Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  Think of what humans can do with the most unpromising places to live or grow food. No water? It rains everywhere, even if not often or much. Your water supply depends on the size of your storage area: tank, cistern, dam, plus recycling and water retention methods. Water can be recycled indefinitely, even in greenhouse agricultural systems where you need only bring in as much water as you take out in the form of crops, instead of losing perhaps ninety per cent to evaporation.11 Mountains? Terrace, and fit your house to the land. No land? Grow ten hectares of vegetables up the wall of a skyscraper. It’s called vertical gardening and turns a city into roughly ten times the amount of productive land than it was when it was mostly horizontal. A city of green walls and rooftop forest, connected by animal-sized crossings, could intensively host more wildlife than a national park. Not every endeavour will succeed. But it’s more fun trying than watching ‘someone else’s reality’ TV.

  16 Love your country

  Perhaps the first step in learning how to live well on the land is to love it. The European sailors saw a land with no easily visible safe harbour, with tough ground covers instead of the lush grass to cut for the hay needed for their voyages.

  The mutton eaters saw a land to be transformed into the fields of home, with grass, not tussocks, and fat sheep and cows. Who was the first colonial, I wonder, to actually see the land as it is? How long did it take the first emigrants, 60,000 years ago, to say, ‘This land is who I am.’

  What is it to love a country?

  I love the creek here, smooth deep holes in granite bedrock, worn by a hundred thousand floods; I love the sunlight turning the casuarina dew to diamonds, the frozen spider webs on barbed wire fences. I love the land I know.

  My knowledge is deepest here, but if this valley is my partner, then Uluru is a sister, Western Australia a brother. They are familiar, known, though not as closely.

  Where does the love stop? At the Pacific Islands? Malaysia, which I’ve never seen? The United States on 9/11, or Indonesia and Japan after their most recent tsunamis? I wept for them then, and for the first time realised those lands were my brothers too.

  Maybe the love of country eventually stretches to the whole planet, because finally – as humans, as creatures of this planet – the breeze from the butterfly wings that sweep across the African plains does eventually reach us here.

  Love the planet and you will work for it. Love your neighbours and you will fight for their survival, or at least offer them a casserole when they are crook. Remember that a frog may be your neighbour, too. Love this life, its richness and diversity, and it will (mostly, or at least quite often) be good.

  * * *

  How to make stringybark twine in the Araluen Valley in the twenty-first century

  Follow the path of the white clematis in mid-spring, as it twines about the tops of trees and bushes, creating a highway of white to show your way. The clematis blooms at just the right time to harvest the stringybark for twine, while it’s still soft and new.

  The path will take you through damp gullies, where you can stop to drink. Two hundred years ago they’d have been rich in frogs to eat, but these days the green and golden bell frogs and the giant burrowing frog are critically endangered and all native animals are protected. Don’t take the bird eggs, either, and ignore the ground orchids, even though their tubers are sweet and good when baked. Bring sandwiches instead and, as you eat them, dream of the days when this valley would have been rich in waterlilies. You might have made cakes of their pollen or eaten the stems or roasted the seeds. You might still find some late kangaroo berries on the vines, but don’t pick the similar bright oranges berries from bushes - they’re toxic. You need to know your berries in the bush.

  Three hundred years ago you’d have found plenty of bush honey, too, from the solitary blue bees or dark native bees, both stingless. But don’t risk tracking the wild hives of what are probably feral European bees now or you may get badly stung. Don’t eat the watercress and other wild greens either, unless they are well cooked, because of introduced liver fluke carried in tiny native snails.

  You’ll find the stringybark trees on the downside of small ridges, above the gullies. Take the small stone from your pocket that will cut, grind seeds, crush sinew for sewing and a hundred other tasks. Cut long thin strips off the bark, right down to the smooth shiny inner layer. Each strip should be no wider than your hand. Don’t take too much - if you ringbark the tree it will die, and if you over-strip it the tree may rot before the scar heals. Each strip should be as long as you can make it.

