The Bush

by Don Watson

  These days Tom works out of a big shed on an industrial estate full of machinery, tools, Toyota HiLuxes, and rocks and core samples in lengths of polyurethane pipe. He read books about rocks as a kid, and then learned more from working with geologists. He drives through Mt Isa’s brick-red ranges, the rock outcrops, the tumbledown battlements of quartz and ironstone, and separates the Proterozoic from the Mesozoic, the igneous from the sedimentary; follows the inclines and synclines and folds, all the dramas of geological creation. He walks through the spinifex with eyes scanning the ground and the distance for signs of mineralisation. ‘Focused’ does not describe it: to be a prospector is to be in some degree possessed.

  Nineteenth-century prospectors such as Ernest Henry made epic and perilous journeys, trudging up and down ranges and across plains, through the spinifex and turpentine, with nothing on their minds but rocks – and sheep, because the first prospectors around Mt Isa were also stockmen and drovers, or, like Henry, pastoralists, real and intending. Many of them might have stepped from the pages of Such is Life, although in the case of Henry, who among other torments survived a Kalkadoon spear in his back, The Odyssey might be nearer the mark. The Kalkadoon took Henry to the copper outcrop that became the Argylla mine, where he persuaded some of the men to break the rocks, and some of the women to be his mistresses. Kalkadoon also took him to Mt Oxide, walking for days in the awful heat of February until they reached a cave and pointed to the copper lode in the ceiling. But before Henry became a hero of the Queensland mining industry, he founded the pastoral industry in central-west Queensland.

  The Kalkadoon excepted – and they were soon to go – no one knew the country better than the stockmen; no one was more likely to see the promise in the ground, or at least imagine it. And no one was more likely to talk about it. According to Geoffrey Blainey, it was the story of an old stockman who used to talk about a quartz reef he had seen while droving out west that prompted John Campbell Miles to make his way there. Campbell Miles, a cautious and solitary type who felt most at home in the company of horses, discovered and named the Mt Isa lode in 1923. Soon the ancient ranges were taken by a tribe of bushmen-turned-gougers armed with picks and shovels and, above all, pegs (mainly gidgee) with which to stake their claims to the silver or lead or whatever else they could find. Soon, with or without the Kalkadoon or sheep, hardly an acre of the hills and valleys was not subject to a mining lease. And so it remains.

  Tom Donovan comes of this tradition – the horse, the cattle and the geologist’s hammer. From his days as a stockman he knows the country from Boulia in the south to Burketown on the Gulf. Directly north of Mt Isa lies the Calton Hills station, where Alexander Kennedy first drove cattle in the 1880s, more recently owned by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Council, now by a council of Kalkadoon people. The station is as big as an English county, and in his days as a ringer Tom rode every bit of it. He saw it as a stockman, and as a Kalkadoon. It is hard country, though maybe not to a prospector with eyes on rocks and the red and yellow earth: red stony rises growing spinifex, and scraggly eucalypts, gidgee and mulga; sparsely vegetated plains, quartz outcrops, ancient crumbling walls, deep ravines, white-trunked gums and myrtles by the waterholes, the rivers fringed with Noogoora burr 2 metres high and a dozen wide. Here and there grows the buffel grass esteemed by the cattle and sheep industries and deliberately spread by pastoralists and their drovers as they rode around their runs, a naturalised Australian plant if ever there was one but a menace to native plants, from grasses to bottle trees and red gums. Buffel grass and another import, gamba grass, burn readily and with greater intensity than native grasses. Authorities reckon it is possible that between the two of them the vast tropical woodlands of the north may be turned into grasslands.

  On a rolling red plain, a few cattle graze on tussock grasses and step between lines of bulging plastic bags left by the uranium miners. A couple of signs by a fenced area warn of radioactive dust. There are thousands of bags, in rows and piles, stretching over a square kilometre or so. Half of them have split open in the sun and their grey powdery contents have spilled out on the ground. A sign by the track announces that the Kalkadoon community and Deep Yellow Limited are ‘Working Together and Sharing the Future’.

