A Story of Seven Summers

by Hilary Burden

  On the way to picking up fresh produce in Scottsdale, we used to say hello to an old Ford truck that had been left in a paddock to rust. It was a 1975 Ford D Series, with a long timber tray and a racing-green cabin. It had a look about it, and when Barn said it had good lines, I knew exactly what he meant. One day we dropped in to the farmhouse next door and introduced ourselves to the owner.

  Gate at Northdown, Thomas Estate, overlooking Bass Strait.

  ‘We’ll make you an offer if we can get it going,’ said Barn.

  The next day, we set off with tools in the boot and my bucket containing pink rubber gloves, a dustpan brush, Jif and cloths. Audrey would have been proud of me. ‘I don’t think we’ll worry too much about cleaning it until we know we can get it going,’ Barn said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I’d like to clear out the cobwebs and grease before I sit in it!’

  After fitting a new battery, Barn put the key in the ignition and turned it over without the accelerator to get the oil into the engine. After pumping the accelerator a few times, we both cheered when the engine started straightaway. Michael Brill, the owner, couldn’t remember how long it had been sitting in his paddock; he thought at least five years, maybe more. ‘She used to carry logs, was as tough as they came,’ he said. Barn soon worked out that a metal brake line had broken which we’d need to fix before moving her out of the paddock. I left Barn and Michael working on the old girl together and set off to get brake fluid from the nearest service station twenty minutes away.

  The next day we went back to the truck and Barn fitted the new brake line. We did a lap of the paddock and decided she was good to go. There was no one at the house so I left some cash in an envelope under the front door, and opened the gate to let Barn out onto the road. I followed in the Jeep thinking, the things we do together.

  A few weeks later, and on her second attempt, the old Ford truck passed her registration. Barn texted Michael with the exciting news and he replied: ‘Well done! I trust she will serve you as she did me, got big heart. Brilly.’

  ‘What are we going to do with a truck?’ I asked Barn.

  ‘I don’t know, but we saved it,’ he said with a smile and a hug.

  The first feature I ever wrote for British Vogue was about collectors. One smart man collected all sorts of jugs—but only white ones—and displayed them in tall, purpose-built glass cabinets in his drawing room. Another, a twenty-something woman who lived in a downstairs flat in South Kensington, had a collection of pig ornaments. When I asked her how it started she told me ‘with one pig’. After that, people started giving them to her as gifts and, before she knew it, she had a collection and had been collecting pigs ever since. I realised this was how we came by Maurice, an old Morris Commercial J-type baker’s van. If I hadn’t told my friend Leonie at Jansz about how we’d rescued a truck from a paddock, we would never have known about the sweet van that her husband had bought for sixty dollars in the 1970s and that was now rusting away in their back shed in Pipers River.

  ‘You can have it,’ she said. ‘We don’t want anything for it. It’ll be going to a good home.’

  According to the midday news it was the day after the world was supposed to end. Lyndy had emailed to say that between them the girls had only managed two dozen eggs this week. Petal, she wrote, had decided to go broody, and had been sent straight to the broody box, but Blanche had started laying and was producing a good-sized egg: ‘People don’t realise the stress behind producing a dozen eggs!’ she wrote, and signed off saying she and Dave had been blessed with another set of twin lambs: ‘Luckily the world didn’t end after all . . .’ We let our customers know that their egg order would have to go on hold as the chooks were on vacation; like everyone, they needed a rest now and then.

  I was keen to track down some old photos of the Nuns’ House and thought of Dave Flynn’s sister Billee, the kind lady who’d given Barn the thank you cakes. She said she wasn’t sure what she had but would have a look. I should give her a couple of days to put her hands on them. Then, just before hanging up the phone, Billee told me a friend of hers used to live here as a nun.

  ‘Yes, at the house where you are. She lives in Launceston now. She’s no longer a nun, though. If you like I’ll give her a call and let her know what you’re after. She might be able to help you.’

  I was excited at the prospect of meeting someone who could connect me to how the house used to be.

