by Don Watson
There are accounts of bullock teams and their teamsters being swept away by the ‘wicked and deceitful’ rivers of Queensland, town populations spending days high in the branches of trees, cottages washed off their stumps in the middle of the night and ‘waltzing down the flood with lamps alight’. To take a random sample from the less than comprehensive Queensland Flood Summary, in the years 1914–18 the deaths of ninety-seven people are recorded, including sixty-one in one day on the Comet River in 1917. The summary for 1920–29 mentions eighty-nine deaths, with ‘at least 39’ in a flood in the region of Ingham. More than human life was lost of course. Enormous losses of stock were recorded. In the Gulf Country, untold thousands of cattle were lost in the 1974 floods, and according to some estimates 100 000 were drowned in 2009. Animals got bogged in the mud and died slowly en masse.
In 1890 a flood swept down through the Dunambrel and Llandrillo stations on the Big Warrambool River towards the Barwon, between Collarendabri and Walgett. A man called Humphries, who had a selection further upriver, rode all day and night to warn the downstream stations of the coming inundation. One H. C. Wilson was droving sheep in the district when he got word and at once made for higher ground, with ‘an old blackfellow’ following behind picking up the new lambs and loading them on to a spring cart. The higher ground was not high enough: on first watch that night the blackfellow, ‘Jack, the boy’, reported the sheep were up to their knees in water, so they set out in the moonlight for the highest sandhill they could see. But a depression lay between them and the sandhill, and the flood was rushing through it. All night they tried to swim the sheep across, but sheep are neither very bright nor well made for swimming. Wilson lost his two dogs, then found them in the water, ‘keeping themselves up on drowned sheep’ and howling for their master in the moonlight.
They got 1100 of his 7000 sheep onto a hilltop of barely a hectare, but none of the lambs. After two days the water was still rising. They built a platform in the highest pines. The water stopped rising and they lopped pine to feed the sheep. It was three weeks before they got off their island. A Mr Sinclair of Moongulla station told Wilson that one of his men had come down in a canoe to tell him that his entire flock of 12 000 had been washed away. The man had spent the previous night in a tree where for want of anything else he had eaten the liver of a drowned ewe. All told, ‘hundreds of thousands of sheep’ were lost in this flood. On the Barwon stations alone, Henry Bloxsome reported, 45 000 sheep were lost in one night. Two years later, Henry’s brother Sydney, who was jackarooing on Llandrillo, found ‘the skeletons of thousands of Dunambrel sheep’ on the boundary fence.
Twenty kilometres from Walgett, Michael O’Brien’s Angus heifers grazed on the black-soil plains in oats up to their bellies. His crops stood up strong and dense as privet hedges. The country round Walgett is flat, and when Michael first mentioned high ground I thought he must be talking about some other, hilly holding of his. But these things are relative: on flat country a metre or two makes a mountain of difference.
After years of drought it had rained on the black soil plains. Water lay here and there in sheets, but clear of the crops. As we slid and splashed along the tracks separating his fava beans from his wheat, his wheat from his barley, his barley from his chickpeas, and his black cattle from his Merino sheep, emus sometimes ran beside us. A pair of grey kangaroos bounded away. Michael said the kangaroos used to be all reds and blues but now he only sees greys.
He also used to see more trees, of course, especially the weeping myalls that gave the land its character. Myall wood smells of violets. Bushmen carved pipes and stockwhip handles from it, and used the ashes to cure kangaroo hides. In drought the sheep would eat the weeping branches. But trees get in the way of the colossal spray rigs used in modern cropping. The satellite technology farmers employ for sowing and harvesting requires near perfectly level and open ground, which means that around Walgett the last remaining weeping myall trees have not much time left. Only about 2 per cent of the original myalls in the central-west remain.
O’Brien’s beans and barley do not grow in what those who are used to them would call paddocks: he has 1000 hectares of this crop on one side of the road, 1500 hectares of that crop on the other, and a further crop of similar dimensions a few kilometres in this or that direction. He has crops that stretch to the horizon. All up he has 40 000 hectares. In addition to the crops, he runs 4000 Dohne Merino sheep and 2000 Angus cattle. In this good year of my visit he expects the crops to return $14 million. Three new 100-metre-long sheds are waiting for them. Not all the grain will be sold, nor all of it harvested. Some of the oats will be grazed. A lot of the fava beans will be buried and kept in reserve for droughts, the plants left to wither and rot back into the ground.
