Burrawan

Although I have lived in the area for several years now, I had never seen Lake Innes, never knew its story… or its real name, which is Burrawan.

There is one public driving track in to the Lake Innes Nature from the Lake Cathie/Port Macquarie side, to Perch Hole Picnic area. And this beautiful serenity is what lies at the end of that track through a paperbark swamp.

Whether you look south or north, this large lake is impressive… and empty today save for one lone kayaker.

I was driven to go and see it for myself after being on the other side of Burrawan for the launch of a book about this lake.

In it, John Heath and Ashley Barnwell have compiled inforrnation and records about the story of this lake, offering both Birrpai and colonial ideas and histories.

In front of the ruins of Major Innes’ brick home complex, once almost a small village, overlooking a grass sward that runs down to the lake, we were given some extraordinary insights.

The tall blue gums that would have totally blocked the view were long gone, and the lake was still visible behind John and Ashley as they listened to the speeches. 

Major Innes had the trees cleared for his farming establishment, while his wife kindly introduced lovely garden plants, like lantana!

We were treated to a smoking ceremony and dances, mainly by John’s charming young relatives. The Birrpai were revered and applauded here today, but as the book shows, were not considered in Major Innes’s time.

But the shocker was that this lake was then freshwater, and is now salt… and all the plant and animal life that thrived on it had died.

Despite warnings, and never-realised intentions to build floodgates to stop the saltwater flowing back, a channel was dug by hand from Lake Cathie to Burrawan in the 1930s. The idea was to drain the lake and thus create 12,000 acres for farmland! 

So, as the book summarises, the lake and all its wildlife and biodiversity was seen as merely submerged potential farmland.

Records from Albert Dick’s diary chart the demise of the rich life of the lake as the salinity increased, and they are truly shocking.  I thank John and Ashley for this work, shocks and regrets notwithstanding; like massacres, we need to know the damage done by blind colonisation.

But you need to read the book! The Port Macquarie Historical Society has published this valuable resource and record and you can buy it from them or from John Heath.

Revive Lake Cathie is a group working hard to return Burrawan to fresh water — visit them here to find out more.

Peeping review

A lovely review of ‘Peeping’ by Michelle Lopert, in the Autumn issue of our great local ideas magazine, ‘Inklings – the thoughtful alternative’. Email to subscribe to digital issues.

This delightful collection of short stories from local author, Sharyn Munro, engages the reader from the very first page with its lyrical language, recognisable situations, and insights. The author sweeps us from childhood to old age, capturing a snippet of life at each stage in the human journey. For those of us born in the ‘40s and ‘50s, these scenarios are all too familiar.

The childhood stories in Part One remind us of the innocent years of childhood, the confusion of dealing with new experiences, and the uncertainty of our place in the world. In one story, a young girl witnesses the argument that ends in her parents’ divorce. In another, a girl’s dreams of being an artist or ballerina are dashed. Children try to make sense of the unknown, using their own limited logic, sprinkled with a vast imagination. Munro captures the mystery and complexity of the adult world, seen through a child’s eyes.

In the second part of the book, the pain and excitement of adolescence and early adulthood are captured in stories about lust, sex, marriage, divorce and   heartbreak. Her university story encapsulates the blossoming of new-found independence, at a time when we pretend to be grown up, confident and cool. We want so desperately to fit in whilst embracing new experiences. But some of us can be hurled out of our comfort zone with dire consequences.

I laughed aloud at the humorous portrayal of a camping trip that went horribly wrong from day one. And haven’t we’ve all been there! The story is written with word-juggling playfulness, showing her mastery of language.

The author acquaints us with the rationale of one- night stands, the trepidation of reuniting with old lovers, and the awe of people who break the rules or choose an unconventional path. But she hints that life isn’t all envy and befuddlement. We are merely gobbling up the world in our thirst for knowledge, wisdom and understanding. In the process, there is no shying away from brutal realities such as the death of a child or the shock of a suicide. These poignant stories are jarring, but honest.

The final part of the book shines a gentle spotlight on the inevitable decline and indignity of old age. It echoes with sadness and loss — loss of physical vitality, loss of youthful appearance, and ultimately loss of love, passion and a future. The portrayal of older women becoming invisible and devalued is a stark reminder of our shallow society, one that worships youth rather than experience and wisdom. This is especially highlighted in the story of a group of widows whose empty lives consists of regularly meeting at the club and playing the poker machines.

