by Don Watson
Unknown numbers of Australian plant species have vanished or retreated to remnants of land, and with them have gone many of the dependent marsupials, insects, birds, reptiles and invertebrates. Magpie geese once ranged in the south of the continent, but not any more; many animals now found only in the south-west used to range in the south-east. Lepschi told me about the clearing at Esperance, Western Australia in the 1960s, when hundreds of animals – quolls, potoroos, bustards and malleefowl – fled before the bulldozers and chains and the fires that followed. Australians still clear vast tracts every year. Even when the soil is no good and there’s little or nothing to be got out of it, they clear. Lepschi thinks that in this perfect contempt for nature they might be obeying a primitive impulse of their unconscious.
What makes Australia tough going for an ecological scientist like Robert Godfree makes it a place of almost limitless possibilities for a taxonomist like Lepschi. By way of example, between the 1860s and the 1990s no one studied one of the most widespread Australian genera – Melaleuca. Though professional cutters who harvested it for fencing material noticed that one type died after cutting and another grew back, the melaleuca known commonly as broom bush was always thought to be one species. Lepschi’s survey identified not one or two species, but twelve. In similar vein, following a 1980s study of the mallee Eucalyptus foecunda, an assumed five species became fifteen. With the eucalypts classified levispermae, five became twenty-eight.
Lepschi says his job is as much art as science. His purpose is to identify all the things in creation, which happens to be the essential starting point for Godfree’s science. As the scientist cannot go far without taxonomy, neither can the conservationist. You cannot conserve if you cannot identify; you cannot legislate. But identifying Australian plants presents unique difficulties. This became apparent when, as we drove past a stand of unprepossessing eucalypts on a barren hillside, Godfree and Lepschi argued about whether they were E. dwyeri or a subspecies of E. dealbata.
It is in our nature to see things as discrete, Godfree says. We are ‘pattern-seeking organisms’, very likely hardwired to be so in the days when recognising patterns might have saved us from being eaten. The vegetation of the Australian bush frustrates this instinctive search because of its inveterate tendency to hybridise. The dichotomies by which we classify and understand are often not there. We see weird scribblings instead. But the promiscuous intercourse that confounded Europeans is what makes the eucalypts so adaptable and enduring. Yellow box (E. melliodora) and brittle gum (E. mannifera) are distinct species, but they interbreed and the hybrid offspring are as vigorous as the parents. White box (E. albens) and narrow-leafed red ironbark (E. crebra) produce hybrids with characteristics of both. Reticulate evolution is the name this now goes by, and it is a major strand in the Australian evolutionary story. For students of the story, Godfree and Lepschi say, it is less a question of what is different and what the same, and more one of identifying various degrees of evolutionary separation.
Godfree’s studies of the grasslands near West Wyalong are being done in conjunction with the Lake Cowal Foundation. In a paddock of remnant native grassland he has constructed several plastic hexagonal ‘open-top passive heating chambers’, by which means he can increase air temperatures by 1 to 2 degrees. By observing the effects on the plants and soils within the chambers he hopes to learn how native grasses will adapt to global warming.
Godfree’s other study concerns the effects of invasive annual plants on the native grass Austrostipa aristiglumis. For this he has created twenty-seven exclusion plots, each one divided into square-metre grids, in turn divided into 10-centimetre grids and these into 5-centimetre grids. Into these he and Lepschi delved and soon find the natives: Austrostipa blackii, A. nodosa and A. scabra; Erodium crinitum; Stuartina, Hypoxis, Siloxerus; Enteropogon acicularis, Euphorbia drummondii. Beneath the lank grasses, an underworld of mosses, lichens, ferns, hornworts and liverworts – the spore-generated plants known sometimes as cryptogams, which hide the ways they reproduce. A bit like Orpheus, the scientists fancy that with what we learn about the unrevealed realms we can live more deftly in the upper light.
After pulling out all the ryegrass and other European plants, Godfree counts the natives – the number of species and the number of individual plants – and measures the percentage of soil they cover. Looking on this scale he discovers such things as one species of wild oat growing on higher ground and another growing on ground a few centimetres lower. He is looking for patterns of invasion, decline and recovery. Lepschi, who was helping him on the project, says it was the most taxing and ‘incredibly tedious’ work: on a two-day visit they made 45 000 calculations and ‘nearly went nuts’.
