Many will have heard of the popular memoir, A Fortunate Life, which follows the story of Albert B. Facey (1894 -1982), and his experiences growing up and farming in the Wheatbelt, a book that has sold over half a million copies.
It’s a great story about his trials and tribulations that would shock the current generation with stories of hard work and basic living in the bush, from an era long gone.
As an Australian history buff, I’m always on the lookout for stories of our farming pioneers, unfortunately, they are few and far between.
Across the waves of farm land allocations we have had in WA, including the post-settlement, post-gold rush, WWI Solider Settlement Scheme, Group Settlement Scheme, 3500 Farms Scheme, WWII Soldier Settlement Scheme, Conditional Purchase Scheme, and the Chase Esperance Land Development Company, we only have scattered historical publications of the life and times of the new land farmers that picked up the axe, drove the tanks and dozers, or bounced around on the ploughs.
A friend of mine recently gave me a link to his father’s story, ‘Go West Young Man’ Extracts from Letters written from the Esperance Sandplain 1957-1962 by Peter Standish, a Melbourne lad who took up a 2000 acre Conditional Purchase CP block at Munglinup after working for the American backed Chase Syndicate.
It’s a great read and a valuable first hand record of what life was like during the big post-war push to develop a million acres a year, the catch cry of the former premier Sir David Brand’s Government’s Wheatbelt development push, which ran from 1959 to 1971.
Peter sadly passed away not so long ago, but he has left us with a real insight of what life was like for those Esperance new land farmers.
We are now rapidly losing these hard, tough men of the bush, individuals who took up about 5000 CP blocks that were released post war through to the early 1980s, when the then Burke Labor government panicked about land clearing, and the last of the surveyed land, east of Hyden and north of Esperance, was pulled from the market.
In total we have probably only had a total of 50,000 families that, since the gold rush days, have been involved in taking up new land blocks across the Wheatbelt.
For many of these remaining families, less than only 3000 today, we can trace their farming history back to an axeman, or those who drove the chains and root rakes as the original block clearers.
Of these, barely a handful have left a record of the times their forefathers endured.
With farm numbers declining at a steady 2-3 per cent per year, from the peak of 23,000 in the late 1960s to today’s remaining 5000 broadacre farmers, we are in a race to capture the past before it’s forgotten.
The stories that are diaries and manuscripts sitting in the Battye library, left on dusty shelves in family archives, or lost in shire council historical societies’ records are a resource that should be collected, collated, and digitised along with the photos and maps of the work clearing these farms.
The State government needs to play its part. If it can afford to allocate $77m, from the failed effort to introduce the new heritage laws, to a 10-year program to help traditional owners capture the story of their sacred sites, then surely there should be some money to help capture the history of our pioneers who often worked alongside the local Indigenous people of the area.
Personally, I have no problem with the government’s commitment to spend millions to capture the history of the Noongar people while the elders who can recall the stories are still alive.
In fact, I pushed for it as part of the debate of the heritage legislation. Instead of making landholders pay to protect indigenous heritage sites, the State should step up to not just map and fence sites, but record the stories in language to ensure they are authentic. Then we can all celebrate the legacy of the past.
Now, I’m calling for a brave government and opposition, to add to that program by announcing a $2m policy to capture the oral history of our remaining land clearing pioneers.
Because, just as with our the indigenous elders, we are running out of time to capture the oral histories of those of the Silent Generation and the early boomers, and collect their diaries, manuscripts and photos, and put it all together in the State library under one special collection.
We keep hearing about reconciliation and the importance of the past, so what better to celebrate the 200th year of our State in 2029 than to open a wing in our new museum dedicated to our pioneering farming families of new land farmers.
Knowing this will never happen until woke politics leaves us, I urge all those old farmers who recall the days of endless root picking on new land blocks to have their families record their stories, and those families with old manuscripts in cupboards like Peters diaries, to send a copy to the Battye library.
