The Bush

by Don Watson

  The Big Scrub had been occupied by the English, Irish and Scots, by Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians, including Free Presbyterians, and Methodists. For all the differences between them, they were joined in being white and being first. Others came. According to a police census, there were 200 Indians and Afghans, 300 Kanakas and nine Assyrians living in the Northern Rivers district in 1895, and another fifty ‘Hindoos’ were soon expected. There were also a few Chinese. All but the Kanakas were known as ‘Hindoos’, including one Ibrahim Creambox, a pedlar. They had come to work in the cane fields; a few took to hawking wares, some grubbed lantana. The local press carried advertisements from farmers wishing to employ them, and also vicious letters and articles calling them ‘scum’, ‘polecats’, ‘skunks’ and, among other things, ‘a most objectionable and useless race’. The writers accused these ‘Hindoos’ of driving wages down and predicted that, any minute, they would be taking over the farms of the district. Some businesses refused to serve them or have them on their premises. Local larrikins assaulted them.

  Italians came in the 1920s and ’30s. They left poverty in Italy and took it up again on the ridges of what had been the Big Scrub, growing bananas. Italians were second-wave pioneers in many parts of rural Australia, including the Murray-Darling irrigation areas. In the hills of my childhood they leased steep land that no one had been game to cultivate and they drove their tractors down it. Then, with one or more of the family sitting on the front to hold the nose down, they drove back up to the top, and down again. They planted peas and beans. Some of the old local families were offended by their presence, and even more so by the implied insult of their fearless ploughing. They said to each other that sooner or later one of these dagoes would be killed by a rolling or bolting tractor, and it is just possible that they were also hoping for it.

  In the Big Scrub, Italians leased small, formerly unproductive blocks, cleared the weeds and scrub with mattocks, dug up the earth with spades or horse-drawn ploughs and put in their bananas. Whole families migrated, along with men who came alone and sent for their families only when, years later, they had built something better than a leaking hut with hessian windows. Some of these men were interned as enemy aliens during the war. At the end of it, they found the numbers of their countrymen had been swelled by POWs captured in the Middle East and shipped to Australia to work grubbing lantana for local farmers. The Italians held on and generally succeeded well enough to buy land, build homes and extend their enterprises in the better times postwar.

  That volcanic soil and warm wet climate grows nothing in moderation. What was once the Big Scrub is now a patchwork of pasture, plantations, orchards, lank grasses, lush stands of bush, and vast tangles of lantana, morning glory and other invaders. Much of it looks like the hills of South Gippsland fifty years ago, as if the country is still resisting the agrarian paradise its conquerors had in mind, fighting back in mutant, weed-infested form.

  Cows graze, each with an ibis in attendance. Pre-eminence in bananas has been lost to Queensland, but they still grow here. So does sugar cane. Macadamias are the thing now, the anchor of horticulture in the region, along with avocados, pecans, stone fruit, citrus, lentils and vegetables, including fashionable kinds of salad greens, zucchini flowers and herbs. The Northern Rivers grows pretty well everything demanded by the modern master chef and diner, including coffee.

  The enterprise is not just to grow food, but to add value to it. As Norco turned their milk into butter and their pigs into bacon, local entrepreneurs roast and package their coffee beans, turn fruit into conserves and preserves, extract the oil from macadamia nuts and make muesli and cosmetics from them, or coat them in chocolate. Up until forty years ago, Byron Bay existed for its whaling station and its meatworks, and smelled of blubber, blood and guts. Now it’s much easier to get a massage than a leg of mutton. The whales pass unmolested, watched from the shore by misty-eyed tourists. Byron is a tourist town and a frangipani-scented anchorage for sybarites, sea-changers, young entrepreneurs, and aged activists who came to save the forest at Terania Creek in 1982 and couldn’t think of a good reason to leave.

