by Don Watson
Sheep, farmers say, spend their lives looking for a way to die. They get worms, fluke, lice and scab; they get lame, they get rickets, they get cast on their backs and can’t get up. They get Ovine Johne’s disease, bent leg, pulpy kidney, twin lamb syndrome, white muscle disease, ergotism, listeriosis, acute and subacute enterotoxaemia, perennial ryegrass staggers, Cumberland disease (anthrax) and catarrh. Any number of grasses and grains at various times of the year will poison them or cause them to lie down or fall over. Around their mouths they will grow contusions and blisters scarcely less horrible than their flyblown rears. A paddock full of sheep is never much more than a drench away from resembling a field hospital. Their morbid propensity left New South Wales with 40 000 sheep-dip sites contaminated with arsenic. It accounts for the mountains of plastic chemical containers in and about the sheds of modern sheep farms where the use of chemicals has trebled in recent years. In the 1950s they were drums of chlorinated hydrocarbons, such as dieldrin and DDT. Today, we are assured, the cures are less malignant.
It was my father’s father who liked sheep. ‘Where the sheep lives there lives man’, so when he came over the hills with us, so did his sheep. He had spent his childhood on a sheep station near Mt Gambier, South Australia, where his Edinburgh-born father was a manager of some kind. His mother was a half-sister of the proprietor, an Edinburgh Scot called Robert Gardiner who had made his fortune from whaling and sealing in Bass Strait, from grazing, and, by some accounts, digging up Aboriginal bones and selling them to scientific interests. Mt Gambier was great horse country and abounded with horsey Scots. Just a short ride over the dunes from the thunderous breakers at Port McDonnell lived the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon, the horsiest of all. My family owned a copy of his Poems, held his name in some reverence, were given to quoting his more familiar lines, and shared a less fatal dose of his melancholy disposition.
The Scottish factotum’s dual instincts of prideful independence and unstinting faithfulness – one feeding off the other in an unwitting Presbyterian frenzy – and a faint blood connection to the lord of the manor lent the family both a spurious gentility and related propensities for indignation and martyrdom. When, for reasons unknown, my great-grandfather was obliged to make a new start with his family in the forests of Gippsland, these quirks and airs came with them, together with a few items of silverware presented in appreciation of their service to the local church, a small journal in which were written out some useful aids to raising animals and crops, and an enduring suspicion that fate had dealt them a cruel hand and left them to languish beneath their rightful station. The bush provokes its own melancholy, so it was not helpful to bring theirs with them. The habits of loud laughter and forlorn irony were more useful.
First on a block in the low foothills of the Great Divide east of Melbourne, then, after the Great War, on a nearby soldier-settlement block, the paternal line laboured away with little return. For years my father lived with his parents and his two brothers in one half of a cowshed, and they milked the cows in the other half. As there had been before the war, there was trouble after it. No one ever really knew what the ‘trouble’ was, but one day my grandfather drove his wife into town in the jinker and put her on the train to Melbourne. And there she stayed while he raised the boys according to his own sometimes brutal lights. As each of the three boys turned fourteen he left school to work on the farm (and soon after had his teeth removed). Work meant work: my father reckoned that as teenagers, in a typical day’s work he and his brother might take a draughthorse, a crosscut saw, axes, maul and wedges into the bush, cut down a mountain ash or blue gum, saw the trunk into 2- or 2.5-metre lengths, split the lengths into posts, load the posts onto a sledge behind the horse and be home in time to milk the cows – by hand.
My grandfather liked Romney Marsh sheep. They are among the larger breeds, good equally for meat and wool, hardy as sheep go, ‘very weighty’ and, coming from the estuarine marshes of Kent, resistant to footrot, though that trait seemed less persistent in South Gippsland. Footrot had been the bane of the Mt Gambier flocks until the manager turned to robust, Australian-bred Corriedales, so we had them as well. My grandfather died in the sheep yard, among sheep, in 1951. He had a bad heart and had been given no more than a year to live, although my grandmother insisted his death had something to do with the lilac my mother had in a vase on the mantelpiece. We had haughty Border Leicesters with aquiline noses and startling, bandicoot-like ears; short-woolled and short-legged Southdowns (‘very firm and tasty’, according to a 1920 expert); comebacks, another Australian variety, produced by joining Merino ewes to rams of a large-framed breed, such as Border Leicester, and joining the progeny back to a Merino; and Dorset horns, with beautiful shell-like horns, and a useful tendency to bear twins.
