The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  ‘Ian Turnbull would not hurt a fly and [is] an ultimate gentleman,’ Slater wrote to Peter Dunphy, the executive director of SafeWork NSW. He claimed that Turner, having made threats against the Turnbulls, had been taken off the case and Gary Spencer forced to intercede. He complained that the OEH should have prevented Turner from nearing the Turnbull properties, but he’d continued ‘on a frolic of his own’. ‘Therefore Mr Glen Turner and more importantly his superiors knew there was a risk and did nothing about it beforehand.’ That inaction, he concluded, ‘is partly to blame for the tragedy that has befallen the Turner family and the Turnbull family.’

  In another letter, he expanded on this proposition: ‘[I]f this employee had been following his workplace procedures he may well be alive today and another man not be in jail, and possibly if the relevant department doesn’t change its ability to control their employees this may not be the only death in relation the native vegetation act.’

  In Slater’s view, Turner’s well-attested provocation had not been given due weight, and the ‘habitual’ use of marijuana Slater alleged not considered relevant. Nor, the provocation defence being denied, was a verdict of manslaughter permitted in the judge’s direction to the jury. ‘This is all on record. Is this democracy in action?’ Meanwhile, ‘the persecution continues as Mr Grant Turnbull is still being prosecuted from the OE&H … [s]omeone in Government has been pulling strings in many areas.’ The OEH, the Land and Environment Court and the Supreme Court of New South Wales had all concealed or denied crucial evidence exonerating Turnbull and his family from their crimes, and protected the reputation of Turner, ‘a rogue employee doing as he wanted bullying the farming community without managerial responsibility or restraint’. Slater was only further persuaded of this collusion when SafeWork replied with a lack of enthusiasm for re-opening concluded investigations, and the NSW Coroner’s Court with no interest in the information he claimed to have.

  ‘It is hoped,’ Phil Spark wrote measuredly to the NSW Coroner’s Court in the same period, ‘recommendations could be made to make the role of compliance staff more safe, and the process from field investigation to court hearing streamlined, to enable a speedy resolution in court that would be better for all concerned.’

  Slater could not have been aware of Spark’s words. But there was some overlap in ambitions between the victim’s colleague and the relative of the killer. ‘[S]ome accountability is required,’ he complained, ‘and it is a matter of “public interest” for the facts, not just what they want us to hear, to be laid bare and be properly investigated.’

  A MONTH AFTER THEIR patriarch’s death, Grant and Cory Turnbull were back in the Land and Environment Court to discuss the second bouts of clearing that had taken place five years earlier. It was April 2017 by the time this matter was addressed before patient Justice Preston, with the usual reprise of background history, seriousness of the charges, pleas of misunderstanding, definition of polygons cleared, heated disputes about how many and what kinds of trees removed, disagreement between ecologists’ testimonies, mathematical additions of estimated area cleared, passing concern about koala populations potentially affected, quotes from authorities’ advice given … It was all done first for Grant, and then for Cory. The verdicts and sentencing wouldn’t happen until October.

  The discussions themselves, though they ended in guilty pleas, took five days.

  Chris Nadolny had had to prepare his notes, his memories, yet again and travel to Sydney. Out came the lists of trees now long since felled and burned, the possibility of crushed native grasses almost no one had noticed, the deaths of koalas known only from their scat and their silence. Nadolny stood and gave his testimony. The courtroom was a chamber of weary ghosts.

  THE ASSUMPTION IN LANDOWNER Australia, as it has been since Europeans declared it terra nullius and took it, since squatters ignored government boundaries but cried for protection in frontier war, since the Land Acts and their obligations faded into historical memory, is that owners own. ‘If government continues to restrict and compromise farmers’ agricultural production with environmental regulation for the benefit of the wider community,’ said an aggrieved Mitchell Clapham of the NSW Farmers Association, ‘then government has to be prepared to pay for it, not farmers.’

