The tiny community of Wallendbeen on the South West Slopes is closely connected. Photo: G Jacobs
Unless you’re from the tiny village of Wallendbeen between Cootamundra and Harden on the South West Slopes, there’s no reason why you’d know our neighbour Janet, who died this week at 88.
In the way of the bush, our family stories were entwined for generations. Her father Ross share-farmed wheat, growing magnificent crops on the good red country that produces more grain per acre than just about anywhere in Australia.
He began farming in the days of horse and plough. Long ago, when an Indian maharajah visited the big house with his retinue, Ross remembered how their white robes frightened the horses.
His daughter Janet was a stockwoman all her life – a capable, quiet woman who could pull a lamb, calve a heifer, and make her rounds through a paddock full of maiden ewes without disturbing the nervous first-time mothers and their babies.
There were often poddy lambs or calves in the garden around her tidy house. As you walked through the creaky wire gate, it was wise to beware of the corgis – Cindy, and a long line of others whose temper could sometimes be a bit uncertain. On windy nights, our dogs would start her dogs barking. The chorus of woofing echoed around the valley and down to the village, waking up half the neighbours.
She raised chooks and ducks, and her eggs were marvellous, rich, yellow-yolked globes. Janet’s ducks were always a treat – lean and delicious. And if you wanted to cook a genuine French coq au vin, her roosters were the real deal too, gamy and flavoursome from roosting in the forest of elm trees.
The eggs went into old-fashioned cakes, golden inside. She milked a cow until she was 86 and the cream – dispatched to us in used margarine tubs – was thick enough to stand a teaspoon.
At the Wallendbeen Red Cross Christmas stall, Janet’s 12 dozen lamingtons sold out early unless you remembered to place an order weeks beforehand. It was best to be there in time to buy her geranium cuttings and eggs before Santa arrived for the kids, fresh off the header.
Janet herself was increasingly bowed over as time went on. But wearing a cardigan and her brown or green knitted beret, she was always happy to see neighbours enjoying scones and jam in the tea room at the hall.
She went to Sydney once many years ago. There’d been a fire, possibly sparked by faulty electrical lines, and she gave evidence in a legal case arising from the damage. She marvelled at the height of the buildings, then came home without the slightest desire to see the city again.
This week, Janet collapsed while feeding her chooks. She had a medical alert with her, and one of the cousins, a paramedic, arrived quickly, as did her family.
She lapsed into unconsciousness and may never have known she was leaving Wallendbeen. She would have wanted it that way.
Hers was the quietest and simplest of lives, yet its riches were many. She lived with the rhythm of farming seasons – lambing and harvest, shearing and sowing. Her days were spent on land she loved, surrounded by people connected to her in a rich web of friendship and community.
Janet never travelled or saw the wider world, but she knew the deep blue light of winter skies after a storm and the unblinking haze of the midsummer noon on our rolling hill country.
Each day, she heard the frogs calling in Connaughtman’s Creek and magpies carolling in the huge old trees over the road in Granite House paddock. Droughts came and went, the creek filled, and the earth yielded up its goodness.
Time whispered by, and with it the old stories of drays stacked high with hand-bagged wheat or towering bales of creamy wool, of the Baldry Shield sports days at Wallendbeen School and the Red Cross, of weddings and funerals and generations of children born to the land.
These were the things she loved.
As this world spins harder and faster every day, it seems right to pause, in stillness and silence, and to remember her.
Genevieve Jacobs is the CEO of Hands Across Canberra, the ACT’s community foundation.
