Review—thinking about the work of others…
Kylie and the man on the headland
THERE IT IS at the bottom of the clearing. A modest shack of weathered grey boards with a roof of galvanised iron. In its simplicity, this modest memorial to writer, Kylie Tennant, is as historically significant as any bronze statue high on a plinth in a city park. Sure, it is a reconstruction of the shack that was Kylie’s writer’s retreat and although it is not in its original location here on the coast at Diamond Head it is an important placemarker in Australia’s literary history.
We are in Crowdy Bay National Park on the Mid-North Coast of NSW, around seven months into what is now the more or less southwards drift of our road trip, when we set off along Metcalfes Walking Track to find Kylie’s shack.
We open the door and walk in. Daylight shows between the hardwood planks of the walls. So, I wonder, it was in this shack that Kykie sat typing her novels? The one about the headland—Diamond Head—and Ernie, the man who lived there?
The headland. Ernie Metcalfe. They are the geography and the central character in Kylie’s well-known book, The Man on the Headland. The book is more than a biography of an independent, resourceful man who characterised the mythical Australian character of the time, the one that Australians imagined themselves to be but all too often fell far short of. It is also a portal into rural Australian life around the mid-Twentieth Century. I have just this morning finished reading it and have come away with the realisation of how much Australian life has changed over the past 80 or so years.
This is the story of Kylie and her schoolteacher husband’s life at Diamond Head and of her relatives and friends. Most of all it is the story of Ernie Metcalf, the man who lived on the headland.
Why this book? Well, I suppose one reason it appealed to me is because I have visited Laurieton a fair number of times and have a general familiarity with the area. My introduction came through the discovery of the nearby riverside village of Dunbogan—it is really just a strip of houses along the riverbank—when curiosity impelled me to turn off the Pacific Highway and drive into the place on one of my late-1960s-early 1970s solo road trips. My partner and I repeated those visits on more-recent road trips. I noticed how Dunbogan was changing. The houses have had a coat of paint and new houses have appeared in the time since my first visit. The old tackle shop and dinghy hire by the river now has a modest cafe. Still, the village hasn’t changed all that much. It retains its character, unlike so many other coastal towns.
The man on the headland
Who was Ernie, the man on the headland? Kylie paints the impression of an independent bushman who comes into the district in his sulky with his dogs, after a stint of mining in Queensland, and discovers the headland. He is at the same time solitary but friendly, and never marries. Ernie is the quintessentail bushman of Australia’s past.
He had gone off to World War One and on his return was allocated a soldier-settlement property on the Murray where he set about establishing an orchard. Orcharding is still today a big industry along the river’s banks. Kylie writes of Ernie’s time there, saying that it:
was not the drought that beat soldier-settlers but the flourishing condition of their orchards. You could not sell apricots. There were so many that it was not worth shipping them to market. The banks foreclosed on the farms, the soldiers were evicted and the farms were bought by men who made fortunes out of them.
Ernie walked off his property saying that he was fish-hungry and he could do with some surfing. Before settling at Diamond Head he made a canoe journey down the Darling River with a friend, got lost in the Menindee swamps and swapped fish for flour and tea at the farms along the way.
Ernie sets up at Diamond Head, growing bananas and strawberries and keeping bees to make rich, dark honey. He is a man who can see the productive potential of the land and turns it into a livelihood. He was an expert fencer and too energetic to get fat. Eventually, Ernie moves away from agriculture although he keeps a small herd of cattle to provide him with an income, as well as his bees. Later, he builds a small galvanised iron shack down near the hives above where his vegetable terraces once were.
Goodbye to Ernie
Kylie’s husband is a schoolteacher who likes eating oysters and surfing. Kylie is already a writer. She spins her story around those pursuits, around Ernie’s life, observations of local people and of Laurieton and the headland. It is a story of her family, its relationship with Ernie and with Laurieton and the coast and headland. It is very much a story of place and people and how they interact and influence each other.
Years after moving into town the family packs and goes to live in the Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill where Kylie continues her work in the publishing industry. Again, rural life calls and they buy an old dairy farm in a valley in the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney. Ernie visits, saying of the Blue Mountians that:
…the place was all right if you didn’t mind winter nine months of the year.
Pressure of work keeps her in Sydney despite her intention to visit Ernie. She feels guilty about leaving him alone at Diamond Head. She and her husband travel back to visit during their holidays. Ernie dies at 83.
We had left him, not for the first time, to wait our coming in vain… we had missed him by a week.
Life in-place
A sense of place is a continuous sub-theme through Kylie’s book. Geography shapes how people think and relate to a place. There is the headland itself, the Three Brothers—the rounded, forested mountains behind Laurieton that dominate the local geography—and the beach.
The book paints a valuable lesson in the value of friendship, in people’s priorities at the time and how they lived. It is not only Kylie’s family and Ernie, but many of the townspeople keep vegetable gardens, fruit trees and chickens. Doing so was commonplace in rural towns and farms at the time and Kylie gives us descriptions of what grew in them.
Foraging was also part of the lifestyle. There were goats on the headland and fish in the sea. Kylie writes of:
…the run of mullet on the beaches… the groper and lobster holes for fish-traps. If you wanted moorhen or duck you only had to shoot them on your own lake. There were plenty of kangaroos if you ran out of meat for the dogs. You could take a cart down on the beach and shovel up the pipis, boiling bucketfuls at a time for fowl feed. Wonderful golden eggs the hens laid when fed on pipi meat… They would kill a goat, salt it down, fish with plugs of dynamite in the holes under the cliff, get a chaff-bag full, and smoke the fish in a home-built smokehouse.
It is description like this that raises a strange sense of loss in me. We can no longer live like this. There are too many of us, the land is locked up in national parks where foraging is illegal and we have largely lost the necessary skills. Over recent decades there has been a trend for people to rediscover elements of this way of live and to relearn the forgotten skills of homesteading, however on reading Kylie’s book they come across as exceptions practiced by comparatively few, whereas in the time Kylie writes about they were common, everyday things.
How do I describe a book that is biography and autobiography, the story of Ernie Metcalfe and Kylie Tennant as well as her husband, her two children and this place called Diamond Head? All I can say is that this is a book written around not only an extraordinary, independent character but around a sense of place. That is a sense that you acquire only by living in a place for a long time and interacting with it physically and psychologically. Something I read ages ago hinted at this. The writer said that it was more than just ‘living in a place’. It was ‘living in-place’ by integrating with its terrain, its geography and geology, its history, its dangers, its wildife, animals and people, its weather and the cycle of its seasons. Whoever that writer was, they called it ‘reinhabiting’ a place. After reading Kylie’s book I can see that is what she and Ernie did. Their familiarity with Diamond Head and the region brings not contempt but knowledge and understanding and a sense of satisfaction in being where they were.
As I read Kylie’s book my mind would flick back to images of Laurieton, Dunbogan and the coastline from which Diamond Head projects, an amalgamation, a mental compilation of images from roadtrips past and recent. I guess I feel some affinity with this place, as much as that is possibly in being only a visitor. It is part of an affinity with a coast that extends from Harrington in the south all the way to where the Pacific’s swells surge in evenly spaced sets into the big bay at Crescent Head in the north.
Now, I will never be able to look at Diamond Head again and not see the ghosts of Ernie Metcalfe and Kylie Tennant wandering around that little one-room shack of grey timber and galvanised iron at the bottom of the clearing.
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