Abandonment issues, part 5; On the farm.

From the first glimpse of a horse, small and kindly-looking, with a yellowish coat and black mane;  the first trip to the chicken coop, a haphazard tin-and-wire structure in the corner of the yard; the first game of tug-o-war with a foolhardy but benevolent dog – I was hooked.

I don’t know how my somewhat estranged brother ended up owning a farm. I wasn’t really at the age where I was inclined to ask conveyancing-related questions. I was at the age where I looked cute wearing a leotard and a tutu and carrying a basket of fake flowers at said brother’s wedding. So were my sisters. It was, I think, mainly for this reason (the wedding, not specifically the leotards and tutus) that we took a seven week trip back to Australia just before I turned nine.

While we had moved to the UK, my brother, whose name is Nicholas but who has been known as Harvey all of his life for reasons unknown, lived on a stud farm near Busselton, Western Australia. I think their main source of income was a giant, rather frightening horse named “Chopin,” whom everybody called “Chops.” I didn’t get the joke until many years later when I started piano lessons. I thought the horse’s real name was simply “Show Pan,” and that like Harvey, he had been given a pseudonym that had nothing to do with his actual name.

We did a lot of things on this seven-week stint back in the motherland. We circumnavigated Uluru, visited my grandparents in Newcastle – I vaguely remember something about Sydney Harbour too, but really, one never remembers specific visits to Sydney. They all just mesh into one. But we also stayed on my brother’s farm for a while. I remember absolutely nothing about the house, or where we slept, or even talking to my brother much. I was eight and he must have been about twenty-two. At the time I thought he was old – a man – and placed little distinction between his age and that of my parents. It’s only now that I realise he was younger than I am now, and certainly quite young to be getting married.

What I do remember is loving the farm itself. I loved the hot sun on the coarse, browning grass. I loved the shrill, metallic notes that each steel gate sung when opened or closed. I loved the sacred sense of responsibility when entrusted with the task of collecting eggs from the chicken coop each morning; the sense of wonder each time that, overnight, these unassuming feathery dimwits had produced such miraculous feats of nature, and that we could eat said feats of nature for breakfast. There was a novelty in it that was appealing, for sure. But there was also a longer-term sort of personal satisfaction that as an eight-year-old, I was more inclined to phrase as “this is so cool.”

When I was in grade nine my parents bought Ironbark farm; 902 acres in the Hogarth Range, just southwest of Casino, NSW. For many years it too was a source of novel pleasures, from Schoolies week to renovation symposiums for Chinese PhD students. It had the same squeaky gates and scorched grass. But over the last few years I’ve begun to see its value as a living, breathing entity too. Its lack of mobile phone reception, internet or television, along with its constant need to be renovated, cleaned, painted, fixed, demolished and rebuilt is addictive. I have been unashamedly guilting my parents out of selling it for three years.

I’ve seen my brother maybe six times since his wedding, with increasing sporadicity. I know he moved to Melbourne and no longer seeks his fortune in farming. When people ask me what he does I say “he's in IT,” because he is, but that’s all I know. I’ve never asked him what inspired his brief period as a stud farmer. I’ve never asked him what inspired his decision to stop being a stud farmer. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever asked him a single question about himself except for “Harvey, why did you cut off all your hair?” 

As I move closer to the time at which I am bound to have a mid-twenties identity crisis (also known as finishing university and facing the prospect of starting one’s career) and entertain, with increasing enthusiasm, the notion of abandoning my aspirations as a schoolteacher and moving down to Ironbark full-time and becoming a hermit, I can’t help but wish I had, in fact, asked my brother these questions. Perhaps I will now, and maybe while I'm at it, I'll ask him exactly what it is he does in IT.