Chapter Four
Masters of War
I helped my father on his farm while I continued managing another large rural holding nearby. Both my parents were from European origins and their propensity for hard work was genetic. They worked side by side in the fields when seasonal activity reached its peak during late spring and early summer. My mother was as accomplished on a tractor as she was on a piano and despite her own fragile health, she would work from daylight to well into the night to try to ease my father's workload. Conversely, my father was as familiar with a stove and cooking as he was setting up a grain harvester and he would cook and clean during my mother's long bouts of illness. He made breakfast every day and cooked extravagant lunches on Sundays for his family and guests.
He was an incredibly generous man who had spent most of his life in rural activities. Despite living in a conservative rural area as a young man, some of his political and religious views were a little too radical for most people. He found himself as one of the few young men excommunicated from the local parish, perhaps one of the few to ever be thrown out of a church in the whole nation. Many of his contemporaries saw him as the black sheep of the family and learning to fly aeroplanes, dabbling in co-operatives and conversing with left wing politicians, only added to their suspicions of revolutionary behaviour.
My father was short, with neatly combed brown hair, piercing brown eyes, a ready smile and a rotund appearance that disguised his incredible physical strength. His handshake had the power of a hydraulic press and he lifted 187-pound bags of super phosphate fertiliser like feather pillows. Even well into his late sixties, he surprised his grandchildren by walking around the lounge room on his hands, his legs kept vertically in the air. His grandchildren would try to emulate the feat of strength with disastrous results.
He was an engaging character with a sharp intellect and excellent business acumen that allowed him to amass a sizeable fortune by age forty. He was capable of conversing on all levels of financial dealings and was once headhunted and offered a potential seat in federal parliament, which, during the pre-selection period he was told, “You will have wealth beyond your wildest dreams.” I believe his move away from the district, his wife's poor health and his conscience were some of the reasons he never pursued a political career.
In later years, a roughly rolled cigarette hung jauntily from the corner of his mouth and a supply of yellow packeted, 'Champion Ruby' tobacco, 'Tally-Ho' cigarette papers and ‘Red Head’ matches was always in the pocket of his fawn coloured work pants. He loved his wife and family and was a doting grandparent. His gregarious nature ensured there was a steady stream of visitors to the farm and he entertained guests with his ability to tell vivid stories and jokes. His amazing home brew beer was another bonus for visitors and many of them left their senses in the kitchen of the farmhouse when they departed. My father was a practising practical joker and after many years of playing tricks on us children, we finally turned the tables.
He became a legend in the country as the man who discovered a white, shingle-back lizard. His celebrity status lasted for quite a few months and his fame as a naturalist spread to some of the major museums in the country. The large, shingle back lizards are common in the semi-arid habitats of Australia. The lizards are relatively solitary, but monogamous and generally shuffle around quietly, hunting for small insects and succulent vegetation. When threatened, the big lizard turns towards its aggressor, opens their wide mouth and pokes out a broad blue tongue to frighten off attackers. If the ugly blue tongue fails to scare the attacker and the threat remains, shingle-backs will hiss and flatten out their body in an attempt to appear larger and more formidable. Shingle backed lizards or 'stumpy tails' in our part of the country were never white, just good old army issue, dark brown camouflage.
My father loved to tell the story about how he discovered the large white lizard. "Well," he would say, taking a calculated draught on his roughly rolled cigarette. "I was just walking past the tank stand on my way to water the tomatoes, when I heard some rustling in the long grass. The weather was getting warmer and I thought it might be a snake, so I approached very carefully." At this point, his eyes would light up as he caught a glimpse of anticipation on the face of his listener. "And there it was, I couldn't believe it, a white Stumpy Tailed lizard. This lizard wasn’t a pale shade of brown, but brilliant white. It was so amazing I called out for the wife to have a look and she could hardly believe what she was seeing either. Well, we didn't know what to do at the time," he continued, "So we just watched quietly as it slithered under the cypress hedge and disappeared. We didn't think we'd tell anybody about it, because we knew nobody would believe us. Then, about one week later we saw it again, bold as brass and still a brilliant shade of white.”
