A Single Tree Read online

  The physical evidence of the past at Steiglitz quickly gave way to imagination as my history walk progressed. On the second stop on the tour I visited one of the first hotels built in the town. Those looking for this building would find it difficult to locate as nothing exists at the site except for the opening of a well at the rear of the property, from where the hotel’s water was once drawn. After passing the foundational ruins of another early Steiglitz institution, the town’s first newspaper, I found myself with map in hand standing before a rusting corrugated water tank, lying forlornly on its side on a vacant block of land. This site, along with the empty block next door, which contained nothing but an unidentified fruit tree at the rear of the yard, indicated that this land had once been occupied by ‘settlers’. The absence of little physical evidence today of occupation, although seemingly rendering the land very houseless, was something that the history tour attempted to overcome, bringing a colonial past of occupation into an otherwise vacuous present.

  When all traces of buildings were absent, when not the slightest fragment of material culture remained behind to tell the story of the pioneers, I was left with nothing but a numbered marker on a piece of land reflecting a sense of white terra nullius, a land no longer occupied by settler society. But no, as I stood peering up a hill to some unreconstructed rubbish in the distance, my brochure informed me that I was standing before the former Presbyterian Church. (Although in fact the actual building itself lived on after it was removed from the site in the early twentieth century, to re-emerge as a woolshed in the town of Elaine in 1908.)

  While this tension between emptiness and occupation is evident in the official contextualisation of Steiglitz, confusion is even more apparent when walking around the town. Rubbish, both domestic and industrial, is everywhere. While being directed to a retired water tank that acts to legitimate colonial occupation, both past and present, visitors to Steiglitz can also view cast iron stoves, decommissioned farm machinery and the remnants of barbed wire fencing that seem to represent nothing but the discarded material evidence of an itinerant community that has, due to economic and social forces, moved on. Adding to the ambiguity at Steiglitz, it was a little surprising to find that it is not a fully fledged ghost town. A few people still live in there, although it seems clear that they are not part of the display, and in no mood to perform any act of ‘staged authenticity’ that might have provided a Sovereign Hill-style addition to the visitor experience. While this outcome at Steiglitz may well be an example of ‘exhibiting the dead as if they are alive and the living as if they are dead’, the message coming from some of those who remain at Steiglitz is explicit, with KEEP OUT signs evident at some of the remaining houses that are occupied.

  ‘“Death is Forgotten in Victory”: Colonial Landscapes and Narratives of Emptiness’

  in Jane Lydon and Tracy Ireland (eds.), Object lessons: archaeology and heritage in Australia,

  Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2005

  Herbert S. Bloxsome

  c. 1950

  1

  The yards were valued as a station improvement. At one drive 8,500 kangaroos were trapped and killed.

  In 1885 another drive took place which was attended by William Hay Caldwell, a scientist who was studying the system of reproduction of marsupialia and at which he made some valuable discoveries. At that time my brother Reginald Bloxsome was an A.D.C. to the Governor of N.S.W. and a large party from Government House attended the drive.

  The wings going into the yard were over a mile long and met at a point of a “V” where the yard was situated, the kangaroos were driven towards the yard and just before entering it were driven over some bushes, the other side of which was an excavation five feet deep from which they went up an easy grade into the yard. The bushes and excavation prevented the leading Kangaroos coming out again. There were sixty two men in the drive and it lasted three days.

  2

  We did very well out of our cattle during the war. In 1917 we purchased Hippong and Ormonde, situated about half way between Delubra and Chinchilla. We paid £8.8.6 per head for 1,700 head of mixed cattle that were branded directly after the sale was completed. We sent 1,200 of cattle to Dalby for sale by auction and we got up to £11 per head for both cows and bullocks. We then stocked up Hippong from Delubra and started it as a breeding property, we branded 800 calves the first year, but we lost a great number of calves from blackleg.

  Berkeley was born 18.6.18. Cattle were still at very high prices and we sold 350 bullocks (fats) at fourteen guineas per head, a remarkable price at that time.

