The Best Australian Essays 2017

by Anna Goldsworthy

  And so, although I spent much of my childhood building hide-outs among the scribbly gums and skinny-dipping in a choice of twenty-eight dams, I only learned to link two pieces of wire with a figure-eight knot when I was thirty-one. Before 2014, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the difference between wallaby grass and kangaroo grass, what it feels like to put a rubber ring around a bull calf’s testes or how to prune a quince tree.

  Even now, entering the third year of my yet-to-be quantified apprenticeship, when I pepper Dad with questions and jot down his answers in a Moleskine I keep in my moleskins, I think he still hopes I’m going to wake up one day with a burning desire to be a full-time public servant who farms on the side. He seems astounded that I take an interest in continuing what he established, rather than leading my ‘own life’ (that is, procreating and buying a house). Dad didn’t get the memo that most Australian millennials are renters, unmarried and haven’t had kids yet. Nor the one that you’re only able to combine full-time farming with full-time city work if you opt out of third-wave feminism. That’s what happens when you spend much of your time in the back paddock with no-one for company but Suey the sheepdog.

  Dad recently told me that if he had his time again he would’ve been an orchardist instead of an economist. And that’s a shame, don’t you think? That statement – and his claimed loathing of the very lifestyle he so dearly loves – betrays what I think most disturbs him about my farming future: that I wish to revert to a kind of hipster remastering of the very world his father (he of the bark hut) escaped so that Dad could become a go-getter. My father is worried that when I grow up, I want to be a peasant.

  *

  In June 2010, I visited Iceland on assignment for the travel pages of a newspaper. It was three weeks after the eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull had grounded air traffic across Europe; when the wind blew from the south-east, a thin film of grey still settled on the windshields of Reykjavík. The tourist pap – T-shirts, tea towels, mugs – said it all:

  Don’t fuck with Iceland!

  We may not have cash, but we’ve got ash!

  Everywhere, it seemed, I encountered the hangover of the country’s financial crisis: garish housing estates, half-finished, lay empty; Hummers – once longed-for trophies of success – were scorned in the street as vulgar reminders of living beyond one’s means; the criminal prosecution of bankers dominated conversation. In the space of one generation, a nation of farmers and fishermen had become high financiers, and now they were asking if it was worth it. The mood mirrored southern Europe, where since 2008 thousands of young professionals, suddenly unemployed, had been moving back to ancestral plots of land. In some cases it was a question of survival: they needed something to eat.

  A paradigm shift was underway, a critique of the moment when a lifestyle had been replaced with a ‘career’. In a new Reykjavík bar focused on local produce, the menu captured the zeitgeist:

  There is something to be said about the old days, when people worked with their hands and produced something tangible. We hope you catch a glimpse of those days as you sip your coffee or munch on some tried and true Icelandic delicacies.

  Australia was spared the worst of the GFC, but not the disdain for the economic system that created it. The casualisation of the Australian workforce and the squeeze on the first-home buyers market have made emphasising saving for the future over living for the present less sacrosanct – let alone relevant – to my generation than to my parents’. Why slog away doing something you don’t enjoy for a house you may never own? Better to find meaning in other facets of work than financial remuneration.

  In many cases, jobs once seen as ‘unskilled’ are by necessity being filled by those who would have previously found work in academia, the media and the arts: just as your barista probably has a PhD in philosophy, the guy who sells figs to Canberra’s best restaurants each autumn has a similarly useless degree: Bachelor of Arts (International Relations), with honours in French. (Incidentally, I actually use the French a fair bit on my rounds – you’d be surprised how many Gallic pastry chefs lurk in Australia’s commercial kitchens.)

