by Don Watson
The buyers seated themselves on the benches of the grandstand on one side of the bullring and read catalogues containing each bull’s name, pedigree, provenance, and genetic disposition to such things as calving ease, fertility and carcass. As they studied, a number of buyers finished off their steak sandwiches with the insouciance that by now cattle probably expect of us. The auctioneer took up his position in a small box on the other side of the ring, with his smaller assistant adjacent and in deep shadow under his prodigious brim. With only their heads and shoulders visible they couldn’t help but look a bit like Punch and Judy. The stony-faced wrangler, who had sat opposite me at dinner the night before, stood in the ring with a long prod in his hand, facing the customers with a spaghetti-western stare.
It was just a few days since the hung parliament had resolved itself into a Labor government. One of the two rural independents whose support Labor had won was the member for the adjoining electorate of New England, Tony Windsor. Windsor was known to all at the bull sale. The auctioneer, who had a sardonic wit, a conservative frame of mind and a voice of inexhaustible volume, began by saying, ‘What a lovely new government we have,’ and referring to the Member for New England in terms that might have been intended to make him think twice before setting foot in Walgett again. A ripple of derision washed round the ring.
The first bull was brought in, a sturdy little brute as most of them were. He rocketed to one side of the ring, pulled up short, and rocketed back to the other side. Then he rushed to a side he had not been before, and then to the side opposite. He plunged round the ring clockwise and then he went anticlockwise. He snorted and pawed the dirt with his left front leg, then he pawed it with his right and flung dirt up onto his back and into the crowd. By the time the dirt settled on the ground he’d been sold for $4000. The auctioneer called the buyer’s name, and no sooner had that bull cantered out of the ring than another came in and rushed about in much the same pattern as the one preceding it.
A Scottish meat buyer once told me that he never saw a beast grazing on a hillside without also seeing it in wholesale cuts hanging in a coolroom. As each bull entered the Walgett sale ring, did 160 eyes dismember it, weigh the several parts, examine the flesh for marbling, imagine the offspring from their heifers and dismember them as well? The auctioneer drew our attention to a bull’s good bone or good shoulder, good muscle, good skeleton or good eye. While the beast blew and paced, buyers weighed the genetic imprint in the catalogue’s family tree and searched with their trained eyes for matching signs in the bull. We were all looking at bulls that afternoon but we were not all seeing the same thing.
They sold 132 bulls in the ring, and sixteen smallish ones that failed to meet the $2500 reserve were passed in. The highest price of $16 000 was paid for a beast of entirely different composition to the rest. He was twice as big for a start and there was a sort of tragic character to his face: more lines and, with the lines, more of an impression that he was capable of deeper thought, or had seen things that other bulls had not dreamed of. It was as if Winston Churchill had walked into the ring after a dozen political hacks. A mere snort from him made human hair bristle. The local TAFE college bought him.
Only one bull obliged the inscrutable wrangler to take cover, and that was more a case of exuberance than malice. The manners of the others were impeccable. Michael O’Brien bought fifteen bulls at the auction. For his heifers he bought some lighter ones with pedigrees that indicated a low birth weight in their offspring, and he bought some bulkier bulls to join with his mature breeders. He was denied the very best bulls because a big pastoral company, based in Gunnedah but with 30 000 recently acquired hectares in Walgett, was there with much more firepower. In turn, everyone else at the sale was outmuscled in any contest for an animal that Michael O’Brien wanted and the big pastoral company didn’t. One suspects there were people there who would have liked to buy just one bull, but did not have $2500 to spare.
The company man was tall and bespectacled and had an ascetic Presbyterian sort of aura about him. No vulgar Texan influences for him; he wore a broad-brimmed hat, but in brown, and ‘pastoralist’ or ‘squatter’ in style, with a low pork-pie crown and a circular, turned-down brim. He was the son, I believe, of a great Australian business and pastoral entrepreneur. From the same stud the company had bought $176 000 worth of bulls earlier in the year – ‘good, practical bulls’, ‘bulls ‘for production, not the show ring’, they said. As soon as he saw the tall gentlemen and his companions by the ring – or perhaps when he saw the big BMW in the car park – Michael O’Brien knew he would be outgunned. But in the end he and the tall man agreed to split a dozen unsold bulls, so he finished with twenty-one bulls for about $90 000 and was content with his afternoon’s work.
