Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  They were still beautiful.

  And then, on 1 January 1983, it rained. Clouds like bruised knees were swollen on the horizon, moving as swiftly as a brown snake strikes. An agony of hail first, balls as large as oranges, smashing windows, cars, leaving human injuries that needed stitches. And then the rain.

  How much water can the air hold? I can’t tell you how much it rained that hour and a half – the rain gauge was clogged with hail and when it melted it was full. A rough estimate, given how fast an empty 44-gallon drum left outside filled, was that we had at least 533 millimetres, with possibly 253 millimetres in an hour. In the first part of that hour the rain was too heavy even to stand up in. No official record will show how much it rained that day – their measuring devices too would have been clogged, then full and overflowing.

  I looked outside. The ground moved. At first I thought it was an earthquake and then I saw it was just water, shivering, shaking, covered the detritus of four and half years of wombat droppings, dead leaves, dried grass. The ground was simply too hard for the rain to soak in.

  A metre-high tide of water slid down the slope behind the house and joined the water that had just fallen too fast for much to soak into the drought hard ground. The water seeped in under the doors, and then rose higher. It stank. I stood on the bed and held the baby up out of flood reach as the water edged upwards.

  And then as fast as it had come, it drained away. The creek crashed boulders in a flash flood down below. But around the house the soil was still dry under less than a millimetre of dampness, too hard baked for any of the sky’s largesse to matter.

  It rained again after that, several more floods in one year, soaking rain that did sink in and green the valley once again. But if that one thunderstorm had stood alone, on paper it would have looked like a reasonable year – not good, but not disastrous. Half a metre of rain can mean greenery, or disaster.

  And that is what it was like, from 1877 till August 1903, year after year of drought and hard-baked soil, with a few destructive storms that didn’t even soak into the soil in between.

  Our worst drought?

  The drought years of 2002 to 2004 were, by measurement of rain alone, worse than the Federation drought, although a lack of accurate rainfall figures and soil moisture index makes this impossible to determine precisely. But the social, ecological and political effects of the 1877 to 1903 drought were far worse.4

  Don’t get me wrong: 2002 to 2004 was hard, even deadly for those who died in bushfires or from the heat. The year 2003 hosted the driest ten months ever measured in our valley, and the summer was the most consistently hot, with maximum temperatures rarely dropping below forty degrees and soaring up to fifty-six degrees on two successive days. Gale-force winds blew regularly over a three-month period fanning a constant series of devastating bushfires around us. There were months when vegetation was coated in red dust blown from the inland, a mountain of eucalypt forest slowly browning, culminating in a day when the air was too thick with ash to see, the sky pulsating flame red as the outskirts of Canberra burned, and the wind blew the ash and smouldering debris over us. But the worst was over in just one year.

  There are ecological differences between the 2002–2004 drought and that of 1877–1903, beyond the sheer length of the latter. By 2003 Australia had better water storage and transport solutions, better rabbit control and better pasture management. In many areas groundwater replenishing schemes meant the land did not dry as fast, and farmers were certainly far better educated overall.

  In 2003 you could buy water when your water tank was empty, even if it was expensive to cart. Cars and buses could take you for a respite to a city, even a hotel where you could have bath after bath of glorious water. You could watch television, and for a while be part of a world that wasn’t hard blue sky and harder ground.

  But the main social difference between these two droughts in the area where I live was that most farms were no longer solely dependent on farm income. Sons and daughters routinely left to work elsewhere; two-generation family farms are now rare. Wives (or sometimes husbands) have off-farm jobs. Even the ‘primary farmer’ of the family is more likely to sell most or all of the stock in a bad year and take work elsewhere, even heading off to Western Australia or South Australia to work in mines, or as a guard in refugee internment camps. This change came in part as a response to the 1980s drought – ‘sell stock, take a job and wait it out’ is now a recommended strategy for farmers.

