The Bush

by Don Watson

  Europeans too were fond of the flesh, reckoned their skins made good mats, and valued the oil even more highly than the Aborigines did. A good-sized bird might give up 5 or 6 litres with which lamps could be filled, saddles and other leather goods softened and preserved, firearms lubricated, and sprains and bruises in men and animals alike relieved. When fatigued, Ludwig Leichhardt ‘rubbed it into the skin all over the body, and its slightly exciting properties proved very beneficial’. Oscar de Satgé swore by it and reckoned it oozed through glass, ‘so permeating and incisive are its powers’. It continues to be marketed as something akin to a sovereign remedy for everything from malfunctioning prostate glands to acne, dandruff and eczema, but the American Food and Drug Administration is sceptical and warns buyers that emu oil is an ‘unapproved drug’.

  Emus were also hunted for the pure fun of it. It was their misfortune to be able to run at around 50 kilometres an hour (some people say 70 is not beyond them), which makes for an exhilarating pursuit on a horse that can run at around the same speed. On his 1838 overlanding expedition, Joseph Hawdon, his men and a greyhound chased an emu for 11 kilometres without catching it, and later he measured the bird’s stride at just short of 3 metres. Emu hunting had a bit of the spirit of the rodeo and a bit of polocrosse, and all classes enjoyed it: from the back of a galloping horse, a man could brain the birds with a stirrup iron or shoot them with a revolver. The smaller emu subspecies in Tasmania and on Kangaroo Island and King Island were hunted to extinction. In 1865 the immortal ornithologist John Gould begged the colonies to ‘check [the] wanton destruction’ of emus on the eastern plains of Australia before it was too late and the bird was ‘extirpated’ from that region. Now on the mainland it has vanished from many of the places where once it was common but, taking advantage of the increased supply of grain that accompanied white settlement, in some regions there are now more emus than there were before Europeans arrived.

  Had they only eaten the stuff, the wheat growers’ outrage might have been contained. But for all the wheat they ate, emus trampled a great deal more. Fences did not stop them; most they easily climbed with their three-toed feet, and those they couldn’t get over they tore down, leaving the way open for rabbits. As the wheatbelt expanded in Western Australia open season was declared on emus and many thousands were destroyed – more than 57 000 bounties were claimed in one six-month period. In 1932, with wheat prices cruelly low, the Commonwealth Minister for Defence agreed to a request that a machine-gun detachment be sent to Campion, Western Australia where 20 000 emus were reckoned to be preparing an assault. A small company of soldiers with two Lewis guns and 10 000 rounds of ammunition were sent and the wheat farmers tried to drive the birds into the field of fire. The emus, it seems, were wise to the strategy and their casualties were remarkably light. The Commonwealth refused all further requests for military assistance. In 1944 emus were declared vermin and in the next fifteen years the bounty of 4 shillings per beak (and sixpence for eggs) was claimed on 284 704 emus.

  Emus are omnivorous; they like both wheat and the pests that eat it. A Queensland emu with a price on its head for allegedly spreading prickly pear was found to have ‘2,991’ caterpillars in its stomach. They might spread post-European weeds, but by carrying the seeds of native plants as they traipse around the land they also do their bit for biodiversity. Among the plants they spread is the native cucumber (Cucumis melo ssp. agrestis), which explorers including John McDouall Stuart ate to ward off scurvy. Emu stomachs have been found to contain stones and pebbles, shards of glass, nails and car keys: anything small and hard enough to grind their food and help digestion. To the prospector Arthur Ashwin this curious habit explained one of the mysteries of his profession: how it was that he might find pieces of gold lying on the ground but search in vain for any more. ‘I put it down to the emus swallowing it and the gold passes through them,’ he wrote.

  Emus were associated with powerful myths in Aboriginal society all across the continent. Not the least of them is one which has the sun created from an emu egg thrown skyward. The ‘emu claw’ is a common insignia in Aboriginal rock art and, uncannily enough, was replicated in the arrows white surveyors carved in marker trees across the continent. The kadaicha man, the famed executioner of some Aboriginal cultures, is said to wear emu feathers on his feet so as to leave no tracks. Emus were also incorporated into the mythology of European Australia. The eggs were prized for fancy decoration. The Australian Light Horse, ‘in body and spirit the true product of the Australian countryside . . . the very flower of their race’, wore emu feathers in their slouch hats. And it was reported that, having been saved from starvation by a passing emu, Peter Fitzallan MacDonald of Yamba station in Queensland adopted the bird as his crest – or we might say, his totem.