I doubt if we ever had more than 150 sheep, but their character proved indelible. The bleating, the bustle in the pens, the sickly footrot smell, the sound of rattling dags, the tails lying in the grass a fortnight after rings called elastrators had been attached to them. The procedure was called marking and all testicles went the way of the tails, traditionally with a knife and a hot iron to sear the wound, or, in legend, strong teeth and a hot iron. I liked their smells and sounds, their silly habits, their nimbleness, the convenient size of them. I remember the rampantly healthy Southdown rams banging their heads together in the front paddock; in winter, a lamb or two in shoeboxes on the hob of the stove; the ewes stamping their feet at any threat to their lambs; the wethers’ mad leaping as they raced through a gateway; the pleasure a boy got from catching the half-grown lambs on marking day and delivering them up to the knife or the elastrator.
In 1916 that paternal grandfather of mine had left his young wife and two boys under three years of age and sailed with the First AIF to France. His sisters, by some accounts, may have done their bit with white feathers for shirkers. Rural enthusiasm for the Great War is one of the wonders of Australian history. In some country towns, news of the war was marked by the prolonged ringing of church bells, school bells, fire-brigade bells. There were parades, public meetings and formal pledges of loyalty to the King. Patriotic Leagues were formed, and patriotic funds, patriotic sewing guilds. There were patriotic concerts; patriotic services were held in the Protestant churches and patriotic send-offs were given to those departing. The mood, as John McQuilton says in his study of the subject, was ‘almost festive’. In just three small towns a thousand horses were driven in from the bush for sale to the expeditionary forces. Farmers donated horses and bullocks. Ladies got to work knitting.
German migrants found their way to our district after the Second World War. Not everyone made them welcome, though the same people very likely were not well disposed to any migrants. There was a poor German who lived in the valley and was much feared for his erratic driving of a Ford Custom. He was known as Hiney and I don’t think I ever saw him on his feet or heard him speak: there was just his goitred face behind the steering wheel. He was a veteran of the war and it’s possible his name was Heine. Blighted and lonely as his life seemed then, had he been at large in these parts in 1915 it would have been unliveable. In rural Australia residents of German descent were hounded and vilified, and German place names memorialising German pioneers were replaced with English, French and Belgian ones. Nowhere was imperial sentiment stronger than at the furthest reaches of the empire.
It is easy enough to see why men went to the war. In most minds, there could be no loyalty to Australia without loyalty to the British throne, and duty was a byword of such loyalty. To not go was to forfeit a place among the exalted, to be deemed of a less manly cast, to be a shirker. Men went to answer the call of their king, to protect the honour of the empire and their family, and because their friends did, or to escape their fathers, or as redemption for misdeeds, or for the adventure, or for the money. It is possible that redemption was among my grandfather’s motives. A bout of influenza and a couple of minor wounds aside, he returned physically unscathed from the battles at Pozièr
es, Hamel, Bullecourt, Mouquet Farm, Broodseinde Ridge, and Mont St Quentin-Peronne. But everyone said – as they always have about returned soldiers – that he was a different man afterwards.
My family was patriotic on both sides. The brother of my sweeping grandmother got himself from the bush to an enlistment booth within a week of war being declared in Europe, and fought with the 8th Batallion, the ‘Bush Batallion’, at Gallipoli and in France, where he was gassed. Her two cousins also served in France. Twenty-five years later, one of her two sons served as a gunner in the New Guinea campaign. In 1940 my father was invalided out of the army with rheumatic fever he caught in camp. His brother was a Rat of Tobruk. All those who went came back alive and sound in body. Their minds were another matter.
My father and his brother both joined the Light Horse in the 1930s, as their father had before them, and my mother’s brothers did the same. Their farms were not providing enough income to keep them, and they had taken jobs driving trucks, trapping and poisoning rabbits, droving, rotary-hoeing. They were following the pattern of Australian rural life: in hard times, small farmers put themselves on the labour market. The thirties were the hardest years, but they were inclined to say that the Light Horse made them the best. Horses drew them to the battlefields, but once the war started they were separated from their animals for the first time in their lives. They went into battle on foot.
