The Bush

by Don Watson

  Equally, she wrote nothing critical of her husband’s frequent and increasingly ruthless pursuits of cattle-thieving wild blacks. ‘They knew perfectly well that what they were doing was wrong,’ she wrote, ‘but they liked “bullocky” better than kangaroo and chose to run the risk.’ For all that, she may have preferred the policy of their neighbour, Robert Christison. A Christian and lay anthropologist and ‘a highly vocal, self-styled protector of Aborigines’, Christison made a kind of treaty with the Indigenous people and would not let the native police on his land. By one account, on his 5000-square-kilometre run called Lammermoor, he lived with ‘many hundreds of blacks . . . in amity and mutual understanding’.

  Not so the Grays. The Aborigines who at first retreated before white settlement, had after three years of increasing hunger in the ranges launched a counteroffensive. They attacked cattle, sheep and shepherds, and Lucy Gray wrote in her diary: ‘Charlie out all day after niggers’; ‘Charles . . . giving the blacks a lesson’; ‘Charles after the blacks’.

  When Lucy had first seen Hughenden, she thought of Canaan, ‘and certainly Moses from Pisgah could not have seen a fairer prospect’. A ‘black groom’ had ridden up to meet her party and escort her to her new home, after her ten-day trek from Townsville. They passed ‘some black shepherds in very airy costumes watering sheep’, which reminded her of Jacob and his flocks. Husband Charles had applied for and received a shipment of Kanakas and was well satisfied. He paid them a third of a white man’s wages and could demand more of them. They were willing workers, better (if not happier) shepherds than the Chinese, who were best employed as cooks and gardeners, and they had the ‘bump of wonder’ that, to Robert Gray, Aborigines appeared to lack. It was not long before Lucy was writing of pleasant evenings spent on the veranda, ‘everyone lounging about in their cool white clothes’, while the Kanakas sat around a ‘large dish of milk’ put outside for them and passed around the pannikin. She taught one of them to cook Indian-style under a bough shade. Sometimes Lucy fancied herself in India, and sometimes in the lands of the Old Testament – the Old Testament because, with her husband forever digging for water in the dry bed of the Flinders River, ‘it was easy to imagine the servants of Abraham and Abimelech quarrelling for the possession of a well and Abraham planting a grove there’. Both the likeness and the contrast kept them in her mind: there was Abraham’s shady grove and there was the bush reality of shadowless gums and the perpetual glare from ‘dazzled and faded’ skies.

  As well, when the treetops let in the moon and the starlight and the clear crimson afterglow of sunset, and the trunks of the gums looked like ‘gigantic bleached bones’, there was the ‘perfection of the night’. Then Lucy liked to go riding in the scented air. There was ‘such delicious yellow light’ on moonlit nights, ‘and deep purple brown shadows’, quite unlike the ‘cold blue and silver of English moonlight’. While the always uniformed Mr Gray rode the range and dammed the creeks, Mrs Gray let herself be enchanted by the bush.

  She was never so appalled by the more dismal sights as to turn away from them. She recorded with equanimity the ‘hideous gallows’ for slaughtered beasts which was the first thing one saw at a station, the feral pigs that disturbed her sleep, the withered country in the dry, the ‘immense sandy bed’ of the Flinders River, the hot gravelly gullies ‘looking as if there never had been, never could be water in them’. She even managed to note the local habit of calling everything that flowed a creek, and everything with water in it a waterhole, without rendering it as quaint. She and the rest of the Grays lived with sandy blight, and the horrible Barcoo rot which gnawed their hands, were not above eating pigweed to ward off scurvy, and managed, all of them, to survive malaria.

