Author: dean

The news that fat men may lose their sensual charm has made my eyes bulge as well as the rest of me.

The statement at a Melbourne conference titled Towards a Slimmer Australia was made by a stern and well-meaning doctor who said that obese men could be romantically impeded.

This brought local sniggers and coy looks over our morning eggs.

“And how’s my lard and master today?” said the siren of Smithfield (who needs no introduction).

My daughter brought out her guitar and began singing, “My Pop is a roly-poly Romeo.”

For those of us who think big the fat could be well and truly in the fire, but if you expect me to reduce you’re in for a long weight. So there!

People don’t just say to me, “You are looking well.”

They shift the emphasis and say, “You are looking, w-e-l-l-l…!

Their sneaky eyes tell the rest. Be sure your chins will find you out.

Yet my doctor is cheerful: “I know what I’ll do about your weight. Get stronger chairs for the surgery.”

Yet I remain a passionate man when I see my wife waiting for me. Romance is still part and parcel of our lives. In fact, she romances more about parcels than any woman I know.

“What have you brought me tonight,” she’ll whisper, “apart from eight kilos of blubber?”

How many great lovers of the past have been thin? Henry VIII quickly had the measure of anyone who called him a big fat ruler. Charles II probably ran to portliness but Nell still approached him with a cheeky Gwyn.

But if I’m obese am I not amiable? When I kiss my loved ones goodnight I hold out my arms and fold them into my folds.

Of course I’m scolded by secretaries who snatch sugar—and other secretaries—from my path.

When I go to my trouser-makers, my measurer shakes hands with his colleagues and says, “Well goodbye, men. I’m just leaving for the front.”

Tyre manufacturers beg me to make commercials. That width, that grip, that heavy tread.

And all those spares.

Yet, I’ll let you into a secret. There still beats a warm heart in these old ribs. The young moon above the dark quilt of the ranges, the star-struck night still remind me of the elemental forces and the passionate activities of the human race. Such as supper.

Come winter, I have not lost my fire—even if I prevent most other people from sitting near it.

Well might my wife cry: “Which do you love best—me or a cream bun?”

Please… don’t make me choose!

 

Max Fatchen

West Wyalong is in flames. Hay is clutching at its last straw. Motels are reeling.

Draw together, defenceless ones.

The grandchildren are coming.

Everywhere relatives are putting on their best face. Welcoming banners are being erected. Warning signs are in place. The toilet wall awaits its graffiti.

The bathroom is ready to become a flooded paddyfield and a soapy swamp.

Vulnerable tablecloths are being hidden and the tough old plastic, wipe me-downs are being brought out.

The grandchildren are coming and they are drawing near.

My wife already is planning the blankets and the beds that need borrowing.

The kinky ice-cream with its leering litres of raspberry ripple is going into the refrigerator.

Prepare, prepare.

The hordes are being released. The mini-Goths are upon us, the kindy Huns are on the loose, the teeny Vikings are preparing to sack the sitting room and plunder the pantry.

The holidays are coming.

My eardrums are tingling with dread at the thought of erupting stereos, of telly and transistor in raucous accord.

“They’ll be a year older,” says my wife.

They’ll be a year older and a year bolder; a year prouder and a year louder.

Adjust your face, you old sourpuss. They are your flesh and blood even though they make your flesh creep and your blood boil. OK, they are nice on the telephone, nice and offhand. They are mostly background on the telephone when you are talking to other people.

“That’s the kids in the background”, says your dear one.

“You mean it’s not a tank battle?” you shout from your end.

It’s all nice because they’re a long way off, like distant thunder.

Now they are coming. Take cover, Truro. Stand by, Smithfield.

They are on their way, sticky-faced and relentless, pouting and looting.

Today we had an emergency meeting on food supplies. The shelves are piled high with trendy cereal, crunchy, munchy and crackly. They’ll have it all over the floor like the brown snow. The milk will run in rivers. The cordial, green and orange, will rainbow its way in restless tides over kitchen tiles or cataract down the cupboards.

