Down here in the valley there’s nowhere you can look out the window and not see dirt or rock or cliffs. There’s a bloody great mountain of it front and back. It’s a secure feeling having all that dirt around.
Winter is a great time for dirt. The grass shrivels away from the hills so you can see their shapes, round and skull-like up on the Tableland above us, but beautiful skulls, and rocks like sheep and sheep like rocks.
You can see the dirt in the garden too – unlike in summer – when you pull something out of the garden a space stays there for a few months instead of filling up with weeds or parsnip or calendula seedlings. (There’s a legend that your husband will always be faithful if you’ve got calendulas flowering…and once you’ve had them flowering in your garden it’s hard to get them to stop.) But for now we’ve got the dirt instead – even if it’s accidental dirt, lyrebird inspired.
June 5
Pudge was mooching round the jonquils this afternoon, just after the sun fell behind the ridge (which is about two and a half hours before dusk). She heard me picking lemons so trotted over, giving her oof oof oof noise, which means ‘Please feed me’. (Each wombat I’ve known has had its own ‘Here I am – now food’ noise. Ricki used to give a shrill geek! and Fudge a sort of yip.)
So I poured her out a bowl of oats, and she snuffled in it happily, then fell asleep by the bowl. It’s really the wrong time of day for a wombat to be out. But the winter sun shouldn’t hurt her, not down here in the valley, so I left her asleep and counted the camellia buds.
I’ll miss the wombats in summer. These pale winter afternoons are a perfect wombat time, with enough sun for warmth but not dangerous.
June 6
Now that it’s cooler Bryan is moving boulders down on the flat again.
They used to be mullock heaps, piled by the gold miners as they scurried after bright metal in the creek; then the thorn bushes grew among them and then the blackberries came…Bryan is attacking them, one by one, hauling away the blackberry and the thorn bush they spread over, rearranging boulders and leaving gardens in their place…
When I first came here a couple of decades ago, there were two obvious resources – blackberries and rock.
The larder is full of blackberry and apple jelly (Bryan doesn’t like the pips in blackberry jam, so I have to strain the juice and make jelly instead), the garden is mulched with slashed blackberry and we’re about to plant a new shrubbery (I love that word) on a patch of once dead ground reclaimed by years of blackberry roots foraging deep down and the resultant leaf litter. (There is also a fair amount of blackberry left for anyone else who wants to share this resource – we eradicate maybe half an acre a year.)
The rock is another matter. After all, there are rocks and rocks. Some of our rocks are lovely clean ones, shaped like a more interesting brick, washed down by each flood. Unfortunately one major and several minor droughts later, there are never quite enough floods to keep us in well-shaped rocks.
The other rocks come in two forms. The first are the rocks on the scree slope above the house. Whenever a band of rock on the hill above is exposed, it cracks and falls and forms a great slope of rock – lichen covered and thick with black snakes, and surprisingly stable, even though visitors sometimes assume we’ve built our house in the middle of a landslide. The lichen-covered rocks aren’t much good for house building, however – the lichen continues to grow on the walls, and continues to breathe too, and a decade or three later the rocks pop out. (I once spent three days and seven scrubbing brushes trying to scrub off the lichen…then gave up and used the rock from the creek.)
Then there are the mullock heaps. Our place is mostly either vertical or mullock heap…or used to be, till Bryan met the mullock heaps.
Bryan’s love affair with rock started in his cliff-climbing days. Not that he did anything with rock in those days – just admired it as he went up or down.
Then he met the mullock heaps.
First he redid the stone stairs I’d built up to the wood heap. My stairs sort of slid down the slope. Bryan’s marched firmly upwards – and stayed there.
Then a rock retaining wall. And then another around a herb garden. Then a sort of pyramid-type garden. And then a stone fish pond with fountain for my birthday…
Bryan and the granite have bonded.
It’s a close relationship. As I write this I can look out the window and see him, hands on his hips, regarding yet another pile of rocks. In the past six months he’s made tiered gardens that face the morning sun (wonderful for druidical sacrifices or storing and reflecting heat on frost-prone plants), stone walls, rockeries – in fact everything you can do with a mullock heap he’s done…I think. There are still a few mullock heaps to go and I’m not sure what he’s planning with the next…
There’s his new line in garden furniture too – a bit cold on the bum but very durable. The chairs look like Stonehenge remnants. The table is a massive two-tonne boulder, quite flat on top, which took six months of engineering to move from the creek to the barbecue. (I now have a theory that the pyramids were built by one mad Irishman and plenty of potatoes – shame about the chronology!)
It’s not that I’m objecting, mind you. It’s fascinating to mooch down every couple of hours and see what’s been moved where and why. And the results are beautiful. Bryan’s passion for rock and rolling is probably nine parts engineering to one part aesthetics – but good engineering can have some lovely results.
It’s just that sometimes…sometimes…I look up at the granite cliffs above us, hundreds of feet of shining rock…and wonder what will happen when the mullock heaps are all transformed, and Bryan’s love of granite is still undimmed.
What next? What next?
