by Kate Holden
Croppa Creek and nearby small towns Warialda and Pallamallawa form a triangle on basaltic soil between the Gwydir and Macintyre rivers, which run roughly east–west before curling around to the south; Croppa Creek itself cuts diagonally across, meeting up with sister creeks in a skein of precious wet in the mostly flat expanse west of the Divide. To the southwest of Croppa is Moree, a town of over 7000 people; Warialda, once the district centre but now much shrunken, lies to the southeast.
This is country just sufficiently close from the arid inland, just soaked enough with rain, just mineral-rich enough from millions of years of basalt ground to powder, that from the moment an escaped convict reported its riches, men were drawn here to make wealth.
It is good grazing land, because the self-mulching soils can’t be easily destroyed by hooves. Cattle grew fat and happy here. But grains and cotton make more money. Now it’s one of the most intensively farmed, broadacre-cropped, wealth-producing areas of the continent. It’s one of the most transformed landscapes of the nation, and its colour is no longer khaki green but gleaming gold.
In A Million Wild Acres, his landmark book about the history and ecology of the adjacent Pilliga region, historian and farmer Eric Rolls describes the country beautifully: ‘The plains are like flat, black ocean. In the marvellous mirages of hot summers, they often look like true ocean, a surging blue which indistinctly joins the sky. There is nothing else to be seen. Even the trees are drowned in blue light.’ This is a land of thin waving stems, of brushed silken fields smooth as Persian carpet. The thin strips of travelling stock routes, still shaded by eucalypts, box, belah and acacia, seem eccentrically messy in comparison. But that scrub is the last of a type of dry rainforest millennia old.
Moree is wealthy, not just a rural hub but a destination, home to artesian baths and a multimillion-dollar aquatic centre. Eastern European migrants incongruously pilgrimage here annually to take the waters. It is also a town of stock agents and silos: the sight that greets those who arrive by road is yards of gleaming new John Deere tractors, ranged by the dozen with their shining green snouts, announcing Moree’s practice and its pride. The Moree Plains Shire produces a yearly average of a million tonnes of wheat, worth about $180 million, and many of the wealthy families of the district consider themselves patrician, the makers of the country. Even the footpaths of the town are silky granite. In rain they become slippery. It doesn’t rain that much in Moree anymore, however.
The Moree Tourism website puts it sweetly: ‘At different times of the year, the wide plains of the Moree district are a natural tapestry as the beautiful differing colours of the bounteous crops flood the land.’ One commodity the shire has in abundance is sunshine. About ten kilometres out of Moree, a company called Fotowatio Renewable Ventures runs one of the largest photovoltaic solar plants in Australia. The plains are changing in more ways than one.
But in the summer of 2016–17 Moree had a heatwave that broke all records. It equalled its hottest day ever recorded: 47.3 degrees. And it had fifty-four straight days from December to February in which the temperature rose over 35 degrees. The previous record, back in 1912, was twenty-one days.
There is no shade and less rain because the trees are gone. Once, there were grassy woodlands. Then there was a broad clot of scrub, thick with koalas, wild pigs and prickly pear. That has been vigorously cleared in the past fifty years. Now the land is naked.
JUST A FEW HOURS’ drive southwest from Moree is Cuddie Springs, where stone tools place First Nations peoples there between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. The original inhabitants of what would later be Moree Plains Shire had thousands of years of experience in that landscape. They saw it dry and moisten. They probably witnessed megafauna grazing on its plains, stepping through the forests. They walked every centimetre of that land. They knew it; they changed it.
The Aboriginal peoples in the northern part of the district are Bigumbul/Kamilaroi, and to the south, Weraerai. The area is strewn with what’s left of their traditional meeting and sacred sites: a grand bora circle at Terry Hie Hie, more at Northcote, Boobera Lagoon, Berrigal Creek and others. And in Boobera Lagoon, the Rainbow Serpent, Garriya itself, is believed to rest.
