by Don Watson
How was this to be interpreted? Who was to blame, the settlers for watering too heavily or the authorities who had instructed them? If raising the level of the channel without also raising the Dethridge wheel that measured the flow of water to the farms caused settlers to overwater – which in turn raised the watertable and caused salinity – who was responsible? How had it been allowed to happen? And who was to put in the drains to carry the water away? The Pharisees said one thing; the people of Israel were inclined to say another. Whose bright idea was it to feed air into the failing pumps, which, among other disruptions, caused the water master’s chip heater to explode while he was having a shower? When water to both the plants and the houses developed a sickening smell, what was the reason and who was at fault? It turned out the cause was aquatic life which had fried to death in pipes exposed to the sun. In pipes not exposed, the mud was home to millions of cockles (Corbiculina australis). How was anyone to know? To clear the mud the authorities shot a charge of chlorine into the pipes. This did the trick with the mud but killed the cockles and sent their shells and foul decaying bodies throughout the irrigation system, which, in addition to the stench, gummed up channel pumps, filled the sumps beneath the Dethridge wheels, and choked the settlers’ pipes and sprayers. Where was the science in that? And why did it not predict the electrolysis that ate away the bolts at the Cooltong pumping station and caused the manifold to ‘burst asunder from the outer wall . . . in a spectacular display of mud and water’?
Second World War soldier settlers received an allowance of 5 pounds 8 shillings a week for the first two years, and all working costs were covered with loans from the Lands Department. The allowance was not enough, so they took other jobs and grew pumpkins, melons and tomatoes to tide them over and help pay off the money advanced them. They grew oranges (the now despised Valencia variety), grapefruit, lemons and mandarins; grapes, mainly Gordo and sultana, but also many other varieties suited to drying and fortified wines; Moorpark apricots and Elberta peaches. Bucket watering gave way to furrow and portable pipe irrigation, then overhead sprays. Each was more convenient than the one preceding it but just as wasteful and as certain to raise the watertable. Now they use drippers. And they don’t cultivate, but use weedicides; don’t fumigate red scale but use biological controls; don’t bring in recent migrants and students to harvest, but use machinery. Nor do they plant Gordo and sultana grapes, but, to supply the corporate winemakers who have set up there, chardonnay, merlot and shiraz for sale at the bottom of the market in cardboard casks.
Cooltong began with forty-seven returned servicemen and their wives and children. Most of them coped with the hardships and survived the floods of 1956 and the drought of 1966–67. ‘We had suicides, divorces, drownings and other fatal accidents, incest and a few alcoholics, but no murders,’ one settler wrote. ‘We weren’t much different from other communities except we were all ex-servicemen.’ It was no utopia, but the dream was only rarely utopian. Utopia was too concrete a notion. They settled for hope. Probably they went to satisfy an ancient human longing to get their living from the ground. The bush still promised independence. It happened that there was also satisfaction in a community of like spirits. There were friendships. Not the communalism that utopians extolled, or even mateship: just friends. That might be the nearest expression of the agrarian dream: independence plus amity. It was a ‘wonderful life’, one of them said half a century after arriving. Whether by that she meant that it was so much better than any life she might have had in the city, or better than any a person might reasonably expect, it seems to have been the general opinion and therefore a fair summary of what the land can satisfy in a human soul.
Irrigation in these arid areas has proved poor John Oxley wrong. They were not uninhabitable, not all of them, though if he could look at Google Earth and see the extent of the salinity he might feel vindicated. The Snowy Mountains Scheme, which diverted water to otherwise marginal lands, extended the ‘garden of verdure’ and placed a great many people in it. The Murray-Darling Basin amounts to 14 per cent of the continent’s physical extent, and with the help of 75 per cent of the country’s irrigation it now produces more than 40 per cent of the nation’s agricultural wealth. The Snowy scheme and the irrigation communities it made possible were also building blocks of multicultural Australia. Large numbers of displaced persons from Europe worked on the scheme, and southern European migrants were numerous among the irrigators. The scheme meant a useful transfer of technological skills, and helped to teach the country that there are rewards in cultural variety. Communities like Cooltong represent elemental hopes fulfilled, and, like the Snowy scheme itself, are woven into the historical fabric and the spirit of the country. The Snowy, as Michael Cathcart wrote, was the fulfilment of an old desire to ‘redeem the [arid] country with engineering’. It was proof that we could dominate nature and make the land our own.
It is possible to drive around the lower Murray and marvel at great works: the peaceful towns, the gleaming orchards, groves and vineyards. It is equally possible to drive around the Riverland and see broad expanses of land devastated by salt, orchards and vines ripped up, houses and sheds abandoned. Low prices for their grapes have made their lives hard. The long drought made them harder, along with the high dollar and increasing costs, including the cost of investment in more sustainable methods. The level of frustration and anger has risen with the watertable and the debt. When governments and scientists insist that water must be taken from the irrigators and fed back into the natural environment, the growers are outraged. When economists talk market principles, they are outraged again: as one would expect from people who have worked as hard as any on the face of the continent, but whose task would have been impossible without government assistance. The growers want to know why no dam has been built in the last thirty-five years. It is a ‘disgraceful indictment on Government’, they say. On the other side of the argument, there are plenty who would indict any government that even contemplated another dam.
