Back into the Past at the Other Bronte

In reminiscences and family matters handed down, few are written and fewer published, and they are distorted by ignorance and surmise. The reprints of Miles Franklin’s Childhood in Brindabella cannot convey the experience of the three months that it took in the 1840s for a family to move from near the Raby of Thomas Mitchell south of the Campbelltown road junction with the Hume Highway to that place in the deep bush. Now it is a few hours’ drive. The day-to-day reality of the old treks is beyond our experience or understanding.

The cover of the reprints of her memoirs shows Miles resplendent in riding dress looking like a rich squatter’s daughter, as though she spent her life between horse races, gymkhanas and picnics and perhaps attended one of those finishing schools in Switzerland favoured by the wealthy Queenslanders of the late nineteenth century.

What remains of her parents’ home at Kirkdale off the road to Canberra is a slight mound of a rectangle where the foundations still show how small the house was. The modern schoolchild can have no conception of what it was like to get up daily at five o’clock, milk the cow, get ready for school and walk often some miles for an education, as well as the many other chores on afternoons and weekends. Special events such as shows and gymkhanas were rare and savoured intensely. Thus the collections in the Mitchell and other libraries with their loving commentaries hardly touch the sinews of the life of our immediate ancestors. Henry Lawson and Henry Handel Richardson, Patrick White and Christina Stead do so, as this power of penetration is the domain of the novelist.

Out at Cogeldrie in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area—once full of fat lambs, rice, wheat, fruit and vegetables, but now a desert slowly being reclaimed from salt—among swarms of ragged children at little primary schools a few miles apart, was one typical lot, the Wise family. Henry Wise was a rice farmer, but a share-farmer like so many, which means half his income went in rent.

He was a giant, yet well-proportioned, with forearms as large as many people’s thighs. When he had whooping cough one year, he had to climb down from the tractor and hold on to the top wire of a fence with both hands every now and then, his body racked with coughing. The daily appearance of countrymen, apart from old trousers, old waistcoats in winter and a second-best felt hat, was always dust. Yet on regular evenings when washed and groomed and in his Masonic rig one would have assessed his status and income, as with Miles Franklin, quite differently.

At one little affair in the village, with picnic races in the dust between the pub, main street and the railway line, nearing forty, he entered the sprint for “the men” in his good suit, shirt and coat-tails, and all saw an amazing sight. A professional runner competed, and down to the finishing line came the two in front, the little professional hard at it with the giant alongside him, coat-tails flying behind him, knees propping up each step almost to the chin, felt hat in one hand, glancing down at his terrier-like opponent and laughing.

Income small, despite the good and regulated price for rice each year, hay cut for the Clydesdales when petrol ran out, bags of rice swapped for a giant load of peaches that the whole family for days, cut, halved, sugared and preserved in 364 large bottles, one for each day of the year. And plenty of cow’s milk and cream. You killed a sheep every week for at least three meat meals a day. And the kids, if slack, would be hounded out the door with a roar to go and search for eggs in the hay for breakfast and feed the horses or cut some wood for the stove.

A fuel stove to be kept going for all cooking, and hurricane lamps on mantelpieces. And just one special Aladdin lamp. The kids rode bikes or horses to school. The girls were just as competent with sheep and with the tractor as the boys when they grew tall enough to reach the clutch. The weekly washing was a hard toil over the copper and tubs. Wives were more worn out than husbands then, with the indoors and the cooking, with the random tearings of childbirth and often work with the men also.

Imagine a Wise family history with Henry Wise in his best suit for illustration. Henry was only one of many men of that description in the district and this is when the fit and younger were away at the war. What far century are we talking about? Now, the air services soar into action during floods, dropping Woolworths groceries to farmers who now produce nothing to eat except one or two crops that get shunted out of the country in giant trucks and ships.

Australia is vast, yet its inhabitants are mainly piled into a few square miles of concrete and car parking. But the old, slowly decaying Australia still exists, well hidden, its main foes the bushfire and the investor clearing millions of acres of bush to plant a giant crop without a person or a village in sight, and closer to towns, the bulldozer and the caterpillar-like property developers.

