by Kate Holden
13
To those people who put immediate utilitarianism in front of everything, let me remind them that we are pioneers of a continent – a continent which possesses a remarkable and in many respects a unique vegetation; and the pleas of those who ask that the specialised vegetation should not be destroyed unnecessarily is worthy of some regard.
—Joseph Maiden, From the Useful Native Plants of Australia, 1889
On 10 September 2014, the OEH sent Chris Nadolny and fellow ecologist Terry Mazzer to inspect the latest bout of clearing on ‘Colorado’. With them for protection were the New South Wales police. Nadolny was reassured by their presence, but it had come to this: government officers protected by firearms, a vision of the old colonial days.
They could see now what Turnbull had been doing the week Turner was killed. Since Nadolny had been there the previous December, ‘Colorado’, including the areas reserved for remediation, had been vigorously cleared. It seems the last of the clearing had gone on for nearly a month after Turner’s death.
Grant was supposed to be following the final directions on remediation on the property. But the remnant endangered ecological communities of brigalow and box, the native grasses that had begun to return, the koala habitat: it had all been pushed.
The officers walked over the ground, silent with feeling. There, to the north, was the boundary fence, towards which Turner had run for shelter before the final bullet caught him. On the far side of that fence was the road, the soil he’d bled into. There were the ashes of the stacked timber that had been burning that night, beacons that made him stop the car, that flared in Robert Strange’s photographs below the last twilight Turner saw. There were the invisible marks of the trees that had been felled, the unmappable sites of vanished vegetation, koalas’ obliterated tracks and fertility blanched from the soil. This was where their colleagues had worked so hard, and for so little. This was where Turner had stood to take GPS readings of his observations. This was where he had to stand and watch the dozers. This was the place the OEH itself was being tried. It was a great blank now, a fenced space, churned smooth of all its history, ready to be sown with the staff of life.
JUST OVER A WEEK later, on 19 September, Ian Turnbull was given sentence for the first lot of clearing on ‘Strathdoon’, and what had still been called ‘Lochiel’. For his own actions and his direction of others to clear, Turnbull was fined $140,000 plus costs to the prosecution. The court found that Turnbull had been aware that approval was required and hadn’t had it. For seven months after being issued with a stop-work order, he had continued to clear. Justice Sheahan found that over 3000 trees had been felled – an environmentally ‘significant’ number, leaving the dislocated fauna without enough habitat. ‘I find that the level of the environmental harm caused was substantial,’ said Sheahan, and that ‘Ian’s conduct was reckless breach, a factor that increases the objective seriousness of his offence’. Indeed, the judge said, he’d ‘flagrantly disregarded the consequences of his actions’.
The old man heard this. Had he been expecting it? He had been described by a friend as ‘devastated’ years earlier when charged: his community was watching. His son and grandson were implicated. Everyone in the district was converting grazing land to cropping: why had he been singled out? The Croppa Creek golf club would be talking. The media was outside.
Even so, facing a possible fine of up to $1.1 million and costs possibly up to $340,000, he had got off lightly.
THERE ARE THOSE WHO believe we inherit the earth. For them, nature is a gift. There are others who see humans in a stewardship role. As elders need the assistance of their children, so Mother Nature needs our help when enfeebled.
There are others still who can only perceive humans as a metastasising cancer consuming its host, best removed or contained. The healthiest places in the world are those unpolluted by human presence.
A stateswoman of American conservationism, Margaret ‘Mardy’ Murie, described this sentiment as she composed the founding ethos of the Wilderness Act 1964, which covenanted 9 million acres of federal land in the United States for wilderness reserves. ‘A wilderness,’ Murie wrote, ‘in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognised as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.’ Her definition has become famous for its precision and its cogency.
But humans ‘attribute qualities to a landscape which it does not intrinsically possess’, according to British nature writer Robert Macfarlane. ‘We read landscapes, in other words, we interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory.’ A dream of wilderness is a necessary emollient for those who feel humans do damage to the land. Its unruliness is what we feel has been lost from the modern human sphere, where maintenance and control are our habit: erotic Dionysos to chilly Apollo.
There is a final tribe, often a mix of Indigenous peoples and Western philosophers, who hold faith in an Earth able to maintain itself – animals, rivers, gardens, humans all. ‘We were born wild to a wild earth,’ believes Jay Griffiths. ‘To me, humanity is not a stain on wilderness, as some seem to think. Rather, the human spirit is one of the most striking realizations of wildness. It is as eccentrically beautiful as an ice crystal, as liquidly life-generous as water, as inspired by air. Kerneled up within us all, an intimate wildness, sweet as a nut.’ Humans and nature are not separate but one whole. Systems decay and recompose, energies braid in currents that cannot be stopped but must continually change course: nature as a rhythm, not a particle but a wave.
IN CESSNOCK CORRECTIONAL CENTRE, Turnbull was keeping in touch with his family by phone. He knew he was being recorded, but he spoke freely. In phone calls in September and October 2014, he made what a judge would term ‘strong critical comments about the OEH and its officers … indicating a strong dislike by the Accused of that agency and its officers including the deceased, Mr Turner, and Dr Christopher Nadolny, an ecologist’. He agreed with his wife: Nadolny was ‘just a nasty piece of work’, a ‘sneaky snipy bloody snake in the grass’.
