by Kate Holden
ALISON MCKENZIE IS RAISING Alexandra and Jack alone. She grew into activism with the introduction of the new biodiversity laws, which she felt made a travesty of Glen’s death. When the Cultivating Murder documentary was finished, with the help of crowdfunding, in 2017, she went to many of the screening events around New England and various cities, speaking to the audiences. Her friends were concerned at first, wondering if it would prolong the trauma, but McKenzie is committed to making change. She and Pearce adopted a favourite brand of Scotch: Glenlivet, which they like to call ‘Glen Liveth’.
The year after Turner’s death, a scholarship at the University of Newcastle was established in his name by the New South Wales government, offering a stipend to a student of natural or sustainable resource management. A few months later, a memorial bench was erected at a beach in Port Macquarie, where Turner had loved to run his dogs.
In September 2018, Robert Strange and Glen Turner received Australian Bravery Medals. Strange had already received a gold medal from the Royal Humane Society of NSW, and this second honour was for his selfless, courageous behaviour under danger. Turner was posthumously commended for valiant conduct in his attempts to escape with his life. ‘Our family is proud and humbled to receive this honour for Glen,’ Alison McKenzie wrote in a statement for the media. ‘We try to focus on the man we knew and loved, rather than the final frightening half-hour of his life.’ She accepted the medal from New South Wales governor David Hurley.
A sombre Strange said that ‘what was done on that day’ would never be forgotten. The medal, he explained, was for the families that had suffered.
The coronial inquest never happened. The coroner was satisfied the OEH had made changes, and little more was to be learned.
Every year, McKenzie and her children plant a tree for Turner, on the anniversary of his death, his birthday, Father’s Day. In decades to come, there will be a little forest.
THE VIRGIN BRIGALOW IS gone. Clovers and lucerne grew in its traces, and cattle chewed that away. But the suckers and whipstick are there, defeating axe and dozer, chain and plough, napalm and fire, as they always have.
Salt has soaked through the soil, which has breathed away its carbon and its nitrogen. White crusts appear, and glazed earth washes away, flowing through rivers and out into the sea, leaving gullies and scoops. Invasive species finger their way across the fields and along the margins. Seeds blow into ground too stunned to receive them, and birds fly out looking to build nests in trees that are no longer there.
By 2009, the 7 million hectares of 1788 were half a million. Another three-quarters of a million were mixed brigalow growing back; most of it was just starting out after clearing.
There is still a little brigalow left. It is difficult to predict, says the country’s expert in the species, Henry Nix, but it’s possible it might one day regrow. ‘Brigalow,’ he writes, ‘can wait.’
ROBERT STRANGE’S ELDEST SON, Joshua, was in the audience when Strange appeared on Insight in 2018. His father spoke frankly. ‘Every day,’ he said, ‘there’s something that reminds you.’
Jenny Brockie turned to speak to Josh. When the camera found him, the young man, wearing glasses and a youthful beard, was fighting tears. He composed himself and spoke. ‘I lost my dad for twenty-four months after the event,’ Josh said, in a voice constricted with feeling. His two younger brothers were in their early teens, going through their own stresses; he was doing HSC. He’d never been close with his mother, Josh said, and he relied a lot on his dad. ‘To not have a father figure there – through no fault of Dad’s own …’ He swallowed and made himself keep going. The pitifully small outings, the child urging the father to attempt a walk in the fresh air, a visit to the shops. The hopes raised; the humiliation of the defeat. ‘The hardest thing,’ Josh said, glancing at his father, ‘was not knowing what was going on, and not being told.’
Listening, Strange gazed back at him, or lowered his eyes to the floor, a look of the palest sorrow on his face. He said his reticence had been intended to protect the kids, as much as just not wanting to speak about the pain. He nodded, his eyes solemn. ‘While you think you’re protecting them, you’re probably hurting them.’
IN JUNE 1938, WHEN Ian Turnbull was a little lad in the district, the anthropologist and linguist Norman Tindale spoke with and recorded two of the last fluent speakers of Kamilaroi language, a man called Harry Doolan and two other male Elders.
They told him a Dreaming story. They mumbled and hesitated at first, speaking the old words because they hadn’t used their language for a long time. The only written record of their language was from a hundred years earlier – translations of pages from the Bible.
It took days for them to remember the right words, to shape them clearly in their mouths. They told the first part on one morning, the ending the next day. Slowly, the shape of the story was firmly formed again. The story was one that men would tell their children at a campfire at night.
It tells of Emu and Brolga: their envy and trickery of each other; the cost to them of their avarice. In most versions, parents are deceived into killing their own children. And in one, the Brolga must not only have her children killed for eating food she might eat herself, but she must eat them, too.
That story belongs here on the gold plains of the northwest of New South Wales. In Roman mythology, from the other side of the world, where white Australia’s roots lie, stories tell of the god Saturn. That stern father rules the world of agriculture. But he is best known in a Goya painting: Saturn devouring his own children.
