by Don Watson
With trains taking soldiers and equipment from the east coast to Cloncurry and on to Darwin, the Second World War gave Julia Creek a boost, especially the cafés where soldiers stocked up on sweets and tobacco. After the war the town got sewerage and electricity, and built a swimming pool, a retirement home, a Presbyterian church and a new Catholic church and convent school, a medical centre, a new hospital and a new rodeo and campdraft grounds. There’s a Dust ‘n’ Dirt Festival every April and a Dunnart Bush Festival. There are community weight-loss programs, a Healthy Lifestyle Program and an Active Ageing Falls Prevention Program for Seniors. Federal and state governments fund these sorts of things. The town benefits from the health of the beef industry and BHP Billiton’s nearby Cannington silver and lead mine.
An hour before dusk there is a sudden increase in traffic on the road: four-wheel drives of roo-shooters mainly, a lot of them Mad Max-inspired arrangements of spotlights and chrome, as if the shooters feel they cannot kill kangaroos without intimidating them first. They have made their vehicles into fierce creatures of the natural world, as well adapted as any goanna and governed by the same predatory instincts. The shooters perform an essential task because, especially now that dingoes are much reduced and bores provide a steady supply of water, the roos compete directly with sheep and cattle for grazing rights. Fences don’t matter to them. The shooters keep their numbers down, but would do it better if it suited their commercial interest to kill the females rather than the big males. In the early hours they sweep back into the towns with the kangaroos, heads and tails hacked off, hanging in rows above the trays of the trucks.
Bores have also made life good for parrots. In the 1950s the naturalist Vincent Serventy saw flocks of several thousand corellas out towards the Diamantina, and elsewhere budgerigars in similar numbers. Serventy took delight in the spectacle, but the birds tormented farmers. Wheat and other crops were to corellas, cockatoos and galahs what sheep were to dingoes. The newly planted seed and grain fed to stock was a gift. The birds multiplied and their range expanded with the wheatbelt, and in Western Australia at least they have overrun the habitats of local species, including corellas and galahs. Like kookaburras, long-billed corellas (Cacatua tenuirostris), little corellas (Cacatua sanguinea gymnopis) and sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita galerita), all native to the continent’s east, have descended on the west, where they not only devour crops, but attack street trees, cricket pitches and putting greens, and foul cars and clothes lines. The birds also like lettuce, carrots, almonds, walnuts, seedling blue gums, and, for what bird experts call ‘bill maintenance’, water reticulation pipes and fittings and vital parts of buildings.
Farmers came to loathe these birds and took to them as they took to the dingoes. They shot them and poisoned them. They netted and gassed them. And they introduced a new sound to the land, to go with the birds’ bush-defining squawks – the regular booms of scatter guns set up in paddocks to scare them. All these methods are still in use, though the authorities recommend a restrained approach: the ‘procedure’ for gassing birds tangled in a net, for instance, is not an ‘aesthetic’ one, as the West Australian Department of Environment and Conservation advises, ‘and could easily upset some members of the public, so should only be considered for use at a controlled site’.
The verges of the road to Hughenden were deep in weeds. Fork-tail kites rose from the dried-out carcasses of kangaroos that had been drawn to the green pick on the roadside; or hovered and swayed above the foliage, looking for mice or grasshoppers. These kites love grasshoppers, and the country is full of them – red, yellow, brown and green. You hear them hopping and scratching and clicking all around. In certain years – locals say before big rains – gidgee bugs swarm in the millions and make life miserable. Spinifex and Mitchell grass alike abound with insects. As I lay down one night the most benign-looking of all creatures, a 12-centimetre-long stick insect, landed on the transparent roof of my tent and was still there when the sun rose. I could not tell if it was looking at me or the stars. Mantises and hoppers are forever bumping into you on the Mitchell Grass Downs. Mosquitoes and sand-flies pester at night. The Downs are home to a vast number of ant species, including a flying, biting, nocturnal variety. The evidence suggests that about thirty ant species are endemic to the Downs or at least, as the scientists put it, exhibit ‘a high degree of fidelity’ to them.
