the chook house

January 18, 2015

Rottnest 2015

Mini Murmurations.

Starlings do this thing. Instantaneously. Like a sheet shaken out. About to be laid over a bed. Thrown into the sky in one action. Graham is sitting on the arm of the couch on the balcony trying to capture the moment on his iPhone. It escapes him every time. They are alerted by. What? No one can work it out. Milly is sent to startle and throws sticks into the casuarina. They do not stir. Then, when no one is ready they fling themselves into the sky, light, like screwed up tissues. All a flutter. One flies into the house, attempts an escape through the fly screen but then crashes into a glass plane. It lies momentarily stunned on the cork floor tiles. Graham scoops it from the ground and releases it. The starling flies off, uninjured.

Later, back on the mainland it is discovered ( by Graham) that the birds are not Starlings since they only live on the east coast and perhaps the bird most likely is a Swallow – the Welcome Swallow.

January in Rottnest is new for us. A decade of trips in November during school term has come to an end since private school demands attendance, especially during exams. It is warmer than our usual holidays. Every day a cloudless blue sky with predictable easterly winds that change to south-westerly by the afternoon. No blankets required at night. Warm enough to inhabit the balcony all night long.

As we enter Longreach we sense a difference, but it takes us a few moments to realise what the difference is. Have some trees been removed? The rear brick fences of the chalets have been cut down, so a brick fence only a few feet high surrounds each yard. Everything on view. Bikes and the detritus of beach life. There is a feeling of over-exposure, less privacy. It takes us a few days to adjust, and then it is as if there has always been low fences. More cricket is played on the street. More view for the barbecuers. Not liking the change, turns to liking it, forgetting it was any other way.

Monte – pale, nuggetty, five years old. Bullish. Exuberant for life. He moves so fast that often he almost topples on the turn, but rights himself before he falls. He has only just learnt to ride a bike, but needs no trainer wheels, and can make the steepest hill. He perfects the skid. He needs someone to tighten the string of his swimming shorts and to tie his shoelaces, but he knows to check before he eats anything and to ask how many can he have. How many chips Mamma?

Monte has been a type 1 Diabetic for a few years now. He has a pump that feeds the insulin directly into him, so there is rarely a need for needles. The pump is carried in a pouch, like a traveller’s wallet. A five-year old, like an astute tourist in a dangerous land.

I’m low, says Monte.

Mother Milly has become an adept reader of her son’s endocrinology. From marketing to maths. From regular mother to someone who understands the intricacies of a disease and a physiological process because it is the condition her child has. She has no choice but to become fully informed. Like being on a roller coaster, sometimes she panics, but there is still no getting off it. She has to open her mouth and holler, fling her arms in the air and then cease, get a grip, and hang onto the carriage, ride the thing till it comes to a stop at the end. Her child is with her and she has to take the plunge too. She has learnt that other mothers are interested, only in as much as they want to know how she saw the disease develop. What were his symptoms? Perhaps they have a child that may one day be afflicted. But when it comes to understanding more, she sees them glaze over.

Monte, denied an adventure with the big boys pleads his case, Hugo can take the diabetes bag.

The diabetes bag is the lifeline to all that is going on in the world of Monte’s blood glucose. Seemingly only a moment away from being too high or too low. Despite the technology of a pump there is still the required calculations to make. All through the day he is being tested and the insulin amount dialled in. Both parents have become skilled in the area of nutrition and glycemic index, of calculating the amount of insulin that is required to counteract the food just consumed. Sides of packets are read for their sugar content. But still there are the inevitable fluctuations that result in a low. Luckily Monte can tell his own symptoms. He can feel a tingling is his legs. Milly is always at the ready with a jelly baby or an orange juice. At the peak of the Longreach hill, on the way to the settlement, the mother and son are beside the road with bikes laid over. Amongst the tall grasses they sit and a skin prick to a finger tells her, “No, you are not low – it is just the hill. It has exhausted us all.”

The day we leave Fremantle a fire takes hold of the bushland and suburbs of Bullsbrook. It is too late to leave. Leaving now will result in death. Take refuge in a room with two doors…. The radio makes its familiar emergency notice. The one that gets the hairs on your arms rising. The bush fire takes days to control and stains the horizon with its billowing smoke. It feels like the world has imploded across the water. Perhaps we will spend the rest of our lives on the island. At night the orange of the flames can be seen. Smoke still in the morning.

Beach cricket. Monte has the prekindergarten child’s inability to lose gracefully. He can never understand why he is out. It is never fair. It is always too early or Hugo is being too hard. But before the game begins they shake on “being out means no tears.” No downside mouth turns. Handshakes aside, tears still flow.

