The trouble with photographs is that after a time you tend to remember them, little islands in the past, and not the events around them. They are more vivid than memory and distort the rest of your past with their colour.
The drought broke when E was six weeks old. A foot of water rolled down the hill, thick with years of wombat droppings, through the house, over ground too baked to absorb any moisture and rain too thick to see through. The flat below the house rolled and swam like an earthquake but it wasn’t – just the tide of four years’ litter, leaves and fallen bark, all flowing down to Moruya.
Like E, the vines began to grow. In the next photo he’s bald and jumpered, so it must be winter, and the vines are bare. But there is lush clover and weeds below them. The trees in the distance are green. In the next one he’s galloping on a feather duster under the vines and they’re galloping too, reaching upwards to the wire. He’s still bald, but they’re leafy, have started the incredible luxuriance they have today.
The ground below them is paved in the next photos. The vines are only pencil thick, but there are roses planted too and herbs and people sit beneath them and drink tea and kids ride bicycles. E is growing hair, but still mostly naked, running below the leaves and blossom and drooping fruit, and there are birds sometimes in the background, blue wrens and yellow robins and the manic shrike-thrush who calls from the pergola every morning and bangs his beak against the glass.
I rarely take photos, so these are mostly relatives’, a series taken after gaps of months. The vines grow thicker in each one, and E taller like the garden around him, both of them dating from the breaking of the drought.
By their third year, and E’s, the kiwi fruit covered the pergola and were regularly hacked back, my excuse for pruning. The stems are as wide as my wrist now, twisted round on themselves and winding in patterns once bent by the wind and weight of fruit, now set forever, because I was preoccupied when they were young and didn’t straighten them. But I don’t regret it – their twists are individual. I’ve never wanted an ordered garden.
A few years ago an elderly Taiwanese woman visited with her daughter. Suddenly she exclaimed and pointed to the vines, but her daughter refused to translate. The elderly woman insisted, and finally her daughter (with great embarrassment) explained: it was the golden hairy goat’s testicles, which she hadn’t seen growing since she was a child in China; they used to grow wild outside her village.
Golden hairy goat’s testicles seems a very satisfactory name for kiwi fruit. On the vine they’re hairy. By the time you buy them in shops they’re bald. (Bald goat’s testicles really does sound rude.)
It’s hard to believe the green leaves will come again this morning, looking at the bare twisted vines; that we’ll sit under the dapples again drinking tea, watching the wasps hover over the blossom and the honeyeaters drink wisteria nectar and the shadows play among the casuarinas by the creek.
My first marriage broke up beneath the kiwi fruit. My second began there, though I didn’t know it, drinking tea with friends in the still Christmas heat when a strange man walked up the steps under the wattle before a bushwalk up the creek. The kiwi fruit grow thicker and the garden round them taller, waiting for the next episode in the lives below.
June 15
Most of the pruning is finished already down the valley, and I haven’t even started here. Not that we do much, more hacking away a few branches that get in the way.
Noel Wisbey is carefully levelling what was once mullock heap, and carting in new soil; Rod is fencing, lovely straight fences that never dare to bend over. Both intend to plant more trees this year. They have to – the public gets sick of one variety and expects another, each yellower and firmer and with a redder skin that slips off like it was casting off a petticoat.
Some of the old trees here must be fifty years old; but the commercial peaches are lucky to make it to fifteen. Which means that most of the public are fools. The Wisbeys tore out their last orchard of Golden Queens this year – all except one tree for themselves – as no one buys them any more.
It was the same when Conrad down the valley grew traditional tomatoes – lovely fat things that oozed red juice. But hardly anyone bought them. Despite what people say, they don’t really want an old-fashioned tomato. They want ones they can slice for sandwiches that won’t wet the bread; or quarter for salads in neat obedient shapes. Old-fashioned tomatoes are soggy.
I don’t think most people really taste things these days. If they did they’d never eat a packet cake again, or commercial biscuits or those cold fruit lumps mislabelled as muffins or shiny, rattly packets that fraudulently claim to contain pasta marinara or carbonara, just add water and microwave…
Ricotta Cheesecake with Pine Nuts and Peaches
6 dried peach halves
1 cup water
2 cups ricotta
1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 tablespoons pine nuts (Browned in the oven if you can be bothered)
1 teaspoon Cointreau or almond liqueur
4 eggs, separated
Simmer peaches in water for 5 minutes. Cool in liquid. Drain. Mash.
Preheat the oven to 200°C. Mix everything except the egg whites. Then beat the egg whites until they are stiff, and stir in gently. Pour the mixture into a buttered tin, then bake for about an hour, or until the top is lightly browned and feels set when you push it with your finger.
Eat hot or cold. Extra cream is decadent but good.
Peach and Parmesan Individual Soufflés
The taste of peaches goes well with cheese, as anyone who’s had that old English favourite – cheese and peach jam sandwiches – knows.
