The Bush

by Don Watson

  The Carnegies’ sprawling weatherboard house was still standing when I went there in 2011. Twin palms still dominated the gardens, ringed by pepper trees. No one lived there. Most of the furniture had gone from the house but its character remained, along with the wood stove and the fly swat and oven mitt hanging by its side. It took little imagination to picture it lived in, to hear the voices, and the sounds of sheep, dogs and shearing, to smell the roasts, sense the gathering of memories. But the abandoned shearing shed was silent. Old scales, the wool press, and the pulleys that drove the shearing machines rested within its log-framed, corrugated-iron walls. Unmilled tree limbs had made the pens, and years of being crammed with sheep had shined and varnished them. The stencils used to stamp the bales of wool hung on the walls: ‘C&NMC Cowal West’. The house itself was sinking. Oily black water was seeping into the garden. West Cowal homestead was soon to be swallowed into the mine.

  The local Narrungdera people, a clan of the Wiradjuri, cultivated the seeds of medicinal plants, fertilised quandong trees, stocked creeks and watercourses with fish and built weirs to contain them; they farmed the swamps, and with their fires maintained grasslands. They made sanctuaries. They managed the land intensely and regulated their harvest of it. In particular they managed water. The task of enforcing the rules of land management was given to a keeper – a gunjung. Gunjungs were mature men of knowledge and authority.

  Malcolm Carnegie has made of himself a kind of white gunjung. When it became clear that the mine was going ahead and the years of farming West Cowal were over, Carnegie decided he would extract whatever he could from the mining company – not for himself, but for the local environment and farmers. He did a deal with Barrick: in return for West Cowal the company would be the principal funders of the Lake Cowal Foundation, which would ‘protect and enhance’ the ecology of the lake and undertake projects in the interests of local conservation, sustainable farming, education and research. There is an urgent point to these efforts. Many of the farms on the Western Plains of New South Wales cannot survive without government assistance, and very few are not in heavy debt. Some make do by capturing feral goats and selling them to abattoirs. The degradation of the environment might not be the cause of their beleaguered circumstances, but soil erosion and dieback in the vegetation do seem to reflect the struggle of farmers to stay in existence. For some people it would be better if, much in the way of the managers of the pastoral age, they were paid to look after the land and to do whatever can be done to restore it – even to manage a common herd or flock.

  The foundation operates from the Lake Cowal Conservation Centre, a big, purpose-built shed with meeting rooms, multimedia, and a herbarium of plants from western New South Wales and the Lake Cowal area. The centre is a partnership between the foundation, Barrick Gold, the local high school and the Lachlan Catchment Management Authority. The aim is to improve understanding of the land and climate and to provide practical assistance for those who depend upon them. The shed is used for school programs and conferences; the adjoining paddocks and remnant bush for research trials, field days, demonstrations, school bush walks, and various projects to rehabilitate soils and pasture. More than ninety local landholders are involved; 15 000 hectares are under the centre’s management. Projects are under way with partners ranging from Landcare to the CSIRO to Greening Australia and proponents of no-kill cropping. Sixty-two local farmers have completed property-planning studies conducted in association with the Western Institute of TAFE, and nine have completed certificate III in conservation and land management – the first formal qualification some of them have ever received.

  In the nearby 3000-hectare Spring Creek catchment area, the foundation is trialling Natural Sequence Farming (NSF), a system developed by Peter Andrews in the much wetter Hunter Valley. Where most other efforts at land reclamation aim to re-establish as much of the original vegetation and landform as possible, Andrews starts from the premise that we should imitate the ingenious, naturally evolved system that underlay the landscape of Australia. Where once the movement of water was slowed by chains of ponds and swampy meadows, deforestation, grazing and agriculture, including the draining of ponds and swamps, allowed water to flow unchecked, with dire consequences for soil nutrient levels, productivity, biodiversity and water quality. NSF artificially restores the chains of ponds, and in doing so not only restores fertility and biodiversity, but reverses salinity and reduces the risk of fire. Andrews believes restoring some of the functions of the pre-European landscape is the key to rehabilitation: the re-creation not of a pre-European landscape per se, but one that works in the same way.

