Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  After reading that book, I began to think . . . Southern France . . . Southern Tasmania . . . similar in a way. Surely it was possible to bring some of those French shepherding practices here? Grazing our roadways strategically with community meat or fibre producing animals could reduce the amount of chemicals we needed to spray to manage roadside ‘weeds’ and give retired or unemployed people a valuable role in the animals’ care. Imagine one reformed druggie girl and her goat, or a former alcoholic old man and his sheep. In my utopian world I could see a landscape sprinkled with happy herders and their animals managing vegetation working seamlessly.

  My daughter’s tubby pony, Gemma, is a classic example of the benefits a tethered animal brings to vegetation control. Gemma is my chief gardener in the hard-to-mow areas and is often borrowed by neighbours on ‘contract’ gardening jobs to eat grass they can’t be bothered mowing or in places that are too steep or boggy. Currently I’m using Gemma to teach my kids when to move stock on from pastures. We are grazing her between two moveable fences and, in our real-life classroom, we trundle about, heads bowed, inspecting vegetation and manure, watching Gemma closely and the pattern in which she grazes on fresh ground, selecting plants in a set sequence. After reading Michel and Fred’s book, I saw how it would be possible to create a stock route in Tasmania that served the community in many ways on the road where I used to live.

  Agricultural systems globally need to be re-envisioned if we are to survive in the future. By utilising our roadsides to convert plants into protein or fibre by droving sheep or cattle systemati­cally along public roads, we could teach young students the science of animal and human behavior. What better classroom to learn herbivores’ relationship with plants and palatability, along with teaching the complex and artful vocation of low-stress dogmanship, horsemanship, stockmanship and land care through grazing. In other words, the art and science of forage grazing, animal handling and environmental observation.

  This community grazing enterprise would also provide a much-needed tourist attraction that could reconnect us to the ‘slow’ ways that have been lost to us since our obsession with the car and technology in our society. Imagine a droving vista where motorists stop and get out of their cars to see this living synergy that sustains us all. It would give many a new perspective that can’t be achieved by roaring down a terrifying four-lane highway or simply stopping to read an information sign as many enthusiastic tourists do.

  I was well familiar with the poetry and spectacle caused by the drift of a herd of cattle along a road after the years I spent working with the Treasure family in the High Country of Victoria on the Dargo Road. From the back of my horse I would witness the delight that we drovers and our dogs, horses and cattle sparked in travellers. We were representatives of a slower time that people now crave. I could see that if droving grazing animals to control roadside vegetation could be applied here in southern Tasmania, replicating southern France, it would be a win-win-win for rural education, environmental enhancement and tourism, and yet when I suggested it to a mob of council fellas, all they could talk about was occupational health and safety, insurance costs and the legal cases that would arise should a motorist run into shepherded stock on the road.

  ‘People are in too much of a hurry to put up with stock on the road,’ one councilman said as he sat at the community hall table.

  ‘You’d never get the insurance to cover it,’ another said.

  ‘The legalities would be a minefield,’ came as the final full stop to my idea from a third man.

  I knew this fledgling idea could benefit so many, and get those kids out of science labs and classrooms and learning in the real world. Even though the fenced-in human mindset dismissed the idea immediately, and a road block of thought put up several barriers to it, one day it could just happen. It’s an idea waiting to flourish and I gift it to some clever person reading this book now! Perhaps it would boost a community near where you live? And you’ll be able to say, as you sit on your horse on a spray-free road, teaching the next generation of animal handlers and ecologists while posing for a photo, ‘I got the idea from a book I read once.’

  It’s these unfenced ideas that will save humanity. Fred says the only constant in life is change and it’s our guiding principle.

  ‘When Mother Earth gives us drought, tsunamis, flood and earthquakes, hurricanes, eruptions, we see it as nature behaving badly – kind of like a geological tantrum, but that soon our old planet will regain its balance, its sameness. But the truth is it’s only our short tenure on earth that deludes us. Our time here is too short to see continents crash together, then tear apart, mountains rise and fall. Plant and animal species coming and going like a kaleidoscope. Any species, if it’s going to survive, has got to be able to co-create with changing environments.’

  Can you get the sense of how poetic this scientist is? Fred says animals and people adapt to change through what’s called ‘the wisdom of the body’. All creatures, including you and me, have body wisdom. But it’s more than a matter of taste. We eat to feed cells. These cells are communicating with our tastebuds to tell our brain what our body needs. Because we alter human food so drastically in processing, adding sugars, salts and fats, and eat so much on the run, our wisdom bodies are out of whack and obesity and diseases are on the rise. We can no longer self-medicate using food, and now rely on drug companies and health supplements. Double that with plant varieties and production practices that produce food with fewer nutrients in it, and we’re on a downhill slide.

