A Single Tree Page 14

  Without cheap labour, painstaking work of this order would not have been possible. Yet it was just this intensive care that enabled Australian wools so rapidly to dominate the English market. Back of it all were those homeless wandering shepherds, tailing after the tin-tinkling sheep bells in their white smocks or moleskins and cabbage tree hats.

  Squatter’s Castle: The Story of a Pastoral Dynasty,

  Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1973

  James Fenton

  1891

  The plain upon which I had entered was covered all over with wombats, feeding vigorously like a flock of sheep. There were at least a hundred of those curious animals; some of them left off grazing and stood looking at the strange visitors, but not one attempted to run. I started off at a canter, thinking to give them a chase and have a little sport; but they only stared with innocent curiosity. Kitty knocked some of them over and sent them sprawling. It was not until I reached the other side of the plain, and was in the act of repeating the charge, that they seemed to realise their position and ran. They had burrowed little holes in various parts of the plain, not deep enough to give them shelter, but they scampered away to those holes, in which they buried their heads, leaving their bodies projecting all round; while others, unable to share a portion of the hole, contented themselves with hiding their heads between the shoulders of those that had been first there. It was the most amusing sight I ever saw – a circular bunch of about a dozen badgers or more without a head visible. I then got off my horse, kicked them, pulled them out by the legs, and tried to rout them, but all in vain; they persisted in making back to the group and hiding their heads. I had no time to watch further proceedings, as I was anxious to see all I could of Gunn’s Plains that evening, the weather being still doubtful. I passed on through splendid black level land, a little stony, with small gum trees growing thickly upon it, but quite clear of any undergrowth. In Mr. Gunn’s report he expressed a belief that the trees upon the low-lying land he went through were not more than twenty years old, and that it was covered with grass before that time, which is most probable, as fragments of grassy patches still remained, upon which the forest was evidently encroaching. He also found in his wanderings generally round Surrey Hills and the Leven that in none of the low-lying places were any signs of charcoal visible, from which he inferred that the absence of bush fires encouraged the growth of timber on plains that were once covered with grass . . . On returning to the big plain I found Mr. Calder, with Mr. Dooley and his assistants, had taken up their quarters for the night on its borders, the smoke from a fire they had just kindled enabling me to discover their whereabouts without any difficulty. The badgers had not learned discretion from my interview, for they allowed Mr. Carstairs to go up to them and slaughter one for our supper.

  Bush Life in Tasmania: Fifty Years Ago,

  Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London, 1891

  John Fenwick

  1863

  Monday 23 Nov . . . Got up all right, decided at once to start after sun down, travel all night, camp at the Bluff – on the Basalt River (32 miles) get to Gibson’s next night 28 more, and home 18 more next morning. 6.50 p.m. I started, the moon seemed to give less light than usual, the shadows were long and very deep, the track lay through many patches of scrub. O K’s station is within 4 miles of this and consequently the Blacks cannot be very far off – my revolver is ready of course – but Grisly will not stand fire, so I might as well be unarmed. I don’t look at my watch so long as I can possibly help it and when I do, find it is only 8 o’clock, not yet 5 miles, how long the road seems, jog, jog, jog, wearily along, oh! dear, it is only 10 o’clock and 12 miles, I feel sleepy, on, on, on, cross the Creek, a camping place – no fire – no one there, across a long plain, where I made the first track with the wagon in February – on, on, cross creek again, on, on, on, on, on, what a long way tis to the third crossing, ah, here it is, no! only a branch – 12 o’clock, find myself nodding. Well, I cannot get to the Bluff that’s clear, however, I keep on – on the Horse, and on the track, and wake up within 100 Yards of the Shepherd’s Hut of one of the “A’s” out stations, I don’t want the shepherds so I tumble off, what a row the dogs are making so I sing out “All right” I am going to camp out here – in 5 minutes more I am rolled in my blanket on the stony ground and Grisly’s bell is tinkle tinkle tinkling me to sleep. 1.30 a.m.

