A Single Tree

by Don Watson

  “Milkin’ twenty cows, these days,” Red heard Deb say. “Up at daybreak . . . and when it’s hot and still like this smoke about . . . I can’t keep my eyes open.”

  After a while she drowsed too. Sun-dazed and sleepy himself in the heat and stillness, Red saw Deb lying on the dry leaves, an arm’s length from him. She had turned her back and flung an arm over her face. Her limbs twined over each other, brown legs and long brown arms, bare from under her blue cotton dress.

  Red thought of a young tree fallen there beside him as he took Deb in. His sleep-stricken brain tore the blue rags of dress from her young strong body, and it gleamed against the dark foliage and through the haze of the forest as trunks of the karri gleamed, mellow ivory, with the glamour of parchment, the lustre of silk. Dreaming, afraid to stir, disturb or change the half-waking strange soaking joyousness he lay in, Red wondered vaguely whether he was asleep or awake. He was conscious only of wandering in misty depths of the forest.

  Bone-white and silver in high light against the leafage, the dead tree caught and held his brain. Abysses of trees fell away from the dead tree and surrounded him. Red could not not see far for tapestry of the leaves, and the smoke bush fires in the distance put among them.

  There was a faint dry ticking as if the pulse of every living thing in the forest was vibrating. Life was suspended; yet Red heard that ticking, the rattle of frail shells, innumerable infinitesimal insect castanets clicking, as an assurance that the transfixed world about him was not the world of a dream. He could almost hear sap flowing in the trees, electric currents circulating among roots of the plants; the soil stir and move to its nitrogen, potassium and phosphates. The air he breathed was undulating with rarefied elixirs. He seemed to be drifting away on them, absorbing subtle magnetisms of the air, the earth, insects and trees.

  Working Bullocks (1926), Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1972

  Stephen J. Pyne

  1998

  Over and again, in almost every environment of Australia, Europeans reported rapid ecological changes with settlement. It was not simply that one group of humans replaced another, but that each encouraged the reconstruction of whole ecosystems. Some of the reforms were deliberate; many, accidental. In some places that transition was brief; in others much delayed. But everywhere fire remained the most sensitive of the biotic barometers that recorded the transfiguration of Aboriginal Australia.

  Shortly after settlement British observers cited a thickening of scrub on lands they had initially likened to English parks. The suppression of Aboriginal fire and an infestation by exotic grazers, which attacked the grassy fuels, had stimulated woody growth, and unless cut or burned the blossoming scrub threatened to close off open forests. Typically a period of years, sometimes decades, passed between the Aboriginal and the European regimes, with the result that European firing acted on a far greater accumulation of fuel than was possible in Aboriginal times, a process repeated with remarkable singularity throughout Australia. Bald hills in Queensland revegetated with forests, and formerly open forests choked with understory. In New South Wales Murray pine grew like weeds until the dense scrub forced the abandonment of runs along the Lachlan River; in the Pillaga Scrub nearly twenty-five years passed between regular burnings, and the woods reached unprecedented dimensions; near Cobar the suppression of periodic fire promoted a cancerous explosion of Callitris, a species otherwise “easily destroyed by fire”, but which now took “complete possession of the soil, to the exclusion of other plants”. Something similar occurred in the southwest – in the jarrah and karri forests, in the Kimberleys, along grassy plains, subtropical savannas, and heaths. It was clear to early observers like Stokes that “native fires” seemed “readily to account for this”. Bunbury concluded that through Aboriginal fires “the country is kept comparatively free from under wood and other obstructions, having the character of an open forest through most parts of which one can ride freely; otherwise, in all probability, it would soon become impenetrably thick . . .” Around Sydney, where Cook, Joseph Banks, Hawkesworth, Parkinson, Hunter, and Elizabeth Macarthur spoke of a country swept clean of underwood, “like an English park”, similar processes were at work such that T. L. Mitchell could write that “the omission of the annual periodical burning by natives, of the grass and young saplings, had already produced in the open forest lands nearest to Sydney, thick forests of young trees, where, formerly, a man might gallop without impediment, and see whole miles before him”. On Beecroft Peninsula rainforest encroached into scleroforest. D. A. Herbert cited Aboriginal fire as the principal reason for the distribution of upland savannas and the “great areas in coastal Queensland, formerly savannah, [that] have, following protection from fire, become re-clothed with trees.” And so it went. By the 1890s the consequences of removing Aboriginal fire became inescapable. By the 1980s, they required restitution.

