by Sue Williams
With the Loop reopened as soon as the floodwaters subsided, visitors have started to embrace the concept again, and make the trip along the two tracks to the two pubs. And although Jo knows what a hard taskmaster the Outback can be, she realises it will always be part of her life. Although she left twice, planning never to go back, now she’s committed her heart to the thought she’ll always return.
‘The Outback isn’t for everyone,’ says Jo, smiling. ‘It’s raw out there and you have to be made of pretty sturdy stuff to enjoy it. You need to be able to laugh at yourself, and take joy in simple things. It can be magic out there, but you have to respect it, and it doesn’t come at the push of a button; it’s something you feel and sense and is all around you. I love it, and I loved it that first day I went there, back in Birdsville. Now I just want to spread the word, so other people can come and have a unique Outback experience, feeling, sharing and discovering the amazing place that it is.’
9
WORKING IN HARMONY WITH NATURE
Libby Maulder, Liffey, Tasmania
It was the start of one of the coldest winters Tasmania had ever known, and 27-year-old newly qualified doctor Libby Maulder shivered as she sat hunched in the draughty three-man tent, listening to the icy sleet slamming into the thin nylon walls.
For years she’d been dreaming of living in a wild area of Australia, close up with nature and far from the city and, despite feeling chilled to the bone, she’d never once regretted the move.
Even having to shower out of a bucket with a hose laced through the branches of a nearby tree, and cooking meals over a campfire outside, couldn’t dampen her enthusiasm. And she wasn’t daunted, either, when she discovered she was three months pregnant with her first child, and faced the prospect of having to spend her first few months as a parent, with husband Greg, nursing a newborn in a tent.
‘When you’re young, you can put up with anything,’ she laughs today. ‘I just knew that’s where I wanted to live, and I was ready to put up with any of the sacrifices that might entail.’
Those sacrifices, to anyone else, might have proved simply overwhelming. When the sun came up each day, Libby would wash in freezing water lugged up from the dam 50 metres away and dress quickly before she became numbed by the cold. She’d then set out along the mile-long driveway – little more than a ribbon of rocks and potholes that was so rough-going the couple didn’t have a single visitor for the next four years – to the nearby town to work shifts assisting the local GP. When she arrived back, she’d join Greg working by hand to build their house out of recycled timber that was so hard they had to drill into it first to be able to hammer in a nail.
‘But we’d bought some land above the snow line in one of the most beautiful out-of-the-way places in Australia, and somehow it didn’t matter that we had no more money left,’ Libby says. ‘It was hard, but it was a lifestyle choice, and we knew it would be worth it.’
The Liffey valley in north-central Tasmania is one of the most spectacular stretches of Outback wilderness on earth. Nestled at the foot of the towering Drys Bluff, standing a majestic 1300 metres above sea level, with the imposing ridge of the Great Western Tiers as a constant rugged backdrop, it’s a landscape more than 60 million years old, with an ancestry that can be traced back to Gondwana.
Here, the World Heritage-listed wilderness is dense with thickets of cool temperate rainforest, full of quiet, shady, dark places. Sassafras, myrtle and eucalyptus trees rise tall from a forest floor thick and spongy with mosses and lichens, moistened by creeks tumbling with crystal-clear mountain water that feeds into the Liffey River and its spectacular falls further along. It’s home to thousands of small creatures too, from the Tasmanian short-tailed rat, and ringtail and pygmy possums to the pademelon, platypus and spotted-tailed quoll. In the early morning, it’s a world that comes alive with the cries from no fewer than 21 species of native birds, including the black currawong, olive whistler and grey goshawk. As the sun slips down in the evening, it’s so still the silence can be absolutely deafening.
Although only around 55 kilometres south-west of Tasmania’s second largest city, Launceston, along a tangle of winding country roads, it could be a million miles from anywhere. The former Greens leader Bob Brown, a longtime local, once described it as lying ‘between the farms and the plateau wilderness, between the bitumen and nature’s silence, between the late 20th century and the most ancient world of nature’.
