A Single Tree Read online

  A darkness kicks back and the cutout

  bar jerks into place, a distant chainsaw

  dissipates. Further on, some seconds later,

  another does the same. They follow

  the onset of darkness, a relay of severing,

  a ragged harmonics stretching back

  to its beginning – gung-ho,

  blazon, overconfident. Hubristic

  to the final cut, last drop of fuel.

  New Poems: Peripheral Light, W.W. Norton, New York, 2004

  D. H. Lawrence

  1923

  The bush was in bloom, the wattles were out. Wattle, or mimosa, is the national flower of Australia. There are said to be thirty-two species. Richard found only seven as they wandered along. The little, pale, sulphur wattle with a reddish stem sends its lovely sprays so aerial out of the sand of the trail, only a foot or two high, but such a delicate, spring-like thing. The thorny wattle with its fuzzy pale balls tangles on the banks. Then beautiful heath-plants with small bells, like white heather, stand in tall, straight tufts, and above them the gold sprays of the intensely gold bush mimosa, with here and there, on long, thin stalks like hairs almost, beautiful blue flowers, with gold grains, three-petalled, like reed-flowers, and blue, blue with a touch of Australian darkness. Then comes a hollow, desolate bare place with empty greyness and a few dead, charred gum-trees, where there has been a bush-fire. At the side of this bare place great flowers, twelve feet high, like sticky dark lilies in bulb-buds at the top of the shaft, blood-red. Then over another stream, and scattered bush once more, and the last queer, gold-red bushes of the bottle-brush tree, like soft-bristly golden bottle-brushes standing stiffly up, and the queer black-boys on one black leg with a tuft of dark-green spears, sending up the high stick of a seed-stalk, much taller than a man. And here and there the gold bushes of wattle with their narrow dark leaves.

  Richard turned and they plunged into the wild grass and strange bushes following the stream. By the stream the mimosa was all gold, great gold bushes full of spring fire rising over your head, and the scent of the Australian spring, and the most ethereal of all golden bloom, the plumy, many-balled wattle, and the utter loneliness, the manlessness, the untouched blue sky overhead, the gaunt, lightless gum-trees rearing a little way off, and sound of strange birds, vivid ones of strange, brilliant birds that flit round. Save for that, and for some weird frog-like sound, indescribable, the age-unbroken silence of the Australian bush.

  But it is wonderful, out of the sombreness of gum-trees, that seem the same, hoary for ever, and that are said to begin to wither from the centre the moment they are mature – out of the hollow bush of gum-trees and silent heaths, all at once, in spring, the most delicate feathery yellow of plumes and plumes and plumes and trees and bushes of wattle, as if angels had flown right down out of the softest gold regions of heaven to settle here, in the Australian bush. And the perfume in all the air that might be heaven, and the unutterable stillness, save for strange bright birds and flocks of parrots, and the motionlessness, save for a stream and butterflies and some small brown bees. Yet a stillness, and a manlessness, and an elation, the bush flowering at the gates of heaven.

  Kangaroo (1923),

  Penguin, London, 1960

  Henry Lawson

  1893

  Out Back

  The old year went, and the new returned, in the withering weeks of drought,

  The cheque was spent that the shearer earned, and the sheds were all cut out;

  The publican’s words were short and few, and the publican’s looks were black —

  And the time had come, as the shearer knew, to carry his swag Out Back.

  For time means tucker, and tramp you must, where the scrubs and plains are wide,

  With seldom a track that a man can trust, or a mountain peak to guide;

  All day long in the dust and heat — when summer is on the track —

  With stinted stomachs and blistered feet, they carry their swags Out Back.

  He tramped away from the shanty there, when the days were long and hot,

  With never a soul to know or care if he died on the track or not.

  The poor of the city have friends in woe, no matter how much they lack,

  But only God and the swagmen know how a poor man fares Out Back.

  He begged his way on the parched Paroo and the Warrego tracks once more,

  And lived like a dog, as the swagmen do, till the Western stations shore;

  But men were many, and sheds were full, for work in the town was slack —

  The traveller never got hands in wool, though he tramped for a year Out Back.

