Eats and Treats: catering for couch potatoes

By Whittaker Graham

There’s an old saying about truth being stranger than fiction and it often applies when there’s a really REALLY good story to be told. This one is true.

This is a story of endurance: a man stripped of all his considerable worldly possessions and driven to live on a remote mountain where he builds a home from

• Language: English
• Publisher: Th'ink Tank
• Release date: Apr 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780987447036

Book preview

And in the beginning.

Australian humor is often described as dry. This book is no different. Many of you reading this will not have experienced a time just a teeny tiny bit before the internet. Motorola had released Bag Phones. They weighed in at around thirty pounds, and there was no such thing as an 'app'. They say that Australia is a wide brown land. A land of sweeping plains. Yet there are magnificent pockets of green tranquility.

There is a place steeped in Aboriginal folklore, just thirty five miles west of the town of Kempsey on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. It is called Mount Bandi Bandi. I bought those three hundred and fifty six acres sight unseen from a newspaper advertisement. Margy railed at me for spending money on a piece of barely accessible land.

At the time I thought of it as a place to go to camp under the stars, and spend sometime alone in the bush. Up there Dear Companion, with no light bleeding from the towns, the sky is a blanket of stars rarely seen from any other place. Shooting stars. Satellites burning up in the atmosphere. A billion, billion stars like pinpricks through a black sheet.

The land was thick with trees and ferns. Along the creek, passion fruit vines climbed into the thick canopy of gumtrees. In the creek, a family of platypus.

Aboriginal stories told of a hidden lake high up near the peak. They told of climbers and adventurers seeking it out. Those who returned were few, and they spoke of a strange and magic place.

Do you believe in aliens Dear Companion? I am not sure if I do. I can tell you of symmetrical lights appearing high up on a ridge. They came one at a time, spearing in from the sky just as the light began to turn to the blackness that is so deep you feel that even a flash light would not cut through it. We watched perhaps for an hour. Eight, or maybe ten all in a line up on a ridge impossible to reach without expertise and equipment. And then, one by one, they rose into the sky, and became like the stars. They moved at astonishing speed. For a moment or two they were in formation. And then they were gone. This is Mount Bandi Bandi. Home, the indigenous people say of the serpent of the dreamtime. The elusive, and mildy venomous Bandy Bandy snake. I am not sure if I believe in magic either Dear Companion. I do believe in the stories of the dreamtime. Stories that have spanned over forty thousand years, recorded only in pictures and spoken word by aboriginal elders Oh yes! I believe in the dreamtime stories. The land will give, and the land will take. To disrespect it, whether in the town or the bush will have consequences. That I am here to tell this story is a special privilege.

Up there beyond the reach of the logging tracks, what is left is boulders and rocks, washed by the rains. There are no signposts, and many offshoots winding more deeply into the forest. They are like veins and capillaries and can take you further off your route. My three hundred and fifty six acres was high on the mountain. Beyond, the tracks were good only for hiking. Woe betide anyone who went unprepared. So here, Dear Companion was where I began what was to be a new life. A life born of tragedy, grief, and the friendship of a few. The first was Darren, affectionately known as 'Daz'. The mountain has it's ways. Perhaps it calls out. I'm glad you are here with me Dear Companion. Walk with me for a while. I can lean on you. Take your arm if I stumble. It has been many years and the road has been long. Ahead of us is truth. And consequences. And so to introductions. Let us go first to the mountain. This time I will not be going alone. Your company will give me courage.

These days my home is in Melbourne, but on occasion, less that I would wish, I take the camper van and drive to New South Wales to visit my son and my grandchildren. As I near Kempsey my mood begins to change to a sense of foreboding. I'm sure this is purely subjective, but as I near the town it always seems that the daylight becomes darker. Even in the sunshine.

We bought a beautiful house just outside of town, in Frederickton. Margy fell in love with it the moment she crossed the threshold. It was light, with a kitchen made for companionship between it and the lounge. And outside, a big swimming pool, that in the summer was crowded with friends of our son. It was where we had our own big spaces for our books and our record collections. The sliding glass doors opened out from the lounge room and in the summer the laughter from the pool, the boys and girls just hanging after school or during the holidays was a delight. It was there that I began to experience what was then a small ache. It was chronic, and after work I would lie on the floor with a glass of white wine.

One day a customer came into the bookshop in the Medical Center. In Kempsey it seems that everyone knows your business. She knew that we had purchased the house at a very good price. It was an unhappy circumstance, she said. I don't know the facts, but they were a lovely couple at first. But he was a drinker, and they broke up. Then he got drunk and drove into a tree and died. After that I don't know where she went, but the house went back to the bank.