  Who is responsible for the environment? Not the landowner who exploits it, apparently. The government ended up squeezed between the demands of landholders and the pressure of conservation agencies. There should have been less bureaucracy as self-assessment entered the system, but compliance and consultation and arbitration were still the government’s remit. They were also paying off the effects of the damage wrought by the landholders. Mining companies usually must pay royalties to access the assets of the earth that belong to the nation. Farmers, some of whom strip the earth just as effectively, do not have to do the same.

  In the spirit of equity, the new New South Wales environmental legislation carried not only greater encouragement for farmers to clear vegetation, but more money to counter its environmental costs. Part of the package saw the New South Wales government pledge hundreds of millions of dollars over the coming years for conservation and rewilding. Native vegetation and its wildlife could be destroyed, and others would fix it up.

  Meanwhile, only critically endangered species of ecology were protected, and not necessarily their habitat. Paddock trees, those isolated sentinels, gnarled and riven, were not. They are cities of insects, spiders and reptiles, as well as being havens for birds and mammals. Paddock trees shelter, and their deep old roots enrich the earth, drawing nutrients back to the surface, regulating salinity, circulating water, stabilising the soil. The trees exhale oxygen, the roots attract nitrogen-fixing bacteria; the manured grass beneath a shady paddock tree is sweet. And as landmarks and stepping stones for animals, they form connectivity with other scattered trees. Ecologists propose protecting them from grazing as part of integrated landscape management, as they were treated by First Nations people.

  The early settlers found clumps of trees in open country to be ‘picturesque’, and the sight still stirs nationalistic affection in many of us: great twisted river redgums or ironwoods, elders of the country. They are monuments to endurance and grandness.

  They are mostly mentioned in agricultural literature as an obstruction. Modern farming equipment runs best in straight lines, and ‘tramlining’ techniques abhor an impediment. The New South Wales Department of Planning, Infrastructure and Environment website says that paddock trees could be lost entirely from southeast Australia within the next hundred years. It does not mention all the dozers pushing them over, fifty a day and counting.

  In a decade of work as an ecological surveyor, Phil Spark has seen several extinctions from the local area. Rock wallabies, once prolific, are vanished from this side of the Range. The booloorong frog population, much reduced. The yellow-spotted bell frog on the Southern Tablelands, the hooded robin, almost gone. He noticed little plant species too, medics and panics and grasses, vanishing from the roadsides where they’d once been crammed.

  For the brigalow, in shrunken belts and miserable pockets, strung along travelling stock routes and espaliered along fencelines, the margins of farmland have been some of the last refuges. Now they too were open for clearing, virtually to the fenceline, under the exemption for routine farm maintenance needs. ‘So that landscape,’ says Spark, ‘that’s already down to probably 5 per cent native vegetation, they can now clear it.’

  Many of us probably imagine that there are nature reserves full of scrub somewhere, old bushlands preserved and safeguarded, stocked with all types of native flora. Spark is blunt. ‘There’s no reserve. Or a fraction of a reserve. So as far as some kind of adequate reserve system that covers all the vegetation communities, there’s next to none. So yeah, we’re down to what’s left on private properties and travelling stock routes.’

  Almost everything else is already gone.

  ‘SOLASTALGIA,’ EXPLAINS GLENN ALBRECHT, an Australian phi
losopher, ‘has its origins in the concepts of “solace” and “desolation”.’ Solace, he writes, is associated with comfort against distress; desolation is a distress associated with abandonment and loneliness. Albrecht conceived the word by contemplating the relationship between environmental change, ecosystem distress and human distress, and coined the term in 2003 to describe the phenomenon, perhaps ancient but certainly modern, of a sense of ‘homesickness’, a skewed nostalgia, that may be felt not when one is far from home, but when home itself has become unhomely and strange.

  It was invented to express the feelings of people living in the Upper Hunter, not far from Moree, where, over twenty years, rich farming land was gouged for open-cut mines and power stations. The landscape was changed utterly, and people felt not just melancholy, but powerless. Their grief wasn’t new in that place: 150 years earlier, First Nations peoples had seen their homeland pounded out of shape, their totem animals bloodied, their own care of country broken. Sickness, madness and despair come from such sorrow.