  On a flat a few kilometres away, an old rail fence has weathered grey among huge spinifex tufts and weeds. Tom was a ringer when the cattle were mustered here, drafted for market, castrated and branded. Horseshoes, nails, bits of bridles, tobacco and sardine tins lie in the dirt. The bronco rail is still here. ‘Bronco’ is a Spanish word meaning rough or rugged or surly, hence in North America a bronco is a wild horse, feral or domesticated but unbroken. In Queensland a bronco was a draughthorse of medium size. The bronco rider dragged a lassoed cleanskin to the bronco rail, where the stockmen leg-roped and threw it, branded it with an iron from a nearby fire, earmarked it, and, if it was a bull, castrated it. A big muster took weeks, and the scene round that old yard gives the impression that the work was brutally hard on man and beast alike.

  Tom’s grandmother, daughter of Popsy and an Afghan-Englishman, schooled her grandson in traditional Kalkadoon knowledge. When Tom was fourteen she persuaded his parents to send him to live with Murdering Joe, a kadaicha man – an Aboriginal hit-man. Every blackfeller for a hundred miles was terrified of Murdering Joe, and with good reason. Tom liked him. He taught him a lot about the land and horses and cattle, and being Aboriginal. Tommy became a ringer, by virtue of his Aboriginal and Afghan blood an outsider, and yet also a descendant of the men at the bar of the Drovers Rest in Cloncurry, as Mary Durack described them: ‘lanky, sunbronzed, bearded overlanders, swapping yarns, sketching maps on the bar counter or on the floor, forefingers wetted in whisky or rum’.

  Late in his teens Tommy took a job in the mines and he was working there in 1964 when he was called up and sent to Vietnam. When he came back he took his uniform out into the scrub and ‘fuckin’ burned it’. Then he cleared out for two years, ‘drove all over the fuckin’ place’. Back in Mt Isa he married Robyn, a woman of Kalkadoon descent – he was the only one of his generation of Donovans to marry ‘a person of colour’, she says sardonically.

  Tough as his childhood was, he was luckier than a lot of others. In Queensland all Aboriginal people lived with the threat of sudden removal to the dormitories of Palm Island or Barambah on the whim of a local policeman. Any pretext was sufficient – for answering back to a white man, for being the inconvenient offspring of a respectable whitefeller. Hundreds were sent because they were a ‘nuisance’, indigent, old, venereal, or for no reason thought worthy of recording at the time. The threat of Palm Island was a means of forcing submission to any directive, to any form of words, and to any employer regardless of the treatment dealt out. Aboriginal children could be taken ‘under the Act’ and placed with white families in a city a thousand miles away, or to labour as domestic servants for no wages on an equally remote station.

  There are a couple of dozen Kalkadoon gathering sites on Calton Hills station. It would take weeks to see them all: Tom might be the only person who has. At one site deep-blue waterholes glow beneath ramparts of fractured quartz. Elegant white-trunked eucalypts cling to the walls of the chasm. The gidgee and turpentine scrub would have been there before the cattle; the weeds came with them. Sinister black schools of cane-toad tadpoles glide beneath the surface – they’re also new. Tom says the local reptiles are recovering from the invasion: the crows were first to find a method, and now goannas have learned to flip toads on their backs and eat the guts without ingesting the poisonous skin. Despite the weeds and toads, it is not hard to imagine the presence of people here when the ceremonies were in full swing. Spreading back 100 metres, the flat rocks either side of the pools are covered in petroglyphs: the same symbol – a 5-centimetre circular indentation within a 20-centimetre circle is repeated over and over. There are paintings and petroglyphs on the walls of the chasm and on massive rocks on either side of it. Half a kilometre up a rise, on a r
ock on the floor of an overhang, rests a grinding stone stained with ochre.

  In a steep quartz ravine on a bend in a river there are petroglyphs that, according to an archaeologist who has seen them, may be more than 40 000 years old. The river runs through dense grass and scrub, a sandy bed on one side, near vertical rocky walls on the other which somehow manage to support tall gums with gleaming white trunks overhanging the river at alarming angles. When first seen from 30 metres or more, the petroglyphs might be relief on an ancient Greek or Roman column, somehow transported together with the crumbling stone to this impossible setting. The rock walls are decorated with emu claws, snake, goanna, and the circle with the dot in the centre. The stone is flaking away. It might all be gone in another hundred years, and much less than that if someone follows our tracks. Employees of the mining companies, or prospectors and surveyors coming in advance of them, have been known to destroy or deface these sites, even spray-painting graffiti over them; and Aboriginals with an interest in claiming native title to lands they call their own have augmented their cases by planting artefacts souvenired from adjacent but unrelated sites.

