Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  ‘I’ve just had to be picked up off the floor of the university!’ she had said. ‘You know that story I mentioned that complemented yours, “The Conquest of Emmie”?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said slowly.

  ‘It was written by your grandmother! Joan Wise!’

  It was as if the universe swirled around me in that moment and I felt chills of connectivity – there actually were no words for what I felt. We’d had no idea of the connection. A master at digging out literature gold, Danielle in her excavations had uncovered the story in the 1950s Bulletin magazine by the relatively unknown writer Joan Wise. She couldn’t find any biography on her when she searched archives and online, so when you live in a small city like Hobart, you simply ask around. Danielle set about quizzing her mother’s friends. One person at last said, ‘Ah, yes. Joan Wise . . . I think one of her daughters married a Hobart lawyer.’ When she heard his name, a light flashed in Danielle’s head. She knew he was my father, so as the piece of the puzzle fell into place and the picture became complete, her breath was momentarily taken. Against the odds, across time, across space, across life and death, a grandmother and her granddaughter’s stories had come together, to sit side by side together in a collection. Despite the gap of a generation, the bloodline that placed words upon the page connected, as did the strong theme of capable women in the landscape.

  I told Danielle about the box of notes and writing Auntie Susie gave me of Gran’s work, complete with that dry-cleaning receipt and sprinkling of mouse poo. Once I realised the importance of those creative threads down the family line, the box has since been taken to the University of Tasmania by Danielle to a much more respectful place than under my bed for the dogs to sleep beside and mice to rummage in.

  Through Danielle’s contacts, an emerging filmmaker called Pauline Marsh secured a grant to turn ‘The Conquest of Emmie’ into a short film. Danielle converted Gran’s story into a screenplay for her and we worked together to finesse it. Pauline was captivated by the tale because it was ahead of its time. It showcases a strong mother of one with another on the way deciding which man to marry – a love triangle about an unwed mother. Again, not the done thing for women to tell stories about in the fifties. Women in the landscape of the Australian wilds and in our oceans are powerful metaphors and my female forebears were the real deal. Not a single ‘Jessica’ amongst them.

  Joan’s daughter, Auntie Susie, still uses the expression ‘Go about your traps’, meaning go and see what you may have captured in life from the traps you have set for your future. I’ve set many traps of positivity and know in time my traps will be full of bounty. Imagination is my light that guides me, and in it I see a woman in a long skirt with dead rabbits tied about her waist, standing in high-country boggy marshes with a ruddy face and a strong stance. I see a woman astride a horse in a mountain stream shifting cattle and later boiling a billy outside a log hut. I was happy to say that woman for a time was me, living that clichéd image, with my man by my side. I got to live that dream of high-country life for a good few years with my former husband. Precious years.

  After I lost access to that life, and the hope died that we would be together forever like the old fairytales had taught me, I was a woman stripped bare. I had lost all but my children. Even my dignity was holding on by the merest thread. There was not much further for me to fall and I had no place left to go. Except to the place that told me I was a strong woman, capable of standing on my own two feet on this land . . . and that one day I would be ready to stand alongside another, but with my own self complete. To help heal, I sought out the sea. So I went with my horse (whom I’d named Archie, after my grandfather) to the east coast of Tasmania, where my grandmother must have gone when she carved her name in that rock.

