Soft April weather
April
in New Zealand is early autumn, with the weather still warm, food
plentiful and some seasonal farm jobs available. But winter is close
at hand. For this unemployed man, his options were running out.
Over winter he would have to face the humility of getting hand-out
meals from a soup kitchen and sleeping rough.
Stiver, fiver,
fifteen bob
"I
havent got a stiver" "I haven't even got ten cents."
A stiver was an insignificant amount of money. A fiver was five
Pounds, about a week's wages in 1930. One Pound was equal to 20
shillings, and "fifteen bob" was 15 shillings, about six
hours wages.
The tractor's
pinched m' job
There
were only a few industrial jobs in NZ in the early 20th century.
Most men worked on farms. But farms were becoming mechanized. Farmers
had prevoiusly employed many men to guide the horses that ploughed
the land for crops. One tractor driver could plough as much land
as several horse ploughmen. Similarly shearing machines and milking
machines reduced the number of workers needed for those labour-intensive
occupations.
In
the 1890s it took 20 to 25 hours of labour to produce 50 bushels
of wheat (1.4 tonnes) on one hectare, using horses, plough, seeder,
harrow, binder, thresher, and wagons. By 1930, it took only 7 to
10 man-hours to produce the same amount of wheat using a tractor,
plow, discs, harrow, combine and trucks.
The monkey-man
has foreclosed
A
home or small business can be financed with a mortgage loan from
a bank or a loan company. But a loan is like a monkey on your back;
it's easy to get it there, but difficult to get rid of. If you can't
pay the loan, the monkey-man reposses your house.
When
British soldiers were in India in the 19th century, the 500 Rupee
banknote had a picture of monkeys on it. So when they returned to
England, they called 500 Pounds "a monkey." And a mortgage
loan for a house was typically about 500 Pounds.
M' woman's run
off with the drover.
Today
sheep are taken to the freezing works in crates on 40-ton trucks.
But even as late as 1950, drovers guided flocks of sheep along the
back country roads to the nearest railway station. The sheep walked
slowly, perhaps 15 km a day, grazing on the roadside as they went.
This is why roadways were 20 metres wide, with wide grass strips
beside the gravelled highway. (The roadway north of Feilding is
40 metres wide. They brought big flocks of sheep down that road.)
There were public holding paddocks every 15 km or so. They were
usually overgazed and full of dog-daisy. Our local drover at Mangamahu
had a horse-drawn, rubber-tyred gig and several dogs, but some drovers
rode on horseback, with their gear on a packhorse.
Down on My Luck, on record
1967,
Fernfire Singers (Pat and Rudy Sunde, John Walton) Sweat in the
Sun, Mate! LP
1980, Graham Wilson, Paydirt, LP
1993,
Rudy Sunde, Songs of New Zealand, CD
2009,
Brent Morrissey, Echoes in a Trackless Land, CD
This
song has also been part of Dave Hart's repertoire for several decades.
Rex (A.R.D.)
Fairburn, 1904 -1957
Rex
Fairburn was a major New Zealand poet of the 1920s - 50s. He was a fourth-generation
New Zealander: his great-grandfather being a missionary, his grandfather
an eccentric critic of society and his father an Auckland businessman.
Rex attended Auckland Grammar 1918 - 20, leaving it without academic
qualifications. He then worked as an insurance clerk for six years.
He was unemployed from 1926 until 1930, but did some freelance writing,
winning a poetry prize in 1929. In 1930 he went to England. It was
a time of intellectual searching as he formulated his personal philosophy
there; a mixture of Douglas Social Credit, vitalism, and back-to-nature
organic farming.
In 1932 he returned to New Zealand with a wife and child but he was
unable to find paid employment, and for three years he experienced
at first hand the relief gang work he depicted in later poems. He
began publishing poems and rticles in the late 1930s, and also worked
with the Farmers' Union, a Social Credit organisation, helping to
edit its journal, Farming First. He served in the army 1942 - 43, and
then was manpowered into work with radio station 1ZB as a scriptwriter.
In 1948 he became a tutor in the Department of English at Auckland
University College, and in 1950 lecturer in the history of fine arts
at the University's Elam School of Art. He was also active as an editor
in these years. His career was cut short by his death from cancer
in 1957.
Ballads of his such as Walking
on My Feet and Down on My Luck were among his most successful
works, with the anonymous speakers taking on a role like that of Harry
in Glover's Sings Harry poems. Fairburn's easy command of rhythm
and prosodic effects, his image-making ability, and his control of
a middle range of diction, neither vernacular nor consciously poetic,
result in poems with great emotional resonance, lucid, direct and
deceptively simple.
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