Michael O’Brien, the 2009 New South Wales Farmer of the Year, is a modern farmer, a leader and trailblazer among farmers. Starting twenty or so years ago, about the time his father died at just sixty-three, he has steadily unlocked the potential of the land. He’s sixty-seven now and has survived a heart attack of the kind that killed his father. The laconic, slow-moving Australian farmer he is not. Dressed in a shabby blue windcheater and jeans with the crutch almost reaching his knees, he seems to never stop moving or talking. He’s in a full-blown, passionate relationship with the land. He has unravelled its secrets, conquered it, and success has made him much ‘gamer and bolder’ than he used to be, he says. As much as his own accomplishments, he is proud of having persuaded the farmers of the shire to take up his methods, share in the rewards, and turn the shire of Walgett into a highly productive and, it would seem, sustainable food bowl. Where the farmers used to compete with each other, now they cooperate, he says. They believe in what they’re doing. Twenty years ago the shire had about 120 000 hectares under crops. Now they have 486 000 hectares, and Michael O’Brien believes that in the course of the next century the area can double.
Revolutionary as the change has been, the contemporary story is in certain ways the resolution of an old one. Arthur Dewhurst noted it in 1887: when he first came to the region, squatters held sheep and cattle runs of 25 000 acres or more, for which they paid ‘less than one halfpenny an acre’. The considerable number of souls they employed they fed on crops that grew readily in the soil. Yet when people demanded that the runs be broken up and given to small farmers for cultivation, the squatters declared that not so much as a cabbage would grow and certain ruin faced these misguided agitators. Cultivating was of no interest and did not pay ‘the great landholder and lord of flocks’, wrote a merchant and banker to his British investors in the early days. ‘Wool is the great point to be attended to and the secondary object . . . is the breed of cattle for market.’ Above all, he stressed it was the ‘fleece’ and only the fleece ‘whence ultimately a certain return can . . . be expected for any great outlay of capital’. The success of Michael O’Brien speaks for both cases: the triumph of his agriculture proves the agitators’ point, and he continues the tradition of the great landholder and lord of flocks. His success perhaps also speaks for the modern equivalent of those nineteenth-century British investors, in particular the Dutch-owned agribusiness giant, Rabobank.
Walgett’s soil has a natural propensity to retain water; in a region of unreliable rainfall and frequent drought it is the grain grower’s art to make the most of it. By rotating crops of cereals and legumes, canola and sorghum, O’Brien puts back into the soil everything the crops take out. And because it dries and compresses the soil and makes it vulnerable to erosion, he doesn’t till. In a country where 70 per cent of arable land is degraded, and a world where soils are being eroded faster than they can be replaced, no-till farming is a very welcome development. An inch of soil can blow away in an afternoon, and it can take anything from fifty to 10 000 years to reconstitute it. No-till farming reduces erosion by 80 per cent. To kill weeds and grasses – anything that might compete with the crop – Michael O’Brien sprays the soil with the glycine herbicide Roundup, and then direct-drills the see
d into the ground. As the crop grows he sprays it several times for broadleaf weeds and insects. Farmed this way, the soil retains its moisture, and by carefully rotating crops with nitrogenous plants such as fava beans, it retains – even increases – its fertility. Occasional applications of urea aside, Walgett soil needs little fertiliser.
Roundup is to crops what penicillin is to medicine, the telephone to communications, the jumbo jet to aviation. It has revolutionised agriculture. Plants absorb Roundup into their enzyme pathways, where it stops them producing three amino acids essential to life. Nothing that might compete with a crop can resist it. Deadly as it is, Roundup, the manufacturers say, ‘rapidly breaks down to natural products in the environment’. The dead weeds also break down of course and are absorbed, with beneficial effects, into the soil. Again in the manufacturer’s words, Roundup ‘has very low toxicity to humans and animals’. True, they warn you against allowing it to enter streams and water storages, or failing to thoroughly wash it off your skin, but compared to all previous herbicides, Roundup is environmentally benign.
