The Bush

by Don Watson

  ‘We got over it in an hour or so,’ Everard said of the devotions in the parlour, and the next day he crossed the Wimmera River and walked north towards Lake Albacutya. Here a man named Coppock took him on as shepherd. Coppock’s gravestone reads: ‘An honest man.’ Everard would have agreed with that judgement. Coppock shared boiled mutton and damper every night with his men and was kind enough to lend George Everard the 150 books he possessed. In the course of his six months shepherding, George said he read them all twice.

  One imagines George, like Marlowe’s shepherd, sitting at the door of his hut in the Mallee’s evening glow, and, while the sheep rest and lambs play leapfrog on carpets of everlastings, longing for his true love and the pleasures they might prove. But George was an exceptional shepherd. Squatters reckoned their flocks in weight of wool and meat or tallow, and their shepherds measured them in wages, not metaphors. The notion of human innocence or a rustic golden age did not sit easily with this common occupation of former convicts, and just as commonly of men who were off their rockers. Pastoral life in the Australian bush was ‘the antidote of all poetry’, Thomas Mitchell said, because ‘man’s better half was wanting’, though he did come upon an Irishwoman, with ‘a child at her breast and another by her side’, who was hutkeeper for her shepherd husband. Mad or not, they were notoriously foul with wool grease, dirt and dung, and even sane ones must have looked fairly goatish. The plaintive Psalm 22 of David probably affords a better glimpse of the shepherd’s mind than does Marlowe, or Virgil.

  They watched their flocks by day from unshady trees, by night from a purpose-built utilitarian watch box, 2 metres long by a metre wide, with handles at each end so that it could be moved about like a litter. Strychnine baits hung from the trees, with nearby tins of water for the dingoes to drink with their meals and hasten the effects of the poison. Each dingo tail was worth half a kilogram of tobacco from the station manager. According to Mona Henry who lived at Birdsville in the early 1950s, dingo scalps at one pound made for a local currency in the far outback.

  Shepherds were given anything from 200 to 1500 sheep to guard in the daylight; at night they yarded them between moveable hurdles, or within a fence made of 2-metre stakes ‘woven like a basket, with Mallee, to keep out the dingoes’. To eat they had flour, salted mutton or beef, and tea; for comfort, tobacco; and for company a gun and sometimes a dog – and the sheep of course. For their labours, in addition to rations delivered every month or so, they might receive 15 shillings a week, and at lambing time a shilling a head for each lamb in excess of 75 per cent of the total number of ewes – by this fine equation they were compensated for enduring the miseries of winter nights to rescue lambs born feeble or to indifferent mothers. (Merino ewes are not as reliable as British breeds.) They were never compensated for loneliness or fear – of all the bush occupations, they were the most likely to be killed by Aborigines – or for the acrid, flyblown filth in which they lived. The surveyor George Watson recalled encountering shepherds – and solitary stockmen – enduring ‘their periods of isolation in a round of existence that can scarcely be called life’.

  At Eucla on the Great Australian Bight, John Muir, of the pastoral family, did his own shepherding during the drought-hit 1878 lambing season, camping by the well that watered his ewes. The wet and cold got to him. After going out to talk to ‘a lot of niggers [who] came in from the bush and sat about the woodheap’, he returned shivering and couldn’t eat. He wouldn’t take brandy, mustard did no good, and he began ‘spilling blood’. ‘He took my hand and kissed it and the stuff in his chest seemed to choke him,’ his wife said. It was just as sad for shepherds who went the same way without a hand to hold.

  When gold drew the labour pool away, Chinese and Aborigines (and later, Pacific Islanders) were employed as shepherds, though the Aborigines, one settler reported, had a habit of taking the odd sheep ‘and suddenly disappearing upon the business of the tribe without the slightest warning’. As pastoralists realised that Merinos more often thrived when they grazed freely over broad expanses, they decided it was better practice to fence off big paddocks, and the shepherds faded away: the last of them, according to Bean, were to be found along the Darling.

