We set out on a warm but overcast Sunday morning. At the bottom of the hill the ocean looked flat and grey, and clouds sat low over the headland. The old gate at the end of the drive was stiff and Mick had to hoist it out of a rut in the sandy soil and swing it across to where a stand of ragged banksias dropped their cones onto the dry verge.
‘Time you fixed that gate up,’ he puffed as he climbed back into the car. ‘I’ll have a look at it for you before I leave.’
‘The place is neglected. I’m never here. I keep thinking I’ll get away for the weekend but it never happens.’
‘You could sell it.’ I gave him a look and he shook his head. ‘Sorry. Old memories, I guess.’
Yes, old memories.
It was on my way to the shack, as a young wife, that I’d first met Mick. He was hitchhiking along the coastal road and my husband, Bill, stopped and we gave him a lift.
‘Where you headed?’ Bill asked.
‘Hoffmanns Valley. You know it?’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘There’s a commune there, Yudhikara, or some funny name. Got a mate who’s building a house in it.’
‘I didn’t know there was a commune in this area,’ said Bill. ‘Bit cold for it. I thought communes sprang up north of Sydney where you can get your gear off all year round.’
Mick grinned. He was an easy presence and we struck up an instant rapport.
We dropped Mick outside the pub in Tandarra, a tacky little seaside town then, and thought no more of it until the following Friday when we ran into him in the main street.
‘How’s whatsitsname?’ asked Bill.
‘Yudhikara. Yeah, good, I’m thinking of maybe propping there for a while. Why don’t you come out and visit?’ He turned to me. ‘Chick out there reckons she knows you.’
‘Knows me?’
‘Yeah, chick called Miranda someone.’
I gaped at him. ‘Miranda Meacham?’
‘Dunno. They don’t use second names. Miranda someone who said she went to school with you.’
‘Miranda Meacham is living in a commune? You’re kidding.’
Mick shrugged.
Now my interest was really piqued. Miranda Meacham had been school captain at my high school and girl most likely to succeed. Last I heard she was working for a law firm in the city; now she was evidently some kind of hippie. ‘How do we get there?’ I asked.
Mick drew a rough map on the back of my shopping list.
‘I’ll ring first,’ I said.
‘No phones allowed. It’s a rule. Just front up. People come and go all the time.’
From that moment I felt an urge to visit the valley. As a child and later as an adolescent you measure yourself by certain people, those among you who seem more blessed: smarter, wittier, better looking, wealthier and, above all, more cool. Miranda Meacham had been one of my measuring rods; I envied her more than I could ever have confessed to anyone.
I don’t recall exactly when Bill and I made our first visit to the valley but I do remember that it was hot. We drove a long way into the area known as Bell’s Country, past the hills where the tin mines were worked out and the Chinese labourers had long since packed up their joss house and moved on; past the fertile dairy farms that supplied the famous butter and cheese; on and on over a rough unsealed road that ran through towering bush of giant mountain ash and peppermint gum. Before long we felt disoriented; we might have been anywhere. Then, suddenly, the road emerged out of a blur of state forest into a small valley. The densely wooded hills sloped down into a lush green clearing where rustic stone houses with roofs of slate tile stood in a cluster on either side of a narrow dirt road. The road was not much more than a track, though it ran right through the middle of the valley. Along the edge of the surrounding grasslands stood a scattering of wooden cottages, timbers faded to grey, their broken guttering and derelict verandas giving notice that they were uninhabited. Two Jersey cows grazed languidly and there was a fenced-off enclosure with four elegant goats and a goat house painted in limewash. Puffs of white cloud hung suspended from a blue sky and a soft, filtered sunlight bathed the stonework in mellow tones so that the entire valley seemed suffused with summer haze. I almost gasped at its beauty.
We parked the car outside one of the stone houses that Mick had marked on our map with an ‘X’. It was a two-storey cottage with a pitched roof and would have looked quaintly English were it not for a narrow front veranda. A man lay in a hammock strung between two poles of this veranda, a dusty bare foot dangling from one end of the striped canvas and a broad straw hat rising just above the rim of the other. He looked up as we slammed the car doors shut and we told him we were looking for Mick.
‘You’ve come to the right place,’ he said. We knocked on the open door and Mick appeared, along with a big golden labrador that leapt up onto Bill.
‘Down, Gandalf!’ Mick growled. ‘Bloody dog.’ He had a proprietorial air which surprised me; he’d only been there a few weeks. He ushered us into a big open living area where another man was seated at a rough pine table eating his lunch. There was a cob of homemade bread on the table, a ceramic dish of curd and the remains of a green salad.
‘This is Dave,’ said Mick, ‘and this is Ariel,’ gesturing to a woman attending to the wood-fired stove with a toddler on her hip. ‘And this is little Gracie.’ Mick patted the child’s head.
Dave stood up with a welcoming grin and shook Bill’s hand. He was tall and lanky with black shoulder-length hair and traces of a Welsh accent. I liked him instantly. He was obviously smart, not some dozey drop-out, and Mick had told us that he was something of a leader in the commune. Of course the members of the commune didn’t believe in leaders but Dave had a natural authority. Later we discovered that he was the one who had found the valley and negotiated the sale, along with Miranda Meacham who had vetted the contract and handled the conveyancing.
Dave invited us to sit on bush chairs he had made himself and when we declined lunch Ariel brewed some tea made from mint grown in her garden. It was watery and weak.
We asked Dave about the commune, only to be rebuked gently. ‘We don’t call it a commune,’ he said, in his sonorous Welsh drawl. ‘It’s a settlement.’ There was an important difference, he explained; the word commune gave out the wrong message and encouraged spongers and dopeheads. So far there were eight families who had bought in to the valley, and three more were planning to move there and build over the autumn when it wasn’t so hot. Right now they were fixing up one of the derelict timber cottages as a guesthouse for itinerant workers who wanted to make a contribution. In October it would be their three-year anniversary and they were having a special celebration, a weekend festival. We were welcome to come.
