The Bush Read online

  But the Aborigines had not turned the land to the purposes that the Europeans’ God intended. As he rode through it with his wagons and uniformed men, Mitchell imagined that, having watched over it since Creation, God was now smiling on his progress. He conjures from the scene a divine blessing for the conquerors, a divine right. In what became the Western District of Victoria, he found what he called ‘this Eden’ and declared it ‘ready for the immediate reception of civilized man; and destined perhaps to become eventually a portion of a great empire’. It is the standard reading, the one by which occupation was assumed to be right and just, but given a more poetic rendering that granted the occupiers an element of grace.

  ‘Gold with breast high kangaroo grass’, the ‘most fattening grass’, ‘full and ripe and waving in the wind, it had lain waiting in the swelter of the sunlight’. This was the universal refrain. The bush was put there for Europeans to find. It was ‘feed’. The frontier went where the feed was, where the sheep and cattle went. And then it was gone. In Mitchell’s Australia Felix, within twenty years native grasses had disappeared before the sheep and salinity; the hills were ‘slipping in all directions’; and, running across the compacted ground, rainwater carried ‘earth, trees and all before it’, and carved out gullies 3 metres deep.If we grant that it was the Aborigines who made the land into something Europeans judged to be immaculate and God-given, we may as well grant that by their ‘severe utilitarian improvement’ Europeans brutalised and destroyed the land they so craved and admired. Such a general owning up to the truth would recast bush mythology, not least because it would imply that Aboriginal religion demanded more respect for creation than the religion which held that God was the Creator of all things.

  In the beginning there was the bush, and it was there when the first humans arrived, perhaps 70 000 years ago; still there for the recent arrival of Europeans. About 45 million years ago, when the continent broke away from what became Antarctica and began inching north (every year about 7 centimetres), it took a cargo of plants from the bush of Gondwana, the southern supercontinent that, until they drifted north, included the landmasses of India, Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.

  Though the Gondwanan forests of Australia are very different from the bush we think of as typical, they are Australian nonetheless. Vast swathes of these forests have been destroyed since Europeans arrived, but Gondwanan species such as myrtle and Antarctic beech (Nothofagus), Huon pine (Lagarostrobos) and pepper bushes (Tasmannia) still thrive on the east coast of Australia and in Tasmania. Many other descendants of the Gondwanan, including tree ferns, cycads, casuarinas, grass trees and Murray pines, grow in profusion here and there, though George Seddon reminds us that no extant Gondwanan plant ‘has persisted unchanged through the millennia’. In general the Gondwanans are the gymnosperms – their seeds are ‘naked’. Think of a pine cone. The species which dominate today are the angiosperms – their seeds are contained in a vessel. Think of an apple or a gum nut. Angiosperms are the ones that flower, like gum trees and wattles.

  The sclerophylls came out of the rainforest, developing their hard leaves to cope with ancient soils that struggled to retain moisture and nutrients. Phosphorus was notably lacking. Scientists frequently use the poetic Greek-derived word ‘edaphic’ to explain the character and variety of Australian eucalypts: it means of, or relating to, or influenced by the soil. Eucalypts are edaphic plants. The bush is an edaphic place; it is multifarious in keeping with the soils. Move the soils about and the bush moves with them.

  The further north it drifted, the more arid the continent became. The great drying-out occurred roughly 17 million years ago, during the Miocene. The rainforest lost its canopy, the ferns burned to death in sun which had not reached them before, and the grasses and sclerophylls took over. The more severe the droughts, the worse the soils: the more arid the continent, the wider the Sklerophyllenwald. And wider still, when Aboriginal occupiers further depleted soils by regularly burning the vegetation. In a change just as dramatic, when the Aboriginal burning ceased the open woodland created by the fires was colonised by both exotic (often highly flammable) weeds and non-endemic native species. Much of Australia is now more densely forested than it was before the European occupation.

