Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  ‘Good morning, Buddha,’ I would call to him, before setting up shop.

  On the last day, I saw the Buddha again. Suddenly I had an overwhelming feeling that he had to come home with me. On a limited budget in divorce-recovery mode, I couldn’t justify buying a useless ornament, but something in me had to take my little friend home. I sat the Buddha on the front seat of my ute, putting his seatbelt on. I laughed at the idea. Buddha riding shotgun home with me. Inside I felt at the time I needed Divine protection. It was dusk and I had a three-hour drive home, with some winding dirt and kangaroo-lined roads to get through. After three full days of giving my all to my lovely readers who come to say hello at Agfest, but nursing a broken heart, I needed a buddy. As I went to drive off I saw some funny clown had put a can of Bundy and Cola on Buddha’s lap. So there I was sitting with this irony beside me.

  It made me think of a stopover in Bangkok where the kids and I found the teachings of Buddha in a book in the bedside drawer of our hotel. In the front of it, printed on the crackling thin pages, were instructions on ‘How to become a Buddhist’. As my young children wallowed in their bath, I sat on the edge and read them the dot points on what we had to do to become Buddhist. I could do kindness, I could do forgiveness, but one of the other undertakings was to give up alcohol. I remember pausing, wrestling with something within, then shutting the book and thinking, Mummy’s in trouble there, kids. Culturally, letting go of alcohol was something I struggled with. But I did not want my kids growing up like me, thinking that each dinner had to be hosted by the biggest star of the family . . . the bottle of wine on the table.

  My little stone Buddha friend from Agfest now sits in a sun-filled bedroom below the wooden cut-out letters that spell WRITE. He still has his hands pressed together in prayer, but my little man no longer holds rum cans for me. That part of my life is over now. The manmade religion of idolising booze and instilling the obedience of women has no place under my roof. And the stars of the show at dinner time are my children, home-grown food and our gratitude for life. I have set down the long-held generational tradition of the bottle and now have both hands free in which to hold my children.

  Vividly I remember how the world around me swirled as we drove from the hospital, my tiny daughter, still hued with golden jaundice skin, in the car capsule behind me. We arrived home to the back step of boots and barking dogs, me feeling as if I’d had an out-of-body experience. I think the truth was, I had. No one had prepared me for the stormy seas of a traumatic birth . . . where I felt myself and my baby hovering between the thin veil of the living and the dead. The labour was long, the baby was trying to arrive bum first and both our energies were running low. For hour upon hour I battled to birth. I could feel myself fading, surrendering my life in a stupor of exhaustion and extreme pain, but my daughter was far more resilient than I. All of a sudden, she turned herself and was born naturally, right when I was about to be wheeled away to emergency theatre.

  With my newborn, I stepped into my home, was handed a cup of tea and gingerly propped on the couch, sitting on a rubber ring the hospital had loaned me to stop the many stitches tugging. The expression ‘ripped from arsehole to breakfast time’ took on a whole new meaning after childbirth. As I thought back to the birthing, I wondered how on earth I hadn’t seen that one coming. On the farm I’d faced birth over and over, with its bloody brutality. I’d pulled lambs from cast ewes, saving the lamb but too late for the mother. I’d seen the way crows feasted on dark placentas in paddocks and how cows strained in a futile attempt to calve a tail-first baby. Why then had I been so shocked at the blood that kept coming from my body, and the milk that arrived in such painful quantities for a baby that was too dozy from birthing drugs to drink?

  Little did I know I was on a whole new journey of understanding about what it is to be female, and animal. Someone had once said to me about babies, ‘Start how you mean to go on,’ so with determination that first day home, I had that cup of tea, then with the help of my step-mother-in-law, I strapped my tiny baby to my body in a front pack and called my working dogs to heel. It took us a while to move that mob. I was stiff, sore and bleeding and soon learned that I could no longer slip through a six-strand plain wire fence with a child strapped to me, so waddling to the gates made the job slower.

