The Bush
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Striving to Stay in Existence
‘Thou shalt not plant an Asherah of any kind of wood beside an altar of the Lord’. Deuteronomy, 16:2. Cf. the bhodi (Ficus religiosa). At school in the fifties we sat in our classrooms at the school where the forest had recently been and recited ‘Pioneers’ by Frank Hudson: see australianpoems.tripod.com for full poem. ‘[S]ince nothing can be or be conceived without God, it is certain that all those things which are in nature involve and express the concept of God, in proportion to their essence and perfection. Hence the more we cognize natural things, the greater and more perfect is the cognition of God we acquire, or . . . the more we cognize natural things, the more perfectly do we cognize the essence of God, which is the cause of all things. So all our cognition, that is our greatest good, not only depends on the cognition of God, but consists entirely in it.’ Spinoza, The Ethics, from which we might conclude that there is no God unless it be nature. See Frederick Law Olmstead, ‘The Plans of the Central Park’, (1872) in Bill McKibbin (ed.), American Earth, 0pp. 120–25. Colin Tudge, The Secret Life of Trees. New World environments were chewed up at extraordinary rates. By one contemporary estimate in the last decade of the 19th century, US homes and industry were consuming woodlands at the rate of 25,000 acres every 24 hours. J. Sterling Morton, ‘Arbor Day Leaves’, in McKibbin, op.cit., p. 128. Morton was the Nebraska pioneer who later founded Arbor Day. Bill Bunbury (ed.), Timber for Gold, p. 204 & passim. Lyle Courtney, Our Houseless Home, p. 2. For the melancholy and magic of casuarinas, see Matthew Condon, ‘The Casuarina Forest’, pp. 38–49. Paul Fox, Clearings, Melbourne, 2005, pp. 195–96. Francis Cadell, ‘On the Navigation of the Murray’. Flinders saw substantial circular huts that slept up to 15 adults when he anchored in the mouth of the Clarence in 1799. Mary Bundock in Eric Rolls (ed.), Visions of Australia, p. 216. An early settler, James Ainsworth, reckoned there were 4–5000 Bundjalung living around the Northern Rivers when the Europeans arrived. ‘Their principal food was fish and oysters and the varied products of the chase. They were simple, good-hearted and friendly people who would generously give away anything they possessed to the “white feller”.’ Richmond River Historical Society, A Souvenir of the Visit of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth . . . 1954, p. 7. Louise Tiffany Daley, Men and a River. At Eucla, SA, Thomas Muir’s manager employed Alfred the Cheater, Fluf and John the Canter. Like horses, the names of ex-convicts and Aborigines were very often preceded by ‘Old’: Old Hill, Old Jack Batt, Old Sambo, and so on. Alexander Harris (‘An Emigrant Mechanic’), Settlers and Convicts, p. 88. Before he became the country’s most celebrated bushranger, Ned Kelly worked in the forests of Gippsland. Shirley Walker, Roundabout at Bangalow, pp. 84–85. Settlers and Convicts, p. 45. For myth, see Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, New York, 2005, p. 40. ‘Always had a blackfellow . . .’, Trudgeon, op. cit., p. 23. R.D. Carr, in Trudgeon op. cit., p. 14, for getting the logs to the sea. For King’s party, Daley, op. cit., p. 31. Pumpkin: They lived on dampers and treacle/And sometimes a pigeon or two/If they couldn’t get dampers or treacle/They made boiled pumpkin do. From a ballad composed by George Arkinstall, a pioneer descendant. In Pauline Barratt, Around the Channon, p. 21. Shirley Walker, op. cit., p. 3. Paspalum in Sydney Morning Herald, 19 March 1913. For Coraki, Pauline Curby, Battlers’ Boomtown: Coraki in the early 1890s, Lismore, 1992. In 1907 Coraki Public School took in ‘several Aboriginal children’, but within a few days ‘feeling was high’ against them and on the inspector’s advice they were sent home, ‘even though their clothes were clean’. E.J. Brady, Land of the Sun, London, 1924, pp. 81–82. On clearings, R.G. Garbutt, ‘The Clearing: Heidegger’s Lichtung and the Big Scrub’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 16, no. 1, 2010, pp. 37–38 & passim. Lantana covers 4 million hectares of Australia, costs farmers about $10 million a year and causes the deaths of about 1500 cattle. Slavoj Zizek makes the point about civilised silences in Living in the End Times, London, 2011, p. 133. For the organic farmers, NSW Department of Primary Industries Factsheet. For sustainable production, brookfarm.com.au, ABC Radio, Bush Telegraph, 29 August 2008.
