The Bush Read online

  Later generations would feel some of Holmes’s gratification when they opened up new land with rotary hoes and tractors, but nothing could match the sense of conquest that went with the axeman’s labour in the primeval scrub. We wondered how they did it, and they must have wondered too, and must have known that we would wonder. As children we heard about how the axemen would scarf (notch the trunk to control the direction of its fall) a number of trees on a hillside, then fell a couple of big ones higher up to bring the lower ones down in ‘a vast, crashing, smashing, splintering, roaring and thundering avalanche of timber’. It satisfied the heart of the axeman to watch the drama and know that neighbours miles away had heard it. One man, or two or three, could clear great swathes this way, and the timber all lay parallel and tightly packed and ready for burning.

  Eucalypts (and acacias, grevilleas, melaleucas, hakeas and banksias) have hard leaves: hard in texture, hard for herbivores to digest. They contain toxic compounds to make them tougher and last longer as litter to mulch the trees from which they fall. The trees are called sclerophylls because of this hardness. Sclerophylls dominate Australia’s vegetation and give the bush its character. (It was the Sklerophyllenwald, a German botanist said.) By ingenious adaptation the species have developed a strategic interdependence with fire. Evolution has given them a death wish. They need to ‘shower sometimes in Hell’, as Les Murray put it. Of all the eucalyptus species none is more dependent on fire and more explosive than the mountain ash which ruled the Gippsland forests my forebears helped cut down. Only intense wildfires will crack the seeds and get saplings growing in the ash, so every few hundred years they must ‘commit mass suicide’. Since Europeans took up residence in the forest they have been doing it much more frequently and, on occasion, with catastrophic effects.

  The selectors lived in a world of fire, smoke and ash. They were always burning. They bonded through fire, gathered as a community for burns – big burns and smaller, cleaning-up burns. The hotter the fire, the sweeter the grass that followed it, or so the selectors reckoned, though just as often the sweet grass grew coarse within a year or two, and scrub took over. Big burns began early in the afternoon on hot summer days, when several men with rolls of burning bark serially lit the bush to make a circle of fire, and another one adjoining it, and another, until they had created an inferno. The ‘awful grandeur’ of these firestorms, roaring with the wind they made, was seared into the memory of old Holmes. When the storm was over it was as if the last days were upon the earth. The forest had become a sea of fine white ash, and an unearthly ‘weird, livid, yellowish-green hue’ was cast ‘over all and everything’.

  The last days for the forest, but the first day for selectors. A good burn was like the Creation. As they stood in the ash they saw the sky, the sun and the stars as they hadn’t seen them since arriving. They saw neighbours’ places they hadn’t seen before. Conversation was possible. News was possible. Courtship and marriage. Mutual aid. Quite possibly they saw the future. Burning set them free.

  Any remaining logs and limbs they levered into piles and burned them too. And with fires that smouldered for days, they burned out stumps. There was ‘nothing to compare to the delight’ of gathering round the fires at night – ‘[t]he glow, the darkness, the scent of bough, the tang of smoke’ – and nothing so enchanting as the evenings when the scented smoke was rising from tussocks, or stubble, straw, weeds, or whatever had to be burned to create a firebreak. Eucalypts and men alike enjoyed that shower in hell.

  The destruction of so much good timber was ‘madness’. But the man who said that was an outsider, and a scientist. Gippslanders distrusted both kinds. In any event the clearing was an official condition of their occupancy. As the same scientist said, ‘There seemed to be in the departmental mind a dread that selectors might make money out of the timber, so they were virtually compelled to destroy it’. Compelled by the terms of their occupation, but perhaps also by the mesmerising pleasure of the act. Burning was a way of life, and also a kind of mania.