The sale wound up with more steaks and beer and wine. As a fine rain sprinkled their hats, the men stood round drinking beer in stubby-holders that advertised the outstanding quality of the stud’s bulls, and held an impromptu powwow. In front of a big poster of a bull’s testicles done up in a pink ribbon, I talked with a lady from the stud. She told me that to minimise their need for chemicals and fertilisers, the stud practises ‘cell grazing’ and ‘biological farming’ (no pesticides, no Roundup) and that it seemed to work.
It is true that city people – consumers in general – want all the advantages of efficient agriculture, but do not always acknowledge what efficiency requires. Their interest stops at the supermarket, as if the food were made out the back. Primary producers have always felt at least a little under-appreciated: now, having adapted to a full-blown consumer democracy in which most people know little and care less about the origins of their food, it is not surprising that they should feel it acutely when bleeding-heart, middle-class minorities complain about their methods.
There is no denying the efficiency of much modern farming. Yet there is also no denying that fashions among farmers have sometimes had calamitous results, and it should not surprise them when others who inhabit the continent are sceptical. Efficient as farmers are, they cannot do much about the inefficiencies of their animals. And when it comes to producing protein for humans to eat, cattle are the most inefficient. To begin with there is the disquieting fact that every Angus steer takes up to 54 kilograms of fodder to produce a kilogram of beef, and drinks 40–80 litres of water a day depending on the kind of fodder it is fed. A chicken can produce the same nutrition with thirty times less. If, unlike many farmers, we see no reason to doubt the almost universal opinion of climate scientists that the earth is warming and that greenhouse gases generated by human activity are substantially responsible for it, we are obliged to question the wisdom of subjecting 56 per cent of the continent’s landmass to grazing ruminant animals that produce as much greenhouse gas as all the cars and trucks on the nation’s roads combined – that is, 11–15 per cent of the total, and 20 per centif we count land-clearing in furtherance of the industry. As the science of climate proceeds according to the same scientific principles that gave the farmers more productive animals and crops, advanced machinery, fertilisers, greatly improved weather forecasting, chemicals, and medicine to keep them and their animals healthy and on their feet, there seems no reason for them to not trust it as much as they trust Roundup.
The present generation of cattle and sheep bear only part of the responsibility. Every ruminant since 1788 has added its share of methane and nitrous oxide. There had never been such an animal on Australian soil before then, and never an animal with hard hooves. Now there are roughly 500 million livestock on the continent, not including feral goats, horses, buffalo, donkeys and camels beyond counting. Ninety per cent of the vegetation cut down in Australia was cut down to make way for livestock. The desertification in much of arid and semi-arid Australia has been caused by them, as has a lot of the salination, erosion, and ruin of waterways throughout the continent. It is difficult to measure the cost against the benefits we have derived from the pastoral industry, and just as difficult to estimate the cost – or the fea
sibility – of curtailing it to any radical extent.
Whether we call it the most destructive or merely the most influential agent of change in the Australian landscape, were it not so long established and so tied up with the nation’s history and identity, the pastoral industry would be a matter of perpetual public controversy. In such a controversy, if environmentalists did not do for it, the advocates of animal welfare might. The grisly acts in primitive Indonesian slaughterhouses broadcast on Australian television in 2012 so horrified the audience that the federal minister felt obliged to suspend exports of live Brahmin cattle to that country, and in doing so effectively suspended the industry in northern Australia. Soon after this, scenes inside two Australian slaughterhouses were broadcast, and the public was again appalled. The authorities closed down both plants; one was described as a ‘rogue operator’, the other was run by a respected individual and, according to the local press, the video captured scenes that were not typical of an otherwise humane procedure.
