Among the quieter pieces on Allen Hackworth's personal site, the verse about the fence that cleaved the South Farm sits like a marker post at the edge of a paddock. It is a poem of boundaries, but not in the legal sense alone. Allen reads the wire as something his forebears both relied upon and resented, a slender line of iron that turned neighbours into strangers and one tract of land into two inheritances. The poem has the cadence of a man walking a property line and counting the differences on either side.
The South family line, which Allen has traced through chronologies and archival records, runs through rural districts whose outlines still turn up on modern title plans. The farm in question was partitioned in the early years of the twentieth century, when an heir took his share south of the wire and another stayed with the homestead and the northern paddocks. The poem listens for the voices of both branches and for the silence between them. It also opens onto a wider question about how families remember division, whether they treat the fence as a wound or as a contract.
The South farm covered roughly two hundred acres of mixed grazing country, with a homestead block on the higher ground and a creek flat that watered the southern end. When the partition was drawn, the surveyor drove in iron-bark posts at intervals of a chain, then strung plain wire between them. The procedure echoes the kind of subdividing work that shaped many Australian holdings after the closer-settlement reforms, when broad pastoral runs were broken into smaller family-sized blocks. The boundary itself was unremarkable in the landscape, but its consequences were not.
Allen writes of the morning the posts were sighted. The poem notes that the southern paddock lost its shelter belt and that the northern block gained a clean edge against a road. The change in microclimate, the loss of windbreak on one side and the new exposure on the other, becomes a small parable about how a drawn line alters weather as well as ownership. Australian farmers of that generation would have read the shift in pasture growth immediately, and the poem trusts its reader to do the same.
Allen's lines tighten where the wire is taut and loosen where the posts begin to lean. He uses short, clipped sentences for the surveyor and his chain, then longer lines for the dialogue between the brothers who watched him work. The effect is musical rather than narrative. The reader feels the give and pull of the conversation, the way each side measured the other across the boundary as if it were a contested strip of ground. It is a technique that suits a country where neighbours can be a long drive away and a short fence line still separates two worlds.
The poem also leans on the language of stock yards. A phrase about drafting weaners on sale day carries the same sense of sorting and separation that the fence performs on the family itself. Readers familiar with regional saleyards, from Wodonga to Ballarat, will recognise the rhythm of the drafting gate. Allen borrows that rhythm deliberately, so the verse sounds like a working shed rather than a parlour.
A marker post does more than show a corner. It records the date of survey, the name of the licensed surveyor, and the legal fiction that a piece of ground has been reduced to a line on a plan. In New South Wales and Victoria, the relevant fencing and dividing legislation has long required adjoining owners to share the cost of a sufficient fence, and the poem alludes to that shared obligation. The fence, in other words, was meant to bind as well as to divide.
Allen turns the post into a witness. The post saw the brothers argue about the position of the gate. The post saw the southern heir carry away the milk cooler and the northern heir keep the draught horse. The post saw the grandson, decades later, ride a motorbike along the line and wonder what the fuss had been about. Each of those observations sits inside the poem as a separate stanza, and the post keeps its own quiet chronology. There is a certain Australian directness in this device, the idea that a piece of treated pine could hold a memory better than any letter.
| Aspect | Northern paddock | Southern paddock |
|---|---|---|
| Original heir | Stayed with the homestead block | Took the share that included the creek flat |
| Soil type | Red loam over clay, drier in summer | Alluvial silt along the creek, prone to winter flooding |
| Main use | Wool and fat lambs | Mixed cattle and fodder crops |
| Wind exposure | Lost shelter belt after the fence went up | Gained full western sun once the tree line was thinned |
| Family memory | The line as practical, even necessary | The line as an early wound, never quite healed |
The contrast in the verses mirrors the contrast in the rows above. Allen lingers on the soil, the stock, and the wind because those are the things that decide whether a fence feels like a relief or a theft. A reader who has watched a summer storm cross a paddock will recognise the small injustice of weather being shared unevenly across a boundary. The poem gives that injustice a name.
In the second half of the poem, Allen lets the southern heir speak. The voice is plain, slightly bitter, and very specific. The man remembers the cool change that used to roll in off the hills before the northern shelter belt was thinned, and the way his cows suffered once the wind cut straight across his country. Australian readers will hear in this the long-running rural argument about trees and shelter, an argument that still turns up at field days and in the pages of the local paper.
The southern heir also remembers the gate. The gate was the only movable part of the boundary, and it became the place where the two families met. Allen uses the gate as a counter-symbol to the wire. The wire divides, the gate can be opened, and the poem gently insists that opening it is a choice the heirs still have. The contrast carries a quiet Australian stoicism, the kind that accepts what cannot be undone and looks for what still can.
The South farm is no longer a single holding. The northern block passed through two more hands and is now part of a larger grazing aggregation, while the southern paddock was absorbed into a neighbour's place in the late nineteen-eighties. The fence, in places, has fallen into disrepair, and the gate hangs on one hinge. Allen's poem preserves the line in language, the way a survey plan preserves it in ink.
The piece sits alongside the site's other archival work, including the obituary of James Telford, blacksmith and farmer, which records another branch of the family who worked the iron and the forge rather than the soil. The obituary was sourced from a Melbourne newspaper archive of the period, and read together with the poem it sketches a region where a man could be a farmer, a smith, and a neighbour all in the same week.
For anyone tracing the South line through the site's chronologies, the natural next step is to read that obituary of James Telford alongside the poem, then open the South family chronology to see where the fence line falls inside the wider record.