The Bush Read online

  I can recover the smell of our cowyard with ease, and the sheep yards and hay and silage, soil and superphosphate, though it is forty years since I smelt them. But the masses of animals sent for boiling down, in works that dotted the pastoral landscape like a kind of animal gulag, made a stench of a different order. The idea appears to have come from Russia. There was little science to it: the men took their heavy hammers into a yard, knocked the animals on the head, bled them into a trough and threw the carcasses into the boiling vat, from which the fat was run off into barrels. Each man could do about 130 sheep a day. Cattle, being a little harder to brain and whose bodies needed hacking into pieces, took a good deal longer. Years later, to the satisfaction of those who thought the original method wasteful, a new process turned the beasts into ‘extract of beef’ (or mutton – or horse, presumably), as well as tallow.

  In the dry heat of South Australia the smell of the boiling works was too much for one gentleman, who complained to the resident Government Officer that his children were sick from it and he’d been forced to remove his family from its vicinity. The smell in the humid subtropics was likely worse. Rosa Praed wrote of the boilers’ ‘foul smell . . . when the wind set towards the humpey at Naraigin station’. Here and in many other places the smell was probably worse for being associated with hardship and failure: scab, drought, depression and mortgages. Towards the end of the century the Rockhampton works was turning 100 000 animals into tallow each year. ‘I will boil down fifteen hundred wethers and as many cattle as I can find fat enough, as a sop to the bank,’ Mrs Praed’s ‘disappointed pioneer’ says. Much that happened in the bush after Europeans came, including the smell of it, can be traced to an ‘indissoluble and particularly pleasing union’ between the imperial banks and Australian squatters that emerged in the 1830s, thence to the rate of interest.

  James Tyson turned a vast portion of ‘idle’ bush into a productive cattle run. Having learned a lot about the land from them, he turned many hunter-gatherers into stockmen and domestic servants. He turned himself into a tycoon. He turned the bush into something else too. No animist could have done it, no nature-worshipper, not in the way he did it. According to his obituary, Tyson ‘made his millions honestly, at the expense of no-one but nature’. We can measure that expense in weeds, salinity and erosion west of the Divide; or in the extinction of species such as the paradise parrot, the loss of habitat for blue-billed ducks in the Great Carbung Swamp where he once lived in a gunyah, or in the massive blue-green algal bloom in the Murray near Mt Dispersion in the last big drought. The cost to nature is beyond measure. ‘Never see the river rippling under the big drooping trees, or the cattle coming down in the twilight to drink after the long hot day. Never, never more!’ Dick Marston laments from his cell as he awaits the gallows in Robbery Under Arms.

  But at least Dick saw that rippling river. Chances are that later generations saw a river twice as wide and not half as deep, eroded and clogged with silt, strangled by willows and weeds. As early as 1865 the rippling rivers of central Victoria were ‘fast becoming mere channels for the efflux of sludge and sand’. They are in a worse state now. Most Australians of the past century and a half have only known the bush when it was half dead, a shadow of itself. The philosopher John Passmore made his first trip from Sydney to Melbourne in 1936, and sixty years later recalled seeing through the train’s window the plains stretching to the Alps ‘littered with the white corpses of ring-barked gum trees’. For well over a century governments offered incentives to farmers and graziers for ‘the ringbarking of useless timbers’, and governments and big pastoral companies alike employed men, including ‘perfect armies of Chinese’, to do the job. ‘The invaders’, as one of Passmore’s great contemporaries said, ‘hated trees’.

  I remember seeing just what Passmore saw when we drove through East Gippsland in the 1950s: some of the deaths were due to ringbarking, some to dieback. And, in the same region, as a teenager I camped under the bridge at Stratford on the bank of the Avon River. The riverbed was 50 metres wide, but the stream was a series of pools at most 2 or 3 metres across and half a metre deep. The squatters had lived by a river not half as wide, but deep enough for steamers to sail up from the Gippsland Lakes, bringing them all they needed – servants, food, whisky, musical instruments, building materials – and taking out their wool and wheat. Less than fifty years of European occupation was all it took.

