Kate liston-mills’ the waterfowl are drunk!

Monday 22 June 2015

Pambula-based writer Kate Liston-Mills is a friend of mine and a fellow graduate from the University of Wollongong’s creative writing program, where she was a few years older but a few year groups below me. Disarming, ebullient, and universally beloved, Kate is humble to a fault, with eyes so blue they must’ve soaked up all those South Coast seas and skies. As an editor for the annual UOW Creative Writing literary magazine Tide, I remember having the chance to publish some of Kate’s outstanding poetry back in 2010, but page limitations ultimately forced the committee to bump the lowly first-year from the volume, something that never quite felt right to me. Thankfully, if unsurprisingly, Kate’s words have since appeared in publications much loftier and more widely circulated than Tide (and even later editions). But it still felt like something coming full circle when the advance copy of The Waterfowl Are Drunk! appeared in my inbox. A wrong has been righted, and in such spectacular fashion.

The gorgeous KLM.

Published electronically by Spineless Wonders as a Slinkies Under 30s collection, The Waterfowl Are Drunk! is Kate’s first major work. In seven interconnected short stories, she draws from deep wells of truth and fancy to bring to life this heartfelt tribute to town, home and family. Working in the best traditions of the tall tales and urban myths repeated and embellished in country pubs the nation over, The Waterfowl Are Drunk! is a richly rendered and skillful meditation on birth, death and disability in coastal, regional New South Wales.

Perhaps somewhat embarrassingly for a gen-y bibliophile like myself, this was actually my first experience with an ebook, so it was only after some significant fandangling and carnsarnitting with the zoom function on Apple’s iBooks that I was finally able to sink into the collection’s opening vignette, ‘Bound’, which immerses the reader in the teeming wilds of the Pambula wetlands, ‘on the fringes of what some would call a dated town’. 

But this is no Eden, if you’ll excuse the pun. ‘Think red dirt, murky water and tired trees’, the first line enjoins us. The birds swelter in the heat, the ‘stench of rot and fetid water is inescapable’, and in the bushes lurks a dangerous interloper, a red fox. For a moment here I thought I was reading an example of that rarely realised mode of environmental fiction that children’s literature scholar John Stephens calls ‘deep ecology’ – fiction that attributes an intrinsic value to the lives of animals and the environment, often decentering or showing as contingent human perspectives, or excluding them altogether. But the instance of a pen anthropomorphically assigning her cygnets names, as well as the somewhat malapropos simile of a waterfowl slurping a worm ‘as if it were a slushy’, anchors the reader in a human perspective and a roughly contemporary moment, and it soon becomes obvious that what transpires in this wilderness is deliberately symbolic of the human lives we are to encounter in coming stories. 

As with the collection on the whole, ‘Bound’ is not without its awkward lines and, at times, it struggles to maintain focus in its all-encompassing narration, moving abruptly from one group of animal subjects to another mid-paragraph. But in just two-and-a-half pages (depending, of course, on the size of your browser window), Kate achieves quite an affecting narrative in the story of the fox and his victims, cast in suitably raw, fictile language that showcases her poetic credentials and, at its best, recalls the evocative simplicity to be found in the rural poems of Seamus Heaney:

     The cygnets’ eyes, not yet open, are glued with fluid. And through the flurry of
     feathers and calls, the cygnets plop out of the eggs and sog up the earth.

In the symbology of this natural tableau, it is worth interrogating the figure of the fox: is he, as an introduced species, merely representative of a troublemaking outsider, upsetting the rightful order and earning the fear and scorn of the locals? Is he death, an agent of doom against whom the members of the community are able to rally, though never fully prevail? Perhaps, by extension, he is the reader, come to gorge himself on the lives of the town’s inhabitants in the coming pages for his own satisfaction. Or could he be the writer herself – all writers: slinking double-agents moving stealthily amongst unwitting native prey, scavenging for stories and details? The answer, of course, is up for interpretation.

