The Bush Read online

  Jerseys are not nearly so common now, and Guernseys have gone the way of the horse-drawn plough. Both breeds have been replaced by Friesians (also called Holsteins), big black and white beasts that produce great quantities of relatively low-fat milk. Jerseys and Guernseys used to graze the hillsides in herds of thirty or forty; today’s herds of several hundred Friesians with their great tumid udders, docked tails and loose bowels are to those earlier scenes what a poultry farm is to a few hens scratching in the orchard. While the 650-kilogram Friesians produce about 25 per cent more milk than the 450-kilogram Jerseys, they consume much more water and fodder and produce far more methane in doing it. A North American study of 13 000 dairy herds discovered that it would take 19 per cent less Jersey milk to produce half a million tonnes of cheddar cheese, and the Jerseys’ carbon footprint would be 20 per cent smaller: put another way, replacing all the Friesians in those herds with Jerseys would be equivalent to removing 443 900 cars from North American roads. Now we read in the farming journals that some farmers are going back to Jerseys. City folk are not the only citizens at the mercy of fashion, or whatever passes for commercial or scientific wisdom. Fads come and go among farmers, too. Twenty years ago they all cut off their cows’ tails, but the latest thing is to leave them attached.

  One evening early in the 1960s two men arrived at our place with fingerlings of European carp – ‘a delicacy in France’, they said, and a great fighting fish. We bought them and, as instructed, put them in a couple of the dams. They grew fat, they churned the dams into soup; when hooked they fought like a football sock might fight and when cooked their soggy flesh tasted of little except mud. And, if not from our dams then from others, they escaped into the streams and became one of Australia’s great destructive pests. Tens of millions of them, 80–90 per cent of the total fish population, have infested the waterways of the Murray-Darling Basin, undermining banks, thoroughly outbreeding the native fish, muddying the water and damaging aquatic plant life. Anglers despise them and leave them to rot on the riverbanks.

  The history of Australian agricultural enterprise has always been, among other things, a story of mistakes: false understanding, false assumptions and false conclusions. You learn as you go, or you learn from what others have learned, or believe they have learned. In the absence of scientific knowledge, most farmers have made do with intuition or imagination, including, on occasion, faith in an omniscient God and visions of reward both spiritual and temporal. A thousand cases go to show that, along with droughts, floods, pestilence and unspecified misfortune, the Australian cocky has to number himself among his most persistent and destructive enemies.

  Necessity has forced the farmers’ hands very often. Markets have forced them. But so have phantoms – perceived necessities, bad science and no science, habit, prejudice, fashion. Around the time that great-grandfather of mine arrived in the bush with a few pages of animal remedies to guide him, the first farmers in the Mildura and Renmark irrigation colonies were given, with their 32-hectare (horticultural) or 64-hectare (agricultural) blocks, a copy of Settlers Handbook: eighty pages, leather-bound, 76 x 38 millimetres. Written by George H. Tolley, a licensed surveyor, the handbook contained everything new settlers needed to know: what tools to buy and how much to pay for them; the cost of seeds, wire, staples and labour; what vegetables to plant and when; how to calculate the capacity of tanks and excavations, how much water His Majesty had granted to the licensees, and how to learn the ‘art’ of using it. Irrigation was, as Tolley said, an essential art, for ‘[m]any rare plants have been destroyed, and well-meaning persons disappointed by a non-observance of or misapplication of the simplest laws of nature’. He hit on the truth, and with surprising force: ‘Do not try to wash all the fertility out of the ground . . . by irrigating with a stream sufficient to run a mill.’ But in the space of half a century the watering arts he recommended, together with the clearing of the mallee and bluebush, and tilling the soil to a depth of 35 centimetres, created a full-blown crisis of the environment.

