Rachael Treasure - Down the Dirt Roads

Never in my wildest imaginings of my adult future did I think I would be in my forties, living in a rental property, in a town with my children... farmless. But there it was: the bare, brutal facts of a failed dream that a country girl like me had to face. Under the foreign gleam of streetlights, with the press of the energies of unseen people in houses all around me, I would wake in the starless night to gaze at the artificial glow outside my window and the bleak reality that I no longer had a future exploring the same blissful bushland with my children that had seeped into my own soul when I was a child. I no longer had a life of teaching them about caretaking animals and soils, things that I not only loved, but revered and worshipped.

The story of how I lost that future and my farm is more far-fetched than any novel I could dream up. But life is like that. It takes you down roads you never expect to go down, under circumstances that are, at times, stranger than outback fiction and harder to swallow than a John Deere 24-plate disc plough.

I remember the day I went to look at the rental where I now sit and write. My first impression was not focused on the house, but the comfort I took from the fact that it was on a dirt road. Fancy that! A dirt road right in the middle of town! And across from it... there were sheep in paddocks yet to be claimed by housing. Sheep! I could smell them from where I stood near my ute. Those two things sheep and dirt were ribbons of connection not just back to the life Id lost, but to the future that I hope to create for my funny little family, of just me and two children and the remains of my farming menagerie: a dumpy pony, four chooks and two working dogs, along with an emotionally complex toy poodle called Megatron. My larger horses had been agisted out to other properties, causing me as much agony as a mother sending her children away to boarding school, but I knew I had to make this move if I was going to find some time and space in which to heal.

As I first walked up the front steps to shake the pretty hand of the suited and appropriately heeled real-estate agent, I noticed the outside boards of the house were painted the hue of maggot-infested wool. It wasnt a criticism; just a passing observation from a farm girl who had recently taken up weekly art lessons and was reassessing colours in the world. On seeing the colour, I was suddenly teleported back to my paddocks, stooped over the tail end of a weaner lamb, my bubba children babbling in the ute, while my square, rather manlike, hands gripped shears as I sliced away white crimped wool in search of the activity of the viciously hungry maggots, chewing into the flesh of the sheep. There was something so satisfying about my day, if I knew I had saved one of my flock from such excruciating discomfort. Finding that seam of green stain in the fleece was always the path to revealing where the flesh-eating fly larvae were, and dealing with the problem, pronto.

Now when I direct my farming friends to our rental, I say, Its on the dirt road, and youll see the house its flystrike green. They instantly get it. To anyone else looking at the colour it may be more glamorously referred to on a paint chart as Avocado Smash or Fern Den Lush, but to me the girl taken out of the country, with the country remaining in the girl it is and always will be the house of flystrike green. A house I never planned on living in. A house in which I realised I had been grieving the death of my farming life post-divorce for far too long. It was coming up to six years since my marriage blew to dust, so as I stood in the lovely sun-drenched rooms I realised I had to emerge from my own negative clouds and find a new compass to guide me.

The reason my pain had carried on for so long was because when the divorce was imminent in 2010, my father opted for my ex-husband to remain with him in the farm partnership. Dad stood by him, not me, and shoulder-to-shoulder the men stayed and laid claim to the land. It was the children and I who had to leave.

For a time, I tried to recreate what I had lost on reduced acreage just up the road from my family farm. In my move from 2000 acres to just under 20 acres, it soon became clear that it was just not going to work. I was trying to earn a living as a writer, pay off a new mortgage, drive children to and from school, along with running a property, when all the while I was running on emotional empty.

And that is how it came to pass... me renting a town-bound flystrike-green house that was not my home, but near to my childrens schools. The journey to it had left me questioning everything about myself, my agricultural industry and a society that dismissed the power and gift of women and desecrated Mother Nature so brutally.

As I packed my electric fencing equipment that I had once used to regenerate pastures into the suburban backyard shed, along with my chainsaw and fence-post rammer, I also tried to pack away the shame of being ousted from my beloved farm, and tried to find forgiveness for myself and those involved.

The experience has sent me on an inner journey, fuelled by the discovery of a different compass by which to be guided in life. Its not the white mans compass that merely has the four points of North, South, East, West on a two-dimensional geographical landscape. I now view the world by the Native Americans seven-point compass. A compass that has North, South, East, West and also