Our blackbirds are folding their wings and sub-letting their nests. Small rodents are leaving our house. They know when an earthquake is coming.

Oh, the rich smell of rancid sun lotion, the trail of discarded under wear, the stumbling impediment of discarded thongs, the ceaseless interrogation about food, about the anatomy, about going to the beach How can I wait?

My wife says that of course the grandchildren will be asking a lot of questions.

When didn’t they? And they’ll have learnt a lot of new words. When haven’t they?

Last year they came out with an affectionate nickname for me. It sent other adults into hysterics and I was mildly pleased.

Hullo, Whale Bum, they said.

So the poodle and I are enjoying our last few days of peace, sharing a brave gingerbread and stitching every nerve-end tight.

Everything combustible, edible; anything that will mark, paint or perforate… all are being put on the higher shelves.

It is a fulfilling time for us, says my wife. And the filling will start as soon as they arrive, mark my words.

Move over, Genghis Khan. Stand by, the Riot Squad.

The grandchildren are coming Whale Bum is on red alert!

 

Max Fatchen

They’re calling me Max the Minder down our street.

Why? Because I recently became that overwrought human being, the home minder for those away on holidays the sad stayput who waters other people’s potplants, who presides over pet food, who is savaged by goldfish while the care- free owners are living it up from Semaphore to the Gold Coast.

How I became a day-and- night water carrier, a feeder of fins, a dispenser of sustenance for incorrigible canines and scratching cats is a dark chronicle indeed.

To say nothing of a flowerbed guardian and a slave to the awful automatic watering system that some people install to leap from the lawn clean under one’s groin in the most awful and terrifying gushing.

First it was the neighbours who were taking an early holiday and who wanted to avoid the rush.

They said: “We wondered if you’d feed Centurion for us.” They indicated their guard

dog, one of those Teutonic breeds who likes to sit down quietly with your arm in his mouth to reassure himself that you aren’t a housebreaker or a member of the Secret Service.

“Well, this place where we’re going doesn’t take dogs,” they said, jiggling and avoiding my eyes, “so Centurion will have the run of the yard and just see that he has his meaty chunks and, if he does take your arm in play, stay there quietly even if it takes most of the evening.”

Then there was their cat, Dulcimer, a kind of mobile mat of indiscernible breed as fat as butter and as torpid as potatoes.

They said: “Dulcimer has milk and a little bit of chicken but no bones. If he strops your leg stay still because his claws haven’t been trimmed by the vet.”

And there were special crumbs for Moby Dick, the goldfish, splashing and spouting in his bubbling aquarium (“Make sure he is getting oxygen.”)

They handed me the house key with urgent reminders about checking the windows and keeping away from the deep freeze.

Then suddenly their car doors slammed and they were gone, leaving me with Centurion, Dulcimer and the aquatic creature, finning its way through its bubbling oxygen and over its slimy weeds.

Finally I reached home after a particularly trying hour with Centurion going walkies with my arm and Dulcimer stropping my left shin.

I screamed at Moby Dick: “Give me trouble and you’ll finish as fish fingers.”

No wonder he went green about the gills.

Alas, no sooner had I flung myself into my armchair when one of those horrible “Yoohoos” at the door caused my blood pressure to rise like a bad morning on Mount St Helens.

Another set of neighbours poured in, thrusting a packet of my favourite biscuits upon me and smoothing my forehead with soggy caramel cake. It meant only one thing.

They wanted their place minded too.

Their situation was arboreal and horticultural—complicated notes about watering, coddling the potplants and adjusting nozzles in that holy of holies, the fernery. Then there was the explanation of their sunken lawn-watering system which left me with sunken sockets in the first five minutes.

My wife spoke the terrible inevitable words: “I’ll see that Max does it.”

I shan’t tell you of the nightmare of the next few days. But then again why should you be spared!

