TWO WAYS: CAMPING

Mum would send us outside to ‘let the hills take care of it’.

Our new street was named after the Ruffles and I took huge delight in writing to my grandmother with the news that I was ‘keeping very busy having delicious banana cake on the Ruffles’ verandah on Ruffles Road’ with ‘Ruffles’ underlined so she understood the importance of my hosts.

Childhood rolled along and we all survived the city-to-country transformation. All those almost invisible little initiations: dam swimming instead of pools; fresh milk rather than being storedependent; and forgetting our shoes when we had to leave our slice of paradise for supplies. As our forward-thinking parents predicted, before we knew it our family was largely self-sufficient, working as a fivesome, learning how to be farmers. Bananas were first, but between seasons we’d experiment with passionfruit, cucumbers and zucchini. We saw that seeds need time to grow and that nothing worthwhile was fast.

When we had a problem, mum would send us outside to ‘let the hills take care of it’ as they often miraculously did. A playdate with neighbouring farm kids could take up to half a day’s walk, which made us fiercely loyal pals. ‘It pays to be picky with who gets your time anyway’ was another one of our mother’s take-aways, always reframing a negative.

Some of us thrived more than others, but the family pact seemed to be that one of us would take the hit in the face of the group’s newfound joy. My mother’s impressive output was evidence of her successful changeover, but I could sense, in the most invisible of ways, her constant struggle. Outwardly, though, her ideas were genius, resourceful and downright magic-making. She was helped very much by her bible, Grass Roots, a magazine that would take like-mindeds step-by-step (with hand-drawn illustrations) through ways to do a wide range of useful things; from breaking in a pony, making crazy paving or building a pizza oven, to improving the microbes in your dam.

My mother demanded a pool, the right of every Queenslander, so it was hand-dug by all of us. ‘If you can’t understand the job at hand,’ my Dad would say, ‘how can you ask another person to do it?’ Mum and Dad read up on mosaics, borrowed some gear and started to tile the pool themselves, bringing in a pro when it counted. With ideas bigger than they ever had budget for, and more chutzpah than they were born to, they decided at the last minute to add a pair of swimming dolphins in the

deep end. Made of tiles! Not even my grandmother could believe our flair. Was there anything that we couldn’t do?

And this is what I now realise was the bravery and genius of my parents. Whether they staged it or not and whatever was going on for them to make such a bold move, they showed us that nature was always the fix. That doing things with our own hands was the only way to feel satisfied and that the real luxury was in long form: slow paving, slow cooking, waiting for mango season, eating our meat meaningfully. It was idyllic for us and restorative for my then midlife father who was (and still is) horse crazy. As a mother now to my own three, I can see the sacrifices that my mother made. But having four out of five was a good enough happiness ratio and she really threw her deeply academic self into farming life.

When I grew up, I decided I’d had enough of banana farming. I left the farm for Los Angeles as early as a minor could. I never looked back. Not until five years ago, when, very much entrenched in my close-to-burnout city life, I knocked on the door of our old house and asked the new owners if I could have a mosey around.

The brief visit brought up an avalanche of feelings. I started to panic. I had not given my children any of this. Not even a slice. Was it too late?

With control as one of my biggest drivers, there was no way I would relocate pin-the-tail-onthe-donkey style as my parents did. Instead, I started to acclimatise my city kids into country life, bit by bit. Motorbikes on dirt tracks, dares to swim in dark dams, visits to friends living a real McLeod’s Daughters life, among other simple things I had once found such bliss in.

‘You’re too late,’ said my older two, as they took their own transport back to the city to their respective networks. But I could see the glint in our youngest one’s eyes. I took her away with me, as deep as we could go on the weekends, desperate to show her the joy in nature’s rhythm and the solace in non-forced isolation. She took to it like a duck to water, more than I could ever have imagined. She now has a horse. This is a significant feat for a family who lives in an apartment in Sydney.

Our city life is starting to show cracks. The closer she gets to nature and animals and her horse, the more she seems to release. I know too well the gifts of a childhood spent in nature, but now my daughter wants them too, without just dipping in and out.

