by Kate Holden
He had no map for what was coming. Turnbull drove the dozer to clear the offset areas. There would be no regeneration. No restoration. Soon it would all be under crops.
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Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos: Whoever owns the soil, it is theirs all the way up to Heaven and all the way down to Hell.
In the Supreme Court in 2016, several psychiatric experts testified as to Ian Turnbull’s state of mind in July 2014. Dr Olav Nielssen, a consultant psychiatrist at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, who assessed the accused just over a week after the crime and again eighteen months later, testified that the Turnbull family shared a history of depression. Ian’s mother, Beryl, had been so stricken after his birth that she was hospitalised, and two of his sons were taking pills to alleviate the stress of being on the land.
During his first evaluation, Turnbull told Nielssen that he’d been feeling low in recent months. At his age, friends were dying off. He didn’t want to travel, watch television, go out. Repairs seemed too difficult. He didn’t like to drive in town anymore, and his truck licence had been revoked. It was hard to make decisions, somehow. No, he hadn’t mentioned any of this to a doctor, just got the prescriptions, had the usual chats. His memory was going, he said. There was a persistent sense of growing weakness, an instinct of an approaching end. ‘I had the feeling that I had to get things done before I died,’ he told Nielssen. ‘All I wanted was to get this farm developed and pass it on better than I took it.’ Then, ‘just pull out’.
He’d had suicidal thoughts in adolescence. In the 1960s, when the drought was bad, he’d taken antidepressants for two years. But that was all. After that he’d been growing a family, growing the business. No more trouble, he told Nielssen.
By 2014, the Moree district had been in drought for three years. Drought is considered a stressor for farmers, whose livelihood, home and heritage are all implicated. It is particularly associated with a reduction in the seeking of professional help. There had been floods in Croppa Creek in late 2011 and February 2012, as the Turnbulls were beginning the clearing. Properties were cut off, as in the days of Robeena’s childhood, by the waters and the mud. Then some called the parching of 2014 the worst drought in the northwest in a century, but state subsidies ceased in June.
Robeena claimed Turnbull grew convinced that Turner had a vendetta against him, and became more and more obsessed. In late 2013 and early 2014, she affirmed, her husband grew quiet. For a man previously very sociable and popular in the community, he was unusually withdrawn, repetitive in conversation and compelled only on the subject of Turner, on which he’d talk for hours. Grant agreed. The Cushes and neighbour Garry Colley, too. They described Turnbull as dishevelled, distracted, ponderous, with a morbid turn in his thinking. Their descriptions supported the idea that Turnbull was depressed and his capacity inhibited: the crux of his defence for murder.
When he slept, he would awaken at dawn, he said, with ‘Turner in my mind. Turner. Turner.’ More often, Robeena would find him awake in bed at 3.00 a.m., or he would rise in the winter dark and go to the kitchen. After fifty years of marriage, they woke separately.
He didn’t have words for feelings. Farmers in remote areas rarely do, explained another psychiatrist, Dr David Greenberg, who met Turnbull after eighteen months in remand. ‘They have to be resilient and stoical because they’ve got to be able to do everything for themselves. They’ve got to be plumbers, electricians, mechanics … I mean, they’ve got to be self-sufficient.’
‘I’m virtually finished,’ Turnbull told Nielssen in 2014. But he denied being depressed. And before the trial two years later, in jail and facing a murder charge, he still denied it.
TURNER HAD NEARLY COMPLETED his house with Alison. His children, ten-year-old Alexandra and eight-year-old Jack, were his joy. ‘Glen was happy,’ Alison wrote in her victim impact statement. ‘Glen didn’t want any more. He had me, he had our kids, he had his farm, he had a job he enjoyed and he had a life full of friends and fun and music and laughter.’ He played piano. When his daughter was a baby, he’d prop her up on a cushion atop the instrument. He loved bluegrass.
THE FRONTIER IS FULL of renegades. The squatters, careening carelessly over the official bounds of settlement; the escaped convicts who skirted the margins for decades; the researchers on remote experimental farms where soil loosened into sand; the soldier-settlers, told to make the best of flogged land on the margin; the industrial farmers, knocking down the odd paddock tree: they were all far from the authorities, who were in a different world, down there on the coast.