Centurion removed my left shoe and departed into the undergrowth to his terrible lair. Sometimes I fed the plants and watered the cat. I was struck on the head by a hanging fern. The complicated lawn-watering system kept going off in a geyser of technology.

Then the neighbours began ringing from their various holiday resorts.

“How’s Centurion?”

“Well, he was OK last time I rang the dogs’ home.”

Gasping at the other end of the line.

“And the cat?”

“Well, you can’t stop a steam roller but he felt nothing and he’s flatter than a place mat. Oh, and Moby Dick? Well, before Dulcimer went to higher things he put a catspaw into the water to test the oxygen and Moby Dick just happened by and he won’t be needing Oxygen anymore.”

The telephone hung up with a crash at the other end. I could imagine them throwing things into their cases and heading for home. It was a beautiful thought.

It was unfortunate that the other neighbours rang because I was now in a thoroughly nasty and untruthful mood.

They enquired anxiously about the orchids and the ferns and the dwelling and my reply came, admirably controlled but with the faintest hint of urgency.

“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I haven’t been able to get near them. Anyway, the fire brigade is just leaving now…

They were all home within the next few hours.

Nobody is speaking to me anymore and nobody is asking me to mind anything except, my own business!

 

Max Fatchen

I must confess that I read with trembling hand and twitching eyelid that story in Two AM (10/2/ 84) about the TV show that turned down an offer of dishwashers as prizes because they were too sexist.

This raises questions about the whole sexist apparatus of the kitchen and the role-reversal situation in which I have lately found myself.

The odd theory that men get in the way in the kitchen has long since gone down the sink.

Take it from me, we proud victims of domesticity are alive and muddling.

I have learnt all the positions of the various kitchen machinery.

I can give you an intimate layout of the knife and fork drawer, ticking off the various items with what fingers I have left.

I know where the best large china plate is kept, way at the back of all the other china and you have to lay the whole damn lot on the floor while you’re groping around for the accursed

piece. Talk about crackpots!

Getting back to the knife drawer, we have carving knives that wouldn’t carve butter and others that would sheer through armour plate. In another age they would have been cutlassing the heads off buccaneers or dropping from a great height on the necks of the French aristocracy.

Take the saucepan cupboard. I’ve opened the door and been overwhelmed by an avalanche of utensils, falling around me in an uproar of aluminium.

There are old saucepans that may be used for boiling eggs and we get along tolerably well.

But new saucepans with thickened sides are teasy and temperamental and the kitchen mechanic can get into a nasty mess with them.

Then there are the machines that beat things and how you manipulate them beats me. They have instructions attached giving speeds for certain substances but they could disintegrate me in a twinkling of an eye and, man, that’s no mean disintegration.

You need only take one look at me with my wild stare and lips foaming with egg-nog spray and brutalised banana to know that I’ve been on one hell of a blender.

So the kitchen has taken hold of me. I have become its creature, made captive by its pitiless machines in the dreaded cycle of meal preparation.

Sooner or later one of them is going to get me and I’ll be served up to the wife’s friends with a bit of parsley. Serve them right. I’ve never gone down well with them.

Of course I know the dishwashing machine is a marvellous device and you stack the dishes and set the dials and close the door.

For silly sexists such as me it’s more wonderful than space walking.

But, I ask myself, does the machine also scrape the dishes?

Why won’t the lazy devils in our dining-room finish their meals properly instead of leaving little plateside deposits of carrot or potato or the bit of gristle that stuck in their whistle?

While I don’t actually lick the plates I do take a peck at this and that. Yet when I shove dishes into the sink, bits of spaghetti come writhing to the surface, while rounds of carrots swirl like lifebuoys after the sinking of the Titanic.

The role-reversal kitchen also has other horrors for the beginner such as the condiments closet where there are a dozen salt shakers, four of them blocked, six of them empty and two working through only two holes.

I could also mention the shelf of opened jam, that sticky avenue of irritable old pots waving sad banners of brown paper tops with marmalade congealing beneath and clinging crab apple jelly which I’ve found very useful for sticking down tiles.

