The Road from Coorain Read Free Page A

and Scotland, and hinted at pretensions to the life of the English country gentry.
    The soldier settlers carried with them a strange mixture of feelings about the England the Australian rich emulated so sedulously. They scorned “the bloody brass hats,” the English military leadership they correctly blamed for the suffering and slaughter of war in the trenches in France. They laughed at Mayfair accents but spoke fondly of Blighty. Piccadilly, Leicester Square, and Westminster were the center of the political world for them. Horrible as the experience of battle had been, the journey from Australia, the experience of England and the Continent, and the sense of epic participation in momentous world events filled them with pride and inspired a collective and treasured sense of history.
    Whenever they gathered together for the working bees that became a way of life as each new western land lease acquired a house, or sheepyards, or sheds for shearing, they talked about the1914–1918 War. Sometimes solemn, sometimes ribald, they refought the battles. Each one learned where the other had been at Ypres, at Passchendaele, at Vimy, on the Menin Road, or with what outfit at Gallipoli. Heads would nod about tactical blunders that had cost lives needlessly. Arguments would break out about which regiments had been to the right or left in the line. Maps would be drawn in the red soil and places marked where this man was wounded or that friend died. There would be bursts of sardonic laughter about the stupidity of the high command and the inefficiency of the desk types who lived in luxury far from battle and spent their lives drawing up ridiculous military regulations. Generally they respected the Germans, despised the French (“the bastards wouldn’t fight”), condescended to the inability of the British (“the poor bloody Poms”) to manage a hard and dangerous life in a harsh environment, and reserved judgment on the Americans.
    The chance to acquire title to a western land lease was the chance of a lifetime. In the expansive environment of the 1920s, men who felt lucky to be alive looked at the plains and dreamed about finally achieving economic independence. Perhaps, if things went well, their children could live the life of Australia’s pastoral elites. For the returned soldiers, class consciousness was more or less set aside, but most knew they wanted private schools for their children, fashionable clothes for their wives to wear to the races, a fancy horse or two in the stables, and freedom from worry about money.
    The voices that exclaimed over the follies of brass hats or swore poetically about the stubborn ways of sheep and cattle did so in a melange of accents. Some carried a Scots burr, some a trace of a Yorkshire flat
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; some spoke grammatically and displayed the manners produced by attendance at one of Australia’s private schools. Most spoke broad Australian: picturesque in image, laced with the rhyming slang of Cockney London and the poetic black humor of the Irish. Their manners and their clothes were deliberately working-class. At night when they sat with theirwives beside their crackling static-blurred radios, they waited for Big Ben to chime and then heard the impeccable British accents of the BBC announcer reading the news. With that voice they absorbed a map of the world which placed their near neighbor, Japan, in the Far East, and located distant Turkey in the Near East. So far as Australia was concerned its map was also clear and idiosyncratic. There were Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide on the southeast coast, and the bush. Other places existed—small country towns, the new federal capital planned at Canberra, the Snowy Mountains with their huge areas of snow and ice, industrial seaports like Newcastle, near the coalfields. They did not register because there were really only two places in the westerner’s consciousness: the bush, and the metropolis at the end of the railway line where the wool was