My Year Without Matches

by Claire Dunn

  “Okay, now show me your foot glue,” I joke.

  “Don’t forget I only just got hand-drill a few weeks ago,” Nikki says, trying to make me feel better.

  True, Nik had only just spun her first hand-drill coal mere weeks short of the end of the year, but that’s only because of her neck injury. Hacking off the fronds to use in a shelter demonstration, Nikki gives the remains of the trunk a pat of thanks. I’m relieved that in a recent check on the paperbark I wounded at the start of the year, I found it alive and well.

  “Come on,” she says with a smile, shrugging it off. “This won’t feed the masses.”

  The masses. Kate has just informed us that as part of the open-weekend proceedings, we each have thirty minutes to talk about what we’ve learnt from our individual focus areas of the last six months. What am I going to say? Should I tell them about the tracks that grief, fear and anger leave across the body? Explain the art of wandering? Talk about fire, betray all the secrets of our tumultuous relationship? Read out the inspired poems that I write by my fire at night? Try to find words for this wild woman I am learning to inhabit? Give them an interpretative dance demonstration? I have no idea. I’m apprehensive about the whole thing.

  “Hey, look what I found,” says Nikki, plucking the small green fruit of the styphelia, the ballerina flower that I’ve been watching the spinebills beak-deep in.

  “Oh, wow, I didn’t know you could eat them,” I say, popping one in my mouth. “Yum.”

  “My latest discovery is this,” I say, directing Nikki to a nondescript rainforest tree. “Native guava.”

  “Really?” she says, surprised. It’s unusual for me to know a plant that Nikki doesn’t. Breaking off a leaf, I crush it in my fingers and hold it to my nose, committing it to memory before the flowers fall.

  “Where to next?” I ask, Nikki flicking through the bush-food book.

  “Well, it says that tubers would have been the main carbohydrate around here.”

  “Not anymore,” I say grimly. “Well, there are fringe lilies, but we’re hardly going to dig those up.”

  “Same with orchids,” Nik adds. “And if we knew how to prepare cycads we could make bread.”

  “I’d prefer not to poison everyone, if possible.”

  “Oh, well, we’ll just have to do our best with what we do know,” says Nikki optimistically.

  By day’s end, our cumulative knowledge turns out to be rather impressive.

  Our baskets brim with forest berries: the last of the sour currants, the sweet bite of the red-bearded heath, devil’s twine, molucca bramble, yellow wombat berries, lilly pillies, hordes of geebung and my favourite – dianella. Beach berries are also plentiful: native scaevola, the coastal bearded heath, and the bush-food strawberries of the pigface fruit. The salad basket overflows with native hibiscus leaves, warrigal greens, native sarsaparilla, lomandra tips, scrambling lily shoots, native spinach and nettle from the creek, and a collection of edible weeds: dandelion, dock, wood sorrel, purslane, chickweed and plantain.

  We collect bulrush rhizomes and stem bases to roast on the coals, a couple of tree-fern fiddleheads, as well as the macadamia and bunya nuts we were gifted. For a cordial, we plan to steep banksia and grevillea flowers picked while nectar-laden in the early morning.

  “At least it’s the best time of year for bush food,” I say to Dan, who is sitting cross-legged next to me as I pound the red bead-like seeds of saw-sedge. “Here, go wild,” I say, handing him wattle seed to grind.

  “Birdseed breakfast?” Dan asks, teasing, even though he knows I plan to mix it with flour for ash cakes.

  “You sound like Shaun,” I smile back. I heard from Kate last week that Shaun had left the army. He should be here.

  “Hey, taste this,” Dan says, getting up to fetch me a roasted kurrajong seed from the sack of pods he collected from the trees in the Bunnings carpark.

  “Now that is good bush tucker,” I say. There are upsides to Dan’s love of town. “Hey, we could make warrigal-green kurrajong pesto!” I say excitedly.

  “Okay, your turn to be a guinea pig,” I add, handing him the pandanus seed that took about half an hour to extract from its shell.

  Chewing with his mouth open, Dan stands legs wide, in Crocodile Dundee pose. “Well, you can eat it, but it tastes like shit.”

