by Kate Holden
There were those willing. Groups continued to cohere, like-minded doubters of the progress ethos gathering and sharing their theories. Furrowed brows bent over pages of minutes. A bifocalism was opening between those on the land: between those who, looking backwards with long vision, foresaw trouble ahead, and those who, gazing a short way ahead, ignored the present and the past.
Late in the century unfederated Australia still lacked a central authority for issues like basic sanitation or the distribution of water. Almost from the start, people, sceptical of government and remote from the bases of authority, had had to solve problems on their own. The impulse was still colonialist: even among naturalists, the attitude was often exploitative, manically sourcing specimens for natural history collections and tramping across fragile ecosystems in eagerness to be the first to describe a species. Then the ‘bush-walking conservation movement’, those hardy souls led by Myles Dunphy who bashed around the scrub for fun, began to push for more authenticity in the urban surrounds. The amateurs were mobilised. They were, in a way, as selfish as the settlers who wanted to use land for other purposes. But their intentions marked a turning point.
IT WAS A COMBINATION of scientists and writers who pushed the environment into a brighter foreground in Australia. In the 1940s two men, scientist Francis Ratcliffe and broadcaster Philip Crosbie Morrison, both made calls for nature that were too loud to ignore.
Ratcliffe’s writing on the derelict interior put an end to dreams for populating those landscapes. In the ‘Dirty Thirties’ he had looked down a railway track north of Broken Hill: on one side, untouched scrub with clear air; on the other, a stock-compacted ‘yellow asphalt’ blowing away. Australians, said Ratcliffe, have ‘every reason to be intensely proud of their record in settling the great spaces of the inland’. They were only to be chastened, he quipped, ‘in that they seem to have done the job too thoroughly’.
Crosbie Morrison was a radio journalist, and editor of the magazine Wild Life, which later also had a hugely popular radio program. His mission was to engage the general public and amateur enthusiasts in love for, and then conservation of, the natural Australian world. As World War II raged, he proposed nature as a balm to the spirit, as consoling as religion.
Although there had been conservation agencies since the early twentieth century, they focused on ‘resource conservation’, not ‘nature conservation’. The point was to support the land so it could support agriculture and grazing. The federal research agency CSIRO was invested in problems like soil erosion, rabbit plagues, irrigation, dust storms and fires. State departments managed some issues around fauna, but usually licences around hunting or fishing; wedge-tailed eagles, galahs, cockatoos and kangaroos were all evaluated not for their vulnerability but in terms of the threat they posed to human endeavours. It was community groups, field naturalists and bird-watching leagues that took up concern for the wellbeing of native wildlife and vegetation. In Victoria, Crosbie Morrison drew focus for many people worried about the nature under pressure from development. Dunphy’s campaign promoting walking maps and information, and his belief that the best scenery should be reserved for public use and benefit, and later Crosbie Morrison’s idea that if you show people the natural world they will instinctively respond with sympathy and protection, encouraged human relationship with nature. Humans must trudge in heavy boots over fragile ecosystems, must disturb Eden. Better we enter it, find presence, find our human scale against its immensity. But soon campaigns focused on the idea of protecting nature by keeping it separate from humans in parks and reserves.
Public defence of nature, too, began its identity as separate from, even opposed to, authority. In the subsequent years this would twist strangely, so that Ian Turnbull, descendent of settlers, could find himself defending his idea of ‘conservation’ against Glen Turner, agent of government, charged with the same mission that began in opposition to the authority he now held.
The areas initially selected for reserves were not necessarily those most in need of protection, but the most convenient or inexpensive for the government to put aside. Their boundaries were frequently, haphazardly, defined by more important projects: golf courses, mining sites, arable areas. They enclosed land previously cleared for plantations, or were located atop landfill sites, in former Aboriginal missions, or on old sewage works. Their value as natural assets was perversely determined by their lack of material wealth.
