Now that things have settle down a little. We have lodged our pottery rebuilding plans and DA application with the Council. It’s just a matter of time now, as we sit and wait.
What could possibly go wrong?
While we wait, I have set about doing a bit of repair work on a few of my burnt out tools. There are so many burnt and buggered tools and pieces of machinery, left ruined by the fire that I will have repair work for many years to come – if I ever get around to fixing them.
I decide to ease into it gently by re-shafting a few of my tools that I now realise that I need to get the project moving. Some hammers, mallets, block buster, sledge and sketch hammer, tomahawk, axe etc.
I found a few old bits of timber in the barn when we were repairing it last week, even a few hardwood tool handles, and a hickory axe handle dating back to the 70’s or 80’s? I set to work re-purposing the split and shattered, used block-buster shafts, cutting the them in half and making shorter handles for other tools out of them.
I get a lot done in a couple of hours of entertaining handiwork. I feel great afterwards. I feel like I have achieved something. Not exactly the feeling I had after spending 9 hours preparing the many, many pages of building application forms for the council building app. But that was last week, and this is now. Something positive, no matter how small, is gratefully accepted and engaged with.
Getting shafted was never so much fun.
These tools were all burnt, rusted and flakey yesterday, just like the axe heads in the image above. They too will come good with a little TLC.
I have a lot of other tools that are on my ‘to-do’ list, all lined up outside on the stone wall.
These few items are the next lot of heads that are on my work bench.
They all look a lot better after and bit of wire brushing. My big problem with the adzes is that I can’t buy an adze handle anymore from the hardware shop. I might have to carve them myself, but I’d rather just buy them, as i have quite enough to do already.
Dawn breaks clear and rosey pink, a few scuds drift over and the days graft begins cold and clear. We sweat and toil till dusk and the day rewards us with a fiery sunset reminding us of our overworked muscles.
Such is our current ‘new’ life. One remarkable thing that happened today was that we saw a plane fly over.
It was a bit of a surprise, as we used to see and hear them many times a day in our previous life. There were so many that we didn’t bother to look. In fact we didn’t really notice them at all. They were omnipresent. Now they are a novelty.
6 months ago we had them thundering slowly overhead at low altitude, flaps down and roaring, just above a stall speed to deliver their pink fire retardant all around us. But that was then and this is now, so this solitary plane was a notable surprise.
A lovely event this week was the appearance of a clutch of baby wood ducks grazing in the Chekov orchard. For decades, we had wood ducks breeding here in the cherry orchard and on the dams. At that time we had a big eucalyptus tree with a hollow branch hanging over one of the the dams. A perfect breeding site that was used every season by many generations of wood ducks. Tragically, that tree blew over in a huge storm 10 years ago. Since then, the wood ducks haven’t bred here. They are apparently quite choosy about where they nest. Since the catastrophic fire. All the old trees with dead, hollow branches considered suitable by wood ducks as a nesting site have been burnt. Their choices are very limited now. The fire removed all the forest around here. There is no under growth or shrubby nesting sites for small birds, and no hollow branches considered suitable by wood ducks to breed in. So they are not so choosy any more. This pair seem to have lowered their expectations and managed to raise this batch of babies somewhere closer to the ground.
They usually hatch about a dozen little ones, but they loose almost one baby duck per day to predators in the early days. These ducklings seem to be about 3 weeks old and are now too big to be taken by curawongs, but hawks, powerful owls or a fox could still take them. So they are still very cautious.
At the moment, we have seven survivors grazing each morning. They are particularly shy of people, even after over 40 generations of breeding here on this little farm holding. You’d think that they would have got used to us by now, as we always keep our distance and never chase them. Once their kids have fledged and gone their own way, the parents will be a lot more tolerant of us walking around in their orchards, amongst their cherry trees and on their dam banks, or walking on their grass.
It’s nice to see them back. I can only suppose that, because of the total loss of grass and suitable sites due to the fire, our grassy orchards and partially full dams are now the best option for them to breed in again. We keep out of their way and give them plenty of space to graze peacefully, as we want them to return permanently. These pictures were taken through our bedroom window, as we can’t get close enough to them to photograph them outside.
When I get a bit of time and energy, I should look into what kind of nesting box wood ducks prefer, then get a couple set up in trees somewhere near the dams. Then hope they like it.
Life goes on. But in the mean time, I have a pottery to build and a new orchard to plant, and so we graft from dawn till dusk.
It is half a year now since the fire on the 21st December, right on the solstice. We have been in clean-up mode ever since. All the black from around the house is now cleaned up and dead with. Be that cutting up into suitable lengths for fire wood for later, or piling up and burning in bonfires. We have almost finished the burn piles. We started with 16 big tip truck loads of stumps, twisted branches and blackened gnarly undergrowth, all too difficult to deal with in my damaged and exhausted PSD state.