  Tuesday Nov 24 I am saddled up and off before Mr. Shepherd turns out, his master is many miles off!

  2 miles – Cross creek again, last time, 3 miles plain, 3 miles forest, 2 more mixed, and I am on our own river. But still far from home – Grisly is again free and I am at breakfast, part of a Johnny cake and tea, my blanket forming my shade. A station is across the river, in sight, but we do not eat there! So I lie on my back, and think, think, for hours and then I think of Grisly, and he is gone! I follow his tracks and find him past the station, a little after noon – I start – hungry – but refuse to stay to dinner at the Station (a pack of unprincipled scoundrels) and after a ride over plains and through forests I am at G’s (28 miles by half past 7 p.m.) Heaven knows how many pints of tea I imbibed, I did not count them – but turned in thereafter and slept soundly.

  Diary of a Journey from Port Denison to the Basalt River (Queensland) With Cattle,

  1863, State Library of Victoria, MS 8676

  Tim Flannery

  2004

  Kangaroo Essence

  When the gentlemen of Hobart met in 1829 to form Australia’s first scientific society, they took as their motto Quocunque aspicias hic paradoxus erit. ‘Whatever one examines here will seem a paradox.’ It was a phrase that well captured the received British perception that everything in Australia was, contra naturam, novel to the point of being ridiculous. The kangaroo, as symbol of the newly discovered land, bore the full brunt of this preconception. Phrases such as ‘kangaroo court’- a court where there is no justice – entered the language via America and reinforced the sense that things get turned on their head in Australia and can’t be taken seriously.

  For anyone who has watched a red kangaroo with her joey in the dawn light of the Australian desert, such glosses are manifestly inadequate. The crisp air lends a gossamer-thin softness to the landscape whose pastel shades are all the more precious for the knowledge that in an hour or so they will be gone, and in its stillness wafts the delicate scent of dust and saltbush that is the essence of the outback. Not knowing that you are there she rests, the mother, her eyes half closed as the first weak rays of the sun warm her, while her offspring tries out his new legs in flailing investigations of every bush, insect and stone in his expanded world. They are frail living things in an awesome wideness of environment that, like the open ocean, offers no refuge from the forces of nature. Yet they will survive. They always have. Unless of course we disrupt the subtle web of relationships that life is attuned to in this country.

  So what, in essence, are kangaroos? While manners may make the man, the outer form does not make the kangaroo, for members of this are astonishingly varied – being mistaken for cats, rats, deer and raccoons by early European observers. Their variety continues to confound non-expert observers, and yet no matter whether they be tiny rat-kangaroos or the giant red, kangaroos share a suite of characteristics that make them utterly different from all other living things. These kangaroo essentials, so to speak, underpin the creature’s great success, and involve the way kangaroos reproduce, eat and get about. Because they evolved with the earliest kangaroos, they tell us a lot about the ecological challenges that faced the first kangaroos in a long-vanished Australia. In effect they form a sort of family blueprint, an ‘anatomical fossil’ dating to the Eocene period, around 35 to 55 million years ago.

  Kangaroos have no close relatives among living marsupials, yet their anatomy bears the indelible stamp of having evolved from small, tree-dwelling ancestors. One of the first people to speculate on what that original creature might have looked like was Rudyard Kipling, who in 1908 published the ‘Sing
-song of Old Man Kangaroo’:

  Not always was the kangaroo as now we do behold him, but a Different Animal with four short legs. He was grey and he was woolly, and his pride was inordinate: he danced on an outcrop in the middle of Australia . . . saying, ‘Make me different from all other animals; make me popular and wonderfully run-after by five this afternoon.’

