Some graziers in the Northern Territory have agreed to set aside small areas of their lease for Aboriginal people to use as campsites; I wondered if Aboriginal people might not do as much for me, but as far as I could see no precedent had ever been set. As freeholders the people of Utopia should be allowed to sell any part of their 180,000 square kilometres, but whether they would be wise to do so after the long struggle they had to acquire it is another matter.
Again and again Aboriginal people showed me the beauty of country. In 1982 I had just wandered out of Port Hedland, going north on the one and only sealed road, the two-lane blacktop that rejoices in the name of the Great Northern Highway, with the intention of observing the mining operations in the Pilbara, when I came across two Aboriginal girls hitching by the side of the road. They said they wanted to go to Derby, but after a while it turned out that they really wanted to go to Marble Bar, where somebody who was important to them was in the lockup. I was only too happy to turn the rental car off the highway and plunge off ahead of a two-kilometre plume of blood-red dust on the unsealed road to Marble Bar, famous for generations as the hottest place in Australia. The girls were as reticent as Aboriginal people usually are. Most of the little they said to each other was murmured in language, but I eventually learned that they were supposed to be at school at a Catholic mission near Cap L’Eveque.
‘Do they know where you are?’
‘Nuh.’
‘Didn’t you tell someone?’
‘Nuh. Just shot through.’
Fleeing from Catholicism. I could certainly relate to that.
We were eighty or ninety kilometres down the unsealed road, at the point where the Marble Bar road crosses the Coongan River, when the girls asked me to pull over. Without a word they jumped out and ran fully dressed into the mirror of water which burst around their skinny dark figures in cascades of opaque turquoise flakes. Nothing I had ever read about inland Australia prepared me for the radiance of that water reflecting the white colonnade of great River Red Gums, or for the dance of the light prisms that veiled the girls as they busily washed their legs and arms, drank thirstily from their cupped hands and tossed the water sequins over their heads. I felt as if I could have broken out my swag and camped on the red rock-shelves under those ancient eucalypts for the rest of my life.
It was inevitable that, with all avenues on the south coast of New South Wales exhausted, I would give in to my deepest longings, and fly to Alice Springs. There I took a charter plane northwards to Delmore Downs, to visit the Holts. If there was anything for sale in the Northern Territory they would know about it. They might even be prepared to let me buy something of theirs, but it was a slim chance. Don and Janet Holt have been important facilitators of the artwork of Utopia and principal patrons of the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Don laughed when I asked him whether he thought his daughters would marry the kinds of men who would choose an uncertain livelihood in the cattle industry.
‘I’m a cattle-breeder. I want to keep my own progeny by me and I will if I can.’
‘Are you going to restore the house at Delny?’
Delny was the title of another of the Holts’ leases; it had belonged to Don’s grandfather who had begun to build there one of the first concrete houses in Australia. The house was never finished. When their youngest child died of gastroenteritis, the family threw in the towel. I’d seen the half-built structure every time I’d driven the sand track up to Delmore, and something about it attracted me, its uncompromising rectangularity perhaps, its huge windows. It didn’t have to remain an emblem of defeat, or so I thought.
‘Restore Delny? I don’t think so. Why?’
‘I thought I might have a go. You could sublet it to me maybe.’
‘Why would you want to?’
‘I’m looking for a good place to put my archive. Somewhere dry and not too weedy. Somewhere I could manage as a nature reserve. I’d only need ten hectares or so.’
Even as I said it I could feel the feasibility drain out of the idea. This was cattle country. There were still a few native animals about but an isolated ten-hectare reserve wouldn’t be much good to them.
‘Jeez, Germaine, that hardly makes sense. You’d be in the middle of cattle country, hundreds of ks away from any other wildlife reserves. The only wildlife you’d come across would be reptiles.’
‘I don’t mind reptiles. But it’s the vegetation I’d be concerned about. I’d like to restore the original plant associations. If possible.’
‘Even that might be difficult,’ said Don. ‘For one thing, the native grasses are gradually dying out. We’ve never seeded this property with buffel grass but buffel grasses are taking over, and just as well, because you’d never grow cattle on the native stuff.’
