I couldn’t make Leon see that the serious environmental weeds, the willows, the Smilax, the blackberry, the sweetbriar, the pines, the exotic grasses, had to be tackled. He thought it was enough to plant the occasional tree. A free load of whips had been supplied by some agency or another, and planted directly into the rough grass in front of the house, where they languished for lack of the water necessary to get such little trees started. If the tags that still fluttered on them were any guide, few of them were true natives of the area. No botanical survey had been done of Leon’s properties, nor could one have been particularly helpful, for practically every form of vegetation on most of the properties was a feral exotic. Some of the native species he selected would become feral in their turn. I tried to make him see the beauty of the Cherry Ballarts growing on the undisturbed sandbanks at the river mouth, and the cloud shapes of the Melaleucas along the low shore, but he was not inspired to act. I talked to him about endangered dry grass forest communities and the importance of keeping robust competitors out until the trees and the grasses have had a chance to re-establish, but he didn’t listen. It would have taken hard work, a lot of money, and rigorous mental discipline to have restored even a modicum of the biodiversity of his consortium’s string of bits of land; without consensus we couldn’t even begin. Meanwhile, beyond the boundaries of the property, the area was losing its amenity with every day that passed.
Twofold Bay has been in trouble ever since it was visited by Bass and Flinders in 1798. In July 1803 Her Majesty’s armed tender Lady Nelson fired cannonballs into the cliffs for no particular reason. Sealers who used the bay to flense their catches had no scruples about removing the Kudingal women for their own use and shooting Kudingal men who presumed to object. Such is the reverence felt by Australians for their own brief history that the old whaling station, where the fat was boiled off the great beasts, so that the stench of rotting whale meat hung over the bay and decaying matter choked it, is now a carefully manicured tourist venue. The town of Eden popped up on the shore when more and more hopefuls arrived by boat to try their hand at panning alluvial gold at Kiandra in the 1850s. There were grandiose plans for a city, but by 1866 the gold had petered out. At one point the citizens of Eden got very excited when their town was considered as a possible site of the Federal Capital, but Canberra was chosen instead. Eden remained a backwater, logging for railway sleepers and fish canning its only industries. In 1999, after fifty years of operation, the Eden fish cannery was finally closed because it was not ‘globally competitive’, throwing 12 per cent of the total population of the town out of work. Eight months later the site was sold, for the building of a tourist resort. Meanwhile the beauty of the bay had not been advanced by the building of a fuel storage depot on Lookout Point, smack in the middle of the two lobes of Twofold Bay.
Eden has been described as a town forever waiting to be saved by the next major development. In 1970, when the Daishowa Paper Company of Japan, which had been logging in the old-growth forests of south-eastern New South Wales and Gippsland, opened its woodchip mill on Munganno Point, most of the citizens of Eden were convinced that prosperity would follow. Opposition to the demolition of the forests came from outside, from middle-class greenies who lived in the cities, who became more vocal as more and more old-growth forests were logged. The state government’s only response was to guarantee ‘resource security’ to Daishowa; each year the quotas were increased and the royalties reduced, to offset raised transport costs as Daishowa had to go further afield to find the trees to fell.
Conservationists hoped that the chip mill would close in 1997. When it showed no signs of doing so there were public demonstrations which resulted in its temporary closure in 2000. Harris-Daishowa, since 2003 called South-East Fibre Exports, is once more running full-bore, though in June 2005 work stopped for a day when activists entered the mill and lashed themselves to the conveyor belt between the chipper and the stockpile. In 2004 observers from the action group Chipstop counted the number of trucks bringing timber to the mill, an average of 163 per day; 79 per cent of the loads contained old-growth trees, many of such girth that they had had to be split before loading.
I wondered whether it might not be my destiny to be caught up in the struggle to preserve the forests of the south-east. It wasn’t as if I could ignore it, if I became a landholder in the area. The mill and its wharf and the container ships are visible from all round the bay. The noise from the mill carries way up the river, augmented by the constant noise of the timber transports turning off the main road and along the purpose-built road through the bush. Not to fight against the destruction of the forests would be tacitly to support it. I couldn’t see the activists letting me stay out of it, come to that. I didn’t have the stomach for so hopeless a fight.
