The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History 9780415731584, 9780415731577, 9781315849676

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title page......Page 8
Copyright page......Page 9
Table of Contents......Page 10
List of figures......Page 12
Foreword......Page 14
Acknowledgements......Page 16
Prologue......Page 18
Introduction......Page 20
1 Hooves......Page 28
2 Bores......Page 57
3 Scrub......Page 81
4 Wheat......Page 108
5 Dust......Page 128
6 Reeds......Page 158
7 Cotton......Page 183
Conclusion......Page 203
Epilogue......Page 207
Bibliography......Page 211
Index......Page 226

Citation preview

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THE BROKEN PROMISE OF AGRICULTURAL PROGRESS

The question of food and our reliance on the global agricultural system has become one of the defining public concerns of the twenty-first century. Ecological disorder and inequity is at the heart of our food system. This thoughtful and confronting book tells the story of how the development of modern agriculture promised ecological and social stability but instead descended into dysfunction. Contributing to knowledge in environmental, cultural and agricultural histories, it explores how people have tried to live in the aftermath of ‘ecological imperialism’. The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An environmental history journeys to the dry inland plains of Australia where European ideas and agricultural technologies clashed with a volatile and taunting country that resisted attempts to subdue and transform it for the supply of global markets. Its wide-ranging narrative puts gritty local detail in its global context to tell the story of how cultural anxieties about civilisation, population and race, shaped agriculture in the twentieth century. It ranges from isolated experiment farms to nutrition science at the League of Nations, from local landholders to high-profile moral crusaders, including an Australian apricot grower who met Franklin D. Roosevelt and almost fed the world. This book will be useful to undergraduates and postgraduates on courses examining international comparisons of nineteenth- and twentieth-century agriculture, as well as those studying colonial development and settler societies. It will also appeal to food-concerned general readers. Cameron Muir is Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia. From 2013 to 2014, he was Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, and a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE), part of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, USA.

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‘Cameron Muir has produced a brilliant, far-reaching book that combines environmental and agricultural approaches to urgent questions about food politics and land management. This is a terrific work of historically textured, geographically immersed storytelling that also has a strong conceptual payoff in debunking resilient myths about what it would take to feed the world. Muir’s conclusions will reverberate across disciplines and national borders.’ Rob Nixon, University of Wisconsin, USA ‘In his gripping account of the failures of European agriculture on the western plains of New South Wales, Cameron Muir challenges our assumptions about the social and environmental outcomes of agricultural progress. How can global food security be maintained, given that modern farming technologies can ‘break’ places? Muir’s perceptive and fresh analysis alerts us to why the lessons of the past are so crucial for the future management of our environments.’ Kate Darian-Smith, University of Melbourne, Australia

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ROUTLEDGE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES Series editors: Iain McCalman and Libby Robin Editorial Board Christina Alt, St Andrews University, UK Alison Bashford, University of Cambridge, UK Peter Coates, University of Bristol, UK Thom van Dooren, University of New South Wales, Australia Georgina Endfield, University of Nottingham, UK Jodi Frawley, University of Sydney, Australia Andrea Gaynor, The University of Western Australia, Australia Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA Jennifer Newell, American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA Simon Pooley, Imperial College London, UK Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota, USA Paul Warde, University of East Anglia, UK Jessica Weir, University of Western Sydney, Australia International Advisory Board William Beinart, University of Oxford, UK Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA Paul Holm, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland Shen Hou, Renmin University of China, Beijing Rob Nixon, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Pauline Phemister, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK Deborah Bird Rose, University of New South Wales, Australia Sverker Sorlin, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich and Co-Director, Rachel Carson Center, LMU Munich University, Germany Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University, USA

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The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture recognising that today’s world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution and resource depletion, global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl, overpopulation, food insecurity and environmental justice are all crises of culture. The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present and future environmental challenges has shifted the epicentre of environmental studies away from an exclusively scientific and technological framework to one that depends on the human-focused disciplines and ideas of the humanities and allied social sciences. We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences disciplines for an inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favour manuscripts aimed at an international readership and written in a lively and accessible style. The readership comprises scholars and students from the humanities and social sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the human dimensions of environmental change.

Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An environmental history Cameron Muir

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THE BROKEN PROMISE OF AGRICULTURAL PROGRESS An environmental history Cameron Muir

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

ear thscan

from routledge

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First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Cameron Muir The right of Cameron Muir to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Muir, Cameron. The broken promise of agricultural progress: an environmental history/ Cameron Muir. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Agriculture – Environmental aspects – Australia. 2. Agricultural ecology – Australia. 3. Soil management – Australia. 4. Soil degradation – Australia. I. Title. S589.76.A8M85 2014 630.994—dc23 2013045401 ISBN13: 978-0-415-73157-7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-73158-4 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-1-315-84967-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

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CONTENTS

List of figures Foreword Acknowledgements Prologue

xi xiii xv xvii

Introduction

1

1

Hooves

9

2

Bores

38

3

Scrub

62

4

Wheat

89

5

Dust

109

6

Reeds

139

7

Cotton

164

Conclusion

184

Epilogue

188

Bibliography Index

192 207

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FIGURES

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4.1 4.2

‘Dark deeds’, the stockmen’s route in 1841 Aboriginal territory of the plains Aboriginal people of the Bogan River Political cartoon of Governor Gipps as Don Quixote ‘Remnant of the Bogan tribe’ Aboriginal people of the Darling River Stocking rates in the Western Division of New South Wales ‘A Cruel Death’ ‘Sinking artesian bore – Wanaaring, NSW’ A settler’s hut at the Pera Bore Experiment Farm The irrigation and settlement block plan at Pera Bore ‘Kaffir’ corn growing at Pera Bore Irrigation furrows for growing lucerne Manager’s residence and orchard at Pera Bore Date palm plantation at Pera Bore ‘Virgin scrub would starve a lizard’ Box seedlings at the ‘Bogan Scrub’ near the Coolabah Experiment Farm Fifty acres planted with saltbush at the Coolabah Experiment Farm in 1904 Clearing chain used in the second half of the twentieth century Grant MacAlpine driving his grader to create a new ‘water-pond’ Ray Thompson’s saltbush on a regeneration site ‘Panorama of harvesting wheat,’ Narromine Station ‘Australia’s offer to the British boy’

11 14 15 20 23 24 29 32 40 50 51 52 53 54 57 67 70 78 82 83 84 95 101

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xii

Figures

4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

‘White Australia: march of the great white policy’ Abandoned railway station at Girilambone (near Coolabah) ‘The dust-storm is coming, early Broken Hill’ ‘Some people are born to be a burden on the rest’ ‘Freedom from want’ ‘Highways of Empire’ Frank McDougall (left) at the San Francisco Conference Cumulative residual rainfall for Dubbo, New South Wales Dust storm approaching a town in central Australia Photos of soil erosion on the western plains Portrait of William McKell in 1922 Aboriginal Bora, ‘Arrival of the King’ Aboriginal ceremony, ‘The Sick Warrior’ Aboriginal ceremony, ‘Lying in Wait’ Macquarie Marshes from the wildlife viewing platform in July 2008 The Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission emblem ‘The Orient Looks South – Seven Million Not Enough!’ Macquarie Marshes Nature Reserve ‘Buddah Lakes’ scheme Empty water storage cell near Bourke in 2007 Bare cotton fields near Nevertire in 2007

6.6 6.7 6.8 7.1 7.2 7.3

103 105 110 116 121 124 127 130 131 132 141 145 146 147 152 154 158 159 167 170 174

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FOREWORD

Welcome to Routledge’s new Environmental Humanities Series. We are honoured to introduce Cameron Muir’s exciting, creative and scholarly book, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress, a book that encapsulates so much of what the series has been established to achieve. Growing food is fundamental to people everywhere, but it is a peculiar story in each particular place. ‘Food studies are on the rise,’ Rob Nixon, Rachel Carson Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Madison notes, and argues that Broken Promise is ‘an eloquent, ambitious volume in that domain, one that ought to reverberate across disciplines and internationally.’ Cameron Muir’s provocative book thrusts us into what the author calls ‘the ecological disorder and inequity at the heart of our food system’. The Environmental Humanities has a particular obligation to cross scholarly fields and engage them in international conversations of this sort. In Broken Promise, questions of food production build on both environmental and agricultural histories, and they consider present practices, and limits and possibilities for future production. The country of inland Australia has a harsh and variable climate, distinctive geological and vegetational characteristics and a difficult history of frontier settlement that together conspire to make the story of ecology, culture and food uncommonly rich. Broken Promise takes its readers into ‘a volatile and taunting country that resisted attempts to transform it for the supply of global markets’ but that has been wounded by imperial visions and international scientific approaches to agriculture. It has been, in some ways, damaged irreparably. Nonetheless, Muir writes the story of the country where he grew up with compassion for its people and hope for its future. This is truly a work of the interdisciplinary humanities. Cameron Muir combines a literary lyricism with meticulous archival scholarship. His book is attentive to the social function of global agriculture and how it plays out in particular places.

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xiv

Foreword

It is a gripping account that takes its readers to the heart of global questions about ‘feeding the world’. It also grapples with the way nationalist cultural and economic positioning can work against local ecologies. Adapting to environmental challenges has shifted the epicentre of environmental studies away from an exclusively scientific and technological framework to one that depends on the human-focused disciplines and concepts of the humanities and social sciences. Muir’s work is part of this new turn in environmental studies, and shows elegantly how the humanities can enhance environmental understandings. As series editors, we welcome Muir’s vivid, accessible style, his artistic structure and presentation, and his deft interweaving of themes in dialogue with one another. Using the forensic scalpel of a humanist, he exposes myths, moral sloganeering and ‘the material consequences of the language and metaphors we use to understand the living world’. Sometimes, he considers the infrastructure (bores), sometimes the ecological conditions of place (scrub, reeds, dust) and sometimes the aspirations for the area (wheat, cotton). Always, he is attentive to the ways that wider ideologies of race and nation can become entangled in local food missions. Together the chapters build a powerful holistic narrative that ‘opens up a conversation about real long-term reform and vision for our relationships with the non-urban environment that sustains us’. We encourage other prospective authors to be inspired by Broken Promise, and to offer book proposals from all humanities and social sciences disciplines for our inclusive and interdisciplinary series. Our readership comprises scholars and students from the humanities and social sciences, museums and thoughtful readers from all walks of life who are concerned about the human dimensions of environmental change. Broken Promise launches this new venture, exploring the role of culture in global food security, agricultural and water crises. We also seek to embrace studies of ocean pollution, resource depletion, global warming, urban sprawl and broad questions of environmental justice. Iain McCalman and Libby Robin

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the guidance and generosity of Libby Robin. Her optimism and enthusiasm inspire all who know her. I thank Libby and Iain McCalman for selecting this book for Routledge Environmental Humanities series and for their kind words in the Preface. Heather Goodall provided thoughtful feedback and her pioneering research on the black and red soil country of the western plains has been an important resource. Deborah Bird Rose shared an intense and fun trip to Bourke with me and offered philosophical and ethical advice for researching, writing and being in place. This book is dominated by stories of men, but the work and advice of these three women have inspired and shaped my approach to history. Thank you to readers Ben Spies Butcher, Daniel Connell, Bruce Elder, Sylvie Ellsmore, Billy Griffiths, Tom Griffiths, Michael Larkin, George Main, David Muir, Leanne Muir, Rob Nixon, Bruce Pascoe, Les Russell, Rachel Sanderson and Catherine Sherwin, Patricia Sherwin and Kate Darian-Smith. Any faults in this book are mine alone. I thank staff at the various places that provided space for writing: The Fenner School of Environment and Society (Australian National University), The Centre for Environmental History (Australian National University), the Research Centre (National Museum of Australia), and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich. I am grateful for the assistance of staff at the libraries and archives I visited: Sandra Smith from Macquarie Regional Library (Dubbo), Cathy Simpson from Bourke Public Library, Norma Meadley and the Narromine Local History Society, Vicky Glover from the NSW Department of Primary Industries Library at Orange, Warren Public Library, Mitchell Library, State Records NSW, National Library of Australia, The Powerhouse Museum, Iowa State University Library, The American Philosophical Society, ANU Library, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, National Film and Sound Archive and the creators of the National Library of Australia’s digitised collection Trove.

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xvi

Acknowledgements

For fantastic peer support and friendship I thank Allesandro Antonnello, Saskia Beudel, Natasha Fijn, Bernadette Hince, Rebecca Jones, Luke Keogh, George Main, Emily O’Gorman, Thom van Dooren, Jessica Weir, Sharon Willoughby and the participants of the National Environmental History PhD Workshops in 2008 and 2010. I am grateful for the support and encouragement offered by Julianne Schultz, Erica Sontheimer and the rest of the Griffith REVIEW team. The Griffith REVIEW Emerging Writers’ Prize allowed writing time at Varuna. The Australian Society of Authors Mentorship Scheme provided me with very valuable feedback via Bruce Pascoe. An Australian Research Council Linkage grant allowed me to finish this book, and the Australian Academy of Humanities provided financial support for the book’s production. Parts of this book are based on essays published in Griffith REVIEW, Australian Humanities Review and Inside Story. My thanks go to local landholders who welcomed me into their homes and shared their stories with me: Myra and Phillip Tolhurst at Willie Retreat and Neville Simpson at ‘Allambie’ and Bourke. Steve Buster who, despite having a crop in for the first time in years, took time out to show me where to find Pera Bore sites, and gave me permission to go through the old Pera Bore archive that is in his possession. Peter Tyrell spent hours explaining water licensing to me. The Dubbo Field Naturalists Society, and Danielle Flakelar and Damian Lucas of New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife, allowed me to tag along on field trips. Permission to publish the Bora ceremony photos near the Macquarie Marshes was graciously provided by Wailwan elder Uncle Neville Merritt via Powerhouse Senior curator of Koori History and Society, James-Wilson Miller (with written permission from Gilgandra Land Council). I thank the Norman Rockwell family for permission to publish the iconic ‘Freedom From Want’ poster. The cover image is based on the artwork of Tamworth artist Marie Larkin. Hamish, Angus and Lachie were born during the time it took to write this book. Thank you Leanne Muir for your enduring support.

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PROLOGUE

‘This place isn’t romantic enough to write a book about,’ a National Parks officer advises me, nudging at some wiry scrub with the toe of his boot. We’re standing in a clapped-out former sheep paddock at the edge of the Macquarie Marshes. One hundred kilometres north of a town called Warren, in the backblocks of western New South Wales, the marshes aren’t on the way to anywhere. You have to have a reason to come out here. Colonial explorers were drawn here by the prospect of discovering a great transcontinental river, but instead they found ‘an ocean of reeds’.1 Soon settlers came to feed sheep and cattle. Later a few would visit for its remarkable birdlife, and recently, more people came to grow cotton. The Wailwan, before authorities forced them to move in 1935, had lived here for more than a thousand generations. The Parks officer raises his head, squints into the last of the winter light, and scans the plains. ‘Books need mountains, ancient forests,’ he explains. ‘This place is . . . too degraded.’ I take it as counsel about what kind of ‘nature’ receives attention and resources. Perhaps his view is drawn from his own experiences working here. Not far from us a white four-wheel drive kicks up dust on a scald. I try to blink the grit out of my eyes. This place is supposed to be an oasis, a green heart in dry country, a place renowned for attracting wildlife from all around the semi-arid plains, from all over Australia, and even from the northern hemisphere. Today though, fine red clay dries the back of my throat. It tastes salty, metallic. We start walking down to the campsite. Two dead trees on this side of the fence bear hacked bands typical of ringbarking. There’s nothing on the ground except for a spiny shrub called Rolypoly. It rolls along as it is blown by the wind, then settles and finds a new place to spread, offering sparse cover to bare ground. Upstream the river is dammed and harnessed for irrigation and it’s been years since a big renewing flood spilled out across this country. This is a landscape of big ideas

xviii Prologue

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and broken promises. The landholders around here are tired, and so is their land. Maybe the Parks officer is right. Yet somehow I am drawn to this place not so far from where I grew up, even after agriculture has come, and gone away again, leaving the land with its bones showing.

Writing the toad In his book The River, environmental historian Eric Rolls shares a story about introducing his first wife, Joan, to the Namoi River. It was the middle of summer and the river was losing an inch of water a day. Joan wasn’t immediately impressed with the sight before her. Rolls said, ‘If Joan thought it was a toad, it was no use me trying to argue the warts off it. She had to see it differently for herself.’2 Before long Joan must have seen it differently because they made love on the banks of the river. Or perhaps that was Eric’s method of persuasion. Making love is not an option when dealing with the sensibilities of a National Parks officer. How do I get across that ‘flat’ doesn’t mean featureless, that a plain isn’t boring? As Australia’s climate dried and the Great Dividing Range rose, low energy streams began carrying sediments from the highlands and deposited them inland over millions of years to form a vast alluvial plain. The gradient was so slight and volumes so low that no gorges were cut into the earth. Shallow rivers danced lightly across great expanses in slow geological time. With sediments up to 100 metres deep, the plains are a palimpsest of abandoned riverways. Plains are old and secretive. You need to read them with a deeper sense of time. American writer Barbara Kingsolver says iconic places such as the Amazon rainforests or the Arctic tundra ‘have a power that speaks for itself, that seems to throw its own grandeur as a curse on the defiler’. She wonders who would complain if someone muddied her own Horse Lick Creek in Jackson County, a place that is ‘nobody’s idea of wilderness’.3 How do you write so that others care about your clay-pan? About the places that aren’t usually regarded as beautiful, or romantic, or inspiring? I write the inland plains as they are, I don’t try to argue the warts off them, but I hope the writing shows that broken places like these plains are still worthy of attention and care.

Notes 1

2 3

After hearing Oxley’s reports of the Macquarie as ‘a noble river of the first magnitude’ W.C. Wentworth thought the river might cross the continent. See Ernest Favenc, ‘Unfulfilled Dreams of Australia’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 November 1901; John Oxley, Letter from Oxley to Governor Advising of His Return from First Expedition. August 30, 1817., (eBooks @ Adelaide, 2003 (1817–18)), http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/ oxley/john/o95j/appendix1.html (accessed on 1 February 2014). Eric C. Rolls and Marianne Yamaguchi, The River (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1974), 5. Barbara Kingsolver, ‘The Memory Place (Horse Lick Creek, Kentucky)’, in Heart of the Land: Essays on Last Great Places, ed. Joseph Barbato and Lisa Weinerman (New York: Vintage, 1996), 284.

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INTRODUCTION

Growing, procuring and eating food, argued American historian Donald Worster, has been humanity’s ‘most vital, constant and concrete’ connection to the natural world. Exploring our relationships between ecology, culture and food production, he urged, ‘must be one of the major activities’ of the emerging field of environmental history’.1 More than two decades after the publication of those words, the question of how we feed the world without destroying it is as pressing as ever. The weight of the challenges we face grows each year: peak soil, peak oil, peak water, peak phosphate, obesity, inequality, soil erosion, river degradation, commodity speculation, species extinctions, food riots and a billion people hungry. What does it mean to live at a time when the way we feed ourselves threatens the social and ecological fabric of the planet? This is a conversation in which we must continue to participate, and this book is just one contribution to that ongoing dialogue. It offers a perspective from history in a recently colonised, food surplusproducing nation, a place that possesses a fraught and complex relationship with its ecology. Three primary ideas weave their way through the seven chapters of this book. The first is that Western agriculture in the twentieth century developed in the wake of ‘ecological imperialism’ and this shaped its goals, philosophy and professionalisation. The way agriculture evolved was in many ways a response to the environmental consequences of colonising ‘new lands’. It held an ambiguous role in this regard. It was, at once, a means of environmental repair, and a cause of environmental degradation. The second is that nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury ideas in biology became entangled with cultural ideas about inheritance, race, population and civilisation, and this played an often unacknowledged role in influencing modern agriculture and food production. Agriculture has been valued less for the food it produces than its social and geopolitical purposes. The third idea concerns the nature of our human and environmental relationships. It arose

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2

Introduction

unexpectedly during the writing of the book. The stories collected together began to suggest there is a connection between how we treat each other and how we treat the land. Good ecological relationships depend on good social relationships. This book tells the story of how we’ve tried to grow food, and conserve the environment, with all the violence and courage that marked this endeavour. It’s a tale of small-town tragedy and species extinction, of strange experiments and ‘slow violence’, of idealists, visionaries and the contradictions of an environmental hero who destroyed Australia’s greatest river system. It is set in the western plains of New South Wales, once described as ‘a place where every prospect displeases, and all but man is vile’.2 It is an environment that shares some characteristics with parts of the Great Plains of the United States and Canada, the steppes of Eurasia, and the pampas and drylands of Argentina. It is flat, semi-arid and often a challenge to farm. It’s not known for being the kind of place people go to experience scenic beauty, but it is the place from which I draw gritty local detail to pose local, bioregional and global questions.

The aftermath of ‘ecological imperialism’ The British colonisation of Australia unleashed agriculture and industrialisation upon the continent almost simultaneously, in what historian Tom Griffiths described as a ‘compressed, double revolution’.3 Early in the nineteenth century great herds of cattle and sheep spilled into the inland plains of the continent. Tens of thousands of years had passed since megafauna last grazed these grasslands. Unlike every other British colonial experiment (except New Zealand), this was a place where no cloven foot had broken the soil.4 Landholders sought to remake the continent’s interior as a paddock for England. The result was brutality, massacres, corruption, animal cruelty and environmental waste on a scale that threatened to derail the entire settler project. Luxuriant grasses disappeared with a rapidity that astonished landholders, dust storms raged from the plains and shrouded the burgeoning cities along the coast, hard and spiny native vegetation began to ‘invade’ the ruined grasslands, scores of small mammals were made extinct, introduced rabbits ran wild in ‘plagues’, the ground hardened, streams incised into the flat earth on which it formerly spread and complex, ephemeral waterways were degraded. Disease and demoralisation weakened Aboriginal populations as they fought to the death with European colonisers for the plains. This is a narrative which might appear familiar – an account of ‘ecological imperialism’. In his influential book, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, Alfred Crosby drew attention to the temperate zones of the world in which European colonisers displaced the indigenous people, achieved ‘demographic takeover’ and produced food far exceeding domestic needs. These ‘neo-Europes’, as he labelled them, were the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Uruguay. Crosby’s compelling argument was that the Europeans seized these places, not with technological or cultural superiority, but

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Introduction

3

with the help of the diseases, plants and animals they brought with them. The raw, young plants of Europe, specialists of disturbed environments, thrived in the newly disrupted ecologies of the New Worlds, and unlike in the colonised tropics, European agriculture worked better in temperate climates. Crosby might have overplayed a one-way exchange of species and ideas, and perhaps, gave up too much to non-human agency. We cannot deny human responsibility for the bloodshed and injustice that marked the colonisation of the New Worlds.5 It is inevitable that such a sweeping book would receive revisionist criticisms and subtle expansions. Can ecological imperialism help explain events in Africa and Asia where colonisation wrought environmental change but demographic takeover did not occur? Is ‘temperate’ too general a term to describe the diverse ecologies of the New World lands, and is it too restrictive as a climatic category defining where ecological imperialism occurred? Midway through his book Crosby points out that the temperate areas were really only pockets of suitable land in these new colonies.6 In Australia, for instance, only 6 per cent of its landmass is arable.7 Ecological imperialism spread beyond the temperate zones, to the ice cold of northern Canada, and into the dry and heat of inland Australia.8 Producing large food surpluses was not an easy task and required modifying local places as well as the plants brought from Europe. The purpose of this book is not to interrogate the idea of ecological imperialism, but to retain it, in its broad, evolving sense, as a useful shorthand for the events that took place and a productive concept for locating points of connection between different settler societies. Australia’s story is not isolated. The unique experiences here were also part of a global story about scientific agriculture, and the exchange of knowledge, species, commodities, social movements, environmental politics and geopolitical alliances. If Crosby set the year 1900 for the end of ecological imperialism, what happened after this? We know the ‘neo-Europes’ went on to become food exporters, but how, and why and at what cost? This story explores the aftermath of that ecological imperialism.

The social purpose of agriculture Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the settler project was in a dire state. ‘The promised land was about to forget its promise’, Geoffrey Blainey wrote in A Land Half Won.9 The pastoral industry had collapsed and economies sank into depression. Inland villages, in the words of one writer at the time, were left ‘sundevoured and sand-swept’.10 The colonies began losing their populations through emigration. Whenever the coast-hugging settlers turned their gaze towards the great interior plains, they glimpsed broken country, bloodshed and extinction. They saw skulls pierced with blunt lead bullets, ribcages cracked open with heavy spears, red country littered with ringbarked timber and the desiccated carcases of millions of sheep; they saw clay-pans, silted creeks and sagging slab huts; they saw the material

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Introduction

remains of initial hopes and land-lust bleached by an unrelenting sun. For governments, the frontier quickly became a liability; for pioneering colonisers, it was a path to ruin. The idea that agriculture could play a significant role in the development of the colonies had been largely abandoned as settlers focused on mining and pastoral pursuits. Few people thought agriculture could pay in such a dry climate, with such a small population and long carting distances. In 1892, William Wilkins, the Under Secretary for Public Instruction, wrote a fifty-page treatise on agriculture, which began: ‘It was a maxim of ancient statecraft that the food supply of the people should be raised within its own boundaries.’11 This was no longer the case, argued Wilkins, because of expanding imperial relationships and international trade. New South Wales, following Britain, could import its food. Wilkins cautioned that necessary economic conditions must exist before agriculture could succeed in Australia. Governments needed to redeem the settler project, and agriculture based on scientific principles emerged as an unexpected solution. At the same time as Wilkins was writing, there were others for whom the social function of agriculture was more important than any economic constraints it might face. The New South Wales Colonial Government established a Department of Agriculture in 1890 and, sixteen months later, it reported on its operations. Prizes were offered to farmers, judged not simply on yield or quality of produce, but on the ‘cleanliness’ of the land, and the general ‘neatness and suitability of their house and farm buildings’.12 The Department saw in this work the opportunity to foster a moral sensibility for tidy places. Its goal was to ‘raise Agriculture in New South Wales to the proud eminence as an honourable calling and an exact science which it has long enjoyed in the most highly civilised countries of the Old World’.13 The developing field of scientific agriculture could deliver a new class of technically educated, semiprofessional workers and small landholders for the new century. It would be a mode of production more suited to a modern state than squatting or mining. Agriculture promised to bring civilisation even to the frontier. Agricultural history often emphasises the influence of changing economic policies and structures, as well as industrial technologies, scientific discoveries and solutions, and problems overcome. Histories of agriculture may tell a story of political battles and class warfare – between large landholders and small farmers, between conservative and powerful interest groups and egalitarians. These are important areas of scholarship, but less common is an examination of the sort of societies that agriculture aspired to create, and the influence of the environmental concerns and biological anxieties that pervaded nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society. In 1898, for example, Sir William Crookes, the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, said the civilised nations needed to find ways of increasing their wheat production because wheat was the plant that gave white people superior brains. The non-white races were increasing their populations and the white races needed to secure their food supplies. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century societies were obsessed with understanding inheritance, race and

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the effects of environment on civilisation. Cultural ideas and scientific knowledge about biology have played a significant role in shaping how problems were framed, why and how agriculture was encouraged, where it was carried out and for whom. Further shifts and expansions in the social purpose of agriculture occurred over the twentieth century. In the 1920s, agriculture became a reward for returned soldiers; towards the end of World War II, the hope that agriculture could increase Australia’s population became vital to a government worried about invaders from the north; and in the 1960s, a productionist approach to agriculture was supposed to increase Australia’s export income. In How a Continent Created a Nation historian Libby Robin examines the ‘battler’ ethos that emerged in this period. Robin shows how it was founded on a perception of the Australian environment as hostile and useless, and hence why those who battled the land and made it grow European commodity plants were revered for their high moral character. The ethos was the basis of Australian national identity and culture for much of the twentieth century.14 The social function of agriculture became just as important to the nation as its utilitarian function. Societies valued the culture, character and work of agricultural production over the actual food and fibre it produced. Historically the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and, more recently, Argentina have made moral claims about the virtue of their agriculture.15 Throughout the changing social values for agriculture one powerful moral claim endured: the idea of the need or obligation to ‘feed the world’. This idea has been used to defy criticism and resist change, to justify environmental exploitation and to shut down debate. What could be a more important moral imperative than feeding the world’s poor? The goal of feeding the world is an admirable one, but it hardly reflects the reality of the agricultural industries of wealthy nations. Australia, like other neoEuropes, exports to the highest value markets in developed economies and to the middle classes in developing countries.16 Most of Australia’s wheat and meat are exported, and this has become the basis for a national myth, a comforting narrative that sees golden harvests and choice cuts being shipped and distributed to hungry mouths across the world. In fact, Australia contributes less than 2 per cent of global grain and meat production.17 A recent Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences report stated, ‘to a large extent, Australia’s food exports are not oriented towards countries with serious food security problems’.18

Shadow places and slow violence Sites of agricultural production are the world’s primary ‘shadow places’. Rural heartlands provide for our material demands and biological nourishment, yet few of us know much about them or give much thought to them. Environmental philosopher Val Plumwood drew attention to a flaw in the way many environmental writers were advocating love and connection to one’s place as a way of preserving ecological integrity. Rather than celebrating one special, privileged place, or striving for self-sufficiency, Plumwood argued we should start from the ‘materialist end’, taking responsibility for the places we ‘don’t know about, don’t want to

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Introduction

know about, and in a commodity regime don’t ever need to know about’.19 The enjoyment of homes and places of recreation, such as Central Park in New York or the nature reserves at Sydney’s edges, has been made possible by ‘sacrificing’ rural lands to the disorder of industrial agriculture. Shadow places are out of sight, out of mind and therefore they are easier to discount. Distance absolves duty of care and the need to support efforts to find ways of doing agriculture sustainably. Outsourcing accountability to the shadow places transfers the burden to other people – often the most vulnerable – and to future generations. Plumwood drew on the philosophy of Gaagudju elder Bill Neidjie and his concept of ‘the places that grow you’ to propose a more comprehensive ecological understanding of place that would entail taking responsibility for all the places, all over the world, from which we draw material resources.20 Ecological humanities scholar Rob Nixon developed the idea of ‘slow violence’ to describe incremental environmental devastation that does not receive continued attention from industrialised societies. These are the long-lasting, multiple-cause disasters deemed ‘outside the purview of spectre-driven corporate media’.21 Nixon cites examples such as the Bhopal Gas explosion, which has continued to affect ecologies and people’s lives for decades after the initial incident; government neglect of regulation, or willingness to appease large polluting and resource-extracting corporations; and mega dam-building projects in developing nations financed and controlled by the West. River degradation, soil erosion, and fertiliser and chemical run-off, unfold over a range of vast temporal and geographic scales. They don’t often create spectacular internet and television news pictures. Social relationships form complex ties with ecological relationships. Aldo Leopold, a founding American conservationist and nature writer, offered the idea of a ‘land ethic’ for resituating humanity’s understanding of its place in the world ecologically and ethically. Leopold wrote in A Sand Country Almanac, ‘The individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts’ including soils, waters, plants and animals, ‘or collectively: the land’.22 Long-term economic prosperity for landholders required a land ethic that engendered ‘respect’ for fellow members and the integrity of the community itself. In Leopold’s view social wellbeing and ecological well-being were intimately connected. Restoration was as beneficial for the people doing it as it was for the paddocks. Fractured social relationships, divided communities and inequality can be a cause as much as a product of impoverished environments. Prevention of pesticide pollution, for example, depends on effective government regulation and compliance enforcement, local community members having access to information and understanding the risks different chemicals pose, and workers having sufficient education and training in correct application methods. Phil Sullivan, a Ngemba traditional owner and Cultural Heritage Officer at Bourke, holds the view that ‘how people take care of social relationships and how they take care of ecological relationships are in reality the same question’.23 For Sullivan, soil erosion on the plains is evidence of social division and stress, extreme economic pressures and industry dominance over other values. Environmental and

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social justice, as it relates to place and agriculture, are driving concerns in each of the chapters. The consequences of rural social alienation and the detachment of urban populations from the locations and practices of food production help explain ongoing environmental failures in agricultural landscapes. Social relationships are written in the ground. The promise of scientific, industrialised, globally traded agriculture was that it would save the land and feed the world. We are still waiting for that promise to be fulfilled, and meanwhile the land itself is blowing away. Our agricultural activities have been one of the primary causes of species loss and, according to the world’s top biological scientists working for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, continue to be ‘perhaps the single greatest threat to biodiversity’.24 Agriculture has played a major role in plunging the earth into another mass extinction event, the sixth in 4.6 billion years. In the last 100 years, scientific agriculture has accelerated the intensity, scale and influence of cultivated landscapes in the earth’s ecosystems. Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture have emerged as another great threat to biodiversity. As biologist Niles Eldredge put it: our ‘local’ ecosystem has become the planet: we function on the level of Gaia.25 There is no model for this. The history of past mass extinction events cannot be used as a guide to the outcome of the one we are facing. It is easy to understand environmental historian John McNeill’s conviction that ‘humankind has begun to play dice with the planet, without knowing all the rules of the game’.26 The way we do modern agriculture will determine the fate of our species. We need to understand why we have done it the way we have. The problems of our food system come from somewhere. They are not just the way things are. Greg Dening wrote: ‘if my history by story and reflection disturbs the moral lethargy of the living to change in their present the consequences of their past, then it fulfils a need’.27 The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress casts light on the shadow places. It dramatises the history of the slow violence of grinding ecological damage wrought by our agriculture and asks whether it is possible to reimagine the world’s food systems. Understanding our past frees us to choose our future.

Notes 1 Donald Worster, ‘Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History.’ The Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990): 1091–92. 2 Ibid., 1092. 3 Tom Griffiths, ‘Ecology and Empire: Towards an Australian History of the World’, in Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, ed. Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997), 4. 4 Eric C. Rolls, ‘The Nature of Australia’, ibid. 5 Tom Griffiths, ‘Ecology and Empire: Towards an Australian History of the World’, ibid. 6 Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press (Canto), 1993), 148–49.

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7 FAOstat database. http://faostat.fao.org (accessed on 1 February 2014). 8 For Canada see: Liza Piper and John Sandlos, ‘A Broken Frontier: Ecological Imperialism in the Canadian North’, Environmental History 12, no. 4 (2007). 9 Geoffrey Blainey, A Land Half Won, Rev. ed. (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1983), 318. 10 Favenc, ‘Unfulfilled Dreams’, 6. 11 William Wilkins, Agriculture in New South Wales, Commission for the World’s Columbian Exposition (Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1893). 12 Department of Agriculture (New South Wales), ‘Report Regarding the Operations of the Department of Agriculture During the First 16 Months after Its Inception, 1891’, in Miscellaneous correspondence [Department of Agriculture], 1886–93 (Kingswood: State Records of NSW), 16. 13 Ibid., 22. 14 Libby Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007). 15 Birgit Müller, ‘Still Feeding the World? The Political Ecology of Canadian Prairie Farmers’, Anthropologica 50, no. 2 (2008); Julia Olmstead, ‘Feeding the World? Twelve Years Later, U.S. Grain Exports Are Up, So Too Is Hunger’, (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, 2011); Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson, eds, Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011). 16 Brian Moir and Paul Morri, ‘Global Food Security: Facts, Issues and Implications’, in Science and Economic Insights (Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences, 2011), 10; Olmstead, ‘Feeding the World? Twelve Years Later, U.S. Grain Exports Are up, So Too Is Hunger.’ 17 In 2004, Australian-grown wheat and other cereals accounted for just 1.39 per cent of the world’s grain production. It is a similar story for Australian meat, which provides 1.45 per cent of the world’s share, and for fruit and vegetables: a tiny 0.4 per cent. These United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics have been consistent for the past quarter of a century. See: Cameron Muir, ‘Feeding the World: Our Great Myth’, Griffith REVIEW Edition 27: Food Chain (2010). 18 Moir and Morri, ‘Global Food Security: Facts, Issues and Implications’, 10. 19 Val Plumwood, ‘Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling’, Australian Humanities Review, no. 44 (2008): 146–47. 20 Ibid., 145. 21 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 6. 22 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 203–04. 23 C. Muir, D. Rose, and P. Sullivan, ‘From the Other Side of the Knowledge Frontier: Indigenous Knowledge, Social–Ecological Relationships and New Perspectives’, The Rangeland Journal 32, no. 3 (2010); Deborah Bird Rose, Cameron Muir, and Phil Sullivan, ‘Wounded Rivers’, Ecological Humanities, www.ecologicalhumanities.org/wounded rivers.html (accessed on 1 February 2014). 24 Niles Eldredge, ‘Cretaceous Meteor Showers, the Human Ecological ‘Niche’, and the Sixth Extinction’, in Extinctions in near Time: Causes, Contexts, and Consequences, ed. R. D. E. MacPhee (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 1999), 4; Kenneth G. Cassman and Stanley Wood, ‘Cultivated Systems’, in Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Current State and Trends: Findings of the Condition and Trends Working Group of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, ed. Rashid M. Hassan, Robert Scholes, and Neville Ash, The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Series (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005), 747. 25 Eldredge, ‘Cretaceous Meteor Showers’, 14. 26 John R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the TwentiethCentury World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 3. 27 Greg Dening, ‘Performing on the Beaches of the Mind: An Essay’, History and Theory 41, no. 1 (2002): 12.

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The soil had a mulch of thousands of years. The surface was so loose you could rake it through the fingers. No wheel had marked it, no leather heel, no cloven hoof – every mammal, humans included, had walked on padded feet . . . Every grass-eating mammal had two sets of sharp teeth to make a clean bite. No other land had been treated so gently. Eric Rolls, ‘The Nature of Australia’, 1997

Great herds of hoofed beasts and their belligerent white masters made sprawling, bloody, grass-destroying progress into the Aboriginal lands of the plains. The colony’s Governors were responsible for protecting the wealth of the soil, the rights of Aborigines and ensuring the steady development of a stable, civilised society founded on an agricultural yeomanry and small industry. The uncontrolled spread of stockmen and their animals beyond the boundaries of the colony threatened all three. In the end, wrote Geoffrey Blainey in A Land Half Won, ‘the sheep were victorious’.1 As early as 1825 a third of the colony’s sheep ‘were grazing west of the mountains’ that had hemmed in the settlers of the Sydney Basin for a quarter of a century.2 Agriculture had been forsaken for nomadic pastoralism and speculation. As stockmen fought Aboriginal people for control of the plains, commentators in England began to suggest that in the wild environment of the antipodes Europeans lost their morals and racial characteristics and regressed to a level ‘worse than beasts’.3 The dispersed populations and itinerant labour structures that pastoral operations created were blamed for the perpetuation of an uncivilised frontier culture. The variable climate of the plains produced economic cycles of boom and bust that broke even the largest companies.4 The millions of sheep that starved to death with every drought, the encroachment of scrub and the disappearance of the native grasses led to concerns about the consequences of the pastoral industry on the colony’s environment and resources.

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In the 1880s and 1890s agriculture based on scientific principles emerged as a possible solution to the social and environmental problems of the pastoral occupation of the plains. This came after fifty years of neglect in favour of pastoralism and mining. The purpose of agriculture was not to kick-start another round of careless resource extraction, it was seen as a more orderly alternative to the laissez-faire capitalism favoured by pastoralists. The advocates of agriculture and the professional agriculturalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not conceive of scientific agriculture as a means of pursuing exploitative, industrial development disconnected from nature. They saw it as a restoring, prudent and conserving project – and in Australia, an alternative to the reckless culture of overstocking and continuous cropping that was occurring. It is worth spending some time looking at the conditions that shaped the ‘renaissance’ of agriculture in the late nineteenth century to understand how the purpose for scientific agriculture in Australia became one of social and environmental correction – a pattern that continued in the twentieth century.

