Lurking behind the question of why I live like a hermit amongst the wildlife is a harder one: what caused me to be the sort of woman to answer ‘Why not?’ as I have? Until I saw from people’s reactions that my lifestyle choice was considered quite odd, I hadn’t thought much about this. To answer it, I needed to retrace my steps to find where the paths had diverged, where I took the turnings—or was pushed.
The most obvious conscious choice of direction was moving here in early 1979 with my husband, our five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter. But the world we left behind was also relatively odd. In fact, we lived in ‘a village down the road’ from Newcastle for the ten years before we went bush.
Minmi was an ex-coalmining town stranded in its own past, five miles of winding road and bushland beyond the last suburb. In its heyday, it had been a bustling town of 5000 residents, with fourteen pubs. When we lived there it had 200 people, no shop and only one pub, but the best sort—the local at the heart of the village.
Our home in this village was not your average house either. It would be hard to imagine a more extreme downsizing to a 3x4-metre tent than from the grand complex that locals simply called ‘the old jail’. Built in the late nineteenth century, it encompassed court-house, police station, three-cell jail and exercise courtyard, plus the residence, with accommodation for a special constable tacked on later. Not to forget the back-to-back outdoor double toilet—the most imposing proverbial ‘brick shithouse’ imaginable.
Of sandstock brick and sandstone, our five double chimneys overlooked multiple roofs over multiple wings and entries. Vast semicircular windows of intricately patterned clear leadlight graced the two big rooms that had respectively served as police station and office, while the courthouse had tall double-hung windows whose lower sashes were multi-paned with rose, amber and green, for privacy. All the official rooms had cedar-panelled ceilings, and even in the residence the rooms had marble fireplaces, cedar doors, rosewood skirting boards and architraves, and tallowwood floors, and each of the many external steps was a single polished grey-slate slab.
Grand.
There was a separate kitchen/dining room building, as was the safety custom in the days of wood-fuelled cooking, linked to the main house by a breezeway. The latter also led to the heavy iron door, complete with spy hatch and massive iron bolt, accessing the jail courtyard, open to the sky except for iron bars, and thence to the cells. These had similar iron doors—creak of rust, clang of finality—no getting out of there.
Atmospheric.
Built in times when Australian rainforest timbers were plentiful and tradesmen were unstinted and unstinting craftsmen, it had my carpenter dad’s approval: ‘Ah, they don’t make ’em like they used to.’ It was unrenovated except for a few regrettable efforts by the only previous private owners, like painting over the soft pinks and ambers of much of the external walls.
Our renovations were basic but expensive. We did not touch the courthouse or cells, but the rest was totally rewired, and the floors sanded, polished and sealed. We renovated the bathroom and kitchen—the latter mostly done by Dad, who lived with us for six weeks while he built many cupboards.
A big cost was installing a septic toilet and self-contained drainage system, as there had been none. Until we could turn the old pantry off the breezeway into an indoor toilet, the backyard dunny still had one side in operation under the rather unsavoury pan fill and collect method—although I can’t say the new septic’s frequent odour of boiled cabbage at the back door proved much more appealing. When the outhouse was partly demolished I saved the kauri full-width seat and lid, and it graces my pit toilet here. It’s very smooth, as you’d expect after being polished by more than a century of warm thighs.
However, when I swapped teaching for motherhood, our income was halved, so for our last five years there we were restricted to low-cost, high-labour jobs, like stripping doors and patching and painting the lime-plastered walls. A few pot plants and hanging baskets turned the exercise yard into a pleasantly sunny, protected courtyard, accessible also from the lounge room via an iron-barred door.
I’d had to promise not to get pregnant until we’d repaid the loan for the total purchase amount of $6000 (truly!) and even that loan was only possible through personal string-pulling by my in-laws. In the 1960s a wife’s income was not taken into account and women could not borrow. The Pill had arrived, but if bank managers knew about it, they weren’t letting on.
