My Year Without Matches Read online

  Published by Nero,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  37–39 Langridge Street

  Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia

  email: [email protected]

  http://www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Claire Dunn 2014

  Claire Dunn asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Dunn, Claire, author.

  My year without matches : escaping the city in search of the wild / Claire Dunn.

  9781863956529 (pbk)

  9781922231543 (ebook)

  Dunn, Claire. Rural women – Australia – Biography. Wilderness survival – Australia. Urban-rural migration – Australia – Biography. Country life – Australia. Rural conditions – Australia – Biography. Australia – Rural conditions 920.720994

  Contents

  SUMMER

  AUTUMN

  WINTER

  SPRING

  Picture Section

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Dedicated to my parents, Bob and Pauline, with my deepest gratitude

  And to the Earth and all its wild inhabitants

  SUMMER

  *

  Awaken your spirit to adventure; hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk. Soon you will be home in a new rhythm, for your soul senses the world that awaits you.

  John O’Donohue

  *

  The sacred order of survival:

  1. Shelter

  2. Water

  3. Fire

  4. Food

  1.

  I thought I knew the forest until we moved in together. And then, as is often the case with flatmates, I realised I barely knew it at all. It had been an easy assumption to make. I was a forest campaigner; the forest was my life. All day every day it was what I spoke of, what I thought about, what I loved.

  I knew its names and numbers – hectares lost, saved and under contention; species extinct, threatened and rare. I knew its borders and boundaries from luridly coloured harvest plans – straight lines demarcating logging compartments, riparian buffers, clearfell zones. Computer logarithms revealed its inhabitants’ most private figures – the length and breadth of their terrain, the shortfalls in habitat needed to maintain viable future populations; their terminal diagnoses ruthlessly spat out in tables and percentages. Timber modelling software had informed me of the forest’s weight and density in cubic metres and wood supply quotas. I could tell you the precise number of megalitres of water held back from catchments clogged with thirsty saplings, and list the Latin names of the frogs affected by creek siltation. I could even take you to the place by the harbour where the forest sat behind barbed wire, a mountain of chips waiting to be exported and made into serviettes and printer paper. It was the kind of knowledge that led me to believe I knew the forest intimately.

  But now, standing in front of a blank canvas of bushland that is sizzling and spitting at me, contemplating how I might build a shelter with only natural materials that will keep me dry in torrential rain and warm in sub-zero temperatures for a year, I am suddenly aware how very little I know about the forest. I was its spokesperson yet didn’t have a clue how to survive in one. I knew how many acres were cleared each week but would struggle to point out more than half a dozen eucalypts by name. I couldn’t tell you what the first bird of the morning was, or which direction the storms rolled in from.

  What I knew was “The Forest” – revered, magnificent, faraway. The Forest was vulnerable. It needed me. This, however, is the forest. Searingly hot and seemingly repelling me with every prickle it can muster.

  “Don’t forget to check for dead overhead branches,” says Kate.

  “And jumping-ant nests,” laughs her husband, Sam. He swings one tanned and muscly arm around her waist as she sways from side to side with newborn Bella in a sling. Kate flicks her long brown curls back to smile up at him. They seem pretty chuffed that their long-held dream of offering Australia’s first year-long residential wilderness-skills program is actually happening, their six guinea pigs about to be unleashed on the bush block they bought especially for the purpose.

  Our mission is to build our own shelters, and gradually to acquire skills such as making fire without matches, hunting and trapping, tanning hides, gathering bush food, weaving baskets, making rope and string, moulding pottery, tracking, increasing sensory awareness, learning bird language and navigating in the bush. Visiting instructors will join Kate and Sam to teach a series of workshops over the first half of the year. Then we will be left to fend for ourselves.

  The rules are few. Apart from no booze, we are limited to thirty days out of camp, and thirty days of visitors in. It is essentially to be a Choose Your Own Adventure story, with equal emphasis on experiencing the changing face of the bush and ourselves, over four full seasons. A cross between the reality-TV show Survivor and the solo wilderness reverie that American poet and naturalist Henry David Thoreau elucidated in his book Walden. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Thoreau had exclaimed in exaltation of his self-styled life as a forest hermit, words I had inscribed on the inside cover of my journal. To qualify for the program, all we had needed to do was study the basics over two week-long courses, and prove that our motivations weren’t madness or law evasion.

  “Madness” is a word that comes to me, though, as I do a swivelling glance at the hundred acres of baking scrubland that will be my home for the next year. And, by the looks on the faces of my new tribe members, it’s a word they might be contemplating too. Even the routinely optimistic Nikki is slightly perturbed, which makes me feel better. She lifts her Akubra to wipe away the sweat gathering under her hatband, releasing a mane of blonde corkscrew curls. If it wasn’t for the crow’s-feet around her eyes, you wouldn’t guess Nikki is the elder of our crew (at the ripe age of thirty-five). I’ve known Nik for a few years, but not well. She’s the ultimate outdoorsy, go-getter gal. She’s ridden a bike around Australia and hiked more trails than I could name, so she’s a yardstick for me to measure how hardcore, fit and adventurous I am (or am not). She squats back on her lean haunches, quadriceps bulging, and scratches a stick in the dirt.

