The Lane

LANTANA LANE leaves the highway so unobtrusively that, although it is the only side road between Tooloola and Dillillibill, strangers sometimes miss it. There are many car tracks leading off to half-hidden farm gates, and the Lane, at its junction with the bitumen, looks much the same as these. There is no signpost; if there were, it would bear the name Black Creek Road, for only by the inhabitants of the district is this mile-long strip of red earth called, in half derisive affection, Lantana Lane.

It follows a winding, hilly course along the crest of a ridge from which (where the lantana permits) one may look down across sloping farmlands to Black Creek on the one hand, and Late Tucker Creek on the other; both are tributaries of the Annabella River, whose estuary is visible from a point where the Lane, coming to an abrupt end at the top of a steeply plunging hillside, overlooks a stupendous view. Miles of farmlands lie below, lightly linked by ribbons of red road to the clustered roofs of little towns, and beyond them blue ocean and white beaches proclaim a stretch of the long, Queensland coastline, fading north and south into a haze of distance. Until this point is reached, however, one sees very little except the high walls of lantana, between which there is just room for two cars to pass, unless their owners are faddy about paintwork; but this we dwellers in the Lane have long since ceased to be. We are more concerned for our springs, axles and universal joints.

And with reason. The surface of the Lane is composed, for the most part, of football-sized boulders thinly overlaid with the native earth—or, at the bottoms of the hills, where this has washed down upon them, deeply buried. In such places vehicles proceed with comparative smoothness except in rainy weather when, as likely as not, they are unable to proceed at all; for our soil combines with water to produce a mud of such slipperiness that even our dogs cannot walk on it without skidding. Then there is The Bump between Kennedys’ and Dawsons’; among so many bumps, it claims the distinction of capital letters, for it is bedrock, a section of the earth’s crust here nakedly exposed, and pity help you if you hit it unwarily. There is The Dip, too, just opposite the Griffiths’, where it is nearly always greasy because of an underground seepage. And of course there is The Tree blocking half the road at the foot of Hawkins’ hill; but we shall have more to say about this later.

And yet, despite all these hazards, we are fond of the Lane. A dead-end road must obviously develop a character quite different from that of a thoroughfare. Heaven only knows who the travellers along the Tooloola-Dillillibill road may be; the flash of sun on their paint and chromium is all we ever see of them. But if a car turns off into the Lane, it is making for one of the farms behind the lantana; it is one of us; or one of our friends; or Wally Dunk, delivering the groceries; or Doug Egan on his big truck, collecting our fruit for market; or Sam Ellis approaching, honk, honk, honk, to leap from his van at our gates, thrust the bread into the boxes nailed to their posts, and be off again, honk, honk, honking the news of his arrival all the way down to Ken Mulliner’s. We do not need to look up from our chores, for we know them all by the sound. Thus there is a cosy, family atmosphere in the Lane, and those who live in it will stoutly assure you that it is by far the best part of Dillillibill.

Jack Hawkins’ grandfather once owned all the southern side of the ridge, and most of the northern slope as well. There was no Lane in those days, no Dillillibill, and only a bridle track to the railway town of Rothwell. But since then the land has been subdivided and re-subdivided until there are now ten farms fronting the Lane. The largest of them is only thirty-five acres, the smallest is eight, and the rest are all between twelve and twenty. Those rural Moguls who measure their properties in square miles would doubtless be amused by our presumption in claiming to be on the land at all; and indeed, we have only a toe-hold.

But we hold on tight. In the cause of survival many forms of life develop many strange faculties and physical characteristics—and small farmers have developed powerfully prehensile toes. This has been made necessary by the Curse which has relentlessly pursued them down the generations for six thousand years.

The first of their kind, as we may recall, took over a going concern, and his status was that of a caretaker rather than a proprietor. His instructions were to dress and keep the garden—nothing whatever being said about re-planting, grafting, cross-pollination, original research of any kind, or even developmental work. But the garden (containing, as it did, samples of every form of vegetation), was more than one pair of hands could dress and keep, so Eve was rung in to help—as she still is, on all one-man holdings.

