The Bush
Page 26
Where towns can, they adapt and grow, take on new personas and facades, make it up if necessary. Where they can’t adapt they die, sometimes in sad, slow ways, like a sheep cast on its back. Not only circumstances, but human judgement decide their fate. ‘Progress’ is the buzzword in country towns. Their progress associations could just as well be called adaptation associations, because adapting is what they need to do; what looks like progress in one era can look like lunacy in another. Plenty of Australian towns – and cities – would look more pleasing, and be more likely to survive, if they had not decided that progress must eliminate history. Other towns opted not to hide their history, but to make a welter of it: ‘leverage’ is the term consultants use.
Not very long ago, someone persuaded the people of the Riverina town of Jerilderie to ‘leverage’ the bushranger Ned Kelly. Whatever he stole from colonial banks, and cost colonial governments in the effort to catch him, Ned has more than put it back by lending his image to the tourist industry (not to say to art and literature). The Kelly Gang took over Jerilderie for a few days in the summer of 1879 and rode off across the plain with £2000 from the Bank of New South Wales. This exploit is now memorialised in black metal cut-outs of the ironclad sociopath that have been nailed to buildings up and down the town’s main street. That Ned and the gang did not wear their mad helmets and armour for the Jerilderie raid is a matter of no consequence: it is by the helmet we recognise him. The inn in which he and his gang put up has been turned into a museum. You can walk in his footsteps and visit sixteen sites the gang visited or where the ‘iconic bushranger’ said something noteworthy. The townsfolk could not have done more had it been Jesus and the disciples who rode in.
A board outside what is called Ye Olde Bank of New South Wales informs visitors that they behold ‘Victorian Elegance’. A portrait of Queen Victoria in the centre of it seems to be adding the point that ‘elegance’ is an unrepeatable historical condition, which might be an inadvertent way of excusing a couple of the mid-twentieth-century buildings on the other side of the road. Fifty years ago it was the habit of country towns to knock down the old buildings (or at the very least their verandas), and in the name of progress replace them with modern gimcrack. Now they think twice before demolishing the old ones, but are still not inclined to build elegant new ones. In Jerilderie not long ago they built a new police station. Remarkably enough, seeing Ned shot three policemen dead and plotted the murder of dozens more, the station’s facade is designed in the manner of Ned’s iron headpiece, and the same helmet is, as some people say, ‘referenced’ throughout the building.
It was during the raid on Jerilderie that Ned wrote his famous manic rant, the Jerilderie Letter, the primary source of a novel by Peter Carey that won a Booker Prize. The Jerilderie Letter is no small thing, and every second February there’s a Jerilderie Letter Event which features a parade, and a car, bike, truck and tractor show. I don’t suppose they could have decorated the street with tin cut-outs of Ned Kelly writing a letter, but it might have encouraged a useful habit in local children.
John Monash went to school in Jerilderie while his father was keeping a store there. John was top of his class. As an adult he built bridges, commanded armies with success, established the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, and was knighted by the king. A quarter of a million people attended his funeral in 1931. An impressive statue of the general on his horse stands in Melbourne’s Kings Domain. A replica would not be out of place in the main street of Jerilderie. But Monash could never have the bushranger’s ‘brand’, as the marketing consultants call it. He lacks cachet.
In truth Ned didn’t seem to be doing a lot for business in Jerilderie when I arrived: at 7.30 on a Sunday evening not a resident or visitor was to be seen in the wide main street, except for two boys kicking a football up and down the footpath while their mother got cash from an ATM. Ned and the boys could have waltzed in and taken over the joint again. I ate alone in the hotel lounge while Kyle Sandilands hosted a talent quest on half a dozen flat-screen TVs, and music and voices from a long afternoon blared from the bar. The exposed brick walls of the lounge were decorated with local Aboriginal paintings.
There might be more people in on Thursdays, when it’s parmy (veal or chicken) night. Parmigianas came with the southern Italian migrants who used to make them with eggplant rather than meat. Like the pepper trees that grow by old country houses, they rapidly became naturalised – first in the suburbs, then the bush. In Jerilderie, as well as the traditional versions they have Outback Parmy (barbecue sauce, grilled bacon, onion and cheese), Aussie Parmy (tomato sauce, bacon, egg and cheese), and Meat Lovers Parmy (bacon, cabana, onion, barbecue sauce, cheese). I had a Bushranger Steak.