The house is now clear and no longer dangerous to walk around, as we were always wary of falling dead and burnt branches. We haven’t even thought about dealing with the burnt bush further from the house. It will have to wait. I have a couple of years work ahead of me just around the house here. We just won’t go there without a hard hat.
So now it is the solstice again. The winter solstice this time and we have passed from high summer through into deepest winter. Something to look forward to is that the days will now start to get longer, although the coldest days (and nights) are yet to come. A full six months has passed, half a year, I have been working hard every day, but not much seems to have been achieved. We still don’t have a pottery. I guessed, with no real evidence or insight, only the past two bush fire events that burned our previous potteries down, that it would take at least a year to rebuild. That was based solely on past experience. but I was a lot younger then and had so much more energy. Now i’m so much older, I can’t keep up the pace I want to achieve. I’m smart enough to know when to knock off. No more working with torches or under lights. At least not very often!
These last few weeks we have insulated the new car port walls with earth wool insulation and then lined the walls with fibre cement sheeting (fibro). I installed it back to front with the textured side out and left it untouched with it’s slightly pink mottled face as the finished surface. It looks OK. I have been trying to make this brand spanking shiney new industrial shed look somehow slightly softened and more comfortable in these rustic surroundings. I think that it’s working. I’m trying to do it without spending very much money either. That’s a challenge.
The wall cavity has been stuffed with 100mm of recycled beer bottles as brown fibreglass.
Since lining the carport I have been working with my friend Colin the environmental builder. We have dismantled the burnt-out north western corner of the barn and rebuilt it with my new square peg post and another recycled one that Col had in his yard.
We removed the roof and walls and replace all the timbers with new ones that we milled from one of the old stringy bark eucalypt trees when we hired the portable saw mill a few months back. It’s a very rewarding feeling to be able to rebuild this old barn using timber grown here on-site and personally milled and adzed into shape. I really like the concept of embedding something of the old native plant garden into the new shed. it’s all good quality hard wood, so theoretically it should last a hundred years. as long as we can keep the next fires at bay.
We removed the two burnt out posts, then placed the new adzed post in position. I lifted it with the little crane that I have on my truck and raised it up to about 45 degrees, then pulled the post up into place using my chain block.
I will reinstate the 4 water sprinklers on the western walls once the building is finished next week. I only need to install the guttering and replace the polycarbonate. Then I’m done. This old barn now has it’s own 2 new water tanks and will have it’s own high pressure fire pump to run the sprinklers. I decided to reuse all the old burnt corrugated galvanised iron wall sheets. They look suitably rustic and appropriate. The new gal roof sheets look a bit too shiney just now, but as they are old fashioned galvanised zinc coated, they will age to a dull grey, non-reflective surface, just like the old sheets that are next to them.
The half dozen burnt roofing sheets will be re-used on the new pottery workshop walls where it won’t matter if they have a little damage, as they won’t need to be totally waterproof.
On Friday, we got our DA approval for our plans for the new pottery building from the Council – with 9 pages of conditions attached! It seems like a lot of fiddle and extra work, but I’m pleased that we have approval to get going with the new building. This is a big step in the right direction. And after only 6 months! I had a few discussions with the inspector who kept asking for more detail. I eventually had to redraw the plans and colour them in, with a colour code ‘key’, to show all the different materials that I intended to use.
Everyone that I have had to deal with at the council has been incredibly helpful and supportive. We are so lucky!
The trees are just starting to make new shoots since the rain, but half of the rees are dead and will need to be taken down for safety – sometime in the future.
Over the last month I’ve been slowly working away at squaring up a big stringy back log that was burnt in the catastrophic fire that swept through here in December.
Our barn was badly burnt in that fire and we lost one corner, completely burnt out. As I stayed to defend our property from the flames. I was able to put out the flames after the fire swept through and I managed to save the barn. God knows how! The immense energy of the flames from the fire burnt everything in its path, but the roof and wall sprinklers on the barn were just enough to keep the building from bursting into flames, However embers lodged in the corner of the tin walls and set fire to the massive 300 x 300 mm. hard wood bridge timbers that I used as uprights.
It’s more or less impossible to set fire to a 300mm. square old hardwood timber post in any usual circumstance. However, if you have a once in a lifetime catastrophic fire fanned by 70 to 80 km/hr winds from the dry north, at 50 to 60oC , then anything is possible. The main fire front swept through burning almost everything in it’s path, I had taken refuse in my kiln for safety and didn’t dare emerge until after the main fire front had passed by. The yard and all the garden was ablaze. Every tree was on fire, thick smoke was everywhere. I come out of my kiln-like bunker. It took me some minutes standing under the house’s roof and wall sprinklers spray to cool off sufficiently to get my thoughts back in order. I realised that both the railway station and barn were both on fire fanned by the roaring wind.