Most of the people of the plains were ‘disposed of in one determined engagement’, according to Eric Rolls, when a massed group of warriors challenged the stockmen on a property near Borambil, an hour south of what is now Tamworth, in 1827 or 1828; almost all of the young men died on one day. Those who weren’t killed in frontier violence were captured and put on missions, and their descendants have shared scantily in the wealth of the country since.
In the course of millennia, the land consumed the traces of those humans who first stepped so lightly on its surface. That self-mulching soil, says a heritage survey report, has devoured their footprints. What was left has been scraped away by demolition, neglect, ploughing and laser levelling for irrigation. The bora trees were knocked down, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes not.
The old Scott brothers’ ancestor came out, like many other Celts, in the 1840s, and settled near Moree in the 1870s. The family took up land, stocked it with 100,000 sheep and built a large homestead. They poisoned dingos, felled trees, dug dams, put in wells and fences. The history books don’t mention what happened to the local Kamilaroi. The property shrank, but two small blocks survived in their hands until 2011: ‘Strathdoon’ and ‘Lochiel’.
Ian Turnbull was born in Moree in November 1934. It was the year of a grasshopper plague so bad the insects ate the clothes off the washing line, the blinds off the windows; they shaded the very sun, so the trains halted on the track. Dust storms came booming over from the inland, bringing smothering gloom and clogging vehicle engines, stripping the landscape to the west and obscuring this one. They were caused by erosion, due to farming and pests, such as rabbits and grasshoppers. The legacy of pastoral experimentation was already flailing.
This was the Depression era, when men would come by looking for work and a feed, tearing cooked meat off the bone like dogs. The week Turnbull was born, there was a storm on the Thursday night and heavy black clouds on Friday morning. Those grasshoppers were soon to hatch and, with the oppressive weather and farmers under strain, buyers had to sign a pledge that poison would be applied only to the insects and not used for murder. There were warnings for anthrax, galvanised burr. On ‘Strathdoon’, the Scott brothers’ father was penalised for not killing enough rabbits. A compliance officer came to inspect the block and fined its owner for running an environmental hazard: anyone who owned Australian land was expected to kill wildlife, put up fences and ringbark trees. You were letting the community down if you did not, and the law would make sure you knew it.
Mostly settlers just grazed the country, letting the cattle roam wild in the scrub and pear, bashing it back where they could for roads, settlements and, later, fences, but unable to clear it. This was until ball-and-chain clearing and the cactoblastis moth came along. ‘The way was now open for the development of the famous Pallamallawa wheat belt,’ a Croppa Creek town history states proudly. ‘Development has been most spectacular.’
Long-time resident Robeena Turnbull contributed to that history. ‘My happy childhood was spent at “Lima”,’ she wrote. ‘When Dad bought the property in 1931, he camped in the woolshed until the house was built.’ Croppa Creek barely existed when Robeena was born. It formed within what was once a run called Bogamildi, which at its prime covered over 220,000 acres, right on the richest little wedge of agricultural country on the continent, the heart of the black-soil plains.
It was a world marked by distances. Local church services were held under a tree, the minister doing the rounds on a buggy. A man called Jacob Haddad came around once a month in a truck stocked with hosiery, boots, sewing supplies and fabric. Kids, a working part of the farming life, were sent off after school to infect prickly pear with cactoblastis moth larvae and chase wild pigs through the scrub on horseback. Landowners grew wealthy on vast properties, farmers struggle
d on small plots, and bitter power wars between nineteenth-century squattocracy and selectors continued to play out even as a gravel road was put in and Moree built a fine art-deco cinema for the first talkies. By the 1940s Croppa had houses and a railway line. Drays carted wool to town in handsewn bags that were stocked in great towers. But works on the line were lit by slush lamp – a dish of tallow with a string, as basic and rustic as in the 1790s.
