Dora Birtles (1903–1992)

Until reading this, I'd never realised Australia sustained actual Japanese attacks in WW"2.
As Jap planes start bombing a remote town in the Northern Territory, the local meat packing plant is ordered to pack up and ship out. But a drover has just arrived with a thousand-head "mob" of cattle.
Rejecting the notion of slaughtering them all, he gets together a random bunch of locals, willing to assist, and embarks on an 8 month, 1500 mile journey to Queensland..
Quite enjoyed this- the characters in his team (including Ma and Pa Parsons and their two daughters..plus .a couple of trouble makers, two Aborigine men, and a rootless Scottish sailor) and the adventures ...from breaking in brumbies to coping with drought and a load of temperamental bullocks.
Gives a real feel of the rough and ready outback life.… (altro)

I picked up The Overlanders as my first read for 2020 for a number of reasons. It was on my TBR list last year (but never got read), it was a reasonably slim volume at 212 pages (achievable) and it was also a Virago (of which I read precisely zero last year - sad face).

Early on in my reading, I reported to my son I was already enjoying it despite being only being nine pages in; “Let’s watch the movie together. It could be fun.” I said. “Read the book first,” he intoned “The movie might spoil it.” We tend to assume the book was written before the movie was made but in this case, it was quite the reverse. Dora Birtles was originally employed as a researcher by the movie’s producer/writer Harry Watt. Her role grew to become more of script adviser and casting consultant. The movie was made in 1946 and the book published in 1947. Dora says: “The book had great success. Ten editions. I got a station wagon, one of the first six in Australia, out of it. No more bicycling.” The film was also a great success. Dora called it “The Crocodile Dundee of its time.”

I grew up on a steady diet of Seven Little Australians et al, so the writing is familiar, if sometimes politically incorrect. Aborigines are referred to as Abos or blacks. It’s set during WWII and the Japanese are called Japs. But the female characters are strong and hardy. They can catch and throw down a steer when required and head off a stampeding mob; very satisfying indeed.

Dora reminds us that “Patriots in Sydney were very fond of Russia in those days. At that time the Russians retreating from the German eastern offensive were said to be destroying what they could not carry with them.” The filmmakers wanted to create a story that would enshrine the scorched earth policy and is based on a real cattle trek that happened during the war. Apparently, the Minister for Food’s slogan was “Bully beef not bullets” but I'm having trouble finding that easily in Trove. An army marches on its stomach and all that.

So why, in this day and age, read this book? Well, for a start, it’s a cracking good read. The plot is compelling and rolls you along from one drama to the next. There’s fording of rivers, trapping of brumbies, stampedes, broken bones, daring rescues and impossible feats of bravery and above all dogged perseverance, laced with dry humour.

Birtles builds her characters up beautifully, from the somewhat gormless, shell-shocked Scottish sailor who abandons ship in Wyndham and decides to try droving, despite never having ridden a horse, to the wily old cattleman/trickster, Corky aka J. Claverhouse Corkingdale aka Jimmy the Snoot who realizes his droving days are numbered and is desperately looking for a get-rich-quick scheme.

Birtles’ language of the day had me googling furiously, looking up Rolls Royce station wagons: did such things really exist? Yes, they did! What on earth is a thorough brace waggon? And so on. But I enjoyed the hunt and I loved the writing. Here’s a particularly evocative description of the homestead:

“He went in for a last look around the kitchen, opening the shallow drawer at the far end of the white-scrubbed kitchen table. Ma’s cookery books lay in it. He took one out, the mottled-covered, thick exercise book in which she had written out every special recipe ever since they were married, with the donor’s name on the top of every recipe. It was like a garland of Ma’s friendships through the years: Rosa’s sago plum pudding and Miss Woodget’s special orange cake. “

Above all, there’s passion and love for the country which rang particularly true for me during these heartbreaking times. Here is an impassioned speech by Dan McAlpine, the drover, which you could be forgiven for thinking was taken from an Extinction Rebellion protestor today:

“Exploitation’s wrong. That’s the trouble with the whole caboodle down south. That’s the trouble with the whole of this country from the coast to inland. We’ve torn the heart out of it. We’ve lost the timber and we’re losing the soil. We’re losing the rivers and we’re losing the grass. All these get-rich-quick exploiters think of nothing but money, how to make money as quickly as possible, and now how Australians are going to live twenty, thirty years from now. Exploit men if you like, they can fight back, but the land can’t fight back. Punish it too much and it gives up. The desert creeps in. I love the Territory too much to see it go the way of a lot of the rest of this country. And it won’t take so long to ruin it. It’s a peculiar country. It’s got to be handled right by people who know it and can use it to the best advantage for the future as well as themselves.”

