an essay by Liv Hambrett, English
It’s roughly a four-hour drive from the coastal town of Woonona to the tiny village of Carcoar, which is about the same time it takes us to drive from our home in northern Germany to Berlin, or the Polish border, or to Copenhagen. Distance has a whole other meaning in Australia. After a week or so of sandy feet and salty skin, our noses and shoulders perhaps a little too pink, we’re on our way inland. The children are due to start school in Carcoar, where my sister and her family live, and so we must wend our way from those wide south-coast skies to the wider skies of the countryside with its village in the valley and the bubbling Belubula that curls around it.
We’ve taken a different route this time, having done the more straightforward drive a number of times. On the map it looks a little jagged, but on the road, it’s positively sinuous. The Crookwell Road route pushes us past Crooked Corner and we bump over the bridge in Tuena, winding, almost deliriously, along Abercrombie Road. The road careers around and through and over the khaki countryside with its silver eucalypts and tussock-dotted slopes and paddocks. By the time we get to Trunkey Creek, the windows are down, and the kids have their faces turned to the breeze, tongues out like dogs. The hope is their car sickness will be cured by what we have come to call Bushluft.
My children are German-Australian, born, just like their Dad, overlooking the flat fjord in Germany’s port city of Kiel. They’ve grown up coming out to Australia every couple of years and spending weeks on end roaming the bushland and beaches of the Central Coast’s Pearl Beach, named for the scallops of brilliant white the waves carve on the shoreline, visible from Mount Ettalong. Bushluft – bush air – is both typical of the way they talk and think, an unconscious melding of Australian English and German. Compound words and phrases built from each language’s bricks are not only second nature, they’re almost central to the way we communicate as a family. Bushluft has entered the family lexicon over the three months we have spent driving around New South Wales and Victoria and, like both the place itself and the concept-denseness of German, it’s replete with meaning and potential for interpretation.
To the four of us in a modest Kia rental car, whacking our way through around this south-east pocket of the country, Bushluft is the scent of the ghostly gums, the sun, the dry grass. It’s a deep sigh of appreciation as we drop down through the sub-tropical, cicada-filled gorge into Pearl Beach. It’s a long drive, clinging to Victoria’s coastline, the sun on your face in the afternoon, the anticipation of a new town dotted somewhere within the vastness of a state twice the size of Germany. It is the olfactory summation of the past few months of pure freedom. But it is also a seemingly inherent understanding of the significance of the bush to Australians – the bush has deep roots in the Australian psyche and its branches look like rangers and poetry, fire and walks, music and tucker, medicine and an escape. The bush is folklore. To give it a scent, to recognise its air, is the most Australian thing my children could do.
In Carcoar, we prepare for school. We made an agreement with the German education authorities that we would enroll the children in a school in Australia and that school is the thirty-student strong Carcoar Public. The entire school is only slightly bigger than my daughter’s Year 4 class and everyone knows each other. In fact, the first day back is a lot like an extended family reunion, the kids in their buttercup uniforms – a foreign concept to our kids – quickly starting games of handball – also foreign in this playground form – and the parents standing around catching up. All that’s missing is a barbecue.
It’s a soft landing for our two and, for my husband and me, the best end of the stick. We fall into a routine of walking the kids down the hill to school and then spending the day drifting. We drive to small towns like Canowindra and Vittoria and Milthorpe and Neville where we eat and drink and wander the shops. In the bakeries, I make sure I get all the things from my childhood – neenish tarts and cream buns and lemon slices. In the pubs, my husband tries the spectrum of Australian beers. Twice, I have to jump out and help a turtle off the middle of a hot, dusty road and often there’s a sudden, hard brake to make way for a roo. We wend our way around and over the cream-yellow hills dotted with black Angus cattle and they become as familiar as Carcoar’s key characters, who seemingly rotate through the pub, post office and café, asking prying questions as to how long we’re staying for and why. News travels fast in towns of two hundred.
Often, after we collect the kids from school, another novelty they’re not accustomed to, we walk home via The Carcoar Royal, the old pub on the main street, where the kids have a can of Kirks lemonade or Solo. Kirks is another thing that has come to be, for them, synonymous with Australia. The sticky, lemony sweetness of their cans of drink forms an additional note in our sensory memories, as does the hot sun on the road, the infinitesimally cooler night air as autumn slowly beckons.
Towards the end of our handful of weeks in Carcoar, my sister ducks across the street and returns with a paper bag from the homewares boutique, itself a study in scent, all tobacco and leather and spice. On more than one occasion, we’ve sent ourselves into a bit of a candle-sniffing spin. In the paper bag, there’s a Carcoar candle, which smells richly of tea tree oil. Tea tree, or Melaluca, is as familiar to me as the perfumes my Nanas wore and the hard eucalyptus lollies from the chemist. Along with the candle, there’s a box painted in the now-familiar cream-yellow colours of the countryside. Stencilled in gold on the box is ‘Our Place. Sun-dried paddocks and Bush Blossom.’ Its description is of ‘bush florals, spicy clove bud and cardamom to evoke the warmth of a late summer afternoon in the bush.’ I shake the brown glass bottle loose and spray it immediately. I can’t believe it. Unwittingly, my sister has bought us a bottle of Bushluft.
Back home, on the other side of the world, in the cold of early spring, the little brown bottle sits in our living room. This time of year, as Australia slowly settles into a smokey autumn, the air is pollen-rich here and threaded, headily, with the darling buds of May. There’s no Bushluft. There’s cut grass and the pungent canola, the early Pfingstrosen and the big fat strawberries. And in our living room, there is a little brown glass bottle which we spray, conservatively, when we need reminding of all that will always await us on a summer’s afternoon on another continent, a world away.