Correspondence

The Maligned Squatter

SIR: The evil squatters still get a lot of blame for everything. John O’Connor (Letters, April 2013) is wrong to suggest that in Ned Kelly’s day Victoria was “substantially in thrall” to the squatter interest. By the end of the 1870s, when the Kelly gang was at large, the selectors had emerged victorious and had taken up huge swathes of land for farming at the expense of leasehold graziers, many whom left for the outback Riverina or Queensland to lease new grazing land.

The squatters never had much political muscle. The Victorian Legislative Assembly was democratically elected, apart from some multiple voting, and reflected the interests of the majority. Squatters had some power through the Legislative Council, but it was mainly to slow democratic change down a bit. The Council represented established interests generally, not just squatters. Its principal figure at the time was Sir John O’Shanassy, a wealthy businessman and landowner and also an Irish immigrant and Catholic. He was a great public and business figure of the day.

The Premier was Graham Berry, the most left-wing—rather Whitlam-like—Premier of the colonial era in Australia, and his Attorney-General (and for part of 1878–79 Acting Premier) was Sir Bryan O’Loghlen. O’Loghlen was Irish-born and a Catholic, like a lot of the police. About 60 per cent of the Victorian police were born in Ireland and about 40 per cent were Catholic.

If anything, the turbulence the Berry government caused when it temporarily ran out of supply due to its tangles with the Council over payment for MPs caused discontent among the police, not the squatters. But police, like other people, make mistakes. Greta seems the sort of township the force might send a misfit to in order to get him out the way.

Nor did the squatters “steal” land. In early colonial times they had permits to graze on what was looked on as common land. Later these became grazing leases which, incidentally, were meant in principle to be shared with the Aborigines. Some graziers gamed the system to get freehold, but there were also lots of poor as well as rich squatters, Ned’s maternal relations in the north-east among the poor ones. The Kelly selection farm could not have been too “hardscrabble” either since, unlike most, it stayed in the family into modern times.

I am of pure selector stock, so have no brief for the squatters and have a more sympathetic spot for the Ned legend than my friend Peter Ryan (March 2013), but these furphies about squattocratic and various other oppressions in earlier times are much too common.

Robert Murray
Hampton, Vic

The Pariah Forester

SIR: I read Mary-Ellen Turbet’s article in the March edition with a tear in my eye. Like her, I have suffered at the hands of save-the-forest protesters, and I have watched with dismay as they destroyed my profession and an environmentally benign industry. However, there was a brief moment when I was able to make a protest of my own.

In 2009 I attended a literary festival in a small town on the central north coast of New South Wales. It was held in a lovely old timber hall amongst beautiful eucalypt forests. Both were much admired by the participants.

The theme of the festival was trees and forests, and as the Black Saturday bushfires were just behind us and I was a forester with well-known views on bushfire issues, I was invited to be a speaker and panellist. I enjoyed the festival, which was friendly and efficiently organised, and I met many gifted and stimulating people.

But there was a lowlight. At the festival dinner, the speaker was an academic from Tasmania, who gave an outraged and bitter anti-forestry presentation. It was replete with shock-horror PowerPoint slides of logging operations, and condemnation of greedy timber workers, woodchipping, foresters, criminal timber companies—all the usual suspects on the green agenda. As I was a guest of the festival I kept my lips buttoned; besides, his words were eagerly received by the audience and I felt that if I protested I would be on a hiding to nothing. The assembled writers, poets, book reviewers, journalists, academics, artists, musicians, editors and publishers were the largest group of intellectuals I had ever confronted, and I was daunted. On the afternoon of the final day, he had another slot in the program, and he did it all again.

In the wake of the redundant second outburst, I snapped. I stood up, and did some confronting of my own. I told the Tasmanian that I was insulted by his portrayal of foresters and timber workers as mindless vandals. I described the way foresters had established the Australian forest estate and conservation policies in the first place, and how we had regenerated and cared for Australian forests from times when nobody else did. I emphasised that Australian timber workers operated within the law, that their work complied with government policy, and that in my experience they were mostly decent hard-working men and women. I reminded the audience that the beautiful forest outside the hall in which we were sitting was regrowth, regenerated after logging many years ago, and that it was typical of millions of hectares of lovely forests coming up after timber cutting all over Australia. I pointed out that the charming old festival hall itself had ceilings and panelling of red cedar, the floor was hoop pine and the weatherboard cladding, which was keeping the rain out as we spoke, was the local red mahogany. All these timbers had been cut from nearby forests and milled by timber workers. I observed that the enjoyable concert we had attended by a local lute player the previous evening was played on instruments made from timber.

Finally, I reminded the writers, poets, journalists and academics to whom I was speaking that they were all consumers of paper; it was the principal tool of their trade. Paper was made from wood pulp which came from woodchips which were derived from trees felled and processed by timber workers to supply the needs of consumers of paper. And I reiterated that the forests from which the woodchip logs had been cut were all being regrown, and just like those outside the door of our hall, would one day soon become indistinguishable from old growth.

There was an embarrassed silence when I sat down. I felt I was hated by a great many people at that moment. But it felt good to confront them. They were prepared to condemn, often cruelly, decent everyday Australian workers and professionals, and to portray them as despoilers of the earth, but were unwilling to confront their own complicity in the industry they deplored.

