Rural Dreams Read online

  In a matter of weeks after meeting Anders, I broke up with my older, brown-haired boyfriend who I’d known for years. ‘Things have changed,’ I said, looking at the sluggish Thames. ‘It’s time to move on.’ My brown-haired boy played with a loose button on his coat and stared at his feet. ‘I can’t pin you down,’ he said and when I said well stop trying, he said, maybe I will and at the time I was glad.

  When I asked Anders to come home with me and help renovate the business, he didn’t hesitate. There was loads of work with all the clean-up and people were apparently making good money out of it. Anyway, he said yes – I suppose it appealed to his adventurous streak. Now he finished his icy pole and snapped the stick in half. ‘The students have been here again,’ he said, face glued to the screen. ‘They want to see you about something.’

  I stood next to the fan for a moment, felt the air cool my thoughts. I pulled my boots on, found a hat and rolled open the back door of the shed. The heat smacked me, made me unsteady. I burn easily. As a kid, I’d swim in the creek on hot days – spend hours by myself lying in the shallows, resting my head on some rock, looking up at the canopy of leaves and the blue beyond. Hard now to recall if there were ever these endless plus 40, cloudless days that choked all effort at play. I wiped my forehead with my t-shirt and retied my hair. Somewhere up high a magpie gave a mournful cry; it may well have come from the bush itself. The heat shrivelled all living things and the birds didn’t sing as much or as often as they used to. I started to walk down the bush path to the cottage. Madness to ever come back, I thought and not for the first time. Madness to ever come back to a place you lived as a child and think that things could be the same. As a kid this place was Dot and the Kangaroo country, deep and wild with thrones of moss to sit on and shiny rocks to build dams from. When was the last time I heard the family of fairy possums? I thought. It’s been a while.

  But here I am, against the advice of my parents who wisely now live in a newly-built home in Yarraglen, road access in two directions and insured to the hilt. Here I am, trying to recreate my childhood, rebuild the guest houses, get the sheep going again. I thought about the word ‘folly’, but it felt too English. ‘Fucking lunatic’ was what my brother said, and he was probably right.

  It was memories of the moss throne that bought me back. The moss throne, remnant of a fallen ash, had me spellbound as a child. In that way I was no different to all the other Australians living overseas who return. We return for the imagined past, for Big M days on the beach, the broad spaces and freedom under an unpolluted sky. We are always in a state of return, but to what we don’t exactly know. We can’t even explain what we left.

  That ancient throne, green with moss and damp with the smell of rich undergrowth, that was what I held on to. Queen Guinevere would have been so lucky to sit upon such a chair. I’d play around it and on it for hours and once velvet evening settled over the bush, I’d feel a witchy awareness of the surrounds. My eleven-year-old self could hear the final laugh of the kookaburra and the beginning of the boobook owl’s sonorous call. Once I saw a lyrebird step out among the undergrowth, it’s black feathers an intricate gown. Sometimes the neighbours’ kids would join me, but mostly it was just me. When darkness fell across the valley I’d run, half in terror, through the bush to my home.

  But there’s no moss now and the throne is a splintered black stump, home to bugs and spider webs.

  I tapped at the window-pane of the little cottage where the four students had been staying, researchers from the University. Neat and polite, they kept to themselves for most of the time, wandering about the place during the day and trying to keep cool in the stone cottage in the evenings. Anders and I agreed that they were much more mature than we were at their age. Why weren’t they out drinking every night and laughing hysterically with their friends? Once I asked that and they nodded. ‘It’s because there is so much at stake now,’ one answered. Normally I would laugh at a response like that, but the way the young researcher said it, I was stopped in my smirk.

  The students poured out of the cottage, smiling and nodding. The last one to come out, a young Japanese girl, took me by the hand and began leading me further down the track, into the bush. ‘Come with us,’ she said in her clipped accent. ‘We have something to show you.’ The students were studying the local vegetation and fire practices in the region. Anders and I went with them to a talk about Aboriginal fire management and it sounded like more than good sense to me. I wished everyone had listened to it a year ago. Now, the students were focussed on trees in the valley.