  But in the 1880s you took your stock droving, to better pasture, leaving your wife in charge of the selection. Or you sold your stock and left your farm to the cockatoos and brown snakes while you went ‘on the wallaby’, carrying your swag from farm to farm, shed to shed, looking for work, possibly for money but, more usually, simply for enough food to last till the next handout.

  Eating bear or soup-kitchen bread

  There are no records of mass starvation or whole towns dying of thirst in the 1877 to 1903 droughts, though there are records of death from heat stroke on some of the worst days, when someone thought to keep a count. There was probably enough food in most places, in terms of kilojoules. You’d put down old Bessie the cow when she had stopped giving milk and laid down, her hipbones gaunt, or drag a sheep from the muddy remnant of a dam, slit its throat, and live on the meat for a week or two. There were rabbits and ‘bear’ (koala) and kangaroo. (If you’re going to eat a wombat, one old-timer told me, make sure you hang it for a few days first. It’ll be too tough to eat, else.) There might be no cabbages in the vegetable garden, but pumpkins crop even in a drought, if you give them the washing-up water, and pumpkin tendrils were served as the ‘green veg’ on plates. The growing infestation of prickly pear gave fruit for jam – and vitamin C – as long as you were prepared to laboriously pick out the prickles first. By then many farm families did know some of the edible native fruits to snack on, and even if they could be stewed and served with custard for a ‘proper’ meal.

  But in the cities there was no ‘bear’ or bunnies to eat. By the mid-1880s charities had set up soup kitchens in Sydney and Adelaide to feed starving workers and their families.

  Country town stores back then routinely gave credit for flour, tea and sugar, often waiting months for payment till a crop was in, the cattle sold, or the money order sent from a husband or son out droving. If there were children involved they might keep the debt for years, or even decades. (Some local stores still gave years of credit in the 1978–83 drought – ‘we know you’ll pay when you can’.)

  But mostly there are no records, only descriptions in poems, stories and letters. Even as recently as the 1960s those in isolated areas of the bush might be born or die without official records, or changed identity illegally. Even where there were records, the death toll is hidden: a death recorded as ‘heart failure’ might be from heat, or prolonged stress and lack of food – or decent food. ‘Beef and plenty greens for me,’ calls the traveller returned from the bush in one of Lawson’s stories. He had eaten nothing but mutton, damper and potatoes in the time he has been away.

  Cockies and true merinos

  Lawson’s stories were of ‘cocky’ farmers, ones whose small holdings grew more cockatoos than crops. Poet and journalist Banjo Paterson gave a very different view of the bush, but he also mixed with the more affluent. Squatters (‘true merinos’) often had the wherewithal to move their stock to areas where there was water. They had usually sited their homes on areas of good water, and by the 1880s many also had other investments, from money earned in better times.

  I suspect – and hope – that no one in Australia will ever again experience a drought where there is simply no way out, where the ground is bare and food for humans or animal is hundreds of kilometres away, with no means of getting there. As I settle into the second half of my life I hope that it won’t be lived in a world of dry. But the 1877 to 1903 drought should be a lesson: Australian droughts can last for decades, even without factoring in global warming.

  One
of the most crucial factors underlying the severity of the Federation drought is that it covered most of Australia. But that is also why it’s difficult to pinpoint its dates.

  The Long Drought

  The Federation drought is usually described as spanning the years 1895 to 1902, but much of country was already dry in 1877 and didn’t receive true replenishing rains until August 1903.5

  It’s probably more accurate to say that what became known as the Great Drought or the Long Drought, depending on where you were, began in 1877 and eventually affected all colonies, with the Federation drought as a particularly horrendous final few years. Queensland and Western Australia possibly fared the worst, with not just vast numbers of dead stock but large areas of bush and swamp dying too.

  From 1880 to 1886 most of eastern Australia had little or no rain. The rain that did fall was not enough to replenish watertables, for springs to run again, or even to soften the ground so that rain could penetrate – you need three good years in our climate for the soil structure to change back so that rain penetrates easily. By 1888 it was extremely dry in Victoria, especially in the northern areas and Gippsland, Tasmania was dry and New South Wales had the driest year since records began. Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia in the central agricultural areas lost many sheep.

