Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th) Read online

  If we repeat this tour next year I wonder if they will return and bring their new work to show me. If just one woman at each stop brought a rough-stitched sampler of her husband, we would have a gallery. I could stitch them together into a massive quilt – ‘the beloved farmers of Victoria, caught at rest, by their wives’.

  Sister Crock was here first (I have heard the men joke about the ‘maiden’ on the maiden journey). Mary Maloney came next, then me. When I was appointed I made an agreement with Mary. She was to improve my cooking and I was to correct her sewing, but it hasn’t worked out like that at all.

  When we are not lecturing, or preparing, or travelling in the sitting car, we roam the train together. We have attended some of the lecturettes and watched all of the demonstrations. Our favourite is the ‘detraining of stock’. As soon as we arrive at a stop the stock hands don their white coats and climb through the slats into the animal wagons. Mr Plattfuss, the Head of Stock, makes an announcement. He holds a loudhailer in one hand and waves theatrically with the other. BANG, the ramp doors of the wagons are let down all at once and the stock is walked out. The biggest bulls come first, blinking into the bright light. An almost continuous line of animals follows, all of them stiff-legged, not yet adjusted to solid ground after the journey.

  Big crowds gather for the detraining. They push forward towards the train only to be barked at by Mr Plattfuss, whose handlebar moustache neatly mimics the curve of the loudhailer he holds to his mouth.

  ‘Stand back. Stand back. Make way for some of the finest animals in the nation.’

  Mr Plattfuss announces the name of each beast as it descends the ramp. There are many different breeds of sheep and goats but most attention is paid to the cattle. The cows shine in their loveliness, different colours and shapes. Some are sweetly pretty, others are exotic with deeply set eyes behind dark, heavy lashes.

  Mr Plattfuss tugs at his too-tight white coat and reels off statistics about calving rates and butterfat production. He calls an elegant Friesian the pride of her breed. He says a Red Poll is the cow of the future.

  Then the folly cow is led out, always last. She is just an ordinary cow. Mary says she is actually quite a good example of an ordinary cow. Mr Plattfuss can’t wait. She is still on the ramp and he is deriding her.

  ‘This, gentlemen,’ he says, ‘is the cow of the past. A plain scrub cow with no particular parentage. Her butterfat production is poor but she still eats the same as her better sisters. You must weed out these poor producers. She is the folly cow – it is your own folly to keep wasting fodder on her.’

  The folly cow blinks and bends her big knees awkwardly. As if on cue she looses her footing on the ramp and slips over the last rung. A young stock attendant, the very youngest (no one wants to lead the folly cow), walks her away.

  Mary shakes her head angrily and says it is time for some cooking. I help her mix up a batch of rough, crumbly pastry. She fills it with black treacle. We bake treacle pie for the folly cow and feed her in the evenings after all the crowds have left. The treacle is doing her coat wonders; she glistens with good health.

  ‘Hello, my sweet,’ we say, like she is a child. Mary holds the pie as she bites through the crust and uses her fat pink tongue to scoop up the treacle. ‘Hello, my lovely Folly.’ She smells glorious, of warm fur and milk and sweet treacle. Mary is dismissive of the fancy breeds. She says when the drought strikes and times are hard you need a good-doer – you need an honest and practical animal that will make the best of what’s on offer. She could have been describing herself.

  Mr Ohno has seen us tending Folly. At Golden Square he walked off into the hills and picked her a thick sward of purple pasture. Mary had to explain that it was Paterson’s Curse – a highly toxic weed causing spontaneous calf abortion. She had to mime some of the difficult words and it was hard to tell if he understood.

  Mr Ohno likes animals and he is easy with children. At Bendigo I watched from the carriage window as he teased two small farm boys holding a Shetland pony on a length of dirty clothesline.

  ‘Is kangaloo?’ Mr Ohno asked them, mock serious with his hands in his pockets. The little boys doubled over with laughter, banging in to each other and holding their hands across their stomachs.

  ‘Oh. Is not kangaloo?’

