Pastorale series.

Basics and out-takes.

This is just basic background for Jack Nichols, and the "Pastorale" series of stories. The stories are based (mostly) around Jack Nichols, and more-or-less around his small property, "Ballindean", in central New South Wales, Australia.

Think of the stories as alternate universe stories. They have more-or-less common background, but they diverge into different world-lines at different stages. What follows is more-or-less basic, but not fixed in stone. Some things can vary. In fact, there are some things that are so different that they needn't have been written as "Pastorale" stories at all. Just change the name and they'd be a completely different story. In fact, in at least one of them Jack Nichols has a different name - but he's the same person. I just feel more comfortable writing with a developed background for the action and the characters. I often still write for Jack Nichols who was born and raised in that small (say 5,000 square mile) shire in the centre of New South Wales, whether he returns there to "Ballindean" or not.

You've heard of stories that are semi-autobiographical? Well, these are more-or-less 5% autobiographical. Jack is a person I might have been, probably wish I had been, but I never made it. However, the background and most of the facts are accurate. Jack Nichols is quite possible.

You can think of the following as good basic background, but don't count on it for all the stories. It's basically cuts, copies and out-takes from a variety of stories - background which proved too wordy to include in the stories, but background nevertheless. Between stories times can differ, actions can differ, facts can differ. Sometimes even the homestead house differs. Discards which were too wordy to keep, but formed the background (even if unspoken background) for the stories anyway. Don't expect consistency - they are from different stories after all.

* * * * * * * * * * *

My name's Jack Nichols. I've got a small farm in some granite hills in the centre of the state. I taught science until I was thirty, saved assiduously, came into some money, and used it and my savings to purchase the farm. I chose carefully: in fact I've had my eye on the property since I was five years old. It’s surrounded by rough country, with the hills being State Forest and National Park. However, my section is fairly level, fertile and has permanent water. At 128 hectares or 320 acres, most people thought it was too small and isolated to be viable, which was why I could afford to buy it. I’d sneaked in and taken an option on the place with the owners when I was twenty-five, then bought it when they planned to retire. It never even came on the market. It was used for grazing and growing lucerne (alfalfa) hay, but I followed a growing trend and put in several hectares of wine grapes, with different varieties ripening over a period of almost three months. I studied viticulture and winemaking. I also put in areas dedicated to apples for cider, pears for perry, and smaller areas of stone fruit dedicated to speciality fruit wines. I added two hectares of mixed olives, some for oil and some for pickling.

I'm going to put in a small commercial wine cellar, and hope to do cellar-door sales, tours, and boutique sales to restaurants and by subscription. You don’t make real money just selling your produce. You need to add value. However, much of that is in the future. In the meantime I sell quality meat animals, as many as possible by private treaty to restaurants, speciality suppliers and even private individuals. I've also added poultry and game birds aimed at the same markets.

My first priority is to develop the farm; my second is to pay it off. Mortgage payments are a killer. Life is so much easier when your money and your land’s your own. Every spare dollar I have beyond development needs goes into paying down the mortgage.

I still teach occasionally: casual teaching around the area on an ad hoc basis. I could make that full-time if I wished. Science teachers who are willing to live in small country communities are a rare breed. I also stretch my dollars as far as possible. I was raised on a small farm in the same district in what seemed like another era. I learnt that it’s easier to spend money than to make it, but that you can eat well off your own land free of most costs. What's more, you don't have to earn money, keep books on it, pay tax on it, and then spend what's left over to do it.

There's an old house orchard, which I refurbished and am expanding, and a large vegetable garden. I kill and butcher my own meat and keep my own chickens for eggs as well as meat. I sell the excess fruit, eggs and vegetables by subscription when I can, and otherwise to the local fruit and vegetable shop. I also have a milk cow and goat. I time the cow to go dry in preparation for her next calf just after the goat is due to kid, so I always have milk. More milk than I can use, in fact, but I make cheeses and yoghurt for my own consumption. Health regulations are too much bother to comply with for sale of milk products, but there are plenty of people who benefit when I give it away. Any excess produce at all goes to the poultry and pigs. I keep a few pigs for my own use and local sale, but don’t deal in them in a big way.

I use a lot of grain, but don’t grow any at all. It just isn’t worth my time. Instead I barter some of my produce for what I want from farmers on the same road, closer in to town.

