The Woman on the Mountain (9 page)

For the last three autumns I’ve been planting out the little trees. I choose autumn because, while it’s still warm enough for growth, the cooler weather means less evaporation, and thus more chance of their survival; rain or mist is more likely; and, very importantly, snakes are not so active.

Their new-home gullies are
really
steep and, being fenced off from the horses, are also inaccessible to my four-wheel-drive Suzuki. With my arthritic knees, it’s a challenging process to get trees and gear down there. I was not expecting arthritis when I first applied for the grant; if I had, I’d have considered such a planting program to be an impossible undertaking. Being forced to do it showed me that it’s not impossible, just slow.

The first problem was how to carry everything. At the op-shop I’d found a capacious and sturdy, woven and lined cloth bag, which unfortunately was of ugly brown checks. I had to choke down my distaste to buy it. Incidentally, I’ve noticed that many men think it’s odd when my first question about, for example, a bargain car, is ‘What colour is it?’ They think it irrelevant!

But the homely brown bag has proved perfect for its task. In it I can wedge the seedlings, the roll of green plastic guards, three bamboo stakes each, and the rubber mallet to bang them in with. With its cloth ‘handles’ slung over my shoulder and the bunched stakes protruding behind, I feel like Diana with her quiver of arrows, albeit a ragtag, older version. From each hand dangles a 4-litre container of water. The spade handle is held as well, precariously, in my right hand. I really need another hand but make do with dropping the spade when my wrist begins to hurt.

I edge my way along the narrow transverse wallaby tracks, slip over rocks or grass, try not to twist my ankle on the sharp drops, narrowly avert a headlong fall ... and finally reach the part of the gully where this lot are destined to grow. I try to avoid stepping on tussocks because their dense mature growth bends over and forms lovely habitats for small mammals; I can often see little tunnels beneath.

Looking back up the near-vertical slope, I sigh at the thought of the return climb. I search for a half-level spot and lower the water containers to the ground. As I unlock and massage my hands, I’m struck anew by how heavy water is. I should have known, after all the buckets I’d carted for the mudbricks, but perhaps the intervening 25 years have made it heavier.

I began planting about twelve at a time, then it dropped to eight, and now five, because I am planting so far down the gully that I’d never walk back up for more water. To get my seedlings off to a good start, I was giving them a third each of what the water containers hold, and walking back up to refill from the larger one I had in the back of the car at the closest point. So I was making two climbs each session. This autumn the soil was so dry that they needed more water each.

Most fine mornings I plant some. My progress back up the hill is urged on by a small voice telling me with each plodding step that this is good for me. ‘Oh yeah, ’ I think, ‘so’s castor oil.’ I make it once more, collapse over a coffee as I write down what I’ve planted. I keep a running tally—it’s over 600 now—only thousands more to go. It doesn’t sound like a lot compared to flat paddock regeneration projects, but it takes time to even find a spot where there’s a spade’s depth of soil amongst the loose volcanic rocks down there.

I shower off the possible leeches or ticks and let the water soothe the nettle stings. Then I start worrying over whether it will rain soon, as I have neither the energy nor the knees to go back down and water them after planting. They must survive on their own, but there were so few follow-up showers this last atypical autumn that I thought it too risky and stopped planting.

The vines—
Cissus, Dioscorea,
Glycine,
Euphretus
—will go in later. I expect that birds and bats will pass on gifts of other seeds to complete the tapestry.

I hadn’t expected it to be such a long-term project, but some seeds germinated quickly, some slowly; some seedlings raced towards adulthood, others remained too small to plant out. Each autumn is very busy, with far less writing time than other seasons. I’ve come to think of autumn as I did those first five years of my children’s lives, a dedicated nurturing time when other interests take a back seat, hoping it will mean better results later.

It was suggested I get some WWOOFers (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) to help, but that would be so impersonal. These seedlings are my babies. I want to see them safely established in their new lives, not hand them over to strangers. If the patient seedlings start losing it, demanding faster progess than I can manage, I will seek help, but not yet.

And I like pottering about alone in my spring gullies; it gives me the chance to be quiet in them, to absorb their unique atmosphere. Sometimes I think about what would happen if I slipped, broke a leg or an ankle, or if I disturbed a brown snake and was bitten, but it’s only a passing thought.