Rafferty is only slightly bigger than the younger Monte. They could be confused as twins. The older boys call him the Raffinator, but the nick name is ironic for this small boy’s aim is not destruction or leadership. He exists in his alone world, riding his bike single mindedly up and down the road, or searching the beach for shells that resemble letters to make words, or checking his newly purchased soft toys for defects in the stitching. He speaks in a husky, beyond-his-years voice with iridescent blue eyes and the closest he gets to eating lettuce is rubbing it against his tongue. I want a T-shirt that reads I love Raff.

The teenage boys are sinewy and brown. They are bullied into washing up, into emptying a bin or two. When their sheets make their way onto the floor they sleep on bare mattresses. They lose stuff. They forget stuff. They leave piles of wet belongings like snakes shed skin. They hold themselves away from you when you ask for a hug. You remember them young and their bodies soft. You remember them telling you where it hurt. When they told you stuff. Before they rolled their eyes when you spoke. They now know the island like it is a second home. They make their own movies, take their own pictures, post to their own instagram accounts. They are forging their own Rottnest. They can ride every hill with ease and speed. They can have a stack and not cry. Let a bubble of blood form a clot on their knee, and not ask you for a bandaid. They can walk off on their own to be on the jetty whilst you order a meal at the pub. When their food arrives he cannot be located and you begin to imagine yourself as Harrison Ford in Frantic. Then, the speck of him is there, slowly returning up the beach. Just walking Mum. They spend the afternoons in their room with their headphones and their technology, but still are drawn into the beach cricket games, the beach paddle ball competition, the snorkelling and endless trips to the Geordie shop to purchase sweets and ice creams. Making memory of beach, of summer, of family. Salting their veins.

Bus ride – once the island had trees before the need for fuel. Then the trees were felled and burnt and now the island is barren and scrubby. Volunteers still plant. Little squares of plastic mark their progress. So easy to cut down and plunder. So much harder to regrow.

At night we have various cocktails made with Campari or Aperol, Prosecco and Cinzano Rossi. It is our first year requiring the presence of a jigger from the mainland. Teenagers are sent to the shops for oranges so slices can adorn the drinks. Then we play Cards against Humanity. Strangely, or not, couples seem to find their partners answers the funniest. Milly – beautiful laugh. Learning the meaning of words such as queefing. Then, the adults all do a skin prick test to assess their own blood glucose. Why? To see if it hurts? To marvel at how, despite the excesses of ice-cream and alcohol, homeostasis remains. Blessed is a working pancreas.

We cook from Yottam and Graham makes tortillas with Masa flour. The smell of maize flour makes everyone think of various South American journeys. But I have never been to South America. To me it will always remind me of home, of Rottnest, of men in board shorts and no shirts standing at the bench top working the tortilla press with a red cocktail to the side, whilst women cut onions and make salsa and small boys play cricket on the sand.

Maths. The maize flour will send Monte into a massive low. It is decided he can have pasta and left over Bolognese instead.

Other holiday-makers join the balcony. They have brought their own Hendricks to make gin and tonics. They add slivers of finely sliced cucumber to thick-bottomed glass tumblers brought from home. Jasper’s T-shirt with the silhouette of a wolf stirs the man to tell his wolf-bite story. He was bitten on the ankle by a young wolf he was walking on a chain at a wolf sanctuary in England intent on conservation and reintroduction. When asked what was the purpose of the walks he says that the wolves required the exercise. The trainers spoke to the wolves in Inuit.

The The plays. Echo and the Bunny men. Nick Cave. Beck.

Boat grounded. Man stands and inspects it, hands on hips. Rocks it. Doesn’t budge. Rocks some more. Another man, his boat still afloat a few metres away enters the beach. Not a sideways glance. Hops on his boat and motors away. Never a word between them. From the balcony we think, Not very Rotto. Friends join the man with the grounded boat. More people will it from the grip of the sand with hands firm on hips. The bottom hangs on. In the end the tide does their work for them. Later they secure it further from shore.

Hugo has a scratchy eye. Sand for sure. Tightly hanging on to the underside of an eyelid. Bike ride to nurse’s station. Blue light. Flipped eyelid. Like rolling a blind. Unsuccessful flushing. Cotton bud. No corneal ulcer. Instantly better. Nurse’s bread and butter. Earlier in the week the tanned beachy nurse told me of the face-plants of cyclists – the ones who, riddled with fear, don’t lose their grip on the handlebars and meet the bitumen with their face instead of their hands. Then how she’d spent her shift by the side of a woman with a slowly leaking aneurysm, choosing to die at Rottnest, with her family all around her. The nurse was moments from sending for the flying doctor, after more than ten hours of dying, and the woman, maybe knowing she would be flown away from her beloved place, passed away. Later the family gave the nurse champagne.

Walking back from the pub the iPhone cameras come out. A beautiful place in which to chose to die. Light pools, sand, gum leaves. Shacks and verandahs with dart boards. Black bitumen roads shining silver. The black blobs of quokkas waiting to unseat cyclists who travel too fast.

