I’m back home after a couple of nights visiting a friend on her farm a few hours west of me. A smattering of rain hit the windscreen in the last half hour of the drive, enough to require flashing the wipers on briefly. Not enough to wet the road. Not enough to quench the parched landscape. All the way across to my friend’s farm and back, the land was asking for water. Trees and shrubs at the roadside wilting in the wait. Some already given up; brown with exhaustion and death. The paddocks yellow straw at best; bare ground at worst. Surely the rain will come soon. Like the landscape, I crave water.
At Helen’s place, we walked her dry hills. Her STEEP dry hills. I puffed up behind her. She paused to point out works in progress - fences put in to keep stock out of the waterways, shrubs by the hundreds already planted. I listened and caught my breath. We marched on, discussing ideas for where further fence lines could go for more revegetation works. I could almost hear the hills saying their thanks to the good work Helen and her husband are doing on this farm they have taken on.
We walked through a tongue of burnt blackness where a bushfire had licked across the hill and threatened the house. It was extinguished in time to prevent damage to any buildings. Disaster averted. The burnt trees are already resprouting, sending green shoots of promise skywards.
We found the horses on the side of a hill, already looking at us by the time we saw them. The palomino mare is the same colour as the dry grass. Her daughter, a young bay filly, walked up to us for a pat, her long thin legs expertly negotiating the terrain.
In the base of the valley is a huge dam. Welcome water in this dry autumn. The dam is on a neighbouring property but creeps onto Helen’s farm; a result of the dam wall having been built a little too high. Helen’s reward for good neighbourliness in allowing the encroachment is to be given free rein to swim and kayak on the dam. So we scaled the fence and dragged the kayaks onto the broad water. And this, this was the highlight of the trip for me.
It’s years since I paddled a kayak.
My paddle slices the water as I sit. A huge flock of coots takes off as we approach. I watch their webbed feet racing across the surface of the water as their wings lift them to the air. A female musk duck dives near us and resurfaces tens of metres further away. Three black swans swim near the shoreline. An ibis pecks along the bank. A small group of Pacific black ducks takes flight. I feel like I am paddling through a nature documentary.
We beach our canoes near a small jetty, sinking up to our shins in thick, black mud as we wade out. It oozes between my toes. We strip down to our bathers, leaving our clothes on the dry bank. The water is dark and cool. I have become accustomed to the buoyancy of the sea and miss it as I swim heavily through the fresh water. We swim across towards the other dam bank, some 150 metres away. We both swim crooked and crash into each other. There we are, in the middle of the vast dam, laughing as we tread water and reset our courses. I swim backstroke, looking up at the clear blue sky.
On the bank just near the dam a cow stands with a new born calf. It nuzzles under her and drinks as she eyes us.
We swim back across to the jetty. Helen wants to keep swimming, so sets off for another lap across and back. I sit on the jetty air-drying. The ducks and coots that have settled back on the water take off again in a raucous mob. At first I think it is in response to Helen swimming, but then realise they are coming towards her, not away from her. Then I see it. A small fast raptor in the midst of the panicked flock. The raptor is perhaps an Australian kestrel, but I can’t make it out for sure. I curse my lack of glasses, binoculars and knowledge. Whatever it is, it swoops through and lands in a tree on the shore not far from me. I stare, transfixed, willing my eyes to reveal detail. The bird swoops again and the waterfowl move as a mass along the water. The raptor is among them but I can’t make out what’s happening. Then it again flies up and takes perch high in the stark branches of a dead tree. It is still there when Helen gets back from her second crossing of the dam. I point it out. A brown speck in a grey tree.
I keep looking up at it as we paddle the kayaks back along the length of the dam. The musk duck is still swimming in the same area she was when we went out. I lose sight of the raptor. I never did see whether it was eating anyting, whether its hunt had been successful. I try to hold an image of its outline in my head so I can identify it later, but the picture that claims the space in my memory is that of the coots taking off, their feet flicking the water’s surface, ripples running away from them. The picture I take on my phone when I retrieve it from a dry log is of the dam as we drag the canoes out.
We balance on rocks as we put our shoes back on, dragging socks onto wet feet, ignoring the mud caked around toenails.
Early the next morning, before I head home, we go down and paddle again. The wind, which roared all night, is singing through the trees high on the hill, but down here on the water in the bottom of the valley, it is still. The water barely ripples. Our kayaks cut a path through calm water. The coots and ducks are on the water. We only see two swans. They show their white pinion feathers as they flap and fly away. They land on the other side of the dam and swim with arched necks. I decide I will buy a kayak. I want more of this, more time exploring the world from the water’s surface. More water too.
See you outside,
Jill
Inside
I was thrilled to see What’s for Dinner? listed in Pip magazine in the top 10 Sustainability Books. Pip is a permaculture magazine with a subtitle of ‘Nourishing yourself and the planet’ and always has some interesting reads. It must be doing something right as it’s currently celebrating 10 years in print, which is an impressive achievement for a small independent magazine.
I was interviewed live on stage at the Donnybrook Apple Festival a few weeks ago. I had a long-ranging conversation with host Barry Green about all manner of things related to food, farms and environment. Unfortunately something went wrong with the recording, so our discussion did not get recorded. Fortunately, Barry and I had previously chatted for a segment on his Community Radio program. Barry and I go back a long way - I wrote an article about his property Boronia Farm for ABC Organic Gardener magazine in 2006! Boronia Farm also cracks a mention in What’s for Dinner? because it is the birthplace of the Lady Williams apple.
And while I’m on a magazine theme, I have a piece about the Australian dairy industry in the latest issue of Outback magazine. I haven’t been doing much freelance magazine work recently so it was good to get back out there.