Ariel had made no attempt to join us and seemed absorbed in her task beside the stove, cradling her daughter on her hip like a young earth mother. She had one of those enviable hourglass figures of fine-boned shoulders and full breasts, a slender waist and curvy hips that give shape to a long skirt. Her silky brown hair hung to her waist and when she passed beneath the skylight on her way to the sink the sun caught it so that it shone with silvery highlights. I wanted to talk to her, to draw her into the conversation, but she was one of those women who are still and contained, as if surrounded by an invisible ring of silence.
‘We’re not drop-outs,’ Dave was saying. ‘We’re not here because we’re afraid of the world, and we’re not anarchists.’ He gestured towards a bundle of leaflets on the kitchen table and told us that he was about to distribute fliers for a ‘good man’ in the town who was running for the local council on a platform of conserving the forests. I asked Dave what he had done before he moved to the valley and he said he had been a history teacher in a high school in the city. After he found the valley he applied for a transfer to the school at Tandarra and worked there for two years while he built his house. Now he was on call as a relief teacher and the money was enough since they lived frugally. The other settlers did various kinds of work: each house had its own vegetable allotment and some people sold vegetables and homemade cheeses at the local markets; others worked as deckhands on the coast or nursed at the local hospital. A few were living off savings while they ‘looked around’. I knew some must be on the dole, though we didn’t mention it.
‘I think I know one of your people,’ I said, feeling awkward with that word ‘people’. They were not communards, they were not exactly pioneers or settlers, so what were they? ‘Mick said there’s a Miranda Meacham living here and she said she knew me. I think it must be the Miranda Meacham I went to school with.’
‘Miranda’s away just now.’ There was no warmth in Dave’s voice and his manner cooled. I sensed that he and Miranda didn’t get on, that Dave was one of the few men she couldn’t twist around her finger. I didn’t press it, though I was disappointed and made a mental note to ask Mick to be sure to let me know when Miranda returned.
‘What about the old cabins?’ Bill said. Someone had obviously lived here before the commune.
‘This area was settled by German families who came out in the 1860s. The local folklore is that they came from villages around Frankfurt to escape having their sons conscripted under Bismarck, so of course we like that idea, that they were anti-war.’
‘Perhaps they just wanted to protect their children,’ I said.
‘Same thing in the end, isn’t it?’ He pushed his plate away and stood up. ‘Would you like to look around? I can take you on a tour if you like.’
All this time Ariel hadn’t said a word. I had waited for an opening, a way to bring her into the conversation but she hovered at a distance beside the stove, and Dave was such a compelling presence. He drew you towards him.
We left our half-drunk tea on the rough pine table and headed towards the door. Dave strode out onto the veranda and Bill and I followed. Mick stayed seated at the table. ‘Catch you later,’ he said. ‘I’ll just groove around here for a while.’
I looked across at Ariel. ‘Goodbye,’ I said, and she smiled shyly.
We strolled out into the sun, aware suddenly that the stone house was dark inside, as if built against extreme heat, or snow and sleet. The houses were picturesque, in a Hansel and Gretel kind of way, but I wondered how suited they were to this temperate valley. Bill asked about their construction while Gandalf padded along beside us and I confess my mind wandered. I was trying to picture Miranda lolling about here in hippie braids and a peasant skirt. The image didn’t fit.
‘How big was the original settlement?’ I heard Bill ask. ‘The Germans, I mean.’
‘Well, in this valley it was just one extended family, the Hoffmanns. Two brothers with eight sons and five daughters between them. To get to Australia they had to offer themselves as indentured labour, which meant working for the local squatter south of Tandarra on the big sheep run. They kept gardens and sold vegetables, and pooled their money until they had enough to buy land. Then they hacked their way through the bush with axes and cross-cut saws until they found this place. They were Lutherans of course and they built a little chapel.’ He pointed towards the northwestern corner of the valley. ‘We can walk there if you like. I’ll show you the graveyard. Some of the headstones are still upright.’
As we walked, I looked around at the little village of stone houses, all of different designs but each impressive in its finish. Mick had said something about it being a rule that you had to build your own shelter out of the local stone but these places looked too, well, solid. Surely they had employed stonemasons?
By this time the men were ahead of me and I could hear Dave explaining the property entitlements to Bill.
‘There are eleven owners, tenants in common, but a lot of people come for a short stay.’
‘Don’t you have rules about that?’
‘It’s up to the shareholders how many people they want to have living with them at any one time. But if anyone causes any kind of trouble they have to go.’
We had already heard from Mick about ‘trouble’. One afternoon a mob of bikies had driven into the valley in full leathers and florid tatts. They had pulled up on the edge of the settlement, revving their powerful engines, and Dave had gone out to meet them, had stood for some time talking to them in a low-key way. No-one knew what he said but after forty minutes or so they had driven off with a friendly backward wave, never to reappear. It was an episode that had greatly enhanced Dave’s authority. He seemed to have a gift for dissolving tension.
Ahead of us I could see what looked like a miniature church, too small to enter and almost ornamental. It was made of orange-red brick and some kind of plaster and it had a white column on either side and a domed bell tower. Dave saw me looking perplexed.
‘That’s our bread oven,’ he said with pride. ‘That’s where the real worship goes on around here.’ He paused in front of the oven’s cast-iron door and launched into a detailed account of its construction, which was of great interest to Bill, though I found the oven repellent, absurd even. They had gone to so much trouble and the end result was grandiose. Too much of a statement.
The real church sat at the far end of the valley on a low rise. It was clad in weatherboard on a stone foundation with a pitched roof of rusted iron and a faded wooden finial. As we approached I could see four worn steps leading up to the door, and both steps and door looked like they might collapse at any moment.
‘Is the church used now?’
‘We show movies there on a projector, once a week. This week it’s The Conversation. Come if you like.’
‘Seen it,’ said Bill.
