You can smell a flood. It’s a smell of rotting, fresh decay, debris accumulated from the last one. It’s a wet smell, strong enough to creep into your clothes and every crevice, so strong you forget it’s a smell and accept it as part of the world of flood. You forget it in the dry times. It’s only when the water rises again that you remember.
I remember the smell from my childhood. Floods were adventure then – four kids and my mother hauling her brown Mini back as it floated down the street, tying it by the bumper bar to the fence where it bobbed amongst the tide mark of lawn clippings and dogs’ bones and bits of lunch-wrapping washed down from other suburban gardens (I never asked if we were insured for flood damage; never wondered how long it took adults to turn the world back to normal).
We would sit on the verandah with the brown water lapping round the stilts of the house, watching cars sweep down the hill to the submerged road, betting which would ignore the barriers and crash through, to disappear under next door’s diluted strawberry bed and dog turds. Mostly teenage boys who laughed as they struggled out of their cars, Brylcreem dissolving in suburban soup; or suited men unable to realise that any barrier was also meant for them and who then sat in their stranded cars and yelled as though someone must be responsible, some authority must be around to complain to and rectify the matter pronto.
There were floods at the beach too, on the island where we went for holidays – even more romantic. My mother remembered when she was a child and a storm washed a shipwreck ashore as well as a chest of money (to pay the crew, perhaps, or a pirate’s hoard, or the semi-mythical export of Australia’s copper and silver coins to Hong Kong whispered through my childhood – the metal value was supposedly greater than the exchange rate).
She’d tell us that story every time it rained, and we’d listen under the thunder of water on the tin roof and fat drips from the gutters and the wet smell overcoming the holiday scents of damp towels and sand and watermelon and white bread and Vegemite and last night’s stew – how the whole town was out on the beaches picking up coins, mostly small coins but some larger ones; she got over two pounds and her father more than five, women with handbags, shopping bags, kids’ strollers and men with fat leather workbags or hessian sacks with the coins rolling among the remnants of hen food or chaff.
The waves rolled the money in for three days, shifted sand on the silver so you had to grub for it with your toes, wedged the coins among dead seagulls; then it rained again and the waves crashed and the beach was clear again, just white sand and rolling water and no copper and silver freckles of humanity at all.
We’d run to the beach after every storm, of course, with wedges of bread and honey so as not to stop for breakfast, and the dog dragging its wet ears through the sand as it sniffed dead fish, but we never found any money or even broken chests or captains’ chairs at all. Just cuttlefish that we stuck in our pockets for the cockatoo, jellyfish like half-chewed jubes, salty watermelon rinds even we wouldn’t touch, the half skeletons of fish, and coral branches sometimes still with a wash of purple in the crevices but mostly flat and grey. And the dog would get sick on some innards it found draped round a rusty bucket. These were the days before drink cans and plastic bags; the days before you wondered if dead penguins and seagulls had succumbed to storm or humans and pollution. In those days bottles were rare, a prize to be carried off even if they didn’t have a message in them – the deposit back on two bottles meant an iceblock.
This is a small flood of course. Not even enough to top up the water table – the valley will be dry again in two weeks. (I still remember listening with rage to a woman in a city cafe in the last drought. She was watching perhaps twenty drops of rain scatter from the sky, and said: ‘Maybe the farmers will stop complaining now.’ She had no idea just how much water you need to fill the soil again, to buffer you from drought, to make things ‘normal’.)
This flood was still fun. E and I went down to poke in the debris this morning. I’d told him Mum’s story and it took hold, of course, though the chances of chests of money coming over the falls at Major’s Creek and spilling into our swimming hole is even more remote than coins between the beach flags when I was a kid.
Silt between the rocks and rusty lumps leftover from a tractor, old shirts (you find them every flood – bushwalkers casting off their clothes and then forgetting them? Campers washing in the creek? Or bags of rags dumped by the road and somehow washing down?), thongs – always at least one thong – if we’d collected them over the fifteen years we might have a pair by now. Thongs breed in floods, even now when more people wear jogging shoes than thongs (I have yet to find a jogging shoe washed down by floods).
E wanders back across foam-tipped rocks. He’s found a wet feather, a bit of yellow waterproof material that was too tangled around a rock to move, four rocks that will lose their colour when they dry, driftwood (we could make a raft but by the time the flood settles to safe levels there won’t be enough water to float it on), and a bit of quartz with a flash of pyrites.
‘Is it gold?’
‘No.’
He throws it in the water with a fat plop. There’ll be other floods. Perhaps the gold will come in one of them.
We head back to the house. The kitchen air is warm after the damp outside. It smells of cooking apples and boiling kettle, stronger than the smell of flood. Tomorrow or the day after we’ll start repairing the water system, mending the water gouges in the road. The air will thin out and dry again, the ground won’t suck and shiver as we walk on it, the creek will turn silver instead of brown.
Floods are a different world, as different as the sea.
April 14
It’s cold suddenly – that sort of bone-winter cold and even overnight the colours of the world have changed, wet green, deep green, the sort of green you get with lots of water and no sun to bleach it out. This is the start of winter: even if the air warms up again, the soil will stay cool.
