A Single Tree Read online

  I propose visiting them to morrow, I may expect a good view of the country from them to the N. W – the Blacks, are sleeping on shore to Night – we walked about 12 miles – the Capt. quite knocked up – the wind blew hard up to 12 0clock.’

  Thursday 4th June 1835

  ‘I think on the avarage, moust beautiful Sheep Pasturage I ever saw in my Life. I am sure I can see 50,000 Acres of Land in one direction and not 50 trees, in short the only trees in the great extent I have above mentioned are She Oak and none more then 10 Inches in diameter The only thing that will be felt in a short time or a few years will be the want of fire wood . . .’

  Journal, State Library of Victoria, MS 13181

  Barbara Baynton

  1902

  Always her dog – wakeful and watchful as she – patiently waiting for her to be up and about again. That would be soon, she told her complaining mate.

  “Yer won’t. Yer back’s broke,” said Squeaker laconically. “That’s wot’s wrong er yer; injoory t’ th’ spine. Doctor says that means back’s broke, and yer won’t never walk no more. No good not t’ tell yer, cos I can’t be doin’ everythin’.”

  A wild look grew on her face, and she tried to sit up.

  “Erh,” said he, “see! yer carnt, yer jes’ ther same as a snake w’en ees back’s broke, on’y yer don’t bite yerself like a snake does w’en ‘e carnt crawl. Yer did bit yer tongue w’en yer fell.”

  She gasped, and he could hear her heart beating when she let her head fall back a few moments; though she wiped her wet forehead with the back of her hand, and still said that was the doctor’s mistake. But day after day she tested her strength, and whatever the result, was silent, though white witnesses, halo-wise, gradually circled her brow and temples.

  “’ Tisn’t as if yer was agoin’ t’ get better t’morrer, the doctor says yer won’t never work no more, an’ I can’t be cookin’ an’ workin’ an’ doin’ everythin’!”

  He muttered something about “sellin’ out”, but she firmly refused to think of such a monstrous proposal.

  He went into town one Saturday afternoon soon after, and did not return till Monday.

  Her supplies, a billy of tea and scraps of salt beef and damper (her dog got the beef), gave out the first day, though that was as nothing to her compared with the bleat of the penned sheep, for it was summer and droughty, and her dog could not unpen them.

  Of them and her dog only she spoke when he returned. He d—d him, and d—d her, and told her to “double up yer ole broke an’ bite yerself”. He threw things about, made a long-range feint of kicking her threatening dog, then sat outside in the shade of the old hut, nursing his head till he slept.

  Bush Studies, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1995

  Charles Bean

  1910

  1

  The Red Country

  The truth is that there exists inside coastal Australia a second Australia – the larger of the two – of which most of our people know very little more than do the Londoners. It is the land of those astonishing grasses which spring up, then vanish in 20 years, and then suddenly flush up again to the delight of the oldest inhabitant, who is the only man that can spin a yarn about them. It is the land of the delicate scrub, which is as puzzling as the grass and, mostly, as useful; of the mulga, the best of all for stock, and one of the prettiest, with its exquisite black tracework of branches against its “Liberty” grey leaves; of the applebush or rosewood or bluebush, which, when half-dry, is fairly good for stock; of the emu-bush, which droops like the bunch of an emu’s tail and is very good fodder – as the rabbits have found; of the native willow, which is good to make it yokes of; of the gidgea, which is good for fencing, and which drops beans that are good for sheep, and smells so pestilential after rain that they say at Nyngan they can tell you when it is raining about Bourke, because the nearest gidgea is there; of the leopardwood, which is good feed and bad timber, and crops up again as often as it is cut; of the myall, which is good sheep-feed; of the whitewood, which is fairly good; and the belar, which is very little good; and the wild fuchsia, whose flowers, full of honey, the sheep at any rate think to be good; of the hopbush, which is good for yeast; and the beefwood, which is good for timber; and the dead finish, which may be good for whip-handles; and the budda, which is good for nothing except to keep the surface on the ground – to stop the wind from blowing the skin of Australia away and leaving her cheek-bones all shiny red and bare and useless.

  For out here you have reached the core of Australia, the real red Australia of the ages, which – though the rivers have worn their channels through it, and spewed out that black silt in narrow ribbons across it – still hems in this flat modern river-soil, so that, if you drive only a few miles from the river-bank, you will always come out in the end upon a red land, a slightly higher land, rising sharply from the grey plain; a land which stretches away and away and away across the heart of Australia, with the history of the oldest continent on earth written in interesting little patches – patches of ironstone pebbles, of river-worn quartz, stony deserts, and a thousand other relics of its bygone sufferings – across the whole face of it.

  That is the real Australia, and it is as delicate as its own grasses. In parts the sand, which covers it and contains the whole calendar of priceless seeds that have taken a few million years (at a low estimate) to evolve, is not more than one foot thick; so thin and light and delicate a skin that only the delicate Western scrub holds it in place at all.

  There, years before “erosion” became a matter of general public concern, a dangerous problem of wind erosion had fully developed. The Western Lands Board had been studying it and already had taken some wise steps in the effort to check it.

