A Story of Seven Summers

by Hilary Burden

  Earning a living seemed to progress like this, too. Jobs came in like odd rocks, and somehow they were crafted together to make life work. Over the next few months, while working casually for Local Radio, I found myself helping with a magazine launch for News Limited in Sydney, and as launch editor on a quarterly magazine for small businesses in Tasmania— which is most of them. So many were creative and family-run and revolved around making a living from nature. At a lunch hosted by Delicious magazine at Strathlynn restaurant on the Tamar River, a passionate local chef by the name of Daniel Alps celebrated the growers whose produce he was using, and the magazine’s food editor described Tasmanian produce as the best in the country. I liked how Daniel seemed to mentor his growers and that he’d invited them to dine, too. I got chatting to a young photographer from Sydney who said he had plans to move to Tasmania and open a restaurant. His name was Luke Burgess. Like Daniel, Luke expressed a real appreciation for produce and wanted to make his life in the place where it grew best. In the meantime, he worked as a food and travel photographer for magazines in Australia. We exchanged numbers and planned to keep in touch.

  Freelance journalism is a precarious business, and after nearly a decade freelancing in London I was accustomed to its ebbs and flows. While I was thankful that projects were popping up in Tasmania, I knew this wouldn’t always be the case, especially the longer I spent living away from the hub of things. I was partly drawn to the familiarity of work that I’d always done while also trying to open up new horizons by doing what I felt like doing, as opposed to what I thought I should be. This included photographing the sky, flowers and landscapes where I lived; writing and gardening; pottering and pootling. Not really being an expert at any of this, I regarded everything as playing.

  I had no compulsion to leave home except on the occasion of work or important events, like Les’s Living Treasure exhibition at the Object Gallery in Sydney. Les wanted to introduce me to an old friend of his from the sixties when he used to live in Sydney. Back then Tetsuya was working as a kitchen hand in Surry Hills. Now, Les and I were guests at his Kent Street restaurant, rated among the best in the world. ‘Tets’ invited us to put our heads around the door of his inner sanctum: a white-marble, stainless-steel and black-glass kitchen. ‘It’s so easy to clean, you just hose it down!’ he said with an infectious grin.

  Tetsuya not only wanted us to taste as much as he could place in front of us, but also to see his bar, view his ceramics collection and for me to accept a gift. As we left, Les grabbed my hand and we ran across Kent Street through a wall of Sydney humidity and for no particular reason caught a bus to Circular Quay. On the bus, I opened the bag Tetsuya had given me to find a bottle of his oyster dressing and a jar of black truffle butter. They reminded me of the red stilettos: to be admired on a pedestal as a work of art, not messed about with on a Nuns’ House country platter.

  The next time I visited Les, he cooked. He explained it was how he’d paid for his board when he lived in Watsons Bay in the 1960s. I could see the easy brusqueness of a skilled cook at work as Les chucked prawns into a skillet splashed with homemade chilli oil, followed by spaghettini al dente tossed into both. The way Les prepared a meal was the way he lived life: ‘light a fire under it’ he always said. He was talking about living, but his gas-top oven was always more aflame than perhaps it needed to be, and on such occasions, just like a fencer, he parried to turn down the gas knob and to remove the pan from the heat with a tea towel he kept tucked by its corner into his jeans pocket for moments like this.

  Les’s bookshelves were in the corridor next to the kitchen, and while he cooked I would browse the shelves. I noticed how the poetry and cookery sections were next to one another. Christine Manfield’s Paramount Desserts always jumped out, with its sleek white edge curved like a plate. I wanted to make the dish on the cover, a mascarpone love heart on a base of berries, because it looked like Tasmania. ‘How do you get that shape?’ I quizzed Les, who went straight to his store cupboard and found just the thing, the sweetest secret: a white porcelain mould in the shape of a heart. ‘Here, take it. Use it,’ Les insisted.