  Mr Ohno asked the boys their names and numbers and offered them a few coins for a ride of their charge. The Shetland pony, true to form, was hugely fat. Mr Ohno hoisted himself up as if mounting a beer barrel, his slim legs splayed wide around the pony’s swollen belly. The ensemble was incongruous but somehow also stylish. Mr Ohno’s swallowtail jacket looked like a smart riding coat and his black hair could have passed for a shiny helmet. And they were oddly in proportion.

  One of the boys slapped the pony over the rump and it lurched into a reluctant trot. Mr Ohno grabbed a hank of mane with one hand and put the other out for balance. Then he looked across at the train, he turned his head and scanned the carriages, looking in at the windows. He was smiling a proud smile and I realised he was riding the pony for me.

  — 4 —

  A LECTURETTE ON GOOD SOIL HUSBANDRY

  Women don’t generally attend farming lecturettes but Mary’s story has sparked my interest in super phosphate. There are big crowds at Warracknabeal so a marquee is erected alongside the train. I sit in the last row with a flap of canvas lifting against my back. The men in front of me are wearing their hats so my view is blocked. I can’t see Mr Pettergree standing at the front but the murmuring of the men stops as soon as he starts to talk. He has an English country accent – each sentence carried by the same singsong rhythm – and no regard for his ‘h’s’. There is another quality too – a certain pitch or urgency.

  ‘Imagine you want to kill your dog – do you cut off its paw and then wait?’ The men shift a little in their seats.

  ‘Do you watch the thing limp behind you and bleed and howl? Of course not. You shoot it outright.’

  He pauses.

  ‘Then why, I ask you, do we do it to trees? You ringbark a tree today it’ll die sure enough, but it could still be standing there haunting you in twenty years time. You can’t farm properly with paddocks full of dead wood. Your first duty as farmers is to completely clear the land. Once you’ve got nothing between yourself and the soil – that’s the time for agriculture.’

  The men nod. There are a few faint ‘hear-hears’.

  ‘You men might think you know how to farm, but you know nothing. You know nothing because you are always looking in the wrong place. You’re watching at the ears of your corn or the heads of your wheat and forgetting the most important component of the whole equation – the soil. For the past seven years I have studied the soils of Victoria and I have no hesitation in telling you that your soil – the soil of the Mallee – is the poorest. You are the men with the greatest challenge of all. Your soil is barely more than sand. Leave it without crop cover and it’ll up and blow back to the seaside. Remember that the soil is a living organism. If you want to feed yourself you must feed the soil. You have to get to know your soil. Gentlemen, you have to watch it and touch it. You have to taste it.’

  There is a pause, the audience shuffle in their seats and look about uncomfortably. I stand up to get a better view. The new soil and cropping expert, Mr Pettergree, is kneeling next to the lectern as if he is praying, his white laboratory coat bunches and folds at his thighs. He digs into the dirt with a penknife, extracts a clod and rolls it in his hand like tobacco. Then he stands. Slowly and with great deliberation he lifts the soil to his mouth and licks. I see his tongue flick over the dirt, all the while his eyes look straight ahead, holding the gaze of the audience.

  He motions for the men to copy him. A few do, then they shake their heads and spit with distaste. But there is little time to ponder. Mr Pettergree resumes his spiel. He talks rapidly, leaping from one subject to the next. He is taking us on a journey starting at the very beginning of the earth. He talks of carboniferous sands dotted with the fossil
ised bones of ancient creatures; he talks of Australia’s inland sea. He describes our soils as the relics of ancient history – the red-brown earths, red clays, brownish sands, stony downs, desert loams, black-cracking clays, soft-red soils and the poorest soils of all – the skeletals.

  He explains the moral and patriotic duty of the farmer who comes across a ruined soil to repair it, and he shows us how. He shows us super phosphate.

  All of the audience is on their feet now, but the man in front of me moves a little so I get a better view. Mr Pettergree is sorting through some papers at the lectern. He is around thirty, not tall, but strongly built. His chest, in a grey serge suit, juts out noticeably at the front. He has dark, coppery red hair. He is sweating. Strong and red, this is the sense I get of him – a man flushed with purpose.

