In north Queensland the first big banana farms were started by the Chinese, who travelled there for gold and stayed to farm along the Barron, Johnstone and Tully rivers, and later around Cairns and Innisfail. In those days every banana crop was planted onto newly cleared land; bananas are a hungry crop, and fresh land would be more fertile. But until the past two decades or so bananas in Australia were also inbred, each banana plant a division of the same ancestor and extremely vulnerable to fast-spreading diseases. Growing them on fresh land was a way to cut down this risk – and a lot of ‘old banana land’ was available for other farmers.
From 1850 to 1878 it appeared that the land would again be ever-generous: wool, mutton, gold and more mutton to feed the miners and the employees in the growing industries. It is in this period that many Australian icons were born, from rags to riches tales of finding a massive nugget, to the lonely drover’s wife struggling to care for her children and keep a small holding going in her husband’s absence.
Death by dust and sheep: Part two
By 1865 sheep (and to a lesser extent cattle) roamed over all but the driest or most tropical parts of Australia. And then came the next drought, compounded again by the lack of understanding of the land and climate.
The 1877 to 1903 drought was tough for both large and small farmers; by the end of the drought Australia had only half the number of sheep that had grazed its grasslands in 1870. But, unlike the 1840s drought, most of the large property owners were able to ride this drought out with off-farm investments and low costs.
Closer settlement meant there was odd-job or seasonal work or shearing for men from the selections. The poems and stories of those times talk of poverty, despair and hardship, but they also tell of a culture where, by and large, the wife and family were expected to stay on the land and keep the farm going.
When the dust storms of 1900 hit there was already a growing realisation that wide-scale clearing might be bad for the land. Clearing still continued (as it does in some parts of Australia even today) but at least by then there was a growing dialogue about what the land needed, as well as agronomists and farmers who actually looked at the land rather than superimposing a European vision on it, or assuming that they could acquire more land to make up for the productivity lost on the land they already had.
Land was slowly being fenced, especially with the new barbed wire. Superphosphate was spread on land from which the phosphorus had already been exported as wool or wheat. New pasture grasses were tried, with combinations that included subterranean clover, which has bacteria associated with its roots that fixes nitrogen – one of the three great elements needed for soil fertility – from the air.
For the first 150 years of white settlement, Australia still lived ‘on the sheep’s back’, a reference to the major part wool later played in our export economy, then on mutton and its by-products, tallow and wool and drippings. Until the 1920s much of Australian life was based on sheep, from the food we ate, to the clothes we wore, to the shapes of our towns and cities, with long straight central roads you could drive a mob of sheep down. Even our long Christmas school holidays mark the time when children needed to be available to help bring in the first and second cuts of hay that would be used to feed the flocks.
The decline of the ‘true merino’
Sheep – especially their wool – remained Australia’s major export until the 1960s, gradually being overtaken by industrial products, then mining. Many of the great squatter families (popularly known as ‘true merinos’) could still trace their family back to members of the ‘Second Fleet’, who had often gained their land through illegal grants and corruption, or to ancestors who had simply squatted and used political pressure (derived from their wealth, and the early franchise that gave the vote only to male landowners) to have the land that they’d taken made legally theirs. Many or even most of those families remained rich but not necessarily from wool, or from wool alone.
Wealth was diversified over the generations, allowing many to ride out droughts, replenishing their fortunes in good seasons or when the price of wool was inflated by war. (War is extremely good for woolgrowers, or it used to be before uniforms began to be made from synthetics. Many of the hideous burn injuries combatants experience now could be reduced if their uniforms had been made of flame-retardant wool.) But, increasingly, grazing families would face the ‘long paddocks’ in dry times, leaving their farm for years to take their stock along roads in search of ungrazed feed, or along established stock routes with water at regular intervals. By the 1960s drought, those who relied solely on farm income were often hard-pressed indeed, or simply walked off the land, unable to sell it. Mansions or large comfortable houses rotted, unwanted and untenanted.
