The Woman on the Mountain Read Free Page B

have, or would have wanted to.
    The hollows worn into the slate steps of the old jail had meant more to me than the grand cedar ceilings, because they held a greater sense of history. The building as I knew it was intriguing, mysterious—far more than just a house—and the village was similarly imbued with layers of past lives and events that triggered my imagination. Had we stayed long enough in the jail we’d have ended up with a showpiece, an impressive and historic home, worth a lot of money. So what? It wasn’t a lifestyle destination I wanted—renovating for years, then showing it off, lunches and dinner parties—all that seemed shallow. Aldermen were threatening imminent ‘progress’, housing developments all the way from that last suburb to our village. Houses on the hill overlooking us? Neighbours just over the fence? Our village turned into a suburb? No thanks.
    Although we’d planted over a hundred trees on our large block in the middle of bare paddocks, they would not give real privacy. Also seeking more space, and a greater connection to land than our garden could offer, we bought 100 acres near Merriwa. We camped on it in our new Kombi van every second weekend. Despite spending most of our time collecting and burning prickly pear and trying to stop the kids disappearing down wombat burrows, we loved it.
    Soon we wanted to reverse the time balance, to be living like that for five days a week and going out to earn money two days. As we’d never risen above student levels of consumerism, nor had any desire to, there was no need for a big income.
    Fascinating as I found that Merriwa block’s sandstone ridge vegetation, its flowering small-leaved shrubs, its ironbark and wattle trees, its lichen-encrusted rocks and its sandy wombat world, I knew it was too dry for me to be happy living on it full-time. Although my childhood’s Sunday-night-only baths had been due to lack of tanks that didn’t leak rather than lack of rainfall, I never wanted to return to such water restrictions if I could help it.
    We started looking elsewhere, but too often the block on offer was a fenced-in island of degraded land with perhaps one rocky patch of remnant bush, and surrounded by other similar blocks. Rural residential jails. My privacy envelope had expanded and I needed real bush around me that I could walk through unhindered. Eventually we found this mountain, much more remote than we’d intended, but by then we knew how hard it was to find anything so natural closer to civilisation. And it had high rainfall.
    Both the old jail and my mountain have links to the past and a strong sense of place. I can’t imagine living in a place devoid of these qualities, scalped and sanitised free of them, such as a new project home in a new subdivision, no matter how well landscaped, no matter how great the facilities. There would be such a separation from reality as I understand it that I’d feel as if I was constantly short of something vital, like air.
    Conversely, I often wonder how people used only to such lives would cope should they be suddenly placed in the position of what millions around the world know as normal, with a sheet of tin, one pot, one spoon and a ragged blanket as ‘Home and Contents’.
    I imagine that for a day or two they’d behave well, as if they were on a reality TV show, but when no one called ‘Cut!’ as their nails chipped, their hair grew greasier, the loved one began to smell like a human animal instead of deodorant, and meals became minimal fuel for the energy to find food and water the next day, rather than an occasion for display ... what then?
    Somewhere in between the riches and the rags is a sustainable way of living that we need to adopt if our grandchildren are not to find themselves without a choice in the matter. That requires urgent attention to global warming, yet what we hear from our major politicians is still as irrelevant as the hollow ‘pock!’ of their party