  In stifling noons when his back was wrung by its load, and the air seemed dead,

  And the water warmed in the bag that hung to his aching arm like lead,

  Or in times of flood, when plains were seas, and the scrubs were cold and black,

  He ploughed in mud to his trembling knees, and paid for his sins Out Back.

  He blamed himself in the year ‘Too Late’ – in the heaviest hours of life —

  ’ Twas little he dreamed that a shearing-mate had care of his home and wife;

  There are times when wrongs from your kindred come, and treacherous tongues attack —

  When a man is better away from home, and dead to the world, Out Back.

  And dirty and careless and old he wore, as his lamp of hope grew dim;

  He tramped for years till the swag he bore seemed part of himself to him.

  As a bullock drags in the sandy ruts, he followed the dreary track,

  With never a thought but to reach the huts when the sun went down Out Back.

  It chanced one day, when the north wind blew in his face like a furnace-breath,

  He left the track for a tank he knew — ’twas a short-cut to his death;

  For the bed of the tank was hard and dry, and crossed with many a crack,

  And, oh! it’s a terrible thing to die of thirst in the scrub Out Back.

  A drover came, but the fringe of law was eastward many a mile;

  He never reported the thing he saw, for it was not worth his while.

  The tanks are full and the grass is high in the mulga off the track,

  Where the bleaching bones of a white man lie by his mouldering swag Out Back.

  For time means tucker, and tramp they must, where the plains and scrubs are wide,

  With seldom a track that a man can trust, or a mountain peak to guide;

  All day long in the flies and heat the men of the outside track

  With stinted stomachs and blistered feet must carry their swags Out Back

  In the Days When the World Was Wide,

  Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1896

  Henry Lawson

  1896

  “I’d been away from home for eight years,” said Mitchell to his mate, as they dropped their swags in the mulga shade and sat down. “I hadn’t written a letter – kept putting it off, and a blundering fool of a fellow that got down the day before me told the old folks that he’d heard I was dead.”

  Here he took a pull at his water-bag.

  “When I got home they were all in mourning for me. It was night, and the girl that opened the door screamed and fainted away like a shot.”

  He lit his pipe.

  “Mother was upstairs howling and moaning in a chair, with all the girls boo-hooing round her for company. The old man was sitting in the back kitchen crying to himself.”

  He put his hat down on the ground, dinted in the crown, and poured some water into the hollow for his cattle-pup.

  “The girls came rushing down. Mother was so pumped out that she couldn’t get up. They thought at first I was a ghost, and then they all tried to get holt of me at once – nearly smothered me. Look at that pup! You want to carry a tank of water on a dry stretch when you’ve got a pup that drinks as much as two men.”

  He poured a drop more water into the top of his hat.

  “Well, mother scream
ed and nearly fainted when she saw me. Such a picnic you never saw. They kept it up all night. I thought the old cove was gone off his chump. The old woman wouldn’t let go my hand for three mortal hours. Have you got the knife?”

  He cut up some more tobacco.

  “All next day the house was full of neighbours, and the first to come was an old sweetheart of mine; I never thought she cared for me till then. Mother and the girls made me swear never to go away any more; and they kept watching me, and hardly let me go outside for fear I’d —”

  “Get drunk?”

  “No – you’re smart – for fear I’d clear. At last I swore on the Bible that I’d never leave home while the old folks were alive; and then mother seemed easier in her mind.”

  He rolled the pup over and examined his feet. “I expect I’ll have to carry him a bit – his feet are sore. Well, he’s done pretty well this morning, and anyway he won’t drink so much when he’s carried.”

  “You broke your promise about leaving home,” said his mate.

  Mitchell stood up, stretched himself, and looked dolefully from his heavy swag to the wide, hot, shadeless cotton-bush plain ahead.

  “Oh, yes,” he yawned, “I stopped at home for a week, and then they began to growl because I couldn’t get any work to do.”

  The mate guffawed and Mitchell grinned. They shouldered the swags, with the pup on top of Mitchell’s, took up their billies and water-bags, turned their unshaven faces to the wide, hazy distance, and left the timber behind them.