What is established early and unequivocally in this opening story is that Kate’s is a vision of the world where the invisible forces that so often move and shape us, guide and animate us, are made visible, where the abstract and intangible interplay with reality in concrete ways. On occasion here and throughout the collection, this device can veer towards the overly ‘telling’ or convoluted (such as, for example, when we are told that a wind blowing through the town’s streets carries ‘the aftershock of war and soiled youth’), but at others it results in breathtaking passages of Wintonian beauty and eloquence, as when, simply, ‘Ed feels the day approach’ or, later, when the news of Ed’s demise as it travels throughout the town, mobilising everyone into sympathetic action, is characterised as

     tinkering like a mechanic, slowly tapping on each head. It’s tapping into the nuts and 

     cogs of the heart of the machine, tapping each greasy component, until the parts all 

     work together.

Aptly, the concept first treated in this fashion, the ‘sweet nostalgia’ that ‘blends with the croaks and sits on the tilted horizon’ in ‘Bound’, is also the one that most suffuses the work as a whole, which is always romantic and wistful, but never saccharine or overly sentimental. Indeed, what could be levelled as a criticism against another writer becomes in Kate’s hands one of the work’s greatest strengths. Kate shows herself to be an adept conjurer of those moments, sometimes mundane and others extraordinary, that characterise every family history, those universally relatable and yet thoroughly idiosyncratic memories and rituals that form the fabric of a family.

The organising force of the collection is family matriarch Hazel, modelled on Kate’s own grandmother. Prominently featured also is Hazel’s daughter Lottie, a beautiful soul who has Down syndrome, inspired by Kate’s real-life aunt Nettie (to whose memory the book is dedicated). ‘Hey Porter, Hey Porter’ takes the reader to the moment in time over Christmas of 1956 when Hazel is forced to confront her daughter’s disability for the first time. The opening passage, which I count among the strongest in the book, showcases Kate’s skill in tapping into our collective nostalgia in a scene that is both quintessentially of its time and specific filial setting, and yet immediately recognisable:

     The radio is crackling and everything smells of tobacco. The news reporter’s
     carrying on, something about blood in the water at the Melbourne Olympics.
     Nobody’s listening. Hazel has it on so they don’t miss the Queen’s 3pm Christmas
     message. Everybody’s knackered from midnight mass and no one can be stuffed
     cleaning up. The aftermath of Ed’s pig trotter feast is now gelatinous on the sink.
     Flies chinwag in the corners of the trays and stick there. It’s a rotten mess for
     another day.

Later, we find this same skill in ‘I Don’t Even Like Scotch Fingers’, an everyday tragedy where we watch in knowing discomfort as narrator Georgie, distracted by the trivia of teenage existence, takes Hazel, her grandmother, entirely for granted. During one of those familiar interstices in senescent–adolescent conversation, Georgie’s mind wanders to the time they had to rush Aunt Lottie to the hospital because she was choking on a nut, but then they drove over a speed hump and the obstruction dislodged itself, sailing through the air right into her uncle’s hand: just the kind of unlikely, though all-too-real family legend all of us can lay claim to in one form or another.

Just as some stories consecrate the emotional landscape of the family, others do the same for the town of Pambula, most notably in the title story, ‘The Waterfowl are Drunk!’, in which the town reacts to the loss of Hazel’s husband Ed. ‘In Pambula,’ we are told when the death coincides with the arrival of an eccentric houseguest, ‘you have to be hospitable. You just have to.’ Littered throughout the story, attached to the ends of sentences here and there, we find the refrain, ‘as you do’: signposts in the thought processes of the grieving widow that perfectly evoke the double-edged comforting familiarity and stifling oppressiveness of small-town living. Hazel’s actions are governed by a subconscious list of preapproved Things You Do in Pambula, forcing her into the tiresome obligation of indulging the strange old bird who turns up on her doorstep (people are always birds in The Waterfowl Are Drunk!, and birds people). 

