Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  With such childhood shaping, it’s also no wonder that as a teenager I kept on with the family tradition of boozing mindlessly, without any thought of the culture that lay beneath it, let alone the harm it did me. Alcohol went hand in hand with my search for male love – in all the wrong places, like pubs and the rural rumbles of Bachelor and Spinster Balls. Starting relationships on such liquid foundations only led to more lessons in life on how not to live it and how not to choose partners. It was a time of binge-drinking gone bonkers, leaving me vulnerable to male predators. In my generation date rape wasn’t ‘date rape’ – it was our own female fault for getting so trashed. Booze saturates our culture and impacts women dreadfully. It comes from a long history that takes a lot of personal unpacking to see it clearly, like an old forgotten trunk stowed away on a First Fleet voyage.

  My forebears lived in a time when Hobart ran on rum currency and beer was better than water. Rough days, tough days. A place where arriving ships filled with female convicts were ambushed by convicts and soldiers alike and a frenzy of rape occurred. The men then were probably mostly drunk, as rum was standard ration for all. During the early years of white settlement, there used to be a drink called ‘Blow ye skull-off rum’ in Hobart. I know, after tasting the homemade moonshine that my muso friends create, that the legacy of rebellious Tasmanian pride in ‘brew your own’ continues. The homemade liquid fire is the kinda stuff that warms your guts, but it tastes oh so smooooooth and it lubricates song lyrics like you wouldn’t believe.

  After divorce I discovered, as a mother at home alone with her children in a remote area, using alcohol as a prop to counter loneliness was not really an option. If I ever had to drive the kids in an emergency and I was schnozzled, I would never have forgiven myself. When the children weren’t with me, I soon learned alcohol didn’t drown the sadness I was wading through, but instead preserved it. I was pickling those inner self-damning patterns from the past like interesting gizzards in formaldehyde sealed in a jar. With each sip I was beginning to sense a conflict in me. Teamed with booze, I knew I would keep repeating the same mistakes with men, disastrously.

  It wasn’t until after my one and only failed volatile relationship post-divorce, with a man who loved the bottle more than me, that I was prompted to read a few books by British author Allan Carr on addiction, to help me understand the alcohol trap. I realised how weird it is that in our culture we celebrate and use alcohol as a kind of lubrication to courtship, and that alcohol is the same stuff we use to swab wounds and kill germs. No matter how much advertising using sexy ladies or uber-chic bars to enhance the glamour of our fancy wine or spirits, at its core, the stuff of alcohol ruins lives and, bottom line, is a poison. And yet here I am with my stubbie-holder collection, looking forward to a hot Friday arvo where I can share a beer with a buddy or drink a wine with a friend by the fire after a winter’s ride on my horse. Drinking together is part of the weft and weave that gives rural living its richness. When there’s bushfire, the pain of the flames is doused with beer. When there’s floods, it’s the dry space of the pub where folks gather. When there’s a drought, there may be no water in your stock dams, but the community club fridge always holds a liquid refreshment for those parched spirits and a place to whet your whistle. Every single big ‘woo-hoo!’ moment in my life, be it a Tim McGraw country music concert with my wild country gal pals to a bush wedding, has been framed by alcohol. It brings joy. It brings devastation. It is part of life.

  In the village where I now live, there’s always Friday-night happy hour. The volunteer firemen gather for a beer and pass the helmet around for a few gold coins in exchange for a ticket in a meat tray or chook raffle. It’s traditional Aussie local community volunteer activity like this that makes my heart sing as I chuck my coins into the mix. But here in our town, more and more, the hills are planted out with rows of vines and we can look upon them romantically as if we exist in a transplanted version of France or Italy. How sophisticated! Or is it a waste of food-producing resources like land and water? Shouldn’t we grow vegies instead on such ground, or do we keep expanding our posh poison plots in the same way we are growing more and more sugar in the north of Australia in giant irrigation schemes just when the world is waking up to the fact that we don’t need more of that kind of foodstuff?

