Writing this made me cry. I thought I'd cross post it. It's important.
From the board - a thread on where we grew up:
My parents moved to Castlemaine when I was probably around a year or two old. Castlemaine is a town of about 6000 people in the middle of the Victorian country, which was founded when gold was discovered in the area. This meant lots of trips to mining sites and projects on the gold rush when we were growing up. I remember hearing a story about how the building of one of the local pubs was financed because they found an enormous nugget of gold while they were digging out the cellar.
The house in Castlemaine proper was right next to one of the local primary schools. I remember wearing a t-shirt with a Vegemite logo on it for my very first day of school. We lived in that house until Mum and Dad bought a block of land on a hill in Chewton (a bush community about a fifteen minutes drive from the town center) named as such because of the early Chinese influence in the area. Apparently the site was dubbed 'Chow-Town' when the area was being mined, and you can still go out and visit the crumbling stone supports that held the water-wheel, an enormous battery that they used for crushing quartz. Dad designed the mud-brick house and built it, and it remains the strongest example of 'home' that I've ever experienced. Dale, my brother, and I helped on the site - we would mix the mud for the bricks by squelching about in dirt-and-water pits until the consistency was right, and we hammered and sawed whatever was needed.
The house had solar power (with a back-up generator) and rain-water tanks, with a gas fridge and stove, powered by enormous tanks we'd refill when needed. During our first winter in that house the local wildlife hadn't adjusted to us being there, so we'd routinely find tiny black scorpions on the floor, or several varieties of fairly deadly spiders. We never got bitten or stung by anything serious, but we did learn to tap our boots before we put them on. We saw a good number of snakes (including a King Brown once - deadly!) and we had a family of kangaroos in the paddock that our tiny little dog Rebel used to chase indignantly.
Dale and I spent most of the time out climbing the enormous hundred-years-old gum tree which was in our 'front yard' (although we didn't really have proper fences around the property). I fell out of that tree about a hundred times, but never from the secret spot three storeys up that only I could reach. We rode our bikes up and down the dirt road with the kids who lived next door (a five minute walk through an abandoned block). Once we rescued an echidna that was stuck trying to dig under a wire-fence. We'd catch yabbies in the dams deep in the pine forests surrounding the property, and go on fishing trips and build cubbies out of branches and old sheets. When it was hot we'd pile down to the local swimming pool and muck around for hours, baking on the concrete and eating cheap lollies with the tang of chlorine on our skin. When Mum and Dad went for a drink at the local pub, we'd go and play in an enormous mulberry tree that had half-blown over but kept growing. We'd stuff ourselves with the biggest mulberries I've ever seen, and get the juice off our fingers by crushing up green berries, a trick I learned from a friend of ours.
The most beautiful thing about that house was the sunsets - we lived on a hill and could look down over the valley. The horizon was clear, and when the sun set, the golden orange light would flare up and turn the world into a flame-filled extravagance. The huge gum was magnificent, towering, the light snagged on the splayed leaves in an almost orchestral splendor, and we'd walk barefoot on the soft dirt and watch, and slowly the light would fade and the mosquitos would emerge and the stars would sprawl overhead, and Dad would sit quietly while his music echoed off the high church ceilings in our lounge-room.
Eventually, my parents separated and my Dad died, and we sold the house. My brother and I have pledged to buy it back one day if we can.