There was even worse in the offing. In 1999 it had been announced that Twofold Bay was the site chosen by the Australian government for a new naval munitions wharf and storage facility. A 200-metre-long wharf in East Boyd Bay was to be connected to the shore by a jetty seven metres wide; the bay would be dredged to a depth of 10.5 metres to provide the berth and turning space for the munitions ships. A new access road was to be built from the shore to the roadway and on to a storage depot fifteen kilometres away in the state forest, amid fire-prone sclerophylls. The Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales objected to the proposed construction, citing the effect it would have on the protected seagrasses, and on the rare Weedy Seadragon (Phyllopteryx taeniolatus), on the likelihood of polluted run-off and the importation of sea pests, the change in patterns of tidal flow, deposits of sediment and erosion. They could have made a more convincing case if they had been given time, but it would have made no odds.
The port, which in my innocence I thought would never be built, opened on 17 October 2003. All arguments against its siting in Twofold Bay had failed, mainly because all the other suggested sites were too close to centres of habitation. One of the benefits of the remoteness of the area and the depression of the rural economy was that local opposition was minimal, and apparently further afield nobody cared. The local MP Gary Nairne declared, ‘The Navy Wharf project has been an enormous boon for the Eden and Bega Valley Regions, creating 112 local job opportunities and potentially attracting millions of dollars of private investment to the region.’ Whales may no longer play there, and the oysters on the rocks may be too dangerous to eat, but everyone will be, potentially, richer.
Environmental degradation spawns its own inevitability. When it was suggested that Eden’s mussel farm be extended from twelve hectares to fifty, it was argued that fifty hectares of bobbing buoys could hardly detract more from an area of great natural beauty than the chip mill, the fuel tanks on Lookout Point, and the munitions wharf already did. On 4 April 2004 a toxic bloom of the dinoflagellate Dinophysis acuminata was discovered in Twofold Bay. This organism infects shellfish, rendering them toxic at very low concentrations. Not for the first time, oysters, pipis and mussels from Twofold Bay were declared inedible. Yet in 2005 the state government signed off the permission for the mussel-farming project to proceed to its second stage. This may not be as stupid as it looks, because one way of reducing the overabundance of nitrogen that favours the proliferation of mixotrophic algae is to have mussels filter it out of the water. If I had bought Leon’s parcel of forest, I’d have had a munitions wharf and storage depot, a chip mill working twenty-four hours every day, and 163 timber lorries a day, and fifty hectares of mussel farm to look at and listen to, as well as several losing battles to fight.
Before I left the south coast I made one last attempt. The local estate agents had a ‘historic’ homestead on the books, so Jane and I went to see it. Our way up into the pastoral district of the Monaro took us on zigzag timber roads over the coastal scarp through the higher-altitude sclerophyll forests, where far too often we could hear the cling-clang of the Bell Miners. As we got further inland the native forest gave way to huge dark plantations of Monterey Pine. The road fizzled out and navig
ation got harder, as we wove our way through the crisscross logging tracks. We seemed to be driving for hours without getting anywhere. I was convinced that in my obsession for travelling cross-country I had finally succeeded in getting us properly lost when the five-barred gate of the station was suddenly in front of us. I jumped out, stepped up to unhook the chain and open the gate, and froze. Beyond the gate the broad, undulating pasture lay grey and dry, watched grimly by the distant pines. In the birdless, terrible quiet, nothing moved. The sky too seemed drained of colour. It was as if my vision had gone from colour to black and white.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Jane.
I didn’t know. ‘I don’t want to go in,’ was all I said. My hands were cold. My sister studied my face and said nothing. We’d been driving for more than three hours to get to this place, but she didn’t ask even to stretch her legs. I got back in the car, turned it around and drove the three hours back again. I apologised for my strange behaviour. Jane shook her head.
‘You didn’t see yourself. Your face was grey.’
