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SUNDAY
EXTRA
FARMING MEDICINE
THE COCKIES
none Help
and the death of a legend
By DEBBIE CAMERON
HE'S BEEN A COCKIE for 50 years. A
battler with a couple of hundred acres
and a grudge against the Government
and the weather.
The sort of bloke who could fight a war, pull
down an engine, put out a bushfire or fix the
steering on a Massey Ferguson tractor with a
bit of 12-gauge wire.
His face is as red and rough as terracotta
roof tiles and the skin on his hands is always
chipped. He's got a sheepdog and an old ute
with a packet of cigarette papers and a tangle
of baling twine in the glovebox. The glovebox
catch is broken so he keeps it closed with a nail.
He's a battler. For 50 years he's been
struggling with balance sheets, bankers and
brokers. And now he's in more strife than a
thirsty man without a water-bag.
It is not that farming as an industry is in
peril, although a farmer wouldn't tell you that.
It's the legend that is changing. The cockie who
occupied the pens of poets and balladiers now
hardly exists.
For nearly 60 years I've been a cockie,
Of drought and fire and flood I've lived
through plenty,
This country's dust and mud,
Have seen my tears and blood.
— Eric Bogle
The legend is vanishing like the frame of a
bush hut under wattle and daub. The cockie
is being overtaken by a corporate image
researched, constructed and marketed by the
National Farmers' Federation.
The fiercely independent, even stubborn,
cockie has been converted to a sort of rural
unionism. The president of the NFF, Mr Ian
McLachlan, told the National Press Club in
Canberra this week that the federation had
modelled itself on the ACTU.
And with its new corporate profile the bush
has changed. Squatters and big landholders
who pompously write "grazier" after their
names in the telephone book and "speak up
for the little man" at Liberal Party and
National Party meetings and conferences are
close to the NFF and the McLachlan line. But
for the first time the cockie, who had stood
shyly aside while his "betters" fought his
battles, is backing the campaign too. It has
meant sacrificing independence and not
insignificant amounts of cash.
As far as the cockie was concerned, the
Government and the weather were and always
would be against him, and he had no reliable
allies in tough times except his family,
particularly his wife.
For the banks are all broken, they say,
And the merchants are all up a tree.
When the bigwigs are brought the
Bankruptcy Court,
What chance for a squatter like me?
— anon.
He had got his land in a soldier-settlement
ballot, and had been flogging a plough over it
for years. He was lucky if he had a zak left from
the wool cheque after he'd paid his bank loans,
but he was his own boss and he couldn't think
of anything better to do. He had seen his
neighbours sell up and move into the towns,
where they invariably got jobs repairing roads
for the council, and although he thought,
"Wish I got his pay packet at the end of the
week and had no worries", he would never
leave.
The image has only been air-brushed in the
past five years, but even before then extinction
of the cockie had begun. There was an
economic imperative. For decades he had been
told by his bankers, brokers and the
Department of Agriculture to get big or get out.
By definition a cockie is a small landholder and
once they "get big" they cease to fit the strict
definition. But a lot of them, though the size
of their landholdings entitle them to the be
called graziers, still say they are cockies.
The culture of the cockie is being swamped
by the new corporatism — a single media
image, an agenda and a theatrical but not
exaggerated leader. But the NFF is not so silly
that it would leave behind the image
completely — it is being traded on. The cockie
is the central figure in the "You Can't Take
The Country Out Of Our Country" television
advertising campaign, but like an opera prop
he will be stored at the end of its season.
Professor Russel Ward, author of The
Australian Legend, wrote in the introduction
to The Penguin Book of Australian Ballads,
"The legendary bushman carried in his cultural
swag racist delusions and laziness, as well as
mateship, and endurance, and a full share of
what G. K. Chesterton called 'God's scorn for
all men governing'." Aspects of the bushmen
have been refined in the cockie, and certainly
the rcccnt protests outside Parliament House
indicate that they still revile all men governing.
Professor Ward said this week that it was
"unfortunately" true that the legend of the
cockie was being obliterated by a corporate
image.
"There is nothing new in the sense that
cockies always have complained bitterly about
the Government and taxes and rain and the
weather and droughts," he said.
"Fifteen years ago people were poor just like
they are now. What is new is that the NFF has
succeeded in putting down roots to tap this
discontent. Poor cockies have always felt like
this, and with some reason, and they've always
felt before that they could never do anything
about it... now they are getting together with
their betters, the squatters." The distance
between squatter and cockie is narrowing.
Oh, he sowed the land with grasses and
he planted many spuds,
With thistles fine and turnips, oats and
wheat;
And he bought him 40 sheep and 20
ancient cows,
And 20 little pigs to give him meat.
And the grubs ate all his grass and the
rain spoilt all his hay
While his pigs ate all his spuds and
turnips round.
And it cost him 15 sovereigns when his
cattle got astray,
Just to rescue them from out the public
pound.
Then he sheared his sheep in winter and
they all died in the spring.
And one by one his pigs all pined away,
While his cattle died of measles and his
poultry all took wing
To that better land we hope to see some
day.
— Rowland Skemp
Historian Professor Manning Clark also has
rccogniscd a change in the cockie. He says he
is now better educated, better connectcd to the
world outside his farm, better equipped with
machinery and more aware of his standard of
living. The cockie who was content to live in
a draughty house, drive a worn-out car and
take his kids out of school at 15 wants more.
"Education, plus wireless, plus television,
plus the motorcar, plus the aeroplane, have
strengthened in their mind that they shouldn't
have to put up with hardships," he said. "They
are asking for the city standards in education,
transport and health care."
