The Bush

by Don Watson

  More recently science has taken a position. Curly spinifex (Triodia bitextura) and lobed spinifex (T. basedowii), which are the best species for fodder, are less than 35 per cent digestible. Cattle get more energy from some endemic trees than they get from spinifex. But while it doesn’t provide much nutrition, it fills them up, and is long-lived and hardy in the extreme. Eaten with other grasses – native and exotic – and trees, it does well enough for cattle most of the time.

  There are photographs of mid-twentieth-century Queensland outback buildings with spinifex walls. Hill said that in the West Australian outback they were building roads with ‘reinforced spinifex’. Aborigines in the same country put it to similar uses, and countless others. The Warlpiri of Central Australia call Triodia ‘marna’, a word testifying to the ubiquity of the genus, since it also means grass. They had names for the different species and for parts of the plants, for the stages and habits of its growth, for the country in which the various kinds grew, for the way the different kinds burned, and when the burning should take place. They ground the seeds of some varieties for food. The resin was combined with hair and animal sinew to bind axe-heads and spear-tips to their shafts. Thatched spinifex was bound with the resin to make waterproof shelters. Spinifex was the habitat of emus, emu-wrens, seven types of grasswren, the painted finch, the spinifexbird, the Gouldian finch, bronzewing and spinifex pigeons, night parrots, budgerigars; and ingeniously adapted marsupials, reptiles and insects. Among the insect-eaters were ten species of hopping mice (Notomys), five of which are now extinct. J. H. Browne found 170 of them in a bag from which an Aboriginal man had been steadily eating for half an hour. Spinifex was a staple of Aboriginal life. It sustained the food they ate, the culture they practised, the cosmos they inhabited.

  Robert Watson travelled west to Cloncurry, then turned north for Burketown and the Gulf. He had been sent to survey a possible route for a railway to serve the copper mines and beef industry. For once we have an observer with only a passing interest in ‘feed’. Watson looked at the vegetation with an eye for rail sleepers, and at the ground for ballast. Thus he entered ‘the wretched and nasty brigalow’ (Acacia harpophylla), between Roma and Charleville, noting that there was ‘not a blade of grass’ but plenty of promising rock and box and ironbark, and much later, on seeing ‘a new tree, the Tea tree’, he saw thirty to fifty sleepers.

  To some travellers, ‘with its dark evergreen foliage, its naked trunks, its bare ground strewn with dead wood’, the brigalow was ‘dreary and somewhat sad’. But the journalist Melissa Sweet grew up in it, and in an article in 2009 recalled brigalow and gidgee scrub ‘sprinkled with bauhinia trees bearing large white orchid-like flowers and spreading generous shade. There were so many grasses, so many wild flowers.’ Even when it forced him to travel up the sandbeds of dry rivers, Major Thomas Mitchell described the brigalow scrub with fondness: ‘The notes of the magpie or GYMNORHINA, resounded through the shady brigalow, and the rich browns and reddish greens of that prolific bush contrasted with its dense grey shades, were very beautiful.’ A magpie in the morning can gild the drabbest scene, though a century after Mitchell, it might struggle with remnant stands of brigalow infested with the imported Harrisia cactus (H. martini), naturalised in large parts of central and south-east Queensland, where it crawls on the surface of the earth and over other plants in vicious piles of prickles up to 2 metres high.

  Brigalow, the tallest specimens of which grow on a ragged stem to 20 metres, once covered vast areas of subtropical south-east Queensland, in a belt extending from just north of Townsville to Dubbo, New South Wales. Ninety-five per cent of the brigalow is now gone. Most of it went for agriculture, some for mining. Brigalow has deep taproots that enable it to endure drought, inundation and salinity. Its removal accounts for some of the massive soil loss in the course of the last century. There are farmers who say there have been fewer storms since it was cleared.