  Untypical and many millions of years older though they are, the Gondwanan descendants are no less the bush than a forest of gums, and the same must be said for the millions of hectares of lantana now growing where the forest used to be. The bush never stops adapting, both as an environment and as a mental construct. It is impervious to its own destruction.

  The Bush Will Not Lie Down

  Paterson, Lawson and the frontier legend – New World gods – drovers’ wives and drovers – bush soldiers – mates and other Victorians – the bush indestructible

  Oscar Wilde was not much drawn to country life. He preferred to be tempted in the city. ‘Anyone can be good in the country,’ he said. In my experience it was not so easy. The country wasn’t innocent. But it was timid. It was full of people who had never got up the courage to leave. The country was potholed with the bitterness that comes of staying put. That’s where a lot of the aggression comes from. You could live a whole life there and never learn much more than you took from school. Of course, ignorance and resentment weren’t inevitable, but the tendency forever lay in wait. The city held the promise of self-invention, of escaping one’s history and the weather; one’s callowness might take longer. It promised tests of mettle and survival additional to those offered by cars, beer and cattle. The city was more of a wilderness than the country.

  In 1967 I joined a couple of hundred other rural eighteen-year-olds at a new university in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. Thousands more streamed into other universities, teachers’ colleges and city jobs. It was the same every year. A large percentage of these people would make the city their permanent home.

  Only about 15 per cent of Australians now live outside the cities and the essentially suburban coastal corridor. The country has taken on the character of a gum tree, a critic wrote a few years ago: the heartwood dead and crumbling, all the life in the sapwood of self-obsessing suburbia. And the liveliest of those suburbs are home not to the descendants of drovers and Anzacs, but to ambitious migrants from Asia and the Middle East, with no taste for rural life, and no appetite for sagas of male bonding in shearing sheds and creek beds under Banjo Paterson’s everlasting stars.

  Nineteenth-century Europeans brought with them their fashionable Gothic taste, which the bush with its various ‘contrarities’ did much to satisfy. It was ‘fantastic’, full of ‘monstrosities’, where ‘alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write’, as Marcus Clarke said. And since him, a host of writers, painters and film-makers have pursued those themes of a harsh, eerie and dangerous perversity in the landscape, and similar qualities in the people.

  Yet it remains a commonplace of the official Australian worldview that all that is distinct and admirable in the national character and belief comes from the bush. It made Australians what they are. More than a century ago, Miles Franklin called herself ‘a child of the mighty bush’. ‘I’m the mother-bush that bore you,’ wrote Henry Lawson. In one of his best stories, ‘The Bush Undertaker’, the bush gives rise to Australians only: ‘the grand Australian bush, nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands’. And here is a governor of Queensland speaking after the great floods of 2010–11: ‘So much of what is best, truest and fairest in the Australian character is drawn from our bush traditions, our values forged like gold from the diggings in the challenges – and from the pressures and the opportunities – of life in the bush.’

  Asked the origins of their character, Americans might give half a dozen or more answers – the Puritan forefathers, the constitution and its enlightened authors, the Civil War, the unrestrained marketplace, immigration, liberty, the absence of an established Church, the fronti
er. Different parts of the country are likely to give different answers. But Australians have really only ever had one answer: the bush is where it came from. British institutions and, recently, the Judeo-Christian tradition have been offered, but other people also spring from those places. The official view remains Lawsonian: the bush is a mirror of our imagined natural and unvarnished selves, an emblem of our natures – our natures being hardy and adaptable like gum trees and mulga, dried out like the sclerophylls, and quite unlike the natures of people from continents that lack this kind of vegetation. That the great majority of Australians live in cities does not diminish the power of the bush, but on the contrary adds an exotic or romantic dimension to the suburban cliché of our existence. The bush is where the real Australians live, and whatever hurts or threatens them the rest of the country feels. Our literature, our language, our politics and our prejudices all have deep roots in the countryside, or at least exist in a state of constant interaction with it. The economic historian John Edwards has plausibly suggested that the pattern of drought, flood and financial disaster which characterised the old pastoral economy continues to infect contemporary economic thinking with Hanrahan-like gloom. Much in the way of national development – rail and road, dams and irrigation, regional development – has its roots in the land and has shaped our collective identity and ambition. In tethering the world to the mighty bush, as Lawson put it, we tethered ourselves to it.

