by Roger Deakin
Going to meet Eric, I took the train out of Sydney at the height of one of the most serious droughts for years. The Sydney Morning Herald said over a hundred bushfires were burning that day, and the forecast was for even hotter and dryer weather. Bushfires are part of the weather in Australia. We went through the Sydney suburbs: Stanmore, Petersham, Ashfield, Strathfield, Meadowbank. The jacarandas were in full flower in every garden: pale mauve against the deep green of avocado trees, paperbarks in flower, date palms, scarlet hibiscus and the intense blue morning glory clambering everywhere.
In the newspaper was the story of a Sydney man killed in his garden by a eucalyptus the council had forbidden him to cut down. Approaching the coastal hills of Hawkesbury sandstone, we began to climb through enormous stretches of eucalyptus woods, the blue of their foliage accentuated by the blue-grey haze of smoke that hung over them from the bushfires. The valleys disappeared in smoke, and it flattened the horizons. The train snaked through the lovely flowering woods in the heat, sounding its horn eerily into the sudden darkness. We entered a tunnel, emerged into bright sunshine, then plunged again into another tunnel of smoke. More tunnels, more secret valleys of ferns and pines, wattle and eucalypts, then we were crossing the steep, wooded grandeur of Pittwater in brilliant sunshine. Across on the far shore, wooden boathouses, landing stages and sheds stilt-walked into the glittering fjord, half hidden in the trees, and rows of knee-deep salted sticks delineated the oyster beds like allotments.
Bushfires burnt here and there all the way north for the six hours of that journey, visible in the main as smoke hanging in the cuttings or across valleys further off, or as the blackened, smoking trunks of gum trees. At Camden Haven it was 43°C. In spite of the continuing heat, Eric and I drove west two days later from the coast through Kempsey and the Broken Bago State Forest, all bare, baked earth and charred trunks of eucalypts where the fires had swept through. Having invited fire by emitting the volatile oils of their leaves in the heat, the eucalypts would now protect themselves with almost immediate new growth from the hidden epicormic buds beneath the under-bark. That is what ‘eucalyptus’ means: ‘well covered’, from the Greek. You might call them ‘hidden buds’. In a forest fire, said Eric, only five per cent of the eucalyptus wood is burnt. In a grass fire, all the grass is burnt. In 1830 the Broken Bago was all rolling grassland with dense rainforest along the river banks. Now the tangled rainforest has mostly gone, except in the deepest ravines, and a tall eucalypt forest has grown up. From the coast to Kempsey, we passed huge Moreton Bay figs standing in the fields, parrots on the wing and wooden bungalows. In the logging town of Wauchope we paused to inspect a giant tallow-wood trunk marooned beside the road like a whale on a beach. It was said to be a thousand years old, contained 1,842 cubic feet of timber and had been hauled out of the forest, a notice proudly announced, by the firm of Bartlett’s of Wauchope.
As we wound up through the mountains of the Dividing Range, dense and dark with smoke, the temperature dropped to 11°C. Now and again the immediate air cleared and we saw that the valleys were all filled with lakes of blue smoke. Every so often we passed a dead kangaroo or wallaby, picked threadbare by eagles and crows. We followed a lorry crammed with live sheep up interminable hairpin bends. One animal had fallen helpless to the floor, its leg sticking out awkwardly through the slatted side. ‘All these animals were once driven to market in Sydney along the drovers’ roads,’ Eric said. ‘Estate Agents or Auctioneers would advertise farms for sale in the Dividing Range and all the way to the Namoi River as “only four hundred miles from Sydney” or “an easy three weeks’ droving to Sydney”. They reckoned these places were nice and handy for the stock markets.’
Descending the western slopes, we entered lovely open, rolling parkland where cattle grazed in the shade of the blue gums that were dotted about it. The drought had bitten hard: all things shrivelled to a drab kangaroo-brown. Swaying herds of thin, listless brown cattle grazed along the road verges, attended by stockmen in shorts and Blunstone boots parked up in the shade of trees in their utility trucks, with flasks, radios and a dog or two.
The temperature was over 40°C at Tamworth as we crossed the bridge over the Peel River, where Eric, fleeing his farm during heavy floods, was once nearly washed off into the surging river in his car. Some of the houses were perched on stilts, like fishermen’s shacks. The Australian Stock Company, incorporated by Act of Parliament ‘for the Cultivation and Improvement of the Waste Lands in the Colony of New South Wales’, established its headquarters here in the early days of land settlement. Driving into town, looking towards the great sweeping expanses of the Liverpool Plains beyond it, Eric spoke of the Kamilaroi Aboriginal people who used to roam them, from Tamworth to the Pilliga region south of the Namoi River. Kamilaroi, once a widespread Aboriginal language, has now died out. Aboriginals, he said, were all great linguists, often speaking five or six different languages of the neighbouring tribes, all very different from their own. The Kamilaroi had a most intricate, subtle, complex language with dozens of words meaning ‘to see’. There was a word for seeing things as you approached home ground, another for seeing something far away, another for seeing something within the camp itself. Eric said there were more cases and tenses than in English. There were even three kinds of imperative: normal, emphatic and taunting.
