Annabelle Hickson: A Day in the Country

ANNABELLE HICKSON ON THE UNEXPECTED PERKS OF SOLITUDE AND ISOLATION.

“PEOPLE IN ENGLAND do not and cannot know what solitude is… Here it is wood, wood, all wood… I think that if I were to live alone in the bush I would go melancholy mad.” So wrote Emily Darvall, an English immigrant recently arrived in Australia, from her new home on her father’s farm in Parramatta. I’m reading a collection of the Darvall family letters written in Australia to their friends and family in England from 1839–1849. Initially, I picked up the book because they are ancestors of my husband’s family (our son’s middle name is Darvall). Now I reach for the letters because they’re utterly engaging. The idea of Parramatta being “wood, wood, all wood” is delightful. But the line that’s struck me the most is: “There is something wild and independent in our style of life which makes one forget the loss of a few comforts and luxuries.” I know I am hardly a frontier woman who has to ride hours on horseback to meet the postman on his monthly mail delivery like Emily did, but this sentiment resonates in me. “Wild and independent”: Emily, that is how I feel about our life on this farm, too. Having grown up in the city, I am very accustomed to everyone being specialised. You call a plumber for plumbing jobs, you take an orphaned animal to a wildlife shelter, you ferry your kids to a tennis coach to learn how to play tennis. Everything is outsourced, or at least outsourceable. But things are different in rural Australia. Because of the isolation, you just don’t have the outsourcing options. When we first moved here, I rang a plumber to come and put the gas on for my oven, which has a gas hotplate. That was three years ago. The gas hob now acts as extra bench space. For a stovetop, I use a camping stove and, more recently, the dodgy electric hotplates of an old oven wired up and plonked alongside its more modern counterpart by a passing electrician. Sometime during the waiting-for-a-plumber period, the kitchen sink started to regularly block up. I soon discovered domestic life is rather depressing without a functioning sink, so it was with some urgency that I begged my husband to come to the rescue. Ed, who’s a farmer not a plumber, built a system that blasts high-pressured water through the pipes. The pressure is so great it could launch a rocket into space, I’m sure of it. Congealed lamb fat and candle wax don’t stand a chance. I have no idea if this system would meet plumbing standards and regulations, but by god it works a treat. I, who arrived here a trained journalist, have not mastered plumbing but I have become an abandoned kangaroo carer/ floral-installation devotee/mad gardener and ride-on lawn mower aficionado. None of these things I had planned to be. My point is that when you are not expected to be so damn specialised, you can be all sorts of things. A certain amount of solitude and isolation necessitates all-roundedness. With that comes the unexpected joy of doing things yourself, of experiencing a sense of efficacy over your domestic life. This sense of efficacy — of being able to work things out yourself or of being willing to let things slide — is one of the greatest joys of living in the middle of nowhere. Sure, there’s no-one ‘professional’ to help if your sink gets blocked, but the flip side is no-one can come in and tell you what to do or how you should do it. It is here I really feel as if I am standing on my own two feet, in a way I never did in the city. Alongside Ed. Together, we are working things out for ourselves and our family. And that’s incredibly satisfying. We have a wild, possibly illegal plumbing system, the kids are playing ‘catch the guinea fowl’ on the roof and I’m having a coffee with a stray kitten purring on my neck. The windows have cobwebs and half the doors can’t close properly, but this life is ours. I feel very proud. Annabelle Hickson lives with her husband and three kids on a pecan farm in the Dumaresq Valley, NSW. Follow @annabellehickson on Instagram