by Don Watson
One of those Police Waterhole expeditions had been led by a station owner named Curr. Robert Watson and his party, including a ‘poor little black boy’ called Pagan, stayed with Curr in April 1881. Curr was not Watson’s first encounter with the violent side of the Queensland frontier. A few weeks earlier, on Oscar de Satgé’s Coreena station, he was visited in his camp by a boundary rider who had ‘once been condemned to death for killing blacks, roasting piccanninnies alive, etc’. ‘The conduct of many whites toward the blacks is disgraceful’, Watson wrote, and countless others testified. Girls eleven or twelve years old were taken. Elsewhere, the anthropologist Theodor Strehlow called it rape; others said ‘a bit of nookie with an Aboriginal girl’ was no such thing. White settlers took the women – the lubras – for sex and for labour, and on occasion kept them manacled or behind fences. Sometimes women were ‘freely’ given by Aboriginal men anxious to appease the invader, sometimes the women chose to go, sometimes they were taken by force. However it happened, the exploitation broke the tribes and made the settlers’ task easier. Indeed, both the Queensland Protector and a boss drover of long experience said the practice made settlement possible: ‘the outback would still have been in its wild state if it had not been for the lubras’, the drover said.
Curr’s account of a recent murder is instructive, as is Watson’s own resigned judgement:
Mr Curr told me, the stockman and a black boy were hunting for stray cattle; they came upon a black’s trail which they followed to their camp; then they drove away the black men and took possession of the Gins, with whom they remained in camp. Presently the stockman fell asleep, one of the gins stole his revolver and gave the signal to the blacks who came around, put a spear through both his thighs pinning him to the earth; and then beating out his brains with nullahs; then they cleared out. This is the boy’s version, but he did not report the murder for 4 days. It seems the stockman had been thrashing him for some days and it is thought he might have had his ‘revenge’. Mr Curr told me he and others had pursued the blacks and shot five and that the police were coming to give them a further dressing, as that was the only thing they understood. It seems hard to steal a man’s gin or child and then shoot him because he objects; but I believe there is no help for it but speedy and ostensible annihilation.
Battle Mountain is an ancient, massively worn outcrop of rock, ochre-red in parts, the almost sheer faces furrowed with watercourses. At its base a dense forest of 2-metre-high grevillea grows with spinifex and stunted gums. Where the ground rises, the shafts of a deserted twentieth-century copper mine enter the side of the mountain, and machinery and bits of buildings lie around. The Kalkadoon must have trudged up the gentler slope leading to a saddle. They cannot have hoped for anything more than temporary respite: there is no water on the mountain, no food and no escape. The mounted police followed them up the same gentle slope.
If climbing the mountain was suicidal, so was killing Europeans. Then again, the Kalkadoon had tried other ways of dealing with them. They had led Ernest Henry to his copper mines. They had worked for the station owners. As in virtually every other part of the country, they laboured in everything from droving cattle to raising children. Watson found on his approach to Cloncurry that ‘the stations about here seem to be worked entirely by blacks’, and the ‘young gins are said to be very useful among horses and cattle; in fact, “capital stockmen’’’. E. M. Curr said they rode ‘like Centaurs’. They had a grip on a horse ‘like an octopus on a rock’, Banjo Paterson declared. An Aboriginal stockman put a different view: ‘We bin starvin’ since we learned to ride a horse.’
Like the plains of the United States, northern Australia excited dreams of grandeur. ‘There is no smallness in it,’ Oscar de Satgé said. ‘This huge Western watershed . . . is now consecrated to the development of a gigantic pastoral industry.’ ‘Consecrated’: there can be no opposition to men with a divine purpose, especially when they are riding a wave of credit that at any moment might throw them onto the rocks. Their minds, the sense of their own importance, must have swelled with the scale of creation. This was Lebensraum for sheepmen; any race considered inferior would be either put to work or annihilated. As Mary Durack wrote, it became the view of white people that western Queensland would ‘only be habitable when the last of the blacks was wiped out.
