The Woman on the Mountain (5 page)

They’re all handsome, with admirable carriage. Straight backs and necks, heads held high as they bound across the paddock or through the trees. The females are smaller, but retain the well-defined facial bone structure of the species; they never look like wallabies. In their dusky greyish-brown coats, paler front fur, black highlights of ears, nose and paws, and their large dark eyes, they are always elegant.

Their young are just as cute as the wallaby babies—big-eyed, fluffy, uncoordinated, given to twisting themselves back-to-front to scratch at fleas or ticks, or leaning back at an odd angle to scrabble at their tummy fur, or corkscrewing themselves vertically into the air, just for fun. Like the wallaby joeys, they sometimes play at sparring with their mothers, who are very tolerant, literally turning the other cheek until they’ve had enough, when they give the annoying child a cuff and move on. The joey shakes its head several times, as if to clear the stars it’s seeing, then comes back for more.

I am pleased that the kangaroos now ignore me almost as much as the wallabies do, if I move steadily. As I’m seeing several family groups now, not just one, I’d say they’re here to stay. When I opened the yard gate the other day, a female kangaroo grazing very close by remained so unconcerned that her joey, who’d been dozing on the grass, stayed right where he was instead of panicking.

Only recently, for the very first time, I have seen a Swamp or Black Wallaby and her joey near my yard. Dark-chocolate velvety fur, small head, usually seen in the ferny forests on the shady southern side of my ridge. I assume the drought is sending them foraging further afield. They eat bracken, so I hope they start on mine.

I’ll learn more about these newer neighbours when they’re fully at ease with me, when they understand how this refuge works. That is, they’re the occupants; I’m just the cleaner-upper of introduced weeds and bouncer of introduced animals. And protector.

When a wallaby stands still and looks me in the eye I cannot understand the kind of person that would see this as a chance to shoot it. I don’t want to be classed as the same species as humans who take pleasure in shooting such beautiful and harmless animals, those who like living creatures as targets—not for food or self-protection, but for ‘fun’.

Here all native animals are protected from shooters. It is not so everywhere, despite what the laws say; especially with some weekenders who like to play at being tough bushmen, huntin’ ’n’ shootin’. Since it’s usually very late on a Saturday night when I hear the distant shots, the toughness is probably out of a bottle and I fear for both their discrimination and their accuracy.

I feel like warning my resident wallabies and wallaroos and kangaroos, anything big enough to be a target: ‘Don’t go down to the woods today’—stay up here with me. I could add, ‘And be glad our state forest is now a national park’, for they are allowing amateurs—‘almost professional but!’—to hunt and shoot feral animals in their/our state forests, without supervision. I’ll bet my local weekend shooters would like a go at that.

They are calling it ‘conservation hunting’. Who do they think this spin is kidding? Not the wounded feral animals that will escape to painful deaths, and the wounded or killed native animals hit ‘by mistake’, and their babies that starve as a result. Not to mention the odd bushwalker or birdwatcher accidentally potted—but they’re probably greenies anyway, so no great loss to the state.

Feral animals—deer, cats, dogs, pigs, foxes, rabbits, cane toads, camels, brumbies, introduced birds like starlings and Indian Mynahs—
are
a problem, but they didn’t ask to be brought here any more than our convict ancestors did.

If the criteria for extermination were ongoing damage to Australia’s natural environment or displacement of the indigenous species—the destruction of their habitats, food sources and health, even to extinction—I think we’d be top of the hit list of introduced species. We’d hope the culling was humanely done, wouldn’t we?

For me, the validity and relevance of the books of the world’s religions are not indisputable. In fact, the Bible’s insistence that God gave man dominion over all creatures seems to me to have caused a lot of our problems. Instead, I keep to one rule, and try to follow the admonition of Charles Kingsley’s
The Water-babies
character, Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby I know Jesus is reputed to have said much the same, but I like the pithy rhythm of Kingsley’s language better. If everyone managed to treat others as they’d like to be treated themselves it’d be a pretty nice world, don’t you agree?

Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby had an offsider, Mrs Bedonebyas-youdid, but I found her rather Old Testament vengeful and didn’t take her up to the same degree.

Although mightily impressed by Mrs D’s simple rule as a child, I only thought of it in the context of human relationships. I’m now extending it to all creatures, even—almost—to leeches, based on the premise that being different from humans is not a reason for superiority and exploitation, but rather for learning more.

We used to kill whales before we realised how intelligent and complex they are, how more like us. ‘How can they!’ we now say of pro-whaling nations. But I don’t feel that the right of a species to survive ought to depend on its degree of similarity to us, or on whether it’s of any use to us. It’s an intrinsic right, as part of the whole wonderful natural world—biodiversity. We simply don’t know enough about how all things were designed to work together—ecosystems—and we usually don’t find out until it’s too late.

