As well meaning as this might seem, it shows ‘contact’ as relatively benign. I would call it patronising, generalised, convenient. It suggests dispossession was inevitable, desirable. The Western Australian wheatbelt region has long been known for its conservatism, which has expressed itself in strong support for Australia’s military ventures, as any town war memorial or commemorative park will show with its roll of war dead, and in support for conservative political parties. The wheatbelt is a bastion of Anglo-Celt resistance to ‘foreigners’, it is strongly anti-refugees, anti-Asian. Racism is endemic. Homophobia is rife. The wheatbelt is avowedly Christian. Italian and Eastern European communities find their bond with other European ethnicities through Christ, even indirectly, but despite, say, an Islamic presence in Katanning, and Buddhist retreats, other religions and cultures are not much represented in the wheatbelt. Hence, they have little input into the creation of new mythologies. They are ‘different’, and the wheatbelt handles difference depending on how much that difference is perceived as a threat.

But the wheatbelt is also the place of shearers, traditionally of the left, and of social disruption through heavy drinking, and increasing drug abuse problems. Isolation of youth, who have little to occupy them, is a growing problem, and conservatism more and more becomes the male farmer with his educated wife. The wheatbelt is a specific area, but its extremes are far apart. Be it the boundaries of the goldfields, the borders of the southern forests, or the sandplain of the coast, the wheatbelt is a broad zone. Northam is considered the gateway to the wheatbelt, and the four towns of the Avon Valley, Toodyay, Northam, York and Beverley, are pivotal to its history. But so many histories exist. An entity such as the rabbit-proof fence becomes symbolic of occupation and resistance in more ways than one, and contradictory mythologies and stories arise out of the same event.

For me, the songs of the custodial owners of the land are as strong as ever, and it is with respect I ask permission of these people to tell stories that have come to me in a variety of ways.

When I was a child being driven through York, I was told that ‘out that way’ existed a fringe-dwellers’ camp. I didn’t know what this meant, other than that Aborigines lived there. I am not sure of the camp’s history, or when it was closed down or abandoned, but I knew it was there. In York, Nyungar families are well respected by the community-at-large, and there is at least on the surface a peaceful coexistence. How deep the scars of dispossession and a history of disrespect and violence go, it is for these Nyungar families to say. But there was such a history, and there are still plenty of local racists to keep the memories of it alive. In all of my wheat-belt poetry, even if it’s not declared, this is the subtext – an awareness of the injustices experienced by indigenous peoples, for whom I have total respect. My uncle used to hire Nyungar stookers when I was a child, and I remember seeing them out in the paddocks, but I never spoke with them. I was aware, however, that their myths were not the myths of The Farm, and that somewhere between these different mythologies was silence. I became interested in how this might be articulated, how some form of reconciliation might take place. And this is still my interest.

In Jack Davis’s play No Sugar, there’s a scene in the Northam police station in 1929, where Gran has just said: ‘An’ your supposed to be native ‘tector.’ She and Milly take their rations and leave the station and the Sergeant says: ‘Looks like I’m the one needs protectin’.’The Constable replies: ‘Should put a pinch of strychnine in the flour’, and the Sergeant comes back: ‘Too late to adopt the Tasmanian solution.’ Mr Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines, is there as well. The ‘solution’ is to deport the Aborigines to Moore River Settlement. The process of removal from the wheatbelt is the key to how replacement myths gain credence – and how a pastoral poetry of the wheatbelt has become a subtext to Australian identity. This is the core focus of this essay.

We cannot forget, before we begin, that the beginning is one of covering up, of displacement. A poem of Jack Davis’s is relevant here:

Fear has been created for the displaced, and also for the possessors. A paranoia of usurpation that ranges from guilt to aggressive denial, instigates a substitute language of place. New names, new descriptions, other ways of seeing.

So much poetry of the country comes out of weekend excursions, by those who leave the cities to go into the country and record their experience in picaresque-like poems. The road, the drive, bind the journey. There is not a great deal of wheatbelt poetry, and a lot of what there is befits the term excursion poetry: brief encounters with the rural world and the devastation it has wrought on natural environments, usually interwoven with personal experience and anecdotes, memories of earlier journeys in childhood, or comparisons with city life. I am not criticising these poems, but rather registering them as a subgenre of wheatbelt poetry. In fact, the tentative ‘touching’ of place, and the overwhelming points of reference coming out of zones so apparently very different, create insights that those familiar with the place, or locked into the place, don’t always get, or can’t get.

