by Don Watson
They know two seasons only, the crushen and the slack.
For most of the year they planted cane, water cane, cut cane, cart cane to the siding, talk about cane and dream about cane. When one of their wives is selected for the Queensland hockey team they say that don’t grow no cane.
One asks the cane inspector for advice on his wife’s pregnancy, for he sees a certain similarity between a woman and a cane-paddock. In each case it’s the yield that’s important. She speaks only Spanish so doesn’t understand the insult. The cane inspector circumnavigates her great belly as slowly and gravely as he would a patch of cane, scrutinises it front-on and side-on and predicts a boy. It’s a girl.
Burdekin men like womanly women, those who know their place.
Of sex they say wisely, ‘It’s got to be fed and it don’t eat wheat’.
BURDEKIN WOMEN
Burdekin women cook over hot fuel stoves; wash all the clothes in the copper outside in the burning sun; starch and iron the men’s shorts and shirts, worn when going to town to drink or bet; make all the family clothes.
They sit in a car outside a pub with grizzling children for hours.
They are grateful when their husband brings out an occasional shandy. They don’t drink straight beer. Women who drink straight beer have been known to get out of control.
A Burdekin woman does not interrupt the men in the pub or the club, scream, fall frothing to the floor or beg her husband to come home soon or she’ll kill herself. As a spoiler of men’s pleasures she would shame her man forever.
Burdekin women are sometimes taken to the new RSL club if it’s a social evening. Here they gather in a group discussing their children while the men carry on about what they did in the war, the snakes they have seen, the fish they have caught and the cane they are growing.
They are womanly women. They pride themselves on this; they know their place.
Of sex they say nothing, of childbirth plenty.
Roundabout at Bangalow: An Intimate Chronicle,
University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2003
Samuel Wagan Watson
2006
Back Road
revisiting childhood through that time-gauze of greying feather,
back to a time
when the road seemed wider
but had the same volume of insanity
Dad always concrete at the wheel
Mum in the “Worry” seat
sharing with Dad,
the worries sometimes reaching the backseat
as the sporadic vapours got too heavy
and did their backdraft thing
upon our small foreheads
breathing in the pockets of
blackness
yet, we ride
our little bodies fading into the upholstery
the rear-view mirror
keeping its eye on us
Smoke Encrypted Whispers,
University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2004
The Weekly Times
2010
There’s a certain irony in the fact Australia’s top-ranked school on the Federal Government’s My School website is James Ruse Agricultural High School, located in Sydney, which teaches agricultural science as a mandatory subject from Year 7 to 10.
Yet Prime Minister Julia Gillard has overseen the development of a national curriculum that largely ignores agriculture or portrays it in a negative light.
In December 2008, as the Federal Education Minister, Julia Gillard and her state counterparts agreed to develop a national curriculum, based on a declaration of educational goals. The declaration quite rightly made 21 references to indigenous education and disadvantage, but there was no mention of the wider rural disadvantage, farming or agriculture.
It’s no surprise the authority charged with developing a national curriculum based on this declaration largely ignored agriculture.
But what every farmer needs to understand is the national curriculum is crucial to their future.
The ministers’ failure to mention rural issues and agriculture was simply a reflection of the wider ignorance of rural issues that exists within urban Australia.
It’s this very ignorance a well-designed national curriculum should address.
If city kids fail to understand where their food comes from and how it is produced they will never develop any empathy for rural communities.
Ask many Year 10 city kids if farming harms the environment and the answer is “Yes”.
So, farmers and their lobby groups should be demanding the recently appointed Education Minister Simon Crean step in to give agriculture the emphasis it deserves. After all, Mr Crean knows better than most the importance of agriculture to Australia, having previously held the trade and the primary industries portfolios.