In Language in Danger, Andrew Dalby relates how R. M. W. Dixon, a kind of linguistic archaeologist who has recorded many disappearing languages, managed to find two people who could still remember about a hundred words of Kamilaroi between them around 1972. Tom Binge and Charlie White were living in an Aboriginal settlement in southern Queensland. Dalby describes how more linguistic work was done by others and collated with notes taken in the nineteenth century by missionaries like the Reverend W. Ridley, who published The Kamilaroi Language in 1886. Eventually, with poignant irony, a Kamilaroi dictionary was posted as the first-ever dictionary on the internet, just as the language became fully extinct. Eric demonstrated the sucked-in or blown-out aspirates that separated two vowels in Kamilaroi when they occurred together. He could remember old white men of no learning around the Pilliga who could still pronounce the place names authentically as the Kamilaroi did. But most of the British were such bad linguists, he said, that they probably misheard names like Coonabarabran and corrupted them.
A road sign on the way into town read ‘Welcome to Tamworth, Traditional Home of the Kamilaroi People’. Eric gave it a wry look and spoke of the white squatter stockmen and how they disposed of the Kamilaroi Aborigines who harassed them on the plains in the early days of settlement. This is how he tells the story in A Million Wild Acres:
It happened about 1827 or 1828 near a cattle station called Boorambil. The Aborigines might have issued a challenge to the white stockmen as they sometimes did to settle their own differences, with day and hour formally stipulated. The whites had no intention of exposing themselves. When they saw the long line of painted warriors approaching, all the stockmen who had gathered (some said seven, others sixteen) took cover in a well-built hut with slots in the walls to poke rifles through. When spears and boomerangs thrown against the walls in derision failed to bring the whites out, the Aborigines stormed the hut and tried to unroof it. They persisted for hours. Perhaps two hundred were shot, most of the young men of the tribe.
Eric said the warriors had even tried to climb down the chimney of the hut, but every one of them was killed.
A flock of fifty straw-necked ibis flew over as we began crossing the forty square miles of the Liverpool Plains. This vast sweep of land was once some of the best alluvial soil anywhere. Now it is over-exploited and badly affected by salt. On the Beehive Feed Lot, cattle were being fattened for Japanese export beef. They were hot and dusty, flicking their tails unhappily, and there was no shade for them. Eric said the beef was no good either. Here and there conical hills stood up, the cores of old volcanoes. Beyond them, in the far distance to the west, we made out the topsy-turvy outlines of the astonishing Warr
umbungle Mountains, like Hokusai waves in a choppy sea. They were the sort of mountains I always thought were confined to fairy stories, jumbled and free-form, a line taken for a drunken walk, their quasi-Aboriginal name somehow onomatopoeic. Wrecked trees and wrecked cars lay about the huge five-hundred-acre stock enclosures of the farms. We crossed Cox’s Creek and the great Namoi River, both of which flood the plains from time to time, and passed into black pine country. A road train loaded with swaying green bales of lucerne went by the other way. The farmers, cattle and sheep were all in crisis with the drought, and there was talk of mass slaughter. The radio spoke of little else.
As we approached Coonabarabran, Eric pulled off the road into woodland, and we walked over to a stand of the local white gums that characterize the place. They were fine trees up to sixty feet tall, with straight, smooth white trunks and limbs. As we came closer to one of the trees, we saw how it was decorated with the most exquisite black-ink doodling, the work of the larvae of a small moth, Ogmograptis scribula, as it ate its way through the soft tissue beneath the thin bark. The grub meanders about, etching a little map of its own individual gastronomic tour. But its course is not as random as it seems, because halfway through its larval life the insect loops round and retraces its steps, consuming the hormones it has excreted on the way to complete its development. It then pupates and flies away as a moth, leaving behind the arcane insect jotter-pad Eric and I now contemplated. The zigzags on the bark resembled the jerky lines that denote highs and lows of atmospheric pressure on the graph paper of a barometer. It was quite clear why people call Eucalyptus rossii scribbly gum. A close relation, E. signata, likewise autographed, grows along the coastal strip of New South Wales.
We drove through the white cypress pines and ironbarks of the Pilliga Forest itself and arrived at Baradine, Eric’s old home town from his farming days. The place had a Wild West feel: a classical town hall complete with Doric columns presided over a wide main street, entirely deserted in the afternoon heat, a single pub with balconied rooms above, filling station, café, barbershop, agricultural stores and a cluster of utes parked end-on. This is where Eric farmed for twenty-two years at Cumberdeen, a dozen miles from town, and before that at Bogabri for another twenty-two years, to the east of the Pilliga on the Namoi River. The Cumberdeen farm held too many memories for him to go back and see it now.
