February 1, 2014

When I turn on the lights in the bedroom I notice a film of movement on the glass doors. I look closer and hear the faint tick tick of feet climbing the glass. The doors are often covered in insects on summer nights, and we’ve watched armies of them rise and fall. They climb to the top and drop down again, creating waves of motion in the periphery of vision. Usually they are tiny flies, so tiny that we’ve had to close the glass doors because they can crawl through the fly wire. These are much larger, about a centimetre long, with a bulbous yellow back and a red stripe. I am less amused by this waterfall of bugs when I recognise them as one of the creatures I’ve seen on the kale, one of the many reasons (along with the cluster caterpillars and the pumpkin beetles) that the few kale leaves that the wallabies have missed look like lace.

I’ve never translated those nighttime insects into daytime evidence of destruction before. This time I see nothing but the potential damage that is climbing up and down our door. Although I’m ready for bed and more suitable bedtime reading, I go and dig out the book by Judy McMaugh called What Garden Pest or Disease is That?, a depressing litany of beetles, caterpillars, flies, scale, fungus, rot, spot, blight, canker, rust. I shield my eyes from the more gruesome pictures of bundles of sawflies or infestations of mould as I flick through its pages. You wonder why you bother when there’s a whole double-page dedicated just to things that attack macadamias. Eventually I match tonight’s bugs to the photo of the redshouldered leaf beetle.

It turns out they are native beetles that occur in swarms – yes – most common in late spring or summer – yes. They chew ragged leaves in foliage – yes – and attack a wide range of plants. The author doesn’t mention kale, but I get the idea that it could easily form part of their diet. There’s something about a swarm that brings out an antagonism towards invasion in me. My eyes are drawn to Judy McMaugh’s usual response to insects – spray with carbaryl – but even she admits that this chemical is ‘of relatively low toxicity to humans but highly toxic to bees’. I remember to ask myself why I have a garden, and how that garden sits in the grand scheme of our environment, and my feelings soften. Awww. Red-shouldered beetles get hungry too.

31 January 2014

At dusk, the creek is strangely silent, the usual cacophony muted. A sole catbird, its husky croak lingering in the trees. A short burst of cicadas. Two black cockatoos fly a short distance, adding a few precious peals of their beautifully mournful calls to the uneasy evening. The air cools quickly.

We can talk of nothing but the weather. That is, the lack of rain. The paddocks are brown again, after the brief respite of the drizzle last week. The line where the bald hill meets forest is a series of grey patches – lantana, blackberry and more desirable trees that have lost their leaves, or failed to flourish at any time this summer. I am still angry at the crossword compiler who last week set the clue, ‘The brief account sounds pleasantly warm (7)’, playing on the homophone summery/summary, where the ‘pleasantly warm’ section of the clue is meant to indicate ‘summery’.  Pleasantly warm it is not, in our summer. We’ve been spared, so far, the spectacular heat that some areas have had. Our high temperatures have been in the 30s, rather than the 40s. But the dry has been devastating, defeating, relentless. Not pleasant.

The wallabies are becoming desperate again, and any hint of growth on mizuna, parsley or kale vanishes overnight, nibbled to the stalk. The grass is crackle-yellow again. Any small plant that suffers a setback moves quickly to death’s door. Our last surviving strawberry plant was scuffled by a stray paw – creature unknown – and despite some extra mulching and water is now losing the battle for life, leaf by leaf. The appearance of animals that we rarely see – a large echidna down on the creekflat, trundling along in an immediately endearing manner; two goannas, implacably thudding by the side of the road – is a cause for concern. Why are they there? Why aren’t they in their normal habitats? Are they looking for food, water? Will they survive?

The forecast is for rain next Tuesday. I hope everything can last that long.

January 14 2014

I had just turned out the light last night when I noticed a blotch against the window where no blotch had been before. Bright light shone through bruise-coloured clouds, big swells of grey turning red around the battered moon, one side missing. The blotch – almost rectangular – stood out from the doorframe, silhouetted. I sat up to see better what it was, and it darted away. A frog.