June 7
Picked the Lady Williams apples this morning; a lovely firm late apple – it tastes of both sun and frost. You can bite into them fresh, or bake them, or keep them for six months and their skins shrivel and they are even sweeter, or stuff them and bake them, which I’ll do for the next six weeks till Bryan and E get sick of them (I don’t). Stuffed apples are so simple – thirty seconds’ preparation and some cooking, and you have a dessert or an entrée.
Sweet Stuffed Apples
apples
brown sugar
butter
Preheat the oven to 200°C.
To prepare the apples: core them, slice around the outside through the peel a few times so they don’t burst, and place in a buttered dish.
Fill with brown sugar and dot with butter and bake in the oven for 30 minutes or so till soft and the juice and the brown sugar have melted together into syrup and the whole thing perfumes the kitchen with appley steam when you open the oven.
(The decadent stuff their apples with walnuts or dates. I don’t.)
Savoury Stuffed Apples
apples
crab meat or prawns or lobster or yabby flesh
cream
OPTIONAL
a little onion seethed in butter till transparent with some very finely chopped parsley or coriander – a good addition (if you can be bothered)
Preheat the oven to 200°C.
Prepare the apples as above.
Stuff with crab meat (and the seethed onion mixture, if you are using it); pour cream generously into each cavity. Bake as above till soft. The juice will be crablike and creamy.
June 8
A lyrebird was dancing on the garden seat this morning, outside the kitchen window, warbling happily into the morning mist. I don’t know if he was performing for the sheer joy of it or for a hidden audience in the pittosporums; or maybe as a warning dance to his reflection in the kitchen window; or maybe even to us, the triumphant dance of a bird who has just ripped up seven artichoke plants, leaving them in soft grey shreds…
I yelled at him and he went tail down and squawking off into the loquat tree; then reconsidered, glared at me and pranced back onto the chair. He was still there when I’d finished my porridge.
The sun isn’t abo
ve the ridge till eleven minutes past nine (not that we’re counting); and it’s not midwinter yet.
June 11
Suddenly the days have dark blue shadows with a chill around the edges and we’ve become fire worshippers. Only a few weeks ago a dusting of smoke on the horizon would mean anxious calls to the Bush Fire Brigade. Now the urge is atavistic – get the fire going and sit round it.
Visiting friends means a dive into their kitchens to press your bum against their wood-fired ovens. Conversations turn to the comparative virtues of yellow box (a good burn), wattle (the hottest wood around), red gum (the wonder wood) and casuarina (the stayer), with mutterings against the wood provider, be it spouse or commercial delivery – the pieces are always too long, too wide, too green and you look with envy at organised souls with neat wood stacks like ordered sentinels against winter. And the spiders leap off in terror as another log is jammed into the grate to boil the kettle.
Sitting by a fire or wood stove is one of humanity’s ancestral joys. The warmth of wood is like no other, drier and more penetrating than gas and electricity that leave your skin dry and hot and your soul and bones chilled. Crouching by a kero heater or a central-heating duct just emphasises the blizzard outside. To sit by a fire is to be cherished.
Sometimes I wonder, wandering never quite dark city streets and watching the blue flickers in the front windows, if the modern affection for TV is just a substitute for something more primitive, the urge for a family to crouch together round a dancing light in the darkness.
Our fire is a slow-combustion stove. It goes on combusting twenty-four hours a day through winter. When summer comes and the grass starts to crackle I miss it dreadfully.
The stove’s the place that visitors head for as they burst out of the descending Major’s Creek fog, opening the oven door for a blast of hot air as they unwrap; where kids dash for after a bath, leaving puddles and damp towels behind them. Why dry yourself? The fire will do it for you as you revolve your reddening body slowly till it’s half cooked. I’ve known thin-skinned dogs and hibernating carpet snakes and a baby wombat to take up winter residence by the family stove and not move again till blossom time.
In the evening you can draw up a chair by the oven and toast your toes till bedtime on the oven racks; stick your wet head in for a fast hair dry; dry jeans overnight on the door and keep a genuine stockpot not quite simmering, so the kitchen smells of fresh wood and cooking throughout winter. It’s amazing the amount of biscuits that are made and eaten when the oven is always hot, just waiting to be used.
I heard on a radio program somewhere where a farmer’s wife bewailed the uselessness of her new microwave. She’d just stuck her gumboots in for a few minutes to dry them out…
You rarely come across genuine kitchen fires nowadays, deep smoky recesses in the kitchen walls and wide hearths. I met one about a decade ago a few miles from here. Both its tenders have since died.
We’d called in on an impulse, looking for an old chaff-cutter wheel to put on our cement mixer. The air outside had that still, dry winter clearness, but the kitchen was a warm brown fug, with steam from the kettle on the hob, the flames lapping just below it and the heavy caramel scent of crisping biscuits and drying socks on the line above the fireplace. Even in the daylight the fire glowed shadows on the sixty years of collected calendars on the walls.
It was four o’clock so we were invited to stay for a cuppa. I suspected the cuppa might be substantial when the table was set with dinner plates. It was.