  Early in the 1960s the Queensland government opened up 1.4 million hectares of this area for grazing and agriculture. Known as the Brigalow Scheme, it was the last in the century-long series of closer settlement schemes in Queensland, and was a great deal more successful than earlier ones which had families living on the returns from 4 hectares of maize. The scheme was successful because the clay soils on which brigalow grew were in general fertile, and because practical science was employed, markets and prices were good, the farmers were experienced and well suited to the task, and the blocks were of a viable size. Immense tracts of brigalow scrub were cleared with the same energy an earlier generation had brought to the mallee regions. With bulldozers and tractor-drawn balls and chains the brigalow was torn down, ripped out and burned. Much of the cleared land was turned to productive pasture, often with imported buffel (Cenchrus ciliaris or Pennisetum ciliaris) and green panic grasses, which for a few years increased the carrying capacity of the land tenfold. Other parts went to crops, including wheat and, in more recent years, cotton. The Brigalow Scheme did as much as anything else to lay the foundations of the modern independent Queensland farmer-grazier, working broad acres with advanced science, technology, transport and infrastructure in a form of rural industry that, matters of environmental consequence aside, is at last well matched to the physical and economic reality.

  A 2002 government study which found very little of the continent was not under severe ecological pressure declared sixty ecosystems threatened or endangered in the Brigalow Belt. The threats were introduced plants such as lantana, Brazilian nightshade (Solanum seaforthianum) and buffel grass; introduced animals such as pigs; native animals such as the black striped wallaby whose numbers have greatly multiplied with changes to the ecosystem; fire, cattle grazing, housing development, salinity, and, not least, clearing.

  There never was agricultural and pastoral development without destructive consequences for the existing environment, and rarely has it been the general opinion that the environment should be preserved at the expense of men and women wishing to make a living on the land. The rule has never changed: the environment is what we make of it, and if in its present form it stands in the way of our ambition, we will make it into something else, something useful. This was why the brigalow was cleared in the first place and why it is still being cleared – not because it is ‘nasty’, but because, like spinifex in some accounts, it is useless. Now swathes of it that were cleared with ball and chain are being cleared again with purpose-built, 8-metre wide Savannah Blades attached to 560-horsepower bulldozers that rip out the regrowth and roots at a rate of 60 hectares a day, and are followed by 600-horsepower ‘supertractors’ that cultivate the ground at 20 hectares an hour. When Melissa Sweet went back she saw the results of ‘a massacre on such a vast scale . . . the land itself is changed beyond all recognition’.

  Before he left England around 1910, Harold Lewis read that the Queensland government was offering prospective settlers 160 acres ‘freehold and free of charge’, and £10 an acre to clear and plant it. In Australia, when Harold found himself cutting burrs for a living (and being called Bluey), he told his fellow burr-cutter Snowy about these advertisements, and Snowy put him straight:

  That land is pear country. You seen pear? It’s cactus. Put a piece on that barbed wire fence and it’ll grow. Sometimes I seen it grow straight up like a forest of trees and so close you couldn’t walk through it. Sometimes I seen it thicken out maybe eight feet high, so dense you can’t get your axe underneath to cut it. I seen ’em burn it all off with hundreds of gallons of kerosene, and next year it’s all up again. The birds eat the pear fruit. Like a tomato inside, full of seed. Emus carry it hundreds of miles and drop it, all fertilised. Pear, Bluey! It’ll kill Stralia – choke it to death.

  The Brigalow Belt’s destiny as a great pastoral and agricultural province was delayed several decades by the pear. Bad as the Harrisia cactus is, it is nothing to prickly pear. Snowy had seen it take different shapes and sizes because half a dozen species of the genus Opuntia found their way into northern New
South Wales and Queensland. The first one came with the First Fleet, along with the cochineal insect that eats it: the idea was to make red dye, red being a colour much in demand among the British.

  Descendants of that plant still grow in New South Wales, but the real villain was a later arrival, Opuntia stricta var. stricta, or the ‘Common Pest Pear’. This was the pear. Judith Wright heard that the first specimen had been brought to Maitland in a pot, and from there taken into the northern country to grow hedges against Aboriginal reclamation of the land, a fact, she said, that had ‘long been suppressed’. At Gladstone in 1868, Lucy Gray saw a ‘congregation of houses, all wooden, low spreading, with wide verandahs, clumps of bananas and hedges of prickly pear’, but she didn’t say if the hedges were for anything more than keeping out the wind. It is more common to read that a few settlers took prickly pear into the drier country for use as a stock feed of last resort in droughts, to grow hedges as windbreaks and boundaries, and to plant in gardens for the fruit, which, among other uses, makes good jam. Opuntia stricta, and other varieties that had somehow come to join it, occupied about a million hectares by the time of federation. During the Federation Drought some Queensland farmers boiled it up in 400-gallon tanks and fed it to their starving cattle: the stronger ones survived, the weaker got paunches full of fibre and died.