  Over supper we sat next to each other on the same side of the table so we could both see the reflection on the river of the eastern shore lights. I shared my pride with Les in the building of the deck and how I’d learned to use a hammer. Les recalled a Bob Brissenden poem he had in his collection, and went to shuffle through his bookshelf. He pulled out a slim volume, signed by the poet, and leafed through it gently until he found the exact line he wanted: the one about the four elements a potter employs: water, fire, earth and ‘his own informing breath’. I closed my eyes to hear the poet’s words as they fell from Les’s lips, and realised how much I liked my job again: it opened up a way to meet people, like Les, who few of us get the chance to meet, and I was inspired to find the words to reflect their life’s endeavours. I decided to focus my writing on the place I loved and the people who appreciated its natural beauty. I had distanced myself from a crowded life by living in the country, but, unexpectedly, my livelihood was proving to be a way of staying in touch with human endeavour.

  I met Christina Sonnemann when I interviewed her for the Afternoon program on ABC Local Radio. She was a harpist who played at soirees in Paris, Prague and Hobart, yet lived in Tunbridge, a bush town in the heart of Tasmania. She brought her harp into the studio and played live to air. She was fresh, young and articulate with long pre-Raphaelite red locks and great natural presence. She played with strength as well as elegance, and sang a range of pieces, from a Doris Day ballad to Celtic hymns. After meeting her, we stayed in touch through our mutual appreciation of words and books. When I read about Tasmanian Living Writers Week, and how the community was encouraged to participate with their own events, I invited Christina to collaborate on a self-styled ‘Afternoon of Words and Music’.

  I’d experienced my first four seasons in Tasmania, and ‘Karoola Seasons’, a set of haiku, was the result. Christina interpreted my words for the harp and we decided on the Jansz Wine Room as a venue, in Pipers River not far from the Nuns’ House. It premiered in August, before a gathering of nearly a hundred people: ‘a huge crowd,’ enthused Maxine, the wine room manager, who had arranged generous tasting glasses of Jansz non-vintage sparkling wine for the assembled guests. Audrey was chuffed in hot pink, Jim and Simon stood in the back row, heckling me with their champagne flutes, and Leigh offered the proud eye of an old friend. We hadn’t discussed whether she would come. She just did, and brought two friends, Fiona and John, who were visiting her from New York. I felt spoilt as well as thankful that time had let us step through the hoop of awkwardness thrown up on her first visit. It was a treat to hear how Christina had turned my simple words into music for the harp, and how she sensed each season in her clever score.

  The Jansz Wine Room was an impressive space. The weatherboard winery was built in the early 1970s in the style of a Dutch barn, and had been a working winery until it was renovated to architectural award standard. It was a perfect blend of old and new, and I thought of it as my local and liked to share it with friends and visitors who came to stay. Some were so impressed they suggested I might like to work there. While sipping on flutes of Mumm and Pierre-Jouët in London bars, or Tesco’s Brut Cava at home, it was nowhere near my dreams that one day I’d live in the unofficial Champagne region of the southern hemisphere. I thought I’d found heaven when I heard there were four top Australian sparkling wines in the Pipers River region alone. I tried them all, but it was Jansz that seemed to draw me back by the architecture of the place, the elegance of the wine and, as I soon found out, its winemaker.

  Natalie was young, had a fetish for chic shoes, and travelled everywhere with a wired kelpie bitch called Bob. Nat’s name was usually followed in conversation by a slight intake of breath: ‘. . . a female winemaker?’

  Nat said she could pinpoint exactly when her love affair with wine started, recalling the smell of vintage while cycling through the vineyards in
the Barossa Valley where she grew up. I envied the impact that place had on her at such an early age. Through the smell of grapes being harvested she found a destiny many people never find: a lively mind connected to the ground it walked on and a livelihood to match.

  I couldn’t rely on freelancing alone to pay the bills, so, inspired by friends’ advice, I approached Maxine at Jansz about the possibility of casual work. She told me my timing was perfect. I couldn’t believe that as a cellar-door hand my day would start by tasting sparkling wine.