‘Govt deserves an ‘F’ for ag’, Editorial, The Weekly Times, 28 July 2010
Jackey White
1877
Dear Sir,
I want to come back to Wannon, I knew you ever since I was a boy you used to keep us live I recollect about thirteen or fourteen years ago when you used to travel about five or six miles to bring us to your place, so will you be obliged to write to the government to get us off this place [Mission Station, Lake Condah], so if you will write to the government for us, and get us off here, I will do work for you and will never leave you so I wish you get us off this place, I always wish to be in my country, and to be in my country where I was born, I am in a mission Station and I dongnt [sic] like to be here, they always grumble and all my friends are all dead I lost my friend Doctor Russel [Dr. Francis Russell, local Anglican clergyman]. I recollect him living at Hillgay when Mr. and Mrs. Russel were young, and now we are old, and I am now miserable, all the Wannon blackfellows are all dead and I am left, my poor uncle Yellert Perne is dead he was quiet [sic] young when he came hire [sic] when I see his grave I always feel sorry, I can’t get away without leaf [sic] from the government. This country don’t suit me I’m a stranger in this country I like to be in my country. When I used to [go?] to places I ought not to be Mr. Russel used to get me out, wherever I used to be on a Station I used to work. Mr. Jackson wanted to give us ground and we did not take it so I am very sorry that we did not take it. This is all I have to say.
I remain,
Your affectionate friend
Jackey White
‘Letter from Jackey White, a Black Fellow,
to Mr. Samuel Winters, Murndull [sic]’, 7th January 1877,
Winter Cooke Papers, Margaret Kiddle, Murndal, Victoria, 1950
Compiler’s note: Reciprocating the sentiment, in his old age at Macedon, Samuel Winters gave instructions that he would like to be buried back at Murndal, ‘in the stones where the blacks are buried, no ornaments of any kind except plain black soil to be used.’
Neville White
2003
Yolngu people engage increasingly with the wider Australian society; however, in my experience, the elements of worldview described in this chapter have remained resilient to forces that might otherwise result in the assimilation of such Aboriginal groups into the dominant culture of the Australian state. One final example perhaps illustrates this resilience.
Gunaminy and Yilarama were two Yolngu men who visited me in City of Melbourne in 1984. The former was aged in his forties, the latter in his thirties, they had never been to a big city prior to this visit. Neither was impressed by the streetscape of skyscrapers and bright lights, nor by the technical wizardry of urban Australia; their attempts to make meanings out of the specific features of a landscape were evident from such comments as: ‘Where are the trees?’ ‘That moon is bigger than in my country; that is why it is so cold.’ ‘There is too much noise.’ ‘There is no breeze; my skin feels slack.’ ‘Where do the Yolngu [Aboriginal people] from this country live?’ ‘What do you call that river?’ ‘What is the name of [a particular plant or animal]?’
Interspersed with my attempts to provide answers were further
questions about the engagement of city dwellers with the places we traversed: ‘Why is that man hungry?’ asked Yilarama at a large and busy food market one Saturday morning. Much intimidated by the crowd, he had grabbed my arm and drawn my attention to an elderly man in scruffy clothes who was kicking among the discarded vegetables. ‘What is he doing?’ Yilarama asked. I replied that he was searching for food. Yilarama was shocked and exclaimed: ‘How can a man be hungry when there is food everywhere here? Where are his kin?’ Thus, it was, above all, the human element of city landscapes that took the interest of the Yolngu visitors.
In the light of my discussion of Yolngu aesthetic appreciation of the landscapes of their own country in the northern Australian bush, it is significant to observe that the two visitors had nothing to say about vistas or panoramas evident from vantage points around the city. Indeed, they were reluctant to walk to high points that provided the best views: ‘Why are we climbing this hill; is there food at the top?’ queried Gunaminy. ‘No, I want to show you the country,’ I replied. ‘I’ll stay here, you go on!’ was the answer. Neither visitor saw any point in this form of ‘sightseeing’, just as I have always encountered a lack of interest among Yolngu in accompanying me to climb to high vantage points in their own country. On occasions when men have joined me in this way, my remarks about the attractiveness of the vista evident from high lookouts have commonly been ignored, or perhaps responded to with a comment such as ‘Ah! Nganda, marrkapmirri’ (‘Ah, my dear south-east breeze’).
