by Kate Holden
By the start of the twentieth century, after a centenary of occupation, ‘battling the land’ was a proxy for the traditional masculine challenges of hunting and warfare. An actual war, which was waged for 150 years and barely acknowledged, was subsumed by a ‘war’ on nature. If Indigenous people were mentioned, it was in connection to the settlers’ endurance, their suffering. The infamous capture of Eliza Fraser in Queensland and the killing of the Mawbey family in New South Wales encouraged an idea of settlers ‘under siege’. White Australians in the nineteenth century, says Curthoys, were able to acknowledge tensions and moral concerns about black–white relations. But as Australia entered a new mood of nation-building in the early twentieth, the idea of settler heroism soaked into Australian historiography. What W. E. H. Stanner famously called ‘the great Australian silence’ fell.
Understanding ressentiment, the perverse little psychological gambit identified by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, is fundamental to understanding Australia. Ressentiment is the twist by which inferiority or insecurity is not owned, but externalised to another, who is then called ‘inferior’. It allowed white Australia to compensate for its colonial sins by blaming its own victims.
Eventually, the trauma of repressing violence and culpability evaporates the capacity to empathise with others’ trauma. In Curthoys’ words, ‘[t]he self-chosen white victim finds it extremely difficult to recognise what he or she has done to others’.
Ross Gibson’s brief Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002) is a psychogeographical study of a stretch of roadway near Rockhampton and its dark histories. Examining photographs of late-nineteenth-century Queenslanders, he notices a pervasive cast. These men had done and seen terrible things, but although they kept silent about them, they couldn’t hide the evidence on their faces. ‘No matter how much self-conviction or arrogance sheened the faces, many of them were also taut with some deep stun of alienation and doubt,’ Gibson wrote.
A cast gets set on European visages that have worked too hard outdoors for too long. The mouth is a serrated horizon-line. Furrows mark a neck and jawline clamped to the rigours of adversity. Eyes are tarped with forbearance. When one encounters the face in bus stations and road-houses, it is usually not reading or talking. It is persisting, wasting no vigour, wisely, and keeping to itself whatever it knows. It’s the right kind of countenance for contemplating the brigalow, and it first took shape during the settlement years. It is in hundreds of photographs from the late-nineteenth century … No matter how fervidly they might have told themselves the land was there for the taking, many of these people knew in their souls that they were not getting anything for free.
There is another, particularly compelling photograph of Turnbull, taken the week he killed Glen Turner. It is his mugshot, grainy chiaroscuro in the blow-up included in the files of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. His hair is mussed, his mouth clamped, there are furrows on his nose and lines in his forehead. His eyes gaze out like black marbles, lids pinched a little as if looking into bright light. Turnbull wears no expression on his face but a composed steadiness. It is the face of someone who has acted, and has nothing more to say.
ONE OF THE MECHANISMS of ressentiment is that, in the deft sheeting of responsibility to another, it gives licence to shed inhibition, social norms or obedience to the law. The weaker the person feels, the less they can suppress their reaction. A person feeling vulnerable will speak bitterly. They will fixate on blaming another. They will imagine a system ranged against them. They will pause their vehicle on a winter road on the way to meet an unsuspecting, unarmed foe, and slowly get out their gun.
At some time that year, according to his son Roger, Ian Turnbull began talking of killing Glen Turner. Roger said his father would often complain to family, friends and even local shopkeepers. He might have spoken with a laugh, but he would say, ‘If I go to jail, I won’t be there long. I may as well take Glen Turner with me.’
6
We toiled and toiled clearing those four acres, where the haystacks are now standing, till every tree and sapling that had grown there was down. We thought then the worst was over – but how little we knew of clearing land!
—Steele Rudd, On Our Selection, 1899
‘Spirit of place’ and ‘place attachment’ – or eutierria, the neologism coined by Australian ecological philosopher Glenn Albrecht – all suggest the same basic thing: love and feeling for a place with which a human has a nourishing relationship. For Indigenous Australians, ‘country’ has manifold and profound associations with family, culture, mythos, support and responsibility: ‘my mother’, as poet Ali Cobby Eckermann puts it. For Australian descendants of European migrants and settlers, things are more complicated.
On her property outside Croppa Creek, Alaine Anderson is trying to explain her passion for the land. A trim, vigorous woman in her sixties, with fine blonde hair and a capacity to talk without pause for an hour, she is the first to concede it’s an instinct, not something easy to articulate. ‘I haven’t got an underpinning of science studies, I haven’t got that. The only thing I can say is that that we four girls were brought up in the real bush, on horseback. Dad would come home with a feather or a leaf and Mum would look it up. In most country areas, the people who have their roots in the country are instinctively caring of the environment. Because we know that if we look after nature, it will look after you.’
She mourns her children’s lack of connection to the country, living in a city. ‘They’re not connected to the land anymore. They don’t realise that my grandchildren would love to come home and feed the little wallabies. It is good for our souls. It is good for us. And it is very healing.’ She’d recently had a group of disabled young people come to touch the koalas in her care. ‘Nature,’ she says certainly, ‘is there for us to support us, make us happy, make us laugh, make us cry.’
