Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  It wasn’t until I read Women Who Run with the Wolves that I saw the way society’s mainstream stories tend to paint women as feeble, evil, or if they are strong, they are emulating the strengths of males . . . not our own strengths that I was learning to acknowledge and embrace as gifts that come with my gender, like nurture and intuition. How many kick-boxing, pump-action shotgun women are out there blasting and karate-chopping their way to domination now in films, taking on traditional male traits? Is it a step in the right direction in empowering women – or is it unbalancing us? In rejecting our feminine traits are we also rejecting good men and peace? I wonder what legend and fairytale expert Clarissa Pinkola Estés would have to say about it.

  In the film version of The Man from Snowy River, the whole impetus of the movie’s plot was from the never-seen-on-screen character of Jessica’s mother, a woman meddling with the love of twin brothers – saucy vixen she must’ve been. The men were not held accountable for their own destructive jealousies. It was all the fault of the woman and her racehorse gift from one of the brothers that had landed them in this pickle. The movie showcased that women were not to be trusted, and when it came to the great outdoors, they were not strong or smart enough to belong on the rugged mountain beside the men. Don’t get me wrong, I love the movie, so much so that I fell for and married a man from the High Country, spent seven bliss-filled years with him in Gippsland riding droving routes to cattlemen huts and through snow country tailing a herd of cattle before we were married, and I now have beautiful children with the snow-gum bush in their blood to show for it. But the movie sat in contrast to what I knew of rural women.

  During my years in Gippsland I got to see the beauty and strength of the Treasure women, stemming back to their forebears’ matriarch, Emily Treasure. She was the woman who, unbeknownst to her husband, rode all the way (haphazardly, because she wasn’t much of a horse rider) with her son to Omeo to secure the High Country lease that the Treasure family continue to hold a connection to today. Emily became the subject of my novel The Cattleman’s Daughter, coloured by my own days spent riding behind red hides in snow-gum country with fantastic in-law women like Auntie Christa, Rhonda Treasure and cousin-in-law Lyric Anderson. My time with those gorgeous ladies allowed me to know that I was part of a clan of women who were unlikely to sit about a homestead and wait for a bloke.

  It was also here with my in-law ladies that I saw the positive impact grazing could have on a landscape. I was yet to study it in a formal way, but my woman’s intuition, guided by the other women who loved their dogs, horses, cattle and landscape as much as me, told me banning grazing from Alpine regions was a political move, rather than an environmental one. The national parks that had been locked up were a disgrace, as far as I could see, overrun with blackberries, ragwort and whatever other single dominant species comes from a lack of nutrient cycling and the required soil disturbance. It’s this disturbance that allows a variety of seeds to set, due to the stimulation by grazing animals. The cattle-grazing ban was all about political image, votes and steering attention away from the people with money who truly profited from the Alpine landscape. The government wasn’t trying to ban skiing in the posh resorts, which, in summer, when viewed from the Treasures’ grazing runs, looked like lumpy brown scars on the mountain’s face. Those same wounds were opened up year in, year out, each time the ski runs were dusted with snow, and people rushed to the mountainside hotels, bars and ski lifts. No one saw it. You had to ride to a certain ridge to get a proper view of the degradation, yet all the environmental hoo-ha had been focused on the cattlemen’s families. Families that were headed by hardy women, but who were limited in their time and energy to fight political battles that made no sense. I still miss those Treasure women and I still long for their company in their country. I now know why I related to them so much. In Tasmania I had grown up witnessing my maternal grandmother, Joan Wise, shoot a feed of rabbits with a .22-calibre rifle, and hand-fish flathead out of a tumblesome sea in a tiny dinghy that she launched fearlessly through frothing dumpers. She was a strong lady with big, square hands and broad shoulders. There was no outboard motor on her boat, just her fists on the oars and her wide back set to the horizon of the sea beyond Maria Island as she rowed.

