Nothing We Liked Better: a house remembered, a home restored

“I then had to look for another home, and there being plenty of places for sale at the time I travelled about a bit, but saw nothing I liked better than around Moyarra.”

William Rainbow, in his pioneering memoir published in 
​The Land of the Lyrebird, 1920.

By Jillian Durance
 
Prologue: The Promise

In the summer of 1997, we went looking for a home in South Gippsland. We were a couple, not so young, but newly together. The late February afternoon was breathless with heat. The hills rolled away in every direction, their shoulders taut and dried under the sun.
 
The car pulled up in the dense shade of an enormous pine tree. Its bark was ravined and craggy, like the wrinkled skin of an ancient giant, its trunk the width of three or four people holding hands to encircle it.
 
At the green wrought iron gate, half open, we caught a glimpse of the old homestead: the outline of a gabled roof, a brick chimney lined with tufts of grass, a window under the deep brow of the return verandah, weatherboards bare of paint. It carried an air of weary charm that cast its spell and slowly reeled us in. We walked through the welcome cool of a rambling garden.

Jillian Durance was highly commended in the 2020 Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction for Nothing We Liked Better: a house remembered, a home restored, six excerpts from a longer memoir. 

“William Rainbow built this house, exactly a century ago,” we were told. “Miss Mabel Rainbow was the last of her family to live here. She died only a few years ago.” Already we began to collect the stories that had gathered about this place. And we had not yet stepped inside.
 
Despite its obvious age and dilapidation, or perhaps because of it, we began to imagine a life here. A house of many rooms, we could have a study each. Spaces to garden, to grow fruit trees. 100 years ago we would have been surrounded by the Great Forest of South Gippsland. No trace of it now, but perhaps we could plant some of it back.
 
We looked around at other places, but always came back to The Pines. There was something about it. It had character, a history unfolding. More to unravel. It was a place both strange and familiar, but it held out the promise of a new life together.

*****
​

Chapter Two: First Nights
 
“The life of the dead is placed within the memory of the living.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero.
 
It was February 1997 when we first saw the The Pines, July by the time we  moved in. The house we had fallen in love with had changed. The cool corridor of summer was now gripped by the draughty chill of winter. Icy breezes flowed down from the hole in the ceiling. The bare Baltic pine boards that had so appealed with their honeyed hues now filtered freezing air through the wall cavities. And where the wallpaper still clung on, it billowed loosely in the breeze like a ship’s sail. When the wind blew from the south there was nothing between us and Antarctica. We moved in on the day it snowed across South Gippsland.
 
The homestead at The Pines stood on a level knoll, rare in these parts. It was as though the slopes about it could have been scooped away by a giant’s hand to form a central mound, and then smoothed up and out again to shape the rim that circled our distant horizon. We sat upon an upturned saucer of land within a broad bowl of hills. On cold, still days, we hovered above the fog that filled the valleys below. Like an island floating in a sea of milk. On other days the torrents of wind tore about us holding us hostage.
 
It blew from the south with needles of wind threaded with ice. It blew from the north. The west. It swung endlessly to and fro. Northwesterly then southwesterly. Wind worried at roof iron, teasing out the spaces created by corrugations. It nudged at old nails and loosened sheets inch by inch , so that they lifted and rattled like a drumming of the gods. At 38 degrees latitude, we seemed to be in the path of the roaring forties, a power of wind. “What is wind, girls?” my old Geography teacher used to ask our class. “Wind is moving air, Miss Cerutty,” we would chorus back, little understanding anything then about air pressure, isobars and weather systems.
 
Here at The Pines we were witness to this drama of wind. We saw it coming for us straight up the valley, watched it toss the trees about, roaring and ripping at branches that yawed in the mouth of it. This South Gippsland wind showed no mercy and howled for days, wild, demented, threshing our spirits and keeping us indoors. Even crouching behind a tree to pull out weeds offered little protection. Wind could find you wherever you were. “Wind is more than moving air, Miss Cerutty,” I would love to tell her now. “Wind is a rush, a terror, and in these hills where the natural cover of sheltering trees is removed, a threat to be reckoned with.”. A kind of punishment perhaps.
 
There was some refuge from fretful wind and seeping cold in the long living room, the centre of our old house. At night we would hunker by the open fire, at first set with wood we had squirreled away and brought over the hills from our former home. Kindling we could gather from the under the cypress edging the back fenceline. Tunnelling westerlies pierced the thickest of clothes and as I gathered makings for the fire I was thrown back to other times. Hunched down into my Japara hood and balaclava, I saw the old Miss Roadnight of my childhood, clutching a bundle of sticks collected from the park. Wisps of grey hair escaped from her bun, her ancient blue eyes watery from cold. “She’s a witch,” kids whispered. As much as my ten year-old self wanted to believe them, I just saw an old woman who needed to feed her lonely fire. As I grew older in this place of harsh winters would I become Miss Roadnight? Or Miss Mabel Rainbow, who escaped the winters here and spent them in a cosier house down on the coast. How many winters with this wind could we endure? The first apple tree we planted we found lying flat on the ground the next morning. It had given up even before it had got going.
 
