14/1/16
Back at the farm, where a flock of galahs flies overhead, bellies storybook pink. Back from a few days in Sydney, where long grey greasy footpaths string the way beside roads, where a tall man covered in sores wearing a lank dress walks, scattering neatly dressed woman with clutched handbags as they emerge from the Greek centre.

Back at the farm where black sapote flowers have appeared for the first time on our tree, grown from seed – the flowers turning into tiny fruit, little squashed balls with petals that come around and touch at the front like origami gifts.

Where the night smells of lemon verbena and scented geranium, washed into the air by a sudden storm, thunder booming and thin lines of lightning sparking through the sky.

29 December 2015

There’s been a lot of indignation in the chook run. We bought four new little chickens on Sunday, two New Hampshires (chestnut brown, with a few black feathers in the tail) and two Andalusians (one black, one blue ie silvery-grey). They spent the first night in the old chook house – the little, pre-fab cutesy house that’s never been the same since the pig escaped from next door and headed for the chook food. The front door doesn’t really shut properly and the grass has taken over completely since the chooks moved to their new industrial-strength run. Nevertheless, with a bit of urgent weeding and displacing of spiders we made it liveable and the chickens quickly made it their home, snuggling down together in the nesting box in a delightful huddle of chestnut and black feathers.

Yesterday we fenced off a portion of the chook run and put the chickens in, along with their food bowl and water. The two old chooks were horrified. Even, terrified. They cackled loudly, crankily, for the rest of the day. It was the same noise they had made the day there was a brown snake in the run. The noise only stopped when the chickens all nestled together under the pomegranate tree for a siesta and were no longer visible. In the evening we caught the chickens and put them back in the pre-fab house.

This morning we put them in their section of the run again. The cackling started at once, but didn’t persevere for long. The older chooks even allowed themselves a peek at the enemy, and moved around their run more normally rather than running past any area where they could see the upstarts. But when we went to check on progress this afternoon we found the two New Hampshires had made their way into the main run, their quiet cheeping giving away their position. They were tucked into the long grass at one end while the old chooks remained firmly at the other end, with a very determined refusal to look in THAT direction. Later, at dusk, it was again the New Hampshires who appeared, striding across the lawn, having escaped the run but not having any real destination. We put down our dinner and ushered them back through the gate. They were as keen to be reunited with their Andalusian friends as we were.

The two old chooks will, according to the chicken lady, be ‘spent’ by the end of summer. For her this means they’ll be disposed of. For us, I suspect it means that they will no longer reliably lay eggs, but that they’ll fuss around the run until the grim reaper catches up with them, naturally.

20/12/15

When I was a very little girl, one of the jobs I enjoyed doing was helping my mother to hang out the washing. I would hand her the pegs as she put the washing on the line. We had our own measure of the heat of the day. If it was a cool day, two hankies would be pegged together. (It was never cool enough for each hankie to have its own peg.) If it was a warm day, three hankies would be pegged together, and if it was very hot, four. I would ask, ‘Is it a three-hankie day or a four-hankie day?’ as I felt the sun beating down on my hatless head, and my mother would tell me. I would then pick out the right number of hankies, and a peg, and hand it to her. Sometimes, if she wasn’t in a hurry, I would be allowed to pair the socks, and hand them to her with a peg as well.

Today is a four or even five hankie day. I hang out the washing and the line spins around, catching the wind. It will be dry before I get to the bottom of the basket. The thyme plants have shut down for the day, their leaves compressed. The birds have already headed down to the creek after spending the very early morning in the garden, looking for seeds and bathing in the birdbath. The sky is that far-away blue colour.

Even after I’ve come inside, and despite wearing my hat, I can feel the burn of the heat pressing down on the top of my head.

12/12/15

Since we got the bees, our minds have turned to flowers. Not a huge imperative in the garden beforehand, but now an ex-vegetable patch has become a patch of native plants – grevilleas, a low-growing banksia, melaleucas, an eremophila, a midyin berry, all being linked up by a creeping myoporum. They’ve done well, and most of them, even the tiny ones, have flowered. The melaleucas with puffs of lilac and white, the eremophila with a startlingly pink pendulous flower. One of the grevilleas has powered ahead, thickening up quickly and taking a greater share of the garden, threatening to dominate with its thrusting stems covered in fleshy grey-green leaves and spidery red flowers.