As Dr David Suzuki says, ‘...we tear at the very web of life that makes the planet habitable.’

This blind blundering is nowhere more evident than in clear-felling our native forests for wood pulp to send overseas. Recycled, plantation and alternative fibres can be used instead, and yet we allow this madness to continue. We lose the plants and animals that lived in those forests and we lose the trees that would have been hard at work absorbing CO2 from our atmosphere, helping to save us from worse climate chaos. Which is clearly not as urgent as the lining of foreign pockets by the cheaper wiping of bottoms, foreign or otherwise.

And we think we rule the planet because we’re so clever.

It is said that cockroaches will survive a nuclear war. Imagine if they ended up the dominant species. I’d hope they’d not be wanting revenge for all those baits and sprays! But I wonder if they’d even consider the remnants of the human race worth keeping. After all, we’re greedy, aggressive, dangerous, and so stupid we foul our own nests, overpopulate, and self-destruct. What good are we?

With that humbling thought held firmly in the back of my mind, I’d like to think that many of us are atypical humans and that we do care enough about our world to stop wrecking it and start healing it. I’m not a misanthrope, even if I did choose the daily society of animals over that of men.

And believe me, I tried both.

Being forced to live in Sydney, amongst millions of other humans, after living here with just ‘my family and other animals’, as Gerald Durrell put it, was a culture shock from which I didn’t really recover, since I always saw my life there as temporary.

With hindsight, I was barely holding myself together. The marriage break-up had turned my world upside-down, and as a single parent it was a desperate financial struggle. The kids and I were restricted to visits here at best every second weekend, depending on whether I had petrol money or a suitable vehicle. I was without the consolation of this place where I belonged, and the lack of physical work seemed to leave me out of kilter with myself. There was only stress and worry and no release for it.

I began smoking again, which I hadn’t done since first becoming pregnant. It didn’t help, but somehow chimed with my desperation. I’ll stop when I’m happy, I promised myself. Which I did, just before I moved back to the mountain again with my new partner. It’s pathetic, I know, but I started rolling the smokes once more when
that
relationship began to sour. They were roughly nine-year cycles, I’ve calculated, but this time I stopped far sooner, determined not to be so pathetically dependent.

It helps being so far from the temptation of town. Such a strong addiction is always hovering, waiting for the next stressful situation. It’s ironic when I think how hard I persevered with the damn things as a student, to overcome the nausea, so I’d fit in, look cool. If only we’d known...

Often it rained on our precious mountain weekends, which we thought most unfair. We’d either leave Sydney on Friday evening or at dawn on Saturday. Sometimes the kids would bring a schoolfriend each. If we’d arrived at night, the visitors wouldn’t know what the outdoors was really like until next morning. I’ve never forgotten the pre-breakfast comment of one nine-year-old, whose home was an inner-city semi on the main Rozelle shopping street, with no front yard and a tiny cement rear yard. Taking in the paddocks, the surrounding forest, the mountains stretching away into the far distance, she said, ‘Gee, you’ve got a big back yard!’

I’ve found four pages of scribblings from one wet autumn mountain weekend in one very wet mountain year. I’d forgotten them, but the freshness of detail, lost if left to memory alone, says a lot about those years of estrangement...

At night we’d play board or pen and paper games by candlelight, the kids idly scoring the candles with a matchstick, toying with the flow of wax. They’d make hot Milo drinks, adding so much powdered milk that it was thick enough to eat. I’d have a cask of wine on hand. When my daughter and I could no longer bear it that my son had to win, and he usually did, we’d clean our teeth at the kitchen sink, make a last trip outside by torchlight, and be asleep by 8.30 at the latest. But we didn’t bother much about time up here. Time out.

Even when we lucked on a fine weekend, it wasn’t often that I could get the kids to stick around and help me with maintenance, let alone start any new projects, and anyway I had no money for materials. When my son was about fourteen, and tall enough to reach the underside of the tin roof from my ladder, we did manage to gradually and very roughly line it with reject plywood, blue builders’ foil stapled on top in an attempt to keep some of the heat in or out. The battens were ancient hardwood, and we only had hand tools, so nailing the sheets to them from below was a painful process.

The ply is better insulation than nothing, but not much. Every now and then there’s a creak as a nail pops out and a sheet of ply partly loses its grip. Well, it’s gravity isn’t it? Should have been screwed.

A few friends, mostly new ones, helped me over those years. One loses track of some possessions and some friends in a marriage split-up. I found it hard to be around cosy couples and avoided them until I was stronger.

