The Wood and Stone Petition

On the 2nd of June 1849, my great great great grandpa C. Erdmann Jäckel, a tischlermeister (cabinet maker-joiner) with 210 other settler of 'New Silesia' in the Barossa Valley, signed what is now called the ‘Wood and Stone Petition’ lobbying the South Australian Governor to take material from Crown land to build pioneer homes. Though Erdmann soon had to leave his trade, and learn to farm, his family fell into distress which saw the death of his wife, his children’s mother. When he re-migrated to the east of Melbourne in 1853, where he could practice his craft on town houses built with gold rush wealth, he did not trust to this mastery, but kept to a hard-won providential life, with a small farm, cow, vines, orchard and hives at Boundary Road: a freedom practice many of his descendants still practice, or remember.


With hands in flesh worn to touch, but no ready money,
with families in health to provide, but no ready homes,
with rich mentalities, with skilled hands to use, but no materials,
I, Erdmann Jäckel, with my compatriot New Silesians
of this Barossa Valley, on the North Gawler river, petitioned
the then Governor on the 2nd of June in 1849 in a plea
to obtain wood and stone from the wastes of the Crown.

Finally, the Governor’s reply came with a breach
in the prohibition, - as if this was permission:
‘You will be allowed to remove dead trees.’

Those dead hardwood Australian trees are hard near to
a Prussian blue Exit signature inked at last on the too-easy writ
of dense legislation; and me, a tischlermeister, able to turn
the finest wood into even finer interiors…in a time of bark
huts, free-stone cabins, of wattle and daub, of unceilinged,
newspapered walls! Interiors? What use was dead wood?
What use was I? I lasted few years, then took ship for Port Phillip.

So, the fine fancy of lace-wrought wood in Victorian
gold scrollwork on front verandahs of Melbourne,
or the timbering of Hawthorn-brick homes does not answer
as well as a table, a chair, a bench seat, nor a shed roof, but there
in the wilds of ‘The Nunawading’ my mortises and dovetails made
fine hives for honey, my joinery made a prize cow bail, a water barrel,
a wooden home with verandah post and beams for vines, and my coffin.

Now, 157 years after my day, I, Erdmann Jäckel, the Earthman-builder
whose rustic bones underscored and spokeshaved what has become
suburban-Melbourne’s rise, am not blind to you, who still have hands
of flesh, much compromised to a world of paper resourcefulness,
in a mortgage shuffle of paper skills, good at the too-easily printed paper…
I petition now for you (and for your freedom) to ask for wild wood and stone
against many a signed paper, to foil a death-pledge of documents
you hold in the bought-surround houses of your night.

Give a Grace for Wood and Stone! Gnadenfrei -free grace
always will be what matters most for a signature writ
in the all-weather building-blocks of cultured simplicity.


July 2005-Jan 2007 © Wayne David Knoll