A Story of Seven Summers

by Hilary Burden

  To help Dave out on the farm, and to give her something of her own to do, Lyndy decided to start breeding hens and selling free-range eggs and chickens. We started offering organic eggs to our hilbarn customers and I enjoyed hopping in the Jeep on Sunday afternoons and driving up the road to collect the eggs. There was always something new in the farmyard Lyndy wanted to show us: a hen that was so broody she’d taken to sitting on an apple; or a beautiful silkie who’d just hatched nine chicks and was playing mother hen. One day I arrived and the hens and roosters had arranged themselves artfully in Dave’s barn on the back of his ute, as if they were waiting to be painted. We took photos and Lyndy shared her farmyard stories on our blog in the hope that our customers would see their eggs came from real chickens cared for by real people who told funny stories. I watched as Lyndy hand-polished the last egg to fill the dozen and was sure that her care could be tasted in the yolk itself.

  This week our order from Alan in Northdown was our biggest to date: silverbeet, pak choy and basil. We first made contact with Alan after spotting his bagged fresh herbs hanging on the wall in a veggie shop only to find that he was a third-generation broadacre farmer who supplied the major supermarket chains. The herbs were something he enjoyed doing and was aiming to expand. He was more than happy to supply us with whatever we wanted.

  The first time we met, Alan had given us a tour of his latest on-farm ventures—there were new polytunnels for growing hydroponic vegetables and a hothouse for micro herbs. His super-sized hands marked him out as a farmer through and through, but there was an air of mad professor about Alan as he played with new ideas and invented ways of making them work. Satisfying the supermarket duopoly was becoming increasingly difficult, he told us, with their compliance regulations now several pages long, including specifications for the exact sizes and dimensions of a cucumber. To us, a cucumber was a cucumber— all that mattered was that it tasted good. We wondered which came first: the customer who wanted the perfect shape or the corporate buyer who demanded it?

  Alan’s farm was organised with farm-made signage; capital letters were handpainted in white on green-painted wooden boards. There was OFFICE, HANDWASH, GRANARY and VISITORS REPORT TO RECEPTION. For customers who collected fresh produce from his big coolroom Alan made smaller signs out of brown-laminated, hexagonally carved board, carefully handpainting the name in gold letters.

  We placated Ruby and Midge, the farm guard dogs, and opened up the coolroom to find a whole pallet of boxes just for us. Sitting on top was a wooden sign with the word HILBARN inscribed in gold paint, and a slot that held our invoice. For some reason the sign meant so much to us we both had tears in our eyes. Alan wouldn’t have made a sign and painted our name on it if he didn’t think we were here to stay.

  Alan turned up. ‘I’ll have beans next week if you want them,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to come and pick them for yourself though.’ Alan explained that although it had been a good season for beans and the harvest would be a large one, the processing company wouldn’t take the entire crop they had contracted him to grow. Instead, what they didn’t take next weekend he’d be digging back in.

  ‘What a waste!’ we chorused.

  We decided to pick beans for our boxes and arrived again at Alan’s early on Sunday morning. Barn dropped me off and continued west to pick up brussels sprouts from Nathalie and Johan in Kindred. As Alan drove me in his ute to the bean paddock, his two dogs ran alongside, faster than the ute. The dirt was orange-red, the beans bright green, and the sky like a double shot of blue. I wasn’t expecting Alan to stay, but he got down on his knees with me and together we picked the tiniest scratch of his broadacre paddock clean of dwarf green beans. He even showed me how best to do it by hand: first, kneel, don’t bend. Pull out the plant, roots and all, turn it upside down and shake it so you can see the beans hanging in the opposite direction to the way they grow, then strip the beans individually by tugging down on them. Toss the stripped plant into a pile and the beans into a box. Aim to pick nine kilos in one hour between two people—that’s talking while you do it of course, and allowing time to watch the dogs playing in the paddock and a break for a can of soft drink.

  I loved being outdoors talking with Alan, but it was hard, manual work, and perhaps not the sort I was minded to do every day. I looked down at my hands and nails that were cracked and split, tossed away the memories of manicures in London spas and held onto the thought that at least we had green beans.

