This land is our land

"There is no denying that fashions among farmers have sometimes had calamitous results": Don Watson. Photo: Getty Images

The brutal reality of growing up on a farm invoked confusion in Don Watson. But he says there is a dignity to living on the land that city folk fail to appreciate.

In his novel Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn, Henry Kingsley said that free men in the Australian bush never touched their hats to anyone. My father never passed a woman in the street without touching his and he would do the same to any man he didn't know or believed worthy of respect. He was a smallholder of industrious, sober and gentle habits, modest ambition, a mortgage and little ready cash.

He split wood under the pine tree out the back. We could hear the blows: hear the blue gum cleave if the grain was even, tear but not surrender if knotted, the next blow just hard enough to force it apart, but not so hard that the axe jammed in the block or sent the pieces flying further than he could retrieve by bending where he stood. Every move was practised. Find the rhythm in it. Don't force it. In getting a cow in a bail, or drafting sheep in a pen, taking the harrows off the tractor or the horns off a cow, there is a rhythm to be found. As nature finds the easiest way to do things, find the way of nature. He was a Zen sort of farmer.

Meat market: A buyer checks out cattle in a saleyard before they're auctioned. Photo: Fairfaxsyndication.com

In the parable, the good soil speaks of a good heart. His heart was as good as he could make it: every wound of childhood sutured, every savage instinct denied satisfaction, but not always the indignation that thundered at the uncontained instincts of others, or signs of them in his children.

The ungodly folk on whom he visited his judgments were those whose baser natures were not contained: sloth, drunkenness, profanity, foul mouths, lasciviousness, cruelty, troublemaking and bluster, he could not bear. He tried to love his neighbour but, as a righteous man regardeth his beast, who could love the neighbour who mistreated his animals, or the bully who raged at man and beast alike? Or the man who never cut his thistles or pulled his ragwort so the seeds blew across the boundary fence?

He couldn't love such neighbours, but he internalised his disgruntlements, rendered them to the same inner authority that kept everything else in check. And as he ruled himself he would rule this bit of land: with hard work and obedience to the commandments, with irony and without anger, envy or cruelty.

We had dairy cows, but he always preferred crops and sheep. Then he began buying yearling heifers from "up north" where they were cheap as a rule. They would arrive on the train, skinny and half mad, but our good grass reformed them. He'd calve them down, which is to say, get them in calf ("pregnant" was an impolite word that we did not use in any context), and once they were delivered of their offspring, he'd break them into the routines of the milking shed and sell them to the local dairy farmers. He also bought springers, heifers already in calf.

The business involved a lot of bovine copulation, a lot of placenta and blood in the paddocks, a lot of bellowing and kicking and shitting in the cowshed, a lot of dead calves, veterinary bills and ingeniously polite denial of the brutal reality of our enterprise, and a lot of guilt, loathing and confusion in me.

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This land is our land