Frost glistened on the grass this morning as the sun rose above trees lining the paddock surrounding my house. I don’t mind cold mornings when they herald the promise of a glorious Indian summer’s day. There could be nearly three hundred frosts a year here I was told. I shouldn’t mind; I was the envy of my friends for being able to experience the remoteness and beauty of the high country most people rarely see.
The first time I stood within its stark and raw beauty I gasped aloud, “I feel like I’ve come home.” But it did not resemble the Australian landscape of my home country. Perhaps it was more a feeling of harshness it exuded, locked within a brown, barren remoteness that reminded me of the tenuous grip many Australian farmers’ had on land they called the ‘back of beyond’. Not only did it demand respect and awe, but it gave me the opportunity to gaze at it with fresh wonder day after day, the changing of the seasons and the different lights of day subtly, or dramatically, altering the lens through which I viewed it.
Dust lifted languorously behind the little bus snaking along the ribbon-like metal road. On one steep ascent, a scree mountain slope towers like a giant fortress above the road, a spectacular crazed pattern etched deeply into it from pelting rain during a recent thunderstorm. Other evidence of the storm’s ferocity still clung to the land in the form of a torrent of cement-like mix that had rumbled down the scree to flow across the road and over the paddocks below.
 |
| Scree Slopes |
I pulled up at a gate. “Your turn to get the gate,” Jodie said.
“Yeah,” Tony mumbled irritably and yanked the door hard to slide it open, the accumulation of dust and tiny stones causing a high-pitched scraping noise of metal against metal. Tony held the wooden gate open while I drove through, then closed it, flipped the chain over the hook and climbed into his seat, scraping the door shut. I could hear a familiar country and western song blaring on his ipod. It was Tony’s favorite singer. The beat of the music and distorted sound created an image in my mind of a stiff, puppet-like figure plucking a guitar and singing through a hinged jaw that flopped up and down on an expressionless face.
Beyond a long, sweeping plateaued hill where cattle grazed, the road cut into balding hills before descending to a wide valley floor, still covered in frost which hid the faint green that resolutely clung to the land after the rain. Over a narrow wooden bridge and around sheep yards on the right where a few horses grazed, poplar and willow trees broke up the starkness of the brown landscape behind them.
Stopping the bus outside the homestead’s gate, I gave two short toots on the horn. After a slight pause, the door burst open into a tiny courtyard. Janice and Luke, slinging their schoolbags across their shoulders, scrambled sockless into well-worn sandals before racing each other to the bus. Their mother appeared, and came over to the bus, resting her arms on the edge of the front passenger’s door when I opened the window, exposing the tattered sleeves of an old thermal top. Amidst excited children’s chatter she asked, “Would it be okay with you if I collected Janice and Luke before lunch to see the judging of our merino sheep? It’s an annual event that includes all the farms in the valley.”
A feeling of irritation instantly bit into my stomach. She was unaware the children were behind in their studies and that I was working extra hours each day with more thorough planning to help them catch up. “That’s okay,” I said, quickly checking my annoyance, adding, “but I’d appreciate it if you could let me know the night before so I can schedule it into the day’s plans.” I looked intently into her scrubbed, weathered face with its furrowed brow and wavy blond hair roughly pulled back and tied in a knot at the back of her head. Long hours in the sun mustering sheep and cattle and working alongside her husband in the sheep yards during the heat of the day had etched premature lines of age around her pale blue eyes.
“Sorry,” she said, taken aback by the apparent rebuke. “We just decided on the spur of the moment last night that it would be good for the children to see it…perhaps for all the children to be there.”
“Plans can be changed,” I said with a hint of resignation. I watched her model-like body retreat to the house before backing the bus around in a wide arc and heading back along the track. It was my daily run, but one I never tired of, for in this moonscape wonder I could let my thoughts run free like a dog, first going this way then that, sniffing scents or dashing into undergrowth to chase a rabbit. It was one of my favourite times of day.
Just before lunch, amidst a babble of excited voices, my students eagerly climbed into the little bus to escape school for the afternoon, excited by the prospect of running under cloudless blue skies and absorbing the titillating energy of excitement produced by a large gathering of people – so rare in this moonscape-like land.
