On Australia Day, and on ceremonial occasions around Australia, acknowledgments to Country are made by and for the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Often this ceremonial prose would seem clunky to me when spoken at a podium, on a stage; out of place. It may not be possible yet, I thought, but in these days of moving towards reconciliation, one day perhaps it would become a universal acknowledgment that we all made to The Land (not our land or their land) regardless of our race or boundaries. A thank you to the place we lived in and everything it provided for us. Hopefully, too, one that was not duty bound or paid for, but a thank you—heartfelt.
In some ways I wondered if that was what recipes were. If we only reminded ourselves of where they came from, they too could be a thank you to our land, to what is grown and reaped, turned into something by caring hands, and finally handed down through families and to friends in one unbroken line, like Rose’s recipe for egg and bacon pie.
Rose was a rural reporter who lived alone in the orchard country of Hillwood, about twenty kilometres west of Karoola. We were about the same age, and as children had attended different schools in the same town, but only met each other later in life through working at the ABC. Home for Rose was an old weatherboard farmstead with a wide veranda on two sides, and an established orchard overlooking the Tamar River. Her driveway was long and lined with bush, and, if I compared it with my own open view from the road, I sometimes envied her privacy.
Rose had many fine attributes, none of which would have made a man feel like she needed him. She could do anything for herself: re-roof, dig garden beds, prune tall trees, make her own cello out of myrtle . . .R ose also specialised in what she called ‘veranda food’: this meant freshly made pie, or cake, and a platter of plump cheeses, salamis and olives, served with freshly chopped whatever was in season, and, always, a glass of something sparkly. She introduced me to amaranth, chickweed, mulberries and macadamias. It was simple home cooking, based on what was in the garden and the time available to rustle it up. Food with a view and with friends—a form of cooking that went well with what Rose called ‘the occurring world’. That is, what was happening right now.
Rose laid a cloth on the veranda table and placed a vase of cut lavender on top to stop it from blowing off in the breeze along with just-out-of-the-oven ‘Cloud Nine’ scones, a bowl of plump berries and a pouring jug of cream.
Stuff, plop, toss, dollop . . . chunks of this and that— I loved the absence of fuss on these occasions. And that if the food were the point of our visits, what might we be missing in our conversation? Food, however, was what we gathered around, sat ourselves near, salivated over and enjoyed. We swapped dishes and plates with each other in the same way we swapped recipes. A plate of food that we’d grown, caught, dug or preserved was just as special as the dishes we’d baked. I brought a rhubarb tart and Rose made the egg and bacon pie she’d learned to make at her mother’s knee, the recipe never written down. As the sinking sun leaked into the Tamar River and the first star appeared, we hoped to catch a glimpse of the Comet McNaught and strained our necks to look up at the sky—without luck. It was only 140 million kilometres away from us.
As I turned out of Rose’s street that night to make my way home to Karoola, I spotted the incredible tail—a starry smear, like the spray from a hose, that stretched millions of kilometres across the sky. I texted Rose straightaway. ‘It’s lower in the sky than we thought—south-west and low. Stand on far corner of veranda. Can’t miss it.’ I wondered how the comet could stay together when its tail was so far apart from its head, but I drove home anyway feeling all joined up.
Rose’s egg and bacon pie
(as told to me by Rose)
6 rashers bacon
2 handfuls leafy greens
3 handfuls chopped parsley
1 handful chopped chives or shallots or spring onions
12 free-range eggs + 1 for glazing pie crust
white pepper
2 sheets ready-made puff pastry
First you need an old enamel pie tin (preferably
square). Line the tin with one sheet of pastry,
loosely covering the sides. Then, place three rashers
of bacon on top of the pastry. I cook the bacon
beforehand but Mum doesn’t. I also split the bacon,
half on the bottom and half on the top, unlike Mum.
Sprinkle over leafy greens plucked straight from
the garden, three handfuls (not small amounts)
of parsley, and something from the onion family
(I prefer chives). Break a dozen home-laid eggs from
happy hens into the tin, keeping the yolks whole.