  Once when I was a young woman, and a few years after my grandmother had died, I ventured far around the rock face of that shore and risked getting caught by tides swallowing the bases of cliffs, but something compelled me to keep going, and there on a rock I found her name carved deeply onto the face of a giant boulder. Joan. To this day I’ve never found the rock and her name carving again, and sometimes I feel I dreamed the whole thing, but I recall sitting on the huge warm seaside slab and running my fingers in the grooves of the letters, imagining what patience she must have had to set her name in stone. And what strength in her hands and heart.

  I feel to this day a synergy with her. Like me, she was a farmer and she wrote stories too. I never knew her on the farm. I only remember her life after they’d sold the land – three daughters meant the future of the farm was lost back then. Her ‘retirement home’ was a vertical-board beach shack in the bush, where we’d sump oil the boards to stop them curling from the drying sea breeze. Inside, bookshelves were packed with Australian titles like Brumby Jack Saves the Wild Bush Horses, Kings in Grass Castles, The Magic Pudding, and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. On the walls were heavy still-life oils painted by my great-uncles, along with a beautiful Mary Durack original painting of an Aboriginal boy (or girl) in a stockman’s hat. Granno told me stories of the Dreamtime and showed me layers of meaning behind the Aboriginal artwork that hung on her wall. Great slabs of bark, handpainted with dots showing serpents, rock pools and the sun – art that she’d collected herself on her travels in the 1960s to Aboriginal settlements in remote Western Australia. It was where she must’ve also gathered her Durack sisters’ collection of books and that beautiful stockman painting.

  She also had Aboriginal and Papua New Guinean artefacts she’d gathered, which my mum eventually donated to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Then there were her own manuscripts on the go, stacked beside her typewriter. The shack in which she lived held a kind of magic for me. At night native cats and quolls caught moths against the windowpane. Possums roamed the roof. Tassie devils squabbled under the floor as if gurgling blood. Magpies, noisy miner and butcherbirds ate the family offerings of chop fat and toast set out on a stump outside the kitchen window. There was the constant backdrop of waves, louder at night, and in summer, ABC cricket on the radio adding to the constant symphony of Australian living.

  Some days I was allowed to put the turntable needle on the spinning black records so we could listen to Slim Dusty or Rolf Harris. Australiana in the 1970s flooded that sun-drenched, sea-horizoned room. Anything with an Aussie flavour set my senses alive and Gran brought life to the stories, music, art and Indigenous culture she had all around her. Grandfather Archie, who had Parkinson’s disease and had suffered a stroke, would sit at the table in an old wooden swivel chair he had once used in his farm office and watch us. He was unable to speak, but still smiled through his kindly clear blue eyes at his blonde-haired brood of grandkids. With such art and literature placed under my nose at an early age – particularly by Australian women and by my own family members in the setting of a bush shack – the magic of storytelling was lit from within me, along with a deep understanding that another culture that at the time most white Tasmanians denied knew the true stories of the landscape upon which we walked.

  Years later, my Auntie Susie gave me a box of Gran’s writing. It was a mess of notes, manuscripts, letters, receipts and a dry-­cleaning slip. In it I found a story Gran had written about Grandfather Archie and how, after his stroke, he’d disappeared with a gun into the bush, worrying her sick. Her fretting did nothing to bring him back but eventually when he did return he had a rabbit for the pot. She could not be cross with him for long. Love for him was woven into that story, despite the burden of her being
his carer for what must have been many years.

  I think there’s a mistaken belief that women ‘in the old days’ had less freedom than we do now. But when I piece together the stories about the women in my family, there are no ‘Jessicas’ waiting in homesteads or on cliffs screaming to be rescued. They are out there in the bush catching game or carving their name in stone and, it seems – if family folklore has it right – claiming the men they wanted.

  I don’t know if the stories are true, because the aunts can be vague or tight-lipped about the family’s couplings, but it was rumoured my great-grannie Lizzie McDowell (my Grandfather Archie’s mum) was a good seventeen years older than the bloke she fell for. One can only assume it was such a scandal back then for a woman to take a ‘toy boy’ that after the lovers married they moved on from the family farm of Logan at Bothwell in the Tasmanian highlands to resettle on the coastal property of Fulhum, at Dunalley near the Tasman Peninsula. My Grandfather Archie was an only child, because Great-Grannie was late into her forties when she had him. Not the done thing back then, but I bet she had a wow of a time falling in love with her young man, who came from the large and prosperous Wise family who owned stone wharf factories in Hobart Town that still stand today. Their pretty white farmhouse overlooking the sea still stands too, and I’ve driven past it, longing to live there like Great-Grannie and Grandpa Wise did with their little son Archie.

