The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  When the new laws came into effect in August 2017, the Nature Conservation Council of NSW and EDO were ready with a challenge: the state government’s environment minister, Gabrielle Upton, had signed off on the legislation too late in the process, apparently without sufficient diligence. The implication was that the environment had been an afterthought. There was a spat in cabinet. In fact, according to The Australian, Minister for Primary Industries Niall Blair apparently shouted at Upton, in front of Premier Gladys Berejiklian and other ministers, ‘Why didn’t you bloody sign off on it in time?’ The code was invalid, conceded the government in March 2018. The concession meant a second allegation, that the laws didn’t address the legal principles of ecologically sustainable development, was never contested. The legislation was withdrawn, but only for a night. The very next day it was remade, without amendments, and carried on. Busy farmers like Lalli might barely have noticed.

  ONLY THE DAY BEFORE Roger’s claims over the ‘Yambin’ road were rejected, Robert Strange’s case for damages was heard in the Supreme Court of New South Wales.

  It was 28 September 2017, a year and three months since he had filed his documents alleging Turnbull had committed criminal negligence, assault and false imprisonment. He’d begun it when Turnbull was alive. Now the farmer was dead. But Strange would sue the estate.

  The case lasted one day. His lawyer, Eugene Romaniuk SC, faced off against the Turnbulls’ stalwart, Todd Alexis QC, who would be back again the next day as barrister for Robeena and Grant in the case against Roger. Alexis had been mastering the Turnbulls’ affairs for years now, and his grasp of their claims and counterclaims was extraordinary. But in Robert Strange, he was facing a very credible witness. This man’s life had been comprehensively ruined by the afternoon in Croppa Creek.

  Strange had not worked since Turner’s murder. The photographs he took of the burning stacks were the last task he did for the OEH. After the encounter with Turnbull, he kept mostly to his house, frightened and jumpy. He ensured the doors were always locked. Messages from friends went unanswered; he didn’t have the energy for the conversations. Inside his house, he wept, alone. Telling that story again and again wore him out. There was no question of him returning as a compliance officer.

  His family was concerned. When Strange had to leave the house, he needed one of his boys with him. He couldn’t bear to do it alone. Eventually, his oldest son moved in with him permanently.

  Six months after this court hearing, he would tell SBS’s Insight program, on an episode devoted to the trauma of witnessing a violent crime, that for a long time after that day in Talga Lane he was braced for death: ‘Expecting someone to come through the door with a gun. Expecting someone to shoot through the windows of the house. Expecting phone calls.’ He shook his head before the camera. ‘Paranoia and anxiety, absolutely rampant.’ His ex-wife had taken him in for a while after he returned from Moree. It gave him some sense of normality, living there with her and their kids, as they’d done before. But he watched for a gun barrel through the window. His boys in the firing line.

  He was, he’d written in his victim impact statement, constantly anxious, and full of self-doubt and anger. ‘On a personal level I have become a recluse,’ he admitted frankly. ‘My anxiety levels are at a constant high. I have little if no energy to cope with the rigors of daily life that I have needed to get help in to do the basics of daily life like cleaning etc.’ There were days when it was not bad just to make it from bed to the lounge room. A good day now was to do a little gardening, or play a game of golf. ‘It’s amazing,’ he told Jenny Brockie on Insight, ‘what something can do to your brain. You believe you’re a reasonably sane and measured person. And then a switch goes off, and that’s no longer the case.’

  His health underwent a major change after the events of 29 July, he noted. ‘I have suffered a heart attack which I believe is a direct result of the stresses that have been placed upon me from these events, have been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder which has had a major impact upon my life,’ he wrote in his statement.