The first buffel grasses to come to Australia arrived in the 1870s as packing in the saddles of the camels that were the first mode of transport available in the inland. Botanists now disagree as to whether buffel grass is a burr grass in a separate genus Cenchrus or whether it should be included in the genus Pennisetum. It is thought that some of the grasses spreading across the Northern Territory now are the Afghan species, Cenchrus pennisetiformis and C. setigerus. Cenchrus ciliaris, native to Africa and south-western Asia, was imported in quantity into Australia in the 1950s to provide superior forage in areas of low rainfall, and also to stabilise soils destroyed by overgrazing. The United States Soil Conservation Service began experimental seedings of buffel grass in the 1930s to control erosion; they began to spread in the 1980s and buffel grasses are now serious weeds of the Sonora Desert. Now that buffel grasses have spread across more than half of the Australian continent, where they have all but overwhelmed the native grasses, it is far too late to attempt to control them. In the sandy gidgee country north of Alice, they thrive as nowhere else. Although buffel grasses have been identified as major environmental weeds in the Northern Territory, there is nothing to stop graziers seeding the new varieties that appear on the market every year. Cattle prefer to graze on immature buffel grass; the mature tussocks that are often left standing have a larger, tougher and deeper root system than native grasses. As a consequence when grass fires come through, the buffel grass tussocks burn much hotter and for much longer than the native grasses, with serious consequences for other types of vegetation. Buffel grasses will regenerate after such hot fires; the native vegetation will not.
‘Buffel grasses are the most drought-tolerant pasture grasses in the world. And they’re damn’ good fodder as well,’ Don went on.
‘But what if the ecologists are right? They’re saying that because buffel grasses burn so hot and so long, the soil heats up to a considerable depth and mulga and witchetty are killed. The River Red Gums that have survived millennia of grass fires won’t survive the scorching of their root runs.’
At Delmore visiting blacks camped in a dry channel of the Bundey River, under huge River Red Gums. Don had grown up around that camp and under those trees, and I knew he’d be distraught to lose them. I didn’t want to play the prophetess of doom, but the case had to be made, so I forged on.
‘Once we exclude the cattle and control the buffel grasses, we’d probably get hundreds of species coming back. You wouldn’t know till you got a botanist to do a survey.’
Don was unimpressed. ‘Well, you’d have mulga, gidgee, witchetty bushes, Bush Orange, Bush Plum, Corkwood, She-oak, Cypress Pine maybe. Nothing special.’
‘I don’t want special. If I managed to get all those acacias to re-establish, we’d get some nitrogen back in the soil, and you’d start to see the wildflowers coming back again.’
Mulga, gidgee and witchetty are all acacias, fabaceous plants which with the help of associated bacteria fix nitrogen in the soil. Mulga is the common name for a group of Acacia species including Acacia microneura and A. aneura, not imposing trees but remarkable ones, that can live for a hundred years before achieving their full ten-metre height. The gidgee is A. cambagei and the witchetty is A. kempeana. I thought there
might be a few more Acacia species as well, maybe Ironwood, A. estrophiolata, and Cooba, A. salicina. To minimise water loss through transpiration most desert species have greatly reduced leaves or phyllodes, more like needles or spines than leaves. Others have waxy coverings that reflect back the sun’s radiance, or silvery fur, or turn their leaves side-on to the sun. Whatever the strategy the result is very little in the way of shade; rather than block the dazzling light the desert vegetation filters and patterns it. Most elegant among the desert trees is the She-oak, Allocasuarina decaisneana, that tends to grow with no other trees but its own kind, making a forest full of light. The White Cypress Pine, Callitris glaucophylla, which is actually blue, is rather less translucent than the She-oaks but much more so than the other species in the genus. If I acquired a strip of central Australia I would have them all, as well as the Honey Grevillea, Grevillea juncifolia, ssp. juncifolia, that drips nectar in golden strings through its narrow leaves. Its flower is a loose burnt-orange affair; its big sister G. striata, the Beefwood, may provide less in the way of nectar, but has ten times as many flowers, almost more flowers than leaves, and they are white. After every trip to the centre I planned and unplanned my bush garden, crammed it with woody Hakeas, known in these parts as Corkwoods, and Mallees, Emu Bushes, Saltbushes, every shade of silver, jade and turquoise borne on purple shadows against the blood-red ground under the black-opal sky.
