Your needs can be many, but the strongest one is that which forces you to win or to die.
(Machiavelli, Art of War)
The first Duttons to settle this land, fighting was all they knew. It’s how they got here, how they kept the land once they did. But today it seems like it’s a liability. Cowards rule the world these days ... With coward rules and coward customs. To succeed today all you got to know is how to blame and how to complain. I truly believe it’s the survival of the un-fittest these days.
(John Dutton, Yellowstone Season 5)
I avoided Yellowstone when it first came out five years ago because I am prejudiced. Kevin Costner playing a Montana cattle rancher? Whose ancestors took the land from the first people who lived in harmony with nature? But this year I discovered it, and my all-too-easy-breezy dismissal of the series has changed to respect and continuing interest because it has made me think about humanity and the world. It made me reflect on being human, and what (despite and often because of our best aims and intentions) we might have to do in the world to survive.
Season 5 of Yellowstone has dropped this month on Stan, drip-feeding one episode a week, which is a challenge for the lazy binger. The luxury of discovering the first four seasons untapped earlier this year made for some late nights – who knew that the white coloniser, the wolf-killer, the brutal driver of men and beasts, could have a soul? That the Duttons (whom we might in Australia have called squatters) might not have been the worst thing to happen to the land and its first peoples? Not that they aren’t bad enough, but that there might be people with intentions that are more damaging to the environment and its first peoples than a post-modern cowpuncher?
Summer Higgins, environmental campaigner: What caused that forest fire?
Carter (homeless teenager fostered by Beth Dutton): Lightning.
Summer: Who puts out the fire?
Carter: God.
Summer: Nature puts out the fire, kid.
Carter: That’s what I said.
This is fantasy on a wide scale, a pseudo-current history-as-written by those who won the past and are clinging by fingernails onto the present. And the future? After John Dutton, the deluge will surely swamp all of them: him, the first peoples and the land they both love.
‘Yesterday is what eats everybody; that’s why I don’t think about it.’ (Rip,