The Bush
Page 19
It was more than the damage they did: it was the way they often made a spree of their attacks, killing far more than they could eat, ripping the flanks and eating only the kidneys, leaving a trail of injured sheep among the dead ones. As with coyotes in North America, there was something personal in the loathing for dingoes: they were vermin, but worse than that, they were wanton, cruel and cowardly.
Typically dingoes have a ginger coat, with white paws, white chest and a white tip on their tail, but some are much darker than others and there are black dingoes and white dingoes. Some are bigger than others, some are smarter, some – old doggers say – kill to eat, some for the fun of it. And some seem to kill because they just hate sheep. In the early morning light, a healthy, well-fed male dingo with his ears erect and his tail arched over his back is a sight to make you shiver. They are the toughest of the tough – macho, ruthless, brutal survivors. The canine embodiment of the bushman, we might say. The females are smaller, with pretty heads and slender, nimble paws. A wild dingo is like any wild dog, including a domestic dog gone wild: wolf-like, a hunter. A great many wild dogs are dingoes crossed with domestic dogs; some are not dingoes at all, but feral dogs, and no less destructive for that. In the High Country of the south-east, these crossbred and feral dogs are much more common than dingoes, and just as loathed by farmers.
The dingo is a descendant of a South-East Asian domestic dog, which descends from an Asian wolf. Its nearest close relation might be the New Guinea singing dog. The dingo’s somewhat hazy ancestry is reflected in the names given it by science – Canis familiaris dingo and Canis lupus dingo, and most recently just Canis dingo. The Aborigines at Port Jackson were reported to call it a ‘tingo’. It’s likely they arrived on mainland Australia about 4000 years ago, probably with parties of human migrants who had domesticated them. The oldest dingo specimen, excavated on the Nullarbor Plain, has been dated to 3450 BP. For 2000 years or more they coexisted with the predatory thylacine, and it is possible that they had a hand in the extinction of that animal on the mainland. That they kept marsupial numbers down seems beyond dispute: their near extermination in parts of central Queensland in the 1870s brought kangaroos in numbers that ‘overwhelmed’ the district. Aborigines in most parts of the continent domesticated dingoes, hunted with them, and enjoyed their companionship, the physical warmth they provided at night, and their usefulness as guards.
While they have been assimilated into Aboriginal social and economic life and, like buffalo, into their mythology, dingoes are not counted among the great Creation beings. If Tim Flannery is right, it is possible that they deserve at least an honorary place. Flannery believes the dingo’s arrival changed the continent’s ecosystem and human culture in radical ways. For instance, he says, the advantage Aboriginal groups gained from having dingoes enabled them to spread their influence and with it their language: the dominance of Pama–Nyungan dialects over seven-eighths of the continent might be put down to dingoes. By reducing the numbers of herbivores, Flannery says, dingoes expanded the range and diversity of grasslands. Seeds became a staple food of Aboriginal people, grindstones became an essential implement, and the understanding and management of these lands became crucial to Aboriginal life. Of course, if the Aborigines owed their grasslands to the dingoes, so did the Europeans who ran their sheep on them.
There have been Wild Dog Destruction Acts and Wild Dog Destruction Boards and decades of complaint and argument about the inadequacies of the measures taken. Thousands of kilometres of dingo fences have been built, and at great expense rebuilt and repaired after floods and sandstorms, salinity and the depredations of kangaroos, emus and rabbits. The war has gone on for 200 years. Strychnine, Anthony Trollope observed, ‘was as common in a squatter’s house as castor oil in a nursery’. On the large runs carts were ‘continually’ taken round distributing the poison, and on smaller establishments ‘the squatter or his head man goes about with strychnine in his pocket and lumps of meat tied up in a handkerchief’. So much strychnine was laid, station owners kept their sheep and kangaroo dogs in ‘poison muzzles’ to stop them eating it. Sadly, this was not a precaution that could be taken with birds that saw the baits.
