The fatal futility of fact ...

 

When I was doing postgraduate work, one of my best friends was involved in a titanic struggle with Shelley’s poem, Mont Blanc. He often used to bemoan the fact that other scholars of English literature would interpret poetic work with reference to factual information, like where the poet was when the poem was written, who he or she was with, what their life circumstances happened to be at the time. My friend named this kind of scholarship the “fatal futility of fact”. His view was that only a close scrutiny of the text could reveal what the poet was actually on about. Not being a student of English literature, I feel totally comfortable disregarding this advice about the fatal futility of fact and what follows is some factual information about the layout of the farm. 

Cracroft Farm is actually made up of two separate parcels of the land; a 10 acre block with a cottage on it (where we are currently in quarantine) and a bigger 50 acre rural block further south.  The map, with some of Cath’s annotations, shows the general layout of the former property.  The house (well what the house may look like someday) and shed are at the south end, the views over the Huon river are to the east,  the northern boundary is at Kay Street, and some beautiful old gum trees mark the western border. Two creeks run through the paddocks adjacent to Kay Street (which is a street in name only) and rather optimistically a dam is planned for one of them. The area around the gum trees and the lighter shaded wattle trees is what we refer to as the gully. It is completely overgrown with blackberries which appear as a continuous shaded area. The creek that we plan to dam is also completely covered in blackberries, so much so that you can’t actually see anything beneath the tangle but you can hear water running somewhere. The black curvy lines are Cath’s rather optimistic ideas about routes the tractor might take to get to the paddocks. Contour lines these may be, but as the person nominated to drive said tractor, I have serious doubts.

It’s all a bit of blank canvas for a couple of complete amateurs to take on, but it will be interesting to see how things develop … if Cath and Pepper can find their way out of the gully.