I'm a born-again bachelor; freed by fate just before the move from a wife who had revealed herself a first-class bitch once we were married. Things had been beginning to look awfully like property settlements would be in my future. Not a good feeling – she’d done nothing to help earn what I had, a lot to detract from my efforts, contributed nothing positive to the marriage, and would ruin my plans if she took half or more of my capital. However, she got drunk one afternoon, drinking with the latest of a string of boyfriends, I discovered later. She was rushing to get home, at twice the speed limit and over twice the blood-alcohol limit, and speared off a bridge into a ravine. Instead of a property settlement I got an insurance settlement. You can get lucky sometimes. I’ve been on the farm just over five years, I'm thirty five years old, and I'm still a free agent – a little gun-shy I guess.

I'm very fond of the farm and the house, and very proud of it all. However, it isn't your standard farm or your standard farmhouse. First, it’s not a house: it’s a shed. At least, it’s part of a shed.

I had read a definition of a house as "a machine for living" or "a machine to live in". That formed my opinion of what I wanted. With no one to please except myself, I had an architect rubber-stamp my ideas, and I put up an enormous shed. It was a big long open portal-frame warehouse building, but with less height. A stony ridge – a poor grade of slate – overlooked the old home-site, forming an all-weather gravel driveway up to the public road. I put up my building across that, with the residence in the northern (sunward, for we in the Southern Hemisphere) end of the shed. The ridge dropped away both sides, of course, so I could put in a basement without much extra work, open to the west and north. I lived in the basement while I finished building.

I built a granny flat – bedroom and living room with kitchenette – into the north end of the basement. Adjoining were a toilet and a shower. The rest of the basement, which would become a large gymnasium and billiards room, shared them. Next there were walk-in cool-room and freezer with an access ramp leading up to the main floor of the building. Then there were cellars leading back into the ridge. I'd spent a few months on crutches once, and I'd wrestled more than a few refrigerators up stairs. I decided that while I was building I ought to build for wide doorways and disabled access throughout. Just one fridge without stairs would make it all worthwhile.

Upstairs I built a substantial residence in the north end of the building, set back from the east and west sides to form two-and-a-half-metre-wide verandas. The conservatory was tacked on as a lean-to on the north, over the granny flat, with shaded clerestory windows above it in the gable-end to let sunlight into the house in winter.

The house had a small kitchen, and there was a solar oven and a focused-solar hotplate and grill built into the Northwest corner (sunwards, remember?) of the conservatory. However, next in line south of the main house section there was a large dedicated kitchen and pantry area. It could be opened up for ventilation, and functioned as a summer kitchen, keeping the heat of large summer cooking and preserving jobs out of the main living area. It also handled other large food-related jobs such as brewing beer or fermenting wine. This was also where the ramp from the cellar came up.

Next came garages and workshops, then open-fronted machinery sheds with the first section walled off by weldmesh to form a firewood area. Next came a closed grain-storage area, then another open-fronted area (this one for hay). At last came animal-handling areas. The ridge fell away again here, so there was a shearing shed above with sheltered animal yards underneath and extending into the open. This was also where the milking area, calf and poultry pens and dog runs were.

This arrangement meant that I could walk undercover with light all the way to a pregnant animal which was about to deliver, at 3am, mid-winter, out of the rain and wind and sleet. It also meant the animals were a comfortable distance away – further than many farms have them in separate buildings. Whatever I needed (apart from the pigpens, which smelled too much) was all in one building.

It also had the advantage of giving an enormous catchment area for rainwater. 25 millimetres (one inch) of rain on that roof resulted in fifty thousand litres (roughly US quarts) of runoff. It was all channelled to water tanks. When they filled, the excess went to large underground tanks or cisterns, then to a special rocky clean-water pond. I pumped water to an elevated tank to provide water pressure for the building.

A parallel system took filtered water from the earth dam (pond) for use in the garden, livestock drinking water, swimming pool and flushing toilets.

All in all, the house looked pretty good when I'd finished – if you could bring yourself to accept that at the south it had eighty metres of big shed tacked onto it. The grounds, on the other hand, are definitely a matter of taste. The only things that can grow on that gravel ridge are a few eucalyptus, some scattered clumps of native grasses and wildflowers, and what I make the effort to put there. Not a disadvantage in my view. I’ve killed enough snakes, chipped enough thistles and burrs, and fought enough fires to be grateful I can be selective about what grows around my home.

