The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  THE LAST YEARS OF the nineteenth century brought a reckoning in New South Wales. Pastoralism seemed finished. It had ruined the plains.

  An inquiry in the 1880s, following the devastating drought, illuminated landholders’ attitudes. The commissioners’ questioning drew complaints for focusing on the lack of grass for stock, rather than acknowledging there was not enough water to grow grass. The connection seemed to elude the graziers. They still kept increasing stock. By 1891, there were about 13.5 million sheep in western New South Wales. These animals were stamping and eating the country to stubble.

  It began to seem to many that agriculture could save the day. Only 2 per cent of freehold land in New South Wales was under crops; Victoria and South Australia, having had more luck with breaking up squattocracy holdings under their own land acts, had already surged their agricultural efforts, encouraging interstate rivalry. The moral qualities and machismo of agricultural labour had not been forgotten, and as a nation-building project on the eve of Federation, it seemed apt. The analogue to the improvement ethos was a dread of going backwards. Wheat would feed and build the country.

  Though the endeavour had largely failed the first time around, technology and society were different by the later part of the nineteenth century: the criminal element was much reduced, the Aboriginal peoples mostly dispersed or dead, the urban bases were stable. A brisk utilitarianism resumed, in which landscape would be parsed almost totally for its suitability for agriculture.

  Technology and scale converged on the fields, and landholders realised that small estates simply weren’t sustainable if they were to use the straight-driving new machines. The big runs, divided by the Selection Acts, were set to recohere. And wheat finally came in a big way to the plains of New South Wales.

  Those lands seemed made for grains; indeed they had been formed for them, by the traditional owners. The country west of the Divide, especially the basalt plains around Moree, was some of the best on the continent. Aeons of erosion had sifted minerals through the soil and skeins of big rivers, and creeks had the water. The problem, as settler James Atkinson had noted back in 1826, was erratic rain, unpredictable floods and haphazard droughts. Gambling on ‘good years’ meant relying on the rain falling at the right time. But if it did, and you could get rid of the scrub, then what prospects!

  Wheat was made for a strange kind of national romance. Governments and farmers alike loved the popular ethos of golden plenty. ‘Where golden grain is golden gain,’ cooed a promotional pamphlet by the newly invented Country Promotion League in 1920, ‘there is a welcome for you.’ Historian Cameron Muir describes its ascension to an exalted place in our national mythos: wheat, with its biblical associations, its satiny fields, its satisfying ceremony of sewing, harvesting, threshing and milling, its European heritage and even its blondness, fitted wonderfully into the racist, nationalist, agrarian culture of white Australia on the eve of Federation. It was celebrated as the food of the homeland (although, as Muir points out, the British mostly ate rye, barley and potatoes) and a proper form of nourishment, unlike the rice cultivated by the non-whites to the north. Renowned scientist Sir William Crookes baldly claimed in a famous speech in 1898, ‘Wheat created the white race. It did not just shape white civilization, but gave white people their intelligence and biological characteristics.’ Wheat production duly and patriotically soared.

  But Australia’s wheat took a long time to find its fittest habitat. The international supplies of nitrates were running out; the coastal plains of Australia were already exploited. Limits were reluctantly set on expansion; limits were overrun; those who attempted the dry inland soon met with disaster or fell back. The great continent began to feel like a trap.

  AS TURNBULL PREPARED TO finish his clearing, he knew that the New South Wales land-clearing laws were also on the brink of a reckoning. A review was being prepared, and all over New South Wales clearing was accelerating in anticipation of the loosening. If Turnbull could be patient, perhaps he could fall under the shelter of new regulation.

  But legislation can be a long time in the offing, he couldn’t afford to wait years. His profit share was only of the first year. He needed time to let the ground wet down over the season, aiming for a winter crop. There were only eight weeks left in summer to work: eight weeks to get it ploughed, levelled, stick-raked and the sticks picked up. It was a race against the clock. The future of his family was at stake.

