It takes time to learn to see the land. To begin with the early settlers often saw what their land wasn’t – it wasn’t cleared, it wasn’t grassed – instead of what actually was there. How did they get it so wrong?
Various historians have implied that the new farmers in New South Wales had little knowledge of farming, but even in the early colony – and in the First Fleet – this isn’t true. The most common convict profession (apart from thief) was ‘farm labourer’3, and even those who just put down ‘labourer’ as their profession could well have grown up in the country. Probably most had a great deal of farming expertise, even if they hadn’t put ‘farmer’ on their immigration sheet. Looking at my own family tree (a diverse sample from seven countries and at least six denominations), every ancestor who arrived here had a farming background, even one who was a thief – he had been convicted of stealing a dray and bags of seed. The one who was a clergyman lived in farming communities and came from a farming background.
The Ffrenches had worked their land for hundreds of years, and prosperously. They knew how to tend the land so that it would feed generations to come. Peter Ffrench arrived with reasonable capital; Charlotte had a head for business. Peter could have chosen a life in Sydney or Melbourne, with luxuries like next-door neighbours and a pub down the road. But he must have loved farming, known how to coax crop after crop from the land.
But not this land.
A land fit for sheep to live in
The devastation began with the two dreams the immigrants brought with them, from as early as the First Fleet in 1788. The first centred on a mob of sheep, wobbly and starving from months at sea (only ewes are recorded, but presumably someone had thought to bring rams, as there were soon lambs). The wobbly sheep were part of the dream of neat green fields, small farms in villages and almost self-sufficient farmers.
There used to be an old English saying, from Romney Marsh, I think: ‘Stock ten sheep to the acre until you can stock ten sheep to the acre.’ It means that the sheep will clean up woody weeds and keep the turf short until only the turf remained, thus creating perfect sheep country. Instead of fertilising the land you fed the sheep hay until their dung had fed the soil.
This works in small neat English fields, where it rains regularly and often and the turf is thick and tough and able to cope with sheep’ hooves, and the area is evenly grazed. It doesn’t work in the bigger paddocks (whether fenced or kept by shepherds) of Australia. Instead the sheep camp by waterholes, concentrating their dung there, polluting the water and compacting the ground. Sheep ‘follow the leader’ to water, creating paths that will erode into gullies.
England was once marsh and forest, not fields of sheep or ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, as Blake wrote. Sheep changed England, too. But England with its regular rainfall is perfectly suited to small fields of sheep, marked out by fences or hedges. In winter, stock might even be brought indoors, letting the land rest. A good snow, farmers said, fed the land, helping break down animal dung and washing it into the soil. But sheep (like feral goats, pigs and deer) can turn the wrong land into desert, especially where much of the land – as it is in Australia – has a relatively thin covering of topsoil.
European and North American rivers and ancient glaciers dropped vast amounts of deep rich soil over wide areas, leaving the fertile cropland that still exists today. Deciduous trees also drop their leaves every year, so nutrients are recycled annually.
Australia has relatively few big rivers and flood plains, and those it has do not behave like the rivers of Europe and North America. They are slow moving for the most part, with a tiny gradient and enormous catchments. When the rain doesn’t fall they dry up and stop flowing, reduced to a few deep pools and, once they dry up, what water remains flows beneath the surface. When the rain does return they collect water from thousands of square kilometres of country and the rivers run, opaque and soil-laden, until they top their banks and spread for kilometres across the almost flat country; it can take months for the water to recede and travel once again between the now remodelled riverbanks.
Soils in bushland are mostly regenerated by the slow dropping of eucalypt leaves and bark, the annual fall of insects like Christmas beetles that feed on those gum leaves, and the dung of grazing animals – all minute in comparison to European soils’ yearly autumn leaf replenishing. Europe’s climatic extremes also help create new soil, as freezing breaks rocks down. Australia’s extreme weather events – floods, fires, cyclones, tornadoes, hail like cricket balls – wash soil away, especially if it has been disturbed. And Europe has many more native annuals than Australia, the bare soil of a European winter warming in spring allowing them to germinate. Soft annual plants recyle their nutrients much more quickly than tough perennials – last year’s growth is this year’s soil. Of the roughly four hundred species I have identified on our place (a minute fraction of what is here) only one, the paper daisy (Xerochrysum sp.), is an annual, and it blooms mostly on road verges. Our land needs perennial ground covers and deep-rooted trees like river redgums (E. tereticornis) to hold the land and trap sediment.