I WAS WALKING WITH my five-year-old son down the street one day as I was writing this book. We passed some spindly twigs carefully planted on the nature strip. They were new. ‘What are those?’ he asked.
I groaned. They were replacements for dozens of callistemons, the bushy red bottlebrushes popular in gardens and as street trees, found up and down the east and west coasts. But here no longer.
For years we had been walking down that inner-urban road to find the rough branches of the callistemons wrenched from the trunks and strewn across the footpath. Shredded joints remained pale on the trees. In the night, every few months, someone liked to rend these trees to pieces, yanking them until they cleaved, one after the other, down the line of the street. Sometimes whole trees were split in two, but somehow they survived; the wounds sealed, the trees endured and regrew. The consensus was that the damage was the work of drunks on their way home, but there was a relentlessness, a savagery required, that spoke of a deeper intent, a particular hatred for those trees. It went on for years. Someone wrenched those trees in the night, pulled with all their body weight, kept on pulling until something tore.
The council decided they’d had enough. They put notices on the surviving ones, proforma text saying they were ‘diseased and/or growing badly’, and one morning workers chopped them all down and pushed them into a shredder. In their place were planted spindly introduced species, those leafless twigs my son observed: Japanese elms, which would eventually grow to 13 metres but take years to cast shade; which would spread, casting leaves into the gutters and onto parked cars; which would nourish no native animals. Around the whippy little things someone had carefully packed a mulch of the shredded callistemons.
‘Why don’t Australians like native trees?’ my son asked. I kissed him, and tried to explain.
CODA
In March 2012, Ian Turnbull was interviewed in his lawyers’ offices in Moree, soon after contracts were signed on ‘Strathdoon’ and ‘Colorado’. Glen Turner was there, but Gary Spencer, the special investigations officer for the OEH, did the running. Turnbull was candid, unperturbed by the questioning. He admitted he’d put on extra workers to finish a bout of clearing before the stop-work order came through and that, indeed, they’d finished the job.
‘So what you’re saying,’ said Spencer, ‘is you were trying to get as much done as you could before the stop-work order came.’
Turnbull shrugged. ‘Yeah. There’s an
economical equation in there that we’ve always got a deadline to meet with banks and so forth, so we had to try and get somewhere. The area we’ve cleared plus the ground that’s – that was already cleared – should get them through this year until we can do some negotiating with the EPA or the Gwydir Catchment Authority. Otherwise the place will have to be sold to someone else.’
‘Can you tell me what your intention is with this property?’ Spencer asked.
‘To turn it into broadacre farming country,’ explained Turnbull, ‘because it’s surrounded by broadacre farming properties. It’s not as though it’s an isolated property by itself, surrounded by undeveloped country.’
They asked if he had any last questions or comments. Imagine the old man standing, straightening his shoulders in his blue check shirt, speaking man to man, at ease in his lawyers’ room, having seen off the interrogation, having explained his comfortable view of his actions. ‘I’m hoping,’ he said, ‘you blokes have a bit of compassion so that we can clear it up and make it a farm for this younger generation. That’s about it, yeah.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing this book has been an exceptional education for me: very daunting but an enormous satisfaction. I am honoured to tell the story of Ian Turnbull and Glen Turner, the sorrows that came from their encounters and the lessons that may be learned. From the twilight scene on Talga Lane and my writing desk in suburban Melbourne I came to walk outwards in my research to the distant lands of Britain, the deep past of the First Nations legacy and the wide, gleaming wheatfields of New South Wales. It has been a revelation of place, identity and history to me. I finish it in a new home, in a new part of the continent, hearing the sea in the distance and looking out to a mountain dark with forest.
I’ve come, too, to a new understanding of my own creation: grown in a city that often resembles Europe, raised fond of lawns and English flowers and romantically habituated to the bare flanks of stripped country, I’ve learned to notice our native landscapes newly, and to comprehend my own ‘shifting baseline’ as I contemplate the future of the nation my son will grow up in, compared to the one I knew as a child; my lifetime alone covers nearly one-fifth of the period of white settlement in Australia. We face existential crisis with climate change, and everything is now to be reshaped. I was a city girl: now I see that I am as formed in nature as any brigalow.
The story of Ian Turnbull and Glen Turner is such a painful one that many involved struggled to speak of it. I am very grateful that Alison McKenzie, Fran Pearce, Rob Strange and Les Slater all generously agreed to share their experience and recollections with me. Phil Spark and Chris Nadolny were both endlessly patient with their expertise and recall of events, and Alaine Anderson took time in her busy day to talk. Others spoke cautiously on condition of anonymity, and I would like to thank JD, BO and JM, women of the northwest who spoke of life on the land and offered a female perspective on a very male narrative. From the OEH, former staff Simon Smith, John Lemon and John Benson, and Leah McKinnon at the Border Rivers–Gwydir Catchment Management Authority, lent their insight, while Andrew Picone at the Australian Conservation Authority also contributed information. Appreciation, too, to the four blokes at a Moree cafe who invited me to sit, bought me a coffee and told me of local life.
