The Woman on the Mountain

by Sharyn Munro

  In between the wooden posts I banged in the steel star posts with my wonderful ‘putter-inner’, a heavy iron cylinder, closed at one end, that a friend had welded up for me. The shop ones, called post-drivers, have handles, and I suppose they are all bought by weak women—Real Men use iron mallets that I can barely lift off the ground, let alone above my head.

  And I’m no weakling, despite being small. But some jobs don’t only depend on strength. They’re just bloody impossible without the right tool—like my ‘puller-outer’, a shop-bought manual post-lifter, which makes removing star posts and tomato stakes amazingly easy, and which, I suspect, even Real Men might use.

  These are the sort of tools I love: dead simple and very effective, requiring neither mechanical knowledge nor great strength, needing no manual, using no fuel, hiding no spark plugs, able to be forgotten and left out in the rain without damage, enabling little me to do heavy work. In fact they’re the sort of old-fashioned items that are usually discontinued nowadays—too simple, too enduring, a one-off purchase that brings no economic and ongoing joy to anyone but the buyer. What a useless thing to keep manufacturing!

  Posts all in, my partner strained up several strands of plain wire for me to attach the hingelock to, as I can’t seem to get into my head how to set the chains and teeth of my fence strainer so it works. Or perhaps I’m just scared of the way it bites and snaps and strains almost to breaking point.

  Then I unrolled the old hingelock netting, relic of my first dream of a bush life seventeen years previously. My then husband and I had fenced in several large areas for vegetable gardens, since we thought we’d grow fancy foods like globe artichokes and asparagus—and back in the 1970s these were fancy, rarely seen in shops. After the marriage broke up, so did the fences, only more slowly.

  The artichokes quickly died, but nothing could kill the asparagus; nothing eats it once it’s past the tender shoot stage. I’d have thought they’d be delicate plants, but they’re so hardy that, unfenced, unfed and untended, each year since they have come back up through the grass. The problem is that when I haven’t been around to stop those succulent shoots continuing to grow into ferny leaves and produce red berries, these have been eaten by birds and the seeds thus spread over the mountain, forming my main crime against the flora—after the kikuyu, that is.

  Having demolished the falling down garden fences, I’d saved the hingelock netting in great rolls, with dead tussocks and bracken still entangled.

  So, fencing the second time round, I’d recycled it, much as I did with my bush lifestyle dream. For ten years the fence had worked. The second relationship had lasted about the same length of time. The rusty and fire-brittle hingelock probably should have been discarded along with youth and optimism; it certainly wasn’t doing the job anymore. But I come from thrifty Scottish stock; I throw nothing away. Except perhaps my men?

  Eventually I finished adding the higher chickenwire, leaving the top of it flopping outwards, which is supposed to deter possums. The wallabies gave up their acrobatic feats of invasion. Except for one, and guess who? Yep, the rogue wallaby.

  But surely not even a double-jointed wallaby could get through chickenwire. He looked at me most boldly when I threw up my hands and asked ‘HOW?’, before resuming his nibbling of rose leaves. I’d hoped the latter might get ahead of him and survive his indiscriminate pruning. But he is so conscientious that I think not.

  He must eat the grass and roses close by my house at night, because in the morning there are so many droppings that they need raking out of the way. It seems to be a greater amount than elsewhere—as if emphasising that my territory ends at the steps, the rest is his.

  I have now seen him make one exit and one entrance—by climbing up the netting, not by pushing through or jumping over. What on earth has he been genetically crossed with? Wallabies aren’t supposed to climb; it isn’t natural for wallabies to climb. But then neither is it natural for humans to walk on tightropes. I guess he’s just clever and keen—and weird.

  Actually I’m not sure if he ever leaves anymore. He’s so relaxed that I’ve seen him drinking at the horse trough/bathtub near my clothesline. It was an incongruously domesticated scene, because he is a wild animal.

  We may grow old together. I wish I didn’t like my heritage roses so much.

