The Woman on the Mountain Read Free

lower sashes were multi-paned with rose, amber and green, for privacy. All the official rooms had cedar-panelled ceilings, and even in the residence the rooms had marble fireplaces, cedar doors, rosewood skirting boards and architraves, and tallowwood floors, and each of the many external steps was a single polished grey-slate slab.
    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.
    Built in times when Australian rainforest timbers were plentiful and tradesmen were unstinted and unstinting craftsmen, it had my carpenter dad’s approval: ‘Ah, they don’t make ’em like they used to.’ It was unrenovated except for a few regrettable efforts by the only previous private owners, like painting over the soft pinks and ambers of much of the external walls.
    Our renovations were basic but expensive. We did not touch the courthouse or cells, but the rest was totally rewired, and the floors sanded, polished and sealed. We renovated the bathroom and kitchen—the latter mostly done by Dad, who lived with us for six weeks while he built many cupboards.
    A big cost was installing a septic toilet and self-contained drainage system, as there had been none. Until we could turn the old pantry off the breezeway into an indoor toilet, the backyard dunny still had one side in operation under the rather unsavoury pan fill and collect method—although I can’t say the new septic’s frequent odour of boiled cabbage at the back door proved much more appealing. When the outhouse was partly demolished I saved the kauri full-width seat and lid, and it graces my pit toilet here. It’s very smooth, as you’d expect after being polished by more than a century of warm thighs.
    However, when I swapped teaching for motherhood, our income was halved, so for our last five years there we were restricted to low-cost, high-labour jobs, like stripping doors and patching and painting the lime-plastered walls. 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.
    We loved living in this semi-rural, anachronistic village. We loved the sense of history, the pub just down the road, the publican and his family, and many of the pub-frequenting villagers. I’d joined the Ladies Darts Team, and so got to know another world of women, vastly different from that for which my convent school and university had prepared me. As the locals gradually educated us into acceptable behaviour, we made friends and had many great post-pub parties in the courthouse. I remain in touch with several of those friends, all of whom have left the village, and with whom those party memories still raise more than a giggle.
    So long as you didn’t mind everyone thinking it their right to know your business, the reward of village life was that your neighbours cared. For instance, I’d be asked at the pub about the owner of the green Mini that had been parked outside our gate on the weekend. ‘Stayed overnight, didn’t he? Live far, does he? On his own, wasn’t he? Not married, then?’ No chance of getting away with any illicit affairs round there.
    On the way home from hospital with each of my babies, we had