Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  On my family farm I had the ability to live more directly from the land but now we are living in a semi-rural area, the children are witness to their mother sometimes being weary and frustrated as she searches fruitlessly (pun intended) for organic or holistically produced food. Some days I feel like a modern hunter-gatherer mother, constantly on the lookout for food for my family that isn’t weighed down with the toxins of manmade sprays, fertilisers or hollow foods grown in depleted soils so the food itself offers no nutrition whatsoever. Based on that, I feel as if I live in a time of famine . . . a pure-food famine. There is a deficiency in our society of food literally grown from a place of love.

  That is why I am tenacious in keeping a vegetable garden going no matter where we live so I can at least offer my kids some homegrown clean food. After witnessing one of the hottest, driest summers on record for Tasmania, I’m also compelled this Christmas to wish for change. There was such a chilling disconnection from that supermarket with its artificial lighting, fake air and faux food with what was going on outside its prefab windowless walls. Outside where the farmers are.

  It’s been so dry here in the lead-up to Christmas. Hot and windy. Crops have failed. Dams are empty. Stock are being sold off. Or kept on to stagger about and die. Minds are being twisted towards despair as the hollow promise of grey clouds in summer skies above are still failing to deliver any rain. It seems as if it’s all we have been speaking about lately. The dry. The heat. The scarcity of hay. The terrible shortages of grass – possibly for years to come. All due to the weather. For months, the talk has been going around like this:

  ‘How much did you pay for your hay? The rural merchandise blokes are selling it for $22 a bale for small squares. It’s crazy!’

  ‘I saw one round bale on the back of a ute advertised for $200 parked near the grocers. Two hundred bucks. For one bale. It’s a wonder someone hadn’t torched the bale and the ute along with it. That’s wrong. It’s daylight robbery.’

  ‘There’s going to be a shortage for years now.’

  ‘We just need rain. There’s no grass anywhere.’

  It’s a conversation I’ve heard repeated on loop every few years all my life during drought times. But isn’t it time we asked ourselves, Is it really the weather? Is it really lack of rainfall, or is it something else? Something to do with how we have shaped our landscape and our soils since white man’s settlement and how we manage it? Even when the conversations are going on around me amidst my friends, my mind says, But there is grass. You only have to look at the roadsides in the driest of times to see the benchmark of what banquet Mother Nature has on offer, stimulated by the lightest of dew on beautifully protected soils. Mother Nature is a modest lady . . . she likes to cover up. Roadsides are where I get my eye in on what is possible to grow in dry times. But only if the land is grazed right.

  Christmas Day turned out to be scorching 36 degrees – probably higher out on the barren ground of denuded paddocks. My cousins would be skiing on the river that flows through their farm, a day off of sorts wedged in between grain harvests and hay-carting duties and livestock care. The kids and I had opted to leave them to their water worship and simply stay home and lark about in the floppy inflatable pool we’d set up in the backyard. It was an Aussie classic. The best yet. Super-soaker guns, an inflatable crocodile, Lee Kernaghan blaring on the CD player, and the pancakes of course! I just felt blessed I had such gorgeous kids and we had water.

  Later, in the evening, I drove from the flystrike house to feed my horse Archie, who was not far away on agistment. On the drive, I passed farmlets and hobby blocks that looked like desert landscapes. I saw our precious soils blowing away over fencelines from paddocks like rain squalls. The paddocks looked as if they’d been sliced dry by iron ploughs, but they hadn’t been ploughed at all. Instead they lay bare because they were chronically, unrelentingly overgrazed. It was land that never knew rest from hungry mouths and land that had been abused. I watched life-giving soils hurtling towards the sea. My heart bled at the sight of it and the neglected stock on barren paddocks.

  Cattle with ribbed sides like xylophones desperately pushed their heads through barbed wire, grabbing what they could from roadsides. Miserable hot sheep, despondent with hunger and tattered and mangy with lice, hung their heads and panted in treeless paddocks. I wished I could doorknock on all the houses of the people who owned the hobby blocks and animals, not to berate them . . . but to show them another way. It’s a way I’ve discovered from meeting and following the visionaries who are revolutionising farming and the way we think about our connections to animals, soil, land and food.

  I bet the people within those houses had eaten well on Christmas Day and sought shade. But their animals hadn’t been able to. I thought to myself, if only the people who owned those small acreages knew the possibilities and importance of nurturing land to life so that not only would their animals be more comfortable but they too could help reverse climate change by sucking carbon out of the air, through their grasses and into the soil so it stabilised there. Heck, they could even surround themselves with beauty, not barrenness. All those semi-rural land parcels could begin sequestering carbon back into the soil by giving life to it. If only I could write a book that would inspire all that . . . then our Christmas vista could be vastly different!

