by Don Watson
It went further than cypress hedges and English gardens, or peacocks, blackbirds, foxes and starlings, useful correctives though they were. Songs helped – settlers intending to write diaries often scrawled the words of remembered songs and never wrote much else. The Australian bush was uniquely deficient in original songs. The most famous of them, ‘Waltzing Matilda’, is set to a Scottish tune; ‘Click Go the Shears’ to an American one. ‘The Banks of the Condamine’ seems to have been a resetting of an English song from the Napoleonic Wars. As the country’s preeminent folklorist, A. L. Lloyd, also pointed out, there are ‘astonishingly few’ Australian songs about love. It might have been the prolonged absence of women. From his hut by the Great Australian Bight a shepherd wrote that ‘the moon is not at the full or I would have sent you a verse or two’, but he was writing to his master, the owner of the sheep.
Some people found the pangs less painful when sheep or vines were in sight. Some looked forward to the day when the early colonial buildings had become ruins. Searching for the familiar English picturesque in the Australian landscape was not a casual fad, but an attempt to satisfy a psychological craving, to dull an ache. The bush gutted them: by the way it looked and sounded – or failed to sound – and in the absence of recognisable antiquity.
It was older than antiquity: that was what disturbed them. The unsettling sense that the bush was older than time. ‘[Y]ou walk on and on, there’s a feeling comes over you that you’ve gone back to Genesis,’ an old shepherd told Rosa Praed. On her veranda on a winter’s night Praed heard the neighing of frightened horses and the bellows of ‘imprisoned cattle’, together with the sounds of the forest’s elemental forces – ‘ghosts maybe of dead Lemurians revisiting their pre-Adamic haunts’, she wrote. As it did for the Aborigines, the bush harboured ghosts. It was full of bodies, Barcroft Boake discovered: ‘Hardfaced greybeards, youngsters callow/ Some mounds cared for, some left fallow/ Some deep down, yet others shallow/ Some having but the sky.’
The lines were porous for the legend to pass through. Long after the statistics showed a majority of people living in the suburbs, the country remained close by and handy for camping expeditions and picnics. As the colonies became among the most urban societies in the world, sizeable parts of the city populations had lived in the country, and had relations there and retained an active connection with it. I was corrupted by a second cousin from the city who once or twice a year came slithering down our track behind the wheel of a Morris Minor. He smelled of cigarettes and Californian Poppy, brought Newman’s chocolates and peppermint chews, copies of Pix magazine with photos of women in two-piece bathing suits, and – now and then – a bottle of Pimm’s No. 1 Cup. At seventeen, a mere five and a half feet tall and weighing all of 59 kilograms, he had lied about his age to join the first AIF. Soon after he reached France he was wounded, and soon after that he contracted spinal meningitis and was shipped back to Australia. He had been a junior clerk in a city law firm and it was to a clerk’s job that he returned. It seems faintly possible that ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ inspired his adventure.
He was not the only city person to turn up in old family photographs, dressed in impractical clothes, brilliantined, hatless, out of place in a fern gully or a sheep yard. Just as often, our country folk appear in city shots, caught by street photographers, sunburned and obviously rural despite their best outfits, on their way to the cricket or a fitting at Fletcher Jones. There was always this simmering cultural exchange. No doubt there were city people who thought us yokels – there were people in nearby Wonthaggi (population 5000) who thought we were – yet my father’s two almost genteel maiden aunts, who lived together in a Melbourne suburb, seemed to regard our rusticity as an estate much more honourable than that of their neighbours.
Families exchanged children during holidays and the children picked up various habits peculiar to each setting. Country folk went to the city for surgery and hospitalisation. City folk went to the country to recuperate or get over whatever physical or mental condition afflicted them. Each was a kind of moral sink for the other. Country girls were sent to the city to escape shame and embarrassment that could not be hidden in the country. The country, being good both for moral improvement and physical health, washed away the wickedness in city folk – or at least provided an opportunity to hide it. Sanatoriums were built among the mountain ash and clematis in the hinterlands of cities. Working-class and migrant children from the inner suburbs were taken in buses on day trips to the bush for the good of their lungs and souls. When one breathed the clean, eucalyptus-scented air one breathed patriotically.
From the end of the nineteenth century to the present day, popular columns by naturalists, ornithologists and vitalists of various kinds have commended the benefits of getting out in the bush, to walk, cycle, take photos, watch birds and other creatures and smell the gum leaves. We owed it to ourselves to know and love the bush – indeed, we owed it to the bush. When Lawson and Paterson and the Bulletin school were gone, less fabled writers such as R. H. Croll, Alec Chisholm and A. S. Kenyon went on singing bush hymns. For these writers, as for many who read them, ‘the country was as close and personal as their own childhood’. Croll, author of such popular ‘fresh air’ books as The Open Road in Victoria and Along the Track, declared that if he were dictator he would ‘insist that every child should be born in the country, and reside there for the first ten or twelve years of his life’. Thus would the nation be made fit, strong and ‘intellectually bright’, he said. (And not depressed or suicidal, one hopes.) Perhaps in support of his claim, before Croll died in 1947 he could have pointed to the past eight prime ministers, Scullin, Lyons, Page, Menzies, Fadden, Curtin, Forde and Chifley, all of whom had country childhoods. So did John Monash for a while, and even Alfred Deakin spent a year or two at Kyneton.
