The Bush

by Don Watson

  In truth, to judge a Northern Hemisphere tree as more alien to this ecosystem than an Angophora or Corymbia – or a white cedar (Melia azederach), a deciduous fire-retarding Australian from the tropics which I have recently planted – seems closer to a political judgement than an environmental one. If to be a native means to naturally belong, Angophoras, Corymbias and Melias are as alien to this hill on which my house is planted as any oak tree; that is, unless we are content with the idea of one plant being ‘more native’ than another by virtue of its occurring naturally in very different ecosystems but on the same continent. The argument becomes even more slippery with something like a red ironbark, which does not grow in the Black Forest but occurs in profusion 40 kilometres away; or with species that flourish at the bottom of the hill but not where I am, halfway up it. There is no one bush, but many bushes.

  And what to say about a rhododendron: nested in by wrens and thornbills, at home among the ferns at the foot of a mountain ash, and growing ‘with all the characteristics of spontaneous indigenous plants . . . increasing and multiplying by natural means without the direct help of man’? Having met all the criteria by which botanists consider a plant to be naturalised, to call the rhododendrons living among the gum trees on Mt Macedon alien is like saying an eighth-generation Australian of Scottish and English descent, like me, is an alien. Or a weed. ‘Not indigenous, merely born here,’ as Les Murray said sardonically in another context.

  For all that, I could uproot a hundred rhododendrons if required, but no more cut down a mountain ash than shoot my unoffending dog. The poet Theodore Roethke wrote that when he gathered moss he felt he was ‘pulling off flesh from the living planet’, desecrating ‘the whole scheme of life’. It might not be a rational reaction, but it is a human one. Logging the old-growth forests of Tasmania or turning cattle into the High Country of Victoria strike me as degenerate acts. This is not a moral judgement, but a response akin to what we feel at seeing the Buddhas of Bamiyan blown up by the Taliban, or the thought of Notre Dame being bulldozed, or the destruction of anything rare and precious. It is not a judgement at all, moral or otherwise – at least not at first. At first it is horror.

  Horror is not rational, but nor is it worthless. The point needs making if only because very often opposition to acts of environmental destruction (or cruelty to animals) is painted as purely emotional, impervious to reason, regressive, invalid. Yet as much as reason does, our capacity for horror marks us out from the indifference of nature. Several other, mostly laudable, human qualities have origins in horror, among them sympathy and altruism. Unreason need not flow from it. If it horrifies me, the chance exists that I sense a threat: to me, my descendants, the human family, life itself. I don’t claim to understand the primal instincts, but it seems sensible to at least half trust them if I want to stay in existence. What Europeans have done to the bush is atrocious by any measure, rational or not. Along with my somewhat guilty sense that I owe much of my fortunate life to a host of destructive acts, the scale of past atrocities dismays me. We are all, to some degree, implicated in them. It seems to follow that we’re obliged to refrain from throwing more than a handful of well-aimed stones, but equally to do a share of the necessary repairs.

  In 1927 an English war veteran saw a poster calling him to ‘help cultivate the land in sunny Australia’. He came with his wife and daughter and managed to buy a disbanded Group Settlement property 300 kilometres from Perth. They cleared 20 hectares of karri and jarrah forest, sowed it down, ran Jersey cows on the new pasture, sank a well, built a house. Despite the wet, heat and fleas, in three years they had their farm. They sold it and bought another one near Busselton which they also cleared. The grim years of the Great Depression, the settler’s daughter recalled, were made bearable by ‘the divinely beautiful bushland’ surrounding the farm: ‘the sparkling dew-decorated trees . . . the river shimmering in the sunlight . . . the kangaroos, wallabies, emus, possums, snakes . . . Spring mornings, with the perfume of black boronia; Summer days, with the scent of wattles . . . Just imagine a vast plain covered with greyish-white smoke bush intermingled with blue leschenaultia, purple Hovea and red and green Kangaroo Paws.’ And on she went about the 4000 varieties of wildflower, the trees, the banksias. ‘Wonderful to have lived with them all’, she wrote, ‘and ever wonderful to remember.’

