Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  In the corner of the room I had unrolled our swags not too far from the broken wood fire that seemed more like a black icy cave than a heater. I nestled myself into a big floppy beanbag a friend had lent me. Beneath my double-socked feet was a red shag-pile rug. It was Austin Powers-awful. We’d bought it from one of those cheap plastic furniture stores for one of those dreadful party plan ‘adult toy’ parties my friend had been conned into hosting for the local ladies. Deciding to make the most of the fact she was committed, it turned out to be a riot of a night – country women who normally behaved when the men were about were given the green light to become girlish again. The dance moves of the Levendale ladies on that shag-pile rug was something to behold. I got good mileage out of that rug and the party, finding the first scene to my novel The Farmer’s Wife. Amusingly, and tragically, that tacky rug was to be the first piece of decor to set down on the floor of the Heavenly Hill. I was yet to be brave enough to venture back to my home to claim my lovely woollen Turkish kilims I’d splurged on when backpacking. The house sat above a steep bank of young wattles to one side of it and I remember thinking, If this house ever burns down, I won’t lose much. Forever reaching for the positive.

  In the first year the kids shared a postage-stamp-sized room filled with bunk beds, and I crammed my clutter of papers, books and clippings into the second slightly larger bedroom, along with my computer and clothes. On the long dark nights that I experienced in that room, with my small people coming to me in the dead of night for reassuring mummy-cuddles, I wondered if I would ever feel at home in that place. As the days rolled into months, I would drive past the farm and see my brother, my nephews and my dad out cutting wood in the paddocks with my ex-husband. On weekends, when the kids visited, I would catch glimpses of my own children in the stockyards with their father and my biological tribe while I rolled on by, alone. It was as if I was a ghost in my own life.

  Why, if I’d been such a good girl and good wife, hadn’t I found my happily ever after? Childhood memories flashed again. I remember driving out to Runnymede weekly when I was really little. Dad used to point to derelict huts in lonesome paddocks that we passed and say, ‘That’s going to be your house when you grow up. The little house on the hill.’

  I was so young at the time, I had no idea he was simply teasing. I would look in horror to the windowless, haunted dwellings with falling boards, sagging roofs and an air of poverty and desperation, and wonder if what he said was really true. I tried to imagine that I’d fix them up and put flowers at the front door and pretty curtains, make the best of it, but I was internally devastated. Did I really have to live there – in a cold little house on the hill? So now, as an adult, as I bunkered down into another night of numb madness alone on that hill, and I listened to the wind blowing off the powder-snow top of Brown Mountain and its fierce frostiness curling up and under the gap between the bare roof and the ceiling, I saw his prediction had come true. I would hug my knees to my chest and pull the doona over my head, realising in shock that here I was . . . in ‘the little house on the hill’. All alone. Had I created this out of my very own fears?

  It wasn’t until I found another lifesaving stepping stone in the form of Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ book Women Who Run with the Wolves that I realised the depth of wisdom for women that has been edited out of fairytales. It is via stories that we form our identity and psyche. In my childhood, girls only had the pared back versions of the original women’s wisdom held within stories. I’d been raised thinking we had to find a prince so we could live happily ever after. That was until life taught me otherwise and Clarissa Pinkola Estés showed me the depth of meaning in ancient tales aimed at women living a fully realised life.

  I was not all alone. As I began to heal, I realised the experiences I was living through were cracking me open to be a better person, and it was my life’s mission to stop the patterns of self-destruction, self-denial and fear. I could become a person who no longer had to believe what she’d been told as a child. I didn’t even have to believe the biblical quotes from the Testament of John that an in-law had once shouted at me, that ‘women were to obey and serve’. I came to see that the greatest challenges we face are our greatest opportunities.