We fossicked about The Pines to find bits of fallen timber for the fire. Pine burned quickly to a fine ash and left no embers. Lengths of old cypress burned long and warm but spat sparks. Split pieces of old weatherboard caught fire without coaxing and open pine cones could resurrect any low flame slumped in the grate. Sometimes we would haul out a piece of dead, dry hawthorn that had come adrift from the hedges that bordered the garden. Hawthorn was the best of all, glowing hot and long; kiln wood it once was, prized by potters and bread makers of old. Now loved by us.
 
On one of those early wintry nights we sat, Nick and I, side by side on chairs we had drawn up closer to the hearth. Like children we loved every phase of fire, the gathering of flames toward their upward leaping, the glow of coals, the changing colours and shapes, the faint sigh as wood released its secret reserves of moisture and scent. We loved even the hiss that betrayed wet wood that had escaped our culling. And then, there were the stories that only the tongues of flames can tell.
 
A serpent of grey smoke writhed smoothly upwards. Even after one hundred years the chimney drew instantly, truly. “So well designed, this fireplace, isn’t it,” we smiled to each other, proudly, as though we had had a hand in it. “They really knew what they were doing back then, didn’t they”?

*****

We are welcomed into the community at a district gathering,
meet neighbours and begin to collect stories of our home and
the Rainbow family who lived there. We celebrate my 50th birthday
​with a big tree planting to establish our first windbreak.

​Chapter Five: The Pines
 
“I will never stop learning from [trees], but what I have learned so far under their leafy canopy exceeds anything I could ever have dreamed of.” (Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees)
 
Until our new natives grew we only had elms and the old pine trees for dense summer shade. In those early days we would sit out the heat under the huge pine in the turning circle. It was the highest spot on the property, on a rise that caught the breeze flowing up from the ocean, 20 kilometres away. We would gaze beyond the rolls of hay perched on the golden sward of hillside toward the coast, where we could glimpse an arm of Anderson Inlet in her sleeve of horizon. At sunset the trunk would be aflame with light caught from the setting sun, the air spiced with the scent of resin released from warming needles. Forever here, the scent of summer.
 
The pines soar into the space above the horizon, into the places left behind by the eucalypts that once towered here before them for thousands of years. In just a few years a forest once nigh impenetrable was completely erased, and wind barrelled in from every direction. Before that great clearing you would be barely aware that such ferocity of air existed. Did those early settlers think that a mere line of conifers would do the job? Before, the Great Forest had simply filtered the wind layer by layer, from ground level up to a hundred metres high. But every settler seemed to think the same: a line of pines marks the site of all those early homesteads around us. The humble but tenacious pine tree might have been a reminder of a long ago homeland. A familar sight in an otherwise hostile and unrelenting landscape.
 
The giant pine trees that lined the boundary of the house paddock once formed an avenue leading right up to the house from the old road, across the brow of the hill. The Rainbows referred to their property as The Pines, but who planted them in the beginning, and why, we can only wonder. Pine trees frame the few photos that remain from those early times. By 1913, when pioneers assembled at Moyarra to gather their stories for The Land of the Lyrebird, the pines seem quite substantial. Well established. Men in dark suits and women in long straight skirts and white blouses frilled at the neck stand or sit in sombre rows between two pines that mark the limits of the camera’s lens. Pine trees feature in photos of Sunday School picnics and sports meetings; the remnant forest, hacked and burnt by men and scarred by bushfire forever diminishes behind them.
 
Those same pines are now seldom appreciated, often disdained. Pines have shorter lives here than they would in European climates; here they grow quickly, enjoying the wet and relatively warmer winters and decline rapidly after a hundred years. Over time they become top heavy, dry out from the top down and shed giant branches like arms sundered from a body. Eventually they rear up as nude, twisted spectres, gaunt figures etched on the horizon. “Sentinels guarding the homestead,” I think, “waiting for our return.” We catch sight of them from kilometres away as we drive home along the Inlet Road. “What are you going to do about them?” we have been asked. “Before they fall down, hit the house, kill some-one, or a cow standing underneath?”
 
The Pines, as a title, sounds rather flat, ordinary, when others about here called their homes – in the days before road numbers – romantic and glamorous names that signified something of the owner’s origin or leaning. The Elms of Athelney had come from Somerset, the last refuge of Alfred the Great where he defended his realm against Viking invaders in the ninth century. The McLeans by the river, in calling their home Shalloch Burn, commemorated the streams of their native Ayreshire. George Matheson, William Rainbow’s closest neighbour, had emigrated from the Isle of Skye and named his home Bonnie Vale. The Nicolsons, also from Scotland, chose Inverness. The Glasgows from Ireland called theirs Derry Vale. Names like Carleon, Lapa Kia and Callemondah all have a certain ring to them. While The Pines is by far the plainest name, the house itself is the most enduring of all. In fact about the only one still here, the place least changed. Sometimes it is only the few ragged pine trees that mark the site of other homesteads, long gone.
 
Although The Pines does not conjure up the same alluring image, the name itself is the key to our home’s history and the mysteries surrounding it. We find its name on documents that contain clues to its tragic past:
 
On the 31st July, at her late residence “Pines” Moyarra South Gippsland, Mabel, the dearly beloved wife of William Rainbow, aged 40 years…
 
On the 22nd January, accidentally drowned “The Pines” Moyarra, William Ernest aged 27 years, Henry Phillip aged 25 years, beloved only sons of William and the late Mabel Rainbow, Moyarra South Gippsland…
 
Wanted, family for sharefarm, milk 30-40 cows, experience all farm work necessary, L and M Rainbow “The Pines” Moyarra, 1940.
 