The grasslands Godfree studies are grasslands because trees cannot establish themselves in much profusion on the deep-cracking clay, and stand no chance of doing so in long droughts. As you go west in New South Wales evaporation rates determine plant life. The native grasses are perennials, a condition of survival in low-nutrient soils and climates of great variability. Droughts like the one that ran for most of the first decade of this century may kill them, but the seedbeds they deposit revive with rain. The kangaroo grass is gone, but there are plenty of other native species, and among them weeds: Paterson’s curse, capeweed, black oats, soursob, barley grass, Salvia verbenaca, Hypochaeris glabra, Malva parviflora, Lolium rigidum . . . The last is annual (or Wimmera) ryegrass, which invades crops and grasslands alike and, because it has adapted to Roundup, is one of the world’s worst weeds. Like the other weeds on Godfree’s hillside, it thrived when superphosphate and animal manure added nutrients to the soil. This has been one of the great changes since Europeans arrived in Australia –the conversion of grasslands from perennial to annual. But on the basis of the evidence he has so far gathered, Robert Godfree thinks warming will probably favour the return of the native perennials.
Approaching Narrandera from the south across flat country, you strike a forest of native cypress on the red sandy slopes about 20 kilometres before the Murrumbidgee River. The town is where it is because even in flood the river could be crossed there. When the Victorian goldrush began, a town crept into being around the punts ferrying livestock on their death march to the butchers on the fields. Now along Narrandera’s main street, which dips in the middle and rises to the north, the remaining Victorian buildings with their balconies intact give the town a graceful quality. On a beautiful morning a handful of the 4000 locals are taking their lattes and eggs in the sun on the footpath outside the bakery, or in the courtyard of Café G. Café G has a sign outside that says ‘Life’s too short to drink bad coffee’, and inside on a blackboard a kind of homelie du jour advises patrons to be positive. Narrandera has a lake, a fine swimming pool, and, just off the main street, a Royal Doulton fountain erected after the First World War and still in working order. In the other direction an immaculate cricket ground with a gleaming white picket fence nestles under a little park with gum trees. It might be the combination of the buildings and the brilliant light that gives some of these New South Wales towns their agreeable ambience: they look prosperous and kind, and as if they have always been so.
And indeed, beginning with the explorer Charles Sturt who camped there in 1829, early European accounts generally agree that the place where Narrandera now sits, park-like, abundantly supplied with water and abounding in plant species, animals, birds and fish, was not far short of heaven. The Riverina was then a ‘pastoral paradise’, according to an eloquent drover of the early times, and the Narrandera country ‘in the blue-eyed seasons of the later Fifties was worth the ransom of a thousand kings . . . the lush grasses along the river banks; the green, open-hearted look of the country; the cattle rolling fat; the unfenced panorama of the sunny landscape, was all a grand vision to the heart and the vision of the drover’. Bill Gammage quotes this drover in his history of Narrandera. Gammage is a historian who values evidence over fancy, so we should take him seriously when he says ‘it is hard not to fe
el that this land lay in balance and harmony, recovering quickly from flood and fire, evading the worst impact of drought, malleable to whatever the uncertain seasons may bring’.
The name Narrandera comes from the Narrungdera, who lived in the district where the town took shape. ‘Narrungdera’ means frill-necked lizard. In 1843 a European settler took the trouble to estimate how many Narrungdera people he and his fellows were displacing: he reckoned between 2000 and 2800. Disease was the great destroyer – tuberculosis, influenza, syphilis, measles, typhoid, mumps – everything with the potential to kill white people killed Aboriginal people en masse. It would nevertheless be a denial of extensive evidence in both settler accounts and Aboriginal oral tradition to imagine that deadly violence was not also common. On the Namoi, the Lachlan, the Murrumbidgee and the Darling – throughout the Murray-Darling Basin, in other words – a sporadic and vicious war was fought. Around Narrandera, 1840 was the year the Narrungdera fought back. They attacked stations, killed settlers and managed to drive others away. The settlers counterattacked. A massacre on Murderers Island in the Murrumbidgee brought the war to an end.