  And there were the stockmen. Mustering excited her. Hearing from 15 kilometres away the ‘huge bellowing mobs of cattle’ approaching, the cracking stockwhips, the ‘black boys’ calling ‘Hi, Hi’, and the climax of swirling dust and milling, bawling, moaning animals when they reached the yards. Then the sound of the slip rails dropping in, and when the last bellowing calf had found its mother, absolute silence. The men, she wrote, ‘let their reins drop and jog quietly to their camp where, (if they are true Australians) they will do nothing more, not even sit up if they can lie down, smoke and spin yarns with supreme content’. The same mystique that appealed to Mrs Gunn, Ernestine Hill and Mary Durack also intrigued Lucy. She visited a stockman’s hut and wrote a detailed description of its style and contents. It was made entirely of thatch, had openings at either end for a window and a door ‘which did not exist’, and high ‘bunks’ down either side with ‘some grass and hide for a mattress’. A ‘section of a large tree’ did for a table, and ‘all round were hung stockwhips, bridles, rifles, revolvers etc. without any attempt at order’. When Lucy looked at a stockman it was as if at a member of another – rather attractive – race. He had so few wants, uttered so few words, and seemed so self-reliant, so content with life – and, it seemed, with the company of other stockmen. He appeared to miss women about as much he missed fruit punch.

  They dream big in Queensland west of the Divide. They have from the start: dreams of gold and copper, oil and gas, sheep and cattle, beans or cotton. The country lends itself to thinking on a grand scale and yields most when it is taken on that way. It responds to capital and technology in big doses. Closer settlement was for losers, by and large: unless, ignoring the hardships, we take it as fulfilling an early dream of room to move, clean air and independence. The Queensland bush harbours multitudes of the spiritual descendants of those closer settlers, from alternative types to hobbyists and small farmers. Having room to swing a cat has always been the principal attraction of the bush, or room to train a racehorse or a greyhound, race your car on your own homemade racetrack, nurture your own ecology, raise your own poultry and heritage pigs, grow your own pecans, your own marijuana, idly pursue your own slovenly ideal.

  All these and many other ways of life are subspecies of the original European plantings. Also evolved from the originals, but more from the left side of the brain and much modified by the application of capital, technology and sound business principles, are the conventional farmers, both family and corporate – the rootstock of the livestock and agricultural industries.

  Senator Barnaby Joyce believes that the beef industry is both a mainstay of the rural and national economies and a measure of a person’s mettle. He tells farmers that by getting up early in the morning, keeping a watchful eye on the market and on every dollar spent, by being prepared to weather the inevitable bad times, an individual can succeed where showier and lesser types will fail. And there is always a way into the industry and onto your own block: droving or leasing, for instance, or, as Joyce did, by becoming an accountant and putting your earnings into land and stock.

  The enemies of the industry are market centralisation, animal liberationists, environmentalists, and governments that listen to ‘the prophets from the inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne’. Here be demons and fools who create ‘idiotic’ laws like carbon taxes and bans on clearing trees.

  How did we let that happen? Why is it that now if I go on my own place and push over trees that are mine that I can literally go to jail? How does that happen in Australia? How are we still allowing that to happen right now? Why aren’t we more pestiferous and say this is ridiculous. This is my property, my asset. It is merely a tree another one will grow back and if I decide to push it over, the world will not come to an end. It will neither heat nor cool. The world will stay around about the same temperature.

  Senator Joyce comes from a proud tradition of family farming. He also comes from the tradition of hyperbole among rural politicians. Give those animal-rights people an inch and before you know it you won’t be able to put a tag in your calf’s ear without an anaesthetic. The enemy of the farmer is the enemy of common sense, of all that is reasonable and just. He is as the Devil was to Job, outrageous in his malice. Joyce has seen it with his own eyes: ‘pivots on places where peopl
e are trying to do up their places and go all the way round until it reaches a bull oak, a bull oak for goodness sake. This is hardly a cedar tree and it has to go all the way back the other way because they can’t move the bull oak. This is obscene . . .’

  In the farmer’s view, his enemy is the enemy of progress. The farmer’s efforts being a desideratum for the whole country, the country is mad or wicked to put obstacles in his way, or reward the less productive and less taxing efforts of city dwellers. Any fool can see it.

