The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  A year or so earlier, Turnbull’s son Roger had been investigated for clearing on his property ‘Talmoi’. Inspections were made; a minor breach was found; a caution was issued. The experienced officers who delivered it expected some appreciation for the reasonable response, but were left shaken when Roger allegedly reacted with fury. Then in March 2011, someone tipped Turner off about clearing on another of Roger’s properties, ‘Roydon’. Turner had a look and arranged orders for Roger to do remediation there. A penalty notice came through for Roger in December 2011, along with the news that his relatives were buying the Scotts’ blocks and had already asked about clearing them.

  The legislation that Turner was being called on to enforce was contentious. In 2003, several state agencies, including the Environment Protection Authority, the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and Resource NSW, had been merged in a supersized ministerial department: the Department of Environment and Conservation. The Native Vegetation Act 2003 heroically pulled all forms of native vegetation clearing under one framework, and forbade it unless in accordance with development approval or a regional agreement on management, to be decided by local committees. Building on the Native Vegetation Conservation Act 1997 introduced by premier Bob Carr, it was a huge flip in paradigm. From 1995 on, trees over ten years old could not be removed from private land (with certain exemptions).

  The Act was supposed to be firm but fair, yet instantly the topic glowed red with dispute. Farmers used to hacking back woody vegetation and out-of-control scrub now felt they were being told that it should all be cherished and guarded. The counterargument – that scrub was regrowth, no matter its age – began to cement. To adherents of this position, ‘illegal clearing is not degradation, it is restoration’, as historian Cameron Muir paraphrases it. Ian Turnbull was firmly in this camp.

  In retrospect, supporters of the 2003 Act concede that it wasn’t well explained, and the motives for preserving the native vegetation weren’t presented. Ecological literacy, they acknowledge, can be the difference between seeing scrub as a messy impediment or appreciating its complex ecology and its role in sustainability. Instead, discussion on the issue often got waylaid by the idea that the heroic pioneer bashing the bush had been committing a crime, which seemed uncomfortably close to the so-called ‘black armband’ view of colonial history that still rankles conservatives.

  Many also felt that a bit of bush was valuable, keeping the wind off or giving shade, but when it began to sprawl across good arable land, it had to be pushed back. Farmers complained, in a persistent misunderstanding, that under the new laws they weren’t even allowed to clear invasive weeds, but must watch them storm the land unrestrained. The system of prohibition on clearing certain types of plants was effective, but seemed harsh to farmers used to making their own evaluations, and some grew expert in exploiting loopholes – for example, preserving trees but digging up grasslands.

  Compliance officers such as Turner enforced penalties, but it was so difficult to prove native versus invasive species of grassland that his busy office soon gave up attempting many prosecutions; for other offences, the fines were so small that they didn’t balance against the massive profits to be had from developing good cropping country. An offence under the Act also had a statutory limitation of only two years – even if there were compliance officers and ecologists to conduct an investigation, some had to lapse without prosecution. Some farmers waited it out: simply didn’t turn up to interviews with compliance staff, or burned evidence. There were cases where farmers were aggressive, threatening, uncooperative.

  Meanwhile, for all the frustrations and imperfections, the Act held, albeit with occasional revisions. By 2012, Turnbull and his family would come to know it very well.

  TURNBULL DIDN’T TALK TO Doug or Bill Scott about his plans for the blocks before the sale went through at the end of January 2012. The trust was implicit: they all used the same agent, and Turnbull’s lawyer, Roger Butler, was one of the trustee owners of the property, along with Bill Scott. The brothers were even allowed to stay on in the homestead on ‘Strathdoon’, their niece in the cottage. The place had been poorly managed, degraded. But the properties were bought on the condition, the old men believed, that their legacy would be upheld: there would be no clearing.

  Turnbull had already leased some of the cleared bits of ‘Strathdoon’ from the Scotts the previous year, and Grant had done the same on ‘Colorado’ next door. Now he had his grandson, whose middle name was Ian, on the land too. The pressure was on, and those forgotten old blocks were in their last summer mornings of peace.

