Inking our stories

In the paddock my foot kicks over a horseshoe rusted brown with age. It lies on the top of the soil, the wind having blasted the surface layer away exposing its rusted fragility. I pick it up and ponder about the horse. I put it back, leaving it there to rust some more.

Friday I went to a workshop hosted by Public Records Victoria and held in the Trench Room at the Town Hall. I love ascending that staircase to the Trench Room, the ornate carvings, the ceiling roses, the walls painted in Heritage colours. The Mysteries of Dr. Blake is filmed in this building and in watching it I am able to return to times past, which is also the purpose of my visit here today. The workshop is called ‘Getting around the block: property and land research’, and on first glance it might seem a topic that doesn’t inspire fascination, but as the morning unfolds it opens up a treasure trove of quirks and intricacies from our local history. I’ve come with a dual purpose: one- to see if I can find some keys to unlocking more about our property’s history; and two- to see what ideas I can take away for my teaching, or even research.

I’m instantly hooked when they begin talking about how the sources we will explore today will give us an ability to build a better picture of the past, and therefore, of the present. I love this notion of continuity and change, of looking at tangible artifacts and seeing what we can glean from those about the less tangible aspects of our heritage. I’m the youngest person in the room by years and I wonder if this is because it’s a Friday morning and I have the ability to integrate this into my work day, or if it is because it is only when people are older that they have the time, space and perhaps even, inclination, to pause and wonder how things came to be as they are.

I’m soaking up resources I haven’t used before – Niven’s directory of Ballarat, the Sands & McDougall street directories, the list of Parish maps, the links to wills and probates, to rate notices, to township plans. As we learn how to dig through the archives holding over 170 years of Victorian history stored in Ballarat and Melbourne, I’m becoming seduced by the notion of leaping off the edge of the present and into the past. I wonder why I never took my history studies further than my undergraduate degree – this idea of sleuthing through carefully inked records is wholly romantic. Perhaps in real life it’s less romantic, more a series of hits, misses and dead ends that can lead to disenchantment. Here in this room though, I see how each archive reveals a new piece and each piece contributes to the making of the whole. I often talk about my love for Tasmania as being comprised of the fact that when I’m there I can feel history breaking through into the present and in this workshop I’m reminded of how Ballarat can be the same. Perhaps looking into history is like looking at those 3D image puzzles, once you stare long enough and find the picture, it is impossible to ‘unsee it’ – every time you look at the puzzle, the picture emerges almost unbidden. Perhaps history is the same, once you alert yourself to the horses that rattled down the road, the women who ran private hospitals and pubs, the men who left their daughters hotels and a ‘set of bees and honey’ so that they could live ‘independently of any man’, once you find and listen to their stories, you cannot walk down the streets of your town without seeing history flashing through the fabric of the present.

I depart the workshop, a set of keys in hand and I come home ready to use them to unlock the past and continue the journey. We are all each of us already and always in the process of making history, of inking our own story into the fabric of existence.

Spring awakenings

The last week of winter has arrived as an early spring. Each morning we awake to fog hanging low over the mountain but as we grab cups of tea and head outside to feed the fish, the sun breaks through the fog and blue sky heralds the changing season. It's an awakening that sings of possibility. Here, on the farm in the warming sunshine, all seems possible. Rohan and I are awakening from our winter hibernation, hatching plans for farm projects for the rest of the year. We rush home from work so that we can get out in the paddocks and soak in the air. 

The weekend meant time to get out on the farm and meet the changing season - we mowed, we had a quick lesson in pruning from Nam and I tackled the orchard, and now need to tackle it again when David called over and said we hadn't taken enough off! On the apricot and almond trees blossom is already starting to emerge, bringing promise of fruit to come. We made a barrow load of mulch for the compost with the prunings and need to make some more to under the pine trees where we will plant berries, with the acidity from the pine needles just what they need to help them grow. We replaced the door at the back of the studio that leads into the pizza oven and we are going to give that room a much needed makeover - we'll rip off the wood covering the window, plaster the roof and walls and give the pizza oven a new coating of concrete and maybe a coat of paint on the outside. With the flue attached and the makeover done, it should serve as a great outdoor yet indoor cooking area for pizza. 

As the farm awakens it reminds you of the things that are important. At work there is a pressure for me to take on a new position, one that brings hours more work and a heavy responsibility. When in the office, I think perhaps I should do it, but then my eye begins to twitch when I think of all it entails. I drive home, turning the corner into our road and the rise where next door's green paddock meets the blue horizon startles me with it's contrast and beauty. All thoughts of increased responsibility and workload disappear. This is what matters- spending time outside, watching green shoots grow taller in the sunshine, talking about plans with friends who've recently got properties of their own, taking trips to Melbourne or Warrnambool to eat and laugh with family. 
My eye twitching ceases as the awakening occurs. 

