Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  The problem was that to get out to the main highway, I had to pass the paddocks that didn’t just contain my former beloved sheep and cattle, but also hundreds of memories. The children’s new schools were a two-hour round trip, sometimes involving leaving in frost-filled darkness and inching slowly down treacherous mountain bends, then crawling, even slower, in city traffic to make it to school drop-off in time. It soon became apparent I couldn’t keep it up because the emotional pain of seeing that old farm daily was excruciating and it kept tracking me down that same old road of thought.

  I’d glance into a paddock and remember an autumn when I once ran over that place, gathering up perfect umbrella-shaped field mushrooms. Or I’d glimpse the tricky gate, eased with a length of wire, that I would open from the back of my sturdy mare Jess to let a mob of freshly crutched crossbred ewes drift through. Up would bubble the memory of when the ute was bogged by the blokes and I had to haul two little kids, splashing and laughing, over wet paddocks layered with silver water, the dogs dancing droplets into the air as we went off to find a tractor to pull the men out. That same journey repeated in the summer when the earth was baked, with the kids dinking on little Blossom, the mini pony, and the dogs trailing us, dodging dry thistles, their tongues pink in bright sunlight.

  On days when I saw cars outside the shearing shed, with freshly shorn sheep dotting the holding paddock with their dazzling white skins, I wondered why it wasn’t me treading those beloved boards within, classing the wool inside with the shearing men I had grown up with and idolised. Why wasn’t I out the back in the yards, classing the sheep in the old wooden drafting race, as I had done for years for Dad? I would see the spot where I used to tie a keen-eyed young pup to the tank stand, a legend-in-waiting as he received his patient but time-consuming initiation into the world of the fully grown working dog.

  Along with the memories that invaded my morning drive came observations on the current farm management that I witnessed as I passed. Although not as mind-scarringly awful as the wasteland that other land managers create in Tasmania from overgrazing, I could see that my former sheep needed lice treatment, or crutching, or moving so they had fresh tucker, and with my grassland-goddess awareness, I could see that the paddocks needed more time and rest. Glancing over fencelines, I could still feel how the environment and the livestock craved a different way. The pasture was that same short, manmade version of ‘grass’ that had been sown since seed companies and marketers hijacked the system of agriculture. I would hear Col Seis say, ‘Ecologically functioning farms should not look like parklands. To conventional farmers, they appear messy.’ I thought of the paddocks I had on the new place that were, with each turn of the earth, filling up with a rampant, wild and outrageous flourishing of plant life, dishing up a biodiverse banquet for my animals – all created by time-controlled grazing, natural manures and my very own love. Insects, birds, snakes, wallabies, kangaroos, wombats and a bounty of minuscule creatures too that I couldn’t see, but I could feel, thriving both above and beneath the soil.

  I couldn’t help myself, constantly wishing to be custodian of that land again, on the old farm, creating the same life and abundance. A richness that was not measured in money, but in a farming system that spent less, and made more and gave more to the world, like Colin’s.

  On some mornings driving past, when the sun flickered in shafts through the tree canopies, I would spot my Hereford girls grazing amidst the bush runs, and feel a swamping of grief. Worse was when I would glimpse my old border collie, Diamond, wandering, doddery and almost blind, in the garden of my old house. She was my best dog, a gentle New Zealand bloodline short-hair collie who calmed sheep, cast wide and moved mobs steadily enough you could virtually sit back and have a cup of tea while she worked. She was a sweetheart, and losing her to the farm partnership (which had also claimed my ute, trailer, shed, cattle, sheep and horse yards and self-esteem) was one of the hardest parts of the divorce. There’s a story about Diamond and how she came back to ‘we three’ briefly before she died because of a bushfire. It’s too raw to tell here, but that dog was one in a million, and leaving her behind was as big a rip as losing a child to the other parent, never to be held again.