  Looking back, I think I understand why houses are so highly rated by our family. When my dad was a boy it was his job to feed his father’s hunting and stockwork dogs. Not a big chore for a lad, you would think, but when your father makes his money from sheep work, hunting and the fur trade – particularly rabbits – and there are forty dogs chained up in a row beneath broody pine trees, I can see how it might put you off dogs. Maybe that’s why, no matter how much I begged, we were never allowed a dog. I could also see how my dad had been packed into a tiny weatherboard house during the Depression era that was not much bigger than a dog kennel itself. That tumbling family of eight kids, made up of five tear-about boys and three cheeky girls, lived on the chilly, windswept fringes of the township of Campbell Town in the heart of the Tasmanian midlands.

  No wonder when he grew up Dad would want a larger house with no boards to paint or dogs to chuck hunks of meat at and lug water to. He didn’t see the sea until he was eight years old, so of course he would be a person who wished for sea views from his chosen adult abode. Ours weren’t rambling homes suitable for several dogs and many children and a menagerie of pets. They were tidy places of restraint. As kids, we were allowed one cat, Greebly, a long-haired lady marked like a black-and-white border collie. When I was little she was my constant focus. Poor cat. I would pretend she was a dog and try to teach her to walk on a lead and convince her to sit on command. It never worked.

  As a very young child, I remember my mother crying with exhaustion at the front door of our first house after hauling our heavy old-fashioned metal pram up the shin-scraping dog-legging treacherously steep steps, the groceries bursting from the bottoms of brown paper bags dumped on the door mat, and us kids and the cat yowling around her legs. It was not an easy house for a new mum of two kids born eighteen months apart. But it was a sensible house, as it was near Dad’s work as a part-time law lecturer at the university and was a place to live whilst he climbed the ladder towards partnership in ye olde Hobart law firm. When it came time, he knew the house would sell well and that would bring more security for us.

  When I was about eleven my father chose our second house, again for investment reasons. In this house I recall my mum crying about more steep stairs and the repeated drain of energy that they presented. Again she stood at the top of sharp steps, amidst the tearing collapse of plastic shopping bags. On days like this she exposed her longing for a sunny courtyard on flat ground. And I continued my longing for a dog. But Dad was only doing his best for us. I guess for someone like Dad, who was witness to his own stern father being the centre of the family wheel, with everyone else revolving around the man’s every want and need, he knew no other way. Mum’s job, even though she was a smart cookie, buried under the expectations of the era, was to keep peace and equilibrium, so we were silenced over and over. I sometimes think that’s why I became a writer – because I had no voice. I can understand Dad’s love – it was shown through money and security, and based on old principles that he was the provider. It came from the right place of guidance on his compass of living. Who was I to question it? I’d never known the hard slog of Depression-era living that my father did. I had been given a life of privilege from a fiscal perspective, so I had the luxury of being more dreamy about future places to live – places that allow you space to share with animals, plants, trees and people.

  Around the time I reached my teenage years and we moved from our bush-surrounded weatherboard house near the university to a growing suburb on the steep slopes above the prestigious suburb Sandy Bay, I began at an ivy-covered private all girls’ school. It was a shock on all fronts. My childhood imaginary dogs and horses fell away, as did my dream I could live a life like my farming cousins at St Marys. Even when I was as young as six, clambering over the hay bal
es with my cousins, I knew I belonged on a farm – not in a city. As a sensitive being linked so solidly to the earth beneath me and the trees that were my childhood companions, the move to an even more urban house and an alien school shocked me. I was an esoteric, ethereal child who saw fairies and spoke to beings unseen. At our old house near the uni, the apricot tree where we played was more home for me than the dark bedroom I feared due to its dank, shadowy energy. I was an ‘energy’ reader even back then.

