The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  Cory informed Farago that he’d begun clearing, but ‘it shouldn’t be a problem’, he said, according to Farago’s evidence, ‘as I’ve only been clearing regrowth and areas where the groundcover is less than 50 per cent native’. Farago told him to stop until he had approval. By the time Farago was supposed to inspect, Turnbull had the dozers out and the EPA was already investigating illegal clearing on ‘Strathdoon’.

  Much hinged on whether the Turnbulls were clearing regrowth; how much native grass cover there had been; and whether any endangered species had been on the blocks. The Turnbulls had engaged an ecologist, Peter Hall. He spoke bluntly, making a case that the scattering of vegetation on the two blocks meant the koalas had already had to cross grass from one tree to another; walking on wheat crops or stubs wouldn’t make much difference. In fact, having only a limited number of trees could make mating more convenient. In any case, Hall said, you had to consider the clearing of koala habitat in the context of the whole landscape. There were other places they could go.

  The prosecutor, David Jordan, was incredulous. ‘Are you saying that the clearing has done the koalas a favour?’

  Hall retreated; no, but the Turnbulls hadn’t cleared everything. He conceded that ploughing prefers long, clear lines for the tractors, and paddock trees or clumps of vegetation impedes that. But the Turnbulls, he said, wanted to protect the koalas; they’d left trees in the gully (overlooking the fact that these couldn’t be cropped anyway). There was, he estimated, still 200 hectares of fragmented koala habitat left on the blocks – never mind that they had to cross 100 metres of open, cropped land to reach the next. The brigalow was too thinned to be considered an endangered ecological community. The endangered species, he said, were actually coping well with change – as you could see because they were still there. On the Turnbulls’ blocks, most of the felled trees were young, not the hollow-bearing habitat ones.

  Hall’s evidence went on and on. He argued that the clearing was minimally damaging; the land, he seemed to imply, was already too compromised to be worth protecting. His opinions were echoed by another consultant ecologist brought by the Turnbulls, who agreed that the felled trees had probably not been good koala habitat anyway.

  Then it was Chris Nadolny’s turn to give his evidence. In his soft, steady voice, he gave a detailed assessment of the vegetation he’d seen on the blocks, including native trees, shrubs, vines, mistletoes and groundcover. The brigalow, he said, definitely qualified as endangered; other species had already been reduced by two-thirds in their catchment management area. There was significant loss of habitat on the properties, including for several threatened species such as the koala and the grey-crowned babbler.

  ‘I was on the stand for a day and a half,’ says Nadolny, ‘and Ian was listening to what he would have regarded as all the rubbish I said about the environmental impacts of the clearing and all that sort of thing, and how it was native vegetation and how it was altered. The trees that he felled were large old things with hollows – in that part of the country, they would have been a couple of hundred years old.’ Those trees had probably pre-dated white settlement. But they’d been felled by the modern inheritors. ‘He wouldn’t have liked to hear that even if he knew it was true.’

  The Land and Environment Court had to consider various aspects. Had Turnbull meant to damage the environment? Did he understand the consequences of the clearing? Was he aware that it was not permitted? Did he think pushing native trees was wrong?

  ‘Your Honour,’ Turnbull’s silk said, ‘when one looks at this, this is not a man who wilfully engaged in a deliberate endeavour to contravene quite deliberately the law.’

  ‘We never intended to clear it all,’ Turnbull told a different court – the Supreme Court – years later. He’d known, he confessed to the room then, that there would be restrictions and permission needed, but the land had been rung before. Turner, he explained, had said they could only farm what they’d already cropped, and lightly graze stock on the rest. ‘I don’t know what he thought you would lightly graze, because it was heavily timbered,’ he said. ‘Unless there was a lot of summer rain, there was no grass, and a lot of erosion among the trees.’ He could tell it was eroded because of small white pebbles that usually lay a few inches underground. He’d been a conservation farmer: it wasn’t a thoughtless enterprise. ‘We thought those factors would all be remedied with broad-acre farming, with competent [soil]banks and zero tilling, leaving all the crop residue on the ground to protect [it].’

