My hens taught me things I didn’t know. I learned that they cluck loudly after laying an egg, and will find you if they’re hungry. They won’t eat what they don’t like and will always leave a little grain in the plate for later. If you lay down mulch in the garden they will find it straightaway and scratch it out of place. Regardless of your efforts to put it back they will remove it again each time as if they think they’re helping you, when in fact it’s quite the opposite. They clean themselves by flapping their wings and rolling in dry dirt baths they make by digging in the garden, sometimes so well they look as if they’d buried themselves. Now they’ve made a nest in the honeysuckle bush where they lay perfect buff-coloured eggs. I love going to the nest when the eggs have just been laid and are still warm to touch. It feels like stealing but I always say thank you to the ladies as I carry them inside. Nothing quite like hour-old eggs, poached in a pan of gently rolling water for three minutes, then laid on toasted homemade buttered ciabatta. When the planets are lined up I get two eggs a day; some days, bizarrely, there are three . . .
This is as far as my smallholding goes. In another six years and seven summers, maybe I will have mastered limon-cello, crop rotation, a sunflower paddock, and spinning alpaca fleece . . .O f course, I’m only just scratching the surface. I look at Suzanne and Alvaro’s vegetable garden in Lalla—their raised beds, the intricate planting, savvy ways with irrigation, the rare varieties of vegetables and herbs, some saved for seeds, the neat footpaths lined with sawdust, and the immaculate quality of everything that is in season, trussed, tied or pruned, mulched and composted exactly as it should be—and feel overwhelmed.
‘I have so much to learn,’ I said, standing in the middle of it all.
‘But I didn’t start until the age of forty-five,’ said Suzanne, with all the encouragement in the world. ‘You need to get a copy of Guide to Vegetables and Fruits, from the Rodale Press. It’s how the organic movement started. Look it up.’
‘A lot of people would like to live this life but put it off,’ said Alvaro.
We stopped to listen to the squeaky-door call of a family of native hens. To Alvaro they sound like a cross between a donkey’s bray and a rusty saw. ‘I consider it a privilege to hear a native hen,’ he says. ‘It gladdens my heart when I hear them.’
Suzanne and Alvaro came to Tasmania from Chile in their forties. Thirty years on, they still think of themselves as ‘city people’ but their vegetable garden is a masterpiece of the life they now lead. In Chile, Alvaro had worked as a naval architect, senior executive and lecturer, holding five university degrees, but in Tasmania he chose subsistence farming. Suzanne said one of her favourite things to cook from the garden was Tongue of Fire, a strikingly beautiful green bean tipped with red flames which hails from South America. ‘It’s a special family occasion for us, as the beans must be harvested at optimum plumpness, but before they start to dry.
‘In Chile, I remember seeing sacks of beans with their edges turned down: white beans, pink, striped, beans with spots . . . I used to dream of making a mosaic out of all those beans. In South American popular culture, beans give strength and courage. We’ve been planting ours and saving the seed for thirty years.’
‘You must select pods with the maximum number of beans,’ said Alvaro. ‘From those, eliminate the smaller beans. The bigger ones have more energy.’
‘Come back when the beans are ready,’ said Suzanne. ‘Come and eat with us and I will make granados con choclo—it’s a traditional summer dish from Chile.’
Back at the hilbarn packing shed, Barn had made a hundred hilbarn berry boxes out of recycled fence palings with the help of Des, Anthony, Nathan and Michael from the Lilydale School Farm. They look heavenly lined with gold florist’s paper and wispy ‘wood wool’ shavings, waiting to bear fruit and take off. We had traversed the berry triangle from Turners Beach to Underwood and Ross, and finally sourced the best fresh berries we could find. The coolroom looks like Christmas.
With Rachael, James and Billy home with their father for Christmas we all pack together, and finish off the berry boxes with sprigs of holly picked from the roadside by Barn and his eldest son, James. We add up all our costs and at the end of all the calls and visits to growers, the making, weighing and packing and the delivering, we have a grand total of thirty dollars, which makes ten dollars each for the kids. That’s how it works; it is a Christmas harvest, after all.
As promised, we received Suzanne and Alvaro’s invitation to join them for beans picked from their garden and turned into ‘simple people’s food’. Barn was busy doing gardening work in Lalla, so Suzanne said we’d save him some leftovers. The beans were served straight from an earthenware pot onto a flat plate with sliced tomatoes from the garden, drizzled with a little oil, garden basil and freshly cut chilli.
‘How do you say bon appetit in Chile?’ I asked.
‘Ah, this is buen provecho,’ explained Alvaro. ‘In Spanish, this means enjoy your meal, but provecho, literally, means profit.’
Buen provecho! When you eat from the land, you profit. If only we could all learn how to look after the land like Suzanne and Alvaro, I thought.
