Sounds seem louder at night. The creek flows fresher as less water evaporates from heating rocks, but that isn’t enough to account for the strength of the sound. Scents are stronger at night, too.
There are other sources of light at night: Phosphorescent fungi shine down by the creek and animals’ eyes flash red, green or silver. The granite rocks seem to glow too, as if they store light as well as heat, but you know it’s just reflection from the quartz, the facts of daylight never seem quite convincing at night.
When I first came to live in the bush I stayed inside at night. I turned the light on at dusk. Just as in town there were two worlds, light and dark. But the lights were gas lights and kerosene, and as I didn’t have a driver’s licence to travel to get more they had to be conserved. Gradually I only turned the light on when necessary – to make dinner or read. I learnt the thousand graduations between light and darkness, the ways the colours change as the light ebbs. The way they flow again as light comes back, starlight, moonlight, soft light that glows around you instead of concentrated above.
I would sit outside instead on the grass in the clearing; the light of the moon seeming reflected from the hills around me, as though the valley caught the light and held it.
Later, as my knowledge of the native animals grew, I realised that life around me began at twilight. Old wombats and elderly swamp wallabies and roos loping down with the shadows on the ridge. Animals seem less wary at night. Perhaps because they know the night is their world, just as the day is ours.
Many of the friends I made were night animals, like Smudge the wombat and Fred the black-tailed wallaby, who later shared the dawns and afternoons with me as they got older. Black-tailed wallabies divide their territories according to age and time of night so that you only meet the sick, starving, or elderly during the day.
I began to feel at home at night. Daytime is good for reptiles, soaking up the sun on hot rocks. Or for birds who make their own breeze, or insects searching flowers in the sun. Night is kinder by far for mammals – wombats, kangaroos, us.
Tonight the air was cold. I felt if I moved too fast I’d break it. Mothball glanced up at me, munching grass on the flat, then ignored me. It’s not food dish time now. Biceps, one of Rosie’s joeys from some years ago, glanced up and dismissed me too.
At first when I walked at night I carried a torch. I gradually realised that the torch was blinding me, not lighting me, that because of its brightness I was failing to adapt to night and its low light levels. When you walk at night you learn to use other senses – your ears (wind sounds different on ridges and gullies), and your skin (if you’re not going in the right direction you’ll realise the feel of the wind on your face has changed).
Sometimes it’s almost as though your feet are seeing for you at night. You can even run through thick forest in full dark and, somehow, your body knows the way.
I walked up onto the first knoll. There’s a log there, backed by decades of silt. I sat on a bald patch, where I suspect wombats sit too sometimes, sniffing the view just as I sit here watching it by moonlight.
I know this country. I know how the land changes after a thunderstorm, after three days of rain, or a damp three months. I know how the light changes from season to season, when to expect the first Wonga blossom on the hot rise above the gate and what prompts the grass orchids and the clematis and the goannas out of hibernation, be it day length, temperature or rain.
Every time I look at a patch of ground I see what it’s been for the last thirty years, and can call up a vision of what it will probably be like tomorrow and in five years time too. How could I ever want a holiday from this? It’s part of who I am.
Humans hide part of themselves away from each other. No matter how intimate you are with another human, it never has the honesty – or the complexity – of your relationship to the landscape, if you’re lucky enough to live where you and the land can know each other. Having wild land in the world isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity, not just for other species, but for our collective human sanity.
August 5
Mothball is on sentry duty, outside the front door, marching back and forth like a fur-coated sentry on all fours. She tried to bite my ankle as I leapt over her to fill her food dish. I filled Bruiser’s too, though he isn’t out yet. Probably scared of the noise of Bryan raking up the leaves.
Suddenly, fifteen years ago, the seedlings we planted became trees. Now there are jungles of tree dahlias, rambling roses and chilacayote melons and kiwi fruit and choko clambering over the trees. At last count we had about 270 different kinds of fruit growing here. I suspect it’s Australia’s largest fruit collection. Despite drought, heat, frost and neglect there is never a time when there aren’t at least 20 kinds of fruit to pick – year-round apples (132 varieties) and lemons – macadamias on the trees and a dozen veg, usually far more.
I made a cottage pie for Bryan. He likes cottage pie. I don’t, so I drank hot milk instead.
August 8
Long phone calls this morning, celebrating my returning voice. I can talk but can’t sing. Hadn’t realised how much I sing as I wander. Fabia is back from giving a recycling workshop in the Solomons. Guido is in Thailand. Helen has a new gallery lined up for a show in Sydney. Dad has decided he is going back to a beer every night, on the theory that nothing he can do will make much difference now, except to make him happier.
I answered emails: Lisa has sent the almost-final pages of The Tomorrow Book; Margaret’s working on a sex scene; Elaine has bought a scarf; Peg’s been wandering up a gorge in red sand country, though it still sounds so much like ours. A gorge is always a place of depth and wonder, slightly further from the earth above than common sense will tell you.