  Archie came a year or so after the tragic death of my beautiful horse Dreams – the death I am yet to speak of, in an accident that has ugly barbs to people who tangle themselves in a backstory I’m not ready to tackle and prune away just yet. The thorns of those memories would cut me too much. Archie is young and beautiful. Solid. Like Dreams, he’s a buckskin. While Dreams was a soft buttery colour, Archie’s body is the strong colour of bronze with a mane and tail as dark as night. His legs are brushstroked with the same black, as if he had galloped across a night sky. I had named him Archie after my handsome farming grandfather because, as my mother reported, he was a man who was kind to his farm animals, loved his daughters and gave them a go of the rabbit trap and the rifle. And now here I was, his land-lost granddaughter seeking solace by the sea, with the memories of my grandmother in her dinghy setting off to check cray pots with him. This day, though, I wasn’t on Gran’s beach, but with my friends, a little further up the coast near the township of Swansea. Today the waves were mild, but gave enough of a crash and a boom to spark a side shy from Archie, but once over the break, a wave surged upwards and suddenly, we were swimming in the sea. Wearing just my bathers and a T-shirt, no shoes and no helmet, like the teenage girl I’d once been, I was swimming with my horse. Above us, the skies were a moody blue, hazed with bushfire smoke, and stretching before us the sea was a sulky grey in the heat of the day. Even Freycinet Peninsula hulked in the distance like a prehistoric beast, too drowsy from warmth to stand.

  With my bare thighs wrapped around the gold-gloss coat of my horse’s hide, his thin charcoal-lined ears flickering backward and forward, I felt a rush of gratitude. It was incredible to feel the power of such an animal beneath me. I was washed with joy that I had another chance to experience the absolute privilege of owning a horse like him and of earning his trust and feeling his commitment to keep us safe and swimming. I still recall his playful snorts of pleasure as the water took us and bathed us in a new life and a new way forward. We emerged from the surf, dripping wet, with silver rivulets falling onto white squelching sand.

  The glory of the moment has not faded, so when the desolation of my land-less life tries to crowd me again, I think to myself, I have my horse. And I have the sea. And I have that day, when he and I went swimming. And above all, I have my forebears out there in the stars guiding me and cheering me on as I become that woman in the landscape.

  In my writing endeavours, on the cover of my first novel Jillaroo I deliberately asked photographer Bill Bachman to take a shot of a girl riding her work-fit, mountain-bred horse with the beautiful Great Dividing Range in the background. In the photo she was to be looking down to her bloke. He had to walk. For a short time before the covers of women’s rural genre fiction reverted back to cliché and images of passive women in the landscape, I got to, in a small way, help alter the psyche of a nation when that cover hit the bookshelves. I know my Granno Joan and Granddad Archie would be proud of me. There are as many sheilas from Snowy River as there are men in our country, and there always have been. Now’s our time, girls, to pick up our reins and ride!

  As the sun rose slowly in the sky, the frozen tin on the Lemont shearing shed ticked and banged as it expanded above our heads. The ice fuzz that had covered the corrugated iron during the cracker overnight frost began to melt and drip down onto the ground. Inside, a kettle was chugging steam into the Midlands’ chill and the arriving field-day participants were writing their names on silver ‘1000-mile-an-hour tape’ to stick on woollen jumpers and jackets as name tags – farmer style. Today we were going to hear from a range of speakers about the benefits of native grassland in Tasmania’s extreme conditions, and how native grasses don’t need expensive fertilisers and can be a precious resource to farmers. The speaker line-up included our pasture-cropping guy Colin Seis, grazing guru Graeme Hand and a woman I hadn’t heard of, Annabel Walsh, from a large property in New South Wales.

  As I chatted with my farming friends, we made our cups of tea, gathered up biscuits and settled in against the morning cold on plastic chairs on the lanolin-soaked wooden floor that faced a whiteboard. Clasping the heat of the cup, I held it to my face, the steam warming my reddened nose. Despite thermal long sleeves, a thick polar fleece and
a wool-lined oilskin vest, and my feet encased in Tassie-made woollen socks and my old faithful long-top boots, I was still cold. I shivered. It was the first farmer event I’d been to since I’d moved off my old farm, and I was still finding my way on my new patch of soil and in my heart. With me always, like a shadow, was the shame that I was no longer on my farm. Because of those thoughts that played on a loop in my head, I found myself feeling awkward at social gatherings. The opening line of ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘Do you farm?’ sent my internals in a spin. Where to start on that?

