The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  ‘… many landholders and their advocates welcomed news …’: Clarry, 2018. Some might have wondered why landholder lobbies felt so oppressed. In late 2015 and early 2016, the federal environment department under then minister Greg Hunt wrote to fifty-one prominent landholders in Queensland who had state approval to clear land near the Great Barrier Reef, asking them to show how the proposed clearing wasn’t unlawful under the act. The existence of the letter got around. The farming lobby exploded. Nationals figures began shouting. Within two months, an apology was issued to the landowners. The environment department, assistant secretary Shane Gaddes wrote, ‘deeply’ regretted any distress caused. Enquiries had now shown that at least eighteen of the landowners didn’t need government approval. Department staff would meet other owners and talk it through. Labor and the Greens, the letter concluded pointedly, were blocking the creation of a streamlined process for handling clearing approvals to ‘remove the bureaucratic double handling that occurs when the Queensland government issues permits but ignores national environment law’ (see Rendell, 2015 and Slezak, 14 March 2018). But as The Guardian journalist Michael Slezak explained, in three years just three voluntary referrals to the federal government had been made, during a period in which land-clearing was dramatically increasing. ‘The story each time,’ he wrote, ‘is of some sort of action taken to reign in clearing, either by government bureaucrats or even by the minister for the environment, and then outrage from a farming lobby group, backed up in parliament’, usually by Nationals MPs. Josh Frydenberg, Slezak wrote, ‘has repeatedly talked up the federal government’s powers to control land clearing, but action has not yet matched the tough words’ (see Slezak, 14 March 2018).

  ‘… the authority of Dr Wendy Craik …’: Department of Environment and Energy website. Craik is highly experienced: she’s chaired the Climate Change Authority and the National Rural Advisory Council, been a board member of Dairy Australia and was a former executive director of the National Farmers’ Federation. She has a doctorate in zoology and a diploma in management; she was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2007 for, among other achievements, her service to the natural resources sector. She was assisted by then Assistant Minister for the Environment, Melissa Price, who had previously worked in the farming and mining sectors.

  ‘… Dr Craik took submissions from stakeholders’: EDO and John Williams quoted in Bettles. The Angus Taylor #Grassgate saga continued for months, including reports of a meeting with Frydenberg’s office, prompting the office to ask if protections for critically endangered grasslands might be quietly scrapped. Taylor himself had an interest in the company that was investigated for the illegal spraying, but insisted any meeting had had no connection with his own situation.

  ‘The government should pay farmers and landholders …’: Craik’s report can be found at www.environment.gov.au/epbc/publications/review-interactions-epbc-act-agriculture-final-report. Meanwhile, a 2019 report established that globally, only 1 per cent of the at least $700 billion (£560 billion) of public subsidies for farmers was used to prosecute environmental aims. Much of the rest contributed to what the authors, using OECD data, guessed was about $12 trillion a year of costs to environment, human health and development (see Carrington).

  ‘In the past twenty-five years alone …’: Vaughan; Cox, 1 November 2018. Most of the remaining wild places are within just five countries: Brazil, the United States, Russia, Canada and Australia. Each of those five has governments that have stated their devotion to increasing productivity and development, though US president Joe Biden has committed to answering what he called in his inauguration speech ‘a cry for survival’ from the planet, ‘a cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear’. It remains to be seen if his focus will be solely on climate change and transition to renewable energy economics, or address other concerns related to sustainability.

  “by the simultaneous restoration and rehabilitation …”: Albrecht. Soliphilia, Albrecht says, is ‘the love of and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it’. See Albrecht’s post dated Thursday, 19 February 2009 on his blog Healthearth.

  ‘… Europe is seeing a sudden increase …’: Flannery, 2018.

  ‘… human presence can, perhaps, chaperone healthy ecology’: It is worth remembering that, after the cataclysms of the Blitz in London, the firehoses watered seeds stored in the Botanical Gallery, where they had been dormant since collection 150 years earlier. Others were activated in bomb sites. Heated by the blaze of incendiaries and watered by desperate firemen amid carnage and demolition, flowers not seen since Napoleon, not smelt since the Tudor era, bobbed their heads in the sunshine of hundreds of years later. Even tumult and violence can germinate revival.

  ‘… meat, cereals and vegetables may be grown in laboratories’: Taking inspiration from a NASA concept, in 2019 a Finnish company announced its successful production of Solein, a flour-like substance containing carbohydrates, fats and high levels of protein, manufactured from only carbon dioxide, water and electricity. Its production is carbon-neutral, retail costs low and ingredients prolific (see Hughes).

  “The Sympathetic Mind leaves the world whole”: Berry, p. 186.

  Chapter 24

  “Our land management has changed forever”: Anderson.

  “It’s gone from quite a substantial piece of habitat …”: Miller.

  ‘… why aren’t the koalas there?’: Anderson.

  ‘Under the new legislation …’: McKenzie, 2017.

  “the most poorly managed species in eastern Australia at present”: Quoted in Slezak, 7 November 2016.

  “the National Party have decided to make this their hill to die on”: Quoted in Foley.

  ‘… the koala … was facing extinction …’: King.

  ‘Yet though the state government had a $45 million Koala Strategy …’: The strategy pledged $20 million to buy 5000 hectares of koala habitat, while permitting the clearing of seven million hectares of it across the state (see Blanch, Sweeney & Pugh).