  Clearing, dieback, wind and water erosion, the concussion of hard hooves, even the loss of burrowing mammals such as bandicoots and bettongs, everything since the arrival of Europeans has accelerated the movement of water across the landscape. What happened on a hill near Henty in southern New South Wales is a miniature for much of the continent. The movement of water made what was familiar to one generation a lost world to the next.

  Generations ago, locals noticed the disappearance of hillside springs after ringbarking teams denuded Cookarbine Hill. Instead of soaking down through porous granite and seeping from slopes, rainfall drifted swiftly across hillsides bared of trees, shrubs and fallen limbs, of the textured surface that formerly slowed and captured water. Early in the twentieth century, when Dudal Swamp flooded during particularly wet seasons, Henty residents gathered for boating events. As decades passed, sandy material eroding from hillsides and paddocks spread across the swamp. Red gum saplings grew, preventing even the smallest boats from sailing.

  Spring Creek is typical of catchments across the continent, and of the usually dry creeks that cross the highways. Spring Creek and the watercourses that feed it have cut into the soil and become continuously eroding drains. Rain that used to soak the land and replenish soils and vegetation instead washes them away. Vegetation that used to recycle the water and keep the landscape cool has very often been removed. The Reedy Creeks no longer have reeds and the swamps have gone from the Swampy Creeks, just as the emus and turkeys that lent dozens of creeks their names have gone.

  The Lake Cowal Foundation, together with local landholders and students from the Australian National University, have built fifteen of Andrews’ ‘leaky weirs’, forty or so hay weirs, and created three rock flumes in Spring Creek. The weirs are designed to slow the water’s progress, and recharge the floodplain. ‘Recharge’ just about says it all: what was, what is, and what might be with the bush. More than 30 000 tube-stock trees, aquatic plants and native grasses will consolidate the banks, and bare and eroded areas have been mulched.

  Andrews believes weeds are in the eye of the beholder. In general he shares the view memorably articulated by the legendary environmental scientist and writer George Seddon, that weeds are ‘stateless persons with no civil rights’, ‘dissidents’, plants that don’t properly belong. Essentially, as Seddon says, plants are ranked as weeds if they are contrary to human intentions. But what if the intentions are contrary to common sense? For Andrews, so-called weeds are an essential aid to the land’s regeneration. If blackberries and willows are holding the banks of a stream together, leave them there. Control them by slashing, planting shade trees and native species, but don’t poison them. For Andrews, the residual effects on the food we eat and the people who grow it constitute one of two main arguments against herbicides and chemical farming; the other is that weeds look after the soil in hard times and restore it for our benefit. Their deep fibrous roots draw up moisture and minerals and not only hold the soil together, but also make it porous, fertile, and ready for the emergence of grasses and other plants to which eventually they will give way. The weed, to quote an earlier admirer, is the ‘pioneering agent of Nature’.

  Blackberries might do all these things, and prevent stock from breaking down stream banks as well, but it can be hard for a farmer to imagine that planting shade trees and fencing them off is the answer to a hectare o
f 2-metre-high blackberries harbouring colonies of rabbits and foxes. And it’s hard for government scientific bodies or Landcare groups to now decide that the willows they are dedicated to eradicating should be left to prosper. But at his farm ‘Barramul’ in the Widden Valley of New South Wales, and on farms managed by his many disciples, that is what Andrews has done, and casuarinas and other native species are now out-competing the weeds and exotics.

