This is hard to write; it is emotionally difficult to accept. But the continent of Australia is no longer isolated geographically; our quarantine services have been so drastically cut back that new parasites – pests like the Argentine fire ants, the varroa mite that devastates bee colonies, the myrtle rust that may kill vast forests of eucalypts – are a continual threat, nor is there anything resembling adequate resources to control these when they are still only isolated outbreaks. The research of state departments of agriculture and the CSIRO have been so dramatically extinguished or redirected that we simply do not have the studies to know what threatens us most, nor what to do about it. What if Barmah Forest virus and Ross River virus become major problems rather than rare? Will we see Lyme disease established in Australia? What unknown zoonoses may be spread by flying foxes that migrate into urban areas when their forest habitat is destroyed by drought, fire, disease or clearing?13
As I write this, southern hairy-nosed wombats are facing critical decline due to poisoning from introduced weeds, and some bare-nosed wombats suffer such mental confusion after catching toxoplasmosis from feral cats that they are unable to survive long in the wild. In dry years, when they are forced into sunlight more to get their food, introduced mange becomes so severe it leads to local extinctions. But we simply do not know enough to evaluate the severity of any of these.
I do not want to face the bush with no wombats. But can Melbourne or Sydney survive a world where the bush around their catchment dams die and the land turns to desert, silting up the dams or making the water undrinkable? Will global warming lead to the increase of toxic blue-green algae, or cryptosporidium or other deadly agents in our water systems that present filtration and treatments cannot clean out? In this, too, we need to follow the example of those who survived here for 60,000 years: prepare for the worst and, above all, keep your water clean.
Prediction 22: An unexpected invention will change the way we live within the next decade.
No, this one is not gleaned from watching the land, but it belongs in a list of predictions. I love old sci-fi stories, but neither those sci-fi writers nor the scientists writing at the same time (in some cases the writers were both) accurately predicted either the technologies that would alter our lives nor major social changes, such as the way contraception, TV, mobile phones, the internet and personal computers have transformed our society. The sci-fi writers from the 1890s to the 1950s also assumed that women would always and only be wives and secretaries.
(Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein did predict some of today’s technology, or possibly their imagining it inspired others to create it. But sci-fi is better at examining its own culture through extrapolating and exaggerating existing features than predicting what comes next.)
Prediction 23: We may actually become the lucky country.
Wealthy countries may survive climate change better than poor ones: they have the money for disaster care, and the resources – both financial and technical – to change strategies. Australia is wealthy and relatively well educated. We are also generous. This matters.
But we have one other major advantage too. Most of our land is desert, impossible to survive in without experience and knowledge. Refugees to Australia – both in the past decades and the past two hundred years – mostly wanted to come to cities, where life might approximate what they had known. With few exceptions, like the German farming communities of South Australia, they did not set up small settlements of their own. Our cities and developed areas are inviting. Our land – by and large – is not.
Australia may yet be a place where we care for each other as times get worse, where we have the education, ingenuity and resilience to cope with a changing world.
Australia, too, tends to be a land of generalists – with a small and far-flung population we have had to be. My husband describes working at Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, near Canberra, during the Apollo moon project. The visiting NASA representatives tended to specialise in one small area. The Australians wanted to know how everything worked, and exactly what new things they could do with it. (And when the oxygen tank on Apollo 13 ruptured, the Australians’ tendency to play with every scenario meant they had already come up with the procedures, and tested them in a simulated disaster, to track both the spacecraft and the following rocket.)14
Forty years ago we were a land of tinkerers, of blokes in sheds. We are still a land where kids experiment with strapping Mum’s mobile phone onto their remote-control toy truck to see what’s happening in their sister’s bedroom, where high-school projects are valued for their innovation, and of stroppy women (which effectively gives us fifty per cent more ingenuity than countries where women are suppressed). If the central water supplies fail we’ll rig up water tanks; if the power fails each street may have wind generators, bodged out of bits that fell off the back of a truck … and the very word ‘bodged’ says much about Australia too. A land of bodgers is likely to survive.15
So will our best farmland, but then we have experience of repairing poor land too, despite the closing of the agricultural research stations, the slashing of CSIRO’s budget, and the fact that much of that experimentation and development is now being done by private companies and individuals.
As a nation we have made some extraordinary blunders, blighting large parts of our continent. But when we put our minds to it we are reasonably good at if not solving the problem, then at least mitigating it.
Prediction 24: Tomorrow will be pretty much like today.
But one day it won’t be.
Picture Section
A woman’s tool. I was taught that handles were the great ‘stone age’ revolution, but this small multi-purpose tool needs no handle, perfectly fitting my hand. It cuts, scrapes, grinds, and doesn’t get blunt. Yet like so much of the lore of Indigenous women, it could be invisible to outsiders as ‘just a rock’. Photos: Bryan Sullivan
Food or toxin? These berries grow side by side in the bush at our place. Those on the left are good to eat; those on the right could make you seriously ill, though similar berries that grow on a twining vine are edible but bland. Native Australian foods were so unfamiliar, so diverse, and so potentially deadly that they were mostly ignored by the new settlers, even when starving or suffering deficiency illnesses like scurvy or Barcoo rot. Photos: Bryan Sullivan
This stringybark bag was given to me forty-four years ago. It wasn’t new then, and it’s survived flood, life in a damp shed, and much use since. Correctly made, stringybark twine is strong enough to hold a climber, and can be used to make fishing line, fish traps, baskets, doormats and much else. It can also be beautiful.
