Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  But the anger on both sides remained.

  A new federal government might be the way to bring in industrial laws covering the whole of Australia. The first meeting of the Australian Labour Federation General Council was held in Brisbane on 31 August 1890. The trade union movements sponsored new labour parties in all the states, though before Federation they only contested elections in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia, winning major reforms like ‘one man, one vote’ in New South Wales. These state parties would be the basis for the Federal Labor Party, formed after labour representatives met together in May 1901 following the first federal election.

  The dreams come true (and still it didn’t rain)

  On 1 January 1901, when the Constitution of Australia came into force, Australia did finally become one nation. The new nation had been created by both idealism and self-interest. But its major shaping force had been the drought.

  Federation, however, was not enough to make it rain. Australia wasn’t entirely free of drought until the good rains of August 1903 came.

  That long drought had changed Australia physically and socially. It created erosion gullies, dust storms and land too depleted to grow crops. But it also gave us the anger and idealism to fight injustice. Other droughts had and would shape both Australian government policy and the Australian character.

  That drought gave us a nation.

  * * *

  How to predict a drought

  You can smell a drought, just before it begins to bite. The wind here comes hot from the northwest, strong enough to bring new scents. When rain falls in the first few months it is always less than you’d imagined or the weather bureau predicts. There are other scents, too, a sharp clear smell of eucalyptus oil evaporating in the heat, the slightly cooked scent of hot flowers. But if you know your land, you can tell what the next year, or even decades, will bring.

  The spring last year told us what the summer weather of 2012-13 would be. The clematis bloomed prolifically, but not the wonga vine. Clematis grows in dryer soil; wonga vine likes damp gullies. The goannas were out early - light, not heat, seems to determine their hibernation patterns. Gully gum (Eucalyptus smithii) had had the longest, strongest flowering I’ve ever seen, a vast strip across the valley. No other gum trees bloomed. The gully gum likes dry, hot conditions.

  But along the coast, about thirty kilometres from us as the crow flies, although an hour and a half away by road, the spotted gum had the best flowering in years. Put that information together and you get a long-range weather forecast: weak lows coming from the southeast would release their rain onto the coast, even flooding it at times, but little of that rain would reach this far inland.

  But the vegetation last spring also indicated that it wouldn’t be a bad bushfire year - at least here. The three acacia species didn’t set much seed, nor did the Bursaria or Indigofera. So it was unlikely we’d have the weeks-long hot bushfire north westerlies, nor dry thunderstorms with lightning strikes.

  This summer of 2013-14 should be much the same for this small part of Australia. There’ll be rain, most possibly as violent thunderstorms. They will be interspersed with long weeks of dryness and above-average heat. It will be much like last summer: a few extremely bad weeks, with fires around that may possibly reach us too; not a lush year, but enough rain to get by. If we get a flood it will be a sudden gusher, not many days of relentless rain.

  We’ve had no long, loud wombat mating games, which would indicate in extremely lush green year to come, but there are more young wombats than usual in the pouches. Nor have we had signs of a truly bad year, although as I revise this in June 2013 it is too early for me to really tell, until the spring buds begin to swell in a month or so, and I can see how much seed has set from the winter blooming plants. ‘Pretty much like last year’ isn’t much of a prediction, but I’m relieved that all indicators put a really bad drought at least a year or two away. I am all too aware how limited my knowledge and experience is, compared to men and women now long gone, who could predict years in advance. I can only predict a year in advance, with a ‘maybe’ for a few years after that. Nor does the year here - as in most of Australia - fit into the conventional four European seasons. Instead we have six or eight that include two ‘springs’, one of which is windy, and with cold nights, but full of growing abundance. The other ‘spring’ has blue and gold days that can linger till December, or vanish in November. Nor do the seasons start and end on a particular date each year.

  But the predictors and seasons above only work for this end of this valley. Each area and its different species will respond to a coming drought in different ways. The land’s signs (here, at any rate) have been more accurate than weather bureau forecasts, although this may change: the science of weather patterns is rapidly advancing, and should continue to do so unless dingbat politicians cut the funding.

  Hopefully within the next few years the conventional science of weather prediction will be as good or better than predictions based on watching a piece of land one knows well. It takes decades of watching, combined with lessons from those who have known this part of Australia for many generations, to do the kind of weather forecasting I’ve described. A science degree takes only three or four years, as long as the climate and weather patterns have been accurately worked out for the students to study. Scientists are only beginning to understand the many influences on Australian weather. These include an El Niño pattern, when waters along the western coast of South America are warmer than usual and cause a tendency to drought in northern and eastern Australia, and La Niña, with abnormally low air pressure over Australia, and a tendency to more rain and floods. But the influence of the temperatures in the Indian Ocean to our west, as well as the strength of weather systems to our far south, are only just beginning to be understood, as is the influence of the strength of the jet stream that circles the earth.

  A land of drought and flooding rain needs accurate predictive models. To get that, we need adequate resources directed to research. They may not appear to bring in immediate financial reward, but in the long term Australia’s economic and ecological survival may depend on them. We also need planning decisions based on worse-case scenarios, assuming that some time in the next decade fresh water will be critically short.

