Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  Once it was rumoured the truffles we were harvesting that day would be flown to Princess Mary, who was on a yacht somewhere for her birthday. I imagined her in her royal bikini of navy-and-white polka dots, sunning herself on Mediterranean waters, then when the sun was sinking towards the azure horizon, I imagined her frocking up all princess-like for her Tasmanian truffle delight. I love the image in my head of my fellow Tasmanian-born Princess Mary on a sun-drenched deck, anticipating the arrival of a truffle I had grubbed out of the ground a day or so before. Her world and the world of fine restaurants sat in such a stark visual contrast to the place I was in, handling the truffles. Kneeling, sometimes in slushy mud, sometimes in a hard-as-rock frost, whilst my dog rolled with delight in whatever stinky or dead thing he could find amidst the trees.

  I also can’t separate the scent of truffles from the smell of Devon meat, or Belgium, as we call it here in Tasmania. You know the sort you see in red plastic tubes in supermarkets selling cheap? Cut in small squares, my dog, a springer spaniel named Tiny, would go nuts for it and would work all day hunting truffles for the fatty stuff. I tried him on chicken, on dried liver and other rewards, but he was a sucker for junk food so Devon it was.

  I also came to discover there is something magical about a trufferie. A trufferie is the ‘orchard’ into which we would enter, sterilising our boots and dogs’ paws before we went through the wallaby-proofed gate. (Yes, wallabies like truffles too.) It took me yonks to be confident enough to say the word. Trufferie. In my broad Tassie accent I would say ‘Truff-fer-ree’, like ‘referee’. But it ought to be said with a French roll of the tongue: ‘True-fur-ree’. Ah! Mais oui!

  We’d drive through farmland and arrive at the properties, entering a secluded world where rows and rows of oaks, hazelnuts and the evergreen ilex had been planted, their roots infused with the truffle fungus. I came to know the different soils in the different trufferies in that job, witnessing it at close quarters on my knees, bowed down in worship. I would see that secret world of filaments of underground fungi, of tiny creatures, and smell the scent of decay that fed the whole system. Delicate lace roots tangled and entwined with woody tree roots, birds above me watching me curiously. It was a magical time. And above all, there was my harvesting team of dog women, earth girls and out-and-out larrikins who have since become my lifelong friends. Not only did the money come in handy during the bleak wait for a twice-yearly royalty cheque to turn up, but the job gave me great networking opportunities with other farm women. We’d do working-dog deals, source hay for one another, point each other in the direction of agistment paddocks in dry times, or to where a good line of cheap sheep or cattle could be bought. We became a farm-girl sisterhood. Girls who talked cattle prices and rainfall, not shopping and shoes.

  Looking back, it seemed as if the earth orchestrated our meeting because those women were my mainstay as I sailed into the foreign seas of singledom and farmlessness. Those truffle girls were the ones who came to paint walls in the refuge house. To offer food parcels. To treat the children to a trip to the zoo. To text a funny joke. To tell me they loved me. To give me a place to stay when I needed to get away. They were women of my kind. We were a bunch prepared to trudge in gumboots for kilometres up and down rows of trees in a mid-winter Tasmania, being towed behind a dog, and no matter how frosty, or how suddenly hot, or how rainy and windy, we’d dig our fingertips through soil and shove our faces into the holes we had dug. All of us, with our trained noses sniffing along invisible perfume seams for hours, just to find truffles. People think it’s the dog that digs up the truffle. But that’s not so. One scratch from a dog’s claw and the precious item could be damaged and degraded. Our dogs were quickly called away from the booty of truffles they’d find. Some dogs were known to eat truffles. It was an expensive mistake we would never let happen. Although I think it did happen once or twice with Chips, who was a big, strong, clever dog and often gobbled one down, leaving Deb cranky with him and swearing like a trouper.

