Following In The Steps Of A Trailblazing Journalist
The Age
Saturday August 7, 2004
BOOK REVIEW: BACK ON THE WOOL TRACK, By Michelle Grattan, Vintage, $24.95 Charles Bean was one of the more significant and influential Australians of the 20th century. Australia's official correspondent at Gallipoli and the Western Front, Bean survived the war despite the repeated risks he took to obtain an eyewitness perspective and, as Australia's official historian, proceeded to write and edit a series of volumes that kept him busy until another world war was under way. Bean's history was innovative as well as massive. Its pioneering approach won international acclaim. In his writings and other activities, notably being the creative founder and guiding spirit of the Australian War Memorial, Bean substantially shaped the Anzac tradition. Before the war he was a Sydney Morning Herald journalist, best known for a series of reports he wrote while touring the back country of NSW. These articles he converted into several books. On the Wool Track (published in 1910) has been hailed as a minor classic. Michelle Grattan, political editor of The Age, decided to follow in Bean's footsteps through western NSW. She traversed the same country, comparing her findings with Bean's observations. "The biggest story of the west," she concludes, is that the "wool track has become a more diverse road". Sheep no longer dominate, and there are fewer shearers than a century ago. Harnesses to support their backs, unknown then, are commonplace today. The advent of female rouseabouts has made women more visible in the sheds. Other changes have included the plummeting unionisation of shearers, the advent of tourism and the transformation of towns such as Bourke and Wilcannia. The most significant element that has not changed is that drought remains critical - "never a matter of if, but when. Often it has not been drought alone, but failure to understand that drought's the norm, that has led to the disasters the people and land have suffered." Grattan cites a financial counsellor's tribute to the "enormous durability" of the women of western NSW. "They cook breakfast, put on a load of washing, go out and muster, then come back and cook. Most of them work like two men." In hard times, though, some wives have to become the main family breadwinner, moving from "beleaguered properties" into the towns to get jobs. A farmer's marriage to a nurse or a teacher in this region can result in congratulations for having drought-proofed his property. Grattan presents her survey via the stories of people she encounters. There is a Wilcannia-based architect of Melbourne houses, a mother-of-six shearers' cook who used to drive a taxi and a German immigrant photographer who resides in one of the quirky underground houses at White Cliffs, the opal-mining township where instead of mowing lawns they rake rocks. Along the way Grattan rides a paddle-steamer, enjoys the celebrated once-a-year Louth races and gets on the end of a broom as an assistant rouseabout. Interspersed with the breezy exchanges and chatty country cuppas is abundant information about population shifts, sheep statistics and agricultural trends, presented with the thoroughness that readers familiar with Grattan's political journalism would expect. There is no index, though, and the "Notes on Sources" are selective. Readers wanting to follow up Grattan's quotes from, say, Dorothea Mackellar's diary, or a profile of Billy Hughes contending that he feared homosexual rape in outback NSW, will look in vain. Grattan's roving travelogue provides an illuminating picture of life out west, especially for unenlightened urbanites. Her analysis of the changes that have occurred since Bean's time is insightful. Bean himself has an intermittent presence in the narrative, although readers searching for fresh insights into his oeuvre as a war historian won't find them here. Various writers, such as Grattan, have looked at aspects of Bean's life and work, but the lack of an authentic biography remains a notable national deficiency. (Dudley McCarthy's 1983 study was a pseudo-biography; when Bean's rich war diaries stopped in 1919 so too, essentially, did that book.) Grattan has more in common with Bean than a stint as a journalist on The Herald and an interest in western NSW. Both have made a priority of people-based narrative and have been renowned for painstaking diligence and down-to-earth prose. Grattan quotes Bean's aspiration "never, if possible, to write a sentence which could not be understood by, say, a house maid of average intelligence", and endorses Les Carlyon's assessment that Bean did not always achieve it. In this book she does achieve it, while allowing herself an occasional flourish, as when she describes newly shorn wool as "like rippling white custard" and lakes at Menindee as "like a beach with attitude". Grattan found that Bean's On the Wool Track, though long out of print, is well-known out west today. Her Back on the Wool Track is destined for similarly enduring popularity among the people and places she visited. Ross McMullin is the author of the award-winning biography Pompey Elliott, published by Scribe.
© 2004 The Age