  The family story goes that a generation later, Archie and Joan hooked up at the Wellington Ski Club Hut where they both enjoyed, clearly, very social cross-country skiing. Joan was the Hobart-born daughter of Coralie Annie Donnolly – Coralie was a beauty in her day with an 18-inch waist and a good set of lungs. I was told by the aunts she was a brilliant singer who once performed alongside Dame Nellie Melba, and was invited to tour with her, but Coralie’s parents wouldn’t allow it. Typical of the day. Instead Coralie married well into the large Boyd family, choosing Eric, the son of one of the commandants at Port Arthur, and the result was the birth of two boys and one girl . . . that being Joan. According to my aunts, Joan and Archie had to be quickly married within nine months before my Auntie Elizabeth arrived along with the next snow season. In Elizabeth’s album, there’s black-and-white photos of groups of the old-style skiers, rugged up in the wintry Tasmanian bush amidst powdery snow. I saw that photo recently at Elizabeth’s eightieth birthday gathering, where a collection of photographs was spread out on my cousin’s farmhouse kitchen table for all the family to see.

  There she was . . . my cradle-snatching great-grannie Lizzie, sitting in their rather rickety-looking wooden fishing boat with a few other long-skirted friends, her handsome young son Archie in their midst. I’ve been told they spent a lot of time on the water, and used to row sheep out to the tiny Green Island to graze near Dunalley. In the photograph Great-Grannie Lizzie was wearing a ladies’ hat, bowed white blouse and the long dark skirts of her day, but it was no stern formal family portrait that one normally sees from that era. What made me smile with wry understanding of my legacy was what she was doing in the picture. She has one hand on the tiller, and in the other she holds a pistol, aiming straight for the camera! Her son, Archie, is perched on the sailing boom, smiling indulgently. Elizabeth’s formally attired husband, Norfolk John Wise, stands above her, looking as if he’s trying not to be amused. Seated with them all in the boat is a younger woman raising a long-neck bottle of beer or cider. I think it is Joan, Archie’s young wife. Her head is turned so I can’t see her face, but I sure can recognise those strong hands gripping the corked bottle and enamel mug. They mirror my own hands. There was something powerful and playful about the image of those skylarking women, and remembering it has often given me fuel in my tank to keep being a strident voice for rural women, despite a society that may want to keep me stuck on a cliff edge or in a homestead wearing appropriate length frocks.

  It seems the women in our family were always ones for bucking fashion. Outside the corrugated-iron-roofed coastal shack, in the centre of a gravel turning circle, my gran had the most wonderful native garden that was netted to keep the rabbits, possums and pademelons out. She was certainly not ‘on-trend’ for the time in terms of garden style. Back then, English gardens were all the rage in Tasmania. Roses, daffodils, hawthorn hedges and granny’s bonnet filled up most Tasmanian gardens, along with neat lawns and deciduous trees that glowed in autumn when their leaves turned the colour of bronze or liquid honey. But Joan didn’t seem to care for such gardens, such was her love for all things native. Inside the shack on the tables and the fire mantel, kangaroo paws and bottlebrush sat alongside mother-of-pearl-washed half-shells of abalone that she often used as ashtrays.

  Gran was an adventurer in the outdoors. She had once braved wild seas, harnessed to a flying fox over cliff-smashing swells, just to get from the boat to Tasman Island to visit the lighthouse there. The result of the experience was a children’s book called Trapped on Tasman, which she published in 1971. She also ventured to the Sahara Desert to see a lighthouse that once guided the camel trains. Unlike Jessica, she wasn’t chasing a bloke. She was wanting to have a look about the place. Also a keen golfer, I can imagine her in her tweed skirt with pin, trudging in her fringed leather lace-ups over Tasmanian golf courses that were alive with diving magpies and snakes in the rough. During crib games, she would eyeball her opponents competitively through a haze of smoke. There were no flies on her.