  “Now you just need to pull out the baked-bean tin from behind your back,” I laugh.

  “Look what I’ve found,” calls Nik, running towards us, unfurling her palm to reveal two ripe mauve roly-polies.

  “Oh my God, I’ve been watching that vine ever since Mark raved about them,” I say.

  “Well, there’s no point sharing these amongst fifty people,” says Dan, with a mischievous grin.

  Nik slices one into four pieces. I savour mine on my tongue. The flavour is a cross between blueberry and white grape, but much more subdued, like a delicately fragrant wine. No wonder we’re all such sugar addicts. This is about the sweetest wild fruit I’ve encountered.

  “I’m glad you’re going to be here for this,” I say to Dan, watching him grind the stone in circles.

  “Yeah, well, why wouldn’t I be?” he says with slight irritation. The grinding stops.

  “Claire, I was never going to do it the same as you,” he says, holding the rock in his upturned palms, as if deliberating on its weight. “It was big enough for me just getting out of the city. I got what I needed,” he says, wiggling his tattooed foot. “In my own way.”

  Of course it was. Reaching out, I draw him into a tight hug.

  “Thanks, Dan.”

  “What for?”

  “For being you.”

  He looks back at me with one eyebrow raised, and a mocking shake of his head. I laugh and wipe the corner of my eye with the back of my hand.

  *

  The bush telegraph has been busy. Ute loads of visitors from the local farming community roll up, along with a photographer from Australian Geographic. I lead a rowdy group to my shelter.

  Up front are Ted and May, our ninety-year-old neighbours, who moved to the area as newlyweds in their early twenties.

  “So this is where all my grass has been goin’,” Ted says, pointing his walking stick up at my roof. “If I knew you were that hard up, I’d a given youse some tin!” He grins, obviously impressed.

  I smooth a seat on my swag for them to sit down on. One by one, the crowd hushes as they duck under my door, as if entering a church. The last in is a young guy in cowboy hat and boots. Stuffing his hands deep in his pockets, his mouth gapes as he stares up at the chimney. My firestick bag is passed around.

  “Didja make this?” he asks.

  I nod.

  Outside, he approaches me. “Man, I’ve always wanted to do this. I thought you were a bunch of hippies but this is seriously cool.”

  A flush creeps into my cheeks. “Yeah, I guess so,” I answer. It’s just daily life now, and I’m always seeing ways it could have been better (I never did get around to more pottery). I’d forgotten that I have done exactly what I set out to do: I lived in the bush for a year – without matches!

  “You could do it, too,” I say lightly, as the young guy looks wistfully at my shelter, knowing as soon as I say it that there’s plenty of reasons why he can’t, or won’t. While the few thousand dollars and the luxury of unattached time mightn’t seem like much, it’s more than most people have. And that’s the easy part. Hardest is the belief that it’s possible, that you can do the thing you’ve always wanted to do, the one thing that calls to you more than anything. The thing you’ll only regret in its absence.

  *

  Mud is the grand leveller. All the able-bodied visitors are given a quick camouflage demo before being let loose on buckets of mud and clay and leaves. Divided into teams of six, they are given their stealth mission
– to stalk the wild chocolate bar, unseen by other teams or scouts like me on the prowl. I’m amazed by how little encouragement is needed. With a brief instruction on sensory awareness, the teams sink and fade into the brush. I pretend not to notice as the first team belly-crawls from behind a tree towards where I protect the prize. From the corner of my eye, they look like a family of giant lizards, eyes bright beneath mud-encrusted eyebrows.

  Ryan’s mum and sister stand back, in a bit of a daze, part heat-induced, and part culture shock after leaving small-town middle America a couple of days ago. His mum sprays clouds of insect repellent around their heads. Despite their obvious discomfort, they maintain a buoyant cheeriness. I can see Ryan is a bit on edge, trying to marry the different parts of himself that have collided with meteorite suddenness. I’m glad only a few of my friends were spontaneous enough to turn up at late notice. Nikki’s hordes are making up for it.