‘So have I,’ said Dave, ‘and it’s a long way to travel for a movie.’ He laughed, and gestured at the church. ‘Pity it’s not big enough to hold a dance in.’ Then he opened the door and we looked inside. It was bare except for some green plastic chairs ranged along one wall. It might have been an old schoolhouse. There were dead blowflies on every windowsill and cobwebs high in the corners of the ceiling. Outside again, we followed Dave to the rear of the building which was unkempt, and in among the tall grass there were headstones encrusted with lichen.
‘Have to cut that bloody grass again soon,’ he said. ‘We should preserve these headstones. Graveyard maintenance is on the roster but you know what happens to rosters.’
‘I suppose a pastor came and visited,’ said Bill.
‘Apparently not. It was too far for the nearest pastor to travel in a buggy. And that didn’t matter because they didn’t believe much in priests. Every man is responsible for his own salvation and all that. I imagine they met on Sundays and took it in turns to read the lesson.’
‘They must have been lonely.’
‘Well, they were hard workers, a legend in the district. The librarian in Tandarra – she comes from around here – she told me the old men were great characters. They hated having to rest on the Sabbath. After their Sunday dinner they’d go for a walk and knock the heads off thistles with their walking sticks, the closest thing to sacrilegious work they’d allow themselves.’
‘What did they farm?’
‘They were potters originally, artisan families, but they obviously knew a thing or two about farming and the valley produced enough to support them. As you can see, it’s a special place.’ He looked around him with an expression of pride. ‘They kept pigs and ducks, and cows. Apparently they made cheese and travelled on a horse-drawn wagon to nearby towns to sell it. Cured bacon, grew potatoes. All that.’
‘Did they build a kiln?’
‘If they did we’ve never found it.’
We read the names on the headstones. Friedrich Hoffmann, Ada Hoffmann, Heinrich Geller, Ludwig Wolfhagen, Maria and Johannes Hoffmann, Frieda Rubenach. The Johannes Hoffmann headstone had an inscription that I couldn’t quite make out. Dave saw me peering at it up close and read it aloud: ‘Heaven is my fatherland, Heaven is my home.’
I liked that inscription. There was something soulful about it, but also defiant.
‘Johannes Hoffmann was one of the original brothers. Thanks to the warmongers in Europe he had to renounce his country. Imagine it, he was fifty-three when he arrived in Australia. That was a fair age in those days and he most likely came to the conclusion that from now on the only fatherland that counted was the big H.’
Dave began to walk on and Bill followed but I lingered for a moment, distracted by another headstone. Sophie Hoffmann, wife of Nikolaus, had died in the valley in 1892, aged twenty-seven. Although it was a hot day my skin went cold; twenty-seven, it was my age. At the bottom of Sophie’s headstone the names were engraved of the infant son she had left behind, Wilhelm, along with three small daughters, Elise, Bertha and Salome. Dave, who had backtracked, came up behind me. ‘I know,’ he said, looking over my shoulder. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘So what happened to all the Hoffmanns? In the end, I mean?’
‘The young ones eventually moved to the city or towns. Only three spinster sisters were left behind with their widowed brother. The brother’s children had no interest in the valley and we bought it from them.’
From that day on Bill and I became regular visitors at the commune. It held a fascination for us. It’s easy to mock these things; it was easy at the time and even easier looking back, but that valley was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. It seemed blessed. Bill and I had moved to the coast for a year because Bill was employed with Baird and Markham, a big construction company that had contracted to build a new bridge over the Clarence River. It meant we could live in the family shack for no rent and save money towards a house of our own in the city. Because we had decided to try for a baby I wasn’t looking for work; Bill was on a good wage with a generous allowance for working away from home and I expected to fall pregnant soon, so there was no point in starting a new job. This was 1979, when mortgages weren’t a killer and everything seemed easier.
Bill was fascinated by the practical problems of the commune and happy to advise on surveying or when a problem arose with the drainage. Dave liked people who were useful and they soon developed a friendship. Bill especially loved the stone houses and spoke for a time about building one himself, but I was more interested in the politics. How on earth were they going to make the place work? What would happen when they couldn’t agree? When someone couldn’t or wouldn’t pay their share of the land tax, or when someone’s kids ran riot and rode their bikes through the corn patch, or let the goats out? Perhaps because he had been a schoolteacher Dave was always keen to talk and never seemed to mind my asking a lot of questions. And because we visited often at the weekends we soon learned about the rituals and protocols of the settlement. There was a weekly council for collective decision-making and a roster for chairing the meetings, although the roster was a problem; some people can chair a meeting and some can’t and inevitably Dave acted as the council’s de facto convenor. Meanwhile Mick had decided to stay on in the valley and was living in the cottage that had been fixed up for itinerant workers. He was a mine of information and was able to tell me that the meetings of the collective went surprisingly smoothly. The last big disagreement among its members had taken place after they built the bread oven. Typically, they had no trouble agreeing on the big item, the design of the oven, but couldn’t agree on the small thing, the design of the bread. They had plans to sell it on Saturdays at the local market and wanted to ornament the cob loaf with an emblem of their collective enterprise. But what emblem? Some had favoured the peace sign; it would symbolise their own politics and honour the original settlers, past and present linked together. But Miranda Meacham had been withering in her view that the peace sign was already a cliché. One woman suggested a Y sign for Yudhikara. This had the advantage of being easy to form out of dough, but some of the others felt uneasy about this. After all, they didn’t know what Yudhikara meant. It was a name left over from the time of the Hoffmanns but it wasn’t German, it didn’t belong to the local Indigenous lingo and it wasn’t Sanskrit, so who knew what it signified? They could be perpetuating some bad karma. In the end they agreed not to have anything.
Often Mick would arrive at our shack with one of the Yudhikara people known as Dolby. They’d roll up in Dolby’s ute to collect Bill and go out fishing on the old couta boat that Dolby’s father had left him. It was an easy life. ‘I’m glad I took that job with Baird and Markham,’ Bill said one night as we lay in bed, reviewing our prospects. He had grown up in the inner city, had spent no time in the country at all and now he was beguiled by it. Between the coast and the valley we seemed to have the best of both worlds.
