Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  Sometimes as we walked over the new paddocks, I noticed little waterways where I’d once met a blue-tongue lizard or a little brown frog were all but destroyed, dozed over, and the contours of the land reshaped to suit the investor farmer’s straight and tight fence lines. I’ve since been to those shelterbelts where I used to ride my pony. Little Tristan, patched with dun and white, would walk up to his knees in kangaroo grass, snatching at seed heads with his velvet muzzle. We’d jump the fallen logs the men never bothered to snig out, Tristan’s ears pricked, his black tail swishing. Now, over thirty years on, those same shelterbelt trees have just about all died. What hasn’t been cut for firewood are grey bones on the ground, and the native grasslands that used to grace the area have all but been grazed out and replaced with British varieties of pasture-like cocksfoot, clover, phalaris and rye. There are no lizards or frogs to meet nor even much birdsong left, save for a flock of introduced cockatoos that have taken over in great numbers, looking like white washing on a loaded line when they sit screeching in the few remaining long-dead ringbarked grey gums.

  Even the marshland on the lower country, where as kids we would wade through floodwaters catching long snake-like shiny black eels, is now devoid of pin rushes due to the large drainage system created by big machines. With the recent weather patterns of low rainfall, the area barely floods and I sometimes wonder how those long-buried eels survive in the silted-up dam beds, if at all. Tenaciously the native hens, or bush chooks as we call them, still remain on the marshes in their army-green feather jackets and stalk about on their ready-to-run stick legs. But the canopied world that I would play in before the dozers came has long been destroyed. The land now has a same-same blandness of very little natural life. To those who hadn’t witnessed and felt the pulse of it over three decades ago, you wouldn’t notice its absence now. These days, to the everyday viewer, it would simply look like what we now term ‘farmland’.

  Despite this early deep insight and conflict in my childhood mind that we were damaging the landscape, I came to embrace agriculture, adore sheep with a passion, and love farming with all my heart. My father was the son of a farm labourer. Through tenacity and sheer hard work, Dad made good and became a Hobart solicitor, specialising in company law. Eventually he put enough of his hard-earned dollars aside to buy a small farm to enjoy on weekends with us kids. But for me, weekends weren’t enough. I had a double dose of country in my veins, with my mum being the daughter of Derwent Valley farmers who had land connections running back to the Tasmanian highlands at Bothwell and the coast at Dunalley. I wanted more than weekends! I wanted to be immersed in the land right from the start. Agriculture, writing stories about it and studying it daily, was to be my only path.

  But in watching the demise of soil health and in turn human health over the past thirty years, I’m finding that my old love for rural culture is strained. I mean no disrespect to my forebears, nor my father, nor the men and women who have toiled to clear this land, but I am hoping to reach for a new future for agriculture through new farming methods. I see a future that is balanced, one that honours the land in the way Indigenous cultures do, so there is a placement of reverence upon it. So that we can all survive as a species and have a planet that is thriving, not dying.

  I can see agriculture splitting, like the way a road does . . . there are three routes: one is that of an old meandering highway like we still have here in Tasmania. It’s a road on which the traditional farming family travels. This is where the (usually male) farmer hands the land down to (most likely) the eldest son and they jokingly deem the son’s inheritance into farming as a form of ‘child abuse’. This is due to the lack of profits and perceived life of struggle on ever-declining soils, with rising costs like fuel, herbicide, pesticide and fertiliser (a post–World War II system that is based on using leftover chemical by-products from war and that is described as ‘best practice’ by Australian government advisors).

  The second road, which is more like a six-lane highway, is the corporate system of agriculture, whereby technology, profit-driven commodity production and overseas investment drive methods of producing food that is not so much ‘food’ as it is filler for marketed ‘product’. It’s a fast-paced, sterile, straight-lined road to travel and those who don’t keep up with the speed of it fall away. Diversity in nature and healthy ecology have no place here, and even though you may find more women in this system, there is no sign of Mother Nature’s feminine principles of cyclical and slow. I’ve read articles that claim that in Australia we are now producing oranges that contain zero vitamin C due to farming practices that are more concerned with profit than human health. Nutrition in food produced in this autobahn-style of farming has been steadily in decline since the 1950s so that when you shop in the fruit-and-vegie section of the major supermarkets, you may be shortchanging your body on much-needed vitamins and minerals, even though you think you are making a healthy choice. In this system we pay supermarkets cents per kilo, not cents per bodily goodness, and it’s costing us dearly.

  The final road – the road I want to travel down and the road I want to take you down – is the dirt one. The road less travelled. Down this road are the slower travelling methods of farming that will nurture clear-flowing waters that have been filtered by healthy, fecund, breathing soils that underpin a multi-layered farming system. Methods that not only produce chemical-free, nutrition-filled food, but that embrace ecosystems as a whole and build human communities on farms and in rural townships. In these systems there’s not only room for women, but also children. And there’s also room for food infused with love. What could be healthier?

