Category: Diary of a Novel

This morning, sleeting rain replete with tiny hail stones greet me, suggesting I stay in bed and keep reading. I’m getting lots of reading done this trip.  Eventually, I emerge from my little capsule like a reluctant numbat and set off to explore more of the district. (more about the numbat later) Deanmill is where my father first found work when we migrated to Australia. He would ride his bicycle to and from the farm each day but it is not a place I ever visited in the past. Today it is a small historic time warp. Row upon row of tiny identical jarrah weatherboard houses still stand, mostly in good repair so I’m guessing they are still occupied. Apart from the houses, there is a large Mill Workers’ Club but nothing else. The town is deserted as I drive around. The workers must all work elsewhere. I pass what could have been the sites of timber mills but they are guarded by large gates with forbidding signs.

I am snooping around the old farmhouse again when I remember I didn’t take a photo of the houses in Deanmill. When I return, a woman is hanging out washing on her verandah. I stop to ask about the place. She is friendly but I don’t find out much. She said she didn’t know if the mill was still running and they rent the house from a Queensland mining company that owns the town, and much of the land in the vicinity. I’d like to ask more but it starts to pour and I don’t get invited onto the verandah so I scurry back to the car. Not for the first time, I get the impression that Manjimup is a district that has closed ranks against ‘Greenies’. But how could they think Iam a Greenie? I’m just a little old lady.

Next, I drive to Yanmah expecting to find a small community.  When Mrs Google announces: ‘You have arrived’, I am at a bus shelter with the sign YANMAH painted in large letters. The undulating farming country is lush and picturesque and the remnant forest especially in the valleys is spectacular. A few wildflowers, perhaps impatient for spring, are to be found but fungi is still hiding.

I spent the rest of the day in the library and adjoining art gallery where I enjoyed seeing an exhibition of works depicting the six Noongar seasons. Apart from being able to keep warm, I can look up a few books and use the internet which is not available at the caravan park.        

Manjimup  Day 2

After breakfast at the Timber Park Café, I re-visit the timber museum. A large proportion of the exhibits are intent on showing the timber industry in a heroic light, celebrating the development of more and more efficient technology to fell the forest giants. There is only a passing nod to the 65 000 year old indigenous culture it displaced or the opposition from conservationists.

I still feel the tragedy how we could fell magnificent trees, many hundreds of years old to be woodchipped and sent to Japan, to be converted to paper that largely ends up in our bins. This is the same Japan that is about 70% covered in forests. Their forests are not indiscriminately felled. Their culture holds trees sacred.I know the arguments for woodchopping but they do not hold water. there had to be an alternative

After persistent, and sometimes huge protests this practice was stopped but we still have not managed to protect these forests from power and profit and I have to stop myself despairing for the future of these unique ecosystems that are disappearing bit by stealthy bit.

I left the timber museum and drove to Pemberton to the Gloucester National Park looking for an old-growth forest to explore. To my disappointment it is still recovering from a control burn. However, the towering ancient trees command reverence from their gigantic moss-covered roots to the canopies reaching for the blue eternity of the sky.  Bracken fern and Zamias sprout fresh and green but Harderbergia and Clematis hang, grey as grief in the charred understory. Oil on the blackened eucalyptus leaves that carpet the earth shines silver with dew. There was very little sign of fungi spore bodies. I saw more in Sampson Park near Fremantle last week. It may be too early for them down here.

My path meets the Bibbulmun Track which I follow over a small lichen-spotted bridge, up hills and into valleys. Here, there has been no burning. In the stillness, I imagine I hear a murmur of insects, or is it the oxygenated breath of the trees replenishing the silence?

Winter in Manjimup. I asked for it. As to be expected, it is fff-freezing. Meagre warmth from the sun earlier, has now dissipated into the clear ether, leaving me huddling inside my tiny van, swaddled in layers of clothing and fur-lined boots. I can’t complain, the weather enabled me to set up my camp without a drenching, and it was my choice not to go for a walk around the town. However, I feel justified in my slackness after driving most of the day.