  But there is one sure weather prediction for Australia: drought will come. We need better predictive science and local insight based on millennia of observation to know when.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 13

  Truth or propaganda? The bronzed Anzacs of Gallipoli and Kokoda

  Sunbronzed, forged by the land that bore them, the bravest of the brave, our soldiers saved Australia at Gallipoli and Kokoda …

  Or did they? How much of what we think we know about those campaigns and the men who fought in them is myth? And how much did the land contribute to the quality of our soldiers in the iconic campaigns of Gallipoli and Kokoda?

  Gallipoli, 25 April 1915, 1.30 a.m.

  The moon sank into darkness that could be either land or sea.

  On the decks of each of the three battleships the men waited, the first wave of 4000 soldiers (the 3rd Infantry Brigade of the 1st Australian Division) crammed together. They came from what Charles Bean1, Australia’s first official military historian, called the ‘outer states’ – Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and Queensland.

  Every second man had a pick or a shovel to dig trenches to shelter them from enemy fire – if the enemy left them alive long enough to dig. Each also carried the massive bulk of their equipment on their backs: overcoats, 250 rounds of ammunition, two to three days’ food – mostly army biscuit – and as much water as they could carry, as well as rifle and bayonet.2 They had spent the day at the grindstones, sharpening the latter. Now the tops gleamed in the starlight. From the three battleships they were organised into groups to be towed ashore.

  The enemy waited on the shore. The Turks were not just defending their land from this invading force: they had been
told that if they lost, their country would be under the rule of Russia. They would become serfs, Russians slaves; a gift from Britain, Russia’s ally.

  Each Australian Imperial Force man had volunteered, unlike many of their allies and their enemies. Many had been given two gold sovereigns to spend when they reached Constantinople, the Turkish capital. Turkey was an ally of Germany. When England had refused to agree to let Germany pass through its ally Belgium to invade France, England and Germany were at war. The men on the big grey ships were fighting for ‘the Motherland’, England, the place where perhaps a fifth of the Australian forces had been born, and most still called home.

  The men had already been told it would be bad. They would face enemy fire when they landed – the Turks were in trenches behind the beach, halfway up the hill and on top of the cliffs. The Australian troops had been told that an estimated one in five of them would die.

  Twenty kilometres south, the main British force was to land at Cape Helles. The untried and, in the British eyes, only semi-trained Australian and New Zealander soldiers had been given the subordinate but still critical role of heading inland to capture high ground, the promontory of Gaba Tepe and what would be known as Hill Number 971. Reinforcements would then push even further inland.

  Originally the campaign was supposed to be a primarily naval operation, or at least be supported by fire from the big ships. But the fear of mines meant that the men had only darkness, not naval guns, to protect them. They needed to take the enemy by surprise – or as much of a surprise as three battleships and seven destroyers could pose. The Turks knew they were there. But at least, in the darkness, any shots fired into the night would not have a visible target.

  The rope ladders swayed as one by one the men clambered down to the landing boats, so crowded that they sat low in the water. There was no room to duck. The barges began to tow the boats towards the darker line that was the shore. The only light was the red flashes of Turkish gunfire.

  Or was there? Some men who were there described the enemy gunfire as they rowed ashore, and even of bodies dragged off from the deck before they disembarked. But the official accounts say that there was no answering fire from the shore till 4 a.m., when the first boats were about thirty metres from the shore.

  Once they reached the shallows all the boats had to be rowed as the barges headed back for reinforcements. The boats went slowly through the waves, the men so crowded in that it was impossible to pull the oars far back.

  More shots, or possibly the first shots; at least one machine gun. Blood, brains and bone-splattered uniforms, bodies slumped into the water.

  The rowers kept on going. As a rower was shot and slumped to the bottom of the boat he was replaced by another man at the oars. The stars on the eastern horizon were just beginning to dim into predawn grey. Bursts of red and green and yellow slashed across the black. Shells screamed above them. More bullets slashed across the sea. Young officers stood to give the orders – and died in that instant, with a bullet to the head. The snipers targeted the officers, thinking that would cause chaos and panic.

  The first of the boats hit the beach. It was narrow, cut by a shallow trench with about seventy Turkish soldiers, waiting. Further down, the more open beaches were lined with barbed wire fences.

  The Anzacs staggered out, each man wading through the water, trying to keep his footing on the slippery and uneven pebbles and rocks. Some were lucky enough to be only knee deep. Others found themselves up to their necks in water. Many drowned, unbalanced by the weight of their packs.

  Even before the first Anzac boot hit the beach the sea was red with blood. Above the men were steep cliffs, cut with narrow fissured gullies and dappled with thornbush. On the cliff more Turkish soldiers waited, firing down. Orders were yelled into the darkness: drop the packs, take only rifle, ammunition, bayonet and haversack.

  The first to land at least had the cover of darkness. They overran the first Turkish trench and started upwards, digging those sharpened bayonet points into the cliff to haul themselves up or bushwhacking up the gullies. The sheer strength of numbers overwhelmed the Turks in the trench halfway up the cliff, too. But still above them the larger Turkish force fired down.