You have to like the town – as much as a highway through its centre allows any place to be a town – but you long to see the signs of what’s authentic and original about the place. It is not really a town of cranky Irish-Australian outlaws and their sympathisers, but of people who grow canola, oats and tomatoes, raise livestock and manage businesses; a community of about 1600 people (roughly half of whom live in the town proper), of which around 5 per cent are European-born and 2 per cent are Aboriginal. No less real is the fact that a decade ago the town was declining, if not actually dying, which was when its leaders decided that tourism was the best way to save it. They asked the federal and state governments for $1.6 million to make Ned Kelly the means of creating what the Shire General Manager called ‘a tourism-driven economic recovery’ and ‘an opportunity for drought-stricken farmers to look at other ways to make some money’.
Tourism offers escape. When Australians decide to ‘see Australia’ they leave the familiar habits of their lives and go looking for something authentically Australian. Somehow the bush is more authentic than the suburbs, and the modern is never as authentic as the old. The old days were bush days, and the bush days were the days of the true Australia. Bush towns see the tourists coming and give them museums and historical parks full of old wagons, ploughs and harrows, crosscut saws and axes, a big log, a tractor, a diorama of a rural Victorian bedroom. They sell them tea towels, plates, postcards and prints bearing images of drovers, native flowers and animals, sheep and dogs, the jolly swagman, a stockman calling ‘coo-ee’ – a sort of Nietzschean idealisation of bush life. Tourists are asked to close their eyes and think of a Cobb & Co coach galloping by, of whips cracking, dogs barking, bushrangers crying ‘Stand and Deliver!’, as if it were only in the bush that the will of human beings was truly exercised.
Kitsch and tourism are inseparable partners. Perhaps it is because, by definition, both are inauthentic. To the extent that they need tourism, towns need kitsch, and to that extent kitsch is as authentic an expression of such towns as the silos full of wheat, and the bakeries full of pies and vanilla slices. It may be that the residents are also attracted to a kitsch aesthetic, though it can’t be presumed that Jerilderie would present a more authentic face if their taste were avant-garde or neoclassical. Without Ned Kelly the town might die. Without the parmigianas, the pub might. With neither of these things Jerilderie would be that much closer to being the provincial backwater a lot of city people imagine country towns to be – especially if they cannot find espresso coffee and muffins.
Breakfast next morning in Jerilderie was instant coffee and a pie from the bakery with Ned Kelly standing on the roof. It was a charmless transaction and I left with the pastry stuck to the ceiling of my mouth. But coming back a few days later, I spotted a little place hidden away behind a shady tree: espresso, muffins, takeaway and tables in the courtyard. No passive aggression; the service was gracious and amusing. You find this divide in many country towns these days: Campari umbrellas and croissants on one side of the street, pie and chips on the other.
Dying towns can hope for a goldmine, but failing that, they must make do with ‘leveraging their natural advantages’, and in the absence of anything useful in that category, try farmers’ markets, ‘themed’ tourism, rodeos, an
d festivals of various kinds – country music, camel races, Elvis imitations, and so on. It is the cultural equivalent of efforts to restore riparian zones or halt erosion, and just as important to the health and character of the bush overall. Only some succeed, but all express the will to live.
As organisms need oxygen, towns need investment. Without it they can only do their best to hide the fact that they’re trying not to die. West Wyalong, further north on the Newell Highway from Jerilderie, looked on my previous visits to be that sort of town. It had boomed after gold was found in the district in the early 1890s, and wheat and sheep kept it going when the mines declined in the 1920s. So much of the confidence and style of those good times was written on its facades, but the main street resembled a film lot after the shoot was over.
Now on the definitive bend in the road, right in the centre of town, there’s a new café called Thom, Dick and Harry. Espresso coffee is just the start: there are espresso machines for sale. They serve biscotti, if you don’t mind. A little bit of Tuscany in downtown West Wyalong, as they say in the epicure magazines. Like the old town itself, this new café owes its existence to gold.