Like clockwork, we would all see the white lizard every week in the same spot as it orbited the house yard and finally we decided to tell one of the neighbours about my father's discovery. David, one of our neighbours, was the local naturalist and during the lizard's weekly rounds, he managed to see it as well. He dashed off to get his camera and before long he was back to take photos of the dazzling, white lizard. David couldn’t believe what he saw and said he would contact his friend in the museum, send him the photos and see what we should do next with our incredible white lizard.
Being an isolated rural area, the news of the white 'albino' lizard spread like wildfire and soon other neighbours were calling in to catch a glimpse of the amazing reptile. This went on for quite a few weeks until my brother arrived one day to listen to his father tell him how he had discovered the first white, Stumpy Tailed Lizard in Australia. My brother listened intently to the well-rehearsed saga of the discovery and just before the story finished, he suddenly interrupted and burst out laughing. "Don't be so bloody stupid." He informed his startled father. "I was out here a few months ago and was painting your fence; a big fat old lizard was stuck there, so before I released him, I painted him completely white." With that revelation, he roared with laughter at the bemused expression on his father's face.
The amazing white lizard was a fraud and the whole story of how the lizard became white, slowly filtered around the district. The farm was still something of a tourist attraction, because from that day forward we painted any lizards that strayed too close. There were white lizards, blue lizards, red lizards, and all the colours of the rainbow. My father had to admit, he was the victim of a well-executed practical joke.
My mother was average height, with short, auburn hair, twinkling hazel eyes and early pictures of her portray a very attractive woman. She absolutely adored my father and loved her children and grandchildren. She had an amazing ability to converse with any person, no matter their social standing and I was constantly amazed at her understanding of worldly matters and human nature. Like my father, she had a wicked sense of humour, eyes that danced playfully, a kind face with a ready smile, was highly intelligent with a scintillating wit and between them; my parents were capable of being the centre of attention at parties and social gatherings. As a result, our family entertained dignitaries, industrialists, overseas visitors and people of all ages, from all walks of life.
As a child, my family exposed me to a wide range of people from all ethnic backgrounds and I can vividly remember listening in amazement to some of the incredible stories I heard. I listened to indigenous Australians, Jamaican basketball players, world touring tennis players, World War II pilots and soldiers, geologists, architects, industrialists, bankers, share brokers, executives, politicians, shearers, students and shysters.
My mother was an accomplished pianist and she helped my sister reach concert level performances. My sister could happily rattle out Bach, Beethoven and Rachmaninov as well as contemporary tunes as well. Regardless of whether they were living in the city or rural areas, our family joined numerous parties and social events. My parents were both from large families and there was a constant stream of relatives flowing through our house. The fatted calf was killed, the ale was brewed and the feasts and merriment went on for days. Although we were cash poor, the farm provided basic food in abundance to feed the army of eager visitors. The walls of the old farm cottage rang with the sound of laughter, music, poetry recitals and good times. My father seemed to have an endless supply of poetry that ranged from Shakespeare to bush ballads and he was very willing to share his incredible recital gift with friends and family. Occasionally, just for the hell of playing with people's heads, he would expose some complete stranger to a few lines of poetry during a conversation – they were usually stunned by his pattern interrupt.
My father was gentle and caring to his animals and unlike many other farmers I met, I never saw him deliberately mistreat any animal, particularly dogs, in anger. In rural Australia, a working dog is worth its weight in gold. With a good dog, a person can yard and draft a herd of cattle, a mob of crazy sheep and even shepherd a group of hens or turkeys. At times, a good dog is worth ten men, they will work in all types of weather, all day long and they do it because they love their role and wish to please their owner. I met numerous men with outstanding stock dogs that were legendary with livestock, one of those people was named Dick, and his black and tan 'Kelpie' dog was named Crawford. My father and I recruited Dick and Crawford for a single day to help with a large flock of ewes and lambs.