  Notes

  Publication details for works included in the bibliography are not repeated here

  Everyone Was Happy

  John Adams’ So Tall the Trees is a first-rate local history of Narracan. The Land of the Lyrebird, a collection of settler memories of the Gippsland forests, is a classic, as is, in a different way, Tom Griffiths’ Forests of Ash. The Lawson story is ‘Settling on the Land’; for the birds, Tim Low, Where Song Began: Australia’s Birds and How They Changed the World. In her Bush Studies Barbara Baynton calls the rouseabout Billy Skywonkie (‘wearing his best clothes with awful unusualness’) a ‘swagger bushie’. For fungi and nutrient cycles, Patrice Newell, Ten Thousand Acres: A Love Story, p. 143. Arthur Ashwin records the absence of eels in WA in Gold to Grass, p.15. Haldor Laxness, Independent People, for an unforgettable Icelandic novel on the theme. Of lyrebirds: Mr L.C. Cook, whose descendants were our neighbours, was lying in a gully watching a bowerbird one day when he found himself surrounded by eleven lyrebirds, all of them hissing at him. He put it down to his having feathers in his hat. Of eels: in many parts of the world, dams, the destruction of wetlands and pollution have damaged eel habitats and blocked the paths of their migration. ‘Glass eels’ are netted in vast numbers and end up not in the streams and lakes of their ancestors, but on Chinese eel ranches and Japanese sushi trains. Eels are vanishing in the Northern Hemisphere. We don’t know if the figures indicate the death of Earth’s ‘circulatory system’, as one writer says, or a mere blockage. Nor, it seems, do we know with much certainty if they are declining at anything like the same rate in Australia. Snakes: In fact most of the snakes we killed were half the size of full-grown red-bellied black snakes and had pale yellow-white bellies. We took them for immature black snakes, but some locals say that these were copperheads and the most common snake in the district. Brian Bush’s persuasive ‘Australia’s Venomous Snakes’ can be viewed at http://members.iinet.net.au/~bush/index.html

  The Bush Means Work

  For the Indigenous people of Gippsland, A.W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, and for the Kulin, Gary Presland, Aboriginal Melbourne, and other works. ‘The Memoirs of Arthur Henry’ are invaluable for more than Poowong. David Day discusses Inigo Jones in The Weather Watchers; James Woodford deals with wombats in The Secret Life of Wombats; the possums are in Tim Flannery’s Country; Georgiana’s Journal, p. 184; and The People’s Forest, edited by Greg Borschmann. The yellow mouse is in Ron Hateley, The Victorian Bush, p.132. Richard Semon recorded his studies of platypuses in In the Australian Bush and the Coast of the Coral Sea, and Shirley Cane wrote about Sylvester Doig in ‘Notes of a Quiet Explorer’, SLQ OM-77-9. For dogs, see Pearson and Lennon, Pastoral Australia; Lawson’s ‘That There Dog of Mine’ and George Main’s Heartland, p.58. For Gardiner, see James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, p. 317, and for a first-rate study of the curious south-east corner of South Australia, see Cliff Hanna, Corartwalla. The sheep are in W.S. Kelly, Beef, Mutton and Wool, p.47. The story of the camp near Drouin is brilliantly told by Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Langdon in Jackson’s Track. For the lack of Victorian trackers, see Gary Presland, For God’s Sake Send the Trackers. The figure for chemicals is from the Commonwealth Depar
tment of Sustainability, Environment . . . ‘State of the Environment’ 155.187.3.82/soe/2006/publications/drs/indicator/196/index.html. One settler recalled a worm that, once unravelled from the kookaburra which had choked attempting to eat it, measured 9 feet.

  What is the Bush?

