Unsettled Landowner

The Forest comes in over
my unfenced boundaries
as I want no fence where
the fence needs to be
I need no fence which
will hedge my spirit in...

But marsupials eat my nut tress
Rosellas ravage the orchard
Seedling gums and wattles
come up in the rows.

The smallholding merges
and the Forest becomes my farm
in an unholy sacreligious communion
of pet sheep and wallabies,
kangaroos and tether-prisoned goats.

But the forest-wall is still a hedge
and this clearing-lot too small
for me to have in-fee-Simple faith
in arbitary boundaries and title...

I exist in heresy: not farming
the farm that never was until
I came. And all my not-farming
is diluted across the treewall
to the ever-grey of leaf ridges
which I need to slope colour
into the distances.

So I climb the big peppermint-gum
to a gumleaf eyrie.
Stop pretending to cope
with settled life
which fences me in a dull body
of one place, one view,
one parentage of mind.

Twenty embattled acres
are nothing but an itch under
the saddle of my want's
Great Dividing range.

But looking down I see
my feet, tangled in vines,
crippled in choiceless vegetation:
derelict snowpea trellis,
once superphosphated grass,
fallen droughted berry canes,
and sorrel infested daffodils...

and then
the half-clear
regenerating wildflowers.



1989 © Wayne David Knoll

The problem with revisionist history claims of Terra Nullius is that such claims give doubtful conscience to our lives, so maybe they arer the lies of a fifth column bent on taking power? Who has more right to land and place than he who turns it to productivity and shelter. This country of nomads is settled, but something, some question is unsettling our spirits from being here, growing in here. Which Crown has the right to this entitlement? Which country is my home?

I did the gruelling hard yakka, inched up the hard yards to pioneer a new 20 acres, but a failure to stock up as idealogy and liberalised politics took all my joy after its first creation. I seem to remember many sinuous esses slipping off those too-easy tongues, asking: 'But is that correct? Is that enlightened?" I was too influenced by doubt back then. I did not trust enough to the old pioneer wisdom that I learnt in childhood. In his novel 'Hinterlands' Robert Morgan writes: " But we gradually begun to push back the woods and make this into a place for people. It's the animals that do it it. When you have cattle grazing they keep back the wild things and make room for humans. People on their own can't do it." Then, I thought I wanted the wild. Yes give me the wild! But I have the wild. No wilderness is as savage as one human heart torn up from its roots. If I had fenced the place I could have gated those stray cattle that wandered in from the Forest, and had them by adverse posession. As my richer neighbour got them. Every seed of doubt destroys our peace on earth.