The Woman on the Mountain (20 page)

I drive down to the tar road to collect two-wheel-drive visitors, leaving their car at a friend’s, and take them back to it at the end of the visit. This makes three hours’ driving in total, but I choose to live way out here, so it’s up to me to make visiting possible for those friends who want to share it with me, to give me the stimulus of their conversation and company and a good excuse for trying new and special dishes, mountain vego style.

The drive in is always a reverse culture shock for such visitors, as well as a bodily one. I assume my fifteen-year-old Suzuki Sierra has some sort of suspension left, but she seems to have none of the cushioning effect I’ve experienced in newer ones. The dirt roads used to be dreadful, so bad as to be impassable at times, but most have recently been improved to ‘safe and trafficable’ level, after my ten years of begging and battles with various levels of government for emergency vehicle access. To reach home I still must travel over about 5 kilometres of bone-shaking, teeth-chattering, boob-bouncing, rocky dirt track, including my own. It’s a crawl in first or second gear, 2 to 20 kilometres per hour, and often steep, but never smooth.

From the depths of my ignorance I try to look after my Suzi, in that I check the oil and water, but if anything went wrong there’d be no point in me putting up the bonnet and looking at her engine. We can never be intimate friends, for I simply don’t understand her. I depend on Charlie, my trusty mechanic in town, to keep her happy, replace the parts I wear out and check for any bits shaken and rattled almost to breaking or falling-off point. Charlie thinks I ask too much of my old Suzi, but I don’t have a choice.

I like my Suzi because she’s reliable, she’s basic—no carpet, no fancy lining—and she’s light, more like a grasshopper than a tank, which may be why she bounces so, but she hops over humps and logs and banks and tussocks and doesn’t slide much on wet clay slopes. And she’s little, so doesn’t use more fuel than necessary. Even so, a return trip to town currently costs close to $20, depending on the route I have to take. My petrol tank is small, so I always fill up before I leave town, just in case I need to do some visitor-ferrying, although I keep jerry cans here. A full jerry can is not only getting dearer, but heavier, harder to lift and balance for pouring, I notice.

I don’t like gambling on fuel, and try never to go below a quarter-full tank, but in my experience most blokes hate to pull in to a petrol station if the tank isn’t empty. How many times have I gritted my teeth as the male driver played Aussie roulette on a long highway drive? He pulls the trigger, but we’d both suffer if he lost the game, which begins when the dial on the petrol gauge is flicking E for Empty.

Click! Another garage passed. ‘Nah, there’s always a bit in reserve.’

Click! Another garage passed. ‘I was in the wrong lane. She’ll be right.’

Click! Next garage almost reached. ‘Oh hell. Thought for sure we’d make it to that little place over the hill. I’ll just walk over and get a can full.’

Click! ‘Um, they were shut.’

My daughter has a modern four-wheel drive, so has no trouble getting here, although she dislikes the mud or dust that inevitably accompanies her home. When she and her little family visited lately, she set about rasping the horses’ hooves, while my granddaughter mixed mud pies and cakes on the verandah where she maintains a well-equipped kitchen, and my son-in-law obliged by taking a look at the latest machine that wouldn’t—the brushcutter.

He first asked had I checked the spark plug; I confessed I hadn’t been able to bring myself to face looking for its location yet. He headed for the shed. I was delayed in following as my granddaughter was taking orders for mud morning tea. Then I heard the sound of the brushcutter engine. Damn! Another machine that went first go for the first male that tried, when it had refused for me!

He stumbled from the shed doorway, coughing, carrying the offending brushcutter—going, but spewing white smoke from its rear; surely that wasn’t normal? I glanced beyond; the shed was full of smoke.

‘You couldn’t possibly have put two stroke in it, could you?’ he asked politely.

‘Well, I could have, ’ I replied, ‘Anything’s possible, especially since I don’t know what that means. Is that petrol with the oil mixed in, like the chainsaw?’

He nodded.

‘I keep getting mixed up; but it’s a tiny engine—how can it be it a four, why isn’t it at two?’

‘You’d better write 2S or 4S on them with Texta, ’ he suggested.

‘But how would that help? It’d still be a cryptic symbol. I’ll have to write proper words like Unleaded or Mixed with Oil or something. I mean, I used to think all mowers took the oily stuff but the one I’ve got now doesn’t. Why on earth can’t they all be the same!’

I know why, but I’m not game to say it for fear of being accused of harbouring conspiracy theories.

