The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  A few months later, the full mandatory ten-yearly review of the whole Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act was announced by the new Minister for the Environment, Sussan Ley. The panel included a First Nations Wik-Ngathan representative, an environmental law and policy expert and a public administration expert alongside Dr Craik, but, as conservation groups pointed out, there was no ecologist or scientist of any kind. Its report was due in 2020.

  THE WORLD IS NO longer in the same form as we knew it in as children, and the future is more profoundly uncertain than ever before. Though for thousands of years every generation has changed the world and seen it change around them, it has never occurred at this rate and scale. The trajectories of climate change numb the imagination as they soar off the charts. Ecosystem collapse is no longer a risk but a reality: we numbly contemplate the implications of lack of pollination, water insecurity and habitat loss, as well as greenhouse gas pollution. In the past twenty-five years alone, after 10,000 years of agriculture, humans are estimated to have destroyed a tenth of the Earth’s remaining wilderness.

  Some projections are apocalyptic. Others bet on adaptation. But one thing is certain: human life will not look as it does now. Solastalgia, that vaporous unease, is a gentle word for an experience that might sound like a scream.

  The effect of solastalgia cannot be remedied by going home, as in homesickness, or by amassing mementoes, as with nostalgia; but it can be solaced, Glenn Albrecht suggests, ‘by the simultaneous restoration and rehabilitation of mental, cultural and biophysical landscapes’.

  Stranger things have happened. Tim Flannery describes how Europe is seeing a sudden increase in ‘abandoned lands’ as farming becomes more compact and mechanised, and fewer and fewer people are required or able to live on country, while across the globe, something towards 2 million square kilometres of cropland have already been emptied, most since the advent of industrial farming. Again, the ‘old country’ is instructive. There are 741 million people in Europe, but vast parts of it, like the regrowth in the depopulated region of Chernobyl in Ukraine, are transforming into untended, organic, astonishing wildernesses. In a sense, this is another kind of offsetting: the dense hazards of chemical industrial farming in some areas are what permits large natural reserves in others. And both the agricultural practice and the character of those reserves are potentially changing for the better. Regenerative farming is growing too. It is all, one might even say, improvement.

  The continent is rewilding. Corners of fields are left uncultivated for haven, as they used to be. Programs of reintroduction are multiplying, and people are literally making wilderness, as in Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands, where land claimed from the sea has been devoted to recreating an Ice Age landscape complete with fauna and flora. Wolves are back. Bears are roaming. The population of carnivores, larger herbivores and scavengers are now, Flannery observes, healthier than they have been since the Middle Ages.

  We cannot go back to what it was: Eden is lost. But human presence can, perhaps, chaperone healthy ecology once we accept that we are part of it.

  More astoundingly, it seems that agriculture, now using half of the Earth’s land surface, may one day require very little land at all. Already vegetables are being grown hydroponically – and vertically – with nothing more than water, distilled minerals and solar ‘sundrop’ heat. One day it is possible that crops, even something like wheat, will be cultivated not in the ground or even in hothouses but within the vessels of microbes. Minuscule grains, manufactured from genetic material and nutrients, will be manifested for our convenience; meat, cereals and vegetables will be grown in laboratories, no longer requiring their own agricultural supplies and devotion of water resources. With farming lands vacated for nature, we may yet live once more in a world of settlements separated by wildwoods and grass-plush plains.

  Europe is pioneering once more. The continent that exported so much wrecking and revolution to the world is now a demonstration of how double occupancy is possible. Maybe there is just room enough for an intensity of humans and an intensity of natural environments. We could consider the natural world our habitat, not our garden or our factory.

  It may be that we are at the apogee of malevolence to the Earth. Sympathetic, supportive forms of living are coming through, green buds. The question is, can nature hold on long enough? We are facing the sixth extinction. The trends and rates and trajectories are bad.

  And, of course, we are animals at risk too. Our bodies, our food supplies, our habitats are as compromised as those of a quoll or a koala. We are each ‘a flea in the pelt of a great living thing’, in Wendell Berry’s words.