  The irony is that his favourite is the Autumnalis, an 1812 shrub rose that was the only rose the possums didn’t eat. So I propagated dozens of cuttings and planted them in various parts of the yard, in rows like hedges and in corners so they could spread. They should be metres-high and -wide, bearing masses of bright green leaves and clusters of little pink buds and creamy-white roses. Perversely, he strips them all, thorns notwithstanding.

  Country blokes look at me as if I’m dense when I complain about him, since for them the solution is obvious: ‘Shoot it!’

  No, I’ve given up, resigned myself to sharing the house garden with him and his unorthodox topiary, much as I became resigned to my post-arthritis horse-grazed garden.

  But if I do go away for a long time again, I’ll get a caretaker in, to maintain my claim and water the yard. When I get back from the next writer’s retreat with a village down the road, I want no unwelcome surprises.

  As if it’s in my control...

  CHAPTER 13

  WET AND WILD

  Dorothea Mackellar’s iconic poem, ‘My Country’, describes hers as one ‘of droughts and flooding rains’. As is mine, although it’s no ‘wide brown land’, but steeply crumpled green, more vertical than horizontal. Yet rain dictates the fortunes of my country just the same.

  The years of the big fires have also been the years of little rain, of relative drought. Our ‘little’ may be twice what outback areas ever get, but here it means that, beneath the trees, the long lush growth from normal wetter years is drying out, turning from green to brown to blonde—and waiting.

  On the steeper slopes where the topsoil is thin, so is the grass, but the eucalypts droop their leaves, avoiding as much evaporation from the sun as they can, and shed many, which join the fallen twigs and strips of bark to form an incendiary carpet below. Waiting. All it needs is a spark from an old trailbike as it revs up an overgrown track, or a lucky strike from a fork of lightning.

  For summer brings many dramatic electrical storms to these mountains, and this last summer was notable for the ongoing frequency of such storms—climate chaos at work? They may be my equivalent of the worldwide hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and landslides, increasing in both scale and frequency. Disasters that I no longer call ‘natural’.

  So far Australia’s been lucky, just a longer drought and a stronger than usual cyclone or two. Rural stuff. Public awareness is rising at last, but it will probably take a tsunami at Bondi to get the voting majorities to look up from their shopping mall worlds to the bigger picture, and demand real action on climate change from the powers-that-be.

  If people were given the choice, rather than have the climate become even more chaotic, I’m sure they’d prefer to endure infinitely smaller hardships, like turning off lights. Industry and commerce may have to be legislated out of their profligate power use.

  Then the government couldn’t claim that demand was forcing them to allow more coal-fired power stations, major, major producers of the rising CO2 levels, the ‘greenhouse gases’ that cause the global warming that cause the climate chaos. That’d be a start.

  Then a mix of renewable energy sources could meet our needs.

  The logical next step is not to mine and sell the coal to other countries’ power stations—there are no atmospheric borders. If that sounds economically subversive, I mean it to be. We must think of other ways of economically progressing. Every new coalmine will add nails to the global coffin. I find downright immoral the view taken by the federal MP responsible for the area where the huge Anvil Hill mine is proposed—that if we don’t sell them the coal to burn, someone else will. You could say the same about nuclear weapons.

  It u
sed to be said that Australia rode on the sheep’s back. Do we really want to be now riding on the back of global warming, from coal; or nuclear danger, from uranium? We’re rich in coal and uranium, but we’re also rich in sunshine and wind. We could be proud of our economy riding on those instead, famous for our technological and manufacturing skills in these energy industries that have a safe and proven record, and a future.

  Since his last trip to the US, Mr Howard has been talking about nuclear as ‘inevitable’, his solution to global warming, a term that has now become politically useful to him. If coal is now dodo technology because it’s turned out to be globally self-destructive, nuclear is already proven to be dangerous: in process, in possible uses and in by-products.

  ‘Safe nuclear’ is as much a myth as ‘clean coal’.

  Who’s keeping the blinkers on our ‘leaders’? They see black, they see red, but they can’t or won’t see green, let along go for it. This cynical little old solar-powered lady dares to wonder why.