So it’s easy for a man to have a breakdown in the kitchen. The only secure and reassuring routine is the washing-up.

One’s at home squirting the soap, fishing in the sink and trying to crowd things on the old plastic drying rack

So the dishwasher would be wonderful. Let it saturate my insecurity. I may even fondle it a little and kiss it when no-one is looking. It can be as sexist as it likes with me. I am ready to befriend it for life.

My wife says it would be just like me to get one now that I’m doing a kitchen stint.

So I’m biding my time. I’ve learnt how to get the flour from the flour tin and spill only half of it; I know how to find aged turnips at the bottom of the vegetable rack. And there’s so much more.

But just a word of warning. Don’t push me too far.

Otherwise I’ll dishwasher my role-reversal hands of the whole thing.

 

Max Fatchen

The country carnival cricket will soon be with us, bringing its adherents to the luxury of turf wickets and wall-to- wall grass.

They’ll come from country grounds of questionable surface, surrounded by oceans of straw. Harvest-hardened hands will grip the Gray-Nicholls, the Gunn and Moore, the County and the Slazenger and all the other great bat brands.

Some old and venerable bats will be coming to clunk a greeting to warriors from Weetulta or sloggers from the South-East. There will be bats with binding and heavy as lead, laden with linseed and reeking of runs.

Some say country cricket is now more sophisticated. Certainly I know of at least one country cricketer who clears the area around his telly set so that he can practise the strokes he sees in instant-replay. Only recently when I was at his residence his bat drove a tray of scones straight through the gap between the lounge and the occasional table, Thank goodness I was there to take a diving catch.

Then again, I always was a butterfingers.

I suppose the country cricketers will be wearing new caps, although our team never reached the cap status. In fact we could only boast two caps between us, We had several washing hats, two stained felts and half a dozen straw harvester hats which threw a big shadow when you crouched low over the bat.

I was once caught off my straw harvester hat, the only hat-trick in which I was ever involved and which I indeed considered as the last straw.

The umpire was adamant. He was a member of my team and he never again got a drink from my waterbag.

Our association sent a team to the carnival and everyone manoeuvred desperately for selection. We even tried to improve our fielding on the ground which was where we put most of our catches.

We also tried all kinds of wiles to woo the selectors—filling up their cars at the hand-operated petrol pump at the local store and even allowing them to use our team batting glove when they played against us. Too late we discovered they were hand-in-glove in more ways than one!

As the country carnival selector came in to bat my captain would whisper “Give him a gentle full toss, Max,” and that’s what I’d bowl. It was no hardship because I rarely bowled anything else.

The names of the country carnival team went up on the notice board of the local post offices.

We gathered around. There was no glory for most of us, the habitual tail-enders, the matting masochists, the rural trundlers and the faithful who brought the waterbags.

Oh they’d picked the good ones. There was the flashing blade from Virginia, the all- from Penfield, he of the craggy countenance and the seaming ball, the terror of tail-enders.

There was the guileful spinner of Gawler River, smiling as he spun. There was the scourge of Angle Vale who ran us all out with his stentorian “Come on. There’s two in it” even if the ball had but trickled at his feet.

Yet he could win a match in an afternoon, his sixes bouncing into the gum trees and a nearby graveyard where the umpire called dead ball.

There were also the Stan McCabes of Smithfield, members of a cricketing and wicketing clan with batting oil in their blood and who showed their babies how to grip the rattle correctly before they were weaned.

So the team was chosen! The rest of us went away and sat down heavily in our cars, Bradmans nipped in the bud, Woodfulls wasted, Oldfields ostracised. But we went to the country carnival anyway.

We were dazzled by the opulence of city grounds. Green grass AND curators, if you please.

Where was the cow at long on and the brown snake where straight hit dipped down into a forest of artichokes and star thistles?

There was a river called the Torrens running near some urban grounds, a river with visible water and boats and girls.