  One of my main ‘shames’ was with my ego-based identity that I was no longer a ‘farmer’. Not officially. Not commercially. In my head I’d become a busted-arse single mum, rejected by her blood kin, like an ugly featherless chick thrown out of the nest. But something in me stirred and grumbled at this very pathetic portrait of self. Deep within I knew I was on a mission that was bigger than just me, and the layers of belief and bullshit I’d amassed in a lifetime needed to be peeled away if I was to continue on that inner calling. It was a mission to discover more about Mother Earth, Mother Nature – Mother herself – and to put it all into words that others could absorb and enjoy . . . and to use as leverage to change our thinking, our lives and, above all, our land. We get what we focus on, so my intention was to get more people focusing on a new road in agriculture, the topic we were gathered there to talk about on that brisk morning.

  I planned on using my newly bought 20 acres to trial what I was learning about resting pasture, managing grazing and watching what happened when the land was given time to heal. I began to see it was actually a blessing in disguise that I was no longer ‘farming’ back with ‘the boys’. Here was a chance to take all pressure off the land to make a dollar from it and see what happened. It was an experiment I could never have undertaken had I been caught in the family systems of my home farm. Today at Lemont I was hoping to put more tools in my tool kit by hearing the speakers and to weave their knowledge into my fictional works. Increasingly I was discovering a deep inner calling to help open people’s mindsets about landscape and how it functions (or fails to function) under farming practices. Since I no longer had much of a farm to showcase effective methods of the new agro-ecology methods I was learning, my beloved fiction writing was a place I was still empowered to share those ideas.

  As the introductions were made, I shifted in my seat, already looking forward to the part of the field day where we would be warming our bodies by walking pastures and inspecting native grasses, and learning to identify species under the gentle pale sunshine that was emerging from a low-slung sun. I told myself, uncomfortable as I was, it was nice to be with others. It was also lovely to notice that, because of the changes I was making within myself, I was gravitating towards an entirely new crowd of people. People who were open to listening and learning from others, but also listening and learning from the land itself. I noticed too, there was a higher percentage of women in the crowd than previous farmer gatherings I’d been to. I had read from many sources that once you begin to change within, sometimes other people in your life fall away. Since the divorce I was certainly drifting through changes in social groups.

  The clock ticked on the pale-blue wall, overseeing the bent steel down tubes of shearing stands, and the day of speaking began. I fell into a spell of awe and admiration when it was Annabel Walsh’s turn. Tall, slim and beautiful, and unquestioningly feminine, even in khaki drill shirt, denim jeans and work boots, Annabel was standing in front of us as the chairman of Stipa Native Grasses Association.

  Stipa is not an acronym. The association was named after Stipa, the most common genus of grasses, which includes spear grass. It’s a plant found all across this continent but few of us could identify it by name. The Stipa Association aims to change attitudes towards native grasses and promote them to make landscapes healthier and farms more profitable. In doing so, with green summer native grasses, it’s likely their restoration could reduce the savageness of bushfires in this land. I’d been involved in Australian agriculture all my life and yet I’d not heard of Stipa grasses. I was so conditioned in my farming education to adopt only British thinking and focus, that my knowledge of native grasses was non-existent. I’d also very rarely heard women speak in the way Annabel did. She did not reference a man when she was describing her system of farming. My mind drifted and I wondered why. Was she like me? Single? I hadn’t known at the time that she’d suffered an immense personal tragedy that had been the subject of an Australian Story episode on the ABC back in 1998. I noticed she spoke with assurance, and she used a different language from men who ‘work and manage’ land. As a woman she used language that set her up as a caretaker who learns from the land and sees it as her ‘teacher’. She also held an energy of love when she talked of her farming landscape. Her presence before me prompted a profound awakening, particularly when framed by the deep questions I’d been asking about the very masculine slant of our world and rural systems that I’d experienced.

  I’d been reading a very interesting book, Farmacology, by a family physician and nutritionist, Dr Daphne Miller, about her research and enquiry into finding healing for her patients via nutrition grown from fertile soil. In her brilliant book, Dr Miller quotes from the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Norman Borlaug, who was the man touted as being ‘the father of the Green Revolution’. During his prize acceptance speech he said, ‘With the help of our Gods and our science, we must not only increase our food supplies, but also insure them against biological and physical catastrophes.’

