Ambrose Ambles

 Twelve Caesars..

Book Three.."Twelve Caesars".

Part  primus.

Twelve Tyrannies.

 

1)      Expectation.

2)      Method.

3)      Order.

4)      Time.

5)      Measures.

6)      Loyalty.

7)      Poverty.

8)      Work.

9)      Honesty.

10)  Truth.

11)  Dedication.

12)  Love.

 

Now, I can’t be certain of this, but as much as I am certain of other uncertainties, I am pretty certain of this.

 

I am going to tell you a story..it is going to be the last story…I am going to write it into a book..it is going to be the last book..oh, others will write more stories and books, but THIS will be the last book of that era, for the story has ended, the time is past and the players are of no influence now in this new world rising..a new world where hope is a one minute wonder and love can seem a speculative opportunity..and this is why we may not survive..not world wars, neither disease or plague or natural disaster .. all these have gone before at times when humanity was still so vulnerable .. when we were still small tribes wandering from water-hole to hunting ground to shelter just to stay alive .. and we did .. and we did because of one central desire .. : a desire to be a part of other’s lives … a loved one, a special one within the tribe itself perhaps.. within the shelter of the tribe as a whole .. that other one who shared our particular liking for a particular fruit or woven style of cloth or place of refuge over all others .. that someone special that would in times more conducive to individual preference develop into a love. And regardless if it can be fulfilled in the interests of tribal custom or culture … these days call it ethnic group or class structure and creed … regardless if it is never consummated in a relationship, still the embryonic desire will develop in the imagination till it reaches a kind of fruition in the hidden senses and is held to one’s heart in secret conspiracy and there it is stored and adored.

 

There are moments many of us live through in our lives that can give such emotional pleasure and personal joy so that they are held in deepest secrecy and must never be revealed except perhaps .. and that is a big “perhaps” .. at point of death. For to release such a secret of one’s deepest personality is equal to destroying the base belief in a personal future. The fate for those partners who seek or demand that such be revealed to them can be the unforeseen ruination of a current relationship.

I have experienced this as a revelation on the death bed moment, on that later.. This holding close to the heart is a most human desire that it can reach right into our most personal hunger for company .. A woman I knew in my younger , wilder years told me recently of why she was in a relationship with a man we both knew in those years .. :

“ He was a strange bloke, was B …. ” I remarked “How’d you get along with him?”

“Oh .. quite well, as a matter of fact .. and we only broke up because he went to work to the North West of West Australia. and I stayed here to finish my nursing training .. we wrote for a while but we were both young and we drifted apart .. ”

“How’d you get to know him?” I persisted.

“He was just a friend at first .. and we went out together a couple of times … He was an electrician .. and his flat was full of bits and pieces of electrical gadgets that he’d fix for friends … and clocks .. he liked making electric clocks .. He had a bench in the front room full of junk ..

I came to his flat from work one day all teary and upset as I’d just had my first patient die on me and he just held me and talked to me in his deep, slow voice while I wept … that’s all he did .. he just talked about his electrical stuff and what he was doing and he stroked my arms and back and just talked softly and slowly until I went to sleep in his arms .. He was such a comfort .. a lover-friend. “

And this is why we, as a species may not survive .. We have been hollowed out, gutted like a dead fish. We now are so untrusting, so protective of our sensitivities, so afraid that we will not allow another too close lest they seek to hurt us emotionally. Perhaps losing our collective confidence in ourselves to survive emotional trauma. Many young people do not enter into relationships anymore, choosing instead to conduct temporary “meetings” that demand no commitment, no deep emotional give and take where those “secrets” of heightened pleasure or pain are nurtured and ensconced within our psyche .. and we, as a species are getting weaker for it .. for if we cannot trust ourselves with holding that secret of emotional pleasure to carry as a talisman through rough life, then what trust will we allow others that we hold dear to have their own private “suitcase” with their own private desires .. and will we destroy our own relationships from a desire to destroy the entrusted confederacies of others?

