Monaro memories

I went home to Monaro country recently. A family friend, and father of my oldest and dearest departed friend, died;  and the urge to be closer to people I’d grown up with surged from deep within.

The old man who died had been a very special man. A deep man. A man who professed no particular spiritual tradition and wasn’t impressed by any kind of institutionalised religion but who stood out – head and shoulders - in a way that truly spiritual people sometimes do.

He was gentle, intelligent and sensitive in the way some Australian country men really can be when they drop the façade and allow others to see who they really are and how they really feel. I remember him at our birthday parties when we were kids and at various gatherings and in his cattle yards but most clearly perhaps when his daughter, my dearest friend, was dying.

I watched him one day lift her - frail and ill - from the bath where her sisters had helped her bathe. He carried her, wrapped in towels, to a day bed on the verandah. They chatted about the noise of the magpies warbling out on the lawn and I was struck by the intimacy between them. He was strong and manly but tender and so utterly close and connected. She was frail, sick, exhausted and days from death. He loved her with a father’s love and tended her as though a nurse trained over a lifetime to know just what his patient needed.

A quietly spoken man, thoughtful, articulate and passionate about so many things but especially the land. He might be the closest, I think, to a truly authentic human being I’ve ever known. 

Arriving in town, I headed out to see his son to spend a few hours bumping along in an old ute feeding sheep struggling through a desperate drought. We talked about life and death and stuff that rarely gets a chance in the general run of things. He was quietly more willing to give of himself than he had been when we were children and I caught myself noticing how thoroughly he had become so much his father’s son.

Barren hills in the distance, low cloud fogging the windscreen,  cold bitter wind biting our ears, all we could hear - with the engine turned off - was the sound of hungry sheep stumbling over rocks to get close to the feed trailer dragging along behind us. 

We talked about drought and stock prices, climate change and mystics, meditation, Songlines and ancient wisdom. We talked about sheep and bulls and feedlots and which fallen trees made the best firewood. It’s not my world anymore but the people I grew up with matter to me in ways it’s hard to put words to. When life gets stressful, when loss feels too real or my sometimes quiet shame overwhelms me; I remember a time of childhood innocence and can almost see those hills and feel those Songlines drawing me home.

Monaro country really is different, it really is unique. Tucked away south of Canberra and rolling up to the Snowy mountains, its cold and dry and strangely magnificent. The sky seems lower somehow and the air crisp and cold. 

I met an Aboriginal woman in western NSW a few years ago who knew Monaro country. She had an Aunty who lived on the coast and had stories of the mob that used to walk those rolling hills around Cooma from the coast towards Kosciuszko – Kunama Namadgi - in years long gone. Sitting by a fire somewhere west of Bourke, we shared memories of the landscape and she gave me a generous gift of belonging which has transformed my sense of self.

As we sat and chatted, I told her that I was sorry I didn’t know anything about the Aboriginal history of the country I’d grown up in but that I felt I could feel something I called ‘Songlines’ between the hills around Bredbo and my home town of Cooma. Feeling a bit embarrassed and awkward, I mumbled something about thinking I could feel some sort of ancient energy in those hills.

She became very quiet and very serious. Then turning to me and holding my gaze, she said; “You can feel it. It is real. You were born there. It is your country too…and if you stayed there long enough, you’d be Black one day ”. It was a gift of hugely generous proportions. In one little moment she affirmed my sense of self and identity and belonging in a way that allowed me to feel at one with her and at one with the country I’ve always called ‘home’.

Monaro country is ‘home’ to me and she somehow made it feel even more real than it had been before. She both welcomed and affirmed me as ‘belonging’ to country… me, a white woman of vague German and Scottish heritage with only one generation of experiences on the Monaro, was made to feel at one with that land in a way I had intuitively felt all my life. 

I thought of her as we bumped along in my friend’s ute, stopping to open gates and check feed troughs. I thought of my closest friend who had died all those years ago, her ashes buried in the garden and of her father whose spirit too now graced the hills around their homestead. 

We’ve all loved the Monaro, we’ve felt its strange power. It will be here when we’re all long gone. Crows will pick at carcasses and flies will bother sheep, droughts will happen and dams will empty before rains come again. Pandemics will hit and cancers will kill and the land will go on waiting for all of us to wake up to its being a living dynamic, to the fact of its being alive; beating, breathing, somehow feeling.

The old man knew, his daughter understood, the ancient mobs knew, white sons of the land know, there are local farmers can feel it and clever old Kelpies as they nuzzle in for a pat. We ‘belong’. We’re all intimately connected. We’re all a part of something so much bigger than any one of us, the same life blood runs through my veins and his and hers and theirs. It seeps through the soil and pops up through the springs, it’s in the leaves and in the clouds and in the dirt.

We belong. We all belong … together. All life. All people. All animals. All breath. All soil. All spirit. We’re all connected, we’re all family, we’re all dependent on each other and influencing all that is around us.

Some of us are lucky enough to have grown up in places like Monaro country, to know the smell of soil and rain, to know something of the seasons and the wildlife. Some of us are lucky enough to have known an old man and his daughter who lived their truth and blessed the lives of all those who knew them.

RIP old man. You’re home. Again. Now. For all time.