Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  * * *

  Back-burning

  ‘Back-burning’ is different from ‘control burning’. Back-burning is an extremely effective technique to stop an existing fire, as long as you know the terrain, and how the winds are likely to change while you back-burn.

  Back-burning creates a firebreak in front of the fire, to lessen its fuel and improve access for fighting it. Fire burns faster up a hill. If a fire is coming down the slope, a small back-burning fire lit at the base of the hill will also create its own wind that may drive the fire back onto land it has already burnt. If a back-burn is done well, and the fire front isn’t too extensive, it may even mean getting the fire under control reasonably swiftly.

  Local bushfire brigades used to be very good indeed at using back-burning to save farmhouses or stop a fire entirely. Now the organisation and strategy of firefighting units is centralised, and those who know the area are no longer in control of the way a fire is fought. The difficulty in getting permission from far-off bureaucrats to back-burn - a decision that needs to be made swiftly and by those on the ground - means that this technique is now used infrequently. Local volunteer firefighters from families who have fought fires in their area for generations, with the knowledge of how the wind will change or where the fire will spread passed on from generation to generation, may even be denied access to a fire area because it is been deemed too risky to fight the fire due to possible insurance liability. Volunteer firefighters along with the equipment bought by the local communities may now be ordered to fight fires far from their local area, leaving their own neighbourhood vulnerable. Meanwhile, the controllers in their air-conditioned offices wonder why experienced firefighters leave the bushfire brigades, and why younger locals don’t join.

  * * *

  I have watched lightning strike a forest of mostly gully and ribbon gums and seen the fire spread, eating up the ground even as the rain fell. I have also seen lightning strikes in the local plumwood forest in a dry season, where the trees blackened but no fire spread in the fire-resistant system. But if this area had been sprayed with diesel to get a good burn (as frequently happens in a ‘control burn’) at the driest time of the year with a strong dry wind, the fire-resistant species would die, to be replaced with ones that thrive on frequent burning, and are much more likely to burn fast and hot.

  Properly done – that is, a slow, cool burn – control burning does reduce the risk of bushfire in many areas, getting rid of dry grass and thatch and dangling bark. But if the fire is too hot it can kill shrubs or branches, leaving more dead wood to perhaps burn later in the summer in a bushfire. But control burning (well done or bad) will not make an area totally safe from bushfire. In the severe 2003 Deua fires near to my home, a bushfire that started from lightning strikes raged through the same area three times in as many months. After the second fire it seemed that everything that could burn was gone, but then the wind changed, hot and dry and fast. Within hours the bushfire was burning back onto land that had already been burnt so severely that there were no trees or bush, just blackness. But the fire kept burning. This third time it burnt the soil itself, fusing it hard and black. In weather like that, no control burning will be effective.

  As I write this in September 2012, more than a dozen blazes threaten New South Wales and Victoria. All of them are from control burns that gathered disastrous strength in gale-force winds that had been predicted at least ten days in advance. Each of these fires is the result of a refusal to consider easily available data like wind and temperature forecasts, and assess the high fuel load after our two summers of reasonable rainfall. Their severity is partly because these areas have been control burned so often that the only species left are those that can survive fire, and burn hard and hot. They are also a result of our culture’s deeply held mindset that sees ‘the bush’ as homogenous, so simple that it only needs hours or days of study, instead of decades of observance matched with the inherited lore of tens of thousands of years.

  Firestick farming is an attractive concept for every covert pyromaniac or public planner anxious for a big bang result for as little money, training and effort as possible. ‘It’s traditional,’ they say, as they set alight yet another forest. It isn’t – or not as it is mostly practised now.

