by Les Murray
I’d lumped more iron camp ovens, butter churns, and logs too
than ever he had. He stayed out for minutes.
When he came around, he cursed me. Called me every kind
of low-bred bitch. That’s when I said – that other.
What did I say? That doesn’t matter. I silenced him.
It would be a sin to do on purpose. To practise.
He hated me, ever after. And he hung round home
so I’d see him and know. But I’ve got a strong back;
I could bear it. You could still buy revolvers then
and he had one. But it took him years to creep away
round the verandahs, one Sunday, from where they were drinking
and lean in at our window, where I lay sick in bed.
He opened his coat, took out that thieves’ gun, said
See this, Emily? It’s for you. Poor thing. I nearly laughed.
Of course, I might have been shot for that. So I had to
look frightened, when really I was sick and tired
of the whole silliness. He went away, but my third boy
heard him, and followed. He was only seventeen
and Ted was a grown man. But he made him hand over
that gun in front of everyone. Harold never spoke, as usual.
The boys climbed up and dropped the thing down inside
the walling of this kitchen. It’s still rusting there, I fancy.
THE LINE
Opium and vitriol and a plug of twist
added to the rum have left the Tiger prostrate,
snoring on his stripes in the sun.
Mickeen and Hoojah
step gingerly around him. Their own headache-bones
wince at the long saw’s bare-fanged undulant clangour.
At the palace of a felled tree’s crown, they strike up a fire,
share a pannikin of tea, then mix burnt bark with the dregs
and immerse a string in it.
Hold your end, Mickeen!
They walk either side of the sawdust-mealy pit
and pass the string above a chocked log. Precisely as Mercator
the wet black twine hovers half an inch above
the timber’s knocked continents, tautens, is minutely
aligned. Then Hoojah plucks it.
The whipped note lays the first
straight line of a city, the first rectilinear thought
realised on that landscape. And marks it for division.
Down in the hole, now. Sheeus late, a Vickeen!*
And keep yer feet on the ground, ye Fenyan bolter!
The black blade angles down,
is gripped: a rhythmic chaff
starts modelling sweat, choking ripe Donegal curses.
As each plank slats off, the saw sings its future as cattlebells.
The line has been printed six times, when the Tiger stumbles
across from their tent with bread and three pounds of salt beef
stuck on a bayonet.
At least it’s not the poisonous snake
he slung into the pit last time the rum clawed at him.
Belching after a feed, he rips the handles downward
as if to pull the merciful saw through himself
or drag work itself down on his anguish, like Samson.
Don’t jerk a woman
right through the cut, there, Tiger!
Shouts Hoojah, laughing, or I’ll be narrer and flat.
Taste, reverence and polemic close over the gang after that.
* Down with you, Mickey! (Anglicised Irish)
EXTRACT FROM A VERSE LETTER TO DENNIS HASKELL
Dear Dennis,
Warm thanks for your letter
in verse. It’s very much better,
nicer and more thoughtful than those
postcards packed with minuscule prose
I write even to friends, like the harassed
editor I once was. I’m impressed.
Moved, too, that you should miss my company
– I never quite expect that, perhaps funnily,
of people. Yes, too much ochre
separates us now, joker from joker.
It’s a bore that the width of the continent
can’t be secretly folded or bent
so’s to let us yarn here on the crest
of Deer’s Hill, watching sunsets on Rottnest,
or strolling, well fed, by the Swan
as it flows beside our vegie garden.
I think you’d like it here, in our glade
of fruit saplings that now nearly manage shade
and soft grass, beside the lotus dam
and our other trees. Some year you must see them.
Trees, space, waterbirds – things of that ilk,
plus people of my own kind, are the milk
and honey I came home for. Not dairying,
that drudgery, poor, imprisoning, unvarying.
At eighteen, I made a great vow
I’d never milk another bloody cow.
It was only after I won my battle
to be free of them, that I came to love cattle.
Few dairy here now, anyway. It’s gone largely bung.
I’m forty-eight next week. I won’t die a dairyman. Or young.
The bush permits allusion, not illusion:
I didn’t come for any past that’s gone.
More for Dad, who had stopped getting on
and was getting old and sick. Our eldest children
too had already missed a country childhood
and we didn’t think the younger three should
have to. Also there was this choice I had:
get out of Yuppie City or go mad.
No perhaps in that either. But enough.
Life here is scarcely tough:
Valerie’s wryly and happily learning bush ways
and would have mastered the harder ones, too, of the old days.