Perhaps there was more rural mysticism in the hunting of the ball hit for a six into the Gawler River, an old river full of gnarled gums and gnarled yabbies.

It was a river high with the scent of eucalyptus and maybe a departed sheep, a river with a jewel of a waterhole where kids fished with bamboo rods and corks on the line until the corks bobbed in a frenzy, activated by a “muddy” a small fish much sought after by anglers in short pants.

There was none of that on this urban ground. There was even a scoreboard and drinks were taken from glasses and a jug, mind you.

There was, of course, the dressing room and, it was rumoured, even showers.

We spectators were shown the mysterious sightscreens so different from looking into a gum tree or a haystack or the rump of a passing cow.

We did have a sort of dressing. room on our home ground. It was a tin shed. Alas, in the weekdays cattle horned it and horses leant against it or used it for itchy rumps until its tortured tin was bent into such a shape that we could only dress in it while lying down.

So our district team took the field. The country carnival was on. We stared at our lean opponents from the Mallee, men raised on dust storms and full of grit.

It was a beautiful time particularly when we won the toss.

And while our star batsman, true to form, ran his partner out in the first over, he did atone by hitting a passing bus and holing the sightboard with two towering sixes!

 

Max Fatchen

Christmas time, says my Oldest Country Cousin, always reminds him of an old strainer, fencing post that stood at the corner of the homestead property and acted as a letterbox.

At first it was a totally primitive system, the mail being left under a piece of limestone rock on the top of the post by the mailman driving by in his floppy-hooded old tourer.

The car had a distinctive roar, ejecting the galahs from the gums and with a heraldic horn that sent the kids saddling the pony to collect the mail, everyone hoping for a letter or for a cheque or even for something sealed with a loving kiss.

Bu came the time, towards one Christmas, when the mailbox post was modernised with an empty Griffiths Brothers tea tin nailed on top. The tin had a lid, it glinted and it was ritzier than the four-gallon-kerosene tins which some used These mailboxes were sometimes sent spinning by nosy cattle or passing whirlwinds.

But the tea tin survived and shone like a beacon. It received its first Christmas deliveries, sheltering the postcards of cribs and kings and more Wise Men than on the local council and even old-fashioned cards decorated with brightly-coloured thread patterning shepherds and stars.

So the mailbox did good service on top of the strainer post and it was about the right size for the parcels too. The mailman always blew the hot in a prolonged blast when there were parcels. Once he blew it so long that he ran down the battery, says my Oldest Country Cousin.

There were a few tragedies; the cake from Aunt Hetty in a battered parcel had been left in the mailbox for a few hours and the bull ants came stampeding from every hole within wind whiff. By the time my Oldest Country Cousin arrived the whole post was a rippling black army of currant-carrying ants wishing each other a merry Christmas.

My Oldest Country Cousin always squeezed the parcels when he collected them because it gave him a hint of what might be in them.

Then he’d lean against the strainer post, watching the clouds go past and wondering how the old character with the reindeer coped in an overcast and whether he’d ever shaved the nearby ranges.

It worried my Oldest Country Cousin, the thought of Santa walloping into the sharp spears of the yakkas on the range summit with toys scattering everywhere amid the outraged wallabies.

Sometimes the strainer post was washed with a few tears when expected letters didn’t arrive or unexpected letters did. He’d shed a few tears himself when he grew older and got his superphosphate bill.

Once he’d nearly broken his toe on the old strainer post when a particular communication from the land tax people made him kick out in sheer exasperation.

But near Christmas the family would wait for the mailman to give him his present and to have a celebratory drink or two.

The mailbox was decked with tinsel and a tiny Christmas bell that tinkled lightly in the breeze.

My Oldest Country Cousin’s mother had always brewed wonderful ginger beer for Christmas and the mailman liked it.

It was a dangerous brew, often exploding in the pantry in frothing shrapnel and once, when in a hurry she’d left a bottle in a wet sock for the mailman, the heat had dried the sock and the bottle had exploded with dramatic force, bringing the sleepy lizards to full alert.