A mind that can confidently remember that 2S relates to one thing and 4S to another, without any reason or clue, is beyond my comprehension. At school, even as a teacher, I was never sure which playground bin was for what. They were blue and yellow at my last school, one for papers and one for scraps. But which? I’d have to lift the lid and look inside every time. Why didn’t they paint the paper bins pink, or purple? Then I’d have known the other bin must be for scraps!

It’s a matter of me understanding the way my mind works, or doesn’t, and accommodating that.

I’m gradually emptying the shed of any object whose function I don’t know or can’t make use of, not even ‘one day’. My ex-partner has now taken most of his stored gear, which included many jars of rusting nails and screws and bits of metal that were parts of larger metal things that only he would recognise should they ever turn up again, and containers of magic substances to keep old cars running, or at least get them through registration.

He seemed to spend half his life under the bonnets of cars that had cost very little—if you didn’t count the time they demanded. My one stipulation when we moved up here was that the yard wasn’t to become a car graveyard, knowing his fondness for keeping wrecks to cannibalise for spares.

My dad didn’t throw anything out, and as I’d done the final cleanup in his garage after he died, and I couldn’t throw out anything of his, I have a great deal of potentially useful items in the shed. Bits of twine, short lengths of wire, off-cuts of wood, handle-less rasps and chisels, tool-less handles that don’t fit any tools I have, and rusty but solid and strangely shaped pieces of iron that may be just what I need for something some day.

When you’re this far from a shop, the farm shed is a priceless repository of possibilities, so I haven’t been too ruthless in my clean-up, although two trailer-loads of things with no imaginable use despite my good imagination, like tins of dried paint, have been taken to the tip. Of course I’ve had the mandatory post-clean-up realisation that something in one of those tip loads was exactly what I now need.

I tidied up because I had to know for myself what the shed held in its dim depths, and also need to be able to see where I’m walking on the earth floor—snake-free spaces—which was not the case for the first year I was on my own. I rarely entered, left it to the quoll. The shed held its male mystique long after the male had gone; I needed to reclaim it, to de-mystify it.

My relationship with machines will never be more than casual, but at least we won’t be strangers. I’m getting there.

I’m not sure what lies ahead for me, here on my mountain, what with me and the wildlife being so unpredictable. Nor out there in the world of people, often sadly all too predictable, but sometimes gloriously atypical.

I do know that taking any step leads to another, and often not along the path envisaged. But a first step in some direction must be taken or we’re only marking time. And time’s too precious to waste. Ask any cancer victim.

One small step with unforeseen consequences was my first unpaid
Owner Builder
contribution, which led to an ongoing income. Another was when I decided to send in a ‘Country Viewpoint’ to ABC Radio National’s
Bush Telegraph.
I’d often written down funny, interesting or frustrating events in my life on the mountain, but for myself, not thinking of an audience. One day it struck me that listeners to that program might like them. They did, they do; I’m a regular contributor now.

What grew out of that was my idea of making a collection that might be publishable; then a friend suggested I write a whole book about living here.
Et voilà!

Taking the difficult personal step of going solo had freed me to concentrate on writing like this. After that one final and aberrant hiccup, my Internet romance, I was also freed from a lifelong delusion that had often distracted me from creative paths: Romantic Love.

Just as in childhood I wrote bad derivative poems about Trees or Spring, in late adolescence I wrote equally bad ones about Love. Fortunately few survive to embarrass me, but those that do reveal a pathetically unrealistic Romantic. Like the last line of this one:

There has to be a love supreme for my faith in life to persist.

Oh dear, ‘supreme’, no less—
la grande passion.
Like pizza, love with the lot. No wonder I kept being disappointed, and dismissive.

It only took me 30 years to get back to my creative path, so that my days are now illumined by Real Life instead of Romantic Love. Each day dawns for me with an undercurrent of excited anticipation. I hurry to do my planting or potting; attend to any pressing survival or maintenance matters, like the vegetable garden, firewood or fencing; then check emails and deal with any paid writing jobs or unpaid ‘green’ networking, write any letters needed ... and at last settle down to the treat of writing.

Now, I’m too busy to look for Love. If it finds me, well, I’ll see what happens. One step at a time, close no doors, work hard to create opportunities for my own destiny, which may cross another’s, or not. And keep trying to do as I would be done by.

Many small things I do here are with the future in mind, but a bigger future than my own. Apart from the tree regeneration program, whenever I eradicate a potentially feral garden plant—like the dratted honeysuckle—I feel as if I’m making a will, bequeathing a better place to my descendants, and the world.

My refuge exists to protect native animals. We human animals seem to need protection too—from our own progress. Since we’re not quite ready to set up a refuge for humans on Mars, I think we need to look seriously at this ‘progress’. The word implies an advance towards something better, but it’s been misused as an excuse for anything to be imposed on the populace, and endowed with such sanctity and national pride that protestors are labelled mad, bad—or worse, green.

