Paddington to Pine Hill

Somewhere between a letter, diary and blog this ramble is an effort to share with you the world I’ve been indulging in for the past twelve months.

Winter 2009

The cold of winter has arrived: fog shrouds the twiggy garden of chilly mornings, and days are gentle and clear, which makes it around a year ago that I moved to Pine Hill.

I remember asking my editor, heart thumping in my chest, if I could move to the country (I don’t think he realised quite how far away) while continuing to work for the magazine. Remarkably, he agreed, so I now split my time between home – ‘Pine Hill’ somewhere in the far-flung plains of the Central West Slopes and Plains, and three weeks of magazine deadline in Sydney.

For my arrival at Pine Hill, winter (The Farmer and I call our friend-season) was all around us. I was experiencing my first frosts and learning that it wasn’t a good idea to let the fire go out during the day, because when you came back inside in the evening, it was frightfully cold – bitterly so. The most memorable thing about my first winter was, its rapid disappearance – just as I was just beginning to settle into this wintery cosiness with slow cooked meals and marshmallows by the fire, it was over. Spring came around quickly and didn’t delicately emerge as I had expected it to. Like a smack in the face, days were quite warm again, summery in disguise, and things were growing to no end in the garden. What I didn’t know, was that this was an indication that summer was going to be horrible, and days would get unbearably hot. Hindsight is a wonderful thing – employed frequently, as I learn day by day about this new life of mine.

Not long after unpacking at Pine Hill – two van trips, a car and ute-load later, we thought while I was solo at home during the day that a four-legged friend would be a nice thing for company. Willow, enter stage left: the cutest black Labrador puppy you ever did see, made our extended family official. Her older brother Banjo: a Jack Russell cross Silky Terrier had been The Farmer’s trusty sidekick for three years. He’s as tough as a bull – just the size of your boot. He truly believes he will one day catch a kangaroo, and doesn’t give up trying. He and Willow were partners in crime, chasing rabbits by day and snuggling together by Winter’s nights.

The learning curve is steep. The mistakes: a plenty. The number of times I have felt so far from familiar are countless, but I have never been happier. I often consider if I’m one to take comfort in discomfort. I’m not too sure. Either way, there is an abundance of happiness in my life over the past two years.

By the end of Winter I had effortlessly made my mark. I had run over a sabotaging rock with my (very city and very low to the ground) car – needing to be towed from the property to the very country mechanic who usually fixes very country cars in town. (For some reason, if not humiliated enough, the farm-folk thought it best to record this moment forever on film). A day or so later out in the paddock, I had also managed to leave the ignition on in The Famer’s ute leaving him to discover a flat battery in the dark (country dark is proper dark – a distinct lack of street lights causes an extreme effect) having sowed wheat all day and night. Not able to call me to collect him from the paddock because my car was already sumpped out of action, he had to call his mother: Mrs M. I had failed.

Mrs M. lives in the homestead with Mr M. and Puss, a half Burmese-half wild (it happens) cat, all of who I’m sure were laughing themselves to sleep that night.
With Mr & Mrs M living 70 metres across the garden, they impact my life directly and everyday. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m privileged to have such magnanimous oldies up the garden path.

Winter to spring is calving time here – that time of the year so the new calves and feeding mum’s have plenty of food available for the growing season. The heifers, which are cows yet to be mums, are checked morning and night for birthing trouble – if you saw the size of the things that came out, you’d expect there to be trouble. Things can go terribly wrong – its just too big to squeeze – and you can lose calf and cow in a very traumatic and lengthy delivery. There is a very archaic procedure for delivering a calf in the yards: its winched out of the standing heifer and drops to the ground like a soggy sack of potatoes. If she doesn’t grow weak at the knees and fall over, it’s been a good delivery. There is apparently no other way. My imagination is conjuring up slings and cushions to take the weight of the weary cow, but nothing has come of my ignorant ideas. I have proudly delivered a calf with The Farmer. You know you’re doing a good thing by intervening, but I did need a long and un-waterwise shower afterwards, followed by a drenching of Chanel No 5 before I could fathom the motivation to cook dinner.

Pine Hill becomes a bit like a maternity ward this time of year. There’s a delivery room in the cattle yards alongside a nursery pen for newborn calves. Out in the paddock where the new single-parent families are moved after a few days in the yards, its incredible to see the cows nominating a nanny to babysit several of the little ones while the others walk to greener grass: calf day care – who would have thought. The baby girls have a little more than a year of growing up before they are joined for the first time and become teenage mums. The little guys get fattened, castrated and sold, and the old cows are joined again in a few months time in October. No rest for the wicked.

Silently in the background at around the same time, the crop is punching up out of the ground and spring rain becomes more and more crucial. There were all kinds of stats being thrown around, day after day, about how much income rainfall would create: so many millimetres over so many thousand hectares of wheat would create x amount of dollars - $100,000 a millimetre was the call at one stage – and not a cloud in the sky. One thing I’ve learned quickly out here is that rain is like liquid gold. Last spring there was frustration, as rain seemed to fall north, south, east and west of Pine Hill, never above it. The Farmer is online several times a day choosing which of the most promising forecasts he’ll take as gospel – I too now have weather sites alongside design sites on my bookmarks bar. They’re never right anyway – rain falls when no one’s predicted it, and never falls when it’s a sure thing. But the viability of farming here relies solely on rainfall, which is baffling, because it’s entirely out of human control.