It’s a silent day – no birds, no wallabies, just a few wet roos up on the hill. Even Pudge has sheltered somewhere (I hope). Usually she just chomps her way through rainstorms and wonders why her biscuits are wet.
It’s the sort of day that makes you check the store cupboard for winter preserves, the chilli and garlic garlands, the dried and bottled fruit, the boxes of apples and jars of jam and chutney. (I don’t know why I make chutney – we rarely eat it – guilt I suppose at ‘wasting’ fruit, though it’s never wasted with the chooks and compost.)
I hauled out a bottle of peaches this morning; probably a waste to start eating bottled peaches so early, but I feel like them now – it’s a peach-soup day and nothing else will do.
Hot Peach Soup
1 large white onion, chopped
1 dessertspoon olive oil
4 firm-fleshed peaches
4 cups chicken stock
1 cup water
a scrape of cinnamon
1/2 cup good white wine (unless you have white wine in the stock, in which case don’t use any more)
2 cloves
1 teaspoon very finely chopped parsley
Sauté the onion in the olive oil till soft, add the other ingredients except the parsley and simmer for 20 minutes. Strain so that the soup is quite clear (eat the sludge with your fingers).
Reheat if necessary. Serve very hot with a sprinkle of parsley. (Though it’s not bad cold.)
Peach and Ginger Pudding Cake
cooked or raw peaches – enough to line a cake tin or soufflé dish
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 cup self-raising flour
1 dessertspoon golden syrup
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
4 teaspoons ground ginger (or more if the ginger is stale)
strong black coffee – about 1/2 cup, depending on the size of the eggs
2 dessertspoons crystallised ginger (optional)
Preheat the oven to 200°C. Line a cake tin or soufflé dish with the cook
ed or raw peaches.
Cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs, beating well after each addition. Fold in the other ingredients. Pour over the peaches, bake in the oven for 40 minutes, or till the cake is firm on top.
Turn out carefully onto a serving plate, or spoon out of the dish in which it has been cooked. This is probably best hot and fresh, but it’s still good cold, or reheated gently in a moderate oven.
Serve by itself or with cream or good vanilla ice cream.
April 17
The trees are yellowing – not just the autumn leaves on the European trees, but the new shoots on the pittosporum after all the rain. The new gum shoots are red or rusty green, and the casuarinas still sparkle silver with raindrops on their branches. The last of the roses are incredibly fat – autumn roses are the biggest and sweetest of all.
It’s still too early for the red autumn leaves and the deepest of the yellows. But the rosehips are reddening – great fat ones on the rugosas and Climbing Ophelia (I always feel a bit odd about Ophelia climbing up to our bedroom. Ophelias shouldn’t climb – languish maybe, but then ‘Languishing Ophelia’ doesn’t have quite the same ring for a rose).
I pick the rosehips sometimes and bung them into a pot of herbs in whisky to sweeten them. At the moment there are jars of chamomile flowers, lemon verbena and lavender brewing with rosehips in the larder – I just stuff them in a jar and pour on whisky (brandy is the herbalist’s usual choice – I like whisky better).
The rosehips give a sweetness and tang. They may also add vitamin C but I’m not sure about that after steeping so long in whisky. (The whisky preserves and extracts volatile oils and I’m sure Grandad would say it does you good in its own right too – especially with the aforementioned brew of chamomile, verbena, lavender and rosehips, which is taken by the teaspoonful to relax you before bed.)
Eglantine Sauce
This was Queen Victoria’s favourite.
3 cups rosehips (pick deep red ones – briars are best)
sugar
a dash of lemon juice
Simmer the rosehips in a very little water till tender, then press through a sieve to get rid of the seeds. Add half a cup of sugar for every cup of purée and a dash of lemon juice to taste. Bring to the boil, take off the heat.
You can eat this with roast lamb (as Queen V did), or even on muesli or on top of ice cream (as she didn’t). It is much better than you might think.
Last century’s herbalists acclaimed this as a tonic for chronic diarrhoea, cystitis, gall-bladder problems and other ‘female disorders’. Dunno if Queen V suffered from any of those or not. After all those kids, perhaps she did.
April 20
Picked pumpkins today – two barrows full. I always go overboard with pumpkins. Flat grey Crown Princes and fat Queensland Blues and a few hard-skinned and thin-fleshed Golden Nuggets, and an odd warty variety I can’t remember the name of, and a few Turk’s Caps and yellow squashes (don’t know why I planted those, as we never eat them; the siege mentality again I suppose – if the aliens invade we’ll live on pumpkin).
Pumpkins are supposed to cure on the chook-house roof (curing really does harden pumpkin skins) but I can’t be bothered climbing up there, so they’re on the hot paving instead, where we trip over them every afternoon. Then all I have to do is find a place to store them…
April 26
No sign of Bad Bart for a week, or Chocolate either – they’re filling up on grass. Pudge hadn’t been around for a while, but she visited last night. She looks like a brown beach ball with four legs and a nose. Three-and-a-half pads round the house looking hopeful as soon as the sun falls behind the ridge, and if we don’t feed her straight away she tucks into the green stuff instead.
