Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga Read online

  ‘Google doesn’t say anything about it,’ I told Jeff. ‘Maybe I should remove it just to be on the safe side? Any suggestions?’

  Jeff’s bright idea was to send me down there with a three-metre length of structural pine. Structural pine was Jeff’s answer to most things. He figured I’d be able to sort of hook it over the rump of the roo then guide it, floating nicely, back to the edge, where I could then simply pull it out onto dry land. It all seemed so easy and he couldn’t see what all my fuss was about.

  The dam is about one hundred and fifty metres from the house and it was deceptive just how big that body was, as well as how far into the dam it was. With each step I knew the plank slung across my shoulders was going to be useless but I kept telling myself to believe it would work. Jeff says it’ll work so it’ll work.

  Sure enough, even as I stood on the edge of the dam and cast out my wooden fishing line, it fell pathetically short. It wasn’t even a third of the way toward the corpse. I walked back to the house but refused to admit defeat.

  The next solution was mine. I made Jeff stop painting and asked him to go and buy us a rubber blow-up boat. A few hours later and wearing gumboots, we carried our brand-new boat down to the dam. Getting into the boat was the easiest part, which even this gumby surprisingly managed to do without falling into the muddy water. We rowed out to the dead roo and, as we got close, the stench overwhelmed us. I mean, never in my life had I smelled something so vile. It went right up into your nostrils and down into your gut like you’d taken a big chunky bite of it. I heaved against it, turning my head so Jeff wouldn’t see.

  I told Jeff to hold on to its tail so I could row us back to shore. I just couldn’t believe he agreed to the plan and watched in horror as he leaned out of the boat and took a hold of the animal’s tail. It probably would have been a good idea to bring gloves as well as rope, I thought. I rowed as hard as I could but all we did was go around in circles.

  ‘Row harder!’ he called.

  ‘I am!’ I snapped back.

  ‘Its fur is coming off in my hands! It’s melting off the bone! Why aren’t you rowing?’ he yelled at me.

  The sight of that rotten tail in Jeff’s hands really made me gag: He’s touching it! He’s really got his hands around it! Ants crawled up his arms. I could see more skin than fur.

  ‘Keep holding it,’ I said as cheerfully as I could. ‘It won’t be long now!’

  I could feel the roo was stuck on reeds and I just didn’t have the strength to pull it free by rowing all by myself.

  ‘Change of plan,’ I said. ‘It’s stuck on reeds and I need you to help me row. You’ll need to tie the boat’s rope around its neck.’

  ‘What? You can’t be serious!’

  ‘Just do it, Jeff; you just have to do it. It’s no big deal.’ No big deal that you have to get your arms around its neck and your face close to its head. No big deal it’s slowly coming apart in the water.

  Jeff was kneeling on the bottom of the boat and had to reach far out over its edge, his face down close to that melting skin. I heaved again. His face just touched it! I’m sure his face just touched it!

  ‘You’re nearly there!’ I said encouragingly. ‘So close!’

  He nearly gave up but thank Christ he didn’t, though he was constantly brushing away the ants on his arms. After four or five goes at it, he finally got the rope around the kangaroo’s neck. I couldn’t look at Jeff because I was so worried that a piece of the roo had come loose and would be stuck to his face. My stomach hurled at the thought and I retched again.

  Jeff came to sit next to me in the boat but I still couldn’t look at him or his hands and with double the strength in rowing we gradually freed the body from the reeds and slowly guided it to shore.

  I got out of the boat just as the real rancidity hit the air. If I’d thought it stank before, nothing could prepare me for the smack to the face of it once it was out of the water. I heaved a few more times. It was without doubt the worst smell I have ever smelled.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he yelled at me.

  ‘I . . . I can’t. Jeff, I’m sorry! Ugh,’ I heaved audibly. ‘Don’t hate me but I just can’t do it. Ugh!’ I heaved again. ‘You’ll have to p-pull it out on your own.’ I reefed off my shirt and held it over my nose and mouth and crouched down to put my head between my legs.