  As then, not all of us react with concern to the phenomenon of rapid, voracious development across the globe. For some, it is the mark of progress, a triumph. For others, it appears God’s work. For yet more, it represents the glory of personal profit. There must be people who gaze at the prospects of the Earth in the twenty-first century and feel confident and good. Their horizons gleam bright beyond fields as golden as those of Elysium.

  IT WAS 7.30 A.M. ON Alaine Anderson’s property. The air was clear on a Friday morning. Then, with no warning, a helicopter appeared, bashing through the trees, whipping the air, with rapid gunfire coming from it. Bang, bang, bang.

  It was neighbours, though not the Turnbulls. They were shooting for feral pigs. The old landowners have been succeeded by ‘a young generation who don’t give a stuff about anyone else: everyone for themselves’.

  Kangaroos are also fair game around there. Country people believe they ruin the crops, though a 1992 CSIRO report found the extent of their impact hard to determine. If shots are fired from a helicopter or a moving vehicle, locals consider the hunting to be outside regular restrictions.

  Now live fire spattered from the helicopter doors. ‘The noise was unbelievable. It was just like Vietnam,’ Anderson says. ‘It was so scary, and I was in tears.’

  After comforting a backpacker who was working on their land, Anderson rang the neighbour. ‘I said, “It was so scary and you gave us no warning: what’s happening? I could have been riding my horse over there.’”

  The neighbour was unapologetic. ‘I’ll do what I bloody well like,’ he said, and slammed the receiver down. Anderson rang the police. ‘I was shaking like a crazy thing.’

  Then the neighbour’s wife called. ‘She said, “Oh, we are so responsible.” The self-righteousness: “My husband would only ever shoot the other way.”’

  Anderson and the neighbour agreed they would let each other know in future if there would be shooting. She took the backpacker outside. ‘We walked the boundary there and we saw only one dead pig: they probably only got a couple of pigs.’ They found a live koala, too. ‘How would they know if they had shot that koala or not – they wouldn’t.’ In the past, her husband has had to euthanise a kangaroo with a rotting gunshot wound, and they’ve found roos shredded by plunging through wire fences in panic at the sound of hunting sirens. She has a little graveyard on her property for the animals that die in her care.

  Between landclearing and changes to the climate, the animals have almost nowhere to go. With the drought of 2018, Anderson said, the number of koala joeys being brought in for care was overwhelming. They were starving, sunburnt, thirsty. A local vet would travel hundreds of kilometres a week to collect injured animals on a volunteer basis.

  Anderson was fretting about the seven koalas in her care. Before they could be released they had to pass stringent tests for chlamydia and other diseases. Anderson needed to get them out and breeding, but there was nowhere to take them. ‘If we have them too long we get into trouble,’ she said, ‘but we can’t just throw them out to die.’

  There weren’t many possums and kangaroos when escaped convict George Clarke and surveyor Major Thomas Mitchell first got to the area. By the 1870s, the Aboriginal peoples had largely been run off or killed. The smaller fauna were being devastated: foxes and dogs killed native birds and mammals such as kangaroo rats, curlews and wallabies. ‘Native bears’ (koalas) and ‘tiger cats’ (quolls) were disappearing. As cultivated pastures spread, native grasslands were crushed or covered with scrub. Later, the tracks of tractors caught and spread pest predators and seeds, and took small lives.

  Across the border in Queensland, a joint report by the RSPCA and WWF released in late 2017 found that, in the two years since loosening of regulations on landclearing in that state, an estimated 90 million native animals had been killed, largely by land-clearing activities. Most died painfully. Bulldozers weighing up to 100 tonnes typically charge over uneven ground, tipping into hollows and blind spots, and pushed trees crash, fall and splinter. Others simply starved. ‘Nothing else in Queensland,’ said Mark Townend of the RSPCA, ‘causes as much suffering and death among animals as the escalating destruction of bushland habitat by bulldozers and other machinery.’

  The report found that in the five years to 2014, more than 10,000 Queensland koalas were admitted to wildlife hospitals – out of 15,000 believed to exist in the state.