The morning is still. We get out early. Our tribe of beach goers. Small boys, big boys, men, women, diabetes bag, flies. Turkish towels. Graham and I take the beach wheelchair and the regular chair too. The others cycle. We get there first and inspect the scene. Far below lies a crescent-shaped beach. Turquoise water. It is a narrow sandy path between thick scrubby bushes. It is a single file path made by feet. I transfer to the hippocampe and leave the titanium one by the bikes and we push it through the path, taking out the sides of bushes, till we get to the rocky path. Now there is no set path, just goat trails. It is a two-person job to get the chair down to the beach. Discussion over piggy backs gives way to just carrying the chair with me in it. Holus bolus. Like I am a queen unable to touch the dirt. Cleopatra-like (wish). Handed down the cliff and limestone till the beach is made. Over salt bush we hurtle. No thought as to the journey back. We swim. The water is icy. A red starfish is found. Small boys get to feel it, comment on how they find its sliminess disgusting, before it is returned to its crevice. Boys snorkel. Small boys practice skimming rocks. Home time.

The uphill journey gets to the rocky ledge before another man, a stranger, appears and offers his muscles to the task. Three men now – and the job is easier. I suspect it has made his day – to help someone. To feel the value in his working muscles, lift another person. Just as his appearance was a gift to us – as the scaling seemed bigger and harder than the descent – his helping has given him a story for later in the day. He will tell how on a steep rocky path he came across three people, one in a wheelchair, scaling the path from Armstrong Bay. He gave his arm to the chore and the woman was returned to the safety of the road, to the familiarity of bitumen and manmade surface.

November 25, 2014

Grey t-shirt and Jeans

Today I heard the tail end of Mark Zuckerberg saying he wore the same thing every day to cut down on his cognitive choices. Wearing a grey t-shirt and jeans on a daily basis gave him one less thing to think about. Rather than it limiting him, it freed him.

Some of us have more anxiety over clothes’ choices than others, but even if this gives you little stress, it can still be possible to imagine that ridding yourself of having to choose can be a good thing. A liberating thing. Sometimes this is why I would like to shave my head.

Just as the monastic life and a hairless head gives the monk more time to meditate.

I think about school uniforms and the way individuals still attempt to put their personal stamp on their dress style. The skirt shorter than allowed. The hat more bent and battered than supposed to be. The untucked shirt – a duck tail. Some of us strive to choose. But does it equate with making us more content?

Ridding yourself of choices, the program goes on, relieves stress. Even small decisions take mental energy. For this reason I am thankful to have never discovered make-up. I never have to decide on lip stick, eye shadow, powder.

I start to think about this concept for dogs. When we give anxious dogs cues to follow that result in predictable outcomes for their actions we take away some choice. This can be reassuring and decrease their stress. Modern behaviourists also like to give dogs choice. We like to give cues and signals as opposed to commands. But this is not to say that choices are easy for dogs. It does cause them stress. Especially if doing one thing ends in a result that they cannot predict. One time they jump on Johnny and everything is fine, the subsequent time they get yelled at. The next time Johnny is over there is stress around his visit. Should I jump on him or not? What will happen if I do? Perhaps I might nip him and see what happens then.

Watch the dog without direction. The one with too many choices. He is a bouncing jerking mess of mayhem. He is all over the shop – pawing, licking, barking, whining. He is seeking information as to what to do. But no one has taught him to be calm. No one has rewarded calmness in him. He is trying on lots of outfits. Red shirt, blue pants. Green top, corduroys. Loafers, no runners. Top hat, cap.

Make life simple and predictable for dogs to give them back some calmness. Give them some cognitive space. Let them be a grey t-shirt and jeans type.

November 14, 2014

Akbar

Swan taxi to the airport. Wagon.

No need to dismantle the chair.

First question before reaching the end of the street.

“That man – he was your husband? And the boy your son?”

“Yes.”

“What is happened to you?”

I explain. Paralysed. Long time. No need for you to feel sad.

“He must be a good man. Where I come from a man would not be with a woman such as you.”

He is an original refugee from Afghanistan after 9/11. He came by leaky boat to Christmas Island 14 years ago. Thirty hours at sea. Once a school teacher. Now a taxi driver.

He tells me how good men are in Australia. He tells me the story of how his small son must spend a night in hospital and in the same hospital room is another child. The parents of this other child are a strong and handsome man ( more handsome than himself, he says) and a woman who has, how do you say? He makes a chopping motion at the elbows and knees as he drives.

“A dwarf?” I offer.

“Yes. This would never happened in Afghanistan,” he says.

“She would be discarded there. But here she has a handsome man. Remarkable.”

