by Don Watson
The bellows of cows separated from their bawling calves, the calf corpses hauled with ropes feet first from their exhausted prostrate mothers, the heifers madly following the tractor with their stillborn progeny dragged behind – from this daily puerperal spectacle he would return composed. Soon after the milking machines fell silent he would come walking through the grey drizzly murk of a winter’s evening laced with chimney smoke, up from the cowshed to the back porch, past the doomed calves in the calf shed and the woodheap under the pine, as fixed and unfailing as the hens settling on their fowl-house roosts, the magpies in the cypresses. He washed for tea, put on a clean shirt if necessary and combed his hair; never let his standards slip, or the little rituals that maintained them.
Farming is like playing a piano: it is measured violence. It teaches a man willing to learn that there is a right way and a wrong way of doing everything. The farmer must meet every effort of nature with a calculated countervailing force: the thistle with the hoe or spray, the log with the axe or chainsaw, a disease with a drench, horns with a dehorner. Let things go for a moment and a week’s work will become a month’s, the month’s a year’s, and very soon the thistles are the size of saplings and the farmer is sitting defeated in his ant-eaten weatherboard and numbering his days by the level of the lavatory can. At least that was the impression from some road-gates. Some farmers never moved on to the spray or the chainsaw; they let their fences fall down, their dams silt up and their hedges shut out the light. They left the horns on their cows or took them off crudely with a tenon saw. Perhaps despair or regret, or poetry or nature, had crept into their souls. The difference between that kind of farmer and the other kind – our kind – was nothing more than a quirk of fate or character, but the world was divided on these lines.
The mental images have not faded. The subject cannot be separated from the settings in which he worked: the hills and the trees and the fences and wooden sheds and yards and the cattle and crops and the back porches with their boots and coats, the smell of mud and manure, and the rush of the westerly in the pines. In a dry spell he would tap the tank beside the kitchen window. He tapped the barometer just about every day of his life. In the evening the wind moaned in the Chinese cedars, the calves bawled, the bulls roared their lust. At night the possums rattled their throats in the trees, fighting for territory, discouraging owls and dogs. The dogs barked, howled sometimes. Magpies welcomed the mornings with a warble, the thrush with its thrill of a song.
The images are like photographs, except in most old photographs the subjects are gathered for a special occasion, a wedding or a dance or a picnic in some Arcadian spot, or just outside their poor huts. My subject labours on the unornamented earth: ‘That huge and gross body of dust, stones etc. which supports our feet and affords us nourishment’, as the family Dictionary of the Bible described it. When photographers followed their subjects to work they made them pose, on a reaper and binder, or beside a bullock team, on a plank with axe poised 10 metres up a mountain ash. We have to read what we can from the setting, from the looks in their eyes, the way they hold themselves. What happened when they moved we can only imagine.
Yet the way he moved is precisely what I remember about him. The images my mind retains are memorials to the force he exerted on the physical world – or at least the small patch of it on which he had made his home. So long as it was daylight, living and moving were the same things. Living and working were the same.
It stands to reason then that I remember him in the act of working, for in physical work he expressed his life’s purpose and the grace this granted him. That is the puritan’s creed, as well as his fate. Work was what he knew most deeply. With farmers of his generation and before, it was often all they knew, all they had time to know. At the same time as these images speak of abundant self-possession and power over their environments – and over their children – they also resound with what they did not know.
A handful of Methodists have as much claim as anyone to be the founders of Poowong. They were the first to build a church: a simple wooden chapel high on the ridge, facing the cold southerlies. There among the felled and bleaching ringbarked trees they sang of sin and self-delusion, of grace and love, and of their confident belief that when they ‘quit this cumbrous clay,/And soar on angels’ wings away,/ My soul the second death defies,/And reigns eternal in the skies.’ It’s still there, declared a ‘historic’ chapel now, up the hill from the old Bunurong campsite.