  When biologists rather than poets try to picture the creature kangaroos evolved from, the living pygmy possums – mouse-sized omnivores that lurk in dense scrubs in southern and eastern Australia – offer the best guide, for they share a few odd characteristics with kangaroos. Hopping, however, is not one of them, and the ankles of these possums make one realise how extraordinary it is that kangaroos – and hopping – ever evolved at all. Possums have the most flexible ankles of any mammal, allowing the foot to be ‘dislocated’ so that it can swing through 180 degrees and point backwards – something unimaginable outside the torture chamber for humans and kangaroos alike – but a very necessary ability for an animal that climbs down tree-trunks head-first. To convert this most flexible of ankles into the rigid structure required to withstand the extreme forces generated by hopping is an engineering feat akin to converting a bicycle into a bulldozer.

  The flexibility in a possum’s foot is facilitated by the shape of its joints, which are rounded – rather like ball-and-socket structures – and loose-fitting. The joints in the kangaroo foot are, in contrast, all sharp angles and closely opposed linear facets. In extreme cases bones have become fused together to exclude all movement except in a forwards-backwards direction. The evolution of the kangaroo foot is so distinctive that a single bone is usually all you need to identify its owner. Indeed the kangaroo family, Macropodidae (meaning ‘big foot’) takes its name from this part of the anatomy.

  We have little idea how long it took for this radical re-engineering to be effected, but we do know one thing – the changes were not driven by the requirements of hopping, but rather a shift from an arboreal to a terrestrial lifestyle. This is because it is evident from the fossil record that hopping was not achieved until long after the distinctive features of the kangaroo foot first appeared. For millions of years – possibly tens of millions of years – after the group first arose, it seems all kangaroos got about by bunny-hopping.

  Country: A Continent, a Scientist & a Kangaroo,

  Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2004

  Mary Fullerton

  1921

  Vandal

  The farmer on the river, by the bend,

  Has killed the wattles that I loved last Spring!

  The thrush, too, loved them, and the quick fantail;

  The warbling magpie, and the shy bronzewing.

  Their healing effluence on my heart they spilt,

  Upon my soul, long arid in her drouth;

  Softly the blossoms touched, like virgin kiss,

  My weary eyelids and my parched mouth.

  And now I see the dying stems exude

  The trees’ last sap, and I, the heart they healed,

  Behold their doom and can do nought to save

  The riven magic of September’s yield.

  The birds are gone, and on the landscape’s face

  The sun smites down, unmitigably stark,

  And in his waggon on the road near by

  The farmer bears his load of vandalled bark.

  Contented with his pipe, he bumps along,

  Unwitting that among those withered sheaves

  He bears bird twitters, and the golden dreams

  My dry heart gathered under golden eaves.

  The Breaking Furrow: Verses, J.Endacott, Melbourne, 1921

  Mary Fullerton

  1964

  There is to this day no more delightful sound to my ears or scent to my nostrils than the ringing sound of axe and maul and wedge, and the glorious odour of broken green gum or box wood. There was always chopping or splitting, sawing or adzing going on in the bush about us. My father was a believer in sheds, and yet more sheds, to house everything, in Old Country fashion. And so one-eyed Mick was constantly employed timber-getting. When the air was crisp and still in the autumn afternoons we used to love old Mick’s neighbourhood; to watch him while emitting the wood-chopper’s approved grunt, send flying the giant chips which made us sometimes fearful for the well-being of his remaining eye; to watch him thrust back and forth the sharp-toothed cross-cut through the juicy timber, swiftly and easily, as though it were cheese. How we loved to watch, too, the bursting log as the fibres parted beneath the mighty blows when Mick’s concern was slabs or posts and rails! And again, when season and sap permitted, his deft tools peeled off the shaggy bark from the stringybark’s straight bole. How we loved to dance upon the sheets of it, curled, sappy-scented envelopes; to help to straighten them upon the ground for the weights to be put upon them. And then there was the stripping of the poles for the building of the everlasting sheds, in the making of which the stringybark sapling played such an important part. Many a sapling of these fell to the blows of an infant Hercules, who, for his turn, had the joy of the tomahawk, while the rest had the second-rate pleasure of stripping from the fallen the enveloping bark.