Then he tells me of going to the desert with his mother when he is young man. They are visiting ancestral lands. They travel on the back of an open truck. Struggling along the side of the road is a woman astride a donkey with a man on either side supporting her. He bangs on the truck window and gets the driver to pull over. He sends his mother over to the woman to find out what is wrong and if they can offer assistance. The mother returns to the truck and says it is no use. The woman has been in labor for over a day. The baby is half in and half out. His mother has had many children and he trusts her knowledge when she says nothing can be done. He says the woman has the most terrible look on her face. His mother tells him the infant is already dead and the woman will soon join her child. He asks the truck driver if they can take the woman, but he refuses saying she will bleed and mess on his truck. The men with the woman do not want any help either. They want to press on, despite the futility. Akbar argues with the men – urging them to let them take her with them to get her to a doctor. He asks them if they had land or belongings that they did not think of selling in order to help her. But she is dying. They travel on, away from the truck. Barely fifty metres on she slumps over and dies. Akbar tries again to get the truck driver to take them back to their village. But the truck driver does not want to make his journey longer.

In Melbourne. In the taxi queue.

A sedan.

I ask him to pop the boot so I can show him, how once inside the taxi, I can dismantle the chair for him to load it inside. But he won’t take me.

“I can’t take you if you want to bring the chair,” he says.

“Yes, I want to bring the chair. Yes, you can take me.”

“No,” he says – crossing his hands in front of his chest. Shaking his head. He drives away to the next customer and I am abandoned on the sidewalk.

“He won’t take me! He refuses!” I am yelling up the street to the taxi controller. I point at his cab. “He won’t take me!”

I hear my mother’s voice.

The taxi controller begins her argument with the taxi driver. He gets out of his cab, gesticulating. She is photographing his licence plate and writing in her note-book.

I am negotiating with the next sedan driver. “You have to take me! I can dismantle the chair.”

October 9, 2014

Yunderup

The lapping of the river is like a giant dog licking itself. A constant slurp. It is skinny milk café latte. Sometimes it shimmers. Sometimes it is smooth, muddy brown. Bottomless. When boys get atop canoes and kayaks it becomes Huckleberry Finn territory. They have legs like twigs. Hobbit feet. Notoriously unsteady. They wear life jackets because a father said “what if a boat hits them” – one is unconscious, and then the other is forced to try to rescue a dead weight and then they both drown. Could happen? Fear makes you drive to Ray’s Outdoors and spend more money. Dog eyes make you buy more slow releasing dog food toys since there is a City Farmer’s next door. And whilst you’re at it purchase a piping bag for the Birthday eclair making later in the day. Since Master Chef these things are easily purchased, as is a madeleine tray, or blow torch for creme brûlée.

It is a river that flows and all rivers have their own strength. Beneath its silky surface, it is all force and wanting. Sometimes stronger than the muscles of an eleven year old. Especially ones so sinewy and strapping. More like sapling trees that bend and sway, than meaty boys. So not solid. Rubber limbs. Life jackets makes sense. It gives mothers and fathers peace. It gives boys freedom. Specks now as they paddle away. Urged on. Laughter carries on water.

Mosquitoes keep mothers inside. They suck even through denim. Mighty. Squashed, they are filled with more blood than their size allows. A baby keeps a young girl occupied. She has been abandoned by the sapling boys who have told her not to follow them. Her white blonde hair would make her a Gretel in the forest. She must stay with the women who drink tea and talk endlessly about how to make babies sleep. At least she has Nutella.

The baby is soothed by pumpkin and breastmilk. He seems easy, and hard to please, at the same time. Mothers of saplings remember back and can’t. Have stories, but stories could be made up. Memory is so mutable. It seems hard work – the baby thing – being so attached. Having to be carried, picked up, pushed around. I tell how I have spoken of Jasper in the plural to make him sound like more than one baby. I speak of “children” when I should have said “child.” To make myself sound equal to a mother of six. How hard can one be? I hear them all thinking. So I multiply him.

Now the saplings are off most of the time, or else take themselves away from the adults to commune in their room with their own music. Macklemore. What headphones they would buy if only they could save up the money. They run most of the day, jump in and out of pools, scrape knees, chew gum, and then at night fall they are couch-bound. Like heavily worked horses, they need watering, feed bags full of grain.

At night the river turns syrupy. Molasses. Really treacherous now. As if the snags and concealed boughs could move and strangle. It slurps and pulses. It grows stronger. There is a blood moon. It hangs heavy and low in the sky – disguises itself as a street lamp.

The dog stands on the jetty, peering. He is intrigued, but not stupid, and not brave either.

We talk of another dog, left home in the care of a comforting cleaner. Gold dog has had rounds of chemo to little effect to shrink down the size of a facial tumour. Despite the mass, she bounds happily in all types of tepid, stinking water. The smellier the better, you get the sense. If she was a person you might describe her as loopy, as the type to approach everything with gay abandon. The kind to strike up conversation with any stranger. She has anxiety too, and now is on multiple drugs to ease her disquiet. Sometimes she is panicked and wide eyed – her thoughts only on demons. She tears up whole rooms and, when a nail splits, it is as if an ax-murderer has been in the bedroom.

Solving her dilemma might be more than science and love can muster.

