HAIL and FAREWELL! An Evocation of Gippsland Other books by Hail & Farewell! An evocation of Gippsland (1971) Who could love the nightingale? (1974) Four faces, wobbly mirror (1976) At the window (1984) The garden gate (1984) Mapping the paddocks (1985) Play together, dark blue twenty (1986) House of trees (reissue of Hail & Farewell! 1987) Victoria Challis (1991) House of music (1996) Wainwrights’ mountain (1997) Waking into dream (1998) didgeridoo (1999) Janus (2001) The Centre & other essays (2002) Love in the Age of Wings & other operas (2003) Melba: an Australian city (2004) The Wainwright Operas (2005) Oztralia (2005) Cloud of Knowing (2006) Benedictus (2006) Mini mags Escape (2004) Hallucination before departure (2006) HAIL and FAREWELL! An Evocation of Gippsland Chester Eagle First published 1971 by William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne. The poem ‘Bairnsdale’ by Marie E. J. Pitt, from Selected Poems (1944), by kind permission of Lothian Publishing Company Pty Ltd, Melbourne. Cover etching, ‘Gippsland’, by David Armfield, 1971. This electronic edition published 2006 by Chester Eagle, 23 Langs Road Ivanhoe 3079 Australia, operating as Trojan Press. Phone is (03) 9497 1018 (within Australia) and email address is [email protected] Copyright is held by Chester Eagle. To Tim and Rosa ‘Poor young feller, he never knew what life was.’ Just so, Tim; just so. Contents Introduction 1 The Men from Snowy River 3 Landscape and People 73 Introduction At the end of the 1955 academic year all we bright young Dipedders were given our teaching appointments at a final assembly. We chiacked each other in the corridor afterwards. ‘Where’d you get?’ ‘Dimboola.’ ‘Never heard of it.’ ‘Neither have I. Where is it?’ Victoria’s towns of secondary-school size were so unpromising. Wodonga, Warracknabeal, Ararat (some connection with Noah’s Ark?), Stawell (ah, yes, the Gift!), Numurkah, Warragul, Horsham, Warrnambool ... My two friends and I had applied for Drouin. It wasn’t so far from Melbourne to stop us driving down of a week-night for a concert or a party; we’d all be together, we’d make a world of our own and see our real friends—Drouin!!!—every weekend. The peabrains and pinheads who made up a little country town would have a hard time cutting us down to size. One got Mildura; the other was sent to Portland. Someone else we knew got Omeo Central Classes. The announcement drew a great shout from the male students. Omeo, buried in The Alps! The place was unthinkable! Much earlier in the year I had even pulled out an atlas to find this town; I was staggered at its remoteness. My appointment sent me to the atlas again. I had no idea where to find Bairnsdale. I found it eighty-one miles from the dreaded Omeo, which, presumably, crouched under Matterhorn-like peaks. They were both in the section marked Gippsland. This word meant nothing to me, apart from the ABC’s midday ritual of the river-heights which I heard every day when I was at home on my parents’ farm in New South Wales. As far as I knew, Australia was 1 flat. It grew red gums, sheep, bulokes, native pines and wheat. There were cities, of which I knew two, and the Dead Heart. The hinterland was dreary. Everything to do with culture was imported and could only live in the capitals. But not to worry, I would take my own with me; it would need only a couple of kindred spirits to start a self-generating fire, fueled by our reading and our contact with the city. Full of these bright resolves, I arrived at the Country Train Terminal at Spencer Street with two minutes to spare. I had done it many times before, on my vacation trips back to New South Wales, but this was my first indication that Gippsland was different. A porter put me wise, a taxi-driver did his best, and I arrived at Flinders Street Station just in time to pay the driver the double fare I’d promised him, grab my cases and run on to the platform to see the Gippslander pulling out, heading for I knew not what. 2 The Men from Snowy River I first heard the famous poem read at primary school in New South Wales. Mr French, the teacher, was a man’s man; that is to say, he was well accepted by farmers and cricketers and he looked on knowledgeably at the local football games, showing the same extreme-male reactions as the keen supporters around him. His wife was appreciated locally as a soprano; she sang brackets of numbers at afternoon functions and at con- certs. During the Second World War, a large number of men, nationals of countries