Reading Madame Bovary (25 page)

‘This is Dave,' said Mick, ‘and this is Ariel,' gesturing to a woman attending to the wood-fired stove with a toddler on her hip. ‘And this is little Gracie.' Mick patted the child's head.

Dave stood up with a welcoming grin and shook Bill's hand. He was tall and lanky with black shoulder-length hair and traces of a Welsh accent. I liked him instantly. He was obviously smart, not some dozey drop-out, and Mick had told us that he was something of a leader in the commune. Of course the members of the commune didn't believe in leaders but Dave had a natural authority. Later we discovered that he was the one who had found the valley and negotiated the sale, along with Miranda Meacham who had vetted the contract and handled the conveyancing.

Dave invited us to sit on bush chairs he had made himself and when we declined lunch Ariel brewed some tea made from mint grown in her garden. It was watery and weak.

We asked Dave about the commune, only to be rebuked gently. ‘We don't call it a commune,' he said, in his sonorous Welsh drawl. ‘It's a settlement.' There was an important difference, he explained; the word commune gave out the wrong message and encouraged spongers and dopeheads. So far there were eight families who had bought in to the valley, and three more were planning to move there and build over the autumn when it wasn't so hot. Right now they were fixing up one of the derelict timber cottages as a guesthouse for itinerant workers who wanted to make a contribution. In October it would be their three-year anniversary and they were having a special celebration, a weekend festival. We were welcome to come.

Ariel had made no attempt to join us and seemed absorbed in her task beside the stove, cradling her daughter on her hip like a young earth mother. She had one of those enviable hourglass figures of fine-boned shoulders and full breasts, a slender waist and curvy hips that give shape to a long skirt. Her silky brown hair hung to her waist and when she passed beneath the skylight on her way to the sink the sun caught it so that it shone with silvery highlights. I wanted to talk to her, to draw her into the conversation, but she was one of those women who are still and contained, as if surrounded by an invisible ring of silence.

‘We're not drop-outs,' Dave was saying. ‘We're not here because we're afraid of the world, and we're not anarchists.' He gestured towards a bundle of leaflets on the kitchen table and told us that he was about to distribute fliers for a ‘good man' in the town who was running for the local council on a platform of conserving the forests. I asked Dave what he had done before he moved to the valley and he said he had been a history teacher in a high school in the city. After he found the valley he applied for a transfer to the school at Tandarra and worked there for two years while he built his house. Now he was on call as a relief teacher and the money was enough since they lived frugally. The other settlers did various kinds of work: each house had its own vegetable allotment and some people sold vegetables and homemade cheeses at the local markets; others worked as deckhands on the coast or nursed at the local hospital. A few were living off savings while they ‘looked around'. I knew some must be on the dole, though we didn't mention it.

‘I think I know one of your people,' I said, feeling awkward with that word ‘people'. They were not communards, they were not exactly pioneers or settlers, so what were they? ‘Mick said there's a Miranda Meacham living here and she said she knew me. I think it must be the Miranda Meacham I went to school with.'

‘Miranda's away just now.' There was no warmth in Dave's voice and his manner cooled. I sensed that he and Miranda didn't get on, that Dave was one of the few men she couldn't twist around her finger. I didn't press it, though I was disappointed and made a mental note to ask Mick to be sure to let me know when Miranda returned.

‘What about the old cabins?' Bill said. Someone had obviously lived here before the commune.

‘This area was settled by German families who came out in the
1860
s. The local folklore is that they came from villages around Frankfurt to escape having their sons conscripted under Bismarck, so of course we like that idea, that they were anti-war.'

‘Perhaps they just wanted to protect their children,' I said.

‘Same thing in the end, isn't it?' He pushed his plate away and stood up. ‘Would you like to look around? I can take you on a tour if you like.'

All this time Ariel hadn't said a word. I had waited for an opening, a way to bring her into the conversation but she hovered at a distance beside the stove, and Dave was such a compelling presence. He drew you towards him.

We left our half-drunk tea on the rough pine table and headed towards the door. Dave strode out onto the veranda and Bill and I followed. Mick stayed seated at the table. ‘Catch you later,' he said. ‘I'll just groove around here for a while.'

I looked across at Ariel. ‘Goodbye,' I said, and she smiled shyly.

