Diary

Wednesday, 17th February 2010

Matthew Parris opens his diary

How unexpected. Half a world away from an English winter I find myself, shivering before a crackling fire, just lit, in a mud-brick house illuminated by oil lamps and candles, with rain beating on the high roof, as outside in the deep Australian night the wattles and eucalypts drip. ‘So you’re off to sunny New South Wales,’ cried envious friends as we departed London in the drizzle: ‘Don’t forget the tanning lotion.’ What I did forget was the umbrella.

But I’m happy. We’ve been visiting friends, the writer and broadcaster Richard Glover and playwright Debra Oswald. And here where we’re staying, high in the southern fringes of the Blue Mountains, is the house they built. Literally. Along with fellow broadcaster Philip Clark, Richard and co have mixed, moulded and laid every mud brick, sawn every rafter — and it’s taken them 25 years. Next morning (still raining) I helped Phil and Richard build a new wall. I think they enjoyed shouting orders at an ageing, mud-spattered Englishman, their unskilled navvy, staggering around in the dirt. And I enjoyed learning about building in mud: a tough and durable brick so long as it’s roofed, a good heat-insulator, and very forgiving: the D.I.Y. bodger who goes off-true with one course of bricks can easily correct this with the next — mud being the mortar too.

In this rain the dead trees look even stranger. Perhaps you Australians don’t notice dead trees, any more than we Londoners notice red buses, but to the visitor there’s something faintly haunting about a place where, when trees die, they don’t seem to fall over, go mushy-brown and rot. They just stand there: gaunt, dry, stretching grey-white arms, like bones, to the sky. It’s as if the bush will not bury its dead. Ghostly — to us English — I swear.

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