Digging Around Yam Daisies

( Losing the Country of Lived Freedom )

Dig! Ivan would dig all right! He placed the blade of the long-handled posthole shovel two inches back from the dig-face. He jumped on the stepped flanges of the spade top with both boots, driving the blade of the shovel into the soggy black earth. He had often found a shovel to dig with when he had to think about making a decision.

Ivan loved to dig. He loved the earthy scents which made him think of new potatoes and wild mushrooms. There were no potatoes or mushrooms there, but the wild plants were full of the same fresh musk which he breathed to remember how vital Bette had been when they first married. Native buttercups, flatweed and swamp bluebells grew in the soak. Ivan had seen onion orchids among the Yorkshire fog-grass last summer, but that was up a bit higher where the blackwood seedlings grew. He avoided that place so he wouldn't damage the onion orchids.

Ivan tried to guide the ditch along levels of contour so it would avoid the matted green hairleaves of swamp bluebell. Last summer bluebells had flowered on every summer day. Each flower was a five-petal split-bell the size of a one-cent coin, crowded into a mass which formed a wild carpet of skyblue. Ivan had admired them as he went out to the orchard each day. Old flowers among the mass purpled to crepe before discolouring. Petals faded to white-out like sterilized clouds among the mass of blue.

Once Ivan had imagined himself as a botanist. He thought he would have enjoyed botany if it meant working hands-on with plants in the field. He had read the journal of Ferdinand von Mueller, the pioneer Australian botanist. Ivan had written up an extract out of von Mueller's essay 'Suggestions on the creation, enrichment and maintenance of forests', for his quote board on the kitchen wall. It read: 'Let us regard the forests as an inheritance, given us by nature, not to be despoiled or devastated, but to be wisely used, reverently honoured and carefully maintained...'

But Ivan had found biology at school too theoretical. Too much micro-biology and tunnel vision down microscopes for him. He liked plants in the wild, eaten by animals, attacked by insects, or dug up to be used by human beings. He liked the world to live freely under the open sky. Ivan had noticed all the wildflowers since he was a child when his Grandad August had told him the names of the plants. He thought of himself as a remnant of the old world where native plants also survived.

He jumped the shovel home. The flanges were flush on that groundlevel which Ivan loved to achieve. He liked to get the shovel in all the way. He levered back on the handle to take off the shovel-deep slab of earth. The slice broke away from the body of the soilcake in the filled-in heartshape of the shovelblade.

Last family day, Ivan had talked about the soil as he was inspecting a paddock where Barry, his brother, was going to make a new planting of apples in hedgerows. Ivan's idea was that the orchard treeroots grew to join as part of a soil cake-dough.

"Wild yeasts, worms plantseeds make a rising cake of topsoil out of stuff and decay."
"Full of sustenance!" he said to Barry. "Nearly good enough to eat."

"Eat it then!" Barry had grunted.

Ivan grinned as he gritted his teeth on a small clod.

"At least I get to nourish my soul with it" Ivan teased.

Nowadays, Barry hardly touched soil any more. He had mechanised his orchard out at Pakenham with all mod-cons.

Ivan slid his left hand down the shovelhandle and pivoted the shovelful up with his right hand on the end of the handle. Then using the grip of his left hand as a fulcrum, he drew the shovel back, and with a twist of his shoulders and a swing of arms, he tossed the the shovelful of soil six feet to the pile on the left ahead of him. He like to move like a pendulum when he dug. The deliberate rhythm seemed to sway with the wind-moves of the trees and resonate with the lap and ripple of the water.

He was planted beside the spring. He was a tree that had grown more mobile. His muscles were elastic timber, strong and bendable, flexing upright through his own shape with each sway. He eased himself to the earthmoves with no strain, digging in and throwing the earth aside.

A puff of wind swayed the blackberry canes on the old broken-down front fence, tousled the fray-strands around the holes in Ivan's old green windcheater and sent his hair over his face. He looked up as he flicked his hair off his face, to watch the the wave of air surge up the Dandenong Creek valley where the agitation parted the forest on the wall of Mount Corhanawarrabul as if it was a monkey fingering the fur apart in search of fleas.

Ivan went on digging. He was a tree exercising. Ivan liked to create something when he exercised. He skewed his face in disdain at the idea of
exercise for its own sake. Tony, Bette's brother had a special room in his air-conditioned house at Mitcham for his weights and his exer-cycle.

