I clung to his leg from the stool below. ‘Don’t do it!’ I protested. I held my breath, awaiting an explosive crack. Mercifully, Stuart’s resolve wavered.
‘All right,’ he conceded, ‘I’ll stay the execution.’
As he lowered his gun, I hugged him around the knees with gratitude. Unfortunately this unbalanced his careful distribution of weight. Suddenly he swung wildly out of the manhole and crashed into the adjoining wall, planting his left buttock through the plasterboard. Giant cracks instantly criss-crossed down the panel to the floorboards.
‘That’s it,’ muttered Stu, extracting his buttock from the crater. ‘No more chances for that cat.’
Pests of the non-feline variety became a regular topic of conversation in the weeks that followed. The cotton crop grew at an exponential rate, its tiny linear tips developing into miniature leafy plants. I started to look forward to the regular visits of Stuart’s new agronomist, Toby Leroy. Due to the previous season’s debacle with the spray contractor, Stuart had lost confidence in the agronomist charged with monitoring that crop. He’d advised Stuart to watch and wait one too many times, as the crop withered in the field. So Stuart had made a fresh start this season with Toby, an old football mate, who came with glowing references in agronomy. Toby now checked the crop twice a week and, despite a heavy workload, was never too busy to stop by my office.
‘It’s the good, the bad and the ugly,’ Toby explained to me one afternoon as we stood outside the Danube, admiring the crop. ‘We don’t have the thrips and army worms like last year, which is good,’ he affirmed, ‘and the ladybird population’s strong, which is great because they eat the aphids.’ Toby shuffled through a copy of Gebar’s integrated pest management plan.
‘And why are aphids bad?’ I asked, feeling a little like a kindergarten student.
‘Well, they suck the sap out of the plants,’ he replied. Instantly my mind flashed back to Dave Wynnum’s early dinner lesson on ‘chewin’ pests and suckin’ pests’. So aphids are suckers.
‘Looks like the flea beetles are more of a worry this season, though,’ Toby continued, jotting a few notes on his clipboard. ‘So I’ll keep an eye on things and talk to Stu about hitting them with a bit of chemical next week, if things turn nasty.’ He motioned towards the hazy horizon as he walked towards his ute.
‘Lookin’ pretty ugly yonder,’ he commented. ‘You might have to batten down the hatches.’ And with a wave, he was gone.
By late afternoon, the haze had turned into something more ominous.
‘Is it about to rain, Stu?’ I asked, as the wind whipped gravel from the driveway against the Danube’s walls.
‘Close your windows,’ commanded Stu through the wire screen door. ‘There’s a dust storm coming.’ He ran towards the house.
I stared out the window. A menacing grey cloud was whirling down the Jandowae–Macalister Road towards us, no more than a kilometre away.
I slammed shut the Danube’s windows and door and raced into the house. Just as I was closing the laundry door, the vortex hit.
‘Come inside,’ bellowed Stu over the roaring wind.
We stood at the kitchen window, watching the cotton crop vanish beneath the cloud of dust. This must be what a hurricane feels like, I thought.
The next morning, Stuart inspected the damage in the field. Hot winds of up to 70 kilometres an hour had flattened the tiny cotton plants. Minute abrasions, caused by fine sand particles, had turned their previously light foliage a deeper, patchy green.
‘The effect’s similar to a fan-forced oven,’ Stuart said, standing bereft at the field’s edge. ‘The plants got sand-blasted.’
‘Will they be all right?’ I asked, expecting the worst.
‘Some of them are dead,’ he confirmed. ‘But the plants left behind will try to compensate by growing bigger and producing more cotton on the bush.’ He bent down and stroked the leaves of a battered cotton plant, the way a father might rub his child’s bruised shin.
‘So I’ve got to take extra care of these survivors now,’ he said.
For the first time in my life, I fully comprehended the truly arbitrary nature of farming. Before moving to rural Queensland, the vicissitudes of the weather had affected me only in so far as my fashion choices were concerned. Looks like rain, I’ll wear black pants. While I’d recognised that Australian farmers struggled against adverse climatic events, it all seemed very unreal. Their plight bore no connection to my reality. Just another farmer on the news, harping on about flood, fire or drought.