‘Once you had the acacias, you’d get the dedicated butterflies, and the mistletoes, and with the mistletoes the Mistletoebirds. And all the other birds. And the wildflowers.’
For years I had been photographing Northern Territory wildflowers, Boobiallas, Everlastings, Mulla-mullas, Scaevolas, Potato Flowers, Desert Roses, and a good many weeds as well, and I still hadn’t found time to identify them and label my photographs. With a sliver of land I could study the plants and their associations properly, instead of just taking their picture in their party dress and moving on.
‘And the native grasses, like Lemon-scented Grass, Kangaroo Grass and, best of all, spinifex.’
‘That’s the last thing we need,’ said Don. ‘More bloody spinifex.’
I’ve never understood the hatred of spinifex that seems almost universal in white Australia. The pioneering botanists, who couldn’t decide if the genus was Plectrachne or Triaphis or Triodia, or what family it was in, gave the species contemptuous names, pungens, irritans, hostilis, molesta, inutilis. Even now botanists cannot make sense of the exclusively Australian genus which at the present count consists of sixty-seven species. Admitted, spinifex is nothing like lawn. You can’t play croquet or cricket on it and it’s no good as pasture, but it is the characteristic dapple that softens the scarps and the sandhills of a fifth of the Australian continent. It is the dot in dot painting. Its name sounds aggressive, and you can’t actually sit on it or run over it barefoot, but spinifex doesn’t grow in dense swards. The hummocks don’t connect up and in the sheltered spaces between live hundreds of ephemeral wildflower species. As the hummocks age the centres die out and the domes become rings; tree seedlings that sprout within a spinifex ring are the only ones in most parts of Australia that will be safe from introduced rabbits. Spinifex provides the habitat for the world’s richest lizard fauna, and for tribes of tiny mammals. Aboriginal peoples pounded its seeds and baked the paste in the coals to make nutritious bread. Its resin, which was melted and used to glue together weapons and tools, was traded up and down the continent. The rhythm of spinifex hummocks growing up and over sandhills or carpeting the plains is the heartbeat of Australia.
When conditions are right the Delmore spinifex makes an apple-green dome of quilled leaf sheaths out of which radiate thousands of fine silver flower spikelets, in a shimmering nimbus, like the guard hairs on some precious fur. There would certainly be space for it on any land of mine.
‘Look,’ Don went on, ‘I run cattle at very low density, probably not much more than one beast per square mile. This land, compared to the Barkly Tableland, for example, is clean. We don’t have Parkinsonia; we don’t have Noogoora Burr or Mesquite or Prickly Acacia. So we’re ahead of the game.’
Parkinsonia, Mesquite and Prickly Acacia are thorny shrubs and trees that were deliberately introduced into Australia to provide shade and control erosion. All three will form impenetrable monospecific thickets that greatly reduce the carrying capacity of the land, and obstruct the watering and mustering of cattle. Sheep straying into these thorn thickets are likely to be trapped by their wool and will die. Parkinsonia aculeata was introduced into northern Australia from central America as a hedging plant in the late nineteenth century and has now taken over more than 800,000 hectares. Mesquite or Prosopis is the dominant genus in the vegetation of the semi-arid south-western United States, where its seeds formed the dietary staple of the indigenous peoples. The species that has colonised huge tracts in the Northern Territory is Prosopis pallida. Like the other Mesquite species, it is long-lived, with a taproot twenty metres long, and tolerates an enormous variety of cultural conditions. Prickly Acacia (Acacia nilotica ssp. indica) from Pakistan has spread from Queensland across northern Australia as far as the Kimberley. Cattle and most other herbivores readily eat the pods of these three species and excrete their seed undamaged; the occasional flooding that is typical of the Australian inland climate carries the seeds to every watershed in the top end.
