The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  Laws have changed since Australia was founded partly as a home for gun-flourishing criminals and police. Indigenous laws, a fine lace of iron-hard filaments that lay over every community, every relationship, had held systems in place for thousands of years. They, like the other institutions and axioms of Aboriginal life, were shaken loose by European settlement, though they remain amid modern experience, in First Nations people’s sense of relation to country and to the authority of Elders. European law, founded on protection of property, is often as implacable. Modern Australia, inheriting and adapting British jurisprudence, has firm if not consistent ideas about what is and what is not allowed, what is and is not to be protected.

  Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, used the Enlightenment’s computational model of human behaviour to propose deterrence methods: by modulating the costs versus benefits of the transgression of laws, society could make penalties sufficient to outweigh potential profit. This system, still generally adopted through the West, works up to a point. But for many property developers, fines are built into the finance.

  ‘Governance is a behaviour management system, with many cogs and levers that might be deployed to change its outcomes,’ note academics Paul Martin and Donald W. Hine. Responses to the idea of environmental regulation are called, in cool behavioural science, ‘motivational postures’ and are influenced by how much ‘social distance’ people perceive between themselves and authority. Some citizens are broadly aligned with governmental paradigms and submit to their requirements. Those who, aligning with a narrative of victimhood, feel oppressed or alienated by a system are likely to resist abiding by its laws. They may become what sociological researchers Robyn Bartel and Elaine Barclay, in their research on 5000 agricultural workers across the country, call game-players.

  Game-players tend to be older, typical of the ageing population of Australian farmers. They feel that regulations express the values of city-dwellers, and complain that hobby farmers and mining companies aren’t scrutinised and imposed on to the same extent. Game-players are invested in maintaining control and independence. A person with a resistant, intransigent posture to authority – like Ian Turnbull – might respond to strong enforcement or generous financial incentives, but he would more likely enjoy finding ways around regulations, might stolidly persist in the face of criticism and chastisement.

  The more an authority and its subjects share beliefs and values, the less likely defiance is. It comes down to the building of trust, respect and agreement on the purpose of regulation itself. It depends on what people believe everyone else is doing (as with the celebrated habit of tax avoidance, there’s a paradox that if regulations are needed, it signals that someone has been getting away with something). It depends on levels of peer pressure to encourage compliance, and on the potency of shaming, ostracisation, surveillance and social penalties. Criminal subcultures, Barclay and Bartel remind us, are shaped by the same foundations.

  ‘THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WAS quick to investigate the clearing,’ Phil Spark wrote in 2017 in a submission calling for an inquest into Glen Turner’s death, ‘but in the end they did nothing with it.’ He continued: ‘A fire spread from a burning heap of vegetation that burnt a large area on “Colorado”.’ He was writing of a literal fire, which federal inspectors suspected had been deliberately lit to blind their view when they visited a week after the OEH team, making it impossible to determine how much land had been cleared. But it was a metaphor, too. For the Turnbull case would soon ignite the flammable subject of political interference and incompetence in protecting the natural assets of the state.

  FARMERS, MORE THAN MOST, are formed from the nutrients of the cultural soil in which they originate. Many Australian historians have dug into this humus to explain the national character.

  Australia’s history is not only of ruthless British imperialists raping and murdering their way to ownership of traditional lands. When the new arrivals are themselves subjects, the effects compound. Libby Robin, in How a Continent Created a Nation (2007), proposes that an unresolvable yearning and trauma was brought to Australia by the Irish, still preferring the prelapsarian, uncolonised Celtic landscape of their imagination. Scots, far from feeling colonised solidarity with local mobs, were among some of the most ferocious attackers on Black communities.

  Weak relationships with the environment go with strained social relationships. Inland, in small communities and isolated farmstead families, it was a tense social world. Here, a white-collar ex-convict might work for a former agrarian itinerant; the bourgeoisie got just as dusty and leaf-strewn in their crinolines and bonnets as the former lags in their kitchen.