But in times of crisis, there is also comfort to be taken from such rituals and ritualised behaviours, as we see with the ceremonies surrounding tea that so pervade the book – the word itself is used some twenty-one times in seven stories (I’m getting the hang of this ebook thing). In ‘The Waterfowl Are Drunk!’ it is this beverage, so treasured by Lottie, that occupies her while the rest of the family tries to shield her from the death of her father. But she is more attuned than her family might think. The sensitive and subtle exploration of the perceptions of different forms of disability that runs throughout the collection is another element for which Kate deserves laudation, executed as it is with the confidence and integrity of a much more experienced writer.

Just as Kate endows Hazel’s family with a canon of folktales and memories, the town too is replete with its own mythology of larger-than-life tales and escapades and, given the distribution of the stories over the course of a century, we are witness to many of them – the misadventures of Ed and Tom on the night Hazel goes into labour, as they rollick around town trying to get their mate’s body to the morgue in the back of a ute and, of course, the tale that gives the collection its title: the time the town drunk disappeared temporarily, only to turn up in a freshly dug grave covered in waterfowl inebriated by the bottle of sherry in his hand. In the telling of these fables we find the blending of comedy and tragedy, that certain mix of beauty, poignancy and irreverence, that marks the best Australian fiction. Which brings me back to the most remarkable element of the collection: the incredible lyricism of Kate’s voice. 

If all literature can be plotted on a spectrum from the spare and sparse on one end to the expressive and ornate on the other, The Waterfowl Are Drunk! would have to be classified ‘hyper-lyrical’, on the far side of the latter. Fans of the Spartan, the reserved, the unadorned sentence, Hemingway devotees and Naipaul adherents alike, be warned. Each of us has our own preferences in this area, and the pendulum of taste seems to have swung back and forth since the inception of the novel, between one school of writers determined to prune back the overgrown grandiloquence and floridity of their forebears, and their own successors, who seek to rejuvenate with inventive, sensual, descriptive writing prose that has come to be seen as sterile and dull. There is a place for writing at every point on the spectrum, but I, for one, tend to prefer the latter kind: writing that gives me something. Writing that’s luscious, that astounds and inspires and tantalises me with new ways of seeing the world. Writing that pushes descriptive language to the limit, that shows me something of the author. Writing like Kate’s.

In The Waterfowl Are Drunk! Kate is a veritable Nigella Lawson of letters, unable to resist tiptoeing down to the fridge after midnight to indulge in one more simile, one more metaphor. And what delicacies she has crafted in this smorgasbord, what moments of descriptive brilliance, masterful details and turns of phrase slipped expertly into the narrative: Lottie picking up the phone ‘gently like a hot cup of tea’, Michael Swaney’s parents with their ‘vegetable-scraps-in-the-plughole-of-a-marriage’, a body ‘fancified’ by bruises and scratches, natal blood ‘soaking into the sugar’, all complemented by and contrasted against an enviable command of authentic, spirited dialogue: ‘‘That’s gotta be the best birth in ‘istory Haze –’ says Hazel’s neighbour, ‘rainwater on the skin, sugar-taste everywhere. Gotta be the most perfect girl I ever seen!’’ 

Of course, with a young writer working on this end of ‘the spectrum’, where so much is risked because so much is ventured, there are bound to be some misfirings. Sentences brim so full with description and simile in the book that they sometimes spill over into mixed metaphor, or rush at you so quickly you can’t appreciate them.

But some imperfection is to be expected here on the literary frontier: young writers publishing their first works in a digital-only format. Minor errors, unintentional linebreaks, occasional patches of less refined prose – these become part of the reading experience. There is a sense, during the reading, of the haste in which some parts might have been written (perhaps in one long ‘binge-writing’ session), of the smallscale, independent organisation behind the book, working on a hope and a prayer, kept going by the passion of dedicated, but underpaid and overworked employees, interns, volunteer hours and a shoestring budget, struggling nobly on in spite of the current, arts-hostile political climate. Slinkies and programs like it have been devastated by the Abbott government’s funding cuts, and now more than ever its stated mission of providing ‘a platform for young and emerging Australian writers’ is invaluable. If a few impurities are the price of having access to this kind of writing, I am more than willing to pay it. I can’t put it better than Slinkies editor Bridget Lutherborrow in an interview for the Wollongong Writers' Festival:

     When people are developing and perhaps feeling that gap between their abilities and 

     where they want their writing to be – it can be tempting to stop. Getting beyond that 

     emerging stage requires a great deal of resilience. It’s important we support writers 

     through this process if we want to have exceptional writers in our future. Also, the 

     kinds of writing and subject matter young people want to write is often invalidated, 

     because it might be a bit raw or incomplete, but I think young/new writers can have
     an incredible energy and unique perspective on what it’s like to exist at this moment
     in history.

With some variation, the collection generally grows in skill as it goes on, culminating in the two most restrained and technically accomplished stories, ‘Without Floaties’, which gives us our first outsider’s perspective of the town, and ‘Shiny Lino and a Whistling Kettle’, where an older, repentant Georgie reflects on the lives of her aunt and grandmother. Especially if the whole collection is read, as I would advise, in one or two sittings, it is difficult to imagine not being moved by this frank and effortlessly fluid final story, which resounds with the authenticity of a lived experience and functions as an exceptionally tender obituary for its two major figures. What’s hard to believe is that Kate will only become more talented with time, and undoubtedly has the skills to surpass even her best work here.

The Waterfowl are Drunk! is a brilliant and powerful fiction debut, well worth the outrageously cheap $4.99 for which it is being sold. I mean, that’s FIVE DOLLARS. Five dollars would be worth it just to help support the arts and emerging writers in this country (because Lord knows the government won’t), let alone what you’ll be getting in this artful, beautiful book. Buy it, sink into your favourite spot on the lounge, and prepare for a pleasurable few hours one afternoon. And when you do, why not pour yourself a big mug of tea, too? For Lottie.

Thanks for reading

LPL

References

Sarah Fallon's 2015 interview 'NYWM Interviews: Bridget Lutherborrow' on the Wollongong Writers' Festival website.

Kate Liston-Mills' 2015 ebook The Waterfowl Are Drunk!, published by Spineless Wonders.

Images from katelistonmills.com.

John Stephens' 2006 journal article 'From Eden to Suburbia: Perspectives on the Natural World in Children's Literature' on pages 40 to 45, issue 2, volume 16 of literary journal Papers: Explorations Into Children's Literature.

Spineless Wonders' 2015 interview 'Meet the Slinkies: Kate Liston-Mills' on the Spineless Wonders website.

Miranda devine: enemy of the heart, the mind, and vegetarianism (part one of three)

Tuesday 11 October 2011
(updated Friday 14 October 2011)

I've had a post about eating meat, in a fragmentary, incipient form, drifting around mournfully in Tintin's purgatory for some time now, awaiting that catalyst I was talking about in 'The urgency of nonfiction' to call it into being, when who should publish an article on the subject but my favourite News Limited columnist. Y'know. Just to get the content of this blog up to a healthy 300% responses to Miranda Devine. Articulating my views on the subject and critiquing Devine, however, caused this piece to swell to a gargantuan size, so I'll post it all in three parts instead, with part one focusing on deconstructing Devine's argument, and parts two and three responding to that argument in order to detail my own.

Devine's opinion piece, 'Everybody hurts, but we've all got to eat', delivered in her trademark casuistic style, is a critical response to an earlier article that appeared in The Australian, authored by Michael Kirby AC, CMG (that's Companion of the Order of Australia and Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, for those of you not up on your orders of chivalry), highly respected public figure, influential academic, eloquent orator, former Justice of the High Court of Australia – the highest court in the land and the final court of appeal in the Commonwealth, invested with the authority to rule on matters of the constitution, and possessing the recently demonstrated power to overturn the expressed will of the Parliament. Seriously, Miranda. Go home. You're out of your league, here.

But in examining the piece, I think I've come to a realisation about why it is, specifically, that Devine infuriates me so much. She constantly makes herself an enemy of the two characteristics I value above all else in life: empathy and critical thinking. And I think my criticisms of the piece can largely be organised along these lines, I suppose because the errors she makes in it are moral (empathetic) and rhetorical (critical).