  Autumn was a breath of fresh air away. Barn and I collected produce along lanes lined with hawthorn trees starting to turn bright red with berries. It was also the last day of blueberry picking at Crestview. It was sad to say goodbye. I felt a sense of gratitude, loss, and yearning for more, all rolled up in one. But we’d be back next year. Happy 1 March, happy birthday Barney, wearing gumboots, getting caught in showers on cool nights, with open fires, stacking wood, pruning trees, kicking leaves, sipping hot chocolate, eating apple and rhubarb crumble together with dollops of thickened cream . . . I love the seasons we share.

  Oddly, March was also the month in Tasmania when the forest industry decided to start forestry burns, when the sun could be extinguished at midday, and highways closed by poor visibility caused by nuclear-sized mushrooming plumes of smoke. Despite calls from asthma sufferers, from concerned residents, from schools whose students couldn’t get to school, from winemakers worried about smoke-taint on their grapes, the industry continued with its practices. No one could understand how this could be allowed to happen in a place that also sold itself on being ‘clean and green’.

  As the seasons turned I felt less and less inclined to visit cities, but it was definitely my turn to visit Leigh in Sydney. When I arrived at the departure lounge at Launceston airport, I was stopped by a security officer who asked me to take off my shoes, belt and jacket. As a Londoner, I used to be able to justify the discomfort of undressing in public in a busy airport with the thought that at least our security was being considered. But who in their right mind would make Tasmania a terrorist target? Why, I wondered, did we want to be like everyone else, or to play by their rules, when we were so obviously set apart?

  A second officer stopped me and explained politely that her job was to swab for traces of explosives. Would I stand aside please and hold out my arms? I surrendered in despondency to an invasion of privacy in a place where I had hoped privacy meant something. After living in Europe and travelling all over the world for nearly twenty years, I’d never been so thoroughly searched prior to boarding a plane. It made me want to stay home.

  I remembered when the first American bombs were dropped on Baghdad in 2003. I was working at Closer magazine on Shaftesbury Avenue. I remembered how we gathered around the television to watch the bombing and I thought to myself we were watching an act of murder. How these acts still touched my life now, years on, in the swabbing of my body at a small domestic airport—so exquisitely provincial you still had to board the plane via portable staircases pushed by airport ground staff across the tarmac and pick up your luggage from a tractor trailer—was incomprehensible to me. I got to Sydney, drank cocktails in a brand-new bar in the Cross, bought a pair of gold wedge-heeled boots, swam laps in the Boy Charlton pool, ate breakfast out, and talked with Leigh almost non-stop for two days. That was my Sydney. It fed me, and although I’d lived there for four or five years, it wasn’t home; at least, not the kind of home with constancy at its heart.

  You must know that feeling of arriving home: the ease, the sense of comfort when you open the door, put down your bags and breathe in a familiar air. I had found this at the Nuns’ House. And now I was finding it with Barney too. He was waiting in the driveway with two glasses of bubbles when I got home. How simple are life’s true pleasures. Accounting for his height, he lifted me up and stood me on the back step so I didn’t have to crane my neck back to kiss him. Then I threw open all the doors and windows and said hello to every view: the view from the kitchen window of rolling hills and a country road, and
paddocks crisscrossed with fences and stocked with cattle and sheep. Through the sunroom window I could see the wiggly line of willows running along the creek, Karoola corner, and Barn’s paddock hurrying slowly into the park of his dreams. From the front veranda, the soft humps of the valley hills were kissed by afternoon sun, and in the foreground the lemon-tree smile was beaming. A car passed and pipped. We couldn’t see who it was but we each threw up a wave anyway.

  Isis, one of hilbarn’s customers, had left a recipe on the hilbarn blog using the Lebrina beetroot we packed into last week’s box. I always tried to photograph the produce we collected in natural sunlight on rough backgrounds, just as they were. I always took a few options. Usually it was the first one that worked because it was how I had initially seen it, without trying to make it look good, to consciously find the right angle, arrange the leaves, make the light stretch, lose the shadows, or paint a perfect picture. First-feel was what seemed to work, even though sometimes it was out of focus.