  Some reintroduction of fire became essential. How this was accomplished is a complicated story, and with two exceptions it is a tale that resides outside the fire history of the dispossessed Aborigines. The exceptions derive from recent, profound changes in land usage by contemporary Australia, in particular the establishment of effective reserves for both Aborigines and native biotas. For each to be preserved in something like its pre-European state, an approximation of their ancient fire regimes had to be reinstated. In both instances, however, reinstatement had to proceed within the context of the political and environmental realities of New Australia. Much as the Aborigines had laid down a matrix within which natural fire had to operate, so European settlement had blocked out the boundaries within which a reinvigorated Aboriginal fire must survive.

  The outstation movement has sent bands of Aborigines away from strongly Europeanized settlements and into their old territories or new reserves. The outstations are themselves a halfway house, a syncretic blend of the old and the acquired. Early reports suggest that broadcast fire is not being exploited in what is understood as traditional ways. In part this may reflect a loss of tradition and, in part, the altered environmental conditions within which anthropogenic fire must function. But it also derives from the fact that the new settlements tend to revolve around the outstation rather than cycle through the landscape. Broadcast fire and nomadism are ancient allies. Whenever humans settle more or less permanently, the domain of broadcast burning begins to shrink. To the extent that out­station Aborigines attempt to recapture their old ways, they will have to re­acquire, at least in compromised form, the practice of broadcast burning. There is some evidence that patch burning around out­stations has begun.

  In nature reserves, the need to abate typical European fire and to substitute for it some form of patch burning is driving managers into programs of controlled burning. For some areas, like Uluru National Park, this has meant a reconstruction of Aboriginal fire history with the idea of progressively restoring the kind of fire regime that characterized the pre-European epoch. The great fires of 1974–75 burned 80 percent of the park, an event unlikely in Aboriginal times. Recurring fires subject mulga groves to intense, sequential fires that could lead to their extirpation. Preservation of the old biotas will require the preservation – by restitution – of old fire practices. For Kakadu National Park, reform has even led to the employment of Aborigines as technicians to assist with burning. For nearly all reserves, the recognition grows that a diverse flora and fauna demand a diversity of fires, that the character of native biotas, so valued by New Australia, had been sustained or created by Aboriginal burning practices.

  Yet it is not possible to restore completely that ancient mosaic. Too much has changed, and for too long. The exotic flora and fauna that swept over Australia in wave after wave of European colonization cannot be expelled. A nomadic society demands lands on an order that is difficult for an industrial society to meet; no single fire regime or set of fire practices can satisfy all purposes. Nature reserves and Aboriginal reserves, while complementary, are not identical; they cater to different clienteles and express differe
nt purposes; they must enact different fire practices. Australia exists within a global economy and a global ecology and can neither deny nor defy that reality. Any new fire practices must compromise old techniques with new needs.

  Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia,

  University of Washington Press, Seattle & London, 1998

  Ravenshoe Writers Group

  2010

  Bluey Wyatt and Tin Mining

  John Wyatt, (“Bluey”), started his life in the tin-mining town of Brownsville near Irvinebank. Long years of mining gave his father silicosis and he died in 1940 aged only thirty-nine. The family moved to live with his mother’s parents at Limestone Creek near Mt. Garnet. After a short spell in Ravenshoe from 1943, they returned to Mt. Garnet.

  As a young man, Bluey worked for the Luceys who owned Strathvale Station. It was they who started the successful Mt. Garnet Amateur Racing Club. By 1952, after a variety of work experiences, Bluey started mining wolfram at Stannery Hills with his stepfather’s brother Frank Robinson. The Korean War had put the price up and they did well while it lasted. Bluey returned to Ravenshoe to work briefly at Rosenfeld’s Sawmill. His next job was with the Ravenshoe Tin Dredging Company at Battle Creek, working with a blacksmith, George Cook, who taught him to box.