  I made a Christmas wish then and there in the gale-force furnace winds, not just for rain, but for change . . . change in direction towards an Australia that is wonderful, not just for every person, but for every living thing. Not just man, but also microbes. A new vision that would see the life in the soil stable and fecund, no matter the amount of rain. And the water systems too, nurtured back to the crystal-clear tree-lined rivers Aboriginals must have once enjoyed. Like all Christmas wishes, you make them once and send them out, then comes the hard part . . . waiting with a sense of trust and inner knowing that they will come true. It’s the same as the concept of Santa, in that sense that if you believe, you receive. So it is with life. It’s the Law of the Universe. Your beliefs become your reality. And hopefully by you reading my words now, the reality of our place, our Australia will change.

  After arriving home from my barren drive, as if on cue after my wish, the sound of rain could be heard landing on the corro roof. A moment later a text arrived from my mate Jackie in the north of the state.

  ‘It’s raining – proper rain,’ she texted excitedly. As I typed a reply, it started to ‘rain proper’ on the roof above me too and raindrops covered the glass and began to converge in silver rivulets on the window. ‘We three’, the kids and I, from the front windows of our rental house, are witness to the saddest of paddocks across the dirt road from us. It’s a landscape more reminiscent of outback Queensland. It has the pallor of the sick. It is yellow and grey. Starlings are trawling the compact bare soil surface for seeds and insects. The sheep, instead of being camped, are up, haunting the ground, nibbling what is left of the grasses, roots, soil and all. In my fictional world, I imagine I am gazing out the window and can see a biodiverse paddock that has been strip-grazed with different species of livestock. The creek would not be the bare, washed-out gully that it is, but instead, in my imaginings, growing with blackwoods, shrubs, native grasses, forbs and herbs that used to thrive here before the settlers arrived. The sheep would be camped under a shady patch, chewing their cud and they would be content. The frogs too would be singing.

  Fortunately for us all there are real-life farmers achieving this kind of vision from the windows of their homesteads. There are people waking up to the possibility of new farming and food-selling systems that sit outside the norm of that bleak drought-scarred landscape and Christmas-ravaged concrete supermarket. These new-age farmers are travelling down the dirt roads of thought to new places. They are the people who are no longer willing to simply race at high speed along the concrete highways of collective thought. Unchallenged beliefs about an economic-based society that turn us all into ‘consumers’ rather than ‘citizens’ are f
unnelling us towards our own extinction. As a race, we have become so used to looking at bare landscapes of farms, coal and gas mine sites and accepting the massive developments of commercial sites and housing and industrial estates, that we assume this is how Australia should be. That this is somehow normal. It’s not.

  We have forgotten how this continent was once teeming with life and vegetation under a different management regime – that of Aboriginals who had mastered this entire landmass and its islands and ran it as a grassland farm, without the ravages that money brings. I, along with many agricultural change agents, believe that women are an untapped potential of the mightiest power to make the changes in food production systems that humankind so desperately needs. I see it will be the balanced, conscious, fully awakened woman who can coach the men to awaken too, so our brotherhood moves with us. As we women heal on a deep ancient level, so too shall the earth heal.

  I’m hoping that this book has graced a place beneath your Christmas tree, and that more people will be waking up to the fact we need to make changes in how we perceive and manage our land, and the importance we place upon the richness of our lives that comes from landscape, not bank balances. All it takes is just one wish from you. One special Christmas wish. As you journey forward, remember to use your seven-point compass to guide you . . . North, South, East, West, Above, Below, Within. This year, may the spray-free cherries find you.

  It’s the first day of spring and a journey down a new dirt road is about to begin. I have just signed a contract to buy ‘we three’ a house on a pretty postage stamp patch of land that happens to be nestled in a dirt road cul-de-sac on a quiet country road! It was six years ago on this very same day, 1 September, that we got the keys to our Heavenly Hill. Now here we are sowing new seeds to our dreams based on our vision for 10 acres near the children’s school. The house feels solid and friendly and has the potential to come to life with the ramble and rumble, tumble and play of children and dogs. There are sunny spaces for me to write, and views to bush covered rolling hills. Only a novelist could dream up such a tidy and happy ending to a story, but here it is in real life.

  Whilst there are still some hillocks to climb with the bank and the sale of the Heavenly Hill, I can feel the stars aligning. The real estate agent in charge of selling our Heavenly Hill has a family very keen on buying the place. I’m certain they felt the energy of love that we had infused there, and I’m sure they sensed the thrum of life in the soil that we had loved back to life in the paddocks.

  Now we have the chance to love more land to life. With a loan yet to be approved, it’s a matter of faith, trust and detachment from the outcome. There is only room for peace in the process and daily taking the step-by-step moves that will lead us to holding the keys to the place in our ready-to-work hands.

  Imaginings of great potential have been prompted in all three of us as we fell instantly in love with the honest brick house and the easy ‘flat as flat’ land. It has freed up our minds.

  For my son, he sees the good sturdy dog kennels and his dream of training collies and kelpies to kindly and quietly work sheep comes to life. It’s an art that will gift that young man with a lifetime of opportunity to seek wisdom via each pup he trains.

  For my daughter, the sight of busy ISA Brown chooks at the property has fuelled her dream to deliver ‘Czeg’s eggs’ to the Richmond café, using chook tractors that we shall move behind the areas grazed by the horses and half a dozen dog-training sheep.