  Mr Pettergree has only recently joined the train and I have never seen him in the sitting car. I have noticed him though. I watched him recently through the window while we were stopped for water at a small siding. He walked some distance into a paddock and dug a hole with a hand pick. As he was walking back to the train I saw several bulging calico bags threaded through his belt. I think he was sampling the soil. I smiled to myself as I thought he was taking a souvenir from the route of the journey in the same way Mary collects the posters we send ahead to each station advertising our arrival. But I was wrong. Mr Pettergree wasn’t collecting out of sentiment, he was collecting for knowledge.

  Mr Pettergree hands around two photographs and waits while they are passed from man to man, row to row. When they reach the back the young farmer next to me is confused. Should he give me the photographs, or keep holding them? He passes them to me abruptly, saving himself from having to walk to the front and return them. The first photograph shows a stubbly paddock with a few poor looking sticks of wheat. The second a lush and healthy stand of tall, shiny stalks. It would be easy to say the photographs were simply taken on different farms, except for the sign that appears in both. PETTERGREE’S SUPER PHOSPHATE TRIAL, it says, in black paint on a white timber cross.

  Mr Pettergree drags a heavy sack from under the lecture table to show us. The men crane their necks to see as he digs his hands into the sack and holds two great handfuls aloft – an offering. I am surprised it is just a powder, pale and chalky.

  ‘This – this is farmers’ gold,’ he says.

  ‘Australia’s soils are old men – this is the tonic that will bring back their youth.’

  The lecturette is over. The men leave the benches and Mr Pettergree starts to pack his equipment away. I sit and watch him for a minute and then get up to return the photographs. He hears me walking towards him down the aisle between the benches and looks up. He frowns a little. He is clearly surprised to see a woman at his lecturette. I hold the photographs out to him. ‘Here. These are yours.’

  He stares at me fixedly. He is staring at my mouth. I touch my lips, brush the grains of soil away and smile nervously.

  ‘Hello, Mr Pettergree from soil. I am Miss Finnegan from sewing.’

  I have learnt this about Mr Pettergree: he does not smoke; he is from Yorkshire; he did night classes at Melbourne University while working in an insurance office by day; he has spent the past seven years at the Rutherglen Research Station; he knows more about soil than any man in Victoria. I start to notice him. I notice how he hangs back when collecting his sandwiches so we arrive at the lunch table together. He favours egg and lettuce. I notice that he often arrives late when a local dignitary is making the welcome speech and sidles slowly through the crowd until he is standing behind me. But it is Mary who uncovers something interesting. She asks the stock hands about him and after some questioning and some fruitcake and more questioning and a jam sponge they finally tell her what Mr Pettergree does of an evening.

  They call him ‘the taster’. They say he can identify any place in the state of Victoria just by the taste of its soil. The stock hands run the racket. They put out the word from station to station, seeking the type of men to take such a gamble. They spell out the rules – bring a handful of soil wrapped in newspaper or a handkerchief and bring a pound. Double or nothing.

  It happens in the evening, after the displays have been packed away and the superintendent has been driven into town to the best hotel. The men gather on the tracks at the front of the train. They light a fire in a drum and share a beer. They wait for the taster. When he is ready he walks out of the dark and takes a position near the fire. He needs the light to see the sample and a little warm water to mix with it before he tastes. He doesn’t drink the beer. He isn’t part of the jostling or backslapping or money talk. He comes, tastes and leaves, taking half of each stake with him. The stock hands pool the rest, buying beer and sometimes spirits, funding their poker marathons and, in the bigger towns, visiting the tabbies. The stock hands often theorise about what Pettergree does with the money – send it back to the old country to a sweetheart, buy gold, pay off his debts . . . In more drunken moments they say he eats it and tastes every place in Australia it has been, ending up back at the mint.

  The larking stops as soon as the taster arrives. He takes the sample, lifts it to his tongue, closes his eyes, considers, spits.

  ‘Rupanyup. Closer to Minyip maybe, but not far off.’

  The sample bringer is agog. The odds had looked good – what man could match a soil to its location by taste alone? The stock hands take his money and give him a beer in consolation.