  A couple of days later Barney dropped in to see Billee and she handed him a manila folder, a photo album and a large envelope to give to me. They felt like treasure in my hands: newspaper cuttings, stories of the old pioneers and of the building of the church on the hill. Two black-and-white photographs

  of a massive congregation featured tough ground and smart country people dressed in their finest suits and frocks, with an array of bowler hats, bonnets and boaters, fashionably de rigueur for early settlers in 1898, photographed at the opening of their church. She told me the collection had come to her from her grandmother, who had organised the church’s fiftieth anniversary. The community’s history was alive and looked after in Billee’s care.

  Karoola congregation photographed at the opening of the Sacred Heart Church, November 1898.

  Opening day of the Sacred Heart Church, Karoola, in April 1902.

  (Photographs courtesy of Billee Parry)

  There was also a copy of an article from The Monitor, dated 4 April 1902, on the opening of the new convent and a welcome to the Presentation Sisters—quite a showy name for nuns, I thought:

  They will indeed have the warmest of welcomes from those dwellers in the Turner’s Marsh and Karoola districts, who have kept alive under Tasmanian skies the best Catholic traditions of the old land, and who have infused into the hearts of their children a love for their Holy faith, that rivals in its intense devotion and its practical character the faith of Holy Ireland itself. The old pioneers are passing away—the men and women who so bravely faced the perils and the hardships common to all the early settlers—but their spirit of faith and their example of pluck and plodding perseverance remain, and in the happier times now before them will bear simple fruit.

  I liked those words, and the ideas that sprang from them, of aspirations to bear simple fruit, of folk full of pluck and perseverance. There was no mention of the convent here at the Nuns’ House, and no photos, but, as promised, Billee had also included a handwritten note with the name and phone number of her friend Louise Lee-Archer, the nun who once lived in my house. By phone, Louise had a warm and lively voice and was more than happy to share her memories of her time in Karoola. She had some photos she’d hunt down, she said, but she’d also given a lot to the Catholic library and suggested I contact Sister Carmel in Hobart. I invited Louise to visit the Nuns’ House for morning tea the following week and I was thrilled when she agreed.

  It was a chilly enough morning to light the fire, although the skies were clear and the borrowed scenery outside my window was picture perfect, as if the valley had put on its Sunday best for Louise’s visit. When she parked her car at the front gate and hopped out, I was pleased to see she was as lively as her voice.

  ‘Oh, that view from the top of the hills as the valley opens out,’ she sighed. ‘I’m surprised no one has captured that in a photograph to promote the district. It truly is a beautiful valley. You know, I think of it as my valley?’

  ‘So do I,’ I said, standing on the front steps. ‘Welcome back.’

  I noticed how Louise took special care not to step on the brass footstep at the front door. ‘It used to be my job to clean and polish it!’ she recalled. ‘I was always in the habit of stepping over it because of that—so I’m not going to step on it now!’

  And we both laughed at her memories. She placed her bag and a book on a chair, and I let her take in the surroundings while I made us both a cup of tea with a plate of Nuns’ House shortbread.

  ‘There used to be a corridor here,’ she said, tentatively. ‘That was my room�
�well, it’s where I slept. And there used to be a sink right there.’

  I loved listening to her spirited memories of the house: how she watched the football played on Karoola oval from the front veranda; how the dining table was always piled high with church correspondence; how the elderly Sister Finn Barr slept in the little room off the front veranda, the one I used as a study, and that Louise, then Sister Claver, would never dream of entering. She told me how the nuns used to catch the school bus to Lilydale from the end of the driveway.

  ‘The school bus was really a lorry with canvas sides,’ she laughed. ‘The prefect used to say to the children, “Siddown or I’ll knock you down!” We’d get in wearing our long black habits and starched white guimpe. It was a gravel road from Karoola to Lilydale so by the time we got to school each day we were filthy!’

  She remembered ringing the bell up at the church to tell the farmers to stop their milking and come to mass, as well as setting the rat-traps behind the altar.