After winter, spring will come...

It's been a while between farm blog posts- winter descended on the farm, days grew shorter and colder, and nights dropped below zero. During this time the farm fell into an easy, quiet rhythm. Days began and ended around the fire, clutching mugs of tea, heads crowned with woollen beanies and hands clad in mittens or gloves, the fire and the kitchen became the throbbing heart of the house. In winter it is easy to see how the kitchen has taken centre stage in portrayals of farm life, for it is here that you return to seeking warming food and drinks after being outside in the bitterly cold air. Our first winter on the farm has seemed icily cold, but perhaps that is how it will always be here at Innisfree? Walking the dog in the morning, wrapped in layers and quilted jackets, my feet crunch over grass that has been snap frozen overnight. The heavens open and rain falls, making a persistent slush in the lower end of the paddock and near the hay shed. My gumboots are caked in mud and if you venture too far you get bogged, 4WD or not. 

The olives meanwhile slowly ripened and on weekends we went out to pick more, laying them in containers of salt. After a few weeks we put some in water to leech out the salt and tasted them. They were a revelation- richer and sweeter than any store bought olive I had tasted. After tasting them I donned my apron and went straight back outside to pick more. 

Weeks passed and still winter persisted. The mountain lay shrouded in cloud and for days not a glimmer of sunshine broke through the grey. I flew overseas for work, leaving Rohan home on the farm and arriving in London on a bright, sunny day. Lying in the bedroom that night in our apartment I was sweltering as I remembered the way London traps the heat and feels hotter than it actually is. The next day Rachel and I went for lunch on the rooftop at Selfridges, and, there in the sun, I got my first London sunburn. My pale, wintery skin was no match for the English sunshine and I'm embarrassed to even write that. So while I spent nearly 2 weeks in England in storybook sunshine, back at home winter was reaching out her gnarled, cold fingers over everything. Snow fell on the paddocks and open water tanks froze solid for days. As I wandered in sunshine through the fields next to Herstmonceux Castle where my conference was, Rohan sent me photos of the farm, white and crisp. I loved the summer sun on the other side of the world and my trips to the ballet, the theatre, and being in London. Each time I'm there I feel strangely at home, I wander down streets that are both foreign and yet strangely familiar after consuming a English novels like food.  Despite this part of me yearned to be home on the farm and when I saw photos of the cows sprinkled with snow, I wished I was home to be part of the story that is our first winter on the farm.

Rohan meanwhile was living through a comedy of errors as he bogged his car, and then had a neighbour bog his car and someone else's tractor in the paddock in an attempt to offer assistance. I commented that it seemed a bit like swallowing a spider to catch a fly... Our neighbour David came to the rescue, dragging all the bogged vehicles of various sizes and ownership from where  they lay idle and immovable. 

Over the last couple of weeks there have been signs that the seasons are beginning to move towards change. In our kitchen garden planters the seeds that Rohan planted are beginning to germinate and tiny, green limbs begin to push their way through the chocolate soil. The grey clouds are beginning to clear and on some days, like today, the sun pushes across the sky leaving only whispy clouds. In the paddocks, the sheep are moulting, saggy pieces of fleece hanging from them as they rub up against fences, leaving tufts of white fluff behind. They begin to resemble balding, middle aged men, with tufts popping off their hides every now and then. 

With the advent of sunshine we become more active. The mower is retrieved and I begin my mowing meditation, gliding up and down between rows of the grove. We buy a new mulcher, needing a bigger one to handle the pruning that Dave has been doing and that we still need to tackle. In the concrete tank I'd pretended I would make a dipping pool, we now have 55 trout. The nutrients from there will feed our gardens and later in the year I'll be feasting on fat, juicy trout. There are fruit trees to be pruned and ash from the fire to be sprinkled around the cherry trees to save them from the cherry tree slug that munched through their leaves prior to autumn.

We still need to get chickens and hopefully in the next school holidays Rohan will have time to mend the chicken coop so that we can keep the chickens safe from foxes. On the radio I heard that is only 125 days till Christmas and so my kind turns to fire preparation- as always there will be much to be done to prepare for the ever present threat of fire come the warmer weather.  

In the meantime we need to call our local landcare who are working on a gorse eradication project - this will be perfect for us to become involved in and we can begin to tackle the back paddock which is suffering from an invasion of gorse. Yesterday we shepherded a koala that was heading to the middle of the road, making sure that he/ she found their way back into a tree alongside the mine rather than the middle of the bitumen.

There is much to be done but eight months after we moved in here I still cannot believe how much I love it. I think it is the open, endless sky I love most of all. It's an ever changing landscape: a sea of clouds; a pallet of muted pinks, oranges and reds; a rumbling, dark and threatening storm; and a twinkling, black map of the universe. 