  While I agree with Dad’s scorn for the rising nostalgia of an insular and nativist Australia, I don’t think there’s anything demeaning or intellectually wasteful about pursuing the life of a small farmer. Dad’s right: I do want to be a peasant when I grow up. Restoring lost links between consumers and producers in a broken food system is rewarding and empowering. The recent proliferation of farmers’ markets and focus among home cooks and restaurant chefs on local, seasonal produce aren’t merely a question of taste. They speak to a growing desire for sustainability in both the ways we produce food and the communities who produce it. I was recently called a wanker for questioning why a friend was eating an out-of-season, imported kiwifruit. I relish the title. But I also relish the title of ‘writer’. For the past seven years I have worked on and off as a research assistant for a political scientist, to cover the rent and allow me to write two days a week. Initially, I approached farming the same way: when in the position to, I would use the profit from selling livestock and produce to subsidise my writing. But increasingly I don’t see why the two should be compartmentalised – my ‘career’, such as it is, divorced from my life.

  In his magisterial book The Art of Time Travel (2016), Tom Griffiths writes of how the late farmer-historian Eric Rolls combined his dual vocations:

  He wrote of the constant battle between words and acres, between the soil as a source of his originality and the farm as a demanding distraction. He knew that the battle to win time for writing was part of the necessary discipline.

  Rolls’s farm chores restricted his writing, but he recognised they also nourished it. American farmer and writer Joel Salatin calls this ‘intellectual agrarianism’ and sees it most purely embodied in Thomas Jefferson, who believed getting your hands dirty was crucial for deep thought; for the Romans, the notion of otium conveyed the prerequisite state of peace – physical and mental – for literary occupation in a rural retreat. Much has been written in recent years on the link between walking and creativity. I have found my otium on the farm, my mind subconsciously working on writing while I open gates and herd cattle. And among my peers it’s catching on.

  The average age of a farmer in Australia is fifty-eight. I’m thirty-two. A common lament of agricultural policymakers is that, with record sheep and cattle prices and emerging markets to our north, Australia could be the food bowl of Asia – but only if we can hold onto our farmers. In the most urbanised country on earth, the drain from country to city has become a torrent, leaving in its wake broken communities, farm gates locked for good.

  I can only speak of my own experience, and my experience is not the type of farming Chinese consortiums have their eye on. I believe farming should be conducted within the environment, not against it. At Gollion we haven’t ploughed a paddock for decades, because it destroys soil structure and releases carbon into the atmosphere. ‘Weeds’ are in the eye of the beholder out our way. I wouldn’t be interested in growing a high-yield, herbicide-and pesticide-dependent monoculture, either: depleting soils, killing wildlife with chemicals and encouraging crop failure and disease through specialisation is part of the problem, not the solution. Is it any wonder the political party most enthusiastic about fashioning this so-called food bowl – ostensibly the farmers’ party – is less enthusiastic about curbing greenhouse emissions? No farmer who cares for their country is blind to the increasingly challenging climatic conditions they face. Aside from the economic unreality of a high-wage advanced economy becoming Asia’s food bowl, where still-significant mineral exports appreciate the exchange rate and high commodity prices are offset by high farm costs, it’s not the lack of farmers that is frustrating this grand ideological plan so much as the land itself. But I am not alone in my friendship group in wishing to return to the land for creative, as well as moral and financial, prerogatives.

  I’m currently doing a course on
holistic farming near the southern New South Wales town of Braidwood. I had expected it to be full of ruddy-cheeked cattlemen in their forties and fifties; instead it is mostly people like me, tertiary-educated thirtysomethings who want to grow their own food to nourish their vocations. We are writers, a ceramicist and a filmmaker; a market gardener with a background in conservation; the manager of a local farmers’ market and her partner, who feeds his chooks on maggots from roadkill kangaroos. An industrial designer by training, he recently designed and built a house for his parents from gleaned materials. It cost $60,000.

  I was told about the course by one of my oldest friends, the scion of merino producers from an escarpment near the Great Dividing Range. His family are the ultimate agrarian intellectuals: they build their own unapproved dwellings and grow much of their food. This friend’s dad studied law to appease his parents, only to immediately become a farmer on graduating; his middle brother, who bakes the family’s bread, brews its beer and tans its hides, hasn’t needed to pay tax for years.

