The Bush

by Don Watson

  Journeying down the Murray in 1908, E. J. Brady encountered a good many white hunter-gatherers-cum-cadgers – walers – who had discovered that with the river’s natural bounty, and supplements solicited from passing travellers, working for wages was not the absolute necessity that in general it was held to be. The same class of men had been there twenty years earlier when the peripatetic journalist ‘The Vagabond’ passed through. And it is a person of this description that one afternoon Furphy’s Tom Collins saw dawdling in his direction on the north bank of the Murray. Tom lights a ‘mighty’ pipe, his muse – the bushmen of old were very often a little stoned on tobacco – and enters into a reverie-cum-sermon on the nature of God, Man and earthly justice. Meanwhile the ‘flotsam of humanity’ comes ‘plodding steadily along, with his billy in one hand and his water-bag in the other; on his shoulder horse-shoe fashion, his forty years’ gathering; and in his patient face his forty years’ history’. As Tom watches him through binoculars, the image reminds him (and should remind all his fellow men, he thinks) that ‘the God in Man, the only God we can ever know, is by His own authority represented for all time by the poorest of the poor’.

  It seems certain that Joseph Furphy meant us to conclude that our humanity can be measured by how we think about the swagman, how we treat him if he camps in our paddock or comes to our door, and he is therefore also the touchstone of Australian democracy.

  A Collision of Cultures

  mice, mallees and their roots – the marvellous malleefowl – (re)naming the place – the lake and the heavens – an amiable itinerant – lives of the shepherds – the Indigenous people of the Murray – dingoes

  On a starry night in 2011 I drove through the Victorian Mallee during a mouse plague. The imported house mouse (Mus domesticus) swarmed in millions. The tracks of vehicles preceding me were stamped in bloody flesh and bone, and as hordes of the undead milled and panicked in the headlights, I could hear and feel their bodies crush beneath my wheels. Down the floodlit tunnel of death I went, zombie-like, as if in a nightmare that wouldn’t stop. It seemed to be a metaphor for the human, as much as the mouse, condition. But by the time this thought came to me, the horror had passed and I was pretty well immune to the carnage, and this also seemed to be a metaphor for something. For the history of settler colonialism, perhaps; for the frontier where moral immunity issues from the act of possession itself, however egregious the act may be. It might have been a metaphorical way of saying that folly lies at the heart of the search for historical understanding (if that is how the objective of this and many other trips I took might be defined). Why try to recover the unrecoverable and awaken the dead? To blame them, when you know you would have done the same? To punish the living – the good people watching telly by the lights that every now and again I could see faintly on the plains?

  The verges of the highway had not been cleared, so in the dark that night it was easy to imagine that I was travelling through a vast sea of mallee scrub. In fact, had I stood on the road and thrown a stone in any direction it would have landed in a wheatfield. Wheat of course was what the mice had come for. About every three years they breed up to a plague. There are photos of farmers standing around piles of dead mice 2 metres high, wheelbarrows full of them. In the kitchen of their farmhouse not far from Sealake, Ken and Val Stewart told me about the time the mouse tails were hanging down through the joins in the ceiling boards. Both close to ninety, they’ve been on the farm all their married lives, growing wheat and raising sheep. They are as if replicas of the settlers the returned soldier Jack Edey met when he first went to the Mallee around 1919. ‘A different breed of people,’ he said. They lived in huts with iron roofs, hesssian walls, and earthen floors washed and swept to a polish. While his horse rested, Jack would sit and drink tea with the settler’s wife and eat the scones she made for him on the open fire outside. Ken and Val Stewart live in more comfort than Jack Edey’s generation, but they maintain their eloquent hospitality. They share their son’s concern for conservation. Sitting in his harvester in the middle of a wheat field, Ken told me the Mallee should never have been cleared. It had been a disaster, he said.

