[ with thanks to John Shaw Neilson for 'The Orange Tree']
Blue cranes, blue wrens, green days and cherries. I had been reading John Shaw Neilson, singer of the colours. His poems were full of the sort of things I saw around the farm. More than dull gum trees and twiggy straw. He had grown up on a block which I imagined was like mine. I had planted a thousand trees on the block. I had tried to get all sorts of fruiting plants to grow. His lines were observations of the same Victorian bush landscapes as mine. Where his quintessential eternity of fruition had become poems, I had dreamed of finding that special fruit.
When I first went up there I thought I'd be able to get any thing to grow. I dreamed of tropical fruit like date palms, avocadoes and mangoes. In the first winter even the passionfruit died. So I fixed on growing citrus as the ultimate attainable ambition. Limes froze. Oranges turned black. Grapefruit died. Only the lemons survived with dwarfed shoots and stiff cold-pruned leaves. They produced browned-off stunted flowers which turned into misbegotten lemons which dropped off while they were still green. The citrus were a dead loss. They were more bitter than bitterness for me. I kept trying. In wind screens. Under glass. On northern aspects. Those made my worst seven years. I failed. Had fallen in shame. Drawn in ironies. I had once given up becoming an environmental consultant to 'nurture the earth' myself. I had to go back to a primary school of weather. Bitter climes took the edge off what I thought was an all-weather dream.
I had seen the weather girl on TV on the first of June announce: "Today is the first day of winter". And I thought God no! Who does she think she is? The siren of the official season? Pretty little autumn gone? I didn't want to be reminded of winter. It annoyed me that the weather girl sat in her air-conditioned studio on plush suede couches and looked down in all friendliness at a camera, with artificial spotlights on her makeup, and told me it was winter! Oh! how I envied that monumental ersatz!
The only thing I resented more than a fact which belied my senses was a fact which belied my hopes. The last thing I needed was an early winter. June One was sunny. Every day of June had been sunny so far! It proved how wrong they were! That it was winter was an official lie! I was damned if I'd hear that lie. I knew winter was imminent and I didn't need to be goaded into believing it! I had seen too many of my trees blackened by frost. Winter kept killing dreams on which I had based my life!
I knew by then that nature made its own calendars. She had no politics and no pretty green theories. Autumn often kept on until the midyear solstice. The last years the autumn leaves on the miles of oaks in the Avenue of Honour planted in memory of war veterans in Hillanook had hung on yellow, red and brown right through until July. So what if the sunny days started white with frost? The rains and clouds of winter had not begun!
But I'd gotten down. I was sick of the bush. The native forest was drab and the world had lost all sense of brightness and colour in my eyes. The gumleaves hung like shabby pennants. Thick flaps of downward flags the shape of long teardrops. They put me in a sense of being in a never-falling shower of khaki drizzle, like we get up there for the winter half year. Drooping, drooping, the indifference of the bush had put a droop in me. I could hardly bear to look up from my work, because the bush was all the horizon I had to envision.
I had to get out of there that morning. I woke early, scraped the ice off the windscreen and left for a day in Melbourne. As I drove I recited my favourite Shaw Neilson poem: The Orange Tree.
"The young girl stood beside me. I
Saw not what her young eyes could see:
-A light, she said, not of the sky
Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.
I had been working with my neighbour Hans, building his sandstone house, while living in a kit shed myself. We had just finished preparing and pouring the concrete slab in those cold blue days. We would even rock up to lay reinforcing mesh in the frost. The pressed iron hut we camped in was lonely. I had only got to see people and cheer myself up with a bit of local colour when I drove past the highschool kids waiting for the bus along the five gravel miles in to Hillanook for milk, 'The Age' newspaper or some nails.
-Is it I said, of east or west?
The heartbeat of a luminous boy
Who with his faltering flute confessed
Only the edges of his joy?
I believed so much in planting trees that I got thingo. Possessive. I became uptight about it. I started making rules about how they had to be planted, watered, sheltered. I knew I knew how best. I was a sixty acre tyrant on my home ground. Sally left me two years ago. I just about had a seizure of self-righteousness. She couldn't hack the hardships I said. But that day I was glad to get out of the gluey clay and off the ochrey building site myself. I longed to be somewhere where every footstep was free of glug. I could break my own rules with impunity! I was driving for a flight, so full of expectation that I found myself getting to be elated as I came off the range. I think that I dreamed of being in love again.
Was he, I said, borne of the blue
In a mad escapade of Spring
Ere he could make a fond adieu
To his love in the blossoming?
The sky ahead of me was cloudless. The sun rose up over the Pretty Sally ridges to the east. Blossoming! The day was warm and friendly. Murray Greys in green paddocks mooched happily into the cocksfoot grass. Packing on beef. Two magpies dived and banked in the clear air above the highway, dropping into the sugargums. What a day it was!
I was going at a hundred Ks on humming wheels. I was going to see crowds in the Victoria market, see lights and differences and colours. I wanted to sit in a warm cinema and be transported into the make believe of "The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen". I hoped to catch up with Julie, a tutor at the Uni. I'd always had a soft spot for her.
-Listen! the young girl said. There calls
No voice, no music beats on me:
But it is almost sound: it falls
This evening on the Orange Tree.
The lines were like a drug to me. They made me feel wonderful even though I didn't understand exactly what she was talking about. The ute whistled wind songs as she flew along. Down in the distance the city towers rose to view through a low mist, angular, but in a soft screen, like lyrical glass castles in a child's picture storybook.
I had been so keen to escape the city once. There, I had been in a sort of neurotic state where I saw everything around me, as if it was a battle of demoniac spirits against humanity. Quelling my need to be fruitful. I used to walk around, only seeing the evil, in a spectral world of polished slabs of granite, verticals of marble, cloisters of mirrorglass through which bought people looked down at the hoi polloi.
I had had a chance of being one of the city bought people. But that being seemed to exist on video to me. I felt like a ghost who only had existence when the acetate I was in had light beamed through it onto the big screen of daily commerce. Unreal. I saw myself in a bought life that starved my soul. I saw myself as a power-being who only caught up with themself when somebody caught me out picking my nose in the executive lift. I saw the city full of anorexic people like me whose skin was a prop which held me up to the world. The fruits of power are green! People jostle and hurry, like I did, to be a part of an existence that they took to be quite normal in spiritual darkness. The force of that daily vision had nearly overwhelmed me. I had left to go up country. I wanted more for myself.
-Does he, I said, so fear the Spring
Ere the white sap too far can climb?
See in the full gold evening
All happenings of the olden time?
The dawn had been alight with a thin rind of apricot around the horizon. Then, far in the distance, the blue banks of the Dandenongs raised receding arms of beckoning up veiled valleys towards where the orange sun rose. The world seemed so wide and open to me. I was free. Travelling. Going to arrive somewhere wonderful.
When the highway turned into a freeway I began to feel at one with the people commuting in to the city. Cars in front of me, behind me, beside me, were, for me, all part of the celebration of that day. I guessed Mr Toyota was going to a meeting. Chairman Opal was going to clinch a deal. Mrs Holden was going shopping. Everything seemed purposeful and good to me. The flyover bridged across the valley below, where I saw market gardeners out on the Maribyrnong river flats, tending good greens for the people. I crossed the viaduct over the river. Everything flowed together.
Is he so goaded by the green?
Does the compulsion of the dew
Make him unknowable but keen
Asking with beauty of the blue?
The wind rustled in the ute's roof-gutters. A jumbo jet flashed silvery against the sun as it took off for an overseas destination from Tullamarine airport. I was coming down from the cold mountains, rolling out into civilisation on to the Port Phillip Plain. Ready for a rich experience. I imagined nothing that could ruffle my day. The vehicle-wind brush-stroked the roadside foliage.
A man is sane as long as he feels free to act within the bounds of his own self-corrections. How long did I have to argue to convince myself that I was satisfactory? But was I still sane when the attraction of innocence made me vulnerable to whimsical obsessions? My obsession for real fruit scared me. That poem had gotten in to the very core of what my life hunger was.
-Listen! the young girl said. For all
Your hapless talk you fail to see
There is a light, a step, a call
This evening on the Orange Tree.
I saw myself as the man in the poem. What was the step that I was failing to take -to see through this haplessness? Hapless? This was morning, not evening. I was okay. Yearning yes. My life was routine. Hapless meant... not happening? What did hapless mean?
I looked at the way the light was falling on the autumn leaves in Strathmore. I was reminded of the house I grew up in. I could see my mother as she used to be when she was at her best, out in her garden. She'd look up through the russet orange and yellow leaves with a saw in her hand to where a treetop had been broken by a storm and quote St Paul lovingly: 'All things work together for good to those who love God'. And she cut the broken branch away.
Her view of the world was simple. Be open, honest, and always think the best of people. Mind you she loved a good prune in the garden. Hacking, it was. She used the space to plant something new.
-Is it, I said, a waste of love
Imperishably old in pain,
Moving as an affrighted dove
Under the sunlight or the rain?
Outside Julie's house the leaves on the overhanging elm all rattling with a shake of wind. Yellow leaves confettiing, billowing up on the eddies of traffic. No ones wedding. The knock I gave the door bought out a twentysomething woman in her Japanese house gown.
"Julie?" I said.
"Yeh?"
"Looking for Julie," I repeated
"Julie's in Sydney. She's gone for a year on a staff exchange plan."
"Howard Jammer?" I said.
"Wanda. She never mentioned no Howard no."
The leaves all shaking so much I found myself looking up from the defended threshhold into the swirl. This Wanda noticed the water in my eyes but said nothing. I felt too embarrassed to stay.
"Say hello then," I said from the gate.
Browsers Bookshop! I needed inspiration. The film didn't start till the evening. So I walked across Carlton toying with an old thread that hung loose from my sloppy-joe. I had wanted to get hold of a copy of Henry David Thoreau's 'Walden' to stimulate some optimism in my life. He made something of a row of beans. I could browse through the natural history books and read some poetry for a few hours.
Is it a fluttering heart that gave
Too willingly and was reviled?
Is it the stammering at a grave
The last word of a little child?
How could I be called hapless? I was a landowner. I was building a house! My life carried weight. I was making things happen. The bookshop was one of my favourite places in Melbourne. Two floors of an old terrace house with works of literature, history, ideas; books from all around the world which could transport me to other places. The shop was closed. A sign on the door read: 'Due to a death in the business...'
I rebounded away from the bookshop with all the force of my attraction. I had fallen into closed doors. I stopped on the kerb, wondering what I was doing. I scratched my head and looked about me in a daze. I found myself jaywalking across tramtracks, heading for a little park. I sat like the morning homeless on a bench seat in the sun. Escape to the Uni Library was only a block away.