The stories carry us to a variety of locations, from convent schools, university pubs, the mundane suburbia of Newcastle, the glory of the Blue Mountains, and beyond to lonely mountains in regional Australia. Nature plays a huge role in her stories and I will never forget those magical frog symphonies  that  pushed out a grumpy lover.

Just like life, there are no happy-ever-after endings, but the final story could be construed as a sort of epiphany. In this mystical story, an elderly woman sheds her earthly attachments to become one with nature, much to her daughter’s incomprehension.

It’s not hard to see why these stories have won prizes and commendations. Munro is not afraid to face all aspects of life, and reveal the true thoughts, fears and motives of ordinary people, be they ever so lofty or mundane.

Michelle Lopert

Peeping through my fingers

Glimpses of childhood, old age – and the dangerous bits in between

As followers of this blog, most of you know me as a nature writer, the author of The Woman on the Mountain and Mountain Tails. Basically I am an observer of the world around me, whatever that happens to be.

In this collection of short stories, I turn from peeping on my wild animal neighbours to peeping on my fellow humans in their hopeful stumble through time — ‘life’ — and then imagining a story about what I saw. Fiction, based on a germ of real life.

Since my third book, Rich Land, Wasteland, I have been totally involved in battles for our environment and communities and for action on climate change — lately dominated by the fight to save Bimblebox Nature Refuge from Clive Palmer’s Waratah Coal.

Meanwhile I have neglected my fiction, and yet short stories are my favourite writing genre. So, after a few health scares, and facing turning 75 next birthday, I realised I might run out of time to remedy that neglect. 

This collection of stories, grouped into three sections – Growing Up, Grown Up? and Growing Old – is linked by short commentaries on my own evolving life, as candid as my readers have come to expect. Many of these stories are award-winners, but here brought together for the first time. I want them read more widely! 

I aim to continue with both storytelling and activism. Your support will help me do that.

Please spread the word amongst your friends and groups. I am happy to come and speak to a gathering, and talk to me if you want to use the book as a fundraiser.

The book, ISBN 978-0-6456106-0-4, is distributed to bookshops and libraries by IngramSpark and is now available.

Sunkisses

This is an extract from Chapter 16, ‘Let the sun shine’ in The Woman on the Mountain. It was also included as a stand-alone piece in an anthology by Catchfire Press called Stories for a Long Summer (2006).

Summer once meant glorious, golden sunshine, for outdoor playing and swimming, from sunup to sundown if we could wangle it. Painful sunburn and peeling skin was inevitable, every year, for everyone except those with foreign, that is, not English, Irish or Scottish, skin. We soothed the burns by dabbing with vinegar or cut tomatoes, picked at the dry skin as it peeled, and drew satisfaction from extra long strips removed. Noses and shoulders were always the worst and most frequently burnt. As new freckles appeared we joked about ‘sunkisses’. I could count mine then.

By my fifteenth year it was all about sunbaking in bikinis, a race to ‘get a tan’ quickest, grilling our bodies like skinny sausages, assisted by a coconut oil baste. This ritual was interrupted only by an occasional stroll to the water, mainly to see and be seen by the unattainable golden boys with their goods on show in Speedos. As our costumes shrank to four brief triangles, soft and virginal bands of flesh burnt so badly the pink turned livid, yellowish, and school uniforms and seats could hardly be borne on Mondays. But we persevered, for white skin had the connotation of slugs, not porcelain. Not that I’d ever have the choice again, having by now acquired a permanent shawl of sunkisses.

Fifteen years later, summer meant the annual angst in front of unfriendly mirrors and lying saleswomen over whether we could still get away with wearing a two-piece costume. It was spent supervising sandcastles and shell collections, soggy towels and gritty kids, with hardly a minute to ourselves for sunbaking. As we still did, with suntan lotion overall, zinc cream or sunscreen only applied to acknowledged vulnerable bits. We did wear hats.

These days summer brings danger. Sunbaking, suntanning, sunkisses – such antiquated words, such tragic innocence. Forget sunscreen; with the hole we’ve made in the ozone layer, we need sunblock. Slip, slop, slap. Kids are growing up with sunblock as their second skin, they swim in neck-to-knee lycra and aren’t allowed to play outside at school without a hat. They are taught to be as afraid of our once-beneficent sun as of strangers. It’s like science fiction come horribly true. I dread the announcement that constant exposure to sunscreen has been found to be carcinogenic, but I won’t be surprised.