  The way I saw it, Dad had moved us all to a new house with the coldest of energies, which I only saw for the first time after the deal was done. My dreams of living where there were paddocks for horses and room for sheep and cattle and a dog or two was not on my parents’ agenda. I can see now that at the time, both of them must have wanted to escape their rural roots and make a better life for themselves in a well-connected suburb. The farm Dad wanted to own one day was to be a gentleman’s hobby. Not the hard yakka his father endured as a farm labourer. His heart, as they say, was in the right place and really, at the end of the day, how lucky we were to have a house, even though it was a corpse-grey structure that was 1970s-ugly. Even the blooming roses, which rectangled in straight-edged garden beds around the compact sloping lawn, couldn’t make that house look any better to me. It was constructed with bland concrete-tone bricks stacked in a boxy shape and with blank aluminum windows that faced the sweeping Derwent River far below. When opened, the windows would yawn with the ho-hum of the city commuters on their way to work, livened only with the occasional blast from a moaning boat horn on the river.

  The wind on that hillside that hit, icy from the domination of the giant Mount Wellington (yet to reclaim its original name of kunanyi), was sometimes terrifying and shook the windows violently. Inside, bright yellow carpet, elaborate silver light fittings and a bidet, in which my brother and I found much amusement, spoke of the previous Italian owners’ tastes, as did the sweeping expanse of the concrete driveway, which was perfect for my daggy 1980s hobby of rollerskating. Even when the house was filled with the remnants of my mother’s farming origins in the form of antique country furniture from her mother’s farmhouses, the place still had a raw unimaginativeness to it. A coldness. I thought the one thing that could make life feel more comfortable in that house was a dog. I could walk him on the stretch of beach that shouldered the moody waters of the Derwent River, or have him sleep at the foot of my bed at night. He would be there to talk to and, above all, like Lassie or Rin Tin Tin, he could rescue me after unhappy days at high school.

  But a dog was not to be. As a budding teenager with the country in my veins and rampant creativity stymied by sub­urban living and a regimented private-school routine, my refuge was a vacant paddock over the back fence that had baths for water troughs, along with two lethargic bay horses. Ex-pacers or racers, I suspect. Poor ugly angled things with drooping lips, dull eyes and scarred hides. I don’t remember the owners ever doing anything with them, but I do remember the paddocks beside the house more than the house itself. We hadn’t been there long when the horses were removed. The dozers came, roads were rammed and steamed onto the earth with a finality, and houses were stacked up in rows, and whoever owned the land stashed money in their bank to spend on more soil coverage elsewhere. Where once a family of plovers had raised their chicks and wallabies had grazed was now premium-priced suburbia. Within a few years of our moving, houses soon stretched across the gully below us and climbed up the hill. Dad’s prediction about his asset gaining value had been correct. As the land was smothered with concrete, so too was my inner being. Country life was in my blood and I felt trapped and alone, coming alive only when I went to my aunt’s farm in school holidays or heading off in the bush at Runnymede every weekend with my friend, the granddaughter of the investor farmer.

  In my dreamscape as a child I saw myself in a white farm cottage with an elegantly curved and slightly rusted tin roof, the delicacy of lace-like peeling paint on old boards and rambling roses over lichen-covered lattice amidst the dapple of eucalyptus trees. Team my dream house with paddocks, bushland views and a couple of working dogs dozing on a split-board wooden verandah, a friendly fire pit in the garden, and my life would be complete. It was odd that when I was in my early teens and Dad bought the 800-acre farm, at its heart nestled a little old white cottage that was similar to my dream home. I set my sights on it when I was older, and as a teenager who loved art, painted it in thick oils onto a firm canvas. As I shadowed the verandah uprights with a grey paint and scratched in the limbs of the trees that flanked the house with the wooden end of the paintbrush, I had dreams of living there, with my horse in the adjacent paddock, grazing beneath the poplars.

