The Year of the Farmer

by Rosalie Ham

  About The Year of the Farmer

  In a quiet town somewhere in country New South Wales, war is brewing.

  The last few years have been punishingly dry, especially for the farmers, but otherwise, it’s all Neralie Mackintosh’s fault. If she’d never left town then her ex, the hapless but extremely eligible Mitchell Bishop, would never have fallen into the clutches of the truly awful Mandy, who now lords it over everyone as if she owns the place.

  So, now that Neralie has returned to run the local pub, the whole town is determined to reinstate her to her rightful position in the social order. But Mandy Bishop has other ideas. Meanwhile the head of the local water board – Glenys ‘Gravedigger’ Dingle – is looking for a way to line her pockets at the expense of hardworking farmers already up to their eyes in debt. And Mandy and Neralie’s war may be just the chance she was looking for . . .

  A darkly satirical novel of a small country town battling the elements and one another, from the bestselling author of The Dressmaker.

  “Rosalie Ham deftly sharpens the razor edge between comedy and tragedy. The Year of the Farmer is a book that delights, appals but never waivers in its brutal honesty. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.” Sue Maslin, producer of The Dressmaker

  Contents

  Cover

  About The Year of the Farmer

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1. Water and Sheep

  Chapter 2. Disappointment

  Chapter 3. Water from the Sky

  Chapter 4. Twenty Percent

  Chapter 5. It Can’t Get Any Worse

  Chapter 6. A Circular Subject

  Chapter 7. Predatory

  Chapter 8. Divide and Conquer

  Chapter 9. I Knew All Along

  Chapter 10. The Meeting

  Chapter 11. Consequences

  Chapter 12. No Harm Asking

  Chapter 13. Skullduggery

  Chapter 14. One Beer at the Pub

  Chapter 15. For the Greater Good

  Chapter 16. Grand Opening

  Chapter 17. Unacceptable

  Chapter 18. Twelve Kilometres of Channel

  Chapter 19. Shot and Sprung

  Chapter 20. A Harvest, of Sorts

  Chapter 21. Collateral Damage

  Chapter 22. Date Number Two

  Chapter 23. The Capitalist System Destroys

  Chapter 24. Christmas Eve

  Chapter 25. Peace, Harmony and Goodwill to All

  Chapter 26. Boxing Day

  Chapter 27. Try the Billabong Hotel

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About Rosalie Ham

  Also by Rosalie Ham

  Copyright page

  For the Hams, farmers all

  Here is a rural fellow

  That will not be denied your Highness’ presence.

  He brings you figs.

  William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 5, Scene 2

  Prologue

  Except for the busy nocturnal creatures and a light wind rocking the bushy gums, all movement in the camp had ceased. Evening had settled into night and the people were asleep. One dog sat up, stretched, and crept to sniff around the smouldering fire. Others raised their heads and joined him, tails up. They milled together in the lifting smoke, ears and tails moon-tipped. One moved off and the others followed, slinking behind. At the river, they paused and lifted their snouts to the dark air, then turned and moved westwards, a handful of mongrel pets pattering along the edge of the water. As they ran behind the caravan park, a Labrador joined the pack, a fluid line of hunt-coloured ghosts moving with purpose. The dogs rounded the pump station and ran under the bridge, continuing along the riverbank behind the shops. No lights shone in the houses on the flood plain opposite, and traces of rabbit and fox slipped across the river to them, but the pack were drawn towards a bigger chase, lust warming as they ran, blood on their minds. They travelled along the exercise track and over the levee and vanished way beyond the swimming hole, past the hospital and the new service station, outrunning the westbound flow of the sluggish river to the sleeping sheep captured in their paddock and yards, innocent to the coming game.

  1.