Gardens of Verdure
Evidence of Salsola australis in places isolated from European settlement suggests that the species is native to Australia, but the plant is a phenomenal coloniser. In the United States, a few salsola plants brought to South Dakota by a Russian immigrant spread across the prairies and deserts of the Midwest and west and became a weed loathed by farmers and horses, and a specifically American symbol of frontier lawlessness and impermanence. Griffith Taylor, Australia in its Physiographic and Economic Aspects, London, 1911, pp. 252–53. The definitive work on the business of water in Australia is Michael Cathcart, The Water Dreamers; see esp. pp. 219ff. Stuart McIntyre, A Colonial Liberalism, p. 97. For de Satgé, Australian Dictionary of Biography (entry by D.B. Waterson). For Palm Island, Herb Wharton, Cattle camp: Murrie drovers and Their Stories, St Lucia, Qld., 1994. ‘Chief pillars’, Frank Fox, Australia, p. 50. For gentlemanly customs, Paul de Serville’s classic study, Port Phillip Gentlemen, esp. pp. 82–195. For soldier settlement in Queensland I depended on the M. Johnson’s excellent Ph.D thesis, ‘Honour Denied’. Jill Roe, ‘My Brilliant Career and 1890s Goulburn’. For Western Australia, transcripts of the Royal Commission on Repatriated Soldiers of the AIF under the Discharged Soldiers’ Settlement Act, 1918 (1923). For soldier settlers in Victoria, Marilyn Lake The Limits of Hope; for South Australia, Karen George, A Place of Their Own. The Pike Royal Commission into soldier settlement in Queensland in 1929 concluded that 40 per cent of settlers failed, but Johnson found the commissioner’s calculations to be ‘wildly inaccurate’, that at least 60 per cent had given up by 1929 when the scheme was abandoned, and of the 40 per cent remaining many more walked off in the years of the Great Depression; report pp. 419–21. Praed, op. cit., p. 126. For Swain, see Gregory A. Barton & Brett M. Bennett, ‘Edward Harold Fulcher Swain’s Vision of Forest Modernity’, Intellectual History Review, 21:2, 2011, pp. 135–50. For the dimensions of the settlers, From Battlefield to Block, Merbein, 2002. Jared Diamond, ‘The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race’, in Discover, 1 May 1999. The residents of Birdsville were ‘startled’ by the sudden deaths of the rabbits. The corpses began piling up just as the rats of a recent rat plague began to die. Mona Henry, Diary, Oxley Library. The pursuit of the rabbit had consequences for other creatures. In a letter from his home in Surrey in 1903, a doctor and keen naturalist who had accompanied Sturt on his journey in the desert proposed that the increase in locust populations in the wheat country of South Australia might be put down to the destruction of a native insectivorous mammal known to the Aborigines as pincoo and to the Europeans as pinkie. The creatures which he described as nocturnal, ‘the size of a rabbit, silky fur of a fawn grey colour, the underparts and tip of the tail being white’, had been very numerous in South Australia when Dr John Harris Browne, a onetime pastoralist, was cultivating olives there; Dr Browne noted that they consumed great quantities of locusts – and, what was more important, their eggs. The pincoos he described are now widely known as bilbies. Browne was right in saying that in their largely unsuccessful efforts to wipe out rabbits, farmers were very effectively wiping out these bandicoots. He had seen it: ‘whenever a rabbit burrow has been dug out, the Britisher, with the destructiveness of his race, kills every living thing he finds in it’. The pastoralists were not impressed: as if it were possible to gas, poison or rip selectively, to kill one species and spare another! Did the doctor not understand the costs and practicalities of farming? A friend of Browne’s wrote back to say, alas, the pincoos ‘like all who frequent bad company must suffer for it’. In The Mammals of South Australia, published in 1924, F. Wood Jones, declared the ‘formerly abundant’ pincoo ‘either extinct or on the verge of extinction’ in that state. SLSA, PRG 260, The Advertiser, February 1935. For the settlers at Cooltong, Judith Weir (ed.), We Will Remember Cooltong. Cathcart, The Water Dreamers, p. 240. David Millstrom’s story is told in Gregg Borschman
n’s excellent The People’s Forest. The farm at Trangie is described in a Grain and Graze case study of Central West/Lachlan, ‘Mixed Farming with Old Man Saltbush’, n.d. Tammy Azte on saltbush, from her speech notes.
