by Don Watson
Contents
Map
Everyone Was Happy
The Bush Means Work
What is the Bush?
The Bush Will Not Lie Down
An Asylum for Lost Souls
A Collision of Cultures
Striving to Stay in Existence
Gardens of Verdure
Town and Country
Farming the Flood Plain
No Smallness In It
Waiting for the Fire
Appendix
Images
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Credits
ALSO BY DON WATSON
Caledonia Australis
Recollections of a Bleeding Heart
Death Sentence
Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words
American Journeys
Bendable Learnings
for TDW and GDW
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity . . .
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, ‘Tintern Abbey’, 1798
The principal task of civilization, its actual raison
d’être, is to defend us against nature.
SIGMUND FREUD, The Future of an Illusion, 1927
I think that most men who have been alone in the bush
for any length of time – and married couples too – are
more or less mad.
HENRY LAWSON, ‘Water Them Geraniums’, 1901
Everyone Was Happy
the fuschia and the tree fern – the grandmother, the creek and the eel – a forest and how to clear it – a world of fire and ash – the lyrebird in the gully – snakes and other terrors – the bush becomes something else
I remember my mother’s father in a tattered hat and trousers tucked in his rubber boots, striding like Hiawatha across the paddock from his cowshed. I remember her mother sweeping. He strode, she swept. She swept as if not to sweep might let the devil onto the back veranda. Every morning she beat the gum leaves and cypress debris from those boards, and then from the steps that ran down to the garden, and the path that led past the vegetables and currant bushes and the lucerne tree that blocked out a view of the milking shed and the pig pen, one side of which was a fallen tree trunk. And on to the back gate, the woodheap, and the lavatory in the shade of the cypresses – a grim watchtower with a bench seat of well-worn planks from which one could see through the cracks in the door to the chopping block, the place where the old house had been before the great bushfires of 1898, and the distant blue-green hills. Everywhere she wielded the broom with elbow grease and grim purpose. The back veranda was her frontier, those steps the ramparts of her civilisation.
The front veranda she swept less often. Like most front verandas in the Australian countryside, it was not much used. The front garden with the big white azalea, the bee-bush and the foxgloves she kept in good order, as she did the side one with the snapdragons, cineraria and wall flowers, but all visitors save inexperienced travelling salesmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and city motorists with flat tyres or boiling radiators came in by the back door. She would say, ‘I expect the men will be in soon,’ and the men would come lumbering up the steps. ‘The men’ were her husband and sons and they came in for lunch – called dinner – and morning and afternoon tea. They moved with the stiff-backed, stiff-buttocked gait of farmers everywhere, scattered the flies from their backs with their hats, let the wire-screen door slap behind them on its rat-tail spring and sat down in the kitchen with a sigh or a groan. The groan was partly because their joints and muscles ached with effort, partly from habit, and partly in imitation of their elders. It was a noise from deep within the culture. There had been no house fifty years earlier; no farm thirty years before that. But the sense of the house and the farm and the people was that they had always been there.
The meat safe was on the back veranda. So were the copper, the bootjack and boots and, enclosed at one end, the bath. On Christmas Day we sat on the veranda and steps and ate our dinner. In the shade on one side of the steps stood the fuchsia, a native of South America where hummingbirds make love to it, but here it gets by with spinebills and honeyeaters. On the other side was a tree fern, brought up from the creek, orphaned and out of place among weatherboards and cypresses, but thriving just the same. There were always a few bluebottles crawling on the boards with their bulbous translucent back ends sticking up, and a couple of native bull ants, and an imported blowfly buzzing about waiting for its dose of Flytox. One year the grasshoppers were bad and they hopped all over our dinners, and another the steps were stained with the green flesh of caterpillars. Our elders remembered a year when the train couldn’t make it up the rise to Thorpdale because of the caterpillars on the rails. But they had been worse in the very early years: no sooner had the land been cleared of its ancient vegetation and sown down with grass than caterpillars came and ate the farms clean as the streets of Melbourne, and the cattle starved.