  The dawn light shone around them. Each man was a target now, but still they kept on scrambling up the gullies. About a kilometre from shore the Allied ship Bacchante accidentally fired a volley of shot, bursting in front of and splintering one of the boats. Most of the men drowned but some survived, to be taken back to the ship and then placed once more into a rowboat for shore.

  The second wave followed.

  By 9 a.m. on that first day about 8000 Anzacs made it up the cliffs, thrusting their bayonets into the dirt to haul themselves upwards. The sun danced across a thin line of cloud, well above the horizon. The beach seemed to melt in a great hot wave of light, but there were shadows on it now as well from boxes of stores and ammunition brought ashore, though at times it was hard to tell which were shadows and which were pools of blood.

  Many of the officers had been picked off by snipers; the officers’ habit of standing up in the boat to give orders made them easy to target. The units had become mixed up – there was no time to look for the identification patches on your comrade’s sleeve to see what unit they belonged to. Captains Lalor and Tulloch led two parties of Australian troops that fought their way inland.

  Other men – alone, or in twos or threes – fought what was almost their own war3, shooting, stabbing with bayonets, fighting hand to hand with the enemy, crossing rocky ravines and hillocks that hadn’t appeared on their maps. (Although the area had been well surveyed by army intelligence in the weeks before, the maps had not been passed to the troops who would be landing there.) It was heroism. It was also, in both senses, a bloody mess, as men or groups headed off on their own without the strategy that might have made their position defensible. At last they reached the high ground they had been told to take.

  Then lost it. Turkish reinforcements arrived and enough Allied reinforcements did not. By the next morning, the surviving Anzacs were huddled under the cliffs at what was to be known as Anzac Cove, waiting to retreat back to the ships.

  They didn’t. New orders came from England. Even though the high ground was occupied by the enemy, they were to try again, again and again. In four days, seventy per cent of the men from the 25 April landing would be dead.

  But the rest kept fighting, and when the reinforcements arrived they did too, for seven months, until – again – the orders came to retreat.

  By then legends had been born: of courage, mateship, men who died with a last joke on their lips, who refused to salute officers but who would give their lives for a friend. The legends were simplified, often inaccurate. It is fashionable now to claim that the legends of bravery were created as propaganda, and some of it certainly was, or at least embellished.

  How much of the Anzac legend is true?

  Who were the first Anzacs?

  Gallipoli: you can’t say the name without evoking images of young tanned men charging at the enemy, like we see in movies. It was said at the time, and still even now, to be the true birth of our nation, as the world – or at least the British Empire and its enemies – learnt that the Australian colonials could fight.

  Who were the Australians at Gallipoli? Were they really a superb fighting force, superior to others? Were they larrikins, who refused to salute an officer? Did their irreverent senses of humour stay with them to the end? Would they give their last crust of bread to a friend? Had the land they came from somehow created a soldier who was different from the British soldiers they fought with, with whom they otherwise shared most of their recent ancestry?

  Probably to some extent at least. They are men that I knew, my grandfather and his generation, and my father-in-law’s. You can’t understand Gallipoli – or Kokoda, the World War 2 campaign that furthered the legends – without knowing the land that shaped the men who fought there. There are aspects of the Gallipoli legend that cert
ainly aren’t true: they weren’t fighting to save their country, and most weren’t the boys or young adults shown in movies. Nor were they necessarily good soldiers at the start of the campaign – that first tenacious assault up the cliffs and gullies to high ground was heroic, but it was also disorganised, with possibly far greater loss of life because of it.

  But the rest? Let’s examine them, point by point.

  The make of the man

  Were the Anzacs fitter and better able to endure the conditions at Gallipoli than those from England, despite the fact that about a fifth of them had been born in Britain?

  Possibly, even probably. Those first Australian troops were carefully selected. So many enlisted at the beginning of the war that the army authorities couldn’t even process them all. That meant they could be picky, and only about one in three volunteers were taken. Later, as the need for more cannon fodder grew desperate, the requirements were dramatically lowered, and then lowered again.

  In August 1914 when the first men destined for Gallipoli enlisted, the requirements were that they be between eighteen and thirty-five years old, a minimum height of five feet six inches, and chest measurement of thirty-four inches, although a skilled driver could have chest that was only thirty-two inches (a chest measurement is a rough but reasonable test of fitness).4

  The men had to pass a medical examination, and it is probable that, as in the Boer War, preference was given to those who could shoot. Back then, men who could shoot wouldn’t have been members of gun clubs, shooting only at targets. They’d have potted rabbits in the dusk, dark and dawn (rabbits aren’t out feeding during the day). Potting rabbits wasn’t just a good day out – it added meat to the pot (hence ‘potting’) and you got a good price for the skins. Rabbits were in plague numbers, and farmers were eager for anyone to shoot them. Many or even most suburban lads made enough to buy their bicycle, tools for their apprenticeship or just to help mum put bread on the table by selling rabbit skins.