It was many months before I found out that the property we went to see was the very station where, sometime in the 1840s, a whole Aboriginal community was murdered. The story, which has been passed down by one to another manager of the station ever since, is that the Aboriginal people used to sneak into the dairy at night and lick the cream off the top of the milk in the separating dishes. Nothing was simpler than to lace the milk with strychnine. Somebody must have bought the station ultimately, for I see it’s operating once more, but I’m glad that someone wasn’t I.
Thus ended my search for a place in New South Wales.
Desert
What I really wanted was desert. For twenty years I had been roving back and forth over central Australia, hunting for my own patch of ground. Whether stony, rocky or sandy, pink, vermilion or blood-red, whether bald, furred with native grasses, or diapered with saltbush and spinifex, I wanted it. For years I have gorged on the life that pounds within what we were taught to call the ‘dead heart’, from the sudden glitter of dawn, when kangaroos sprang in front of me and emus loped beside me, with my ears tuned to the electric sizzle of the finches’ song against the limitless silence, to the creeping violet fingers of evening. The white heat never seemed all that hot to me, because the desert winds freeze-dried the sweat on my body. Zero humidity and I were made for each other. The more I saw of semi-arid Australia, the more I yearned for it.
This falling in love began when I first drove the Birdsville track from Bourke to Alice Springs in 1970 and camped in the deep warm pink sand of the dry Todd River. I had never had an Aborigine’s-eye view of my country before, and what I saw I loved, until the police raided the beer garden of the Alice Springs Hotel and took most of my fellow campers to jail. After I had followed the sequence of injustices through the magistrate’s court on Monday morning when all my new friends, who had committed no offence, were given custodial sentences, some of them as long as six months, there was no time to venture out of the town and discover the inland for myself. I flew back to Sydney and eventually back to England, but the feel of that warm sand in the dappled shade of the river gums under the cobalt sky never left me. Whenever I found myself in Australia, I took every opportunity to escape from the endless sprawl of suburbia into the vast blue yonder.
Literary description of semi-arid Australia always dramatises its pitiless emptiness. Nicolas Rothwell, who followed the tracks of the explorers for his book Wings of the Kite-Hawk, recycles all the clichés. Why do I not feel ‘the stillness of the bush, pure and uncaring’, or the ‘dull monotony of tree and scrub’, in this ‘inhuman’, ‘unnatural’, ‘alien’ ‘world of suffering, exhaustion, danger and death’, ‘the cruellest and most inhuman world that it was possible to conceive’ under the ‘empty blueness of the sky’? I don’t feel the desert as an ‘empire of formlessness and death’; what I feel in the desert is deep comfort. Only in suburbia do I begin to feel frantic and hopeless, suddenly back where I was in my teens, imprisoned, heartsick, revolted by the endless roofscape, desperate for life to begin. Maybe the claustrophobia I inherited from my father, that has disqualified me for life in the brick veneer bungalow on its quarter-acre block, hemmed in by fences on all sides, is quieted only in the desert, where I can wrap myself in the same kind of euphoria that lures divers to their deaths at the bottom of the sea. I am never frightened in the desert, not even when I’m well and truly lost, and God knows I should be. A silk dress and a car key are unlikely to get you out of trouble, should you strike it, but I take a delight in following the example of my forebears who went bush during the Great Depression, with nothing but the clothes they stood up in and a bicycle. If Aboriginal people can get around the bush without four-wheel drives and spare fuel- and water-tanks and air conditioning and roo bars, then so can I. I have never felt that the country was harsh or unforgiving. Whitefellas have always seemed to me the most dangerous animals in it.