By the 1970s drought, and even more so in the 1990s drought, a canny farmer had a wife with an off-farm income – often teaching, accountancy, pharmacy, working on the council or at the Rural Lands office in town, which was enough to survive on in bad times and helped to pay the mortgage or put the kids through school in good years. Mostly.
But by the 1990s farming – and farmers – had changed. (Never call farmers conservative. Show most of them that a better way works and they’ll take it.) Few farmers these days just ‘do what granddad did’. They study both their land and farming economics and ecology.
And the sheep continue
Mutton production is more profitable than ever. Wool has given way to synthetics and other fibres, but fat lambs – or even elderly merinos – are valued as meat in the emerging markets of Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Some sheep are transported live, so they can be killed according to religious law, or cryovacked, even more efficient than freezing or refrigeration. Fat lamb is one of the most profitable products today – possibly the most profitable.
Merino sheep grow fabulous wool but do not make good eating. Sheep bred for meat have much harsher wool. Using merinos for meat or using crossbred wool in clothes undermined both the popularity of woollen garments and the quality of lamb for eating.
Meat breeds like dorper are now increasingly popular, which are more or less without wool and whose meat isn’t toughened with stress hormones from shearing, so their body effort can go to meat not wool production. Soft, fine merino wool is still prized but it is now for the more expensive end of the market. (Most cheapish wool garments are made of recycled wool, not ‘pure new wool’. Recycling wool is a good thing, but compared to new wool it is harsh and scratchy. Other cheaper and thicker woollen garments are made from coarser wool from crossbred sheep.)
A sheep’s life can be a hard one: scavenging in the dust for grass, roughly shoved by shearers, mulesed, drenched, cut by rough shearing, trucked to abattoirs. But in smaller flocks, and with proper management, the life of a sheep bred to give fine wool can be a good one. If stocking rates are kept to responsible levels with a good range of both introduced and native pastures, it can even be an ecologically sustainable enterprise.
Well-run farms can make money, but only if you don’t have a crippling burden of interest to pay and the seasons are kind – or at least not all of the seasons are bad, or climate change doesn’t relatively suddenly change your land’s tolerances. Perhaps the best way to weather bad years is still to have that off-farm income, whether from a spouse, or by working yourself on contract for others, fencing, road building, digging dams; or by to selling all but your best stock and working elsewhere for the duration.
Increasingly these days, rural land is owned by retirees or urban ‘tree changers’ who can afford high prices for land and don’t depend entirely on its income. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the land. In fact, if they know what they are doing (some do, some don’t), not having to push your land to increase production and run yet another hundred head of stock to pay the interest bills can be very good indeed, especially if there is capital to plant belts of trees and fix erosion gullies. But it can be bad for the social framework of the district. Weekend hobby farmers rarely join bushfire brigades, bring a plate to the Ch
ristmas party, send their kids to the local school, or otherwise become part of the fabric of the area.
Few farms these days support two or even three generations, as they did fifty years ago. For a while, back in the eighties, it looked like all the family farms in my area would be slowly broken up for hobby farms. This was as much due to the rise in lifestyle expectations as it is a comment on our rural economy – the days of kids being happy with plates full of meat and vegies and new shoes once a year have vanished with the rise of the iPod and holiday ‘escapes’ once a year generation. But new industries have grown: alpaca farming, with a second income from alpaca fleece products; cheese-, beer- and cider-making; farm tourism, from holiday cottages to B&Bs. And now it looks as though much of our land might sustain farming even longer than the Ffrenches farmed their acres back in Ireland, with managers eager to listen to their land.
And sheep – once again – is a favourite food on our tables. Tender dorper lamb, or lamb tagines with Moorish spices, Dorset lamb for a beautiful Sunday roast, Wiltshire Horns for lean but tender and tasty meat from all parts of the carcass, or fat-tailed lamb on a spit for Australians whose ancestors came from the Middle East, not England. The sheep farmers still survive, even if both their recipes and their vision of the land have changed.
