The Bush Read online

  Soil and climate determined vegetation in pre-European Australia, and both being variable, so was the vegetation. The bush is any one of many different kinds of forest, scrub, woodland, savannah, rangeland, grassland and desert, made up of countless species in countless combinations of shape, colour, light and atmosphere so ephemeral and various that, unable to cope with them, our collective imagination has rendered all as bush, and often reduced it to a river red gum combined with a flock of sheep.

  Collapsing into a single word or image tropical rainforest and mulga, and all the ecosystems in between, is a natural enough convenience, but the bush describes much more than vegetation and its native creatures. It is not just the tree but the sheep beneath it. The bush is a paddock full of sheep grazing on Italian ryegrass and English clover. It is cattle descended from Hereford, Angus, Holstein and India, feeding sometimes on native grasses and sometimes on exotic buffel and running wild not only with the native marsupials, but with goats, dromedaries, pigs, buffalo, rabbits, hares, horses, cats and toads – none of them indigenous to Australia, but now highly adapted and so familiar (and useful as food) that Indigenous people have accorded them a spiritual provenance and a legitimate place in country. The bush is the twitter and tinkle of wrens and fantails and the sound of a truckload of calves on the way to oblivion. It has equal measures of what was there before Europeans came and what is there now. It is what we have done to the natural environment and what it has done to us. The world outside us and the world within. Wilderness, home and garden. Temple, nursery and slaughterhouse.

  The bush is where some Australians live and where others will never go. It is stiff, tremulous Theodora Goodman in Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story sitting among the docks and flying ants under the old apricot tree at the homestead which was her ‘bones and breath’, and Stan Parker in The Tree of Man on his knees pressing cabbage seedlings into the soil of his clearing, trying to make his life ‘purposeful’. The bush is a blockie on twelve irrigated hectares, and a ringer tailing cattle on a station the size of Belgium. It is the most rugged example of rugged individualism, and the most protected of protected industries.

  In a great many bush lives, rhododendrons and roses are as familiar as gum trees and more admired; the smell of cypresses as common as eucalyptus and as much enjoyed. ‘Australians,’ Lucy Gray observed in Queensland around 1868, ‘don’t seem to care for any place that is quite wild and uncultivated, they prefer trim well-kept gardens, and open country without many hills or trees.’ It is not a forest or a river red gum that recurs in my dreams, but the big pine at the front of our old house; the primary symbol in my subconscious is not Eucalyptus camaldulensis but Pinus radiata, native to California and a naturalised environmental weed in Australia. And after the pine tree, probably it was the claret ash, and the other pine at the back of the house, then the rhododendrons – and only then, maybe, the blue gums lonely and stranded in the ryegrass, waiting to be blown down or struck by lightning in the front paddock. The bush, for European Australians at least, has always been multicultural, not only in the planting of species from every other continent, but in the naming of native species. The most ‘iconic’ of Australian trees, the river red gum, got its name from a garden in Italy, L’Hortus Camaldulensis di Napoli.

  Bush people chose to mongrelise the bush. Pepper trees from South America, broom from South Africa; the brother of the Scottish explorer Angus McMillan brought cuttings from willows planted on St Helena by his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, and they and their numerous offspring have been ever since choking the creek in South Gippsland by which he stuck them. For obvious economic reasons settlers chose cows and clover over wallabies and bracken; for equally compelling psychological and aesthetic reasons they chose azaleas and weigelas over grevilleas and correas. There are more so-called native gardens now (and more fanatical nativists) but whatever the people who plant them may imagine themselves to be, they have no greater claim on the bush than a woman growing roses in a garden backing onto the Murrumbidgee.

  The bush being so many different things, to speak of it as one place is a heroic assumption, as it is for modern folk to call themselves ‘bushies’, or for anyone to claim to speak on its behalf, or to maintain that it can be represented by anything they choose to call an icon, be it an old Southern Cross windmill or the Member for Capricornia’s hat. In the modern sense the bush means everything and therefore almost nothing. It is nine-tenths nonsense. As it did in the beginning, the looseness of the term speaks not only for the difficulty of defining something so various and changeable, but for the way the landscape often overwhelmed both our ability and our desire to understand.