  The farms that no one noticed

  Were the living larders created by Indigenous women agriculture? Yes, but not as we know it: intensive areas that are cropped either annually or even several times a year, leaving the soil bare in between, or planting orchards into otherwise bare soil. In most parts of Europe and the Americas regular drizzle means that bare soil soon becomes green growth. In Australia bare soil is an environmental hazard, where thunderstorms, wind, or months and even years without rain mean the topsoil washes or blows away. In northern Australia, the deadly bacterium Buckholdereia pseudomallei may also kill if the soil is disturbed. (Our area appears to have a least one similar and potentially dangerous organism.) Possibly those who attempted New Guinea-type agriculture discovered that soil disturbance in the wrong place could kill.9

  The living larders profoundly changed the land, but without radically disturbing the soil.10 Some may have been created over hundreds of years. Others, from anecdotal evidence, may have been planted over one or two good seasons, when old watercourses dried up or river’s courses changed. The most intensive farming was usually around good campsites, often sheltered water sources, but they could also be near areas of sacred significance, where the fruits, medicines or other crop might be needed. They might also be deliberately distant from camp sites, so that too much use wouldn’t damage the plants or soil, and so future generations wouldn’t be tempted to over-harvest. The ‘larders’ often only needed to be planted once, then, if they had been planted in exactly the right place, for hundreds of years new seedlings would take the place of the old trees or bushes.

  Nor were the fruits and vegetables planted in the intensive way we use today, with possibly thousands of similar fruit trees grown together. I suspect the female ‘farmers’ deliberately created areas that would not tempt their descendants to take too much, stay too long or come too often, knowing that the land would not sustain them indefinitely. Sometimes an area would have many different fruits, tubers, seeds and so on that would all be harvested together over a period of weeks. In other places there would be fewer, to encourage a much shorter stay.

  Indigenous women’s farming was not primitive, nor a precursor to ‘proper’ farming. It was a sophisticated, deliberate choice of land use, and that choice was probably made many times over many thousand of years, as women heard about other forms of farming, and rejected them. Early agriculture in the form of domesticated bananas and other crops had begun in New Guinea even by the time that land was separated from northern Australia by rising waters about eight thousand years ago. Indigenous nations traded with those to the north and, as shown after European settlement, were eager to take up new technologies they considered useful, from metal axes to replacing dingos, which don’t bark, with the new dogs that would warn of intruders. Their land-use techniques were diverse and adaptable.

  But one technique they did not employ was carving up the land and using it over and over again each year. They moved on, letting the land recover till they returned. Even some of their ceremonial gatherings depended on the seasons and the resilience of the land. The bunya feasts, for example, varied according to the crop, as bunyas do not fruit reliably every year.

  Most of Australia does not have deep topsoil. Fertile river flats and rich volcanic soil are relatively rare and, even where the soil is fertile, rainfall can be erratic, with droughts that can be decades or hundreds of years long, or violent storms dropping seven hundred millimetres in a few hours. Annual cropping creates bare soil that blows or washes away. It needs irrigation in dry times and as Australia is an old, dry continent, these can be frequent. Our soils are usually salty from millennia of winds from the sea, so every instance of irrigation builds up the salt level a little more.


  The agriculture Indigenous women developed worked, but only for a population of probably less than a million across the continent. This population was limited to what the land could supply in the worst years.

  Unlike many Polynesian cultures (and European ones too), Australian oral history doesn’t have stories of mass starvation. Instead there are stories of dry years when some enterprising person or ancestor or land spirit (I am using a most inadequate English translation for a varied and complex concept here) discovers a new food source, like succulent ant larvae.

  Modern Australian agriculture feeds millions of people, but at a cost. It is a cycle of boom and bust, where shortage in one area due to flood, fire or drought must be replenished from areas far away. It is dependent on fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilisers. On the other hand, it is not necessarily dependent on these. It is possible to develop intensive and sustainable agricultural systems, but to do so we need to go back to the underpinning philosophy of Indigenous farming – looking at each small piece of land, tree by tree and river bend by river bend, rather than trying to impose ‘one size fits all’ policies.

  The ghosts remain

  If you look at our valley even now – after large parts of it have been grazed by heavy footed introduced animals, burnt and otherwise mutilated – you may still see the edible landscape created by thousands of generations of women.

