Memory of Place

After many years away, I’ve come back to see where I grew up as a child; a wheat and sheep farm in central-west New South Wales. Tiny compared to the merged ones today. We moved away when I was thirteen years old. Some years later our farmhouse burnt down. When I heard, I was sad this part of my childhood; a box of memories, was gone forever.

I’m standing in endless red dirt looking at empty space, failing to rebuild my house from imagination. Small clumps of scrappy artichoke thistle and ragweed grow where our patch of lawn once encircled the house, like a moat defending the civilised from the barbarian. A stupid place to live really, growing crops and fattening animals in barren soil fertilised by super-phosphate. But I didn’t feel melancholic about this futility, simply numb emptiness. I was surprised by that.

No longer able to recreate my home in my mind, I stared instead at the flat landscape, longer than it was high. As a child it seemed the opposite, looking up was eternity but around me was crowded possibilities. Now slowly, the physicality of the place leaked a trickle of memories into long-dried courses within me.

Sparse stands of gum trees, smaller now of course, feathered the edges of barely visible tracks leading to paddocks and fallen fences. A lonely tractor was rusting into history which my brother and I used to play on for hours. Next to it was a pinched tree, one we thought enormous back then. My much older brother, about twenty years old at the time came to visit one day. We thought him the greatest footballer on earth (having been invited to play VFL with South Melbourne). One day we watched awestruck as he kicked a football over the top of the tree. We idolised him but we didn’t really know him. He was too old.

Flickers of my childhood, both good and bad came into view like snowy TV reception. Little chicks we thought warm and safe in cages, headless, killed by foxes; Setting off fireworks like Roman candles and Tom Thumbs on cracker night around a bonfire to keep the biting cold at bay. The best ones were the little parachutes that floated down with toy men hanging below. Early next morning we would rush out of bed to forensically scan the ground for their landing spots; The stench of the rotting goanna Dad shot up a tree that didn’t fall down for months; The tawny frogmouth owls which both fascinated and scared us with their eerie nocturnal hooting; Going bird-nesting, that awful art of climbing trees, stealing eggs from nests just to push pinholes in each end and blow out the yolk. We’d then add them to our precious collection. Sometimes no yoke would drip so we’d break them open to look at half formed hairless chicks curled up inside.

I wandered over to the dam, finding crusted dirt instead of murky water. It was where the yabbies used to live. We’d tie meat to one end of a short string and the other to a stick pushed deep into the bank. When the string went taut, we’d yank them out as fast as we could before they got a chance to scurry back in. Near this dam we’d trap rabbits venturing out of their burrows. Terrible metal jaws that snapped shut, crushing furry legs and killing them with shock. Sometimes a feral cat would be caught, desperately hissing and howling. They never died easily, and Dad usually had to hit them over the head with a metal pipe. We couldn’t look. The guttural sound and the expectant thump frightened us. At least the rabbits went quietly.

Thinking back, the cruelty we inflicted on animals was a constant. The tailing of lambs with rubber rings, mulesing sheep to stop their arses getting flyblown and full of maggots. The worst thing was cutting off the balls of young male pigs to sterilise them. The sound of a screaming pig as its sack is sliced off with a razor and sulphur thrown on to prevent infection is possibly the most distressing one could ever hear. All its fearful incomprehension of the moment summed up in pierced squealing. Still, my brother and I would walk around the yard throwing these soft rocks at each other. Once I trapped my brother under a water tank and pissed all over him.

Our farm was both a magical heaven and a marginal hell where the weather ruled our lives like a God, sometimes benevolent and other times malevolent, always beyond our control, treating us no differently to the animals we regarded as inferior. Sun in spring that helped wheat grow could turn into a nasty evaporator of water and hope in summer. Rain, when it came, would sometimes be spiteful hail flattening everything we’d planted. Gentle winds could turn instantly into storms and cock-eyed bobs, their paths unhindered by the flat landscape, arriving to tear at walls, like a mad man trying to get inside. One time a plague of mice, thousands upon thousands, descended on the place like a frenzied army looking for food. We had to sleep with no sheets on our beds and the bed posts placed inside buckets of water to drown them before they climbed up the mattress. Dad opened a shed door once and the entire floor moved back and forth like a swelling ocean. I had nightmares for weeks.

I wandered for the next couple of hours and just before leaving I bent down, scooping up a handful of dirt and filled my jeans pocket to take back home to Perth. I felt more love and respect now for my parents. I never appreciated how they had the strength to live here and then the strength to leave. I could only imagine the shock of emotional displacement, moving to an unknown city on the other side of the country, friends and family left behind.

With the ever-tormenting flies following in glee, I walked head down towards the farm gate where we used to wait to catch the school bus. My car was parked there, its sparkling yellow paint looking poncy and ridiculous.

Approaching the gate, I noticed a range of distant hills, light blue lumps against a grey winter sky. I paused in astonishment. I had no memory of them at all. It felt like the first time I had ever seen them. How could I remember a football kicked over a tree but not a range of hills?

I rubbed the dirt in my pocket between my fingers, the pangs of lost love and long years welling up my eyes.