"DIRT MUSIC" - TIM WINTON: HARD MEN - HARD COUNTRY
A great novel finds resonance in your soul reflecting light in to the windows of one’s long forgotten memories I finished Tim Winton’s “Dirt Music” about a month ago, a novel that came my way through Bookcrossing. It was the first of Winton’s books I’ve read.
He has a distinctive style that describes whole swathes of landscape or ranges of emotion in a few sparse sentences. “Dirt Music”, for me, was an uncompromising story set in a brutal landscape. I’ve never been into the vast emptiness of Australia but could feel the pulse of the land in the words. I l was so impressed by Winton's writing that I bought “Cloudstreet” before I finished “Dirt Music”; which I added to my ever growing Mt TBR.
Those that is of the opinion that Bookcrossing stops people from buying books have no idea what a horrible addiction reading is, do they?
“Dirt Music” had been reviewed many times and I’m not even going to attempt to write another one. My only comments are that it would have enriched the novel if the back-story of Luther Fox and Jim Buckridge were explored. To some extent I could understand Lu’s “shamateur” life-style and why he chose to live as an outsider. I would have loved to know what happened between Jim and his father and what made the Buckridges the feared and revered unofficial kings of White Point. What lurked in Jim’s past, those “bad things” he had an obsessive compulsion to make amends for which he refuses to reveal to Georgie Jutland?
Oh, and then there’s the ending which was totally at odds with the rest of the book - an unexpected, almost sugar coated conclusion that one would expect to find in some bad romantic trash and not in a novel that carries a bleak and unforgiving plot up to the last few pages.
Again, this is not a book review but about the long gone remembrances from a different life-time that the reading of “Dirt Music” dislodged from the inner recesses of my memory.
White Point’s reason for being is the crayfish industry and the residents build huge monster houses as symbols to define their new found wealth. Size was all. A couple of years ago I was offered the use a holiday home along the Western Cape coastline by a kind colleague. It belonged to her brother, I think, who farms in Namibia. This house is only used once a year when the whole family converges on the little town over Christmas. It was an ugly multi storied monstrosity that was about four times the size of our house in Jozi. The mansion was fully stocked with all mod-cons and the many freezers were filled with frozen meat, mostly big slabs of frozen venison that the owner brought from Namibia on previous visits.
♥ Girl and I stayed for one night and then found simpler accommodation. This was not our understanding of a beach house. All along the coastline these abominations competes with each other for size and ugliness. Not a single one have architectural merit and most of them were empty waiting patiently for their owners to use them maybe once or twice a year.
There should be a law against bad design not in keeping or in sympathy with its surroundings and if I could I would have burnt every single one to ashes. Size seldom counts for anything, as Sir Horatio Leeford so ably illustrated many times.
I another lifetime I lived for nearly two years in the town of Zeerust close to the Botswana border. The prevalent attitude and behaviour of these backward, inbred bastards made them ideal residents fo White Point. I think Jim Buckridge and his cronies would have hit the road if these guys moved in.
I was working for one of the large commercial banks at that time. It was the policy to rotate the management every couple of years. Country bankers had broken furniture and stupid kids. Stupid kids because a lot of our offspring attended at least six different schools during they're schooling because their parents were transferred so often.
There were enough firearms in the banks strong-room to start a war. Game hunting in Botswana is big business and a lot of professional hunters left their prized hunting rifles in Zeerust for safekeeping. The famed Derek Brink “an African Motswana and heir to Botswana greatest fortune” owned some of these rifles if I remembered correctly. Beautiful gold inlaid Holland & Holland shotguns and double bore under-and-over elephant rifles, each worth a small fortune. I hate blood sport but these rifles are a true work of art.
I’ve never met Brink but he allegedly privately owns the largest area of land on earth in the hands of a single individual. One of his game ranches covers 100 000 hectares and borders the Limpopo River.
But this is not about stupid children or Derek Brink but about stupid white men, and not the Michael Moore version of them. Zeerust was as close to a Wild West border town one can get in South Africa. Bankers know that client’s financial affairs are confidential but I knew a lot of stuff about the doings and screwing’s of upstanding citizens at that time that could get the lot in jail, not passing go or collecting R200. Illegal diamond buying, hot currency cross-border deals and cattle rustling were a way of life.
The area is also renowned for its mampoer (peach brandy) that were made famous in the tales of Herman Charles Bosman, the South African author who was condemned to death for murdering his stepbrother. Bosman spent time on death-row, was reprieved and then sentenced to ten years with hard labour. In 1930, he was released on parole after serving half the judgment.
It was the happening in this part of the world that provided Bosman with a gateway into the human condition;
“When something happens by which you are drawn into those strong undercurrents that constitute the real life of a dorp, and that makes a mockery of its superficial air of repose, then you come to a stark realisation - possibly for the first time - of what tangled and gaudy and tempestuous material this substance consists that people call life”
Distilling mampoer is against the law but there were many illegal stills in the Zeerust area. I accompanied a border policemen to one of the stills once, not to arrest the moonshiner but to sample the different concoctions, 90% proof firewater - no wonder its illegal. To be taken by an officer of the law to an illegal still says a lot about the prevailing attitude in town.
This little piece of outlaw heaven formed; in most probably still is part of the heart-land of right wing white supremacy. God help you if you were black farm labourer employed in the mid 1980’s on one of the farms in the area. I remembered having a beer (or two) once in the pub of the Transvaal Hotel when a disgusted farmer stormed in asking for a dop. He came from court where he was fined for dragging a black labourer behind his bakkie on a dirt road. Could the magistrate not understand that it’s his right to decide the form of punishment on his farm to those that transgress his rules? There was no remorse, no sense of wrongdoing, just pure irritation and aggravation about the unjustness of the law that gave no protection to landowners.
I hated every minute of the year and a half I lived in Zeerust. There are other strange and bizarre stories I can tell about this bastion of sophistication and gentile living, like the disastrous effect of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Botswana in 1988 on the town’s economy. The shopkeepers and tradesmen thought that millions of devout Catholics will drive through town on the way to Gaborone to have to tea with his Holiness. T-Shirts were printed by the thousand and JP’s image appeared on all kinds of trinkets. Mountains of bread and other perishables were procured to feed the hungry pilgrims. They never came and there must still be unsold T-Shirts in some forgotten storeroom. Ah well
These are twenty-five year old memories that the reading of “Dirt Music” dredged up. I haven’t been back to Zeerust since and don’t intend ever to return. Maybe it has changed for the better with the coming of democratic rule. It does not matter.
Hard men, hard country - like Jim Buckridge’s White Point.