  Amidst the rich-smelling leaf litter some truffles could simply be found on the surface of the ground. But this was rare. Most times a dog would ‘hit’ on a target, meaning he would zigzag forward, his floppy ears wet from the grass, helping to waft the scent to his nose, and then suddenly he would scratch on the surface. I had to watch my whirligig springer spaniel, Tiny, like a hawk and be focused on his every move. I would then reward him verbally and with a chunk of Devon as he sat straight-backed and keen-eyed, sweeping the ground with his plumed tail. I would drop to my knees and ever-so-carefully inspect the area with just about every sense of my body. Closing my eyes I’d inhale above the freshly scratched soil, hoping for a clue. Sometimes tiny mounds could be seen, the soil loose and friable, and I knew I’d bagged one straight up. Other times it was a frustrating task of digging, shoving my nose into excavations, clumping handfuls of soil to my nostrils to see if I could still detect a scent. Sometimes the trail would go cold and precious time was wasted when a truffle remained hidden, like buried treasure in the ground.

  I remember Jeanie kneeling on the wet grass with hillocks of soil all about her like a gopher gone mad, her dog dozing in the weak winter sun. She had looked up to me, palms to the sky as if pleading with the Truffle Gods, and said with reddened cheeks, ‘I know there’s one there! I know it! I just can’t find it!’ She pulled up just short of a sob. Given that top-quality truffles were worth about $3000 a kilo to our boss back then, we would be reluctant to leave a spot where we’d caught a scent. We could be walking away from a beauty. It was addictive and alluring. At times it was physically challenging due to the steepness of the hills and the pull of the dog on the lead, or the wildness of a freezing mid-winter’s day, but it was the worst when you could smell a truffle but not find it and the perfume told you it was now or never and that same truffle that you failed to uncover would be on the turn the next time you were back in the trufferie.

  All of us were farm girls back then, supplementing our income from our part-time seasonal work, but really deep down, all of us knew we’d joined a sisterhood. The truffle harvesting and camaraderie between us and our dogs fed our souls, as we happily trudged on a frost-crusted earth in search of black gold.

  It was 2009. I was emotionally as parched as the landscape around me. The dams were low. Rain wasn’t falling. People’s spirits were slumping too. It wasn’t so bad for us. We had my then-husband’s teaching income, my book royalty cheques arriving every now and then, and we’d spent enough time drought-proofing ourselves with the fodder production shed and reducing our stocking rate so it was just a matter of getting by until it rained. Faith and optimism would see us through, or so I thought.

  Even still, those fellas kept pointing out what was wrong. It was exhausting. With the inner work I was doing sparked by Louise Hay’s book given to me by Paul Macphail, I could see that even without rain, our lives were rich beyond measure and so many things were oh so right! Why couldn’t the fellas see it? Why couldn’t they speak it? Couldn’t they hear themselves? Didn’t they know how deadly it was to talk your world down when you can just as easily talk it up?

  As I tried to find my footing as a new mother in a man’s world, I had grappled for answers about the men’s view and their disregard for what was magnificent about our lives. The more I practised Louise Hay’s spin on the world, the more I was led, as if by an unseen force, on a pathway of books that kept appearing before me like stepping stones. Other books came to me on new science, philosophy, spirituality, farming, history, feminine awakening and faith. Through such books and lectures, in particular epigeneticist Bruce Lipton’s work and the writing of Esther and Jerry Hicks, I was learning that it is our thoughts and the words that we speak that form our reality and govern everything – particularly the health of our bodies. With my daughter’s condition too, I was seeking out health methods that truly addressed the inner and the outer lifelong condition she faced. We began to see a Bowen therapist to help her with her high-tension little legs. That de
dicated practitioner also set us on a journey towards other modalities of healing that were not only helping my daughter but healing and awakening me as well.

  I realised what I was learning wasn’t spiritual whoopee-la-la stuff that can so often be dismissed by practical realists found in my farming culture, but I was actually learning about quantum physics and the new science of epigenetics. Very concrete concepts proven in laboratories at legitimate universities around the world. (The only PhD I’d ever claimed to obtain was a Post Hole Digger, and with it I watched soil and rocks spewed up from the earth as we put in some great fences with it. Being so close to the soil and life and death of animals leads you to what I think is the best outdoor university life can provide.)

