26 February 2015

On Monday night we went to the Tim Minchin concert. The steps of the Opera House filled with happy people. The sun went down and the lights of the city filled the buildings with Klee-like patches of yellow. Ferries beetled in and out of Circular Quay, jolly with their patch of splashing water. Tim Minchin talked and belted around the stage, singing songs where the wordplay mixes sharp needles with custard. Nice custard that warms the heart; clever, acupuncture needles that hit the right spot and make you smile maniacally along with him.

On Tuesday I went to the state funeral for Faith Bandler. I suppose all funerals are moving, but this one, with its collection of people, many of whom are publicly important, gathered together to honour someone who has affected our world in so many valuable ways, without having had huge recognition in the wider community – this was particularly moving. Speaker after speaker talked of her grace, of her perseverance. She spent ten years speaking to community groups before the 1967 referendum – a referendum to change the constitution regarding Aboriginal people (including them in the census – as Linda Burney said, “before that we were nothing” ­– and removing the prohibition on the federal parliament having the power to make special laws about Aboriginal people) that was agreed to by 90.77% of the Australian people – the highest number ever. Faith Bandler was a formidable activist, feminist, strategist, mentor, humanitarian, internationalist – an inspiration. And she was, as Professor Paul Torzillo said so forcefully – and to the great appreciation of the until-then sober and respectfully quiet crowd – “she was a leftie, and we’re claiming her as ours.” Maybe Barry O’Farrell didn’t applaud that one.

On Wednesday I woke to the news that there was a crash on the Harbour Bridge. Southbound traffic was banked up to The Spit. Traffic on Wattle Street was at a standstill. Extensive delays through the peak hour. Buses delayed by an hour. It sounded like the whole centre of Sydney had turned into one massive traffic jam that I didn’t want to join. I dawdled in the flat, waiting for it to clear. By the time I did leave the streets were normal, with a feeling of relief about them. I drove across the bridge and up the highway, turned onto the motorway. I drove through heavy rain and sunshine, on wet roads and dry. I arrived at the farm in the late afternoon. The creeks greeted me with a bit more splash than they’ve had for months.

This morning, Thursday, I woke to this year’s family of blue wrens belting around the garden. Their tiny bodies are barely heavy enough to weigh down the parsley or basil they land on. The grass is wet from last night’s rain. Since last Sunday a lot of the zucchinis have melted, their big strong scratchy leaves gone, their hollow stalks reduced to a puddle on a yellowing stem. Wallabies have found the sweet potato and its leaves have gone too, only the stems left to stand, empty, on their vines. Two of our first plantings – the live fast die young tamarillos – have died and we cut one of them out last week. I pile its bare branches onto the mattress springs that the sweet potato grows through as one more hurdle for the wallabies. It’s good to give the tamarillos another purpose before they become kindling. They deserve a lengthy send-off. These pioneering trees formed the basis of the food forest in the top garden. We planted coffee bushes under their shade and shelter, ringed them with lemon grass and comfrey, grew out from them with greens, then carrots and tomatoes, then arrowroot, further out with marjoram and feijoa, joined their bed up with plum and peach trees. This summer we extended again, with turmeric and yacon, melon and cucumber. But the tamarillos were the first: they established the centre. Our first crop, they taught me to love the tart, red-blood ooze of their fruit.

This is my life. City and country. Light and dark. Frontloader and twin-tub. Chicken and egg. Joy and pain. Life and death.

February 21 2015

Jokes about regicide apart, it wasn’t easy killing the queen. Not that we did it. Our mentor, Alwyn, took us out to where he had sited our ailing hive and his (new swarm) hive, in someone’s lovely vegetable garden on the outskirts of town. We opened up both hives to find that our hive was still – after three months – just managing to replace itself, still only occupying the five original frames it came in. Our queen was there, and a new queen cell near her. ‘They know she’s no good,’ Alwyn said. A sixth frame had a massive hole in the middle of the wax. ‘Wax moth. Sign of an ailing hive,’ said Alwyn. Judgement day was upon us.

The new swarm hive, the control against which ours was being measured, was booming. Bees occupied every frame, the eggs were being laid in a regular pattern, we saw larvae and pollen and honey. The queen was wandering around with an entourage, a bubble of worker bees around her. Alwyn picked her up to put a blob of blue marker pen on her – it makes them easier to spot, and the colour coding for each year lets you know how old she is – but she scrambled out of his hand and flew off. We tiptoed around, not wanting to be the person who squashed the good queen, until Alwyn spotted her on the ground, picked her up and marked her and threw her through the front door of her hive. Then he turned to our hive. Our queen’s red-dotted back came into view, close to the new queen cell again. That red dot had once been the source of excitement, alerting us to our queen’s activity, showing us that all was well with our queen on her throne. Today, the red dot is sad. It marks her out for her fate. Alwyn reaches down – not with those careful fingers that held the other queen so lightly that she flew away, but with hard pincers that squash the queen and … she’s already gone. A smear. ‘What about the queen cell that they’re building?’ I ask. ‘That needs to go too,’ he says and it’s gone, broken in half. ‘Look,’ he says, pointing to a viscous substance in the cup-like half of the cell, ‘there’s the royal jelly they were feeding to the young queen.’