‘Standing in the way of Progress’ is a Sin.

Yet much Progress is not advancing towards anything except Profits for the few and side-benefits for the governments who allow it to happen. For the little people and the environment it is often Regress—‘a going backwards’ to a worse state than they already had.

As our primary aim we’d do better to replace Progress with Sustainability if we want to leave our grandchildren a viable planet. I’m not advocating that everyone go and live in a tent to re-learn what is essential and work up from there, as I did. We can’t all be weird, or at least not in the same way. But we can’t go on guzzling power and water and resources without a thought for the future, destroying our own world. We knew no better for a long time, but we do now.

Global warming is a fact. Rapidly increasing CO2 levels are the reason.

Burning coal for energy emits vast quantities of CO2—it has to stop.

Trees absorb CO2—land-clearing has to stop.

Here’s the biggest ‘weapon of mass destruction’ the modern world has faced and this time we not only know where it is but it’s in our power to put an end to it. How come the President of the World has shown no interest in tackling this one? Someone should enlighten him: ‘P-s-s-t! No planet, no profits.’

The polar ice caps
are
melting, as are the glaciers, right now threatening whole countries like Bhutan. They knew it wasn’t just a green conspiracy myth.

Low islands are already being evacuated as the ocean level rises; the 680 inhabitants of the Cataret Atolls off Papua New Guinea were the first official permanent evacuation due to climate change. They knew it wasn’t just a green conspiracy myth.

Our already ‘sunburnt country’ is drying up. The farmers knew it wasn’t just a green conspiracy myth.

The world’s climate
is
in chaos—‘natural’ disasters of massive extent are hardly news anymore.

It would be nice if the government could work towards a future beyond the next election.

It would be nice if they genuinely got behind renewable energy industries.

It would be nice if they stopped saying coal is necessary for the economy, and admitted how much the industry
costs
us in economic terms, which they should understand.

For I was shocked to learn recently that the government gives a 38 cents per litre diesel fuel rebate to these hugely profitable mining companies. Why? It’s not as if they need an incentive, or as if they’re struggling. BHP Billiton reported a $13.7 billion profit in 2006.

This is the same fuel rebate that farmers get, but
their
profit margins are hardly in the same league as the resource giants. Nor is their fuel consumption.

Just one of those monster mine dump trucks consumes 2800 litres of crude diesel every 24 hours. As an example, take one particular open-cut mine in my region, the Hunter Valley in New South Wales. This mine uses around 70 million litres of diesel annually for its machines, and so receives about $26 million in subsidy per year!

Don’t you think that’s shocking?

And yet politicians keep saying that coal is cheap energy and renewables are too expensive. In fact, the New South Wales government
pays
the Hunter coal industry
more
in subsidies than it receives from it in royalties. Hunter coalmines were given $300 million in diesel subsidies in 2005. Imagine that much money going into developing renewable energy industries. For example, $26 million would buy solar hot-water systems for an
awful
lot of houses. Imagine what $300 million could do!

With the Howard government’s recent sudden leap into awareness that climate change has reached the status of a political issue—and they need to be perceived as doing something about it—they announced a fund of $500 million over fifteen years to develop low greenhouse gas emission technology. Gee. Wow.

Let’s get that in perspective. It’s just over $33 million a year. Why, this same government spent over $200 million on advertising last financial year!

It shows how seriously lacking they are in genuine intent to solve this critical problem. For one thing we can’t wait fifteen years; for another we already have ‘low greenhouse gas emission technology’ in renewables—but they don’t involve coal; and then consider that in those fifteen years the coal giants will have received $4500 million in my area alone! Imagine what the national mining subsidies figure will be.

Now that you know about this, I bet you’ll think of it whenever you fill up your tank, as I do. Mentally subtract 38 cents per litre from your fuel bill. Then write to your MP asking why these huge companies making huge profits should be offered it at all, while we keep paying more and more. And write to the PM, who assures us he
feels
for us, but can’t possibly drop the excise, which is 38 cents a litre.

It would be nice if they all stopped speaking with forked tongues.

Now I’ve admitted I’m bad at maths, but isn’t $300 million a lot of
our
money to be giving to the mining giants, most of which are foreign-owned, when the government says it can’t afford funding for essential social services—for
us.
If you’re on a public hospital waiting list, say for a new hip, or your keen children can’t get university places, and you’d have to mortgage the house to send them if they did, you might like to see those millions of dollars spent differently.

