The Woman on the Mountain

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.

I have a telephone, but I must take care of my own power, water, sewerage and garbage—and of myself, for I live alone. I had never intended to live by myself, way out here in the mountains; I wouldn’t have entertained such a foolhardy idea. You’d have to be mad!

Perhaps I was at the time, four years ago, when I made the decision to end my second long-term relationship. My dad had recently died, and I was seeing the whole world differently. That break-up precipitated a second decision: stay here alone, or sell up and leave.

I’d first lived here in the late 1970s, with my husband and two young children. Our relatives and colleagues had indeed said we were mad, but we weren’t alone in following our back-to-the-land urges, just a bit late. Woodstock was long ago, Jimi Hendrix was dead; we hadn’t even thought of going to the Nimbin Festival; we owned a Kombi, but it was new and it didn’t have flowers on it. We were far too sceptical to be hippies—but we did read
Earth Garden.

For fifteen months we lived in a tent while we made mudbricks and built a small cabin, cooking on an open fire, carting buckets of water up the hill from a nearby spring, showering outdoors under a canvas bag. I absolutely loved the simplicity of it and the closeness to nature.

My husband used to work away from home for a few days each week, often staying away two nights, while the kids and I remained here, with no car and no phone. I was never worried—I’d done first aid, we were all healthy, and it was too remote for baddies.

But isolation tests a relationship, puts it under stress until any structural cracks show through the civilised veneer. When the marriage failed a few years later, I was as upset by the loss of my simple bush lifestyle as by the loss of my husband of twelve years. I’d married far too young, for the wrong reason—insecurity—and to the wrong person. For my foolishness I was then sentenced to thirteen years in the city, bringing up my children on my own, renting cheap, sad houses, and working at a crazy succession of jobs for which my Arts degree had not equipped me.

Every second weekend, if I could afford the petrol, we would drive the four and a half hours to our real home, which we always referred to as ‘the mountain’. When the kids had finished school and were so involved in their own lives that I hardly ever saw them, I announced I was going back up there for good.

Amazingly, a phone line had been put in to that remote area by then, under pressure from nervous weekenders. So in 1994 my new partner and I installed solar power and moved to the mountain. With a computer and a phone line, I could keep doing the copywriting/editing for the graphic design studio where I’d last worked. He would continue to do guitar repairs and restorations. The plan was that with no rent to pay, growing our own vegies and living frugally, we could make enough for thinly buttered bread at least. In the meantime we would pursue our creative interests, which for me was writing; for him, developing his own handmade classical guitar.

His plan worked—the Kellaway Classical Guitar sounds as beautiful as it looks.

My plan didn’t get started for the first four years, as there was always too much else to be done that, being female, I couldn’t ignore. We were together here for eight years, during which time this place had etched itself into my very bones. It wasn’t really a choice with this break-up; there was no way I could leave. Understanding this, and my grief-stricken state, my ex-partner did not create difficulties.

Having owned the mountain for nearly 30 years, I belonged to it.

I’d just turned 55; I had arthritis, which, though under control, restricted what I could do physically. How I would manage, whether I could manage, I didn’t know, but I was damn well going to try before I gave up my bush life again. The alternative was too depressing.

Unfortunately, the self-sufficient lifestyle here depends on things that require ongoing work and maintenance, much of which assume either strong wrists or a good relationship with things mechanical, neither of which I possess. There would be many days of frustration and foul language directed at sullen metal objects.

The isolation proved the easiest thing to cope with. Perhaps this is because I’m a writer, with my kaleidoscope brain full of people and places and situations demanding I get over here to the keyboard and get on with their stories—so I’m never lonely. Only once did I have an intense feeling of ‘aloneness’, which is not the same as loneliness. It was the first time I’d arrived back here by myself at night. I always tried to get back by twilight to avoid a nerve-wracking trip from town, peering for, second-guessing and dodging panicked marsupials. The Council slash the exotically rye-grassed edges of their long and lonely tarred road; many wallabies and wallaroos are enticed there to graze—and many are killed.

The feeling began almost as soon as I turned off the engine and headlights. Silence. Blackness. Emptiness. I flicked the torch beam about as I walked down to the dark house ... where no one was waiting. After the long drive in around the uninhabited forested ridges of the national park, it hit me: ‘I am totally alone here—this huge forest doesn’t give a damn about me! Anything could happen and nobody would know. What am I doing here? Who am I kidding? I’m not this brave...’ and a lot more in the same vein.

Sudden, overpowering awareness of what an irrelevant human dot I was in this vast wild world.

Rushing inside, I lit the fire, sobbing, sniffling, feeling extremely sorry for myself because I would
have
to leave now I felt like that. But as the familiar cosiness of my cabin settled around me like a child’s comforter, the feeling passed. I suppose it had been a flash of panic.