The poet Tracy Ryan is a case in point. She lives at least part of the year in the wheatbelt and has a history of family connection with it, but has always seen it as alien and not her ‘place’. She is very conscious of the issues of dispossession, though does not directly speak of them. The discomfort in her rural explorations comes out of a sense of tension of ‘belonging’. She clearly feels she doesn’t, at least, belong. Ryan has written a series of non-wheatbelt ‘Excursions’ (though these are more about a personal relationship than the specificities of place, despite place being the point around which the poems turn), but also poems about her sister’s inlaws’ farm at Minnivale, experiences on ‘Wheatlands’, my uncle’s old farm, and other wheatbelt points of reference such as the ubiquitous (if vanishing) mallee root, a favourite for open fires. These are poems of someone coming into a world that has been mass-cleared, by ball and chain, by burning, by bulldozers:

The Farm is the myth here, but a myth with teeth. An ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary is established, and it’s this myth that extends to so much of the discussion that takes place between rural and urban. In Western Australia this divide is particularly pronounced because of the paucity of cities.

There is a fundamental question: what kind of place is it? The land has been profoundly altered, and damaged, and the need for profit takes precedence over any issues of bonding or respect. And thus the comparison to kan-garoo/fire-stick farming of Aborigines becomes more polarised. The claim of indigenous farming creates a connection, a kind of legitimacy for ‘settler’ farming methods, but also clarifies the effectiveness of an earlier form of farming, and the failings of the form that replaced it. Science becomes the catchword – genetic modification, hybridising, cloning, spraying, fertiliser – for redressing the failings of unsuitable farming methods.

The result is usually more confusion and damage, increasing the divide. The Farm itself is as much a conceptual entity as a real place. The Farm is where a certain set of social and cultural (even, from an urban perspective, anti-cultural) values locate themselves. For the city boy, The Farm might be about large animal testicles and running amok; for the farm kid the city lacks any connection with the ‘real’ world. The Farm is neither a state nor a religious creation, neither Marxist nor capitalist. It sets itself at variance with all but the like-minded. This is what Ryan’s poem captures, the outside view of The Farm, with an awareness of the ironies of this view.

Ryan’s maternal grandparents were part of the ‘pioneering’ wheatbelt tradition, and in clearing land at Carnamah they discovered the attendant difficulties and horrors of farming in a dry place. European farming methods were inappropriate and a general lack of understanding of place meant inevitable decline. The prime myth of ‘hardship’ of settler/ invader cultures in the wheatbelt was inevitably news: ‘Poor old Teddie has had some very bad luck as I told you, but I couldn’t tell you all their losses in a letter. As a matter of fact everything has been against him & another thing is that he has no money to buy the things that he wants very badly. The wheels of his spring cart went wrong & have had to go to Three Springs to be put right, so at present he has no conveyance of his own to use, but has to borrow Mr Forrester’s Sulky every time we go out, otherwise we should go much more often. It went before I came & is not back yet. It is just awful the time one has to wait here to get anything done. They are really hard up, but are very happy ... But I tell you it is hard to make both ends meet. If only Teddie had a hundred pounds, it would enable him to get a couple of clearers, so as to get a few more hundred acres in crop, then he would have nothing to worry about, as that would enable him to get more machines & horses.’4

The belief that more land clearing must result in more profit has become ridiculous in this salinity-conscious age. Land, however, was profit, and profit was identity. Profit brought cultural capital, and a rich cocky could make the trip to Perth with his family if desired: ‘It is funny but they are having a Shakespearian season in Perth now. Of course it couldn’t be when I was there. Also there are several recitals, both Vocal & Instrumental coming on, which I should like to have gone to, & there was nothing at all while I was there except what I told you before. Violet & I do long for a piano, but we shall have to wait a bit longer.’5

The writer comments constantly on how Teddie borrows books from the Boans lending library, that he’s interested in science and literature. She finds this remarkable. The notion that the wheatbelt is an ‘uncultured’ place challenges our definition of ‘cultured’. The farmhouse as preserver of distant culture is one issue, but what is more relevant is the relationship of The Farm to its nearest town. The Farm and its town live in symbiosis, feeding one another. Then the singing group, or CWA cake-making competition, or the local amateur theatrical club with members doing a hundred-kilometre round trip to act in a Noel Coward play, sees the creation of a different kind of ‘culturality’. Urban culture is reread and reinvented, and it is this that draws the poet as much as purple sunsets over Mount Bakewell.