East towards Cloncurry, once out of Mt Isa’s rocky extremities, the land quickly takes a monotonous shape and the sky becomes overwhelmingly huge. It is one thing to travel this landscape in a car, another thing entirely to do it on a horse. And yet another, surely, to live in it as a pedestrian. When the Aboriginal inhabitants were removed from these places a human perspective was lost; in other words, a world. By day the only animals are dead marsupials by the roadside, and the kites that feed on them. The Brahmin cattle, wandering in single file along the fences or camped in the shade of a woody weed, might be feeding on ancestral memory, dreaming of home.
This was March 2010, and the drought had half broken. Floods were to follow. For now, the feed was green but fragile, nothing like the swaying seas of Mitchell grass, ‘the richest pastoral country in Australia if not the world’, as it had once been known. A couple of locals reckoned it might be too soon for the cattle, and recalled times when, in a rush to make up losses, graziers had restocked before the new grass was properly established. In fact on the long flat plain between Hughenden and Winton, the paddocks of pale green grass dotted with prickly acacia trees, solitary and in copses, looked as if the drought had left its shroud behind.
These plains are part of the Mitchell Grass Downs that stretch from the central-west of Queensland, across the Barkly Tablelands and as far as the Kimberley, a belt where 250–550 millimetres of rain falls, most of it in summer. Except for the paths of the watercourses and the little mesas of the ‘jump-up’ country, whose covering of spinifex and low eucalypts have the appearance of a Fred Williams painting, the typical sweep of the grass is all but unblemished by trees. There are those rolling downs with scarcely a tree in sight, and wooded downs with scatterings of boree and gidgee; in the south, an irregular mosaic of open downs, downs of eucalypt, brigalow and mulga, and belts of callitris, coolabah and ironbark – which is to say, there are a half-dozen species endemic not only to the Downs but to the national literature – and in the case of Mitchell Grass, the 50-cent coin.
Wherever Mitchell grass grows so very often does equally nutritious Queensland bluegrass and Desert bluegrass, along with Flinders grass, kangaroo grass, button, cup and windmill grass, emu foot, native millet, and half a dozen other species, all of which make useful feed at certain times of the year. The Downs encompass the divide between rivers flowing north into the Gulf of Carpentaria (the Flinders, the Gregory) and those flowing south (the Diamantina, the Georgina, the Channel Country) into Lake Eyre and the deserts of the dead heart. This is the definitive ‘droughts and flooding rain’ country: much of the big story of the continent is told here. The legendary towns of Longreach, Winton, Barcaldine, Camooweal and Julia Creek are Downs towns. The tourist brochures call it Waltzing Matilda country.
Major Mitchell first saw the tussock grasses that make up the genus Astrebla (A. lappacea, A. elymoides, A. pectinata and A. squarrosa – or curly, hoop, barley and bull) near Bourke, New South Wales in 1835. A decade later, when he saw the sea-like downs, he declared them the ‘El Dorado of Australia’. In all his travels, it was ‘the finest region [he] had ever seen’. He saw it from the banks of the Alice River, ‘as large as the Murray’ and much larger at certain times.
Pelican and ducks floated upon it, and mussle-shells of extraordinary size lay in such quantities, where the natives had been in the habit of eating them, as to resemble snow covering the ground . . . Verdure alone shone now, over the wide extent to which the waters sometimes rose . . . Two kinds of grass grew on these plains; one of them a brome grass, possessing the remarkable property of shooting up green from the old stalk.
In fact they were not bromes, but with their o
at-like seeds swaying in the breeze they looked like them. And they contained more protein.
The proof was in the pudding: in the great days of the Queensland pastoral industry there were stations on the Downs that sheared 200 000 sheep, and Arthur Ashwin recalled the shed at Saltern Creek shearing 300 000 in 1878. He was fencing in the district at the time: he and two other men put up 645 kilometres of ‘improvement’. The boundless plains would now have bounds.
Curly and hoop Mitchell are the most nutritious of the Astreblas, bull the least. Their vertical, metre-deep roots draw up what little moisture is to be found during the long droughts that separate floods, happily accommodating themselves in cracked soil in which trees struggle. The grasses have evolved to withstand drought, but they falter in a combination of drought and overgrazing, or grazing before they set their seed. They are, though, as if made for the digestive tracts of sheep and cattle, and the racehorse trainer Bart Cummings declares there was never anything like it for horses.