The day of the sheep muster dawned cold and clear, with a frost driven, rapier wind that casually sliced through our protective 'oil skin' clothing and literally chilled our bones. We had to move a mob of four thousand ewes and lambs into the waiting sheep yards. It was a difficult manoeuvre, with low bushes on either side of the holding paddock. The bushes close to the sheep yards, gave the old ewes an excellent opportunity to break away from the exhausted dogs as we attempted to push the huge flock through the open gate. It was frustrating for all concerned, the old ewes, the lambs and especially the dogs. After employing a decoy strategy, the sheep finally surrendered to captivity and the exhausted dogs were given time to rest.
The noise was horrendous, lambs screaming for their mothers and ewes desperately calling for their separated lambs and it was into this cauldron of chaos that Dick and Crawford arrived. They found the ewes had lost most of their fear of the dogs and would stand defiantly protecting their fragile offspring. Extremely defensive ewes would lower their heads, stamp their feet and charge the wearied dogs and the dogs could do little but snap at the ewe as they side-stepped the attack.
It was now time to separate the lambs from the ewes and this was Crawford's speciality. He was an acknowledged yard dog, extraordinarily fit, with astute brown eyes, black pointed ears and sleek black and tan fur. He soon had the cunning old ewes heading towards the drafting race where we temporarily divided them from their lambs. Dick would issue commands to Crawford and Crawford would execute the command with military precision. What a team! It was quite a performance. There was just one problem, well there were several problems really. The first problem was time and because we were dealing with a large number of difficult sheep, the process was taking a longer than expected to complete. This meant that Crawford was getting weary and Dick was getting angry.
Then it happened, Dick issued a command and Crawford just sat there, no way was he going to chase another sheep, he was exhausted and wanted out. "I'm warning you!" screamed Dick with an edge of insanity creeping into his voice. What happened next was like watching some bizarre movie. Dick jumped over the sheep pens to where Crawford was sitting. "I warned you." he informed the amazed dog and pulled out a pair of pliers from a leather sheath attached to his belt and proceeded to clamp the pliers on Crawford's ear. We couldn't believe what we were seeing and neither could Crawford, he yelped in agony all the way over the nearest hill and wasn't seen again for the rest of the day. Dick had just lost all credibility as a 'stock man' and a rational human being and spent the rest of the day doing the work that his dog should have been doing. As for Crawford, he eventually returned to the yards on dusk, but he made sure Dick was well out of pliers range.
Fortunately, my father was never prone to these examples of cruelty. He had come from a long line of successful graziers, incredibly attuned to his environment. He had learnt to sow crops at exactly the right moment to avoid the crops drowning in soggy soil or ravaged by insects in soil too dry. He cared for his land and made sure his property supported large tracts of beautiful native forest. This was unusual, as most farmers in Australia had cleared nearly every semblance of native vegetation from their properties. By leaving virgin forest, my father left habitat for a wide range of native fauna and it was an incredible experience as a child to see native animals in their natural environment.
Even as children, we instinctively discovered the art of bush craft and were able to track animals through the forest, looking for faint footprints, broken twigs, loose fur, droppings or dislodged stones. We were able to recognise the scent of the various animals and always kept downwind of them to get closer. By stealthily using trees and shrubs to hide from their view, we could get unbelievably close to our subjects and were able to watch kangaroos and emus only a few metres away.
Sometimes we would find a patch of thick bushland and just sit perfectly still for a few minutes. It didn't take long before beautiful, small Blue Wrens and honey eaters would land only centimetres from our heads, twittering loudly in short, high frequency staccato and start feeding in our presence. Provided we never moved, we witnessed foxes, rabbits, kangaroos and small rodents in their natural state, interacting with each other and the environment, completely oblivious to our proximity. The moment we moved, even a finger, the birds or animals would see us and flee in terror.
My father left one third of his property to native forest in his high ground and large tracts of native forest on his low ground. The belts of vegetation on the plains meant his livestock had shelter from the fierce winter squalls and shade in the summer time from the cruel summer sun. My father left portions of his land in a natural state because he loved the serenity of the bush and valued other living creatures above the pursuit of money. He was well aware that clearing the native forest vegetation would mean he could sow pasture grasses to produce more livestock and generate more money. He also realised 'love' had never been and was never going to be, a column on his accountant's balance sheet.