  Conceive of the resolve required to take a patch of bush and raze it. To cut down the men, women and children who stood upon it. People were transformed in the colony, permissions given, their latencies erupting. They washed human blood from their palms. In Wiltshire, in Aberdeen, life was not like this. How strange it must have been; how full of relief and even pride a man or woman when, tested, they could find it in themselves to act; what a balm dissociation and denial. ‘[I]t is no coincidence,’ observes historian Cameron Muir, ‘that the same society that perpetrated [Indigenous] massacres produced animal and plant extinctions and the degradation of grasses, watering holes and soils.’

  The frontier lands of Australia were not a vortex of horror from end to end. But the violence – abrupt, stunning, blood-spilling violence – was a wide-spattered pattern.

  From all this endurance, brutality and strangeness came a recognisable type, the Australian character. Anyone who lives in or visits a town like Moree will see him there: blue check shirt and wide-brimmed hat, jeans, dusty boots, a firmness of jaw and squint of eye. He is celebrated in everything from Slim Dusty’s music to Patrick White’s The Tree of Man (1955) to Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore (1986); he is recreated in popular ‘rural romance’ fiction and Senator Barnaby Joyce’s wardrobe. Russel Ward, writing in The Australian Legend (1958), suggests that the famous Aussie battler, the Gallipoli larrikin, the twinkling rogue, was born from the rebelliousness of Irish settlers, the antiauthoritarianism of the itinerant pastoral worker and the defiant pride of its native-born generations. We know its branded iconography: R.M. Williams boots, Akubra hats; the celebrated blue-eyed, thousand-yard stare.

  In one photograph published by the media, taken years before he committed murder, Ian Turnbull looks the very avatar of the tanned New South Wales farmer, with his square face solid and lined, posing proudly in his check shirt in front of the ‘Yambin’ silos.

  Then there are the furrows of his cheeks, the leaping eyebrows, the averted gaze and the letterbox mouth, in a shot taken in the passageway between custody and police transport van.

  5

  The wilderness … came with us, the invaders. It came in our heads and it gradually rose out of the ground to meet us …

  —Les Murray, Introduction to Eric Rolls’ A Million Wild Acres, 2011

  A week after the encounter with Anna Simmons in late August, Phil Spark rang Glen Turner. ‘There’s a dozer operating on “Colorado”,’ he said. He was at the fenceline, waiting for the police. ‘They’re pushing trees right now. I’ve got photos of it. The Total Environment Centre is going to contact the premier’s office.’

  He rang off and called the federal hotline to report unauthorised clearing and risk to protected species. He knew all too well that federal and state environment departments rarely shared knowledge of cases. Koala habitat was being destroyed, he told them, as well as other endangered ecological communities listed in the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act.

  Hours earlier Gary Spencer had called Grant Turnbull. It was just past eight in the morning. ‘Grant,’ Spencer said, ‘we have received some information that some clearing is taking place on your properties.’

  They weren’t clearing, Grant said. Just cleaning up and tidying the stacks of trees they’d already felled. Then they’d get the tractors into the sheds. ‘Just
in case anyone says we are clearing, I give you my word,’ Grant said. ‘There will be no more clearing done.’

  ‘It’s very important,’ said Spencer, ‘that no more occurs until this is sorted out.’

  Grant got back on the front foot. ‘From the beginning,’ he said, ‘we’ve been waiting for someone to come out and sit down with us and tell us what we can and can’t do, and we’re still waiting. We are not environmental vandals. We just want someone to come and tell us what we can do, so we can get a farm plan. We’ve been waiting for CMA for eighteen months. We’ve put aside 500 hectares for land for conservation and made corridors for wildlife.’ Again, he said, ‘I give you my word there’ll be no more clearing.’

  But that night, Spencer rang Grant again. There had been reports from neighbours. ‘Grant,’ he said carefully, ‘I just need to clarify a few things. You know when I spoke to you and I told you it was in your best interest to stop clearing until the matter is all sorted out? I have received information that some clearing has occurred today on the property.’