Fences were fixed, water pumped and wood cut with help from visitors, especially one stalwart family friend, Nigel. The wildlife and the horses ate everything except the bay tree, the jonquils and the ferny asparagus leaves. I was often depressed at the place’s abandoned air, but I was often depressed anyway, at my own sense of failure, at having lost my way. Only the children kept me going.

My Sydney jobs were meant as fillers until I felt up to the stress of teaching. After six frustrating weeks of job seeking I’d realised that an Arts degree was a handicap, stamping me as inexperienced and overqualified, despite my protests that I’d do anything. No one even wanted me as a waitress, because I was over 30 and hadn’t done any since my uni days.

I’d taken the first job offered, in the storeroom of an architectural hardware firm. Bob, the storeman, the archetypal rough diamond with heart of gold, had originally been very unhappy about having a woman on his patch, but we became real friends. Over two years I worked my way up from the storeroom to scheduling and being a consultant to architects. I also made a friend ‘upstairs’: Susan, the accountant, a single parent like myself, extremely intelligent, with a dry and rather wicked sense of humour.

I did apply for a teaching post, but it was several years before I was offered one. Then it was way out west where I’d be the only French teacher, and I’d never taught that, although I’d been trained to teach both French and English, my majors at university. The kids were settled in their city school, had made friends, and there was the impossible distance from their father—and the mountain. I said no. Farewell to any prospects of secure work and pay, of working hours that matched school times, of school holidays without the worry of who to mind the kids.

I moved into better firms, in various commercial fields, advising on and specifying fantastically expensive designer furniture, lighting, door hardware, bathrooms, fabrics—with increasingly top-of-the-range products. I took Susan with me into one of those companies, since she deserved better pay and respect than she’d had in the chauvinistic place where we’d met.

How come I could do such unlikely jobs? Well, I had a good eye for line, colour and composition; I was intelligent and practical, I picked up new things fast; being a working mother of two, I was a good organiser, so a good project manager; and I was honest, so clients trusted that my advice was not biased for a sale.

I learnt to read plans, and did a few partial courses to flesh out the knowledge I gained from reading—a year’s correspondence course from England in architectural ironmongery, in which I got a distinction; a term of fronting up to Tech on a Friday with electrical trade apprentices to learn about lighting sources; two terms of Tuesday nights at Tech to grasp the basics of mechanical engineering drawing.

A woman in the midst of such all-male groups was considered a joke, as was my presence on commercial building sites. I didn’t mind the workers whistling, but I did mind the bosses smirking when I entered the site office. They stopped when, for example, I drew a screwdriver from my handbag and got them out of an urgent deadline problem, with big penalties at stake, by opening up a mortice lock and changing its function and hand on the spot.

Meanwhile the kids and I were living in student-type rented dumps that I filled with other people’s reject furniture. As Rozelle and Balmain shot up the trendy scale, so did the rents. We’d soon needed three bedrooms, and moved many times in those thirteen years, ‘downsizing’ in a vain attempt to keep the rent to no more than half my wage. A grotty old house was better than a sterile flat with no yard, no earth, where I’d have really gone mad. I changed jobs to earn more.

The advantages of Balmain’s pubs and cafés, like the theatres of Sydney itself, were lost on me, as I could never afford to go out unless someone else was paying. Every dollar had to be kept for its budget allocation.

As a client dithered over gorgeous curtain materials that cost more a metre (wholesale) than my fortnight’s rent, or an elegant sliver of Italian leather, slung on chrome sticks, labelled a chair, and worth a year’s rent, he or she would often turn to me and ask, ‘So what do you have in your home?’

‘Oh, ’ I’d say, shrugging my shoulders nonchalantly, ‘a rather eclectic mix, actually.’

I saw inside many upmarket Sydney homes. I never wanted to live in any of them, harbour views notwithstanding. They were too impersonal and artificial, and way too big. It was out-of-control consumerism, as far from the simple life as could one get. I mean to say,
five
bathrooms, not counting the outside one by the pool, and even if only three of them had gold-plated taps and black-marble floors?

By my second job I’d moved up the scale enough for a company car to be part of the deal. I argued for a four-wheel-drive Subaru instead of a Commodore, so they could be sure I’d get back from the mountain on a Sunday night. The only problem was having to wash the bush weekend off it before taking it to work; I had much the same problem with my inner self.

I had several men friends—consecutively, not concurrently—and initially only going out every second weekend when the kids were with their father. They were mostly journalists, a profession which, at least in those days, carried the occupational hazard of drinking too much alcohol. Hanging out with them inevitably involved me doing the same, although I could never match their excesses. After all, they were in regular training. But it was no way for me to regain emotional stability.

When the kids began going less often to their father’s, and I began wishfully thinking of father figures and happy families, I twice made the mistake of thinking a relationship might become more permanent. The reality was disastrous and brief each time. Conflict with my kids was unacceptable; we were better off on our own.