The smallest thing can excite the image of that veranda and my grandmother treading it, as inexorable as a ghost. The smell of milk, cream, meat and pastry. Cypresses and gums baking in the sun or stewing in the damp. Rubber boots and dogs stained red by the soil. Flyspray. Trout. The smell on the days she washed and threw the boiling water from the copper on the boards and scrubbed it off with her broom. At certain times there was the smell of just-made jam: melon, raspberry, plum, quince. Farming families made great quantities of jam and ate it every day; they ran on sugar, along with flour, salt, oats, meat, peas, beans and potatoes. And butter and eggs, and pumpkins, swedes and scones. We ate like aristocrats. It was a veranda of smells and tastes and either will bring it back. Made by my mother in the way her mother did, a scone will do for my memory what that madeleine of his Aunt Léonie’s did for Marcel Proust’s.
The leaves of the gum tree are slightly convex and either long and pointy or sickle-shaped – both designs for retaining moisture. They hang vertically and provide scanty canopies that let the light in and make the forest less shadowy than the woods of the Northern Hemisphere. Their oil glands give the bush not only its distinctive smell, but, on hot days when the oil vaporises, the beloved ‘blue distance’, as Miles Franklin called it. The same oil makes the leaves highly combustible and being shaped also to catch the wind, once alight, they are adept at spreading fires. Only rarely is the ecological strategy suited to the domestic one. While gum leaves lying on their backs fly away at the merest touch of the broom, leaves face down move only after several slaps, as if to show that the bush will not surrender to women and fuchsias. Yet it is possible that deep in the thoughts that accompanied her daily ritual, my grandmother’s banging of her broom had more to do with the design of her own life than with nature’s. If the Tom Collins of Such is Life had wandered onto her veranda on a bad day, he might have seen in my grandmother a little of his puritanical Mrs O’Halloran, who had ‘explored the depths of male worthlessness’. There was, Tom added, ‘no known antidote to this fatal enlightenment’.
Tough as she was in almost everything, she was also phobic and superstitious. Crossed knives at the kitchen table portended a family fight. Spilled salt meant bad luck. To have lilac in the house was to invite death or some other calamity. It might have come from her English side, which had left London with the second and third fleets. They were convicts, though it seems no one ever told her, and she handed on to us a tale about their arrival from which the unwelcome facts had been carefully excised. Snakes and lightning frightened her in equal measure and she never tired of warning us about them. The first growl of thunder put her in a state, and as the black clouds swarmed closer she drew the curtains,
covered the mirrors and the cutlery. She always said the storms had been much worse when she was a child and some of the forest was still standing. The night frightened her as well, or at least to be alone in it did, though she didn’t mind sending a grandchild on his own to that stygian lavatory, to sit there in the blackness hardly daring to breathe, waiting for some venomous thing to crawl from among the toilet paper in the old saddlebag nailed to the wall.
I’m not sure that my grandmother would have said she loved the bush: it was not the kind of thing she was given to saying about anything or anyone, and her husband, Rechabite and member of the Orange Lodge, was even less inclined to it. There was a drinking side to the family and an anti-drink side: she was anti-drink, like her mother, who ran the Temperance coffee palace. But neither side, as far as I could tell, were much given to hugging or throwing kisses. Whatever affection they had for the natural environment, and whatever regret they felt about its passing, was buried beneath their fear of it and their uncompromising purpose – to pay the bills and feed and clothe their children. Their objectives were not aesthetic or revelatory or spiritual, even if they were sometimes encouraged in their efforts by Biblical injunctions to tame the wilderness, to live by the sweat of their brows and so on. If not in doctrine, in psychology they were at least half Calvinist in the bleak manner of the Scottish east whence in the main they sprang.