Presbyterians and Anglicans followed and built their churches in more sheltered positions. In the 1950s one family commanded both the butter factory and the front pew of the Presbyterian church, and with three or four allies from the better farms, they pretty well ran the church and a good deal of the town itself. Presbyterians seemed to have more than their share of the good farms, and some, like ours, that were not so good. Some selector families had done well enough in the first fifty years to build what were called ‘fine homes’: stately weatherboard houses of generous proportions and verandas on three sides. When the weather was kind and the flowers were in bloom, ladies held garden parties. Our house had been built within a few years of the first packhorses arriving and was a pretty basic affair, but at least it was soon sitting in a garden.
It might be going too far to call it feudal, but hierarchical the community most definitely was. To be on the land – even very steep, bracken-and-burr-infested and heavily mortgaged land – was to have an unspoken edge in respectability. To be Presbyterian sharpened the edge a little. In Western Australia, the early-twentieth-century Irish Presbyterian James Twigg had the ‘sense of difference’ even though his faith had lapsed and his land was so benighted he had to hunt possums and rabbits and hire himself out castrating lambs. The land reduced him to a ‘ghoul-like looking creature’. Yet he thought the universal franchise was a curse on the country; to give a tramp a vote equal to that of a landowner was madness, and he cleared out to Africa.
True, a handful of our local business owners were respectable enough, but in general it was suspected that towns inclined naturally to wickedness, and that children of the farms best keep their distance from children of iniquity. ‘God made the country, and man made the town’, as William Cowper said. The thought had come down from the Old Testament: every town was a potential fleshpot, and it was a fact beyond dispute that people living close together and without cows to milk and calves to feed were prone to mischief, particularly in the evenings. There were rumours. ‘Apparently’ they were more than rumours.
So long as the people of the country are the real Australians, other people are less real. This might be only to say less distinctively Australian, or it might mean out of touch with reality and real people, and not knowing which side their bread is buttered on. Then again it might mean effete, parasitic bludgers: sybarites, late risers, people with no conception of what it is to be at the mercy of the elements, the needs of animals and soils, unreliable markets. E. J. Brady, a friend of Henry Lawson and a would-be Jack London of the bush, thought bank clerks and their like – the ‘idlers’ and ‘dandies’, ‘pigmies’ and ‘vegetables’ in the cities – were akin to a third sex. Bush people led lives of ‘strength and usefulness’; city life was all ‘weakness and futility’. Bush people did not need to think this to know it at some level.
A Gippsland historian and long-time observer of the province, Patrick Morgan, described the Calvinist mentality of a typical South Gippslander as ‘tight, closed, devoted to one single thing with religious fervour to prove himself worthy’. By worthy he means of ‘the elect’, who, he says, paraphrasing the sociologist Max Weber, ‘took the place of the absent aristocracy’. This may not have been true of every community in those hills, but it was true of Poowong. Not that the non-elect took much notice: along with the sturdy Anglicans and a residue of the founding Methodists, there was an equally staunch bloc of sceptics and Epicureans who gathered by the local garage on a Sunday morning to talk about the football of the day before and – I thought b
itterly with my head down in the back of the car – to snigger at God’s elect chugging by to worship at the Presbyterian church.
The old women who gathered under the trees after the service were too blackly fearsome for a boy to more than glance at. Viewed through a child’s eyes, the men might have risen from the grave for the occasion; their transparent skin like parchment maps, with brown blotches and deltas of fine blue lines, stretched so tight across their noses and around their mouths it was a wonder they could talk, much less sing hymns. They had been born in Victoria’s heyday, never knew sunscreen or moisturiser, and had long since forgotten their own teeth. But through those taut lips talk they could, doubtless of milk and cattle prices, sheep – there were still some in the district – the coronation, cricket, Suez, and the weather both recent and forecast, including the long-range forecast. The long range forecaster was Inigo Jones, who reckoned the weather in 35-year cycles which he believed were determined by astronomical events. Job had had as much to go on. In the absence of satellites, computers and knowledge of the Southern Oscillation Index, his forecasts were hokum. But, wanting to believe in him much as they wanted to believe in God, the Presbyterians were prepared to grant him the same benefit of the doubt.
