by Kate Holden
Regenerative farming promotes healthy soils and retaining vegetation to support them. It maintains functioning biodiversity that helps protect against other carbon-emitting degradation such as bushfires. It supports water retention and soil structure. It could, points out Massy, make ‘a ready, effective and proven means of fixing enormous amounts of long-term carbon in the soil’.
In September 2019, Farmers for Climate Action, a nationwide advocacy group, launched a report by the Australian Farm Institute warning that agricultural production will fall and food insecurity increase in the absence of a proper policy on agriculture and climate change. The Liberal Party launched the report, but the National Party declined to send a single member to its launch.
THE USE OF THE term ‘regenerative’ in relation to farming, environmental historian George Main suggests, is powerful because it speaks of ‘a painful history of suppression, fragmentation and disorder’. It can be confronting to open a discourse that admits of this, he concedes. But necessary. The health of soil systems and water courses are not the only things in need of regeneration and restoration in this country.
Alaine Anderson has read Massy’s Call of the Reed Warbler, and it echoes her own instincts about the importance of getting Indigenous peoples back on country for management. ‘Whenever we are fighting for the least of these animals, we are fighting for the least of our brothers and sisters who feel displaced. While ever we have these beautiful spaces, we need to celebrate them.’ She names a local Elder. ‘He is very sick. I know he wants his young people back as custodians, to get back in touch with nature and the culture that they had. And the animals, the koala totems or whatever: they will have a sense of purpose and meaning. Well, we all need that.’
She’s not the only one to advocate turning back to agricultural systems practised here by First Nations peoples for millennia. Aboriginal people survived droughts and unpredictable climate, while maintaining a small population rather than expanding it. Bruce Pascoe, whose bestselling Dark Emu (2014) enthusiastically describes Indigenous agriculture, says that as drought returns many people are reading his work and asking questions about traditional methods. Native grasses, Pascoe says, are not as productive per acre as introduced cereals, but they grow themselves, sustain wildlife, stabilise soil and encourage water to soak in. And they could potentially draw down a fair amount of carbon. They are suited to Australian soils, and they will withstand a drought.
Massy is from the Monaro, in southern New South Wales. The area is basaltic, volcanic, famous for its grasslands and its overclearing. When his property was devastated, first by his own incautious ploughing and then by drought, he began to ask questions: ‘What is it that makes a landscape? And how, in the face of Australian summers that now, year by year, seem to be fiercer and more desiccating, do I continue to manage and regenerate this extraordinary world around me?’ In fact, many of the experimenters and renegades he met had only been prompted to look for solutions after a disaster such as fire or drought had broken the complacency they had about institutional farming. A ‘monoculture of the mind’ dominates a farming mentality as compacted and sterilised of flexible feeling as a broadacre-crop field. ‘The crucial point, however,’ Massy writes urgently, ‘is that what we farmers carry in our heads determines the health of a landscape.’
No coincidence, perhaps, that so many farm homesteads have much wall and small windows. It is agonising, Massy says from personal experience, to realise that a lifetime’s work in good conscience, trying to build up a farm, following expert advice, traditions, common wisdom – a long dedication to building a future for one’s children and grandchildren, years of sweaty slog put into shaping and insisting upon a recalcitrant bit of country – has all been wrong. You haven’t built anything. Rather than ensure a secure future, you have pulled it down around you.
Ian Turnbull came, too late, to know this feeling.
But regenerative farming, sometimes called ‘lazy farming’, is taking hold. Funding is being secured for more research and ratification. Word is spreading. In February 2017, the Moree Champion ran a story of a Queensland family, the Trotts, who were using holistic grazing to negotiate the drought. ‘After what we have seen this year and the position we are in now,’ Jeff Trott said, ‘I reckon we would be spending a lot of money on feed right now if we weren’t doing what we are doing.’
