The Tree In Changing Light (11 page)

A
RRIVED IN
the evening with the car chaotically packed to the limit. Edged through the lower gate. Then up the ridge to the camping saddle at eight hundred metres, tent pitched just on dark. Shabbat candles and whisky. The blessings. Seven kangaroos watching. Half moon through the tent flap later.

Watched the candles burn down—blinked awake as they guttered—came awake again and they were black, smoky. Sparks from the campfire drifted up. Away below was the inky lake of night-time Australia. Rolled over and rolled back into sleep.

Misty morning. Wombat trudging the fenceline, horny-skinned as an old dog—mauled, tufted, dozy, moving in lumbering bounds as it got away and sheltered under a low tussock. ‘It's all right, old timer. Stay,' and I found myself down on my knees, elbows in the dirt, imploring.

Dry crunch of sticks and leaves as I started the breakfast fire. Fierce rush of flame as the bark caught and I was happy beyond words. A childhood feeling. I rambled remembering when we shod our feet in old Minties packets and tied bark
around them as shoes, then walked the blue-metal road verges to Govett's Leap, where Flynn of the Inland, my father's friend, pinched my bottom (playfully) as I drank from a bubbler.

Susie wrote, eiderdown up to her chin, elbow next to an enamel mug of steaming green tea:

 

‘Sheep Camp. A place to put your heart and mind and body to rest. I feel the magic of the land working its way through. Waiting for the wildlife to come creeping back from being driven away by our noisy unfamiliar intrusions.'

 

Anna wrote:

 

‘Last night I had a terrible sleep. The night seemed to go on forever and at least three times I woke from a fitful sleep and upon seeing the white-green side of the tent, thought I was either blind or in a strange very enclosed space and I leapt forward in a panic to the front door.'

 

Here were the essentials we carried with us up to Sheep Camp from the storage room at Jeremy's farm, starting a new phase of life:

 

Tools:
fencing pliers, tie wire, chainsaw, fuel can, green string, spade, mattock, tomahawk, mallet.

 

Camping gear:
small tent, large tent, three blue tarps, one silver tarp, picnic table, branding iron, candlesticks, plastic
buckets, gas bottles, Esky, air mattresses, camp stool, easy chair.

 

Cook house:
Four tin mugs, cutlery, dish tub and drainer, camp oven, frying pan, peg and griddle, triangle, toaster/griller, one large water drum (40 litres), one small water drum (20 litres), one large billy, one small billy, sieve, food safe (hanging), two toasting forks.

 

Remember how each simple item unpacked had an aura? How the toasting forks with their scorched wooden handles and bent prongs demanded their own lovingly fashioned hooks to hang by the fire?

One day there would be a house there on the saddle. When the house was built the discomforts and make-do's of camping would be gone. Talking about the house made the camping sweeter.

Then we took everything away again down the hill. The drive back was without the magic of coming in. Gates closed, tracks winding out; where was the excitement? Better to be always arriving, anticipating. Departure was demolition. Except, there we were, a few hours later in Goulburn, elbows jostling around the table, wedged in the Paragon Café eating fish and chips and drinking pots of hot black tea—celebrating, already remembering through layers of experience such details as red gum tips on the skyline at sunset flaring like a roadworker's scarlet jacket.

 

Next time, I made a writing camp—dashed down the
freeway to arrive at Sheep Camp before sunset, three hundred kilometres in three and a half hours. In steady wind I worked like Charlie Chaplin, doing alone what needed a helper and leaning against the wind to hold collapsing tent poles until everything sprang right and I rewarded myself with a Scotch by lamplight.

I had twelve days to ‘break the back of that book'. Sleep was profounder than oceans. Next morning I walked around in a daze, feeling over-lucky, supremely privileged, and couldn't get started. Funereal cockatoos came from the high, cool forest at my back, languorously flapping and seeming to lurch and slide through the air. They were a sign, a gift, and I remembered waiting months at Spring Farm before the black ones appeared, and when they did (tearing into the stone pines) I felt a tension rise away. That was twenty years ago. Where did the feeling come from and why? It was the same sensation when gang-gangs came out of the cold and worked their way through hawthorn bushes along Durran Durra Creek. On the gang-gangs went, fluffed and scarletgrey, nutcracker-beaked, doubled over like fists and hanging half upside-down gorging berries. One bird penetrated too far and crucified itself on the thorns, wings spread wide. Too late for any help, I found the bird mummified that windy, freezing August. Meanwhile out in the open paddocks galahs moved through the dry grass gathering seed, busy and oblivious—pink-waistcoated, grey-jacketed aldermen murmuring in undertones—and the world played a hard, bright, brass-band tune.

At Sheep Camp gifts came raining down. Gang-gangs and funereal cockatoos were common. Each morning the high
forests disgorged birds in various strung-out flights heading for a day's foraging in the farmland below. From the highest paddock I could locate Spring Farm through binoculars, but only faintly, a line of poplars away out on the plateau twenty-five kilometres away. Maybe some of the birds reached there, where a full life had once been lived, when it seemed there would never be anywhere else, nobody else.

All those years ago I read the lines, ‘We weep for our strangeness,' and stored the feeling without knowing why.

