Category Archives: My Story

My Story, Rebels, Rural Childhood

Dearborn, death & American dreams

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NEON DREAMS The Henry Ford Museum, Detroit.
NEON DREAMS The Henry Ford Museum, Detroit.

A Writer’s Midwestern adventure.

SEEKING the childhood haunts of farming icon Henry Ford, on arrival in the great city of Detroit, we (me, a cameraman and a presenter) headed not for Motown (unfortunately) but to the city fringe and the Dearborn area.

There, the Motor City puts on a veneer of rural respectability, but on the many occasions we got lost in our hired Buick, street upon street of homely clapboard stoops in everyday neighbourhoods revealed themselves, where no-one cared much for Ford and the quiet revolutions he spearheaded.

All that is on ostentatious display at the Henry Ford Museum, our first port of call.

It would be hard to name a more complete exhibition anywhere in the world. As an entrée to life in the American heartland, this place is the veritable cherry on the pie.

Acres of halls burst with memorabilia on a huge scale – the neon sign display must be the world’s best, and there’s an entire Holiday Inn which was moved brick-by-brick as an homage to the original American road trip.

A Museum staffer showed us to another building on the far side of the exterior exhibition (filled with entire villages – Ford loved the whole brick-by-brick thing), where he pulled-up a garage door and trundled a rather strange looking machine into the daylight.

This was Henry Ford’s 1907 ‘Automotive Plow’ – the prototype for the mass-produced Fordson tractor.

This tractor changed farming practices dramatically after centuries of hard labour and heavy horses. Ford didn’t invent it, but he made it affordable for most.

MAN OF EXTREMES Henry Ford and his wife in his first car.
MAN OF EXTREMES Henry Ford and his wife in his first car.

A documentary shown at the Museum detailed Ford’s deep regret that his vehicle production technologies helped inspire the military tank, which tore through troops in the slaughter that was WW1.

Turns out Henry Ford (1863-1947) was not just a farmer and industrialist – he was also a pacifist and a vegetarian. Now that got me interested.

As we left the Museum, a formal line of Presidential vehicles revealed itself, from beautiful carriages to limousines. The last one was roped-off, because people respectfully leant across to touch the rear right passenger door.

I wanted to see why, but the sign explained the patently obvious – this was the car in which President John F. Kennedy was killed. Surprisingly, it had been remodelled and used by other presidents for many years after the assassination.

Quite close by, the upholstered chair in which President Abraham Lincoln was shot to death is also on display.

Such a strange, endearing collection of dreams, death and the pinnacle of farming achievements. The dichotomy says much about the man behind the collection, loved and reviled in equal measure. Say what you want about Henry Ford: he was a collector like no other.

Ford’s early tractors were manufactured the world over, and many have become collectors’ items, so we hit the road in search of them, heading south into the great farming state of Ohio, on the very edge of America’s Midwest.

As we embarked, another journey was just beginning in California. Young high flier, 7-year-old student pilot Jessica Dubroff’s ‘Sea to Shining Sea’ flight was going to rewrite history and make her the youngest person to fly across the United States, assisted by her pilot trainer and her father. The Ohio and Michigan media were anticipating seeing Jessica cross their skies any day now.

Passing through the endless city limits of mighty Cleveland, I checked our itinerary, and realised a colleague back in Suffolk, England, had booked us to do an interview in east Ohio, then travel a day and a half back to Michigan, only to turn around and drive back south into Ohio again. The English have no idea about distances! I grumbled, before calling and asking for the dates to be changed.

Meanwhile, we visited affluent farms where Ford tractors that had not tilled the soil for decades were stored like precious objects in huge, pristine sheds.

We interviewed farmers who ran thousands of head of cattle on prairie-like pastures. Here, my vegetarianism was something even I questioned, since these cows lived a life of liberty, with just their ears tagged before they were set free to graze the hills until it was time to bring them in for slaughter.

We met an Amish man who ran a sawmill entirely without electricity, just a pair of heavy horses who he treated like the precious commodity they were.

LAND OF EXTREMES A traditional Amish buggy makes its way into town (Photo: Ad Meskens).
LAND OF EXTREMES A traditional Amish buggy makes its way into town (Photo: Ad Meskens).

The sight of Amish carriages crossing the landscape in the distance was an eerie link with America’s past. The culture of the Plain People contains the last vestiges of a rural romanticism that every country child can relate to.

In Ohio’s land of abundance, everything was larger than I had ever experienced. To reach the arms of the chairs in restaurants, you needed to put your arms out wide!

Then the nation awoke to terrible news that Jessica Dubroff’s plane had gone down shortly after takeoff from Cheyenne in the state of Wyoming. A brief life cut short. A dream broken in this land of big, record-breaking dreams.

