City and Country

On ABC Radio ages ago, there was a discussion about two contrasting poems; Peter Porter’s On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod and Les Murray’s The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle. Porter, who grew up in Australia and moved to London, wrote of leaving Australia, exchanging it for a cultured, urban life. A place where culture thrives and rustic machismo dare not intrude. By contrast, Murray is a ruddy-faced, typically country bloke. His thesis is that the country sustains a culture where neighbours look after each other, where everyone gets along.

I have just finished the first of three novellas in Acts of Love by Jon Lonie. After I first read the volume I managed to meet the author and wove his portrait, which I must exhume from my collection of photos on cd. It was about a gifted, gay youth who grows up in southern Qld during the era of Premier Danish/NZ Bjelke_Peterson. BP molded public government into blatant political indifference, for instance calling press conferences “feeding the chooks”.

At this time I had already moved to Sydney where I was living but looked north to BP’s regime as if I were a type of cultural refugee, determined never to return. How could you live with such a betrayal of democracy? How could you accept that your fellow Qlders had allowed it to happen, okay, on 20% of the state vote. The punchline of Lonie’s work was that if you grew up in a Qld country town which found out that you were a “poofta” the only solution was to move to Sydney. I had done this years earlier.

At the end of high school I joined the local council gang that was put to work digging canals or drains with mattocks. The gruff males terrified me; I felt them constantly criticising me and wondered if that would at any time turn to violence. We used mattocks for our work. The practised hacks of the trade used an overhand swing so that the force of gravity was enough to break the ground. By contrast, I used little “nibbles” which one of the gang scornfully described as Chinaman’s gardening.

We were working at a particularly beautiful town Finch Hatton. In this week’s Fake or Fortune show I discovered that the original FH is in Scotland. The roadside where we worked was overshadowed by Babylonian hanging gardens, vines and rainforests. The men would stop work from time to time and roll a ciggie. I took those moments to grab a scrap of paper from my pocket and scribble a line or phrase which I later combined as poems. Please forgive the transliteration of a country accent but the foreman of the gang would ask about the “lidas” (letters) I was writing. As a non smoker I thought I was entitled to equal time.

I had begun to write poems in mid high school and thought that a university degree based on my favourite activity would be a positive outcome. Had there been a more insightful guide, they would have noted my creativity, both visual and verbal, and advised me to get into art school, However, as John Lennon wrote, life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans. So, I came to live in Australia’s first and largest city, a vast, anonymous, fostering space especially for gays.