  For a time around either side of 1900, a coach service ran from Cloncurry to Kajabbi, a town of gougers on the Leichhardt River 100 kilometres to the north-west. The coach ran through the Calton Hills station, and the remains of a staging post lie there among the spinifex and gidgee scrub. Where there were stables, a blacksmith’s, a kitchen, meat-house and sleeping quarters, a few brick foundations now protrude from the earth, and the rubble of a fireplace crumbles into the red dirt with the rusted tins and handmade nails. Where there were stockyards there are the stumps of a few posts, a few rails strewn on the ground. It is easy enough to see this place in its brief career: a handful of hard-doers and horses waiting for the next coach on the useless, baking plain. It was one small stitch in the fabric of the empire, complete with the remnants of a broken tribe sitting in the dust turning bits of glass and tin and wire into the axe-heads and blades they had once made from stone. The products of their efforts still lie on the ground.

  By a river an hour away, on a square kilometre or so of red earth that Tom reckons was once a swamp, are dozens of hearths, and the ground is littered with quartz flakes used for cutting and with stone axe-heads and grinders. Archaeologists call it a lithic scatter. Who knows how many generations gathered there? A thousand? Two thousand? But in one generation it was over: ‘lithic scatter’ momentarily suggests something more than the archaeologists’ meaning. One abandoned hearth lies in front of a rock shelter at the top of a hill with a view across a great horseshoe-shaped gorge. There’s ironstone everywhere. Tom picks up samples here and there and taps them with his geologist’s hammer, splitting them asunder. ‘Fuckin’ rocks! I always loved ’em, eh.’ These days he contracts to mining companies as a mineral surveyor. When he’s not doing that he does his own prospecting, for copper, lead, zinc, uranium, silver, gold – with a view to selling the lease rather than developing a mine. He’s interested in finding the stuff, not mining it.

  Back in his shed there’s a sink, table, fridge, jug and a bin with XXXX beer empties and exhausted tea bags. A door leads into a neat, air-conditioned office with a bunk bed by the window. Ned Bourke, Tom’s old mate, lives in a house adjacent. Ned is given to long and sombre silences; he’s thoughtful, doesn’t suffer fools or racial slurs. Every now and then he breaks into a story that he tells in an unbroken stream, about droving and poddy-dodging, the bastardry of certain people, money made and lost, encounters with pythons – he was kneeling down to drink from a native well at dusk after a waterless three-day ride with stolen cattle when a python tried to swallow him head first. Ned counts among his relations Hugh Mosman, after whom the main street of Charters Towers is named. Mosman, Ned says, left all his money to his Aboriginal descendants, but it’s in England and he can’t be bothered going to get it. He and Tom both reckon brown snakes make a whistling noise when they’re hunting mice: they’ve heard them and they don’t care what anyone else says. Among the Stony Rises in western Victoria, my niece hears them too, always before she sees them. Tom and Ned reckon kangaroos knock the tops off termite mounds and eat the ants, and on Calton Hills I saw the big powerful antilopine kangaroos (Macropus antilopinus) grazing and I saw termite mounds with the tops knocked off them. Tom reckons whitewood’s only poisonous when it’s young, and cattle can eat it when it’s mature; Ned reckons that’s bullshit. Caustic weed is poisonous but nothing will eat it anyway, this they agree upon. They agree about most things: that blackfellers (and Afghanis) have been written out of the local history, for instance; that ringers never got paid enough – less than £10 a week in the 1960s, which was when Ned took up driving bulldozers on the new road to Katherine for twice as much.