Brandy, you’re a fine girl….

I’m not sure what this song has to do with olive picking, maybe it was the talk of brine that got me thinking of this song (the next line goes, but my love, my life and my lady is the sea…). Because olive picking time means salt, salt means brine and brine means I need a LOT of jars.

It’s been a gap between posts as we’ve both been at the business end of school and uni teaching semesters. Rohan is now on holidays and I’m about to enter my last week of teaching for the semester and even though I have a massive pile of marking to do, I’m trying to draw breath – 2 days of mental health first aid training reminded me again of how important it is to take time to stop and smell the roses, or in our case – pick the olives.

We began our olive picking experiment on the long weekend when Rohan had his family up for his birthday.

Happy birthday Rohan!

 Prior to sitting down to lunch everyone wandered out into the grove for some experimenting with the best olive picking strategies. Dave had given Rohan some olive picking gear for his birthday including some mini rake heads and handles and a big sheet of shadecloth for laying out around the tree. 

This was the raking experiment, where people clustered around and banged the olives off the branches onto the shadecloth for collection.

 I’d gone more old school and had bought a couple of butchers aprons with pockets on the front for some hand picking.  A couple of hours out there and we had well over 30 kilos of olives, from about 3 – 4 trees. With about 357 trees to go we were underway!

 1st Note to self: Must buy olive press.

The next step was pickling recipes. We began with a tub, some water and some salt – following a recipe from Sally Wise’s “A year on the farm” which recommends throwing all that in together, sealing the lid and walking away for at least 6 months. The leave and forget approach to pickling. Love it. So one beer keg and 12 kilos of olives later and we have an olivey tub of goodness sitting in the spa.

2^nd note to self: Must move olive tub to more sensible location.

The next pickling experiment was in a tub of salt. No water, just salt and leave the olives for about 4 weeks until they have created some sort of weird briney situation all of their own. Then you can jar them.

3^rd note to self: Must eat more jarred goods so have more jars for pickling.

 Today’s olive experiment was to find these beautiful black babies (here you can see that I don’t know my varieties at all, otherwise I’d name them). I picked them with my trusty apron and then began to follow a recipe from an Italian preserving book that Rohan got from Dave for his birthday. Step one was to drop them in boiling water, remove them and leave them overnight to dry. Tomorrow I’ll have to put them in a container with some salt and in 7 days I can jar them in olive oil with chili and commence eating. Express olives from tree to stomach!

4^th note to self: See note 1. Must buy olive press so have large quantities of oil for preserving olives in. I sense a catch 22 here. No press = need to preserve. Preserve = need for olive oil. Olive oil = need for press. 

Um Houston, we have a problem.

Of cows and medlars

The last couple of weeks have been incredibly busy as we reach the end of term for Rohan and end of semester for me. We’re both in need of a holiday and waking up in the night, to do lists running through our heads. On the farm though, things still demand attention.

As we drove past other people’s paddocks and saw calves tottering around on spindly legs eating grass, we were more keen than ever to get some cows for our back paddocks. Maryann said that Chris can help us out with the mathematical formula for working out how many cows to get given the space of our land so that we won’t have to purchase feed for them if they munch through all the grass. See, who said maths has no application for the real world?

Friday night I headed home to Warrnambool for a very belated mother’s day and Rohan headed to the pub in search of cows with Dave. Victory ensued when he beeped me to say he’d lined up a couple of 18 month old heifers from a local and as I type this, we’re waiting for our heifers to arrive. Yesterday we headed into the nearest paddock past the olive grove to clean up around the gates so we can more easily open and shut them, and inspected the fences, checking to see how likely it is that the bull next door could leap through and impregnate our girls, as I don’t wish to pay for semen I haven’t asked for (does that sound as wrong as you read it, as it sounds as I type it?).

Meanwhile Jane sent me an email last week linking to an article in the Epicure section of The Age which mentioned medlars. Oh strange fruit that they are, it was a timely reminder that I needed to get out there and get them harvested and on their little hay beds. I’d seen a tweet from the Royal Mail in Dunkeld earlier in the week that had rows and rows of medlars lined up on hessian sacks, waiting to be used for a dessert. Meanwhile I reminded myself of the process by checking out this website:  http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2012/11/medlar-jelly-recipe/

So before work one morning as the rain tumbled down, I grabbed my gumboots and raincoat and headed outside. First stop was the hay shed, to grab some hay and I went to the studio and made a little bed of hay on our trestle table. Next stop was the medlar tree which had lost its leaves, leaving only the fruit hanging on stark brown branches. I picked them and headed back to the studio where I lay them out on the hay to ripen in a process known as ‘bletting’. Now we wait for the fruit to turn to some sort of sticky, squashy consistency where it kind of resembles rotting and then we can use it for making jelly or perhaps some sort of alcoholic beverage. Who knows the fine line between ripe and rotting though? It could be that we make something that tastes god-awful, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