We loved living in this semi-rural, anachronistic village. We loved the sense of history, the pub just down the road, the publican and his family, and many of the pub-frequenting villagers. I’d joined the Ladies Darts Team, and so got to know another world of women, vastly different from that for which my convent school and university had prepared me. As the locals gradually educated us into acceptable behaviour, we made friends and had many great post-pub parties in the courthouse. I remain in touch with several of those friends, all of whom have left the village, and with whom those party memories still raise more than a giggle.
So long as you didn’t mind everyone thinking it their right to know your business, the reward of village life was that your neighbours cared. For instance, I’d be asked at the pub about the owner of the green Mini that had been parked outside our gate on the weekend. ‘Stayed overnight, didn’t he? Live far, does he? On his own, wasn’t he? Not married, then?’ No chance of getting away with any illicit affairs round there.
On the way home from hospital with each of my babies, we had to stop by the pub so the new baby could be passed round the bar, along with the Commonwealth Bank tin money box—a miniature bank building—for the equivalent of the traditional donation of a sovereign ‘to give the nipper a start in life’.
I would push the big cane pram, a family heirloom that I’d desecrated by painting bright orange, over the bumpy dirt road for a walk, or to fetch the mail from the post office—there was no mail delivery. As I passed, people would appear at their gates or fences to ask how the baby was doing. Was he over the croup that so-and-so had told them about? And proceed to give me the benefit of their experience with croup or wind or babies in general.
Here I feel obliged also to confess that I painted a beautiful, borrowed, antique cane bassinet and stand with gloss enamel ‘Aquarius Green’, a rather acidic lime. It was the era of the musical
Hair,
‘the dawning of the age of Aquarius’, plus that’s my star sign—but neither seems a worthy excuse in retrospect.
Once I’d become a stay-at-home village mum, I started a local playgroup. The large courthouse room was perfect: chipboard panels from the tip attached to the walls for pinning up blank newsprint paper for painting; overflowing boxes of dress-ups from StVinnies; ice cream containers of violently pink, green or yellow home-made playdough, sparkling with the coarse salt we added on the mistaken theory that then the kids wouldn’t eat it; old carpet to protect tender baby knees from the wooden floor, and that didn’t object to having the above paint and playdough trodden into it; wooden fruit crates, covered with paper, as tables; an old couch or two for the weary mothers from which to referee the toddlers or feed the latest infant.
It was fun and games interspersed with tiffs and tears. I introduced excursions, which were welcome on the proviso that we were always back in time for some of the mothers’ daily hit of the TV soapie
Days of Our Lives.
In the long summer holidays, to give the older kids in the village some activities and stimulation—and the mums a break—I ran craft workshops in the courthouse.
All this interaction meant that from babyhood my children never lacked for playmates, even though we didn’t have near neighbours. Their birthday party photos show the wide age range of local children, mainly girls, who liked to visit. They came partly to experience the novelty of differences—of this impressively large and solid house compared to the small, flimsy, and mostly askew miners’ cottages in which they lived; and of our lifestyle, with so many books, and original paintings and pottery, a strange world where television did not rule.
Hence when we moved to ‘the mountain’, my kids swapped a busy social life for each other and the wallabies, just as we did. At least living somewhere without even a corner shop had partly prepared me for bush life, since I’d got into the rhythm of keeping a vegetable garden producing, which is harder than it sounds, and I’d become used to shopping only once a week.
My decade in the old jail was relived over and over again recently as I wrote my first novel,
A Taste for Old,
set in a similar ex-mining village in 1972, when, like Australia’s government, it was on the cusp of big changes. ‘It’s time’ ran Labor’s winning slogan, but unlike the nation, my village didn’t think it was.
In researching its history, I came across a National Trust website for the renovated jail complex when it was last for sale. Much extended, it had become a function and reception centre and restaurant. The playgroup room had become a billiards room—not so different in purpose. As one of its past uses, what I assume was my playgroup was incorrectly described as a crèche, hardly the word to describe our rough DIY set-up. The old place now looks very posh, more redolent of renovation than of history, and has clearly had much more capital sunk into it than we ever could have, or would have wanted to.