It was suicidal folly for the Aborigines to think the settlers would tolerate their resistance, or sue for peace, or pack up and go home. For their part, most of the settlers appear to have believed that upon the brazen occupation of their country any decent Aborigine should have bowled up to their doors and applied for a job. Of course, this outlook depended on denying the Aborigines any inherent right to the land, which in turn depended on holding that their numbers were too few, their civilisation too primitive or too barbarous to warrant recognition. Thus, under its founding act of 1834, South Australian lands were declared ‘waste and unoccupied’, and an 1842 Waste Lands Act confirmed that description while setting aside 15 per cent of monies raised by sale of lands for the welfare of the Aborigines who had until recently occupied them.
The land being officially terra nullius, the settlers were being speared by people who did not exist, Her Majesty’s subjects though they were. The fiction of terra nullius prevailed until the 1990s when the High Court of Australia quashed it by finding native title existed. The so-called Mabo judgement and the later Wik judgement, which found that pastoral and native title could coexist, produced entirely predictable anxiety in rural Australia. Just as predictable was the denial: it had, after all, been a habit from the earliest beginnings of the European land grab. There was no bleaker evidence that the pattern would continue after Mabo than reports of farmers burying middens, chopping down canoe trees, and hiding or destroying spears, axe-heads or other artefacts their families had collected – anything that might suggest Aborigines had once lived on the land they now farmed.
One night in 2010, as I ate saltbush lamb chops in the dining room of a cavernous country club on the Murray River, a band led by a rotund gentleman in an orange jerkin played ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ and ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’, and women in gowns and men in jumpers with their trouser cuffs caught up in their boot labels foxtrotted and waltzed away the night. Into this beautiful narcotic unreality a man from Swan Hill inserted the observation that the premises and the road leading to it had been built on Aboriginal middens.
In Such is Life, Joseph Furphy remarked on the ‘physical revolution’ by which the original tussocky, spongy landscape, noted much earlier by John Oxley, was transformed by settlement. Furphy welcomed the change, and not only because it meant travellers were less likely to become bogged in it. Sheep – as opposed to the ‘half-specialised and belated animals’ preceding them – would bring about ‘the ultimate extirpation of all trees and scrubs’. And if their ‘sharp little hoofs’ compressed the absorbent soils, so much the better, he reckoned. The country was at last waking from its primeval sleep to the civilisation of ‘rich and spacious plains, variegated by lakes and forests and probably enjoying an equable rainfall’. This revolution confirmed in Furphy’s mind the idea that Australia was a continent waiting like a virgin bride – ‘how long has she tarried her bridal day!’
Furphy was right, up to a point: in many places, for two or three decades those invading animals formed soils and vegetation that were suited to them. ‘It is a country that will improve very much after it is stocked’, John McDouall Stuart wrote from the fringe of the desert north of Adelaide, as if in 1860 it were conventional wisdom. Everywhere, the squatters poured on more stock. In 1879 there were 6.5 million sheep in the Western Division of New South Wales. In 1891 there were 15.4 million. The odd voice warned of consequences, but with good seasons, borrowed money and faith in providence, no one was going to hold back. Then the droughts came, and the rabbits at the same time. In 1901 there were 3.5 million sheep in the Western Division and in New South Wales as a whole the number had halved.
Out west, sand buried tanks and sheep yards and threatened to swallow sheds and houses. Fences erected to keep sheep in and rabbits out became dunes and the rabbits ran over them. Pastoralists built fences on top of the fence-dunes, and sand came again and the rabbits ran over them too. By the first decade of the twentieth century, 70 000 kilometres of rabbit-proof fencing had been erected in New South Wales. The rabbits swarmed into it and suffocated in sand and fur, and other rabbits clambered over the corpses to the other side. The more the rabbits competed for what little grass remained, the more sheep starved to death. When there was no grass left the rabbits stood on their hind legs and ate enough of the saltbush and shrubs to leave them black and withered. They ringbarked trees. They climbed trees: Thomas Griffith Taylor saw ‘dead rabbits hanging in forked branches’, the desperate creatures having slipped and died from choking while trying to get at the leaves.