  I was raised in a household where meals were cooked and presented to the breadwinning man at the head of the table, business shirts were ironed as stiff as his briefcase for him, and children were silenced and shut away in their rooms at news time. It was all in order to serve the man of the house. His peace and happiness was paramount. It was classic fifties stuff that carried through into the late sixties when I was born. I learned early that those women not wearing aprons, and the ones who were young and pretty enough, were objects for men’s sexual enjoyment. As a six-year-old, hidden behind the couch, I saw enough on the TV of Benny Hill chasing half-naked women and Alvin Purple’s sexist soft porn to find out where I stood in the world as female. It was not a good place.

  With an older brother who had a different relationship with my dad, gender stereotyping hit me hard and early. They share a language seeded around masculine, knock-on-wood ‘real’ world things like share portfolios and company law. It’s a language some women can learn, but I’ve never wanted to. My reality innately had those extra points on the compass.

  What was real and tangible to me was possibly airy-fairy stuff to them. Right from the beginning, I was never going to be the girl I was expected to be. I was never going to be a lawyer or a doctor type. I couldn’t do numbers to save myself. I was never going to make a Hobart society wife either. I didn’t like dolls or dresses. Instead I drifted with clouds and dandelion seeds blown in the wind. I was distracted by colour and light. I shrank into a shell of terror from the outside world and emerged in glowing light in my inner world, knowing I was made of the Divine. I conversed with fairies and angels. I liked cowboys and Indians and torn jeans. Along with my complexities, I was a grumbly tomboy in a world where pretty, demure, compromising girls were rewarded. Adding to that I was born a creative, and dubbed ‘a mad writer like your grandmother’. Still, despite feeling a fringe-dweller to my own family, I acknowledge the love in which I was raised. It was love made jagged by the era, but it was love nonetheless.

  As I fly back in time and hover over that clearing that I witnessed as a child, I know in my heart that if a woman had been in charge of converting that land into a farm, she would have gone about it vastly differently. The landscape’s beauty and diversity would’ve been retained, and all the creatures would’ve got to share in some way.

  When I found myself at the age of forty-o
ne, without the paternal support I craved trying to escape a toxic marriage, I sought the refuge of a single room on my friend’s farm next door. Crammed into one bed with my kids, I realised the depth of my lack of self-worth. I was ill equipped to reason with the blokes who had ousted me and negotiate a better way forward with them. In my world, women had been conditioned to put up and shut up. So I did. I gave in and walked away with nothing. That’s what a woman does when their core belief is ‘I am not worthy’.

  On paper, I was better qualified as an agriculturalist and had worked hard on the practical implementation of farming since I’d left school. Hadn’t I proved my stripes that I belonged on my farm? That I was capable? Was my father doing the best he could, thinking he was protecting me from the workload farming brings by keeping my primary school teacher ex-husband on the farm instead of me?

  In 2003 when I returned as a married woman to my father’s hobby farm of 800 acres, it ran a motley lot of Merino wethers. Dad said fondly that some of the sheep were ‘old enough to draw a pension’. Those big smelly wethers, thinning from age with crispy dry wool, came with yellow teeth worn down to stubs like dehydrated corn kernels. Whilst my then-husband worked off farm, I set about converting the farm from a profitless tax deduction into a respectable farming business. I convinced the blokes that we ought to lease more country, so that our flock grew to 2000 sheep, a mix of wool and prime lamb production, run on over 2000 acres of pasture and bushland. Also, there were my Hereford girls I’d bought from a jillerooing mate of mine. Quiet, regal beauties, who produced pixie-faced calves that kept coming, so soon we had a herd of thirty gorgeous bovine ladies. To drought-proof the business, and silence the ongoing ‘not enough rain, not enough feed’ loop of complaint, I steered us into a partnership with our neighbours and put in a hydroponic fodder shed that had the capacity to produce up to 2.5 tonnes of sprouted barley per day. It was fresh, easily digestible, regular stock feed that I weaned cattle onto and fed to our sheep regularly so our wool was sound and our lamb weights would be good for the trade. It meant I could take pressure off our grazing land too, and slow our paddock rotations down so the landscape could rest. We also began to sell the fodder to horse owners as well. It was lush, vibrant stuff that we pulled out of the trays like long green shag-pile hall runners after eight days of growing time. Twice weekly I bundled my little son into the ute to do ‘Fast Grass’ deliveries to horse owners whilst my daughter was at school. I remember the days fondly as it was around the time my little blond-haired cherub boy was learning to count. And count he did, as we drove to the rumbling of the diesel engine of my Holden Rodeo.

  ‘Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine . . . One hundred!’ he would say breathlessly. ‘Phew! I did it.’

  ‘Good boy!’

  ‘Now I’m going to start again, Mummy!’

  ‘Okay,’ I’d say, pulling a ‘is he serious?’ face. ‘Great!’

  ‘One, two, three . . . ’

  They were busy but wonderful times, filled with purpose and a vision. Plus, for a born nurturer like me, there was something so satisfying being with my child, delivering grass to racehorses who were stabled most of their lives or kept on bare paddocks. I knew their acidic grain-tied guts were gaining relief from the feed we were supplying.

