A Big Country

Perhaps I should have titled this post 'Fire, Flood, Watermelon'. It was line ball. I went for 'A Big Country'.

Last Friday night, outside, there was an eerie stillness, somehow suiting the end of a tough working week of hot weather. After a bath and a tantalising dinner of lamb mince tacos and burritos with salad, I was ready for a movie. Frustrated that the movie I'd had on order from the DVD shop hadn't been returned ('How to Throw your Mother From the Train'; Brent Gazzanica recommended it to me to help my writing) I flicked through the satellite channels and settled on Movie Greats, 'A Big Country'.

Oddly I can't remember having seen it before, although the big musical theme was so familiar to me. It was number one track on all the old 'Great Western Movie Themes' LP's. It was made in 1958, a classic western starring Gregory Peck, Chuck Heston, Chuck Connors and I think Burl Ives. I loved it, especially the part of the resolute Peck in his role as a retired sea captain in the unfamiliar setting of ranch life and range wars.

The forecast for Saturday was that of a day from hell, 44C with gale force wind. I went to bed dog tired and prepared to have most of the day off hiding from the heat, catching up on bookwork.

I woke at dawn a bit after 6.00am. The morning was as eerily still as the previous evening. No leaves moved as I lay in bed looking out the window into the garden. I remembered the forecast and thought to myself, almost like a premonition, this 7th of February will be one that will be etched permanently in memory.

The sun burnt hot as it rose over the eastern hills when I walked the dogs. It was 32C when I returned home and 39C before midday. By afternoon there was a strange orangey light as the sun filtered through smoke; the temperature on our deck for most of the afternoon was 42/43C. The wind picked up and was gusty but, mercifully, it was not as strong here at Gembrook as it must have been elswhere. Melbourne recorded it's highest ever temperature, 46.4C, and as the day unfolded news of fires in various parts of the state began coming through. We lost power at 6.00pm and with it the phone also goes due to our setup with answering machine/cordless phones.

Our power was restored Sunday morning. I saw the workers up a pole on my walk. It seems our outage was unrelated to the fires. As of now, Monday morning, the count of lost lives is at 108. The weather's cool but fires are still burning around Victoria and we can only pray for favourable weather conditions in the coming days.

The phone rang twice while I was in the bath last night, both times it was mates ringing to check if we were OK. The first was 'Grub' at Hansonville. He's fine but the air's thick with smoke there and he's nursing a broken leg. He was in hospital during the heat wave a couple of weeks ago after he was caught and bowled over by a cow in a cattle pen. The second caller was Dave Dickson.

"How are you 'Will'? Are you safe from the fires?"

"Gidday Dave, just hold on, I'll dry my ear. Yeah, were fine so far. Nothing real close, we've been lucky, the Dandenongs haven't gone up. Where are you? Last I heard you were in Canada on your honeymoon about six months ago. You sent a card from the Rockies."

"We're about half an hour out of Charters Towers. It's been raining here like you wouldn't believe. We're locked in, all the roads are cut and there's washaways. It'll be some time before we can get to town. It's rained every day this month and every day in January except for five, I counted."

"I wish we could have some of the rain here. We've had nothing to speak of in that time. I've never seen it drier. Leaves crisp and crackle under foot as you walk. It's been so hot trees are shedding leaves and foliage is burnt to buggery on the bush. It's going to be a tough year. What are you doing at Charters Towers?"

"We're looking after a property here, 25,000 acres. We work three days a week. There's no one else here, just us. A good place for newlyweds." He laughed. "If you could see this mate, you'd love it. I'm feeding a young red kangaroo off my hand, a beautiful little thing it is."

"What does it come up on the porch?"

"No, I'm in the kitchen, it comes in the house. It's like a pet, follows Jodie everywhere, even into the shower. It loves a shower."

"Into the shower?"

"Yeah. It's good. She cleans it up when it gets shitty. It won't go into a body of water though, outside, no way. Not like the swamp wallabies I saw the other day. I was going past a gully and there were four heads sticking out of the water eating the top of the grass above the water."

"Is there a shortage of grass on the hills?"

"Nah! There's 3 foot of grass everywhere with all this rain. They just love the water. Swamp wallabies. I felt a bit like one myself a while ago. What happened was there was two bulls in a cattle yard on the other of the river. We're on a hill with a creek on one side and a river on the other. In the dry you can drive straight across the river at the crossing but now it's about 60 metres across and about 12 feet deep and flowing quite fast."

"The property owners locked the bulls up after hard work catching them, they were going to shift them, but it started raining and the truck wouldn't have got out, so they left the bulls penned, planning to get them the next day and left on the quadbike. But it kept raining, there was no way to get back to let the bulls out. The boss was going to organize a helicopter, but I said 'don't do that', I'll swim across the river and walk to the bulls. Our nearest neighbours, they have six kids, live a couple of k's away on the other side of the river, so I thought I'd take them a big watermelon from the garden."

"I had two changes of clothes and a pair of running shoes I bought in Canada for about $180, in a plastic bag, so to get the watermelon across I tied a length of rope around my waist and to the other end I tied the handle of a big plastic bucket into which I put the watermelon. Off I went. The current carried me downstream quicker than I thought it would, I didn't realize the bucket would drag me so much."

"If I'd been there, Dave, I would have told you that."

"I crashed into some tee trees sticking out of the water. There was a log the floods must have brought down held up by the tee trees, so I climbed on to it, but in trying to pull up the bucket I dropped the plastic bag and my clothes floated off. I wasn't going to lose my runners so I swam downstream after them, and then going back to the log against the current I was quickly exhausted. I lost the watermelon, but I made it to the neighbours and he went and let the bulls out. Apparently four feet of water had gone through the yards at the flood peak. The bulls would just have had their heads out of water."

"You haven't changed Dave. Take it easy. At least Jodie must be happy, to stick it out." Jodie's Canadian.

Dave laughed again. "Well, she's not got wheels to get away. Nothing's going anywhere for a while here. Give my love to everyone down there."

" I will mate. See ya. Thanks for ringing."