But when the family met the mailman everyone sang and drank from pannikins and wished a merry Christmas to each other and the mailman said it was his best call and don’t forget to wish merry Christmas to the land because it was what everyone stood on, built on and grew on and it deserved to be remembered.

The afternoon sun caught the strainer post mailbox and it gleamed like a star while the little bell tinkled tiny greetings.

The strainer post mailbox is no more. The post is still there, split and splintered by age, the tin has long since rusted away and the homestead has a fancy box number in the nearby town where you can get to quickly in your air-conditioned car.

The bull ants wait in vain for Aunt Hetty’s cake but the stars are bright on Christmas Eve and I understand the ho-ho character and his reindeer haven’t yet clipped the yacca spears on the top of the ranges.

“They’re too busy dodging Halley’s Comet, and them soaring interest rates,” says that wise man, my Oldest Country Cousin.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Max Fatchen

 

People, now that I am supposedly retired, keep asking me what I do with my time.

In fact people, who are still working, will hurdle moving cars, leap over newsstands and cross dangerous streets just to ask me accusingly: “What are you doing in town?” as if I was unlawfully on the asphalted premises of my own fair city.

If I venture within rolled-up newspaper throw of my old place of employment it suddenly spews anxious employees, crying: “Can’t you keep away from the place?”

This seems a common experience with retirees.

Where have they gone and are they behaving in the patterns that society prescribes for them? Or are they getting into mischief?

Some people are concerned that I haven’t taken up bowls, which, of course, I did years ago. They were neatly made, hollowed bowls and held mostly chocolate mousse.

Greenkeepers are just as happy keeping me away from bowls. They reckon my weight would cause me to sink clean through the rink and dislocate the pennants for weeks.

Some are worried that I am not camping in some out-of-the-way place dealing with a broken axle in some northern creekbed; camping beneath a sky dusted with stars and a terrain crawling with tiger snakes; huddled beneath col lapsing tents in torrential rain.

“We thought you’d be way beyond Andamooka by now”, they say fretfully

Others are simply livid that we haven’t gone overseas. Taken the trip. What, not even New Zealand? Tasmania? Dear me!

So Beefeaters of the Tower, calm yourselves. Gondoliers ride gently at your moorings in Venice. That’s not the Fatchens approaching. Be patient Disneyland. Sleep on Isles of Greece where Sappho sang.

Don’t wait up, girls of Montmartre.

A few people who have been trying to find out where my lump sum went, say that I have gone into real estate on the Gold Coast. Even I know that people who go into Gold Coast real estate rarely ever come out again.

To tell you the truth I am spending a lot of time in my presentation chair. It was designed especially to fit my back and its width could accommodate the hips of a rhinoceros. It is superbly and seductively comfortable. It settles with a satisfying hiss when I sit on it as if I have just sat on a carpet snake.

It has some kind of hidden hydraulics and is as cunning designed as a space shuttle It is on rollers and it swivels. I can roll and swivel, traverse and reverse by using nifty legwork. I can make circuits of my study in a true poetry of motion, skimming past the bookcase and hot-rodding past the filing cabinet.

Or I can lean back and twiddle my thumbs. Indeed it is something I wanted all my life, a thumb-twiddling, revolving back-fitting, swivelling, roller-coasting study chair.

Already my wife sees it as a mistake.

“What’s Max doing?” the telephone callers ask anxiously.

“He’s sitting in his chair, twiddling,” she says.

Shrieks on the phone.

“Not that, TWIDDLING,” she says, spelling it carefully.

Or they say, “Is that thunder?”

“No,” she answers, “It’s Max drag-racing down the passage.”

Some people are afraid to visit us. I collected two callers on my lap when they were a bit slow. We now have the only house with a zebra crossing in the passage.

My wife is talking wistfully about people who get active retirement presents such as garden tools.

And crystal decanters. There have been a flood of them among retirees in our street; crystal decanters flashing in the sherry light.