  Whenever Malcolm Carnegie walks into the bush, he sees plants that the standard classifications do not describe. This is because in nature adversity creates opportunity: the plants and animals that take those opportunities defy the classifications. These developments take time, and Carnegie wonders if time might be the problem with Natural Sequence Farming. If we are trying to imitate natural sequences, don’t we have to imitate the time they take? Andrews says no: the point of planting ‘pioneering weeds’ is to speed up the process of restoring biodiversity and soil restoration. At the same time farmers will be eliminating herbicides, and, by planting willows and poplars instead of eucalypts, making their properties less vulnerable to fire.

  It might be a decade or more before the results of the Lake Cowal Foundation’s enterprises are known. Will it restore productivity to the soils, regenerate the native grasses and slow the flow of water across the surface? Will it help farmers to keep their farms and defy the trend which has left only a third of the productive land in the Lachlan River catchment in local hands, and those hands largely tied by impossible accumulations of debt? Or are the remaining family farms on borrowed time as well as borrowed funds? Without the resources to improve their properties and stock, take on the new technologies, or make their operations fit for the globalised, free-market world, are they bound to fade away before the juggernaut of agribusiness and its massive, vertically integrated companies? For the time being, the answers to these questions may be less important than the fact that so many people have been wakened to the land itself, and are managing their farms with deeper knowledge and more respect than farmers have before. If imitation is the sincerest flattery, this might be the best homage Europeans can pay to the people their ancestors displaced.

  Viewed from a car at 100 kilometres an hour, the vegetation of Australia can look the same for long stretches, but people who travelled it on foot or horseback learned, often to their frustration, how frequently it changed. On the south-west slopes of Lake Cowal, weeping myall (Acacia pendula) grows at lower elevations, and box slightly higher. Higher still and on poorer soil, there are ironbark and box and scrubby understorey. Another change in soil produces white cypress pine and mallee. The landscape is ancient but not static. It is a shifting mosaic. And not just soil but landform determines this. An almost imperceptible difference in the profile of the land – a hollow, a rise, a barrier against the wind – can mean the difference between a species surviving and dying out. Any kind of disturbance to the environment – a plough, a road, a horse, a passing explorer – creates change in regional vegetation. Species not endemic to a region, whether native or exotic, seize the chance to invade and dominate, which is to say to become naturalised. Disturbed environments also encourage endemic species to hybridise; the hybrids often outperform the parents and soon take over.

  Scientists say it is best to see the bush as bits of genetic material moving about. The material alters according to the elements it is exposed to: climate change has changed it in the past and is changing it now. In the blazing hot, dry and fire-prone Pilbara of Western Australia, relictual rainforest species grow on dolomite dykes safe from fire. Subalpine snow gums (Eucalyptus pauciflora) are endemic to the bush within view of my house, though it is far from subalpine and snows infrequently. They are a relict of the last ice age. The black gums (E. aggregata) are likely another relic, probably the residue of a much larger population that did not survive the ice.

  Snow gums also grow near Narrabri in the New England ranges, where Robert Godfree lives when he’s not being a senior research scientist with the CSIRO in Canberra. Godfree grew up in New England and was eight years old when he first noticed how the plant life changed the higher up he went, until he got to the snow gums growing at 400 metres on Mt Kaputar. They are a different subspecies to the ones that grow near my place, not far from Melbourne. Going south from Mt Kaputar, you won’t see another one until you reach the Australian Alps. Godfree wondered why the gums on the mountain were all old, why no new ones ever grew. He noticed plants at lower elevations were creeping higher up the slopes, and thought it might be because the climate had grown warmer. He has been interested in drought and its effects on vegetation since his childhood, and the study of it has left him with a love for the ‘incredible toughness’ of Australian plants. On his office wall he has a photo of a train travelling through the New England ranges at 250 metres. It is the 1960s and the land is deep in snow. Maximum winter temperatures have risen from 12 degrees to 14 degrees since then and it is now years since snow settled in New England, thirty years since a major snowfall.

