BACK INTO THE WOODS.

ACROSS THE CENTURY, A FARMING DISTRICT GOES FULL CIRCLE

It is the natural function of an old person -- after all I have gone past four-score years -- to recall the old ways, to dredge from them the silt and the mud. I remember the natural simplicity and basic joys of living; times when people were important; times when commonsense was an attribute. I realise I have lived, since the end of the Great War, through what could be described as the greatest social, industrial and farming revolution that the world has known.

For example, during the years as a prisoner of war in Austria, I lived and worked as a farm labourer, doing the kind of work that farm labourers had accepted as a part of life for hundreds, no thousands of years. We milked cows by hand, cut hay and grain crops with scythes and sickles, and wood with axes and crosscut saws. After the war, all of this changed. What is accepted practice on farms in both Austria and Australia at the beginning of the twenty-first century is quite foreign to everything I knew as a child, as well as my post-war farming experience here in Flowerdale.

When our two sons took over the property, with financial assistance, over the years, from banks, they were able to purchase what previously were four small mixed-farm lots, and all the necessary equipment, machinery and sheds to milk, eventually, over four hundred cows. The total purchases meant it was necessary for four farming families to move to town or city. Our two sons and one employee were all required to work the total property. Because of a huge overdraft both sons accepted the necessity to work eighty to ninety hours a week, and their spouses were obliged to find at least part-time professional jobs. The advent of a modern circular milking shed, milking all four hundred cows as quickly as we had milked our sixty-cow herd twenty years previously, was in keeping with the generally accepted philosophy of `get-big-or-get-out'.

The huge costs involved in purchasing and maintaining modern farming equipment has automatically forced many small farmers, other than hobby-farmers, off the land. The get-big-or-get-out philosophy was relevant to most forms of farming, as it is in the manufacturing and business arena. How well the workers at APPM in North Tasmania would remember the replacement of 75 per cent of the workforce at the Pulp by costly, modern machinery. The small farmer, in many cases, has little alternative but to get out. Most are older men who could sell their property at a price and retire workless to the nearest town. The younger farmers with a family at school must search for some job other than on the land.

What are these things we reach for, which many of us don't get? What are the effects of this search for greater output per person that farmers and industry have been forced to try to achieve, and so often failed? My mind is a mix of uncertainties. I am confused. But only for a time. How could I not be content here on this farmland in my isolation, with birds and bees and trees unlimited and all the wonderful annoyances such as potoroos and possums devouring any of my unprotected fruit and vegies? How could I not also be critical, as daily I hear the world news? From here, on a slither of Bass Strait, on the flats beside the river where I was born all those years ago in fruitful poverty, the world appears to be destroying itself.

Was it Angela Davis who said `of two million people in jail in the USA, 50 per cent were Blacks; in Australia 30 per cent of those in jail were Blacks?' Referring to SWS, the Sudden Wealth Syndrome -- `It is said there were Nine Million Millionaires in the US? These bits of information I find frightening. We know Blacks everywhere are despised as inferior beings. Why? Because they are Blacks? We hear statistics and pass them off as of little concern. I find it incredible: nine million millionaires in America. Apparently all citizens should aim to be at least millionaires. Come to think of it, if this goal were achieved would there be no poverty! Ach! Turn off the news! It can be depressing. And I shall hear it all over again on the telly tonight. SO, where was I?

Something about farm jobs, wasn't it? Ah yes, Preolenna farmers. Soon after the war, in the late forties, an area of farmland at Meunna, west of Preolenna and half an hour south of the town of Wynyard, had been selected as a soldier settlement area. As a committee member of the RSL, I had watched the progress of the area, previously a mix of scrub and `run' country; where farmers from adjoining areas took some of their store cattle in the off-season. The soldier settlers and their families were granted what were to be mainly dairy properties. The total area was suitably selected and supplied with available water. Forested areas had been cut and burnt. Attractive houses were built with septic tanks and sewage systems. Gardens, barns, cowsheds, pigsheds, roadways and fences were installed.

All went well for some years until Meunna farmers were caught up in the get-big-or-get-out philosophy. The only alternative they had was to sell to a neighbour, to buy bigger and better machinery, build expensive new cowsheds etc.; but because of isolation, land prices, inadequate returns, cartage costs and the reluctance of banks to provide finance, forest interests proved to be the only alternative. As well, some of the settlers decided that it was not what they wanted for their children. Gradually over the years the settlers sold out, but to forestry interests.