The Pines appears on our title document and every day we are reminded of its significance, We wake to the sight of bare branches tangling with the eastern sky; the tallest pine dominates our northern view; the widest one forms the centre of our turning circle at the head of the driveway.
 
Here the yellow tailed black cockatoos cry as though they have been spurned by lovers, keening as they glide in on outstretched wings. These birds know things that we humans do not. The weather bureau may say ‘no sign of rain today’ or ‘zero chance’, but as the cockatoos flap about to find a perch on the turning circle pine, they warn us otherwise. With their steely beaks and powerful claws the birds begin to shred pine cones, cracking them, cawing and flinging them down. Dangerous, if you happen to be standing underneath. “There’s weather coming,” Nick will say, and sure enough, the weather comes. Within hours the front has swept in, with wind and showers, wetting the debris of pine needles and cone carcasses on the ground. The turning circle is where we greet our visitors. “Please don’t leave your car here. If the cockatoos come in, that’s the end of your windscreen,” we advise. I have had two smashed. As much as we love these birds for their certain tidings and reliable forecast it pays not to go there when you hear their familiar cries and thuds of pine cones. If you must go out, take an umbrella, or cover your head as you run the gauntlet.
 
Black cockatoos are remnants of the vast array of bird life once thronging the Great Forest of South Gippsland. With the old forest gone and tree planting newly begun, the alien pine trees play host to the species that remain. In winter, ravens and currawongs compete for roosting places, while magpies fight for dominion over all of them in the sky above. Sometimes a white faced heron settles in their spreading crowns. Wood ducks line up on lower branches checking the crevices for possible nesting sites. Smaller birds weave in and out of the intricate web of branches, performing aerial feats that only feathered creatures can. The kookaburras laugh at their audience below. Tiny fantails flit about finding insects in deep ravines of bark. In June the shrike thrush returns after a short absence and hops along a lower branch watching us hang clothes on the line. On days when the wind is right, the wedgetail eagles perch at the very top of a dead pine. They wait for that sweet moment to launch themselves onto a current of air where, with their mighty wingspan they float and glide, then sail down the valley. Our pines are still the tallest trees around. At night we hear the boobook owl calling in the tree at the edge of the hay paddock.
 
One day John Gow, one of our older neigbours came to visit us. He was one of the many who had been keen to tell us all the ‘Rainbow’ stories, John stood for a while at his car, as if reluctant to go before he had told us yet another story. “I remember the day,” he began slowly, as though willing this one out of a long ago memory, “Miss Rainbow needed to go to the funeral of a family member in the city. It was a long way and she did not have any experience of city traffic. I offered to drive her, in her car of course, because she insisted. She even bought me lunch. We got back after a long day. I helped her out of the car, she always had trouble walking, her legs you know, they were thick, swollen . She stood here under the pine tree, threw out her arms, like this’ and he stretched his arms out wide. ‘Ah, fresh air and freedom,’ she said. That’s how she saw home, she never went anywhere.” With that he made his farewell and left us wondering. Did Miss Mabel Rainbow just like her own company or had she  got to used to living alone? Perhaps she found it too painful to move every much. But we began to associate the pine tree in the turning circle with her affirmation of home. “Fresh air and freedom,” we would sometimes say to each other, our arms out wide.
 
Our landmark of sentinels on the hill diminishes year by year as branches fall and whole trunks disappear from the horizon. We do not fell those that have died; they seem to take care of themselves and will end up on the ground sooner or later. Or capsized by a storm, uprooted and straddled over a fence broken on the way down. Just be careful not to sit under them. One trunk we trim to make a seat, a meditation spot. Another branch lying horizontal becomes a playground, a great plank to run along if you’re a kid. Or a cat. New seedlings appear but by the time they are big enough to notice we have grown accustomed to having them around, by which time they are too much trouble to take down. So the pines become incongruous, no longer in an orderly avenue, just higgledly piggledly in windbreaks or in the garden. ‘Oh, there’s a new one in the turning circle, have you seen it? It will keep the old one company. May as well just leave it now.’
 
As for the name of our home “The Pines”, it might be plain and not very original, but it says what it is, with  just a suggestion of grandeur. Pines are a part of our history, framing the past. They are witnesses to events, weaving a common thread through stories of all those who have lived here. In each summer’s heat their needles release the same scent and as their branches sway in the wind they sigh the same song of long ago. They have marked the beginnings of two centuries, endured droughts, storms of rain and wind, withstood the weight of snow, the threat of fire, and persuasion by those who say: “take that dead one down”, oblivious of the creatures who now depend upon it for food and shelter. We toy with the idea of placing a plaque with our name on the gate. We have a road number these days, but one or two friends who are either more old fashioned or in tune with our history address their letters with “‘The Pines’, Moyarra”. It’s what we have become.
 
Until our native eucalypts reach the same height, those pines are needed here. It won’t be long now. At night we will find the moon nestled in a crook of branch, or slung like a hammock amongst a tangle of limbs. Its light will cast shapes like spokes of an umbrella across every corner and edge of the garden. Despite their decline and occasional fall it seems as though the pine trees still command the landscape, shaping the space in which we live. We sleep in the embrace of their long shadows.