Every bushfire burns down some old abandoned cottages of sawn planks and stone chimneys that once were selectors’ shacks and houses, often finely built houses, since gathered into larger properties or abandoned to the bush altogether. Sometimes they are demolished deliberately, as those with vertical flitches for walls from giant timbers are too old-fashioned for a new owner to tolerate if visible from the road. Some large homes built from the best timbers with high ceilings are now hay sheds. And local municipal inspectors would rather you did demolish and “upgrade the area” to fit with a written code from the distant state capital.

One needs the fast-dying-out last lot of locals to indicate the hidden past. Things from the past need looking after and we haven’t got the time, or worse, the inclination. Concrete “cleans the place up” and needs no further attention for years. Who needs more than a plaque where something was demolished and a Hollywood-type movie, like The Man from Snowy River? Quite enough.

ONE SUCH place is Bronte. Not the Bronte of the Pacific Ocean with its bright and casual openness of the past now crammed with dwellings in piles just for a bit of ocean seen through a window and milling people as if on a railway platform in the bright sun and on the glowing sand. This other Bronte is just a sign of a locality going off a through-road, and as with many names, the traveller might think it must have once been the name of a sheep property.

This older Bronte cannot be visited except by arrangement as it is down the almost private road off the tarred main one, rutted, stony and treacherous at times as all but a minute fraction of all roads were seventy years ago. Not so long ago there were no tarred roads between the main streets of Mildura and a strip of tar between Wamoon and Leeton. The inquisitive come to a gate known to few which leads to Bronte but it’s private property now, beyond which was the place. The traveller is not surprised, as the sign saying Hawke’s Lane also says, “No Through Road”. So the many who hope and still venture never reach Bronte, and it’s a bit like the fox and the grapes.

So when the small local historical society advertised in the local newspaper that on a certain Saturday members of the public could come on an excursion to Bronte, for a small fee to cover some of the cost of sausages, sandwiches, tea and coffee and a donation to the museum, several people took advantage of the opportunity to have lunch down the paddock on the Hawkes’ place and be shown over the property by Stephen Hawke himself.

Three or four local folk and some Society members turned up, meeting in their cars at the start of Hawke’s Lane and slowly following each other down to the farm gate before the house. Stephen Hawke came out and was greeted by those who knew him. He told us his Mum was sick and he has to tend to her garden as well as doing everything else these days. She’s only got him. He wasn’t complaining. He speaks quietly, without emphasis, even when he mentions unpleasant or alarming things. So many of the different types of the old Australia have died out and this is one of the last.

A.E. Pearse, the poet, Queensland University and Oxford man, friend of Eric Partridge the linguist, who were both privates in the army serving in France, told me years ago that the tales of the reckless First AIF were of a minority. Most soldiers, he said, just got quietly on with the job and just as quietly ignored the less reasonable authorities when they could.

Stephen Hawke is about sixty, and his legs slightly buckle in his slow walk from years of chain-sawing, a few accidents with falling trees and all the work that sheep demand. We know his wife lives elsewhere not far away, just another inevitability of life, not worth dwelling on by Stephen or other locals.

So we have a look at his Mum’s garden with its rhubarb and chrysanthemums while he goes inside to tell her where he’s going. A house garden is a lot of work in that climate with the hard and unfertile soil. This region south of Goulburn was the area left for the early poor migrant and the ex-convict, as the good land from Campbelltown, Camden to Crookwell, Taralga and Yass had quickly gone to the gentlemen of the times, the military, the clergy, the government people and the occasional family of wealth.

Bushrangers liked this area to retreat to, especially as the battling settler, often an ex-convict, protected them from the police whenever they could. Consequently the police had small chance of success in that vast difficult area over to the coast, east and south, the rivers, the steep creek gullies, hard going and with few landmarks visible in the thick bush. And bushmen like Sturgiss, the ex-Light Horseman, “The Man from the Misty Mountains” as he was called later, could go through that region a century ago unerringly and never forgot the unworn paths (usually just noted trees) that he went by only once.

Out on the western plains a selection could mean isolation for many months. The Carrathool postman, his wide area of service made on horseback, once delivered some mail to a home towards the Lachlan River in that great maze of nineteenth-century land holdings, in bits and pieces like medieval wheat fields, strips and takeovers the result of the struggles over Jack Robertson’s land laws. It was a long ride and it was dinner time so the couple invited him to join them. The three children, the eldest about seven years old, sat silent and agitated, even fearful. The postman, a young man, asked what was the matter. “You’re the first person outside us here they’ve ever seen,” said the father.