Annette, Tony's wife, said Tony was into pumping iron and chiropractors. Tony got out of touch with life in his exercises, Ivan thought. Tony had become one-eyed and martial. Ivan laughed in private amusement at Tony's militant fitness regime. Tony must do it to make up for being a Warranty Loss-adjuster. The job sounded like so much whitewash that Ivan had once taunted Tony to explain what he did. Tony said "get stuffed."

Another shovelheart of soil thudded onto the pile. Ivan looked at the worms. He bent down to kneel on one knee so he could pick a long worm out of the distant pile. Nearly a footer it was. A scrubby. Only scrubbies were that long. It was good to know the native worms were still there. The blokes who fished for Murray Cod would give a pretty penny for that sort. Not that Ivan would ever sell. Worms were the future of the land itself. He tossed the worm to be buried in the pile of earth.

Many small worms were cut in half as Ivan had been digging. Enough of them there not to matter, he thought. A bloke was free to wield a blade in good conscience. Ivan's old Grandad August, his Mum's father, used to say "It doesn't matter, Boy! Each worm you cut will come back to life again."

As boys Barry and Ivan had often helped Grandad in his big vegie patch. Grandad August had had the orchard before he retired so that Ivan's Dad could take it over. Ivan remembered Grandad coming back every year to help their dad with the pruning. When Barry or Ivan wanted to give up Grandad would say "Come on boys! Wire in! Wire in!" And then Grandad would set a fierce pace.

On Sundays Grandad had been a preacher, and when he pruned he railed against what he called the apostasy of modern life. He told them the world was always going to the devil. He used to say "Follow the Divine Compulsion boys! For unbelief has crippled Protestantism, robbed her of her soul."

Barry had stayed in awe of Grandad. They used to go out and stay with him and Grandmum on their retirement acre at Nar Nar Goon. Grandad had told stories about his forebears. How Gottlieb Plaent, Ivan's Grandfather four generations removed, had settled in what the family had called the Yarra Wilds east of Melbourne in 1854. Gottlieb had left Silesia after the Prussian Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm the Third had decreed an Empire-run church. Gottlieb was a traditional non-comformist Lutheran who emigrated
as a matter of conscience rather than face persecution. To deliberately compromise would have been unthinkable to him.

In Melbourne while the qet-rich-quick dreamers rushed inland to the goldfields, Gottlieb took up land between the Domain and the River Yarra. He planted a vineyard and orchards above the riverflat near the old punt crossing. He used the northern steep slope to sun his grapes. Nowadays the road to the punt is Punt Road and the vineyard is subdivided and built under the trendy suburb of South Yarra.

Barry, as the oldest male, had the framed quote in his loungeroom at Pakenham, which was taken from a translation of Gottlieb's journals which Ivan's mum had done:

'Treasure not the gold which you may dig up if you are lucky,
But the fruit of the Spirit you grow if you persist in God.'

Ivan had seen his Auntie Flo's photocopy of Gottlieb's naturalization papers. In his entry for 'Religon', Gottlieb had crossed out all the formal words and written: 'I worship with the Independents.' Ivan thought Gottlieb's phrase might have set an outlook for his family ever since.

Grandad August had been a stickler for doing a job properly. Once, Ivan's dad had gone over to help him put up a fence at the back of the Nar Nar Goon acre. Ivan's dad had dug the gatepost holes three-foot-six inches deep, and deep enough, he thought. But no, Grandad wanted the holes four feet deep, and rammed with stones to that depth. "Think of the future!" Grandad had said. "A gatepost has to hold up, and last."

Ivan believed that he had kept spirit with the Plaent family trait. While Barry had accepted the fundamentalist worship which Grandad used to preach, even as he modernised his farming, Ivan had kept faith with the eternal verities which he believed were at the heart of a real and fundamental basis for people to have a future. Ivan would do a job properly or not at all. His temporary partnership with Barry had split up, because Ivan had hated Barry's way of adopting the "She'll be right" attitude of hard-bitten opportunists and poor-spirited employees. Barry had hated what he called "slackness" in Ivan.