Every station had a dogger or two: a solitary soul with a wagonette for his gear, a pair of horses to pull it, and a riding hack hitched behind. Any place that the dogs were a pest, the best way to poison or trap them was a great topic of conversation, and as I discovered at a motel in western Queensland, for some people it remains so. A dogger named Denny McGrath, held by some to be the best in the Western Division of New South Wales, made decoys from the boiled internal organs of a dingo bitch and kept it in the boiling sun until even the cagiest male dog could not resist the scent. W. S. Kelly recommended inserting a knife into either breast of a still warm parrot and dropping in enough strychnine to cover a threepenny piece. Hang the parrots on a fence or dry bush and strew a few feathers about, and all dingoes, foxes and dogs will take the bait.
Dingoes howl as if they mean to be heard by every dog since time began. ‘Unearthly,’ people said. When they howled nearby, Bert Facey said, ‘a funny feeling ran up and down my spine’. On the McLeay River, Annie Baxter sat down under a tree in the bush one evening and for fun, or in protest at the preponderance of dull and unlikeable men in her existence, she began to ‘howl like a Native dog’. To her great surprise a dingo came forth from the scrub and answered her. Perhaps nothing else expressed so well the colonial experience of the uncanny, the strangeness of the otherwise familiar. Dogs were meant to be domesticated animals, after all. In 1917, on his farm at Maranup in Western Australia’s south-west, Will Brown was driven ‘ratty’ by the prospect of losing his sheep to them. His wife wondered if he might end up in a lunatic asylum. She went off to bed and wrote home while Will sat by the door ‘listening for dingo howls with the gramophone trumpet’.
Two days after Anzac Day, the wreaths still lay at the foot of the memorials in Lameroo and Pinaroo, two small towns in the South Australian Mallee with Victorian buildings that hint at large ambitions. Along the road between them, huge pivot irrigators sprayed water from the underground sea onto fields of onions and potatoes. There was the bush of creation and the bush of human ambition. With the sun setting behind us, we passed through a patchwork of wild saltbush, stubble and cultivated soil ready for seed: grey-blue, creamy yellow, mushroom, ochre. The artist beside me said it was burnt sienna, and it was true that some of it looked like Tuscany.
At the headquarters of the South Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service in Lameroo, the young woman in khaki shirt and shorts told us that the emus and wombats on local farms would have to be dealt with. She said it with apparent regret, but firmly. Just now the farmers were waiting for the locusts to peter out before they seeded their paddocks. Tall, and broad across the shoulders, smiling and articulate, she stood with her feet planted wide apart in the way that farmers often do, as if to signify their determination to stay put. She managed the Ngarkat Conservation Park, but she was a farmer’s daughter and combined her attachment to the park and its creatures with sympathy for the people who do not share interests with wombats and emus.
Ngarkat (named after the Aboriginal people who lived there) is one of four such parks in the Murray-Darling Basin of South Australia. Together they amount to nearly a million hectares of protected remnant mallee. Impressive as this is, the parks represent just 6.8 per cent of the South Australian Mallee’s original extent. Management of the parks means management of fire: preventing it, suppressing it and employing it when necessary. It also means managing human use of the park: the place is equally attractive to gentle birdwatchers and four-wheel drive adventurers and hoons. Then there are weeds to manage, dingoes and rabbits, and the apiarists whose bees have been harvesting the nectar of desert banksias (Banksia ornata) for many decades.
Ngarkat had burned ten years before, and there were still a few old 7-metre trees with blackened and amputated limbs. But the land was in full recovery: the young ma
llees gleamed, and melaleucas, pines, banksias and small flowering shrubs – heath, pea-bush, sour-bush – were thriving. The leaves of the mallee trees rustled in the wind, and that was the only sound. There are 185 bird species in Ngarkat, only four of them introduced. I saw two scrub-wrens. They flitted about in the silence. A malleefowl had left startlingly big fresh footprints in the sand, along with the sense that he was somewhere close by, just being invisible for now. All manner of reptiles and marsupials inhabit the park. Like the fairies of Ireland, you couldn’t see them but you knew they were there.
Ngarkat is not a designated wilderness. Some of it meets the criteria set down by South Australia’s Wilderness Protection Act, but other parts have been too much affected by European occupation. One-fifth of the plants in the park are exotic and most of them grow along tracks used by the other exotic – four-wheel-drive vehicles. Ngarkat, like the Big Desert across the border (which is a designated wilderness), is a series of massive sand dunes. Sand dunes are irresistible to four-wheel drivers – or as one member of their kind puts it, they provide ‘a variety of challenging driving experiences’.