My swimsuit mostly functions as a relic of my past, to be found scrunched in the back of a drawer along with lace handkerchiefs, suspender belts, French knickers and tired G-strings. Summer glare and heat are too savage for me to want to be outdoors at all. Instead of exposing winter flesh, I cover up more, never leaving my verandah without throwing on my sunfaded Akubra hat and the longsleeved cotton shirt, usually a man’s work shirt, second-hand, that will be hanging there.

Too many threatening spots and lumps have already been removed, after hiding amongst the thousands of freckles of my inappropriate Celtic skin. I go to my skin cancer clinic every six months for a checkup. The doctor, genetically brown-skinned and unfreckle-able, shakes his head at the mottled map of my youth each time I take off my shirt.

I have copies of The Woman on the Mountain which you can buy at a special price here.

Woman at work

This drawing was meant for Chapter 12 of The Woman the Mountain, ‘While the woman’s away…’ which is mainly about the wildlife moving in and taking over when I wasn’t there.

Here’s the relevant extract about one of the ultimately futile attempts to keep them out…

When the rain finally stopped, I began fortifying the fence against the wallabies, slowly and erratically, depending on when I could afford another roll of chickenwire. As I clipped it on to the old hingelock netting, I was forced to get up close and personal to the past.

I’d erected this house fence ten years ago, when I came back to live here. My dream had included a large garden in the midst of the regenerating bush and its abundant — and voracious — wildlife. That required a netting fence. As my partner was already engrossed in his creative and income-earning pursuits — absolutely single-mindedly, as many men can be — I did most of it myself. I dug the holes and tamped around the wooden posts with the head of the crowbar, which isn’t easy to do on your own and still have the heavy posts end up roughly vertical. A fair bit of boomps-a-daisy balancing was needed.

In between the wooden posts I banged in the steel star posts with my wonderful ‘putter-inner’, a heavy iron cylinder, closed at one end, that a friend had welded up for me. The shop ones, called post-drivers, have handles, and I suppose they are all bought by weak women — Real Men use iron mallets that I can barely lift off the ground, let alone above my head.

And I’m no weakling, despite being small. But some jobs don’t only depend on strength. They’re just bloody impossible without the right tool — like my ‘puller-outer’, a shop-bought manual post-lifter, which makes removing star posts and tomato stakes amazingly easy, and which, I suspect, even Real Men might use.

These are the sort of tools I love: dead simple and very effective, requiring neither mechanical knowledge nor great strength, needing no manual, using no fuel, hiding no spark plugs, able to be forgotten and left out in the rain without damage, enabling little me to do heavy work. In fact they’re the sort of old-fashioned items that are usually discontinued nowadays — too simple, too enduring, a one-off purchase that brings no economic and ongoing joy to anyone but the buyer. What a useless thing to keep manufacturing!

Posts all in, my partner strained up several strands of plain wire for me to attach the hingelock to, as I can’t seem to get into my head how to set the chains and teeth of my fence strainer so it works. Or perhaps I’m just scared of the way it bites and snaps and strains almost to breaking point.

Then I unrolled the old hingelock netting, relic of my first dream of a bush life seventeen years previously. My then husband and I had fenced in several large areas for vegetable gardens, since we thought we’d grow fancy foods like globe artichokes and asparagus — and back in the 1970s these were fancy, rarely seen in shops. After the marriage broke up, so did the fences, only more slowly.

I have copies of The Woman on the Mountain which you can buy at a special price here.

Wet school days

Few modern parents would allow their children to take the risks that I frequently did to get to school in weather; well, perhaps they still would in the country…

From The Woman on the Mountain, Chapter 13: Wet and Wild

By the time I was thirteen I was used to our farm creek flooding, when I had to wade barefoot through knee- to thigh-deep water that covered the lower parts of our track and the road to the bus stop, half a mile away. My school shoes and stockings and a little towel were in my Globite school case, balanced on my head with one hand, the other keeping my tunic tucked up into my navy bloomers.

There was first the hurdle of our rickety wooden bridge, which lost at least one of its round logs each flood, the gap hidden beneath milky brown rushing water. It was a matter of inching forward, feeling with my toes for the gap that might drop me through to certain drowning, as the creek was full of bobbing and whirling branches and logs — more than a match for my feeble dogpaddle.