  Mallees grow on the southern edge of the arid zone in a band extending across four states, from west of the Kalgoorlie goldfields in Western Australia to south-central New South Wales. In Victoria and South Australia the Mallee is a specific place – north-westernVictoria, south-eastern South Australia bordering on the lower Murray. Not all of these mallee lands are dominated by mallee trees; within them are large expanses of heathland, pines and saltmarsh. More than with the native environment, these regions are associated with wheat. Mallee farmers grow other crops and, where water can be channelled in, run sheep as well. But the romance is with wheat: swaying fields of William Farrer’s golden, rust-resistant wheat stretching to the horizons, and concrete silos by the railways. Wheat lumpers built on the same lines as the silos. The bronzed and wiry women. Scorching heat, mice and locust plagues, dust storms.

  We learned these things at school. The Mallee was a model of national progress, its people Australians of heroic quality. Through the science which produced Farrer’s wheat, the ingenuity of everyman expressed in Ridley’s Stripper, the Smiths’ stump-jump plough, McKay’s combine harvester and Mullens’ mullenising, along with phenomenal labour and never-say-die, a virtual desert had been made to flourish. The Mallee had been ‘reclaimed’ from its neglected state, just as eucalyptus oil was reclaimed from eucalypts, and Murray cod from the Murray.

  It was a ‘frightening place’: the sameness of it, and having no water. The Mallee could swallow you in a couple of gulps like a troll. A. S. Kenyon, the first historian of the region, claimed settlers told misbehaving children they would take them into the scrub and leave them there. Major Mitchell called it ‘one of the most barren regions in the world’. The explorer Edward John Eyre ventured into the Mallee, and having lost his horses to thirst and hunger, staggered back the way he had come. The botanist Ferdinand von Mueller was also an explorer and an accomplished bushman, but the Mallee was more than he was prepared to tackle: he went round it to Swan Hill, the Murray town on the stock route that ran all the way to Queensland, where he found emu hunting and killing ‘thousands of black snakes’ were the only diversions. Hawdon the overlander, who but for his ‘sagacious dogs’ would have lost his cattle in it, saw countless snake skins hanging from the lowest branches of the mallee trees. Another visitor to the Mallee wrote of the ‘terrible desolation’, another called it a ‘horrible region’, another ‘a wilderness in the strictest sense of the term’.

  And there was the silence – the ‘solemn silence’ – and the emptiness. ‘In a journey of 100 miles from north to south, not one solitary bird or living creature was to be seen.’ John Stanley James (‘The Vagabond’ of The Argus newspaper) sat down on a log in it somewhere south of Balranald:

  The solitude is awful . . . There is not a sound except the faint buzzing of the social flies, which stick to me by the hundred. I wonder what they live on. I wish that I could see a snake. I begin to speculate what it is like to be lost in the bush – to wander round and round in a circle, helplessly trying to detect a landmark in the hideous gum-trees; to follow a trail leading to a rabbit-hole; to lie down and die within a few yards of succour, or to go mad, as so many have gone mad in this bush.

  As with every other category of bush in Australia, the scrub known as mallee is a product of climate and soil. There are more than 200 species of mallee eucalypt and the vast majority grow in areas of low and erratic rainfall (somewhere between 200 and 550 millimetres is most common) and young, shallow and infertile soils – claypans, the calcareous soils of old seabeds. The remainder grow in isolated patches in hard, barren places – exposed subalpine hill areas, cliff faces. Wherever they grow, the trees are notable for their toughness. They grow where other trees will not venture. They do not feel the stress.

  It is the way they grow that distinguishes mallees. Typically they have no single ste
m in the manner of a tree, but several, like a bush. The stems rise from a lignotuber, a woody, irregular swelling at the base which provides the trees with the water, carbohydrates and nutrients they need to withstand intense heat and drought. Lignotubers are common to most eucalypts but only on mallees do they occur in the cool beneath the soil. Every lignotuber contains epicormic shoots that burst into life after fire or cutting. As much as any towering rainforest, the Mallee seethes with natural power and energy, and it can inspire as much awe and dread.