That “death bed revelation” moment … well, it was a long-running chiack between my mother and myself, that the local GP., .. Doctor Short, who used to do house calls in those days and attended me when I was bedridden with bronchial-asthma at an age of around 6-8years old. He would attend to me while my mother fussed with the pillow or blankets … and my mother, being in her mid-twenties at that time and married to a much older man AND quite attractive .. must have caught the attention of the tall, deep-voiced Doctor, who I in memory recall was sometimes in close attendance as much to my mother as to myself … NOT that there was any encouragement on HER part .. but I used to tease her in her older years by saying on a regular basis ;

“That Doctor Short .. I reckon he was burning a candle for you .. ” … to which she’d pooh-pooh the whole thing away and say don’t be ridiculous! .. But the last time I saw her in the palliative care ward, dying from pulmonary fibrosis .. I again said in a teary attempt at jest .. :

“I still reckon that Doctor Short was burning a candle for you … ” to which to my surprise she looked straight into my eyes in the most meaningful manner, that I have to say threw me a little and whispered ;

“I do believe you are right … ” … and I am not sure to this day if she didn’t give me a wink ..

And that was the last visit I had with her as she died a day later.

And now it is finished…if one could but have the vanity of a thousand souls I still would not brag of a complete understanding of what has been lost to my history.

 

This story has been seventy years in the making, but this book has been over two thousand years in the telling. It finished with the death several years ago of my mother and with her ; the last generation of that whole era..an era built on the foundations of the pragmatics of work..a tyranny of time and measurement..but it started in The West with the creation of the first major nation state of The Roman Empire….it started with “The Twelve Caesars”.

 

Homeland.

They rolled across the flatlands of the Murray River plains like an unstoppable force of nature..for surely that would best describe their tenacious persistence to forge a new Silesia..a new Posen a new homeland in this strange and distant place…a new life they saw as gifted to them from God that with their twisted version of a Christian Faith allowed no deviation from the written word and little forgiveness for those who slacked off in their expected commitment to both community and pastor, and the churches were quickly and proficiently built on land that still held the scent of the wild animals hunted by the indigenous peoples that were driven at bullet point from their hunting grounds and living sites along river and stream.

The Germanic settlers had arrived…themselves forced from their homelands by a brutal military government that despised both their cultural independence and their version of Protestantism, they arrived on the shores of the newly formed province of South Australia with all the determination of a desperate people with little or nothing to lose, and so the English governors of the day used them to push open that wild country to the northeast of the capital…pushed them into the wild hunting grounds of the indigenous peoples to force a confrontation and so “justify” a brutal retaliation by such renegade militia that the powers that be could muster together…a collection of criminals and prospectors for gain seeking any excuse to break agreement of the Letters Patent that guaranteed cultural and land rights to those indigenous people…a cruel betrayal of both the English governors own King and Parliament and the people who came under their physical power.

But the central government underestimated the determination and perseverance of these new settlers..These peoples, mostly Slavic in ancestry were compelled to Germanise their names, religion and culture as part of the new Republic of Germany or suffer the consequences..hence the migration of entire villages replete with Pastor to Australia in the 1840’s onwards to the end of the century. These eastern Europeans were known mostly to themselves as Wends or Sorbs. And unlike the other two waves of Germanic migration; The persecuted Middle-class from the German cities who settled and brought culture to Adelaide and the proletariat industrial workers from the cities, who brought trade and industrial skills to the state, they held their culture and themselves to themselves and their Pastors. Hence the close-knit settlements around the Barossa Valley and Kapunda / St Kitts / Steinfeld areas of Sth Aust…and right up to the late 1950’s, English in their homes was a second language.

