Love in the Age of Drought

by Fiona Higgins

  ‘What’s “integrated pest management”?’ I’d asked, intrigued, when Stuart dropped the term over dinner the previous week. He’d been considering the feasibility of planting another cotton crop in the coming spring, as well as the types of management techniques he might use.

  ‘It’s a method of pest control that only uses harsher pesticides as an absolute last resort,’ he replied, passing me a bread roll.

  ‘So what do you use instead?’ I asked.

  ‘A bunch of complementary tools and biological controls,’ he replied, ‘like spraying an organic virus to kill the heliothis in your crop.’

  I blew on a spoonful of soup, made with home-grown vegetables delivered earlier that day by a kindly neighbour, Libby. She’d plucked them from her garden and dropped them off in a box, lingering on the Danube’s verandah for a chat.

  ‘Do the softer options always work?’ I asked, wondering if using an organic virus was like burning citronella candles to ward off mosquitoes – natural, but often ineffective.

  ‘Not always,’ Stuart replied. ‘Take last year for instance. The soft options didn’t control the thrips and the army worms.’

  Whatever a ‘thrip’ was, I assumed it was bad. And just the term ‘army worm’ brought to mind guerrilla warfare.

  ‘So are you thinking of using harder chemicals this season instead?’ I asked, picking at the crumbs of my bread roll. Stuart sighed, clearly frustrated.

  ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘To be honest Fi, I’m not even sure that I should be planting cotton at all.’ Surprised, I waited. Stuart proceeded to butter another bread roll in silence.

  ‘Will you plant a different crop then?’ I asked finally, speculating that sorghum might be a better choice this season.

  ‘No, it’s all the same really,’ he muttered. ‘Doesn’t matter what the crop is, there’s always a water problem.’ He pushed his soup bowl away from him with a force that propelled the spoon onto the floor. I stiffened; his tone reminded me of his despair in autumn, pre-harvest, when the cotton crop had been accidentally sprayed with weedkiller.

  ‘There’s some water in the dams from the wedding rain,’ he continued, ‘but not enough to guarantee full production. If more rain doesn’t come this summer, I’m just not sure I’ve got it in me to keep farming.’ I stared at him, searching for something to say.

  ‘Won’t you just plant enough crop for the water you do have?’ I asked, recalling a tried-and-tested strategy he’d adopted in previous seasons.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll probably do that again,’ he said. ‘But it takes the same amount of time, effort and management to set up all the equipment to plant ten acres of crop as it does for 1000 acres, Fi.’ He shook his head with resignation. ‘It’s hard to feel optimistic when there’s so much work ahead for so little return.’

  Instinctively, I reached for his hand across the table and grasped it tightly, willing him to persevere. His talk of abandoning farming frightened me. Not because I doubted his capacity to dust himself off and move forward, but because I was far less fazed by the challenges of rural existence than I’d previously been. As strange as my Sydney friends might consider it, I was enjoying being a farmer’s wife.

  After a protracted silence, Stuart leant down and retrieved the fallen spoon from the floor. ‘All right, Fi,’ he said. ‘Let’s give cotton one more go.’

  Something rolled across the ceiling above us; Stuart glanced up with irritation. We had endured weeks of disturbed nights throughout winter listening to this very noise.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Stu, ‘I’m going up there.’ He grabbed a torch from the kitchen bench and tucked it under his arm. Placing a stool on top of a chair, he carefully positioned himself beneath the manhole. ‘I should have oiled my rifle,’ he said.

  I blanched. ‘If it’s a possum,’ I said, ‘can’t we just catch it and relocate it?’

  Stuart didn’t answer and hoisted himself up into the roof. He emerged five minutes later, covered in cobwebs and holding three knobbly spheres in his hands.

  ‘Potatoes,’ he declared triumphantly, tossing the spheres into the kitchen sink. I looked at him with incomprehension, attempting to fathom a connection. As he washed his hands, I contemplated the impossible: Are there potatoes growing in our roof?

  ‘It’s the rats,’ he announced. ‘They’ve been taking potatoes out of the pantry, carrying them up into the roof and rolling them across the ceiling into their nests. That’s the sound we’re hearing at night – potatoes rolling. There’s at least a dozen up there. I’ll get the rest later.’ My jaw dropped. So that was why we’d been going through so many potatoes.