  The years 1890 to 1895 were not even the driest of the drought years, but it was in 1892 that a young Henry Lawson was sent out to record the impact of what had already been more than a decade of dry. If what he saw – the dying children, the hopeless women, the dust, the near starvation – was so bad in the relatively good years of the early 1890s, it must have been close to hell as conditions grew worse.

  One statistic we do have is sheep. In 1891 Australia had an estimated 106 million sheep, despite the poor conditions since 1877. By 1902 there were only 54 million.6

  From 1895 onwards some areas saw almost no rain for years; other parts of the country had reasonable rain in 1900 and early 1901, but with the coming of spring in 1901 very dry weather set in across the whole of eastern Australia. By 1902 Sydney was about to run out of water. The New South Wales government declared 26 February a day of ‘humiliation and prayer’, with services held in churches and halls across the state praying for rain. There was virtually no wheat harvest. The Darling River dried up near Bourke, New South Wales for over a year from April 1902 to May 1903.7

  Even more than in the 1840s, the severity of this drought was exacerbated by human mismanagement. A drought is not just a lack of rain and water.

  The land blows away

  There was the dust. In good years, large parts of Australia had been cleared to create grasslands for sheep and cattle, or for wheat, maize and other crops. Even the saltbush country had been destabilised by overgrazing, especially by the introduced rabbits that were now in plague numbers. The hard, cloven feet of the sheep and cattle were much more unforgiving on the soil than the feet of roos and wombats. The soil became compacted, so hard that water ran off it instead of sinking in, especially on the tracks that the sheep and cattle made as they trailed across the landscape.

  During the 1860s and 1870s many of the large ‘squatter’ holdings had been broken up into smaller ‘selector’ holdings, and in so doing they became more vulnerable to drought. On a large property stock can be moved to lessen the impact of hooves compacting the soil, and to take advantage of the slow seep into waterholes that might give a mob water for a few days, then must be left alone to fill again. Selectors needed to crop part of their land to make a living – dead pumpkin or tomato vines don’t give fruit. But stock can survive eating dead grass, and if you have enough of it to last until it rains, you will still have all your stock.

  The land blew away. Up to a metre of topsoil in some places disappeared with the wind, and when it rained the subsoil washed away too, beginning the network of deep erosion gullies that became etched like wrinkles into rural Australia until various government and community projects from the 1980s began to stabilise and correct them.

  Red dust from the inland covered the land to the coast – even gardens and houses in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne were red with dust. At times the dust storms were so thick that a horseman couldn’t see his way clear in the main city streets.

  Facing the fire

  Bushfires were a constant fear each time the wind blew hot and fierce, and during a drought, as hot air rises, winds are usually stronger too. Bushfires today are often deliberately started by people. Back when fire was the only way to cook your food, the fires of selectors or swaggies could easily and accidentally spark a bushfire, especially in those gale-force days.

  Lightning from thunderstorms also often sparks a fire then is quickly put out as rain flows, but in a drought you may get lightning but no rain. A wind of eighty or ninety kilometres per hour can spread a bushfire more than a hundred kilometres in a day. The stronger the wind, the more flaming debris is caught up, whirling high but still burning, to light spot fires tens of kilometres away. Each time the wind direction changes, the flame front grows wider.

  Once again, there are no reliable records of bushfires, except for those near large towns or cities, or exceptionally large ones. Until the 1990s, in our area as with many in Australia, most fires were tackled by the local bushfire brigades – or just by locals if the fire brigade was already busy. Of the several I helped fight in this district in the 1978 to 1983 drought, none was officially recorded or responded to as the fire truck was already busy elsewhere. If you hadn’t lived here at the time you could look at the records and assume there had been no fires. We fought the fires with green wattle branches, bashing at the flames, and, just once, a ranger had a single official McCloud tool (a combined rake/hoe) that was useful for hauling down burning bark and debris to be stamped out on the ground.

