Oakstand: Part I

Simon: [After a pause, to MAL] I take it you’ll be
barracking for Labor tonight?

Mal: [Looking at him] Well I don’t anticipate yelling
myself hoarse, but I’m certainly hoping for a change of
government. I take it we all are?1

• Don’s Party, David Williamson, 1971

 

1. The left-hand of Oakstand.

 

28th of November, Nineteen Seventy-Two                       |                          1pm

 

“…There are four days until the federal election. By all reports the Australian
Labor Party, headed by the acerbic orator Gough Whitlam, is projected to win.
If Labor wins, it will be the first time they form a government in 23 years …
Labor has been rapidly successful, questioning staunch believers of the
Coalition all across regional NSW…”

 

The rapidly changing continent reassumed its strange, unvisited glamour.

Somewhere on the paddock of rural Oakstand, a boy in blue rugby shorts bowled a disastrous spinner at a young batsman standing before an oil drum used for stumps. In a land of stagnant heat and Mallee Trees, the maddening afternoon sun made overs of cricket last forever.

‘Christ, bowl already!’ said a voice down on the paddock, with a hint of struggle amidst the forty-degree slaughter of Hillston’s summer. It was getting too hot to talk, but not too hot to complain. Around the paddock, the sun’s relentless rays handed out a vicious red-brown sunburn that made arms with pale shoulders look like cigarettes pulled out of an old Benson and Hedges pack. Even after dark, the heat hung around in poorly ventilated bedrooms which couldn’t catch enough of the breeze to make a difference. Day after day, the farm of Oakstand buckled under a burning blue sky, the absence of clouds an ever-present reminder from above that what they hoped for would not come today. Under the drought was

Oakstand. The farm. The home. The wife and eighteen-year-old kid. The CWA in town every second Wednesday. The loves. The hurts. The petty victories. The games of cricket and warm cans of Fosters and tightly rolled shirt sleeves. The election posters all over town.

Come on kid, bowl! thought Lance.

He tapped his fingers against his pants as he walked. Why am I so nervous? He spun in his head. The thud grew louder. He smelt like an old cigarette pack mixed with traditional tones of sweat. Lance wore a red Bisley work shirt, rolled tight around the forearms. Leave no room in the folds, it’ll get caught in fence wire, he always told himself. His dusty boots stamped through the dry grass.

Lance arrived at the game.

He raised his left arm to the cricket crowd and signalled that he wanted to bowl next. The players looked in disbelief, as the man who never bowled made it clear he was about to. Lance was a short, stocky man built like the five-eight he had been back in his day. His eyes were old and deeply blue – as his mind was sharper than the garage bandsaw and quicker than a Dapto Greyhound. He shaved his head every other week, so his baldness was protected under a wide brown Akubra. His left hand was marked up and down by vicious fencing scars, under the tanned skin. He walked with a slow limp in the right leg but was able to push through it and walk normally if he needed to. Like in a game of cricket.

The build-up to the election was turning something inside Lance, and its tension could be felt even in the early morning pleasantries exchanged between old friends. The town of Hillston was usually a bit tone-deaf to politics, but between the television advertisements, posters, and songs – it was becoming hard to ignore. With his son, Junior, turning eighteen in May, and Lance as a relic of Oakstand, things were slowly coming to a head.

Cricket kept him calm. Oakstand kept him calm.

Lance smiled as he heard the infamous; ‘Lance is playing, holy shit!’

‘Give us that ball, would ya kid?’ laughed Lance.

The bowler quickly relinquished the ball to Lance, and he did a few windmills with his left arm to prepare. Lance was the only left-handed bowler in Hillston. His son, Junior, was the only openly left-wing supporter in Hillston. He was a short, amiable boy with brown-blonde hair and cracked lips that he licked constantly, who stood outside the town library handing out red pamphlets for the Labor Party. In his persistent effort to get the inexorable conservatives onside, he knew the power of a sweet word, a generous compliment. When talking about something important, he moved his freckled hands around in Flamenco-inspired circles until the point was stated.

