Love versus Science

Train journeys with my mother, between Melbourne and Hamilton in the Western District of Victoria, were a highlight of my school holidays in 1950s Australia. Early departures from Spencer Street station on frosty winter mornings, our knees covered with tartan travelling rugs and our feet coaxing tepid heat from antiquated foot warmers. Avoiding cinders blown in through open windows during hot summer journeys. Sprinting along the platform at Ballarat, where the train stopped briefly, to minimize time spent queuing at the station buffet for meat pies whose hot gravy burned our chins.

My maternal grandparents lived on the outskirts of Hamilton, on a one-and-a-half acre block, quite large enough for a boy reared in the suburbs to develop a love of the land, even if he was intimidated by territorial magpies swooping down from gum trees or by country cousins’ warnings of snakes recently sighted in the paddock. In later years visits to friends’ farms, at Kialla in the irrigated north of the state and Koonwarra in the lush South Gippsland hills, provided insights into what it took to be a sheep or dairy farmer in Victoria. Given this personal history, Carrie Tiffany’s quirkily titled first novel, Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, struck an immediate chord when the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist was announced. Its intriguing plot turns on a state government-funded ‘Better Farming’ train, which rattles around rural Victoria in the 1930s, loaded with agricultural and domestic scientists preaching the gospel of science to farmers and their families. This was a book that demanded to be bought and read with the insistency of loud bells and flashing lights at level crossings. I was not disappointed. The novel is a thought-provoking journey through Australian national identity in the 1930s, and also a wry social history that made me think about what it meant to be an Australian then and what it means now. It also made me reconsider the advisability of farmers and their wives unquestioningly adopting scientific principles as the basis of their agricultural and marital husbandry. Tiffany’s protagonist is a seamstress, Jean Finnegan, who narrates her story in an unmistakeably Australian tone of voice, characterized by an economy of expression and an exceedingly dry wit. Relating a schoolgirl anecdote from 1915, when Jean’s contribution to her school’s Patriotic Fund was to ‘catch frogs for the University’, her father’s laconic comment, on being told that the frogs were for the war effort, was ‘Good in the trenches, no doubt.’ A snake described as ‘a branch wrapped in muscle’, which had bitten and paralysed her cat, later resurfaces as a fatly coiled tiger snake embroidered on one of Jean’s college samplers, signalling her wish to subvert the monotony of conventional handicraft motifs. In 1934, Jean joins two other women on the ‘Better Farming’ train, demonstrating infant welfare, cookery and dressmaking to farmers’ wives, ‘playing at science, using its language to dress up the drudgery of women’s lives’. The real work of the ‘Better Farming’ train is done by the men, including Robert Pettergree, a reclusive soil and cropping expert who warns farmers in the Mallee area that their soil is the poorest in the state. ‘Australia’s soils are old men; super phosphate is the tonic that will bring them back their youth.’ His courtship of Jean is unflinchingly objective, and he presents her with a copy of his recently published article in the Victorian Department of Agriculture Journal, ‘Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living’:

1. Contribute to society for the achievement of mutual benefits. 2. The only true foundation is a fact. 3. Keep up-to-date. 4. Avoid mawkish consideration of history and religion. 5. Keep the mind flexible through the development and testing of new hypotheses. 6. Cultivate the company of wiser men – men who are stickers – not shirkers. 7. Disseminate. The labours and achievements of men of science must become the permanent possession of many. 8. Bring science into the home.

Tucked into the journal are Robert’s map of a wheat farm at Wycheproof and its mortgage papers. Seduced by the modernity of his ideas and the passion of his conviction that science will provide all the answers they need, Jean promptly marries him and together they embark on their mission to improve wheat yields in the Mallee. The disintegration of their dream is poignantly charted in the tabulated results of Jean’s annual test-baking of ten loaves, made using wheat grown on their property between 1935 and 1940, which show a steady decline in quality rather than the longed-for improvement. Dosing the red loam of the Mallee with super phosphate, gypsum and zinc sulphate does not work. Failed agricultural science becomes an additional burden for them and their wheat-farming neighbours, one to add to the usual droughts, sand drifts and plagues of mice. Signing up to a dodgy forward payment plan that enables a merchant to sell their wheat at any price once it has left Australia, and to deduct a massive commission, is the district’s financial undoing. Too late to save her marriage, Jean realizes that ‘every experiment, every sample, every hopeless loaf of bread’ was all about love, not science. ‘The rules don’t mean anything,’ she tells Robert. ‘They just get in the way of you seeing things how they really are. They get in the way of the truth.’ Ironically, on the outbreak of the Second World War, the ‘Better Farming’ train is recommissioned as the ‘One-in, All-in’ train. When it reappears in Wycheproof, recruiting farmers for the army, Robert joins up. Jean remains on the land. Although Tiffany’s novel is book-ended by Australia’s participation in two wars, world events are incidental to her story. More significant is her oblique allusion to the failure of Australian settlers to understand and manage the ancient land. By regularly setting fire to it, indigenous aborigines regenerated plant food for themselves and the animals they hunted, and sustained a viable food chain. The author has worked as a park ranger in central Australia. In an interview in The Age, she described how an aborigine made her realize how much better indigenous people understand the ancient land. ‘I got out of the vehicle and had my equipment to test the spinifex to see if it needed burning or not. He got out bare foot, smoking a rollie, went for a walk, came back, gave me the thumbs up sign and threw the cigarette over his shoulder. It was an epiphany. I was never going to understand this place like he does because he can feel it through the soles of his feet.’ This realization informs her novel. The Murray-Darling Basin, where Everyman’s Rules is set and in which 3 million people live, is now in its seventh year of drought. The federal government is even funding a study into the feasibility of shifting agricultural activity to the far north of the continent, where rainfall has increased. ‘The power went off last week (when it was 40 degrees) due to the bushfires in Gippsland,’ Tiffany wrote last year during an apocalyptic Melbourne summer. ‘We sat around and panted and wondered if this country is actually fit for human habitation.’ Her novel provides prescient lessons from the past.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 17 © Colin Martin 2008