing and mowing the grass, I noticed that Wilf was less active than I remembered. He seemed to hobble around on the edge of things, bending only to pull out a weed or identify another branch for Simon to prune. ‘It’s my dickie knee,’ he said, by way of explanation, refusing to expand on this. I wanted old Wilf back, the man who sometimes greeted you with arms outstretched like Fred Astaire. Still, while slow-pacing his way around the garden, hands clasped behind his back, Wilf claimed a bit of the garden as his own: a wild bank held up by a dishevelled dry-stone wall, a screen of scrub so untamed it was impenetrable. ‘Okay, that’s mine, leave that bit for Wilfie,’ he said, perhaps seeing the magic garden it might once have been. ‘Oh boy . . .’ He seemed to lose himself in the task ahead. I think he might have known that it would take more energy than he had or time to give.
A Story of Seven Summers Page 3