‘Meaning and Metaphor in Yolngu Landscapes, Arnhem Land, Northern Australia’ in
David Trigger and Gareth Griffiths (eds.), Disputed Territories: Land, Culture
and Identity in Settler Societies, Hong Kong University Press, 2003
Patrick White
1981
As often happens in the approach to an Australian country house, it was difficult to decide where to breach the Lushington homestead. There were verandas, porches, lights, snatches of piano music, whinging dogs, skittering cats, archways armed with rose-thorns, a drift of kitchen smells, but never any real indication of how to enter. Australian country architecture is in some sense a material extension of the contradictory beings who have evolved its elaborate informaility, as well as a warning to those who do not belong inside the labyrinth.
After blundering around awhile he was finally admitted by the fresh-faced Mrs Edmonds, wife of the groom-cum-dairyman-cum gardener. Herself who aired Mrs Lushington’s furs, and who had brought the invalid white rosebud down to the cottage.
She said, ‘They’re expecting you, sir, in the droring room.’ She was too shy or too untrained to go farther than indicate the direction in which the room lay.
He might have blundered some more if it hadn’t been for light visible in a doorway at the end of the passage and a few groping piano chords of musical comedy origin. The piano act, he suspected, was staged by Mrs Lushington to lure him in.
In fact it was her husband brooding over the piano.
‘Vamping a bit,’ old Lushington explained with a bashful smile. ‘It helps pass the time.’
Leaving the piano, he advanced and asked, ‘What’s your poison, Eddie?” as though he might rely on alcohol to dissolve human restraints.
Lushington himself, still wearing leggings and cord breeches below a balding velvet smoking-jacket, was already comfortably oiled. ‘You’re well, are you?’ he asked. ‘You look well.’
Eddie was prevented answering either of his host’s questions by the entrance of a little yapping Maltese terrier with a delicious sliver of a pink tongue who proceeded to skip around, blinded by his own eyebrows, excited by his own frivolity.
The guest spilled a finger of what smelled like practically neat whiskey as the dog’s mistress appeared.
‘We haven’t met,’ Mrs Lushington said, ‘but I know you, of course, from the Hotel Australia.’
‘How the Australia?’ her husband asked in some surprise.
‘On an occasion when I decided not to lunch there,’ she answered. ‘It all looked too bloody – like some awful club, full of the people one spends one’s life avoiding. Too much flour in everything – and a smell of horseradish.’
Mr Lushington looked perplexed. ‘But we’ve always enjoyed the old Australia. You run into so many of your mates. And you, Marce, have never found anything wrong with the food.’
But Mrs Lushington was holding out. She raised her chin, and smiled. Like Peggy Tyrrell she enjoyed her mysteries, while being more than half prepared to share them with one who was not quite a stranger, but almost.
‘Stop it, Beppi!’ she advised the Maltese, who was chivvying the fur with which she was hemmed.
‘Darling,’ she asked her husband, ‘are you going to pour me a drink?’
As Greg Lushington was too deeply immersed in the mystery of his wife’s betrayal of the Hotel Australia, she advanced and did it for herself with a most professional squirt from a siphon covered with wire-netting.
Marcia was wearing a long coat of vivid oriental patchings over her discreet black, less discreetly sable-hemmed, skirt. It was in the upper regions that discretion ended completely, in an insertion of flesh-coloured, or to match Marcia, beige lace which strayed waistwards in whorls and leaves. Her daring must have deserted her in dressing, for she had stuck an artificial flower in the cleavage of lace or flesh, a species of oriental poppy artistically crushed, its fleshtones tinged with departing flame.
‘Do sit,’ she invited their guest, ‘if you can see somewhere comfortable. Other people’s furniture, like their coffee, is inclined to be unbearable.’