When you travel all day through the ranges you become aware that with every minute change of light and orientation the character of the country changes. Different elements become visible and others fade or are burned out. Fissures in rock can turn from blue to purple to black. Depending on the time of day the very colour of the air changes, from magnesium white to misty blue or honey gold or peach pink. When it rains everything is transformed. I have seen Uluru in rainy weather, and it was blue. One of my fantasies has always been to lie in my own bed and watch the desert landscape slowly turn violet while fat yellow stars pop out in the inky sky and owlet-nightjars shake the still-warm sand through their tawny feathers. Or to watch the storms as they ride over the scarps, sending their white-hot feelers raking down the ridges and exploding in sheets of coloured light. I have driven the backroads of the Pilbara when flames were popping all around, and the saltbush and scribbly gum were bursting in showers of sparks that fell in front of my tyres, and still I wasn’t afraid. It’s not that I trust the desert not to kill me; it has killed better people than I. It’s more that I don’t mind if it does. Better a swift agony in the desert than my mother’s long twilight in a seaside nursing home.
Thousands of other people too find the desert comfortable, and far safer than the town. Anmatyerre women will take off barefoot for a day’s hunting, with no more protective gear than wash-cotton dresses plus the full complement of respectable underwear, armed with nothing but a crowbar and a hatchet, with their children and dogs gambolling around them. No boots, no hats, no sunblock, no sunglasses. I was lucky enough to spend a day hunting with them once, because my hired four-wheel drive was just what they needed to get them far enough out in the scrub to find a big goanna. Goanna fat is the essential bush cosmetic; it is the basis for the scented unguents that the women use to keep their skin soft and supple and the insects at bay. To help me recognise the goanna’s track one of the women drew it for me in the sand. She tucked three fingers under her palm, and as she pulled her hand across the sand she rocked it, so that the thumb and little finger made the marks of the scurrying feet on both sides of the trace of the dragging tail.
The Anmatyerre women were as much at ease in the ‘inhospitable’ landscape as if they were grand ladies presiding over their tea tables. They picked clear gum off a small mulga tree and gave it to me to chew, with as much grace as if they were handing around the cucumber sandwiches. ‘Bush lolly’, they called it. It had a faint aromatic sweetness that was enormously refreshing. We dug up the roots of the witchetty bushes and extracted the fat white grubs that are the greatest of all bush delicacies. One of the women used her hatchet to cut an oval of bark to use as a coolamon, sealing it off at the edges with red mud so that the harvested grubs wouldn’t fall out. The children could hardly be dissuaded from wolfing the grubs raw. We followed the flight of native bees to their holes in the eucalypts, and stole their honey with impunity because they have no stings. To me the native bees are a perfect emblem of the gentleness of a country that, instead of lions and tigers, has kangaro
os and koalas. Not for the first time I asked myself why the white explorers had felt it necessary to ‘discover’ a country that its inhabitants already knew like the backs of their hands and could manage with minimum effort.
I had met up with the women at Alhalkere on what used to be Utopia Station. When I first heard of Utopia the Aboriginal people had just acquired the leasehold with the help of the Aboriginal Land Fund Commission. I asked an old Aboriginal stockman in the Alice Springs Hotel how the Aboriginal people were getting on with their cattle. He looked at me with narrowed eyes.
‘Ate ’em.’
I was shocked. That was twenty years ago. I wouldn’t be shocked now.
Utopia came to the attention of the rest of Australia in the Seventies when the Anmatyerre women began producing silk batiks. In 1990 or so I went there to see their work for myself. When I got to Alhalkere the people had all gone bush, so I hung around for a bit, hoping that they’d come back. It was while I was cooling my heels that I realised that I was surrounded by a breast-deep sea of silky blond grass with feathery tops that swung in the slightest breeze, the like of which I had never seen before. Nowhere else in the Northern Territory had I seen unmunched, untrodden vegetation or clean waterholes where people could drink, rather than acres of trodden mud. Then I knew why the people had killed and eaten all the cattle. In the paintings by the women of Utopia you will see again and again the streamer patterns of the sacred grasses that are the glory of the place. The Anmatyerre are now the freehold owners of their land, and even the hundred or so head that Cowboy Louie Pwerle used to run for his own pleasure are no more. From the Anmatyerre I learned what I would do with any piece of central Australia I might get my hands on. I would leave it to recover from nearly two centuries of misguided exploitation.
White Beech: The Rainforest Years Page 7