My friend and I bought land together. The friendship ended there

My old man told me, more than once, never to buy a tractor with a neighbour. The neighbour would need to sow when you wanted to reap, he said. And naturally enough, he’d want to reap when you needed to sow. The fuel gauge on the thing would always hover on the middle frond of the letter E. And the morning after that neighbour finally married off his dunderheaded, poochy-cheeked son who’d seemed destined for a life of lonely masturbation, he would rise at dawn, still hazy from an overdose of Barossa Shiraz, and fill the machine with petrol instead of diesel.

This wasn’t advice on tractors – it being clear, even then, that I’d never own any machinery a working man might need. It was advice on friendship. Owning things with friends, Dad said, was a sure way to get fewer friends.

So the week after my old man’s funeral, perhaps flushed with the emancipatory gusto of a son who no longer had to second-guess wise counsel, I bought a block of land with a lifelong mate. When people ask me now if I believe in an afterlife, I tell them I’ve heard the dead laughing. Dad laughs at me about twice a week, still, and he died in ’95.

It was a bush block in the Strathbogie Ranges with creek frontage, waterfalls and long views, cast with an array of granite boulders that gave it a monumental feel, as if you were walking through the garden of some goliath Rodin. Neither Jim nor I could afford it, so we decided to pool our money and become partners. Happy Adams holding title on a petite Eden – nature’s protectors, keeping hungry agriculture at bay. At the auction, we were so excited we spent way over our reserve. But, you know ... what price paradise? We both grimaced and got loans.

I’m told now that Indigenous Australians lived in perfect harmony with never a hint of a ruckus over territory. Them being Homo sapiens, it seems unlikely to me. But good on them if it’s true. What a wondrous example they might have been to Jim and I, who fell to fighting pretty much the day we got the key to the gate.

First night camping out on our creek, we started to discuss our plans for the property and realised we’d been dreaming contradictory dreams. Jim had by this stage drunk a bottle of whisky. And I don’t say this is necessarily a poor precondition for negotiations – after all, Churchill was pie-eyed at Yalta and he came away brandishing a string of peninsulas and peoples. But the whisky lit up Jim’s stridency as brightly as two bottles of merlot lit up mine until we were each our own North Star, blinded to the desires of others by personal radiance. Our partnership ended as fast as one of those co-ops of wistful hippies who cut each other’s throats at their first squash harvest.

First, we fought over the size of the shack we were going to build. Then Jim explained his plans to fell redgums to see the creek better. “We’re not cutting any trees,” I said. “You take a chainsaw out of your ute and I’ll shoot it.”

“You’ve brought guns onto the place?”