I have noted the many unrecorded efforts of many of those families while they battled with George Fife Angas’s use of their hard labour and their dedicated to family attempts to hold onto their impossible to farm successfully; hopelessly small plots of land and were in many cases left destitute and broken by what must be a deliberate plan to use them to clear-fell those sections of the mallee most suitable for cropping...for as with any families who have lost everything and then been granted by fortune or fate a second grab at life, they took no prisoners in either social or pragmatic concerns..They ghettoed and they clustered together for their own protection…small hamlets under one pastor..a collection of families working together to form a community…land leased from a tyrannical landlord ; The South Australia Company, a fascist corporation that formed a corporate government even before the word “Fascist” was properly defined in its meaning..their sole objective being running a state on speculation and entrepreneurship using cheap labour of the new Germanic migrants to farm the cleared land stolen from the first peoples..; The Kaurna, the Ngarrindjeri, further northern tribes and clans driven from and massacred by the advanced arms imported without restraint from America…carbines replaced the old black-powder muskets that needed close-quarter contact with the indigenous warriors who then had distance enough to use their accurate spear throwing skills to at least fight back…and from then on it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Once these new hamlets grew with more children and then to become towns and then the farmlands started producing profits, The German peoples started organising local civil governance..town councils organised in conjunction with their church and pastor would liaison with the central governance of the state…but then also at arm’s length…for these settlers were still suspicious of the ultimate intent of the English landlords…after all, they too felt the hard hand of a ruling class that had little use for alternative culture and would cast adrift any group that lay hindering their path toward capital domination…so suspicion ruled operation and little was done via civil intrusion into the running or health of these strange Germanic clusters with their own schools, their unpronounceable names and inflexible natures…they were by and large watched with suspicion but left to their own devices..so that when disease swept through the clans, the central administration did what they did to the indigenous peoples…they left them to rot.

Many made their way north to the lower Flinders Rangers..to places like Hammond, Craddock, Gordon, Farina and others even more lost in the sands of time..“Rain will follow the plough” they told the settlers who established themselves in those first good seasons, then the drought set in and it all went to hell…the land collapsed, the farms went dry as dust, the people walked off their properties and the towns collapsed back into rubble and then sunk back into the earth they so wearily rose from.

“Rain will follow the plough”, they said and so the ploughs went back south ..to Stonefield, Sandelton and Sedan..hard mallee country..with a slender top-soil and below, a layer of “calcrete” so hard every vibrating crowbar strike would ring ; “Gibraltar!” and so they drained and farmed the swamps..and the hilltops..and the stoney flats..picking up the stones by hand and throwing them into piles from the back of the dray..they farmed them with wood and iron and steel ploughs till the tynes and shares were worn to a slither or blunt as a gibber…They farmed the wind-blown flats till their families died with the diphtheria or in harrowing births gone wrong, attended only by young girls too frightened by the ghastly complications of childbirth to do little but cry in shock of what could very soon be their own fate…or they died in fires and accidents too frequent to collate in a doctors surgery, too far from a doctors assistance and left buried in sad, lonely cemeteries, serenaded only through the fall of time by sighing sheoaks around the perimeter of the church yard.

But again, the central government underestimated the determination and perseverance of these new settlers..and while the cemeteries filled with their children and vulnerable, so that you can see at one settlement of “Peter’s Hill” pioneer cemetery, just under the lee of Marschall’s Hut where there is interred around sixty eight souls, forty two of them are children…and I cannot help but believe that the death of a child then was of just as much grief as now, so that when the count became so high, so intolerable, the settlers moved from what was considered an unholy site to disperse over the flat lands of the Murray River Plains and still you can read of those same families names spread like summer chaff place to place..Dutton to Stienfeld to Sandelton to Sedan…they were driven by a faith unstoppable and a courage inviolate.

And even there, after successive droughts and, yes, floods, some moved on even further to the Adelaide Hills, to Lobethal and Hahndorf to join an already flourishing German community…some travelled further east to Hamilton in Victoria to set up anew their Lutheran Faith and churches and settled on more rich and promising soil…but they were still the same tenacious pioneers who stepped off ship with all the stern determination of a surviving peoples.

