The Lost Principles of Dignam Schwartz.

The Lost Principles of Dignam Schwartz.

The short, front bar of the Totnam Hotel in the regional town of Mt Mossman finished in a dead-end against the western wall of the hotel. Next to the bar on its right side was a once busy but now seldom used dart board…its playful amusement being replaced by continual television programs featuring any current sporting event or panel of experts discussing such events OR the running of all and sundry horse, trotting and greyhound races…that, combined with a number of coin inserted slot machines in a side room made the skill of dart throwing redundant…three tatty darts stuck deep into the board resided there interminably. On the left side of the bar in the servery was a yellowing poster advertising “Kahlua Liqueur”.. there was a barstool sited at this extremity on the customer side that was the accepted possession of the aged person of Dignam Schwartz. It was not that he held ownership of the actual barstool, but that it was this position that he took up whenever he was in residence, with a schooner of the hotel’s finest amber fluid, at the front bar of the Totnam Hotel….which, by the way, was at precisely six thirty pm. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday of the working week and at precisely eleven am. On Saturdays…it has been recorded that in the cooler winter months, he would, at times peculiar to himself, substitute the schooner of beer for a pony of tawney port.

It was from this advantageous position, with his back to the wall, that Dignam..under the common nick-name given to him by the other local clientele ; “Focus”, would deliver his principles of subjects most dear to his mind to any who would be foolish enough to linger longer than time required to refill their glass of beer, because just to say “hello” and enquire of the health of Dignam was fuel enough to be drawn into lengthy discourse of the subject de jour on Dignam’s mind…he would do this by interrupting the victim who may be well into a discourse of distraction so as to avoid the very trap about to snap shut on their attention by cutting into the rambling conversation of the other person with a soft but sharp..: “Listen…Listen”…and when the other person, through wearily learned experience kept on talking with one foot already dragging the body away…would repeat with one hand holding the person’s sleeve..”listen…listen”..hence the cognomen; “Focus”…

Dignam was a dairy farmer, now retired from the industry and common to many such farmers dealing with the filth of handling those animals while in the process of milking and then having to manage strict health and cleanliness rules regarding the processing of dairy milk, he had the over-scrubbed look about himself…his skin on his lower arms and hands and face scrubbed over many seasons till it was almost opaque…cherry pink and opaque. He lived alone in his later age, his wife of many years, having tolerated his “listen..listen” announcements for as much as she could take, stopped listening and took action of her own that left him paying out half the value of farm and stock…she did not contest for his collection of encyclopedias and subject matter tomes that lined the shelves of the study as she did not know what even was in there as she exhibited the least interest in entering that den of stuffy silence…her only moment of satisfaction after so many years of matrimony came at the end of the divorce action, it was a moment outside the magistrate’s office when the lawyers concluded the settlement details and Dignam made an enquiry about a detail in one of the clauses of settlement and his wife ; Dorothy (Dot), just quickly interrupted her lawyer’s explanation with an address to Dignam…”Listen…(she said softly and sharply)..Listen”…and that was it.

There was a time in the early years of the dairying adventure, when the wet, cold claws of winter with the cows up to their hocks in mud and slime, would bring a wince of disgust to Dignam’s face and the first evidence of a “shitball” expulsion from a cow’s bum, hitting either himself of a worker in the face or upper body as they connected the udder of a cow to the milking machine at the rotary milking parlour, would send him to the telephone to book a three month holiday at some Northern Queensland coastal town, like Maroochydore or another unpronounceable named location till the winter was over…turning the dairy, milking and care of the cows over to a reliable share farmer while he recovered from the horror of the memory…this went on for many years, even up until he retired from the industry..it was not from hatred of the animals or industry, but rather it was “…the principle of the thing”…he would reason…that principle being that to remain in the industry, he had to get away from the industry in the winter…or he could not tolerate the industry…it seemed logical to Dignam.

