In the Rain Shadow – by Jessica Carter

Nonfiction

22 Nov

ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY | AUSTRALIAN NATURE WRITING

1. Transportation

I wake to the smell of fading red blossoms. The air is warm already. There are bushfires in the west, yet the haze is not smoke but dust. Late last night I arrived here, on the other side of the Great Dividing Range, the one marked by rain shadow, and the absence of tall buildings, rushing humans, city fumes and ocean breeze. The sky is wider, the plant leaves tighter. Breathing comes lightly.

I’m back on the family farm, but the return is always fraught – a mixture of trepidation and a deep pull somewhere near my heart. A reminder of the queasy combination of fear and hope that comes with being tethered to something. I’m returning to my childhood home in Australia from my temporary one amid Hyderabad’s heady traffic fumes, crowded skyline, flashing rainbow lights of old temples, and lofty cries of men selling wares from carts that pass my door.

When I am away, I miss the colours in the landscape this side of the range. The sky is a crisp blue; wattle flowers range from fluorescent to golden yellow; scribbly gum trunks glow white. The further you go inland, the lowering humidity yields an even more distilled clarity.

But my memories are more than visions. Part of being Australian is – as Tim Winton puts it in Island Home – to know the ‘tectonic grind’ of our planet’s most ancient continent, felt as the way ‘this country leans in on you’. It’s in the way the land forges our bones. The lean arches into an ache that I notice most when I cross the threshold from tarred road to dirt that leads to the farm. Until then, the shallowness of city life distracts me from the tectonic shifts within.

Palette of this land
paints my bones – pulling me here
as I pull away.

2. Condensation

I spent my early years in daydreams, floating with the clouds. I’d drift from the cover of the towering yellow box in the morning to the shrubby camouflage of the pepper tree in the afternoon, taking imaginative cues from the other creatures that shared the shade.

So many of my childhood memories are measured in millimetres. The jasmine in my Nana's unruly farmyard garden, which climbed and crept, creating tunnels that enticed and scared me at once. Garden snails, who moved at a slightly faster pace by comparison, leaving silvery trails under the sun's crystallising light.

The ants moved in millimetres too. I’d shadow black garden ants on their paths across the lawn, the verandah, the jar of the horses’ sugar cubes by the door. I followed the red fire ants from afar, occasionally working up the courage to poke one with a stick, and watching the explosion of troops rushing to rescue a fallen friend.

I didn’t know then that so many of my small companions were invasive species – that they’d inhabited the island continent for less than two centuries, just like my family. I did know that the ants were a sign of coming rain. Without fail, their numbers multiplied as the air grew heavier. We watched rain fall in any metric, gratefully.

I dream I weep, but
tears cannot be measured. A
mopoke calls me back.

3. Precipitation

We worshipped water. It was a gauge for life, relief and joy. It moulded the land I played on with my baby brothers, muddying our toes and marking new rivulets after each storm.

Adulthood has led me to cities – often on foreign soil – and petrichor has become my portal back. In a flash, I am little again and the sky seems to collapse under its own weight. In a breath, I am back where four generations of my family have lived. The precise location is a coordinate of feelings as much as a mark on a map or a moment in time.

My family calls this land Pembury, after the small village in the south of England that my great-grandfather left behind. We are west of Barraba, a small town in north-western New South Wales, known by the First Nations people who have been here for tens of thousands of generations as a place of yellow-jacket trees. We are on Gamilaraay Country: an enormous space ranging from north of the Hunter River to west of the Barwon River and covering the Namoi and Gwydir basins between. The home that sheltered me in childhood sits beside Tareela Creek, which flows into the Manilla River, and then into the Namoi.

Long before I played in raindrops here, the Gamilaraay people knew that the source of water came from above. In the Dreaming, the Milky Way is Warambul – big river – a place where everything lived once upon a time, until the world turned upside down and poured it all onto the earth. Warambul stretches across the Southern Hemisphere sky as a watercourse woven in silver, arching from one horizon to the other. We are just the shadow it casts.

For all that I lack in words to define the place I first called home, it continues to speak to me, and I feel called to it.

The emu waits, with
his hidden eggs, for the earth
to shift in shadow.

4. Infiltration

The region was etched onto British maps in 1818. Soon the squatters came, seeking land to graze cattle and sheep, their arrival sparking a century or so of rapid changes to the ancient landscape. Sandy loam soil was compacted by hooves; creeks ran brown during a gold rush; hills were stained white with exposed asbestos.

For the First Nations peoples who called the land home, these changes to Country brought turbulence and trauma. Within decades, thousands of loved ones were lost to disease and violent deaths. Between 1828 and 1838, at least 669 Gamilaraay people were victims of colonial massacres – and with the loss of their lives came an erasure of names and stories. Among them were 80 Gamilaraay people massacred in Barraba in 1836. On 10 June 1838, at least 28 Gamilaraay and Wirrayaraay people were murdered at the Myall Creek Massacre. Seven of the 12 perpetrators were later hanged publicly for their crimes, a rare instance of British subjects being executed for killing Indigenous people.