Australia’s population lives mostly on the eastern coast of Australia, clinging to its edge like limpets and bearing a deep love for the mysterious “outback”; rugged but beautiful terrain which is mostly inhospitable to humans. You can imagine our real terror when we face the loss of what is usually considered “safe” country – the coastal strip - and are faced with the large, empty abyss of the interior. Birtles’ tale reminds us that we have faced testing times before and that our national character will stand us in good stead in the toughest of times. Here's one more quote from her Afterword:

"War breeds a strange state of mind. There is all the anxiety, the fear, the dread, the burdens of being alive and keeping going and the sudden need of pleasure, of real friendships, of hilarity. In that climate, we made The Overlanders."

I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did.

PS I have since tried to find the movie on the net. I looked for it on Kanopy, SBS On Demand, ABC iView, Netflix, Stan etc. I could only find it on Daily Motion which is just hideous, full of ads, so I can only recommend that you try finding a copy at your local library or, in Australia, at one of the National Film and Sound Archives' Access Centres. Gold Coast City Council Library has a copy on DVD which I have ordered or keep an eye out for it on free-to-air. It's sure to pop up again sometime soon.… (altro)

I quite enjoyed this tale of a cattle drive across Australia. It was fascinating to read a different take on the kind of event I have only encountered before in American westerns, at once both foreign and familiar. The story was similar, but the tropes were different, and the wonderfully descriptive writing showed a landscape full of ant mounds and spinifex instead of rattlesnakes and cactus. Birtles writes in short, sometimes choppy sentences, with a lot of idioms, but she manages to paint a vivid and engaging picture of the characters and the harsh Australian country they drive the cattle through.

The book was based on a 1946 film of the same name, which was in its turn based loosely on real events in Australia during WWII.… (altro)

In April of 1932, Dora Birtles, with two old women friends, one husband and a professional sailor, set out to sail up the east coast of Australia from Newcastle and then across the sea and up to Singapore in a 34 foot Swedish cutter called Skaga. The voyage attracted much local attention since it was the first time women had attempted such a trek. The first half of the book details the coast-hugging part of the adventure. Although there was a lot to see, a great part of the narrative involves the relationships among the five sailors. (Joan and husband Henery were antipathetic toward Dora/Dona; Ruth tried to side with Joan, but Henery couldn't stand her; Henery and Sven, the professional, were often in conflict; Sven was in love or close to it with Dona who had a husband at home and wanted only to be respected by Joan.) I came to care very little. I also did not care for her blatant racism, certainly the product of her time. I found her harder to forgive because she fancied herself rather liberal in discussing the sad living conditions of the black population on government-run Great Palm Island, and yet her attitude toward "gins" and "picaninnies" kept me on edge. The latter half deals with their sailing adventures, including being becalmed and nearly starved, and ports of call from New Guinea on to Singapore. This was the more interesting section.
Birtles was dedicated to her chosen craft of writing, which made me read her more critically than I might have otherwise. A random quotation of description gives the flavor of her prose; "...They are the cores of old volcanoes and they remain, rounded down by time but still malevolent in outline, like satiric old ladies with shawls about their humped shoulders, hinting of forgotten fierce ardours and bearing a mute testimony of the geological antiquity of the Australian continent." Well and good; not necessarily my taste but a good enough thing of its kind. So how could such a wordsmith produce poetry like this?



Rice Tafel



We had eaten heavily,/it was our first rice tafel./We had drunk appropriately,/it had been a farewell luncheon,/and pulling up the anchor at sunset/- for we had to get under weigh -/was an uncomfortable job,/and in the clear Banda air we were all a little tipsy.



Her friends didn't care for her poetry either, to her great despair. I will not comment on the attempt at stream of consciousness to depict the one time she got drunk on the trip. And having said all of this, some fascination remains in a real adventure to exotic places in a past that feels more than 70 years away.… (altro)