Carnamah, 1921: ‘We had a terrific hailstorm on Wednesday. It only lasted a very short time but it was extraordinary. We could see it coming along in the distance but didn’t know what it was, the noise was like a rushing & roaring sound, then when it got here, great stones bounced down from the size of a marble to an egg, it passed right over & we could see it travelling on. The sky was such a funny colour. It just covered a certain area. Mr Bowman’s farm next to ours, was scarcely touched & Mr Rookes, not far away, not at all. Mr Forrester had several chickens killed, but ours at first began rushing after the stones, as before it got right over, it was just as if someone was throwing eggs or pieces of bread, but they soon took shelter. But we think that one or two of them had some knocks as they haven’t been very lively today. One of them specially is rather queer. Thank goodness it hasn’t hurt Teddie’s crop anything to speak of. At least he doesn’t think so.’6

When writing my poetry volume The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony, I took as my model for the book Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. The movements of the piece through the joy of entering the rural place, the festivities, the impending and overwhelming storm, and the renewal after the storm, are taken through five ironic inversions in my approach. The imposition of European farming methods has meant a scarring rather than a renewing of the land, so nothing can be as cyclical and self-encompassing as Beethoven’s romantic masterpiece. Still, there are positives in among the gloom, and The Silo does have its ‘human’ moments, as well as its celebrations of nature in among the pessimisms. The fourth section of The Silo is called ‘The Fire in the Tail of the Cyclone’, and is emblematic and synonymous of and with Beethoven’s storm movement:

It’s a dangerous game of hubris that has lightning strike you. Aged about nine, I remember one summer day profoundly. I’d been at the dump with my cousins, smashing bottles. We’d emptied drums of rubbish. Driving home past the salt on the gravel road, wandoos arching overhead, a drum fell off the back of the ute. I was encouraged to jump out, collect it from the roadside, and hoist it back onto the tray. The lightning knocked me off my feet. Collected by my oldest cousin, I remember getting home and hearing my uncle had been called out to fight a fire. Smoke was billowing ‘on the world’s curve’. My auntie says to this day that my eyes ‘were out on stalks’.

In her book Between Wodjil and Tor, Barbara York Main closely examines remnant wheatbelt bush. In the chapter ‘Bushland climax’ we learn that the storm and its attendant fire (through lightning) are part of the cycle of the place – fire germinates seeds, it renews. So there is a classical Beethovenian sense to the place, but not to the place as cleared and rearranged by European farmers: ‘From a lowering thunder-cloud a streak of lightning zigzagged to earth, striking a tinder-dry expanse of dense sand-plain scrub bordering a gravel ridge. The thicket exploded and in the gusts of wind rushing into the vortex of the storm, the fire was hurried through the scrub, while the oily and waxy volatiles, released by the heat, flared high above the scrub itself ... The climax to many bushland associations is terminated by fire. It is a kind of natural ritual.’8

Ritual is a process of control and organisation. When thinking of non-indigenous myths of the wheatbelt area of western Australia, one always thinks of Dorothy Hewett. Hewett explores and dissects ritual behaviour. She is interested in the outlandish. Her ‘Legend of The Green Country’ is an iconic poem. The myth of family that by extension mythologises the poet, persona, and environment of production of the poem, is characterised in the figure of her grandfather in this fragment:

My grandfather rode out, sawing at a hard-mouthed ginger horse,
    And a hard heart in him, a dray full of rum and beer, bully beef and treacle,
    Flour and tea, workboots and wide-awakes with the corks bobbing for flies;
    Counting the campfires in the dusk, counting the men, counting the money,
    Counting the sheep from the goats, and the rack-rented railway houses.
    No wonder I cannot count for the sound of the money-changers,
    The sweat and the clink, the land falling into the cash register,
    Raped and eroded, thin and black as a Myall girl on a railway siding.

She is mythologising and deconstructing myth. The difficulties seen in the Carnamah letters are clear, and the desire for profit, but here loss is paramount over profit, and the land ‘raped and eroded’; furthermore, this is associated with an Aboriginal girl, an aside, isolated on ‘a railway siding’. This is profit made from taking away: taking away land, taking away pride and intactness of body. It’s about exploitation working both ways – loss and profit, profit and loss. The association of Aborigines with land has both positive and negative connotations. Hewett is ironising its deployment as a dehumanising tactic – the same tactic that allows the farmer to furrow and plunder the land is that, in her mind, that allows him to, by implication, rape the Aboriginal girl. The connection is his excuse. By creating the association, Hewett is showing how myth is manipulated for power.

The wheatbelt is part of Phillips’s heritage. He has written extensively of the Avon catchment region. The seasons have been an important part of his work, as has the practice of rural life. But this has been interwoven with a concern for diminishing species, for locating those places where they might persist. He shares this with naturalist Barbara York Main in her documenting of the small wheatbelt reserve, the remnant bush on private property. Even the long paddock, the roadside, becomes a refuge for animals and plants increasingly under siege. Phillips’s ‘Spring Burning’ is a poem of loss linked with a strong (sexual) desire for spring renewal:

Wheatbins are icons of the wheatbelt – symbols of purpose and prosperity. Travelling the wheatbelt with Phillips, I prided myself on being able to name the ‘types’ of bins as we passed through towns. I worked the bins for a couple of seasons. Familiarity with the wheatbelt, university and a need for money seemed the right combination. My experiences were overwhelmingly negative. Brutalisation, harassment, violent racism, sexual exploitation, animal cruelty. The quarters were a rite of passage and a scene of torture. On balance, each year, half the seasonal staff would be local or have had country experience before, the other from the city with no experience. The new boys (and the odd girl, though not on the bin I worked), had to be blooded. What they took back to the city with them were either tales of horror, or stories of complicity if they joined the madding crowd and helped them to find substitute and replacement victims. People of other nationalities and Aborigines were the usual substitutes.