I choose occasional risk over constant stress—traffic, overcrowding; harassed and cranky mums with whingeing toddlers in supermarkets; neighbours’ dogs barking at shadows in the middle of the night; neighbours’ kids just metres from your study window, endlessly skateboarding or playing rap music ... no thanks!

This fostering of growth from seed to tree to future rainforest is the most creative thing I’ve ever done, factual babies and fictional stories included. I only wish I’d started earlier, so I’d have more chance of seeing advanced results. I might get twenty years, but what a sight they’ll be after 40!

The greenhouse that made possible the propagation and slow staging, and thus the whole regeneration project, was also the subject of an article for
Owner Builder
—‘Evolution of an OB Greenhouse’. ‘Evolution’ because it was built in unplanned steps over several years and was not in the end what it started out to be.

The project only began because, on a trip to Sydney, my partner and I spotted a huge pile of plain timber sash windows stacked on the footpath outside a block of flats with all new aluminium windows winking down at us. And we were towing an empty trailer. Incurable magpies we both were, but I was wavering towards leaving them for the rubbish collection when he said, ‘They’d make a great glasshouse.’

We got them up here and restacked them expectantly near the chosen site. Two years later, the windows were still sitting there, flaking paint. I began to mutter about unkept promises. ‘OK, OK, I’ll take a week off this spring and build it.’

Nights were spent drawing up the design, the building size and shape and frame calculated to fit the window halves—a tiny glass church with turned wooden finials on the ridgepole; none of these sterile aluminium kit models for us.

The greenhouse would be level, but the site wasn’t, so my partner intended to fill in below the bottom timber rail later, with rocks. By the end of the allotted week, the roof and most of the sides had windows on, but there were many gaps, including all round below. Fencing wire was used to hold it all together in the meantime. Sitting high on its skinny wooden legs, pointing its nose due north and deceptively up, it did look like a glass church about to be launched.

A year went by I saw it suffer under all weathers, including our heaviest ever snow. I watched the wind gradually demolish my glasshouse. The fencing wire stretched and allowed a bit too much movement; the windows tried to behave like balloons and burst; the putty fell out; the frames peeled, parted company at their corners. I picked glass shards out of the grass and started muttering once more.

We sent for greenhouse brochures and began redesigning. We would use the glass out of what was left of our windows and just buy a bit extra, plus aluminium glazing bars, clips, etc. My now experienced greenhouse builder decided he’d first fill in those rock walls so the wind couldn’t sneak in and burst this one. That took a long time, not only because he didn’t have much to spare, but also because he preferred working in ‘larger windows’ of time. Since mothers always have to snatch whatever short bursts they can to get anything done, I found it hard to be patient.

Next the much-abused free windows were removed. I painted the timber frame with white enamel and it was ready for glazing, the unfree commercial way. Cute glass churches are overrated anyhow. Gravel fill made a heat sink floor and allowed drainage. It worked. On a cold windy day, inside it was sheltered and sunny, warm and peaceful, with garden and forest views; I would sit on my potting stool and contemplate moving my bed in there.

Doing it twice to get it right brought the total cost of that greenhouse close to $1000. Freebies can be very expensive. But had we not picked those windows up we wouldn’t have started the greenhouse and I wouldn’t have considered a rainforest nursery.

As inspiration for my young rainforests, just over my ridge-top boundary is the patch of virgin brush that appealed so strongly when we first bought this place. It shelters on the cool southern side, fiercely protected by a belt of tall stinging nettles and raspy wild raspberries. I venture in there rarely, and never by myself.

In there it is another world, awesome yet fragile. In there the silence commands respect as, hushed and inadequate in the dim green light, I breathe in its mushroom smell, peer at its surreal fungi and lichens, giant snail shells, bird mounds and scrapings. I tread lightly, yet still sink into the thick compost of leaves, slip over mossy fallen trunks. In there lives a Giant Stinging Tree of vast girth, hollow and ancient, but mostly it is hard to name this forest of tree roots, buttresses and trunks, laced with ropey twists of vines, their leaves but silhouettes far up in the canopy. It is only outside, from the track on the ridge above, that the cedars declare themselves with the pink-bronze of their new leaves, and unidentifiable vines flower on top of the green upper storey.

I love the absolutely independent life of this brush. I’m hoping that my rainforests will one day creep up their gullies to the ridge and link thin fingers with it. Lost generations coming home.