  Dovetailed into life was my love of training working dogs, which I bred and sold at the Victorian Casterton dog auction. For Mothers’ Day, with a royalty cheque from one of my novels, I bought myself some portable sheep yards that I erected outside the front of the house. I could train my pups, wave to my kids on the deck as they played in the sandpit and even sip a beer while the dinner was on, all the while coaxing a young pup into a confident life of sheep work.

  We’d also put in horse paddocks and, with the help of friends and neighbours, built a round yard. For a time a black glossy waler stallion became part our family and we began to breed a few stock horses. I was also generating off-farm income from writing novels and channelling that into the farm. Life was busy, and blissful because my babies were with me – both my two-legged and four-legged kids – and I was holding on tenaciously to my right to write, despite spousal grumbles. Life held the potential to be extraordinary for all of us. But there was one sticking point. The men in my family. They couldn’t seem to share nor see my vision. Dutifully, I fulfilled my perceived role of wife, mother, daughter. I was constantly on call for them, in the house, the farm office, the yards, the paddock and the shearing and fodder sheds, always there for my babies but constantly putting my needs as a woman last. Over time, I felt like I was cracking from not being watered. Like the grassland, I was being pared back to something I wasn’t and wilting from lack of nurture. The men would come into our home bringing with them clouds of negativity that, like the rainless clouds outside my kitchen window, just made me sadder. The more I looked at my internal landscape and then to the external landscape, I knew the old farming and social systems weren’t working. Like me, the land and the animals were struggling.

  Instead of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome, I began to seek methods that would help solve our problem. I’m not saying I’m an heroic farm girl like the girls in my novels . . . Some days in my writer’s head I was distracted, dreaming up descriptions of sheep moving across pasture, and I would forget to check a trough or shut a gate. I’d be lost in my creative thought. But there was one thing absolute about me when it came to the farm. I was utterly passionate about it and my life on it. However, I was yet to learn some blokes are terrified of passionate women.

  In my research, I began to see the parallels in the treatment of the land with the treatment of myself. The feminine of the land was being neglected and so too was I. I wanted to change how we farmed our land and keep the chemicals away from my children. I wanted to be honoured in my new status as mother. Yet motherhood had seemed to disempower me in the world of men. It hadn’t given me the extra standing I thought it would. I was pushing for change but the men in the family were having none of it. My quietly rebellious mum was like me, mute in a culture that had taught women to ‘disappear’ themselves.

  By the time my second child started school I was exhausted. I withdrew into myself. I shrunk into a pall of gloom inside the home, only coming alive again when I was in my beloved bushland with my dogs and children by my side, or escaping to my writing world.

  I recall a female farming mentor of mine drawing me aside. With her older woman wisdom, she must have seen that I was being drained energetically. She looked into my weary eyes and said my name as if she felt sorry for me. As my son and daughter dabbled about in a mud puddle, she must’ve seen how I nervously kept an eye on the mood of the men. I remember her hand on my arm, and the glint in her eye.

  ‘Have you got a Fuck-off Fund, Rachael?’

  ‘A what?’ I looked at her, puzzled.

  ‘Every woman needs a Fuck-off Fund,’ she said matter-of-factly in her Tassie drawl. ‘Are you putting any money aside for yourself? Just in case. I have. I know I’ll never leave him, but it’s nice to know I could fuck off any time if I wanted to.’

  I reeled at the horror of the thought. I had never entertained the idea. When I married, I married for love and for life. But some inner alarm in me dinged. What could she see that I couldn’t? When it came to money, I simply trusted that there would be enough, that what was mine was ours. I hadn’t been the type of woman to spend money on clothes, redecorating the house or Sunshine Coast holidays. All my book royalties were tied up in cattle yards, sheds and farm equipment, and the red hides of Herefords or dogs and horses.

  But what that woman foreshadowed became real. By 2010 my husband remained fixed in the farmhouse that was central to the farm business with my dad’s blessing, and I found myself on the farm next door, camping in my best friend’s spare room with no money and nowhere else to go. My father hadn’t heard me . . . that I wanted to be a full-time farmer who wrote a bit, not a full-time writer, missing a farm for the rest of
my life. Throughout the whole mess, my mother just doggedly got on with being a grandmother to my kids, and swallowed the ugly situation and remained silent.

  As I lay in that bed, crowded either side by my sleeping children, I wished I’d heeded that woman’s advice. My daughter had plaster casts on both legs at the time as treatment for her cerebral palsy. I’ll never forget how she would kick me awake as she slept fitfully. We would laugh about it in the morning, but during the sleepless night I knew I didn’t want to say goodbye to that childhood place . . . my sacred world of majestic trees I worshipped, bushland groves that sustained me and mountain skylines that gave me my compass point on the earth. Above all, I knew I didn’t want to farewell my beloved, beautiful animals: sheep, cattle, horses and dogs I adored with all my heart. There would also be the loss of sharing those precious moments with my children on that place. Would my children be visiting a motherless farm for the rest of their lives?

  In the three months we lived in my friend’s house, Dad came to the door once. I don’t know why. He never really spoke much. But standing beside him, looking like Dad’s second-in-charge, was my ex-husband. I remember feeling the same energy a horse must feel when it is compelled to bolt for its very own survival. At the time I kept thinking, Why did Dad have to come with him?