Chapter 2: Rewind forty years.
Family holiday at Gayndah, Qld.
Both Smash and I have childhood memories of spending time in the country. For me, they are very fond. My Great Uncles owned land around Gayndah in Queensland and ran Hereford and Brahman cattle on large holdings of land. The uncles were quiet, solitary men, but every now and then they endured the cacophony of visiting relatives looking for an inexpensive holiday. Usually we’d go with other family, so there would be a minimum of six kids roaming around the property, avoiding parental supervision. The stock horses were a massive draw card, but it was the freedom we loved most. No baths for days, our bodies sticky with sweat and horsehair, subjecting those poor stock horses to gymkhanas and curry combing them within an inch of their lives, hiding in the bush when it started to get dark, until it did get dark and the yellow lights of the house and smell of dinner drew us back in. In the mornings we’d wake to the yeasty smell of white bread slabs being toasted on a fork, the sound of boots clomping on floorboards, magpies warbling. We’d wander out to the kitchen and stand as close to the Rayburn wood stove as we could without singeing our pyjamas and make whispered plans for the day. Very simple pleasures.
For Smash, not so much. He’d liked camping with Scouts, and he’d camped during the Franklin River blockade, but that was serious business, they had jobs to do, badges to earn, knots to tie – there was none of this roaming around in the bush for the fun of it. His only other experience with country life was when he and his large family visited a Grandfather who lived near Penrith on acreage. The adults sat inside in the dark and drank tea and the kids were told to play outside. There was nothing to do, according to Smash, other than fight with his siblings and cousins, or wreck stuff. His standout memory is swinging on a willow branch, then being whipped by said branch shortly after. His Grandfather, (the whipper) was furious and scolded Smash for ‘wrecking the tree’ which did not seem fair to Smash’s eight-year-old thinking, given he wasn’t the one who’d broken the branch off. Needless to say, he didn’t yearn for more visits to the country.
I did, however, and when I left home at seventeen, I’d hitch a lift down to Stanthorpe with a group of my sister’s friends to hang out at a block of land she and my brother-in-law had bought at The Summit. There was no house on the block, but we ate around a fire and slept in panel vans, bongo vans or tents (or sometimes on the ground with an inflated Moselle bladder for a pillow). We drank a lot, played games at night in the bush, ran into trees, tripped over logs, screamed with fear and excitement. We listened to music, swam nude in the creek and got covered in leeches, talked and laughed and explored. When we did venture off the block, it was to clamber over the nearby boulders and caves at Donnelly’s Castle, (famous for being bushranger ‘Captain Thunderbolt’s hideout), or if our beverage supplies were getting low, we might tour the wineries. When I say ‘tour’ what I mean is ‘drink at’. In those days the wine makers were a lot more generous about how much of their produce they offered, or maybe we were just bold and brash youths with no manners, but we sure did sample a lot. Usually our tasting session came to an abrupt end when we got too rowdy, or when the owner worked out that we had no money to buy. (I’ve made up for my bad behaviour since by buying plenty of Stanthorpe wine.)
When I met Smash, I took him to The Summit to visit my nephews (who were by then eleven and fourteen) to show him this special place on the granite belt where much of my youth had been wasted. I was a bit nervous about whether he would enjoy it – born and raised in Sydney, he seemed more of a city guy. We hadn’t been going out long, my son, Jackson was still giving him the baby evil eye for daring to enter our lives and things were a little tense between us all. Smash was getting used to having a very lively two-year-old in his life, and I was getting used to hearing a second opinion on the best way to parent. I hoped that running wild and free in the bush for a few days would bring everyone together.
We stayed in the house my brother-in-law had built at The Summit, a cosy and cute timber cabin that met all our needs. We played cards, charades and board games in the evenings, listened to music, sat and stared into the fire. In the daytime we explored the block, cooked up feasts, and visited all the places of interest I’d visited so many times before. There was a lot of down time, when we just hung around and grew drowsy in the sun. Very quickly, it became obvious that Smash got bored easily. He couldn’t sit still, always needed a job to do…maybe something to wreck. While my sister and I lay on the grass with the kids, trying to outdo each other with wry observations, Smash was off chopping wood, hand washing clothes, cleaning stuff inside.
‘Just relax!’ we all said.
‘I am,’ Smash said.
And I realised after a few days, that in his own way, he was. He didn’t seem particularly happy though, moving from chore to chore with a serious expression; he really only brightened when beer o’clock rolled around. In the car on the way back to Sydney, with Jackson passed out in his booster seat in the back, I asked Smash if he’d enjoyed his holiday in the bush.
To my surprise, he said he’d loved it. Then he thought for a while, and said he’d really, really loved it. By the time we were cruising back along the Pacific Motorway into Sydney, he was planning our next trip. This time we’d take a tent, and we’d rig up a flying fox for the kids, and we’d go for a bushwalk in Girraween and we’d buy a chainsaw and we’d get a blow-up dinghy for the creek…and on and on.
We started going every year or so, then when we moved to Brisbane, the visits became more frequent. Sometimes we stayed at The Summit, but as we got to know more people in the Stanthorpe area, and formed friendships, we’d stay with them too, around Wyberba, Liston and Nundubbermere. It was always very social, lots of parties, lots of music and fun. Just about everyone we met seemed to be a talented musician – there’d be jam sessions in apple packing sheds, acoustic guitar playing around massive bonfires, disco dancing in steel sheds with mirror balls. Being there loosened something in us. Come as you are. Do what you wanna do, be who you wanna be, (yeah). It was the company mostly of course, but it was also the place. The bush. At night, the sky seemed ridiculously huge and star-spangled, closer than in the city. We breathed cold, clean air, and worked up a sweat chopping wood or playing soccer with the kids on the grass. Yelling was fun, lots of yelling and laughing. The combination of feeling isolated and secluded, yet open and free was intoxicating. Something as simple as climbing a hill and lying back on a whale of granite to watch the clouds sail past was mood altering.
So, after exhausting our coastal options for buying land, it seemed only natural to head towards Stanthorpe. It had a lot going for it. The cooler climate, the aforementioned sense of freedom, the built-in social scene and affordability. The drought would be a problem. The travel time, at three hours, an hour longer than we’d hoped for a weekend getaway. And the fire danger, obviously a major concern.
But still, the yearning continued, so we began hunting for the perfect block on land on the granite belt.
Smash sipping on a lip burner at the Franklin River blockade. (Note the lack of comfort.)
