Cider Country

By Paul J. Laverty

Welcome to Cider Country - home to the apple orchards of Australia's Central Victorian region. Not only do they produce the nation's favourite fruit, it's also the main ingredient in one of our favourite summer drinks. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: RoadHouse Media
• Release date: Jul 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9780648518730

Paul J. Laverty

Paul J. Laverty is a Scottish-Australian author and journalist. He is the host of the Community Radio Network book show and podcast, The Quiet Carriage. His novella, Man Overbored is out now.

Book preview

CIDER COUNTRY

PAUL J. LAVERTY

First published in 2019 by Roadhouse Media

Copyright © Paul J. Laverty

ISBN: 978-0-6485187-0-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Edited by Paige Sutton

Cover art by Supun Tharaka

Formatted by Daystar Digitals

All enquiries should be made to the author at [e-mail]

For Ella x

www.pauljlaverty.com

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DOM

It began with a bike ride.

I hadn’t been near a bicycle since I was 14. I used to ride my flame-painted Repco Tracer everywhere - school, footy training, shops, mates’ houses. Then suddenly it wasn’t cool anymore. It was cooler getting the bus. And then a few years later, it was way cooler driving. Girls loved this. And when you’re a teenager, whatever girls loved was the thing you did.

But here I was at 34, cycling the hills of Claymore, using muscles I didn’t know I had. And being a fair few kilos heavier than back when I had that Tracer, I was struggling to move the thing.

This wasn’t all my fault. I couldn’t be sure of the original colour of the Malvern Star racer as it had rusted through (it had been my brother’s, and I think it might have been a dangerous-looking midnight black). The gears clanged when I changed them, the pedals were stiff-to-the-touch, and the front tyre had a slow puncture which had to be pumped every day. It was a good thing I couldn’t pass the 25 kilometre an hour barrier even when going downhill, as the bike had no brakes.

Still, it was better than walking. The temperature was in the high-20s, warm even for Victoria’s Central Highlands in November. And cycling was the only option since my car was repossessed.

Feeling flushed and faint, I pulled over to the side of the gravel track. I had a glug of lukewarm water from the Black & Gold bottle. I used the rest to douse my face and the back of my neck. I felt a taut sting around my nose and under my eyes and wished I’d bought some factor-50 before I’d arrived here. But money had been tight, and so had time.

It was the money issue - or the lack of it - which got the wheels in my mind turning when I spotted the sign across the road.

R.B. EDGAR ORCHARDS PTY LTD

This was an apple town. ‘Cider Country’ as my granddad used to call it when my brother Pat and I would come to stay each summer. I remembered the trees laden with lush red and green varieties. Those cool nights when we would chase each other through the rows, filling our arms with as many apples as we could carry. Then the mornings when we’d play in the yard and watch the trucks roll into town. The pickers would load them with fruit for shops and supermarkets, where they’d make their way into homes and lunchboxes.

Apples meant jobs. I knew this by the travellers and drifters of every age and gender, every colour and creed, who’d descend on Claymore during the summer months, filling the orchard by day, camping around it by night.

Right now, I needed a job. Any job. And despite my bulky CV, I was in no position to be fussy around here. You couldn’t be when you were on your knees.

I pulled my faded Miller cap over my eyes and stuck my head into the old warehouse. A smell of engine oil and corroded steel came off the array of decaying tractors and ride-on lawnmowers. The place looked like an abandoned agricultural museum.

‘Hey, are you the manager?’ I asked a large misshapen man with no neck who was sitting on a chemical drum, smoking a cigarette. I knew by his filthy hi-vis singlet and uneven stubble that he probably wasn’t. I could also tell by the way I’d startled him that they didn’t get many visitors.

‘Nup. He’ll be here any minute.’

‘Thanks. I’ll wait outside.’

I lit a rollie and found shade under an overgrown apple tree. I thought about what my grandmother would say to me right now. Me in the orchard game where her own parents had worked. How things can sometimes go full circle. My own mother would be dead against it. This was the life she’d wanted to leave behind, something she achieved when she was 17. Mum hated even visiting the town when we were growing up. She’d only collect us after our summer stay once every couple of years when grandma would lay the guilt on thick, making my dad do it the other times. The ‘backwardness’ of it all, she used to complain. The ‘bleakness.’ Though I think there were more reasons than that.

Despite this, it was my mother who gave me the keys to the old place, saying that up here I could lay low for a while, that she wouldn’t tell her brothers. Or my father.

It was exactly what I needed.

An old ute pulled up, its muffler rattling away like a solitary marble in a tin can, grey smoke spewing into the virginal sky.

‘Can I help you, sunshine?’ A scarlet-coloured face grinned up at me from the driver’s seat, resplendent with a rude shock of red hair. I thought his voice sounded like he was trapped in a tin can until I noticed the electrolarynx he held up to his throat. I’d only ever seen them on TV. It was jarring enough to make me stub out my cigarette.

‘I’m Dominic … Dom,’ I said, shooting out a hand. ‘Are you looking for workers?’

He laughed long and hard, his face turning a deeper shade of crimson. The mic was no longer at his throat, so there was barely any noise, just an eerie, whispered cackle.

‘Why, what’s wrong with ya?’ he finally asked, replacing the instrument.

‘Nothing at all,’ I replied. I’d never worked manually. I’d spent the last ten years with the biggest news organisation on the planet. But despite what the burgers and beers, and the cocaine and smokes, had done to my body, I was confident I could handle the load.

‘No one local works here unless they’re drunk, on the dole, or on the run.’ He looked me up and down suspiciously. ‘Or a mixture of all three. There has to be something wrong with ya.’

He was right. I’d been exposed in the aftermath of the recent Royal Commission into the banking sector as a finance journalist who’d accepted a new Mercedes S-Class, four overseas trips and around $250k in gold bullion to write puff pieces masquerading as news for two major banks to bolster their share price. I’d only done it for four months.

Four hazy months that I couldn’t really remember because my weekly cocaine and champagne habit had swayed towards the every-fucking-night end-of-the-scale. When it all came out, I was no longer writing the news, I was the news. Front-page news at that. The most hated man in the country, more so than all the fat bankers who’d made millions over the years rigging the game. I was fired. I was publically disowned by my Labor MP father,