The gruelling isolation of farm life ensured my father enjoyed a social outing with his friends in the pub on a weekend. If my mother was away in the city visiting her daughter, these weekend pub sessions turned into a Cecil B. De Mille movie production with a cast of thousands. I remember more than one occasion when my brother and I would have to take off his boots and try to get him to bed at some absurd hour of the morning after his return from the hotel. We would find his car next day with strips of chrome hanging at strange angles and it would take us weeks to discover the full extent of his adventure. He always managed to extract maximum enjoyment from his way of life.
Unfortunately, primary industry has always been a risky venture in Australia and along with fire, flood, drought and disease; the rural commodity market is subject to wild economic fluctuations. In a quirky twist of fate, our farm had just survived a life-sucking drought, quickly followed by one of the worst rural commodity market crashes in Australia's history. The drought and resultant lack of stock feed, forced us to reduce stock numbers and the value of livestock plummeted to record low levels as millions of starving animals flooded the markets. Valuable, fine wool Merino ewes that were once worth $20 each, sold for twenty cents in markets bursting at the seams with animals from all over the district. Cattle prices suffered a similar fate and we knew of farmers who failed to make any profit at the sale yards after paying the cost of transport for their livestock. Farmers around the nation became desperate as the rural recession impacted on countless numbers of hard working people. Although we were in dire straits ourselves, we knew many people who were being forced from their farms with nothing more than a suitcase.
Our livestock were worthless and while the huge meat processing firms made millions of dollars exporting cheap, frozen carcasses overseas, we were experiencing financial terror. Our over stretched stock mortgage was greater than the real market value of our stock and the banks threatened foreclosure. Letters of demand deluged our large letterbox and angry phone calls plagued us during mid-day meals. Our credit was exhausted and bankruptcy was imminent. We felt powerless to avoid the mighty chasm of despair that was looming.
My brother helped by setting up a separate business entity so we could trade outside our restrictive bank accounts. This allowed us to buy and sell livestock outside our debt-ridden mortgage to pay for necessities. It meant that the hungry financial institutions didn’t immediately gobble up the few pennies we made as repayment on crippling loans. We came up with ingenious ways to find and move money and I sank my savings into the farm to keep liquidity for stock, fuel, insurance, vehicle registration, council rates, repairs, wages and power bills, but the cost to my father's health was devastating. We felt powerless against the global forces controlling our commodity market and ultimately our economic destiny.
At our darkest moment, the government decided to conscript young males for military service in the Vietnam War and I was 'called up' to fight in a war I knew was insane at best. The military draft consisted of a lottery draw, based on a person's date of birth. The ballot resembled a regular lottery draw, with a rotating, clear Perspex sphere and numbered marbles. The Australian nation watched eagerly as the final five ballots near the end of the war were televised nationally to an enthusiastic, salivating audience. The whole process was disturbing and bizarre and reeked of some hidden game known only to the bureaucrats involved. Numbered marbles representing birth dates were chosen randomly from the barrel and within a month, men whose numbers had been drawn were advised by the Australian Department of Labour and National Service of whether they were required for participation in the conscription or not. Those who didn't register after their number was drawn without an acceptable explanation were automatically rounded up for military service and subjected to a fine.
The conservative Australian rural community couldn’t wait to send their sons and daughters to war and their reasons for justifying unprovoked foreign conflict were absurd. Hundreds of local lads found themselves rounded up and marched off to the steaming, foetid jungles of Asia – for god's sake; they were naive rural boys with no idea why they were fighting. Young city people were demonstrating in vain against an Australian government hell bent on sucking America's cock. There were many brave individuals, who demonstrated against an unjust conflict. In the U.S.A, Daniel Ellsberg published the 'Pentagon Papers' in the New York Times, clearly showing the U.S. government had been lying to the public about success of the war in Vietnam.
The U.S. Military juggernaut just kept churning out casualties, regardless of citizen protests. I watched foreign governments involved in the war use rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons to break up student demonstrators protesting against the war. Our government responded to objectors with baton brutality, prison sentences and the inevitable personal attack on war demonstrators, portraying them as unpatriotic, cowardly and subversive.