Most of the never-ending street that took everybody into town was playing cricket at Oakstand. Girls in bright orange corduroy flares sat on the side of the paddock fence and watched the game. The girl’s clunky shoes rested against the wires of a fence that was the vapid colour of depressed tin. Adolescents clad in work shirts and black rugby shorts complained of the batting order, and of the leper colony of odd bumps and divots of grass that constituted the outfield. Facing Lance was Junior, who held the willow between his hands with confidence. He knocked the bat on the ground and nodded at his dad as if to say go on, do your worst.

Lance spun the ball right to left from hand to hand.
Right to left.
Hand to hand.

In many ways Lance and Junior were the same. They had the same tanned skin, wore similar work shirts, and the same calloused hands riddled with scratches and scars from everyday labours. They were both built the same. On their day, they were both frighteningly good spin bowlers. But to the big world beyond, Lance was an old outlaw, and Junior was an innocent episode of Sesame Street. Junior read the Tribune. Lance read the Australian. Junior loved school. Lance never finished. Lance never spoke about politics in public. Junior was gathering local support for the Labor Party. Junior would want Lance to vote for Labor in the election, as he was still too young. Lance was a staunch supporter of the inveterate Liberal Country coalition.

Right to left.
Hand to hand.

Junior’s school results brought with them a world of change, amplified by an election and Lance’s fear of change. Lance was tone-deaf to anything bigger than the farm, politics, people, culture. Junior was politically astute, and up to date with the cultural happenings in the city. So as such, his school results were good. Really good. He was the dux of Hillston Central School and fell into great academic praise. Junior thought his academics would take him to university. Lance thought it was a waste of time. He was happy Junior was intelligent in his own way but saddened to notice Junior became disinterested with Oakstand. If the Labor Party won the election, Junior would receive a university scholarship, and probably leave for good. Lance believed even if Labor won, the election promises would never make their way to Junior. He had the idea in his head – like a mantra – that relying on governmental change was weak, especially for a young man.

Hillston had always been blue, and that’s just the way it was.

Lance voted for the Country Party his whole life and let them do the rest. It didn’t matter then, because the Country Party and Liberal coalition had been in government since Lance was 32. Now 55, he felt that a possible change of government was indicative of a loss of control. Loss of control over his son. His world.

Right to left.
Hand to hand.
Stop.
Look up.
Breathe.

Lance stood with the ball in his left hand. Ready to bowl. A glimmer of defiance in his boy’s eyes. He jogged up at an angle and released the ball with his arm up as if he was doing freestyle. Everyone watched as it went up. It glided and spun around itself multiple times in the air before hitting the ground and curving around Junior’s legs and onto the stumps. Junior turned in disbelief as the pitch lapsed into cheering. The work-shirts and rugby shorts ran around each other in excitement, as Lance and Junior looked at each other. Everyone was cheering, but Junior just nodded his head slowly and gave the bat to someone else. Lance took his victory quietly and walked back up to the veranda. How did he do that? Junior pondered desperately, as kids and fielders began asking each other if they saw that and pointing at the spot where the ball had landed – “how’d he get so much spin on it?!”

Reluctantly, Junior took a fielding position under the Mallee tree down the side of the paddock to think. What the hell was that? He never plays. He always watches. Is it because of the election? Because of the pamphlets?

The Australian sun and the game of cricket had an air of revelation; he could feel it. So went the afternoon, as Junior stood under the Mallee tree, and the sun slowly rolled across the burning sky.

 

2. A handful of fear in a few crowded hours.

 

Twenty-Ninth of November 1972                                 |                                 5pm

 

All quiet on the paddock. All noise on the veranda of Oakstand.

Lance, Junior, and Mother Eileen sat in thatched chairs around the wide veranda, overlooking verdant plains that extended out forever. The country before them stretched out low, as if it were hiding from the starry unbroken sky above. Every now and again Eileen would slap her knees, sigh, then get up to periodically check the rissoles in her oven. As they cooked, the smell started to waft out in all directions.

