by Don Watson
He put up the tent, pinning each corner from inside with rocks and tying the guy ropes to rocks.
‘I’ve even used rocks as pillows,’ he said.
She sat, one leg crossed over the other, cleaning dirt from her painted fingernails with a nail file.
He instantly doubted whether she had ever used a rock for a pillow and whether sleeping on a rock was in fact OK.
‘There, he said, ‘the tent is up.’
She looked across at it, got up, went over and looked inside the tent but did not go in.
‘How about a drink?’ he said.
Sure it’s happy hour. Any hour can be a happy hour.’ She laughed at this to herself.
He went about getting the drink.
‘I’ll cook the Christmas dinner. That’ll be my contribution,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s OK. I’m used to cooking on camp fires.’
‘Look – you may be fourth-generation Australian but you’re not the only one who can cook on a camp fire, for godsake.’
‘All right, all right.’
As they had their bourbons he doubted whether she could cook on campfires. He thought about what they could salvage to eat.
‘I came through the Australian experience too,’ she said.
‘Do you know what to do if you get lost in the bush?’ he asked her.
‘No, I didn’t mean to invite a test, but you tell me, what do I do if I get lost in the bush?’
‘You stay where you are, mix a dry martini and within minutes someone will be there telling you that you’re doing it wrong.’
‘From a Bush Log Book I’, in Forty-Seventeen, Penguin, Melbourne, 1988
Andrew Muir
c. 2000
Marron was plentiful back then – you could catch 70 or 80 in an hour with a snare on a stick. Turtles and marron lived together in the river. We caught perch which were established in the Perup River by my grandfather Thomas Muir in 1917. Our pets were usually possums, kangaroos, calves, lambs, and young foals if their mothers had died . . .
When I was about 16, they had open season for snaring possums and it was for around a three week period in November. The price for possum skins wasn’t all that good. You see, some of the skins were spoilt because the young ones rode on the backs of the mothers. The possums were snared by leaning a stick against a tree because they would always jump up or down onto the trunk of a tree. You had to be careful that they didn’t bite through the wire snare or pull the stick from the tree. The possums sometimes stayed on the ground to sleep away the day and always ran around at night. You could get a pound or ($2) each for the skins when stamped. The fisheries inspectors would come around to stamp the skins, and you could keep hold of them until the price rose. I remember a possum skin buyer we had by the name of Ness who died from throat cancer, then there was Harry Young who used to drive for the buyer.
Rabbits first appeared in 1934. They were soon in plague proportions. First we caught 18, then 50, and then a few years later we were using strychnine poison inside apples to poison them. You could pick up close to 1000 or 1500 rabbits within a chain of a furrow where they had been free-fed for three nights. When myxomatosis was introduced, rabbits were almost exterminated. They now breed up in the winter, and then when the summer comes on – it almost wipes them out again.
We had big problems with parrots – there were thousands of them, and also black white-tailed cockatoos. They were nuisances because they would strip the apple and pear orchards. We had big apple orchards. They were dry land orchards in that era, and the fruit didn’t bruise like the irrigated fruit of today.
Dingoes roved in packs throughout the south west and northern areas. These were trapped and also poisoned with strychnine baits. Thousands of sheep were destroyed by these wild dogs, which would also attack and kill young calves.
Kangaroos were here in the thousands throughout Western Australia. There were greys in the south of the State and red kangaroos in the north. Hunters from this area went north and shot kangaroos at the water troughs for their skins. You would get around five shillings or 50c per pound for dry skins. My father made a living hunting in the bush and shooting kangaroos. Rugs were made from the small skins – one kangaroo rug was worth three blankets when we were on the coast trips down south. Hundreds of kangaroos now come into the pasture areas on farms as there is very little feed for them in the State forest unless the areas are frequently burnt with a running fire. Professionals now try to control the kangaroo population. Over the last few years there have been kangaroos going blind – this was unknown in my younger years. I can remember snakes in the hundreds, mostly Dugites. Tiger snakes were very rare in my younger days. There are plenty now especially around swamps and rivers. When you lived in the bush you didn’t usually get frightened like some people do when they see a snake or wild animal. You generally had a faithful cattle dog with you and they were very good caretakers.
Battlers, Bushmen & Drovers: Stories from Manjimup and Bridgetown,
Busselton, WA, 2006
Sarah Murgatroyd and William Wills
2002 and 1861
By now the ailing surveyor [Wills] was mixed up about dates. His last diary entry is attributed to 29 June but was probably written earlier. Despite the confusion, his last words appear in his usual meticulous handwriting:
I am weaker than ever although I have a good appetite, and relish the nardoo much, but it seems to give us no nutriment, and the birds here are so shy as not to be got at. Even if we could get a good supply of fish I doubt whether we could do much work on them and the nardoo alone. Nothing now but the greatest good luck can save any of us; and as for myself I may live four or five days if the weather continues warm. My pulse is at forty-eight, and very weak, and my legs and arms are nearly skin and bone. I can only look out, like Mr Micawber ‘for something to turn up’; but starvation on nardoo is by no means very unpleasant, but for the weakness one feels, and the utter inability to move oneself, for as far as appetite is concerned, it gives me the greatest satisfaction. Certainly fat and sugar would be more to one’s taste; in fact those seem to me to be the great stand-by for one in this extraordinary continent; not that I mean to deprecate the farinaceous food; but the want of sugar and fat in all substances obtainable here is so great that they become almost valueless to us as articles of food, without the addition of something else.
