Spirit of Progress Read Online Free PDF Page B

just might be able to catch a glimpse of this puzzling world of Progress gathered there, and which might fall upon him at any moment now, like sudden rain.
    The image of Skinner stays with the young journalist all the way back to the city. A solitary figure standing at the gate of change, at the gate of the world that has always been his but which he will soon pass on to others. For the paddocks, the stable (in which Michael and a girl calledKathleen Marsden will kiss in the distant year of 1961), the milking shed and the house, and the generations of care that have been invested in it, will soon become the lost domain of what was once Skinner’s Farm. For Skinner’s world is already lost, and Skinner, somewhere behind those vague and affable eyes, is perfectly aware of it. Although vague is not the word, the journalist corrects himself, taking in the gathering clutter of workers’ terraces that constitute much of the inner city and which will eventually become the victim of what the new city planners will call slum clearance. Skinner is merely distracted by change. Change that will soon leave him ambling about where his farm used to be, in clothes that nobody wears any more, wondering who on earth all these people could be, and what all these houses and shops are doing on the paddocks that were once his. For it is just possible, the journalist imagines, that Skinner was born and has lived all his life on and around those twenty or so acres that constitute his farm and never really ventured much outside. While beyond its fences the world changed around him. And it is that world, the post-war world, that is currently speeding towards him, a solitary figure at his gate, the last custodian of a world that has already passed into History and which only lives on in isolated pockets such as Skinner’s Farm and the old woman’s tent.
    It’s a quiet drive back and while the journalist is arranging his notes for the story he will write, a part of him is lingering on that solitary figure and asking himself if it will be the same for all of us. That one day we will all find ourselves walking around in the clothes that nobodywears any more, with a distracted, affable look in our eyes, wandering pigeon-toed through the wrong world. And perhaps that is why the image of the old farmer has stayed with him throughout the drive back. It is a hint, an intimation, that sooner or later we will all stand at that gate.
    Then his thoughts return to the old woman, at this moment quite possibly brooding in her tent, for she had the look of a brooder about her. Possibly a small kerosene heater keeping her warm (and here the image of her small, white fists returns to him) as she broods on the intrusion and those people who come along and disturb you when all you want is to be left alone.
    As they enter the newspaper building with its grand façade, a touch of New York overlooking the Princes Bridge rail yards and the soot-covered palms of the Kings Domain across the river, that world they have just intruded upon seems far away. It’s out there all right, though. But not for much longer. For what he has come back with are notes, dispatches from a world that hasn’t entirely disappeared but is slipping away even as we watch it. He clutches his notepad, as if having journeyed in time and brought back with him evidence of his travels, along with the mud on his shoes.

3.
The Journalist on the Street
    L ate that afternoon, the journalist, in his favoured gabardine coat, is standing on the footpath outside the newspaper offices. He has a copy of the paper open, a broadsheet that can be difficult to hold in windy conditions or cramped spaces in trams and trains, and is reading the story he wrote that afternoon: ‘Old Pensioner Has Pioneer Spirit’ (not that he thought up the headline; someone else did that). All around him the offices of the city are closing and its workers are walking towards the station with, he notes, that brisk, purposeful stride