It was common wisdom that horses were among the noblest and cleverest animals. We were told about horses that could open gates and that sailed across the ground so gently it was like riding a rocking chair. We never met these animals but we knew their names and characteristics, and in some cases, such as that of the fabled Charley (c. 1925–35), the wretched circumstances of their deaths. In my childhood we had draughthorses to pull a sled across the paddocks, or a scoop to clean out dams. But the draughthorses of old were legends of nobility. They worked till they dropped dead in their traces, some of them. For every marvellous horse there was a dog equally exalted: dogs that wore chamois boots and put flocks of sheep in and out of paddocks while the men were having lunch; a brave one on my mother’s side died at the hands of a kangaroo. There is scarcely a family photo that does not have a dog in it, and in some of them there are five.
Though the dogs and hacks of my lifetime could not compare to those of old, and led relatively spoiled and uneventful lives, they were essential to both productivity and convenience. But it was not for the likes of cow cockies that Australian working dogs were bred. It was for the pastoral industry. The vast dimensions of paddocks and stock routes of the interior required a dog that was biddable but tough. English black bob-tails and Smithfields had been favoured breeds but they lacked stamina, and their long coats and longer ears found them out in the heat. Like the border collie beloved of sheep people and sheepdog trials, the kelpie came down from the Scotch collie, emerging in the eastern Riverina late in the nineteenth century with the name of the kelp-dwelling, shape-changing Highland water sprite. By the 1890s short-haired descendants of the imported Brutus and Jenny and the locals Kelpie and Moss were scooting around paddocks in searing heat, fully formed with short, pricked ears, bright willing faces and inexhaustible verve. It’s not clear when they developed the ability to yard sheep by running across their backs, to travel long distances in the boots of cars with no water and hardly any air, and to stay grinning and enthusiastic in spite of daily being cursed, inhaling prodigious quantities of dust, threatened with death, and pelted with clods and sticks – but these things define them, and their grinning faces define something essential about the bush.
There is no dingo in the kelpie. Around 1870 a Mr Hall of Scone, New South Wales put dingoes to blue Northumberland drovers’ dogs and got Hall’s heelers, which became blue (or red) heelers, also called Queensland heelers, Australian heelers and Australian cattle dogs. These sturdy dogs are as canny, loyal and durable as kelpies, but less balletic and, on the face of things, less imaginative. Henry Lawson declared a dog of his ‘a better dog than I’m a man . . . and a better Christian’. For years this dog – and his mother before him – had follered him on the ‘cursed track’. He was ‘a true, straight, honest and faithful mate’. In two of Barbara Baynton’s brilliant handful of stories, loyal, intelligent and gallant dogs show up perfidious men. But the greatest of all dog-mates might be the two sheepdogs belonging to a shepherd from Burrangong station in the Riverina: lost in the bush, the shepherd kept himself alive by cutting pieces from the tails of the dogs and drinking their blood. He reached home six days later, the dogs coming along behind him, faithful as ever. Dogs were more than a material help: they helped faith survive in men and women.
In a tent beside the cypress hedge in the far corner of our front paddock, a man called Marky Harrup lived for three or four years. I don’t know what we paid him for cutting rubbish, and weeding and picking the pea crop we grew every year in those days, any more than I know how he survived the winters in that miserable place. He had come from the Aboriginal camp 30 kilometres away on Jackson’s Track with other pea pickers my father had recruited. The camp had been formed in the 1930s, in large part because the lands the local Aborigines had previously used were taken up by soldier settlers, of whom my grandfather was one. Some people said Marky was not Aboriginal at all, but ‘a white man gone black’, like Phillip, a Pole who had fought with the Free Polish Army in the Second World War, and now lived in a one-room hut in Slaughterhouse Lane with Cathy, an Aboriginal woman. The hut belonged to a good friend of my father’s, and they worked at the same sort of jobs as Marky and for the same scant wages.