  In our town, vegies are less glamorous than growing grapes for boutique wine and so is left to the local hardworking Hmong community to sell at the Saturday market, or greens are grown commercially on great swathes of exposed, pummelled soil for the big players like Coles and Woolies. Wine growing is oft times reserved for the sophisticates and the ones who can afford the land on tourist trails. Don’t get me wrong, I like the occasional stop-off at a vineyard on a sunny day, but it sits at odds with me due to my upbringing and the unstable ground I set beneath my feet from toasting both joy and misery in my life with a glass.

  Even my author image is founded on ‘Bundy Chick’ and I have the stickers on my ute to prove it. That’s a drink that adds caffeine and sugar to alcohol. Yet in my younger days I worshipped ‘the square bear’ and had a giant cardboard cut-out of him, which moved house with me each time I found another place to adventure to. Nowadays I’ve noticed beer and cider are climbing the ladder into the sophisticates’ world. Labelled ‘craft’, boutique beer and cider are all the rage in Hobart Town, along with whiskey and gin distilleries – history repeats. Recently when I was writing in a coffee shop, again waiting for the school pick-up, I found myself ‘mature-lady perving’ on the good-looking young men with trendy beards and carrying computer man-bags. They were out and about promoting their artisan brewing and looking so eye-catchingly cool. Surely boutique beer – although in my book a little bit wanky as well as swanky – is a healthier option than that which is produced by giant beer companies that pump out amber fluid like petrol to be sold by the carton beside service stations? Isn’t celebrating crafted-and-cared-for booze a good thing? And surely carefully created whiskey is a better option, ahead of the lolly-water laced with rocket fuel sold at chain-store liquor outlets to kiddies? Isn’t it? I don’t know. I’m asking you.

  We identify ourselves and our class by what we drink, and given that my upbringing had one boot on workman’s ground on Dad’s family’s side and the other lady shoe on grazier grasses from my mum’s farming side, I never know what to drink, or even if I want to drink at all.

  Trying to avoid our culture of booze and betting is tricky. It’s all around us. My son, heavily into sport, was as young as six when he began clicking onto the web to find the footy scores. There, flashing live and large were bottles of beer and ads for betting. I started his education about advertising then and there! All around us, advertisers program our children to see it as normal to drink, bet, consume and not question. I was influenced as a child too, back when cigarettes were chic. I remember being eleven years old and having a crush on the Marlborough Man. Who wouldn’t love a cowboy, even if he had a stinky habit like smoking, so long as he had a horse and a range to ride?

  Recently I took myself off to The Falls music festival on the rolling seaside hills of Marion Bay to see how that kind of crowd rolls there compared to the paddock festivals I know and love so well at rural events, like ute musters and cattlemen’s get-togethers. Back when I was going to Bachelor and Spinster Balls in the late eighties and nineties, if the partygoers caught someone smoking marijuana or taking drugs, there was a rumble of disquiet, often a fight, followed by an undignified eviction of the drug takers. It was a country law not imposed by security or police, but by the rural party people themselves. Rural folk having good clean fun on rum. You could get soaked from the inside of your liver out to your boots on booze and you’d be a living legend, but if you took illegal drugs, you were an outcast and labelled a loser.

  Now ‘doof doof’ drugs that go with ‘doof doof’ music have spread to regional areas. They are rife in our culture. As I sat in the traffic jam in the paddock lined with gumtree-log lanes at the entrance to Fall
s, I hoped I would be proved wrong about drugs and music festivals. I noticed most of the crowd were arriving in sedans. I was used to paddock line-ups of utes. The crowd felt foreign to me. A policewoman walked past. I suddenly remembered the large bag of clover hay I had in the back of the ute. My plan was to drop it into my horse, Archie, on my way home the following day. Fresh cut from an irrigated paddock on the red soils of northern Tasmania, the hay looked green and lush, even in dried form. Would it be mistaken for something I could sell or smoke? Would I be apprehended for having the biggest bag of clover hooch ever taken into a Falls party? I never found out.

  I think, given the backlog of cars to search and my age, I was simply waved through and I never found out if my horses’ hay would be treated as a suspicious illegal substance. I mustn’t have looked like the drug-taking type . . . middle-aged mother that I am. No matter my age, I’ve never been one for drugs. The only two substances of my undoing have been lost love and liquor. Having an imagination like mine meant I’ve never needed mind-altering experiences. My mind, if let loose to wander, is constantly in an altered state, lost in the depths of my creative daydreaming and philosophising, when I’m supposed to be watching the clock and getting kids to school.