  It was a rude surprise when twenty years ago city workers, retirees and dropouts harbouring a few goats and donkeys began moving into the old selection districts; the more so when in their dress, habits and general understanding they chose to imitate not the third or fourth generation of farmers, but the first – as if Dad Rudd or Jubilation T. Cornpone knew something that a century of science and experience failed to teach. None of us would have believed that farms made useful and productive by the sweat of our fathers’ and mothers’ brows would fall into the hands of people for whom farming was no more than a hobby. And that hobby farmers and real farmers alike would come to insist that they lived, not in the country, but in the bush – this was unthinkable.

  It might turn out that the great forests of Gippsland were cleared for the benefit of no more than a couple of generations. The labour of the first generation was for the benefit of the second, and the second laboured just as hard for the third – mine. Mine and the next one enjoyed the benefits. But those 60-hectare farms carved out of a virgin forest and rendered productive by prodigious labour now sell with their houses for about half the price of a renovated worker’s cottage in Melbourne’s inner suburbs, or a fraction of many executive annual salaries, and often that price is only possible if the land is subdivided into ‘lifestyle’ blocks. There are few takers for farmland. There are not enough farmers.

  Despite everything, the real farmers retain the posture of their forefathers. They might drink shiraz with their lamb chops, spend the evening in a recliner in front of a television, and make use of a flush toilet, but they are not like other Australians. In farmers there are certain unalterable mental threads. They are primary producers: the very term implies that they are indispensable. They are producers. Their produce is primary. They are first among producers. They are of the line that goes back to Genesis. Coalmining, banking, hairdressing, being a lawyer, plumber or barista – no other line of work has this promise of divine approval.

  There has always been more than a material ambition to be satisfied, more than independence: there is something in common with the incorrigible urge of the explorers, men like Stuart and Leichhardt and Giles who persisted, despite everything. If this in part explains their claim on the national imagination and identity, it might also be why, when the banks become their master, or markets fail them, or for whatever reason they are beaten, the defeat drains the meaning from their existence. Behind the laconic lurks the morbid. The bush is a home for martyrs. The room to move, the physicality of the life, the seasonal patterns of existence and the contest with nature attract them as a thornbill is attracted to nectar. It is a primitive, visceral addiction. It satisfies something ancient in their makeup. If suicide is more common among male farmers, it might be at least in part because failure means these needs are no longer satisfied, and that is unbearable.

  Television came to the country and tended to confirm the old perspectives with scenes of urban self-indulgence, crime, tomfoolery and sloth, and advertising that assumed a stream of ready cash, leisure and services which most rural folk did not enjoy. Of course, the farmers suburbanised their lives and joined the general addictions to celebrity, game shows, sitcoms and police dramas. The grandmother who sat in the potato paddock while the bushfires raged about her and got around for more than half her years in a horse-drawn vehicle was, in later life, devoted to Graham Kennedy and never missed an episode of Naked City. Her husband may have slept through most of this, but it was in a chair facing the same way as hers, towards the little TV in the corner. All over rural Australia, no less than in the suburbs, the chairs and sofas and pouffes were turned to face the idiot box and they have never been turned back. Country people bought the same cars and the same clothes lines as suburban people, and the same carpets, curtains, kitchenware, laminex and, once the power was on, fluorescent light fittings. The outward distinctions blurred.

  But people who went on the land still made themselves the centre of life’s drama, the undisp
uted subjects. The drama begins with someone alone in nature. In time there will be a couple, family, a community, but the original objective – to be masterless – remains the defining, heroic value of rural life. Farmers might sleep on electric blankets, but when they go out the door they face nature directly – the mud or the dust, the blazing heat or the flying rain, the good season or the bad – and they do whatever has to be done according to their best judgement. In their eyes they still live as men and women are meant to live and, they might say, as Australians are meant to live – hard up against the elements, conquering the continent. More than their hats and moleskins and lopsided gaits, the interior silence of their days still sets them apart, confirms them in their creed, sets it in stone. They are special and their case is just, and they are doomed to always deserve more than they are given.