Photo: Bryan Sullivan
Macadamias: perhaps Australia’s best-known native nut. Modern commercial macadamias are Macadamia integrifolia varieties bred in Hawaii from Australian seed. Pictured is M. tetraphylla, a rough-shelled wild species. The number of wild macadamia species surviving in gullies and bush along the Australian east coast is still unknown. M. tetraphylla produces a few nuts at a time all through the year, rather than one crop; is drought-tolerant and cold-resistant to -6° C; and the shells are too tough even for the cockatoos to open. Photos: Bryan Sullivan
The fig tree by the pool. The next Port Jackson fig territory is hundreds of kilometres away. Like the local bunya varieties chosen for larger, sweeter nuts, various fig species were planted in the small pockets where they would survive, and around the living areas, ceremonial sites, harvest areas and other places where they were needed. Like the ‘clematis road’, the ‘kurrajong highways’ and the ‘mobile farms’, if these figs were planted in the right places, new plants would grow as the old ones died. Photos: Bryan Sullivan
A rock pool below our house – a paradise of food, if you know where to look – and know what not to eat. Photos: Bryan Sullivan
Tasman charted the Land of Giants (later named Van Diemen’s Land and later still Tasmania) while hunting for the mythical Land of Gold so many Europeans were convinced had to be
in the Pacific, well away from the disappointing land mass of Australia, with its lack of safe harbours and grass for food for the animals kept on board – and the dangerous winds that nearly wrecked Tasman’s ships.
Frederik Hendrikx Bay Marias Eyland/F. Ottens fec. direxit. Pub. 1726. State Library of New South Wales, Z/M2 881.38/1726/1
The map of New Holland/New South Wales post the 1770 voyage of James Cook. Most of west, south and north Australia – or New Holland, Concordia, or Van Diemen’s Land – had already been mapped by Europeans before Cook charted the east coast. Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, c. 1794. John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland Neg: 262496
European sailing ships needed the shelter of safe harbours. Australia has few of the big river systems that might create those harbours, and those we do have could be easily missed, as James Cook missed the potential of Sydney Harbour, passing the narrow gap between the headlands of ‘Port Jackson’ as the Endeavour was pushed northwards by a sharp southerly wind.
George Raper, The Land About Botany Bay, 1791, National Library of Australia, an21511990-2
Cook had found only one relatively safe harbour along the coast of New Holland. By extraordinary fortune there was another, at what they named the Endeavour River, near enough for the ship to sail into when she was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, the ‘dangerous waters’ marked on the old maps that Cook knew he was leading his ship into.
Entrance of Endeavour River, and Botany Bay, in New South Wales, c. 1773. John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland Neg: 397436 Entrance of Endeavour River, and Botany Bay, in New South Wales, c. 1773. John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland Neg: 397436
Against all orders, and even commonsense, James Cook sailed the Endeavour up the east coast of New Holland. The decision wrecked the ship. Only luck and the ingenuity of a young man, Jonathon Monkhouse, saved it. William Byrne, A View of Endeavour River, 1773, National Library of Australia, an9184938
Australia owes its British settlement to goat droppings. When the Endeavour was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, dry goat and sheep droppings saved the ship. This is an Arapawa descendent of the Old English goats Cook took on his first and second voyages to Australia. The presence of so many animals aboard ships like the Endeavour – all needing grass – also partly explains why Australia was ignored by European colonial nations for so many centuries.
Photo: Dr Karen Nicholl & the Rare Breeds Conservation Society of NZ
Cynanchum erubescens br (or pedunculatum), one of the many Australian plants collected by the enthusiastic amateur botanist Joseph Banks that led to the renaming of ‘Sting Ray Harbour’ as ‘Botany Bay’ – and a colony. Sir Joseph Banks, from Illustrations of the botany of Captain Cook’s voyage round the world in H.M.S.
Endeavour in 1768-71, National Library of Australia, vn3118211
Two views of Sydney Cove, eastern (top) and western (centre), with a map (opposite) showing the extent of the colony c. 1798. The new colony was laid out to fit Governor Phillip’s ideal of large gardens and small farms, like those of England. But the colony would soon become drunk on the concept of ‘endless land’ – a myth that still underlies many of today’s planning and political decisions.
Illustrations from An account of the English colony in New South Wales by David Collins, State Library of New South Wales.
One of the few native plants that the colonists did know and use was what we now know as warrigal greens. A plant can grow thirty centimetres a day, and feed an entire family with all the greens they need. To eat, blanch the leaves to remove some of the oxalic acid before cooking as for spinach.
Photo: Peter Abell
Jackie among the maize, 1975. Anyone who doubts that the early colonists could have survived on garden vegetables alone has probably never lived off their own vegie patch. Even during the hungriest period, the colonists demanded wheat bread, even though maize was far more suited to the area.
