shit country

even the ground litter is habitat!

in the early days nellie and i sat by our little campfire evening after evening and talked about the land deep into the night, before stretching out on the ground on our thin camp mattresses to sleep beneath the stars, awakening to the dawn chorus of magpies and parrots, with dew on our faces and blankets and our lungs full of the pure desert air. in the daytime we walked about a lot, together or alone, getting to know the land. we regarded every dead or living leaf, every pebble, every stick and stone as sacred. before even gathering sticks for the fire we would stand and stare in reverence and awe at the beauty of the undisturbed tree litter we were about to disturb. only then would we feel okay about gathering them. 

the spirit of the land was very strong and articulate and had set to work on us, knowing that we wished to learn how to respect it as habitat, as land stolen from its rightful owners not so very long ago, to learn how to inhabit it respectfully, and how to open our minds and imaginations to its wisdom and love. of course these spirits of the land were imbued with the magic of the indigenous peoples and their words, their languages, their actions and deeds and their terror and grief upon losing their lands are forever coded into the stones and clay, still shaping the gestures of now mature trees, still part of the spiritual inheritance of every leaf and flower - and of insects, birds, reptiles and mammals and the myriad tiny life-forms that make up the ecology. it is breathed in with every breath, and made one with us in the subtle chemistry of our cells.

we walked barefoot in the land, not yet aware of how important that was. i had read that certain mexican people who walked barefoot on bare ground all their lives had no foot problems in later life - nothing like the mottled purple, varicosed veins on permanently swollen pudgy feet twisted and deformed by bunions and festooned with painful corns that my mother's generation took for granted. and i'd seen photos of the beautiful, strong, healthy feet of the perennially barefoot peasants of india. my feet were already hardened from going barefoot on city pavements so i soon took a pride in being able to negotiate the sharp stones and occasional prickly patch. and i can't tell you how good having dirty feet feels. i confess, i did not often wash them. 

we had few visitors, but now and then curiosity would bring a couple of locals, or people from the shacks by the river and we'd give them coffee and have a yarn with them. they laughed at the idea that we would have a little farmlet here, saying nothing would survive the climate. they'd point at the shallow adobe soil over bedrock visible in large stretches and say, 'this is shit country.' over and again i heard that phrase until it seeped in, that yes! shit! everywhere you look. any square metre of land is continually receiving a slow shower of shit. kangaroo, wombat - these are the most obvious. smaller marsupials, birds, reptiles, and of course, arthropods and worms, all of them producing shit. fertilizer for the land.

wombat shit.

so coming to terms with the fact of our own shit was a matter of pure sanity, knowing that:.

shit is a product of metabolism.
it is not a waste product.
it is not a by-product.
it is a product.
it belongs to the earth. 

experimental diy composting toilets gave way to worm farms, which are much cleaner and easier to use and practically odour-free. the council was surprisingly tolerant of this but refused us permission to build a house. they required us to dig 60cm deep foundations, which was crazy on such solid bedrock and put the project way beyond our budget at that time, but the law's the law. they could have refused us permission to go on living here, and in fact, perhaps they thought that not being allowed to build would make us leave and only visit on weekends. but we'd burned our boats and had already bonded with the land. 

we had no visits from them for years, with all documentation describing wyeuro aka 'block 6'  as unoccupied, and when they did find out, we'd been there for so long and lived so peaceably that they sort of tacitly approved of our caravans and admired our gardens and instead of kicking us off as the law might dictate, all they did was recognise wyeuro as a primary residence, not just a weekender, and reduce the rates accordingly. so peace and blessings to them for their mercy and a gold star!  

🌟

wyeuro: the vision.

in 1978 after discovering that my mental health was not going to allow me to work for my living i used all the money i had earned sporadically as a clerk, sold my decrepit single-fronted cottage in an inner-city suburb of adelaide, and bought a bush block out in the mallee, near the river murray.

a few other people from my primal therapy group came too, with the idea of starting a hippy commune based on the highest ideals and the soundest ecological principles, with a view to establishing healthy lives in tune with nature and capable of meeting our true personal needs - as primal therapy had enabled us all to discover them. the commune failed to attract others, and one couple left abruptly when the girl fell pregnant and their parents collared her and her man and took them home.

that left me and nellie, both on the then 'invalid' pension, now referred to as disability support. i was 27, had read rodale and was reaching for the findhorn story, and looking around for like-minded people in the area. i owned the title to eighty acres which is about 33 hectares of unimproved limestone flats and small pockets of mallee, with very shallow mostly adobe soils right on goyder's ten inch rainfall line. no power, mains water, unsewered.

the elves were very helpful - well, nelly might have got photo-shopped.

nellie and i hung on gamely, and had our sights set on becoming as self-sufficient in at least the basics as we could. we subscribed to grass roots, permaculture international and earth garden magazines, devoured self suff books from oz, nz, the us and britain, joined the soil association, considered permaculture, biodynamics and other systems and settled for traditional organic gardening practices.

we'd both grown up in the toxic sixties believing that sick was the norm, and both had discovered health by rebelling against that and looking at alternatives. we studied nutrition, health and disease, and had both experienced the huge liberation that health represents, and were hooked on it. conversely, we were both unimpressed with the medical profession and felt we should take care of our own health, and were therefore studying alternative health care, especially herballism.