Thankfully our itinerary had been adjusted, but we were asked not to delay – the subjects of our interview back in Michigan were heavily pregnant, due any day now. They couldn’t guarantee what we’d be greeted with. So we completed a long night drive across the border into Portland, Indiana, then back up to Michigan to the city of Flint, home of another great American, film maker Michael Moore.

Flint, and in fact that whole section of Michigan, was emerging from a harsh winter. Nevertheless it’s not just the climate that caused a certain down-at-heel quality.

Unlike the vasty fields of Ohio, that part of Michigan seemed rather poverty-stricken. The farmers were less welcoming and more suspicious of travellers. We got lost a few times, and the idea of knocking on doors and asking for directions was more than a little frightening.

This was long before Michael Moore’s films pricked the conscience of the western world – we were only there to interview a goat breeder.

Her flock of Boer goats was in the process of birthing its next generation, so we waited patiently while the mothers bleated. New life within a toughened landscape brought all the cheer we needed to feel better about Henry Ford’s macabre collection, about Jessica Dubroff’s life cut short, and about ourselves in the midst of a thawing state of disbelief … and more beautiful footage of brand new kids has rarely been captured, I’m sure.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

Day Jobs, My Story, Rural Childhood

The black soil in my blood

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A Writer’s birthright.

I WAS born in the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales and I spent the first years of my life living on my parents’ farm between the crossroads village of Delungra and the town of Bingara.

The countryside consisted of rolling uplands, the last vestiges of the black soil country before they give way to Queensland’s Darling Downs.

Some of my earliest memories are of the soil, often baked hard into cracked clay beds, or sluiced with water into acres of mud, but always black. Black against the yellow straw grass that covered the hills.

‘Paxton’, the property where I spent my childhood, was salvaged by my parents from a derelict state. Despite a few years of success, death and divorce saw my rural childhood disappear like spinifex on the wind.

Nights of blazing stars. Days of grey skies over blue hills. Hailstorms and wind that blew the corrugated sheds around like leaves… all were replaced by the disturbing lights of cars in urban streets crossing my bedroom wall in town, of houses that seemed insanely close together, and people living right up against one another.

My family bridged a great divide. The country half were tall, Germanic, Presbyterian stock in great numbers, who, by the time I was born, lived with a fading sense of entitlement based on achievements past.

The other half were a small band of establishment city dwellers with a dose of very English mores.

An attempt was made to combine these energies in my parents’ marriage, but it failed miserably.

I left the country, and in many ways I have been running from it my whole life.

But when I left London to take up a job offer in Suffolk, barely an hour from the city, it was to work for a rural media company.

In my application, I evoked the country of my childhood to get the job. I didn’t need to pretend, I’d lived in and around a mixed crop and stock farm, and I knew a bit about how they operated.

Despite feeling like a complete sellout, I used my trump card – being of strong country bloodlines – and I could see the eyes of one of my interviewers misting over. There is a great camaraderie, and a willingness to help-out their own, amongst families who have worked the land.

I was a farm boy who had video production and communication skills, and I got the job.

Forget that I thought agriculture in general had lost its way, that I was vegetarian, and an animal liberationist who had little interest in farm machinery. I needed a good income, and an opportunity. Farming Press offered me that, and I took it, wondering when my secrets would be discovered.

BURGE'S BURGH The windmill tower on the hillside of the hamlet of Burgh, Suffolk (photo: Barry Hughes www.geograph.org.uk/photo/41986).
BURGE’S BURGH The windmill tower on the hillside of the hamlet of Burgh, Suffolk (Photo: Barry Hughes).

So I packed-up my room in a shared flat in London’s leafy Lewisham Park, and rented another in a tiny row of cottages in the charming little hamlet of Burgh, up a hill past a windmill from the even more charming village of Grundisburgh, just north of Ipswich, Suffolk’s historic county town.

With barely three days to prepare myself, I had to pack for a flight to Detroit, Michigan, to document the traditional skills of farming people across three states.

In the rush I didn’t get much of a chance to meet my new colleagues or my housemate, or settle into the Farming Press offices on the edge of Ipswich, a typical English company with some friendly faces, wanting to know this Australian who was going to work in the video department downstairs.

My first week’s pay was more than I would have earned in a month of cinema shifts. The Suffolk countryside was blossoming into a gorgeous spring. I got a touch of hay fever. I became lost on country lanes trying to find my way home. I was cornered by inquisitive cows. I bought my first ever car and was able to traverse the country without the crippling cost of train travel.

