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Later that day I drove through the front gate of the place that was to become the retreat. It was located just a few streets away from Tricia's place, in Ridgehaven Circuit in Leanyer. I got the dogs settled inside in front of the aircons. I gradually unloaded the 4WD, trailer and roofrack in the thick humidity of tropical thunderstorms on my own. Many of the boxes containing products for the retreat shop already had the bottoms out of them. So I used cheap plastic buckets to slowly haul them up the fifteen or so stairs onto the front verandah. After feeding the dogs from the portable car fridge, I collapsed onto the floor of the house beside them and fell into a deep exhausted sleep. It would take a while to get used to Darwin's sticky heat again.
In regard to setting up the retreat, there was to be some challenging weeks ahead. The place needed a lot of fixing up and there would be a fine line between getting an inexpensive retreat up and running and keeping up with the mortgage payments and many other expenses. I wanted to be able to pay all the bills on time, as well as provide somewhere very beautiful an inexpensive for creative artists and writers to stay in Darwin. One day, with the right support from various funding bodies, I anticipated a free retreat for artists and writers.
The elevated tropical house in Ridgehaven Circuit was dark and shady. It was surrounded by dozens of palms and thick tangled undergrowth that blocked out all the heat and all the daylight along with it. At first the atmosphere inside the house was heavy, stale and quiet. When I'd stayed there a couple of years before, I'd noticed that the door to the second bedroom had been broken, as if someone had locked themselves in, while it was smashed in from the outside. I also remembered a creepy feeling that seemed to form itself into a black mist that moved from the hallway into the main bedroom. I thought that perhaps there had been some problems here from the previous owners and that I was picking up one of my impressions of the place.
Outside and downstairs the garden was a tangled and overgrown mess of jagged grey rocks, spiders, discarded beer cans, bones and tree stumps. The owner's labrador 'Sandy' was buried near the pool. The place needed a make-over. I designed the layout with stones and paths, leaving the trees and shrubs where they were. I cleared a lot of the undergrowth, leaving selected plants and rocks around the pond. It was a very shady house and so the idea was to lighten it up, without cutting down any trees, but rather by clearing the tangle and planting more.
The frogs, skinks, bearded dragons, butterflies, geckos and birds remained. I spent a lot of time carting rocks around in a cheap red wheelbarrow, and in plastic gloves pulling out broken glass, beer bottles and the bones of dead animals from the garden. I was drenched in sweat with twigs and tropical leaf litter and dirt stuck to my arms, face and clothing. The trailer that had come from Sydney was used to cart thousands of fronds and cleared undergrowth to the tip nearby. All this was done on my own. I had never been very strong physically, but having gotten this far, I was determined to make this whole thing succeed.
After all the indoor cleaning, looking after the dogs, phonecalls and book keeping had been done for the day, and when most people went out or slept, I got to work downstairs in the garden. I was shovelling and carting around wheelbarrow loads full of multi-coloured rocks at two a.m. in the morning. I had a couple of camping lanterns or a full moon to light the way. In order to achieve the dream, I had to work around the clock before the scheduled arrival of the first residents. I was working up to seventy hours a week, since severe financial constraints meant that I was on a limited budget with even more limited time.
I planted dozens of different kinds of plants, which was very hard since the ground was full of palm roots. I cleared the pond by hand and filled it with aquatic plants. I then laid all the river rocks and stones myself using plastic buckets, shovel, spade and wheelbarrow. The paths, pool area and driveway needed sweeping every day and the fronds needed picking up and placing in the trailer. There were a lot of frogs and different types of lizards living in the yard, including the common green tree frog. Binda and Kindi, who were both fourteen years old, watched from the verandah, too hot to come down the stairs. |