CHAPTER 10
How we almost won Eureka
In 1850 a giant of a man sailed from Australia to the Californian goldfields. As Edward Hargraves gazed at the granite outcrops and veins of quartz, so like those in Australia, he had a vision: a gold rush for Australia, as spectacular as California’s. He sailed back to New South Wales and informed the inspector-general of police that he was going to discover gold.
The inspector-general was not enthusiastic. ‘A wild and unprofitable undertaking,’ he said.
But Hargraves was sure gold was waiting for him. According to the stories he told later, he didn’t even visit his family in Gosford to say he was home. On 5 February 1851 he galloped across the Blue Mountains and down onto the Bathurst plains, on a great brute of a horse that bucked and stumbled the whole way. And there was the gold, shining in a creek, just as he had dreamed, a greater goldfield than any in California.1
That, at least, was the romantic tale Hargraves told to the press. The reality was somewhat different. Hargraves was a drifter, a charismatic dreamer, not a worker. He had bought a farm, a pub and a store with his wife’s dowry then deserted her, leaving her to work the store. He was lured to California by the dream of easy money. But mining was hard work. Hargraves already knew there was gold back in Australia, near Bathurst in New South Wales – over the past few decades there had been several accounts in Australian newspapers, and probably even more gossip in various pubs. The problem was that the colonial governments didn’t want a gold rush – and legally, the government owned the gold. Hargraves hatched a plan to pressure the colonial government to pay him a reward for finding gold in Australia.
Finding that gold wouldn’t be difficult – it had been ‘discovered’ many, many times before.
The gold discovery myth
It’s difficult not to find gold in granite country in Australia, once you know where to look for tiny grains among the gravel in creek beds, or shining in seams of the rock. There’s a lot of granite in Australia. There are tiny flecks of gold in the creek on our property, and even more in other creeks nearby. According to the old-timers here, the local gold rush started when an elderly widow cut open the gizzard of a turkey (turkeys need grit to help digest their food) and saw flecks of gold. ‘Gold! Gold!’ she yelled, and her son hurried to peg out their claim. Every decade or so another company ‘discovers’ gold again, and floats the idea of a gold mine.
Gold exists in many parts of Australia, but not in large enough amounts to make much money. Few Australian goldmines make a profit: gold is valuable, but the costs of finding it can be greater than the proceeds from the gold. This was as true in the 1840s as it is today.
The first gold discovery by a European settler may have been in 1823 when surveyor James McBrien found gold in the Fish River east of Bathurst. In 1841 Anglican clergyman and geologist the Reverend William Branwhite Clarke, principal at the King’s School, Parramatta, found gold near Hartley in the Blue Mountains, and more in Bathurst and Liverpool in the next few years. But he claimed that when he told Governor Gipps about his finds he was told to ‘Put it away, Mr Clarke, or we shall all have our throats cut’.2
The colonial governments made most of their money selling the vast amounts of unoccupied land. But now, with the collapse of the wheat and wool prices in England and the 1840s drought, the governments were struggling financially too. Colonial administrators had sent out surveyors to find useful mineral deposits, like coal. There were no orders to hunt for gold. Gold, in fact, had been noted but the colonial authorities had decided not to follow it up. Gold might bring chaos.
The Indigenous people, too, knew where gold was, of course. But what use are bits of soft yellow metal? They’d later point it out when asked. The Bendigo gold rush, for instance, would be started when members of the native police showed Sergeant McClelland large amounts of surface gold. The Eureka claim, too, was found when miner Paul Gooch sent a ‘blackfellow’ out to look for a strayed horse and he returned with a nugget of gold as well, then Gooch sent a party to find out if there was more.
The Reverend Clarke did keep silent about his gold finds until after Hargraves had made his ‘discovery’. But despite Clarke’s discretion, the rumours of gold abounded, so why wasn’t there an Australian gold rush before 1851? The reason was simple: all minerals like gold belonged to the Crown, in this case the New South Wales government. There was no point prospecting if miners weren’t allowed to keep or sell it. Nor did the colonial governments want a gold rush – they were already overstretched trying to govern the expanding colonies. They assumed, correctly, that the dream of gold would also bring a need for police and troopers to protect those on the diggings and attract far more prospectors than the colony could easily house, feed or transport.