It was after retirement and sans marriage that Dignam began to wade into the deeper waters of popular philosophies or rather..: theories. Having more idle time in retirement than was healthy for a person of strict manual application like was demanded in his life, Dignam began to frequent second hand book shops and collected older publications of those writers whose names kept popping up in “quotable quotes” in the “Readers Digest” magazines his wife subscribed to…the old publications being now read by Dignam in his quiet nights alone by the fire. Of course, such notable authors are rare on the shelves of second-hand book shops and opportunity shops in the regional towns he shopped at…but by and by he gathered together a small but select collection of such valued opinions. Dignam would read the words of wisdom in these books, paragraph by paragraph, close the book and encouraged by a small glass of tawney port at his elbow, cogitate on the values of such philosophy..he would class these maxims of sage advice against his own lived experience in his working life and compare the integrity of the writer’s wisdom against the hard reality of what he thought of in his mind as ‘ “The shit-ball comparison”…that being whether the words read could over-ride with comforting balm the ghastly memories of the aforementioned shit-ball experience…if the words rationally explained away the discomfort of the latter with the logic and reasoning of the former, he would nod his head , smile and have a sip on the tawney port..and at some future date whilst corralling some unfortunate at the front bar of the Totnam Hotel, would say with an insistence most annoying..:”Listen..listen..” and then go on in a soft most boring drone about a long-lost theory none could understand nor glean the slightest interest in…but Dignam was never discouraged by the lack of interest, because, as he would explain..”it isn’t so much the idea, but the principle of the thing”…It was this explanation that gave some wag the notion of adding another nick-name to the existing one of “Focus” to call Dignam “The Headmaster”.   

But by far the one theory that most caught Dignam’s interest was from an old article published in 1919 in a magazine called “New Age”…titled ; “ “A Mechanical View of Economics” by C. H. Douglas” he was reading..” Douglas criticized classical economics because many of the theories are based upon a barter economy, whereas the modern economy is a monetary one. Initially, money originated from the productive system, when cattle owners punched leather discs which represented a head of cattle. These discs could then be exchanged for corn, and the corn producers could then exchange the disc for a head of cattle at a later date. The word “pecuniary” comes from the Latin pecunia, originally and literally meaning “cattle” (related to pecus, meaning “beast”)”..this was both a language and methodology Dignam could both understand and sympathise with..he was captured by this curious take on a new interpretation of economics..so much so that it did not take long before Dignam was a member of the public library and had requested as much as he could carry home the best and most informed reading of both C.H.Douglas and Social Credit..however, no matter the enlightenment, nor the depth of knowledge of such an archaic financial system he accrued, Dignam could not interest even one person resident at the front bar of his favourite watering hole in the outstanding but overlooked genius of C.H.Douglas and his theory of social credit…to which he would tiresomely draw any bystander’s attention with a soft but sharp instruction to ; “Listen..listen..”, completely unaware that “listening” to a carping lecture on a lost principle was the last thing they wanted to do.

I was told the story of Dignam Schwartz by Bill Duncan, our local farrier, Bill being one of those congenial blokes who frequent local hostelries much more than yours truly..and always having a ready ear for yarn and gossip, he accrued a repertoire of the local goings on to be repeated later to other eager ears…the one about Dignam being the only one I ever heard him repeat with weary dismissal of how much a crushing bore it was to get caught in conversation with “Focus” about such a boring subject. But the yarn seems to be the one that stuck most in my memory..and the conclusion of the life of that yarn was reached by the most coincidental situation.

I was seated at the dining room table sharing a cup of tea with a friend of similar age to myself, who had unfortunately suffered a series of small strokes in recent times that debilitated them enough that they had to abandon a self-sufficient lifestyle and take up residence in a nursing home in the near regional town. I was visiting out of loyalty to the friendship and while enjoying the cup of tea, our attention was drawn to a raised voice several tables away, where a much more elderly man was complaining to the care worker of the hardness of the biscuits placed before him on a plate to be enjoyed with his cup of afternoon tea,

“The biscuits are much too hard for me to chew.” He complained “as I have false teeth”.

“Well, that’s all we have in the cupboard at the moment, Dignam…and if the hardness bothers you, you can always dunk the biscuits in your tea.”

The name “Dignam” caught my attention for just enough to arouse my curiosity to listen closer..

“DUNK THE BISCUIT!..” the man cried “I’ve never heard of such a thing!…I would rather more care was taken to supply me with appropriate fare…it is not so much the quality of the biscuit, but the principle of the thing”.

Now THAT word certainly caught my attention..and with that identification of Dignam’s complaint, came the final piece that concluded the story of just what happens to the Dignam Schwartz’s’ of this world…The care worker heaved a weary, dismissive sigh, was about to turn to go when her sleeve was pinched and held and the man said in a soft but sharp command…”Listen..listen..”