  Memory is about all we have of the bush she saw. The history of Australia is studded with these valedictories wherein readers may hear of a country quite unlike the one they know, and quite irrecoverable. For all the nostalgia and regret, we are entitled to wonder what stopped them grasping that gone meant forever. The ‘impatience to possess’, the venerable historian W. K. Hancock called it in 1930. We might also say their irrepressible humanity, their ‘I’, their egos, their id. Behind the violence of settlement was a romance of the spirit, a fulfilment of the soul. They had ventured into the darkness, pulled off their pieces of the living planet. And everyone was happy, as the Gippsland pioneer said. It was with the best of themselves, not the worst that they destroyed.

  So much that is good in us comes from the bush, as the governor said. We have made its nature an element of ours. To this extent, when we declare our love for the bush we profess self-love, and when we harm it, inflict self-harm. This fancy that nature made essential parts of us much as it also made gum trees should dampen the old assumption that we humans occupy a special place in creation. But it does not play out like this. Of it we are, but also above and outside it; at all events we have dominion over it. This is a conceit to help us be both indifferent and devoted. Whether we believe that God created us independent of all other life and are answerable only to His laws, or that we evolved with other species and according to the laws of nature, the implication is the same – our affection is caddish. So long as the narcissistic myth endures and we go on looking at the bush for flattering images of ourselves, we must remain to some degree unacquainted with both parties.

  While he regretted the ‘violence’ with which the bush had been destroyed by Europeans, Hancock imagined a day when the wounds had healed and Australians established ‘a true partnership’ with the land. He hoped for something he described as ‘rich permanence’. It is likely that he had in mind an association with the land deep and productive enough to make up for the consequences of invasion. Now we would say ‘sustainable’, or speak of bringing the needs of high-yield food production into some kind of concert with the needs of biodiversity and natural ecosystems. Any appraisal of the eighty years since Hancock wrote – and especially the last thirty – has to acknowledge outstanding instances of progress. In many places across the continent the so-called frontier mentality has at last yielded to science, and farmers are finding that the values of conservation sit well enough with their own. Yet in the same period much more violence has been done, families and communities continue to struggle, river systems and the land degrade, productivity declines. The rural population is lopsided: the young leave to escape the fate of the old, who stay on because their houses and farms are not worth enough to make leaving a sensible prospect, or who sell up for a song to (often foreign) corporate interests. Though agriculture still contributes 12 per cent of national GDP, farmers do not have the economic clout they once had. The new realities of technology, science and the global economy which are spruiked these days to drive a rural boom (some say the greatest since the heyday of the pastoral age) seem much less real to a lot of farmers than they do to agribusiness and shareholders looking for profitable investments.

  For any number of reasons, including both the old frontier mentality and the contemporary ideological climate, it is difficult to see a great many Australian farmers escaping the fate of millions of their kind across the world. They will fade away, as 16 000 of the 19 000 Australian dairy farmers of the mid-1970s have faded away, and the towns, landscapes and character of rural Australia will fade with them.

  Such solutions as there may be will cost more than governments are willing to pay or farmers
are able to. In these circumstances corporate interests find plenty of easy targets. Of course, it would mean nothing to the bush if they were to end up owning every acre of it. The meaning will be in their actions. Will they be persuaded to have a care for the land? Will they see such care as a creative condition of long-term productivity? Is modern agribusiness even compatible with healthy and sustainable bush environments and viable bush communities, and will governments with a much advertised interest in both have any way of obliging giant companies to pay more than the usual lip service to good citizenship? Twenty years ago, in an unconscious echo of Hancock, there was talk of a partnership between landholders and government in the interests of the bush, for which both declared their love. In 2001 the heads of the National Farmers Federation and the Australian Conservation Foundation, Rick Farley and Phillip Toyne (who a decade earlier had together founded Landcare), proposed an environment levy to raise the government’s share of the money. Such a scheme – and such a partnership – seems even less likely now than it did then.