  In 1817, when the resolute and gloomy John Oxley was exploring south of the Lachlan River in New South Wales, he saw from a distance a ‘glaucous hue’ that gave the appearance of extensive plains. Travelling in that direction he found himself dementing in a sea of miniature eucalypts, each ‘spreading out into a bushy circle from their roots in such a manner that it [was] impossible to see farther than from one bush to the other; and these . . . very often united by a species of vine, and the intermediate space covered with prickly wire-grass, rendering a passage through them equally painful and tedious’. Oxley’s companion, Allan Cunningham, an explorer as well as a botanist, named the predominant species Eucalyptus dumosa. Dumosa means bushy, but all mallees are more or less bushy

  Oxley didn’t care for them. He had laboured in the marshes along the Lachlan, trudged across a nearly waterless ‘miserable tract’; now he was understandably vexed at finding his party in the midst of these numberless dwarves not much higher than a Georgian ceiling. Difficult as the going had been on the Lachlan, his men had caught perch and cod in wonderful abundance, ‘nearly a hundredweight’ one evening, and on another a Murray cod weighing 32 kilograms. But a few days later, and not many miles from the river, they were making do with rats and bandicoots, and even a dingo that wandered within range of their camp.

  The vine was Cassytha, probably C. melantha, a parasite also known as Mallee strangle vine, and dodder-laurel, the berries of which were a source of raw food for Aboriginal people and a staple of malleefowl. In time E. dumosa became better known as white mallee. Red mallee (E. socialis), green mallee (E. viridis) and blue mallee (E. polybractea) are just as common. An explorer trying to find a way through mallees was never going to see anything to like about them, but their striking flowers and that grey-blue, blue-green hue that reflects the heat of the sun and is essential to their survival in the wild have made several species feature plants in modern Australian gardens, and Californians like to pot them up for their patios.

  Mallee scrub contains more than mallees: broombush (Melaleuca uncinata), spinifex (Triodia), boobialla (Myoporum), saltbush (Atriplex), emu bush (Eremophila); numerous kinds of acacia, banksia and dianella, and succulents such as pigface (Carpobrotus). All have found ways to cope with the absence of water: rolling their leaves in the heat to expose fewer stomata; silver leaves to reflect the sun; hairy leaves to deflect the flow of hot air; few leaves, or flattened stems called phyllodes instead of leaves; deep tap roots and extensive surface roots to draw every bit of moisture. Vast stretches of mallee are dominated not by trees, but by heath with ‘opportunistic’ annuals such as paper daisies (Bracteantha), which germinate with the rain and flower spectacularly and set their seed before the summer dry. But it’s the slender naked stems of the eucalypts, with their narrow glistening canopies, which give the mallee lands their uniquely cloistered and confounding character.

  The Mallee has yet more subtle charms than these. The stupendous night sky is one of them, but that is true of the inland in general. Amid the mallee stems, however, it is not the sky that mesmerises as much as the patches of night light that reach the ground through the tree canopies, as if the light has been captured in one of those ‘earth–sky reciprocities’ the theorist and sleuth Paul Carter talks about. More prosaically, Sylvester Doig reckoned you could see a lot in the bush at night that you couldn’t see in the day, and hear a lot more too.

  Certain lines in the Mallee poems of John Shaw Neilson might indicate he feared the night. But he loved the birds. The birds were one reason why he was no pauper in that poor country. You can stand in it for hours and not see or hear one, but the scrub and heath are home to an immense variety of parrots and honeyeaters, the emu-wren with its emu-feather tail, bee-eaters visiting from the tropics, whipbirds, raptors, emus, plovers, the ‘gentle water birds’, the cranes.

  To the variety of human being that likes to watch them, birds seem by nature eccentric. The eccentricity mainly consists in behaviour that resembles – and parodies – our own. They are dour, flamboyant, comic, obsessive, cruel, ingenious, silly and neurotic, not to say very often beautiful and surprising. Malleefowl (Leipoa ocellata) are on the dour side, obsessive and slightly comic, but they are above all industrious. All living species are driven by the need to survive and reproduce, but malleefowl make a welter of it – we might also say an art. They are mound builders. At first sight, settlers sometimes took their constructions for Aboriginal burial mounds or earth ovens.