Inset: colonial maize. Unlike modern sweet corn (and wheat), old-fashioned maize varieties are drought-hardy and easily stored for long periods. Colonial maize can simply be left to dry on the plant in its husk, then tossed in a shed, husk and all, until needed, then ground to flour. These cobs are about fifteen years old and show the different colours that used to be common.
Inset Photo: Bryan Sullivan
Sheep – and that ‘endless land’ – could make you rich. But the sheep would also turn parts of Australia to desert, and drastically simplify the Indigenous ‘living larders’ almost beyond recognition.
Men rounding up sheep, Shelbourne, c. 1895. Photographer: J.P. Lind Studio. Source: Museum of Victoria
The ‘squatters’ moved rapidly beyond the official colony’s boundaries, using local material like ‘wattle and daub’ to wall their homes, and sheets of stringybark for roofing, and living on ‘pumpkin and bear’ (koala) and kangaroo until their sheep bred them wealth. Tom Walker and family outside their wattle and daub home, c. 1880. Photographer unknown. Source: Museum of Victoria
Indigenous women’s farming rarely disturbed the soil, but their agriculture only supported a small population. Crops like wheat would feed far more, but by the 1960s six tonnes of topsoil could be lost for every tonne of wheat. Men and bullock team clearing land, Mollongghip, c. 1900. Photographer unknown. Source: Museum of Victoria
Gold was a dream, as it had been for the ships’ owners of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, hunting for the mythical Land of Gold. But miners were more likely to starve, succumb to scurvy, or die in floods or mine collapse than get rich.
David Tulloch (print after), Thomas Ham, (lithographer, publisher). Golden Point, Ballarat 1851. 1852. Colour lithograph, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 2000
Imagine the darkness of the diggings: true darkness, with no torches, few fires, and deadly mine pits every few metres. Darkness won the battle of Eureka. To understand Eureka you need to understand the darkness, too.
John Skinner Prout, Night Scene at the Diggings, c. 1852, National Library of Australia, an4446213
If the rebels at Eureka had won, might we be a state or territory of the United States now, with no Gallipoli or Anzacs in our history?
The Eureka Stockade, 3 December 1854, engraved by Patterson, Shaggs & Co., painted by Thaddeus Welch and Izett Watson, State Library of New South Wales, a1528649
The drought from 1877 to 1903 caused squalor and desperation for the ‘cocky farmers’ and the slum dwellers of Sydney alike. Henry Lawson lived with both, and wrote about it. That drought would turn a collection of states into one nation.
Photographer unknown, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland Neg: 169982
The rabbit plagues made the drought far worse, not just because they ate grasses and other vegetation, but because their stinking corpses piled up by dry dams and creeks. But at least anyone with traps or a firearm could live on ‘bunny’, and the iconic hats made from their skins kept off the sun. Australian rabbiter, NSW, 1880–1900. Photography by Henry King. Tyrrell Collection: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union of South Australia – the Mothers of Federation. Henry Parkes, constitutional lawyer, is known as ‘the Father of Federation’, but our nation is equally the child of the stalwart efforts of the Women’s Temperance Unions, fighting for a new parliament that might make new laws giving women the vote, and ending the horrors of child labour.
Photographer unknown, c.1918, State Library of South Australia, PRG280_1_9_79
The Anzac biscuit recipe of Mrs Thelma Edwards, my grandmother, handwritten possibly by my great-grandmother Emily Sheldon in about 1916 – a tough biscuit for a tough land. The troops were issued bully beef and soldiers’ biscuits, too hard to eat unless soaked in the usually filthy water of the trenches, especially for the roughly 70 per cent of men with poor teeth. A good, slow-baked Anzac biscuit survived the long journey from Australia to the battlefields, and the men who ate their oats, sugar, flour, butter and coco
nut were possibly slightly more likely to survive because of them.
Young men playing on an Aussie beach. The Anzac troops of Gallipoli were lauded in the British newspapers and parliament as being the bravest of the Empire. They were not, however, described as ‘the best soldiers’. But a tradition of neighbourhood sport and fighting bushfires together may have added to their mateship traditions. Blakeley family collection, c. 1900–1917, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria
Amateur cricket match c. 1900.Wherever there was a bat, a ball, and a few square yards, Australians of all classes played cricket, usually in a more egalitarian spirit than back in England.
Photographer unknown, c.1918, State Library of South Australia, B71667
Floodwaters in northern South Australia, about 1914. One sure prediction is that if a piece of land has flooded once, it will almost certainly flood again.
Photographer unknown, State Library of South Australia, PRG 280/1/13/176
Queensland floods, January 2011. Old-style Queenslander houses were designed for floods to pass under them. But over time the ‘under the house’ areas were enclosed, and more cleared land meant that water moved faster. Land known to be flood-prone was built on regardless … then the floods came again. Shutterstock.com
Some bush types need fire to regenerate, but misunderstood ‘prescribed burning’ in other areas has instead encouraged fire-loving species and made the land more vulnerable to burning again.
Photographer unknown, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria H2002.199/1476
Let the Land Speak Page 46