  Money is no doubt a key, but progress would be helped if it were accompanied by something resembling a philosophy, a cosmic view, some kind of Socratic dialogue. Landcare has something of this, or did when it began – it was more than science, there was an element of shared religion. Whatever form the movement takes, it will be more likely to succeed if it improves on the impression, left by myriad accounts of European behaviour since settlement began, of serial psychopathy: of men and women hacking and gouging; hurling themselves at rival kingdoms, plant and animal alike; poisoning the ground; uprooting, planting, and uprooting again; crashing and roaring about, making fortunes and going broke, shooting anything that might move against them and never stopping to watch the clouds except to look for rain – in general obeying the demands of every neurosis peculiar to our species, and, for trying to survive their furious assault, declaring nature treacherous.

  We could begin by examining all the received wisdom about the bush being melancholy, silent, perverse, a nursery of weird souls and sterling male associations – just in case all this time we’ve been projecting. If it turns out that we’re the sullen, unpredictable, dangerous, weird melancholics, and the bush is just the bush and merely abides, we’ll be in a good place to start. Close examination might reveal that the bush is not a dangerous neurotic, that drought and all the other defects in the country are really defects in our thinking, and even that mateship, which is built and exercised less on our love of the bush than on our fight with it, is half humbug and baloney. In this case our mental slate will be that much cleaner. While we’re at it, we may as well own up to all the carnage: a bit of truth and reconciliation will help us to grow up. Then, denatured though we are, we might work out what we owe the bush, what we want from it, and what is reasonable to ask of it. It’s not just food and wealth, marketing icons, and movies about bush-nurtured sociopaths and felons: we need to do more than leverage our vast and marvellous estate. Much better to know it and ourselves.

  You can’t kill myths but that doesn’t mean there is no other way of seeing things, or that you can’t cultivate something more profound and useful to coexist with them. It can do no harm to settle on the public mind a deeper and more honest knowledge of the land than anything that myth and platitude allow, or to encourage love to overrun indifference. Throughout Australia there are people whose daily lives are led according to a philosophy of just this kind. There are farmers who farm this way. We need a relationship with the land that does not demand submission from either party, that is built more on knowledge than the hunger to possess, and finds the effort to understand and preserve as gratifying as the effort to exploit and command. In the end it is possible to love and admire the bush both as farmers do and in the kind and curious ways that the woman in Western Australia loved the birds and the sight and the scent of the black boronia; the way that the farmer further down our watercourse, who by his neighbours’ lights should have been busy cutting his bracken, loved the lyrebirds that surrounded him as he lay gazing in the gully. Except we need to love it as it is and can be, not the way it was and never will be again.

  Appendix

  the coat of arms

  We can date the European history of kangaroos to the moment at Botany Bay in 1770 when Joseph Banks sent his hounds after the first one he saw. Since then the hunt has never stopped. It was always both a sport and ‘a matter of necessity’ – not just to protect crops and pasture, but for the cash that the skins brought, the rugs and bedspreads, and the flesh that fed dogs and pigs. According to James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land in the early years was a ‘kangaroo economy’: the population depended on the animals for food as well for the trade in the skins, and convicts who had absconded to the bush with stolen dogs kept themselves alive and clothed with kangaroos. The marsupials made possible their freedom and so gave birth to the earliest bushmen and bushrangers.