  “I have no idea how many koalas were killed …”: Cornwall.

  ‘Eco law is evolving’: Gleeson-White. Drafts of the Rome Statute, listing international crimes against humanity, included ecocide as a crime until it was dropped under pressure from the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands. But ten countries do recognise the offence, and activists are lobbying to have it reintroduced to Article 8. It would bring perpetrators of ecocide to the Hague.

  ‘… first proposed by … Christopher Stone’: Monbiot.

  ‘the ambivalence … between arrogance and abjection continues’: Grear.

  “Who will listen?”: Anderson.

  “low energy streams began carrying sediments …”: Muir, p. xviii.

  ‘… a local of Bingara … suggested a memorial …’: Stubbins & Smith.

  ‘… one of the major regions of archaeological disaster …’: OzArk.

  ‘Briggs-Smith believes the treasure was returned by a farmer …’: Hinchcliffe.

  ‘The Moree Tourism website says …’: ‘The Kamilaroi’, Moree Tourism.

  ‘Look, the man said sorrowfully’: Main.

  “Wouldn’t it be lovely if someone were guiding us”: Anderson.

  “leave a legacy of sustainable farming and robust environment”: Quoted in Miller.

  “When it’s been dry for a while …”, “The climate’s been changing for 20,000 years”: Lucy, pp. 26–27.

  “There will be more”: Anderson.

  ‘But a photograph of a homeless koala …’: Wharton.

  “Can’t we stand back now …”: Anderson.

  ‘Ran and his wife, Jenny, have put their property …’: Jenny Mitchell is also an OAM for her work with country women’s groups in the South Pacific. One prominent visitor to their property, Dr Terry McCosker, estimates that at the carbon pricing models of 2016, sequestering two tonnes of carbon per hectare per year would make the soil itself worth more than cattle raised on
it (see Nason, 2016).

  “If you had a workshop …”: Spark, 2017.

  ‘The Turnbull family welcomed the news …’: Cornwall.

  “concerned landowners”: Ellicott & Brown. Marshall has pushed for ‘regional codes’, allowing some areas more licence than others. There is already a pilot scheme at Walgett, west of Moree. ‘Because of the scale of the farming enterprises out there,’ said David Witherdin, chief executive of Local Land Services, which grants permissions, the codes ‘don’t really work as well as they could’. That may be because there is so little native vegetation left: in the northwest, ‘unexplained’ clearing jumped about five-fold in a year (see Cox, 2 July 2020).

  “I’m totally gutted by it”, “There’s no doubt … this is an emotional issue …”: Ferguson & Ingall.

  ‘Some 27,000 hectares of woody vegetation …’: Commission DPIE, 2019 and Nadolny, 24 October 2019.

  ‘In the region covered by Moree Plains Shire Council …’: Morton & Davies, 2019.

  “The current environmental trajectory is unsustainable”: Samuel.

  ‘… with a grab for final approval …’: Hannam, 29 July 2020.

  “This is a process that will take some time to complete …”: Quoted in Cox, 28 January 2021. The report is available at https://epbcactreview.environment.gov.au/resources/final-report

  “Seems everything we do is a waste of time …”: Spark, 2019.

  ‘By 2017, the property was estimated by Cory himself to be worth about $5 million’: Chief Executive v Cory Ian Turnbull.

  ‘None of the remediation …’: Anderson.

  “Ian Turnbull was an evil man …”: Hannam, 11 August 2019.

  “prime farming land”: See listing: www.domain.com.au/-colarado-croppa-creek-nsw-2411-2014808843

  ‘Money from the sale of the other properties will be used to pay … Robert Strange and Alison McKenzie …’: Strange v Turnbull. By June 2020, the estate of Ian Turnbull had failed to make the settlement payments to Strange and McKenzie. In October 2020, the New South Wales Supreme Court ordered the estate’s executor, Robeena Turnbull, to pay the settlements, plus hundreds of thousands in interest, and legal costs (see Chillingworth, 14 October 2020). As this book went to print, the money still had not been paid.

  ‘Roger and Annette sold …’: Schlesinger.

  ‘She and Pearce adopted a favourite brand of Scotch’: McKenzie, 2020.

  “Our family is proud and humbled …”, “What was done on that day …”: Alison McKenzie and Robert Strange quoted in Chillingworth, 2018.

  ‘The coronial inquest never happened’: McKenzie, 2020.

  ‘… the seven million hectares of 1788 were half a million’: Lucas et al., 2014.

  “Brigalow … can wait”: Nix.

  “Every day … there’s something that reminds you”: Robert and Joshua Strange in Piatek.

  ‘… the anthropologist and linguist Norman Tindale …’: For a discussion of Tindale’s methodology and legacy, see Monaghan, Paul, ‘Laying Down the Country: Norman B. Tindale and the Linguistic Construction of the North-West of South Australia’, PhD, 2003, University of Adelaide, available at https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/21991/2/02whole.pdf

  ‘It tells of Emu and Brolga’: Austin & Tindale; see also ‘Burraalga bulaarr Dhinawan / The Brolga and the Emu’, Guwaabal: Yuwaalaraay and Gmilaraay Stories, available at http://yuwaalaraay.org/stories/burraalgaV2.html.