WEATHER STATIONS

THE TERN
Tony Birch, Melbourne
For more than a year now my elderly neighbour, Jack, has been sorting through his life
and getting rid of some of his stuff. While we’re not family, and have known each other
for just a couple of years, a lot of what he has no more use for has come my way.
He began with hardback copies of The Encyclopaedia of Australian Tractors and Tractors
and Modern Agriculture. He offered them to me one sunny morning as we were talking
across the scraggy hedge of lavender that passes for the fence separating us.
Jack knows his tractors and loves talking about them. Had he been a contestant
on the old Mastermind television quiz, tractors would surely have been his ‘specialist
subject’.
Jack spent his working life selling tractors across Victoria in partnership with his
twin brother, Ronnie. They set up the business together and a couple of years later
married girls from their hometown — in the same church and on the same day.
They’d also planned to retire to a pair of neighbouring beach blocks on the west
coast. But just a few months before they were to quit the business the ute Ronnie was
driving was washed from a bridge during a flood while he was trying to cross a swollen
river out the back of Colac. While the battered wreck eventually turned up a few miles
downstream from the scene of the accident, Ronnie’s body was never found.
Even though he missed Ronnie greatly, Jack went ahead with his retirement plan just
the same, while Ronnie’s widow sold their block to ‘some city type’, as Jack dismissively
referred to him. Although the ‘city type’ built a house next door to Jack, he rarely visited
it over the following years before putting it on the market.
I bought the house with the dream of fixing it up in between writing the great novel.
But I’ve done little work on the house since moving in, and have scratched out no more
than a few paragraphs.
In addition to his books on tractors Jack has also been handing his old tools across
the hedge to me. To be honest they’re of as much use to me as the books on tractors.
It is not that I don’t appreciate Jack’s generosity, but I couldn’t bang a nail straight to
save myself.
48 WEATHER STATIONS: WRITING CLIMATE CHANGE