  What he was saying made sense to me, as I’d intuitively swerved my supermarket trolley away from formulas and infant baby mush encased in jars and tins. Instead I stewed my own local apples, mushed homegrown spuds and pumpkins and boiled my own chicken stock, along with garden-fresh celery or anything else I could grow or find from other people’s gardens to introduce my children to. It seemed I naturally knew their palates would be altered for the worse if, as babies, I gave them high doses of sugars in white breads and cordials, or salt and sweeteners in baby foods. I wasn’t trying to win an award for Mother of the Year, or wear a halo for being some kind of food purist, but there was an inbuilt wisdom in me – one Fred was naming up now scientifically! I also somehow knew to let my kids crawl on shearing-shed floors, through garden beds and rumble on the back lawn with border collie pups in the chook poop, because I also knew instinctively that there was ‘good’ bacteria there – and even exposure to the ‘bad’ bacteria helped my kids’ immunity. I knew how to clean a house without toxic chemicals. It was cheaper to use water and white vinegar and bicarb soda or vanilla essence anyway. My kids had been raised around the raw facts of life and death and animal guts. They were healthier for it.

  When the professional dog-food shooters came our way, I used to beg a batch of dead possums from them or pick up what I could from roadkill. Waste not, want not. Brush-tailed possums were plentiful before the tree plantation companies wiped out their populations with poison. On an old stump, I would axe the claws from the carcasses and singe the fur on a fire out in the house paddock. There was something calming and ritualistic about that act. Modern people who have never been poor or hungry might see my actions as barbaric, but for me it was a natural act. Possum meat is terrific for hard-working farm dogs. The dogs love a bit of fur and gut, along with the vegetable matter found in the possum’s stomach. My babies would be rugged up in their prams, watching the flames, the imprint of the fire and singed possum hair in their nostrils. It was an ancient act. A quiet act. One where I blessed each possum that men with guns had shot.

  Because of our lifestyle on the farm, my kids were also weaned onto roo patties. I made the mince into burgers and then cooked them in a gravy. I innately knew the healthy native meat, grazed on a variety of plants grown on a variety of soils, would be better for my children than that of domestic animals grazed on limited pastures and soils. I knew somehow, without needing to obtain a PhD on the subject, that the microbiology of soil and our guts were
inextricably linked, and that modern processed food played havoc with what I now know as ‘the wisdom body’.

  To help me get over my agony of eating meat when I am an animal lover, Fred also explained that eating food is simply, scientifically ‘energy transfer’. Whether it’s a carrot or a cow, when you eat it, it is transferring its energy system into your energy system and that is simply how the world turns in all natural cycles. When an eagle eats a mouse, it is energy transfer. When a cow eats a plant, it’s energy transfer. When a human eats a fish, it’s energy transfer.

  Fred’s work supported all I was discovering on my farm about the benefits of multi-species pastures that were not just made up of a few introduced grasses, but were a blend of native ones alongside shrubs, forbs and herbs and the British species. By understanding how palatability works in livestock Fred has been able to train animals to avoid eating certain plants or encourage them to eat others. It’s meant primary producers can now train stock to graze in areas where animals once may have destroyed certain crops. For example stock can be trained to forage in forest plantations without harming the trees. He’s taught wine makers how to train sheep so they can graze in vineyards yet they won’t touch the vines. Fewer sprays mean a more diverse insect population and that means fewer pests. The act of grazing also feeds the soil with manures and urines, so the produce grown in those soils is more nutrient-dense. Sheep now mow grasses in citrus groves without ringbarking trees. Dr Fred’s work has even helped people train horses to avoid eating local toxic plants. His method has worked on cattle too, so they can graze in areas where poisonous plants used to be a problem. Excitingly, animals can be trained to eat particular weeds, even invasive species like thistles. Fred’s training techniques have also been used in wild populations of herbivores to stop overgrazing in riparian areas, or to protect rare plants. Cattle and sheep become low-cost alternatives to herbicides and mechanical means.

  Apply this to humans, and how we now have young mothers with no food education, and an entire generation that has sadly lost their food wisdom due to processed food. Fred showed some pretty confronting slides on obesity, and how it alters gene expression, meaning the babies born to overweight mothers are much more likely to be obese.

  In his talk, Fred began to speak of the grassroots movement that was underway around the world. I knew he was referring to people like Colin Seis, who were inspiring people who all wanted to be part of that sweep of change to a better, more profitable and more environmentally balanced form of farming.

  ‘Productivity doesn’t equal profitability,’ Dr Fred said. I had seen myself the rise of the ‘bigger is better’ mentality within farming since the 1980s. Fred said that because we’ve developed this style of modern larger, genetically enhanced livestock, we can no longer survive on what nature provided. These ‘super’ creatures need higher inputs at higher costs. The old-timers may have had smaller animals, but they had smaller input costs and so therefore were more productive. We are duped into believing in constantly ‘improving’ animals from genetics outside the local region, and as a result our animals have lost their inherited wisdom to survive on nature’s local banquet. These ‘enhanced’ breeds then need expensive introduced plants that have to be bought from multinational seed companies for them to achieve the desired weight gain. It’s like the animals only know how to dine on manufactured ‘fast food’ and this in turn limits a farmer’s profits.

