Publication: Melbourne Herald
Date: 19 January 1935
Fourway Farm, January 18, 1935. Dear Ab, Reading your letters it seems to me that bits and scraps of advise I been able to give you has sort of took some of the sting out of your recent love bust. If so I am glad and thankful I have been of some use. Love's a funny thing, Ab, me boy, as may be you have heard before. Talking about love remines me that I been reading somewhere that the wild birds have decided to bring up two famblies this year sted of one. Well, I aint a bit surprised, Ab. It is jist another proof of what I been thinkning for a long while now. And its this here, Ab. I got more than a slight ideer that Nacher has got fair fed up with the human race, and has made up her mind to chuck man into the discard and play a lone hand. And if that is so, we aint got no one but ourselfs to blame. When you come to things what Nacher has done for man all these long centuries and what she has put up with from him it only stands to reason that sooner or later she is bound to sling in her alley and let man go hang. For hundreds and hundreds of years the human race has been forgetting they are children of Nacher, and gradually trying to boss everything on earth. Man has been letting water in deserts, and pumping it up from the bowls of the earth and cutting down forests and chucking around fertiliser and inventing farm machinery, and inventing new sorts of plants and fruits and playing hokey with Nacher genrally. And all the time the old dame has stood for it like a foolish mother with a spoiled brat. She has done near all man asked of her. Doubled the crops and improved the quality and still he kept yelling "More, more! And grow it quicker!" Well, one year Nacher puts up a great spurt and has a record year with bumper crops and everything. And still like a dilly maternal mutt she sez, "There you are, dearie. There's more food and more clothes and more everything than ever you had before." And then man ups and tells her she is talking through her old bead bonnett. And when Nacher asks why he says, "Overproduction. I've got too much everything, and now I'm dead broke. It's all your fault," he says. Well, can you wonder, Ab, if old Dame Nacher aint going to be the mug all the time. Would you? Here I am, she says to herself, been spoiling and coddling this bit of a sawn orf runt of a thing that gets about on its hine legs and all I get is abuse. And, all the time, she says, I been neglecting me other children what si a lot more deserving. Let him go and eat machinery, she says, I got other things to see to. Well, Ab, you and me is beginning to see what is starting to happen now. And it don't look none too good for the human race. It is just old Mother Nacher calling to her other kids to come along and tuck in. – There is plenty for all. Grasshoppers is increasing, so is wooly worms and beetles and fleas and rats and hares. So is wallabys and bandicoots and wombats. I been noticing it everywhere. So is green parrots and pear slugs. And, by gum, so is sea serpents. And now Nacher has told the birds to raise two broods and eat hearty. Ah, well, I seen it coming, and man has got himself to blame. I think that is about all the news from home, Ab. Your aff. father. JAS. JAMES "Den" Herald , 19 January 1935, p6