Today, a ‘countrymindedness’, as political scientist Don Aitkin puts it, persists in the stories rural people tell about themselves. Many of the wealthy landowners of Moree might live some of the year in Sydney’s prestige Potts Point, winter in Bali and holiday in Italy, educate their children in boarding schools and stream Netflix in their living rooms, but they keep their hard-bitten squint, their blue check shirts, their love of local boy John Williamson and the instinct that they are misunderstood, living on the thin edge of survival.
Urban populations often don’t comprehend or value complex histories of agricultural landscapes, or the architecture of agribusiness finance, or the compression of trade policies. They see native vegetation trashed, monocultures maniacally imposed, bull-headed attitudes rewarded, political corruption; they see consequences, but not connections.
Farmers complain rightly that they are maligned by people who have no clue. The ones who gobble the grain, munch the cereal, pour the oils, spill the milk. Most of us feel we’ve paid our price at the supermarket checkout. Any cost more – to the environment, or to the harmony of the countryside we glimpse on our travels – feels a price too high. We take, but we do not give. Victorian and New South Wales coast-dwellers logged out their forests and cleared grasslands for more than a century. Now they tell Queenslanders and those on the New South Wales border country to pull back, leave good soil unused, because they would like to keep those forests, that scrub. Those who have worked so bloody hard are expected to give up their future wealth, not pass the farming way of life onto their grandchildren – because someone down on the coast won’t like it?
And the food. The food has to come from bloody somewhere.
The scientists and the government caution and regulate, some farmers grumble, but only a few decades ago they said the opposite: they said clear. They said the country must be taken, must be worked. They said ‘you’re our heroes’. And now they say knock down the fences, empty the vats of chemicals, let the bush grow over your crops, let the trees engulf your home, they’re more important than you.
Country people’s injured reaction to city folks’ criticism widens the divide, of course; attitudes dig in, are defended with palisades. Slick lobby groups present, in historian George Main’s words, an ‘oppositional, exclusive position for rural landholders’, undermining ‘what sense remains of common interests between rural and urban sectors’. They rouse with martial talk of a ‘clash’ of opposing interests, a ‘call to arms’.
Ian Turnbull’s entry into farming in the mid-1960s was during a historical moment of almost psychotic belligerence towards native environments. Silent Spring (1962), Rachel Carson’s landmark work about industrial farming in the United States, described how postwar technology and science once more tilted the ‘balance of nature’ question: across the Western world, wild spaces were seared with chemical weapons and crushed by machines. In that period, still percussing with the effects of the mid-twentieth-century’s immense violence, there was a reprise of accusations of the ‘uselessness’ and inconvenience of the scrub even as nationalism evoked a gumnut arcadia. Turnbull’s father could wash his hands of the poison he’d laid for wallabies and koalas, and wipe his hands on a tea-towel printed with them. Stealthy and sterile were the weapons of this psychopathy, and an apocalypse was the result.
Neoliberalism, with its insistence on dehumanised market rationales, removes ethics of car
e, community or responsibility. There is no room in a broadacre field for contamination: paddock trees are obstacles, native animals are pests, indigenous plants are weeds. Chemicals guard against and eliminate interfering vegetation and wildlife. Yellow crops fill the centre, green natives are edged to the periphery. It is efficient: ‘agriculture’, in Carson’s words, ‘as an engineer might conceive it to be’. Or an economist.
For Ian Turnbull, ‘Strathdoon’ and ‘Colorado’ were worksites. Alaine Anderson, next door, feels differently. Some people, she says sharply, ‘have a lot of money, and they have technology. They don’t hop out of the airconditioned cab. They have a pie warmer and a DVD player and remote-controlled robotic tractors. So they’re not getting down smelling the earth; they are not counting seeds.’ From the lofty position of a tractor cab, the earth may be merely a surface, as abstract as the screen full of numbers when they go home to do the accounts.
