A Single Tree Page 22
Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia, From Moreton Bay to Port Essington,
1844–45, Libraries Board of South Australia, 1964
Bert Leoni and Tip Byrne
2008
Snake anecdotes are intrinsically interwoven with folklore that surrounds two of the north’s grander and more distinctive barrack structures.
The property of former Cardwell Mayor, Tip Byrne, was infested with taipans.
“The cutters wouldn’t go out of the barracks at night,” he recalls.
“The cane toads wiped the taipans out completely.”
Tip Byrne recalls ‘a big strong young cane cutter’ who lived in their barracks in the early fifties, being bitten by a taipan still alive in the burnt cane.
“They couldn’t save him. There was no antivenin then. He went back to Yugoslavia in a box.
“We found taipans dead everywhere since the cane toads invaded North Queensland.
“The poison the toads squirt will kill the taipan. Cut them up and you see the toads inside.”
The Cane Barracks Story, Eugenie Navarre, self-published, Queensland, 2007
Gladys Linke
1996
For mustering we had fourteen riders, each man being allotted three horses. After the horses were drafted, each stockman shod his. Saddles, saddle cloths, bridles and hobbles were counted out and checked, then the cook’s cart loaded with rations. To muster Carnegie and Wongawol took two months. The camp moved from windmill to windmill, staying at each until all the cattle were picked up.
The day’s mustering were long and arduous. The horse tailer up before dawn to catch the night horse and ride out and seek the feeding horses. The next up, the cook, to stoke up the embers around the ‘night log’, put the billy on and prepare breakfast. By the time the horse tailer returned the men had breakfasted and were waiting to catch the horses they would ride that day. Some men were detailed to shepherd the cattle in hand. The remainder mustered out in all directions from the water. When all the cattle were picked up they moved on to the next windmill. A few riders took cattle along the road. The others fanned out on either side, mustering as they went.
Mustering was a daylight to dark job, seven days a week. Sometimes the day’s work dragged on into the night. The musterers might pick up cattle many miles out, or have trouble with wild ones. Then it could be well after dark before they arrived back at the yards. Also, in those early days before yards were built at every water, the cattle often had to be night-watched.
Every few days the bullocks were cut out. For this the mob was held on an open stretch of country. Roy would ride into the mob and, one at a time, turn out the beasts he wished to send to market. Riders would take over and shepherd it into the sale mob, which was then tailed out to feed. The remainder of the mob were yarded, and all the cleanskins branded then let go.
A bronco horse was used when branding. A medium sized draught horse was trained for the job. He needed to be very quiet and placid, with plenty of energy and strength. The bronco gear consisted of a strong leather breast plate with a strap over the horse’s neck to hold it in place, and a strap over the saddle and girth. The lasso rope was hooked, either on the near or off side (depending whether the rider was left or right handed), to the back of the breast plate near the saddle, by a swivel chain. Generally a hobble chain was used for this purpose.
At this time, when many grown cattle were unbranded, the rope used was made of wire for extra strength. This was covered by a layer or two of plaited greenhide.
The rider rode into the yard and through the cattle. When he saw a cleanskin he lassoed it and urged his horse toward the bronco ramp. The bronco horse would develop quite a lean when pulling the heavier beasts up. He continued on past the bronco ramp, the rope sliding over the curved panel and into the slot at the centre. When the animal was pulled hard up against the bronco panel, he was leg-roped and thrown.
A stockman ran from the fire with the brand, another used the earmarking pliers. If a male, he was castrated. Some beasts could be fiery when let up. On releasing the ropes, there would be a scattering of men in all directions as they sought to avoid the charging animal.
Some long, hard days were spent branding and the men would be weary when finished. But the work was leavened and lightened by the impromptu entertainment of a man being chased by a malevolent beast. Someone would be kidded to jump on the back of an animal as he was let up after branding. There would be barracking and laughter from the onlookers at the resultant buck jumping show.
In the beginning, bulls four to five years old abounded on the property. At that time they had no value. The men destroyed as many as they could. They would gallop up along side a wild bull and shoot it with a sawn-off.303 rifle. This took care and dexterity. A wild bull could kill a horse with one blow from its horns. Over the years we lost a few good horses through horning. Miraculously no rider was ever seriously hurt.
And if Her Droughts are Bitter,
Hesperian Press, Perth, 1996
Tim Low
2005
Q: What does the word ‘wilderness’ mean to you?
TL: Wilderness has grown into the one of the biggest buzzwords in Australian history – I mean, it’s a marketing tool, it’s a way of selling holidays and calendars and diaries. It’s just gotten a bit over the top.