It stands to reason that no plan will ever satisfy all the needs of the various interests in the Basin, or all those of the river system itself. Even if it were possible to balance the imperatives of a healthy environment and healthy regional economies, the political task would remain: the federal government might declare a certain amount of water must be directed to environmental flows, but, for good reasons or doubtful ones, a state government might decree a different amount. When Canberra decides that land clearing must cease in this area or that – when Canberra decides anything – state governments might resist for good reasons or for political ones. Meanwhile the fact remains that in three of the dry first ten years of this century, extraction from the rivers exceeded inflows, and in the last year of that decade 93 per cent of the average natural flow was taken.
At Waikerie, an irrigation settlement near Renmark, South Australia, Tammy Atze, the thirty-something daughter of a successful blocker, grows saltbush and sells it to farmers and government agencies. Depending on demand, she has half a million to 1.5 million seedlings ready for planting. Tammy grows an ‘improved’ version of old-man saltbush, called DeKock certified.
Old-man saltbush can improve the carrying capacity of marginal country by anything up to a factor of ten, and treble it in areas of higher rainfall; it controls wind and soil erosion and the movement of sand drifts, and can proof properties against drought. It’s the ‘living haystack’. Grazed on a rotational system, it provides valuable fodder and allows other pasture to be rested; it makes a good windbreak, reduces the need for hand feeding, absorbs remarkable quantities of salt and minimises groundwater, and so can be used to revegetate sodden and salty land. Also beyond argument is its use in reducing weeds, encouraging useful insect life, fostering the regeneration of native grasses, and making for tastier and leaner meat with higher levels of vitamin E. It’s a first-rate firebreak, and can be used to repair ravaged land at mining sites.
Old-man saltbush has rare powers to live where everything el
se succumbs. Vertical roots up to 6 metres long and three extensive layers of lateral and shallow-hair roots tap every drop of moisture, including morning dew. In effect, the plants are water pumps and that gives them the ability to reclaim saturated and saline land. The same deep roots, by some accounts, draw up minerals that are good for the health of the animals that eat the plant; and the leaves, some say, contain an oil that kills internal parasites. The Aborigines ate Atriplex, as did the Native Americans of the United States. In several translations of the Book of Job, saltwort, or herbs of the saltmarshes (probably Atriplex halimus), is the food of the pariahs. Europeans ate it for centuries, until spinach arrived around the fourteenth century.
De Satgé called it ‘that corrective herb which sets the seal of healthy sheep country throughout most of Australia’. In the old days of which he wrote, ‘clumps of saltbush used to surround the myall trees and sheep, panting in the exuberance of their fat, used to be attracted to the shade’. The first squatters knew saltbush was good, they knew the native grasses were good – they had proof of their goodness in the numbers of stock they carried. It was because they were so good that they overgrazed them, and, come droughts and rabbits, destroyed them.
David Millsom, a farmer in north-central Victoria, makes the point that all irrigation systems cause salinity. ‘There are no known exceptions,’ he says. ‘We know from the last 6000 years that the average lifespan of an irrigation system is 150 years. This one is 120 years old and running true to type.’ To counter salinity on their property, the Millsoms have been planting saltbush for twenty years. Their farm at Mt Hope, Victoria was cut out of a squatting run a hundred years ago. In the squatter’s day the land was described as ‘115 000 acres approximately of wasteland’. When the Millsoms took over their portion, it was a good deal less productive than the wasteland had been, and going backwards. Almost all native vegetation had been cleared. Quarrying had eliminated three permanent waterholes. The soil was eroding and cattle ran on the eroded land. In the 1980s, Millsom says, virtually no one was interested in changing from the ‘rape and pillage mentality’. When the remaining old-growth trees began to die, the farmers planted anything but endemic species in their place – the indigenous stuff had proven its inadequacy by dying, after all. The Millsoms collected seed from remnant native vegetation on their land, not just canopy trees, but understorey plants. The ‘new’ bush they created doubled the number of bird species, and brought more reptiles, invertebrates, bats and insects. The biodiversity helps to control pests, and since the vegetation is leguminous, it improves soil. Planting saltbush on rocky and eroded hillsides has doubled capacity. Planting it in paddocks that have been flood-irrigated for a century has lowered the watertable and reduced salinity.
A farmer on an old family property in central New South Wales told the Millsoms about ‘saltbush magic’. Because one ancestor had been too lazy to clear it, the next one had been able to discover its qualities and how to manage them. They never fed hay, looked forward to droughts when cheap stock were available, and grew some of the best wool in the country. (Saltbush is said to be good for the staple.)
As with all serious farmers, David Millsom could be nothing but a farmer. I spent scarcely ten minutes with him, but he had the aura of work, the strain in the eyes. ‘Our dream is to build something here that is sustainable,’ he says. Sustainable is a modern buzzword with a meaning in the bush that it lacks in other contexts: it means the land will be farmed in another twenty or fifty or a hundred years. The Millsoms know they won’t get an answer in their lifetimes. In this they echo the selectors and soldier settlers who saw farming not as a job, but as a life, and whose dream was to build something for their children.
