Story for performance #585
webcast from Sydney at 08:05PM, 26 Jan 07

Life on a farm can be difficult when the farm is not a farm. Abandoned by lord knows who, the farm of more than eighty acres on Millers Road rolls on past the creek with no name into a line of eucalyptus on the second ridge.

The farm has been abandoned and squatted on by a long line of people with no money. Now, we are those squatters—Paul, Lalia, a few others whose names I never knew, and me.

Paul’s philosophy of life is mixed, and really, it depends on the weather. Really it does! I call him The Black Cloud because he is always depressed and always lowering. I like that word, lowering. That is Paul, lowering. I think he smokes too much dope. Not like me, I don’t like the weed. And it is just a weed. Anyway, it makes you depressed and spongey-brained. It makes you think stupid things.

Paul dresses up in a costume he made himself from leather. He did all the tooling of the design too, on the leather. It looks authentic. Anyway, he dresses up as a Roman centurion, and he has arrows and everything. He goes up the back paddocks and shoots the arrows. At nothing. When the arrows are all gone, he wanders everywhere gathering them up again, and off he goes, marching, shooting, marching. I know because I watch him through the telescope in the back room. He’s very entertaining.

Lalia is an activist which I think means she goes to protests a lot, and gets arrested a lot. We don’t have a phone here but if we did, Lalia says she could call us to get her out of the watch-house. She is Swedish, and her armpits are incredibly hairy. It is one of those things you can’t help staring at—all that hair. One night, I don’t know who was in the house but I heard a scream.

Oh, I forgot to tell you that the house has been condemned. It is full of holes and white-ants. No wonder the farmers left it. They probably didn’t have a lot of money because there is nothing to farm except a big paddock of custard apples. When we don’t have enough food, we always eat custard apples.

Anyway, back to the scream. I came racing into Lalia’s room and she had fallen through a hole, a new hole, and was stuck halfway through it. I had to run downstairs (it’s a big old Queenslander, well, it was. Now it’s a dump), I had to run down under the house and push her wiggling legs back up into the room. She had a lot of scratches but I couldn’t help laughing.

The other people there I am not going to mention because not many have stayed here as long as us lot. To me, the animals are more important—Red the Rooster who goes to sleep when you hang him upside down. And there is Kong the Kat who is the biggest cat you will ever see! He eats rats under the beds. Crunch, crunch, at night, crunch so I can’t sleep.

We have goats, Sylvia the mum and Rosie the baby. Once, Sylvia ran through the strands of barbed wire fence and cut open her udder. We have a friend who is a vet so we rode off on bicycles to get him, and he came and sewed up her udder. She brayed and bayed, poor Sylvia, and the grass was covered in milky blood. We have lots of cows too which have to be milked twice a day and most people forget. I don’t. It is basically me and Paul who do it.

And there are Heckle and Jeckle who give me the creeps. They are cane toads and enormous! Paul ties them by one leg each to the kerosene fridge (we don’t have electricity). During the day, he puts them in the compost bin and at night he lets them out so that they can eat cockroaches. They do but I hate going to the kitchen in the dark. Plop, plop.

We don’t have electricity but we have solar hot water! Only trouble is that we couldn’t get the monster onto the roof so we left it in the side paddock. It works, but we have to lug buckets upstairs to the bath.

Paul loves his chainsaw. ‘I’m gonna cut off that branch, it’s dead’, stuff like that he says. Any excuse to get it out! I like the smell of the oil and petrol mixed with fresh sawdust but I hate the vibration of the thing in my hands. Paul is so mad about it that once he climbed a gum tree. He had been looking at that dead branch for months, eyeing it this way and that. I knew what he was up to.

So one day, he threw ropes around his body in a messy way and climbed up to the branch. From the small window of the kitchen, I watched him far away at the dam, balancing and revving up the saw. I remember breathing in deeply because I realized that he was standing on the branch he was cutting. I dropped what I was washing and ran out the back to yell but in those seconds, he fell and the branch fell away and by the time I reached him, he was hanging upside down by one leg in a tangle of rope, the saw still running.

The wall between the kitchen and what I think is the dining room is covered from top to bottom with anarchist posters. All Paul’s work. He says he is going to chain-saw that wall off and take it with him when we get chucked out. If the house doesn’t fall down first I guess.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Miriam Taylor Gomez.