Taking the COVID-19 silver lining of the challenging school year of 2020, we found her a school in the country where she could keep a horse and ride before and after school. There’s a school pig that just had babies and a family of ducks that waddle past the classroom. A business-savvy year sixer sold me half a kilo of his parents’ potatoes from his locker. We are still talking about their creaminess.

While she is there for a trial, living on campus with her new friends and their horses, we are left in our unnervingly quiet city life, feeling very much like the middle-aged machines that we are. She is young, but as my father says, she is more than ready for real lessons, and his point is that not every child is. It’s not a given that just because one person wants a horse, it doesn’t mean the whole family would. Pot: kettle, Dad!

I think of my own siblings and how it was my brother who had the most country air in him and it was he who suffered most when he came back to the city after the Ruffles retired and we all started selling off corners of our paradise.

My mother, an educational academic, reminded me that the only way to guarantee what she calls a ‘thorough’ education is through the magic glue of passion. I’ve long accepted that the school fees I pay have nothing to do with my youngest child’s passions and that self-realisation is the stickiest of all the glues. I thought it was my job to show her the beauty of country life, but now she is showing it to me. n

Meet Tim Atkins at his campsite on the banks of the Dumaresq River on the New South Wales–Queensland border, and Marthe Rovik who lives in a beautifully renovated bus with her young family. They both swapped traditional house-life for something a bit different, and neither of them are looking back.

TIM ATKINS

BONSHAW, NEW SOUTH WALES

When work dried up in Wollongong earlier last year, construction labourer Tim Atkins moved out of his rented home, packed his tent and fishing rods into his RAV4 and drove nine hours north west to the hundred-person village of Bonshaw on the New South Wales–Queensland border where his father is buried.

He set up camp on the bank of the Dumaresq River. The plan was to get out of the city and spend two weeks catching cod, letting his dicky knee heal and tending to the grave of his father, who died in a truck accident in Bonshaw when Tim was two years old.

Three months later, Tim has caught ‘six sh bigger than my biggest sh ever’ and has embarked on a renovation of all 27 graves in the cemetery, not just his father’s. He’s scrubbed all the headstones with bleach, he’s bought fake owers and sourced 30 concrete vases to hold them. There are three spares, or rather two: one will be for Tim when he is buried there. He’s dug trenches for drainage around the graves, he’s built retaining walls to stop erosion on the sloping site and he’s planted grass, watering the bright green strips by hand with water lugged up from the town. (There’s no tap at the cemetery.)

‘I am having a blast. It’s the best time of my life, no two ways about it,’ says Tim. ‘I can’t remember my father, and it’s only now I’m hearing all the stories.’

Tim spent the rst two years of his life in Bonshaw, but after his father’s death his family moved away and his mother remarried. Most Christmases they’d return—his mother and stepfather and Tim and his siblings—to clean the grave as a family.

‘We’d start with my father’s grave and my grandfathers’ graves, but then we’d give them all a clean down. I was brought up being told that no job’s worth doing unless you do it properly. If I do my family’s graves, well they would prefer that I cleaned everyone else’s graves as well. They’d expect it.’ Tim plans to spend at least another three months camping and working at the cemetery. Others are responding to his enthusiasm.

The local council has committed to building an animal-proof fence around the cemetery, while another local got out her gold nail polish and painted over the faded lettering on the headstones. ‘It does look a bit like a kid has done it, but she’s done a pretty good job ... it’s a hard job to do without stepping on the graves or the grass. She must have straddled.’ A local artist has offered to take off the nail polish and do the lettering by hand with paint.

‘The older you get, the more you start to think about these things and you start to show respect for others. If you’ve got luck and you’re grateful, you can do things to help the next guy that comes along. That’s what I’m doing in the cemetery. Everything I do there, it has to be an improvement in one way, shape or form. I’m blessed. That’s the word I use. Blessed for the luck that I’ve had to be here and to be able to do this.’

Words and photography Annabelle Hickson