  Sam has kidnapped Ryan’s dad, and it’s a different man who pulls up to the Gunyah a few hours later, waving a stiff hat out the ute window.

  “Fell off the back of a truck,” he says, looking decidedly pleased with himself as he helps unload a roo from the back.

  “Way to go, Dad!” says Ryan.

  “Thanks, son. Now you can show me a real Aussie barbie.”

  “You’re on,” says Ryan, grabbing a shovel to start digging a ground oven.

  With the roo baking underground, Kate and Sam usher everyone together. I’m nervous, still having no idea what I’m going to talk about. I’m relieved when Ryan offers to go first.

  “Well, it started with one bundle of grass, and ended three thousand later. End of story,” says Ryan, pretending to get up and leave. A chuckle ripples through the audience. The round face of our local guide, Mark, appears in the back row. Ryan nods to him in acknowledgment.

  “Yeah, it’s … ah,” he laughs awkwardly, “it’s been a bit of a big one, I guess you could say.

  “I was planning on telling you about my shelter,” he says, holding up his notes, “how I designed it, built it without power tools, what I learnt about heat and ticks and grass and primitive windows and tinea. But I’m not going to.

  “I could instead tell you about how to tan a hide with brains, how to make fire in the rain and without a knife, how to skin a shark, trap a wallaby or spear a stingray, how it feels to walk blindfolded through a rainforest at night or get so absorbed in a trail of horse tracks that a day passes in what feels like an hour. But that would also be like telling you about the frame and not the painting.” Ryan clears his throat, as the fire crackles.

  “I come from a family of ranchers: my grandfather, great-grandfather,” he says, glancing sideways to where his dad sits, arms folded.

  “They all lived life in the open air, knew how to do things, you know, real things. I’ve always felt like I was letting the team down, not following in their footsteps. I think I came here to try and be that person … prove myself, I guess.

  “Truth is, most of the time I was beating myself up for not being that person, for wanting to just hang out, well … often just with one person in particular,” he says looking over at Nikki. Ryan’s mother smiles and nods in the front.

  “It took me most of the year to be okay with that. And to be okay with knowing that my passion is for yoga and meditation. And, really, to be okay with just being me.” Ryan’s voice cracks. He steals a look at his dad, whose hat is cocked low, obscuring his face.

  The remaining three of us pick up where Ryan leaves off. These are not tales of heroism or grandeur, of skill mastery or amassing repositories of knowledge. They are not neat, pretty or sugared up, but gritty, raw and real. While the journeys we describe are different, the destination is the same. We speak of what we came searching for and what we were shown instead: the path to our hearts.

  At first I’m worried that I’m rambling, but as my words spill out I can sense them taking shape, assembling themselves like paragraphs on a page, knitting together into a narrative. I feel the story lifting above me, merging with the communal pot of stories bubbling away on the fire, becoming part of the broth of everyone’s story. That’s why this is important, I realise. Kept to ourselves, a story is too fragile, liable to wither or blow away. The story is not truly lived until told. It’s only through the telling that the story can mature, can ripen and claim a life larger than its own – a gift for others.

  The crowd claps as the four of us gather with our arms around one another, an arm extended at either end in memory of Shaun and Chloe.

  “Okay, enough talk. Time to eat!” Dan announces, everyone dispersing in a clatter of dinner preparations.

  I watch as Ryan approaches his family, stopping a few feet short of where his dad stands, poker-faced and unmoving. Ryan steps closer. Suddenly his dad reaches out, drawing Ryan to him in a back-slapping man hug.

  A cloud of lemon-myrtle scented steam rises, as Dan peels back the sweating paperbark and the bushels of green leaves from the ground oven. In the bottom of the pit, the skinless roo is curled like preserved remains. The flesh is deep pink, falling off the bone. The smell drips throughout camp. Nikki lays out the bush-food buffet, while I throw the chopped roots and stems of water lily in a wok on the fire with some garlic. Plates pile high with berries and leaves, shoots and roots; cups overflow with banksia cordial.

  “Sure this isn’t spiked?” grins Ted, looking around at the glowing faces.