  The remarkable anthropologist and bushman Alfred Howitt spent years in Gippsland, and a lot of that time getting to know the Aborigines. Their accounts and his own observations convinced him that much of the dense forest the Europeans were clearing had been open forest managed by Aboriginal cool-burning regimes, until the 1851 Black Thursday holocaust destroyed it. All those stone axes the settlers found beneath the tangle had not been there for hundreds of years, as Holmes the selector thought, but for just two or three decades. There were old trees, to be sure, but a much greater proportion of the forest was new and dense and tangled because of the 1851 bushfires, and many of the parts that had not burned then were a tangle because the Aboriginal managers had gone. No one can say if the 1851 fires were started by Aborigines or by lightning and it hardly matters. European occupation brought an end to Aboriginal supervision of the forest, and wherever it was absent infernos were endemic.

  It was all but inevitable another summer day would come, and heat and wind combined would consolidate the settlers’ burns into fires that crowned and leaped exploding across the canopies of gum leaves. Designed for just this purpose, in 1898 their moment arrived. The fires had laid siege to farmers all through the Gippsland hills since the last days of December. Late in January and early February they ranged around the hills near Korumburra on the south side of the Strzeleckis, ‘burning pasture and crops, fences, sheds, vehicles, whole herds of cows and other livestock’. On Red Tuesday, the sky turned a ‘strange shade of purple, tinged with blood’. When it was over, Gippsland was a ‘blackened waste’. There was ‘nothing but want and misery’.

  The fire burned my grandmother’s childhood home, and the hamlet by the creek in which it stood. With a medley of terrified creatures, she huddled with her mother and siblings in a clearing as the flames went by. For months afterwards, she told us, her mother’s cheeks had long thin scald marks from the tears that boiled as they ran down them. She was just a girl when the fire went through, and my grandfatherwas just a boy when it burned down his family house 3 kilometres up the road from hers. The one that replaced it was the house with the back veranda where we spent our childhood holidays.

  It seems likely that the fire was in some degree responsible for the sense of possible horror that pervaded our mental chambers, along with a kind of survivors’ guilt about the real horror that had befallen others. Children had burned to death in the 1898 fires. One family lost five of their six. Children also drowned in creeks and dams, were kicked and thrown and dragged by horses, caught in machinery, struck by lightning; they got chills and died. Our brains were stuffed with the unspeakable consequences of foolishness. It kept us in order and left us either chronically sententious like our elders, or chronically foolish.

  The bush could gulp you, or your children, much as the dread interior swallowed explorers and drovers and prospectors. A few kilometres from my place a monument has been erected to some children who got lost in the bush and died. The lost-children stories are legion. Rosa Praed wrote about a mother finding her toddler half devoured by ants. Dot gets lost in the children’s classic Dot and the Kangaroo (although one scholar insists the book is really about her being found). In Such is Life one of Furphy’s campfire characters, a tank-sinker named Stevenson, tells the unbearable story of his little brother lost in the bush on his father’s selection. Twenty-five years earlier Stevenson had hit the boy and sent him home crying, and he was never seen again. Guilt is the poison in these stories very often. The spot where the boy was last seen, his brother related, was now a cleared and cultivated paddock. It seems possible that the horror of being lost in it – an ancient fear, after all – made the bush that much more of an enemy, and removing it that much worthier a project.

  When they were not milking or ploughing, burning, grubbing or sowing, our forebears hacked at the bracken, burrs, bidgee widgee, wire grass, sword grass, prickly currant bush, bramble and blanket leaf. They hacked at tussocks left over from the forest floor, or at
blackberries and ragwort and the half-dozen varieties of thistle that had come in with these independent people. That’s what they were at heart. At least that’s what drove them: some inkling that a man who was not independent lived life in vain. Independent people and those without independence lived in two different dimensions. An independent man was more of a man than a man on wages. His wife was more of a woman, and led more of a life for being married to such a man. A man on wages was at another’s beck and call; he lived in turmoil, between his master’s approval and the bidding of his own spirit. He was not a natural being, but a social one. He lived life trying to please other men; an independent man need please only himself and his Maker. Whether in Gippsland or Iceland, ‘People who aren’t independent aren’t people’. That alone put the Aborigines in the wrong camp: they didn’t slash away at the bracken so that they might one day be rid of it. Instead they dug up as many of the carbohydrate-rich roots as made a meal and roasted them.