  Because of this new awareness and hunger for a new way, I began to practise being witness to my daily thoughts and the words I spoke. I began to see the energetics others were attracting around me.

  At the time I had an ‘in-law’ who would come and stay with us often. Instead of kicking back and blessing the fact he was sharing a pie at the bakery in sunshine with his family, he would rant about the price of the pie, the weight of beef within it and the minuscule amount of money for the beef that would’ve been paid to the farmer. Doom and gloom and misery-gutsing on a sunny winter’s day with glorious, healthy children in our company. I found it sickening. Literally. Particularly when I had paid for the pie for him and desperately wanted everyone around me to be happy, to be grateful, and to love life.

  When we were out and about this particular in-law would introduce me to people, saying, ‘This is Rachael. She not only writes fiction, she speaks fiction as well.’ As I was smiling politely, shaking hands, inside me I was bleeding from that cruel remark. Each time he said it, it cut me to my core. Not only was it the ultimate put-down for an honest person, but it revealed just how little respect and understanding a dominant alpha male had for a woman like me. I may come across as idealistic, but my positive speak and big-vision paintings with words are a very deliberate intention about my place in the world and the change I wish to inspire. I still ask myself today, Why did that dear soul have such a compulsive need to dominate, belittle and silence me? Was it because I was female and I had a public profile? Was it because my philosophies did not sit well with him? Was it because he knew I had an inner power building inside me . . . the power of a woman coming into her own, finally, at forty, knowing her real place in the world? Even if what I said sounded like fiction to the more bitter and cynical around me, I knew that by speaking love, light, positivity and optimism and directing my focus towards what was possible and what I was grateful for, I could in fact change my reality. I wanted the men around me to get that too, so their lives could flourish. I also knew the old belief systems of agriculture didn’t need to be adhered to, and that we could find a new way forward.

  Along with the extra work drought brings, I had young children to care for, livestock to feed daily, a fledgling fodder business, writing deadlines to meet and our little school facing closure . . . again. It was all life’s stuff, which I knew I could handle, but I couldn’t do it without being nurtured, or without support, nor without being honoured as a woman and a mother and without being protected. I felt increasingly that energetically dark shadows were drifting into my space from those around me. There was never any offer of solutions. It felt like a never-ending cycle of ‘not enough rain, not enough chores being done, not enough bookkeeping tended to, not enough tidying up, not enough of anything’. I felt I was simply ‘not enough’ for those men around me, and with the tendency in me to want to keep everybody happy, no matter how much I gave . . . it was never enough.

  To keep myself going emotionally, I would set off at dawn, iPod ear buds jammed in my ears, jogging in the glistening bushland with my dogs at my heels before the kids were awake. The rhythm of my steps on rough terrain set a background tempo to Esther and Jerry Hicks’ The Law of Attraction that played as an audio book.

  With the sun rising over the bushland I began to see I had a power deep within me that I had dimmed due to my childhood programmed beliefs. I saw how I diminished myself to make those around me feel comfortable and in the process enabled them to never truly respect me.

  On those runs I was becoming a woman starting to shake off her chains of self-bondage, and I began to discover those slow changes didn’t sit well with those around me.

  I could now see that despite the glorious children that trundled around us, despite the free-range-egg-and-bacon pies I cooked, or home-grown farm-fresh meals I’d set down on the table, or the wool clip I’d just classed and sent to market, or the cattle I’d just drafted, or the bestseller I’d just released crediting my husband for his support, or the way I’d try to make myself feel attractive with my post-baby body for him, I felt I could never make him happy. Nor did my efforts seem to ease my father’s, or father-in-law’s, focus on what was ‘wrong’. I began to feel like I was losing myself. At the time, I was reading theories in quantum physics that our belief systems actually alter our very own biology within our bodies. It explained why I was getting so sick frequently. While a tiny seedling of a new way of thinking, believing and being was beginning to sprout inside me, outside of me everything seemed to be drought-dead. I was a woman, a mother, hungry for care.

