Читать книгу Of Rivers, Baguettes and Billabongs - Reg Egan - Страница 5

Writers are a curious mob: a few make a handsome living, some make enough to exist and thereby justify their occupation but the majority survive - somehow. So, why do they do it? Why do they stick at it?

The glib answer is: because they love it. But perhaps it is more than that; perhaps it is also a wish to share. They have come upon something or have discovered something which is too good to keep to themselves and so they want to share it with you; whether you like it or not. And while I hope that I do not sound too fervent, that is the principal reason for this book: a wish to share two great loves; one which began to manifest itself when I was as young as six or seven and the other which crept into my life when I was in my early thirties and burst like a grand fireworks display when I crossed the Rhine into France in 1972.

I lived the first nineteen or so years of my life in the bush. I do not mean the country, which is sometimes referred to as “the bush” by clever and disparaging media people, I actually mean the bush. It was a place called Tolmie and it was in the hills halfway between the towns of Mansfield and Whitfield in north-eastern Victoria.

Our farm had deep rich brown soil, a big rainfall and was cold and frosty and wet in winter with the occasional three or four inches (75 – 100 millimetres) of snow. In summer it could be hot but the nights were always cool to cold.

If you walked up to the back of our farm (and on to the neighbour’s farm) you had a reasonably good view down towards Cheshunt and the valley of the King River; you were aware of the wonderfully scenic Powers Lookout a few miles away and of the Mt Buffalo park in the far distance; there was Mt Feathertop straight ahead but also very distant and Mt Hotham, wonderful, enigmatic Hotham and Dinner Plain near by; and finally as you turned to your right there was Mt Cobbler and Stirling and Buller.

Great country, great bush — with its elusive wild orchids, its startlingly clear creeks and their rocks, its rich hillsides blazing in the yellow wattles on a sunny afternoon in late winter, its serious gum trees in their unique greens, deep blue and grey-greens and its questioning native animals like its quick gliders, its ringtail possums, its mumbling, bumbling wombats, its clumsy wallabies and graceful grey kangaroos, and, and… Yes the list could be long.

Even as a boy I was in love with it all, and thanks to my parents and the majority of our schoolteachers, I was rather proud to be an Australian. Yet I had seen a tiny portion of this country. I did not so much as hear the roll of the sea and feel the sand beneath my feet until I was nineteen, and I knew nothing of the beauty of Tasmania, or of the glorious eastern coast of Australia. I had not been to the mountains of our Great Dividing Range nor had I felt the soft and deep warmth of our sub-tropical state of Queensland, and although I had heard about our cattle kings and our intrepid explorers, I had only read of the Outback and the glorious shapes and colours of the centre of this continent. But, ignorant though I was and am, I came to love it all. Then France arrived on the scene.

You can love two countries. Indeed you can love more than two, but let me, a real Aussie, explain to you about France.

Wine has taken me on a terrible, and a momentous journey. It was wine that led me to one of Melbourne’s most honoured wine merchants Seabrook & Son adjoining the demolished Selbourne Chambers in Bourke Street. And it was Tom Seabrook (“old Tom”, the father of Doug) who suggested that I should get a copy of the little Penguin paperback The Generous Earth by Philip Oyler, and it was Philip the lovesick Englishman who started my affair with France. Philip literally immersed himself in pre-World War Two France, but it was the valley of the Dordogne River which captured him heart and soul and held him a prisoner for the rest of his life.

Then came Freda White and her Three Rivers of France — Dordogne, Lot and Tarn, and then we went to France and finally we came upon the valley of the Dordogne. What more could a man ask?

Well, he could, as I have said, ask for a chance to share his love with you. Then comes the problem — how do you concentrate and condense your justification for the affection that you have for both these remarkable countries?

It seemed to me that you would choose a thing or an area that was involved in the history of each country and was to an extent at its geographical centre or near centre. At first therefore, I chose two rivers: the Dordogne in France and the Darling in Australia. Now in France I could have picked the Loire with its historical but perhaps too pretty and perfect châteaux; or I might have chosen the Seine rising in some quite beautiful country just to the north of the middle of France; or I might have written about the mighty Rhone and its remarkable exit in the south of France; or I could have selected the Lot. But I finally concluded that it was the Dordogne originating in the Massif Central, that was most representative of the France that I had come to know and love, and especially villages and towns in its valley like Carennac and Sarlat.

The next task was to justify my Australian river — The Darling. The river which is in the eastern half of Australia marks, in its west, the start of the Outback. The Outback; what a word. But the more I researched and looked at the Darling River itself, the more I realised that it would not do. It is a boundary of sorts but it does not represent Australia in the way that the Dordogne Valley represents France. It is a river that seemed to gather together the highly adventurous squatters and nomads of the outback with their more conservative counterparts to the east of the river and it also encompassed many such squatters and station owners from over the border in Queensland.

But it was, even before the coming of the upstream irrigators and cotton magnates, an unreliable river, a stream that was as our historian C.E.W. Bean admitted in the early 1900s, “a river [which] will be navigable, on an average, for six or eight months in each year [and only] in the lower reaches”. And even then we are speaking of navigable for relatively small steamers like his paddle steamer the Dreadnought.

No, the Darling and its valley and the valleys of its tributaries like the Bogan and the Culgoa and the Namoi and the rest of them, bear no resemblance to the Dordogne and its tributaries. Those Australian valleys are to a great extent uninhabitable, but the Darling does, as I have said, mark a boundary in Australia — it always has and it always will. It is the boundary that signals the beginning of the Outback and that Outback and its interpretation by writers and poets and painters and their like (living principally to the east and in the large towns and cities) describes and fixes many of the characteristics for which Australians are known and admired. And so, I could and I have, therefore, written about the actual valley and the people of the Dordogne but the spirit of the Darling and its influence, its disproportionate influence on the creation of the Australian character as we have come to know it.

I ask you to bear in mind, when reading this account of part of the geography and history of France and Australia, that it does not claim to be a complete or an exhaustive account. I hope it will simply whet your appetite and that you will now begin to explore the two countries and their architecture, their countryside, their writers and poets and their food and their differences and similarities — go deeper and go further than I have, but start your journeys. Taste the essence of France by travelling from Clermont Ferrand in the Auvergne and finishing on the Atlantic coast and, perhaps follow our route in Australia: along the east coast and then in a wandering way arrive eventually at Bourke, on the Darling and then wander back again.

And if you do not succumb completely and utterly to the charms, and the differences of each country, I’ll… Yes, indeed I will.

Reg Egan