  They’d just put the tractors away, Grant said. You couldn’t leave them outside or they’d be pinched.

  Spencer told him that someone had seen trees being pushed.

  Grant had tried to ring Ivan Maas, he explained, but ‘he must have had his phone off’. They didn’t have radios. ‘He had to cross some fields to get over to where the sheds are. One of the tractors got bogged and we had to pull it out, but they’re all in the shed.’

  Spencer pushed a little harder. ‘Was Ivan doing any clearing of trees?’

  ‘He probably was, but as soon as I got off the phone with you I went out there and put the dozers away. I gave you my word that no clearing was going to happen, and as soon as I spoke to you I went out and stopped it.’

  TWO DAYS LATER, THE Commonwealth sent out investigators from the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Populations and Communities, at the time under Labor minister Greg Combet. These were officers supporting the federal protections, which overlaid the state ones and carried higher potential penalties. They too saw the pushed trees. They saw burning stacks. They gave Ian and Grant warrants authorising their inspections and warned them again of the laws they were potentially breaking and the ways they could check for protected species such as koalas on their properties. They spoke of severe fines and confiscated dozers. They talked of seeking their own stop-work order. One of them followed up with correspondence stating, in the plainest terms, that except for fire-risk management, no more felling or burning should be done without approval.

  The same officer also wrote of how, as the inspectors were standing on ‘Colorado’, someone set grasslands and fallen trees on fire near them. In the middle of the burning grass, a single tree was left standing. The inspectors had just seen a koala in it. Now smoke billowed across the field. ‘The lighting of those fires,’ he wrote in an email to Grant, ‘might be seen as an attempt to obstruct my colleagues and I from carrying out our duties.’

  They’d thought the inspectors had gone, Grant explained earnestly. He hoped the officer would contact him personally next time he was on the property and about to leave. And he sent a helpful ‘heads up’ that they’d have the dozers out again soon, ‘to push and spread piles of dead ground wood to be burned’. ‘We do want to work with you on this,’ he added, ‘not against.’

  THAT AUGUST, SPARK AND Alaine Anderson began writing a series of letters to local member of parliament Kevin Humphries, explaining Turnbull’s activity and asking him to intervene. His friendship with the Turnbull family was local knowledge, but they wrote nonetheless. ‘We have heard all the political spin,’ wrote Spark baldly; ‘we now want the facts about what has happened and what you are doing to rectify the situation.’ Anderson was still writing to Robyn Parker, the state minister for the environment, about the clearing of koala habitat. Both politicians assured Anderson and Spark that investigations were underway. ‘Once adequate information is gathered the most appropriate regulatory response will be determined,’ Minister Parker wrote late in September. ‘I appreciate you bringing [the allegations] to my attention.’

  THE LAND’S HORIZON WAS as vast as the ocean over which settlers had voyaged. It swallowed bullock trains, explorers and settler parties; it engulfed ambitions. A person could evaporate in that sky.

  Almost all settlers to northwest New South Wales came from green lands with no arid zones. For many, it was the first time their skin had been so dry or felt such heat. A ploughman from Sussex, an accountant from Birmingham, a seamstress from Galway, their eyes screwed up in the glare: what had they imagined, and what did they make of the reality?

  To many, Australian nature was eccentric, novel, curious; it was also monotonous, wearisome and melancholy. They voiced bafflement at the apparent ‘reversal of nature’ in which, in the exasperated description of one settler, ‘trees retained their leaves and shed their bark instead, the swans were black, the eagles white, the bees were stingless, some mammals had pockets, others laid eggs, it was warmest on the hills …’ It seemed a gnomic metaphor, but there was no poetry in it. Literature faltered here. Reassuring synonyms were sought: a patch reminded someone of the Highlands, another of the Weald. Some loved the new environment. The delicacy of tree ferns and the graceful droop of eucalypts were admired by Europeans from the First Fleet on, including the sensitive Lieutenant Watkin Tench in his wonderful account of the new land. Others were aghast: ‘The country is horrible,’ explorer Daniel Brock wrote bluntly, ‘a Climax of Desolation – no trees, no shrubs, all bleak, barren undulating sand. Miserable! Horrible!’