  A small section of Tom’s shed is reserved for his camping gear: stretcher beds, water containers, portable fridge, mosquito net, pots and pans, homemade hotplate. A few years ago he was mustering cattle on a quad bike when Ned, blinded by dust, rode full-tilt into him on his horse. The collision broke several of Tom’s bones and nearly killed him. He needs an operation on his shoulder, which is missing a piece of bone. Twice the doctors sent him to Townsville hospital and twice the hospital left him waiting for days in a bed – twice he walked out and went back to Mt Isa. Three times he has been bitten by brown snakes – one king brown, two common browns. He was camping out when the king brown got him and he lay all night in his swag wondering if he would survive until morning. The second of the common browns bit him late one afternoon when he saw a storm building and decided to fire the grass before the rain. In thongs and shorts he went flicking matches here and there, and wasn’t really surprised when he saw the black head flash out of the grass at his bare leg. He thought, Kills me it kills me, and finished loading the steers he’d slaughtered onto his truck and set off for Mt Isa. He was groggy when he reached home an hour and a half later. His wife drove him to the hospital. Tom has ‘a bit of paralysis’ in his left arm and thinks his liver might have suffered some damage, but he’s not sure which of the three snakes is to blame.

  Battle Mountain is about 100 kilometres north-east of Mt Isa. It is one of a series of rugged hills forming a basin that opens towards the Painted Range. Beyond the range in one direction is what remains of Kajabbi, a town that thrived when the copper mines thrived, and when it was the end of the rail line and cattle were driven there from northern stations. Now it is a forlorn home on the Leichhardt River for forty people, mainly Kalkadoon and Kalkadunga, to whose ancestors there is a memorial opposite the Kalkadoon hotel. To get to Kajabbi you turn off the highway about 80 kilometres north of Cloncurry. We got halfway along the muddy road before we noticed the petrol gauge was showing less than empty and had to turn around and crawl back south. At Quamby the hotel owner, a hearty young man from a station near Winton, sold us some fuel. The official population of Quamby is seven, although the day we were there it was eight, because a young woman from Sweden had taken indefinite leave from her backpacking holiday to give the owner a hand. South of Quamby the highway crosses the Corella River, and on the Corella is a place known as Police Waterhole.

  It was at this waterhole, about 40 kilometres north of Cloncurry, that Inspector Frederick Urquhart, later a Queensland police commissioner, established a camp from which to fight the Kalkadoon, who in recent years had killed several people, including police and stockmen, and Chinese miners. Upon hearing of another murder Urquhart led his men in pursuit of the tribe. The Kalkadoon men, women and children had come through the Painted Range where Mt Remarkable towers over it. Urquhart found them camped and ready for a fight on Battle Mountain. The first assault the Kalkadoon beat off with spears and rocks. The second was a rout. The number of dead Kalkadoon is generally put at 200. Many more had been killed in earlier ‘dispersals’ led by Urquhart and his native police, and by station owners, managers and stockmen.

  It was the same all over Queensland. In 1883 at Lawn Hill station in the far north-west, a travell
ing companion of the intrepid Caroline Creaghe told her ‘he saw 40 pairs of blacks’ ears’ nailed around the manager’s walls. The manager, Jack Watson, was notoriously ‘hard on the blacks’. In the east, Korah Halcomb Wills, the first mayor of Bowen, whose daughter married the manager of the Australian Joint Stock Bank, was hard on them too – ‘for the good of the whole civilized world’, he said. For the good of his soul, perhaps, while the rest of a hunting party looked on, he dissected and flayed the flesh from an Aboriginal man and took the skull and bones home in his saddlebags. In his day, the blacks were ‘dispersed in hundreds if not thousands’.

  Sylvester Doig was hard on those in the slice of subtropical forest he made his own, principally for the absence among them of ‘any idea of the English law of trespass’. At Hughenden in the central-west, Robert and Charles Gray were too much the gentlemen to seem hard, but as Charles’s Anglo-Irish wife Lucy recorded, when needs must they ‘dispersed’ them (gave them their ‘just desserts’, was Creaghe’s description of the practice) with as much vigour as the hard men. For a while Charles and Robert might have fought with what Rosa Praed, whose father had conducted a savage retaliatory massacre near Harkwood, Queensland, called that ‘very proper aversion to shooting a human being in cold blood’ which lay ‘in the breast of every Englishman’. In the Englishman the desire to succeed was ever locked in combat with the instinct of the sportsman.

  ‘They ought to have been seen to when I first saw their smoke,’ Charles Gray wrote, much as he might have ‘seen to’ a swallows nest when he first saw the droppings on the veranda. Like Korah Wills (and his friend, a Protector of Aborigines who was ‘a kidnapper to the hilt’), the Grays took black children from their families, to civilise them and to serve in their households.