WAITING FOR RAIN Midwestern farm by Margaret Bourke-White.
A Writer’s first exposure to supernatural forces.
IN MY childhood, rain meant something. It meant action.
Buckets had to be strategically placed along the hallway of our farm-house to catch the roof leaks.
My father had to move fast, to get outdoors towards the approaching bank of clouds, cup his hands to his mouth and lean back into the wind, crying out: “Send her down Hughie!” as loud as he could. If my grandfather was around, he would yell it too.
“A farmer had to take things into his own hands, not by bending to his knees in prayer, but making a proactive, dramatic, full-throated invocation.”
I don’t recall asking what the shouting was for, like I don’t remember asking why we had to run around with buckets while mum lifted the rugs. Somehow it was just part of living on a farm.
Dad was doing what many farmers do, calling on the weather god to send down the rain and not miss our farm. Too often we’d see heavy showers passing to the south at the far end of our shallow upland valley west of Delungra, leaving our hillsides dry and cracked with the heat.
A farmer had to take things into his own hands, not by bending to his knees in prayer, but making a proactive, dramatic, full-throated invocation. Nothing less would do. You had to make a great gesture of effort, a visible show of need.
My father would also pretend to be the ghost of ‘Old Harry’ walking down the long hallway of our home, scaring me and my brother into our beds.
Seeing dad’s familiar figure pass in the half-dark, I was never sure it wasn’t ‘Old Harry’. After all, if your dad is yelling to a weather god, then anything could be true.
These days, people will try to tell you that ‘Hughie’ is Saint Hugh, the Catholic saint associated with rain. Surfers apparently invoke Hughie for the best coastal conditions. Slim Dusty even wrote a song about him.
But none of that is what Hughie means to me.Hughie is darkening skies. He’s dangerous gales. He’s the hood on your parka flapping in the wind, while you think about getting inside before the storm hits.
STORM FRONT Cumulus panorama.
Hughie is fickle and chaotic. He doesn’t just drop the rain anywhere. He’s up there, riding the front of the weather where it’s so loud you need to wail at the top of your voice for him to hear you.To send down the rain, Hughie needs to see someone, and not just anyone. He takes orders only from the most stoic, the most reserved member of your household, and that’s always dad.
When Hughie’s feeling generous, he’ll give you gentle, soaking rain when your crops are in and it’s time for them to grow. When you’ve pissed him off, he’ll send your sheds tumbling over themselves, and lift iron sheets off your roof.
Perhaps Hughie’s a stray weather god stranded in the southern hemisphere, lost after some climatic sortie when people stopped believing in the pantheon of Greco-Roman Gods?Perhaps Hughie’s always been here, and we’ve just given him a new name?
For me, Hughie was a precursor to chaos. Not just bad weather, but death, divorce and family divisions. He chased me and my family off the farmhouse in the late 1970s, and I even felt him blowing around the town houses we lived in after that.
I became a weather-watcher, because I could sense a change coming. My parents’ separation, divorce, and our move away from the country was all played-out against a great tension I had due to the fear of abandonment. I could hardly go to school for fear of coming home to find nobody there, with thunderstorms raging outside and no-one to protect me.
That was Hughie.
The day we arrived at our new home on the fringe of the city, shell-shocked, I began to relax. Something about that place is beyond Hughie. He rarely makes an appearance there, with the cool climate gardens and higher average rainfall.
But I still feel him at work whenever I take off in a plane. He’s that gale which creates turbulence, reminding me I am no longer earthbound.
Next time you’re waiting for rain, think of Hughie. You’ll know what to do.
STAR PERFORMERS Tom Roberts’ ‘Shearing the Rams’ c.1890 from the National Gallery of Victoria.
A young Playwright’s first theatre.
SOME of my earliest memories of growing up at ‘Paxton’ (the property my parents owned near Delungra in New South Wales), are of the shearing shed, and not just during shearing season.