  The taster rarely fails. Sometimes tricks are played. At Avoca, where he was expecting the gravelly duplexes of the Pyrenees, a Gippsland black loam was presented. The sample bringer, a battered looking labourer with ill-fitting false teeth and a nasty sneer, insisted the sample came from the Avoca football ground. The taster knew the truth before the soil touched his tongue. The labourer demanded his winnings, his voice rising to a whining falsetto, but his crookedness was well known amongst the crowd.

  ‘Tell the truth, Frogley, you bloody liar.’

  ‘Neville bloody Frogley. You couldn’t lie straight in your own bed.’

  Finally he admitted that, yes, he had taken a trip to Leongatha and brought back the soil packed around some fish he’d caught in the river . . .

  ‘The Bass River?’ Pettergree asked.

  The labourer was silent for a minute then exploded with frustration. ‘Yes, the bloody Bass River.’ He looked at the men gathered around him and kicked at the ground with his boot.

  ‘Strewth, it’s only soil.’

  — 5 —

  THE HONEY CAR

  We have stopped for a few days’ rest at a siding near Dimboola. The animals are released into paddocks alongside the railway line and we are driven into town to buy supplies. The mayor and his wife take some of the train’s senior men and all three of its women on a tour of the town hall and a new cricket ground. I picnic with Mary at Woraigworm Station and we look for Mallee fowl, a strange scientific bird that builds a nest like an oven and bakes its precious eggs into life. The people of Dimboola bring us their produce: bags of flour, a watermelon large enough to sit on, some beehives ripe for extraction.

  I write up my notes and sort through my samples and supplies. I have twenty-one half-finished turn-back collars. One for each town we have visited. I am walking alongside the train, checking to see if Folly is getting her fair share of the pasture, when a window slides up and Robert Pettergree calls down to me from the honey car.

  ‘Come up here,’ he says. ‘The apiarists are at the pub and these hives need doing before they candy.’

  He hoists me up into the car by the plump of my arm. It is hot and dark inside – the shutters are drawn to calm the bees. He places a knife in my hand; its bone handle radiates heat.

  ‘Here,’ he says, ‘like this.’

  He hands me a wooden frame strung with a fine gauge wire mesh. Each tiny square is filled with waxy honey. I sluice the wire with the hot knife. The wax melts. Honey drips slowly, brightly, through the mesh into the tub of the extractor. It is so hot in
the honey car. I plunge the knife into a jug of boiling water to clean it. The stove at the end of the car crackles, a kettle steaming on top of it.

  ‘Here,’ he says. ‘Here.’ He is moving quickly, going outside opening hive boxes, removing frames, bringing them to me. Each frame brings a few bees with it. Slow, sad bees stuck amongst the honey and the wax. Slow bees crushed between the frames. Slow bees in my hair and on my wrists.

  I am sweating. Sweat slides from my face and throat and mixes with the honey. There is honey on my cheeks, my fingers, my dress, on the toes of my shoes.

  He tends the fire and refills the knife-jug with boiling water. His part of the job is done. He doesn’t thank me. He doesn’t offer to help. He just stands and watches as I sluice the last of the frames.

  ‘I did a bit of bee work with my uncle. In the old country.’

  I nod. My arms ache with the weight of the frames.

  ‘It’s hot in here.’

  I nod again. Then he takes off his shirt, pulling it over his head, the buttons still done up. It is so tender a thing to see – his face hidden in the cotton like a boy.

  I watch him as he takes a cup of water, drinks, and splashes it onto his head and chest. Then he is behind me, sprinkling water over me, flicking it through his fingers. I lean back towards him. He paints me with water, his thick finger dipping into the cup then tracing my forehead and the curve of my jaw.

  There is a sense of everything crumbling and swirling.

  ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘You’re not finished.’

  So I stand with him behind me and drag the knife over the last frame again. But I am weak with it. Honey is splashing and dripping, missing the extractor. He is wetting my arms, pushing his fingers up under my sleeves, wetting my skin, pushing higher, searching out the join between arm and body.