  The first couple of generations of settlers used a number of generally imprecise and overlapping terms to differentiate one kind of bush from another. Often they called open woodlands ‘forest’; what we mean by scrub they called ‘brush’, and dense forests ‘thick brush’ or ‘fastnesses’. The towering rainforest of the Northern Rivers of New South Wales was the ‘Big Scrub’, and expanses of low mallee and brigalow woodlands were also ‘scrub’, which is surely more than the word can encompass. With good reason, Lucy Gray wrote that she ‘imagined “bush” meant scrub’ – the two were often interchangeable in common speech – but outside Townsville in 1868, she saw that what was called ‘“bush” was a forest of tall trees, without undergrowth, chiefly gums, but others with delicate feathery foliage, mixed with palms’.

  To the extent that the bush means to us what was here before we ‘civilised’ it, the first bush myth is the bush itself. Call it bush or scrub, brush or forest, Lucy Gray and her contemporaries were looking at landscapes that to greater and lesser degrees were different to those seen by later generations. European clearing and burning of forests, mallee and scrubs of whatever variety, and intensive grazing and agriculture on grasslands and woodlands, moved soils and vegetation around, put paid to ancient ecosystems and forever changed the look of the land.

  Much of the bush before Europeans was not, as in general we’ve believed, an untouched and ‘neglected’ or ‘pristine’ wilderness, but a landscape wrought to the cultural design of the Indigenous people. It was always half on fire. Fire made it and in doing so disposed it to burning. For several million years lightning amply satisfied that need, until the Aborigines arrived and in time made fire a way of life. Surveying the coasts of Australia in the 1830s, it seemed to John Lort Stokes that in the hands of Aborigines fire seemed ‘almost to change its nature, acquiring as it were, complete docility’. Burning was inseparable from Aboriginal culture and belief, a keystone of law and ceremony. That was why, among the many descriptions written by settlers that conform to the stereotypes of a terra nullius and virgin wilderness and ‘monotonous’, ‘melancholy’ and ‘miserable’ country, we find numerous references to a landscape that in its open orderliness and beauty looked like a ‘gentleman’s park’, an ‘English park’, a French park, ‘an immense park’, ‘one stupendous park’: places so much like European parks it was easy to think that some vanished civilisation had made them.These parks had ‘meadows’, some of 4000 hectares, ‘waving with . . . grass’, ‘velvet like grass’; parks that looked like a field of corn; were ‘decked with flowers’, and ‘trees standing in picturesque groups to ornament the landscape’. The park-like aspect of the landscape was Australia’s ‘most characteristic feature’, one settler said. In fact, after ‘bush’ and ‘scrub’, ‘park’ was the word newcomers most commonly used to describe the countryside.

  The Aborigines who made these parks also made wells for people and dams for animals shaded by shrubbery and ‘apparently by art’. They had well-worn paths. They had ‘villages’ of stone or timber huts, ‘winter wurlies . . . built with mud in the shape of a large beehive’, as J. M.Stuart found near Lake Torrens. Mitchell saw them on the boundless plains of Queensland’s central-west that became the Mitchell Grass Downs: in the midst of grass thick and high enough to hide a horse from view were ‘[w]ell beaten paths, and large permanent
huts’.

  At Port Phillip in 1835 John Batman saw land as rich as he ever saw in his life, ‘thinly timbered . . . but thickly covered with . . . grass 3 and 4 feet high’. In 1828 William Sharland looked upon a valley in south-west Tasmania with ‘all the appearance, at a distance, of undergoing all the various processes of agriculture, – some parts (the most recently burnt) looking like freshly ploughed fields; and again, other parts possessing the most beautiful verdure from the sprouting of young grasses and rushes’. The Tasmanians had burned just before snow: there, and all over the mainland, settlers and explorers observed how, to contain their fires and to bring on new growth, the Aborigines also burned before rain, which in some parts of the continent at least was forecast by the behaviour of ants. Far from south-west Tasmania, north of Port Hedland in Western Australia the explorer Frank Gregory reported that Aborigines had taken advantage of dew. They burned to encourage growth and they burned to flush out game. ‘Systematic’ was Ludwig Leichhardt’s word for it – ‘systematic management’. We might almost say scientific, if it were possible to show that Aborigines understood the scientific reasons why their burning kept the ecology healthy, and why, when Europeans either ceased burning or burned in the hottest and driest time of the year, it was as they predicted: forests and woodlands died from parasite attack, and what had been grasslands and ‘parks’ became impenetrable scrub.