The grass looks almost good enough to graze myself at the moment – water fat and autumn lush.
Someone once called these blue and gold days. And they are.
April 27
Down to Tilba to camp with Noël and Geoff. Wind and sea biting at the cliff and ruffles on the lake and it was wonderful, just that wonderful stretching blue and it doesn’t end, you can keep on going forever around and around the world
Geoff hauled home firewood, like a hunter proud of his prey, and then made damper, which was like most dampers I’ve eaten – small and hard and round (rather like a wombat, come to think of it) and doughy in the middle (which a wombat isn’t).
How to Make Damper that Works
No, I didn’t smugly tell Geoff this, and I hope he isn’t reading this; and luckily E shut up too and didn’t say ‘When we make damper’…Maybe he’s getting tactful or, more likely, was just more interested in the dead crab the other kids had found in the firewood.
Damper making is an art. It’s not just what goes into it that makes it good – if it’s not made the right way it’ll be tough or, even worse, raw inside and burnt outside.
2 cups self-raising flour or plain flour with 2 teaspoons baking powder
about 2 tablespoons butter or margarine or oil
salt, if you like salt
about 1/2 cup water or as needed to make it doughy
OPTIONAL
buttermilk instead of water and butter
1/2 cup rolled oats to replace 1/2 cup flour
mixed spice or cinnamon
mixed fruit, grated peel, etc
Combine all the ingredients. It’s best to add the water a little at a time and knead well – the more you knead, the less water will be needed. You may end up with a soggy mess if you add it all at once.
Now butter a camp oven – the thicker the metal, the better a camp oven is. Flatten out the damper till it is about half the diameter of the oven and press a largish hole through the middle – a hole about the size of your fist. If you don’t do this, you may end up with a doughy middle.
Leave the dough in the oven with the lid on for half an hour to ‘rest’, and tend to your fire. It should have plenty of coals.
Scrape the coals away and place the camp oven on the bare ground where the coals were. Then, with a spade or bit of green bark, scoop the coals up and onto the camp oven so there is a good layer on top of it as well as around it. If you don’t do this, or if you leave coals underneath it, you’ll get a burnt bottom and pale top.
The damper will take about 30 minutes to cook – check it after 20 minutes and stick a bit of grass down the centre. If it comes out doughy, put the lid and coals back again.
A good damper should be brown and shiny on top – the combined steam and melted butter dripping onto it will give it a good glaze. It should be eaten hot, with golden syrup or plum jam – or even strawberry jam and cream if you don’t want to be traditional.
If you don’t have a camp oven, you can use a billy. If you don’t have a billy, you can use a terracotta flowerpot with a rock on top of it as a lid. When we were kids we made damper in an old fruit-juice can – we bent back the lid to drink the juice, then bent it back down again as a cover to keep the coals off the bread inside. If your tin can doesn’t have a lid, stick a large rock over it instead. Don’t overfill small containers or you’ll get heavy soggy damper.
Fried Bread
This could also be called ‘flat bread’ – though most flat breads are cooked in the oven. It’s a form of hearth cake, and variants on this recipe can be found in most cultures around the world, wherever seeds can be found and ground for flour. It is much easier than damper and very good indeed; also good made at home if you run out of fresh bread. (Come to think of it, flat bread has probably been eclipsed by supermarkets. Who needs to make flat bread now when most people can dash down to the shop at almost any time of day or night? Scones ditto probably – Grandma’s emergency food if a horde arrived. Come to think again, hordes probably don’t arrive unexpectedly in the city either – just out here, when they bowl up and say: ‘We were just driving past and thought we’d…’)
3 cups self-raising flour
2 tablespoons olive oil (plus extra oil for frying)
1 cup
warm water (plus a little extra if needed)
OPTIONAL
for a sweet fried bread, add 1/2 cup brown sugar, lots of currants and some mixed spice
Mix all the ingredients. Knead for about 5 minutes – it should be elastic and rubbery or the resulting bread will be scone-like. Cover with a tea towel and leave for 20 minutes.
Divide the dough into small balls, about the size of a very small egg. Pat them flat – don’t roll them with a rolling pin – the constant patting with your hand gives the best results.
Heat a heavy frying pan; add enough oil just to cover it, and wait till the air above the oil begins to shimmer, then put in your rounds of bread dough.
Fry each side for about 5 minutes or until golden. Drain and eat hot.
I’ve cooked fried bread on a hot stone by an open fire – it’s a good standby when your camp oven is full of stew.
Fried bread is good with hot kebabs and yoghurt sauce, curry, vegetables cooked in olive oil (especially tomatoes and artichokes) – and lots of other things.
May 1
Pumpkins under the stairs, in the larder, along the laundry passage – and of course the wretched things don’t even taste particularly sweet. We just don’t get enough sun down here in the valley, not enough for the lovely, dry, close-textured pumpkin taste anyway. The best pumpkins are grown in a drought (well, we had that most of the season)…but not in a deep valley…
Year in the Valley Page 18