‘Black devils’ In 1841, on the saltbush plains between the Bogan and Macquarie Rivers, the advance of the pastoral frontier came to a brutal halt. During drought and after a rainless winter, nine stockmen working for a squatter named William Lee drove 600 cattle deep into the ‘forbidden lands’ beyond the licensed area of their run in a desperate search for water.5 With the Bogan River dry they headed north from present day Peak Hill towards a place marked as Mount Hopeless on the 1835 map of government surveyor Thomas Mitchell.6 They knew from Mitchell’s account that they could find a large waterhole near there. After crossing red and grey plains for sixteen days the stockmen found a sandy lagoon surrounded by a good cover of grass. This area was the Canonba Ponds named in Mitchell’s second journey along the Bogan. In dry seasons it was the only source of water for 70 miles. Far from the eyes of government, hundreds of miles from any kind of law enforcement, and beyond the extreme fringes of the licensed occupation of the colony’s vacant wastelands, the stockmen set about establishing a station. A year earlier John James Allman, the Commissioner of Crown Lands based at Wellington, had prohibited licensees from venturing any further than Mount Foster, just south of the Macquarie Marshes, ‘to conserve enough water for the natives’.7 From the late 1830s a series of battles for water and resources between stockmen and Aboriginal people had erupted across the inland plains. Allman travelled to the lower Macquarie to investigate claims stockmen had forcibly moved Aboriginal people from their waterholes so that cattle could drink at them instead. He could not find direct evidence of violence – partly because the only white men he could interview were, in Allman’s view, most likely the perpetrators – but he did hear stories about how Aboriginal people had died of thirst because of the lack of access to their waterholes. He warned that conflict could arise over waterholes in the drought and stated the order to go no further than Mount Foster included

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FIGURE 1.1 ‘Dark deeds’, the stockmen’s route in 1841. [Note: The names and locations of present day towns are marked in grey for reference.] In 1841 William Lee’s stockmen drove cattle far beyond the limits of the colony during drought. After seeing cattle muddy their precious water, Aboriginal people hacked three of the stockmen to death. A surviving stockman covered his retreat with a pistol and rode to Bathurst where he summoned the Mounted Police. The troopers, in defiance of Governor Gipps’ orders, rode out to Canonba and fired indiscriminately into a group of Aboriginal people before finishing off the wounded with sabres. It was a period in which squatters and Aboriginal people fought to the death for land and water across the plains.

Source: Cameron Muir.

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the lower Bogan, which ran parallel to the Macquarie.8 The colony’s Governor, Sir George Gipps, confirmed the order in a proclamation. Lee’s men either did not know about Gipps’ order or had ignored it. In any case, in Gipps’ view, it was certain they would have known that driving cattle over 70 miles into the interior was breaching the conditions of their licence to de-pasture stock on Crown lands. At the Canonba Ponds Lee’s men recruited a family of fifty or so Aboriginal people who occupied the ponds to help construct stockyards and huts. That far north, they would not have been Wiradjuri, but probably Ngiyampaa people.9 According to the account given by the overseer, William Carr, they worked cooperatively, felling trees and erecting the yards for about a fortnight.10 The cattle continued to muddy and drink the precious water. One morning the stockmen had split into three teams when a group of about forty of the Aboriginal people gathered near the hut that held the white men’s weapons. Without provocation, according to the stockmen, some Aboriginal men attacked three white men working on the drays, ‘their skulls cut to pieces with axes and boomerangs’.11 On hearing their screams the others ran to assist. They found one man had an axe still sticking out of his throat, one was cut across the back of his neck, and the third had been beaten to death with clubs.12 The ‘black devils’ then hobbled the horses and set fires in the grass and scrub around the station, they stripped the dead men’s bodies of clothes and articles, looted six months of supplies and began spearing the cattle.13 Along with the three dead, one or two stockmen were injured but escaped after the overseer, William Carr, arrived at the drays and covered the white men’s retreat with the aid of a pistol.

Blood and dust Over the course of about two weeks, Carr rode 250 miles to the major inland settlement of Bathurst to summon armed men for a retaliatory expedition. The Commissioner of the Mounted Police was absent without leave at Windsor, so the Police Magistrate sent for the military officer at Bathurst and between them they decided to dispatch six or seven troops to pursue the Aboriginal people at the lower Bogan. This was despite Gipps having continually reminded the magistrates that the Mounted Police were a civilian force and were not to operate beyond the limits of the colony. The troopers were supposed to go to Wellington to put themselves under the command of Commissioner Allman, who was responsible for the Crown lands covering the Bogan, Macquarie, Castlereagh and Darling Rivers region. Instead, at the urging of a stockman named Andrew Kerr, they deliberately avoided being constrained by a senior authority and bypassed Wellington to go directly to the Bogan.14 The party, consisting of the Mounted Police, an Aboriginal interpreter, bullock drivers and at least three stockmen including Carr, made its way to Muda, a station on the Bogan. Kerr was the overseer for a station near Lee’s, and had been driven back from the most distant reaches of the river from fear of the Aboriginal people who owned that territory. Kerr and another stockman, an ex-convict license-holder named Joseph Moulder, led

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the troopers to groups of Wiradjuri on whose lands they were trying to form stations. Carr could not recognise any of the Aboriginal people at the first station, so Kerr took the group to his abandoned station called Darobel, which was the last station on the Bogan and about 70 miles short of where the killings took place. At Darobel the riders startled a group of 100 to 200 Aboriginal people, all of whom took to their arms on seeing the whites with their guns.15 Again, Carr could not identify any of the killers among the group. Some of the Aboriginal people began to move in and out of the scrub and surround the white men. The troopers were on edge. Corporal Reilly ordered his men to fire a few shots. The Aboriginal people fled to the other side of the riverbank and laid down their weapons. The white men sent their Aboriginal translator across to ask if they knew who had committed the murders but no one in the tribe ceded any information. The troopers decided to continue up the river to Mount Hopeless where the murders had taken place. Kerr and Moulder left the party at that point. It seems they were not interested in pursuing the Aboriginal people who lived further north – they were more interested in the problem of Aboriginal people living where Kerr wanted to run stock. After days of riding across parched red plains from Muda to Mount Hopeless, eating nothing but salted meat and bread, the men would have been tired, sore and thirsty. When Mitchell made the same journey in drought a few years later, temperatures reached 45 degrees Celsius. Oxen collapsed and died in their yokes and three of their strongest and fittest dogs perished in the heat. Mitchell suffered a severe infection and temporarily lost his sight after days of facing a hot wind ‘that blew like a blast furnace’.16 The poultices applied to Mitchell’s eyes had not worked so he sent for leeches from the waterhole at Nyngan and applied fourteen the same evening. His party struggled from dry waterhole to dry waterhole and extracted whatever moisture they could. The expedition barely made it to the ponds at Canonba, near Mount Hopeless.17 For the troopers the flat dry country of the plains must have seemed hostile, unpredictable and unfamiliar compared to the green tablelands at Bathurst. Probably few of them, if any, had ever ventured that far into the interior. They had been ready for action since they set off weeks earlier. Perhaps nerves kept them enthused, or perhaps they were growing tired of chasing. About 7 miles from the site where the white men were killed, the troopers came across a family of about fifty Aboriginal people. The overseer Carr saw one of them with a shirt belonging to one of the white men who had been killed. Corporal Reilly immediately ordered the party to charge in on the camp. With little time to respond, a few of the Aboriginal men scrambled to protect the group. One of them managed to spear the horse of a trooper who was galloping in and another just missed spearing a different trooper. Reilly gave permission for his men to fire indiscriminately into the camp.18 The troopers also drew their sabres as they pushed into the camp and slashed and stabbed those who were not already dead. Two Aboriginal men, Cudjenmoly and Currajomblay, were captured alive and the rest escaped into the scrub.19

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Aboriginal territory of the plains. This map shows the three major language groups in this region. The languages here, especially north of Wiradjuri and along the Barwon-Darling River, were similar. Within the broad language regions people also grouped themselves by their home country. For example, Ngiyampaa people speak the Wangaaypuwan (Wongaibon) way – they use the word wangaay for ‘no’. Their home country groups include Pilaarrkiyalu (Belah Tree People), Nhiilyikiyalu (Nelia Tree People) and Karulkiyalu (Stone Country People). FIGURE 1.2

Source: For more information on languages spoken on the plains see NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, 2003.

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Naked and bleeding bodies littered the scrub floor. At least ten Aboriginal people were killed according to the official records Gipps reviewed.20 In his sworn statement Carr said two or three of the dead might have been involved in the murder of the whites, but the fact he was not certain about how many and who in the group were the perpetrators reveals the precarious notion of justice in the summary punishment. The troopers continued to the waterhole at Canonba and found the skeletons of the three white men. Corporal Reilly ordered two troopers to bury the remains. Perhaps they found comfort in this solemn ceremony after what they had just done. Such was their thirst after the hunting and killing, and so parched were the plains surrounding that one good waterhole, that on their way back the stockmen and troopers were forced to slaughter one of their oxen to drink its blood. Historians can never know what people in the past were thinking. It is ‘easy to become over-ingenious in interpreting the intentions lurking in other minds’, warned Inga Clendinnen in Dancing with Strangers.21 However, writers and readers alike cannot help asking questions about the silences and absences across shaky, temporal moral gaps.22 What would the troopers have made of the sight before them: of the wounded moaning in pain, of frightened children crying for their fathers and brothers, of distraught mothers on the edge of the scrub hitting themselves and rubbing red dust into their hair and faces? Would they have mounted their horses and ridden away, satisfied at a job well done? Or would their hands have trembled and the bile risen in their throats? Were the English right – did the wild and strange environment strip them of their education, their humanity, their European characteristics, until they were ‘worse than the savages themselves’?23 For whites and blacks alike, wrote Ross Gibson, ‘questions of the “rightness” and “wrongness” of every single human action must have been churning up for daily

FIGURE 1.3 Aboriginal people of the Bogan River. The battles for land and water on the grasslands were most intense between 1830 and 1850. Aboriginal people and colonisers found ways to coexist. Aboriginal people of the plains subsidised the pastoral industry by providing station and domestic labour.

Source: ‘Portrait of a large group of Aboriginal men and women, Bogan River tribe, New South Wales’, (c. 1870). Photo by Samuel Nixon. National Library of Australia, vn4766593.

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negotiation along the frontier’.24 Killing was so common during the expansion of grazing on the plains, argued Richard Broome in Aboriginal Australians, that ‘frontier violence was normalised’.25 It was a topic for everyday conversation among white society. So too, it must have been, for Aboriginal society. Whatever judgements we make of this legacy, however we try to understand it now, we know that at the time violence such as this was the subject of condemnation. England deplored the violence against the natives of Australia, refusing to accept that these acts were any part of English nature, and so did many in the colony. Pastoral landholders, on the other hand, did not think the show of force had gone far enough.

‘Disjecta membra’ Despite having attempted to control the occupation of the inland, Colonial legislators gave up on agriculture, settlement and the equal rule of law in the 1830s and handed over the run of the inland of Australia to the cattle and sheep men who had illegally ventured beyond the boundaries of the colony. Governor Richard Bourke made a proclamation in 1835 introducing the notion of terra nullius, prohibiting Aboriginal people from being able to sell or assign land, and a year later authorised stockmen to roam their herds across the vast interior grasslands in return for payment of a £10 annual licence. The nine Commissioners of Crown Lands, posts originally devised to prevent the unauthorised occupation of the interior, were now responsible for the granting of licences, collection of fees and the maintenance of law and order. By 1839 they commanded their own Border Police. Most Commissioners were graziers themselves and tended to support their class in the enforcement of regulations.26 The collection of the token fee was often ignored. The squatters were getting away with mining a public resource – the grasslands – for little return to the public. It is easy to see how things might have gone awry. Isolated from the settled lands, with only the most basic of resources, the Commissioners of Crown Lands were virtual administrators of remote sub-colonies. The unauthorised stockmen became known as ‘squatters’, which was a term borrowed from Americans who were using the word to describe people without formal titles to the land they occupied (they were ‘only squatters upon other people’s land’).27 Even established graziers petitioned the colonial administration to control the squatters in 1836, complaining that ‘the interior of the colony is infested by gangs of cattle stealers and other disorderly persons, whose depredations are carried on to an alarming extent’. 28 They had a reputation for thieving, gambling, selling spirits and ‘every species of debauchery’.29 Bruce Elder, in his influential book Blood on the Wattle, characterised these men as simple, hard-working and from lowly origins. Some, he said, were social misfits who sought to distance themselves from civilised life.30 Many probably suffered brutality as convicts. The free settlers among this group, wrote Elder, were not ‘entrepreneurs seeking new lands to conquer’ but people with ‘absolutely nothing to lose’.31 Later, convict heritage would become another concern for a society preoccupied with inheritance and the role of biology in social problems.

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Itinerant workers tagged along with the teamsters who established outpost stations and camped in simple huts. In 1846 Thomas Mitchell was appalled by the state of affairs at a remote station en route to the Bogan River. He spoke with the Irish wife of a shepherd, who complained that in two years they had not been able to source any potatoes. She and her husband and baby were moving on: where, they weren’t sure. One man was destitute after losing his meagre herd of cattle, while another man had lost all his property ‘amid the wreck of colonial bankruptcies’ and lived in a bark hut lamenting ‘the state of depravity to which the colony was reduced’.32 Mitchell commented, ‘so fares it with the disjecta membra of towns and villages, when such arrangements are left to the people themselves in a new colony’.33 Concerns about the wild culture and conditions of the pastoral occupation of the inland plains spread throughout the colony. Eventually ‘squatter’ also applied to the wealthy landholders who employed the debauched to manage their runs. The squatters fought to maintain the status quo of exclusive suffrage and weak land laws that allowed their control over large expanses of the inland, while their opponents tried to introduce liberal reforms. In Spoils and Spoilers Geoffrey Bolton suggested that the environmental history of Australia could be seen as a conflict between those who exploited the country to serve preconceived economic goals and imported attitudes of mind, and those on the other hand who sought to create a civilisation where human use of resources was compatible with a sense of identity with the land.34 This idea is apparent in the aftermath of the killings and retribution on the Bogan. When Gipps heard about the defiance of the prohibition to run stock that far into the interior, and about the mass killing of Aboriginal people, in consultation with Allman he refused to renew Lee’s licence to de-pasture stock on Crown land and ordered him to bring his stock back within the boundary of the colony. This decision continued a public battle between the squatters and Gipps that had begun four years earlier.

‘Divine command’ The killings were reported in short articles in the Sydney Herald which emphasised the ‘treachery’ of the native tribes. This would have been the end of the matter, except that one year later a group of ninety squatters and their supporters signed a petition protesting against Gipps’ decision to cancel Lee’s licence and suggested that the responsibility for Crown lands should be taken away from the Governor. They took the petition to James Macarthur to present before the Legislative Council instead of directly to Gipps so that they could stir public debate and support. James Macarthur was the son of John Macarthur, the wealthy landowner famous for gaining access to valuable merino stock and bringing them to Australia, and whose entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes him as a ‘protagonist

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of the “pure-merino” ultra-conservatives’.35 Like his father, James represented the squatters. Gipps, on the other hand, was the son of a clergyman, and had gained a reputation for being fair-minded, liberal and a supporter of the Whig reformers.36 The squatters hated him. Four years earlier, Gipps had supported the prosecution of the perpetrators of the Myall Creek massacre, in which at least twenty-seven unarmed Aboriginal men, women and children were shot, stabbed and burned. Twelve white men involved were acquitted because the jury thought Aboriginal lives were worth less than a European’s. As one of the jurors put it: I look on the blacks . . . as a set of monkies [sic], and the earlier they are exterminated from the face of the earth the better. I would never consent to hang a white man for a black one. I knew well they were guilty of the murder, but I, for one, would never see a white man suffer for shooting a black.37 The Attorney-General ordered a retrial on different charges and seven of the men were convicted and sentenced to hang. Gipps signed the execution order. After receiving notice of Macarthur’s intention to raise the matter of the petition in the Council, Gipps collected all correspondence, reports and sworn statements concerning Lee’s men and the killings at the lower Bogan. He spent two days and nights poring over it, and even read Mitchell’s journal of his expedition to familiarise himself with the area and the habits of the Aboriginal people there. Macarthur spoke first and opened his address by accusing Gipps of perpetrating a ‘serious injury’ against the ‘highly esteemed’ William Lee, a man whom Macarthur’s own father had provided with a small flock of sheep, and who with ‘persevering industry’ had become a gentleman known about Bathurst as ‘Honest William Lee’.38 Macarthur’s speech had little to do with the administration of Crown lands. He used the petition as a means of publicly attacking Gipps, presenting it as a story of hard-working men versus an aloof and unfair Governor. He proceeded to give an account of the killings in which the natives were treacherous, the party of Mounted Police and stockmen restrained and virtuous, and argued that the innocent Aboriginal people who were shot ‘must be looked upon as persons unlawfully leagued together’.39 To emphasise the treachery he repeatedly stated that the Aboriginal people who killed the white men were friendly ‘domesticated’ blacks from further south who suddenly turned on the white men for no reason. In Macarthur’s version the troopers waited as long as they could before they were forced to fire in self-defence. He went on to quote Scottish political writer George Chalmers and his paraphrasing of Vattel’s The Law of Nations, both of whom wrote philosophy providing convenient arguments for justifying dispossession of indigenous people in America: the world was a gift from the Great Creator and men were commanded to use it.40 For Chalmers, the ‘roving of erratic tribes over the wide extended deserts does not form a possession’. Small populations had no right to the land when inhabitants from ‘overstocked’ countries wanted it.

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Their hunting and fishing and living from the ‘mere productions of nature’ meant they were ‘unable to fulfil the great purpose of the grant’.41 After quoting Chalmers but attributing it to Vattel, Macarthur argued that Europeans taking possession of the natives’ land might seem like a ‘gross outrage’ to them, but the occupation of their country was ‘only in accordance with the Divine command, by which man is instructed to “replenish the earth, and subdue it”’.42 Stockmen on the plains were fulfilling their divine duty.

‘Dark deeds’ Gipps was a skilful orator and was not intimidated by the squatters. He began his reply by calling the petition for what it was: no more than a move to ‘try the strength of the squatting interest against that of the Government’. He said the squatters were already becoming too powerful and it was his duty to make ‘the most firm and determined stand against it’.43 He reminded them that the Crown lands were held in trust for the benefit of the whole Empire, not ‘any particular class’ of people, and that as Governor he alone was responsible for protecting the rights of the Aborigines, which was, in his view, a ‘sacred duty’. Armed with a swathe of documents relating to the killings near the Bogan the year before, he declared ‘there is a difference between the truth and the whole truth’.44 Gipps then proceeded to tell a more complete account of what happened out beyond the limits of the colony. Gipps found no evidence that they were Wiradjuri from further south, or that they were friendly and accustomed to white men. All the evidence suggested they were from that area, and that they were trying to protect their waterhole, which was the only one for 70 miles. ‘Seeing their water . . . used and destroyed by cattle’, said Gipps, the Aborigines acted as anyone concerned for their survival would have done. He continued: If it was esteemed noble in the Tyrolese or Swiss to fight for the beloved mountains of their native land, it was without question, equally praiseworthy for the Australian black, to fight for the protection of his waterholes; and no European, therefore, ever drew a sword in a purer cause, than that for which these injured though savage people, raised their spears and boomerangs.45 At its heart, said Gipps, this debate was about the treatment of Aboriginal people and their rights versus the desires of the squatters. Violence against Aboriginal people was discussed freely, but it was rare for the issue to be debated publicly at the highest levels of government. The petitioners, said Gipps, were the ones ‘bringing their dark deeds to daylight’. He said the petition itself would be used by those in England critical of squatters as evidence of their lack of humanity. There was not one word about the murder of the Aborigines, but ‘abundance of sympathy for horned beasts’ and poor ‘suckling calves’. Want of water was no excuse. Gipps asked, were the cattle ‘to be saved at the expense of the lives of men; were the

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lives of Aborigines to be disregarded?’ He condemned the squatters for their lack of morals and Christian values. Lee could not be found criminally responsible, but he was morally responsible. The Bishop of Australia and the Chief Justice James Dowling spoke briefly and agreed with Gipps. Macarthur withdrew his motion but the squatters felt they had achieved their aims.46 In a tirade against Gipps the day after the debate, The Australian newspaper affirmed the colony had been given ‘instructive insight’ into the Governor’s views towards squatters. ‘Sir George Gipps,’ the editorial declared, ‘is the systematic foe and persecutor of the squatting interest, while he is at the same time a very injudicious friend of the Aborigines.’ It continued the calls for renewed military action against the natives, arguing ‘a wholesome and salutary fear of the white man must in the first instance be impressed upon their mind . . . the basis of the social reformation of any Aboriginal tribes must be laid in fear and respect.’ A few large assaults led by the military with all its armoury and the problem would be solved.

1>QN Q v i X O T t 'í M V A A H A B LC

D aw

AOVENTUHE

f t £ t U ( t N l N f tO£ t U ( t N l N O

W I T H T HE C A T T L E,

H O ME AOAIN-

FIGURE 1.4 Political cartoon of Governor Gipps as Don Quixote. Gipps is depicted as Don Quixote charging the squatters (who are represented by the bellowing cattle). On his joust is written ‘New Regulations’. In the lower scene Don Quixote returns to England defeated with his ‘regulations’ joust broken.

Source: Edward Winstanley. ‘Don Quixote’s remarkable adventure with the cattle . . .’ (1844). Ways and Means for 1845 or taking it out of the Squatters, State Library of New South Wales, a2255008.

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Doing otherwise was ‘false humanity’: one mass slaughter now in a spectacular display of military power would result in fewer lives lost in the long run.47 The editorial claimed the ‘multitude’ was on the side of the squatters, but that is not evident from letters published over the preceding year. The Australasian Chronicle hoped that someone might ‘devise a remedy to the crying evils of Aboriginal extermination’ and republished a letter from the Sydney Herald which pleaded for Gipps to end the ‘almost open warfare’ that the servants of the squatters were engaged in with the natives.48 The letter suggested the agricultural settlement at Wellington with a reserve for Aboriginal people proved conflict was not inevitable. Gipps, however, had already admitted defeat. In a letter to Lord Glenelg he wrote: ‘Your Lordship is, I am sure, well aware of the extreme difficulty of devising any measure that shall effectually check the outrages which, I regret to state, are now of frequent occurrence beyond the boundaries of location’.49 Gipps and others in the Council feared that too many people were not becoming settlers but were choosing to be squatters instead.50 Despite public condemnation there were few legal or social consequences for the squatters and their servants. When the Council was opened up to new members from 1842 the franchise was so high that nearly all of them were wealthy squatters.51 Corporal Reilly was made a sergeant shortly after he carried out the killings on the Bogan. William Lee became a popular figure around Bathurst and sat in the first Legislative Assembly in 1856 in the seat of Roxburgh.

Murdering stumps The landscape at the plains became inscribed with the memory of violence. Five years after the killings, when Thomas Mitchell’s expedition was suffering badly from dehydration at the Bogan, they found relief at the Canonba Ponds. Sunk into one of the waterholes were the ephemera of fleeting white occupation: several kettles, a spade, barrels and other articles, as well as the imprints of many hooves. Two elderly Aboriginal women informed his guide that ‘three men had been killed here when the place was abandoned’.52 Mitchell and his men were camped at the murder site. The story of the killings became part of the local settlement mythology. By 1860 another station was established at Canonba and in 1881 over 400 people had settled in a village nearby. In 1874 Town and Country Journal did a feature on one of the stations at Canonba. In that article the locals had inflated the number of white men killed to seven, and that because of the killings Gipps had declared the area from Nyngan to Fort Bourke a ‘Black’s Reserve’.53 Just as the petitioners’ account neglected to mention the disproportionate revenge attack on the Aboriginal people, so did the oral and written stories of the local whites. Six years after that article, a correspondent for Town and Country Journal gave a serialised account of his trip in a mail coach from Dubbo to Bourke. The site of the killings at Canonba was now known as the ‘Murdering Stump’ and the number of white men killed increased to nine – taken unawares and mercilessly murdered by the treacherous blacks. It was a story ‘handed down from generation to

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generation of mailmen’.54 In the twentieth century, a local named Elsie Walsh provided a version of the story for a book on the history of Nyngan. The ‘Murdering Stump’ had been pluralised, because now there was more than one stump – eleven, in fact, next to which an unspecified number of white men camped for the night. The Aboriginal people attacked the men in their sleep, killing all but one, who escaped after undoing a horse’s hobbles and rode bareback to Warren over a hundred miles away, with only the hobbles to steer, ‘hitting the horse first one side of the head and then the other, to guide it this way and that’.55 In the year 2000, Keith Windschuttle published an essay in Quandrant attacking Australian historians’ estimates of the numbers of Aboriginal people killed during colonisation. Towards the end of the article he criticised the editors of The Oxford Companion to Australian History for not including the mass killings of Europeans by Aboriginal people under the section ‘Massacres’. He compiled a list of seven to which he suggests the editors could have referred, including ‘seven stockmen on the Bogan River run of William Lee killed in 1842’.56 Windschuttle failed to provide any sources for this assertion so it is impossible to tell if it was a wilful exaggeration of the number of Europeans killed or if he just relied on an already-augmented tally extracted from third-hand accounts. It was probably the latter for, like the other second- and third-hand tales, he did not mention the Aboriginal people who were indiscriminately shot and sabred after the three white men were killed.

‘Advanced posts of an army are not better kept’ Mitchell’s observations and encounters in the aftermath of the killings, gleaned from the account of his 1846 expedition, tell a story of victory followed by slow and grinding defeat for the Aboriginal people of the Bogan River. After killing the three stockmen working for William Lee, the Wongaibon began spearing and roasting the 600 cattle. They invited neighbouring groups to join the feasting. Mitchell saw earth ovens where Aboriginal people had roasted the cattle whole and ‘about their old encampments [were] many heaps of bones’.57 Wongaibon and Wiradjuri used the environment of the scrub country to defend their land. Early in Mitchell’s journey a station worker showed him a place north of Peak Hill where Aboriginal people had waited for rain and then drove 800 fat bullocks into the soft clay mud to strand them. They roasted and consumed twenty beasts a day. Their continued attacks forced the graziers to retreat. Squatters had pushed as far as present day Nyngan in the late 1830s. Ten years later they had withdrawn 60 miles to an area near Dandaloo.58 There Mitchell entered what he regarded as a no man’s land, passing the ‘line of demarcation between the squatter and the savage’.59 About 6–12 miles further north his party began coming across deserted stations and the material remains of fighting and killing between whites and blacks. Major Mitchell, an experienced military officer, described the country there as a battleground. His party had:

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crossed the neutral ground between the savage and the squatter. The advanced posts of an army are not better kept, and humiliating proofs that the white man had given way, were visible in the remains of dairies burnt down, stockyards in ruins, untrodden roads.60 As he continued north he came across more abandoned stations, the homes torched, the gardens overgrown, and little remained of the fences save a few charred posts. The reprisals, however, continued. Groups of vigilantes rode into the prohibited areas to kill Aboriginal people. Twenty-two miles south of the Nyngan waterhole the local Aboriginal people accompanying Mitchell’s party farewelled them, warning that ‘gentlemen’ should be wary of ‘the spears of the natives of Nyingan, as many natives of Nyingan had been shot lately by white men from Wellington Valley’.61 The violence of permit holders along the Macquarie near the marshes, and the competition for resources with cattle, pushed the Aboriginal owners there towards the Bogan. Border police encouraged a war between the Macquarie and Bogan River people.

FIGURE 1.5 ‘Remnant of the Bogan tribe.’ This is a sketch from Mitchell’s 1845/6 expedition. It shows leaders of the Bogan people who had suffered during a war for resources between stockmen, troopers and neighbouring Aboriginal groups. Mitchell wrote: ‘[They] sat doubled up on their hams opposite to each other, under the withered bushes, naked, and grey, and melancholy – sad and hopeless types of their fading race!’

Source: ‘Remnant of the Bogan Tribe’. Vignette at p. 30 of Thomas Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia (1848), State Library of New South Wales, Call no. C 779.

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FIGURE 1.6 Aboriginal people of the Darling River. The labour of Aboriginal people was vital for the pastoral industry. This photo shows Aboriginal stockmen, and Aboriginal women wearing clothes typical of domestic servants.

Source: ‘Group of standing men and seated women and children, Darling River, New South Wales’, (c. 1886). Photo by Charles Kerry. National Library of Australia, vn4312907.

Mitchell noticed the absence of Aboriginal people where he had estimated hundreds living ten years earlier.62 He heard that the ‘Chief ’ of the Bogan tribe, who had helped his party on his first expedition, had been killed. On 9 January 1846 he wrote, ‘All I could learn about the rest of the tribe was, that the men were almost all dead, and that their wives were chiefly servants at stock stations along the Macquarie’.63 A year before Mitchell travelled through the plains, Aboriginal people on the lower Macquarie drove cattle from stations and speared a hutkeeper. The Commissioner for Crown Lands, a sergeant, a corporal and four troopers of the Mounted Police set out in pursuit in August. On 2 September, between Mount Harris and Mount Foster, the party faced a group of Wongaibon or Wailwan. According to their account, the Aboriginal people ‘immediately commenced’ an attack. The party killed ten Aboriginal people.64 Five days later they received reports of more Aboriginal people ‘mustering in great numbers’ near Narromine on the Bogan. The troopers opened fire again and killed two more Aboriginal people. One of them was the Bogan Chief that the whites called ‘Joey’ and probably Mitchell’s old friend. Joey’s real name was Cudjenmoly. He was one of the two Aboriginal men captured during the massacre at Canonba in 1841. The troopers had taken him back to Wellington but the magistrate had to release Cudjenmoly without charge – much to the disgust of the stockmen – because

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there were no suitable translators. On 7 September 1845 the troopers shot Cudjenmoly seven times before he fell. They had finally got their man. The violence on the plains continued. In 1928 an elderly landholder was interviewed for a small local history publication. He recalled his father shooting at Aboriginal people whenever the whites felt they were getting out of control, reflecting, ‘in those days, we had to use a bit of violence’.65 Eventually the squatters and Aboriginal people agreed on a mutual tolerance. Aboriginal people provided the valuable labour that subsidised pastoral operations and enabled the squatters to remain on the plains.66 Conciliation with the squatters meant that, for the time being, Aboriginal people were able to stay on country in relative safety. The violence of the squatters was just the beginning of fears about the culture of pastoral settlement. Soon colonial authorities, commentators and the landholders themselves grew concerned over the exploitation of the interior’s plants, water and soil.

‘Our “cloven foot” everywhere’ Until the colonisers brought cattle and sheep to Australia no cloven hoof had ever marked the soil.67 ‘No other land,’ wrote historian Eric Rolls, ‘had ever been treated so gently.’68 The impact of hooves was immediate. In 1846 Thomas Mitchell abandoned the dry Bogan, headed east to the old murder site at the Canonba Ponds and then across to the lower Macquarie. He had decided to follow the floodplains north from there up to the Barwon. On the edge of the Macquarie Marshes his party of thirty-two white men and four Aboriginal guides and their bleating, lowing snorting caravan of 250 sheep, 80 bullocks and 13 horses were short of water again.69 Mitchell had engaged a local Aboriginal person to help guide their path. Each time he took Mitchell’s party to a water source he was exasperated to find it had already been degraded or destroyed by cattle. The guide was shocked by the speed with which they could suck a waterhole dry and by the extent of the damage they caused. On 20 February, at the edge of a saltbush plain near the marshes: A shallow creek appeared soon thereafter on our right, in which our guide had expected to find water, but was disappointed; cattle having recently drank up there, what had been a large pond when he was there formerly. He showed us the recent prints of numerous cloven feet, and thus we were made to feel, in common with the aborigines, those privations to which they are exposed by the white man’s access to their country.70 The following day their local guide: ‘brought us at 5pm to “Willery”, the place where he had expected to find water; but here again, he had been anticipated by cattle, which had drunk up all, and trodden the ponds as dry as a marketplace.’71 The clay soils sank beneath the weight of the wagons. Mitchell wanted to get clear of the Marsh country. Their oxen could not drink at the reed beds because they became bogged, and the waterholes at the edges of the marshes were already

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emptied by the squatters’ cattle. Mitchell’s guide, Yuranigh, made it clear to the local guide they needed firmer ground for quicker passage. The local guide chose a route over the plains that would take them via the many cowals that could supply them with water. Cowals are clay depressions that hold water long after a flood or rain.72 Each one was known and had a name, no matter how small. Mitchell’s party set off, with the local guide expecting to show them water along the way. However, on 22 February 1846, the first day of their new course, Mitchell wrote: The water in these holes had been recently drunk, and the mud trampled into hard clay by the hoofs of cattle. Thus it is, that the aborigines first become sensible of the approach of the white man . . . Cattle find these places and come from stations often many miles distant, attracted by the rich verdure usually growing about them, and by thus treading the water into mud, or by drinking it up, they literally destroy the whole country for the aborigines . . . I felt much more disgusted than the poor natives, while they were thus exploring in vain every hollow in search of water for our use, that our ‘cloven foot’ should appear everywhere.73 The impact of hooves on ancient soils, soft earth, precious waterholes and native grasses was immediate. It was not until grazing pressures increased from the 1860s, and grasses began to fail to recover from drought, that landholders and commentators took notice and made calls for solutions to the problems on the plains. The changes that sheep and cattle made to the plains environment is recorded and analysed in numerous histories and papers in science journals.74 Eric Rolls provided what is probably the most succinct summary: ‘during a long drought in the 1870s, sheep and cattle turned millions of hectares into dust – then died’.75 Rolls said it took less than six years in most districts for the animals to kill the grasses.

What happened to the native grasses? Eric Rolls’ timing is about right. During the 1830s illegal and legal pastoralism backed by British capital became a ‘wild orgy of business speculation and fictitious prosperity’.76 Economic depression followed from 1841 to 1843. More than twothirds of the assets of the colony’s banks consisted of what the post-2008 world would recognise as ‘toxic assets’ – discounted bills with little or no real value – and six out of the fourteen banks folded.77 The slump, combined with drought and the ‘depredations’ of the Aboriginal people of plains, stalled the squatters until the next ‘land boom’ of the 1860s.78 Nearly every portion of land capable of growing a blade of grass became part of a run during the first half of the decade. The Robertson Land Acts introduced in New South Wales in 1861 were designed to make land more affordable for people with limited means. ‘Selectors’ could buy unsurveyed land in 320-acre lots of freehold title with interest-free loans for threequarters of the purchase price. Politicians hoped the selectors would try agriculture

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but the adoption of cropping was limited and the Acts were mired by corruption and abuse by the large landholders who used agents to gain control of the best pieces of land.79 In comparison, there were squatters such as Samuel Wilson who held 2.5 million acres of leasehold land80 – hence, squatters made up half the New South Wales parliament.81 When drought hit in 1866, landholders saw for the first time on a large scale what the Australian climate could do to the land, the grasses and their stock. The drought lasted four years and settlers said it was the worst they had experienced since they began running sheep and cattle over the plains.82 Newspapers reported, ‘For 300 miles down the Bogan you might easily put all the grass you see in a bandbox; the Darling is nearly as bad’83 and the river frontages were ‘bare as a house floor’.84 The grasses, however, showed how quickly they could recover. There was a brief spell in the drought in 1867 when autumn rains fell. At Bourke, on the Barwon-Darling, the Dubbo Dispatch reported ‘the grass has commenced to grow nicely’.85 In June a correspondent for the Dispatch travelled the Bogan and Macquarie river districts, rejoicing, ‘rain, rain, is the order of the day, and grass as much as you like’.86 The grasses had not been killed off yet. By 1869 drought conditions were as bad as ever. Near the Macquarie Marshes settlers were ‘getting nearly to starvation point’ and there was not a vestige of grass from Dubbo to the Barwon-Darling.87 The country from the Bogan down to Wentworth was ‘most appalling to look at’, the Macquarie was ‘wretched’ and ‘desolate’ and sheep had become ‘almost general property’.88 According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald the sheep were ‘like locusts, travelling in all directions, and eating up every mouthful of vegetation’.89 When the drought ended the speculators returned, but the rate of growth was not as rapid as the early 1860s boom. Seasons were more favourable in the 1870s and the plains only suffered one short drought over 1877 and 1878. It was clear, however, that the grasses had not been given a chance to recover from the drought of the late 1860s. The variety of grasses had diminished. As early as 1873 the German-born botanist Richard Schomburgk, working for the South Australian Government, observed that the native grasses in all the Australian colonies were ‘rapidly dying out. In some districts all the annuals are extinct, and even the kangaroo grass gets scarcer every summer’.90 Others began to comment on the growing problem of overstocking throughout the colonies. A market report in the Coonamble Independent blamed the death of millions of sheep in the dry years of 1877 and 1878 on overstocking and warned that it was ‘one of the greatest evils which overtakes the settlers in Australia’.91 An article in the Sydney Morning Herald compiled reports from across the colony about runs with ‘thousands of reeking carcases strewn over them’ and argued the ‘cupidity’ of the landholders in their decision to overstock was cause for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to become involved.92 A correspondent from Dubbo said he knew of one run which carried 12,000 sheep in 1867 but by 1877 was trying to support 67,000.93

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Commentators worried about overstocking in the 1870s must have been astonished at the increase in stock numbers over the 1880s and 90s. In 1879 there were 5 million sheep in western New South Wales. Three years later, numbers had jumped to almost 10 million.94 This increase occurred despite a drought in the first half of the 1880s. Stockmen supplemented the disappearing grass by lopping the branches from trees and by taking sheep and cattle to more recently opened lands where overstocking had not had as much of an effect on the grass.95 By 1884, however, overstocking as a management strategy had caught up with the landholders. At Nyngan the sheep were ‘walking skeletons’ and from Dubbo to Nyngan the plains were ‘a perfect desert on which there is not a blade of grass’.96 It used to be the case that landholders took their stock to the Darling to fatten but by the early 1880s the condition of the country was so bad they drove their animals north to Rockhampton over a thousand kilometres away.97 On the Barwon, stations were losing up to 40,000 sheep and the local correspondent commented that the city investors had ‘suffered severely from overstocking’.98 A ‘curious industry’ emerged on the banks of the Macquarie in Dubbo – the collection and washing of ‘dead wool’. People took the wool from carcases ‘in a filthy state, matted with dirt and dried refuse from the decomposing bodies’ and washed it in the river.99 Landholders did not think it was a severe drought, but figured the losses were due to two factors: ‘there have been much more stock to die, and much more stock to eat up the grass’.100 The losses might have been as high as 9 million sheep in New South Wales.101

For want of grass On 10 May 1884 the New South Wales Government established a Royal Commission to investigate methods of water conservation for the interior with the goal of ‘averting the disastrous consequences of the periodical droughts to which the Colony is from time to time subject’.102 The Commissioners were shocked to find that witness after witness had no interest in conserving water. They wanted grass. Some landholders believed the deterioration of the soil and the loss of the grasses improved the plains. This was, at least, in terms of its water-holding capacity: Formerly, in that part of the country, owing to the loose nature of the soil, if we had 50 points of rain it used to go into the roots of the grass; whereas now, owing to the hard crust formed on the surface by the tramping of the stock, the water runs into flats or tanks.103 Overwhelmingly, the Commissioners heard that the landholders had enough water – they suffered from ‘the want of grass’.104 These responses perplexed the Commissioners. To them, the complaints about a lack of grass indicated the need for water conservation measures and irrigation.105 In May 1885 the Commission asked Arthur Dewhurst, a district surveyor, about the benefits of irrigation for grass:

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Commissioner: If we had irrigation should we not get grass? Dewhurst: I do not think that the plains will ever be irrigated: there is not sufficient water to irrigate them. C: Suppose that the flood waters of which you have been speaking which goes to waste were stored, should that not be sufficient? D: I do not think so. 106 The Commissioners’ questions were shaped by the vision of an inland Australia supporting small pastoral settlements and growing agricultural settlements. Their questions and suggestions fell flat with landholders who had no long-term interest in conservation of the state’s resources.107 The Commissioners appeared to have no sense of the scale on which the low-capital and opportunistic pastoral enterprise was run. At Dubbo, a stock inspector asked the Commissioners how could a landholder grow enough hay to feed 180,000 sheep?108 Frederick York Wolseley, a large landholder on the Barwon and inventor of shearing machines, explained it in clear terms: ‘It would be economy to lose your stock in preference to going to the expense of raising fodder to keep them alive’.109 The losses of millions of sheep were not due to ignorance or a lack of means to conserve water or irrigate or buy pasture: it was a management decision. Even if the government provided the water

Number of dry sheep equivalents ('000s)

16,000 14,000 12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0 1860 1862 1864 1866 1868 1870 1872 1874 1876 1878 1880 1882 1884 1886 1888 1890 1892 1894 1896 1898 1900 1902 1904 1906 1908

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Stocking rates in the Western Division of New South Wales. The graph shows the number of dry sheep equivalents in the Western Division of New South Wales, 1860 to 1908. Although total numbers of sheep in New South Wales and in Australia have increased since the end of the nineteenth century, the Western Division has never been able to carry as many sheep as it did in the height of the frenzy and speculation of the 1890s. FIGURE 1.7

Source: Butlin, Noel G. ‘Distribution of the Sheep Population: Preliminary Statistical Picture, 1860–1957.’ In The Simple Fleece: Studies in the Australian Wool Industry, edited by Alan Barnard, 281–321. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press in association with the Australian National University, 1962.