It’s a great thought. ‘
Regeneration,
n.,
the process of being morally, spiritually or physically renewed or reborn.’ Renewing the forests to what they once were, giving back to the land a little of what has been taken, in gratitude for what it gives me. The trees I plant might live for hundreds of years after I die.

The key, it seems to me, is in the word ‘respect’. We need to ‘respect’, to go back to our roots as well as those of the word—from the Latin
specere,
to look, so ‘to look again’. If we can cast aside our acquired blindness, we might actually
see
the natural world to which we belong—its richness, diversity and importance beyond ourselves—and regain respect for it. Perhaps then we’d stop trashing it.

Bush matters.

Nature is always dominant here. Each year, I’ve only just accepted that it’s no longer winter before I begin to worry that it’s nearly summer. My enjoyment of spring is thus threaded with concern for how dry or hot it will be, because that will determine the fire danger.

The fire danger period usually begins in October and goes through until March. In bad years it’s extended. I always get told if it is because it’s my job to repaint the sign our rural fire brigade puts up in advance of the season each year. If it’s up there in black and white, Joe Blow can’t say—as his illegal fire races through his next-door neighbour’s forest or through the national park—‘How was I supposed to know I needed a bloody permit? It looked like it’d burn, so I lit it, same as I’ve always done.’

Most past fires in these mountains have originated in such burn-offs, often from pastoral properties a long way away ‘just burning off the rubbish’, meaning their back bush, and they haven’t worried if it kept going towards here. ‘Could do with a good burn, anyway.’ When we first bought this place, its previous owner would drop lit matches as he drove by, anytime he thought it would burn. It took a few years to convince him that we didn’t see it as a favour.

There are new regulations, where the environment is considered in deciding what and where and how often landowners may burn off, aiming for more strategic, mosaic burning. But the old idea of‘ I can do what I like on my own place’ dies hard.

In this last very dry autumn, from the smoke I could see that an ‘escaped’ burn-off two valleys away was racing up towards the wilderness areas, driven by high winds. A day later I learnt that it had burnt the ancient paperbarks round the perched swamps, where my seeds came from. As the well-fed smoke billowed skyward I thought of those giant eucalypts in the old-growth forest just beyond, and how the fire might gain a hold inside their forked bases.

Due prior process for approvals and notifications, containment plans, etc., had apparently not been bothered with. In the night I saw the fire’s hungry red progress on the slopes, and felt sick at heart at the destruction taking place out there, at all the small animals that burn with the tussocks...

Rain fell after about four days—but what if it hadn’t? And was any action taken against the match-happy, responsibility-shy landowner? I’d lay bets it wasn’t. Natural assets ought to be valued as highly as man-made ones. Houses and sheds can be rebuilt; endangered species and unique habitats can’t.

Rather than burning off, I use horses to reduce the fuel on the ground, and thus the fire hazard. A tall, coarse grass, called blady grass, grows strongly where the forest has been cleared. Often waist-high, it burns as if it’s been doused in kerosene; in a bushfire you hear a sudden great roar as it reaches and feeds on a patch of blady grass.

Not only does fire love it but it loves fire, and comes back vigorously. So it’s a fire cycle: the more blady grass you have on a block, the more fire-prone it is, and the more often it’s burnt, the more blady grass you get. If you plant enough trees, eventually this grass will cease to dominate, but that’s a slow process. Cattle usually don’t eat blady grass, but horses do.

My daughter keeps her horses on my place. They’re fenced off from all but about 30 acres, as the rest is regenerating. They like blady grass so much they stick their heads through the fence to eat beyond, so they create a small firebreak outside the fence line too.

I’m not a horsey person; I think them beautiful, especially in motion, but I’m scared of their size and power—especially if I’m on them. Since they sense this, although I can ride, I mostly don’t. We all took riding lessons before we first moved here, being practical, in much the same way as I did a first aid course.

My daughter was only three then, and had already been anointed a horse person by my youngest sister, who’s the horse lover amongst my siblings. We still have the how-to book she gave my daughter on her second birthday,
Your First Horse Book.
So my daughter had no choice in the matter, and she’s now inducting
her
daughter.