*****

We begin fencing and restoration of ‘The Pines’, all the while discovering traces of the past and hearing stories of the Rainbow family. NOTE: Miss Mabel Rainbow was the last of the family to live in the house.
​Mrs Mabel Rainbow was her mother.

Chapter Eight. Looking for Mabel
 
“I have stood at windows
in old houses
and wondered at the lives
from inside there.”
Petrea Savige, from Waiting for Angels
 
“Will we see a green flash tonight”? one of us will ask the other as we walk down to our secret sitting spot under the old pine tree at the western boundary. Each of us carries a glass of wine and a bowl of nibbles. It’s an autumn ritual when the sky is clear, the light so lovely, almost liquid over the hills as the sun sets due west. We have not yet seen the green flash here at The Pines, but we are sure we will.
 
It’s risky there under the pine, but a great vantage point to catch the last sight of the sun dipping down past the horizon. The pine tree died years ago; its brittle limbs sometimes drop, but we chance it. The green glow will last but a second. We’d have to be unlucky to get wiped out at the same time by a falling bit of branch. We settle on the bulging roots that buttress the base of the tree, place our glasses on the level table of earth between them, lean back to rest against the trunk and hope for the best.
 
We recount the progress of the day, and before the darkness, we check the ground where the roots emerge to see what treasures they have brought up this time. Or is it the wind that worries the soil to reveal what has been hiding all these years? It could be blue glass from a broken leadlight window, white china from a bowl, a curved handle from a teacup, a scalloped edge from a dinner plate with intricate designs in pastel blues and greens. Who used these plates? Who broke them and why are they here? They rest there for years, then emerge, entwined in the roots of the pine tree. Roots embrace reminders of a long ago life, a latter day midden.
 
Here at The Pines we discover relics from the past everywhere. We find horseshoes, huge hefts of iron that once shod the draught horses that pulled the plough in teams across the paddocks or dragged the cutting blades through the standing summer grass. Smaller horseshoes worn by ponies ridden by the Rainbow children. All lost or abandoned and covered with soil, they re-appear without us even looking for them. We pick up sickles, forks and all manner of blades, curved fingers of metal that once spanned a gate and rusty knuckles of cast iron that held it fast. We find a three legged stool we accidentally halved for firewood before we realised what it was, a milking stool, where Mabel may have sat beside the cow, her head resting against its warm flank in the chilly dawn.
.
What do we do with our discoveries? We are not living in a museum. We can’t use a broken stool or shards of glass and little chips of china, but we have to collect them. We shove them into boxes and leave them in a shed and forget where they are. Looking for something else we discover them all over again and resolve to make a mosaic to frame and hang in the hallway, or to nail up a line of lucky horseshoes, somewhere. We never do, we always seem too busy doing other things.
 
We live in Miss Mabel Rainbow’s house and neighbours tell us stories, those ancient ones who are looped back to others who lived long before our time. They are the old ladies, sometimes the bent old man, who line the wall at our Moyarra gatherings. These bright-eyed elders are eager to talk when they learn where we live. They can conjure up tales of happy country childhoods with the elders of their own time. “Rainbows”? they begin, “they were good people.” I hope that they will say the same of us, but you can never predict how history will paint you. Values change; perceptions rely on personalities. The stories others choose to tell.
 
But Mrs.Mabel Rainbow is not there in any stories. She died too long ago for any-one to remember. You can never quite get to that one person hanging onto that last fragile thread of life, the one who really might know, before it is too late. You can be too polite, too shy or not too sure whether it’s the right thing to do to go visiting the very frail aged in a nursing home just so you can trawl through their storehouses of memory, sharp, rusty, wandering or reliable. You hestitate another month and then they’re gone and niceties don’t matter any more. You have lost that precious knowledge you needed so much to make your own existence in this house somehow more meaningful. Your curiosity remains unsatisfied, your search unvalidated. What exactly are you trying to find? Why this constant preoccupation with the dead?
 
The local historical society keeps the old newspapers bound in large heavy volumes. Heaving them open I turn the unwieldy pages, worn tissue thin. I search for signs of Mabel’s existence before the grave. Could I have missed her somehow in the small type face, the many columns? My eyes are drawn to ads for shapely figure hugging dresses, no doubt designed for bodies drawn in by whalebone and corsets. Were women buried in these too? There are ads for Wertheim pianos beside gushing reports of football games, where the same old teams slog it out in the muddy slush of fields all over the wintry countryside. There are regular cattle markets in towns once bustling, now shrinking like the dots on modern maps or by chance discovered on scarce used winding country roads with their savage potholes. Their names like Glen Alvie and Burndale reflect a wistfulness for ‘the old country’ or a respectful curiosity in the new, like Jeetho and Kongwak.
 
Coming closer to Moyarra now and Mabel’s life at The Pines we have the Jumbunna news. Just three miles away the frontier mining town bristles with pub brawls and foul words used by a housewife in her front yard. Another coal miners’ strike’s been settled, (“another trouble out of the way”), there’s council notes, advice for farmers on the use of lime and kainite, (a dubious form of fertiliser it turns out), and health warnings on greeting horses too closely in the street, with the prospect of catching some disease in a single snort or sneeze. There are countless stories of woes connected to kidneys, bile, rheumatism, all coupled with the equally countless cures. But still no sign of Mabel, or indeed of any woman whose life was lived out of the public eye, behind the windows of houses not yet old.
 