Now when men pry into mysteries they are called scientists, but when women do the same thing they are called inquisitive, and if we are to reprobate the inquisitiveness which began the search for knowledge, we cannot but view with some reserve the scientific genius which has so stubbornly pursued it, even into the dreadful fastnesses of the Atom. Eve’s husband was clearly a bloke with a sluggish intellect and no ambition; we have her, and her alone, to thank for the fact that we now know enough to blow ourselves into small pieces. But in common justice we must bear in mind the disadvantage under which she laboured. She was not really at all inquisitive about atoms; her curiosity was directed towards quite different matters. And being entirely innocent of knowledge, she could not possibly be expected to know that all knowledge interlocks, and that fiddling with one bit disturbs the whole cohesive structure. Of course the Creator of the garden knew this very well, having just spent a solid week designing and manufacturing parts for assembly into a working model; and to see one’s unique achievement endangered by a pair of ignorant meddlers (particularly when they have been created, merely as an afterthought, to preserve the status quo) is enough to make anyone curse.

So Eve and her offsider were for it. The great anathema was uttered. Cursed was the ground for their sake; in sorrow should they eat of its fruits; thorns and thistles should it bring forth, and with the sweat of their faces should it be for ever bedewed. So exactly has this maleficent prophecy been fulfilled throughout the centuries, that we cannot fail to marvel at the persistent way in which each generation produces a fresh crop of mugs not only willing but eager to dare its bane for the sake of possessing a bit of earth of their own.

To the stern and awful voice of the Lord has now been added the somewhat peevishly didactic voice of the Economist. Even the most junior apprentice to this craft knows, and will tell you with assurance, that the small farmer is doomed. He is done. He cannot compete. He cannot afford to be mechanised, and if he is not mechanised he is not in the race. Nor can he live-through-the-bad-years-on-the-fat-of-the-good-years, because the good years no longer produce much surplus fat, and in any case (whether owing to Acts of God or acts of nuclear research), seem to be getting worse, and farther between. He has become—to put it quite plainly and brutally—an Anachronism. Whenever he is warned by the economists of all this, he listens a trifle absent-mindedly, and does not answer back. There is one reply which he might make, but never does—and this is a pity, for it is based upon figures, which are things economists respect very highly. Those who have consulted certain tables compiled by insurance companies will have noted that farmers live longer than any other description of people except clergymen. We cannot account for the longevity of the clergy (indeed, it would appear to conflict with Professor Freud’s theory of wish-fulfilment, since they may be supposed to hunger for the hereafter), but it is clear that farmers live long precisely because they indulge in such anachronistic habits as rising early, working hard all day in the open air, retiring early, and sleeping like the dead. They are therefore in a position to look those who warn them in the eye, and retort: “Better a live farmer than a dead economist.”

The ten Anachronisms in the Lane are all alike in that they fulfil the prophecy of the Book of Genesis by sorrowing, sweating and contending with noxious weeds. And they are all alike in that an economist would need to do no more than cast an eye over their account books to say: “I told you so.” But these are the similarities of their condition as practising farmers; their dissimilarities of personality and background are so marked that the observer is driven to enquire what common factor it can be which has brought them all together in Lantana Lane. He will discover, if he examines the matter, that on only four out of the ten farms are to be found people who were born, so to speak, with brush-hooks in their hands—namely, the Hawkins, the Bells, Herbie Bassett and Joe Hardy. Now some are born farmers, some achieve farming, and some have farming thrust upon them. The Hawkins, the Bells and Joe Hardy were born farmers; Herbie Bassett had farming thrust upon him; but the rest have achieved farming, and they have found their way to it by paths so strangely various that we shall pause for a moment to glance at them.

Aub Dawson had a newsagency in a Melbourne suburb fifteen years ago, and his wife, Myra, was a cashier in a large store before she married him. He is a solid, active, rubbery little man who, in those days, used to gamble on the horses—which, as he often remarks now, are drearily predictable compared with the things farmers gamble on. Myra tells us they made quite a lot of money out of the newsagency, but quickly lost it again on the race-tracks, so at last Aub woke her up in the middle of one night, and said he had been thinking. When he says this she always knows that she is going to hear something very cynical beginning with “Listen, love,” and what she heard was this:

“Listen, love—remember that little farm we used to talk about when we were engaged? Right. Well, I thought I’d play safe, and make some money instead. So now I get up in the dark, and work like hell all day seeing that everyone gets their crosswords, and comics and cheesecake, and I make some money. Right. What happens to it? We both like a flutter, so we put it on the wrong horse, and lose it. Now suppose we put it into a little farm instead—what happens then? We still get up in the dark and work all day seeing that everyone gets their vitamins, and we’re still gambling, and we still lose our money. Right. Which way would we rather lose it? “

Put like that, it was really quite simple, and within six months Aub and Myra were settled in the Lane. Aub bets on this or that market, instead of on this or that horse, and usually bets wrong. He gets a hunch that Melbourne is rising, and sends his fruit there—and Melbourne falls; next week he backs Sydney, and Melbourne pays top price. But he says it’s all good, clean fun, and Myra swears that she would find the life quite perfect if only she weren’t so allergic to ticks.

