The Bush

by Don Watson

  The answer becomes more elusive the further one looks, it seems. Paul Carter looked as hard as anyone and concluded that the word ‘appears to express the collision of irreconcilable cultures’. By this he means that the word’s origins are indeed in the language and culture of the Indigenous people, but not, as alleged by the translators, with specific attachments to tree, people and place; rather, they described the relationships between them. The one European word for the species of eucalypt, the kind of bush in which they were dominant, and the region once dominated by that bush stands for a failure to comprehend; we might even say, for an absence of will among Europeans to comprehend fully. The word, Carter says, represents ‘a lost opportunity to understand the creative principles of a region’.

  Thomas Muir, who with his brother Andrew had vast holdings in the south-west of Western Australia, discovered the Aborigines had a ‘name for nearly every mile and some very appropriate ones’. Once their provenance is unravelled, these words contain all manner of lost knowledge. Carter’s winningly obsessive study of the Mallee is, among other things, a sort of X-ray of the white settler narrative. The image is fuzzy, but the point he makes is clear enough and undeniable. A great deal of what European Australians came to ‘know’ about the land had either shaky foundations or none at all. He is talking not about foundation myths or grand narratives, but something more subtle and insidious that finds its most common expression in the attachment of names to places. The Mallee and countless other places got their names from Aboriginal words misheard, from Aboriginal beliefs and relationships misunderstood or carelessly recorded, from vocabularies compiled with the assistance of Aboriginal intermediaries who lacked local knowledge. Names were given to places without connection either to their meaning or to the Aboriginal people who had once been there. The squatter E. M.Curr reckoned the high plains of south-east New South Wales were called Monaro (or Manera, Manuru, Meneru or Maneroo), not by the local Aborigines, but by a ‘Sydney black’ who, on being asked by the whites he was accompanying what the region was called, replied, ‘Manyer’ – ‘I don’t know.’

  What was even more common, the bush was inscribed with names drawn at random from the memories, affections and airs of the invaders: English villages, Scottish aunts, the Napoleonic Wars, the Indian Mutiny, faceless officials, anything that came to mind. As it was comforting to alter the scenery, so it was to give familiar names to the hills and streams, plains and marshes, and every little thing that the totemic ancestors of the Dreaming had named as they moved across the landscape singing the Aboriginal world into being. Every time Europeans applied an English vocabulary to features of the new landscape that reminded them of home, they were at once remaking (in George Seddon’s words) ‘a land so unlike that in which [their] language evolved’ and by this means literally making themselves at home in it. That giant eucalypt is an ash, that casuarina is an oak; that watercourse, whatever the natives might have called it, is where I wash my sheep and henceforth will be Sheepwash Creek. That ancient lake will be Victoria. That one the natives call Nookamka, but I’ll call it after my friend, Mr Bonney. That mountain will be Doughboy after my horse which broke a leg within sight of it (it was named even as ‘sentinel tribesman’ watched from a distance). While riding with Andrew Muir, Governor Weld fell in the (thereafter) Weld River, Western Australia. Paddy’s Creek, for the Aboriginal Uringalla, or Wellington for a score or more hills and creeks and valleys, was a matter-of-fact statement of the British settlers’ psyche, which might be why the Austrian aristocrat Baron Charles von Hugel said they reflected an ‘excess of pedantry’ and bore ‘the stamp of . . . low taste’.

  White settlers had more pressing concerns than the subtleties of Indigenous culture, but this does not oblige us to ignore the signs of their indifference – nor, we might add, of an outlook that set more store in mockery and irony than in understanding. Getting about the New South Wales bush in 1834, it seemed to Hugel that ‘the Aborigine never hears a single sensible or informative word’ from the settlers. The English, never bothering to learn the ‘New Hollanders’ language, generally greeted them with a joke about the number of wives they had or the amount of food in their bellies, and continued in a sort of idiot patois until they couldn’t ‘think of any more’.

  Joseph Hawdon’s account of his 1838 journey down the Murray to Adelaide, each man in his party of ten armed with a carbine, a brace of pistols and a bayonet, is a case in point. They had reason to be wary of people who kept appearing in large numbers and making it plain they wanted the Europeans to leave. If we can believe Hawdon, not a shot was fired at them. Yet the grave meaning these meetings held for the Aborigines seems to have been lost on him.