One young woman (a poet, I think, also from Tasmania) was so upset by my views that she burst into tears and had to be consoled with a large glass of wine. I spoke to her afterwards and asked what it was she wanted, what her goal was for humanity.

“The entire world must be changed so that people no longer consume the earth’s precious resources,” she said, still tearful.

I refilled her glass, and asked, “How did you get here from Tasmania?”

“I flew Qantas,” she replied.

Roger Underwood
Palmyra, WA

An Uplifting Story

SIR: Perhaps because I am in a precarious state of health myself, G.F. Adler’s short story in the April Quadrant, “The Rustle of Spring”, affected me deeply. But no, on second thought, the piece stands deservedly on its own merit as a simply and beautifully crafted story about awakening to others, and about Hope. Hope is that “indefinable nascent sense of renewal”; the possibility of returning to what one loves to do; and by extension returning to life. Two equally significant discoveries are realised by the central character.

I am grateful to Adler for his life-affirming and uplifting story, at a time when for me it held special meaning.

Nana Ollerenshaw
Buderim, Qld

What Makes Societies Dynamic

SIR: Matthew Walther’s piece (April 2013) on Stephen Greenblatt’s recent book The Swerve strikes me as unfair and only tangentially connected with the work under review.

What especially puzzles me is how the gist of the first chapter is not discussed. Beyond the immediate focus of the humanist Poggio Bracciolini finding a lost classical poem in a remote library, Greenblatt suggests that dynamic societies embrace books and learning (and the imagination), whereas societies which devalue or even forbid them are on the path to stagnation.

His argument runs like this: Medieval society was rigidly hierarchical, Europe being tightly controlled by the church, which was able to rule due to a closed worldview. This outlook mirrored (a) that so few people could read, (b) that access to books was near impossible, (c) that few non-Christian texts were available (some were deemed sinful and banned; most classical works had been destroyed). So Europe stagnated.

The rest of Greenblatt’s book shows that by firing the imagination of the individual reader, things like books, libraries and learning will fuel dynamic societies. If I accept that some dispute the interpretation of Lucretius, my own feelings are that this is a necessary book because it so strongly shows the necessity for reading imaginative literature, for keeping libraries running, for holding on to old books, and for studying the humanities. 



Christopher Heathcote
Keilor, Vic

Roadkill for the Raven

SIR: In the April Quadrant, Alan Gould puts the boot into my March essay, “Pen, Pencil or Keyboard”, ignoring the larger theme—Ted Hughes’s absurd argument that handwriting is more inspiring than typing—in favour of chicken-pecking my comments about Hughes as poet. Gould charges me with slather that “degrades the discourse on poetry”.

He name-calls me in six instances to reinforce his irritation, accusing me of being indecent, a mongrel, a hole-picker, a cheap shooter, irreverent and “clever”. (My ex-mother-in-law called me clever when I got her daughter pregnant—believing she should have aimed higher.) Someone once said when a person starts calling you names, or invoking the Nazis, they have already lost the argument.

Gould says Hughes has “the most daring and resourceful mytho-poetical imagination since Blake”. Opinion. Much like Christopher Ricks’s flutter-eyed pine that Bob Dylan equals Shakespeare. Well, in my opinion, Hughes doesn’t merit scrubbing William Blake’s etching plates. Do you know how the non-Latin-speaking ex-Laureate translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses? Someone wrote him out prose translations—he rewrote them as poetry. Someone should have nudged: “Learn Latin, if you want to translate Latin.”

Gould prefers “character” of a poet’s work rather than A/B grade classifications—then closes by implying that he has his own A/B compass for classifications and that my writing falls short. He must be using the same instrument Columbus used when he thought Cuba was China and the Bahamas Japan.

Gould weirdly criticises my failure to quote examples of Hughes’s “B-grade” material when there is an embarras de la pauvreté to choose. Where does one start? We could be here all night. I own fifteen books by Hughes. I would take five of Sylvia Plath’s best poems over this entire collection.

Look at the dreariness he delivered for the monarchy. On the Rigor Mortis Scale just below Andrew Motion’s rap-poem for Prince William’s twenty-first. Why do Laureates think they can produce memorable poetry-on-demand when they get the Royal Assent? “Rain-Charm for the Duchy” requires two pages of Hughes’s notes to explain references. My rule of thumb: if you need an introduction or notes to explain the poem, it isn’t written properly.

And Crow, despite squawking, is simply a poor verse novel. No Crow poems stand on their own merit outside the context of the whole. They barely stand within it. Crow is roadkill for The Raven. Here is my final caw on that Heckle and Jeckle:

             Poe’s Crow

Poe said poetry
should sing like Swinburne
not sting like sunburn

the Crow only perched
on that bust of Ted Hughes
to catch its breath.

Joe Dolce
Carlton, Vic

Smith on Stewart

SIR: Thank you for Vivian Smith’s wonderful article on the poetry of Douglas Stewart (April 2013). I have just returned from the local second-hand bookshop with a good copy of Stewart’s Selected Poems under my arm.

The article reminded me of what a fine literary editor of Quadrant Vivian was back in the 1970s.

Suzanne Edgar
Garran, ACT