I’ve spent the afternoon sitting here by the swimming hole, watching the silver ripples. I love winter light. You feel like you’re breathing the sun. I just realised that apart from Bryan I’ve seen no other person for six days, and for two of those he’s been away in Canberra. Yet I’ve been surrounded by friends the whole time; phone and email for the humans; and the others all around – Bruiser and Mothball, Rosie, the vulture currawong who sang to me this morning, as though forgiving me for not jumping up to feed him every time he leers into my window.
Millennia ago, in ancient Greece, they called out to the father of two Olympic winners ‘Die now’, for surely life could get no better. I don’t think life gets much better than this. Friends, family, books, wombats, fruit on the trees and water in the creek, but I don’t want to die now.
When death finally comes to me (I hope it’s ‘finally’, in many decades time) I hope he wears something comfortable, familiar…a pair of old jeans maybe, and a wool jumper, tatty at the elbows, pulled out of shape by years of gardening and mooching through the rain. I’d hate to think death might be dressed in a business suit, just another commercial transaction, fitting me in between Smithie down the road and Mrs Chang at 2.35 pm.
I hope I die sitting in a chair watching sunlight, or rain, perhaps, with a fire indoors, and a cup of tea in my hand. I hope there is time to relive a few memories, and to say goodbye.
It’s a pity you can’t book your death beforehand. Life would be different if we knew the when and why of our deaths. Perhaps that’s why as I get older I get less patient with fools and boredom. Perhaps that’s why I have fewer inhibitions about saying, ‘I admire you’ or ‘I love you’, too.
Years ago, lying in a hospital emergency corridor, the chaplain asked me if there was anything I felt needed to be done before I died. And suddenly I knew. I wanted more. More lunchtimes with friends. Grandchildren, or if not, watching the people I love grow older and fulfilled. More books. Sometimes it feels as though I have only started to learn to write. The best books are the ones creeping at the edges of my mind, that I know I haven’t had the craft to write before.
More wombats. More mornings of sunlight and tree dapples.
Just more.
August 9
Eight eggs today.
Still no words on the computer.
Damn it, I’ve planned this book for two years. It’s in there somewhere. Pity I can’t scoop it out with a mixing spoon. If a kangaroo can hop on one leg I should be able to write a novel with four-fifths of my brain.
So I cooked instead – biscuits, lime butter, feral-goat curry. The house smells of roasting garlic and fresh biscuits. Good, even if I don’t want to eat them. Also jonquils and the old-fashioned single pink camellias. You don’t realise they have a fragrance till you find it drifting in corners of the room.
A good life is made up of tiny luxuries. Matt’s bread, eggs with yolks like darkened sunlight and jam that smells of fruit. Quietness and bird noises. Kids’ laughter, or just that sort of mutter when they decide to cuddle.
Think what the world would be like if everyone demanded the ‘good life’. We have lost so much. Communities where you needn’t lock your door; air that doesn’t smell of car exhaust; places where children can explore free and safe, pick fruit or flowers.
Time. Of all the things most humans today have lost, time is perhaps the greatest. Time to make the jam, the bread; time to do the talking and the listening and sit around the kitchen table as you do those things, solve the problems of the world and dream of wonders yet to come.
What is life for, if it’s not to fill it with the things we love?
There are always alternatives, if you’ve got the courage to look them in the face. Tomorrow can never be like yesterday. Change happens. And some of that change will be created by our hands.
This is the life I dreamed of when I came to the valley; a community where friends helped build each other’s houses and chook sheds from stone or wood or earth; shared planting the gardens to feed and delight; where each house captures its own water and power from sun or wind and shares the surplus; where wild animals and birds share the world, enough bounty for us all.
It’s possible. We’ve done it here. It would be easier in suburbia, with so many others to share the load. If everybody demanded a life as good, it would be a very good world indeed.
Forty years ago I thought it might happen; twenty years ago I was sure that it never would.
Now I believe in tomorrow again. Tomorrow can be good.
August 10
Calloo callay! Two wombats eating from two dishes. Bruiser even snarled at a blue wren. I think he’s going to make it.
Suddenly I felt like eating too. Real food.
I found a single mushroom underneath the oak by the cottage. It’s as though my tastebuds have woken up to spring. Stir-fried the mushroom with Savoy cabbage, winter bright carrots, slightly frostbitten chili, grated ginger. Turned the heat down to low then broke in two eggs, and let them sit there till the whites set, but the orange yolks oozed out when I pushed my fork through, into the veg. Ate one bowlful then another.
Sunrise Veg
Fetch eggs from chook pen. You need fresh eggs for this, supermarket eggwhites will run into the veg, instead of setting in a neat circle about the yolk.
Rummage in the veggie garden for whatever is ready for the picking, or find what looks best in the market. You need colour here: red capsicum or orange carrot, purple eggplant, green celery, broccolini, fresh peas, white or brown mushrooms. Add flavourings: garlic, red onions, spring onions, parsley, basil, chilli, ginger, coriander…whatever is in season and you love.
2 eggs per person
3 cups garden vegetables per person
2 tablespoons olive oil per person
Chop the veggies into small pieces. Small pieces taste better, more surface area for your tastebuds.
