The Bush Read online

  These were Anguilla australis, or short-finned eels, a species that can also be caught from the banks of the Condamine in southern Queensland and in the majority of the inland waterways, swamps and billabongs east and south of the Great Dividing Range. Eels are nourishing. Aboriginal groups in south-eastern Australia caught them in slender traps woven from reeds and placed in artificial ponds. John Batman saw another method near Port Phillip with stone walls more than a metre high. The Wurundjeri also caught them by wading very carefully until they felt them in the mud beneath their toes. They smoked them in little houses made of stone, or baked them in clay. Some they ate, some they traded. White bushmen also fancied eels: Arthur Ashwin, a model of his kind, used to get them when he was chasing cattle around Ballarat. ‘The creeks were full of eels,’ he said, and he wondered why they could not be found in Western Australia.

  All eels are catadromous: they spawn in the sea but spend the rest of their lives in fresh water. Australian eels (at about fourteen years of age for males and twenty or more for females) make epic migratory journeys against the currents to somewhere in the Coral Sea. Reduced to ‘little more than skeletons with gonads’ by the time they arrive, they have only enough energy left to breed. And then they die where they were born. As paper-thin and translucent larvae, the fat eels we pulled from the Narracan Creek had caught the currents down the east coast of the continent on a three-year journey to the streams in which their late parents had swum. At river mouths they took on their loathed reptilian shape and headed inland. By night elvers can make good progress on land, slithering through wet grass to ponds, watercourses and dams. When we cleaned out our dam in the 1950s the mud teemed with fat, metre-long eels – ‘mud eels’ we called them, believing they were a different species. Following my grandmother’s murderous example, at the age of eight, I trudged about in gumboots chipping off their heads with a spade.

  If we had no time for eels, what mercy would we show a snake? By the watercourses and in the swamps there were red-bellied black snakes (Pseudechis porphyriacus) and lowland copperheads (Austrelaps superbus). The black snakes were some 2 metres long and thick as an adult’s ankle. Both types were shy, and while venomous, in the entire history of European civilisation in Australia there seems to be no recorded instance of a human dying from a black snake’s bite, and very few from copperheads’. But snakes were snakes: they menaced us in our sleep, coiled in our waking minds as the weather warmed in spring, and did not leave till Easter. Every now and then some drongo in the papers would quote statistics saying the chances of dying from snakebite were so remote we ought to leave them alone. No doubt he didn’t have to share their habitat. In any event, there was neither science nor any recognisable religion in our thinking, only dread and loathing, and a more forgiving attitude was not possible. The sight of snakes so antagonised our primal senses we could never stop to wonder or admire, but went after them with whatever instrument was at hand: fern-hook, shovel, stick, length of wire, shotgun, or boiling water.

  A diary-keeping selector at Woombye in Queensland took the same approach. His daily entries recorded little more than the nature of his labour, which most days was grubbing, and killing snakes. On January 6 he reported killing a black snake. On January 7: ‘Seen 3 snakes and killed 1.’ January 9: ‘grubbing all day in my scrub and killed one brown snake’. February 5: ‘Killed long green snake.’ February 13: ‘Killed 6 black snakes.’ February 17: ‘killed black snake and green one’. February 20: ‘Killed one black snake.’ February 24: ‘killed one black snake’. Floods stopped his momentum for a fortnight but he was back on the job by mid-March.

  Killing snakes – and dealing with one’s fear of them – was one of the incidental tasks of settlement. It is the uncanny about them that disturbs us, Freud said. They look at us across ‘one of evolution’s bridgeless gaps’ and we can find no case for their existence. By making them loathed of God and a surrogate for Satan (and as Freud also said, the male organ), the Bible added a moral imperative to the horror they excite in us. A rich, happy, laughter-filled childhood was unimaginable without snakes. Snake stories are legion among bush people, including, of course, Aboriginal people, for whom a snake – the Rainbow Serpent – is the pre-eminent actor in the drama of Creation. It was with a snake that Henry Lawson created an archetype for bushwomen, in ‘The Drover’s Wife’. A million versions of the same story were told round campfires and kitchen tables. Had the drover been able to install a vibrating snake-repelling device, like the one my mother has at her front and back doors, his wife might never have found herself in the predicament Lawson described – which is yet more evidence that we would be poorer without them.

