Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  Ooglies only tell you that rain is coming, not how much; a low pressure that brings a small drizzle is enough to get the ooglies flying. Ants, too, are not always accurate. They’ll build tall edging to their nests to help keep out water before rain, but they can be fooled by a big low coming, too, one that brings cool weather but no rain. In a drought we get low after low, and no rain with it. The ants are fooled even more often than the weather bureau.

  Reptiles are better forecasters than the termites. Snake-necked turtles head uphill ten days before a flood. I see them mostly as they cross the road from the wetlands called Jembaicumbene, but sometimes I see them here, too, leaving the creek to head upwards. I mark it in my diary: day ten, there’ll be a flood. In forty years they haven’t been wrong.

  Look at the level of creeks and springs if you want to forecast the breaking of a drought. The level falls and falls; then overnight - it seems to happen at night - the water level rises, only a few millimetres perhaps, but at a time when it should drop. The timing isn’t as precise as the snake-necked turtles’ evacuation; the water can rise anywhere from forty-eight hours to three weeks before the drought breaker. Usually (not always), the longer the period of rise before the drought-breaking rain, the more rain there will be.

  Want to predict a thunderstorm? Long before the bruised knees gather on the horizon the golden skinks will know. They dart across the paving, not hunting insects but running at each other till one of them retreats.

  The most extraordinary reptile warning was back in 1977. The day had been hot, that breathless heat that leaves you gasping. By mid-afternoon I headed down to the creek for a swim. Then stopped. Every few metres small rolls of twigs twisted across the ground. But they weren’t twigs, they were lizards, biting, gouging lizards, six to ten in each ball, chewing chunks off each other. Over on the track I saw two black snakes lunge at each other. I ran back to the shed. We have eight species of snakes here and giant goannas - I didn’t want to see what they were doing too. Just over two hours later the storm hit, the wildest I have ever known. The creek rose in a wall more than two metres high, tossing boulders on its crest. It thundered down, bringing logs and more rocks with it. The reptiles were quiet.

  I might have doubted what I had seen that day if I hadn’t met a zoologist years later. He had been about twenty kilometres downstream on a similar day. He saw snakes, not lizards, giant coils of them, the dry riverbed wriggling as they savaged each other. He said he ran, terrified, away from the riverbed and the maddened reptiles. He had just got to his car when the thunder crashed and lightning parted the sky.

  Birds know a storm is coming. When they vanish, it’s best if you vanish too.

  Australia was peopled by more than three hundred separate nations, each with their own traditions and language and knowledge. Now we try to apply one method of forecasting to a vast and varied land.

  Don’t get me wrong: I listen and watch the scientific forecasting, too. We need more of it, not less.

  But we need observation too.

  * * *

  Julie’s voice was the only link to the world, in between the hooting of the ABC emergency siren. In the ashy darkness, the gale winds howling across the valley, the fire could have been twenty kilometres away or two hundred metres.

  The land shapes those who live on it. It’s not the only factor, or even the most important factor, especially in these days when TV shows from the United States or Britain inculcate much of our culture and values. But from earliest settlement – black or white – Australians made do.

  Disasters like the Canberra bushfires, when our national capital showed a country town’s generosity, or the 2011 Queensland floods make you realise that mateship isn’t just a politician’s cliché trying to weld us into a jingoistic voting majority, but something that is far beyond politics. We respond to clichés of mateship because we have felt it.

  The disasters that shape both our landscapes and our culture can, to a large extent, be predicted, and even are predicted. These days there are enough experts who understand the land, not from 60,000 years of observation and handing down lore, but using scientific instruments and techniques, and catching glimpses of those 60,000 years in the process.

  But as happened at Gundagai in 1852, on the Hawkesbury more than two hundred years ago and in Queensland on 31 January 1974, as floods covered about three quarters of Queensland, the disasters happened because planners ignored evidence, or because political decisions were taken ignoring their advice. Disaster planning takes money – best shut your eyes and hope you’ll have moved on before the disaster comes.

  Accepting that disasters happen

  It is not difficult to predict most natural disasters. The hardest step in predicting them is to accept, both emotionally and intellectually, that they can happen, and that today may not always be like tomorrow. If there is one thing that history teaches you it is that things change. Sometimes slowly – tectonic-plate slowly – sometimes fast as a flash flood or a gale-driven bushfire or an earthquake. But the irreversible truth is that the land, and the climate, changes.

  A possible major Christchurch earthquake had been predicted for at least a decade. There were even warnings on the Australian Foreign Affairs website of a high magnitude earthquake in the South Island of New Zealand. Christchurch was built on swampy land that was vulnerable in an earthquake. Much of that disaster was a man-made one, just like the floods.

  When – not if – the sand dunes that line much of the land south of Gosford are washed away in a ‘once in a hundred year’ storm, and land that is below sea level reverts to the sea, most of that disaster will be man-made, too, by all of those complicit in the decision to allow people to build there. Australia is not short of land to build on (though we should not build on good farmland, either). The decisions to build houses and infrastructure on land known to have a major flood risk are made for profit, not necessity. The islanders of Tuvalu may have no choice but to build their homes where floods and rising sea levels will eat them. This is not the case here.