In fact, I’d tended to view farmers’ predicaments as a function of personal choice: They choose to work with nature, so why are they surprised when the elements misbehave? I even theorised that they brought it upon themselves: If they stopped sucking the rivers dry, maybe the weather would be kinder to them. It took a late spring dust storm in Jandowae for me to understand the devastating cumulative effect of arbitrary meteorological events on farmers. And in particular, their effect on my farmer, who struggled so valiantly to respect the natural resources with which he worked. Stu’s buoyancy had only just started to return. He didn’t deserve another setback.
Under Stuart’s care in the weeks that followed, the cotton plants slowly recuperated from the dust storm’s assault. Eventually, they began sprouting bud-like squares at their growing points, a precursor to flowers. As I jogged alongside Field 5 one morning, Toby the agronomist popped his head up from among the plants.
‘Hooroo!’ he called. ‘Just countin’ the bugs down here.’ He picked his way towards me, carefully shimmying between the plants to avoid trampling them.
‘The insects love these squares,’ he explained. ‘They’re the flower buds that’ll turn into cotton bolls eventually, and they’re chock-full of nutrients.’
He peeled back a square and peered at its innards with an implement that resembled a fine-tipped pencil.
‘What exactly are you looking for?’ I asked, impressed by the delicacy of his efforts.
‘Heliothis caterpillar eggs,’ he said, squinting into the square. ‘This is a non-GM field, so I have to take extra care to monitor the insect levels. If a heliothis takes just one bite out of a square, the plant will abort it. Plants can handle some damage by grubs, but there’s a critical point where we just have to spray ’em with a pesticide.’
Toby paused, perusing his clipboard.
‘Still, there are plenty of good bugs in the crop today,’ he continued. ‘So no need to take that sort of action just yet.’
I gestured towards the Danube in the distance. ‘Well, I’d better get back there, Toby. It’s almost time for me to start work.’
He chuckled. ‘Not a big commute,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing you can do your Sydney job from here. Technology, ay?’ He waved me off. ‘See ya in two days, when I’ll check it all again.’
As I jogged back along the border of Field 5, I contemplated the unpredictability of the non-GM approach. Checking the crop every second day for insects was certainly labour intensive; it would be so much easier to minimise the uncertainties of nature by simply planting GM cotton. But could the predictability delivered by GM in the short term be reconciled with the uncertain impacts of manipulating the gene pool in the longer term? It was an ethical quandary I still hadn’t resolved.
CHAPTER 17
The summer heat was upon us again and I reconciled myself to long days of searing temperatures and fly-swatting. In a personal stand against climate change, I resolved to avoid using the air-conditioner in the Danube. Thus by ten-thirty most mornings, sweat droplets glistened along my lip and forehead as I tapped away frenetically at my laptop. Open windows offered no respite from the tyranny of heat. By noon, my face had flushed a deep crimson.
One particularly blistering day, as the Danube’s corrugated frame creaked and groaned in protest, Stuart strode in from the paddock. His face was plastered with white zinc and his shirt was wet against his chest. He wrenched the Danube’s screen door open with a flourish and p
ointed to the wall behind me.
‘Turn on the air-conditioning, you nutter,’ he ordered, ‘or you’ll boil your bloody brain.’
My two-week boycott of air-conditioning was officially over; my environmental idealism dismantled by the heat.
By mid-December, small white flowers had started to appear at the base of the cotton plants, multiplying in number every couple of days. The bees followed the flowers, their cheery buzzing drifting through the Danube’s windows. When pollination occurred, turning the white petals a throaty pink, Toby began to focus his attention on moisture levels in the soil.
‘We’d better start irrigating next week,’ he announced one Friday morning, standing with Stuart in the shade of the Danube’s verandah. ‘The plants aren’t increasing their uptake of moisture from the soil anymore, so it’s definitely time.’
Toby grinned at me. ‘Now the fun starts, Fi. Prepare to lose your husband over the next eight weeks,’ he said. ‘Unless we get rain, Stu will be irrigating every eight to ten days until harvest.’
