Nothing to place me here except for the name of that river and the way a mob of Eastern Greys bounds away in its desultory panicwhenever you get close to them in the paddock by the river, and the fact that it is winter in June, and the way right now the possum drags its world-weary self into the nest it calls its own in the ceiling above my head. I am in Australia, though it’s not easy to tell. Soon the frogs will start up along the Wingecarribee, which snakes through the pastures and the willows and the birches down there, a quarter mile from where I sit. The light is failing soon I must go and lock the hens in their coop. The ground smells of poplar leaves and the aftermath of rain. Across the lane the elms have stopped being yellow and stand bare against an acid-clear winter blue sky. Since mid-March it is where I have sat and worked, and I am sitting there now – writing this – in early June. According to Ross, who came the other day to dig a trench to bring the telephone wire down from the house, the cowshed is a four-stand walk-through, and it would have milked sixty head twice a day one hundred years ago. It is made of brick, rendered now and painted the same kind of yellow as the house. The cowshed is a little older than the house, and it is the reason the house is here. It is a plain house, but pretty, and it is set about with rose bushes and mature trees, and it is more than enough for us.īut the real reason we bought the place – apart from the paddocks over the fence and the space around us and the cool air above, and apart from the fact we could afford it – sits down the back between the silver poplars and the oak. It has four bedrooms now, its weatherboards are a nice dusty yellow, and its roof is clad in corrugated iron. The house has grown in the hundred years since it was that first dairyman’s home. The house we found was built for the man who ran the dairy for the big property from which our acre has since been cut. So here – to keep it trim – we are in the landscape again. But I’m not much good at the kind of work you have to do to afford the kind of oversubscribed and overlit life the city wants you to lead, and every day in town was another day I couldn’t see out to any kind of country, and every day I seemed to become less like the man I thought I was. We moved to a terrace house in the inner city and tried to like it.

Then children came, and I needed to find the kind of regular work that feeds a mortgage and a family, and which one finds more of in a city. We moved here two months ago after another unsuccessful attempt to love – and afford – the city. I should tell you that we live on an acre in the country one hundred and twenty-five kilometres south-west of the city. During a lull in the fiercest weather event the south-east of the continent has seen in thirty years – we call them ‘events’ these days, as though someone’s putting them on – I went out on a Sunday morning and bought myself a book.

A storm in a teacup