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for free, most witnesses said they would not use it. The Commissioners learned that many landholders had no intention to conserve resources, to act responsibly, to prevent the suffering of millions of starving animals or to make real capital improvements to holdings. Geographer R. L. Heathcote in Back of Bourke argued the pastoralists had little choice. They had to try to recoup their losses and pay back debts by stocking up and hoping for a ‘good’ season.110 It made some kind of economic sense. It also said a lot about their attitudes to the plains environment and the animals in their care. Tim Bonyhady in The Colonial Earth gathered contemporary statements that condemned the pastoralists. Individuals and the Lyne Royal Commission expressed concern about the treatment of animals and the destruction of vegetation. Stock numbers, however, continued to increase. By 1891 there were 13.5 million sheep in western New South Wales.111 Rabbits bred in plague numbers and added to the grazing pressure. Woody, dense-standing native vegetation began to encroach on the grasslands due to grazing disturbance, the repression of Aboriginal burning and the destruction of grasses that fuelled fires.112 Commentators began warning the industry’s practices could not be sustained.113 In 1895 drought returned and lasted seven years. The pastoral industry collapsed.

Exploiters and civilisers Hooves and the lust for land, quick profits and power had irreversible impacts on the plains.114 The loss of vegetation and the exposure and trampling of ancient soils, combined with drought, caused ‘horrific’ dust storms which left four-foot fences buried under sand.115 Of the 3.7 million hectares of native grassland that covered western New South Wales, almost half has been destroyed or replaced since European settlement.116 Less than 1 per cent of the temperate grasslands of eastern Australia are considered ‘unmodified’.117 The eastern hare-wallaby, the crescent nail-tail wallaby, the long-tailed hopping mouse and the lesser stick-nest rat – with its spectacular three-metre high nests built from the twigs and litter fallen from the semi-arid woodlands – were all animals that the squatters, stockmen and selectors had the privilege of seeing on the plains. We will never see them. These creatures who witnessed the arriving hordes of cattle, sheep and rabbits will never play their role in the ecology of the plains again. Daniel Lunney compiled species loss data and found that of the sixty-one native mammal species present in western New South Wales at the time of European settlement, twenty-four are now extinct and seventeen are threatened. All the extinctions occurred before 1900.118 Extinctions are rare in the earth’s history.119 On average, two mammal species become extinct every 1 million years.120 The pastoralists wiped out twentyfour species in half a century. Geoffrey Bolton’s two poles of Australian environmental history – the exploiters versus the civilisers – could characterise not just the history of post-1788 Australians and their environment, but the popular historiography too. Stories of noble pioneers were countered with stories detailing the violence and environmental

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destruction of colonisers who despised the Australian environment. Scholars such as Tim Bonyhady and Grace Karskens have sought to bring nuance back to the storytelling. They have emphasised the civilisers in their histories – the people who expressed wonder at and appreciation of the Australian environment, and who shaped new identities around it. In The Colony, Karskens described a settler society in the Sydney Basin, mixing classes and negotiating complex relationships with the local Aboriginal people; a society coming to terms with and finding pleasure in the new climate and new geography.121 Bonyhady’s essays in The Colonial Earth counter the generalisation that no settlers felt any affection for the new plants and animals and landscapes they lived with. Artists, administrators, religious leaders, public commentators and other passionate individuals found beauty in the Australian environment and advocated for environmental protection and conservation. Like Bolton, he suggests ‘the environmental aesthetic is as deeply embedded in the culture as is resistance to putting environmental ideals into place’.122 Bonyhady and Karskens shatter the comforting assumption that our present generation is more environmentally enlightened and that the ecological degradation of the past was a result of ignorance, of not having enough data, of not being environmentally aware – an assumption that has fostered the complacent and convenient attitude that the past was bad but we are much better now. There are two reasons why I have written about both Aboriginal dispossession and resistance and the rapid environmental changes that pastoral expansion on the plains caused. The first is to argue that it is no coincidence that the same society that perpetrated massacres produced animal and plant extinctions and the degradation of grasses, watering holes and soils. Social relations in the inland were fractured and strained. Theft was rife. A common joke on the plains was that the only time you would get to eat your own meat was if your neighbour invited you for dinner. It was a divided society of gaping inequalities and class warfare, of extreme economic and environmental pressures, of uncertainty and instability, of naive legislation and mismanagement. It produced a culture in which people defied judgement and criticism, shed the constraints of established civil and moral codes, and at times relinquished basic humanity. Some did it wilfully, some out of desperation.123 There was little capacity for conservation. Weak and stressed social relationships are interlinked with poor ecological relationships. The second reason I have included the experience of pastoral expansion on the plains is that it provides the context for the foundations of agriculture based on scientific principles as a civilising project. Scientific agriculture was never meant to be the next stage of laissez-faire exploitation of the interior. The professional agriculturalists saw their role as responding to crisis. They wanted to restore the nutrients to the soil, save the remaining vegetation, regenerate the grasslands, and teach long-term principles for cultivation. They wanted to establish holistic education institutions that would make farmers into amateur naturalists with general knowledge in geology, geography, botany and zoology. The political advocates for scientific agriculture saw it as a means of redeeming the culture of the inland. They wanted to create a civilisation for the plains. When they used

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the term ‘closer settlement’ it was not just invoking a quaint dream of a European agricultural ideal – it was a hard-fought political agenda, about justice, reform, a moderated capitalism, a better society and conservation of resources. It was a loaded term that carried all the baggage of the frontier violence and debates between squatters and their opponents.

FIGURE 1.8 ‘A Cruel Death.’ Commentators at the time were critical of the suffering to which sheep were subject in this system of pastoral exploitation. So many sheep died some began to collect ‘dead wool’ – the wool left on the rotting carcases of starved sheep. Banjo Patterson recorded the practice is his poem ‘It’s Grand’: It’s grand to be a shearer Along the Darling side, And pluck the wool from stinking sheep That some days since have died.

Source: Wood engraving by J. Macfarlane. ‘A Cruel Death. Recent Drought in New South Wales.’ Published in The Illustrated Australian News (12 January 1889). State Library of Victoria.

Notes 1 Blainey, A Land Half Won, 51. 2 Ibid. 3 ‘Legislative Council’, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 25 August 1842, 2. 4 See: R. L. Heathcote, Back of Bourke: A Study of Land Appraisal and Settlement in SemiArid Australia (Melbourne University Press, 1965).

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5 ‘Bathurst: The Bogan Blacks Again’, Sydney Herald, 15 October 1841. Most were working for Lee, one or two worked for an ex-convict squatter named Joseph Moulder. 6 This location is one of the few rises on the plains. It is now known as Two Brothers and is near the village of Girilambone. 7 ‘Letter to Colonial Secretary from J. J. Allman, Commissioner of Crown Lands, Wellington District, 20 September 1845’, in Brennan Papers (Warren, NSW: Warren Shire Library, NSW). 8 ‘Legislative Council’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 August 1842. 9 According to the AIATSIS map of Aboriginal Australia, Mt Hopeless is located in the Wongaibon language group area. The Canonba waterhole is on the eastern side of the river and the map suggests this is the territory of Wailwan people. The accounts of Mitchell and Allman in particular suggest they were most likely associated with the Bogan River near Nyngan and belonged to one of the Wongaibon groups. The related names for people and the languages spoken in the area are Wangaaybuwan, Ngiyambaa and Ngemba. For a map of Aboriginal territories see Fig. 1.2. 10 The accounts of the stockmen were recorded in sworn statements and general details were published in newspapers at the time. One year later their side of the story was told again in debates in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly. Specific sources are cited in the rest of the chapter. 11 ‘Bathurst’, Sydney Herald, 18 October 1841, 2. 12 ‘William Carr, Sworn Statement at Bathurst before the Police Magistrate, 11 October, 1841’, in Documents relating to Aboriginal Australians, 1816–1853 [Dixson, William, Sir, 1870–1952] (Sydney: State Library of NSW). 13 ‘Bathurst: Bogan Blacks’, 2–3. 14 Sergeant Reilly said the order to go to Wellington was ‘overruled by Mr Kerr, who said it was better to get upon the Bogan at once’. Gipps was dismayed that a stockman could take command of a police force. ‘Michael Reilly, Sworn Statement at Commissioner of Crown Lands Office, Wellington, 4 November, 1841’, in Documents relating to Aboriginal Australians, 1816–1853 [Dixson, William, Sir, 1870–1952] (Sydney: State Library of NSW). 15 Ibid. 16 Thomas L. Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia, in Search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848), 19. 17 Ibid. 18 Reilly’s sworn statement said, ‘for the safety of the party I found it necessary to order the men to fire upon them indiscriminately.’ ‘Michael Reilly, Sworn Statement.’ 19 Sources for this paragraph: ibid; ‘Peter McEvoy, Sworn Statement at Commissioner of Crown Lands Office, Wellington, 4 November, 1841’, ibid; ‘Legislative Council [Sydney Morning Herald].’ 20 ‘Legislative Council [Sydney Morning Herald]’, 2. The statements given by the perpetrators on the numbers killed were vague and inconsistent. One said he only saw three bodies, but other statements said more. I do not know what range of documents Gipps held. It is not an unlikely number – in 1845 a smaller party of troopers killed ten Aboriginal people in one clash near Mt Foster on the Macquarie River. 21 Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 126. 22 Greg Dening encouraged historians to ask these questions, to use imagination not fantasy, to have done enough research, to have heard some of the sounds, to be able to translate those silences. See: Dening, ‘Performing on the Beaches of the Mind: An Essay.’ 23 ‘Legislative Council [Sydney Morning Herald].’ 24 Ross Gibson, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (St. Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 2002), 62. 25 Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: A History since 1788, 4th edn. (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2010). 46.

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26 Samuel Clyde McCulloch, ‘Gipps, Sir George (1791–1847)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Edition 2010 (2006), http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010412b. htm (accessed on 1 February 2014). 27 ‘Squatter, N.1.’, in OED Online (Oxford University Press, 2010). 28 ‘Squatting’, Sydney Monitor, 9 April 1836, 2. 29 Ibid. 30 Bruce Elder, Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788, 3rd edn. (Sydney: New Holland Publishers, 2003). 31 Ibid., 74. 32 Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition, 12. 33 Ibid., 10. 34 Geoffrey Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers: Australians Make Their Environment 1788–1980, Australian Experience: No. 2 (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 23. 35 Margaret Steven, ‘Macarthur, John (1767–1834)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Edition (2006), www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020133b.htm (accessed on 1 February 2014). 36 Samuel Clyde McCulloch, ‘Gipps, Sir George (1791–1847)’, ibid. 2010, http:// adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010412b.htm (accessed on 1 February 2014). 37 ‘Letter to the Editor’, Australian, 8 December 1838, 2. 38 ‘Legislative Council’, Australian, 24 August 1842. 39 ‘Legislative Council [Sydney Morning Herald]’, 2. 40 See: George Chalmers, Political Annals of the Present United Colonies, from Their Settlement to the Peace of 1763 (1780), which paraphrased the Swiss philosopher Emerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law Applied to the Conduct and to the Affairs of Nations and of Sovereigns (1758). 41 George Chalmers, Political Annals of the Present United Colonies, from Their Settlement to the Peace of 1763, Book 1 (London 1780), 5. 42 ‘Legislative Council [Australian].’ 43 ‘Legislative Council [Sydney Gazette].’ 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 ‘Legislative Council [Sydney Morning Herald]’, 2. 47 ‘Editorial’, Australian, 26 August 1842, 2. 48 ‘The Aborigines’, Australasian Chronicle, 5 December 1840, 2; A Traveller, ‘The Aborigines’, Sydney Herald, 3 December 1840, 2. 49 ‘Gipps to Glenelg, April 27, 1838’, Historical Records of Australia 19, 397–98; quoted in Samuel Clyde McCulloch, ‘Sir George Gipps and Eastern Australia’s Policy toward the Aborigine, 1838–46’, The Journal of Modern History 33, no. 3 (1961): 264. 50 ‘Legislative Council [Sydney Morning Herald].’ 51 ‘Gipps, Sir George (1791–1847)’. 52 Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition, 46. 53 ‘Murrawombie’, Town and Country Journal, 10 October 1874, 580. 54 ‘A Bush Trip’, Town and Country Journal, 14 February 1880, 314. 55 Wilfred Gibson, ed., Nyngan on the Bogan: Centenary Year 1983, (Nyngan, NSW: Nyngan Historical Society, 1983), 213. 56 Keith Windschuttle, ‘The Myths of Frontier Massacres in Australian History [Series of Three Parts] Part 2: The Fabrication of the Aboriginal Death Toll’, Quadrant 44, no. 11 (2000): 21. 57 Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition, 40. 58 Between Peak Hill and Nyngan, and west of Narromine. 59 Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition, 20. 60 Ibid., 25. 61 Ibid., 31. 62 Further north, towards the Barwon-Darling, he made similar observations, such as: ‘We saw no natives; nor were even kangaroos or emus to be seen, as formerly, any longer inhabitants of these parts.’ Ibid., 41.

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63 Ibid., 30. 64 ‘News from the Interior’, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 September 1845, 2. 65 Back to Nyngan Week, September 24th to September 29th, 1928, ed. Back to Nyngan Executive Committee ([Sydney?]: Printed by the Regend Press, under the auspices of the ‘Back to Nyngan’ Executive Committee, 1928). 66 See: Heather Goodall, ‘Renewing Country: Aboriginal People and Their Lands in Rangeland Environments’, The Rangeland Journal 23, no. 1 (2001). 67 Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers, 81. 68 Eric C. Rolls, ‘The Nature of Australia’, in Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, ed. Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997), 38–39. 69 The numbers for the expedition are approximate. It is difficult to tell how many sheep and cattle were left by then. 70 Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition, 67. 71 Ibid., 68. 72 The word probably comes from one of the Aboriginal languages of the area. In Yuwaalayaay language, for example, Gaawul means ‘creek, lagoon’. See: John Giacon, ed. Yuwaalayaay, the Language of the Narran River: Information Supplied by Mrs G. Rose, Willie Willis, Greg Fields, Mrs West, at Goodooga; Collected and Recorded by Ian Sim (Walgett, NSW: 1998). 73 Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition, 70. 74 Heathcote, Back of Bourke; Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers; Michael Quinn, ‘Possessing the West: The Public Management of the Western Division of NSW, 1880s to 1930s’ (PhD Thesis, Australian National University, 1995); Tom Griffiths, ‘One Hundred Years of Environmental Crisis’, The Rangeland Journal 23, no. 1 (2001); Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002). 75 Eric Rolls, ‘How We Savaged the Soil’, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 January 1988, 17. 76 C. J. King, ‘The Commencement of Settlement (1788–1831)’, Review of Marketing and Agricultural Economics 25, no. 3 (1957): 16. 77 Ibid. 78 Heathcote, Back of Bourke, 102–03. 79 Bede Nairn, ‘Robertson, Sir John (1816–1891)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne University Press, 1976). For a thorough examination of the failure of the Land Acts, see: Brian Fitzpatrick, ‘The Big Man’s Frontier and Australian Farming’, Agricultural History 21, no. 1 (1947). 80 L. J. Blake, ‘Wilson, Sir Samuel (1832–1895)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne University Press, 1976). 81 Nick Abel and Art Langston, ‘Evolution of a Social-Ecological System: Adaptation and Resilience in the New South Wales Rangelands 1850–2020’, CSIRO draft publication (2001), www.cse.csiro.au/research/aglands/nswrangelands/pubs/popular_articles/Draft_ Paper.pdf (accessed on 1 February 2014). 82 For example, it was a drought that had ‘never been experienced on the Castlereagh before, even by the oldest inhabitant’ in ‘State of the Interior’, Brisbane Courier, 16 January 1869, 6. Landholders who gave evidence to the Lyne Royal Commission (1885–89) recalled it was one of the worst – if not the worst – droughts that they had experienced (in terms of rainfall but not stock losses). 83 ‘New South Wales’, South Australian Register, 4 September 1865. 84 ‘State of the Interior’, 6. 85 Dubbo Dispatch quoted in ‘Country News’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 April 1867, 2. 86 Dubbo Dispatch quoted in ‘The Bogan and Macquarie’, Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser, 6 June 1867, 3. 87 ‘The Bligh, Castlereagh, and Darling Country’, Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser, 4 March 1869, 1. 88 ‘Colonial Markets’, Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser, 4 March 1869, 3.

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89 90 91 92 93 94

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96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

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‘The Weather in the Country’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 January 1869, 2. ‘Artificial Grasses’, South Australian Register, 26 September 1873, 5. Coonamble Independent in ‘Overstocking’, Argus, 2 June 1879, 7. ‘Overstocking and Its Effects’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 September 1877, 2. Ibid. Sheep numbers in the Western Division of NSW, 1879: 5,053,000 and in 1882: 9,619,000. Noel G. Butlin, ‘Distribution of the Sheep Population: Preliminary Statistical Picture, 1860–1957’, in The Simple Fleece: Studies in the Australian Wool Industry, ed. Alan Barnard (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press in association with the Australian National University, 1962), 300. A newspaper report in 1882 said the country along the Bogan and Macquarie Rivers looked as though a ‘destroying angel had passed over it and blighted everything. Not a vestige of grass of any sort, and the trees all lopped off of their branches to find a little feed for the starving stock’. ‘From the Warrego Southwards’, Queenslander, 8 April 1882, 434. ‘A Terrible Tale’, Queanbeyan Age, 28 March 1884. ‘From the Warrego Southwards.’ Daily Telegraph in ‘A Terrible Tale’, 2. Ibid. James Moseley, at Narrabri, 12 May 1885. William John Lyne, ‘Royal Commission – Conservation of Water (First Report – Minutes of Evidence)’, Votes and proceedings of the Legislative Assembly during the session 1885–6 6(1885): 178. Bonyhady, Colonial Earth, 284. William John Lyne, ‘Royal Commission – Conservation of Water (First Report)’, Votes and proceedings of the Legislative Assembly during the session 1885–6 6(1885): 1. C. G. Tompson, at Bourke, 27 May 1885. ‘Minutes of Evidence’, 251. M. Campbell Laingtree (from Cobar district), 22 January 1885. Ibid., 134. Arthur Dewhurst, at Tamworth, 9 May 1885. Ibid., 152. Ibid. Heathcote’s analysis of lease transfers shows few landholders were there to settle or commit to the plains. Many transfers occurred in good seasons when speculative interest was greater and when there were fewer pressures that would cause financial failure. (See, for example, Back of Bourke, 123–26.) At the Lyne Royal Commission in 1885, E. J. Bloxham, one of the few long-term residents of the plains and who later became known as ‘the father of Bourke’, stated, ‘there is no profit arising to people from keeping sheep in this district. I would not like to name a sum. People have made money by buying empty runs, and then stocking and selling them’. ‘Minutes of Evidence’, 221. Robert George Dulhunty, at Dubbo, 29 May 1885. ‘Minutes of Evidence’, 274. Frederick York Wolseley, at Walgett, 16 May 1885. Ibid., 183. Heathcote, Back of Bourke. In 1891 there were 13,587,000 sheep in the Western Division. Butlin, ‘Distribution’, 300. James C. Noble, The Delicate and Noxious Scrub (Lyneham, ACT: CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology, 1997). For example, E. D. Millen’s seven letters to the Sydney Morning Herald which contributed to calls for the 1901 Royal Commission into the conditions of the tenants of Crown lands. See: Bonyhady, Colonial Earth. Abel and Langston, ‘Evolution of a Social-Ecological System: Adaptation and Resilience in the New South Wales Rangelands 1850–2020’. 10. See: Griffiths, ‘One Hundred Years.’ Quoting E. D. Millen’s articles for the Sydney Morning Herald. Natural Resources Advisory Council, Understanding Our Native Grasslands: Agricultural, Environmental and Indigenous Values and Management for the Future (New South Wales Government, 2010), 10. Ibid.

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118 Daniel Lunney, ‘Causes of the Extinction of Native Mammals of the Western Division of New South Wales: An Ecological Interpretation of the Nineteenth Century Historical Record’, The Rangeland Journal 23, no. 1 (2001). 119 Niles Eldredge, ‘Cretaceous Meteor Showers, the Human Ecological “Niche”, and the Sixth Extinction’, in Extinctions in near Time: Causes, Contexts, and Consequences, ed. R. D. E. MacPhee (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 1999). 120 Anthony D. Barnosky et al., ‘Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?’, Nature 471, no. 7336 (2011); Robert Sanders, ‘Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?’, UC Berkeley News Center, http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/ 03/02/has-the-sixth-mass-extinction-already-arrived (accessed on 1 February 2014). 121 Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2009). 122 Bonyhady, Colonial Earth, 11. 123 That is not a description that should be extrapolated to the rest of the continent. I am examining a particular place, a particular experience and a particular time.

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In 1912, late on a winter’s afternoon, the editor of Bourke’s Western Herald newspaper led a party on a tour of the experiment farm and settlement at Pera Bore. After setting out from Bourke, travelling 12 miles into a strong westerly wind that carried tonnes of red dust, past barren plains and the dried scraps of dead saltbush, the visitors arrived at Pera Bore to behold a ‘glorious sight’. Cut out of the gidgee scrub were neat rectangular blocks of 20 acres each. On these grew millet, maize, dates and citrus fruits, all watered with over a mile of irrigation channels. They saw orange groves with ‘beautiful green’ foliage and ‘luscious’ fruit. ‘Fancy,’ said the visitors, ‘millions of golden globules hanging from the trees.’ This, they declared, truly was ‘an oasis in the desert’.1 Less than a decade later the settlement was abandoned. This was a place where science for agriculture met its limits. When the New South Wales Department of Agriculture announced in 1895 that it would establish an experiment farm at Pera Bore, no other agricultural experiment station was located so far from an agricultural district. In the early 1890s the township of Dubbo was considered the ‘farthest western outpost of prosperous agriculture’ and Pera Bore was nearly 240 miles further into the dry interior.2 The farm would face an average rainfall of 350 millimetres. In one year the area received just 102 millimetres (4 inches) of rain for the year.3 Even the graziers struggled to profit with sheep on the semi-arid plains north of the Darling River. For the experiment, however, rainfall hardly mattered.

The promise of underground water The farm’s purpose was to test whether or not agriculture was possible in the driest parts of the colony using irrigation water tapped from recently discovered aquifers. At the end of the Triassic period, uplift across the vast margins of inland Australia gave the angle and direction water needed to carry sediments into the Carpentaria,

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Eromanga and Surat Basins – together these form what we know as the Great Artesian Basin. Thousands of ancient streams deposited alternating layers of porous sandstones and impervious clays. During the Cretaceous period the sea overwhelmed the low-lying plains of inland Australia and dumped marine sediments over them. Volcanoes lit up eastern Australia and 100,000 cubic kilometres of volcanic rubble washed westwards into the inland sea, just before the sea itself retreated.4 These dynamic processes created one of the world’s largest aquifers, underlying nearly a quarter of the continent of Australia. As water pushed into porous sediments over millennia, the pressure forced ancient water to the surface to form springs and soaks across the dry inland plains. Unique ecologies evolved in these springs. Aboriginal people of the interior drew, painted and memorised complex maps marking the locations of mound springs. They tended the springs and wells, while reeds, rushes and sedges filtered the salty water. The springs were an integral part of life and culture for thousands of years.5 By the time a station manager’s experiments with well-sinking and drilling produced the first bore to penetrate the waters of the Great Artesian Basin in 1878, the formations of the plains that carried water were already located, named, utilised and changed. Over the first decades of pastoral expansion into the west, settlers and government contracted geologists to advise on dam and tank construction. Cuttings were made to spread water away from creeks and channels. Before anyone had drilled artesian bores, settlers sunk wells to draw on groundwater, and they used the natural mound springs on the inland plains. Statements given before the Lyne Royal Commission (1885–87) gave the impression that there was hardly a watercourse or water place untouched by small earthworks. Edward John Bloxham, a managing partner of the Bogan River Company, moved to the plains in 1860 at the beginning of a long drought. Landholders and workers took stock to any water sources available. Bloxham remembered springs ‘in their original state when first found, were like a sugar-loaf of green river reeds’.6 These isolated cone-shaped rises of reeds, rushes and sedges were grazed, trampled and dug out. Long troughs were cut to draw water away and some were drained with pipes. During a dry season Bloxham built a 4-foot high embankment around the Lila Springs north of Bourke and ‘kept three or four flocks of sheep constantly watered there’.7 For all the damage done to mound springs, their clear, sweet water did nothing to prevent stock starving to death during drought when there were no grasses or shrubs left. In 1880 the government geologist C. S. Wilkinson, Inspector of Public Watering Places H. A. Gilliat and Chief Inspector of Stock Alexander Bruce recommended drilling for water along the stock routes towards the Mount Browne goldfields, near Milparinka, to attract traffic from the north to the railhead which was nearing completion at Bourke.8 The government began this work in 1884, employing teams of ‘water augers’, named for the type of screw-like drill they used to dig artesian bores. Their first successful bore was at Goonery Springs, between Bourke and Wanaaring. Several more bores produced artesian water at Tinchelooka in 1885 and Cuttaburra in 1887. Elsewhere artesian water was struck in South Australia near Hergott Springs in 1883 and in Queensland on Thurrulgoonia Station in 1886.

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The same year, W.W. Davis, later Member for Bourke in the Legislative Assembly, spent £5,000 to drill the first deep artesian bore in New South Wales, striking water at Kerribree at a depth of 366 metres.9 Advocates for agriculture were excited by the discovery that artesian water was widespread in the dry interior. The United States had produced a ‘revolution’ in the condition of its drylands with groundwater

‘Sinking artesian bore – Wanaaring, NSW’ (c. 1900). In the 1880s the New South Wales Government began sinking bores on main stock routes to try to attract traffic away from Queensland and South Australia. The water that gushed out continuously was far more than what stock required. The government and advocates for agriculture saw an opportunity to try inserting small artesian irrigation agricultural settlements into the dry interior. They wanted to bring civilisation to the frontier. FIGURE 2.1

Source: James Benson. ‘Sinking artesian bore – Wanaaring, NSW’, (c. 1900). At Work and Play – images of rural life in NSW 1880–1940. State Library of New South Wales, bcp_03630.

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irrigation development. In California there were 3,700 flowing wells, 30 miles of irrigation channels in one town alone, and land purported to be worth £100 per acre.10 One enthusiast wrote, ‘one naturally pauses to think if there is any reason why the same results cannot be obtained in our western lands, where climatic conditions exist almost identical . . . and where we have a soil of unbounded fertility’.11 The Sydney Morning Herald wrote, ‘the Americans are pointing the moral. The Australians have only just begun to adorn the tale.’12

‘A fountain of corroding soda’ By the early 1890s there were at least twenty-one government bores in the west, although not all of these were flowing. In November 1891 J. W. Boultbee, Superintendent of Public Watering Places, suggested the enormous quantities of water flowing from the bores that ran to waste because the pastoralists did not use it could be applied to agricultural crops. Experts were critical of the idea. They argued the soil and water were not suitable for long-term cultivation. The Minister for Mines and Agriculture, however, was enthusiastic for proposals to bring agriculture to the drylands, believing that, ‘if any scheme of water conservation could touch on the development of the arid western lands, artesian boring alone could afford the large and inexhaustible supply of the commodity most needed – water’.13 The Minister approved a small experiment farm for the Native Dog Bore 70 kilometres from Bourke. On the 20 acres surrounding the bore the local Inspector of Public Watering Places grew stone fruit trees, bananas, olives, citrus trees, sugar cane, grapes, wheat, maize, vegetables and forest trees. The principal of the colony’s agricultural college at Hawkesbury was impressed with the results and together with Boultbee decided their experiments should be expanded and used for demonstrating the possibilities of artesian irrigation to western landholders. They announced that the experiment would start from scratch at the Pera Bore because of its proximity to Bourke, its high flow and the mineral content of the water, which at 48.076 grains per gallon, was low compared to the other bores in the district. Apart from the Chinese market gardens at Bourke, and Aboriginal farmers at the Brewarrina Aboriginal Station, there were few existing farmers for which the experiment farm could provide services. So the government also announced it would be bringing the farmers to the farm, and opened land around the bore for an irrigation settlement. Pastoral landholders were incensed. On the back of the Crown Lands Act of 1884, which allowed for half a squatter’s run to be made available for small selection blocks, the pastoralists feared the further break-up of their runs in aid of a political desire for closely settled agriculturalists. ‘Where is your market?’ they asked.14 No other experiment farm was located so far from a large population base. It was one of the most isolated experiment stations in the world. Pera Bore was over 1,000 kilometres from Adelaide, 900 from Brisbane, and nearly 800 from Sydney. Wool could last for years stored in bales so the length of time it took to transport it to ocean ports was not a problem. The irrigators at Pera Bore were expected to grow

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horticultural crops that perished quickly. The detractors of the experiment farm scheme described Pera Bore as ‘a howling desert, the water of its bore as malignant as a fountain of corroding soda, as devastating as Vesuvius, as bitter as Marah to the Israelites, as fatal as the Red Sea to the Egyptians’. Men were being ‘lured to their destruction by the mirage of outrageous misrepresentations’.15 The Department of Agriculture only saw opportunity. The New South Wales Colonial Government had little knowledge or control over natural water sources for most of the nineteenth century. If artesian water proved suitable for irrigated agriculture it would change the course of inland settlement. Pera Bore could ‘prove the possibility of close settlement upon land hitherto devoted to the raising of stock and the employment of a nomadic and restless population practically unacquainted with steady patient labour’.16 Colonial authorities wanted modern agriculture to act as a corrective to the social problems of dispersed settlement and to the environmental problems that unrestricted pastoralism and opportunistic cropping had caused. The experiments with artesian water were also an opportunity for the new Department of Agriculture to gain credibility as an institution that could offer advice and solutions to practical problems. It was a way for the Department to build the authority of its experts and its scientific approach to agriculture.

The ‘renaissance’ of agriculture As the pastoral industry buckled under the strain of environmental degradation, volatile markets and its culture of rampant speculation, agriculture surged. Until then agriculture had been neglected in favour of pastoral and mining pursuits.17 In 1892 William Wilkins, Under Secretary for Public Instruction, wrote a treatise that outlined the state of agriculture in New South Wales and its prospects in the colony. Wilkins was an advocate of universal education and spent the bulk of his life overseeing the administration of the state school system during its formative years in New South Wales. He was in this role almost by default and it was not something he had pushed for, however, he turned out to be a great reformer. As the school system expanded he suffered health problems with the stress of additional demands.18 The report on agriculture would be his last contribution to public life. The report had been commissioned for the World’s Columbian Exposition, a World’s Fair held in Chicago in 1893 on the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the New World. The fair was a monument ‘marking the progress of civilization throughout the ages’ and Australia sent many exhibitions and treasures.19 World’s Fairs celebrated the wonders of the age – the industrial revolution and the latest advances in technology, and the exotica and new knowledge discovered through imperialism. International expositions also acted as trade fairs, where countries occupied stalls and pavilions promoting their local commodity goods. Wilkins gave detailed evidence of soil and climate characteristics, suggesting agriculture had strong potential in New South Wales. He was a very capable person for this task. As Inspector for the Board of National Education he was concerned

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that text books based on British information were not relevant to colonial children. He took matters into his own hands and in 1863 wrote The Geography of New South Wales.20 Even though the report on agriculture was an exercise in marketing, he was blunt about the current state of agriculture in the colony. He pointed to the Robertson Land Acts of 1861, which allowed anyone to select small holdings of 360 acres, and their failure to generate interest in agriculture. Census figures show that in 1888 only 2 per cent of freehold land in New South Wales was planted to crops.21 Wilkins argued it was understandable that settlers were reluctant to engage in cultivation. Market conditions were unfavourable, carting distances long and expensive, and there were few investors willing to lend capital to agricultural farmers. Even the settlers who did take small selections had to supplement their incomes by providing labour for the pastoral industry as fencers, shearers, road carriers and station hands. The result, wrote Wilkins, was that ‘cultivation came to be looked upon as a precarious mode of gaining a livelihood, and therefore to be avoided when possible’.22 Lack of experience, capital and time meant that scientific agriculture was rarely practised or even understood. This was about to change. Wilkins was writing on the cusp of a rapid expansion of agriculture in New South Wales, and the same had already begun in Victoria and South Australia. He observed the recent emergence of a new type of settler with a renewed interest in agriculture. The new settlers appeared to have better practical skills and as a consequence the ‘character of the cultivation . . . materially improved’.23 Suddenly visions for a society underpinned by agrarian development seemed credible again. It was not just public rhetoric for agricultural development that had returned, but landholders were willing to risk cultivation too. The closing decades of the nineteenth century marked the beginning of the ‘renaissance’ of agriculture in Australia.24 The South Australian and Victorian colonies doubled the area they were cultivating from the mid-1870s to mid-1880s, New South Wales tripled the area it planted to crops between 1890 and 1900 and Western Australia made a similar rapid expansion from 1910. Wilkins ended his report with optimistic predictions that agriculture would flourish from then on, so long as the recently established Department of Agriculture played a significant role in shaping and providing agricultural knowledge. Its job was to gain a better understanding of the ‘defects . . . which characterise colonial agriculture’ and to ensure the emerging farmers became ‘an enlightened race’ with a combined practical and scientific education.25 Only then could New South Wales ‘gain the same eminence in agriculture as it has already gained in pastoral pursuits’.26 Wilkins didn’t live to attend or read reports about the World’s Columbian Exposition. At Chicago he would have seen the pastoral industry was still the dominant international face of Australia. A book accompanying the Exposition, titled The Book of the Fair, provides descriptions of Australia’s involvement. The agricultural exhibition, part of the larger Human Achievement in Material Form display, was housed in an expansive building crowned with a 130-foot high glass dome, named the Temple of Ceres, after the Roman goddess of cereal growing. Australia was granted 8,600 feet of exhibition space, causing some controversy

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because, to Kansas and California, ‘both with a much larger volume and variety of agricultural production, only some 2,000 feet were awarded’.27 Although the theme was agriculture, and Australia was ‘not an agricultural country, in the proper sense of the word’ it still managed to have a massive wool promotion included among all the other nations’ displays of grains, vegetables and other plant produce.28 Four hundred bales of wool were used to form the ‘largest collection of the kind in Agricultural hall’.29 At the entrance to one stall solid bales were used to create a giant archway, while adjoining the aisles were pillars and pyramids of similar construction. The excess of the exhibition matched the fatalist excess of the pastoral industry back home as it teetered on the brink of collapse. The Book of the Fair indicated the looming fate of wool in Australia as prices suffered a ‘serious depreciation’.30 However, even after the sharp decline in stock numbers after loss of vegetation through overgrazing, the bank collapse of 1893 and prolonged drought from the mid-1890s, it would be decades before agriculture would play a role in primary production anywhere near the significance of pastoralism. In 1901, at Federation celebrations in Sydney, the Wool Arch reappeared. Dignitaries marched under the scoured wool, which was ‘topped with an enormous merino ewe and ram bearing the inscription “Welcome to the Land of the Golden Fleece”’.31 Even with the dominance of pastoralism at the end of the nineteenth century the rate of growth in agriculture during its ‘renaissance’ at that time would never be matched again. It was the beginning of some of the most important changes to land relationships in Australia’s history.