Such a singular environment gives rise to all manner of specialist creatures: lizards, snakes and small marsupials that have adapted to life in the tussocks and cracks; and birds – emus, bustards and pigeons among them – adapted to life without trees. All made good eating. Settlers reported 8.2-kilogram bustards (Ardeotis australis) in flocks of up to seventy, and after rain, bronzewings (Phaps histrionica) in the hundreds of thousands. Rain also triggered plagues of long-haired rats (Rattus villosissimus), which swarmed in prodigious numbers over the country devouring every edible thing in their paths. The bronzewings declined with the pastoral invasions and by 1950 were thought extinct, but they have recovered and, like the rats, still flock in great numbers when the rain comes.
There is ‘a kind of “greed of country” that comes over the pioneer’, de Satgé wrote. To understand that greed we need only imagine the good seasons when bullock wagons piled high with bales of wool and rolling like ships’ made their way across the plains, swaying with golden grass, to the railhead at Hughenden. The town was then ‘an extremely noisy and bustling little place, being the centre of a large traffic in wool for London and fat stock for Townsville’. Imagine also the spectacle after rain: the wagons bogged or turned on their side and the bales spilled on the ground, the bullocky’s profanities and the cracks of his whip fading pathetically in the vast space.
It was more than self-interest when the squatters complained about government preoccupation with closer settlement, more than a whinge about the colonies’ ingratitude for their services. They reckoned the country could not do without ‘the capital that has so lavishly and confidently been poured into her lap by the investors of Great Britain’. It was a fair point, though not all of the money that flowed the squatters’ way – from Great Britain via Melbourne, in the main – went to make a better wool industry, much less a secure one. A lot of it chased land and other speculative enterprises rather than the improvement of flocks and management. Average annual growth in wool production was 4 per cent in the fifteen years to 1891, when the boom went bust; in the fifteen years before that, with half the volume of investment, it was 11 per cent.
Having seen the consequences in such ‘crack’ districts as the Liverpool Plains, de Satgé warned against overstocking. But apparently impervious to his own advice, he and his partners were convinced that, with water from artesian bores, the Mitchell Grass Downs could carry any number of stock through all conditions. ‘[H]aving secured the element hitherto most valued and most scarce in Central and Western Queensland, the future is assured and it cannot be a failure’, he wrote. In the drought of 1892 that theory condemned 90 000 sheep and 10 000 cattle on Carandotta to death from starvation. ‘What can compare [to their] slow lingering deaths?’ de Satgé asked. The manager had been ‘caught in a trap and was unable to get the stock away’. There is no reason to doubt this judgement, and none to deny that ‘greed of country’ helped lay the trap that caught him.
Lacking trees, the Mitchell Grass Downs lacked shade. To provide it, graziers in the early twentieth century took to planting South African prickly acacia, or prickle bush (Acacia nilotica). The Queensland Department of Agriculture recommended it as ‘a grateful shade for sheep and . . . a useful forage in the pods’. The plant was so well suited to the Downs that pastoralists – and selectors to whom the Downs had been opened in the late 1880s – found they only had to throw the seed from horseback and the stuff would thrive. The seeds grew even better when they began life in a wad of cow manure, and better still if they began it in the damp around a bore or along the channels dug between bores. Floods and wet seasons are heaven for the seeds. Cattle spread it more efficiently than sheep and goats, and as cattle have steadily supplanted sheep on the Downs since the 1950s, prickly acacia has supplanted a lot of the native grasses. So that now, if you drive across the Downs, for many kilometres at a time you will see Brahmin cattle foraging on bare ground among these weeds of 5–10 metres. It is not the prettiest sight, even less so when you know that each tree can produce 175 000 seed pods each year, and that out of sight beneath the soil dormant plants lie, six or so to the square metre.
