by Kate Holden
Adjustments were promised, though Hunter complained that he’d had no direct response from the OEH. As the new legislation geared up to take effect, conservation groups wrote to the chief executive at the OEH with a concern: even after the improvements, which involved relying less on satellite data, the maps were only about 60 per cent accurate. They wouldn’t be used as regulation tools, the OEH promised. But they had already been used in the Hunter Valley on proposed coalmines.
The maps were still not all finalised when the laws came into effect in August 2017, and where they were absent, landholders were able to make their own assessments. By late 2017, several maps available for use in determining native grasslands were withdrawn. Mitchell Clapham of the NSW Farmers Association described the situation as a ‘debacle’. An OEH map of his property had confused blackberries with eucalypts, he said. Other farmers mentioned water courses supposedly atop hills, or property boundaries wrongly ascribed, and a lack of response from the OEH to complaints.
New South Wales Minister for Primary Industries Niall Blair reassured the association that ‘the government will not make any decision on the maps until consultation is complete and farmers are confident they will work’. In the interim, they would have to do without maps. The Local Land Services Land Management Code was designed as a work-around, allowing for yet more self-assessments.
In the case of grasslands – notoriously difficult to evaluate because they die back seasonally, and it is challenging to distinguish native from introduced (especially from aerial images) – it was easier to just give it all away. In November 2017, the OEH published an ‘interim grasslands and other groundcover assessment method calculator’ on its website, but trials at workshops had farmers again muttering of inaccuracies. It didn’t seem to satisfy either landholders or environmentalists, and, judging from the intricacy of its instructions, only experts would be eager to test its advantages. Local Land Services ‘worked with’ the OEH to get native grasslands removed from the regulatory mapping system.
The confusion agreed with some. ‘The farmers,’ Phil Spark recalls, ‘were actually saying, “We quite like it like this, and this is the way we want it to stay. We don’t need maps!”’ he chortles.
Into the chasm opened by the OEH mapping fiasco, NSW Farmers deftly inserted a wedge. In late 2018, members voted that the vegetation maps would have to be approved by the association. They should have veto over them. And no map could be used for regulatory purpose – used, for instance, by OEH compliance investigations on conservation values or remediation programs – unless the landholder had confirmed its accuracy. In late 2019 the OEH put up its newest Native Vegetation Regulatory Map for exhibition with an invitation for submissions from landholders ‘and other interested parties’, anticipating further updates. A map that shows an endangered ecological community would, if NSW Farmers had their way, have to be ratified by the owner who might want to remove it.
The association, on a roll, passed other motions. Invasive native species such as cypress pine should have a lower level of protection than non-invasive species. The prosecutor in a land-clearing case should be able to offer evidence of the clearing – even though such evidence is commonly raked, burnt and spread before it can be photographed. The OEH should grant a forgiving ‘retrospective permission process’ for ‘non-permitted activities’ under the last years of the old laws, rather than pursuing prosecutions. This last would be realised in 2019, when the state government declared an amnesty on new prosecutions for illegal clearing before 2016.
‘We’re in a dark spot,’ Chris Nadolny admitted in 2018, ‘where rates of clearing appear to be increasing but we don’t even have figures to back that up.’ As vice-president of the Armidale Tree Group, he had just written a summary and assessment of the law reforms as a whole and found they ‘will certainly make it easier for landholders to clear land legally’. The system of offsets, he wrote, relies on honesty and compliance. Though it technically halves the gross areas lost to clearing, it ‘will never compensate for the loss of habitat for wildlife’. In a strange personal experience of the revised laws, seventy-eight large and antique eucalypts in the grounds of the University of New England, where Nadolny works and where the OEH had an office, were suddenly marked for felling. Some of the trees probably pre-dated European settlement, and all were important habitat for fauna, many full of hollows and nests. A few were actually in the car park of the Natural Resources department. The reason cited for removal was safety; no further rationale was required, no alternatives had to be explored. Arborists were consulted, but no ecologists needed to be, despite the possums, gliders, parrots, bats and other animals that lived in the trees. Many had been cut down by the time Nadolny supported a student-led protest to save the rest. It can take over a hundred years for a young tree to form its hollows. Saplings were planted in their stead.
BY JULY 2018, THE Nature Conservation Council of NSW was loudly demanding that the OEH release recent figures on landclearing. The public data was four years out of date. After an eight-month wrangle with The Guardian, the government relented, and the information was as bad as conservationists had feared. From 900 hectares in 2013–14 to 7390 by 2015–16, the annual rate had risen, as the new laws were being anticipated, by an immense 800 per cent within three years. Regeneration and conservation programs were down – restoration that same year was less than half what it had averaged in the decade (though it still vastly exceeded the area cleared). Tree cover loss was huge: 106,100 hectares gone in one year, 40,000 hectares the next. This was mostly due to bushfires, infrastructure development – and rural projects. The rates would only continue to rise, and the government to bury the figures until they couldn’t be contained.