Sheep nibble closer to the ground than roos, wombats and wallabies. Within years or decades they had killed the native pastures – not just the native grasses, but the hundreds or even thousands of ground covers present in native pasture.
Australian ground covers have evolved with our dramatic fluctuations in weather, decades of drought then years of rain.4 A few species take over while others lie dormant, either as rootstock or as seed in the dried droppings of kangaroos and other wildlife.
Wombat teeth grow throughout their lives. They need tough tussocks, rich in silica, to grind their teeth down. When they eat the tussock seeds they spread them in their dung. Poa tussocks survive here when grass species have vanished after two or even three years of drought. But sheep kill poa tussocks if they are stocked too heavily, or are desperate in a drought. Sheep don’t, however, eat the similar-looking, sharp-bladed introduced weed called serrated tussock, or the other introduced weeds either, which is why they are ‘weeds’, unpalatable or poisonous to stock and taking over land bare from drought, flood or storm.
The hard, cloven feet of sheep are harder on the soil than the feet of roos and wombats. When Australian soil becomes compacted, water runs off it instead of soaking into the subsoil. Compacted soil means that creeks flood after rain, carrying away topsoil, but relatively little moisture is left deep in the soil to keep the creeks flowing till the next rain.
Sheep (and cattle and wheat) led to a loss of topsoil – up to six tonnes a year according to a CSIRO study in the 1980s – as a result of devastation by pests, weeds, salination, erosion gullies and dust storms. But bare soil not only blows or washes away, it is also vulnerable to weeds, especially the new ones brought by colonial settlers. In the 1980s I watched two sites recover after devastation from a tornado, one in eucalypt forest in the Araluen Valley and another in the nearby Monga rainforest. Both were at least a kilometre from introduced weeds and quickly recovered, with fast-growing native grasses, emu berry, native nettles and other soil ‘stablisers’, then fast-growing canopy trees. But overgrazed paddocks fill instead with Paterson’s curse, thistles, serrated tussock, broom and other weeds.
Sheep and cattle also need water. Colonial Australians would show enormous ingenuity transporting water to areas of grass, using windmills to pump from springs and creeks to stock troughs and paddock dams. Up until the 1970s, when petrol pumps and poly pipe changed irrigation, most paddocks had their windmill, an iconic but now almost vanished part of the Australian farmscape. But those dams and stock troughs meant that more land could be damaged by stock.
We drained water tables, too, and are still doing so. Back at school we were taught that this was a virtue: we Australians were making the desert come alive, drilling deep wells into the artesian basin and other aquifers. But Australia’s soils are also older than Europe’s or North America’s, with salt blown in from the ocean over millenn
ia. Add regular irrigation with slightly salty water and the salt builds up until it becomes too salty to grow even grass. Clear too many trees and the salty watertable below the ground rises again, turning what was once living larder into vast, salinated desert.
All this from a dream of green fields dotted with snowy sheep.
I can imagine putting this to my ancestor: ‘Peter, you are going to destroy the land, not make it a paradise.’ I imagine him answering, ‘But a man must feed his family.’
There are alternatives5 to going back to the living larders of pre-1788 Australia, feeding at most a population of a million: micro-managing even sheep, with electric fencing and other techniques, so that the land can regenerate, with windbreaks of trees and shrubs and mixed pastures of perennial and annual species of grasses and legumes; farming kangaroos and emus, or using stock like alpacas, which may be gentler on the soil; researching and using native pastures; and, most importantly, looking at the land, assessing both damage and possibilities and continuously monitoring soil, weeds and pests. But that wouldn’t happen for nearly two hundred years.
Sheep may not even have been a disaster if Australia had been parcelled into small farms, where farmers were forced to work out ways to manage it sustainably, or die. Instead, for over a hundred years, colonial settlers had free, or very nearly free, land.