Nineteenth-century mining built fine inland towns which remained prosperous after the mining had gone. It also gave rise to towns that have since vanished off the face of the earth, and towns that have neither flourished nor faded away. Evolving into something stately and self-sustaining, like Bendigo, depended on the size of the lode and other serendipities, but above all on capital. Without public and private investment in business, education, transport, housing and community facilities, when the miners leave, the towns go the way of the holes in the ground. This was true of the mid-nineteenth-century goldrushes, and some people argue that unless governments and communities demand more from the mining companies, by the middle of this century it will be true of today’s boom towns.
A Canadian-based transnational company called Barrick Gold owns and operates the Lake Cowal mine, about 30 kilometres from West Wyalong. As I approached the gates an emu and two half-grown chicks were pacing along the side of the road, stranded between the bitumen and the fence. No creature of the old bush looks more incongruous in the new, or more likely to be wondering how it came to be native to a land with fences. At the mine fifteen trucks, each carrying 190 tonnes of rock and working twenty-four hours a day, were digging a mind-bending hole 200 metres deep and a kilometre wide. When the mining company leaves in fifteen years or so it will be 400 metres deep.
The trucks lug the rock to a series of massive grinders that reduce it step by step to gravel. From this, with the aid of a cyanide solution, the gold is leached at the rate of a little less than one gram per tonne of rock. The operation uses about 6000 tonnes of cyanide a year, and 17 megalitres of bore water a day. At the end of the process the cyanide solution is pumped into vast settling ponds, and the crushed ore deposited in mountainous mullock heaps around the perimeters of the land the company has leased. Each truck burns 3500 litres of fuel a day. In 2010 the plant burned 247 000 kilowatts of power, which, at the bargain price of 6 cents a kilowatt hour, costs the company about $1.5 million a month. Every fortnight the gold is taken away from the mine – it fits readily in a single armoured car.
Opponents of modern gold mining calculate that 18 tonnes of earth have to be dug up and 12 cubic metres of tailings dumped to make the average wedding ring. To this objection, opponents of the Lake Cowal operation add the mine’s proximity to a nationally significant ephemeral wetland, which is what Lake Cowal has been declared. The lake is dry for about three years in every ten, and in those years farmers grow crops on its slopes and floor. But with good rains it fills from the surrounding creeks, and sometimes from an overflowing Lachlan River. Full, it is 17 kilometres long, 10 kilometres wide and 2 metres deep. It sits in an ecosystem of 29 000 hectares which supports over 400 species of flora, 72 species of terrestrial fauna, 277 bird species and, miraculously, 14 fish species. Last time it filled, there were enough cod and perch to support two full-time professional fishermen. The prospect of such a huge mine producing so much chemical waste so close to this rare and wonderful ecosystem inevitably provoked opposition.
Even if mines like Lake Cowal caused no great harm to the environment, their opponents insist they harm communities by creating an economic bubble that cannot be sustained once the mine is gone. ‘All across the world,’ one opponent of Barrick Gold says, ‘communities never benefit, land never benefits, indigenous people never benefit.’
Barrick Gold is accustomed to this kind of resistance, and would not be the world’s biggest gold producer if in most cases it did not win out in the end. After a commission of inquiry, the company offered compromises that the New South Wales government – like governments in Colombia and Tanzania – was very keen to accept, and, thwarting injunctions, it legislated for the mine to go ahead. The government, the local shire, and probably a majority of citizens had been persuaded that the project would be ‘ecologically very, very sound’, and, of course, they liked the idea of the 300 jobs and the $20 million or so in wages that the mine provides. The miners will be gone in a decade and a half, but its supporters doubtless hope the wealth and facilities they bring in the short term will do the place good in the long run as well. Even if they don’t, chances like this one hardly ever come to the West Wyalongs of the world, so they grab them when they can.