  Seddon, The Old Country, p.183; Hill, Broken Song, p.10; Mary Longford and the tussocky land, Condon, Out of the West, p. 105. For exotic animals and Indigenous culture, David S. Trigger, ‘Indigeneity, ferality, and what ‘belongs’ in the Australian bush’. The anthropologist Rhys Jones coined the term ‘firestick farming’ in an article in Australian Natural History, 16:224, 1969. More recently see Bill Gammage’s exhaustive The Biggest Estate on Earth, and his submission to the Inquiry into management of Public Land in New South Wales, 18 Sept. 2012. Mitchell’s various journals may be conveniently viewed online, Robert Watson’s 1881 diary at Queensland’s Oxley Library (OM 79-29). For Gaia, see Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Life and Land in Aboriginal Australia’, in Charlesworth, Dussart and Morphy, Aboriginal Religions in Australia, and the introduction by Charlesworth; Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins are among the evolutionary biologists who have criticised the concept and its principal proponent, James Lovelock. Boyce in his Van Diemen’s Land, p. 257. For the destruction wrought by paddle-steamers, W.R. Randall, ‘Voyage up the Darling and Barwan’. The ‘pleasing union’ was described in an 1840 edition of the English financial journal Atlas, and quoted in Phillip McMichael, Settlers and the Agrarian Question, p. 107. John Passmore, an environmentalist who thought Gaia and other forms of deep ecology irrational, remembered the ringbarked trees in Memoirs of a Semi-detached Australian, and his contemporary was W.K. Hancock, Australia, 1930, p. 21. The agricultural historian was Ted Henzell, Australian Agriculture, p. 18. Ernestine Hill in Ports of Sunset, Vol. I of the Great Australian Loneliness, 1940. Dawn May characterised industry assistance in Henzell, op. cit., p.125. W.E.H. Stanner’s much quoted On Aboriginal Religion was published as an Oceania monograph in 1960, and see also The Dreaming and Other Essays (Melbourne 2011). Dewhurst put his thoughts down in ‘A Flying Trip to Queensland’ (SLQ M449, Box 5294); Curr in Recollections of Squatting in Victoria (1883) 1968 edition, pp. 189–90; and Rosa Praed in My Australian Girlhood. Mary Durack’s drover appears in Kings in Grass Castles, p.114. The Gray Papers, including Lucy and Eva Gray’s, are held in the Oxley Library, Brisbane. Lucy and Eva and their journals are the subject of Anne Allingham’s MA thesis, ‘Victorian Frontierswomen’, James Cook University 1987. For Louisa Meredith and others, see Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, esp. pp. 127–57. For Gould, see Sean Dawes, John Gould, p. 212.

  The Bush Will Not Lie Down

  For the crumbling heartwood, Elizabeth Farrelly in Sydney Morning Herald, 17 January 2007. Clarke in his introduction to A.L. Gordon’s Poems. For a stimulating analysis of the Gothic theme, see Gerry Turcotte, ‘Australian Gothic’, in Mulvey Roberts, M. (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature. Matthews told his tale in A Parson in the Australian Bush, and Adams his in The Australians: A Social Sketch. See Ward, Australian Legend, pp. 256–57. For the silence and solitude, Marcus Clarke, Old Tales of a Young Country (1871) Sydney, 1972, p. 163. The SLV has a collection of letters Clarke and Whitman exchanged. For the miners’ peculiar view, David S. Trigger, ‘Mining, Landscape and the Culture of Development Ideology’, Ecumene, Vol. 4 No 7, 1997, p. 174. For Bean and bush ideals, The Dreadnought and the Darling (1911), pp. 317–18: elsewhere, On the Wool Track (1910). Boake might have had the likes of A.J. Cotton in mind: according to Henry Bloxsome, Cotton around 1904 had a map of Queensland on his office wall with buttons marking his (and the Bank of NSW’s) mobs of cattle when last heard of, and the name of each drover attached to them. McIntosh, Beaten by a Blow (2008), and Lewis, Crow on a Barbed Wire Fence Muir Papers 1973. Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police 1975. For the cedar-getters’ bad behaviour, John Vader, Red Cedar, 1987, pp. 47–53 & passim. For the shameless, Mary Young to Charlotte Need, nd. c.1905; Frost, No Place for A Nervous Lady, pp.14, 181 & passim; Mill, ‘The Spirit of the Age’ (1831); and for the Victorians in general, Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870, Yale, 1957. Barry Hill discusses O’Dowd and Ingamells intriguingly and at length, op. cit., pp. 386–94. The letter about the moon, Alex Langter (?) to Thomas Muir, 24 May 1852, Muir Papers. Praed, My Australian Girlhood, pp. 152–53, and Boake, ‘Where the Dead Men Lie’; another of his more compelling ballads, ‘Twixt the Wings of the Yard’, is gloomier still. For Croll et.al., see Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, pp. 168–75. For the order of the wattle, Richard White, Inventing Australia, pp. 117–19. For frontier violence, Durack, op. cit; Korah Wills (Mayor of Bowen), Diary, Oxley Library, Brisbane; Tony Roberts, Frontier Justice, pp. 138–39; Cliff Hanna, op.cit., p. 212. For drought, see (NSW conservation farmer) Phillipa Morris, ‘Submission to the Productivity Commission’, www.pc.gov.au_data/assets/pdf_file/0018/82710/sub023.pdf. David Lewis quoting John Howard, Clive Hamilton, Ross Gittins and Michael McKernan in Sydney Morning Herald, 29 September 2007. And Robyn Ballinger, ABC Radio National’s Perspective, 12 July 2007. Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, for the many settlers who, far from finding it miserable and worthless, delighted in the Australian landscape.

