The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  ALAINE ANDERSON IS FACING three battles: to save the koalas in distress in her district, even if she cannot protect them long-term; to persuade her neighbours to more sympathetic forms of farming; and to prepare for passing on her own property. She is in her late sixties, her husband older. There is pressure to leave their land.

  They bought ‘Strangford’ forty years ago, when the property had only about 10 per cent native vegetation left. This is still the case, despite their efforts. They’ve worked the land. Human-induced edge effect has killed off attempts to extend the green, due to spray drift and desiccation on the margins. When she began publicly criticising Turnbull for the clearing next door, her pumps mysteriously became blocked with dirt, wires were cut in the Spra Coupe, the letterbox was pulled out – twice. She still doesn’t go out walking alone if she can help it. The sign out the front of their property looks ferocious: in red print, it says things like ‘STOP’, ‘BEWARE’, ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED’, and warns of CCTV. Other owners in the countryside have such signs, sometimes to daunt government compliance officers. Anderson has hers to warn off hostile neighbours.

  While Turnbull was in jail, word had spread that the Andersons would retire soon and move on. In a phone call, a sullen Turnbull told his interlocutor he couldn’t wait. The sooner, the better, he said. Someone would buy that property and clear it.

  Anderson has no plans to let that happen. But it would be nice, she says wistfully, if they could retire. ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if someone were guiding us,’ she muses, ‘to put this bit of land aside, and put it into writing as a covenant in perpetuity.’ She has considered a covenant, but is cynical of its durability. ‘You have to be able to say, this is so important that we will never clear this.’ She and Lionel haven’t been perfect, she admits: they’ve cleared and caused erosion in the past. ‘Now we have to try and fix it. So I am not in a position to tell other farmers what to do, but I’ve seen a lot of changes for the worse. I just wish I was younger.’ One day, choices will be made for them. Their children only say, Get out, get out now. What they hope is to move on from a life of farming and wildlife protection, and to ‘leave a legacy of sustainable farming and robust environment’. That’s, she says, ‘all we’ve ever wanted’.

  The Moree heatwave of 2017 – a nightmarish two months of incessant scorchers – broke records. Climate change is lengthening the extent of heatwaves, raising global temperatures and increasing the likelihood of drought and flood and extreme weather in general. It is creating less and less certainty, except of inevitable hardship.

  ‘When it’s been dry for a while and windy, the sky gets pink with dust,’ said Moree’s mayor, Katrina Humphries. The dry dust of the inland blew over Sydney in November 2018, followed by devastating rain and storms. They succeeded months of drought in the capital; out in the semi-arid interior, the dryness continued. ‘Rain follows the plough,’ people used to say. Not anymore. In the Moree region they plant water-intensive crops; they filch from rivers; they moisten the earth from bores. The sky is changing above Croppa Creek, but below, the tractors are still busy pushing trees.

  Farmers are reporting serious issues with their ability to sustain crops. In 2018, the worst summer season since 1956, crops in the Golden Triangle failed. Many landholders didn’t sow the following year. In 2019, after 231 years of agricultural effort, Australia was forced to import wheat.

  Moree, said Humphries bravely, is adapted to hot weather. ‘The climate’s been changing for 20,000 years,’ she told science magazine Cosmos after the heatwave. ‘Mother Nature can be a bitch, she really can. We have to manage ourselves with what she does for us.’

  Anderson and her friends discuss the prospect of the next few years. There are no windbreaks left since landholders began clearing right to the fencelines. There is no water in the dams. There have been dust storms, like in the 1930s. ‘There will be more,’ she sighs. Trees are now being taken out even from waterways. ‘I can’t believe it. They want the aerial spraying; they spray everything. The little birds’ eggs aren’t strong anymore, they won’t hatch like they used to. Now they take out all the trees and they have open slather with their planes.

  ‘They fill in the dams too,’ she rushes on. ‘That was the big push here: fill in the dams, fill in the dams. If we have a fire here this summer, god help us.’