Some people have scored prints of Australian landscapes and even coffee sets. Everyone knows what I have. I have my presentation chair.

“Go, go, go,” scream the larrikins as I do a wheelie.

Sometimes I sit in it as I am now and stare out the window at the burgeoning spring, at soft-plumed honeyeaters sucking nectar, at homeless bees trying to squat in the ventilator. Skylarks soar and the green crops in the paddocks wave like a sea. Blossoms make a little snowfall on the lawn.

My chair holds me closer.

So there we are, sitting pretty together awaiting your call to ask me what I’m doing in my retirement.

 

Max Fatchen

IT WAS A meeting of metal dinosaurs, a congregation of great grain gobblers, of lumbering, snouted machines.

For one fearful moment I expected them to pick me up, winnow me from my flesh, granulate my bones and send me off to the silo.

We were all gathered where the barley grows heavy of head, delicate of stalk and the prima donna of the paddocks.

Tractors throbbed with suppressed excitement, with cabins full of instruments orchestrating on display panels the insides of their harvesting charges. Metal worms were ready to writhe inside cylinders and lift the barley into obedient trucks.

But my country cousins were taking the moisture content of the barley. This is an almost religious ceremony. Moisture content testing is the great rite of barley well-being. If it’s too high a great sigh will ripple from Wallaroo to Warooka.

It is often conducted in the boots of cars. It is attended by anxious drivers of the great machines.

The landscape, most of it barley, nods its million bearded heads in the morning breeze. Has it absorbed too much moisture from the night air, this beautiful, booming, billowing crop of dreams?

“This is a very delicate apparatus,” said my country cousins who are very delicate apparatuses themselves come harvest time, as temperamental as master violinists, playing their vast machines to the score of plenty, to the glory of national income and in praise of the munificence of Mother Earth and the Wheat Board.

One of my country cousins was awinding a sort of coffee grinder. Another showed me a complex machine of dials and indicators, probes and appendages which would give the reading.

Not even my doctor had made such fuss when I went for my last check-up. He had merely looked at me, inflated his blood pressure gadget, sighed again and sent me away, hopeless and shapeless. I always give a poor yield of vitality from the vast panorama of my paunch.

But Yorke Peninsula on a barley-brimming morning is a wonderful place. Even the breeze hushes at moisture-content time.

“Costs hundreds of dollars,” a junior country cousin told me, indicating the machine, “they don’t like too much moisture at the silo.” Turned back from the silo. Such disgrace, the truck slinking through the back roads.

My country cousins went on grinding while others waited; while the great machines were frozen a moment in mechanical immobility. The regiments of barley heads waved and the sun caught the little silos of the paddocks, galvanised islands at which the harvesters docked to discharge their grain.

So we waited. Morning sun dappled the nearby scrub, a hint of blue, moisturised sea showed through a hollow. I had not known such science in my farm days. The moisture content was something, that came from clouds and spat on your face.

When the wheat was hot and brittle and the torpid hares managed to take their languid pads from the eager knives and whirling fangs of old binders, or the rolling greasy structures of harvesters that raised dust and chaff, then you didn’t care about moisture content.

The only moisture content was in the waterbag or the billy-of black tea or it ran from under your armpits or it fell from your eyes when you got your taxation assessment.

But hush, it was time for the moisture content reading, said my country cousins. One took the crushed barley and placed it at the end of the sensitive probe. Needles danced, dials were adjusted, readings taken as a hawk hung breathless above us. Then the shouted verdict.

We’ll reap!

Thus spake the high priests of moisture content.

Silos, stand by. Roar, tractors.

Everyone raced for his machine like drivers at Le Mans. The air shook and quivered, chaff spurted like spray. Away they went, these 20th-century adventurers on their ships of grain, this cacophonous convoy in its harvest hullabaloo.

I hurried back to the farmhouse for several cups of tea. I have a big area to nurture and I like to keep my moisture content stable.