It was all usefully seen in relation to activity just across the border. Queensland authorities’ data showed nearly 400,000 hectares cleared in 2015–16, under new laws introduced by the Campbell Newman government. This had released about 45 million tonnes of greenhouse emissions, contributing to a nullification of all the tree-planting efforts by direct action projects and other mitigation schemes. Meanwhile, in the Northern Territory, land-clearing permits had increased by ten times under a new Labor government, with interest in opening up more of the Kimberley to grazing.
Turnbull might seem like the last of a certain type of farmer, as he scraped away at the black soil. But he was a man very much of his moment. The dozers have been roaring across vast tracts of the nation in recent years. In New South Wales, with the re-election of the Berejiklian government in 2019, they were refuelled.
21
The only good snake is a dead snake.
—Country saying quoted in Jock Marshall, The Great Extermination, 1966
It was only six months after his father’s death that Roger Turnbull’s patience broke again. In September 2017, he took his mother to court, with Grant as secondary defendant. He and Annette were arguing their right to cross a corner of ‘Yambin’ to get to one of their own properties.
It was a nasty little dispute. It involved not just the family homestead but various other Turnbull properties, and gives an insight to the ways in which the family was adept at transferring property ownership. Proprietary in their property. They had excellent lawyers.
In the 1990s, Ian, Robeena and the four sons had together bought a station, ‘Wallam’, on the north side of the same east–west road as ‘Yambin’. Five years later, under the partition arrangement when Roger stopped working for his father, it was made over to Roger and Annette alone. On the far side of ‘Yambin’, from 2008 on, was Roger’s ‘Royden’.
There was an access road across ‘Yambin’, which allowed Roger and Annette to avoid a very long detour along public roads from one of their properties to the other. Roger maintained that his father had pledged he could have access (reportedly saying irascibly that he didn’t want Roger churning past the ‘Yambin’ homestead, casting up dust and making noise at all hours). But after Roger reached out to offer condolences to Alison McKenzie, th
e long-held tensions between Roger, Ian and Grant split them like a dead tree. The family foresaw that Glen Turner’s family would sue for damages and make a claim on Ian and Robeena’s properties, including ‘Yambin’ and ‘North Yambin’. Roger was worried his right to the access road across ‘Yambin’ would be lost, and hastened to claim it officially.
He wasn’t, he felt strongly, responsible for the crimes of his father, nor should he be penalised. In December 2014 he went to his mother, in what she would later testify was a state of agitation, and asked her to sign a document to prove his entitlement to the road. She signed it. He left. The next day Robeena rang her son and asked him to screw up the paper. He said he would, but he didn’t.
In May 2015, Roger attempted to sue his parents for what he claimed was his lost inheritance. The old man was enraged. After that, Roger alleged, his mother got the lawyers onto her son, under her husband’s instruction. Roger, Annette and their staff were not to use the access road. Roger was not even to enter the bounds of ‘Yambin’ or any other of Ian and Robeena’s properties.
Roger and Annette continued to use the road. ‘Yambin’ was by now in Robeena’s possession, after Turnbull had sold it to her for a dollar, and Grant, administering affairs on her behalf, let them use it. A tense family Christmas came and went. But in January the lawyers wrote again, warning, ‘Any attempts by Roger Turnbull, Annette Turnbull or their employees, agents or contractors to enter, travel through or utilise any roads, paths or tracks on or through our clients’ properties, specifically “Yambin”, will be deemed as trespassing.’ Letters flew between legal offices. Four months later, Ian Turnbull was in court for murder, and Roger was due to testify for the prosecution.
The boundary between ‘Royden’ and ‘Yambin’ is a strange one: the two properties don’t touch. A creek runs between them. It and its banks are Crown land. So on one side was the land of the patriarch, and on the other the venture of the progeny, a line of nature imperviously trickling its little way through, separating father and son, but binding them together.
Marshalls Ponds Creek loops and careens its way in sine waves across the plains from the Golden Triangle to north of Moree. It crosses boundaries, upsets the geometry of block divisions, wobbles the composure of fencelines. It takes detours. Tiny trees stitch it tightly. Obtuse blocks of velvet green, cream yellow or the pale ones are cropped fields; one can tell the native vegetation from the colour, that familiar grey-olive. Most of the land is scraped clear like nap pared with a knife.
Marshalls Ponds Creek garners virtually no mentions on the internet. It appears not to be notable in any way, or to have any history that has been deemed worth transferring into new media. Google Maps barely deigns to identify it. Any attempt to follow it across scrolling screens of satellite maps is an exercise in frustration, as dark, unnamed undulating lines converge, branch and disappear from one zoomed-in view to the next, across the plains from the Golden Triangle to north of Moree. The hem of trees is supposedly protected, as part of the state waterways; satellite images show it wiggling restlessly, dark seam in a blanched fabric. It crosses boundaries, upsets the geometry of block divisions, wobbles the composure of fence-lines. It takes detours.