  That was in 2018. The apocalyptic bushfires that hit New South Wales at the end of the following year and burned throughout the summer didn’t reach Croppa Creek: there was so little left to burn. But a photograph of a homeless koala licking rainwater from Croppa–Moree Road made headlines in British media, along with news that up to 3 billion of its wildlife cousins had been lost in the infernos.

  The drought, Anderson and her friends had felt, was probably ultimately a good thing. It was a chance to rethink. We’re all in it together, she reminds people. ‘Can’t we stand back now in the midst of this terrible drought,’ she asks, ‘and just say – right, enough is enough and let us not do this ever again?’

  She’s not entirely alone. North of Moree District, the Gwydir Shire Council has an energetic Landcare group, the Northern Slopes. In 2017, the group won a state award and became the state’s representative at the federal awards. In February 2018, it invited Charles Massy and Colin Seis out to talk about regenerative farming. Their network of ‘Future Farmers’ now numbers about 600. They organise ecologists to talk to schoolchildren about spotting and guarding native wildlife. They have an Aussie Ark Threatened Species group to survey for fauna.

  In North Star, Robeena Turnbull’s brother Ran and his wife, Jenny, have put their property, ‘Leyland’, on the regenerative agriculture map. Mitchell, on inheriting the farm in 1954, noticed the returns from the soil were diminishing. So he took on no-till seeding, stopped fungicides and began composting. The property is now a stop on field tours through the Landcare group, and stars of the regenerative movement such as Massy and Dr Terry McCosker drop by. Relationships are being made where there were none, collaborations forming, competitions evaporating.

  Phil Spark visits the shire regularly to give talks on koalas and other endangered species. For a while he also attended the Environmental Defenders Office workshops around the region, explaining the implications of the new legislation to farmers and conservation groups. He wheezes with humour. ‘If you had a workshop specifically about how to manage native vegetation for biodiversity, they wouldn’t turn up. But if you can capture them …’ Most country people are good, Spark says. ‘They’re lovely people.’ But there is the cone of silence around illegal clearing – it’s like the concept of omertà in Sicily. ‘It’s just,’ he says with a sigh, ‘that one little problem they’ve got.’

  He admits to ongoing unease over Turner’s death. There are still questions about why Turner was left vulnerable. The Turnbull family welcomed the news of a coronial inquest, announced by the New South Wales coroner in 2017; they promised ‘explosive’ new evidence about Turner’s harassment. But Sparks frowns when he explains the need for an inquest. ‘We – we feel a little bit personally responsible because we were pressuring OEH staff to do more, all the time, you know,’ he says. ‘And poor Glen. He was the meat in the sandwich.’

  Spark leans back, considering. He, Anderson and the liaisons in conservation organisations ‘feel partly responsible that he was even there. Because there’d been some more clearing that we’d heard of down the road, and we were getting him to look at that.’ He has hopes the inquest will illuminate a broken system, and clear Turner’s name once and for all.

  IN JULY 2019, FOLLOWING the re-election of the Berejiklian Liberal–National coalition government, the Office of Environment and Heritage was abolished. Its functions were absorbed into a newly created Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, its title perhaps indicative of the government’s priorities.

  The following month, the Berejiklian government announced an amnesty on new prosecutions of land-clearing transgressions committed in the lead-up to the
new legislation implemented in 2017. Remediation orders would be a last resort from now on. The Nationals’ Adam Marshall, the new agriculture minister, told ‘concerned landowners’ in Moree that landholders should not be prosecuted for acting against the law if the law had now changed. Farmers, continued the member for the Northern Tablelands electorate, which covers Croppa Creek, ‘are our best environmental stewards and shoulder responsibility for the majority of land management in this state’. Marshall himself grew up on a farm near Gunnedah. He told his audience, ‘I will not stand by and watch as activists and ideologues try to paint our farmers as criminals.’

  Alison McKenzie, hearing this news from her property outside Tamworth, had to respond. ‘I’m totally gutted by it,’ she told the ABC. The premier sympathised. ‘There’s no doubt,’ Gladys Berejiklian said helpfully, ‘this is an emotional issue for many people.’