  My mountain will be safe from tsunamis, but the storms here don’t need to get any wilder. They are already a spectacularly powerful reminder of human vulnerability and insignificance in the face of nature. From my open ‘skybowl’ clearing I have front row seats—and what the sky delivers, the trees amplify.

  From the edge of the escarpment below, many ranks of trees stand between me and the full force of the winds. Silvery smooth blue gums, rough brown mahoganies and stringy-barks, flanked by skinny she-oaks—wind-curved at the back of the troops and ramrod straight in front—are laced with rising branches to form the sides of my bowl, their upraised arms ending in thin fingertips dangling fans of gumleaves to fringe its rim.

  These fans are rarely absolutely still, and are constantly creating different patterns. Often they are part of a more energetic dance, being shaken about like cheerleaders’ pompoms as the upper branches sway from side to side in what can be a very lively routine.

  I accept this fluid nature of the top half of the sides of my bowl; it allows me to see all the different colours of the leaves as they bounce and turn and shimmer, to hear them gently humming the tune to which they dance, to keep me aware that they are very alive. It doesn’t make me feel nervous about the safety of my bowl at all.

  What does is when the dance passes into frenzy, when the humming becomes screaming and roaring, when fans are thrown from one side of the bowl to the other, when their very arms are broken off and dashed to the ground.

  Sometimes the dancers whip their bodies back and forward so violently that they break in half, or forget the first rule of this dance, which is that their upper halves perform all the actions—their feet absolutely must stay on the ground. They fall headlong, crashing heavily to the earth, their toes turned up in fatal exposure and their fans still quivering in shock.

  During such extreme storms I admit to anxiety, occasionally verging on fear, here in my little cabin. I hope none of the closer trees above me fall downhill, in defiance of the wind’s direction. Even though I built in a clearing, and thought I had left enough space in front, in 30 years the trees have grown taller and I am no longer sure of safety there either.

  The aftermath is always shocking to behold: splintered shafts like pitiful amputees, shredded leaves and smashed branches strewn everywhere. Worst of all are the living dead—the great trees prostrate when they ought to be upright, their huge root masses still holding soil, exposed to air and light instead of safe in their own dark underworld. Behind them gape the matching holes, lined with severed rootlets. The trees die slowly, the leaves turning brown and falling, the bark cracking, the broken limbs splitting, the trunks drying until they are no longer registered as trees, living things, but as logs, usable commodities to be sawn up and split for posts or firewood.

  A tree on the outer edge that falls like this may bring others down too, creating a tangle of three or four, uprooted and smashed to the floor of my bowl. Such a major collapse leaves that part of my tree rim very thin and weak. All of a sudden I can see through it in patches to the distant light-green hills of the valley, and the wind finds its way in when before it was forced to blow over the top. I plant new trees at that spot, erect a temporary fence around them, and hope it will recover. So far it has.

  For nearly two years after the last bad fires the tree rim didn’t look like mop heads at all, for there were none left. Instead, the silhouettes on my horizon were of upraised skeletal arms and claws that gradually grew furry as the interim leaves shot all along the branches until the trees could recover. Cleverly designed things, our eucalypts. Then strange post-fire colonising shrubs appeared, adding to this alien landscape—some native, like the purple-flowered Kangaroo Apples and Nightshades of the Solatium family; and some exotic, like Inkweed, Phytolacca octandra, that grew everywhere, 2 or 3 metres high, with red stems, purplish-black spires of berries and reddish autumn leaves. I was assured these would not be residents for more than a couple of years, and so it proved.

  One uncommonly wild storm came over when the extended front verandah was not quite completed. It was over 3 metres wide, so its tin and polycarbonate roof presented a large area of uplift. My partner had only put in half the amount of roof screws needed before he ran out of the time he could spare. At least the roof was on, and had been in this half-fixed state for some time—but how firmly was it on?

  Late one afternoon, we heard what sounded like jet engines revving flat out, fast approaching from the west. We looked around, saw that the sky there was an ominous pale leaden colour, and within seconds the tree cover on the western rim turned thin as leaves were whipped flat, trunks lashed into that dance to be feared. Then it was upon us.

