Poor white country. Little makeshift settlements, their tin roofs extinguished with paint or still rawly flashing, huddle round a weatherboard spire. Spindly windmills stir the air. There are water tanks in the yards, half-smothered under bougainvillea; sheds painted a rusty blood-colour, all their timbers awry but the old nails strongly holding, slide sideways at an alarming angle; and everywhere, scattered about on burnt-off slopes and in naked paddocks, the parts of Holdens, Chevvies, Vanguards, Pontiacs, and the engines of heavy transports, spring up like bits of industrial sculpture or the remains of highway accidents awaiting a poor man's resurrection. A tin lizzie only recently taken off the road suddenly explodes and takes wing as half a dozen chooks come squarking and flapping from the sprung interior.
Nothing is ever finished here, but nothing is done with either. Everything is in process of being dismantled, reconstructed, recycled, and turned by the spirit of improvisation into something else. A place of transformations.
At one point on the highway, surprisingly balanced above ground and about the same length as the Siamese Royal Barge, is the Big Banana, a representation of that fruit in garish yellow plaster. Two hundred miles further on and you come to the Big Pineapple, also in plaster, and with a gallery under the crown for viewing the surrounding hills. Between the two you are in another country. Men work in shorts in the fields and are of one colour with the earth, a fiery brick-red. Kids go barefoot, moving off the track on to the tufted bank with a studied slowness, as if they had heard somewhere that there is a fortune to be made by getting struck. Little girls in faded frocks hang over gates, dispiritedly waving, or in bare yards sit dangling their legs from an elongated inner-tube that has been hoisted aloft and found new life as a swing.
Every significant happening here belongs to the past and was of a geological nature. A line of extinct volcanoes whose fires were dashed out several millennia back, leaving a heap of dark, cone-shaped clinkers, are the most striking components of the scene. Cooling as they have in odd shapes, they have ceased to be terrible and are merely curious. Even their names in the Aboriginal language, which were often crude but did at least speak up for the mysteries, have dwindled on the local tongue to mere unpronounceables, old body-jokes whose point, if there was one, has been lost in the commonness of use.
It is one of my duties as an emissary of the Arts to bring news of our national culture to this slow back-water. My name is Adrian Trisk, livewire and leprechaun; or more properly, Projects Officer with the Council for the Arts.
The routine is always the same. Advertisements are placed in the “Canefarmers’ Gazette" or “Parish Recorder” and the Shire Hall hired for say Tuesday night at seven thirty, with supper provided and no charge. I show slides of contemporary Australian painting and sometimes a film, using the projector that is housed, along with the paraphernalia for Sunday Mass, in a hutch at the back of the hall; or I lecture on the life and works of an Australian poet. Nothing rigorous. Usually there are no more than a dozen in the audience; sometimes, in bad weather or when my appearance coincides with a meeting of the.
Country Women's Association, just two or three. Most difficult of all are places like Karingai where the population “mixed" — that is, part Australian, part Italian, part Aboriginal, part Indian; and worst of all is Karingai itself, where even the Indian population is split into sects that worship at rival temples. I make certain, so far as these things can be arranged, that towns like Karingai appear on my itinerary no more than once every two or three years. Bridging the gap is all very well, but there is a limit to what a man can do with the discovery poems of Douglas Stewart and a slide evening with William Dobell.
The culture business, it's a box of knives! I could show wounds. I have been at it now for half a lifetime: twenty years as an expatriate with the British Council in Sarawak, Georgetown, Abadan; a stint at a West African University; two years as tutor to the brother-in-law of a sheikh — I'm not altogether without experience. But at fifty-six I have no firm foot on the ladder. There are always the young, pouring out of the universities with their heads full of schemes for converting the masses; little blond geniuses, all charm and killer-instinct, looking for cover while they finish a novel; girls with a flair for doling out rejection-slips and serving coffee to visiting celebrities; streamlined lesbians who know just how to re-organise everything so that it works. I have enemies everywhere, and they have not scrupled to poison the ear of authority with insinuations that I am not what I claim to be: that my post at that flyblown university, for example, was not on the teaching side but in catering. Life is a constant struggle.
I meet it with energy. Boundless energy. Nothing disarms people so completely, I have discovered, as breathless enthusiasm. Hopping about on one foot, crowing, chuckling, slapping one's thigh, pinching people's elbows in an excess of delight at finding them alive, well, and just where they might be expected to be; peppering the speech with absurd formulations like “Aren't we all having a marvellous time? Isn't this just what the doctor ordered?” or such patent insincerities as “Hello there, all you lovely, lovely people!;” above all buttering the ear with flattery, flattery so excessive that only the most hardened egotist could take it seriously and lesser men curl up with embarrassment — these are powerful weapons in the right hand, and immediately establish the user as a harmless crank, too clownlike, too scatty, too effusive and highly strung to be a master of calculation.
Well, it's one of the strategies. In fact I am full of good will and want only to be left alone to make my way and to enjoy a moment of late sunshine at the top of the tree, but to achieve that I must protect myself, and protecting myself means playing the buffoon and avoiding places like Karingai where for reasons quite beyond my control (like the fact that the wretched Indians have rival temples) I will be left presenting my Brett Whiteley extravaganza to the wife of the Methodist minister, a retired timbergetter who is rewriting the works of Henry Lawson, and the hapless two-year incumbent of the one-teacher school.
2
I had finished my lecture and was waiting for the minister's wife, C. of E. on this occasion, to lead me to supper. The coffee-urn and the trestle table laden with sausage rolls, anzacs, rainbow cake, date-loaf, and pavlova were waiting at the end of the hall, presided over by two large-bosomed ladies who had spent the whole of my talk in setting it up, its impressive abundance determined less by the expected size of the audience than by their own sense of what was due to the Arts — the Arts, out here, meaning Cookery, of which the higher forms are cake-decoration and the ornamental bottling of carrots. The platform lights had been removed, the extension lead and projector, like some image of local veneration, had been restored to its hutch.
“If y’ don't mind, Mr. Trist, I'd appreciate a few words. You might ‘ear somethin’ t’ yer advantage.”
It was the legal phrase that startled me — I was used to the little confusion about my name.
The speaker was a diminutive woman of sixty-five or seventy, very battered looking, whom I had taken when she first came in, she was so dark-eyed and brown, for one of the Indians; except that she wore a hat, a crumpled straw with two roses pinned to the brim, and a pair of white gloves that suggested Anglo-Saxon formality, the effort a woman makes who has to see her lawyer about the terms of a separation, or a doctor for what might prove, if luck is against her, to be a fatal illness— occasions she would want, later, to remember and be dressed for.