There was homemade bread, at least the height of two normal loaves, cut breadboard-thick, with black tops and thick crusts and a close white texture that invited pulling, half a dozen sorts of jam (our host later took me to see the trees they came from, quince and crab-apple, plum, cherry, mulberry and rows of currant bushes), two sorts of biscuits and fruit cake with slabs of cheese, all in plate-sized servings, and cold mutton with chutney and a cross between scones and pikelets that had just been cooked on the hearth – we scooped the cream like frozen silk from the top of the milk to eat with them.
Both our hosts looked at us mournfully whenever our plates were empty. They finally took matters into their own hands and just reloaded them without asking. The youngest son, who lived with them, just kept on eating. He was about two metres high and nearly as broad – all muscle – and needed a lot of fuelling.
Later our other host showed me how she made the bread, with flour she still had sent in sacks from Sydney, a habit she’d got into in 1910, though it came by truck now not bullock wagon. She mixed the dough in a plastic basin and it rose by the banked fire through the night (they kept casuarina wood for the purpose – a few logs at bedtime turned to thick ash with the embers still glowing underneath ten hours later).
In the morning they just tossed on some tinder and stuck the bread in the oven on one side of the hearth and went back to bed, to rise again with the kettle boiling and the smell of fresh breakfast bread.
She’d eaten homemade bread every breakfast of her life, except for the first day she was in hospital to have her veins done. She couldn’t eat the tasteless stuff there, so her daughter had to bring in homemade supplies, and then all the other women in the ward wanted homemade bread too and eggs with deep yellow centres, and her daughter provided the lot.
That was the first time she’d been in hospital. She’d had the kids at home, suckled the last baby in one arm while she turned the handle of the shearing machine with the other. But after the War – World War One not World War Two, the man they’d hired to help said the work was too hard, and the shearing had gone electric.
We left with armfuls of loaves and pumpkins and a doorstop of fruit cake, as well as the wheel we’d been looking for, which our host found in a rubbish heap next to the collapsing slab shed that housed his pride and joy – a purple and silver dune buggy that could do 100 kilometres an hour on the highway with a couple of sick sheep in the back.
(If you ever saw a gleeful octogenarian and two startled woolly faces dashing in a purple and silver buggy towards Braidwood, no, you weren’t hallucinating.)
Hearth Cakes
These can be made on a hot hearth by a fire. Alternatively use a thick frying pan.
1 cup plain flour
1/2 cup currants
a dash of vanilla extract
1 dessertspoon sugar (optional)
a lot of butter
Mix together the flour, currants, vanilla and sugar. Rub enough butter into the mixture to make it crumbly and stick together. Knead till it forms a ball of dough.
Roll out the dough till it is as thick as your finger. Cut it into rounds with a glass. Fry in butter till brown or cook slowly on a hot hearth.
Eat without butter or jam, hot or cold. They’re not bad with a slab of cheese. They keep for months in a sealed tin.
June 12
Three-and-a-half arrived at ten minutes past sun fall below the ridges, which at this time of year is about 3.20 in the afternoon. Her pouch is getting heavier daily.
I had a look at Pudge’s pouch yesterday – still flat. Despite the fact she seemed to be on heat a while ago (she stank and so did everywhere she trod) there’s no sign of any offspring…which reassures E, who was shocked that anyone who was still drinking from a bottle might think of sex.
The lyrebirds have ripped up the strawberries.
June 13
Bryan cut firewood all this morning – some of the old wattle that fell last year, and the blue gum over by the shed that we had Charlie Heycox cut down (if either of us had tried it, it would have fallen on the shed). We spent this afternoon stacking it.
The wood smells wonderful – old sap and sawdust – and looks even better. A bulging woodshed, orderly as all Bryan’s heaps always are, the driest wood at the corner closest to the house, the greenest furthest away.
There is something enormously reassuring about great piles of wood.
June 14
Blue smoke sifting across the valley, a high blue sky,
and a fluffy wombat sleeping stomach upward among the lavender…
This is the magic time, blue winter days and clear light and picking kiwi fruit. They are nothing like the fruit in shops, these brown fuzzy ovals that have ripened on the vine. When you pick them the fur sticks to your fingers, and most are just out of reach, even on a stepladder, even on a chair. So the bowerbirds get many of them.
I planted the kiwi fruit in the ’82 drought, when the grass had crumbled into the hot earth and the creek was scummy puddles inhabited by ducks and desperate thirsty animals from the ridges.
It was a bad time to plant. But they’d been in pots for two years, waiting for a better season, which didn’t seem to come. So I planted them along the pergola in front of the kitchen in baked ground that needed a crowbar to chip it, and fed them the less greasy washing-up water and duck-smelling dribbles from the hose.
I was pregnant. It was a waiting time, for the birth and for rain and for the thousand projects that might come from both. I spent most of those last few months sitting at the kitchen table by the window looking at the hot creek bed and the drooping trees and the kiwi fruit, surviving, but only just.
A photograph of that time shows the house as a bare stone rectangle, surrounded by dry ground, fresh posts and the small thin kiwi fruit with drooping leaves. That was when I brought E home from hospital. The wattle was blooming, a yellow carpet where the grass used to be, and in spite of the dust haze and the patches of dead trees creeping up the ridge I cried because it was beautiful, and I was glad to be home.
Year in the Valley Page 21