  The chairs on the verandah suddenly flew to the far eastern end and piled up against the rail, their cushions sailing up and over and beyond. Doors and windows slammed, loose objects in the yard became airborne. I thought of Dorothy and the hurricane that took her to Oz. The verandah roof creaked and groaned, lifting, straining to leave the battens and cut loose, but, miraculously, it held. Torrential rain followed the big wind, sounding like a continuous barrage of nails on the roof over our heads.

  Next day, the remaining roof screws were added while I searched for and retrieved the far-flung items from their strange landing places.

  Yet being close and exposed to the sky does offers compensatory pleasures.

  As a child, I would lie on my back in the warm ploughed dirt between the rows of orange trees in our orchard and watch the clouds for as long as I thought safe from detection by my mother, who was always on the lookout for time-wasting. She’d have thought cloud-dreaming even worse than reading.

  There I was below the clouds, Gosford being almost at sea level. Here I’m high enough to look side-on at the cloud masses as they glide silently past like grand ocean liners, and close enough to see their slow explosions from within, their metamorphosis from one shape to another.

  Often they descend, surround me with the most gentle moisture, fill my bowl with cottonwool so finely spun as to be translucent, transform the familiar to the mysterious, vague shapes and elusive silhouettes seen through sheer white curtains. Sometimes the cloud which encloses me is suffused with sunlight. It’s such an ethereal ambience that my spirit soars into what I have to call bliss—and I don’t do bliss lightly or often. And I’m moved to say, ‘Thank you!’—though to whom or what I don’t know—for my good fortune to be here. On a more practical level, on days like this I know it will be sunny way out there in the unseen valleys and above my cloud, and my solar panels do collect a little power.

  The cloud might visit me for a morning, a day or a week. Much as I love it, after a week, when my solar panels are in need of genuine undiluted sunshine to recharge the batteries, aesthetic considerations fade if I am about to need to use high-wattage items. I could run the generator, but usually patience wins; the cloud lifts, the sun returns, and the batteries bubble again.

  As the cloud rises, its leave-taking has occasionally coincided with
the sun setting through the tree rim on the western edge, creating some breathtaking special effects of refracted fiery light, fanning out like rays of revelation. If the gods had anything to say to us mortals they’d say it then, or if there were a mythmaker about, she’d make one.

  My neighbours have better wet weather intuition than I do. The frogs go crazy, vying with each other in volume, in the lead-up to thunderstorms; the black cockatoos appear, wheeling about, doing astonishingly agile aerial runs between the trees with their big wing spans, squawking loudly—I am told that if they fly up the creek (or is it down the creek?) rain is coming; and the ants build high circular walls of dirt around their holes on the track.

  At the first rumbles of thunder, I unplug the telephone and the computer; it only took one phone sizzled by lightning to get me into that habit. If I am on the line when it starts to crackle, I say goodbye hurriedly. Often after a bad storm, my phone line will buzz, hum, whine ... or die. It can be out for days, sometimes weeks, as it’s tough terrain for repair teams, and 18 kilometres over hill and dale and creeks from the exchange.

  To report a fault, I walk up the hill with my CDMA mobile until one bar flickers on it—if I face a certain way. Digital doesn’t work at all. The old analogue system worked fine at the house but when did the powers-that-be care about us bushies? Now they’re phasing out CDMA. Why am I sceptical about the resulting effect on me?

  When I get through to the centralised computerised fault report centre, the person assures me it will be fixed in two days. ‘No it won’t, ’ I yell down the poor line, trying to explain the remoteness and the reality of time and distance. They merely repeat what their screen tells them. I give up; reality can’t compete with virtuality

  The intrepid repairmen travel by four-wheel drive for over two hours by a back route through private property to get here, as there’s no road from my exchange to me. They have to come in pairs because it’s remote, and the same blokes have been coming for twenty years because a rookie could get lost en route. So we’re old mates, although I doubt I’ll be seeing them once Telstra is fully privatised. Because of the high cost of servicing this line I’ve remained loyal to Telstra, reasoning that they should get the profits too.