I’d never experienced the full brunt of Stuart’s gruelling summer irrigation schedule. When I’d arrived in Jandowae the year before, I’d caught only the tail-end of it. ‘So do you get a break over that period at all?’ I asked Stuart.
He shook his head.
‘Not really, once I start irrigating the cotton plants, I can’t stop,’ he replied.
‘A bit like a demanding wife,’ Toby joked, sauntering towards his ute. ‘You’ve just got to keep giving her what she needs.’ He climbed behind the wheel and saluted us with a breezy wave.
As Toby’s ute disappeared down the driveway, Stuart wrapped an arm around my shoulders. ‘I’ll be irrigating at night to reduce evaporation and keep out of the heat,’ he said. ‘So you might like to think about finding something else to do of an evening.’
I already had an idea.
Three evenings later, while Stuart slopped around in ankle-deep mud, starting siphons and checking water flows, I drove into Jandowae to try my hand at a favourite local pastime. It was Becky who’d first told me about the Jandowae Line Dancers, when I’d bumped into her at the post office one day.
‘You should come along,’ she’d urged, with all the zeal of a religious convert. ‘Newcomers are always welcome. We don’t take things too seriously. You’ll fit right in.’
The sessions were conducted in a small church hall under the direction of Ellen Schwarz, secretary to the local doctor. Now wouldn’t she know some local secrets?
I arrived for my first session in good time; 6.25 pm for a 6.30 pm start. Ellen was hovering at the front of the class; Becky was nowhere to be seen. At least 30 minutes passed as the necessary technology (an old tape player) was assembled, and a playlist identified as we courteously awaited latecomers.
‘Becky’s running late because Ben’s mother’s not well,’ advised a woman in her seventies at the back of the class.
The other members of the group nodded sympathetically, while I attempted to restrain my impatience. My preferred policy of ‘Never mind Becky and start the bloody class ’, an unshakeable vestige of my former Sydney existence, was patently unacceptable in Jandowae.
Becky eventually arrived and we moved into position; three lines of four women, all facing Ellen. I took my place towards the centre of the assembled group, with someone to watch on all sides. I’d never line danced before, but I’d seen a snippet of it in a documentary on the US state of Texas. The first bars of a song blared through the tinny tape player; I limbered up in anticipation. Ensconced between two Jandowae matrons, I shuffled along clumsily to a Country and Western version of the Macarena. Mimicking the actions of those around me, I hooked my thumbs in my jeans and tilted my head under the weight of an imaginary Akubra.
It was immediately clear that I was in the company of professionals. The moves involved complex, multi-step combinations, which everyone around me performed with solemn precision.
‘Thanks a bunch, Becky,’ I muttered under my breath.
‘We’ve been line dancing together every week for fifteen years,’ explained a member of the group during a brief intermission. ‘We’ve memorised over 200 routines and won a few regional and state competitions in our time, you know.’
I didn’t doubt it. These ladies were serious line dancers. Too serious, I reflected, as we ambled along to a lively country tune featuring the upbeat chorus, ‘He drank tequila, and she talked dirty in Spanish’. It was a catchy little number: the routine cried out for a bit of spice. Unable to curtail my enthusiasm, I wiggled my hips and hummed with gusto. This chutzpah was met with loud tut-tutting from a woman directly behind me. I flushed with embarrassment and immediately fell into line, literally, with those on either side of me.
Several hours later, as I wound my way home along dark rural roads, I smiled to myself, recalling the good women of Jandowae shuffling en masse. Such activities clearly offered a vital opportunity for isolated rural ladies to socialise, exercise and transcend the doldrums of drought. The group’s sorority, forged over one and a half decades, was as impressive as its competition record. But in my heart of hearts I knew I had neither the temperament nor the time to persist as a regular participant. My line dancing career was over before it had even started. Perhaps I was still too city, after all. At least I had my running, I reasoned, as I followed the road home to Gebar.