We strolled out into the sun, aware suddenly that the stone house was dark inside, as if built against extreme heat, or snow and sleet. The houses were picturesque, in a Hansel and Gretel kind of way, but I wondered how suited they were to this temperate valley. Bill asked about their construction while Gandalf padded along beside us and I confess my mind wandered. I was trying to picture Miranda lolling about here in hippie braids and a peasant skirt. The image didn't fit.

‘How big was the original settlement?' I heard Bill ask. ‘The Germans, I mean.'

‘Well, in this valley it was just one extended family, the Hoffmanns. Two brothers with eight sons and five daughters between them. To get to Australia they had to offer themselves as indentured labour, which meant working for the local squatter south of Tandarra on the big sheep run. They kept gardens and sold vegetables, and pooled their money until they had enough to buy land. Then they hacked their way through the bush with axes and cross-cut saws until they found this place. They were Lutherans of course and they built a little chapel.' He pointed towards the northwestern corner of the valley. ‘We can walk there if you like. I'll show you the graveyard. Some of the headstones are still upright.'

As we walked, I looked around at the little village of stone houses, all of different designs but each impressive in its finish. Mick had said something about it being a rule that you had to build your own shelter out of the local stone but these places looked too, well, solid. Surely they had employed stonemasons?

By this time the men were ahead of me and I could hear Dave explaining the property entitlements to Bill.

‘There are eleven owners, tenants in common, but a lot of people come for a short stay.'

‘Don't you have rules about that?'

‘It's up to the shareholders how many people they want to have living with them at any one time. But if anyone causes any kind of trouble they have to go.'

We had already heard from Mick about ‘trouble'. One afternoon a mob of bikies had driven into the valley in full leathers and florid tatts. They had pulled up on the edge of the settlement, revving their powerful engines, and Dave had gone out to meet them, had stood for some time talking to them in a low-key way. No-one knew what he said but after forty minutes or so they had driven off with a friendly backward wave, never to reappear. It was an episode that had greatly enhanced Dave's authority. He seemed to have a gift for dissolving tension.

Ahead of us I could see what looked like a miniature church, too small to enter and almost ornamental. It was made of orange-red brick and some kind of plaster and it had a white column on either side and a domed bell tower. Dave saw me looking perplexed.

‘That's our bread oven,' he said with pride. ‘That's where the real worship goes on around here.' He paused in front of the oven's cast-iron door and launched into a detailed account of its construction, which was of great interest to Bill, though I found the oven repellent, absurd even. They had gone to so much trouble and the end result was grandiose. Too much of a statement.

The real church sat at the far end of the valley on a low rise. It was clad in weatherboard on a stone foundation with a pitched roof of rusted iron and a faded wooden finial. As we approached I could see four worn steps leading up to the door, and both steps and door looked like they might collapse at any moment.

‘Is the church used now?'

‘We show movies there on a projector, once a week. This week it's
The Conversation.
Come if you like.'

‘Seen it,' said Bill.

‘So have I,' said Dave, ‘and it's a long way to travel for a movie.' He laughed, and gestured at the church. ‘Pity it's not big enough to hold a dance in.' Then he opened the door and we looked inside. It was bare except for some green plastic chairs ranged along one wall. It might have been an old schoolhouse. There were dead blowflies on every windowsill and cobwebs high in the corners of the ceiling. Outside again, we followed Dave to the rear of the building which was unkempt, and in among the tall grass there were headstones encrusted with lichen.

‘Have to cut that bloody grass again soon,' he said. ‘We should preserve these headstones. Graveyard maintenance is on the roster but you know what happens to rosters.'

‘I suppose a pastor came and visited,' said Bill.

‘Apparently not. It was too far for the nearest pastor to travel in a buggy. And that didn't matter because they didn't believe much in priests. Every man is responsible for his own salvation and all that. I imagine they met on Sundays and took it in turns to read the lesson.'

‘They must have been lonely.'

‘Well, they were hard workers, a legend in the district. The librarian in Tandarra – she comes from around here – she told me the old men were great characters. They hated having to rest on the Sabbath. After their Sunday dinner they'd go for a walk and knock the heads off thistles with their walking sticks, the closest thing to sacrilegious work they'd allow themselves.'

‘What did they farm?'