‘DEPHYSICALISATION’ IS A LEGAL term signifying the privilege of human over private property. ‘Land law’ is now ‘property law’. This flinty, abstruse vocabulary is part of the process by which land has been appropriated, not because ‘land’ is actually abstract but our culture prefers it to be so. The matter was as blunt for Lord Coke in seventeenth-century England – ‘For what is land but the profits thereof?’ – as, four hundred years later on the other side of the world, for Moree MP Kevin Humphries: ‘If the community wants farmers to set aside productive land … they should be paying for it.’
Turnbull bought the blocks with the last of the black soil and determined they should be cropped. All qualities of that terrain apart from the potential of the soil were irrelevant to him. In Turnbull’s rights over that land was manifested a monomania, founded on purpose, principle and privilege. Exclusion of and separation from other interests is an axiom of ownership. That might include not just trespassers but ecological interests. Contemporary agriculture includes constant vigilance and the maintenance of order.
In fact, farmland is no longer the place for yeoman idylls or squatter dominion, but an economic and material base for an industrial system of production and export. Huge investment consortiums, able to survive on one good year in five, devour smaller holdings on thin margins. As American environmentalist Wendell Berry reminds us, industrialisation has always been about replacing people with machines. ‘If you’ve got a neighbor, you’ve got help,’ Berry points out, ‘and this implies [a] limit … You have to prefer to have a neighbor rather than to own your neighbor’s farm.’ An industrial farming landscape is unpeopled. And aerial chemical spray, used to kill insects or fungus, drifts over the land and across those stern boundary lines, sheds poison over the remnant vegetation, weakening birds’ eggs in their nests, contaminating eucalyptus leaves as they grow, sifting into water reservoirs and running off through the soil towards the coast and all the way to damage the coral reefs far out to sea.
But there are ravines between farmer and farmer, too. Political ideology loves the craggy landscape of extreme postures: coast-dwellers against countryfolk, greenies against black-soil battlers. The contours of difference between farmers are as important as that between clay soil with eucalypts and black soil with brigalow. Some farmers cleave to the old ways. Some are exasperated by them.
And in the jostling, abrasions rub raw at times. The family farm is overshadowed by a massive agribusiness; spray drift contaminates an organic farm; untreated pests pervade a carefully sterilised boundary. One farmer might quietly illegally clear scrub. Another might dob him in. Another yet might, as was rumoured to have occurred in Croppa Creek, send in a gang of workers with an earth-moving machine to trespass on a neighbour’s property and forcibly clear his remnant woodlands. Phone lines will be cut. Crown lands might be bulldozed and farmed over. Frontiers will be erased and redrawn.
A Glen Turner is charged with responsibility for maintaining the tiny incursion of public interest in private land: the overlap between broadacre-crop zone and fenceline vegetation, or the minute dotting of ecological communities across a landscape otherwise assigned to private profit. This is a tricky, subtle practice. Boundaries are not easy to maintain. Palisades have gaps. Weeds, roots, dust pass across and between every borderline; sorrow, concern, judgement and ghosts follow them.
Thoughts may thicken, too, in the margins of the mind. Resentments can become embedded. An idea may wriggle under the fence of resolve and, once broken into clear ground, make havoc.
IN OCTOBER 2018, ALAINE Anderson was on her way to pick up antibiotics. She had seven koalas in her care, needing medical attention and nutrition. Another three had recently come to her after suffering chemical burns from the aerial spray of pesticides and herbicides on farms around their habitat. ‘They’re in the tips of the trees, where the aerial spray happens,’ Anderson explains. ‘They’ve got so little protection. Our treelines are only about 25 metres wide. It’s not enough cover for them.’ Two of the three had neurological damage.
