The Bush

by Don Watson

  There was a man who walked with his dog from our nearest town to the next one on the Grand Ridge Road pretty well every day. At one or other of the towns, he would give his dog a threepenny ice-cream. I don’t remember his name or what sort of dog it was. To pass him was no more to be remarked upon than passing a familiar house or tree. I think this man had suffered brain damage in the Second World War. Another man, not five feet tall, swarthy, and known only as Dominic, walked the highway between Loch and Korumburra. He was ‘foreign’, as people were prone to saying, but nothing much else was known about him. He wore an old sports jacket buttoned up over who knows how many layers of clothes. We saw him at least once or twice a week, from the school bus or the car, as constant as the gateposts and about as troubled by the roar of vehicles. He slept in a succession of grass huts he made among the rank vegetation on the verges of the road. The last of these, in which he stayed for several years, was eventually torn down by some of the local youth. As we knew his name, he must have uttered it to someone I suppose, but I never heard of anyone who talked to him, or even waved. Soon after his hut went, Dominic went too – where, I don’t know. He was the last of the swaggies in our part of the world.

  Of our own family, the great pedestrian was that uncle who had served at Gallipoli and been gassed in France. In the Great Depression he abandoned the sandhill on the Ninety Mile Beach that the Soldier Settlement Commission had granted him, and walked to Longreach in Queensland, where he found work and sent for his wife and two sons. And there they lived for the rest of their lives.

  No one else went anywhere near as far as Longreach, but even in the 1950s, before four-wheel-drive cars and tractors and quad bikes, farmers did a lot of walking: miles every day in heavy boots up and down the hills, burning up the carbohydrates from the animal fat, potatoes, cakes and pastry. As their vehicles improved, the men developed stomachs. ‘Herb has developed a bit of a stomach,’ the women would say. It was a sign of better times.

  It wasn’t mentioned, but there was a feeling we might be getting somewhere, at least rising with the general tide. When the sun was on the grass and the cows’ coats gleamed, the farm breathed hints of hope and satisfaction. The perseverance of my parents’ generation was now yielding the high schools and universities, full employment and prosperity denied them in their youth. To a healthy lad this thought was unbearable. I dreamed of escape. No doubt it was Oedipal, or something of a nature just as far beyond my power to recognise or understand.

  If a ship is a prison with the chance of drowning, a farm is a prison minus that excitement. It is a prison with cows and weeds for gaolers. Nothing was ever finished on the farm: one milking followed by another, one harvest by another, one hay bale by another, one animal. I think I remember every move in a 1950s milking shed. Putting the cups on a cow’s bulging teats, the bran in the bail, the shit out the door. It must be kept in the muscle memory. Fifty years later I believe I could still put a leg-rope on a cow, and feel the jolts of her kicks through the chain until she quietened. The memories are stored along with the smells of the milk and muck and a dozen sounds that harmonised with the machines sucking the milk into the vat, and the yellow beestings of the freshly calved into the vacuum bucket.

  Still, I had it easy. I was there to be called on, but for much of the year spared the everyday obligation of service in the shed or in the paddocks, and for that I was grateful. My disgruntlement was due less to a loathing for farm life than to the attraction of somewhere else. Anywhere else, but not the city: the Mallee, the Riverina, the Lachlan, Deniliquin. I imagined pulling into these places, soaking up their mystique, gifting them a little of mine. Had the 1960s been the 1930s and the choice for a farm boy the farm or the road, I would have chosen the road, and gladly. In deranged pubescence, I resolved to leave school. One day towards the end of my Intermediate year, having accompanied my father to a cattle sale at Warragul, I walked up the street and applied for a job with the Bank of New South Wales. I was four months shy of my sixteenth birthday and dreaming of being eighteen with enough money for a car to get me on the road, and to the drive-in. The bank job was to be temporary: I fancied a career as a travelling salesman.

  Whatever the impulse was, there could be no dream of forsaking farm, family and education and losing oneself in the inland without an inland to do it in. The bush had that practical use: it shut out society and many of life’s pains and complexities. My bush dream had whispered to hordes of other unexamined, if not unbalanced, minds, beckoning them to the great maw where they could love or lick their wounds as they fancied, and around a bar or a waterhole feel free, manly and untroubled.