  At the festival, as I ‘set up camp’, which involved the very simple act of rolling out my swag in the back of the ute, I passed a car, all four doors flung open and cops all over it. A sniffer dog, looking proud of itself, sat beside the car, wagging its beagle tail, hoping for another drug-bust treat. I looked at the young man talking to the policewoman and I wondered why people risked getting arrested in a bid to get high. With tablets that may result in death? I couldn’t understand it. To me, with nature all around, the sea vista along with a sea of summer grasses and bush-covered hills, surely this place was enough to get high on? Marion Bay is spectacular. The festival village is set above a white crescent beach, and today a perfect turquoise and azure sea was greeting us. Just looking at it told me that life, if you let it, is spectacular. How greedy we humans are. We want more and more of everything when what is about us and within us is really enough.

  After heading into the crowd and hearing some of the bands I thought I might need some drugs after all to help me cope with the music. Surely it must’ve been assaulting the wildlife around me too? Discord and doof. Each to their own, I thought, as I watched privileged teens walking over paddocks in their cool-dude get-ups. Did they notice the docked lambs’ tails that lay in the paddocks? Or the cow dung on grazed pastures over which they walked? Did they spare a second of thought for what goes on here eleven months of the year? I wondered if there were feminine struggles and self-esteem issues present in the girls of fourteen who sauntered along the path to the beach. What was it like to be female in this day and age for them? These young, fortunate festival-goers were generally people who had never known what it’s like to lack food or experience life without technology.

  At the food section of the festival, there weren’t just burgers, hot chips and dagwood dogs on offer. This crowd was far too sophisticated for that. Instead there were food choices for the educated and the ethical. I ordered thyme-roasted vegie haloumi salad with chimichurri and cumin yoghurt on cyprus pita. Really! In the middle of a paddock that had now been cultivated as lawn! I was used to farmer-clearing-sale fare of sausage in bread. Tomato sauce if you were lucky and onions if you wanted to be flash. At the bar I discovered, gobsmacked, there was no Bundy. Were country-person beverages really that uncool? As I sat on the watered lawn amidst bushland to eat my fancy food, and drink my cappuccino, I realised few of the fly-ins would know that there was a drought in Tasmania, and that recently the township of Dunalley not far along the coast from the festival site had been razed by bushfires. For the next couple of days, the biggest crisis for the festival-goers would be having to walk a long way to get your mobile phone charged at the Telstra stations, or walking hungover to the beach.

  When I went in search of the waves I heard complaints about the time it took to get to the beach. As I travelled over beautiful saline wetlands, on boarded pathways in a conga line of people, I studied the plants and the story of the management the landscape told me. I caught snippets of conversations, saw people by the thousands. Beside the dunes I watched girls drain tanks of fresh drinking water just to rinse their hair and wash the sand from their pretty feet.

  This was a cushy, cushy festival for people who led cushy, cushy lives. Myself included. Since leaving the farm, I’ve never known life to be this empty of hard labour . . . so physically easy. Mentally for me it’s been hard, but I feel myself and even my physical body softening with every pass of a full moon into a person I am not. I love bush life and hard labour. My body likes it. It must be in my DNA. Without hills to walk and livestock to check, I was turning into a blob. The festival found me missing my farm and the connection to the deep realities of life’s cycles with an ache. I would rather have been riding a horse or moving sheep over the paddocks than sitting on a lawn in the midst of the bush drinking a cappuccino and eating a thyme-roasted vegie haloumi salad with chimichurri and cumin yoghurt on cyprus pita. At this pristine, beautiful festival realities were masked. Which, I guess, is the point.

  Even the long-drop toilets were something palatial, with tubs to wash one’s hands in with hand-pump soaps! I was supremely impressed, after years of going to the Tassie Mountain Cattleman’s where you did your biz in a bottomless bucket above a shovel-dug pit, behind a wall of tin with a sheet of black plastic weighed down with a length of wood as a door so you got a bit of privacy. We bushies at our bush events take a bit of pride in roughing it. Not so at the doof doof festivals. It was luxury all round. But good on them. You would need good dunnies with the amount of dhal and lentils that were on offer, washed down with elegant wines.

