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I love my book cover. When I saw it perched up there in the book shop nestled between the new biography on Julia Gillard and an expose on Ozzie Osmond I knew the stink I’d raised, the trouble I’d caused, the headaches I instigated at Random House were worth it.
You see my book was due out in May, and here we are in September and it is now, officially 3 days old (hooray!) Early in January the lovely people at Random sent me a variety of beautiful covers, none of which felt right. Then they sent me another one, which I really liked the concept of and everyone from publisher down loved. Unfortunately it had a detail on it that just didn’t sit right with me. We (publisher, sales, editing, publicity) all hoped I’d get over the detail (it was a photo of child’s leg on a horse, but the boot was a North American lace up – I know…. it sounds really petty) but I didn’t, get over it that is. Instead it rankled and rankled and became bigger in my head than it should have been. Finally, at the 11th hr and 59th minute, Nikki Christer – (god bless her cotton socks) decided I really was never going to like this cover and pulled the book from the May line up. Needless to say, this freaked me out quite a lot. It was also brave and bold and the sort of decision that makes Nikki such a great publisher.
We all took a deep breath and came back with fresh eyes. I bombarded Nikki with images of book covers I loved – she forwarded them on to the designer. I wrote another brief. And then on a visit to Sydney I caught up with Nikki and she showed me some early concepts of the new cover. There were some lovely ideas. One was a photo of a horse leaning over a fence and a little girl hugging its head. We both loved this concept – but for a number of reasons it wasn’t quite right.
As we stood there chatting, I suddenly remembered a photo a friend had snapped for me when we were working on the concept of the old cover. I remembered the feel of this photo as being similar to the concept we both liked. It was on my computer and I whipped it out and Nikki went wow. In fact we both stood there thinking WOW. The original photo is a moment of connection between the old horse and the small boy. It has a dreamy almost out side of time feel to it. It was captured as both the photographer and I got fed up with small boy and horse – both of whom were being very uncooperative models. We’d given up on them and I’d gone to catch another horse when the photographer snapped the two of them wandering off up the paddock. Later, when we were flicking through hundreds of photos from the shoot, this jumped out at us as a special photo. But because it wasn’t on the concept we moved onto other shots.
Nikki sent it onto the designer with no promises blah blah and I waited nervously to see what she would think. The designer loved it and came up with the brilliant background that seems to evoke hope and despair at the same time and also the feel of the land round here. I, in turn love the result. It’s a cover that I relate to, it’s arresting and different from what else is out there. There’s a casualness and a grounded feeling and most of all it evokes something terribly visceral. It makes people take another look. As an image it seemed to circumnavigate the cliché I’d struggled against with other versions of the cover.
I lot of people have worked so hard to make this book take shape. From editors, to design, to sales, to publicity – all levels of what is a big company – have made every effort to make this book a success. I realize how lucky I am to be published at all. I know how hard it is out there in ‘no book deal’ land. That my experience has been one where the publisher listened to my concerns, where my anxiety and disconnection with the old cover was taken seriously has made this whole journey worthwhile.
Here’s the original photo (don’t you love the naughty corgi in the background?)
In the morning the first sounds are the defiant calls of the roosters challenging the day (and each other) from the chook house. I lie under the covers and marvel at their early morning exuberance. Outside it’s still dark. The rain has bought a respite from the big frosts we get here. The view out my window is bleak as day dawns but it’s actually warmer than a clear morning when the whole world is frozen in vice like beauty. Those are the mornings that I dread slipping out of bed because the air is so cold it bites bare skin. But rain brings a gentler version of winter and it’s too not so hard to shove my feet in sheepskin slippers, pad out to the kitchen and flick on the coffee machine. The next switch is the radio bringing Fran Kelly’s voice and a view into the wider world. Then I stoke the fire and turn on the computer. At the back door my black Labrador slaps her tail and peers in at early morning school lunch preparations. The coffee brews.
My coffee machine is a luxury that lessens the pain of not being in close proximity to café society. I take my steaming cup to sit in front of the fire. The frogs are a background chorus to the sound of my fingers on the computer keyboard. Recently this early morning coffee routine has become slightly more complicated than just opening a bottle of store bought milk.
You see we’ve finally got a milking cow. My daughter bought her as a four-day-old calf and raised her from a bottle, then out of a bucket, then watched as she grew into a confident, bossy heifer. Finally she was old enough to go in with the bull and then she had her much anticipated calf and now, three years down the track we have a milking cow.
Her name is Hettie and she’s brown with white splodges. She doesn’t take long to be broken to milking and she happily stands munching her hay and oats while my small daughter works away on her udder. But it’s my uncle who is the superfast and efficient milker and he milks her every day in the first month to get her supply established. Now the calf is big enough to handle the milk and he can have a day off every now and then or milk in the afternoon.