  The environmental misadventures of European settlement can always be offset by the good that came of the agricultural and pastoral use to which the land was put: the public and private wealth; the food, clothing and countless other useful products, and the countless good lives spent producing them; the towns and cities built upon the treasure – not only the grander rural cities, but the little towns with their bakeries and beauty salons and well-kept cemeteries honouring pioneers called Walter and Myrtle and their descendants Kayleigh and Shahnee. Way out on the margins of the West Australian wheatbelt, you’ll see the odd empty hut, perhaps just a shape in the dusk, and you can feel the loneliness steal under your skin. On the fringe of the road at the end of a sandy track creeping back through the scrub, you’ll see a sign warning you that children cross here – one child leading another by the hand – a familiar international sign, but out here something in you rattles when you see it. It’s sentimental of course, but sentimentality is a native of the bush. The town of Hyden rests in that West Australian scrub, stubble and gathering salt. The gravestones and the gimlet gums shine in the starlight of ravishing night skies, and in modest air-conditioned bungalows miles from anyone, men and women sigh and groan and laugh at the TV and bring each other bedtime tea and biscuits. As you enter the town a sign says: ‘Bush Living at its Best’, and who wants to argue with them.

  True, the loss of nature as religion, as a human cosmos, is an expense for which there is no apparent compensation, but Europeans long ago passed that up. In fact, insofar as all civilisations seem to sense some intolerable crime or violation in their genesis, and need myths to live with the knowledge, we might take the destruction of nature to be not only the material, but the inevitable psychological precondition of European civilisation in Australia. In the plainest terms, Australians would not be who they are – and would not know themselves – if they had not fought the war with nature. The same is true of the war fought with the Aborigines, even if we have been in denial about it for most of the time since the last shot was fired. It is not to say that Australia is the ‘vile hypocritical country’ the Congregationalist missionary Lancelot Threlkeld declared it to be after his experience of New South Wales in 1826, but whatever else we think of when we think of the bush, underneath it is always the land violated, and the Indigenous people too.

  But now, as when Tyson was in his prime, should anyone (including scientists) not resident in the bush since birth tell farmers that the expense to nature is too great, even for their own good, chances are they will be instantly written off as city ignoramuses untutored in the real ways of Australia’s natural world. The stand-off between book learning and bush lore likely began very soon after the first European pitched his tent out of sight of his associates and noticed a disjunction between what he was seeing with his own eyes and the received wisdom guiding the main party. The row is related to the elemental tension between freedom and authority. It also overlaps with nativist or anti-British sentiment, and even more so with the mixture of resentment and insecurity that the city has always incited in country people. Then there is that tendency handed down from the frontier to deplore abstract thought and deal only in concrete, useful, ‘provable’ things, such as an implement or drench, which (the city-based science that made it possible notwithstanding) they will take up with great zeal and declare indispensable to their existence.

  It is in large part through a fitful combination of these two world views – the vernacular and the Olympian – that the European bush has evolved. There was (and remains) a lot to observe, a lot to understand, and trial and error
was the inevitable way of things. Along with steady, sometimes near-miraculous progress, the record includes not only follies, but repeat offences and incalculable lost opportunities. The mistakes are so many and so devastating in their consequences we have to remind ourselves sometimes that the story overall is one of triumph: over formidable, indifferent, inscrutable nature; over all kinds of hardship, including the self-inflicted kind; over ignorance, fashion and dogma.

