November 22 2014

For the last two Fridays we’ve been kept inside by the heavy hand of a hot day. A peaceful morning of lemon sun and bright birdsong gives way to the monotony of bellbirds. Leaves beaten dry clack in the wind.

As the last arcs of the sun fall behind the western hills we venture out, sitting on the eastern side of the house in a cool breeze. Last week a cloud of white ants flew into the air from an old tree stump, shining specks of light catching the last rays. They scattered through the air, flying with abandon, crashing into us and the trees and the ground. The chooks pecked avidly at every log they landed on. To the south a great grey streak of cloud splashed the sky. Trees on horizons turned black on grey-green hills.

When the night is completely dark the soft air hugs our bodies. First stars come shyly through the blackness.

November 14 2014
We were sitting on the back deck late in the day last Saturday with a farmer from Victoria, the father of one of our neighbours. We’d been discussing birds – he’d noticed a yellow-breasted whistler; I’d noticed my favourite bird, the leaden flycatcher, back in the garden on its migratory round, and I’d gone to get the bird book (a massive edition of Cayley) to show him approximately what it looks like – when Martin said, What’s that bird in the tree? and followed me inside to get the binoculars.

It turned out not to be a bird at all. It was a koala, in the exact tree that I had heard a sound from weeks ago when we were weeding by the creek, less than 100 metres from the house. We took turns with the binoculars, watching it climb higher, out onto branches that looked far too thin, making the branch shudder as it reached out for leaves. It climbed around the tree as dusk fell darker. I watched it turn towards us, giving me a full koala stare with its round face and fluffy ears. A kookaburra landed on the ground below it, and we only needed a wallaby (or an echidna perhaps) to wander past to create a complete Australiana diorama. We laughed, but our laughter was for our fortune, of being granted such a magnificent boon.

It was nowhere to be seen when we went down to look at the tree last night at dusk. We wandered around, cricking our necks, my ears yearning for the grunt or snort that would give it away. The bush creaked and sighed, but with bird sounds, late-evening chirps that sounded as muted as the sky. Just as we were leaving a sound came from further up the hill, in a stand of similar eucalypts – one tell-tale bellow.

November 4 2013
We have our bees, thanks to Martin’s intrepid journey to Maitland and back via bumpy winding roads in the dark, dodging bushfire and a tricky petrol gauge. A few were sacrificed to the god of travel, but the rest are out and about this morning, exploring their new surroundings.

We did our first lesson in beekeeping on Saturday. I think I’d expected a lot of talking about bees and honey, but instead we were marching up to the apiary along a sandy track in the sun and straight into watching how you start and stoke a bee smoker – a bit of paper to start it then pine needles, stringybark or paperbark, packed in loosely at first then stuffed in so you’ve got enough fuel to keep it smoking. Smoke calms the bees when you open the hive as they try to load themselves up with honey rather than attacking you. Our instructors – all generous, kind amateur beekeepers – told us that it needs to be cool smoke, not hot smoke that might harm the bees, and demonstrated what cool smoke is by puffing it onto our hands. It was cool. Once the smokers were puffing nicely we got kitted up – Martin and I (and quite a few others) in conspicuously white new beekeeping jackets with built-in hoods. Even manoeuvring into the jackets was a feat that needed assistance. We divided into small groups with an instructor to open each hive and almost immediately I had a frame of bees in my (gloved) hands.

Like many firsts, there’s nothing quite like the first time you hold a frame of bees. There in front of you is a multitude of bees, crawling all over the frame and indeed on your hands (gloves). You’re not running away from it, but you’re standing still, watching the bees get on with their business. Alarmed at first, I moved to actually seeing what they were doing in their busy wanderings. I saw a drone, briefly, before it flew off – the larger, male bee who serves a purpose once in its life (if it’s lucky, as our instructor said, chortling) – but the rest were all field bees, females who tend the hive and the brood and manufacture the honey by some alchemical process we may learn about next week. Sweat ran down my back in the heat, in the jacket, but holding bees, observing bees, learning how to swing the frame around to inspect both sides, seeing how to lever the frames out of the box, scrape the propolis off the edges and ensure that the frames were clean and adequately spaced – made for an exhilaration, a freedom from ancient fears that completely overcame my discomfort.

19 October 2014

Usually it’s Martin saying, ‘I just saw …’ or ‘Come here quickly – ohh, it’s gone’ but today it’s me saying, ‘I heard the strangest sounds – I came to get you but they stopped.’ I heard them first down by the creek. We were cutting lantana – we have a little bush regen project going down there, which is going very well, with lots of young trees coming up amid the dead lantana stalks – and I had moved towards the rainforest section while Martin was at the other, open, creek-bend, end. As I moved towards another section of lantana I heard a purring noise, that turned into a rhythmic snoring sound, getting louder then finally becoming pig-like snorts that tailed off, back to the purring. It could have been anything, coming from anywhere – a frog or a bird in the congested lantana that I was approaching, trying to scare me off? Then the sequence was repeated. It was coming from the rainforest, up the hill. The pig-like sound was disconcerting – wild pigs? They have a reputation for ferocity. I walked hesitantly towards the sound. Was it coming from a tree? Twice I walked up the hill, slowly, quietly, peering into trees, ready to leap back if a pig exploded from the bush. Twice I went back to my lantana when the sounds stopped.