Ivan was in trouble. He couldn't keep up with the time-and-motion grind of producing fruit which his fellow big-time orchardists said they had to adopt to compete. "But time is money, Ivan," Barry had said. But Ivan hated to rush. He was slow and sure like his Grandad. Too slow, it seemed, for the world around him. The family orchard was stranded in what had become inner outer suburbs! Even as he dug Ivan could watch the traffic
speeding by just behind the tops of Grandad's solid old fenceposts. The traffic cannoned past all night the last few years.
Ivan could remember a time, as recent as the sixties, when he and Barry, and their mates, Ian Bauer and Colin Hannard, would kick-to-kick the football on the Mountain Highway out in front.

The orchards around had been cut up for housing estates and ten acre factory buildings. Bauer's, next door west, had a hundred brick-veneers where the peach orchards used to be. Ivan wished the production-line houses were gone. That was no way to build a city. He had dug up some stuff in books which he latched onto to support his opinions.

Ivan's idea was that greenbelt wedges of farmland and bush should have been preserved right into the inner city. He read about cities like that in Europe. He once saw a picture in a Time-Life book which showed dairy cows being driven through the streets of Berlin to a wedge of pasture which was visible in the picture beyond the ends of the cobbled streets. Ivan had seen the rows of a real orchard which showed through the gaps behind the three story houses in the picture.

So Ivan could see no sense in the acres of houses spaced for ten peach trees. And roads clogged with hurry. No. It made him feel hemmed in. Lost on his own place. Wantirna was no place for him anymore.

Ivan was digging dirt out. His trench contoured through the sedges. The dig-face approached an area thick with ground plants. He knew most of the plants. But there were clusters of rosettes with hairy green leaves. Were they flatweed? The leaves were longer than usual. More erect. The edges had scalloped points which flatweed didn't have. He thought he should know the plant.

Then he saw the purplish cold-bloom on the low older leaves and remembered. Ah yes! The plant had nodding buds! It was yam daisy. This was no weed. Yam daisy was not introduced, but native! Grandad August had shown Ivan and Barry the fleshy roots when they were boys. "The aborigines lived on these!" Grandad had told them. "Myrniong, they called it! It was like potato for them. A staple food!"

Ivan remembered that they had dug up some of the roots and roasted them much like parsnips, serving them with the midday Saturday roast. Barry said the roots tasted like stinkbugs. But Ivan liked the taste.

Myrniong. Good name. Much better than yam daisy. Ivan was glad the soak was too wet for orchard trees, for myrniong had survived, where it didn't in cultivated ground. The soak had few clumps of them. Ivan
would save them. He went over and got some old orchard branch props and pushed them into the saturated ground as stakes to mark the yam daisies.

Then an alarm had sounded. Ivan stood to look westward across the seven acres of Red Delicious to where Mayne's place had been. Mayne's had been a dairy farm when Ivan was a small boy. Then, during Ivan's teens, after milk pickups ceased, Mayne's had a little riding school and they agisted schoolgirls' horses. That was where Ivan had first set eyes on Bette. Where she had once ridden over to the fence for her horse to accept some apples was now paved for a carpark. The pressform sheds of the new Vulcan factory covered most of Mayne's. The siren seemed to sound for no good reason.

Bette would worry what the siren meant. Ivan wanted to dig for longer. He had found real solace for his imagination by digging, creating worlds and unearthing the roots of things, since he was eight years old. When Ivan's older sisters, Annette and Rosemary, had been teasing Barry about how much money they were going to make picking apples, Ivan announced that he was going to hoe Great Grandad Plaent's orchard. The others had laughed at him, thinking an eight year old could never live up to such a boast. Ivan said he would do it. Barry said that Ivan wouldn't have a hope, and anyway he wouldn't get paid.

Great Grandad Plaent's orchard was a half acre of twenty exotic and non-commercial trees that had been neglected in Ivan's father's time. The trees grew in the nook of land between the soak and the front fence, where the track went back from the house to the the hill with the old split-paling Plaent 'homeshed', as the girls had rechristened the original dwelling. The old orchard went down to Mayne's fence. Vulcan's ten-foot cyclone mesh fence was there now.

Ivan had never thought much about why he had wanted to hoe the orchard. Maybe he sensed the neglect. Maybe he did it to please his mum. His father was always busy with the commercial orchard and Ivan's siblings never gave the relic orchard a thought. Once his dad had wanted to bulldoze the trees but Ivan's mum had said over her dead body. Maybe Ivan was more tuned to intangible rewards.