To protect Ngarkat, park managers insist on a complete reversal of all previous European behaviour in the Mallee. Do not pick flowers or other specimens, disturb stones or rocks, or dig holes of any kind except for the placement of faecal matter. Do not wash in streams or springs or camp near these or any water source that will be used by birds and animals. Do not leave litter. Do not poison, trap or shoot the native animals. Do not make tracks. Leave no sign that you were ever here.
The South Australian Act seeks ‘the restoration of land and its ecosystems to their condition before European colonisation’. To restore the Mallee is nothing less than desirable, yet to speak as if it had been a wilderness when the Aborigines were there seems to be restating the Europeans’ view that the land they grabbed was as God alone had made it. Can a place that was intimately known and exploited by humans be a wilderness? Is a dingo-baiting program consistent with restoring the pre-European ecosystem? And if it was a wilderness when Aboriginal people lived there, how can protecting it from ‘the effects of modern technology and exotic animals and plants and other exotic organisms’ make it a wilderness without them? Their descendants having given up the Mallee for the streets of Murray Bridge and Mildura.
Striving to Stay in Existence
the essential tree – woodlines of the west – the tree-feller’s mind – the stoic red gum – the Big Scrub – red cedar – the cedar-getters – a cream economy – the counter-cultural bush – sustainable and organic
For Hindus, banyan trees are sacred. For Buddhists, bodhi trees; for the Arabs, certain date palms. To be stalwart in a ‘tree-like’ way was to approach goodness, according to Confucius. The Normans built chapels in the trunks of yew trees. Many other cultures attached religious significance to particular trees and groves and forests. Adonis was born of a tree. Daphne turned into one. George Washington confessed to cutting one down and the United States, as a result, was all but immaculately conceived. The tree is the symbol of the male organ and of the female body. The Hebrew kabbalah depicts Creation in the form of a tree. In Genesis, a tree holds the key to immortal life, and it is to the branches and fruit of an olive tree that God’s people are likened in both the Old and New Testaments. To celebrate the birth of Christ his followers place trees in their sitting rooms and palm fronds, a symbol of victory, commemorate his entering Jerusalem. A child noted by Freud had fantasies of wounding a tree that represented his mother. The immortal swagman of Australia sat beneath a coolabah tree. In hundreds of Australian towns the war dead are honoured by avenues of trees.
The Judeo-Christian God, however, did not suffer rivals. There would be no worship of the tree itself, no Eucalyptus religiosa. The faithful could set upon the most commanding and inscrutable gum with reasonable hope that the ring of their axes was music to His tremendous ear. The pagan, the sinful and the forbidden inhabit wildernesses, and people who go there are as if out of the sight of God. The sooner they clear the trees, the sooner God’s sight can be restored and His kingdom on earth realised. No doubt there were settlers who went about the work of clearing scrub convinced that, as much their own work, they were doing God’s too, and settlers for whom God’s direction was not needed. Even John Shaw Neilson, whose ‘terrible and thunder-blue’ God gave way to one found in the gentleness and beauty of birds and light, and whose genius was to find the sublime in what had been all but vanquished by Man, went on cutting, grubbing and burning as he wrote.
Driving between the Victorian Mallee towns of Manangatang and Piangil in a heatwave in 1926, the Presbyterian Reverend Fraser Sutherland saw God in the mallee roots. While every other living thing was panting and distressed, the mallee trees were sending up new growth. ‘Springbacks’ the farmers called them, and cursed their defiance. As the roots were the trees’ great unseen resource, and the source of their beauty and wonder, so was God to Reverend Sutherland in the struggle to establish His kingdom there. Encouraged by the psalmist who declared ‘truth shall spring out of the earth’, the reverend hoped that even as they slashed and bludgeoned them back into the ground his battling parishioners might find in these springbacks the faith to wait for a new heaven and a new earth.
Reverend Sutherland might have been onto something. The mallee lignotuber, universally known as a mallee root, is a storehouse of life and the vital instrument of reproduction. Each thing strives to retain its being, as Spinoza said: ‘the power of nature is the divine power and virtue itself. Moreover, the divine power is the very essence of God’.