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When ground cover isn’t grass
Most Australian paddocks are sown with introduced grass: usually one to three species, including a legume like sub-clover, whose bacteria fix nitrogen from the air. Native pastures are enormously diverse in comparison. Our paddocks at Araluen, for example, contain the plants listed below and many others not yet identified. These paddocks were lightly grazed for decades and haven’t been sown with introduced grasses, yet even this was enough to destroy the murrnong (yam daisies) and the many ground orchids that still exist in the small forest glades beyond the paddocks.
Rough spear grass (Austrostipa scabra), Three-awned spear grass (Aristida vagans), Vanilla lily (Arthropodium spp./milleflorum), Yellow buttons, common everlasting (Chrysocephalum apiculatum), Yellow buttons, clustered everlasting (Chrysocephalum semipapposum), Barbed-wire grass (Cymbopogon refractus), Blue flax lily (Dianella longifolia), Kangaroo grass (Themeda australis), Weeping grass (Microlaena stipoides), Paddock lovegrass (Eragrostis leptostachya), Forest hedgehog grass (Echinopogon ovatus), Kidney weed (Dichondra repens), Slender tick trefoil (Desmodium varians), Stinking pennywort (Hydrocotyle laxiflora), Small St John’s wort (Hypericum gramineum), Twining glycine (Glycine clandestina), Poison rock fern (Cheilanthes sieberi), Soursop (Oxalis radicosa), Native raspberry (Rubus parvifolius), Soursop (Oxalis perennans), Native geranium (Geranium solanderi var. solanderi), Ajuga (Ajuga australis), Poa tussock (Poa labillardierei var. labillardierei), Native sorrel (Rumex brownii), Clustered wallaby grass (Rytidosperma racemosum var. racemosum), Wild sorghum (Sorghum leiocladum), Short-haired plume grass (Dichelachne micrantha), Creeping cudweed (Euchiton gymnocephalus), Variable glycine (Glycine tabacina), Narrow rock fern (Cheilanthes sieberi), Hairy speedwell (Veronica calycina), Native bluebell (Wahlenbergia gracilis or stricta subsp. stricta).
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The cheap land disaster
Free or extremely cheap endless land for anyone who wanted it was our second agricultural mistake. Put together sheep and ‘free land’ and you had an ecological disaster. When land is free and seems to be in unlimited quantities, you don’t need to tend it as you would two or even a thousand acres back in the United Kingdom. Land there usually needed to be fenced (though in the Welsh hills, parts of the Scottish Highlands and some other areas this wasn’t the case – mobs of sheep passed on knowledge of ‘their’ territory to their descendents). It might need draining and labourers to chip away at the weeds in winter, the ‘off season’ when you used the labour you needed for sowing and harvesting in spring, summer and autumn to do maintenance jobs. But this new continent didn’t have winter, at least not by British standards. In most parts of Australia crops and feed grew all year round.
When you have what you think of as infinite land – land you can either just take, ‘squat’ on, or buy or rent for a pittance compared to what you might expect to make from it – then you can afford to move on to new land, or extend your acreage as feed grew scarce on the land you already had. ‘Free’ land meant that instead of closely managing one acre to get fifteen bushels of wheat from it, or raise fifteen sheep, you could use fifteen acres to grow one bushel per acre or raise fifteen sheep. You could even have a thousand acres – which would make you wealthy in England but be a recipe for bare subsistence in much of Australia – or measure your property in square miles, with one sheep or beast for every ten acres. Land could make you wealthy both in England in Australia: in Australia you just needed more of it.
The costs for farming 10,000 Australian acres were lower than farming ten English acres. Even in the 1980s many large Australian properties did not even have fences along their boundaries much less fenced paddocks, except around the homestead. Sheep would be rounded up once a year for shearing, or two or three times a year for dagging (removing the dirty wool that could attract fly strike) or, later, dipping in pesticide.