  What is the Bush?

  silence and melancholy – seeing the bush – the spongy earth – the mongrelised and multitudinous bush – Indigenous farmers and their cosmos – the pastoral scourge – frontier thinking – Major Mitchell and the Aborigines

  I grew up in what people now call the bush, but I was in my twenties before I saw what we took the bush to be. It was then that I began fishing in the streams of the Great Dividing Range – the Big River, the Thomson and Macalister, the Yarrangobilly, Goodradigbee, Murrumbidgee and the Thredbo. I had to go camping to hear what my ancestors had heard in the mornings: the cacophony when every bird seems determined to tell all the others that it has survived the night. I saw my first lyrebird this way, first bowerbird and whipbird, first wombat and first dingo. It was the first time I heard the silence creep over the land as the day got older, and the first and only time I was chased by a tiger snake. Frank Moorhouse swears he has often camped in bush where no European, and possibly no human being, has ever been before. I can’t say that I have done this, but I have been at least to places where the bush feels as it might have felt to an intruder three hundred or three thousand years ago. It was on these camps that I was taken in by the bush, and realised that its magnetic charms constitute the rarest of all the privileges that living on this continent bestows.

  The Australian bush is both real and imaginary. Real, in that it grows in various unmistakable bush-like ways, and dies, rots, burns and grows into the bush again; real, in harbouring life. Imaginary, in that among the life it harbours is the life of the Australian mind. It is, by many accounts, the source of the nation’s idea of itself. The bush is everything from a gum tree to any of the creatures that live in it or shelter beneath it, and it is the womb and inspiration of the national character. It is the smell of eucalyptus leaves, long shards of bark waiting for a fire, the din of galahs, the cawing of crows. And invincible silence. It is the blue horizon, the ute trailing a cloud of dust, the silo, the saleyard, the drover’s wife. It is an uneducated cow cocky, and a private-school laird with a law degree. It is each dawn heralded by the insane laughter of a kookaburra or the warble of a magpie; and the inspiration for literature, philosophy and art – and also, some will declare, an impediment to all of those. The bush is a social construct as well as an ecological one: as much as the things that grow and live there, we define it by the people who inhabit it.

  Around 1900, at which time the legend of the bush was largely written and the national romance was most intense, a new settler in the south-west of Western Australia wrote home about ‘the dullness of the bush’. Perhaps he had not yet seen it in spring when the wattle and wildflowers were out, or was looking for something familiar and couldn’t see beyond his memory of Ireland. After clambering about in it for a year or two, the romantic Polish wanderer Paul Strzelecki saw ‘ever-changing colour’, ‘delicate and minute strains of verdure’.

  Once you begin to see them, even the most sombre and dispiriting scrub never stops revealing subtle colours, in the flowers, barks, leaves and lichens. In the trunk of a manna gum there is cream, yellow, grey-brown, tan and brilliant white: set its pale elegance against the sky and watch its limbs sway and leaves glimmer as they catch the sun. Look at a salmon gum or gimlet, ‘burnished like the flanks of a racehorse’ (as George Seddon says); stand in a karri forest when the sun is low, and colour and light seem to explode through the canopy as if through the windows of a cathedral.

  Take red. Much of the continent is red: red rocks, red soil, red dust, the Red Centre. But long before you reach the dry inland, or the Kimberley, there is red in the forests and woodlands. It is the inside colour of the bush. The ‘gum’ of gum trees is generally red. The coppery-red gimlets (Eucalyptus salubris) of Western Australia and many other species ooze red gum as if from stigmata. Sometimes when you split stringybark it pours out like blood from a severed artery. It was for this gum that the first Europeans to see them called them gum trees. The heartwood of many common species is red: the ironbarks (E. sideroxylon, E. tricarpa, E. crebra and E. fibrosa), the regal red box (E. polyanthemos); the magnificent eucalypts of Western Australia’s south-west, the jarrahs (E. marginata), karris (E. diversicolor) and red tingles (E. jacksonii); and the mighty red cedar (Toona ciliata) of the north-east coast. There are the red stringybarks and red mallees (E. macrorhyncha and E. socialis), red ash (Alphitonia excelsa), red morrels (E. longicornis), red gums, (E. camaldulensis) and salmon gums (E. salmonophloia). And there is E. (now Corymbia) ficifolia the flowering red gum native to south-west Western Australia which has attracted gardeners and urban planners all over the country, and the coppery red of ‘gum tips’ which colour the upper canopy of the bush in spring and turn up in domestic floral arrangements. Of course, the bush can look – and feel – as dull as the Irish settler and a million others said. There are days when the sun’s glare washes out the colour, and the life with it, and days when cloud does. Light decides it. The bush is a medium for light. The effects on our senses are unpredictable, subtly mutable, aleatory. Light rules.