  George Everard seems to have been happy enough shepherding. He was happy enough in any job. For fifty-five years he wandered in Victoria and South Australia, and blew his cheques in the pubs and theatres of Melbourne and Adelaide. But he kept coming back, generally on foot, to the Mallee. He never saw as much water in the region as the first time he went there, which was when he saw Pine Plains – the most beautiful place he ever sighted. Elsewhere he saw ‘a place like a garden, it being covered from end to end with flowers – white, blue and yellow . . . One would imagine it had been cultivated.’ But, he went on to say, in later years the rabbits killed most of the plants: the quandongs and pigfaces ‘entirely’ and the dogwood and sandalwood all disappeared soon after settlement.

  When weeds did not come with men, very often they came in advance of them, their seeds borne on the wind, or in the hides and bellies of animals and birds. On his first trip to the Mallee, Everard came across a mob of wild cattle grazing on sow thistles and mallows – exotic weeds. The bulls (‘scrubbers’) were one of the local hazards, as they had been on the far side of the country from the very beginnings of European settlement. Men could get a pound a head for them, boiled down for fat and pig food. Aborigines earned tobacco by shooting them. Among other crimes, bulls spread weeds, diseases such as brucellosis, and forged clearings in rainforests that let in light, which encouraged grasses, which encouraged fire.

  The South Australian and Victorian Mallee became host to boneseed (Chrysanthemoides monilifera ssp. monilifera), gorse (Ulex europeaus), Salvation Jane (Echium plantagineum), African boxthorn (Lycium ferocissimum), African lovegrass (Eragrostis curvula), bridal creeper (Asparagus asparagoides and A. declinatus), Bathurst burr (Xanthium spinosum), several subspecies of broomrape (Orobanche cernua and O. ramosa) and Noogoora burr (Xanthium strumarium). Some came with the pastoral industry, some with irrigated agriculture. Some, like the Mediterranean native Salvation Jane, also known as Paterson’s curse, came as a garden plant. Some remain limited to farming areas. Some, like the terrible bridal creeper with its thousand seeds to the square metre, have invaded the national parks.

  You never knew who or what you might come upon when you walked in mallee scrub: a boy in a rough hut shepherding sheep, his mother cooking for him; the shepherds who were ‘off their dot’, or ‘melancholy mad’, or the men who’d tied a hawker and his son to a tree and split their heads open with an axe. George came upon Adam Lindsay Gordon once, not in the Mallee but not far from Naracoorte, about 160 kilometres north of the poet’s home near Mt Gambier. All day they jogged along together, George, his mate, and the ‘so-called poet’ who ‘seldom opened his mouth to speak’ unless it was to say something about horses, and then he would ‘ruminate again – I suppose manufacturing some more of his poetry’. George preferred Carlyle to all other writers.

  Plonked in the scrub here and there were eucalyptus-oil distilleries, rough and ready set-ups that one came upon, presumably, by walking towards the smoke that forever issued from the boilers and burning waste, or by following the scent of eucalyptus on the breeze.

  Frustrated gold diggers and other battling bush types performed the operation, boiling up the leaves to push the steam through a condenser made of metal pipes set in a long trough, and skimming the oil from the liquid that collected at the end of them. To stumble on an old distillery now is to be confronted by an eccentric ruin of rusted metal chutes, levers, tanks, bins, pipes, twisted tracks and scatterings of charcoal, a sort of sculpture of the mind that made it.

  Encouraged by Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, who was always looking for profitable things to do with gum trees, in 1852 the Yorkshireman Joseph Bosisto set up a distillery on the Dandenong Creek, 30 kilometres east of Melbourne. Later, in association with the pharmaceutical businessmen Alfred Felton and Freder
ick Grimwade, he established the Eucalyptus Mallee Company. As an antiseptic, decongestant, deodorant, anti-inflammatory, solvent and insect repellent, Bosisto’s eucalyptus oil found a ready market in Australia and abroad and won numerous medals at international exhibitions. For eighty years the business flourished, and in the winters of my childhood the school bus, the schoolroom and many of the schoolchildren smelt of handkerchiefs soaked in Bosisto’s eucalyptus – along with milk, hay and licorice.

  Though several different species, including blue gums (E. globulus), were used, mallees, particularly those of the blue mallee, green mallee and the West Australian oil mallees (E. oleosa vars. plenissima and kochii), are richest in the cineole which makes for oil of pharmaceutical quality. Using plantation mallees and a good deal of serious science, Bosisto’s is still going, and while Australia now produces less of the stuff than China, some people believe eucalyptus oil can once again be a profitable industry, and that a blend of eucalyptus oil might even substitute for petroleum and greatly reduce the polluting consequences of motor vehicles. In Western Australia, wheatbelt farmers have planted thousands of hectares of mallees to control salinity and prevent erosion caused by clearing the original vegetation. Government and industry now see potential in carbon sequestration and fuel. Twelve thousand hectares have been planted with mallees to be burnt for electricity generation.

