Page 180 - Exile-ebook

180 AN EXILE OF THE MIND WHERE THE COWS SLEEP AT NIGHT 181

for a book entitled Wild New world in the thickly wooded acreage.
Zealand. Michael King and Maurice The house site was chosen where
Shadbolt were amongst several cows flopped at night for com-
excellent writers persuaded to make fort and four-leaf clover grew for
contributions to the book. I revisited luck amongst the sticky patches of
Hawera, the town I had once lived sundews. A kilometre-long drive
in, calling in on Jane Lawrence and through a forest of ironbark, black-
her mother, Doris, on the way. butt and turpentine opened into a
After working with two other clearing and a natural spring where
Sydney book publishers I headed to frogs loudly croaked to compete
the sparsely populated countryside with a chorus of cicada leg friction
of northern New South Wales with in the forest around us.
my new partner, Anna. Buying 100 The project was accomplished
acres of forest on sandy loam soil, almost single-handedly with help Preparing the house roof with my two boys.
we set about creating a lifestyle of from Marcel and Jean-Paul, press-
self-sufficiency, 50 kilometres from ganged into labour when they came the Widow Maker, complete with shoulder by a whisper and taking off
the nearest town. to visit in the school holidays. Anna’s winch, hoisted the heavy poles the Widow Maker’s mudguard.
The two-storey mudbrick house brother-in-law helped with the roof. into place and almost lived up to Six thousand large mudbricks,
in the shape of a hexagon took over Thirty-six tree trunks up to its name. The heavy logs swayed each weighing a back-breaking 18
five years to build, using timber seven metres long were used for the precariously as they were winched kilograms, were shaped from the
hewn from the forest and clay from inner and outer hexagon structure, up and threatened to come crashing clay soil with a sprinkling of straw
the ground. We called the property with trees sawn into planks for down on my head. As one did before for extra strength. The forest, the
Tanglewood. It was hidden from the the roof frames. A tractor called I could yell ‘timber’. Missing my soil and sweat, were the main

My team at Reader’s Digest. Anna in the Sydney apartment. Jean-Paul and his friend, Nathan, making mudbricks.