With a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Lance slouched in his chair and sighed deeply. His work boots were laid out before him, slowly catching the falling ash. Numerous empty tins of Foster’s sat on a circular wooden table in the middle of the deck. Opposite him, Junior swished wine in a glass, raising it to his nose every so often in an effort to look like he was a connoisseur rather than a kid who just wanted to feel a little light-headed from time to time. Ten-year-old Clancy was occupied on the floor with a thin piece of wire he was wrapping around a stick shaped like a deformed dowsing stick.

Clancy twisted the wire. Lance tapped his fingers against his pants, a nervous twitch.

The tapping had begun a few days prior, when he glanced at Junior’s final results on the kitchen table. Seeing the name ‘Lance Wilson’ on a Higher School Certificate paper had filled Lance with pride, but it was a brutal reminder that his son would be gone for good depending on the election’s results. It wasn’t the life he wanted for Junior (or perhaps himself), and the farmer in him battled with the father in him. In his youth, Lance was a drover until the sweeping arm of the Second World War took him to Northern Africa. He hated Africa, but it was better than being in one of those Japanese POW camps he’d heard so much about.

Not for a second in Tobruk or Wilcannia had he dignified going to university or changing who he voted for. Lance knew how it worked in the city: suits cowering behind their robes and degrees and money and big houses and mid-life crisis boats and children who would grow up to hide behind them. They weren’t the ones going to war.

Always mute on conscription day.
Always deafening on protest day.

Like any father, Lance wanted what he thought was best for his boy, but it hurt to know that his dream of passing on the farm was not one shared by his namesake. Weighed down by a sense that this meant he had failed as a father, Lance was riddled with guilt that his boy was the only one on the street who preferred homework over harvest. The only one to have political pamphlets sitting around the house from a different party than Lance voted his whole life.

If Junior had his way, it would make him the first in the family to go to university and forgo his family for something bigger. Packing up and moving out to the city was a speculative decision that Lance was all too aware of, and one which could ultimately break Junior when he realised how difficult it would be competing with a thousand other kids just as intelligent as him.

In the middle of the veranda, Lance’s small brown transistor sat at the centre-table like a sentinel, watching and speaking out with a crackling authority. The familiar voice of George Negus began.

“Hello Australia, I’m George Negus, and this is ABC news…

‘Quiet!’

“…The kidnappers of the Victorian Faraday school affair in October have been convicted…

Lance smiled.

...Labor hopeful Gough Whitlam has stated that if he is elected, he will withdraw all troops from Saigon, marking the end of our involvement in the conflict…”

‘Thank god,’ Junior exclaimed. Lance looked at the boy in sudden disbelief.

‘What do you mean thank god?’ Lance spat, leaning forward in his chair, and taking a long drag of his cigarette.

‘The war went for twenty years. It was a disastrous display of the Liberal’s foreign policy-’

Lance looked incredulously at his son, daring him to continue. When he didn’t, Lance couldn’t help himself from speaking his mind.

‘First the Labor pamphlets around the house, now Vietnam – don’t you forget who’s providing this roof over your head!’

‘Dad, don’t you see? Times are changing. Vietnam is unpopular, people want public healthcare, we need to acknowledge the Aborigines–’

‘But why? Things are fine the way they are!’

‘Get with the times, Dad! That way led us to Vietnam for the last decade!’

‘My mates are over there, and some of them won’t ever come back! Have some respect!’

‘Tell your mates they wasted their time,’ Junior replied quietly.

Lance stared at him, stared into those eyes which mirrored his in almost every way except for the arrogant shimmer in them now. He wanted to launch an invective, ask him what the humidity and the sweltering reality of Bataan was like, ask him what the ‘political thinking’ was behind a battalion decimated by a superiors’ grievous tactical oversight.

His silence was far harsher.

