A Single Tree Page 8
conifers inked above the chine
years of stooping over sempiternal ragwort
Part of your souls will surely remain –
lost wombat Count Strzelecki scarlet bathroom –
like wool or dreams
of figures lightly daubed
on a pastoral bowl.
The Emotions are not Skilled Workers,
Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1979
Emily Caroline Creaghe
1883
5 MONDAY
Did nothing particular. Mr. Lamb a young fellow camped some distance from here arrived from Normanton.
6 TUESDAY
Did nothing particular. Miss Shadforth & I helped the gins to wash all the morning. It was very hot. No rain yet. The washing is all taken down to the bank of the creek & boiled in kerosene tins.
7 WEDNESDAY
Intensely hot today, I never felt anything like the heat. I do miss the fruits and vegetables. There is no such luxury up here. Mr. Lamb left this morning. Last night we brought our blankets out onto the verandah, it was too hot to be indoors. Ironed all the afternoon.
8 THURSDAY
We slept again outside, but even then it was too hot to sleep. Mr. Bob Shadforth went up to “Lorne hill” Mr. Jack Watson’s and Mr. Frank Hann’s station about 40 miles away. Very Hot. No Rain. Mr.Watson has 40 pairs of blacks’ ears nailed round the walls collected during raiding parties after the loss of many cattle speared by the blacks.
9 FRIDAY
Did nothing particular. Still no rain, very hot.
10 SATURDAY
Very hot, still no rain. Mr. Bob Shadforth came back from Lorne Hill.
11 SUNDAY
The mailman came, & went on South. Wrote to Papa & Jessie.
12 MONDAY
Mrs. Shadforth was unwell all day. Did some washing in the morning. Very hot. Mr. Shadforth went down to meet his son Ernest who is coming from Bourktown [sic] with the provisions in a dray; he ought to have been here today, so he is a little anxious about him. Bourketown is 4 or 5 days journey from here & the blacks are particularly aggressive in the district.
13 TUESDAY
Washed again this morning & ironed this afternoon. No-one but Mr. Lamond has been here for some time. Miss Shadforth is going to be married in May, so she, Mrs. Shadforth and Bob will have to go to Normanton then. They will be taking a buggy, so Harry says I may go too then & wait at Mrs. Forsyth’s until he comes, instead of remaining here, I am so glad only 3 months more! No rain, intensely hot. I still sleep on the verandah. That is too hot even for Harry, he takes his blankets right outside.
14 WEDNESDAY
Nothing happened of any consequence. Trying to exist through the great heat of both day and night.
15 THURSDAY
A nice cool wind sprang up during the night, & the sun is not so strong, so it is pleasantly cool today. It looks a little like rain. Mr. Lamond brought his express over & took us to the Native Police encampment. It consists of about 15 bark humpies round a square courtyard. There are several gins with their picininies, all with no clothing on. Mr. Lamond’s abode is only a log hut divided into four compartments.
16 FRIDAY
It was showery all night but today the rain has ceased, but it is still cloudy. Amy Shadforth, Edith & I went for a walk to the Tarpaean rock about 2 miles from here. We called in at Mr. Doyle’s humpie on our way. His place is a little inferior to this. Mr. Russel a brother of the one we met at Thursday island, arrived at about 1/2 past 8, this evening.
17 SATURDAY
It rained on & off all last night, then a little showery all day. Mr. Tudor Shadforth, the second son, came from the station he is on this evening, to stay till Monday.
18 SUNDAY
There have been a few showers today. Mr. Doyle came to tea & spent the evening. Went for a short stroll with Harry in the afternoon. Mr. Lamond & little Harry came over this evening as usual. Harry Shadforth about 10 years old lives with his future brother in law.
19 MONDAY
Raining pretty heavily in showers all day. The air is delightfully cool.
