Chapter 18 - Canaries and Cane She is ninety-four years old and she breeds Yorkshire canaries. One of her birds has just won Best Bird in Show and I offer congratulations and suggest she must have a feel for Yorkies.

She smiles and enjoys the flattery for an instant, then changes her tune and frowns.

“I didn’t think he’d win,” she says. “All he does at home is fidget and fuss. I can’t get him to do anything. Here he was well-behaved.”

Her voice is thin and gravely like a country road, and rises and falls about the same. She’s sitting on a chair facing her well-behaved boy, and her eyes are sparkling mischievous. She watches me sit next to her and says nothing.

“He’s in good song right now,” I say.

“Yes, yes,” she says. “He seems pleased with himself.”

It’s a cold, wet day in Mackay, and later that afternoon I walk into a lounge bar to find a flight crew from one of our national carriers shivering and wrapped in blankets and even newspapers, I swear. The next day the papers confirm it never climbed beyond 11.8 degrees, making it the coldest maximum on record, and breaking the previous record set in 1958 by over two degrees.

My canary lady would have still been a young woman when that record was set, probably raising the last of her family. It’s unlikely she’d have seen herself almost fifty years later sitting alone at the Show, proud of a bird she raised. She probably took over the canaries when her husband died, because it seemed like the right thing to do to keep his birds alive. Now they’re as much a part of her life as he was.

Outside the hardy show-goers are in good spirits, regardless, almost as if they’re determined to enjoy themselves even more to spite the weather. Or perhaps the enjoyment isn’t forced at all, but a genuine response to variation, a departure from life’s uniformed march.

I’m gathering vox pops and I put the microphone to the man who runs the plastic duck stall and suggest he should liberate the ducks in the muddy walkway. He picks up the ball without missing a beat.

“I tried that but they kept escaping to go on the rides,” he says, deadpan.

I suspect he’s half-pissed and ask him how long he’s been doing the ducks.

“Too long,” he tells me. “Ten years? We go up and down the east coast, from Cairns to Ballarat: now there’s a miserable, God-forsaken place!” But I don’t give him a chance to elaborate and I move on.

I find a girl of about four years eating fairy floss. I ask her what rides she’s been on, and in an irresistibly earnest voice she tells me she hasn’t been on any rides because her Dad wouldn’t let her.

“Or my Mum,” she remembers, frowning.

A grown man with a big soft toy under his arm tells me it’s definitely a bull, not a moose, but he can’t remember which game he played to win it. His mate comes to the rescue.

“You know, the one where you make the fish swim faster over the top of the thing and then the arm comes down and if you’re quick enough you win,” he says. The winner confirms this with a satisfied nod. Now we all know.

A mother watches her children squealing and whizzing around on some sort of open-carriage ride. She’s smiling broadly and the raindrops are wetting her upturned face.

“They must be getting drenched,” I say, stating the obvious.

“Yeah,” she says, not taking her eyes off them. “This is their third go.”

“Not tempted to go up with the kids?”

“Not in this weather. They’re crazy.” And she laughs through the rain.

Back inside the bird exhibit shed my canary breeder is worried about it. I ask her if there’s been too much rain and concern clouds her face like a storm.

“It’s terrible,” she says. “They won’t be able to get the cane in for crushing. And they’ve already had to put it off twice.”

She is ninety-four years old and she’s seen this happen before. Rain at this time of year makes the fields too boggy to harvest. Mackay’s crop isn’t the largest in Australia, but including Sarina and Proserpine the area produces about a quarter of the nation’s sugar cane crush. Operating at capacity the plants need about 23 weeks to process the crop, regardless of when the harvest begins. This means every week lost at the start of the harvest waiting for the fields to dry must be added on to the end, and the farmers run the risk of clashing with the wet season. If the monsoonal rains come before the cane is in, there’s nothing to be done but leave it there.

She also knows that cane is a ratoon crop, meaning it will regrow after harvest just like a lawn will regrow after being mowed. This allows farmers to get numerous crops from the one planting. But it also means if it’s left standing in the field it can stimulate its own regrowth and take off again, using its own reserves of sucrose to fuel the new growth spurt. This often lowers sucrose levels, which is not good since farmers get better prices for higher sugar levels.

She may also know that the bi-product from the cane crush is called bagasse, and is being used for power generation and ethanol distillation. It’s hard to imagine these developments would excite someone who has been around longer than household power and almost as long as the model T Ford, but she would certainly support anything to help the growers.

She asks me why I’m so interested in an old woman and I tell her I’m doing some radio.

“Have you heard of Charles Wooley?”

“No,” she says.

“He’s a very attractive man,” I tell her. “Do you want me to send him up to you?”

That’s when she tells me how old she is.

“You could probably still handle him, couldn’t you?” I ask her.

“I expect so,” she says, and laughs the most delicious little laugh I’ve heard in years, a sound that carries every flavour of woman man ever got lucky enough to taste.

She is ninety-four years old and she breeds canaries, she cares about the cane farmers, and her heart is still as young as the breeze.

© Monte Dwyer 2008