  When I first read this quote I felt a pulse of both amusement and frustration. Gods? Dr Borlaug was asking our ‘Gods’ to help us with farming, but there are no male gods of agriculture. They are all female goddesses. No wonder our systems since the 1970s, heavily reliant on science and manmade process, are failing us! We need to be seeking help from our goddesses. They are all female when it comes to food production – with the exception of an occasional hermaphrodite. Our yummy-mummy foodie goddesses include Greek goddess Demeter, the goddess of corn, grain and harvest, who blesses grasses and fertile land. There’s Fulla, the Norse goddess of our bounty. Chicomecoatl is the Aztec goddess of agriculture and nourishment. Our Native American Corn Mother protects our grain and harvest. Ops is the Roman protector of the harvest. Then there is Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. Set in that classic Egyptian pose, body front on, head turned sideways, is Heqet, the goddess of fertility and germination of the crops. In Australia we have our beautiful goddess Nungeena, who gives us beauty and balance in nature and was responsible for engaging the birds to resolve an insect attack on the land. Little did I know, in that icebox of a shearing shed, I was about to discover a real-life goddess of grasslands. A living, breathing representation of what can happen to land under a woman’s stewardship.

  Annabel runs an historic 30 000 hectare property called Moorna, which has grazed mainly wool sheep since about 1858. The property is downstream from the town of Wentworth in the south-west corner of New South Wales and fronts the Murray River. The original lease was over 500 000 acres and at shearing time at one point in the property’s history 150 000 sheep were dragged across the board of the busy shearing shed. Those sheep would’ve been run on the productive native grasses that grew year-round and covered the soil, capturing any rain, keeping the ground warm in winter and cool in summer. Annabel said these types of green native grasses at times didn’t even need a rain event to retain their vigour because they were able to make the most of the dewy mornings.

  However, by the time Annabel arrived at the property twenty-five years ago when she married into the Walsh family, the property could only sustain 10 000 dry sheep equivalent. She said the property’s history of continuous grazing that didn’t match rainfall, along with rabbits and increased numbers of kangaroos, meant that the vegetation composition had gone into survival mode. Annabel described the environmental degradation and corrosion of ecology as a ‘loss of natural capital’. I liked that
description. Suddenly here was a term that the more hard-arsed economic, linear-minded amongst us could understand. I find some people switch off when you talk about ‘environmental health’ but here was Annabel with a great term to switch on the mindsets of the most sceptical.

  ‘Approximately 80 per cent of the natural capital had been lost and many of the properties in the district were becoming unviable even without the wool market slump,’ Annabel said. To add to that, the effects of the Murray–Darling irrigation scheme of expanding the lake systems through damming had created a rising water table beneath the ground at Moorna. It meant that grasslands were becoming salt land before Annabel’s eyes. The official government irrigation bodies said the salt land problem would be so bad by 2025 that the land would have to be ‘retired’, bought up by the government and locked up and left! Faced with a tough choice between selling up or staying put, Annabel saw it would be up to her and her family to increase their knowledge to counter the salt problem.

  Whilst other properties were being bought to be locked up by the government, Annabel and her family set about on the most incredible journey of land regeneration. Instead of focusing on enhanced genetics, fertilisers and improved pastures as most grazing managers do, Annabel began to focus on rest and time for the land. The rotational grazing system she developed gives her ground ten months of rest before her large mobs of sheep – sometimes as many as 4000 in one mob – return to the area for two months of grazing. She’s been carrying out this style of livestock management since the mid-1990s and as a result of the dramatic changes to the landscape, she now hosts visiting scientists from around the world. The longer rest for the countryside from grazing animals means the ecosystem is now flourishing. In her words, ‘Keep your ecosystem complex and your business simple.’