This morning a blue-banded bee had found the melaleuca lilac puffs and was unmissable with its distinctive buzz – loud and persistent – around the flowers, darting in impulsively then backing off to hover and buzz. We noticed that the large grevillea was being badly eaten by something. I had thought that the bare tips of the stems were new growth, but in fact the leaves had been munched off. I saw one caterpillar, thin and camouflaged, the same width as the stem, similar yellowy colour, with a slight red stripe along its length. I picked it off and put it on a brick where I squashed it. Then I saw another one, then a much larger one, with its colours more pronounced in side bands of red and greeny-brown. It reared up when I reached down for it, curling back and threatening me with its tiny rounded head, but it too was consigned to the killing brick. Soon the brick was covered in squelch, and I was so inured to the killing that I was just squashing them with my gloves.

When the plant seemed free of its invaders I noticed that a couple had fallen on the ground. Squash. Next to them was a sort of small white leathery sac, like an egg but malleable. I squashed that too – it was clearly associated with the caterpillars – and a green substance oozed out of it. It was the colour of a baby rug, cute and pastel. Then I saw some brown segmented creatures wriggling around the base of the grevillea. Their shells were hard and crunchy, pointed at both ends, and they could have been cocoons except that they were very active. They wriggled menacingly, like extras in Alien, pointing their blind tips at me. They too had pastel-green insides when squashed, the astonishingly benign colour oozing out between the ugly brown segments. You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.

I had nearly the whole life cycle in front of me, from eggs in a sac, to needle-thin caterpillars, to large rearing-up caterpillars, to cocooned transition creatures. I was killing them all, knowing nothing of the caterpillar or its butterfly or their place in the ecosystem. All I knew was that they were stripping my grevillea, and I was fighting back.

18 November 2015

If I could, I would paint this scene. I would call it ‘Late afternoon with flying ants’. I would capture the bright late afternoon light on the little eucalypt – fading now, the leaves no longer glowing yellow but reduced to their usual grey-green – and the continuous flow of flying ants from the old tree stump. Each set of wings catches the light as it rises. Collectively they catch the wind, blowing to the north, then to the east. Reminding me ridiculously of a bubble machine, they stream up and out, glinting gold against a background of multiple greens – every green in the Derwent pencil box. The swallows circle them, paragons of control against the wafting mass of ants.

Once the sun is behind the hills, the land slowly darkens and the orchestra of the night commences. Against the violin section of cicadas and frogs, magpies, catbird and whipbird add highlights. The magpies are in the distance, their four-note call rising and falling sweetly. Closer in, the catbird adds a harsh, throaty stream, punctuated by the whip! whhhhip! whipbird. The deep repetitive bass of the wonga pigeon sets a dignified underlying tone. The magpies move further away, the catbird takes a solo. One frog calls, magnified from the drainpipe, chuckchuckchuck. The owlet nightjar starts its trilling, the frog-cicada chorus takes over, louder and louder, rhythmic, unstoppable. Kookaburras make a final call. It’s night-time.

In the dark night (the half-moon already well on its way into the west) the spotted marsh frog sputters out its crk crk crk, the stony creek frog purrs gently behind the house. A green tree frog is plastered to the bedroom door, its white belly flat against the glass, its sucker feet spread. When I turn off the light the bumps of moths and small insects against the door slows down, then stops.

30 October 2015

My gardening technique veers between ‘that should work’ and thorough research. ‘That should work’ has about a 50% success rate. Thorough research probably has a lower rate, because I can never quite find the exact answer to my question, and I end up reverting to ‘that should work’. Take these broad beans. They’ve grown well and we’ve had a decent crop, but now they’ve come to their end. We’ve stripped off the remaining beans and the stalks are wilting. Some are black and rubbery. I remember reading somewhere that you should leave broad bean roots in the ground as they fix nitrogen, so I drag out all our gardening books. Some of them say nothing about broad beans after you’ve harvested, but the rest seem to reach a consensus that you should dig the roots and stalks into the ground. None of them say the thing I remember, about leaving the roots in the ground to rot.