England had opened itself to me a little… and then I had to leave her in a rush of camera equipment and travelling instructions. America’s rural heartland was waiting.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

Day Jobs, My Story

Writing my way out of London

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ROYAL MAIL I sent plenty of dreams into the slots of Royal Mail boxes in England (Photo pixabay.com/en/mailbox-background-architecture-22149/)
DREAM CATCHER I posted plenty of dreams through the slots of Royal Mail boxes.

A Writer gives up on the big city.

I LIVED in the city of London for three years. During the first I was heady with hope, not caring that I hadn’t ‘made it’ yet, sure that I would at any moment. Throughout the second I bargained with my definitions of success, as I compromised in order to survive financially while keeping my dreams alive. In the third, my hopes were dashed and my finances dived as I held-on for that dream job, while life collapsed around my deluded ears… relationships, projects, homes, prospects. All gone with the rent money.

Long before I encountered the hopeful practice of affirmations, I was already making them in my own way. When ridiculous barely media-related jobs were offered to me, since I presented as a non-insane organised person, such as the job filming rich tourists on Caribbean cruises, I would get out of them by saying: “Thanks, but I have been offered another job which I simply cannot refuse… I’m perfect for it, and to turn it down would be impossible.”

The crestfallen human resources folk would express a moment of regret, then drop me, still unemployed, with the phone.

Thankfully I landed just enough unpaid independent film and television work to stave off a real ego bruising.

I assistant-directed a Goldsmiths College student film, after answering an ad the student producer put in the local paper seeking skilled volunteers to support the shoot. We filmed in a famous British Comedian’s daughter’s house, and in between consoling her about the abuse her place was getting from its use as a location, and various auditions she felt she had failed, I was consoling the students through a series of disasters. The main one was the discovery that all the rushes (on expensive celluloid!) were unusable due to focus problems.

I encouraged a soldier-on approach, which was met with wild anger from the director of photography, who stood in my face and screamed at me, barely masking his obvious feelings of guilt about the fuzzy rushes. Quite rightly, I felt I didn’t need that, and at the end of that shot, I walked off set and didn’t go back.

Later that year I assisted on two short films directed by the life-enlarging Jillian Li-Sue, who I still feel has a feature film in her waiting to get out, if only someone would take a punt on her and put up the money.

The first of these was shot on location in Catford, only a few blocks from where I lived in Lewisham.

CEDAR ON CELLULOID Production still from Jillian Li-Sue's short film Cedar Wood and Silk.
CEDAR ON CELLULOID Production still from Jillian Li-Sue’s short film Cedar Wood and Silk.

Taking care of odd jobs on a film set, like fetching porn mags to be used as props, and amusing actors between shots, earned me the title of second assistant director on Jill’s beautiful short Cedar Wood and Silk. That was one I was proud to have been a part of.

Amazingly, some Australian friends were able to put me in touch with one of Britain’s film producers of the moment, who was kind enough to meet me at his Soho office, and not laugh at the film script I’d sent him. In fact, he gave it to one of his readers who wrote an exacting report on it. Tough stuff, but a wake-up call.

There I sat, feeling misunderstood, across the desk from this titan of film. He must have been bemused at my silent miscomprehension of exactly how he could help me, kindly pointing out that a certain amount of enthusiasm was essential for getting a project together. I barely knew what I was doing there, really, but he took my number and gave it to someone.

Weeks later, after returning from my regular job-seeking in the West End, I played the answering machine, only to have missed a call for a day’s work on his new movie. I called back, but the super-busy-super-organised production assistant happily informed me that position had been filled. Too late.

Around that time my Soho office (a red telephone booth off Charing Cross Road) was blown-up by the IRA. The kid who did it lived over my back fence in South London, and apparently the  explosives he’d used were stored in the garden shed, only metres from where I’d slept for over a year.

Perhaps I was in the wrong place?

So I answered an advertisement in Broadcast magazine, looking for a production assistant for a small production company in Ipswich, Suffolk.

I had to look on a map to find Suffolk, imaging it to be tucked ‘up north’ somewhere remote. But it was barely an hour away by train. For an Australian, an hour was a mere trifle. Perhaps I should expand my horizons beyond the tarnished fabulousness of London?

Not having even a typewriter to make use of (one of my flatmates stole the phone bill money and disappeared to St Lucia … cue the violins, but I had to sell stuff to get by), I hand wrote a job application and resume onto beautiful thick yellow paper, hoping it would stand out. My handwriting on quality paper was about as honest as I could be in the situation I found myself in.

I posted the letter on the way to my cinema job, and promptly forgot all about it. After all, the Royal Mail hadn’t delivered me a break in three years.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.