A new study shows that women look at their dogs with the same eyes they have for their newborn babies. Makes perfect sense to a woman whose love for her dog makes her curious about what he might be feeling and what makes him happy. He slips out the front when the rest of the house is eating dinner and could easily take off down the street. Instead he waits patiently outside the front door till someone realises he is missing and lets him in. He spends the rest of the night at the feet of the couch-bound saplings.

Babies and dogs are not so very different. Mothers are vets and vets are mothers. Babies are dogs and dogs are babies. Love is love.

September 12, 2014

This House Of Grief – Helen Garner

I have just finished reading Helen Garner’s This House of Grief. It is a remarkable achievement, especially since the story is so well-known that there is virtually no opportunity to create suspense. Yet it is suspenseful. It is not suspense as to the outcome of the trial. It is suspense over what will Helen think? How will the experience end up for her? What will she feel after having witnessed, day after day, the trawling, the mucking out of people’s lives? Since Helen is us – the reader – she asks the same questions. She has the same doubts over innocence, the same tingling in her gut. She is not frightened to tell us.

“One day, when court rose for lunch, I took my sandwich to the Flagstaff Gardens and lay on the grass under a tree. Why had Farquharson, during the first trial flashed outraged grimaces and vehement head-shakings at his sisters whenever the word ‘suicide’ was mentioned? Was there a moral register on which suicide was more disgraceful than murder? Perhaps the most shaming thing of all, a failure of nerve that no ‘Anglo-Saxon country bloke’ could possibly admit to, would be to launch a murder-suicide and not complete the act. I recalled a famous Sydney story about a man who threw himself off the Gap and was caught before he hit the rocks by a huge and timely wave. The coastguard vessel picked him up unhurt. ‘The minute your feet leave the ground,’ the saved man said, ‘you change your mind.’ An American mother I read about drove her car full of children into a river; she drowned and so did all her kids except the eldest, a ten-year-old, who fought his way across her lap and out through a part-open window. He told police that as the car began to sink his mother had cried out, ‘I made a mistake. I made a mistake.’

Was the core of the whole phenomenon a failure of imagination, an inability to see any further forward than the fantasy of one clean stroke that would put an end to humiliation and pain?

Cindy Gambino had observed that Farquharson had become a better father after their break-up. Perhaps a hard-working husband is screened from his children by the domestically powerful and emotionally competent presence of his wife. When the marriage ends and access visits begin, he has to deal with the kids on his own. He is shocked at first, finds his new duties exhausting and difficult and often tedious; but gradually, by virtue of this unmediated contact, the children’s reality penetrates his armour and flows into his nerves, his blood. Now that he knows them, and knows their love, his exile from their daily life causes him a sharper suffering. To a man who is emotionally immature, bereft of intellectual equipment and concepts, lacking in sustaining friendships outside his family, his children may appear to be not only the locus of his pain, but also the source and cause of it. If only he could put an end to it – amputate or obliterate this wounded part of him that will not stop aching! As the judge in the first trial put it in his sentencing, he forms a dark contemplation…

I watched the thought, to see what it would do. It firmed up, like jelly setting. And there is sat, quivering, filling all the available space.”

September 1, 2014

Seven Thousand Three Hundred Days

We drive through constant rain in a car that knows it is raining and switches its own wind screen wipers off and on.

So different from the leaking Kombi. No protruding springs through ripped ruby vinyl. No view of the bitumen rushing beneath.

Even the seats are heated.

We are without child. Sans enfant. For we are celebrating twenty years of union. To those we can’t be bothered to tell we aren’t married, we says its our “wedding anniversary.”

In a car without our child there is a lot of silence. It is not brooding. Just comfortable. No need to speak. There is also our own choice of music. Bill Callahan. There is the retelling of the This American Life episode, but without Ira Glass’ enigmatic style. I feel a school girl-like glee to be on our own.

We are heading to the forest. Here the trees are tall and straight; good for the masts of tall ships and once used to paved the streets of London. But how much better to be standing here still, pushing skywards. To be beneath them is to be made midget in the most majestic of ways. This corner of bush hangs on in this damp and undulating part of the south-west. The ground is soggy. Water sits on its surface in large puddles and rushes in streams down the sides of roads. But, it is a timber town still. Rednecks have stickers on their utes, “Die Greenie scum.” Pastures are press studded with the black dots of Angus cattle. We see emus. We are constantly surprised by green. Green this fluorescent is a rarity in Western Australia.

At a town on the way we eat a BLT and a burger. A group of sixty-somethings sit around another laminex table in the same cafe. “One day we will be them,” says Graham. “You will wear a cardigan like that.”

An antique shop in the town has a sign on the door advising, “No children, including teenagers.” I decide not to enter either.

Settled into our accommodation, I give Graham the present I have brought down south with me. It is a book of photographs of the Port where we live. I also give him the story of us that I have written. A small part of me feels on show, as if I am handing an assignment to a teacher. What grade will I receive? The story is called Seven Thousand Three Hundred Days.