  Isis’s recipe for beetroot chocolate cake sounded so incongruous I had to try it. Morning light shone straight into the Nuns’ House kitchen, making it one of the most pleasant times of the day to cook. The boiled beetroot was blitzed into a puree and poured into a chocolate cake mix. The sunlit colours of purple and chocolate looked ravishing as they mixed together, like paints in a bowl. I poured the beetroot-chocolate mix into an old heart-shaped baking tin, one of our market finds, and took photos with my phone at the same time. The cake rose more than I thought it could, which made the top crack into two magnificent ravines. It tasted as it looked: perfectly confounding. We shared the recipe online with thanks to Isis and her love of Liz and Michael’s Lebrina beetroot.

  Isis’s beetroot chocolate cake

  ‘I beetroot!!! Here is a lovely chocolate beetroot

  cake I made from the last beets I got from you.’

  Isis St Pierre

  75 g cocoa powder

  180 g plain flour

  1 tsp baking powder

  250 g caster sugar

  250 g cooked beetroot

  3 large free-range organic eggs

  200 ml vegetable oil of choice

  1 tsp vanilla extract

  icing sugar to dust

  Preheat oven to 180°C and lightly butter a 20 cm

  round cake tin.

  Sift the cocoa, flour and baking powder in a bowl.

  Mix in the sugar.

  Blend the cooked beetroot in a food processor. Add

  the eggs, one at a time, then the oil and vanilla.

  Process until smooth.

  Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients, add the wet mixture and lightly mix.

  Pour into cake tin and bake for 50–60 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.

  Cover loosely with foil if the cake starts to brown at 30 minutes (expect the top to crack!).

  Leave for 15 minutes before removing from the tin, then place on a wire rack to cool.

  Dust with icing sugar to serve.

  CHAPTER 17

  Spring, Tasmania

  I once sat opposite an elderly man on the train from New York to Boston. We shared the sort of open conversation that people do when travelling with strangers they are never likely to see again. ‘I could never tire of that view,’ I said to my new train friend, as I looked out of the window at the Manhattan skyline. ‘You remind me of my late wife,’ he beamed. ‘Every morning of our married life she would wake up, wish me good morning, and say, “What shall we do with the day?”’

  That’s what the dawn birdsong inspires in me followed by the welcome light of the sun as it breaks over Mount Arthur. The urge is always strong to open a window or a door into the early morning, no matter what the temperature, to smell the dew, the perfume of a new day with the promise of things to be done. Today, the blackberries seemed to have ripened suddenly. I could tell because Jack and Kerouac were raiding the fence for breakfast. I grabbed a billycan and headed down to the bottom paddock to see what was left. One for me, one for the billycan, one for me . . . Barn stopped on his way home from driving the school bus and helped to pick and eat a few. We left just enough in the bottom of the billy to make an apple and blackberry tart: apples from our gardens, blackberries from the paddock fence. I loved these roadside suppers and that a fence could be edible too.

  The next time I collected eggs from Lyndy she had some news. She and Dave had got engaged and were wasting no time in naming a date. It was going to be a country wedding held in their backyard with family and friends, and Barn and I were invited. She was over the moon, but, being more accustomed to living in comfortable farm clothes, she had one concern: the dress. I told her I could see her all bosom and hips in a dress like the one Marilyn Monroe wore in The Seven Year Itch with the white pleated skirt that blew up around her legs.

  On the day of their wedding, Barn and I laughed out loud at a huge handpainted banner tied to their cattle yard that read ‘Farmer Has Found a Wife’. So many friends and family had gathered to celebrate the occasion that Dave and Lyndy’s front paddock was full of utes and cars. We parked, and as we walked up the farmhouse driveway towards the back garden I spotted Lyndy in a sky-blue strapless dress, its silky skirt floating and billowing like summer clouds. Wedding guests were chatting in the shade of the shed where Dave’s vehicles were normally parked. Trestle tables were laid out with an abundance of plates, platters and bowls carrying their friends’ home-cooked offerings of cakes, meats, fruits and salads. Rob from the Lilydale service station was sparking up the barbecue, dressed uncharacteristically formally in a shirt and tie. As we made our way to the garden that was full of scented rosebushes I stopped to admire Lyndy’s handiwork. She’d made a large sun umbrella out of stiff cream calico, pegged it over the Hills hoist washing line, and tied it on with big blousy bows. Seats from the Karoola Hall were arranged underneath the now shady clothesline in a semicircle. We all sifted in, gradually, and found a spot ready to hear the celebrant’s words and the couple’s exchange of vows.