Then along came ‘gap analysis’, which used broadscale vegetation mapping to find ‘gaps’ in order to plan for future reserves. The Australian Academy of Science, founded in 1954, pioneered these projects. Gap analysis was an early union between the worlds of resource conservation and nature conservation, because it gave quantifiable evidence of changes in the physical environment. ‘The scientific approach cooled emotional pleas about saving bushland and provided a way to make pragmatic choices,’ Libby Robin explains. ‘Nature reserves were no longer just a matter of personal taste or aesthetics, nor would they be limited to the “leftover lands”.’ At last, biological resources would be given the dubious distinction of economic value.
The science was horribly eye-opening. The gaps were enormous: biological diversity was at dreadful risk from development. So began, in earnest, conservation biology: what Robin calls the ‘science of crisis’.
Partly this was driven from the cities, from where ‘the countryside’ felt more and more remote. The nationalist interest in landscape shifted focus from the battler on the land to the more distant and evocative deserts, oceans and wildernesses. Thus by late in the twentieth century, agriculture and rural scrub, in the middle zone, seemed more and more ‘other’, devalued, even quaint.
In the cities we still don’t really know or care about agricultural lands: on the map, as we drive out into the countryside, many places are marked as blank, what Val Plumwood called ‘shadow places’, those ‘we don’t know about, don’t want to know about, and … don’t ever need to know about’. Most of us are ignorant of whatever nature remains there. We drive fluidly past kilometre after kilometre of farmland, oblivious, seeing only picturesque cows or sheep, pleasant meadows, colourful crops; some more lovely, some less.
We do not map silence, where frogs once croaked or birds called. We do not map movement, of wildlife at night, migration paths, seeds blowing in the wind, the places where shadows used to lie beneath trees, or animals and people who are no longer there. We do not map ghosts.
TURNBULL WAS PLEADING, IN the pre-trial hearings in the Supreme Court, not guilty to the murder of Glen Turner, but guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter, on the grounds of substantial impairment.
Others were also preparing for the trial. Over at ‘Talga’, Felicity Whibley looked over the statement she had written by hand after that terrible night: ‘I was at the stove cooking dinner. Brenton and our son Matthew were watching TV in the loungeroom.’ She had carefully inserted ‘adjoining’ before ‘loungeroom’. ‘At the same time the phone started ringing,’ she wrote, and told the story. She had hesitated over how to phrase the need for someone with first aid; she crossed out the phrase ‘And I was trying to both process and catch what both men were saying’, referring to Michael Coulton on the phone and Andrew Uebergang at the door. Both men were saying ‘almost the exact same thing’: ‘Ian Turnbulls [sic] had just shot someone, multiple times, I think he said chest & back and that it was bad.’
Felicity had trouble sleeping after the crime, she wrote. Her statement concludes, ‘Since that night I have been in shock … I have not been myself.’
IN THE MIDDLE OF the twentieth century, after a hundred and fifty years of Australian agriculture violently slamming from triumph to disaster, optimism to apocalypse, and back, thought was given to the idea of balance.
The ‘balance of nature’ extolled in pious seventeenth-century Europe was echoed by modern science with the emerging doctrine of ‘wise use’ – the judicious application of technology to use the land, but not abuse it. Industrialists and
primary producers liked this concept, as it allowed them to continue farming with, in fact, the promise of more growth. Politicians and historians liked that it fitted with the narrative of progress, improving the land. And would-be conservationists liked that it chimed with the ecological system of ‘equilibrium’, imagined as a kind of zen state of perfect functionality.
There was a moment when ecology was seen as a close companion with wise-use agriculture. With time, the popular concept of ecology became more and more identified with the side defending nature against industry. But ecology itself is science, neutral.