What was happening at Meunna was what had happened at Parrawe (and at other back district soldier settlements). There after the end of the Great War -- the war to end all wars -- soldier settlement farms had been established. Mainly because of their isolation during the depression of the thirties, the settlers there gradually got out. The district lost its school, church-hall, shop, post office, houses. Farms over the years have mostly been planted out with various species of eucalypts and pine.

So it was to be at Meunna, half a century after the debacle at Parrawe. A complete district which had cost millions to prepare for settlement has been bulldozed and planted out with trees. Did it matter? The reaction of people generally was apparently to shrug their shoulders: `But it is growing trees, isn't it!'

Having heard that all but one of the big farms at Preolenna had been sold to forest interests, I decided at last to go there, to see what was happening. I had known it only as a typical back-country district with an annual rainfall above ours in Flowerdale, a little colder in the winter, but good for dairying, beef cattle and particularly for seed potatoes.

I drove through Moorleah and on to Preolenna, on past relatively new plantations that once had been small farms; where people who wanted to have a place of their own in the country, had worked hard growing a few acres of potatoes, turnips, and garden vegetables, milking several cows, running a few pigs, sheep, fowls, all either for sale or for their own use. There were no tractors in those days, which meant you always grew a paddock of oats for sale or chaff enough to feed the horses. If you had to go to town you either walked or went with the horse and cart. These country people were hard and tough. Some were ex-army, having served in Gallipoli or France; and some of their children had been soldiers in the Second World War. There is a war memorial at Preolenna, another one of those country districts which annually has remembered the locals: alive or dead. Yes! They were tough, hard, bushwhackers, accepting life as it came. It was a life I remember well; a life where all family members had a job to do. While sugar, salt, bread (or its ingredients) had to be purchased, most country children of my vintage lived through the depression years with enough milk, butter, vegetables, fruit and meat (all grown on the farm) not to be too concerned about the future.

All these thoughts were going through my head as I drove into Preolenna, that part of it where there were several house lots -- were they `hobby' farmers? Then I came to the town's centre. The old school was no longer a school. The war memorial stood proud and permanent, nearby the hall that was. I drove on up the hill to look down on it all.

I felt suddenly confused and depressed, standing there at the top of Morse's hill, looking down over a wide view of the farms below. Already there were rows and rows of reddish cultivated strips, dirt rows in green grass paddocks, some planted, some ready for the planting. This was tree farming! Nobody needed to live here any more. The previous owners had to be gone by the end of next month. The buildings, what was left of them, probably would all be dozed and burnt with loads of trash. The trees, over the next twenty years, maybe longer, would wait to be harvested; the rubbish heaped in rows and burnt. Another crop would be planted, if there was still a market. If not, who knows? It may someday be farms again.

Yes, I was confused. What next? Has this all been a waste of time? I'll come back again some other time, when I've thought more about it. But hadn't I done that already! The problem was simple enough. There were these farmers in a good farming area who were offered a good price for selling their farms to forest companies, to grow trees. The whole of this cleared land going back into trees! Was there anything wrong with that? The prospects for dairying were not good. It had been tough this year and considering the long hours they worked, why not take the offer to sell!

Anyway, that's what happened. I did go home, and then later I decided I would go back again. But why? I think I had always had this problem: wanting to be -- to do -- to go -- but not quite knowing why. I tried to pinpoint what it was I wanted to prove. Eighty years ago as a kid, I can imagine holding on to my mother's hand as we walked very slowly down the path in the back garden, down to the cowshed to get fresh milk for breakfast. Not a memory, an imagining. I could have snatched at a vegetable and been told `No we won't touch that: later, when it's big, we'll eat it. That's called a cabbage'. Life was always a search for understanding. I know I shall always be looking for answers. But the question comes first: what is it? How does it work? Why? Often I finished up with two different answers. That would renew the problem to know.

I came on to the Preolenna road and could see again the plantations; some, several years older than others. There was something attractive about these young trees. So maybe it wasn't the trees that offended me; but the fact that the previous farmers, for various reasons, had been forced to accept offers for their land from tree-farming enterprises. Will the share-holders of these tree-planting companies make big profits? Will they receive satisfaction from knowing that they had helped transfer hard-working farmers off the land into towns and cities? My objection to the scheme was that it was a continuation of the get-big-or-get-out policy, often at the expense of the small farmers and the peasantry who, in the main, have been forced off the land. Life now is one big money game. We have tossed aside the search for the ideal. But let us hope not entirely.

Barney Roberts lives on the same farm as his two sons and their families.