  The birds themselves are not much bigger than one of the more robust domestic fowls, such as an Orpington, but the mounds put observers in mind of a much more substantial creature. Their emu-like footprints add to the impression that something big is about, but with their genius for rapid exits and camouflage, an impression is generally all it is. In times of extreme peril they can fly about 100 metres, not always far enough to save them from a fox or a gun. In Victoria the Aborigines called them lowan. In Western Australia they were gnows. Wherever they were, and whatever they were called, it was their misfortune to taste delicious, as did their eggs. Their numbers are greatly reduced, but they have at least survived.

  With their oversize feet malleefowl scratch a hole a metre deep and 2 metres wide and fill it with leaf litter. Then, like wheat farmers, they wait for rain. With rain the litter begins to decompose. The male fowl spends the winter turning the compost and building the mound, day and night until it measures 3 metres or more across and about 60 centimetres high. Come spring and the female (she mates with him for life) lays her eggs, one or two at a time until there are anything up to thirty of them, deep within the compost. The male tends the mound with the same prodigious labour and assiduousness he brought to building it. His task is to keep the temperature (which he tests with his beak and tongue) at a constant 33 degrees by adjusting the amount of litter. In autumn, as the sun’s heat flags, he opens out the mound entirely, and closes it at night. In cold snaps and heatwaves he makes all necessary adjustments – and all with the backward movement of his legs. ‘Great was the love within thee hid, /O, builder of the Pyramid!’ a poet wrote. When the chicks hatch after seven weeks their parents are gone. They dig their way out and scurry into the scrub. Within a few hours of hatching they can fly.

  Colin Thiele thought the malleefowl ‘a symbol of commitment’ and ‘one of the most wonderful of earth’s creatures’. He is ‘unforgettable’, he said: ‘his design, his stance, his dignity, his incredible industry, his wisdom’. To Thiele the bird was magical. ‘In clear sunlight he is magnificent, in sunlit scrub suddenly invisible. For the dappled patterns of light and shadow under his native mallee trees disperse him, catch him up mysteriously, merge and melt about him with a kind of woodland sleight-of-hand. And he completes the camouflage by his stateliness, his measured movement, his habit of pausing motionless as if listening to some faint far message before moving on.’

  Thiele, of course, is transposing what is natural for the malleefowl to what he believes is desirable among men and women. The bird is ‘industrious’, ‘abstemious’ and ‘thorough’. He has ‘faith’. He works ‘seven days a week’. If it were not that he worked Sundays we might have him a Methodist. This is not altogether silly. Anthropomorphism and religion share a long history. Why wouldn’t we see in a malleefowl a life well lived – better lived than a Mallee settler’s, for instance? Work made art, necessity made grace. Could it be this, a sort of transference, that attracts us to the birds at the back door or the kitchen window: a thrush or fantail’s
life read as promise fulfilled in another dimension?

  Malleefowl don’t need to drink; they survive hot dry summers on nothing more than the moisture they gather from vegetation. In the way common to all desert dwellers since Isaiah and before, they depend on the fruit and seeds of plants, and such insects as cross their path. The crop and gizzard of a male accidentally killed near Renmark, South Australia in 1983 contained more sand than anything else. A female opened a year later contained in addition to plant material, twenty nymphs, forty-three ants, two wasps, twelve spiders, two grasshoppers, the larvae of four coleoptera, an adult dragonfly and a cockroach.

  The visitor’s guides say that the word mallee is, or is derived from, an Aboriginal word. Whatever the word was and whatever was meant by it, people with ears tuned to various dialects of the British Isles sometimes wrote it down as mallee, and sometimes as malleen, marlie, mullun, mullin or murn. Or, as the squatter J. W. Beilby had it in 1849, mallay. A. S. Kenyon says the Scots among them led Victorians to call it the Mawley, until the ‘South Australian invasion at the inception of the wheat-growing era’ fixed it as the Mallee, to rhyme with Sally.

  But what did it mean? Early collectors of native words said it was the name for one of the stunted eucalypts from which Aborigines extracted water. But other word collectors had ‘weah’ for water and ‘borung’ for the species, and one had ‘mallee’ meaning the species in the Wergaia language and meaning thicket in the Jardwadjali spoken by their neighbours.