Don Watson - Watsonia: A Writing Life

Acknowledgements

HERE ARE COLLECTED ESSAYS, COLUMNS, reviews, op-eds and occasional addresses from the past forty years. Most of the pieces are reprinted as they first appeared in journals and newspapers, with an odd error of fact or grammar corrected, an occasional tangle untangled, some paragraphs cut adrift. On indignation has been filleted from a longer essay. Forewords and afterwords aside, there is nothing from my books, nor any speeches written for other people.

The writing in this collection has been through the hands of more editors than it is possible to name, so I thank them all for their guidance and attention. Meredith Curnow graciously released essays from an earlier collection published by Penguin Random House. Chris Feik, the masterly editor of Quarterly Essay, chose the entries and found a way to arrange them on thematic lines. For this and essential aid in past endeavours I thank him. Also, Kate Hatch and Kirstie Innes-Will for assiduous editing; Sean OBeirne and Erin Sandiford for locating articles. Finally, and for much more than the idea of this omnibus, my thanks to Morry Schwartz.

The Gippsland frontier

UNTIL VERY RECENTLY I HAD not realised that Gippsland was an idea as well as a place. I presume the idea of Gippsland dawned on me slowly because I grew up there and it presented itself to me as simply existing. It may well be that what I saw was what Gippsland was. On this reading Gippsland is primarily a kitchen with a view of a tank and cypresses. It is then a privet hedge, a lavatory, a fowl house, a pine tree, a cow shed, a watercourse, the weaner paddock and the back hill with the big gum tree and the eagles nest.

But it always comes back to the kitchen and the porridge and the scone and the Anzac biscuit. The red dog always lay under the stove in a storm.

In south Gippsland there was a winter smell and a summer one. In winter it was the smell of very wet earth, damp jumpers and rancid milk on rubber boots in the porch. In the summer it was the smell of hot hay.

God it was hot carting hay. Young people these days dont know what hard work is. Thats a fair sort of fact now and it was an unassailable fact then.

We always knew the past meant work. Work. Real work. Work you might possibly be able to imagine but never equal. You looked at the forearms of the older generation and there was no denying it. Like legs of mutton. Hands as big and hard as housebricks. Each finger as thick as a schoolteachers wrist.

You knew the land on which you kicked the football had once been bluegum forest. There were still a few big museum pieces to remind you. A patch of hazels on a hillside and the blackwoods by the roadside were proof of the middle tier. Their cover gone, tree ferns in the gullies baked to a slow death.

The blue gums had been two hundred feet high at least. They had been felled with crosscut saws and burnt, or split with an axe and wedges into posts. One man or perhaps two did all this teenage brothers did it. They did it all by hand. The harvest was done by hand, the cows milked by hand, the cream separated by hand.

But how to live in the face of pioneering virtue? How to redeem yourself through work when all the works been done? I mean the mighty work. Your body might ache from exertion but they had worked harder by far. You can labour away with your axe all morning but its pathetic in comparison. Look at the size of your chips. Bloody puny little things. You could eat your dinner off one of your fathers. One chip of his keeps the stove going all night.

Its the same cutting rubbish. You cant match the calm, relentless efficiency of his work. He labours in a state of grace. Blackberries, bracken, thistles (variegated, Scotch, shore, Californian and milk), burr, barley grass and snake, all fall beneath his fernhook. He pulls the ragwort without changing stride and bends to larvicide a burrow. He moves across the hillface as if hed been doing it for a hundred generations. Youd swear he was solar-powered. And you hack away gracelessly with your face red and the thought forms itself, I will be an internationally renowned cricket player and trumpeter and I will return to Gippsland in middle age with my nose thumbed. How mean all this is! When I am eighteen, no sixteen, I will say goodbye, by cripes.

Snake! A bloody snake! Hack, thump. Eyes full of blood. Bits of red-bellied snake everywhere. Surely its time to knock off. Of course there were more snakes in those days their days I mean.

Snakes were a significant element in Gippsland bonding. Red-bellies, yellow-bellies, copperheads and tigers, we killed them with fernhooks, shovels and hoes. A piece of plain wire was very good, particularly on rough ground. There were Gippslanders who could grab them by the tail and crack them like whips. Returning from a Presbyterian Ladies Guild meeting one Wednesday afternoon, Mrs McIntosh of Wild Dog Valley stood upon a five-foot copperhead at her front porch. She ran its head through with her hatpin, as I recall. In the Strzelecki Ranges, where the roads are narrow, windy and precipitous, the practice of skidding the back wheel on snakes caused more than one spectacular fatality. Boiling water was poured down their hideaways while extended families gathered at the ready with all manner of implements, including shotguns. We told jokes about snakes and played jokes with dead ones. Long into the nights we yarned about them. Deep in the Gippsland subconscious there lay coiled a snake. Had it been a Catholic province, I believe there would have been an annual festival.

But Gippsland did not have such things. A potato festival evolved at Koo Wee Rup, it is true, and in recent years the town of Korumburra has held a festival of the giant earthworm. It is not Rio, however. Gippsland is not quirky. They scotch all fancy and display there. They root out evil and prize the very normal.

The idea of Gippsland is the idea of normal. That is what pioneering is the quest for normality, a set of unwritten rules by which a community lives. This is a radical enterprise, particularly when you realise what that normality encompasses. Here are some potted examples which make a mockery of the belief so often expressed in Gippsland, and doubtless elsewhere, that one day things will get back to normal.

Gippsland was first explored by a pious Calvinist from the Catholic isle of Barra, and a Polish sub-mountebank who was knighted for philanthropy in the Irish famine and who died, a friend by then of Florence Nightingale and William Gladstone, in Savile Row.

Among Gippslands early settlers was the hereditary clan chief Glengarry, whose garb and weaponry in the colonies had him on at least one occasion taken for a bushranger.

In its first decade of white settlement three languages were spoken in the Gippsland bush English in its various forms, the several dialects of the Kurnai tribes (who had been there for at least fifteen thousand years) and Scots Gaelic. It was commonly alleged that a prominent Gaelic speaker, Ronald Macalister, was eaten by some Aborigines, and bloody massacres ensued.

The dispossession of the Aborigines and the manner of it was described by a melancholy English settler as one of the darkest chapters in the annals of history, a description which might have echoed Glencoe and Culloden in the minds of the Highlanders who were engaged in the rampage.

In the frontier period of Gippslands history the Highlanders and others made free with their fantasies and found them turned into reality. (The frontier might be described as a place where imagination and reality meet.) These Gippsland gentlemen dreamed of vast domains thickly populated with cattle, sheep and horses all on a scale quite unimaginable to their fathers. They got them all. They fancied secure tenure and great houses and servants. They got them too.