13 July 2014
The blue wrens that were such fixtures during summer and autumn have been missing from our garden for weeks. They make an occasional visit as dusk falls when we hear rather than see them, a ghostly presence fluttering among the turned soil and weedings, searching out caterpillars and exposed worms. But in the last week they have been replaced by a group of slightly larger, plumper yellow-breasted birds, which are every bit as gregarious, and attentive when we’re gardening. Generally we only see these birds down at the creek, hopping around and watching us, perching sideways on any vine or tendril, but suddenly they are on the fenceposts and wires, taking up observation duty on the perches we have set up, and sitting decoratively on a spade handle as if they’ve been reading Beatrix Potter.

We look them up in our massive edition of Cayley’s What Bird is That? to check the correct name. We decide they are Eastern Yellow Robins, but annoyingly Cayley has entered them twice – in one entry he says that there are Eastern Yellow Robins as far as Newcastle and Northern Yellow Robins north of that, but in the other entry he says that they are now considered to be conspecific, all Eastern Yellow Robins. Whatever the common name, ours are Eopsaltria australis chrysorrhoa, with a dusky yellow breast and a brighter yellow patch on their rump. I think Cayley is being overly poetic when he describes this patch as a ‘golden rump’ that ‘glows brightly against dark tree-trunks in dim light’, but he’s correct in making their defining characteristic: ‘A friendly and trustful bird.’

The kookaburras have set up their winter vigil around the house; the currawongs have been flocking, filling the morning air with warbling and the sky with manoeuvrings. A family of honeyeaters passed through on Thursday – at least five adults and a baby. We’ve had trouble identifying this bird before, so I won’t start trying. It’s a large honeyeater, at least 15 cm, and in the past it’s appeared alone. This group appeared quite suddenly, the adults foraging in the same places as the robins. We first saw the baby, tucked into the lemon verbena, as one of the adults gave it something round and red. On closer, quiet inspection, this turned out to be a chilli. From the lemon verbena they had easy access to the chillis, and soon three of them were weighing down the small chilli bush, pecking vigorously at the red fruit. Mid-winter, and it’s lean pickings in the wild.

8 July 2014
When I go outside to let the chooks out, the air is as bright and crisp as the sun. There is a thin white layer of frost on the grass, and the leaves of the plants huddle in. An exuberant burst of song from the lyrebird fills the valley, rich and moist. It’s like velvet, yet the morning is as spare as cotton.
Once the sun comes over the hill and hits the ground, the frost is gone, leaving drops of water on the dried blades of yellowing grass. The cows are looking for the bits of feed they’ve been ignoring, next to trees, under fences, and the barbed wire is coated in little black tufts of cow hair. Kookaburras fly low across the paddocks. One darts from its watch on the roof to snatch a tiny green caterpillar from the kale. The land is looking shrunken, its coating becoming sparse.
There is a lot of fuss in the big gum by the creek as bowerbirds chase each other from branch to branch. I heard their noisy flap of wings, their guttural mumbles, when I arrived yesterday, the only sounds in the quiet valley. This morning they are still there, adding a flurry of warm life to the pale blue sky and the glinting trees.

28 June 2014

It rained last Sunday morning, huge bowling balls of thunder from the west rolling through the valley just after dawn. At the height of the storm little balls of hail bounced across the pavers. This morning the clouds were merely decorative, arranging themselves Magritte-like to intersperse with blue sky, then racing away, spreading out as they chased down the valley.

Swallows careered in the wind, darting in to inspect the fatal nest – too close to the eaves for teetering babies to balance – then swooping out again. One red feather flutters on its edge. Below the swallows’ nest a tomato has lodged in a crack in the paving. It soaks up the winter sun in its protected corner, producing little red tomatoes that delight visiting children.

This afternoon the sky grew dark in the west, dark-blue, then purple, then black. When I walked around the house I could see the sky falling away towards the east, felted in every shade of grey. The storm whipped in with cracks of thunder, flashes of lightning. Wind-blown rain covered the deck, gusting, evading capture for the tank.     