  Not that they’re blind to the past, or ungrateful for it, out west in Queensland. The region abounds with museums. In Longreach there’s the Stockman’s Hall of Fame, which ‘pays tribute to the pioneers of the Australian Outback’. Cloncurry has a local history museum laden with artefacts from the early mining and pastoral days, and Ernest Henry is declared the man who brought civilisation to the region. In the pious vein that often takes hold of old pioneers, he wrote a poem: ‘Our struggles here, Thy wintry storms portray/ Thy springs are pledges of a peerless home/ Where truth and true affections have their sway/And ends all further need or wish to roam.’

  In Winton, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ is the motif for another museum dedicated to the pioneering days of the pastoral industry. Bathed in the glow of the diorama’s campfire and the stars of the Southern Cross, the squatter, three troopers and the jumbuk stand in their places round the billabong, which is garlanded with lilies. From under these the late swagman speaks. He tells the story of the country not just through Banjo Paterson’s little tale, but Gallipoli, Kingsford Smith and the rise of Hitler. Shells explode at El Alamein. Lorraine Crapp swims to gold for Australia. It’s all told in flattened vowels that would make Banjo’s Miss McPherson wince.

  Ninety million years ago, before the sheep, the central-west was a great place for dinosaurs. At Winton, visitors may see the bones of a big sauropod, and the ‘only recorded evidence of a Dinosaur stampede’. A few kilometres from Hughenden there are fossilised squid, and visitors are invited to inspect ‘Five hundred million years of History and Culture’ in the town’s new and commodious museum. The exhibits are intriguing, and so is the total absence of anything to do with the Indigenous people. They are not mentioned. There is not a single artefact. We leap in a single bound from dinosaurs and squid to the shearing sheds. If Ernest Henry brought civilisation to Hughenden you might think he also brought it to the dinosaurs. In the United States they made heroes of Davy Crockett and Kit Carson, who fought and killed the Native Americans; in Australia they talked in whispers, covered their tracks, pretended it didn’t happen. The bush is tainted with this cowardice.

  It is the same in the cemeteries. The graves of Europeans are decorated with familiar totems of mourning and remembrance, faith and resurrection: crowns and wreaths, doves and olive sprigs, forget-me-nots, shamrocks, Celtic crosses marking identification with the ancient country and its culture of the dead, cruciform of various symbolic designs, draped columns, scrolls, cherubs, angels, and for the children, the Lamb of God. The Aborigines, if they occupy any acknowledged space at all, are in neglected zones set apart for other races: Chinese, Indians and Afghans. In the cemetery at Cloncurry, where at the end of the nineteenth century there were 200 Muslims, a sign points to a large area containing just two visible graves: one Afghan, Syid Omar, a mullah; and one Aborigine, Nellie Edwards, who ‘may have been a cameleer’s wife or a rare convert to Islam’. It was common practice: at Mareebra on the Atherton Tableland, the Aborigines are buried with the ‘Orientals’ up the back of the cemetery where, according to the people at the historical society, the watertable is high and the bodies liable to wash out of the ground.

  Being Aboriginal and Afghan as well as Irish, Tom Donovan can see the irony in half of him lacking accredited existence. He has one foot in the world and one in the silence. It’s bullshit, he says. They take that silence seriously in these parts. While researching the history of the central-west region, including that of the station on which she grew up, an historian I know discovered that one of her not very distant ancestors had randomly murdered Aborigines with a revolver. For writing about it, her image has been removed from family photographs taken when she was a child. Where she stood with her parents and siblings by the swimming hole, or sat on a horse among them, there is now a space, a hole in the record. For her sympathy with the dead and exiled she has been sent to join them.