  Looking back, I wish I hadn’t been so stoic. I wish I’d nestled myself into a cocoon with my baby and had others serve me, but I had been raised so much to emulate the masculine traits of being human, I had no idea how to proceed in life embracing my feminine qualities. I’d no idea how to proceed as ‘mother’, such was the silence in our family culture on matters such as women, birthing and rearing children. I had other tough women modelling similar behaviour, so on I plodded as a new mother. Lost.

  It was years later that Fred Provenza, through his studies, helped me understand my base animal journey as ‘mother’ in feeding and teaching my young. He explained that the ‘mother’ of almost all species has a lifelong influence on both diet selection and behaviour of her offspring.

  ‘It starts in utero,’ Fred said. ‘Flavours in mother’s amniotic fluids influence the flavours chosen after birth. Flavours that are in mother’s milk influence food choices. Also, there’s mother as a model. All are hugely important.’

  Fred went on to talk about a field of study that I’ve been fascinated in for a number of years after discovering the work of stem cell biologist Dr Bruce Lipton. The area of science is called epigenetics, where scientists discovered gene codes are not fixed as previously thought, but can be modified.

  ‘What we’re learning,’ Fred said, ‘is that genes are being switched on and off early in life to create new relationships with changing environments.’

  Fred’s conclusion is that it’s not nature versus nurture. It’s both those things all the time.

  As a farmer I had watched merino mothers closely and saw how different they were within the group. Some mums would stomp the ground and defend their newborn lambs with a brave defiance. Others would turn, in a sea of hormonal upheaval, and no matter how gentle and respectful I kept my arced distant passing of them in the paddock, with my dog close and my eyes averted, the mother would abandon her lamb and take off, tail-end bloody, placenta dragging. She would momentarily scram from her lamb in a fog of panic.

  I saw the variation in the behaviour of cows too. Some were attentive mothers; others were not. Those crazy cows were often culled from the herd, because they would often produce crazy calves.

  In all the species, though, there was a clear pattern that the young would watch and mimic the adults. When the cattle found their way unexpectedly over a fence, compliments of a fallen tree, I would observe how the mothers would browse excitedly on the banquet of varied vegetation that was not available in the paddock. With gentle patience they ensured their calves were at their flanks, watching their every move, despite their excitement of their newfound browsing freedoms. When the sheep got in my garden I would leave them there awhile and watch the way they went from plant to plant, tree to tree, bush to bush. A nibble here, a nibble there, the lambs at foot watching, imitating, following.

  When we were breeding horses I would make sure I put the mare and her foal in the bush runs for a while, so the mare could teach her baby to cross creeks without panic and snatch up tussocks, a few wattle leaves and native grasses. The foal, behind his mother, would navigate his way over uneven ground, low wattles dragging on their backs – all familiarisation for when the babies were ridden out in the bush later in life, and for developing a palate for rougher sorts of plants. So often horses are fed luxury feed mixes and sweet hay, ahead of what they really need, which is bulky dry matter and natural variety. Instinctively, too, I knew the mothers needed a broader environment than just the bland square manmade paddock to teach their young about the environ­ment they would have to one day navigate under saddle.

  After observing so many mothers of other species, when my first child arrived I saw how the natural instinct of
motherhood fundamentally changed me forever. It was my turn to become that defiant mother, stomping her front hoof, turning to face dangers. Once, on a misty early morning back at the family farm, I was breastfeeding my baby on the couch. I saw out the front window of our lounge room a four-wheel drive pull up in the white haze. A man got out and, carrying a gun, climbed through the roadside fence. At the time, we had a big herd of wild deer that grazed above our house and I knew he was out to stalk one. It wasn’t deer season, he had no permission from us, and yet there he was in my front paddock. My nostrils flared. My foot stomped. Without thinking and with a growl in my throat, I bundled up my baby, put her in the ute’s baby capsule and revved my still-cold diesel engine hard around the road to warn the stranger away.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, as I braked beside him and got out, ‘what do you think you’re doing?’ My voice had a she-wolf tone. I must’ve looked terrifying, or at least mad – hair askew in a sleep-ravaged ponytail, polar fleece over flannel pyjamas, feet shoved into dogger boots, breasts most likely still leaking milk beneath my clothing. He turned in surprise and began to walk towards me, his gun pointing down to the frosted ground, the sun, screened by mist, turning him into a shadow on a white background so I couldn’t see the expression on his face.