But farmers of all religious and cultural varieties incline to the hard matter of fact and to the phlegmatic. They live with the apparently loveless conception of cows, sheep and pigs, and with the death of them, and with the weather and failed crops. When needs must, they will destroy a forest and live with the weeds, pests and regrowth that follow in its train, and any guilt or doubt that might invade their consciences. To be a farmer, first let the iron into your soul: if dejection should also get in before you close the gate it, too, is part of your lot. To deflate hope, squash excitement and expect awfulness is emotional insurance. It is not practical to mourn the death of a wombat or bandicoot: one may as well mourn the pig that owes its existence to your liking for bacon. A good dog one may mourn a little, because a good dog is a loyal servant to men and women and seems to understand their needs, but one should never make a fuss about these things.
A few of the native birds went on singing after their forest was gone and there was little left to pollinate – the grey thrush, the song thrush, the butcherbird: and the wrens, silver-eyes, thornbills and fantails that flitted about happily, as if in denial. Every few years a pair of whipbirds came up from the creek to the garden and tried to build a nest under the shrubs. The world’s songbirds originated in Australia. Nightingales and mocking birds have Australian ancestors. Especially in the early morning, a gully in a mountain ash forest might easily be taken for the nursery of the whole extended singing family.
In the daily contest with nature the women were as determined as the men, as faithful to the cause. But the women made exceptions of the surviving birds. They talked to them, treated them in the garden as companions and friends; saw in them, possibly, intimations of grace. Their sweet and friendly calls, their balletic nectar-sipping sensuality, their brilliance were hints of another, dreamed-about dimension. I think it was the women’s greatest pleasure to make their gardens borders between those two worlds – theirs, the world as it was; and the birds’, the world as it had been, before the Fall.
In 1840 the Polish adventurer Paul Strzelecki led a small party into the eastern end of the South Gippsland ranges that would later bear his name. In the deep gullies of ‘nearly impenetrable . . . scrub, interwoven with grasses and gigantic trees, fallen and scattered in confusion’ they almost perished. Koalas captured by Charley Tarra, their Aboriginal guide, kept them alive until they got through to Westernport Bay and made their way to Melbourne.
A year later, W. A. Brodribb, a most enterprising and gifted squatter whose sheep and cattle grazed at various times in Tasmania, the Monaro and the Riverina, found the going almost as tough as Strzelecki had. He too was impressed by the ‘immense trees’ and was similarly inconvenienced by the fallen ones: 100 metres long and ‘like the side of a house to get over’. As if the trees and the undergrowth were not obstacles enough, the whole of it was bound with supplejack and creepers. ‘Trying country’, Strzelecki said, but he saw potential in the blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus) and mountain ash (E. regnans). And Brodribb was impressed enough to remark on the beauty of the fern groves and the commercial potential of the timber that grew on their margins, ‘without a branch on the trees for at least 100 feet’. He noted it was very rich country and would ‘some day be all under cultivation’.
If the men who came to clear and cultivate it marvelled at the bush, only rarely did they say so. They saw the red soil, the permanent springs, the creek, all signs of rainfall reliably in excess of 1000 millimetres a year, and they took up their axes. It was an immense labour by not a great many people to clear all this away and sow it down with grass and clover, oats and maize to feed cows and fatten pigs. Yet the style of my ancestors’ operation was almost casual. With the permission granted the landless classes by the colony’s Selection Acts, in 1873, two cousins (and great-great uncles of mine) David Forsyth and David Scott Graham (natives of Angus), together with George Glen Auchterlonie, rode into the forest and after exploring for a few days chose two blocks. ‘Dave & I went there after dinner and pegged out 320 [acres] each,’ Auchterlonie wrote. Then they drew straws to decide who should get which block. That was the end of July 1873. Forsyth put in his application for a licence the following month and Auchterlonie three months later.
By the end of September the blocks had been surveyed, and though they didn’t know with much precision which creek was which or where they all flowed, they set to work ringbarking the big trees and cutting the scrub. Ringbarking, a practice imported from North America, involved notching the trunk in a circle to about the depth of an axe-head. ‘After dinner I went with Jim to ring trees on Daves block I could ring an acre in 2½ hours & Jim could cut down all the saplings in about 2 hours.’ Eight hundred hours (320 acres by 2.5 hours) and a few days’ burning in the late summer put paid to several million years. The ringbarked trees stood for anything up to a century, glum spectres good for firewood and parrots’ nests, and believed by some settlers to ‘sweeten’ the soil, while a few giants, outnumbered by pine and cypress hedges, lived on in the gullies and along the roadsides.