The dictionary said. 'Hapless: luckless, unfortunate, unlucky.' Unfortunate indeed? 'For all your hapless talk you fail to see' Was that me? I turned out of there and walked back towards the ute. I would go down to the Yarra River bank. I wanted an eternal, reliable, destination. How could I see what I fail to see? Luckless talk! Books that I've read and blind? As I drove I had a great sense of darkness come over me. I felt a heaviness in my eyes. A weight was balling up and rising in my belly.
I drove southwards towards the city. I glanced over my left shoulder as I passed a mirror building to see the ute reflected obtusely in the glass. What if my whole way of seeing was warped? I turned east onto Victoria Street to take the city bypass. I moved into the rightmost of four lanes, following an old cream round-cabined Bedford truck.
My right index finger tapped on the steering wheel, like it was pointing out my need for light to give me definition, to put full stops into the chaos of my belly. I felt that my eyes were looking backwards into myself, and searching sideways for what I didn't know.
On the very back of the truck was a single row of waxed cardboard cartons containing oranges. The cartons were higgled apart on the buckled splintery wooden floor of the tray. I could see the oranges on the seventh carton where the top layer had been jostled from the pack. The roundness of the oranges was like a colourful landscape of valleys and hills against the backdrop of the raised carton flap. The truck hit the uneven road where a watermain gully-trap broke the surface. The tray bounced and one orange was jolted up to rest precariously on the loose jostle of fruit below. I fixed on that orange with an inexplicable fascination. Was that the very orange I had always dreamed of growing? I coloured better in seeing the deep orange skin. I memorised the full roundness of the fruit. I imagined it was the tastiest orange I had ever seen.
I became like a father to that fruit. Doting. I worried about the orange. Any bump could send it onto the road. The truck had no sides. I let myself become annoyed. No tailgate. The oranges had been stacked too carelessly. All my sense of wonder went out to make that orange precious. The truckie didn't seem to realize how fragile his load might be. My need for innocence was projected into that orange. I thought I might toot or pass and let the driver know. But the ninethirty morning traffic was still peakish. Trucks, cars, and taxis filled every lanespace. No one else but me had any thought for the orange.
While stopped at the lights I looked closer at my orange. For I thought of it as mine by then. I saw that the navel had close pores on the skin which made me think of Sally's chin. Funny how you telescope things you miss so much, like that content of grace and closeness you find where you study your wife's pores while nuzzling after making love and before a further kiss. When I nosed up close I could read the labels printed on the end of the cartons. 'NAVEL ORANGES MILDURA CITRUS CO-OP Nangiloc Depot.' While I was up close reading the labels I suddenly got a sense that the orange might fall. I eased back as we took off and I left space behind the truck in case I had to dodge to save the orange.
I met Sally in Mildura. I had gone there during the year I postponed study to make a bit of money for another year at Uni. Mildura was a revelation to me. A green foodbasket in the desert. The Chaffey Brothers founded an oasis of irrigation. The climate is Mediterranean. Winter there is sunny. It's the warmest place in Victoria. I remember groves and groves of dense-green orange trees so covered with bright oranges they made me think of lights on a Christmas Tree. Nearby vineyards of harvested sweet and purple grapes were aglow with dropping yellowed leaves.
Sally was suntanned after picking for months. She took to me right off. I remember us swimming in the Murray River, rubbing along each other like dolphins in the water. She was honey blonde and the brown in her eyes was speckled with sparkles like they had orange gems in them. She was winter sunshine for me.
One time we went walking out away from the oasis into the Raak Plains, mallee and desert scrub. We walked letting our longings out. Mildura seemed to have just the right balance of civilisation and wilderness. Fruit to eat and desert for our spirits to expand into.
The truck was like a little bit of Mildura travelling through Melbourne. The traffic was roaring off over St Vincents Hill. The Urvan behind me was revving forward like I was too slow. The car next to me was trying to nudge into the gap between me and the truck. I accelerated to close the gap. Traffic hedged me in the righthand lane. Then a taxi tried to cut in from the left. I looked in the rearview mirror as I sped up. I glanced ahead to see the truck bounce on a bump. The orange was in mid-air. I swerved as the orange hit the road.
A red Toyota planted its horn. Brakes squealed behind me. I was sure I had straddled the orange. I couldn't stop. A car veered away from me. I believed I had missed it. No cars crashed. I swerved into the turn lane and kept going through the lights with a turn arrow. I tried to see the orange in the rearview mirror. Nothing. I accelerated with the traffic.
Couldn't go on. I'd be a coward. I owed something back there. I slowed beside a giant Moreton-Bay Figtree, pulled left into a empty space. Twenty minutes still on the meter. My search for the orange found grace.
I walked back up Lansdowne street. I stepped out across the citybound lanes of Victoria street. I angled across the elmtree avenue of the road-island. I scanned across the pavements in front of me. Tram tracks and chip-packets, but no orange. Then I realized my mistake. In my daze I had taken the tramway for the eastbound lanes of Victoria Street.
Was I crazy? Why bother with one lost orange? I didn't need a free orange anymore than I needed to be made free. I had money for cases of oranges. But I was set on that one particular orange. I crossed tramtracks and the footpath to the bluestone kerb. I expected to see the orange lodged in the gutter, caught against a projecting bluestone. My wild orange had to have come through! The one that had broken free from the pack. There was nothing but fallen autumn leaves in the gutter by the right-turn lane.
I trod on the bluestones of the gutter, going uphill. Bobbing down to look under parked cars. Stepping between vehicles. There was an overdressed man sitting behind the wheel of a blue Mercedes. Watching me. I must have looked ridiculous. I thought about asking him if he had seen my orange. I dared not. Secretly I laughed to think of him wondering what I was up to. "I'm looking for an orange off the back of a truck." I imagined explaining it to him, and his suspicion of me. I looked out of his eyes and burst, laughing out loud at myself. I was in a kind of ecstasy to be liberated from care about what he thought. I was in a delight to be a character acting before a more pedestrian audience. But ha I was the pedestrian. I slapped my legs laughing. I was thrilled in my obsession.
I felt wonderful right then. I began to realize that I might not have to find the orange to have my wonder. I was mad enough to look for something that preciously insignificant! I searched eighty metres of gutter and parking spaces. I stood to look out on the road further toward the city.
Ten metres away the bitumen was wet in three splats. I saw half my orange squashed in two sections. I stared at the wetness a few seconds. I didn't want the orange to be mine then. I wanted to pretend that I had forgotten something and go back the way I came, maybe whistling 'Amazing Grace' as I hurried away on pretence of some business.
I found the ball of knots was back in my belly. Then I was sitting on the bluestone kerb crying my damn eyes out. Great howls of sobbing came out of me. The traffic wheeled fourtyred passed. I wanted to act like nothing had happened. But what had? One of the bits of orange lay between the traffic lanes. I could see it through the wet, bright orange. My tears made a screen through which I saw the human traffic all at sea. I wept for I don't know what. I felt inconsolable. I kept saying these words that came from nowhere: "Orange is halfway between sunshine and blood. Orange is ... sunshine and blood. Orange ...half... sunshine ... blood." My words were cries.
I had seen the beams of green light shine down through my tears and I heard yet another oncoming wave of traffic pass beside me. I stood like an old man and tottered away from the road towards the ute.
In my mind I saw my orange run over repeatedly by many tyres. There were pores in the close up skin. The orange grew from the orb of skin till it was whole and orange again. Then one bit I could eat and taste the value of was in the gutter. I picked the dirty orange third from the bluestones. Hardly able to grasp it. I was beside myself. Flayed orange wounds dripped. I split it open with my fumbling hands and plunged my teeth into the delicious flesh, sucking out the sweet tangy juice. A light not of the sky shone inside me.
I had broken off from the tree of my own threshold of dreams. I found a yielding within me. I didn't know what was best! It might have been me did the damage! I wanted to believe in what might be. The world wasn't just what was there. The Fitzroy Gardens, and the pathside bench I sat on, was only the substance which grew out of real stance. Stance and sub-stance. The present was falling passed me like it was in freefall. I felt connected outside any moment. Old timers were asking about what I saw happening now. It was me who fleshed out the spirit anew. The huge elm tree I sat under dropped leaves into a big pool of browning yellow under the tree. The sun shone until clouds moved under it. And shone again.
Hope found me there. I said 'Orange is sunshine and blood' aloud as if eternity depended on it. Melba with her clipped poodle on a leash walked by. I nodded to her as if I would soon know her, but she turned her head away. She didn't have to see me. The light in the swirl of autumn leaves sang about the shining it was going to do after I was dead. Lord Melbourne in his beige overcoat passed me with a copy of the Sun News Pictorial under his arm. The headline read: "Better Times in 33". I looked him in the eye but he looked woodenly ahead. I saw his boys coming at a great distance. They were agitating for their lost vitality in full sunshine. A gardener went by carrying a fibreglass pond-dragging net on its pole.
My eyes followed the gardener as he took the elm avenue into the depths of the park. I just knew he was someone of special ilk. I got up to follow him but the old brick building moved out of history to block me. What was it? Not a tiolet block? No. A shelter shed like we had in primary school? No. A kiosk? The garage width doors were bolted and padlocked. I moved around the block.
Green painted seats, with awning verandahs to cover them, were fixed to three sides of the rectangular building. On the fourth side two queues of strangely confident men shifted quietly towards some open hatches, like minute kiosk serveries, which divided the wall. The sun streamed onto my side as I realized it was a soup kitchen. The men were dressed in dirty blue old-fashioned suits above many layers of cardigans. They talked among themselves in a tone of agreeable acceptance. Most of them didn't see me as I went back towards the end of the queue.
One man nodded to me and I connected with his eyes. I knew immeadiatly that he had once eaten one like my orange.
"Jock Neilson!" he said. " And you'd be Howard Jammer, right!"
"The Orange Tree !" I said.
"For you Howard, just 'The Orange' will do." he said. " But come!"
He turned me aside from the queue.
"You see! The gardener's gone for breakfast fish." he said. "The company will need good followers. We lived a time, but time must continue to be lived."
"How come I'm here, Jock?" I asked.
"When few will weep, few can be happy," he said. "Joys long dead climb out upon a tear."
"But what is this?" I asked.
"They call it the sweetening of the year," Jock said. "The flesh resists spirit being born out of it. But flesh finds no sweetness until then."
He turned to speak to his queuemates and I saw the brotherhood of faith that these men had wrought out of time. Seeds of renewing mind sprouted. Sight unseen I saw. I saw through between the men and realized the second queue were men and women. These were marked with the scars of the lash of earlier times. They all appeared like a distant view between far trees.
Suddenly, as I knew these people, at last the sense of belonging I had always desired, a true family of mine , got thin and opaque in the sunlight. I turned to ask Jock what was going on. He was nearly not there. So thin.
