PORTRAIT OF AN AUSTRALIAN FAMILY — BENJAMIN HENRY DeVRIES

Jane. Fifties. Tall and elegant of bearing. Those who buy dresses from wind chime stores rarely rush around like Jane does. She walks like an italic letter. Drives like she’s late. Spiderwebs are clinging to the rearview mirrors of her car, remarkable given our speed. Either by luck or by intuition the spiders must have found a windbreak on the mirror.

She’s picked us up at the train station, our bags are no longer piled on the ground, but we can’t go to the farm yet. There’s a funeral in progress and Jane has to show face there. She drops us on a street corner in the shadeless two-pub town. Which is only natural. We’d know no one at this funeral.

We take the opportunity to stock up on beer. The last farm was stingy with the beer. When Jane picks us back up she notes our brand and tells us the next slab’s on her.

Nearer to Kookendjeri we pass cows lying in a golden sere paddock. They look alright. Snoozy. But this sets Jane off; she upshifts and shakes her head. You see that? Not a single tree in sight. They must be roasting.

An exasperated narrative from Jane goes a certain way; the rate of narration picks up speed, the volume slides higher, and sometimes it seems like she’s getting pretty peeved at you personally for whatever she’s worked up about. Then she’ll pause, turn to you, and say: Well, I wasn’t impressed.

To get to know Jane is to get to know what doesn’t impress her. Farmers who don’t care about their animals. The disobedience of Jett, one of the newer dogs in her kennel. Supermarkets that wrap their produce in soft plastic that’s nearly impossible to recycle. Guests who don’t grasp her recycling protocols. A daughter running late.

Darling is the word Jane applies to daughters. Rain or shine, and whether Jane’s impressed with them or not that day, they’re always darling. She says it the posh way, which can sound incongruous when I recall that I’ve seen Jane clipping fecal clumps off a sheep’s backside. She makes it work. I don’t know whether Jane’s parents used to call her darling, but I suspect so. They’re from New Zealand. Jane’s half Maori, which means that Jane’s granddaughter calls her the Maori word for grandma, which is coo.

Where’s coo? The granddaughter asks it of everyone. Repeats it like a litany. Coo reads her stories and lets her sit on the counter beside the giant wooden bowl of produce and eat jam on toast. It’s only natural to want to know where she is if she’s not there.

Daughters and granddaughters impress Jane very much. Also the unflappable serenity of house dog Toby, some kind of royal spaniel. Also Virginian farmer/author/icon Joel Salatin. Also a well-arranged bouquet of banksias.

Those new to the community must work to impress Jane. You have to contribute. But if you do, she’ll tout your achievements. Mainly when you’re not in the room.

I share some of Jane’s values regarding speed and efficiency, but even I could have stood to linger a little longer in the banksia patch. It’s a jurassic sort of place, cut into a hillside; one would be able to see the whole carpet of Kookendjeri’s paddocks unrolled if not for the distractions of giant flowers and low zooming pollinators closer to one’s face.

Jane snips the flowers she needs and calls us back to the ute. There’s a meal to prepare. Tuesdays are particularly harried days.

Allen. Sixties. Trim build, sharp nose, bald beneath his range hat. Shorts and boots, oilskin coat waxed in anticipation of the rainy season. Feeding the sheep is a task he takes on every afternoon. It’s easier with me or L along for the ride to open gates. He listens to the ABC on a portable radio he prefers to the radio in the ute. He drives along perimeters to check for fence breaks, check that the current still flows. If a story on the radio catches his ear, he’ll pause to finish listening to it. He looks out into the far distance but also looks down at the ground. Sometimes he’ll find a rusted and forgotten piece of something at his feet. Pick it up. Remember what it is and what it does. Chuck it in the ute.

Jane doesn’t understand how her husband could possibly take so long feeding the sheep. It’s like she’s talking about time spent behind the locked door of a bathroom. What could possibly take him so long?

Get Allen started on the wool shed. In continuous use by the Daintrees since 1888. Smells like roasted nuts. The wooden pens are the color of coffee beans, oiled smooth as a result of the many millions of sheep passing through. A sheep is a giant brush soaked in lanolin.

