10 Jun Swan Farm
This is a story about small incidents up the Bell River valley, on the fringe of the Catombal Range, where my friends Helen and Ann live on a diminutive settlement called Swan Farm.
Bell River in June is a swathe of sunshine. Early morning frosts give the day its bite. Cockatoos sweep the sky.
Swan Farm is a menagerie of small animals, small crops and big dreams.
At Swan Farm this weekend, I did something I haven’t had the privilege of doing since I was a little girl – lick the beaters.
And not just any beaters – lemon meringue pie beaters.
Twice.
That’s four beaters, two bowls, two pies.
Four beaters two bowls of fluffy white meringue made delicious by eggs laid yesterday by chooks scratching for vege scraps in the grass in the paddock next to the house. And lemons from the tree near the shed.
Helen’s lemon meringue pie
Helen and Ann are pivotal to the small WIRES (wildlife rescue) team in the vast central west district. All weekend, calls come in for injured birds and mammals. A cranky little wallaroo who was rescued from the roadside several weeks back, has outgrown her urban dwelling and is dropped off at Swan Farm.
She’s happy enough – if we feed her a bottle and leave her alone. She is a taut reminder that help as we might, she owes us nothing. She is wild. She knows where she belongs, and it’s not here . . . warm as she is in her flannelette pouch by the fireplace with the cats and dogs lazily circling the heat.
That’s not so true for Lomax, a young though grown wallaroo who lives in a cage with an open door up the yard and has not yet found reason enough to hop away. Helen and Ann say when he is ready to mate, he’ll bound away with the right wallaroo. For now, he’s content at Swan Farm.
Lomax
Although he was in trouble on Saturday when Helen discovered he’d got into the studio, freshly prepared for friends expected to arrive next weekend. Now what would any right-thinking wallaroo do in a room with a bed?
Why – jump on it of course!
That, for me, has to be the laugh of the century. I mean, picture it. The walleroo jumping on the bed.
It was the muddy footprints on the rumpled sheets that gave him away.
Swan Farm planting project
The weekend’s project was a small garden on the studio’s south wall. Turf had already been laid on the waist-high weeds, it was time to install the water feature and plant the bay tree Helen had kept in a pot for the last 10 years. Finally, it had found its home.
Here’s Helen and Ann at the start of the project (how many animals are in this picture, not counting the humans?)
There was only one creature on Swan Farm not happy to see me – Jacko.
Jacko went to war the moment she spotted me in the kitchen early that first morning. Woosh! A flash of white and there she was, eyeball to the window glass, this eye, that eye, a sharp annoyed peck at the glass. A white cockatoo who’d been caged her entire life until she had the good fortune of being handed over to Swan Farm, she now has feathers and freedom. And a good friend in Ann.
The rest of us, she doesn’t care for much at all and after one sharp peck at my shins, I was armed with the water squirter.
Here’s Jacko sipping tea with Ann at lunchtime.
As the sun goes down over my last evening by the Bell River, red wine in hand we watch colour drift along the low Cotambal peaks, and listen to the cockatoos spread wide over the freshly ploughed paddock across the road – yummmmm, wheat seeds for dinner.
Or, if you’re human, lemon meringue pie.
Again.
Written by Stephanie Dale, author, journalist & traveling writer; founder of The Write Road and Walk and Write.
Stephanie Dale is an award-winning journalist and author with a fondness for walking and writing. She is a passionate advocate for the visibility and voices of everyday people and focuses on supporting new and unpublished writers to write and keep writing. The Write Road is dedicated to empowering people to tell their stories, their way.