The rest of the procedure was quick. Alwyn placed a piece of newspaper over the top of our box, then some thin pieces of wood on three sides and another box on top. He punched holes in the paper with a nail. We moved the five frames from the good hive into the box along with three empty frames. The thin pieces of wood keep the boxes apart and give the bees in the top box an access door in one direction while the bees in the bottom box have their access in the other direction. This means the bees can go in and out of their own hives separately until they’ve eaten through the paper and the hives have combined.

We put the lid on top of the top box, and bricks on top of that. I wonder if I’m too soft to be a farmer.

February 12 2015
The joy of homecoming, recognition, is immediate, but it takes a while for the buzz of the drive and the city to leave me. I check the chooks. They look to see if I’m carrying the white bucket with their scraps, or even a caterpillar on a kale leaf, but I’m empty-handed and they ignore me. I walk around the garden. Finally, the zucchini have a decent crop and not just flowers and enormous leaves. I find an escapee at the back – it was probably tiny when we left last Saturday but it’s nearly 30 cm long now. The new zucchini – the Christmas present seeds – are already producing ball-shaped fruit, one way past tennis ball size. Should I pick it? The self-sown capsicum – the only sort we seem to be able to grow – has got half a dozen green capsicums. One down the bottom is turning red so I pick that. Tomatoes have started coming up where the beetroot came out, vying with the pepinos for space on the bank, apparently trying to outdo each other for the prize for the plant that spreads the most and produces the least at the moment.

Further along, the Jap pumpkins continue their rush down the hill, but they’re doing the right thing, with a satisfying number of flowers turning into little bulbs of green-striped pumpkins. The strawberries are breaking free of their cage – the one tiny area of order in this chaotic garden, where the strawberry plants are in a row, surrounded by mulch and looking something like a gardening photo – but their runners can’t be contained or rerouted any more and the cage will have to be expanded. The mandarin tree which has struggled for three years, and which we noticed only last week has finally started to thrive, is looking less happy. Some small branches are almost bare of leaves, and other leaves have large chunks taken out of them. Nasty looking caterpillars, orange, brown and white, have invaded. My secateurs are the nearest implement so I chop the ones I can see in half and hope I’ve got them all.

And now, my dinner of zucchini and pasta eaten, the night’s cool air around me, moths the size of small birds battering against the flyscreen, the slow chirrup of frogs and crickets an undecipherable background blur, I’m here.

3 February 2015
The morning sky is that lighter blue that says, enticingly, daringly, ‘autumn’. At the farm on the weekend the days had lost their burning heat and the nights were cold enough to push us indoors for dinner. We woke up on Sunday morning to a light mist over the hills, creeping down behind each tree to silhouette it briefly before devouring it.

Even Sydney has sky and weather. Sydney where a mother raised on Sesame Street sings to her daughter as they ride their matching scooters down the street. Where women give the man with a baby strapped to his chest admiring looks when he walks into the coffee shop. Where the two middle-aged men at the table next to me earnestly discuss whether single-breasted or double-breasted suits are currently in fashion. I switch off from their conversation to concentrate on my coffee-shop reading matter, a paper on BMAD (Bell miner associated dieback). BMAD is the source of some discussion at the farm, and puts a sour note into the beautiful call of the bellbirds (otherwise known as bell miners). Bellbirds have come a long way since they were Henry Kendall’s ‘silver-voiced birds, the darlings of daytime!’. They are now being blamed for facilitating infestations of psyllids (tiny sap-sucking insects) that feed on certain eucalypts and cause dieback, where the leaves are stripped from the canopy and the tree often dies. A further connection has been made with lantana around the base of the tree, as a nesting site for the bellbirds. The simplistic response has been that getting rid of the lantana will remove the bellbirds and therefore save the trees. But, as with anything in nature, it seems the solution is not that simple, because the cause is not that simple. The paper’s summary concludes that ‘there is a complexity of connections and interactions, many of which have yet to be deciphered.’

I leave the coffee shop and wander into Ming On Trading across the road. We’ve only ever bought chicken cages (round domes that we use to protect our vegetables from the wallabies) from Ming On, but today I go upstairs to a world of ribbon and trims, boxes overflowing with strings of sewn strawberries and fake fur. Two women speak rapid Chinese to each other, interspersing their conversation with the occasional English words – ‘sample invoice’, ‘ring downstairs’. It’s like a song I can’t quite get, their voices rising and falling and flowing, then stopped by harsh English syllables. Back outside a woman wearing a black hijab stops on the footpath to embrace her little girl who jumps and points into the sky, calling out excitedly, ‘An aeroplane!’. We exchange a smile at the joy of discovery. What a complexity of connections and interactions yet to be deciphered!