Ants are the constant companions of picnickers, campers and bushwalkers, as well as the higher categories of bushmen, including Ludwig Leichhardt who was plagued by vicious black ants on his way from Brisbane to Port Essington. Along with flies, mosquitoes and fleas (‘which seem to pervade this colony in universal swarm’), Mrs Charles Meredith loathed the way ants infested houses and ‘got into everything’, as indeed they do, but she enjoyed watching them in the wild. Ants have almost as much claim to iconic status in Australia as the kangaroo or kelpie. In the northern savannahs their mounds, whether of the buttressed or the sheer ‘magnetic’ kind, imitate the skyline of Manhattan and now attract tourists. Green-ant nests hang from the trees in this country, and the ants have a habit of dropping down passing shirt collars and nipping the flesh inside. If you’re not allergic to its venom, the bite of a bull ant or jack-jumper is a defining bush experience; if you are allergic, it may kill you. Bites from members of the primitive genus Myrmecia cause anaphylaxis in thousands of people each year and probably kill as many people as snakes and crocodiles combined. A Victorian jack-jumper (M. pilosula) bit a friend of mine a decade ago, and ever since he’s had heart arrhythmia and goes everywhere with an adrenalin hypodermic and a tin of ant powder to cordon himself off at barbecues.
An insect history of the bush would be useful. It might start with William Dampier’s remarks upon meeting the Aborigines on the west coast of the continent in 1688: ‘Their eye-lids are always half closed, to keep the flies out of their eyes; they being so troublesome here, that no fanning will keep them from coming to one’s face.’ It was the same at our place in the summers of the 1950s and ’60s: flies (Musca vetustissima) crawled into our noses, mouths and eyes and sat on our ears. In the warmer months we never entered the house or the schoolroom without brushing our backs, black with flies, against the wall of the porch. The females are the more persistent, seeking the proteins we secrete for their ovarian needs. Not that we knew that. In 1912 newspapers reported that schools west of the Divide in New South Wales had been closed down and ‘everywhere stock is wandering in poor condition, unable to secure proper nourishment, on account of the onslaught of flies’. In the years between the First Fleet and our schooldays, the habit of brushing flies away with an action rather like a windscreen wiper became known as the Australian salute.
Dampier’s report casts a little doubt on the theory that bush flies were not plague-like before European animals scattered the land with dung in which the flies could multiply, but it is certain they were not disadvantaged by the invasion. They brought to the Museum of Bush Apparel the hat with corks hanging from the brim, or a veil protecting the eyes, and something similar for horses. As well as men, women and children, they drove horses and dogs mad. The surveyor George Watson observed that ‘the flies will eat the eyes out of a horse’s head’, and he was not the only one who saw it. They descended in swarms on sheep bloodied by shearing. Worse, the maggots of several species of fly burrow under the wool and skin to feed on the animals’ flesh. Along the Upper Hunter River in 1914, 48 000 sheep died from fly strike.
Bush flies lay their eggs only in manure – of native animals or exotic ones, they do not care – and are not great disease carriers. But by getting in human eyes they spread trachoma, also known as Egyptian opthalmia, or, in the bush, sandy blight. Up to 50 per cent of the people in some remote Aboriginal communities suffer with it, and in many it has caused permanent blindness. Elsewhere the disease has been gone for sixty years or more, but there was a time when it was the great curse throughout the bush. A woman living on the Darling in the late nineteenth century
recalled her whole family feeling their way around like blind people and being unable to sleep for the pain, and men on the track coming to her door day after day with rags wrapped round their eyes, in agony. Sandy blight is ‘a hundred times the most painful affliction a man can possibly have’, said the surveyor Archibald McMillan.
Then there are ticks. The natural habitat of paralysis ticks (Ixodes holocyclus) is a 30-kilometre coastal fringe stretching from north Queensland to the northern Victorian border. Bush ticks (Haemaphysalis longicornis) inhabit the same narrow strip but do not come so far south. Both species are no more than a nuisance to most humans, though a threat to any who are allergic, and a great menace to dogs. Far more serious is the cattle tick (Boophilus microplus), the agent of tick fever or redwater disease. Tick fever swept through the Queensland cattle industry in the last decade of the nineteenth century and wiped out most of the breeding herds. Three million cattle died. Farmers were said to have gone broke in a matter of days. If, as it frequently does, cerebral babesiosis sets in, the symptoms are ghastly: hypersensitivity, circling, head pressing, aggression, convulsions, paralysis.