  I noticed the elaborate tents and camping setups too. ‘Glamping’, as my friends call it, in reference to glamour and camping. There was not a single fat aerial in sight on a big bull-barred ute, nor a blue singlet or akubra. Not one of Lee Kernaghan’s dirt-road songs was blaring from ute speakers, like they do in a country crowd. There was an absence of Aussie-as whip-cracking by keen girls and boys, and no proud dads in black hats, who had done the prams up as trucks or utes with grinning country kids in them. The bush culture was absent from the bush at this Falls festival, with city imports landing on paddocks and looking like Dr Who had vortexed them here from the inner bars of cities. As a rural person, it was a culture I didn’t recognise, but at least there was colour here. In dress, in music, in dance. As the sun sank and I met some local farmer friends who were volunteer firefighters, we settled in to people-watch and enjoy the slow turn of the earth to music that began to at last wrap me in a desire to dance. The Falls Festival was a peaceful celebration of life, of creativity and the beautiful landscape in which we live, and by day two, like a culture-shocked tourist, I’d adjusted. I found things to love about it.

  In contrast, on my last book tour I got to see the homogenised, concreted, oh-so-bland version of Australia. I spent the bulk of my travels heading to shopping centres and the bookstores buried within major retail chains. It got to the point I could barely tell which town I was in. Give me a sophisticated Falls crowd any day ahead of hypnotised shoppers and globalised selling centres. A shopping mall in regional Victoria was very similar to the ones in Western Australia, which were similar to the ones in South Australia, which were similar to the ones in my home state. When I enter those places, I find myself cowering from the weird lighting and mind-numbing consumer rush. As I make rare mad dashes into those sorts of stores to grab mundane things like school socks for my children I find myself saying to them too loudly, ‘How can the world sustain this? This is a nightmare! Are people mad? Look at them all shopping, like it’s the new religion! Do people realise they’ve been brainwashed and we don’t need all this stuff?’ Poor kids. They just needed socks and were probably hoping their mother would stay long enough to get them a Boost Juice.

  Anothe
r unravelling and homogenising of Aussie culture has been the beautiful country and inner-city pubs that have been undone with pokies money. Horrible carpets, awful lighting and dreadful energies. At least at the Deni Ute Muster you can drink your beer and toast a sunset, even if you have to lift your eyes beyond the XXXX girls who stand about in their skimpy clothes promoting beer and misogyny. The blokes there certainly don’t notice the sunset. In my days of early motherhood, when my body was not my own and my husband’s attentions had gone AWOL, I remember bitterly calling the scantily clad Bundy promotional girls at a cattlemen’s event ‘prostitutes without the fuck’. I was not so much offended by their choice to get paid for looking bare and beautiful, but angry with society and the leering men around them, who most likely had wives, mothers of their own children, or girlfriends who deserved honouring. I was drunk at the time and not proud of myself for the outburst. Poor Bundy girls. But something comes undone in a woman when she has gifted her body to a man to bear his children, only to find he is hungry for the manufactured image of women, and not the reality of the one standing before him, who is battle-scarred and bloodied by birth. It seemed to me society made mothers invisible and irrelevant, while marketers steered our culture towards celebrating mindless, young and sexy.

  A turning point for me came when I found Buddha. Literally. Well, at least I found a Buddha. He was at Agfest, our three-day Tasmanian rural festival of which I was patron of at the time. I’d been going to Agfest every year for almost a decade, at first as a support to my dog education friend Paul Macphail, then later with my own pups to demo and sell, then later still, with novels to my name. The year I found Buddha, our tent was next to a garden ornament site. You know the sort . . . concrete bird baths, griffins, cast iron archways, tinkling stone fountains. Over the three mornings that I’d been arriving at Agfest, I’d look into the garden ornament stall, and give my greeting to a little grey concrete Buddha, sitting cross-legged and smiling with his eyes shut. Palms pressed together. A serene little bloke.