  After Fred’s talk, my neighbour and I mobbed him as if we were groupies gushing over a rock star. His information was so practical and profound, and his delivery of such complex science, made easy for rough-nut farmers like us, lit us with excitement, particularly as women who cared so much for our land, animals and the food we ate and dished up to our kids. When I returned to my kitchen, I did so with a new awareness. If I was offered free-range food like rabbit I ought to take it, and teach my kids to cook it and to eat it. A bunny grown in the wild is nutritionally worth more than a giant pumped-up chicken from the supermarket. I knew it contained some lovely natural nutrients for my kiddies.

  ‘Would you like to try some rabbit?’ I asked the kids as I picked up the kitchen scissors and cut the carcass into pieces and began to coat it in stone-ground flour and salt and pepper.

  They looked up at me, momentarily taken from the universe of their Lego building, and pondered the question. It would be good to let them eat rabbit. It was, after all, the animal that our forebears made their living from.

  ‘I’ll cook a chicken casserole too in case you don’t like it,’ I reassured. ‘No pressure.’

  ‘Okay,’ came their answer, ‘we’ll try it.’ They went back to their Lego.

  I didn’t need a recipe book to cook it. I had my mother and my auntie’s nutritional wisdom built into me, so I knew to fry it first in butter, then put bacon and barley and onion in with it along with some chicken stock powder. The kids ate it with no fuss. As I tentatively joined them, I decided it was delicious. The next night, with the leftover gravy, I made rabbit rice balls, fried up and eaten again with no complaint. Just gratitude for the rabbit and the wise auntie who gave it to us.

  Some of the earliest memories I have are gazing up at Dad’s dad, Grandfather Smith, sitting in a halo of pipe smoke on a brown vinyl couch, with a backdrop of Nan’s pristine white lace curtains lit by sunshine. He would perch beside his silver smoking stand, braces stretched taut over lean workman’s shoulders, heaving air like Darth Vader on one good lung. On the sunny porch beside some potted succulents a budgie called Pretty Boy, who was possibly not a boy, chirruped. It was here at a very young age that my uncles and my grandfather taught me three of life’s major lessons: how to shake hands firmly, how to pour a beer properly, and to never smoke (this third lesson I absorbed more than was taught). Granddad was the living – or half-living – result of it.

  Despite Granddad’s shuffling and wheezing, the house was always a riot of fun when the Smith siblings got together, with my tiny gracious Nana egging them on with the slightest of disapproving smiles that held no serious threat of reproach. The uncles would stand over me jovially and coach me on, tilting the beer glass sideways to get the right amount of froth. What an Aussie thing to teach a kid! When I was first learning to talk, my brother would lead me about and make me say ‘bottle of beer’ to the adults in my wonky baby speak. I sounded like a ventriloquist’s dummy so the adults would roar with laughter, and raise their beers in cheer.

  Beer was a central feature of our lives. Cartons would arrive home in the back of the Ford Falcon station wagon, and they would be the first thing put away in the fridge, moving aside all manner of more healthy dietary choices, to the constant quiet grumble of my mother: ‘The beer takes up too much room!’

  Looking back, what an apt thing to say! Life revolved around beer. If we were caught washing Dad’s or Granddad’s pewter mug with dishwashing liquid, we’d be in trouble. It flattened the beer, apparently. I grew up thinking that men on weekends had a can of beer permanently attached to their hands, only to be set down for a short time if there was a lawn to mow, sheep carcass to cut up or spuds to dig. I saw barbecues were great for men, because the beer could remain in one hand whilst tongs were held in the other to turn a chop or a sausage on a hotplate. It made them look busy and useful in front of the women, as they sizzled and sipped, standing beside a halved 44-gallon drum that housed spitting flames. My chief routine to impress a male adult was to toddle to the fridge to get another coldie and hand it to them when their other beer was done. Or to remind Dad there was a longneck in the freezer and he needed to take it out before it shattered into brown splinters amidst the ice. I learned there were rewards for honouring men’s beer . . . it meant I got positive attention, ahead of disciplinary actions.

  As life moved us to more sophisticated circles, those boxes of beer were replaced by wine club orders, and the Ford Falcon that we used to cart sheep shit in for Nana’s roses was replaced with a Saab. My mechanic uncle had become Tasmania’s only Saab dealer a
nd he’d had to upgrade his showroom to match his new clientele. As I grew older, heavy reds, rich with the weight of importance and with labels that leveraged one up in society, entered our life, as did European cars with seat heating, but thanks to the grounding of those cheeky uncles, who hadn’t chased a university education like my father, the ocker seed had already been sown within me.

  Now, as an adult with square farming-woman hands, I tend to hold a stubbie like a shearer and shake hands like a truck driver. Not such a good thing when I’m at author events trying to clutch a slim-stemmed champagne glass. Or the error I feel when I’m crushing some clever soft-handed Sydney or Melbourne publishing fella with my ‘I can crutch sheep’ handshake. Amidst that mainland city swank I sometimes feel like a woman who has more balls than a billiard table standing next to those perfumed, preened, but extremely lovely and gorgeous men.