Geriatric horses put out to pasture would seem ideal hazard reducers, but there are problems. They die. And they may not do it in one hit but ‘go down’ and do it slowly. If we call the vet to come up and give it a mercy injection, at enormous cost, we must then bury or somehow enclose the body so other creatures can’t eat it because it will be toxic. Or we must get someone to shoot it—and still we’re left with what to do with the body. They’re too big for hand-dug graves, and they tend to choose awkward places, too close to the house, or in a dam. Several times my daughter, a courageous young woman, has had to tie a rope around the dead horse—somehow—and tow it away—somewhere—beyond sight and smell. Years later I come across its bleached skeleton in a gully.

My daughter tends the horses on her occasional weekend visits. She’s smaller than I am, but strong in the arms like me, so she can keep them standing on three legs while she rasps and trims their hooves. People may think that so long as horses have grass, shade and water, they’ll look after themselves, but they need frequent checking, often hoof trimming or cleaning, worming, maybe teeth filing, and on a bush block there’s always a possibility of being caught in barbed-wire fences, or staked in the abdomen by a fallen stick trodden on the wrong way.

Both these have happened here. The latter must have been horrific for the young bay horse, Sally, and occurred while we were weekenders. My daughter’s friend discovered the accident days later and phoned my then seventeen-year-old daughter, who drove up from Sydney. After the vet had put Sally down, they had to burn her body. So it was horrific for them too. If you can judge a person’s character by whether or not you could depend on them in a crisis, those two country teenagers would come through with gold medals.

The other accident was only redeemed from being fatal because I was here full-time again. Jess, the oldest and wisest horse, had stood immobile all one day and night, not panicking and pulling against the barbed wire, until we’d missed her and gone looking. Always wary of being caught, moving away as soon as anyone approached, this time she remained perfectly still while we cut the wire from around her legs.

As she leapt away to join her mates, I happened to glance further down the steep fence line. A flash of reddish fur, and long white bones. Close up, it was the remains of Red, a chestnut who’d gone missing years ago.

All barbed wire was replaced after that. The rogue cattle for which it had been used were long gone, and since the national park was created, there are no cattle in the forest.

We currently have four horses: two geldings and two mares.

I’m now forced to depend on them as my primary lawn mowers as well as hazard reducers. I used to mow my entire house paddock, raking up the grass and using it for mulch. To feel less like a house-proud suburbanite, I called this ‘harvesting mulch’. It was also a fire hazard reduction measure, but secretly I liked the look of the almost-lawn around the trees and shrubs.

Being hit with arthritis about five years ago made me stop that nonsense. Not only would my knees not cope with the pushing, always up- or downhill to some degree, but my wrists wouldn’t let me start any of the vintage Victa toe-cutter mowers my partner had collected. Which was a pity, as they were perfect tough little slashers for these tussocky paddocks.

And for kikuyu. Thirty years ago, on the advice of then Soil Conservation Department, I planted runners of the introduced kikuyu grass to hold the sides of the newly bulldozed track and dam. Fortunately it’s too cold here in winter for it to do well outside my house fence, where the wallabies eat it right down. It now seems hard to credit our ignorance—their ignorance. I’d seen kikuyu on the coast literally drowning sheds and fences in an unstoppable high tide of viciously bright green. I knew how it could take over, yet I did what ‘the experts’ told me to, regardless.

My punishment for this environmental crime is that kikuyu has taken over my gardens. Now, in spring and summer, I let the horses in to graze, and what survives in my garden is what they permit. They do a good job on the kikuyu, except that they are overly thorough, and in reaching a strand of it they tramp through and flatten woody shrubs like lavender and rosemary. They back onto, tread on and break small trees, seeming to target the slow-growing, precious ones I’ve been nursing along for years.

You’d think they’d be content with the lush kikuyu, but no, they like variety, and what’s more they are extremely flighty about it—perverse even. For example, as they’d been driving me crazy by eating my honeysuckle vine every few weeks, I figured it’d be safe to plant some out to cover a wall on the shed. Their dependable pruning wouldn’t allow it to run and sucker. I protected the base of the new plant until it was established and it grew very well. But the horses changed their minds and didn’t touch it and now I have an expanding sea of honeysuckle in the grass of the orchard. They just eat around it. ‘Your problem, ’ they imply, when they briefly interrupt their grazing to watch me straining to pull out rooting runners.