The mythology of farming was being
dismantled. No longer were farmers "prisoners
on their own land" or for that matter its
victims.
"I am struck by the paradox that the
introduction of very heavy machinery has
given them their power over the land and the
capacity to do almost what they like with the
land — rip out forests, change the direction of
streams, knock hills over, make valleys
diappear. But that has undermined the
conviction that you couldn't do much with the
land — that the land was more powerful than
you. Hence, I think that the idea of failure on
this hostile land entered into the legend.
"Strangely the machines have enslaved the
farmers. They have liberated them from the
drudgery but they've also enslaved them
financially because farmers can't afford to pay
for the machinery, and so [they are] one of the
causes of indebtedness.
"The farmers' rallies that I've seen are
purely rallies attended by very angry men and
women, and I get the impression that they are
really saying the same thing now as they were
saying a long time ago — that those on the land
work harder than those who work in the cities,
they don't get the same return for their labour,
they are in effect subsidising the luxuries of
people in the cities."
City folk these days despise the cockie,
Say with subsidies and all we've had it
easy.
But there's no drought or starving stock,
On a sewered suburban block.
— Eric Bogle
As afectionate as ballad writers are about
the cockie, the legend holds only faint
attraction for men like David Trebeck. He is
an economist, and has an economist's
indifference to romance. Mr Trebeck, now the
Liberal Party's policy coordinator, was deputy
director of the National Farmers' Federation.
He does not lament the passing of the cockie
one iota; in fact he stops just short of saying
that the cockie was a dill.
"The cockie was not only struggling against
the weather and the Government, but
struggling because he had not had sufficient
training in agriculture," he said. "He might
have been a returned serviceman on a soldier
settlement block in the dusty Wimmera of
Victoria, rarely did he have enough land to
make an economic go of things. But that is all
very much in the past.
"There might have been some romance in
the struggle, but so what... ? We could go back
to the romance just as we could forsake tractors
and go back to horse-drawn ploughs but where
would that get us?"
Mr Trebeck is of the "onward, forever,
onward" school. He is glad that the end has
come for small landholders scraping together
a lousy living off a small farm.
"The cockie, as the image grew up over 50
years, was a much more pitiful type because
of poor training, inadequate areas to grow his
crops and out of touch in an isolated
community," he said. "I don't feel any
attachment at all to the cockie and I think it
is an area of great sadness. I think you'll find
that more heartbreak and misery was caused
by the generation of inexperienced farmers
than any other part of Australia's agricultural
history."
We'll all be rooned, said Hanrahan
In accents most forlorn.
Outside the church, ere Mass began,
One frosty Sunday morn.
— Father John O'Brien
Professor Manning Clark: the mythology of farming being dismantled. Help
Professor Manning Clark: the
mythology of farming being dismantled.
Ian McLachlan is at the head of the National
Farmers' Federation. He has taken the straw
men of farming and given them brains. He has
been the image-maker, responsible for forming
the corporate profile and blending it into the
culture.
He has never been a cockie. He has never
struggled to pay his fuel bill or been
embarrassed about looking a bank teller in the
eye as he slid a cash withdrawal slip across the
counter. He is a millionare pastoralist and
among other companies he is a director
Elders IXL.
But he still talks in acres, swears in an
elegant sort of way and says that things in the
bush are "diabolically awful".
Mr McLachlan learnt about the legend of
the battling farmer from Australian literature
and by talking to people. He did not learn it
first-hand. But unlike Mr Trebeck he is not
willing to sacrifice the legend on the slab of
corporate endeavour. He is like a museum
curator in charge of an icon.
"I love the legend," he says. "It is romantic
and there is no doubt about it, being in the back
of whoop-whoop and getting into the local pub
or going to the local races is fun. People out
there are just absolutely natural.
"Farmers are independent, but there are two
sorts of independence. There is the fiercely
independent guy who could do anything, ride
any horse, go to war, run a place when things
were crook, pull a machine to pieces.
"The other is the fellow who takes an
independent view politically and commercially
all the time because he was rich enough to do
so. In the 50s and 60s the woolgrowers were
all so bloody rich that they all took different
views. But it doesn't happen anymore because
they can't afford too. They can't afford to get
anything but get it right. And that is a big
change in the way farmers think."
There are traces of the struggle in Mr
McLachlan and he talks about how his father's
brother "made our show".
"He took up land nobody else wanted," he
says. "No water, no nothing out in the 5-inch
rainfall. He built an empire on land that
nobody else even wanted.
"The Americans would look at that sort of
effort and applaud; the Australians and the
Poms say: look at the bastard, he's got a big
car. It's stupid."
Mr McLachlan talks about over-production
of commodities like wheat and getting farmers
to diversify. "I always think of a New
Zealandcr who gave his son his farm and kept
10 acres around the house and produced
$250,000 worth of blueberries off 10 acres.
"Let's face it, today if you are going to
succeed you have to be bloody good at it.
We've got to represent efficiency and
competitiveness and all the things that are
going to enable us to survive in this very hostile
world.
"I don't know if farmers have given
themselves a corporate image. Certainly they
are still individuals and they like being by
themselves, but the only way the industry is
going to get anywhere is if we're all together.
"We are only interested in people who can
get going, we are not interested in people who
want to hang on to what they've got. We say,
if you can't survive today, goodbye."
But of the hut I builded
There are no traces now,
And many rains have levelled
The furrows of my plough.
The glad bright days have vanished;
For sombre branches wave
Their wattle-blossom golden
Above my Mary's grave.
- Henry Lawson
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