Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  The land grab was not just because the land was there. After all, it had been there – and known by potential colonisers – for several centuries at least. But for the first time the vast landscape could be made to earn money from the new breeds of merino and merino cross sheep, and the new markets for their wool and meat.

  In those days of slow sailing ships and no refrigeration, Australia was too far from international markets for large meat animals like cattle to be profitable. But there were now three other factors: free convict labour to manage vast mobs of sheep, a large and growing market for selling foodstuffs, especially fresh or salted meat, to whalers and sealers, mostly from North America, and the tough merino sheep bred by Elizabeth Macarthur while her husband, John (one of the New South Wales ‘Rum’ Corps), was in England facing legal charges for participating in a duel, or was back in Australia but mentally incompetent, needing to be physically restrained. Macarthur earned the name ‘father of the sheep industry’, and that first tough little herd of merinos was his brilliant idea, but it was his wife, and then his children, who mostly ran the properties, and kept breeding even tougher sheep who could survive not just the heat but had the stamina to walk miles each day, browsing among scattered tussocks for enough to eat, than get back to water by dusk without dying.

  Those long-nosed sheep not only produced good quality and fine wool for the established woollen mills of England, they also fed the crews of whaling and sealing ships. That now almost forgotten industry was the foundation of much of Australia’s early wealth, and the reason why it was profitable to grab so much land, so fast.

  The wealth from whaling

  It’s 1959 and I’m standing with Dad on the beach south of what is now Surfers Paradise, but back then was just sand dunes. I’m wearing my red and white flowered ‘cossie’; Dad is in his swimming trunks and Panama hat as he points out the great humps of passing whales.

  In 1959 there were still whaling stations around Australia – and there were still whales, though nowhere near the vast numbers of a 150 years before. By the mid-1960s, when my father and I again stood on the same beach, there were no whales to be seen and growing worldwide agitation to stop the whaling industry.

  These days, when volunteers try to rescue stranded whales and a healthy hunk of the tourism industry relies on whale watching, few probably realise just how massive the whaling industry was, especially in the early years of colonisation.

  Sealing and whaling, primarily for oil but also for seal fur, was our first really profitable industry. Even though the whale oil fortunes went back to the lands the whalers came from (mostly the United States as well as France and England), the whalers needed to buy food supplies, blankets, new sails, repairs, candles, clothes and barrels as well as imported supplies like lamps, leading to the growth of a middle class of merchants. By the 1820s whalers operated all along the eastern and southern coasts, while sealers operated in Bass Strait and the south coast of New South Wales, with much of the seal oil going to China. Their crews were American, French and British too, but there were also escaped convicts, Maori, Aboriginal and Tahitian men, either volunteers or shanghaied while drunk or simply hauled on board. Once at sea there wasn’t much you could do to get home.

  The whalers set up camps on coasts or islands, coming ashore with guns and clubs and even packs of dogs, hunting game to eat while they boiled the blubber for oil, kidnapping Aboriginal women, killing the men, spreading disease, all beyond the reach of the colonial authorities or their own government. Not that the colonial government tried to control them – they had too few resources to even try, and the industry was too valuable to antagonise whalers who might get their supplies from New Zealand instead.

  Sheep, both for meat and wool, were also too valuable to the colonies to put any realistic limit on the squatters either. In the 1820s and 1830s the price of wool was high in England and the price of meat was high in the colony. The power and wealth of the squatters grew. They had almost, or totally, free land, and free labour – the convict shepherds who lived in bark huts on damper and mutton – plus a ready and eager market for both fine wool and meat. Banks gleefully gave loans to any bloke with a belt for his trousers to buy the sheep necessary for him to take the short journey to land ownership and riches.

  By 1837 Governor Bourke gave into the inevitable: squatters could have as much land as they could use and pay a pound an acre for their homestead plot, with a levy on the number of sheep they had – calculated, of course, by the squatter himself. It was a land without fences, mostly without law, and seemingly boundless opportunity.

  But – there is usually a ‘but’ when you talk of a short road to riches – the myth of ‘infinite land’ was about to lead the colony to disaster.

  Australia’s boom goes bust: Part one

  Australia’s first major economic depression in the 1840s is often put down to the English recession and the subsequent steep drop in the price of wool and wheat, combined with financial ineptitude. Those contributed to the disaster, but its major cause was drought and graziers’ deep misunderstanding of the land they had acquired.

  In 1839 the lush years swung back to dry, the grass withering in the east as well as South Australia. Creeks dried up, sheep died. And 1840 was as dry. Australian squatters should have been able to ignore the lower demand and, hence, prices for wheat and wool. Their land properties cost them almost nothing to run, labour was free, and a property beyond the settlement boundaries was too far away for a Sydney bank to foreclose on, especially now when the land itself had no resale value.

  The farmers should have been invincible, able to sit out the lower prices for a decade or more. Yes, much of their stock would die, but the tougher ones would survive to breed when the rain returned. Even in the late twentieth century an advocated strategy for drought-affected farmers was to ‘let the weak ones die’; that way you ended up with a drought- and heat-resistant strain of stock. Some older farmers still practise that form of management, not often explicitly or publicly, though with easier transportation there are now more attractive and viable options.