"Eat your orange and seed it in the people" he said. "Your flesh is now."
They were all gone with him. The hatches on the building were closed. I could still smell the aroma of pea soup. I ran out with my arms ready to catch the poet himself. But I was the only one there. I became conscious that the traffic was still going. I turned and saw the gardener approaching. He had a big fish in the net. It was a different gardener. This unexpected man came over to me. His other hand was full of watercress.
"Brown Trout?" he asked, as if I knew the answer. I looked quizzical.
"Good one." I could hardly believe what was happening.
"We need to eat," he said. "Share with me."
The gardener lead me over to the electric barbeque. He sliced the fish into cutlets with a sheath knife through the scattered coins of the copper spots on its skin. The flesh was orange. He sizzled it in melted butter on the hotplate.
"They call it brown," he said, winking. "But we both know they understate things. Really absorbed reverie is an orange study."
He knifed fish cutlets covered in watercress onto my spread palms.
"Sunshine and blood?" I said as if he might have a clue.
"You never know your luck in a small town," he said. "Like embers watching ashes boasting of the fire, the heat needs rekindling."
We sat and ate the fish deliciously. He knew I'd been beside myself till then. I walked with him and he taught me how I could catch myself out. I limped in pain like my insides had new blood pumping out the bitter juices. I was so taken with the convergent times I lost track of where I was.
-Silence! the young girl said. Oh, why,
Why will you talk to weary me?
Plague me no longer now, for I
Am listening like the Orange Tree.
Blood sunshine was flowing visions through me. I could kindle people into the tree. Stoke the fire! I had to set myself off on a blaze of glory. Be fruitful myself on the burning bush! It was me that could be an orange.
When I realized the gardener was gone the sun had welled over and faded. I had been taken in as if under a pervading charm of real sentiment for deep emotions, become a part of a whole, absorbed. And I could feel my flesh burning up with being.
1990 © Wayne David Knoll
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
Digging Around Yam Daisies
( Losing the Country of Lived Freedom )
Dig! Ivan would dig all right! He placed the blade of the long-handled posthole shovel two inches back from the dig-face. He jumped on the stepped flanges of the spade top with both boots, driving the blade of the shovel into the soggy black earth. He had often found a shovel to dig with when he had to think about making a decision.
Ivan loved to dig. He loved the earthy scents which made him think of new potatoes and wild mushrooms. There were no potatoes or mushrooms there, but the wild plants were full of the same fresh musk which he breathed to remember how vital Bette had been when they first married. Native buttercups, flatweed and swamp bluebells grew in the soak. Ivan had seen onion orchids among the Yorkshire fog-grass last summer, but that was up a bit higher where the blackwood seedlings grew. He avoided that place so he wouldn't damage the onion orchids.
Ivan tried to guide the ditch along levels of contour so it would avoid the matted green hairleaves of swamp bluebell. Last summer bluebells had flowered on every summer day. Each flower was a five-petal split-bell the size of a one-cent coin, crowded into a mass which formed a wild carpet of skyblue. Ivan had admired them as he went out to the orchard each day. Old flowers among the mass purpled to crepe before discolouring. Petals faded to white-out like sterilized clouds among the mass of blue.
Once Ivan had imagined himself as a botanist. He thought he would have enjoyed botany if it meant working hands-on with plants in the field. He had read the journal of Ferdinand von Mueller, the pioneer Australian botanist. Ivan had written up an extract out of von Mueller's essay 'Suggestions on the creation, enrichment and maintenance of forests', for his quote board on the kitchen wall. It read: 'Let us regard the forests as an inheritance, given us by nature, not to be despoiled or devastated, but to be wisely used, reverently honoured and carefully maintained...'
But Ivan had found biology at school too theoretical. Too much micro-biology and tunnel vision down microscopes for him. He liked plants in the wild, eaten by animals, attacked by insects, or dug up to be used by human beings. He liked the world to live freely under the open sky. Ivan had noticed all the wildflowers since he was a child when his Grandad August had told him the names of the plants. He thought of himself as a remnant of the old world where native plants also survived.
He jumped the shovel home. The flanges were flush on that groundlevel which Ivan loved to achieve. He liked to get the shovel in all the way. He levered back on the handle to take off the shovel-deep slab of earth. The slice broke away from the body of the soilcake in the filled-in heartshape of the shovelblade.
Last family day, Ivan had talked about the soil as he was inspecting a paddock where Barry, his brother, was going to make a new planting of apples in hedgerows. Ivan's idea was that the orchard treeroots grew to join as part of a soil cake-dough.
"Wild yeasts, worms plantseeds make a rising cake of topsoil out of stuff and decay."
"Full of sustenance!" he said to Barry. "Nearly good enough to eat."
"Eat it then!" Barry had grunted.
Ivan grinned as he gritted his teeth on a small clod.
"At least I get to nourish my soul with it" Ivan teased.
Nowadays, Barry hardly touched soil any more. He had mechanised his orchard out at Pakenham with all mod-cons.
Ivan slid his left hand down the shovelhandle and pivoted the shovelful up with his right hand on the end of the handle. Then using the grip of his left hand as a fulcrum, he drew the shovel back, and with a twist of his shoulders and a swing of arms, he tossed the the shovelful of soil six feet to the pile on the left ahead of him. He like to move like a pendulum when he dug. The deliberate rhythm seemed to sway with the wind-moves of the trees and resonate with the lap and ripple of the water.
He was planted beside the spring. He was a tree that had grown more mobile. His muscles were elastic timber, strong and bendable, flexing upright through his own shape with each sway. He eased himself to the earthmoves with no strain, digging in and throwing the earth aside.
A puff of wind swayed the blackberry canes on the old broken-down front fence, tousled the fray-strands around the holes in Ivan's old green windcheater and sent his hair over his face. He looked up as he flicked his hair off his face, to watch the the wave of air surge up the Dandenong Creek valley where the agitation parted the forest on the wall of Mount Corhanawarrabul as if it was a monkey fingering the fur apart in search of fleas.
Ivan went on digging. He was a tree exercising. Ivan liked to create something when he exercised. He skewed his face in disdain at the idea of
exercise for its own sake. Tony, Bette's brother had a special room in his air-conditioned house at Mitcham for his weights and his exer-cycle.
Annette, Tony's wife, said Tony was into pumping iron and chiropractors. Tony got out of touch with life in his exercises, Ivan thought. Tony had become one-eyed and martial. Ivan laughed in private amusement at Tony's militant fitness regime. Tony must do it to make up for being a Warranty Loss-adjuster. The job sounded like so much whitewash that Ivan had once taunted Tony to explain what he did. Tony said "get stuffed."
Another shovelheart of soil thudded onto the pile. Ivan looked at the worms. He bent down to kneel on one knee so he could pick a long worm out of the distant pile. Nearly a footer it was. A scrubby. Only scrubbies were that long. It was good to know the native worms were still there. The blokes who fished for Murray Cod would give a pretty penny for that sort. Not that Ivan would ever sell. Worms were the future of the land itself. He tossed the worm to be buried in the pile of earth.
Many small worms were cut in half as Ivan had been digging. Enough of them there not to matter, he thought. A bloke was free to wield a blade in good conscience. Ivan's old Grandad August, his Mum's father, used to say "It doesn't matter, Boy! Each worm you cut will come back to life again."
As boys Barry and Ivan had often helped Grandad in his big vegie patch. Grandad August had had the orchard before he retired so that Ivan's Dad could take it over. Ivan remembered Grandad coming back every year to help their dad with the pruning. When Barry or Ivan wanted to give up Grandad would say "Come on boys! Wire in! Wire in!" And then Grandad would set a fierce pace.
On Sundays Grandad had been a preacher, and when he pruned he railed against what he called the apostasy of modern life. He told them the world was always going to the devil. He used to say "Follow the Divine Compulsion boys! For unbelief has crippled Protestantism, robbed her of her soul."
Barry had stayed in awe of Grandad. They used to go out and stay with him and Grandmum on their retirement acre at Nar Nar Goon. Grandad had told stories about his forebears. How Gottlieb Plaent, Ivan's Grandfather four generations removed, had settled in what the family had called the Yarra Wilds east of Melbourne in 1854. Gottlieb had left Silesia after the Prussian Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm the Third had decreed an Empire-run church. Gottlieb was a traditional non-comformist Lutheran who emigrated
as a matter of conscience rather than face persecution. To deliberately compromise would have been unthinkable to him.
In Melbourne while the qet-rich-quick dreamers rushed inland to the goldfields, Gottlieb took up land between the Domain and the River Yarra. He planted a vineyard and orchards above the riverflat near the old punt crossing. He used the northern steep slope to sun his grapes. Nowadays the road to the punt is Punt Road and the vineyard is subdivided and built under the trendy suburb of South Yarra.
Barry, as the oldest male, had the framed quote in his loungeroom at Pakenham, which was taken from a translation of Gottlieb's journals which Ivan's mum had done:
'Treasure not the gold which you may dig up if you are lucky,
But the fruit of the Spirit you grow if you persist in God.'
Ivan had seen his Auntie Flo's photocopy of Gottlieb's naturalization papers. In his entry for 'Religon', Gottlieb had crossed out all the formal words and written: 'I worship with the Independents.' Ivan thought Gottlieb's phrase might have set an outlook for his family ever since.
Grandad August had been a stickler for doing a job properly. Once, Ivan's dad had gone over to help him put up a fence at the back of the Nar Nar Goon acre. Ivan's dad had dug the gatepost holes three-foot-six inches deep, and deep enough, he thought. But no, Grandad wanted the holes four feet deep, and rammed with stones to that depth. "Think of the future!" Grandad had said. "A gatepost has to hold up, and last."
Ivan believed that he had kept spirit with the Plaent family trait. While Barry had accepted the fundamentalist worship which Grandad used to preach, even as he modernised his farming, Ivan had kept faith with the eternal verities which he believed were at the heart of a real and fundamental basis for people to have a future. Ivan would do a job properly or not at all. His temporary partnership with Barry had split up, because Ivan had hated Barry's way of adopting the "She'll be right" attitude of hard-bitten opportunists and poor-spirited employees. Barry had hated what he called "slackness" in Ivan.
Ivan was in trouble. He couldn't keep up with the time-and-motion grind of producing fruit which his fellow big-time orchardists said they had to adopt to compete. "But time is money, Ivan," Barry had said. But Ivan hated to rush. He was slow and sure like his Grandad. Too slow, it seemed, for the world around him. The family orchard was stranded in what had become inner outer suburbs! Even as he dug Ivan could watch the traffic
speeding by just behind the tops of Grandad's solid old fenceposts. The traffic cannoned past all night the last few years.