The local doctor told us about Phillip’s war record. We would never have talked to him long enough to find out, just as we never talked to Marky long enough to find out who he was or where he came from, what he had done in his life or what had been done to him. My mother used to send us down to Marky’s tent with half a dozen buttered scones and he’d eat them on the spot and give us back the plate. He seemed to be scared of women, white women at least, and would go to elaborate lengths to be invisible when my mother was around. Life had taught him to know his place among white people. His face was handsome, lined and leathery, and he smelt to me of earth and tobacco. Especially tobacco: I think that smell on Marky was the root of my later addiction. I can see him cutting rubbish at the bottom of a hill by a watercourse where he got two snakes one day. That watercourse ran into another in the neighbour’s place. The neighbour had found axe-heads, grinding stones and shield trees. We never saw any, but we never looked either.
Eighty years before Marky came to work for us, the Victorian police surveyed the Aboriginal population and found only 489 full- or part-blood Aboriginal men in the state. That was less than half the number counted fourteen years earlier, which was about a sixth of the estimated male population at settlement twenty-five years before that. In 1880 the Victorian government had to send to Queensland for black trackers to hunt the Kelly Gang because there were not enough Victorian Aborigines left. By then it would have been thought unlikely that eighty years on, Marky or anyone like him would exist. That might be why he left such a memory: not only because his skin was different, but because he had the expression of a man in hiding from a society which believed he had only a limited right to exist. I never saw that expression on a farmer, or even on the faces of the kids who went to St Joseph’s convent school and were obliged to sit at the back of the school bus, and to whom we never spoke except to slight them.
The great poet Les Murray grew up as we did on a small farm. He liked cows, and he liked the simplicity of the men and women who raised and milked them. In his poem ‘Walking to the Cattle Place’, he pictured his family and the New South Wales community to which they belonged as descendants of ancient Boeotia, noble and virtuous in their rusticity. The Athenians (read the sophisticates of Sydney and Melbourne) scorned them for their backwardness, but in truth these people were the ‘vernacular’ Australians – those possessed of ‘our deepest common values and identificati
ons’.
There is much more charm in the poem than I recall seeing in the kitchens and cowsheds in our neck of Boeotia. Sons crushed by fathers, daughters by mothers; fathers and mothers terrorised by frustrated sons; anger, cruelty, superstition, prejudice, guilt as thick as the mud on their boots; despair closing in like the cypresses around the house. Perhaps they were different in New South Wales, but if the post-Enlightenment Athenians of Melbourne relegated us to an inferior caste of ‘bigoted, conservative, ignorant, despoilers of the environment, a doomed, obsolete group’, as Murray says they did his people, we didn’t notice. Conservative we were and bigoted up to a point, but no more than the national average and the same might be said about our ignorance. The environment scarcely concerned us, and our education, the Church, and government subsidies did more to persuade us that we were indispensable than doomed and obsolete. We did not want for a sense of our own importance. Did farmers ever?
Indolence was unforgivable, along with all forms of ostentation, vanity, immodesty and observable ambition. All inklings of self-love had to be disguised or internalised, a refreshingly old-fashioned manoeuvre to be sure, but not entirely healthy if taken to extremes. Far from innocent or inferior, we thought ourselves a good bit better than those city bludgers, even as we enjoyed the products of their labour and invention: the cars and hay balers, aspirins, cough balsams, light fittings, fencing wire, and the penicillin in the tubes we poked up the teats of our machine-milked cows. Our glumness we owed to no one’s prejudice, but to the weather and our own natures. Our happiness, in the main, we owed to our cows.
Two of the three common breeds of dairy cow in Gippsland came from the Channel Isles and took their names from there, and the third came from Ayrshire. We had Guernseys. Most farmers in the district had Jerseys. Guernseys are golden and white, docile, and produce milk rich in butterfat. Our forty-odd Guernseys were so quiet we could sit on their backs. Jerseys are brown or tan, silvery-tan, silver, or even dark grey approaching black. They have black feet and a black switch at the end of their tails, and a light creamy band around their muzzles. They are a little smaller than Guernseys and prettier – a good Jersey looks a bit like Audrey Hepburn – and their milk is even richer in butterfat and protein. Like Guernseys, they are quiet and good-natured, but the bulls are ferocious and should not be approached with anything less compelling than a pitchfork.