Alaine Anderson tells of friends in Glen Innes who have put in permanent pasture with three different crops. ‘Oh, the moisture in that paddock!’ she crows. ‘There’s a full crop of native pasture because the roots are grown, the microbes are there. In five to ten years, if they so wish, they can put the land into full agriculture for another ten. It’s giving the land a rest. And the trees!’ She sighs. ‘I went up there to release a koala. The trees in those paddocks, with no chemicals for twelve months, [had] three times the foliage of anything at home. Unbelievable! It was beautiful! She went up this gorgeous big tree and away she went.’
Some of the farmers Massy met had made the most astounding discovery: if they left their land alone, it got better. Sometimes it wasn’t entirely subdued. There were seeds secret in the ground, biding, the ones not scraped away, the ones not split and crushed. People walked away from their land in despair and returned to find it grassed and lovely, the soil knitting once more, the green stitching it. They had stopped assaulting country. Damaged and changed, it seemed able to forgive them.
Of course, in some places it is less resilient. Others have found that when they abandon the land, species go extinct. Thoroughly ecologically modified, the land rewilds in monstrous form, overgrown and limited in diversity. Feral animals hunt unchecked. Weeds proliferate. We have pressed upon the earth, so in some places can things even function anymore, after our presence? We live in what is becoming known as the Anthropocene.
Walking off land isn’t an absolute solution, but farming that is kind may help. ‘I believe that love is the essential ingredient in human and human–Earth relationships,’ Charles Massy concludes. ‘An absence of love is seen in the ongoing colonial psyche in Australia and its ongoing lack of remorse for our Indigenous peoples’ loss of sacred country.’ Improving on the past ‘means un-learning many things’.
THE SEEMINGLY ENDLESS SPILL ofprosecution, trial, penalty and appeal, over three separate lots of clearing on two different properties, cascaded a little further on a warm spring day. Two weeks after the first part of Robert Strange’s suit was settled, on 24 October 2017 Grant and Cory were convicted of the illegal land clearing of the second bout done on their respective properties in 2012 and given a fine: a total of $708,750.
Justice Preston, having heard the defence in April, now gave Grant the sternest penalty possible – minus a discount of 12.5 per cent for the belated guilty plea – after taking into account various technical considerations. The farmer would have to pay not only over a third of a million dollars, but also the OEH’s costs for prosecution. It broke records for such penalties and made media headlines.
The penalty came on top of the remediation he had been ordered to do in 2016, estimated by Grant himself at $4.5 million, although it appeared still not to have been begun. Indeed, what the Turnbull family had done on ‘Strathdoon’ and ‘Colorado’ was, the judge said, ‘irremediable’.
Grant had no prior convictions. A friend testified that he was known for his ‘generosity, compassion and humility on many occasions’. But because he’d taken a year to plead guilty, the court had had to assemble for the case on nine separate occasions. He’d argued every point apart from his basic culpability; he even suggested that he should get a smaller fine in part because he had to pay for his defence team, including the inexhaustible Todd Alexis. The judge found that he showed no remorse, nor acknowledged the harm caused by his actions.
Cory appeared more sympathetically. A family friend who’d known Cory since childhood said he was ‘an honest, respectful young man’ now preoccupied with worry and anxiety. He understood his mistakes and wanted only to
put the acts behind him and look forward to the future. But the judge reminded the room that, under cross-examination, Cory had said that ‘at the end of the day it didn’t matter’ if groundcover on his property ‘was native or non-native’ because it was all going to go under crops. He did not express sadness that the land was unlikely to regenerate. He’d set out, he said, ‘to achieve a goal of turning a grazing farm into a cropping farm’. To walk away now ‘would mean the environment and myself would not benefit at all’. His admissions, the judge felt, were really ‘statements of regret for being apprehended and prosecuted for committing the offence and for the sentence that might be imposed’.
‘Strathdoon’ cost Cory and his grandfather about $2 million when they bought it. By the time of the hearing in 2017, it was estimated to be worth two and a half times that. The court must ensure, said the judge, the penalty involved just punishment and denunciation: ‘The community must be satisfied that the offender is given his just desserts.’