  By Brock’s time in the 1830s, distaste for Australian landscape had become a mark of good taste. No longer ‘evergreen’ but ‘ever-brown’, the bush was scolded for being unpicturesque, unvaried, lacking ornamentation, untidy, desolate, tedious, too quiet, too loud or, in Charles Darwin’s words, ‘looking actively dead’.

  How had the original inhabitants endured it?

  The colonial plan was to ‘improve’ the native people with agriculture. Governor Macquarie sought desperately to make the Indigenous peoples between Sydney and Parramatta into peasant farmers. In 1814, he drew up plans to distribute land and tools to them; two years later, he was still pleading with them to take them up. Traditional cultures were not much interested in an ideology of progress. Others of his fellow settlers weren’t so patient, or so inclined to imagine harmony beneath this hot sky. The Kamilaroi people, the second-largest group in Australia after the Wiradjuri, held over 30,000 square miles. In the first years of the 1830s, in the huge, mainly waterless plains, there were few reasons for competition. But by the late 1830s, as waterholes were seized and game taken, there was growing defensiveness among settlers and infuriated pushback from the local tribes. The 1830s and 1840s marked the worst of the violence. A local man put the attitude simply: ‘Shoot them all and manure the ground with them.’

  Violence between stockmen (many of them convicts or ex-convicts) and Aboriginals reached the Gwydir River, only about 30 kilometres south of Croppa Creek. The ferocious Major James Nunn came from Sydney in late 1837 with a party of about thirty troopers and some volunteers. His two-month campaign killed hundreds: in 1838, perhaps up to 300 Aboriginal peoples were ambushed and murdered at Snodgrass Lagoon on Waterloo Creek, southwest of Moree, on what is now Australia Day.

  In the 1970s, a William Henry Weick, who had grown up in Warialda, confessed, ‘I often think about “Murdering Gully”, about 4 miles east of Warialda. As a boy I was told it got its name because at one time the Blacks were rounded up and murdered there.’ There appears no trace in formal history of Murdering Gully, but it is not the only site in Australia to hold that purpose. The last attested massacre in Australia happened only ninety years ago, at Coniston in the Northern Territory. It was in 1928, six years before Ian Turnbull’s birth.

  Professor of imperial history Ann Curthoys suggests in her essay ‘Mythologies’ that settlers’ inability to acknowledge the humani
ty of Aboriginal peoples and therefore the magnitude and horror of the violence enacted against them led to a strange reaction. Not only were settlers constantly suppressing their guilt, but they came to identify simultaneously as superior to and victims of Aboriginal Australians.

  There is a strange, morbid fixation in Australian myth of just how hard a person has to work on this land. One of the perplexities of Aboriginal life for colonists was how idly the people appeared to exist. Their contented eating of shellfish and game, the amount of sitting and communing – it appeared insulting to the newcomers, who whacked, hacked, lugged, shoved, piled and sliced through their days. Blacks weren’t grimed with sweat; their hands weren’t scarred from pulverising scrub; they weren’t collapsing over a meagre campsite meal of damper and boiled mutton every night. It was as if they had no idea how to earn their place – so they should not have it.

  It’s a weird kind of heroism that feels braver the harder it’s fallen to its knees. But John Locke had placed emphasis on labour to morally justify the owning of property. The more work put into the land, the more settled a man was upon it. So if the axe wouldn’t clear for crops, cattle would be hauled across rivers to tread the soil. If the stock, trampling the native vegetation, encouraged the scrub to explode in great thickets, this would be hacked and burned away. If the soil lifted and blew away in vast sails of dust, if the earth was grooved in rain-washed gully erosion, if bushfires flamed incandescent from horizon to horizon as eucalypts replaced more fireproof species, there was all the more work to be done. There would never be any end to the work. A man could sweat for eighty years on this land: how thoroughly, then, he would own it.