  Jeff muttered some swearwords and a few other choice things under his breath but from my safe distance I watched him use all his strength to haul the carcass onto dry land.

  Jeff went a bit funny then. A look came over his face, his voice changed. ‘I’m going to be disturbed by this for months,’ he said. ‘I feel like we’ve murdered someone and now I’m moving the body.’

  I knew this would mean many weeks of a panicked Jeff waking up in the middle of the night, sitting bolt upright convinced he was covered in spiders (and one night it was lucky me ‘covered in spiders’ and the ever-helpful Jeff in his half-sleep/half-nightmare state thought it best to beat them off my chest . . . such a pleasant way to wake in the dead of night), or ants or perhaps the kangaroo had come to accuse him of foul play but despite this, and those moments of his pure terror that were yet to come, I just couldn’t bring myself to touch that dead thing, or get my face so close to its flesh.

  We’d already seen what foxes, crows, goannas and ants could do to strip a skeleton bare – a dead kangaroo we’d seen on a walk with visiting friends had all but disappeared within a few weeks – so we decided to leave it by the edge of the dam, hoping it would be gone before our international guests arrived.

  We were ready to call it a day, both feeling overwhelmed and dirty, but then out of the corner of my eye I saw something else in the dam, a black thing about fifty metres from where we had retrieved the kangaroo.

  ‘What do you think that is?’ I asked, pointing.

  ‘Don’t know . . .’ Jeff said dismissively.

  ‘Don’t you think we should . . .?’ I ventured.

  ‘Oh you’ve got to be kidding me!’ He threw his hands in the air and marched back to the boat.

  The other dead thing in the dam turned out to be a fully-grown adult swan. So now we both had our T-shirts around our noses and out we rowed again, this time without any rope (it was still tied around the kangaroo and Jeff refused to take it off again), which meant Jeff would have to grab hold of the dead bird’s neck with his bare hands.

  Quite happily, I was doing all the rowing; Jeff was doing all the dead-animal handling.

  ‘I can feel its vertebrae in my hands!’ he squirmed while leaning over the edge of the boat.

  I kept saying silly little encouragements like, ‘It’s fine, no big deal, it has to be done,’ all to keep his mind on the job but at the same time I couldn’t help but think, Oh my god, I cannot believe he’s touching that!

  Later that night at dinner I struggled to watch him pick up a chicken leg and eat it with his fingers, the same fingers that only a few hours before had flesh dripping through them.

  ‘I’m just not very hungry tonight,’ I said and pushed my plate aside in favour of another glass of wine.

  *

  Another day on Block Eight, another newbie error: ‘Gee, the water’s running slow today,’ I said, standing over the kitchen sink.

  It was a few days before Christmas and we had a house full of Canadians – lots of showers, dishwasher loads, water running from most taps at one time or another and it was the worst time in the world for the water to slow down when we needed it most.

  We’d been living on the property for three months and hadn’t once thought about where the house water came from; it just isn’t something city folk ever have to think about: water just comes from water mains!

  Jeff went looking for those water mains to see if somehow they had been turned off but after walking the perimeter of the house a few times he couldn’t find anything.

  ‘What about that pump in the shed?’ I prompted. ‘What do you think that’s for?’

  I went and
inspected the pump but could see nothing wrong with it (with all my experience with those kinds of things). Then we walked the ten minutes down to the road to see if we could find a water main down there, but again there was nothing even remotely familiar-looking.

  As we were walking back toward the house, now with a curious James in tow, he said, ‘Erm . . . do you think those might have something to do with it?’ He pointed at the two enormous concrete tanks next to the shed.

  Jeff and I looked at each other, aghast, and ran into the shed.

  To be sure, the previous owners had given us a twenty-minute run-down on how things worked on the property during a handover session back in August but it had been overwhelming, rushed, and we’d taken no notes. I’d pretended I knew exactly what the husband was talking about because I didn’t want to appear stupid or out of my depth (though of course I was feeling totally stupid and out of my depth). I did recall him saying something about the pump in the shed, but I’d assumed rainwater captured in the tanks was a backup.