Ivan could remember a time, as recent as the sixties, when he and Barry, and their mates, Ian Bauer and Colin Hannard, would kick-to-kick the football on the Mountain Highway out in front.
The orchards around had been cut up for housing estates and ten acre factory buildings. Bauer's, next door west, had a hundred brick-veneers where the peach orchards used to be. Ivan wished the production-line houses were gone. That was no way to build a city. He had dug up some stuff in books which he latched onto to support his opinions.
Ivan's idea was that greenbelt wedges of farmland and bush should have been preserved right into the inner city. He read about cities like that in Europe. He once saw a picture in a Time-Life book which showed dairy cows being driven through the streets of Berlin to a wedge of pasture which was visible in the picture beyond the ends of the cobbled streets. Ivan had seen the rows of a real orchard which showed through the gaps behind the three story houses in the picture.
So Ivan could see no sense in the acres of houses spaced for ten peach trees. And roads clogged with hurry. No. It made him feel hemmed in. Lost on his own place. Wantirna was no place for him anymore.
Ivan was digging dirt out. His trench contoured through the sedges. The dig-face approached an area thick with ground plants. He knew most of the plants. But there were clusters of rosettes with hairy green leaves. Were they flatweed? The leaves were longer than usual. More erect. The edges had scalloped points which flatweed didn't have. He thought he should know the plant.
Then he saw the purplish cold-bloom on the low older leaves and remembered. Ah yes! The plant had nodding buds! It was yam daisy. This was no weed. Yam daisy was not introduced, but native! Grandad August had shown Ivan and Barry the fleshy roots when they were boys. "The aborigines lived on these!" Grandad had told them. "Myrniong, they called it! It was like potato for them. A staple food!"
Ivan remembered that they had dug up some of the roots and roasted them much like parsnips, serving them with the midday Saturday roast. Barry said the roots tasted like stinkbugs. But Ivan liked the taste.
Myrniong. Good name. Much better than yam daisy. Ivan was glad the soak was too wet for orchard trees, for myrniong had survived, where it didn't in cultivated ground. The soak had few clumps of them. Ivan
would save them. He went over and got some old orchard branch props and pushed them into the saturated ground as stakes to mark the yam daisies.
Then an alarm had sounded. Ivan stood to look westward across the seven acres of Red Delicious to where Mayne's place had been. Mayne's had been a dairy farm when Ivan was a small boy. Then, during Ivan's teens, after milk pickups ceased, Mayne's had a little riding school and they agisted schoolgirls' horses. That was where Ivan had first set eyes on Bette. Where she had once ridden over to the fence for her horse to accept some apples was now paved for a carpark. The pressform sheds of the new Vulcan factory covered most of Mayne's. The siren seemed to sound for no good reason.
Bette would worry what the siren meant. Ivan wanted to dig for longer. He had found real solace for his imagination by digging, creating worlds and unearthing the roots of things, since he was eight years old. When Ivan's older sisters, Annette and Rosemary, had been teasing Barry about how much money they were going to make picking apples, Ivan announced that he was going to hoe Great Grandad Plaent's orchard. The others had laughed at him, thinking an eight year old could never live up to such a boast. Ivan said he would do it. Barry said that Ivan wouldn't have a hope, and anyway he wouldn't get paid.
Great Grandad Plaent's orchard was a half acre of twenty exotic and non-commercial trees that had been neglected in Ivan's father's time. The trees grew in the nook of land between the soak and the front fence, where the track went back from the house to the the hill with the old split-paling Plaent 'homeshed', as the girls had rechristened the original dwelling. The old orchard went down to Mayne's fence. Vulcan's ten-foot cyclone mesh fence was there now.
Ivan had never thought much about why he had wanted to hoe the orchard. Maybe he sensed the neglect. Maybe he did it to please his mum. His father was always busy with the commercial orchard and Ivan's siblings never gave the relic orchard a thought. Once his dad had wanted to bulldoze the trees but Ivan's mum had said over her dead body. Maybe Ivan was more tuned to intangible rewards.
Ivan's mum said she wanted her Grandad's orchard because it was a rare legacy of old-fashioned varieties. She always said we needed all the sorts to live well. Ivan had learned the names of the trees from her till he knew them by heart.
There were four rows of five. The first row had a galvanised-pipe trellis where the Neuchatel Pinot, Verdeilho, and Burgi's Tokay wine grapes grew. The two trees which made up that row were both espaliered Josephine de Maline pears. Ivan hoed that row the first week.
In the second row were, in order from the roadside, a Bereczki quince, the Morrocan tangerine, the two Irish-Peach apples, and a greengage. That row took Ivan two weeks, and Barry said Ivan would never finish.
The third row had three apples: a Blenheim Orange, a Branley's Seedling, and the Cornish Gilliflower. The last two trees were a Sloeblack prune, and the Chinese pear which never went soft. Ivan had hoed that row in two days on the last weekend before school went back after the summer holidays.
The final row, near Mayne's fence, was taken up with the Jefferson plum, then two damsons: Bradley's King and Frogmore's Prolific. Next to the White mulberry was the tree Ivan adopted as his own special tree. It was the Sweet Welsh medlar. Ivan had never tasted jam as good as that which his mum made from those medlars. Ivan took three weeks to hoe that row after school. He finished with a funny kind of secret pride.
When Ivan was showing Annette he got a sense that he had done something for God. When Annette told the others that night and the whole family went out into Great Grandad Plaent's orchard to see it hoed Ivan felt as though he had done a sacred thing. Ivan was glad that he had impressed Barry to see what he was capable of. Ivan's dad had been speechless with wonder. He said: "Who'd believe it?" and then he went inside and gave Ivan a reward. Ten pounds! Ivan had got. But, of course, he had to put it in the bank.
And there Ivan was trying not to think about money. He kept on digging to get space out of the house. Bette would be inside worrying. She had become a wife of the suburbs. She was probably on the phone to Wendy or Gaye, sweating over the estate-agent's cards, and saying "mule". She loved the 'Development Proposal', like it was a ride to heaven. He could feel her eyes arrowing the target of his back. Wanting him to relent. Wanting him to sell out. He felt daggers of her want and saw the brochure dream home she wanted him to have built with the money.
He couldn't stop advancing pavements, roads and the encampments of houses springing up as if they were all uniform in an invading army. The factories bled and seeded like warts on the land. His home was overrun by wage-slaves and clones of consumerism. Ivan had been raised and trained to be a independent yeoman. A free farmer and nothing less!
He saw a future for his children where slave-minded 'subbers' had stripped all freeholds, and squeezed his descendants to little lives alienated from the earth and from God.
They were squeezing his kind out by the very bulk of their so-called democracy. Mob rule it was. Subbies wanted everyone the same like them. His kind was being put under siege.
His kind! Yes. He had the divine compulsion. He didn't even find that in church anymore. He didn't find one sympathetic eye. Only that traffic of blank eyes like the windscreens on 'Molehill Highway'! His place was levelled to be no place. The blank eye glared at him from his own hearth.
"Everyone wants us to sell, Ivan" Bette had said. "We'll be better off! The offer is too good to refuse... Brian Tobbling has offered over half a million dollars now. Ivan?"
Ivan remembered how much those pounds would buy. Brian Tobbling wanted an answer by six o'clock that night. He had the developer ready to sign. The developer was jetting off to California the next day.
"It's the best offer we've had Ivan!" Bette had said.
"What's five hundred thousand divided up between my family?" Ivan said. There were six equal shares in the old family orchard.
"I can't buy another orchard property for that!" Ivan had said. "This place should be worth a million. I reckon land speculation is sin!"
"But Brian Tobbling says he'll have to spend a fortune just to bulldoze the orchard, and demolish the farm sheds...and clean up the piles of old boxes and junk... besides roads and power and water and all that. And what do you mean, sin?" Bette said.
But Ivan had walked out on her. Let them bulldoze their own backyards. He didn't want to make that decision. He said he would think about it.
He had got out the shovel like he had serious work to do. So there he was digging. He would sooner think about saving yam daisies. And canals.
He dug a moat around the plant cluster to make it an island. The soak-springs had filled the canal with water. The shovel-width trench made a perfect canal for toy boats. Ivan had played boats with Barry there when he was eight or nine. The old canals had collapsed into shallow depressions. But Ivan was digging sharp new depths in place of the blunted memories. Ivan rembered many years of going back to play boats in chains and chains of canals. Judy and Veronica, Ivan's younger sisters had joined him as Barry got too grown-up to play.
Ivan cut his new canal along the old depression with the water lapping the dig-face. He would show the canal to the children as they came along from school. Adam could tow his wooden Star yacht from the bank, and Alice could drag her plastic cruiser. The canal boats could ply the soakland with the old trades and cargoes. They would land at Sedge Dock and take on basket reeds. Then he would show the kids the yam daisies and they would dig one up and they would taste it and spit it out.
Ivan knew they thought he was ridiculous. He was in a bind and he reverted to child's play. His rates were levied at purse pocket values and he had hundreds of purses to pay. He had been losing the last five years. The subbies wanted proper footpaths and sewerage for which he had to cough up for all his frontage. He didn't have the money.
Only a high-tech orchard might raise the money. And that took five years from planting to fruit. The subbies had his bit of green cornered. His heritage was being swamped. He was a being of the country left behind when his country had retreated. He wanted to stay and dig in. To keep an area open, free from alienations and pavedoms. But how could he? He would get too poor. Debt would take him and the subbies would collect in land. The kids would suffer.
The kids were there at last. Adam and Alice had friends home along the gravel path. They jumped the old fence and went to the canals. Ivan had to make boats for the friends out of the broken ends of old pinewood apple boxes. More kids walked by and came in to join the fun. Ivan warned them out of the orchard-prop stakes which protected the yam daisies.
Then he was too busy making boats to notice what the kids were doing. He loved the kids to enjoy a real world of imagination. Adam forgot the warning and with his friends pulled up the stakes so they could pull the boats clear around the moat. The barges were strung along the maze of canal. The kids were chatting and exclaiming in excitement. By the time Ivan came to watch the game the yam daisies were churned into a slurry of mud.
Then Ivan blew his top. He screamed at the kids and swore them home. They ran off to subbie streets named after native plants to their paved houses. And then the mums had phoned Bette angry that their kids were screamed at and had come home all dirty, dragging mud on the new carpets. They asked if the man was dangerous.
Bette came out trembling with shame and told Ivan what they said. But Ivan didn't seem to hear. He had the soak in his eyes.
"It's yes for Brian Tobbling," Ivan just said to her.
He went to the shed and took a box of matches out with some old packing paper. He dug a few yam daisies out of the mud with Adam and Alice. He told the children about the Yarra Wilds country and explained about Aboriginal potatoes. He told them about Grandad August's divine compulsion.
