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!  

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