  The pear grew with the nation. Each year it marched across another million hectares. By the mid-1920s, 24 million hectares were covered. Hundreds of farming families had been driven off their properties, taking with them indelible memories of the hellish scenes the plant created on their farms, and, just as indelibly perhaps, the taste of boiled wheat and treacle – ‘cocky’s joy’ – on which many of them had been obliged to live. Embryonic rural communities were stifled. Out of the reach of birds of prey under the plants, death adders thrived and multiplied. The land was cursed.

  Ripping, tearing, flattening, burning it, burying it – all failed. Spraying it with arsenic pentoxide – at no one knows what cost to the health of the sprayers or birds or grazing animals – was popular enough to require the creation of an arsenic mine near Stanthorpe, Queensland, but it didn’t stop the pear’s brutal progress across the landscape. The New South Wales and Queensland governments passed Prickly Pear Destruction Acts; politicians toured the invaded rangelands and set up commissions and appointed commissioners; hundreds of men were employed to spray the cactus either with arsenic or Roberts’ Improved Pear Poison, which combined one part arsenic with four parts sulphuric acid; and in February 1926 Queensland put a bounty on emus and their eggs, crows and scrub magpies, which all carried the seed. In the first eighteen months the heads of 40 000 crows and 8000 scrub magpies were presented to local government authorities in Queensland, along with upwards of 60 000 emu heads and a similar number of emu eggs. Overall, in just under three years the scheme was reported to have yielded more than 317 000 emu heads and more than 110 000 eggs, but with no apparent effect on the cactus. The birds might have been innocent of the crime for which they were executed, but at 2/6 a head and a shilling for the eggs, for a lot of people their deaths were not in vain.

  Science provided the answer. Experiments in biological control had been going on for more than a decade when, in 1926, authorities released onto pear-infested farms around Chinchilla the predatory South American insect Cactoblastis cactorum. The effect was as astonishing as the spread of the weed had been. The plants vanished, dissolved before the farmers’ eyes – ‘simply deliquesced’, Judith Wright said. The curse lifted, a landscape all but forgotten revealed itself again. In six years the common pest pear was under control. Abandoned farms were re-occupied. Townships that had all but died started up again. Other species, including one known as tiger pear, continued to thrive, and in many places still do, and there’s always been enough around for jam. But the curse was over. To mark their ‘gratitude’ to Cactoblastis cactorum for ‘deliverance from that scourge’, the Queensland Women’s Historical Association erected a plaque at Dalby, and on a long straight stretch of the Warrego Highway between Brigalow and Chinchilla, the people of Boonarga built a hall and named it Cactiblastis Hall.

  On the Alice River and elsewhere Robert Watson came across the ‘wretched gidgya’ and he despised it as much as brigalow. The two species sometimes grow together, but gidgya predominates in the drier lands. Settlers had told Watson that it was ‘excellent for lasting and from 9–12 in. in diameter’, but what he saw was ‘miserable stuff not a stick amongst it worth twopence’. The tree generally goes by the name gidgee or gidyah, and Watson’s estimation of it might have depended on which of the half-dozen species he saw. It is almost certain that he saw Acacia cambagei, one of more than 900 species of acacia native to Australia. Also known as stinking gidgee or stinking wattle, A. cambagei, with its twisted trunks cloaked in grey slabs of bark, and malodorous litter and leaves, is a species that might decorate a story by the Brothers Grimm. But in various parts of the country there are also black, spreading, sand dune, and the (very poisonous) Georgina gidgee trees.

  Gidgee’s quality, as with most things in the Australian bush, varies from one place to another depending on soil and climate, and no doubt other factors invisible to lay travellers. It is among the many contradictions of the landscape that pretty well everywhere the ‘drab sameness’ so often remarked upon changes every 25 kilometres or so. So Watson saw gidgee with brigalow, gidgee growing with myall and sandalwood, and, near Muttaburra, ‘7m of Gidyah and Boree scrub’. Aborigines used gidgee for making boomerangs, clubs and fighting poles. For the Kalkadoon it was an essential of life, like the basalt and quartz from which they made their axes. For surveyors it was essential for pegs. And it was good for fence posts, and so good for burning in boilers that Banjo Paterson declared bore sinkers in the artesian basin could get 30 horsepower out of a 20-horsepower engine fed with gidgee.