 

Arranged my writing table; ran a lead to the car battery for the laptop; opened my notes and weighted them down with a stone. Definition of writing: easy postponements and contrived delays infinitely multiplied. Went up the hill and looked down at the tent on the saddle. Sunlight exploded under trees and isolated their shapes distinctly in the landscape. There was a purple haze from eucalyptus growth-tips over the forests. The tent, in cubes of green, tan, silver, was the ghost of a house or the prediction of a house. It had a blue tarp for a verandah awning and a silver tarp for the workroom floor. I half closed my eyes and multiplied its roofline. The tent was hot in the afternoons, even on cool days. Too soon for a house here yet, but the idea of a caravan beckoned, as if the house, like a seed unbuckling, would have stages of growth and each one to be gone through.

Seed pods of blackwoods crackled in the heat. The still, grey heads of yellow box trees thinned in the sun as I walked down the track to where I knew of a native cherry, half-hidden on a tangled slope—
Exocarpus cupressiformis
, a
parasite, from which I took strength. The purple trunk of pitted armour was like iron. Turning from there I climbed through a straggly stand of half dead trees choked by mistletoe, a parasite also. The spare beauty of the mistletoe flower was like a tree-frog's finger pads, faint coral pink on toughened stems.

Then back up the hill to my work table. My diary records:

 

‘Slow going with the book again. It feels too “spiritual”. Need to roughen the boy stuff a bit. Got to have people leaping from the page and don't have it yet. Take from life. Just get it down.'

 

Looking up from the page I was connected through every dry crunch of leaves, each bird call, every flap of canvas to my boyhood self. Went and stirred the fire, boiled the billy. Made myself drunk on tea, bread and honey, like a grub-crazed tree-creeper. There I sat sniffing woodsmoke at the far end of longing. I was able to say to that boy, myself, far back at the beginning of longing, ‘You will arrive and be grateful.' Gratitude was the overwhelming feeling of the person of faith—Susie found the quote—and I came into that gifted state just then, incoherently offering thanks to the light, to the moment, to the racing cloud-shadows, to the trees. I gave thanks to the flourishing parasites who gained their nutrition come what may, and whatever was needed in the writing came as I opened the letters and diaries of strangers, and streamed with invention.

‘Completely renovated. Suit artist,' ran the ad. So we bought the old caravan and persuaded a tow-truck driver to haul it to Braidwood the next morning. We spoke by mobile phone and I accelerated onto the freeway expecting to sight the convoy close to Sydney, but it took until near the Bundanoon exit, well on the way, before there it was, sashaying along ahead, a louche hippy leftover painted in grey-blue cloud shapes, matching speed with the growling yellow tow-truck as if a propellant was lit under its swaying tail.

The renovations included a double mattress on milk crates and all the plastic caravan fittings ripped out and replaced with cheap wooden shelves. A sink cupboard was painted with a macaw. Angels were daubed on the ceiling. The curtains were tattered, dyed homespun, embroidered with spiders and a name plaintively stitched: ‘Greg'. We could hear lorikeets at evening alighting on the tin-clad skylights with a click of claws. At dawn it was two below zero inside, last night's cocoa dregs embroidered with ice-spears.

That first cold stayover we lay in bed with the round face of the gas heater (‘do not use in caravans or boats') disking a red glow and roaring like a banshee. Firetail finches,
Emblema belum
, threaded the thornbushes at the back window. In the stand of ribbon gums nearby—where I watched, spellbound, the changes of light—shards of fallen bark crackled in the cold. How to describe that grove and make it eternal? The creamed aluminium smoothness of the trunks, the feathery, motionless leaf-heads where wire-thin twigs snapped and helicoptered down to be gathered for fire starters.

We came again, and then again. And then one day we came in a mood of doubt and fear seeking resolution.

No easy words for this, except Susie wrote:

 

‘I can't quite reconcile the softness, the round loveliness, the nurturing lovingness of the breast as host to this mutant, fearful, despised murderous abnormality. Nature is full of it, of course, plants, animals, insects of perfect exquisite God-given beauty that poison, strangle, kill. Parasites that invade have to be hacked out in order to preserve life for the host. My life versus its … Chemotherapy is poison, but the farmer destroys to grow. Think of the surgeon as farmer, tilling the land to clean it up. Radiation is natural. Rays free-float throughout the cosmos. Extant everywhere, that in therapy are mechanically focused by a machine. Find an image to use during treatment. Visualise the rays emitting from the palms of Raphael, the Healing Angel.'

 

Winter mornings. Close to three thousand feet we are above the deepest freezing fogs. Everything still and white, with a fuzzy sun coming through. Melodious conversation of a family of choughs using low branches like stepladders to overvault each other and spread out searching for grubs. At breakfast the sun melts the frost. But away below, the Braidwood plateau remains quilted with fog that folds into the lower gullies and holds the frost down there until late morning, sometimes past noon. The school buses rumble along with their headlights dully burning. The iron bolts on the stock and station agent's doors have to be kicked open in the cold.

What is there to do then except laugh with the beauty of the day, get the fire started, and talk about tree plantings and house plans?