Not surprisingly I am almost alone in the campsite. Who else wants to come south and camp at this time of year? The alternative, warmer accommodation I tried to find is apparently all booked out, needed to house the workers who are establishing a lithium mine in Greenbushes.

Lithium is what we need to help technology for green energy. And at the moment, I am ignorant of the process of digging it up but somehow, it feels like a sick joke that we have to mine the stuff from the middle of our precious native forests.

So tonight, after some pea and ham soup, heated up in my little air-fryer (the best invention) and a couple of glasses of red, I’m off to bed with Michael Christie. I hope he doesn’t keep me up too late with his novel ‘Greenwood’. Tomorrow I’m off to explore the old growth forests if I can find any still standing.

My character’s mind keeps returning to her mother, Nancy.

Nancy came from the north west of Scotland near the beautiful village of Achitilbuei where her family had owned a croft on a green hill bordered by the sea. The Summer Isles shone jewel-like in the bay. Beyond, on a clear day, the Hebrides showed themselves, grey and mysterious. She went back to Achitilbuei after the death of her mother. It was summer when the light refused to die. It transformed, enchanted, coloured the croft and the sea and the islands until she felt close to drowning in its beauty and her grief. Now, regret overwhelms her. She could have returned years earlier with her mother, perhaps after Granny had died. They could have shared so much.

 

Granny had come out to Australia and lived with them for a while. She was part of the furniture sitting by the fire, humming Gaelic songs to the click clack of her knitting, needles. Knitting, knitting, always knitting. A jolly old lady with a wicked laugh, she’d tell Nedra stories from the islands while they sat and shelled peas or peeled potatoes. The stories were full of kidnappings and killings and ships going down with sailors drowning. She can still see her frowning mother shaking her head, saying: ‘That’s no’ a tale to be telling a wee lassie, Mother.’

Sitting on my sofa with my laptop on my knee, I find myself stuck. 42 000 words into the first draft of the story, I am grounded. The weather is conspiring against going to the beach and walking my way out of my stranded situation, causing the dog to harrumph in a sulk. I find myself staring at the painting in front of me, a portrait of my father that I entitled, Accordion Man. I wonder why I never succeeded in painting a portrait of my mother. I was never satisfied with the attempts I made. Last week, while writing, I realized that, once again, the mother/daughter relationship had crept into my work.

The room is silent except for the old dog now quietly snoring beside me on the sofa. My eyes wander, and then rest on Clyde Woman that I painted as an imagined portrait of the great grandmother I never knew–Agnes the central character in my first book. For the first time, it now strikes me with certainty that this painting is actually a portrait of Mary, my mother. Behind the figure is the Cloche Lighthouse at the mouth of the Clyde River in Scotland. It is the place we lived at the time of my birth. She wears a white apron and holds a fish in her arms, a grim set to her face. The grimness is understandable when you know many of the circumstances of her young life. The white apron, she would not physically have worn in my lifetime, even though such a garment could still be found in readiness behind the front doors of tenements in Scotland until the 1960’s. By that date Mary was settled in Australia. However, this garment, a mantle of respectability, a resistance against the judgment of the Victorian era that maintained the poor were responsible for the condition they found themselves in, I believe was handed down through the generations to be mentally worn by my mother during my childhood and perhaps beyond.

The fish, although held firmly by her hands, still controlled her. It is the Christian fish of her protestant upbringing, that when she married my strongly socialist, atheist father, she tried to let go but never quite succeeded. My intelligent, funny, artistic mother was full of joy and anger. Contradictions that were often hard to understand. I believe we can unwittingly, inherit things that we thought were left behind in our past. I believe, attitudes, culture, sometimes trauma can be imprinted into our minds and bodies and as much as we try to deny them, they can surface when least expected.

I am stuck, halfway through my present book, yet suddenly, I am thinking about another project. I feel certain that next, at long last, I need to write about Mary and set us both free from the bindings of the fish and the white apron.