  And there was always in the fall of the year the clearing-up fires; after the tree-felling in the bush there was a fine litter of branch and bark till gathered up and burnt. This ‘tidying-up’ was a rare game, though we made a virtue of the pleasure, and sometimes exacted payment for it. What heaps of half-withered all year branches did we pile, waiting for the seasonable hour to fire them, went to the moonlight orgy all the family came: we danced in the glow like little savages, imperilling ourselves often enough in feeding the leaping flames with yet more withered branches. A fire in the bush on a moonlight night of chill, and the faces and forms around it off one’s fellows – I know nothing of the town child’s possible recreations of day or of night to compare with the delight of it! The little scamperings among the shadows that may be a possum or one’s own dog nosing out some bush thing. The glow, the darkness, the scent of bough, the tang of smoke. We went home from it all to sleep well.

  Bark House Days, Melbourne University Press, 1964

  Lyn Cuthbert Furnell

  1981

  The following eulogy of Mr. E. Seccombe must always be recalled when Paspalum and the North Coast are mentioned, “In acknowledging our debt to Mr. Seccombe memory goes back to the pre-paspalum days when dairying was in a precarious infancy and the whole of the lowlands of the Richmond were covered largely with a pest – Mullumbimby couch. Useless for cattle, we recollect how an often indifferent existence was secured by timber getting, grazing and sugar cane growing, how the little dairying that was done resulted often in disappointment; the keg of butter brought to town slung on a pack horse with stones the other side to balance it, having a very uncertain passage by boat to Sydney and the rye grass, cocksfoot, and small parcels of couch grass which were grown being anything but satisfactory, the hot weather often burning the rye out of the sod. We remember how the vigorous growth fought and conquered pernicious Mullumbimby couch. We see languishing acres suddenly springing into vitality and luxuriant verdancy. We hear the lowing of many cattle, we see small creameries rising up on every hand and then giving place to the wonderful factories and still more co-operation; in short we see a great trade bounding into existence and spreading to the other side of the world. Recalling all this, we stop and wonder, indeed realise, how much we owe to Edwin Seccombe.”

  Out of the Big Scrub, Bangalow, Casino, NSW, 1981

  Joseph Furphy

  (Tom Collins)

  1903

  1

  ’83 was a bad year. The scanty growth of the ’82 spring had been eaten off nearly as fast as it grew, and afterward the millions of stock had to live – like the Melbourne unemployed of later times – on the glorious sunshine. Then when the winter came, it brought nothing but frost; and the last state of the country was worse than the first. The mile-wide stock-route from Wilcannia to Hay was
strewn with carcasses of travelling sheep along the whole two hundred and fifty miles. On one part of the route, some frivolous person had stooked the dried mummies (they were lying so thick) in order that drovers and boundary men might have the pleasure of cantering on ahead to run the little mobs out of the way. And as human nature, thus sold, never grudges to others participation in the sell, the stooks improved in size and life-likeness for weeks and months. I remember noticing once, in passing along the fifty-mile stretch of that route which bisects the One Tree Plain, that, taking no account of sheep, I never was out of sight of dying cattle and horses – let alone the dead ones. The famine was sore in the land. To use the expression of men deeply interested in the matter, you could flog a flea from the Murrumbidgee to the Darling.

  2

  It is not in our cities or townships, it is not in our agricultural or mining areas, that the Australian attains full consciousness of his own nationality; it is in places like this, and is clearly here as at the centre of the continent. To me the monotonous variety of this interminable scrub has a charm of its own; so grave, subdued, self-centred; so alien to the genial appeal of more winsome landscape, or the assertive grandeur of mountain and gorge. To me this wayward diversity of spontaneous plant life bespeaks an unconfined ungauged potentiality of resource; it unveils an ideographic prophecy, painted by Nature in her Impressionist mood, to be deciphered aright only by those willing to discern through the crudeness of dawn a promise of majestic day. Eucalypt, conifer, mimosa; tree, shrub, heath, in endless diversity and exuberance, yet sheltering little of animal life beyond half-specialised and belated types, anachronistic even to the Aboriginal savage. Faithfully and lovingly interpreted, what is the latent meaning of it all?