After a few years of living in Mabel’s house we were given some photos and her wedding certificate from one of the last remaining Rainbow relations. At last a glimpse of Mabel, posed so that her uplifted arm rests on a sturdy tree trunk to reveal the tiniest waist, so tightly cinched in that you imagine you could girdle it in the span of both hands. So fine a figure that a puff of westerly wind could have blown her away.  A froth of dark hair curls about her delicate face. It’s a vulnerable open pose, but carefully arranged. The cut wound of the studio tree is lit as brightly as the faint smile lingering about the lips. Her eyes pensive, perhaps expectant, give nothing away. About her slender neck Mabel wears a gold chain and watch which 22 years later appears in the inventory of her possessions after she dies at the age of 40 of a cerebral haemorrhage.
 
How could Mabel, such a tender creature, leave the civilised confines of urban Ballarat to forge a forest life in the wilds of Jumbunna East and to marry a man nearly twice her age? For this she did in marrying William Rainbow in 1892, exchanging the comfort of a mine manager’s house where she lived with her parents and younger sister Juvena, for the rigours of a basic cottage made of logs and corrugated iron. Four rooms planted in a clearing, surrounded by cowsheds, yards and piggeries. She rode side-saddle to her new home, trusting the surefootedness of her horse on miles of muddy tracks as she edged along steep sided gullies, through forest so dense she never saw the sun. During long dark nights the dingoes howled round about. I just hope that she was in love.
 
Just a decade later, Mabel is at The Pines in the garden of her new home. In a few short years she has borne five children and moved into a serious prosperity, when a seam of fine black coal is discovered under their first selection on the side of aptly named Mt. Misery, just over the way. Her neatly turned out sons, Ern and Harry, wear riding breeches and waistcoats as they sit astride their ponies. Her daughters, Lily, Beatrice and Mabel, wear dresses with matching lace collars, replicas of their mother’s own fine dress.
 
By early 1913, Mabel’s slight figure is hard to spot amongst the older, more matronly figures of the district’s pioneers. They have all gathered at Moyarra, in 1913, to record their tales of endurance in their conquest of South Gippsland’s ‘Great Forest’. The collection of stories that will become known as The Land of the Lyrebird. But Mabel’s story will never be told. Her face is thin and drawn, her eyes almost haunted, as though she is about to disappear. By now I have found her obituary:
 
On 31st July, at her late residence, “Pines”, Moyarra, South Gippsland, Mabel, the dearly beloved wife of William Rainbow, aged 40 years.
 
Sadly missed.
 
Forty years old. The women then were lucky if they outlived their husbands. If it wasn’t the travail of childbearing, they were struck down by other afflictions, exhaustion. And here I was, only a lifetime later, a woman of fifty, just on, coming to live in the home that was once Mabel’s, and looking forward to another of her lifetimes here. I am so drawn to the place, I have proclaimed once or twice: “I will only leave if I am carried out in a box.” A bit “maudlin” my mother would say, but it’s just one of those things that pops out when the real words won’t come. And I will be an old woman by then.
 
Slowly we discover the few, private traces of Mabel. She’s been here, I know. Our living room spans the width of the house. Its walls are covered with the most sombre of brown, dulled further by a century of woodsmoke escaping from the fireplace. It was here that William Rainbow’s portrait hung when we first came into it. It was here decades before that he had penned his finely tuned pleas for the opening of a school and the sending of teachers. It was here that he and others discussed the site of the new church. Perhaps it was Mabel who drew the charming penguin emblem for the butter factory. Or painted the delicate little water colour of the house with the young apple tree near the front door. It lives on only in a photograph. Or perhaps she played the piano that was the same make and vintage as my own great-grandmother’s.
 
But the living room was different then. Above the architrave the old wallpaper is peeling away. The paper underneath is bright and light, a pale green figured with creamy flowers. The opening petals suggest a young woman’s taste, a pride in her new home perhaps, elegant and fresh.
 
These are just the few traces of Mabel, three photos, a newspaper obituary, a scrap of wall paper, bits of broken crockery and glass, a lost painting, a piano, a handsome headstone on the highest point of the Korumburra cemetery and its touching epitaph. I could have left my searching for her there, ‘now in God’s keeping’, knowing that she did deserve “sweet rest at last.” Mabel might have been ill suited to this rural life of hardship and isolation, but she created beauty around her.
 
For twenty years we have harvested fruit from the remnants of Mabel’s orchard. We have looked out to the same view in the dark mornings of early winter. For over a hundred years the elm trees in late autumn have leant their outstretched branches on the air and released slowly their golden leaves onto the green ground below. She would have seen too, beyond the front door the apple tree we have named Mabel’s Blush in her honour, weighed down with yet another crop of rosy fruit.
 
I have known for a long time that it was Mabel who worked in this garden, who planted the bluebells, daffodils and snow drops. Pruned the roses. There are traces of Mabel everywhere.

*****
​

We become part of the wider community and discover the darkest story that people told about ‘The Pines’, the one that people only hinted at.

Chapter Ten: The Pump Shed
 
“Abide with me
Fast falls the eventide…” old hymn, H.F.Lyte.
 
