Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

I will not say the day is done

In a recent column, I quoted a description of corrupt, cynical 
and ruthless capitalism from a thriller set in Japan. And now my 
wife has come up with another!

A few days ago she borrowed from our local library a recent 
(2002) book about the life of Australian writer Hesba Fay 
Brinsmead, Days Never Done by Sydney journalists Michael 
Pollak and Margaret MacNabb.

Like many Australian families, my wife and I have in our book 
collection a copy of Brinsmead's most famous work, Pastures of 
the Blue Crane, as well as the first of her Longtime series, 
Longtime Passing, about the pioneers who in the '20s lived 
in near total isolation in the bush along Bell's Line of Road in 
the Blue Mountains — now, of course, one of the main arterial 
roads west out of Sydney.

Brinsmead's publishers tried to pigeon-hole her as a "children's 
writer" and strenuously resisted her efforts to break that mould. 
Certainly, I did not know of her as anything else.

And yet, she was a passionate environmentalist for whom the 
drowning of the unique and beautiful Lake Pedder by a hydro-
electric project in the middle of a national park was a 
devastating experience.

It moved her to write a non-fiction work for adults, about the 
struggle to save the lake and, by extension, the Franklin and all 
of Tasmania's endangered wilderness: I Will Not Say The Day Is 
Done.

The title is from J R R Tolkien's great work of fantasy and myth, 
The Lord of the Rings: it's part of a song sung by Frodo's 
faithful companion Sam Gamgee after Frodo has been captured by 
Orcs in Mordor and all seems lost. And yet the song expresses 
confidence that good will triumph in the end.

Brinsmead wrote the book in the 1970s, but despite her standing 
as a very successful author was unable to get any publisher to 
handle it until 1983, when a small Sydney group called the 
Alternative Publishing Co-operative took it on.

To Brinsmead's disgust, the major publishers wanted to sweep it 
under the carpet. They all said it "just had to be published — 
but not by us!", she told Pollak and MacNabb.

Even her regular publisher Oxford University Press did not want a 
bar of it. "Frank Eyre [OUP's principal in Australia] felt that 
the book could have political repercussions, and additionally he 
was concerned that OUP's bank balance may have been put under 
pressure with the threat of legal writs and so on".

Chalk up another resounding success for private enterprise and a 
"free press"!

Eyre may well have been aware that those fighting the 
environmentalists in Tasmania had seemingly unlimited funds. And 
the stakes were certainly high: as Terry Aulich, a former Senator 
from that period later wrote, it was "the biggest invasion of a 
wilderness area in the history of this country".

"One billion dollars and that's the end of a wilderness that 
exists nowhere else in the world." But for a billion dollars 
profit, who's going to lose sleep over a bunch of trees, eh?

Aulich, who retired from the Senate in 1993 after nine years, had 
turned to fiction writing while still in parliament. Given 
Australia's draconian libel laws, writing fiction is one of the 
few ways left to depict the reality of the Australian scene 
without inviting ruinous law-suits.

His 1972 thriller The River's End, dealing with the 
struggle to save the Franklin River, has a graphic description of 
corrupt Australian capitalism in action:

"It was the beginning of the '80s and the men at the beach could 
see the afternoon shadows on the sand-banks and they rubbed their 
eyes. But they didn't see much.

"Then, none of us saw much, even though big shiny cars ran up and 
down the black-top highways doing favours and bags got delivered 
to politicians, and bank managers opened accounts in false names 
and men with a seat in the members' enclosure were learning to 
say 'do it' and someone got taken out at night and got killed.

"And we rubbed our eyes and didn't see much."

Just as the police didn't see much — or claimed they couldn't 
see much — when Lake Pedder campaigner Brenda Hean received 
telephone threats that she would be killed unless she stopped her 
activities against the dam project and the flooding of the lake.

When she subsequently went missing on a flight in a small plane 
between Hobart and Flinder's Island in September 1972, together 
with another environmentalist, the pilot Max Price, many people 
cried "foul".

The similarity to the convenient sabotaging of progressives all 
around the world that was taking place at the time was just too 
strong. But, of course, it was too easy for the authorities to 
point to the fact that they were flying in a Tiger Moth, and to 
blame the plane and its "foolhardy" occupants for the "accident".

Hesba Fay Brinsmead, who had flown in a Tiger Moth and vividly 
described a crash in one in her novel Echo In The 
Wilderness, believed the environmentalists had been murdered.

In a letter in 1975 she wrote, "People make me so angry when they 
say 'Fancy flying in an old Moth, no wonder they were killed'. 
Like a lot of Pedder people, I think his [Max Price's] plane was 
sabotaged."

Certainly wouldn't be the first time capitalism had blood on its 
hands.