Love In a Sunburnt Country (5 page)

‘The rocks are still there,' says Luke.

‘The rocks are still there and we could see in the diaries just what they put into the kiln, how long it was in there, which day they bagged it up. It meant we could create the same product.'

Luke has used mortar made to the family's traditional recipe and local stone to add a kitchen to the original homestead, where it fits seamlessly into the house. He used the same techniques in restoring the cellar in the wall of the creek.

Luke's first piece of restoration was the blacksmith's shop: now a beautifully rendered white rectangular low-roofed building, done before Frances had rediscovered the mortar recipe.

‘Up until four years ago this building was fairly wrecked. You could see daylight through it, the pines were all exposed and their bottoms rotting off,' he says. ‘We had a guy on the shearing team who was a fully qualified concrete renderer and he came back over winter and helped me, and it saved the building. Although it wasn't done in the correct way, it is still restored and useable again.'

Luke opens the door and we see that one half of the blacksmith's shop is the forge and the other a store for miscellaneous metal objects. Cataloguing these is another of Frances's ‘one day' projects. There is a glass-topped, hand-operated fuel bowser. Copper wire glows from among the soft rust. Huge scythes for hand-harvesting crops are hung like bats from a wire alongside harvester fingers and rabbit traps.

We step further into the room and my eyes are instantly drawn past the forge and into a cut-out inlet. There crouches a set of bellows, twice the size of a garden wheelbarrow, reminding me irresistibly of a little leathery-winged dragon. It has been carefully mended by a friend of Frances who, like her, has inherited his great-grandfather's business: in his case, upholstery. I am enchanted and astonished, both by their size and the fact that they are still here and because Luke has not just restored the blacksmith's shop, he's returned it to life. Visitors can watch Luke draw out iron and then beat, twist and twirl until it becomes a poker or a candlestick.

‘You want a high steady heat—no sparks!' Luke says. ‘Frances's great-great-grandfather William Warwick was a master blacksmith and his father-in-law was too. So it ties into the history. But I can only do relatively simple, decorative things at this stage.'

We come to another restoration, this one using the original pug and pine. This method required minimal materials, time and effort at the outset, but needed constant renewal: more pug, more pine to fill in the cracks created by the contracting cold and expanding heat.

‘When we looked back through the history we found these old notebooks by Alexander Goyder. In there he called it “Scalp Hut” but we don't know why. We do know that Holowiliena was a depot for wild dog scalps. People travelled to bring the scalps here and collect their government bounty. The family here was responsible for destroying the scalps so they couldn't be bought back to claim another bounty.'

In looking at the restorations we are seeing too the steady progress in Luke's skill. Next on the list is the cellar which, like Scalp Hut, was filmed as part of the ABC production. Rock and mortar are set in the deep creek wall, and a wooden frame is fitted into the rock, wooden door precisely fitting into the frame—inside are river red gum beams and shelving, and on the shelves are bottled fruit and preserves. There are bottled grapes, cauliflower (which looks good but apparently tastes precisely as one would expect cauliflower and vinegar to taste), plums, peaches, pears and apricots, jams, marmalades and relishes—all made by Frances. The jars, the bottles and the red gum, all in the rich subdued colours of Rubens and Titian, glow against the walls of grey creek stone.

The two pieces of work that Luke is most pleased with are his most recent: the pizza oven (near the cellar in the creek bank, and designed to cook with ambient temperature: the fire is lit the day before the pizza or roast is cooked) and Janne's new kitchen. We gather there for tea and coffee with Janne and Richard, to learn more and to see some more of the family treasures. One of these is written and the others are worked in wood and metal.

Luke hands us a beautifully finished wooden chain with swivel and turnbuckle, at the end of which is the bark-clad stick from which it was carved. This is some of Uncle Frank's work.

‘Uncle Frank also tried to carve chain out of matches,' says Richard. I find both ambition and attempt hard to credit, but perhaps Frank was inspired by a family-held curiosity of unknown origin: so minute and finely made that it looks like fairy work.