  Water and sheep

  The dust staining the thin sheet of clouds peeping from the horizon told Mitch the sheep were coming. He stopped the ute, tied the steering wheel to the rear-vision mirror to keep the vehicle on course, and wedged a square of timber against the accelerator. He paused again to check the clouds sneaking up, then put the ute in gear and climbed onto the tray, the truck grinding along at a walkable nine k’s and the sun hot through his shirt. The hungry, thirsty mob hurried towards him so he jumped onto the feeder trailer and pulled the outlet lever. The middle of the seed in the bin fell away, and wheat trailed on the dry dirt. Soon the thread of skinny, unhandsome sheep were falling into line, like a zipper closing, either side of the thread of golden feed. He pointed. ‘Those clouds will slide over here and water will fall from the sky.’

  Tinka, Mitch’s mostly black dog, understood many words but there were none she recognised in the sounds he was making, so she turned her ear back to the gathering mob of dull sheep.

  ‘I see you don’t believe me, Tinka, but I’m reliably informed that weather works in seven-year cycles and I choose to believe it.’ He climbed across and stood on the roof of his ute. ‘This is my year, our year. Rain will fall and life will change.’

  Tinka moved to the very far corner of the ute and examined the contents of a passing breeze. The ute kept moving, the rams kept eating and Mitchell Bishop sat down, his feet dangling over the headboard. He reached for his phone and held it up to the meagre clouds, hoping a signal was passing, a lean, broad-shouldered young man in his prime, expectation in his heart despite the drought and his just mildly successful marriage. No marriage was perfect and, in the way of things, his would tick on until change presented itself. There were no messages on his phone, but Mitch’s main concern was survival. Specifically, water. While his ravaged sheep nibbled with their tender lips and noses in the dirt and their own hard dry shit, he looked again to the promising horizon. Rain would be good to grow a bit of feed, though it would have been better months ago at sowing time. His crop was poor, sparse and starved, but that crop had come to represent survival. An adequate harvest could see him break even, just, though no income he’d get from his poor sheep or any sort of crop would dent his debts. He checked his phone once more then put it in his pocket. As he climbed back to the feed trailer his dog swivelled one ear to him.

  He shut off the seed outlet and drove to the yards to fill the bins for the next day’s feed then drove back to his flocks in the fire truck to fill the water troughs. He let the farm dogs off for a run while he refilled the fire truck tanks, then tied the dogs up and fed them, and drove home. Pulling up next to his wife’s car, he looked at the old house. Within its chilly walls his father would be watching The Morning Show and Mandy scrolling through Mitch’s emails. He wished he had more sheep to go to. He opened the door and Tink jumped down off the tray and they paused to watch a vehicle out on the road roaring through the morning stillness. It was Cyril Horrick heading towards Riverglen and Glenys Dingle, most likely. They would sit together in Glenys’s shiny, dustless office and discuss the forthcoming meeting. Any discussion with the Water Authority meant announcements, and announcements meant changes to water supply allocations.

  o0o

  In town, Jasey White dropped two slices of bread in the toaster, flicked the kettle on and went to the back verandah. She unlocked t
he wood box, took out her .22 rifle and paused to inspect the churning grey sky and inhale the dusty eucalyptus air. Then she loaded the rifle and moved to the back step, where she stood in a sun shaft which cast her white hair golden. She trained the scope on the reeds along the low river. The riparian areas no longer shuffled and whirred with busy ecology; the long, dry years had made the river gums still and brittle and the birds had migrated to a richer place. Dieback had crippled their canopies and where once great tree limbs had stretched out over a wide, strong flow, there was nothing, just exposed roots clinging to bare sloping clay, hardened where the tide had receded. Sometimes the crash of a branch being shed echoed all the way to the main street. In the small flow of turbid water, one fowl and her three chicks were paddling towards the reeds. Along a low, fat branch of a thirsty gum, wild ducks were lined up, their little boxy heads snapping from side to side and their thin, flat feet lifting. The hen in the water turned abruptly and paddled away, her chicks following as fast as their small webbed feet allowed. Jasey moved her scope to the reeds. She found the black-rimmed red ears of Mr Fox, watching like a sphinx. Then he rose and Jasey held the crosshairs on his shoulder as he slunk across the clay bank towards the thick, slow stream. Mr Fox put one foot in the water, took it out, but was drawn in towards the chicks. He swam delicately, his nose high, a gentle wake rippling out from his fluffy tail. Jasey held, exhaled and squeezed the trigger but the bullet punctured the water high of Mr Fox’s shoulders and he flinched. The hen squawked and turned, wings flapping and water splashing, her beak spearing at the retreating fox. Her chicks swam in confused circles and the ducks on the branch flapped away. In the kitchen, the kettle clicked off and Jasey’s toast popped up.