  George Everard spent all his life in Australia travelling the tracks of the Mallee and beyond, to Melbourne and Mt Gambier and occasionally to Adelaide. In Melbourne he saw Othello, Richard III and O’Callaghan on His Last Legs; in Adelaide, Lohengrin. He followed the seasons, working sometimes as a shearers’ cook, sometimes as a shearer or a shepherd or a shepherd’s hutkeeper. He mustered sheep, crutched them, lambed them down, castrated them, and washed them in a solution of tobacco and sulphur that lifted the nails off the quicks of his fingers. He must have eaten thousands of them, mainly salted. He did a bit of fencing, a bit of rabbiting, a bit of dogging, droving, navvying, well-sinking and dam scraping, a bit of ringbarking, limeburning, woodcutting, wool picking, wool pressing, Scotch thistle cutting, and a bit of digging for gold. He wrote of tramping from town to town for weeks on end, sometimes with a mate or his brother, sometimes on his own, lonely, broke and thirsty. He saw a lot of the runs fail in droughts and plagues, thousands of sheep and cattle die. Bogged in mud on the sides of streams and ‘billybongs’ were dead sheep and sheep too weak to free themselves: ‘a fearful sight – the poor creatures still alive with their eyes torn out by the cursed crows: flocks of the wretches in every gum tree’. He saw cattle ‘up over their backs, their heads just out of the mud, and not a solitary eye among them’. He hated crows. ‘Of all the birds these are the most damnable – the black fiends.’ He saw workers and their wives and children with scurvy. He saw a baby die from it.

  While the record shows that people have lived for 40 000 or more years along the Murray and the Darling, there is no evidence of permanent human occupation near Lake Tyrrell earlier than 6000 years ago, and stone artefacts suggest only a sparse human presence in the rest of the Mallee before 2000 BP.

  One late-nineteenth-century European settler, Peter Beveridge, noted that people from the Murray made long annual expeditions into the northern Mallee for ochre from a pit at the bottom of a dry lake, and for taarp – or lerp – a sweet secretion of insects found in waxy deposits on the leaves of trees. In the hot summer months, when this taarp accumulated in abundance on the branches of the mallee trees, a person could gather 20 or so kilograms of it in a day. It was a great hit of carbohydrate, and the collectors thrived on it ‘most amazingly’, Beveridge wrote. The same tribes also took long ‘rambles’ in the Mallee in winter, mainly to collect ochre, but also, Beveridge thought, to take a holiday from the ‘everlasting bodily terror’ of attack from rival groups.

  There were times when the Murray stopped flowing altogether. Yet modest as the volume of water was, as the archaeologists John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga put it, ‘in terms of prehistoric human subsistence and demography it was Australia’s Nile’. The record indicates that the population density of the riverine areas was twenty to forty times greater than just a few kilometres into the Mallee. Early white settler accounts describe a river teeming with cod, perch, turtle, mussels and Murray crayfish, its billabongs often crowded with waterbirds, including swans and native companions in the hundreds. From time to time these billabongs are still crowded: a farmer of longstanding at Barham, whose homestead backs onto a massive lagoon, declares that after good rains the birds are thick on the water. In Aboriginal days ‘it must have been like Toorak’, he says.

  The Aborigines who shared the Murray with Peter Beveridge and his sheep and cattle near Swan Hill had fish in abundance for eight months of the year. His brother had been speared to death by Aborigines, but Beveridge always maintained a kindly interest in the local people and pleaded for ‘remedial measures’ to save them from ‘vanishing off the face of the land’. He went out with them one day and watched them catch, with lines and by diving with spears, ninety-three cod, perch and catfish, and that did not include the fish they ate for lunch.