in other words, we were hippies, full of hippy ideas and hippy spirituality, full of peace and love and disenchanted with the mainstream - significant portion of the so-called counter-culture of the nineteen seventies.

we began sharing a biggish tent, erected a chookyard of wire netting, and released a dog and some cats and began to merge with the land. and we planted our garden.

the locals were mostly okay with us, although in our see-through cheese-cloth shirts and love-beads, long clinging indian dresses, barefoot or in hand-made buffalo hide toe-thongs, feathers in our hair and perfumed clouds of petuli wafting about us, we rather shocked them. a few were hostile but some gave us strong support and would hear no ill of us, so we lived in peace for a few decades.

in its heyday, wyeuro farmlet had a dairy with one to three not too finely bred milking goats, producing enough fresh milk for keffir and yoghurt, cottage cheese, hard cheese, and whey, an orchard producing enough long-keeping apples to see us through most of the winter with enough for cider vinegar and to dry for the rest of the year, and plenty to share with the goats from two trees, all the oranges we could eat, apricots, peaches, plums, olives for pickling, and rosehips, and also bramble berries and strawberries in plenty. we had several kinds of nuts, and we were experimenting with beans and peas, grains and seeds to dry. a herd of angora goats gave us fleece for spinning and knitting and weaving, meat for ourselves and to be dried for the dogs, and skins to tan.

hens of many mixed breeds produced more than enough eggs and young birds for the table with plenty of old eggs for weather-proof long-lasting house paint.

a garden of dyers' herbs supplemented the abundance of wild sources of splendid dyes for our clothing: fungi, lichens, barks, herbs, flowers, leaves and even a kind of cochineal bug. with traditional wisdom in mind, medicinal herbs and cullinary herbs were interspersed as companion plants in our flourishing, deeply composted vegetable garden which was cultivated according to the phases of the moon. a winery/brewery made the most of flowers and fruits: melomel, mulberry, prickly pear, elder flower and elderberry wines.

we had a beehive, and one of nellie's boyfriends had worked for a bee-keeper, but we never did get hold of any bees. not yet, anyway. we made a good deal of mead, my favourite drink, with honey from a local bee man. we were ready to try our hand at beers, ales and laagers, as well.

a mud-brick oven was in constant use, and i was using my indoor hearth for a racu style kiln for rune stones, amulets and tiny objects for fairy shrines, while planning a bigger one and perhaps a small forge outside. it was all so easy, so possible. you just have to hold your own in the power struggles with people who want you to conform to mainstream consumerism.
we even indulged in a flower garden and grew magnificent flowers to brighten our caravans, because we had never got permission to build the mudbrick cottage we had planned, and anyway, my parents had generously supplied a couple of small, cheap but weather-tight vans.

we'd done our share of wildcrafting too, learned about the local plants, and tried most of the bush tucker described in books as safe. a lot of it was hahaha entheogenic, which didn't much bother this hippy :D altars and shrines for indigenous and exotic fairies were in constant use and wild places sacred to them were identified and honoured. we cared for injured and orphaned wild-life too.

and the dream kept unfolding - a woodlot, well coppiced, seemed plausible. i had schemes for more catchment for rainwater. aquaculture seemed more and more feasible as the experts get more expertise in small-scale production.

okay, that's at its best. we had our ups and downs, and we never did get it exactly as we wanted it. and sometimes times were grim. in farming, 'what's bad for the peas is just right for the grain.' so what brought it all to a grinding halt? disaster struck.

nellie's last boyfriend lived nearby, and was very helpful around the place, but he had been severely poisoned by agricultural chemicals in his youth and was dying of cancer. his doctor gave him five years to live. the disease affected us all. the power-struggles we had with him exhausted us both - he was a bullying abusive man - but we appreciated his needs and gave him an extra five years while she tried to bring out the best in him - and she did that well. he was a terrifying bully as time went by and at the end of that time, the farmlet was in ruins.

he hated the goats, and slammed me for having them so hard i was bedridden from the power he had. i lost control of the herd which he wanted shot out, and it bred up to twelve, where i keep them at four or five. in a sensitive rapport with them i have always found them cooperative and moralistic animals, willing to respect stock boundaries, craving the routine of the milking shed. under this man's regime they broke down the fences and killed the gardens.

meanwhile i was fighting off psychic attack from other quarters and in the desparate, bad-vibe, scenario that followed i became ill with shriekingly painful kidney stones and under intense stress, was struck down with shingles, not wrongly called hellfire. acutely painful at first (it looked like chain-mail all round my torso), it was extremely debilitating over a very long period and by the time the boyfriend died, i was too weak to even try to mend my fences.

three and a half years ago he died, right on samhuin, and no sooner had she buried him than nelly found that she too had terminal cancer and still not trusting mainstream medicine, she kept it a secret until the last few weeks. she died still refusing treatment on the exact day of samhuinn last year, 2018.

this is the trauma i'm still crawling out of. and what i have described above is the perfectly realistic dream i still cherish. they say you should never let your dreams die, and this is one that so wants to come true: whether alone or with company, i fully intend to recover my health, retrieve my little farm, and fix the magic, so that i can carry out some of the beautiful plans i had made for it such a short time ago. 

front decoration of our mudbrick bread-oven.