When I hear the word ‘wilderness’, to me it’s about remote places where there’s been no human impact and people can never get a sense of belonging and I have a problem with that because I think that there’s an environmental crisis and the way to overcome that is for people to feel close to nature, and the word ‘wilderness’ is ultimately alienating because you can never really belong in it – you can be a kind of transient visitor just passing through but you don’t really belong there and I think we need a relationship with nature that’s based on a much greater sense of belonging and being in rather than passing through.
I think a relationship with nature is most powerful if it’s there all the time, so if you have a close friend that you only see once a year it’s hard to have a good relationship; if your friend is right there all the time your relationship deepens. So I place high value on relationships I can have with the animals and plants around me – those that are in my yard, those that I see when I walk to the corner store. And I think that the rhythm of the seasons, the comings and goings of the birds and flowers and things – that you can get a sense of place, a sense of kinship through that, and I think that that sense of relationship with nature has been greatly undervalued, with the emphasis instead going on the idea that we should have a relationship with wilderness, which always happens to be a very large distance away . . .
People think that if you want to experience nature you’ve got to go out into a wilderness or a big national park and I don’t think city people realise the extent to which animals have moved into cities, that most of Australia’s largest cities have got peregrine falcons that are sometimes nesting on skyscrapers and flying foxes in a lot of cities, little tiny bats in roofs, snakes and so forth. There’s a lot of biodiversity in the cities that is overlooked, and I think that there’s this wrong perception that if an animal is living in a city it’s because we’ve destroyed its natural habitat when in actual fact, cities can be very, very good environments for animals, and the important message in that is that we don’t necessarily repel nature, animals don’t necessarily hate humans. We’re not awful in everything we do; we’re not just this destroyer species knocking everything down – hey, we do knock a lot of things down and we do a lot of destroying but we benefit a lot of animals as well and it’s worthwhile remembering that. Sometimes I think we feel so bad about ourselves and that doesn’t help us develop a relationship with nature. It’s nice to know that some of the birds coming into the gardens are living really happy lives and that we’ve kind of helped them out . . .
People have this idea that animals that come into a city are only doing it out of desperation and they’d much
rather be in the wilderness and it’s only because we’ve chopped down the forest, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that that’s wrong because you can get much higher densities of possums, lorikeets, certain honeyeaters, much higher densities of certain lizards in cities than you do actually in natural environments. Then when you start to ask why that might be you can see that people have planted so many nectar-rich flowers that there’s a lot more nectar in the city than there is in the bush nearby, for possums there’s a lot of hiding places in houses, for lizards there’s all the rockeries, there’s the use of fertilisers and water – in the middle of a drought you can still get fruit on garden plants . . .
I think if you look to the future of conservation, it’s been based traditionally on the idea that you set aside natural areas, national parks, and that’s where nature is. If you look at what’s really going on, animals are just moving all through the landscape, they’re moving into cities and farms and it’s getting harder and harder to say that conservation is all going to go on in national parks. So I think we’ve got to look at what the animals and plants are doing and work out where they are in the landscape and it means that conservation becomes a lot more creative. Conservation could mean that you leave that old shed there because there’s a family of bats in it, it could mean that, in the short term, you leave those blackberries and other weeds on the creek bank because there are native hens living in there. I think that the idea that conservation is in this part of the landscape and people are in the other part of the landscape – you can no longer have that simple divide. Nature’s everywhere and conservation potentially can go on anywhere and so we’ve got to be a lot more flexible in how we approach conservation and living with nature.
Interview for Film Australia’s Wilderness, 2005
James Stuart MacDonald
1931
I should say that [Arthur] Streeton has seen and thought of more and finer things in our landscape than any other painter, and that what he has not elected to use would provide material for plenty of first-rate pictures. And what he sees and thinks of and feels he implements beyond any right to expect that we may entertain.
Painting explicitly his work is full of implication. By his hand the conscious and the unconscious are welded. Mystery with him does not demand twilight; viewless midday also holds it. Invisible magic flutes tell us what is there though we cannot see it.
Is this far fetched? Well, let it seem to be; but it is a poor art which bears no hints of unseen things. For me, Streeton’s major canvasses have in them music akin to great overtures; golden, morning stuff, melodious and Grecian. To me they point to the way in which life should be lived in Australia, with the maximum of flocks and the minimum of factories. But we have to be like the rest of the world, feeling out of it if we cannot blow as many get-to-work whistles, punch as many bundy-clocks, and show as much smoke and squalor as places that cannot escape such curses.
I am for the Streetonian view, for his pictures to me are like the description of Australia I should expect from Theocritus set to music by Mozart.
Out upon your clatter and dirt as necessary to development! How did Aristotle manage to survive without the talkies? Or blind Homer without earphones? Or Shakespeare without a tin Lizzie?
If we so choose we can yet be the elect of the world, the last of the pastoralists, the thoroughbred Aryans in all their nobility.