  I well remember being in Chinchilla on Good Friday 1918, at that time the Germans had made a big push on the British lines in Belgium and Northern France and gained a lot of territory, the position was most serious and it almost looked as though we might lose the war, but the troops of the British Empire held on with the assistance of the Americans and in a few months we had won the war. In September 1920 we sold to Mr. Fred Duncombe of Roma 312 store bullocks at £11.10.0 per head, just after this the big cattle slump set in and he lost heavily from this deal.

  Journal, State Library of Queensland, OM77-12 Box 8954

  Barcroft Boake

  1891

  Where the Dead Men Lie

  Out on the wastes of the Never Never –

  That’s where the dead men lie!

  There where the heat-waves dance for ever –

  That’s where the dead men lie!

  That’s where the Earth’s loved sons are keeping

  Endless tryst: not the west wind sweeping

  Feverish pinions, can wake their sleeping –

  Out where the dead men lie!

  Where brown Summer and Death have mated –

  That’s where the dead men lie!

  Loving with fiery lust unsated –

  That’s where the dead men lie!

  Out where the grinning skulls bleach whitely

  Under the saltbush sparkling brightly;

  Out where the wild dogs chorus nightly –

  That’s where the dead men lie!

  Deep in the yellow, flowing river –

  That’s where the dead men lie!

  Under the banks where the shadows quiver –

  That’s where the dead men lie!

  Where the platypus twists and doubles,

  Leaving a train of tiny bubbles;

  Rid at last of their earthly troubles –

  That’s where the dead men lie!

  . . .

  Strangled by thirst and fierce privation –

  That’s how the dead men die!

  Out on Moneygrub’s farthest station –

  That’s how the dead men die!

  Hardfaced greybeards, youngsters callow;

  Some mounds cared for, some left fallow;

  Some deep down, yet others shallow;

  Some having but the sky.

  Moneygrub, as he sips his claret,

  Looks with complacent eye

  Down at his watch-chain, eighteen-carat –

  There, in his club, hard by:

  Recks not that every link is stamped with

  Names of the men whose limbs are cramped with

  Too long lying in grave mould, cramped with

  Death where the dead men lie.

  Traditional Australian Verse: The Essential Collection, Richard Walsh (ed.),

  Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2009

  James Boyce

  2008

  The possession of a single dog, stolen or purchased, meant a convict could live independent and free in the bush. In 1805 Knopwood recorded the return of five convicts who had been absent for nearly three months despite the colder weather (they also provided the first sighting of a “tiger”), and by the next year convicts were living in the bush right through the winter months.

  The association of the bush with freedom was a dramatic, and largely unrecognised, moment in Australian colonisation. Collins had only been stating the facts at P
ort Phillip when he warned that the armed runaways “must soon return or perish by famine”. Even in the first year in Van Diemen’s Land, the five prisoners that “got off into the woods” with muskets and gunpowder surrendered quickly. With­out dogs, the bush was a site of probable death, but with them, the grassy woodlands of Van Diemen’s Land became, within two years of settlement, a hospitable refuge. With no man-made walls to keep the few hundred prisoners contained (there was not a secure gaol on Van Diemen’s Land until the early 1820s), many convicts simply wandered off to live a life of quiet freedom in the well-watered, game-rich bush, well away from the supervised labour, dependency and potential for harsh punishment integral to a convict’s life in a penal colony. With what seems extraordinary speed, a motley collection of British criminals made the bush home.

  Those who stayed in the bush without authorisation as hunters were listed as absconders – the first bushrangers. Sixty-eight of the Calcutta convicts (those who arrived with Collins) would be listed as having absconded at some time, several of them more than once. The settler and trader James Gordon summarised the origins of bush-ranging at the British government’s Commission of Inquiry into New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land undertaken by John Thomas Bigge:

  I think that it originated from a practice that prevailed as far back as the time of Govr. Collins, who, when provisions were not to be had, allowed the convicts to repair into the country and hunt for the kangaroo. In this they were joined by the officers’ servants, who went to hunt for their masters. By this means, they got habits of wandering and obtaining subsistence. No outrages were committed by these men, but still Govt. cd. not call them in.