They went over to the old homeshed and built a fire of fallen branches under the cypress trees. They sheltered from the wind in the lee of the leaning homeshed. The kids looked into the building to see the dusty bric-a-brac through the dead rats and cobwebs.
Ivan made a spitfork from old fencing wire and roasted the roots of yam daisy over the fire. The kids tasted them and ran round the fire chanting "yuk yuk yuk." Then they ran off to watch their favourite soap on TV, saying they had to help Bette with the chores.
Then as Ivan sat in the dusk he found he needed to make his choice real. He got the shovel from the soak and went into the homeshed with shovelfuls of embers from the fire. He piled hot coals beside torn hessian on the thin lath walls. Then he clutched a fistful of cooked yam daisies and stood back.
Then while the century-dry tinder of the homeshed began to tongue alive into orange flames Ivan walked out through the relic orchard. Great Grandad's trees needed hoeing again.
Ivan climbed up the Sweet Welsh medlar to watch the burn. He waited for the action while chewing on the bitter yam daisies.
The homeshed was burning from every window frame, catching fire up into the cypress trees. Good, Ivan thought. Let the past burn. They won't get any comfort from my history. The place would be gone before any subbie water was let out.
Darkness fell deep as the fire sirens wailed. Ivan watched the engines roar in to wet the homeshed ashes and put out the cypress trees. Men looked suspiciously into any old applebox and chatted up Bette.
But none of them saw Ivan's face in the medlar. He sat wedged like an ape in the crook of branches nursing his divine compulsion. His eyes were wild as they flashed red in the convoluted flare of the fire engines.
Dig! Ivan would dig all right! He placed the blade of the long-handled posthole shovel two inches back from the dig-face. He jumped on the stepped flanges of the spade top with both boots, driving the blade of the shovel into the soggy black earth. He had often found a shovel to dig with when he had to think about making a decision.
Ivan loved to dig. He loved the earthy scents which made him think of new potatoes and wild mushrooms. There were no potatoes or mushrooms there, but the wild plants were full of the same fresh musk which he breathed to remember how vital Bette had been when they first married. Native buttercups, flatweed and swamp bluebells grew in the soak. Ivan had seen onion orchids among the Yorkshire fog-grass last summer, but that was up a bit higher where the blackwood seedlings grew. He avoided that place so he wouldn't damage the onion orchids.
Ivan tried to guide the ditch along levels of contour so it would avoid the matted green hairleaves of swamp bluebell. Last summer bluebells had flowered on every summer day. Each flower was a five-petal split-bell the size of a one-cent coin, crowded into a mass which formed a wild carpet of skyblue. Ivan had admired them as he went out to the orchard each day. Old flowers among the mass purpled to crepe before discolouring. Petals faded to white-out like sterilized clouds among the mass of blue.
Once Ivan had imagined himself as a botanist. He thought he would have enjoyed botany if it meant working hands-on with plants in the field. He had read the journal of Ferdinand von Mueller, the pioneer Australian botanist. Ivan had written up an extract out of von Mueller's essay 'Suggestions on the creation, enrichment and maintenance of forests', for his quote board on the kitchen wall. It read: 'Let us regard the forests as an inheritance, given us by nature, not to be despoiled or devastated, but to be wisely used, reverently honoured and carefully maintained...'
But Ivan had found biology at school too theoretical. Too much micro-biology and tunnel vision down microscopes for him. He liked plants in the wild, eaten by animals, attacked by insects, or dug up to be used by human beings. He liked the world to live freely under the open sky. Ivan had noticed all the wildflowers since he was a child when his Grandad August had told him the names of the plants. He thought of himself as a remnant of the old world where native plants also survived.
He jumped the shovel home. The flanges were flush on that groundlevel which Ivan loved to achieve. He liked to get the shovel in all the way. He levered back on the handle to take off the shovel-deep slab of earth. The slice broke away from the body of the soilcake in the filled-in heartshape of the shovelblade.
Last family day, Ivan had talked about the soil as he was inspecting a paddock where Barry, his brother, was going to make a new planting of apples in hedgerows. Ivan's idea was that the orchard treeroots grew to join as part of a soil cake-dough.
"Wild yeasts, worms plantseeds make a rising cake of topsoil out of stuff and decay."
"Full of sustenance!" he said to Barry. "Nearly good enough to eat."
"Eat it then!" Barry had grunted.
Ivan grinned as he gritted his teeth on a small clod.
"At least I get to nourish my soul with it" Ivan teased.
Nowadays, Barry hardly touched soil any more. He had mechanised his orchard out at Pakenham with all mod-cons.
Ivan slid his left hand down the shovelhandle and pivoted the shovelful up with his right hand on the end of the handle. Then using the grip of his left hand as a fulcrum, he drew the shovel back, and with a twist of his shoulders and a swing of arms, he tossed the the shovelful of soil six feet to the pile on the left ahead of him. He like to move like a pendulum when he dug. The deliberate rhythm seemed to sway with the wind-moves of the trees and resonate with the lap and ripple of the water.
He was planted beside the spring. He was a tree that had grown more mobile. His muscles were elastic timber, strong and bendable, flexing upright through his own shape with each sway. He eased himself to the earthmoves with no strain, digging in and throwing the earth aside.
A puff of wind swayed the blackberry canes on the old broken-down front fence, tousled the fray-strands around the holes in Ivan's old green windcheater and sent his hair over his face. He looked up as he flicked his hair off his face, to watch the the wave of air surge up the Dandenong Creek valley where the agitation parted the forest on the wall of Mount Corhanawarrabul as if it was a monkey fingering the fur apart in search of fleas.
Ivan went on digging. He was a tree exercising. Ivan liked to create something when he exercised. He skewed his face in disdain at the idea of
exercise for its own sake. Tony, Bette's brother had a special room in his air-conditioned house at Mitcham for his weights and his exer-cycle.
Annette, Tony's wife, said Tony was into pumping iron and chiropractors. Tony got out of touch with life in his exercises, Ivan thought. Tony had become one-eyed and martial. Ivan laughed in private amusement at Tony's militant fitness regime. Tony must do it to make up for being a Warranty Loss-adjuster. The job sounded like so much whitewash that Ivan had once taunted Tony to explain what he did. Tony said "get stuffed."
Another shovelheart of soil thudded onto the pile. Ivan looked at the worms. He bent down to kneel on one knee so he could pick a long worm out of the distant pile. Nearly a footer it was. A scrubby. Only scrubbies were that long. It was good to know the native worms were still there. The blokes who fished for Murray Cod would give a pretty penny for that sort. Not that Ivan would ever sell. Worms were the future of the land itself. He tossed the worm to be buried in the pile of earth.
Many small worms were cut in half as Ivan had been digging. Enough of them there not to matter, he thought. A bloke was free to wield a blade in good conscience. Ivan's old Grandad August, his Mum's father, used to say "It doesn't matter, Boy! Each worm you cut will come back to life again."
As boys Barry and Ivan had often helped Grandad in his big vegie patch. Grandad August had had the orchard before he retired so that Ivan's Dad could take it over. Ivan remembered Grandad coming back every year to help their dad with the pruning. When Barry or Ivan wanted to give up Grandad would say "Come on boys! Wire in! Wire in!" And then Grandad would set a fierce pace.
On Sundays Grandad had been a preacher, and when he pruned he railed against what he called the apostasy of modern life. He told them the world was always going to the devil. He used to say "Follow the Divine Compulsion boys! For unbelief has crippled Protestantism, robbed her of her soul."
Barry had stayed in awe of Grandad. They used to go out and stay with him and Grandmum on their retirement acre at Nar Nar Goon. Grandad had told stories about his forebears. How Gottlieb Plaent, Ivan's Grandfather four generations removed, had settled in what the family had called the Yarra Wilds east of Melbourne in 1854. Gottlieb had left Silesia after the Prussian Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm the Third had decreed an Empire-run church. Gottlieb was a traditional non-comformist Lutheran who emigrated
as a matter of conscience rather than face persecution. To deliberately compromise would have been unthinkable to him.
In Melbourne while the qet-rich-quick dreamers rushed inland to the goldfields, Gottlieb took up land between the Domain and the River Yarra. He planted a vineyard and orchards above the riverflat near the old punt crossing. He used the northern steep slope to sun his grapes. Nowadays the road to the punt is Punt Road and the vineyard is subdivided and built under the trendy suburb of South Yarra.
Barry, as the oldest male, had the framed quote in his loungeroom at Pakenham, which was taken from a translation of Gottlieb's journals which Ivan's mum had done:
'Treasure not the gold which you may dig up if you are lucky,
But the fruit of the Spirit you grow if you persist in God.'
Ivan had seen his Auntie Flo's photocopy of Gottlieb's naturalization papers. In his entry for 'Religon', Gottlieb had crossed out all the formal words and written: 'I worship with the Independents.' Ivan thought Gottlieb's phrase might have set an outlook for his family ever since.
Grandad August had been a stickler for doing a job properly. Once, Ivan's dad had gone over to help him put up a fence at the back of the Nar Nar Goon acre. Ivan's dad had dug the gatepost holes three-foot-six inches deep, and deep enough, he thought. But no, Grandad wanted the holes four feet deep, and rammed with stones to that depth. "Think of the future!" Grandad had said. "A gatepost has to hold up, and last."
Ivan believed that he had kept spirit with the Plaent family trait. While Barry had accepted the fundamentalist worship which Grandad used to preach, even as he modernised his farming, Ivan had kept faith with the eternal verities which he believed were at the heart of a real and fundamental basis for people to have a future. Ivan would do a job properly or not at all. His temporary partnership with Barry had split up, because Ivan had hated Barry's way of adopting the "She'll be right" attitude of hard-bitten opportunists and poor-spirited employees. Barry had hated what he called "slackness" in Ivan.
Ivan was in trouble. He couldn't keep up with the time-and-motion grind of producing fruit which his fellow big-time orchardists said they had to adopt to compete. "But time is money, Ivan," Barry had said. But Ivan hated to rush. He was slow and sure like his Grandad. Too slow, it seemed, for the world around him. The family orchard was stranded in what had become inner outer suburbs! Even as he dug Ivan could watch the traffic
speeding by just behind the tops of Grandad's solid old fenceposts. The traffic cannoned past all night the last few years.
Ivan could remember a time, as recent as the sixties, when he and Barry, and their mates, Ian Bauer and Colin Hannard, would kick-to-kick the football on the Mountain Highway out in front.
The orchards around had been cut up for housing estates and ten acre factory buildings. Bauer's, next door west, had a hundred brick-veneers where the peach orchards used to be. Ivan wished the production-line houses were gone. That was no way to build a city. He had dug up some stuff in books which he latched onto to support his opinions.