I write us a few thousand words. Our story. In my words. For him. Unpick, unravel. Having gone to the archive, the narrative springs forth. A fresh, new image. After reading, he says, “One day we will give Jasper the story.”

When I told Jasper that I was writing the “story of us” for his Dad, as a gift, he thought it was a “dumb” present. “I hope you are going to give him something else too.” But the story would have been enough. It has weight and substance. Like developing a lost reel of film. It unlocks. In staccato images an animation of our journey leaks out. In third person, then in first. It moves him. Relief. For a moment our faces are smooth again. His hair is long and mine is short. We don’t need glasses. Not a cardigan in sight.

We walk the circumference of the Big Brook Dam. It is paved and easy. There is abundant moss. It is no Dove Lake. Fallen leaves make the path their canvas. There are green weeds in motion under a foot bridge. Like the tendrils of a drowned river maiden, they wave languidly in transparent water. The air here is different from the city air we are used to in Fremantle. There is no salt. There is no industry. No smell of trucks or train. No scent of scared sheep. The air is motionless. Like each molecule pushes its neighbour far away. Holds it at arm’s reach. Fremantle air is laden with salt and sea, feels heavy with the life of the port, clingy and jostling. Here the air feels cleansed by rain. Standing alone, drenched through. It feels see-through, like the most polished of panes.

At our special dinner on the long table at Foragers we are seated next to a couple on their “baby moon.” Who knew there was such a thing. And next to them are some locals, Billy and Elaine. Elaine is an artist. On their property she films the decomposition of a dead kangaroo on a security camera; watching the animals come to the carcass and slowly dismantle it. “It’s good for my work,” she says and we know exactly what she means. The couple on the “baby moon” are wishing for an infant that sleeps all night and never cries. We all have a laugh about that.

At Foragers there are Wessex Saddleback pigs in a paddock. They have mud. They have a hut. They are lean and jaunty. They come to the fence when you go by, curious, thinking you might have come to feed them.They are busy with their snouts in the dirt.

On our drive home we come across a juvenile hawk standing by the road side. It does not move as we drive by. We turn around and go back. Sure enough it is injured. It cannot fly, but merely flaps a few feet in front of Graham as he attempts to catch it. He snares it under a billowing rain jacket. We inspect it for injuries and can feel its crunchy bone beneath the skin of its wing. Its keel bone tells of its struggle and suggests it has been injured for a while. We doubt it will make it, but the beauty in its eyes tell us to try. Certainly it will die if left to fend for itself by the side of the road. Our plan is to take it to the zoo in the morning. But in our care it succumbs too. A few hours after its rescue it flaps noisily inside the box and then is found dead. Jasper has not even seen it alive and is saddened to be shown the body of the dead thing. He names it instantly and wishes to bury it. Graham wants to let the worms work at its head to reveal its white as white bird’s skull. I, too, can see the value in that.

August 7, 2014

Straw House

Remember the story of the three little pigs – each attempting escape from the wolf in their houses – one built of straw, one of sticks and one of bricks.

The one built of straw did not fair well. One huff and one puff and I will blow your house down.

But he was the happiest of pigs.

I am watching Masterchef and the contestants are delivering food to a table of food producers on a property using the produce of the people they are feeding. Matt Preston asks the farmer about the pork – throwing around the words organic and free-range. All the farmer gets out is that the “pigs are raised on straw.” Cut to the next shot of lavish food. I think how lost on most viewers would be the concept of “raised on straw.”

But here’s the thing. Pigs love straw. Uncut, long, manipulable, regularly-changed straw. Being omnivorous means they are curious searchers. Being omnivorous means you will investigate all manner of things in search of food. There are many reasons why the raising of pigs in the modern tradition poses welfare concerns. When your natural desires are thwarted you are driven to do unnatural things. When we place pigs in their brick houses, away from the wolf, we take away their ability, but not their want, to explore the world. Deprived of rooting material they nuzzle one another. They chew each others very interesting and mobile tails. For what else is there to do?

Coles seems to want us to be seduced by their “sow stall free” pork products. But do people even know what this means. A “sow stall” is a small confined area designed to restrict the movement and hence promote the growth of the gestating sow. Being “sow stall free” does not mean that the sow, once having given birth, is not once again confined to a farrowing crate. Given a choice a pig might build a nest in the straw for several days before giving birth. Housed, all she can do is pace and paw the ground. The farrowing crate is an enclosed area with bars supposed to protect the piglets from the squashing weight of the sow as she struggles to lie down slowly on a concrete floor.

How much better would the life of a pig be if her need for straw was recognised? Straw, more so than toys or dangling chains, does more to improve the welfare of intensively housed pigs than just about anything.

Driving in the hinterland of NSW I see pale skinned creatures dotted over tussock land. I am surprised and delighted to see they are pigs. This is so rare a sight. Not only do these pigs have straw, but also mud and wallowing. Free range pigs – doing what they love to do – building houses out of straw.