  Inside the shed, we traced the water pipe back from the pump to its source . . . the concrete tanks on the outside.

  ‘Do you think that’s our only source of water?’ Jeff asked in astonishment. I just shrugged.

  My next step was to check the water level in the tanks. I climbed up the ladder and removed the heavy concrete cover of the tank. Way down the bottom I could see a trace of water; a few inches at best. Even as I knew it would not be the case, I silently insisted to myself that the next tank would be full; that there was nothing for us to worry about. But after climbing up and removing its cover I saw that it too was empty.

  As silly as it might sound, there wasn’t a single internet search term we could think of that gave a set of results for businesses that would bring us water in bulk. It took us over an hour to finally stumble across ‘water cartage’.

  When you live in a rural area of Australia reliant on water cartage, there’s no such thing as an H2O emergency. Everyone is in the same (drydocked) boat and normal people – knowledgeable people – plan their water requirements well in advance. Few are stupid enough to ever let their tanks run dry. My pathetically pleading phone calls were dismissed: Too busy; don’t do the dirt road; existing customers only; not until next week. We would have to put our guests up in a hotel and dance for rain.

  I made one last call and finally someone took pity on me, or more likely saw some dollar signs, and we were promised a small load of water within a couple of hours – for two hundred and fifty dollars. But all I cared about was that disaster had been averted. The boys who delivered the water sniggered behind my back and really took the piss out of me – and then I looked down and saw that I was wearing a pair of Crocs with white pull-up socks. Nothing says I’m a serious straight farmer like a maiden-in-distress phone call and a pair of Crocs ’n’ socks.

  The next day I called around again and found a guy called Phil, who was willing to become our regular water carter for a hundred and forty dollars per load, and a few days later he came and filled those tanks to the top. Lesson learned – or so it should have been. Jeff decided it was best to leave a piece of structural pine at the tanks so we could dip it in any time and get a precise level reading.

  At dusk on the very next day, with apparently full tanks, I was again confused: ‘Gee, the water’s running slow again today.’

  ‘Maybe we’ve used it all. Have you checked the tanks?’

  ‘Jeff, come on, there’s no way in hell we’ve used 45,000 litres in under two days! I mean, I know I like my showers but it just doesn’t take that long to rinse and repeat a centimetre of hair.’

  ‘Still, you’d better go check the levels. Use the structural pine.’

  As soon as I approached the tanks I saw the torrent of water running down the hill. The ground had turned to mud; leaves and mulch had been completely washed away. Jeff’s structural pine level reader had fallen over in strong winds and had cracked open the pipes, effectively emptying all 45,000 litres onto the ground. I raced back to the house and sounded the alarm but by then it was too late.

  ‘You and your fella must shower a lot,’ Phil the water guy said when I called to ask him for yet more water. As I hadn’t mentioned Jeff to him at all I figured the Hunter grapevine worked just as well as any other, perhaps better. I explained our mistake with the plank of wood and pointed at the fresh pipe from Bunnings that Jeff had used to replace where the crack had been.

  ‘You sure you ladies know what you’re doing out here?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing much aside from discos and cake-baking.’ I laughed off his dig and went about my business.

  Two days later I went to water my vegetable seedlings and had that familiar sinking feeling when I again saw the ground flooded with water. I’d left the tap turned on but the hose nozzle off and overnight the pressure had built and it had burst the hose off the wall. A few thousand litres of water had been lost but at least there was no need to call Phil out for another emergency – thank god.

  It was the same when it came to the water in our dams. Where did it come from? We simply didn’t know. Jenny had said that we should fix the irrigation, only we thought it was a specialist skill and didn’t even think we could do it ourselves. After paying two handsome studs a fortune to fix our vineyard irrigation, which drew on the large dam, we asked them if they knew where the dam water came from but they just looked at us as if we were crazy. After all, we were the guys who’d just paid them two thousand dollars to walk up and down the rows of vines and plug holes in the irrigation with materials you could readily buy at Bunnings (as we learnt later).

