Forcett, Farms & Farewell

Penstock to Hobart was a drive through country that kept changing: highlands to midlands to the outskirts of the city, the landscape dropping and warming with every hour. We were not heading into Hobart itself but to Forcett, a farmstead twenty minutes from the airport, because Anth had a screening flight to Adelaide the next morning and needed to be close.

Michael met us in the yard. A retired dairy farmer from New Zealand, he had been in Tasmania over twenty years, long enough to have stopped being a newcomer without ever quite losing the Kiwi warmth he had arrived with. His property sat east of the city, quiet and green, with enough space to park the bus without feeling like an imposition. Tess, his dog, came over with the disciplined enthusiasm of an animal that has been trained well and knows it, offering a greeting that was equal parts obedience and showing off. Michael talked easily, the way farmers do when they have time and company, and by the end of the first cup of tea the stay had shifted from a stopover to a visit.

The next morning Sal drove Anth to the airport. It was the first time she had taken the wheel of the bus on her own, and the fact of it mattered more than the twenty-minute drive. The Coaster is not a small vehicle. She managed it without fuss, dropped him at the terminal, and drove back to the farm alone, which was also a first. Anth's screening trip was thirty hours, a quick flight to the mainland and back, and the gap it left was the first real solitude either of them had experienced since the driveway at Aroona.

Sal did not fill it with anything useful, and that was the point. She stayed up late watching television, the kind of formless evening that would have felt wasteful in a previous life and now felt like a luxury she had not known she wanted. She slept in the next morning, properly late, and spent the afternoon walking through Michael's paddocks with the phone to her ear, catching up with family in conversations that ran long because nothing was pulling her away from them. The solitude was not lonely. It was room, the kind that appears when the other person steps out and you discover that the shape of the day is entirely yours to decide.

She picked Anth up that evening and the bus was whole again. Neither of them made a large thing of the reunion, because thirty hours does not warrant a large thing, but the small ease of being back in the same vehicle said enough. Forcett, Michael, Tess, the farm: all of it had been a one-night plan, and already it felt like somewhere they would return to. In a fortnight Sal would be on her own again, longer this time. The first solo stretch had shown her she could do it. The next one would show her what she would do with it.Læs mere