June 19 2014

It seems more likely to me that we like diamonds because they remind us of the sparkle of waterdrops as the morning sun hits the leaves of trees across the valley, than the other way around.

Winter is here now, and the early morning sun slants in through the double doors when we open the curtains to let it in. It exposes every smear and cobweb across the doors, creating a film across the view beyond. I have to go outside into crisp air, cooler than the bright sun would suggest, to see the chicken wire around the kale transformed into a piece of magnificent, extravagant jewellery, glinting droplets suspended from every filament.

I arrived late yesterday afternoon, driving past mist that lay close to the river flats. As the evening lengthened, it filled every creek and riverbed with slow-rising swirls. The last light through the trees was swallowed by mist; branches that used to be covered by leaves ended in dark unfamiliar bunches of dripping black. Mist spread thick across the paddocks, covering cows, submerging houses. I drove through wisps of sliding cloud.

June 14 2014

The chooks are our unexpected allies in the battle against the kikuyu. They peck at its ends, grazing on it as their preferred food when they’re let out in the mornings. There’s a noticeable difference between the grass inside and outside their run.

Their run is 50 metres of electric mesh held up by pronged stakes. It took five of us about an hour to put it up, but that involved complex arrangements with tent pegs and ropes that I doubt the original developers had ever foreseen. It’s connected to a solar powered energizer with a dead battery that only works when the sun is shining fully onto it. That seems to be enough, and the chooks mainly stay inside, running in a six-legged pack whenever they see a person (or a car, or a dog), anticipating food. They’re generally rewarded.

We’ve had the chooks for about six weeks now. They’re still growing, their wattles developing slowly, their red combs edging out of the tops of their heads. Their pecking has become fiercer and I no longer let them eat out of my hand unless I have gloves on. I let them out when I’m gardening nearby so they can scratch and hunt, picking grubs delicately out of the leafy greens, or to have any snails or grubs that I find. They have a particular cry, a startled expression of joy, that greets these treats. The first one to reach me grabs whatever she can and runs, away from the others, her rump waggling. The other two follow, and I have to call them back to show them what else I have found. At dusk I catch them and put them back in the run. They file up the ramp into their penthouse suite, wobbling on their perch for a while in a show of maturity then, I suspect, going back to the comfort of the nesting box to sleep.

May 31 2014

I am woken by Martin whispering, ‘Look out the window’. A wallaby is standing in the garden. ‘Right where I planted the peas!’ Martin says. But neither of us jumps up to shoo it away. It looks straight at us, through the glass doors of the bedroom, then stands still, only its ears twitching. They rotate on its head, catching every nuance. It lifts its muzzle up high, sniffing something on the wind. It holds its little hands together daintily, its body still, its senses alert. It’s close enough for us to see its damp fur, beige on its front, red on its face, head and back. Then we hear the click of someone opening the top gate and its body tenses. It leaps up and – too quickly for me to see – it must turn in the air because it’s bounding down the hill, over the rhubarb and the new beetroot seedlings.

Soft white mist is rolling in. There are trickles in the downpipes. The yellow berries of the white cedar trees brighten the view, standing out on the tips of bare branches. The wompoo pigeon embarks on another round of fifty pomp-pomp-pomps. As I sit at my desk I hear a rustling ­above the bird calls – it’s a cow’s head rubbing against wire, pushing through the fence to reach a new patch of grass.

Last night when I came home the sky was so clear that the stars shone down and lightened the land. Star clouds gathered in the Milky Way; bright shining stars filled the deep sky. So high and vast, reaching down to the hilltops, silhouetting the trees. I woke the cows from their resting on the driveway. They looked at me through bleary eyes, rose reluctantly and lumbered a short distance away as I drove through. This is my everyday life here – the startling beauty of the common world.