I followed the trail of dust to where there was a temporary sheep yard staked out across a hill. The track to it was too steep and rough for the bus to climb, so I parked it by the road and the children scattered up the hill like autumn leaves blown by a strong wind while I plodded on behind them. At the top, there was a greeting of sorts from a familiar party-like atmosphere of people preparing food or eating picnic lunches in the shade of four-wheel-drive vehicles. A clatter of cups and plates blended seamlessly into excited chatter while they awaited the sheep judge’s report.
It could have been a scene from a movie set in which I had no part to play, causing me to feel like a gatecrasher at a private party. Munching an apple, I cast myself adrift to circle behind the vehicles and wander aimlessly toward the sheep pens, where men were herding sheep through a race. While one man lifted each sheep into a sling for weighing, another recorded their weight on a clipboard. Then eyes, teeth, feet and fleece were checked before each wriggling mass of wool was released, kicking and jumping, into a large holding pen.
 |
| Merino sheep being judged |
Absent-mindedly, as if my body had switched to automatic mode, I sidled over to a small triangular pen showcasing the station’s best five sheep, leaned over the rails and, in a moment of half interest, parted the wool to inspect the crimps. Instantly, like a spinning wheel sucking the warp through a spindle and onto the bobbin, I whirled into the past, and in my hand a familiar wire brush was teasing a staple of fleece for spinning.
“Nice wool…” I said more to myself than the man standing next to me, also inspecting a fleece. “…Takes me back to my time on a sheep farm in Australia.”
The man straightened and looked at me. “Where in Australia?”
“Victoria…Western District…near Ballarat…” I didn’t bother saying “Mannibadar” because it was so small it wasn’t even marked on a map. Just a community hall and a closed school marked the spot, set against a backdrop of grazing land.
“That’s where I come from...”
“Actually, I lived in Skipton…in the old bush nursing hospital...”
“That’s where I come from…”
It struck me then that perhaps I should have said “Mannibadar” in the first place, for it occurred to me that he didn’t live at Skipton at all, but somewhere close by, so I added, “We had a farm at Mannibadar…”
“That’s where my farm is…”
I stared at him in disbelief while I pondered the chances of meeting a one-time neighbour in a remote expanse of New Zealand high country. “Where was your farm?” was the inevitable question that came next, instantly flickering to life a film clip from the past as if a smouldering cinder had suddenly blazed into a leaping flame. A pine-tree-covered hill came into view around a bend just before the entrance to the farm Eric named Tahara. A gravel drive headed past the mustard-coloured, weatherboard cottage with sun-blistered paint where John and I had lived, and continued on to Betty and Eric’s cream brick-veneer-house, surrounded by a wildly overgrown garden smothered in forget-me-nots; the pine-tree-covered hill rising up behind it.
“The hill…” I struggled to blurt out, almost like an exclamation mark, groping for words to describe it within the after shock of an unexpected collision with my past. The hill was a landmark at the edge of the rolling volcanic plain and the man exclaimed, “Oh, Johnson’s old place. We were neighbours then…” to which I added, “Over twenty years ago.”
We had never formerly met, but he said he had occasionally seen me out riding my horse along the road. After a brief chat he said, “I’d better get on… These folk brought me over here to judge their sheep and they’ll be eager for the results.” I watched while his fingers parted a fleece and he wrote something on his clipboard; then walked absently away, the numbness of shock scattering thoughts through my brain like shotgun pellets.
My students chased each other between the vehicles parked across matted dry grass. Behind them, layers of brown hills tinged with green, blended into blue-grey jagged-edged mountains. Yet I was lost in quite a different scene: the day we arrived to live on the farm.
The only welcome the tiny weatherboard cottage could give was the pale pink leadlight flower on its front door. Surrounding it was a rusting barbed wire fence loosely holding in the remains of a neglected garden parched dry by the early north winds of summer. Spindly shoots of growth from a low hedge bordering the front of the house bowed and danced in the breeze as John circled the car to stop at the back gate. With his words echoing in my ears, “I’m going to find Dad,” I twisted around to look at Philip, strapped into his car seat behind me. He was just seventeen months old, his cheeks crimson from new teeth he was cutting. His light blue eyes met mine and I smiled. "Well, this is our new home," I said.