Down in the waterways, the eucalypts grow in the clay soils, seams of refuge from the basaltic soils coveted by the broadacre farmers. There, in the remaining scrub, the koalas live. But the nutrition isn’t high. ‘Pretty paltry out here,’ Anderson confides. ‘Like cornflakes, really.’ She goes out every day to cut three lots of leaves each for her koalas. But trees are being taken out of the waterways too now. Above those gullies, the trees have been mostly cleared: a few sentinels left in vast broadacre fields, and the thin margins of fenceline vegetation. ‘One or two trees aren’t going to last with exposure and chemical spray and drought and all the rest of it.’ Once those refuges are gone, Anderson worries, ‘There’s just nowhere if we haven’t got those good waterways.’
The koalas are ‘all but gone from this district now’, Anderson says bluntly. ‘We can’t release them here. Even down on the Mehi River, there’s a whole stretch near Moree of kilometres that’s been burnt by chemical, all those big red river gums.’ The koala colonies are isolated. The travelling stock routes, long strips of bush alongside the highways, are being grubbed up and planted by farmers despite being Crown lands, and the fenceline scrub is being knocked down. A few trees are left here and there in gulches and groves, but they’re often surrounded by field stubble or waving crops.
The last of the brigalow on ‘Strathdoon’ and ‘Colorado’ was home to some of the last koalas. Chris Nadolny had seen six koalas on ‘Strathdoon’ in August 2012, before the third lot of clearing, and others had seen evidence too: scratch marks, scat. But as the fragments of habitat disappeared, many of the animals were kettled, like protesters hemmed in by police. When developers want to clear koala habitat, it’s said, they run the dozers in a tightening spiral. The outer trees fall. The animals flee inwards and upwards. As the dozers close in, crashing the vegetation, the animals begin to scream. It is a terrible sound, people say. And, others will tell you, the best thing then is to put the beasts out of their misery.
‘WASTE’, BRITISH WRITER JAY Griffiths tells us, comes from an Italian word guasto, connoting ‘ravage, damage, injury’. The scrub-covered land that greeted the waves of white settlers was seen as ‘wasteland’: a legal term that indicated undeveloped Crown land. In the utilitarian paradigm of colonisation, the unused is either the yet-to-be-exploited or the expendable.
The word itself connotes abrasive, messy, compromised vegetation. The plants are imagined low and stunted, even if they’re not. Scrub infiltrates, but at the same time is also diminished.
Scrub, thickened and tangled, waving its strange low, hard phyllodes and shaggy leaves, with its fused canopies and dense undergrowth, growing on slants and obliques, blocks the eye. Straying sheep are hidden. Sightlines are compromised. A man cannot see to pursue, or what stalks him. Confections were made of the dark scrub, the dark people who lived in it and the shadowy presence of mythic beasts both local and transported: bun-yips and bogies, banshees and marsupial devils. It became a metonym for what thwarted and disappointed the great project of improving Australia.
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br /> Historian Ross Gibson uses a patch of brigalow scrub up near Rockhampton to describe a landscape haunted by the consequences of the past: massacres of Aboriginal communities, murders of tourists, assaults on the land. It is ‘one immense crime scene’. The scrub was a space into which things might disappear, ‘a lair for evil’ where the delinquent, the fugitive and the outlawed could be stowed or stow away. It has associations with criminality and concealment: murder victims’ bodies are still abandoned in shallow graves to the stoic watchfulness of the thickets of forest and freeway strips. A writer for The Bulletin in 1895: ‘No man who disappears mysteriously in Australia can be safely set down as dead until the scrub-country has been raked for him.’
When Ian Turnbull spoke of digging graves, he sometimes mentioned a hole large enough for a four-wheel drive, too. A chasm that capacious might go unnoticed, even in 2014, even in the scraps of scrub that remain.
Miasmas might lurk in the scrub. Bushrangers. Devils. Murderers.
ON THE MORNING OF 29 July 2014, Turner kissed his children goodbye as they ran to catch the schoolbus, and he and Alison drove into Tamworth together. He had packed an overnight bag for an inspection trip he was taking with his old colleague Robert Strange. Only one of the three properties on the day’s list was Turner’s, but the compliance officer supposed to attend those with Strange had a sudden family situation, so Turner had been pulled in. They were all in the Golden Triangle area, and one was in Ian Turnbull’s neighbourhood.