Henry Griffith is an Englishman, and was once a lawyer. His wife, Sue, also English, was the daughter of an archæologist and a French pianist of no mean repute. She is one of those women who would look elegant in a cornsack girdled with a bit of string, but she is usually to be seen around the farm in shirt, shorts and gumboots. To these she frequently adds headgear in the shape of a tea-cosy—gorgeously striped in rich shades of green, yellow and vermilion—whose purpose is to remind her that she has left the iron switched on, or a cake in the oven; but its effect, in combination with the rest of her toilette, is to make her look rakish and enticing, like a musical comedy she-pirate. As for Henry, it is difficult to imagine what can have prompted him to choose the law as a profession, for he likes to get things done fast. He also has a lively sense of humour, and a massive bump of irreverence; had it not been for the fact that he is an extremely stubborn cuss, persistent in pursuing a course that he has set, these qualities would surely have bumped him out of the legal profession before he was fairly into it. As it was, he hung on grimly until his thirty-sixth birthday, when he took the day off, and had time to reflect.

He reflected that the effort of spinning out for months matters which could have been settled in hours was already producing in him symptoms of acute nervous irritation, and might well end by giving him stomach ulcers; that he seemed constitutionally unable to experience that sharp thrill of horror which shook his colleagues when they encountered a departure from precedent; that a time might come when he would not even want to laugh at the multitudinous absurdities which surrounded him; and that his partner was a pompous ass upon whom some day, he would surely inflict actual bodily harm. He put all this to Sue, and it terrified her; so when he suggested that they try farming in the Antipodes, she immediately rushed out and bought their steamship tickets. Thus they arrived in the Lane where, as they agree, impecuniosity is chronic, and absurdity by no means unknown—but pomposity is blessedly absent.

Ken Mulliner is not much over thirty, but he has been many things—-soldier, carpenter, taxi-driver, bus-driver, garage mechanic; he met his wife when he was driving the bus, and she was its conductress. We know of her only from hearsay, however, for as soon as she saw the prospect of farming ahead, she found herself a tram-guard, and told Ken he could go and grow pineapples by himself. Ken does not appear to have been at all cast down at finding himself duly and legally released from the bonds of marriage; in fact his elder sister (who often brings her two boys to stay with him), has expressed the opinion that he was never so pleased about anything in his life. Certainly—if one may judge by his cheerful, ugly face, his brightly roving eyes and his sardonic grin—the unfortunate affair has caused no damage to his psyche.

He farms in a slap-happy sort of way, working furiously for a few months, and then disappearing for a week or two. He doesn’t keep a cow, or fowls, because he says he likes to be able to walk out any time, and just shut the door behind him. (This, by the way, is a mere figure of speech. We do not shut doors when we go out—far less lock them; probably the only key in the Lane is the one old Mrs. Hawkins keeps hanging on a nail in case someone’s nose begins to bleed.) But this desire to be untrammelled in his comings and goings seems to have been always noticeable in Ken, for his sister tells us he once got down from a bus he was driving, left it standing there bulging with passengers, and was seen no more for six months. She also assures us that he held the record for the whole Army in the matter of being A.W.O.L.

Bruce Kennedy and his wife were both teachers. He is a tall, thin man who speaks slowly, and she is a short, dumpy woman who speaks fast. He works to a relentless timetable, and reaches his deadline triumphantly, like a sprinter breasting the tape; but there are times when he becomes possessed by a desire to do something which will serve no purpose other than exercising his muscles or his grey cells—both of which, his wife thinks, are too active anyhow. He is much given to mental arithmetic, and does many useful sums, but also many others whose usefulness is not so apparent; for he will suddenly produce discouraging statistics about how many hours per year they spend washing-up, or how many times Marge will have to loop the wool round her needle before she finishes knitting her new scarf. He has even been known to tackle the problem of how long it would take to fill a ten-foot square room entirely with paint, if you painted it once a year—assuming, of course, that you had somewhere to stand during the later stages of this chore, though why anyone should assume such a thing, we do not know; at all events, Bruce derived some mysterious satisfaction from discovering the answer to be fifteen thousand years. His degrees were in science, and even before he turned farmer he was always reading books about agricultural theory and experiment. He belongs to the compost and organic manure school of thought, views chemical fertilisers with reserve, and will talk for hours about methods of controlling erosion, the need for preserving soil-bacteria, and the evils of monoculture. He is enthusiastic about worm-casts, and frequently invites Marge to admire them; indeed, one is tempted to wish that the common earthworm were a more sensitive and responsive creature than it appears to be, for on Bruce’s farm not even Royalty could be more warmly and respectfully welcomed.