  This was once the most generous of valleys with still pools of waterlilies, the stems chopped up as a vegetable, the seeds ground to a rich oily flour to bake cakes and a thin flaky bread a bit like Central American paper bread, spread and cooked quickly on hot stones. The waterholes were rich in ducks, fish, yabbies, freshwater mussels, the gullies planted with fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, edible grasses, the ridges with stands of stringybark, easily accessible, for weaving string and baskets, the ‘roads’ demarcated with white highways of wonga vine and clematis in late winter and spring, or the easiest ridge to follow marked with a kurrajong tree. Clans met yearly for ceremonies and games as well as feasting, but according to oral tradition and accounts written back in the 1850s the location would rotate so that no area was used more than once every four years here.

  The ‘old’ valley died in the gold rushes. The river was dredged, the trees on the hills chopped down. Only sand and rock and mullock heaps were left, and hills that slumped and avalanched and eroded. But slowly, as the miners moved away, the land stabilised. It even became rich in species again, because so much of the land and its wet gullies were too steep to be cleared or mined. They provided species refuges. First of all bracken, native nettles, water mint and poa tussock grew on the piles of dirt and mullock heaps; then Bursaria spinosa, Hymenanthera violacea, emu bush and others; then black wattle, blackwood and Araluen gum (Eucalyptus kartzoffiana), which grows fast in disturbed soil; then gum trees or dry rainforest species, Backhousia myrtifolia, Dicksonia tree ferns, and thousands of other species. Finally the casuarina trees that grew on the disturbed creek edges are giving way to the red gums that once grew here.

  When I first came here forty years ago, we camped on a small rise by the creek near a fireplace made of a small ring of stones. Years later, my husband, Bryan, decided to make the fireplace more substantial, digging down to properly bed larger rocks. He dug down to sand and charcoal, then more sand and more charcoal, layer after layer …

  Suddenly that small rise made sense. It was, indeed, the perfect campsite. Every few decades or once a century, perhaps, the creek flats would flood and the fireplace would be covered in sand and silt. But someone would build a fireplace there again, till over thousands of years, perhaps, the site slowly became a rise.

  I had always known that the area around the campsite, near where we now have our house, is richer in native food species than the surrounding areas; that the emu and kangaroo berries here are sweeter or more prolific than those five hundred metres away. But after that lunch with the women from down the river, I saw my own landscape in a different way: the tussocks of blady grass, the wombat berries and oval emu berries that taste sweet instead of cardboard-like; the clematis and stands of stringybark; the kurrajongs, Port Jackson and sandpaper figs; the native cherries, currants and grapes; the orchids; and the groundcover herbs that have so many medicinal uses but vanish with few even knowing they are gone once an area has been sown to introduced pasture.

  I live in a land created by tens of thousands of years of women. I had studied it for forty years and still not understood.

  * * *

  How to spear a fish (for blokes)

  A good hunter waits.

  Stand still, above the pool or waves, your spear held a handspan above the water. Keep waiting.

  A good hunter knows if the fish pass at dawn or dusk, if they hide in the warm shallows in winter or sink to the cooler water or currents in the heat. In the pools of our creek, for example, they will head to the small areas of sunlit water to feed at mid-afternoon.

  As the fish passes, wait until its head is a handspan beyond the direction of your spear. Strike down. Lift up. You have your fish. It’s taken an hour of concentration, and you have only one fish instead of the full net the women will have collected in a fraction of the time. But other men will respect your skill and, just possibly, a European artist will be inspired to paint the strong male body, the macho spears, the bloody fish.

  How to catch fish (for women)

  A good hunter waits.

  Cut the lomandra leaves. Let them wilt a little, but don’t let them dry out totally. Plait them, then after the plait is about as long as your hand, weave one of the threads into the start of the plait, so the plaiting slowly turns into a long basket. As you come to the end of each lomandra leaf, overlap it with another to keep the plait continuous.