In her examination of the galvanising Little Desert campaign of the late 1960s, Libby Robin identifies a difference between ecology and ‘ecological consciousness’, a form that engages attitudes in ‘individual, collective and political senses’, and emerged over more than a century. It wasn’t until 1949, when American biologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold published his celebrated A Sand Country Almanac, that modern ecological consciousness found popular expression; thirteen years later, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring confirmed its worst fears. The seeds were sown for the environmental movement. But the full harvest of ecological studies, and its political or metaphysical consciousness, wouldn’t be reaped until the 1980s and beyond. By the 1960s, Marxist and postmodern critics were applying structural critiques to feminist, race and labour issues, but the science that guided conservation was respected: a practical, utilitarian way of looking at nature, for both a farmer with an ag scientist by his side or a bushwalker keen to access scrub. Nature was not yet political.
It was, ironically, the workers of the industrial world who introduced a political element. In 1970, Jack Mundey and the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation began ‘green bans’ on construction work on urban bushland at Kelly’s Bush in Sydney. This radical instant, which attracted the impulsive support of many, came at a time when people began to perceive an acute finitude to resources. Talk of population pressures, oil supply politics, the rapid disappearance of bushland due to postwar development, the increasing salinity and aridity of the Australian interior and the rise of private interests grabbing at public assets – sand-mining proposals on Fraser Island or the flooding of Lake Pedder in Tasmania – irritated and worried people in a new way. New Age mysticism, folksy nostalgia and worship of Gaia collided with pragmatic concerns over resource capacity; wistfully, people looked for wilderness.
The 1970s were ferocious times for conservationists. Huge amounts of energy and discussion were expended on multiple causes: commercial whaling, sand mining, hydro-electric schemes, old-growth logging, nuclear proliferation, chemical pollution, desecration of Aboriginal heritage, over-fishing and other threats to Australia’s ecologies. On the other side traditional interests were pressing for cheaper power and dams, and expanded resource extraction, and against the concept of Aboriginal land rights. There were calls for ‘limits to development’ and to ‘think global, act local’. People began to think of themselves as stewards of the planet and to feel they had agency in preserving it. Much of the energy for environmentalist campaigns came from cityfolk, drawing on international connections and calling meetings in suburban homes and inner-city pubs. The neighbourhoods rang with arguments and chants, the streets thrummed with marching feet and Roneo presses whirred with newsletters. Mining magnate Lang Hancock had to yell to be heard when he snarled about ‘these people, whose numbers are swelled by a great mass of unwashed, unspanked, dole-bludging dropouts’.
Somewhere, forgotten in all this, were the back blocks of rural country – the unspectacular scrub, the quiet animals, softly being sprayed with DDT, mutely witnessing the soil wash away.
FEW NATURE-LOVERS MAKE PILGRIMAGES to the brigalow copses in Croppa Creek. Alongside the Newell Highway, which runs north from Gunnedah to Moree, are some of the travelling stock route reserves still used by both grazing stock and koalas; they are only a few metres deep, pinned between roaring trucks and cleared paddocks, the rest stops littered with cigarette butts and yoghurt squeezies. But ‘west of the highway’, says Alaine Anderson, ‘you can do a 360-degrees and not see a tree’. The besieged patches of native scrub are the last of this land as it was before Europeans arrived, the last of a fully functional ecosystem; but they are a cause taken up by few. The words ‘native vegetation protection legislation’ do not get hearts racing.
There is a term in biology, essential to understanding how we relate to nature: ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, coined by a fisheries expert, Daniel Pauly. We calibrate the health of nature around us according to what we knew as children. We may faintly credit our parents’ and grandparents’ accounts of an unrecognisable world before we were born, but each generation defines a new baseline for normality: what the weather is like in summer, how forested the hills are, how many fish makes a typical catch from the ocean. We can lament but barely comprehend the massive changes that preceded our awareness. We don’t really understand that the baseline, after two centuries of occupation, is already in ‘a state of extreme depletion’.
