You are very much right, Perseus. Am going on 87, and reckon my wife and I did alright by me returning to cockyin' after WW2, but one thing I learnt during the Depression was the need for people on the land to get together and unionise.

But both from the one son and his sons now running the farms, can't get them interested in farmer's groups possibly because modern farm advisers tell them that farming is a business and should be run like a business.

Okay to run a farm like a business, but also remember the farm contains your home, and your district community is a special way of life, which unfortunately with advancing communication has tied us too much to the cities, even sport having become so regional that rather than more than a dozen district teams in our shire of Dalwallinu, we only have a couple of cricket teams for example in Dalwallinu itself.

The way it was it seemed sport and bush unionism went together, and we can well now understand the saying from the city electorates, when the Country Party was changed to the National Party, the original moniker of the now Liberal Party, that thank God the days of the Feudal Yoke are over.

All too true, yet in countries like France and Germany the Feudal Yoke is still well alive, still bearing the name of agrarian socialism, yet a socialism or get-togetherism that can strike either right or left as Stalin found out when the Russian Kulaks refused to hand over their seed grain, which for them was something very personal.

No need to portray much more, except to still pine a bit for the old days?

The sooner the Nationals disappear from Australia's political scene, the better. As a former Liberal MP who turned independent, my 8 years in the WA parliament convinced me that we no longer need agrarian socialists to represent some of the hardest working people in the country, namely, our farmers. They (the farmers) have enough problems without being asked to believe that taxpayer-funded handouts are the solutions to all their problems. While most of the Nationals MPs that I know are good people, they live in a bygone era and simply don't understand modern day reality.
When the Nationals are gone, country people will be able to more easily vote for one of the two major parties who, in my experience, will be better able to represent them in our modern, complex and challenging world.