  Murray cod (Maccullochella peelii) are among the more remarkable creatures of the bush. An Aboriginal account has it that the river was created by a huge cod fleeing a great hunter, its flapping tail making the bends. They are great carnivores, making meals of other fish, crustaceans, ducks, mice, snakes and turtles. M. peelii 2 metres long and weighing more than 110 kilograms have been taken, but no one would expect to catch such a big one now, or many that have reached their potential to live for seventy years – an evolutionary trait developed to ensure that the adults participate in at least one La Niña breeding season. Overfishing, weirs and dams, silting caused by stock and clearing of vegetation, salt, poisons and pollution, loss of breeding habitats, exotic parasites and pathogens, and competition from introduced species such as European carp, have devastated the Murray cod and it is now declared a threatened species.

  The Murray river clans also took from the river ‘immense numbers’ of lobsters and shrimps; and from the lagoons ‘every kind of aquatic bird’, which they captured in nets 90 metres long and some 2 metres wide. In the breeding season their canoes returned ‘literally laden’ with eggs ‘by the thousand’. Pigeons and parrots abounded: Joseph Hawdon, on his way to Adelaide with a mob of 355 cattle for the residents to eat instead of kangaroo, saw ‘white macaws with crimson heads’ (long-billed corellas?) in such abundance ‘they almost darkened the air’. The parrots of the world originated in Australia, along with more than half of all the world’s bird species.

  The Murray clans collected and ate the roots of waterlilies, a species of flag called kumpung, ‘dandelion yam’, sow thistle, trefoil, and, if it was available, with every meal of animal food, pigface. They ate kangaroo, emu, wallaby, possum, grubs, frogs, snakes and dingoes. In winter when food was relatively scarce, Beveridge said their skin was blotchy and dull, but as soon the weather warmed they resumed ‘their normal sleekness, a glossiness truly wonderful.’ The same glow was observed in the Monaro people in the late spring when they had feasted on Bogong moths.

  Glossy or otherwise, many of the Murray people carried the scars of smallpox. On his 1838 overlanding journey, Hawdon noticed them on the faces of ‘fine well-made men’. While a number of scholars maintain the virus originated with the First Fleet, and may even have been released deliberately into the Aboriginal population, the more common view is that it came with the Macassan trepang gatherers on their yearly visits to the north coast. On the evidence of early settler accounts, anthropologists estimate these smallpox epidemics may have killed up to 60 per cent of the Indigenous people, a scale of destruction comparable to the ravages of the Black Death in medieval Europe.

  Beveridge said the Murray people carried terrible memories of an epidemic, which as far as he could glean, had come ‘with the waters’ about forty years earlier. The dead and dying were too numerous to give them ‘proper sepul
chre’: the clans moved on and left them to die and rot where they lay. What the pre-1788 population was, no one is able to say. The economist Noel Butlin came up with an estimate of 250 000 in south-eastern Australia alone, but most scholars would put the number much lower than that. In Victoria, two Assistant Protectors, William Thomas and Edward Stone Parker, reckoned the number of Aborigines when Europeans arrived at 6000 to 7000, and others thought it half that. Whatever their number, if smallpox wiped out half of them, white settlement must have been easier because of it, as it was because of tuberculosis, influenza, whooping cough and venereal disease. Such a massive loss of population also means that Europeans settlers did not always see the inland as it was before 1788.

  There still live in the Mallee kangaroos, echidnas, dunnarts, hopping mice and pygmy possums, goannas, geckoes, shingleback lizards, bearded dragons, skinks, bandy-bandies, brown snakes, burrowing frogs, dingoes and a phenomenal assortment of ants. Bettongs, bilbies, pademelons, wallabies, bandicoots and kangaroo rats, all named in early European accounts, are among the missing.

  Before sheep came toddling across the land, dingoes had all these animals to choose from. They were also ‘deadly enemies of the bears’ when they came down to change trees. Dingoes are generalists, both predators and scavengers. When sheep and lambs turned up on their ancient hunting grounds, they must have thought the kingdom of heaven had arrived. Furphy called sheep ‘carrion’. Slower than any kangaroo, unable to fly, burrow, climb, hide, or leap anything substantial, and clueless when pursued, sheep were the easiest live meat any undomesticated dog ever enjoyed. When attacked they either mobbed together or ran blindly in the dingoes’ path, and the dingoes responded by savaging as many as they could. One nineteenth-century squatter reckoned he lost 2000 in a single night; in the mid-twentieth century the industry estimated that each year dingoes were destroying half a million sheep in Queensland alone. Dingoes drove some sheepmen out of business.