The Other Side of Sunset: Memories of One of the Last True Pioneer Settlements in Victoria, by Campbell Curtis

We have all heard stories of a lucky boot dislodging a clod of earth, to reveal a shining gold nugget underneath. One gets a similar sensation upon opening Campbell Curtis’s The Other Side of Sunset. (Not that the book itself in any way resembles a clod; self-published, its design, production and readability are all well up to the standards of many paperbacks issued today by big-name publishers.)

The subtitle precisely defines the subject: Memories of One of the Last True Pioneer Settlements in Victoria. It is a plain-language account of Millewa County. (Note: not Millawa, which is a winegrowing region elsewhere in the state.) The story is told intimately from the inside, because Curtis’s father pioneered a virgin block among uncleared Mallee-covered lands, and his son returned there to carry it on. Millewa is—very roughly—up where the Murray River and the South Australian border form a sort of corner; Mildura is the nearest main centre.

As the settlers frequently took possession of their blocks almost wholly timber-covered, the first thing was to cut a clearing for the “house”, which would be a bare frame of fresh-cut poles of Murray pine, covered with a plain roof of galvanised iron. Walls (internal partitions, too, if such luxuries were allowed) were mostly of sacks, heavily coated with whitewash. The floor was of earth, smoothed and trampled flat. The pine poles showed that, just occasionally, Man and Nature could work hand-in-hand, for the timber was shapely and handy-sized, but above all remained for decades proof against the ravages of white ants.

As a little spare time and spare cash would allow, dwellings would be improved and extended, usually to accommodate growing families. But often the original basic structure could still be discerned thirty years later.

Horses supplied personal transport and motive power for the farm machinery. How Curtis loved them! He gives us character sketches of some of them by name—the majestic draughts that pulled the plough, and the livelier ponies that carried him and his sisters to school. He grieves still for the family’s amazingly sagacious border collie sheepdog, Rover, who had at last to be put down with a merciful bullet. The parson told Curtis that, lacking a soul, Rover could not go to heaven. Curtis: “If old Rover has no place in heaven then they can keep it, it’s not a caring place.”

Though his account is strung along the thread of first-hand personal experience, the author’s completeness of understanding, his wider reading and his clear writing create a true history of his district which will hardly be surpassed by even the most learned and discerning professional historian. More broad-ranging studies of Victorian land settlement policies, land use, developing agricultural techniques, the extension of roads, railways, medical and social services and education can all be tested by a quick reference to The Other Side of Sunset.

Curtis retains steady admiration for the results achieved by those hardy young persons who staffed the one-teacher and two-teacher state schools of his youth; he himself was one of the lucky ones who got also several years at boarding school, but he does not kick down the ladder by which he mounted: the love of reading and the joy of mathematical facility entered into him in the earliest grades. God knows how he would fare today.

Motor transport made a wary appearance in the 1920s, mostly, at first, such robust trucks as Fargos and Dodges. Roads were so rough that no vehicle of today (and few of today’s motorists) would have the ticker to tackle them: rutted, pot-holed, sand-choked in summer and bogs in winter. And yet, in 1938, there appeared the unimaginable luxury of a Chevrolet sedan of that year’s vintage. Average travel speeds remained around thirty miles an hour. A family visit to relations at seaside Warrnambool entailed two full days of driving, camping a night by the car at the roadside.

Viewed against modern-day concerns for the dwindling Murray River, the author gives a fascinating picture of the original form of irrigation in the Millewa. Three mighty pumps set each at a successively greater elevation above river level were installed. They raised water to the highest point in the district—no stupendous height in that level land. In July every year the pumps were started, and ran continuously for two months. Each main dam on every property was filled to capacity, giving as a rule sufficient drinking water for livestock for a whole year, and for vegetable growing, gardening and general farm purposes. (House drinking water was drawn from iron tanks filled by rainfall runoff from the roof.)

All the pumped water from the Murray was led to its final destination in open channels, many of them little more than gutters scratched in the ground surface with a pick and shovel. For a brief, miraculous moment, the kids on each farm had water to paddle and play in.

With such a system of distribution, one is not surprised that the wastage was calculated to be about 98 per cent. But there is no point today raising puritan hands in horror at such prodigality. The Murray of the time was under no stress, and water turned onto the land at Millewa would otherwise simply run out to sea. As it was, productive farms could be worked by a sturdy race of independent Australians—many of them, incidentally, born of German and Italian forebears.

Since it seems to be expected that a book reviewer should make some criticisms—if only to prove what a smarty-pants he is—I would at a couple of points have been helped by a diagram-for-dummies; I still don’t grasp just how the famous “stump-jump” plough works. If—as one hopes—a new edition is soon required, a few passages of unnecessary repetition could be excised.

But it’s all there: the droughts and the duststorms; the drifting sands that buried your stock fences, which had to be dug out again; the menace of the stumps still in the ground, which could overturn a wagon or rip an expensive tractor tyre to shreds; the mystique of the Mallee root—incomparable fuel for Melburnians’ home hearths; the (to me) totally surprising sandalwood cut in land clearing, and sent to China to perfume many a joss-house.

An inner Campbell Curtis is revealed by a few perfectly chosen and placed quotations: from Shelley, from Thomas Gray, from the land’s own poet John Shaw Neilson. He presses scents and smells into the service of his story, and I paused long over the passage where he describes the premises where one versatile tradesman combined the callings of both barber and saddler. I knew exactly the aroma of hair-oil and saddle-soap competing.
Joseph Conrad stated in four words the duty of a writer: To make you see. You can see Millewa County very clearly indeed in the pages of Campbell Curtis.