  Tom Donovan calls it gidgee. Tom’s been a stockman, a prospector, and many other things, including a soldier. ‘The oaths of the Queenslander are peculiar and to great extent senseless,’ Robert Watson declared. ‘He collects all the obscene and profane words he can possibly think of, jumbles them together in a way utterly regardless of their meaning, and then belches them forth with the most savage ferocity . . .’ Tom uses oaths in a way that may be descended from the pattern Watson observed. Although he uses only two obscene words, every second sentence is graced with them, sometimes for purposes of abuse, but just as often for nothing more than emphasis or tone. Far from being belched out, the obscene comes forth wholly integrated with the polite in a thin drawl, punctuated by the querying ‘eh’ with which Queenslanders west of the Divide, like New Zealanders and Canadians, so often tag their sentences. And while Watson’s Queenslanders spoke with ‘grotesque and senseless gesticulations’, Tom Donovan’s hands scarcely move. His lips barely move, for that matter. He is a very still person: in check shirt, broad hat, and tight blue jeans on his startlingly bandy stockman’s legs. Our conversation goes along these lines:

  ‘What do you call this grass?’

  ‘That’s shit. Buffel, eh.’

  ‘Do cattle like it?’

  ‘Cunts love it, eh.’

  It is hard to say what Mrs Aeneas Gunn would have made of Tom. Of all the bush folk she knew, it was the drovers she loved best. ‘Because of them Australia is what it is,’ she wrote in We of the Never Never. Her logic was that horses were the truest test of a man. They separated the noble from the riffraff: ‘if he is steadfast of purpose, just, brave and true-hearted it will all be revealed; but if he lacks self-restraint, or is cowardly, shifty, or mean-spirited, he will do well to avoid the test, for the horse will betray him’. Tom might be more inclined to the view that the rider tests the horse at least as much as the horse tests the rider, and that the horse learns at least as much from the test. And if the horse fails the test? Tom and his friend Ned say standard practice among drovers stuck with a crook horse was to ride it out of sight somewhere, ram the barrel of a rifle into its rectum and pul
l the trigger. And tell the boss the poor bastard dropped dead, must have had a weak heart, eh.

  To make him fit her bush folk, Mrs Gunn would have had to ignore Tom’s distaste for Christianity, his essential solitariness, and the fact that nothing in his experience of the pastoral industry inclined him to the view that rank counted for nothing in the bush. More than this, she would have had to allow him to think that in the bush, as in the world at large, there is what is real and useful, and all the rest is bullshit. It’s a practical moral philosophy, but ‘bullshit’ means much more than falsehood, trickery or fantasies. It means what can’t be tolerated. The ‘nigger hunt’ in Mrs Gunn’s novel – were Tom to read it – would be bullshit, not because it didn’t happen, but because . . . it’s bullshit. Sometimes bullshit seems to mean the unspeakable. The Vietnam War Tom fought in, the army, a lot of people – all bullshit.

  Tom was born and raised in Mt Isa, on a dairy farm where he and his father milked thirty or forty cows and sold the milk and cream in the town. With bells strung from their necks, the cows roamed in the bush and were left to mate with wild bush bulls. Without electricity, the Donovans milked by hand and separated the cream with a hand separator. Even into the 1960s they travelled everywhere on horseback or in a sulky. Tom’s mother had been to a Catholic school and wanted her child to be as devout as she was; his father, an Irish-Australian from Charters Towers, left the decision to Tom, who quickly decided Christianity was bullshit. He took himself to a gym run by a former heavyweight champion and learned how to defend himself against the attacks of boys for whom ‘the little black kid’ was a daily target. Tommy’s great-grandmother was Kalkadoon. As a child she was one of a dozen or so to survive the clan’s last fight on Battle Mountain, spared by an Afghan-Irish member of the native police who took her home and raised her. She grew up with the name of Popsy.