On one of his visits to collect Bill, Mick announced that Miranda Meacham was soon to return. Immediately my antennae went on high alert; I wanted to know when.
‘Dunno,’ said Mick, ‘but Dave’s less than thrilled.’ He winked.
‘Why?’
‘He thinks she’s trouble.’
I wasn’t surprised to hear this. ‘I sensed they didn’t get on,’ I said.
‘That first time we visited and I brought up her name, he went all cold.’
‘Well, as I heard it, she nearly scuttled the whole thing.’
‘Scuttled? How?’
‘Well, they didn’t just build those stone houses from scratch. No-one had a clue how to go about it. So Dave sussed out these journeymen dudes that travel around working for people. He organised a couple to come to Yudhikara for a while so they could show everyone how to build in stone.’
‘Journeymen?’
‘Yeah, wanderers. Haven’t you seen ’em? I saw one hitching outside Tandarra a few months back. Didn’t come near us though.
Probably warned off.’
‘Yes, but who are they?’
‘Tradesmen. Just out of their apprenticeship, usually. Mostly Krauts. You can’t miss ’em. They wear waistcoats with little pearl buttons and top hats. And they have big walking sticks. They do their apprenticeship back home and then they travel around the world looking for work to finish off their training. And there are strict rules. They have to carry their tools on their back and walk, or hitch. If they work for you, you give ’em a bed and feed ’em.’
‘So some of them worked at Yudhikara.’
‘It was Dave’s idea. He heard of two stonemasons hitching around the south and he drove down and found them and brought them back to the valley. So they could teach him and the others how to build in stone.’
‘Where did everyone live while they were building?’
‘Some were in tents, some rented shacks in the town, or on the coast.’
‘That explains it,’ said Bill. ‘I thought those houses looked professional.’
‘Yeah, but they nearly didn’t get built.’ Mick paused with the knowing look of one who has gossip to impart. ‘Your mate, Miranda what’s-her-name, shacks up straightaway with one of the journeymen and soon he’s building her house at a great rate. Then suddenly she’s fucking the other one on the quiet and when the first one finds out all hell breaks loose. They’re big strapping boys and they take to one another with their sticks. Dave had to sort it out and got his jaw broken in the process.’
I think my mouth fell open at this point.
‘Luckily, by then everyone had the hang of it, the stonework and all.’ Mick gave a high, barking laugh. ‘Dave read the riot act to Miranda and she told him his fortune. If you listen to what the others say, it’s been a power struggle between those two from the start.’
‘He could have asked her to leave,’ said Bill.
‘He wouldn’t do that. She’s a tenant in common for one thing, and for another he owes her. When they were negotiating the sale of the valley, the Hoffmann family changed their minds and wanted to back out but Miranda nailed them, some kind of legal technicality. That’s what Dolby said, anyway. Without her they wouldn’t be there.’
Each time we visited the valley I sought out Miranda, only to receive the same answer from those who were sharing her house. ‘Haven’t heard. She’ll be back before long though.’ Meanwhile the commune was immersed in preparations for the winter solstice, its big festival for the year. There would be a feast and circle dancing, local musicians had been invited and a giant bonfire would be lit.
One Saturday in late June we drove over to the valley for the solstice. Miranda Meacham had still not returned. As the sky darkened we gathered at one end of the pasture where the settlers had built a bonfire from a huge pile of wood and old tyres. The night was cold but utterly still, the black sky lit by a swathe of stars. On either side of the dirt road there were big white lanterns moulded from papier mâché in the form of goblins or sprites. They dangled from tall, sinewy poles with the eerie glow of benign ghosts and the effect was magical. We sat on rickety canvas chairs in a half-circle around the fire, nursing our mulled wine, and it was noisy; wood cracked and snapped and sparks sprayed into the winter dark like Roman candles. Mischievous from too much wine, I asked Dave about the journeymen stonemasons, saying Mick had mentioned them, but Dave just looked away, over to where Ariel was assembling the children with their smaller lanterns in readiness for the ‘parade of light’. Ariel was often in charge of the children; she had a way with them. They would tug at her skirt for attention and hang on her soft words.
‘The kids have been making those lanterns for weeks,’ said Dave. ‘The local school principal’s been a big help, lets them do it in class as a special activity.’
I could imagine. Dave would have approached the school and, in his quietly authoritative way, made it sound like an eminently reasonable proposition.
‘The journeymen? Did they stay long?’ I wasn’t going to let him off the hook.
‘Long enough for us to learn from them. As you can see.’ He gestured towards the houses at the other end of the valley. ‘They were incredibly well trained, better than in this country. One of them, Manfred his name was, told me his father had worked on the restoration of Cologne Cathedral. I told him my uncles had flown bombing raids over Cologne at the end of the war.’
‘Was that tactful, Dave?’
‘I told Manfred, the past is the past, we start afresh here. And I apologised for the raids over Cologne.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘I wanted them to know where we stood on the subject of war. That our valley was a place of peace. And to know we valued them. We were stoked to have them here. We took their coming as a sign, a blessing. My God, they could eat though. They ate enough for a platoon. Ariel never left the kitchen.’
Silently I admitted defeat. With Dave the conversation always ended up on his terms. So what if Miranda had bewitched both journeymen, that wasn’t the point; the point was that Dave and Manfred had sorted out the bombing of Cologne. Dave wasn’t going to tell me about the scandal; the personal was always subordinate to the big picture. To history.
‘You were lucky you found those guys.’
‘Luck didn’t come into it.’ Dave stared into the leaping flames. ‘If you look past your nose for long enough, Di, you can always find what you need.’
Five days after the winter solstice, Miranda Meacham returned to the valley. Mick dropped by in Dolby’s ute with some fish and a red cabbage sent by Dave. ‘Your old schoolfriend’s back,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d like to know.’