In their work on farmers’ attitudes and values, researchers Nicole Graham and Robyn Bartel, like many before them, point out that place attachment fosters a healthy investment in those sites. People with strong place attachment feel protective of and connected to the wellbeing of a place. They may also, however, be parochial, resistant to change, NIMBYish, uncaring of the wider consequences of protecting their patch or devoted to the preservation of damaging practices. It might be observed that this can be said of traditional owners as much as treechange greenies or intransigent farmers, though the deeper that attachment to place, and the more comprehensive the understanding of its qualities, the more a wise and equable relationship is possible.
For non-Indigenous denizens of Australia, place attachment is often associated with private ownership. The pride of a suburban gardener is as keen as the rapture of a devoted bushwalker.
For farmers, the instinct is even sharper: property means privilege. That privilege, argue landholder rights groups to this day, bestows a special relationship to a piece of land. The famous multigenerational familiarity and expertise, pride and custodial sensibility of farmers is the return for decades of hard work. The land loves the hand that tills it. For many farming families, it is that sense of legacy and responsibility that forms their fierce attachment to place. To grow up, enter adulthood, work upon and pass on a single patch of land is a powerful experience few of us will know.
Landholder rights groups argue that freehold title, still a minority option in New South Wales despite the reforms of the Selection Acts, guarantees the best investment in long-term landscape health. Virtually all of western New South Wales, like most Australian grazing lands, is still Crown leasehold, originally on short-term leases. Agriculture, on the other hand, is generally founded on freehold, and that puts a landholding farmer in a position to invest in and cherish a productive property. Others see in the idea of private property a hyper-separating, deracinating abstraction. Here farmers consult lawyers, and those lawyers, in rooms far from the country, speak a strange, occult language. Documents and digital binaries are more important there than root systems, migration paths, nitr
ogen levels. Landholders arguing a special privilege on land are simultaneously claiming an intimate, metaphysical relationship and casting their relationship in the most material terms.
Property means both agency and liberty. Liberty to generate profit, liberty to act on the land and freedom from interference in doing so, at least up to a point. The United States’ libertarian ideal, derived significantly from Locke, limits the extent that any agency, including the government, may interfere with an owner’s entitlements without incurring what is known as ‘takings’. ‘Takings’ means the reduction of rights and entitlements – just as in Locke’s axiom, he who has ‘subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his Property, which another had no Title to, nor could without injury take from him’. Here Locke won out over Paine or Rousseau. The assumption is that a landholder owns – has ‘annexed’ – rights over the soil. Anything that reduces that ownership is an affront, a grievance requiring redress. The government, in ‘taking away’ a right, can only legally do so by ‘just terms’ – that is, compensation.
The concept exists in Australian law, but as American political trends penetrate Australian discourse, the limits of the Australian application are being tested. Does country belong to all of us, and is its legal ownership an appropriation from our common wealth? Or can land be taken, so we must pay to maintain an interest in its bounty? It seems a long time since our ancestors enjoyed a commons to which all were automatically entitled: since some mythic Eden with fruit for all to pluck.
The idea of ‘takings’ isn’t really about property. It is about state versus individual. It distinguishes between and polarises the public and the private. Land law in Australia is divided into two arenas: property rights (advantaging an individual) and environmental responsibilities (usually seen as a burden). In New South Wales, the Local Land Services or Catchment Management Authority governs use of property, including granting permission for development and clearing, and the Office of Environment and Heritage covers environmental regulation and its enforcement. ‘Takings’ can be the battleground between these two related but sometimes opposing principles: a pushing and shoving over boundaries like the rope in a tug-of-war. In the Turnbull case, the slippage between the two agencies made for some of the abrasion.
Property Rights Australia is an illustrative Australian lobby group. Its website states that ‘property owners are entitled to the basic rights of exclusive access, use and the opportunity to profit. Legal recognition of those property rights is in the best interests of a fair, just and prosperous community.’ Their motto is ‘STAND YOUR GROUND’, and they run a ‘fighting fund’ to prosecute legal test cases and ‘other strategic causes’. The site features heroic images of men, of cleared land, of handshakes, wide-brimmed hats, sheep; silhouetted forms of adults and children holding hands beside the iconic windmill water pumps that signify rural Australia. It is typical of strategic branding in its admixture of patriotism, tradition and ownership.
But farmers and graziers cannot be kings of grass castles altogether. A freehold or pastoral lease implies that a landholder is responsible for management of that land, including its environment. This means cooperation with neighbours and agencies – reciprocity and obligations as well as rights. In times of natural disaster, floods, droughts and fires overrun those meticulously defended borders and boundaries. What then of absolute property rights and proud independence? What then of defiance?
MURRAY FISHER WAS ONE of the Commonwealth investigative officers from the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Populations and Communities. Like Gary Spencer and Robert Strange, he was a former cop. He had stood beside Turnbull on the land and talked with him about koalas and clearing their habitat. The family, said Fisher, had to observe the rules, the law.
Turnbull, according to Fisher’s account, raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m an old man,’ he said, as he’d told Turner. ‘I’ll do what I want. What are you going to do with me?’ He’d bought the block for the black soil there, the last of it. It needed to have a crop on it, and that’s what he was going to do.