  Australia’s brown snakes, tiger snakes and death adders are more venomous than the cobras of Africa and Asia, which belong to the same elapid family, but cobras kill a lot more people. Indeed, numerous as they have always been, the remarkable thing about Australian snakes is how few people they bite and how few of the bitten die as a result. Explorers published accounts of traversing the whole continent without once referring to a snake, much less to a bite from one. If they do strike it is almost always in self-defence, and they envenom only on about half of those occasions. Settler diaries occasionally mentioned a death from snakebite, but much more often the talk was of killing them or the fear they excited. In the past quarter-century about forty people died from snakebite in Australia, which is more than die from tick bites but only half the number killed by lightning. European honey bees and horses are ten times deadlier to humans, but as one writer noted, we don’t slaughter every bee we see or go round hitting horses on the head with a shovel.

  The forest gone, the watercourses and springs still flowed and were all the farmers needed for their stock. Most years there was enough rain for their crops as well. People in other parts of the country had been damming streams and sinking holes in the landscape for decades. Irrigation was a matter of national faith. But in this part of the country there had always been water. No one thought of dams until the 1950s when potato growing became the rage. Then the potato farmers bought up many of the dairy farms and blocked up the gullies and raided the springs for irrigation water. They dammed the Narracan Creek. They pumped water from it. By ploughing right to the edges, they filled it with silt. Their herbicides and pesticides flowed into it. The willows planted by the first generations of settlers choked it. Carp got into it. In the space of half a century they wrecked it.

  Still, when the sun is low on the green hills and the gleaming roadside gums, and the grazing cattle shine and the cypress hedges throw their shadows on the grass, no one could say it is not a beautiful bit of the earth. And if you have closed your mind to what was there before, or do not know, it is no less beautiful for being made by human enterprise and for growing food and wealth.

  The Bush Means Work

  the Bunurong – Presbyterians and others – the good farmer’s creed – native creatures present and absent – a world of mud and rubbish - rain never-ending – the trouble with sheep – the appeal of horses – the kelpie – the farmer in nature

  When I was two we exchanged those hills for others 65 kilometres west, and that still prolific creek for a lifeless river called the Bass. We remained Gippslanders, and we were still in the Strzelecki Ranges, indeed not far from the point at which the explorer scrambled out of the hills to safety. Our new hills were steeper; blue gums, not mountain ash, were the dominant tree, the soil was grey, and there were more Presbyterians.

  The dirt road passing the cattle pit at the end of our drive stretched for 5 kilometres from the highway to the valley of the Bass River, about as modest a river as ever went by the name. The first Europeans had seen a crystal stream alive with blackfish slipping through the blue-gum forest, but seventy years later, when we arrived, it was a turgid and eroded ruin. Waste from the butter factory half a kilometre up the hill had killed the river and all the blackfish, eels, galaxia and platypuses that swam in it. In 1943, when a son of an early pioneer returned aft
er several years away, he was shocked to find ‘a seething mass of curds’ and reckoned those responsible should pay a price for their vandalism. Of course they never did. Across the continent, they never did. When we went to school in the fifties, there were no visible curds, but no life either. By then, instead of pumping the whey into the river, they were spraying it on an adjacent paddock, from where no doubt a lot of the stuff found its way to the water by more subtle means.