The olives turn darker each day, resembling tiny dark plums that beg to be picked and munched on. Despite their enticing colours, I’m not falling for this trick. Rohan, however, decided that they couldn’t taste that bad raw and picked an olive the colour of night the other day. His face, the spitting and the swearing that followed, suggested that they could in fact taste that bad and perhaps even worse than anticipated. Next weekend we’re going to have a bash (literally) at picking some, but we still haven’t worked out what to do from there. I’m reminded again, how much I still have to learn about farming olives!

So while I work out what to do with the olives, the phone has rung heralding the arrival of the cows. Better get moving and welcome the girls to the farm!

Olive preserving failures: Number one.

We’ve had some wild and windy nights here on the farm. As the trees blow all through the night, I lie inside wondering if any branches, leaves or olives will be left by morning. After the first of these wild nights, I went out the following afternoon to see the base of the olive trees littered with green olives of various sizes. My beautiful olive crop lay on the ground, glistening with rain that had fallen during the day. I grabbed a green shopping bag and began picking them up, discarding those that seemed too bruised, or which looked like they might have already been pecked at by the birds. Indy wandered along beside me, off lead, munching on olives and spitting out the pips- who knew dogs were a fan of olives straight from the tree? (I had done some frantic checking online to make sure I wasn’t poisoning her).

An hour or so later I had over 3 kilos of olives and no idea what to do next. I figured I could use these olives as an experimental batch to try out different preserving recipes. About a week earlier, I’d had a conversation with one of my colleagues who told me some of her fondest memories of the first village she lived in were of olive harvest days. On these days, families from the village would send a boy as a representative of the family to pick olives with the community. As she grew up in a family of girls, her mother would send her and her sisters as the family representatives. She talked about picking the olives, filling bucket upon bucket and then feasting at lunch from tables set up in the grove with the other adults and children. She went on to say she left this village at the age of 7 in a time that wasn’t officially classed as war, but there was a push for territory, and a moving on of the residents of the entire village in less than a week. Anyone left after that time was massacred and killed. As she spoke, I was reminded of how incredibly privileged and safe my own life has been. We talked about my own plans to have people over for harvest, to share food, to talk and laugh, I said she should come to recapture some of those earlier memories and she promised to find out from her mother the recipes she uses for preserving her olives.

In the meantime I headed to my usual source of information, the internet, to see what I could discover. As I read, a sinking feeling grew in the pit of my stomach. ‘Don’t pick up and use ‘dropped’ olives – they will be bad’. Uh-oh. I had just collected 3 kilos of olives and now I discover they will be bad? Still I decided to persevere. What does the internet know? I reasoned. Anyway, technically these weren’t ‘dropped’ olives, these were olives that had been kindly harvested by the wind on a stormy night. What’s the worst that can happen? It’s all a science experiment.

So with a sink full of olives I began by washing them, scoring slits in them to allow the bitterness to leech out and then putting them into a barrel filled with a mixture of salt and water. The plan was that we would change the water each night for at least two weeks before putting the olives into jars with whatever recipe we decided upon. 3 nights later and we hadn’t changed the first batch of water. This wasn’t going well. Meanwhile, I was stricken by fear about what to do with the salty water if I was to dispose of it. What do people do with barrels of salty water? I can’t pour that down the drains on a farm, sending back it into the earth. I thought about collecting all the excess water and taking it back to the sea, pouring one lot of salty brine back into another. Why had I never thought about the environmental impact of olive preserving processes? Meanwhile 5 days had passed and I still hadn’t changed the water. As an olive preserver I was failing, and failing rapidly.

Salvation arrived, as it often does, in the form of a book. While shopping for presents, I came across a book by Sally Wise called ‘A year on the farm’. 

Wise moved from a home on Tasmania’s coast to one in the Derwent valley, sharing recipes and tales of her first year on the new property. She writes of finding traditional methods for preserving olives complex and time-consuming and then includes a method that seems much more my style. 5 kilos of olives, 500g of salt, 5 litres of water. Throw it all in together, seal the lid and leave for 3-6 months. Sure it might be a bit longer before you can eat them, but I like this idea of throw in, leave, forget and come back a few months later to see what happened.

Out in the grove, the olives have started to change colour, shifting from green to a deep shiny purple. 

They are stunningly beautiful and I’m getting ready to pick some and throw them in a container for preserving experiment number 2. Luckily I’ve got about 360 trees to experiment with, so my failures become just another part of my olive tapestry of tales on the