‘Vicinity-maximization or dispersion-preventing principle’ Colonisation should not proceed ‘by the scattering of people over a wilderness, and placing them for ages in a state between civilization and barbarism’, wrote Edward Gibbon Wakefield in 1833.32 Instead, colonial governments and administrators should plan and directly shape patterns of settlement. From the 1830s until his death in 1863, Wakefield spent most of his life writing and promoting a theory of ‘systematic colonisation’.33 His interest in institutions, rationality, economics and social structures developed while serving three years in Newport prison for abducting and marrying a fifteen-year-old heiress in the hope the union would prompt her father to help him gain a seat in parliament.34 According to Wakefield, Britain’s social troubles, such as crime and pauperism, were due to overcrowding. The problem of surplus population could be relieved through relocation to colonies such as Australia. A successful settlement required a rational and systematic process of development, one in which there were incentives for capital investment, and which relied on an organised migration scheme to provide labour. The essential task for colonial administrators was to get the balance right between labour, land and capital. Wakefield suggested one policy instrument for ensuring this balance, which was for the government to set the price of land high enough so that only those with sufficient capital to continually improve the land

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could attain it, while the remaining sections of the population would provide the labour. Wakefield’s theories received attention around the world, or at least, in countries holding colonies around the world. He was influential among utilitarian philosophers, including Jeremy Bentham.35 Richard C. Mills, a founder of economics scholarship in Australia, wrote his PhD thesis on Wakefield’s theories and published it in 1915. Among Bentham’s manuscripts he found references to Wakefield’s systems of colonisation, which Bentham described as the ‘vicinity-maximization or dispersion-preventing principle’, as well as discussion of Wakefield’s work on the colonisation of South Australia.36 This principle and Wakefield’s solution had some influence through land regulations in Australia when the Colonial Office replaced land grants with sale by auction at a minimum price of five shillings per acre in 1831. However, many believed his theories were too idealistic and few colonial administrations attempted to put them into practice, except for isolated and compromised instances in South Australia, New Zealand and Canada. In Australia squatters simply ran their stock beyond the legal boundaries of the colony, and ultimately Wakefield dismissed the Australian experience as a ‘token salute to his scheme’.37

The ‘spectre of degeneration’ For those on the Australian continent, the experience of the first hundred years of colonisation suggested Wakefield had been right. Browse the stained pages of the Western Herald and Darling River Advocate from the end of the nineteenth century and you will soon find stories about nature gone wrong on the frontier – extreme weather, plagues, lost vegetation, rivers that flow underground, domesticated animals turned feral and people committing such unnatural acts as bestiality, paedophilia and incest. Recurring themes in the editorials and reports are conflict, brutality, impoverishment and an ominous silence on Aboriginal people. Read about Samuel Hummerston, who spent the day drinking at the Page Victoria Hotel in Wanaaring just north of Bourke in summer 1895. At dusk he stumbled out back and fell against the fence in the hotel’s yard. It was there that Senior Constable Burrows and Constable Mann witnessed the ‘unnatural offence’ with the female dog. Hummerston swore his pants were only down because he was making water. The magistrate said it was a ‘most disgusting case’ and sentenced the man to 12months imprisonment.38 Or read about Mrs Patrick Bourke, who was driving her children along a lonely bush track in the back blocks of New South Wales when the horse bolted, throwing her and her children to the ground. Dazed and dust smeared, the children desperately pursued the runaway horse. It galloped beyond their reach. The children began to weaken in the heat and were forced to abandon the chase. Back towards the cart they saw their mother motionless on the bare track. They rushed over, cradled her tumbled body, and revived her with some water. She made some pessimistic murmurings before the children ran 5 miles for assistance. They returned with aid to ‘behold a terrible sight’.39 Wild pigs had gorged

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on their mother’s head, and had eaten out her throat. The dispersed and sparse settlement of the inland plains had left the Australian colonies closer to a state of barbarism than civilisation. Informed by new knowledge in biology and influenced by disputed, tentative and emerging theories about inheritance, anxiety about the effects of the environment on Europeans in distant colonies was widespread. In describing the context and mood of the late nineteenth century, historian Tom Griffiths wrote: ‘Australian colonists like the rest of the European-American world were haunted by the spectre of degeneration.’ This was especially the case in Australia, with its ‘relic forms of nature’ and scarcity of resources.40 Early in the expansion of the pastoral industry, Thomas Mitchell observed of dispersed settlement: Indeed if it were an object to uncivilise the human race, I know of no method more likely to effect it than to isolate a man from the gentler sex and children; remove afar off all courts of justice and means of redress of grievances, all churches and schools, all shops where he can make use of money, then place him in close contact with savages. ‘What better off am I than a black native?’ was the exclamation of a shepherd to me just before I penned these remarks.41 Henry Lawson, one of Australia’s best known writers, found his voice and fame writing about the western plains at the end of the nineteenth century. He valorised the efforts of those settlers who struggled in the face of a harsh environment. The Western Herald newspaper, however, provided a far darker account of inland settlement than Lawson’s stories about bush life. Mrs Bourke could have been a character in Lawson’s short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’, but in this version Tommy, Jacky, Alligator and the rest are powerless to prevent a fatal ending.42 Perhaps Lawson was protecting Australia, cleaning up his stories for an international audience, or perhaps he knew that stories suggesting the possibility of moral goodness in encounters with the Australian environment would appeal to a local population racked with deep fear and shame about the frontier. Hard work purged a sinister reality, but what remained unspoken behind all those euphemistic ‘blanks’? The whole imperial project seemed to be falling apart. Lawson’s contemporary, Joseph Conrad, did not recoil from depicting a debased reality. In Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, nature is not a passive setting device but an active agent. In colonial Africa mangroves writhe in despair at Marlow and his fellow passengers on the ferry, the river is alive and deadly as a snake, mist screams at them and vegetation riots. In this ‘prehistoric earth’, nature draws out the darkest savagery in the hearts of Europeans. Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist found one short sentence in Heart of Darkness ‘summing up the history of our continent, our humanity, our biosphere, from Holocene to Holocaust’.43 The main character of the novel, Kurtz, is the agent of a Belgian trading company operating in the Congo Free State. The lawless state and its primordial African environment have a corrupting effect on Kurtz. He has the indigenous population worship him as a god and ruthlessly draws hoards of ivory to his trading outpost. Marlow is sent to bring

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back Kurtz so the company can avoid embarrassment. Kurtz, barely alive, hands Marlow an essay on the civilisation of the natives, which ends with the stark instruction, ‘Exterminate all the brutes’.44 For Lindqvist this sentence summed up the ‘core of European thought’. It is apt for the colonial experience in Africa, the Americas, Asia and, of course, Australia. For King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, the solution to degeneration was the return to law, after the Belgian government annexed the territory in 1908. In Australia, attempts by legislative means to change patterns of inland settlement had failed to produce a better frontier culture. Land laws were easily exploited by wealthy investors and had failed to create closely settled communities. At the end of the nineteenth century overgrazing was continuing to permanently degrade vegetation, soils and waterways, while exploitative forms of agriculture were beginning to emerge across the colonies. Public authorities were desperately seeking to change relationships with land.

Agriculture as a corrective It was in June 1887 that civil servant Ernest Burfield Taylor wrote a 22-page letter that would partly form the basis of government programmes for agriculture in the colony. It was addressed to Henry Parkes, the Premier of New South Wales. In his letter Taylor was critical of the fact that most of the population lived in cities. He warned the course of settlement needed to be changed ‘if these colonies are to take rank among the great nations of the world’.45 Henry Parkes led public and political backing for federation of the Australian colonies, and here Taylor was appealing to Parkes’ nationalist vision. Advocates for agriculture were starting to see it as serving a national purpose. It was becoming more than simply a means of generating raw material and wealth for the mother country, it was important for the social fabric of an impending federation of colonies in the antipodes. The social, cultural and environmental promise of scientific agriculture overshadowed its basic food production purpose. Taylor wrote that it was generally understood in the colony that the land laws had ‘failed in settling a yeomanry class upon the soil’.46 He shared public concerns about the culture of the sparsely settled inland, and argued for an institutional system of agricultural education for ‘youth’ and for a Department of Agriculture to raise the status of cultivation, demonstrate how agriculture could be achieved and provide scientific knowledge to those the government would be encouraging to take up cultivation. Like others examining the experience of the inland settlement in Australia, Taylor argued that it was the responsibility of government in ‘young countries’ to ‘undertake much that in older countries is left to private enterprise’.47 His letter was not so much an appeal as a set of instructions for the establishment of a Department of Agriculture. It outlined what the Department’s structure should be, the roles of caretakers and administration staff, and even suggestions for salaries. Taylor’s recommendations for botanical, chemistry and entomology divisions, seed distribution, a museum and model farms, all became part of the Department of

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Agriculture when it was established by the New South Wales Colonial Government in 1890. Taylor wrote that he had modelled his proposal on the United States’ federal Department of Agriculture. The first experiment stations in the United States were created with the passing of the Hatch Act in 1887. The Act provided federal money to each state to open a new experiment farm and these were usually associated with state ‘land grant’ colleges that had been established to assist new settlers going into agriculture. The experiment stations in the United States were modelled on the newest European experiment farms.48 Australia had more in common with the United States than Britain in its circumstances of agricultural development. In the United States the Homestead Act of 1862 opened up western lands for settlers – the United States was moving agriculture into its drylands around the same time as Australia. In Britain, agricultural education and support for small farmers was also about class, in that it was partly an attack on large landholders, and was partly a way of providing an alternative education to classical or establishment education for the ‘land classes’. Its agricultural science, however, was not pursued as vigorously as it was in Australia and the United States. Agricultural science in Britain undermined traditional farming culture, so it was a threat at both ends of the social scale. Britain could draw on the massive quantities of agricultural commodities that had started being produced in its colonies and dominions, as well as in the United States and Argentina, so there was little reason to push for scientific agriculture and agricultural production as a basis for economic growth. From the 1870s to the end of the nineteenth century the area under wheat in Britain fell from 3.6 million to less than 1.5 million acres.49 The purpose of agricultural science in the United States was to serve the economy, assist settlement on new land and make agriculture possible, much like in Australia. However, the two New World countries shared other concerns too, including anxieties about dispersed settlement and its effects on culture. The American farmer, journalist and civil servant, George E. Waring Jr, wanted ‘to bring the social fruits of city life to the farm but also to protect farmers from urban riffraff and temptations’.50 He called for restrictions on where farmhouses could be built, and proposed a village system of close settlements in which all new farmhouses had to be built in a central location with the farms nearby. The closely settled communities would provide the farmers with ‘enlightenment, sociability, intimate friendships, [and] opportunity for displaying their modest merits of person, clothing and attainments’.51 Alan Marcus, in his book Agricultural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy, explained this idea was too ‘radical’ a solution for the problem of dispersed settlement in the United States and it found little public support.52 It appears Waring’s proposals were too prescriptive in a country with a founding preference for small government. On first impressions, Taylor’s letter suggests nothing much had changed in the rhetoric since Wakefield proposed ‘systems’ of colonisation and settlement. Concerns about dispersal, however, had expanded beyond problems of capital, incentive and division of labour. The same moral and cultural corruption that had mired the imperial project in distant colonies with wild environments could

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also undermine a nation. Agriculture was the most ‘healthy and beneficial’ occupation in which the people of the colony could be engaged.53 Failure to encourage agricultural development would result in ‘backwardness’, wrote Taylor.54 The experience of pastoral occupation had inserted Social Darwinist ideas into Wakefield’s economic arguments for close settlement. With fears about the influence of environment on people and culture so prominent in nineteenth-century thought and actions, it is no surprise that spatial concerns were high in the list of public anxieties. Proximity became an obsession that underpinned the rhetoric for agricultural development in Australia. A sparse settlement lacked any civilising influence. The inland frontier, with its itinerant labourers, nomadic drovers, absentee owners and impermanent communities, was shifty and elusive. Nature was backward and wrong. Men turned wild. Violence, bloodlust and depravation were the result. At the same time, the city was overcrowded. The confinement of bricks and concrete, the artificiality of the urban environment, obscured its inhabitants from the spiritual and bodily benefits of natural surroundings. Temptation was within easy reach, poverty was rife and idleness prevailed. Those who did make a living were preoccupied with superficial pursuits. Only agriculture could provide the stable foundation for a civilised society in a country rich with land. Moral goodness was to be found in hard work, in cultivating the soil, in shaping and improving nature. The inland would become a vast patchwork of farming communities, every small landholder in control of his destiny. These were the circumstances that gave rise to government and popular press advocacy for the emerging field of scientific agriculture, the government funding of experiment farms and agricultural education, and infrastructure to assist modern agricultural production. It helps explain why an agricultural experiment farm was established so far into the semi-arid interior at Pera Bore.

A ‘depressing, gidgee-covered waste’ The first year for Pera Bore was a difficult one, and it appeared the pastoralists were right. Settlers began arriving in August 1895 to find their 20-acre blocks were surveyed on a ‘depressing, gidgee-covered waste’.55 They spent the rest of winter and all of spring scrub clearing. It was summer before they put their first crops in. Then, a heatwave struck Bourke. The temperature hit 49 degrees Celsius three times within ten days. It didn’t drop below 46 degrees for a fortnight.56 The New York Times, reporting on the extreme temperatures, declared the readings ‘conveyed but an imperfect idea of the terrors of the heat in interior Australia’. No one could find respite, said the Times, ‘bringing a feeling unspeakably depressing’. It was said that 500 people had died, animal carcases were scattered everywhere and birds ‘drop dead from the trees’.57 People made jokes comparing Bourke to Hell, and the local newspaper described the western country as godforsaken. Sixtyone people from the Bourke district died during the heatwave.58 One of the first to perish was Daniel MacDougall, the manager of Pera Bore Experiment Farm.

Source: Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales.

FIGURE 2.2

A settler’s hut at the Pera Bore Experiment Farm. The Western Herald newspaper congratulated the settlers for using thatch in an effort to keep out the heat.

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Bourke’s Dr Kane had driven to the settlement at Pera that Sunday afternoon interested in inspecting the bore and in seeing the progress the settlers were making. When he arrived he found MacDougall ‘in his death agony’.59 Three minutes later MacDougall died in the doctor’s arms. Dr Kane pronounced the cause of death as heat apoplexy. The settlers at Pera Bore might have arrived at the beginning of one of the worst droughts on record confident that irrigation water would protect their farms. They had not counted on the heat. In addition to losing their manager, they lost all of their vegetable produce to the extreme temperatures. The following month the replacement manager for Pera Bore was delayed. For weeks the local newspaper had carried sensational headlines about the heatwave. Now, in a short-lived interruption to the drought, the headline read: ‘The Rain: Heaviest Fall Ever Known in the West’.60 On Wednesday, 12 February, Bourke recorded over 100 millimetres of rain. By Saturday surrounding villages and stations were reporting falls of up to 300 millimetres, almost the annual average.61 Parts of the railway line between Nyngan and Bourke were under water, and every 10 or so miles, washaways had damaged the lines. At Pera Bore there was not much the

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FIGURE 2.3 The irrigation and settlement block plan at Pera Bore, 1895. Settlers began arriving in August 1895 to find their 20-acre blocks were surveyed on a ‘depressing, gidgee-covered waste’.

Source: Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales.

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settlers could do but wait for the new manager, for the deluge had destroyed what was left of their crops, leaving the farms, as the Western Herald described, ‘a mass of bedraggled and rotting vegetation’.62 During the heatwave a ‘cyclone’ tore through Bourke. It lifted the roofs from buildings in the town, including those of two sturdy hotels, but there were no reports of damage at Pera Bore, so the settlers seemed to have been spared that at least. A month or so later, after the rains cleared, fettlers repairing the water-damaged railway line suffered sunstroke.

The ‘horror and desolation of Pera’ The settlers at Pera Bore had little money or experience. One of the first applicants approved for a 20-acre block was a settler named John Pulbrook. His trade was fencing and scrub clearing, so Pera presented an opportunity for him to clear and fence his own block. Like most of the other Pera Bore settlers he had to supplement his income from the block with additional work. Pulbrook made extra money clearing the Department’s 70 acres reserved for the experiment farm and he had to continue contract labour jobs while he held his farm. E. C. Millen had little experience with agriculture or irrigation, but he was the president of the Bourke Mechanic’s Institute, and was interested in progressive projects for the west.

FIGURE 2.4

‘Kaffir’ corn growing at Pera Bore.

Source: Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales.

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T. Munro had a rented farm in the Macleay River district. At his local Mechanic’s Institute library he came across an article, ‘depicting the horror and desolation of Pera’.63 The protestations attracted Munro’s attention: he saw it as a challenge. He collected articles on Bourke, travelled there when applications were open, and then sent for his wife and children when he had gained a block. Fred Hersey had been farming by ‘halves’ on the Darling River near Louth. He did have experience with irrigation and earned enough to afford a holiday to the Melbourne Cup each year. He went to Pera with enough money to devote all his labour to the farm and had made the best start out of the first ten settlers. The government’s plan, to attract farmers like Munro and Hersey away from rented farming, appeared to be working. Politicians were concerned that rented farming, or farming by halves, did not produce stable communities, was too opportunistic and did not provide incentives for long-term commitments to the soil. These were part of the broader aims of agriculture based on science. The Department of Agriculture and settlers grew cotton sourced from the United States, teosinte from South America, millet from Japan and Hungary, sorghum from South Africa (Kaffir corn), Canadian Wonder Beans, and date palms from the Trial Gardens of Hamma in Algeria. The Department believed one of its core responsibilities was to improve ‘the conditions of life in our western area’.64

FIGURE 2.5

Irrigation furrows for growing lucerne.

Source: Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales.

Manager’s residence and orchard at Pera Bore.

Source: Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales.

FIGURE 2.6

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The date palms served that mission in two ways: they had commercial value, but they also added a ‘pleasing aspect’, improving the appearance of the dry plains.65 They also grew olives, almonds, grapes, nectarines, peaches, prunes and all kinds of vegetables.66 The locals at Bourke understood why they grew the substantial pumpkins, cabbages and potatoes, but thought the melons were exotic. They even tried bananas from Fiji, which had probably arrived there from Mauritius via England first.67 Many of the plants they grew at Pera Bore had only been well known in Europe for a few hundred years. They were not creating a little England in the desert; they were creating a farm for England. It was a New World garden made possible by imperialism and global trade. They depended on the production of surpluses and a world commodity trade to buy them. In the early 1900s the Department decided, as part of its experimental work, to test how well oranges from Pera Bore travelled on an overseas voyage. The Department also wanted to know whether long-term international trade links could be established to sell the surpluses that the developing agricultural industry was producing. They sent cases of oranges to England, the United States and Canada. The New South Wales Government put the oranges on display at their offices in Cannon Street, London. The oranges were praised for their colour and the ingenious method of packing using discarded wool, but their production was dwarfed by the plantations in the Caribbean, which already served the British market. In the first few years the settlers built a school at Pera and a sports ground; they even fielded a cricket team in the regional competition. Nineteen out of twenty blocks were taken. In 1898 the Postmaster General approved a mail service for Pera and 170 letters a fortnight went out.68 By 1900 the Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales was reporting good progress at Pera, but the local newspaper showed the settlers there had many grievances. The flow at the bore had started to diminish and there wasn’t enough water to continue cultivating their farms. Some settlers wanted out. The cricket team struggled to get enough players at Christmas. In November 1901, after only four years, the Department closed the experiment farm and transferred the manager to Lismore, abandoning the remaining settlers.

Science versus ecological limits The pastoralists and critics of the Pera scheme transferred the imagery of classical antiquity and the Bible to describe Pera Bore, because they saw it as a place without its own history. It was an empty place. They called it a desert because it could not support agriculture and was hardly fit for pastoralism. Its climate is semi-arid but it is not what we would classify as desert. The advocates for agriculture shared a similar kind of thinking, but with different consequences. They saw the plains around Pera as a blank canvas, not a particular place with its own ecological characteristics – just add water and anything will grow, said the local newspaper. The environment and practical experience at Pera Bore forced the Department of Agriculture to rethink its views on the semi-arid plains. It started a second phase of experimental work at Pera Bore. The government orchardist W. J. Allen

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ordered most of the stone fruit trees to be pulled down. The farm abandoned its experiments with wheat and concentrated on citrus fruits and date palms, for in the words of Allen, at Pera, ‘the climatic conditions [for date palms] are all that could be desired’.69 The Department thought it was growing Deglet nour (‘date of the light’) – that was the variety it had ordered from the French Government and Governor General of Algièrs – but when the trees finally matured and bore fruit the experimentalists found they had received a mix of varieties, so the fruit were unevenly sized and had irregular characteristics of sweetness, flesh and colour. In Allen’s article for the Agricultural Gazette, he complained that if only they had better varieties, with the largest and best fruits, they would be doing better.70 There was, perhaps, a suggestion in his wording that he suspected the Algerians had sent inferior dates to protect their commercial markets. By 1910 the Department of Agriculture was conducting experiments on ‘sterilised soil’ – that is, soil rendered infertile by the application of bore water over three or four years. The Department’s chemist, R. S. Symmonds, mixed nitric acid with bore water for distributing on plots one hundredth of an acre in size, and at a concentration the equivalent of 600 pounds to the acre. The staff applied the mixture to the soil from a perforated butter box, which ‘though crude, answered the purpose fairly well’.71 Plants growing on treated plots on the black clay soils at Coonamble and at the northern Macquarie Marshes were ‘improved’, ‘promising’ and ‘looking well’, and were generally better in appearance than the untreated plots. There was, however, still no large-scale industrial method of fixing atmospheric nitrogen. In 1905 Schonherr and Hessberger improved on the Birekeland-Eyde process, producing an electric arc in a metal tube and passing air through it – basically replicating lightning to create nitric oxide gas. Symmonds proposed that landholders should use this method and blow the gases directly into the artesian wells so the alkaline salts in the water would absorb the nitrogen. It was an expensive and highly technical solution for farmers with little capital. Eventually most of the plantings at Pera Bore failed. Hard clay-pans formed that would not yield to ‘plough, pick, or crowbar’. Symmonds described the interaction between the alkaline salts in the water with poor, sandy red soil at Pera Bore: The alkali (carbonate of soda) neutralised the natural acidity, dissolved out the humus (organic matter), broke down the crumb-like structure, and reduced the soil to a condition of ultimate particles in jelly, which on drying becomes a hard compact mass, impervious to air and water.72 The red ground turned to ‘cement’, the water was too alkaline for shallow sandy soils and the flow from both the old and the new bores had stopped and could only be raised by pumping. The settlers left over a period of ten years. By 1920 the government had leased the old farm site at the Pera Bore to the Fort Bourke Pastoral Company.

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Date palm plantation at Pera Bore. In the experiment farm’s second phase Department of Agriculture staff attempted to match horticultural and agricultural plants to the region’s climate. These date plantations were among the first in Australia. FIGURE 2.7

Source: Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales.

Why agriculture? Why did agriculture make a return to public consciousness at the end of the nineteenth century, and why were colonial authorities suddenly interested again in introducing a range of measures to encourage its adoption? Histories of rural place and agriculture have usually been the domain of economic and social historians. Explanations for agriculture in Australia have been dominated by theories of economic development and changes in technology, while the politics of agriculture in the nineteenth century has traditionally remained focused on class relations, leaving agriculture and the environment relegated to the background in the colossal field of Australian labour history. The result is stories of capital flows, squatters, labourers, tractors and silos – both physical silos and silos in thinking. Plants and animals become commodities abstracted from their environment, and soils and waterways become resources. Changes in rural and ‘production’ places become a series of technical problems overcome. This approach tends to take agriculture as a given and misses fundamental questions about the origins of modern agriculture in Australia. Oddly, what has been overlooked in explanations for the development of agriculture in Australia is environment. In this chapter I have emphasised the

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environmental reasons for public programmes for agriculture – both the anxieties about the effects of environment on society, and concerns over the exploitation and degradation of the inland plains. It is understandable that the Department of Agriculture would make mistakes given that science for agriculture was an emerging field. Its knowledge was uneven and was not fully integrated. I am not suggesting the failure of the settlement at Pera Bore was a failure of agricultural science. I have tried to show that the forms agriculture takes and where and how it is done should not be taken as a given. Agriculture is shaped by complex cultural desires and anxieties. Agriculture was not simply about producing food, achieving an economic return for the state or other utilitarian functions. Its social purpose has been at least as important as these. In the nineteenth century science had become the dominant means of knowing the natural world and had built on its authority and appeal by demonstrating how scientific knowledge could be applied to the technological and social problems of an industrialising world. In the case of early science for agriculture in Australia, the problem society asked it to solve was dispersed settlement and the frontier culture of pastoralism. The Department’s staff struggled to fulfil the promise of technique with their recognition of the ecological limits of Australia’s climate and soils. It may seem curious that the solution to living with Australian environmental conditions was to replace one form of imported primary production (the grazing of sheep and cattle) with another imported form – one even more intensive. However, the advocates of agriculture saw their project as a means of addressing the environmental exploitation of the plains by replacing reckless pastoralism with a careful, measured and professional soil culture. Agriculture was more sedentary compared with the nomadic nature of pastoralism, scientific cultivation fostered long-term commitments to the soil, and the field was set to offer further benefits with its promising technical solutions and rapidly expanding knowledge in biology. Western science usually asserts it placelessness, its universality, but as geographer and historian of science David N. Livingstone demonstrated in Putting Science in its Place, science is always ‘a view from somewhere’: the museum, the field, the botanical garden, the hospital, the human body or a particular region.73 Even the understanding of Darwin was shaped by the geography of the country where it was received. Agricultural science in Australia was no exception. In England, Rothamsted was a private institution that carried out long-term agricultural experiments in the same plots and distributed that knowledge to farmers. Australian agriculturalists knew place could not be universalised in a continent with such diverse ecologies. The New South Wales Department of Agriculture planned to establish at least one experiment farm in every district so it could account for all the varying conditions of climate, soil and vegetation.74 Australians’ culture and economy were bound to Britain, but they looked to the United States for experience with colonising a new land and for a vision of what the new society could become. Like the United States, Australia’s agricultural science was part of a systematic government programme for the development of modern agriculture. The United States was concerned with conquering the land, but Australians were driven by an

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anxiety to settle. The Department of Agriculture’s early success was in building a foundation for an Australian agricultural science. The Department failed, however, in its treatment of the fledgling agricultural settlers. When Pera Bore became a disaster it tried to protect its authority by blaming the settlers: they were ‘the wrong kind’. In the late 1880s, when proposals for a Department of Agriculture were drafted, each experiment farm was supposed to have an agricultural education facility attached. Instead, the inexperienced settlers, with limited means, gained little from their participation in the Department’s experiments in unknown environments. The Department of Agriculture had its reputation on the line, but they could afford to walk away. The settlers, on the other hand, risked their livelihoods, and in some cases, everything they owned. The early experiences and failures at Pera Bore led the government to focus on rivers for irrigation development, and it knew irrigation could only ever be done on a modest scale close to the riverways. It also turned its attention to dryland cropping as a means of bringing agriculture and civilisation to the inland plains.

Notes 1 ‘Pera’, Western Herald, 1 June 1912. 2 Andrew Garran, ed. Australasia Illustrated; Illustrated by Leading Australian and American Artists, under the Supervision of Frederic B. Schell, with over Eight Hundred Engravings on Wood (Sydney: Picturesque Atlas Publishing Company, 1892), 264. 3 The record low of 102 millimetres was in 1929. 4 David Johnson, The Geology of Australia (New York; Port Melbourne, Vic.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 133. 5 See: Brad Moggridge, ‘Groundwater Dreaming’, Australasian Science 28, no. 3 (2007). 6 William John Lyne, ‘Royal Commission – Conservation of Water (First Report)’, Votes and proceedings of the Legislative Assembly during the session 1885–6 6(1885): 219. 7 Ibid., 220. 8 Walter Gibbons Cox, Artesian Wells as a Means of Water Supply: Including an Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Art of Boring for Water in Europe, Asia and America; Progress in the Australian Colonies (Brisbane: Sapsford, 1895). 9 G. P. Walsh, ‘Davis, William Walter (1840–1923)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Edition (2006), http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A080265b.htm (accessed on 1 February 2014). 10 ‘The Artesian Wells of New South Wales’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 July 1897, 4. 11 Quote from a display at the Pera Bore Christian Community about the history of the experiment farm. The quotes in the display were sourced from newspapers and the Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales. The display was presented from about 1995 to 2005. The documents are held by the Buster family at Bourke and photocopies are in the author’s possession. 12 ‘The Artesian Wells of New South Wales’, 4. 13 ‘Pera Artesian Bore Settlement’, Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 11(1900): 273. 14 Ibid. 15 ‘Pera Settlement [I]’, Western Herald and Darling River Advocate, 10 April 1897, 2. 16 Quote from a display at the Pera Bore Christian Community about the history of the experiment farm. The quotes in the display were sourced from newspapers and the Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales. The display was presented from about 1995 to 2005. The documents are held by the Buster family at Bourke and photocopies are in the author’s possession.

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17 L. A. Clarkson, ‘Agriculture and the Development of the Australian Economy During the Nineteenth Century’, Agricultural History Review 19 (1971). 18 Cliff Turney, ‘Wilkins, William (1827–1892)’, Melbourne University Press, www.adb. online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A060433b.htm (accessed on 1 February 2014). 19 Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Book of the Fair: An Historical and Descriptive Presentation of the World’s Science, Art, and Industry, as Viewed through the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 (Chicago, San Francisco: The Bancroft Company, 1893), 3. 20 Turney, ‘Wilkins, William (1827–1892)’. 21 New South Wales, ‘Statistical Register of New South Wales for the Year 1888’, Votes and proceedings of the Legislative Assembly 3(1889). 22 W. Wilkins, Agriculture in New South Wales (Sydney: Charles Potter, Govt. Printer, 1893), 8. 23 Ibid. 24 C. J. King, ‘The Turn of the Century: 1885–1895’, Review of marketing and agricultural economics 25, no. 3 (1957). 25 Wilkins, Agriculture, 32, 8. 26 Ibid. 27 Bancroft, Book of the Fair, 341. 28 Ibid., 366. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 366. 31 Robin, How a Continent, 65. 32 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834). Quoted in John Gascoigne and Patricia Curthoys, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Port Melbourne, Vic.: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 33 Graeme L. Pretty, ‘Wakefield, Edward Gibbon (1796–1862)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne University Press, 1967). 34 Miles Fairburn, ‘Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 1796–1862’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, www.dnzb.govt.nz/dnzb/default.asp?Find_Quick.asp?PersonEssay=1W4 (accessed on 1 February 2014). 35 Gascoigne and Curthoys, The Enlightenment. 36 Richard C. Mills, The Colonization of Australia (1829–42): The Wakefield Experiment in Empire Building (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915), 153. 37 Pretty, ‘Wakefield, Edward Gibbon (1796–1862).’ 38 ‘Bestiality’, Western Advocate and Darling River Advertiser, 05 February 1896, 2. 39 ‘Untitled’, Western Herald and Darling River Advocate, 28 January 1899, 1. 40 Tom Griffiths, ‘The Social and Intellectual Context of the 1890s’, in Exploring Central Australia: Society, the Environment and the 1894 Horn Expedition, ed. D. J. Mulvaney and S. R. Morton (Chipping Norton, NSW: Surrey Beatty & Sons, 1996), 16. 41 Thomas L. Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia, in Search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848), 12–13. 42 Henry Lawson’s short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’ is an iconic Australian story about the hardships and isolation of life in the outback. Most of Lawson’s stories were set on the plains. His work as a rouseabout at Toorale and travels through the region in the early 1890s influenced his writing. 43 Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes (New York: New Press, 1996), 3. 44 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1995), 78. 45 Ernest Burfield Taylor, ‘Ernest Burfield Taylor, a Department of Agriculture for New South Wales, 1887’, in Miscellaneous correspondence [Department of Agriculture], 1886–93 (Sydney: State Records of NSW, 1887), 1. 46 Ibid., 7.

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47 Ibid. 48 Wallace E. Huffman and Robert E. Evenson, Science for Agriculture: A Long-Term Perspective, 1st edn. ed. (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1993). 49 Michael Cowen and Robert W. Shenton, Doctrines of Development (London; New York: Routledge, 1996). 50 Alan I. Marcus, Agricultural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy: Farmers, Agricultural Colleges, and Experiment Stations, 1870–1890 (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1985), 9. 51 Waring in ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Taylor, ‘A Department’, 22. 54 Ibid., 1. 55 ‘Pera Possibilities’, Western Herald and Darling River Advocate, 8 February 1896. 56 ‘The Weather’, Western Herald and Darling River Advocate, 25 January 1896. 57 ‘Hottest of Hot Waves on Record. How It Struck Sweltering New South Wales in January Last’, New York Times, 18 August 1896. 58 ‘The Fatal Heat Wave’, Western Herald and Darling River Advocate, 29 January 1896. 59 ‘The Heat Wave’, Western Herald and Darling River Advocate, 15 January 1896. 60 ‘The Rain’, Western Herald and Darling River Advocate, 15 February 1896, 2. 61 100 mm is approx. 4 inches; 300 mm is approx. 12 inches. 62 ‘Pera Settlement [I]’, 2. 63 ‘The Pera Settlement [Ii]’, Western Herald and Darling River Advocate, 14 April 1897, 2. 64 W. J. Allen, ‘The Date Palm’, Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 21(1910): 887. 65 Ibid. 66 ‘Pera Settlement [I]’; ‘Pera Artesian’; ‘Date Palm’. 67 ‘Pera Settlement [I].’ 68 Pera Bore Post Office file [Box 519], 1895–1902, National Archives of Australia, SP32/1, 436941. 69 Allen, ‘Date Palm.’ 70 Ibid. 71 R. S. Symmonds, ‘Experiments with Nitric Acid on Alkaline Soils in Coonamble District’, ibid., 257. 72 ‘Artesian Irrigation: Alkalinity and Acidity Problems’, Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 21(1910): 946. 73 David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 184. 74 Department of Agriculture (New South Wales), ‘Minister’s Preface to the Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales, July 1890’, in Miscellaneous correspondence [Department of Agriculture], 1886–93 (Kingswood: State Records of NSW).

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3 SCRUB

On 17 April 1835 botanist Richard Cunningham wandered into the scrub, west of the Bogan River, and never returned. He was travelling with Thomas Mitchell’s expedition to the Darling River and, when south of present day Nyngan, Cunningham strayed from the main group. Over the following days members of Mitchell’s party found traces of Cunningham – footprints, a saddle and bridle, a whip, one glove and a piece of paper cut with the letters ‘N. E.’. Following Cunningham’s trail was difficult because the country would change between grassed plains, soft earth and thickets of white cypress pine, she oaks and dense vegetation. The Bogan River marks the transition between rich alluvial soils of the plains to its east, and older sandy red soils to its west. In some places the change is abrupt, but in other places there is a mix of black and red soils, shifting clays and sandy rises, and gilgais and cowals that hold water long after rain or a fresh in the river. The red country supports semi-arid woodlands of mulga, poplar box, kurrajong, wilga, myall and budda. Mitchell and his party would travel through 17 miles of dry woodlands before reaching a small grassy plain and then enter the woodlands for miles more. They followed Cunningham’s tracks this way for 80 miles before coming across Cunningham’s horse lying dead in the scrub. Nearby they found Cunningham’s footprints backtracking, venturing into the dry woodlands with his dog, reemerging without it, and repeatedly returning to a grassy plain. Cunningham’s desperate tracks came to within a mile of the route of the main party. His trail went directly north into the scrub but was lost in hard ground. Further on they picked up Cunningham’s tracks again in the bed of the Bogan River, along with some broken clam shells and fish scales. Next to Cunningham’s boot print was a bare foot, either accompanying or tracking him. This was the territory of the ‘Myall blacks’, the term for unknown Aboriginal people far beyond the boundaries of the colony. Mitchell noted, ominously, that by walking north, Cunningham had entered ‘into the jaws of the wild natives’.1

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On 4 May, Mitchell’s party woke to fire tearing through the scrub. The men took turns taking watch, while others slept with their guns: just as cattle often preceded the impending arrival of Europeans, fire and smoke often preceded the presence of Aboriginal people. The next day they headed north through the burning open forest, with trees exploding and crashing about them. Mitchell observed that ‘much pains had been taken by the natives to spread the fire, from its burning in separate places’.2 Near an Aboriginal campfire Mitchell’s men found the last traces of Cunningham’s existence now reduced to fragments littering the semi-arid woodlands. They brought back the skirt of Cunningham’s coat, pieces of his map of the colony and some yellow paper found in the hollow of a tree. As the expedition continued for the Darling, Mitchell persisted in his attempts to glean Cunningham’s fate from the Aboriginal people he met along the way. Up to that point in the journey Aboriginal people of the upper Bogan would join the party and exchange food and implements. They camped nearby and translated for the white men. Many spoke a common language learned during contact with the outstations. As historian Heather Goodall explained in Invasion to Embassy, this was a way of accommodating the Europeans into proper social hierarchies.3 However, the Ngiyambaa further down the river had little or no contact with the colonisers.4 Mitchell probably did not realise he was crossing a boundary area between the broad language groups of Wiradjuri to the south, Wailwan to the east, and Wongaibon to the north. Within each of these were different sub-groups. Territory negotiations were formal and essential. Not knowing each other’s language or customs, both Mitchell and the Ngiyambaa felt it was safest to draw on their own traditions in these engagements. Mitchell took a green branch, a symbol of peace in Western culture since the olive branches of the Greeks, while the Bogan River people, with a far longer cultural history, set aside their weapons and sat ‘cross-legged, with their eyes fixed on the ground’, which Mitchell figured was ‘their formal mode of expressing respect or consideration for strangers when first received’.5 In these meetings Mitchell learned about the technique for drawing water from the roots of the scrub trees, but nothing about Cunningham. In November Lieutenant Henry Zouch led a search party for Cunningham and rounded up forty ‘Myall blacks’.6 He held them until they offered the names of four people who could account for Cunningham’s disappearance. They told how he had approached them gesturing that he was hungry. They fed Cunningham and let him camp with them but during the night they observed him rising frequently and behaving strangely, making them suspicious. In the morning a group of Ngiyambaa clubbed Cunningham to death.

Our modern biological worldview Cunningham became a ‘martyr to science’, as a correspondent for the Dubbo Dispatch put it in 1867.7 The reporter had followed an old line of marked trees to the site where bones said to belong to Cunningham were exhumed and reinterred.

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On seeing the cairn marking Cunningham’s grave the reporter commented, ‘How great the contrast between his monument in the Botanical Gardens and the lonely mound surrounded by a few rotten logs, mouldering to dust, in a silent scrub, on the wild West Bogan?’8 The ‘scrub’ lands west of the Bogan River were a problem for settlers, governments and the whole civilising project right from the start. It was a place of murder and massacre, a place of environmental degradation and animal suffering. I have returned to the semi-arid woodlands at the edge of the plains because I want to explore two experiments that took place there between 1896 and 1908. In the first, 700 unemployed men were sent to the Bogan scrub to clear vegetation so that others could settle there. It was a policy decision influenced by curiosity about the ability of white men’s bodies to undertake manual labour in isolated and hot environments. In the second, an experimental farm was established at Coolabah to investigate wheat growing in dry country. One was corporeal with little planning or forethought. The other was cerebral and material and was carried out according to the formal principles of an emerging field of science. Both were about dealing with a ‘hostile’ environment and for understanding how Europeans could handle heat and aridity. The experiments arose from the intersection of local and Empirewide anxieties and were underpinned by provocative new ideas about the living world. Science had changed since the gentlemen naturalists and botanists like Cunningham collected specimens from around the globe and pondered the workings and origins of life. It is hard to appreciate how profound a rupture the beginning of the biological revolution must have been for nineteenth-century society. As Europeans made their first incursions into Australia’s interior, geologists began to understand that the earth must be millions of years old, not a few thousand. In Hunters and Collectors, historian Tom Griffiths conveyed their dramatic expansion in perspective: ‘in the two hundred years following the European invasion of Australia, the known age of the earth increased from about 6,000 years to 4.6 billion’.9 Soon after the geologists made their revelations, the naturalists put forward persuasive arguments for an even more radical theory – humans were just another animal and differentiation of species was a random, contingent process. ‘Nineteenthcentury evolutionists,’ wrote historian Edward J. Larson, ‘envisioned the earth as a grand laboratory or workshop of organic development: a shimmering sphere of life spinning in a vast universe.’10 It was the most fundamental shift to how we viewed ourselves and other living creatures, we ‘became interconnected competitors rather than separate creations’.11 Biological thought has flourished over the last 150 years. Larson wrote, ‘We now live in the shadow – or the illumination – of this modern biologic worldview.’12 Expanding knowledge in biology provided scientific agriculture with a powerful conceptual framework and theoretical authority, but natural selection and inheritance were also interpreted and applied with dark consequences. Scientific agriculture at the turn of the twentieth century was still working out the limits to its knowledge and techniques; the possible was unknown.

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The political rhetoric for agriculture asked ambitious tasks of it and included it in grand schemes and ideological movements. Through examining the interplay between the Bogan scrublands and the wider national and international context I can continue to explore how ideas about the living world, and the physical environment, shaped modern agriculture. How does scientific agriculture engage with the imperial and national agendas within which it operates? How do we see this manifest in place, and how does place itself shape scientific agriculture?

