Cave Visit (Northam to Yanchep)
In the Shade of the Shady Tree (York)
The Life History of a Wheatbelt Music Teacher (Quairading)
The Legend of the Boat (Perth/Canning River)
preface
Last night a storm hit this drought-ravaged place without warning. It was a brutal assault. We kept our roof, but neighbors lost theirs. There are a number of large York gums down—snapped off low on their trunks. Inside the trunks, the soil welded by excreta and saliva of termites crumbles out. So many of the trees here are hollowed by termites. Echidnas scrape at the base of the trees for termites—we often see their telltale diggings, but rarely the nocturnal echidnas themselves.
We received thirty-two millimeters of rain last night, the most in a single downfall for five years. It’s a reprieve for a lot of the life on this block and the surrounding area—drought has killed many trees, and the effect on wildlife has become evident. It has been diminishing, not only from lack of water, but from increasing pressure of human occupation.
On lands that are traditionally Ballardong Nyungar, clearing and poisoning and other abuses of place have taken their toll, and continue to do so. Just over the hill begin the vast wheat and sheep farms of the Victoria Plains district, part of the Western Australian wheatbelt. Devastation caused by this monocultural farming is seen in ever-increasing land salinity, and in changing local weather patterns, due not only to larger global processes but also to localized land-clearing.
I first entered the wheatbelt when I was a few weeks old. My uncle and aunt’s farm, Wheatlands, was a beacon of my childhood. As I grew up, I spent many weekends and holidays at Wheatlands. The grain silos, heart of the many towns that dot the wheatbelt’s hundred and fifty thousand square kilometers, are fed by farms like Wheatlands, often handed down through generations. Nowadays, they are breaking up as eldest sons no longer inherit the lot. Divided up between the children, the farms are often sold on to large companies: corporate agriculture.
The history of the wheatbelt is multicultural, though the divisions of spoils are lopsided. Anglo-Celtic colonizers (“settler”-migrants) dispossessed the indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century and exacted their labor. Colonists later relied on convicts (petitioning for their presence in the colony!), then migrants who came with the 1890s gold rush, and still later the great migrations prompted by conflict in twentieth-century Europe: Italians, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Poles, and many others were paid a pittance to clear the bush for grain growing. Some of these people eventually established their own farms and their own dynasties. Others failed. For every success in the wheatbelt there is a failure. It is harsh in many ways.
My poetics and sensibilities formed not only in the paddocks and remnant bushland, but also on the vast salt scalds where very little grew or even lived. But there was life there if you looked; and I did look. Though they were the result of European overfarming, and truly a blight on the land, I discovered, in the gullies and scalds of “the salt,” mysteries, wonders and beauties that have fascinated me all my life. Complex formations of salt crystals, the “puff and bubble” of salt tissue over mud, the harsh reflector beds of white in summers that reach the high 40s centigrade. My entire poetic output has been grounded in the contradictions of the terror and beauty of salinity.
Yet it is not only poetry I have written through my life: there are also stories. The poetry has been about place in a very empirical way, concerned with damage and its implications. But in my stories I am more concerned with glimpses of the people who live in the wheatbelt. Whether I approve of their activities or not is irrelevant. What is at issue is how they interact with the place, and how they make that place what it is. I am interested in the weirdness that comes from the ordinary, the extraordinary from the matter-of-fact. The behavior of people seems more odd to me than, say, supernatural belief. I ask how secrecy is part of everyone’s lives, and how disturbance goes hand-in-hand with the predictable. A good deed can mask ill intent; a bad deed can result from well-meaning acts. There are rarely neat resolutions, and other than death, few absolute conclusions. Even death leaves loose threads, many loose threads.
Underlying all these glimpses is the knowledge and acknowledgment that I am writing a land stolen from indigenous people; that in truth it is still their land, if it’s anyone’s. I have never believed in property per se, nor in “ownership.” I see my role in this place as one of “carer,” one who has a responsibility to observe, discuss, and even protect.
But these stories aim to do something else: they are a jigsaw puzzle that offers the reader, I hope, a way of seeing how small fragments of the place work, or don’t work. Some have fable-like morals, others are fantastical, but many are just “insights” into an aspect of being here. I am interested in the glimpse into character, and how that character is affected by “place.” No one’s entire story can really be told. Yet many stories or glimpses added together, collated on a journey, might give us a broader picture of the so-called human condition.
In the vein of one of my favorite Australian story writers, Henry Lawson, I really see them as yarns: stories told for the moment, out of experience more than “art.” But they are informed by an artfulness, if not an art. One of my favorite volumes of American stories is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which most would know is artifice on the level of story but “truthful” in the insights it gives into living in a small town somewhere in Midwest America, if not in the eponymous town itself. I lived in Ohio with my family for a number of years. Our son was born there. I see it as a home. We went looking at the real Winesburg knowing it wasn’t the Winesburg constructed by Anderson. And that was okay—it interested us to see how the stories had affected the town, and of course, they had.
When we write place, we necessarily contribute to a view of what that place is—even such a vast place as the Western Australian wheatbelt with its many, many towns, varying in size from the seven thousand population of a regional center like Northam to the handful of residents in places like Jennacubbine. Our contribution to the view of the place is always disproportionate, even if only read by a single reader. Because the life of that place is only ever a glimpse, is selective, and often largely a construct. And that’s true of this book as well. The stories herein follow a roadmap from the northernmost point of the wheatbelt, up near Northampton, down to the Great Southern, where the wheatbelt becomes something else. Each town passed through is given a tale that might or might not capture something “real” about that town or its district.
What I hope the book captures is something about people, and the way people make lives of place and alter that place in doing so. What happens in one story in one town or district might just as easily happen three hundred kilometers away in another part of the wheatbelt. But the stories did come out of those places, so immediately a sense of belonging or maybe alienation locates