‘The phone was connected in 1952,’ Robeena recalled. It was only a line with twelve parties; anyone could pick up a receiver and listen in. ‘We drove into Moree every six weeks for groceries and business which was an all-day affair. My brother Ran and I, being the eldest, used to sit in the back of the 30 cwt. Oldsmobile truck rugged up in blankets.’ The winter roads would stick any cart to a stop. For weeks it was impossible to get supplies from Moree. It might have been any time in the previous century. ‘Often a storm had been across the road while we had been in town and we would end up bogged, mostly on the road near the place “Yambin”.’ She could not know then that the property would one day be her home with Turnbull, the scene of his midnight arrest, police in the garden alert for resistance, headlights trained on the front door.
In the mid-1950s Ran, then in his twenties, began to farm ‘Leyland’, in the Gwydir Shire near the village of North Star, with support from his father, Les. Ran got help to build a wool shed from a trainee carpenter, Ian Turnbull. The two young men built the shed, and a cottage next door. They got on well. Turnbull – who had a little block himself, out near Inverell – married Robeena a few years later. Ran, content to live and work on ‘Leyland’, began to love his small patch of land. He studied it deeply and understood it to be a gift from God, to be managed in a responsible, nurturing way to the best of his ability. But Turnbull, with his father-in-law’s encouragement and a bit of his money, began to buy, clear and sell land.
‘Now in 1987,’ Robeena wrote comfortably in the local history, ‘Ian and I have been married for twenty-eight years, during which time we have raised four sons, Douglas, Roger, Grant and Sam. We have two daughters-in-law and two grandsons, Cory and Nathan.’ More descendants would yet be born.
Steadily moving through the decades, Croppa Creek has remained a small, close world. Its proud little primary school still has only a handful of students. The silos, gleaming beacons, rise above the town; inside lie the billions of grains of the people’s prosperity. This is l’Australie profonde, its mythic colours of gold and green, its timeless ways, its small gods. It was country destined for wheat from the first hopes and plans of the colony, but the endless burnished plains of the Golden Triangle have been a while in the making.
THE WEALTH OF THE Moree plains links, unexpectedly, to the musings of white-wigged political philosophers hundreds of years earlier, and their considerations on property ownership and the land. Distant and abstruse though they seem, the ideas of these European and American men directly inform modern Australia, are sensed deeply in its rural communities and were present at the gate of ‘Strathdoon’ when Ian Turnbull explained to Glen Turner and Chris Nadolny why he had to develop his property. They contour the motivations for this tragedy: why a man like Turnbull could feel such a grip of ownership on land he has fashioned and profited from, whose boundaries he’s marked and title he holds, and how a government compliance officer like Glen Turner is charged with reminding him of the responsibilities of that creed.
English philosopher John Locke, writing in the 1690s, was a defining character in this paradigm. Earlier thinkers had posited that God bestowed country; occupation of land implied property, albeit contingent on divine will. Locke adjusted this concept: it was the application of action that conferred a moral right of property. His Two Treatises of Government proposed a logic of ownership which begins with the principle that each man (it was always men) owns his own body and his body’s labour. Nature is a ‘negative commons’, a world that exists for all, and when the person applies his labour, the ground on which he does so becomes his.
Unowned land, or terra nullius, as it became known, was a ‘land of an equal richness lying waste in common’. And if land was virtually unlimited – as seemed the case with the endlessly extending Americas of Locke’s day – what could be the injustice in using, and so claiming, it? ‘Nobody could think himself injured,’ Locke wrote, ‘by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst. And the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.’
A century later, and only six years after the First Fleet ‘discovered’ another apparently endless continent, American revolutionary philosopher Thomas Paine riposted that property ownership was in effect theft: it deprived the many of their natural inheritance of God’s bounty. ‘[T]he earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race,’ he wrote, presaging the concept of shared human stewardship. ‘Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made,’ he agreed, but he insisted only the improvement itself and its profits, not ever the land, could belong to an individual. By taking both profit and property, the landed, entitled gentry had inflicted ‘a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before’.