  ‘The Sympathetic Mind leaves the world whole,’ writes Berry in an essay. ‘It looks upon people and other creatures as whole beings. It does not parcel them out into functions and uses.’

  Glenn Albrecht also coined other words: eutierria is a positive feeling of oneness with the Earth, obliterating distinctions between self and nature in ‘a deep sense of peace and connectedness’, and soliphilia is ‘the love of and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it’. Our own libidinous greed, our bemusement; on the other hand, nature’s imperviousness, its vulnerability, its forgiveness. Solastalgia is a painful wound, the sense of loving something and hurting for it. Its injury is the cost of finding a better way.

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  Moving into the future, forget not that it, like the present, is well served by the past. Let us resolve to preserve what is good, to discard what is not – to improve where practicable and not to damage or destroy. We can value our heritage, have confidence in ourselves and have faith in tomorrow.

  —The Honourable Sir Kenneth McCaw, NSW attorney-general, raised in Bogamildi (near Croppa Creek), circa 1987

  Gunnedah, south of Moree, still bears signs referring to it as Australia’s koala capital. Now, after years of land clearing and the establishment of four Whitehaven mines, it is the coal capital.

  ‘Our land management has changed forever,’ Alaine Anderson laments. ‘If we want to stay, well, we can’t keep putting tens of thousands of dollars into chemicals every month. We’re too small – we haven’t got properties all over Australia where we can mitigate our risks. So I reckon the best way would be to rejuvenate the soil, go back to permanent pastures or rest it or something. We’ve all got to look at these different ideas because what we’ve been doing isn’t working. The soil’s had it.’

  Footage in Gregory Miller’s documentary Cultivating Murder shows Anderson with Deborah Tabart, CEO of the Australian Koala Foundation, comparing vegetation maps of the Croppa Creek area. In the 2008 maps of ‘Strathdoon’ and ‘Colorado’, koala habitat appears to cover about half the properties. Much less was visible in 2013, after the Turnbulls’ clearing. The next map, from only a year later, shows virtually nothing left. The documentary shows a map of the broader region: those green patches of 2008 were among the largest in a sea of cleared, cropped country. Tabart puts it frankly: ‘It’s gone from quite a substantial piece of habitat to virtually nothing.’

  Many Australians, Anderson says, imagine that state and national nature reserves comfortably accommodate sufficient koalas and other endangered species. ‘They look at state forests and ask, why aren’t the koalas there?’ she says. ‘Well, it is too dry, and as climate change increases they are going to need more water. They need 50 per cent water in every leaf, and the stress of the trees produces more tannins and more toxins.’ We don’t want them all on the coast in concentrated strips or reserves, she explains, because there the colonies have other problems, such as retroviruses. Those koalas afflicted with the retrovirus can’t breed, or their young starve. ‘Whereas at least with chlamydia we get a couple of babies sometimes and then mum will die,’ she says frankly. And she points out that Local Land Services had in 2018 given permission for 55 acres of ‘pristine virgin country, koala country, on the river here to be cleared’. On the one hand, the authorities give approva
ls for clearing, and at the same time they fund wildlife rescue programs. ‘It beggars belief, in my book,’ says Anderson.

  Alison McKenzie had also been startled by the reduction in koala habitat when she was given the preview of the new laws in 2017. ‘Under the new legislation,’ she wrote in her open letter to state politicians, ‘there is no protection provided for koala habitat and there is no protection provided for the thousands of mature hollow trees that provide vital habitat for at least seventy-two species.’ The National Parks Association stated dramatically that koalas can lay claim to be ‘the most poorly managed species in eastern Australia at present’. The loss of protection for up to 99 per cent of their habitat was, they said, ‘hugely disappointing in light of their beloved status’.

  By mid-2020, scientists were warning a parliamentary inquiry that the koala, under more pressure than ever following the horrendous bushfires of that year’s Black Summer and the unending onslaught on its habitat, was facing extinction in New South Wales within thirty years. Everyone seemed amazed.