  The Crown prosecutor leaped on this. ‘So you’re suggesting, are you, that by clearing it all you were going to make it better for the environment?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Turnbull agreed. ‘Exactly.’ But then he thought again. ‘I had better put that right. We never intended to clear it all.’

  That discussion about erosion and tree coverage, permit applications and tilling techniques occurred as Turnbull was in the dock being tried for murder. And still he was protesting that he’d been in the right.

  Back in March 2014, Turner was in court for the three days of the hearing. He and Turnbull exchanged glances. Turner was keeping his feelings to himself, but he must have hidden a weary grimace. On the first day of the hearing he’d been sent some photos by Phil Spark. They showed dozers at work on ‘Colorado’, pushing trees. Two days later, 6 March, with Turnbull sitting grim-faced beside his lawyer as Alexis rose to speak, Turner had his colleague Robert Strange, recently returned to the native vegetation division, drive the three hours to Croppa Creek to have a look. The view was as expected; Turner duly made the familiar notes. Meanwhile, in the court, Todd Alexis QC was attempting to mitigate the penalty. Turnbull’s age, he’d said, meant that he was unlikely to reoffend.

  JUST WEEKS LATER, IN April 2014, there was big news in the district. The largest wheat grower in Australia, Ron Greentree, was selling up some of his holdings in the Moree area. A jowly man with dark brows, usually photographed in the obligatory Akubra and check shirt, Greentree co-owned the Boolcarrol and Milton Downs stations at Bellata. His business partner was Ken Harris, of the huge Harris family, which had holdings in New South Wales and the Kimberley. They had bought the stations – 47,500 hectares of luscious black-soil country – in 2008 for a total of about $75 million; they put in 300 kilometres of roads, built accommodation and ‘increased both the area of plantation and the productivity of the farms’. ‘Improved’, that land was now massively increased in value.

  Wheat sales had been deregulated in 2009 after the Australian Wheat Board scandals, and Greentree, a former chairman of GrainCorp and the Grain Growers Association, had profited from higher prices. But prices turned, and a few years later he was ready to sell to fund managers, who were investing in Moree. ‘This is succession planning,’ Greentree announced to journalists. He had the welfare of local farmers in mind: ‘I really want to make sure that young farmers get a chance to get hold of these properties,’ he told Matthew Cranston at the Australian Financial Review. ‘I am a first-generation farmer myself.’

  In April 2014, Greentree and Harris put the property on the market. The asking price for Milton Downs was $200 million.

  Turnbull would have read all this in the papers, heard it at the Croppa general store. He hadn’t even started farming until he was nearly thirty, and had begun with just one property. Now, he was friends with the right men, had the right kind of attitude. He had respect in the community. With 20,000-odd hectares in the Turnbull name and a shed full of dozers, he had begun the running. If only Turner wasn’t there, simply wasn’t there.

  That month, Turnbull told Roger he’d dug two graves, one for Turner and one for a colleague, somewhere on the Turnbull farms. His son thought, Fuck, Dad, what are you saying?

  ‘But I never imagined,’ Roger said, ‘he would actually do it.’

  8

  To provide suitable conditions for shallow-rooted, annual crops, farmers must apply industrial devices each year to replicate catastrophe.

  —George
Main, Heartland, 2005

  In 1896, blood rain smothered Melbourne. A dust storm had carried dirt all the way from the Red Centre. The land had been flogged and, belatedly, people realised it. Joseph Jenkins, a Welsh immigrant farmer who worked as farmhand, travelling around Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, came to a conclusion: ‘There are three characteristics peculiar to the farmers of this colony,’ he wrote. ‘[E]xhausting the land, abusing the horses and exploiting the labour.’

  Drought, inevitably, had hit before, in the 1870s. Almost everything declined – including pests. But crafty, hardy native flora crept back, even into new territories. The brigalow especially prospered. Clumps became scrub. ‘It came up so quickly it was cast like a protective net over plants, birds, mammals, insects that would have disappeared for ever in the disasters of the next seventy years,’ Eric Rolls writes of this late insurgence.