  ‘You are toying with a woman who has the patience of a gate post, Mr Fox.’ She unloaded the gun and put it into the wood box with the bullets, locked it and hid the key under the mat.

  She ate breakfast, dressed and waited on the front step, her name tag large on her left breast. The clouds had turned soft and flat and crept away across the blue sky. Galahs and magpies flew past towards morning business, and the rye grass fluttered stiffly with a passing zephyr.

  Two houses westwards, the Jovetic family had heard the gunshot but resumed their morning routines. Lana Jovetic’s father turned his small sticky eyes to her. ‘Home today you will come to help your mother the potatoes to plant.’

  ‘I will,’ she said, and watched him struggle towards the back steps and his garden. These days the old man moved slowly and stiffly up and down his rows of vegetables, swearing at the damage the fat rabbits had done in the night. Papa was beyond physically hurting them now; he hated his diminished status in the family, though, and remained a tyrannical presence.

  Mati said, ‘Vile you can enjoy, go. Do.’

  Lana kissed her mother and left. As she crossed the yard she lit a cigarette and looked at the grey-streaked sky. At her precious 1990 Holden Commodore, she brushed the dew and soft white spheres of dandelion seeds from the windscreen.

  At exactly ten minutes to eight, Jasey and the rest of the river dwellers heard Lana’s car rumble to life.

  She drove slowly down her gravel drive, turned east and, about twenty metres later, turned into Jasey’s gate, bouncing over her stock grate and rolling up the potted driveway, thin boree fronds brushing her car. She pressed play and the first bars of the song filled the car as Jasey opened the door. They sang, ‘You didn’t love me like you said you would but I loved you as much as I could, though you made me cry . . .’

  It took three minutes and fifty-eight for their favourite song to play through but it took them about two minutes to get from Jasey’s to work, so they drove past the house where their friend Neralie had once lived, and crossed the bridge and turned and drove on through the town past Jasey’s IGA. They smiled at the men hanging the sold sign from the pub balcony, drove on past the op shop, then the hairdressers – Beau Monde – the deserted butcher’s shop and empty frock shop and the people waiting outside the newsagency. They waved to Kevin, standing by a tractor outside his garage. The car turned at the swimming hole, where Larry Purfeat exercised his thin, languid greyhounds and the morning walkers trudged – some elderly folk with their Zimmer frames, the Rural Women’s Club and the smart set, with their blonde ponytails swinging. The blue car drove around and around the barbecue area until the last note of the rousing crescendo – ‘I stopped loving you though I knew I could because you didn’t love me as much as you should, so now it’s your turn to cry’ – faded. Then the faster walkers in their tight activewear crossed the road to Maria’s cafe for a skinny decaf latte. Lana parked in her spot beneath the kurrajong outside the abandoned butcher’s shop. Opposite, customers still waited outside the newsagency. Jasey said, ‘Something should be done about that,’ and Lana replied, ‘You’ve been saying that every morning for five years.’

  They headed to the IGA, where Paul was sorting letters into the mailboxes in the window. Jasey picked up some money waiting near her cash register. ‘Debbie’s been in for milk and cereal?’

  Paul continued sorting the mail. ‘Yep.’

  Jasey counted the money. ‘She take Rice Bubbles too?’

  Paul paused to read a postcard. ‘Yep.’

  ‘She owes me five cents. That card from Zac?’

  ‘It’s raining in Noosa.’ He poked the card into Zac’s parents’ mailbox, wondering at the cruelty of Mother Nature for giving Zac rain on his holiday, but none on his farm.