There are so many revelations in this process. There’s the sheer volume of milk – this cow is easily supplying two families with milk, plus her calf, plus about seven dogs who now have the most incredibly glossy coats. The black lab sits beside who ever is milking and would lick the milk off Hettie’s udder if she were allowed. As my uncle pours the excess into the big dog bowl he mutters – “We are going to have to get a pig.”
The next revelation is just how creamy the milk is – I skim, no skim is too shallow a word, I scoop rich tablespoons of cream off the top of the milk after its been in the fridge. My kids take a moment to get used to the taste of unpasteurised milk – but it doesn’t take them long. My aunt makes butter and sends it down to us in firm patties. We buy a yogurt maker and all of a sudden my weekly shop is looking dramatically smaller – though I’m not sure about my waistline.
It’s now possible to cook a meal with nearly everything sourced from the farm. My uncle kills, butchers and delivers lamb to my back door. We have a constant cycle of roosters in the fattening pen. We have chook eggs and duck eggs, an enormous vegetable garden and now the cow. I love that my kids know that to eat meat something has to die. They don’t like the killing part but they are both fascinated with the art of butchering. They can see the cycle of birth, life and death. They know how a tomato should taste. They can walk into my aunt’s vegetable garden and identify broad beans, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, beans, snow peas, potatoes, pumpkins (I could go on). They understand that egg yolk is not meant to be pale yellow like the sand but bright florescent gold like the sun. They know where chops come from, and that the chicken you buy in the supermarket may as well be a different species to the roosters we raise in the rooster pen. All this is perfectly natural to them and they take it for granted. And perhaps I do too.
Recently I attended a Writer’s Festival and after my session and obligatory book signing I sat listening to a foodie who was selling his book next to me. Apparently he has his own TV program. I’ve never seen it, but I couldn’t help but laugh as he seriously explained the benefits of his new way of life. What he was saying was important, but he had the revolutionary zeal of the newly converted and the slickness of the city as he talked about it. He was loudly lamenting a way of life that had been lost and that (according to what I was hearing) he was singlehandedly reintroducing.
He was right and he was wrong. The sort of lifestyle he is leading is wonderful and not as common as it used to be, and it’s important to raise awareness of how interconnected our food chain is and how removed our population has become from the source of our food. But at the same time, this way of life is not lost, there are generations of farm families who have lived this way and that too is important to know.
I snuck a look at his hands. They weren’t farmers’ hands. Maybe he wears gloves.
In my new memoir ‘When it Rains’ the animals who live around us are central characters. Their stories sit alongside my story and it’s often in the telling of their daily lives that slippages occur and if I write carefully something larger than us is revealed.
My daughter’s little mare has hurt her leg. She’s been confined to her stable for the last six weeks. Fortunately the stables are in the middle of the farmyard and she has had much to watch and keep her interested. Our old pony Will has likewise been confined to barracks because the mare is inconsolable if she can’t see him. It has been a lot of extra work. Usually the horses only come in at night and I rarely have to clean out their stalls as the chooks and ducks get in and scratch around – it’s dusty but there’s no manure left or wet patches. But with them both being shut up, either my daughter or I are up at the stables twice a day, mucking out, feeding and watering our invalid and her companion. As the days lengthen and the earth warms up, our little mare has been ever more desperate to get out into the sunshine and play. The short ten-minute walks around the haysheds are an experience akin to holding onto an unexploded bomb. I’ve taken to putting a bit in her mouth because the smallest noise is enough to send her rearing and bucking at the end of the lead rein. She’s a gentle, kind mare, but she’s also a thoroughbred and therefore predisposed to brain snaps.
The beginning of this week marked the end of her six weeks of confinement and she progressed to 35 min walks and the day yard at the back of the stable. It’s a beautiful almost spring morning as I lead her up the lane. She dances along next to me completely uninterested in the green grass we are trekking through. In the next paddock a small group of calves bunch together and gallop up to the fence for a stickybeak. The mare snorts and props and with that they dash off for the top of the paddock, mud flying, tails in the air. My gentle kids pony erupts. She rears and twists away from me, then kicks out at the dogs before attempting to take off with me hanging onto the end of the rope then she’s up in the air again and all I can do is lengthen the lead and wait for her to land knowing she’s going to try and take off. Her front hooves touch the ground and I yank on her head to throw her off balance. After a brief tug of war, and wrestle of wills, order is restored and we make our way back up to the stables. I growl at her and put her in the day yard. Her blood is still hot and she makes the most of the 20m by 30m freedom.
I head into the stables to start mucking out stalls. My uncle has the chainsaw going around the other end of the shed but even above this I can hear an uneven crashing. I know what that is. Bugger. Bugger. Bugger. The mare has got herself cast under the fence. I round the corner to see her stuck with four legs and her head through the fence and her body in the yard. She’s thrashing with all the desperation of a wild animal caught in a trap. I approach her head and speak to her quietly. She stops fighting and lies still, trembling and grabbing desperate breaths. I try and wrestle her out but she’s really stuck and I’m going to need some more muscle. I run round the corner for my uncle and between the two of us we manage to manhandle her head from behind the post and then drag her free of the fence. Once she realises she’s free she plunges to her feet and then stands with her head in my arms her whole body shaking. Her legs are dripping with blood but I can see she’s going to be all right.