The farmer’s wife at the house next to the bus stop always let me get dressed on her verandah. I’d dry my cold legs and red feet, still tingling from walking on the sharp gravel of the road, and put on my black cotton stockings. Later in this particular flood school morning, I was commanded to the blackboard by the formidable Sister Augustine. I had passed up the aisle between the desks and was halfway across the open space of lino before the blackboard, when Sister’s sharp Irish voice rang out in the slow-rising-then-fast-falling rhythm she used for my name when I was about to get into trouble: ‘Sha-a-a…ryn Munro! What on earth is that?’ pointing at the floor near my feet.

Everybody stared at a trail of dark red spots that led from my desk to where I stood and where the spots were forming a small pool of what appeared to be blood. This blood was coming from somewhere up under my tunic, and given that menstruation was in the offing for all of us, she could have been more tactful. I was so ignorant it didn’t occur to me, or I’d have been even more embarrassed.

I was publicly commanded to go and find out what the trouble was. As I slunk out the door, she called, ‘Well at least there’s nothing the matter with your blood; it’s a lovely rich red!’ (She also taught biology — and geography, as it was a very small school.) In the toilets I rushed to unclip my suspenders and pull down my stockings. Out rolled a fat, gorged leech, its puncture mark on my thigh, just above where the stockings ended, still steadily oozing blood. It must have been there for hours, as it was now nearly eleven o’clock.

On my return I explained what the cause was, which drew not much more than a general ‘Ugh!’ from the class and a ‘Really!’ from my teacher, who gave me a bandaid and sent me to fetch a mop and bucket to clean up the blood. I had the distinct feeling that I had displayed something too basic, peasant-like, for my superior town classmates.

And I still shudder at leeches!

I have copies of The Woman on the Mountain which you can buy at a special price here.

Jail baby

This sketch was intended for Chapter two: ‘Getting out of jail’, of The Woman on the Mountain. We lived here, in a village of 200 people, for 10 years before we went bush; both my children were born while here.

‘It would be hard to imagine a more extreme downsizing to a 3 x 4-metre tent than from the grand complex that locals simply called ‘the old jail’. Built in the late nineteenth century, it encompassed courthouse, police station, three-cell jail and exercise courtyard, plus the residence, with accommodation for a special constable tacked on later. Not to forget the back-to-back outdoor double toilet — the most imposing proverbial ‘brick shithouse’ imaginable.

‘Grand.

‘There was a separate kitchen/dining room building, as was the safety custom in the days of wood-fuelled cooking, linked to the main house by a breezeway. The latter also led to the heavy iron door, complete with spy hatch and massive iron bolt, accessing the jail courtyard, open to the sky except for iron bars, and thence to the cells. These had similar iron doors — creak of rust, clang of finality — no getting out of there.

‘Atmospheric.

‘… A few pot plants and hanging baskets turned the exercise yard into a pleasantly sunny, protected courtyard, accessible also from the lounge room via an iron-barred door.

‘I’d had to promise not to get pregnant until we’d repaid the loan for the total purchase amount of $6000 (truly!) and even that loan was only possible through personal string-pulling by my in-laws. In the 1960s a wife’s income was not taken into account and women could not borrow. The Pill had arrived, but if bank managers knew about it, they weren’t letting on.’

That antique cane pram in which my babies basked in the exercise yard was a family heirloom that I desecrated by painting bright orange. 

‘Here I feel obliged also to confess that I painted a beautiful, borrowed, antique cane bassinet and stand with gloss enamel ‘Aquarius Green’, a rather acidic lime. It was the era of the musical Hair, ‘the dawning of the age of Aquarius’, plus that’s my star sign — but neither seems a worthy excuse in retrospect.’

I have copies of The Woman on the Mountain which you can buy at a special price here.

Mountain moments

When I wrote my first book, The Woman on the Mountain, I originally intended to illustrate it. After all, if Gerald Durrell could have illustrations in books for adults, why couldn’t I? In the end, the book having grown longer, we decided not to use the pen and ink drawings.

I still have scans of them, and as I hate waste, I’ve decided to share some of them with my blog readers, accompanied by relevant extracts from their chapters.

This one was meant for Chapter 3 – ‘Close to the elements’, as we certainly were, living as we did for fifteen months in a small secondhand tent. Except for wet weather, we really only slept there; all the real living space was outside. 

‘Yet despite the extremes dealt by the elements, that first year here, living mainly outdoors, remains the happiest of my life.’

