31 August 2014
The creeks are running, the rivers are spread out, forcing their bulk along with a steady sense of importance. There is mud and squelch underfoot, and the lettuces and rocket have exploded with growth. The one downside of all this rain – and you really have to search for it – is that the second day of our HotSpots program had to be curtailed. We were going to participate in a controlled burn of a section of forest on a nearby property, but the ground was too wet. The road to the property was too slippery for the number of cars involved, and the forest floor would have proved impossible to light.

Even at the local RFS shed, where we could at least cover the theory, a demonstration of how to light a grassfire fizzled out despite multiple matches and special burners. But who could argue with rain? Who could criticise its beauty? The spluttering flames that failed to rise, the creeping fire that failed to take off were just part of the merriment. We went back to our theory, learned about who you have to talk to before you light a fire – notify neighbours, get permission from the RFS – learned how to measure fuel loads – ground, elevated and bark – learned how to calculate which level of fire danger the arrow should point to – depending on time of day, temperature, humidity, wind speed – and learned how you can use that measurement to determine how fast the fire will run, how far the flames will leap. It doesn’t take much for the fire danger to change from ‘high’ to ‘catastrophic’, where fires will run along the tree canopy and jump from ridge to ridge.

We saw the grim need for all this theory as we left the workshop. A few weeks ago a local landholder failed to observe any of the basic precautions that we had just been taught. They didn’t notify neighbours or the RFS, they didn’t consider the then-droughty conditions, or fuel loads or wind conditions. The result is there to be seen in the long deep scar of burnt land rising up one hill and down the next. One of their neighbours was informed, 20 minutes before the fire hit, that their property was in danger. The other day – after all the rain – this neighbour saw a tree go up in smoke. It was a hollow tree that had been smouldering internally for three weeks, harbouring the flames that had finally burst out. But the surrounding land was wet and, as with our demonstration burn, the fire failed to spread. Luckily.

23 August 2014
Not only have the chooks started laying eggs – they’ve discovered their wings, and fly out of the run as easily as they wolf down caterpillars. This means that they’re completely free-range in the garden now. I can see that this is going to run a fine line between having them do extremely useful things, like eating the bugs and aphids and turning over the soil, and creating utter chaos and destruction.

The first time they made it down to the house, and the front garden, they came cautiously, and fluttered off in a rush of wings when I stared at them through the window. But this morning they sashayed around the corner, with just a high self-satisfied chirruping bleat to herald their appearance. Standing and shooing them achieved nothing. They turned their backs on me and started rummaging in the silverbeet, kicking over the soil and having the occasional peck at a leaf. One of them ducked down and fluttered her wings – their most recent development, that seems to mean ‘pat me pat me’. I obliged, until she stood up, shook herself and wandered off.

It’s a wonder how much amusement a chook can provide. Not quite as much as the neighbour’s two piglets (that got so excited when I went to feed them last week that they couldn’t get out of the barrel they had been sleeping in and rolled it all over their yard) but the sort of affectionate, exasperated amusement that comes from watching them hunt and catch and chase, always following each other in fussy, hurried little steps and running to see what the other has found.

Oh by the way, it rained. Intermittent light showers, heavy showers, continual dampness. Misty mornings, overcast days, grey skies. Freshened leaves, greening paddocks. Beautiful.

14 August 2014
The weather forecast is for rain – 40mm originally, now downgraded to 20mm – but even 20mm would be very welcome. More than we’ve had all year. The paddocks are bare after drought and frost, and most of the cows in the area nibble at bare earth and are being hand fed. We still have some feed, and the cows still look plump, but they’re trying all sorts of things – wattle, lantana – that they wouldn’t normally consider. We’re on the edge of our seats waiting for rain. We’re on edge.

There’s something so deeply depressing about bare paddocks and bright blue skies that don’t even hold a cloud. You know powerlessness right there. Wishing and hoping is not going to make it rain. You can’t entice or seduce or implore it to happen. Nothing is going to make it rain except some eventual cycle of nature.

Again the day ended with a promisingly deeply black sky moving in late in the afternoon. The temperature dropped as the thick cover of cloud loomed and menaced. We could see it falling onto the hills in the distance, sheets of grey between the earth and the sky. We hurried up to the house from the creek flat, full of the anticipation of the sound of rain as we sat by the fire, breathing in the moister air and wondering if we would make it inside in time, whether we had enough dry wood and had we picked the greens for dinner? Then nothing.