  ‘He had this belief,’ psychiatrist Dr David Greenberg later testified, ‘that he was the head of the family and had to pass on his heritage, the farm and that lifestyle, to his family.’ International consortiums come and go, but family dynasties endure, homesteads are kept, surnames mean something. The Turnbulls looked the part, but they’d only had land for less than a century. Sydney Turnbull had settled lightly with sheep; Ian Turnbull had ploughed the ground with his appetite for purchasing. Roger and Grant were the seedbed for the future. Grant, too, had a young son hoping for life on the land. It was Cory, and Grant’s teenage son, who could make the Turnbull name cover a map, like an empire.

  There was one thing in the way: the OEH, and an officer named Glen Turner.

  TURNBULL’S REFUGE FROM THE vexation of his family’s trials was his brown recliner, in the lounge room at ‘Yambin’. His life had a rhythm: the hush of Robeena sleeping beside him in bed as he, unable to sleep, lay awake and watched dawn creep across the ceiling; the grunt of the dozers starting up every morning and rumbling to a stop each evening; the sight of the smooth, sweet land he’d cleared.

  He was taking a lot of medication for this and that. Every morning was a tray of pills. He had angina, indigestion and reflux, skin cancer on his nose. Osteoporosis. Peripheral neuropathy, a condition where the nerves in his legs were shot. They would ache and twinge. Sometimes it was all he could think about, the pain; it was part of what kept him awake.

  He was overheard saying he was willing to do something to help overturn the laws that so frustrated him – to be a ‘martyr to the cause’.

  Although Turner hadn’t spoken to Turnbull for more than two years, his name was on an affidavit in the file that came along with the summons for the second lot of clearing when it was delivered in June 2014. Now Turnbull and his grandson were accused of more illegal clearing of protected vegetation on ‘Strathdoon’. The old man held the papers in disbelief. ‘The fact that Cory Turnbull was indicted,’ reflects Nadolny, ‘would have made Ian see red. He would have been absolutely mortified.’

  Ian knew that Grant was intelligent and robust, a fighter, a manager of complex business affairs. He could look after himself. But to have young Cory sent through the trial process again seemed to injure Turnbull’s sense of justice. Cory and Donna were only just starting a family and didn’t need this. It was all threatened because of the interfering OEH. The face Turnbull saw when he imagined his bureaucratic enemy was that of a tall, serious man called Turner.

  Turnbull should have been expecting a new prosecution, given the first one had been successful. The family had cleared not just between November 2011 through to January 2012, but again and again; they were clearing again right at the moment. But he was completely dismayed by the new charges. ‘This will finish us, it is not going to be stopped,’ he apparently told Grant.

  ‘He was at a point of despair, is how I’d describe him,’ Grant later said. ‘He was down.’

  And it was Turner who had had Strange out there to have a look back in March; had sent a file about the clearing to Local Land Services.

  Turnbull instructed his lawyer to file a complaint, his fourth, against Glen Turner. ‘Our client has a particular discomfort,’ Sylvester Joseph’s letter to the OEH said, ‘dealing with Mr Turner. He feels he is victimised by what appears to be a personal vendetta.’ The OEH, according to Joseph, responded by issuing another notice, demanding Turner be granted access to inspect ‘Colorado’.

  In mid-July, Ian and Robeena hosted their old friends the Cushes, as they did every year. As usua
l, Turnbull drove Ian Cush and his wife around the properties on a proud tour, showing off the winter crops. They headed out from ‘Yambin’ and up County Boundary Road. A right turn to ‘Buckie’, on the far side of the Croppa Creek township, where Grant lived at times. A stop at the friendly little Croppa Creek general store, with the big robot on the front fence made from old plastic milk crates, the dim store interior stocking books on mental health (Taking Care of Yourself and Your Family, ninth edition), a menu consisting mainly of bacon-and-egg rolls, and a noticeboard with advertisements for horse acupuncture, the mobile preschool, someone seeking a partner to sharefarm.

  They sat and had a coffee, in view of the stream of white four-wheel drives pulling up outside. Turnbull mentioned that the remediation order meant installing fences, which they couldn’t afford. Turnbull did not mention – perhaps he did not understand – that the court had said they needn’t fence: they could decide how best to protect the vegetation. Turnbull grumbled to his friends, who’d had their own issues with land-clearing permissions, that they hadn’t had any stock since 2002. The Cushes were struck by his gloom. There had been a change in the man. He seemed vexed, rubbing his aching legs, his mind alight.

