Down the Dirt Roads Read online

  About the Book

  ‘For me, being in a paddock means anything is possible . . .’

  Country girl and bestselling novelist Rachael Treasure had worked hard to build a long-dreamed-of lifestyle on her own patch of dirt in Tasmania’s rugged and beautiful wilderness. But through the breakdown of her marriage, Rachael lost her family farm and, in her words, lost her way in life.

  Discovering an all-new compass to live by, she took her two kids and her dogs and left the beaten path. Intensive farming, men on the land and women in the home – everywhere Rachael looked she saw ongoing harm to the soil and the foodchain. By going down the dirt roads and getting back to grassroots, she discovered another set of stories about country life in Australia, and a different way to live on the land. From her rebel granny to pioneering farmers and passionate animal handlers, Rachael became inspired by fresh ways to do things.

  Down the Dirt Roads starts as a heartfelt and moving insight into the life of a single mother displaced from her home, and becomes a groundbreaking and powerful book about healing, health and hope. Nourishing and sustaining, it presents a practical and positive vision of what life on our land could become.

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  The Clearing

  The Wonder of a Working Dog

  Catching the New Farming Wave

  Recipes for Restoration

  Truffle Treasure Hunt

  A Knight in Shining Farm Boots

  Walking the Talk

  Creating Heaven

  The Sheila from Snowy River

  The Grassland Goddess

  Les, Dolly and Life’s Lyrics

  The Grass Is Always Greener

  From Bundy To Buddha

  The Merino Mother

  Stars Above

  Cricket Crazy

  Holidaying with My Horse

  The Diamond Crunch of Crisis

  Christmas Wishes for Rain and Change

  POSTSCRIPT

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

  For Margaret Connolly, my book midwife and my safety net,

  and for my children, my children’s children, and so on . . .

  The earth is your grandmother and mother, and she is sacred.

  Every step that is taken upon her should be as a prayer.

  BLACK ELK, 1863–1950

  OGLALA SIOUX

  Never in my wildest imaginings of my adult future did I think I would be in my forties, living in a rental property, in a town with my children . . . farmless. But there it was: the bare, brutal facts of a failed dream that a country girl like me had to face. Under the foreign gleam of streetlights, with the press of the energies of unseen people in houses all around me, I would wake in the starless night to gaze at the artificial glow outside my window and the bleak reality that I no longer had a future exploring the same blissful bushland with my children that had seeped into my own soul when I was a child. I no longer had a life of teaching them about caretaking animals and soils, things that I not only loved, but revered and worshipped.

  The story of how I lost that future and my farm is more far-fetched than any novel I could dream up. But life is like that. It takes you down roads you never expect to go down, under circumstances that are, at times, stranger than outback fiction and harder to swallow than a John Deere 24-plate disc plough.

  I remember the day I went to look at the rental where I now sit and write. My first impression was not focused on the house, but the comfort I took from the fact that it was on a dirt road. Fancy that! A dirt road right in the middle of town! And across from it . . . there were sheep in paddocks yet to be claimed by housing. Sheep! I could smell them from where I stood near my ute. Those two things – sheep and dirt – were ribbons of connection not just back to the life I’d lost, but to the future that I hope to create for my funny little family, of just me and two children and the remains of my farming menagerie: a dumpy pony, four chooks and two working dogs, along with an emotionally complex toy poodle called Megatron. My larger horses had been agisted out to other properties, causing me as much agony as a mother sending her children away to boarding school, but I knew I had to make this move if I was going to find some time and space in which to heal.

  As I first walked up the front steps to shake the pretty hand of the suited and appropriately heeled real-estate agent, I noticed the outside boards of the house were painted the hue of maggot-infested wool. It wasn’t a criticism; just a passing observation from a farm girl who had recently taken up weekly art lessons and was reassessing colours in the world. On seeing the colour, I was suddenly teleported back to my paddocks, stooped over the tail end of a weaner lamb, my bubba children babbling in the ute, while my square, rather manlike, hands gripped shears as I sliced away white crimped wool in search of the activity of the viciously hungry maggots, chewing into the flesh of the sheep. There was something so satisfying about my day, if I knew I had saved one of my flock from such excruciating discomfort. Finding that seam of green stain in the fleece was always the path to revealing where the flesh-eating fly larvae were, and dealing with the problem, pronto.

