I haven’t been back to Blair’s Lane since I left the house in January 2019. It was time to move on, but I’m inescapably drawn to recollections of earlier days by an email.
ABC Classic FM are celebrating Beethoven’s 250th this year, and when the first lot of [Covid] lockdown occurred they played Fur Elise – which always reminds me of you (and the second difficult section) and made me wonder how you were getting on. So I tried ringing but got no answer, so wondered whether you had moved. Couldn’t find you, even on the web, phone book, anywhere…and no email address…bummer. Thought you might have moved to be near one of your kids. …but now bingo! …thanks to your bushwalking friend. (Tell her I’m grateful). Email from Rob 8/7/2020.
I first came to Yackandandah in 1973. The experience is long gone but memory jogs and images burst into vivid remembrances. Memories – fragments of Beethoven and Bach; rich and vibrant recollections of life’s events; vague abstractions of the distant past.
I came with Rob; artist, archaeologist and friend. I remember him in Melbourne. He was the younger teenage brother of my bridesmaid; a kid that often went bush or melted into the background when I visited his sister. Seven years later, by chance, both single and in our 20s we met again.
Rob wanted some new paintbrushes so we planned a trip to Godwards wool shop and art supplies in the red brick building on the corner of Kars and Hammond Streets, above and behind the Yackandandah primary school.
We approached Yack from the Beechworth Road; driving down the long hill overlooking the town with Mount Big Ben in the distance. There was something enchanting about that view and the towering English oaks that lined the main street. I could live in this place, I thought to myself.
Time passed. I met Chris, the man with whom I would spend my life. Over the next eight years I moved from Wangaratta to Bendigo and then Melbourne, but the memory of that village had captured my imagination and wouldn’t be dislodged.
Chris and I bought land in Blair’s Lane in 1981. Eleven acres plus frontage on Kinchington’s Creek. A bargain at $20,000. It even had a house of sorts; a three gable weatherboard miner’s cottage, desperate for demolition.
The stables were fairly new; two fibro-cement sheet horse-boxes and a tack room. The boxes were solidly lined with six-inch wide, by one-inch deep hardwood planks. There were gaps between the boards and the spaces behind were filled with big black spiders and runaway hay. The sweet smell of horse sweat, manure and leather filled the space and, in my mind, is almost as real today as it was then. The stables would be our home for the next twelve years.
There was an abandoned forge, hidden under an ageless, rambling mauve and white wisteria. Built with rough cut, bush poles, roofed with corrugated iron and clad with large swathes of bark, originally prised from old-man river red gums, it was the perfect place for children to hide from adults, read books or contemplate future adventures.
There were a few eucalypts, a couple of spreading laurels, an ancient twisted pomegranate, four huge radiata pines, a lilac, quince and oleander. The rose garden, no longer visible, was the best in the district we were told. Further away, various gums lined the creek and weeping willows and blackberry bushes prevented erosion and held the banks together. I’d almost forgotten that the paddock between the creek and the old house was bare save for rampaging rabbits, thistles, capeweed and huge patches of reeds. The ground was compacted by horses hooves and the fences scarcely standing.
We built a house with our own hands, fixed fences, created a parkland of European and Australian trees, eradicated weeds and rabbits and raised three children. Thirty seven years sped by faster than a runaway billycart on Railway Avenue.
Memories are a function of the intellect. I cannot feel, see, touch or hear them yet they were awakened by a simple email from an old friend. Rob introduced me to the small farming village of Yackandandah forty-seven years ago. I never imagined then that I would spend the rest of my life here.
Marian Robinson
8 August 2020
