On Mon, 2009-02-23 at 08:18 +1100, Max Richards wrote:
> Chris,
>
> what story is this?
Basically, the difference between small farmers whose block of land can
be counted by the number of fence posts and the large cockies and
graziers who have a holding too large to easily count fence posts or
even be fenced in.
Murray is from a small dairy farming background and in most cases it is
the bank that owns these small holdings due to the loans needed to keep
living on what is a marginally small piece of land. So it concerns the
class character of rural Australia. Also, fence posts are fluid and
don't stay in one spot generation after generation which more or less is
an image of the shifting class character of rural Australia where a
family of graziers can find themselves counting fence posts as part of
the way in which agricultural capital flows in the inland.
That's about as much as I can say wrt Les Murray, but it does fit into
the fluid ways in which agricultural capital is injected into the
landscape of colonial Australia. Large grazier holdings make large
super-profits thanks to the state virtually giving them the land but as
these profits decline with the organic growth of capital and the large
holdings become unprofitable the government buys them up and
re-distributes small lots, as has been done with lotteries of small lots
given to war veterans who then struggle to survive on a marginal amount
of dirt until the bank forces a sale and big landholders then buy the
land back, in a fluid situation and so forth.
We can still see this happening today with the ALP government buying up
large land and water holdings on the Murray-Darling for more then it is
worth on the free market in the name of saving the Murray River. In my
view, this large monopoly water holder should have been nationalised
without compensation and placed under control of workers and small
farmers so that resources could be effectively shared between all stake
holders and in such a way that it cannot happen again, however our
pro-capitalist pro-environmental-destruction government sees fit to
support and ensure super-profits for large capitalist farming which
again will do more to destroy our natural resources including inland
water resources. Midnight oil CDs are burning! Sell-out artists!
Anyways, that's it, best, Chris Jones.
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