  Now when I direct my farming friends to our rental, I say, ‘It’s on the dirt road, and you’ll see the house – it’s “flystrike green”.’ They instantly get it. To anyone else looking at the colour it may be more glamorously referred to on a paint chart as ‘Avocado Smash’ or ‘Fern Den Lush’, but to me – the girl taken out of the country, with the country remaining in the girl – it is and always will be the house of ‘flystrike green’. A house I never planned on living in. A house in which I realised I had been grieving the death of my farming life post-divorce for far too long. It was coming up to six years since my marriage blew to dust, so as I stood in the lovely sun-drenched rooms I realised I had to emerge from my own negative clouds and find a new compass to guide me.

  The reason my pain had carried on for so long was because when the divorce was imminent in 2010, my father opted for my ex-husband to remain with him in the farm partnership. Dad stood by him, not me, and shoulder-to-shoulder the men stayed and laid claim to the land. It was the children and I who had to leave.

  For a time, I tried to recreate what I had lost on reduced acreage just up the road from my family farm. In my move from 2000 acres to just under 20 acres, it soon became clear that it was just not going to work. I was trying to earn a living as a writer, pay off a new mortgage, drive children to and from school, along with running a property, when all the while I was running on emotional empty.

  And that is how it came to pass . . . me renting a town-bound flystrike-green house that was not my home, but near to my children’s schools. The journey to it had left me questioning every­thing about myself, my agricultural industry and a society that dismissed the power and gift of women and desecrated Mother Nature so brutally.

  As I packed my electric fencing equipment that I had once used to regenerate pastures into the suburban backyard shed, along with my chainsaw and fence-post rammer, I also tried to pack away the shame of being ousted from my beloved farm, and tried to find forgiveness for myself and those involved.

  The experience has sent me on an inner journey, fuelled by the discovery of a different compass by which to be guided in life. It’s not the white man’s compass that merely has the four points of North, South, East, West on a two-dimensional geographical landscape. I now view the world by the Native Americans’ seven-point compass. A compass that has North, South, East, West and also Above, Below and Within.

  Here I was, a person with the soil on her hands and in her heart trying to ground myself in a new place that was utterly foreign to me, with new concepts brewing within, on a dirt road that seemed, at the time, a dea
d end. But I was mistaken. Life was merely moving me on.

  I soon met new neighbours . . . good neighbours. Kind neighbours. Funny neighbours with cool kids, who helped me see that the dirt road I was travelling on was a road that held a writer’s seam of gold. A pathway that would give me the courage to speak of healing, for myself as a woman, for society as a whole and, also, healing for our land.

  I heard Fred and Rachael before I met them. Musicians of the folk and blues kind, on still nights I could hear banjo sounds drifting over the fence with Johnny Cash’s ‘train a comin’ ’ as they jammed on their back porch, accompanied by their kids on harmonica and a box for a drum. Our children began playing together in the creek that separated our houses and I soon found myself raising a tiny glass of Slovenian schnapps with them on a sunny afternoon and laughing with them whilst the kids cuddled guinea pigs on a trampoline. Life was starting to feel almost normal, as if we were stitching our lives back together into the fabric of a new community. It wasn’t the cloth I would have chosen, but what was patching together was warm and beautiful.

  A year into living in the village, Fred and Rachael asked my children and me – ‘we three’ – and our pony to their backyard wedding. On the day of their marriage, I headed out early to a farm just down the road to pick a good 5 kilos of plump straw­berries, from Sophie Nicholls’ Littlewood Berry Farm. I planned on piling the fruit high in a large white bowl, fresh, shiny, ruby-red and gorgeous, topped with their little green fringes for the wedding guests. I had bartered with Sophie that if I did a couple of hours’ harvesting jam strawberries and weeding for her, she would provide the marital strawberries.