  Jenny eventually solved the mystery of where our water came from. It turned out we were part of a scheme called PID (Private Irrigation District) that pumps water from the Hunter River all over the valley. It hadn’t been in our contract for sale when we purchased the property but we are legally bound to spend five thousand dollars a year in order to get our allocation of 7.5 million litres of water, and if we want more water, we pay more. We have to pay the five thousand regardless of whether we use all of our allocation and this was another nice little surprise to take a further chunk out of our must-only-use-for-villas savings.

  Girls (and Boys) Just Want to Have Fun

  While some of the big picture plans for the property (like water and wine) were gradually coming together, I still had dreams of living off the land as much as possible. We had so much unused space, so much water in our dams, it felt that anything was possible. Plant a seed and harvest more food than any two people could ever eat in a season. Throw in a line, and the critters would practically beg to be caught and cooked.

  One of the greatest and most infamous challenges at Block Eight in the early days was whether we had any yabbies in the dam between the olive groves and, if so, who was going to be the first to catch one. The previous owners told us the small dam was teeming with the lobster-like things and as they are one of Maggie Beer’s favourite Christmas ingredients, well then, I just needed to catch them and cook them up for myself. I had visions of a long table under the shade of the olive grove on Christmas Day, forty or fifty people passing around share plates – all made from ingredients grown or raised right here on Block Eight. But instead, Jeff and I drove to my parents’ house on the Central Coast and had a less bucolic (but still delicious) meal with our Canadian visitors.

  Try as I might, those fancy little crustaceans outsmarted me every time I tried to catch them. Not even Jeff and his sister Carole (who was visiting with her partner Tom from the UK) in that dead-roo rubber boat could catch anything by trawling behind it with a large net. I googled ways to catch them, went out and bought an array of fancy (and bloody expensive) traps and nets, but every time I threw in some bait, it was gobbled up and I was left as far from becoming Maggie Beer as I had been when tending to my pot plants in Annandale. I posted on social media about it at the time and before long, thousands of people joined in the challenge to catch a yabby. And when I say thousands, I mea
n three. Three people. It all came to a head during January 2013, when we hosted relays of friends and family during the traditional Aussie summer holiday.

  ‘I used to catch them in the dams outside Tumut all the time as a kid,’ my dad told me. ‘Those were the days . . .’ and then he went on reminiscing about sliding down hills covered in pine needles or over slippery rocks in the river.

  ‘But the yabbies, Dad,’ I brought him back to the here and now. ‘How did you catch the yabbies?’

  ‘We just dropped in a piece of string with a bit of sausage tied to the end and whoosh,’ he made an impressive sound, ‘there was always a yabby on the end of it.’

  I dragged him down to the dam, preparing myself to be impressed by the simpler technology of yesteryear. Of course! I had been over-thinking, over-engineering it when clearly a piece of string was all that was required all along.

  Dad perched himself on the esky I’d packed with drinks and snacks ready for a long fruitful session, and threw in his line. And we waited. And waited. And waited some more.

  ‘I don’t think they like the bacon. Are you sure you don’t have any beef sausages? Or chicken sausages?’

  ‘They’re yabbies, Dad, not rabbis.’

  He just gave me a look. After a few minutes, I asked: ‘Any nibbles?’

  ‘Nothin’,’ he said, defeated. ‘But my back’s killing me.’

  After about nine minutes the former Tumut Yabby Champion had sadly retired for good.

  ‘Must’ve been the bacon,’ he said, as we walked back to the house, our heads hung low in defeat.

  ‘Maybe they’ve evolved into some sort of super-yabby,’ I suggested, whereupon I received another of Dad’s looks.

  The next batter up was Vicky, one of our kids’ mothers. They were all down visiting Block Eight for the school holidays. To say Vicky is competitive would be a bit of an understatement. She loves getting the kids involved, too, so we all went down to the small olive dam one afternoon and she spent some time arranging the meat in the trap just so. Vicky had even bought a pair of nylon stockings with her, as she’d seen on YouTube that this was one piece of equipment that was non-negotiable. After fifteen minutes Vicky pulled the trap back in and the kids and I very excitedly crowded around. Nothing.