She’s on leave from teaching. Alec goes to special school by bus,
Clare to a local school. I’m running my export business
out of this room from which, well, four bean rows
and two of turnips are visible. Peter, our smallest boy,
is enjoying his babyhood, but sometimes gets wistful for Sydney.
Dad’s had a cataract op. and sees well for his age
but now he’s got shingles, nailed not to rafters but his rib-cage.
Ouch! Still, spring here delivers days you could dance to,
given a chance to. And that is our news.
MAX FABRE’S YACHTS
Towers of swell fabric
leaning on the ocean
go about in salt haze
to race for the rocked gun.
Straining theory makes the world
equivocal as miracles
ever were. Between spear and sphere
here tussle in purified war
the souls of rich men,
of syndicates and winch-winders
but no longer do they skate
on a sunk ice of ambition.
Nothing turns on a blade: all
now glide on a lucky trefoil,
a trinitarian trifoil,
vision of a drowning man
and first unveiled off Newport:
Hermes, messenger of Heaven,
speeding with one winged foot
dipped in the ocean.
Max Fabre, of Sydney, made pioneering designs in the early 1960s of trifoil ‘winged’ keel forms for ocean racing yachts.
ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE AND WAR ON THE GLOUCESTER ROAD
I travel a road cut through time
by bare feet and boots without socks,
by eight-year-old men droving cattle,
by wheels parallel as printed rhyme
over rhythms of hill shale and tussocks.
In the hardest real trouble of my life
I called this Gloucester road to mind,
whi
ch cuttings were bare gravel, which rife
with grass, which ones rainforest-vined.
The road starts at Coolongolook
which means roughly Leftward Inland
from gulunggal, the left hand,
runs west between Holdens’ and James’
where new people have to paint names
on their mailboxes, and stumps have board-slots
from when tall trees were jibbed like yachts
and felled above their hollow tones.
Later logs lie about like gnawed bones.
The road comes on through Sawyers Creek
where the high whaleback ridge becomes a peak
and where my father, aged nine years,
faced down the Bashing Teacher, a Squeers
who cut six-foot canes in the scrub
and, chewing his tongue in a sub-
jective ecstasy, lashed back-arching children.
Mind your mhisness! – Time someone chipped you! –
Short blazed at tall – and the knobbed cane withdrew.
My father was cheered shoulder-high in the playground then
and the flogging rods vanished. But previously slack
parents loomed, shouting. And behind them, the sack.
Here too a farmer heard Give up
cigarettes or your life! He coughed a sup
of Flanders gas, cried Jesus Christ and that,
Doctor, I’ll give up my life! And what
was burning inside him smouldered on
for decades, disclosed only once
in ’39, teaching dodges to his sons.
(1939, smiles an aunt, the year
when no woman had to stay a spinster.)
The road runs through Bunyah, meaning bark
for shelters, or firelighters’ candlebark
blown on in a gugri house, a word
for fire-hut that is still heard
though few farms still use a googery.
Few? None now. I was gone a generation.
Even parrot-eating’s stopped: – The buggers,
they’d been eating that wild-tobacco berry:
Imagine a soup of boiled cigars! –
I’m driving to Gloucester station
to collect my urban eldest from the train,
and there are the concrete tips
of bridge piles, set like a tank trap
up a farm entryway. The huge rap
of a piledriver shivered few chips
off the bedrock when they were banged stubbornly
by an engineer who would not be told
Black rock at eight feet’ll stop you cold!
What did locals know, lacking a degree?
I loved the old bridge, its handrails,
ballast logs and deck, an inland ship.
Kids watched how floods’ pewter rip
wracked limbs over it. Floods were our folktales.
Now we drive above missed schooldays, high
on the Shire’s concrete second try.
There at the hall, drums and accordions
still pump, and well-lit dancers glide.
In the dark outside move, single and duo,
the angrily shy and the bawdy ones:
blood and babies from the dancing outside.
We held Free Church services too, though,
in that hall. For months I’d cry aloud
at the rise in the east of any cloud
no bigger than a man’s hand.
A cloud by day led me out of Babyland
about when Hiroshima had three years to go.
The Free Church, knuckle-white on its ridge,
now looks north at the Lavinia Murray Bridge,
at my great-grandmother’s Chinese elm tree
and the Dutchman tractoring peaceably.
That faint scar across the creek is butts
of a range for aligned wartime rifle shots.