  Lady Ida Poore, wife of Admiral Sir Richard, Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy’s Australia Station in the years before the First World War, was impressed by the character and habits of Australia’s bush dwellers: the ‘practicalness of the Australian woman’ she found admirable, and the men struck her as ‘silent, self-reliant and thoughtful; possessed of a natural dignity, and showing a quite peculiar courtesy and gentleness towards women and children’. Men afraid of their own thoughts or unnerved by the silence and vast emptiness that made them feel like ‘midges in St Paul’s’, could not survive the bush, she wrote. In Lady Ida’s experience (and that of her Royal Navy husband) those that did survive it had what every real man had – ‘something tough and insensitive in [their] fibre’.

  In Western Australia the tough Irishman James Twigg reckoned the bushmen he met were ‘always . . . very quiet men who rarely laugh and . . . [he supposed] . . . it must be the effect, and solitude of the bush’. It could be that while the man of the bush was just as inclined to express his thoughts as anybody else, not many entered his head, or those that did were not well formed. Or perhaps they were too complex for expression. That might be an effect of the Cathedral-like silence: his silence might be of a religious kind. Just as likely, prolonged contact with unpredictable nature has made a sceptic of him. He might have seen too much that defied explanation or comment, or have done inexpressible things. The ‘uncanny’ of the bush might have a hold on him. The prolonged solitary exposure to the bush that makes some people odd or crazy might in others bring the active and contemplative life into perfect harmony or grace. It is true that the bush can gather you in, and take your mind with it. The stillness was ‘emblematic of death and desolation’, a late-nineteenth-century American visitor declared.

  Perhaps it was to resist these glum sensations that, as he boiled his billy under a coolabah by a waterhole in Queensland, the celebrated swagman sang his little ditty. Who knows, he might have been singing over a crow’s desolate cawing, or the noise of thousands of little corellas, the electric buzz from the invisible dimension in which cicadas and blowflies live, or perhaps it was to drown out that tomb-like silence. The bush talks; it is ‘close, close as your own thought’.

  So we sing of a jolly jumbuk (a sheep) drinking at a billabong. The swagman up and grabs the sheep (and cuts its throat, we must presume) and stows it in his tuckerbag. Enter the owner of the animal, a squatter mounted on his thoroughbred, and three policemen, also mounted. ‘Where’s [or ‘Who’s’ in some versons] the jolly jumbuk [bloody sheep] you’ve got in your tuckerbag?’ they ask him, a form of inquiry which suggests the police have told the squatter to let them do the talking. Passing up the opportunity for a smart-arse reply, the swagman jumps into the water and drowns. We can only guess at what possessed him. In any event, when we sang this song as schoolchildren, we were told to render the last verse respectfully and sotto voce, as if he might have laid down his life for a high cause.

  To be fair to the pastoralist, it was not so long since he’d been admired for his pioneering verve. Grand as the enterprise was, squatting had always been a risky game. The weather and disease could ruin him. Bad management – his own or someone else’s – could bring him down. He depended on a flow of funds attracted from abroad by interest rates much higher than those in England, on short-term credit for operating expenses provided by
the local merchants through which the funds flowed, and on advances to cover him for the many months it took to grow the wool, get it to London and be paid for its sale there. Stupendous as his holdings, political power and social pretensions often were, at base the squatter begged his living from nature and British investors. As the end of the nineteenth century approached he was begging it from the masses as well. By then, the popular mood was set against him. Selectors (and even swagmen) had replaced him in the pantheon. Drought, rabbits, collapsing prices, exhausted soils, rising labour costs and economic depression pushed him towards bankruptcy. It was no wonder he fought the new pastoral unions to a standstill. It was life and death.

  Banjo Paterson wrote the words of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ while staying at McPherson’s Dagworth station near Winton in Queensland, and set them to a tune that the young lady of the house had heard at a Victorian race meeting. Like most folk songs, the words of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ moved around a good deal, but the story stayed much the same. It was 1892, a year after the Great Shearers’ Strike. Here and there the riot act was read, armed troopers with bayonets fixed escorted wool across the plains and down the rivers. For all other citizens the carrying of firearms was forbidden. Unionists talked of revolution and were sent to prison.

