Maiden Voyages

The long weekend glimmered like a beacon of hope after a busy but good first week of semester. I'd come home each day buzzing with enthusiasm about my uni teaching and the feedback I'd collected from students suggested they were enjoying the first week as much as me. Each night I came home exhausted and wondering when I would find time to sit down and do some of the writing my research and job demands. I'd even missed my regular Tuesday morning virtual 'shut up and write' session. Surely this week it will be easier to get some work related writing done? Here's hoping or it could be a lean year for research publications! 

After the promise of rain all week, some finally fell on Friday evening. Clouds drifted across the landscape until the house was shrouded and rain floated through the air in soft sheets. It was far from a downpour, more a light splattering of drops, but it was enough to give me hope that rain will come again. After letting the rain tap my skin outside, Rohan and I sat down to watch some House of Cards as it is our new addiction. Halfway through an episode and the power went out. We padded around the house in the dark, and with the moon hiding behind the clouds, there was no light to penetrate the inky, black darkness. Each time the power goes off I'm suddenly reminded of all the reasons why we need a back up power source and our new water tanks. With the power out we only have the water in our pipes if the bore isn't pumping and at the front of the property our electronic gate stays firmly shut. So it was an early night, but not quite an old fashioned one as we both lay in bed, the room illuminated by the glow of our iPads. 

Saturday morning and Rohan was up early to go hunting rabbits with Nam (and I've got a vision of a Disney cartoon in my head now). I, however, had woken with one of those headaches that makes you feel like your brain is sloshing against your skull each time you move your head. Standing up was like running a marathon, and Rohan, the saviour that he is fed me toast, tea and painkillers in bed before he headed outside. A few more hours of drug induced sleep and I was up, slowly inching around the paddocks trying to get fresh air to cure me. David, Jane, Lisa and Neale were coming up for the weekend and I was desperate to get my brain in working order before they arrived. All the things on my Saturday to-do list lay untouched, and I was even more grateful to house guests who arrived with lunch, wine, herbal tea and good spirits. I felt like a terrible host though, drifting off in conversation, pressing my fingers into the point at the back of my neck where I could feel some relief and wandering around the house in a zombie like state. 

With my brain not working and a frantic week before I hadn't organised anywhere for dinner and so we headed to our new local a couple of k's up the road, the Shamrock, which had only opened the weekend before after a long period of renovations. I'd read some of the history of the pub and of the town it's located in, Dunnstown, which was named after James Dunn, a man who grew barley and made whiskey at a distillery located there in the 1850s. A once thriving town, it was populated by the Irish who fled the potato famine, and was popular given its location to the Ballarat goldfields. The distillery closed down and the Irish turned back to potato growing. 

At home that afternoon I'd tried to get my head together by reading the Britt family history book that Jane had lent us. Reading it I realised her family history is intimately woven into the landscape all around us, with the pub down the road part of her extended family's stories. Looking at the map of the area with the names of the families that owned parcels of land, I saw Irish name after Irish name. Some of them are names that are familiar to me, names that belong to Irish families who also lived in the south-west where I grew up. As we drive towards the pub I wondered what place it will play in our new lives? 

Inside it was busy and stories began to seep out of every brick. I recognised faces from the Christmas party at the community centre and while only a week old I had a sense that the pub would become a hub for the local community. The footy tipping chart hung on the wall, a few names (including Paddy O- can you get more Irish than that?) already pencilled in. At the bar we chatted with Shane, the publican and realised that even here we needed a booking for dinner! We ordered, thinking we'd eat at the bar, but got a table when Lisa did some hunting and some reorganisation. Towards the end of the meal, Shane got up and in ways reminiscent of a 21st thanked us all for being there, encouraged us to join the footy tipping and introduced the first of their sat night bands. I did some people watching, creating stories and lives for the people in the pub. 'There's a book in that pub', I said to Rohan Sunday morning as we lay in bed, 'I'll have to go back each week for research'. I'd sent Kat from work who has bought her parents house nearby an email telling her we'd taken our maiden voyage to the pub and she replied saying that her dad knows our property and knows about a whole range of the previous owners. He's keen to meet up at the pub to share a beer and some stories so I definitely have to go back now! 

Sunday meant coffee, wandering around the Mill markets for bargains and then we took a trip up to the top of Mt. Warrenheip and peered out through the trees to find our farm in the distance, our rows of olives looking neat and symmetrical from far away. 

Once our guests headed home, we decided to take our first off farm trip and headed to Warrnambool where we were picking up a load of kindling for our wood fire in the form of fence posts from where my folks had their fence replaced. Much as I love the olive groves and paddocks, I had been feeling a bit landlocked and was itching to hear the sound of the sea rolling in the distance through my bedroom window.

 In Warrnambool it was like an Indian summer was underway, at the beach a surf lifesaving competition was on, fishermen filled the bay and people lazed around tables at Lake Pertobe. For a moment, I could just imagine it was the start of summer and that holidays stretched out before me. On Monday morning I headed into Kermonds for a burger, where tired Port Fairy Festival goers lingered outside taking pictures of themselves outside the shop.

If you're not from Warrnambool, you probably don't understand what the big deal is, but all I can say is if you're ever in the south-west then you have to do yourself a favour and try a burger (with double sauce to pretend you're a local). With my fix of the seaside it was time to head home and there the olives were waiting. 

Tonight the rain has arrived, I sat at the kitchen table with Maryann who dropped in on her way home from work and we sniffed the air - that gorgeous smell of rain on hot, parched land. Indy and I wandered around the grove, rain falling while the sheep huddled under the trees. There, in the paddock, with rain falling on my bare arms, I was happy. A perfect farm moment captured in memory. 