Getting out of the car I surveyed the paddocks below the cottage, disappointed there was no welcoming greeting from the yellow hues rolling up to meet me. It was only a few months ago that the rebirthing energy of spring had charged my soul with hope as we drove around the farm to consider Eric’s offer. "Forget the past...start anew..." whispered the delicate yellow-greens of early spring grass, enticing me with a promise of better days to come. Just as that soft, green grass seduced me with the image of making love with John on its delicate cool softness, so too had Eric’s offer to John been seductive: a cottage to live in and a chance to try his hand at farming – for a small wage...and a dream. The image came to me of father and son standing on the hill, Eric with one arm around John’s shoulders, the other stretching out to encompass the paddocks below. He whispers in his son’s ear, “All this will be yours one day...”
It was Christmas Eve. The sun's searing rays had long since sucked out the essence of new life from the land, and the soft carpet of green had transformed itself into tall prickly grass stalks that were now yellow. I decided to forego unpacking the car in favour of taking Philip for a walk to see what our new life had to offer, carrying him up the gravel track towards the hill. The track turned left at the brick-veneer house, and two sheep dogs, a kelpie and a border collie, pulled their chains taut with lunging barks until I called out, "Don't you remember me?" and they slunk into makeshift kennels to lie down.
To the right of the track stood a silo, and an old shed with planks missing from walls where steel posts and fencing tools were propped. Covering bench tops was a jumbled array of nuts and bolts in boxes and an assortment of odds and ends that Eric insisted could come in handy one day. Next to the shed, long spikes of brittle dry grass wove through pieces of old rusting farm machinery, thrown into a heap. To the left were the sheep yards and shearing shed. "This is where the shearers will come to cut off all the sheep’s wool...like this...bzzzzzzzzz..." I ran my fingers through Philip’s silky blond hair. He frowned. "I don't think it will be that bad, Philip," I said, and laughed. "They'll grow more wool again."
I set Philip down to walk beside me, holding his chubby little hand. Just before the track slid underneath a gate I noticed the new shed on the right. “Look Philip, you can see the truck, the little blue tractor…and there’s the plough the tractor will pull to dig up the ground…” Hay twine held the fence together at the gate, where the wooden posts had rotted and were crumbling apart. Fast-growing thistles choked good grazing land on the other side of the sheepyards, and uncovered bales of hay lay rotting in the corner of a paddock on the flat below.
Once past the clutter of buildings and fences, the track curved into the contour of the hill. Mid-way into the curve, it suddenly exposed an undulating volcanic plain which stretched into the shimmer of summer haze beyond a patchwork of paddocks dotted with dams, farmhouses, plantations, and a solitary bore water windmill spinning atop a tall tripod of rusting iron. A few curious, odd-shaped hills perched upon the otherwise flat landscape, looking like weather-beaten remains of broken tombstones in a long-forgotten graveyard.
Once past the clutter of buildings and fences, the track curved into the contour of the hill. Mid-way into the curve, it suddenly exposed an undulating volcanic plain which stretched into the shimmer of summer haze beyond a patchwork of paddocks dotted with dams, farmhouses, plantations, and a solitary bore water windmill spinning atop a tall tripod of rusting iron. A few curious, odd-shaped hills perched upon the otherwise flat landscape, looking like weather-beaten remains of broken tombstones in a long-forgotten graveyard.
A gust of wind swept up from the plain to greet me, bringing with it the sweet scent of freshly baled hay – a deadly perfume that sent me into fits of sneezing that could last for hours. Later I would feel trapped within the suffocating grip of this harsh and dusty dryness, and long summer days which stretched out as far as the horizon. Yet this view, with its water-colour-palette of yellow hues and earthy tones, broken only by the smoky greens of spindly sugar gum plantations or the deep greens of cypress trees used for wind breaks, would always make me stop to gaze at it in wonder...to drink it in as nourishment for my soul.
I wondered then if I could now settle into the role of mother...and make it fulfilling. From studies in psychology I had learned that a child's first three years are the most crucial for its development. How we treat and relate to children in those early years taught them how to treat themselves, relate to others, and cope in their environment.