Exactly 162 years later, I visited the opening of the Myall Creek Memorial and Massacre Site on a school excursion. As we inhaled the smoke of ceremony, we heard truths that no-one had ever told us. Truths that 22 years later are still barely whispered. But you cannot look away from a towering granite rock that marks massacre, speaking wordlessly of loss and resilience amidst ironbark trunks.

Wedge-tailed eagle soars
over red dirt and red bark.
Buried secrets rise.

5. Percolation

Just over 100 kilometres to the west, Mount Kaputar emerges from the eucalypts. It is a marker of a different history buried beneath Earth’s surface. The landscape today still carries echoes of the Eromanga Sea, which covered much of inland Australia more than 100 million years ago. The land I grew up on once sat on the shore of this shallow sea. The creatures that inhabited it were prehistoric, their fossils mostly identified as pliosaurs. There were also icthyosaurs and ammonites, distant ancestors of today's dolphins and squid, respectively. Their bones have been fossilised, becoming opals in the soil further west, where the evaporation of the silica-rich sea left deposits that mixed with earth.

After the sea evaporated, millions of years passed before the land began to bleed lava. For four million years, molten rock spilled, forming a giant volcano more than 50 kilometres wide – Nandewar. In the 20 million years or so since that violent expulsion of fire, the giant became a smaller, milder version of itself, morphing into the buckled spine of the Nandewar Ranges, with Mount Kaputar its highest peak. Wind, rain and ice left their marks in millimetres over millennia, giving a home to woodland and eucalypt forests and the world’s only pink slug – its neon coat a nod to the lava that once covered the ground.

Today, those volcanic soils yield lucerne, wheat and other crops from which many farmers, including my father, make a life and meagre living.

The soil flashes like
lorikeets fleeing for home
as twilight arrives.

6. Evaporation

For most of my childhood, we lived through drought. In lieu of rain, clouds of dust inhabited the skyline, and a black cloud lived over our heads. Harsh light scorched the soil and parched the stems of plants. In the years between the rains, the sky would sometimes shed a tear, but it was never enough to smooth the land’s deep wrinkles. The landscape faded, ironically, to a watercolour. The ground and the sky blurred into browns, only the blue of distant trees keeping them apart.

My father carried his tears like votive offerings, holding out hope that each new day would bring rain. Every morning, he checked the instruments on the back verandah, adding the readings to his mental catalogue of weather. From there, he’d gaze longingly at the rain gauge on the back gate, before returning for breakfast and another dry day.

Even before the drought, the waterways on our farm were only ever trickles. At night the creek would sing to us, and by day the magpies would sing to it. After the skies dried, the grasses followed, and then the creeks, dams, gullies and springs. In the early days of drought, the green necks of lucerne turned golden, and it was briefly beautiful. Then the earth turned a muted red, matching the hides of the Herefords who left hoof-prints in the dust.

Eventually, the singing stopped. We never acknowledged aloud, in the cool of our cottage, that the world around us was shrivelling. Only the silence spoke of that. Even in the dry, a river has so many things to say.

Bare earth and bleached bones
greet sun. But hope flies farther
than a black swan can.

7. Transpiration

I wake to the sound of ironbark leaves rustling. The air is even warmer than yesterday and a haze of dust remains on the horizon. Outside my window, the soil is exposed, pockmarked by the memories of humans, trees, rocks and rain. The roots of the ironbark weave these disparate markers of time together.

In rain and in drought and in all the times between, the trees have persisted by holding tightly and loosely all at once. Erupting from the Eromanga Sea’s silica deposits; clinging while their roots shifted and shook through the formation of the Nandewar Ranges; standing tall while their comrades were cleared for cropping; they are still there. Still rustling.

The ache in my bones deepens.

Transmutation – the
process of translating truths
through the elements.

8. Condensation

Before I fall asleep, I sit on the verandah and watch the oldest story in the world. Seven sisters, stranded for eternity in the night sky, fleeing from the men who hunt them. Called the Miyay Miyay by the Gamilaraay and Euahlayi peoples, the missing seventh star in the Pleiades constellation hints at how long humans have been telling this tale. Modern astronomy shows that seven stars would have been visible over 100,000 years ago, explaining in part how the story – in its many forms across the world – is always about seven sisters, even though the sky only shows us six today.

Tonight, the Magellanic Clouds – campfires in the sky – are brilliantly clear and the lights remind me of my own insignificance, the smallness of my part in this big scheme. Droughts and deluges, delights and disappointments, all will come and go as the Earth continues to pace around its solitary star.

To grow up here is to expect space, to seek softness in harsh edges, to acknowledge the age of the Earth each day. To return here is to remember time and space. To keep turning to the truths that rest in the bones of the land and the body.

I have been a girl running away too. But I am not stranded. I choose to stay in the rain shadow a while longer.

Rain shadow whets my
soul (four years dry). Like wattle
seed, waiting for fire.

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This work is part of our Australian Nature Writing Project suite.