In the Shade of the Shady Tree: Stories of Wheatbelt Australia

Preface

ix • 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 largeYork 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 theVictoria 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 x p r e f a c e 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 xi p r e f a c e 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...