Roundup was developed and patented in the 1970s by the US chemical company Monsanto, the flagship of agribusiness in the United States. Monsanto is usually the first name mentioned when citizens complain about the loss of family farms, the decline in quality and variety of produce, and the rate of suicide in farming communities. As the principal creator of genetically modified (GM) crops and chemical farming, it is almost always in the courts and never out of the news.
Around three-quarters of Monsanto’s GM seeds are engineered to tolerate Monsanto’s herbicides, and more than half of them are designed to tolerate Monsanto’s Roundup – the so-called Roundup Ready seeds. The effect is to greatly increase both the use of the company’s herbicides and the likelihood of weeds developing resistance to them. Roundup Ready crops tighten Monsanto’s stranglehold (politely called vertical integration) on US agriculture. They patent the plants that resist the sprays Monsanto makes. Monsanto extracts royalties from not only the original seed, but all subsequent generations, and demands a 3 per cent levy from non-GM farmers whose crops are found to contain GM seed, even if the seed has been blown onto their farms. The company has sued US farmers on the grounds of ‘patent infringement’ when any trace of GM seeds is found on their farms, and in 2012 threatened to sue the state of Vermont if it legislated compulsory labelling of GM food products.
Critics say the threats are manifold: to the farmers who must handle the herbicides and deal with the ‘superweeds’ evolving to resist them, to consumers who eat the genetically engineered food, to the diversity and health of the world’s food supply, and to farming communities and rural cultures as they fall under the control of agribusiness and the massive, capital-intensive monocultures they create. They insist that ‘epidemiological studies have found an association between Roundup exposure and miscarriage, birth defects, neurological development problems, DNA damage, and certain types of cancer’. Other studies maintain that, far from being harmless to humans, the surfactants used in combination with the glyphosate make Roundup toxic to humans and have the potential to cause genetic damage. An Australian study (and others elsewhere) found the herbicide is toxic to frogs and poisons aquatic environments. The American science writer Michael Pollan insist that the crops (he takes potatoes and corn as his prime examples) produced according to Monsanto’s chemical regimens are poisonous. What’s more, he finds farmers who agree with him and won’t eat the food they grow.
Monsanto is at present fighting a lawsuit brought on behalf of 300 000 US farmers, including Willie Nelson, who farms and sings. In Brazil, where 85 per cent of soybean crops are grown from Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds, the federal public prosecutor has asked that the use of Roundup be suspended. Roundup is banned in four Canadian provinces, in Denmark and, more recently, the Netherlands and Sri Lanka.
Spray a plant with Roundup often enough and for long enough and the plant will likely work out a way to beat you. After more than two decades of spraying, resistant weeds have evolved with particular vigour in Monsanto’s GM Roundup Ready crops of cotton, corn, soya and potatoes. In the US the evolution of these superweeds has earned a New York Times editorial. In Australia the first of them to be noticed was annual ryegrass (Lolium rigidum). Like Italian ryegrass and perennial ryegrass, annual ryegrass is a Mediterranean native introduced early to Australia as a hardy and nutritious stockfeed. Being an annual, it dies each year, but before it dies it sets seed which germinates when the ground is cultivated for growing crops: hence the need for glyphosate herbicides. In 2010, across Australia about a hundred populations of ryegrass were found to be resistant to glyphosates.
It is rare to meet an Australian farmer who can easily tolerate sceptical inquiry about Roundup. One may as well speak in praise of government. It has always been so with the man on the land. Just thinking about governments can make him fume. The very thought of the Native Vegetation Acts, which restrict farmers’ rights to remove trees from their own properties, incenses them. Telling them what tree they can knock over! As if they’d bloody know! Talk of climate change can have the same effect.