I surrounded the house by paved or gravel courtyards. I built walls and raised garden beds from the stone and gravel quarried when I build the basement, the cisterns and the swimming pool. There were many plants: edible, medicinal and ornamental. They were in beds or tubs or holes drilled and blasted; they were plants or shrubs or trees or climbers on trellises. However, they were all where I wanted them, and I didn’t have to break my back to tend them. Blessing above all others, the only lawns were a carefully-placed postage-stamp patch beside the swimming pool and another in a courtyard below the conservatory and in front of the granny-flat: cool evergreen ground-cover which never needed mowing.

That’s my home: "Ballindean". I made it what it is. I love it.

 ***************************************************

Interest is easy. Eliminate debt, then you pay no interest. It is actually easier done than said for most farmers these days. Just sell off most of the farm and use the money to pay off debt and set yourself up in a more self-reliant way. Go back more to the way your grandparents did it, and less to the way the bank head-offices off in the big cities want you to act to further their profits at your expense. The hard things are to realise that it needs doing, and to do it.

Chemicals and fertilisers are also somewhat easy. Revert to a more natural method of farming, and do it on a small-enough scale that you can substitute labour and management practices for chemicals. You can’t readily do without them altogether, but it is possible to cut things back to just medications to treat animal diseases and parasites, and mineral fertilisers to replace minerals in products sold off the farm. With small widespread plots you can reduce disease, pest and weed spread, and with frequent preliminary working of the soil you can cut weed growth back to insignificance. If you have an uncontrollable crippling disease or pest problem then you’re doing something wrong: probably trying to grow the wrong thing. Change the crops or animals you use.

Not overstocking, and frequent rotation of stock to new ground, reduces parasite build-up. Small plots make better use of pasture too. Grazing stock can live well on plants that aren’t their favourite candy. If you reduce their options then they’ll graze down less palatable plants that they won’t eat if you give them a choice. Intensive grazing – maybe strip-grazing with an electric fence – is proven to work. However, you can’t do it until you’ve got the property down to a size that is literally manageable, rather than the broad-acres that suit the banks and mean you can’t make effective use of your investment.

To avoid having to apply externally-supplied fertilisers use animal manure and green-manure crops (which are grown purely to be ploughed in to enrich the soil), or legume pastures. Also, proper crop rotation (so that cereals come after pasture which has built up the soil fertility, or gross feeders like maize after a legume crop like beans or peanuts) will do much to help.

External labour costs: well, that’s easy too. Don’t use external labour. Keep the farm small enough so that you (and your family) can manage it on your own. Maybe arrange labour-swapping with neighbours so that you’ll help out with his early oats and he’ll help out with your late wheat. When you do need specialist work (shearing for instance) hire the specialist workers, do what you can yourself, and again swap with the neighbours for more non-specialist labour. External labour costs money, and money costs more money. You’re back on the treadmill again, borrowing money and letting the bankers who make money from your debt tell you to go into more debt or they’ll bankrupt you.

OK, brief pop chemistry tutorial coming up.

Organic chemicals are built on backbones of connected carbon atoms, with skeletons of other elements (mostly hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, sometimes others) hanging off them). Sugars are built on rings of six carbon atoms, connected head-to-tail. Six, so they’re sometimes called hexoses. Glucose is the single-ring sugar.

Nature builds polymers. Sucrose is a dimer – two glucose rings connected by sharing two carbon atoms, like a little section of honeycomb sharing a wall, with the bonds being the wall and the atoms being the corners. Polysaccharides are long chains of glucose rings connected side-by-side, like a long narrow string of honeycomb. Polysaccharides are generally slippery. Examples are the gum in gumbo – okra; or the fluid of semen, most purely seen as pre-cum. Longer polysaccharides get more solid and they are the starches.

There is another class of sugars called pentoses, built on rings of.... wait for it.... that’s right, FIVE carbon atoms. There are polymers of pentoses as well. Almost nothing eats them. The big example of the type is lignin, which is what makes up wood and straw.

