The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  One of brigalow’s most remarkable attributes is its resistance to fire in a combustible continent. As Tim Flannery observes in The Future Eaters (1994), almost everything about the plant is designed to impede fire, from the way the narrow, hard phyllodes fall to the ground to how the trees are shaped. What brigalow does, moreover, is shelter other species of vegetation beneath it. These plant communities have much of the typical Australian vegetation found in rainforests, as well as mammals like long-nosed bandicoots. The brigalow, in this sense, is a protective haven for an ancient Australia, pre-dating even Aboriginal arrival. It is what’s left of an antique and complete ecosystem.

  Native plants are not just relics or ornaments. They house biodiversity and represent cultural and heritage values, and many have qualities unique in global biology. But practically, they also protect the land surface. They help retain water and regulate rainfall; they halt erosion and provide windbreaks; they foster microbes, fungi, pollinators and other elements that form the food chain. They store carbon. They provide wildlife corridors. They diminish problems with salinity and acidity. In short, they work on the land as surely as farm labourers. They are removed from a landscape system at a cost that has not often been well explained to landholders, but has been paid by successive generations.

  For graziers, who acknowledged its edible young foliage, shade and wind shelter, brigalow wasn’t a real problem until clearing provoked the vegetation to thicken so it swallowed whole herds. Anything that interferes above ground (ringbarking, felling, spraying and poisoning, bulldozing) or even with the surface roots (if stock trample the ground, if the land is scorched with fire, if it is repeatedly levelled by a tractor) triggers what expert Henry Nix calls ‘a massive suckering response’. Brigalow can produce 25,000 suckers per hectare, and remain like this for thirty years before stirring to its next phase: whipstick brigalow, a barrier of tensile saplings that can endure for more than fifty years, at between 5000 and 20,000 stems per hectare, taller than a man. At the surface the roots are braided and set, firm as ships’ cables, and five metres higher the canopy meshes and tangles. Below, the roots, as with other legumes, carry bacteria that fix nitrogen into the soil. Belah does a similar thing, but using a fungus. The two species are drawn to weathered, infertile soils, and over time they restore them. Brigalow encourages a collegiality of other virtuous growth.

  But the brigalow is not loved. It stands a dark, muscled fortress on the good soil it has nurtured; it impedes view and passage and progress. The dominant mentality is to reap its gains, and then curse and destroy it.

  IAN TURNBULL HAD BEGUN his farming life with grazing, but had long since given it up for crops: conversion of grazing to cropping land was where the money was now. There were heavy mortgages on each of the Scott blocks – no time to waste. By the end of January 2012, his son Grant had secured ‘Lochiel’, about 1500 hectares, for $3.2 million, and 27-year-old grandson Cory and his wife, Donna, had bought the 900-odd hectares of ‘Strathdoon’ for nearly $2 million. The arrangement was that Turnbull, in addition to taking the profits from the first year’s crop, would supervise the clearing and cultivation. Doug and Bill Scott were in their eighties and had wanted to give something to their relatives – the cash would do nicely, and the price was good.

  The task ahead wasn’t complicated: get rid of the paddock trees and some scrub, and there’d be huge big fields easy to sow and plough. Minimum tillage – a method causing as little soil damage as possible – would put that wheat in on the good soil.

  Turnbull knew you had to be clever with money. Shrewd. Had to have a savvy accountant and a good lawyer. The government wanted to stick their fingers in everything; well, they’d never quite get to the bottom of the pot. Turnbull wasn’t stupid – he’d protect their wealth, make sure the young ones got their fair share. It took work, keeping track of what was under whose name, for how much, dividing it all up. It had been a life’s work, building and building the family’s wealth: so many hard days out there, so much to keep track of, what with managing all the staff.

  When they stopped grazing, it got simpler. It was a shame to give up the sheep – his dad had been a wool-buyer for years, and Turnbull had grown up when the country rode on the sheep’s back. But now the future was big crops.