  In certain parts, where men had come out onto that country and cut down the scrub recklessly, with rough-shod, ready-made European methods, the surface of the earth had blown clean away. In some places, where all that exquisite, wonderful plant-life had been gradually developing through all the ages, it took just one bad season to destroy it; and instead, we found there great patches of “scalded” clay, as bare as on the day when the last wavelet of some receding ocean lapped over them and left them to evolve a covering for their nakedness.

  How much even some enlightened Australians knew about this greater half of Australia may be judged from a single instance. Not so very many years previously, at a time when that wonderful native scrub was being used as a great reserve of fodder in the West – and being used, if anything, too fast – and when the one useful thing which the Government could have done would have been to pass a law making it criminal to destroy it, it was found that the Lands Department had actually inserted a clause into its Western leases, insisting that lessees must improve the country by clearing it of scrub. The Western Lands Board had since changed all that, yet the thing that struck a townsman coming out upon it was that the real Australia was, even to most Australians, to all intents and purposes an unknown and unstudied country.

  2

  Next morning the big shed dozed as innocently under its dazzling shimmering iron roof as if “wet sheep” had never been heard of. Inside the machines hummed, the belt slip-slapped, the shaft always turned, the shearers sweated. Outside, in the sleepy glare, two men, manager and jackaroo, were letting out from the counting-out pens beneath the shed the poor, bolting, skinny, undignified, decrepit sheep. The shearer, as he finished each sheep, sent it skidding down a chute at his side into his particular one of a series of small pens underneath. And now a boy was emptying the pens. As each batch cleared the gate, with bleeding noses, patched eyes, stiff as wire, with the stagger of inebriated slum ladies and the solemnity of centenarian parrots, the poor silly fools jumped higher, jumped and jumped again, as if it were part of the formula. And during this performance they were counted and credited to whichever shearer was using that pen. Presently, for a good-bye, each was branded like a sugar-bag with what looked, and apparently felt, like hot tar. If there had been ticks or other pe
sts in that country he would have been dipped a little later, bolted down a race, and betrayed by a sort of oubliette into a bath of sheep-dip. But in this district there was no need for dipping. From the gate of the “shorn-sheep paddock” they strung out eagerly again into the limitless West.

  And all the while the shed was humming; and always on the green flat below, watched by a single silent horsemen, there waited one of the famous flocks of the world.

  On the Wool Track: Pioneering Days of the Wool Industry,

  Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1910

  Charles Bean

  1911

  It was exactly the same when evening brought us to a boundary-rider’s hut. He asked us in to share his evening meal as a matter of course. And when the time came to turn in, nothing would satisfy the old chap who lived out there, but that the Sydney passenger should have the rough wooden bench that made his bed, while he himself curled up on the floor.

  Out in this country of huge distances they seem to take all this as one of the conditions of life. A strange buggy is seen jogging across the paddock, and they make its occupant honestly feel that they are glad he has come and are sorry when he goes away. That outback hospitality sets the ideal for the Australian; the city Australian as well tries to act up to it, so far as it is feasible in big cities. Naturally it cannot be quite the same in crowded parts, but one has hopes that it will always remain the standard.

  Perhaps the strongest article in the outback code is that of loyalty to a mate. Possibly it is an article of faith with all Anglo-Saxons; but it is worth mentioning here because that loyalty is a quality which largely originates in the back country, especially in the mining camps. Wherever you have men of the British race engaged in mining precious metals on their own account, you seem always to get a tremendously strong public opinion in favour of straight dealing between mates. It is public opinion, not the police, that really prevents thieving in a mining camp. The average digger is the most loyal man on earth. Such people have nothing particular to get from a Labour Government, but they make the most solid Labour constituencies in the country, partly because they are highly independent, but chiefly because it is a necessity to the miner to be what he considers loyal to his mates elsewhere. You cannot talk about that sort of loyalty; the more it is bragged about the shallower it becomes. But one may just say this, that although the Australian will never be an effusive “imperialist” nor, probably, favourable to any hard and fast parliamentary constitution binding his country to the motherland, nevertheless, if ever a certain ancient country, the old friend and protector of a younger land, finds herself in difficulties, there is in the younger land, existing in quite unsuspected quarters, a thousand times deeper and more effective than the more showy protestations which sometimes appropriate the title of “imperialism”, the quality of sticking – whatever may come and whatever may be the end of it – to an old mate.

  The Dreadnought of the Darling, Alston Rivers Publishing, London, 1911

  George Bennett

  1860

  The Earl of Derby found the Emeu to be strictly monogamous, not approaching any female but the favoured one. The formation of their nest is very simple: they usually select a situation in a scrub upon the hills, where they scrape a space similar to those made by brooding hens; sticks and leaves are left about and upon the cleared place; in this the eggs are deposited, without regard to regularity, the number varying from 9 to 13; and it is a curious circumstance that it is always an odd number – some nests having been discovered with 9, others with 11, and others again with 13 eggs. It is now ascertained beyond doubt that the eggs are hatched by incubation: they are of large size, some measuring about 6 inches in length, with a diameter of 3½ inches; but some are smaller than others: they vary in colour from a beautiful bluish-green to a dark bottle-green colour.

