Why I keep writing about Mullumbimby

The month I started work on my first novel, I moved from a small Sydney apartment to a ramshackle cottage in a rainforest valley near Mullumbimby.  Tall trees reached their branches over our roof, and at night we could hear animals – possums, bandicoots, pademelons -  rustling around in the forest just twenty metres away. Not long after we moved in, it started to rain. And didn't stop for three months.

The landscape and the rain- perhaps predictably - found their way into my book; Salt Rain featured lots of dripping forests and red mud and creeks rising over causeways.

That was twenty-odd years ago and since then I moved down on the plain, mostly in the township of Mullumbimby. But I can’t seem to stop writing about the valley. It has featured in all three of my novels and in several stories. Now – with my kids’ novel, ‘Big Magic’ about to be published (which, inevitably, also features Mullumbimby), I’m trying to understand what it is about the valleys and this area that has so captured my imagination. 

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I grew up in Armidale, New South Wales – sheep country with distant blue hills and vast open paddocks. When my family would drive to the coast for a camping holiday, I avoided looking out the window at the dry paddocks and sparse eucalypts because something about them made my stomach feel hollow. I longed for the lush, dense vegetation of Valla Beach where we were headed.

In my novel (for adults not kids), PROMISE (set largely in the hills around Mullumbimby), my protagonist, Anna, walks into a forest:

The dirt path was narrow and wound between the tall trees. All around, the air was wet and loamy, and rain dripped from the forest canopy above, the droplets bouncing the big leaves and making the delicate ferns shiver. It was such a benign landscape. No, it was more than benign, it was abundant and cocooning. Which was why she was desperate to stay and not head out into open country.

Anna once read that people were meant to be feel most at home in the landscape of their childhood, but she found the countryside around Orange uninviting.

Here, the forest burst with life, everything moist and fertile, vines looping from tree to tree, ferns and palms sprouting from the smallest crevice. When she was nineteen and Pat first drove her up into the hills in his old van, the forest getting denser around them by the minute, the thought kept running through her head, I’ve come home, I’ve come home.

Like Anna, when I first drove up into the hills behind Mullumbimby, in a real estate agent’s leather-seated car, I had the sense of returning home.

My then-husband Matt and I bought the one-bedroom cottage the real estate agent showed us. I left my job at the ABC, we followed the removal truck up the highway and set to work painting the cottage, building a deck and planting a vegetable garden.

I can still conjure clear memories from that January, of walking down to the waterhole each afternoon, along the winding dirt road, past the hillside of palms, to the burbling, boulder-strewn creek. Sweaty and tired after working on the house, we would sink into the cool, earthy-smelling water. The creek rushed over a lip of rock into the big still pool where I floated on my back, looking up to the trees circling the waterhole, their branches silhouetted against the sky. I felt protected and contained by the trees and the valley walls, and by the quiet. It was unfathomable that my friends and colleagues were – at that very moment - driving through traffic in Sydney, and rushing to story deadlines at the ABC. Up in the hills, I felt outside time. Like I’d entered a magical realm.

When the rains came, we learned to keep working outside even as it bucketed down, we learned to navigate the slippery red mud, and to stock up the pantry in case the creek crossings went under or a tree fell over the road. Neighbours told me about using flying foxes used to cross flooded creeks and of cars washed off the causeways. There was something thrilling about a heightened awareness of the weather and landscape, and in the need to be being self sufficient and beyond the usual demands of society.

Something thrilling, too, in seeing nature slowly reclaim its land, land that had long ago been cleared by white settlers for logging, then banana plantations and dairy farming.

Then came the devastating weather events of February and March 2022. I’d long since left the valley but I’ve seen footage and photos, and heard accounts from friends. Trees and houses have slid down hills. The road that Matt and I walked along to the waterhole has been completely gouged away by the river. Roads have been cut and causeways washed out. The very contours of the land have changed.

I can’t go up into the valley now. It’s too dangerous. But I can see it still in my imagination, and I suspect I will continue to conjure it in my writing.

A version of this article first appeared in Verandah magazine