On 25 July 2007, were you present at a seminar hosted by the State Government authority Transgrid, to guide and facilitate public discussion of options for the economical distribution of electricity in south-western New South Wales?
You weren't?
Would you perhaps have been at the ACT Law Society's fortnightly get-together, where the topic for discussion was Commonwealth Liability for Actionable Torts Pertaining to Easements between Leasehold Properties in the Territory Jurisdiction?
No? That's a real shame.
Because the man sitting at the head of the table was the President of the ACT Law Society, Denis Farrar.
And Denis Farrar can do something that I bet you can't.
He can grab his nose and blow so hard that stuff comes out of the corners of his eyes! Yes, that's what he used to do on the bus, the blue and red bus, that ran along Forest Road to Bexley in 1963. Then he and Rodney Ferrier, the forensic accountant, would try to put itching powder down the back of your pants.
But let us go now, back to Transgrid - to the afternoon seminar on the 14th floor, to the tasteful grey panelling and the waxing and waning sussuration of the air-conditioning, to the dismal views across to Redfern, poignantly relieved by a side glimpse of the Sydney Cricket Ground.
Ah... let us inhale the scent of overbrewed Transgrid coffee, waiting to be poured into those identical white cups...
The topic under discussion is not to be dismissed lightly. There will be, one suspects, at least one voice struggling to maintain composure as the deficiencies of a shire transponder are carefully and politely explained. And the presiding voice, the forger of consensus, will call for expert comment to enforce the Transgrid line. And all eyes will turn to a white-shirted figure, who may smile and lean forward, as he calmly dissects the technological alternatives and points the way to the optimum .
I give you... Leon Arkinstall, Principal Electrical Engineer.
And as the white-shirted figure plays his part, the camera draws back, losing focus on his careful gestures. And the noise of talking becomes the drowsy hum of a distant substation, and the mind races back decades, as if over flattened grass.
In the words of Chris Ellis, ' He was a boy who could have been very good at English'.
How good? Consider please, his reading of The Plough.
Of course, to read The Plough as construed by Arkinstall, you have to recall the craft and prowess of a 15 year old, and then place yourself in a whole class full of such, with the wit to appreciate the ingenuity of Arkinstall's exegesis.
This talent for innuendo was evident elsewhere, nay everywhere, in the Third Form of 1965. Did not a whole busload, returning from the Long Reef geology excursion, groan in unison as the bus rutted in first gear at a set of uphill traffic lights? And were the hole-exploring feats of Hill End confined to miners of the previous century?
The agrarian romantic AG Street set his sights on inspiring those city-bound middle classes wealthy enough to indulge a hankering for the great outdoors. His essay The Plough is an accomplished piece, rather too quaintly written to survive its generation, but the sentiment of recapturing a lost simplicity is as old as urban civilisation.
To we Third Formers, of course, it was just shit boring, like every other supposedly entertaining essay in that dreary little book.
[Here it is, read it yourself. The Plough]
It was Chris Ellis who sowed the seed of Arkinstall's stimulating reinterpretation, with a discussion of medieval allegory. Things had got bogged down, you see, with Richard the Second. There he is, locked up in that bloody tower, talking to himself for a whole Act before Bolingbroke's boys break in and put him out of his misery. Ellis has to do something to get us interested, so he gets us to decode some of R2's ramblings, by telling us about how Shakespeare uses parallel metaphors from the animal kingdom. You have to understand that everything stands for something else...
Eventually, in the mind of Arkinstall, this comes to fruition:
' The plough, which looks so clumsy and uncouth, changes its character... It is no longer an ugly, awkward inanimate thing, but a delicately flexible instrument, which responds to your lightest touch'
'You and the plough have become one, a common intelligence with but one idea only, to plough - on and on and on.'
'..you are drunk with the urge of the plough and do not stop. Stop? Why, to stop would be absurd, and on you sail, unheeding, on and on and on'
'Why cannot one plough one long straight furrow for ever, without these petty hindrances? But one is forced to turn.. then to turn again into the work, and swing away on a new tack, happy and interested once more'
And finally:
'...I would suggest in all sincerity that three months steady ploughing would cure any man of a nervous breakdown.'
' ... and if ploughing generally be conceded a pleasing thing to do, then to plough virgin land is pure joy.'
The word spread rapidly around STHS. Within days, a hapless student teacher was convinced to allow Arkinstall's whole essay to be read aloud to the class and Room 14 rocked and convulsed with laughter.
'Good at English'? Arkinstall was a genius. I think I can hear AG Steet down there, bumping the lid of his coffin...