20 TUESDAY
The rainy season seems to have set in, in real good earnest; it has been raining heavily nearly all day. Mr. Shadforth & Ernest Shadforth came home, but had to leave the dray at Gregory Downs as the roads were too heavy & the rivers too high. They brought a new black gin with them; she cannot speak a word of English. Mr. Shadforth put a rope round the gin’s neck & dragged her along on foot, he was riding. This seems to be the usual method.
21 WEDNESDAY
No rain this morning, but dull & cloudy. Rained all the afternoon in showers. The new gin, whom they call Bella, is chained up to a tree a few yards from the house, she is not to be loosed until they think she is tamed.
22 THURSDAY
Showery in the morning, but poured with rain all the afternoon and all night. The river close to this house has not risen yet, but the others must be flooded by this time.
The Diary of Emily Caroline Creaghe: Explorer,
Corkwood Press, Adelaide, 2004
Bernard Cronin
1929
The milking sheds were lit by a hurricane lamp swung from a rafter. They were constructed of slab uprights, with a roof of shingle. Strips of bark had been nailed down the joints of the slabs, but these had long since split to the shrinking of the timber, so that the walls were now a mosaic of draughty chinks. The floor was of slabs, also. These, settling into the earth, had become uneven and insecure. The slightest pressure fetched a spew of vile slime from the joins. The stench of it mingled with the reek of hot dung, and the stickily-sweet aroma of the spilling milk.
The bails gave on to a yard that was a morass of frozen filth, through which the cattle stamped almost to the hocks. Their udders were slimed with the stuff when they came into the stalls. It had to be washed off, and the udder dried, before milking could be attempted. A number had cracked teats. Blood from these stained the first milk . . .
The cows were a lean, mongrelly breed, with the rough hides that flaunt a starvation diet. Even in the flush of their calving they gave but little milk; and this of poor account. Their yield was reduced now to a mere winter’s pittance. The whole herd of fifteen barely filled the twelve and a half gallon can that went each morning to the cheese factory at Guruwa.
Jasper milked with his head burrowed into a shaggy flank and his knees trembling to the weight of a filling bucket. His feet were blocks of ice . . . beyond reach of their former agony of irritation; or, indeed, of sensation of any kind. The hot milk soothed his hands. For the time his chilblains were forgotten. He would remember them only when anointing a sore teat with petroleum jelly, taken from a tin at the head of the bail. He would anoint his fingers at the same time. The milk and the grease and the blood formed a scum on his hands, and dribbled down the side of the bucket . . .
In the adjoining bail his uncle was rising to empty his own bucket into the strainer set in the neck of the can. In addition to the ordinary fine-wire mesh, there were three or four thicknesses of cheese-cloth folded into the strainer. In spite of this precaution a good deal of dirt found its way into the can, along with the milk. Mr. Carbury, the factory manager, frequently complained of this. He had, indeed, not long since threatened to take no more milk from Musk Ridge, unless it was better strained. The threat had roused Hector Martin to a blasphemous fury. He had, notwithstanding, added an extra fold to the cheese-cloth. He let it be known that Carbury had – in the vernacular – “got him well set”. Jasper, for all his years, was unimpressed. He knew that Carbury was the last man to make unfair discrimination. The milk from Musk Ridge was more than ordinarily dirty. It was the fault of the milking yards. But, in that, most small off-road farms were alike.
Hector Martin’s milking stool had only a single leg. As is the fashion in some parts of Gippsland, the stool was strapped to his hindparts; so that as he walked to and fro one had the absurd impression that he wore a tail. The stool
leg stuck out straightly. He had need only to assume a sitting posture, and the act was actually accomplished. In most so contrived, perhaps the quaintness of it would alone have attracted an unsophisticated observer; in the case of Hector Martin, the borrowed appendage became somehow part and parcel of his curiously simian proportions. His thinness was extraordinary; and he was tall and stooping, with overlong limbs. He wore no hat – seeming to be impervious to the cold, and his high head proclaimed itself bald and shining, except for a ragged circle of mouse-coloured hair. From full temples his face narrowed to a pointed, pepper-and-salt beard. His eyes were black, and deeply sunken; his nose fleshy and congested; his mouth a straight slit. His was the face of an intellectual marred by self-treason; a swift, sharp, clever face having in it a quality as of clean water newly dirtied. For the present, in the stress of hidden thought, this pollution was abominably plain to see.