  The Emeu is found on the plains and open forest country; the Kangaroo on the hilly ranges. Many of the Australian fruits are eaten by the Emus, more especially the Quandong or native peach (Fusanus acuminatus), which, when in season, is its favourite food.

  The kick of the Emeu is its only means of defence, and it has proved so formidable as to disable dogs that have attacked it: the blow is given backwards and outward, in a manner similar to that in which a cow kicks.

  At Sydney, some very elegant and useful ornaments have been made of the eggs, mounted in silver, as milk-jugs, sugar-basins, &c.; but I find that the egg, exposed to the glare of the sun, soon loses its beautiful green colour and becomes of a brownish hue.

  Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australasia 1860, Currawong Press,

  Sydney, 1982

  Judith Beveridge

  1987

  Fox in a Tree Stump

  I gripped the branch

  and waited in a paddock that ran on

  over harder and harder earth.

  Leaving me with smoke and the stick

  to beat the fox, my uncle drove off.

  Terror barrel-rode through my stomach.

  I knew my uncle’s quick rabbit-skinning hands,

  his arms like dry river-beds dammed at the shoulders,

  his voice harsh, kelpie-cursing

  would not understand if I let the fox run to the bush.

  Fox-hairs of dust sweated in my palms.

  I stood in the exhaust of leaves

  the short time it takes a tongue

  to reach into a hurting body and strike ashes.

  A twig snapped. The fox stood, coughing.

  The branch on its neck

  rang like a shot:

  a shot so loud it shook out a flock

  of galahs from their trees,

  cracked like a wave

  the buried sleep of rabbits.

  When my uncle came back, he threw

  the charred body into a ditch.

  I turned away kicking earth over the bloodspots of fire

  and prayed not to waken

  another animal from the wheat.

  I was nine years old. All my life

  I’d stuck close to my yelled name.

  I was a child praying for the dark

  each time the sun caught my uncle’s eye.

  The Domesticity of Giraffes, Black Lightning Press, Wentworth Falls, NSW, 1987

  Tony Birch

  2005

  1

  In late 1998 I toured several sites of colonial ruination in the western district of Victoria. After writing about persistent attacks on Indigenous people and history in this region I was curious to see how colonial society provided legitimacy for its temporal occupation of Indigenous country. While (not unexpectedly) I visited places that attempted to deny the presence of Indigenous culture and evidence of ownership of land on my travels, I also discovered sites weird, wonderful and bizarre. Through these visits I came to realise that colonial commemoration of its past and contemporary identity is often contradictory and confusing, relying on heavy-handed mythologies and poorly-constructed fictions in an effort to authenticate its story.

  I visited places where whole towns and streets were signposted in the middle of the bush in order to locate a colonial site of occupation that never existed beyond an entrepreneur’s utopian imaginings. I spoke with farmers who relayed colonial fables disguised as historical truth – such as that it was ‘a widely known fact’ that Indigenous rock-art, carbon-dated at thousands of years in age, had actually been painted by a French artist in the late nineteenth century. While driving the roads of the western district I was confronted by giant Koalas, miniature Great Pyramids and Eiffel Towers, and even a rather puny Big Apple. I also consumed an oversupply of commemoration plaques, funereal cairns and ‘I was here’ anxieties that attempted to obliterate Indigenous life from both the landscape and historical consciousness . . .

  2

  During my first visit to Steiglitz I was invited to ‘take a walk in history’ by visiting 25 ‘sites of significance’ located around the town, accompanied by an interpretive map that provided information about each
place that I stopped at along the way. I quickly discovered that it was not only examples of otherwise very ‘trivial’ objects both ‘saved from oblivion . . . rescued from triviality [and] protected and enshrined’ that were on display at Steiglitz. The land itself, or more particularly the ghosts of the nineteenth century buildings and streets that had encompassed the colonial landscape have been resurrected to provide context where it might otherwise not exist. The Steiglitz history walk relied heavily on the imagination, or at the very least a level of generosity on behalf of the visitor to ‘go with’ the rhetoric of the brochure and interpretive displays.

  The first site on the tour, the Steiglitz Courthouse, acted as an impressive site of authenticity for any visitor unsure of what it was they would be ‘seeing’, or more specifically not seeing as the walk progresses. The Steiglitz courthouse experienced a very short, active, life before closing in 1879 — only four years after its completion. It would reopen briefly from 1894 to hear cases brought against parents who were apparently ‘neglecting to send their children to school’. (It is possible that the children were in search of their school building, which had been dismantled and sent to another proposed mining town hundreds of miles north.) The fully restored red brick court building stands impressively on a hill overlooking the remnants of the town. It is clearly rock-solid. It is an authentic representation of a colonial past, its authority underscored by use of the inside of the building as the memory palace of its gold-mining history, housing objects (some of them mere fragments), photographs and documents. It is vital that tourists visit the courthouse as the initial reference point for any history walk as it stands to legitimate all that is absent in the remaining Steiglitz history tour.