Later, when I went outside and looked up at the enormity of the starry sky, undimmed and undiminished by city lights, I didn’t feel overwhelmed. I felt I was in my right place, and grateful to be so.

I once had a similar panicky feeling on a small island, surrounded by sea and with no other land in sight. It was milder but more persistent, and during my stay I had to consciously keep it below the surface. My moment of panic here made me better understand what visitors often evidence when they finally reach my little mudbrick cabin. They’ve been driving for ages, have seen only one house in the last half hour, most likely have taken a few wrong turnings—and suddenly there I am, on my tiny patch of‘ civilisation’, a clearing in the midst of seemingly never-ending mountain forests. They feel intimidated. One city visitor experienced such anxiety that he had to bolt after only a few hours, instead of staying for the weekend as planned.

Yet 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 stringy-barks and she-oaks 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?

To illustrate how isolated I am here, and thus the degree of privacy to which I’m accustomed, when I put the phone down after finally getting it into my head that I was as shortlisted as you can get for the 2002 Alan Marshall Short Story Award—that is, I’d won ($2500!)—my first instinct was to rush straight out to the verandah railing and tell my world. Almost bursting with joyful incredulity, I screamed that all-purpose four-letter word so loud and so long that it hurt my throat. Tarzan would have been proud of my effort—but no one would have heard.

What would I have done in the city? Burst?

In the city I’d be hemmed in by a sea of roofs, hard footpaths and roads, fences too close, traffic too loud, other people’s dramas or plaintive dogs too present and unstoppable. I’d avoid the front verandah or balcony like everybody else, skulk in private places of the garden if I was lucky enough to have one, and long for a vast canvas of sunset skies unbroken by blank-faced office towers, for vistas of green and blue with not a red-brick wall or red-tile roof in sight.

People often ask me, ‘Why do you live way out there, so far away from everything?’

I usually simply answer, ‘Because I can.’

I might continue, ‘And it all depends on what you mean by “everything”, doesn’t it?’

I have email and phone contact (lightning strikes and floods permitting) if I want it, ABC Radio National to keep my brain ticking, and plenty of wood, water and sunshine. I can enjoy my home-grown vegetables, home-baked bread and home-brewed beer, great views, privacy and solitude interspersed with visits from family and friends. I am able to live in a natural environment, to take my proper place in what I consider the real world, the whole wild rich world around me—and I can always drive to that other ‘everything’ if I should need it.

So my final answer to their ‘Why?’ is ‘Why not?’

Writers need solitude to write, but they also need opportunities for inspiration and observation, so as to have something to write about. Typically, you’d imagine a writer living in...

Where I live there aren’t any subtle interplays of human relationships to observe and dissect; there aren’t any other humans.

There aren’t any walled gardens, winding staircases or mysteriously locked doors to set in play a train of speculation; there aren’t any other buildings.

There aren’t any evocative ruins, hauntingly hollow shells, dry-stone storytellers; there’s never been any other buildings.

There aren’t even any rusting ploughshares, although I found a rusting crosscut-saw blade from the cedargetters of the ‘red gold’-rush days. I have written several fictional stories about earlier settlers here, but mostly it has been the bush itself, my sense of this place, that has inspired my fiction.

According to the census, I live alone. If a spy were to slink over the ridge and watch me as I go about my daily outdoor business—emptying the compost bucket, sipping coffee on the verandah, heading up the hill to the loo, pegging out washing, shovelling up horse manure, splitting firewood—he’d probably agree.

In reality, I share my mountain with many others, none of whom wear clothes or comment on mine; none of whom have ever invited me to any of their social events, or even to tea, despite helping themselves to my tucker when they please; and none of whom seem to have any awareness of the respect due to me as a superior being by way of my only having two legs when they have four.

They have obviously read the sign on my property gate, ‘Wildlife Refuge’. They know that means they take precedence here, but it’s supposed to be within reason. They do let me occupy a small fenced-in spot in the middle of these 164 acres. They treat this as we do a cage at the zoo, except that familiarity does indeed breed contempt. They are very involved in their own societies. I am not invited to join; I’m merely an oddity that is tolerated—in my place.

Yet as a writer I must draw on the society around me, and since that is non-human for most of the time, much of what I’m writing gets classed as ‘nature writing’. I don’t approve of this division into genres by topic. If I write about people as a part of nature, what genre is that?

What I write from my mountain is thus not to do with the dialogues and dialectics of a society primarily concerned about the status of cappuccinos versus café lattes. I’m afraid others more in touch with that world must write about it. My world is unfashionable, timeless and teeming and intensely fascinating. It commands my interest, my passion and my pen.

So far as I am concerned, I am an observer of the world in which I live, just like Jane Austen.

And if most of my neighbours are wallabies, well, better Wallaby World than Wally World. I feel about the latter as people often do about here—it’s all right for a visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.

However, I wouldn’t say no to a few months’ writer’s residency in one of those romantic places with a village down the road.