Chris Ferguson: A Day in the Country
THEY SAY THAT ONCE THE RED DUST GETS INTO YOUR BLOOD, IT’S THERE FOR GOOD. CHRIS FERGUSON TOTALLY AGREES.
I GARDEN IN BARE FEET, as though I too can be planted. When I was a child, my grandfather taught me to identify the native trees on his farm between Bathurst and Mudgee in central NSW. The gnarled, brittle gum trees and scribbly gums that grew on the rocky hillsides were my favourites. Their twisted branches reaching out at odd angles, the lumps and bumps and squiggles on silver white trunks, they appeared to me to be trees with a story.
My grandfather loved the magnificent yellow box trees. He said that they showed us where the good soil was. Their canopy provided shade for his flock of merino sheep during the hot summer months and the dry wood of trees long past burned brightly in his wood-fired stove during winter.
It seemed that yellow box trees grew with confidence — they knew who they were and where they belonged — while scribbly gums made the best of where they found themselves.
When I turned 30 I left my home and moved right out west to live among trees that were unfamiliar to me: mulga and bimble box, cork-, iron-, beef- and bloodwood trees. I learnt their names, noticed when they flowered and savoured their shade in the relentless heat of the inland.
My husband and I had bought a station in the isolated north-western corner of NSW, 250 kilometres west of Bourke. We arrived in the middle of the decade-long Millennium Drought, which stretched our already scant resources. We fenced and mustered and worked and somehow made a place for ourselves. I gardened in bare feet, warm red earth between my toes, and I transplanted okay.
Our two children completed their primary schooling via School of the Air from Broken Hill. For the most part I was their teacher and playmate, as well as their mum. They worked beside us and became competent stockmen. We were all in it together and everybody’s contribution was valued.
Our trips to town were limited to about six each year. Grocery shopping took on another dimension as I lined up three trolleys at the checkout, then squeezed it all into my dual-cab utility, the kids helping to push cartons of long-life milk under the seats or passing boxes to me as I manoeuvred them around station supplies stacked on the back. In all those years of packing utes, there was only one person who offered to help, an Indigenous man in Bourke who saw me struggling. “You wanna hand, Missus?”
“Yeah, that’d be great.” He passed up boxes and laughed. “You be right with him now?” “I reckon, thanks hey.” “No worries.” Time marches on and some trees grow tall. The wind pushes others too far and they lose limbs, lean precariously >