  Drought can be a disaster both for farmland and for farmers, unless the land is very carefully managed. Stock tend to congregate by waterholes, under trees or by gates where they’ll be fed. Their hooves compact the land, their droppings sour the ground and, when rain finally comes, the earth is too hard for the moisture to penetrate, the last of the grass wearing away. Weeds, plants unpalatable to stock, survive once the grass has been eaten, and then flower and seed and spread so that even when a good year comes the paddocks may be filled with weeds, not grass. Eradicating the weeds takes either money or labour when the farm finances have already been eroded by drought. One disaster leads to another.

  But back then sheep could wander from waterhole, to waterhole, with just a shepherd or two to keep them in one big mob – as long as you knew where the next good water might be. There were far more trees for shade in the 1840s, unlike the paddocks of the 1870s onwards, with a token tree per paddock, or even none.

  The low prices of the 1840s should have meant an interregnum where fewer great fortunes were made, but it should not have been the disaster that it was. Without the drought and poor land management, the young Australian economy could have waited out the drop in wool and wheat prices and the hesitancy of speculators in land.

  The major problem was the drying up of what the newcomers had regarded as permanent waterholes. The colony had known drought before, but those who were fresh to the colony would not have known how dramatically lush, well-watered country here can become bare and waterless in a matter of months. Whole lakes, like Lake George in New South Wales or Lake Eyre in South Australia, can stay dry for decades. What look like substantial rivers can become dry beds.

  Many parts of the United Kingdom don’t get more rain than much of Australia, it just comes more regularly, and as a gentle seep rather than hard torrents puddling at the soil. The United Kingdom’s lower temperatures also mean less evaporati
on. A district’s soil moisture index is usually a better guide to how much can be grown rather than an area’s annual rainfall. Now the creeks and waterholes the squatters had thought would always be there were vanishing. Without the network of streams it became impossible to move the stock long distances to better pasture and water, or even to drive them to Sydney or Adelaide to sell.

  A further problem was the eating habits of sheep. Kangaroos, wallabies and wombats don’t pull grass out by the roots, or graze as close to the ground as sheep. This means that when there is a small amount of rain – the showers of a millimetre or less that are the most common precipitation in east coast droughts – the native perennial pasture grows just enough to provide a small amount of feed. Many native pasture species are drought resistant, with deep roots and oil-rich narrow leaves that resist moisture loss in the heat and dry.

  Wallabies, wombats, possums and koalas have adapted to browse more unpalatable foods when their preferred foods are scarce. Kangaroos and emus can travel hundreds of kilometres with far less expenditure of energy than short-legged sheep, especially if the latter are burdened with heavy fleeces. Sheep stay pretty much near water and turn drought land into desert in the process.

  Sheep also don’t survive well if they are not shorn annually. The wool grows over their eyes and they become ‘wool-blind’. Ewes with heavy wool can become ‘cast’ when they are pregnant, unable to get up from the ground and dying within twenty-four hours. Sheep have to be tended even when they don’t provide an income. Sheep do excellently in Australia in good seasons; in bad seasons you need to be a kangaroo to survive. The pasture also needs kangaroos to survive.

  Kangaroo droppings contain grass seeds, and dried roo droppings last for ten or even twenty years, and perhaps much longer. When it rains the seeds can germinate again, along with the microflora that the soil needs to let the roots most efficiently take up nitrogen and phosphorus. Australian pasture and kangaroos have co-evolved for hundreds of thousands of years, if you count the ancestors of modern-day roos. In the hands of the inexperienced, sheep can destroy the land.

  By the 1840s the vast harvest from previously untouched whaling and sealing grounds also dropped sharply – too many animals had been killed in too short a time for the populations to stabilise. And the market for whale oil for lighting and whalebone for corsetry was drying up as gaslights became widespread in cities and underwear fashions changed. Whaling and sealing were mobile industries that could move elsewhere. When they did, the colony’s most valuable meat market also vanished.

  In Western Australia the new colony begun by John Stirling was in trouble, too. Like Sir Joseph Banks, Stirling had totally misread the land. The land around Perth was too sandy for most European crops, and many of the native pasture plants were toxic to sheep and cattle. Ships found it hard to navigate the Swan River, and the harbour at Fremantle didn’t give enough protection from storms to their ships. The nearest good harbour was at Albany about four hundred kilometres away. There were good reasons why the Portuguese and Dutch had not colonised Western Australia or even explored it for possible mineral wealth or spices. No grass then, and no grass now.

  The 1840 depression was bad. Banks failed, including the Bank of Australia. The value of land sales dropped from about £324,000 in 1840 to about £9000 in 1841. Instead of sitting back while convicts built them a homestead, squatters were reduced to boiling their sheep for their fat (tallow) to make soap or poor quality candles. It was a filthy, stinking job – literally. The stench of carcasses spread for miles, as there was nothing to be done with the unwanted meat except let it rot. Even the crows and goannas were too few to feast on it. But at least tallow could be exported.