So I go out to the broad bean patch and chop down the stalks, which I then chop into smaller pieces. Some of them don’t chop easily, because the stalks are limp and just bend under the blade instead of cutting. Then I contemplate digging. Do I just dig them in, so that there are long bits of stalk through the soil? Or am I meant to be chopping them into finer pieces as I dig, so they’re integrated into the soil? I try chipping them in with the hoe, but that doesn’t work – same problem with the bendy stalks not wanting to be cut. At least the hoe helps me cover my bets by chopping through some of the roots. I then try digging with the fork, turning the soil over the stalks and roots, but it looks too chunky. Given that the books all recommend following broad bean crops with leafy greens, how are the leafy green seeds – which are tiny – going to manage in ground that is hillocked with partially-chopped broad bean roots and stalks?

I think about the term ‘no dig garden’.

I place a thick layer of mulch over the whole bed and water it in. Maybe the microbes will do the work for me. Maybe I’ll come back to this bed in a week’s time and find a beautifully even bed of tilth in which lettuce seeds will germinate and thrive, sucking up their extra nitrogen and expressing it in gorgeously ruffled fabulously flavoured leaves. That should work.

23 October 2015

It’s the time of night when the land turns monochrome. Colour leached out by the setting sun flies up into the sky turning the clouds pink. Kookaburras laugh out into the evening, before the frogs take up the chorus, spreading their chirrups across the drowsy land.

There’s no night-time flurry of swallows returning to their nest tonight, no more cheeping little heads raised above the edge of the nest’s mud wall. But this year it’s because of success, not failure. Last year the swallows had a dismal record of baby-rearing. Two lots of eggs were laid and babies hatched, only for us to find naked fledglings dead or gasping on the ground under the nest after a few weeks of rearing. I don’t know if this year’s parents are better, or if there has been some radical reshaping of the nest under strict Health and Safety Guidelines, but I feel like sending this year’s parents an award for most improved.

Ugly baby heads appeared a few weeks ago, their wildly disproportionate beaks gaping. Last week fluffy babies perched above the nest. This morning there were two baby swallows sitting on the railing, staring at the big world. Their parents came swooping in after a while but they weren’t stopping to stuff titbits into their mouths – they were there to entice them off the rail and out into the yonder. One of the babies followed, returning after one circuit to struggle back onto the rail. Its sibling stretched one wing out and scratched underneath, displaying a certain virtuosity. It spread its wings and flapped but stayed where it was. Then the parents were back swooping and scooping up both babies into their flight. The four of them flew around the valley and returned, the babies to the rail, the parents right back in to the nest, flying out with the third baby following. Swoop, fly, swoop, back to the rail and then all five are in the air, dipping and turning, skimming out of sight and returning to the home rail. The next time they all take off they don’t return. I see them on the edge of the tank, two bigger bodies, three littler ones, then no more.

October 6 2015
Extracting honey is slow. One drip at a time, it falls through the sieve into the bucket below, wax building up on the sides. It’s as slow as the emergency room in a country hospital on a public holiday, where at 1pm the nurse says, ‘The doctor is just having a rest. I had to call him out very early this morning for a case of anaphylactic shock. He hasn’t had his breakfast yet.’ Which means that she has also been on duty since very early this morning. One of the other patients waiting with us says, ‘I’m just grateful that we’ve got a hospital’, and we agree. We might have to wait three hours for Martin to see someone about his very painful shingles, but at least he can see someone. The nurse bandages a young man’s foot and knee – injured yesterday while riding a motorbike and obviously left overnight in the hope that she’ll be right mate – deals deftly with a 6-year-old with a rash, and takes everyone’s blood pressure every hour. She offers cool drinks to those who are waiting, and dashes up and down the corridor, a sister of mercy dispensing painkillers to those in need.