Later that day Burke and King left Wills a billycan of water, a supply of nardoo and some wood for a fire. Wills watched them disappear around the bend in the river. He was alone in the middle of his ‘extraordinary continent’.
It is not known exactly when Wills died. It is likely that he found himself sleeping more and more, drifting in and out of consciousness and drawing himself into a foetal position as his organs began to fail. His heartbeat and pulse would have contined to drop until sleep deepened into death.
The site of his small gunyah on the banks of the Cooper can still be found fifteen kilometres west of the present-day outpost of Innamincka. It is on a rather desolate stretch of the creek, near a chain of dusty claypans that glow yellow in the soft evening light. Did he gaze at the pelicans, and the parrots patrolling the waters of the creek as he slipped away, or did he look out on the vastness of the desert beyond?
The Dig Tree: The Story of Burke and Wills,
Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2002
Justin Murphy and Peter Andrews
1999
1
Australia is facing an environmental problem that could, and very likely will, bring our economy to its knees, if we continue to ignore it the way we have in the past. We have known about it since 1924, but only since the 1970s have we seriously tried to understand it and combat it. Now it’s accelerating, and we may have already lost the battle.
Dryland salinity, the gradual loss of farm and grazing land to rising salt, is a massive problem, hard to comprehend and harder still to stop. There is salt everywhere in Australia; vast amounts of it, mostly locat
ed underground. It has built up over many thousands of years, originating from the weathering of rock minerals or the simple act of sea salt dropping via rain or wind.
The native Australian vegetation evolved to be salt-tolerant. Many of the woodland species, for example, have deep roots and a high demand for water. Whilst the system was in balance, the salt stayed put. But when European farming arrived and replaced the natives with crop and pasture plants that have shorter roots and need less water, the inevitable happened. With every fall of rain, unused water “leaks” down to the water table, raising it, and bringing the salt up with it. That process continues today, and the volumes of water and salt are vast.
Under the soils of the Western Australian wheatbelt and some parts of eastern Australia the salt store is so immense, and the movement of sub-surface water so slow, that restoration to fertility of salt-effected land will take generations. Some areas may never recover. According to the CSIRO, even if we replant up to 80% of the native vegetation, some cleared catchments would not see recovery within normal human timescales.
It is a tragic irony that the felling of many billions of trees to make room for the farming that let this nation prosper has caused, in just 150 years, our worst environmental crisis, and destroyed a natural balance that had existed for millenia.
Now farmers are frightened as they watch their farms degrade, billions of dollars are being lost, and scientists are admitting for the first time that there are no practical answers yet. It’s little wonder, because the problems go well beyond agriculture. Dryland salinity also causes serious damage downstream from where the clearing has happened. Aquatic ecosystems are suffering, as is biodiversity and even urban infrastructure as saline groundwater rises in country towns and attacks foundations, roads and bridges . . .
2
Monumental mishandling of the landscape.
The most interesting explanation I have heard for the extreme weather comes from a landscape restorer, Peter Andrews . . .
His philosophy, boiled down to its essence, is that our landscape was working brilliantly at retaining water and soil until European settlement began making “improvements”.
By changing the landscape, we changed the weather. Transforming the land by cropping, herding and irrigation created a cycle of heating and cooling on the land, a cycle of boom and bust, that could only grow more extreme . . .
It’s all linked, he says, and the accelerating cycle of extreme weather is a challenge made by our own hand.
He regards the global warming debate, and the government’s responses via a carbon tax, as an exercise of expensive irrelevance on a massive scale, compared with the immediate challenge of soil and water loss and the build-up of salinity in the landscape. He sees the threat to the nation’s long-term productive capacity as more immediate than the threat posed by higher global temperatures.
Andrews is also disenchanted by the attempts to restore the Murray-Darling river system, a process that has so far pleased no one, and led to the federal government’s purchase of water rights for billions of dollars.
“Cattle are the main reason why the Murray-Darling is in a mess,” he said. “It used to function perfectly. The amount of evaporation today is a disgrace. It is about 54 per cent. It used to be zero. Water was recycled many times after rainfall.”
On the other great issue facing farmers, coal seam gas mining, and the practice of extraction by hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, Andrews also has strong views. “Fracking is exceptionally dangerous. Groundwater is the most critical thing in the landscape and coal seam gas is a real threat to groundwater.
All this should make him a hero to the Greens, but he is appalled by the thought. “The Greens have no idea. They are clueless.”