  We passed the vacant block next door. For the most part I kept my eyes down, but I was glad to note that the mangled swing set had finally been taken away. The students didn’t speak as we passed. A hush came over them and they hurried, hurried past.

  I was led down the path and into the bush. ‘I spent most of my childhood here,’ I told them and they nodded politely without turning around. They probably thought I was ancient; I do look older than my 29 years, it’s all that sun damage and coconut oil as a teenager. ‘But I went overseas after University and I’ve only been back ten months.’

  The Japanese girl turned around, ‘It must have changed a lot,’ she said, and I nodded. Yes, yes it has.

  At the bank this morning, the manager told me they couldn’t lend me all of the money required to rebuild the cottages. I’d already reached my limit. And now with all the new requirements to build fireproof homes, well perhaps, she said, it was time to look at other options.

  It was dark and cool under the growth as we walked deeper into the bush, but the old creek had long dried up and I missed the sound of rushing water. I stumbled on a rock and tripped. In front of me, the students walked on in sturdy boots. In some parts of the valley, the fire jumped the lower reaches and left whole areas unscathed. This was one of them, and yet, it didn’t feel as dark or as quiet as it had once been. The sun speared down in sharp lines, dry twigs crackled underfoot.

  Two weeks ago, I thought I might be pregnant. It surprised me, the excitement I felt despite my misgivings about Anders. If I had a child it could play in the bush like I did, be a little bush kid. Turned out it was a false alarm. I didn’t mind too much, but still it got me thinking. One of my friends had a baby girl and when I first saw her in her little crib, something in me shifted. The deep cranking of internal cogs when a train track changes course – an altered journey, the need to reset destinations. A false alarm, but still.

  The students and I continued down, deeper into the valley. Here it was quiet and dark. Most of the ash trees had not been touched at all. Those majestic beings, it gladdened me to see them. The students were calling and the Japanese girl beckoned me over.

  ‘Acacia,’ she said in a low voice, as if the plants could hear and be offended, ‘this low down the valley. We’ve found it – the sign.’

  And they were going on and on about the sign and they were taking photos of the small bright trees, measuring the distances from them to the nearest ash and cupping out samples of soil from the ground. They were talking about the first sighting of acacias growing in mass this low down in the valley and that they were the ones to find it. There was talk of journal articles and a large grant. They were most excited about a tiny young acacia, bright like an exclamation mark right in the very depth of the valley, perfectly formed.

  I leant with folded arms against the trunk of an ash and watched them.

  The little yellow clump was photographed and measured. The young students stamped their boots, drank from their bottles and talked about methodology. They wrote things in little notepads and already I could see them back at university, giving lectures on the valley to polite applause. They knew more about my home than I did. As if it was paying respect to their academic prowess, the bush was quiet.

  A few days before, I’d commented to Anders that I used to hear birds all the time when I was growing up.

  ‘I can hear them,’ he’d said.

  ‘Not my birds.’
r />   ‘None of them are your birds.’ He picked up his phone and started texting his new friends and my old ones. ‘They never were.’ When I complained about the weather, he’d say things like, ‘Why should the weather be considerate of you? It’s hot, get over it.’ His pragmatism made me long for a snakebite pint.

  Anders was making plans for the place. Guest cabins again yes, but this time solar powered as well as fire resistant. Fewer sheep in the paddock near the house block, and olive trees in the orchard. Anders knew someone with a press and thought that perhaps he could check it out.

  After a while the students began walking again, up the valley toward home and before I joined them, I leant down to look closely at the revered plant. In the dark grey of the undergrowth, the burst of yellow reminded me of a beautiful and unwelcome wedding guest. All was still. I ran my hands over an old ash and felt a great wave of sorrow. Up above the sun bore down, but here in the valley the trees sheltered me. I rubbed a gum leaf and held it to my nose, I put it in my mouth and clicked my tongue over it.