  We do know that in early 1898 most of eastern Victoria, the Gippsland district, was burnt. Melbourne endured a ‘bushfire night’, a day when the air turned black. Ships at sea had to slow in the darkness as no light can shine through ash. The fires were so bad and the winds so strong that even Sydney was dimmed by the smoke.8

  Ruin by rabbit

  Then there were the bunnies.

  By 1850 a few people in Australia bred rabbits for their meat, but rabbit meat was still a luxury. Rabbits had been difficult to farm in England; people called warreners were employed to try to keep rabbit colonies healthy and productive.

  In 1859 a Victorian squatter named Thomas Austin brought twenty-four rabbits, five hares and seventy-two partridges from England and released them on his sheep run near Geelong. Within ten years the rabbits has escaped from his property and spread all over the neighbourhood. Rabbits thrived in the warm climate. They also liked all that grassland cropped close to the ground by sheep … By the 1860s, farmers were routinely shooting the eagles, goshawks and predator birds that might have helped control them, assuming – incorrectly – that those birds killed healthy lambs, not the dead or dying ones they really hunted.

  By 18799 rabbits were a plague across New South Wales, destroying thousands of acres of grazing land and starving out many native animals as well as causing massive soil loss and erosion. Native animals like roos, wallabies and wombats graze grass, but rabbits and sheep eat it so close to the ground that the roots die, and they kill the hundreds or thousands of other ground species too. Rabbit meat was suddenly cheap; even in the 1860s hawkers were taking freshly killed rabbits from door to door, calling, ‘Rabbit-oh!’ Now in the 1880s and 1890s the rabbits gathered at the last remaining dams or waterholes. They died in their thousands of heat as well as starvation and thirst.

  * * *

  Biting the bunnies

  In 1973 our farm was a paradise for rabbits, their warrens thick on the bare hillsides or under blackberry clumps. A minute’s shooting on the kilometre walk down to my neighbour’s for supper was enough to get three to six. (They died instantly and were eaten by my neighbour or my family, a humane way to control the feral animals causing erosion a
nd outcompeting native species like bandicoots and bettong.) There were no large predator birds to eat them as all birds bigger than a wren had been routinely shot by previous owners. By 1990, with the bush regenerating, we had no rabbits or droppings, nor had I shot a rabbit since 1983. The white goshawks and powerful owls ate them instead.

  * * *

  The rabbits probably (there are again no official records) ate far more than the stock. The drought also probably reduced rabbit numbers, but as dying rabbits tended to gather near the water they desperately needed, they were likely to die around settlers’ huts and townships, too. The dead rabbits stank. The precious remaining water, already polluted by human faeces, grew even more dangerously toxic.

  Barcoo rot and furnace heat

  Outbreaks of typhoid and cholera grew more frequent, as did Barcoo rot, a skin infection characterised by pus-filled sores and ulcers that came from a bad diet and poor hygiene. Named after the Barcoo River region, it was present throughout rural Australia.

  The first heatwave occurred in January 189610, furnace-like winds from central Australia pushing temperatures well into the forties across much of eastern Australia. Bourke in northwest New South Wales had an average maximum temperature over three weeks of forty-four degrees Celsius, with four days in a row reaching forty-eight. Many fled by train but about 160 people still died of heat and disease.

  The summer of 1897–98 was even hotter and windier11; in New South Wales alone the death rate rose by about twenty per cent. Water supplies dwindled ever lower in towns, and death rates from heatstroke and typhoid grew. On 1 January 1900, the first day of the new century, Western Australia, Tasmania and Victoria were recovering from savage bushfires, there was a cyclone off Townsville and the temperature was forty-four degrees in the shade in parts of New South Wales and South Australia. Riverboats on the Murray ran aground, and on some properties in Queensland even the kangaroos were too weak from thirst and hunger to move.