  Squatters walked off their runs – one was sold for a pound of tobacco and two gallons of rum. Robert Dulhunty’s run named Dubbo on the Macquarie River in the central west of New South Wales was offered to anyone who bought a thousand of his sheep. By 1842 six hundred people (from a free – and white – population of about 100,000 in Australia at that time) had been declared bankrupt. Wages had been halved.

  Land sales and rents were a large part of colonial government revenue. In desperation the colonial governments responded by making the land grab even easier. By 1844 New South Wales squatters could stay on the land they’d taken without paying for it for five years. After that they could farm twenty square miles for £40 a year. The generosity was copied in other colonies. In 1846 the Australian Lands Act was passed – finally the squatters could get long leases on the land they occupied but hadn’t bought.

  A lesson in Land Use 101

  The more successful squatters may have had Indigenous help – I say ‘may’ as there is no way to quantify how often this occurred. There are accounts of plenty of Indigenous maids and stockmen and of Indigenous guides showing ‘explorers’ to good grazing country or water supplies. Much of the best land was ‘discovered’ with Indigenous guidance, as were tracks like those across the Blue Mountains (explorer William Charles Wentworth spent much of his childhood with Indigenous companions).

  In Chapter 14 I explore the times Indigenous people warned colonials of floods, but there were many more intimate friendships, too: the men who took Indigenous wives or mistresses, or the lonely white women who grew close to the local dark women. White settlers didn’t boast about these relationships. They didn’t say, ‘I built my homestead and home paddocks here because an old woman with black skin told me that the waterhole never grew dry.’ It’s not written. Perhaps, somewhere, it is still remembered. Or perhaps it never happened to that degree. But the Indigenous people I have known have been generous with their knowledge of the land, sharing willingly, freely. I suspect it is a piece of lost history, a thousand friendships and conversations that marked our land but whose details we may never know.

  * * *

  Sometime in the 1990s, Alice Springs

  A very old woman has come to the library to meet her granddaughter. Somehow we begin to talk about European explorers. ‘And those three buggers,’ she said. ‘The ones with camels.’

  ‘Burke and Wills?’ I ask.

  ‘There was another, too.’ She shakes her head. ‘Auntie told me we tried to tell them to turn back. We threw stones at them. Wrong time of year to go into country like that. Go there, they die. The young men, they threw spears at them to try to get them to stop. They all died,’ she said.

  ‘I think one lived,’ I said.

  ‘Not for long, I reckon,’ she said. ‘Just wouldn’t listen.’

  * * *

  The golden days of rain and hungry mouths

  The economic future of the colony would be saved by the gift of the land that every history book recognises: gold. The gold rushes that began in 1851 meant mouths to feed, and (if they were lucky) the money to spend on it. Miners flocked to Australia.

  And it rained. With no rain there’d have been no gold rush (see Chapter 10). With so many miners to feed and the rain-lush decade of the 1850s, both small and large farms became profitable again.

  By 1865 Australia produced the world’s finest wool. The demand for mutton to feed miners had meant that it was also profitable to cull your sheep, selling those that produced less fine wool and keeping only the best. Despite the romance of gold, half of Australia’s export earnings even in the 1850s came from wool.

  With green grass, improving wool breeds and assured markets, the political and financial power of the squatters grew. At the same time land was opened up to selectors, small farmers who ‘selected’ 160 acres of land, often from the land the squatters had regarded as their own. Many squatters retaliated by selecting land in the names of their children or even servants, who were then forced to sell it back to them by ties of family feeling, self-interest or outright intimidation.

  There had always been small farms – market gardens and orchards, with a few sheep or cows, dairies, even some wheat – near the towns and cities. Now smaller farms spread outwards, once again misunderstanding the land and trying to impose
a European model of land use: big estates balanced by small mixed farms.

  It was an impossible dream. Most small grazing properties would be sold to make larger, more viable properties, or even abandoned. The small farms that survived were those that grew vegetables or fruit or ran dairy cows, often producing butter and cheese to make the small holding viable. The introduction of fast sailing ships (clippers) and refrigeration in addition to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 also made it possible for meat, butter and cheese from the new cheese factories, tallow for making soap and candles and hides, and even fresh fruit to be sent ‘home’ to England.

  Chinese goldminers often stayed and began market gardens, too. Many were indentured, owing years of income to businessmen back in southern China. Australia offered racial prejudice but also a greater degree of freedom, and the chance to make not just a good living but a fortune, as Sydney’s Quong Tart and Braidwood’s Nom Chong family would do, even transcending the deep and often violent British hatreds to become beloved members of the community. Chinese market gardeners knew how to grow vegetables in arid country, building ‘water races’ or channels that ran for kilometres from creeks or swamps. By 1880 there were Chinese market gardens on the edges of all the major towns. Without them, large-scale settlement where children didn’t die of scurvy or Barcoo rot would have been impossible.