I drove into the valley on the Saturday. Bill was on a fishing trip and I was glad; I wanted to reconnect with Miranda on my own. I was eager to see her again, but also nervous. She could be charming, intimate and confiding, but she could also be mocking and dismissive, a bitch. At school you never knew where you stood with her and I didn’t imagine she had changed.
With no phones in the valley, I could take her by surprise. I drove in past Dave’s house where Ariel was squatting on the veranda with Gracie in a sling on her back; she was peeling potatoes from a vast wooden tub and dropping them into an aluminium jam pot. I waved but she seemed to be in a kind of trance and didn’t see me.
I parked the car outside the stone house I knew to be Miranda’s and knocked on the door, which was ajar. A small boy pulled open the door and said: ‘They’re out the back.’ Damn, she wasn’t on her own. Then again, it seemed that no-one in the valley was ever on their own. I walked back down the stone steps and around the side of the house to the rear where a group of sunburnt smokers lay on the grass getting stoned. At first I couldn’t see Miranda but then a woman sat up, waved and beckoned me over. It was her. I hadn’t recognised her because she had shaved her head, no longer the well-groomed young prefect who ruled the school. Her naked scalp shone in the sunlight, her neck was festooned with thick ropes of red and brown seedpods, her upper arms encircled with silver bangles in the Indian fashion and she wore a saffron-coloured sarong. She was lying back on an old plastic recliner, her legs wide apart, her thin cotton vest unbuttoned and her ample breasts bare.
‘Di!’ she cried, ‘Di! Over here!’
As I drew near I saw that her feet were ingrained with dirt and her toenails painted black. ‘Sit,’ she commanded, indicating the grass beside her. ‘Somebody get Di a drink.’
And someone obediently did.
On that first afternoon she could not have been nicer. It was the charming Miranda, the I-have-found-my-valley-and-am-at-peace Miranda. Some of this might have been for show, for her entourage, but I was pleased when she suggested we meet in the town for, as she put it, a tête-à-tête.
It was a Wednesday and I found her at the Green Goanna, a café favoured by the local hippies. She was sitting by the window looking fresh, almost demure, in a white cotton sun dress. Even with her head shaved she looked good; everyone else had grown their hair long as an emblem of where they were coming from but Miranda had to be different. Over coffee she told me that she and Ariel were first cousins and this surprised me. They could not have been more different, though clearly their mothers had shared a penchant for romantic names. I guessed that it was through Ariel that Miranda had met Dave and heard about his plan for a settlement.
‘Dave’s a control freak,’ she told me. ‘He comes from some gloomy Welsh valley, and one of those dour low-church families. You can never get that stuff out of you.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘He’s serious about everything. He has all these rules.’
‘Don’t people agree to the rules when they buy in?’
‘Yes, but you have to be flexible. Give and take. People have to live together. We’re mature adults, it’s not boarding school.’
Miranda hadn’t changed. Everything had to be on her terms, which were of course self-evidently reasonable. Perhaps Dave was a control freak; he did have a flinty quality about him, the sharp nose, the long chin. But I liked him. I liked the interest he took in the valley’s history and its German pioneers, the way he looked after their headstones. Miranda was one of those people who had their eyes on the future while looking to finesse the present.
‘You’ve been away,’ I said, changing the subject.
‘I’m looking into imports. It’s time I became a trader.’
‘A trader? You?’
‘I need an income stream. There’s a shit-load of hippies around here and nowhere to buy incense, clothes, non-chemical soaps, that kind of thing. There are two good markets in this district, one on Saturday at Tandarra and one at Northbridge on Sunday. I could make enough to live. Black market, darling. No Mr. Tax Man.’
‘Where do you get all that stuff?’
‘You have to weasel a good deal out of an importer in the city. Which I have.’ She gave a knowing laugh. ‘But that’s not my big news.’ She paused.
‘Well?’
‘My new man! He wasn’t there when you came on Saturday but he’s arriving any day. And you won’t believe this. He works for John Lennon!’
‘John Lennon? The John Lennon?’
‘That’s the one.’ Her eyes flashed with triumph. Nothing could be more cool than this.
‘What? So he’s just visiting then?’
‘No, darling, John has bought a big property around here, up in the hills.’ She lowered her voice confidingly. ‘It’s a big secret, none of the locals know and I can’t say where.’
‘Have you been there?’
‘Not yet, but don’t worry, I will soon.’
‘Why on earth would John Lennon buy land around here?’
‘Why not? Privacy, a bolt-hole. Somewhere to escape to when they drop the bomb. Geordie says it’s magnificent rainforest country. Used to be a farm but has been neglected for years and is reverting to its natural state. John and Yoko flew out last year from New York and looked it over. Private jet, hush-hush, nobody knew. Then they hired Geordie to look after it.’
‘He knows them?’
‘Not personally. Hasn’t met them yet. An agency hired him.
The agency put a private detective on him to check him out and everything.’
‘You mean they’ve never met him and they trust him?’
‘Well,’ she pouted, ‘they have to trust someone here if they want the place looked after. And Geordie speaks to John on the phone.’ ‘John’ was now Miranda’s intimate, or soon would be.
‘It gets better. Geordie says they’re coming out in October and I’m going to arrange it so they visit the valley. I’m going to break it to the collective at the next meeting. They’ll be hysterical!’
‘I thought it was supposed to be a secret.’
‘It is, but I’ve had an idea. We’ll explain to John how the valley is a peace haven, a symbol of a new age. He and Yoko had that press conference for peace in their hotel bed that time, remember? Well, we can offer them a follow-up in the valley, a small private press conference, just one camera. We’ll take the footage and after they fly out they can release it to the press. And we can make a documentary and incorporate their visit. Nobody will know about it at the time, except us, and we’ll release the doco later. What better way to start a new decade? Nineteen-eighty here we come.’
‘You’re nuts.’
Her eyebrows shot up. ‘You sound like Dave.’
‘He knows about this?’
‘Not yet.’ It was the way she said it; all I could do was smile.
‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘come out with Bill and meet Geordie.
He’s utterly gorgeous. In every way.’ She was practically drooling.
‘Will he live on the property?’
‘He’ll live with me, of course. There’s an old farm house on John and Yoko’s property but it’s derelict. And Geordie’s going to put in a garden for me. I’ve been such a slacker in that department.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘The others are pissed off with me because I never grow anything.’
I could see that even if Geordie turned out to be lying about the John and Yoko connection, Miranda might still come out ahead. All of the stone houses had a thriving vegetable plot, except Miranda’s, and the rampant buffalo grass around her foundations had done nothing for her credibility in the valley.
That night I told Bill the big news and he pulled a face. Bill didn’t take to Miranda. I once described her as a free spirit and he said: ‘Free spirit? That would be another name for wrecker, would it?’ But he loosened up when she started to drop in on us, usually on her way back from the city to collect goods for her market stall. She would arrive wearing a flowing dress in some bold tropical print and clutching a bottle of champagne in each hand, and over dinner she would regale us with funny stories. Unlike most women she could tell a joke and she had an eye for the absurd. Bill would chortle despite himself. Then she would fall into our spare bed because she was too drunk to drive back to the valley. It was not beyond Miranda to roll up and greet us effusively as Mr. and Mrs.
Boring, but at least she said it to our faces, and because she seemed to have some genuine affection for me I never took offence. That was the thing about Miranda: either you bought the full package or you didn’t buy at all. Bill didn’t buy. ‘She’s alright when you get her on her own,’ he’d say after she left, but in matters general he was on Dave’s side.
By mid-August, Geordie McCausland had moved into the valley. Mick announced his arrival on one of his regular visits to the shack and we asked what he thought of him.
‘Is this stuff about John Lennon for real?’ Bill asked.
Mick shrugged. ‘Seems to be.’
‘What’s he like, this Geordie?’
‘Seems okay. Haven’t spoken to him on his own.’ He winked. ‘You’d have to prise Miranda off him.’
Eager to meet this unlikely steward, we drove into the valley the following Sunday and knocked on Miranda’s door.
‘Come in,’ she called, and her voice had a happy sing-song note.
Things were obviously going well.
We walked through the whitewashed passageway and out onto the back veranda where Miranda was lolling on a scruffy day-bed in a see-through sarong, bare-breasted as usual and entwined with a man in skimpy jocks. We took this to be Geordie. He eased himself up into a sitting position and extended his hand to Bill while I looked him over. He was attractive, no doubt about that. He had broad shoulders and long reddish-brown hair that fell in loose curls over a high forehead. His skin was weathered into a dark tan and his full mouth and long scimitar nose made him look like a bush Arab. His legs were strong and muscular and he had a way of holding himself, a relaxed, almost feline slouch of the kind that suggested he knew how to take his time. Miranda gave me a look, a gloatingly possessive see-what-I’ve-got look. I laughed.
We sat for a long time and drank our way through a cask of wine. No mention was made of ‘John’. Geordie talked knowledgeably about the valley’s vegetable allotments and his plans for Miranda’s patch but there was something odd about him, something creepy and at the same time childlike. He certainly seemed to know a lot about soils, and phrases like ‘potassium deficient’ and ‘seaweed mulch’ came and went on the mild afternoon breeze.
Weeks passed and it was some time before we returned to Yudhikara. There were problems with the construction of the bridge and Bill was working long hours and coming home spent. In his time off he slept a lot and didn’t feel like going anywhere. We hadn’t seen Miranda for ages and I imagined her to be preoccupied with Geordie.
Finally Mick turned up one Sunday in Dolby’s ute and plonked himself in a chair in the kitchen. He looked like a man who had had a surfeit of something. ‘Had to get out of the valley, mate. Major shitfight going on there.’
‘Yeah?’
‘The three-year anniversary celebration. No-one can agree how to handle it. Dave and Miranda are at each other’s throats. It’s getting ugly. Had a meeting of the collective last night, bloody thing went on for five hours. Dave wouldn’t let it go and neither would Miranda. Since Dave is usually the one to call stumps I thought we were going to sit there all night.’
‘What’s the problem?’ asked Bill.
‘Bloody John Lennon, that’s the problem.’ Mick grinned. He’d knocked back a double brandy and was starting to relax. ‘Miranda wants to phone him, via Geordie, and invite him to the anniversary celebration. Like, to preside over it. A new era of peace and all that bullshit.’ He snorted.
‘As if.’
‘Exactly, mate. As if. Like they’d be able to keep it a secret and it wouldn’t leak out. But Miranda’s going on about it being a cosmic moment, a gift from the universe. “What better way,” she goes, “to see in the ’80s?”’ And he gave a naff imitation of Miranda’s haughty tone.
It wasn’t leakage I was thinking about. I was wondering why any of them thought that John Lennon would want to hang out with a bunch of hippies at the bottom of the world. George, yes, maybe, but never John.
‘Miranda’s gone off her trolley,’ said Mick. ‘She thinks the sun shines out of Geordie’s arse. Full stop.’
‘What does Dave think of him?’
‘Dave didn’t mind him moving in, especially after he put in Miranda’s garden. Now she’s got the best laid-out patch in the valley. And Dave checked him out and found his father runs a big nursery in the south, so he’s a gardener alright. But Dave’s got doubts about the John and Yoko thing. For one thing I don’t think he believes it, and for another, even if it’s true he doesn’t want to invite them to the valley. “We’re not into celebrity stuff,” he says, last night. “That’s not what we’re about.” Then Miranda goes spare. “But the man’s a genius!” she goes. “He’s a peace warrior! Isn’t that why we’re here, isn’t that what we believe in?” She was spitting chips from the word go, like she’s made her mind up and Dave’s just getting in the way. The more wound-up she gets the quieter Dave goes. You know what he’s like. He just lets her go on and on until she’s said her piece. And then he says, very calmly, “That’s all very well, Miranda, but you can get burnt by this stuff.” And he tells this story about when Dylan came on his first tour of Australia and sang at The Black Swan folk club in the city. A friend of Dave’s called Okie used to make guitars and he took his best one along and offered it to Dylan, who strummed a few chords on it and said: “This guitar’s shit, man.” Okie never got over it.’
