The Sugar Bag

Withdrawal symptoms! That’s what I’m suffering, and from a cause so trivial that I ought to be ashamed to confess it: the old-time, now reviled, wholly disposable plastic shopping bag seems at last truly doomed. With daily increasing generosity, both grocer and green-grocer press me to accept one of their new “re-usable” shopping bags. (Even one of Melbourne’s toniest law firms lately offered me such a bag, generously proportioned and proudly emblazoned with their distinguished name. Maybe it was a kindly warning of the sort of bag I should need, if ever I were to stagger through their front door to pay their costs in cash.)

These are sturdy and capacious bags, and very well designed for purpose—so long as you remember to have one with you next time. But what happens when, miles from home and far from your car, you want to buy a just-noticed, heavily discounted bottle of your favourite brand of Scotch? Do you cradle your purchase like a baby, tenderly in the crook of one arm, and hope not to drop it on your way? Or should you throttle it with an iron stranglehold around its neck, and carry it, clublike and threatening, through the street? One of the old disposable bags would solve all problems of discretion, security and convenient carrying.

The cheap unlovely old plastic bag was an apt adjunct to our high-tech, high-glitz, wickedly wasteful “civilisation”. By what other means could you package instantly, safely and handy for carrying such an awkwardly assorted purchase as (say) a loaf of bread, a bottle of vinegar, a dozen eggs, a tin of boot polish, a toothbrush and half a dozen stubbies?

The disposable bags were simply handy—that was their virtue; and they filled a hundred later uses round the house. They had little else going for them, and much against. I had no doubt that, floating loose in their millions, they endangered wildlife, and turned decent streams and beaches into disgusting rubbish pools. On windy days in Melbourne, the squadrons of plastic bags flying in formation over Collins Street made one think that Armageddon might be on the way, and perhaps none too soon at that.

I had a particular private grudge against them during the years my office was in Victoria’s magnificent but near-medieval Supreme Court. The roof above was a structure of infinite complexity, served by a maze of gutterings, downpipes, flashings, traps and grates. On any day of heavy rain, my ceiling would swiftly become a shower, and work would have to cease; valuable Court papers would be damaged. Good-natured and ingenious Des from the maintenance department would have to trot out his ladders, brave the slippery slates, get wet through and climb down again with a bucketful of revolting and indestructible plastic bags: so I abandoned the old disposables as just another of humanity’s many historic wrong turns.

Casting an idle eye last night over my array of new “re-usables”, something about their surface textures stirred an ancient memory. The bags appear to be made of a stout and closely woven fabric. (No such thing, of course—they are made of heavy plastic sheet, deceptively printed to look woven.) To anyone old enough to remember a fine old traditional sugar bag, here might be its modern descendant—effete, yet still in the business of helping humans to carry their goods and chattels around.

Your true sugar bag was a small, high-quality hessian sack, very strong, and made of tightly woven fine jute. At this moment of writing, I simply cannot put my hand on a genuine specimen to measure, so I will have to guess that it was about 50 centimetres wide by about 70 centimetres deep. After fulfilling its primary duty of carrying sugar from the mill to the market, it was simply discarded. Countless thousands of them must have gone up in smoke in the boilers of the jam factories. But innumerable thousands more survived, creeping into the humble niches of ordinary daily life.

You could fit almost any possession neatly into a sugar bag: two pairs of ordinary work boots or one pair of gum boots; your pyjamas, clean shirt, socks and underclothes for a weekend visit. It may sound a bit rough to delicate souls, but we managed amazingly well in the days before Louis Vuitton; a ham, or a forequarter of lamb; apples picked at the peak of the season; or a load of fresh and sometimes squashy apricots for making jam.

Every swaggy’s tuckerbag had begun its life in some Queensland sugar mill. For a fishing trip you carried your bait in a sugar bag—sandworms, pilchards or an odorous lump of squid, all kept moist with seaweed. The catch (if any) came home in the same bag. From rabbiting, your game returned in the sugar bag which had transported your lunch sandwich, and your box of reserve ammunition.

A couple of metres of ordinary white window-sash cord fitted out a sugar bag with all the handy harness you needed, whether on foot or mounted: just nip the cord smartly with two half-hitches to a bag’s lower corner, followed by a firm turn around the neck, and you had a knapsack fit to carry on parade. Or, across the saddle, your wire-strainer and fencing pliers in one bag and your horse-shoeing tools in another, you set off fully equipped to practise two useful trades.

A derogatory term once used to describe a handy-man was “sugar bag carpenter”. Qualified tradesman carpenters brought to the job all their tools in a long, heavy and beautifully made timber case, in which every chisel, saw and screwdriver sat in its own secure slot. The rough-and-ready handyman, however, performed his work (and brilliantly effective improvisation much of it was) with a tomahawk, a hammer and a few basic odds and ends of tools which all fitted handily into a sugar bag.

The sugar bag also graced the daintier regions of indoors. Cut down in size by housewives, edged with cheerful materials, they gave years of kitchen service as pot-holders, oven cloths, floor mats and handy bags to carry the clothes pegs out to the washing line.

For some odd reason, whenever I think of sugar bags, I think also of author Frank Dalby Davison (1893–1979), my longtime and deeply valued friend. His métier was to be a writer, but as he needed also to eat he was a practical farmer at “Folding Hills”, an hour or so drive out of Melbourne. Australians who do not know Frank’s The Wells of Beersheba have a little gap in their grasp of the Australian tradition. It was once unthinkable that there might be a teenage boy or girl who had not read his Man-shy or his Dusty, moving but not mawkish tales respectively of a little red heifer, and of a farm dog who was partly dingo.

In that bloody day of judgment which—how long, O Lord?—must consume our present generation of school teachers of literature, a black particular on their long criminal dockets will be that Davison and his books are now little known.

The Ryan family used to exchange visits with Frank and his wife Marie. Frank rang one afternoon when he was expected later to dine with us. “Might they bring Sheila? She got lonely if left alone at nights.” Sheila was his long-serving cattle dog, now a rather portly lady of sagacity and beautiful manners. Frank knew that he hardly needed to ask.

That night was forty years ago, but yesterday every member of my family recalled it clearly. And each one said: “I remember Frank brought a sugar bag, and spread it carefully as a mat for Sheila to lie on beside the dining room fire.” (In my own case, I still seem to read the words “Colonial Sugar Refineries”, stencilled large across the bag.)

There was no pompous authorial flourish about Frank’s writing arrangements—no consecrated study or “den”. He wrote mainly at the end of the farm kitchen table. In that domestic posture he laboured on and off for twenty years on the manuscript of a truly enormous novel to be entitled The White Thorntree. It was eventually published in 1968 but, alas, to small acclaim.

These exchanged visits had always their quietly amusing moments. One night Frank, hands affectionately on Marie’s shoulders, declaimed that he, Frank Dalby Davison, was a man more blessed and richly endowed even than Turgenev, prince of Russian writers. He quoted Turgenev’s pronouncement that he “would give up all his fame and all his art if there were just one woman who cared if he came home late for dinner”.

“Marie cares,” said Frank, and kissed her.

One night, with that emboldened candour that can follow a relaxed dinner, I said: “Look here, Frank! This White Thorntree that’s been cluttering the kitchen table for twenty years: what’s it about?”

After a long pause he replied: “It’s about Life. That’s right, isn’t it, Marie?”

“Yes, Frank. Life with a capital F.”