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.
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| the elves were very helpful - well, nelly might have got photo-shopped. |
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.
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.
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| front decoration of our mudbrick bread-oven. |