Despite the near-drought conditions, there are a number of frogs around the house. One jumped out of the seedlings when I moved them in the afternoon, making me squeal like a girl. Its beautiful velvet-brown skin brushed my hand as it jumped. It sat on the top of the pot and looked around, taking in the heat, the sun, my startled face relaxing as I saw it properly. One frog lives in the downpipe and bellows its croaks most evenings. One night last week it came out at dusk and ventured out along the pergola. We could see it move carefully down the beam. It was a good target for late-evening low-flying kookaburras: they sometimes do a final fly-by at about this time. Near the end of the beam it stopped for a moment – then leapt. Not just the two metres down to the ground, but in a vast arc, its tiny body in the air for just that moment. Then it was gone. Maybe into the water chestnuts, maybe right into the garden. We hunted with the torch, but its feat had delivered it where it wanted to be. Invisible. 

January 8 2014

After a day of light rain, the garden is beautiful. No heartbreaking wilting, no dry earth. Purple-blue chicory flowers, the same shape but more intense than cornflowers; vibrant green silverbeet; springy okra plants and sprawling tomatoes. I never noticed weather, or the seasons, in the city. Maybe to see if I needed to take an umbrella, or if it was too hot for an afternoon walk, but it never really mattered. The city is there to change all that. Built shelters to walk beneath, food in the shops, water in the taps. At the farm, weather is everything. It determines what we do, what we eat now and in the future, whether we can have a long shower or a short wash.

I went to the garage on Monday. The air-conditioning had broken down. The mechanic asked me a few questions about the car, then asked what I was doing in this area. ‘I live here’, I said. ‘Ah.’ he said. ‘We could do with some rain.’ I’d passed the test. I knew the importance of weather.

January 1, 2014

The Wollemi pine is fading. The trunk is less green, and nearly all of the points where the branches meet the trunk are completely brown. I stare out at the paddock beyond, at the rudely healthy wattles and gums and white cedars, as if I’m hoping for a sign. Maybe a sign of forgiveness from the universe. It’s new year’s day, a time of new beginnings, but there’s no magic for this poor tree. A male Leaden Flycatcher lands on a strand of the fence. It’s my favourite bird at the moment, maybe because it’s so new in the garden, maybe because of its perfect plumpness, the beauty of its colouring, the precision of the place where the colour of lead meets white. It’s not my sign from the universe. It chastises me with a bossy tch-tch-tch.

I keep one mournful eye open for snakes in the grass around the Wollemi. We had planted it in a part of the garden we’ve been leaving untended. You can’t cultivate everything at once, and this section remained as long grass while the rest was tamed, through mowing and brushcutting and digging and planting. Martin cut a path through to the middle of it for the planting last week, but that remains surrounded by a large swathe of tangling kikuyu. The fact that we haven’t seen a snake for a few weeks makes me all the more wary. It’s hot, and there are plenty around.

The second-last snake was on the deck. We were having our coffee when I heard a chilling sound. I heard stealth. We looked behind the old floorboards we have piled up in the corner, and a coil of black snake stopped moving, its head lifted and stilled. We went inside, closed the glass doors, and watched. It uncoiled – well over a metre of red-bellied glossy snake – across the deck, but instead of heading for the garden it came towards the house and slid into the track of the doors. It moved down the track, undulating up the face of the doors, becoming more and more frustrated as it pushed itself higher up this solid void. It so believed in the penetrability of the glass that I stopped feeling safe. I couldn’t admire the close-up of its belly, but joined it in wondering if it would find a way in. It didn’t. It gave up, slouched behind the pumpkin rack for a while then disappeared.

That afternoon we were back on the deck, drinking tea. A pale pink-brown snake rushed out of the silverbeet, heading straight for us. Its dark eyes met mine and I called out ‘Snake!’. Martin and I both jumped up, pushing back our chairs. One of the chairs hit the metal dog bowl, which scraped loudly along the paving. The snake jumped too, and u-turned back into the silverbeet.

No snake sightings since then.