  As they seemed determined to close around the drays I thought it prudent to show them the bayonets on our muskets, in the hope of intimidating them. One old chief asked me where I intended to sleep; I told him when he gave me a rude push with his staff, pointing for me to return to my party; an impertinence which I resented with the butt end of my pistol . . . Whether their intentions were really for war or peace, we did not much care.

  So the old man defending his ground was ‘impertinent’. That was where the presumption lay. The relationship was colonial, and the presumptions were colonial. To rename Aboriginal places (or to rename Aboriginal people), to proceed without a care for their language and beliefs, was not murder, but murder proceeded from the same convictions, as did the seizure of lands and all measures considered necessary to retain them. Felony murder might cover it, or reckless indifference. And in the Aborigines’ decline into mendicancy and humiliation, alcoholism and disease, this same absence of any will to understand was an accessory.

  Just as important, surely, were the implications for a settler society that preferred its own remote and alien provenance to the Indigenous and immediate one, and willed its own ignorance. From the very beginnings of settlement a good proportion of visitors seemed determined to outdo each other in witheringly unfavourable comparisons of the Australian landscape with the English. To pluck one from many, the Oxford-educated W. S. S. Tyrewhitt who, like so many, found the local scenery ‘dismal and repellent’, reckoned the great fault with it to an English eye was ‘the want of a foreground’. Many years later, the painter Fred Williams solved the problem by painting the scrub without one, or at least without any kind of focal point. The settlers’ remedy was ringbarking: Tyrewhitt came across large numbers of men employed at nothing else, and while noting it was the opinion of some that the practice would cause erosion and increase the likelihood of drought, he thought ‘the new greenness of the grass and the wider view gained by the absence of leaves give the country a much more cheerful aspect’. It was an opinion to go with the Wimmera newspaper recommending a ‘highly improved property’ for having ‘no living trees on it’.

  Sealake is about 100 kilometres west of the great bend in the Murray that loops north towards the Darling, and it owes its unlikely name to the salt lake that lies a few kilometres north-west. Lake Tyrrell emerges gently from a modest creek, a dry saline watercourse much of the time that runs between low grassed hills which, in fact, are sandhills shunted there by wind. An apron of low shrubs and scattered trees and brush – paperbarks, mallee, saltbush, bluebush, pigface and lignum – separates the 113 kilometres of Lake Tyrrell’s shoreline from the fenced paddocks of wheat and sheep. The sky is huge. The light dazzles. ‘Tyrrell’ comes from the Wergaia word ‘tirille’ or ‘tyrill’, meaning, by one account, space, by another sky; or from ‘derrell’, which possibly means above; or ‘dirili’ – heaven – which has to be post-European because before the European missionaries reached them the Wergaia, as far as we know, had no such notion – or one of hell. What it meant did not concern the white settlers who turned it into an English family name meaning stubborn.

  The scrub that once surrounded the lake has gone. The sandhills that were once covered with Murray pines were all cut down a century ago. The spectacular blue-winged parrots and regent parrots that
used to flock among them disappeared. By day, lake and sky seem to be as one, an unbroken chain of being. The effect is even more intense on a clear night when there is water in the lake. Then the lake acts like a ‘gigantic mirror’ with ‘every star in the firmament’ reflected in it, and to stand in the shallow water ‘is like being suspended in space’. According to William Stanbridge, the Boorung people who lived there knew astronomy from studying the stars reflected in the brine. They saw the drama of Creation and the Creators in the constellations, the mythical characters and tales of the Dreaming: the malleefowl, emu, red kangaroo, snake, brolgas, possums. The 100 million stars of the Milky Way were smoke of the ancestors, the Nurrumbunguttias, now living in the heavens. Where Europeans saw Sirius, the Aborigines saw the wedge-tailed eagle. When Europeans took possession of the earth they also colonised the heavens. What had been a possum in a tree became the Southern Cross.

