A Single Tree Page 13
Journals of Expeditions into Central Australia: An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Aborigines and the State of Their Relations With Europeans, Vol. 2, London, 1845
Albert Facey
1981
A new settler took up land adjoining Uncle’s. He was a short, stout man about fifty years old, with a wife in her twenties. Uncle said that the man was hard to get along with, and Roy and the other kids were all scared of him.
The new settler built of mud and stone house of two rooms, with the roof of iron and a dirt floor. He had to cart water from the soak near Uncle’s place, so the first thing he wanted to do was to put down a well. He came and asked Uncle to give him some advice as to where he might find water. Uncle was always happy to give advice and went with the band to have a good look over his property. He finally pointed out a spot where there might be water, about forty to fifty feet down. The neighbour said he would sink the well at the place Uncle had pointed out.
One morning, about two weeks later, Roy, Aunt Alice, Grandma, and us kids were working in a paddock not far from the house, when we heard a man’s voice calling loudly, ‘Nell, Nell, this way Nell.’ Roy said, ‘I think that’s the man from next door.’ As the man got closer, still calling, ‘Nell, Nell, this way Nell,’ at the top of his voice, Aunt said, ‘Something must have happened to their child.’ Roy told me and the other kids to get under a big log that lay on the ground near us, and he got an axe and said, ‘If he comes near you kids I'll whack him with this axe.’
The man is now only about one hundred yards away, and still yelling out. Aunt Alice went to meet him calling out, ‘What is the matter? What has happened?’ He was only a few yards away from Aunt and he was panting and gasping for breath. Finally he said, ‘I’ve been bitten by a snake, a big black bugger,’ pointing to his right arm just below the shoulder. His wife, Nell, had put a tight cord around the arm just above where he had been bitten. He had stopped now and was looking back for Nell.
He told Aunt that Nell had cut the snakebite and sucked out blood, and they had decided he should run to the nearest neighbour for help to get a doctor. His nearest neighbour was three miles away, and as Nell had to carry their two-year-old daughter, he had run ahead and yelling all the way, so that she would know where he was. When he got close to the neighbour’s place he remembered that he had quarrelled with him the day before, so he wouldn’t go there, but continued running on to Uncle’s place, two miles further on.
Aunt Alice sent Roy to get Uncle who was doing some fencing not far away. When Roy told Uncle what had happened Uncle hurried home. He harnessed the horse to the cart and handed the man a drink of brandy. The man wouldn’t drink it as he said he was a teetotaller.
Uncle put him in the cart and drove him over to a neighbour who had a smart horse and sulky. With this neighbour, who insisted on going with them, they set out for the doctor at Narrogin.
Uncle was away three days and when he came home he told us about the terrible time they had with the man, trying to keep him awake. They had had to leave their horse on a farm about twelve miles from Narrogin as it was exhausted, and the farmer lent them another horse to complete the trip. When they arrived at Narrogin the sick man wouldn’t go to the doctor until he had seen an agent named Watts who represented a firm, Elder Shenton and Company, which had sent him a letter about an account he hadn’t paid. He wanted to tell Watts what he thought of him and the firm, in case he died. That convinced Uncle that the man was mad.
The doctor kept the man in hospital for about five days. He completely recovered and got a ride back with another settler. A few weeks later his wife became very sick. She went to see the doctor who found that she was suffering from blood poisoning. She had several decayed teeth, so that when she had sucked out the poison from the snake bite wound, some had entered into her bloodstream. She was very ill and had to stay in hospital.
Aunt Alice and Grandma minded her two-year-old baby girl while she was away; she was such a lovely, pretty little girl. The father was very grateful to Aunt and Grandma for taking care of her. He was terrified of snakes and every time he came to see his daughter he would give Aunt a lecture about snakes. As the weeks went by, then the months, the mother got worse and finally she passed away. After she was buried her husband took the little girl to his sister who was living in Perth.
A Fortunate Life, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1981
G. K. E. Fairholme
1844
The natives delight in an atmosphere of smoke. A family generally share one hut, while the young men sleep apart & in the outskirts of the camp. They all sleep rolled up like hedgehogs, so that a very small blanket will cover them while sleeping. They lie down after sundown unle(s)s they have been excited by a Corroboree or extra feed of beef. They rise early & disperse in parties in different directions in search of food. If on the move, they all meet at sundown by appointment. In starting they each carry a small firestick with which to warm their [bod]ies, till the heat of the sun increases.
Cloaks are used by the men only at night, but the (wo)men wear them all day, except in very warm weather. [The]y are generally made of oppossum skins; but sometimes (of) kangaroo or wallaby skins. Some tribes are too indolent (to) keep their skins & depend on getting cloaks from those (na)tives who make them, by barter. Each skin is softened & rendered pliable by tines or furrows, which operation is (pe)rformed by doubling the skin & scraping the edge with [a] shell or knife. The skins are sewn together with (si)news of kangaroo tail.