After a small discount for pleading guilty, the penalty for Cory was $393,750, plus the prosecutor’s costs. The financial difficulties he pleaded were, the judge pointed out, because he was still paying off a fine for the previous illegal clearing.
Grant immediately launched an appeal against his own fine.
That same year, he appeared in an agricultural trade publication, extolling a new modified hybrid strain of corn. Its name was ‘Pioneer’.
SO MANY MEMORIES, TESTIMONIES, interviews; so many laws, reviews, submissions; so many court cases, appeals; so many legal arguments, and press releases, and media reports; so much analysis, and debate, and discontent; so many shaken heads, so many disappointments. So much paperwork. So many trees felled to argue about the felling and keeping of trees.
Somewhere in the papier-mâché of this, caught in the gluey enclosure of regulation and terminology and argument, is the real world of animals with warm skin, of trees with rough bark, of the soil that crumbles between the palms. ‘The wild,’ wrote the activist scholar Vandana Shiva, ‘is not the opposite of the cultivated. It is the opposite of the captivated.’
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The list of our disastrous failures, from forest obliteration and oceanic pollution to the raising of the extinction rate a thousandfold bears all the marks of a species which no longer believes itself to be part of the animal world at all.
—Richard Mabey, Nature Cure, 2006
In December 2017, Roger Turnbull gave an extraordinary interview to The Weekend Australian in which he admitted his father had coldly premeditated Turner’s murder. ‘Glen Turner … once he had his teeth into something, he wouldn’t let go,’ Roger told journalist Deborah Cornwall. ‘And then you’ve got Dad, an old man who always gets his own way. And Dad just got more and more obsessed with Glen Turner. Neither of them was going to step back.’ Perhaps this wasn’t a revelation, but Roger went further. He said that his father had dug graves on the farm.
Chris Nadolny was horrified when he read this, especially the plural, ‘graves’. He had accompanied Turner on most of the investigations. Turner had asked him to come on that late July trip, but he hadn’t gone along because he was on leave. ‘If it was going to require more than one grave, then who else had he in mind to kill?’
Nadolny had heard rumours of Turnbull’s boasts to hide bodies before, even of a hole big enough for a four-wheel drive as well as a body. What chilled Nadolny’s blood as he read Roger’s words was the memory of a conversation he would not speak about publicly until 2019. Accounts in Turner’s notebook and transcripts of the murder trial hadn’t included it, but according to the ecologist, the day Ian Turnbull threatened Turner and Nadolny’s lives in 2012, he had said more.
When Turner had said, ‘I interpret that as a threat,’ and Turnbull had riposted, ‘I’m an old man. I can do anything I want,’ Turner pressed him. Thinking of the law, Turner asked, ‘Aren’t you concerned about going to prison?’
And Turnbull smiled and said something like, ‘If you were trespassing and I killed you with a single shot, it would only be treated as manslaughter.’
Nadolny admits his memory of the conversation was imprecise, even shortly after it occurred. The whole conversation took fifteen or so minutes. Neither he nor Turner recorded this comment in their notes; because, the ecologist explains, Turnbull said it in such a jovial, even-tempered tone, it was hard to take as seriously as the initial threat. There were other, more immediate elements to record. But Turnbull went on, he insists now: ‘Especially as I’m such an old man. As an old man I’d be let out on bail.’ He said dreamily, ‘I could put up a million dollars, could stay in North Sydney. With the legal complications, the trial could be delayed for years. Til I was dead.’ He had grinned at the two men. ‘It could even be quite nice, retiring from farm work all these years. I deserve a bit of a holiday.’
Two years later, the morning news of a murder. He knew instantly what had happened.
A couple of days after Turner’s death, Nadolny gave a statement to the police. He had, he says, ‘a very foggy memory’ of those further words, and so only confirmed the initial threat.