Suzanne’s granados con choclo (fresh leather-pod beans with corn)
1 kg fresh beans, shelled
250 g pumpkin, diced
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
paprika and fresh chilli, chopped, to taste
fresh oregano, chopped
½ red and ½ green capsicum, diced
250 g zucchini, diced (optional)
kernels from 2 corn cobs
salt
basil, handful of fresh leaves 5 ripe tomatoes
Wash the beans, cover with water and bring to the boil.
This water may be discarded if you wish (to minimise flatulent effect); in this case, bring a fresh pot of water to the boil, add the beans and the pumpkin, and simmer gently; the fresh beans will cook rapidly, so don’t overcook.
Do not add salt until they are tender. In another saucepan, sauté chopped onion and a little garlic in some olive oil, add some paprika and a bit of chilli and oregano.
Add capsicum (red and green), perhaps some zucchini, then sweat, covered, for a few minutes before adding these veggies to the beans and pumpkin.
Add corn (sliced raw off the cob).
Season with salt and add some of the basil. Simmer gently for flavours to mingle; the consistency should be saucy but not soupy.
Serve with sliced ripe tomatoes drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with basil, and offer fresh chopped chilli if available.
Serves 5 to 6.
EPILOGUE
The Seventh Summer
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.
Henry David Thoreau
I woke today to the sound of a chainsaw. A neighbour is felling the row of gum trees on his fence line. There may be ten or twenty eucalypts in the row. I can hear the chainsaw grinding and slicing and through the kitchen window see the bucketed arm of a yellow bulldozer pushing over a tree, and then another. It snaps and crashes to the ground and the sound is reverberating across the paddock. I guess he wants the wood but the act seems wanton to me and I mourn for the trees. I turn up the volume on the radio and switch on the woodheater fan to drown out the noise.
Sitting at a desk all day when life is going on outside isn’t easy. The seasons are turning, the jobs are too, and I wonder if those things are having an effect on me, like Marilyn and Monroe who sense the day is ending, or the swallows when they leave. Life moves in its own way without a plan. It’s Audrey’s eightieth summer this year. Leigh is getting married. Annie now shares her farm with Jen. Garagistes, Luke’s new restaurant, opened to rave reviews in the national press, w
hile Rodney’s Agrarian Kitchen is more successful than he and his wife Severine had ever imagined. At eighty, Les packed up his potter’s studio and moved to New South Wales but I can always find his jewels on Lulworth Beach and see his cupped hands holding them. The raspberry plants Libby gave me when they were just sticks are now laden with berries ripe for picking. Richard sold his vineyard and is holidaying this year in Peru. Rose’s latest doorstep gift was a bucket of garden macadamia nuts. Lizzie is finally coming to visit from London. Viv still uses her hil-barn hessian bag for carrying her laptop in sunny Gran Canaria where she found her home. Glen has had a baby girl. And Marcelle and I have just found each other on Facebook: ‘Hil darling, are you EVER coming to London? If not, why not?’
I want to see her—to tell her that, yes, I have loved again— but it’s not a love that is easy to leave. I am connected to the day turning, to the cycle of living, of growing and reaping and, in that union, feel no need to escape. Although I live in the shadow of a church and share its landscape, I have never felt the urge to enter it. My sense of direction is here and (hopefully this makes sense to you) from here it is infinite. In staying in one place I have opened up my world to a flood of probabilities. Life no longer feels starved but abundant. The lemon smile, the fence line, a bend in the road, the arched eyebrow of my mountain and wide veranda view that frames my existence in this stretched valley beneath an ever-changing sky where life ripens and decays . . . this is my eternal, my necessaries in life, and the story of seven summers.
There’s an email from Margaret, a loyal hilbarner: ‘The girls were overjoyed to recognise the red van driving up the driveway: Mum! I think it’s hilbarn! We didn’t realise how much we’ve missed you, till then. We’ve had an abundant summer veggie garden this year, which now is pretty well dormant, so bring on hilbarn!’
I love how hilbarn is us—Hil and Barn—yet also exists outside of us and that our small business is still growing without being pushed. We do what we do because of where we live and how we want to be together. It’s as simple a life recipe as that.
Barn is in his paddock across the road. He looks like the Man from Snowy River except he’s riding a mower instead of a horse. He’s seen his lady writer in the Nuns’ House window, stands up in his seat and tips his hat towards me. We make each other feel warm like sunshine and we are happy living however many summers we may have.
Not that Barn and I do days, birthdays, anniversaries, or even New Year’s Day. In how we are, every day seems to have a similar weight. It’s how I imagine Jack and Kerouac’s days to be, as they amble their slow-motion way up the paddock along the same well-trodden alpaca track to eat the finely sliced apple from my fingertips. There’s a sense that there are no Sundays in their world, yet that every day might be a Sunday. Summer and winter, day and night, sun up and moon down.
I’d heard Peter Cundall talking on the radio about the Lalla apple and how he wasn’t sure if you could still get them or even if they were still around. They used to be exported to Europe in great quantities before the Common Market came in but you don’t see them on sale in any of the orchards or grocers in town, and few of the old Lalla orchards remain. I phoned Alvaro, who thought their friend Chris Olsen might know; he owned quite a bit of land in Lalla. Chris thought if they were anywhere it would be on a couple of old apple trees on top of the hill in an old orchard just opposite the Pear Walk.