  Take your strips of bark to a cool spot by the creek. Use the dry, short-fibred, outer bark as tinder to help light your campfire. (Even after heavy rain much of it will be dry).

  Now use your fingernails to take a tiny strip of the innermost fibres - they are very thin indeed. Pull slowly and steadily - you should get strips at least thirty centimetres long and, with practice, much longer. When you have a goodly pile of fibres, take four to six of them (six is better, but I can only manage four). Hold the fibres together and tie a knot in the top. Now begin to plait them, moving the one at the right over the next one to the left, till the one on the far right is now the one on the far left. Now begin again with the new ‘far right’ one. Don’t worry - this sounds much more complicated than it really is.

  About ten centimetres before you come to the end of one of the fibres, thread in another to replace it. Keep going until your string is a metre long, or ten metres long, or however long you’d like it to be.

  Your fire should be flickering well now. Take your plaited string and run it slowly through the tip of a flame. It will start to sizzle and you’ll think it’ll catch on fire. It won’t - or, at least, don’t hold it there so long that it does. Instead the tip of the flame will melt the separate fibres together, causing the sap to bubble out and seal the string into a single waterproof strand. If you don’t have a campfire, a lighter will do the job as well.

  It will last for years. It is also far stronger than any similar string you’ll find in a hardware store. Use it for fishing line (it’s waterproof and won’t rot) or to make a belt to carry baskets to leave your hands free. If you want an even stronger rope, plait this string with four to six other lengths of string.

  A few words of caution: if this string or rope is made from the correct fibres, at the right time, in the correct way, it will be very strong indeed. But just in case it isn’t, do test it for strength before you risk life or limb with it.

  Then follow the clematis road back home.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 17

  The next hundred years: Twenty-four predictions

  We don’t need the spectre of human-triggered climate change to know that disasters like flood, fire, plague, pollution or badly planned human activity will visit us again and again. History doesn’t end yesterday. It is woven into the fabric of the present. History is part of the future, too. History’s best lesson is to teach us – emotionally as well as intellectually – that things change.

  The Indigenous people of this land created cultures around the worst scenarios. Their populations stayed at what the land could support in bad times; they cherished food resources, and moved on before they could be depleted. The Indigenous nations were built on the concept of climatic extremes.

  Our culture instead works on assumptions that industrial population growth can continue indefinitely; that there won’t be a pandemic this winter, a fire this summer, a flood in the next decade, or not at least till the planner who approved the new development has moved jobs.

  We are aggressively blind to the lessons of both the past and the land.

  The land is going to continue to shape our future, just as we, too, shape the land. If we are to survive the next few thousand years, we need to learn to see where we are going.

  Prediction 1: Humanity can survive climate change. We might even survive fast climate change.

  Humans have survived massive climate change before. The weather chang
es in the northern hemisphere’s ‘little ice age’ (not a true ice age as it wasn’t a global event, with large local variations) between 1550 and 1850 may have been greater than those even our great-grandchildren will probably face.1 Humans are good at climate change. Each of us is descended, after all, from those who survived the last Ice Age and the catastrophic sea-level rises that followed it when so many of our near-human cousins died out.

  A greater danger comes from pollution: humans have not yet survived a world where change is coupled with the loss of so much of the planet to pollution. An even greater danger are the myths that shape our culture: that development is always good, instead of looking at its cost-effectiveness; that a three-minute shower helps to save the planet. (You don’t use up water when you shower. You borrow it.)

  Knowing history doesn’t make us less likely to repeat it – knowing about Boer War concentration camps just made it easier to envisage more effective ones. But looking at the past does show us that tomorrow, eventually, won’t be like yesterday, that our fate is decided by how we can adapt to the planet and how it shapes us or how we shape it.