To foster love and knowledge of the bush, we had Wattle Day and Arbour Day and Bird Day; and at school we had Nature Study and a table at the back of the schoolroom on which were displayed such things as parrot feathers, black snakes in bottles, dead butterflies, emperor gum moths, writhing saw-tooth fly larvae, and those giant earthworms pickled. Wattle was the golden sun, the golden harvest, the golden future. It was the antidote to bush melancholy. In season it was customary in country homes to put a spray of wattle on the mantelpiece and among the church flowers. The Wattle League, which began in South Australia in 1910, believed the flowers represented Australians’ cheerfulness and optimism, their ‘golden hearts’ and ‘bright, healthy outlook on life’. Even the morose Richard Mahoney was cheered when the sight and smell of wattles carried him back to ‘the blue spring day’ he married. Wattle ‘should be synonymous with Australian honour’, the League insisted, and they recommended an Order of the Wattle Blossom for service to the nation. When the war was over they planted wattle at Gallipoli.
Royal agricultural shows, staged each year in the major cities, were another moment of cultural crossover, as were the mobs of sheep and cattle that weekly plodded down inner-suburban streets on their way to market and the slaughterhouses. At show time twenty or thirty years ago, city commuters could find themselves behind station-wagons driven by men in big hats, their wives also in hats and rigid with unease beside them, picking their uncertain way along the tramlines, and on their rear windows, beside the sticker that said, ‘Wangaratta [or wherever] Motors’, another exclaimed, ‘Eat more beef, you bastards!’
Closer settlement schemes, mining rushes, economic slumps, and new work in everything from eradicating rabbits to picking sultanas or digging irrigation channels, propelled people to the bush, and failure, misfortune and the comforts of suburbia drew them back to the city. All through the century the drift continued. The cities swelled. The suburbs sprawled. Country towns fell away. Land was made available, favourable terms were offered, the good life and the nation’s future were loudly said to lie there. It was the Australian way to live, ‘with a maximum of flocks and a minimum of factories’. The great majority chose to live in the cit
ies just the same. Millions of migrants came and settled without a glance in the direction of a kangaroo or Merino. As manufacturing developed under protective measures equivalent to rural subsidies, an industrial working class organised in trade unions, football clubs and the Labor Party developed traditions and perspectives that owed little more to the bush than the memory of the shearers’ strikes. A prosperous and energetic middle class made the leafier suburbs their own and colonised a good part of the political and mental terrain. The two definitive political speeches of the post-Depression era, Menzies’ ‘Forgotten People’ address of 1942 and Gough Whitlam’s 1972 Blacktown speech, all but ignored the bush. Menzies included farmers in his ‘great and sober and dynamic middle-class’, and left it at that. Whitlam proposed a program of regionalisation and threw low-interest finance and some other familiar bones in a rural direction. That was all. Both speeches were directed to the suburbs. By Whitlam’s time it was reasonable to think that as the nation had outgrown its pre-industrial age it must have outgrown the bush.
But the bush would not lie down. Like the swagman’s ghost, or gum trees after a fire, like those fish that miraculously appear after rain in the dead heart, the bush resumed its residency in the nation’s mind. For ten years a prime minister got around in a species of bush hat, which he doffed regularly to bush ‘values’ and to something he called ‘practical mateship’ – a creed which embodied, he said, ‘real notions of decency and pragmatism in a classless society’. ‘Being Australian’ embodied these things, he said. What impractical mateship was, or if there were other less desirable kinds, or why mateship was more ‘decent’ than friendships made or unmade according to personal judgement, he never explained.
Among the sundry attitudes reckoned as bush values or examples of practical mateship we could count what one old drover called the ‘bushman’s code of honour . . . either stand in with the mob and keep your mouth shut, or refuse to stand in and also keep your mouth shut’. He was talking about the days in the Gulf Country when, to quote another drover, the general aim was ‘to get rid of the blacks, in order that the cattle might not be disturbed at the watering-places’. Not just some of them: as Mary Durack wrote, the feeling among many settlers was that all of them should go, ‘by bullet or by bait. If a man threatened to reveal that others in the party had shot Aboriginals . . . he was soon persuaded to keep quiet if he wanted to live,’ one of her drovers says. This is the other dimension of the silence, the complicit silence, the ‘Great Australian Silence’, as Stanner called it forty years ago. Keeping ‘a quiet tongue’ was the way the mayor of Bowen put it in his journal, alongside a record of his own atrocious acts. That was at one end of the country; at the other, the same thing happened in the same kind of silence and with the same turning of blind eyes to massacre and poisoning. In South Australia as late as 1890 one observer was writing that ‘the work of extermination goes silently on’.