I hosed out the station fire for the first time and ran to the barn carrying buckets of water, as the pump delivering water to the wall sprinklers on the barn had stopped working. There was no other pump or hose system over there on the opposite side of the property to use, so my immediate thought was to run there carrying buckets of tank water from the station tank. Each time I returned to the station, it was back on fire, as the insane wind had fanned the remaining embedded embers back into flames. I would put it out, then return to bucketing water to the barn. This cycle went on for an hour or two, until the station was well and truely out and although the barn was still smouldering, I had stopped the fire from spreading to the whole building. I eventually got it out, but the big corner posts, were almost completely reduced to charcoal.
So one of my on-going jobs over the past couple of months has been to set aside a large stringy bark tree trunk. I cut it to length and start to square it up to make a replacement square post for the corner of the barn. I got one face done, then I fell into the electrical cable trench and sprained my leg. That was the end of my timber milling efforts for a month or so,
I’m mostly well again now and this week I have come back to the job of squaring off the massive hardwood post. Extracting the square post from the curved, round log. I can only manage just one face each day, as It’s hard on my ageing back and shoulders.
Today I finished the last face. It’s pretty ugly, not exactly square, or smooth, but I don’t have the luxury of unlimited time to get it perfect. I have left most of the chainsaw depth cuts in the surface, as this indicates how it was made and is an honest surface for such a huge square post extracted from a curved round log.
While I was working today, adzing the final surface mostly flat. I was drawn to think of the timber cutters that worked these ridges and gullies 150 yers ago. I’m not a pimple on the arse of one of these hardy pioneers. They really knew how to work hard. My wimpy efforts are an embarrassment compared to the excellent quality of the sleepers that were snagged out of the Bargo gully behind us here in the 1850’s. All of their beautiful handiwork is gone. The last of the hand-cut sleepers have been replaced with steel sleepers now. The white ants and time took their toll. But what an achievement, these 50 kms of hand-hewn sleeper-laid train tracks that were felled, cut, adzed and broad axed into perfectly square clean shapes are just a memory. The snigging tracks that wound down into the gullies are all over grown and lost to memory now. But I remember them, Janine and I walked them in the 70’s when some of them were still visible, simply because some of the older locals still used them to get down into the creek.
My efforts don’t compare in any way, but hewing this square post into existence with just a small salute to the past has been a rewarding effort. The new corner post will hopefully tell someone in another generations time of the way in which it was made.
I have booked my friend, the local carpenter and environmentalist, Col McNeill to help me with the rebuilding. It will be a big effort for us to man-handle this massively heavy post into place, but that is next weeks job.
Our Hyundai Ioniq plug-in hybrid electric car has surprised us and out performed our expectations once again.
Last month, we achieved 593 kilometres to the litre fuel economy. But now, because of the lock down and the fact that we haven’t driven any long trips, where we would usually drive out on the battery and return on the petrol engine, we have found that we achieved 655 km per litre in May. Quite unexpected, but very pleasing.
This exceptional fuel economy is of course due to the fact that we have only made short trips to the shops for the last coupe of months. We have been limited to the 150 km. district from Campbelltown to Moss Vale for our basic needs.
The other good news is that we got the solar panels back on our roof last month, so we are now recharging the car directly from the PV panels on the roof during the day and from the battery at night. These days, we only connect into the grid to sell our excess. We have micro inverters on each solar panel, so we generate 240 volts directly into the house/workshop micro grid, we use the power from the PV panels directly into whatever appliance is being used at the time. If we are not consuming enough, the excess is then directed automatically to the battery to top it up if necessary, and only then is any excess directed to the grid for sale.
Shortly after re-installing the new solar panels on the new carport/workshop roof, we got the electrician to wire in the new fast charger for the car. This doubles the speed that we can recharge the car, as we were previously forced to use the standard 10 amp, 3 pin, outside power point to charge the car for the past 5 months. Things are starting to happen now.
Next, we took delivery of two new water tanks to go on the new shed. These are 10,000 litre tanks, bringing the storage capacity for theses two sheds up to 32,000 litres. Enough capacity to supply a high pressure fire fighting pump for about 4 hours at full volume. I have to install wall and roof sprinklers on these two sheds sometime in the not too distant future, so that we will be prepared for the next catastrophic fire event.
Lastly, we finally finished the north end of the new gabion stone filled wall. I needed to increase the height of the wall where it terminated at the battery shed and the power pole where the Tesla ‘gateway’ and the electrical meter box are located. The gateway and meter box were destroyed in the recent fire, with all the plastic components melted and electronics ‘cooked’.
This new wall height extension should help to elevate this in the future?
We started on the south end, but haven’t achieved much so far. All the poles cemented into the ground and half of the wire frame completed. It’s keeping us busy.
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 
You must be logged in to post a comment.