  Those with post-traumatic stress disorder experience both terror and numbness. They relive memories compulsively. They expect danger at any moment, and their bodies are constantly charging with stress hormones, rinsing them with cortisol and adrenaline. At the same time, they can suffer depression to the point of immobility. Even though they are acutely aware that any moment might be their last, should it come, that moment may well be spent lying listlessly on a couch, or crying in a toilet cubicle. They cannot stop awful images condensing in their minds. Strange would for a long time see Turner lying on the cold ground, the smudge of soil on his brow, the fluid that gushed from his mouth when Strange tried to compress his heart. Strange would remember forever walking out into the road – the pale rust road, gone grey in the darkening landscape – the shadows around him, as headlights came down Talga Lane and he stepped out, hands up, eyes squeezed shut.

  He would relive Turnbull turning the gun towards him three times; feel a bullet sing past his ear. He would always remember how dry his mouth was as he begged for Glen’s life, and how the first thing he did before he went to assist the dying man was to drink some water himself. He will never forget how lonely it was, waiting there in the dark for someone to come and help him.

  He had seen counsellors. He had seen psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors. He assumed modern medicine would solve the problem, but it could only help a bit. ‘People call it, “you wake up with nightmares”,’ he scoffed to the television audience. ‘Well, I wake up with reality.’

  For his Insight appearance, he dressed in a neat shirt and shorts. Staying indoors had put weight on him. His large blue eyes were steady in a pale face under stiff, short hair. He reported the crime to the audience with the official language he had learned during fifteen years as a police officer: ‘there was no more shallowness of breath’, ‘he had passed away’.

  Preparing for court, he concluded his victim impact statement in firm, clear handwriting. ‘I was at a place in my working life when I was extremely comfortable and proficient with the role that I was undertaking, but that has now all been taken from me and my future which once looked bright and planned is now bleak and dark.’

  It would be years before he could return to any kind of paid work.

  The Turnbulls, inevitably, fought Strange. In a statement written from jail before he died, Turnbull explained that he didn’t know Strange, and hadn’t known he was with Turner until he saw him on Talga Lane. ‘During the ordeal,’ he wrote, ‘my focus was on Mr Turner. I had no intention of causing any harm, injury or death to Mr Strange. At the end, I recall telling him that he could go and that I would be waiting at home for the police. I regret any harm that I may have caused Mr Strange and I wish to apologise to him for this. As I say, it was not my intention to harm Mr Strange in any way, as I had not had any prior dealings or issues with him.’

  Todd Alexis did not contest the count of criminal negligence. Turnbull had neglected to maintain Strange’s sense of security and wellbeing when he pointed a gun at him and threatened to shoot him, when he’d ignored Strange’s pleas to lower his weapon and when he’d left him in the dark without assistance. The judge immediately awarded Strange damages on that count.

  But the charges of false imprisonment and assault were contested. The was no dispute over the facts, but about how much awareness Turnbull had had of his own actions. Could he have stopped himself, or was he substantially mentally impaired that evening on Talga Lane?

  This was a chance to revisit the argument that had failed at the murder trial. A win here, if Turnbull were still alive, would certainly have helped an appeal on the murder conviction. It wasn’t clear, Alexis argued again, that Turnbull had intended to harm Robert Strange. Turnbull didn’t know him, hadn’t shot him – had considered him superfluous to the scene, even, Alexis might have said, but tactfully did not.

  The defence tendered David Greenbe
rg’s psychiatric evaluation statements from the murder trial. Greenberg had thought Turnbull had major depression at the time of the shooting, with abnormality of mind; his apparent lucidity was part of a ‘dark sunglasses’ perspective common to sufferers of major depression, a faux-rational conviction similar to the sudden cool levelheadedness of a potential suicide.

  However, the judge pointed out that the defence of substantial impairment had been rejected at the trial, and the court had accepted Strange’s evidence at the time. ‘Move back or you’ll get one in the heart,’ Turnbull had said as he swivelled his gun towards him.

  ‘Don’t move. I’ve told you get back or I will fucking shoot you too,’ he said the second time Strange attempted to get to the car.

