The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  There was an old saying: ‘The Thirties made the squatters and the Forties broke them.’ The colony, skewed to pastoralism and stock, had by the 1840s overproduced wool and meat while having to import grain. The prices for wool and stock collapsed, and many squatters went bust. Sheep began to be killed and boiled for tallow instead of kept for wool; the product was bought by Britain to make explosives.

  Then the gold rush, with its manic increase in rural population, windfalls of money and demand for meat, restored fortunes or made new ones. Settlers stood at the peaks of the Blue and the Snowy Mountains and saw horizons of forest, tipping away over the curve of the earth. It would surely take centuries to cut them. ‘Restraint,’ wrote Geoffrey Bolton, ‘seemed unnecessary.’

  By 1860, the country had 20 million sheep and nearly 4 million cattle. They were almost all in the southeastern corner of the continent. Thirty years later, it would be 100 million sheep and 8 million cattle, spread across the country. All might be remade in the antipodes; instead, the damage came up like retribution.

  DOWN ON THE SOUTH coast in 1835, grazier John Batman tried to buy land from its Aboriginal owners. The implications of this precedent were horrific to the British authorities, so Governor Bourke proclaimed the momentous assertion of terra nullius. It conclusively dispossessed Aboriginal peoples of their land; as it asserted the privilege of the Crown, it was also supposed to intimidate, or at least extract money from, the squatters profiting from Crown land. By 1839, the Border Police and a hapless assembly of commissioners were at work. But now that it paid its tithes, squatting was legal.

  Then the booming 1860s saw the famous Land Acts of New South Wales, designed to initiate a new generation of development and occupancy in the interior. Premier Sir John Robertson passed two Selection Acts, in 1860 and 1861. The squatters’ vast estates, all held on lease, would be re-appropriated by the state and broken into smaller properties. Selections of land would be offered, including to the squatters themselves. It was a fair idea and an awful reality – squatters naturally hated having their estates seized, protesting that they had opened up the country, taken risks, with only basic tools and convict labour to develop it. They made sure, through tactics such as ‘peacocking’ (buying up the best patches of land like the eye in a peacock’s tail) or ‘dummying’ (using proxies to bid for blocks) to recapture the land with fertile soils and timber. Those who selected land often got what was left over, and struggled, while amused squatters around Warialda, near Croppa Creek, bought up parcels under names like Anthony Trollope, Napoleon III, Charles Dickens, Henry Parkes and other celebrities.

  Selectors had to live on their land. It had to be cleared and made arable. An early form of compliance officer would conduct inspections to ensure this. Wealthy squatters benefited in that small blocks could be bought freehold and leased. But on small blocks with bad access to water and thick scrub, often in the semi-arid interior, where climatic conditions were rough, selectors found life endlessly exhausting. Up the road, mansions were being built. The Land Acts, supposed to distribute land democratically, instead resulted in larger, more consolidated monopolies, with an enormous transfer of public lands to private accounts.

  Revisions in 1884 tempered things a little. Runs were again divided, this time into two: one for lease by their owner, the other for selection. It was still unsatisfactory – the conditions of selection meant that what land had been redistributed was now in the hands of often unskilled families, frantically clearing timber and scrub, trying to make the land pay for the cost they had to bear.

  The northwest of New South Wales eventually became home to many Scots: tough, traumatised people. Neighbouring New England was originally called New Caledonia, and names such as Glen Innes and Inverell evoked the landscape from which many had been evicted. In Croppa Creek, one block was named ‘Lochiel’, for the Scottish estate from which its crofter owner had been cleared. More than a century later, the purchaser of that block renamed it ‘Colorado’. He was also a descendent of Scottish migrants: Ian’s son, Grant Turnbull.

  THE THIRD TIME IAN Turnbull and Glen Turner met was at the gate of ‘Strathdoon’, with Chris Nadolny, that day in late June 2012 when Turnbull explained his interest in conversion from grazing to crops. The farmer was still acting as spokesperson for his son and grandson. He said they were clearing because it was prime agricultural land. But Turner was only interested in the compliance issues. ‘By doing more clearing,’ he warned, ‘you’re only making the situation more serious.’ The OEH was considering recommending that remediation – restoring the ecology – be undertaken for the earlier clearing. Turner added that it wouldn’t have to be where the crop was already planted. They’d be allowed to get that harvest in first; the OEH wouldn’t make them grub it up. He thought he was being reassuring.