  Now that China isn’t buying so much of our iron ore, our prime minister tells us, we must be more ‘agile’ if we are to prevent a drop in ‘living standards’. But what standards are those – the wherewithal to buy more crap? Unlike most baby boomers I know, I don’t think quality of life is something you’ll find in the Aldi specials catalogue.

  *

  I like to ride my bicycle to Gollion on my weekly apprenticeship day. I prefer the way the country unfolds from the saddle rather than how it blurs by in the car. What were unpaved roads when I was a kid are now largely sealed. Only the odd stringybark has survived the march of Canberra’s northern fringe over the Limestone Plains – preserved for posterity and marketing. (‘The perfect place to nest’, the realty billboards proclaim.)

  Over the hill that marks the border between the ACT and New South Wales, the dumping starts: grass clippings and washing machines, bottles and prams. But slowly the bush asserts itself with more trees between fewer houses, cattle grazing the roadside with their heads through the fence, galahs passing overhead. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses, they always work in pairs.

  Hitting the dirt, my tyres turn white and I get my first glimpse of the farm – one lone old yellow box on our biggest hill – still ten minutes away. (You can see this tree from the summit of Canberra’s Mount Ainslie if you know where to look.) I lock my eyes onto it to avoid concentrating on the last climb, and when I’m hurtling into our valley Gollion opens like a flower: the flood plain with its eucalypt plantations, backed by six hills (green, silver, brown or yellow depending on the season), themselves backed by the distant smudge of the Brindabellas (always blue).

  I don’t know when I will be handed the reins of Gollion. That will be the true test. Sometimes I doubt whether I am responsible enough to manage it: I can be as reckless with my money as the next young cafe-breakfast enthusiast. I recognise how privileged I am to be in this position, but it also scares me.

  Nor have I yet decided what I will farm. I enjoy working with cattle and would like to keep them, but I think I like growing fruit the best. With Dad’s help, and on the back of feedback from chefs I already sell to, I am establishing an organic orchard of eighty black genoa fig trees; in the future, I want to explore growing pomegranates and maybe pistachios. I like the long game of seeing plants grow: if it’s true that millennials suffer from the need for instant gratification, this has been a good antidote.

  But for now, I’m still in training. The days I spend with my dad on the farm are ones of quiet, wholesome routine. Straining up fences. Marking calves. Shovelling compost. Planting trees. There are rituals to observe: morning tea with Michael Cathcart; lunch with Eleanor Hall; afternoon tea with Phillip Adams. Opening the ute door for Suey the sheepdog; swearing at Suey the sheepdog when she refuses to hop in next to us. Dad and I don’t say much to each other while we work, but I’m sure I’ll look back on these days as among the richest I’ve spent with him. There is a silent transaction underway. Skills are being taught. Knowledge shared.

  Bearing witness to it all, in sun and rain, is my akubra. I call it J.H. In the two and a half years since I turned thirty, J.H. has slowly come to fit my head – and my nascent identity as a primary producer. After hundreds of hours of being sat on, blown off and retrieved, it is now, thankfully, a sweat-stained, smelly and misshapen piece of rabbit felt.

  I’ve come to rely on J.H. Maybe a little too much. I recently accompanied my parents to a cattle sale in Victoria’s Western District. Naturally, I wore my akubra. Among this crowd of beetroot-faced, overweight cattle prospectors, J.H. was among the dirtiest, biggest hats. I looked the part – much to Dad’s chagrin. Worse than John Howard, he remarked as we got in the car to leave, now I looked like a member of the Young Nationals.

  The Bystander

  Lech Blaine

  There were seven of us. Five in the car, two in the boot. We were driving to a party no-one knew for sure was happening. This is how our nights played out. We followed hints and whisper trails of action, motivated by the thrill of the chase, or maybe just the fear of staying still and missing out and remaining unseen by the enormous crowd of people that populated our imaginations.

  Except now, with smartphones and social media, we were one step closer and three steps further away from the crowd. We didn’t need to be creative. We could see with our own eyes, in real time, exactly what we were missing out on and who we weren’t being seen by. So we climbed in cars and drove in the general direction of attention.

