The Bush

by Don Watson

  Brumby hunts were hideous affairs. Mary Gilmore reported from south-western New South Wales that, among other methods, they were driven over cliffs. Gammage describes another technique: ‘Most were driven along wings up to three kilometres long to a yard. If they refused to enter they were shot. If they went in they were pushed down a race and as they passed stabbed in the neck with a shear blade tied to a pole, so that they would gallop into the bush before they died.’ Gilmore saw patches of nettles growing in the rich soil where these horses had bled to death, and goannas living under the bones.

  Just outside Walgett, 100 kilometres south of the Queensland border, a black snake lay broken on the bitumen, red belly up. A wandering line of trees a kilometre away marked the path of the Namoi River in the last stage of its journey to join the Barwon, which, depending on the season, then flows or puddles along to the Castlereagh, thence to the Darling. The winter of 2010 had been wet and the countryside was green. Either side of the road coolabahs grew: a sign, like the levees in the town, that the Namoi is prone to bursting its banks. There is a photo taken in Fox Street, Walgett, probably in the flood of 1890, of a dozen or so people sitting in government rowboats and standing on the roof of the Bank of New South Wales. There was another big flood in 1910 and there have been others since then, including the monster of 1956.

  Seventeen hundred people live in Walgett, almost half of them Aboriginal. Here and elsewhere in rural Australia the Aboriginal population is increasing much more rapidly than any other segment. Walgett is one of the poorest towns in New South Wales, one of the worst for domestic violence, and among the most divided. Indigenous children attend the local schools; the non-Indigenous, in the main, are sent away to boarding school. In 1965 the Freedom Riders went to Walgett because Aboriginal returned servicemen were barred from the local RSL. Someone ran the Riders’ bus off the road as they drove out of town. Race is a sore as old as the town itself.

  In the 1830s, a decade after John Oxley explored this prized piece of the Murray-Darling Basin, white pastoralists and their mounted police disposed of a civilisation The Australian newspaper said was of ‘the most wretched and degrading description’. The Aborigines had, the paper claimed, ‘desolated the land – and everything around bore a wild and antediluvian appearance’. Now it grows sheep, cattle and crops.

  Wild might be in the eye of the beholder. When Oscar de Satgé passed through in 1860 he saw ‘a wretched looking place’, but the surrounding ‘Namoi’ he described in terms that suggested the ‘antediluvian’ countryside looked a good deal better than the improved, and was better for cattle. By then the rivers had been running through cattle stations for twenty or thirty years and were ‘pretty bare’ on either side, owing to the cattle lounging about near the water. In the ‘old days’, as a second generation of settlers were already calling them, there had been plenty of ‘antediluvian’ grass, myall and saltbush beyond these bare banks, but most of it had disappeared by 1860.

  Walgett, like Narrabri, Wee Waa, Coonamble, and several other towns on the north-western slopes and plains of New South Wales, was laid out in the early 1860s by the surveyor Arthur Dewhurst. As there can be no law unless its jurisdiction is defined, to bring the bush under the rule of British law lines needed to be drawn on it marking what was what and who owned it. The Aboriginal lines – the songlines, and the lines separating one clan’s land from another’s – were invisible to Europeans and did not show up on their maps, any more than Aboriginal laws showed up in their legal system or their worldview. The new maps performed the essential legal – and probably psychological – function of filling in the savage emptiness.

  Arthur Dewhurst was one of an unheralded imperial army of resilient and persevering men who, as if unrolling the official British mind across it, remade the bush – and other parts of the world – according to their proprietary custom. In laying out the town of Walgett he named the three main streets Pitt, Fox and Peel, a catholic selection that, in the colonial way, honoured Englishness, not political affiliation. Dewhurst made a return trip to the district twenty-five years later, travelling in a buggy and complaining into his journal about the roads, the inns, the food, the dirt and dust, the drunks, the level of public debt, ‘the scoundrel politicians’ and the flatness of the land – ‘the vile monotony of level’. At one flea-bitten inn in the vicinity of Narrabri he met ‘a lady wonderfully degraded by colonial life’ who told him friends of hers, though energetic and experienced in the hardships of America and India, had nonetheless lost a ‘vast estate’ and been brought to ruin in Western Australia by ‘government and poisonous herbage’.