Sometimes it seems that those big money makers and takers live in a different world from us little people, and superficially, they do. But there’s only one earth, and they can’t buy immunity from climate chaos any more than we can.

We all need to take steps to stop it. Small steps and big steps, and not just token green-glazed steps. The keys are energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Business has to treat power as we are beginning to treat water. Not to waste it, for example, by building more glass skyscrapers totally dependent on artificial air, heating, cooling and light, where the thousands of airconditioners and lights go on at the same time, creating the peaks in demand that are the hardest to manage.

But we can’t leave it to them. Just like we’re opting for rainwater tanks and water-saving devices, what each of us does adds up. We can choose better designed passive solar houses that don’t need airconditioners (trust me!), install solar hot-water systems, request ‘green’ electricity from energy suppliers, buy energy-efficient appliances, right down to compact fluoro light globes (no flickers, but choose warm white), and switch off lights not in use and appliances at the wall—even those little red power dots use electricity.

Let’s switch on our brains instead.

I am especially attuned to this issue of mindless power usage and generation not only because I make my own, and because I’m concerned about global warming, but because I’ve seen what the excessive coalmines and the coal-fired power stations have done to
my
region. Its present is so horrific that a better future seems dubious. But I think of my granddaughter, and I have to try to turn the tide.

In the last ten years I’ve watched the once-clean country air of the mid-to-upper Hunter Valley turn murky with pollution and dust as open-cut coalmines have spread like the plague. Each time I descend from my mountain into the greyish-brown pall that hangs over the Valley, or see it as I approach from Sydney or the coast, I grieve. It hurts my heart and soul, offends my sense of rightness in the world. And I’m angry.

Mining has gone mad here: the markets are so hungry, the profits so big, that the companies have brought in their truly giant machines to bite kilometres-wide holes into the landscape, tossing all but the coal onto grey dust mountains higher than the hills were. Whatever the landscape was like before—what grew there, what lived on or under it—now it is all the same. Dead. A lunar landscape. The scars of the Hunter open-cut mines are so big they are visible from space. Look for yourself on Google Earth.

There are thirteen mines in one shire near me, and each year 30,000 tonnes of fine dust—the invisible, dangerous sort—is borne in its air. Two shires north, where there are no mines, it registers only 870 kilograms of such dust per year. A staggering difference.

Imagine you have several of these towering dust mountains right next to your town, just across the sports field, or your farm, just across that paddock. What on earth do the issuers of mining guidelines think happens at your place on windy days?

Farmers are being restricted or stopped altogether from drawing water from rivers to irrigate, yet the mines use massive amounts. In a drying climate, where will the water come from for all the new mines they are planning?

Long-wall underground mines might be less obvious, but they create subsidence, interfere with aquifers, and have caused whole creeks to disappear overnight, dam walls and land to crack open. BHP Billiton refuses to agree to a 1 kilometre safety zone from the Cataract and Georges rivers, critical to Sydney’s dwindling water supply, instead mining as close as 30 metres in some cases. Why isn’t the state government standing up to them?

The scale of what modern mines do, below and above ground, day and night, is oversized, with the profits and the damage accordingly so. ‘Rapacious’ is the only word for it.

In over-mined areas, the air, water and landscape are suffering. So are the people. Everyone talks about the increasing asthma, the all-year-round hayfever, the unexplained nosebleeds, the sleep deprivation from the noise, but it’s not only physical. Dr Glenn Albrecht of Newcastle University has coined a term for the psychological damage he has observed: ‘solastalgia’—the pain and helplessness experienced when one’s home landscape is being destroyed, its solace removed.

I hear many heartbreaking stories of ruined lives and livelihoods, families and histories, dreams and plans. I’ve visited a beautiful heritage home and garden where the dust mountains have grown so near, so numerous, and so overwhelming, that nothing else can be seen in any direction.

‘Ah well, ’ King Coal might say to the government, ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Perhaps we could offer the community money for a new sports shed?’

Pollution in these areas is an escalating disaster that nobody in power wants to know about. Instead they let King Coal do his own monitoring—of course he’s trustworthy, he represents some of the world’s biggest multi-nationals. The conclusions are always the same, as they repeat like Daleks, ‘All environmental guidelines are being complied with.’ Guidelines which they reckon are ‘strict’. Well, this grandma’s got eyes, and she reckons they’re not half strict enough.

And the sad thing is that employment, the reason always touted locally as the up side for all the local damage, is short-term, unsustainable and overstated. Coalmining has become vastly more mechanised, so while coal production has more than doubled over the last twenty years, mining jobs have halved.