  And the third time, as Strange tried to shield his colleague and shots fired through the canopy and sank into the ute beside him, as Turnbull raised the gun and pointed it directly at Strange’s head: ‘I fucking told you, I will fucking shoot you. Now get back.’

  The charge of assault does not require that physical violence be done to a person. It was, the judge observed, sufficient ‘that [Turnbull] intentionally created in Mr Strange an apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact’. Alexis could argue that Turnbull hadn’t intended to cause Strange harm, but he couldn’t claim that Strange hadn’t felt frightened that he would be hurt. The same logic applied to the false imprisonment: the physical intimidation and verbal threats were equivalent to a lock and key.

  In the end, the judge couldn’t grant Strange the satisfaction of summary judgement on all three allegations: Turnbull deserved to have the charges of assault and false imprisonment heard at a trial, but Strange’s team decided to go no further. A settlement agreement was finally reached in October 2018. By 2020, the money still hadn’t been paid. In October that year, Robeena Turnbull had to be ordered to arrange payment to Strange, and Alison McKenzie, for their separate dues. As the following year began, the matter was still not concluded.

  22

  Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over all the earth.

  —Genesis 1:26

  It goes without saying that farmers are not immune to the destruction of the land. They have a unique vantage from which to see it.

  Farmers today see changes to rainfall. They see drought setting in again. They see dust storms and thunderheads once more rushing over the horizon. They see koalas stumbling out onto roads, the desiccated soil falling from their palms in clumps, the water running across glazed earth to flood elsewhere rather than soak. They see weather patterns changing, and many understand that this is because of climate change, and many know that carbon emissions from landclearing and degraded soil are significant. They see that where forty years ago they put half a litre of glyphosphate on a hectare of soil, now they’re up to two litres. They see their friends and family dying of cancer after a few decades’ exposure to wet chemical spray. They see the empty stool at the pub where a friend who took their own life used to sit. They see the young people leaving the land.

  The violation diffuses like vapour over the world. American scholar Rob Nixon has written of what he calls ‘slow violence’ – the ways in which damage from toxins, deforestation and climate change cascades gradually through echelons from the privileged world to the developing one. He examines ‘disasters that are slow-moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world’, and how they are invisible to the very people who benefit from them, but borne by those who don’t. He speaks of how continuity and consequence challenge our attention span, of how we have almost come to consider environmental damage as inevitable.

  Few traditional family farmers – those raised on the land and of it – can face the agony of comprehension that a lifetime’s work has been a lifetime’s destruction. And few of the rest of us, in towns and cities far from farms, comprehend that our lifetime’s consumption is the same.

  IN 1955, THE VICTORIAN National Parks Association came under the direction of Dewar Wilson Goode, grazier and passionate conservationist. Born in 1907, in the time of the scarifying Federation Drought, his first years on the land in South Australia were revelatory. ‘Droughts and soil erosion are devastating the arid pastoral properties of Australia,’ he wrote urgently in 1935, in his first published work.

  Non-Indigenous landholders, Goode realised, had taken a wrong turn. He developed an approach of ‘sustained productivity basis’ in arid regions: renovating unstocked or ruined properties, replanting trees and repairing water erosion. ‘The original greenie’, his son called him upon his death in 2002, by which time he had published or broadcast more than a thousand articles and lectures on conservation. From a grazier on devastated land, Goode became one of the founders of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

  Since the settler James Atkinson published encouragements to heed native plants and resources, there has been a quiet fuse burning of farming more sympathetic to the peculiarities of Australian ecology. It has detonated in the past thirty or so years.

  Every crisis of Australian agriculture has been noted in its time: the scrub incursions, the topsoil erosion, the salinity catastrophes, the extended droughts, the invasive pests, the soil degradation. At each cataclysm it was obvious to some that methods had to change or reverse. But how? The nation’s top scientists set themselves to investigate. Their every solution seemed only to propel the trajectory further into hazard. And as technology led Australian agriculture into more and more specialised forms, a seditious questioning began to occur in whispers from the margins, speaking of what Charles Massy, farmer and author of Call of the Reed Warbler (2017), terms the organic mindset.