The shearing shed is another transitional zone, where stories are tested, rumours started, and the language of the story refined. What is most relevant, however, is the shearing shed as diplomatic outpost. The conflict between Kiwi and Aussie shearers has not lessened over the years, with Australian shearers perceiving New Zealand shearers as ‘hungry’, and as taking their jobs. But the shed is also one of the few places where Maori and, say, Nyungar or Yamatji cultures interact outside academic or government initiatives, and where a sense of solidarity is created. There are numerous bondings as well as conflicts that take place in the shed. I have seen die-hard white racists praising an Aboriginal guy because he’s a good shearer and has ‘got his shit together’ – this always being a dubious accolade, and subtextually bigoted.

   They weren’t eels but snakes
that had sensed their way
down through the stone walls
and timber railway sleepers, slipping
into the cool earth waters. Farmers
would fill fresh water with lead –
shooting snakes as the sun, fixed
like a blowtorch directly overhead,
marked their twisting navigations. Once
slain, the leathery corpses would be lifted
from the heavy liquid with long lengths
of fencing wire hooked at the end.
As children, my cousins told me snakes
were eels arrived via the aqueducts
of underground streams – that all bodies
of water are linked, that even we
are not what we seem and begin
our lives close at hand
only to retreat and be dragged
squirming into the light.
                        (‘Eels’)12

Chantelle Corbett, writing of Pinjarra and the Wagyl, says similar things: ‘As he struggled to survive the flood, changes were made to his body. His form changed from that of a lizard to a long green snake. Because he has no legs and would have found it hard to move around on the land, he decided to make his home in the water. After the rain ended, the furrows made by the lizard’s tail became a constant flow of water and turned into a river. The long green snake travelled up and down the river, which now was his home, and looked after everything around him, especially the Aborigines who treated the river as sacred and a source of food for their people. After many years, the long green snake and the Aborigines began to respect and understand each other. Today, the green snake is called the Wagyl by the Aborigines, and treated by them as the protector of fresh water and many different species of fish they depend on for food.’13

A s a small child I recall going with my uncle to the standpipe to fill tanks of water when the summer had taken its toll on the house supply – there was no mains water out in the farm then. Showers were to be short, and visitors who lingered in them got told off sharply. Fresh water was sacred, and that’s the way they put it. Salinity goes hand in hand with the issue of fresh water, or the lack of fresh water.

Salt formations are beautiful. Ironically, salt protects place in some ways, with less pesticide and herbicide spraying over salty lands. Otherwise, spray culture is endemic, an accepted part of rural life. Planes spray, utilities spray, trucks spray, tractors dragging huge booms spray. The perception is that crops won’t survive without spray. The wheatbelt is a world of spray. Companies make huge profits through convincing farmers that they are obliged to protect their monocultures with chemicals. Farmers who hate spray feel they’ve no choice. Diversity through mixed planting and crop rotation are just the beginning on the track to healthy farming. This is not part of the dialogue, though.

A s a kid at school in Geraldton I heard of fathers killed by grain augers, of tractors overturning and pinning their drivers to the ground. Machinery was given a life of its own. Somehow it didn’t seem like a set of literary conventions for a tractor to be called wild, an auger to be called hungry. In this poem the crossovers and conflicts between literary conventions and a stark reality are explored:

If I write about the necessity of applying paranoid readings to the Australian rural and pastoral poem, it’s out of necessity, for I am paranoid. I am also angry at the injustices surrounding the wheatbelt. At the abuse of land, of people. The idea that we might impose European seasons on the wheatbelt (it has its own seasons), that we should read its codes via European coordinates, is illogical. For me, one of the tragedies of this region is its poisoning. Herbicide, pesticide, and a range of animal treatments are poured into the soil daily. This is the true poisoned pastoral, and it is no myth. Among the Carnamah letters there are some telling lines; despite the cautionary tale we might derive from this, despite the fable, the Biblical parable, we didn’t look for the subtext in time: ‘We went to take Teddie some tea the other day, where he is clearing. You should see him swing the axe, & the wood, some of it is dreadfully hard, it takes some getting down. If only we could send you a little. We have such glorious fires & what you take doesn’t make the slightest difference.’15 ■