Libby Maulder takes a deep gulp of the crisp air that’s blown from one of the longest stretches of open ocean in the world and strides ahead. It’s now 30 years since she first came here, and she’s still as full of wonder at the rawness of the land, and as passionate about its preservation, as she was at the beginning. ‘Three sides of us here are government land and reserves,’ she says, looking out over the escarpment. ‘So that’s thousands of hectares, and no one here! It’s just so beautiful.’
Daily life became a great deal easier as soon as she, Greg and baby (later joined by five other children) had a house to live in – although, all these years on, it still isn’t finished. They always seemed to find more important things to do. Chief among those – in between providing medical services to both locals and those without a regular female doctor via the Rural Women’s GP Service run by the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) – was creating a company producing some of the best medicinal herbs in Australia. And today, after nearly 20 years of work, their company Highland Herbs is the largest ‘by-hand’ herb producer in the country.
Growing, harvesting and processing a huge range of biodynamic and organic-certified herbs completely by hand, they’ve never had to do any marketing to sell their crops. The quality and potency of their herbs brings customers to them instead.
‘But it will never make us rich,’ smiles Libby, now 57, dressed casually in an old T-shirt and loose pants, her eyes still a piercing blue and her silver-grey hair cropped close to her head. ‘It’s such a labour-intensive way of producing herbs; it’s long days of work and it’s always a struggle to make it a commercially viable business. But it’s never been about making money. It’s always been about living in harmony with nature, and helping improve people’s health.
‘We never planned to live in the mountains and grow herbs; it’s something that just happened. As we get older, we think of stopping, but then we’ll get feedback from people saying what a difference the herbs have made to their life and health. So then it seems better to continue.’
It certainly is a labour of love. Their range of around 40 herbs includes peppermint, spearmint, calendula, raspberry leaf, echinacea, dandelion, figwort, lemon balm, red clover, chamomile, alfalfa, bergamot, nettle, rosehip, sage, oregano, rosemary, skullcap and valerian. Planting begins in September in beds of dark earth spread over three hectares, tilled and aerated with old-fashioned wood and iron garden tools, and lovingly enriched with compost produced on the farm. They’re carefully tended and weeded by hand, too, then harvested from November to April every year. That isn’t a simple operation, either. They use four different methods of harvesting the herbs – handpicking, cutting with a simple hand-sickle or with a small motorised cutter, or sweeping through with a hand-held comb with a catcher – depending on whether the flowers, the leaves or the stems are the most important part.
Next they’re laid out on big, flat perforated-mesh-framed drying beds, away from direct sunlight in two sheds the couple built themselves of wood and second-hand iron, and kept at a carefully controlled temperature by wood-fired pot-bellied stoves, or in the kitchen of their own house, suspended just above their heads. When ready, the dried leaves might be rubbed through a screening and winnowing table, to catch and separate them from the stalks, or put through an old-fashioned chaff-cutting machine, a heavy iron hand-turned contraption that dates back to the late 1800s.
‘I know it looks almost primitive,’ laughs Libby, wandering past the selection of old tools hanging up along one wall of one of the sheds. ‘And I suppose, in a sense,
it is. But we’re producing premium-quality herbs. If you’re riding on the back of a machine, you lose touch with how the herbs are growing, how the earth is looking and how much water is needed. This way, you’re connected to the plants, you’re connected to nature and, for some herbs, you might even get three to four harvests a year.
‘Yes, you could pick these with a machine, but then you’d also get a lot of unwanted parts, you’d lose a lot of volatile oils when they’re exposed to heat and the herbs would be bruised, which can reduce the flavour and impair their medicinal properties. It’s important to us to make sure they’re as flavoursome and powerful as possible, so growing, harvesting and drying them by hand gives us the ability to preserve their maximum potency.’
