"Thieves about," the blackboard warns.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
"Late at night," it says. "Lock up."
More worrying news from the roadside. I'm getting used to it.
Driving the highway these days is to be harangued.
Like the omniscient freeway version in Steve Martin's L.A. Story, I feel our digital signs are talking directly to me, but instead of relaying cryptic messages such as SING DOO WAH DIDDY or, the far more helpful, KISS HER, YOU FOOL, I'm being told to STAY AT HOME and CANCEL NON ESSENTIAL TRAVEL.
Now, the blackboard at the edge of our village has caught the gloomy virus.
Normally, it's a platform for the benign details of life. We're told when babies are born, when burghers are dead; when meetings are on at the hall, when meals are on at the pub.
Very rarely, a nocturnal activist might use the communal chalk for political purposes but their protest will be erased faster than a typo in a website headline, so we've learned it's not the done thing and the prime unintellectual property remains incorruptible and agnostic.
Despite this evening's Delphic presaging, as far as worrying about crime goes, we're well beyond the cliché here. Ours is less the kind of community where people don't bother locking their doors and more a place where visitors can just wander inside an empty house as if stumbling upon the Mary Celeste.
We're forced to ponder those times when a stimulus package was a pouch of tobacco and a bailout something you did with a bucket.
It's probably naive, but it's the way we like it and there's always the chance some stranger might unpack the dishwasher.
Even so, as I park the ute, I can't shake the warning.
A thief is about but it's not the one from the blackboard.
It's my old friend complacency. He's stalking us as we DIY our way through lockdown and, this season, he's taking fingers.
A circular saw and a mower have maimed two of our men and I'm among the cohort fearing we're next.
I've already a sizeable scar on my left knee attesting to my lack of respect for a chainsaw. The outcome would've been worse if not for one of those small-town miracles where our doctor at the time had spent the past decade triaging the sliced and diced contestants of the reality TV series Survivor, so could locate and clamp a spraying artery as if she was competing for immunity.
After the incident, my wife insisted she buy me a pair of chaps - which turned out to be good for safety reasons as well - and soon enough I was back in the saddle, although my Stockholm syndrome with the saw remained and, on a deeper level, became adumbration for the duality of forging a life in the country.
Sort of bogan meets bucolic.
On the one (still intact) hand, I enjoy cutting wood and harbour the same kind of redneck awe for my brutal machine as Chris Haywood did in Dogs in Space ("... purrs like a kitten full of cream") while, on the other, it represents destruction and rapacity. Basically, we truly love our beautiful bush but we also truly love the native hardwood we've scored from our local sawmill over the years for various building projects.
The fires have exposed this hypocrisy as they have the forest floor.
Like many others, I worry about what impact the resumption of logging or "selective timber harvesting" down the coast may have on the landscape still recovering from our abusive summer.
We know the loss of ground cover leaves native fauna as sitting ducks to feral predators and further removal of hides and hollows will only accentuate this vulnerability.
These concerns of 2020 bring to mind how, in The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard describes her orphaned Bell sisters moving to a lesser neighbourhood in the Sydney of 1939 after their parents went down with the Benbow.
Night followed night, nights of oceanic silence not even broken now by the screams of bandicoots in traps on the Hornimans' English lawn.
The fact trapping something as precious as bandicoots - an elusive creature I've never seen in the wild - was once commonplace seems outrageous now. It elicits the same derision we have for whalers and idiots who shoot wedgetails (an achievement that once attracted a legitimate bounty). And although, ironically enough, wedgies - and species-jumping diseases - have benefitted from deforestation, it's already obvious future Australians will view the destruction of vital native habitats with incredulity.
Shamefully enough, though, I won't be giving up the chainsaw this winter.
While I'm no tree-feller, there's primal satisfaction in gathering your own fuel, not to mention necessity when you live in a house with little else than generations of dead rodents in the walls for insulation.
And, simply, firewood is hard to argue with. It warms you three times (chopping, stacking and burning), it inspires authors and TV producers (mostly Norwegians with a few harpoons in the closet) and no hipster café is truly complete without a carefully curated collection of round-ends in the corner.
The guttural chorus of metal ripping into wood across an autumn afternoon is also the kind of self-sufficiency throwback to a history which cradles us all around here.
We live amid the spectral infrastructure of hard-scrabble and desperation. As we toil for timber alongside the rusting blades of abandoned mills, the remnants of failed eucalyptus oil outfits, the crumbling granite of gold rush-era aqueducts, we're forced to ponder those times when a stimulus package was a pouch of tobacco and a bailout something you did with a bucket.
As isolation envy becomes a thing, we simple country folk are for once thinking we might just have it over our urbane cousins because there are worse ways to spend a couple of splendidly self-isolated hours than in a paddock with a STIHL or Husqvarna (a debate for another time).
A few more weeks of COVID cabin fever and I'd bet city slickers would pay for such a pleasure. They may even experience the symbiotic thrill of a perspicacious butcher bird swooping down to pinch a grub from their freshly cut log.
In the bush, there are always thieves about.