When David Millsom told me about saltbush and where to read about what he’d been doing, I had a little rush of faith. The word reclaim was apt enough for what European settlement involved, not only in the sense of the accepted definition – to bring uncultivated land into cultivation – but in the implication, as old as colonialism itself, that by seizing the land the settlers were exercising a moral right and putting it to the purpose Providence intended. In 1902, when the US government enacted legislation to dam and divert mighty rivers for the purpose of ‘converting arid federal land into agriculturally productive land’, they called it the National Reclamation Act. It was how the West was won. Farmers, miners, governments, nations – they have all taken from the land what they assume is there for humanity to claim. The land needs reclaiming again, if not from the people with title to it, then from the habits which have governed it for so long. Think about the word for a while, utter it under your breath, and you sense the power ‘reclaiming’ had. It goes some way to explaining the unwavering belief, the grit and superhuman effort that went into settlement. If that is what it took to wreck the bush, it will likely take as much to remake it, make it sustainable, reclaim it. All that, plus better science, deeper wisdom, more investment and government support in at least the same degree afforded the selectors and soldier settlers.
Town and Country
little Chicagos – ‘leveraging’ history – making the most of a mine – a white gunjung – recharging the bush – genetic material moving about – the scientist and the taxonomist – a town on the Murrumbidgee – incredible destruction – Walgett
Barely had the first punt been installed on the Murrumbidgee at Narrandera than people were saying that the town would be the new Chicago, or the Chicago of the west (or south). It didn’t happen. And Bourke did not become Chicago on the Darling, despite several confident predictions. They were essential towns just the same, great bush towns, and the defining force in their respective regions. The bush is made of the natural elements and the people who work in them, of course, but towns also make it and so do the factories, laboratories, banks, markets, and hunger and genius of the cities. A bushman could drove 1000 cattle from Narrandera to Adelaide, a farmer could milk 100 cows and a squatter shear 10 000 sheep, and none of them would alter the course of life in the bush as much as a surveyor or engineer in a morning’s work, or a man with a printing press, a teacher with a gift, a bank manager with a loan.
‘Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.’ Italo Calvino had Chicago more in mind, but his remark does not need much amendment to apply to Narrandera or Bourke.
A frontier exists in a moment of transformation: one civilisation and the environment in which it exists give way as a new one is brought into being. This is a violent and self-interested act regardless of the particular means by which it is carried out, but also one redeemed by the hardships endured by those who perform it, and, contradictory as it may seem, by the purity of their motives, their brave hearts, the grandeur of the colonial enterprise. They are the dragon slayers and to them go the spoils of history. In the same startlingly short historical moment, the losers become servants, mendicants, fringe dwellers – proof that the conquest was both just and inevitable – while their conquerors, the people of ruthless and unceasing action, are granted the grace and stillness of soul known best to philosophers and saints. By then there is granite in them. The pioneers function as all myths do, pressing obedience upon us and the prescription for ‘right action, in this world or the next’.
Towns begin with the act of dispossession and soon after become the locus of the myths. For the first thirty or so years the remnant dispossessed may be seen in the streets; then, as the amenities take shape, these people disappear to the fringes – of both the town and the mind. Within a decade or two of the first tent being pitched there are stores, hotels, schools, churches, banks, a post office, and quite possibly a library, a Mechanics’ Institute, a public hall of some kind. There is a doctor or two and a solicitor or two, elected councillors and council chambers, even a hospital and a courthouse. The streets are named for English royalty, English statesmen, governors, colonial officials,
explorers, poets, early settlers, and the town soon has a provenance both more worthy and more tangible than anything indigenous. And all this before the railways arrive. The odd Aborigine might beg for a while, bushmen come to get liquored and supplied, bushrangers might even pounce. But they all look out of place in the main street and the half-dozen streets adjacent, because here the frontier has been officially abolished. Reputations have been made and sometimes remade. It is the speed as much as the substance of the towns’ growth that does for the culture they overrun, and for the memory of how the overrunning was done and who did it. On the past silence falls like night.
The squatters, being first into any district, were there when the towns took shape, present on the first local representative bodies, and first into colonial politics. At every step they profited, and from their capital and their vigorous self-interest so did the towns – but only up to a point. It took the railway to make them boom. With the railway, real development began – hotels mainly, but also houses and stores for the commercial classes that flocked there. These people were as influential as anybody in shaping the character of bush life, including its steadily increasing amenity. It was the middle classes of the towns who formed the progress associations and sports clubs, dominated the councils, raised most of the money for hospitals and churches – delivered the children, set the bones, pulled the teeth, buried the dead. As well, they made the bricks and mortar, sold the beer and tea and real estate. They ran the newspapers and very often the politics, they channelled the patriotism. Bush towns were the centres of democratic agitation; the conduits of modernisation, fashion and taste. Telephones, televisions, laminex, hairstyles came through the town. So did gossip. The city being ‘a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant heap’, so in essence is a town, and, like other facts in nature, it longs to persist in its being.