After the herbs are prepared, they’re sorted into batches and stored in elevated tin drums in the sheds. Following this, they could be poured from recycled cardboard scoops into cellophane bags and heat-sealed for sale as single herbs, mixed into different tea blends, or processed into products like comfrey- and calendula-infused oils, a variety of ointments, peppermint lip balms and a range of remedial bath salts. With so many regulations these days prohibiting the making of therapeutic claims for herbs, the tea blends have simple indicative names like ‘stress-ease’, ‘body-cleanse’ and ‘rejuvenate’.
‘I’m sure some people look at us, and the way we work here, and the amount of work we do seven days a week, and think we’re mad!’ says Libby. ‘But we believe that a lot of people these days have really lost touch with nature and where their food and medicine comes from, and one of the most important underlying values for us is to live in a way that connects very closely with Mother Nature and the seasons. So even though this is a commercial business, we’ve developed a great reverence, respect and gratitude for what nature gives us in food and medicine, and a major priority is trying to work in harmony with nature. Our lifestyle is thus very intertwined with nature and that philosophy, and we choose to live very simply in keeping with those principles, also growing a lot of our own food and grains.
‘Some people might look and say, “Why do we work so hard, not making much money and living a bit like peasants?” but there’s a deeper reason and meaning to how we live. A lot of people farm conventionally very successfully, but we want to farm in a way that flows with nature, enriching it rather than depleting it.’
Libby Maulder in the Liffey Valley. (Photo by Sue Williams)
Elizabeth Reeckman was born the third of five children to parents who had a mixed farm – sheep, cattle and cropping – in the small town of Rutherglen, in north-eastern Victoria, near the Murray River border with New South Wales. In the mid-1950s it was a much quieter place than it is now, and the family rarely left the farm, because of the need to tend to the animals and the ever-present fear of bushfires.
Libby, as she was soon called, did well at school and, growing up a kind girl with a gentle, loving nature, decided she wanted to continue her studies in an area that would allow her to help others. When someone suggested medicine, she dismissed the possibility immediately. At the age of 10, she’d witnessed one of her older sisters having a tooth pulled out by a dentist and had from that moment on nursed a terrible phobia of needles. Instead, she applied for a number of health and social work courses. Then, two weeks before the application deadline, she woke with a start one morning. ‘Why on earth am I thinking of doing social work?’ she asked herself. ‘If I really want to help people, I should be a doctor. It has everything I want.’
She ended up studying medicine at the University of Melbourne then completed her residency in Ballarat. One Christmas holiday, she went bushwalking with one of her older sisters in New Zealand, spending New Year’s Eve at a party in a youth hostel in Wanaka, a small town in the Otago region of the south island. Also there was young New Zealander Greg Maulder, taking time out from his work in an Auckland nursery to travel around his country. He noticed her immediately. ‘She was standing at the far back of the room, against the wall, and I was really struck by her,’ he says. ‘There was just something about her . . . I tried to engage with her, but I couldn’t get past her sister.’ The next morning, he was dismayed to discover she’d already left by 6 a.m.
But, two weeks later, he was strolling along the white sand beach at Opoutere, a tiny settlement on the Coromandel Peninsula on the north island, south-east of Auckland, when he saw two people walking towards him. It was Libby and her sister. ‘It’s a really tiny place, miles from anywhere with dirt roads to get there, so to see them there, it was amazing,’ says Greg.
A couple of weeks later, he was lost for words again when he attended the biggest music festival in New Zealand, near Waihi, 30 kilometres away. Despite the crowd of over 20 000 people, he ran straight into Libby. It felt as if it was meant to be. ‘She was really quiet and very reserved, but there was still that quality about her,’ Greg says. ‘I was drawn to her.’
But the couple soon had to part ways. Greg was going back to Auckland to start a teacher-training course, and Libby had to go back to work in Victoria. After three months, however, Greg threw in the course and flew over to Australia to meet up with her again. They’ve been together ever since.