  In the course of the great drought that broke at the end of 2010, Godfree began investigating changes in the grassland vegetation near West Wyalong. The period 2006–09 was the driest three-year spell in the district’s history, and the hottest. The seven previous years were the driest on the instrumental record. Godfree has been comparing the responses of endemic and exotic species to these conditions – to warming. Will native species outperform the exotics because they are better adapted, or will the exotics have the benefit of greater resistance to disease?

  Godfree began his experiment with a disadvantage – the general ignorance about Australian flora. In Europe at least 90 per cent of species have been identified; in Australia, while there has been a marked increase in the past two decades, the basic work of identification has been done on no more than 40 per cent.

  To the extent that Australians think the bush defines them, they therefore lack self-knowledge. That Australia is a First World country heavily dependent on primary industry makes the deficiency all the more curious. But the frontier was ever a place for practical people – also, very often, for uneducated people, and people without the means to make good the promise of the land, much less to farm it sustainably, even had they known how. Scholarship and intellectual skills, being as useless as tits on a bull (as they say in the country), attract disdain or sullen rural reserve. As it did in the United States, this anti-intellectualism easily outlived the closing of the frontier and put a permanent stamp on the national cast of mind.

  One did not need an education in botany or horticulture to take up land, only a desire to bend life to one’s purposes. Landholders were obliged sometimes to ‘improve’ the land, but never to study or care for it. The point, after all, was to make a living, and with banks and governments on their backs, to make it as swiftly as they could. True, from the very start some were quick to observe the quirks of local nature and were smart – even ingenious – in their responses. But for most settlers the land was a do-or-die enterprise, not a reflective or abstract one. It is a signal characteristic of the relatively few settler journals that they rarely referred to more than a few of the dominant species growing on their land, and unless they made good feed, it was even rarer for them to be described with either curiosity or affection.

  Being at the service of pastoral interests, explorers were of a like mind. The scientist who travelled with Burke and Wills was left behind (to die, as it happened) before they had gone halfway, and John McDouall Stuart made his botanist – whom he loathed – lighten the party’s load by discarding his instruments and notes. What mattered to the explorer was getting there and back, since what mattered to his financiers was finding land for livestock – and gold or anything else of value they might happen to see. Ludwig Leichhardt took science more seriously, but for all the hand-wringing when he disappeared, his name was soon synonymous with theorising intellectuals, despised by all true bushmen and their disciples.

  The classification of Australian species is a h
uge and formidable enterprise, but so little attention has been paid to it that most of today’s named flora were described before On the Origin of Species was published. Here is Allan Cunningham gaily strolling where no European had strolled before, in 1817 (a couple of days’ walk from where West Wyalong would rise about forty years later), planting quinces and apricots as he goes:

  Dianella sp., a new and beautiful plant . . . Pimelea microcephala, a new species . . . Sida sp., Acacia sulcata, discovered on the S.W. coast . . . Ascending to the summit of this elevated point, I gathered specimens of Pomaderris sp., Ceanothus globulosus, a strong shrub. Glyceria sp., a grass of the Festuceae. Tecoma Oxleyi is very common on the naked rocks, in fine flower.

  For most of the time since Cunningham, plants that look similar have tended to be classified together, when in truth, as DNA analysis has shown, while they might have evolved to look alike (convergent evolution), their lineages can be unrelated. Reliable taxonomy gives scientists a stable base from which to work; the lack of it leaves them not knowing what interbreeds and what does not, which species are related and which are not. The evolutionary story is obscured or misinterpreted. Without reliable taxonomy the bush cannot be scientifically understood.

  Brendan Lepschi is curator at the National Herbarium in Canberra. He has been there for twenty years and the clutter of specimen boxes in his office seems like a fair measure of that time. There are 1.4 million plant specimens in the compactus files in the basement, and he gives the impression that he knows each of them personally, by both their common and Latin names. He admires their hardiness, ingenuity or beauty, and feels for their past or present suffering and the indignity of being branded ash, she-oak and beech because their timber bore a superficial resemblance to unrelated European species – the she-oak, for instance, because it was an inferior oak.