Town and Country
Calvino, Invisible Cities (trans. William Weaver), New York, 1974. ‘Right action’, Armstrong, op. cit., p. 4. A ‘run of mackerel’, Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities, New York, 1938, p. 5. The Shire General Manager in Sun-Herald, 19 January 2003. For the case against mining, Natalie Kent and Sandra Reidenbach, ‘What is the Real Price of Gold? Case Study: Lake Cowal’, UTS Online Journalism, 2004. And see David S. Trigger, ‘Mining, Landscape and the Culture of Development Ideology in Australia’, pp. 170–71. Diary, March 1920–Feb.1928, SLQ Box 8947 OM 75–90. For the hillside, George Main, Heartland, p. 55. Seddon, op. cit., pp. 218–19. Joseph A. Cocannouer, Weeds, p. 94. Snow in New England, ‘The Weather of Armidale’, website article by Peter Burr. Bill Gammage’s Narrandera Shire, takes local history to a very high level and is here quoted extensively. For SA Waste Lands, Hanna, op. cit., p. 31. Such is Life, pp. 101–02. Stuart, Journal, 10 December 1860. It was stocked; the good season in which Stuart saw it reverted to a normal – dry – one, and the stock died. Sheep numbers, D.G. Dufty, G.S. Harman and K.J. Swan, Historians at Work, Sydney, 1973, p. 45. Griffith Taylor, op. cit., p. 133. Eric Rolls was sure the marsupials played a part in the transformation of the Pilliga scrub. James Noble thinks they ‘may well’ have, in The Delicate and Noxious Scrub, pp. 23, 67. For the horses, et.al., Gammage, Narrandera, pp. 224–29; and Fiona Carruthers, The Horse in Australia, p. 271–72. For Walgett’s contemporary Indigenous population, Russell Skelton, ‘Where babies are a mixed bonus’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 May 2008; and for their history, Roger Millis, Waterloo Creek. For occupying the land, see Alan Frost, ‘Old Colonizations and Modern Discontents . . .’, Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference of the Samuel Griffith Society, 1992, chapter 11. Arthur Dewhurst, ‘Trip to the Liverpool Plains’, SLNSW. Henry William Steers in The People’s Forest, pp. 202–04. C.D. Rowley, Outcasts in White Australia, Canberra, 1971.
Farming the Flood Plain
For the Piguenit painting, Tim Bonyhady, op. cit., pp. 301–05. Mitchell’s Journal 13 February 1846. Gray Papers SLQ. Brady, River Rover, 129–30ff. See Emily O’Gorman, ‘Unnatural River, Unnatural Floods? Regulation and Responsibility on the Murray River in the 1950s’, Australian Humanities Review, Issue 48, May 2010. See also Cathcart, op. cit.; Seddon, op. cit, and Paul Sinclair, The Murray: A River and Its People, Melbourne, 2001. Frances Cadell, op. cit. For the drowning sheep, H.S. Bloxsome, Journal, SLQ. For a description of chemical farming in the US that alarms even the farmers employing the Monsanto-directed methods, see Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire, London, 2002, esp. pp. 234–35. New articles and reports critical of Monsanto appear every week: Genetic Engineers Report: GMO Food is Dangerous, Open Earth Source, 2 July 2012, to name just one among hundreds. Not all of them ring with authenticity. Two substantial pieces, the first for and the second against Monsanto, are Michael Specter, ‘Why the Climate Corporation Sold Itself to Monsanto’, New Yorker, 4 November 2013; and Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, ‘Harvest of Fear’, Vanity Fair, May 2008. The Australian study, by Bidwell and Gorrie in 1995, is quoted in Commonwealth Department of Environment, Australian Frogs an Overview environment.gov.au/resource/australian-frogs-overview. For Hegel and other arguments about slaughter, see Mick Smith, ‘The “Ethical” Space of the Abattoir: On the (In)humane Slaughter of Other Animals’, Human Ecology Review, Vol. 9., No. 2, 2002. Anna Krien, Us and Them, p. 34. For 25,000 throats cut, Bonyhady, Colonial Earth, p. 286. Frank Fox, Australia, p. 26.