Proud though he is of his crops, like a true Celt, Michael O’Brien is prouder still of his flocks and herds. He sees good economic sense in mixing grazing with his farming: he gets a better spread of income and one offsets the risk of the other. It’s good for the land, what’s more. But above all he likes the pleasure he gets from breeding, raising and finishing sheep and cattle. Sheep he likes because in all but the worst of times they can put a quid in everyone’s pocket. Sheep have small engines, they don’t eat much, and you can run them anywhere: shear them for half a dozen years and they’re still worth something for their meat after that. The wool game is not what it once was, and very likely never will be again, but it’s better than it was in the early 1990s, when the whole thing collapsed under the weight of a massive unsold stockpile and millions of sheep were destroyed and farmers went broke.
But meat is another story. In 2011 Australians ate about 33 kilograms of beef per head per year, less than half the amount they ate thirty years before. They ate 9.3 kilograms of lamb and mutton, only a quarter of the figure of the early 1970s. But in other countries people are eating more. The Arabs want fat lambs, and in China, India and Indonesia, people who can now afford things that were always beyond their means are developing a taste for red meat. Beef is in good shape.
Michael O’Brien raises only Angus cattle. Angus have certain practical advantages. One is the ease with which they calve, a trait the first of them must have had in spades. Born in Aberdeenshire in 1824, Old Granny is reputed to have lived to the unlikely age of thirty-five and to have had twenty-nine calves, the last few of them sired by Old Jock, son of Grey-Breasted Jock. Old Granny and Old Jock are held to be the original Aberdeen Angus. Angus cattle are quiet, tractable, healthy and adaptable. They don’t have horns and they’re good to eat. They have a big rib-eye and only the flesh of the Japanese Wagyu breed, with which in Australia Angus are commonly crossed, has more of the soft intramuscular fat known as marbling that sophisticated meat eaters prize. W. S. Kelly, an expert in his day, said Angus had a reputation for ‘dying heavy’, which is to say that the proportion of dead meat to live weight was remarkably high. There is also an aesthetic value, or at least a fashion for black created by a marketing campaign, that has given Angus the edge on their rivals.
Michael doesn’t need the marketing. He just loves his black cattle. He doesn’t breed for the show ring, but he likes the look of them grazing in his pastures, or sleek and milling in the saleyards, ready for ‘finishing’ at the feedlots where 50 per cent of Australian beef cattle go before they’re slaughtered. So when the Walgett bull sale comes around in September, Michael O’Brien is ready with his chequebook.
The bulls are bred by a stud in southern Victoria and trucked to Walgett, 146 of them, all Angus. The night before, the locals gathered with the people from the stud at a reception centre, where drink
s and finger food on the veranda were followed by dinner in the cavernous interior. The stud’s owner was a burly, blue-eyed, commanding sort of chap of forty or so, with the manly tone, mellow vowels and good manners that a Geelong Grammar education bestows on the landed classes of Victoria’s Western District. He rose and welcomed guests, recited Banjo Paterson’s ‘Geebung Polo Club’ by heart, and spoke for five minutes on the subject of scientific progress in the beef cattle industry. The beef and wine was, naturally, all on the stud.
The next day we drove to the saleyards, parking the Toyota four-wheel drive among all the other Toyota four-wheel drives, and one gleaming BMW four-wheel drive. For breakfast at Wee Waa Arthur Dewhurst had been served the ‘grandest steak’ he ever saw, a meal fit for twelve but ‘given to me alone’. This, among other traditions of hospitality, continues in the district. Under an awning, the stud people had a grill going and were handing out steak to all concerned, along with bread rolls, coleslaw, soup, coffee, tea, cakes, beer and soft drinks. The buyers went off with their catalogues to inspect the beasts before the auction got under way. There were about eighty people in total. Farmers come large and small, fat and lean, rough and smooth, but when they gather at a saleyard there is a great uniformity about them: they are tribal and those big off-white hats they wear are their headdresses. As well as the hats with the dipping brims and the pinched crowns, they wore moleskins or jeans, brown boots, dark blue jumpers and check shirts – an outfit not unlike the one James Armour was told to wear in 1857 if he wanted to be taken seriously in the bush. Michael O’Brien stood out for his lack of a big hat. The women too showed a more independent spirit, but not to the extent that they didn’t wholly blend with the men folk and each other.