  After a meditation in the strawberry patch, staining my fingers pink, hearing the pop of stems as I picked and feeling the living, damp earth pulse beneath my knees, I realised this was my path. To love the land no matter where I was and to share that love with others. The silence of a field. Sky above. Earth below.

  Near me cars still grumbled past, planes still roared overhead and the busy life of humans went on, but here I got to feel the silence and the slow turn of the earth. That’s why I love farming. That’s why I love dirt. It reconnects you to your heartbeat. It helps you see we are all One . . . with every creature, every plant, every soil microbe, every single other being. The web of life and our place in it can be rediscovered in a paddock, in the bushland, on a ridge top, along with joy for simply breathing. We can remember we are made of the same stuff of stars and of soil. For me, being in a paddock means anything is possible.

  But the strawberry patch stillness couldn’t last. I had work to do. I had to go home to shampoo the pony! Our chunky little patchy brown-and-white Gemma had been given the honour of being ‘bridesmare’ for the wedding ceremony and was needed for the photos.

  On the front lawn with the hose running over her, my daughter and I delighted in the froth of shampoo, rummaging our hands lovingly on Gemma’s summer-smooth pony skin. This again was a blessing of now. There was no time to grieve a lost farm at this moment or carry baggage of bitterness. I was meant to make this earth-walk this way, hard as it had been. While the sun shone down on bubbles and giggles, love swept through me. As it says on a doormat that was given to us as a housewarming gift, ‘Home is where the love is’.

  Soon Gemma was plaited with lavender ribbons and purple stock flower, and my children and I frocked up in our ‘Gladwraps’, as a friend once put it. We were about to head off for the wedding photos, but being the cricket tragic I am, I thought I’d take a quick peek at the telly before we left – just to see how Australia was going in the Test. The Kiwis were answering back in their second innings with a solid knock on the WACA’s sun-baked pitch. But instead of finding out the score I saw the players, like seagulls flocked together, walking off the ground. My ten-year-old son turned to me with concern in his gumtree-green eyes and a quaver of fear and uncertainty in his voice.

  ‘Something terrible has happened in Paris, Mummy,’ he said. My heart plummeted. Harming anyone or anything for political, economic, religious or any other reason lies beyond my comprehension. I knew there would be mothers on the other side of the world grieving the loss of their children, and children the loss of their parents. Losses far greater than mine. Perspective in place, I pulled on my best cowgirl boots, switched off the TV and hugged my children to me.

  As we set off, me in my new flowery dress and our little pony in tow and the kids with the cricket set, I tried to keep the certainty in my heart that the world really is a good place . . . if we humans allow it to be and if we choose to see it that way.

  In the backyard at the wedding, a crowd of bluegrass, blues and Irish folk musos held their beloved guitars, harps, violins, fiddles and flutes aloft to make a walk-through archway for the couple. Holding hands, Fred and Rachael made their way to a rustic gypsy wagon to tie the knot. It was there in the crowd I felt again the presence of my compass in my Australia. A place of peace, of love, of Aussie humour and goodwill. If I had to move to a town, I thought, it may as well be one as friendly, beautiful and peaceful as this one.

  The crowd laughed as the couple exchanged banjos and an in-house muso joke, saying ‘with this tone ring, I thee wed’. When the bride kissed the groom, laughter and applause rose up into a blue summer sky, and as their children hugged their now-wed parents I hoped that the sound and sensations of all that love and goodwill would waft into the skies and reach Paris and Syria, and to all those torn by war. I hoped the sounds of love were arcing to the natural world and animals too, caught in the crossfire of rigid human beliefs and hatred.

  That night my life began to expand, renewed. At the wedding, I met a couple – both nearly ninety, married for over sixty years – who told us stories of seeing the last thylacine when they were little. In the paddock next door a mob of kids used plastic electric-fence posts as javelins in their own mini rural Olympics and then played cricket until it was too dark to see the tennis ball. I sang Irish ballads with people I’d never met. I relished the crowd of down-to-earth folk, as a man in shorts, with odd woollen Tasmanian-made Mongrel socks, one knitted in green and the other in rainbow hues, danced on the back lawn. Eating mountains of fresh, wonderful food, everyone spoke of peace, freedom, getting along, honouring the earth and each other, and before the night was done, there was not one strawberry left in that giant bowl.