  The dairy industry was ‘rationalised’ in the 1970s and in the Northern Rivers four-fifths of dairy farms were ‘rationalised out of existence’. Nimbin, half an hour inland from Byron Bay, was once a stereotypical dairy farming town with war memorial, Mechanics’ Hall, and the other standard fittings. Before that, cedar had been the go. Nimbin now continues life in its post-Aquarian form as an icon of alternative living, or, taking the view from the street as a measure, a fossilised relic of hippiedom, a marijuana-pickled, bad-taste rural slum. Iris Diagnosis, Sound Colour Spirit Healing, Heavymetal Chelation and Bushflower Remedies are all available, and from the one naturopath, who also does Fertility Consults. No doubt the town is better on the inside, but something about the main street seems likely to give human affection for trees a bad name. This is a pity, because the first generation of alternative livers can’t be denied their victories over a destructive orthodoxy, or the degree to which they have altered mainstream thinking about the environment.

  Like any good hippie, Betsy Cockram grew pumpkins and cabbages, raised a couple of heifers, a few sheep, hens, ducks and geese, and a sow, a billy goat and a canary; she made jam and pickles, sent her excess gooseberries, peas, beans and poultry to market, or sold them to the Chinaman. The most significant difference between Betsy, who was farming near Cannington, Western Australia in the first decades of the twentieth century, and today’s alternative-lifestyle farmers probably consists less in the farming and more in what they did beyond their farms. Two decades after Betsy and her fellow farmers arrived, there were halls, schools, hospitals, roads, churches, agricultural shows, Sunday schools, libraries. They had inserted themselves into a crack in the nation’s development and, by persistent effort in the small things, laid down a lasting pattern of Australian rural life.

  The Indigenous people of the Northern Rivers had been gathering macadamia nuts for millennia. They knew the species that were immediately edible and those that needed leaching to remove the cyanide. We don’t know by what means Europeans learned the difference, but half a century later, when Charles Staff established the first orchard near Lismore, he planted one of the two harmless species, Macadamia tetraphylla. The other one is M. integrifolia. Both edible species were exported and plantations established in Hawaii, Malaysia, and countries in Africa and South America. Tax incentives – and publicity for the fact that the nuts lower the level of cholesterol in humans and improve skin tone – boosted the industry late in the twentieth century. Australia is the world’s biggest producer.

  Other fruits that the Bundjalung used to find in the bush are now cultivated – Davidson’s plums, native raspberries, finger limes, lemon myrtle, midgen berries, brush cherries, sandpaper figs and tamarind. The word you see everywhere in the district is ‘sustainable’, along with ‘organic’, ‘local’, ‘biodynamic’, ‘regional’, ‘community’, ‘holistic’, ‘natural’, ‘omega-3’ and ‘antioxidant’. Faddish as they might be, the trend is real and serious. More than 20 per cent of Northern Rivers produce is organic, 13 per cent is certified as such, and the figures are rising. There are more than 1000 accredited organic farmers in New South Wales, on more than a million hectares of land, producing goods with a farm gate value of $108 million. The figure for the whole country is over $500 million.

  Sustainable and organic farming are worldwide fashions, and while they amount to a very small proportion of agricultural production (less than 1 per cent of land in the US, just over 4 per cent in the European Union), in the US between 1996 and 2010 the organic market share increased from $3.5 billion to $28.6 billion, and the amount of land under organic farming doubled. The growth is at least as rapid in the European countries. Worldwide, organic production is growing at a rate of 20 per cent each year.

  Farmers are encouraged to change their methods by the premium prices that organic produce attracts, and by the chance of getti
ng up to 90 per cent of the product’s value by selling in local farmers’ markets or on the internet. Selling to big processors or retailers offers a fraction of that return. In cutting out the despised middle man or the oppressive monopoly, organic farmers are doing no more than what every generation of farmers, including Betsy Cockram’s, has wanted to do. Eating organic is seen by some as a middle-class fad of course, but so was coffee in the eighteenth century, and so might chemical farming prove to be. Organic farming appears to satisfy some half-forgotten need to work more intimately with nature, to work with it rather than against it, to find the rhythms.