Noogoora Burr, a species of Xanthium, is an exotic prickle bush that in its immature phase is poisonous to stock. It probably came to Australia in the 1870s as an accidental contaminant in shipments of cotton seed from the Mississippi delta; its common name recalls Noogoora Station in Queensland, where in 1897 200 hectares were found to be infested. If Don hadn’t found Noogoora Burr on his land in 2001 he may well have found it since, as it has travelled further along the watercourses deep into the territory. To control its spread in the Kimberley, all pastoral leases along the Fitzroy River, from Fitzroy Crossing to the river mouth, have been quarantined. Any traveller found ignoring the keep-out signs may be fined up to $1,000.
‘Don, you’re lucky not to have these weeds yet but, if Australians don’t wise up to what’s going on, you soon will. Landholders become conscious of these infestations only when they destroy the profitability of the land. By the same token, they’re not fighting them in places where the cost of eradication would exceed the production value of the land, which ultimately means that the weeds must win. We know that a handful of introductions can end up taking over millions of hectares, yet we think that destroying a few plants in one place while millions thrive elsewhere will somehow contain the problem. There’s no awareness that Australian biodiversity is in jeopardy.’
Don frowned. ‘What’s so good about biodiversity? Species that are better adapted to survival will replace species that aren’t. That’s how nature moves ahead surely. I don’t run dozens of different breeds of cattle, because there’s no point. I stick with the one breed that is best adapted to my conditions. Droughtmasters are quiet; they tolerate the heat; they’re highly fertile and calve easily. They inherited the best characteristics of the breeds that went into them, so I stick with them.’
‘That’s just it,’ I said, feeling a good deal less certain than I sounded, ‘you need the other species to get your hybrid. The Droughtmaster’s what? Brahman and what?’
‘Brahman gives you the heat- and drought-tolerance and Shorthorn or Devon and Shorthorn give you the other characteristics, more or less. The selection of the best strains goes on continually.’
I was a bit unsure of my ground, because these are breeds rather than species. ‘But you do see that you need to keep all that genetic variability or you’ll have nothing to breed from.’
‘The whole Devon breed is descended from one red bull and three red heifers that were taken to New England by the Pilgrim Fathers,’ said Don, with a grin. ‘If buffel grasses replace native grasses, it’ll be because they’re better grasses. Just as beef cattle replaced the bison. If spinifex tries to fight
it out with buffel grass, buffel grass will win.’
I was silent, thinking about a valiant revegetation project that had been undertaken by schoolchildren just outside Alice. They had cleared a degraded road verge and planted a selection of native grasses and woody shrubs on it; a year later the whole site was supporting only two species, a buffel grass and Ruby Dock.
The next morning Janet and Don took me to see Delny. In the paddock between the house and the road, there was an old wooden mustering yard bleached silver by the sun, as well as a good deal of machinery quietly rusting down into a sea of overgrown buffel grass. The house stood on a distinct rise, which the floodwaters of the Bundey River never reached, judging by the soundness of the reinforced concrete shell that had been built around the original one-roomed stone house. In its time, the house design had been revolutionary. Rather than the ubiquitous pitched galvanised iron roof that would collect rainwater and channel it into freestanding tanks, the house had a flat roof that was dished so that rainwater would run into a shallow rectangular concrete tank built into the ceiling. Even without any glass in its tall louvred windows and without any water in the roof-tank, the house was cool and spacious, and full of the red mud nests of martins. I could see at once how you could extend it with open colonnades and enclosed courtyards, that would connect in a series of versatile breezeways, so you wouldn’t need air conditioning. There was ample scope for solar power, which Don was already using to run the bore pumps for his cattle troughs. The trees around the house were few and scrawny, a Hakea or two, a Mallee here and there, and something else growing out of what must once have been a septic tank. At first I thought it was a She-oak, but it was darker, denser, different. Beyond it, between the house and the invisible river, there were more.
White Beech: The Rainforest Years Page 8