Ivan's idea was that greenbelt wedges of farmland and bush should have been preserved right into the inner city. He read about cities like that in Europe. He once saw a picture in a Time-Life book which showed dairy cows being driven through the streets of Berlin to a wedge of pasture which was visible in the picture beyond the ends of the cobbled streets. Ivan had seen the rows of a real orchard which showed through the gaps behind the three story houses in the picture.
So Ivan could see no sense in the acres of houses spaced for ten peach trees. And roads clogged with hurry. No. It made him feel hemmed in. Lost on his own place. Wantirna was no place for him anymore.
Ivan was digging dirt out. His trench contoured through the sedges. The dig-face approached an area thick with ground plants. He knew most of the plants. But there were clusters of rosettes with hairy green leaves. Were they flatweed? The leaves were longer than usual. More erect. The edges had scalloped points which flatweed didn't have. He thought he should know the plant.
Then he saw the purplish cold-bloom on the low older leaves and remembered. Ah yes! The plant had nodding buds! It was yam daisy. This was no weed. Yam daisy was not introduced, but native! Grandad August had shown Ivan and Barry the fleshy roots when they were boys. "The aborigines lived on these!" Grandad had told them. "Myrniong, they called it! It was like potato for them. A staple food!"
Ivan remembered that they had dug up some of the roots and roasted them much like parsnips, serving them with the midday Saturday roast. Barry said the roots tasted like stinkbugs. But Ivan liked the taste.
Myrniong. Good name. Much better than yam daisy. Ivan was glad the soak was too wet for orchard trees, for myrniong had survived, where it didn't in cultivated ground. The soak had few clumps of them. Ivan
would save them. He went over and got some old orchard branch props and pushed them into the saturated ground as stakes to mark the yam daisies.
Then an alarm had sounded. Ivan stood to look westward across the seven acres of Red Delicious to where Mayne's place had been. Mayne's had been a dairy farm when Ivan was a small boy. Then, during Ivan's teens, after milk pickups ceased, Mayne's had a little riding school and they agisted schoolgirls' horses. That was where Ivan had first set eyes on Bette. Where she had once ridden over to the fence for her horse to accept some apples was now paved for a carpark. The pressform sheds of the new Vulcan factory covered most of Mayne's. The siren seemed to sound for no good reason.
Bette would worry what the siren meant. Ivan wanted to dig for longer. He had found real solace for his imagination by digging, creating worlds and unearthing the roots of things, since he was eight years old. When Ivan's older sisters, Annette and Rosemary, had been teasing Barry about how much money they were going to make picking apples, Ivan announced that he was going to hoe Great Grandad Plaent's orchard. The others had laughed at him, thinking an eight year old could never live up to such a boast. Ivan said he would do it. Barry said that Ivan wouldn't have a hope, and anyway he wouldn't get paid.
Great Grandad Plaent's orchard was a half acre of twenty exotic and non-commercial trees that had been neglected in Ivan's father's time. The trees grew in the nook of land between the soak and the front fence, where the track went back from the house to the the hill with the old split-paling Plaent 'homeshed', as the girls had rechristened the original dwelling. The old orchard went down to Mayne's fence. Vulcan's ten-foot cyclone mesh fence was there now.
Ivan had never thought much about why he had wanted to hoe the orchard. Maybe he sensed the neglect. Maybe he did it to please his mum. His father was always busy with the commercial orchard and Ivan's siblings never gave the relic orchard a thought. Once his dad had wanted to bulldoze the trees but Ivan's mum had said over her dead body. Maybe Ivan was more tuned to intangible rewards.
Ivan's mum said she wanted her Grandad's orchard because it was a rare legacy of old-fashioned varieties. She always said we needed all the sorts to live well. Ivan had learned the names of the trees from her till he knew them by heart.
There were four rows of five. The first row had a galvanised-pipe trellis where the Neuchatel Pinot, Verdeilho, and Burgi's Tokay wine grapes grew. The two trees which made up that row were both espaliered Josephine de Maline pears. Ivan hoed that row the first week.
In the second row were, in order from the roadside, a Bereczki quince, the Morrocan tangerine, the two Irish-Peach apples, and a greengage. That row took Ivan two weeks, and Barry said Ivan would never finish.
The third row had three apples: a Blenheim Orange, a Branley's Seedling, and the Cornish Gilliflower. The last two trees were a Sloeblack prune, and the Chinese pear which never went soft. Ivan had hoed that row in two days on the last weekend before school went back after the summer holidays.
The final row, near Mayne's fence, was taken up with the Jefferson plum, then two damsons: Bradley's King and Frogmore's Prolific. Next to the White mulberry was the tree Ivan adopted as his own special tree. It was the Sweet Welsh medlar. Ivan had never tasted jam as good as that which his mum made from those medlars. Ivan took three weeks to hoe that row after school. He finished with a funny kind of secret pride.
When Ivan was showing Annette he got a sense that he had done something for God. When Annette told the others that night and the whole family went out into Great Grandad Plaent's orchard to see it hoed Ivan felt as though he had done a sacred thing. Ivan was glad that he had impressed Barry to see what he was capable of. Ivan's dad had been speechless with wonder. He said: "Who'd believe it?" and then he went inside and gave Ivan a reward. Ten pounds! Ivan had got. But, of course, he had to put it in the bank.
And there Ivan was trying not to think about money. He kept on digging to get space out of the house. Bette would be inside worrying. She had become a wife of the suburbs. She was probably on the phone to Wendy or Gaye, sweating over the estate-agent's cards, and saying "mule". She loved the 'Development Proposal', like it was a ride to heaven. He could feel her eyes arrowing the target of his back. Wanting him to relent. Wanting him to sell out. He felt daggers of her want and saw the brochure dream home she wanted him to have built with the money.
He couldn't stop advancing pavements, roads and the encampments of houses springing up as if they were all uniform in an invading army. The factories bled and seeded like warts on the land. His home was overrun by wage-slaves and clones of consumerism. Ivan had been raised and trained to be a independent yeoman. A free farmer and nothing less!
He saw a future for his children where slave-minded 'subbers' had stripped all freeholds, and squeezed his descendants to little lives alienated from the earth and from God.
They were squeezing his kind out by the very bulk of their so-called democracy. Mob rule it was. Subbies wanted everyone the same like them. His kind was being put under siege.
His kind! Yes. He had the divine compulsion. He didn't even find that in church anymore. He didn't find one sympathetic eye. Only that traffic of blank eyes like the windscreens on 'Molehill Highway'! His place was levelled to be no place. The blank eye glared at him from his own hearth.
"Everyone wants us to sell, Ivan" Bette had said. "We'll be better off! The offer is too good to refuse... Brian Tobbling has offered over half a million dollars now. Ivan?"
Ivan remembered how much those pounds would buy. Brian Tobbling wanted an answer by six o'clock that night. He had the developer ready to sign. The developer was jetting off to California the next day.
"It's the best offer we've had Ivan!" Bette had said.
"What's five hundred thousand divided up between my family?" Ivan said. There were six equal shares in the old family orchard.
"I can't buy another orchard property for that!" Ivan had said. "This place should be worth a million. I reckon land speculation is sin!"
"But Brian Tobbling says he'll have to spend a fortune just to bulldoze the orchard, and demolish the farm sheds...and clean up the piles of old boxes and junk... besides roads and power and water and all that. And what do you mean, sin?" Bette said.
But Ivan had walked out on her. Let them bulldoze their own backyards. He didn't want to make that decision. He said he would think about it.
He had got out the shovel like he had serious work to do. So there he was digging. He would sooner think about saving yam daisies. And canals.
He dug a moat around the plant cluster to make it an island. The soak-springs had filled the canal with water. The shovel-width trench made a perfect canal for toy boats. Ivan had played boats with Barry there when he was eight or nine. The old canals had collapsed into shallow depressions. But Ivan was digging sharp new depths in place of the blunted memories. Ivan rembered many years of going back to play boats in chains and chains of canals. Judy and Veronica, Ivan's younger sisters had joined him as Barry got too grown-up to play.
Ivan cut his new canal along the old depression with the water lapping the dig-face. He would show the canal to the children as they came along from school. Adam could tow his wooden Star yacht from the bank, and Alice could drag her plastic cruiser. The canal boats could ply the soakland with the old trades and cargoes. They would land at Sedge Dock and take on basket reeds. Then he would show the kids the yam daisies and they would dig one up and they would taste it and spit it out.
Ivan knew they thought he was ridiculous. He was in a bind and he reverted to child's play. His rates were levied at purse pocket values and he had hundreds of purses to pay. He had been losing the last five years. The subbies wanted proper footpaths and sewerage for which he had to cough up for all his frontage. He didn't have the money.
Only a high-tech orchard might raise the money. And that took five years from planting to fruit. The subbies had his bit of green cornered. His heritage was being swamped. He was a being of the country left behind when his country had retreated. He wanted to stay and dig in. To keep an area open, free from alienations and pavedoms. But how could he? He would get too poor. Debt would take him and the subbies would collect in land. The kids would suffer.
The kids were there at last. Adam and Alice had friends home along the gravel path. They jumped the old fence and went to the canals. Ivan had to make boats for the friends out of the broken ends of old pinewood apple boxes. More kids walked by and came in to join the fun. Ivan warned them out of the orchard-prop stakes which protected the yam daisies.
Then he was too busy making boats to notice what the kids were doing. He loved the kids to enjoy a real world of imagination. Adam forgot the warning and with his friends pulled up the stakes so they could pull the boats clear around the moat. The barges were strung along the maze of canal. The kids were chatting and exclaiming in excitement. By the time Ivan came to watch the game the yam daisies were churned into a slurry of mud.
Then Ivan blew his top. He screamed at the kids and swore them home. They ran off to subbie streets named after native plants to their paved houses. And then the mums had phoned Bette angry that their kids were screamed at and had come home all dirty, dragging mud on the new carpets. They asked if the man was dangerous.
Bette came out trembling with shame and told Ivan what they said. But Ivan didn't seem to hear. He had the soak in his eyes.
"It's yes for Brian Tobbling," Ivan just said to her.
He went to the shed and took a box of matches out with some old packing paper. He dug a few yam daisies out of the mud with Adam and Alice. He told the children about the Yarra Wilds country and explained about Aboriginal potatoes. He told them about Grandad August's divine compulsion.
They went over to the old homeshed and built a fire of fallen branches under the cypress trees. They sheltered from the wind in the lee of the leaning homeshed. The kids looked into the building to see the dusty bric-a-brac through the dead rats and cobwebs.
Ivan made a spitfork from old fencing wire and roasted the roots of yam daisy over the fire. The kids tasted them and ran round the fire chanting "yuk yuk yuk." Then they ran off to watch their favourite soap on TV, saying they had to help Bette with the chores.