Splash good olive oil (I buy mine in bulk from a farm in the Mallee) into a large frying pan. Add the veggies and gently caramelise over low heat, so they sweat out most of their juice and the flavours intensify. If you’ve used a lot of cabbage I’d add a dash of soy. If you have tomato jam, chutney or other good sauces in the cupboard, add a splodge just before cracking the eggs. The veggies need to be soft, not overcooked to mush. The colours should be bright and each texture separate.
Make small hollows in the veggies and break in the eggs. Cook over low heat till the whites are solid and the orange yolk ready to run into your veg.
Serve in giant bowls.
August 11
A new wombat has moved in – there were small droppings near Mothball’s and Bruiser’s big ones by the doormat when I came out this morning. We’ll meet some night, I suppose.
White frost; the grass snapped under my boots as I mooched along the creek flats. I scrambled up the mountain, with my scarf over my face so the air didn’t crisp freeze my lungs, till finally I emerged out of the shadow of the valley and into sunlight on the ridge. Spring light – every leaf looks silver-coated. I could smell honey on the wind, the first of the gum blossom must be out.
And suddenly the book came to me. Not the one I’d planned, but something else. It was like seeing the ingredients laid out on the bench – the flour, butter, one of Gertie’s eggs; and all at once you know that if you add choc chips and walnuts you’ll have biscuits. The grime of London 200 years ago was superimposed on the green of the valley, the boy watching the man dangling on a rope; a thief, but his protector; the mouse gnaw of hunger as the hot-potato seller past him by. My great, great grandfather, who would survive the voyage that killed two-thirds of his companions, would win a race; gain a wife; become a magistrate; and give a bushranger his horse. It’s there, just as perhaps it happened, every image clear as the wallaby nose twitching at me over the hill.
I left the wallaby to his breakfast. Waved to Mike as I walked back down the road, and someone in a blue car I didn’t recognise – the windscreen was sunscreen coated, so I couldn’t see who it was.
And now I’m sitting at my desk, coffee congealing on one side, the giant melons from last season’s harvest still dangling from the lemon trees outside the open window, and Bryan in an old beanie and jumper with no elbows, down at the shed.
I’ve opened a new document. Today’s sunlight, the call of the currawongs, the last scent of breakfast toast and lime butter merge into a new reality as I begin to write.
INDEX TO RECIPES
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
Apples
Desperation Cake 196–197
Harvest Tart 193–194
Savoury Stuffed Apples 265–266
Sweet Stuffed Apples 265
Artichokes Araluen, Peasant Style 58
Asparagus Omelette 52–53
Basil
Aphrodisiac 235
and Olive Mezze 234–235
Beetroot Salad 298
Biscuits, Almond-Flour 205–206
Bread
Damper 228–229
Fried Bread 230–231
Root Bread 301
Cakes
Desperation Cake 196–197
Dried Peach and Pine Nut 8–9
Grass-Seed 204–205
Hearth 270–271
Peach and Ginger Pudding 224
Rum and Roses Fruit Cake 126–127
Carrots
Lime Juice Carrots 24–25
Soup 314
Cauliflower and Potato Soup 38
Celery
Root 299–300
Soup 258
Cheese
Calendula 245
Fresh 243–244
Ricotta, with Pine Nuts and Peaches 276
Chicken
Boned Chicken, with Peaches or Cherries 73–75
Cold Peach and Curry Chicken 129–130
Cumquats, stewed 304
Damper 228–229
Desserts
Baked Peaches 215–216
Baked Peaches with Almond Macaroons 211–212
Cheat’s Christmas Pudding 124
Dried-Peach Fool with Macadamias 46
Fresh Peach Melba 108–109
&n
bsp; Harvest Tart 193–194
Lemon Cream 250
Peach Crumble 119–120
Peach and Ginger Pudding Cake 224
Peach Ice Cream 151
Peach Mousse 216
Peaches Poached with Vanilla, Ginger and Chilli 232–233
Peach Sorbet 101–102
Ricotta Cheesecake with Pine Nuts and Peaches 276
Stewed Cumquats 304
Sweet Stuffed Apples 265
Drinks
Classic Bishop 295
Ginger Beer 139
Hot Punch 296–297
Lamb’s Wool 296
Lime-Juice Cordial 40–41
Mimosa 116
Peaches in Champagne 87
Pomegranate Cordial 246–247
Rose Mulled Wine 96
Duck Stuffed with Dried Peaches and Couscous, with Baked Peach Gravy 286–287
Edible Snail 106
Egg
Asparagus Omelette 52–53
Ginger Omelette 258–259
Peach and Parmesan Individual Souffles 277
Perfect Egg 282–283
Eglantine Sauce 226
Fruit Salad, Hot Dried, for Breakfast 44
Grapefruit Butter 292–293
Handcreams – see Lotions
Hare, Massaged 238–242
Jam
Early Peach 87–88
Early Peach: Ginger Variation 88–89
Orange Blossom 68
Raspberry 112
Rose Syrup 247
Tomato 170
Lamb, Stuffed Shoulder of 309–310
Year in the Valley Page 28