The government propaganda machine whipped the public into a frenzy of pro war patriotism and anti-Communist sentiment. I could not believe the way the government was brainwashing the population and like the sheep on our farm eating hay, the public swallowed the propaganda voraciously. They followed the government line without question and blocked their senses to any rational discussion on the subject of war on foreign soil. They never questioned the validity of the government-supplied information and never considered the war from the 'enemies' perspective. What I saw, was people sucking up the lies and propaganda, just the way they utterly believed my brother's outrageous lies, without ever questioning the accuracy of the statements for a second. They never recognised the people they sent their children to murder, were flesh and blood people just like them, with families and children and the same desires and aspirations as they had.
If a person threatened my life or my family member's life directly, I would fight to the death, but there was no way I would travel to a distant country and kill fellow human beings. My stance was completely out of step with my countries thinking at that time and my countries thinking now. My closest friends shared my views and some of them found ingenious ways to avoid the insanity of killing people in an unprovoked foreign conflict without languishing in jail.
Like the abuse, I experienced as a child, the government bullied objectors into submission. The government lied, threatened and promised incarceration to anyone who objected to its insane war policy. My friends and I began to wonder if we were sane and the government was crazy, or if we were crazy and the government was sane. Clearly, we were still functioning as loving, caring, rational human beings. That left a startling conclusion.
I realised the enormous profiteering from war to the corporations sponsoring hardware, arms, ammunition, chemicals and supplies. I was also aware of the profiteering from companies like Halliburton who rebuilt damaged infrastructure of invaded countries after a war, but there were underlying factors that eluded me completely. There was a persistent level of insanity connected to warfare, a rabid insistence on forcing citizens to surrender sons and daughters as cannon fodder. The madness of warfare had echoed down the corridors of history for as long as humanity could remember. I could not understand the underlying cause of the madness, but I knew I would be devoting a large part of my life to discovering how this insanity was proliferating. The total mechanics of war was a problem I would conquer much later by marrying an amazing woman, researching my butt off and discovering 'the key' to the insensitivity of controlling governments.
Who were the controlling Masters of War who could rip people from their loved ones and splatter their guts over the jungles of Asia in senseless attacks? Why couldn't they feel the inconsolable pain of people losing sons, daughters and partners in a pointless conflict? What the hell was going on? It just did not make sense.
Eventually the date for my medical examination for the military draft arrived by post in the large round drum we used for a letterbox. I stood staring numbly at my name on the cold piece of correspondence with its official looking monogram and pre-printed signature. The document indicated a time and place for medical examinations and the penalties I would face if I refused to attend. I drove the 90 kilometres to the appointment; I was twenty-one years old, fit as a 'Mallee' bull, brimming with litres of testosterone, could shoot the head off a match at 50 metres and was able to follow instruction. The medical seemed a formality on my way to the front line. Amazingly, I met a sympathetic doctor who was obviously 'anti-war' and after a long discussion about the impact on my family and me, he failed my medical. I got roaring drunk that night. And the next night with my friends. And the night after that.
The war dragged on for several more years, the air force flew back the bodies of young people for burial at regular intervals and my friends and I shook our heads in disbelief. The young men and women killed (murdered) in this conflict were in the prime of their lives. These people never achieved the fullness of life, love and emotional fulfilment.
The young people slaughtered in a pointless war, never had the chance to discover the ever-changing seasons of life or accumulate the ultimate gift of wisdom and we will never know how many creative, gifted or positive contributions to society these people may have made. It was an insult to any caring human being to allow this orchestrated brutality in a modern society. Some of our friends who escaped the Vietnam war with their lives, returned as a silhouette of their former selves. They retreated into a desolate inner world and rarely spoke of the horror they witnessed in the jungles of Asia. Emotionally and sometimes physically crippled, our friends were unable to function as normal members of society. They received no real support for their condition and their lives were ruined.
After the war, the community shunned the Vietnam veterans like lepers, they were never celebrated or richly compensated like their fellow soldiers from the 1st and 2nd world wars and their legacy is a sad reflection of twisted community perception. There was so much misery and pain caused by so few, for so long and so many people allowed the abuse to proliferate by doing absolutely nothing. In Australian society, it was the classic example of middle class complacency equaling consent to abuse and murder.