The mite which caused scab, Psoroptes communis ovis, was ‘an insidious and imperceptible insect’ that nearly wiped out the sheep industry in the nineteenth century. It came with the First Fleet and it caused a kind of mange that made the sheep suffer horribly and their wool fall off. In 1855 it killed more than 13 000 sheep belonging to the great Riverina pastoralist John Peter. Graziers found that the scab mite was killed if sheep were twice immersed in a hot solution of sulphuric acid and tobacco, and dipping became common practice in the industry. Before that they used arsenic and mercury, with inevitable consequences for the life of streams and ponds in which the sheep cooled their burning feet.
But no treatment was proof against the wandering flocks of less conscientious graziers and drovers. To deal with this threat to the colonial staple, government-appointed scab inspectors were sent to patrol the borders. They were long borders and not every drover was prepared to submit his sheep for inspection. Thomas O’Shaughnessy made a note in his 1866 diary about getting across the McIntyre River above Goondiwindi before dawn, just in advance of the Queensland Inspector and a policeman who were coming after him with a summons. ‘I was in New South Wales. He could not serve the summons.’
In 1859 and 1863 the parliament of South Australia passed two Scab Acts, with the intention of keeping out infected flocks from bordering colonies. Inspectors were granted powers to seize and destroy contaminated sheep, and the passage of sheep across the state was strictly regulated. A mob of 12 000 was destroyed on the Lower Murray in 1867. A son of the Archdeacon of Colombo (but a convert to the Catholic Church), Henry Glennie, was appointed scab inspector and dispatched by steamer to Chowilla station, a ‘perfect wilderness, a hundred miles from the nearest village’ on the South Australian side of the Murray, just north of present-day Renmark. He took with him his wife and eight children and a horse. For £200 per annum and a forage allowance for his horse, he was responsible for all sheep proceeding down the river or crossing it into South Australia. In addition, after 1867, when for neglect of their duty the police were relieved of the task, Glennie was in charge of issuing rations to the Aborigines. They were demoralised by then. A local policeman thought it a ‘remarkable and gratifying fact’ when three babies were seen among the sixty or so camped at Chowilla, for ‘in years past, every living child appears to have been destroyed at birth’.
The Glennie family lived in a hut under a roof thatched with reeds from the river, on land belonging to the resentful owner of the station. To buy a cart, horses and harnesses with which to traipse the river’s meandering course, and build a more liveable dwelling, he was obliged to borrow money at 30 per cent. A more hellish government job it is hard to imagine. At one point he wrote to say that he had eight children down with measles, one ‘lying dead’, and himself ‘very nearly blind with Sandy Blight’.
The river fell so low sometimes that the steamers could not navigate it. And then it would rise so high that poor Glennie and his family had to abandon their house for higher ground. When there was drought in New South Wales, the mobs of sheep poured towards the South Australian border, and he would be out on horseback in the wilderness, or bouncing over it in his cart, trying to turn back the tide of scabby flocks. The ordeal left him with ‘Rheumatic gout’ and at the age of fifty he gave up the job. He died five years later, leaving his wife and eleven children, four more having been born to them at Chowilla and the one having died. Scab was eradicated from Australia’s flocks within twenty years of his death.
Like countless other Australian towns, Hughenden began with a hotel to cater to travellers, in this case people on their way to and from the mines round Cloncurry. The hotel was followed by a blacksmith, a store and butchery. In 2010 Hughenden seemed half dead. The impression was all the stronger for the surviving signs, such as the magnificent Grand Hotel, of its old hyperactivity. Outside another hotel, which had added ‘Resort’ to its name, an Aboriginal man was fall-over drunk, but determined to tell us something – one of those secrets that all towns hide. We did our best but could not understand him. Inside, a few worn-out men played gaming machines or bet on the greyhounds. A few others stared at the walls or at the rugby games and rugby shows on the half-dozen televisions perched around the place, or muttered curses between each other. A sad woman sat alone on a stool with her beer. No hotel actually being used for the purpose of serving food and drink ever hosted a more miserable scene. No steak so resolutely defied eating. One could not be happy in that hotel. If it had any good purpose at all it would be as evidence in the case for hunting and gathering.