  As Massy explains, what would become the ‘organic’ stream of agriculture pushed ahead after World War II, as ‘sustainable agriculture’, a riposte to the postwar industrialisation and conservative ambience. This fed in steady stages into counterculture movements, the New Age and the modern enthusiasm for things natural, traditional and ‘eco-friendly’. By the 1980s, massive industrialised farming provoked a revulsion both instinctive and educated, and out of that reflex has come Massy’s passion, the ‘radical and transforming challenge’ of regenerative agriculture. His book, published quietly, has become a sleeper hit among scientists, conservationists and a surprising number of farmers.

  Regenerative agriculture imparts richness in the land, works in an attentive, humble, responsive mentality. It is an agriculture within nature, not against it. ‘The key difference between industrial and regenerative agriculture,’ says Massy, ‘is that in the former humans generally believe they can control the chemical inputs while ignoring the biology. In the latter, the biology comes first.’

  Leaves and grass blades are all solar panels, Massy emphasises. To get more energy in the system, it has to be seized from the sun by plants: the ambition is having more plants for longer. Ploughing stubble, overgrazing or bare fallow is the opposite of that.

  Massy interviewed farmers and landholders across Australia who, like himself, had become disillusioned by accepted practices and curious about alternatives. The alternatives were found by renegade experimentation, collaboration, meticulous research, gut instinct, trial and error, forensic diligence and bloody-minded contrariness. One farmer may utterly change his or her approach while every neighbour, snorting scornfully, persists with chemical farming; in other places, networks of sympathetic experimenters will coordinate. Many report spectacular results that are visible in satellite images – healthy green in otherwise seared landscapes.

  The main elements of regenerative farming are cover crops, crop diversification, reduced chemical and fertiliser use, rotational grazing and reduced or no tillage. One of the simplest adjustments is to return to the ancient relationship between animals and crops, a complement broken with the challenges of agriculture in the colony and the long obsession with grazing stock. Massy
’s book is full of examples of permutations, including the keyline system, which uses water flow across the contours of hillsides to retain moisture in soil. There is also ‘pasture cropping’, invented by two neighbours, Colin Seis and Darryl Cluff, four hours’ drive south of Moree, who put various methods such as direct drilling (a system of seed placement) and cell grazing together. Seis summed up his approach: ‘The thinking is that the only way you can grow a crop of wheat is to totally remove everything from the paddock to give that wheat every advantage you can. What we’re talking about here is the complete opposite.’ He and Cluff call this ‘farming without farming’.

  The late Michael Jeffery, the country’s first national soil advocate, wrote a report released in 2018 agreeing with a long line of scientists and farmers that soil regeneration is crucial. Our water, vegetation and soil are national strategic assets, and the world’s six existential challenges – food, water and energy security, climate change abatement, biodiversity protection and human health – depend on soil security. Regenerative farming is ‘a no-brainer’, Jeffery told media. ‘If we don’t go to regenerative agriculture, we will continue to mine soils, particularly of carbon. This is the great loss and it is not being admitted. If you continue to mine carbon, you are shot.’ But ‘if we get agriculture right,’ he said, ‘we could pull down as much carbon as we are emitting.’

  Vegetation clearing and land degradation contribute 20 per cent of annual global carbon emissions. The carbon that is stored in vegetation and soil, however, is three times greater than what’s held in the atmosphere. The healthier the soil, and the more microbes and worms and insects and fungi within it, the more carbon it can store. Some experts estimate that the world’s cultivated soils have lost up to 70 per cent of their original carbon, through oxidisation from exposure and devastation to soil biota such as essential mycorrhizal fungi. But, stunningly, perhaps just 15 per cent more carbon in the planet’s soil could pull down all the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.