Bill laughed derisively. ‘What did the others say? Was there a vote?’
‘No, no vote. Dave said we’d leave it “in abeyance”, whatever that means. He knew Miranda had got to a lot of people and he might lose a vote.’
Sometimes Mick surprised me: he didn’t miss much.
‘Miranda stormed out in a state. Fit to burst. Now she’s working her way round the valley, talking down Dave.’
I could picture the scene all too vividly. ‘What did Geordie say?’
‘He wasn’t there.’
‘Isn’t it a rule that everyone comes to the collective meetings?’
‘Supposed to be. Ariel wasn’t there either. Little Gracie’s crook. Everyone else turned up, not that they got much of a word in.’
‘Nothing serious with Gracie?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Wise of Geordie to stay away,’ said Bill. ‘Leave it to the power-brokers.’ He shot me a fleeting glance.
‘So, Mick, is Geordie up for all this,’ I asked, ‘or is it just Miranda’s idea?’
‘Dunno. He’s hard to read, is Geordie. But he knows a lot about rainforest restoration and he showed me the draft plan he’s drawn up for John. He also seems to be pretty cashed up. Heaps of dope. Someone’s paying him, even if it’s not the Beatleman himself.’
‘He probably grows the dope on John’s plantation,’ said Bill.
‘If it exists,’ I added.
Mick shrugged. ‘Any more of that brandy?’
Mick stayed with us that night and he and Bill got up at four to go fishing off the beach. They clumped about so noisily that I couldn’t get back to sleep so I lay there until sunrise wondering why I hadn’t yet conceived. In the seven months since Bill and I arrived on the coast, two women in the valley had got pregnant. Dave maintained that the valley was on a ley line and had a rare fertility, so perhaps Bill and I should spend a night at Yudhikara. But I wasn’t worried. There was plenty of time.
The men returned with perch for breakfast and we fried it up and ate it with a cob of the Yudhikara bread that Mick had brought. Then I left them drinking on the veranda and drove off to do the weekly food shop in the town. It was a bright spring morning and I was in the best of moods. This really is the life, I thought, as I parked the car in the pretty little car park behind the beach and its crumbling pre-war promenade.
After I had worked through my shopping list I sought out Dave at the market where he and Ariel ran a weekly stall and sold their vegetables. He was carrying Gracie in a backpack and had dark rings under his eyes.
‘You look wiped,’ I said.
‘Ariel’s got a fever.’ He frowned. ‘I’ve been worried about her. She’s been off colour for weeks now. No appetite, nothing.’ He looked dejected, kind of hollowed out, which was unlike him.
‘Can you take a break?’
‘I certainly feel like one.’ He called to a teenage boy whom I recognised and who lived in the valley. ‘Jamie, can you mind the stall for a bit?’
We sat at the Green Goanna and I thought I had never seen him so deflated. I asked him about the meeting of the collective, and then confessed that Mick had already given us an account of it. There was no point in hiding anything from Dave; he had a nose for where you were coming from.
‘Oh, that,’ he said, as if it had been a minor difference of opinion. He knew Miranda was a friend of mine. But I prodded him gently until at last he gave in to his exasperation. ‘It was a bit much,’ he drawled, ‘when Miranda started on about the old German settlers, and how we needed to keep the peace tradition going, and how Lennon was a link to all that. A modern peace pioneer, she called him.’ He sniffed. ‘Holding a press conference in bed in a luxury hotel, I’d hardly compare that to packing up and leaving your home to sail across the world.’
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to take sides. We sat for a minute in silence while Dave pushed the orange Smartie in his saucer around and around the base of his cup until the chemical dye began to run in blotches on the white porcelain. ‘History repeats itself as farce,’ he sighed. Gracie began to wail.
We parted in the car park beside the beach. ‘Don’t worry, Dave,’ I said, lamely. ‘It will work itself out.’
And it did, though not in the way we expected. Later that afternoon Dave would pack up his stall as usual and drive home to the valley with Gracie asleep on his lap, back to the haven of peace he had so patiently husbanded. When he arrived at the door of his stone castle, the one he had built with his own hands, the princess Ariel was gone. She had run off with Geordie McCausland.
And now here we were, Mick and I, driving towards the valley after a gap of fourteen years, speeding along the coastal road where the sea-changers and their money had moved in and the old fibro shacks had been demolished in favour of over-designed palaces of wall-to-wall glass and vaulting decks. None of this was new to me. Since my father retired to the shack I had been coming to visit him for years, but Mick had been long gone and, as he told me now, living of late in a commune in New Mexico. That he should turn up out of the blue when I was at the shack for just a few days to pack up my father’s things was beyond belief. When I opened the door and saw him there on that dusty, windswept porch – unchanged but for grey hair and a thickness around the middle – I could have wept.
‘Had to come this way to see Dolby,’ he said. ‘Remember him? Thought I’d drive out to the valley while I was in the area and see how the old place was going. Then I thought I might as well drop by here on the off chance you still owned the shack.’
I had never owned the place but now that my father was dead I did. At last. When I no longer wanted it.
Seeing Mick, so unexpectedly, had the effect on me of walking through an open door, back into the past. Mick especially. To begin with he had been more Bill’s friend than mine, one of those innocuous-seeming men who grew on you. Soon they were eating your food, sleeping on your couch, doing odd jobs about the place and maybe even sleeping in your bed. But my own deep affection for him derived from the time of Bill’s death. It had been a violent spring, the wettest on record. In a week of storms and gale-force winds the scaffolding at one end of the construction works had collapsed and Bill and another man had been swept into the flood-swollen river.