Now, when we ferment sugar, the yeast generally splits the six-carbon glucose ring in two. It builds ethanol (two carbon atoms) and emits carbon dioxide (one carbon) as waste, and uses the embodied energy to grow the yeast. Sometimes, and particularly if it’s using a dimer like sucrose (shared ring, so the second ring only has four carbon atoms of its own) it will end up producing methanol (single carbon). Methanol, methylated spirits, wood alcohol – doesn’t get you very drunk, but it does terrible things to the central nervous system. It can easily kill you or blind you. Burns well at low temperatures though, so it’s good in fuel for low-temperature starting.

OK, you can relax now. Pop chemistry tutorial is over. However, I needed it to explain what I’m doing.

 ***************************************************

I woke from my siesta about two hours later, in mid-afternoon. Joanna was still sleeping lightly beside me. After a few minutes with no change in her, I arose and made a cup of tea. I had that with a slice of fruit cake while I thought about what I’d do with the afternoon. There was always work to do on a farm, but I needed a regular day of time out too – of rest or at least of recreation.

It occurs to me that I haven’t told you about the house. It’s the background for everything I do, so it might help you to understand things if you understand the house.

First, it’s not a house: it’s a shed. At least, it’s part of a shed.

When I’d moved back here from the city, I’d bought my farm at an estate auction. The former owner had built the estate over the years out of several properties, including this small separate one. It had been an old post World War 2 soldier-settlement block of 640 acres – a block one mile square. You needed something that big, or nearly that big, to be viable those days in this dry country. They had offered the estate as two lots – all the adjoining properties; and this separate one. They had thought that one of the neighbours would take "Ballindean" for expansion. However, it was a drought at the time, and they’d been unable to bid. I got the farm for a reasonable amount.

No-one had lived on the farm for a long time, and tramps had burnt the old farm-house while camping in it. As there was no one to watch for stock thieves the property was only used for cropping, and the fences, shearing shed and stockyards had fallen into ruin. I’d moved onto the property to get to know it. In theory I lived in the old shearer’s quarters, but in fact I only used them for toilet and shower. I really lived in a travel caravan I parked there.

I was more-or-less starting with a clean slate. I found a neighbour who would share-crop the place that year, and ripped out the broken-down internal fencing for him. I then rebuilt the boundary fences to an adequate standard to hold not only sheep, but cattle or goats or even horses (different – you can’t use barbed wire for horses). Well, in fact I didn’t do much of the rebuilding. The neighbours had to share the cost of adequate fences. What I did was to supply the materials, and they supplied the labour while I worked alongside them and learnt from them. I did over-engineer to the extent of putting in substantial strainer posts every 100 metres (110 yards) plus whatever was dictated by the neighbour’s adjoining internal fences. That meant I’d be able to run internal fences off them any time I wanted, at any 100-metre spacing I chose.

I decided that the original owners had known what they were doing with house placement. Most of the property was visible from where their house had been. It was convenient to the road but not too close, and floods couldn’t isolate it. That was good: it meant I’d get proper use of their old orchard once I’d pruned everything and tidied it up. It also meant I’d be able to use the dam (pond) they had for garden water.

However, my priorities were different to theirs. I had read a definition of a house as "a machine for living" or "a machine to live in". That formed my opinion of what I wanted. I had seen plans of other houses, other places, which fitted that definition. They were built to make life easier. An example was some middle European farms. The house formed one side of a square farmyard, with the barn across the yard, farm buildings forming another side of the square, and dormitories for the farm workers the other side. Everything was accessible under cover, and there was still separation of the house from the animals.

I wanted a house that did that for me, but which fitted our hot dry climate. Ultimately what I came up with (with the help of an architect) was built into a portal-frame shed, sixteen metres wide, x??? metres long, and six metres high. Remember that I live in the Southern Hemisphere, so for me the sun tracks across the northern sky. To make sense of it for most of you in the Northern Hemisphere, just swap north and south.