Evidence for the case against that way of life can be found a few kilometres east at Skull Creek, one of many going by the name in Australia. There is another one – Skull Hole Creek – about 220 kilometres south, near Winton. This, the tourist brochure says, ‘was the site of a massacre of aborigines in retaliation for the murder of a teamster’. The hunt ‘climaxed at Skull Hole’, which is ‘a ‘good place for a picnic and bird watching’.
The ‘resort’ part of the hotel comprised a series of rooms surrounded by palm trees. A piece of rusted gym equipment, like an abandoned instrument of torture, stood in one corner of the quadrangle. A smallish cane toad sat on the doorstep, and there was a bigger one there in the morning. The sweet, sickly smell of bore water pervaded the rooms, and air-conditioners roared so loudly it would have been more comfortable, probably cheaper, and in keeping with Hughenden’s provenance, to employ someone to fan guests through the windows.
The town took its name from Hughenden Manor in Buckinghamshire, where Robert Gray was born in 1839. The manor, which a decade later became Benjamin Disraeli’s country house, was then owned by Gray’s mother’s family, called Norris. Robert, son of a clergyman and educated at Marlborough, became a military man, joining the British army as an ensign and serving during the Indian Mutiny. In 1863, with his enterprising cousin Ernest Henry, whose mother was also a Hughenden Norris, he overlanded 1800 sheep from Bowen (‘doubtless ’ere long . . . the Sanatorium of the East Indies’) and took up a run on the Flinders River. They called it Hughenden, naturally enough. Soon after, with Henry somewhat over-extended, Robert’s brother Charles bought his share, and twenty years later Hughenden, most of it an all but treeless plain, sheared 80 000 sheep. Mitchell grass could do that. The Grays took up more leases further north, towards the Gulf. ‘Is not the whole land before us?’, as Abraham said to Lot. (Or, ‘The earliest occupants were the aboriginal Dalleburra tribe and then came the settlers’, as the Discovery Centre at Hughenden says.) Those were the palmiest days of squatting, when demand was high, prices were good, labour was cheap, and men of capital were free of all impediment – ‘everything was coleur de rose’.
The Grays were not exactly landed gentry, but through their Queensland enterprise they planned to make enough money to correct this disadvantage. Like others on that frontier,
their hearts were set upon buying an English country seat. In certain ways they approached more closely than most others in the ranks of squatters the colonialist pure and simple: the one who comes to extract what he can from the land and its indigenes and departs with his booty, as opposed to the ‘settler colonialist’ who means to stay and establish permanent sovereignty. When Robert and Charles were joined on their stations by their wives, Lottie and Lucy, for a while they lived as in a sort of faux Raj (Robert Gray likened it to the Punjab), complete with pre-pubescent Aboriginal servants ‘bought’ or otherwise gathered from the clans, and South Sea Island shepherds. Sir George Bowen drew another comparison: they were to everyone else in Australia what the eighteenth-century Virginian planters had been to other Americans.
It is as well that the women were there, because it is through their diaries that a picture emerges of this colonial frontier. Like many other women diarists, Lucy Gray was interested in nature, and as the historian Anne Allingham has pointed out, this disposed her to write sympathetically about the Aboriginal inhabitants of that sphere, without questioning the colonialism that brutally removed them from it. Though she was saddened to see the immediate effects of the transition, in Lucy’s mind nature perforce gave way to civilisation: nature’s ‘wild blacks’ in time became ‘station blacks’ or ‘tame blacks’. In becoming tame, the character of Aborigines underwent a marvellous transformation: where in nature they were ‘cowardly’ and ‘treacherous’, in service they were both useful and fidelity itself – a happier state, to be sure.
When her husband Charles brought home an Aboriginal boy and ‘put handcuffs on his little slender black legs’, Lucy Gray objected that it ‘looked like making a slave’ of him. His name was Walladur. Her husband had cropped the boy’s hair and dressed him in a blue twill shirt that came down to his heels. The handcuffs were ‘to prevent him in a sudden fit of homesickness, going back to his Mammy in the night’. So long as it did not look like slavery, Lucy was comfortable with the arrangement, as she was with their claim on the ‘little gin . . . about twelve’, Charles brought home for her use. Moggie and Billy they called the girl and Walladur, and though Lucy thought them ‘mournful looking creatures’ when she first saw them, and found Moggie ‘very stupid’, she wrote about them with affection.