Season with white pepper. Then place a puff pastry
sheet over the last three rashers of bacon, and cut
strips to place around the edge. Trim the edges.
Make escape holes and glaze with one egg. Bake in
a hot oven (210°C) for half an hour. This is actually
two versions of a family recipe put together with a
dash of A.C. Irvine and a smattering of Stephanie
Alexander—there’s no right way.
CHAPTER 10
April, Karoola
Although the days were shortening, the reality of an early winter didn’t stop me from doing things in the garden. I’d been covering on the breakfast shift on Local Radio for a few months which meant setting two alarms for 3.15 am—just in case. Waking at this hour of the day felt unnatural, but the night sky always lit my way on the twenty-five-minute drive into work. Kangaroos and wallabies grazed along the shoulders of Pipers River Road like sentries making safe the way. I was eager to make the most of the daylight and always rushed home after leaving work at 12.30 pm to get back to the house that held my soul together.
I could feel my sense of home developing as the strongest bond and yet, after nearly three years, I was still being asked how I’d coped with ‘the culture shock’ of moving from London. ‘I thought I’d wake up one day and realise that I’d made a terrible mistake,’ I’d reply, adding, ‘but it hasn’t happened yet.’ Work, though stimulating, had not been able to seduce me in the way it once had; it wasn’t enough to lure me away from the tie of the land. For me, the house, the garden and paddock were all work and pleasure combined. I didn’t know if I could earn a living by spending more time at home than elsewhere, but I knew that the peace of mind being home gave me was worth the effort.
The leaves had fallen and the garden was pared down and showing its bones. I never wanted to take the Nuns’ House for granted and saw it as my purpose to care for it. Despite the persistent drizzle, I would garden until dark, which arrived as early as five o’clock, and was in bed by 7.30 pm, ready for the 3.15 am wake-up call. I found all manner of things while digging: a perfume bottle, glass marbles, a wooden toy, a huge spanner, steel nails the size of stilettos, a horseshoe near the front gate, plenty of pieces of broken china, and even the remnants of an old stocking I imagined had blown off the clothes line.
When I wasn’t scratching and sawing about in the garden, I liked to sit in an old red armchair in front of the wood heater in the heart of the house with piles of gardening books and magazines, imagining what could be done. I was also inspired by a pack of cards I’d bought from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York called Nature’s pharmacy deck: history and uses of 50 healing plants. On one side of the card was a botanical illustration while the other depicted the plant’s history and its contemporary uses. I decided on a kitchen garden as a spring project and consulted my brothers Simon and Jim for landscaping advice. While they argued over its execution I enjoyed the creative tension.
Apart from gardening books, I had no current use for the rest of my collection. My book towers still lined the hallway and picking up a novel was the furthest thing from my mind when there was so much to learn and do. Did you know that limes and lemons ripened in the dead of winter? How would you know this when they’re available all year from any supermark
et? The old lemon tree I’d inherited in the back garden hadn’t fruited since I’d arrived and needed nurturing back to health so I clipped off the dead and straggly bits and gave it a couple of doses of Epsom salts. If Wilf were here he would have peed on it, but Crabtree did the job instead. I found this out one day when he was visiting and suddenly wandered off. When he came back a few minutes later he said he’d felt the call of nature and thought he’d use the backyard citrus. I also read that the first year’s fruit on new trees should be taken off to help them establish themselves. That night, I took care to wrap up each of the new lemon trees in the front paddock to protect them from the frost. I used light bird nets that made the small trees droop like used condoms but they came off again at first light.
Sometimes I liked to leave my corner for a day or two so that I could look at life from a distance. I’d take a trip up the coast to Stanley and stay for a night in a small hotel underneath a big volcanic rock called the Nut. The seagulls outside on the pier reminded me of the English seaside and from my room in the attic I could hear the waves crashing onto the beach. I thought of friends on the other side of the world and missed them but also knew they couldn’t replace that feeling I had found on my own, of being home.