  There’s also fruit trees and vegetable garden beds aplenty, so my pure food famine as a mother can end and I can again gift fresh produce to family and friends, or use our surplus as barter, just as my grandmother did.

  On the flat land we have already imagined the direct drilling of oats to kickstart soil function and how we will test the soil, before and after our grazing management begins. The little place, we can see, could become a showcase of what is possible on small acreage. In my head I’m already hosting our first field day, with Col Seis, Annabel Walsh and Graeme Hand in our midst.

  We three are discussing where we shall put our portable horse round yard and house our saddles for Archie, and our golden pony Jess, who has just won the 2016 National Horse of the Year for Riding for the Disabled. Bless her gentle soul.

  On the quiet road into the place we noticed plenty of unsprayed roadside grasses. It will be little pony Gemma’s job to harvest the native seeds on her tether and then manure them onto our land.

  We have already discussed which directions we will strip-graze the paddock, and if the land becomes too burdened by mouths, how the agistment place is just up the road, within sight of the house, and we can rest the land by taking the horses off it for a time. Once again my children will be learning to look at species diversity, to monitor pastures and assess when to move livestock on with me by their side.

  It’s where I belong. With them in a paddock. Moving the fences so the animals can enjoy fresh pick, watching the plants respond to the grazing. Sky above. Earth below.

  In my heart too, I know now I’m healed and ready to open up to others once again. I can see this patch of land and the warm house receiving weary farm women, who have come to learn about soil and their connection to it. A place where they can again discover the feminine power they hold within. It’s a power that, once embraced within one’s self, has the opportunity to spark the most positive transformations for our society, in particular in agriculture.

  The best thing though is that, with the future of this new road spreading on deliciously before us, I now barely even think of that old place. That old farm. Instead, I just feel love for those I once knew there and seek out fond memories, not dark ones. The excitement about my power within to create a version of an agricultural world that gifts us all is too strong in me now to look back.

  I know this story is far from over. I just know, the next non-fiction book I share with you shall be the story of a patch of land that has been loved to life again, and can sustain not just my family, but many. When that time comes, I will write you a new love story about children flying high and happy from the nest, and the blooming of a woman’s soul and her soil, along with the willingness to impart that wisdom to others.

  For me, being in a paddock means anything is possible.

  I have Penguin’s Publishing Director, Ben Ball, to thank for this book! It was Ben who provided the creative spark for this writing journey. Ben not only offered me lunch, but also the opportunity to write my story about food and farming, so a big hug of thanks for his vision in what was possible, and his faith in me.

  Beside me the entire way has been my long-term mainstay literary agent Margaret Connolly. Thank you for helping me to hunt out the old demons and turn the page to a new chapter in life.

  And to my wonderful friend and colleague, Penguin’s Ali Watts, thanks for seeing the importance of what I needed to say. Thanks to the entire Penguin Random House team, from editors to proofreaders, to sales and marketing, who have assisted in bringing this book to life so it glows! Thanks especially to cover designer Alex Ross, and to Tassie photographer Natalie Mendham for the ‘natural Rach’ saddle-blanket back cover pic. A big thanks to all the sales reps who have taken Down the Dirt Roads into bookstores around Australia . . . especially Tassie rep Debbie McGowan. I know you ‘felt’ my book, as well as simply reading it. Your caring hugs meant so much!

  A massive thank you to my fantastic network of fellow school mums who helped me juggle work with kid commitments, especially Di Sawford aka Flipper. You rock! Ta to Ma for the tucker and the help with washing. Thanks to my lovely neighbours in our street for your warm welcome to your community. For Jackie, your ever-present friendship sustained me throughout the arduous journey of finding the loving balance in this book! Thanks to Lucy and her beautiful boys at the café Czegs in Richmond for giving me a refuge away from my housework to write my manuscript . . . and for great food and coffee. Thanks to my admin helper Heidi and my new business buddy Polly McGee who is encouraging m
e along new dirt roads in life.

  Big thanks to all the friends and family and agro-ecology activists who appear in the book, from Col, to Annabel, to Ian, to Graeme, and to those who don’t appear in words, but are there in support and spirit for this fantastic grassroots movement.

  A massive thank you to my immediate family and my former husband for the lessons in life you gave me, that I now see I came to this earth to learn. You have been remarkable teachers and I send you my eternal love for the gifts you gave me. And speaking of eternal love . . . my two divine children and my cheery animals . . . you are my everything! Thanks for making my life an ongoing comedy that is chockers with love and laughter.

  Thank you to YOU, who have read this book and are now committing to change for our Mother Earth – even if it’s simply by shopping at a farmers’ market ahead of a superstore. I thank you and I send you love. If I’ve forgotten to mention anyone, apologies, but you know me . . . the sun’s shining and I’m off to find a paddock. May we all go forth and share our love with our soil microbes, for they are the lungs of our Earth! Let’s love them to life! Breathe!

  ‘A Singular Woman (Annabel Walsh)’, Australian Story. ABC Television, 13 August 1998.

  Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way. Penguin Putnam, New York, 1992.