  ‘I dreaded taking them out—it would make my stomach turn but I would tell myself I was doing it for the Lord.’

  I would never understand the strength of her belief, only that she must have loved her God more than life itself.

  She peered inside the pantry and recalled how it had always been full of preserves. ‘It looks like they’re the same shelves . . . We’d give the bottles back to the people of the parish and the ladies would fill them up again with fruits. We always had good food because we had to be healthy to teach, and being in Karoola we always had the best vegetables.’

  Louise took her vows as a Presentation Sister at the age of sixteen. She knew that she would never go back home unless one of her parents died. It was a simple life, living in cloisters, where they shared everything. The nuns worked hard but were never paid and consequently never had a penny.

  The book Louise had arrived with turned out to be a handwritten journal complete with photographs. As soon as she mentioned it, as much as I wanted to delve inside its pages, I didn’t want to ask. Inside she’d recorded her eighteen years of life as a nun, as well as her later years as a single woman, teacher, wife and mother. I would need more time to take it all in and hoped she would feel comfortable enough to leave it. Louise found one photo—a loose one—taken in the front yard of the Nuns’ House. Then she turned to the pages on Karoola. There she was, as Sister Claver, standing with her family on the old school steps of the Nuns’ House.

  Louise Lee-Archer (Sister Claver) with her family (left) and with schoolchildren (right) at the Nuns’ House in the early 1960s.

  (Photographs courtesy of Louise Lee-Archer)

  Louise told me that she loved her four years in the valley, and that the people of Karoola had given her a feeling of worth. She said she liked country places—‘perhaps because they represented the freedom I didn’t realise I was longing for at the time’.

  We chatted until lunchtime, when Louise had to leave. I waved her off from the front steps. As she drove out, I noticed that instead of turning right back to Pipers River Road, she turned left up to the church to take in the view of our valley.

  The Archbishop of Tasmania opening the new Karoola convent in 1953; this is now the Nuns’ House veranda. (Photograph by K. Malcolm, The Standard, p. 1; courtesy Wallis Centre Archive scrapbook, Archdiocese of Hobart)

  Children dressed for first communion on the Nuns’ House front steps.

  (Photograph courtesy Billee Parry)

  Nuns’ House shortbread

  250 g butter,

  softened 13 cup caster sugar

  1 tbsp water

  2 cups plain flour

  ½ cup rice flour

  2 tbsp white sugar

  Preheat oven to 160°C.

  Place baking paper on two oven trays.

  Beat butter and caster sugar until light and fluffy; stir in the water and sifted flours in two batches.

  Knead on floured surface until smooth. Divide dough in half; shape each, on separate trays, into roughly 20 cm rounds.

  Mark each round into 12 wedges; prick with fork.

  Pinch edges of rounds with fingers; sprinkle with white sugar. Bake for about 25 minutes; leave on tray for 5 minutes.

  While still warm, cut shortbread into wedges along marked lines.

  Allow to cool.

  CHAPTER 18

  Christmas, Karoola

  I can scarcely wait til tomorrow

  when a new life begins for me,

  as it does each day,

  as it does each day.

  ‘The Round’, Stanley Kunitz

  The rain is running off the tin roof, funnelling and gurgling down the gutter at the side of the study as it makes its way to the old underground concrete water tank that I hope will last the torture of another summer without cracking and leaking. The arched backs of Jack and Kerouac are just visible as they graze in their paddock of long grass and white daisies under the glow of a double rainbow.

  Mild anxiety is brewing like the distant thunder: we have a hundred orders for Christmas berry boxes, all paid for, but we still don’t know if there will be any fruit. With so much rain, the strawberries have had no time to ripen, and we’ve heard the cherries are splitting due to the constant downpours. The blueberries will come when they come and not before. No one can talk, bribe, seduce, nag, harangue, negotiate or turn them into being. It’s nobody’s fault, but it means that the last few days before Christmas will be a runaround to see who has blueberries, if the raspberries are ready, and if enough strawberries can be picked to fulfil every order. And cherries? I need to call Frank and Nancy.