Then as Ivan sat in the dusk he found he needed to make his choice real. He got the shovel from the soak and went into the homeshed with shovelfuls of embers from the fire. He piled hot coals beside torn hessian on the thin lath walls. Then he clutched a fistful of cooked yam daisies and stood back.
Then while the century-dry tinder of the homeshed began to tongue alive into orange flames Ivan walked out through the relic orchard. Great Grandad's trees needed hoeing again.
Ivan climbed up the Sweet Welsh medlar to watch the burn. He waited for the action while chewing on the bitter yam daisies.
The homeshed was burning from every window frame, catching fire up into the cypress trees. Good, Ivan thought. Let the past burn. They won't get any comfort from my history. The place would be gone before any subbie water was let out.
Darkness fell deep as the fire sirens wailed. Ivan watched the engines roar in to wet the homeshed ashes and put out the cypress trees. Men looked suspiciously into any old applebox and chatted up Bette.
But none of them saw Ivan's face in the medlar. He sat wedged like an ape in the crook of branches nursing his divine compulsion. His eyes were wild as they flashed red in the convoluted flare of the fire engines.
A Pair of Dirty Lollies
( Learning the Democracy of Little )
He's just a plonko anyhow!
What'iff he gets up?
Nah. He's too blotto. That Saturday sponge.
What'iff he goes off?
He mighta gone already. Try stones. I'm gunna chuck yonnies on his roof . You'll see! That'll liven the stupid old plonko up. See if I can't git him up - if he's there at all.
* * *
We would never-of thought of it back then, but he was our nearest neighbour. Living just through the farm fence behind our tool shed. We thought of our real neighbours only as the owners of the farms next door. The Italian, Daki's and Barkers. Our house was not like The Italian's, near the road, but set back on top of the hill. Claret Wally lived nearer us, in a dump of a hilltop shed that belonged to the Italian. Wally was less one of us than was the Italian. We never had The Italian at our table. Claret Wally never even got inside the house. So what good of a neighbour was he? Living like a rat in a fertiliser shed. Covering one corner of old slab walls with mouldy spudbags for some last shred of furtive privacy.
Claret Wally got blotto mostly of a Saturday. This day I had watched Wally, as I had watched plonko workers many times before. As a kid watches and picks at any scab where a sore point on a body tries vainly to heal. Wally'd taken off on the dirt tracks, across country, miles each way, walking all morning -as if he had no pride left- into Nathania where the licensed grocer was. Around One O'clock he might-of got back, to disappear into his hole. A brown-papered flagon as a companion on his dirty bunk.
Even Mum would say: How can a human individual get like that?
Later, I hoped he might lurch about like an old duck among the Italian's detached tractor implements. He did that once, like a ghost of damnation in his weakness, as if he could forget how pathetic he was in alcoholic shame. Claret Wally would sing:
"Soff-ly an' Ten-derly Jeez-sus is calling,
Calling far' you an' far' me;
See on th' portals He's watching and waiting,
Watching for you and for me.
Come home, Come home,
You who are weary come home;
Earneshly, ten-derly Jeez-sus is calling,
Calling, Oh Sinner, come home."
Sinner all right! Dad had said, after telling that story over a cuppa tea, with a countryman's native delight in taking him off, drunken hymn and all.
He's useless. No example to anyone!
Makes a mockery of a man! Earnie, our worker, objected.
Used to be a Church of England altar boy! Bloody shame! And a Pom!
Shame. How old was I, then? Between ten and my teens. Old enough to be hard, justifying contradictions we had never owned up to, in our bit of embattled advantage. Judging that those "plonkos" were lower in our "battler's" world. Yet young enough to take the frustrated talk, countlessly tossed across the farmhouse table, as the gospel truth. I wanted to act on it, to raise hell for Wally in his hell.
* * *
Ya gunna do it then?
Yep.
What'll ya throw?
Yonnies, stupid.
Where from?
From the track, dumbie. Them red-dirt stones. But you don't haff ta!
I rained stones down on Wally's corrugated iron roof, thirty yards off. No reply. The dead pan encouraged me. I lobbed more yonnies onto that tin lid, drumming his den of stranger-wickedness. Thhwack. It clanged with my offence at his filth and shame. Each hit was a real accomplishment. It felt good to throw that righteous stone!
Get off ! A dirty voice bent out of next door's shed .
Let's go!
My young brothers Cyrian and Kelt ran off to hide behind the brick tank.
Quick! He's comin out! Cyrian hissed.
Wally's pall eyed a hole in the hessian. He'd seen me curl to the ground and slink off like an ear-shrugged rabbit. I went after Cyrian and Kelt who had run around our shed, not wanting to be implicated with their older brother, to assume the innocence of our playing places in the shrubbery.
I hung back watching Wally from the shade. He shuffled back into his hole of the shed. He came out in his scuffed boots, moving with unexpected purpose toward our fence. He chose the place where he often leaned on the taught wires to talk to Dad about his woes with The Italian. And then he threw a loose leg over.
Heck, he was comin' right into our place. I hid back into the deep foliage. I expected he was gunna come for me. I was sure he'd do me something awful. But he didn't even look about for where I might be. He was going a beeline, like anybody, to our backdoor.
I was in for it from all quarters now. Mum'd blow her stack. She'd belt me with the duster sure thing.
Mrs Schap, one of your boys has been stoning on my roof.
Stones? Which one?
It'd be that Vidy I'd reckon.
I overheard Wally, hardly able to believe he knew my name. I thought he had nothing going up top except for himself. I sure didn't know that he knew me.
All right Wally. I'll deal with this.
Wally turned and went off home, as Mum went back inside to the baby's cry.
Not for long.
Vidy! Come here right now!
Caught out. I saw no use in lying. My own integrity was at stake. I came in to the veranda and to Mum's wrath in a straightforward but honest shame to face up to what I could see no way of getting out of.
Did you throw stones on Wally's roof?
Yes!
Why?
I squirmed. I hardly knew how to begin an answer.
Don't you know that he is a human being? With feelings like you or me?
How would you like it if you were inside and stones were thrown on your roof?
Do you like having stones thrown at you?
No.
Well, then, how do you feel about what you did?
I don't know?
You don't know? It's time you woke up to yourself boy!
Yes.
Are you sorry?
Yes.
Alright. I won't belt you. But you must go up to Wally's place and tell him you are sorry.
But?
But nothing.
But he is just a plonko! And that's The Italian's place!
It's about time you realized that such people are to be respected the same as you would like to be. He's still a man no matter how far he's fallen. A man made in the image of God. Do you believe that?
Yeah.
Then, boy, you have to say sorry to the man. The Italian's got nothing to do with it. Go up to Wally in his own place and apologize.
All right.
Somehow, not getting belted made it easier. I went off quick, as Wally himself had come. Yet the barbed wire fence was a barrier which made my guts tighten like wires. I'd never crossed that fence to actually go to see a plonko. I'd only ever crossed the fence before to play in Anderson's Pines on the other side of The Italian's. We used to walk bent over so Wally couldn't see us. Now it was a wall of fear shimmering like heavy air surrounding the fence which I had to thrust out through, as if electric currents were causing a magnetic repulsion in my own belly. Once through the wires I took the rat track to Wally's. But scared as a stranger.
Hullo, I called out. I felt sick. The spudbags repelled me. They were ingrained with hand grease till they shone.
Who is it ?
Vidy! From over the fence.
A scaly hand swept the door-drape aside.
What is it, boy?
Inside the drape there was one wooden chair. with a rubber cushion unstuffed from its vinyl, at a makeshift table made from flooring boards. Bags stretched on sapling poles made a saggy bunk gainst the wall. Wool army blankets and more spudbags made a quilt. Everything seemed putrid, stained with dirt, too basic for human need. An enamel dish sat at the table to suggest a rare recourse to washing.
I'm sorry for throwing stones on your roof, Mr Wally.
Yes. You're sorry. Well thank you, and please do not do it again.
No. I won't.
Then I guess I'll say I forgive you. I was a boy myself of a time.
Yes. Can I go now Mr Wally?
Wait. I have something for you.
What? I still feared this would be something dreadful.
Wally walked back into his place, leaving me in the doorway holding the drape. He shuffled stuff on the table, then looked up at the wall above the head of a brown lump on the bunk. A wall noggin held dirty paper and medicine bottles. Wally chose a small bag that had once been white, came back and handed it to me.
These are for you.
I recoiled as far as I could from Wally's breath. Then I opened the clasped top of the bag and saw two lollies in wrappers inside.
Oh Yeah! We only had lollies for Christmas or birthdays. But the dust! I was speechless with wanting and yet disgust.
I turned and ran yelling: Lollies! Thanks.
Then to the fence and through it, as if I was pursued by my own dirt and contamination.
Cyrian and Kelt came out from where they'd been hiding, waiting to see what happened to me.
Look. All he did was give me lollies. See!
When I got out of Wally's sight, I screwed the paper bag and ditched it. I tried to wash the stain of fingers off the lolly wrappers. The good rain water from the brick tank peeled the grotty cellophane off my precious sweets. I let the water run across the gems till they shone clear and pure.
I'm not going to give you one, I said to Cyrian and Kelt.
Who cares! They'll be yuck.
I tried the sweet tang of a lolly.
Nothin wrong with it. Tastes good. I said.
Yeah? Give us the other one then.
I gave them the lolly to fight over.
Then I laughed outright.
What's so funny? Cyrian asked.
I only got 'em after chuckin' them stones.
He's just a plonko anyhow!
What'iff he gets up?
Nah. He's too blotto. That Saturday sponge.
What'iff he goes off?
He mighta gone already. Try stones. I'm gunna chuck yonnies on his roof . You'll see! That'll liven the stupid old plonko up. See if I can't git him up - if he's there at all.
* * *
We would never-of thought of it back then, but he was our nearest neighbour. Living just through the farm fence behind our tool shed. We thought of our real neighbours only as the owners of the farms next door. The Italian, Daki's and Barkers. Our house was not like The Italian's, near the road, but set back on top of the hill. Claret Wally lived nearer us, in a dump of a hilltop shed that belonged to the Italian. Wally was less one of us than was the Italian. We never had The Italian at our table. Claret Wally never even got inside the house. So what good of a neighbour was he? Living like a rat in a fertiliser shed. Covering one corner of old slab walls with mouldy spudbags for some last shred of furtive privacy.
Claret Wally got blotto mostly of a Saturday. This day I had watched Wally, as I had watched plonko workers many times before. As a kid watches and picks at any scab where a sore point on a body tries vainly to heal. Wally'd taken off on the dirt tracks, across country, miles each way, walking all morning -as if he had no pride left- into Nathania where the licensed grocer was. Around One O'clock he might-of got back, to disappear into his hole. A brown-papered flagon as a companion on his dirty bunk.