  We can survive climate change, but only if we accept it always happens, whether it had been sped up by human release of carbon dioxide and methane or not, and only if we adapt to it. (I would be more worried by an impending ice age, and certainly of a nuclear winter where dust obscures the sun for years to decades, caused by either large-scale war, massive eruptions from super-volcanoes or the debris thrown up by the impact of a meteor on our planet.)

  To survive we need to change the way we do things: how we assess development, how we farm and what we eat, and ensuring we preserve islands of biodiversity so that when change happens there are more likely to be species that can adapt, or play a greater role in the ecosystem.

  Mostly, we need to learn to look at the land again – or take notice of those who do.

  Prediction 2: The ‘boat people’ will keep on coming.

  The phrase ‘boat people’ originated in the early 1970s, when refugees from the Vietnam War, that Australia had fought in then abandoned, came in small, fragile boats to our shores.

  Refugees from war, persecution, poverty or ecological catastrophe will keep coming. People have sailed across the dangerous ocean to Australia for perhaps the last 60,000 years. Probably they always will, as long as there are humans and boats to sail in.

  Look at a map and you will see why: we are at the end of the world’s migrations. Follow the coasts till you get to Southeast Asia, island-hop down, or surge across the Indian Ocean on the trade winds. This has long been the final refuge. Some years there will be fewer boats. Other years there will be more.

  Australia cannot support, either physically or culturally, all the world’s refugees, or even all of those who wish to come here. The land itself has constraints about what population it can support, not just for this century but considering the centuries to come, too. We are a land with relatively little fertile soil and fresh water. Australia already faces severe depletion of its aquifers as more artesian water is pumped out than is replaced.

  There are social and cultural constraints, too. Trying to merge too many strangers into a culture has rarely, if ever, worked. Instead of offering a place of safety we would create a culture of anger, racism and even possibly the repression in a search for order – or worse, the social devolution where trivial cultural or religious differences mean attacking your neighbour with firearms or poison gas, instead of proceeding through the courts.

  But we do need well-considered strategies to deal with the desperate, the hopeful or even the manipulative, who will always try to land here. The past decade’s strategies have been costly, both in money and psychological harm to those in the camps, and possibly in a small way to Australians too. They have often been created on the hop, to manipulate opinion polls rather than create workable policy.

  In Pennies for Hitler (a novel for young people) I wrote that hatred is contagious, but so is kindness. Sometimes being good to others – as a nation or as individuals – can be as powerful as guns. My grandmother was proud that she greeted visitors with a cup of tea and fresh scones or apple teacake. No matter who the new arrivals are, or what they have done – or for how long we decide they should stay – we owe them the equivalent of Grandma’s welcome – a cup of tea, a scone (and decent education and medical help while they are here) and some compassion.

  Yes, we should plan and examine carefully who, how and how many people come to Australia. But we should always remember that our families were once in those boats, too. And every year, in varying numbers, they will come.

  Prediction 3: Australia will continue to be a target for our resources, both as the subject of equitable trade, but also possibly using economic sanction or other force.

  Look at the map, then look at the history of Southeast Asia for the past four hundred years. This is the region where others come for the natural resources that will make them rich, from spices to rubber. Steel and coal were why the Japanese swung south to Australia in World War 2, diverting resources from their attack on India. Australia’s population, while possibly too high for the land to continue to support at our present level of consumption and way of life, is still stationed well away from our richest resource areas, especially the oil and gas of the North West Shelf.

  We need to show that we can defend the North West Shelf and other resource-rich areas with more than a resolution from the UN Security Council saying ‘naughty, naughty’ if one of the nations that depends on our resources decides to secure them by force, rather than accepting the taxation and development conditions prescribed by the Australian agencies.

  I am a pragmatic pacifist. Almost invariably aggressors lose the war, although it may take decades for this to happen. Physical force only has a lasting effect if it is used to change the mindset, as in Japan and Germany after World War 2 when the Allied victory and occupation helped dismantle the social system that had the military at the top. Peace is not easily made or kept. Military force is just one of the elements necessary to the role of peacekeeper or defender of your country. Its greatest use is possibly as a deterrent – but to be a deterrent it must demonstrably exist.