  Turnbull didn’t enjoy being granted permission to reap his crop. He didn’t like hearing that the investigation wasn’t going away, or that trees might have to be replanted. The OEH was kindly not going to rip up his crop? He looked at Turner from under his thick brows with a flash of anger that unnerved Nadolny. ‘If you’ve got any respect for your life,’ he said, according to Turner, ‘you won’t.’

  Threatening state officers incurs a serious penalty, up to several years’ jail. Turner recorded in his notebook his response: ‘I interpret that as a threat and if you continue to threaten me the police will become involved.’

  ‘I’m an old man,’ Turnbull fired back. ‘I don’t care. I can do anything I want.’

  Now things grew heated. Turnbull wanted to know who’d snitched on him. Nadolny grew fearful for their informant: Turnbull seemed dangerous. Turner, undeterred, showed Turnbull his notebook and the information given by the anonymous caller. He spoke frankly to the old man, warning he knew of a similar case. That individual had been fined $400,000 and had the land locked up for fifteen years until the trees grew back.

  Beside him, Nadolny nodded. ‘You’d better stop this now,’ he said earnestly. ‘This is going to be terrible for you. You’ll dig yourself into a hole and never get out.’ Turnbull began to protest. Quiet Nadolny pressed on. He didn’t usually speak up to landholders, leaving that to the investigators. But he had an urgent sense of foreboding. ‘I’ve seen cases like this,’ he interrupted, ‘where people are absolutely destroyed.’ The OEH men knew that many local landowners were watching what might happen to the Turnbulls, and that even risk-averse OEH lawyers now considered this a certain prosecution. It was going to be bad.

  The old man shook them off irritably, talking again of regrowth. The distinction between ‘regrowth’ (recent revegetation) and ‘remnant’ was crucial; Nadolny thought that perhaps the farmer had misunderstood the difference. But, he persisted, Turnbull was clearing brigalow, which was an endangered ecological community.

  Turner pulled out an aerial photograph taken twenty years earlier, on which he’d marked the new clearing he and Nadolny had seen back in April. ‘This is part of the evidence I’ve used,’ he said steadily, ‘to form the opinion that the trees cleared were remnant.’ It looked like about 200 hectares of protected, endangered scrub, brigalow and other species, had been cleared.

  Turnbull didn’t seem to comprehend.

  Could Turnbull show them the supposed regrowth vegetation, Turner asked.

  Turnbull grew enraged. ‘I had to pay the government a quarter of a million dollars in taxes,’ he snarled, according to Turner’s notebook, ‘and you come here to tell me what I can and can’t do.’

  ‘I’m not here to tell you what to do,’ Turner replied. ‘But there are rules set up by the New South Wales government that you are required to follow.’

  Turnbull responded that if Turner wanted to enter ‘Strathdoon’, he would have to go over the gate with his authorisation papers. Could Turner come and meet Cory, the actual owner of the property, in town? Striding away, he took out his phone and called his lawyer, Roger Butler, to arrange the meeting in the Moree chambers. But there was only a voicemail saying
the office was closed for lunch. Turnbull dug in. The OEH would have to send all correspondence to Cole & Butler. And he’d told ‘the boys’, Grant and Cory, not to take any registered mail. Turner said he’d try Butler again in the afternoon.

  Then Turnbull left, driving off south down County Boundary Road in his white ute, as the dust lifted behind him and Turner and Nadolny watched in silence.

  I HAD TO PAY the government a quarter of a million dollars in taxes, and you come here to tell me what I can and can’t do.

  Turnbull’s complaint was an old, rancorous one. It came from a landscape of ancient abrasions: the long legacies of libertarianism and conservatism. It came from a place of mercenary reckoning that imagines civic responsibility can be salaried away, that recalled the ‘robbery by government’ that made the squattocracy of the 1860s pay for lands they had sweated salt and blood to seize.