  Revisiting the region, Dewhurst was much taken with such majestic scenes of industry as teams of fourteen bullocks or a dozen horses hauling great wagons loaded up to 13 tonnes or more ‘across the roadless plains’. After horses and dogs, bullocks were the most valuable animal in the bush, and the most famously abused, though one old bullocky, with the improbable name of Steers, reckoned only fools treated their animals badly or actually applied the whip to their hides. Lumbering through forests or flyblown plains in an atmosphere of mutual aversion and resentment could only make a lonely profession lonelier and grimmer. De Satgé said bullockies were the backbone of the bush, generally splendid men doing an invaluable service not only to commerce, but to communication and human hope and happiness.

  For all his complaints, Dewhurst’s eye was in general admiring and sympathetic, both to nature and to the ‘kind and genial’ people and the good colonial wine they served. Bowling along in his jinker through the Namoi scrub, he was enchanted by the ‘waving pines, silver leaved brigalows in clumps . . . sweet smelling wattles in full flower’. But Arthur Dewhurst was disappointed to see the way the towns he’d laid out had so quickly ‘dwindled off’, and in those that survived, ‘ignorance, assumption and vulgarity [were] very rampant’.

  Walgett did not dwindle off. Sheep, wheat and the river kept it alive. No respectable paddle-steamer would get down the Barwon in its present state, but in the second half of the nineteenth century there was a wharf in Walgett from which, in good years, the wool went all the way down to the sea. Sheep and crops, including cotton, keep Walgett going now, along with the opal business at Lightning Ridge. There’s a lot of money in the shire, though you wouldn’t know it to look at the town.

  A scholar made a study of Walgett in the 1940s. Among other things, she discovered that very few among the white population knew any black residents. It is doubtful if more than a handful knew anything of the Aborigines’ history, or wondered what had brought them to their present abjectness, or what it was like to be an outcast. But that’s what outcasts are – people beyond the reach of fellow feeling. Segregation is a pathological condition on both sides.

  In the second volume of his monumental 1960s study, Aborigines in Australian Society, C. D. Rowley wrote that, whatever one’s actual racial makeup, in towns like Walgett – like the southern towns of the United States – to be cast as black was a sentence from which there was no escape. Not that you would notice this driving through the town, or staying a day or two for the rodeo and campdraft, the mud trials, the carp muster, cracker night, a sheep or cattle sale, the races at Come by Chance, the annual show or the Bulldust to Bitumen Festival. As Calvino said, ‘everything conceals something else’.

  Farming the Flood Plain

  great floods – the waters dammed – the farmer of the year – no-till farming – Roundup and its critics – the Angus – a bull sale – the costs of cattle

  The bush is really two places: the watered and the unwatered, which means two places in time as well as space. In the central-west of Queensland, Robert Watson saw the Aramac Creek dry in 1881; he fell ill and returned to Rockhampton for a few weeks, and when he got back it was a river 3 kilometres wide. A few weeks after that, a ‘nice sensible stream’ was running through country that looked magnificent. Arthur Dewhurst had also been out west when the rivers had stopped running and the creeks had dried up, and his sur
veying party were obliged to carry water in canvas bags. In ‘quivering heat’ one day, as he and his men sat under a gum tree to eat their midday meal, one chap poured water from a bag into his pannikin and was putting it to his lips when a bird twice dropped onto it and ‘took a lengthened drink’. In 1903 the temperature in Walgett reached 49 degrees.

  Dewhurst had seen it wet, too. At Baan Baa sheep station, south-east of Walgett, he recalled being camped during the great flood of 1864. The water had been miles wide, a ‘ghastly sickening sight’, which swept away ‘the station, huts and woolshed, the Tarrawon hotel and Mrs Milners house’. As the stream swelled, ‘myriads of ants’ swarmed to the higher ground on which his party were camped. Dewhurst and another man managed to rescue four people from a housetop and another two who were clinging to trees and were ‘almost mad’. All night they heard trees crashing and logs colliding and the ‘low moaning of the cattle, the piteous bleating sheep and snuffing [sic] horses as they [were] carried down’. When dawn broke he watched broken buildings, beds, bags of flour, and all manner of goods chasing each other down the stream.