  The same goes for all the variations of ‘sustainable’ farming. The farmer looks for the dynamics in the land, tries to restore the balance, to solve problems with the means that exist in nature. Planting vast numbers of original species, from rainforest trees to grasses, is a first step. Creating habitats for native predators is another. Native carpet snakes (Morelia spilota) eat exotic rats (Rattus rattus), which thrive on macadamias. A pair of barn owls (Tyto alba deliculata) will eat 1500 rats a year. By large-scale planting of indigenous species and encouraging owls to nest on their properties, macadamia farmers can eliminate baits and pesticides, which kill untold numbers of native creatures and continue the story of destruction.

  This kind of farming is often mocked for being impractical and self-indulgent, yet there never was a more faddish farming ideal than closer settlement in the name of which the Big Scrub was destroyed. It is hard to imagine a greater self-indulgence than wiping out an entire ecosystem for the presumed benefit of a few thousand people. The kernel of the pioneering dogma, that it is unconscionable to leave good land in the hands of hunter-gatherers, persists in the modern view that to extract the maximum in food and fibre from the land is an unquestionable moral good, deserving of every blessing that governments can bestow. How else shall the world be fed? Not by reverting to immaculate nature and fighting weeds, pests and disease with organic mulch and ladybirds.

  The argument is not unreasonable, as anyone who’s paid 3 dollars for a couple of scrawny leeks will testify. The productivity of Australian farms is an unassailable fact, as are, equally, the salinity, erosion, species loss and weed infestations of much farmland, and the indebtedness and despair of many Australian farmers. Australian farming is on the one hand a miracle of science and a boon to the nation, on the other an ideology as self-justifying, exclusive and delusional as the doctrine of natural or God-given right under which the land was first appropriated. It is a story of heroic labour and sacrifice, and at the same time one of human beings granting themselves an option over all creation, to be exercised at will and in accordance with any whim or impulse, vanity far from least among them.

  If the history of the bush appals us, it is not for the destruction alone, but also the wilfulness. Even as they laboured for their children and succeeding generations, the settlers were denying them the world they had found. Where trees could be exploited, or removed to make way for mining or agriculture, they were, and without regard to their intrinsic – as opposed to their commercial – value. Red cedar is one example among many, one in which greed overran commercial sense. In the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century 16 million tonnes of karri and marri trees, 95 per cent of them old-growth, some a thousand years old, went to Japan for pulp. Tasmania’s Huon Pine (Lagarostrobos franklinii), the second-oldest tree on earth, growing at no more than 2 millimetres a year for anything up to 3000 years, is another example. Logging, mining and fire (being a Gondwanan it can’t cope) have reduced its range to about 10 000 hectares. In all likelihood, only the ruggedness of the remaining habitats saved it from a more dire fate. Across the continent since Europeans first arrived, 92 per cent of old-growth forest has been destroyed.

  The farmers who are replanting old species on their properties, and indulging owls and snakes, might seem deluded, but they are taking a longer view than the generations that put paid to fields of boronia, forests of eucalypts and Gondwanan wonderlands, and it’s one which might yet reveal that a less anthropocentric approach to land is, paradoxically, more productive and useful to human beings.

  Gardens of Verdure

  the vanished sea and the saltbush – a geographer’s apostasy – the land question – ascendant squatters and agrarian dreams and follies – soldier settlers – blockies – the Murray-Darling – saltbush returns

  John Oxley had never been in a landscape ‘so counter to the course of nature in other countries’. He had never seen a river ‘with such opposite windings’ as the Lachlan, never known a place that afforded abundance in the morning and by midday had you trapped in hellish scrub. He didn’t reach the Murrumbidgee but went back to the Lachlan, and following it downstream out of the swamps found it wandering across a forsaken and depressing plain; and the foothills of a nearby range were just barren red sand, and all the time cockatoos racketed in the branches of the ‘huge, misshapen eucalypti’ that lined the river’s banks.

  The river reduced to a series of holes of milky-white water. The vegetation all but ran out. Oxley led his men onto a plain stretching westward, ‘to the full as barren’ as any he had seen and ‘boundless as the ocean’. A solitary dingo and old impressions of human feet were the only signs of life. Oxley reckoned nature had condemned the place ‘to perpetual loneliness and isolation’, and he along with it. They came upon the remains of shellfish. The air smelt of decaying seaweed. There would be times, he thought, when the boundless plain would be a boundless lake. In fact they were on the floor of a vanished sea.

