My Degustation

I was full of wonderful plans of blogging aplenty over this holiday period, but I feel as though the past few weeks have been a little like living life behind the wheel of a dodgem car – not much progress and plenty of bingles!

I tried to think of a word to describe life right now, and weirdly the one that kept swirling in my head was degustation. Wikipedia is the font of all modern day knowledge, and if you were to look up the word, you would find that it involves the careful, appreciative tasting of various foods … and then this:

Dégustation is more likely to involve sampling small portions of all of a chef's signature dishes in one sitting.

I feel as though my life right now is something of a degustation – in one very long sitting, I’m sampling some signature dishes of Australian life, things that we have become used to having on the menu of our way of life. If you’ve ever read Dorothea Mackellar’s classic poem My Country, you’ll know what I mean. And what am I sampling right now? Drought and bushfires, served up in an excruciatingly slow cooker summer.

The current drought has become a factor of life, simply by the length of time in which it has been around. I have friends who live in drought ravaged rural areas, people who’ve had to sell of all their stock or helplessly watch as their paddocks and crops dried up. I tried to imagine what that would be like, and how they manage to keep going – or in some cases, don’t. I wrote about my friend Neek in the Nyngan area in an earlier post. Now I’m seeing our dam level at Bountiful drop by the day, and wonder if there will be rain to fill it before we can no longer water the trees we’ve laboured to plant and nurture. A great proportion of our boundary hedging has died, and a swag of our Moss White Birch saplings have given up too – now just dry sticks amidst their battling neighbours.  These are plants we sweated and prayed over and hoped good things for. Yet in the big scheme of life, this loss is just a small portion of the signature dish that is life in Australia. It’s my degustation compared to the feast being served to our farmers.

The dry conditions have contributed greatly to the gluttony of bushfires devouring our state and country. When we have been home in Sydney, we’ve battled through the constant smoke cover and family have been evacuated both near and far as fires ignite around us and throughout New South Wales. Amazingly our home in Sydney and the farm here at Bountiful are two hours apart, yet impacted by the same fire. A wind change can mean relief for one location and a nightmare for the other – and anything in between depending on which way it heads next. It goes without saying that we wouldn’t be anywhere without our Rural Fire Service (RFS) – our local commander said it’s the longest bushfire event he’s ever been involved in. Whilst some areas have been hit hard and fast, what is happening here at Bountiful feels something like a slow choking … the ever present smoke so you’re always on alert and can’t relax, the constant monitoring of the wind conditions, the scorching temperatures day after day – and the knowledge that there’s nothing short of good solid rain that’s going to stop the fire’s steady advance. And there’s no sign of that for about another eight weeks. It’s another course on this season’s menu - unwanted and nerve wracking, but just my degustation compared to those who’ve lost loved ones and homes or who are fighting the fires on the front lines.

The view from my back door this morning - the smoke from the Green Wattle Creek fire.

As our dam sits at the lowest we’ve seen it, we think twice about the everyday luxuries we are blessed with at home in Sydney. At Bountiful we shower over a tub that catches all the water for our strip of garden that we’re struggling to keep alive along our front verandah. 

Water destined for some thirsty plants.

As we wait for hot water to come through for the washing up, we catch the cold water in jugs and keep it aside for filling the kettle or saucepans for later. We wash up once a day, shower only if needed and unless it’s brown we don’t ‘flush it down’. To run out of water, one of life’s basics is a real possibility – yet just a morsel of what has already been served up to families living on the land. At present we are fighting what has become an annual infestation of grasshoppers that are trying to munch up said garden bed, as well as rabbits who are determined to ringbark our trees so we’ve had to put all else on hold to get some tree surrounds happening.

The base of one of our Robinias, a close up of the ringbarking damage.

This is our Chinese Elm, a special tree as it is the first one we planted here at Bountiful. The base has been almost completely ringbarked and hubby holds grave doubts it will make it. Praying!

There’s no doubt it’s hard, and still has me wondering whether we’ve bitten off more than we personally can chew, as I wrote in my last post. Whilst I hate all of the difficulties it poses, there is a richness in seeing communities come together and do what they can to help each other out when times are dire. To be a part of that is a blessing. On this, the threshold of a new decade, that’s the feast we can all take part in, and be thankful for.

My prayer for 2020 is best expressed by Michael W Smith’s Let It Rain.

Tracey 🙏

With thanks to the You Tube channel of The Adonai Connection for Michael W Smith's Let it Rain - LIVE 

and 

The YouTube channel of  Lance Scouler  for My Country recited by its author, Dorothea Mackellar.