  The trip began on a semirural street. Narrow road. Trees climbed higher than my line of sight. Before we left, I snuck outside and jumped in the front passenger seat. I was short and chubby with dark hair that ran a mess beneath my ears.

  Tim sat in the middle of the back. Tall and square-jawed. He’d been my best mate since Year Eight. We went to St Mary’s, an all-boys Catholic school near the centre of Toowoomba.

  Everyone else went to Downlands, a more elite private school on the richer side of the city. Henry was back left. Soft features and bottom lip permanently split. Will was back right. Large and laid-back. Dom was the designated driver. He was excitable, with a hint of an American accent.

  The final two were out of view. They’d drawn the short straw of the boot. Hamish had pale and lanky limbs. He was quiet with a sly grin. Nick was short with thick arms and legs, a wild and prodigiously gifted rugby league player.

  Eighteen months earlier Nick had switched to Downlands on a rugby union scholarship, drawing Tim and me into a different social orbit altogether. My dad was a country publican. Tim’s dad was a meat worker. We’d been accepted into a sphere of old money and new homes built on sprawling acreages. It was our final year of high school. Everything was ahead of us.

  Up front there was nothing between the road and me except the windscreen. The speakers blasted ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis, an elegy hidden inside a singalong. My memory is a blinking mixture of lyrics screamed out incoherently and the stink of beer and sweat and cigarette smoke. A million things and nothing in particular.

  The trees disappeared abruptly, razed for the New England Highway. We waited at a freshly erected set of traffic lights. To our right was Highfields, a planned community fifteen minutes north of Toowoomba.

  When the bottom circle of the lights blazed green, we turned left towards the city. No other traffic to clash with. The singing petered out. We concentrated on our phones or on the windscreen. The car accelerated. Sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety. I kept my eyes straight and my breath bated. Billboards flicked white streaks behind me. I felt light in the head and heavy in the feet. The road, half-lit and disappearing, burnt a blur into my brain.

  My iPhone began to vibrate. I’d been texting a girl about a rendezvous planned for later that night. Sex was at the centre of my attention. I looked down to read the message. It was littered with emoticons. I typed a one-word response with two exclamation marks, but I never got around to pressing send.

  There was a glitch i
n our direction. My gaze shifted quickly between the two competing sheets of glass. We’d drifted onto the left-hand shoulder of the highway. The back tyre left the road for a fraction of a second, spinning out in the mouth of a gravel driveway.

  Dom reefed on the steering wheel, a knee-jerk attempt to regain control. He overcorrected the overcorrection. We zigzagged across the highway – right towards the median strip, left towards the shoulder, and right towards the median strip again.

  My first instinct was exhilaration. It looked like we were driving into farmland. Nothing serious enough to scream about. But my geometry was bad. Blame it on velocity. At ninety-five kilometres per hour, the car moved twenty-five metres every second. It took us approximately three seconds to travel from the gravel of the hard shoulder to the trees on the median strip.

  The car ploughed front-first into the vegetation. The windscreen filled with greenery. As we flew through the branches, the front of the car scraped the stump of a tree, spinning us another ninety degrees.

  The median strip led to the other side of the highway. We emerged boot-first into a flood of oncoming headlights. Screams howled from the back seat. I’m dead, I thought. Then it hit. Another car, speed meeting speed, like two protons colliding.

  *

  I didn’t get the luxury of a concussion. I stayed awake the whole way through. There was a glimpse of black, a few seconds max, when my head reeled from the soft impact against the dashboard. White pinwheels spun on the inside of my eyelids. Blood flooded back into my feet and fingers.

  After that everything went berserk. Liquids pissed from unseen engines. Radiators hissed with steam. The windscreen was missing. The wipers whipped against thin air.

  I sat there for a long time, dazed and amazed to be alive, staring blankly at the bonnet, which faced back towards the missing windscreen. I couldn’t see what we’d hit or been hit by. A sticky fluid broke waves against my ankles.