In the space of two generations the plains which had caused squatters to swoon, and Joseph Furphy to foresee a new civilisation built upon their riches, became desolate: where they had imagined a new Chicago the land was now ‘empty, and void, and waste’, like ancient Ninevah. The black-box woodlands with the old-man saltbush were gone, pretty well for good. The native plants had been eaten to the roots and never given a chance to recover. Trodden by hard hooves forever trudging between bores, tanks and creeks, the topsoils of the exhausted plains blew away and left vast claypans. A lot of the soil landed on Narrandera: a 1915 photograph of a black-brown cloud descending like the apocalypse made the town a byword for dust storms. When it did rain, the water now ran off the slightest incline, washing away more topsoil, gouging gutters in the clay, and, as the 1901 royal commission heard, planting the lower-lying country with ‘noxious scrubs’. Pine scrub spread very fast into places it had never been and grew so thick no animal could get through it.
The combination of overstocking, drought and rabbits not only devastated soils and vegetation, it rearranged them. Floods washed weeds to the banks of every watercourse and stream. Winds blew them into crops and pasture. In the absence of Aboriginal burning, and with the disappearance of small marsupials such as bettongs and nail-tail wallabies which had browsed on callitris and eucalyptus seedlings, savannah became woody scrub; one kind of scrub turned into another kind, grassland into vast ‘scalds’ or deserts. ‘Nineteen years ago it was beautiful open box country, with some large pines on it,’ a Cobar settler said of his land; but now it was ‘scrub country’ and just another example of the ‘scrub problem’.
‘Drought did not kill it,’ the royal commission declared. The ‘white man, raw, inexperienced, ignorant’ had gone out onto the plains and in twenty years destroyed ‘much of the wealth that had gradually been stored there since the beginning of the world. It was wealth which had painfully fought and survived the disease of Australia itself.’ There were occasional protests at this war on the ecology: people who surmised that the native grasses had flourished because they were adapted and their removal might therefore be folly; people who reckoned the ‘ruthless desire’ to wipe out native animals was simply wrong. Rolf Boldrewood was among them, and the pastoralists themselves often wrote of their misgivings and regret even as they carried on with t
he war.
The environmental disaster created work. All over the country gangs of men were employed to drive rabbits into chutes, pits and dams, and club them to death, or stamp on them or wring their necks. They trapped, netted and poisoned them. They ripped their burrows. Week after week the contractors killed them in the tens of thousands but the rabbits bred faster than any gang could kill them.
There were so many animals to hunt, both native and imported. Of the native species, bilbies, ravens, eagles, kangaroo rats, tiger cats, cockatoos, koalas, and in Queensland in the 1890s when a plague of them followed the devastating tick-fever outbreak, wallabies all had bounties on their heads. Some of the most fiercely hunted, such as ravens and eagles, easily survived the carnage because sheep and rabbits and dams made food so plentiful, and cockatoo numbers grew with the spread of crops. For some creatures, the bounty paid on ears, heads or beaks was additional to that paid for skins, or, in the case of Queensland wallabies, for the tails skinned and dried.
Wild cattle also needed destroying, and wild horses. Thousands of feral horses – the fabled brumbies – were caught and broken in, often by local Aborigines, and sold as stockhorses or shipped off to India as remounts for the British army. A herd of them usually contained a lot of awful inbred specimens mixed in with magnificent light-footed creatures of noble descent. All of them were tough. But hardy as the brumbies are, they also need 30-odd litres of water every day, and droughts took their toll. Mrs Percy Hindmarsh, a resident of Rawbelle on the Nogo River in Queensland during the drought of 1880, reported brumbies digging holes 2 metres deep to get to water from riverbeds and surviving when cattle could not. Wild horses were revered in one context, and in another were little more than a livelihood for shooters and trappers, who sold them for 2 shillings and sixpence a head, or, having shot them as they drank at waterholes, cut off their manes and tails to sell to mattress makers.