But that all ended with the second world war, for once the soldiers had returned and the community got back to normal, the technological gains that the machine of war had developed into machines of sowing and harvest, the glue of combined manual labour and community reliance on that labour intensive population that held a district together and could prosper from such, fell victim to the culture of the individual…families that once relied on more children, could no longer carry so many inheritors of the one property, families broke up…districts that relied on populated towns now lost their labourers and the shops closed down, the surviving farms that shifted from draught horse to mechanical tractors needed to borrow from the banks to tool-up so they too became victim of capital/compound interest…the end of a whole era drew to a close.

The Last Empire.

‘Twas the hour before the gloaming, when the hardest of the day’s work was done…the bulk of the fortnight’s work actually, for this day marked the winding-up of the harvest..the end of a year’s work of harrowing, ploughing, seeding and watching the crops grow..to now, the winding down of the end of the year’s worry and work…The crop was in, harvested, winnowed and bagged, the carrier contractor with his sons, was loading the last truck of sewn bags of wheat to cart to the rail-head to be shipped to the port. It had been a “paying year” for the cropping…not a bumper year like the one two years ago, but still a good year..and as far as the head of the family went, a good harvest to finish up on.

Mattheus Kreuger tipped the last bucket of hard-feed into the horse’s trough, his eye cast over the mix and texture of the feed with the experienced eye of an old horseman-farmer…Mattheus was never one to either under or over-feed his team of draught horses, knowing from bitter experience from the days of want and scarcity just how much maintained a balance of good condition in a working horse.

“Matt!” the carrier called over the yard “Matt!...we’re on our way…catch you with the receipt up at home?”

“Right you are John…be there tomorrow afternoon…catch you then”..and he gave a dismissing wave as he walked to the feed shed..the truck chassis heaved a creaking groan with the revving of the engine as it set off in a cloud of raised dust out of the farm-gate.

Home for the Kreuger family was not where they sowed these paddocks..like several Mallee Flats farmers, the main house and spread was in the hills above these drylands…in that part of the state where the grazing of fat-lambs was more reliable with the higher rainfall and better feed. But here on the flats, there was sufficient rain for good cropping which needed less than those of open pasture, so that many blocks on the flats were sown by absentee farmers who came to the paddocks with their whole family and workers with horses and equipment to stay several weeks while they worked the soil and seeded, and then when they cut and harvested the crops..There was a spacious hut built of stone on one of the paddocks that housed the women and children and where the meals were cooked and served to all the people working there…at night the women and children would sleep in the stone hut while the workmen would bunk-down in the out-buildings where the harnesses and feed-stores were kept..these outbuildings were built of rugged post and beam construction with pug and native pine infills for walls…it was rustic but warm, with the thatched roofing giving any heavy rain that soft almost silent drumming sound as it fell.

Such had been the routine for farming for so many years, that Mattheus was having troubled thoughts of handing over the reins of the farm to his sons, who were keen to adopt change to both the layout and management of the system of farming practice…for there had risen over the last few years a new technology that would render the old horse-drawn methods redundant…the age of the tractor had arrived and this new machine-driven methodology would allow twice the acreage to be worked in as much time as the old horse-drawn method..and without the tiresome attention given to the animals themselves..Mattheus was well informed of these positives by his two sons on any given moment if  a favourable ear was turned their way…Mattheus was suspicious of any talk of “making life easier”, as time had worked its abrasive grit onto both patience of mind and callous of hand..but then, he recalled, so had he persuaded his father of the benefits of the mechanical stripper over the old stooking and threshing method of harvesting..so he was willing to give his sons the blessing of his elder respect.

But today was the end of harvest and the entire family would sit to dinner this evening with the conscious relief that this marked the end of the repetitious rounds of up at dawn and crack-on till sunset work-cycle of harvest time. Magdalena, Mattheus’s wife of forty years, would serve the last full family meal for the harvest and along with the food would be the end of harvest prayer of thanksgiving and health which Magdalena would lead from the foot of the long trestle table..which would be followed by a loud and solemn ; “Amen” from Mattheus at the head of the table.