The hollows worn into the slate steps of the old jail had meant more to me than the grand cedar ceilings, because they held a greater sense of history. The building as I knew it was intriguing, mysterious—far more than just a house—and the village was similarly imbued with layers of past lives and events that triggered my imagination. Had we stayed long enough in the jail we’d have ended up with a showpiece, an impressive and historic home, worth a lot of money. So what? It wasn’t a lifestyle destination I wanted—renovating for years, then showing it off, lunches and dinner parties—all that seemed shallow. Aldermen were threatening imminent ‘progress’, housing developments all the way from that last suburb to our village. Houses on the hill overlooking us? Neighbours just over the fence? Our village turned into a suburb? No thanks.
Although we’d planted over a hundred trees on our large block in the middle of bare paddocks, they would not give real privacy. Also seeking more space, and a greater connection to land than our garden could offer, we bought 100 acres near Merriwa. We camped on it in our new Kombi van every second weekend. Despite spending most of our time collecting and burning prickly pear and trying to stop the kids disappearing down wombat burrows, we loved it.
Soon we wanted to reverse the time balance, to be living like that for five days a week and going out to earn money two days. As we’d never risen above student levels of consumerism, nor had any desire to, there was no need for a big income.
Fascinating as I found that Merriwa block’s sandstone ridge vegetation, its flowering small-leaved shrubs, its ironbark and wattle trees, its lichen-encrusted rocks and its sandy wombat world, I knew it was too dry for me to be happy living on it full-time. Although my childhood’s Sunday-night-only baths had been due to lack of tanks that didn’t leak rather than lack of rainfall, I never wanted to return to such water restrictions if I could help it.
We started looking elsewhere, but too often the block on offer was a fenced-in island of degraded land with perhaps one rocky patch of remnant bush, and surrounded by other similar blocks. Rural residential jails. My privacy envelope had expanded and I needed real bush around me that I could walk through unhindered. Eventually we found this mountain, much more remote than we’d intended, but by then we knew how hard it was to find anything so natural closer to civilisation. And it had high rainfall.
Both the old jail and my mountain have links to the past and a strong sense of place. I can’t imagine living in a place devoid of these qualities, scalped and sanitised free of them, such as a new project home in a new subdivision, no matter how well landscaped, no matter how great the facilities. There would be such a separation from reality as I understand it that I’d feel as if I was constantly short of something vital, like air.
Conversely, I often wonder how people used only to such lives would cope should they be suddenly placed in the position of what millions around the world know as normal, with a sheet of tin, one pot, one spoon and a ragged blanket as ‘Home and Contents’.
I imagine that for a day or two they’d behave well, as if they were on a reality TV show, but when no one called ‘Cut!’ as their nails chipped, their hair grew greasier, the loved one began to smell like a human animal instead of deodorant, and meals became minimal fuel for the energy to find food and water the next day, rather than an occasion for display ... what then?
Somewhere in between the riches and the rags is a sustainable way of living that we need to adopt if our grandchildren are not to find themselves without a choice in the matter. That requires urgent attention to global warming, yet what we hear from our major politicians is still as irrelevant as the hollow ‘pock!’ of their party ping-pong.
Unbiased scientists worldwide have been calling for immediate action, but only a few enlightened governments are acting. The UK is way ahead of us—
and
it signed the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases. Major polluter, the US, did not. Nor did follow-the-leader Australia, shamefully the world’s highest per capita greenhouse gas emitter. While a small contributor in the global perspective, it all adds up.
A global problem requires a global solution, as the UK Stern Report, released in October 2006, pointed out. It put the cost of ignoring climate change in economic terms, which is a language the US and Australian governments will at least listen to. They have both reckoned there’s no point in signing Kyoto if the developing polluters, China and India, don’t—but why
would
they sign, and act, if the big boys don’t? To me it sounds much like the US stance on nuclear weapons: ‘Do as we say, not as we do.’