At the time, it had seemed strange to Turner and Nadolny that Turnbull would joke about stalling murder charges; probably, they thought, the farmer was awkwardly using humour to backtrack after his aggression. Or was he, Nadolny wondered, ‘saying something so outlandish so that we’d think he was a nutter and be even more scared of him? I didn’t know what to make of it,’ he confesses, ‘so my memory of that part of the conversation grew confused and faded.’
He has borne the memory, though, the weight of it, and wondered. His instinct today is that Turnbull, with his jokes about graves, manslaughter pleas and bail and holidays, was misleading his audience even as he experimented with scenarios and played a little mind game with his foes. How invigorating to talk of getting a gun and shooting a pest! The careless seeds of such talk, tossed lightly, landed in the deep earth of his brooding.
‘This has affected me,’ Nadolny admits. ‘My wife says, “Chris, you’ve got to be positive.” But it gets to you. Particularly seeing all this turning Glen into the villain.’ He sighs. ‘That hurts a lot. Half the people are thinking Glen was the villain for taking on my suggestions: my assessment of the seriousness of the clearing. That came from me, not Glen.’
Turnbull said genially that he would kill Glen Turner. Turner’s life ended in murder; Turnbull’s, as a convicted killer.
WHEN TWENTY-EIGHT CHILDREN, WOMEN and Elders were killed at Myall Creek in 1838, there was no inquest: there was outrage. It was not on behalf of the beheaded victims, hacked to pieces in a creek and their bodies ineptly burned and left exposed. When the perpetrators of the atrocity – former convicts employed on his property by wealthy landowner Henry Dangar – were identified and brought to trial, the settler community was aghast.
Dangar, who had conveniently gone away during the crime, professed himself shocked, but defended his men, raised support and agitated for clemency. His fellow landholders rallied too, and when, after an initial acquittal, seven were re-tried and sentenced to execution, there was protest at this ‘judicial murder’. Petitions were signed in support of their release. ‘I would never,’ a juror at the first trial told The Australian, ‘see a white man hanged for killing a black.’
Their guilt was not at question. Rather, the murderers felt singled out when such killings had been committed by their neighbours with impunity. Men on the land had to do what they had to do, others agreed. When the law was unsympathetic, the law had no business there. The convictions were a scandal; these men were on trial for murder when they had only looked after their landholder’s interests. The experience fatally weakened the authority of Governor Gipps, who had pursued the case; and those were the second, and last, executions for the murder of Aboriginal peoples in the colonial era.
Myall Creek is southeast of Warialda, 115 kilometres from Croppa Creek.
IN LATE MARCH 2018, many landholders and their advocates welc
omed news, announced by federal Minister for the Environment and Energy Josh Frydenberg and Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources David Littleproud, of an interim review of the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act as it concerned agricultural practice.
The review was convened under the authority of Dr Wendy Craik, who had been one of the four-member Independent Biodiversity Legislation Review Panel involved in the change in New South Wales’ vegetation laws. It was planned ‘to reduce red-tape [sic] and find practical ways to help farmers meet the requirements’ of the Act. For three months in mid-2018, Dr Craik took submissions from stakeholders. The Environmental Defenders Office was one of them. There is no evidence, it said, that the Act put ‘an undue regulatory burden’ on landholders. The problem was not the Act, but the lack of resources to help farmers understand how it works. Nationals MP John ‘Wacka’ Williams had a say too. He’d been infuriated by a tale of a farmer, the brother of federal Liberal MP Angus Taylor, being prosecuted for spraying out native grasses that had been declared protected only a year earlier. Williams expected common sense would see the federal laws fall away in favour of the state ones so that ‘farmers could be left out there to run their properties under state regulations to grow the food that feeds all Australians and tens of millions of others’. His wish would be supported.
The Craik report was completed by September 2018, though not published until June 2019. It recommended that farming interests, including options to lessen economic impacts, should be considered before a federal minister of the environment decided whether to list a threatened species under the Act; the public should also be consulted. The government should pay farmers and landholders to protect the environment through a billion-dollar fund, and landholders should be compensated if they suffered a ‘financial burden’ by hosting increases of threatened species.