  When I saw my Diamond girl amidst the first flush of yellow from the bulbs I had once planted years ago with a baby in my belly, I would clutch the steering wheel of the ute and suck in a ragged breath. Unable to stem quiet tears, I would hope the children hadn’t seen my emotion, so would resolutely turn up my Pistol Annies country music tunes louder to stop the noise of pain that ran in my head. I would try to put imaginary blinkers on so I could no longer see the lost lifestyle that slid past silently on either side of my ute windows. But I never fooled those kids. I would feel a small hand reach over and rest on my arm comfortingly. Those children can read me like an open book and we were all suffering far, far too long.

  As I reached the intersection and clicked the indicator to turn right onto the highway, I found myself with the same questions running in my mind. It was always the same rant about my situation. If I was to run this sort of narrative in my head over and over, it would destroy me and hurt my children more than it already had. But where was I to go? How was I to transcend the story?

  I recently learned from a lecture by neuroscience expert Dr Joe Dispenza that of the thousands of thoughts we have per day – around 50 000 to 70 000 of them – 90 per cent are the same thoughts from the day before. I would find myself being triggered into travelling down those same rutted mental pathways. I’d reach the intersection and realise I’d been on that thought-road again. It was time to stop thinking in the same way and to reshape my perception of what had happened. To rewrite the narrative of my journey.

  I began to remember how Dad had always said, ‘If I leave you this farm when I cark it, you’ll have to promise to keep it tidy.’ It dawned on me that a whole new story could be constructed. Maybe my situation was a blessing in disguise? Maybe I was being sent on a bigger mission than working just one farm? Maybe my experience was something I could learn from, and in the healing of it, I could write about finding new ways of thinking and living?

  I realised if I had stayed to manage the farm, I would’ve broken my dear dad’s promise. If I’d had my way, the farm wouldn’t look like the parkland he so desperately cultivated by slashing ferns, pin rushes, spraying weeds, burning and clearing trees. I would’ve betrayed his wishes. My version of the farm would look like a tumbling version of the Garden of Eden – a tangle of fecund life, with moveable fences contoured over the place, kids and adults teeming on it, selling a multilayered, mishmash offering of farm produce sourced from creative flow rather than planning. But as the biblical story teaches, a woman in Eden is a dangerous thing. She can’t be trusted. Maybe this notion had infiltrated our cultural thinking so much that that’s why the men in my life took my Garden of Eden away from me. Or maybe, as the new story goes, I was on a path to create a new Eden, and maybe even find a new Adam, but how could I do that if every day those curved bushland hillsides and sweeping green paddocks triggered those old neural roadways of thought?

  One day those clever kids said boldly and matter-of-factly, ‘We think we’d better move, Mummy, so you can stop crying about the farm.’

  I was resistant at first. This farming district was my home. Plus I now knew I could create a farming enterprise on the newly lush Heavenly Hill. But the question was did I want to do it alone any more? The property now had soil that sang, and at the little farm’s heart we had created a sunny, love-drenched, artful home, thanks to a series of blow-in builders who saw my plight and pitched in to help. Along with it came my determination to make our space beautiful. We had created a home there. It was filled with love and laughter. And I knew I could create a farming enterprise . . . but the location of the farm was now the problem. I suddenly realised I had to get out. I had to leave. I was in a stalemate with my family and ex-husband. They weren’t going to change anything. It was costing the children dearly emoti
onally, so we started to look for houses.

  It was my son who suggested we look around a pretty historic village for somewhere to live – not far from Hobart, but with a definite rural feel to it. As we moved into our spacious sun-filled cottage on the dirt cul-de-sac, we began to adjust. The kids did so quickly. They got their dose of farming life fortnightly when they visited their dad, but it took me longer to assimilate. On damp days, when the kids were away and I ached for them and, in particular, being with them ‘out there’ on the farm, I would stand on the front porch and look to the yet-to-be developed paddocks that had sheep grazing in them. I would inhale their scent like perfume.

  Next to our house, over what was once a creek before it was dug out and cleared to look like a drain, is a vacant block. The generosity of our landladies meant we could keep our dogs and chooks and even run our tubby, patchy pony Gemma there. Having the animals was our anchor, and village living had great gifts I was yet to unwrap and accept. After school, even until dark, reaching my ears and my heart was the sound of my kids laughing outside, and the repeated scudding of bike tyres on gravel as they practised their skids. More children from other houses came and one evening I counted eleven kids, a cheerful golden retriever and our escaped poodle all enjoying life in a community that held rural values at its core.