Back home I visit the Fremantle markets and ask the seller of a supposedly free range pork where the pork is from. I wonder if she will mention the Byron hinterland pigs. It seems a natural question, and one I am expecting a detailed answer to. I imagine the purveyor to be selling such a product because they care at least about the conditions in which the animal has been raised. But sadly, she seems perplexed and confused by my questioning. Is their only care the empty assumption that people will pay more to ease their conscience? It is from over east, she offers first. I try again. But where? Perhaps she thinks I am interested in slow miles, so she says she has local stuff too. It is compressed into a vacuum bag without a label. It could be from the moon. Asked about the location of the “local” property she answers, “God knows.”

You would think that selling free range, organic produce would be a choice made out of compassion for animals’ needs and wants. You would think the vendor has thought long and hard about the decision to sell such a product and hope that they had done their research into the product they were selling. Naively, I even think that perhaps they have travelled to the farm to view the animals’ conditions. Do they think that consumers are happy enough with labels telling them a product is “sow stall free” in pretty pink chalk board writing, reflecting nursery rhyme style memory?

What I want to know is: do the pigs have any straw?

July 12, 2014

Disappointment

What is disappointment?

I know it now.

Having failed my oral Animal Behaviour membership exam the feeling is of huge disappointment. The word is not being enough.

We are driving in the Byron hinterland when my friend calls my mobile to tell me my result. Immediately on hearing her voice, flat and lifeless, I know the call is not what I want. It is a moment of disbelief. I have spent most of my time imagining what it might feel like to pass. Imagining how relieved and elated I will be. Instead I am feeling that spiraling, hideous feeling of chagrin. There is shock too. There is disappointment.

Graham pulls the car over on to the verge of deep winter green grass. Two women, out on a morning stroll, peer into the car to see me in tears, hauling myself through the gamut of negative emotions. Perhaps they think the man and the woman are fighting. Perhaps he is revealing an affair. No one can see the 12-year-old boy in the rear seat. He has collapsed down on his belly with his head in his hands and is sobbing too. It seems I have wrecked everyone’s dreams in a moment.

So how can I explain what went wrong? A subject I love, and have taken into my soul, and have studied endlessly, was not able to be revealed to the two examiners seated beyond the table with the navy blue tablecloth. We are on the 21st floor of a Gold Coast Hotel. The sun is over the water and shining into the room. It should be a view to savour.

My brain becomes a series of ill-fitting cogs. It jams with a wooden block, allowing it neither forwards nor backwards movement when confronted by a question that no longer makes sense. The examiners continue to ask for the same information over and over again. Time warped. All I can do is repeat the question back to them – making no sense of the words, like a new arrival trying out a foreign language. There is a question on the welfare of circus dogs and despite my knowledge of canines and welfare I suspect I don’t give them the answers they want to hear. Why else are they repeating their interrogation? Haven’t I just answered that? Nightmarishly repetitive. They hammer away, driving the block deeper, with each successive repetition. There is a question on cockatoos invading a grain field and the way to control them, and despite knowing much about feral animal control, the picture of the swarm of birds lodges the block even further into the mechanism of retrieval of memory. Asked about the disadvantages of lethal methods it is as if the word lethal has never been heard before. Suddenly I have become a non-English speaker. When asked about drugs to help an old dog sleep I talk about benzos. They want more, and despite knowing other drugs, I give them nothing.

My hands are sweating and I am balling up tissues in my palms, as I try to get my brain to move forward out of the cog it is stuck in. I try joviality and humour. I mention my lucky shirt. I am dying on stage like a comedian with no jokes. Like turning the key in the ignition and hearing the dead sound of a car that won’t start. Still I keep trying. Repeating the questions seems to take the answer further out of reach. Answers flutter out through gaping holes never to be retrieved.

What is it about stress that sees it screw with my mind?

Having studied behaviour we all know that stress destroys the ability to remember. But I had never expected to become a blank page.

The tears come again, recalling what a dunce I must have appeared.

In the lead up to the exam my partner and child make up behaviour questions to test me. It is fun in the kitchen by the stove revealing my knowledge to them. Jasper asks me to tell them what I would do with an orca that is attacking the other orcas in his pool. In his eyes I am a behaviourist. Graham asks me for my treatment for a dog who is anxious travelling in the car. I practice to myself too. Nothing is the same as the way it is in the Hotel room.

One day after hearing the news of my failing the oral I am alone in the hut on a coffee plantation in the Byron hinterland. The boys have gone hiking. There is sun on the hillside and cattle in the distance. It is hard. I want the opposite feeling to what I am experiencing. I need not practice more resilience. I want to be making plans for my future as a behaviourist. Instead I am imagining being here again next year and again awaiting news of pass or fail. How can I change my brain to cope better under the stress next time?

April 26, 2014

Hemming Grey School Trousers

Today I have traces of my mother running through me.