  Just months later, the state Nationals threatened to quit government over faintly increased koala protections. Independent MP Justin Field spoke for many in his incredulity that ‘the National Party have decided to make this their hill to die on’. Yet though the state government had a $45 million Koala Strategy, habitat trees continued to fall, and grey-furred bodies to be crushed.

  ‘I have no idea how many koalas were killed in those clearings,’ Roger Turnbull told The Weekend Australian. ‘But I do know about one incident in June 2012 where [my] father ordered more than 100 koalas to be shot on sight on the Colorado farm and thrown on a fire to burn because he knew the federal inspectors were planning to come and do a headcount that week. What kind of person does that?’

  IF HUMANS ARE NOT willing or able to perceive equity between ourselves and other living things, the law will not privilege those living things over ourselves. What if the law ratified nature? What if it recognised that nature is not simply an object but the equivalent to a person: that it has rights?

  Eco law is evolving. In Ecuador, natural flora and fauna have had rights since 2008, under the argument that this would expand Indigenous rights. New Zealand has granted legal personhood to the Te Uruwera forest, the Whanganli river and Mount Taranaki. The Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India, and the Atrato river in Colombia, have personhood too now. The Fitzroy and Margaret rivers in Australia may be next.

  This ‘raising’ of natural elements to the status accorded humans is an idea first proposed by American lawyer and academic Christopher Stone in 1972 and since championed by the late environmental lawyer Polly Higgins: part land-rights movement, part human-rights push. It sways around the issue of whether nature is important in itself or only inasmuch as its health is significant to humans – the ambivalence within environmental movements between arrogance and abjection continues. But the Enlightenment confidence in nature as object is losing traction. A tree may be easily felled when a dozer gets to work. But the consequences are more powerful than any human concern: annihilating drought and climate change will be the response.

  ‘Who will listen?’ Anderson says bleakly. ‘By the time they wake up, it’ll be too late.’

  IN THE MIDDLE OF 2016, Ron Greentree reportedly sold 10,000 hectares of Milton Downs, just under a fifth of its total area, to an American corporation, Westchester, for $55 million. The price paid only six years earlier was $75 million for the lot.

  In the end, Turnbull was small fry. He and his sons and grandsons are not a dynasty. He hadn’t had enough protection. Perhaps he was even thrown to the pack. Perhaps he was bait.

  THERE IS A PECULIAR quality to time on the land. It is slow as stone.

  The western plains of New South Wales bloomed over millions of years, rising and falling beneath the oceans, gliding around the Southern Hemisphere, heaving up the Great Dividing Range on one side and scorching out the deserts on the other. As the mountains rose, writes Cameron Muir, ‘low energy streams began carrying sediments from the highlands and deposited them inland over millions of years to form a vast alluvial plain’. Under the membranes of sediment, the plains ‘are a palimpsest of abandoned riverways. Plains are old and secretive. You need to read them with a deeper sense of time.’

  Like the light of stars, some of the life in the plains only comes to our eyes millions of years after it occurred. The white pebbles Turnbull saw exposed by erosion under the soil of ‘Strathdoon’ and ‘Colorado’ were rolled in rivers so long dried that they are written in stone. The nutrients that were stored in the soil had accreted for thousands and thousands of years, through floods and droughts in cycles as regular as breathing, as once the land itself rose and fell in the breath of the Earth. What comes up through the skin of the soil takes aeons. What wounds it may take an instant.

  It was with shocking speed that Europeans began our work here. The land rang like a bell under the stroke; with little axes and hooves, we undid the work of millennia. Now, a tiny 230 years later, we make decisions based on the infinitesimally small scale of political terms: three years, four. On farming budgets drawn up in five-year plans; on bank mortgage schedules over twenty or thirty years of repayments. A farming family’s boarding-school fees may determine the destiny of a paddock by the time the child reaches high school. Two bad years in a row may sell a property, while a seasonal fashion or global market price fluctuation will tear out a vineyard thirty years in the growing for a crop that takes twelve weeks. A politician may need to weather a crisis that blows up in days; commitments are made now in thirty-second grabs on the news. Restoration may take thousands of years.