In a tiny transparent box, nested in cotton wool, sit a carved peach stone, plum stone and cherry stone, each with a tiny neat plug. Richard pulls out the miniscule plug from the delicate cherry stone and carefully tips the mouth over a sheet of white paper. Tiny identical metal shapes spill out.

‘Don't anyone sneeze,' says Frances.

Careful not to breathe, I lean closer. The tiny shapes are teaspoons, their shallow bowls and their handles plain against the white paper.

How are these tiny spoons to be returned to their cherry stone? With the dexterity and grace which is surely one of the chief family gifts, Richard touches his work-roughened index finger to a spoon and then to the mouth of the tiny vessel. We fall silent watching him until every spoon is out of sight and the plug back in.

The written treasure is a letter of proposal.

‘It's from my great-grandfather Robert, who was 52, to his 31-year-old next-door neighbour, Edith Davies,' says Frances.

The letter has been lovingly typed out for modern eyes, including the original misspellings, but the Warwicks have (of course) also preserved the original.

P.S. If it is to be No Could you simply wire me No and this will Condemn me to all the misery I deserve, and if we are to become engaged write me a long yes R.W.

The script in the original letter shows the anxiety and feeling of the writer. It is not written in the almost mechanically neat copperplate of the station diaries; the loops are heavier and the words seem spilled onto the pages rather than measured out perfectly. You hear of such letters being drafted and redrafted, but I believe Robert simply wrote his heart out on the page just once.

Phrases like ‘You know the life I like and am likely to lead is in the bush' make sense. Edith needed to love the life as well as the man. Little has changed in all the years since Robert penned this letter. The person marrying into an outback life is taking on far more than just a partner.

Robert's letter brims with his desire that Edith will be happy. This is the very essence of love and as I read and reread it, I understand why she chose to marry him, even while knowing just how hard a life it would be. A photograph of Edith shows a woman with a delicate frame and a fine-featured, gentle face: her expression holds a quiet self-confidence in her wisdom and competence. The daughter of a doctor and one of his few children to have survived, I imagine her to have been clever, and as familiar with loss and suffering as the much older Robert.

The rightness of Edith and Robert's marriage is part of the foundations of what we see today. The property is still in the family. The business remains viable—Richard and Janne have paid off the debt. Not just that; under their management the condition of the land has improved.

The debt is gone, but the maintenance of the buildings is now overdue, says Frances. That, she says, is part of the work for her and Luke.

‘Tourism works for us because Dad has done it [informally] for years,' Frances says, ‘but we are not trying to change the world and make a big business out of it. We just want the history to pay for itself.'

While the history tourism is only to pay for the restoration and maintenance work, the station must do a great deal more than pay its own way, and this is the biggest challenge facing Luke and Frances. Despite the pressure of a repayment schedule, Richard and Janne took great care not to overstock the property. This is now visible in the good condition of Holowiliena and the abundance of feed.

‘If you love the land, it loves you back,' says Frances. ‘You know the saying, “The country is in good heart”? Holowiliena is always in good heart.'

We go up to the top of the highest nearby hill to look down at the Holowiliena homestead as the sun sets: houses, gardens, outbuildings, shearing shed, shearers' quarters, yards, sheds and wells. Hills encircle the homestead and the gently undulating land around it, and there are hills past the hills, and then yet more hills further back. It is like standing on an outer petal of a rose and looking into its deep heart.

The Holowiliena family refers to this as ‘Woolshed Hill'. On its very top is a shepherd's cairn. At shearing time, in the days before two-way radio, the shepherd waiting patiently with the next mob to be brought through for shearing would keep his eyes both on the flock and the shepherd's cairn. When he saw a flag of a particular colour appear atop the cairn he would know that it said ‘Bring 'em up, Fred' and he would bring the sheep those last few kilometres into the yards to be shorn.