1. Gippsland’s first great book

My heart is heavy as I begin this essay, yet something tells me I should be exultant because many readers won’t have read The Pea Pickers – such a modest title! – so they won’t know what’s in store for them.  I say ‘in store’ knowing that it’s an ominous-sounding expression, and knowing, also, that it’s appropriate for Langley’s troubled life, with its wretched, solitary end.

I’ll start with my first encounter with this book.  I was teaching in Bairnsdale, East Gippsland, and the town’s librarian was Hal Porter, Gippslander extraordinaire.  He spoke highly of The Pea Pickers, so I read it.  I knew its places, and I understood its crops well enough to appreciate that roaming bands of pickers were needed for the harvest.  I’d explored for myself any number of half-settled and previously-settled areas so I understood what Eve was talking about when she wrote:

We … collected all the old boots around the hut, finding about twenty.  They are the flowers of the Australian forest.  In some places you won’t find a blade of grass, but you’ll always pick up an old boot, as hard as stone, its little round tin-metal-edged eyes gleaming malignantly at their bad treatment.

I was at the time too much a high-culture person to see this as literature, but it was amazingly vital, and I was pleased that I’d encountered her little curio, as I thought it then. [read more]