  Floods are as natural to Australia as droughts and fires, and since colonisation have very likely been more lethal than all the other calamities combined. It is a dramatic, ancient pattern. When the dry of El Niño switches to the wet of La Niña, dry riverbeds become vast torrents, desert becomes sea and lake. If the northern wet meets a southern trough, the floods are doubly epic. The most striking – and romantic – representation of the phenomenon is the painting by W. C. Piguenit, The Flood in the Darling 1890. Piguenit offered not the devastation (Bourke was submerged), but the tranquil aftermath. Look at the painting sometimes and you wonder if he was not painting nostalgia on a grand scale, an image of the vanished sea; so it’s a portrait of loss, the great psychic hole in Australia. It might also be taken as a bit of romantic opportunism, as a study of light, or as a statement in tune with the popular chorus about the need for dams and the potential for irrigation.

  Thomas Mitchell described a very welcome flood coming down the Macquarie River in the moonlight. He heard ‘a murmuring sound like that of a distant waterfall, mingled with occasional cracks as of breaking timber’. Then, snaking through the sand came ‘a point of meandering water, picking its way like a thing of life, through the deepest parts of the dark, dry, and shady bed’. The torrent followed. ‘It rushed into our sight, glittering in the moonbeams, a moving cataract, tossing before it ancient trees, and snapping them against its banks.’ From her homestead on the banks of the Flinders River at Hughenden in north Queensland, Lucy Gray heard what she thought was the sound of a violent storm in the night, and in the morning saw the river stretched across the valley ‘sweeping along with a dull sullen roar’. The hut in which the Grays had first lived was gone, along with all the trees bar one, a huge gum which ‘shook two or three times as if it had received a violent blow, bowed once, twice, and laid itself softly down’.

  In the floods of 1956, 7000 square kilometres in the Murray watershed were inundated. At least twenty-five people were killed in the Hunter Valley. West of the Divide in the Macquarie, Castlereagh, Namoi and Gwydir valleys, animals drowned in the tens of thousands. Dubbo, Narromine and Gilgandra were flooded. In the streets of Narrabri the water was 3 metres deep. For those of us born postwar, these floods were our first national disaster, the first sign of drama, the first indication that we lived in a country that was not always benign. I suspect the floods were the first ‘news’ I ever registered, and the first time some other part of the continent became real to me. We saw pictures of people stranded on the roofs of houses and haysheds, people sadly surveying their mud-filled kitchens, people serving beer from hotel balconies. They looked foreign and familiar at the same time.

  The Darling and the Murray meet a few kilometres north of Mildura at Wentworth, New South Wales. The Murray rises in the Great Dividing Range and is fed by winter rains and snow-melt. The Darling rises in south-east Queensland and fills with the northern monsoons. When La Niña strikes, it is common for heavy rain to fall in both watersheds at the same time. If one inundation is soon followed by another, little of the second soaks into the saturated ground. In February 1956 run-off in the Queensland catchments was 100 per cent. Around the junction of the two rivers electricity pylons were floating in liquid earth. The Basin flooded for months. ‘The floods were nebulous, spreading, peaking and pulsing through the watershed in irregular bursts and cumulative waves.’ At Wentworth local irrigators worked day and night building levees with their little Ferguson tractors, and to commemorate these heroics the town later hoisted one of the ‘Fergies’ onto a pole as a monument.