This was the ritual that finished the end of harvest every year since the family had bought and come to the Mallee Flats to crop the land. This was the ritual that bound every member to the home and hearth of family consciousness. This was the ritual that was repeated in many of those sturdy pioneer gatherings across the length and breadth of what was known as “Breakheart Country”. This was the “glue” that formed the tie to community and church and from there to each other, this familiarity and consciousness of like-habits and required procedure…this..was the culture of a community.

And what food there was!..so much gathered from the farm vegetable garden, home produce that bore the skilled hands of the growers, makers and preparers, recipes for cured meats and cheeses handed down generations…sauces and spices made from the smallest measures of condiments that extracted the richest of flavours, cuts of meat from farm-grown stock, placed in large cooking dishes and pushed to that certain place in the large wood-fired vault oven at the rear of the hut…a “hut” whose proportions were of such space in height, length and breadth to take the whole family with children and workers at one long trestle table set groaning every night with frugal but sumptuous fare..for this was not the banquet of a gluttonous merchant, but the necessary food for hard working people..and as such would give each and every person fair share of the products of their own labour from both field and garden, with loaves of fresh-cooked breads to the steaming potatoes from the garden…all was good, all was well and at the completion of the meal, when an air of sighing satisfaction was perceived, it was time for the head of the family to make a speech.

Mattheus rapped the wooden serving-spoon from the plate of vegetables onto his plate…

Mattheus’s speech..:

“My usual position when at this point of the evening, at this “end of harvest night”, is to be standing here at the head of the table, cup of good cheer in hand, giving a thank-you speech and congratulating us all on a job well done…but tonight, I will remain seated..not out of a sense of indolence nor disrespect…for I doubt there is a person in this room does not know of my nature by now..But tonight I remain seated so as to talk to you on the same level…no longer as “Th’ Boss”…nor now as head of the work-team, for tonight I hand the reins…if only figuratively..over to my sons ; Peter and Christian..for it is they who will now take the family farm onto the next chapter of its evolution with the full blessing of myself and Magdalena..and it is that evolution that will change the entire work practices..as we have talked of these last several years..from the old one of horse and harness to the new of tractor and steel couplings…Myself, having reached both God’s and Nature’s allotted time of years allowed a man..; “Three-score and Ten”..I am like the proverbial old dog and new tricks…I cannot change and I have no right to stand in stand in its way.

But tonight, I want to talk about another thing and I hope give both my sons, their wives and children..our grandchildren..both warning of consequence and also to top up the cup of cheer with the measure of hope.…

Nature has lent its hand to us…she has given us soil…water…and sustenance…From time immemorial we have harnessed her beasts for the field..with the strength of these fellow toilers, these mute companions of our labours, we have turned the soil, harrowed the Earth and seeded our crops…from the time when my father and mother first set foot on this strange country and drew our section of land and marked the dimensions of their home on the soil, to now when their children sup at the table of their dreams and promise, it has all been done with eyes firm set on that measure of a man’s worth..the measure of a woman’s worth..on the measure of home and family..on a measure of hope..My parents, our forebears built an empire out here upon a new country..not an empire of imperial conquest, nor an empire of expansive proportions, but rather an empire of hope and dreams for their family..their backs bent to the chores of that ambition, without doubt, without fail and with high faith in their mission to succeed…indeed, succeed they must or perish in the trying.

The greatest treasures of a parent is their children..it is the children who will carry the future to further horizons that can be dreamed of by a parent and it is the safety of those children that exercises the most concern for the parent..What measure of gold is the equal to the harvest of seed that gives new life in every season to a garden? What reward of contentment can equal that of a full stomach, a clear mind and the love in one’s heart for what greets them on the start of a full day of productive and rewarding toil?...Why would a man get out of bed if not to fulfill the promise and reap the bounty of a life of hope…that measure of hope that is the right of every person born under Nature’s sky and God’s heaven?

When I gazed tonight upon the healthy meal that my loving wife, Magdalena, set before me, I saw the fair measure of meat…of potatoes..of pumpkin grown so prolifically over the old composting stable heaps..it’s tendrils seeking distant promise like an arm reaching for distant fruits..a wonderful meal..and all in good measure..and it is that measure that I now talk to each and every one of my children and their families to heed and be watchful that envy and greed do not cast a shadow over future ambitions.