Springtime is beautiful – birds are everywhere in the garden, the almond blossom, japonica and sweet peas are out and the wisteria is a waterfall of purple. The rest of the garden is on the verge of the new season – about to burst with new growth and flowers. The higher sun warms the days, but there is one horrible truth about spring: the snakes. Emerging from hibernation, slow and sluggish and full of potent venom brewing over the sleepy winter, brown snakes and red bellied black snakes could be anywhere you tread, seemingly everywhere – and fatal temptation for puppies. At just five months old, Willow couldn’t resist the excitement a metre long brown snake presented and played with it for so long and was bitten so many times, she only made it a few metres from where she must have realised she was doomed. Writing this is not therapy for me – I still feel nauseous thinking about the way she went. Finding her was horrible, and far too late. Finding the snake coiled up, but with a very broken back was little comfort. There were bite marks down its length from head to tail – and its face still looked scary, even when dead. My rose-coloured glasses were abruptly and unexpectedly shattered. I cried for a week for so many reasons. She is buried in one of my favourite spots of the garden where a line of self-sown red gums stand tall and screen the afternoon sun as it drops low in the distance, where dappled light passes through the trees and draws long shadows over our western lawn.

It felt like we were close to the desert during summer. It seemed that just beyond the saltbush paddock that borders our garden beyond the line of red gums, the Great ol’ Sandy would begin, orange dust blowing in the scorching breeze that made our world more like a fan forced oven than a lush place in the country. There was no escape and we would spend time on the Internet wishing we had somewhere to retreat to in southern Tasmania. I would read Susan Irvine’s garden books and read of natural springs and so much rain, and would resent her for it. My roses actually experienced sunburn and had to grow out their blistered leaves.  But I’ve learned they are the hardy ones – tough and at peace with the sandy soil. Clematis and her delicate associates didn’t’ hold up so well, and subsequently aren’t encouraged in the garden.

The months in the race to Christmas are hectic. I am in Sydney at my real job enjoying familiar haunts, Prosecco, and time catching up with family and friends. The farmer is gearing up for harvest, playing with machinery and inspecting the crop to decipher the opportune time to start giving the wheat its haircut.

Through sowing and harvest time, The Farmer adopts the work hours of a world market-bound stockbroker, where his office is instead the tractor driving 2km lengths up and down the paddock for weeks. During these times, morning tea, lunch and dinner arrive on the Postie – somewhat better transportation to the paddocks than my car (who now lives in the wool shed for most of her country life).

Always interested, but never expecting such obsessive behaviour, I have fallen in love with gardening. Edna Walling is quoted as saying in her book A Gardener’s Log that the love of gardening is an incurable disease. I confess, it is true. Work on the garden began immediately. There were some lovely parts to the garden, but they were in need of some love and attention, and really needed adding to, to ground the vignettes in the overall layout. And so the obsession began.

The eastern garden bed on the edge of the garden had a huge Cotton Wood tree, an all but dead pear tree and one remaining Melaluca from a row that screened the once-standing shearer’s quarters on the other side of the fence. The Cotton Wood is a thirsty tree, not so good in the drought conditions that now face the garden, it created a huge amount of shade over the entire front lawn and being deciduous dropped the toughest leaves on the ground that refused to decompose. The Cotton Wood’s days were numbered – the eastern bed is what I would view from my desk in the office, and nothing (well, in my grand ideas) was going to grow underneath it. I later learned Mr M proudly planted this tree that was now a stump in the ground. But (sigh) it instantly looked better, and the view east now contained the gorgeous line of olive and pepper trees that meander down the drive.

I have a new companion for the garden: Molly another black lab - Molly Mud-guts is how she’s often referred. I am currently researching an appropriate spring solution for her in efforts to avoid a repeat performance of last year, I have decided to remove her from danger and indulge her in a month of doggy day care while I’m at work. For Dog’s Sake seems to be our day care of choice – suitable for her cosmopolitan holiday – I just hope she doesn’t destroy the toy rabbits the same way she does the real thing with Banjo at home…

Molly never made it to day care – she is too much a farm dog now to behave appropriately in a city environment. She’s a country bumpkin, and a social outcast in Centennial Park. Molly can’t believe Pugs are actually dogs. I am told by The Farmer, that she caught a rabbit all by herself the other day – usually its Banjo’s relentless chasing that brings a kill home. A proud moment – she certainly thought so, nose in the air with a tiny bunny delicately held in her soft mouth. The bunny was unharmed, so The Farmer released it into a pipe to live another day. I doubt he would have done the same to Banjo.

So after holding my breath for three weeks in the big smoke at the magazine hq, I’m back on the farm to even out the gender numbers. The transition from Paddington to Pine Hill is dramatic, obviously in a practical sense but also emotionally. It gets harder and harder to leave here – which I guess is the way it should be. We will always have them both, but while a smile continues to grow on my face as I make that 452 kilometre drive west, just as the countryside flattens out and the land turns golden and the Lachlan River winds its way towards The Murray, Pine Hill is where I'll call home. Home is where the heart is.