  The Bass rises in the Strzelecki Ranges and, after a journey of 30 kilometres or so, flows into the mud and mangroves of Westernport Bay. It got Bass from George Bass, the English seafarer who, on his whaleboat voyage of 1798, discovered the bay, and about a kilometre inland from the mouth of the river, repaired his keel amid the ti-tree on the banks. Westernport, he reported, was teeming with swans, ducks and mussels, oysters and oystercatchers. Thousands of seals congregated on the rocks on the shoreline and around the two islands in the bay. A few years after Bass, sealers established semipermanent camps with Aboriginal women they had bought in Van Diemen’s Land for lumps of seal meat and kangaroo dogs.

  Straddling the Grand Ridge Road on the northern ridge of the Bass Valley sat the little town of Poowong. We sat on the other side. Every morning of our schooldays my brother and I went down the hill from our place, across the valley and up the other side to the town where stood our school, our church and our butter factory – and a hotel for others. Every afternoon we reversed the procedure. If we were on foot, and the river was running, we stopped to float a few sticks under the bridge and watch them drift down between the gums and wattles. When we were not walking we went by car, bus, bicycle or, occasionally, if one should pass our way, by tractor.

  ‘Poowong’ is said to mean carrion or putrefaction in the language of the Bunurong, on whose lands the settlement arose. The Bunurong were one of the five tribes of the Kulin nation. People had lived in the vicinity for at least 30 000 years, possibly 60 000. The Kulin had been there in a quarrelsome ‘kind of confederacy’ for an unknown proportion of that vast time. In 1802 a Frenchman attached to the Baudin expedition met a group of Bunurong a few kilometres north of the Bass River: ‘They had a white cross upon the middle of the face, their eyes were surrounded with white circles, and several had white and red crosses all over their bodies.’ Smallpox had ravaged them by then. With the loss of their lands, fifty years later there were only a couple of dozen left.

  The Bass was their road for seasonal excursions to the forests of blue gum and mountain ash that covered the ranges, and the marsupials, reptiles and birds that lived there. In the five different but related languages of the tribes, Kulin was the generic word for human being. It seems to follow that people who were not Kulin were considered at best human beings of a different order. As the tribes to the east were called Kurnai (or Gunai), which in their languages also meant human beings, or men, it is no surprise that the two groups were mortal enemies.

  We were not so categorical about our neighbours, yet it is true our boundary fences separated mental realms as well as properties. There were conscientious farmers like us, some with farms which conscientiousness could not make good, and some who seemed worn out by the effort. On those 5 kilometres of road there were Plymouth Brethren, Presbyterians, nominal Anglicans and non-denominated. All were neighbourly enough, even the ones whose habits were reclusive. Tea and biscuits were on permanent offer in every kitchen, but there was no partying. The best chance of encountering several of them all at once was in the hay-carting season, a rare moment of ecumenism when our souls collided in a shower of sweat, and tea was brought down the paddock by the women. Common tendencies to introversion and voting conservative aside, the grind of dairying, the mud, the drizzle, the weeds and the limits of hope had shaped them in different ways, from affable eccentricity to glum and secretive weirdness. Of course, some were normal like us: in truth, perhaps, more normal. Odd, that so many experts have looked for the typical Australian in the bush – it was the last thing you would find on our road.

  But that’s the thing: whether we speak of the bush itself or the bush as a place of people, we need to ask, What sort of bush, what sort of people? Tatty scrub or forest, hill or plain, small holding or large; Catholic, Protestant or sceptic; stoical or not, optimist or pessimist, fit and strong or less so, anxious or easygoing? What kind of climate, crop or animal? Because all these determine the kind of work and how well it is done, and the bush is work.

  It was little more than an average lifetime since Europeans had first set foot on the land either side of the road, but it might have been forever. While there was much talk of progress, life could move no faster than steep hills and the patterns laid down by dairy cows allowed. The cows made tracks along the hillsides and farmers followed them at the same pace. We noted neighbours puttering up the road and on any day but market day half wondered where they were going, or if they might run into the milk truck on one of the two blind corners, or on the crest. In all the years of watching, they never did. Strange cars excited comment; cars going more than 30 kilometres an hour, displeasure. We had standards and were always on the lookout for breaches of them. Nothing dairy farming might inflict on a soul should compromise a man or woman’s dignity.