‘They were potters originally, artisan families, but they obviously knew a thing or two about farming and the valley produced enough to support them. As you can see, it's a special place.' He looked around him with an expression of pride. ‘They kept pigs and ducks, and cows. Apparently they made cheese and travelled on a horse-drawn wagon to nearby towns to sell it. Cured bacon, grew potatoes. All that.'

‘Did they build a kiln?'

‘If they did we've never found it.'

We read the names on the headstones. Friedrich Hoffmann, Ada Hoffmann, Heinrich Geller, Ludwig Wolfhagen, Maria and Johannes Hoffmann, Frieda Rubenach. The Johannes Hoffmann headstone had an inscription that I couldn't quite make out. Dave saw me peering at it up close and read it aloud: ‘
Heaven is my
fatherland, Heaven is my home.
'

I liked that inscription. There was something soulful about it, but also defiant.

‘Johannes Hoffmann was one of the original brothers. Thanks to the warmongers in Europe he had to renounce his country. Imagine it, he was fifty-three when he arrived in Australia. That was a fair age in those days and he most likely came to the conclusion that from now on the only fatherland that counted was the big H.'

Dave began to walk on and Bill followed but I lingered for a moment, distracted by another headstone. Sophie Hoffmann, wife of Nikolaus, had died in the valley in
1892
, aged twenty-seven. Although it was a hot day my skin went cold; twenty-seven, it was my age. At the bottom of Sophie's headstone the names were engraved of the infant son she had left behind, Wilhelm, along with three small daughters, Elise, Bertha and Salome. Dave, who had backtracked, came up behind me. ‘I know,' he said, looking over my shoulder. ‘It doesn't bear thinking about.'

‘So what happened to all the Hoffmanns? In the end, I mean?'

‘The young ones eventually moved to the city or towns. Only three spinster sisters were left behind with their widowed brother. The brother's children had no interest in the valley and we bought it from them.'

From that day on Bill and I became regular visitors at the commune. It held a fascination for us. It's easy to mock these things; it was easy at the time and even easier looking back, but that valley was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. It seemed blessed. Bill and I had moved to the coast for a year because Bill was employed with Baird and Markham, a big construction company that had contracted to build a new bridge over the Clarence River. It meant we could live in the family shack for no rent and save money towards a house of our own in the city. Because we had decided to try for a baby I wasn't looking for work; Bill was on a good wage with a generous allowance for working away from home and I expected to fall pregnant soon, so there was no point in starting a new job. This was
1979
, when mortgages weren't a killer and everything seemed easier.

Bill was fascinated by the practical problems of the commune and happy to advise on surveying or when a problem arose with the drainage. Dave liked people who were useful and they soon developed a friendship. Bill especially loved the stone houses and spoke for a time about building one himself, but I was more interested in the politics. How on earth were they going to make the place work? What would happen when they couldn't agree? When someone couldn't or wouldn't pay their share of the land tax, or when someone's kids ran riot and rode their bikes through the corn patch, or let the goats out? Perhaps because he had been a schoolteacher Dave was always keen to talk and never seemed to mind my asking a lot of questions. And because we visited often at the weekends we soon learned about the rituals and protocols of the settlement. There was a weekly council for collective decision-making and a roster for chairing the meetings, although the roster was a problem; some people can chair a meeting and some can't and inevitably Dave acted as the council's de facto convenor. Meanwhile Mick had decided to stay on in the valley and was living in the cottage that had been fixed up for itinerant workers. He was a mine of information and was able to tell me that the meetings of the collective went surprisingly smoothly. The last big disagreement among its members had taken place after they built the bread oven. Typically, they had no trouble agreeing on the big item, the design of the oven, but couldn't agree on the small thing, the design of the bread. They had plans to sell it on Saturdays at the local market and wanted to ornament the cob loaf with an emblem of their collective enterprise. But what emblem? Some had favoured the peace sign; it would symbolise their own politics and honour the original settlers, past and present linked together. But Miranda Meacham had been withering in her view that the peace sign was already a cliché. One woman suggested a Y sign for Yudhikara. This had the advantage of being easy to form out of dough, but some of the others felt uneasy about this. After all, they didn't know what Yudhikara meant. It was a name left over from the time of the Hoffmanns but it wasn't German, it didn't belong to the local Indigenous lingo and it wasn't Sanskrit, so who knew what it signified? They could be perpetuating some bad karma. In the end they agreed not to have anything.