The afternoon grew slower, the shadows longer. We went back to the house where I did some more weeding in the vegie garden while Martin made dinner. Suddenly, through the soft dusk, a commotion arose from the rainforest section of the creek. A series of loud shrieks and grunts and snorts, a cacophony, very guttural.

By now I had my suspicions but I had to check them, finding a great range of noises (shame about the American commentaries) at http://koalaland.com.au/what-sounds-do-koalas-make. I was right. There must have been at least two koalas by the creek. One of our neighbours sighted one a couple of weeks ago – climbing their verandah post, hoping it led to food – but that was the first evidence we’d ever had of koalas on the property beyond noticing a very strong distinctive odour in some areas. Today’s display shows that we have more than one. The farm reveals itself to be ever more precious.

11 October 2014
Spring may be a European concept, but here at the farm there’s a definite spring-like atmosphere. Normally staid goats cavort in the field, the three young ones following their parents in a steeplechase across a ditch. The swallows have been more successful as parents this year and in the space of two days their babies have transformed from tweeting beaks that look picturesquely over the rim of the nest to speeding bullets travelling in formation. The garden has exploded into waves of seeding asparagus, rocket and parsley while the kale and chicory are only slightly behind, bulbous with bees on their flowers. It’s a scene of complete serenity – the asparagus ferns wafting, the kale flowers punctuating the green distance with lemon-yellow flowers, the brown snake gliding past the compost bin …

This is the brown snake’s second languid appearance in exactly this spot in two days. I know it’s the same one because it has a small scar near the tip of the tail. I’m so close – collecting lettuce – that our eyes are at the same level. I can see that it has pale eyes, which helps me to identify it as an Eastern Brown Snake, rather than a King Brown (orange irises). It keeps gliding, moving its whole metre and a half length around the path established by its head, more interested in what may be in the compost bin than in me. I still remove myself swiftly, watching it at all times. It doesn’t exactly follow me, but it does end up on the paving near the sliding doors, casually searching, poking its nose up the corrugations of the tin for any lunchtime snacks. The frog we saw on Thursday night is not seen again.

More attractively, sightings of an echidna – a young one, sticking its long nose into the soil in a ‘you-can’t-see-me’ way – near the front gate, a young wallaby by the road and a pademelon vanishing up the gully. We have only seen the pademelon at night previously and it’s a treat to see it in daylight, to know its colouring (very dark brown, almost black, with a red tinge around the head) and see more clearly its powerful legs and stubby tail. Daylight saving must have confused the wildlife as well.

25/9/14
Grey floating mist settles heavily into the gullies, hiding the trees and the hills and cutting us off from distance. It reminds me of those Tasmanian calendars that were such standard fare for a couple of decades. They appeared so reliably at the end of every year, so much so that I took them for granted. Then I wanted them, and they were gone. They always featured mist: white mist curved like velvet over rocks; stretched wisps of mist swirled around treetops; time-lapsed mist rushed down rivers like tastefully-drawn cartoon ghosts. I valued those calendars for their connection with the heroic fights to save the Franklin River, for their vision of a splendid, dramatic world that was Australia – not another, more important, or more historic, or more beautiful country. They made mist special for me, beyond its own gusting, mesmerising specialness.

The trees and hills hidden by mist today were in full view yesterday under a clear blue sky. We walked up into an area of the property I’d never been to before, passing carefully through a sprawling edge of blackberry to a large open glade of wattle. It was cooler under the dappled wattle light. The soft floor was a nursery for seedlings, making us watch where we trod. On the edge of the grove a baby giant stinging tree extended its vast and dangerous leaves – disarmingly, heart-shaped – like a young beast yawning with razor sharp teeth. A baby native tamarind identified itself with one large serrated leaf on a spindly stalk. Saplings of white euodia of various sizes were springing up, ready to take over from the wattle once its short life ends. Like a textbook image of rainforest regeneration taking place, the grove, in its calm beauty, shouted Nature will win! What should grow, will grow!

We walked back to the flat and crossed the creek at a place I’ve crossed a hundred times, never noticing before how a fig and another tree entwine on the edge of the bank so it’s hard to see which branch belongs where. The other tree was identified yesterday as a shatterwood, joining all those other Australian names that speak of the colonists’ disaster or dismay – Wreck Bay, Lake Disappointment, Mount Warning, Cape Tribulation. I could almost feel the timberworkers’ disgust at this tree, so promising, so plump, so useless to them as it shattered. I could almost feel the tree’s laughter: I’m not here for you!