SUCH a garden as the Hawkes’ is now rare, with flowers, fruit trees and vegetables still in the taste of earlier days. I looked for snapdragons. A wire-netting fence kept out the stock and it was only as large as could be watered in the dry months. The old Australians know that what they discuss so fervidly in the public world of politics and television as “drought proofing” is just a joke. They gardened, at least the women did, for a bit of the old beauty from the past around them (though they didn’t disdain gum tips in the house) and for fruit and vegetables that otherwise you couldn’t obtain. And if you didn’t, your kids got rickets and other deficiency diseases.

Sheds about the rear and bare earth between house, garden and the paddocks, as this is as much that can be controlled when the great hot westerly wind comes and brings fire. As so many knew, against lightning and more especially firebugs, you haven’t a chance of controlling the thing. Many a country man and woman will curse heartily and declare, “I’ve never fought a bushfire, only back-burns!” The modern Australian mind is ignorant and gullible in such matters, and no wonder when we look at the extent of our enclosed and protected lives in endless suburbs, experts of the barbecue.

Now sport rules as a proper aim in life and as moral and example for the young who are regimented, in expensive uniforms and with coaches and other supports. “The flannelled fools at the crease” and “the muddied oafs at the goal” as Kipling derisively put it in earlier days, as supreme advocate of military training, has become more true with players herded, confined and controlled by clever and wealthy owners of “sport”, who make heroes of talented youngsters who in desperation break out and have to be solemnly chastised and penalised, confessing before the priests of the games and brought back with fines and penalties to be once more the heroic models of the high conduct we expect of them.

Yet around Bronte, the remains of old tennis courts, cricket and football fields, showgrounds and picnic places litter the bush every few miles or so. They were enjoyed by all ages, as in all Australia; along with churches, travelling circuses and rodeos, working bees in true co-operative style, many local halls, large and small, and local horse-race meetings.

Ten houses could provide enough players for all games and other events. One family, the McInneses of Lake Cargelligo, had a cricket eleven and played another large family from time to time. But this was fun, not like the nonsense that pervades and controls “sport” today. Nor did they do much more than simply play, not football “training” constantly these days, even before Christmas. Even a Dunlop, a young boxer who fought good Americans, worked and kept his basic fitness working for the council with pick and shovel. No one can do that now.

The Australian sports person today is a spectator. In Bradman’s day sportsmen had jobs and he himself if playing for South Australia could be at work in the morning each weekday of the match before going to the Adelaide Oval. This was sport, and for most, a Sunday afternoon’s tennis, men and women, boys and girls and a big pot of tea, biscuits and rock cakes. And the men playing Saturday afternoon cricket. Now, the gym and exercise bike, not much fun in these. Saturday night dances at local halls saw romance and fights outside and could go on in summer till dawn and a sleepy ride home and a sleep till nearly noon, then off onto the tractor until dark the same afternoon.

Cricket was universal in the males from a dozen years of age to the sixties. One year Mr Smith, a farm worker, forever dusty and ragged, ploughing, butchering sheep, shearing and whatever else, in his forties at this stage and never seen doing anything but work, was asked to fill a vacant spot in the local cricket team, just to “make up the number”. He probably had been in the First AIF but you’d never know. Without white shirt and trousers and with his old work boots on he took nine wickets out of the ten and the little accountant, Mr Ivery, middle-aged, usually seen in a bow-tie behind the desk of the bank, scored fifty runs and came off happy and pouring with sweat, nostalgia for his youth in him.

Such simplicity! And such simple prejudices almost grand in their indifference to what others asserted with capabilities Homeric of the type. And such stark and silent tragedies. A young lad of twelve drew his pen-knife on a sadistic teacher yelling, “Don’t you come near me!” and the teacher paled and shook, saying over and over, “Don’t do that, Amy! Put that down, Amy!” in a splutter. This was a boarding school in the heavy bush. Amy disappeared, search parties were sent out, probably found him, but that was the last that was heard of him.