  The Turnbulls got the paperwork started. Cory submitted a property vegetation plan to the CMA and applied for approval to clear, on the grounds that the vegetation on ‘Strathdoon’ was regrowth, and therefore expendable. He didn’t realise the application couldn’t be granted until the contracts were actually exchanged. While it was still under consideration, and with the contracts awaiting signature, Turnbull moved the dozers in.

  It’s true that ‘regrowth’ under the law technically means only what’s regrown since 1990 – earlier than that and they call it ‘remnant’. But old Turnbull, overseeing the work, didn’t bother with that kind of pedantry. When the OEH got him in for an interview a few months later, he told them regrowth is anything that’s come back after clearing: ‘After the ground was settled … I say regrowth is what – it’s regrown since the land was originally settled.’ The blocks had been occupied since 1857, said Turnbull, and overstocked; all the native grass had been eaten out long ago. What was there now was just growth after spring rain. Grant’s ‘Colorado’ next door was all native vegetation – limebush and belah and brigalow, a kind Turnbull called ‘boonery’: big trees, maybe a hundred years old. But then some of it had been ploughed before, so he was only doing what others had done in their turn. He’d never had to deal with permissions before, he insisted, and he’d had twelve properties in his time; and Roger Butler, trustee part-owner of ‘Colorado’ (then ‘Lochiel’), had an Order of Australia. He hadn’t told them they couldn’t go ahead. Though it’s doubtful Butler had knowledge of Turnbull’s plans.

  The Scotts weren’t so happy. As soon as the clearing started, there was mess on the blocks, and the old men irritably began burning the dried stacks to clear things up.

  The Turnbulls seemed surprised when the EPA began to get involved. Many in the community were watching. Some were likewise doing profitable conversion with old grazing blocks; some of those were doing it illegally. They saw Turnbull bring in dozers on blocks known for their protected species: what would happen?

  A woman called Alaine Anderson lived next door to ‘Strathdoon’ with her husband, Lionel. They had crops too, but they liked to replant trees, and Alaine was mad about koalas. She wasn’t from the area originally, but that didn’t make her afraid to voice her opinions. She had stood up in the Croppa Creek hall, in that talk about koala protection that Turnbull attended, and told the locals what to do. Even lectured them all in church about looking after nature. She had maps, she said, showing the koala habitat shrinking to almost nothing. Every now and then someone would pull out her letterbox or put drill bits in her tyres, show her how it went. The Turnbulls mostly ignored her. But when some anonymous person sent a letter saying the Turnbulls had a reputation for illegal clearing and the EPA sent someone out to have a bit of a poke around, perhaps they suspected Alaine.

  The way the EPA (and later the OEH, once it took over such matters) found its targets was a process of elimination. Satellite images of vegetation cover were run through comparison software to identify tens of thousands of anomalies. These were then whittled down: those caused by fire, permitted cases and so on. Just a few thousand unexplainable instances were sent to each regional office: the office in Tamworth received about 2500 a year. A fraction of these were selected for investigation, based on scale and severity. A former head of the EPA, and Turner’s boss there, Simon Smith, explained how the huge potential workload was borne. ‘I�
��d say, how do we break this down to something we can deal with? So we’d put a risk assessment on it.’ Looking for systemic issues, problem owners or likely candidates for illegal conversion, they’d winnow drastically. In 2014–15, for example – the year of Turner’s death – there were 465 complaints listed in the OEH’s public report. Though most of those cases were later found to be lawful, they all required examination. ‘One officer can only do two, three cases, maximum.’ There were, Smith said, usually two or three compliance officers in his division, and about twenty-four across the whole state, and some of them had other responsibilities as well. About fifty priority cases statewide would be chosen and more fully investigated, Smith explained, and of them, about ten would make it to court.

  ‘And in among that fifty,’ Smith said with a sigh, ‘was Ian Turnbull. And it just so happened Glen was assigned to see what was happening.’