For under the flat marquetry of the Moree plains and the jostle of perpendiculars and parallels are fugitive lines: the renegade curves and purposeless meanders of these waterways. The big rivers and the tributaries, the creeks and the flood paths. They surge diagonally over the maps; they loop and lope, dwindle and thicken according to moods invisible to cartography: gravity, habit, their own forms of profit. Around them cluster the last trees, at their densest here, where the roots may find moisture without incurring resentment. From above they form lines, too, irregular widenings and narrowings: so they spool across the land. This is a different kind of separation from the fences, the blocks with their property numbers, the roads, the gates and mapping polygons. There are no closed loops or rectangles in this wild espaliery, though the trees form lines, the water extends its silver threads. Every line has its gentle termination, with passage between them. Not so much a net as branches of a plant.
And the lines are permeable. Anything may pass through a thicket of trees: animals, seeds, breezes, sunshine and shade. Anything may pass over water: leaves and blossom, skimming insects, aerial animals, cloud shadow. Guilt.
THE OLDEST KNOWN EXAMPLE of primogeniture is the biblical story of Esau. For the Turnbulls, possessed of four sons, there was no question about a male inheriting; but like many an imperfect royal succession, the establishment of a classic dynasty would be complicated by its patriarch’s ambitions.
Esau, eventually, was tricked from his inheritance by his younger brother, Jacob. It is Jacob who becomes spiritual leader of the family, heir to the lineage of Abraham. His mother, Rebecca, sides with him.
In September 2017, the Supreme Court of New South Wales heard that after the exchange of letters between lawyers in the summer, Grant Turnbull had had one of his staff drive a dozer, pulling a ripper attachment, right along the length of the access road. He then tore up another part of the road and planted crops on it.
According to his mother, Roger or someone acting for him had, in response, spitefully trespassed on ‘Yambin’ with a spray rig one winter night, driven along one boundary and poisoned a chickpea crop growing there.
The Turnbulls were literally gouging out each other’s pathways, poisoning their mother’s crops. The land was no longer simply friable soil into which one inserted seeds and saplings. It wasn’t money anymore. It was a battleground, as it had been for nearly 200 years.
Grant took the stand. Under cross-examination, he said the Turnbulls, despite their keen interest in property, didn’t keep written agreements between themselves, even as they worked on each other’s land under various arrangements and understandings. He and Roger had worked together, along with their brothers Sam and Doug, for many years.
The family, the judge would later summarise, ‘did not require a piece of paper to record what the agreements were’. Their father ‘would tell his sons how things were going to be’ and ‘they would do it’.
In Grant’s view, Roger ‘did not give any support to Ian following his arrest’. Grant took a strong view about that, which he conveyed to Robeena. Roger told the court he and his brother ‘have never been close’; Grant, in turn, agreed. Yet Grant, though positioned to do so, hadn’t upheld Ian’s command to block access on the road until nearly a year later, when a sharp letter, written at Grant’s instruction, came from Cole & Butler spelling out the restriction. The path linking the brothers was literally being closed. For good measure Cory and his family were specifically exempted from the decree.
Roger lost the case. His testimony was, the judge decided, lamentably unreliable. He had knowingly misled the court in preparations for the trial by initially denying the incident spraying out the chickpeas; he had previously tried to get a loan by pretending, ‘as bait’, that he was about to sell his property and thus fund repayments. ‘Sometimes you bend your figures to make it work,’ he’d told the court. He’d admitted to these lapses under oath, which spoke of a desire to be honest but, at best, ‘Roger’s evidence may have been a subconscious construction. At worst,’ said the judge bluntly, ‘it was a deliberate fabrication’.
Roger and Annette wouldn’t be compensated for the road dispute. Robeena was entitled to sue for damage to her chickpea crop, the judge ruled. The family left the court into a mild September day and headed to their various homes, all of them exhausted.
NSW FARMERS, UNDER AN abbreviated nomenclature and the leadership of Mitchell Clapham, was reasonably pleased with the laws it pushed for, passed by a sympathetic Liberal–National coalition government. Its website carries – as does the Local Land Services site – a case study featuring Nerinderjeet ‘Nick’ Lalli, a blueberry farmer from near Grafton. He cleared what he called ‘mostly scrappy bush land’ with a dozer. The land had been a peach farm, cleared by authorities for fear of fruit f
ly and then left to regrow scrub. ‘The trees don’t even grow straight,’ Lalli said. Blueberrries, however, enjoy the acidic soil, and he’d navigated the new legislation to clear a rectangular block in the middle of thick treed vegetation that stretched for many kilometres in every direction.
Under the law, Lalli was allowed to clear in exchange for set-aside areas of native vegetation: nearly 11 hectares of needlebark, stringybark and red bloodwood trees on another part of his property had to be protected ‘in perpetuity’. Local Land Services, Lalli told NSW Farmers, spent hours auditing the biodiversity, and external auditors observed those staff at work. They chose the set-aside area for its connectivity to other timbered country on nearby properties. Of course, what it means is that there is now a cleared space where once there was none. It was a revelation to Lalli that clearing could be expanded under the new legislation. ‘With the previous land management policy, I wouldn’t have been able to clear my property at all,’ he said, pleased. ‘The new regulations have opened possibilities.’
His business, at high season, employs sixty people. Clearing the vegetation from one section of the property, he said, ‘will unlock massive opportunities, not just for me but for the whole district’.