‘The Morning’s Milking’ in Patrick Morgan (ed.), Shadow and Shine: an Anthology
of Gippsland Literature, Centre for Gippsland Studies, Churchill, Victoria, 1988
Robyn Davidson
1980
Throughout the trip I had been gaining an awareness and an understanding of the earth as I learnt how to depend upon it. The openness and emptiness which had at first threatened me were now a comfort which allowed my sense of freedom and joyful aimlessness to grow. This sense of space works deep in the Australian collective consciousness. It is frightening and most of the people huddle around the eastern seaboard where life is easy and space a graspable concept, but it produces a sense of potential and possibility nevertheless that may not exist now in any European country. It will not be long, however, before the land is conquered, fenced up and beaten into submission. But here, here it was free, unspoilt and seemingly indestructible.
And as I walked through that country, I was becoming involved with it in a most intense and yet not fully conscious way. The motions and patterns and connections of things became apparent on a gut level. I didn’t just see the animal tracks, I knew them. I didn’t just see the bird, I knew it in relationship to its actions and effects. My environment began to teach me about itself without my full awareness of the process. It became an animate being of which I was a part. The only way I can describe how the process occurred is to give an example: I would see a beetle’s tracks in the sand. What once would have been merely a pretty visual design with few associations attached, now became a sign which produced in me instantaneous associations – the type of beetle, which direction it was going in and why, when it made the tracks, who its predators were. Having been taught some rudimentary knowledge of the pattern of things at the beginning of the trip, I now had enough to provide a structure in which I could learn to learn. A new plant would appear and I would recognize it immediately because I could perceive its association with other plants and animals in the overall pattern, its place. I would recognize and know the plant without naming it or studying it away from its environment. What was once a thing that merely existed became something that everything else acted upon and had a relationship with and vice versa. In picking up a rock I could no longer simply say, ‘This is a rock,’ I could now say, ‘This is part of a net,’ or closer, ‘This, which everything acts upon, acts.’ When this way of thinking became ordinary for me, I too became lost in the net and the boundaries of myself; stretched out for ever. In the beginning I had known at some level that this could happen. It had frightened me then. I had seen it as a chaotic principle and I fought it tooth and nail. I had given myself the structures of habit and routine with which to fortify myself and these were necessary at the time. Because if you are fragmented and uncertain it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt. Survival in a desert, then, requires that you lose this fragmentation, and fast. It is not a mystical experience, or rather, it is dangerous to attach these sorts of words to it. They are too hackneyed and prone to misinterpretation. It is something that happens, that’s all. Cause and effect. In different places, survival requires different things, based on the environment. Capacity for survival may be the ability to be changed by environment.
Changing to this view of reality had been a long hard struggle against the old conditioning. Not that it was a conscious battle, rather it was being forced on me and I either accept it or reject it. In rejecting it I had gone over the edge. The person inside whom I had previously relied on for survival had, out here and in a different circumstance, become the enemy. This internal warring had almost sent me around the bend. The intellectual and critical faculties did everything they could think of to keep boundaries there. They dredged up memory. They became obsessed with time and measurement. But they were having to take second place, because they simply were no longer necessary. The subconscious mind became much more active and important. And this in the form of dreams, feelings. A growing awareness of the character of a particular place, whether it was a good place to be with a calming influence, or whether it gave me the creeps. And this all linked up with the Aboriginal reality, their vision of the world as being something they could never be separate from which showed in their language. In Pitjantjara and, I suspect, all other Aboriginal languages, there is no word for ‘exist’. Everything in the universe is in constant interaction with everything else. You cannot say, this is a rock. You can only say, there sits, leans, stands, falls, over, lies down, a rock.