For lunch I cooked corn fritters. Jasper ate them like I did at his age – pulling them apart with his fingers and dunking them in mayonnaise. After we might have settled down to an afternoon of Tarzan or else a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy. The square box television. Instead he has a comic. It has absorbed him all day. He leans half-on and half-off the couch in what looks like an uncomfortable position. He is still in his pyjamas. He has the dog for company. Graham attempts brioche that fails. Old expired yeast. Or maybe he’s just not a baker. But the pulled pork for dinner has slow cooked all day and…

After corn fritters my Dad would have taken to his garage. My mother might have watched the movie with us whilst writing her letters on her lap. Scrawling off letter after letter on pale pink notepaper. Some letters to friends, other searching for autographs and letters back.

I take Jasper’s long grey school trousers up by three inches. I take the waist in too. I use a needle and a thread. I jab myself more than once with a pin. It’s not a great job, but it’ll do.

I take the dog for a walk because I need a break from the study (how does a ewe recognise its own lamb, the flehmen response in cattle…) and the moment I am out of the house the rain starts. It is soft. I think gossamer. I think georgette. Walking along I try out words to describe the sky. A favourite distraction. The old skate park is empty now there is a new one in town. But a small boy takes his father there because it is empty. He has it to himself. No teenagers. The rain softens and fades and soon is gone. It does not sink through the dog’s heavy wire coat. Little balls of wet silver rain just travel with him. Rain brings memories always. Wet roads do that. Wafts. The jacarandas have a scent when they’re wet. I am back in my yard beneath the trees where the chooks scratched at the dirt. My dad is in the garage and there is the smell of motor oil. Rain makes the train louder too. Smell the metal off the tracks.

Scent is like that. It pushes its way forward – just sometimes.

For animals scent is everything. A trained canine is capable of detecting a finger print left on a glass table six weeks earlier. Having two nostrils separated by just several millimetres is enough for a dog to discern from which direction the odour is coming. Sometimes us humans can barely smell smoke. Our vestigial noses. Hardly smelling a thing in comparison. To the rest of the animal world we are almost anosmic. Yet. Sometimes we do. When we smell it feels ancient. The world gets big and small at the same time. We are connected. Suddenly thrust back into childhood. A molecule of odour passes through membranes and assaults our brain as if it is memory itself. This might be a fraction of what animals feel and know as they busily sniff and sneer at each lamp-post, each blade of pissed-on grass. For them it is more than memory. They are sending email, on dating sites, telling each other of their sexual availability, their state of oestrous, whether or not they can tend offspring or fight off other suitors.

Chipotle chillies are smokey flavoured and remind me of pimento and a meal I once had in France full of intestines and innards. Visible amongst the red tomato sauce was the tell-tale texture of an animal’s stomach wall. It was inedible. The smell reminds me.

April 2, 2014

Vinculum

Today I learnt what was a vinculum.

It is the kind of thing you might learn when you help an eleven year old with his maths prior to a test. Yes I remembered what was a denominator and even a numerator but I had no idea the line that separated them was called a vinculum.

To spellcheck the word does not exist.

To google it is a tendon before it is something in mathematics.

Lately I have learnt how to do factor trees. It is something brand new to me. Not quite as much fun as learning that leaves transpire water from their surface just the same way we breathe. But. It’s maths. Quite fun really, but something I feel I have never done before. Did factor trees exist in the 1970’s? Where were factor trees when I was in grade seven? Between the rise of the white board and the demise of the blackboard did the triumphant factor tree emerge? Surely maths doesn’t change. Then, between straw-sucks of a liquid cereal breakfast, he tells me two negatives multiplied make a positive number. Are you sure? This rings a bell. I will have to check since I don’t do negative numbers. Pass me the iPad again. How is it that two negatives multiplied make a positive? Please don’t ask me why. My mind is spinning. It is only 7.30am. I wonder why negative numbers exist. You can’t have minus three apples any more than you can have minus six.

Then there is the school tie. If you want to wear a jumper – and it is cold outside – you need to wear a tie. But it looks ridiculous. No it doesn’t. Everyone will look ridiculous. It feels wrong. You’ll get used to it. Scream. Scream.

Under my breath and not under my breath – God save me. Save me from myself and my pettiness. Just wear the tie, so you can wear the jumper. Please.

If a submarine is 160 metres below the surface and then rises 90 metres and then submerges again by 170 metres how far is it below the surface? In my underlining you can see my purpose. I want it in cement. I want it drummed in. If I rub hard enough, underline often enough, say it louder it works, right? It makes me hate myself.

He trudges across the oval with the heaviest of chiropractor approved school bags. Must weigh ten kilos. He has the legs of a stick insect. There is dew on the oval. I call out looking good and a smirk creeps out. Don’t let her see it. Turn your body in case. Your morning track across the oval, like a giant snail trail.

I so wish the vinculum was just a tendon.