  Lyndy and Dave, both in their fifties, a lifelong spinster and bachelor, looked as happy as the frolicking Suffolk sheep in their paddock and the free-range hens nesting in their honeysuckle and rose bushes. I hadn’t known either of them for very long, but I felt thrilled that they’d found each other late in life and wanted to share the rest of their lives together.

  Barn and I continued our Sunday road trips from Wilmot in the west to Winnaleah in the east, and Lefroy in the north to Tea Tree in the south, picking up produce as fresh as it could possibly be. The Shingle Shed near Latrobe was an old fruit and vegetable shop with dim lighting and a concrete floor. We usually dropped in on our travels to have a look at what was there, and to browse through the nursery next door. On one of these occasions, Barn spotted two trays of perfect lettuces—red and green mignonettes, misspelt as ‘minuet’—and as pretty as a bouquet. We asked the woman behind the counter if she knew the grower.

  ‘No, but if you like I’ll call the owner to find out.’ She popped out the back to use the phone and soon returned.

  ‘Sorry, she can’t remember his name. Thinks he’s somewhere up Port Sorell way. She doesn’t have a contact. The man just drops in with his lettuces every now and then.’

  ‘Look, we’ll take all of them,’ said Barney. And we left the shed smiling with two trays of perky lettuces. They were grown hydroponically, so when it came to packing them, Rhonda wrapped their wet spidery roots in newspaper and we sat them on top of the box like a gift.

  I was haunted by the perfect lettuce and felt compelled to track down the grower so that we could buy more. Alan lived near Port Sorell—perhaps he might know?

  ‘I think he might be somewhere near Thirlstane,’ said Alan. ‘I probably shouldn’t be telling you this—he could be competition!’

  I decided to drive to Thirlstane—it was only just over an hour away—to see if I could find the lettuce grower for myself. I stopped outside houses, drove up driveways,
knocked on doors, and stopped one woman tending to her horses in a paddock— but to no avail. I turned back onto the main highway and was heading for home, feeling thwarted, when I noticed a ute pulling into a driveway.

  I stopped to ask the driver if he knew a man who grew lettuces in Thirlstane.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘he’s right over there.’ And he gestured over my shoulder to the house next door. There in the garden next to a greenhouse was a man tending to trays of lettuces.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to the man in the ute. ‘You’ve made my day.’

  We’d never noticed the hothouses before, even though we’d driven past them nearly every weekend. Funny how sometimes you never really see what’s in front of you, even when you know what you’re looking for.

  The man was attending to what looked like twenty rows of a thousand lettuces growing at waist height in small channels. It was bitterly cold, with alpine winds coming straight off the Great Western Tiers.

  ‘They’re living lettuces—it’s hydroponics,’ explained Graeme. ‘I’m still learning.’

  He told me that he worked as a nurse at the local general hospital but started growing lettuces a few months ago because he wanted to be closer to home to help his wife Kym look after their two young daughters. ‘I’d love to help you out with lettuces,’ he said, picking out two for us to try.

  I often wondered how it was that Barn and I had grown up in different ways and places and yet our feelings for things could be so in tune. We both liked finding and rethinking unwanted things, and to love and preserve what was local. An old farm gate cast aside in a paddock could make us turn off the road. We always checked with the farmer first and offered him something for it: ‘It’s our heritage,’ said Barn. I learned that on rainy days farmers used to keep themselves busy by making gates. Certain wooden styles with crosses were my favourite—you rarely saw new ones like that. In the end, we made one together out of recycled wood for Jack and Kerouac’s paddock.