I eventually located the old farm. I wanted to make it the home of the main character in my new book. I thought I remembered where it was but I couldn’t find it. I must have driven past several times. The crossroads of my memory had altered and there was no farm house to be seen. It had been half-swallowed by bushes and was slowly being strangled by vines and brambles. They formed a thorny barrier as I tried to enter the remains of the driveway that had led to the back door. I gave up and walked around to the other road but here a fence joined forces with thick scrub to guard any entrance. Just one more try, I thought, aware that I was trespassing. If I could just see whether the building had survived enough to stoke my memory, I would seek permission from the new owners to explore further. If it had succumbed completely to time, I would have to leave and be satisfied with the frail nostalgia of my childhood.
I walked back around to what, I am almost certain used to be right way in but the road seemed to have been re-routed and I saw the old side road was now a driveway. Past where the back gate used to be, I picked my way through more scrub. Memories loomed, of my cousin and I hanging bunches of rabbit carcasses from the gatepost for the Diamond truck to pick up. Here the bushes thinned out and I could walk into what used to be the orchard. Several senile fruit trees with lichen-covered trunks still stood. My heart leapt. I recognized the huge loquat tree that, as children, we had loved to climb. Its robust branches still reached for the sky in a profusion of healthy green. It stood beside the large concrete water tank that I knew was close to the house. Thinking a machete would have come in handy, determined I pulled aside some of the vines and crawled, sometimes on my belly, tunnelling through the brambles. At last, I emerged dishevelled but whole, born anew into the world of my childhood. Tears welled as I was greeted by the pink profusion of a large camelia bush. My aunty had planted that bush, a rare extravagance in a place where plants were meant to feed hungry mouths. Almost giddy with hope and joy I looked through the grimy windows and saw into the large lounge room that filled the centre of the house.
Ok, I thought, you really are trespassing. I needed to find the new owners and seek permission to explore further.
A beautiful calm morning on the river this morning. Warm, under cloudy skies I paddled into the forests of the book I am writing. While I was down south, I met a man called Ted. Ted works with the environment in the north of the state, but he has 100 acres of land in the south-west that he intends to restore to its original state using different methods including weed control. It was on Ted’s land that I saw several very large trees with a thick white trunks and far-reaching branches. Ted told me they were karri trees.
How could that be? All the karri trees I had known had smooth white trunks that reach to the sky before sprouting branches.
‘These are very old ones that have escaped the forester’s axe. Perhaps they had a burl or were not straight enough.’ He pointed to a burl. ‘The foresters would not have wanted a tree with a growth like that.’
So, the growth saved the tree, I thought to myself, immediately spying a metaphor to use in my story. ‘But why is it not tall and straight like the rest of the karri trees?’
‘That tells how ancient it is,’ replied Ted and I hear a sadness exhaled with his breath. ‘Before white settlement, the indigenous people managed the land, farming some of it to grow yams and grains. They planted between the trees using frequent cool burns to help them. The bush was a place that animals and people could move through, and the karri trees could spread their branches. It was only after white settlement when whole forests were felled and fire set to the debris that the regrowth came back so thick and impenetrable that when the karri trees germinated with abundance from the ash, they had to push themselves towards the sky to catch the light.’
I am fascinated. I feel so ignorant, and again am reminded that Indigenous history has all but been erased. I need to know more and wonder if some of what I am learning will find its way into my new book.
I’m not sure how it started. Several wants were gnawing at me. I wanted to write a book like Barbara Kingsolver. Her characters are believable, her plots interesting with surprises thrown in but the best thing is the way she weaves many of her novels around a deep concern for the environment. In Flight Behaviour, published in 2012, her fictional story reveals the consequences of climate change on a small rural community and on the iconic Monarch butterfly.
My second want came after hearing a news report about the deadly 2019-2020 bushfires in NSW. The fires had burnt with such ferocity that the heat had baked the earth deep down, killing the underground ecosystems. One of the most important of these were the underground fungi that have a vital symbiotic relationship with trees and other plants. To my surprise I heard that about 250 native truffles have been identified but scientist think there could be as many as 1500. The entire health of forests depends on the intimate relationship between truffles, trees and animals but we never hear about them. They are hidden.
My third want evolved from the truffles. I wanted to set the story in the south-west timber country in WA where still survives my first home in Western Australia. These days the old farm house has almost been reclaimed by the bush. I wished I’d had a machete when I returned to explore it.