  This didn’t put a stop to the clearing, of course. By 1884, a total of 4 million acres had been authorised for ringbarking across New South Wales; a few years later, permits were granted for the same again, with permission only required to clear big old trees. The countryside was now a spectral landscape of white, dead stalks.

  Pastoralists realised that they would simply have to accept fluctuations in the climate and make the most of good years. So when the soil was wet again, rather than reduce stock numbers, they sunk artesian wells as a back-up and went for broke. If they felt uneasy and vulnerable, how good, then, the glee of action. Swinging axes, dragging trees, clearing acres – it must have been immensely satisfying. Much masculine literature was devoted to paeans to the axe, the dauntless frontier bushman, the passing of antique forests to the radiant horizon of the new. ‘The stump, a symbol of nature subdued,’ writes William J. Lines in a mordant history of the Australian environment, ‘became an enduring image in Australian history.’

  But wool prices fell from the 1870s; by the mid-1880s, the rabbit plague reached the Darling River and leaped across. Shearers’ strikes in 1891 and again in 1894 brought the wool industry to its knees. By 1895, with another drought coming on, there was economic chaos, with banks closing and food shortages in the cities. Stock was fed mulched native vegetation and prickly pear. The compacted soil that blew off in dust storms went flying away under their hoofs, unable to soak in moisture when it did rain. Many believed the productive capacity of the plains was finally exhausted. The chief botanist of the New South Wales Department of Agriculture, Frederick Turner, appealed to pastoralists to at least keep native grasses so seeds could replenish bare earth, but they did not. Nor would they set aside fodder for bad times, but used it to expand their flocks. Most seemed to think there would always be somewhere else, some new frontier on which to bet their fortunes, and they assigned the drought and failing land to the spite of an unjust Providence.

  ON 10 JUNE 2014, there was an incident on Roger Turnbull’s property ‘Royden’, just south of Ian Turnbull’s homestead off the Croppa Moree Road. Roger and his wife, Annette, owned several properties in the district: they’d had ‘Wallam’ for twenty years, north across that road from his parents’ ‘Yambin’, and they’d also had a couple of others up near North Star. They’d bought ‘Royden’ in 2008 for nearly $4 million, and moved in in late 2010, when the previous tenants moved out.

  In April 2011, the same year Ian Turnbull went guarantor to help with the purchase of the Scott brothers’ blocks, Glen Turner had visited Roger to investigate reports he had illegally cleared 97 hectares on his property. He’d moved farm equipment onto the property and begun to farm wheat, barley and chickpeas, according to Turner’s report. Roger had had some kind of altercation with Turner. There had been remediation orders and a small fine of $3700 issued. Now, with his family under serious investigation for similar offences, Roger wasn’t in the mood to show patience. When two OEH officers, David Minehan and Wendy Illingworth, visited in June 2014 to inspect the remediation works, Roger allegedly lost his temper. There are accounts that he locked them in a room, and someone in the house called the police to report them as intruders, although the officers held an authorisation of entry document. ‘There were words or something,’ Chris Nadolny recalls.

  The officers, according to the story, called their manager for help and were released after about fifteen minutes. No charges were laid. The agency seemed to take it as just one of those situations where feelings had run a bit high. ‘Roger wasn’t formally indicted or anything,’ says Nadolny, but the encounter ‘would have upset Ian’. Fuck the bastards, Ian Turnbull must have thought. His family was being persecuted; this was personal.

  That June day was a hectic one for the Turnbull family. As Roger was shouting at compliance officers near Croppa Creek, his brother, son and daughter-in-law were in the Land and Environment Court in Sydney for two days of appeals hearings against the remediation directions issued by the Office of Environment and Heritage back in April 2013, even while the judge was considering what penalty to hand down to Ian Turnbull for his part in the clearing.

  Grant and Cory seemed to think their penalty unjust. Grant argued that he honestly believed he was clearing regrowth on ‘Colorado’. Cory told the judge that his grandfather had acted without his authority. Cory, like his father and uncle, lived much of the time away from Croppa, either in Moree, in an apartment owned by Robeena, or across the border in Toowoomba; he worked regularly but not full-time on the properties. It was the old man, with his interest in the first year’s profits, who doggedly worked the blocks. ‘My grandfather is eighty years old and I can’t control him,’ pleaded Cory. ‘If he has something set in his mind, that is what he does.’ Once the clearing began, Cory said, they had to continue to clear it all for crops, so they wouldn’t be financially ruined. After the family had borrowed heavily to buy the properties, the wheat price had gone down and drought had arrived.