IN NOVEMBER 2012, NEARLY a year after the Turnbulls began their clearing, Grant finally submitted a completed application for a property vegetation plan for ‘Colorado’ to the local Catchment Management Authority. ‘Improvement of land’ is still a criterion for development. Ten days later, he duly signed a ‘referral proposed action’ for review under the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act. As the federal investigators and the state-based CMA had reminded him, both permissions were required. He was absolutely prohibited from clearing without them.
The federal application was later withdrawn. Six months from its submission, the CMA application would be rejected. Ian Turnbull and his family, having first not sought permission, then having had it denied, cleared protected land at various periods from 2011 to 2014.
Above them, rippling in the winds of political change, was the mesh of state and federal legislation. It is not wholly surprising that Turnbull pleaded ignorance of some of it, whether he really was oblivious or not, because it is a tangle, overlapping a network of state-level regulations with further weavings of national laws, different supervising ministerial departments and various authorities.
In April or May 2014, Turnbull wrote to Kevin Humphries, the newly minted Minister for Natural Resources, Lands and Water. ‘Because,’ Turnbull told his defence lawyer in the Supreme Court in 2016, ‘the situation seemed to be becoming completely absurd with their demands and whatnot. It was just a simple – we bought the place and we were just converting a grazing property into a broadacre farming property, which all the other farms around had been converted some 20 or 30 years ago.’
Humphries, a son of Tamworth, came out to Croppa Creek. Turnbull and Grant drove him around the farms. The minister ‘just shook his head’, Turnbull said.
Turnbull was still operating under the belief that Humphries, as a Nationals minister, would maintain his loud enthusiasm to change the land-clearing laws. But on taking power, the Liberal partners of the coalition demurred on such a plan. The New South Wales Liberal Party had a perhaps surprising history of pro-conservation legislation, along with pro-development enthusiasm; the Askin and Greiner governments had introduced protective laws. The user-pays ethos extended, for them, to ‘polluter-pays’, and damage to the environment should, in that tradition, come at a cost. This put them at variance, even decades later when that ethos had somewhat waned, with the ‘agrarian socialists’ of the National Party. Changes to the native vegetation laws were in the works, but not the annihilation that had been touted.
Few would say the state and federal laws complement each other adequately. Conservative ideology, unenthused by centralised authority, dislikes national laws. The state system, in which wealthy and influential landowners have even greater prominence than in a national context, has, in Queensland and New South Wales under conservative governments, been increasingly accommodating of rural development for private profit. For landholder-rights advocates, the gap between state and federal laws is not simply unwieldy – it demonstrates that the federal laws, less sympathetic to land clearing, are superfluous: ignored at best and barely enforced at worst. Their protections of endangered nature and their insistence on a common wealth of natural resources and bounty must be dissolved. Conservationists agree that inconsistencies are dangerously exploited by developers.
While the details of the law are finicky and often disputed, the principle is clear: individuals are subject to the state’s mission to protect its assets. Transgressions are penalised. Compensation is due to the state when its riches are stolen. There is bureaucracy, protocol, judiciary. There is an established system, and it is run by adults.
HERE ENTER THE LAWYERS. There is the restricting of environmental harm, and there is the prosecution of those who cause it. So long as an act is not completely morally repugnant – for example, the poisoning of protected wedge-tailed eagles – environmental crime
has traditionally been seen as ‘victimless’. Most environmental offences are strict liability offences, in which the severity of the action, not any mitigating circumstances of the offender’s intention or mental state, is weighed. Financial penalties, rather than jail time, are the custom. However, public attitudes are changing.
Much depends, it seems, on the object of a crime. If it’s a person or property, the full weight of the law comes down. On an ecology, it’s more diffuse: is it a crime against the small mammals who sleep in that scrub, the protected plants in it, the soil beneath, the firebreak it represented? If it’s against the future potential of an ecological community, the damage is more vaporised still.
How you weigh such issues depends on who you are and what you assume. Many people, not only farmers, might be classified as ‘anthropocentric’, seeing the environment as a setting for human life, to be protected in order to safeguard, above all, the human habitation of it. Researchers Robyn Bartel and Elaine Barclay, who identified ‘game-players’, found that one of the most commonly recognised environmental crimes is trespass. Someone’s aerial chemical spray drifts carelessly over boundary lines (organic farms are especially sensitive to this), or fire explodes out of unkempt scrub across fencelines, or polluted water churns downstream, or someone’s son comes furtively hunting on private property. The hermetic seal of property rights can’t stop these things, and the crime is often perceived as against the landowner more than the place itself. In the informal courts of the pub and golf club, intention is judged in two tiers: deliberate contamination is harshly condemned in those who should know better, but ignorant negligence is as bad in those who don’t. ‘Social norms will strongly influence farmers’ perception of what jeopardises environmental management,’ write Barclay and Bartel, ‘and accordingly what should and should not be defined as an environmental crime.’ In the real world, unlike the legislative, it is still humans, not the ecology, who seem to matter most even in assault against other living species.