History Revisited

So, after a bare few weeks of proper (if unorganized cohabitation) MyMan is settled into his historic but dilapidated family home on the farm block, while I’ve been sent home to prepare the family for a new term of school. We’ve spent the weekend nurturing our plans for the block. I walked the boundary of our 5-acre plot for the first time – from white survey peg, to peg, to peg and back again. As we walked MyMan spoke to me about the original farm. Just to fill you in – just two years after MyMan was born in the 1970s, his family moved to this large-sized mixed enterprise farm on Eastern EP with a dream of starting out on their own. But the 80s came, and with them, the droughts. And, according to MyMan, his father was too proud and too careful to risk his family’s future on such a large operation. So he sold up, down-sized and moved his wife and four young children to a smaller farm. But MyMan’s parents had been there long enough to give the property a name – EastWinds – because that’s the only kind of wind they saw during those dry years. They had a lot of dreams and hopes wrapped up in that little home with its sliver-view of Gulf to the East and the ranges in the North. When MyMan took me to see the property on a nostalgia trip the ranges sported a series of windmills, like spines on a sleeping dragon’s back, and we both fell a little bit in love with the space and sky and remnants of a family farming past. So, now the current owner is busy sub-dividing the 5 acre rectangle that will be our home. The home we plan to live the rest of our life in. But, until then, MyMan will live out there in the lopsided Shouse (shed-house) cleaning up forgotten iron and thriving boxthorn while here, in town, we will concentrated on getting my home rent-proof. The eventual plan is to build a house on the Eastern corner of the property (the Shouse is on the Southern corner) but we’ll make do until then. We’re both good at that – making do. So, ignoring that little wander into the past and future, it’s back to the present: We spent the weekend at EastWinds, mowing & burning & unpacking cardboard boxes full of man-effects. The giant, rusting skeleton of a ship overshadows the Shouse. Apparently, an overly ambitious renter, a decade ago, thought he could rebuild the boat. Despite my suggestion that we borrow a crane and move it out to the road (imagine being able to say; “15km off the highway and turn left at the ship”) tomorrow it’ll become scrap when the metal-man comes to town, along with most of the weed-shrouded piles of old farm machinery, 40 gallon drums and corroded sheds. Sadly, it won’t be us collecting the money – but on the upside, it’s less work for us. One corner of the Shouse has slipped massively in the 30+ years since MyMan’s family first colonized it. But at least the kids will never fall out of bed, with the slant in the bedroom floor rolling them up against the wall. In a tiny floating cupboard randomly hung on the loungeroom wall, we found a roll-call of Shouse residents, beginning with MyMan’s Clan 1977, and ending most recently with the ambitious shipbuilder. Now our names will join the list. On our walk around the property, MyMan demonstrated for me the cow clamp – a wooden frame with a sliding plank that used to trap a cow’s head and shoulders while a cold-fingered child milked the relunctant bovine many years ago. In fact, there’s the crumbling remnants of a whole stock yard including the stock run which we will recreate as my vege garden. It’s a great way to create a space that can keep the chooks out when I don’t want them, let them in when I do, and not lose that family-remembered feature which, otherwise, would just become another pile of weathered wood and wire. The giant machinery shed alongside the yard will protect my delicate veg from the Gulf winds in summer, retain heat in winter, channel water into the sidealong tank and play host to a variety of climbing fruits, grapes, peas and beans. Heading back towards the western corner we will run our fruit trees, melons and pumpkins all the way to the scrub and the chook shed which MyMan’s father built. In the middle of our future orchard are the remains of a basketball court which we will relevel and name ‘The Orange Court’. I can imagine my future (long-way-in-the-future) grandchildren giggling out there as they bounce the ball between them on a summer evening, hidden from the grown-ups by the trees. Note to self: lighting will be necessary. Two edges of the block are lined by native scrub and landmined with little piles of forgotten metal and wire. It’ll be MyMan’s job to thin the trees out and clean the undergrowth so that I can replace the sad, gnarly scrub with flowering natives like grevillea, bottlebrush and buddleah. One of my favourite things already – between the open sky and spin-in-a-c ircle-till-you-fall-down space that we are beginning to open up – is the sound of birds in the trees. When the sun came sneaking in through MyMan’s kitchen window this morning it sparkled off a pair of ageing, lichened trees – a mulberry and a fig that we hope we can save from years of neglect – hosting a noisy crowd of magpies. Inside, the view isn’t quite as picturesque. Wooden floors float in different directions beneath the musty carpet. When the current owners removed the flue…and the potbelly (oh how cold we all are now)…they left behind a pile of toasted bird carcasses. The loungeroom door opens up onto a shed full of wool bales and an old Bondwood caravan. The leaky roof is covered in lichen, moss has invaded the windowsills, the cats are feasting on unwelcome mousy squatters and we’ve already been warned about the local ram’s late-night visits to the not-quite-outdoors toilet. And I don’t care, I love it. I love it because in a handful of years it’ll just be another funny story of how MyMan and I began the-rest-of-our-lives together. Despite my original hobbyfarm disappointments I trust that MyMan would rather sit on his John Deere ride-on than his laurels and he will always work to make my big imaginings come true. And best of all, he makes me want to work hard, just by working alongside him. He is excited by my excitement. He has always wanted acreage, I have always wanted to be able to cook for my family from my own garden. He laughs at my alpaca ideas but grew up raising pigs for pocket money. Chooks are a given, although I suspect he secretly thinks that’ll end in me baking him cakes and meringues every day. Neither of us, both nearing 40, has ever built our own home, and we’ll now get to do that together. The lovely thing is that we live in an area where other people have lived this life, and succeeded. So many farm families have spent their young family years doing up old properties, or making do in them while they save for a bigger, better place of their own. So, when we laugh about the Shouse we aren’t met with negativity, but offers of help and shared stories of ‘the hard years’. As a result, I feel uncharacteristic optimism rising in me like a tide, washing away all my sensible concerns about dodgy water heaters and mouse-plagues.