  ‘How have they carried them all that way?’ I asked, gobsmacked by the notion of potato-sequestering rats.

  ‘They’re big rats, babe,’ replied Stu. ‘Strong enough to carry potatoes in their snouts.’

  I sat down, weak at the knees. ‘How do we get rid of them?’ I asked.

  ‘You’d rather not know,’ he said. ‘Just leave it to me.’

  Before Stuart could make good on this ominous undertaking, just days later the sound of our potato-snatchers was replaced by mewing, snarling and scratching.

  ‘I think it’s a cat, Stu,’ I whispered, listening from the bed below.

  Stuart grunted dismissively. ‘It’s a cat, but not as you know it,’ he said. ‘Feral cats aren’t like the domestic variety, you know. But at least the rats will bugger off now.’

  It was true; the midnight cricket balls ceased. Several nights later, on my way to the toilet, I slid open the side door and caught sight of the cat in question.

  It was mid-pounce, accosting a small, rodent-like creature near the birdbath. It flattened itself against the grass and fixed me with glinting green eyes. Tail swishing, it grasped the squirming animal in its mammoth jaws and, with a leonine growl, ferried the critter away.

  ‘The cat’s enormous,’ I reported to Stu on my return to the bedroom. ‘I think it had a rat in its mouth.’

  ‘Well, it’d better leave the roof soon,’ he replied, ‘or I’ll help it leave this world.’

  October was a windy month. I regularly awoke before dawn to hear the sound of air rushing around the bungalow’s eaves. With no rain since July, the opportunistic wheat crop had all but failed. The welcome rain of our wedding seemed a distant memory.

  ‘These winds could blow a dog off its chain,’ said Stu over breakfast one morning. ‘We’ll have to plant straight after we irrigate. I hope we don’t get a cold snap. The soil temperature’s got to be at least fourteen degrees for the cotton seeds to germinate.’

  I sipped at my coffee, digesting this information. I’d never seen a cotton crop planted on Gebar before. With my very limited understanding of agriculture, I’d presumed that it would all be fairly straightforward, a bit like tending the pot plants on my Sydney balcony. You plant a seed, you water it, the seed grows into a plant, you harvest it. As I learnt more about Stuart’s pre-planting activities, I realised how ignorant I’d been.

  ‘Soil test results are good,’ Stuart continued. ‘We’ve got the right balance of nitrogen and phosphorus out there. Potassium and zinc levels are good too.’

  ‘I never knew dirt could be so interesting,’ I laughed. ‘So, how close are we to planting now?’

  ‘I’ve got one more irrigation,’ Stuart replied. ‘Then we’ll plant in a week’s time.’ He pushed his chair back and picked up his hat. ‘So I’ll catch you later.’

  ‘Can I come with you?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never seen irrigation in action.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘And if you’re really keen, you can start some siphons for me.’

  We drove to the Pelican Dam in the ute. Cranking open a series of gates in the dam, Stuart released a tide of precious water into a head-ditch at the top of Field 2. Propped across the head-ditch were countless black polythene pipes, their ends pointing skywards like bayonets along a trench wall.

  ‘Come on,’ Stuart called, motioning towards the head-ditch.

&
nbsp; He walked ahead of me, carefully balancing on the side of the embankment. Leaning against the incline, he lifted one end of a siphon, cupped his hand over its end and started the flow of water with three swift jerks. He then threw the siphon’s end over the bank and gravity did the rest, water gushing into the field.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t replicate his seamless, sweeping action. Each siphon was more than four metres long, as thick as my arm, malleable and unwieldy. After my tenth unsuccessful attempt, my biceps were burning and my white shirt was muddied with silty water.

  ‘It’s all right, babe,’ Stuart said, patting me on the shoulder, ‘this is one skill you don’t have to master. Even Roger can’t always get it right.’ I sighed, defeated. Farming was a hell of a lot harder than I’d imagined.

  Stuart dropped me back at the house and returned to the field. Sliding open the side door of the bungalow, I stumbled over a cardboard box obstructing my path. Our lovely neighbour Libby had been at it again, picking vegetables from her garden and packaging them up for our enjoyment. This was the fourth box she’d left me in the same number of months. I rummaged through the box and discovered a jar of homemade strawberry jam.