Overnight, a southerly had been gusting up to a hundred kilometres an hour, so relentless that it brought down a tall black wattle at the end of my driveway, blocking one lane on Pipers River Road. I heard it fall, cracking like a volley of bullets on the nightly news. I pulled on a waterproof jacket and braved the horizontal rain to survey the damage. By the time I’d reached the fallen tree, a car stopped and a woman got out. Without speaking to each other—the wind was too loud—we began clearing what we could of the tree debris blocking the road. Before long we’d done enough for her to get on her way.
‘I’ll call the council,’ I shouted against the wind. ‘At least the road is clear now. Thanks for the hand.’
I fetched the small pruning handsaw Audrey had given me when I told her I was going to buy a chainsaw, and was clearing the smaller branches when a truck pulled up in front of me. ‘Have you got a chainsaw?’ the driver asked.
‘No, but the council is on the way,’ I explained.
Above the wind that continued to howl, the driver said his name was Hilton and that he used to live in Karoola. He knew the family who once lived in my house, and had played footy on the oval down the road. I wasn’t surprised anymore. I felt looked after each day by this house on the corner.
‘Hang on,’ said Hilton, and walked to the back of his truck.
Pulling out a sturdy road brush he started sweeping the road free of broken sticks of wattle. He smiled, I thanked him, and he went on his way again. Before long, another ute had pulled up and a man hopped out.
‘Have you got a chainsaw?’ he asked me, offering to help clear the big tree from my drive.
‘It’s okay, I have another access to my driveway at the back, and the council won’t be long. Thanks anyway,’ I told him as he continued to clear bits of wood from the road.
He returned to his ute and fetched a pair of leather work gloves. ‘Here, take these. That’ll get it done,’ he said, and drove off. I wiped away a tear because I realised that I wasn’t alone here, even in the midst of a storm.
An hour later, two men from the council arrived with a chainsaw. One of them asked if I wanted to keep the firewood and even what size I’d like it.
‘That’s service for you,’ I said. ‘Small, thank you.’
I left them to it, and within thirty minutes, a neat pile of firewood was stacked at the end of my driveway, waiting for me to wheelbarrow it up to the woodshed. Another job or two to add to my ever-extending list of everything that needed doing about the place. Some things never got crossed off—usually odd jobs but important ones:
Fix fence (it had come off its bolt)
Clean out gutters
Sweep chimney
Turn shed into chicken coop
Move stack of wood to woodshed
Cut down remaining wattles over driveway . . .
When I looked at the list I realised they were jobs I couldn’t do on my own. Libby had told me about Paul Broad, a local man she called on to do ‘odd jobs’, and I decided the time had come to call him. ‘Odd jobs’ was an inadequate description because, as I found out, he could do most things. His shoulders were just like his surname, and his neck was like ballast, deeply tanned from being outdoors, and straight as a gum tree. He told me he’d trained to be a helicopter pilot until he was diagnosed with diabetes— that scuppered his career. I could tell that it still stung a little as he sat on my veranda at the end of the day, sharing a cold apple cider, his stories and the last of the day’s rays.
This was a dying job, said Paul. People didn’t do this kind of work anymore and yet he worked every day, was booked up for a year or more. Started work at 5 am some days, and only finished when it was too dark to go on. People talked about time management, he said, but it didn’t work like that. He set his prices according to a person’s needs and circumstances. He wanted to live in the community and walk down the street knowing he’d done the right thing by the people he met in the post office or at the store. He only wanted what he needed. So I paid him twice the price he quoted for the huge wattle tree that he felled because it was too close to the house.
‘You’re in credit,’ he said.
‘But you quoted me too little.’
‘You paid me too much,’ he retorted.
So I’m in credit. That’s how it works.