Powerful women like Mrs Harris, a favourite with children with their billy cans, milking cows while they waited, she under a cow and talking to them, sold milk for a few additional pence, was thin and worn out just as much as the men on Anzac Cove. Well past her prime in ragged dresses, she ever managed a courtesy and a steady state in all the virtues. Her son was a disappointment, a droll drunk when he could be, amusing the audience at the travelling circus trying to ride the donkey. If there was no milk in a household for breakfast a few Weetbix loaded with sugar and cold tea from the teapot sufficed in some families. Her husband was a man who could have easily strung Ulysses’s bow, silent and red-haired, a fox hunter with a pack of big red dogs. Mr Kenny and a neighbour, Mr Hemphill, had a fight on horseback with stockwhips, something to do with someone climbing through a bedroom window.

Occasionally a man died while in prison overnight and the local policeman became notorious, but good ones like Mr Toll could be seen in conversation leading a jolly drunk down the footpath past the School of Arts to the police station, the last building before the big paddocks. Next morning the man could be seen chopping wood for Mrs Toll, with a good breakfast inside him. And released when the woodpile was sufficient.

Little Bill Box, all unhealthy white skin and freckles, went home each lunch time from Fourth Class and made lunch for his alcoholic mother. Dick Taylor had the dilapidated garage in the main street, dark curly hair and a barrel-like chest, and a digger from the First World War, in his forties. This didn’t stop him having endless fights at the side of the Commercial Hotel on Saturdays, head down, not quitting, uncaring that blood streamed down his face.

Old Mrs Burney was a droll character, loquacious and merry, amusing all. It was never proved, but asserted as likely with her eccentricities, that she would climb a tree near her house and nail up a ten-shilling note for safer keeping.

The forever wariness of children was to avoid by taking the long way around houses where several dogs waited for passers-by in the fenceless, dust-deep front yards. Two boys would watch as their dogs fought it out. Villages had more dogs than people, despite culling now and then by someone leaving poisonous baits around.

Some rural places of large families almost resembled little fortified kingdoms in their independence. Most families controlled their children with church and alarms of sin or “proper behaviour” but boys down the back of orchards and in sheds explored the girls with determination and triumph.

IN THAT region Wilga station, with its miles of private irrigation from the Murrumbidgee, pumped by the boiler of the old HMAS Sydney, provided constant employment for the village and other small places. It was owned by Freddy Hughes the magnate who once could have walked from the Lachlan to the Murrumbidgee without stepping off his own land. He achieved success when his horse Hiraji won the Melbourne Cup and it was said locals made a few quid on the race. Not that Hughes was loved or even respected. He had that meanness so necessary to achieving great wealth to the extent that on his annual visit from the city accompanied by an apprehensive manager he never offered to pay for anything. No bonuses here!

On hot days a great competent station hand, de Mammiel, grimacing with suppressed rage, would have to walk with them, for the day or days, holding an umbrella keeping the sun off the big boss. If single, like so many treated with no even gaze of equality, he would have walked off. He had a large family to feed.

Tony Carlon of that family, born in the Burragorang in 1898, worked sheep and horses, built a beautiful shearing shed of timber brought down the several hundred feet from the steep hill behind, dragged by horse and cut by axe and handsaw. He wrote poetry, some not merely bush ballads, and loved the literary pages of the old Sydney Morning Herald before it went pop, and would tell of instances of what he called “bush madness”.

Practical jokes worked out in fine detail and persecutions like the neighbour, his house a hundred yards from the Wollondilly River with a steep bank, who one Christmas presented his wife with a wooden yoke he had carved so she could bring two buckets of water up at a time. He would lock the gate near his house securely though it was a public road.

Tony’s neighbours, the Langs, one day when he was away in Mittagong or perhaps Sydney as he liked to go to the theatre and Angus & Robertson’s when he could, put a large kangaroo in his shack. When he opened the door on his return it bowled him over and he was taken to hospital.

That wild boy Robin Archer of Picton, known as Wockle, was one of the last survivors of the old life of the Burragorang and was last heard of only a couple of decades ago, found dead in a paddock up near the Abercrombie River. Or was that a rumour? Another seen in a wheelchair in the mall had both legs missing from diabetes, cursing everything and everyone in authority to their faces from doctors downwards and upwards as those generations often did. What was Wockle doing there? Probably helping someone with a tough job as he usually was.

As with Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States, that necessarily strict opening up of universal primary school education saw so many succeed from the lower classes who were not thought to be fit for it, in the wider worlds of the sciences, anthropology, medicine, politics, literature and languages. As so surprised Ford Madox Ford when he first met D.H. Lawrence.