Empathy first. The piece, which contains numerous derogatory references to 'sentimentality', makes Devine's contempt for 'excessive' compassion known from its opening, when she patronises Kirby for his sensitivity: 'It sounds very kind to swear off eating meat because you looked into the eyes of a cow, which former High Court judge Michael Kirby explains as the reason for his latter day vegetarianism'.

That crazy old coot! Getting all choked up, letting his emotions run away with him, going to all that trouble to make a drastic lifestyle change, and for what? 'Cause he got up a little too close and personal with a bloody bullock!

Now, as I said above, Kirby was a judge, and when you're working with the law, you have to be 'judicious' with language. Understandably that's a foreign concept for Miranda, but it doesn't give her licence to take what I'm sure were Kirby's carefully considered words, rearrange them, and then blame him for it. 'Animals raised for slaughter' she quotes from Kirby, 'cannot explain the suffering, pain and fear they feel. But humans who empathise sufficiently, can do so.'

'In other words', she garbles, doing what she does best, 'those of us who eat meat do not have sufficient empathy. Thanks, your worship.'

See, no. You don't get to do that. 'Other words' is right. I know someone as semantically challenged as you might find it hard to believe, but there's a subtle and important difference between 'not empathising sufficiently' and 'not having sufficient empathy'. By changing 'empathising' (verb) into 'empathy' (noun), you've also changed the word modifying 'empathising', the adverb 'sufficiently' into the adjective 'sufficient' and made the verb 'having'. You've taken it from not performing a process to the right extent, to not possessing enough of a quality. If Kirby had meant 'not having sufficient empathy', I'm sure that's what he would've said. Honestly!

Later Devine similarly misrepresents vegetarians and animal rights activists altogether, saying that 'this creeping idea that "meat is murder" is just moral vanity', that 'vegetarian moralising is [being] thrust down our throats' by the likes of Kirby and US author Jonathon Safran Foer, and that animal activism is simply the 'parasitical companion' of this moralising. Firstly, what a bitch! And secondly, did I just read a CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC COLUMNIST complain about MORALISING!? I only ask because I couldn't concentrate properly over the sound of that pot and kettle being repeatedly smashed together in my ear. Far out.

Animal cruelty is continuing on a massive scale, and we know it is. The industry is a major contributor to climate change. Animals experience fear, pain, affection, and many of the other emotions we do, making the view that unnecessarily killing them for our own enjoyment is bad a reasonable one. To reduce the often heartfelt and profoundly personal decision of millions to forgo meat andor take up the fight of animal welfare, in the face of all of this and more, to a mere 'moral vanity' or 'parasite' is staggeringly callous and inaccurate. And to charge Kirby, of all people, with thrusting moralising down the public's throats is a sickening untruth. His articles are imbued with the sense of a wise, sensitive, loving man calmly laying out his ratio decedendi, submitting it to the public forum, gently coaxing you with carefully laid sentences to consider his point of view. Nothing like the coarse, poorly reasoned diatribes of Ms Devine, shamelessly appealing to the lowest common denominator thrice weekly.

It takes cold cynicism to misrepresent Kirby the way Devine does. I think he's best vindicated by a quote from another of his articles on the issue where he praises Australian philosopher Peter Singer for not seeking 'to convert the unwilling', for recognising that 'many people are at different stages on the issue of animal welfare.' Do those sound like the compliments of an absolutist ideologue determined to force-feed his opinions to the public like a bowl of vegetables?

Furthermore, the idea that meat is murder is actually quite a credible one. Fair enough, you don't have to agree but, you know, murder involves killing something and eating animals involves killing something. The similarities are remarkable! In fact, under the laws of logic Miranda usually subscribes to, that would make them exactly the same thing (cf Devine's Dictionary entry for definition of 'detrimental fatherlessness').