  Chloe, swatting flies from her face, lowers herself down next to Nik. Under an enormous sombrero her pale cheeks are flushed pink, her mouth pursed. The blue cotton of her long-sleeved shirt is marked with dark patches under each armpit. She lifts the rim of her hat and catches my eye. I return her question mark with an eyebrow raise. Chloe was a good friend in the city, although she moved north a year ago. Seeing her again here feels like an odd mix of the familiar and the strange.

  Ryan doesn’t just look uncomfortable, he looks shell-shocked. This is hardly surprising given that he’s just left blizzards at his Colorado mountain home. The baseball cap he wears barely shades his nose, his neck growing pinker by the minute. On his feet are a well-worn pair of Teva sandals, which seem to be part of the uniform for athletic Americans. Ryan’s also a mate. We met while I was travelling in the United States a year ago, both taking the same course at a tracking and wilderness school. Knowing that this program needed six people to get off the ground, I had shamelessly head-hunted him. His dry humour and practical mountain skills, I thought, would be
a great contribution. He is currently intent on staring at one featureless spot on the ground. Is he avoiding my gaze?

  “What about snakes?” asks Dan, scratching a marmalade-coloured goatee. His dog, Jessie, pants laboriously at his feet, looking up at him pleadingly. Dan’s right foot is jiggling continually, which is distracting. He folds his arms across a trucker’s singlet and sighs. I look down to see “Follow Your Heart” tattooed under his thong strap in large calligraphic lettering. From our brief conversation, I’ve ascertained that Dan is on an escape mission from Sydney. A public servant for the last decade, he had been balancing boredom with a little too much of the high life in recent years, it sounded like. “I need something to ground me,” he said. Dry you out, too, I thought. Well, you can’t get much more dry and grounded than this. I’m a bit worried that apart from sharing the same age of thirty-one and a few favourite books, we mightn’t find much in common.

  “What about them?” snorts Shaun, the other wildcard. Hatless and shirtless, Shaun is either immune to the heat or trying out primitive sun protection. He shifts from foot to foot in a new pair of five-toed wet shoes, with more knives than a chef would use hanging from his belt. I’ve heard Shaun is only with us for six months before he leaves for the army. He stares out into the scrub, biting his top lip impatiently.

  “Good luck,” Kate says, giving us a wave in farewell for our shelter location hunt.

  Stepping gingerly out of the paltry shade, I wander off in no particular direction, a lump of fear in my throat, in search of a place to call home.

  *

  I stick to the rutted four-wheel-drive track and follow it downhill to where the canopy of trees greens and thickens, pausing to look for a way in. The brush looks impenetrable on all sides. I sigh, and kneel down to crawl under the spiky bush hedge. The brush clears a little but remains thick. I push vines from my face and penetrate further in. It’s cooler here than on the ridge. But there’s winter to consider – six months away. My stomach suddenly tightens, as if gripped by a firm handshake. One whole year. What am I going to do out here all day? The grip releases a cloud of skittish butterflies.

  I hear someone crashing off in the bush across the road, so it’s too close. And where would I put a shelter in here, anyway? I’d have to knock down several trees first. I am pinned in by foliage. A wet, slippery sensation alerts me to two large striped leeches sneaking up my ankle. Others are closing in, their heads sniffing me out. I freeze. They freeze too. I’m going to have to make the first move. My decisive flick sends the first racer flying into a nearby bush. The second wraps around my middle finger like a slimy ring. I wave my hand madly in the air. It’s no good, this sucker is on tight. Scraping my finger up and down the trunk of a tree, the leech falls with a plop onto the fern below, taking a layer of my skin with it. I scuttle back to the road before the next wave of cavalry descends.

  “Simplicity,” I mutter. Easy for Thoreau to say. He moved straight into a comfortable hut on the edge of a clear-water lake, only two miles from town, and he took his laundry home every week.

  Back on the main trail, I trudge uphill until the scrub thins out, rubbing shoulders with stringybarks, dusty red termite mounds and unnamed spiky shrubs. The shrieks of cicadas are so loud my hands involuntarily rise to cover my ears. I try to remember the mud map of the property that Sam drew on the whiteboard. The boundary to the east is bordered by a creek – or river, if Kate had her way, the two of them spending a good ten minutes bantering about how to classify the modest water source. The bridge over it is our exit to the tarred road, highway, beach, civilisation. On the western border Sam sketched another waterway, no challenge this time when he wrote “Snake Creek” in neat letters under the squiggly blue line. Chloe and I shared a glance at that one, knowing well her snake phobia. Sam filled in the white space beyond that boundary with large slashed lines, indicating the sandstone cliffs that I had spied in the distance, and the start of a vast tract of national park. To the north and south are fire trails that demarcate our territory, although the private land beyond is largely uninhabited and, from what I could gather, can be considered part of our larger backyard.