The blacks are in the habit of carrying fire with them [at] all times, but if they have it not, it is always in their (p)ower to get it with the stalk of the grass tree. A piece (o)f this stalk, which is very dry and spongy in the interior, is taken about a foot long. In the middle of this, a hole is cut. This piece is placed on the ground, & held down by the feet. Another portion of stick, pointed, is placed in this hole & quickly turned between the palms of the hands. A little charcoal powder being added, the dust (s)oon catches fire from friction and falls on a small heap [of] stringy bark placed below it, which is blown into a (f)lame.
In some parts of NS. Wales, blacks have an objection to camping in one spot for more than one night. When the camp is shifted the gins old & young, have to carry all the property, [and] when loaded, present the most ridiculous figure possible. A stranger seeing 5 or 6 loaded gins coming towards him, would be somewhat puzzled to make out of what they consisted. Their legs are often so thin & their load so large, that they look like great moving heaps of skins & rubbish supported by two sticks. Their property consists – lst of a number of nets made of stringy bark called currajong & about the size of a sea fishing line. The string is two stranded & is made very quickly with the palm of the right hand on the thigh by being twisted or rather rolled. – (The meshes of their nets are about 4 inches square & the nets are from 20 to 40 yds long, & when staked out, are 3½ feet high. They are used for catching wallaby, being placed along the edges of patches of scrub, known to be full of these animals. Some of the blacks watch behind the nets, & spear the wallaby, as they reach the net. If they miss, the animal turns & tries to get out somewhere else, being beat up by the other blacks.)
2nd A number of coolimons or water buckets. These are all shapes and sizes being the knobs or excrescences of trees (cu)t off & hollowed by fire. Some will hold 2 gallons of (wa)ter & are very thin and light. Any small crack or hole (i)s filled up with a sort of resinous gum, much used by (al)l the blacks & which I shall describe hereafter: –
3rd The blankets, cloaks, old shirts &c, all very valuable property. –
4th The grubbing sticks, the points of which are sharp & hardened by fire, for the purpose of grubbing in the soft loam of the swamps for wild yams, & a great variety of other roots eaten by the blacks: –
5th All the spears, boomerangs, waddies, tomahawks, & other utensils except those that the men are carrying for present use.
6th A number of small nets, or net bags containing a variety of articles such
as a piece of red & yellow ochre, [ba]lls of string, old pipes & pieces of tobacco, bones made [in]to thin needles or other marlin spikes for sewing: – (c)harms consisting of rock crystals with a quantity of string [ro]lled round them. – da, de, da. –
7th Perhaps a child borne on the shoulders above all this load.
‘Sketch of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of New South Wales’ (1841)
in An Early Note on the Aborigines of Southeast Queensland,
W. R. F. Love (ed.), University of Queensland, n.d.
Elizabeth Farrelly
2007
To trek this country, from the asphalt to the dirt and back, is to prove what we knew. Australia, like some great termitey redgum, is emptying out, concentrating its vital tissue into a thin coastal cambium with big fat nothing at its centre.
It’s not a new trend. Driven by mechanisation and drought, then sea change and downshift, our coastal drift has been evident for a century or more. What’s new is the extent and the impact. It’s what the demographer Bernard Salt calls the Big Shift and what last year’s State of the Environment report calls the “suburbanisation of coastal Australia”. And perhaps, you tell yourself, it’s fine. Nothing to chew your knickers over. After all, those great, hollow-core eucalypts often sprout happily on, oblivious of the vacancy at their centre. So perhaps we can safely leave the continent to the big corporate abstractions, the miners and the irrigators, the diggers and the salters, and sprout gaily on in our cooling coastal breezes.
Perhaps. But when you travel the country, fine is not how it looks. Even the biggish mining towns such as Kalgoorlie, Broken Hill and Cobar are going yellow at the edges, as the practice of outsourcing miners closes pubs and starves service industries. But it’s the small towns that really show the damage. Like Wilcannia, with its wistfully self-proclaimed “friendly grocer” barricaded behind mild steel while child gangs on bikes maraud the streets. Or like Manna Hill, well outside mobile range in outback South Australia, where the single phone box takes only Telstra cards that you can’t buy because, midday Friday, the pub, the servo and what might have been a general store are all closed and gone bye-bye.
In 1901, Salt says, 32 per cent of us lived in Australia’s cities, 7 per cent on the coast. By 2001, the figures were 64 per cent and 19 per cent respectively. In 2003, the State of the Environment report says, 91 per cent of Australians inhabited either the major cities or “peri-urban coastal communities” as the great linear suburb girdling Australia is now known. In some places, these coastal communities are only one-block thick, either side of the blacktop but, excepting national parks, it’s now near-continuous, leaving the vast inland largely emptier than ever.
It’s enough to make you wonder whether terra nullius wasn’t an apt description after all. River after river is nothing but dry leaves, lake after lake nothing but salt, field after clear-felled field nothing but a parched, broken and hoof-hardened landscape while long-arm irrigators busily deplete rivers and salinate soils as spiralling dust spouts dump any remaining topsoil into any remaining waterways.
Sure, there’s a drought on. And sure, it’s beautiful, this wide, brown, droughty country. But did we have to be quite so mindless in its management? Just because we’re dumb white folks? Must we limit our horizons to next year’s profit season? Are we obliged to perpetuate the spirit of our convict forebears who starved rather than understand the landscape? And what, you wonder, might (say) the Israelis have made of such a place?