Which leads me to the critical thinking side of things. The keystone of Devine's argument in the piece is that 'scientists discovered that plants have feelings too'. She concedes that 'most people feel sadness at the death of animals' and confesses to her own brief stint with vegetarianism, which she says came to an end with the revelation that some plants can experience pain. Incidentally, I love how the results of a couple of studies by scientists are enough to convince her to recommence eating meat, but the overwhelming consensus of every national scientific association in the world, without any reputable dissenters, isn't enough to convince her of the threat of manmade climate change.

'The point is', Devine declares, 'that if you took sentimental thoughts about food to their logical conclusion, you wouldn't eat at all.' That sentence really does encapsulate her contempt for empathy in others and her inability to reason with any depth. I mean, if you take anything to its logical conclusion you get a ridiculous result. If you take political correctness to its logical conclusion, you get a stifled society. If you take Christianity to its logical conclusion, you get America. If you take capitalist-fuelled carnivorism to its logical conclusion, you get the KFC Double Down. It's about how far you want to take it; it's about which point along that line you think is right and reasonable.

Personally, I'm unconvinced that automatic hormonal reactions and chain sequences from one plant to another catalysed by external factors constitute any evidence of plant sentience, neither in terms of perception or communication; evolution has had many other incredible effects elsewhere without causing speculation that the organisms displaying those effects are somehow self-aware. Science may prove me wrong one day, but it's beyond the point: Devine's simplistic conclusion is that abstaining from meat doesn't make sense because no matter what you eat you are causing pain and killing something. This logic pretty much justifies cannibalism. If there is no scale of value for different forms of life, if killing a plant is the same as killing a pig, then so too is it the same as killing a person. This is starting to become a pattern in Devine's work: over-generalisation. It's a mistake infants make during language acquisition. Just as children whose fathers have abandoned them are the same, in Miranda's eyes, as children with two mothers, eating vegetables is just as bad as eating animals because they both 'feel pain', even though animals necessarily have a much greater capacity for suffering. I will expound upon these issues further in part three.

For now, vegetarianism is plagued by this kind of one-dimensional thinking. You either have to go the whole way or no way; you're carnivore or vegan; you're a realist or an idealist hippie, but this isn't the case. It reminds me of a clip from US talk show The View that I came across on YouTube one night in Santorini during a glut of 'cyperactivity' after too long without internet access, in which vegan actress Alicia Silverstone (seemingly) snubs former Survivor: Australia contestant Elisabeth Hasselbeck, one of the show's conservative panel members, over her earlier argument with Rosie O'Donnell. What she then says in terse response to Hasselbeck's comment that she always questions 'vegetarians that walk around with leather shoes' sums it up: 'Well I like—I'm happy when anybody does anything good, so it's okay if they are veggie and have leather shoes'. SHUT DOWN. More eloquent is a quote from vegan podcaster, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, whose podcasts are available for free on iTunes, that I've been directed to by a newly vegan friend since I first wrote this post: 'Don't do nothing because you can't do everything. Do something. Anything.'

It's advice that could be used in any area of life. You don't have to be a vegetarian to acknowledge that it's the right thing to do, to aspire to that lifestyle. Kirby himself says

     I have not become a strict vegetarian. Still less a vegan. I eat eggs
     and see no moral problem with that whatseoever – if the eggs are
     produced by free range chickens. I still eat fish, an inconsistency
     of which I am constantly reminded by my partner. But gradually,
     step by step, I continue to make moves towards the world of
     vegetarianism. But so far, I am not pure. Except when it comes to
     meat and poultry. They are out, banished entirely from my diet.

It's not about giving up meat 'cold-turkey', so to speak, in a blaze of self-righteousness. You can reduce your consumption, you can buy organic and free range, you can support animal rights, you can experiment with that magical set of ingredients that sometimes, somehow, can be combined in such a way as to make you not even realise there's no meat in your meal (cheese, tomato-based sauces, eggs, mushrooms, potato products and other carbs, and nuts).