  Suspicion has long streaked British attitudes to government. Most nineteenth-century subjects, lacking property, did not have civil rights, including the right to vote, while brutal responses to the Chartism movement and petty crime made for deep enmities. As evicted Aboriginal tribes had discovered, a traditional land could be forfeited or forsaken; their dispossessors brought the advantage of knowing this. From the Clearances in the Scottish Highlands and the Enclosures of England, British settler migrants had learned that land was not the common birthright their ancestors had enjoyed – it could be taken away and it could fail. They had seen whole communities perish or disperse, and rich lands grow pale and barren. It is little wonder, then, that they gripped to their patches of land so tightly.

  The apparition of a government man at a station gate had, for nearly two hundred years, rarely meant good news. As Geoffrey Bolton explains, ‘Australians inherited the strong British dislike of government interference; but they also formed the habit of relying upon government action.’ Such a paradox made for a submerged resentment that still roils. The landholders of the 1840s in the northwest had felt egregiously short-changed by the government in Sydney. In exchange for their dauntless endeavours in the wilderness, they found that authority, normally so quick to mount criminal charges in defence of property, appeared to abandon them. Instead, their efforts to defend themselves against Black reprisals seemed to be chastised. Governor Gipps, in particular, stepped over the line, they felt: lecturing and punishing when he had no idea what it was like up there in the outlying districts.

  What was the good of authority, then? It was nothing but oppression – an instinct confirmed two decades later, when in the Robertson Land Acts those squatters were made to pay money as well as blood for their land. And even then, with monies paid, the meddling continued.

  Ian Turnbull had spent time in the United States. There he had heard wheat growers and landholders explain their liberal grand narratives of private property and the need for solidarity against state harassment. Without secure protection by law, there wasn’t investment, there wasn’t wealth. But then the government would come and knock a man’s legs out from under him. Where was the proportionate representation if you paid a quarter of a mil in taxes and they still didn’t take your calls?

  ‘I’m not here to tell you what to do,’ Glen Turner had said. ‘But there are laws.’ He might have been hapless Gipps, trying to establish a coherent society bound by authority, speaking more in sorrow than anger as squatters fumed and fomented. The government would talk of laws. But, the settlers felt, there was justice, and that was another matter.

  THERE HAD ALWAYS BEEN weapons in Australia: waddies and spears, lil-lil clubs and boomerangs. The first whites brought flintlock muskets, then revolvers and rifles. Guns came in the arms of the First Fleet soldiers. They were fired at beasts, at Blacks, at each other; native wildlife, Aboriginals and convicts received most of the bullets for decades. Spears were thrown in return.

  To be armed was to feel protected, but it was also to feel powerful. For decade upon decade guns were held in the hands of the anxious and angry, were kept above mantelpieces, were slung in holsters at horse-sides. Everyone wanted to hold the gun, no one to have it held against them. To point the barrel was to say: I stand. You fall back.

  Two hundred years later in Croppa Creek, as everywhere in rural Australia, guns are still part of farming life. They are regulated now, kept in locked boxes, registered and numbered. They are brought out often enough though, to cull pests: feral pigs in the paddocks, kangaroos in the scrub. Rifles rattle around in back trays of utes.

  Ian Turnbull had used guns for fifty years. He had licences for two shotguns and two rifles. He was a good shot.

  AFTER TURNBULL’S UTE DISAPPEARED, Nadolny and Turner exchanged disbelieving looks. At Turner’s suggestion, they each noted down what they remembered of the exchange. Then they proceeded with their inspection of the property. They took photographs, examined vegetation and cut samples from felled trees with a chainsaw. The trees were already buried in stacks of dried timber, ready for burning. On the ground was a huge chain, the type that is hooked between two bulldozers to take down trees. They took a photo of a mature brigalow standing in a pile of fallen timber and scrub. It was near sunset, winter dusk, when they left.

  Turner wrote up the encounter with Turnbull and his findings on ‘Strathdoon’ that night. He made meticulous observations of times, locations, file numbers. His crabbed hand recorded every action and statement from Turnbull. Each line of the farmer’s speech was introduced formally: ‘Mr Ian Turnbull said …’

  A week or so later, Turner received an anonymous email with an attachment. It reported ‘illegal clearing of Belah, Brigalow and Box Tree which contained 6000 acres koala colony’.

