George Seddon by Gaynor Andrea;

Author:Gaynor, Andrea;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Inc.

Porter’s elaborate trope works at several levels; above all, it shows that the sheep are out of place, but it also evokes the acute vulnerability and the aloof, aristocratic air of many sheep (the Border Leicester, for example). The sun-scarred miles and muddy dams are their creation much as pre-revolutionary France was ravaged by its luxury-loving nobility. His image has an especial poignancy in Fremantle, a major export centre for the live sheep trade, where the tumbrils roll past daily with their hapless victims crowded against the bars, on their long journey to the bright knife.

Sheep are not merely the dumbest of the dumb brutes: they are the least romantic of animals, as anyone who has had to deal with foot-rot or fly-strike, cutting maggots out of the living flesh, or knackering the lambs, or even rounding them up, will attest. There has been little attempt to romanticise them in Australian or any other literature, to my knowledge, except, of course, when they are stage props for The Good Shepherd, which we will come to later. What has been romanticised endlessly is the Arcadian setting, along with the values and behaviours that it is perceived as legitimating. These values and behaviours of Arcadia are best exhibited in Australia at the beach, our own locus amoenus.

So it is not the literary form proper that has played such a large role in Australian culture, but the pastoral setting, Arcadia, and the values that go with it. One has been the tendency to locate health, happiness and virtue in the country, and vice and misery in the city. This has long been an English literary tradition. There is a suite of associated myths and attitudes: that of the Golden Age, including its Edenic version, and the appropriation of the pastoral imagery by the Church, which has played a part in Australia in sanctioning a particular form of land use and of individual wealth accumulation. There is a splendid example in Geoffrey Hamlyn, one that uses the rhetoric of the Old Testament to legitimise invasion of the Snowy country:

‘There are a cattle down there, certainly,’ I said, ‘and a very large number of them; they are not ours, depend upon it: there are men with them, too, or they could not make so much noise …’

‘I’ll tell you what I think it is, old Jeff’ said James, ‘it’s some new chums going to cross the watershed and look for new country to the south. If so, let us go down and meet them: they will camp down by the river yonder.’

James was right. All doubt about what the newcomers were was solved before we reached the river, for we could hear the rapid detonation of the stockwhips loud above the lowing of the cattle; so we sat and watched them debouche from the forest into the broad river meadows in the gathering gloom: saw the scene so venerable and ancient, so seldom seen in the Old World – the patriarchs moving into the desert with all their wealth, to find a new pasture ground.

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