Chapter 4: A bigger, grander view.

When we arrived to look at the block of land in Nundubbermere, twenty minutes west of Stanthorpe, it was drizzling slightly, and grey. We met Julia, an agent we’d met before, and Josh at the front gate of the property. With her trademark disdain for sales, Julia opted for staying in her car and suggested we go in Josh’s four-wheel drive, rather than our Volvo, and to leave our dogs behind with her.

‘The owner has hunting dogs,’ she explained.

Pushing aside the image of our pups getting mauled, I latched on to the other subject in her sentence. ‘Owner? I didn’t know there was a house.’

Julie pursed her lips and made a sucking noise. ‘Bit of a dwelling there where the owner’s son is living. You’ll see it as you go along. Probably best if you stay in the car and just drive on up top. I’ll wait with your pets.’

We nodded in compliance.

‘That’s part of the property too,’ Julia said, flicking her finger at some bush on the other side of a fence. Dog fence runs through it.’

‘Dog fence?’

Julia nodded. ‘Dingo fence. Council patrol it and do bait drops along it.’

My heart sank. I’d seen a dog baited with 1080 poison once in my youth. It had been an incredibly distressing experience, for all involved.

‘Don’t worry,’ Julia said, perhaps misinterpreting my concern. ‘The council will do any repairs needed.’

Feeling less excited, we got into Josh’s four-wheel drive and took off along a wide valley. On the left, a parched looking hillside, pockmarked with large orange coloured craters where the owner had extracted gravel. Very few mature trees, just masses of Melaleuca shrubs all leaning slightly north-west. To the right, on the other side of the dingo fence, the landscape was dramatically different. A dark green and grey hillside rose steeply; glimpses of massive granite boulders skulking behind black trunks. It looked cool, wild and mysterious. Looking at the aerial photos, we’d noticed the block was located where the granite belt meets trap rock country, but we hadn’t expected the landscape to be so contrasting.

A few hundred metres on, we emerged into a basin of cleared pasture and saw on our left, a caravan sitting on concrete blocks – a really long and rusty caravan with green stripes down the side. A concrete block structure abutted the caravan, about four metres by six, with an opening for a window and corrugated sheets on a skillion roof. At some point it had been painted white until the paint had run out and there was no window in the frame – SBS World News style. There was a clothesline strung between two saplings and other than the flapping T-shirts pegged on the line, the place looked abandoned. Further up the hill, about twenty metres from the caravan, a timber dog house sat on stumps and as we crawled past, the dogs inside started barking, pushing their snouts against the wire of the cages in a snapping, slobbering frenzy.

We passed silently, unattractively slack jawed, looking out through tightly wound windows like tourists on safari. There was a definite Walking Dead vibe; any second someone was going to come out of the caravan with a rifle and yell, ‘Git…Go on, GIT’.

At this point, Josh decided to take a different route to the one he’d taken when he first came to look at the block. It had been ‘a bit hairy’ he explained, and there were plenty of other tracks to choose from to get to the top of the hill because the previous owner had leased out the property to a four-wheel driving club for racing. Some of the tracks were deep wounds, eroded chasms in the rusty earth. We chose one that looked passable, on the eastern side of the block running along the dingo fence. As we climbed a little higher, something pale grey came into view. We stared in disbelief as we got closer. The ‘flock of sheep’ I’d seen on the aerial photos turned out to be a massive pile of concrete rubble. It looked like an entire shopping centre had been demolished then dumped on the block. The size of it was shocking: a football field of rubbish.

One of the concrete piles.

‘Bloody hell,’ someone said.

I was speechless, waking from the dream. The dumped concrete and twisted metal were an eyesore, an insurmountable problem, uglier than the eroded tracks and something that would not heal in time.

The mood in the car shifted a little.

‘Shame about the concrete,’ Josh said. ‘The owner must have been paid by someone to let them dump it here.’

On we went, rocking and rolling along the track, heading northwest, climbing higher. The landscape became more wooded, but many of the Ironbark trees lay dead or dying, chopped down for fence posts or firewood. Everywhere, the blackened tops of these once majestic trees were drying on the ground next to the stumps they’d been connected to. Prickly Pear came into view, one, two, then scores of them, some pink with fruit – flourishing. On and up we drove. Turning a sharp corner on a narrow section of the track, Josh pointed out a car down at the bottom of the gully beneath us: a white Mahindra ute, on its side, front caved in, battered doors. I gripped the handrail harder, thinking how easy it would be to slide down the hill and join it. Josh changed down to first gear to tackle a particularly steep and rutted section, then all of a sudden, we emerged onto the ridge.

The view southwest.

In unison, Smash and I said, ‘Wow!’ There was the view, the landscape we’d seen in Josh’s photo but so much more impressive in real life. Breathtaking. Limitless. We drove slowly, bumpily, along the ridge, climbing higher still, chattering excitedly. At one point, we could see nearly 360 degrees of view stretching out in all kinds of terrain – granite outcrops, dark green cypress, pale yellow pasture, a tiny cluster of white farmhouses and outbuildings, Nundubbermere Road snaking through on its way to Sundown National Park.

After staring in wonder for a while and deciding which direction the lounge suite would face to take in the (no doubt) amazing sunsets, we headed back down on a different track, a much steeper descent, rockier, scarier. So many rocks. As each spine-jolting metre passed, my elation over the view lost air. There were so many problems with the block. The dingo fence would mean regular invasions of privacy from the council, not to mention the risk of baiting. The huge concrete eyesore was too big to bury; the ugly existing ‘dwelling’ expensive to demolish and remove. The four-wheel drive tracks scarring the bush were already creating erosion problems, starving some areas of bushland from water. The destruction of so many Ironbark trees was heartbreaking to see and the craters caused by gravel and deco extraction and screening had left orange scabs on the landscape where nothing would grow. Other than the stunning view, the block had a sad, mistreated feel to it, as if it had been abused too much and given up.

Erosion on the western hillside.

We drove past the dwelling on our way back to Julia. This time, a lone, skinny figure in a track suit stood near the caravan, fists plunged deeply into hoody pockets. I raised my hand to wave, but he’d already turned away to go back inside the caravan. By the time we’d returned to Julia, I’d made up my mind: this block was not the one.

Smash however, had other ideas.

I’d presumed his serious expression and lack of joie de vie meant he was thinking along the same lines as me – a mistake I make often. In the car on the way back to our friends’ place he pondered how hard it would be to bury the concrete. (The D9 was mentioned again.) He talked about bush regeneration, wildlife reserves and building an artist studio on top of the hill. I wondered out loud how much it would cost to fence a section – to keep the dogs safe from baits. Smash said: ‘Not much’ without any apparent knowledge on the matter. I mentioned how dry it was and how the drought was bad, real bad. I was starting to sound like one of the real estate agents when Smash reminded me of his lifelong dream to own a block of land.

We signed the contract on April 1st and I tried very hard not to read anything into the date.

The view southeast.