The pump shed is a place of great peril for me. Terrified of all things electrical and never able to tell clockwise from anti-clockwise, I steady myself to turn on the stopcock that fills the pump’s little reservoir. Ready with my handy mantra of ‘righty tighty, lefty loosy’ I go through the motions first without touching a thing. Then commit. Relief, as the water rushes in. Then I have to insert a three pin plug into its companion socket. Sparks will fly, or so I imagine. At the point of contact, I close my eyes and say: ‘I loved you all’. So far I have survived the turning on of the pump, a few times now, unclenching when, without my own demise. it surges into life.
 
The cypresses out there have grown so huge that their trunks lean into the little square of pump shed, pushing it sideways. The small space is crammed with discarded window frames clutching their fragments of thin, cracked glass; there’s timber that might soon be useful, a broken chair and endless loops of cobwebs. Light leaks through the open door or gaps in the roof. Ancient trunks of once tall gums form the uprights that hold together the rusty sheets of corrugated iron. Here lives the yellow Onga pump that services the rickety network that links pipes to dams, tanks, stopcocks and taps, inlets and outlets. We were given a map of this underground web of old iron and newer plastic, but it bore no relation to how it all actually worked. The pump shed itself keeps its own secret that we slowly unravel.
 
Stand at the door now that you have wrested it closed across the uneven rooty ground. Look closely a little lower down, waist height, and you will see two sets of initials, one below the other. Block letters, evenly spaced and carved by confident hands across the timber panels. W E R and H P R. The R’s are more weathered, nearly smoothed into nothingness. They belong to William Ernest Rainbow and Henry Phillip Rainbow. They would have stood here those boys, 10 and 8 years old perhaps, making their mark upon the world. The only mark that remains of their lives cut short, nearly a century ago.
 
The summer of 1922 was hot and dry. Water was low in the iron tanks surrounding the house, the well almost empty, the hand pump sucking air. It was Sunday, 22nd of January. At The Pines, it was a time for the young men to wash up before lunch. To save water at the house they decided to take a dip in the dam. William, the eldest son, 27, his younger brother Ernest, 25, and 19-year-old Charles Scarborough who had been labouring on the farm. The dog followed them down.
 
William Rainbow had recently constructed a dam which spring rains the year before had filled to a depth of between 10 and 12 feet. It was 40 feet long, and a chain [20.1 metres] wide. A rope was suspended above it from trees on either side.
 
Every account of what happened differs little. “They did not return by lunch time,” reported the local paper “and at 2 p.m. the father becoming anxious, started out in search of them. He saw no sign of his sons or Scarborough on the bank, but on looking around the dam discovered the clothing of William and that of Scarborough. Realising that a terrible tragedy had occurred, he rushed away for assistance.” The dog was still guarding the clothes.
 
The Rainbows’ friend and neighbor, Mr. John Irving, came down from Cloverdale. He had dug the dam in the first place with his team of draught horses and a bucket. Now he was dragging the dam for three bodies.
 
“When the bodies were found, those of Scarborough and William Rainbow were clasped tightly together, but instead of both being in the same position, their heads were against each others’ feet.”’
 
Henry Rainbow had rushed in to assist, fully clothed, but he too had succumbed to the sudden cold and grasping mud. The three bodies were placed on the open sledges that were used to transport the cream cans. Drawn up to the house the young men were laid out. Which room, we often wondered. A distant Rainbow relative later confirmed that it was the drawing room, where the piano stood opposite the fire-place. It was cool there on the southern side of the house shaded against the summer heat by the verandah. It is the room we now reserve for our guests who, unaware of its sad connection, say they love its tranquillity and view of the garden.
 
The local Korumburra doctor, Dr. Reed, signed the death certificates and with Constable Duvanel prepared a report for the coroner. Still young at 30, and lately returned from the battlefields of the Great War, Dr. Reed would have seen many gruesome sights. These Rainbow boys had enlisted for the war, but were rejected on medical grounds: shortsightedness in one, a stutter in the other. Spared the front, they had died at home.
 
Three black, horse-drawn hearses toiled up the hill away from The Pines. It was the image that lived on in those who watched it, who then passed on that memory to those who came after them. The funeral took place on Tuesday afternoon and a long line of vehicles followed the hearses into the Korumburra Cemetery, through the main gates up to the topmost crest of the graveyard. The sons of William Rainbow were buried next to their mother’s grave…thy kingdom come, thy will be done. A headstone was later added with the words:
 
Greater love hath no man than this than to lay down his life for his friends
 
It was a soldier’s epitaph, as if William Rainbow needed some solace from these otherwise futile deaths. Selfless heroism was little consolation in a house shrouded in an almost endless grief. ‘He was never the same afterwards’, people said, ‘and Miss Mabel and Miss Lily had to learn how to farm.’
 
The dam was filled in, so they say. We needed to dig another one. Like the pump, I live in fear of it. Falling in, slipping down, cramping with cold, caught by mud, sinking, drowning. Dams and pumps are necessities of rural life. But sometimes when things are not going so well for us, when a tree falls on a fence and destroys all our work, or we fall out with a neighbour, or with each other, or the burden of propping up a long neglected house becomes too overwhelming, we wonder what shadow this tragedy has thrown over our home and both our lives within it.
​

*****
​

We salvage the orchard, prop up the fern cutters’ cottage, the
old laundry and outhouse, but begin to flag in the endless task of
renovation and restoration. We distract ourselves in the
copious harvests of fruit over many seasons. I research and write
​the history of the district as revealed in its WW1 Honor Roll.