A ‘forbidding wilderness’ In September 1896 the New South Wales Labour Bureau sent seventy gangs of ten men each to the Bogan scrub near Nyngan.13 Their task was to clear vegetation in preparation for the break-up of the large pastoral leaseholdings and the settlement of small farmers. The red country at the Bogan represented the typical conditions with which settlers would have to contend in any plans for populating the dry interior: shallow sandy soils, hot summers, low variable rainfall and little or no surface water. It had long been established there were no great inland rivers, and hopes that artesian water might ‘redeem’ the interior were fading. Would the continent’s interior be an impediment to the colony’s ambitions forever? Pastoral occupation had failed to create stable settlements. Agriculture might bring civilisation to the inland plains but was it possible there? The New South Wales Government saw the Bogan scrublands as the place to find out. The scheme probably drew on aspects of the New Arcadia movement that was popular in Victoria and South Australia. In the early 1890s over-production of agricultural commodities and flawed financial policies caused a global economic retraction. Fourteen banks folded in Australia in 1893. During the Depression the unemployed became conspicuous in the cities and politicians proposed various solutions to deal with the problem. One such scheme was to get the unemployed out of the cities and into cooperative farming villages. The New Arcadia movement held a ‘utopian vision of cooperative villages across the Australian interior, each surrounded by orchards and small scale farms’.14 Hard work would redeem the wastelands and the settlers, and intensive agriculture would develop an ‘ethic of environmental care’.15 This vision shaped policies for dealing with the unemployed. Colonial governments passed legislation supporting village settlements and up to 20,000 men participated in the schemes.16 The politicians’ plans for the Bogan scrub shared the principles of environmental and moral redemption that underpinned the New Arcadia movement but its programme would operate differently. The labourers would not own the land or form a community – they would do the clearing work so that others could settle on small agricultural blocks. In 1897 the New South Wales Under Secretary for Lands, William Houston, journeyed to what were known as the ‘West Bogan wastelands’ to inspect the country.17 He reported that, on either side of the route for 175 miles, ‘it would be no exaggeration to say that the greater part of it is in its present condition a

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forbidding wilderness’.18 In an essay on New Arcadia and the unemployed, cultural historian Melissa Bellanta explained that the term ‘wastelands’ did not usually mean a degraded or contaminated area, but referred to un-alienated Crown land or undeveloped land, and was a word that reflected the ‘uncertain grasp of White Australia over its indigenous expanses’.19 It was land that went unused in the face of the Divine Command to subdue the land or to legitimately possess it by tilling it.20 The Bogan country was both: it was not occupied and it was a place left degraded by overstocking during the preceding decades of pastoral speculation. The Western Herald commented the land was of ‘excellent quality’ but ‘temporarily ruined by the growth of scrub’.21 There were calls for the government to ensure the country was occupied immediately so that small landholders practising scientific agriculture could carry out remedial work and stop the spread of scrub.22 These were environmental arguments for occupation.23 The destruction of the native grasses meant that dry woodlands did not carry sufficient fuel to burn off the new growth or cleared areas. Houston assessed that the country was ‘in its present condition absolutely useless’.24

The changing scrub The Oxford English Dictionary says scrub is a variant of shrub. Australians have used scrub to describe both plants and places. It could be used in a very general sense to mean uncultivated land, either in a ‘virgin’ state or abandoned. Usually it has meant a tract of country that is more densely timbered than surrounding areas with relatively low-growing trees and bushes. In The Default Country, lexicographer Jay Arthur noted that the vegetation is regarded as ‘stunted’ even if it has reached its full height, suggesting a perception of lack and inferiority.25 It is an assessment of vegetation in relation to its value for grazing and agriculture. The low and tangled trees and shrubs prevent easy passage and stock could easily wander from trails in such conditions. Unlike on an open plain, the landholder’s gaze is obscured. While ‘scrub’ was used to indicate land of lesser value relative to open country, it did not mean worthless. In 1833 W.H. Breton reported that ‘Maize . . . grows luxuriantly on what is termed “Scrub Land”’ and in 1871, J. Baird’s Emigrant’s Guide to Australasia explained, ‘The scrublands, that is, those numerous low, level patches by the margins of rivers and creeks, above high-water mark, clothed with the most luxuriant and beautiful vegetation, composed of black unctuous clay and vegetable mould, will grow anything.’26 It seems settlers did not view the scrublands with contempt at first. Perceptions began to change in the 1880s, after disruption to Aboriginal land management, restriction of fire, and overgrazing altered the composition of the western vegetation, and ‘scrub’ took on entirely negative connotations. Landholders began to report that the scrub was changing. It was resisting all attempts to occupy it. The character of the semi-arid woodlands altered so that the hard, spiky and unpalatable plants dominated. One newspaper reporter following the Minister for Lands’ visit to the western districts in the 1880s said of the dry woodlands at Byrock, north of Coolabah:

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It is almost a treeless country . . . and absolutely level. The surface soil becomes pulverised by the traffic into an impalpable red dust, and the slightest agitation of the wind raises it in heavy clouds. It tinges everything around; in fact it is one of those places where every prospect displeases, and all but man is vile.27 The scrub was increasing in density, it was closing over, and it was rejecting the European settlers. What is it about scrub that attracts suspicion and mystery? For Ross Gibson, the Brigalow scrub in Queensland is one immense crime scene: Australia’s own badlands. It is a ‘lair for evil’ where ‘malevolence flourishes naturally’ or has been ‘shoved in there since colonial times’.28 Scrub is unknown, unseen, unpopulated and secret. The Bulletin declared in 1895, ‘No man who disappears mysteriously in Australia can be safely set down as dead until the scrub-country has been raked for him.’29 Across Australia, scrub has elicited despair and distrust. We have a long literary tradition of children going missing in scrub, as Peter Pierce has shown in The Country of Lost Children. ‘Had he not heard how men had been

V i R C I N

S C R BU

WOULO

iTAtVt

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LI2AII D

N O V E M B E R november FIGURE 3.1 ‘Virgin scrub would starve a lizard.’ The semi-arid woodlands near the Bogan River were described as ‘useless’ and ‘a place where all but man is vile’. In this poster, commissioned by Britain’s Empire Marketing Board, scrublands are depicted as a place that is ‘useless’ for nature itself. This is a precursor to today’s justifications for broad-scale clearing of native vegetation: scrublands don’t support enough ‘biodiversity’.

Source: H. S. Williamson (Date: 1926–39). Empire Marketing Board posters, CO 956/107. National Archives (UK).

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lost in that awesome scrub, silent and impenetrable, which swallowed up its victims noiselessly?’ asked one of his sources.30 According to Pierce, the colonists’ narratives betray a ‘profound unease about their presence in this continent’. 31 The scrub is always silent. Historian Michael Cathcart provided a fascinating account of the symbolic importance of silence in The Water Dreamers, arguing ‘the silence expresses the moral condition of the land – the lethargy and stasis of a primordial forest. The silence is a dimension that exists before time’.32 Only the arrival of whites could animate or bring time and history to the land. Australian vegetation even has an international reputation for danger – the search for lost tourists inevitably turns to the scrub. Scrublands appeared to have received the most scorn from a society that was beginning to turn its gaze from the fertile and picturesque coast to the hostile and deficient interior. Perhaps it was predictable that the scrub itself became the problem, and not Australians’ relationships with their environment. Was it inevitable that agriculture, as the new tool of social and environmental correction, would be called on to deal with the scrub problem?

Where our brethren toil on a hungry soil Scrub clearing was hard work. Men toiled in forty-degree heat using axes to ringbark and fell some of the hardest timber in Australia. Pastoral landholders would order their scrub-cutting gangs to cut a shallow ring around the outer bark, from as small as a single line that did not remove a chip to about six inches wide. The trees lose the ability to send sugars to their roots and with this method take about three years to die. The landholders would leave the grey trees standing in the paddocks. Ringbarking for cultivation was even harder. Farmers or their workers would cut deep through the bark and sap-wood into the darker coloured heart-wood. If done this way some species of the semi-arid woodland trees could die within a few months.33 It must have seemed an unending and unrewarding task for the scrub-cutting gangs. When you cut trees such as budda and poplar box, new shoots called ‘suckers’ grow from their wounds. If you take the trees out by their roots and leave fragments of the root system in the soil the leftover pieces grow new trees. Pine and box seedlings sprouted everywhere over the ringbarked country, especially where it was heavily stocked.34 Scrub-cutters could use an axe or a slasher on the pine but with the box trees they had to use a mattock and dig the seedlings out to a depth of eight inches. Unless landholders were cutting, slashing, felling and digging the trees and their suckers year after year, the vegetation would revert ‘if it were possible, to worse than its former condition’.35 Chinese immigrants had provided labour for the pastoral industry from its earliest days and much ringbarking and suckering was carried out by Chinese scrubbing gangs.36 The New South Wales Minister for Lands, Joseph Carruthers, was keen to see the Bogan scrub populated and agriculturally productive. He was also an advocate for federation of the colonies ‘for the sake of White Australia’.37 Soon after the gold rushes of the 1850s the New South Wales Colonial Government

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placed some restrictions on Chinese immigration. In 1896, the same year the unemployed were sent out to the Bogan scrub, the New South Wales Government passed legislation which did not just restrict Chinese immigration, but banned all ‘coloured’ immigration.38 Without the option to exploit Asian and Islander workers, who would carry out the manual labour to prepare the ground for agriculture? Would white people work for low pay, and perhaps more importantly, were they physiologically capable in the interior’s heat and dry? The white men doing the work of ‘coloured’ people soon found public sympathy in newspapers and in the labour movement. W. T. Goodge, a writer of light verse, wrote a poem about the plight of the ‘struggle-for-lifers’ for the Bulletin in 1899. These two verses illustrate some of the key concerns that emerged from the Bogan scrub experiment: Oh, come with me to the Bogan Boys, To the Bogan scrub so gay, Where our brethren toil on a hungry soil, At an Indian coolie’s pay! [. . . ] For the damper’s tough in the Bogan, boys, And the beef ’s as hard as rocks, And the bull-dog ants get into your pants And eat your Sunday socks! No sinful pleasure is there, my lads, No wickedness there you know. The scrublands have been a place of murder and massacre, a place where sin came easy, but where sin could be purged through battling the land, a place of perverse biological and corporeal reckoning, of environmental degradation and moral redemption. The scrub was no longer just a place in need of correction; it could also correct the defects of the unemployed through tough physical work. New ideas in biology created an obsession with the body and physical fitness. It is no surprise that 1896 was also the year of the revival of the Olympic Games. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, physiological sciences such as anthropometry and phrenology could supposedly explain a range of physical and mental characteristics and health issues: ‘symmetry of the body was thought to reflect physiological – even spiritual – fitness’.39 The men’s labour was reshaping their bodies as well as reshaping their minds. All the while they were reshaping place. In a survey of key texts on the history of masculinity and morals, J. A. Mangan and James Walvin argued that by the end of the nineteenth century ideas about ‘manliness’ had shifted from earlier ideals of the gentlemanly and Christian concerns of ‘selflessness and integrity’ to ‘stoicism, hardiness and endurance’ or ‘neo-Spartan virility’.40 In Australia, settlers felt the Aboriginal people and native animals were

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not worthy opponents.41 The ‘kangaroos and other marsupials did not offer the classic challenge of the wild animals of Africa’, wrote historian Libby Robin in How a Continent Created a Nation.42 The settlers killed both in great numbers but it did not bring honour. Robin argued that by the start of the twentieth century ‘battling the land’ stood in for the traditional challenge. Perhaps scrublands had taken on a symbolic, even hero-making, role. Some of the unemployed scrub-cutters found the challenge of battling the scrub too tough. In April 1897 several members of the labour movement made a deputation to the Minister for Labour on behalf of the scrub-cutters. The men complained they could not earn more than six shillings a day working ten hours a day because they were paid per area of cleared land. The money they received was not enough to make a livelihood. Some quit and left the Bogan as fast as they could. The Minister, Jacob Garrard, responded with fitting harshness, stating that the men who deserted the relief works ‘deserved to be flogged’.43 Garrard refused to pay them a daily wage but a few days later conceded a small increase in the rate of pay.44 By the end of the scheme the scrub-cutting gangs had cleared over 600,000 acres.45 The Department of Lands had released 187,194 acres of the cleared land

Box seedlings at the ‘Bogan Scrub’ near the Coolabah Experiment Farm. Shrubs and trees such as budda and poplar box produce new shoots called ‘suckers’ from their wounds. If you take the trees out by their roots and leave fragments of the root system in the soil the leftover pieces grow new trees. Pine and box seedlings sprouted in many places over the ringbarked country, especially where it was heavily stocked. The actions of settlers contributed to the increase in woody native vegetation. FIGURE 3.2

Source: Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales.

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for Improvement Leases – the condition of the country was still so poor that those 200,000 acres could only support forty-nine mixed farms.46 Many of the farmers who took up the leases came from the semi-arid districts of Victoria.47 The New South Wales Colonial Government asserted that every acre of scrubbed land would be taken up but ‘a large area’ of the land remained vacant afterwards.48 Graziers were not interested and because of the drought it was ‘quite useless for agricultural purposes’.49 One newspaper said it was surprised ‘such country was ever taken up’ by the Crown tenants who abandoned it over the 1880s and 1890s and by the new improvement lessees.50 In 1900, of the half a million acres cleared, only 3,000–4,000 were under crop.51 The newspapers proclaimed the scheme a failure: Persistent attempts have been made to make it wealth-producing, but in a large number of cases the experiment has been heart-breaking. Hundreds of thousands of pounds have been lost there, and many a man discouraged almost beyond redemption.52 Some of the scrub-cutters were directed to clear the major stock routes in the west as well. Dubbo’s Daily Liberal complained, ‘the result now appears in the steady and indiscriminate destruction of almost all the shade trees along the routes’.53 Some residents took ‘grim consolation’ in the fact that the ringbarking work was so poorly done it appeared not every tree was going to die.54

The idea of whiteness In 1896 Australia led the world in formalising the idea of whiteness. In the words of Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Australia embarked on a ‘radical new departure in international relations’ when the New South Wales Colonial Government introduced the Coloured Races Restriction and Regulation Act in 1896.55 The other colonies soon followed suit, and at Federation the new national government passed the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. These Acts had their origins in anti-Chinese protests and violence from the 1850s, when miners objected to competition from these ‘industrious’ immigrants.56 The New South Wales and Victorian governments introduced some restrictions on Chinese immigration soon after (as did other countries around the world, including the United States and Canada).57 European immigrants were worried that Chinese and Indian workers would accept lower pay and living standards. Australian journalist and traveller George Ernest Morrison (known as ‘Chinese Morrison’) was a thoughtful writer and an expert on Asia and foreign relations. He admired the hard-working and frugal Chinese character, yet he demonstrated widely held views when he commented in his 1895 book An Australian in China: To compete successfully with a Chinaman, the artisan or labourer of our own flesh and blood would require to be degraded into a mere mechanical beast of labour, unable to support wife or family, toiling seven days in the

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week, with no amusements, enjoyments, or comforts of any kind, no interest in the country, contributing no share towards the expense of government, living on food that he would now reject with loathing, crowded with his fellows ten or fifteen in a room that he would not now live in alone, except with repugnance. Admitted freely into Australia, the Chinese would starve out the Englishman.58 Morrison then went on to cite an Australian academic by the name of Pearson who reported that when the Chinese began furniture-making in Victoria the trade was ‘ruined for white men’ within five years.59 What was radical about the 1896 legislation in New South Wales was that it banned ‘all persons belonging to any coloured race inhabiting the Continent of Asia or the Continent of Africa, or any island adjacent thereto, or any island in the Pacific Ocean or Indian Ocean’ irrespective of a country’s power or status as an ally, or even if an individual was a British subject.60 This angered Japan and India and embarrassed Britain.61 It divided the world into white and not-white for the first time.62 After the Australian colonies federated in 1901, politicians gave priority to debates about immigration restriction in the first year of the new nation’s parliament. There was support for a ‘White Australia’ right across the political spectrum but leaders of the labour movement were its most strident advocates. It was a key part of the Labor Party’s policy platform and was popular among its support base.63 The debates in parliament acknowledged the states already had sufficient legislation to restrict the entry of non-white people, but as protectionist and Labor Party member David Watkins argued, it was important to ‘tell the whole world’ in no uncertain terms that Australia would be white.64 Anti-Asian immigration was fuelled by workers’ fears about competition in the labour market, but a loud and proud White Australia expressed deeper anxieties and insecurities about Australia’s human breeding stock, the effects of its environment on bodies suited to cooler climates and its geographic position near Asia. Watkins agreed with those who argued that the education test conducted in a European language was too passive a measure because it did not make a statement about the intentions of the Australian people. Hardliners also argued the test was flawed because it could deny entry to some Europeans, such as Scottish highlanders, but it would be possible for some Chinese or ‘Hindoos’ to pass it.65 They demanded the test be conducted in English only and that the legislation explicitly name ‘coloured’ races. Some free-traders and classic liberal politicians also believed the legislation did not go far enough. George Bertrand Edwards told parliament, ‘The miscegenation of races gave us the vices of both races and the virtues of neither’. He vowed to ‘block the introduction of these inferior races at any cost’.66 Edwards saw the social welfare policies advanced by the labour movement as ‘an inducement’ to the inferior races to come to Australia.67 Labor politician William Guthrie Spence argued along similar lines to his political foe, declaring Australians ‘desired out of loyalty to the racial feeling to keep the race pure’.68 There was no point in supporting social policies such as welfare because ‘the deterioration of the race would more than

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counterbalance all the benefits derived’.69 Their arguments based on biology, such as miscegenation and inheritance of defects, echoed the Social-Darwinists of the time who believed some welfare reforms and assistance for the poor made it easier for the inferior, the weak and the feeble-minded to reproduce, and were artificial interventions distorting the principle of the survival of the fittest. There were voices critical of race-based immigration restrictions. Arthur Bruce Smith, a disciple of classical liberalism and supporter of free trade was one of the fiercest opponents of the labour movement, social welfare policies and the desire to create a White Australia.70 He argued, ‘The foundation of the bill was undoubtedly racial prejudice . . . the whole subject was a bogey, used as political capital for gullible electors.’71 He did not ‘wish to see low-grade coloured races swarming into the Commonwealth’ but believed the Labor Party were exploiting prejudices for political gain, allowing hysteria to grow over a matter that was trivial – the numbers of immigrants of Asian origin were small.72 Fears fuelled by economic self-interest made the demands for restrictions urgent, but even these were influenced by ideas about race. Consider the clashes between Ngiyambaa and the sheep and cattle men in the early nineteenth century. This division could be understood along lines of time and place, with the material and political interests clear. It was those who owned the land versus those who wanted to take it. The Aboriginal people of Australia were described as savages, but as Sven Lindqvist pointed out in Exterminate all the Brutes, this was ambiguous – did it refer to all people we categorise as developing nations today? Did it mean dark skinned? How dark was dark? If the Anglo-Saxons viewed everyone as lower than them, it meant morally or technically – which a few centuries before was the situation the Western Europeans found themselves in when they engaged with the superior civilisations of the East during the Crusades.73 For Thomas Mitchell, whose writing shows he was strongly influenced by Romanticism, the Aboriginal people of Australia were ‘noble savages’, the finest examples of humans in touch with nature, and the nature they inhabited was unspoilt and sublime. Perceptions of difference depended on religious, moral and philosophical beliefs. Increasingly during the nineteenth century, however, human difference was explained through scientific ideas about the natural world. Where once God had made the world and all its creatures final and stable, Cuvier demonstrated a world in which species could become extinct. Lamarck argued that species change in response to environment, and Darwin recognised this process as historical. Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History wrote that Darwin transformed ‘the prevailing view of stability – of the earth, of all the species on earth, and not least the stability of society’s strata – into a picture of motion’.74 The hierarchy of species was a result of a dynamic process in time – the ‘lower’ species were older, the ‘higher’ newer, and ‘the struggle between them created ever “higher” forms’.75 Different ‘races’ of humans could be ranked separately in the list of species. Some might be an older ‘type’ or form and therefore the link between advanced humans and other animals, or some groups could have degenerated from the higher type. It was a classification system that reflected existing

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power structures and cultural perceptions of superiority.76 It was applied inconsistently and unscientifically to Aboriginal Australians.77 They were either relic fossils or degenerates in an impoverished environment, and sometimes they could be both at once. In 1854 W. Augustus Miles wrote: It has been asserted that the Australian aboriginal is the lowest of the human races; that he is the link between the human and the brute species; that he is more degraded than the generality of mankind, and little better than the monkey.78 The justifications for the treatment of Aboriginal people could now be found in nature. They were doomed to be replaced by the superior race anyway. Now that human difference had a biological basis, it meant that ‘white races’ must have distinct biological characteristics. In The Cultivation of Whiteness, Warwick Anderson argued that previously ‘white’ in Australia had meant British ancestry, but from the 1880s ‘whiteness’ became a ‘type, mobile and standardized’.79 Skin colour was too unreliable a determinant, it had to be something more, but it was elusive. Perhaps it was ‘a typical bodily constitution or temperament’, a thoughtstyle, head circumference, predisposition or resistance to diseases.80 The biological basis for whiteness also encompassed its vulnerabilities and limitations, not just what made it different and superior. Foreign environments could affect white bodies. A common belief was that white people were unable to live and work successfully in the humid and disease-ridden tropics, that there was ‘something in the tropical climate inimical to Europeans’.81 This was a widely held fear towards the colony and state of Queensland in Australia’s tropical north. Many people in Queensland had been opposed to restrictions on immigration. Since the 1860s Queensland had been engaged in ‘blackbirding’, which meant importing labour, often through kidnapping, from the Pacific Islands. For the landholders and industrial capitalists cheap labour provided the basis for rapid economic growth. The manual work the Pacific people did in the Queensland tropics was what they were ‘naturally’ suited to, so their conditions and treatment were justified, argued those profiting from the practice. The effects of the environment of the dry interior were more ambiguous. It was too hot to be temperate, but it was not humid enough to be tropical. The little rain that fell evaporated rapidly. When scores of inland settlers died in the heat in 1896 the Western Herald proposed the solution was a simple matter of cultural adaptation to the environmental conditions. It implored people to shed the traditions of the Old Country, such as hot meals, heavy clothes and business hours during the middle of the day when it was hottest, to mitigate against ‘the terrors of the climate’.82 The editorial argued they were not bound by biological constraints; instead, how they chose to live with the heat was within their control. When immigration restrictions were enacted in the colonies and then in the new nation, to protect Australia, ‘for all time from the contaminating and degrading influence of inferior races’,83 it had implications for agriculture in Australia.84

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Agriculture was intricately involved in the production and protection of ‘whiteness’ immediately after the policy changes, and for the next few decades. The deployment of unskilled labour to the Bogan scrub and the experiment farm at Coolabah were the first engagements with the practicalities of populating and protecting a White Australia.

Creating plants with places In the late nineteenth century, plant-breeders crossed wheat varieties to suit the conditions of the New World lands. They made vast tracts of ‘virgin’ territory available for cultivation of European plants, consolidating the Great Grain Invasion which saw the harvests of those plants shipped back to Europe, and which lowered the price of grain foods and devastated the farmers of Europe.85 David Fife, who emigrated from Scotland to Canada, transformed Canadian wheat growing by chance and husbandry. His Red Fife variety, with heritage from the Ukraine and possibly Turkey, became the dominant commercial wheat in Canada. It was also the variety crossed to create the widely-grown Marquis in Canada and Farrer’s popular Federation wheat in Australia. Place determined the characteristics for which the plant-breeders selected and crossed. Farrer wanted good milling qualities, but released Federation even though it did not meet his objective because the short ripening time meant it could be grown in drier conditions where rust was less likely to be a problem, and its shorter straw suited the mechanical ‘stripper’ that Australian farmers used.86 Growing wheat at the Coolabah Experiment Farm would utilise place in two ways. It would allow the plant-breeders to select seeds based on which plants survived the extreme conditions; they hoped the plants would adapt to the conditions through their interaction with the environment. In 1898 Robert Peacock set out for the new experiment farm near Coolabah. As manager of the farm Peacock was charged with carrying out no small task. His mission was to gain ‘the knowledge which it will be necessary to possess before the millions of acres of now almost useless land, of which the farm is typical, can be turned to good account’.87 Fifteen hundred acres were resumed for the purpose, and W. S. Campbell of the Department of Agriculture chose 200 acres on which to make a start. The farm was to give ‘special attention’ to wheat cultivation.88 Peacock would need to collaborate with the Department’s specialist staff to make it possible to grow wheat in an environment where ‘the absence of rain’ had made it impossible.89 The Minister instructed the American-born plant pathologist Dr Nathan Cobb to ‘undertake exhaustive experiments with a view of selecting a wheat that will adapt itself to the climate, and be sufficiently early to benefit by the rainfall’.90 The independent wheat-breeder William Farrer, by then on the Department’s books, began wheat trials using the conditions at the Coolabah farm to produce drought-tolerant wheat varieties. As early as 1890 Farrer had argued that experiment farms should be modelled on the United States’ Hatch Act and be located in areas that represented the greater

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part of the interior.91 He suggested the first should be built on the red soil plains at Dubbo, which was the district he had worked in as a land surveyor. At that time Dubbo was the limit of the wheat-belt. Coolabah, between Nyngan and Bourke, was another 150 miles further into the interior. The village had scratched out an existence servicing a stock and mail route and had gained some permanency with the advance of the main western rail line. The experiment farm was 18 miles west of the line, just beyond the riverine plains, and on the edge of red sand and ridge country. Farrer wrote in a report for the Department of Agriculture that ‘the extreme dryness of the climate of Coolabah makes it the most suitable farm for work in connection with discovering or making varieties suitable for our dry interior’.92 Rainfall in one year barely totalled 80 millimetres. It appeared the ideal place to trial dry farming methods for Australia. If crops grew here they would grow anywhere. The Department’s timing for the establishment of the Coolabah Experiment Farm was unfortunate. Experimentalists began cultivating their wheat plots just as eastern Australia entered what became known as the Federation Drought. The Sydney Morning Herald reported the settlers who had taken up blocks in conjunction with the opening of the Farm were ‘bravely fighting under hard conditions’.93 The Minister for Lands toured the western districts in 1900. He inspected deserted Homestead Lease properties before meeting with a deputation the Girilambone Progress Committee had formed. Its members were the farmers who had applied for the Bogan scrub agricultural blocks the government had sent unemployed men to clear. The farmers relied on information and examples obtained from the Coolabah farm. The Minister acknowledged they were going through a ‘trying time’ and had faced ‘hard battles’ but the government had already spent £107,000 on scrub clearing and there was no money left to alleviate their situation.94 The Coolabah Experiment Farm was doing little better. Farrer was frustrated with the low yields of the ‘Macaroni’, or durum wheat, he had selected for the dry and hot conditions in the interior. He tried North African, Mediterranean, West Asian and Central European wheats with little success.95 The wheat trials did not fare any better when the rains returned. Typical of the extreme variability of the western country, when the drought broke it was with fierce storms and flooding. The Farm’s manager, Peacock, reported that in September 1903 heavy rain caused a nearby cowal to overflow and flood some of the trial plots, and strong winds bent many of the wheat plants. The next month hail storms tore up the plants and, with the unusual amount of rain, rust set in. The rain turned the broken and bare ground hard. With so much rain after such a long drought the grasses and shrubs boomed, but so did the wildlife, including mouse populations. The mice climbed the wheat stalks and attacked the grain, they used the string bands of the sheaves to make their nests, and ‘after wheats were sown they would follow the drills, and scratch and devour the grain’.96 When the remaining seeds germinated they ate the shoots off to the level of the ground. They also destroyed the haystacks, ate the insides out of the melons and pumpkins, and polished off a crop

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of cowpeas before they ripened. The mice ‘appeared to be everywhere, in houses, barns, stables and fields, and would eat almost anything’.97 Peacock’s reports were rarely positive.

Nature fights back Robert Peacock knew dry country. He was a self-taught generalist. He was raised on a mixed farm near Bathurst and his father had worked on the Bathurst property of the squatter and politician William Lee (whose men had massacred the Aboriginal people at Canonba). He knew the soils in the west ranged between poor red sandy loams and richer but difficult to cultivate black cracking soils. He knew grasses could dry out in a drought and get carried away by the wind. He knew rainfall was uncertain, and conditions ‘decidedly arid’.98 As manager of the Coolabah Experiment Farm he did little wheat-breeding research. That was the responsibility of Farrer and, later, the agriculturalist George Sutton. Peacock experimented with wheat-growing techniques for dry country, such as how and when to sow, how to prepare the ground, which machinery to use and how much fertiliser to apply. The country there, however, forced a change in the focus of his work at the farm. He was shocked at the state of the western country after years of pastoral occupation. The varied and ‘luxuriant’ grasses of the semi-arid plains and woodlands, such as kangaroo in the red country and Mitchell on the black soils, had been overgrazed and were confined to a few protected areas and low-lying gilgais and cowals. The edible shrubs that provided extra fodder in drought had also been eaten bare and trees had been ringbarked. The saltbushes had been ‘annihilated’. Pine scrub, bimble box seedlings, budda and acacias had ‘taken complete possession to the thorough exclusion of even the worst grasses’.99 On the river plains, on which woody scrub does not grow, saltbushes began to be replaced by a related but spiny and unpalatable shrub called roly-poly.100 Many of the ‘once coveted western properties’ had been abandoned, and millions of acres were now ‘beyond the scope of profitable occupation’.101 There he was, 31 years old, alone in the far west, in charge of a new experiment farm and assigned with the remarkable responsibility of undertaking what was perhaps the most ambitious project scientific agriculture had attempted yet. He stood among the forlorn remnants of former abundance, on red ground strewn with parched fragments of soil-holding bushes, surrounded by grey and black dead timber and pulverised grasses. Tumbleweeds rode the wind from out of the flats and collected on fences or in the thickening scrub. Most worrying of all, the ‘perpetual summer winds’ were creating ‘ever-increasing’ scalded plains of bared subsoil. This country called on him to talk straight. Writing in the Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales in 1900, Peacock declared the pastoral occupation of the west was ‘a period of deterioration unexampled in the history of New South Wales’.102 The numerous and visible examples of environmental degradation were ‘too familiar landmarks, resulting from the mistakes of the past, and calculated to teach valuable lessons to

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FIGURE 3.3

Fifty acres planted with saltbush at the Coolabah Experiment Farm in 1904.

Source: Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales.

those willing to listen to the voice and teachings of Nature’. For Peacock nature was an active presence. He gave it a voice. These were the admonitions of a professional in a tough situation, invoking the higher authority of ‘Nature’ against those who he blamed for recklessly exploiting the drylands. The same year that the Agricultural Gazette published Peacock’s article, the New South Wales Government established a Royal Commission to investigate the failure of settlement in the Western Division. With increasing criticism of the circumstances of the leaseholders in the west, especially in the Sydney Morning Herald, and momentum building towards an official response, the Department must have seen Peacock’s article as an opportunity to engage in a controversial public debate. It was also perhaps politically safer to publish such a damning condemnation of the actions of the landholders in the midst of declining pastoral industry power. Unlike the many landholders who conceded at the Royal Commission that ‘early on’ some people had overestimated the carrying capacity of the land, Peacock argued that it was the recent methods of landholders that caused the deterioration in the western country. He said the ‘system of stocking which has been practised during the last twenty years’, in which landholders had used water conservation works to push into the red country and had then ignored the need to periodically rest stocked areas in pursuit of short-term gains, had prevented native grasses and shrubs from propagating.103 For Peacock, vegetation was the fundamental concern for the west. His article described the rapid growth and dominance of woody scrub and unpalatable shrubs.

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Rangeland scientist James C. Noble, in his book A Delicate and Noxious Scrub, mentioned in a footnote that the importance of Peacock’s evidence ‘can be gauged by the fact that it occupied the full afternoon of the 24th October while the Commission sat in the boardroom of the Chief Secretary’s Office in Sydney’.104 In Peacock’s evidence, the Commission heard explanations for the changes in the western environment that were based on scientific theory. Rather than listing ‘nonedible scrub’ as another hardship forced on settlers by a deficient and backward Australian environment, Peacock explained, ‘nature, in order to recover her equilibrium, is at present producing vegetation capable of adapting itself to its natural surroundings by its unpalatableness and protective spiny growths’.105 Peacock was a Darwinist. Plant life was evolving to survive the pressures landholders were placing it under.

Saltbush and the first rangelands science Peacock had great respect for the native vegetation of the semi-arid interior: it was uniquely adapted to its environment; it could teach settlers about the long-term climate; it was drought resistant; the number of species was ‘truly remarkable’; and ‘in its primeval condition was admirably adapted for the support of animal life throughout prolonged periods of dry weather’.106 His article seethed with an undercurrent of outrage that exploitative stocking methods had left ‘many varieties . . . well nigh extinct’. In tandem with wheat experiments he began planting trial plots and paddocks with various saltbushes. The genus name for saltbushes is Atriplex and different species grow around the world in semi-arid and arid climates. They tolerate soils with high salt content and their leaves are salty to taste. They have been consumed in human diets for millennia but recently they have been valued more for their role in renewing degraded and salt-affected soils in drylands. In 1904 Peacock had planted 60 acres of saltbushes at the Coolabah Experiment Farm. The most valuable for pastoral properties, and probably the most well-known species, was old man saltbush.107 Peacock’s old man grew 3 metres tall and stayed green for the duration of the drought. Protecting the plants and allowing them to reach that height meant the higher branches were beyond the reach of the sheep and this prevented overgrazing. It provided shelter for animals, produced an abundance of seed and was easy to cultivate. In one article for the Agricultural Gazette Peacock listed thirteen species of saltbush with photos, details on their characteristics and advice on how to cultivate them.108 He had been the saltbush’s greatest advocate and when the drought broke in 1903 and the grasses grew tall, he warned landholders of hubris, for it was certain that ‘droughts will again recur, and the waving plains and overflowing gilgais of today will give place to the dull grey and chocolate of the windswept plains and muddy waterholes’.109 In droughts saltbushes survived long after the grasses had parched and died. Successful occupation of the interior depended on the providence of the native vegetation that had adapted to the environment. Peacock implored, ‘the West must look after its valuable plants, and not ruthlessly destroy those which

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make it valuable’.110 Many species did not return after the drought. They had been overgrazed and some became locally extinct. Peacock wrote that the people of the interior should ‘make good in some small measure the mistakes of the past by the cultivation and conservation’ of the saltbushes.111 The international exchange of plants among agricultural institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is usually associated with wheat. After his years of experiments, Peacock was convinced that ‘the Australian saltbushes have no rivals in drought-resistance’ in the world.112 He sent seeds of seven different saltbushes to the United States Department of Agriculture, as well as two species of Mitchell grass.113 These were distributed mainly in California and Arizona as a food source in dry areas, and to help stabilise sandy or alkaline soils. The saltbushes still grow in isolated areas in these states, along roadsides, on sea bluffs and coastal plains and basins. When Los Angeles airport was expanded and new jets roared above the suburbs surrounding it in the 1960s and 1970s, the beachside settlement of Palisades del Rey and its 822 homes were abandoned. Old man saltbush found a refuge in the vacant lots and overgrown streets, along with an endangered butterfly species, El Segundo Blue. These are the material remains of international cooperation, the sharing of scientific knowledge and genetic material and the reckoning of places.

Wheat should not be grown here In 1908 an article in the Sydney Morning Herald stated that, when anyone thought of the plains between Nyngan and Bourke, the immediate vision was of ‘big stretches of barren land’ and the experience of failure, and prompted the people of Australia to ask ‘whether it is all worthwhile’.114 The author observed that the crops in Dubbo and Wellington, in the recognised wheat-belt, were ‘parched plains and scaled patches’. A further 150 miles past that, ‘out towards that wilderness of sand and all that is desolate; the sepulchre of so many hopes, ambitions, and gallant endeavours’ was the Coolabah Experiment Farm. To get there, the author reported, you travelled through ‘unpopulated second-rate country’, in which you would see deserted selections, the remnants of a wire fence, a few sheep, and some kangaroos and emus. There was no grass, just bare red patches, water-washed and worn. From the rail line you rode over this ‘depressing environment’ for 17 miles before you reached the green wheat, canola and cowpea crops at the Experiment Farm, together with glistening oranges and saltbush 12 feet high. ‘It is a transformation – an oasis in the desert, without exaggeration’, remarked the reporter; this was worth going 446 miles to see.115 The Department of Agriculture, however, had already decided to close the farm. For years Peacock had described the dismal state of the wheat-growing experiments in his annual reports to the Department. In 1902 he recommended that ‘wheat growing in large areas should be discontinued here, and a smaller area devoted to the work’.116 By 1906 even the wheat experimentalist George Sutton agreed: the best that could be hoped for the Bogan scrub country was to grow

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cereals for hay to provide feed in drought. In Sutton’s view saving the soil was more important than choosing the right variety of wheat or determining the correct amount of fertiliser to apply.117 Peacock wanted to continue the saltbush trials and resisted the closure of the farm, arguing the experiments were incomplete and they would lose the opportunity for long-term comparisons.118 Saltbush cultivation for grazing was not a priority for the Department. In 1908, at the time the closure was confirmed, there were still ‘millions of acres yet untouched in this state which must be broken by the wheat-farmer’s plough’.119 Sutton was determined to continue the wheat experiments in an effort to extend the wheat-belt. The Coolabah farm closed and the wheat experiments withdrew to a new experiment farm at Nyngan.

Agriculturalists as ‘repairers’ The country at Coolabah forced a new imperative. Instead of formulating a system in which to carry out the transformation of idle scrublands into orderly agricultural fields, Peacock felt his first priority was to ‘reclaim these wastelands and, if possible, bring them to a semblance of their former condition’.120 His task became one of rescue, not revolution. This is the pattern Australian science for agriculture followed in its early days. The small Department of Agriculture was pulled between the demands of popular development rhetoric and the need to respond to the on-theground circumstances of settler farming and Australian environmental conditions. At the end of the nineteenth century the government was concerned the resources it held were being depleted, primarily in pastoral operations, but also in the way burgeoning crop farming was being practised. The main attraction of scientific agriculture was its promise of allaying some of these environmental problems, along with its potential civilising influence on the culture of inland settlement. Some public figures, however, perhaps influenced by the popular press, and perhaps speaking to popular sentiment, persisted with dreams of wholescale and widespread transformation of the dry interior. This kind of talk was alluring and infectious, and often the Department positioned itself as the institution with the knowledge and expertise to make such projects a reality. Their funding depended on the results being relevant to policy.121 Generally, however, the early experimentalist staff were practical in their work and its scope. Despite the public anxiety to settle for cultural and political reasons, many of the experimentalists and other Department staff were responsive to place. They were critical of environmental over-exploitation and farming practices that tried to profit only in the short-term. In The Delicate and Noxious Scrub, retired Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) scientist Jim Noble argued Peacock’s work ‘probably represent[ed] the first formal rangelands research undertaken in Australia’.122 Peacock was not alone in seeing the agricultural project as a restorative one. In response to the drought and harvest failure in the Russian Steppes in 1891, agricultural scientist Vasilii Dokuchaev began researching the effects of human exploitation of the plains. He was critical of exploitative farming practices and devised plans to repair the environmental degradation of the Steppes.123

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FIGURE 3.4 Clearing chain used in the second half of the twentieth century. Stringing a chain between two tractors and dragging it across the landscape was just one method of broad-scale clearing landholders used.

Source: Photo by Stuart Cohen.

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In the United States, the forester Gifford Pinchot founded a conservation ethic that shaped American Progressivism and agricultural reformers such as Theodore Roosevelt. Landholders continued to clear and overstock semi-arid woodlands over the course of the twentieth century. In 1938 biologist Francis Ratcliffe published his classic Flying Fox and Drifting Sand, based on his travels across the rangelands. He criticised graziers for overstocking and the destruction of native vegetation it caused. By the 1960s and 1970s, landholders were using heavy chains strung between two tractors to carry out broad-scale clearing. They also tried aerial and ground spraying with 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, the main ingredients of agent orange. In the 1980s rangeland scientists described the semi-arid woodlands as a ‘resource under siege’.124 In 1997 the New South Wales Government introduced restrictions on the clearing of native vegetation. Landholders were outraged because they believed the growth of woody native vegetation was unnatural. They grew because of the suppression of Aboriginal burning and the degradation caused by graziers in the past. Landholders at the Bogan formed the Rural Community Survival Group and locked out government

Grant MacAlpine driving his grader to create a new ‘water-pond’. In October 2010 Ray Thompson of the Central West Catchment Management Authority demonstrated using a laser level to work out the gradients for doing ‘waterponding’ works on Grant MacAlpine’s property near Girilambone. The oval-shaped banks of earth retain moisture and catch the seeds of native grasses and shrubs. In this photo Grant MacAlpine is using the grader to create banks for water-ponding on his property near Girilambone. He spends hours collecting saltbush seeds from his existing plants and distributes the seed over the turned earth. FIGURE 3.5

Source: Cameron Muir.

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native vegetation inspectors from their properties. To them, illegal clearing is not degradation, it is restoration. A different conservation ethic continues as well. In October 2010 I went to a property near Girilambone and Coolabah belonging to grazier Grant MacAlpine. Ray Thompson of the Central West Catchment Management Authority demonstrated how he used a laser level to work out the gradients for doing ‘waterponding’ works. The oval-shaped banks of earth retain moisture and catch the seeds of native grasses and shrubs. When Ray had finished the mapping Grant started up his massive grader and showed how he created banks for water-ponding by turning over the earth. He spent hours collecting saltbush seeds from his existing plants and distributed the seed over the turned earth. In the early twentieth century, Robert Peacock, the manager of the Coolabah Experiment Farm, was adamant that the Department of Agriculture and landholders should focus on regenerating the native vegetation. Over 100 years later, that’s what Ray and Grant were doing.

FIGURE 3.6

Ray Thompson’s saltbush on a regeneration site.