But back to the honey. There are emails every day from our bee group telling of swarms that people want removed from their trees, patios, front fences, back walls – and one today in a wine barrel. It’s spring and the bees have woken up, they’ve smelt the nectar and they’ve started making honey. If we’re not careful our bees will be swarming like all the others, having filled up the frames in their hive and wanting somewhere else to store their rations. We have to get some of those full frames out of the hive and replace them with empty ones. Martin is simply not well enough, so I kit up, alone for the first time, trying to manoeuvre the smoker to calm the bees while simultaneously removing frames to inspect them. Trying to speed things up I head for the middle frames, and immediately find one that is full. I take it out and replace it with an empty frame. I remove another frame but the bees are getting cranky. They leave off crawling all over the frames to explode out of the hive and start bombing me. The smoker goes out and I’m left defenceless.

It’s disaster if you panic, so I walk quietly back up to the deck, open the smoker, battle with the tight lid and start it up again. Egg carton, pine needles, light it, let it get going, push the lid back down. Smoke threads serenely out through the nozzle, promising puffs of protection. The bees calm down a little, I inspect a few more frames then decide that … whatever that phrase is about something being better than valour, put the lid back on the hive and clamp it shut. I brush the remaining bees off the one heavy, full frame, and bear it into the kitchen where we strip off the cappings and slot it into the extractor. We already have two frames from the other hive, so the extractor is full and ready to go. Our first go with our brand new extractor! We turn the handle and soon there is honey gathering at the bottom. We flip the frames and turn the handle again. We open the tap at the bottom so the honey can run into a bucket, a thick glistening golden ribbon. Once it’s all in the bucket we remember that we were meant to strain it, and that’s when it runs so slowly, the wax collecting in the strainer, the honey drip dripping through. Slow as the emergency room in a country hospital on a public holiday.

22 September 2015
We were driving down Bucketts Way on Sunday, and we’d just passed the turn-off to The Glen Nature Reserve. I started telling Martin about the bushwalk I’d been on in the reserve on the previous day. We had walked into the reserve along one of its many tracks, crossing and recrossing a shallow creek, yellow rocks on its bed, sudden dark pools by the side of the path. There were tall bluegums with ferns at their feet, smooth blue-white bark contrasting with the deeply textured brown bark of (and here my enjoyment in recalling the day is somewhat tempered by my ignorance) other trees. Possibly turpentines. Tiny blue and purple violets were springing up in the path. Purple, again, in the sprawling hardenbergia and the shrubby pea thingy that was everywhere. Paper daisies, their flowers about to burst out of their buds. Another vine, with starry yellow flowers, and one with a red pea flower. Black fungus frilling on just one particular tree trunk. On the other side of the track, a native clematis, its white flowers frothing. Higher up the path, where the steep slope below us held pockets of rainforest, I recognised the big green droopy leaves of a native tamarind from the rainforest at our place.

But we weren’t there for the trees so much as the birds. It was a walk led by a local man whose passion has been birds for the last 20 years. To me it was a cacophony of tweets and trills with an occasional rustling in the bush. To him it was the grey shrike thrush (the GST), the brown gerygone (tiny nondescript brown bird, hopping agitatedly through the undergrowth), the yellow thornbill (one walker said, ‘I have yellow thornbills at my place’ to which our leader replied, ‘Do you also have brown thornbills and buff-rumped thornbills?’). We saw a Wonga pigeon up ahead on the track, viewed its remarkable size through the binoculars as it wandered amiably away. We heard spotted pardalotes, and looked at their beautiful markings in the bird book. I longed to see one, high up in the canopies, to see its Indian embroidery of dots and dashes covering its head and neck and wings. We looked for its nest in the crumbling bank beside us, seeing every niche as a possible home for this tiny lerp-eating bird. We heard the Lewin’s honeyeater (the bird I’d failed to identify in our garden some time ago, with a greenish body and a white crescent behind its ear), saw the grey fantail (popularly called ‘the crazy bird’ at our place for its darting, twisting, random-looking movements in the air). During the first, lower, part of the walk the whipbirds kept us company, the male making the first call, the female replying with the whip. They disappeared some time during the slog up the hill, but as we walked down from the trig point (520 metres above sea-level) they reappeared. At that point our leader stopped us and said, ‘What’s that one?’ and it was so familiar it took us a while to realise that we were hearing bellbirds for the first time in the walk.