  Van Diemen’s Land, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2008

  Martin Boyd

  1954

  The wide road was empty when he came out again, having washed in a primitive bathroom and changed his dusty shoes. The sun was now becoming scorchingly hot, and before leaving the shade of the sparse pine trees which sheltered Strathallan, he stood a moment and looked about him. The house was a long wooden building with an iron roof and a wide veranda, along which were drying bathing dresses and towels. Indoors there were flies and sand in the bedrooms. The main boarding house across the road was a larger edition of Strathallan. They were both at the top of a steep grassy slope, below which was a short golden beach, protected at the end by a jutting-out cliff which the boys called the ‘Tarpeian Rock’. Behind the house rose the dry downs, scattered with the white skeletons of gum trees, killed by the strong salt winds, a hideous arboreal graveyard. The north wind now blew over the brown paddocks like the blast from an oven. It flung itself at the brilliant green sea, flecking it with white spray as dazzling as fire.

  ‘What a place to choose for a holiday!’ thought Tony, who preferred the cool mountain glades of Macedon and Olinda. He did not know how vividly this harsh and wistful landscape was to remain photographed in his mind all the days of his life. As he opened the churchyard gate he heard the nasal voices of the choir strained to reach the high notes of ‘Join the triumph of the skies’, and although he had only once been to England, and never at Christmas-time, this shrill noise, rising thinly to the high and blazing sky, struck him as a travesty of Christmas celebration, as fantastic and remote from its original meaning as in an opposite direction Catholic rites had become in countries where they were encrusted in local superstitions . . .

  Lucinda Brayford, Penguin, London, 1954

  E. J. Brady

  1911

  There are joys in camp life that no city will ever know.

  You awaken in the morning refreshed and hungry. You slip down to the river in your pyjamas, and peel off, and plunge into water that has not come from a reservoir through miles of heated piping and hydraulic pumps. You do your breast-strokes and over-arm strokes as if you were after the Royal Humane Society’s medal, and you climb out on to the bank dripping like a retriever, and half dry yourself, and get into your clothes with the appetite of a savage urging breakfast.

  Your black billy tea and fried steak will not give you indigestion, nor will your pipe of post-prandial tobacco affect your nerves. The blood courses through your veins – good, red, life-blood, wherein the white corpuscles do not dominate.

  To Halifax with the towns! Avaunt effete civilisation! Pity the poor merchant going tiredly towards his office! Sorrow for the bank clerk at his stool!

  All living Nature pulses, throbs, respirates freely around you. Every breath you inhale is a joy, a pleasure, a draught of wine with no headache in the heel of the goblet.

  Slip cartridges into the breech of your shotgun! Adjust the reel of your fishing rod! Australia is a good country, and you are free to roam without fear of gamekeepers . . .

  The night air was thick with dust and heavy with the smell of sheep. This odor seems to cling permanently in the wool districts, especially in drought times. One breathes and eats and has one’s hourly being in an atmosphere of sheep. The water tastes of sheep, the food has a sheepy flavor, the conversation is nearly all sheep. One goes to sleep at night counting imaginary sheep leaping a mental stile, and wakes in the morning to a breakfast of fried mutton. The plains are dotted with woolly bodies, the bridges are always blocked with them. You drive through compact mobs of jumbucks on the roads—the inevitable sheep-dogs in attendance; you see them bogged along the river banks, and embedded in the waterholes; you find strips of wool on the thorn bushes and barbed-wire fences; bales of wool on the teams, on the trucks, on the barges. You come on shearing-sheds, resounding with the voice of labor; and you pass sheds standing quietly waiting for the opening of the season. Squatters, stationhands, selectors, shearers, and rouseabouts talk sheep to one another from different social standpoints, and the whole Cosmos is wrapped in a fleecy veil of greasy wool, which prevents one getting a proper perspective of politics or philosophy or the ordinary affairs of life.

