Water

In the height of a long hot summer, I scrambled under our house to reach the water pump that had chucked it in. Wiping cobwebs and dirt from my face, I cursed the wretched appliance and bent down to switch it off then on again. It kicked, engine humming and lights flashing, before halting to a stop. There would be no water running from our taps that day.

This was a novel situation. I had spent my childhood in a series of fully serviced suburban homes just North of Brisbane. Later, during my twenties and early thirties, I lived in equally well-equipped homes in the inner city of Melbourne.

There was a semi-detached unit with a toilet in the lounge room, a tiny brick home next to a fire station and a draughty Victorian terrace house with a laundry in the backyard. But everywhere I lived, things just worked. The post arrived every day, the rubbish was collected from the curb with reassuring regularity, and water ran from the taps without fail or thought.

I tried to be an eco-conscious citizen. I recycled and composted and tried to reduce waste. I had a keep cup and followed water restrictions. I sometimes even had a bucket in the shower so I could use the runoff in our gardens. But where the water came from, where the stuff I flushed down the toilet went, and what happened to the rubbish once it was tipped out of the bin? These were things I didn’t think too much about.

The house I live in now, the one with the broken water pump, sits on the side of a hill. A hill that rises from the banks of the Goulburn River and peaks at the very edge of Brown Range and Mt Hickey. 

I moved here with my husband and our two kids in the spring of 2019. It was right at the tail end of 3 years of hot, dry conditions and record low rainfalls. And we didn’t know it yet, but Australia was rushing headlong into one of the worst bushfire seasons to hit the country.

What we did know was that, despite being close to two townships, our home was, let’s just say, underserviced by local utilities. Within days of moving we discovered that, on top of the common rural standards of no town water or sewage, we would also enjoy no waste collection or post delivery, either. Things would not just work.

‘No matter,’ I thought, we had embarked on our grand rural adventure! We absorbed the 10-minute drive to town to collect letters and parcels into our daily routine. And creating an elaborate waste management system to deal with the rubbish was an interesting challenge—all part of the fun! In fact, it felt good to have an immediate imperative to reduce our waste.

Within a month of moving, the septic tank began to ooze effluent. Smelly brown water and wads of paper pressed out of the hatch and right up under the roses at the window next to our kitchen table. Coffee and toast was now accompanied by wafts of sewage as greywater pushed into our overworked septic system.

‘No matter,’ I thought, it was a less fun and interesting challenge than dealing with the rubbish, but simple enough to fix. We called our local Poo-ologist, a bloke named Pudd Saunders, who came and emptied the tank. Then we called him again, four weeks later, once the plumber had successfully unblocked whatever was causing the wastewater to continue to flow out of the hatch under the roses.

Breakfast smelt only of coffee and toast again and laundry day was finally restored to its former aromatic glory as we officially became an ‘if it’s brown, flush it down, if it’s yellow, let it mellow’ household.

I had imagined our move to the country as an idyll of crackling fires and native wildlife sightings; waking to bird song and long walks in towering gums—I didn’t expect we’d also need a Poo-ologist on speed dial.

Within three months of moving, I hit the type of rural amateur highs that would leave me standing over that broken water pump under the house, hands on hips, wondering what I was going to do next.

Sweat dripping from my forehead, I found the manual and set about troubleshooting. Finally, after trying literally everything in the book, I gave up and called in reinforcements, phoning Barry the previous homeowner. 

With more grace and patience than the situation warranted, he asked “have you checked the water tank yet?” Ahhhh, the tank.

With the adrenalin of a woman scorned by misbehaving machinery I lifted the heavy concrete lid and peered into the echoey void at an inch of water. Our tank had run dry.

It took an entire day to get the taps running again. An entire day of trudging up and down the hill of our driveway to connect the pipes to pump water from the Goulburn River into our empty tank. An entire day of imagining long-ago ancestors who spent their lives carting water, stoking fires, pissing into pots and doing laundry by hand.

At the end of the day, when I turned the kitchen tap, heard the familiar hum of the pump under the house and watched the water flowing, a wave of joy flooded my body. 

Weary and satisfied, I dragged myself into the bathroom and stood under the shower enjoying the steaming water washing the grime from my face and the cobwebs from my hair. And I finally appreciated, for the first time in my life, where the water came from, how it got there, and where it would go next.