The Woman on the Mountain Read Online Free PDF

slope but actually was relentlessly unflat, as each small area that needed to be level soon proved. Everywhere involved walking uphill, to or from, and we got very fit, especially carrying buckets of water up the steep incline from the spring. That was excellent for deportment too; only my straightest back would keep the buckets from bumping into the slope ahead and spilling.
    My cooktop was an old fridge rack balanced on four rocks, my cooking equipment was disposal store cast iron—camp oven, frying pan and saucepan—and one heavy aluminium soup pot. (I know, I know, it’s toxic—I don’t use any aluminium now!) From our Merriwa camping weekends I’d developed quite a collection of recipes for one-pot or one-pan dishes. For those weekends I used to cheat a little to compensate for the absence of bench space, like making the dough and rolling the balls for chapatis at home, in which form they’d happily sit until I was ready to flatten them and cook over the fire to accompany the Saturday night curry. Now I had the luxury of the card table as a bench.
    The camp oven, buried in hot ashes and coals, worked well, but I could only bake one thing at a time in it. We bought a rusty fuel stove for $10 and set it up close to the big tree above the ‘kitchen’.
    The first time I used it I wrote:

    Took a long time for oven to heat up but finally cooked pitta, pumpkin pie and two veg. strudels in it. Flue melted its joins and blew off.
    Here’s another baking morning.

    Lit fuel stove—baked cookies first, then two loaves bread, then prune loaf, then Rieska [quick rye bread for lunch]. Used top to warm yoghurt, de-candy honey, cook chickpeas, etc. All done by 12.30. We got sand and rocks for last trench. Finished that by evening.
    Was that me, that so-organised, energetic young woman? Where did she go?
    In this primitive kitchen I was making soft cheese and yoghurt, since I could buy unpasteurised milk from the dairy about three-quarters of an hour’s drive away, where the tar road started. The top of the $12 kerosene refrigerator, near its rear vent, proved to be an ideal warm spot for yoghurt to ‘clabber’ or bread to rise. Although eating meat didn’t bother my family, cooking it bothered me, and they were happy to eat only vegetarian food at home—it was also much easier to keep fresh safely.
    After 32 years I am still a vegetarian; and that flower-painted kero fridge now sits on my verandah, to be pressed into back-up service when I have visitors, like my son, who like their beer colder than I run my small 24-volt fridge. Unfortunately all the dairies are gone, as in the 1980s a large state dam drowned the main valley through which we used to drive from town.
    We had thought hard about whether we should have a milking cow and keep poultry, to be really self-sufficient. But we decided against ‘farming’ animals, mainly due to my dilemma about the unwanted male calves or chickens that would inevitably be produced. To give them away would have been sending them to the axe en route to oven and dinner table—second-hand guilt, first-hand responsibility. No.
    On the very first night that my husband stayed in Newcastle for work, I had a sense of adventure, being alone in the bush, but wasn’t at all scared. I read the kids to sleep in their double-decker stretcher, then sat out by the fire for a while, listening to the night noises. Feeling tired, I went in and made up the ‘double bed’ on the old carpet with which we’d covered the tent’s plastic floor. This process was simple enough: a double sleeping bag laid over two side-by-side single foam mattresses that were stacked up during the day as a ‘lounge’, to make walking space beside the kids’ bed, as the tent was very small. I fell asleep peacefully
    I was awoken by the most fearsome, fierce, ferocious, frightening noise I had ever heard in real life. It seemed to be inches from my ear, just the other side of the fragile canvas wall. I knew there were