21/9/14
The clouds gathered in the dip in the hills to the west, slowly, unobtrusively. The air became humid and the air still. A catbird squawked down by the creek. In the distance a chattering bird set up a background strum. One of the children, invisible on the hill, called out, her high voice carrying like a melody. It was Sunday afternoon.

I don’t often get a Sunday afternoon. Generally I’m in the car, heading to Sydney. The afternoon spins by on four wheels, carried by the long stream of the black road past farms, through villages, alongside a scrappy industrial area. Then across the Hunter River and onto the highway, where the traffic gets more serious but the bush can still delight you with a clump of cheerful wattle or a cliff prettied by boronia. The Hawkesbury River widens as you come down the hill, solemn with the responsibility of being so scenic. The traffic becomes more manic and you’re drawn into Sydney, into traffic lights and narrow-laned roads, vistas of clumped high-rise and the curve of the Harbour Bridge. The road is so familiar that I can daydream the whole journey when I’m meant to be concentrating on someone else’s grammatical errors and structural flaws.

The afternoon drifted along. The clouds continued to gather non-threateningly, fluffy greys and whites, then they spilled over into the valley. They spread out, light blue sky glimpsing through. As evening approached they gained some suggestions of colour, pastel mauves and pinks like an old lady’s bathroom.

15/9/14
The chooks welcomed us on Thursday by clustering around the front garden, trying to join me in forbidden, fenced-off areas and digging around my feet as I cut vegetables for dinner. The asparagus crowns are sending stalks up in random abandon; the Chinese cabbages have remained small but have hearted; the ever-reliable kale has shaken off the aphids and produced whole new bouquets of grey curly leaves. I went inside for a moment with my vegetables and Martin called me out again, quickly. Two of the chooks were chasing one and a half metres of fast-moving, glossy, vibrant red-bellied black snake across the grass. The complete foolhardiness of their quest engrossed us – their little legs, their waggling bums in earnest pursuit. Did they think they had just seen the biggest, tastiest worm ever, or were they were actually chasing it away? Hard to say. We tried to call them back, out of danger, as the snake slowed down and they came closer to striking distance, but they wouldn’t respond. Martin threw a small rock which landed precisely between the chooks and the snake, causing the chooks to squawk and jump and the snake to double back and rear up. The chooks paused, but stood their ground, clucking indecisively while Martin changed tactics, grabbed some bread and called them to him. This time they came up the hill, leaving the snake to its own unfathomable devices, sniffing around the grass, twisting around an unknowable winding of paths, until it slid under the fence and out into the paddock.

The next day, in the garden, the neighbour’s half-grown piglets appeared around the corner of the house in a sudden galloping, snorting confusion. They snuffled around the path then careered down into the garden beds, oblivious to newly-planted trees, wire cages, carefully nurtured seedlings. They ran in ever more chaotic circles, stopping only to sniff, to try to root up the more enticing smells. They came towards us, cheerfully expecting food of some description, racketting off again when they saw our empty hands. Then the neighbours turned up with a bucket of pig pellets – shaken rapidly it drew them away, and back to their pen.

The swirling, ungovernable energy of the pigs remained. I was left with a feeling of impermanence, of the fragility of our little garden. Our delicately tended beds, our carefully arranged stakes, our little paths, our chicken wire and netting were suddenly inadequate, effete – barely even temporary obstacles in the path of determined disruption.

8/9/14
Saturday was the Gloucester Platypus Festival, bringing together local efforts in environmental sustainability. There’s a lot going on in our area that isn’t related to the more unsustainable enterprises like coal and CSG mining. Rain bucketed down on Friday night (no-one noticeably complaining) but you could hear the collective sigh of relief through the valley when Saturday was bright and blue-skyed and the event didn’t have to be cancelled. Weeks of work would have been wasted, and you couldn’t even have complained.

I was working on a ‘make your own milkshake’ stall, where the milkshake is placed at the front of an adapted bicycle and mixed by pedal power – which was provided by the purchaser. The idea of sitting on a stationary bike and pedalling in order to froth their own milkshake was so enticing to pretty much every child at the festival that we were rarely without a queue of customers. There were some who were shy, scared of failure or something new, and some who were too small and needed a parent, grandparent or sibling to ride for them. But mostly it was an energetic crowd, waiting patiently as each rider went through the necessarily slow process of riding the bike sufficiently to froth the milk. In terms of simple (and sustainable) pleasures, this must surely rate.

Back at the farm in the afternoon we gardened, filled with the satisfaction of putting seeds into damp ground. Our newest technique involves placing hessian over the seeds so the chooks can’t dig them up as they germinate ¬— the chances of germination having improved vastly in the last couple of weeks. That night, when we switched off the light, there was a lightness in the sky, the near-full moon throwing dim shadows through the garden. Right in front of our window two tiny dots of bright light appeared, surrounded by a small cloud of dots that moved in and out of perception. Fireflies adding their brief magic to the night.