We lived in Nerredin, about three hundred and fifty k inland of Valiant. Good-size town, nearly a thousand people when I first got there. Used to be sheep and wheat country. We had an olive grove. A hundred and twenty trees, small-scale production, mostly selling into Sumud. It wasn’t a normal crop for the region but they were established trees and they stood up against the drought and the salt. Olive trees have got a really extensive root system so they can tap into deep groundwater. They can tolerate the cold and if it gets too hot they sort of shut down their system in the hottest part of the day. They’re really tough trees. They do need some water to fruit but we had an allowance, and we had these plastic skirts around the trunks that trapped condensation and fed it down to the root line, so they got enough. They’ll even grow back after a fire. Most of the time it’s wildstock, though, it’ll bush out but it won’t bear fruit.
She paused. Couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked that much in one go. She was out of breath but there was more she wanted to say. The audience sat quietly. Camila was watching her, a few people were looking down or away into the distance. Trish had her eyes shut and she was nodding. Angie waited.
Nerredin was a big producer for West. Even bigger once the cereal-cropping country further north got lost to rising salt and the west coast got too unreliable. It wasn’t easy growing country though. We had fourteen years of drought, so we relied on the pipe – the Liu-McKenzie pipeline up from the south coast. Salinity got worse and worse but we kept adapting. People grew all kinds of things under glass, mostly whatever there was demand for in Valiant or the XB. Millet was a good one, there were a few millet producers.
Angie swayed slightly in her seat. The man in the third row coughed again, tried to smother it.
People grew sorghum, too, and a lot of warrine, and some of the modified wheat strains. The sheep container didn’t work out, but there was a big yabbie farm in the old Bickley dam that did really well once they got the salt levels right. And then Homegrown claimed two hundred acres of abandoned farmland just north of Nerredin for a saltwater greenhouse. The howlers on the west coast were getting worse so they were looking inland and we had the population and the infrastructure and a lot of local experience. We were right on the highway too. They were going to try tomatoes first, see how it went. That would have been close to a hundred jobs once it got up and running.
A couple of people nodded. There was consistent demand for tomatoes inside the XB, everyone knew that because of the trucks.
Li said, They started building a pipeline from their desal plant on the coast, so there was construction work for a while, security work. They were going to build the solar tower next. But there were too many attacks on the pipeline and it got too expensive for them to guard it, so they pulled out.
The man with the cough put his hand up. People weren’t supposed to just interrupt. Li looked at him, uncertain.
Did you ever have a howler come through there?
They were well outside the howler zone here and from the way people shuffled and leaned in, Li guessed that most of them had never seen one.
Yeah, she said. We had two in the last two years. Both mid-category.
What was that like?
She cleared her throat, trying to corral her brain in this new direction. Well. Howlers have got a smell to them. You can get a smell of grass before they hit, even when there’s no grass, or a sulphur smell, like lighting a match. We weren’t ready for the first one. We lost some people. And a lot of people left after that. We lost infrastructure too, had to rebuild with prefabs, but the older buildings stood up okay, mostly just broken windows and roof tiles. It hit the farms north of town pretty hard but people further south were okay. We lost the harvest but we kept most of the trees.
A woman said, I thought howlers wiped out everything. She sounded let-down.
Yeah, but we only got the edge of it. And it was mid-category, like I said.
Li could see the grove, suddenly, from the top of the rise. Not a blackened ruin, but grey and green and flecked with purple, flickering silver. Frank’s inheritance. She said, After that, we got re-zoned and we applied for Weather Alert and by the time the second one came, we’d had the two bunkers built for the district. We didn’t lose anyone else. The howlers weren’t what finished us. She looked down at Angie and remembered. Anyway, I’m not talking about Weather. I’m talking about Nerredin.
She understood suddenly what she was trying to offer. Not an apology. A gift.
Someone in the front row said, Well, get on with it.
Angie leaned forward and Li saw their town suspended in the air between them, fragile and provisional. Bob and Shamila’s hardware store. The red dog that slept in the entrance to the takeway. Faysal’s newsagent. The farm supply store and the general store, the op shop and the bakery. The pub with the sandwich board on the verandah advertising Ivan’s lunch special and the winners of the raffle. She could see taxis waiting on the corner and a driver leaning on