Ivan's mum said she wanted her Grandad's orchard because it was a rare legacy of old-fashioned varieties. She always said we needed all the sorts to live well. Ivan had learned the names of the trees from her till he knew them by heart.

There were four rows of five. The first row had a galvanised-pipe trellis where the Neuchatel Pinot, Verdeilho, and Burgi's Tokay wine grapes grew. The two trees which made up that row were both espaliered Josephine de Maline pears. Ivan hoed that row the first week.

In the second row were, in order from the roadside, a Bereczki quince, the Morrocan tangerine, the two Irish-Peach apples, and a greengage. That row took Ivan two weeks, and Barry said Ivan would never finish.

The third row had three apples: a Blenheim Orange, a Branley's Seedling, and the Cornish Gilliflower. The last two trees were a Sloeblack prune, and the Chinese pear which never went soft. Ivan had hoed that row in two days on the last weekend before school went back after the summer holidays.

The final row, near Mayne's fence, was taken up with the Jefferson plum, then two damsons: Bradley's King and Frogmore's Prolific. Next to the White mulberry was the tree Ivan adopted as his own special tree. It was the Sweet Welsh medlar. Ivan had never tasted jam as good as that which his mum made from those medlars. Ivan took three weeks to hoe that row after school. He finished with a funny kind of secret pride.

When Ivan was showing Annette he got a sense that he had done something for God. When Annette told the others that night and the whole family went out into Great Grandad Plaent's orchard to see it hoed Ivan felt as though he had done a sacred thing. Ivan was glad that he had impressed Barry to see what he was capable of. Ivan's dad had been speechless with wonder. He said: "Who'd believe it?" and then he went inside and gave Ivan a reward. Ten pounds! Ivan had got. But, of course, he had to put it in the bank.

And there Ivan was trying not to think about money. He kept on digging to get space out of the house. Bette would be inside worrying. She had become a wife of the suburbs. She was probably on the phone to Wendy or Gaye, sweating over the estate-agent's cards, and saying "mule". She loved the 'Development Proposal', like it was a ride to heaven. He could feel her eyes arrowing the target of his back. Wanting him to relent. Wanting him to sell out. He felt daggers of her want and saw the brochure dream home she wanted him to have built with the money.

He couldn't stop advancing pavements, roads and the encampments of houses springing up as if they were all uniform in an invading army. The factories bled and seeded like warts on the land. His home was overrun by wage-slaves and clones of consumerism. Ivan had been raised and trained to be a independent yeoman. A free farmer and nothing less!

He saw a future for his children where slave-minded 'subbers' had stripped all freeholds, and squeezed his descendants to little lives alienated from the earth and from God.

They were squeezing his kind out by the very bulk of their so-called democracy. Mob rule it was. Subbies wanted everyone the same like them. His kind was being put under siege.

His kind! Yes. He had the divine compulsion. He didn't even find that in church anymore. He didn't find one sympathetic eye. Only that traffic of blank eyes like the windscreens on 'Molehill Highway'! His place was levelled to be no place. The blank eye glared at him from his own hearth.

"Everyone wants us to sell, Ivan" Bette had said. "We'll be better off! The offer is too good to refuse... Brian Tobbling has offered over half a million dollars now. Ivan?"

Ivan remembered how much those pounds would buy. Brian Tobbling wanted an answer by six o'clock that night. He had the developer ready to sign. The developer was jetting off to California the next day.

"It's the best offer we've had Ivan!" Bette had said.

"What's five hundred thousand divided up between my family?" Ivan said. There were six equal shares in the old family orchard.

"I can't buy another orchard property for that!" Ivan had said. "This place should be worth a million. I reckon land speculation is sin!"

"But Brian Tobbling says he'll have to spend a fortune just to bulldoze the orchard, and demolish the farm sheds...and clean up the piles of old boxes and junk... besides roads and power and water and all that. And what do you mean, sin?" Bette said.

But Ivan had walked out on her. Let them bulldoze their own backyards. He didn't want to make that decision. He said he would think about it.

He had got out the shovel like he had serious work to do. So there he was digging. He would sooner think about saving yam daisies. And canals.