After that, Dear Companion, the house was never quite the same for me. It was darker. And the ache in my back grew claws. After a day in my record shop, to lie down on the floor with a glass of wine and some mindless television was a minor release. How could I have known that such a little thing would start me on this journey? That, and the news that Margy had for me. The foreboding I have when nearing Kempsey is founded in a litany of tragedies. As if the town itself were cursed.

EATS AND TREATS: CATERING FOR COUCH POTATOES.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Charles Dickens began his novel, A Tale of Two Cities with that very sentence. So I stole it.

Darren turned up at the worst of times. I heard his Toyota Corolla as it crossed the creek a couple of miles away. Up there, you knew all the vehicles by their sound. The sound of their motors. Jessie’s old Chevy truck, Ian’s flatbed Bedford with its iron bar that clanked against the truck when it hit the bumps. It was thirty five miles up the mountain over disused logging roads to quite near the summit, west of Kempsey on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. My land had some pretty pockets of rainforest, lots of grass trees, kangaroos and wallabies, some pretty big and fast moving goannas, and a lot of cattle that were not mine. It seemed perfectly okay to push fifty head onto my land to fatten up.

Warning signs be buggered, they’d do no good anyway. It seemed reasonable to the faceless owners who came late in the evening to round up or release, that every now and then a cow might go missing. After all how much beef can one old bloke eat? And too much work for said old bloke to butcher more than he needed single-handedly. Besides, the fridge was an old kerosene burner. Good for a couple of six-packs and some bread and butter. At least I had a fridge.

Home was two lengths of corrugated iron, propped up with the thinner branches of a rangey old Eucalyptus haemastoma, a Scribbly Gum if you’d prefer it in English.

By the time Darren had clanked to a stop in his jalopy a few yards from the humpy, the Corolla was smoking and the muffler, or what remained of it, was tied on with a dry cleaner’s wire coat hanger. There was hot water in the billy, an old catering sized baked bean tin. Tea ready to be sprinkled in.

Darren emerged from the dilapidated vehicle, shook out his tangle of dreadlocks, and handed me a business card. On the back seat, carefully strapped in, was a big Spanish acoustic guitar. Stuck between the front and back seats, obviously less of a treasure, was an electric guitar, along with a portable amplifier. I glanced at his card at the same time that I offered my hand to shake. In the bush you learn to multitask. Eats And Treats, it said. The typeface was made up chocolate snack bars and chip packets. Underneath that jolly script in smaller Sans Serif were the words Catering For Couch Potatoes.

By way of stating my age, I grew up in the golden days, when everything was summer after the war. Baby Boomers, they call us. Spoilt rotten and left to run wild. We need another good war to make us appreciate what we have I suppose. Yes! Yes! I'm only joking. Perhaps. Eats And Treats? I questioned His handsome olive face expanded into a careless grin and he added, Yeah, and catering for couch potatoes. So? I prodded the camp oven in which an overblown damper was fluffing up, pushing the dough against the heavy cast iron lid. I must have known I’d be having company. I usually only use half a cup of flour. I returned Darren’s lingering grin. On the other hand, perhaps the big bud I plucked this morning may have something to do with it. I’m not normally a morning toker, but when you’re alone in the bush, it does tend to modify one’s behavior somewhat. Hey you’re welcome to share.

Munchy is it? Darren queried, as he rolled out a tatty quilted sleeping bag close to the fire and flopped down on it.

Well, yeah. If bread and baked beans does it for you. I laughed. It was that kind of dope. Laughing dope. I've got an esky with two six-packs to wash it down with. He said. Swap for a taste of that?

No swaps, everything’s for sharing. Make yourself at home, I said, vaguely aware that he already had. Between greedy mouthfuls of beer, bread, beans, and of course the occasional toke, we spent a pleasant evening. He finger picking his acoustic guitar, enjoying the great outdoors and getting mellow on hotdog-sized doobies. Darren’s insatiable appetite for home grown weed soon accounted for a quarter ounce of pure bud. Five home-grown plants a year grown in pots was all I aspired to, and he was going through my entire yearly supply.

DARREN.

Where do you come from? I slurred. This high up on the mountain, the sky was black silk peppered with holes for the stars to shine through. Satellites and shooting stars sped through the heavens, and the heartache that had sent me to this place quickly diminished in the company of the young man. I guessed him to be in his early twenties, and nobody, but nobody has a right to be that handsome. At more than twice his age, and easily able to hide behind a garden rake, he and I were always going to make an unlikely pair.