On 2 October, Turnbull was transferred from Cessnock to the Supreme Court in King Street, Sydney. He was again applying for bail. Robeena told the court of her husband’s ill health, stoicism through pain, debilitating weakness due to peripheral neuropathy. He could barely walk ten steps, she said, before collapsing. She was also suffering, doing weekly twelve-hour round trips by plane from Grant’s place in Brisbane to Cessnock to visit her husband.
The shooting was an isolated incident, Robeena told the court. The night he came home from Talga Lane, he said he’d simply cracked. ‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ he’d told her. He looked ‘wretched’: ‘His face was blank, it appeared as though he was somewhere else.’
But the court also heard of Turnbull’s angry descriptions of Turner and Nadolny. He’d told a prison psychologist the crime was ‘the deceased’s’ fault. It heard how the Turnbulls sat in armchairs for five hours, stolidly waiting for the police to arrive, while Glen Turner bled out in the dark.
Bail was refused. Turnbull, the judge said, was rich enough to flee, and, faced with murder charges, had considerable incentive to do so. It was likely that his hostility to authorities had been noted in his community. He was a danger to the OEH staff, and to the public in general.
IN THE MOREE DISTRICT, the talk continued.
Turnbull was still being sent messages from supporters. Many stopped short of praising the murder itself, though some did not.
He was pushed too far, people continued to mutter in the pubs and supermarket car parks. The government picked on him; they pushed him to the brink. By picking up the gun he’d only showed the desperation many others felt. When Turnbull cleared his land and when he was investigated for it, when he was told that weeds were more important than his family’s survival, and when he fired his gun at the man representing the authorities, he stood on
the soil of Talga Lane for many.
The September verdict in the land-clearing case on ‘Colorado’ came just at the right time for those who saw him as a scapegoat. Turnbull’s acts became the hinge on which big things swung. He was used as an example by supporters of farmers’ rights. His became the back that had been broken for them all.
On the other side, Glen Turner joined a numberless list of those who have died protecting the environment. The Thin Green Line, it is sometimes called. Turner wasn’t patrolling the jungles of Colombia, protecting gorillas against poachers in the Democratic Republic of Congo or protesting mining projects in Turkey, but his was the first recorded death of its kind in Australia since the infamous 1975 murder of journalist Juanita Nielsen in Sydney for opposing the Victoria Point development. It was shocking because, for all the grousing, authority is generally respected in Australia. While disputes over land management, resource extraction and conservation run hot, few people since the massacres of First Nations peoples have died directly from them. In 2014, at least 116 people – ‘the defenders’, as they are sometimes memorialised – were murdered across the globe for their resistance to environmental damage, and the number would only rise further in coming years. They would include indigenous peoples, rangers and activists. But it was shocking that a father of two would be gunned down outside a wealthy town like Moree.
The death of a martyr is the beginning of a story. Glen Turner’s murder was mourned for the loss of a man discharging a public duty. Only later was it publicly decried as a death in the cause of protecting nature. Turner’s official role was emphasised in media reports, and his stunned colleagues and peers across the country felt the impact of his death on morale and protocol. His name was added to the International Ranger Federation Honour Roll of those killed on the job.
But the victimhood narrative endowed on Turnbull was stronger. The image of the man holding the gun, defending his right to the land, is a composition we have been encouraged to honour. ‘Pushed to the brink on the land’ is an old story. ‘Authorised to protect the scrub’ is not.
WITH BAIL REFUSED AND the court case some way off, the Turnbulls coolly made new plans. At some point in 2015, Ian sold his various property holdings to his wife for a dollar each. It was, he told the Supreme Court a year later, only so that Robeena could keep the farm running while he was in jail, awaiting trial.
Roger saw how things were heading. His father’s situation was inhaling all the family energy, the assets, the entitlements. The elder son had been on the outer with the family before the shooting, and the feeling now was that he wasn’t being loyal enough to his dad. He had supposedly warned the police that the old man was dangerous. Roger and his wife had even been in contact with Alison McKenzie, to express their condolences.
For twenty-six years, Roger would maintain in a statement of claim to the Supreme Court in 2016, he’d helped his parents with their properties. This was, he alleged, despite his father’s bullying and frequent apportioning of blame for everything that went wrong; despite the phone calls demanding his urgent presence on the farm for what turned out to be a trivial task; despite taunts of his divided loyalty and insults to his wife and his children.
There was an understanding, Roger reminded his relatives, that whoever committed to the family business in this way had been guaranteed its inheritance. There was a legacy: millions and millions of dollars of agricultural investment over fifty years, the prestige and power his father had amassed, a dominant Turnbull presence in the district. Roger had done what was asked. For the first few decades of his adult life, the statement claimed, he’d worked unpaid, unthanked. For his devoted toil, the inheritance was to be his. Instead, his father called him ‘stupid’. He was blamed for spells of drought.