of doubtful allegiance in the great struggle, were interned at Tocumwal, a nearby town, ‘for the duration’. By special dispensation of the camp commandant one of these men, a Latvian tenor whose stage name was Mario Dane, was allowed to visit Australian homes for rehearsals. His musical task was to partner the teacher’s wife in a number of duets in a concert ‘in aid of the war effort’. I recall very clearly the tumult of sound produced by Mario Dane and Mrs French when they first rehearsed together. As a child, I heard no music in their noises. What did assault the ear was the thick, impure, sexual-adult shouting in competition with each other; there remains also a strong memory of the teacher’s wife swooping up from her lower register to match the stagey passion of the continental, his voice wob- bling with erotic vibrato. Being a child, I preferred to go outside, but the voices of the two oddly-matched people came thrilling through the white-frosted windows of the School of Arts, came out to little ears that knew nothing of old Vienna, Lehar, or The Land of Smiles. Mr French, though, read us The Man From Snowy River. I had not then seen a mountain, let alone a pine-clad battlement raised on high, as Paterson puts it. The country of this poem was not the wheatland where my parents had their farm. Yet Mr French—old Ivan—showed a powerful assumption that these verses would produce in us an automatic reac- 3 tion. Here, his voice told us, is our unofficial anthem. The tale of the stockman’s heroic ride would stir the inarticulate pride of any Australian boy or girl. Well, maybe. As a child, I wanted enemies. The Japanese and Germans, with their unspeakable atrocities, were fine; one could bomb and torture them in the secret places of one’s mind and in the schoolyard with the greatest of pleasure. Alongside these playground satisfactions, the famous feat of horsemanship seemed very flat beer. I wanted life, and that included death, love and cruelty: so he caught his horse; so what? It seemed a puny sort of heroism to me, after the war news I was hearing. I thought Ivan was up the pole, but like his wife, I couldn’t help responding to the Latvian singer with the half-Italian name; he had an exotic lushness about the way he displayed his emotions, alongside which the Australian teacher, for all his forcefulness, seemed dry and plain. Over the next few years, this feeling intensified in me. Going home to New South Wales after a term at the university used to be a severe test. The countryside, once the memory of Melbourne’s green gardens had faded, was able to recast its spell on me; but the life it offered! Bowls, cricket, ploughing; when will it rain? Bags to the acre, lamb-marking, sheepskins, and snakes in the dam. Get the plumber out to look at the windmill, sound the tanks to see how many rungs of water are left. The homes? Sun-blasted, with pepper trees, or new brick, with rubbishy trappings from the local gift-shop. Auctioneers, canal-diggers, drovers, water-bailiffs, the local sergeant, the newsagent with the hearing-aid who turned the other ear and said ‘Hubby?’ for ‘I beg your pardon?’ Yes, good people, but ... but what about Bruckner’s majestic piety? You couldn’t tell me the arid nuns in the blinds-drawn house partook of that tradition! People thereabouts had their breakdowns, but that couldn’t be what Mahler was talking about in his music? True, the town had its characters, but they weren’t Don Quixote, Falstaff, Hassan or Peer Gynt. Petty crime in our village had none of the fearful temptation offered to Faustus by the devil; a downfall might be represented by getting kicked off the council, or going broke and selling out. How flat was this after Hamlet and Lear! We seemed to live in a moral landscape that was flat and uneventful. The imaginative richness of the European civilisation 4 that we read about in Melbourne seemed to mock me as I walked up and down our little town. Where were the Mozarts here? We had a sign- writer, but scarcely an El Greco; we had an amateur brass-band, but no musicians; little brick or wooden churches with lead-light windows ... but where were the soaring Gothic spires, or the blazing stained-glass of Belgium and France? If our best singer was Mrs French, how could a Schubert ever come to maturity in our country? Brahms could sing to catch your heart and Donne’s poems made you quiver, and Keats ... who did we have to speak for us? The bloody man from Snowy Bloody River? If that was Australia, they could stick it.