The Lushingtons’ drawing-room furniture was a mixed lot: armchairs and sofa in the chintzy English tradition, with a few pieces of what looked like authentic Chippendale, and rubbing shoulders with them, humbler colonial relations in cedar, crudely carved by some early settler, or more likely, his assigned slave.
There was also the grand piano at which Mr Lushington had been discovered vamping, on it a Spode tureen filled with an arrangement of dead hydrangeas, autumn leaves, and pussy willow, in front of it, framed importantly in gold, a portrait-photograph of a younger Marcia, one hand resting possessively on what must have been the same piano, draped at the time with a Spanish shawl.
Noticing their jackeroo’s interest in pianos, Mrs Lushington asked, ‘Do you play?’
‘I used to,’ he said, ‘badly, I was told, but my enthusiasm made me acceptable.’
‘Greg is the musical one,’ nor did Mrs Lushington resent it. ‘He’ll thump quite happily by the hour. I tried as a child, but my chilblains didn’t enourage me to practice. I think a piano’s necessary, though – as part of a room, to stand things on.’
The Twyborn Affair, Jonathan Cape, London, 1979
Korah Wills
c. 1895
Now I must not forget some of my little expeditions among the Blacks in troublesome times when we had to litterally [sic] defend and protect ourselves, for the Government would not or pretended that they could not give us any in those far outlying districts so far from civilisation. They would give us about half a dozen Mounted Black troopers with a superintendant [sic], white man over them, to patrol a district of many hundreds of miles, and if the blacks played up their pranks in this quarter the native police were sure to be patrolling [sic] in the opposite direction some 100 miles away and in that case, the superintentant [sic] who was left with only one or two native police at his command was helpless, if any thing happened as it always did when the police were on patrols. Then the superintendant had to resort to seeking for Volunteers, men whom he thought he could trust for pluck and a quiet tongue after all was over, who he would solicit to join him and his one or two native troopers and go out and disperse the mob that had been committing depredations on the neighbouring settlers, and I was one of the first who he used to drop on on account of my previous career in the Volunteers in Melbourne and to discipline, and of the little affairs he had been a witness of himself he w
ould select about half a dozen fellows the staunchest he could find in the Town and press them into the service for the time being, when?? the Volunteer had to be sworn in as special Constable, and put under arms, and the orders of the said superintendant and off we would go for the scene of the outrage, wheresoever?? it might be and to run the Culprits Down, and disperse them, which was a name given for something else not to be mentioned here, but it had to be done for the protection of our own hearths and Wives & families, and you may bet we were not backward in doing what we were ordered to do and what our forefathers have done to keep possession of the soil that was laying to waste and no good being done with it, when we our own white people were crying out for room to stretch our legs on, and turn to some account, for the benefit of Millions, and what many others have done since. Stanley for instance who I uphold in everything he has done with the one exception that of his claiming all the honours for himself instead of honourably giving a fair share of those honours to the men (white) who followed him, and to which they were duly entitled, and would have been the very thing that would have stopped all those dreadful bickerings that has taken place since their return and which will all be forgotten in another 100 years, but we have got the Country and may we ever hold it for we want it for the good of the whole civilised world. we don’t object to any foriegner [sic]coming in and taking his share of the good that is going, and which is being got from the soil we have risked our lives for in arresting it from the savage that held it before no – many are the expeditions of the above kind have I been in and many are the curiosities that I have picked up in the camps of the Natives wild as they ever were, and perfectly rude and cannibles [sic] into the bargain but there is very little of the dispersing going on now in the colonies only just on the very outsides of civilisation and what there is must be done very much on the quiet or you may hap get into trouble, but in my time they dispersed by hundreds if not by thousands but that was in the early days of Australia, when me and my wife landed there. South Australia (Adelaide) was only about 10 years old, and Victoria only about 14 years old, when all the old tree stumps had not been removed from the Main Street but bogs up to your knees in the wet season if you stepped off the side paths. but they were the