Summer days and nights slipped into weeks, punctuated by Stuart’s unrelenting irrigation timetable. Tantalising storm clouds routinely gathered at the end of long hot days, but rain rarely fell. The flowers on the cotton crop turned into small green bolls, bulging with life-to-be. In between irrigations, Stuart was busy: ploughing between cotton rows to manage the weeds, monitoring the presence of predators and pests, and taking sap tests to ensure the right nutrients were reaching the plants.
Despite Stuart’s best ecological efforts in the non-GM fields, the heliothis grubs persisted. He’d sprayed the crop with an organic virus on several occasions, but finally Toby recommended the use of a synthetic pesticide.
‘Toby’s counted nine heliothis grubs per metre in those fields and the threshold is two,’ said Stu one evening, poring over Toby’s field notes. ‘At these levels, they’re eating the profit. The heat’s made the organic virus ineffective, so we can’t rely on that option anymore.’ He sighed, tucking Toby’s report into a manila folder.
‘So I’ll have to use a harder chemical, Fi. I don’t really want to, but we’ve got to stop them,’ he said. ‘At least it’s selective in its action and won’t knock out all the good guys, like the ants and the spiders.’
I recoiled at the prospect of hordes of grubs marching through Stuart’s crop, consuming his hard-won profit. The battle had clearly escalated beyond the capacity of Stuart’s environmentally conscious pest management approach: now it was time for the heavy artillery.
When the midsummer national holiday of Australia Day rolled around, Stuart had two more irrigations to complete.
‘What do you want to do for Australia Day?’ he asked, calculating his next scheduled irrigation. ‘Looks like I’ll be free for the day.’
For some weeks, the local newspaper had been promoting several dinky-di opportunities to celebrate our Australian heritage in Jandowae. Options included a family-friendly sausage sizzle, a community bash featuring three-legged races, and a Ned Kelly re-enactment starring local schoolchildren. Ultimately we didn’t have to choose between them: three days before Australia Day, storm clouds gathered in Jandowae’s skies.
When the first rain fell, I was startled by the loudness of its rhythmic pitter-patter on the galvanised roof of the Danube. As the droplets struck the earth, they released all manner of pungent aromas from long-dry crannies. I slid open my office window and inhaled the smell of moistened soil. The small wooden verandah beyond my office turned a honey colour in the wet and the paddocks seemed to arch and stretch to meet the rain. Birds flew low, a foot above the soil, twittering with renewed vigour, eager to catch un
lucky worms wriggling through the newly wet topsoil. Green tree frogs, delighting in the influx of fresh water, began their cacophonous croaking in the water tank. As the rain fell heavier, my heart grew lighter in the knowledge that Stu would be elated, the earth’s thirst would be appeased temporarily, and all would be right with the world.
That evening, my delight turned to concern as an electrical storm blew in from the west and the rain intensified.
‘I’ll just go out and check the pumps,’ called Stu over the howling gale, pulling a Driza Bone over his head and mounting the four-wheeler. I followed him to the door and pressed my face against the wire screen. Visibility was almost nonexistent as the rain beat against the house from all angles.
‘Be careful!’ I called in vain, my voice drowned out by the storm.
As the four-wheeler vanished into the whirling vortex, forked lightning speared the ground within metres of the house. It was a tempest of Shakespearean proportions; I stood transfixed at the door until rain soaked through my nightdress.
The rapidity of the rainfall over the next 24 hours caused serious erosion and damage around the farm. I suddenly understood the aphorism ‘It never rains, but it pours’; almost 100 millimetres fell. Stuart was out in the maelstrom at all hours, patching up broken infrastructure. Overall, however, the rain was a long-awaited blessing.
It was a very happy Australia Day indeed. Forgoing other patriotic activities, we splashed and skylarked in the creek like truant schoolchildren. It was a far cry from ferry races and festivities on Sydney Harbour. Scrabbling up the bank of the flooded creek at sunset, I gazed at the box tree branches arching over the banks, mirrored in the swollen waterhole. Suddenly I was filled with a newfound appreciation for Australian bush poetry and the likes of Banjo Paterson. My heart hummed with the beauty of the bush.
Love in the Age of Drought Page 17