  To turn your basket into a fish trap, stake it into the waves with a stick at high tide, then wait for the tide to fall. Once a fish is in the trap it can’t get out. It’s no more dramatic than getting a fish out of the fridge (except this way the fish are fresh) and it’s possibly the most energy-efficient way to catch fish in the world. You can use the same trap again and again, and then use it to carry the fish, or bush cherries, too.

  Sit and gossip while you’re waiting for fish to fill your trap, or gather whatever your great-great-grandmothers have planted around the campsite: grass and tussock seeds, berries, murrnong and orchid and young kurrajong roots, medicinal bracket fungi in case someone is ill or a woman is grieving for her dead baby, or the tiny-leafed plants that grow among the wallaby grass that will help stop the aches that come with age and stop old knees swelling so they can walk to the bogong feasts. Or collect the seeds that you chew sparingly, only two or three a day, for the illness that comes with old age, when your ankles swell and you feel breathless and your chest aches like it has been stabbed with a spear.

  There’s no hurry. The food is all around you, the land shaped for your needs, just as your great-great-grandmothers shaped the small stone tools that you’ll use today to grind the seeds before you bake the paste on the hot rocks. If the young girls are going to gather the strands of inner stringybark tomorrow to turn into waterproof fishing line, make them sweets from dried wild cherries, geebungs, Billardiera and Port Jackson figs, mixed perhaps with cooked bracken root or blady grass-seed paste. Eat with laughter and many stories that are part adventure and part instruction about the land.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 5

  Terra incognita: Dreams of gold, and a land without grass

  Theoretically, Australia should have been colonised by invading Europeans long before 1788, like most of Southeast Asia, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Australia had sandalwood, cedar trees, native pepper and spice species similar to the ones that great trading empires were built on, and granite rocks that hinted at gold deposits. For over two thousand years, traders had been exporting spices like cinnamon and cassia from the East Indies (now Indonesia) using the power of the westerly winds to take boats to Africa and
north to China, and from both to wealthy markets further off in Egypt, Rome and the Middle East. By the 1500s, far from Australia being ‘out of the way’ of the colonial powers, the strong winds meant trading ships headed for these spice treasures sailed far south and west near the west Australian coast before turning northwards up the coast to the Dutch East Indies, India and China. Western Australia was well sited to be a supply post on the way to fabulous wealth.

  But western Australia had toxic shrubs1, rock and sand instead of grasslands, where hay could be cut to feed the animals that supplied vital fresh food on sailings ships. Australia also lacked safe, obvious harbours for sailing ships and easily found fresh water. Add to this relentless winds that prevented ships from manoeuvring safely, high surf on long beaches (a delight for today’s tourist brochures but a nightmare for mariners trying to get to shore in small boats), steep cliffs, and coral reefs with teeth on the northerly approaches, which was pretty much the direction that most of the rest of humanity lived.

  Geography defeated colonialism.

  Australia would be ‘discovered’ time after time, usually by accident, when the ships’ captains were trying to head for somewhere else, either the Spice Islands or the treasure land that was variously named ‘Beach’ and ‘Terra Australis Incognita’, or the ‘Great Unknown South Land’, conjured from humanity’s greed, myths and imagination.

  Ironically, it was a series of profound misunderstandings of the region’s geography that led to the first colonial settlement here2: James Cook’s HM Bark Endeavour voyage to seek the ‘land of gold’ that so many stubbornly believed had to be somewhere east of Australia; Cook’s decision not to take the safer north route back to Batavia but head up the east coast instead, despite the dangers of the Great Barrier Reef between the ship and a safe port; a wet year (for the Botany Bay area at least) when he was here which meant that grass grew and springs bubbled; and an eager but incompetent natural historian, Joseph Banks, with political clout and extreme overconfidence, who urged that a colony should be sent across the world to a dangerous harbour with sandy soil and only a small spring of fresh water – far too little water for a colony, even in the best of years.