‘What’s a foreign policy?’ Clancy asked his father, quickly. Lance held his arm down to signal to the boy to be quiet, and to continue wrapping a piece of wire around a stick. The radio continued:

“…Soon we speak with a political veteran once again doing the ALP dance; Lance Barnard… By all reports the Australian Labor Party is projected to win…

Lance sighed deeply. As the radio talked, the landscape slowly hummed. It spoke a language of its own. It had a way of seeping into their bones; becoming a part of who they were.

‘How’s the fence wire going, Clanse?’ Junior said to his brother, not breaking eye contact with his father.

The boy kept to the wire. He had a strange obsession with the wire. He would build elaborate worlds in his mind, and let his dirty fingers bend and twist the metal around natural objects. He spent days on end fortifying sticks and logs. Everyone just left him behind the shed until he returned with a metal ornament.

‘Are you going to apply to University?’ Lance began again.

Junior nodded slowly, ever wary that this question held far more weight than a simple yes or no.

‘And what are you going to do with a degree while you’re working here?’

As passionately as if he were painting his life’s work, Junior talked through the university scholarship, the bartending job he’d get when he moved into a sharehouse, the unfamiliar politics, (the dreams that would come crashing down when his stupid new government ran out of money), the girl he’d meet.

‘What the hell is wrong with Oakstand?!’

The harsh outburst interrupted Junior. His six cans of Foster’s were making their presence felt. He grunted as he breathed. He clenched his thick fists. Foreseeing what was to happen, Clancy picked up his wire and walked off to the sheds. Eileen walked out to the veranda with rissoles, before promptly spinning around and walking back into the kitchen.

‘Nothing is wrong with Oakstand, but the opportunity for me to go to university might be within reach. I’ve lived here my whole life – and it’s great,’ he added quickly, flaring his hands outwards in a weak display of self-defence. Flamenco. ‘Just, let me rephrase.’ A sigh. No reaction. ‘Imagine me in ten years, Dad, Barrister robes and all, walking out of Sydney district court with a grin and a landmark victory…’

He looked hopefully at his father, whose eyes did not shine with the same innocence and excitement. Fearing a rebuttal and intimidated by the precarious silence, Junior started rambling frantically.

‘And-and… I can’t spend my life working on the farm when I could’ve been able to get something better. I want to be a lawyer, or a-’

He stopped himself. His face flushed with shame and his eyes darted downwards, suddenly interested in the speck of mud on his right boot.

‘Something…better?’

Barely a whisper left his lips, but Junior heard him as clearly as if he’d screamed into his ear. He finished his can and wiped his mouth viciously with his brown forearm.

‘Something better?’ he said again.

Junior tried backtracking, telling his father that it wasn’t what he meant, that he’d read about a free healthcare scheme and the possibility of a local medical centre (“for free, Dad. Free!”).

It was too late.

‘Something…better?… You don’t get it! None of this will happen. Big government means big disappointment. They won’t deliver! You’ll be disappointed, and you won’t have a bar of it when I’m the one who says I told you so!’ Lance stopped. Junior looked in anticipation at his father, waiting for an explanation.

It never came.

Junior continued to discuss university and health opportunities and his aspirations that a new government would bring, but it all blurred out his father. Never had Lance felt such an acute sense of shame, than in that moment.

For eighteen years Lance had raised a son to be the man of Oakstand. If giving him the same name meant anything, it was like Junior’s first eighteen years at home were a learning curve for the rest of his life. There was no rushing teaching Junior about Oakstand; he thought he’d let the farm teach him when it was time. There was no rush then. Fencing was a five-minute skill – but farming was a lifetime. At least that’s what Lance imagined back then, in the twenty-three years of Liberal government he’d always known, where he imagined his son would be far, far different. He liked it how it was. He liked that he could turn on the radio every day since he was thirty-three and hear that the Liberal government was alright, and that it was all good, and that everything was under control. He liked that the government was the same old, even if there was the odd dry spell. He liked that he could manage the farm and still have time for a game of bowls every Friday with the boys. Everything was fine the way it was, now Junior wants to leave, and wants me to vote Labor so he might get a scholarship? He doesn’t realise what will happen when they don’t deliver. Labor never delivers on their promises. I’m trying to help him! Lance thought.

