There will be no motorbikes, sheep stuck in fences or collisions galore — just soft fruit and hay.
One day.
Right now, I stand at Sydney airport on a mid-winter morning, boarding a plane the size of a rather large fridge.
I am off to Wagga to meet an academic and save the world from wheat and barley diseases, before returning to Queensland.
I have booked an extra night so I can visit Holbrook, and with the boys now largely gone, it will be their mother Rosemary — the quiet backbone of the farm and witness to my past adventures — who will collect me from Wagga airport.
I hate flying — small planes are my specialty — and the pilot’s endeavour to land into the blinding fog takes three attempts, during the second of which my rosary snaps and beads go everywhere.
When I am retrieved from inside the overhead locker — my wailing gave me away — we hear the pilot announce he’ll have a crack at Albury’s tarmac.
Apparently the coffee is better there, he says.
Even I don’t laugh.
Fury comes from a handful of annoyed businessmen but I want to slap them all and yell “we’re alive, aren’t we?!”
We land and the pilots and crew line up beside the stairs, wishing us all a fine day to make our way to our intended destination which is suddenly 150km north.
Seething passengers are met with smiles, but I genuflect and kiss the co-pilot’s hand.
I cross the tarmac and tidy the remaining hair that didn’t get pulled out, then I worry that Rosemary has driven the early hours to the wrong city.
The mobile phone is in its infancy and I have no coins.
But there she stands.
She took one glance from her window this morning and said to herself ‘he won’t be landing in Wagga’.
I am silenced.
We arrive at the farm and four of the original dogs come to me slightly sluggish as if to tell me bygones are bygones and I blush.
I have a pre-breakfast nap to ‘take the edge off’ and lay on the antique guest bed.
I feel the melancholy of much warmer days and youthful voices mix with motorbike fumes, barking and dust.
It’s a different place now, and what strikes me most is the pin-drop silence when I hold my breath.
Silent from the past; silent from the summer and far from my home.
Farms are more seasonal than what we see. The earth breathes, it chills in winter and the human soul takes rest even though there’s always much to do.
Short days with a lower sun turn past adventures in December heat into illusion.
I hold my breath again and absorb the other solstice that this land endures.
I hear Bruce’s voice and I laugh at the hallucination — of course it’s going to happen — and wonder which Beatles song he’ll massacre on the piano this time.
Another voice, and I smile, perhaps I’m drifting off because it’s his wife Sonya, and they hadn’t met yet ...
Wait a minute!
Quick footsteps and the door bursts with an explosion of “Righto! Get up, Ted!” and in come the beaming smiles of the much-in-love couple.
“This doesn’t look like Canberra!” I struggle from the quilt.
“Well, this doesn’t look like Brisbane,” he pushes me back down, jumps on top and punches me. Sonya laughs.
They had been hiding in another room, having driven up that morning.
A day in the winter sun sees more re-lived adventures than new ones — although we did enjoy boning out 50 chicken carcases from Rosemary’s autumn slaughter at a much slower pace than in our harried youth.
We have our own children now.
The ground is dark and damp, the wheat is two inches high, and the stubble gone. The headers are behind shed doors. One dog wears a jacket. Jonquils stab through shaggy lawns and the herb garden I built lies dormant. My fingers numb amid the chicken flesh.
Then the day vanishes quietly after some parting words, long hugs and dogs hell-bent on staying warm rather than chase the car.
My wife slapped down the real estate section onto the bed.
“There.”
“Where?”
“There!” she pointed to a property: 120 hectares, facing north, five dams, fully fenced.
“Ah, I don’t know ...”
“Well I do. We’re going.”