What fearsome breach of military law
sent you, Lieutenant Squance, to command
that platoon of worried men-on-the-land
the Bunyah Volunteer Defence Corps
in those collapsing months after Singapore,
brassbuttoned fathers, deadly afraid
for life and family? Your British parade
manner gave them some diversion:
milky boots, casual mutiny, aspersion,
your corporal raving death-threats in your face
for calling his clean rifle a disgrace,
brownpaper sandwiches sent to you with tea
after parade one Saturday –
I think, though, you’d have stayed and defended
us, and died as our world ended,
Mr Squance. Belated thanks are extended.
There’s a house where I had hospitality
without fuss for years when I needed it.
Now it’s dying, of sun-bleach, of shadowed
scarlet lichen, the poisons of abandonment.
I’m thinking, over the next rises,
of children who did not have their lives,
who died young, and how one realises
only at home that, unknown to younger wives,
faces lie in wait in finger-felted albums’
gapless groupings of family. The sums
of those short lifetimes add to one’s own age,
to its weight, having no light yarns to lift them.
Peace or war, all die for our freedom.
The innocent, the guilty, the beasts, all die for our freedom.
I was taught the irreparable knowledge
by a baby of thirty next door in his wheelchair
who’d thrash and grimace with happiness when I went there.
I see the road, and many roads before,
through a fawn snap of him as a solemn little boy
before meningitis. And it is first for him
that I insist on a state where lives resume.
The squatter style grinds eastward here, or ‘down’
(both baarung in the old language) and spreads out from town.
One property here was Something Downs for a bit:
over there through the hills I can glimpse part of it
just short of the pines round my gone one-teacher school
with its zigzag air raid trench and morning flagpole;
from there I remember birthdays, and how to shin
fast over fence rails: You’re last! – I’ll be first in Heaven!
I pass by Lavinia’s gate,
the first woman Shire President in the State
and not dowager at eighty, but reigning, in her fox fur,
descending on Parliament, ascending with the cropduster
whose rent for an airfield was shopping flights to Gloucester.
A flagman stops me with a circled word.
I halt beside him, wait till he can be heard
over a big steel roller’s matt declensions
as it tightens gravel down into two dimensions.
He points at a possum curled like an ampersand
around a high dead branch, spending the day
miserably where its light caught her away
from her cache of darkness. – There’s her baby’s hand
out of her pouch. – She’s dreaming. – Wonder if we
are in her dream? – Wonder if she’s ever seen a hill? –
What lights would we have, on what cars, if we were nocturnal?
Look lower, native bees. – Round a knothole spout
a thought-balloon of grist breathes in and out.
Look, one on your arm. – Their mixture must need salt.
Hell will have icecream before this road gets asphalt.
I drive off, on what sounds like a shore.
In Upper Bunyah there are more
settlers without nicknames, or
none they know. The widower on that hill
used to have one (and he was the raving corporal).
He once
had some evangelists staying
in his house, demonstratively praying,
so one day his two dozen cats annoyed him
and he took the small rifle and destroyed them,
shot them off rafters, sniped eyes under his bed –
cups exploded in the kitchen as poor Tibby fled –
the men of prayer too ran headlong from his charity.
Sweet, for one, are the uses of barbarity.
His later wife had a chequebook and painted in France.
Why does so much of our culture work through yarns
equivalent to the national talent for cartoons?
It is an old war brought from Europe
by those who also brought poverty and landscape.
They had scores to settle, even with themselves. Tradition
is also repeating oneself, expecting inattention,
singing dumb, expecting scorn. Or sly mispronunciation
out of loyalty to the dead: You boiling them bikinis
in that Vichy sauce? We were the wrong people risen
– forerunners in that of nearly everyone –
but we rose early, on small farms, and were family.
A hard yarn twangs the tension
and fires its broad arrow out of a grim space
of Old Australian smells: toejam, tomato sauce,
semen and dead singlets the solitary have called peace
but which is really an unsurrendered trench. Really prison.
It is a reminder all stories are of war.
Peace, and the proof of peace, is the verandah
absent from some of the newer houses here.
It is also a slight distance – as indeed
grows between me and the farm of my cousin
who recently was sold treated seed grain
in mistake for cattle-feed grain:
it killed cows, but he dared not complain
or sue the feed merchant, for fear
he’d be barred as a milk supplier
to the Milk Board, and ruined, and in consequence
see his house become somebody’s rural residence.
Such things can make a farmer look down, at his land
between his boots, and dignity shrink in his hand.
Now the road enters the gesture of the hills
where they express geologic weather
and contend with landscape in spills
of triangular forest down fence lines
and horse-and-scoop dams like filled mines.
What else to say of peace? It is a presence
with the feeling of home, and timeless in any tense.
I am driving waga, up and west.
Parting cattle, I climb over the crest
out of Bunyah, and skirt Bucca Wauka,