Libby had always wanted to live in the country, well away from any city, and she’d once visited Tasmania and loved the wild charm of the state. So she took up a position at the hospital in Launceston to see what it was like and then the pair started looking for a place to live. Driving around Liffey, they went to inspect a 210-hectare block for sale at the back of an existing property, sitting at an altitude of 640 metres, and bordered on three sides by state forests. Libby took one step out of the car and declared, ‘This is it!’
‘I just knew,’ she says. ‘I can’t really explain. But I knew it was the right place for us. We were meant to live here. It was exactly what we’d been looking for. So we bought it.’
It was, however, far from perfect. There was no home on the block and the pair, now broke from their purchase, set up in a tent to see out one of the coldest winters in living memory while they painstakingly worked at building a house from recycled materials, earning extra money by splitting fence posts and cutting firewood. They’d bought a couple of draught horses to help with the work but, with the only place to store the hay being under the house and, with no fences, the horses stayed close, soon churning the ground into a veritable quagmire. Every week, Libby would dress in her work clothes, then put army fatigues over the top and slip into gumboots, before crossing the muddy ocean outside the house to climb into her old car, and then bounce over the jagged jumble of rocks before she reached the road. If the car made it – and it frequently didn’t, breaking down along the way – she’d pull over 2 kilometres before town and take off the army gear and boots to make herself look respectable for work.
One journey out, while four months pregnant, the car slid off the dirt road into a bank, and was a write-off. Luckily Libby wasn’t hurt, but from then on she had to drive their rickety old truck along the route each day, despite the vehicle’s almost total lack of suspension. Every journey she took, she lived in fear the bumping and shaking would tip her into premature labour.
In addition, it was the time of the massive controversy over the proposed hydroelectric dam on the Franklin River, and furious battles were being waged between those who wanted the dam and those opposed to it for the environmental damage they believed it would cause. Liffey was at the centre of the argument as the place where the anti-dam campaign was conceived – at Bob Brown’s house – which, in turn, led directly to the formation of the world’s first ‘green’ party. Both Libby and Greg supported the movement and blockade.
The couple ended up spending six months in their tent with only a short break when Libby went into hospital to have her first baby, a boy they named Tim. Neighbours, reluctant to see them moving from hospital with a small baby back into the tent in freezing weather conditions, rallied round. Bob Brown even donated his house to stay in for a short while. ‘There was no ele
ctricity and if I had to change a nappy at night, I had to light a candle to see anything,’ says Libby. ‘But then we moved to another neighbour’s closer to our land for a while.’
When finally they were able to move into the modest cottage they’d built, it felt like all their Christmases had come at once. But modest it certainly was. It covered only 6 square metres, and had just two rooms and a sleeping loft. Ice crystals formed inside the unlined roof, and the pipes immediately froze over at night. But it was home. On the land nearby, the couple grew their own vegetables and fruit, as well as rye, spelt and barley to grind to make their own bread or to barter with other farmers for milk and organic yoghurt. The wildlife, especially the possums, did all they could to compete for their crops.
In a bid to supplement their income, Libby and Greg started growing daffodils, too. A local businessman had suggested, as their land was elevated and so far south, they might well be able to grow the latest daffodils in Australia. He supplied the bulbs, they provided the land and labour – after all, Greg had grown plants all his life, as well as having worked in a nursery – and their plan was to divide the profits. That scheme worked well for a few years, as two more children, a daughter, Jess, and a son, Matt, arrived in quick succession. Libby and Greg would plant the bulbs, then pick the blooms during the day and pack them in boxes at night, ready to be transported to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
Once a week, they’d drive to Hobart’s Salamanca Market with a truck full of flowers, set up a stall, and sell bunches there for $1. When the baby was tired, she would be put in a flower box under the table to sleep. The three older kids would get involved too, swapping daffodils for ice-creams and treats with other stallholders. Everything went well until the big supermarkets suddenly started stocking and selling flowers and wanted them in bulk, and buying them far too cheaply to make a small-scale operation economical.