  Banjo Paterson’s indelible love song of the Australian male, ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, made the case for life on the sunlit plains. Chained to a desk in his dingy office, loathing the foetid air and the ‘pallid’, ‘greedy’, ‘stunted’, ‘weedy’ masses moping in Sydney’s streets, his narrator dreamed of the world west of the Great Divide, and his mate Clancy out there on the sunlit plains, droving in the breezes. Although the bush incited more gloom than joy in him, Henry Lawson also found his literary inspiration there. For The Bulletin (the so-called Bushman’s Bible) of the 1890s and successive schools of writers and artists, the essential Australia was to be found under a gum tree, on the frontiers, farms and stations, along the droving routes, wherever people were scarce and sheep or cattle plentiful. Charles Bean reckoned he saw a difference out west in New South Wales before the First World War: the sort who ‘props up the veranda-posts in country towns’ was pretty well the ‘antithesis of the strong, simple men who live on the stations outside’.

  No one has ever put it with quite the airy conviction of Mrs Aeneas Gunn. The bush folk in her classic We of the Never Never have in them all that is good about humankind and much besides. Rough-hewn though they are, they will ‘risk their lives for a woman . . . but leave her to pick up her own handkerchief’. They are democratic by nature because ‘out-bush rank counts for very little’. They are Christian, if not by observance, then by philosophy and spirit. ‘Bush-folk . . . do what they can to help each other’; ‘have a sixth sense, and know a pal when they see one’; ‘have long memories and love to rest now and then beside the milestones of the past’. Mrs Gunn was in no doubt that the day had nearly come in the Northern Territory when ‘the bush folk will have conquered the Never Never and lain it at the feet of the great cities’.

  That is the nub of the contract: bush people are the valiant few who wrest the continent ‘from the very heart of nature’ for the less valiant many. And this is the debt the people of the cities carry in perpetuity: the bush folk tamed the country, made it knowable, extracted not only food and wealth from it, but a national romance, an identity. The elements might break their hearts but never their wills, to paraphrase the Queensland premier during the 2011 floods. Mrs Gunn might have written the line. It is axiomatic that the bush made Queenslanders what they are, and if their enthusiasm for raising funds to help their bush brethren can be used as a measure, the cities continue to be grateful.

  For Australians remote from it, the bush holds some of the same Homeric power as its near relation, Anzac. Anzac is part fact, part fable: the story’s meaning depends not only on what happened and with what motives and reasons, but on what it has suited Australians to make of it. With Anzac the sacrifice and comradeship of the Australian Imperial Forces have been made over into an ideal Australian. The bush speaks of similar admirable qualities. Much as Christians do with the resurrection, Australians relive the Anzac story once a year. The bush serves as the Church, keeping it alive in the off-season, while every drought, flood and fire makes a moral drama to renew and authenticate the foundations of faith.

  The two legends have been intertwined ever since the first reports came in from Gallipoli: indeed, one of the authors of those early reports and of the official history of Australians in the First World War also wrote one of the classic tracts of the bush legend. Charles Bean’s 1910 On the Wool Track, which he wrote after touring the sheep stations of western New South Wales, is remembered less for its analysis of the wool game than for its characterisation of the people wool threw up. While empire- and nation-builders looked with despair at the signs of moral, racial and physical degeneracy they reckoned they saw in the cities, out on the plains way west of the Divide, where squatters – or their managers – had been breeding ever better kinds of sheep, Bean found a man as if bred from a cross between Ivor Novello and a red kangaroo: a ‘tall, spare man, clean and wiry . . . of a certain refined ascetic strength’. A man who took ‘everything on its merits, and nothing on authority’. The bush had ‘hammered out’ this man with ‘frankness . . . written largely across his face’. He was out there, ‘over that faint blue line of the dividing range’. A hundred years later, politicians wishing to identify themselves with the ‘real’ people of the ‘real’ Australia were leaving their city offices and crossing the Divide to be seen with the descendants of this mythical progenitor.

