Bonzer Words!: Going Bush
....Harry Jensen's attempt at self-sufficiency began in April. He walked into the forest with a hunting knife and a digging stick and a crossbow set he'd bought at a Hobart gun shop....
But could Harry survive in the bush? This story by Michael Grounds reveals what happened to a man who tried to be at one with nature.
Michael writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
It takes a lifetime to learn a way of life. Just to learn the basics takes all your childhood. That's what childhood's for, learning the rules we need if we are to live like we do, and not suffer for it. That's true for bush blacks and city kids alike. It's something Harry Jensen never learned from the telly. He might have, if he'd watched the right programs, or more likely if he'd listened to the right radio sessions, but he only learned from the Bush Tucker Man*.
The Bush Tucker Man finds food at every turn. Harry learned from the Bush Tucker Man that Nature is teeming with comestibles hanging from trees, buried in the ground, or lurking under every second stone. Harry knew that Tasmania's bush blacks were a healthy well-nourished lot before our lot got at them. Harry knew they survived the Tasmanian winters with just a fire and a kangaroo skin. What Harry needed was a sensible wife, but what Harry had was a longing to get back to nature, to find his primitive roots, to be one with the earth and its fruitfulness.
Harry Jensen's attempt at self-sufficiency began in April. He walked into the forest with a hunting knife and a digging stick and a crossbow set he'd bought at a Hobart gun shop. He was rather ashamed of carrying steel when the blacks had managed with wood, but the Bush Tucker Man hadn't gone into the matter of wooden tools, or was it flint. Never mind, he'd learn.
He had nobody to learn from. The last Tasmanian aborigines had learned from their mothers and their fathers, and it had taken all their childhood. They learned how to survive one way of life, and failed to survive another, in one generation. They learned not to go into the forest in April, for one thing. When the days are getting shorter, you go out of the forest, down to the river flats and the coast, carrying your fire with you. Fire is life, so you need one person to carry it and one to watch out for him. You need three people to kill a kangaroo, and you need women to find the vegetables. The women teach the girls, and it takes all their childhood to learn. There are ten thousand things to learn before you can live that way of life and not suffer for it.
Harry suffered for it. His attempt at self-sufficiency lasted three weeks. He never killed a wallaby, and the vegetables he found were few and nasty. Some of them made him sick. He killed one pigeon with the crossbow (the few bits not shattered by the bolt were delicious) and one jay, which was inedible. He spent days searching the forest understorey for his bolts. When he had lost all twenty he tried wooden ones, and then threw the bow away. His matches ran out before he had mastered the trick of making fire by rubbing two sticks together. This is not surprising; the Tasmanian blacks hadn't learned it in fifty thousand years. He tried carrying fire, but he had no-one to watch out for him, and on the third try he slipped on a rock in a creek and lost it. He turned for home, moving like the blacks down to the river flats and the coast as the days grew shorter. Hunger weakened him and hypothermia got him, just a hundred metres from a clearing, two hundred from a house where people were teaching their children the ten thousand things you need to know if you are to live like we do and not suffer for it.
The children found him late in the summer. He was just a scattering of bones and rags, a hunting knife and a steel digging stick. He had found his way back to nature. He was one with the earth and its fruitfulness.
© 2006 Michael Grounds
* The Bush Tucker Man was a TV series broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The ABC website describes it as follows: In a battered army truck, his home a simple roll of blankets, Major Les Hiddins seeks out and records the different kinds of bush food and medicines used by Aboriginal people for thousands of years.
He's a bush survival expert for the Australian Army and travels alone through the vast, almost totally unpopulated lands of northern Australia to carry out his unique job. And despite the solitude he's a chatty, humorous man who is as entertaining as he is informative.
