Lemonades

The Mallee is wide. And seemingly endless.

The writers’ festival had dished up lashings of seductive: writer in residence Carrie Tiffany, the breathtakingly eloquent Gail Jones, Stefano’s unctuous Mid Winter Feast. And a myriad of other people places and pleasures. And so it was, that on leaving Mildura, I was deeply engaged with the hypnotic and the vast.

Hitting the city’s outskirts, I was struck (again) by the block upon block of orchards. Acres of trees had welcomed me on my arrival just days before, and now as I left, endless groves still stood silently, like globular Christmas pines bedecked in citrus baubles, obediently waiting to be relieved of their bounty.

Every farm gate boasted a sign enticing passers-by to indulge in “LOCALLY GROWN” “FARM FRESH”. There were wheelbarrows, old and new, laden with orange butternuts and nylon netted bags stretched taut by heavy harvests. Produce was reverently stacked on pallet board bench tops.

Joining the A20 and heading for home I passed through Buronga and Gol Gol  - places whose names rolled around in my mouth like golden syrup. Despite their sweetness, some of them seemed nothing more than a locality sign, there being no discernible difference between the fold upon fold of farming endeavour and their insistent signage. Bombarded at every bend by beckoning boards and with a roughly formed idea of something still intangible, I decided to count the number of signs I passed. I inwardly hoped the shift in focus might also lighten the post-festival blues I was already hearing.

My window down and Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’ on loop, I set to my task. Having committed, I drove more deliberately, determined to spot and honour each and every hand scripted sign.

Almost immediately my first subject loomed on a bend. Its sign declared “PRices as Marked” [sic], directing customers to “Put MONEY IN THE SAFE”. Radishes, lemons, oranges, eggs and pumpkins all called - they sat bagged in gentle hillocks or, in the case of eggs, in military marching band formations. And “LEMONADES” for a princely $2 per bag.

The lemonades at Trentham Cliffs pricked painful
memories, but I bought them anyway. 

You don’t often see lemonades for sale - or at least I never have. 

I first knew them to be in my Nana’s NSW mid-North Coast garden, not far from the mossie- infested passionfruit-vined pergola. Actually, it wasn't really a pergola, being free standing and so unattached to any walls. I don't think my Nana would have known what a pergola was if it slapped her in the face on her way home from milking. No, she would not have had a pergola in the house yard. The passionfruit thing was more a humble frame - from which the heavy black fruit hung - and stood close by the ‘hell bed’ where I was sexually abused by my uncle each Christmas. 

More recently, I rediscovered lemonades in my mother’s home orchard. She gathers scavenged and otherwise collected scions from roadsides and long abandoned and tumbledown homestead sites. Along with dozens of other heritage and rarer varieties birthed into existence by her careful grafting, the lemonades hold company in her orchard with the unusual and unfamiliar. 

I chose the heaviest of the four hanging bags and depositing the scatter of shrapnel scrounged from the console, I returned to the highway. And to my counting.

At a place I now know is Monak, I passed a two-storied b-double on a bend. I wondered where the cattle it carried would be sleeping tonight, before making their way to bloody abattoirs and butcher rooms. Just as the last of the truck’s axles left my vision, a shiny glimmer of something caught my eye on that side of the road. There it was again - stuttering shafts of light across my windscreen. Perhaps it was broken glass ejecting winter sunbeams caught in its hollow? Or reflections off a residual pool of water not yet soaked into the thirsty earth following last night’s rain? 

Naturally curious and with time to spare, I slowed, pulled over and doubled back, retracing my route. 

To the flashing. 

It seemed that I drove for almost half a mile. I almost gave up, thinking that approaching from the opposite direction might make the flashing invisible. And just as I slowed - to abandon my search and resume my counting - the shimmer shimmered again. 

And I spied it. 

Ahead of me, a little behind the tarred road’s edge, were singular smatterings of withered silk flowers, and then a melting party hat and scraps of tired and mostly faded tinsel. One length of silver tinsel was carefully draped on a low salt bush, its loose end frolicking freely in the breeze and enabling its small metallic fronds to throw perforated rays into the day. Just a few days shy of the winter solstice, the low sun’s glare combined with the reflecting tinsel to make it difficult to see. A modern day Gretel, I treaded gently on the red earth, following a path of detritus. 

Curiouser and curiouser.

The remnants of old celebration finally led me to a faded hand-hewn red-gum cross. 

It stood perhaps a meter high - its perfectly proportioned cross bar carefully recessed - making the memorial instantly halting. A length of fat pregnant silver tinsel was wrapped over the horizontal arm and surely secured, for although the day’s stiff breeze ruffled the tinsel’s fronds, it stayed firmly tethered. 

The cross was gently greying as hardwood does, its exposure to the elements forcing fissures into its surface that echoed of dry Mallee creek beds. A name, dates and loving inscriptions filled the parallel arm. And my second sign - this one not enticing potential buyers, but forever declaring a family’s love and loss. Its lettering still golden and rich, a black marble tablet sat proudly at the cross’s foot. William was, I now know, “LOVING BROTHER TO DAPHNE, TRISHA, SHAE, DEWELLA, RACHEAL, AMROSE dec TERRY, DEWAYNE, CLEON, JACKSON, RILEY”, “LOVING SON OF COLLEEN & WILLIE” and “LOVED SON TO YVONNE & GERALD”. 

I was overcome by a gut-wrenching grief and within seconds, welling tears spilled from my eyes. They fell to the earth and parachuted red berets of dust onto my shoes. The eleven funerals that I attended last year - each drenched in an ever-accumulating rise of senseless despair - ricocheted around me. Snatches of burial track melodies and lyrics crashed into me in a cacophony of anguish. A glimpsed ugly clutch of synthetic carnations, gyp and greenery screamed at me in a blurred haze, morphing into Kathleen’s casket spray of yellow roses. 

I don’t know how much time passed.

I heard crows and magpies when I regained lucidity and my cheeks were wet and hot. 

I fashioned a naïve posy from the stolen branchlets of nearby shrubs and trees. Wrapping their gathered stems with a sappy length of red eucalyptus tendril, I added my humble offering to William’s memorial.

And returned to my counting. 

RIP WILLIAM JOHNSON

6.6.1985 - 21.11.2009
IN OUR HEARTS FOREVER.

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