  The colour itself was everything I liked about a day: like hay or a pale lemon sky, shortbread, oysters or sponge cake mix, or a soft and buttery Armani suit. When I opened a bottle I could smell and taste the yeast. I tried to find the oyster on the palate and the sea spray or rose petal on the nose, and the lingering oak finish. When I popped the cork I loved to see the mist wisp, and curl, then dissipate into thin air like a smoking pistol; I loved how the aroma itself was intoxicating, got right up your nose and lifted you, like a lemon sherbet bomb. More than anything, I loved the story of Champagne itself, of how women had loved it throughout history; in particular, mesdames Lilly Bollinger and Barbe-Nicole Clicquot, grandes dames who brought bubbles to the world thanks to the early deaths of their husbands. There was talk that corks would one day go from sparkling wine, as they had from wine, but how could you replace the sound a cork made when it popped or how that stopped a conversation?

  I learned to explain how méthode champenoise sparkling wine was made by adding yeast and sugar to wine; that the yeast ate the sugar, which created the bubbles and the alcohol; and that it was sold in the bottle in which it was made. When women tasted, I watched as they closed their eyes, smiled, and looked pleasantly guilty at the feeling of joy as they sipped, smacked lips and swallowed, but rarely spat. It was a very precise expression I loved to look out for, especially when it seemed a private look happily shared in public. When your job is pouring bubbles, there are few complaints from customers.

  While the flock of resident geese was fussing in the Jansz vineyard in Pipers Brook, Nat walked up and down the trellised vines, teasing and tantalising her senses until she knew the time was perfect for picking. Over the bar at the cellar door, while Bob chased a cork around the Wine Room, she explained that her vintage rosé could be from nowhere else other than those one small block of pinot noir vines, planted in the reddest soil on the brow of the hill overlooking Bass Strait. I was happy that working here had connected me to where wine came from, and that it was no longer just a bottle on a shelf.

  It was harvest time again in the valley; paddocks were starting to look groomed and were dotted with fat round hay bales. The lemon trees were covered in exotic-smelling blossom and I had to stop myself from picking it so that I could take the smell inside. I started sensing how life here just seemed to flow— even swan in—more easily than it ever did living in the midst of one of the world’s great cities, where rewards were often hard won. In London I had to push to make things happen; here, things just seemed to emerge around me, serendipitously, I think because of where I lived. One day I thought I’d wake up and wonder what on earth I’d done moving back, but already a year had passed and, despite my London visit, I’d had not one creeping doubt. Often I was asked, ‘Wow, that must have been a culture shock, moving from London to Lilydale! Don’t you get lonely?’ And I would tell them about how life swans in now, and about ‘deepest darkest Africa’ and my uninvited guests. Listen up . . .

  The plumber who came to replumb my toilets invited me to a New Year party, themed Latino. There would be salsa dancing, he said. Would I be interested in judging the costumes? It was my first social event in the area and, given the amount of trouble taken with printed invitations, decorations and planning, I decided to go. I wore the silver Gucci frock I bought in London and had only worn once for a big launch. When I arrived at the party, Simon the plumber told me he thought I’d done well at the op shop, and I didn’t correct him. It was here that I met Paul, a single father who salsaed as poorly as me. We got chatting and I mentioned that I’d been exploring the area. He told me about one of his favourite spots from childhood, not far away, on the north coast. His family had come to know it as ‘deepest darkest Africa’, when the road to the beach was no more than a horse track. ‘It’s changed a little since then,’ he said. I made a mental note to try to find it.

  The turn-off to Bellingham is near Jansz off the Bridport Road, and the road to the coast is signalled by a change of vegetation, made scrubbier by tea-trees. If you go all the way to the end you’ll find a beach. The beach itself is long, empty, rugged, and backed by sand dunes.

  Thick deep eyelashes of seaweed were strewn across the sand, and fascinating rocky outcrops made fingers into a sea that was wild and answerable to nothing. At one end, I came across a wooden bench: five slats bolted to a metal frame, set in the ground with five big rocks that served as a platform. There was no name, no label, no engraved plaque or signature, just a sturdy bench for everyday enjoyment. It had a sense of gloating in the way it sat facing squarely out to sea in a cove sheltered by she-oaks, tea-trees and boobyalla. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ it seemed to be saying. ‘I’ll be here longer than you.’

  The unnamed seat near Bellingham.