During the long drought, I visited Baramul and it remained watered, retaining moisture in the soil. During the big wet of the last two years, Baramul has gained soil, not seen it washed away.
“While other properties have been eroding around us, in the last five years we’ve gained about 10 million tonnes of soil and sand,” he told me. “The reed beds in the creek are now functioning as the system functioned in the millions of years before settlement. The reeds slow the flow of water and help store water in the landscape. The extensive presence of reeds we have now is the same pattern that [Charles] Sturt described when he made his journey down the Darling River.”
‘Salinity – our silent disaster’, ABC 7.30 Report, 13 May, 1999
Les Murray
c. 1977
The Mitchells
I am seeing this: two men are sitting on a pole
they have dug a hole for and will, after dinner, raise
I think for wires. Water boils in a prune tin.
Bees hum their shift in unthinning mists of white
bursaria blossom, under the noon of wattles.
The men eat big meat sandwiches out of a styrofoam
box with a handle. One is overheard saying:
drought that year. Yes. Like trying to farm the road.
The first man, if asked, would say I’m one of the Mitchells.
The other would gaze for a while, dried leaves in his palm,
and looking up, with pain and subtle amusement,
say I’m one of the Mitchells. Of the pair, one has been rich
but never stopped wearing his oil-stained felt hat. Nearly everything
they say is ritual. Sometimes the scene is an avenue.
Selected Poems, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2007
Les Murray
2011
We have come to the sense, which the Aborigines had before us, that after all human frenzies and efforts there remains the great land. As George Johnston wrote, nothing human has yet happened in Australia which stands out above the continent itself. We know in our bones that the land is mightier than we are, and its vast indifference can drive us to frenzies of desecration and revenge. We know, deep down, that the land does not finally permit of imported attitudes that would make it simply a resource, a thing; it has broken too many of us who tried to make such attitudes fit it. Unlike North America, it is not a vaster repeat performance of primeval Europe, a new Northern Hemisphere continent with familiar soils and seasons into which a liberal variation on inherited European consciousness might be transplanted with prospects of vast success. It is something other, with different laws.
Another and perhaps by now related convergence arose initially from fortuity: the continent to which the rejects of Great Britain were sent turned out to be one in which the native people were egalitarian in their way of life to a degree beyond the imagination of privilege and even of earlier liberalism; it must have been of some effect, even if only a barely noticed one, on the colonists that the new land offered no ancient indigenous models of hierarchy at all. The solitary ego could be at once as vast as the horizon and as unimportant as a straw of windblown grass. Fences were a desperate spiritual necessity, and yet kept failing to hold. We still punish the Aborigines for the fear and temptation this sets up in us. It was an insult to all our notions of productive work and getting ahead, that they could be so seemingly destitute and yet at the same time lords of infinite space: `The Natives are unfitted for anything,’ cried an exasperated early commentator, ‘except to be gentlemen.’ In every generation, men especially have felt this temptation to drift away and camp out along the creeks forever. It was only by hiding from the continent, in homesteads and towns and cities, that the colonists could feel comfortable with their traditional, imported ways of life. God, in Australia, is a vast blue and pale-gold and red-brown landscape, and his votaries wear ragged shorts and share his sense of humour. Space, like peace, is one of the great, poorly explored spiritual resources of Australia. In the huge spaces of the Outback, ordinary souls expand into splendid and often innocent grotesquerie which the cramping of urban surroundings might transmute into ugly, even dangerous forms. And it may be, in the end, that humour is the touchstone for the viability of any import here. I have th
ought at times that our patron should be St Philip Neri, for Australia really seems to be where God puts a sardonyx to the lips of Western man and teaches him to laugh wisely.
A Working Forest,
Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 2011
Francis Myers
1914
A tract of country with a frontage of some 420 miles to the river and reaching some 20 miles back, rising generally from the river bank save where in places flats subject to frequent inundations were covered with really splendid forests of redgum. Some few thousand acres of the frontage were lightly timbered or covered with the bluebush, but generally over the whole area the mallee scrub reigned supreme. It had been a hard time in the Mallee country, and the rabbits had marvellously increased; grass there was none; miserable sheep were dying all round; the parched stranger on the weary horse riding through the country heard nothing but the dry rustle of the mallee leaves, saw nothing but the dull glistening foliage, the red sand driving, the starved sheep perishing, the rabbits skipping about (sustaining life in some incomprehensible manner), and the innumerable ants. The dingo howled by night, the villain crow croaked dismally by day, and the only tolerable spot in the broad area of hopelessness and misery was the little irrigated garden at the homestead on the river . . . Yet here were men prepared to provide such pumping plants as had not before been seen in Australia, and to establish, indeed, a township, a city, and a colony in the heart of that howling wilderness. Was it a marvel that a murmur of madness went all through the Mallee country, and that folks who had lived or existed there for thirty years looked on incredulous or aghast? They did not understand that knowledge begotten of experience was at length come into the land. Now there are 11,500 acres under irrigated culture, yielding a return of close upon £400,000 a year, with a population of over 7,000 persons.