The whole town came for a barn dance to raise money for the boys off to the Great War. There was another dance for World War II. An ancestor wrote of these events on a scrap of wood that stands against the wool press. The narrative on the board is economical and sharp — Allen calls these qualities to my attention, because he wants me to understand there was writing as well as sheep farming in the history of his family. It’s a fine act of writing. There’s even a tragic turn, when a girl chilled by nighttime winds brings coal into her room and accidentally asphyxiates herself.

I don’t think there’s an official name for Allen’s game. After community dinner he’ll take out a farm implement of mysterious functionality, usually something that fits in your hand, and pass it around to those present — his family, his friends, his daughters’ friends, and visitors like me and L. We all get a chance to touch and examine. And then Allen asks us, one by one, to guess what the thing does. If someone guesses correctly, they get a prize. If nobody guesses correctly, the prize gets rolled over to next Tuesday.

Those involved in farming have an advantage. But there aren’t a lot of farmers among the friends of the Daintree daughters; their friends work in cafés, though they all own boots, and they’ll help out with farm work if they want to stay over. There’s the puppet man: he’s not a farmer.

If no one guesses correctly what the thing does, it doesn’t seem to disappoint Allen. If the secret is guessed, the secret-keeper ceases his function. Allen likes being a secret-keeper, so he has a vested interest in making sure the items he chooses are sufficiently obscure in their function to keep people guessing. It amuses him when people get creative. But I have to wonder about the implications of this game for Allen. It is a weekly reminder of knowledge lost.

Sophie. Twenties. Never have I seen a middle-child so easygoing. She and her partner have their own farm, but she spends a few days a week working at Kookendjeri. She knows exactly what to do when we come upon a sick sheep separated from the herd: what knot to use to bind the poor creature’s legs, the proper way to lift her into the back of the ute. On a drive to a sheep auction I ask her about her favorite book, and she tells me she can’t remember the title but it’s by a New York chef who started the farm-to-table trend with his restaurant. I have been to the restaurant several times, but I don’t mention this to Sophie because the place is stuffy and overpriced, she would loathe the crowd of bankers in attendance and find it mystifying that no bottle of wine is priced below fifty dollars; I don’t have the heart to tell her any of this because it seems to lift her spirit to believe that people in New York are feeling more connected to their food. She really knows her way around the sheep auction. Knows what she’s looking for.

Her sister Katie also works a few days a week at the farm. The rest of the days she works down at the beach in a café attached to a lawn bowling pitch. Katie’s supposed to take over the farm with Sophie when the time comes. But from what I’ve observed, she’s at some risk to move to Melbourne. She has a lot of friends there. She always offers me and L rides to the beach. She waits to swim until Sophie is ready, because you can’t have a splash fight with yourself and it’s more fun to bodysurf when your sister sees you do it.

The eldest Daintree sister is Moira. Moira doesn’t intend to be a farmer. She has a lot else going on. There are her four-year-old daughter and a newborn. There are the giant seedpods she constructs from homemade glue and wool felt; she’ll sell some of these these, and decorate her festival tent with the rest. There are festivals. There’s the cob house she lives in, which affects her lifestyle because there are no corners; picture a Hobbit house and you have it, made of earth, not a single straight line; you have to adjust the way you live in this thing, commit to a total lack of personal space, nowhere apart from your spouse, apart from your children, it’s togetherness always, which sounds exhausting, but Moira is committed to it in a way I find admirable and bold. It was her suggestion that her daughters call Jane coo. She doesn’t want Maori heritage getting lost.

The management of a sheep farm involves a constant transit of sheep from one paddock to another, or to the wool shed, where they are drenched for worms, checked for health, sheared, or sold. Kookendjeri also plants trees. They also run seminars on how trees improve quality of life for farm animals, stabilize the ecosystem, and provide an extra source of income for farmers. Jane trains sheep dogs. She rents out a room in the farmhouse sometimes. She sells banksia bouquets from a stand at the end of the driveway.