That’s the inland. But the peri-urban coastal communities’ effect on Australia’s periphery is, if anything, more pronounced. Numbers-wise, the main drift is city bound. But the main impact undeniably is on unspoilt beaches, fishing villages and small coastal towns that were once scattered on the coast and are now vanishing under the avalanche of canal estates, shopping malls and epidemic McMansionism that runs from Mandurah to Esperance, from the Yorke Peninsula to the Coorong and from Bega to Coffs.
Who is shifting? Not, contrary to popular belief, superannuated refugees but, on the whole, the relatively young (in 2001, 80 per cent of seachangers were under 50) escaping the jobless inland for the great coastal ’burb. You can see why they want it. More difficult is understanding why any government would see the peri-urban coastal communities – unsustainable, obesogenic, mall-fed and hopelessly car-based – as an OK option.
The reason, if that’s not too strong a word, rests on our understanding of the word “right” and our tacit, modernist belief that the only values that count are personal ones. The rights in question are two: the individual’s right to live where and how whim dictates, and the land-owner’s right to develop. They’re things we all want. But they’re also things that, until relatively recently, were the privilege of the few, not the right of the many. This shift, from mass-wanting to mass-getting, changes everything.
We presume – call it the castle premise – that democracy has made the rights of kings available to us all, and that some fairy dust has costlessly converted the undreamable dream into sustainable reality. This is why we love democracy, why we fight and kill for it. And the peri-urban coastal community is built democracy.
But that’s not all it is. The peri-urban coastal community also symbolises our determination to ignore the best, in the words of Socrates, in favour of the pleasant; symbolises, that is, our devotion to mediocrity, to the hollow centredness that is kitsch. And this is the real peril. As any wise old redgum knows, losing your heartwood may not threaten life but if your sapwood goes, you’re cactus.
‘Great desertion of our heartland’, Sydney Morning Herald, January 17, 2007
George Farwell
1973
As the Ogilvie sheep increased, they moved their cattle further and further out, where they had room to forage on timbered hillsides or the heads of valleys. Their flocks required much closer watching. Rather more, in most cases, than those sunstruck, simple-minded shepherds gave. This would have kept Edward out in the bush for long periods, sometimes days at a time. Each flock was grazed at a considerable distance from the next.
Sheepmen normally divided their animals into flocks of three hundred or so breeding ewes, or four hundred wethers, each with their own shepherd. These assigned convicts had to take their flocks out before sunrise, returning by sundown to portable yards made of hurdles or brush fences. A watchman had to count them in, while the shepherd counted them out again next morning. And woe to the man whose tally was short. The watchman slept in a flimsy wooden structure like a tall sentry box, keeping a good fire and a dog to scare the dingoes away. The hurdles, usually cut from swamp box, ironbark or gumtrees, had to be shifted daily to fresh ground, a precaution against footrot, catarrh or the dreaded scabby mouth, which could rapidly infect a whole flock.
Edward would soon have learnt how to treat this often fatal disease. It was unpleasant work. You cut away wool from the infection, bled the skin and bathed it in a strong mixture of turps and tobacco water. There was also a prevalence of blowflies. Cutting out the maggots was not romantic either. Nor was the castration of lambs, nor the cleaning out of yards in a stench of sheep’s urine and trodden ordure.
Equally difficult at times was handling the shepherds themselves. Theirs was perhaps the most monotonous occupation known to man. They lived in utter solitude on greasy mutton chops and doughy damper they baked themselves. Only the most witless of them remained at this dreary work. Crawling after sheep, the less docile, sharper types called it, absconding whenever the chance occurred. The rest degenerated into lonely hatters, mumbling all day around vacant, sun-baked landscapes, drawn on compulsively by the tinny bells on leading wethers, or drowsing under a kurrajong till an angry master stirred them, often threatening a taste of the cat-o’-nine-tails, especially if a sheep or two was lost. Mostly they were simple, unlettered, sour-mouthed derelicts stupefied by raw grog and the soporific sun. Keep the flock moving, were their instructions, but unhurriedly, let them feed as they go, check the front runners, weed out the sick and maimed and
aged, watch for the wild dogs that attack even by day, rest them under the shade trees in the midday heat, never crowd or hustle them, for a broken-winded sheep is as good as dead.
‘The shepherd who walks quietly among them,’ wrote Cunningham, ‘is a gentle and careful man.’
From Merton’s records there were not many such men.
The Ogilvies took extreme care over the shearing, which happened in November; and over the sheepwashing that preceded it. Each flock was made to swim a creek, preferably with a clear sandy bottom, for three days in succession. Only then did the washing begin. Two men entered the water, the downstream man lathering each sheep with a softening grease, passing it to the second who scoured the fleece, after which the animal was forced to swim upstream as a rinse. If the landing place was sandy or bare, the sheep was bedded down on newly mown grass. After feeding, the flock was penned closely together in straw-bedded folds, or on well-grassed earth, until each fleece was fully dry. Once the yolk stood up clean and yellowy-white, William pronounced it ready for shearing.