Fred Baker

Hardy and rewarding lavenders

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While the forest flashes purple, the tough garden lavenders are blooming too. Some lavenders do well here, beautiful to see and to smell, needing little attention beyond the occasional prune, appealing to neither possums nor horses, but adored by bees.

My most prolific is the French Lavender, Angustifolia dentata (see the finely ‘toothed’ leaves), which grows very easily from cuttings and doesn’t care how poor the soil I stick it in. The colour of the small flowers on the spikes is truly lavender, not purple.


The other one that flourishes here is the Italian Lavender, Lavendula stoechas, much darker and stranger in shape.

The petals on the spikes are very small, very deep purple, but the the tall lavender bracts on top remain like feather head-dresses even after the petals are finished. It makes a most impressive bush.

How generous such plants are, to flower like this every year and demand so little of me.

Final winter flurry

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As August came to an end, the season decided to show a bit of properly wintry snow.

Not at my place, unfortunately, although I’m just high enough at about 1000 metres, but opposite me in the Wilderness Area, where the range is about 1500 metres.

It was cold, 2 degrees, which is about as low as it gets here here, 4 or 5 degrees being the average on a cold morning.

I love to see some snow each year, and I was cosy, with the slow combustion wood fire banked right down, gently beaming fire glow and warmth day and night.

When the snow clouds lifted, all of the upper southern faces had patches of snow, which isn’t unusual.

The surprise was that they stayed there, brightly, whitely visible, although this range is quite a long way off, for the next 4 days. It was sunny down here and not snowing up there, but clearly a lot colder.

Yet the very next week I saw my first red-bellied black snake in my yard!

Why I live ‘way out here’

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This post is extracted from Chapter 1 of The Woman on the Mountain, with the kind permission of my publisher, Exisle.

Wherever you live you need to feel safe, and in tune with your surroundings. I do.

Yet my place is a 90-minute drive from a post box, police station, shop or mechanic, let alone a Big M or a Big W or whatever other letter is considered crucial to modern survival.

Half of that drive is over a dirt road, partly through a national park which verges on wilderness. I have no neighbours within sight, sound or coo-ee, or not in the accepted sense. My neighbours are the wild creatures who live in the national park.
…

…if I were forced to live again in a city, town or suburb, I certainly wouldn’t feel safe, or in tune with my surroundings. I’d be nervous, draw my curtains at night, lock my doors, lower my voice — and I’d feel like a fish out of water.

I’d pine for the tree-clad mountains stretching forever into the distance, the blue gums and stringybarks and sheoaks just beyond my house fence, the hundreds of infant rainforest trees I’ve planted in the gullies, the wild creatures that are my neighbours — the wallabies and birds, the quolls and koalas, the snakes and lizards — I’d even include the leeches.

I’d miss the sounds of cicada, mad wattlebird and bleating frog chorus, or me yelling ‘Feedo!’ at the top of my voice for the horses to come. When could I yell anything at the top of my voice again?…

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Rainbow rays

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I’m being given the gift of many rainbows this winter, but they’re not in the sky. On my mountain, low cloud rising and and low sun setting makes for some spectacular combinations.

This striped beauty lasted only seconds before the last fine drifts of misty cloud dissipated. Being stuck too much at my desk at present, I was extremely lucky to have looked up at just the right time.

I’m not sure whom I’m addressing, but I have to say ‘Thanks!’ for such gifts.

Haildrops

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Although it’s winter, when sleet or snow would have been more normal, we’ve had a surprising number of summery-type storms, where small hail falls. Not for long, but often.

The horses don’t like it, but it doesn’t do any actual damage, so I just enjoy the visual effect while it lasts.

My naturalised snowflake bulbs – which I called ‘snowdrops’ as a child – seem to be made for such a white dotted setting.

They don’t often get the chance for a real snow backdrop.

Brotherburras

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These two Laughing Kookaburras decided to share my occasional bird feeder.

Not that they were interested in birdseed, but it made a good vantage point for wormwatching.

They weren’t into team diving, however, and they wouldn’t have shared the worm.

Probably siblings from one of the large kookaburra family tribes on my place, they’d be used to helping feed younger brothers or sisters, so maybe they were hunting to take back to the nest.

Sky lords

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No, that’s not fly dirt on the picture — it’s the pair of wedge-tailed eagles who lord it over the upper skies here, and have done for the 30 years I’ve been here. They usually have a third in tow, their young one.

They cruise so high up it’s amazing they can spot anything down here on the ground. Their eyesight is equal to ours when using binoculars with 20 times magnification powers.

No other bird can make it up there, although the magpies will chase eagles a long way above the treeline.

I zoom in to check, but oh yes, it’s the wedgies.

Recycled rainbows

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Not being very technologically savvy, occasionally I ruin a CD, the non-rewritable sort, by accidentally copying the wrong thing.

Rather than waste the disk, I collect them, in twos.

I tie each pair together, back-to back with cotton.Then I hang them from the verandah rafters, theoretically for the amusement of my grandchildren. They spin and catch the light beautifully.

But the other day one caught a rainbow. It was late afternoon, the day had been damp and misty, but the clouds were lifting at last.

First the disk itself trapped the colours as it spun. I was entranced.

But, minutes later, it was reflecting a round rainbow on to the scribbly gum furrows of the verandah post. It looked like a projected colour film of hieroglyphics.

Talk about the light fantastic!

A protected joey

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Walking through my forest, I often come across small groups of Eastern Red-necked Wallabies. On this occasion there were three, who propped and watched me.

Sometimes they take flight, but mostly not, because this being a wildlife refuge, they are used to not needing to fear me or what I allow to happen here. No guns or dogs or roads for careless cars.

I was especially taken with the innocence of this joey, who didn’t move at all, just watched, big eyed, its little black paws relaxed against its pale furry tummy. We looked at each other for some time. It didn’t mind the camera. It’s been born here and will grow up here, as protected as I can manage.

Echidna slaughter

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It is somehow worse to see an echidna roadkill than a wallaby. Not only because I see them less often, but because they are so unmistakably not dreaming but dead.

I see wallabies dozing in all sorts of odd poses, but I have never seen a live echidna on its back. The spines are there to protect it from predators; it rolls into a tight spiky ball when threatened.

Yet here it is, the soft underside helplessly exposed, the strong-clawed paws that would have dug it to safety outflung, stiff and useless.

Neither its spikes nor its claws were any defence against the uncaring, unstopping driver of the vehicle that bowled it for six – and out. Echidna-, not manslaughter, hit and run, and yet no one will be punished for this.

Melbourne: cold but exciting

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Back from my week in Melbourne, struck anew by how much colder the more southern latitude makes it, by how culturally alive that city is, and how terrific their metro transport system – even I worked it out eventually.

I wore long johns under my jeans every day, fell in love with the Victoria Markets and the State Library, and was interviewed by terrific women on commmunity radio: Bridget Bosun on JOYFM, the gay & lesbian station; Gab Reade on 3CR, the left-wing social justice and environmental one that felt like home, and 3MDR, where my friend Ann Creber interviews really interesting people in extraordinarily diverse fields. All of them had read my book, and that’s more unusual than you’d think.

No camera, so no pics for you, but can report that the Eltham New Voices Festival went well, in wonderful venues like the faux-ancient Montsalvat and a mudbrick church hall, as did the Belgrave library talk, with lots of keen environmental interest and questions.

Now I am going into retreat to finish the text and illustrations of my next book, Mountain Tails, before the deadline of the end of August. Nearly there.