  IN FEBRUARY 2012, ON a warm, blue afternoon, Glen Turner visited the two blocks with Stephen Beaman and Chris Nadolny. Turner and Beaman were compliance officers; Nadolny was the ecologist who, should the case proceed to court, could present information about the impact of the clearing on plants and animals.

  The three men turned off the highway and entered the landscape of wide, cropped fields and roadside scrub. They parked first on the corner of County Boundary Road and Talga Lane, where there was some phone signal. Turner out got his phone and strolled away from the car, peering through the trees into Grant’s ‘Colorado’.

  ‘Cory,’ he said, when his call was answered. ‘This is Glen Turner of the Office of Environment and Heritage.’

  The agencies were about to be restructured; the new title was still unfamiliar on his lips. The situation was familiar, though, after years of driving out to properties, greeting wary landholders and establishing the authority of the state agency. For Turner, this was a precautionary routine expedition, likely resolved with a chat in a paddock and a note in his files to keep an eye on developments.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘I’d like to enter the property “Strathdoon”. I understand you have an interest in that property.’

  Cory said the gate was locked. That wasn’t usual practice in the country. Turner raised his eyebrows at the others watching from the car. ‘Cory, I have legal power of entry. How do I arrange access?’

  ‘I’ll have to ring one of the blokes,’ the young man said. He sounded nervous. Five minutes later, Turner called him back. He should ring Ian Turnbull, Cory said, and gave him the number.

  Turner called Turnbull. He said later he couldn’t remember the exact details of the conversation, but it was cordial. Turnbull said they’d been clearing lime bush and small brigalow. He was in Moree for the day, but Turner was welcome to go in and have a look. The gate wasn’t locked after all.

  The old Scott brothers were on site, near the ‘Strathdoon’ farmhouse. The inspectors introduced themselves and surveyed the clearing. Doug Scott was setting fire to a heap of scrub, drinking a beer. The old man watched Nadolny woozily as he jotted down details in a notebook.

  No one answered when they tried the cottage further away on the property, but two dozers and a front-end loader were parked nearby. Turner photographed them. Nadolny, a small, neat man with short-shorn grey hair and bright, thoughtful eyes, walked around, head down, crouching to finger a bit of crushed groundcover. It was a bare piece of land, cleared half a kilometre in either direction. The only trees were near the fence and the building.

  ‘What do you think?’ Turner asked.

  ‘It’s predominantly native,’ Nadolny said.

  They spent the next hour photographing and making notes on the felled vegetation. Then they left, and went to Moree for a meal and sleep.

  When Turner and his colleagues returned the next morning, one of the dozers was growling as it crunched fallen trees and shrubs into stacks. The ground was grooved raw with tracks. Turner waved for the driver to stop. The man wouldn’t give his name or address, but he wore an orange shirt with Ivan stitched on it.

  ‘Who owns the dozer?’

  ‘Ian Turnbull,’ the man said reluctantly. He was a solid, square figure with a large head covered in thick white hair. Turner jotted a note in his book.

  ‘You blokes know the law inside out,’ Ivan said suddenly, ‘and I don’t know anything.’

  ‘Do you know about the Native Vegetation Act?’ Turner asked.

  The answer was no.

  Then Turnbull turned up. A tall man, still handsome, hair still thick. He had a nose rough from sun damage, old man’s bushy eyebrows. He explained that he was the financial backer. Cory wouldn’t be available to answer questions. They’d had advice from the local Catchment Management Authority, he said, and they were only clearing regrowth anyway.

  Nadolny suggested that it was native groundcover; Turnbull said it was just native grasses coming back after destocking and some rain. They were restoring the country, really: that scrub had gotten out of hand, and the grazing hadn’t helped. A bit of cross-ploughing and letting the leaf mulch onto the soil would get the nutrients going. They weren’t going to clear it all, of course: they were leaving trees down in the gully for the koalas, and those along the fencelines.

  Turner said he’d need to be interviewed. Turnbull replied coolly it would have to be through his lawyer. Turner didn’t record his response.