  Sixteen kilometres from Hughenden is Mt Walker, a substantial hill. Like other hills in flat regions it is prized for the view to be had from the top of it. On the summit a metre-high chain fence surrounds a picnic area that has been levelled with a bulldozer to create uninterrupted views of the plains stretching in every direction to the horizon. A green painted seat, big enough for three people, has been installed at each vantage point. With no one else there early in the morning, it is possible to sit on each of them in turn and, while the breeze rustles the leaves of the mulga trees, fall into the scene. One can imagine the first sheep stepping through the grass out onto the plains, a bullock wagon or steam tractor dragging out the wool, a train on its way to Winton, Ernest Henry stumbling eastward with a spear in his side. Oscar de Satgé taking aim at a bush turkey. The Duracks’ sullen, thirsty cattle ‘bellowing their misery’. The smoke of Aboriginal fires. Men on horses. The silences and pieties in the blue haze.

  Waiting for the Fire

  the Black Forest – Macropus and Wallabia – El Niño and La Niña – the cult of the exotic – native and endemic – what burns – to love the bush

  These days, for an evening walk I pick my way along kangaroo tracks at the foot of Mt Macedon, a dark hump crouching on the basalt plain north-west of Melbourne. I can’t say that I was responding to anything remotely like the call of the wild when, eight years ago, I moved back to the country, but once there I was glad for the silence, the view into something else, and the birds. As much as the grime, in the city there is the din of predictable opinion, especially one’s own opinion, which week by week, year by year, becomes a sort of metronome sounding at some distance from whatever remains of a sense of actual self. After forty years of city life a home in the country provided no cure or alternative, just relief. The bush has always been as much for hiding pathologies as repairing them. No one asks questions, not to your face at least. The no-speak rule of old persists. In the city, opinion corrodes the outer layer of existence; in the country it eats the inner.

  I can readily find myself thinking that Bob Dylan was clever to say nature is very unnatural. ‘I think the truly natural things are dreams which nature can’t touch with decay,’ he said. It’s a view to go with Freud’s, that civilisation’s ‘actual raison d’etre, is to defend us against nature’. But I can’t help it: I know I am better for having an array of foliage and birds within easy sight. I did not return to a farm of course, and the bush I chose was far from Gippsland, and no longer being worked but merely lived in – by professional and tradespeople and commuters in the main. It’s not a suburb, but it’s hardly wild either; except we live in fear of bushfires, depend on rain to fill our tanks, and each day begins and ends with the birds. And there are evenings when kangaroos graze in the long grass, the cockatoos have quietened, the last of the little birds have settled somewhere and that cathedral silence has fallen, and a kookaburra laughs, then another, then another, and the trees seem to be shaking with the mad sound. If nothing else will pin you to your native land, this will.

  My bit of bush is a fringe of what European settlers on their way to the central Victorian goldfields called the Black Forest – the ‘celebrated Black Forest’. Celebrated for the bad road and the thieves that haunted it. Among several rather gloomy and unconvincing depictions from the 1850s, there is one by the goldfields illustrator S. T. Gill, who wrote that the forest extended for 40 miles ‘and from the sameness of the trees (all black) people are frequently lost in it’. The Black Forest was for many folk their first night deep in the bush, a fact which almost certainly encouraged leg-pulling and added an extra
degree of drama to the stories that circulated about it.

  In the interests of safety, people heading for the diggings were advised to travel in large groups. Captain Melville (a Scotchman) and Black Douglas (a ‘Mulatto Indian’) skulked with their gangs in the ‘dreadful gloom’ of the forest, picking off the gold and anything else of value making its way to and from the goldfields, and leaving their victims tied to logs and trees. According to contemporary reports, some were found too late to be saved from starvation and the ants and crows that picked their skeletons clean. Melville was said to have as many as eighty men working in his Mt Macedon gang, and Black Douglas had help enough to rob sixteen wayfarers and fasten them to a log.

  Among the great who made their way along the track was Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury and three times Conservative Prime Minister of Great Britain. He left us with the observation that the ‘naves of both wheels grazed the trees on each side’. It is easily forgotten that the Black Forest, and all those trees his spring cart passed between, were Queen Victoria’s. Bushrangers ignored Salisbury on his passage through the forest, which left him secure in the view that the goldfields were remarkable for their orderliness, a salutary illustration of the good that flowed down from the monarchy, as opposed to the crime and insubordination that flows up from a mob.