  When it rains the same gang of kids plays in the mud in the creek that runs right through our yard and beneath a warped fence bowed by past flooding. The creek continues on between two cul-de-sacs and it was here, outside our yard, I would graze Gemma on a tether near some fledgling blackwoods. Some days passing Asian tourists capture her cute-as-a-cartoon image on their smart phones as if she is a local monument of note. With my eye for agricultural hydrology, I could see that our rental house was in a flood plain. Not beside one – in one. Local gossip told me it was an old hydroelectric-scheme house from Poatina Power Station that had been plonked here before anyone had time to notice – the paperwork had been snuck through in the busy run-up to Christmas holidays. From my upstairs window I witnessed a new house getting built in a spot where I would put a farm dam. I was perplexed.

  Once when hanging washing, I got to talking to my neighbour Jean. Now in her nineties, Jean had lived in her house for sixty years and could point out the very shed that used to be the local slaughterhouse, or where they would milk cows in the dairy. She told me the story of how she and her husband could’ve bought the land once – all of it – for £50 back in the day, and now she wished they had. Real estate is premium in this convict-created village that, two blocks away from us, swarms with tourists tumbling off big buses, or Hobartians wanting to take their elderly parents out for an easy lunch. As Jean and I talked through the fence beneath a pepper tree whilst the chooks scratched at her feet, she told me about the day the water flooded right up to the back fence where I was standing. It was a level well above our lounge-room floor. Jean shook her head when I told her the block next door had sold and the watercourse was earmarked for ‘residential development’. I wondered at the logic of the decision-makers. There’s money to be made from flood plains apparently.

  Where once Aboriginals used to live amidst nature, we whities have to plonk ourselves upon it and own it for ourselves. Smother the soil with concrete. Raze everything on which to build ugly houses and place our barren roads that displace people, animals, plants and even water. A condition of the vacant block’s sale that was made on paper in 2009 was that the developers had to connect the road that was severed by the creek. It had been this way since the early 1800s and the locals said the old-timers had never joined the roads for good reason, due to the water flow. Suddenly we discovered our dirt cul-de-sac of laughing children would be lost. The creek in which I’m told the rare species of green and gold bell frog used to live will now for certain be doomed. I’d invited a councillor to come and see the area to ask if during the development the road could remain disconnected and the creek free-running. I could see that a small patch of native habitat could be regenerated and those happy tourists and dog walkers could find a glimpse of Mother Nature in an increasingly urban environment. Instead giant concrete pipes would be needed beneath a dangerous big-dipper road that would catapult cars into a busy intersection at the primary school. The councillor advised that the 2009 ‘approval’ meant the decision was set in stone in the minds of the council and the developers. She told me nothing could be done.

  I noticed, lovely as she was, she used ‘man speak’, a bureaucratic, rigid language I never wanted to embrace. In my career as a journalist, I’d witnessed many brilliant women like her, who were bravely getting into politics and governance, masking or even denying their feminine side in those realms in order to soldier on as a man would. I wondered if the people who make these decisions knew in any way, from the intuitive feminine sides of themselves, that they are part of one web. A web of life that interconnects us to everything and everyone. Or were they tangled in their surface-only human egos, where salary and titles and people-politics shouted so much white noise they couldn’t hear the earth sigh or their own universe of truth within their bodies? My frequent visits to the city to drop my daughter at school provided me daily with eye-witness accounts of how humans are a plague upon the earth. The roads are getting bigger, smoother, wider; the cars are getting more plentiful, faster, bigger. Roadkill on four-lane highways in Hobart is a symbol of how much we layer our Mother Earth with our self-focused crap without consideration for other life forms. Our political agenda is so skewed to growth and development of capitalist pursuits that the value of nature holds no place on national financial balance sheets. Sometimes on our drives to school, my daughter and I design the city the way we would want it. We narrate a feminine utopia vastly different to the masculine one we see before us, choked with traffic.