  Later, when I’d done my formal studies in agriculture and journalism, then had wandered overseas, I’d drawn the farm cottage again in my travel journal. I had been in Cork, Ireland at the time, sick with a travel bug, lying on a bunk bed of a backpacker hostel. After I’d sketched the cottage from memory, I’d written to my parents flowingly and emotionally that all I wanted to do was come home to live in that cottage on the farm. I lovingly remembered the hand-split timber boards and the cute little windows that looked like kindly eyes. I didn’t mind so much that there were Tassie devils that lived under its lifting floorboards, along with mean-eyed snakes. Nor did I care that there were raucous fighting possums that skittered on the rusted tin roof at night during killer frosts. Or that the septic was not far enough from the back step of the slumping add-on kitchen to render a stench each time you walked out the door. None of that mattered. To me it was my dream house. With my artist’s eye I could see that it was one that could be crafted back to life in the most rudimentary, rustic but beautiful way with elbow grease and love. Pressed-tin ceilings with delicate designs and a dormant kitchen woodstove awaited me. I knew it was a wreck that could be lured back to life.

  But my father didn’t see it that way. The vacant house to him was a costly problem, only ever fit for renters who paid their rent with dole and dope money. The invitation for me to live there never came, and going back to the farm to start my dream of farming was never entertained. At least not until I was married. And even then, Dad steered my new husband and me into buying a solid investment of a brick house and 20 acres next to his farm. A house I made the best of and infused with love. Until I had to leave it.

  Now when I see people on the television news crying over burnt or flooded housing, I think You’ll be ok. Stuff really doesn’t matter. People and animals do. You have your life. Trust in the process of life and it will get you through. Such sudden enforced change through crisis can be the making of a person. I now know that for sure.

  Not long after moving into the Heavenly Hill the drought of 2009 broke. It rained with such savageness that the floods washed the bridge away to the house. In the darkness of the winter solstice the kids and I found ourselves lugging school bags and shopping while we balanced on one treacherous beam across still gushing waters. We would hike up to the house in the dark pretending we were on an adventure to make the best of the situation. Ironically, without much consultation or dialogue, my dad pulled in his construction crew contacts and paid to have the bridge replaced. I couldn’t help wondering whether he was building a metaphorical bridge for me.

  Today, as I write in the flystrike-green rental, I have our Heavenly Hill on the market. We three decided together that we can never go back. But for a time we did turn it into heaven. The kids and I laughed there, we hosted friends in the sunny space we created. We fixed the wood heater. We warmed our hearts. I, as a woman, fell apart up there and then pieced myself together again.

  I now envision myself in a white house, with a sunny breeze lifting curtains that reveal a view to a sky-blue sea. And in that house is the laughter of my children and the ruckus of dogs. I will be the queen of my domain, and perhaps my fictional king will become a reality and place his strong arms around me to love and protect me. Outside the house the world will be rich with the scent and sensation of Mo
ther Earth thriving. I can see it. I can feel it. I know it is on its way.

  It’s so alluring – that Aussie image of a man in a Driza-Bone coat and akubra hat astride a work-fit horse, rivulets of mountain mist dampening his steed’s sheened, muscled sides. The horse stands in silver waters tumbling over river rocks, with a backdrop swathe of twisting snow gums. Perhaps beyond that is the craggy, expansive blue-tinged mountain range and with a split-log hut on a grassy spur in the near distance. Romantic? Or is it one of our nation’s gender-biased, cultural, stereotypical clichés? And if it is, how did we arrive at it?

  One of the most influential poems that set me on the path to writing was Banjo Paterson’s ‘The Man from Snowy River’, and of course the famous movie the poem inspired. You know the one . . . where Siggy Thornton and Tom Burlinson had that oh-so-breathtaking kiss on the back of that gorgeous dun-coloured gelding. But even as I watched that film over and over as a teenager, I was concerned by what was embedded within the messages of that movie. Basically it was the guys who got to fang about on horses and chase cattle and brumbies through the scrub, while the chicks waited back at the homestead and played piano in frilly dresses. When the character of Jessica did venture out into the wilds of the mountains, her horse hit a pothole and Jessica ended up screaming on a cliff’s edge, and had to be rescued by a bloke. I remember loving the romance and visuals of the film, but mistrusting the unconscious message buried within. Why couldn’t Jessica ride the ranges and be a brilliant horsewoman, then go back to the homestead, soak in a goddess oil-scented bath, put her dress back on and make music?