4 dried peach halves
1 cup water
3 tablespoons plain flour
1 cup cream
5 eggs, separated
1 tablespoon freshly grated parmesan cheese
black pepper
Simmer peaches in water till the peaches are mush. This may take 5 minutes, or even 30 minutes, if the dried peaches are hard and old. Add more water if necessary. Cool in liquid. Drain.
Preheat the oven to 200°C.
Add the flour to the cream, then add the egg yolks. Add this mixture to the peaches and stir over a gentle heat till it thickens. Stir in the cheese, take off the heat, add black pepper.
Whip the egg whites till firm. Stir gently into the cream mixture. Spoon into four small buttered soufflé dishes, and place in the oven. Bake for about 15 minutes. The tops should be dark brown.
Serve at once, with a slightly bitter salad.
June 17
Pudge has discovered the bathroom window. You can see through it from the hill outside behind the house – or hear, in Pudge’s case. Which means that every time she hears us in the shower she tries to jump through the window. Luckily wombats don’t jump very well and she just slides down the cliff.
It is disconcerting to be quietly contemplating on the loo and have a wombat shriek at you through the window. She has extraordinarily good hearing. What’s discreet to a human ear reverberates to a wombat.
June 18
Giles and Victoria and the kids came down last night, bearing chocolates and Giles’s strawberry wine. I remember the wine bubbling beside the fuel stove last summer – it looks even redder now.
Strawberry wine tastes better than you might think; maybe because you expect it to be terrible (like the bottle of peach champagne I was given last year, which we drank at Christmas with the pud and which wasn’t bad either).
But the chocolates were better.
The garden is alive with lyrebirds; six of them head down and dashing for cover when we come out the door, beeping alarm calls like apprentice road runners (which they greatly resemble – that road runner dash is obviously based on very close observation of some bird closely allied to lyrebirds).
June 19
The navel oranges are perfect now. I know they’re perfect because the bowerbirds are eating them, so you re
ach for a perfect fruit and find it’s been hollowed out from the other side and there’s only a bee left nuzzling at a shred of fruit…
Birds mostly like sour fruit, a couple of weeks greener than humans prefer it…except for bowerbirds and oranges. If you want to get the best fruit in the orchard wait for a bowerbird to begin to peck, then grab it from him and take it home to peel for yourself. Bowerbirds choose the ripest, deepest coloured, richest flavoured oranges there are.
We have oranges all year round but the navels are the best. Winter navels soft with cold, sweet from almost a full year’s sun (citrus are one of the few trees to fruit and blossom at the same time – generous trees). You do get a main flush of fruit but it’s rare to find no fruit at all to pick on any citrus tree.
The one jam I never make nowadays is marmalade, simply because we have so much fruit (including the Seville oranges – great flat-topped bitter ones for making jam) that we give it away. And then we get marmalades in return. Some friends are better marmalade makers than others, which adds to the variety. But then Bryan is the only one who really likes marmalade. I just taste each batch, savour it and then go back to plum.
June 20
One of those evenings when you look back and realise you’ve done nothing but stare at the flames. Every now and then Bryan would say something…or I would. But mostly we just watch. The wombats are grunting at each other outside, with the odd shriek of rage when someone steps into someone’s space, there is stew in the pot and three sorts of fresh biscuits in the four containers, and the chimney is yawning up the smoke – a restful sort of night.
June 22
The longest night has gone…and supposedly the worst of winter is over. But of course it’s still to come. Winter is deceptive here. You gear yourself up for winter in June and the days are high and blue and golden; then you wait for the days to lengthen and the wind starts blowing off the mountains and the grass shrinks brown and dry, and you think oh shit, it really is another three months till decent warmth.
The sun peered though the window at 9.20 this morning and dropped over the ridge at 3.09 this afternoon.
June 23
It’s too cold to go outside before ten o’clock these mornings. You feel the early morning air is going to crack if you walk through it too fast. But by midmorning it’s reasonably comfortable. Which suits Bryan well. Bryan dislikes hurrying his breakfast, especially in winter.
‘Is there any more blackberry jelly?’ he asks contentedly, one eye on the lyrebirds as they rip their talons through the parsley bed, the other on the piece of toast spread carefully with this year’s lime and orange marmalade. ‘No, there’s no hurry…just if you happen to be near the larder…’
Bryan has blackberry jelly every morning on one half of his toast – except the year the blackberries failed and he had to have plum jam instead – and the toast is always a soft roll with sesame seeds on top, divided into two and lightly grilled.
The toast is preceded by a boiled egg – an Australorp egg, because Bryan is fond of Australorps. (He says they have more sense than Leghorns, at least three neurones whereas the Leghorns have only two and besides he likes the Australorps’ fluffy knickers.) And before that there’s porridge with cream and brown sugar, all taken in the high-backed wooden chair facing the large window to the orchard, where he can see the lyrebirds tearing up what used to be the onion patch and the bowerbirds slurping at the remains of the kiwi fruit.