Marge gained her academic qualifications in the faculty of Arts, and her whole approach is less erudite. She has an eccentric theory that farms should be pretty as well as productive, and consequently she is always galloping through her farm jobs, or leaving her domestic ones undone, so that she can find time to plant a flowering tree, or sneak some of Bruce’s compost to put round her gerberas. They have a son and a daughter—both married and living down south—who think they are crazy.

Tim Acheson was a bank clerk until about five years ago, and his wife, Biddy, was a typist. Tim is a good-looking young chap with a ready laugh, but when he is not laughing he wears a rather harassed expression. Possibly, in his former capacity he saw too many farmers’ bank statements; at all events, he works as if a mortgage did close behind him tread, and Biddy swears that he once talked in his sleep about overdrafts. No matter how early we get up in the morning, there is always a light burning in the Achesons’ kitchen, and no matter how late we stay out working, we can always see Tim, still plugging away until the darkness swallows him. Biddy says they occasionally talk of the time when they both worked eight hours a day, and they agree that sunrise to sunset doesn’t seem as long as that did. Not while you’re doing it, she adds pensively, but you ache more after you’re in bed.

As for Dick Arnold (and you may believe this or not, when you see him in his mudstained jeans, and note the state of his hands), he once managed a beauty salon in a fashionable city hotel. Even now, when he goes to Church, we catch a glimpse of him as he must have been then—large, suave, well-barbered and well-tailored, with a trick—doubtless perfected as part of his professional stock-in-trade—of bending over the weaker sex in a protective and confidential manner. Despite this—or perhaps because of it—the womenfolk in the Lane were at first apt to vanish in confusion when they saw him coming, for they all felt that he must be noting with contempt their un-permed, un-manicured, un-groomed and generally un-glamorous appearance. But when they learned that his wife, Heather, who had worked in the hotel office, first attracted his favourable attention because she was the only one of several girls so employed who never patronised his establishment, they were reassured; and since Henry Griffith reported him as saying it was a treat to see women who looked like women, and not like bloody film stars, they have quite recovered their self-respect.

Observe that the occupations in which all these people were formerly engaged are highly reputable ones. No curse has ever been called down upon them, nor has any been the subject of solemn warnings, either human or divine—though it is true that Shakespeare made Hamlet say some pretty bloodcurdling things about beauty-culture. They are all respectable avocations, and you can even make money at them. Why, then, have they been so rashly abandoned for the sweat and sorrow, the thorns and thistles of a pursuit blighted by an age-old malediction? Why have the Dawsons, the Griffiths, the Kennedys, the Arnolds and Ken Mulliner all deliberately chosen to become Anachronisms?

It is a simple question of heredity. We can only regret that Genesis tells us nothing about how Eve brought up her sons, but presents them to us fully grown—the elder farming, and the younger keeping sheep. But we may confidently assume that during Cain’s formative years his mother must still have been feeling a bit browned off about that Curse; a bit defiant; a bit inclined to toss her head, and say to her firstborn that in her opinion there was really nothing so marvellous about that garden. You just took seeds from things, and put them in the ground, and up came plants. Anyone could do it. She could do it. Cain could do it if he wanted to, and she’d like to see any son of hers scared off by a lot of bogey-talk about sweat and thistles. The idea!

So Cain, nurtured on subversive propaganda, grew up a rebel, and meddled with creation, while Abel (who was more the caretaker type, like his father), took care of sheep. And in Cain’s posterity the urge for farming has persisted to this day—though there have been those who strayed into other paths. We have explicit Biblical information, for instance, about some who went in for cattle, some who dealt in musical instruments, and some who worked in the metal trade; and, as we have just noted, there are many in Lantana Lane who at first ignored the summons of their blood, and addressed themselves to callings not their own. But in the end, given half a chance, they will all find their way back, rejoicing, from ease to adversity; they will return, singing hosannas, from liberty to bondage; they ask nothing better than to till the ground, come sweat or cyclone, come drought or depression, come curse or creditors; and if the voice that thundered o’er Eden has not taught them sense in six thousand years, the voice that now analyses their economic predicament, and coldly foretells their ultimate extinction, might just as well pipe down. Cursed they may be—but they are cussed too.