  I head in a direction that I think is south. Innumerable tracks criss-cross my path in differing states of degradation, some no more than vague depressions. So much for wilderness. This place has been trashed. It’s sure not the kind of bush I imagined for my precious year of nature immersion. Judging by the map, it’s the only stretch of bushland in the state where the west extends its jagged arm of dry sandstone down to the coast. I’m struck by a pang of homesickness for the place I had originally pictured: towering old-growth forest gums, clear mountain streams, soft grassy groves.

  I know what Dad would say if he were here. He’d take off his wide-brimmed hat, give the top of his balding head a good scratch, screw up his nose and announce with derision, “Green-ant country.” It’s his euphemism for any land unfit for running cows, or human use of any kind. I smile at the thought of his standing here next to me, looking around with disdain. His sweeping judgment is usually my cue to argue the virtues of the land independent of any European sensibility of beauty or usefulness, but today it’s comforting. Poor fella. I’ve really given him a hard time over the years, and yet he was right there for me a few days ago, wishing me luck on what he thinks is a crazy mission.

  I had woken beneath the pink doona of my childhood and rose to watch the dawn sun cast spokes of gold onto the glossy black swans, perhaps offspring of the original swans that came to nest when my parents created the dam, in the year I was born. I packed the last of my things and turned back to wave at the two most familiar and constant figures in my life.

  “Keep in touch,” Mum called out, and then corrected herself, “I mean, we’re here if you need us.” Dad had one hand on the collar of the family border collie, who was straining to chase me out the gate. In my rear-vision mirror they looked frozen mid-wave, as if in a photo.

  I stop centimetres short of a pebbly mound of giant ants. This isn’t just green-ant country, try every-aggressive-and-oversized-ant country. Sweat rolls down my cheek and I wipe at it with the back of my hand, the smallest edge of panic lengthening my stride.

  I follow one trail, my eye drawn to a large log in front of a clearing. It’s still fairly shade deficient but could maybe make a reasonable home, with a bit of imagination. It’d be nice to have something to sit on. I step closer and something rustles. Something close. Something large. I force myself to look around, and another long rustle comes from inside the log. My heart urges a scramble to safety as I catch sight of the something. It’s dark, shiny and tessellated, and emerging from within the hollow. A tongue flicks in and out. “No vacancy,” it hisses. “Move on!” I manage to uproot my feet and take a few slow backwards steps before spinning around into a sprint. I crash through the bush, making as much noise as possible, propelled by the image of two black beady eyes chasing me.

  Just as the sensible thought arises that maybe I should be taking more notice of the direction I’m heading in, I stumble out into a large disused quarry. I collapse against the single spindly tree in the middle to catch my breath. The sun bounces shards of glare from the quartz into my eyes. Damn, I didn’t pack a pair of sunglasses. It’s about the only thing I didn’t bring. Nerves jangle like keys in my belly. I check back a few times to see if the snake has followed me.

  The same nerves have been a constant companion in the last few months, a niggling question mark every time I let myself think about an entire year in the bush. If the goal was simplicity, the preparation was not.

  First there was revenue raising. The initial cost of the program was $4000. It hadn’t taken too much effort to save the $50 a week I budgeted for food and essentials ($2600 for the entire year – was this possible?) The more difficult task was untangling the cords that held me to society: cutting some, tying off others, securing some down for the long hiatus. I was like a p
uppet realising for the first time the full extent of my attachment to the puppeteer. I justified the whirlwind speed and exhausted haze of preparation with a promise to myself that when I got there, then I could slow down.

  There were trips to dentists, doctors, banks, mechanics, camping shops, shoe repairers and hardware stores. I did endless research on the nuances between brands of tools and equipment, and became the proud owner of my first hand-saw and hatchet. I gathered a selection of knives and sharpening stones, billies and camp ovens. I splashed out on some Merino wool clothes and a second-hand mountain bike. I invested in Australian field guides on everything from frogs to fungus (“field guide porn”, I was told, apparently a common habit for budding naturalists), which joined the rapidly growing pile of second-hand books on every subject that I had been planning to educate myself in for years.

  As quickly as I was getting rid of whatever belongings wouldn’t fit in the few boxes stashed at my parents’ place, I was being given bivvy bags full of every possible gizmo and gadget I might possibly need, from eel traps to camouflage army clothing, rehydration fluid to Chupa Chups (emergency sugar?). Apart from no firearms, drugs or alcohol, there were no limits on what to bring. Although I doubted I’d need the camouflage mozzie head-net, the multiple ponchos, the kaleidoscope of topographical maps, the guitar tuner, the waterproof tracking notepad, most of the field guides, the box of ten-year-old army rations, or the solar panel, the solid weight of stuff I was amassing helped to dull the creeping fear that nothing, not even three tubes of tinea cream, could prepare me for what lay ahead.

  As much as I had always been a nature lover, running wild on the riverbank as a child, running feral in my early twenties for weeks at a time in forest protest camps, I still had no real reference point for what it would mean to spend a year in the bush, full time. Without a comfy couch and DVD to retreat to at the end of whatever muddy adventure I’d been on. Without a washing machine, a hot shower or music. Without matches. While I knew it wasn’t going to be a Man vs Wild, scorpions-for-dinner affair, the privations were not inconsequential.