  In late 2019, the government released more information. Some 27,000 hectares of woody vegetation had been cleared for agriculture in 2017–18 under the new laws. This scale of clearing triggered a mandatory review, initially kept secret, and the results were released on a Friday afternoon in March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed Australia. Since the introduction of the new environmental laws, clearing rates had increased by thirteen times. In the region covered by Moree Plains Shire Council, encompassing the Golden Triangle and Croppa Creek, the area lost to cropping and pasture in just 2017–18 was about the size of greater Melbourne.

  It’s hard to set aside something already gone.

  At the same time, Adam Marshall and other Nationals were attempting to wrest elements of environment protection from the New South Wales environment minister, Matt Kean, with a grab for final approval on activities including the clearing of native vegetation.

  Then in January 2021, the report of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act review was made public. It categorically condemned the Act on its history of environmental protection. Two decades of failure since its inception had seen the nation’s environment badly degrade, while the legislation was ‘cumbersome’ and unclear in its objectives. It was ‘ineffective’, not fit for purpose and needed significant revision if it were to counter the threats of the present and future. A full and immediate installation of rigorous national environment standards, and a new office of compliance and enforcement, were the centrepiece of the report’s recommendations; a commissioner to evaluate and audit government policies, more consultation with First Nations peoples and their expertise, and a ‘custodian’ of information to the public were also part of the plan. The ‘piecemeal’ and compromised attitudes of the Act should cease. Responsible and effective administration of the nation’s environment was envisaged, salvation of endangered species and mature management of natural resources.

  Minister Ley responded, having sat on the report for three months before its release. ‘This is a process that will take some time to complete,’ she wrote, but she had committed to developing the national standards idea. The federal Liberal–National coalition government’s other main intention, drafted even before the interim report, was to look into limiting the right of communities to bring legal challenges under the Act, and devolve environmental approval powers to the states and territories.

  ‘Seems everything we do is a waste of time against a system that knows they can get away with it,’ Phil Spark said, downcast after the 2019 state election outcome, which dashed hopes for a Labor repeal of the New South Wales land-clearing laws. ‘Those of us that know the real picture are failures for allowing people and politicians to think that way. I don’t know what it is going to take to bring about the change needed to seriously protect the environment.’

  THERE WILL BE TREES in the future; there will be grain, though perhaps not as before. The continent is enormous, but then so is our appetite. We are renovating the very earth.

  It is a question not often asked of conservationists: what do you ultimately want? Most environmental campaigns are fought defensively. When the future is mentioned, it is in caution: by such a date, some species will be likely be gone. Few, if any, tired conservationists dare imagine a future that involves planning beyond short-term campaigns. Few risk freeing the endangered species of hope.

  First Nations peoples in Australia know this feeling well.

  Most conservationists have in mind a country that is not diminished. The baseline of those who protest development is the moment when things still functioned with no loss of returns: the soil gave and received, the people used what the land could afford, change was sung into rhythm. We don’t know if that is possible anymore. We don’t know, either, if it would have any place for us in it.

  Australians love the country in differing ways. For many, it is an inheritance made for them hundreds of years ago, formed by elders now only dust, put in words carried through years and landscapes. That legacy shapes continents. It scrapes forests from the soil. It sets a tool upon a trunk, sets trees on fire with the ferocity of its belief, scours animals from their hollows, tears meat from the bones of the land. It is a legacy so entire that those who carry it barely notice its weight in their hands.

  It is the legacy of the Enlightenment – which came from the ambitions of property philosophy, from the Enclosures and the Clearances; which flexed from medieval agriculture and was ported across the oceans in little boats; which arrived in the hands of exiles who were ignorant, who tried to learn, who killed those who might have taught – to draw lines, to divide, to apply a compass and a ruler and an account book. The legacy of those who had nothing to lose; those who had everything to protect; the legacy of cities where people did not know the land, and country, where people did not like the rules. The legacy of the gun, of the waddy, of the plough and the dozer; of wheat that began thousands of years ago in the Fertile Crescent, and grass harvested here for hundreds of thousands of years; the legacy of hope and of despair. It all pressed on the earth of Australia like footprints, or the weight of a body.