I’d never seen the joy in mowing grass I wouldn’t use as lawn, or in growing cover for snakes and fuel for fires up to the house. A stony ridge – a poor grade of slate - overlooked the old homesite, so I decided to erect my building across that, with the residence in the northern (sunward) end of the shed. The ridge dropped away there, so I could put in a basement without too much extra work. I did that, having the stone quarried out. Some was cut as blocks or broken into slabs, more crumbled to gravel. We used the gravel as aggregate in the concrete for the building; and I formed a large basement, open on the north end, the west side, and just a little on the north-east corner. I built a granny-flat into the northern end, with the bedroom in the eastern corner, getting sun in the morning. Adjoining that was a combined living room and kitchenette, with full western light in the afternoon. This was set back from the edge of the floor above, so it was sheltered from the high summer sun, but the low winter sun could penetrate to light and warm. Adjoining the flat were a toilet and a shower which were shared by the basement. That would become a large gymnasium and billiards room. Next there were a walk-in cool-room and freezer with a ramp for access leading up to the main floor of the building. Then there were cellars leading back into the ridge, some with concealed access.

I had the floor for the space above the basement poured, using gravel from the excavation as aggregate. Then I fitted out the basement area and moved in.

Next was the erection of the shed.

In case you don’t know about them, portal frames are a type of building frame. Each element is hollow, of large rectangular cross-section and one piece. Possibly two-piece joined by a truss in the centre. They rise as a post, bend at an angle up to the ridge-line of the roof, and are then mirrored on the other side. One of them looks like a large portal or doorway. Think Stonehenge, one-piece with a peaked roof. A row of them, roofed and possibly walled, make the building. They are quick to erect and form remarkably strong buildings with large open internal areas. There are no internal posts or walls as part of the structure. They are used a lot for farm buildings, factories and warehouses.

I had workmen to erect the shed, so I simply ignored the house section, other than the roof. I’d fit that out later. Adjoining the house came a large garage and workshop area. Since the ridge fell away to the west, all doors were on the east side. In fact, the gravel ridge formed an all-weather road up to the public road.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Life is full of compromises. I had originally selected two centre-fire rifle cartridges – the .308 (7.62x52mm NATO) and the .243 (6mm) which is formed by necking-down the .308 cartridge case to take a .243 inch bullet. The .308 was heavy enough to kill anything in Australia, although only just in the case of big water buffalo or wild bulls. The .243 could be loaded down to overlap the performance of the high-velocity .22 centrefire cartridges, or up to kill anything except big sambar deer and the big bovines, horses and camels.

However, Joanna had wrecked this happy little scenario. She had tried shooting with me (at targets initially, then at foxes after they’d got at her poultry). She preferred something lighter when she had the option. All right – we’d dropped back to a newer, smaller military cartridge – the .223 or 5.56mm. Joanna could handle that, and she could also handle the .308 when she needed to.

I retained the .243 for the occasions when I might be shooting anything from feral pigs to goats to foxes to even head-shots on rabbits. However, my new preferred choice of firearms became threefold. The .223, a 7mm/08 (a 7mm bullet in a necked-down .308 cartridge), and a 9mm/08 (a big fat .355-inch or 9mm bullet in a necked-up .308 cartridge). The 9mm/08 was by no means the fastest most-powerful cartridge in the world. However, it threw a big lump of lead at a respectable speed, and it had minimal recoil compared to many other large calibre rounds. There were no land animals in the world for which it was not adequate with the possible exceptions of rhinos, elephants and Cape buffaloes - and they weren't on my list. Conversely, since I loaded my own cartridges, I could have fun with the 9mm/08. It was the same calibre as 9mm/.357 Magnum/.38 Special pistols. I could load it with those short light pistol bullets with a low charge of propellant and use the rifle for rabbits or plinking. It amused me that the same rifle that could drop a grizzly bear in its tracks could also be used to shoot a rabbit and leave enough for dinner. In fact, I even played with hand-cast bullets and home-made black powder, and proved I could take rabbits and goats and pigs out to 100 metres with those loads.

I was limiting myself with those choices - deliberately. There were better cartridges available, taken individually. However, these all had the advantages for me that they were relatively mild low-recoil short cartridges. They were comfortable to shoot, they wouldn't burn out barrels in a hurry, and they would all fit in short-action rifles. Every rifle I had was the same brand, every centrefire rifle was the same model with the same length barrel, and they all had the same sights. They all felt the same, they acted the same until they went "bang" (or perhaps "BANG", but none of them went "KABOOM"). Every bit of practice I did with any one of them applied to all of them.

All material is copyright of the author, © 2004-2005 Aidan McGill, and may not be reproduced in any form without prior written permission. Individuals are hereby granted permission to use one copy for private reading, not-for-distribution and not-for-profit.

Pastorale_Basics-and-out-takes