But it's not enough for Devine to make an attack on empathy, to sully the debate with her one-dimensional arguments and distortions of those who disagree with her. No, she's got to take this opportunity to attack her most hated enemy, the educated, urban Left. It's one of her favourite topics. Particularly she revels in dichotomising it with good old fashioned, true blue, salt of the earth Aussie battlers. The farmers. The manufacturers. 'Labour's aspirational base'. It's something she knows all about, being a moneyed Liberal Party–voting city-dweller who grew up in what she herself calls 'uber-urban' Tokyo. It's not those tye-dye-wearing, chai-latte-sipping, bicycle-riding, dreadlock-sporting, manmade-climate-change-believing, vegan-cafe-patronising, hyphen-using intellectually elitist Glebocrats like Kirby who empathise with the animals; it's the 'dwindling few who live on the land and grow our food'. Why? 'Because it is in their face every day.' It makes them 'more balanced people, more honest, more realistic than the citified others who prefer not to know.'

The citified others who prefer not to know. She does know how to turn a phrase, doesn't she?

'Not wanting to know' has nothing to do with Kirby, who cites animal welfare violations as one of the reasons behind his abandoning meat, and who YOU JUST QUOTED talking about 'the suffering, pain and fear' experienced by animals raised for slaughter.

IDIOT, GOSH!

And similarly, this city–country binary has nothing to do with the issue; it just derails the argument. If it is wrong to eat animals, it is wrong regardless of whether people live in the country or the city. It's simply a way of Devine giving herself something to talk about. There are, I think, very few intelligent arguments you can make against vegetarianism (see part two), so she needs to find something she can sneer at and rail against in order to sound convincing and provocative. 

Devine's solution to 'bridging the gap' she has invented between city and country attitudes to death is poetry, a tactic I agree with but towards an end I don't. To deploy poetry, or any artform, against empathy seems to me a contradiction and, in a way, it does backfire. Her idea of 'bridging the gap' is city people realising that death is natural and shutting up about animal rights, but that didactic purpose is not necessarily served by the poem,'The Early Purges' by Seamus Heaney, which she credits Dr Greg Hertzler for citing:

     I was six when I first saw kittens drown.

     Dan Taggart pitched them, 'the scraggy wee shits',

     Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,

     Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din

     Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout

     Of the pump and the the water pumped in.

     'Sure, isn't it better for them now?' Dan said.

     Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced

     Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.

     Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung

     Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains

     Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung

     Until I forgot them. But the fear came back

     When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows

     Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens' necks.

     Still, living displaces false sentiments

     And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown

     I just shrug, 'Bloody pups'. It makes sense:

     'Prevention of cruelty' talk cuts ice in town

     Where they consider death unnatural

     But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.

Any first-year literature student knows there's more to a poem than the surface-level meaning, and the narrator's voice is not necessarily the poet's, even in a highly autobiographical poem. 'The Early Purges' could just as easily be a lament for the loss of innocence, the hardening, the desensitising that comes with a hard life on the farm, as a criticism of 'prevention of cruelty' talk' and, in fact, I think the evidence supports that reading. If the subjects of the poem went to work killing the 'farm pests' with grim resignation, or even just indifference, perhaps Devine's interpretation would be more plausible, but first Dan Taggart and then the narrator exhibit a malignant attitude to the infant animals that goes beyond what they must do to maintain a 'well-run farm', calling them 'scraggy wee shits' and '[b]loody pups'. This suggests, perhaps, that the poem depicts the worldview that it does as a means of lamenting the necessity of this hardening of sentiment, this cycle of acquired callousness that must be perpetuated as a side-effect of farm life.

In part two and three, I'll respond to Devine's piece with my own outline of why I think vegetarian morality has it right.

References

Miranda Devine's 'Everybody hurts, but we've all got to eat', in The Sunday Telegraph, Wednesday 5 October 2011.

Seamus Heaney's 'The Early Purges'.

Michael Kirby's 'Animals deserve our protection', in The Australian, Saturday 1 October 2011.

Michael Kirby's 'Sense and sensibility about our fellow sentient creatures', in The Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 6 August 2010.

Cow's eye image.

Napoleon dynamite image.