good old days when you could get a 10 or 12 lb Leg of Mutton for a 6d at the boiling down at Port Adelaide or the best Rump Steak out of the best shop in Adelaide at 1 ½ per lb and if you wanted a bit of meat for the Dog the Butcher would often give you a Shin of Beef or a Bullocks heart and our bread was only 3d per 2 lb loaf and flour ten pounds per Ton. Happy days for the inner man, my word I must not forget in one of my dispersing expeditions I was in company of a few squatters and their friends on one of their Stations, when the Blacks had been playing up, and killing a shepherd and robbing his Hut. When we turned out and run them to earth where they got on the top of a big mound and defied us and smacked their buttocks at us and hurled large stones down on us and hid themselves behind large trees and huge rocks but some of them paid dearly for their bravado. They had no idea that we could reach them to a dead certainty at the distance of a mile by our little patent breach loading “Terry’s” when they were brought to bear upon them some of them jumped I am sure six feet into the air with astonishment and a clear out for those who were not in receipt of such medicine and out of one of these mobs of Blacks I selected a little girl with the intention of civilising, and one of my friends thought he would select a boy for the same purpose and in the selection of the same I stood a very narrow chance of being flattened out by a “Nulla Nulla”, from I presume the mother of the Child I had hold of, but I received the blow from the deadly weapon across my arm which I threw up to protect my head, and my Friend who has since been connected with the Government of the Colony and has held the high office of Chief Emigration Commissioner and protector of the Blacks who in my time was a kidnapper to the hilt. I dont know if his concience [sic] ever pricked him on the subject as I never had chance of seeing him since and on one of those occasions I took it in my head to get a few specimens of certain limbs and head of a Black fellow, which was not a very delicate occupation I can tell you. I shall never forget the time when I first found the subject that I intended to anatomize, when my friends were looking on, and I commenced operations dissecting. I went to work business like to take off the head first, and then the Arms, and then the legs, and gathered them together and put them into my pack saddle and one of my friends who I am sure had dispersed more than any other Man in the Colony made the remark that if he was offered a fortune he could not do what I had done. His name was Peter Armstrong a well known pioneer in the North of Queensland and pluck enough to face a 100 blacks single handed any day as long as he had his revolver with him and his Rifle but that beat him he said. Well took my trophies home to the Station that morning, and in the afternoon my friends were all going down to the Lagoons to fish and to Bathe and I took some of my limbs to the lagoon also to divest of its flesh as much as I could and I got on pretty well with it until it became dark and I had to give up the unholy job, and we went back to the Station for supper and yarns, and pipes, and nightcaps of Whiskey before turning in and I had not been turned in long before I had such fearful pains in my stomach that I thought I should have died and so did all my friends it was something awful until I could not speak for pain and my inside running from me and I was quite unable to stop it, and they all but gave me up for a dead-un. But I managed to get over it in the course of a day or two but was left very weak indeed. I believe it was a perfect shock to my system by doing such a horrible repulsive thing as I had been doing. But I was not to be done out of my pet specimines [sic] of humanity, and I packed them home to Bowen as well as my little protogee [sic] of a girl let me who rode on the front of my saddle for over 80 miles and crying nearly all the way. And as I neared the Town of Bowen I met different people who hailed me with how do and so on and where did you get that intelegent [sic] little nigger from. My answer was that I had picked her up in the Bush lost to her own tribe and crying her heart out so I took compassion on her and decided to take her home and bring her up with my own children, which I did and even sent her to school . . . and when I went to Melbourne I took her there to place her at Boarding School with my eldest daughter who was there but she took a severe cold and I had the Doctor to her who I told what I intended to do with her but he said you must not do it for the climate was too cold for her and that she would be dead in less than a month and he made me take her back again into her own climate. When he said I doubt if she will ever recover even there, so I had to bring her back again and she never lost her cold and eventually it carried her off, so much for my trying to civilize the aboriginals . . .