Chapter Nineteen: The Old Pear Tree
 
“Under the canopy of trees, daily dramas and moving love stories are played out…where adventures are to be experienced and secrets discovered.”(Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees)
 
We would sit aloft in the sturdy crook between branches or swing free upside down with knees hooked around a slender bar of a limb. The children that we were felt in command of our world, monarchs of all we surveyed. Released from the burden of gravity, our thoughts roamed in airy regions that had no boundaries. Falling was never a fear; the fact that on a whim a wattle branch might break never entered our heads. We were hardy children, my sister and I, wiry and light, and maybe just lucky.
 
The old pear tree here at the The Pines still calls to the adventurous spirit in visiting children. They clamber onto its thick shoulder that leans down as if to greet them, inviting them to climb. Just swing your legs up and around this sturdy branch of mine, then shimmy along. I will hold you safe, it seems to say. Look up at the sky through my patterns of sunshine and shade. For many years that sturdy branch reached outward, long and wide enough even for an adult to lie upon.
 
I like to imagine the Rainbow children by the pear tree, a young thing then, in the landscape of their childhood. Pear trees grow quickly here, their roots reaching down into the moist soil, their trunks thrusting skyward year after year. The road that passed through Moyarra in those early days ran by the boundary of our orchard. Our pear tree guarded the front gate. Perched inside, the children would have heard the steam whistle from trains of the Great Southern Railway as they clattered through the cutting up Bena way. They would have heard too the clanking of chain and bucket and the snorting of the bullock teams as they toiled up the hill, the whip cracking over their heads as the Irving men brought them home from their latest dam digging venture. On a still day they would have heard the sound of axe on timber ring out before the crash of a falling spar, as the men round about cleared patches of remnant forest. On a clear day, if they climbed high enough, they could have caught sight of a ship on the inlet far below or clouds circling the peaks of Wilsons Promontory. And you know what that means? they would proudly announce. Going to rain tomorrow!
 
Sometimes, secure in their tree house, they may have been joined by neighboring children of the same age. Bill, Gavin, Jessie and Katie McLean lived down the hill at Shalloch Burn by the river. Perhaps they would sit there skiting about their fathers’ prowess of swinging the axe from hand to hand in the smooth endless rhythms perfected over their years of pioneering. These kids could retell in horrified awe the stories they had overheard of accidents on these hills. Mr. Williams, down Kongwak way, coming home to Ferndale with his toe in his sock, blood soaked and limp. Mrs Williams actually got out her needle and thread and sewed it back on again, imagine that. And what about Gavin Pollock? The McLean’s uncle, years before had been killed by a falling tree in the early days of scrub cutting on the hill rising up on our horizon. Clearing stopped and the land remained “Miss Pollock’s scrub” for many years.
 
We loved the old pear tree from the first moment we saw it. It was so tall it strove to rival a neighbouring pine tree. So large it was almost unknowable. It wore small smudges of green lichen within the fissured runnells of its grey bark. Its blossom bursting in the midst of our first spring greeted us every time we came up the driveway. And its autumn harvest of hard little fruit was raided by a converging of ravens, as if in response to an ancient summons imprinted over generations. We didn’t mind too much. The pears stayed pebble hard, and if tempted to take a bite, you lived to regret it: the tartness stuck to your teeth and furred over the tongue.
 
But this tree of ours, we discovered in an old newspaper cutting, might have once produced a harvest of prize pears at the local Kongwak Agricultural Show, way back in 1906:
 
Cooking pears, first prize, it read, W. Rainbow.
 
This hard fruit then, was once good for something. We took to resting the pears on window ledges, waiting for months until they had lost the green tinge just under the surface, until the flesh began to sag within the skin. Then they were soft enough to cook or bottle. Brilliant, in their light pink syrup, slightly sweetened.
 
The pear tree was as much part of the Rainbow’s history as the house. It carried that same sense of home. The previous owners had given us a small collection of photos that Miss Mabel Rainbow had left in the house. Among them was a postcard Bill McLean had sent to her, It was dated February 1919. Le Havre, France. On one side was a photograph of six Australian soldiers of the Great War, informally grouped, relaxed and smiling. The fighting was over, they had survived to the end. Sometime, they would make it home. Bill McLean and Mabel Rainbow had not seen each other since July 1915 when Mabel was just 15.
 
‘Dear Mabel’, Bill wrote, in his neat generous hand,
 
                        “It won’t be very long now before I will be back at my old game again,
                        ‘Mail man’. Hope the old pear tree is still there to act as a seat.”
 
Ten thousand miles away and three and a half years from his Moyarra home, his thoughts had flown back to the ‘old’ pear tree at The Pines. His memories of coming to collect and deliver the mail had stayed with him. Even as he had urged on his horses hauling limbers laden with artillery along the gutted roads of the Somme. Even under the clamour of bombardment, the screaming of shells, the pitiless shredding of men and horses. Terror and blood. So much dying before his eyes. Had thoughts of the pear tree and Mabel spirited his mind elsewhere? Somehow brought him through it all?
 
“These are five of my mates,” he continued, introducing them according to their position in the photo. He described himself as the “one hard dial” in the centre.
 
“Well I think I will ring off for the time being. Hoping you are all in the best of health. I am in tip top shape myself. With heaps of love to you, I remain your aff [affectionate] friend, Bill.”
 
