of the place work, or don’t work. Some have fable-like morals, others are fantastical, but many are just “insights” into an aspect of being here. I am interested in the glimpse into character, and how that character is affected by “place.” No one’s entire story can really be told. Yet many stories or glimpses added together, collated on a journey, might give us a broader picture of the so-called human condition.
In the vein of one of my favorite Australian story writers, Henry Lawson, I really see them as yarns: stories told for the moment, out of experience more than “art.” But they are informed by an artfulness, if not an art. One of my favorite volumes of American stories is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which most would know is artifice on the level of story but “truthful” in the insights it gives into living in a small town somewhere in Midwest America, if not in the eponymous town itself. I lived in Ohio with my family for a number of years. Our son was born there. I see it as a home. We went looking at the real Winesburg knowing it wasn’t the Winesburg constructed by Anderson. And that was okay—it interested us to see how the stories had affected the town, and of course, they had.
When we write place, we necessarily contribute to a view of what that place is—even such a vast place as the Western Australian wheatbelt with its many, many towns, varying in size from the seven thousand population of a regional center like Northam to the handful of residents in places like Jennacubbine. Our contribution to the view of the place is always disproportionate, even if only read by a single reader. Because the life of that place is only ever a glimpse, is selective, and often largely a construct. And that’s true of this book as well. The stories herein follow a roadmap from the northernmost point of the wheatbelt, up near Northampton, down to the Great Southern, where the wheatbelt becomes something else. Each town passed through is given a tale that might or might not capture something “real” about that town or its district.
What I hope the book captures is something about people, and the way people make lives of place and alter that place in doing so. What happens in one story in one town or district might just as easily happen three hundred kilometers away in another part of the wheatbelt. But the stories did come out of those places, so immediately a sense of belonging or maybe alienation locates itself quite specifically on the compass. I find these apparent contradictions fascinating.
I have lived with my family on and off in the wheatbelt for many years. I am quite reclusive, but when I emerge I look and listen closely. I am part of the district, especially around York, where I have lifelong family connections and lived for many years; Northam, the main center of the same region; and the hills north of Toodyay, which we now call “home.” Each of these locales has had disasters and incidents that have brought communities close together and also divided them. Then there are those figures who always remain outside any community. They also interest me. As does how “isolated” farming places (I have always been interested in the particulars of farming, whether I agree with aspects of them or not) connect or distance themselves from the world at large. The prejudices, bigotries, and scepticisms need to be read and “glimpsed,” as much as the affirmations.
I went to high school in the midwest seaside town of Geraldton (now a small city of thirty-two thousand), about 420 kilometers north of the state capital, Perth. Geraldton is a fishing, farming, and mining town. The huge wheat farms that edge the coast are carved out of “sandplain” and are worked using vast amounts of superphosphate and chemical sprays. As a kid, I spent time with my father on a thirty-thousand-acre farm near Mullewa, east of Geraldton. There were tractors with wheels twice my height (machinery at once disturbs and fascinates me). I was traumatized by the clear evidence that the Yamatji people of the region were cut off from their traditional lands, and by the suffering this brought. I had long been familiar with gun culture and saw on a large scale what hunting was all about. By the time I was in my very early twenties, I had become a dedicated vegan. I had the experience to make a clear-cut choice. I did plenty of damage to birds, fish, and animals as a child and a teenager.
When I was twenty, I went away to Mingenew in the northern wheatbelt to work on the wheatbins. Enormous receiving silos. I was a protein sampler. I used the money earned to travel through Europe. I went back the next season and came into conflict with an ex–South African mercenary who was driving a grain truck and held extreme racist views. I resisted and was punished. I witnessed bigoted and aggressive behaviors during that stint that I hope never to witness again. This is always in the back of my mind. But so is positive experience, such as ploughing under the stars on Wheatlands farm, or looking after the farm over summer months—a twenty-one-year-old with responsibility for a large farm is something else. Or again, planting avocado trees with my uncle as he tried to diversify out of monocultural farming, or helping plant trees (they planted tens of thousands) in saline areas to try to reclaim damaged land.
All of these aspects are part of the wheatbelt for me. Giant “food bowl” that it is, its “feeding the world,” as they like to say, has come at a great cost to indigenous people and to the land itself. It has also come at a cost, ironically, to those who colonized, cleared, farmed, and lived there. The suicide rate, especially among males, is phenomenally high, and the sad spectacle of a land dying through salinity and drought goes hand-in-hand with more damage and more misunderstanding of denying the consequences.
In the end, it’s a place of people: their successes and failures, of materiality and spirit. Though the wheatbelt is bound together by the central activity of grain farming, it ranges in geography from coastal plains to semi-arid marginal land, on the edge of the outback, producing very low yields, through to much richer lands (though the soils are still impoverished, there are higher rainfalls) in places such as the Avon Valley, with its ancient river course formed by the Wagyl spirit outside time, and holding the ancient eroded Dyott Range.
To tell more of the place, maybe it’s best just to describe a few towns from the wheatbelt. Following are some of the towns with which I am very familiar, and which in many ways form reference points in my own journey. These are not historical renderings, but impressions formed from living in the regions. In some ways, maybe they are stories in themselves.
York
Earliest inland settlement in Western Australia, founded in 1829. The governor had a residence there, and the police searched for escaped convicts and suppressed the indigenous inhabitants from its police station. The old court building is a tourist site now. Homeland of the Ballardong Nyungar people. I have been in and out of York since I was born—my uncle’s farm, “Wheatlands,” was twenty kilometers northeast. For many years we lived about five kilometers north of town. My mother still lives there. Some call it the “gateway to the wheatbelt.”
As rainfalls have dropped and drought has gripped, an “historic” town such as York has begun to rely increasingly on weekend visits from the city of Perth, a hundred kilometers southwest. York’s early stone buildings, its “colonial history,” and the area’s deeply spiritual significance to the Nyungar people make it a standout in the state.
The town, located on the Avon River, is remarkably beautiful, though the surrounding land has been much damaged by attempts to “train” the river to prevent flooding—that is, dredging it so waterholes, which would once have survived the brutal summers, no longer existed—and devastating salinity caused by overclearing of surrounding lands, as well as clearing of riparian vegetation. In fact, it’s one of the few spots where water stays in the river all year round, even in drought.
Cradled between the small mountain of Walwalinj, or Mount Bakewell as named by explorer Ensign Dale, and Wongborel, known to the settlers as Mount Brown, York is at the crossroads of the Avon Valley. A fiercely independent-minded town, it is home to the deeply religious as well as to the heretical and nonbelieving. Christianity in many denominations is prevalent, and if it isn’t “Bible-fearing,” as some of the more inland wheatbelt towns are, the manners of belief there are always in the background. Anglican gentility informs much of the cultural endeavor of the town, whether it’s an arts festival