  The lost opportunities are harder to measure, and we can’t attempt it without second-guessing generations of men and women who had the courage to take on the bush. The anomalies are curious just the same: why, when superphosphate was developed in 1842 and within a decade widely used in England, did Australian farmers take sixty years to begin putting it on their chronically phosphorus-deficient soils? Why were they just as slow to lime them? Why so unwilling to fallow and conserve the soil? The answer might be found in a tendency to believe that new land was always better than any kind of artificially improved land. So long as land was plentiful and generally productive in the first years, farmers – and governments – did not count fertilising, crop rotation and fallowing as improvement. One agricultural historian calls it the ‘dominance of the frontier-farming mentality’: a preference for short-term viability and immediate profits over the conservative knowledge and traditions of British and European farming.

  It was an attitude common not just to colonial farmers and governments, but to the New World in general, and it owed a good deal to the metropolitan power’s economic needs. It also owed something to the reality that life can only be understood backwards, but on a frontier there is only forwards. Looking back, settlers saw the need to house their animals in winter, to grow lucerne or other legume crops for feed, to manure their fields. But looking around them they saw no need for such things. ‘All the natural grasses of the colony are sufficiently good and nutritious at all seasons of the year for the support of every description of stock, where there is an adequate tract of country for them to range over,’ the pastoralist and politician W. C. Wentworth declared.

  No doubt frontier thinking also brought a valuable measure of innovation and dynamism. It was a frontier after all, and it went with the frontier mentality to recognise that the old ways did not always apply to the new environment. Traditional farmers would have recoiled at the idea of leaving all those stumps and ringbarked trees to rot in the ground. They offended both the aesthetic of agriculture and the logic of the plough. But Australian farmers thought there were more urgent things to do than wrestle with dead trees. The danger lay in the tendency of local knowledge to become dogma, as rigid in its way as the traditional wisdom it was displacing. There are records to tell us the impressive story of rising pastoral and agricultural production from one year to the next, but none to say what the figures would have been with closer observation and more care and foresight, or how much greater again the net benefit to later generations if they had not been left to bear the cost of corrective measures.

  The bush is squatter, selector, soldier settler, closer settler, blockie, timber worker, tin miner, drover, drover’s wife, drover’s dog, poet, prophet, fettler and racehorse. It is rabbiter, herd tester, shepherd, swagman, bush lawyer, bush mechanic, bushranger, grape grower, grain grower, potato grower, Country Party and Country Women’s Association. Dozens of different bush occupations have come and gone as capital found new ways to produce more with less labour, markets rejected one thing and demanded another, and modernity advanced from the cities. For 150 years the people of the bush have been migrating to the suburbs.

  Aborigines, many of whom also moved to the cities, filled a lot of the ‘iconic’ bush occupations, though only rarely those involving ownership of land. ‘Be kind to the wild nigger if you want trouble, he takes kindness for fear all over Australia,’ wrote the bushman Arthur Ashwin. As the lesson was learned and the wild ones were ‘tamed’, Aborigines served as shepherds, drovers, domestic servants, police, guides, fruit pickers and farmhands. They worked at ringbarking and cutting down the bush in which they had until very recently lived, stewing it into eucalyptus oil, showing the way through it to detachments of native police pursuing ‘wild niggers’ and bushrangers, searching for lost white children in it, searching for dingo pups to destroy.

  They accompanied official exploring expeditions and unofficial pushes beyond the frontier led by hungry graziers and miners. They took intending squatters such as the Western District Manifolds to the places from which they would make fortunes, whereupon they were generally abandoned. The naturalist John Gould took Aboriginal ‘attendants’ with him and was ‘scarcely ever without a tribe or a portion of a tribe . . . when in their neighbourhood’. They taught him where to find and how to stalk birds and bats and all the other creatures he wanted to paint and stuff, often shot or caught them for him, and even showed him how they were able to follow a honey bee to the honey-filled hive by attaching to its legs ‘a small portion of the lightest down – that of the eagle in preference . . . twisted into two small points, like two minute feathers’.