However my ability to feel with inner knowing, the truth of this learning, hid from me, for I had erased the memory of my early years like the chalkboards I had dusted clean so many times in the past at the end of a day’s teaching. Yet the memories were still there, squashed underneath parental commandments of "Thou shalt not feel anger, much less express it," "Thou shalt not remember what gave rise to it," and "Thou shalt not tell anyone what happened to cause it if you do happen to get your memories back." So if by chance I pierced through the veils of naive idealism which made me believe my childhood was okay, and saw glimpses of how it really was, shame made me hide the memories again through fear that there was something inherently wrong with me; that underneath my long, futile struggle to be good, I was really bad…a ‘sinner’ who could never define exactly what she had done wrong or why indeed she was ‘wrong’, but who, nevertheless, would burn in hell forever.
A deep sadness that remained hidden within shifting shadows of reality erased the laughter of happy times. It was my silent childhood companion. Yet unbeknown to me it was there still, weaving my past into my future, and recreating in the present all the pain I'd hidden, undigested, in the bowels of the past. School reports labelled me as “quiet” and “co-operative”. But behind this mask of quietness I was grieving an indefinable loss, unable to tie its loose ends together.
Squeals…and the sounds of children’s running feet and high-pitched voices enjoying a game brought me back into the present. Instead of a volcanic plain stretching out before me, I distractedly gazed over a moonscape world of smooth-sided hills and teeth-like mountains cutting into the sky. As I began to wonder why I had just met a man from the unhappiest years of my life, I realized at the same time that they were years that had begun to shape a life as bold and full of contrasts as the glacier-carved landscape before me.
A waving hand brought my attention to a familiar face under a large straw hat and words formed through pink lipstick lips, “Come and sit beside me.”
Margie sat in the shade of a four wheel drive station wagon with her back resting against a dusty rear wheel, dressed neatly in an unbuttoned navy shirt over a white tee-shirt and jeans. The straw hat hid most of her striking, short white hair, cut straight at the bottom. At a party to which I was invited as an afterthought some weeks ago, she had rushed to introduce herself as a fellow Australian from Bathurst the moment she heard my Australian accent.
I sat down next to her now, carefully avoiding the dusty wheel, and excitedly recounted my meeting with the sheep judge. She smiled and nodded and agreed that yes, the world is indeed a very small place, full of strange coincidences.
“You must come to the Valley social gatherings and meet new people,” I heard her say through my pre-occupation with the past. It’s great to have someone new in the area; it will broaden our horizons. Don’t hide yourself away, will you. When I came here I gave up huge chunks of myself to fit in with my husband’s family…and farm life in New Zealand. It was hard. But harder still has been the struggle to reclaim the me I lost. And I’m talking about the true me I buried in order to fit in.”
As Margie’s pink lips moved in conversation, I admired her guts for being the only woman there wearing lipstick. I had given up wearing it as a token gesture to fit in with the local women who worked bare-faced beside their men, hair scrunched up under sun visas, and suntanned skin showing through tattered holes in tee-shirts.
The sheep, the dust, the crowd all blurred out of focus when I looked into her eyes: deep, seemingly bottomless pools that had no sparkle on the surface. What inconvenient truths had she hidden there, I wondered. Was she stuck within a surface image she had formed of herself and long ago forgotten? And did this image reflect her protest against being a farmer’s wife, while the true Margie still remained hidden deep within? The pink lipstick added colour and a hint of lustre to a dry and barren landscape. Perhaps it lightened Margie’s mood and created an artificial sense of well-being. But what was really happening on the inside? Strangely, within the bottomless and faraway look in Margie’s eyes, I found a faint reflection of my own struggle to rescue my mental acuity and creative potential from the harshness and aridity of farming life. Perhaps Margie’s pretty, pink lipstick hid the grief of this loss also – even from herself.
“Come and visit me sometime,” I said.
“It’s too far…I don’t have time…” she said kindly, with a hint of a smile.
But as I watched the smile on her pink lips fade, I made a silent promise to myself to wear lipstick every day. I had already witnessed the inner death of one woman who struggled against her lot as a farmer’s wife…and lost.