24 May 2014

Hanging the washing on the line on a sunny day is probably the only domestic chore that I don’t mind. Being accompanied by the song of a lyrebird makes it truly enjoyable. I hear the song more clearly since we saw the lyrebird at Barrington Tops. It seems to encompass the deep shelter of the rainforest, arising from some cool and shady bower. I hear the rich leaf litter in its resonance, the curl of fernfronds in its embellishments. Today it is the butcher bird’s call that is being improved upon, with extra depth and trills. Yesterday it was the whipbird. When the true whipbird called, it sounded thin and unsubstantial compared to the full-bodied, lengthily-drawn out build-up and the fantastically opulent whip! at the end of the lyrebird’s version.

Even our neighbour’s goat – tethered in the blackberries in an attempt to both whittle down the blackberry shoots and entertain the goat – stops his crying, stands still then kneels and rests, his ever-poised head pointing towards the patch of forest where the lyrebird is performing. This goat lost his partner recently, probably to snakebite, and it appears that a goat’s grieving process is both lengthy and highly emotional. He cried for days after the death, and is still unhappy, picking at his food, growing thin. He’s healthy, his coat is good, he is given everything he needs. It just isn’t the same without his friend.

As the cows meander up from the creek the goat gets agitated. I think it’s his chance to make a new friend, but he eyes them warily. They regard him with interest, or maybe it’s his bowl of cereal and bucket of water that catch their attention. One wanders over and makes light work of the cereal. The goat stands at the end of his tether – yes! – and moves as the cow moves, keeping as much room as possible between them. A cow is a big beast close up so I shouldn’t be surprised, but both goat and cow are grazing animals, which would suggest an affinity. The first cow moves on and a second one comes to take its place, nudging the cereal bowl and looking for any lost crumbs. It reaches over towards the goat, sniffing, positioning its body so that my sight of the goat is obstructed. Suddenly the cow’s hindquarters twitch away. It bends its head around and sniffs again – its hindquarters twitch again. It lets the goat butt with his pointy little horns a few times before it wanders on, joining the herd as they make their way up the hill, munching and grabbing at clumps of grass. The goat watches them go, maybe a bit wistfully, sensing his missed opportunity, or maybe a bit triumphant that he had seen them off his patch, taking victory from their amiable roaming.

6 May 2014

We’ve been trying to show our Canadian visitors all the exotic wildlife we can, listening for the bellbirds and the catbird, trying to remember that a kookaburra sitting on a fencepost is commonplace for us but wildly exciting for them. This morning we heard the black cockatoos for a moment and caught a glimpse of them in a tree near the creek – a few seconds of their mournful call, a black tail swiftly disappearing into the forest shadows.

I’m alone in the garden late in the afternoon, the sun low in the sky, the crisp night air replacing the afternoon’s languorous warmth. The others have gone to town to buy meat for dinner. I’m working on finishing weeding the bed that we edged with turmeric last year. Despite the tough season we’ve had over spring and summer the turmeric has not just sprouted but thrown up healthy leaves, and even flowers, and now risks being strangled by grass and chickweed. I’m making satisfying progress when I hear the call of the black cockatoos, the long cawing in a minor key filling the valley. I look up to see five of them above, the yellow splotches under their tails distinct. They’re flying together with long strokes of the wing when their call changes to a duck-like quack, then back to their normal elongated cry. They’re above a large gumtree on the creekflat when their cries change again, to a parrot-like cluck, then a few notes of a magpie-like warble. They circle the tree then two of them open their wings wide and dive, spiralling down like fighters at an airshow, twisting as they plummet, pulling themselves up and gliding in to land heavily on a branch. The other three take their turns, adding flourishes of fancy flying at will.

Ten minutes later another three cockatoos appear out of the west. They too fly over me, interspersing their calls with quacks and clucks. They approach the gumtree and the calls of all eight birds fill the air. The three new ones plummet and the tree explodes with flapping wings. The cockatoos scatter out over the creekflat, cawing and cackling. The explosion becomes contained, they collect, and land in a different tree. The chaos subsides, the cries die down, the valley is quiet.