 

Max Fatchen

I’m glad some gentle rain from heaven has been falling on the place beneath.

But I know that my country cousins won’t be satisfied with the falls until their livestock start coming from the paddocks two by two and standing around the trailer boat.

Last week my country cousins rang me with one of those rural discourses which they think is necessary for this slothful denizen of suburbia, cocooned in ignorance and with a cultural range bounded by the fishing notes and the menu of the local Chinese takeaway.

I could tell when my country cousins came on the phone that it was rural worry time and that the month of May was not merry and that they were ready to discuss blocking weather highs and lows that slipped away to the south east and weakened.

I weakened a bit myself when they rang.

I knew that they were staring out the window at the moonlit pastures that hadn’t germinated and at ranges over which no cloud crept and that they held the strong view that if there was any moisture about, it was as shy as a tax cut.

In fact, I had been admiring the splendour of the autumn moon through my window as it peered through the tangle of branches and around the corner of the untidy pine trees that mark our house. Autumn moons are beautiful to the casual beholder but as most people’s eyes are full of videos and violence one doesn’t get to see them much.

But the countrysider whose ground is growing colder and whose land isn’t worked up and who is talking about shorter growing seasons isn’t all that romantic on a clear autumn night and is apt to get into land taxes and vegetation clearing.

Or so I learnt on my telephone in the light of the autumn moon.

Excalibur, the tractor, my country cousins said, was so finely tuned that its engine started automatically when someone flushed the toilet so rain-orientated and seeding; sagacious was this motivated mammoth.

It’s no fun waiting for rain, they said and I said I knew that and I couldn’t think of anything by way of comfort. I had already missed half of The Jewel in the Crown because I knew that all my country home cooking and trailerboating to Port Broughton would be in jeopardy if I didn’t sympathise and listen and agonise why the West Australians were always having occasional showers and why Sydney, that scintillating bawd, was always being deluged and even Alice Springs was overcast with patchy rain.

Why was it? they asked huffily. It was time for some computer in the clouds, some satellite that chased the cloud patterns around the earth and parked them neatly over the needy areas. Make rain, not war, my country cousins said.

They had heard I was retiring soon and wasn’t that a relief for the English language and they supposed the old Torana and I would be coming into view on the road above, the top paddock about lunch time. I would be admiring everything as I usually did, crawling and grovelling for new scones and not able to tell wheat from oats.

I didn’t say during this confessional that I would also be eardrummed about barley moisture and silo facilities, about bounties and bonuses, about departmental agricultural eggheads, about marketing mayhem and calamitous Canberra.

I knew that talking was good for the rural soul and that they had to ring someone and that the edgy tightrope of opening rains, if I may mix a rural metaphor, made people ring up and pour it all out into some old ear whose owner would hear them out because sooner or later he and the old Torana would come creeping along the road above the top paddock about lunch time.

My wife called that I was missing The Jewel in the Crown and the rape scene had been replaced by the brutal beating scene and what an atmosphere. The moon rode white and high through the window and the night wind loafed about picking up leaves but never a stick of moisture.

My country cousins said that we’d better get something in the next week or so or they were coming down to burn and loot the Bureau of Meteorology, nullify Aussat and place a banana skin on the runway of the Space Shuttle. So much for technology, they sniffed. So much for predictions and patterns.

They gave me an awful picture of Excalibur juggernauting down the Main North Road flattening the takeaways and reducing Parliament House to whimpering rubble.

Of course I was sympathetic and still am. My country cousins get pretty toey when the opening rains are late. So strive on, Keith Martyn. Work your wonders, Jane Reilly. Give us word of the Wet, I pray you.

For one thing is certain: the old Torana and I won’t be creeping along the road above the top pad dock until the dreaded Excalibur and its brood are sowing the seed and the earth is rain-kissed and mud-mothered.

Then and only then will we call for new scones and country farm eggs. Meanwhile I hope that someone has videotaped The Jewel in the Crown.

 

Max Fatchen