  Once when arriving home from school drop-off on a cold-snap day in summer, I could hear the musk lorikeets shrieking and crying. I looked up and there they were, circling in a morbidly grey sky, their bright-green wings outstretched. All their flowering gums that had lined our road had been cut down. No warning to the people who lived here. No warning for the birds. These beautiful little fern-green creatures, with a vibrant splash of red that was painted beside intelligent eyes, seemed to be in shock and chaos. It was feeding time on the flowers, and nesting time. Prior to the angry bite of chainsaws, they had dangled happily upside-down sipping nectar from frothy red-gum flowers. I’d seen how their antics and beauty had attracted bird enthusiasts who came to our road, and spent time photographing them with that intense human joy that comes when one is immersed in the mystery and beauty of nature. But today, on an ordinary weekday, the trees were suddenly gone. And so too went the lorikeets.

  I had kept telling myself if I had to move to a town, it might as well be one as beautiful as this one. But the town is changing and changing fast, making it harder to adjust to town living, while right outside my door was human bureaucracy gone mad, building a road where one wasn’t needed nor welcomed by most of the locals. For months after first moving, I had displacement dreams. Without the familiarity of the natural surrounds that I’d worshipped and gazed upon with love each day, I was at first unhinged. It was that dirt road, along with the occasional visits from black cockies during rough weather, and the lively lorikeets and warbling comical magpies, that kept me comforted and helped me to reground myself. The move to an urbanish landscape began to creep into my art and my expression. The next time my musician friend Nick Wolfe rolled up to my door and got his guitar out of his ute for a songwriting session, I couldn’t help but suffer a weight of shame welcoming him into my urban rental. Everything about me was country. I felt I was living a lie. It was little wonder when we came together creatively that we wrote about a girl displaced. Out came the line, ‘Growing up is hard with city lights, when you use the stars above you as your guide.’

  That shame is easing now as I begin to see this house as just a stop-off point for healing and learning before moving to a new place. But I s
till find the streetlights invasive and confronting. For the first time in decades, I have to shut the blinds to the sweep of my beloved moon, because not only can neighbours see in, but because I cannot bear the artificial lights that burn all night. The dogs have had to adjust too, hearing cars and other voices strange to them. When we walked out the front door, the kelpies at first would sniff the wind and look to the sheep in the paddock. They would glance at me and ask the question, ‘Can we?’ Each time I would say no, I watched their disappointment. They soon learned the sheep were ones never to be moved, and so they have given up asking me the question. They just slink by, blinkers on.

  Not since Dubbo in 1990 had I lived in an urban environment and even then I only lasted a few months before seeking out a place to stay amidst paddocks. At the time, I’d recently left Orange Agricultural College where I’d failed one subject – typing. As part of my Rural Business Administration course it was a mandatory requirement. Stubborn me, I’d reacted to the sexist notion that women were to be limited by our typing skills. It smacked of sexism and old-fashioned ethos. I’d witnessed the way Dad’s beautifully groomed and perfumed legal secretaries were always in service to men. Typing was the last thing on my agenda. To reach the required typing speed and accuracy, I had to go to Dubbo TAFE for a summer course, otherwise my Rural Business Admin bit of paper was not mine to have! I now know it was the clever universe giving me a giant flat stone foundation that would provide the sure footing I needed to type as fast as my thoughts when I became my future author self.

  So there I was in Dubbo, when all my college mates were out and about harvesting, or waterskiing on farm dams having fun, and I was traipsing to typing so I could join them at graduation. After I’d passed my exam, I didn’t last long in the share house that was set on the road to Gilgandra in New South Wales. I tried, but I couldn’t find any kind of stillness there. I couldn’t bear it. The neat path. The door in the middle that led into a hallway with small rooms either side. The smell of ordinariness and sprinkled perfumed carpet cleaner. Not to mention the huge phone bill that came in because one housemate had been making too many phone-sex calls, and hadn’t realised they had charged him and listed the number on the bill for his fellow housemates to see! I soon hot-footed it out of there and found a house out of town between Dubbo and Narromine. A place with paddocks, trees, birds, the sweep of the sky and the rhythm of the day uninterrupted by human busyness.