  ‘[T]hey were just niggers, the boys shot at sight, the women used brutally,’ wrote the legendary journalist Ernestine Hill from the Kimberley in 1940. Hill was no bleeding heart: elsewhere in the same book she described the ‘recruitment’ (sometimes for flour and tobacco, sometimes by lassoing) of young Aborigines to the pearling boats on which most died within a couple of years; and a ‘masterpiece’ on the wall of a hotel which depicted a ‘bearded pioneer galloping across the landscape whirling his lasso’ at a fleeing ‘lubra’. These were scenes from thirty years earlier. ‘Desperate men and desperate days,’ she wrote. But now: ‘The man who persecutes or ill-feeds his blacks is a pariah among bushmen.’ Flogging was ‘prohibited, and unnecessary’. No bleeding heart, but a bush romantic and always happy to paint the scene – and over the history – in enchanted lights, Hill declared that when the bush ‘breathes the melancholy of its loneliness’, the whites and the previously ‘ferocious’ blacks are ‘too glad at the comradeship of each other to quarrel’.

  When Aborigines served Europeans they also served as evidence of their employers’ superiority. Regularly derided for a ‘persistent beggary’ that was alleged to be ‘natural’ to them, they were rarely paid enough to overcome the weakness. The northern cattle industry depended on Aboriginal labour for a century, as horsemen and domestic servants, and paid only rations or a fraction of white wages in return. It was ‘industry assistance without equal’. It was also a kind of casual slavery, unconsciously summed up both by Hill’s man with ‘his blacks’ and the 1950s song we all sang about letting our Abos go loose because they were no longer of use.

  No matter that the Aborigines were the real bush people: the ones who knew where the water was, how to find the food, what plants and seeds could be eaten and how to treat them, what remedies could be extracted from them, how to farm the bush with fire, how to get from A to B, where the signs were. They lived in what Stanner called ‘a mood of assent’ to all that the bush is and has ever been, moved ‘not in a landscape, but in a humanised realm saturated with significations’. The bush, including those vast parts of it consisting of nothing more than ‘quiet, unimpassioned repetitions’ that would ‘never give birth to a man of taste’, was their garden, their cosmos, their home. Their words for home and country (for which we can read bush) were the same.

  What better evidence of their unfitness? Home, even one of stringybark and wattle, or made in the hollow of a tree, is both of the bush and proof against it: in it, but keeping it out. The Aborigines were of the bush, certainly, and with exactly the same claim on it as the flora and fauna, because they did not keep it out or improve it any more than a kangaroo did. The bush most Europeans speak of is a European bush: though we speak of living in it, the bush exists outside of us, is for our use and, though we may feel some powerful effect from being in it, contains only that which we can see.

  Nowhere is this triumphalist – or solipsistic – vie
w more delicately expressed than in the 1846 journal of Major Mitchell. As his wagons lumbered across the plains of central-western Queensland, he found himself in tantalising proximity to the divine:

  [S]uch a sublime position seems almost attained by him who is the first permitted to traverse extensive portions of earth, as yet unoccupied by man; to witness in solitude and silence regions well adapted to his use, brings a man into more immediate converse with the Author both of his being, and of all other combinations of matter than any other imaginable position he can attain. With nothing but nature around him; his few wants supplied almost miraculously; living on from day to day, just as he falls in with water; his existence is felt to be in the hands of Providence alone.

  Mitchell knew better than most people of his time just how occupied the land was. On previous excursions he had fought battles with the occupiers, had had men killed, and killed several in return. He took a scientific and for the most part sympathetic interest in the Aborigines, and as often as he exercised his power to give every hill and watercourse a European name, he expressed a preference for retaining the Aborigines’. He might declare it all the handiwork of divine Providence – that was all but mandatory for nineteenth-century explorers – but elsewhere he recognised the extensive part the Aborigines had played in it. A generation after Mitchell, the squatter Edward Curr went so far as to say he doubted if ‘any section of the human race has exercised a greater influence on the physical condition of any large portion of the globe than the wandering savages of Australia’. A. W. Howitt reached a similar conclusion.