  Mitchell saw such clear evidence of deliberate and effective burning he was prepared to use a word almost always denied the Aborigines – the word work. In western Queensland he wrote: ‘How natural must be the aversion of the natives to the intrusion of another race of men with cattle: people who recognise no right in the Aborigines to either the grass they have thus worked from infancy, nor to the kangaroos they have hunted with their fathers.’

  Contemporary science indicates that it was only in the relatively recent past that Aboriginal burning became a systemic part of the culture. The record shows no increase in burning with Aboriginal colonisation, but some from about 5000 years ago. As the biologist Tim Low points out, today in the northern savannahs some ‘Aboriginal’ burning carried out according to ill-understood traditions on lands no longer used in traditional ways is destroying mammal and bird populations. But wherever it is cool-burned by Aboriginal people who know what they are doing, the tropical savannah of northern Australia is like a botanic garden tended in accordance with an abiding aesthetic sense, while the unburned parts are a tangle, a ‘wilderness’ created by European intervention.

  In Victoria, by the end of the nineteenth century firestick farming had become as much a habit of graziers as it had been of the local Aborigines, and some of the same reasons were offered for it: regular burning kept the woodland open for sheep and cattle, encouraged the grasses and edible plants to grow. The graziers did two things differently: often they burned intense rather than cool fires, and they burned forests that the Aborigines did not. In doing this they radically altered the environment and increased the risk and frequency of wildfire: the monster fires of 1898 and 1939 were caused by the burning practices of farmers and foresters. They had ‘minds opposed to timber’, a witness at the 1939 Black Friday Royal Commission said. The same mentality that regarded wholesale clearing and burning as essential ‘improvements’ guaranteed soil erosion, silted waterways and invasive weeds.

  The Australian bush is thus made of the effort to create and the effort to destroy. When people speak of Aborigines ‘living in harmony’ with their environment they mean these two forces were in some way reconciled. Like the birds of the air, they neither sowed nor reaped, and had neither ‘storehouse nor barn, and God feedeth them’ – but God fed them only after their considerable manipulation of the land by elaborate and strict regimes of conservation, by substantial and ingenious building of weirs, fish traps, canals and aqueducts, by various forms of cultivation, planting, gardening and harvesting, and by relying on a storehouse of knowledge about the behaviour and properties of plants and animals. They lived in harmony with the environment, but only after bending it to suit their purposes. It seems very likely that soon after their arrival on the continent their hunting and burning wiped out the megafauna. The loss of the megafauna changed the ecology, the nature and appearance of the land; the burning, over thousands of years, went on changing it.

  A few years ago a friend of mine, an anthropologist and biologist, came across a number of rock paintings on land belonging to a Yolngu clan with whose members he had worked for many years. When he asked the most senior man why in all the years they had spent together he had never mentioned these paintings, the man replied: What paintings? He knew the country in astonishing detail, but he denied these paintings existed. He denied them even when my friend took him there and showed them to him. (I’ve seen them. They’re plain as day.) Pushed further, the elder dismissed them as ‘nothing’. No one had painted them. If they were there, they were ‘in the rock’, he said. It seems certain that the paintings were done by people of a different culture in an earlier era. But having no place in the sacralised landscape of the people who have lived on that land for at least the past 5000 years, they did not exist – could not exist. Among other things, the story seems to show that in the Aboriginal bush the visible world was inseparable from invisible meanings. Because they had no meaning the paintings were not visible – not, at least, as paintings.

  Indigenous knowledge of the natural environment was intimate and immense. The survival of Aboriginal civilisation through millennia is proof not only of a powerful and comprehensive system of belief, but of an adaptable one. Yet rich and brilliant as this knowledge was and is, the story of the invisible paintings could be taken to illustrate how much more their understanding of the country owes to religion than it does to anything resembling science; how their knowledge of the environment – taken as the embodiment of an ancestral drama – is in essence an ingenious construction of the imagination and offers only an illusion of understanding and control. The environmental chaos wrought in the two centuries of white-settler occupation testifies not only to their equally profound ignorance of the scientific reality, but to a cosmology uncoupled from the land.