The fire was beginning to languish. Time being what it is in the bush, it could have been ten pm or three in the morning. The sun had been a fiery disc when the red Corolla spluttered and clunked its way into the paddock. The weed had made time elastic, and yet we were barely into the introductions. Darren found his feet folded somewhere in a misaligned yoga squat and disentangled himself to retrieve a fat log. In his hands it was effortless. He returned to the wood pile twice more, each log a yard long and as thick as his meaty thighs. The logs were eucalyptus, full of oil. I had sawn them with the chainsaw so they were round and not split in half. He positioned the logs on the fire, and in minutes, what had been dying red embers became a blaze, hurling hot volatile, aromatic gasses high into the night.

"It wasn't meant to be a business. By the time Darren spoke, I’d forgotten he was there. I was stretched out on my futon, my mind exploring the infinite edges of the universe. Mmm, what?" I managed to mutter.

Eats and treats.

Oh yes. That’s right, catering for pouch potatoes.

"No, it’s couch potatoes. You said pouch potatoes."

Oh, did I? Oh. Well, do you think there’d be a market for pouch potatoes anyway?

What, you mean potatoes in pouches?

Yeah.

Dunno. What do they look like?

I propped myself up on one elbow. Some part of me understanding that this conversation was quite ridiculous. Fucked if I know. Hey, you wanna roll another? I can’t feel my fingers? Darren stretched out his hand and grasped mine.

Here. Can ya feel that?

Yeah. We were too stoned to make sense of anything, except the immaculate beauty of the universe. When we’d stopped laughing, the silence fell, and I slept without dreaming. No beautiful nightmares, until the sun topped the trees. The sight of it brought to mind fried eggs. I whistled for Blue, my wholly independent and sagacious Australian Blue Heeler. His chosen role for the time being was to hunker down at the back of the paddock guarding the dozen White Leghorns and little brown hens. Each evening as the sun reddened over the mountain, he would gently and patiently walk the ‘girls’ into their night quarters and nesting boxes, do a careful count and settle down to ward off barbarian quolls, rats, cats, goannas, foxes. And worst of all, the slimy-assed packs of wild dogs that infested the far reaches of Kempsey where they could be out of sight and out of the minds of those neglectful folks who’d made errors at Christmas and birthdays at the nagging insistence of spoilt children. Blue’s head was down, cheeks bulging, his stride nonchalant. It had taken three days to befriend that old mutt. On the river road at Crescent Head where, beside the Maria River in happier times we had built a tiny two-roomed, higgledy-piggledy house. Years before the Tiny House fad. When Margy was still happy and perfectly beautiful, attending her gardens in red gumboots and her favorite blue (and delightfully see-through) sarong.

I first saw Blue, squatted on the verge of the road, his head sweeping right, then left, as each ratty old farm truck passed him by. The rope tied around his neck had broken and was pulled so tight the poor old fellow was heaving for breath. A smart guess would be that he had fallen from the back of a flatbed truck. (We call them Utes.) When I pulled up close to him in my own flatbed Series 2 Land Rover he took a tentative few steps forward before his teeth bared, and some vicious thug in his soul erupted. I stood a few yards away and squatted. He kept his distance, a chesty growl of menace rippling through him. It’s a hard life blue dog. Like talking to a three year old child. You know, you’ll feel better if I can take that rope off. You hungry? Of course he was. God only knew how long he’d been sitting waiting for someone who was never going to come. Good riddance. There’s not a dog in my experience who can’t be gentle, with a bit of patience.

The butcher in Kempsey was well familiar with my personal taste. He’d cut a pound and a half of prime sirloin an inch and a half thick with a nice rim of suet around the outside, and just enough marbling of fat to keep it juicy while it cooked for just a minute on either side. I can cut it up for you – but maybe you’d prefer it whole, I coaxed, deliberately unfolding the white butchers’ paper. Blue’s eyes locked onto the slab of meat. My meat. My bloody dinner! What the hell was I doing feeding some vicious maltreated mutt fifteen bucks worth of prime beef?

That evening Margy withheld sex. I got a jacket baked potato for dinner! I breezed out later, on the pretext of going to the Macquarie Pub for a jug and a bit of country music nostalgia. Nullanulla Creek, a stone’s throw from Kempsey was the birthplace of Slim Dusty. An Australian icon if ever there was one. So every drinker could croak out at least one bastardised version of I’d Love To Have A Beer With Duncan. And every pub in the region claimed to be the original Pub With No Beer. They had good homemade pies served in the traditional Australian way. On a bed of mushy peas. I’d driven past Blue’s waiting point on the way into town forcing myself not to stop and engage. On the way back through though, I pulled the Land Rover onto the grass with my headlights on. He was there. Looking less sure