  On the way back, I could hear people out the front of the vacant property next to mine. More rubbernecks on their weekend drive. ‘How sad!’ the woman was repeating over and over, the click of her phone camera whirring at every pause. ‘Tragic!’ she said her eyes never leaving the scene. ‘Nine people in here!’ the man was saying loudly, looking around for an audience. ‘Nine people they found all huddled up in the bathroom. All locals. Just goes to show.’

  The students hurried into their stone cottage and I stumbled past the tourists to my place. What was I doing here? I thought once more. Trying to recreate some idea of childhood? But who would want to be Queen of such a kingdom? Whole families, forests and animals have perished here. Leave this place to the students, to Anders, to Rustik and the bank.

  There was a word I needed then, like a howl waiting in the wings – there was a word I needed, and I couldn’t find it. From my bag I pulled out the tiny acacia shrub that I had ripped from the valley floor. I bent toward the yellow bunch of fuzzy foliage and buried my nose in it. It filled my nostrils, got in my eyes and made me blink. What was that word? The one to describe the tipping point of nature, when the old order is overtaken. It hurts this word, it’s a long overdue argument and trying to find it is a bit like peering over the edge of something sharp and slippery and cold.

  Anders called out from inside the shed, ‘Hey, want to go to a barbie at Rachel and Mick’s? They’re the ones with the olive press. I said we’d help them with replanting. Anyway, few drinks near the old creek?’

  I closed my eyes and felt 100 years old. Already he was sounding more Australian than me.

  ‘What happened to the baby polar bear?’ I called back.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What happened to the bear? On the show?’

  ‘Oh that. Dead of course.’

  I look across the yard at the beginning of the dry valley and the vacant block. The lone magpie sends out another of its mournful cries. But now I’ve remembered the word. I look down at the yellow flowers of the acacia, bright and resilient against the hot dirt. The young scientists had the word – they said it over and over again and now I’ve got it. Threshold was the word I was after. Threshold.

  THE PRECIPICE

  Anna was reading her daughter a story when her husband arrived home with some news. A body had been found at the bottom of the Precipice. He would have to go out tonight with the other volunteers and join the retrieval. She turned on the television where already a solemn young woman was listing the details so far; a body found by a bushwalker in difficult terrain, badly decomposed with evidence of animal scavenging. Impossible at this stage to ascertain male or female. Local SES on their way to recover the body from the area colloquially known as The Precipice.

  Anna closed her eyes and saw the looming cliff with its rocky outcrop and the drop hundreds of metres below. Local people called it The Leap for the stories of Aboriginal families herded there by whites in the early days of settlement. At night, in the keening winds whipping up the valley, a lone cry from a curlew could sound just like screaming or a baby’s sob. How long exactly had it been since she had stood on the cliff edge, half frightened she would jump?

  The television showed footage from a helicopter, hundreds of kilometres of bush, mountains and rocky outcrops, hidden crevices and valleys. Anna knew what the search would entail; lines of volunteers in high-vis walking slowly, side by side through the bush, looking for any clues as to the person’s identity, personal items or evidence as to what had happened. People like her husband, winching in from the cliff top with stretchers ready to haul up the body. She half-wished she could be there.

  ‘You should come,’ her husband said. ‘We could do with someone with your skills.’

  It was true, they could. But she wouldn’t go.

  ‘You know I can’t,’ she said. ‘Doctor said I’ve got to rest up. Besides,’ she nodded to their younger daughter’s bedroom, ‘it’s too late to ask someone to mind Emma.’

  ‘I’ll let you know if we find anything,’ he said.

  She nodded and leaned in to him for moment, nuzzling his neck, murmuring and feeling his warmth. He sat there, taking it in, listening, nodding and patting her thigh. He is a good man. She waited till the sound of the four-wheel drive made its way down their long driveway and was out of earshot before picking up her phone and dialling a number.

  ‘Anna?’ a voice answered, shrill.

  ‘Keep calm,’ she said. And then she added, ‘and keep quiet.’

