I’ve set the GPS on the tractor and it will till this field by itself for the next eight hours. That doesn’t sit right with me, so I sit in the cabin and let the machine do its job. I should be helping my wife back at the homestead. She’s crook but doesn’t want me under her feet.

Tractor time is thinking time. Others do the same. Old Ben down the pub sits on a pot of beer for an hour. Just stares at it. His wife died a couple of years ago. I watch Ben watching his pot. My wife the TV on while she’s doing the ironing but she’s alone with her thoughts. A man would be a fool to interrupt Ben or the wife while they were journeying like that. For me, that’s tractor time.

I can feel every one of those undulations as the wheels move over a ridge or as they dig in the wet earth by the dam. That rolling brown topography is like my mind. I remember things, like Josie Richards. She was my first love. She was 15. I was 16. They couldn’t keep us apart. Josie’s dad came over and started blueing with my dad and said Josie was bound to get in the family way sooner or later. Dad said if that’s so, she could come and live with us and she’d learn farming from an expert. Josie was sent to a private girl’s college in Melbourne and that put an end to that.

But something’s not right. Her name wasn’t Josie. It was Jackie. How could I forget something like that? That was 50 years ago. But when I think about it and put some elbow grease in to the recall of it, Jackie ended up going to Adelaide to live with an old aunty. Never saw her again. I have trouble remembering her face. She had freckles and long black hair but when I looked at her class photo in the library, she had light brown hair and a clear complexion. It ain’t like I’ve got dementia or anything like that. If I did, someone would tell me. At the bowling club they’d say, ‘Hey Cal, you’re losing the plot, old mate’. I don’t reckon I am.

I remember things from when I was five years old. I remember The Beatles playing “She loves you” on the radio. She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember the day my Dad had a heart attack driving the harvester and no one found him for six hours and the dogs were howling in the ute.

When I was 20, I worked in a seismic crew in South West Queensland, looking for oil. I was a shot firer working with the advanced party near Eromanga. One night me and Tim Jarrett were sitting in my tent playing guitar, smoking dope and sharing a bottle of Jack Daniels. We were zonked. I had the tent flaps open as it was a hot night. A two-metre western Taipan slides in to view and stops outside the tent. He sticks his head up like he’s looking in a barber’s shop window, seeing if there’s anyone he knows. There’s no back exit to the tent. I said, ‘what’s a snake doing up at 11 o’clock at night?’ I’m armed with an Ibanez 12 string guitar and Tim is armed with an honours degree in psychology. After one very long minute, the snake moves back in to the night. Me and Tim kept in touch for a while but he died of a drug overdose on a Thai beach.

When our son came home from the war in Afghanistan, he wasn’t right in the head. Couldn’t sleep. Said the farm was talking to him. My boy saw his friend get killed by a sniper. Said he could recall that real good. He remembered it in living technicolour every night. Remembered it until he ran the hose from the muffler to the passenger seat, wound up the windows and said ‘good night’ forever.

A lot of stuff happens in a life. You can’t be expected to remember everything. I read about a man in America who could recall every day of his life. Sounds like a nightmare. I’ve worked on this farm since Dad died and I can tell you around here, one day is much like the next. I figure life is like skating on ice. If you can have a giggle and sink a few beers along the way, you’re doing OK. But as for remembering every single day – what’s the point? But the thing is, if I can’t remember Josie’s – sorry, Jackie’s name – what makes me think I’m getting things right at all?

It’s important to remember things accurately. Pretty soon there will just be me on the farm. Memory will be my companion. I watch old Ben and look for little hints inside his head. I’m not going to ask him because we don’t do that around here. I need to divine it. I know the measure and weight of things. I’m a stickler for accuracy.

The first time I made love was with my wife. We weren’t even married yet. It was summer and her parents had gone to Sydney for three days and they’d left her older brother in charge. He went on a three-day bender leaving me and Melanie to get up to all sorts of trouble. It was a hot summer afternoon and blowflies were banging into the wire screens. We had to be careful because there was no contraception in those days. Not if you count gladwrap and a rubber band. She had a single bed with small red flowers embroidered on the bed spread. There was a study desk, a planet lamp and a small bay window that looked out on to a rose garden. Her bedroom caught the morning sun and it was an oven by the time we snuck between the sheets. It was one of the most important moments of my life – and I mean ‘moments’ because I was so excited. Melanie didn’t laugh. She said, ‘never mind, we’ll get better next time and better again after that’.

Before my wife’s diagnosis, we went in to town to celebrate our wedding anniversary. So we go walking down memory lane, and I retell the story of our first shag while we’re waiting for our counter meal. She’s embarrassed because there’s a table of young people next us and people our age aren’t meant to have sex. Not now. Not then.

“It was winter,” she said. “My parents had gone to Brisbane to look at buying a horse. I remember because she would have been mine. Didn’t pan out. I was so disappointed. More so than our first … you know”

“I could have sworn”

“Winter, dear”

Memory is like an elevator in one those old-fashioned department stores. We called them ‘emporiums’ when I was a kid and the lift operators would call out what each floor sold. I had my own names for them.

Ground Floor: cuddles from Mum, birthday presents, hundreds and thousands sandwiches and the time lightening killed Betty the goat.

First Floor: catching older sister naked, Captain Marvel comics, kicking the winning goal in the under 12 grand final and ‘groin stirrings’.

Second Floor: driving the Holden around the farm, passing fourth year and the brief love affair with Jackie.

Third floor: Melanie.

Those floors just keep going up and up. I reckon on the very last floor, you’re back on the first floor thinking about cuddles from Mum.

Memories can take you where you don’t want to go. I was 18 and driving down Coopers Road heading west. I’d had a few at the pub and was trying to get back to the farm as I had to prime the generator. It was late afternoon and the sun was coming straight through a dirty windscreen. This old bloke pulled out of Corkscrew Road in a Nissan ute. Didn’t see him. Couldn’t have stopped anyway. T-boned him and that was that. He died in hospital. I walked away without a scratch. I blew .08 but Dad’s mates at the cop shop put it down as .04. Nothing more was said but I knew. It’s with me at 3.00 am.

The GPS knows its way around this farm better than I do but it remembers nothing. It can’t read the land like I can. It can’t smell the weather or know when it’s right to start harvesting. It has no feel for history or people. All the modern gadgets we have want to shackle us to the present but people aren’t like that. We’re constantly walking between the present and the past, like getting stuck in one of those old fashioned revolving wooden doors in an emporium. We’ve got one foot in the past and one in the present.

At night after the wife has taken her medication and is getting noddy, I grab a beer and walk away from the homestead and plonk myself down by the dam. I look at the Southern Cross wheeling overhead and start listening to the land. Not the manicured land me and Dad created with bulldozers, fences and furrows. But the old land – Aboriginal land.

It takes a while but it comes. There’s no voices or Ouija board spookiness. But they’re there. The Aborigines know the spine of the land. If you want to think about the deep past, there’s always that. Right off the scale stuff. But I’m just a silly bastard stuck on a farm, which is barely keeping its head above water, with a wife who has two years to live.

I’ve had enough of this GPS bullshit and its perfect straight lines. I grab the wheel and feel the pull of the tiller – the little jags as it turns a rock or lifts an old tree root. Sitting up here in on the tractor with the exhaust cap blowing, those memories help keep the story straight enough.