We still have May Gibbs’s stories of flannel flower babies and Mr Lizard in our children’s libraries, but that world already feels like a fairytale. A third of all mammal species have become extinct since Europeans invaded. Almost half of the 3.7 million hectares of native grassland in western New South Wales at white settlement has been destroyed or replaced; less than 1 per cent of the temperate grasslands in all of eastern Australia is ‘unmodified’.
Within two hundred years Australia had arrived in a situation where only manic discipline of activism and research seems able to safeguard the natural. Australia now has nearly thirty major conservation organisations, plus several state and federal departments of environment, official research bodies such as the CSIRO, and tangential research projects across universities and private enterprises, as well as countless local enthusiast and activist assemblies. Keeping nature natural takes a lot of work.
Our faith in science has become ambivalent. Some historians believe nature conservation, rationally supported by research, is, ironically, a legacy of the same Enlightenment that created its requirement. Science authoritatively describes for us now the benefits of human contact with natural places: how the heart rate slows, respiratory issues decrease, vitality is restored, peace and happiness increase, depression may lift. Research consistently shows the need for deeper conservation, yet policies don’t reflect this in practice. The manipulation and vacillations of conservation science, with its failures to predict environmental consequences, impractical solutions to perceived problems and ill-conceived support for projects such as flooding Lake Pedder, has made some people sceptical.
We have dug deep holes in the earth with our foundations, and rather than learning to skirt them, we are somehow still falling in.
JUSTICE PETER JOHNSON DECIDED against holding the murder trial in Moree. There was too much hot feeling there; locals were mortified by the crime in their district, while the Turnbulls were apparently overwhelmed with supporters to pitch in complaints about Turner in support of Turnbull’s defence that he’d been harassed. Detective McCarthy, who’d attended the crime scene and arrested Turnbull at ‘Yambin’, attested that it would be hard to find an impartial jury in Moree given the small pool of eligible populace, and that police had concerns about maintaining security in the courtroom.
McCarthy told the court that Robeena had met with Moree mayor Katrina Humphries, who was hearing a lot about the Turnbull case from all sides. Robeena told her husband about the meeting later, in recorded phone conversations, reassuring him that ‘everyone’ she spoke to in town supported him – though whether this meant support for his actions or his wellbeing in jail was an open question. Turnbull confided in turn that even a corrective services officer in Long Bay had voiced his approval. ‘What you’ve done has done more for the cause than you could imagine,’ the officer had apparently said.
Despite solicitor Sylvester Joseph and barrister Todd Alexis QC arguing forc
efully that Turnbull should be tried by his peers in his own community, McCarthy’s argument, in which land management was part of a murder trial, held sway: ‘Beliefs regarding the policing of land protection laws have been formed over many years, even generations. It is a contentious issue in Country New South Wales. It is questionable if the court could find an individual who would be prepared to attend jury duty, who does not opine one way or the other.’
The Crown prosecutor agreed. It was hashed out in diligent discussion until eventually, ‘for reason of local prejudice or by reason of widespread prejudice among the class from which the jurors are to be selected, or because local prejudice might be thought to exist’, Justice Johnson decided the trial would be held in Sydney, at the Supreme Court. The date was set, finally, for April 2016.
THAT SAME MONTH, NEARLY two years after the horror of Talga Lane, Robert Strange submitted documents to the Supreme Court, filing for damages for negligence, false imprisonment and assault. His lawyers were seeking up to $1.85 million for the injuries to his mental health from Turnbull’s actions that winter night. But they would find that Ian Turnbull’s worth was reduced. This was even as the value of the land on ‘Strathdoon’ and ‘Colorado’ was booming under their bloom of crops. Turnbull owned virtually nothing by 2016; all the properties and holdings belonged to Robeena. And Strange’s lawyers would be blocked from even tendering to the court the transcript of audio files of Turnbull and his family arranging the transfers.
The farmer did not deny he’d forcibly detained Strange in order to kill Turner, but his QC Alexis told the court his client couldn’t summarily plead guilty to the other counts, of negligence and assault. Strange would have to be content with the detaining, or fight for the rest.