  I told Paul later that I’d made it to deepest darkest Africa. ‘Did you find the bench?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I found the bench.’ ‘That’s good,’ he said, sounding pleased.

  Leigh timed her next visit for February, when Sydney was at its stickiest. I hardly gave her time to unpack before suggesting we head to Lulworth. I liked the thought of catching up with her while heading into a breeze on a beach walk we both loved. We kicked off our shoes and scaled the dunes up to the beach, then ran down the other side into the Tiffany-blue surf, expecting to have the place to ourselves. But on this day we noticed there were two other people on our beach—nuisance strangers. We chose to walk in the opposite direction, to the eastern end, and established a cool distance. After two swims, we were forced to head back, nagged off the sand by swarms of march flies. The strangers were nowhere to be seen, until back at the car park we spotted the two men shading themselves in the back of their hired campervan. One was inside reading a novel while the other sat on the tailgate cleaning sand from his toes.

  Leigh started a conversation and established that they were friends from Adelaide, had just walked the Walls of Jerusalem, and were filling in a couple of days before, separately, catching the plane and the Bass Strait ferry back home.

  ‘Hey, do you have a paddock we could camp in?’ asked one of the strangers.

  I told him the address once, without directions, thinking that he wouldn’t remember or would never find the way. We said goodbye and made our way home. A short time later, the white van appeared in the Nun’s House driveway. Total strangers had come to camp. They told us they called the van ‘the deli’. It was stocked with wines and gourmet foods from their Tasmanian travels. Ian told us he worked as a landscape architect and Toby was studying viticulture. Their tastes were refined and their spirits generous as they baked fish for us for dinner that night, mixed jugs of Pimm’s crammed with fruits and fresh mint from the garden, and ended the evening brewing coffee with cardamom.

  After breakfast the next day, the four of us set off in the windowless Jeep for ‘deepest darkest Africa’ on the condition they were never to reveal its whereabouts. On a baking afternoon, we stood thigh-deep in a teal-blue ocean with glasses of sparkling wine in our hands. I showed them what I’d come to know as ‘my Summer Palace’: an old fisherman’s shack nuzzled into the dunes with a bed at every window that looked out to sea. Toby offered me his clasped hands to stand on and raised me high enough to peer through the kitchen window.

  ‘What can you see?’ he asked enthusiastically from below.

  ‘Well, there’s an empty bottle of Jack Daniels lying on the sink, a sauce bottle, knives, a fork . . .’

  We sat on the deck and took photographs as if we owned it a
nd I imagined that I already did.

  The next morning, Leigh and I said our goodbyes to Ian and Toby and as they turned left out of the driveway onto Pipers River Road we could hear the deli van’s horn sound in the distance: the first beep beep was a cheerful farewell; the second beep beep a sadder refrain; the third, the longest honk, a longing for the moment not to go . . .T oby had signed the Nuns’ House guestbook and we opened it to see what he’d written: If you ever drink from the Zambesi they say you will always go back to taste it again.

  A couple of weeks later I made inquiries about the old shack on Crown land at deepest darkest Africa, but it was too late. The official told me it had just been sold. Out of curiosity I decided to visit it regularly to keep an eye on the changes. The first time I visited, as I walked up the sandy driveway I could see that the deck had been ripped out. There was a hole in a wall—for a new window, perhaps—and some water pipes were lying around. Work in progress . . . When I told Crabtree, he said the new owners must be trying to update the shack to meet council regulations. I just hoped they wouldn’t make it posh.

  A few weeks later, I turned the point to see that the old fisherman’s shack in the sand dune had vanished. I couldn’t hold back the tears when I struggled to the top of the dune to see not one sign of it standing. Not even a footprint remained.

  The summer place at ‘deepest, darkest Africa’.

  Natalie’s Jansz Tasmania Vintage Rosé jelly

  with raspberries and rose petals

  2 bottles Jansz Vintage Rosé

  3 cups caster sugar

  2 punnets raspberries

  12 sheets gold or titanium-strength leaf gelatin

  fresh rose petals

  Pour wine into large saucepan with sugar. Bring to