She follows me quietly to the wash bay and I hose her legs down until all the mud is out of her wounds and then smear them with a poultice. A dose of bute and she’s back in the day yard – feeling very sorry for herself.
Walking back down to the house to make a coffee and trying to gather my thoughts for the day ahead the thing that sticks with me is the way she stopped fighting the fence when I laid my hands on her. When I left her to fetch my uncle she fought again and I was worried she’d break a leg before I could get back to calm her. Trust between an animal and a human is an amazing thing. I’ve watched my small daughter ask this mare to jump scary, huge jumps and marvelled at the relationship between them. I watched how the mare has broadened my daughter’s world, made her feel invincible, made her feel like she can fly. And this morning that mare put her head in my arms and said thank you.
One of the misconceptions about people who live in the country is that they are lonely and isolated. I’m not talking about meeting eligible men. Believe me – all the men are married, happily or otherwise (Channel Nine’s ‘The Farmer Wants a Wife’ is a fallacy – at least in my neck of the woods). No, what I’m talking about is a more sustaining form of social interaction of weekly social events, dinners, bbq’s, and the whole plethora of kids activities that make up an extremely busy life.
When I first moved west of the mountains – many of my friends were worried that I’d become a recluse. The thought was not unattractive, part of my reason for retreating was to escape the chaotic nature of city life. But what I found when I came out here was a different sort of busyness. It’s hard to describe the differences. It’s more intimate. More family orientated. Simply, perhaps, more connected.
It’s at one of these Saturday night gatherings that I corner a table full of farmers (male & female) and grill them on all the signs of rain. I love this sort of talk. It’s the sort of chat that happens on the side of road when people pull over for a quick catch up, it happens when you bump into someone in the supermarket, or when someone drops in to buy a ram.
It goes sort of like this:
“Spring’s rising – might be gonna rain”
“Cloud on the mountain this morning – must be going to rain”.
“Did you see the Bogong moths last night? – sure sign of rain”.
“Smoke’s staying low – must be going to rain”.
“Will ya listen to that?! (Kookaburra’s calling in middle of day) “Rains coming”
There are other signs – like trees with insects flaming from their crowns and spiders drifting from the sky, there’s mare’s tails in the wind and ants marching through the house.
But my favourite sign is in the unspoken solidarity of large beasts all over the district that simply lie down. Cows and horses seem to know when there is a big weather front coming through. You see them lying down in the middle of the day, when they would normally be grazing or resting quietly in the shade. Instead of this they lie down with intent, not in the relaxed way they do in their normal routine where they snooze in the middle of the day. Rather it’s a serious sitting on the earth. How do they know this? They must feel some shift in the atmospheric pressure – because they do know and in preparation for having to stand in the wet & cold, they sit in the dry before the rain comes. At least this is the explanation offered around the table.
There are other signs of rain coming, like biscuits getting soggy and spiders in the house. But it’s the cows and horses that really get me. It makes me wonder at the disconnection we all live with between our bodies and the natural world. I can observe the signs of rain. But I can’t feel it in my body the way the animals do. It’s a reminder of the distance between them and us, but by watching them I enter into a more symbiotic relationship with the world around me. This in itself has a fulfilment I scrabbled to find in the city.
The instructions come via email and gave me a link to ‘how to write a blog’. This is helpful. I’ve never written a blog. The instructions say things like – be direct with your audience, assume an intimacy. I make a list of things I can write about – I’ve got it here in front of me and there’s all sorts of interesting things on it & I intend to get to them I really do. But here’s the thing, I’m sitting here on the couch, in front of the fire and there’s a very spoilt corgi who has convinced someone to let him in out of the squally night and is now asleep at my feet and all these things are good and conducive to writing about the subjects on my list. But I can’t get to them. And the reason I can’t get to them is because I have all these cords attached to me.
To backtrack. My heart, that most essential of organs, that tracker of our emotions, is doing things it shouldn’t – or more accurately it might be doing things that it shouldn’t, which is why I’m wearing this monitor thing with the wires attached to my chest and the contradictory words in my ears to take it easy, but to carry on with my normal day.
The wires have pulled me up. They’ve made it tricky to get to the list of things I was going to write about and the reason they’ve pulled me up is because they force me to face my vulnerability. I hate this.
It’s raining. It has been raining for weeks, 3 weeks to be exact. 3 weeks on and off. For the first time in over a decade this corner of the country has been freed from its drought status. The earth is like a lung, a sponge. It heaves when you walk on it. It moans all night with the love cries of long buried frogs. Even in the dark it expands. It’s a different place.
It’s raining, and my book, which was written through the drought, is finally published and my heart, most resilient of organs is racing. Are these things related? Rationally, one would think not. But sometimes in the ‘writing before the writing’ unseen connections are revealed.
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