  The settlers live in us, whether we are their descendants or not. The landscapes we love now are as likely to be made by settlers as by nature. Our streets are asphalt, and our ability to forget the soil beneath is due to those settlers. We have changed the tracks of animals, rewritten their destinies, re-mapped a country erased by the shovel and the axe.

  The richness of the soil has mostly gone. Much of what is left has been sucked dry. It took just six years for all the wealth of millennia to be eaten up in that soil around Port Jackson.

  There is haunting in its grains, though. Blood. Bone. There are ghosts and guilt.

  There is wealth, too. Many have been born here, and found haven and happiness. We have made gardens and grown flowers. We love our country. We love its fruits. How we adore to gobble them down.

  IN MID-2018, GRANT PUT many of the family’s Croppa Creek properties up for sale. ‘Colorado’ was among them. Huge ‘Buckie’ was too, on sale from Grant’s company Qanagco; Robeena’s ‘North Yambin’, ‘Erralee’ and ‘Allandale’. They were leasing out ‘Yambin’ – the family homestead since the 1960s – and ‘Elgin’ and ‘Lima’, the properties bought by Robeena’s father in 1932. Altogether, in a modest ad giving few details, the Turnbulls listed nearly 6000 hectares of their land.

  Cory retained ‘Strathdoon’, by 2017 worth more than double what he had paid for it with the help of his grandfather. It is now a heavily cleared, thoroughly cropped monoculture, most of it bare to the soil but for the industrially farmed grains sown there.

  None of the remediation ordered by the courts had, as far as observers knew, been made, and the real estate ads didn’t mention the issue. A year after they went up, environment minister Matt Kean took the opportunity to make a statement that might have surprised his colleagues. ‘Ian Turnbull was an evil man and people like him give good farmers a bad name,’ he said. Anyone buying ‘Colorado’ needed to know ‘the NSW government will make sure remediation orders are fully enforced’.

  Aerial satellite photos
of the property taken that year show cleared land, except a dribble of vegetation around the water gullies, to the margin. In early 2021, the properties were still unremediated and still unsold: the listing for ‘Colorado’ describes it as ‘prime farming land’ and ‘predominantly timbered by Belah, Brigalow and Myall’. Remediation is still not mentioned.

  Roger and Annette sold ‘Royden’ and ‘Wallam’ in late 2019. Combined, the sales to an American teachers’ pension fund subsidiary made the couple more than $28 million, at $7500 a hectare.

  Money from the sale of the other properties will be used to pay fines, and the settlements due to Robert Strange and Alison McKenzie. In the meantime, profits from crops on those properties may run into the millions.

  THE PHOTOGRAPHS ON THE real estate listings for the Turnbull properties are studies in abstract. Many of them show cleared land: yellow-and-brown rectangles that fill nearly the entire frame. The earth is utterly flat, worn to the stubble. All the plough lines converge in the distance. Far, far away, almost at the top of the frame, is the horizon, under flat cumulus clouds and a pale blue sky, and the dark blotch of some tree. In some images the horizon is slightly tilted, so you feel woozy, tipped from the balance of the earth’s surface.

  There are shots of a shed full of expensive farm equipment. The corrugated iron walls of the workshed. A pale grey concrete floor.

  There are images of the Turnbulls’ wheat silos. Silver, smooth metal cylinders topped with grey metal cones, immensely high. They cast long shadows over the ground beneath them, pale orange, pressed by innumerable tyres. The gleaming metal, the magnificent height, the close ranking: they are like the magical towers of a fairytale castle, the battlements of a fortress.

  And there is a photograph of a road. Not Talga Lane, but a yellow dirt track, a driveway probably. There is flat dark grass of some kind on each side, the edge of a metal fence and, beyond, a line of brigalow and there, just the sky, waiting.