It’s taken Bryan eight years to perfect his breakfast. After all, he had forty-odd years of breakfasting to a schedule to overcome – the glance at the paper, the gulping of cereal all sandwiched into the half hour to spare before leaping into the car. Nowadays he doesn’t leap anywhere. It’s more of a mooch and there’s no point galloping anywhere till the sun hauls itself over the ridgetop and drinks the last of the frost and, like most of us, the sun seems to have creaking joints in winter and it takes hours for it to stir itself.
There’s coffee with the toast, the same mug every morning. Coffee drinking is the contemplative time, when you read out bits from last week’s newspaper to your companion and ponder on their significance.
It’s wonderful how many of the world’s problems you can solve when you’ve got time for breakfast. The trouble is the rest of the world is still leaping into cars or buses without time even for a second cup of coffee, and doesn’t have time to contemplate at all.
After the toast there’s fruit, peeled slowly as the spinebills dip their beaks into the grevilleas and the lyrebirds rip up the last of what’s in season and what the bowerbirds haven’t eaten: kiwi fruit in winter (we snaffled a dozen boxes before the birds moved in) and apples (we’re finishing off the Lord Derby now before we move on to Lady Williams) and oranges soft from the frost, the last of the Brussels sprouts, the occasional mandarins, tangelo, tamarillo, feijoa or cherry guava. Then down to the chooks to check the eggs, or replace the artichoke seedlings the lyrebirds have gouged out, or pick grapefruit for tomorrow’s breakfast and check again to count the eggs…
The Perfect Egg
The perfect egg is three days old, preferably gathered from the nest in the lavender bushes down in the backyard (chooks prefer lavender bushes to nesting boxes). We prefer Australorp eggs – softly tinted shells with golden yolks that make sponge cakes look like they’ve been dipped in yellow dye.
Anyone who can’t taste the difference between the eggs of different breeds of chooks doesn’t have a palate…or the eggs aren’t from free-range chooks. Eggs taste of what the chook’s been eating, and better foragers have better eggs. Battery eggs of course just taste of fear.
The perfect egg is not boiled. Boiling spoils the taste, making it more sulphurous and destroys the subtle undertones of last week’s grasshoppers and watercress and the other goodies the chooks were sampling.
The perfect egg should be covered with water, brought to the boil, taken off the heat then left covered for three minutes. You can slide it into an eggcup or scoop out the innards onto buttered toast – the yellow will still be runny and the white gently coagulated. Dust with fresh black pepper.
On days when luxury is a necessity, cut off the top and spoon in sour cream and caviar or chopped smoked salmon, or peel it carefully, so the egg stays whole (you’ll be surprised at the structural integrity of a good soft-boiled egg) and lay it on a dish of well-chopped silverbeet or spinach, steamed and lightly buttered (or asparagus or artichoke hearts if you can wait till spring) and cover with cheese sauce and grill till the top just bubbles brown.
Then thank the chooks and feed them any leftovers…and know that all those scraps of toast and artichoke and silverbeet are helping to produce another perfect egg.
June 25
The frost seems to be sucking all the moisture out of the ground – and the pots. Spent the morning watering and moving hoses.
June 27
Chocolate marched up while Pudge ate her breakfast, growled twice and scared her off…almost. A minute later she ran back, shrieked, then ran off again – and repeated this at two-minute intervals till we’d finished breakfast and so had Chocolate.
Meanwhile a currawong sat vulture-like on the garden chair above them, huffed up to double its size, stropping its beak against the chair if any other bird even glanced at the leftovers. It was a bit like a driver in a crowded car park lurking behind a car about to pull out, glaring at anyone who might even consider taking the space…
July 1
Jen and Nat to breakfast. Breakfast is a sociable sort of meal, friendlier than dinner. There are so often those people who should be invited to dinner; but breakfast is for the sort of friends whom you don’t mind if they see you in your pyjamas if you’ve forgotten they’re coming.
Marinated sliced orange in orange and Cointreau syrup. Also made omelettes.
July 3
Dry soil, dry air, dry leaves. Even in the cold the leaves are wilting.
July 5
No leaves on any of the deciduous trees now. Even t
he white cedars are bare. The gums on the hill look greyer too. The chooks are down to three eggs a day.
The bowerbirds ate the last of the kiwi fruit this morning.
July 9
The first of the peach blossom – tight pink buds that slowly open along the branches. Not spectacular – peach blossom rarely is unless it’s en masse, and these trees have been pruned too severely to be stunning, except when you are at exactly the right angle looking down the rows or until a lot of the orchards are in bloom at once. As the peach blooming takes place over about two to three months this doesn’t happen for too long – some of the orchards are in leaf when the others still have bursting flower buds.
It is beautiful even now though – partly because the world is slightly colourless, as though winter has put a plastic film over the world. It is mostly a factor of the light of course – or rather the lack of it.
If summer’s light is so strong it takes the colour from the world; winter’s light is not quite strong enough to show it. Winter is the sky-watching time – bright clouds and subtle colours in the sky. Only the highest hills, those closest to the sky, really have colour. Down here in the valley the world is too shadowed to be bright. (I’ve found myself lingering up on the Tableland to see the sunset – gold hills and glowing sky.)
Chilli Peach Soup
Year in the Valley Page 22