LITMIR.BIZ

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the effort to be friendly. He was by nature a very courteous man, but he often denigrated the cocky’s sons when talking privately with my mother.

      ‘All born with silver spoons in the mouth’, he was fond of saying. ‘Their fathers set the bastards up in the first place but most of them will balls the farms up in the end, or piss ‘em up against the wall.’ He was right to some extent. Fathers and grandfathers had set up most of the holdings originally to raise cattle and sheep. Now the new generations were clearing the scrub at an astonishing rate to grow grain, mostly wheat. They saw this as easier, cleaner and more profitable than raising livestock.

      There were a few returned men about apart from Twidale. The locals discussed these men in hushed, reverent and sympathetic tones, except for my father who ignored them. The war touched most families it seemed, in some direct way. Family members lost or captured, or worse still missing in action. A returned man about the place gave an air of importance to a family, someone to admire, thus setting the family apart from those other earthy souls who had spent the war on the land in peaceful hardship.

      There appeared to be a constant commitment or an unpaid debt to these men in the eyes of the community, but I suppose some of those who did not fight in the war felt they had made a different but equally important contribution. Yet somehow the returned men subordinated them, and some people, like my father who had not served, were bitter about this. I never really got close enough to him to explore the depths and reasons for his feelings on the matter. We all knew, however, that the war was a subject to leave alone when Dad was around.

      Personally I was fascinated by stories about the war and I looked at the returned men in open-mouthed awe. Often as we did the vegie run, Mum would nudge my side and whisper as she pointed out some surviving hero. ‘That’s mister so and so, he’s a returned man.’ I would stare with bright lizard eyes, my active imagination conjuring up all kinds of brave acts. We kids talked about the war whenever we could, caught up as we were in the hype of post-war nostalgia. We listened to radio shows on the subject when we visited friends or relatives who owned a wireless, but not when Dad was around.

      Given Dad’s disdain for the returned men and the spoiled cocky’s sons, he was something of an island in the area. Luckily his diverse range of skills made him a bit of a celebrity in his own right, which kept us on reasonable terms with the neighbours most of the time. I often thought that people looked on my family as a sort of local curiosity or a charity case deserving of all kinds of cast-offs or tins of beef- dripping and surplus milk and eggs.

      I was too young to feel wounded pride or resentment at these gifts, but I could see my father’s face set whenever a benefactor came by, and he would always press a bundle of fresh produce their way to appease his ego. But whether he liked it or not, the few creature comforts we had in the house came from benevolent neighbours and Mum welcomed them without independent pride because she was more practical than Dad.

      As more land fell to the bulldozers, the sheep and cattle began to disappear and wide fields of grain now waved where thick brigalow scrub had once stood. A conservationist before his time, Dad was always in two minds about the land clearing. He argued that the farmers should leave strips of connecting scrub to guard against soil erosion and to provide a refuge for the native animals.

      Most of the farmers scoffed at this idea. ‘Why let the animals and birds breed so they can destroy the crops?’ They argued, reasonably from their point of view. Dad had many heated arguments with them about this, but in the end he never won. It was not his land and the government of the day had no stringent rules on the matter.

      The bulldozers crawled through the scrub flattening the tall trees in their path and leaving a swathe of carnage that sometimes filled me with a kind of animal panic. But perhaps I was so close to the soil that I had become feral and joined to the earth like a native animal. Contractors carried out most of the clearing; they simply pushed down the trees and left the rest of the work to someone else. Most contractors used huge Caterpillar D8 bulldozers, but some farmers took on a lot of their own clearing with smaller units.

      The Simmons’ brothers had three relatively small Fowler tractors that were dwarfed by the big Caterpillars, but they linked two of these units together with a long land clearing cable about two inches thick and assaulted the bush. The Fowlers crawled noisily through the scrub in parallel lines about thirty yards apart. One unit advanced about fifty yards ahead of the other and provided most of the pulling power. The rear unit thus acted as an ‘anchor’ that provided leverage and greatly multiplied the combined power of the units.

      The long cable tore down all of the scrub in its path and we marked the progress of the operation by the wavering green treetops, the tractors hidden in the depth of the disappearing bush. When the cable came up against a large and stubborn tree, men wearing thick gloves lifted it as high as they could reach up the trunk of the tree to give it greater leverage. Smoke rose from the cable that grew hot from the friction with the tree as it worked back and forth across the trunk cutting deeply into the bark and wood.

      The angry green Fowlers thumped away, scratching in the dirt like hens and billowing thick clouds of black smoke as they struggled against the cable. The third unit followed the cable and burrowed eagerly around the base of the larger and more robust trees, breaking up the roots until the tree finally succumbed and crashed to the ground. A shower of leaves, branches and the occasional displaced animal accompanied the crashing of the trees as they fell before the land clearing operations. We adopted many possums and lizards made homeless by the dozers. We could hear the Fowlers working from dawn until dark, the sound of their engines carried for miles in the otherwise quiet bush. We called them ‘puffing billies’ because of the ‘pom, pom, pom’ sound they made. These simple but effective machines had very few moving parts and could run on practically any kind of fuel.

      As the scrub fell we followed the dozers and worked to clear the fallen trees from the land. This meant piling broken branches against the fallen logs and burning them. As we progressively burnt the larger logs we gathered the smaller branches and piled these around any stumps that remained. At last, after weeks of backbreaking work, the land would be ready for the first ploughing. The smell of burning logs permeated the area and the thick smoke hung in the air along the creek, lingering among the trees like dirty cobwebs. When the weather was cold and the air was heavy with moisture the smoke curled low to the ground and morning and afternoon skies burned with a splash of deep red along the horizon.

      We learned to accept the discomfort caused by the heat and smoke, consoled I suppose by the money we were making from the clearing work. ‘Stick picking’ as we called this task was hard work and the rewards were not high. We were paid a pound per acre for the work, but an acre is a lot of land when one is clearing thick scrub in this manner. But land clearing meant plenty of work that Dad could do on a contract basis and therefore be his own boss. The grain crops that came later meant bag sewing around Christmas time, so he challenged his conservationist opinions every day for years as the scrub fell, torn between his ethics and his constant need for money to nurture his brood.

      The clearing and the later crops meant that the growing tribe of kids could be put to work as well to earn their keep, and work we did. In the cold or the heat, almost as soon as we could walk we were performing some function. Filling bags or picking up sticks with the clearing gangs. In addition, we helped to keep some production going on the farm. Thus hard work and discomfort became our lot in life for years, our childhoods somehow stolen by adult responsibilities.

      One day at dusk a ‘townie’ looking man in a shiny new car came to the farm and our sheltered minds stirred with interest and fear, because there was something sinister about this stranger in our world. He spent a lot of time in the house talking to Mum and Dad, their voices were often raised and we could hear Dad’s voice above the rest. We kids were banished to the yard and yelled at if we stuck our eager noses around the door in an effort to find out what was going on. At last a grave faced Mum and Dad escorted the townie to his car.

      As the man passed by where we sat in the shadow of the house, he looked intently at the sorry collection of grubby urchins peering at him from the gloom. We stared back, frozen like rabbits

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