  Things had shifted since Turnbull was born into the penumbra of nineteenth-century farming. In the past few decades, ecologists, scientists, greenies, even some agronomists had come to value what grew above the black soil. Before the sale, Cory had got in touch with the regional Catchment Management Authority to get an idea whether clearing would be allowed: he was hoping to remove the odd paddock trees in the areas already cropped, and clear out what he thought was just regrowth scrub; next door on ‘Lochiel’, Grant was looking at a block barely ever touched, even more crammed with brigalow. But Cory was told that these blocks were full of native vegetation, either original or regrown, much of it species so rare they were called ‘endangered ecological communities’. None of that should be touched, and further surveys would be needed on the rest.

  Environmental regulation, too, had flipped. Once it demanded extermination of wildlife, the crushing of trees, the raising of fences. Now if a person wanted to clear they needed to submit a vegetation plan to the Catchment Management Authority, to ensure that native ecologies were preserved. Transgressions involved the state government: the Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Environment and Heritage and their team of officials, investigators and compliance officers. Then there was the federal level, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, which protected native elements, some overlapping with those protected at the state level, others not, and landowners were supposed to get permission there too. It was complicated; country pubs had long filled with muttering that no one could explain what happened if the state laws said one thing and the national laws another. So the temptation for a man like Ian Turnbull, directing his family to turn these properties to profit, might have been to do what one could, just have a go and cop the consequences.

  A clever man played the odds. The regulators were, it was rumoured, spineless: they rarely tried to prosecute. They mightn’t even know about illegal clearing, unless someone dobbed. If they did have a go, you argued your case: you thought it was regrowth, it just caught fire, we had the wrong map. And if it came to court, you got a silk. Five grand a day, well, you put that in your bank account to begin with, ready. Funds for a fine, too. It could never be as much as the profit on the land: a developer could buy a block now and double its worth in a couple of years.

  It was a shame about the koalas. Turnbull liked the little buggers. He had even gone to a local talk about protecting koala habitat earlier that year. They were an icon of the district, and Gunnedah, a couple of hours south, called itself the koala capital of Australia. Someone told Turnbull they reckoned there were a hundred koalas on those blocks. Or forty. But they were in the trees, and the trees were in the way. No one likes shooting koalas, but once they’re on the ground you have to put them out of their misery, and then it’s best to burn the bodies.

  As for the scrub, well, everyone bashes the scrub. The more you cut it, the harder it grew back. No worries about that stuff. People have been bashing that scrub back since the early days, and it’s still there.

  THE STORY OF WHEAT in Australia, those gilded fields that would become the very image of our prosperity, did not begin auspiciously. European varieties of the precious grain struggled in the local soils. There seemed no clovers to replenish the soil: settlers didn’t yet know the leguminous properties of brigalow or the similar nitrogen-fixing talent of other species. It proved more expensive to grow and transport wheat even short distances, such as from the Bathurst Plains to Sydney, than to import it from other parts of the empire. Thus wheat, one of humankind’s oldest symbols of wealth and now a particular grail of the British imperial project, was one of the hardest-charged items of the whole Australian endeavour.

  As with muc
h else, the crop’s failure baffled the colonists. They didn’t know that Australian soils are formed in the crucible of a very dry, hot environment that annihilates much active soil biology: they are lacking both micro- and macro-nutrients, and tend to be inhospitable to water drainage and plant growth. They don’t get much of sea-spray nutrients or dust blown from other continents; glaciers haven’t churned old goodness to the surface. Instead, our soils are scoured by desert winds and blasts from the Antarctic.