Our new farm was a broken-up bit of an old selection – the steeper bit, without river frontage, but most of it lay well enough. There were a couple of springs and a tussocky swamp; watercourses where, for want of protection from the sun, a dozen tree ferns slowly expired among the hawthorn and blackberries; a paddock in which some of the original blackwoods and swamp gums had survived, and a bank where hazels had. The boundary fence was broken down and the farm on the other side of it was a prodigious mass of blackberries, bracken, thistles and ragwort, as were the steepest parts of ours. Rubbish, it was called, and in my youth and childhood it lay at the heart of the meaning of work.
Work meant getting rid of it. A paddock with rubbish in it was ‘dirty’. The provenance of the matter to be destroyed was not important; native bracken and burrs – we had a ‘burr paddock’ – were as much rubbish as Scotch thistles or capeweed. A second cousin who often stayed with us used to say that bracken was pretty. She was right: it looks beautiful under gum trees and on the banks of creeks, the purply older fronds beneath the tender green ones capturing light and stillness according to the breeze. Selectors, surveyors, and others obliged to sleep on the ground made their beds from it. But in a paddock, competing with the grass and clover, it was a pest. We sliced it away with our fern hooks, year after year, until it gave up. Ragwort, an exotic, was even dirtier than bracken. You didn’t cut ragwort, you pulled the flower heads off it and stuffed them in a bag.
The aim in the paddocks was as for the veranda and kitchen – to make a world without blemish. Making enough to live on was the first imperative, but an aesthetic of spotlessness also drove our efforts. Only in what was clean and orderly did the possibility of beauty exist. And if beauty is truth and truth beauty, then truth too could only exist where there was no rubbish. What lived in rubbish if not the iniquitous fox, snake and rabbit? Herein lay the moral imperative of our lives: whatever was dirty was also shameful. To live with a dirty farm was as if to live without changing one’s underwear, it was to let oneself go, to sink into some dark empire of failure and disgrace, halfway to hell itself.
The roadsides, too, contained rubbish: introduced grass species, hawthorn, self-sown plum and apple trees, native wattles, hazels and musk, coprosma, cotton bush, blackwoods, burrs that caught on socks, the riparian clumps we called tussocks, and sword grass which had sliced the hands of the pioneers and the flesh of their packhorses, and sliced our hands too when we were careless enough to trail them through it. Making our way from school, we walked a sort of concourse of natural history. At the bottom of the hill, 200 metres from the road gate, stood a colossal stump, 4 metres high and 2 across. The Methodist patriarch Caleb Burchett reckoned he cut down a blue gum that measured 111 metres and was 600 years old. It might have been this one. The nicks high up in its side had been made by axemen for the planks they stood on when they cut it down. They looked like eye sockets, still staring blindly across the Bass Valley long after all life had gone. Two ceramic insulators were screwed to the stump, and into the 1950s the telephone line that ran through them connected our road to the world.
Of course the land was more productive for being clean, and to most eyes more attractive. It may be taken as another effect of the bush on my character, if not the nation’s, that the same drive to cleanliness also taught the child to forever spot the thistle in the host of golden daffodils; to see the imperfection, or even the potential for it, before he saw the loveliness. This was a consequence as unavoidable as the contrary one, which was to be tempted beneath the blackberries with the fox.
My father’s father, who had come with us to the new farm, quickly planted a Norfolk Island pine and a row of mixed Northern Hemisphere conifers. Rhododendrons and other plants brought from the former property went in down one side of the house, the beginning of what, through the steady exchange of cuttings, roots and bulbs with neighbours and relations, would become our jardin anglais. In the paddocks there were still a few tall blue gums and messmates, and each year another remnant, a koala, would clamber over the fences and run the gauntlet of cows with lethal horns and seat itself in one of the gums. Sometimes it brought a young one on its back. We’d gaze up at them, much as we might have looked at a manatee if one had turned up in the dam. From our beds at night we heard their pig-like grunts, a noise which in the bush is capable of frightening campers a kilometre away.