Source: Cameron Muir.

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Notes 1 T. L. Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia: With Descriptions of the Recently Explored Region of Australia Felix, and of the Present Colony of New South Wales (London: T. & W. Boone, 1838). 2 Ibid. 3 Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972, 2nd edn. (Sydney, NSW: Sydney University Press, 2008 [1996]). 4 This is evident in Mitchell’s descriptions of his encounters with the Aboriginal people of the middle and lower Bogan River. I am assuming the Aboriginal people here were Ngiyambaa based on Mitchell’s location against maps of Aboriginal language groups created in the twentieth century. 5 Mitchell, Three Expeditions. 6 Philip A. Clarke, Aboriginal Plant Collectors: Botanists and Australian Aboriginal People in the Nineteenth Century (Dural, NSW: Rosenberg Publishing, 2008). 7 Dubbo Dispatch in ‘The Bogan and Macquarie’, Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser, 6 June 1867, 3. 8 Ibid. 9 Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Studies in Australian History (Cambridge; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8. 10 Edward J. Larson, Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory, A Modern Library Chronicles Book (New York: Modern Library, 2004), xiii. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 ‘Work for the Unemployed’, Brisbane Courier, 1 September 1896. 14 Melissa Bellanta, ‘Clearing Ground for the New Arcadia: Utopia, Labour and Environment in 1890s Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 26, no. 72 (2002): 13. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 ‘The Agricultural Department’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 April 1900. 18 ‘The Bogan Scrub’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 October 1897. 19 ‘Clearing Ground’, 16. 20 As expressed by Vatell and Locke. 21 ‘Scrub Lands and the Unemployed’, Western Herald and Darling River Advocate, 22 August 1896. 22 ‘The Bogan Scrub’, 3. 23 Tom Griffiths explored the environmental arguments for occupation in an essay commemorating the one hundred year anniversary of the Royal Commission into the Condition of the Crown Tenants of the Western Division of New South Wales (1901) in Tom Griffiths, ‘One Hundred Years of Environmental Crisis’, The Rangeland Journal 23, no. 1 (2001). 24 ‘The Bogan Scrub.’ Houston recommended leaving it unstocked for a year to see if the grasses would come back so that they could build up enough grass for a fire. 25 J. M. Arthur, The Default Country: A Lexical Cartography of Twentieth Century Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003). 26 Quoted in W. S. Ramson, ‘Scrub’, in The Australian national dictionary: a dictionary of Australianisms on historical principles (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988). 27 ‘Ministerial Visit to the Northwest’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 December 1884, 14. 28 Ross Gibson, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (St. Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 2002), 13. 29 Ramson, ‘Scrub.’ 30 Marcus Clarke, ‘Pretty Dick’, in Peter Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 41. 31 Ibid., 9.

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32 Michael Cathcart, The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of Our Dry Continent (Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2009), 59. 33 R. W. Peacock, ‘Western Agriculture’, Dubbo Liberal, 17 January 1900. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Persia Crawford Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire (London: King, 1923); Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002); Eric C. Rolls, A Million Wild Acres (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1984). 37 John M. Ward, ‘Carruthers, Sir Joseph Hector McNeil (1856–1932)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Online Edition (2006), http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/ A070582b.htm (accessed on 1 February 2014). 38 Called the Coloured Races Restriction and Regulation Act (1896). See: Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, Critical Perspectives on Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 39 Roberta J. Park, ‘A Decade of the Body: Researching and Writing About the History of Health, Fitness, Exercise and Sport, 1983–1993’, Journal of Sport History 21, no. 1 (1994): 62. 40 J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds, Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1987), 1. 41 See: Robin, How a Continent. For an example of the attitude that said Aboriginal people did not present an adequate challenge to the settlers, see quotes in Chapter 4: Wheat. 42 Ibid., 42. 43 ‘Untitled [Unemployed at West Bogan Scrub – Conditions]’, West Australian, 2 April 1897. 44 ‘Wages on Relief Works’, Brisbane Courier, 7 April 1897. 45 ‘New South Wales Unemployed’, Brisbane Courier, 11 November 1899. 46 ‘West Bogan Scrub Country’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 August 1898. Improvement Leases in the West Bogan Scrub required the tenant to maintain the improvements the government had borrowed money to carry out, namely, the clearing of vegetation. 47 Peacock, ‘Western Agriculture.’ 48 ‘The Problem of the West’, Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 7 August 1900, 4. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 ‘Western Agriculture.’ 52 ‘The Problem of the West.’ 53 ‘The ‘Unemployed’ and the Tree-Ringing’, Daily Liberal 1900. 54 Ibid. 55 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, 144. 56 ‘Fact Sheet 8: Abolition of the “White Australia” Policy’, Department of Immigration and Citizenship, www.immi.gov.au/media/fact-sheets/08abolition.htm (accessed on 1 February 2014). 57 Canada has used Chinese labour in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Once the rail line was completed it introduced a head tax for Chinese immigrants in 1885. 58 George Ernest Morrison, An Australian in China: Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey across China to Burma, 2nd edn. (London: Horace Cox, 1895). 59 Ibid. Morrison cites ‘Professor Pearson’ without giving a first name. 60 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 144. 61 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, ‘Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empire’, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (2008), www.japanfocus.org/-Tessa-Morris_Suzuki/2862 (accessed on 1 February 2014).

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62 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line. 63 See: Tom Bramble and Rick Kuhn, eds, Labor’s Conflict: Big Business, Workers and the Politics of Class. (Port Melbourne, Vic.: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 64 ‘House of Representatives [Amendment to Immigration Bill]’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 September 1901, 8. 65 Ibid. (This paraphrases the arguments of George Edwards). 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Martha Rutledge, ‘Smith, Arthur Bruce (1851–1937)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Online Edition (2006), www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A110657b.htm (accessed on 1 February 2014). 71 ‘House of Representatives [Amendment to Immigration Bill].’ 72 Ibid. 73 Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes (New York: New Press, 1996). 74 Niles Eldredge, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 8. 75 Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes, 120. 76 Eldredge, Darwin. 77 For more on the inconsistency with which nineteenth-century Europeans postulated on the origins and rankings of Aboriginal people, see: Robert Kenny, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper & the Ruptured World (Carlton North, Vic.: Scribe Publications, 2007). 78 W. Augustus Miles, ‘How Did the Natives of Australia Become Acquainted with the Demigods and Daemonia, and with the Superstitions of the Ancient Races? And How Have Many Oriental Words Been Incorporated in Their Dialects and Languages?’ Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1848–56) 3(1854). 79 Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 2. 80 Ibid. 81 Charles H. Smith, ‘White Men in the Tropics’, Independent, 9 March 1899. 82 ‘The Heat Wave’, Western Herald and Darling River Advocate, 15 January 1896, 2. 83 Isaac Isaacs quoted in Russell McGregor, ‘The White Man in the Tropics’, www. townsville.qld.gov.au/resources/3873.pdf (accessed on 1 February 2014). 84 Queensland asked for a Royal Commission into the circumstances of tropical agriculture but this was denied. In 1906 and 1907 nearly four thousand islanders were deported. Myra Willard, History of the White Australia Policy to 1920 (London: Cass, 1967). 85 Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, ‘Biological Globalization: The Other Grain Invasion’, in ICER Working Papers (ICER – International Centre for Economic Research, 2006). 86 M. Cawte, ‘William Farrer and the Australian Response to Mendelism’, Historical Records of Australian Science 6, no. 1 (1984). 87 Quoted in P. J. Mylrea, In the Service of Agriculture: A Centennial History of the New South Wales Department of Agriculture 1890–1990 (Sydney: NSW Agriculture & Fisheries, 1990). 88 ‘Experimental Farm at the Bogan Scrub’, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 December 1897. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 William Farrer, ‘The Government Experimental Farm’, ibid., 3 May 1890. 92 ‘Report of the Wheat Experimentalist’, Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 15(1904). 93 ‘Minister for Lands at Coolabah’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 May 1900. 94 Ibid. 95 R. W. Peacock, ‘Report of the Manager, Coolabah Experimental Farm’, Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 15(1904). 96 Ibid., 1120.

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97 Ibid. 98 ‘Our Western Lands: Their Deterioration and Possible Improvement’, Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 11(1900). 99 Ibid., 655. 100 They are both Chenopods. 101 Peacock, ‘Our Western Lands’, 652. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., 654. 104 James C. Noble, The Delicate and Noxious Scrub (Lyneham, ACT: CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology, 1997), 17. 105 Peacock, ‘Our Western Lands’, 654. 106 Ibid., 652. 107 Atriplex nummularia. 108 R. W. Peacock, ‘Saltbushes, Their Conservation and Cultivation’, Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 15(1904). 109 Ibid., 212. 110 Ibid., 220. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 The species Peacock sent to the United States were: Atriplex nummularia (old man saltbush), Atriplex halimoides, Atriplex leptocarpa, Atriplex angulata (fan saltbush), Atriplex vesicaria (bladder saltbush), Atriplex leptocarpa, Astrebla triticoides (curly Mitchell grass), Astrebla pectinata (barley Mitchell grass), Eragrostis pilosa (Indian love grass – introduced), Diplachne fusca (swamp grass), and Enchylaena tomentosa (barrier saltbush). United States Department of Agriculture, ‘Seeds and Plants Imported through the Section of Seed and Plant Introduction for Distribution in Cooperation with the Agricultural Experiment Stations’, Bureau of Plant Industry Bulletin 5(1902). 114 ‘On the Land. In the West. Coolabah State Farm’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 July 1908. 115 Ibid. 116 R. W. Peacock, ‘Report of the Manager, Coolabah Experimental Farm’, Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 13(1902). James Noble provides a summary of Coolabah wheat experiment results in the appendix of A Delicate and Noxious Scrub. 117 G. L. Sutton, ‘Cowra and Coolabah Experimental Farms’, ibid. 17(1906). 118 ‘On the Land’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 August 1908. 119 ‘On the Land. Coolabah State Farm. Its Lessons’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 July 1908. 120 Peacock, ‘Our Western Lands’, 652. 121 On public science and need for public support and policy relevance see: Cawte, ‘William Farrer and the Australian Response to Mendelism.’ 122 Noble, Noxious Scrub, 36. 123 See: David Moon, ‘The Environmental History of the Russian Steppes: Vasilii Dokuchaev and the Harvest Failure of 1891’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 15(2005). 124 P. J. Joss, P. W. Lynch, and O. B. Williams, eds, Rangelands, a Resource under Siege: Proceedings of the Second International Rangeland Congress (Canberra: Australian Academy of Science, 1986).

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4 WHEAT

The plains were seed country long before Europeans grew wheat on them.1 Wailwan people tended grasses at the edges of the Macquarie Marshes and across the plains where the gradient levels out and the main channels of the rivers disappear and spill into each other through a vast network of channels and lagoons and small clay depressions forming one great complex ‘alluvial fan’.2 Wailwan dug out and extended channels or blocked them to irrigate open plains. They let the grain ripen over the summer and harvested the cereals with stone knives or by pulling the grasses from the ground. They collected the harvest into large heaps ready for husking and grinding into flour for breads and cakes and for mixing with other foods.3 In the summer of 1846 government surveyor Thomas Mitchell saw rich grass growing in some areas near the marshes. The best, he said, was a species of Panicum (native millet) which ‘was called by the natives “coolly” . . . the gins gather it in great quantities, and pound the seeds between stones with water, forming a kind of paste or bread’.4 Further along, on the Narran River, he saw the dry heaps of grass extending for at least 9 miles. Historian Bill Gammage used accounts of European explorers and surveyors to trace the distribution of galahs with Aboriginal cereal cropping. On the coast, on the higher rainfall inland areas, and along the Murray River tributaries, the plant foods that Aboriginal people ate were tubers, roots and bulbs. In drier country, on the northwest plains, where the rivers were more irregular and tubers weren’t reliable, people ate grains. Gammage noted how the distribution of stone tools for grain processing matched this ecological progression from tubers, to tubers and grain, to heavy dependence on grain.5 Galahs are seed-eating birds and flourished where Aboriginal people grew grain crops. The presence of galahs indicated the protection of grass. Early European observers said galahs were found occupying ‘those vast arid plains’ west of the Blue Mountains or, in Sturt’s words, they were birds of the ‘depressed interior’.6 The term ‘galah’ is a Ngiyambaa word, a language spoken by the Wongaibon and

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Wailwan people of the Bogan and Barwon-Darling Rivers and Macquarie Marshes.7 Large grinding dishes can still be found in these areas. In July 2008 I was in the office of Ngemba man Phil Sullivan, a cultural heritage officer at NSW National Parks at Bourke, where various sizes and types of grinding stones adorned the walls and rested on the floor. They were smooth and flat as a board, about 2–4 centimetres thick and ranged from the size of a dinner plate to as long as your arm. There are no rocks of that size on the black and red clay soils of the plains so they would have been quarried at distant places or at some of the few rocky outcrops rising from the plains, such as Mount Foster at the marshes and Mount Oxley near Bourke and Brewarrina. Phil said this must have made the dishes very valuable. Although the northwest plains were drier and less reliable country compared to the Riverina of southern New South Wales, the Aboriginal people of the Bogan, Macquarie, Narran and Barwon-Darling Rivers created nutritious diets through their harvesting of grains. Tubers were an easier source of nourishment,8 but a cereal-dependent diet did not appear to be a health disadvantage. Mitchell gave positive reports of the Bogan tribe on his first encounter in 1836, and his ‘noble savage’ description of a Wailwan person at the marshes in 1846 is well-known: He was a very perfect specimen of the genus homo . . . His motions in walking were more graceful than can be imagined . . . The deeply set yet flexible spine; the taper form of the limbs; the fullness yet perfect elasticity of the glutei muscles. The hollowness of the back, and symmetrical balance of the upper part of the torso, ornamented as it was, like a piece of fine carving, with raised scarifications most tastefully placed; such were some of the characteristics of this perfect ‘piece of work’.9 In Mitchell’s view, Aboriginal people enjoyed a level of health superior to the civilised races. No wonder, he mused, Europeans had been unable to persuade Aboriginal people to till the earth. He recognised ‘they prefer the land unbroken’ and that when Europeans came to occupy the land on the plains they would cause widespread degradation not seen since ‘man’s fall and expulsion from Eden’.10 In 1898 the amateur anthropologist Hamilton Matthews and commercial photographer Charles Kerry recorded a large Bora ceremony at the Macquarie Marshes. The photos show tall, physically fit men with arms and chests so muscular they would make a modern day athlete envious.

Cereals in marshlands Aboriginal people harvested grains in similar ecological conditions across Australia. Wherever it was hot and the seasons and plant food unreliable, and wherever floodplains and overflow country provided irrigation, people ate grains. Gammage mapped these areas according to his textual sources. He quoted accounts such as that of explorer and surveyor-general Augustus Charles Gregory, who in 1882 wrote:

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On Cooper’s Creek, the natives reap a Panicum grass. Fields of 1,000 acres are there met with growing this cereal. The natives cut it down by means of stone knives, cutting down the stalk half way, beat out the seed, leaving the straw which is often met with in large heaps; they winnow by tossing seed and husk in the air, the wind carrying away the husks. The grinding into meal is done by means of two stones . . . sometimes dry and at others with water into a meal.11 Aboriginal people were growing their grain in a similar manner and similar ecological conditions to the people of Western Asia who first cultivated wheat. Natufian people survived dry times with the use of stone blades and grinding stones to harvest and process the wild cereals of the Fertile Crescent.12 Then people of Jericho in the Jordan Valley, and people of Syria and Palestine started growing wheat along the alluvial flats and near the marshlands of the Euphrates from 10,000 to 7,000 BCE. The wheat was still similar to the wild varieties and they sowed the grain on the flats when floods had receded.13 By 3,000 BCE people on the floodplains of the Nile and Indus valley began growing wheat with similar methods of surface irrigation.14 At about the same time Aboriginal people nurtured grains on overflow country that drained back into the rivers after freshes and floods.15 Aboriginal people made granaries. The seeds were stored above the ground to avoid moisture and rats and mice just as Europeans did. In 1870 near the Finke River, Christopher Giles discovered a native granary. This was a rude platform built in a tree, about 7 or 8 feet from the ground, on this were placed in a heap a number of bags made of close netting. Dismounting, I climbed the tree to examine the bags, and was astonished to find that they contained different kinds of grain, stored up for the winter, or rather the dry season.16 One year later another traveller, A. C. Ashwin, saw at least a ton of grain stored in seventeen shallow wooden containers north of Newcastle Waters in the Northern Territory. It looked like rice, it was grown in flooded country and it tasted good. Sturt had reported seeing rice in that area in 1862. Aswin found more wooden dishes of native rice stored in trees and covered with paperbark.17

The myth of primitive wilderness I have reproduced these quotes at length because they contribute to a picture of diverse Aboriginal land management and adaptation to changing ecological conditions across Australia.18 This is a history that is often overlooked or unknown. A local history published in the early 1980s, reflecting on the poor success of settlers to grow wheat in the Bogan scrub country over a century or so of trying, commented that circumstances had changed: ‘the valley of the Bogan echoes with the toil of an advancing army which carries the flag of agriculture’.19 Agriculture brought

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civilisation, it brought progress. Australians would never legitimately possess the land until it had been tilled. The colonisers applied this principle to Aboriginal people to justify taking possession, but they lived with the knowledge that the empty interior indicated that they too were not proper possessors of land. They were anxious about a foreign power accusing Australia of not making use of the land – usually these were the ‘hungry’ masses of Asia.20 When Governor Bourke took possession of the vacant lands for the Crown using the legal notion of terra nullius in 1835, the British had to use a number of principles to convince the other European powers it was a legitimate claim. Otherwise, Britain faced the possibility that another country could reject it and claim possession instead, if they were interested in doing so. The two major points on which the British could claim sovereignty were that the people were not Christians or ruled by Christians because it was against British law to take possession of a Christian land, and the other was the manner in which the native inhabitants used the land. An editorial in the Sydney Herald in 1838 argued against those who were critical of Bourke’s claiming of Crown lands and who said it was an injustice towards the Aboriginal people: They bestowed no labor (sic) upon the land and that – and that only – it is which gives a right of property to it . . . who will assert that this great continent was ever intended by the Creator to remain an un-productive wilderness? . . . The British people found a portion of the globe in a state of waste – they took possession of it; and they had a perfect right to do so, under the Divine authority, by which man was commanded to go forth and people, and till the land.21 This was a mix of the liberal philosophy of John Locke and his definition of property in Two Treatises of Government (1689): ‘As much as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates and can use the product of, so much is his property’ with Emerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations (1758), which was less influenced by empirical philosophy and relied more on ‘first principles’, hence the Divine right.22 Of course the Aboriginal people of Australia should have the right to enjoy the fruits of their labour and possession of their property, but not if the colonisers judged they did not work the land in any way that was similar to Europeans. It was obvious Aboriginal people did ‘plant, improve, cultivate’, and the accounts of Europeans show they knew it. Tilling of land, the breaking of the soil, turning it over, became the point of difference.23 Some scholars have said it was not a deliberate disavowal of Aboriginal relationships with land. Such were the worldviews and prejudices of the colonisers they lost sight of the reality of the New World – terra nullius was a ‘state of mind’.24 They could not see the methods by which Aboriginal people sustained tribes numbering in the hundreds in semi-arid areas. I am not trying to provide further evidence for what the Australian High Court recognised in 1992; this is about

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demolishing continuing myths about pre- and post-colonisation Aboriginal land management. Consider this view from the local history of the Bogan country mentioned previously: ‘The wilderness home of the primitive races is now one of the world’s granaries; the very land from which a few scattered tribes found it difficult to wrest a living, now helps feed the teeming millions of the world.’25 It never fed teeming millions; it remains marginal cropping country. The Aboriginal people, far from finding it difficult to wrest a living, were healthier than the white settlers who struggled on the plains. In the 1930s a health organisation toured outback New South Wales and found children in a condition of ‘semi-starvation’. At Nyngan 37 out of the 38 babies weighed were suffering from malnutrition.26 Aboriginal people did not have their own agriculture. They did tend to grasslands in a manner that the early European explorers and surveyors recognised. It was rare for Aboriginal people to risk monocultures in Australia’s variable conditions. Their emphasis was on the nurture of mixed food resources. The belief that Aboriginal people had nothing to offer to European agriculture and its adaptations to Australian environments has been a social and ecological loss.

The frontier culture of wheat On 15 September 1900, villagers in Narromine had just settled for the night when the sound of a bell rang out across the town. ‘Roll up, roll up!’ called a man from the main street. ‘An effigy will be burnt at Townsend’s Hotel.’27 A crowd gathered at Townsend’s to see five men take a bundle of straw and ragged clothes up to the veranda, and from there they worked the crowd, brandishing the crude parody of a body with its floppy limbs. They lit firecrackers to add to the spectacle. Then they moved outside to a wooden scaffold they had erected near the hotel and let the sad straw figure hang from a wire. The noise of the rabble attracted the attention of Senior Constable Stewart who was on duty at Narromine that night. He watched as a man named Healy emptied a can of oil over the straw figure, and Lynch apply a lighted match, with Corbett and Carroll assisting.28 The effigy represented T. H. Hassall, New South Wales Minister for Lands. The government had recently cancelled the break-up of Haddon Rig, one of the wealthiest stations in the region with its prime grazing and agricultural land near the Macquarie Marshes. Large landholders were starting to produce wheat on a scale far beyond the capabilities of small landholders and the balloters for Haddon Rig were hoping to break their dominance and get a slice of rich land. That the squatters were now commanding the agricultural market was a point of strong resentment in the west.29 The local newspaper described the burning of the effigy at Narromine as an ‘indignation meeting’ and commented that, had the Minister for Lands been present, ‘no doubt he would have had a very rough handling’.30 Wheat had arrived on the western plains at the start of the twentieth century but it wasn’t going according to plan for the government or for anyone else who had imagined agriculture would bring social stability, a more civilised rural

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culture and better environmental or resource use practices. A few days earlier John Corbett, one of the men involved in burning the effigy, had been brought before the local court alleged to have set fire to a 10,000-bag stack of wheat stored at the Narromine railway station. British export company Bell & Co. had bought the wheat and kept it there insured at their risk, but local landholders Frank Mack and Sidney Austin had grown the wheat. Mack and Austin amassed land on the plains with grazing licenses and gradually converted them to freehold. They had recently become the largest individual wheat growers in New South Wales. Corbett was a small grazier trying to get into wheat cultivation and according to Mack’s testimony he and Corbett had many ‘tiffs’ over the years, including a dispute after which Corbett pulled down the fences on Mack’s run. A labourer told the court he had spoken to Corbett around midnight on the night of the fire. Corbett was drunk and said he was going to ‘burn Mack and Austin out’, to which the labourer suggested he punch them instead.31 All the undesired aspects of the pastoral occupation of the inland plains continued with agriculture and its new dominant commodity: wheat. Politician Hugh Macdonald represented the Coonamble electorate on the plains near the lower Macquarie Marshes and east to the Pilliga forest. He told parliament in 1900 that when he travelled in his district ‘you see a lovely home, with beautiful trees, fine orchards, and great improvements’, however, ‘you can’t go a mile or two in any direction without coming upon the skeleton of another home which marks the demise of a dummy’.32 The lovely home only existed because the landholder managed to ‘get about fifteen other homes from somebody else who are now homeless’.33 Even the government turned out to be corrupt. William Willis, who grew up hawking along the Macquarie, Bogan and Darling Rivers, and who later became the member for Barwon from 1889 to 1904, conspired with Minister for Lands W. P. Crick to take bribes for approving illegitimate leases. In 1905 a Royal Commission into Willis and Crick’s dealings – popularly known as the Land Scandals – revealed many landholders on the plains, especially in the wheat-growing area, were paying thousands of pounds to secure extra holdings under dubious leases. Austin and Mack, the large landholders who Corbett had so much trouble with, were among those who had paid fees to have applications approved. They could extend their lands for grazing by getting less restrictive Improvement Leases authorised while using their best land to grow wheat. By 1903 they were planting 5,000 acres to wheat on their Narromine property alone.34 Wheat was a cash crop luring pastoralists and small unskilled landholders alike. It could be grown across a broad area, was suited to mechanical harvesting, and on the plains the land hardly needed any clearing. Prices were dropping with so much wheat being traded in international commodity markets, and the average Australian yield of about nine bushels per acre was far below average yields in New Zealand or Britain, but these hardly mattered in countries like Australia or the United States where there was easy access to more land. The dry interior gave protection from rust but the variable rainfall, even more than its scarcity, made it

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FIGURE 4.1 ‘Panorama of harvesting wheat,’ Narromine Station, Narromine, 1903. A convoy of five stripper harvesters and ten strippers make short work of 5,500 acres of wheat grown on the property of Mack and Austin.

Source: Melvin Vaniman. A different perspective: Vaniman, the acrobatic photographer, State Library of New South Wales, DL p. 34.

an erratic business. The Australian practice of wheat growing was an opportunistic one in which the landholder planted a crop gambling on a ‘good year’, on the rain falling at the ‘right’ time. Politicians and the Department of Agriculture felt Australian wheat growers were exploiting the soils in a short-term culture of farming. In a book on the history of agricultural commodities in Australia, retired CSIRO agricultural scientist Ted Henzell suggested this ‘frontier-farming mentality’ was pervasive in Australian agriculture and was the reason for the slow adoption of any measures to maintain soil fertility – their mindset was to exhaust the virgin soil before investing in fertilisers or bothering with rotations.35 Despite disapproval over the way landholders were producing wheat, Australian governments continued to encourage wheat growing – with the proviso that scientific agriculture act as a corrective. Farmers could be educated about better practices and take a scientific approach to their whole operation, while department experiments in plant breeding, fertilisers, soil chemistry and cultivation techniques were already helping to stabilise growth and yields, as well as expand the area in which it was possible to grow wheat. The hope was that scientific knowledge about agriculture and the practice of agriculture based on scientific principles would address the perceived negative influences of distance and space, improve the civil culture of rural Australia and prevent further environmental degradation on the inland plains. Wheat was relatively easy to grow on the plains and in a ‘good year’ a landholder could make decent profits, but it was still a speculative endeavour, because, as the local newspapers gave their assessments of the seasons each year, the ‘good years’ did not occur often. What was driving the push for wheat growing? Why, by 1915, was the Australian Government declaring that the ‘wheatgrower is one of the most important necessities in civilisation’? Why had wheat become the ‘king of cereals – the prime essential of civilised life’?36

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Wheat for a white world On the evening of 7 September 1898, experimentalist Sir William Crookes gave a speech which ‘startled a heedless world’.37 Two thousand of Britain’s most important men of science, industrialists and their guests had gathered at the People’s Palace in Bristol to hear Crookes’ Presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Instead of delivering a dreary reading of formal acknowledgements and ruminations on the general importance of science to humanity, Crookes broke with convention and warned his audience about an urgent threat: unless the ‘bread-eaters’ of the world found a way to increase wheat production the white race would be ‘squeezed out of existence by races to whom wheaten bread is not the staff of life’.38 The recent abundance of world wheat supplies was made possible by two factors: nitrate fertilisers and expansion of land under tillage in places such as the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, Russia and India. According to Crookes, both of these means of increased production had reached their limits. The world’s only source of nitrates was the Atacama Desert in Chile and the mines there were almost exhausted. Arable land in the New Worlds would soon be taken up. All civilised nations were in ‘deadly peril’.39 Time was running out. Masses of white people could face starvation within the next thirty years. Crookes cited a publication called The Coal Question as an inspiration for his speech and book titled The Wheat Problem. William Jevons’ The Coal Question, published in 1865, was famous for explaining what came to be known as the ‘Jevons Paradox’: how increased efficiency in resource use would not reduce overall consumption but instead increase consumption as real price declined. The book surveyed the use of coal in the British economy and the finite amount of Britain’s coal stocks. It was less about scarcity and sustainability and the need for alternative energy sources than about the prospect of Britain losing its economic supremacy to the United States, which possessed more resources necessary for fuelling the energy needs of the industrial revolution.40 Crookes, on the other hand, was not examining a single nation’s supply of a resource, but doing a rough survey of the world’s total capacity to supply wheat. Once demand outstripped supply – and the bread-eaters’ population had grown from 371 million in 1871 to 516 million in 1898 – there wouldn’t be any other nation from which to purchase wheat.41 Crookes was predicting a ‘peak wheat’ scenario, and the bread-eaters were not going to fare well. The address received attention around the world. Crookes was already a wellknown ‘man of science’, having discovered the element thallium, invented the radiometer and developed the ‘Crookes tube’, with which other scientists made various discoveries, such as cathode rays and x-rays.42 Why couldn’t the breadeaters simply grow or import some food other than wheat? Crookes was writing at a time when society’s preoccupation with notions of racial difference and hierarchy, underpinned by the application of the Darwinian theory of evolutionary biology, was nearing its peak. The bread-eaters, according to Crookes, were ‘the

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great Caucasian race’, which included ‘the peoples of Europe, United States, British America, the white inhabitants of South Africa, Australasia, parts of South America, and the white population of the European colonies’.43 He was not just grouping together people with a shared cultural preference for bread. Wheat created the white race. It did not just shape white civilisation, but gave white people their intelligence and biological characteristics. As Crookes explained: We are born wheat-eaters. Other races, vastly superior to us in numbers, but differing widely in material and intellectual progress, are eaters of Indian corn [maize], rice, millet, and other grains; but none of these grains have the food value, the concentrated, health-sustaining power of wheat, and it is on this account that the accumulated experience of civilised mankind has set wheat apart as the fit and proper food for the development of muscle and brains.44 Wheat was the dietary link to the world’s great civilisations to which imperial Europe was inheritor. Cultivation of wheat not only founded advanced society and culture, the wheat itself provided the nutritional sustenance for the physical and mental superiority of the bread-eaters. Domesticated wheat emerged from West Asia’s Fertile Crescent, the geographical heart of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and as such it had strong biblical associations. The story of Eden and The Fall are sometimes read as stories about declining resource fertility and the need to work to produce food and store it – or in other words, the rise of agriculture. The bread-eaters put forward many theories for what made them superior. Often they tied themselves up in knots doing it. Some used the idea of race and hierarchy to justify colonialism while others were against colonial mercantilism because the movement of people through Empire networks resulted in the mixing of races. Some suggested skin colour indicated the strength of the biological connection to ancient noble races. White was the most pure and black the most impure, forming a scale from most civilised to most degenerate. To get around the fact that, until the industrial revolution, the most materially and socially advanced civilisations had been in Western and Eastern Asia, Arthur de Gobineau argued in An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races that all the world’s greatest civilisations were created by a white race who migrated into areas such as Persia and the Indus Valley and interbred with the local populations.45 Views of superiority grew during the period of increased trade with Asia. Traders, merchants and travellers were appalled by people who ate dogs and married young. To Europeans the practice of infanticide indicated extreme poverty.46 There were economic perceptions of ‘backwardness’ too. Indian textiles could be made at far cheaper prices than in Europe (which attracted the British East India Company) and this suggested to the traders that Indian wages must be low. They were lower than in Europe, but because of very low food prices in India due to its higher agricultural productivity, real wages ‘for spinners and weavers in southern India

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and Bengal seem to have been at least as high as English ones in the eighteenth century’.47 In The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz reviewed existing sources and evidence to show that standards of living in Asia were possibly higher than those in Western Europe ‘even in the late nineteenth century’.48

Wheat the only true sign of civilisation Wheat in the culture of ancient civilisations and the white people of Europe offered another way of explaining racial difference. Wheat cultivation – as opposed to any other form of agriculture or even harvesting of other grains such as rice or maize or millet – was singled out as the evidence of true civilisation. In 1860 Ohio Secretary of Agriculture John H. Klippart drew on the recent literature of the botanical and natural history of cereals to write what he claimed was the first comprehensive history of the wheat plant. Klippart argued that those who suggested schools or a system of laws was evidence of civilisation were looking at too unreliable a measure because ‘many of the barbarous nations and savage hordes have laws of their own making, and many civilised communities were innocent of schools’. The characteristics of civilisation were not to be found in social institutions, but in the ‘evidence grasped from Nature . . . The true and unequivocal symbol of civilisation, and consequent enlightenment and refinement is, the WHEAT PLANT’.49 Defining the criteria for civilised or not was important in imperial society. Using ‘nature’ as the origin of human difference helped construct powerful justifications for invasion, violence, dispossession and inequality. That wheat created the people and culture was just an extreme version of current theories of co-evolution of agricultural plants and humans. To suggest, however, that the properties of the wheat plant made white people superior to all other races physically and intellectually took it to a new level altogether. As the consumption of wheat gradually came to be viewed as a major biological foundation of the ‘white’ type, how did the Europeans reconcile this with wheat’s geographical heritage in the Fertile Crescent? Even before agronomist and botanist Aaron Aharonson identified a strain of wild wheat in Palestine in 1906,50 the Europeans knew wheat had a long history in Egypt and Persia – apart from the historical texts, the physical evidence of grains were in the tombs they raided. Europe had taken ideas and cultural practices from the ‘Near Eastern’ civilisations – they shared similar institutions and knowledge traditions, it was where their religion came from and they employed similar agricultural production of grains – but the people of this region occupied an ambiguous place in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century hierarchy of races. In nineteenth-century texts, authors usually included Persian- and Arabic-speaking people under the category of ‘civilised races’ and ‘civilised’ was often interchangeable with ‘white’.51 An 1890 German encyclopaedia shows a map of the ‘three great races’ of Caucasians, Mongoloids and Negroids in which the Middle East is grouped under Caucasian, while Russia, Lapland and Finland are Mongoloid, suggesting skin colour was not always the dominant determinant of racial categorisation.52 However, in many texts, discussions

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on the geographical origins of wheat were quickly redirected away from Egypt and Persia to Ancient Greece and Rome, usually with reference to their gods Demeter and Ceres respectively.53 It seems the white type gradually became more narrowly defined during the nineteenth century and especially in the twentieth century as the idea of ‘The West’ emerged.

Gruel-eaters For all the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular and scientific claims about the white race being wheat-eaters, with a lineage from classical civilisation to the civilisation of imperial Europe, the history of agriculture and food preparation in Britain suggests it is more correct to use the term ‘gruel-eaters’. It was not until the seventeenth century that a ‘wheat-eating revolution’ began in Britain.54 The traditional British diet consisted of a mix of grains and legumes such as barley, rye, oats, beans and peas. Most of Britain was too cold to grow wheat and yields varied wildly, from about 4 bushels per acre to about 20, with a low average. Agricultural historian E. J. T. Collins demonstrated that the British local diet and the types of grains farmers grew differed from region to region, and according to season and prices. Collins showed that grain consumption was not primarily through bread, but could be eaten ‘wet and dry, hot and cold, baked and griddled’.55 A typical daily meal in the early nineteenth century for a working-class person was porridge with water or milk, an oat cake and perhaps a piece of cheese for breakfast and supper; an oat cake at dinner and, ‘where taken, for afternoon tea’.56 Diets revealed class relations and nationality. The English preferred wheat when they could get it, the Scottish ate oats, barley and rye, while the Irish ate potatoes. In Australia, retelling the myth of wheat as the foundation of civilisation and the white race was an echo of the English colonial voice.

Wheat for a white Australia After brief and disastrous attempts at creating remote irrigation settlements with artesian water in the late nineteenth century, and after compiling enough data about rainfall and the volumes of Australia’s inland rivers to recognise that surface water irrigation could only occur on a modest scale close to the river beds, dry farming became the ‘greatest hope’ for bringing agriculture to large expanses of inland Australia.57 It became the task of agricultural scientists to make agriculture possible where it was too hot and dry for wheat plants to survive. The New South Wales Department of Agriculture organised Australia’s first national ‘Conference of Wheat-Growers, with Special Reference to Dry Farming’, held in Sydney over four days from 18 July 1910. The report on the conference began with this passage: Where, if not here, has ever any myth come true? Isis’ column at Nysa has fallen, but her golden treasure has borne millionfold, and conquered the world wherever the white men went. When you go through your wheat-fields

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and think of Isis, your great benefactress, you will hear out of the rustle of the ears the gentle voice of the dark-eyed goddess: ‘Rejoice, rejoice.’58 The agricultural scientists saw their work as continuing a legacy that stretched back to the foundation of white civilisation. In the late nineteenth century, colonial governments advocated for agriculture after neglecting it for fifty years in favour of mining and pastoralism.59 They wanted agriculture to act as a corrective to the shifting and unstable frontier culture that marked the pastoral occupation of the inland. The advocates for agriculture wanted to create a civilisation for the interior. Agriculture would need to play its part in maintaining the success of the White Australia policy and the continued possession of a sparsely populated continent. These were the problems society asked its science to solve. The opening address at the dry farming conference mentioned Sir William Crookes’ The Wheat Problem. It was referenced a number of times in the Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales and in newspaper commentary up to the 1930s. Australians could relate to Crookes’ fears. Their soils were poor and required science to make agriculture viable. They also feared hungry non-white populations in Asia who might covet all that land they had failed to use in the interior. Australians may not have legitimately possessed the land according to the principles of Locke and Vattel because they did not till it, but, as one newspaper put it in 1922, ‘the white man has no intention of yielding one jot of his claim to every foot of Australia’.60 The Commonwealth Government used a range of measures, including financial assistance, to encourage British and western European settlers to rural Australia. It produced promotional material extolling the benefits of life in Australia for distribution in Britain. The aim was to fill the empty interior with white settlers. The promotional pamphlets are sources that reveal the image Australia wanted to project to the world in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Between the lines you can read the undercurrent of anxiety and a willingness to be apologetic for the perceived inadequacies of the Australian environment. The pamphlets inverted Australian anxieties about its environment and argued they were positives. Its climate did not cause white bodies to languish – instead, the ‘dry air and sunshine’ were good for the lungs, ‘the exceptionally salubrious climate, and the wholesome conditions of work and recreation, make for bodily strength and health’.61 Australia might not have enjoyed a long tradition of white civilisation or European refinements, but it was ‘not hampered to the same extent by the inheritance of bad, wrong, or inconvenient old things’.62 The people had not degenerated, it assured prospective emigrants, ‘they stand precisely where any other civilised people of this generation stands’.63 One pamphlet, published in the early 1920s, titled ‘Australia’s Offer to the British Boy’, was sorry that there were few Aboriginal people left for the settlers to ‘vanquish’ in the ‘valiant manner of so many of those rollicking stories of life in new lands’.64 This, however, was really just another positive, for ‘it is this absence of hostile peoples which leaves the Australian free to exploit the riches of his immense continent without let or hindrance’.65 The pamphlets performed the same reversals for wheat growing.

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AUSTRALIA

FORTHE

BMTISHBOr ‘Australia’s offer to the British boy.’ Australian governments tried to attract poor, white British boys to Australia to carry out farm labour and settle in the bush. FIGURE 4.2

Source: Department of Immigration. Development and Migration Commission, ‘Australia for the British Boy’. Melbourne, 1929.