He dug a moat around the plant cluster to make it an island. The soak-springs had filled the canal with water. The shovel-width trench made a perfect canal for toy boats. Ivan had played boats with Barry there when he was eight or nine. The old canals had collapsed into shallow depressions. But Ivan was digging sharp new depths in place of the blunted memories. Ivan rembered many years of going back to play boats in chains and chains of canals. Judy and Veronica, Ivan's younger sisters had joined him as Barry got too grown-up to play.

Ivan cut his new canal along the old depression with the water lapping the dig-face. He would show the canal to the children as they came along from school. Adam could tow his wooden Star yacht from the bank, and Alice could drag her plastic cruiser. The canal boats could ply the soakland with the old trades and cargoes. They would land at Sedge Dock and take on basket reeds. Then he would show the kids the yam daisies and they would dig one up and they would taste it and spit it out.

Ivan knew they thought he was ridiculous. He was in a bind and he reverted to child's play. His rates were levied at purse pocket values and he had hundreds of purses to pay. He had been losing the last five years. The subbies wanted proper footpaths and sewerage for which he had to cough up for all his frontage. He didn't have the money.

Only a high-tech orchard might raise the money. And that took five years from planting to fruit. The subbies had his bit of green cornered. His heritage was being swamped. He was a being of the country left behind when his country had retreated. He wanted to stay and dig in. To keep an area open, free from alienations and pavedoms. But how could he? He would get too poor. Debt would take him and the subbies would collect in land. The kids would suffer.

The kids were there at last. Adam and Alice had friends home along the gravel path. They jumped the old fence and went to the canals. Ivan had to make boats for the friends out of the broken ends of old pinewood apple boxes. More kids walked by and came in to join the fun. Ivan warned them out of the orchard-prop stakes which protected the yam daisies.

Then he was too busy making boats to notice what the kids were doing. He loved the kids to enjoy a real world of imagination. Adam forgot the warning and with his friends pulled up the stakes so they could pull the boats clear around the moat. The barges were strung along the maze of canal. The kids were chatting and exclaiming in excitement. By the time Ivan came to watch the game the yam daisies were churned into a slurry of mud.

Then Ivan blew his top. He screamed at the kids and swore them home. They ran off to subbie streets named after native plants to their paved houses. And then the mums had phoned Bette angry that their kids were screamed at and had come home all dirty, dragging mud on the new carpets. They asked if the man was dangerous.

Bette came out trembling with shame and told Ivan what they said. But Ivan didn't seem to hear. He had the soak in his eyes.

"It's yes for Brian Tobbling," Ivan just said to her.

He went to the shed and took a box of matches out with some old packing paper. He dug a few yam daisies out of the mud with Adam and Alice. He told the children about the Yarra Wilds country and explained about Aboriginal potatoes. He told them about Grandad August's divine compulsion.

They went over to the old homeshed and built a fire of fallen branches under the cypress trees. They sheltered from the wind in the lee of the leaning homeshed. The kids looked into the building to see the dusty bric-a-brac through the dead rats and cobwebs.

Ivan made a spitfork from old fencing wire and roasted the roots of yam daisy over the fire. The kids tasted them and ran round the fire chanting "yuk yuk yuk." Then they ran off to watch their favourite soap on TV, saying they had to help Bette with the chores.

Then as Ivan sat in the dusk he found he needed to make his choice real. He got the shovel from the soak and went into the homeshed with shovelfuls of embers from the fire. He piled hot coals beside torn hessian on the thin lath walls. Then he clutched a fistful of cooked yam daisies and stood back.

Then while the century-dry tinder of the homeshed began to tongue alive into orange flames Ivan walked out through the relic orchard. Great Grandad's trees needed hoeing again.

Ivan climbed up the Sweet Welsh medlar to watch the burn. He waited for the action while chewing on the bitter yam daisies.

The homeshed was burning from every window frame, catching fire up into the cypress trees. Good, Ivan thought. Let the past burn. They won't get any comfort from my history. The place would be gone before any subbie water was let out.

Darkness fell deep as the fire sirens wailed. Ivan watched the engines roar in to wet the homeshed ashes and put out the cypress trees. Men looked suspiciously into any old applebox and chatted up Bette.

But none of them saw Ivan's face in the medlar. He sat wedged like an ape in the crook of branches nursing his divine compulsion. His eyes were wild as they flashed red in the convoluted flare of the fire engines.