  ‘I spotted a few deer,’ he said, his voice a little fumbly.

  From the back of the twin-cab ute my little baby girl mewed.

  ‘I know there are deer there,’ I said as frostily as the road surface beneath my boots. ‘They are there most mornings. That’s my house, and I was feeding my baby.’ My words were nonsensical, and I don’t know what compelled me to roar out of my house with my baby to tell a stranger with a gun to clear out and get off my paddocks. I wasn’t angry, but I was ridiculously territorial. When I look back I realise I was gripped with what I termed ‘merino mother madness’. I was totally fearless, and in hindsight stupid, but in that moment I was bulletproof and stomping my hoof and snorting. I also now realise I didn’t call on my then-husband to protect me or the baby. It never occurred to me. He was still snoring in bed. Instead I had instinctively rushed to defend my nest and my young. Thankfully the dumbstruck man simply apologised and left.

  As I came away from that experience and watched myself in a fog of post-birth weirdness, I wanted more understanding about motherhood and Mother Nature. I paralleled my own behaviour with animals, and started to see our farming systems were far too harsh on mothers and their young. As was our society. I wanted to find ways of weaning our animals later, giving more richness and diversity not just to the animals’ pastures but to the environment our animals lived in. I had heard about a study that one of my friends had conducted. He had given one mob of feedlot lambs toys and equipment to play on, whilst a second mob had no entertainment. The lambs who had more stimulation and played more – in other words, who were happier – showed greater weight gains than the lambs with no toys. To me that study and its results were no surprise, yet most people must ‘see the science’ before they adapt their own management of animals, rather than go with their gut instinct and, dare I say it, give love to the animals we are essentially raising for meat.

  Fred Provenza specialises in understanding behaviour and it’s why I’m enthralled in his work. ‘Behaviour is what everything does,’ he says. ‘From microbes to humans, we all behave. So understanding behaviour is crucial in understanding how to work within systems.’

  Fred’s philosophical thinking is nothing like what I expected. I’d stereotyped scientists as being very narrow in their mindsets and very fixed in the ‘realities’ of time and space. While Fred had his foundation as a young man working on ranches before heading into the academic world, his far-reaching mind sat alongside my own stargazing and earth-watching tendencies.

  This style of mid-paddock philosophising led me to wonder how society had come so far away from educating women about their bodies, birth and their wisdom within. I remembered my prepubescent self going to Sunday school to study the Bible. I wasn’t interested in religion, but I was keen to spend as much time as I could with one of my best friends, Libby, and to be witness to her loving family. Her gentle kindly dad was a shipping pilot, and as we drove to the Anglican church in the Kombi van, he would shout, ‘Clear to port!’ or ‘Clear to starboard!’, depending on whether there was traffic on our left or right. That Kombi was a kid’s dream taxi of the most fun kind, as we clambered into it in our cord flares with our iron-on peace signs on back pockets, quoting The Goodies, or singing The Irish Rovers’ songs.

  On Sundays, dressed a little more formally in cardigans and daggy dresses, when we arrived at the church for lessons followed by a service, I recall the thin paper of the Bibles that were laid out on the pews and being perplexed at the capitalisation of Him and He printed within. To me, it highlighted, so obviously, the fact there was no capitalised Her within. As we worked our way through learning about the book, I saw all the chapters in the Bible were written by men. Where were the women writers, I wondered? I remember the devastation of feeling that I was a ‘her’ and not a Him. Was I really second-class to men? With the lean of the storytelling towards the masculine, I saw that my gender was again, somehow lesser. Because of this, my place of worship became a blue-sky cathedral and my religion centred around Mother Nature, for she was a deity who gave fair and equal value to both genders.