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Australian farmers had gained a reputation for being lazy, opportunistic and exploitative. The large landholders did not ‘take wheat growing seriously’.66 They planted a few hundred acres with ‘minimum labour and attention’ and if it turned out to be a good season they would get a good return, if not, they had stubble for sheep.67 If the soil was depleted there was so much land they could move into another paddock. In the immigration pamphlets, this was simply proof of how good conditions were: Australia’s reputation as a wheat-growing country, therefore, has suffered, strangely enough, by reason of the advantages which she enjoys. The very richness of the soil and kindliness of the climate, have tempted many men to adopt speculative methods rather than practice a sound system of cultivation.68 Agricultural and meteorological experts and the landholders agreed drought was the ‘normal’ condition of the Australian interior.69 The pamphlet, however, assured British people ‘it is a false notion that these are the normal conditions even in such parts, and the old conception that the interior of the continent is incapable of production has vanished’.70 The government hoped science could make this characterisation a reality, and perhaps it hoped the agricultural scientists achieved it before too many new migrants discovered the deception. The masses in Asia might have been starving and desperate for land, but supporters of the White Australia policy were more desperate to ensure they did not have access to it. The belief that Australia’s land should be for white people alone overrode the egalitarian ideals tied to the social and environmental agenda of closer settlement. Aboriginal people were excluded. In 1893 a correspondent for Australian Town and Country Journal visited the Brewarrina Aboriginal Mission Station about 8 miles from the main township. He arrived to hear the voices of children singing the hymn ‘Shall We Gather at the River’ and was presented with a large, fresh-baked loaf of homemade yeast bread cooked by one of the Aboriginal domestic workers. The correspondent and other visitors expressed their ‘unqualified belief that it was equal, if not better, than any bread that could be made by a European’.71 On the 2,000 acres the correspondent observed stock in good condition despite the dry season. By 1903, after the worst of the Federation Drought, the pastoral and agricultural operations at the station recovered quickly, and the Aboriginal people set to work, clearing and suckering, repairing the horse and sheep yards, and constructing a new wash-shed and calf-shed.72 In 1907 the stock were in ‘excellent condition’ and shearing and wool sales from the station were bringing in extra income.73 Despite the success of mixed-farming at the Brewarrina Station it was never mentioned in the Agricultural Gazette among the reports of the failures of dry country agriculture at Pera Bore and Coolabah. The powerful identity politics and symbolism of a Great White Continent in the Pacific operated on the ground in shallow, parochial and petty ways. Envy

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white australia

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M A R C H of the G R E A T W H I T E POLICY .

australia the white mans land

safdsgf

gfg

dgfg

MÄR6H

A D V A N CE

AUSTRALIA TW Mx* Ufeni«. IS* F-J

COMPOSE D

by

W. E. NAUWTON, COMPOSER OF

fdsg

"Whise Australia:

1

thont J lit Kvmu!War P4ìj Su» tK World I. World War I. i| World ilnäiin x. mo!War it p«n«f I. !| of AM act. botile -ili tic ¡md World War I. ' Itr loirj; =«=« d lit gfdg

fdg

AM- DINS&A¿£.

fVlcfc O n ì Shilliho.

gfdgf ‘White Australia: march of the great white policy.’ The cover says the song was played at the Australian Natives’ Association National Fete, 31 January 1910. FIGURE 4.3

Source: Cover illustration for the musical score. Composed by W. E. Naunton. National Library of Australia, vn3118296.

appears to have been one motivation that produced what historian Heather Goodall described as ‘a relentless second dispossession’ of Aboriginal people before and after World War I.74 The Aborigines Protection Board faced pressure from the Lands Department to have their land revoked so that local white selectors could take over the land that Aboriginal people had cleared and successfully farmed. ‘The victor would inevitably be the Lands Department and the whites it represented’, wrote Goodall.75 The Board saw an opportunity to increase its revenue and rented the land as well. In 1916 the Commonwealth Government announced that soldiers volunteering to serve in the war would receive land as a reward on their return. However, ‘the rosy promises of the Soldier Settler scheme turned out to be offered only to white soldiers’.76 In Goodall’s research only two Aboriginal men who had served in the war had their applications for land under the scheme approved in western New South Wales. Some Aboriginal men returned from the war to their home towns and were refused soldier settler blocks.

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Bread-eaters saved, for now Sir William Crookes’ fear of mass starvation for the bread-eaters was averted. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch’s research between 1909 and 1913 led to industrial-scale processes for fixing atmospheric nitrogen. Biological research produced plant varieties that could survive more extreme climatic conditions which extended the range of agriculture. The discoveries in biology, underpinned by theories of evolution by natural selection and insights into the mechanism of inheritance, were powerful and productive; however, they became almost inseparable from cultural ideas about racial hierarchy and difference, about human progress and civilisation, and were used as means for arguing that social problems had a predetermined biological or genetic basis. At its darkest, this entanglement would spawn the eugenics movement. Crookes differed from Malthus and the classical economists who followed in the nineteenth century. He did not blame the poor for poverty. He did not believe it was inevitable that the high fertility rate of the poor in the bread-eating nations would lead to famine and economic collapse – he held hope that science could solve the problem of scarcity. Unlike Malthus, who was trying to absolve the wealthy of having to provide assistance for the poor, Crookes’ prejudices were not classbased. His prejudices transcended domestic concerns – they were on a global scale. His arguments naturalised poverty between nations. Poverty in the non-white nations was not the consequence of unequal trade relationships, imperialism, or internal social policies – it was simply a natural state of affairs associated with the increasing populations of those countries and, crucially, their biological inferiority. The poor were viewed as a threat. The political and economic preference to assist the producing classes – which included farmers – over the workers and poor, who were regarded as mere consumers, had dire consequences for the West.77 Science was so successful in defeating scarcity in the early twentieth century that surpluses threatened economic and environmental stability. Commodity prices went into freefall as massive surpluses accumulated in the exporting countries due to a combination of reduction in world trade and the actions of producers, merchants and governments who refused to sell at lower prices and who colluded to deliberately withhold produce from the market. The price Australian wheat fetched on export markets in the 1931–32 season was down by over 65 per cent on 1924–25 prices.78 Governments responded with a hodgepodge of panicked and parochial economic and trade strategies. Australia, encouraged by the Empire Marketing Board, ignored its own mounting surpluses and the ecological constraints of the inland plains, and declared 1930 a ‘Grow More Wheat Year’ in a desperate attempt to compensate for the decline in its export revenue.79 This was the flipside to a strategy attempted several years earlier in response to falling commodity prices in the 1920s, when the United States’ South Carolina proclaimed a ‘Cotton Acreage Reduction Day’.80 Farmers were forced to try extracting more from the land to recoup their losses. The large surpluses and the policies to support producers to produce more contributed to

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FIGURE 4.4 Abandoned railway station at Girilambone (near Coolabah), 2008. The Pera Bore, Coolabah and Nyngan Experiment Farms gradually closed over the first few decades of the twentieth century.

Source: Cameron Muir.

the 1929 crash, the depression that followed and the rural crisis of the 1930s. The social conditions during the Depression contributed to the rise of totalitarianism and militant nationalism in Europe before World War II. Instead of attempting to lift people from poverty and stimulate demand to raise prices, food surpluses went left unsold while millions starved. Modern agriculture has been shaped by prejudices, fear and social division. The entanglement of cultural ideas about race and inheritance with biological knowledge naturalised poverty and inequality. It explains in part the structural inequalities of today’s global agricultural trade. The founding period of scientific agriculture was marred by class tensions, corruption and political and cultural desires that rejected ecological limits. The dispossession of Aboriginal people and dismissal of their knowledge was a missed opportunity for environmental management in Australia. Social dysfunction has consequences for ecological relationships.

Notes 1 The idea of the plains as seed country owes a great debt to the research of Bill Gammage and Mike Smith. See: Bill Gammage, ‘Galahs’, Australian Historical Studies 40, no. 3 (2009); M. A. Smith, ‘The Antiquity of Seedgrinding in Arid Australia’, Archaeology in Oceania 21, no. 1 (1986). My thanks to Bill Gammage for providing me with an early draft of his essay. 2 New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, The Bioregions of New South Wales: Their Biodiversity, Conservation and History (Hurstville NSW: National Parks and Wildlife Service (NSW), 2003). 3 Gammage, ‘Galahs’; Smith, ‘Antiquity.’

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4 Thomas L. Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia, in Search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848), 60–61. 5 Bill Gammage, ‘Galahs [Long Version]’, (Australian National University, 2008). http://dspace.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/47799/1/galahs_long.pdf (accessed on 1 February 2014). 6 ‘Galahs’, 281. 7 Ibid; Tamsin Donaldson, Ngiyambaa, the Language of the Wangaaybuwan, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 8 Smith, ‘Antiquity.’ 9 Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition, 65. 10 Ibid., 66. 11 Gammage, ‘Galahs’, 285. 12 Kenneth F. Kiple, A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 13 Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, New expanded edn. (Chichester, West Sussex, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 115. 14 Ibid. 15 Mike Smith’s research suggests about 3,000 BCE. Smith, ‘Antiquity.’ 16 Christopher Giles, ‘The Adelaide and Port Darwin Telegraph Line.’ Journal of the South Australian Electrical Society 1, no.2 (1888) quoted in Gammage, ‘Galahs.’ 17 Ibid. 18 A comprehensive overview of all the various ways Aboriginal people lived with and worked the lands using accounts from European explorers, oral histories and current practices is vital. Some Aboriginal people lived in permanent huts where the environment was suitable for that mode of living, while others moved across a defined set of areas. They constructed fish traps and made fine quality nets for snaring birds, to name a few such practices. Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth (Allen & Unwin, 2011) is a step towards this. Further research would help destroy more myths. 19 Wilfred Gibson, ed., Nyngan on the Bogan: Centenary Year 1983 (Nyngan, NSW: Nyngan Historical Society, 1983), 18. 20 See: David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939 (St. Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 1999). 21 ‘Crown Lands’, Sydney Herald, 7 November 1838. [Emphasis in original.] 22 Although both Locke and Vattel said God commanded man to ‘subdue the earth’. 23 Even then, this did not exclude all Aboriginal people. 24 Peter Russell, Recognizing Aboriginal Title: The Mabo Case and Indigenous Resistance to English-Settler Colonialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 41. 25 Wilfred Gibson, Nyngan on the Bogan, 18; ibid. 26 ‘Semi-Starvation among Mothers and Children in the Far West’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 May 1931. 27 ‘Mr Hassall’s Effigy’, Daily Liberal and Macquarie Advocate, 3 October 1900, 2. 28 Ibid. 29 R. F. McKillop, Into the Golden West: The Mckillops of Buddah, 1782–1974, 1st edn (Castlecrag, NSW: MWA International, 2007), 107. 30 ‘Narromine [Effigy]’, Daily Liberal and Macquarie Advocate, 15 September 1900. 31 ‘Narromine [Wheat Stack]’, Daily Liberal and Macquarie Advocate, 12 September 1900. 32 ‘[Illegible]’, Daily Liberal and Macquarie Advocate, 11 June 1900. 33 Ibid. 34 ‘Some Wide Wheat Farms’, Advertiser, 18 June 1903. 35 Ted Henzell, Australian Agriculture: Its History and Challenges (Collingwood, Vic.: CSIRO Publishing, 2007), 18. 36 Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Wheat Growing in Australia’, (Melbourne: Commonwealth of Australia, 1915), 5–6. 37 ‘The ‘Wheat Problem’ and Synthetic Nitrates’, Nature 96, no. 2408 (1915): 447.

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38 William Crookes, The Wheat Problem, 3rd edn. (London: Longmans Green, 1917 [1899]), 38. 39 Ibid., 3. 40 Paul Warde, Commentary on Jevon’s ‘The Coal Question’ for Expertise for the Future. Workshop, ANU, Canberra, 7 May 2010. 41 Crookes, Wheat Problem, 7. 42 Some peers disputed his statistics and calculations of land area, population growth and food requirements. In the USA and Canada the urgency of the issue seemed less pressing than in Britain. 43 Crookes, Wheat Problem, 7. 44 Ibid., 29. 45 J.A. Gobineau and H. Hotz, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, with Particular Reference to Their Respective Influence in the Civil and Political History of Mankind. With Intr. And Notes by H. Hotz. To Which Is Added an Appendix by J.C. Nott (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1856). 46 Robert C. Allen et al., eds, Living Standards in the Past – New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3. 47 Ibid., 17. 48 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000). 49 John H. Klippart, The Wheat Plant: Its Origin, Culture, Growth, Development, Composition, Varieties, Diseases, Etc., Etc. (Cincinnati, OH: Moore, Wilstach, Keys, 1860), ix. (Emphasis in the original.) 50 Aharonson thought he had discovered the ancestor of all wheats but the triticum dicocoides he found was probably the progenitor of emmer wheat. Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Wheat Growing in Australia.’ 51 On the inter-changeability of ‘civilisation’ and ‘white’, see: Alastair Bonnett, The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History (Houndmils, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 52 The map is from the 1885–90 Meyers Konversations-Lexikon encyclopaedia. Warrick Anderson in The Cultivation of Whiteness says skin colour was too unreliable as a determinant of racial type. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who developed the term Caucasian, based the type primarily on craniology. 53 For example, Klippart did this in his 1860 book. 54 E. J. T. Collins, ‘Dietary Change and Cereal Consumption in Britain in the Nineteenth Century’, Agricultural History Review 23, no. 2 (1975). 55 Ibid., 106. 56 Ibid., 102. 57 J. E. O’Grady, ‘Our Experiment Farms’, Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 22(1911). 58 New South Wales Department of Agriculture, Conference of Wheat-Growers, with Special Reference to Dry-Farming, Farmers’ Bulletin; No. 42 (Sydney: Government Printer, 1910), 6. 59 C. J. King, ‘The Turn of the Century: 1885–1895’, Review of marketing and agricultural economics 25, no. 3 (1957). 60 ‘Caucasian Australia’, Argus, 16 March 1922, 7. 61 Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Wheat Growing in Australia’, 40. 62 Ibid., 6. 63 Ibid., 5. 64 Commonwealth Immigration Office, ‘Australia’s Offer to the British Boy’, (Melbourne: Albert J. Mullett, Government Printer, 1922), 3. 65 Ibid., 4. 66 Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Wheat Growing in Australia’, 9. 67 Ibid. 68 Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Wheat Growing in Australia’, 10.

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69 For example, see expert evidence and witness statements from landholders in: William John Lyne, ‘Royal Commission – Conservation of Water (First Report – Minutes of Evidence)’, Votes and proceedings of the Legislative Assembly during the session 1885–6 6(1885). 70 Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Wheat Growing in Australia’, 38. 71 ‘The Aboriginal Mission Station’, Australian Town and Country Journal, 22 July 1893, 17. 72 Aborigines Protection Board. Report for the Year 1903. 73 Aborigines Protection Board. Report for the Year 1908. 74 Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972, 2nd edn. (Sydney, NSW: Sydney University Press, 2008 [1996]), 149. 75 Ibid., 163. 76 Ibid., 148. 77 Kathleen G. Donohue, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer, New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 78 Paul de Hevesy, World Wheat Planning and Economic Planning in General (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). 79 See: Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, ‘The Shadow on the Field: Nature and Ecology in the Western Australian Wheatbelt’, in The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and Their Writers, ed. C. A. Cranston and Robert Zeller (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2007); Libby Robin, ‘Ecology: A Science of Empire?’, in Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, ed. Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (Edinburgh; Seattle, WA: Keele University Press; University of Washington Press, 1997). 80 Before the New Deal programmes designed to reduce acreage of low-priced agricultural commodities were introduced in the 1930s, the Southern states made many attempts to voluntarily reduce cotton acreage. See: Gilbert C. Fite, ‘Voluntary Attempts to Reduce Cotton Acreage in the South, 1914–1933’, The Journal of Southern History 14, no. 4 (1948).

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5 DUST

It started with the ‘Rain of Blood’ over Melbourne in 1896. On Boxing Day people left their homes for the open air of parks and streets and seaside to escape the heat of a still and sultry day. Families laid rugs under the shade of trees or on the sand and picnicked and played cricket or just relaxed in the sea-cooled air by the shore. Late in the afternoon a gusting north-westerly struck the city; showers of rain followed and thousands of people were caught in the storm. Their summer clothing displayed the rain’s ‘peculiar characteristic in a remarkably graphic manner’: light-coloured dresses and shirts were covered in red spots, the asphalt streets turned coffee-brown and the trains on the suburban lines looked as if they had ‘just come out of a mud deluge’.1 Everywhere there were signs of this ‘phenomenon of unusual character’,2 which ‘struck terror into a good many hearts’, according to one newspaper.3 The red rain at Melbourne was reported throughout the colonies and numerous letters to the editor advanced theories for its origins. It was said to have reached as far as Tasmania where it turned cherries on the trees bitter.4 It might have been a ‘rare occurrence’ for Melbourne, but according to the Victorian Government’s astronomer, Pietro Baracchi, what they had experienced was the fabled ‘blood rain’ of classical antiquity and medieval Europe. In The Iliad, Zeus cast a rain of blood over the land in honour of his son who was about to be killed in battle. In 582, showers of blood fell over the Paris district and discoloured people’s clothes, compelling them to strip in horror.5 In 1181, blood fell from the sky continuously for three days in France and Germany and a luminous cross was visible in the sky.6 It was a well-known phenomenon in Italy, Baracchi said, and in modern times analysis of the droplets suggested the red soil particles that gave the rain its hue had blown from the Sahara. Baracchi reassured the people ‘there was not anything uncanny about the matter, and that it did not portend anything awful’.7 He advised that on this occasion it was simply dust from the Barrier Ranges that met with a rain storm. The semi-arid rangelands of New South Wales and

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South Australia – overstocked, the vegetation diminished, and the soils parched at the beginning of what would become known as the Federation Drought – were the source of Melbourne’s ‘Rain of Blood’. This was probably the first of the big dust storms that was reported as a strange and portentous spectacle. Wind drove dust regularly in the colonies but most cases seem to have been localised weather events – strong winds swept dust through the streets, heavy traffic broke road surfaces and stirred dust, or whirlwinds lifted dust in narrow bands. In the 1850s, dust storms affected Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide but they were reported with straightforward language.8 There were severe dust storms in inland villages in the 1880s.9 Early in 1896 there were many reports of red dust around New South Wales, including Sydney, and the colony’s Astronomer, H. C. Russell, predicted ‘red rain’.10 He finally received a letter about such a phenomenon in Dubbo during April but it wasn’t until December that year, in Melbourne, that a true spectacle of ‘blood rain’ garnered widespread attention. Reports of massive dust storms that blackened the sky across multiple locations and reached the capital cities were rare in the nineteenth century. Between 1920 and 1950 there was an increase in sensationalised reports of large rolling dust storms that travelled thousands of kilometres. They were often described as worse than the last or the worst in living memory.

‘The dust-storm is coming, early Broken Hill’ (c. 1890s). Reports of dust storms increased after the pastoral degradation of the interior in the late nineteenth century.

FIGURE 5.1

Source: Ion Idriess glass plate negative collection, National Library of Australia, vn6374630.

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A crisis in the West Australia had its own ‘Dust Bowl’ in the 1940s, shortly after the North American one. It was a period of national introspection over the way agriculture was being carried out and saw the rise of the soil conservation bureaucracies across the states. Why did this happen in the 1940s when ecologically the storms had begun to increase years earlier? This chapter tells a different dust story to answer this question from a much wider perspective. It explores the broader political, scientific and ideological context in which ideas about cooperation and the ‘maternal state’ won out over the nineteenth-century capitalist moral philosophy founded in notions of individual competition and survival of the fittest. These cultural ideas were intimately entangled with emerging biological ideas about race, inheritance and population. Some looked to nature for guiding human society but the nature they saw was shaped by their political and moral beliefs.11 After decades of viewing the poor as a drain on society, suddenly the idea of the welfare state, and the desire to lift people from poverty, won influence across the Western world. When you consider the massacres, dispossession, restrictions on ‘coloured’ immigration, geopolitical food policies to save white people, and the general ‘war on the weak’ of previous chapters, it was a radical shift in thinking. What follows is a story that ranges far from dust, to bring together the various interconnected strands of soil conservation, social reform, eugenics, political economy, global food security, human nutrition and the creation of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Dust storms that rolled across vast stretches of the inland to blanket the capital cities of eastern Australia from the 1920s to the 1940s drew the attention of urban populations to the plight of rural people. Dust became synonymous with agricultural crisis and became symbolic of the broken promise of agricultural progress. It drew attention to the failure of government policies to settle people in the interior, to the widening gap between the prosperity of rural and urban centres, and to grazing and farming practices that appeared to be exploiting the environment faster than it could renew itself. After the 1929 Wall Street crash and the depression that followed, it became clear the problem of agriculture was not a local or national one, but a global one. The West’s confidence began to crumble. Fascism and totalitarianism gained momentum in Europe and military tensions between industrial powers were growing. There appeared to be no real answers to an agricultural crisis that saw plummeting commodity prices and food surpluses left unsold while millions starved. Meanwhile, vast losses of topsoil blackened the sky in at least two continents. Politicians and policy-makers were bogged down in debating economic means and had stopped talking about the social purpose of their efforts. World leaders paid lip-service to internationalism but acted in nationalist self-interest. Some began to question how Western nations could retain their supremacy and continue to provide an example of society based on democracy and the liberty of the individual as a model for the rest of the world.

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In the unlikely circumstances, ideas that emerged from two young fields in biology rose to the world stage and promised to restore the social, economic, environmental and moral foundations of Western civilisation. Led by a few passionate advocates in both cases, soil conservation and nutrition science gained influence far beyond their disciplines. Soil conservation, as a subset of ecology, sought to change the way people farmed and for society to reassess how it perceived itself in relation to the natural world. Nutrition science became the basis of an even more radical reform agenda. The Australian diplomat and economist Frank Lidgett McDougall, with the help of former Australian Prime Minister Stanley Bruce, proposed to ‘marry agriculture and health’ in a scheme that would bid to solve the immediate problems of the agricultural crisis, prevent war with Germany, change what people farmed and ate and, in the longer term, restructure the global economy, redistribute wealth and create a more equitable and healthier society. Both soil conservation and public health emerged from ideas based around the scientific nurturing of life that were increasing in influence from the early twentieth century. They were conserving the land and conserving the people.12

‘No inducement to stay’: rural living conditions and the exodus to the city During the 1920s and ’30s the Commonwealth Government spruiked the attractiveness and benefits of life in rural Australia to poor British boys, with promises that a labouring job on a farm meant that ‘you will have started on the high road to success’.13 Australia, the Government’s pamphlets assured, was ‘undoubtedly a pleasant and kindly land for a boy to start the serious part of his life in’.14 Although the work could be tough, ‘life on the land makes a man of you’, and hard work was rewarded.15 Rural people in Australia saw things differently. In a 1923 letter to the editor, a resident of Narromine reflected on the exodus to the city and the poor prospects for people in western New South Wales, commenting, ‘there is no inducement to stay, and nothing to keep them here’.16 Another letter writer complained there was no just reward for ‘good, honest, hard work’ because labouring wages in the city paid more for fewer hours.17 The rural-born politician Henry Somer Gullett, pointed out that, ‘the city man worked 44 hours a week, and his living conditions were better than those of the farm labourer, who worked 60 hours’.18 A priest from Bathurst gave a speech in which he regretted ‘the bitterness created in the minds of rural people by the feeling that wealthy or easy-living people of the cities laughed at them’.19 The inland was a place where one might find people still living in humpies made from bags and tar, such as a family from Dubbo who lived on the banks of the Macquarie River in the early twenties. Typhoid broke out and the town council burned the humpy and its contents.20 Every time dust turned the skies red in the capital cities, it reminded an Australia that had ‘turned its face to the sea’, as one newspaper put it, of the plight of people in the country.21

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Commentators expressed concern over the living conditions of rural people almost as soon as governments encouraged settlers to take up land in the semi-arid districts. One newspaper article recalled the nature of farming in the Australian inland in the late nineteenth century: The farmer’s labour consisted largely in carting brackish water during dry and dreary summer months over dry and dreary miles of barren roads to a joyless home of a comfortless wife and children and starving cattle. There was nothing attractive in the environments of rural scenes upon which the Goddess of Fate appeared to have placed her seal of relentless failure.22 Circumstances improved in the twentieth century but rural settlements in Australia continued to lag behind the cities. Other New World settler societies shared similar concerns for rural people in the face of harsh environments, unfavourable market conditions, and increasing industrialisation of their economies.23 In the United States the first major sociological inquiry into the conditions of rural life – one that is often credited with establishing the field of rural sociology as an organised discipline – was Theodore Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission.24 Roosevelt appointed the Commission in 1908 to investigate the problems of rural living. The main concerns were poor financial returns for the work and products of rural people and social conditions which were ‘far short of their possibilities’.25 The Commissioners included Henry C. Wallace – editor of Wallaces’ Farmer and who later became Secretary of Agriculture between 1921 and 1924 (and whose son Henry A. Wallace served as Secretary of Agriculture under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s) – and Gifford Pinchot, the forester and pioneering conservation advocate. The Commission surveyed tens of thousands of rural people and provided insights into rural life that shaped rural sociology around the world over much of the twentieth century.26 The report soon became of interest and influence to Australian progressive agricultural reformers.27 So too, did the writings of Horace Plunkett, whom Theodore Roosevelt had invited to the United States in 1905 to advise on rural organisation. Roosevelt adopted Plunkett’s ‘Better farming, better business, better living’ slogan that the Australian state Departments of Agriculture copied in turn from the 1920s.28 The rise of rural sociology, and institutional support for it, was recognition that higher yields, the expansion of the ecological range of cropping, and bigger animals, on their own, were not going to solve the problems of rural society and farming.29 By the late 1920s science and industrial technology had been so successful in increasing production that it appeared to be making things worse – massive surpluses were driving commodity prices down. State and federal governments and growers associations in the United States introduced measures designed to reduce production. Rural sociology and economics became competitors to agricultural science as the great fixers and providers of solutions for the ‘rural problem’. Commentary and analysis of the drift to the cities, in Australia and elsewhere, would

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often divide the causes of the problem along gender lines. Men were usually discussed with reference to their economic circumstances. They were said to be leaving to seek better opportunities.30 Concerns about living conditions and ‘comforts’, access to consumer goods, health, family life and rural hygiene were the domain of women. The responses to surveys suggested women were far more dissatisfied with rural life than men.31 This was a challenge for the rural project because women were responsible for raising the next generation of rural inhabitants.

Scientific mothering: expertise for nurturing The connection between women and agriculture has an ancient history. From the Roman goddess Ceres to ‘the May Day and harvest queens, the women garlanded with flowers on Labour Days and the queens of town festivals’, wrote historians Kate Darian-Smith and Sara Wills, women and motherhood and their symbolic representations have long been associated with fertility and nature.32 What was different about the early twentieth century was the increasing influence of scientific expertise in the everyday lives of women on matters concerning reproduction. The ideology and advocacy for scientific mothering developed in the nineteenth century at the same time that science was gaining authority as the primary interpreter of the natural world, and as it gained credibility in the application of its knowledge to society. Social factors such as changing family structures and support networks during industrialisation and mass-migration also help explain why women were seen to need, and sought, advice on rearing children.33 The United States held its first National Conservation Exposition in Knoxville in 1913. Eleven grand neo-classical buildings, painted in brilliant white, were built on the fair’s grounds. The exhibits and lectures pressed the importance of conservation of the natural world for human use, aesthetic enjoyment and for its own sake. It was not just natural resources, however, that needed to be managed with a conservation ethic and scientific expertise, but human life too. One of the eleven buildings housed a Child Welfare Exhibit. It included a women’s restroom, lunch room and a restroom for babies. The walls were adorned with photo galleries and instructional charts illustrating children’s recreation, labour, defects and delinquency. In a model kitchen health workers and nurses demonstrated how to prepare ‘artificial food’ and how to set up a home according to the latest scientific standards. Mothers could take the opportunity to have their children examined for defects in an allglass enclosed room. A woman from the country, intrigued by the glass examination room and expert advice being delivered inside, leant towards her husband and was said to have remarked, ‘There, pa, I told you we’d orter brought ourn’.34 The health departments of Nashville and Memphis, and women’s associations, collaborated with organisers of the Child Welfare Exhibit. Officials collected demographic data from the children who were examined. The data would aid the state and welfare institutions in measuring the health and productive capacity of populations, and to identify problem areas and groups.

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The guide book to the Exhibition on Conservation reveals some of the ties between human health and reproduction and natural resource conservation. It commented, ‘The necessity of conservation of the nation’s human resources is being more and more recognised, and surely nowhere can this be made more effective than at the very beginning of life.’35 Both human and natural resources were national assets. The continued production and reproduction of human and agricultural resources needed expert guidance, planning and state supervision. Science, as the voice of nature, would replace traditional, individual and observational knowledge with a more universal knowledge.36 It could interpret the world on a larger scale and see wider relationships that went beyond private properties or a single individual’s health problems. Science and social sciences could work on the scale of whole landscapes and whole populations. These were the beliefs and principles that supported the creation of a progressive, nurturing and redemptive state. There were significant connections between scientific mothering and progressive conservation rhetoric and politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Historian Stephen Powell described it as maternalistic ideology: an ideology of the nurture of nature.37 Better healthcare, hygiene and nutrition were ways of changing a child’s environment in an effort to improve its mental and physical capacities. The organisers of the Child Welfare Exhibit at Knoxville wanted to encourage universal and positive means of distributing health advice and improving child health and welfare outcomes. Their particular care in not making judgements about the practices of rural and poor women is evident in their refusal to hold a baby competition. The guidebook explained: ‘the unsuccessful mother is not going to subject herself to the humiliation of a contest in which she is a foregone loser, yet she is agonized over her delicate baby and experiments often at the cost of its life.’38 Everyone was entitled to benefit from expert advice and the Knoxville organisers were careful not to condemn any class or type of people. Other social reformers, however, blamed individuals for their circumstances. They saw solutions in the control of genetics and heredity.

Evolution and biologically based social reform Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection described species differentiation as a process contingent upon environmental conditions and variations within individuals and populations. Organisms did not progress towards perfection – they simply had traits that were more or less suited to changing circumstances. On the Origin of Species avoided discussing human evolution, but some of Darwin’s contemporaries began to ponder the book’s implications for humans and society.39 It was ambiguous enough that followers could interpret the theory to legitimise ‘whatever they favoured’.40 Some nineteenth-century classical liberals could see justification for laissez-faire economic transactions and competition between individuals. Those with the most money and power in society deserved to be there

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because they had earned it by surviving ‘the dog-eat-dog’ competitive world.41 ‘Evolutionary theory provided a new, scientific language and a host of fresh metaphors with which to express old prejudices,’ wrote Tom Griffiths.42 Underpinning all the self-serving deformations of evolution by natural selection was the idea of progress – that organisms progressed to higher forms, that there was some purpose driving it, that whoever survived were better than those who did not. They began to ask: ‘if humans had reached their current high estate through a process in which the weak in mind and body were constantly eliminated through natural selection, weren’t public charities, vaccinations, sanitary measures and the like counterproductive?’43 Public health and welfare measures appeared to be stalling and even reversing the direction of evolution. Compounding the problem, the poor, the weak and the least fit were reproducing faster than the elite. Eugenicists argued poverty, criminality, immorality and mental health problems ran in families and therefore must be hereditable traits. The emerging science of genetics suggested prediction of characteristics was possible from one generation to the next, so the eugenics movement advocated for programmes that

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FIGURE 5.2 ‘Some people are born to be a burden on the rest.’ Flashing light exhibit at Fitter Families Contests. Top panel: this light flashes every 15 seconds. Every 15 seconds $100 of your money goes for the care of persons with bad heredity such as the insane, feeble-minded, criminals and other defectives. Panel A: This light flashes every 48 seconds. Every 48 seconds a person is born in the United States who will never grow up mentally beyond that stage of a normal 8-yearold boy or girl. Panel B: This light flashes every 50 seconds. Every 50 seconds a person is committed to jail in the United States. Very few normal persons ever go to jail.

Source: American Philosophical Society, AES, Am3,575.06,44.

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would attempt to increase the reproduction rates of people deemed to possess superior traits and restrict the reproduction of people said to possess inferior traits. ‘Eugenics always had an evaluative logic at its core,’ wrote Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, ‘some human life was of more value – to the state, the nation, the race, future generations – than other human life’.44 Baby competitions had been used to promote mothercraft in general since the nineteenth century in an effort to lower infant mortality rates, but by the twentieth century many were becoming associated with a narrower, heredity- and genebased health reform movement that tried to select and venerate the ‘fittest families’.45 In the view of some American and Australian reformers, it was the most intelligent and most enterprising rural people who left for the city, leaving behind the least capable, the narrow-minded, the degenerates and the defective.46 The shift in the emphasis of baby competitions towards fitter family contests in the first quarter of the twentieth century occurred at the same time that people were beginning to ask whether the principles of selective stock and plant breeding for improving future generations could be applied to society. As one agricultural society member in the United States put it in 1911, ‘you are raising better cattle, better horses and better hogs, why don’t you raise better babies?’47 Supporters of eugenics published books with titles such as The Human Harvest and Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding.48 This was a conflation of animal and human breeding made possible by new knowledge in Darwinian biology and studies into the mechanism of inheritance. Stock and plant breeding analogies were also a way of attempting to gain wider acceptance for their ideas through innocuous-sounding concepts with which rural people were familiar and could understand.49 Who would argue that selective stock and plant breeding had not delivered improvement?

‘Everywhere, nowhere, and eventually somewhere’ In Australia, eugenics was ‘everywhere, nowhere, and eventually somewhere’, argued historian Stephen Garton.50 Australians were obsessed with knowledge in biology and its implications for society. They were gripped by anxieties and concerns over racial hierarchy, population and invasion, and the effect of the environment on bodies and culture. Eugenics ideas influenced prominent Australian politicians, doctors, academics, feminists, trade unionists, moralists and nationalists.51 The eugenics movement, however, achieved little legislative success for greater government control over reproduction. A few bills were introduced into state parliaments, notably one authorising compulsory sterilisation for mental defectives in Western Australia, but the bills either failed to pass upper houses or were abandoned.52 Considering Australian society’s preoccupation with race, environment and biology, one might have expected the eugenicists to have been slicing out the reproductive organs of the poor and vulnerable from Perth to Sydney, from Darwin to Hobart. The reason for the eugenics movement’s failure to carry out invasive interventions is due to some uniquely Australian circumstances and anxieties.

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In a pamphlet published in 1915, Australia claimed, rightfully, that it was among the world’s most progressive and democratic nations, and its workers’ rights and social welfare legislation led the world (for its white inhabitants, at least).53 Did the cultural preference for progressive policies mean it was always more likely that the less authoritarian and moderate eugenic measures, such as physical and mental hygiene, marriage counselling, maternal welfare programmes and physical culture – or ‘reform eugenics’ as some historians have labelled it – would be more influential?54 Perhaps this played some role. Although, Sweden’s notorious pursuit of ‘hard’ eugenic interventions suggests a commitment to progressive social democratic ideals did not guarantee the adoption of ‘soft’ eugenic reform.55 The reason eugenics failed to achieve more in a country that might otherwise have been enthusiastic for the movement’s more extreme measures lies in Australia’s proximity to Asia. In the same pamphlet Australia boasted it was ‘essentially a White Man’s Country’, with over 90 per cent of its population of nearly 5 million being of British descent.56 Its anxieties about being ‘swamped’ by immigrants from Asia led the first national parliament to introduce the White Australia policy. One reason why there was less urgency for invasive eugenic interventions in Australia was because the nation’s ‘gates to heredity’ were closed at the border. The restriction of all ‘coloured’ immigration kept the racial threat external.57 Aboriginal people were not viewed as a significant threat to Australia’s racial hygiene because they were regarded as remnants of a dying race or their biology so weak the ‘half-castes’ could be bred-out by mixing with the superior white race.58 Another reason was Australia’s enduring paranoia about its small population within a large landmass. The Australian people had tilled so little of the land that it feared hungry and covetous Asian masses would feel justified in invading. Australia introduced various measures to increase its white population, such as a maternity allowance in 1912 (similar to today’s ‘baby bonus’) and encouraging poor children in Britain to take up agricultural work in Australia. In 1922 the United States media noted Australia had allowed Italian immigration, commenting that it had ‘abandoned hope of an entirely Anglo-Saxon Australia in order to make sure of a Caucasian Australia’.59 This act would hasten the growth of the population, said the Evening Sun newspaper, proving Australia was a nation in which ‘the white man has no intention of yielding one jot of his claim to every foot of Australia’.60 The prominent eugenicist, Charles Davenport, was critical of schemes to send poor children to work on farms in the United States’ Midwest, warning that exporting ‘bad germ-plasm to good farming communities’ might have the ‘same sad effects’ as transporting convicts from London to Australia did.61 A small population and the threat of invasion worried Australia more. All of its welfare measures were available to any white person regardless of their ‘fitness’.62 The eugenics movement was not going to find much support for any programme that might slow rates of reproduction. For Australians, a nation of depraved, drunken and mentally defective white people was preferable to a nation shared with Asian people.

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From a war against the weak to feeding the world Did the ‘war against the weak’, as Edwin Black described it, end in the 1930s as it became clear the science legitimising eugenics was unsound? Did the eugenics movement quietly fold after World War II when Nazi atrocities committed in the name of eugenics were revealed? Or did eugenics morph and renew itself, continuing right through to the present, in population control policies, pre-natal diagnosis and genetic screening? Historian of science and medicine, Alison Bashford, argues in her summary and historiography of post-war eugenics, that even though current ‘reprogenetics’ measures are choice-based and at an individual level rather than population level, they are still measures that the early eugenicists would recognise and approve.63 For Bashford, eugenics has a continuous history to the present, albeit one that has waxed and waned. Bashford’s perspective offers more for historians, and more for what society might do with, or gain from, its history. It is a nuanced perspective that leaves the possibility of further examination open. It is mindful of the reality that the ‘evaluative logic’ that was at the core of eugenics continues to thread its way through human culture and its science. There are always risks for the least valued lives, no matter how many rights of the individual are officially enshrined in law. It is a cautionary history that urges continual interrogation of the ethics and politics of biological knowledge and its application to society. Eugenics drew on a biological science that emerged only a decade or so after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Evolution by natural selection wasn’t just a new development or discovery in a field of science. It demanded a new worldview. In the shadow of this radical shift experts colluded with the state to apply new knowledge to whole populations with the intention of eradicating particular ‘types’ of people for a social reform agenda. Executing this agenda while so much remained unknown about the science underpinning it is part of what makes early eugenics unique. Perhaps what is more remarkable is the way some leaders challenged the judgemental individualist thinking that helped create a science of ‘hard’ eugenics. After half a century of cultural prejudices entangled with new ideas in biology which saw massacres, assimilation, segregation, Aboriginal people denied soldier settler blocks, the securitisation of food based on race and sterilisations of the poor and vulnerable in a ‘war against the weak’, the idea of lifting people from poverty via a programme of worldwide agricultural reform and nutrition science, was extraordinary.

Freedom from want In the winter of 1941, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt reported on the state of the Union before a joint sitting of Congress, but his words were addressed to the world. Most of central and western Europe had been seized by the Nazi dictatorship. The Enlightenment tradition had fractured in the early twentieth

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century and its inheritors were warring over the rise of fascism and totalitarianism. It was a speech weighed with a sense of fragility and an open fear for what was at risk. Roosevelt asked Congress to approve extra spending for a massive expansion of the United States’ weapons manufacture and then pledged his country’s support for Britain. In the shadow of the 1929 stock market crash and the depression that followed, he warned that social and economic conditions were at the root of unrest that led to the fall of democracies. America, therefore, should widen the coverage of its aged-pension, unemployment assistance and medical care. It was a speech that outlined an alternative to the ‘new order of tyranny’, one that promised a better future, a vision of what the democratic West could become and what it could offer the world.64 This was the extraordinary part of the speech and this is what it is remembered for. Roosevelt listed four ‘essential human freedoms’ – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear – not just for the people of the United States, but ‘everywhere in the world’.65 The third freedom, freedom from want, broke with classic liberalism of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.66 ‘Classical liberals had been able to imagine few systems less liberal than one that would guarantee freedom from want’, wrote historian Kathleen Donohue.67 Government regulations and welfare payments that provided assistance to the workers and the poor would mean that those who did not produce would be living at the expense of those who did. Laissez-faire did not mean no or little government: it meant government structures, policies and legislation that enhanced the rights, protection and power of producers, explained Donohue. The supporters of laissez-faire economic policy ‘were more than willing to see government provide tariffs, railroad subsidies, and internal improvements, all of which benefitted producers . . . What they condemned was intervention on behalf of consumers’.68 The producers were the most noble and virtuous, and contributed most to the generation of wealth. The consumers took money that could be reinvested in production.69 The 1929 crash weakened the authority of the ‘producerist’ philosophy. Roosevelt’s 1941 speech signified a change in attitudes towards the poor and to the role of consumers in the economy. Only a decade before, the poor and least powerful were judged as morally inferior and a drain on society. Any relief provided was unnaturally weakening the gene pool of humanity. The task of government had been to protect producers in the economy; now Roosevelt had declared one of its primary responsibilities was to protect consumers. It set an agenda for the demand-driven, high employment and government-managed economic policy that dominated from the 1940s to the 1970s. Roosevelt’s agenda was more than an economic ideal, it was a moral vision for humanity. It was about the West’s relationship with other nations and the mutual benefits of raised standards of living, the inherent good of human security and peace through international agreement. The 1941 State of the Union address is known as the Four Freedoms speech. It provided the principles and momentum for international institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank and World Health Organisation, and for the

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creation of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Rights (which was a document and set of principles close to Eleanor Roosevelt’s heart). In 1943 at Hot Springs in Virginia, Roosevelt convened the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture – the UN’s first substantial meeting with a large council – commitments at which led to the establishment of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The speech is remembered in an eponymous memorial, a park, a series of artworks, an institute and awards.

ours to fight for

freedom from want ‘Freedom from want.’ Artist Norman Rockwell was inspired by Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 ‘Four Freedoms’ speech – the idea of freedom from want was a turning point in social and economic policies. Rockwell created a series of posters for the Office of War Information (United States). FIGURE 5.3

Source: Norman Rockwell, 1943. NARA Still Picture Branch, United States National Archives and Records Administration.