  Striking shearers had burned down the Dagworth shearing shed and fought a prolonged gun battle with the owners and police. Sometime after this, the body of a swagman-shearer called Hoffmeister was found by a waterhole a few kilometres away. The police said it was suicide. Some students of the affair reckon the police shot him. Paterson must have been influenced by stories of the fateful events at Dagworth and other stations, and it is tempting to read a political lesson in the story he told in ‘Waltzing Matilda’. But while the young Paterson was no Tory, radical politics was not his style. The squatter of Dagworth apparently had no taste for them either: according to Paterson, within a year of the battle McPherson was seen serving champagne to the shearers. And if Lady Poore’s experience was typical, shearers also lost the taste for battle: twenty years after the strike, she found that ‘shearers, transitory hands, the shearers’ cook, [and] the casual sundowner’ all ‘saluted the mistress’ of the station – proof, she believed, of an ‘unconscious acceptance of the patriarchal system’.

  The fraternity of swagmen welcomed all types: delusional cranks, ne’er-do-well parasites, seasonal labourers, failed selectors, illiterate and educated idlers, down-at-heel artists, and innocent victims of economic depression and other misfortune. The literature has ‘villainous looking’ and ‘gallows-faced’ swagmen; Barbara Baynton’s are ominous creatures, Ernestine Hill’s are benign misogynists who just want women to leave them alone. At Dongara in Western Australia, Cyril Penny remembered maniacs, including religious maniacs dressed in rags and offering prayers, and the day when his mother locked herself and her children inside and stood by with an axe while a tramp stole a chicken and left the innards on the front doorstep. Some Aborigines brought a ‘white madman’ to a squatter’s camp near Brewarrina station. He was half starved and burned bright red by the sun, but he had ‘quite a happy smile’. Such cases were ‘not unfrequent in the bush’, the squatter said, and it was ‘extraordinary’ how many of them had a ‘happy unconsciousness of the troubles of life’.

  If we take ‘jolly’ at its literal meaning, the swagman of the song seems more likely to have been one of these ‘hatters’, that is to say, mad like the shepherd in Baynton’s ‘Scrammy ’And’, who might have been bipolar, schizophrenic, depressed, manic, or suffering from any number of other undiagnosed mental disorders. He might have been one of those Miles Franklin saw: ‘all shapes, sizes, ages, kinds and conditions . . . the diseased, the educated, the ignorant, the deformed, the blind, the evil, the honest, the mad, and the sane . . . dirty, besotted, ragged creatures . . .’ Or he might have been a ‘waler’ – a scrounger, one of the underserving poor, like Lawson’s character Mitchell, or Furphy’s university-educated Englishman Willoughby. He might have jumped into the billabong because he knew the game was up on a lie he’d been living.

  Whatever the stripe of his character, the jolly swagman is no stirrer; he’s an antihero, a rebel without a cause, an enchanter. While the squatter and the troopers plainly represent capital and the lackey state, the swagman is surely more bohemian individualist than socialist. Indeed, had they been trade-union organisers who rode up to recruit him, he might have reacted just as he did to the squatter and police. Our swagman is a dropout. He’s crossed over. The bush has claimed him. When the billabong dries up in the next drought his bones will bleach with those of the cattle and sheep and horses – and, who knows, other swagmen – it has also claimed. Ernestine Hill wrote of a dozen such men every year in the north-west, ‘old hands’ seduced by the mirages and dying of thirst. ‘Will the bush ever give up the secrets of its dead, and of the many lonely tragedies that have been played out under the gum trees?’ asked Rosa Praed.

  The title of Paterson’s song probably derives from the German auf der walz, which describes the tradition among young craftsmen of journeying for two or three years once they completed their apprenticeship. ‘Matilda’ comes from the old Teutonic for a hefty female warrior. The swag would seem to be the swagman’s surrogate wife or partner. ‘Humping bluey’ (after the blue blankets in which the swag was wrapped) means the same thing as ‘Waltzing Matilda’. In Henry Lawson’s list of common terms for being ‘on the track’ or ‘on the wallaby’, he included ‘walking Matilda’ and ‘humping Matilda’, but not waltzing her. Whatever the origins of the expression, it took some kind of genius in Paterson to conjure that scene into the nation’s mind: a tree by a lonely billabong in the glassy heat and a voice from a vanished tribe seducing the crows and the breezes: ‘Who’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me?’ And to think Patrick White believed that in the Great Australian Emptiness ‘the mind was the least of the possessions’.

