Who was that luckless politician?

Who was ... ?

Who was that luckless politician,

federal,  I think,

gone now from so many

memories, including mine?

Male, a sort of suited fledgling,

older maybe than he looked,

the guy who feelingly achieved,

while reaching for the aphoristic

wisdom of his people,

the verbal train-wreck we remember

so much better than than the 'issue'

or his features as they pleaded

with the swooping of a lens: 

I'm torn between two places and a

hard rock?

Clearly, it's all there on Google

but wouldn't that be cheating?

Ulrich and the Doc

Ulrich Ellis (1904–1981)

Earle Page (1880–1961)

Ulrich and the Doc, my grandpa,

back there in the 1920s,

are not unlike the country then,

always on the move.

Ulrich, twenty-four years younger,

parliamentary secretary

and general factotum,

doesn't stint on admiration

and both are more than happy

working at an empire's edge.

The future's made of enterprise,

power poles, dams and rail.

Scrub is to be cut and cleared

and dairy farms established.

The Great War is an echo

but neither is discouraged

although the Doctor's several months

of surgery on the Somme

must surely leave a shadow.

Ulrich keeps a notebook

(he's been a journalist as well)

absorbing all his boss throws off,

the 'picturesque phrase',

the 'homely illustration'

then types it all up later with

some extras of his own.

The Doctor is, to Ulrich,

a sort of 'Marco Polo',

so often are they on the road.

For both of them the city streets

 are seriously 'tram-infested'.

And always they are undeterred

even by those tracks

'the mailman himself refuses to tackle'.

Their trips are packed with hard-work heroes

and heroines, as well.

Mrs Smith, for instance,

up at Taylors Arm,

who stays on when her husband

disappears with no word spoken

one morning from his soldier's block

and raises five young children on her own.

She clears and ploughs and ringbarks,

'carries cream on packhorses

seven miles through scrub';

persuades a sister out from London

to help her with the plough.

Her offspring too will prove to have

'manners that would grace

the best of houses'. Ulrich and the Doc

inside an early Chevrolet

are chugging up the mountain gravel

then out across the blacksoil plains.

Once, they reach the western coast,

courtesy the Trans-Australian,

where Doc, the nation's treasurer,

addresses farmers' meetings,

open-air or weatherboard,

'everyone with ... hats on;

the temperature over 85'.

And thus the Country Party thrives.

'Circumstances,' Ulrich notes,

'rarely allowed me to travel

ahead of the Doctor. Where he went,

there went I — usually a few

paces behind him, and at the trot.'

The legacies of pioneers

become a favoured pit-stop:

Thomas Sutcliffe Mort,

founder of Bodalla and

of frozen beef to Britain;

Lord John Forrest too

who helped to start the railway

they've spent the last three nights on;

the engineer, C.Y. O'Connor,

who famously designed

and oversaw for seven years

the pipeline to Kalgoorlie

then shot himself on horseback

one morning in the surf

('succumbing to the darts of pygmies,'

as Ulrich