  Lana was paying for a packet of cigarettes, a carton of chocolate milk and some lamingtons when Nurse Leonie Bergen approached silently in her nursing shoes. Her shopping trolley held fizzy drinks, sweet biscuits and cakes for the Activities afternoon tea. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘some old people don’t bother with the newsagents, they just turn up to Activities at the hospital and listen to the allied health girl read out the headlines.’

  The four people in the IGA turned to the newsagency, where the queue remained.

  Nurse Leonie said, ‘Now’s the time,’ and they all shifted their gaze to the sold sign hanging from the pub balcony.

  Jasey nudged Lana. ‘She’s right. Do something before she finds out who bought the pub.’

  Lana nodded. ‘She’s been asking.’

  On the fifty-metre walk to her office, Lana stopped to light a cigarette and speak to the queue outside Mandy’s newsagency. ‘I’m starting an evening class for youse to come to, on learning how to read newspapers on a computer.’

  The people in the queue looked doubtful.

  ‘Without even getting out of bed, you’ll be able to read the papers on your iPad or computer.’

  They shifted. A few eyebrows rose.

  ‘What night?’

  ‘Monday.’

  They hesitated.

  ‘Before Australian Story,’ Lana added, and they looked like they might just warm to the idea. She walked the rest of the way to the shire offices, where she carefully stubbed her half-smoked cigarette out in the powdery mortar between the worn bricks and popped the remaining half back into the packet.

  o0o

  Isobel Prestwich’s first thought of the day was always of her Merinos, her pretty green-eyed girls with neat, clean arses and rich, uncontaminated wool. She left her high, wrought-iron bed and her snoring husband, his sun-fried nose hidden between the Italian cotton-sateen Chine sheets, their lace flowers meandering along the edges, and dressed. On the broad verandah Isobel raised her arms, inhaling, then stretched. Rain was in the air. Above, soft fat clouds floated. She looked to the river – perhaps the cranes and moorhens had returned? But there was just blue-green algae and cumbungi weeds reaching from one dry expanse of riverbank to the other across a slow, fetid flow of fermenting excrements and dead fish. Midway through her hamstring stretches some kookaburras laughed, and fifteen speedy minutes on the treadmill later, Isobel set off on a brisk walk through the grey country morning, m
agpies singing to her. At the shed, she wrenched open the doors and a cushion of warm vapours – sheep shit, urine-soaked straw and pungent lanoline – engulfed her. Her calm, friendly Merino ewes shuffled together, their large eyes expectant.

  When she’d announced her business plans to Digby over dinner, her husband had gestured to the great outdoors. ‘We’ve already got a business – all those cattle and sheep out there.’

  ‘Really? I thought they were for keeping the grass down,’ she deadpanned. ‘You specialise in meat, Digby; I’ll specialise in wool.’

  ‘Darling, all that extra work, I don’t think –’

  ‘I said I’m going to start a business. If I need your help or advice, I’ll ask.’

  He raised his eyebrows and drank some fine red wine.

  ‘I will breed with Bishops Corner’s best – Mitch’s finest fleeces and the better stud ewes and rams. I’ll send fleeces to be scoured and washed and they’ll come back in skeins.’

  ‘You won’t make any money out of knitting jumpers.’

  ‘Weaving,’ she said. ‘My mother, if you remember, was a very fine spinner and weaver, and the ladies from the Rural Women’s Club’s craft group will make pashminas and whatever other fine wool garments they please and we’ll sell them in Verity’s shop.’

  Verity, Digby’s cousin, ran a fashion boutique in Melbourne.

  Digby shook his head. ‘Really, Isobel, you can’t –’

  ‘I haven’t finished speaking so don’t start patronising me just yet. Sheep are pleasant. They’re not threatening, they’re unassuming but social, reasonably small and neat; ewes are generally very good mothers, they’re vegetarian –’

  ‘Herbivore.’

  ‘And, as you know, they produce lovely meat and wonderful fibre and we have two children, a boy and a girl. Rory will inherit Girri Girri, and I want Philippa to have my sheep and Bishops Corner because Mitchell won’t have children.’

  ‘How do you know?’