  ‘If by shooting Glen he could overturn that,’ Nadolny says of the pressure to remediate, ‘it would have been quite possible that OEH’s reaction might have been to drop the clearing charges.’

  If only the OEH could be deterred from their prosecutions; if Cory could be spared; if there needn’t be all the effort to defend his family; if he could just get on the dozer a few more times, just get on with pushing trees and raking them up. If everything didn’t have to be such a bloody battle, if no one got in the way, if Glen Turner didn’t exist, how soon Turnbull might put down his burden, might finally rest, his duties done.

  That month, Turnbull cancelled his lifelong subscription to The Land newspaper. He gave Cory his $600,000 crop-planting machine, and told him, according to Roger, ‘If anything happens to me, make sure you look after your nanna.’

  DESOLATE GROUND CAN BE fertile. In the 1890s, the bare fallow technique, which involved leaving fallow ground stripped of weeds so water could soak in, was used in the Wimmera, where it produced wonders. Its first thirty years saw yields across the country return to the levels enjoyed by early settlers. Fallow periods, to extend their good effects, were employed for longer, with more and more ploughing to increase the fine tilth of the soil. This churned away the weeds that otherwise bound the soil together, and left the tilth to blow away. No matter: ‘If it blows, it grows,’ farmers intoned, and they watched lovingly as the membrane-thin remnant of top-soil gusted over the few treetops left.

  It was true that bare fallow worked up to a point, but the nitrogen in the soil soon depleted. This issue was solved, luckily, by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented a method of synthesising nitrogenous fertilisers to create superphosphates. The incantation ‘fallow, Federation and phosphorus’ was taken up. By 1914 the wheat industry was the nation’s biggest employer.

  Then the precious new Federation wheat began to take the fungal disease of rust. Scientists worked, tweaking and trialling new varieties. In 1946, Dr Walter Lawry Waterhouse released Gabo, especially suited to high-fertility zones with low rainfall, such as the black-soil plains.

  The black-soil plains are a fussy environment for grain. Environmentalist Eric Rolls tells the story of agronomist Jim O’Reilly from Gunnedah, south of Moree, driving to farmers’ meetings in the 1930s with a piece of string hanging out of a bottle of sand and another from a bottle of marbles. Robeena Turnbull’s father, Les, might well have met him at one of his displays. O’Reilly would explain that however much nutrient was in the soil, if it didn’t touch the plant roots, the grain would wither. The black soil was like marbles rather than sand: conventional techniques of cultivation were hopeless. Instead, farmers should adapt their technology, work shallowly with tyned equipment and consolidate the soil. With this knowledge, the settlers who’d nearly sold off scrubland as useless ‘put their black plains under wheat and found it the richest of land’.

  There were good years and setbacks. Wheat rust adapts too, and even today varieties are still being adjusted to race ahead of it. The timing of rain relative to the state of the ripeness, the optimum length of the stalks before they start to bend and break in the wind, the point at which a grain should desirably germinate: these are all fractious issues, dependent on very specific locations and conditions. The vast blankets of wheat, barley, oats and rye that cover the Moree district plains under the direction of farmers such as Ian Turnbull look smooth and uniform and simple. Their growing is not.

  Technology exploded the field of possibilities. A wheat farmer called Headlie Taylor collaborated with H.V. McKay, inventor of the Sunshine harvester, to produce ‘headers’, machines that could even reap crops flattened in storms. Diesel-engine tractors with rubber tyres, hauling wide machinery and fitted with lights, could suddenly work hundreds of thousands of hectares in all types of weather. Some of the best wheat quality and yield was the result; but more importantly, it was comfortable. Decades later, improvements were still being made: farmers could not overstate the revelation of air-conditioning and heating in tractor cabins. There could be hours more work in a day. Rolls gives a dreamlike description of himself and his colleagues in the Pilliga, each alone in their cabin in the pre-dawn toil as, ‘[s]tupefied by noise and cold, we sat and spiralled round our paddocks sowing wheat’.