Naturally enough, the story took a different course. What mattered was keeping rural communities and their values alive, because if we didn’t we would lose our heart and soul. The national broadcaster continued to devote hours of airtime to the activities of farmers, their struggles and grievances, their drought-blasted or inundated land, their dying towns. A few commentators, including some farmers, reckoned drought relief and other financial assistance was subsidising a national myth and reinforcing the peculiar tendency of farmers to blame everything and everyone except themselves. Drought relief, said one journalist, was like giving a junkie another hit. Droughts are not bad luck, they’re bad management, he said. Another said the ‘indignant surprise’ with which droughts were treated was a symptom of Australia’s failure to come to grips with Australian realities. ‘Drought is a construct’, one academic writer says; the word ‘describes a country which does not live up to our expectations’.
People in the habit of deciding the worth of things by virtue of their usefulness might incline to a related view of history. In his thoroughly adored memoir, A Fortunate Life, the bushman, trade unionist and soldier Albert Facey described his six months on the Gallipoli battlefield in terms indistinguishable from those he used to record the hard times of his working life in rural Western Australia. It was another job to be done, another fear to be overcome, a duty to fulfil, a skill to master. In the end he found it ‘terrible to think it was all for nothing’. Not so, as it turned out. As the stump-jump plough and Fred Wolseley’s mechanical shearing machine were useful to industry, Gallipoli confirmed our faith in the national genius for making the best of a bad job, and proved a great aid to establishing a national identity. Of course if a military disaster can be rendered useful so can bastardries. Utilitarian and pragmatic souls need not enter into arguments about the actual reasons for events, or their real nature, or rights and wrongs, or theories of any kind; they need only say that it breaches national custom to dwell on such things, that we should not get mired in them, but move on.
If we believe that ‘so much’ of what is best about us came from the bush, what do we say of the remainder? That it came from the wars? That we are made of natural obstacles and enfilading fire? Did we draw anything from curiosity? From science – or only when science was turned against infertile soils, cacti, rabbits and diseases of sheep? Is there anything in us that we owe to our imagination? Are we only practical? It must be that our leaders resort to legends of the bush and the wars in proportion to our belief in them, and the lack of ready evidence of interest or accomplishments in other endeavours. It is possible that the near-religious fixation with mateship, including ‘practical mateship’, is inversely proportionate to respect for intellectual effort, and dims interest in it. Just as likely the net effect is to smother genuine individualism and curiosity. Why an exclusively male creed should continue to be the whole nation’s is stranger still.
Yet something has changed. Now we speak with admiration of these bush people because of their struggles with nature, not for their triumphs over it or success in working with it. Wherever they lived, my own generation and the one before knew the nation ‘rode on the sheep’s back’, that wool had been the staple industry since John Macarthur, that Merinos were the finest sheep on earth. Knowing that prosperity depended on the land, as much as they romanced the bush those generations romanced the rural economy: governments brought gifts of subsidies, imperial preference schemes, and gerrymandered rural seats; the public took pleasure in images of sunlit plains clothed in golden wheat, sheep bulging with fine wool, working dogs, drovers on horseback. The glamour has gone now. The themes of work, progress and prosperity live on in century-old paintings by the likes of Tom Roberts, George Lambert and Hans Heysen, and in the calendar photographs on the walls of country houses, but rarely elsewhere.
Much more common on television are images that concern the world unmade – of ‘nature’s gifts’, in the words of the anthem – rather than the world as we have made it. Australians continue to find their identity and to some extent their pride in the ferocity or cuteness of native animals, the number of venomous snakes, the vastness of the landscape beyond the cities, the scale of natural disasters – ‘her beauty and her terror’, as the poet said – rather more than they find it in, for example, the products of their manufacturing industry, their research laboratories, or indeed their farms. It must be that they feel more comfortable with this image of themselves as a people still taming nature, at least as raw as they are cooked, a bit of Saltbush Bill in all of them, with one foot on the pouffe and the other dangling in the vicinity of crocodiles and tiger snakes.
No doubt there are many reasons for the persistence of this wayward and regressive spirit. One of them might be that so long as we believe that some part of us is a sort of stringybark-and-greenhide, natural-born bushie or woodland elf, we spare ourselves the effort needed to excel in more sophisticated things. There was that series of inventions in South Australia which in combination put paid to the Mallee, or created it, depending on your point of view, and there was the golden age of t
he CSIRO, but experience since then has taught us that we may rely on other countries and foreign companies, from Massey Ferguson to Monsanto, to perform the more complex and demanding tasks – just as most Australians have long relied on other people to raise the sheep and cattle and mine the minerals on which our comforts have long depended.
Perhaps it is this guilty knowledge that makes the bush – or at least the myth of it – an ineradicable part of our psychic reality. The less joined we are to the bush in reality, the less stake we have in it; and the less knowledge of and feeling for it we have, the stronger the myth must be. Freudians tend to think all civilisations carry with them the apprehension of some past violation of what was once innocent or perfect, and that myths satisfy ‘our instinct to return us to an original state’. The settlement of Australia involved profound violations – all the more profound because there were people who recognised them for what they were and protested at the destruction of what they held to be beautiful, precious, God-given.
An Asylum for Lost Souls
silent types – the billabong mentality – swagmen, hatters, horsemen and other travellers – Arthur and the Aborigines – luckless Cyril – elemental Albert – the right attitude