  In these sorts of times, the support of other rural women is crucial and, thankfully, never far away. Whilst my husband was away from the farm teaching, I employed my neighbour Maureen to help me with the domestics so I could continue my vocation of being both a novelist and a farmer. Sally across the road was always there with something delish to eat. Just over the boundary fenceline there was my champion Lu, along with her stablehand girls Steph, Sexy Sal or Ange-flange ready for a laugh. A few ks up the dirt road there was another cluster of good, fun women.

  But I was still at a loss as to how to ‘fix’ things for my family on the farm. When my neighbour Janice McConnon called to say she had secured some funding through Natural Resource Management South (NRM South) to bring some guest speakers to the Runnymede Cricket Club I slumped with the weight of obligation to support community events. The cricket ground was basically a paddock with a brick shed in one corner and surrounded by a gloomy, ominous plantation of blue gums in dark rows on what was once a farm. I wondered what on earth a guest speaker could do to help a district as desolate as ours? It would be easier to just stay home.

  We’d already had Lee Kernaghan blow in with the dust to the Woodsdale Footy Club to sing from the tray of a truck and give us some respite from the roundabout conversations and despair about no rain. That gentle, beautiful man in a big black hat gave us not only his time and kindness, but also the generosity of his signature, taking up a thick texta and signing hats, CDs and also the bonnet of a ute. He even, upon request, signed ‘Mattress’ Bourke’s Jack Russell, the little dog delighting in all the fuss. Now, here was Janice again imploring me to come to yet another ‘depression drought-buster’ night, and out of sheer exhaustion I wanted to say no to her.

  She’s a beautiful woman, Janice. A stalwart of the community, who not only works on the farm beside her husband and two kids, but dives into the farm kitchen to provide meals, cups of soothing tea and cheer to all. She’s also a master networker on behalf of the community and a practised diplomat – something needed in a small district like ours! She’s the sort of lady who could run BHP and a small country with one hand tied behind her back, whilst moving a mob of sheep at the same time. At community events Janice glides gracefully into a room like a ship with full sails and even in dusty farm clobber looks regal yet kindly, like a good queen who leads others to achieve feats they never thought possible.

  Janice was responsible for bringing the Bendigo Community Bank to our nearest town, and the profits from that bank have been channelled back to us locally. She’d been working with me tirelessly to protect and preserve the Levendale Primary School, which yet again faced threat of closure. I am sure, to this day, it was Janice’s heavenly sponge cak
e that convinced the man in the suit from the Education Department to keep the heart of the community beating for just a few more years.

  And so it came to pass that I found myself a week or so later mustering the energy to walk into the fluoro-lit, beer-stained carpeted club rooms to listen to guest speakers I’d never heard of. Little did I know my entire life was about to change that night. I was about to find Australia’s knight in shining farm boots. A man who could give me, and many others, the answers I was desperately searching for about our soils and farming methods. A man who has since given me heart and hope, not just about our district that was dying, but about the future of the entire planet.

  That man is Colin Seis, a farmer who lives about 20 kilometres north of Gulgong in New South Wales. If you don’t know where Gulgong is, think Mudgee. If you don’t know where Mudgee is, think over four hours’ drive north-west of Sydney. If you don’t know where Sydney is, I can’t help you.

  Col had come to Tasmania at a time when it felt to me as if we were at war. Our culture and our environment were under attack. The school was in the last death throes after strangulation via city-based people-politics and policies, and our community was feeling threadbare due to the exodus of farming families from the area. This had been caused by government-supported tree companies, propped up by superannuation-fund investors, that were buying up the family farms and moving already depleted and depressed people out. It had fenced us into a future of low population, and a district that no longer grew food. Choppers were spraying atrazine, the European Union-banned chemical, from the air over our roofs where our drinking water was collected, and over my clothesline where my toddlers’ clothes would hang. Superannuation-funded dozers were clearing native bushland in creeks and waterways to make way for the rows of monoculture trees because the government passed legislation to make it possible to do so.