Turning from the Old to the New Testament, we may recollect an occasion when a certain seafaring type told Paul that the freedom he enjoyed as a member of the master-race had cost him a packet; and Paul replied, rather loftily : “But I was born free.” In a like manner, perhaps, do Joe Hardy, the Bells and the Hawkins regard their neighbours who have come late to farming.

Joe is nowadays not often visible at close quarters. We see him working among his pineapples, and he lifts a hand in answer to our waves, but he is of a solitary disposition, and rarely leaves his property unless some crisis in the affairs of a Lane-dweller calls for an extra pair of hands. Then he willingly appears—although, in fact, he has only one really effective hand to contribute, the other having been injured in a cyclone. He lives alone except for his Uncle Cuth, and his blue kelpie, Butch.

Alf Bell hardly ever leaves his pines, either. He is a large, dark lump moving slowly up one row and down the next, all day and every day. No matter how brilliant the sunshine, it never seems able to arrange its shadows in such a way as to lend Alf clear definition; he is just a shapeless object which we know to be a man because it moves. At first one thinks him surly, for he seldom speaks, and when he does his voice is an inarticulate rumble, like a roll of drums. His wife, Gwinny, does his talking for him, and interprets him to us. “Alf says . . .” she tells us; “Alf thinks. . .” And thus we have learned that Alf is a person worthy of much respect; a person with immovable convictions and uncompromising standards of behaviour; a person with an almost agonisingly sensitive and accurate perception of what ain’t right.

Jack Hawkins is a lean man of middle size and middle age, with a deeply lined face, a very quiet voice, and a remarkable gift for looking cleaner and sprucer than anyone in the Lane. He is our Oracle. As the ancients took their problems along to Delphi, so we take ours along to Jack—though the analogy is perhaps defective, for it seems that a good deal of skulduggery went on at Delphi, and you had to pay through the nose for advice, whereas what you get from Jack is free, and dinkum.

Now that we come to Herbie Bassett, we are stumped. We don’t know what to make of him. He behaves like a descendant of Cain in that he tills his minute patch of ground, but we suspect a bend sinister somewhere. We think Abel was his true progenitor, for if ever there was a bloke who liked to leave nature alone, that bloke is Herbie Bassett. No; when it comes to Herbie, we give up. He belongs to no group in the civilised world, though he might have found himself at home, perhaps, in some primitive tribe before progress sneaked up on it; or in Eden, before Eve.

Here they are, then—a bunch of unrepentant anachronisms assembled in Lantana Lane. They are all—except Herbie—farming because they like it. True—true—they will declare, if questioned, that farming means drudgery, misery, penury, monotony, anxiety, bankruptcy and calamity; that it is a mug’s game, perpetually bedevilled by floods, droughts, tempests, soaring costs, sinking markets, debts, gluts, weeds, mud, viruses, nematodes, fruit-fly, bean-fly, top-rot, base-rot, black-heart, water-blister, white scale, gall wasp, bunchy-top, tip-wilt, melanosis, backache, heartache and holes in the tanks; that anyone who chooses such a dog’s life is a beetle-headed, foolhardy, fatuous, gullible, impractical and deluded numbskull, and for two pins they would walk off the flaming place to-morrow. Nevertheless, they like farming.

“By golly!” they will snort bitterly. “Just take a look at us, and then take a look at the graziers! They have it all taped out—half the work, and a hundred times the profit! They’re the Government’s little white-headed boys, all right!” (And is not this the very voice of Cain, contrasting the genial commendation of his brother’s offering with the cool reception accorded to his own?) But growl and grumble as they will, the fact remains that they are farming because they want to, and they will continue to farm until they die—or (like Cain) are driven out. For let us make no mistake, driven out many of them have been, and will be. We need not here usurp the function of the Economist by enquiring into the nature of the power that drives them; it is enough that the bone is pointing straight at their hearts.

But so long as the seasons are still permitted to follow each other in their appointed order, and behave more or less as they have always done; so long as the sun, moon and stars are not crowded out of the sky by satellites, and the rain is not too radioactive; just so long as this will the posterity of Cain mulishly defy every power on earth or in heaven for the undisputed possession of one small plot of earth. For although any farmer will, at the drop of a hat, denounce farming in the terms we have quoted, he will also say, now and then : “It’s a good life.”

And both times he is right.