Exactly one week after the funeral, when my parents had departed at my insistence and I was on my own again, Mick turned up. He cut the grass, chopped the wood, mended the pump and casually looked after the place for a whole summer while I grieved silently. There were days when we scarcely said a word to one another, when I made sandwiches and we sat outside under the shadecloth that Bill had tacked up, and we smoked and stared across to the hills. Friends came to see me and offered to stay but I didn’t want anyone else around. Only Mick. Mick understood about silence; he was comfortable with it. One night we slept together but it didn’t work, and in the morning nothing was said. With that instinctive tact that had enabled him to lead the life of an amiable nomad, Mick behaved as if nothing had happened. Eventually, when he thought I was ready, he packed up and hit the road.
Now he was back, with a yen to see the valley again, and he wanted me to come with him. But I had avoided the valley for years. After Bill’s death I couldn’t bear to go there; it was a site of too many promises that remained unfulfilled. Yet here I was, driving Mick along the coast beside the eroded sandhills. Each year the tides rose higher and the drop from the spiky grass to the beach below grew more and more steep. It was a windy day and a big sea was blowing in from the south-east, scattering a fine mist up over the sandbanks and across the road. ‘Wouldn’t have recognised the place,’ said Mick as we slowed into the outskirts of Tandarra. The town was flashier now, with a new beach promenade and ten-storey holiday apartments lined up along the foreshore. There were powerboats at the marina and talk of a canal development. But we still had an hour’s journey ahead of us so we drove through the town without pause.
When at last we arrived at the turn-off to the valley there was a woman there, sitting idly by the roadside at a stall of homegrown blueberries. She looked vaguely familiar.
‘Do you recognise her?’
Mick shook his head. ‘You?’
‘No.’ But I felt unnerved. Soon we would be in that lush clearing with the steep wooded hills and the filtered sunlight, that paradise of youth, and I could feel myself beginning to choke. It was too much. I could never have driven here alone.
We swung into the turn-off and began the steep ascent, up the narrow winding pass and through a passage of dense forest until, suddenly, we were gazing down into the sunlit open. At first glance the valley looked exactly as it did before: the cluster of stone houses, the old timber cabins, the rich grasslands. But there was no-one in sight. We drove on further, along the dusty unsealed track, and saw a man standing in what had been the goat enclosure. He seemed absorbed in the act of tying up a grey donkey and didn’t look up, though he must have heard us drive in.
I parked beside the fence and we got out. ‘I hope you don’t mind us driving in,’ I said. ‘We used to have friends who lived here and we wondered if they still did.’
He was young, no more than twenty. He began to fill a wooden trough with water from a hose, then looked up from under his broad-brimmed hat and said: ‘What friends?’ I thought him not so much blunt as shy.
‘Name of Eyenon,’ said Mick. ‘You know ’em?’
‘No.’
‘Live here, mate?’ asked Mick.
‘Nah, just keep an eye on the donkeys. Nobody lives here. People come weekends, but.’
‘Alright if we look around for a bit?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, flatly, like it wasn’t his place to give anyone permission to do anything.
We began walking in the direction of Miranda’s old house. ‘She was bloody shattered,’ said Mick, as if Geordie’s abandonment had occurred only last week. ‘Drank herself stupid for a year.’
I looked around. ‘He left her a wonderful garden. Look, the orchard is still here.’ There were apricot, apple and peach trees, ragged and in need of pruning.
Mick began to pull at some tall shoots of buffalo grass. ‘Yeah,’ he murmured, ‘lots of fruit.’ He yanked hard at a clump of the stubborn weed and suddenly it came away. ‘But no Geordie,’ he said, casting the weed to one side. ‘And no John Lennon, either.’
I walked on ahead to where the oven had been. It was gone, completely dismantled, though you could see the concrete square where they had cemented it into the turf. The church, too, was gone. ‘Probably blew off its foundations,’ said Mick, who had caught up to me. ‘They would have carted it away.’ We could see, though, that some of the headstones remained upright, and the grass around them had recently been cut.
The stone houses, so sturdily built, looked just as before; if anything they seemed even more imposing. Only the wooden window frames were worn. ‘They’re as pretty as ever,’ I said. ‘Indestructible.’
‘You’d have to put a stick of gelignite under them.’
‘Dave still owns his.’ I had kept this piece of information from Mick until now. I wanted to surprise him.
‘Dave? Still comes here?’
I nodded.
‘I thought the old crowd had all gone.’
‘They have, except for Dave. He comes here sometimes, at Easter, and school holidays.’
‘You’re a dark horse. I didn’t know you’d stayed in touch.’
‘I didn’t.’ And I told him of how, when I went to enrol my son in high school in the city, I had looked at the school’s prospectus. There, towards the top of the staff list, was a David Eyenon. It was an unusual name and I thought there couldn’t be two of them. And there weren’t. It was him. ‘He’s the deputy principal,’ I said.
Mick laughed. I could see he was pleased. ‘That’d be right,’ he grinned. ‘Dave would be running something, you could back that in.’
‘You know, he doesn’t look any different. Still the same Dave, but in a collar and tie. Still a beanpole. Even wears his hair a bit longer than everyone else. He told us they’d stuck it out in the valley for two more years but the work dried up. They couldn’t grow enough produce to sustain the lifestyle, and some of the women got restless. They wanted to move into the town, or back to the city.’
‘Got a new woman, did he?’
‘I think so. He said something in passing about his children, how they used to love the valley but now they’re older they don’t want to come. I’ve sometimes wondered if Ariel ever came back for Gracie but I didn’t like to ask.’
Mick gave me a look. ‘Always fancied Ariel,’ he said.
‘I know.’ I knew what he was thinking: if it hadn’t been Geordie it might have been him.
‘Look at this place,’ I said. ‘It … it feels so empty. It all went wrong, didn’t it?’
Mick put his arm around my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. ‘Yeah, mate, something usually does.’ But his voice lacked conviction. He was gazing in the direction of Dave’s house and his eyes had gone all misty. ‘I loved this placed, just loved it. It was so good while it lasted.’