  Of course, the plains had been productive grasslands since long before settlers arrived with their pitiful sacks of seed. Early observers recorded Aboriginal people of the plains eating grains in the hot summer, when other foods were less available. They didn’t till, preferring ‘the land unbroken’, as Major Thomas Mitchell wrote in his account of exploring the northwest plains, but cut Panicum (panicgrass) with stone knives, tossed it to be winnowed by the wind and ground it for flour. They stored seeds in granaries and baked bread. When the people of Jericho in the Fertile Crescent began growing wheat along alluvial flats, Aboriginal people had already been gathering and cultivating grains on country that flooded seasonally for many thousands of years. But the colonists didn’t recognise, or allow themselves to acknowledge, Aboriginal husbandry. It was far more important to not see it – to confirm James Cook’s scanty impressions from decades earlier that Aboriginal people were few and nomadic hunter-gatherers, and the countryside Edenic, unworked, originary: terra nullius. The force of this willed perception was so phenomenal that it has persisted to the present day, allowing Bruce Pascoe’s account of Indigenous agriculture, Dark Emu (2014), to come as a revelation to most of us. Yet as Eric Rolls observed, ‘When Europeans came to Australia, the soil had a mulch of thousands of years. The surface was so loose you could rake it through the fingers. No wheel had marked it, no leather heel, no cloven hoof … No other land had been treated so gently.’

  Aboriginal land management took aeons to find its best expression. In Australia, settlers tried to achieve the same explosive outcome in decades. Many newcomers did their best, but merely standing in boots on the land was a violence. Some were purely incompetent, absurdly transplanted from urban British slums or Irish hillsides and left to farm as they could. Others were humiliated by the perversities of the Australian ecology despite their familiarity with British cultivation techniques, which included careful resting of the soil, alternating stock and crops to replenish nutrients, and ancient firestick farming called swidden. They ignored the traditional knowledge already shaping the landscape.

  Native plants could endure only so much: ploughs killed off many, especially the humble groundcover. ‘[N]o person, to my knowledge,’ lamented farmer James Atkinson in 1826, in a handbook he wrote for new settlers, ‘has yet tried any experiments to ascertain how far any of the native grasses might be improved, or made more useful by cultivation.’ He could see the value of native timbers, but admitted many were unnoticed by his colleagues, ‘distinguished by the Colonists by the names of bastard iron barks, bastard box, bastard stringy barks’. Yet his British gaze still saw the plains as vacant: ‘[N]o traces of the works or even the existence of man are here to be met with, except perhaps the ashes of a fire on the banks of some river.’ This made an excellent prospect for properly applied agriculture, and the land was ‘easily wrought’, he declared.

  But that soft and rakeable soil took the hoe for less than a decade, by Eric Rolls’ estimation, and then began to compact.

  The efforts of the typical ‘indolent’ settler, in Atkinson’s mordant account, extended to felling trees for a raw slab hut and a clearing in which first maize, then wheat was optimistically sown, into unprepared ground feebly chopped by a hoe. The makeshift approach would work initially but ‘[t]he consequence of this miserable system is that the land in a few years gets exhausted’. ‘In the mean time [sic], the Settler clears another piece of fresh land, and with this,’ he wrote in dismay, ‘proceeds as before.’ It was as if agriculture had to be invented.

  Settlers tried, but the land bit back. The more they grazed, the more stock trashed the land they trod; the more Europeans tried to cultivate the soil, the more it seemed to harden, desiccate, veil with salt, groove in erosion gullies, blow away, rebuff their crops, fill with weeds. The dreams of reshaping rivers and irrigating deserts came largely to nothing. As the soil degraded under pressure from intensive cultivation, wheat didn’t just fail to thrive, but became infested with disease and rust. And all the farmers could see aside from their dying crops was a land green with trees they didn’t recognise or know how to make use of.

  In the end it was technology as much as climate or philosophy that contoured the continent after white settlement. Modern Australia was made by farm machines and railways. The secret was combination and efficiency. In the 1840s, the stripper machine was invented – not coincidentally, in Australia – and its ease of threshing finally made South Australia an exporter of wheat. In 1843 a ‘patented manure’, the first modern fertiliser, was invented in England, followed by a factory to make the stuff. This discovery changed everything. No longer would farmers be required to rotate grazing and crops, so stock droppings could replenish the soil. The timeless cycle of animals and agriculture was cracked apart. Instead, farmers welcomed artificial, controllable technology, applied mechanically.

  Next were tined seed drills, which cultivated ground as well as sewing seed. The kerosene tractor came to the north in the 1920s. Felling with a ball-and-chain arrangement, strung between two tractors, was a success. Finally, ground could be truly broken.