  ‘On the Edge of a Plain’ in Prose Works, Vol. I, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1935

  Henry Lawson

  1901

  Next morning things looked a lot brighter. Things always look brighter in the morning – more so in the Australian Bush, I should think, than in most other places. It is when the sun goes down on the dark bed of the lonely Bush, and the sunset flashes lke a sea of fire and then fades, and then glows out again, like a bank of coals, and then burns away to ashes – it is then that old things come home to one. And strange, new-old things too, that haunt and depress you terribly, and that you can’t understand. I often think how, at sunset, the past must come home to new-chum blacksheep, sent out to Australia and drifted into the bush. I used to think that they couldn’t have much brains, or the loneliness would drive them mad.

  I’d decided to let James take the team for a trip or two. He could drive all right; he was a better business man, and no doubt would manage better than me – as long as the novelty lasted; and I’d stay at home for a week or so, till Mary got used to the place, or I could get a girl from somewhere to come and stay with her. The first weeks or few months of loneliness are the worst, as a rule, I believe, as they say the first weeks in jail are – I was never there. I know it’s so with tramping or hard graft: the first day or two are twice as hard as any of the rest. But, for my part, I could never get used to loneliness and dullness; the last days used to be the worst with me: then I’d have to make a move, or drink. When you’ve been too much and too long alone in a lonely place, you begin to do queer things and think queer thoughts – provided you have any imagination at all. You’ll sometimes sit of an evening and watch the lonely track, by the hour, for a horseman or a cart or someone that’s never likely to come that way – someone, or a stranger, that you can’t and don’t really expect to see. I think that most men who have been alone in the Bush for any length of time – and married couples too – are more or less mad. With married couples it is generally the husband who is painfully shy and awkward when strangers come. The woman seems to stand the loneliness better, and can hold her own with strangers, as a rule. It’s only afterwards, and looking back, that you see how queer you got. Shepherds and boundary-riders, who are alone for months, must have their periodical spree, at the nearest shanty, else they’d go raving mad. Drink is the only break in the awful monotony, and the yearly or half-yearly spree is the only thing they’ve got to look forward to: it keeps their minds fixed on something definite ahead.

  But Mary kept her head pretty well through the first months of loneliness. Weeks, rather, I should say, for it wasn’t as bad as it might have been farther up-country: there was generally someone came of a Sunday afternoon – a spring-cart with a couple of women, or maybe a family – or a lanky shy Bush native or two on lanky shy horses. On a quiet Sunday, after I’d brought Jim home, Mary would dress him and herself – just the same as if we were in town – and make me get up on one end and put on a collar and take her and Jim for a walk along the creek. She said she wanted to keep me civilized. She tried to make a gentleman of me for years, but gave it up gradually.

  ‘Water Them Geraniums, Part II: Past Carin’ in Prose Works,

  Vol. II, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1935

  Timothy Lee

  2011

  In the wool industry, some genteel pastoral traditions persisted into the mid-century. At Boonoke North servants laid out a fully cooked breakfast on silver salvers each morning. Boonoke, especially, resembled a small hamlet. ‘It had ten or twelve married men’s houses, its own store, big garage, what you’d call a five-car garage plus workshops, big stables and a school,’ recalls Charles Falkiner. ‘It was a complete self-contained village.’ Some families had worked for the firm, as domestics or as station hands, down through three generations.’

  At Wanganella every sheep on the station was blade shorn until 1956, probably making it the last station in the Riverina to retain such a quaint practice. ‘Mr Austin thought it was better for the sheep. Less stress,’ recalls Ken McCrabb, a neighbour who, from the age of thirteen, spent part of every school holidays with Tom Austin at the station. Austin also believed the exra covering of wool left by the blades made the sheep less vulnerable to cold snaps.

  Wanganella station had eighteen staff, including Tom Austin as manager. Aside from the post office and one other residence, in every house in the Wanganella township lived a Wanganella station employee. There was a cook, a housemaid, a station groom who used to milk the cows and butcher the sheep for rations, a windmill main­tenance and handy man (assisted by this son), a full-time gardener, and a station mechanic.

  ‘While most other stations fed their workers on rams and cull meat, we were only given the best,’ former Wanganella mechanic Alex Fraser would recall. ‘We ate the same cuts as the Austin family; nothing worse than two tooth (yearling) sheep.’ Jackaroos also dined with the Austins in the homestead, not the usual station practice.