  With a flash of inspiration, I seized the jam and marched into the kitchen. While I’d just demonstrated that I was useless at siphon-starting, I had a plan. I couldn’t contribute to the physical labour of planting over the coming week, but surely I could make some decent morning tea? I retrieved my grandmother’s scone tray from its storage box in the pantry. Grandma had been the queen of scone-making. When she’d given me her scone tray, just months before she died, I’d been baffled yet touched. Since then, stuffed in the bottom of the pantry between the picnic rug and the wine cooler, it had never seen the light of day. Now I gazed at its smooth silver surface with newfound enthusiasm.

  The following week, I watched from the Danube as an enormous planting rig, some eight metres wide, patrolled the fields. In one rolling motion, it sliced grooves in the moist soil with shiny metal discs, dropped seeds into these furrows at a specific rate, covered them with soil, then pressed the dirt back into place. The rig left no evidence of its presence bar the tyre tracks in the field. As the hours ticked over, Stuart feverishly checked the planter for seed blockages, ferried supplies between the shed and the rig, replenished the planter with mixtures of water and fertiliser, and monitored the number of seeds being shunted into the earth.

  ‘Why can’t you just use more seeds than you need?’ I asked over morning tea, offering Stu a scone. I’d used a ‘never fail’ scones recipe I’d found on the internet, requiring just three basic ingredients (one of which, to my astonishment, was a can of lemonade).

  ‘Because if all the seeds actually take,’ he explained, ‘the canopy will be too thick and the plants will out-compete each other. Then you’ll have a real problem. Ideally you should plant somewhere between eight and fifteen seeds per metre. I reckon the right number is twelve.’ I nodded, awed by the precision involved.

  ‘Hey, these scones are great,’ remarked Stu, licking a dollop of cream from his fingers. ‘You’ve really come a long way in the baking department.’

  I flushed with quiet pride. A year ago, I would have accused him of being sexist. But just nine months in rural Australia had taught me to look beyond my own stereotypes and political correctness. Rather than dismissing Stuart’s praise as patronising, I now recognised the value of rural skills such as home-making and baking. For many drought-affected farmers, the home-based labours of their wives – diligent, unbidden and gracious – leant a welcome predictability, and a softness of touch, to an otherwise bleak and arbitrary universe. This first batch of scones was a modest, but nevertheless important, contribution to life at Gebar.

  Later that evening, when the planter had completed its final pass, Stuart returned from the paddock and roamed the house, fidgety and irritable.

  ‘Everything all right?’ I asked, anxious that something had gone awry late in the working day. Stuart shrugged.

  ‘I’m fine. It’s just a nervous time, Fi,’ he said. ‘Planting’s over and now we have to wait and see if the seeds come up.’

  I wondered how long this process might take, or if sometimes they never came up at all.

  CHAPTER 16

  Aweek later, on my way from the house to the Danube one morning, I was greeted by millions of emerald-green pinpricks marching across the brown earth. Lining the paddocks in military formation, the seedlings had literally sprouted overnight. The nervous wait was over. Stuart bounced into the Danube at morning tea time.

  ‘Good strike rate for the cotton, Fi. What do you think of my cotyledons?’ he asked, with an impish wink.

  ‘Your what?’ I replied, smiling at his energy.

  ‘Cotyledons,’ he repeated. ‘That’s what’s out there in the paddock. They’re the first leaves of the plants.’

  I gazed out the window, admiring the vista. ‘Well, they’re just beautiful,’ I replied.

  Stuart grinned like a schoolboy. ‘Come over to the house,’ he said. ‘I’ll make you a coffee.’

  I laughed at his liveliness. ‘Okay, I’ll just go to the bathroom and be right there.’

  Smiling to myself, I walked to the laundry. The farmer has a spring in his step again.

  I opened the laundry door, lifted the toilet lid and screamed. A red-bellied black snake was coiled in the toilet bowl, half immersed in water, beady eyes boggling and head weaving. I leapt a metre backwards, mind racing. It closely resembled the snake that Stu had shooed out of the house when I’d first arrived at Gebar. There were two possibilities: the snake would disappear under the water, or the snake would slide out of the bowl. Horrified by the prospect of the latter, I tiptoed up to the toilet seat and slammed the lid shut.