  The roo circulates on a paperbark platter, more than enough for everyone. When bellies are full, guitars, drums and percussion strike up around the fire.

  I wander to the back of the Gunyah, where photos of the year are tacked onto cardboard. “Ten More Bundles Shaun” captions the bushy head poking out the top of the treehouse. I sniff a laugh. There are our shelters in stages of building, Ryan parading in a deer-hide loincloth, Nikki doing the hula in a blady grass skirt, Chloe and Dan pulling faces, me biting into a snotty ball of wattle sap. Look at us all down at the waterhole in the first week. Gosh, that seems like a lifetime ago. Babes in the woods. We’ve definitely weathered since then, but not hardened. We’re more like well-worn leather, creased, broken in. Perhaps we’re like plants, flowering best after a hard season.

  A wave of affection for my tribe washes over me. While solitude was something I needed, I couldn’t have done it alone. In fact, it was only because of them that I was able to be alone in the way I wanted to. They were the safe container that allowed me to thrash around within. I could wander far from home because there was a home to wander back to, someone to hear the story and tend the cuts and bruises. Being alone was a choice I made day to day. It was the very existence of an alternative that gave me the freedom to keep diving deeper into it. The irony is exquisite. Tribe is sacred survival. Despite my sometimes wishing for different members, who else but this particular configuration would have shown up my judgments and blind spots in such neon brightness over and over? Who else would have accepted me back unconditionally? It was perfect, for all of us.

  My blood family might not be here but another one is. I curl up within the campfire circle as the music plays on.

  8.

  I can barely bring myself to pull on the same festy pair of ripped cargo cut-offs, now stiff with dirt and mould. It hardly matters. Ryan and Nikki are on a family holiday somewhere between the Big Banana and the Big Prawn, and Dan has moved to Byron. All gone. The teary goodbyes said and done. Just me again. And ten thousand hungry mosquitoes.

  I sit on the damp log outside my shelter. It’s definitely changed shape. The patch job that Dad and I did on the cracked sapling has finally given way under the stress of weeks’ worth of sodden grass. The whole shelter stoops in a hunchback, and with every storm its incontinence is worsening. Termites have invaded a number of the runners and are fast eating their way through the base of my clothes basket. I can feel entropy tugging hard on its skirt hems, hardly both
ering to wait until I’m gone before it runs amok. And I won’t be here to defend my shelter, to dry it out with my smoke and keep it buoyant with my presence. I can’t bear the thought of leaving it, the stone hearth cold night after night. It’ll be like abandoning a child. If mould doesn’t claim it, loneliness soon will. I sigh and get up to straighten some of its storm-tousled hair. There is a gracefulness to its aging, though, a quiet acceptance of the natural order of things, that it is right to reach for the earth, to long for rest.

  A few more weeks, just keep those arms up for a few more weeks, darling. The shelter groans. I know, I know, it’s been a big year for both of us.

  Yawning, I pick up a half-made basket, spin it around in my hands and toss it back down. My mind drifts to thoughts of cafes with friends, movies, washing my hair. Catching a bus or browsing online. I yawn again, holding the binos up to watch a restless flycatcher, my interest tiring before my arms do. I’m the restless flycatcher around here, I think, waving off the mosquito hordes from my face. My God, I’m actually bored.

  I just assumed I would stay three more weeks, until the twelve months is officially over, but now I’m not so sure. It feels like a long time. I’ve been walking loops around The Block like a lonely dog looking for its owner, past the tattered photos flapping at the back of the Gunyah, the broken macadamia shells in the communal firepit. Inside the empty shelters, I stand still and listen, thinking I hear voices coming down the trail. It’s a ghost town. Everything has lost its sheen – the curtain has been drawn back, and I can see the mechanisms behind the magic. Even my sit spot is flat and lifeless, as if the land has shut up shop. Maybe our closing ceremony did exactly that. We did just tell our stories to a hundred people, join hands and send up our thanks in a giant group whoosh. Last night I dreamt of a petrol gauge on empty. I am tired. Maybe it is time to leave? But to where and to what? The questions hang in the humidity.