  Prediction 4: Our centralisation leaves us vulnerable to natural disaster, human error, or attack.

  If you look at a detailed map that shows where our power plants or phone and water systems are, you will see just how few terrorist attacks – or long-range drones – would be needed to cripple our society. Knock out a communications satellite or two, cut a few major telephone cables, cripple eight power plants, bomb eight airports, blow up two bridges in each capital city, and you have – what? Our cities have food for perhaps three days. Back-up generators have diesel for a few days, not weeks or months. Many are in the basement of buildings, which means they are useless in a flood. Our hospitals have central air-conditioning systems and few, if any, facilities to isolate patients in a pandemic.

  Australia also shares the massive worldwide reliance on satellite-based communications, from navigation to banking and data storage. On 1 September 1859, the earth was hit with a sudden and massive cloud of magnetically charged plasma from a solar flare. It took only seventeen hours and forty minutes to reach the earth – too short a time to do much to mitigate the damage. Telegraph wires shorted out across the planet and remained inoperable for days; some telegraph equipment burst into flames. The next night even the equator flamed red with auroras usually only seen at the poles. No flare of that magnitude has affected earth as much since, although a far smaller one on 13 March 1989 knocked out power to the whole of Quebec, Canada, causing tens of millions of dollars damage. If – or when – a similar solar event occurs, or a meteor passes too close to our satellites, crippling the communication, transport and power systems we now rely on, the whole planet will be affected. Bank accounts, tax, health and vital research records will vanish with their data cloud, with little or no paper backup. We are terrifyingly centralised.


  So here is the prediction: in the next two decades we will see at least one major disaster caused because our large country’s supplies of fuel, power, water, transport, communications, navigation, banking and food are disastrously centralised. There will be more.

  Prediction 5: Within the next ten years there will be at least two major natural disasters.

  Or, rather, two that are precipitated by bushfire, cyclone, flood or pandemic, but really caused by a lack of political willingness to recognise the threat.

  (A note here: as I revise this, in January 2013, six months after writing those words, we are in the middle of a natural disaster, with fires in Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales. We have just had a recorded message on the phone telling us to evacuate to a safe area, but no authority has nominated what a safe area might be. As the fires have cut the highways between here and the neighbouring cities, there appears to be no safe, or even possible, evacuation route. The Victorian Fire Service’s web system has crashed, so no one can log in to see where they’re in danger.)

  Prediction 6: Within fifty years the low-lying land between Gosford and Sydney will be a disaster area.

  So will the canal developments of coastal Queensland, large parts of South Australia and anywhere else the land is below sea level, or is surrounded by land below sea level, or is less than a metre above sea level, or is on a tidal flood plain.

  The sea level is rising at an average rate of about two to three millimetres a year, and that rate may increase as feedback mechanisms warm the world even faster, meaning that ice melts at a faster rate. Sea levels also rise in Australia during an El Niño year. The last strong El Niño year was 1997, with a moderate one in 2009. The years 2010 to 2013 have been La Niña periods, or neutral. Expect higher seas when El Niño returns.

  Even without a sea level rise, our land is subject to storms of extreme violence. Many of our rivers, like the Murray, naturally flow out to the sea in some years, or bank up with dunes for decades and it takes a major flood or storm to wash them away. The mouth of the Murray has been kept open to the sea by a combination of weirs along its length, barrages to separate the saltwater from fresh, and, since 2002, dredging to maintain a channel supplying fresh seawater to the Coorong. The mouth has silted up repeatedly in its history and also shifted its position along that stretch of coast. Whether it is open to the sea or not is the result of a complex combination of conditions comprising inland rainfall or floods and wave action, and storms along the coast.