Inexperienced in research in legal archives, I was enormously and patiently helped by Anna Cooper at the Office of the Department of Public Prosecution; Sonya Zadel at the Office of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales; and Linda at the Environment Line enquiry service at the OEH, who helped me untangle the OEH’s evolution. Michael McNamara at the Gwydir Family Historical Society, and the staff and archives at the Moree Community Library, were very helpful as I delved into the town’s past.
I would like to acknowledge the diligence, insight and work of Gregory Miller and Georgia Wallace-Crabbe for their documentary, Cultivating Murder, and Tanya Howard, who wrote the article that encouraged Morry Schwartz at Black Inc. to contemplate a full-length book.
Here, too, is my chance to show appreciation for the devoted and clever journalists on whose work I have hugely relied: Peter Hannam of The Sydney Morning Herald; Michael Slezak, Anne Davies, Adam Morton and Lisa Cox of The Guardian; Brianna Chillingworth of Moree Champion; Kerry Brewster, then of Lateline; and the various others who covered Ian Turnbull’s murder trial and its aftermath. I also thank George Main and Cameron Muir, who wrote thoughtful and attentive histories of Australia’s landscape; and Tom Griffiths, Libby Robin and their son, Billy Griffiths, who have all inspired me with their robust environmental histories, not to mention friendship, encouragement and example.
Julia Carlomagno and Chris Feik at Black Inc. were steady, exquisitely patient editors: Julia in particular never wobbled, even when I presented her with a manuscript twice as long as expected and a hundred times more complicated. Her attentiveness, canniness and expertise, even during national crisis, was a lesson in editorial virtue. I’m also thrilled to have Mary Callahan’s beautiful cover design.
This book was written and edited on the country of various First Nations: the Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation in Narrm (Melbourne) and particularly the Yalukut Weelam (Port Phillip); the Gayemagal people of Kai’ymay (Manly); and the Wodi Wodi people of the Dharawal/Tharawal Nation in the Illawarra.
In my personal life I am always grateful for the presence of the following, and especially for their support as I toiled over this work: Vanessa Cross, Alice Williams, Matt Pritchard, Simon Tong, Ravenna and Shoshanah Keller, Cheryle Moore and Jeff Stein, Stacy Hoffman and Gino Mazzone, Daniel McGlone and many others for indelible friendship and just for taking an interest; Lee Kofman, James Norman, Chloe Hooper, Don Watson and Anna Krien, for friendship, writerly sympathy and advice; Jane Novak, for being my agent and friend and writing me the most encouraging email I’ve ever had; mentor and exemplar Erik Jensen; mentors and friends Anna and Morry Schwartz; Simeon and Tritian Glasson for hospitality as I visited court in Sydney; Julie and Mark Mills for the amazing house; Isabella Tree and Sir Charlie Burrell for hosting us at Knepp; the Fondation Segré and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva for accommodating us; St Kilda & Balaclava Kindergarten for keeping my son safe and joyful as I worked; my cousin Tracey Callander, for the wise conversations about the world and help with my son as I wrote; everyone who asked kindly how the book was going, and listened as I told them. And as always, I’m full of gratitude for my gorgeous parents, Margot and Geoff, who helped with transcriptions and research and who provided love and coffee, and my patient and funny sister Jen, who bravely took the cat.
With all of the above guidance and help, it goes without saying that any errors contained in this book are my own.
I always write to music, and I encourage people to share with me the cinema soundtrack wonders of Max Richter, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Ramin Djawadi, Clint Mansell; Justin Hurwitz’s score for First Man; and the melodies of folk musicians Davy Graham, Duck Baker and Bert Jansch, Barry Dransfield and Fairport Convention, Shirley Collins, Pentangle, Anne Briggs, Judee Sill, Sibylle Baier, June Tabor, Linda Thompson, Bert Jansch and Martin Carthy. If anyone wants the sound of a countryside road in winter twilight, I recommend Richard Skelton’s eerie soundscapes.
Last of all, I thank my incredible partner, Tim, who had the library I needed in his head or on the bookshelves, who made me lunch and listened to me, who has written his own exemplary histories and who is a beautiful, loving, exciting part of my own. And to our shining son, who will inherit all of our life, and live in the Australia that we have made – and the one yet to be loved.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Carrington, Damian, ‘$1m a Minute: The Farming Subsidies Destroying the World – Report’, The Guardian, 16 September 2019.
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——, ‘Look After the Soil, Save the Earth: Farming in Australia’s Unrelenting Climate’, The Guardian, 22 October 2018.