Back then, ‘Paxton’ was not a particularly iconic or beautiful homestead, but my parents had made it habitable after years of standing derelict, and turned it into a viable farm.
The home itself was once two buildings – the main house faced the east, and, built onto tree stumps at the west stood what was probably the old kitchen, once separated. This was common practice from times when the risk of the house burning to the ground was great if the kitchen went up in flames.
“There is something overwhelmingly romantic about a shearing shed.”
A falling-down chook run and an overgrown tennis court stood at each end of the home yard, and up the gravel road was the shearing shed – a cluster of corrugated iron buildings with sheep yards on one side and a rather large door.
This shed was a source of delight and surprise for me and my brother, probably starting when we found our Christmas presents behind that door, long before Santa Claus had a chance to deliver them that year. It was far enough from the house that our frequent secret trips to ride our new bikes were not discovered for some time!
Most of the year, the shearing shed was empty. Not being completely weatherproof, the elements had worked away at the wooden rails of the yards, which were over a child’s head height and enclosed tall weeds more than they did sheep.
But once a year, the building would fill with life, when the Shearers arrived. They introduced new words into my world, the most evocative being ‘Smoko‘, meaning a break, a few minutes to swill down a hot tea and smoke a cigarette, usually sometime in the mid morning. The other was a ‘Spell’ – a short sleep in the shade of a tree after lunch.
My brother and I carried an esky and thermos up to the shearing shed every day the Shearers were in residence. I have no idea where they lived – they probably camped in the shelter of the shed itself.
MAKING AN ENTRANCE Inside the shearing shed at “Paxton”, Delungra.
These were worn men, angular with years of bending into their task, hands burnished from holding their shears, and senses dulled from maintaining the loud engine which drove the complicated overhead shearing system – dangerous rubber belts and fast wheels which whizzed the clippers into action.
We were too young to do more than sweep up sheep crap and help with cleaning the shorn fleece, in the raucous masculine atmosphere which departed as quickly as it had arrived, leaving the shed empty and full of potential.
There is something overwhelmingly romantic about a shearing shed for me, even now I cannot pass one by without getting a look inside. They are scattered across the Tablelands, often surprising you around a rural corner, usually well cared-for if the farm is still functioning. For me, however, the more dilapidated they are the better.
In the drafty darkness of an empty shed, the smell of decomposing sheep crap brings my childhood stampeding back to me. The odour is always tempered by lanolin, the oil from the fleece which builds up on all timbers where sheep have been herded and shorn, preserving wood better than any varnish ever could. The skeletal frame of a shearing shed endures for decades under this resin, whereas the outer shell rots away until it’s like driftwood, lending the place a graveyard quality.
But the most romantic element of a shearing shed is the journey of the wool. Corralled in the waiting yards, sheep are dragged through a timber gate onto the shearing floor, where they are clipped from head to toe, then shoved down a chute to the lower ground level outside to recover from the shock. Those chutes, slippery and steep, were our first fun park.
Each precious fleece, akin to a great fluffy jacket, is thrown over a large wooden table, allowing burrs and sheep crap (called ‘Dags‘) to be picked out, then thrown into the top of an enormous timber cupboard with great doors. There it waits until being pressed into bales and labelled by spraying across a tin stencil to create a mark identifying the wool’s source.
ROGUES & VAGABONDS Australian Shearers operating a wool press. From the Powerhouse Museum Collection.
Those great doors held a kind of theatrical power, perfect for making dramatic entrances. In fact, for me, the perfect theatre would be a converted shearing shed, with the same hand-made quality as the original Globe Theatre in London, where many of Shakespeare’s plays first saw the light of day.
Thousands of pin-sized holes in the corrugated iron roofing sheets make a sky of stars overhead, especially on a brilliant sunny day. An audience could be herded onto the shearing floor, waiting for the actors to emerge from behind those great doors.