Hargraves didn’t look for gold, he looked for someone who knew where it was. He soon found him – John Lister, the son of the innkeeper where he was staying at Guyong, near Bathurst. Lister and his friends, brothers William and James Tom, led Hargraves to Lewis Ponds Creek. Between them they panned about £13 worth of gold.
Hargraves tried to claim a reward from the colonial secretary, but the government still didn’t want to disrupt the economy with a horde of frantic, dreaming miners. Hargraves’ genius was in manipulating the public to demand the right to follow their dreams of riches. In February 1851 he announced to the press that he had discovered a vast goldfield, and publicly demanded a government reward.
The dream of gold seduced first thousands, then tens of thousands, far too many for the colonial authorities to stop. As the colonial authorities had feared, clerks dropped pens, shepherds let their flocks wander around wool-blind; sailors jumped ship. They all went to look for gold. Once they starting looking, they found it. With so many following their dreams of riches, the colonial authorities were powerless to stop them. But they could at least make money from the miners. That gold in the ground still belonged to the Crown (gold and other minerals deposits still belong to the government). The colonial governments began to issue licences, in effect selling the right to search for the gold.
Hargraves kept up a public campaign till he got his reward. (He failed to mention John Lister or the Tom brothers, nor did he share the reward with them.) Within four months more than a thousand prospectors had raced to what would become the Ophir goldfields near Orange.
In fact, Ophir had relatively little gold. Hargraves would later be attacked by furious diggers returning to Sydney, broke and starving. But Hargraves’ dream was contagious.
* * *
A scientist hero
If there is a visionary giant in this story it’s the Reverend William Branwhite Clarke, not Hargraves. Clarke would be called the father of Aus
tralian geology, as well as pioneering meteorological observation and rigorous scientistic procedures in the colonies.3
* * *
Rain brings a gold rush
But the Australian gold rushes were created as much by the weather in Europe and Australia as they were by Hargraves’ contagious daydreams. Europe in the 1840s was a time of starvation; cold, damp summers that turned the wheat and rye harvests to rusts, blights and mildew. There were tens of thousands who were desperate enough to sail across the world to look for gold.
But if Australia hadn’t had a series of wet seasons too, there could have been no gold rush. Australia was in a drought-fuelled depression in the early 1840s. But in the late 1840s, and even more in the 1850s, it rained. And rained. And rained. Gold mining back then (and to an extent even now) requires large amounts of water to sift out the gold from crushed rock or sand or gravel. If the drought had continued, gold mining wouldn’t have been possible. The Araluen Valley where I live now, for example, was one of the largest Australian goldfields in the 1850s, with perhaps 40,000 gold miners in about twenty square kilometres of valley, using the water from the Araluen River and what were once the valley’s lagoons, shaded by red gums, filled with ducks and waterlilies. Races carried water tens of kilometres from high up in the gorge down to otherwise dry parts of the valley. But the river dries up in drought years, apart from the deep pools fed by seepage through the rock, and did so even before increased settlement took more and more water for households and irrigation. If the 1850s had been a drought, there’d have been no Araluen gold rush until the wet years came again.
Gold prospectors also need food. Back before easy irrigation with poly pipe, crops needed rain. Grass for sheep needed rain, too. A cold, wet Europe and China, and warm, wet Australia gave us our gold rushes. Gold-hungry ‘diggers’ arrived from Europe, China, America and New Zealand, but most came from the United Kingdom. In 1852 alone, 370,000 immigrants arrived in Australia. The area we now know as Victoria had 77,000 people in 1851 and 540,000 people in 1853, mostly men. (There is enormous variation in the population estimates of the time, but all agree that the increase was major.)
Let the Land Speak Page 24