  Steadily the steamer pounds her way upstream. The wood sparks pour out of her low funnel. The trees on either bank, lit up by the headlights, come greenly out of shadow, and go back into shadow in her wake.

  The cool, clear night air is good to breathe; the stars overhead, in a sky of darkest blue velvet, are good to see.

  All around lie the great impressive Australian plains, whitened by the moonlight. The saltbush gleams like frosted sliver – the moon upon the saltbush is worth a lover of the beautiful travelling many miles to see. The frogs are croaking in the lignum swamps. From the lower decks comes a murmur of voices. Somewhere below a deck hand is playing the concertina. Anon a hoarse whistle is heard, and another steamer comes into view around the bend, salutes with her siren, and passes on into the night.

  River Rovers, George Robertson and Company, Sydney, 1911

  George Brown (Bruni)

  1904

  We arrive therefore at the conclusion that the merino breed is of ancient and pure blood, and consequently powerful by its homogeneity. I know of no equal to it in this respect but the Arab breed of horses. What proves this purity, this power, this antiquity is that the merino breed preserves its characteristics under the most diverse conditions of climate and mode of culture; in Sweden as in New Holland, at the Cape of Hope as in North America, in the sheepfold as in transhumania. It has lived through the most troublous times in the history of Spain without suffering alteration. It has been preserved alike under the intelligent treatment of the Arabs as under the Visigoths, when of all branches of agriculture, the rearing of sheep was the most neglected.

  How a Continent Created a Nation, Libby Robin, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2007

  Mary Bundock

  1850s

  He went up the river in search of dry open country, described by Edward Ogilvie. One afternoon he rode over the low gap to the lovely Wyangarie Plain. He thought it the most beautiful spot he had ever seen, a smooth open plain with one clump of heavy timber and two or three small lagoons sparkling in the sun and backed by a panorama of mountains at varying distance and the river fringed with a scrub making a
sweep round the back of the plain and holding in its curve a low wooded hill that my father instantly decided should be the site of his future home.

  He moved his sheep up to these drier plains and living in a sort of tent made from bark and his men in another, went to work energetically to build a wool shed ready for the shearing which had to be done shortly.

  The whole country was covered by a thick crop of Kangaroo Grass, then in seed, and looking like a crop of Oats, beautiful to look at but very easy to get alight and not easy to put out so that a few weeks later, soon after the woolshed had been finished, a fire started and the whole thing burnt to the ground . . .

  In my childhood we were quite away by ourselves in the bush, never seeing any other children and playing very happily at games of our own invention and as we grew old enough. riding about and fishing in the many creeks and the river.

  The constant demand for water from both house and huts was a great tax on bullocks and drivers. So, in fine weather the women generally set up a pot beside the river and washed their clothes in the running water, spreading them to dry on the grassy banks. The Upper Richmond was then a beautiful stream of clear water, running over clean sand and pebbles, an ideal of beauty and purity not to be surpassed anywhere, with steeply shelving banks either of clean grass or shaded by beautiful trees of many kinds, one of the most beautiful being the Moreton Bay Chestnut with its deep glossy leaves in spring, its clusters of red and yellow blossom and later the big green pods, which we children spent many hours sailing as boats on the river . . .

  The term “Scrub” for the great forests, which, in the early days, covered the banks of the Richmond, Tweed and Brunswick Rivers and which stretched back unbroken over the ranges to the top of the McPherson range, was a decided misnomer and gives no idea of the beauty of what was really a semi-tropical jungle. It was a mass of splendid trees, running up to 60 feet without a branch before forming a head and growing so closely that the sunshine was completely cut off. In some districts there was a great undergrowth of creepers and vines, especially the notorious “Lawyer Vine”. . .