13 March 2015
Autumn hits with wild abandon, growing weeds and spinning storms through our valley. Everything seeds and stretches, fruiting, colonising madly, in its final throes of growth before death. Everything looks displaced, frenzied. Pumpkins scatter across the hillside, tomatoes lurch out of the garden beds, zucchinis melt raggedly back into the ground. Heavy rain, and unrelenting humidity on the non-rain days, leave the garden damp and panting.
Approaching the farm, I see that a patch of snowy cloud fills our valley.
Slow. A black cockatoo’s wings beat the air as it sails towards the forest. One cry as it reaches the trees.
Sometimes, some very few times, when times are very hard, when the community becomes a nettle patch, painful to walk through, with a lasting sting – but not as bad as a stinging tree – I think what it would be like to not live here, to not have to deal with nettles. It would mean I wouldn’t have a forest to stare at, to walk in, to learn the tiny corners of. I wouldn’t have a creek, to hear its happy rush after rain. I wouldn’t have birds to delight in, that catch my eye or ear as I’m gardening, their gentle hop, their cacophony. I wouldn’t have sudden moments of joy, breathtaking surprise, feeling honoured by a koala, an echidna. A frog. I wouldn’t have a garden to feed me my vegetables, my greens and tomatoes. That offers up a single magnificent strawberry, a cluster of special, delicious midyin berries, just in passing. I wouldn’t have chooks that pick grasshoppers delicately out of my fingers. I wouldn’t have stars drifting, or a moon bursting through night clouds. I wouldn’t have a place that makes me want to use words like ‘blessed’ and ‘soul’. So much I wouldn’t have.

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!

23 January 2015

When we opened our beehive last Friday it was a sorry sight. The bees were sluggish, and there weren’t many of them. There was a small amount of larvae but we couldn’t see any eggs, and we couldn’t see the queen. She’s quite distinctive – not only is she much bigger, but she has a blob of red paint on her abdomen, added by the people we bought her from. A hive can make a new queen, but it needs to be done from the egg stage. No eggs equals no new queen.

We were bad hive parents. Something had gone wrong, and as new hive owners it was bound to be our fault. We went to the monthly beekeepers meeting on Sunday, crestfallen. But the beekeepers are an immensely generous bunch, and nothing pleases them more than helping their fellow beekeepers, no matter how stupid they’ve been. They’re a bit like bees in that respect – it’s all about the group. So we came away from the meeting with many offers of assistance, plus an offer of a new nucleus – a queen with a few frames of her worker bees. We discussed how to manage our existing hive alongside the new nucleus, and the general consensus was that we should combine them using the newspaper method. In this method you put one box (the stronger colony) on the base, then a sheet of newspaper, then the box of the weaker colony on top. We were instructed on it, we were shown it, we looked at it on YouTube and we tried to absorb the many intricacies of this seemingly simple procedure. Wouldn’t all the bees escape during the moving of the boxes? No, they go back to the hive with their own pheromones. Wouldn’t they all fight and die? No, because they have to chew through the newspaper to combine, and by the time they’ve done that they’ve become accustomed to each other’s pheromones and they won’t fight. What if bees from the old hive fly in at the bottom where they are used to flying in? They’ll probably be ok as they’re bringing in food, not trying to rob it. And so on and so on.

Last night we picked up the new nucleus, along with the warmth and expertise of our new mentor. We drove home in the thick sultry night, surrounded by heavy air and stars, the bees strapped in to the back seat of the ute. And this morning we started the procedure. We talked about the steps we were going to follow, we got the smoker going, we put on our bee jackets, we took all the equipment down to the beehives. We opened our original hive for one last check. There were bees everywhere. Bees buzzing in and out of the front door, climbing all over the frames, busily depositing pollen and nectar, feeding larvae, tending to the queen … her tell-tale red blob of paint was slightly diminished, but there she was, her bum in a cell, probably laying an egg. On another frame a large bulbous cell stuck out – a cell that grows a queen. From seeming to have no queen we now had one alive and one in production. We closed up the hive and went to ring our mentor.

5 January 2015

Last night the chooks were dawdling to bed, having a last peck at the feed, a last sip at the water, when I felt something behind me and turned to see the moon, just above the hill, a creamy-yellow disc surrounded by a bright yellow haze, edged with a thin circle of red trim. Slowly it made its ascent into the night sky, amazing all around with its magnificence.

Tonight it is much later, and we sit in darkness as we eat our dinner, bombarded by grasshoppers. A pale line of light forms along the top of the hill but still the moon waits. A cloud above the hill is lit from below. A tiny edge of brightness rises and suddenly the whole moon is there, veiled.

Behind us the bleating frog bleats. Now that I’ve seen him – he sits on the edge of the water trough, calling out to any waiting female bleating frogs – I feel I owe him an apology for my harsh words last week. He’s a sturdy little fellow, maybe 5 cm long, identifiably male from the glimpses of a lemon-yellow underbelly at his armpits and tops of his legs. His long back is a greeny-brown, and his toes end in fat round tips. He is a definite benefit, his beauty less showy than the moon’s but no less remarkable.