More selectors arrived, ‘with such wonderful ideas of the value of the land that everyone was happy’, as one of the originals recalled. Having crawled from under the social pyramid, they ‘worked like tigers’ on their own behalf. They hacked at the understorey, chopped and sawed and ringbarked. For months, in parts of this ‘appalling’ forest they scarcely saw the sun or anything standing more than 45 metres in any direction. Among the trees they felled, one, the so-called Cornthwaite Tree at Thorpdale South, was measured on the ground at 114 metres and declared to be the world’s tallest hardwood. Within a few years there were three mills at Thorpdale. From one 5.2-hectare lot, 250 000 standard palings were cut. But vast quantities of timber were simply burned or left to rot.
Henry Lawson wrote of a selector who spent his first two weeks trying to get rid of a single tree, and the next many months in a futile battle with the weather, diseases of stock, an adjacent squatter, and all manner of misfortune. Lawson’s selector went broke and mad. Not so these people. The speed with which the forests were transformed was astounding. By 1878 Auchterlonie had pastures of cocksfoot 1.5 metres high. He was also growing Yorkshire fog grass, Italian ryegrass, and English clover, plants that would in time determine the colour and texture of the landscape and attract new occupants: quail arrived from the grasslands, along with starlings, blackbirds and Indian mynahs. Crows and magpies multiplied. The selectors passed on memories of eating little but damper and treacle, and a Miss Moncur recalled eating crows. (In fact they were ravens, Corvus coronoides, but not to her or anyone else until recently, and she wasn
’t eating them for long.) Auchterlonie and his neighbours were growing berries, hops, wheat, barley and rape. Very soon they had young orchards of apple trees – Five Crowns, Reinettes, Pippin, Adams Pearmain and Northern Spy, now vanished varieties. The virgin soil grew legendary crops of potatoes, colossal pumpkins and marrows; parsnips 76 centimetres long were reported, and turnips that did for two or three dinners.
Forsyth had a cream separator by 1878, and as they also had flour and eggs, it can’t have been long before they were eating the first of a million scones. Some selections did not lie as well as others and some had poorer soil, but in the space of a single generation, on the better blocks the ancient forest became home to families living in a degree of comfort on what they earned from cream, raspberries and currants, bacon and grass seed. Twenty cows, because a man could milk about fourteen in two hours twice a day, and his wife six or eight. The cows got grass and maize and oats; the pigs, skim milk and pollard. Within a decade and a half a cooperative factory had been established to make butter that the English squatter Oscar de Satgé judged ‘equal to the best Danish article’.
One old Gippsland pioneer named Holmes reckoned no work required more endurance than ‘swinging a five to six pound axe from daylight to dark’, scrub-cutting down in the tangled undergrowth, in drizzle, rain or heat. They called it scrub, even when the top tier of the forest reached 100 metres high. Among the men who swung their axes up to their ears in razor-sharp sword grass and all manner of other impediments to swinging, Holmes recalled one who had been a town clerk, another a miner; a butcher, an architect, a ‘Ceylon nigger-driver’, and a couple of school teachers. In the teams of scrub-cutters, Holmes knew a Cambridge University student who drank very heavily and drowned in a dam, and the nephew of an English baronet.
For all the effort with the axe and hoe, the same Mr Holmes spoke of exhilaration: ‘every day spent in opening up the bush, indeed every hour meant the opening up of a new page of natural history; every fresh step exposed by the intelligent axeman an area that had never before come under the observation of civilised man’. As for uncivilised man, Holmes believed the many stone axes they found proved that Aborigines had once roamed the ranges, but he doubted they had been there since the big forests grew.