It is a common mistake of the ignorant, the philosopher said, to ‘conceive of men in nature as a kingdom within a kingdom (imperium in imperio). They decree that the human mind is produced not by any natural causes, but is created immediately by God, and is so independent of other things that it has absolute power (potestas) to determine itself and use reason correctly.’ This is a fair description of settler mentality as well. In truth, according to Spinoza, human beings, like everything else, including mallee roots, ‘are only a part of nature’ and striving to exist. Whether we should think a man in nature armed with an axe or chainsaw or 380-horsepower tractor with a 5-metre blade, and a man contemplating a spotted pardalote are opposite states or one and the same and equally natural is not clear; nor is it clear if men wreak havoc on the natural world because it is in their nature to do so or because they imagine their existence depends on it. In any event, hope seems to rest on their willingness to look upon the other parts of nature with the same reverence that they look upon the part that is themselves.
Yet it seems possible, even likely, that trees retain some power in the human unconscious that a purely utilitarian perspective or a Calvinist one cannot entirely stifle. Romantic it might be, but whether it is held by a nineteenth-century poet or a 21st-century Green, human sympathy for trees is neither unnatural nor lacking respectable philosophical foundation. It merely lost the argument; like Spinoza, it was declared heretical.
I remember a couple of dozen or more eucalypts and blackwoods, their shape, juxtaposition, and exactly where they stood on our farm. Their imprint is at least as vivid as that left by half a dozen dogs or any other animal. Trees regularly appear in my dreams; the animals never do. One, a painfully slow-growing oak, is planted on the ashes of a maiden great-aunt. I am not sure if the pine tree under which I played and fantasised all my childhood and teenage years, and of which I dream repeatedly, is my father, my mother, the Church or the Allwise Disposer himself, but I’ve no doubt about the authority it exerted on me then, and I suspect still does.
Think of a tree as a tree and not as an impediment or a utility and its power quickly becomes apparent: the height, the mass, the form; the force, tenacity, grace or agelessness it expresses. The colour, light, movement and sound it generates; the vigour, strength, fecundity, the life force. The moods, the terror and the wonder it excites. Trees provoke the imagination and enliven the sens
es; they suggest mystery, remind us of freedom, lift our spirits, and carry us, if unconsciously and only for an instant, back to nature and in proportion to it. It was for this reason – to feed the human imagination (and serve as the lungs of the city) – that New York’s Central Park was created. We plant trees for their many practical uses, but also to affirm life and commemorate birth and death. The power exerted by trees on our minds, and the strength of our relationship to them, may exist quite independently of their vast utility to our species.
We might best measure that utility by noting, as Colin Tudge has, that while we speak of the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and so on, every age, including that of half a million years ago when humans started using fire, has been a Wood Age. There could have been no bronze, iron or steam age without trees, or any human age if we hadn’t lived in them for a long while. It was in trees that we developed our dexterity, and our brains developed in concert with our arms and hands, the hands providing the pay-off on our brains’ abilities that assured our successful evolution. No trees, as Tudge says, no human beings: our debt to them is ‘absolute’. And that’s before we come to the part they play in keeping the earth cool enough for us to live on it.
The need to gather wood was something European Australians shared with Aborigines, but as was almost always the case, the Europeans needed to gather more of it. Mining depended on wood and consumed whole environments. The karri forests of south-west Western Australia went for railway sleepers and for mines in Australia, South Africa and Germany. The streets of Capetown were paved with jarrah. The land immediately surrounding having been cleared of every sapling and twig, for sixty years the West Australian goldfields were serviced by a network of rail lines running out into the forests to the west. These were the woodlines. They consumed immense swathes of mallee, the gleaming copper gimlet (E. salubris) and the miraculous salmon gum with glimmering green leaves on flesh-pink limbs and trunk, and stigmata of blood-red sap. Employed by such enterprises as the West Australian Goldfields Firewood Supply Company, families lived for years among the trees, cutting, transporting and loading, moving as the wood ran out and leaving their iron and concrete and glass in the dust. Hard as the work was, the woodlines provided work and fellowship, and for many hundreds of people a start in a new country. A woman who had been part of a remarkable postwar community of Australian and European migrant workers in these baking woodlands said she and her family and friends loved life there. She confessed to a special affection for the gimlets: ‘You’d think someone had been polishing them all day,’ she said, which just might mean she would have preferred to leave them standing.