I didn’t get as far as telling Martin about the satisfaction of identifying the Lewin’s honeyeater. As we drove around a shallow corner, where reeds grow by the side of the road, a pair of ducks flew out. Their heavy bodies struggled to gain height. I braked. Not soon enough. Before I closed my eyes (yes!) (momentarily) I saw the panicked eye of a duck up close – very close. I saw a plump duck body full of life and pumping, terrified energy. Then I heard a loud thud. I opened my eyes to crazy cracks all over the windscreen. Unable to pull over into the deep ditches by the side of the road I kept driving. In the rear view mirror, a small inert body lay forlorn on the road.

I have a friend who writes a food blog. Last week she wrote about pigeon soup. If anyone wants to adapt her recipe and use a duck instead, I can tell you where there’s a fairly fresh one ready for cooking.

Another country, another currency, another language. Not just words like ‘skookum’ (big, strong) but conversations like, ‘Do you call that a truck?’ Another landscape, another blackberry bush, another pie. This time the blackberries were picked from rambling bushes on the edge of a Canadian rainforest – pine, spruce, fir trees reaching high, creating deep dark mossy places below, arbutus trees twisting thin red trunks out of craggy rocks, maples spreading wide green canopies – and the pie was made and eaten in a log cabin on the side of a still, clear lake dotted with tiny islands, looking across to a forested hillside, a short motorboat ride from the lapping ocean. The loons call, mournful trilling, burbling back and forth. Kingfishers play tag, maintaining a scolding chhhk chhhk as they divebomb each other. Creeks have to be cleared of beaver dams to make way for spawning fish. 

We got to Canada from England via Iceland. The road from the airport to Reykjavik is through an 800-year-old lava flow, where lumps of weathered lava, covered with a blanket of mosses and lichens in yellows and greens, look as if the ground is still bubbling. Glimpses of clear blue sky give way to soft, wet fog that slowly covers the surrounding hills, hides the views of the sea at the end of each street, and starts to drip from the sky in icy rain. We go on a ‘Golden Circle’ tour that includes a visit to Thingvellir, site of the first Icelandic parliament; Gullfoss, a pounding waterfall falling from a glacier, thick and white behind distant black mountains; a hot springs area with steaming sulphurous pools, clouds of stinking mist that billow, and Geysir, the original geyser (which no longer gushes) and Strokkur, which does gush with sudden booming explosions, its pool pulsing like a giant’s pulse, filling the rock pool and falling back, the water becoming heavier, thicker, more forceful, more sanguine than normal water, then the push comes and the water fills with air, propelled upwards, in droplets and spitting spray. When I look up, the clouds look like someone has been knitting Icelandic patterns in the sky. 

We flew to Canada over Baffin Island. You know when you’re by the sea, on a big brown rock shelf, with little perfectly round potholes, and long jagged crevices, and large areas of sharp rock that suddenly fall away? It’s like that, but from on high, and without those little red jelly-like blobs that cling to the insides of the pools, or the sound of the sea booming into caverns below your feet. Dodging my head to get a better view through my window, beyond the plane’s engine, I try to make sense of the white dots that appear in the sea along the shore, then form lines and clumps like so much flotsam and jetsam. Please don’t let them be flotsam and jetsam. Now they are joined together below us and the sea is nearly covered in lacy white, then the white stretches off into the distance until we don’t know what is ice and what is cloud. A tip of dark brown land appears then a wide blue-green channel with small streaks breaking its flat surface. Small streaks like a motorboat’s wake in a place where there is no sign of humans or motorboats. Am I seeing small streaks of a whale’s wake? Then a river claws its way through this red brown land, a blue line plaiting through a wide yellow bed, equipped for gushing snowmelt. Then the clouds cover the land.