  It was the silence that struck the Irishman most of all, ‘the sombre hues and the silence’. The silence can depress and unsettle a sound mind. In all kinds of bush, including the most open kind, and when the sun is relentless, it is easy to get the feeling that all around something is holding its breath, feigning death. Terror is ‘the ruling principle of the sublime’. That spooky silence is elemental. Where did Ludwig Leichhardt go if not into the silence? The Aborigines use this silence in their singing: they break it with their voices or by beating the ground or tools or sticks together. The ‘silence is part of the song’, Barry Hill wrote; it is ‘an expression of the song’s meaning’.

  To take a random selection from the writings of various sojourners: the bush is ‘dismal and repellent’, the scene of ‘extraordinary monotony’, of ‘awesome stillness’, ‘dreary-dark’, ‘unrelieved ugliness’, ‘sere woodlands and sad wildernesses’, ‘treeless loneliness’, an ‘interminable forest of dull, dead green’. It was ‘spooky like’, an old shepherd said. ‘Words fail for painting the loneliness’ of it, Rosa Praed wrote about outback Queensland. She was native-born and hardy as they come, but she still found the bush forbidding. Around Bathurst it was ‘wretched’, the young Charles Darwin said.

  The bush was this dread place and yet also a ‘perfect paradise’, ‘Eden in her earliest hour’, Major Thomas Livingston Mitchell reported from the fringes of the much-loathed brigalow scrub in Queensland. The bush was the ‘most beautiful’ and the ‘handsomest’ country a lot of people reckoned they ever saw. The judgement depended not only on the part of the country, but what part of the part, and on the time of the year, whether it was in drought or after rain, whether Europeans and their animals had yet arrived. And it depended on the eyes that saw it: Rachel Henning hated it the first time and fell in love with it when she returned. In Tasmania, Louisa Anne Meredith, though inclined to the ‘dreary and monotonous’ view, grew a passion for the local blue gums. Patrick White abandoned the bush for twenty years and returned to rediscover the colours, the silence, even the boredom in the landscape that had ‘always made a background to [his] life
’. The explorer John Oxley groaned as he journeyed through it, while on most days his companion, the botanist Allan Cunningham, saw something exquisite or wonderful, be it a towering bluff or the blue and yellow of the dianella’s exquisite little flower. It depended on whether one felt at home in the bush or rattled by the hardness of it, and the ‘weird melancholy’. As he travelled across the continent with Ludwig Leichhardt, William Phillips, a convict, dealt with that melancholy by planting lilies in front of his tent.

  The landscapes of the late-nineteenth-century Australian ‘impressionist’ painters, washed out by dry grasses, clayey soils – the ‘full white daylight’, in one settler’s words – are the bush. So is the sight, rare now but still common in the mid-nineteenth-century landscape, of the darker tones of kangaroo grass (Themeda triandra) growing in spongy soils. Mary Ann Longford remembered riding near Narrandera in the 1850s or ’60s when ‘the ground was very porous and open, as this was before the sheep had trodden a hard surface. If you rode under the trees, the horses would sink up to their fetlocks in the spongy earth. The grass was coarser and tussocky too, and usually grew very high.’ E. M. Curr, a squatter, traveller and first-rate observer, recalled that in ‘the greater part of Australia . . . grass originally grew in large tussocks, standing from two to twenty feet [apart]’. It made crossing the country in a dogcart a very jarring, not to say hazardous, experience.