by Don Watson
The RSL leader, whose patriotic energy was boundless but not catching, then led a procession out of the hall and down the street to the town memorial where wreaths were laid, and from behind a lectern that obscured all but the top of his head a boy played the reveille and the last post on a bugle. He had not reached the heartbreaking end when, heedless of the moment, a gleaming four-wheel drive and horse float pulled out with a roar from the adjacent street and set off for the Cup. As it is in nearly every Australian country town, the number of names on the little monument was something to wonder at. The piper struck up again, and as the gentlefolk allowed themselves a chortle or two the patriots set off marching down the street. By rights they should have marched into the local store and tackled the proprietor, who was rumoured to be dealing ice and amphetamines and had a swastika tattooed on the back of each hand.
The First World War had been a scourge. When men began returning from it, the old agrarian ideal bloomed with new moral purpose: in return for their military service the soldiers would be offered a piece of the national estate. Just about everyone reckoned these men were owed a favour, a better chance at dignity and financial independence than labouring for wages or sustenance could offer. There were other motives, including those that had prompted earlier closer settlement schemes. Murray Johnson, a student of the scheme in Queensland, concluded that the settlers were ‘pawns’; ‘a relatively inexpensive means for determining which rural enterprises would be suitable for different regions of the State’. The exercise was ‘inexpensive’ because while the states administered the schemes, the Commonwealth funded them. In Victoria a 1915 royal commission into closer settlement schemes heard tales of ‘hopeless struggle’, of men, women and children working like slaves only to slip steadily backwards, of wasted lives, wasted years and wasted money. There were people who implored the government not to condemn returning servicemen to this fate. Establish cooperative factories, they said. Get them processing our raw materials. Train them in new technical schools attached to the factories. But the land won out. And no one was more enthusiastic than the soldiers: across the continent, they thronged the Soldier Settlement Offices, determined to give the land a fly.
They had come back in a great wave, many of them invalids and not fit for hard physical work. The AIF ran education programs and issued pamphlets written by experts on raising poultry, growing crops, or breeding sheep according to the Mendelian principle. And land was made available. Later, E. H. McLarty, the man in charge in Western Australia, would say that few of the men knew how to farm but all of them thought they could learn. ‘The practice has been to regard any man who is unsuitable for other callings as being suitable for the land,’ he said.
Trouble was, much of the land would have tested the strongest men, and admirable soldiers though they were, many of them were not strong, and many of them were damaged. A lot of the soldiers never managed to clear more than a fraction of their allotments. The royal commission heard repeatedly of applicants who had presented to the authority as ‘really good men’ with ‘no signs of disability’, but ‘broke down’ on their blocks. Some were ‘not normal after the war’, said McLarty. He meant they were psychologically damaged. Others, he said, were physically damaged – some had lost limbs – and the work was too much for them. The commission found that ‘the great majority of the returned men were suffering from war-caused injuries and shock’. A prewar settler made perhaps the most poignant observation when he said a lot of the returned soldiers were ‘tired’.
The story was much the same in other states. Across Australia more than 90 000 square kilometres of land, either acquired or set aside from the Crown, was allotted to 23 367 ex-servicemen – about one in twelve of those returning from the war. Sincere and generous as the intentions may have been, sending ex-servicemen to struggle in the Victorian Mallee, the backblocks of New South Wales, the forests of Queensland, or land afflicted with poison bush, salinity and weeds, made the First World War schemes a byword for folly and bastardry. Even if they managed to get their farms into reasonable shape and the wild radish out of their crops, their citrus trees growing and free of red scale, or their cows milking and free of milk fever, the soldier settlers still faced the same poor markets, uncooperative weather and crushing rates of interest that made the life of all farmers difficult.
The first soldier settlement scheme in Queensland was at Beerburrum, at the foot of the Glasshouse Mountains, where a couple of dozen soldiers who had been invalided out of the army were given perpetual leaseholds on blocks believed to be suited to pineapples: perpetual leaseholds rather than freehold because it was a plank of the Labor government’s platform to nationalise the land. Veterans were taught the art of growing pineapples at a camp where they lived – the majority with their wives – in ‘light structures made of round bush timber, covered with iron and having canvas walls’. The terms of the leaseholds were punishing, but even if they had been more favourable, the men were bound to struggle with a saturated market and, when there was too much phosphorus in the fertiliser, a debilitating tendency in the fruit called ‘spiking’. The government built a state cannery and on the labels of the cans a uniformed soldier held a rifle in one hand and a pineapple in the other. In the expectation that such British folk as ate tinned pineapple would exercise imperial gratitude, cans of the fruit were exported to the mother country with labels urging them to ‘Buy from the growers who fought for the Empire’. The British people were not significantly moved: they preferred the cheaper Californian product.