  After years of trying out various jobs that included loading railway sleepers at Mt. Garnet, breaking brumbies, working on cattle stations, transporting cattle and inspecting railway bridge piles between Mt. Garnet and Forsayth for soundness, he went back to tin dredging with the Tableland Tin Dredging Company. In 1956 he joined a three-man cane cutting gang that included his new brother-in-law in Tully. In 1959, Bluey went with a friend via Mt. Isa to the Northern Territory, accompanied by another friend he had met in Mt. Isa. They went croc hunting down the Katherine, Daly and Roper Rivers and in the Wet Season looked for other work. One of his mates took on truck driving and the remaining one joined him putting in culverts for the Works Department on the Top Springs highway.

  At the end of the droving season, he met Jack Vitnell, who had been a buffalo shooter and noted bull rider. Bluey joined him and two other men and followed the rodeo circuit from the Territory down into Queensland. He followed that with a spell of donkey shooting with another man he’d met in a Katherine pub. Donkeys were thick on some of the western cattle runs and they made good money but he didn’t enjoy the job. It was time to see his family again and the opportunity came when he followed the rodeo circuit again from Camooweal to Mt. Isa and finally home.

  Bluey settled in Ravenshoe in 1963 and worked at Burt Steel’s sleeper mill on the bank of North Cedar Creek. He took up croc shooting again in the Mitchell and later the Tate Rivers. Back in Ravenshoe, he met Len Cummings in Dalton’s pub and they decided to go to Silver Valley and look over the old tin fields. The valley was in its third year of drought.

  They stacked and washed the tin and hoped for rain, which eventually broke with a small Wet Season. When Len left, Bluey stayed, making enough to feed himself by working old shafts. On one of his prospecting trips he discovered he was sitting on a big tin lode. He kept quiet and saved for four years in order to take a lease on it. His cousin Jeff returned to work with him and they found another rich tin mine site in the low country.

  He stayed on as others came and went, until a massive flood in 1967 wiped out his campsite. He reached his mother’s place in Ravenshoe two days later, helped along the way by travellers stranded between bridges. Sixty five inches or 1650 mm of rain was recorded over three days and most of the bridges in the district were washed away. Not long after, he returned to Silver Valley to start again. Mining was in his blood.

  Red Gold to Ravenshoe: The Story of Ravenshoe,

  Ravenshoe Writers Group, Ravenshoe, Queensland, 2010

  Henry Reynolds

  1987

  It was only a small step from admitting that the Aborigines were the original possessors of Australia to accepting that they had ‘a birthright in the soil’. South Australia’s Governor Gawler informed his superiors in London that the natives had ‘very ancient rights of proprietary and hereditary possession.’ Charles Sturt, his Land Commissioner, referred to their ‘natural indefeasible rights . . . vested in them as a birth right.’ The Methodist missionary Joseph Orton believed the Aborigines had a ‘right of property in the lands of their birth right’, G.A. Robinson thought they were ‘the legitimate proprietors of the soil’ because it was ‘the land of their forefathers’. A South Australian pioneer argued that the ‘rights of the original possessors’ were all affected by Acts of Parliament or Commissioners instructions: their right rests upon principles of justice. It is impossible to deny the right which the natives have to the land on which they were born, from which age after age they have derived support and which has received their ashes.

  The belief that the Aborigines were the original proprietors of Australia and had an interest in the soil took deep root in colonial society between 1820 and 1850. A minority of settlers took the view that the Aborigines were, therefore, the proper, the legitimate owners of the soil and the British usurpers and brigands. But the great majority continued to accept that Europeans had a right to colonize the world, to turn ‘waste’ lands to better use and to subdue and replenish the earth. The obvious way to reconcile the interests of settlers and indigenes was to give compensation for lands acquired by the Europeans. The need to provide ‘an equivalent’ runs through much of the public discussion of the period. There was debate about what sort of compensation, and how much, but very few people opposed the idea itself. The editor of the Sydney paper The Colonist argued in 1838 that it was ‘now a settled doctrine’ with both the Imperial government and Parliament, and the ‘virtuous portion’ of the public that the right to ‘take possession of barbarous countries’, rested entirely upon the principle ‘of a full equivalent being given by the invaders’. Almost everyone accepted that the Aborigines had lost something as a result of settlement, that they had therefore, originally owned something as well. At the inaugural meeting of Sydney’s Aborigines Protection Society in 1838 a local barrister, Sydney Stephens, remarked that, ‘the great question was, whether we were to give them no equivalent for that which we had taken from them. Had we deprived them of nothing? Was it nothing that they were driven from the lands where their fathers lived, where they were born, and which were endeared to them by associations equally strong with the associations of more civilized people?’