  With my own daughter now at that same age facing womanhood, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how to educate, and, most of all, empower her, particularly as her own body becomes that of a menstruating woman. We are still only a short way along the road of waking society up about such topics and learning to bask in our heavenly femaleness. The blood of woman is still taboo and continues to carry a weight of shame. In our society too, a woman’s inner desires are buried deeply, so much so that some of us can’t recognise what they actually are. I was never taught to wrap myself in pleasure by doing things I loved the most. I was taught to put others first every time. It wasn’t until I discovered a woman called Mama Gena, who runs the New York School of Womanly Arts, that I began to learn about the mass awakening of Western woman, sweeping through society. I began to ask, What do I really want as a woman? What do I really want to teach both my son and my daughter about what it is to be female and mother?

  I thought why not create a culture where we celebrate our daughters’ very first journey into womanhood like our ancestral women did, by running warm baths of oil-softened waters sprinkled with blood-red petals of roses for them? Why not light candles for them and read them passages from insightful books like The Red Tent? This novel, given to me by my art teacher, brings to light the life of biblical women that has been lost to history by the chronicles of men. Here I learned that young girls would ‘marry the earth’ with their first blood.

  That notion struck a chord with me. Again, I was being shown a deep link between the feminine and farming. Women and soils are as connected as our cycles are to the moon, but in my very masculine culture of conventional farming, to speak of such things would taint me as ‘out there’.

  Instead women are taught to mistrust our bodies, silence ourselves about the gory business of birth and we are sold ‘feminine hygiene’ products as if we are unclean. This wording alone suggests our cycles are not only something that is dirty, but that we need to be protected from them as a form of illness. Very few of us have the courage to find a voice to express our inner views on the matter, yet in farming we routinely discuss animal cycles. In my rural work I’ve palpitated ram’s testicles, slid my arm up the bum of a cow and cupped her uterus through the bowel wall, while injecting semen into her. I’ve written articles for the dairy industry on cows’ udders and retained placentas. In the racing game I’ve seen prize thoroughbred mares have their vulvas stitched up to prevent infection. I’ve assisted vets to pull out hormonal implants from the vaginas of ewes, and in college we were taught about gestations of the female and the function of the penis in the male of each domestic livestock species
. All without a hint of a snigger. It’s all part of the business of farming. But when it comes to human women and their biz . . . we censor ourselves.

  I want my daughter and all those who come after her to know womanhood that is not shrouded in silence and shame but set by a new tradition; that she is not ‘cursed’, as I was taught by other girls in school, but rather it’s a rite of passage into a sisterhood that courses beyond stars, beyond time itself. It’s a power. Because we live in such a masculine-focused world of economics, rigid education and patriarchal power, we have forgotten motherhood and womanhood is the truth of mankind – birth via a woman is the one thing that is common to us all. I miss my role as midwife to my animals on the farm but I’m grateful for the education I gained from those wonderful female creatures. In our role as farmer, we get to see the miracle and gift of life and death, birth and blood, up close, right before our eyes.

  The day came when I knew we had to leave the Heavenly Hill. During the previous year, my children had changed schools after the little Levendale Primary School had finally closed, convulsing with a last gasp of defeat against shortsighted city-based bureaucratic and political systems. With one final sponge cake hurrah and big pot of tea, we shut up the school for good. But even as we closed the gate, I knew our Janice was forging plans to convert the ground to something new for the community in the future, but I had little time or stamina left to help her. My fire had gone out for community-giving. I had turned into a taxi driver for my kids to get them to their new schools and it was the unravelling of me. It wasn’t the travel that bothered me. Nor the fact I was running a writing business from an office in a V8 ute. When I was farming I’d always worked with that flexibility and flow.