  They were also on the outer fringe of what the geographer Thomas Griffith Taylor called the ‘garden of verdure’ surrounding the arid interior of Australia. Oxley and his party turned back not much further west than where modern Griffith stands, but this was the kind of marginal country that glows with health and vigour in some years and gives every appearance of being dead in others. It also floods from time to time. Seeing it after floods as they had, with ‘infinite regret and pain’ Oxley concluded that ‘the interior of this vast country is a marsh and uninhabitable’.

  The ‘seaweed’ they could smell Cunningham identified as ‘salsolae’, which might have been Salsola australis, a chenopod, a saltbush – 30 per cent sodium carbonate, in fact. Soon they were making ‘excellent meals’ of Rhagodia, possibly R. candolleana, another saltbush. Several species of saltbush, as later inland explorers also found, made an ‘excellent substitute for spinach’ and helped to ward off scurvy. Oxley and his men were in saltbush country, or chenopod shrubland – the land of the halophytes. It only looks barren and useless: in reality, the saltbush (and the almost as common bluebush – Maireana) species support all manner of marsupial, bird, reptile and insect life. The main genus is Atriplex, and among the most common of the sixty species are A. nummalaria (old-man saltbush), A. amnicola (river saltbush), A. lentiformis (silvery saltbush), A. semibaccata (berry or creeping saltbush), A. vesicaria (bladder saltbush), A. polycarpa (cattle saltbush) and A. cinerea (grey saltbush). All are edaphic; all are adapted to aridity and salt, and all in different and ingenious ways: by very deep roots and myriad shallow ones, by shedding leaves and roots to reduce evapotranspiration, by long-lived seeds protected by germination and light inhibitors until they receive the 50 millimetres of rain they need to get established, by silvery leaves which reflect heat and light so the hottest sun will not burn or kill them. The cells of these leaves and roots can absorb unlikely quantities of salt, and through a process called C4 photosynthesis, confined to 2 per cent of all plants, draw moisture from the environment by osmosis. On these remarkable species the fertility and stability of much Australian soil depends.

  Strictly speaking, Atriplex might not be ‘native’ to Australia. Some scientists believe a species of bladder saltbush without bladders found in the Shark Bay area of Western Australia is the ancient parent plant – blown or washed ashore from who knows where or when – from which endemic species evolved as they spread east, developing their r
emarkable aptitudes as they went. If ever there was a plant that might teach us something about adapting to the bush it is Atriplex.

  Oxley’s men found their horses did well on saltbush. Within a couple of decades squatters would find that their sheep liked it too, and within another sixty years they had eaten much of it out. Seeing it disappear, the graziers reckoned this was proof that the desert must give way to progress – which was to say, their sheep. But by the end of the nineteenth century the old chenopod shrublands east of the Darling looked more like desert than anything they or Oxley ever saw.

  By then a lot of saltbush country had been taken up by ambitious but generally undercapitalised farmers. And well before their struggles were over, defeated unionists, the unemployed, and middle-class men and women contemptuous of city life for the ruin it was bringing to their souls, went into this and all sorts of other inhospitable and marginal lands to set up cooperative farming settlements. Just as moth-like in their attraction to the idea of turning scrub into milk and potatoes, and potential anarchists into sturdy farmers, governments helped with money and equipment. But in every case the utopian settlements were abandoned within a few years. The people lost everything, including, very often, faith in their fellow human beings. The wonder was that anyone ever thought they could succeed.

  Beginning in 1911 and continuing in publications throughout the first half of the century, Thomas Griffith Taylor argued that Australia must make the most of the ‘garland of verdure’ and leave the arid or useless two-fifths of the continent to miners and such adventurers as wanted to risk their flocks and herds on it. The geographer believed water conservation and dry-farming methods could improve the productivity of the ‘garland’ and make it fit for closer settlement, and irrigation would be successful so long as it was not extended far beyond the rivers. But any notion of irrigating the inland (turning the rivers, flooding Lake Eyre, and so on) was dangerous nonsense. As for the tropical north, best to leave its development to ‘a confined but contented weaker race’.