Birchip

By Brian Spittle
Brian Spittle is also the author of a book about the history of Birchip and life in Australia, A Place for a Village, which you can read on line. Brian was brought up on Birchip and Kinnabulla farms in Victoria, Australia. He was in the Royal Australian Navy from 1939-1949. He farmed with brothers at Tooleybuc NSW between 1949-1956, then took up a war service farm in Telangatuk East Vic 1957-1966. He then went "disastrously" to WA in Denbarker 1966-1970 and was an "ignobly junior" public servant between 1972-1986. "Thence retirement which is what I was really bred for."

Three Questions

Three of the bigger questions in my life have been

Is there a god ?

Will the oil run out ?

Are humans smarter than lemmings ?

God

With an Ulster Presbyterian background on my mother's side we attended the Birchip church my grandfather and his brothers had built. Despite her upbringing our mother smelled a rat, and as the eldest son we two had earnest discussions as to whether the whole thing was just a waste of time. What if there were no god ? Did prayer actually work?

We decided to play it by ear. The minister seemed so confident. No good asking Dad . He knew that no sane person could believe that stuff.

During the war Hitler was clearly evil, the whole world, it seemed so obvious, would have been so much better off if it were coloured pink and safely within the empire. The king seemed sure that if we put our hand into the hand of God it would be 'better than a known way'. We seemed outnumbered and it was unpatriotic to doubt. In the navy we sang 'For those in peril on the sea' with understandable enthusiasm.

After the war I found a wider world and god faded like the smile on the cheshire cat.

Oil

At the age of 10 in 1935 I asked my father 'How long will the petrol last ?'

He assured me that it came from the bowels of the earth, that the earth was huge, and the petrol and the crude oil from which it came would last indefinitely. We were filling cars from pump-up bowsers then, or buying it in 4 gallon tins, so the draw on the bowels of the earth was modest, but in the early thirties we were obliged to put the car up on blocks and go back to horses as 15 pence a gallon was beyond our budget

I was not completely convinced that the supply was limitless but was content to play it his way as he appeared to know everything.

After the war for the next forty or fifty years I was busy chewing up cars, utes and tractors and polluting where the fancy took me and it was only towards the end of the 20th century that it became known to the literate and alert that Marion King Hubbert had predicted the decline of the supply of crude oil in 1956, according to a formula known as the Hubbert curve and the warnings of common sense were justified.

As very little that first world countries consume is not fueled by oil its imminent decline at an affordable price receives too little notice by politicians and even by many environmentalists. Living style, the size of our backyards and and the limits to our showering times will seem small matters when the supermarket shelves are bare.

Population - Are humans smarter than lemmings?

As for population...after the war Mr Calwell invited ship loads of suitably European migrants to swell our numbers from our shameful 7,000,000. He seemed pretty confident and prices were right so we we went along with that. The post war boom carried us all with it, so despite a childhood kept in relative poverty by droughts, grasshoppers, lousy prices and dust storms that shifted much of our farm into the Tasman, nostalgia swept me up into the farming life I had escaped ten years before.

In 1951 a friend lent me a book by William Vogt called 'Road to Survival'. The book was shocking, frank, irrefutable and sobering. I then bought Vogt's next book 'People'; which was more of the same and is still on my shelves. Erhlich, Carson, Flannery, Clive Ponting, Mark O'Connor, Sheila Newman and many others confirmed over the next half century that the obvious was gobsmackingly in your face fact. No books or learned research are really necessary to grasp this simple truth. Any sane amateur, standing at a city corner watching endless streams of cars. or sitting waiting in an airport watching streams of confidently and casually dressed people smoothly using the magic carpet with never a disturbing doubt as to its rightness normality and permanence can fail to get the message, providing they know some history, a smidgin of philosophy and a touch of commonsense. There are too many people already.... and there will be more. Unless, of course, we rise superior to the lemmings and deny the dictates of our genes.

Wordsworth

Wordsworth seemed to breathe a warning......[1]

' The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!'

(The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.')

Notes

[1] Candobetter Editor's note: Wordsworth was writing at a time of the greatest population growth every known, which began in England, with the earth being torn up for coal and people being pushed around by the early corporations, and spewing forth into the colonies, pushing those people around and tearing up their forests and villages, dispossessing and scattering clans and tribes, in what came to be called 'progress' by economists and the third world and colonies by others.