  An Asylum for Lost Souls

  Lady (Ida Margaret Graves) Poore, Recollections of an Admiral’s Wife 1903–16, London, 1916. Twigg is in Patrick O’Farrell, Letters From Irish Australia 1825–1929, Sydney, 1984, p.116. W. Monkton Dene was the American. Clement Semmler’s entry in Australian Dictionary of Biography is a fine introduction to A.B. Paterson. Therese Radic surveyed the origins of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in ‘The Song Lines of Waltzing Matilda’, Journal of Australian Studies, No. 48. E. Hill, op. cit., pp. 50–51. Penney’s ‘Autobiography’ in Battye Library, WA, MN3194A. Franklin, My Brilliant Career, p. 86. Arthur Ashwin found a human skeleton in the scrub near Lake Darlot in WA. He also recalled a horse tailer called Martin who got the horrors up near the Palmer goldfields, tied a rock round his neck and drowned himself in a shallow waterhole. Gold to Grass, p. 98. E. Hill, op.cit., pp. 108-112. Praed, op. cit., p. 108. The companion to the swag was the billy or billy-can, which possibly got its name from the tins containing a French soup very popular on the goldfields called ‘bouilli’, that were re-used for making tea and stewing meat. P. White, ‘The Prodigal Son’ in Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature (Nicholas Jose ed.) p. 558. Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’. P. Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader, New York, 1989, p. 636. ‘. . . the social system of pastoral Australia is a patriarchal despotism, tempered by Bryant and May’, wrote Joseph Furphy in Rigby’s Romance; Bryant and May were match manufacturers. Frank Huelin, Keep Moving. An Odyssey, Sydney, 1973. Furphy’s sundowner arrives on p. 103 of Such is Life. Ashwin’s story is told in Gold to Grass (ed. Peter J. Bridge), Carlisle, WA, 2002. For the frontier war in Qld and NT, Roberts, op. cit., esp. pp. 136–37, and Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle, Sydney, 1987, passim. Ramsay, Diary, 5 July, 1891 (SLSA). For Chinese, Eric Rolls, Citizens, Brisbane 1996, p. 3 & passim; and see Andrew Markus, Fear and Loathing: Purifying Australia and California, Sydney, 1979. The greatest larrikin of all, Ned Kelly, and his colleague Joe Byrne were on separate occasions both arrested for abusing Chinese people. Ashwin’s reflection on his life as an aging ‘combo’ is from the Postscript to Gold to Grass by Peter J. Bridge. For Massachusetts, Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men, p. 170. Penny’s account is very like that of an Atherton scrub logger whose father told him to have nothing to do with ‘sub-humans’. He also remembered a man called Roberts who shot ‘quite a few’ with a Colt revolver, and another who used to ‘jingle’ them: ‘put a hobble chain on the end of a stick and hit them around the shins. When they bent over, you hit them over the head.’ Leon Wallace Smith in Greg Borschmann (ed.), The People’s Forest, p. 224. Robert T. Muir to Thomas Muir, 9 March 1874. In his classic My Crowded Solitude, pp. 47–51, Jack McLaren tells of a journey such as this one as it was related to him by the Cape York Abori
gine who made it; Kaio was his name and he had to find his way through rivers full of sharks and crocodiles as well as hostile tribes. George Augustus Robinson had seen the same pattern in the south-east of the continent: ‘when the purposes of the whites have been learned the natives have been turned adrift, away, and frequently in a strange country, and destroyed by other natives’. Mitchell had pondered something similar about Bultje, his ‘half civilized guide with the “singularly Socratic face”: how he found the “tact” to live between the loathing of his own people and the prejudice of the Europeans “surpasseth me to understand”’, he wrote. Albert Facey, A Fortunate Life, p. 326. Mrs James Foult, Sketches of Life in the Bush. Such is Life, p. 128ff.