  Nearly forty years ago, Frank and Nancy planted roughly seventy cherry trees on a pretty hillside in Underwood at the end of Cherry Farm Road. One of my favourite views in springtime is of a sun-drenched lane that meanders through their orchard, down to the old chalky-blue wooden cherry shed. The dog scampers ahead, ready to take on the moment in the midst of all that blossom-madness. How incredible it was, I thought, that in roughly eight weeks’ time all those pretty flowers will be plump and luscious cherries. Last year we watched with amazement as the dog picked cherries off the tree and ate them.

  ‘Hello, Frank, how are the cherries?’

  ‘What cherries? We’ll be lucky to find a single one!’

  ‘What, not one kilo?’

  ‘No, not one cherry! It’s the worst season we’ve ever seen.

  They’re all splitting. Call again at the end of the week but we can’t guarantee anything . . .’

  As much as we’d like to buy Frank and Nancy’s cherries we decide it’s best to look elsewhere.

  In the country, the daily weather forecast seems just as important as the daily news, and rather than being a trivial way to pass the time a chat about the weather comes from a deep care for mutual livelihoods. Farmers know their fortunes are dependent on the season being kind to them and that their egos can never be bigger than the seasons.

  ‘Rain . . .’ they say. ‘Drought . . .Y a cop it on the chin.’

  I envy people like Frank and Nancy who have seen their trees through nearly forty summers: the knowledge they glean from that is not the sort to be found in a book. Sometimes I think it’s only in the practice of growing and caring for something that has particular needs—in that ground, on this hill, with that aspect, through those years—that you learn what needs to be done. Travelling might give you a different perspective on where you are, but in settling you reap the reward of each season by turning with it. In this way I think I’ve come to understand that who I am is where I am.

  I now have the satisfaction of knowing certain things about the Nun’s House: that the veggie patch grows best in a raised bed on a flat terrace at the back of the house, for both sun and water; that if I stop mowing the west-side paddock in early winter it will be blanketed hot pink with ixia bulbs in springtime; that the eastern paddock yields between forty and sixty bales of hay, depending on the season; that if I don’t cut back the dead spikes of the October-flowering
watsonias they will look statuesque later in winter on a frosty day; that if I plant in early autumn the ground will still be warm enough for growth, but if I plant later, in spring, the growth will be slower. In some ways, living by the seasons is like watching children grow: you have something to measure the years.

  Ever since moving to Karoola I’d considered keeping chickens. I know friends in city suburbs with pocket-sized gardens who have hens so it’s natural to have them here, although not natural to me. There’s a suitable pen in the backyard that Rose said could be adapted, but I’ve worried about them being caged up or not being here to look after them so settled on reading about them instead. Somehow, though, seeing Lyndy’s chickens scurrying about in her garden rubbed off and I’ve decided to get two. I settle on two striking buff-coloured ladies, one slightly blonder than the other, with sexy legs and underskirts all petticoated and frothy, and name them Marilyn and Monroe. While picking them out, I noticed that Lyndy had recycled her wedding marquee into an extra chicken coop. ‘Needs must,’ she said. ‘It’s better used than getting mouldy in the shed.’

  From the advice I’d read and received I decided to keep the girls locked up for two weeks to get them accustomed to their new home. I hated seeing them running backwards and forwards along one side of the fence as if demented, so when the two weeks were finally up I opted to leave the gate to their coop open.

  Each night they found their own way back to the nest and let themselves out of a morning. This seemed to go on like clockwork. I watched as, together, they started strolling up the gently sloping hill to their den, pecking a grasshopper here, an ant there . . . At a certain time of evening when the light lowered, they knew to enter through the open gate and put themselves to bed. When the day shortened, so did theirs. I tried to clock them each day to see if their bedtime matched the hour the sun left the day, but my own life wasn’t that ruled by time precisely so I gave up.