No Smallness In It
Robert Watson, Diary, SLQ. The Diary of Emily Caroline Creaghe, Explorer, Adelaide, 2004. R.G. Ramsay, Diary, Elder Scientific Exploring Expedition, 1891, SLSA. David Carnegie, Spinifex and Sand. Melissa Sweet, ‘On relations with trees’, Inside Story (website), June 2009. Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia, 1846. See David Cameron, ‘Closer Settlement in Queensland: The Rise and Decline of the Agrarian Dream – 1860s to the 1960s’, in Struggle Country: The Rural Ideal in Twentieth Century Australia (Graham Davidson and Marc Brodie, eds), Clayton, Vic. 2005, for the Brigalow Scheme; and Paul Sattler and Colin Creighton, Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment, National Land and Water Resources Audit, 2002, for some of the ecological consequences. Also, Queensland Government, Semi-evergreen vine thicket regional ecosystems in the Brigalow Belt Bioregion, 2007, Australian Terrestial Biodiversity Assessment, Australian Natural Resources Atlas. Sweet, op. cit. The main hope lies in retaining substantial patches of remnant vegetation, and in 2006 the Queensland government passed legislation to protect them, but miners – the area has colossal coal deposits – are not controlled by it and farmers remain free to clear for firebreaks and fencing. Harold Lewis, Crow on a Barbed Wire Fence, p. 29. Judith Wright, Half a Lifetime, p. 73. Gray Diary, SLQ, September 1868. For the pear and the emus, Queensland Prickly Pear Land Commission Annual Report, 1926–27, and A.J. Marshall, The Great Extermination, pp. 58–9. In a May 1926 letter to the editor of the magazine The Emu, H. Stuart Dove of West Devonport Tas. wrote that it was ‘unthinkable that our finest species, the Emu, should have a price put upon its head for a misdemeanour that has never been proved’, and referred to a study which went ‘far to show that the charge is wholly false.’ ‘When Canadian Bill is firing with the sun-dried gidgee logs/She can equal thirty horses and a score of so dogs . . .’ Banjo Paterson, ‘Song of the Artesian Water’. Blainey, Mines in the Spinifex, pp. 19–20. For the exotic grasses, see David S. Trigger, ‘Indigeneity, ferality . . .’, pp. 638–39. Creaghe, op. cit., p. 26–27n. Korah Wills, Diary, SLQ. Wills sent the girl to a school in Melbourne where she caught a cold and died. Praed, op. cit., 23ff. White men and black women and girls, see Germaine Greer, On Rage, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 123–26 & passim. Aboriginal stockman, Carruthers, op. cit., p. 41. Durack, Kings in Grass Castles, p. 138. For Mitchell and other grasses, Ian Partridge, Managing Mitchell Grass: A Grazier’s Guide, Department of Primary Industry, Queensland, 1996. Cummings, Bart: My Life, Sydney, 2009, p. 21. British investment, James Bellich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939, Oxford, 2009, p. 358. Government weed advice, Queensland Government Fact Sheet; Australian Government Weed Management Guide. Queensland Department of Primary Industries, Impact Assessment Brochure. Flies close schools, The Argus, 21 November 1912. The surveyors and flies, Kitson and McKay, op. cit., p. 182. O’Shaughnessy, Diary, 1848. Scab inspector, Brian Glenie, The Chowilla Stock Inspectors, p. 43 & passim. For the different types of settlers, see Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, London & New York, 1999. See also Dan Tout, ‘Stabilise, Normalise, Eliminate’, Arena, No. 118, June–July 2012, pp. 40–43. For a riveting analysis of the world of Lucy and Eva Gray as described in their equally enthralling diaries, see Anne Allingham (ed.), Frontierswomen: The Australian Journals of Lucy and Eva Gray 1868–1872, 1881–1892, and Allingham’s 1987 James Cook University MA thesis on the subject. Christison, see Arthur Laurie, ‘The Black War in Queensland’, Royal Historical Association of Queensland, October 1958, p. 13. Barnaby Joyce, ‘Speech to the Young Beef Producers’ Forum’, Roma, Qld, 15 November 2012.