  The Turnbulls had initially claimed that the blocks were too expensive to fence to keep stock, so they had to be cropped, hence the clearing. In fact, the boundaries were already fenced, even if not robustly, and the costs of fencing had dropped dramatically. Now they argued that the remediation would cost them $5 million over fifteen years. The family had already lost $300,000 that year – and they were awaiting a sentencing and a possible fine for Ian’s charges. They were nearly $2 million overdrawn.

  The OEH lawyers protested that the Turnbulls couldn’t be allowed to get away with a wilful breach of regulations. The department had put significant resources into this prosecution: not least, an overworked Glen Turner had committed much to the investigation, visiting the properties six times, in the face of threats.

  The OEH was under public scrutiny to stop the clearing. It was a high-profile case, and had been mentioned in state parliament. Morale within the OEH was declining after some promising prosecutions had been pulled. To have the Turnbulls’ illegal clearing conspicuously punished would be a big win. A failure would send a very dangerous message to the New South Wales farming community.

  Turnbull felt the family was being scapegoated. ‘There’s every farm in the 30 kilometres from “Yambin” to “Colorado” has had a bulldozer on it pushing trees,’ he would tell the Supreme Court in 2016. ‘They were honing in on the Turnbull family to make an example.’

  The OEH suggested that the cleared land be restored. But the fact was that the Turnbulls had been thorough: they’d felled, repeatedly; they’d raked and sprayed, to kill emergent weeds and regrowth from the stricken vegetation; they’d ploughed and cross-ploughed, to grind the remaining native seeds and seedlings. And then they’d planted crops. Could the land ever be ‘restored’? Soil erosion and degradation, edge effect and other kinds of intrusion would be felt not only in the cleared areas but all around.

  The Honourable Justice Brian Judge Preston, who has a record of publishing thoughtful pieces on the problematics of environmental law, ruled that a bankrupted Turnbull family wouldn’t be able to restore the properties, so they could continue cropping the land already cleared. They coul
d ‘offset’ in other areas, by planting native vegetation as compensation. This was essentially a win for the family. The commercial operation could remain intact.

  The Turnbulls were allowed to keep the roads carved into the remediation areas. They were meant to dismantle their stacks of felled timber and spread them out over the cropped areas to let the seeds distribute – but those stacks had already been burnt and sprayed. They disputed how hard they should work to keep non-native weeds out, how many, which species. Preston, reading advice from Chris Nadolny and the Turnbulls’ ecologists, Peter Hall and Sinclair, carefully considered the distribution and density of the replanted species, the ratios, and the risk of a weird uniformity if every hectare had to have at least twenty trees of brigalow, belah and poplar box, as the OEH suggested – a prescription of 100 live stems per hectare. He noted that ‘recolonisation of the area’ was likely to be ‘very slow and uncertain’, pointing out that brigalow often seeds only once in fifteen years. The family had killed some prestige vegetation. The Turnbulls, he ordered, should tend the regrowth as carefully as a garden, with mulching, watering, weeding and tree guards. The Turnbulls asked for a period of five years for monitoring and reporting on the regrowth; when this was queried, they argued that it was a typo and was meant to be fifteen. Preston agreed to fifteen.

  Preston’s ruling runs to fifty-five pages. When the Turnbulls began pushing trees, they began a process that would devour countless more trees in some other, unknown place, in the reams of paper representing hours of time, thousands of words, meticulous legal consideration. Whole forests might be pulped in order to defend and condemn the felling of native vegetation.

  The decision came on 25 June 2014. That July, a shaken but resolute OEH charged Ian and Cory Turnbull with the second lot of illegal clearing on ‘Strathdoon’ in 2012. They would be back in court within months. But by then Ian was already facing charges for murder.