  Two years earlier, Anna’s office was successful in gaining a government grant. A small initiative, her boss said at a morning tea to celebrate, but one which could grow across the whole country – benefitting women’s groups and raising community awareness of the scourge of family violence.

  Anna liked the word ‘scourge’. It had a medieval sound to it; conjured up images of torture machines and monks whipping themselves. It was a fitting word to associate with family violence. As a first measure to the grant, her boss outlined, they’d be starting on a small scale – groups of four or five to begin with, interested people were encouraged to nominate themselves. The project was a good idea; young lawyers spending time with victims of family violence to better understand their plight. The time together would be spent in the high country, giving them the chance to immerse themselves in nature, time away from the rat-race to contemplate their own unconscious bias and world view. This would be facilitated by a social worker trained in family violence counselling and a qualified outdoor guide.

  Anna wavered with the nomination. Being 42 years old and three months pregnant was luck enough, she couldn’t risk a thing, and yet her priorities were skewed. Liquorice, raw fish, alcohol, cheeses, all these things she’d mourned but avoided as necessary bother of pregnancy. But a walk in the mountains, the high country of her upbringing, three days on a walk she knows so well she could do it blindfolded? No phones, no iPads no television, no common luxuries – this she would relish.

  She was the perfect candidate for such a project and her boss knew it. Local knowledge, a former outdoor education guide with rock climbing experience as well as a social worker – she could save the company money and deliver a professional experience. She wavered in the face of praise and encouragement for a brief while before nominating herself for the upcoming program.

  The scourge of family violence, a government grant and flattery were what bought her then, to the beginning of The Saddle walk, 1000 meters below the summit of Mt Craven in the Victorian High Country on a chilly morning in late February 2015.

  With her were two other women. At the last moment, the male barrister from Ballarat pulled out. Remaining were Louise, a young Melbourne lawyer and Nicole – a woman who could have been 30 or 50. Nicole’s face told a tale of life lived hard. Wrinkles spread around her thin lips and cut deep into cheekbones like an ancient course for a dry riverbed. A skinny face with dark circles under the eyes and hair limp about her nec
k, Nicole. As part of the project, Louise and Anna were privy to her story; pregnant at a young age to a man who left her, kicked out of home with her son, years spent in sad hostels where she met her boyfriend Clint Drayson, a convicted criminal who would go on to regularly beat her and her son. At last count, he threw her out of a moving car and tried to run her over. Now, with her former partner in jail for other offenses, she was living in secure housing and beginning a TAFE course in Div. Two nursing. Nicole’s personal profile indicated she was hopeful of getting her life on track.

  But still, Anna eyed her walking partners. Good intent didn’t mean good walkers. Louise’s pack was too heavy and her boots too new. Nicole looked frail and if she still smoked, then her ability to walk long distances would be hampered. At least her shoes, old Dunlop volleys, were perfect for this trail. The two of them even had jewellery on, earrings, rings and whatnot. They hadn’t been prepped. Anna walked the trail in her head; 16kms the first day across the Saddle then a night in Baynton’s hut. 13kms the following day up Mt Craven and down again – to comfortable Patterson’s hut. Then the final day – four kms up to the Gap and then a final steep five kms and home to Alpine Valley road where they’d be picked up by someone from King Valley Women’s health services. An easy trek in all respects. She checked the satellite phone to make sure it was working and felt her pockets for the spare batteries, mini torch and compass. You could never be too sure up in the mountains. As a child once, she and her mother were caught between Patterson’s and Baynton’s in the midst of a freak snowstorm. They’d hunkered down, built a snow cave and sheltered there till the storm abated then dug themselves out using a little shovel her mother always carried with her on walks. There’d been times too, she’d been called to help out with some hiker who’d fallen from the track and needed rescuing. A German backpacker, a child, an older man. These people she’d winched to safety by rappelling down and linking them up to ropes, enabling the people above – or in the German’s case, a helicopter, to winch to safety. Not too many places to fall to your death on the Saddle walk, but a few. Best to be safe. She’d packed some basic rope gear in just in case.