‘Do not overgraze,’ the authorities advise; run sheep rather than cattle; replace open channels with pipes. The government holds field days on the subject of eradication. Beetles and caterpillars have been introduced; there are foliar chemical sprays and herbicides for the surrounding soil, chemicals to be painted on the stumps within ten seconds of cutting down the tree at the base. You can grub them with an 80-horsepower tractor in the autumn or you can push them over with a dozer in the winter, stickrake them or use a double chain during droughts. Prickly acacia is a declared Weed of National Significance. It halves the productivity of grasslands, alters their ecological balances and threatens their biodiversity. It makes large expanses impenetrable to stock, restricts mustering and prevents cattle reaching water. It costs $5 million a year in lost production and the efforts to control it cost $4 million. It is now naturalised on 6.6 million hectares of the Downs, and has rendered half a million hectares useless for grazing. According to one observer, the weed threatens to turn the Downs into ‘a thorny scrubland similar to the African thornveld’. And if this blight is avoided, according to Queensland’s Department of Primary Industry, Argentinian algaroba (Prosopis humilis), or mesquite, has the potential to be even worse.
If Oscar de Satgé could turn his horse in the direction of Mt Isa now, the old Tory would marvel at the demotic tone: the local member Bob Katter, the club where men and women eat steak and drink beer and play the poker machines, the café where he might order a cappuccino and where, with the benefit of a little training in hospitality, the girl will say ‘no worries’ in the same singsong voice you hear in the cities. It has come to mean ‘you’re welcome’, or ‘very well’ or ‘of course, sir’. Sometimes they say ‘no problem’, as if to advise that, had they detected one, they might not have given you your change.
It is inconceivable they could talk like this in brave little Julia Creek (population 600), lying out on the plain under the baking sky. Out there, surely, the only things they say are things they mean. In the centre of the main street the people have put up awnings to shade parked cars, and planted flower beds around them. The town sits on the artesian basin and is built around a bore. The water flows at 400 degrees Cinto a giant wineglass-shaped tower, a supremely functional edifice that might also be taken for a monument of deep symbolic, or even religious, value. At night they light up the tower, in the subliminal hope, perhaps, that it will be noticed somewhere in the Milky Way. They have created a museum and a library with a sign saying ‘Knowledge Centre’ painted on the side, and chairs, tables and flowerpots on the front pavement. There is a red-claw tropical yabby farm and a protected space for the endangered dunnart. Signs at either end of the town read ‘Home of the Julia Creek Dunnart’. According to the signs, Julia Creek is also the ‘Thriving Heart of the Midwest’ and the ‘Gateway to the Gulf’.
The Julia Creek dunnart (Sminthopsis dou
glasi) is a mouse-like carnivorous marsupial that, along with rare and endangered bilbies, night parrots and plains wanderers, used to flourish in the Mitchell grass of the plains. The dunnart is brilliantly adapted to drought and dearth, and thrived on the skinks, spiders, scorpions, grasshoppers, and other insects that swarmed in reasonable times. But it struggles to coexist with sheep and cattle and foxes and cats and is on the verge of extinction. Now the Queensland Environment Protection Agency has put a cat- and fox-proof fence around 250 hectares of relatively intact Mitchell grass country so the creature might live on.
Julia Creek was born of the Burke and Wills expedition. Both John McKinlay and Landsborough, who went looking for the explorers, passed through the surrounding country and within twelve months it had cattle on it. McKinlay had the shire named after him, and Burke lends his name to the town’s main street. But there was no town until 1907, a year in advance of the long-anticipated rail line to Cloncurry. They dug a bore to provide water for the trains, and laid out the main street on a gentle ridge beyond the reach of floodwaters. In the great flood of 1974, which inundated 155 000 square kilometres and killed 300 000 cattle, the water just lapped at the town’s edges. By the 1920s there was a state school and a Catholic school, a school of arts, a wool scour, a racecourse, a picture theatre, the Country Women’s Association and the Masonic Lodge. By 1940 the picture theatre had grown into Eckford’s Entertainment Complex, with a dance hall and skating rink, and the main street was bitumen. A new hospital had commenced operations; there were four cafés, a rugby team, cricket teams for men and women, a tennis club and an annual bike race. Depression and drought had laid waste to the chances of a generation and obliged them to hunt rabbits and wild dogs and slaughter their sheep and cattle, but whatever toll it took on individual lives, far from dampening community spirit, if anything it seems to have sharpened it.