  From what my mother says, Joan wasn’t a motherly mother. She sent my mum off to boarding school at six because the war years’ petrol rations meant there wasn’t enough fuel to get the three girls to and from the local school. Despite my mum’s frostiness towards her memory, it seems Joan has been my muse for all my adult writer’s life. Since her passing in 1985 when I was just finishing school, I’ve felt myself drawn into reading her work and contemplating her life. One of her books, The Silver Fish, set in the Derwent Valley, shows what life must’ve been like for her during the hop-harvesting times, when the industry thrived for the local beer-brewing companies. I’ve read that book to my own kids and it’s been wonderful to have her strong voice in their lives via her writing.

  One story, which I shall tell now, is a startling reminder to us all that we are connected by unseen threads that take us beyond the time, space and reality we think we know. Roadways don’t just take us to physical places in the here and now. These paths of connectivity can take us across the thin quicksilver divide into another realm and across time. This story is not so much eerie as ‘otherworldly’ about my Granno and me.

  I have a clever friend and colleague, Danielle Wood, whom I met in our ‘baby journalist’ days when she was a reporter for the Hobart Mercury and I was a writer for the Tasmanian Country. I remember the work pressures and how our editors were getting to us both when one day Danielle cheekily swanned into my office with her impish grin and parked her butt on my desk.

  ‘Some day we won’t have to worry about any of this,’ she said with a glorious sweep of her hand. ‘We are going to be famous novelists.’

  As the earth turned and the years passed, Danielle went on to win the prestigious Vogel prize with her novel The Alphabet of Light and Dark, set on Bruny Island, not far from Gran’s stopover, Tasman Island. Like Granno’s book, Danielle’s fiction celebrated lighthouses and Tasmanian life. I went on to write Jillaroo, which opened the door for other rural women’s manuscripts, and built a name for myself in that newly created genre. It seems Danielle’s prediction all those years earlier was correct.

  But this is where the story gets spectacularly serendipitous. Later, as a university academic, Danielle began to compile a book with Professor Ralph Crane called Deep South, which featured Tasmanian writers, past and present. She’d selected a story I’d written called ‘The Mysterious Handbag’ to go in the collection. I remember I wrote the original version at a writers’ workshop in Emerald, Queensland. I was working on ‘Planet Downs’ cattle station at the time. I had begged our head stockman, Jason, for the day off
, travelling a six-hour round trip and staying overnight for a workshop with writer Rowena Lindquist.

  As with many stories, I tapped into that vein of creativity I can’t explain and wrote a piece that brought to life my childhood pastime of tacking the skins of rabbits and the plague-proportioned brush-tailed possums on the shearing-shed walls to dry and later sell. I loved the task and it must’ve had something to do with that ol’ surly grandfather of mine on Dad’s side who once had his forty rabbiting dogs. Back then in my childhood, Tasmania still had a fur trade and an animal hide industry, which ensured all parts of the animals, including the pelts, were used. I was lucky enough to catch the tail end of that era before it died out altogether and skin processing went offshore, and the commercial harvesting of native skins ended. In discovering the story, Danielle liked the feminist voice in the piece and the ‘Tasmanian-ness’ of my reference to skinning.

  Time passed and many months later Danielle called to tell me the collection was nearly done. My story had been set right at the back because she wanted to place it alongside a story written in the 1950s that she said ‘complemented it’. She said the story that melded well with mine was set in the highlands of Tasmania and was about a woman fur trapper. Danielle said both had similar strong female voices. Happy that my story had made the final list out of hundreds, and not too concerned about where the story went in the collection, I hung up the phone, my ego feeling privileged I was to be included alongside some great Tasmanian writers. More time passed until one day in the farm office, the phone rang. It was Danielle, delivering astounding news.

  I remember my skin pricking with goosebumps and tears coming to my eyes involuntarily when Danielle told me.