Even Mum would say: How can a human individual get like that?
Later, I hoped he might lurch about like an old duck among the Italian's detached tractor implements. He did that once, like a ghost of damnation in his weakness, as if he could forget how pathetic he was in alcoholic shame. Claret Wally would sing:
"Soff-ly an' Ten-derly Jeez-sus is calling,
Calling far' you an' far' me;
See on th' portals He's watching and waiting,
Watching for you and for me.
Come home, Come home,
You who are weary come home;
Earneshly, ten-derly Jeez-sus is calling,
Calling, Oh Sinner, come home."
Sinner all right! Dad had said, after telling that story over a cuppa tea, with a countryman's native delight in taking him off, drunken hymn and all.
He's useless. No example to anyone!
Makes a mockery of a man! Earnie, our worker, objected.
Used to be a Church of England altar boy! Bloody shame! And a Pom!
Shame. How old was I, then? Between ten and my teens. Old enough to be hard, justifying contradictions we had never owned up to, in our bit of embattled advantage. Judging that those "plonkos" were lower in our "battler's" world. Yet young enough to take the frustrated talk, countlessly tossed across the farmhouse table, as the gospel truth. I wanted to act on it, to raise hell for Wally in his hell.
* * *
Ya gunna do it then?
Yep.
What'll ya throw?
Yonnies, stupid.
Where from?
From the track, dumbie. Them red-dirt stones. But you don't haff ta!
I rained stones down on Wally's corrugated iron roof, thirty yards off. No reply. The dead pan encouraged me. I lobbed more yonnies onto that tin lid, drumming his den of stranger-wickedness. Thhwack. It clanged with my offence at his filth and shame. Each hit was a real accomplishment. It felt good to throw that righteous stone!
Get off ! A dirty voice bent out of next door's shed .
Let's go!
My young brothers Cyrian and Kelt ran off to hide behind the brick tank.
Quick! He's comin out! Cyrian hissed.
Wally's pall eyed a hole in the hessian. He'd seen me curl to the ground and slink off like an ear-shrugged rabbit. I went after Cyrian and Kelt who had run around our shed, not wanting to be implicated with their older brother, to assume the innocence of our playing places in the shrubbery.
I hung back watching Wally from the shade. He shuffled back into his hole of the shed. He came out in his scuffed boots, moving with unexpected purpose toward our fence. He chose the place where he often leaned on the taught wires to talk to Dad about his woes with The Italian. And then he threw a loose leg over.
Heck, he was comin' right into our place. I hid back into the deep foliage. I expected he was gunna come for me. I was sure he'd do me something awful. But he didn't even look about for where I might be. He was going a beeline, like anybody, to our backdoor.
I was in for it from all quarters now. Mum'd blow her stack. She'd belt me with the duster sure thing.
Mrs Schap, one of your boys has been stoning on my roof.
Stones? Which one?
It'd be that Vidy I'd reckon.
I overheard Wally, hardly able to believe he knew my name. I thought he had nothing going up top except for himself. I sure didn't know that he knew me.
All right Wally. I'll deal with this.
Wally turned and went off home, as Mum went back inside to the baby's cry.
Not for long.
Vidy! Come here right now!
Caught out. I saw no use in lying. My own integrity was at stake. I came in to the veranda and to Mum's wrath in a straightforward but honest shame to face up to what I could see no way of getting out of.
Did you throw stones on Wally's roof?
Yes!
Why?
I squirmed. I hardly knew how to begin an answer.
Don't you know that he is a human being? With feelings like you or me?
How would you like it if you were inside and stones were thrown on your roof?
Do you like having stones thrown at you?
No.
Well, then, how do you feel about what you did?
I don't know?
You don't know? It's time you woke up to yourself boy!
Yes.
Are you sorry?
Yes.
Alright. I won't belt you. But you must go up to Wally's place and tell him you are sorry.
But?
But nothing.
But he is just a plonko! And that's The Italian's place!
It's about time you realized that such people are to be respected the same as you would like to be. He's still a man no matter how far he's fallen. A man made in the image of God. Do you believe that?
Yeah.
Then, boy, you have to say sorry to the man. The Italian's got nothing to do with it. Go up to Wally in his own place and apologize.
All right.
Somehow, not getting belted made it easier. I went off quick, as Wally himself had come. Yet the barbed wire fence was a barrier which made my guts tighten like wires. I'd never crossed that fence to actually go to see a plonko. I'd only ever crossed the fence before to play in Anderson's Pines on the other side of The Italian's. We used to walk bent over so Wally couldn't see us. Now it was a wall of fear shimmering like heavy air surrounding the fence which I had to thrust out through, as if electric currents were causing a magnetic repulsion in my own belly. Once through the wires I took the rat track to Wally's. But scared as a stranger.
Hullo, I called out. I felt sick. The spudbags repelled me. They were ingrained with hand grease till they shone.
Who is it ?
Vidy! From over the fence.
A scaly hand swept the door-drape aside.
What is it, boy?
Inside the drape there was one wooden chair. with a rubber cushion unstuffed from its vinyl, at a makeshift table made from flooring boards. Bags stretched on sapling poles made a saggy bunk gainst the wall. Wool army blankets and more spudbags made a quilt. Everything seemed putrid, stained with dirt, too basic for human need. An enamel dish sat at the table to suggest a rare recourse to washing.
I'm sorry for throwing stones on your roof, Mr Wally.
Yes. You're sorry. Well thank you, and please do not do it again.
No. I won't.
Then I guess I'll say I forgive you. I was a boy myself of a time.
Yes. Can I go now Mr Wally?
Wait. I have something for you.
What? I still feared this would be something dreadful.
Wally walked back into his place, leaving me in the doorway holding the drape. He shuffled stuff on the table, then looked up at the wall above the head of a brown lump on the bunk. A wall noggin held dirty paper and medicine bottles. Wally chose a small bag that had once been white, came back and handed it to me.
These are for you.
I recoiled as far as I could from Wally's breath. Then I opened the clasped top of the bag and saw two lollies in wrappers inside.
Oh Yeah! We only had lollies for Christmas or birthdays. But the dust! I was speechless with wanting and yet disgust.
I turned and ran yelling: Lollies! Thanks.
Then to the fence and through it, as if I was pursued by my own dirt and contamination.
Cyrian and Kelt came out from where they'd been hiding, waiting to see what happened to me.
Look. All he did was give me lollies. See!
When I got out of Wally's sight, I screwed the paper bag and ditched it. I tried to wash the stain of fingers off the lolly wrappers. The good rain water from the brick tank peeled the grotty cellophane off my precious sweets. I let the water run across the gems till they shone clear and pure.
I'm not going to give you one, I said to Cyrian and Kelt.
Who cares! They'll be yuck.
I tried the sweet tang of a lolly.
Nothin wrong with it. Tastes good. I said.
Yeah? Give us the other one then.
I gave them the lolly to fight over.
Then I laughed outright.
What's so funny? Cyrian asked.
I only got 'em after chuckin' them stones.
A Gnarled Log of Lost Countryside: SHORT STORIES
SHORT STORIES FROM THE COUNTRY OF EXILE
Pilgrimages out of our Homely Homelessness
"What is ... a writer going to take his country to be? The word is usually used by literary folk in this connection would be "world," but the word "country" will do; in fact, being homely, it will do better, for it suggests more. It suggests everything from the actual countryside that the novelist describes, on to and through those peculiar characteristics of his region and his nation, and on, through, and under all of these to his true country, which the writer with Christian convictions will consider to be what is eternal and absolute.
... it is the particular burden of the fiction writer that he has to make one country do for all and that he has to evoke that one country through the concrete particulars of that life that, he can make believable.
...The Christian writer will feel that in the greatest depth of vision, moral judgement will be implicit.
... of his stories called Rotting Hill Wyndam Lewis has written , " If I write about a hill that is rotting, it is because I despise rot." ...some write about rot because they see it and recognize it for what it is."
" When we talk about a writers country we are liable to forget that no matter what particular country it is, it is inside as well as outside him ...To know oneself is to know one's region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from the world. "
Flannery O'Connor - in 'The Fiction Writer & His Country'
{Published in 'Mystery and Manners ' Farrar, Stauss and Giroux, New York, 1957-1970
"Landscape is like revelation; it is both singular crystal and the remotest things." Geoffrey Hill
Pilgrimages out of our Homely Homelessness
"What is ... a writer going to take his country to be? The word is usually used by literary folk in this connection would be "world," but the word "country" will do; in fact, being homely, it will do better, for it suggests more. It suggests everything from the actual countryside that the novelist describes, on to and through those peculiar characteristics of his region and his nation, and on, through, and under all of these to his true country, which the writer with Christian convictions will consider to be what is eternal and absolute.
... it is the particular burden of the fiction writer that he has to make one country do for all and that he has to evoke that one country through the concrete particulars of that life that, he can make believable.
...The Christian writer will feel that in the greatest depth of vision, moral judgement will be implicit.
... of his stories called Rotting Hill Wyndam Lewis has written , " If I write about a hill that is rotting, it is because I despise rot." ...some write about rot because they see it and recognize it for what it is."
" When we talk about a writers country we are liable to forget that no matter what particular country it is, it is inside as well as outside him ...To know oneself is to know one's region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from the world. "
Flannery O'Connor - in 'The Fiction Writer & His Country'
{Published in 'Mystery and Manners ' Farrar, Stauss and Giroux, New York, 1957-1970
"Landscape is like revelation; it is both singular crystal and the remotest things." Geoffrey Hill
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About Me
- Wayne D Knoll
- I am a 4th-to-6th generation Australian of Silesian (Prusso-Polish), Welsh, Schwabian-Württemberg German, yeoman English, Scots, & Cornish stock; all free settlers who emigrated between 1848-1893 as colonial pioneers. I am the 2nd of 7 brothers and a sister raised on the income off 23 acres. I therefore belong to an Australian Peasantry which historians claim doesn't exist. I began to have outbreaks of poetry in 1975 when training for a Diploma of Mission Theology in Melbourne. I've since done a BA in Literature and Professional Writing and Post-graduate Honours in Australian History. My poem chapbook 'Compost of Dreams' was published in 1994. I have built a house of trees and mud-bricks, worked forests, lived as a new-pioneer, fathered-n-raised two sons and a daughter, and am now a proud grandfather. I have worked as truck fresh-food farmer, a freelance foliage-provider, been a member of a travelling Christian Arts troupe, worked as duty officer and conflict resolutionist with homeless alcoholic men, been editor/publisher of a Journal of Literature for Christian Pilgrimage, a frontier researcher, done poetry in performance seminars in schools and public events.