  A Collision of Cultures

  Edward Kynaston, A Man on Edge, p. 99. E.J. Brady reported a proverbial ‘great snake area’ along the Murray as he approached Swan Hill on his 1908 motorboat odyssey, and the local people ‘talked a good deal of snake’, he said. He saw them every day swimming in the water and ‘dealt destruction’ as he passed by; see his River Rovers, p. 68. The Vagabond in Vagabond Country (Michael Cannon, ed.), Melbourne, 1981, p. 49. Oxley, ‘Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales. . . 1817–18’; Cunningham, ‘Diary from March 1 1817 to November 19 1818’. For many years broombush was used for brush fencing in the suburbs of the southern cities. The industry, like that in mallee roots, got going in the Depression. It ended when governments could no longer ignore the environmental damage: in South Australia in the early seventies, in Victoria twenty years later. Carter, Ground Truthing, p.183 & passim. Irene Cunningham, The Trees That Were Nature’s Gift, p. 141, for gnows. For lowans, Shaw Neilson, ‘At a Lowan’s Nest’; and Colin Thiele, The Little Desert, p. 26. Alfred S. Kenyon, The Story of the Mallee, pp. 2–3. Muir and ‘appropriate names’, letter to WA Surveyor-General, 29 October 1907, Muir Papers. E.M. Curr, The Australian Race, , vol. 1, p. xvii. For an extensive discussion of white naming of the landscape, see Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, chapter 2. The Beardy River in New England, we are told, was named by a party of men who arrived on its banks with several days’ growth of whiskers. Nearby Concertina Rocks took their name from a man named Mick who bought a concertina from a hawker and ‘his horse having left him, sat all night on the rocks and played it’. In North Queensland, John Atherton, who gave his name to the Tableland and the Rainforest, named one rocky outcrop Mt Uncle and another nearby, Mt Aunt. No Aborigines lost their lives in this, just what remained of a grip on their old lives. Hawdon, The Journal of a Journey from New South Wales to Adelaide 1838, p. 49 for Bonney; and Durack, op.cit., p. 212 for Doughboy. Charles von Hugel, New Holland Journal November 1833–October 1843 (trans. Dymphna Clark), p. 272. W.S.S. Tyrewhitt, A New Chum in the Australian Bush, pp. 27–31. For Lake Tyrell, John Morieson, Stars over Tyrell; Carter, Ground Truthing, p. 74, & chapter 7 & passim. Leichhardt, Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia from Moreton Bay to Port Essington . . . 1844–45, London, 1847 (1964), p. 280. Praed, op.cit., p. 151. John Wolseley in a letter to the author. By some accounts, the big red gums on the park-like plains of east Gippsland, Victoria were destroyed by Christmas beetles in the last half of the nineteenth century. But the trees had already been greatly weakened and beetles only delivered the coup de grace: in the preceding quarter-century the understorey and its resident beetle-eaters (birds, bats, sugar gliders) were reduced by heavy grazing, which also altered the soils and hydrology. The blanched trunks and limbs of the old red-gum woodland into which the squatters drove their cattle in the 1840s were still standing in the 1960s. For the jodhpurs, see Durack, Kings in Grass Castles, p. 244. Everard’s story from his unpublished memoir, ‘Pioneering Days’. At the age of 10 the Aboriginal boy went to Melbourne on a load of Ellerman’s wool, got lost and was taken in by a Mr Chase, who took him to London where he fell ill, was baptised Willie Wimmera, and died. He is buried at Reading. See Robert Kenny, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming, p. 117ff & passim. Watson in Bill Kitson and Judith McKay, Surveying Queensland 1839–1945, Brisbane, 2006, p. 23. Mrs James Foult, op. cit. Aserath Muir to Thomas Muir, 30 July 1878, Muir, Papers. When Arthur Ashwin was a boy wild chickens roamed the range near Ballarat: he shot roosters for Sunday lunch and collected buckets of eggs from the ‘hundreds of fowls along the creek, all gone wild . . .’ Felton and Grimwade pioneered various colonial health tonics, and combined with other enterprises, their success became the basis of the major companies Australian Consolidated Industries and Drug Houses of Australia. Early in his business career Grimwade contracted to supply overseas buyers with a million leeches from the billabongs around Echuca. Aborigines caught the majority of them by walking into the swampy water and walking out with them clinging to their bodies. John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia, esp. p. 310. Peter Beveridge, The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina, p. 142. Butlin, Economics and the Dreamtime. Josephine Flood, The Original Australians, p. 128. Beveridge also ‘gleaned’ that the venereal disease he saw among them had been present long before the smallpox. He thought it most likely came with the trepang industry on the northern coasts and spread across the continent. On Rottnest Island, WA, where Aborigines were sent for sheep stealing and other crimes, 60 died of influenza in ‘a matter of weeks’; in 1883 and at the Guildford Native School in 1841, 11 of 24 students died of flu or whooping cough. Flannery, Country, pp. 188–207. Arsenic also entered the food chain in the mid-nineteenth century when sheep-farmers began washing their sheep in it to cure scab; and others poured it into troughs and waterholes to kill rabbits. Much else died with the dingoes, very likely to the point of extinction in many cases. W.S. Kelly, Beef, Mutton and Wool, p. 40. ‘Browne Family Letter Book’, Battye Library, MN 973. Other information on dingoes from Dick Condon, op.cit., pp. 237–46