A classic case admired by Arnold Toynbee was that of H.W. Bailey, born far out in the wheat belt of Western Australia in 1899 when that was far out indeed, who would read an encyclopedia in the hayshed, dreaming, and became a professor of Sanskrit and an expert on that great passage-way between civilisations between Tibet and Siberia, the Tarim basin. And countless others.

The cities were more connected to the country in past times, being smaller with rural aspects in among suburbs that tended to be only along train and tram lines. In 1946 there was still a local dairy at Waverley in Sydney, the dairyman a Mr Noad, delivering the milk himself twice a day by horse and cart. There was a pig farm at Leichhardt. Thornleigh station, so close to and visible from Pennant Hills station, was built expressly to freight fruit from the local orchards down to the Sydney markets. Seasonal workers often went to and fro between town and country.

The same skills with horses existed throughout the towns and cities. Country relatives had holidays to the city and to the farms came city relatives. Cane-cutters from cities would keep fit with a labouring job before heading north for the cane-cutting season. Shearers also. Australia was more one. It was in the 1960s that one first heard from eastern suburbs Sydney dwellers that beyond Parramatta was “out in the sticks”.

WE ALL drive slowly through the gate into the main paddock. No sheep are visible as Stephen has them out of the way for the day. It is quiet and the slow line of shining cars has a strange effect in the still back paddock. There is nothing special about this paddock, so large there are no fences to see. Its variations in undulating country could describe hundreds of square miles of the region. The little stove is lit and water boiled, biscuits and small cakes put out on the card table brought along for that purpose. It’s too early for lunch and all eyes are on Stephen’s project, of a few years now, rebuilding the old Bronte school. There are no other buildings in sight.

Stephen gives a soft and seemingly broken account, quite adequate, of the problems. It is an unusual building, built at a time when all sorts of improvised and local materials had to be brought together for a schoolhouse. For bricks there had to be a local brickworks, for timber, a local timber yard, if not, bush poles. This school, a mere two rooms in a rectangle, one room of which is the one teacher’s residence like a duplex, is all close-fitting marble to lintels and chimney. Steps of marble at the doors. Towering high at the centre of the hip-roof is the one stone chimney, serving two fireplaces.

As the water boils we walk round the building and poke about as Stephen explains things. The little school stands on a slope that goes down away to the north and then reaches a shelf, a plateau with a small undistinguished watercourse, all close grass and round and smooth after two centuries of sheep. To the west behind the school, not close to it, are stringybarks, lightly timbered and no shrubs beneath as it is grazed and the season is dry. Stephen, to some surprise, has also planted many new deciduous trees in a row nearby, to provide shade from the western summer for the non-existent pupils, each tree surrounded with wire netting. “I’ve had trouble keeping the water up to them till they took,” he says.

Where did this marble come from, and how was it that the little building, so majestic in its height of ceiling and proportions, came to be built of marble? No one in the party knows, though we know of an outcrop of precious black marble, a vertical strata in a hillside paddock near Windellama, mined only in a small fraction and unspoiled. From Bundanoon? Called Jordan’s Crossing in those days. That’s over eighty kilometres away and in those days transporting it would have been a feat in itself. Would it have come down by rail to Lake Bathurst on the old Cooma and Bombala line? Bullock wagon from there, or a horse team? Or perhaps there’s a forgotten vein of white marble close by somewhere.

The roof is new galvanised iron and when Stephen shows us photos of the school when he began, a ruin of walls only, lintels absent (broken or taken away?), scattered stone all round, we realise what he has done. “I got them at Bundanoon to cut me new lintels,” he says. “Quite a job getting them in place.” He has replaced the wooden floorboards. He hurt his back putting the hip roof up with its steep angles, and he hasn’t quite finished it off, but it’s safe and waterproof. Why doesn’t he let someone give him a hand? someone asks. He did with the lintels and the roof, for a short period, but the answer of one who knows him well, is, said quietly, that he likes to do the thing on his own, when he feels like it, when other work permits. And his replacing of the many fallen wall stones is just as neat-fitting as the original. The joins are hardly visible. He has made two new doors, one to each room. The fireplaces are monumental and with such a tall chimney will obviously draw well. The new windows are well done and fit the place.