Sabbath, the chestnut gelding, has decided he likes the leaves (and fruit if it’s there) of plum, cherry, nashi and mulberry, so they are stripped to the height he can reach. And he’s the tallest horse. Last year he was partial to jasmine, ornamental grape and wisteria. He hasn’t touched them this year, but I know he will if I get complacent about it.

Zack, the boss bay gelding, has the distinction of being the only animal here, wild or domestic, who eats the leaves of any bulbs. I have clumps of jonquils and daffodils and snowflakes and tritonia naturalised in the grass out front, thriving without any effort from me. Their annual reappearance and blooming is always a gift, gratefully accepted. But Zack likes the strappy leaves of tritonia, so they no longer get to produce their massed wands of pink bells.

He was also not averse to poking his head over my vegie garden netting fence to eat celery or cabbage or whatever he could reach. So I had to raise the height of that fence too. Fences within fences! I left its gate at the old height as raising that seemed too hard, and besides, there was only a bare path beyond it. After a few weeks, Zack found he could reach quite a few vegetables by putting his head over the gate and twisting sideways. Making a new gate was still beyond me, so I attached doubled wire netting, like a heavy curtain, across the opening. This means I have to lift the curtain to open the gate, then duck under. Which is fine for gathering vegetables for dinner, but not for carrying spadefuls of compost. A new gate has been added to my ‘sometime’ list.

Jess, the aged buckskin mare, likes to munch the new leaves on the citrus trees, so they remain dwarfed and unproductive. I’ve put netting guards around the skinnier ones—more fences within fences—but am in a quandary about the others. I’ll have to do something as my knees won’t stand the jarring of my angry rush across the paddock when I see she is back over there, ripping and stripping away. She does not desist until I am almost there.

I feel she is ungrateful—I never try to catch her or ride her and I always ensure she gets her share of carrots—but, because she was my daughter’s very first and much beloved horse, no ill can be said of her.

However I do recall some ill being said, if fleetingly, on our weekend visits from Sydney. My daughter would spend hours coaxing the almost uncatchable Jess to come close enough to be caught, a difficult job even in a corral. She’d squat beside a feed bucket, one hand hiding the halter behind her back, speaking softly, patient for a long time, losing it as Jess yet again shied away just as the halter rope went over her neck. Storming off, giving up, quite a few angry words scorched the mountain air. But she always found replenished patience and tried again, saying it wasn’t Jess’ fault, since she’d obviously been frightened in the past.

Shari, the barrel-shaped miniature pony, is a skewbald, white with splashes of chestnut. She likes to straddle small trees or shrubs and scratch her tummy by rubbing back and forth, or back up to bigger shrubs and scratch her fat rump. Consequently she breaks many twigs and branches, so the shrubs are lopsided, and she snaps small trees in half. She finds my metre-high sprinklers handy to scratch her face on, and breaks their moving parts. If I put stakes around anything, she rubs against those and breaks them.

The little wretch also gets through my regeneration area fence. She puts her front feet over the bottom wire and then wriggles and pushes her fat body through, spreading the wires and loosening the posts to the point of eventually lifting them clear out of the ground.

Recently I tried to give her away to a home with better fences and less for her to damage. This family had small boys to love her and a pony her size to be her friend. They led her home on the Friday, then spent the better part of the weekend retrieving her after she escaped twice, through electric fences, and wire fences far more tightly and closely strung than mine. The last time they caught her she was halfway back here.

I returned late that Sunday night from a weekend camp, helping to survey Aboriginal artefacts near Anvil Hill, proposed site for another monster open-cut coal mine in the Hunter. We’d found tools as old as 4000-5000 years, our archaeologists estimated. Holding a stone tool where my fingers fitted perfectly, as other fingers had done so very long ago, was overwhelming.

We’d also seen that rare thing in the long-grazed Hunter: an uncleared central valley floor, rich in unique woodland vegetation. It was incredible that anyone would contemplate the total destruction of this, called the Ark of the Hunter because of its biodiversity treasures, but they were—2000 hectares of it! In a sane world, that area would be declared ‘of state significance’, to be protected rather than disembowelled. The weekend had been both inspiring and depressing, and I was physically and emotionally exhausted.

Next morning I dragged myself out of bed late, and far from alert. From the verandah I could see the three horses patiently waiting at the gate. Then I literally rubbed my eyes, for I could also see a low splash of brown and white through the netting. Bloody Shari!