  Swagmen – or footmen – were also called travellers. Great numbers of this ‘nomad tribe’ wandered in the bush, looking for work, and when there was no work, for at least a feed. One veteran of the Wimmera recalled forty or fifty men always arriving a month before shearing time. Rather than feed them, the squatters gave them a pannikin of flour so they could feed themselves on damper. The poet John Shaw Neilson walked around western Victoria for thirty years and reckoned he had more than 200 employers. It was a measure of things, when men could work hard all their lives and never get out of poverty.

  Among the early generations of swagmen were many former convicts; later ones tended to be men who took to the wallaby when work ran out. ‘Waltzing Matilda’ aside, Banjo Paterson was really the balladeer of the mounted bushman, and Henry Lawson the poet of the pedestrian one. The mounted wanderers, according to Sorenson, who did a bit of wandering himself, held themselves to be a superior caste. With their extra elevation and speed, it was to be expected. There is a world of difference between trudging through the bush in a pair of problematic boots and riding a horse through it.

  ‘To ride that horse was to feel free, exultant, invincible,’ says Tom Collins, after testing the Irishman McNab’s gelding, Cleopatra, over ‘a mile, full tilt’. In Robbery Under Arms Rolf Boldrewood gave his half-caste character Warrigal a cranky misbegotten ambler called Bilbah who does for Warrigal’s enigmatic personality no less than Bucephalus did for Alexander, and Topper for Hopalong Cassidy. Boldrewood’s men ride through the ‘splendid grass country’, the ‘great fattening country’ of Gippsland, up and over the wild ‘mountain country’, and ‘back to old New South Wales by way of the Snowy River and then on to Monaro. After that we knew where we were.’

  That was freedom. A well-fitting horse enlarges both the personality of the owner and his outlook on life. A man of few accomplishments could appear very able on a good horse. It could give him wings, and if it was not that sort of horse, it could always carry more than he could and was a companion of sorts, even a sweetheart. On all his desert marathons, that indestructible bushma
n and explorer John McDouall Stuart took an equally stoic mare called Polly. She was perhaps the only female he could talk to, if not the only ambulating thing he loved. Polly died of starvation under the gum tree where he left her.

  A horse needs food. The mounted traveller – or bagman – was always on the lookout for grass and water. Often he had more than one horse: one to ride and one to carry his goods. That narrowed the odds of most misfortunes except falling off, but doubled the chance of having a cantankerous horse or a crook one. The horse-borne traveller had more than his own personality to deal with: he was in a relationship. To render Freud’s analogy literal, a horse, the ‘locomotor’, added id to the traveller’s ego, and all too often compromised his intended direction. We might see the footman or swagman as having removed the id from the equation, just as he had escaped (or sought to) the muggings of the superego and the external world by clearing out from family and society.

  In Freudian terms, the swagman was the battered ego in flight – and he was rarely, if ever, aware that he was trying to escape himself. A case in point is Steele Rudd’s swagman Cranky Jack, who sees his image in the hall mirror and, recognising his father in himself, takes to it with an axe. Jack represents the voluntary travellers of course, the walers or sundowners who wanted – or, for the lack of any other therapy, needed – ‘an easy life’, and got it from squatters who preferred feeding them to having their pastures set on fire or their sheep shoved in tuckerbags.

  The foot traveller’s great practical advantage was to have only his own mouth to feed, his own meal to beg (and perhaps a bone for his dog), and his own psychological burden to bear. Where the mounted man often spent his mornings searching for a horse that had wandered in the night, his nights listening for the bell that told him it hadn’t, and his days worrying about some infirmity in the horse, and where the man on a bicycle got punctures, bent wheels and sand in his chain, the man on foot had only to roll up his swag and start plodding. He was but a speck on the landscape, all but invisible in what the unemployed and wandering Frank Huelin called the ‘dreaming aloofness and self-containment’ of the bush. With no horse to give him away, he could snooze in the shade of a wilga, like the sundowner Furphy watches in Such is Life, out of sight of the homestead at whose door he plans to present himself, hungry and spent-looking when it’s too late to be sent to the woodheap – ‘the tactical moment . . . when fades the glimmering landscape on the sight’.