  In his novel Geoffrey Hamlyn, Henry Kingsley said that free men in the Australian bush never touched their hats to anyone. My father never passed a woman in the street without touching his – narrow brim, pinched crown, single band, grey, green or brown felt – and he would do the same to any man he didn’t know or believed worthy of respect. With no more formal education than the bushmen of legend, and no less affection for the land, he could not have been less like them. He was a smallholder of industrious, sober and gentle habits, modest ambition, a mortgage and little ready cash.

  He split wood under the pine tree out the back. We could hear the blows: hear the blue gum cleave if the grain was even, tear but not surrender if knotted, the next blow just hard enough to force it apart, but not so hard that the axe jammed in the block or sent the pieces flying further than he could retrieve by bending where he stood. Every move was practised: read the grain, use all necessary force but no more, so no energy is wasted or bones and tendons jolted. Leave nature minimally alarmed. Work with the grain of the wood, not against it; always work with the grain. Find the rhythm in it. As nature has rhythms, what is second nature to a man has rhythms. Don’t force it. In getting a cow in bail, or drafting sheep in a pen, taking the harrows off the tractor or the horns off a cow, or saddling a horse, or grubbing a stump, there is a rhythm to be found. As nature finds the easiest way to do things, find the way of nature. He was a Zen sort of farmer.

  With even steps across the hillside he sowed grass seed, each fluid arc of the arm the same, each dip of his hand into the hessian bag tied like an apron round his waist, the same. While his limbs kept such perfect time, he seemed to be in time with all around him, with every human being that ever sowed a hillside, as much a part of this scene as any peasant ever was of his. To calm the world, he whistled.

  In the parable, the good soil speaks of a good heart. His heart was as good as he could make it: every wound of childhood sutured, every savage instinct denied satisfaction, but not always the indignation that thundered at the uncontained instincts of others, or signs of them in his children. As God and his conscience ruled him, he could not always resist their maledictions. The ungodly folk on whom he visited his judgements were those whose baser natures were not contained: sloth, drunkenness, profanity, foul mouths, lasciviousness, cruelty, troublemaking and bluster, he could not bear. He tried to love his neighbour but, as a righteous man regardeth his beast, who could love the neighbour who mistreated his animals, or the bully who raged at man and beast alike? Or the man who never cut his thistles or pulled his ragwort so the seeds blew across the boundary fence? ‘The weeds are the people of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil.’

  ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ he always said, long after we were sick of it. He inter
nalised his disgruntlements, rendered them to the same inner authority that kept everything else in check. And as he ruled himself he would rule this bit of land: with hard work and obedience to the commandments, with irony and without anger, envy or cruelty. He would make it in his own image. He would make it decent. Something fit for the Lord or any man to look upon with approval. A man was permitted pride in his own work, if in little else except his family, and that in moderation. If it took him his whole life he would make this dirty farm clean. It was only 59 hectares, many of them not so far off the vertical, but he was no less a civilised man for that, and one on a civilising mission.

  We had dairy cows, but he always preferred crops and sheep. Then he began buying yearling heifers from ‘up north’ where they were cheap as a rule, especially in dry seasons. They would arrive on the train, skinny and half mad, but our good grass reformed them. He’d calve them down, which is to say, get them in calf (‘pregnant’ was an impolite word that we did not use in any context), and once they were delivered of their offspring, he’d break them into the routines of the milking shed and sell them to the local dairy farmers as replacements for their herds. He also bought springers, heifers already in calf. Either way, the business involved a lot of bovine copulation, a lot of placenta and blood in the paddocks, a lot of bellowing and kicking and shitting in the cowshed, and on the way to the shed through the mud; a lot of dead calves, veterinary bills, ingeniously polite denial of the brutal reality of our enterprise, and a lot of guilt, loathing and confusion in me.