  By the 1960s, the Brigalow Belt was still the largest undeveloped moderate-rainfall country in Australia. This horrified state governments. Incentives were offered to clear it all. A ball-and-chain could flatten 10–14 hectares an hour. And, echoing the warfare descending from the skies to the northwest in Vietnam, defoliants like Agent Orange were liberally poured from aircraft.

  For many a family, a weekend wasn’t complete without a bit of scrub-bashing. Clearing brigalow was sweaty, soul-blistering work: your skin became scratched and grazed, dirt grimed in your sweat, twigs stuck under your shirt; you had to cut and haul, and then come back to burn. Or you could ringbark and wait, haul it, stack it, burn it. But it often returned, sometimes worse than ever. There were vast acres of this stuff, and it never seemed to understand that you wanted it gone.

  THERE IS A TALE about Turnbull and his boys, told by someone who knew them when they were young. He would put the little kids on a tractor; their feet wouldn’t even touch the pedals. The man would coax them into position, show them how to put their hands on the wheel. Then he’d start the engine and the machine would begin to move, and the child – tiny atop the huge thing – would look beseechingly, and the father would tell them it was for their own good, and leave them, trundling up and down the field for hours, and their father would thrash them if they stopped.

  GLEN TURNER, A MAN in his fifties with a genial face, a receding hairline and sharp eyeteeth, lanky legs and a passion for home brewing, owned a property outside Tamworth with his partner, Alison McKenzie. It was 150 acres in a valley, much of it untouched bush. For ten years they lived in a cabin. After their first child was born, they began building a house. They did a lot of the work themselves. Once it was completed, the new windows would frame a view of green, all the way down to a creek.

  Telegraph Point, where Turner and his three sisters grew up, is a small town between two forests, inland from Port Macquarie. Those forests were, of course, logged for years: the peaceful Wilson River used to jostle with floated trunks. It is a dappled place, and the roads are lined with dry verges and delicate bush. The town has little tidy brick houses, plush green winter paddocks and old gums. Timbertown is a nearby theme park, devoted to the historic curiosity of the region’s forestry. Tourists come to the state forests and walk the Bago Bluff National Park.

  Glen and Alison, beginning their life outside Tamworth, began to plant trees. A thousand times they bent t
o dig and scrape earth along the creek line, fit the roots of a sapling to its hole, press the soil back with their palms. The native trees grew to 15 metres, holding the soil in place. They planted another five hundred. They filled in gaps with trees. They were building themselves an ecosystem, a homemade forest, its roots gripping the earth and holding it steady.

  ‘I didn’t perceive him as gung-ho; he seemed pretty measured in what he did. I mean, in most ways he was very measured,’ remembers Chris Nadolny. ‘He was a pretty social sort of guy. Actually, very social. He was always pretty inclusive, and when we stayed together we always made sure we stayed in the same hotel, had meals together and stuff like that. He wasn’t just like that with me, he always extended himself to be social with everyone he worked with.’ Very much a community guy, Nadolny adds, involved with coaching footy and helping out at the children’s school. One notorious fundraising event involved Turner’s proposal, ‘cow bingo’: inviting bets on what marked square a cow would leave a pat on. But first the cow in question had to be chased down the suburban road by Turner and a fellow parent. Out on the road, he’d call his kids at bedtime and speak with them tenderly. ‘He was an avid reader of The Sydney Morning Herald,’ his former colleague recalls, ‘which contrasts with The Daily Telegraph or the local papers that most landholders read.’ But Turner wasn’t an eco-warrior, either. Nadolny, himself a modest activist, chuckles. ‘He was actually more interested in home-brewing beer than in green politics.’

  In late 2011, Turner – formerly a surveyor, then a compliance officer in water, now environmental regulation, based at the Environmental Protection Agency in Tamworth – got the news that Turnbull and his family were planning to buy ‘Strathdoon’ and ‘Lochiel’. The EPA was only just holding onto the native vegetation compliance: it was about to be handed to the Office of Environment and Heritage under a restructure. But for a few more months, the EPA still had it. And, the Turnbulls having come to the agency’s attention over questionable clearing before, the sale raised a red flag.