  A kangaroo’s means of locomotion, one nineteenth-century Englishman declared, is ‘the most efficient means of locomotion ever evolved by a land based creature’. The efficiency derives from the geometry of their legs and the elasticity of their tendons: the faster the animal hops, the harder it lands; the harder it lands, the more energy is stored and released in the next hop. For the gentleman hunter, the ‘most sportmanslike’ way of destroying them was to run them down with dogs – greyhounds crossed with a mastiff or Scotch deerhound were preferred – and finish them off from horseback with a rifle. One settler recalled using this method to kill 2000 toolache wallabies (Macropus greyi) in a year. M. greyi – after Governor Sir George Grey, for shooting two of them one day – was a pretty species with a light brown coat and a black velvety muzzle. Also known as the Meringer, it had been ‘exceedingly numerous’ in south-eastern South Australia and south-western Victoria and was still common in 1910. It is now extinct.

  In addition to 11 000 sheep, the hands at Narraport station in the Victorian Wimmera estimated the place carried 16 500 kangaroos. W. Candy recalled seeing ‘as many as from four to five hundred in a mob’ near Dunmunkle in the Wimmera, ‘especially just before sundown’. One ‘old man’ tried to drag him off his horse one day. He had been attempting to kill it with his stirrup iron when the brute turned on him, and, like Cyril Penny by the waterhole in Western Australia, Candy wrestled with this one and reckoned he was lucky to come through alive. It is possible that virile young bushmen found it hard to resist fighting these erect and threatening males with humanoid chests and biceps. (The film Wake in Fright has a memorable man-to-old-man-kangaroo fight to the death.) A big kangaroo turned on Candy’s pursuing dog one day and tried to drown it in a crabhole. Candy beat the ‘monster’ to death with a 2-metre green stick, ‘cut off his paws (or hands)’, and his overseer, thinking them of ‘abnormal size’, sent them to the University of Melbourne.

  On his Gournama station in the northern tablelands of New South Wales, Oswald Bloxsome built two sets of trap yards (valued as a station ‘improvement’) and in one drive his men bludgeoned 8500 kangaroos to death. Another drive was attended by a ‘large party from government House’ and a scientist who was studying the reproductive system of marsupialia. Sixty-two men were employed to drive the marsupials between the mile-long wings and towards the ‘V’ where the yard was. The drive went on for two days, and if it was the same one that the Inverell Herald reported, 6500 kangaroos were ‘slain’, making a total of 18 000 for the year on Gournama. Neither Bloxsome nor the Herald said how they were killed or what happened to the carcasses, but the paper reported that everyone, including the ladies, had a memorable time, and the scientist ‘made some valuable discoveries’.

  Like its companion on the coat of arms, the emu is adaptable and resilient, and very good eating. They female lays up to twenty eggs (favoured by Europeans more for decorating than for eating), which throughout the eight weeks of incubation the male bird sits on and protects with ferocious diligence. Two metres tall and capable of tremendous kicks with their clawed trident feet (they kick fo
rward like a kangaroo or mule), males and females are equally formidable in a brawl, but dingoes have some success and eagles and hawks have been known to kill emus by dive-bombing them on the run in open country. Emus prefer to wander in pairs, hunting and grazing and staying in touch by the drumming sounds they make through an inflatable sac on their necks. In people not craving meat or needing oil, a pair of sturdy, gleaming emus strolling in among rocks or over grassland like the continent’s original lovers or a couple of explorers, excites everything but the desire to chase or kill them. They are strange and beautiful at a distance, and worrisomely mad-looking at close quarters. ‘I think your story is, when you were offered/ The hand of evolution, you gulped it’, Les Murray wrote.

  Aboriginal people prized emus (Dromaius novaehollandiae) for their fat. In parts of the country where they still hunt, or did until twenty or thirty years ago, shallow depressions in the ground mark where they have baked them. The people of the Lower Murray cooked them whole in an earth oven with only the head sticking out, ‘so that when steam came from its beak it was judged to be properly done’. Aborigines also made extensive practical use of the skin, bones and tendons, and the copious amounts of oil the birds contain. Major Mitchell observed of the Aborigines he met on his travels, that the emus were for the exclusive enjoyment of the old men and women.