It’s an idyllic spring day down on Jackie French’s farm in the Araluen Valley on the South coast of NSW. The author is watching her garden come to life, a four hectare parcel of land which grows about 270 different sorts of fruit. It’s a wilderness garden openly shared with the local wildlife — wombats, lyrebirds, swallows and wallabies, not to mention the snakes.
The author has recently completed her sixth book in the Shaggy Gully series, a collection of picture books set in a charming small town not unlike her own Araluen valley.
Emily and the Big Bad Bunyip (reviewed here) is about Emily the Emu, a kind hearted emu who just won’t give up on a grumpy old Bunyip.
French admits that although Shaggy Gully is an idealised rural community, recent health troubles of her own have made her realise the “extraordinary kindness” and support a small town can provide, and in fact inspired her latest yarn.
Native Australian animals are a constant theme in French’s children’s books. — partly because she is surrounded by them and partly because she wants Australian children to appreciate the fragile environment around them.
Despairing at the amount of environmental catastrophe stories aimed at today’s youth, French wanted to take a different tack.
“This is disappearing, that is disappearing… it makes you depressed. Powerless.”
“I want to make kids understand the bush,” she says. When you understand it you will fight for it. I want to give them the power to fight for the things they believe in.” The message is reflected in the tenacious character of Emily, who just won’t give up.
Take wombats. Most of us think they’re gentle, lumbering and rather dull creatures, who like to make a mess of country gardens with their constant burrowing. But French says they’re not slow and stupid, insisting they possess a “non-human intelligence.” Wombats are a source of endless fascination for French of course, detailed in her best-selling picture book Diary of a Wombat and the non-fiction companion The Secret World of Wombats.
It’s odd that we tend to see native animals as pests but will happily invite a bird-eating cat in their home. French has created a garden where native animals are not fenced out or shot at, but allowed to roam freely and take a peck at the food on offer. It’s the “tithe garden” philosophy, or the idea that the garden should be shared with people and other animals.
It’s taken from the traditional Christian Church levy: you pay a tenth of your income to support the Church and help the poor. When not writing about wombats, French can be found penning gardening books, such as her best-selling tome The Wilderness Garden.
She describes her garden as being “one tenth for us and nine tenths for everyone else”. Nine tenths is planted with seed producers, wild fruit, blossomers and vegies gone to seed and one tenth is planted with crops or flowers just for her and her family. It suits the wombats just fine.
“Native animals are part of the natural ecology of our farms,” French writes on her website. “Their feet suit the soil, their grazing techniques suit the natural pasture.”
More than that though, French sees animals as vital human companions. “Who wants to live in a world just of human beings and their domesticates? For us, wombats are one of the privileges of owning land — furry obstinate creatures, whose lack of domestic docility is one of the chief joys of farming with them.”
Remarkably, despite the drought that has gripped most of regional NSW for several years, French’s four hectares of fertile land have stayed immune. While the first year she moved to the country she found dead animals on her property every day for two years, this time around the animals stayed fat, making incredible adaptations like learning to skin avocados from her planted trees.
It’s a remarkable existence and one very removed from the average city family. French thinks we should start to think beyond great expanses of paving with a few rose plants and consider a backyard edible jungle.
Incredulous I ask her if it is really possible to create a sustainable, edible garden on the typical quarter-acre block. She assures me it is. “Many farmers in developing countries grow whole market gardens on the same amount of land,” she points out. Even better, once established, a sustainable garden should only take 10 minutes a week to maintain – something even the busiest working parent should have time for.
Our final conversation point is bunyips. The mythical creatures (usually translated as “devil” or “spirit”) are strong in from Australian folklore. Various accounts and explanations of bunyips have been given across Australia since the early days of the colonies. They have also been identified as an animal recorded in Aboriginal mythology. I think that if anyone can set me straight on the existence of the swampy creatures, it’s a wombat whisperer.
Interestingly, she claims there is a waterhole on her property known locally as a bunyip hole. The air is always cold and no animal will drink from it. There is no evidence of campfires there, although another waterhole nearby shows charcoal evidence of fires for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
It’s an intriguing tale, but after a long chat with the endlessly fascinating author, nothing would surprise me.
Emily and The Big Bad Bunyip is published by HarperCollins and available from all good bookstores.
Is Jackie French aware that the NSW govn has sanctioned the shooting of wombats particularly in the southern highlands and south coast of NSW.