  Ludwig Leichhardt believed the ‘starry heaven . . . enter[ed] unconsciously into the composition of our souls’. The sadness of migrants when they could no longer see the familiar northern constellations was a common theme in shipboard diaries. Leichhardt believed their absence generated the ‘painful longings’ that ‘frequently we do not understand, but which we call homesickness’. Feeling at home in the Australian bush meant feeling at home not only among the gum trees, but with the Southern Cross sitting in their soul’s composition where Ursa Major used to sit. Rosa Praed felt it in a hammock on her Queensland veranda on a star-filled summer evening: ‘Ice, snow, the great Bear, holly and mistletoe, and Christmas lights. What have these to do with this languorous southern night, in which the soul faints and cries for something it has never known?’ Now, of course, the great majority in both hemispheres live effortlessly without being much aware of the stars in either.

  Whichever way the wind blows, Lake Tyrrell moves with it, and changes colour as it does. Its shades of sparkling blue and pink and violet are as gorgeous as any tropical lagoon. After a long dry you can walk across it, if you pick your way carefully. You can also drown, or get irretrievably bogged and die of starvation, as countless sheep and horses must have over the years. Tyrell is a remnant, like Lake Eyre, of the departed inland sea. The whole region known as the Mallee has evolved from this marine condition, and as they did in the vicinity of Lake Eyre, early travellers among the sandhills readily imagined themselves on the seashore. To the south, the Wimmera, captured indelibly by the painter Sidney Nolan in the 1940s, used to be the Mallee’s coastal hinterland. The same connection to an ancient sea led one recent writer to describe the Mallee’s trees as ‘dry country corals’. Not that many settlers wanting to plant wheat were likely to see them this way, or like ‘candelabras’, as another writer called them.

  John Wolseley lives about 200 kilometres from Lake Tyrrell, among the whistlers and honeyeaters of the whipstick forest on the Mallee side of Bendigo. The whipstick has been turned upside down by miners, grazed, ringbarked and burned. The soils are poor clay, the winters are cold, and the summers long, blistering and dry, but the ironbark, grey box, mallees and acacias soldier on. John is the grandson of Fred Wolseley, pastoralist and inventor of the shearing machine which, at the end of the nineteenth century, brought a revolution to the activity most basic to the Australian economy. Born and raised in England, John has spent much of his life camped in the bush all over the continent; not, for the most part, in the conventionally spectacular parts of it, but in whatever bits ‘draw me in’, he says. He comes across a door ‘into the living nature of the ground’, settles in, and draws and paints it. Lake Tyrrell is one of these bits.

  Is Wolseley trying to unravel the mysteries, in the shape of birds and twigs and the play of light, trying to see through to the silence? He says he’s trying to find the way ‘the land itself moves’. Much of the landscape is ‘falling to bits’, but there are places where, despite everything, it’s ‘firing’ and he senses ‘all the plants, birds, and even rocks, are moving together’. Camped on the Stewarts’ land by the salt lake, with his crayons and watercolours, he feels at one not only with this bit of nature, but with the ‘cosmic apprehension’ of such enlightened farmers who want to put the fragments back together and get them firing again.

  Out on an island in Lake Tyrrell the ground was pocked with rabbit holes and littered with pellets. A fox lived there. Its dung glittered with bits of Christmas beetle (Anoplognathus), a native scarab that defoliates and, when conditions favour it, destroys large areas of eucalyptus woodland. It was a multicultural community. The neighbours of the naturalised foxes and rabbits included indigenous orange chats and white-winged wrens flitting about in the scrub. A kangaroo had recently left the sun bed he’d made on a sandy slope out of the wind. Alarmed at our approach, he set off across the lake in monster bounds that left paw prints 3 metres apart in the salt mud on the fringe of the island. When we saw him he was half a kilometre away and tiring badly in the thick sludge. As if pursued by hounds or expecting any moment to feel a bullet tear his flesh, not bounding anymore, he was staggering and weaving like a drunk towards the shore.

  At the southern end of the lake, in a marsh that straddles Tyrell Creek, the posts of an old telegraph line are still standing. Among the workers who put them in the ground were John Neilson and his son, the lyric poet John Shaw Neilson. The posts are still standing because the timber they used was Murray pine (probably Callitris glaucophylla), which doesn’t rot or succumb to termites.