The Kulin people called koalas Gurrboors, according to Georgiana McCrae, but she called them ‘a sort of sloth’. Koala bears we called them, and at other times they were called monkey bears and marsupial bears. Of course, they’re not bears at all. Phascolarctos cinereus, meaning ash-coloured pouched bear, roughly speaking, evolved from a kind of wombat. When they gave up the wombat’s phenomenal digging ability for life in the eucalypts, they took with them the wombat’s pouch, which in consideration of their young who would otherwise be buried when they burrowed, faces to the rear. In one of those not uncommon flaws in evolution, this meant that the female koala was stuck with a pouch that faced downwards, an obvious inconvenience for a mother that sits in a tree. Evolution solved the problem by coming up with a kind of drawstring.
On the family farm they sat in the blue gums. Where I now live, they seem to prefer the mannas, but I have seen them climb other trees as well. A neighbour says he has seen them eating pine needles. One New Year’s Eve I heard two sulphur-crested cockatoos in a manna gum screeching wildly at a koala as it made its way up a stringybark. Perhaps they were telling it that it was up the wrong tree. As it adapted to the sclerophyll age and the meagre diet of leaves it allowed them, the koala’s brain shrank to a fraction of its former size. Koalas are to be found in a dozen different eucalypt species along the east coast as far as Cape York, where they are much smaller, and inland along corridors of river red gums. They sleep or rest for 19–20 hours a day; the remaining hours they give to eating toxic, indigestible and pitifully unnourishing gum leaves. No other creature bigger than an insect could sustain itself on such a diet.
Koalas are a protected species and a ‘national icon’, which must mean that these endearing if pea-brained creatures represent something we cherish. Time was, when the bush was deciding the native soul, we thought less highly of them. They make poor eating, the flesh being muscular and smelling powerfully of eucalyptus, but this did not save them. As if it wasn’t enough to cut down the trees they lived in and depended on for food, they were, along with most other fur-bearing creatures of the forest, hunted for their skins – about fifteen made a reasonable rug or bedspread. Millions were exported in the early part of the twentieth century: in 1919 at least a million from Queensland alone. Economic slumps were bad for native creatures. Across the country vast numbers were shot, poisoned, or by various means hooked out of trees when governmen
ts put a bounty on their hides to help necessitous farmers and the unemployed during hard times in the 1920s. Having made them a species of rural subsidy, Queensland established a koala sanctuary in 1927, but in South Australia they were hunted to extinction.
Oscar de Satgé was out driving on the Darling Downs with a fellow sheep man named Mason when they chanced on ‘a quaint fight between two eagle-hawks and a native bear; the eagle hawks were getting the best of it, and being too engaged in the fight to observe us, allowed Mason to get within shot, so he first shot one hawk, then the other; but when he got to the bear, that showed fight, and we had to knock it on the head too’. Arthur Henry, son of the first selector on the land at the bottom of our road, and also a bush memoirist, only thought twice before killing koalas because skinning them meant putting up with the stink. As a teenager Arthur set snares to catch wallabies too. He appears to have caught them in numbers, along with ‘kangaroo rats, tiger cats, etc.’, and on one occasion a young woman, ‘but within a year, a disease (worms) killed the wallaby in Gippsland, they died like flies. I have seen them hopping along and drop dead.’
I have never seen a wallaby in the district, nor a kangaroo rat or a tiger cat. Nor, in our part of it, a lyrebird or a Leadbeater’s possum (Gymnobelideus leadbeateri), the endangered relict species that inhabited the Bass Valley in the days of the great forest. What sort of wallabies they were Henry did not say, but it’s likely they were red-necked wallabies (Macropus rufogriseus), also known as brush wallabies or brushers and in Tasmania as Bennett’s wallabies, which continue to thrive in other parts of the eastern seaboard. Who knows how many other wondrous little things vanished? In the Victorian Wimmera in 1846, a settler reported a burrowing canary-yellow mouse that the Aborigines hunted, but there the record ends, and the mouse with it we must presume. If once there had been a canary-yellow mouse in the Wimmera, might there have been an orange or navy-blue one in Gippsland?