  Australia has some of the world’s most distinctive wildlife, and the worst mammal extinction rate in the world. We are home to one out of three mammal extinctions in the last 400 years, according to the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. That’s thirty native mammal species in only 200-odd years – three in the past decade alone, with a further seventeen likely in the next two. And those estimates do not include the devastating losses in the Black Summer bushfires of 2019–20. Another 30 per cent of the mammal species that have survived (not counting the innumerable bat species) are at risk. Insect populations, called ‘the other 99%’ of biodiversity, are crashing from habitat loss and chemical pesticide. The WWF’s ‘Living Planet Report 2018’ shows that wildlife populations across the world have halved in only fifty years, and a million species are at risk of disappearance. What is described as the sixth extinction may indeed be the beginning of the last.

  It is a swift, silent vanishing, and it can be deceptive. While cutting eucalyptus leaves for her koalas, Alaine Anderson has begun to notice animals she has never seen before, in thirty years of living in the district. They are not magically revived populations but survivors venturing from the back hills, prised forth by habitat disturbance, clearing and drought. The broad-acre properties are coagulating: there are huge ‘exclusion centres’ hundreds of kilometres wide, Anderson says. There is the potential for those farmers ‘to actually wipe out all the wildlife inside those properties, especially out here, where they might only be a ten-thousand-acre property: you’ve only got to turn the water off, and everything but the birds will die. And no one’s supervising it.’

  The specific will serve when it comes to the sequestration of property rights, of individual landholders and their personal profit, and of certain prestigious rural properties. But when it comes to particular endangered ecological communities such as greater gliders, brigalow or even the unique Great Barrier Reef, influential landowners and politicians with vast electorates take a sudden interest in landscape-scale offsetting or claims that threatened nature is plentiful in other places.

  In the slow violence of local permissions, clearing in tiny, negligible pockets could, over time, destroy highly protected ecological communities. The red goshawks and koalas and skinks would quietly be isolated into smaller and smaller patches until, one day, there would simply be nowhere for them to be.

  THE INCONVENIENT PRESENCE OF native vegetation on good farming land is managed thus: we move it somewhere more convenient. The solution is conceived of as a market-based mechanism, in which ‘incentives’ can boost ‘cost-effective environm
ental goals’. Of all the models of offsetting available, the New South Wales government developed the Biodiversity Assessment Method (BAM), which, it explains, can ‘assess impacts on biodiversity values’ by using accredited assessors to balance ‘risk of impacts on biodiversity from a proposal’ with gains from ‘improvements in biodiversity values from management actions undertaken at a stewardship site’.

  The Environmental Defenders Office describes BAM as the weakest of all assessment models because it does not require like-for-like replacement. A destroyed area of scrub need not be replicated, the particular mix of plants replaced. Developers who need to offset can also make payments instead of replanting. Whole types of vegetation might be exempt from needing to be offset at all. And the level of significance of an ecological community is irrelevant: development can be made right on habitat for critically endangered species, so long as some offset or payment is made. If, that is, the clearing of the vegetation is reported at all, if it’s not discounted under non-scientific grounds, if it’s even assessed as coming under the rubric of the legislation.

  When Hugh Possingham resigned from the Independent Biodiversity Legislation Review Panel in November 2016, he warned about the draft legislation’s reliance on offsetting. ‘Biodiversity offsetting, by definition,’ he wrote, ‘means no net decrease in the quality and quantity of native vegetation.’ The new codes were too permissive, allowing for all sorts of exemptions, such as ‘continuing use’. Under the proposed legislation, he warned, broad-scale clearing in New South Wales could double, and much of that vegetation would not be replaced.

  BAM relies almost entirely on vegetation mapping. Maps provided by the government show where low-conservation value areas are: especially, what might be summarily cleared or is not regulated. Peter Hannam at The Sydney Morning Herald reported in early 2016 that there were doubts over the reliability of the maps. Several local councils, instructed to use them for project planning, commissioned an independent review from a respected ecologist to test reality against the mapped. John Hunter found that the mapping was only about 17 per cent accurate in identifying some of the approximately 1500 individual plant communities in the state. The maps, combined from satellite, aerial and locally derived data, missed whole sets of endangered species, and mislocated others. They were, Hunter said, ‘inherently unusable’ for environmental assessment.