MORNING tea draws on and no one is in a hurry. Tom Bryant speculates over what Stephen could use the building for—weekend guests perhaps, and make a bit of money? Stephen has thought of that but only briefly, as finishing off the project is still some time away. There is much skirting conversation among the locals of past persons and families, from early memories and of their parents. Who was there over the back? What happened to old Charley? Some disagreement, some enlightenment. This is as far as most of the past life of ours surfaces to.       

Joanna and her sister Marcia, from two of the old families, say, What about the shearing shed? We should look at that while we’re here. It is out of sight to the south, and near the church. Church? This church at Bronte village, or what was, to some astonishment is perhaps still in use. No one is sure, as even these two who tend and mow and tidy the Windellama church as if it were their own property don’t attend church and in true old Australian style tell the travelling minister who holds in a wince inured by long disappointments, that no, we don’t go but we love the church as grandma felt, old Bessie Williams the matriarch of the region who saw to the maintenance of it. One lady, Diane, now ageing, the sheep being almost too much for them now, but her son is steady, said, “I get down to the two-monthly service if I can just to keep the place open.” There are no new parishioners in Windellama. Have we time to drive over to the Bronte church?

Even the children’s toilets are of the same marble, just as well constructed, on the southern slope the correct distance health dictates from the school. Marble school dunnies! A touch of “the most high and palmy state of Rome”! In the past a deep pit was dug which could last for decades with small children a little afraid of the thin hand-crafted wooden seat, the only barrier to the long drop.

It’s too early for lunch so we follow Stephen to the south on foot and there is the church behind a fence which we help each other climb through without snagging on the barbed wire. Tom has stopped us on the way over, he and some others preferring to walk slowly, and his arm indicates a line of trees and a block of vegetation to the left. “Nothing left of it now, of Bronte,” he says, “but that was the row of houses, three or four.” Not a vestige of a track. A shop, a pub? We don’t know. Probably not, as Tom says, the track past the church leads to the Tarago Road and Tarago itself, this is the access now and can still be used. Few know it exists.

The church’s interior is old and brown, its solid bricks as though grim with age, so durable and of long use. Solid pews, and a dusty Bible and prayer books on the table. A small pile of hymn books. Who comes to the infrequent services now? Or have they stopped? Stephen is not very interested. There is an old umbrella near the entrance. The place could twist the bowels of an atheist. The windows are small and dusty, unbroken. It even has an entrance porch. Someone knows the female parson who has had this church and others in her itinerary.

What a fading away of the once mighty Church of England! Those once staid millions of church-goers and memberships of numerous benevolent funds, friendly societies, lodges of all kinds, trade unions and other communal organisations have gone, superseded by football and soldiers clubs and in popular memory by a continually drinking, rollicking devil-may-care Australia which half the population then would have considered a libel.

Broken Hill was like old Kings Cross in that respect, and in most places, two types, church and Sunday school, rigid wowsers alongside the drunkards and gamblers and working class all heaped together. On Sunday afternoons in Broken Hill hundreds of families with prams and picnic baskets wandered out of town towards Stephens Creek reservoir in their best clothes after the morning’s church services. At one twenty-first birthday on a large scale in a hall at Yass, with many present, friends of Ted Ranyard, the fellow in question, fell silent and without complaint as Ted’s mother announced with nonchalant finality, “Here we all are, but you’ll find no alcohol here, we’re wowsers.”

Further into what is now light bush, regrowth, is the shearing shed. We crowd in amidst much wreckage of old timbers and used tools. The bare tin roof with its bush poles as rafters seems to press down and it tells us how hot it was working under it in summer. There is a couple of old foldable iron-and-wire-netting bedsteads as many shearers, even ones as close as Goulburn in past days, found it too difficult to get back in the late afternoons. Old rusty cans with oils, tar, a ragged towel, drenches, a Billy Tea tin, a canvas water-bag dry and wizened still attached to a rafter, and dozens of old shearing combs in the dust. But all traces of wool have gone. The holding pens are small but outside, so shearing had to hasten if the weather looked rainy; two broken pens with their neat smooth gates.