  The front page of the Gold Coast Bulletin of 16 October 2012 announced that the Gold Coast Council is facing debts of more than $20 million in ratepayers’ money to stop millionaires’ homes being washed into the ocean. A council report stated that Palm Beach foreshores are so eroded that a major storm could damage or even destroy the beachfront homes. Storms combined with king tides have already swept away parts of some backyards.

  Some recent studies show that the rate of air temperature warming may be slowing, but the global air temperature is still rising.8 Ocean temperatures are rising even faster. The sea is rising between two and three millimetres each year as the world’s ice melts, though this figure will vary across the word. Water levels in the Pacific rise in an El Niño year and fall in a La Niña, but this now slow, inexorable creep upwards will mean that in what is probably one great roar of a storm, and not in a quiet nibbling, the houses will go.

  Or will they? For centuries the Netherlands has successfully used dykes to keep out the water. Now the nation is using about thirty per cent of its gross national product to survive climate change in a variety of ways. Ironically, many of the dykes are being demolished and the country is preparing itself to live with salt water instead of only barricading it out. Their innovations include houses designed to float in flood, with deep-rooted chains to keep them in place and floating boardwalks so residents are not stranded, and new public buildings with deep underground car parks that will act as reservoirs for floodwater that can be pumped out when the flood retreats. Even more importantly, new strains of crops are being trialled that will grow in salty water or saline swamps. Wind generators will float on platforms out at sea, instead of taking up land, and even towns may float on man-made islands.9

  It is possible to create a flood-proof house or commercial building. The houses of my childhood, high on their stilts, were reasonably flood-proof in the ‘gully washers’ of violent summer storms, as long as they weren’t in the way
of logs and other debris being swept downstream. The water ran too fast to stand up in but, like the outer edges of most floods, the debris was only grass and twigs and the odd bicycle, not the giant logs or entire houses that are swept away in a river.

  It wasn’t till Cyclone Tracy destroyed most of Darwin and led to the evacuation of most of the city – white-faced women with hollow-eyed children waiting for the evacuation planes, seen on national TV – that an official standard for cyclone-proof housing was developed in the 1970s and, by and large, kept to.10

  It is possible to build a fireproof house, too. CSIRO has created one prototype made of hardwood and corrugated iron that withstood all known extremes of bushfire. As I write this they are about to test another, with strawbale insulation.11 Japanese engineers are designing villages that may be tsunami-proof.12

  In 2012 the Canberra Times reported that there had finally been a decision in the case against the New South Wales Rural Fire Service, alleging that in the fires that raged through Canberra on 18 January 2003, killing four people and destroying almost five hundred homes as well as burning many properties and tens of thousands of hectares of parkland and grazing land, they had negligently failed to control the blazes when they were small enough to manage. Chief Justice Terence Higgins, however, ruled that because of protective legislation, neither the New South Wales government nor the Rural Fire Service and their employees and volunteers were liable for negligence payments. There would be no redress for what he described as an ‘inadequate and defective strategy’. Chief Justice Higgins identified failures in ‘strategic planning’ but he did not level any blame at individuals.

  In late 2002 various friends in Canberra thought I was panicking as I tried to find a safe place to leave irreplaceable documents. ‘It’s going to be a nightmare fire year,’ I told them. And in our valley, by the time things get bad the routes away from both the valley and even the district can be more dangerous to use than staying. Two households on the edge of Canberra offered to take my documents. They were surprised when I refused. It seemed impossible to them that their own houses could be vulnerable to bushfire.

  Our house didn’t burn that year, though fires ringed us for much of three months. Both those who had offered to store my things evacuated as fire burned around their houses. In the event, their houses survived, although possessions were lost or smoke damaged.

  The first step in surviving disaster is to accept that it can happen.

  * * *

  How to predict a flood

  It doesn’t take enormous skill or experience to predict if a flood will come within the next ten, twenty or fifty years. Look for tidelines from previous floods, where the lightest debris has left a lace-like pattern on the ground. Look for debris caught in trees or shrubs. Wind knocks debris down; flood twists it into branches and twigs. If there’s debris above ground level, water has flowed there, fast, and probably higher than the debris.

  Look at the ground. Good soil in Australia is most often a sign of a flood plain; our continent had few glaciers to gives us fertile grasslands like those of Europe and North America. Sand is carried by water, but it’s often covered with a layer of silt, too. Layers of silt and sand are a warning. Dig down half a metre, and look for layers of sand or debris.

  A flash flood can cover grassland. Look for boulders dropped where the water has carried them. Water rises from low land; it also cascades down from the heights. Even if you are above a valley floor a tide of water may roll onto you down the slope. Mostly, look at the records. Ask those who remember the land ten, twenty and fifty years ago.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 15

  A short history of great big farming misunderstandings

  Araluen, 1978

  Our sheep were Tukidales, carpet wool sheep. At the time, their fleece was worth about five times that of a merino. We planned to keep a small flock for their wool, sell most of the lambs each year as ‘fat lambs’ and, in the meantime, they’d keep the grass and weeds down in the orchards.