  Most of us think of eucalypts when we think of the Australian bush, and of the Northern Hemisphere when we think of conifers. But more than 2.6 million hectares of Callitris grow in woodlands and open forests on the Australian continent. In its Gondwanan heyday, Callitris was one of a handful of continent-wide dominant species. About 50 million years ago it began to cede territory to the emerging eucalypts. Like the casuarinas, in the end it lost out to a species that had adapted to the drying climate, exhausted soils and frequent fires, but found the means to survive. The tiny surface area of its leaves helps it retain moisture under a fierce sun. Despite not liking the fires that eucalypts depend upon, and needing phosphorus that eucalypts cannot abide, the trees still manage to live in the midst of box and ironbark, and even to dominate the poorer, sandy margins of their territory. So long as fires are not too frequent or too hot, enough Callitris seed survives and eventually germinates. Should the fires cease, as has often been the case since European settlement, the species regenerates with great vigour. Phosphorus they extract through a compact they’ve made with fungi: the trees grant the fungi carbohydrates from their roots; the fungi help the trees find phosphorus and other nutrients.

  Various species of the genus Callitris grow in the sandier parts of the Victorian and South Australian Mallee, throughout the Murray- Darling Basin, along the coast of north-eastern New South Wales, in the high-rainfall forests of the Atherton Tablelands and in the tropical savannah of Arnhem Land. Callitris grows in the deserts of Western Australia and other places where less than 250 millimetres of rain fall each year, and in Tasmania and the Australian Alps where 1300–1500 millimetres fall.

  The drovers and contractors of old were regularly obliged to negotiate the heavy sand of pine ridges that break up much of the country west of the Divide, including the Riverina. At certain times of the year the pines were alive with pink cockatoos feasting on the seeds. The bushmen of Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life spent many of their days among the olive-green cypress pines of the Riverina, and many of their nights round campfires of cypress that coated their quart pots in thick black soot, and filled the air with the smell not of eucalyptus, but of cypress resin, a heavy perfume much more like the piñon pine of the United States south-west than gum leaves and bark.

  Invaluable for fence posts, the stumps of sheds and houses, for lining wells, for log huts and the walls and floors of homesteads and the decks of shearing sheds, Callitris was an essential element in the development of the Australian pastoral industry. Aborigines used the resin for glue, the wood for
weapons and implements, the bark for rope, and the cones, leaves and ash for medicines. Callitris is still harvested in the Pilliga of New South Wales, for timber in the main, but some finds its way into aromatherapy oils.

  In 1857 George Everard made his way along a track to Lake Hindmarsh in the southern Mallee. Legions of failed diggers were on the track, and the station huts were full of men looking for work or a feed. His chances were greatly improved, he recalled, when a manager advised him to change his new chum’s clothes for a blue shirt and moleskin trousers, and to never present himself for a job in anything else. James Armour, an English digger, described an outfit of ‘blouses blue and red, with the creases of the sharp folds bearing witness to the newness of our purchase, and in bright new leather leggings’. It was the uniform of ‘common bushmen’, and the same blue shirts and pale moleskins are still the fashion at sheep and cattle sales all over the country.

  Horatio Cockburn Ellerman, a squatter who had set himself up by the shores of Lake Hindmarsh, at a station he called ‘Antwerp’ after the city of his birth, gave Everard breakfast. He then obliged him ‘to go into the parlor to listen to a lot of extempore prayers and a sermonette, etc.’ According to A. S. Kenyon, Ellerman was ‘a man of strong missionary sympathies’. The story goes he came upon these sympathies after killing a young woman in the course of a raid on the local Aborigines, not the first in which he had taken part. Feeling guilty, or in fear for his immortal soul, he gathered up the woman’s six-year-old boy and thereafter became much concerned with the welfare of her people. It was Ellerman who showed the Reverend Dr F. A. Hagenauer, the celebrated Moravian missionary, the beautiful site on the Wimmera River for his Ebenezer Mission.

  Soon after feeding Everard, Ellerman gave up squatting to become a minister of the Presbyterian Church. Christians never wanted for ways to justify or forgive themselves the crimes done to the Indigenous population. Hypocrisy greased the wheels of dispossession. In the Old Testament they found divine authorisation for their work of conquest, and from the New they made the calculation that by being Christians in a pagan land, taking hold of it, they were spreading the message of grace and salvation. That was another thing the bush became – a church.