So long as it does not mean looking at the slaughter and environmental destruction that accompany them, pastoral and agricultural endeavours sit agreeably with the romance of nature. The lowing of cattle, the bleating of lambs, the waving fields of wheat are all at one with the ideal. Every farmer is at some stage obliged to work with nature, even if he more often works against it. Miners like to say they ‘recover’ or ‘reclaim’ minerals from the earth. They speak in terms all but identical to those used by pastoralists and farmers: the minerals, no less than the land itself, are being brought ‘within the ambit of human use and control’, which is to say, where they belong. But whether they recover rocks or merely dig them up, miners brutalise the earth; they gouge and blow holes in it and leave gigantic piles of waste behind. They do not sow, nor do they reap; nor shear, nor milk, nor bone and slice. They do not nurture or tend. Jesus was born in a manger, not a hole in the ground.
The miner has a bit of Lucifer about him: he smells of sulphur. The Methodist Reverend George Wesley Brown rode his bicycle between the mining towns of Queensland, Mt Mulligan, Chillagoe, Herberton and Comet, and even with the riveting tale of the three Israelites and the fiery furnace, he could not get a grain of mustard seed to grow with more than a handful of men – this despite the frequency of fatal accidents and the ‘sufferings indescribable’ of miner’s lung. The miners thought of religion and the states of their souls only when they wanted a funeral or wedding to be performed, or needed the sort of charitable aid that Christians were obliged to provide. But when Reverend Brown preached to a gathering of selectors, he ‘felt the inspiring presence of the Lord’.
The history of Australia has been shaped at least as much by mining as by sheep, and mining has had as much visible effect. Rural Australia owes to mining a lot of the more substantial towns and cities, and the roads and rails between them. The map of the landscape owes much to mining, and the landscape itself even more. It is doubtful there exists an acre of Australian bush that ever contained the faintest promise of a valuable mineral which does not show the marks of people digging for it: shafts, depressions, mullock heaps, gouged-out gullies, timber and rubble, bits of machinery, weeds, tracks and rail lines, graves, sardine cans. Miners were ant-like in their industry: they came in their tens of thousands, turned the earth upside down and left it a honeycombed ruin. Pastoralists and selectors wrought their own destruction, but weeds, pests and erosion notwithstanding, they replaced the native vegetation with a new kind, and in accordance with a new aesthetic.
It was not just the digging that scarred the landscape. Across the continent mining consumed countless thous
ands of hectares of trees and scrub, to make frameworks for the shafts, to fuel the boilers, for use in houses and as firewood. The Englishman William Howitt, a digger himself for two years, watched in horror as mining denuded the creek banks, fouled the water and stripped the forest from the slopes. ‘We diggers are horribly destructive of the picturesque,’ he wrote. Howitt loved the picturesque, especially the English picturesque he saw re-created in the cities and round the homesteads in Australia. Mining was the dark adversary, the antichrist in God’s creation. And Howitt wrote before the most destructive forms of mining, dredging and sluicing were unleashed on the landscape.
No mining town left original bush. At Queenstown in Tasmania, mining turned a rainforest into a surreal and forbidding permanent desert. In many parts of Victoria a much diminished kind of bush eventually took root on the cratered land where forests of ironbark and box once grew. Usually it came with the addition of non-endemic species, some of which might be called weeds and others, like pepper trees and almond trees, iris and ‘pink lady’ nerines, which are affecting reminders that people once lived there and imagined they might stay. In many other places the returning bush created intriguing post-mining environments. In north-eastern Tasmania you can follow tracks through head-high ti-tree and perfumed leatherwood that hide from any casual view the detritus of abandoned settlements of tin miners and their families. One cannot say if life here was claustrophobic or enchanted. It is the relative absence of concrete relics, besides the familiar rubbish of rusted machinery and water tanks, that haunts the Australian bush.
Malcolm Carnegie grew up on a sheep farm that borders Lake Cowal. His family moved there in the 1920s. They began with 600 hectares, and over the years bought adjoining properties until they had almost 3000. They ran 3000–4000 sheep and cropped about 800 hectares with wheat, barley, oats and field peas. When the lake was dry they grew sorghum and sunflowers there. For twenty years Malcolm combined farming with work as a mulesing contractor, in the course of which he got to know pretty well all the farmers in the district.