  In April 2012, just two months earlier, the federal environment minister had listed koalas as a threatened species in parts of the country, including New South Wales. Numbers in the state had dropped by a third over twenty years. The catastrophic impact of habitat loss and urban incursion had dulled this legacy. Everyone in Moree had stories of koalas ambling down the main road, or hiding in pockets in the bush. But dogs often killed those that straggled into backyards and parklands in search of water. Many locals were proud of their iconic wildlife and kept habitat locations a secret. The trees on ‘Strathdoon’ and ‘Colorado’ weren’t just some of the last of the brigalow in the district, they were also the home to some of the last koalas.

  Killing koalas was a crime, and their presence on the Turnbull properties complicated things.

  TURNER TOOK TURNBULL’S THREAT to his life seriously. After he reported it, there was discussion with his managers whether he should keep dealing with the farmer. The Turnbulls were powerful and rich: the kind who had QCs over for afternoon tea when an OEH officer was due.

  But Turnbull was an intransigent type he’d met before. Turner resented the idea of kowtowing to his bullying behaviour. ‘Of course I will abide by your direction not to go onto the properties, but there is no more or no less danger for other people who work for OEH,’ Turner wrote tetchily to management on 7 August 2012, as a response was slowly developed. Ian Turnbull had glared at him at the gate of that property with felled trees right behind him. The stop-work order had been swatted away. Meanwhile, Roger was clearing on his property up the road. Years out in the back blocks of the northwest had shown Turner the effects of constant chipping at the small refuges of native vegetation. He spent weekends with Alison carefully tamping soil around sapling and seedling on their property, while out there in the plains, there were would-be developers smashing whole woodlands with their tractors. The emphasis in the regulations was on encouraging voluntary compliance, because, as the OEH website put it, ‘most people want to do the right thing’. But if they didn’t, people like Turner were charged by the state to make sure they had to. In the end, it wasn’t about his feelings for nature or otherwise. Turner was not the kind to shrink from his task of enforcing compliance.

  ‘It is BECAUSE I work for OEH in native vegetation compliance that I was verbally abused by Ian Turnbull,’ he
wrote with restrained exasperation.

  I copped worse from his son Roger (in a separate investigation) and often get a less-than-courteous welcome from farmers just because of the type of work I do … I understand your managerial responsibilities [with regard to] OH&S of staff, but if I’m not to go onto these properties then Gary [Spencer] (or whomever does the rest of the field work) has quite a few days to spend in Moree and they face no less risk than I … if I were to turn up with the support of the NSW Police I’d say we would not have any more trouble.

  Turner’s senior manager, a long-time resident of the environment department, was newly in charge of the agency’s statewide compliance investigations, and managing a thin landscape of officers across New South Wales, travelling between regional offices. He replied to Turner, ‘You should not plan to go to Strathdoon or Lochiel [Colorado] but continue to be the lead on the investigations.’ He had inherited a situation that involved a direct, corroborated threat to the life of an officer. He made his decision: Gary Spencer, a special investigator at the OEH and a tough former cop, would be a steady presence managing the relations with the landowners; compliance officers Michael Wood and Steve Beaman, already looking at clearing breaches near the Turnbull blocks, would support him. Turner would lead from the rear.

  A week later, Turner wrote acceptingly of ‘our expectation that if a similar (or more significant) threat is made next time we go out to the properties, Gary’s experience and training … will put him in a better position than I to handle such a situation should it arise’.

  The police were not notified of the threat. Turnbull was not relieved of his gun licence. Turner and Nadolny had trusted in official protocol, but something got lost in the process: the OEH was used to dealing with administrative wrangles, not threats of physical violence. In fact, other staff had also received threats from angry farmers, and no one had told the police. Turner could only remind Nadolny to keep detailed notes on everything, everything to do with this case, now that it was escalating. Nadolny reflected, years later, that in the final analysis it seemed he hadn’t written quite enough.