The only redress, Paine insisted, was a property tax, which would redistribute some of the unjustly coveted benefits gained from appropriating the commons. ‘I care not how affluent some may be,’ he explained, ‘provided that none be miserable in consequence of it.’
In the years between Locke and Paine, Genevan thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau had also proposed a communal concept of property. A civil society, Rousseau thought, existed to protect property rights but curb excessive private property ownership, and to support a shared commons. In The Social Contract (1762), he wrote of a fundamental compact between a man and his society. The right of an individual ‘is always subordinate to the right which the community has over all’. Any natural right to own property was on the condition of taking part in civil society, not using it to abuse privilege.
The differences between Locke’s concept of ownership and that of Rousseau and Paine are crucial. The first invites an understanding of land as an opportunity for seizure and personal advantage. Today we see Lockean ideas in neoliberalism. The strongest, the first, the most vigorous or powerful take the spoils. Once seized, it is theirs. Anyone who wants something of it will have to pay. Rousseau and Paine agree with Locke that action – the labour involved in improvement of land – is fundamental to the legitimate ownership of property. But land is finite, so possession by one entails denial to another. The landholder only profits from cultivation – any farmer, for example, is the owner of his products but not of the earth that made them. If an occupier takes too much from the land, he must compensate the people. This is a horizontal perspective, looking outwards to fellow humans, aware of our shared interests, respectful of our temporary presence on the planet. Action is taken and improvements are made with consideration of their cost. In place of the Lockean pyramid whose summit becomes a fortification, there may be – there was – a village.
The Enlightenment took inspiration from both Locke and Rousseau, but Locke’s formulas were immensely influential in shaping the Western view of nature. By the time of Australia’s settling, the ineluctable mark of a British citizen was land ownership. It enfranchised him, gave him rights, offered access to authority: he could complain, have restitution, be compensated. Suffrage was only granted to British men with some kind of property entitlement. This excluded about 60 per cent of them, both natives in the old world and free white men in the new.
Land – elemental, foundational – was the desperately prized asset in a new colony. Without it, a man was only an object.
So imagine the feelings of modest people, rural or urban, unskilled or former farmers, who a generation before might have shared pasture but had, since the devastating Clearances in Scotland and the Enclosures of th
e commons in England over the previous century, been evicted from even that small subsistence. Or those who had never even seen a field or a forest, and were told of boundless land for the taking: thirty, forty, fifty acres, apparently empty of competition, ripe for God’s work of improvement. It must have seemed breathtaking. Families could feed themselves. Clans would restore, dynasties be nourished. A man might make a name for himself. He could pass something on to his children, and he could mind his own affairs.
Two hundred years later, it is likely that Ian Turnbull, looking to cultivate the last of the black soil on the Scott brothers’ old blocks, felt much the same way.
2
The good folk say the drought is sent By heavenly power as punishment — As punishment to work us woe For crimes that we have done below —
— Francis Humphris Brown, Songs of the Plains: The River and The Road, 1934
The dark green of the brigalow at Croppa Creek had been stared at by the descendants of settlers for nearly two centuries before Ian Turnbull’s family took possession of some of the last fragments. The township lies at the dwindling tail of the Brigalow Belt, what remains of perhaps 9 million hectares at colonisation, which now extends inland along the Queensland coast from Townsville to mid-New South Wales, covering slightly less than the entire area of Tasmania. The Belt widens, is winched small and fragments as it comes south. The brigalow remnants around Moree and Croppa Creek are some of the largest – and most unprotected – in the nation.
Brigalow, Acacia harpohylla, is a tough, ancient plant. First named scientifically in 1864 by Baron von Mueller, the tree is a legume, which produces a phyllode – that is, the enlarged stalk of the leaf forms crescent-shaped, flat blades.