  Wanganella had a general hand named Archie Hume, a little, wizened, elderly man who was said not to know his own age but rode a good horse to assist with mustering. Station hands were obliged to report any sighting of rabbits so that Jack Riley, the ‘rabbiter’, who daily drove a horse and spring cart to check his traps or fumigate rabbit warrens, would investigate. With his ambling old horse this generally took most of the day.

  Tom Austin loved to tell the story of one of the station’s boundary riders who took on the job at sixty-three. When he reached eighty Tom said to him, ‘Jack you are getting on a bit now. I think you should give some thought to when you shall retire.’

  Jack’s reply was short and to the point: ‘Well Mr Tom, if I had-a knowed this job was not going to be permanent I would never have taken it in the first place!’

  ‘Tom spoke in a manner that you’d think was very haughty – a western Victorian sort of accent,’ recalls neighbour Ken McCrabb. ‘But there was nothing stuck up about him one little bit. [He was] a very, very genuine person loved by everyone’ . . .

  Tom Austin favoured an easy-care, open-faced, good-walking type of sheep. ‘He used to say to me, “Ken, when you are selecting merino rams, you must always keep your eye on a mob of a thousand wethers”,’ recalls McCrabb. It meant that the stud breeder needed to consider what made the best commercial sheep. Austin was prepared to overlook small faults that some stud masters obsessed about. ‘He didn’t mind if it had a black spot on its muzzle, he didn’t mind if it was a bit bare on the legs, and he was
not all that fussy about hocks.’

  The stud rams were housed in a customary Riverina ram shed, a timber structure with a roof of thatched cane grass. By daytime the rams lived outside, feeding on natural herbage and bush. By night they were housed and fed a ration of chaff, oats and lucerne hay, fodder delivered weekly by a horse and spring cart.

  Caring for the rams was the sole job of stud master Peter Spalding. He rode his horse to the ram shed every day and stayed there all day, rimming the odd hoof or preparing the sheep for a coming show . . . Peter Spalding, who oversaw the mating of the ewes using the practice of ‘hand serving’, ‘had a good eye for sheep,’ recalls Ken McCrabb. Mating took place in the pens inside the woolshed. Various ewes would be allocated to thirty or forty of the top stud sires. ‘Cull rams’, trussed in a bag around their loins to prevent them mating, were used as ‘teasers’. They would mount a ewe and then be led away, leaving the ewe sexually receptive for the intended stud sire. The rams often knew their individual stud number and when Spalding called it out the rams in the holding yard would be instantly ready for action.

  Wanganella and the Merino Aristocrats, Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne, 2011

  Ludwig Leichhardt

  1846

  Much, indeed the greater portion, of my journey had been occupied in long reconnoitring rides; and he who is thus occupied is in a continued state of excitement, now buoyant with hope, as he urges on his horse towards some distant range or blue mountain, or as he follows the favourable bend of a river; now all despairing and miserable, as he approaches the foot of the range without finding water from which he could start again with renewed strength, or as the river turns in an unfavourable direction, and slips out of his course. Evening approaches; the sun has sunk below the horizon for some time, but still he strains his eye through the gloom for the dark verdure of a creek, or strives to follow the arrow-like flight of a pigeon, the flapping of whose wings has filled him with a sudden hope, from which he relapses again into a still greater sadness; with a sickened heart he drops his head to a broken and interrupted rest, whilst his horse is standing hobbled at his side, unwilling from excessive thirst to feed on the dry grass. How often have I found myself in these different states of the brightest hope and the deepest misery, riding along, thirsty, almost lifeless and ready to drop from my saddle with fatigue; the poor horse tired like his rider, footsore, stumbling over every stone, running heedlessly against the trees, and wounding my knees! But suddenly, the note of Grallina Australis, the call of cockatoos, or the croaking of frogs, is heard, and hopes are bright again; water is certainly at hand; the spur is applied to the flank of the tired beast, which already partakes in his rider’s anticipations, and quickens his pace – and a lagoon, a creek, or a river, is before him. The horse is soon unsaddled, hobbled, and well washed; a fire is made, the teapot is put to the fire, the meat is dressed, the enjoyment of the poor reconnoiterer is perfect, and a prayer of thankfulness to the Almighty God who protects the wanderer on his journey, bursts from his grateful lips.