At Ennoggera the soldiers could not make a living from the eggs; at Mt Gravatt only four out of the original forty-eight were still in business in 1929. The task was beyond most men of ordinary physical means: what hope then for ‘quite a number of soldiers, each with a wooden leg’ who ‘hobbled past’ to greet the Prince of Wales at Beerburrum in 1920? At Amiens one man gave up on cows and crops and fenced off 50 hectares to raise possums for the fur trade. Men pleaded with the minister or the department for more time to meet their obligations; to let them get a decent crop of maize or beans or plums in; to be patient, now that their boys were approaching the age of thirteen when they would be able to leave school and work on the farm. Up until the Second World War it was uncommon on such farms for a child to remain at school past thirteen or fourteen.
At Bald Hills much of the land was saltmarsh and the bulk of some blocks flooded at high tide. A lot of it was thick with prickly pear, Noogoora burr and groundsel, and prone to plagues of caterpillars, slugs, and other vermin. Coominya, near Ipswich, was as bad as Bald Hills, not because of salt water, but because of no water: at least none that was reliable without pumping it from 30 metres underground. Soon after the soldiers had been placed on land deemed ‘eminently suitable for the growth of lemons and grapes’, the government Agricultural Chemist declared the soils ‘without doubt the poorest . . . ever analysed’. The Government Water Diviner and two other officials were dispatched and were not impressed with what they saw. Drought made it worse. Then, when it rained, powdery mildew destroyed most of the vines. The men were told to plant cotton, but the bolls failed to burst. The Sailors and Soldiers Fathers Association provided laying hens and a bush nurse. After three years Coominya was abandoned. One old settler said the scheme had been an ‘atrocity’.
At another settlement, Pikedale on Queensland’s southern downs, where settlers were trained to grow stone fruit, one plot was described thus: ‘47 acres consists of 15 acres of solid rock, 10 acres swamp, 5 acres unsuitable for fruit growing, and 5 acres (already planted), which is situated at the mouth of a watercourse, and which has huge channels, six and eight feet deep, running through the centre and segregating some of his fruit trees on islands, inaccessible to the plough; the remainder is, in wet weather, flooded flat’.
Around Pikedale some soldier settlements live on. Their place names, Passchendaele, Messines, Amiens, Bullecourt, Pozières, Bapaume, and so on, not only commemorate the battles on the Western Front in which Austr
alian soldiers fought, but eradicate the public memory of the many German settlers who had arrived three or four decades before the war. Sixty per cent of the Australian forces who fought in those battles in France and Belgium became casualties. On Australia’s soldier settlements, returned servicemen failed in very similar proportion, and from every state there are photos of their homes in blasted landscapes that make you wonder if they did not feel sometimes as if their lives in peace and war were two parts of the same nightmare. Some died within a year or two of taking up blocks, many broke down years later, by which time all had struggled into debt. Marilyn Lake wrote: ‘With accounts they were unable to pay, storekeepers who had to be avoided, and legal proceedings which rendered them formally bankrupt, life became a series of humiliations, a mockery of their dreams.’ In New South Wales the tragedy ran at least as deep, and Tasmania might have been the worst of all. In all states men found themselves in a condition essentially the same as those who had protested in the streets of Melbourne in 1858, though perhaps with less hope and more bitterness.
In Queensland the soldier settlement scheme was abandoned in 1929. But no misery or failure, not even the Great Depression and the collapse of export prices, could distract the government from its agrarian dream. ‘[T]his state will continue to be for all time a primary producing state,’ the Premier said in 1933. That premier was not a member of the Country Party, but a Labor man: for William Forgan Smith farming was ‘the natural occupation of mankind’.
‘Dungadine Scrub was beautiful in the old days before free selectors spoiled it,’ wrote Rosa Praed. Maize and millet had replaced ‘the lonely, beautiful scrub which can never be made again’. In many places the pre-industrial environment was destroyed in the effort to avoid an industrial society. E. H. F. Swain, who led forestry departments in Queensland and New South Wales in the 1920s and 1930s, fought for decades against the agrarian obsession which had seen ‘first rate forests’ destroyed for second rate farms’, with nothing more than poverty, hardship and ignorance to show for it. What began as a fixation with creating a yeoman class had become an effort to ‘dispose of our unemployment nuisance in hill-billy settlements’. Worse, these schemes generated a powerful agricultural lobby dedicated to the protection of an industry that, for the human hardship and environmental ruin it brought about, on the whole did not deserve to succeed. Swain even ventured that regional climate change had been a consequence of agriculture.
Far better, said Swain, to create a modern sustainable forestry industry providing good livings to timber workers and foresters, and revenue at least equal to that earned from agriculture, by what he imagined would be an ever-expanding range of wood products, including fuel and food. Instead of subjecting returned servicemen to still more misery clearing land for cows and maize, Swain thought they should be replanting cleared land with useful native softwood species, such as hoop pine, and where the climate suited, imported Pinus radiata. He wanted nothing less than a forest-based society and economy: commercial forests side by side with tracts of the primitive to satisfy the ‘intense desire . . . of the city dweller to seek his own momentary escape back to Nature’. His scheme would be good for the nation’s land and soils, its water supply, its climate, its revenues, its identity, and the physical and mental health of its people.