  The year 1929 was the official ‘Grow More Wheat Year’. In the Mallee, people obeyed the call, digging superphosphates and crops into the soil. For every gain there is a price; again, the exposed soils of bare fallow farming gusted away in dust storms that could make a man go blind.

  Then the Depression crashed the wheat price. The soil gave out once more. Diseases got to the crops and erosion continued. It was a scene of devastation from horizon to horizon.

  This, with all the vicissitudes, was the agricultural landscape into which Ian Turnbull was born.

  There was pensive discussion among agricultural scientists, politicians, landholders and public intellectuals about what had gone wrong. The phrase ‘balance of nature’ was in people’s mouths. Some, such as nutrition expert Sir Stanton Hicks, observed that industrial farming had perturbed the ‘balance’. Others said that a hectic Nature had failed to maintain her balance, and it was up to humans to restore it. The concept converged with an ecological idea of ‘equilibrium’ to provide a scientific basis for environmental management. This evoked a regime reminiscent of Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe in which variables could be removed, elements isolated: it was a matter of ‘getting the balance right’.

  There was a moment in the early decades of the twentieth century, as Ian Turnbull was born, in which the projects of science, conservation and agriculture aligned to redress imbalance in an unexpected manifestation of ‘ecology’: the industrial farm.

  The factor that makes the difference is humans: we have the power to make dramatic changes to whole ecologies, and we get to choose how much our demands for food and other resources determine where the ‘balance’ should fall. ‘Nature’, in this scenario, is the Nature that suits humans best.

  Subterranean clover, like brigalow, fixes nitrogen in a plant’s roots. In the years after the cataclysms of the 1930s, ‘sub and super’, along with herbicides and pesticides, radically renovated farming across southern Australia. Good seasons boosted confidence, the price of wool rose, the cactoblastis moth had the prickly pear on the retreat at last, and the energy of the post-war period kicked Australian agriculture to a new level. Turnbull’s father, Sydney, rode the wave of the new farming with his small grazing holdings, and the son watched him prosper.

  On the western slopes of New South Wales, the area devoted to cereal crops increased almost fourfold between the end of World War II and 1980. The mid-point of this expansion, the early 1960s, is just when Ian Turnbull and Robeena bought ‘Yambin’, their first farm at Croppa
Creek, in the very heart of the richest agricultural land in Australia, the Golden Triangle, and entered the universe of industrial farming.

  TURNBULL CONTINUED TO WAKE before dawn. For nine days he worked on the dozer, in the winter weather, for six hours a day, despite insomnia, despite the pain in his legs and his angina. ‘Strathdoon’ was already cropped. He wanted to finish the clearing on ‘Colorado’.

  Turnbull and his hired help, Ivan and Robbie Maas, worked hard. The trees were pushed. They were raked and stacked, and the stacks were set on fire. When they burned down, the land would finally be prepared. After that, it was just a matter of ploughing ashes into the waiting soil. They would have made it in time for the winter crop.

  Come the weekend, Ivan and Robbie were off. Turnbull kept going on his own. His legs were killing him, tingling and aching. ‘I just wanted to get that [clearing] all done and over,’ he told the Supreme Court. ‘It was to be my last year on the farm.’

  The prosecutor in the murder trial, reflecting on the lead-up to Turner’s death, suggested that Turnbull had pressed on so urgently because he knew a final judgement was due on which parts of the blocks were to be replanted for remediation. Justice Preston’s decision came on 25 June 2014. The final details of the orders, the exact locations of the offset areas, would be given on 31 July 2014. That month, Turnbull was not just ploughing, spraying and cropping areas that were soon supposed to be regenerated, but intently pushing what native vegetation still remained.

  Grant, Turnbull said in his murder trial, had given him a map to work off, showing what was supposedly safe to go ahead and clear, and Turnbull just followed the instructions on the tattered piece of paper on the passenger seat of his ute. Grant might have been around, or on the Gold Coast – Turnbull couldn’t remember. Cory was in Toowoomba, working with his father, Roger. But Turnbull was there, every day, working on their land, the blocks he’d taken the lead in buying and clearing. He had an interest in getting it cleared, didn’t he? To establish them on it. ‘The second and third generation on to the land before I retire,’ the old man said stoutly.