Cattle needed even less work than sheep. In vast areas of marginal country, all a farmer had to do was round up the young ‘poddies’ every year and brand them before the neighbours could duff them, replace a ‘scrub bull’ every four or five years with a good one, and drive the ones you wanted to sell to a market town, hundreds or even thousands of miles away. And if you were curious about how many head of cattle you were actually running you could give them a ‘bang tail muster’, where every animal you put through the yards had its tail switch cut off and thrown in a pile to be counted later.
Modern Australia is still slightly drunk with the infinite land concept, so easy to believe in as you fly over forested mountains and paddock after paddock. That myth, which began in 1788, still haunts us: there’s always more where that came from. If we make a mess here we can move on.
How did it begin?
The infinite land myth
The myth began on 26 January 1788 as the First Fleeters gazed at what they saw as a vast and still mostly unmapped continent. The officers at least knew that large parts of the west coast were dry, but Tasman has noted giant trees in the south, and Cook had restocked the Endeavour in the good grasslands of the north. It was a reasonable assumption that much or even most of New Holland’s interior was grassland or forest, with inland lakes and rivers. That had, after all, been the case with the ‘new’ continent of North America – the central areas were superb farmlands, needing at least a century of immigrants to carve it up into homesteads (and to completely displace the traditional owners).
And this continent was free for the taking. Yes, the Indigenous owners did battle, but they could be overcome by overwhelming numbers and muskets.
Large parcels of land didn’t even have to be taken legally, that is, according to the laws of England, and much of it wasn’t. Australia has a long tradition of those in power taking land then using political or financial pressure to get the laws changed to legitimise stolen wealth. Even in the first decade of the colony officers of the New South Wales Corps like John Macarthur took advantage of the temporary absence of a governor after Phillip left to change the regulations, gaining themselves the vast estates of land on which their fortunes would be built. Now and then the English government or its representatives would try to put limits on further settlement, sometimes with apparent guilt at the dispossession of the Indigenous owners but, more often, because the massive areas and huge distances made their colonies too unwieldy and expensive to govern.
These days the word ‘squatter’ has romantic overtones, the now fashionable ‘squatter’s chair’ a symbol of colonial luxury. Back then a squatter was just that: one who took their stock to an area no other person of European descent had claimed and said, ‘This is mine.’ They simply took, and often ma
de fortunes doing so.
Squatters didn’t even pay the small fees the government required. By the 1820s, for £500 you would be granted one square mile of land (640 acres, or 259 hectares) by the government. There was a limit of two thousand acres on land grants (later raised to 2560 acres). The £500 didn’t have to be cash – it could be in sheep. Over the next seven years a grantee had to spend a quarter of the value of the land on improvements to get legal title to it. You also had to pay a ‘quit rent’ of five per cent of the value of the land, but never more than five shillings an acre, so for 2650 acres you paid £33 per year.
Even that easy ride to becoming a landholder was not enough to satisfy the hunger for land. ‘Squatters’ paid nothing to the government, and their occupation of land was impossible to police. By 1822 Governor Brisbane was forced to introduce a ‘ticket of occupation’ system, so that farmers could legally occupy their land before it was surveyed and could also keep other people off it. Legal landowners would have to employ one convict at their own expense for every hundred acres, and sons wouldn’t automatically be granted more land unless their father’s land was being worked productively.
In 1824 Governor Brisbane declared that no one family could be granted more than five thousand acres and no one person more than four thousand acres. The squatters took no notice, occupying as much land as their flocks needed.
In 1829 Governor Darling proclaimed the ‘Limits of Location’: only settlers within the nineteen surveyed counties would have police protection and laws administered by magistrates. Again, all attempts to limit the land grab failed. Sometimes squatters found new grazing lands even before the explorers as they took their flocks ever outwards in search of good grazing. Surveyors like Thomas Mitchell were often surprised to find a farm and a welcoming dinner when they thought they were in new country. There were ‘overlanders’ too, the men, and sometimes women, especially Aboriginal women, who took the great herds of sheep or cattle from one part of Australia to another, often finding both new routes with more water or land with good grazing that could be acquired by themselves, their families, or the information about it sold on to others who would grab it.
Let the Land Speak Page 22