The old pear tree was still there when Bill returned in August 1919. ‘I just did my bit ’, he might have said as he quietly got on with the ploughing, the milking, the hay making. Did he return to his role as mailman? I like to imagine Bill and Mabel sitting on their old seat, Bill regaling her with war stories, the funny ones of course, the bearable ones, his observations of farming ‘over there’, the faithful horses he had to leave behind. And what were those old mates of his up to.now?
 
The old pear tree had always been place of stories. Secrets. Ghosts now too. So many of their childhood friends had disappeared in the years between. Sweet faced Bill Glasgow who had copped a piece of shrapnel in the heart at Mont St.Quentin, so close to the end of the war too. Dear God, and both the Robertson boys, poor Lily, broke her heart, she would never get over Allan Robbie, one of the very first to join up, to come so close to coming home. And Fred, poor Fred Dowel, got back home all right, two weeks later he just drowned, when he took his first swim down the beach at Inverloch. How could that happen?
 
Mabel and Bill never married, neither to each other nor to anyone else for that matter. They weren’t alone in that regard. The Great War had a lot to answer for. So many of their childhood friends stayed single. Men were light on and even they just didn’t seem to want to tie the knot. Mail deliveries and cricket talk seemed to have kept Bill and Mabel going. How many times did Bill have to fish the ball out of the dam on the boundary?…You just wouldn’t believe how slow the ground is, before the hay is cut …if you play around here you just have to dodge the cow pats. Home team has to get them up off the pitch first of course… windy days you have to get behind a stook of hay to boil the billy for a cuppa at the tea break. How it doesn’t catch fire, we’ll never know!
 
In 1923 Bill’s Moyarra team won the district premiership. Bill was captain of course and knelt in front of the team, holding the crossed bats. Mabel kept that cricket photo, along with another of the McLean boys at a beach picnic and that postcard from France. Kept them all, long after Bill died in 1943. ‘TB’ they said it was, Bill and his brother Gavin, both. Buried side by side in the Korumburra Cemetery. Mabel kept those photos we now have. All her life. Long after their friendship had ended, the pear tree just grew and grew, feeding on the moisture from the nearby dam.
 
A few years after we came to The Pines. a pine branch scythed through the pear tree’s crown during one spring storm, shaving off its upper branches. ‘There have always been storms here’, my elderly friend Lois Glasgow had once reminded me when the apple tree had nearly gone the same way, ,’there always will be. See it as a bit of self pruning.’ Old fashioned country pragmatism I had grown to admire, but here it clashed with the new knowledge we had harvested from this tree along with its hard little fruit. We neatened it up as best we could. The pear tree did the rest in a single season, seemed to heal itself, shooting greenery on every surface. The branch that bore Bill and Mabel’s old seat stretched steadily outwards.
 
But came the day when a fierce northeasterly cracked and twisted several major limbs, splintering their sinews. Wrenched half away from the trunk, they split and plunged, smaller branches, like outstretched fingers driven into the ground
 
It all seemed too difficult and heartbreaking. Summer came .The largest limb bore a myriad of pears that nestled among the red stalks of the rhubarb patch. Autumn, winter, another spring and summer. Grass and weeds grew, impossible to clear among the tangle of branches. We gave up trying to access the gate. But the pear tree went on, sprouting new branchlets from its wounds. Patient, enduring, resilient, glorious thing.
 
Finally another winter, the best time to prune deciduous trees, and we finally have to act. The sap has slowed and cold protects the wound from disease.
 
Nick sharpens the chainsaw “If you can see the edge you haven’t got one,” he likes to say. He begins to cut away the lighter wood. Slowly the full extent of the tangled mess is revealed. It’s a matrix of tension and compression, of ancient branches some as thick as telephone poles, creating spaces unwieldy and tight.
 
Nick keeps working. Slowly. Methodically. I do not want to see the final severing of the largest branch with its century of companionable memories and unstinting productivity. I am standing well back, my hands clasped over my ear muffs, watching, scarcely breathing. Nick holds the saw to the underside of the giant limb, and pushes upward for a few seconds. Then he cuts down from the top. I realise at that moment how much I have grown to trust this man with his caution, his care, his patience. The ancient branch wobbles slightly but then corrects itself, and falls gracefully to the ground. Straight down with a soft thud. The wound is clean, dry, the flesh the colour of honey. It is as though a hand has clutched my heart. Loss and relief at the one time. ”Well done, well done,” I say, shaky with tears.
 
As much as I love Mabel’s Blush, the apple tree outside the front door, it is to the pear tree I go for solitude. I could still sit on that abridged version of Bill and Mabel’s branch, but I am losing the agility (and the will) to haul myself up. Step under the canopy, look up at the shimmering leaves, sky and cloud peeping through. The old pear tree has a presence, calm and wise. Comforting you could say.
 
It’s spring, the air warming. I make a cuppa, call Nick for afternoon tea, place pot, mugs and cake on Miss Mabel’s old tray and carry it down to the orchard. Together we watch the healing of its wounds, check the cracks within its trunk. Above us new growth reaches out a flurry of fingers like a dancer commanding the stage. We are showered by blossom falling as Mabel and Bill would have been as they sat here. We are adding yet another layer of stories. How long will the pear tree keep going, watching over the seasons and holding its place in memory?