Sheep and blackberry

I recall a schoolboy coming home
through fields of cane
to a house of tin and timber
and in the sky
a rain of falling cinders

Cattle and cane

As is Grant McLellan, whose words those are, I am a country boy who has spent nearly his whole life failing to achieve the huge dreams of childhood. Of course, my boyhood was not spent in the canefields of Queensland but among the rolling hills and yellow beaches of far west Cornwall. The wide vistas of Australia are replaced there by a closer, more intimate scenery: the countryside feels part of you, an extension of you. Of course, it helps that it isn't as poisonous or vicious as most of Queensland's natural life.

I couldn't wait to leave it though. As McLellan did, I dreamed of a bigger world. I had to go out into it to find out that it's not so much bigger as dirtier, uglier. The fulfilment that it promised is always around another corner. The most curious outcome of it all is that I yearn now for what I was so keen to put behind me: the sound of surf as I fell asleep, the smell of autumn as the mists and fruity heaviness made the air a blanket, the feeling of home you get from stone-built-houses but not from the timber shacks that people live in here (or worse, the places on this estate -- brick houses that have not been clad; so ugly that I almost weep when I walk around the streets, which I rarely do). How I loved autumn! And now I live in a place that doesn't have one. It is winter here. There was a day, around Easter, when it stopped being warm and humid and started being fresh. It will not grow much colder than it is now.

Well, I know the moral of the story: you only want what you have when it's gone. It's not a new song. And I know that if I was in Cornwall, a couple of wet winters would have me wishing for the blue skies of Brisbane's July. Cattle and cane is about the restlessness that grips the country boy, the aspirations that cannot be fulfilled because they are ever shifting, wordless (the song is almost more affecting in its lack of talk than in what it does say). It evokes for me the long days of my happy childhood: the bike rides, the grassy hillocks of the towans, the sea, scrumping in damp orchards, football at the rec, wayside brambles, love.

But I'm not by nature backward looking. I do not mind that those days are gone. I know I can have other days just as good and, above all, that my children can also have their halcyon days and love a place just as much. I have my doubts that anyone can love the southside of Brisbane the way I loved Penwith and still do, but the human heart is a strange thing and who am I to say what they will and won't care for?

***

But is there not a small piece of me that sees Zenella struggling up a steep hill from the sea to an ivyclad cottage, her hair full of salt? Do I not sometimes picture Naughtyman and Zenita laughing over their pasties, their mouths dark with the juice of berries they picked by the side of the endless lanes that lead from Hayle to nowhere in particular?

Do I not sometimes hear the churning surf and wake on a warm night, puzzled at the quiet?

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:50 am