He’d had his own troubles, with the OEH looking into business on his properties ‘Talmoi’ and ‘Royden’, and that incident with detaining the compliance officers, but he’d kept going, even with his son Cory dragged into all the mess, his boy devastated by what had happened and liable for absurd fines, convictions even. His grandfather had wrecked the boy’s future before it had even begun.
Roger and Annette had other children to look after, two of them with special needs, and there was sour blood in the mix of emotions: Turnbull had always taken against Annette. She didn’t come with land when she married Roger; Turnbull told his son, ‘You’ve made a bad choice in wife, you’re getting what you deserve.’ He blamed her for the boys’ condition. ‘You have disabled children,’ she says he told her, ‘because you have rotten eggs.’
Then there was Roger’s own little brother, Grant, dashing onto the scene during the clearing, and then off again to Queensland, leaving his eighty-year-old father to do all the work. The brothers had barely talked since the late 1990s, when they’d had a falling-out. There was a partition agreement drawn up then to silo parts of the Turnbull money to the sons on Turnbull’s retirement, and Roger had stopped working full-time for his father based on this understanding. It was twenty years ago now, but Roger assumed that the agreement hadn’t changed. Even when Turnbull kept shifting his retirement age back. Now the brothers were having to deal with each other, with their father in the middle of it all, still controlling them.
Roger was alert to the dangers to his entitlement. The lawyers’ fees – Cole & Butler, a QC and the rest of the team – would consume a fortune. If Turnbull was found guilty, Turner’s family would probably sue for damages. Robert Strange would sue for damages. The wealth of the Turnbull family would be chewed away.
Roger got a letter from his father in jail. It was the last one he’d get. Turnbull informed him there was no inheritance for him yet. They would need to keep hold of the estate because they’d need the money to defend him on a charge of murder – though they were hoping he would be convicted of manslaughter at worst. If so, there would be some kind of reduced sentence. He was an old man. He was a pillar of the community. Now look what had happened. In a way, he was a victim too. So they’d also need cash for when he got out of jail.
Then Turnbull goaded his son, accused him of sympathy with Turner over his own father. ‘Your second best friend Turner has got me in jail for more than likely the rest of my natural life,’ he wrote. ‘And it will take a lot of mum’s money to even get that over.’
Roger went to his mother. She confirmed that she now owned the properties.
A silence fell within the Turnbull family. It was the silence of an inhale.
14
And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the land.
—Leviticus 25:24
The history of environmentalism in Australia has faded somewhat, along with the old Wilderness Society posters of the Franklin Dam, and its current resurgence in the face of annihilating threats can feel amnesiac. But its story is as formed by cultural compression and shove of circumstance as that of agriculture and settlement.
We forget that dismay is an old feeling. After initial confidence in an eternal frontier, the scale of destruction as ringbarking took hold in the mid-nineteenth century took people aback; the apparently infinite forests showed gaps. The plains turned out to be finite after all, and there was no sight of the inland sea. The 1860s are called the decade of environmentalism: by then, already, less than a century into white occupation of Australia, the degree of change alarmed many. From the rich soil of the Romantic period and the stems of science in the Enlightenment grew a surprising bloom – a care for nature. In 1864 George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature in America, which, along with the impassioned writings of Henry David Thoreau, had a galvanising effect on concerned types. ‘With the disappearance of the forest, all is changed,’ Marsh intoned. His work showed how the physical environment had altered: soil health, vegetation types and amounts, rainfall, temperature and weather patterns. The book was avidly read here, and the government of New South Wales, heeding Marsh, decreed the first timber reserves in 1871; that 100-foot-wide strip of vegetation left along the c
oast helped create Australian beach culture.
The world’s first national park, Yellowstone in the United States, was created in 1872, and seven years later the second was established: Royal National Park, south of Sydney. This was one of the first major instances of a government authority acting to protect the environment against development, and a new momentum took energy, which would eventually be realised in departments of the environment, in regulations and the enforcement of protection of ecological communities.
New South Wales had formed a branch of the Royal Society in 1866; the Linnean Society of NSW arrived in 1884. These precursors to the CSIRO were research bodies devoted to practical concerns: scholars pursued nascent agricultural science, studying soil health and vegetation prospects for potential cultivation. There could be no question of sacrificing industry to nature, but perhaps a compromise could be attained.
And in the unlikely setting of Bendigo, Victoria, possibly the world’s first conservation group met in 1888. Rural citizens, says historian Tim Bonyhady, could be more preoccupied with conservation issues than the louder voices coming from cities through the press and political stages, where economic and cultural prestige were shouted about and fashions on the subject of native vegetation vacillated. Bendigo had just had a drought and floods, exacerbated, locals felt, by clearing. Now people began to coordinate their concerns.
In New South Wales, too, there had been a terrible drought, and the government launched a commission into water conservation. Historian Cameron Muir tells of how an alert, thoughtful researcher called Robert Peacock explained to the commission his revelation that the problem wasn’t the recalcitrant scrub, but bushwhacking, which had violently disturbed some equilibrium. In 1900 he published an article condemning the state of the land. Its degradations, he wrote urgently, were ‘too familiar landmarks, resulting from the mistakes of the past, and calculated to teach valuable lessons to those willing to listen to the voice and teachings of Nature’.