Perhaps it was the spirit of Shearer’s industriousness and camaraderie that inspired my love of shearing sheds? And probably their faces, full of weathered character, adept at entertaining youngsters.
In shearing sheds, as with theatres, roles are defined, achievements praised, young people trained-up. Vocabulary is important, for the sake of tradition as much as safety. Star performers are made every year. Sometimes they fall, overtaken by younger talent.
The existence of Shearers is tenuous at best, much like the lives of those who ‘tread the boards’. Both career choices rely on good economies and fair bosses, and entire careers can be judged on one day’s performance. There’s plenty of touring, you must go where the work is, and the pay is not great.
The end result of both these labours is something that enhances life without taking it. Such roles should be treasured forever, but they languish in danger of their existence.
MASSACRE ILLUSTRATED An engraving of the 1838 Myall Creek Massacre (Image from ‘The Chronicles of Crime’ 1841).
A Writer’s first critic.
I WAS BORN at Inverell, New South Wales, the second child of a city girl and a farmer, one of the last generations to marry under that great misguided matchmaking code.
We lived on a farm called “Paxton”, on Dufty’s Lane, off the Bingara Road west of Inverell in the New England region. My mum recalled a tree growing in the main bedroom of the long empty farmhouse. She shed a tear years later when watching We of the Never Never (the 1982 film based on the memoirs of Jeannie Gunn), especially the montage where Jeannie makes-over the derelict homestead.
“Prejudice is dangerous to write about.”
My brother and I went to Delungra Public School. Mum remembered the day when we came home talking about how the two Aboriginal children in our class were supposedly ‘different’. I cannot remember who’d pointed it out, but it proves that racism is not born, it is learned.
Mum dealt with the potential for us to develop certain prejudices by highlighting how other people thought the kids of the man who cleared the ‘dunny’ (the old ‘night soil’ man) were ‘dirty’, and that was just ridiculous, and we should just forget anything people like that said.
Less than ten kilometres from our farm was a hall at Myall Creek, where our parents played social tennis. There was a set of old swings, stands of willow and pepper trees, and the shallows of Myall Creek itself.
Sometime before I turned seven, I can recall mum saying, in between tennis matches, that a group of Aboriginal people had been herded over a nearby cliff by white settlers, long ago.
She got the true story a bit wrong, but the image of those people being forced to fall to their deaths stayed with me. It was translated into a recurring dream in which my family led me up the steep gorge beside Myall Creek, and flung me off. When I saw my small body spinning down in the air, I was black-skinned. Back in my body, I grabbed at whatever I could find to stop my fall, but the bright green boughs of orange trees were so slippery I could get no grip. As I hit the ground, I woke up.
Seven years after leaving Inverell, in the wake of my parent’s divorce, mum’s re-telling of the story of the Myall Creek Massacre came back to me in the form of inspiration for what I believe was my second short story, now unfortunately lost.
I recall the scope of what I wanted to examine in words was quite weighty. Having learned that Australian artist Tom Roberts visited Inverell and painted in the region, I put myself (by then a burgeoning artist in my own right) into the story of a young visiting artist obsessed with a local farmer’s daughter, Erica. In the opening scene, he observed her lovingly from a distance while painting at Myall Creek, as she helped local Aboriginal people collect water for their camp site. When the massacre happened, Erica was caught-up in events beyond her imagining, slaughtered at the hands of men who had no sympathy for Aboriginal people, or any farmer’s daughters who spent time with them. My painter included Erica in his picture of the massacre, and was run out of town by the locals.
Not a bad set-up, in hindsight. No attempt at writing in the voice of an Aboriginal person (which Thomas Keneally said he regrets doing in his 1972 novel The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith). My projection of the emotional impact of the massacre onto Europeans is typical of a great disconnect, however. It continues to this day in some Australian writing (the last time I noticed it was in Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 production of his screenplay collaboration Australia in which Anglo-Australian characters are responsible for registering most of the impact of the Stolen Generations on the Aboriginal characters in the film).