August 9 2014
Finding our first two little brown eggs in the chooks’ nesting box this morning was the good news we needed. On the other side of Gloucester there is a vigil taking place outside AGL’s office to protest the fracking of four wells close to people’s houses – and close to a proposed new coal mine. This latest permission for AGL makes their threat of 330 coal seam gas wells very real. We drove through the Surat Basin in the middle of Queensland 18 months ago, where the pursuit of CSG is rampant. We have seen what it is like to live in the middle of a gasfield, and it’s a sad, lonely place. Towns are decimated because the mining companies buy out so many properties, not just for mining but also for buffer zones. The countryside is stripped of its people. The miners establish fenced-off camps to house their workers, who fly in, and fly out again. The land is made barren in more ways than one.

We left the chooks to feel proud of their achievement and spent the day in the pursuit of knowledge, learning about managing fire on our property, the difference between wet sclerophyll and dry sclerophyll forest, and who our neighbours are. We were taking part in our local Hotspots program, run by the RFS and some other government agencies. They took us – about 30 of us – to a property right out behind the State Conservation Area, where we picked up dry leaf litter to see how dry it was, and how easily burnt. We learnt that the fuel load of leaf litter, and any stick smaller than your finger, is the dangerous stuff in a wild fire, and that most wild fires are fires that were started by people then ‘got away’.

We learnt about the different time intervals – maybe five years, maybe 60 years – for fires to go through different areas, and how diversity will dwindle in an area that never has fire through it. Except rainforest. You don’t send a fire through a rainforest. We saw the teeth marks on a gum tree from the yellow-bellied gliders who bite into the tree to suck the sap. They climb down the tree and bite from above so they don’t get sap in their fur. We heard about the glossy black cockatoos and the rufous bettong and the red-legged pademelon, the powerful owl and the local koalas. We spent our day in a world where people care for the land, and want to learn how to care for it better.

August 1 2014
It was a wild hot day. The first of August, still the middle of winter, and it’s too hot in the sun. The air is full of bushfire smoke. The fire season has been declared early in our area, starting today, so yesterday there were burn-offs all around. With today’s wind whipping up ferocious gusts, many of those fires are still burning.
One particularly dramatic gust blew past the house like a gale, a vivid assertion of unassailable power. It blew the chook house right over, leaving the chooks indignant and homeless but unscathed. We didn’t get to them until late afternoon, by which time they’d made their own plans, escaped the run and spent a happy few hours foraging under the tamarillos and lemon grass. The chook house was only slightly damaged and was fixed with a few new screws and a couple of judicious cuts where things no longer quite met. It might have been designed for an effete Sydney backyard, but it’s holding its own in this more exposed environment.
It’s a dark night, the moon a sweet line of mellow light, the stars bright in a black sky. The air has cooled right down. I go into the bedroom to get my book and notice ears in the garden. The ears are still while the upright stalks of the rosemary bush sway in what’s left of the wind. Two wallabies are close by the house, eating the stumps of the parsley plants they’ve demolished in previous forays and moving in on the fennel. They are the smaller, lighter, greyer wallabies with black noses. Martin is still in the lounge room and their heads come up at every noise he makes. Heads down then Martin opens an envelope and heads shoot up, ears swivel, paws are still. Heads down, paws reaching out to grab flyaway fennel stems then Martin pushes his chair back and heads shoot up. I read recently about a study that has shown that the kangaroo / wallaby uses their tail like a fifth leg, particularly for taking off from a stationary position. I can’t see the tails of the wallabies in the garden, but when Martin turns off the sitting room light, they’re off, bounding down the hill.

July 24, 2014

Against the low-lying grey of the sky, stretching out in all directions, trapping the earth in layers of comfortless wool, a pale-blue puff rises straight ahead of me, like an exhalation of light. It brings texture to the still landscape, where husks of yellow grass cover the fields and hills, greyed-out tree trunks rise and slip by like film sets.

Calves and lambs bound in the fields, tiny, fresh, inquisitive. They frolic around their mothers who solemnly patrol the bare paddocks, searching out the feed they rejected yesterday. The black-faced sheep race around a shrunken dam, its sides lined with the corrugations of sheep traffic, its water black. Four horses in long coats gather around a bale of hay. An irrigated field is a startling green, its edges ragged.

The creek is nearly still, the pond near the causeway stagnant and slimy. The air bites as I walk down the hill.

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.