This shed is on the ground, not raised as the better ones are so the sheep manure can fall through the spaced floorboards. Remains of old wool bales are heaped in a corner and along a line of noggins an old alarm clock, three enamel mugs and an old bakelite radio. No table to throw the fleeces on, nor a woolpress, these probably removed for use elsewhere. A random scattering of old straw brooms and dog chains, old hammers, pliers and empty drums of various drenches, chemicals for worms and other pests, old beer bottles; old shirts and overalls, timbers in the dust. Those who worked here knew they were toiling indeed. It is a small, low shearing shed but must have served its purpose.

We conclude this visit with lunch, sausages with onions, sandwiches and biscuits, people sitting at random on folding chairs they have brought. The ladies have done their usual job efficiently as always. Tom Bryant has done research and hands out a page of information.

Once more we look at the renewed schoolhouse and wonder what it was like for the teacher to live there. He was probably single, and a man, no doubt, in such a spot. In villages there was some excitement if a young woman was appointed in the new year and accommodation had to be found. One year, the girl, just out of college, had to sleep behind a hastily installed curtain in the window of Scott’s corner shop until a rice farmer gave her a room out of the village.

Talk turns to other half-lost places in the district and especially to the near-forgotten Catholic Church with trees growing around and through it and a small burial ground of four or five graves among saplings. Something should be done about it. One bushfire will finish it. The last sign of a single family’s life. How did that church, just a bare room, happen to get built? Powerful old social forces long gone. School, church, shearing shed. One hopes that the future won’t bring a fresh sweep of neglect or deliberate destruction.

TWO years later the historical society has another expedition to Bronte. Stephen looks his usual weather-beaten self yet with a sort of roundness of features and no wrinkles that make him seem both old and a boy. He has the melancholy dark look of that painting The Young Bacchus and has drunk his share too. He is always clean shaven and gently complains in a kind of indifferent querulousness, as do so many, of the country being taken over by the Chinese and Muslims. His voice delivering this is of a soft puzzlement, not anger. In the immediate past racism was delivered on evidence of skin colour, physical appearance, religion, hygiene, clothing, sexual habits, technology, especially of the military, the gibbering of other languages, and all boosted by an eager popular Darwinism, “the survival of the fittest” which reigned too in the better educated.

The popular phrase, “You’re a real white man!” was an ultimate phrase of gratitude. Of other peoples, “I hate them all!” or more refined, “I hate the English less than other foreigners, don’t you?” were common expressions. But something high and mighty of the fierceness of the nineteenth century and the AIF of two wars has been lost, as in all sections of civil society. How much racism lingers and is latent we don’t know but world politics, the strife of the Third World and its treatment by the West affirm its constancy. The older virtues, under pressure from investors, parliaments and interfering bureaucracies, often led to the widespread assertion of disgust, “We should give it back to the blacks.”

Little has changed with the restoration of the school. Some go again to the church and shearing shed. But attention has been drawn on arrival to the north nearly a kilometre away on the bare plateau over the dry creek. A stone tower several metres high on the plateau’s edge is striking. It looks about six metres diameter at the base. It’s too far over with the climb onto the plateau for anyone to venture over on such a hot day. We’ll go over on another visit. Stephen explains. “I was looking at the pile of stones over there and I thought there must have been a building or something there at one time. But there’s nothing but stones.” So, eventually, he thought of building a tower.

This tower will probably last a long time. We should know by now why the Egyptians built such heavy and indestructible monuments. We look at the tower in amazement. It has a perfect curve outward at first then slightly inwards going up in proportion to its height and diameter, its own unique cone section with flat top, neither squat nor slender. Stephen wonders if he should do more with it. One visitor with some pretensions to architecture says, “No! It’s perfect as it is!”

These times have no continuity. Sons and daughters rarely follow their parents’ work or life in rural places. Even at Bronte, the school and tower, in bare paddocks and hardly burnable, only need one new owner to plant a few thousand trees as his contribution to delay global warming and the school could shatter again. Or the property sits idle and the scrub comes back—the common fate in these years of much small-acre farming land—ready for a bushfire. The church and the shearing shed need annual clearing and close mowing to a distance around and owners must be committed through all seasons. But the tower should stand.

Stone may last but peoples don’t, though nations identify with ancients with whom they have nothing in common except myths, some words and phrases, an alphabet and insecure and impossible genealogies, bolstered these days by spurious genetic dogmas. Of our brief nation of two hundred years nothing will remain except a simple question of the same order as “Who were the Hurrians?” and countless other powerful tribes.

Julian Woods lives in rural New South Wales