  But if people could be independent and social, if they could ringbark in the morning, draft cattle in the afternoon and play ping-pong in the evening, this was enough pleasure for any person. These independent people were soon enjoying the communal pleasures of church (Methodist), the Loyal Orange and Masonic lodges, the gun club, the bridge club, quail and duck shooting and, on a conveniently flat paddock of Auchterlonie’s, cricket. In the new Mechanics’ Hall they played badminton, rollerskated, and danced to concertina, fiddle and mouth organ, often until dawn. Society sprouted as quickly as the blackberries that several settlers planted in rows for windbreaks, which, though they ran wild along the creeks and gullies, provided a bounty of fruit each year. The hall was built within four years of the first selections; a year later it housed a public library. School classes were held in the same year the hall was built. Elijah Stranger, having walked 27 kilometres from the nearest station, turned up to teach the first ten children, among them five from one family. The following year Stranger founded a harmonic society and a debating society. He taught the local people elocution, speech-making, essay writing and the proper procedure for public meetings.

  John Adams wrote in his admirable history that in a hundred years the district had ‘emerged from a neglected wilderness into a dynamic farming community’. ‘Neglected’ seems a curious term now. We might say ‘pristine’ or ‘primeval’. But the selectors would be more inclined to quarrel with the suggestion that it took a century for the place to become a dynamic farming community. By the end of the nineteenth century James Forsyth (my great-grandfather, who took over his brother David’s block within twelve months of his selecting it) had progressed from rural labourer to respectable landed proprietor worthy of the honorific ‘Esquire’, which in the Scottish mind meant something close to laird. The same was true of several neighbours. In future, however hard the financial going got, their social status held. Few modern business enterprises can promise a speedier or more satisfying return on such modest capital. Nor can the modern minor entrepreneur, or any later generation of farmers, expect the imperishable fame that was granted those pioneers. All the evidence suggests that the community was never more dynamic than it was a decade and a half after the first settlements, and it is doubtful if a community ever had a more gratifying existence than this one did in those early years.

  So quickly did they conquer the bush and remove themselves from the miserable hardships described in the popular literature, as young adults their offspring attended local costume balls dressed as caricatures of pioneers: as Dad and Mum, Dave and Sarah and Joe from Steele Rudd’s On Our Selection. As if to mark the transition from bush to civilisation, for one of these functions my great-grandmother dressed my grandfather and great-aunt in clothes she made of stringybark. They were not ‘bushies’, as people who live in the country now call themselves. And they did not live in the bush, as rural Australia has come to be called. Many of the characters of Furphy and Lawson and Rudd and the predatory oddballs in Barbara Baynton’s stories might have been ‘bushies’, recognisable at once by their mode of dress and drawling vernacular, but they were decidedly not us. Bush – or scrub – was uncleared land, land not yet burned, or land that had been but had ‘gone back’, not to the original forest, as the term implies, but to an unruly combination of endemic species and exotic grasses, weeds and vermin. The bush was primitive or regressive. As a late-nineteenth-century visitor observed, it was ‘the wild up-country’. Perhaps before they built their houses these people of mine spoke of themselves as being ‘in the bush’, but very soon thereafter they lived ‘in the country’ or ‘on the land’. The bush was of the past, and the past was already an early form of theme park.

  While the hillsides had been cleared and all the timber burned, many of the gullies remained as the first selectors had found them, the tree ferns 3.7 metres high by the creeks, and on their margins, remaining specimens of blue gum and ash. Lyrebirds (Menura novaehollandiae)still lived in the gullies: lyrebirds because the fabled instrument of antiquity bears such a resemblance to the tails male lyrebirds have been sporting for 15 million years. In that time, to go with their regalia, they developed a coordinated song and dance routine, with set steps for each of the four songs they sing in succession.