Yet the animals in all these scenes were being slaughtered much as animals were slaughtered for most of the Australian pastoral industry’s history. Today, when they are not being brutally butchered in Egypt or Indonesia or Turkey, or by local ‘rogue operators’, cattle, sheep, pigs and goats are slaughtered ‘humanely’ behind the abattoir walls. The word abattoir comes from the French abattre, meaning to bring down, and it came into general use in English around the time slaughtering was removed from public view – in the case of the Smithfield yards in London, in part because the sight of the doomed animals mounting each other was considered likely to corrupt morals. The moral effects of killing animals in an abattoir remain largely unknown.
The abattoir is a pioneer of modernity. Henry Ford once said the slaughterhouses of Chicago were the model for his car assembly line. The novelist J. M. Coetzee made the point that the Nazis who devised the death camps in which 6 million Jews were killed used the modern Chicago slaughterhouse as their model. The model was one of efficiency, not merely in the machinery and methods of killing, but in the way it allowed those who killed (or processed) to be mentally (and ethically) distant from it – ‘minimal detrimental impact on operators and observers’ is a requirement of ‘humane slaughter’. Critics of the modern meat industry argue that it has constructed ingenious deceits that allow people to pretend the animals they eat were not once the cows that went ‘moo’ in a paddock, or the sheep that went ‘baa’ in the nursery rhyme, and to deny that they bear any relationship to the pets they nurture and adore. Indeed, it is the ‘voice’ of the animal – at least the voice found in its ‘violent death’, as Hegel said – that the modern industry has been at pains to still, or at least get out of the public’s earshot.
These are arguments to provoke fury among those who raise the animals, as well as those generally low-paid men and women who process them into chops and glue. The animals only have lives because of the industry, they say, and everything possible is done to make those lives happy and carefree. Product they may become, but until the moment of their death they are treated like the sentient creatures they are – able to feel pain, subject to anxiety and depression, as much possessed of personalities as dogs and cats. Which qualities, the critics say, make our turning them into product for consumption all the less forgivable.
There is something inscrutable about Brahmin cattle, as if, like the hedgehog, they know one big thing. ‘[I]ntelligent, inquisitive and shy’ is how the New South Wales Department of Primary Industry describes the Brahmin breed. Bred in the United States from Indian stock, Brahmins are able to better withstand the ravages of tropical climates – heat, drought, tick infestation and other insect attack and diseases. Herein lies a truth about the pastoral industry that its contemporary opponents tend to overlook: even the cruellest death in a slaughterhouse is kind by comparison to the deaths from thirst and starvation, flood, fire and disease which has been the fate of millions of animals since the first squatters set out with their sheep nearly two centuries ago.
Protests about the cruelty of the business are not new. Individuals were publicly deploring the suffering inflicted on millions of animals in the droughts of the late nineteenth century. Advocates of water conservation, including Henry Lawson, pointed to that suffering when making their case. In the day-to-day records of the industry they have always gone down as ‘stock losses’: the millions lost in the 1880s drought along the Darling when ‘the land stank with carrion’; the 40 000 to 50 000 sheep per station said to have died from thirst and starvation in drought- and rabbit-ravaged western New South Wales between the wars; the uncounted thousands of cattle that die of botulism each year in Australia’s north – up to 25 per cent of unvaccinated herds. Unable to get what they need from phosphorus-deficient soils on the northern savannahs, the cattle chew the bones and carcasses of horses, donkeys, goats, pigs, rodents and other cattle. Death takes anything from one to fourteen days. ‘Semi-circular marks on the ground may be the only evident sign when a carcass is found, resulting from the uncontrolled paddling movement of the legs.’
