Pollen dust covers the ramp and steps in the mornings. A fine yellow carpet that floats and settles near the door of the classroom. Dried and warm like sweet grass-seed, the smell carries me to the bush and the days of Gina.
We kept her in a paddock that lay across the road from home. A dusky brown heifer with the island of Tasmania in a splash of white across her muzzle. There had been others before her. Clarabelle first, then Mammy and Velvet, but Gina was the queen. Her walk set her apart. An unhurried stepping, like a ship on legs. Mum kept a diary, a small brown book where she marked our milestones such as baptisms, when we started school or who got whooping cough. Gina’s doings were listed there as well, under C for cow. La Lolla, Dad named her, but we called her Gina.
I was 10 when I began walking across by myself to get her. I wore Dad’s gumboots and carried a stick. I felt brave then, ready to hit a snake or ward off a magpie. Sometimes she’d be standing close to the gate just waiting, staring at the bowlers on the smooth square greens on the opposite side of the fence. Other days she’d be lying among the tussocks and I’d wander the maze of paths that ran towards the football ground, calling until I found her. She’d lead the way back, rocking her weight in even time along the tracks to home.
We milked her in the shed, on a concrete patch in the corner where Dad had built a bail. I had the morning shift and when it was cold I watched as steam poured from her nostrils and left watery drops on the bristles near her mouth. I bolted the plank in behind her ear, caught her tail on the nail above and tied back her leg with the cord. Each milking we gave her a handful of hay and filled her bucket with water. While she ate or drank or just stood mashing her cud, I washed the swollen udder that hung like a bag of puffy fingers below her belly. I leant against her and listened to the rumble and gurgle of milk running like a river inside. The hair just above her udder was softer and there was a secret space between the bag and her leg, a little warm pouch where my hand fitted perfectly. She’d give a sudden kick and I’d remember the milking. With the bucket held between my knees I tilted it towards the wall and started. Two pin-straight lines hit the tin and within minutes a creamy froth rose up the sides and the bucket felt warm and heavy against my legs.
Gina made milk and calves. Every year we took her to visit the bull at Davies’ farm. It was a two-mile walk we called The Long March. Dad drove the car at walking pace while we crouched down low in the back seat and held the rope that was looped round her neck. People slowed and watched as the little procession moved through the streets, past the town hall and on to the highway. “Where’s the circus?” or “Get a horse!” they yelled. We were ashamed. Dad wasn’t; he just laughed and idled the car along, his arm angled like a paddle out the window.
We left her at the farm in the front paddock where the black bull stood watching, then, after a week, returned to bring her home. She didn’t remember us. She wanted to stay. We jammed the rope in the window and held on with all our might, but as the car started up so did the bull. All along the dirt road we heard him, a hoarse angry bellowing backed by a chorus of mooing. It wasn’t until the highway that the air quietened, Gina stopped pulling against the rope and it was safe to pat her through the window. The car dropped into second gear as she padded the gravel beside the bitumen and I listened to the rhythm in her hooves.
The arrival of a calf each year was recorded in Mum’s tiny script. “On July 16th ’66, to Gina and Horace another little bull calf. Both doing fine.” Motherhood was a brief experience, however, and after a week the farmer would come and take it away. We watched the splay-footed creature calling out from the back of the ute and when I lay in bed at night I heard Gina’s sore and lonely cries carrying across the road like a broken trumpet.
In my last year at school she died. My brother found her lying by the gate with her feet sideways in the air, a piece of fence wire dangling from her mouth. Maybe she knew what was coming. The following month the bowling club expanded and her paddock became a car park. She was the last cow we kept. The small country that lay across the road became the land I never visited.
Until this year and this tree. The tree that towers over the portable classroom where I teach. The one that drops seeds and pollen dust that crisps in the sun and scents the air with a smell like hay. The one that brings back the queen and her country again.