  ‘Stuuuuuuuuu!’ I wailed, adrenalin coursing through my body, ‘there’s a black snake in the toilet!’ Stuart shuffled out of the house, coffee cup in hand, and casually lifted the lid. The bowl was empty.

  ‘It was there! I swear!’ I urged, panicking.

  ‘Well, it’s probably gone back down into the S-bend. Must be living in the septic, chasing the frogs. Can’t hurt you – it’s probably more frightened than you. Don’t worry about it.’

  Don’t worry about it? Visions of unseemly snake bites haunted me. How would I stabilise a venom-punctured buttock, for God’s sake? Or more to the point, how would someone else stabilise it for me? Unlike my first black snake experience at Gebar, I was in no mood to be appeased. There was simply no scope for human–serpentine coexistence. The snake had to die. It was thoroughly in keeping with my new, radically pragmatic interpretation of Buddhist philosophy. Inflict no suffering on any living being; unless it might bite your bum.

  ‘Stu, you have to get rid of it,’ I declared. ‘And I mean get rid of it for good.’ The desperation in my voice was unbecoming but I didn’t care. ‘I won’t be able to go to the toilet unless I know it’s not down there. And I’m not prepared to urinate on the lawn,’ I said, anticipating his response. Stuart rolled his eyes and summoned Roger on the two-way.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ he intoned into the UHF radio. ‘We’ve had a bit of an incident in the toilet. I need your help.’

  Stuart and Roger spent the next four hours attempting to locate the snake – removing the lid of the septic, blocking the S-bend and pouring hot water down the air vent to literally flush the snake out. It was a tense saga which I watched from the safe distance of the Danube’s verandah. Finally Roger, wielding a giant pair of pliers, caught hold of the wriggling snake by its tail and bludgeoned it to death. Amid the blood and water splattered about the laundry, Roger inspected the lifeless snake.

  ‘Y’know, it doesn’t look like the one I’ve seen around,’ Roger called out to me. ‘Too small. Might be a baby of the bigger mother.’

  I blanched at the prospect of an irate mummy snake, seeking revenge for her offspring’s demise.

  Later that evening as we lay in bed, the light of the full moon blazed through t
he slats of our blinds. I considered my predicament. There were doubtless hundreds of snakes on the farm; I couldn’t have them all killed. But that toilet-inhabiting black snake had engendered a primal repulsion in me. So much for the animal-loving vegetarian; rural Australia was turning me into a hypocrite.

  ‘Stu,’ I whispered, sensing that he was still awake, ‘will the snakes get worse in summer?’ Stuart threw back the sheet and wound an arm around my waist.

  ‘No, they’re pretty bad all year round,’ he goaded. Stuart hissed, waving his other arm in the air like a viper poised to strike. I squealed and rolled out of his grasp. As we wrestled and laughed, Stuart suddenly stopped and sat up. An audible hissing sound was emanating from the ceiling.

  ‘It’s not another snake, is it?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Stu. ‘That bloody feral cat’s still up there.’

  The hissing morphed into a distinctly feline miaow.

  ‘Howling at the bloody moon,’ said Stu in disgust, ‘I’m going up there right now.’ With a steely glint in his eyes, he pulled on a pair of football shorts.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, scrambling out of bed and tugging at his arm as he strode towards the kitchen.

  ‘We don’t negotiate with feral cats,’ he said resolutely. ‘Hasta la vista, kitty.’ He disappeared downstairs and returned with a .22-calibre rifle.

  ‘But it’s just a cat,’ I pleaded. ‘And it’s done us a favour by controlling the rats.’

  In my previous Sydney life, cats were part of the fabric of city living: curled up on beds, lazing in courtyards, perched on fences.

  ‘It’s a feral pest,’ said Stu sternly. ‘It preys on native wildlife. Much worse than the snake you had us kill this morning.’ I grimaced at the reminder.

  Stu retraced his steps, ignoring my entreaties, and hoisted himself up into the roof. After several minutes of scanning, he pinpointed the cat in the sights of his rifle.