My three-year-old daughter and five-year-old son loved it… and so did I.

‘For dining, under the spreading arms of a white mahogany tree we had set up a card table and canvas director’s chairs, with holes dug in the ground for the uphill chair legs so diners didn’t roll down the slope when eating, as several unwary visitors had done. As they were a little tipsy at the time, they rolled easily and didn’t hurt themselves, although the sight was so funny that the sides of the callous and equally tipsy spectators ached for some time.

‘Our chosen clearing had appeared to be a gentle slope but actually was relentlessly unflat, as each small area that needed to be level soon proved. Everywhere involved walking uphill, to or from, and we got very fit, especially carrying buckets of water up the steep incline from the spring. That was excellent for deportment too; only my straightest back would keep the buckets from bumping into the slope ahead and spilling.

‘My cooktop was an old fridge rack balanced on four rocks, my cooking equipment was disposal store cast iron — camp oven, frying pan and saucepan — and one heavy soup pot. From our Merriwa camping weekends I’d developed quite a collection of recipes for one-pot or one-pan dishes. For those weekends I used to cheat a little to compensate for the absence of bench space, like making the dough and rolling the balls for chapatis at home, in which form they’d happily sit until I was ready to flatten them and cook over the fire to accompany the Saturday night curry. Now I had the luxury of the card table as a bench.

‘The camp oven, buried in hot ashes and coals, worked well, but I could only bake one thing at a time in it. We bought a rusty fuel stove for $10 and set it up close to the big tree above the ‘kitchen’.

‘The first time I used it I wrote (in my diary): 

Took a long time for oven to heat up but finally cooked pitta, pumpkin pie and two veg. strudels in it. Flue melted its joins and blew off.

‘Here’s another baking morning.

Lit fuel stove — baked cookies first, then two loaves bread, then prune loaf, then Rieska [quick rye bread for lunch]. Used top to warm yoghurt, de-candy honey, cook chickpeas, etc. All done by 12.30. We got sand and rocks for last trench. Finished that by evening.

‘Was that me, that so-organised, energetic young woman? Where did she go?’

I have copies of The Woman on the Mountain which you can buy at a special price here.

Book boom

Things are snowballing with the Rich Land, Wasteland coal book. One amazing lady has just bought 100 books to send to politicians whom she feels simply must read it to know what they are doing to us.

Bacchus Marsh and Inverloch here in Victoria are yet more unthinkable regions for mining/gas to be proposed.

When I get back from Victoria, I’m heading over to the mid-north coast for several talks before nipping down to Parramatta. Maybe some of you can make one, so just in case here are the details:

?Wednesday 27 June
Gloucester? 7pm Senior Citizens Centre
?30 Hume Street
Contact: Email Di Montague

??Thursday 28 June
Kendall—Laurieton?
5.30pm Laurieton Library
Contact: Kate Forrest, Librarian (02) 6581 8177 or email?

Friday 29 June
Kempsey
?4.30pm Kempsey Library
Contact: Alison Pope (02) 6566 3210 or email

??Tuesday 3 July
Taree
?1-2pm Taree Library
Contact: Margie Wallis (02) 6592 5291 or email

and ??6-7pm Taree Library

??Wednesday 4 July
Parramatta?
5-7pm Parramatta Library
Contact: Yan Zhang (02) 9806 5157 or email?

Hornsby talk

For interested Sydneysiders, I’m speaking at Hornsby Library at 10 am on Friday 8th June. Phone (02) 9847 6904 for details.

Having spoken there for each of my other books, I know it’s always a good event, with keen readers and a lively Q & A after the talk.

Novella Fine Books from Wahroonga will be there with books to sell — and be signed!

Eltham event

After winning the Alan Marshall Short Story Award in 2002 I spent three months at an historic and extremely atmospheric mud brick house, ‘Birrarung’, near Eltham.

This was a writers’ residency courtesy of Parks Victoria and Nillumbik Shire. It became a chapter in my first book, The Woman on the Mountain.

So I have a special spot for Eltham and Meera’s terrific Eltham Bookshop, and have spoken down there several times.

If you’re in the region, come and meet me on Sunday afternoon, June 10th, 3:00—4:30pm at Edendale Farm, Gastons Lane, Eltham.

Bookings are essential: Call (03) 9439 8700 or email Eltham Bookshop. Refreshments are included in the $5.00 entry.

Find your way to Edendale Farm by checking Eltham Bookshop on Facebook.