The motel has a neon sign–Reasonable Rates. I turn into a vacant margin.
Sit there. Listen to the crickets, the road trains hauling epic poems interstate.
‘Some lines are straight, some bend a little’ Peter Bakowski and Ken Bolton, The Elsewhere Variations
If you’ve studied literature then you’ll know Australia is not a real place but a figment of someone’s imagination, with the Mallee being most imaginary of all. I love the Mallee. It’s chockers with images: Burke and Wills carting a grand piano through Donald; Lascelles growing tulips in the desert; Shaw Neilson painting the Mallee green; Shakespeare on the Murray; Homer at Minyip, Swan Lake in Mildura; the ‘Fun Town’ of Monarto. Images run amuck in the Mallee. I can’t possibly list them all.
Nowadays, of course, everyone is Mallee Mad thanks to the genius of Harper and Hammer. Great busloads of tourists are always rattling through screaming SMALL TOWN BIG SECRETS and demanding to see where the priest shot his congregation or the farmer turned his gun on his family. You might quibble I suppose that Hammer’s Scrublands is actually set in the Riverina of NSW or that I sometimes conflate the Mallee with the Wimmera. Precisely. The Mallee respects no artificially imposed borders.
When I think of the Mallee I see Sidney Nolan’s painting of a dying Burke in the desert dissolving into nothingness. Those poor pioneers left no imprint of their lives on this arid interior except I suppose the Big Mallee Fowl at Patchewollock. Their crops perished without water and extraordinary to think that through the terrible drought of 1914 the poems of Mallee farmer John Shaw Neilson turned the bleached landscape green. Everything was green, even the petticoats of his bonnie lasses doing the highland fling at Lake Tyrrell.
I get a little lost in the Mallee. Is that drinking fountain up at Hopetoun that commemorates the ‘King of the Mallee’, Edward Lascelles, ironic? What did Lascelles see out there that his contemporaries missed? ‘Disgusting country’ wrote JW Beilby in 1849. An ‘abomination of desolation’ said Duffy Minister of Lands in 1880. Lascelles wasn’t deterred. He set about turning his fantastical dreams into reality, planting a six-acre garden of orchards and flowers beds, which he watered with an open channelled irrigation system linked to the lake nearby. He made an oasis, until the water turned to salt and everything bar two olive trees died.
The 1985 Mallee Conservation Report, where I got those quotes, is a heart-breaking record of wormy fence posts and rusty wire. It’s a daunting task, try as the historical societies across the Mallee valiantly do, to weave these sad relics into human history. And yet salinity can’t poison the Mallee imaginary any more than Lascelles and Shaw Neilson suffered from heat stroke. Go up to Hopetoun and Sea Lake and see it for yourself. Stand there and imagine their Scotland and Kew Gardens. You can’t. It’s impossible. They were the very first Absurdists – the myth of Sisyphus and all that.
It took decades to kill the elegant, sand loving trees and achieve this salinated wasteland of today. Cutting down the trees didn’t work. They had to dig out those pesky Mallee roots year after year because they kept regrowing. They called it grubbing, an image of repetitive, near perfect, futility.
Lascelles and Shaw Neilson are very like the narrator in Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts, who moves from an unnamed capital city to the borders of his imagination, somewhere in the Mallee, to write a ‘Report’ on his associative mental imagery. He’s annoyed by the endlessly flat landscape. It distracts him from his inner images of monks and stained-glass windows, which he draws from a Catholic childhood and the European books he has read. Like Shaw Neilson and Lascelles before him, the narrator must ‘guard my eyes’ from the exterior world. The droughty natural world is on a lesser aesthetic plane. Only the symbolist landscape of tulips, grubbing, green petticoats and monasteries reveal truth. Mallarme and the gang would have loved the Mallee.
All sorts of poets, painters and philosophers have been drawn to the Mallee. Some like Eric Beach just disappeared: no sightings; not even a recent poem in Cordite. Others like Homer Rieth knew how to guard his eyes and settled in very naturally, establishing a philosophical society in the tiny, enthusiastic town of Minyip. Oxbridge came to the Mallee. Rieth led the seminars on the Western canon in astonishing detail, taking them twenty years to get from Plato’s The Republic to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, 'I exist' said Sartre. ‘And I find it nauseating.’ A lot of people agreed.
Sadly, Rieth died before they could tackle Deleuze. Still, Homer stayed true to his name. He left behind two massive epic poems Wimmera and the Garden of Earth, the later being a Whitman inspired song to the Murray Basin. There are rumours, however, that the philosophical society died with him and awful if that history is extinguished. They’re sculpting a statue of Nick Cave over at his birthplace of Warracknabeal so I’m hoping for a Homer Street in Minyip soon.
The poets of course love Nhill - pronounced NIL. It’s Clive the haiku poet’s ‘favourite town’ in Elsewhere Variations. It’s where he buys his Hawaiian shirts although I’ve searched and searched and can’t find Lola’s Garage Vintage Shop. It could only be in Nhill though, halfway between Melbourne and Adelaide, where the poet pulls into the motel and listens to ‘the road trains hauling epic poems interstate’. I also feel strongly, without any evidence, that it is outside of Nhill on the highway to Border Town where Ken Bolton sees the passing trucks with the Australian poetry brands printed on their containers: ‘“Tranter Parisian” says one. “Murray: Australian Product” says another’. Such sightings could only happen in the Mallee.
- J.G.