  After they left Turnbull, the men went on to ‘Colorado’. Trees had been felled: bimble box, whitewood, belah, rosewood. There were blade marks from the dozers on the trunks. The officers saw piles of ashes where stacks had burned. Turner took photos and location readings, recorded detail in his notebook, collected vegetation samples.

  Nadolny voiced it: some of the clearing was not just native, but of an endangered ecological community. After felling the trees, the farmers would plough, and the groundcover, and the potential for the brigalow to regenerate, would be gone. This was significant vegetation; time was of the essence. The work must be halted to allow for an investigation.

  Back at Tamworth, Glen Turner entered Simon Smith’s office and shut the door. It was the worst possible moment for an urgent, decisive intervention. The agency was in the midst of having enforcement of native vegetation laws removed from its remit and transferred to the Office of Environment and Heritage, which did important work in protecting state resources, but had absolutely no familiarity with enforcing environmental regulation. National parks officers and ecology researchers did not, some had already made clear, have an appetite for confrontation. And Smith, experienced and confident, was about to leave his position as head of operations. Turner’s step sideways into the OEH would be on his own.

  The pair talked for two hours, wrestling with options. Smith proposed issuing a rare stop-work order. Turner could see pros and cons. He’d have accepted another option, Smith recalls, but agreed it might work. Smith hastened to the director and deputy director of the OEH and argued hard. ‘I had to do a lot of talking. I couldn’t in all conscience leave this thing unanswered, leave the degree – the wilfulness – of the clearing.’ He knew Turner would be left to enforce the order. ‘Glen had all the information, we had all the documents there, we’d documented everything. I just hoped that the OEH coming in would pick up the responsibility and run with it.’

  He got the stop-work order approved about twenty-four hours before his position ceased to exist. ‘I knew I was being provocative,’ he concedes. ‘I lit the fuse and I threw it over the fence.’

  LAND CLEARING IS THE watershed issue for tensions between farmers and environmental agencies. Nothing stokes feelings quite like it. It goes directly to the questions of ownership raised by Locke, Paine and Rousseau. It relates to what we deem shared heritage; to the concept of a common wealth that spreads across private property, despite fences, and down through time; to the dilemma between maintaining land and working it; to the choice between a legacy for your children or the survival of ancient ecologies. It goes to possession and entitlement. When land is cleared, f
ractures erupt. When land is cleared, agreements explode.

  As much as ethics or practicalities, farmers are influenced, like everyone, by their social landscape. What’re the neighbours getting away with? Should I have a go? Will someone else do it if I don’t? A landscape with a bulldozer on it is an incandescent stage for these questions.

  But what influences one farmer to smash down trees and another to hesitate? Those who study such matters identify the anthropocentric, who see nature as there to be used, and the balanced or ecological, who regard it as inherently valuable and under threat from human activity.

  There are many farmers of the ecological type in the northwest of New South Wales. There are also a proportion who might be called ‘developers’, primarily interested in profit, with an anthropocentric, exploitative attitude to the land they buy, work and sell. They, too, respond to what they believe neighbours are doing: brusque clearing for broadacre conversion. Their transgressions don’t seem significant to them. Others are doing the same, or worse.

  It would be a narrative convenience if Ian Turnbull’s psychology was no more complex than that of an ordinary developer. But Simon Smith knew Turnbull in the early 1980s, when Smith was involved in the Soil Conservation Service. He remembers a surprisingly different character. ‘He was quite a progressive farmer. He was involved early on in picking up these conservation farming techniques. We had a group of “champions” happy to take people onto their property, show them what they were doing; he was someone I would have regarded as one of my champions in conservation farming techniques.’ Turnbull helped Smith form a Moree Conservation Farmers Association, promoting zero- and minimum-till methods, then believed to be the least destructive practice, and educating about the benefits of a healthy farm ecology. He was no radical – conservation farming is more technical than mystical – yet he comprehended the advantages of a more responsive agriculture, and led his peers into new territory.