Let others if they are bent upon it mass produce themselves into robotry; thinking and looking like mechanical monkeys chained to organs whose tunes are furnished by rivetting machines.
We do not need to do these things. We have the pastoral land, and if we do not realise it sufficiently well, we have Streeton’s pictures to stress the miraculousness of it. That is it; ours is the world’s Pastoral and all it implies of herds and flocks and vines and hives, orchards, olives and grain. Are smokestacks prettier or healthier than groves or do they give rise to finer deeper emotions? Hardly.
On dissection of one’s thoughts on Streeton’s work I should think one’s appreciation would disclose itself as gratitude for being shown something which one ought to have seen, but which one didn’t, until it was made apparent by one who saw better, more beautifully, further into the matter and who had the skill, won to by great pains, to reveal to us a fair proportion of what he saw and felt.
Art in Australia: Arthur Streeton Number,
3rd Series, Number 40, Sydney, 1931
Roger McDonald
2001
Somewhere in my early childhood I absorbed images of an ideal bush. Two places come to mind. One was not bush-proper at all, but a backyard at the edge of an inland New South Wales town with a tennis court, some pepper trees, a few eucalypts dense enough to hide and play in, and (most importantly) to climb. I don’t remember what variety they were, but they were aged enough to have hollows formed by fallen branches containing wild beehives, and other hollows big enough for a child to climb into. Water was on tap but always in short supply. On the outer edges of the trees, through a fence and across a dirt road, were wheatfields. They were well cleared except for a few ringbarked dead trees and dark, shimmering clumps of native cypress. In the harvest season around Christmas there were sheaves and haystacks to play in. Alternating images of enclosure, darkness, and hiding places, compared with openness, brightness, and distant views, were the contrasting combinations.
Though this first ideal image of bush was not native bush at all, but a Europeanised mongrel remnant, it is mostly what we meant in Australia when we used the term ‘the bush’ (which also meant everywhere outside the cities). It was on the outskirts of Temora, in central-western New South Wales.
The other image is more timeless in feel. It was a kangaroo-grass hillside at the back of a small Riverina town, with granite boulders among scattered wattles and gums, and with small shrubs hardening their seeds past their spring flowering. There was the incessant hum, hop, click and scratch of insects, and the constant presence of birds. It was not farmland but unwanted land, and so had survived as bush in the second sense. I do not know if it is still there. It was the season for sawfly grubs, who linked themselves in a long, rhythmic chain and jerked along the earth with the unity of a single organism, and other species endemic to eucalypts, including the ones called hairy caterpillars. We raced around dropping them inside each other’s shirts, creating allergic reactions. From a slightly elevated position it was possible to look out over the town and west into the wider inland. Like a lot of bush it only existed to the passing eye in a good season, when it responded and burst into life. Otherwise it needed closer ways of looking to be understood. It was at Ardlethan, in the eastern Riverina . . .
I remember trees away out in the smashed-glass glare of wheatfields: yellow box, white cypress, kurrajong. Lone sentinels shimmering in heat haze. And playground eucalypts in asphalt, their leaves pungent after rain. A tree at Bourke, it must have been a red gum, growing tall in the dirt-surfaced playground there; Aboriginal kids eating grubs from under the bark and boasting about it; our teacher taking us out to sit around under its thin shade and asking me to read out a story I had written – a ‘composition’ I remember how everyone listened.
I remember visiting a homestead on the Darling River and staring at the orange trees: glossy leaves, creamy flowers, fruit with a skin thicker than coconut rind, flesh richer than any mango. Then up to the border at Hungerford, camping out under the stars, and my father naming the trees: leopard tree, bloodwood, wilga, quandong – peeling the sour red quandong flesh, insubstantial as a thumb-scraping, and drying the seeds that were ridged like a model of the human brain. We made a game of spotting leopard trees – their delicate distinctiveness was a prize in itself. Travelling through red sandhills my father waved his hat against the door of the car to attract emus. They came in their curious hundreds. Up there, north-west of Bourke, it was the beginning of the outback, except that ‘outback’ then was always somewhere further on.
The Tree in Changing Light, Knopf, S
ydney, 2001
Ann McGrath
1987
Black women were viewed as a side benefit of working on remote cattle stations. Some station managers used their authority to exploit the young women of a tribe as ‘bait’ to attract or hold single men to their jobs. An employee of the Victoria River depot complained bitterly that it was unfair that some white men had their black women taken from them, while managers of larger stations ran brothels. Many white men were lured to employment by being offered the pick of the best ‘black velvet’. One employer informed his employees that there were plenty of women down in the camp if they wanted them and that he would go down and procure them for a small fee. Xavier Herbert told me they had to be there; without available women, men would refuse to work on remote stations. Because station staff in remote areas was so difficult to procure, Bleakley felt it would ‘require more strength’ than most station managers possessed to prohibit offenders.