‘You’re welcome to have a look,’ he said. ‘Feel free to pick some pears while you’re there. The trees are at the top of the hill, next to two big old oak trees.’
I stopped the car where Chris had directed, and climbed over the gate into a paddock fenced by an avenue of old pear trees bearing golden teardrops of ripe pears. I started to fill a basket but the sun was dipping behind the softly draped hills and I decided to press on up the slope. The cow paddock opened up into a north-facing field with views of Lalla and beyond. A creek ran through the middle and old huts were calling me in to fossick, but I’d spotted the oak trees ahead on the brow of the hill. As I caught my breath at the top I noticed the trees were gnarled and ancient with views in every direction over a piece of land turning back to nature. There were no apples, the season was over, and the possums had probably done all the picking to be had. I would have to be patient and wait for next year to taste the Lalla apple in Lalla.
Lalla apple fruit crate label. (Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office)
who you are is
where you are
READING LIST
Books I am glad to have met
Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The agrarian essays of Wendell Berry, Counterpoint, Berkeley, 2002.
The Countryman VXXIII No 1 1941 April–May–June, edited and published by J.W. Robertson Scott, Idbury, Oxfordshire.
Peter Cundall, The Practical Australian Gardener, Penguin, Camberwell, 1990.
Andy Goldsworthy, Wall at Storm King, Thames & Hudson, London, 2000.
The Organic Gardener’s Complete Guide to Vegetables and Fruits, Rodale Press, 1982.
William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, Grant Richards, London, first published 1825.
Rosemary Hemphill, Fragrance and Flavour: The growing and use of herbs, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1959.
A.C. Irvine, Central Cookery Book, St David’s Park Publishing, Hobart, first published 1930.
Susan Irvine, Rosehips & Crabapples: A rose-lover’s diary, Lantern, 2007.
Meredith Kirton, Dig, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2003.
Stanley Kunitz with Genine Lentine, The Wild Braid: A poet reflects on a century in the garden, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2005.
Griselda Lewis (ed.), Handbook of Crafts, Edward Hulton, 1960.
Stirling Macoboy, What Flower Is That?, Lansdowne Press, Sydney, first published 1969.
The Portfolios of Ansel Adams, A New York Graphic Society Book, Little Brown and Company, Boston, 1981.
RHS Good Plant Guide, Dorling Kindersley, London, 1998.
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, The Astronomer-Poet of Persia, translated by Edward Fitzgerald, Collins, London & Glasgow, first published in 1859.
John Seymour with Will Sutherland, The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, Dorling Kindersley, London, 2003.
Nigel Slater, Appetite, Fourth Estate, London, 2000.
William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, illustrated by Maira Kalman, Penguin, New York, 2000.
The Tao Box, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2002.
Margaret Tassell, Rural Launceston Heritage Study: Report of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, QVMAG, Launces-ton, 2000.
Henry D. Thoreau, Walden: An annotated edition, edited by Walter Harding, Houghton Mifflin, Boston & New York, 1995.
The 21st Birthday Cookery Book of the Country Women’s Association in Tasmania, Penguin, Camberwell, first published 1957.
Edna Walling, Country Roads: The Australian roadside, Pioneer Design Studio, Lilydale, Victoria, 1985.
Dave Watts, Field Guide to Tasmanian Birds, Reed New Holland, Sydney, 2002.
Sally Wise, A Year in a Bottle, ABC Books, Sydney, 2008.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A Story of Seven Summers came about because of an article written for Australian Country Style magazine in September 2010. I’d been writing for the magazine from Tasmania for some years when, out of the blue, the editor, Victoria Carey, asked if I’d like to write about my own life. When the article came out, it touched a nerve in her readers, including publisher Annette Barlow, and so this story began.
I am thankful to Victoria for the precious seed sown. I am also grateful for the ripeness of the opportunity offered by Annette, who somehow could see a whole book in 750 words. And I respect and admire the careful tilling of Catherine Milne, who helped turn my journalism into writing. I know now they are not the same thing.
In researching the provenance of the Nuns’ House in Karoola, I owe gratitude to warm-hearted women who opened up their memories, photo albums, personal arch
ives, recipe books and contacts, including Marita Bardenhagen, Libby Wardlaw, Billee Parry, Mary East, Margaret Miller, Louise Lee-Archer and Carmel Hall, and to Margaret Tassell for her local history expertise.
Thank you to both Ross (Barney) Bennett and Leigh Small for their continued love and friendship, which works on me like the sun and the rain, and for their reading of the text; to Audrey Burden for all her blessings; to the late Dr Wilf Burden for his love of books; and to Les Blakebrough, who lit a fire under everything.
And thank you to both the landscape and the good people of Karoola and Lilydale—my home for the past seven years.
A Story of Seven Summers Page 19