Michael Farrell
Poet on the Monaro
Sometimes, when I’m writing my poems about horse riding and cattle work, I start wondering if it really is me writing, and whether the things I’m describing happened to me or to someone else. Is it likely that someone who spends their days with stock and dust and trees would write more than the most basic notes? I stagger into the hot dark tin-roofed room, in my tight damp jeans, and fall asleep on the quilt without getting undressed, and dream I’m a writer from a family of writers—people who leave Hegel and Kant on tables and have dinner parties with dentists and other well-offs. I’m writing about the fun of daily life, of parties, café incidents, going on a boat and watching the waves. In the dream I feel like an impostor, like I’m not one of the people I’m one of. A man reads something I’ve written and says I’ve copied it from a book. He shows me the passage about a writer whose parents read philosophy, whose grandparents own land and dental and boat factories, and spends time looking at waves. But what about Borges? I ask, as I wake. I have an uncomfortable feeling for a while till I remember and repudiate the reality of the dream. I write something about a drover I’d met, and the things he’d said about station life in the Top End. I hadn’t read this anywhere else: I remembered him telling me. I don’t, in writing it, even pretend they are my experiences – what do I know about the Top End, of dingoes chewing cows’ tails, and the wild things that go on up there? So I make him seem a bit flashier than he really is? We make our own fun, no time for backyard games or watching urban paddock sport on TV. Just a bit of scribbling now and again, of lives lived like the lives before us, like a really long ignorable play. But where did I get the content of the dream? I decided to make up a character who comes from the city, and lives on a farm for some reason, and rides a horse now and again and has experiences—romantic ones—and sees or hears something (a snake or lyrebird, something potent), in the hope that would get rid of the feeling I was writing someone else’s life: by deliberately doing so. I’ve stopped showing what I’m writing to the others and they return the favour. I’ve been riding three days and my tongue tastes like a horse’s hoof. I come to a river and remember something out of a French novel, which I tell to the closest cow listening. She shakes her muzzle in the water. Was I born in the city all along, and am now trying to write a character that I’ve forgotten? We are cutting the tips off the calves’ horns, blood spraying everywhere, in the farm kids’ faces, and taking photos like tourists. I write it all up before I forget. My father calls to ask me how it’s all going, saying you’re well out of academia, complaining that he’d been called to order by the dean and had almost resigned. There are swallows building nests in the shed. The cattle, some of which seem familiar, like I’ve known them my whole life, piss and shit and swish flies away. They don’t need their horns on the Monaro. The sun’s high and everything seems to have decided to take a break. I’m thinking just one more trip to Queensland, one more truckload to Bairnsdale, and I can buy back the old place. More time to write, more stability, less shimmer. I walk back from the river and see a snake at the same time as I hear a lyrebird. The horses are in the yard, waiting to be caught. The air smells like wire. I haven’t watched a Western or read any cowboy books for twenty years or more. They must have had an effect on me, on everyone. Yet we ride and walk on different land, and follow tracks in a whole different way that cowboys on TV don’t know. There’s a sheep or two under the tank—never knew much about them, or talked to any shearers much. Bells clang. I picture living here where my recent ancestors grew up, writing their lives through mine, effacing theirs to some extent. Would it be easier, in a way, for someone more alienated, and therefore less implicated? One day we drive to my great grandfather’s cement grave, his initials spelled in small rocks. Like a beloved servant