Each morning, Jon Snow’s ‘Snowmail’ arrived in my inbox at 4 am, as regular as a British milkman. He was the Channel 4 newsreader in the UK whose bright ties were a trademark. Subscribing to his ebullient newspeak was one of the few links I’d kept to my old life, if only to remind myself of some of the reasons I might have left. Stories of a knifing in a northern town . . . a special report on the US election . . . and now economic catastrophe looming. Reading the predictions of financial cataclysm, I wondered, really, what is wealth? Why do we want more money than we need? And why is credit (money you don’t have) pushed at people who can’t afford to pay it back?
In moving here I’d set myself a challenge: to try to live without credit cards. To me, plastic cards seemed to represent the consumer-driven life I wanted to escape. It wasn’t an easy task to live without credit, and almost impossible to book an airline ticket or a hotel without it. Without credit cards I found I had more respect for hard-earned cash and was learning to shop in alternative ways: in someone’s old barn, a garage sale or at the tip shop. Weekends were not just for shopping like they were in the city. There were many other things to do with my time and less opportunity to shop here. Instead I ‘shopped’ at Lulworth Beach for rocks and pebbles, driftwood and sea sponges. These were the things that caught my eye now. I only took what I could carry back up the beach and over the dunes to the Jeep. Everything was free and replaced on the next tide or two. I made wonderful finds, too, in second-hand shops, including a 1940s stole, 1970s glass light shades, and a book published in 1960 called The Handbook of Crafts, edited by Griselda Lewis. In it I found an essay called ‘Handweaving’ by Algernon Gibbs and a passage that summed up, for me, why money and beauty were separate paths:
A handweaver cannot expect to become a millionaire. He must be content to work for the love of the craft, to love color and texture, to want to create beautiful things. Anyone wanting to produce masses of things and to make a great deal of money had better have a factory and be done with it.
There were few splashy displays of material wealth in the area and yet people were not poor here. Their wealth seemed to be defined in different ways: surplus vegetables to swap with a friend, raspberries to sell from the roadside, a vintage car in the garage or shiny horses in the paddock, a garden that looked like a park, and water tanks that stored life. Then there were the woodpiles. While firewood cost around eighty dollars a cubic metre, some homes had fences made of woodpiles so long and
winding they circumnavigated the house and almost joined up again, like a centipede sculpture. There were eras of home fires in all that wood. My favourite was on the road to Hobart, at Dysart House in Kempton. The owner had built a woodpile as wide and broad as his paddock, then turned it into a garden wall feature, permanent and decorative with a rose-covered pergola right in the centre.
It seemed to me that woodpile wealth was a lasting prosperity, not wealth for its own sake. It was a welcoming kind of affluence that put value on the future and kept a family and their visitors warm in winter. Most people who had snaking woodpiles also collected their own wood, which meant they were probably quite fit too.
While aspiring to woodpile wealth, I was spending the days writing and gardening; pastimes most people regard as retirement activities, but I hoped would be my livelihood. I had kept up my handwritten journal, but the writing that would earn me a living was patchy, and the garden was not bearing enough fruit to stock a pantry. I felt committed to earning a living without relying on a paycheque at the end of the week, inspired by the people I wrote about who were doing the same. They were artists, designers, artisans, carving a niche of their own, living where they wanted to live, without money being their motivation. This island seemed to be a creative haven where artistic livelihoods were born of being here.
The publisher of the small business magazine I’d helped launch was pleased with how it had been received and asked if I had any ideas for more. An idea had been brewing, so I said I’d work on it and present them with a proposal in a couple of weeks. It would be a food magazine, based and founded in Tasmania, with national and international reach, about growers and provenance. I contacted Luke, the photographer I first met at Daniel Alps’ restaurant. Luke was also a chef who had trained with Tetsuya, and had now moved to Tasmania with his girlfriend, Katrina. They’d recently opened a small restaurant south of Hobart called Pecora, specialising in foraged, artisanal and locally sourced food. Luke mentioned that Rodney Dunn, a friend of his from Sydney, had left his position as food editor for Gourmet Traveller and was moving to Tasmania with his young family to follow a life in food and to start a cooking school.
A Story of Seven Summers Page 10