  ‘Equilibrium ennobled is “abidingness”’, wrote the anthropologist, W. E. H. Stanner of the Dreaming. It might be too big a stretch to equate the ecological implications of the Dreaming with the principle concepts of deep ecology or the Gaia hypothesis, which holds that earth (if it is to abide for much longer) should be understood as a single, self-regulating organism. Yet it is true that, for both propositions, nature tends towards an uncanny equilibrium, or the ‘preservation of balance’, and they are not necessarily less credible or less useful for being more like guides to living than verifiable theories. In any event, the success of the Aborigines’ relationship with the bush over many thousands of years does make a Gaia-like case for the wisdom of joining intense observation of the natural world to a philosophy – especially one that sets humanity in nature, not above it.

  While droving cattle from Sydney to Adelaide in about 1847, Thomas O’Shaughnessy and his father, a ticket-of-leave convict, came upon a young man living among the reed beds along the Lachlan River, just north of its junction with the Murrumbidgee. He ‘had a few cows’ and ‘was living in a reed gunyah’. The meeting, which O’Shaughnessy recorded in his journal, would be of no interest were it not that the man, also the son of a convict – his mother had been transported for theft – was James Tyson.

  Within a decade of this brief encounter, James Tyson was rich from a slaughter-yard he set up on the Bendigo goldfields. When he died, fifty years after O’Shaughnessy saw him by the Lachlan, he was running cattle and sheep numbering in the millions on land holdings that stretched from north Queensland to Gippsland, and he was very rich indeed. He was also famous, not only as Australia’s first self-made millionaire, but as a politician and social benefactor. More than famous: upon his death, Banjo Paterson wrote a poem about him, as if he belonged in the pantheon that housed Mulga Bi
ll, the Jolly Swagman and Clancy of the Overflow.

  There was Tyson, the monotheist in the bulrushes with his invisible God and the ibis, blue-billed ducks, herons, egrets and cows. The polytheists, animists, totemists, ‘equilibrists’ – the Aborigines – were all but done for. What the historian James Boyce said of Tasmania is also true of the mainland: that ‘[f]ar from historians exaggerating the suffering caused by British settlement . . . the truth of the crimes committed is still to be faced’. When O’Shaughnessy’s party reached Mt Dispersion on the Murray (so named by Major Mitchell after he ‘dispersed’ the blacks in 1836), the Aborigines would carry their things across the river in their canoes and accept a couple of slaughtered bullocks in return. The ‘not to be trusted’ wild blacks further down at Rufus River would soon have the wildness blasted out of them; and at a station a little further still, the drovers saw a swivel gun mounted on a stump that, as they understood it, the owners had been forced to use on troublesome natives. Their hunting grounds would be taken up by sheep, their fish traps removed to make way for wool-laden paddle-steamers; the ‘ricks and haycocks’ Mitchell saw stretching for miles along the Darling would fade from sight and memory like the native millet (Panicum) they were made of. In a very short time, in keeping with the pastoral and agricultural economy it supported, the overland route from Sydney to Adelaide would be the songline of the monotheists, and all the Aborigines would be mendicants, waiting at the slaughter-yards for sheep’s heads and plucks to roast on their fires, and at the missions for blankets and blessings.

  As the frontier spread north and west, the myths of European religion replaced the myths of the Aborigines, and in places destitute of European religion, bush religion replaced them. Rapid though it was, this was no easy transition. The Aborigines got by far the worst of it, but violence was done on both sides. For a while, as the semi-nomadic Aborigines were increasingly forced to become sedentary, the invading Europeans became semi-nomadic, as the characters of the Old Testament were and as Tyson was in the swamp. They wandered with their cattle and sheep, the lamb of God and the lamb of wool, chops and tallow – the one to be cherished for His offerings of love and salvation, the other for shearing, eating and boiling down. New civilisation, new talismans, new ambivalences. And with their millions of sheep, cattle and horses, new smells: from the living with their dung and sweat, from the dead dissolving in the vats or rotting on the ground.