Brian Chatterton's Roosters and Featherdusters
Review by Peter Strawhan
Peter Strawhan reviews Brian Chatterton's book Roosters and Featherdusters (Renwick NZ: Pulcini Press, 2003).
Peter's review concentrates on those parts of the book dealing with food and drink.
Research Centre member Brian Chatterton was Don Dunstan's Minister of Agriculture, Forests, and Fisheries from 1975 until 1979.
He attempted to function in the same role for John Bannon from 1982 but in 1983 retreated to the Legislative Council benches and retired in 1987.
Chatterton claims he set out to provide a "short memoir" and not a "formal autobiography or a political tract".
Aided by his wife Lynne (the Umbrian bread-maker), Chatterton was in his element talking dry-land farming techniques with North African farmers and bureaucrats, even those inhabiting perfidious, terrorist states, like Libya and Iraq.
He reveals the often fascinating, and usually frustrating, machinations of politicians, public servants, and academics, and he soon learned the harsh lesson, "that your own side is more dangerous than the Opposition".
Chatterton started life in India, where his English father was an engineer who married into an old South Australian family.
Like Dunstan (and Bannon) he was a product of the establishment's St. Peter's College.
He by-passed Roseworthy to obtain his agriculture degree from Reading University and then farmed the family property at Lyndoch, adding a winery.
He recounts how Dunstan was, perhaps for the only time, "totally lost for words", when informed that Sir Henry Ayers was Chatterton's great-great-grandfather.
Appropriately enough they were wining and dining "some visiting dignitaries" at the Ayers House bistro, Paxtons.
Like Dunstan, Chatterton married his research assistant, and her typing skills would save the day, or the minister, from the inefficiency of public servants and others on more than one occasion.
Again like Dunstan, Chatterton was a Labor Party anomaly, in his case with equally valid Establishment connections, but that even rara avis, a "hands on" farmer who was also an intellectual.
Even before he became a minister Chatterton demonstrated something of his own abilities as a problem solver.
As a grape grower himself he was well aware of the difficulties faced by the then host of small growers, dependent on the big wineries buying their crop each vintage.
Dunstan, like Playford before him, had retained the wartime Prices Commission and used this mechanism to set a minimum (rather than a maximum) price the wineries paid growers for the bulk varieties used in brandy production.
In 1974 Whitlam abolished excise concessions on local brandy, which immediately threw the industry into panic at the prospect of a deluge of cheap imports.
Chatterton, who was still a humble MLC, knew that the demand for quality table wines was increasing and that certain wineries were already paying bonus prices for the better varieties of grape.
Dunstan accepted his recommendation to reverse the Commission's minimum price policy, which "on a return per hectare basis . . . rewarded quantity not quality", thereby encouraging growers to diversify their plantings.
The success of the reversal was confirmed when "Cabernet Sauvignon grapes . . . more than doubled in price in a single season", and eventually other growers fell into line.
Apart from the foodways connection with cereal crops and later olives, the book contains other informative snippets on food.
One is the inordinate amount of time once spent annually by Labor's Caucus discussing the price of Balfour's pies and pasties! In the early days of his ministry Chatterton set about decentralising the Agriculture Department.
To him it made no sense to have offices in Gawler place, when the client farmers were dotted around the countryside in their various regions.
Taking his philosophy of regionalism a logical step further, he and Lynne entertained the Australian Forestry Commission at a lunch built around regional food and wine.
Federal minister Ian Sinclair, who fancied himself as a bon vivant, was vastly impressed: "The most interesting [lunch] I've had at a Ministerial Council meeting . . . What an interesting marketing concept . . . We must do more of this overseas."
Sadly, Chatterton found that local producers preferred to slumber on, in his view because "political hostility towards Labor by farmers was a barrier to their own self interest".
After Dunstan's abrupt resignation, Chatterton and his wife went to India, the Middle East, and Rome to continue various projects.
A prominent destination was Iraq, "then our gallant and trusted friend"; in the minister's view the rate of Iraqi consumption of whisky and beer (the Koran only vetoes products of the grape) precluded that nation from being part of any terrorist conspiracy.
On their return the "anti-intellectual" Des Corcoran led Labor over the election cliff.
Chatterton packed his personal papers and his own special wall decoration, a feather duster, hung there to remind him of Arthur Calwell's political aphorism, "Cock of the walk one day and feather duster the next." Following the forgettable Tonkin interregnum John Bannon led Labor back to the government benches in Chatterton's "chook house", and Brian resumed his familiar portfolio.
But the Bannon style was too much of a contrast to the Dunstan model of "active" government.
The Chattertons migrated to Rome and used this as their base for a new joint career as authors and dry-farming consultants.
They relocated to Umbria after the sale of the Lyndoch property and eventually gained acceptance as olive-growing members of the agricultural community.
The Slow Food and the Slow City movements are now part of their milieu, as Chatterton sees it, a return to what Dunstan was about, with his philosophy of promoting a worthwhile quality of life to a slow-to-learn Adelaide.
I enjoyed reading Roosters and Feather Dusters but lament the absence of an index, while belatedly confessing my personal research interest in Don Dunstan and his era.
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