29 December 2014

Yesterday’s rain has gone, leaving behind it a fresh night sky with bright spots of starlight. Where the mists rose from the hillside (drifting lines of white fog that meandered up, forming curlicues that hovered before being sucked back down into the forest) we can now see – although it has always been there – that there is a patch of rainforest in a gully surrounded by eucalypts. At the front of the forest a stand of young eucalypts stood uniformly tall, uniformly bare-trunked to a ball of leaves, when the mist silhouetted them against the hill.

The rain has other benefits, like the steady call of frogs as night falls. There is a low background consistent hum of croaks from the paddock; closer to the house a ‘crik crik crik’ noise. Coming in above that an intermittent grrr-aak, grrr-aak grinding its way through the dark. Then there is the loud discordant screech that stops and starts. What was once a general ‘sound of frogs’ – the sound of summer nights, washed air, grateful bush sighing – now pulls apart into the stony creek frog, the green tree frog, the common eastern froglet and, unmistakably, the bleating tree frog.

Although I’m not quite sure that the bleating tree frog could really be called a benefit.

22/12/14

The first time we came to see the farm with a view to buying it, the owner, Eva, a woman in her eighties, who had run the property since the ’50s as a dairy farm with her husband, dead for ten years when we met her, told us that the white cockatoos had been so bad in the orange trees that morning that she’d got out her shotgun and had a go at them. Part of me was shocked – shoot at cockatoos, those whimsical jesters? – but part of me knew that one day I would understand. That day has come, with the sight not of cockatoos but of three king parrots sitting in our apple trees this morning, pulling at the developing fruit, chewing through to the seeds then moving on to the next one, unmoved by our shouts or thrown stones. Not having a shotgun to hand I rushed up the embankment waving my arms until they rose in a leisurely manner and landed a few trees away, watching to see if I would leave them in peace. More rushing and waving sent them off into the paddock. Beautiful they may be, with glistening feathers of impossibly bright red and green, but we want those apples. Our two apple trees are only two or three metres high, our crop is only going to be in the order of 20 apples, but that makes them precious. Maybe when we have a garden full of established fruit trees, loaded down with fruit, I’ll be able to emulate Jackie French and have a more ‘one for you, one for me’ philosophy.

The day turned hot, and I had to wait until the evening cool to wrestle with netting. I had just finished (one tree fully enclosed and the other covered in netting bags like a badly decorated Christmas tree) when my neighbour Rachel appeared. She had just seen another koala. We hurried up the hill, up behind the houses and along the wallaby track. There, in a spindly tree, was the koala, as promised. Hunched in the tree, its back to us, dark grey fur with a redder tinge around its shoulders. It seemed smaller than the others – the one we’d seen in the tree by the creek, and the one Rachel had seen in a different tree further down the hill. This was the first one I had seen without the aid of binoculars, standing on a hill almost level with it in its tree. Suddenly every eucalyptus amplifolia has the potential to hold a koala, to be infinitely more interesting than it was yesterday.

That’s the thing with living on the farm. The excitement can be intense, like seeing a koala up close, or it can be soft, like seeing the new silhouette of a wrapped apple tree against the deep blue night sky.

December 13 2014
Driving up here from Sydney last week I saw a collection of birds in a swampy area outside the little settlement of Craven. Craven is something of a ghost village, with a death sentence on its head. One of the coal mines wants to dig up that particular piece of land where a row of houses sits, so the road is going to be moved some kilometres to the west to accommodate this completely reasonable desire. It hasn’t happened yet and the houses in Craven continue to be inhabited, and the gardens continue to grow, but everything looks a little impermanent and tenuous. I’m not sure if it depends on the price of coal rising or falling, but whatever it is, Craven is situated in limbo.

Outside Craven, on the Gloucester side, is one of the very few straight stretches of road on Buckett’s Way. The rain has filled the ditches with water and any low-lying paddocks with swamps, and it was in one of these temporary swamps that I saw a small group of waterbirds. A number of egrets and two enormous birds, bodies the size of pelicans but with long legs, bodies a rounded mound of black and white feathers and beaks thinner and pointier than a pelican. It was only when I looked in the bird book that I realised how lucky I had been to see them, as they were jabirus. They do, apparently, come as far south as this, although I had always assumed them to be birds of the tropical wetlands.

So this week, as we drove up, I looked very closely as we came out of Craven. Nothing on the swampy area – more swampy than ever, thanks to continuing blissful rain – but then, further into the paddock, it was there again. We did a u-turn at the top of the hill and came back down, got out of the car and crossed the road to watch it stalk, elegant, reaching down and moving on, flamingo-like with its legs that joint backwards. It patrolled the paddock, walking down then back again – big body, stick legs – a complete anomaly in a field that doesn’t usually contain anything more exciting than a cow.