  The 1956 and 1958 Murray-Darling floods followed decades of dam and canal building and a variety of other engineering works, including the Snowy Mountains Scheme, to regulate the rivers’ flow and guarantee year-round supply to downstream irrigation blocks, even in times of drought. Upstream, farmers who didn’t irrigate had been inclined to resent the dams as favours done for irrigators further down. When their land was flooded they blamed the dams and the government authorities that built and operated them. The authorities said they might as well blame the river. From ‘time immemorial’, they said, when the river’s flow was ‘too large to be contained in its channel it spreads out over its own floodplain’. A quarter of New South Wales is a floodplain. What did they expect on a floodplain if not floods? As for the dams, the chief engineer at the River Murray Commission declared that no stored water had been released. But the dams had held the water up when without them it would have got away, the farmers said: this interfering in the river’s natural flow had not caused the floods, but it had made them worse than nature intended.

  It was not the first time farmers had cursed the authorities for disasters wrought by nature, but there was more to it than this. The argument in the 1950s between the engineers of technological, economic and social progress and the farmers threatened by it prefigured the present clamour over the future of the Murray and the entire Murray-Darling Basin. Writing early in the twentieth century, E. J. Brady thought disputes over water in the Murray-Darling Basin would be the most likely cause of an Australian civil war. Since then the battle lines have changed. The irrigators are still where they stood in 1956, but the dissenting non-irrigating farmers have been replaced by conservationists who, in the face of blue-green algal blooms more than 1000 kilometres long in the Darling, and salinity throughout the basin, want to return the river as far as possible to its natural flows, including the floods on which the ecosystem depends.

  Singly and in combination the rivers are no longer rivers in any organic sense, they are part rivers and part machines. On the Lachlan, for instance, the Wyangala Dam regulates almost 70 per cent of inflows. The major tributaries are also governed by dams. The dams and all the other elements of the machine are a boon to the bush dwellers who depend on them for irrigation, but to the extent that they also prevent the regular flooding of wetlands, they are a menace to the bush itself. Large flows into the Booligal Wetlands on the Lachlan decreased by 50 per cent in the twenty-five years before 2007, with consequences not only for the vegetation, but also for migratory birds, among which the glossy ibis (Plegadis falcinellus), which have been breeding in these and other wetlands of the basin for millennia, may be taken as emblematic of the entire ecology. Whatever threatens these flood-dependent wetlands, including their invasion by exotic species, salination, pesticides, clearing and grazing, also threatens the glossy ibis.

  Were the species to ever disappear from the region, it might be thought a small price for the food the nation harvests from the irrigated land, and the families and communities the crops support: there are plenty of other glossy ibis in the world, including in Australia, and indeed, for most of the time since European settlement, the birds’ survival or extinction has been left to chance. But now, no doubt to the despair of some practical minds, Australia is obliged to protect the breeding habitats of glossy ibis under several internati
onal conventions and agreements on migratory birds. Accordingly, the Murray-Darling Basin Commission has conducted studies of the various Lachlan wetlands, and others in the basin, and takes it as its duty to maintain adequate flows into these non-commercial, non-utilitarian swamps. This is the great balancing act. Where engineering the river for irrigation was the River Murray Commission’s charge, and the glossy ibis was left to take care of itself, the modern Murray-Darling Basin Commission is charged with the infinitely more complex task of saving the river and the ecology of the basin, without destroying the regional economies whose practices have made the task necessary.

  Despite much damming of the waterways, all kinds of flood mitigation works, scientific forecasting and the ability to broadcast instant warnings, floods still take human lives: at least thirty-five in Queensland in 2011, for instance. Many more were lost when people lived in isolated places amid a less unpredictable nature – more, surely, than the records indicate. It could not have helped that few white people knew how to swim. Leichhardt’s 1845 party that journeyed from Brisbane to Port Essington did not have a swimmer in it; a hundred years later it was still a relatively rare skill in the bush.

  On a June night in 1852 the Murrumbidgee River washed away the town of Gundagai. Eighty or more of the 250 residents were drowned. Local Wiradjuri men rescued forty-odd in their bark canoes, and in gratitude for this singular display of mateship the community granted them bronze medallions and the right to beg sixpences. When the Murray-Darling navigator Francis Cadell visited Gundagai in November of the flood year, the township was gone and he saw ‘horses and bullocks suspended by the legs from limbs of the gum trees, full 30ft above the bank of the river and 40 above the stream’. The town was rebuilt on higher ground.