The pastoral industry in its frontier phase had neither the facilities nor the inclination for the modern industry’s rules of slaughter. It may be that anyone capable of killing horses in the way described earlier has already experienced ‘detrimental impacts’ of some kind; so might have anyone capable of cutting the throats of 25 000 of his sheep, as the owner of a station near Albury was reported to have done around 1888. In fact it might be that the effect of mass animal deaths on bush men and women has been both general and profound. That much might be inferred from the remarks of the prolific journalist and imperialist (Sir) Frank Fox, who in 1910 wrote that to all the fine qualities the struggle with nature had imbued in the bush Australian, seeing ‘sheep and cattle perish in thousands and, in the rare cases of a great drought, hundreds of thousands before his very eyes’ had added ‘a strong touch of cruelty’. Cruelty might be the wrong word. It is more like the imperative to treat nature on its own moral terms, which is to say, to be as indifferent as it is.
No Smallness In It
spinifex – the useless brigalow – the pear – gidgee – Tom Donovan, bushman, etc. – sites of the Kalkadoon – Tom and Ned – Battle Mountain – Mitchell grass - Julia Creek – insects – the Queensland Raj – the silence
In the dry lands that make up about a quarter of the Australian continent the dominant plant is spinifex. To botanists, though, it is no more spinifex than a koala is a bear: true spinifex, the genus Spinifex, grows only on sandy coastal beaches. The silvery grey and spiny hummock grass that grows in the red sand and rocks of inland Australia, giving the landscape its pruned and sculpted character and rendering an eccentric beauty out of the barrenness, is genus Triodia. The outer leaves of young Triodia and plants regenerating after fire are flat and soft, but to preserve moisture they curl, then harden and develop sharp points as they age – hence the common name porcupine grass, and the popularity of leggings among prospectors and other bush pedestrians. Every hummock is a kind of slowly expanding porcupine, prickly on the outside, a mass of stems and dead leaves on the inside. Some species are so rich in resin they ooze it much as gum trees do, leaving thick deposits on the ground and giving off a smell which Eric Rolls described as ‘an exciting mix of gibberellic acid, formic acid, musk and lanolin’.
‘It appears that what is called “Triodia” on the map is the same as spinifex . . .’ wrote Robert Watson while surveying the country north of Blackall Queensland in 1881, which suggests that the anomaly was known to the earliest white settlers. But the earliest white settlers were not much concerned with such things, and their descendants are not either. There are sixty or so species of Triodia, but most cattlemen will settle for bull, soft, feathery and curly spinifex. The bush personality is fed and watered by imprecision. What is useful – or a bastard of a thing – gets a vernacular name. What is neither useful nor a bastard is not worth knowing about. But while there is generally a consensus on what’s a bastard,
what is useful is a matter of opinion.
‘Spinifex is a grass that nothing eats, so this country is of no value,’ the indomitable Caroline Creaghe declared in her diary. She was trekking in north-west Queensland in 1883. ‘Useless country consisting of spinifex and mulga’, R. G. Ramsay wrote in South Australia, heading west with the Lindsay expedition of 1891. The Ninth Earl of Essex, the Hon. David W. Carnegie, who trekked in Australia’s inland before going to Nigeria where a poisoned arrow got him, said there were ‘two varieties of spinifex known to bushmen – “spinifex” and “buck” (or “old man”) spinifex. The latter is stronger in the prickle and practically impossible to get through . . .’ He should have known because he spent many months trying to get through the ‘horrible’ and ‘hateful’ plant that can grow as high as 2 metres and as wide as 3 metres. Carnegie conceded ‘a vast plain of waving spinifex’ looked beautiful and it had ‘a few uses’: it provided shelter; the roots were food for marsupials, bound the red sand in which it grew, and when dug up and turned over made a good mattress. But as feed, apart from the three weeks it was in seed, it was ‘useless’.
On the other hand, Ernestine Hill reported from the west that crested spinifex made ‘a golden harvest of thousands of square miles of . . . excellent fodder for cattle and sheep and horses’. All grass is ‘feed’, a disgruntled Rachel Henning noted after a couple of months living in the colonies. Whatever was not good feed was ‘useless’. A century and a half later, the same attitude prevails – everything is defined by its usefulness, as if the bushman’s eye converts nature to a machinery shed. Spinifex might not be especially good feed, but it is feed. That’s what matters: stock eat it, even if under sufferance very often.