The self did not seem to be an entity living somewhere inside the skull, but a reaction between mind and stimulus. And when the stimulus was non-social, the self had a hard time defining its essence and realizing its dimensions. The self in a desert becomes more and more like the desert. It has to, to survive. It becomes limitless, with its roots more in the subconscious than the conscious – it gets stripped of non-meaningful habits and becomes more concerned with realities related to survival. But as is its nature, it desperately wants to assimilate and make sense of the information it receives, which in a desert is almost always going to be translated into the language of mysticism.
What I’m trying to say is, when you walk on, sleep on, stand on, defecate on, wallow in, get covered in, and eat the dirt around you, and when there is no one to remind you what society’s rules are, and nothing to keep you linked to that society, you had better be prepared for some startling changes. And just as Aborigines seem to be in perfect rapport with themselves and their country, so the embryonic beginnings of that rapport were happening to me. I loved it.
And my fear had a different quality now too. It was direct and useful. It did not incapacitate me or interfere with my competence. It was the natural, healthy, fear one needs for survival.
Although I talked constantly to myself, or Diggity or the country around me, I was not lonely – on the contrary, had I suddenly stumbled across another human being, I would have either hidden, or treated it as if it were just another bush or rock or lizard.
Tracks, Paladin Grafton Books, London, 1980
Arthur Hoey Davis
(Steele Rudd)
1899
Cranky Jack
It was early in the day. Traveller after traveller was trudging by Shingle Hut. One who carried no swag halted at the rails and came in. He asked Dad for a job. “I dunno,” Dad answered, “What wages would you want?”
The man said he wouldn’t want any. Dad engaged him at once.
And such a man! Tall, bony, heavy-jawed, shaven with a reaping-hook, apparently. He had a thick crop of black hair – shaggy, unkempt, and full of grease, grass, and fragments of dry gum-leaves. On his head were two old felt hats – one sewn inside the other. On his back a shirt made from a piece of blue blanket, with white cotton stitches striding up and down it like lines of fencing. His trousers were gloom itself; they were a problem, and bore reliable evidence of his industry. No ordinary person would consider himself out of work while in them. And the new-comer was no ordinary person. He seemed to have all the woe of the world upon him. He was as sad and weird-looking as a widow out in the wet.
In the
yard was a large heap of firewood – remarkable truth! – which Dad told him to chop up. He began. And how he worked! The axe rang again – particularly when it left the handle – and pieces of wood scattered everywhere. Dad watched him chopping for a while, then went with Dave to pull corn.
For hours the man chopped away without once looking at the sun. Mother came out. Joy! She had never seen so much wood cut before. She was delighted. She made a cup of tea and took it to the man, and apologised for having no sugar to put in it. He paid no attention to her; he worked harder. Mother waited, holding the tea in her hand. A lump of wood nearly as big as a shingle flew up and shaved her left ear. She put the tea on the ground and went in search of eggs for dinner. (We were out of meat – the kangaroo-dog was lame. He had got “ripped” the last time we killed.)
The tea remained on the ground. Chips fell into it. The dog saw it. He limped towards it eagerly, and dipped the point of his nose in it. It burnt him. An aged rooster strutted along and looked sideways at it. He distrusted it and went away. It attracted the pig – a sow with nine young ones. She waddled up, and poked the cup over with her nose; then she sat down on it, while the family joyously gathered round the saucer. Still the man chopped on.
Mother returned – without any eggs. She rescued the crockery from the pigs and turned curiously to the man. She said, “Why, you’ve let them take the tea!” No answer. She wondered.
Suddenly, and for the fiftieth time, the axe flew off. The man held the handle and stared at the woodheap. Mother watched him. He removed his hats, and looked inside them. He remained looking inside them.
Mother watched him more closely. His lips moved. He said, “Listen to them! They're coming! I knew they'd follow! ”
“Who?” asked Mother, trembling slightly.
“They're in the wood! ” he went on. “Ha, ha! I’ve got them. They’ll never get out; never get out ”