A long life..a hard life taught our parents the creed of what is fair measure for one to aspire to..what is just reward for one’s labour..and there is no sense of satisfaction in the shirking of one’s fair share of labour..for there is a measure in nature in this world where each person is allotted a share of labour and where one person shirks their share, it falls to the shoulders of another to carry that extra load..and THAT..in anyone’s sense of justice is a failure of duty toward our brothers and sisters.

I hear talk of the new mechanics of farming having the means of “making life easier”..and I have to admit that after a bad day with horses, harness and machinery, such a phrase would even make my eyebrows lift in inquisitiveness and bring a smile of delightful possibility to my lips…”To make life easier”…now isn’t that a hope and dream to aspire to?...to make life easier…but then I have to ask..; “easier from what?”..certainly, if one was held in slavery..or imprisoned unfairly..or driven to extreme by brutal Master and Lord, one would wish for life to be easier..for those conditions are  un-natural to both nature and humanity..and I would trust to all of us here in this room..let no man proclaim ownership over another’s life, lest he too be one day given like punishment.

But no..here and now, on these paddocks..on this farm..in this part of the world, what measure of life can be claimed to be better for the making of it easier? Will the children grow faster, learn their lessons more swiftly? Food more hearty…vegetables grow faster, the sheep more wool?...Will the ache of work be more assuaged with a full stein of beer at day’s end? And if injured..in body or love..will the hurt be less?..and what of THIS day..this end of harvest celebration..will such a thing exist once the mechanics of it takes away the camaraderie of shared, shoulder to shoulder labour?...and what of the table of food like we see here in front of us..where waste from the stables goes to the heaps of compost and thence to the garden from whence comes the vegetables to our table…where will the waste from the tractor go? Will it give nourishment to the soil or will it make waste of the soil and thence make life less easier for those who must clean up such waste?..Will there be need for such a gathering of family to give thanks for the blood, sweat and tears of a year of toil when less folk are needed for the harvest?...Will the making of life easier also mean the lessening of the rewarded pleasures for the job’s end , for is there anyone among us who does not breathe a sigh of relief at hard work’s end..but then also be content and the soul fulfilled with satisfaction of a job well done?..Does not that also feel so good?..And I wonder on the lessening of the need for hired labour to attend the many chores for maintaining the draught horses…the harness repairer, the farrier, the smithy..and if they go, what of the town band..and the church choir..and then the bakery and grocer?...and our neighbours who cannot afford to tool-up to this new mechanics..are they to become a sacrifice to a new world order of an “easier life”..

No..I cannot stand in the way of progress, but I do give notice to you, my children, that you use caution with this new method of farming..not to let it take control of you..I know you will have to go to the bank to up-grade to the tractors and new machinery it uses..be warned about the banks..they have no friend but compound interest, no mercy save the court of bankruptcy and no soul save that traded with the devil.

No..I cannot stand in the way of progress, so I will leave the farm in the steady hands of our children and wish them well while myself and Magdalena seek retirement in Tanunda and I will perfect my arm at bowls and my ear at listening to the idle chatter of the town.

So let us raise our cups to give thanks for the measure of hope that has been promised and now fulfilled…”

 The following morning, while the sun was yet low and the breezes mild in the Mallee trees, the trappings of the hut and camp were packed up, the women and children were driven back to the farmhouse in the car and Mattheus and his sons led the horses down the track in the direction toward home.

Now we only have echoes of what once was..A ruined settlement, crumbling huts and houses, one or two surviving members of a once dominant local family, clinging to their marginal farmland in hope of a better time to come, Memories of lost opportunity and relatives, a cluster of plastic flowers falling from a broken vase on the lichen covered marble of a grave.

What was once THE dominant culture now peppered with a desperate overflow from the cities and regional towns seeking cheap rentals and having little interest in joining the local community.