  We have become used to the momentary. The age-old security of time has evaporated. We barely believe in it anymore; the future is as forgotten as the past. Australia, post-settlement, is unsure of how much of the past to clutch. It doesn’t know how to imagine its future.

  We seem so engrossed in our work that we forget how the tools came to be in our hands, how the earth that is in the shovel came to be made, that there must be a place to put that earth, that eventually everything must be laid down somewhere.

  We like to consider our legacies, but not our mortality. One annihilates the other: genetics, bank accounts, property deeds, examples set, heirlooms, influences felt; we have so many ways to persist. It’s comfortable to count the endowments we lay out for our children – the provisions, the advantages and the memories – but more difficult to countenance the damage, the dereliction. Who can bear to imagine they have squandered a fortune and cost their children a future?

  Ian Turnbull mortgaged ‘Yambin’ to help guarantee loans for his son and his grandson and their families. He wanted to set them up, help Grant become secure and get young Cory established. That plan for succession, like the rest of Turnbull’s hopes, ended in Talga Lane when he stopped his ute and put a gun to his shoulder.

  But the Turnbull story isn’t over. The generations go on, but they have spent much time in courts now, arguing to defend their wealth, arguing with each other over its division, explaining why it took blood to protect it. Their legacy is now one of dismay.

  IN 1965, A LOCAL of Bingara, Len Payne, suggested a memorial to the twenty-eight men, women and children murdered at Myall Creek. He thought he’d make something, using the hinges and rails from the Myall Creek stockyards: a gate suspended from a pillar. The community was horrified, and called the idea ‘mischievous and an insult’. Payne continued to privately lay a wreath every year until his death.

  It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the community was ready to recognise what had happened. Elders, local mob, non-Aboriginal locals and descendants of the culprits gathered in January 2000, and a huge granite boulder was placed at the site. IN MEMORY, it is inscribed, OF THE WIRRAYARAAY PEOPLE WHO WERE MURDERED ON THE SLOPES OF THIS RIDGE IN AN UNPROVOKED BUT PREMEDITATED ACT IN THE LATE AFTERNOON OF 10 JUNE 1838 […] IN AN ACT OF RECONCILIATION, AND IN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF THE TRUTH OF OUR SHARED HISTORY. WE WILL REMEMBER
THEM. NGIYANI WINAGAY GANUNGA.

  There are few sites left with traces of the Murri people who lived around Croppa Creek for millennia. The Barwon River Basin, which takes in the Moree plains, is described by one scholar as one of the major regions of archaeological disaster in New South Wales. Time and farming have erased almost all of it.

  But in 2015, an anonymous donor sent an item to local Elder Noeline Briggs-Smith OAM. It was the damaged brass breastplate decorated with a kangaroo and an emu, which had been given in both mockery and a kind of honour, as these things were, to an Elder by a European figure of authority. The ones in Moree are usually from the late nineteenth century or later, even from Ian Turnbull’s lifetime. Briggs-Smith believes the treasure was returned by a farmer who feared a land-rights claim based on its existence. That wouldn’t happen, Briggs-Smith reassured, but she observed the plate had been damaged. It looked, she said, like it had been hit by a plough.

  The lifestyle of the Murri people, the Moree Tourism website says, ‘is to co-exist with, and maintain a balance with nature’. The first Kamilaroi Aboriginal people ‘lived in harmony with the environment’. They hunted some species ferociously, perhaps even to extinction; they set whole landscapes on fire and reconstituted every element upon them. But what they did was maintain a functioning, equitable system that included humans – a threatened species themselves at times – in its calibrations. The Kamilaroi acted, to recall Charles Massy, ‘with love’, and since that time have watched their country transformed in only a few lifetimes more utterly than their ancestors did in millennia.

  For his book Heartland (2005), George Main spoke to a Wiradjuri man from Main’s own region around Cootamundra. The two men stood on country, gazing out. Look, the man said sorrowfully. Look at this ruined garden of ours.