Swain won many battles and left a legacy of substantial achievement, but he lost the war with agriculture. It turned out that Western civilisation had a better future than he imagined; the oil and coal did not run out as he thought it would, agriculture found more productive and less destructive methods than those he deplored, and wood was not ‘the stuff from which anything could be made’. Yet he was only a bit wrongheaded. He was right about the damage agriculture (and mining and pastoralism) had done, and the hardship endured by many who were doing it. The country is still paying for those mistakes. And had his greater ambitions been fulfilled, much good might have been done, and much of the debate which defines our times might have been averted or taken better shape. Comprehensive regulation of land use in the interests of productivity and the environment, less clearing and more reafforestation, setting aside more native forests for their intrinsic value and for tourism, better understanding of forest ecology, the preservation and sustainable exploitation of species – he would have more listeners now.
The Murray River irrigation scheme founded by the Chaffey Brothers at the turn of the century accommodated soldiers returning from the First World War, and was expanded for those returning from the Second. The first soldier settlers in the Riverland suffered many of the same disadvantages as their brethren across the continent and some others specific to the application of the imperfect science of irrigation in a very hard and poorly understood environment. One local study, containing more than a hundred brief biographies, reveals many of the men had been wounded, injured, gassed or shell-shocked in the war. It also documents the rather surprising fact – given the legend of the uncommonly rangy Anzac – that on average the men were a little shorter than Richard III. The king stood 5 foot 8 inches before his spine buckled: the average for the 112 returned soldiers was between 5 foot 6 and 5 foot 7. Their average weight was little more than 63 kilograms. These products of European agrarian/industrial society seem to have been smaller than the Aboriginal people who preceded them on the Murray, and if Jared Diamond can be believed, a good 3 inches shorter than the average hunter-gatherer in Greece and Turkey towards the end of the last ice age.
Lessons were learned and soldiers returning from the Second World War were in general allotted better land and more of it. Roads, fencing and housing were provided. The intending farmers were screened more carefully and it is likely most of them were fitter and stronger than the generation preceding them. Certainly there was no less enthusiasm for the land: the New South Wales government received 10 000 applications for just 204 blocks in the western division of the state. Economic conditions were good, and at times, for wool especially, stupendous. In most places, at least for the first decade and a half, it rained. The CSIRO triumphed over rabbits with myxomatosis at amazing speed: a month after it was released in New South Wales, and before news of the release had reached the communities, thousands of rabbits were dying 1000 kilometres away in Queensland. Not every season was a good one; there were floods and bushfires and infestations of weeds, and other familiar hazards, but in the altogether better circumstances of the 1950s and ’60s many more soldier settlers not only survived, but prospered. Of those 204 blocks out west in New South Wales, seventy-six had been fully paid for by 1959.
The Second World War settlers began arriving on the Murray in 1949. They moved onto semi-desert land, almost dead flat under a huge sky. A lot of it was sand, held together by hop bush and mallee. That was the first task: to clear the vegetation. Thereafter they endured dust storms. When they had cleared the scrub, they pegged their rows, and when they had pegged, they dug the holes. Then they waited for the trees to arrive. With their wives and young children they lived in tents or Nissen huts until their two-bedroom weatherboard or brick-veneer houses were built.
The Department of Land had determined what was to be planted and where, in accordance with their soil survey. Citrus was to go where the soil was 60 centimetres deep, apricots and peaches where it was 45 centimetres, and vines into clay. When they dug the holes the veterans realised the soil changed often and haphazardly, but the government planting inspector decided the issue. The arrival of the seedlings was a moment of great excitement, but because many seedlings were of poor quality and failed to grow, the first planting was frequently followed by a second.
Long as the wait had been, most settlers got onto their land before the water did. Until it arrived they watered their seedlings by hand, a job that sounds less gruelling than it was. Some of the settlers didn’t want the irrigation channels; they feared their children would drown in them. But the channels were built and settlers made do by working for wages on them. Some of the pipes were laid uphill, and the men got more work re-l
aying them. When the water arrived the main channel was too small, but at least the settlers could now irrigate more than one tree at a time. By day, husbands and wives worked together in the desert heat, their infant children parked in whatever shade could be found or contrived. Sandblasting winds, frosts and vicious dust-storms menaced their orchards. They ate dust with their meals until the installation of louvre windows helped keep it out of their houses. Hares attacked their seedlings. Snakes lurked among them. But, until the myxo took hold, rabbits were the worst. Men and women rose to find all their trees and vines stripped bare. They ripped the burrows, painted their plants with blood and lime, built a rabbit-proof fence. It was biblical.
On the Victorian side of the Murray the settlers were known as blockies; on the South Australian side they were called blockers. On both sides the central drama of life was conducted between the settlers and the various tiers of government, their officials and their doctrines: the central point at issue, when it was not the supply of water, was the effect of it on soil and plants. Commonwealth and state bureaucracies provided horticultural advisers, a water master, department officers, district officers, a Land Board, a Liquid Control Board and a Water Advisory Board. For all the government supervision, the soldier settlers of Cooltong, South Australia still learned by trial and error. Within a couple of years the settlers had seen the leaves fall off their trees, and discovered their roots had rotted in water that collected in the clay.