Unlocking mysteries

'All you need is ignorance and confidence, then success is sure' 
                                                                            - Mark Twain

I was in the studio/ library/ gym room yesterday and I saw the blue of this book out of the corner of my eye, I picked it up and began re-reading the blurb, unable to remember what had attracted me to the book when I'd first bought it - was it just the mention of the sea? As I read on, I decided 'yep, I must re-read this' - the story of two people who bought a banana farm near the sea when they knew nothing at all about farming bananas. Seems we're not the only ones who venture out into new lifestyles without any idea of what we're doing and the Mark Twain quote at the start of the book captures perfectly my feelings about life here on the 'farm' (just don't call it a farm to people who have a real, normal amount of land, as opposed to the dinky 38 acres of our hobby farm).  Blind ignorance and optimism will surely see us succeed? Or those things will see us being too stupid to actually realise when we're failing so it will be okay anyway.

It's been a busy week for me with students in our new Masters of Teaching course starting this week. This is a course that a group of us had planned last year and so to see it finally begin has been fantastic - and I had a couple of days where I came home from work literally buzzing - so excited about the way the year had commenced, having the opportunity to team teach with uni colleagues, to bounce ideas around together with students and to have one of the best professional learning discussions I've had with a colleague after we observed each other's classes. It was a week where I was keenly aware why I work in education - learning is pervasive and the relationships you form with others in education settings are unlike anything else. Last night I saw a tweet from Pope Francis (love a Pontiff that gets onto twitter) that said 'Educating is an act of love; it is like giving life'. The Pontiff is onto something here, this concept that in education we are opening doorways for people, showing them ways of being, thinking, learning and living that perhaps they might not have considered before. So while our Masters of Teaching students started, our first years were getting into the Oweek spirit of things and here we see a whole different learning journey commence- some wandered the halls looking terrified, others looked unsure, others wandered with parents and one decided to leave after a day when the practicalities of bus timetables from another town all seemed too hard and too daunting. It would be easy to scoff at that and think 'what?', but when you're in first year with no family background of going to uni, little finance and you come up against a transport hurdle, it all seems too hard, too scary, too new and so you want to retreat to what it known, comfortable and easy. I'm lucky to work with colleagues who understand that sometimes it's not a lack of aspiration that stops people, but a lack of physical, material and other resources, and they work hard to help young people find their way in a world that is new and overwhelming.

While I pondered the nature of learning and waxed lyrical about how I loved my job (I'm sure that will fluctuate throughout the year), Dave continued to transform our old house. Each time he comes up the walls seem to straighten beneath his touch, the layers of paint brighten what was dull and with Rohan, Woody and Dave working on it yesterday, the trees emerged from the straggle of weeds and the old kitchen benches disappeared. We're doing a few small cosmetic touches by adding a couple of new cabinets, hoping that someone else might wander through, and like Rohan and I did, see their lives as homeowners starting in this small and humble house.

Yesterday I drove home and cattle were crossing the road as they moved from one paddock to the next, boys on quad bikes mustered them and I sat watching the black angus pad across the gravel road, their silky hides shining in the sunshine. They passed by and I kept driving, coming across one neighbour on his tractor, his face breaking into a smile and a hearty wave emerging from the cab when he saw me. Here already, we are part of something bigger than just us, we become part of the history of this place, woven into the landscape.

Friday night, our neighbour David came over, bringing us the card of an olive farmer he met at a farmer's market. This guy presses his own olive oil by hand and David had told him we'd just taken over with no idea of what we were doing or of what we would do with our olives. He's happy to come and see our farm, talk to us about our trees, and is also interested in buying our olives to press them if we do the harvesting. I'm so excited at the thought that someone will walk through the lines of trees with us and be able to tell us more about the trees we have. Rohan and I wandered through the grove last night, turning and twisting leaves and olives that grow bigger by the day. In our hands some olives lay oval shaped, while others are like round, green balls. Different varieties surely, but which ones? Here on a small business card, lays a clue that may unlock the mystery of our trees. While David was here we talked about the land around us, Rohan taking out the Britt family history book that Dave and Jane had lent us and which shows that Jane's relatives live just down the road, running the dairy. David nodded and told us that paddocks on the other side are also owned by the Britt family and that further down the road, the people there are related to the Britt family as well. We see the family history of the land emerge around us, people are cousins, uncles, aunts and Rohan wonders how our patch of land came to be owned by an Italian family when other patches of land were either passed on to family, or sold and then re-bought by people who wanted to keep it in the family. Where did our Italians come from? How did they find themselves here in a land surrounded by the Irish? It's another mystery to unlock as we continue to learn more about the place we've chosen to live.

Last night after Dave and Woody had gone home, we set about moving the sheep into another paddock to graze, moving an old bath for water, carting water in the ute to fill it up and then heading into the paddocks to muster our three girls into the next paddock. No sticks were required for moving the sheep this time and once we opened the gate, all three wandered in like they'd been waiting for us to do it. Once inside we wandered around as well as this was the first time I'd ventured into this smaller paddock and so we headed to the back of it to where the small dam lay dried up and empty. I wonder if we will get rain soon and if the dams will fill? Each week the forecast has promised days of rain, but as the promised days draw closer the forecast changes and the rain inches further and further away on the 7 day forecast and we're yet to get to the promised rain. Today held the promise of early morning showers and yet as I write this the sun is glinting of the silvery leaves of the olives and only small white clouds dot the sky. Rain when it comes will surely turn our soil to a rich chocolatey mess, and I can't wait for it. I can see myself plodding around, my gumboots slick with mud, raincoat on and hair matted with water - or is this just a hopeful fantasy?

So we wait. We wait for rain, we wait for more of the stories of the land to emerge and we learn everyday.