Dick has a sense of responsibility for the soil. Moreover, Dick cannot merely use the land and its soil until it no longer is fertile and therefore useless for farming, as Charlie Slatter does with his land. This is not rational and therefore it is not the way of a good coloniser and the flourishing farmer. Pigs to raising rabbit, as well as opening up a kaffir store. This can clearly be seen in the passage where the reader gets to see Dick changing his mind from beekeeping to raising This unorthodox and failed tactic can also be seen in how he constantly changes his mind in what the farm’s main focus and source for earnings should be. In comparison to his neighbour Slatter, Dick is not acting rationally when it comes to making a profit.

He does not only want to take from the land, he also wants to take care of it.

Whereas Charlie Slatter, and his peers, see their land strictly as property, Dick Turner, on the other hand has a way of looking at the land in a more romantic and idealistic way: “he loved it and was part of it”. He is irrational, unsuccessful and without the chance to improve his financial position and his position in society. Dick, on the other hand, has many of the traits that are associated with the black man and thus should never be traits of a British coloniser. Charlie Slatter is exactly what the discourse says that he should be and wants him to be: rational, determined, successful, and therefore a good colonist. Dick is a failure as a farmer and all through the novel the reader is given proof of his futile attempts to make profit from the land that is his to reap. Dick’s inability to get his workers in line does, according to Slatter and other successful white farmers, mean that the workers get lazy and his farm cannot produce what it could have and be an example that reinforces the notion that the white man is above the inferior black man.

One of the problems that Dick Turner in Dorris Lessing’s Grass is Singing has is that he does not drive his workers hard enough.

The grass is singing characters