It isn’t immediately apparent who all lives on the farm. There’s the farmhouse, and the barn where L and I sleep, but there’s also the cob house where Moira lives, a house where Katie lives with some friends, the puppet man’s trailer, and a tiny house where a Welsh couple is staying while they construct a bigger house in town. A yogi, one of Katie’s friends, is free to set up a tent in one of the paddocks and meditate for a number of weeks. Nobody seems to be paying rent to the Daintrees. Their generosity is simple to comprehend but staggering to behold. It makes more sense when you realize they take seriously Indigenous Australian ideas about land ownership, the idea that no one truly “owns” land. To have land is to share it.

Only after more than a month at Kookendjeri do I learn of the farm across the road. This land belongs to a relative of Allen’s, a cousin I think. Kookendjeri used to be one uninterrupted expanse; now it stands divided into East and West. And so we have a shadow farm, right within the sightline of ours, present to remind the Daintrees just how difficult it is for a farm to survive the eruptive disorder of a new generation. Who knows what the squabble was about — no one talks about it.

There’s a plan in place to ensure Kookendjeri isn’t cut up and sold. Moira and her family will go on living in the cob house; Sophie and Katie will operate the farm; Jane and Allen will spread the gospel of agroforestry, sit in their easy chairs and watch the Australian Open, and read to their granddaughters.

If Sophie and Katie were merely capable farmers, this would never work. Fortunately, they are much more than capable farmers; they are exceptional sisters, which gives me great hope. They are the kind of sisters that let the small things slide. They gossip about each other just enough to pick up what a given sister might not come right out and say about what they’re feeling. They talk without talking. They spend hours making each other birthday presents.

They are aware of what they’re up against. Fire and drought don’t care whether or not you’re an exceptional sister.

Here’s a personal flaw I have. There’s always a part of me that wants to know how the watch works. And the watch in question is one of the most fluidly functional families I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. But I can’t just ask, because I don’t want to seem like I’m looking at them under glass. They’ve taught me how soil works, what to look for in a sheep you’re buying, what to order and what not to order at the café, how to dye felt using plants found in the woods, what to do when I smell smoke. They’ve given me large portions at dinner. They’ve shown me how to move sheep and even complimented my stock-sense, which is a really nice way of telling me that I don’t know what I’m doing but eventually I could. I feel wrong for wanting more. But I do. I want to know how Daintrees work.

L and I are setting up some ramps and barriers. It’s a training course for sheep dogs. We’re about a week away from leaving, and it only occurs to me later that Jane wants to show off, wants us to see what it takes to train a sheep dog, see what she does. Things aren’t going as planned, though. Jett isn’t cooperating, and Jane’s losing her temper. Her anger is tipping over; it might not be about dogs anymore. I’m not sure where to look.

For reasons I can’t begin to understand I pick this day, while disassembling the barriers, to ask Jane how she does it. Does what? Keep the family together. Keep them on the farm. I’m not expecting much of an answer, not from someone who has just yelled herself hoarse, but I have to ask.

She tells me that it’s easier because the girls aren’t spoiled. Right now, between the sheep and the dogs and the trees, the farm is doing well. But there were many lean years they lived through. Years of fire, years of drought. She and Allen never tried to hide that from the girls, and that’s why they know how lucky they are. They’re prepared for things to get worse.

You really have to drag Allen away from community dinner. He likes having a yarn, telling stories about horses, how as a young man he drove cattle on horseback through unforgiving terrain. He seems content, in his stories, to play the sidekick to heroic horses. From all appearances his daughter’s friends are glad to be his audience. They’re leaning in; they have questions when the pause time comes. Some among the audience may drive stock on horseback at some point; most will not. No matter who they may be or become, they all show up and meet their neighbors. Everyone cooks something. Everyone plays the game. The most uninformed guesses are gladly accepted.

L won the game one Tuesday. She guessed the rusty metal horn was once used for giving sheep their medicine. We can’t remember what her prize was. To play was prize enough.