  The Law of the Land, Henry Reynolds, Penguin, Melbourne, 1987

  Richmond River Herald

  1890

  On Saturday last an aboriginal known as “Samson”, who had been employed by Messrs. C. and T. Yabsley as stockman for about 20 years, was found dead on the plain near the Bungawalbin ferry. It appears from what we can gather that he had procured liquor somewhere, and was on a Christmas spree, and while in a state of intoxication fell from his horse, and lying exposed to the fierce rays of the sun on the day named soon ended his career. He was a good working, reliable fellow, except when in drink, which of late years appears to have got the better of him. An incident in connection with his death – worth recording as showing the tendency towards civilisation of the few dusky mortels [sic] now about – in that as soon as they found Samson was dead, one of their number (Muldoon) ordered a coffin, with the assurance that he would pay for it. Some half-dozen darkies then took the coffin out to where the deceased was found, and having encased the remains, the procession of a dozen of the tribe as they struck out for the burial place formed a picture the like of which no doubt has never been previously seen.

  Battler’s Boomtown, Pauline Curby (ed.),

  Northern Rivers Publishing, Lismore, NSW, 1992

  John Robertson

  1853

  All the creeks and little watercourses were covered with a large tussocky grass, with other grasses and plants, to the middle of every watercourse but the Glenelg and the Wannon, and in many places of these rivers; now that the soil is getting trodden hard wi
th stock, springs of salt water are bursting out in every hollow or watercourse, and as it trickles down the watercourse in summer, the strong tussocky grasses die before it. The clay is left perfectly bare in summer. The strong clay cracks; the winter rain washes out the clay; now mostly every little gully has a deep rut; when rain falls it runs off the hard ground, rushes down these ruts, runs into the larger creeks, and is carry­ing earth, trees, and all before it. Over Wannon country is now as difficult a ride as if it were fenced. Ruts, seven, eight and ten feet deep, and as wide, are found for miles, where two years ago it was covered with tussocky grass like a land marsh. I find from the rapid strides the silk-grass has made over my run, I will not be able to keep the number of sheep the run did three years ago; and as a cattle station it will be still worse; it requires no great prophetic knowledge to see this part of the country will not carry the stock that is in it at present – I mean the open downs – and every year it will get worse, as it did in V.D.L.; and after all the experiments I worked with English grasses, I have never found any of them that will replace our native sward.

  Pastures New: An Account of the Pastoral Occupation of Port Phillip,

  R. V. Billis and A.S. Kenyon (eds.), Macmillan, Melbourne, 1930

  George Augustus Robinson

  1841

  1

  It was a fortunate circumstance these girls were met with. As well for themselves as for society for I cannot help thinking, and I have reason to know, that they were encouraged and kept in this neighbourhood by nefarious disposal of the white men – for improper purposes. And this opinion was subsequently borne out, for in the evening these two children were sitting by themselves and conning over to themselves obscene, scurrilous and blasphemous language – with the most perfect indifference, apparently quite unconscious of what they were repeating. Some of the words were: well done fuckumoll, go it fuckmoll, good night fuckmoll. Fuckmoll and fuckumoll was often repeated. And then g—d d—mn your eyes, you old b—ger, etc. No better evidence is wanting to stress the infamous character of the white ruffians who prowl about the country insinuating poison into the minds of these depraved beings. And nothing more is wanting to show the necessity for those who wish to teach them better, to exert themselves. For the devil’s teachers have been most assiduous. Would to God that Christians had been as assiduous to teach them good. It is awful to contemplate the danger to which these poor creatures are exposed by the machinations and bad instruction [of] these evil minded disposed persons. The girls seemed pleased with their change of situation – and my natives were delighted with their adventure . . .