  The Aborigines valued those tails and made seasonal visits to the forest to catch their owners and to gather food, including the crowns of tree ferns which they roasted. The sounds lyrebirds replicate so perfectly are passed on from one generation to the next. In 1969 a park ranger near Dorrigo in New South Wales recorded one performing, as if on a flute, two popular tunes of the 1930s. Later he discovered the tunes had been regularly heard and imitated by an ancestor of the bird that had been a man’s pet for a while. The same marvel prompted a selector and amateur naturalist in South Gippsland to wonder if ‘the notes we call the lyrebird’s own . . . [are] . . . instead the notes of birds of an extinct species’.

  From the front veranda on a clear still morning, my mother remembers hearing the lyrebirds in a nearby gully. The birds began with their own brilliant song, followed by the imitations of other species – bowerbirds, whipbirds, wrens, magpies, flocks of parakeets and, the most uncanny and spectacular, the kookaburra. These birds they had been imitating for millennia, but now they added to their daily routines the notes of saws and axes, and the whistle of the train.

  A new paper mill offered money for the giant eucalypts still standing in the famers’ gullies. When burned out, the trunks of these trees were big enough at the base for a horse and cart or a modest congregation of Methodists. Having accepted the offer, the Depression-saddled farmers watched as the mill took more than they had allowed themselves to believe. The lower and middle storeys of the remnant forest went with the upper one: mountain ash, manna gums, blue gums, grey gums, stringybark, peppermint and messmates, blackwoods, beech. The sweet-scented wattles, hazels, musk, cotton bush, lightwood and myrtles; prickly Moses, the ‘lace curtains of supplejack’ (clematis), sassafras, raspberry, Christmas bush; the tree ferns, maidenhair fern, rock ferns, the wildflowers, lichens and mosses – ‘the most beautiful mosses’, wrote a Miss Elms of Jumbunna. In earlier days, she had travelled along avenue-like tracks through this lower storey, with flowering supplejack festooning the trees, and fern fronds forming arches overhead. And fungi. Australia has 250 000 varieties of fungi, the greatest number of any country in the world. They are ‘essential in nutrient cycles’, but how this is so is not very well understood. Many are invisible. Among the visible was the delicious kind that appeared in the paddocks in autumn, in great rings and incredible abundance some years. Early generations topped up their income with these mushrooms, if they could get them to market before maggoty grubs mysteriously swarmed in their flesh.

  Goannas, lizards, bandicoots, wombats, wallabies, koalas, potoroos, pademelons, tiger cats, quolls, platypuses, gliders, ringtails, echidnas, and who knows how many representatives of other species – if not entire species – vanished with these remnants of the forest. As children we heard them all spo
ken of, but saw very few. The people from the paper mill moved into the gullies with bulldozers and wiped it all away. The farmers and their families never heard the lyrebirds again, and never saw them. If the land had been certified Paradise itself, the dominion of man’s cows would have still been unconditional.

  The Narracan Creek remained. Fed by springs it ran all year round, a metre and a half at its deepest and two or three wide. Blackfish (Gadopsis marmoratus) and another variety known as ‘slimies’, eels, crayfish and yabbies were all native to the creek; brown and rainbow trout were introduced for anglers. Into her seventies, my grandmother could still be persuaded to take a fishing rod and worms down to the little brown stream where the odd big eucalypt still stood and a few tree ferns were dying a slow death among the stumps of the old bush. Gippsland crayfish (Euastacus kershawi), which came up clinging by one claw to our fishing lines, we lifted out and tied by the leg to a tree, where they couldn’t take our bait, and we returned them to the creek when we left. Some people ate them; perhaps in unconscious obedience to Leviticus, we did not.

  To my grandmother the olive-brown, silvery, snake-like eels were the real abomination. A biting trout takes the line across the stream, but eels invariably head down it. If she did not quickly land them, the eels coiled around the nearest submerged log or branch and made themselves immoveable. As she would no more skin and eat one than she would a tiger snake, saving her line and tackle was the only reason to land them. The Westernport Aborigines killed eels by biting the back of their heads. My grandmother put her shoe on their writhing bodies and cut through to their spinal cords, using the bone-handled table knife with a broken blade. As the sweet smell of their blood and slime rose to our nostrils, she made more brutal incisions in their 60-centimetre-long digestive tracts until she came upon the hook and wriggling worm.