My fourth want is to use the hiddenness of fungi as a metaphor for my characters.
Now all I have to do is find out what my characters want.
I’m not sure if I remember trudging along the narrow bush tracks, hushed except for the buzzing of bush flies in the summer heat, or whether these weekly Sunday walks were etched into my mind by the memories of my mother. It was the early 1950’s and we walked for miles, or so it seemed. I followed my mother’s desperation over the tangled roots and up every hill to try to see above the trees. We never did. Sometimes she sat and wept with frustration, wishing we could to go home.
Again and again my father patiently pointed out that we hadn’t the money to repay the fare and remind her that this was what she wanted. She wanted follow her sister to Australia. What, in God’s name, did she expect?
‘Not this,’ my mother would cry. ‘No electricity, no water, no civilization, bloody nothing.’
We were living with my aunt and uncle on a dairy farm in the southwest of Western Australia. Where Mary had imagined open space, grew towering trees and thick undergrowth. Perth, the nearest civilization, to Mary’s mind was an insurmountable distance away for the couple who owned a bicycle between them. Terror must have clawed at her heart as she realised the recklessness of their decision to migrate to this alien place but who could blame her for seeking greener pastures? In 1948, straight after the end of the Second World War, Glasgow was a grim place to live. The city, whose name ironically means dear green place, was the target of 400 German bombers that dropped more than 500 tons of high-explosive bombs and 2,400 incendiaries on Clydebank. The once vibrant port was devastated. Only eight of 12,000 houses along the Clyde escaped damage. More than 1,000 people were killed. Fires raged and the city, already blacked by years of heavy industry, was now even blacker with piles of rubble everywhere.
Mary yearned for a better life. Her sister was off to a life of adventure in Australia and she was still on a dreary treadmill. With 35,000 people left homeless by the bombing, finding a place to live was a nightmare. Many young couples in their situation moved in with their parents, but living with either of my sets of grandparents would not have been a bag of laughs. Worn down by years of poverty and hardship, they would have watched the young couple’s every move with controlling, over-anxious eyes.
My parents eventually found lodgings in Gourock, a small village at the mouth of the Clyde, near Greenock where John grew up. It was a small, dank room with a bed and a gas burner and little else, but neither of them was used to luxury. They were on their own. That was luxury enough. Mary became pregnant with me, and the landlady who said she couldn’t abide the thought of a noisy bairn swiftly evicted them
Dad said he knew of a place – a disused air force base in the grounds of Castle Levan. The castle stood on the hill above the Cloche Lighthouse, which guarded the mouth of the Clyde. Miss Curry whose family ran the Cunard shipping line owned the estate. They peered through the window of one of the Nissan huts and Mary could see that they were cosy with curtains, beds and stoves.
Mary had misgiving about moving in. Who did the huts belong to? Dad explained the air force had left them after the war and they were lying empty, which he called a bloody disgrace. He was enraged to think that these perfectly good dwellings were going to waste while ex-servicemen and their families, who had been promised houses after the war, were homeless.
‘What about the people in the castle?’ Mary wanted to know.
‘Just one old biddy,’ replied my father, and he said, surely she could put up with a few more people on so much land.
The padlocks were cut off and thrown into the gorse and the young squatters, with some of their friends, moved in. Mary, fearless in most situations, hated openly flouting the law. She became more and more frightened as she spent long days alone while the others were at work. She didn’t dare leave the camp. The air force had posted a man on the gate. The moment the squatters vacated they could be locked out. Mary, heavily pregnant, at one stage, was stressed and having nightmares. Her only company was their dog, Molly. One day Molly was shot and killed by the farmer who rented the land. He claimed Molly was chasing the sheep, but Mary knew that he hated the presence of the squatters.
By this time, they had come to know Miss Curry, the owner of the estate, who turned out to be a very nice lady rather than an old biddy. Upset by the shooting of Molly, she spoke to the authorities. There was public sympathy for my parents’ and plight, and after a court case, they were told they could stay.
The squatting story has always filled me with pride for my adventurous and rather non-conformist parents, but life did not hold a glowing vision for the future. They had applied for a council flat in Greenock. Anyone who visits Greenock today can still see some of the great, grey, concrete towers that were the modern post-war council flats, and marvel at the contrast to our lives in Australia. If our mother hadn’t hankered after following her sister to Australia, a trip that was free for ex-servicemen, what would our lives have been like?