The radio began.

“This is the ABC. We have on the line Graham from Narrabeen. Who will you be voting for Graham?

“…Ah well I’d be voting for Labor, they promised to end conscription, and I don’t want to join the army…”

Lance huffed.

“…We now have Julie from Moree. Who will you be voting for?

“Definitely Labor, they promise me equal pay at work…”

Junior tried to use his infinite vocabulary and hand movements and acerbic wit to convince Lance, but it was no use. Words didn’t bring solutions. Actions did. Junior was devastated. There was no such pain as disappointing a parent. Junior didn’t know it, but his dad felt the unnerving shame of disappointing a child. Junior silently swore to himself that if he ever felt that way again, he’d never forgive himself.

The sky, changing with the minutes, seemed the only unbroken part of the landscape.

Junior had known the election and school results were troubling for his father, but not to that extent. Tears rolled across Junior’s freckles and onto his shirt, becoming absorbed into the shirt’s carmine hue. Junior watched the now evening sun crash into the hills, reflecting its fading glare through moist, glistening eyes. The sun was going, but the heat stayed, radiating around an air filled with arguments and disappointments. The radio played out.

“…Queensland’s Neville Bonner will be running in the Half-Senate election, which is concurrent with the election of the entire lower house. If successful, he will be the first aboriginal to be elected to parliament in their own right….”

Junior should’ve known Vietnam was a tough topic. In his grand displays of vanity and intelligence, he had disrespected everything that Lance was here for, and everything he voted for. Oakstand. He didn’t want his dad to face the disappointment of a different son. He knew he was different. Junior had heard it all before, but the way he was going he’d cost himself his father’s affirmations that everything would be okay, that they would go through the brave new world together. He didn’t know the world the way Lance did. And the truth was, he couldn’t know. He couldn’t know if Labor would win, and he’d get what he wanted. Or that he’d get stuck in the country, like his father, and grandfather, and endure an endless life on the farm. That scared him. Getting stuck. He couldn’t know the unfairness of his dad losing a farmhand. Oakstand had a gravity to it, but Junior wanted nothing more than to wrestle his way out of its maternal pull.

The worst bit of the big world for Junior to swallow was that if Labor lost, the arguments would have all been for nothing. So would that be it? Lance votes for the Country Party, and I push him to vote for Labor, for no purpose? Junior pondered. The government didn’t hinge on one man in western NSW, but Junior wasn’t eligible to vote, so it was just Lance. Junior was a boy who had such lofty aspirations, grand visions for the future, and yet here he was – consumed by his father’s fear of the future. Fear of change.

It became too much at that moment, as he tried to imagine a life for himself without university.

If Labor lost, Junior wouldn’t get his scholarship. He’d probably be conscripted. If not, in a month he’d be mowing a rusty Holden FJ with a shitty gearbox that never worked around the bends of the Great Western Highway, doing supply runs for Oakstand on a feeble tank of fuel he picked up in Yass. Gough Whitlam’s promises of change would float off into the distance while Junior watched. In a year, he’d be clearing out his room of all his old literature of Hillston Central High Sixth Form and wondering what all the fuss was ever about anyway. He’d dismiss it all to try and curb the devastation, a vicious jab in all directions. Oakstand would have a way in – but never a way out. A lifetime created because his time would be badly spent, and throughout, his dad would have known that Junior could have done it far, far better if he didn’t expect so much to change.

This would all be fine if Junior was Lance. But he wasn’t. And as nothing gold could ever stay, all of it could be painfully real.

But now, the face of the plains became a mirror through which Junior saw himself. Junior wasn’t sure if in that moment, he’d lost himself – or found himself. He wasn’t sure whether he’d be sure of himself again. So also in Oakstand’s vastness, Junior sat under a darkening sky, and continued to wait for moral sustenance.

 

To be continued…