  We’d also have as much mutton as we wanted to eat.

  When my first marriage ended, the sheep went too. I miss them, now and then, especially in spring, when the lambs’ tails are wriggling up on the tableland above us as I drive into town.

  But it was only when they’d left that I saw how the sheep had changed the land. We only had forty ewes, two rams, and their offspring, on 106 hectares over about two and a half years. But even that had caused local exterminations.

  The yam daisies had vanished. The bettongs – small hopping marsupials – had gone too, and the shaggy nests they made in the tussocks. The sheep ate the tussocks and the bettongs moved on. (They may be returning: I’ve recently tripped over what might be new nests.) A few grass orchids survived, and slowly over the past two decades they are building up again. But countless other grassland species – literally, for I knew too little to even catalogue them before they were gone – vanished in those few years of sheep. Even lightly stocked and for so few years, the land lost far too many of its species.

  And yet Australians are learning – relatively quickly – how to measure their impact on the land and repair much of the damage of the past two hundred years.

  By the 1990s farmers and rural landowners were cooperating in small groups to repair the land, as well.

  Landcare

  In the early 1980s things looked grim for much of Australia beyond the capital cities, with widespread drought and fences half-covered with drifting soil. In large parts of Australia – anecdotally, for there was no official measurement – many native animals became regionally extinct. Erosion gullies spread through paddocks, becoming deeper with every rainfall. And thousands of hectares were still being cleared each day.

  Then came the revolution: Landcare.

  Landcare Australia Limited was formed by the Commonwealth Government on 10 October 1989 as a private non-profit company. It receives funds from governments, corporate organisations and private donations.

  In the past twenty years much of the farmed land in our area has changed dramatically. Erosion gullies have been stabilised. Trees along waterways are no longer chopped down to ‘stop them taking all the water’ (unless they are weed species). Instead the water is slowed down with fallen logs or dams to help replenish the watertable. Vast areas of weeds have been successfully cleared (even if some have grown worse from overuse of herbicide without resowing other species before the weed seeds sprout again). Eroded streambeds have been stabilised, and millions of trees planted in shelter belts and as ‘wildlife corridors’ to help isolated populations to interbreed with surrounding but discrete populations.

  In the 1970s here the average farmer wanted to cut down as many trees as possible. These days the average farmer – still, in many cases, the same farmers – is planting trees, accepting that not only does it raise the value of their land but also increases productivity. The Landcare movement didn’t just provide money to repair damage. It encouraged farmers to look at the land, identify its problems and work out solutions, and to develop new methods to make their farming sustainable.

  Never call farmers conservative. As I write this, our car industry follows much the same game plan as they did twenty years ago. But farming has been revolutionised. The narrow colonial vision of Peter Ffrench has almost vanished.

  Modern farmers don’t just look at their land themselves. They increasingly rely on integrated pest-control monitoring, use consultants who help them recontour their land with swales to divert water to the new tree plantations, and utilise electric fencing to micromanage their stock, reducing the impact on the fallow and allowing it time to recover. It is a long way from ideal yet, and not all farmers do this. But the change is large enough to call it a revolution – and the revolution grows.

  Yesterday was ‘eco farming’ day in our local town park, dozens of sustainable businesses and land management experts in marquees offering everything from testing of soil moisture and humus levels to biological pest control and k
angaroo or feral goat sausages. We’ve come a long way.

  The Landcare success shows how little is needed to create a revolution in our approach to the land.1 But then, it was aimed at those who already loved it: the farming families of Australia.

  The ‘land crimes’ of the past two hundred years, though, have been so vast that repairing them is beyond the ability solely of farmers. Many have also been misunderstood.

  So what crimes have sheep or, rather, those of us who stocked them, committed, all with good intentions but with neither the experience nor the patience to wait, look and understand? And other farmers, too?

  A dozen crimes against the land

  1 Clearing

  Clearing seemed so obviously a Good Thing, a priority on the list of necessary improvements to gain title of a leased block. Trees were ringbarked and then burnt, the stumps dug out or left to rot while you used a stump jump plough. (Those rotting stumps would lead to the proliferation of phytophthora and other fungi that would contribute to the massive dieback of eucalypts in the 1970s and 1980s.)

  A three-volume book could be written on the impact of clearing. But, briefly, in dry sclerophyll forest types, soil is held together by a multitude of thin-leafed plants that minimise their exposure to sunlight by their small leaf size. Remove these native ground covers and the rain falls heavily, washing away the soil till only rock and shale is left. The gentle drainage lines where the water flows grow deeper and deeper till they are erosion gullies.

  Remove the trees and you let in sunlight. Many wallabies, including the black-tailed or swamp wallaby, Wallabia bicolor, slowly go blind with excess light. They stumble, starve and die. Koalas, possums and hundreds of species of birds are left homeless. Other species, like fruit bats, starve without eucalypt blossoms, so they invade orchards and gardens looking for food, and roost in places like the Sydney Botanic Gardens.