  I began my rural journey as a knotty-haired tomboy playing in the singing creeks of southern Tasmania with frogs, tadpoles, skinks, mud and rocks. I had holes ripped in the knees of my hand-me-down boy jeans and would spend hours gazing at tiny living creatures in clear, sparkling water that shone and warbled over moss- and algae-covered creek stones. The Tasmanian land at Runnymede that my father was involved in was undergoing rapid change due to the fact its new owner, a civil engineer, had brought in some big machines to sculpt the landscape from that of marsh and bushland into a farm.

  Right from the start there was conflict within me. I was a girl who loved the fairy glades of ferny rocky creek beds that offered a backdrop to my imagination, and yet all around were the ravages of the dozer blades that had fallen ti-tree, wattle and peppermint gums, and dozed sags, ferns, tussocks and rocks. The remnants of a beautiful bushland were windrowed into long giant heaps and left to dry. Then months or years later, on an autumn day when the wind was right, we would gather as a family and watch the burning. I would see graceful huntsmen she-spiders scuttling from the smoke, watch silver-sided skinks panic from log to log and hope with all my heart that any possums, quolls or Tassie devils sleeping in the piles would escape the furnace. Around the heaps the soil had been disced by iron ploughs, then harrowed and then sown with firstly turnips and swede, then later with improved pasture species that were delivered in giant bags from seed companies, and mixed with hard little white lumps of superphosphate fertiliser that was mounded in small mountains in the paddock. Back then the government helped subsidise superphosphate so it was literally bought by the truckload.

  I would look at
the rocky, black clay soils and sometimes-sandy loam patches that were now the home to a flock of Polwarth sheep on virgin pastures and wonder at it all. Through the innocent eyes of a child, I innately knew the brutality of the men’s action, but was reliant on the teachings of adults that this was a great and masterful thing. I would ask my father why they had to doze all the bush – why couldn’t they just graze the animals in grassy patches amongst the trees? I don’t think he ever saw my naive viewpoint, but I was, after all, just a girl, whereas my brother was earmarked for greater things due to his status of older sibling and boy.

  My father did try to bring clarity of mind to his blue-eyed, rather confused daughter by pointing out the young sapling stands of timber that the dozer driver had been instructed to leave for shelter for the sheep. Later, he would show me how wonderful it was that the turnips were edging their way out of the exposed soil and indicate how the sheep had nibbled the core of the turnip out so that a shell, like a half-buried skullcap, remained in the ground. The stench from sheep on a turnip crop is something to experience – like gas from an ancient swamp – and those farting ovines told me it wasn’t natural for the animal, nor this land. Maybe in England, but not here. Wandering off, I would go stand in the remaining shelter belts of young trees and shut my eyes and try to recapture what the landscape had looked like before the clearing, and picture the diverse plants the sheep would’ve preferred. Who would want to eat turnip all day long?

  To me what was once a garden of Eden had now been ‘tidied up’, as Dad always put it, into a ‘farm’ that looked for all the world to me like a war zone – similar to the footage I’d seen as a toddler on the TV news when reports from Vietnam were beamed into our lounge room. Back then even in black-and-white I could visualise the colour of blood and the pallor of men at war. Amidst the remaining saplings I felt a similar war-torn grief from the land. I could see in my mind’s eye the landscape as it had been: the way the sunlight had filtered through treetops in a silver-and-gold sheen of light. In those sunbeam curtains in the bush, little moths and butterflies had flittered about and I’d be mesmerised in this world as the tussocks shone and lit spider webs drew me towards them in fascination. There were songs and secrets to be heard, whispered in the leaves of the gums above me as the breeze blew, because I was the kind of child who heard such things. But now all I saw were the pushed-up butts of logs, roots held in the air like clawed fingers reaching as if they were desperate to be rescued by the sky above. I would frown against the sun beating down on soil that was once a shaded, secretive and pristine landscape, and wonder at the adults’ choices.