I recall a temporary English teacher pulling me up on calling Aboriginal people ‘blacks’ in the mouths of my 19th century characters, as though I was overdoing the racism. I refused to change this (silently) on the grounds of verisimilitude. I also recall her trying to tell me that you should write ‘the carriage went passed the pub’ instead of ‘the carriage went past the pub’.
Here were some weighty lessons on my plate: that many people feel they have a greater knowledge of the past than others, that prejudice is dangerous to write about, and that critics will always try to find the smallest thing to pull down a good piece of work. I passed the most important lesson, however, about sticking to my guns creatively.
In 1987, during my Higher School Certificate exams, I shirked all last-minute study (I didn’t need any by then… I’d been studying for two years’ solid because I didn’t have a life) and started writing a novel about the Myall Creek Massacre. We’d studied Tim Winton’s 1982 debut novel An Open Swimmer for two years, and the very real voice of the main character, Jerra, had prised my consciousness wide open.
CHILDHOOD LANDSCAPE Looking south from Dufty’s Lane towards Myall Creek, the typical rolling country of the region (Photo by Michael Burge).
Even my small amount of research revealed much more than mum’s evocation of events. Infamous for being the first time white settlers were tried and hanged for the murder of Aboriginal people, the atmosphere of this 1838 massacre is laid bare in newspaper accounts and court records. The racism in the reporting is so extreme it’s almost laughable, making it ridiculous for my teacher to expect me to lessen the prejudiced vernacular of the characters in my story.
I enthusiastically embarked on a two-level narrative: small boy learning racism at country school, counterpointed with local historical massacre. No white girls to register the emotional truths, only the young station hands, witness to the bloody killing of innocent men, women and children. This fragment of my work also does not survive, written into the back of my studious notebooks, destroyed some time later in the upheavals to come.
The Myall Creek Massacre would come back into my life again, and I’d learn more about the truth and impact of the events, but not for a very long time.
Modernist Mansfield
My first short story was written sometime in 1985. I had fantastic English teachers at secondary school: Beatrice Mayer (year 7-10) and Yvonne Smith (year 11-12). Mrs Mayer introduced me to Shakespeare, and a host of Australian work, but one week she opened up a whole world of possibility to me in the form of Katherine Mansfield, and what were described as ‘unpleasant stories’ in which the characters and plot need not necessarily be ‘nice’. It was a Friday, and we read one of Mansfield’s excellent works. I cannot remember which, but the knowledge that she was from New Zealand, a ‘modernist’, and died young (of tuberculosis) was enough to evoke a host of romantic themes.
Our challenge was to write a whole short story with ‘unpleasant’ characters. I think we were given a week, but I walked home that day brimming with inspiration, and poured-out my story (alas, also now lost) that very evening, and re-wrote it over the following days. I also recall the pen I used, one of those new erasable-ink pens with a rubber end, handy for changes-of-mind and grammatical corrections.
I recall it was about a boy my age on his paper run, encountering his neighbours as he delivered the news, including an old woman and a dog, and a blind man. I think the penultimate scene was on a railway station, where despite the old man’s ‘unpleasantness’, he saves the boy’s life. Everything else is lost to my memory, apart from the 20 marks out of 20 I received in red ink after getting my exercise book back the next week.
It was a whole, living, breathing story. It had life. It was deemed worthy. It was the start of an exciting, creative time for a young man coming into his own.
Recalling these three brief years now, I am happy to remember that even my end of school exams didn’t get in the way of the act of sitting down and writing. I must have been doing something right, because my early work was attracting critics, and my inner critic wasn’t too strong. It’s also interesting to note that my work revolved around themes of prejudice.
Trouble was, nobody encouraged writing as a career choice. Mrs Smith made a fleeting (probably hopeful) mention that I ‘had a novel in me’, but amidst the ‘importance’ of university applications, and deciding what to do with my life, my inner world of writing was left far, far behind.
Michael Burge Media 