Out to the west of Baradine lies the pastoral land once known as the Pretty Plains. A ten-mile strip of special soil runs through it: a deep-red and grey sandy loam over a lime subsoil that grows cattle and kurrajong trees beautifully, said Eric, who grew both through his Cumberdeen years. Such a variety of trees and shrubs grow scattered about the paddocks that when Eric lists them in his book, their names are like an incantation:
Kurrajong, Wilga Budda, Boonery,
Whitewood, Quinine Bush, Hickory, Gum,
Ironbark, Supple Jack, Needlewood, Angophora,
Pilliga Box and Bimble, Cypress Pine, Belar,
Wild Lemon, Wild Orange, Currant Bush, Beefwood,
Deane’s Wattle, Bull Oak, Boobialla, Motherumbah.
We decided to keep moving and headed straight out into an area of the forest called Merriwindi for a dozen miles along a wide, sandy road before we turned along a track to Trap Yard Dam. These dams were dug out as water reservoirs. But they are not the lush green oases you might imagine. They have caked, muddy banks sloping to brown water puddled by wild horses, wild pigs and cattle. The first you see of a dam as you approach is the windmill above the trees and the corrugated-iron tank on a wooden tower once used for filling the fire-fighting trucks. The wind pumps and tanks are now all defunct, but the dams are the places to see animals and birds, especially in a drought at nightfall. They have interesting names: Friday Creek Dam, Etoo Bore, Tarranah Waterhole, Station Creek Dam, Log Road Dam, Wooleybah Bore, Bibblewindi Dam, Yellow Spring Creek Dam, Sawpit Road Dam, Dead Filly Tank, Dingo Hole Dam, Bungle Gully Bore. They relate to the intricate system of creeks that suffuse the Pilliga map like the tiny veins in a bloodshot eye.
Next day we drove out to see Eric’s friend Gerald Harder at his sawmill, the Cartref. It stood just outside the forest in an open field with an old ironbark in it that had shed a mighty bough: a challenge for anyone with a saw. Gerald, in blue shorts and a white yachting T-shirt, was in his early thirties, blond-haired and fit-looking. He worked with Barry in a sawmill they built when they could see that the farming was no longer paying. A series of flat-roofed, open-sided tin sheds, supported on wooden poles and bolted white pine struts, housed the saw benches and planes. A pair of big John Deere tractors powered all the machinery. They had built the mill themselves by stages, buying or bartering components and materials as they could afford them. The skids and rollers for the saw cost Gerald two cases of beer, one of which he helped to drink, and they had saved and bought their saw blades one by one. The tin came second-hand off the roof of an old hospital.
They were cutting two-by-fours out of the tough, dense white pine the timber-getters delivered at $1,000 a truckload of fifteen cubic metres. They can sell on the machined timber at $500 a cubic metre, but there’s a lot of waste on the relatively slender trunks of white pine. As you square them up, you lose the edge strip: the rounded part of the trunk under the bark. And the circular saw blade itself is a quarter-inch thick, so every four cuts you lose an inch of timber and generate mountains of sawdust, although not enough to interest a power-station in collecting it for burning as fuel. The Pilliga is too remote and the sawmill too small, so they end up incinerating it themselves, as if the place needed warming up any more. The potent scent of white pine flooded the mill. Gerald’s dogs, all collies, sniffed the air. His timber is in great demand, especially by the Japanese building trade, who need it to make strong wooden frames for houses. White pine contains turpentine, a natural pesticide, so white ants won’t eat it.
We shared a late breakfast of tea and teacakes with Barry, Gerald and his wife in the kitchen up at the farmhouse, an old wooden homestead now leaning at a precarious angle at one end. Its wooden piers were sinking unevenly into the ground. Every now and again, said Barry, there was a loud report like a gun as one of the roof spars or a structural beam sprang clear of its fixings and poked through the outside wall like a broken collarbone. They then had to jack up the house four inches at a time, straighten it up and ease it back on to supporting chocks. The little homestead was on the move, inching crabwise across the Pilliga. This was one definition of moving house. Australians, being practical people with mainly timber-framed dwellings, often took their houses with them when they moved. Gerald did a lot of house moving on contract. ‘I just take a chainsaw, climb up on the roof and start cutting her in half,’ he said. He even made it sound easy, slicing the house into sections like a carcass, lifting them with a crane on to a low-loader and putting it all back together again somewhere else. This is exactly what Eric and Elaine had done with their fine timber house on the banks of the Camden River at Camden Haven. They found the site, bought a house they liked somewhere else and trucked it to the riverside, where they raised it up on stilts to give themselves an extra storey, a fine balcony and a boathouse, where Eric keeps his beloved wooden Sojourner.
Sawmilling was hard work, but better than farming, said Gerald and Barry, because it gave them more freedom to take a day off now and again. They went dinghy sailing on some inland lakes across the plains or chased brumbies in their utes at up to fifty miles an hour. ‘They can be dangerous brutes, especially the stallions,’ said Gerald. ‘They’ll kick out sideways at the ute or bite at you as they run.’
Kurrajong trees, a lovely deep green, threw their shadows across Gerald’s land like big poplars. Their leaves make good cattle fodder, and their seedpods are so high in caffeine that the explorer Leichardt used them to make coffee on his expeditions: Brachychiton populneum belongs to the same family as the cocoa bean tree. The Kamilaroi Aborigines would pull up the yam-like tap roots of the seedling trees and cook them as vegetabl
es. They also made good canoes and shields from the timber.