  The sighting would have been easier to dismiss if Bean had been the only one to see it, but he was far from the first or the last. C. H. S Matthews, a parson, reckoned such degeneracy as existed in Australia was confined to the mammon-worshipping cities and not to ‘these dear children of the bush, so strong, so brave, so humorous and true’. Having spent five years in Australia in the 1880s, the young English journalist Francis Adams found nothing that was different – or much less than contemptible – among the city middle classes. But beyond the Divide, where ‘the marine rainfall flags out’, he saw the beginnings of a ‘new race’, the ‘noblest, kindliest and best’ Australians. The difference between men of the Divide and the men of the interior, he said, was already ‘absolutely defined’ and ‘complete’. The bushman was the heart of Australia, ‘the Australian Australia’.

  In the same vicinity, Edward S. Sorenson found a man with a ‘broad hairy chest . . . huge, muscular arms . . . matchless physique . . . A man of surging robustness, rugged as his native hills [and] one of nature’s gentlemen.’ The bush of Mrs Gunn’s Never Never created her indomitable and adorable bush folk, ‘turning back the weaklings and worthless to the fleshpots of Egypt, and proving the worth and mettle of the brave-hearted’. It made practical people: ‘I’ve learned a deal of things in my time,’ her Quiet Stockman chuckled, ‘but reading never taught me none of them.’ And he was pretty much as one with Marcus Clarke’s overlanders who, though gentlemen, ‘alone with their flocks and herds in the vast wilderness’, threw off their city-born conventionality and ‘felt the joy of an almost savage independence’. ‘Traversing the great grey forests, or camped by the edge of some friendly waterhole . . . [they] felt that wonderful and subtle happiness which is born of solitude and silence’. And all-male company, perhaps.

  Clarke shared Walt Whitman’s excitement about these ‘bearded and embrowned’ Godlike new men of the New World. He imagined his ideal man reining in a horse on a mountain spur, seeing beneath him ‘the wide waste of untrodden “bush”’, and waking ‘suddenly to the consciousness that he was lord of that wilderness, that in it he could live unmolested and secure, that he could find there a home and a subsistence, with no aid but that of his own hands
and his own brains, then for the first time did he discover to what a heritage of power his birthright as a “man” entitled him’. That was the thing: what men found when they found themselves in the ‘phantasmogoria of their wild dreamland called the bush’ was their manliness. It agitated the male imagination, satisfied the male ego. It brought forth the ‘whole man’, E. J. Brady said.

  A good part of the heroism of pioneer farmers resided in their willingness to endure drudgery and ignore the interior voice telling them that life should be more than this. They must listen instead to the one telling them that things could be worse. A pioneer should have hope, but not so much as to make a fool of himself with God or the neighbours. For the male of the pioneer species, even as it grinds him down, the toilsome life builds him up and goes some way to satisfying the chronic demands of manliness. In the absence of such urgent calls on their identity, women were free to lend a hand to the ‘manly’ work while doing the women’s entirely on their own, and giving birth to the children and caring for them.

  Forty years ago, in a famous book, Anne Summers wrote that the women of colonial Australia were cast into one of two ancient repressive archetypes – whores or obedient representatives of a feminine ideal. Like the Indigenous people, they came wild or tamed. For the first fifty years, the majority went under ‘whores’. Thereafter, what Summers called the existential straitjacket was enlarged to include the option of being ‘dutiful wives and bountiful mothers’. In both cases women were commodities: prostitutes to be bartered among the men who far outnumbered them, or wives to keep the men in line and to breed up a free, white and decent population. The reprobates were there from the start among the convict population; the dutiful were free immigrants recruited to correct the habits of the frontier and create a more respectable society, but one no less dominated by men. Families and Christian observance would be the foundations. In the country of my youth they still were, even as the eternal Jezebels circled.