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Few remember – or perhaps even knew at the time – that a fruit farmer from Australia played a role in shaping the international aspects of Roosevelt’s vision for Freedom from Want.

An ‘expert on Empire Trade and an artist at propaganda’ When twenty-five year old Frank McDougall decided to become a farmer and move to the new irrigation settlement of Renmark in South Australia’s Riverland in 1907, his chosen town wasn’t even connected to a train line. Unlike Greenwich, McDougall’s birthplace, Renmark certainly wasn’t the global coordinator of modernity’s time and space. Its dry, hot and scrubby flats boasted no university or manufacturing. Tanned scrub-cutters and fruit-pickers would cool off and bathe in the Murray River’s long and wide meander sweeping round the edge of town. Red dust accentuated the creases at the corner of the townsfolk’s eyes and drifted silently through their airy huts and settled on everything. Renmark did share something in common with the German city of Darmstadt where McDougall had gone to university – both were made possible by post industrial revolution agriculture. The sandy, nutrient-poor soils of each place needed industrial fertilisers to support agriculture and large populations, while semi-arid Renmark needed the additional input of water supplied by modern irrigation methods. On the 80 acres he had cleared, McDougall built a two-room shack and grew apricots. Stone fruits originated in temperate Asia. The ‘Armenian apple’, or apricot, was cultivated in the highlands of Western Asia where cool winds blew down from the mountains. The sweet golden flesh became a delicacy and was traded on the cross-continental silk routes by merchants and nomads and soldiers to be displayed at the great marketplaces of the cities and oasis towns in China, the Indus valley, Persia and the Mediterranean. The fruit was displayed alongside fine fabrics, spices, jewellery, perfumes and medicines, and was eaten while traders conversed on the latest philosophies and knowledge that would become the basis of the modern world. In Renmark, at the end of the summer harvest, the discarded stones of McDougall’s dried apricots accumulated around his shack until the paths were paved with them.70 Each new stone marked the slow and quiet passing of time at the bottom of Australia. Perhaps he yearned to be at the centre of things again. McDougall enlisted in the army and served in Egypt and France with the 1st Anzac Cyclist Battalion.71 On his return he wasn’t content to simply grow fruit, but instead became a member of the board of the Australia Dried Fruits Association and travelled to England to represent growers’ interests. In 1923 he formed a close relationship with conservative Australian Prime Minister Stanley Bruce who sought McDougall’s advice on a range of economic, political, agricultural and trade matters. He wrote memos, pamphlets and pseudonymous articles in leading British newspapers on the benefits of imperial preference, which was a system that basically created reciprocal tariff reductions between British colonies and dominions. In 1925

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he published Sheltered Markets, a book that ‘refined and popularised’ the concept of imperial preferences.72 He was a skilled communicator, and the analogy he used to explain imperial preference was that of a ‘weir which obstructs the natural flow of trade. Foreign trade must flow over the top of the weir while we could flow through the preferential sluice gates’.73 Ever since Britain repealed the Corn Laws in 1846 it had been a far more committed supporter of free trade than the United States and especially more so than Europe. Trade liberalisation was devastating for poorer farmers as they were left with no protection from the masses of grain cheaply produced and shipped from the United States and Russia, and increasingly Argentina, Canada and Australia. Protection still held a lot of support in Britain, and by the early twentieth century doubts grew over Britain’s capacity to compete with more advanced industrial technology produced in the United States and Germany, an area in which Britain had dominated.74 Compounding the doubts were concerns over Britain’s reliance on trade credit from India: 73 per cent of its trade credit came from Asia in 1910 and without this it probably wouldn’t have been able to support free trade.75 To address these pressures, Colonial Secretary Leo Amery under Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin established the Empire Marketing Board in 1926. Officially its main functions were to fund scientific research on a competitive grants basis, as well as market Empire products. It produced posters depicting production and trade scenes from across the Empire. These were designed to change the poor image of ‘empire’. An art critic for the Times commented in 1934 that until the Board had commissioned the posters, the words ‘Empire’ and ‘Imperial’ were ‘fatally compromised’ and associated with ‘too many distasteful, selfish, money-making schemes’.76 The posters portrayed calm pastoral and agricultural scenes, and development projects creating mutual benefit. The Board’s ultimate aim was to sure up markets for Britain’s out of date industrial products and persuade colonies and Dominions from trading outside the Empire. McDougall was appointed to the Empire Marketing Board when it was created. Historian John B. O’Brien, in one of the few essays on McDougall, described Empire trade as policy that was ‘narrowly focused, restrictive, combative and essentially pandered to xenophobic nationalistic instincts and pursuits that could best be realised within the limits of a confined section of the world and to hell with the rest’.77 This was a somewhat harsh assessment and could have applied just as much to the actions of all the other Western trading nations. After the 1929 crash in particular, the trading countries entered a tariff war to protect domestic producers and terms of trade. European countries already employed steep tariffs, and the Hoover administration’s Smoot-Hawley decision to impose tariffs in the United States sparked a round of worldwide retaliatory tariff increases. Most of the industrial European countries were net importers of food but they increased tariffs so much to protect their provincial peasant farmers for cultural and nationalist reasons that they had become self-sufficient in food.78 By 1931 France and Italy had a tariff equivalent of about 16 gold Swiss francs per quintal of wheat, the United

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highways of empire

buy empire goods from

home and overseas

‘Highways of Empire.’ The Empire Marketing Board was established in 1926 to promote scientific research and trade within the British Empire. It commissioned posters to portray the Empire positively and to encourage consumers to buy from Empire nations. FIGURE 5.4

Source: ‘Highways of Empire: buy Empire goods from home and overseas’, Library and Archives Canada/Department of Industry, Trade and Commerce fonds/c109480.

States 8, and Sweden 5, while Britain had none.79 Britain was exposed in these circumstances but the Empire Marketing Board was seen as a way of countering its disadvantage while not abandoning the principle of free trade. It became apparent the Empire Marketing Board’s efforts were failing by the early 1930s. There was only a modest increase in Empire trade as a proportion of British trade and the scheme had done little to address the economic depression.80 McDougall was involved in a number of economic conferences on the Empire’s economic position, the most important of which was the British Empire Economic Conference in 1932, also known as the Ottawa Conference, at which Britain decided to abandon free trade and adopt a direct system of imperial preference. The Ottawa agreement failed to foster greater trade connections between Empire Dominions and Colonies and there was little prospect for increased investment in Empire development projects. All it seemed to achieve was to introduce tariffs and other trade barriers to Britain for the first time.81 Britain resented the restrictions the agreement imposed on its capacity to seek and establish markets outside of the Empire.82 Ottawa was ‘little more than a series of acrimonious bilateral bargaining sessions between the Dominions and an increasingly bitter United Kingdom’, wrote economic historian Sean Turnell.83

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The Ottawa agreement should have been a triumph for McDougall, but he lost faith in the model he had helped found, promote, and negotiate, almost the instant it was signed. Eight years before Ottawa, McDougall had been walking in Melbourne’s Botanical Gardens, and asked himself, ‘What am I?’, answering, ‘an expert on Empire Trade and an artist at propaganda’.84 As he began to realise imperial preference was flawed and – in the end – doomed, his doubts over his own contribution to society returned.

The ‘marriage of health and agriculture’ Frank McDougall was dismayed by the system he had helped create. The Ottawa agreement failed to address the Depression and Britain dismantled it. The World Monetary and Economic Conference in 1933 ‘failed to agree to anything save the desirability of the restriction of production in a poverty stricken world’, wrote McDougall.85 He was astonished by this. McDougall abandoned his views on imperial preference and tariffs. He thought it was immoral and economically senseless to restrict production in a world of poverty and hunger. Instead of protecting the producer, he argued for a plan to increase the capacity of consumers to purchase the surplus, thus stimulating demand. It would be based on a restructure of the purpose of agriculture. It could no longer be treated as a set of commodities for balancing terms of trade – the global agricultural system would be redesigned to provide the world with more nutritious foods. McDougall had become good friends with the world’s leading nutrition scientist, John Boyd Orr. His nutrition agenda was drawn directly from knowledge he gained through his friendship with Orr. A healthier society, combined with other efforts to increase living standards, would increase world demand, stimulate industry, end the problem of surpluses and bring the world economy out of depression. In a briefing paper of 1934 entitled ‘The Health and the Agricultural Problems’ McDougall drew on the nutrition literature to argue that the emphasis of agricultural production should shift from high-energy grains to the most nutritious and vitaminrich foods, such as fruit and vegetables, milk and eggs.86 Food processing and distribution – the middlemen that Hoover started subsidising and Franklin Roosevelt continued to subsidise – should be ‘conducted more on the lines of public utility services’ rather than profit-making businesses.87 McDougall was suggesting public investment and competition or takeover of private industry. Food production should be considered a public utility like domestic water supply. McDougall pointed out that food processors in the United States and the United Kingdom continued to make large profits during the worst of the Depression, when farmers were losing income and people had less money for food. He said the big companies should place ‘public service on at least as high a plane as profits’, which was a proto‘double bottom line’.88 He even included ideas for how milk might be delivered by a system of pipes and distribution centres, following the model of petrol stations. Former Australian Prime Minister Stanley Bruce took the paper to the League of Nations, promoting it as a plan to ‘marry health and agriculture’. The long-term

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aim was to restructure the global economy, redistribute wealth and create a more equitable and healthier society. Members were intrigued by the reversal of conventional thinking. The historian of international development Amy Staples wrote that its originality ‘rejuvenated’ the League of Nations and caught the imagination of a Depression-weary world.89 Before long, twenty countries had established national nutrition committees, India reduced its tariffs on milk and Estonia did the same for fruit and vegetables. It was extraordinary, it was radical and it gained worldwide attention. It became the League’s best-selling pamphlet.90

McDougall’s dinner with Roosevelt and the creation of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization As war with Germany loomed, McDougall argued that food programmes could bring peace. It could alleviate the grievances of those causing social unrest in response to the poor economic conditions of the 1930s. This approach was labelled appeasement and failed. During the war McDougall continued to pursue his nutrition agenda. He prepared a memo for the United States Department of Agriculture in 1942, and by chance, Eleanor Roosevelt read it. In September that year he was invited to dinner with the President. McDougall claimed most of the conversation was taken up by Franklin Roosevelt trying to determine a name for the United Nations after the war. At one stage, when ‘the president momentarily became absorbed in the contents of his plate’, McDougall suggested that the United Nations should have something to do, such as an international agency for food and agriculture.91 In February 1943, Roosevelt called the first conference of the United Nations at Hot Springs, Virginia; its subject was food and agriculture. It seemed like a triumphant moment but England, followed by the United States, began to put strategic interests before international cooperation on agriculture, food and health. Britain and the United States began to perceive the global nutrition agenda pushed by McDougall and Orr as a threat to their domestic and strategic interests. Orr’s 1936 study, Food, Health and Income, so embarrassed Britain that it excluded him from the 1943 conference on food and agriculture at Hot Springs. McDougall found a way to include the nutrition scientist. He screened a film called The World of Plenty that featured Orr asking, ‘What are we fighting for?’ Amy Staples described the reaction: ‘When Orr answered his own question by arguing for a war against want, starting with food, the delegates rose to their feet and cheered.’92 In October 1945 an interim commission met for what would be the first of the UN FAO’s regular meetings. Britain only granted Orr observer status. The British delegates conspired with the United States’ Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and Assistant Secretary of State Will Clayton to diminish the organisation’s responsibilities. Its role would be to gather statistics and offer advice. One year later, to the extreme disappointment of the British and North Americans, Orr was the last candidate standing for the position of first director-general of the FAO. While director-general, he proposed a more activist World Food Board. He wanted it to

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create vast food banks, stabilise prices, oversee trade agreements concerning agricultural commodities, advise on the most nutritious foods to grow, redistribute food and provide generous assistance to farmers in developing countries. This was McDougall and Bruce’s marriage of health and agriculture. Britain opposed Orr’s proposal because it was dependent on food imports and any plan that might lead to higher food prices would be detrimental to its weakening economy. Raising farmers’ incomes in developing nations was not its priority. The United States was opposed because it saw its future as dependent on the generation of wealth through opening markets for its exports. It wanted the new International Trade Organization that it had played a significant role in founding to determine trade agreements without any interference from the World Food Board. It wanted trade to protect its prosperity, not to lift the poor from poverty. The United States also thought the proposal would obstruct its national security agenda and the pursuit of its long-term strategic interests. The World Food Board would have limited ‘its ability to use food aid to bring third-world nationalists into the US fold, and its garnering of international goodwill through its food initiatives’,

FIGURE 5.5 Frank McDougall (left) at the San Francisco Conference. The San Francisco Conference, 6 June 1945. On the left is Frank Lidgett McDougall representing the United Nations Interim Commission on Food and Agriculture. On the right is Robert B. Schwenger, Assistant Secretary of Commission II/3. McDougall had travelled far since his days as a fruit farmer in South Australia.

Source: UN Photo 169015.

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Staples wrote. The State Department described the proposal for a World Food Board as ‘disturbing’.93 Knowing the World Food Board was popular among developing nations – including India – Britain and the United States worked quietly to defeat it. McDougall, Bruce and Orr believed international cooperation and the economic and social advantages of a mutually beneficial global agricultural system would define a new era of peace. The dominant power, the United States, pursued a parochial nationalist agenda centred on economic conflict, military supremacy and the promotion of a false free trade. Food became just another instrument of its foreign policy.

‘Don’t forget the soil’ Also at Hot Springs in 1943 was pioneering soil conservation advocate and head of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service Hugh Hammond Bennett. He gave a speech in which he admonished the other delegates for their enthusiasm for increased production and food for the world because they had not given enough consideration to whether it was ecologically possible. Soil was being taken for granted. Bennett said the United Nations might be interested in making agreements and policies about food distribution and increasing production, but if the soil was ‘washed or blown away’ there would be no policy the United Nations could adopt to bring it back. ‘One fundamental mistake we dare not repeat, if our civilisation is to survive, is the mistake of mistreating our agricultural lands,’ said Bennett.94 Bennett was frustrated that food was being discussed everywhere he went. It was impossible to grow food without soil. He felt the nutrition agenda was overshadowing the soil agenda. After the war he tried to gain more attention for soil conservation by positioning it within national security debates. Failing to care for the soil could result in ‘national weakness and decline’. Soil conservation could defend western civilisation against ‘the enemies of democracy, which appear to be girding themselves for new marches against our kind of government’.95 Eventually, national security would overshadow both the soil and the nutrition agendas.

An Australian Dust Bowl? In the final year of World War I, a severe drought hit eastern Australia. There was a brief respite for the returned soldiers taking up small agricultural blocks in the interior as part of the Soldier Settlement Scheme in 1920 and 1921 before drought returned. In 1922 red rain fell over Melbourne again but without the panic of the previous event.96 The dust contained diatoms – microscopic plant organisms that live in wet environments – which showed the dust came from alluvial flats and dry lakes. The types of minerals suggested it came from far to the north of Victoria, in the semi-arid and arid inland where there was no agriculture but where grazing continued to degrade the grasses, waterways and thin soils.97 Then, on Christmas

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Day the same year, a dust storm began near Cobar in western New South Wales and rolled across the state. The residents of Cobar had to rush for shelter as blackred clouds enveloped the town. Men riding could not see their horses’ heads and it was impossible to see in the streets. It was so dense that lights had to be kept burning inside homes. ‘It had the fury of the simooms of the Sahara and the Arabian deserts’, reported the director of mining operations, but fortunately, in the era of White Australia and racial science, ‘it was unaccompanied with the pestilential germs that are carried in those dreaded storms’.98 A few days later, on New Year’s Eve, as the residents of Dubbo took stock of the bad year they had suffered, the storm reached the town and ‘raged with the noise of a tempest’ and ‘deluged’ everything with dust.99 At Trangie weatherboard homes were blown apart and possessions strewn across the district. Pots and pans could be ‘had for the picking of them up’.100 One man found his new suit a quarter of a mile away. Pepper and fruit trees were uprooted and the brick walls of the new Masonic Hall collapsed.101 Across the plains people came out from hiding to find inches of dust deposited over their beds and on the floors.102 Was this just a result of drought and stronger than usual winds, or were the dust storms getting worse? Considering the exchange of population between the inland and urban centres it was possible some people would not have lived there long enough to have experienced such storms. The newspapers, however, recognised this and interviewed the oldest residents. Elderly residents of the west said they remembered stronger gales but ‘never were the dust clouds so dense’.103 The director of mining operations had lived in Cobar for nearly thirty years and said it was ‘the worst storm he had ever experienced’.104 In Dubbo the local newspaper reported it was ‘the most prolonged visitation of the kind that has ever been experienced in the district’105 and in Trangie it was a dust storm of intensity ‘not in the recollection of the oldest inhabitant’.106 Previously there were long gaps between large dust storms, but in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s they struck towns and capital cities every few years.107 More dust carried by the wind meant the ultra-fine particles that travelled long distances were more noticeable. In 1928 the schooner Margaret W arrived in Sydney with the captain reporting the vessel had encountered a violent dust storm 400 miles off the coast.108 After a dust storm hit Sydney in 1948, a pilot 600 miles out to sea saw ‘a solid wall of dust, hundreds of miles thick and 8,000 feet high’.109 Dust from Australia’s red interior was visible in the air and snow in New Zealand at least seven times in the twentieth century.110 Australia did not just have a ‘Dirty Thirties’ like the United States and Canada – it had a dirty thirty years. Dust storms were increasing in frequency, the Great Depression hit hard and evangelical soil conservationists attracted public attention, but Australia’s cultural iconography of rural decline, land degradation and economic collapse were never associated and confined to a single ‘event’ like the Dust Bowl of Northern America. The boundaries – cultural and ecological – are more diffuse. Despite the similarities during the period of agricultural mechanisation and expansion into New World drylands, there were significant differences in the underlying circumstances.

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In North American popular culture and academic literature the Dust Bowl is associated with the development of cropping on the plains in the early twentieth century.111 In Australia it is difficult to prise apart the interrelated effects of pastoralism, agriculture and climatic conditions. Unlike the Great Plains of the United States, on which herds of buffalo had roamed, Australian grassland plains had not been subject to heavy grazing herbivores. When sheep and cattle entered the semi-arid interior of Australia it was a shock to the grasslands ecology. Australian pastoralism drove a host of animal and plant extinctions and degraded the plains permanently.112 Soil erosion in the west as a consequence of overstocking became a professional and public concern as early as the 1880s. Recent research shows that grazing on natural grasslands has caused the rate of erosion to double, while on improved pastures it has increased five-fold.113 By 1900 the value of agriculture – primarily wheat cropping – was getting closer to and, in some years, surpassing pastoralism as a percentage of GDP. Grazing, however, still dwarfed cropping in terms of its scale of land use. Even today, because of Australia’s dry climate, grazing accounts for 56 per cent of total land use, while cropping accounts for less than 3 per cent.114 When dust storms began reaching the eastern capital cities in the 1920s and agricultural scientists began warning about the growing problem of soil erosion, few separated grazing from cropping – both types of landholder were responsible. Add to this the fact that soil erosion as a result of human activity can occur years 1000 Cumulative Residual Rainfall (mm)

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Drying period

Wetting period

500 0 –500 –1000 –1500 –2000 –2500 –3000 1860

1880

1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

2020

Cumulative residual rainfall for Dubbo, New South Wales. This method shows the trends in rainfall against the average over the last 130 years. It charts the cumulative total of the deviations from the mean: in the first half of the century there were many years that recorded below average rainfall and in the second half there were more years above the average. It suggests the first half of the twentieth century in eastern Australia was a drying period and the second half a wetting period (staff at NSW Department of Primary Industries overlaid thirty-three NSW locations and produced similar curves). FIGURE 5.6

Source: Bureau of Meteorology rainfall data.

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FIGURE 5.7

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Dust storm approaching a town in central Australia.

Source: John Flynn, ‘Dust storm approaching an unidentified town, [2]’, (c.1912–c.1955), Australian Inland Mission Central Patrol, National Library of Australia, an24382262.

or decades after the activity that caused it, and it becomes clear that any attempt to isolate pastoralism from agriculture for the first half of the twentieth century would prove impossible. The Federation Drought, from about 1896 to 1903, marked the beginning of a ‘drying’ period in eastern Australia that lasted until the large floods and strong La Nina of the early 1950s (see Figure 5.6). Both grazing and cropping left the plains more vulnerable to erosion in the dry conditions and this was recorded in on-the-ground surveys at the time. To what extent they made dust storms denser or more frequent probably cannot be determined.115 The social circumstances in Australia were different to the United States in the Dust Bowl period too. There were about as many people living on the Great Plains in the United States as there were in the whole of Australia at the time.116 As historian Libby Robin argued, ‘the immediate social cost in sparsely populated Australia was not as high as in the densely populated Midwest’.117 Rural migration in Australia accounted for just over half of capital city population increase between 1933 and 1947, up from around 40 per cent between 1921 and 1933.118 Even though there was a slight increase in the rate of rural migration, Australia did not have obvious ‘Oakies’ like in the United States. Rural migration in the 1930s and 1940s did not overshadow the fact that the exodus from the bush had started much earlier. The social concerns were about the long-term decline of rural Australia and how its progress had stalled. The long history of cultural acceptance towards government intervention in rural areas, and for public development of natural resources, also helps explain why the Soil Conservation Services in Australia were not as controversial as in the United States. This was the case at the time and it has shaped the interpretation of these

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events in popular, political and academic culture since. It did signal a shift to a more complete break with British and colonial models of environmental management, but it was never seen as a radical departure in the conduct of government like it was in the United States – Australians are comfortable with ‘big government’ and government intervention on farms was not perceived as an infringement of individual freedom. Australian governments had long intervened in the exploitation of natural resources because people believed the private sector lacked the capacity to do so and would not take on the risk in Australia’s variable environment. The influential Australian economist Heinz Arndt suggested, provocatively, that Australia invented the idea of ‘economic development’ as something that governments and organisations could do, explaining: In Australia’s hostile environment, where settlers from the earliest convict days had to contend with drought, flood, pests, distance and more drought, economic development did not happen. It was always seen to need govern-

FIGURE 5.8 Photos of soil erosion on the western plains. Photos taken in the Condobolin, Cobar and Nyngan areas.

Source: NSW Soil Conservation Service. State Library of New South Wales, GPO2–28222, GPO2–28060, GPO2–28145, GPO2–28146.

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ment initiative, action to ‘develop’ the continent’s resources by bringing people and capital from overseas, by constructing railways and by making settlement possible through irrigation and other ‘developmental’ public works. So well established did this notion become in Australia that by the 1920s it was referred to as ‘the doctrine of development before settlement’.119 When government agencies intervened in land-use management it was not a departure from the kind of role it had already assumed. Also, in Australia, unlike in the United States, the states were responsible for land and water, and Robin suggested this made erosion less prominent as a national problem.120 The dust is still significant though: it drew attention to a place where not many people lived, to the poor living conditions in rural Australia, to the failure of government policies to settle people on the land and it drew attention to grazing and farming practices that were over-exploiting the nation’s natural resources. Dust changed the politics of resource conservation. Previously conservation in Australia drew on the Empire model associated with Empire forestry. During the dust storm period, conservation switched to the United States model. Dust allowed politicians to push through major environmental management reforms. The shift in attitudes towards the poor, however, did not create the equitable food system for which reformers such as McDougall, Bruce and Orr had hoped. In April 1948 Orr’s term as director-general ended. He left for Scotland, bitter and dejected: ‘I took out my handkerchief, wiped the dust of America from the soles of my shoes with it and threw it into the harbour.’121 Years later, Stanley Bruce expressed his disappointment that their nutrition agenda had been narrowed and marginalised to ‘humanitarian considerations’. He said their scheme had little to do with high moral principles: they had always argued on economic grounds. The distribution of food was supposed to be integrated into the mainstream of the economy, not something special and conditional, in the form of food aid, which reinforced inequitable economic and power relations. McDougall continued to work for the FAO for the rest of his career, pursuing his nutrition agenda from the inside.122

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

‘The Rain of Blood’, Barrier Miner, 31 December 1896, 3. Ibid. ‘A Phenomenon in Victoria’, Barrier Miner, 29 December 1896, 2. ‘The Rain of Blood’, Mercury, 6 January 1897. H. C. Russell, ‘Red Rain’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 April 1896, 5. Ibid. ‘A Phenomenon in Victoria.’ For example, in 1858 a dust cloud ‘enveloped the whole town’ of Sydney: ‘Weather and Appearance of Sky’, Empire, 9 January 1858. In The Cultivation of Whiteness, a source described in his diary a dust storm affecting Melbourne in 1855: Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 21. The same year the Melbourne newspapers reported that northerly

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9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32

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winds had stirred up some ‘misery dust’: ‘Victoria’, Empire, 16 November 1855, 2. Strong winds carrying dust blew roofs off buildings in Adelaide in 1855: ‘South Australia’, Argus, 20 November 1855. See: A. Liversidge, ‘Meteoric Dusts of New South Wales’, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales 36 (1902). Russell, ‘Red Rain.’ Gregg Mitman, The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Stephen Powell’s PhD thesis is a useful resource for further reading on the connections between maternalist philosophies and resource conservation agendas. Stephen M. Powell, ‘Mothering, Husbandry and the State: Conservation in the United States and Australia 1912–1945’ (PhD Thesis, Monash University, 2000). Commonwealth Immigration Office, ‘Australia’s Offer to the British Boy’, (Melbourne: Albert J. Mullett, Government Printer, 1922), 1. Ibid., 5. Development and Migration Commission, ‘Australia for the British Boy’, (Melbourne 1929), 3. See also: Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Wheat Growing in Australia’, (Melbourne: Commonwealth of Australia, 1915). W. Gillespie, in Daily Liberal and Macquarie Advocate (Dubbo 1923). This letter was also published in the Daily Telegraph. Alex H. Fraser, in Advertiser (Adelaide 1931). ‘Country Left for City’, Argus, 10 June 1927. ‘Country Problems’, Argus, 8 May 1925. ‘Humpy Burnt’, Daily Liberal and Macquarie Advocate, 8 January 1923. ‘Country Problems.’ ‘Rural Industries’, Register, 17 April 1909. William L. Bowers, ‘Country-Life Reform, 1900–1920: A Neglected Aspect of Progressive Era History’, Agricultural History 45, no. 3 (1971). See, for example, the opening lines of Samuel McReynolds’ essay: ‘Most rural sociologists and development specialists can find their professional origins in the 1908 Country Life Commission (CLC) and the subsequent Country Life Movement (CLM) in the United States’: Samuel A. McReynolds, ‘Eugenics and Rural Development: The Vermont Commission on Country Life’s Program for the Future’, ibid. 71(1997). Commission on Country Life, Report of the Commission on Country Life (New York: Sturgis & Walton, (1911) 1917), 18. Olaf F. Larson and Thomas B. Jones, ‘The Unpublished Data from Roosevelt’s Commission on Country Life’, Agricultural History 50, no. 4 (1976). United States Progressivism had a strong influence on Australian advocates for agriculture and rural reformers from the early twentieth century. See: Kate Murphy, “The Modern Idea Is to Bring the Country into the City’: Australian Urban Reformers and the Ideal of Rurality, 1900–1918’, Rural History 20, no. 01 (2009). Most notably, the Victorian and New South Wales Departments of Agriculture, Railways, Education and Public Health ran Better Farming Train exhibitions for settlers in the 1920s and 1930s. They modelled the trains on the Canadian Better Farming Trains. Clayton S. Ellsworth, ‘Theodore Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission’, Agricultural History 34, no. 4 (1960): 156. The letters to the editor and Henry Somer Gullett’s assessments, cited above, are good examples of how men were spoken about in terms of simple economic choices. The responses to sociological surveys were more complex (e.g. men were concerned about their children’s education and access to schooling too) but most of the commentary in regards to men was concerned with economic opportunities and returns for labour. McReynolds, ‘Eugenics.’ Kate Darian-Smith and Sara Wills, ‘From Queen of Agriculture to Miss Showgirl: Embodying Rurality in Twentieth-Century Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 25, no. 71 (2001): 18.

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33 See: Philippa Mein Smith, ‘Mothers, Babies, and the Mothers and Babies Movement: Australia through Depression and War’, Social History of Medicine 6, no. 1 (1993): 69. 34 William M. Goodman, ed. The First Exposition of Conservation and Its Builders; an Official History of the National Conservation Exposition, Held at Knoxville, Tenn., in 1913 and of Its Forerunners, the Appalachian Expositions of 1910–11, Embracing a Review of the Conservation Movement in the United States from Its Inception to the Present Time (Knoxville, TN: Press of Knoxville lithographing, 1914), 275. 35 Ibid., 273. 36 See: James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Agrarian Studies. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 37 Powell, ‘Mothering.’ 38 Goodman, First Exposition, 275–76. 39 Diane B. Paul and James Moore, ‘The Darwinian Context: Evolution and Inheritance’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 40 Diane B. Paul, ‘Darwin, Social Darwinism and Eugenics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ed. M. J. S. Hodge and Gregory Radick (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 214. 41 Niles Eldredge, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 11. 42 Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Studies in Australian History (Cambridge; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 45. 43 Paul and Moore, ‘Darwinian Context’, 28. 44 Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, ‘Introduction: Eugenics in the Modern World’, ibid., 3–4. 45 Wendy Kline, ‘Eugenics in the United States’, ibid., 514. 46 Jean I. Craig. ‘Some Aspects of Life in Selected Areas of Rural New South Wales.’ MA Thesis, University of Sydney, 1944, quoted in Graeme Davison, ‘The Exodists: Miles Franklin, Jill Roe and the “Drift to the Metropolis”’, History Australia 2, no. 2 (2005): 35.7–35.8. For American attitudes, see: McReynolds, ‘Eugenics’, 306–07. 47 Alexandra Minna Stern, ‘Making Better Babies: Public Health and Race Betterment in Indiana, 1920–1935’, American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 5 (2002): 748. 48 David Starr Jordan, The Human Harvest; a Study of the Decay of Races through the Survival of the Unfit (Boston, MA: American Unitarian Association, 1907); Charles Benedict Davenport, Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910). 49 Baby competitions were usually held at agricultural shows along with the stock and crop displays. In the United States the competitions were targeted at poor rural whites with the aim of increasing the chance of survival of those babies over those of the migrant non-white workers. The judges were usually medical doctors and nurses and sometimes a public official was included on the panels. Children were divided into age categories and doctors performed a series of tests and examinations, including mental exercises, limb and cranial measurements, and standard height and weight measurements. These types of competitions were a means of promoting a particular human physiological ideal – often this was a racial ideal, or one that made moral judgements about the poor. 50 Stephen Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of Racial Science’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, eds Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 243. 51 Politicians included Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, nationalist Richard Arthur and Labor politician John Eldridge. Ibid., 244. 52 Ibid., 247. 53 A pamphlet designed to attract migrants, stated: ‘The people are free and democratic, and their law progressive and advanced; in industrial and social legislation Australia leads the world.’ Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Wheat Growing in Australia’, 49–50.

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54 Historian Daniel Kelves first used ‘reform’ eugenics to describe the changing characteristics of eugenics in the 1930s after it became clear the science supporting it was fallible. ‘Reform eugenics’ was supported by left-leaning advocates and focused on reducing the birth rates of the inferior through health programmes and counselling rather than surgical procedures, euthanasia and segregation. Some historians have used the term to describe so-called ‘soft’ eugenics measures in general. See: Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985); Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia.’ 55 See: Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, eds, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1996). 56 Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Wheat Growing in Australia’, 49. 57 Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia’, 248–49. 58 Ibid. 59 Evening Sun (New York) in ‘Caucasian Australia: America Sees a Rival’, Argus, 16 March 1922, 7. 60 Ibid. 61 Charles Davenport, preface to Arthur H. Estabrook, The Jukes (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916), iv. 62 Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia’, 253. 63 Alison Bashford, ‘Epilogue: Where Did Eugenics Go?’, ibid., 551–52. Bashford also comments that individual choices in IVF selection and pre-natal diagnoses can have unintended population-scale eugenic effects. 64 ‘Annual Message to Congress (State of the Union Address) on January 6, 1941’, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum Website, www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/ pdfs/ffreadingcopy.pdf (accessed on 1 February 2014). 65 Ibid. 66 Kathleen G. Donohue, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer, New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 67 Ibid., 1. 68 Ibid., 2. 69 This paragraph draws heavily on Donohue’s Freedom From Want. 70 John B. O’Brien, ‘F. L. McDougall and the Origins of the FAO’, Australian Journal of Politics & History 46, no. 2 (2000). 71 Alfred Stirling, ‘McDougall, Frank Lidgett (1884–1958)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Online Edition (2006), www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A100251b.htm (accessed on 1 February 2014). 72 O’Brien, ‘Origins of the FAO.’ 73 F. L. McDougall, Sheltered Markets: A Study of the Value of Empire Trade (London: J. Murray, 1925). 74 Stephen Constantine, Buy and Build: The Advertising Posters of the Empire Marketing Board (London: Public Records Office; Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1986), 2. 75 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), 297. 76 Constantine, Buy and Build, 17. 77 O’Brien, ‘Origins of the FAO’, 165. 78 Gregory P. Marchildon, ‘Wheat and Trade Policy in the Great Depression’ (JohnsonShoyama Graduate School of Public Policy Working Paper Series, University of Regina, Canada, 2010). 79 Paul de Hevesy, World Wheat Planning and Economic Planning in General (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 762. 80 Empire trade rose from 30 to 36 per cent of British imports between 1926 and 1933, but it had already been increasing before the Empire Marketing Board was established, and continued to increase after it was abolished. Constantine, Buy and Build, 16.

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81 Sean Turnell, ‘Monetary Reformers, Amateaur Idealists and Keynesian Crusaders: Australian Economists’ International Advocacy, 1925–1950’ (PhD Thesis, Macquarie University, 1999), 76–77. 82 O’Brien, ‘Origins of the FAO’, 166. 83 Turnell, ‘Monetary Reformers’, 77. 84 ‘F. L. McDougall to His Brother, Norman, 13 July 1924’, in McDougall’s letter to his family, c.1900–53, Frank Lidgett McDougall Papers (Canberra: National Library of Australia). This is also the line with which John O’Brien opened his essay on McDougall. See: O’Brien, ‘Origins of the FAO’, 164. 85 ‘The Challenge to Western Civilisation’, in Articles and addresses by F.L. Mc Dougall, 1929–52, McDougall Papers (Canberra: NLA, 1947). 86 ‘The Agricultural and the Health Problems’, in Articles and addresses by F.L. Mc Dougall, 1929–52, McDougall Papers (Canberra: NLA, 1934). 87 Ibid., 12–13. 88 Ibid., 13. 89 Amy L. S. Staples, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Have Changed the World, 1945–1965 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), 73. 90 O’Brien, ‘Origins of the FAO’, 170–72. 91 Ibid., 173–74. 92 Amy L. S. Staples, ‘To Win the Peace: The Food and Agriculture Organization, Sir John Boyd Orr, and the World Food Board Proposals’, Peace & Change 28, no. 4 (2003): 498. 93 Ibid., 505. 94 ‘Don’t forget the soil’, 1943, Bennett Papers, Special Collections, Iowa State University Library, MS 164. 95 ‘Conservation for war or peace’, 1950, Bennett Papers, Special Collections, Iowa State University Library, MS 164, 13/28. 96 Red rain fell over Melbourne on at least twenty-three occasions between 1896 and 1944. See: Blackburn (1983) in G. H. McTainsh, ‘Quaternary Aeolian Dust Processes and Sediments in the Australian Region’, Quaternary Science Reviews 8, no. 3 (1989). McTainsh did not provide sources for any reports before 1896. The reaction and reporting of the 1896 event suggests it was novel and that it was the first time it had occurred for many years – this was unlike the first half of the twentieth century during which it occurred frequently. 97 ‘Red Rain and Desert Dust’, Argus, 6 May 1922. Grazing and its relationship to vegetation and soil degradation in that area and during this period was documented, famously, by ecologist Francis Ratcliff in his 1930s reports for the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and in his popular book Flying Fox and Drifting Sand (1938). 98 ‘Dust Storms’, Daily Liberal and Macquarie Advocate, 5 January 1923, 3. 99 Ibid. 100 ‘District News’, Daily Liberal and Macquarie Advocate, 5 January 1923, 4. 101 Ibid. 102 ‘Severe Storm in NSW’, Argus, 3 January 1923, 7. 103 Ibid. 104 ‘Dust Storms’, 3. 105 Ibid. 106 ‘District News’, 4. 107 For example, in 1924 a fierce dust storm stopped play in a cricket match between Australia and England at Sydney. (Typical of the English to rely on the weather – Australia were 400 runs in front): ‘Australia Leads’, Argus, 24 December 1924, 11. In 1929 more dust from central Australia, western New South Wales and the Mallee lands of Victoria shrouded Melbourne: ‘Stormy Weekend’, Argus, 2 September 1929. The 1930s appear

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108 109 110 111 112 113 114

115 116

117 118

119 120 121 122

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to have been worse for Victoria and South Australia than New South Wales. In Burra, South Australia, the local newspaper described a dust storm in 1934 as one of the worst experienced ‘and should go down to history as “Red Monday”’: ‘A Record Dust Storm’, Burra Record, 19 December 1934. Large dust storms rolled over Sydney again in the 1940s. In the summer of 1944–45 the south-eastern states experienced months of severe dust storms that blacked out the capital cities for hours. These are well-known dust storms, and are listed on the Bureau of Meteorology website as a significant event in Australia’s climate history. The captain said it was unique in his twenty-three years’ experience. ‘Dust Storm Encountered at Sea’, Canberra Times, 11 October 1928, 1. ‘Dust Storm Reached Lord Howe Is.’, Canberra Times, 13 October 1948. ‘Quaternary Aeolian Dust Processes.’ Note: Australian dust reaches New Zealand almost continuously but it is so fine few people notice. One classic study is: Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). See Chapters 1, Hooves; 2, Bores; and 3, Scrub. National Land and Water Resources Audit, 2001, Landscape Health in Australia, Commonwealth of Australia. Australian State of the Environment Committee, Australia, State of the Environment 2006: Independent Report to the Australian Government Minister for the Environment and Heritage (Canberra: Department of the Environment and Heritage, 2006). Note: this does not mean the dust would have been proportional to the percentage of land use. Of the four main locations that are sources of major dust storms, at least one – the Mallee-Riverina area – was extensively cleared and ploughed for agriculture early in the twentieth century. (Inference from McTainsh et al. 1990.) For a good overview of the difficulties of determining wind erosion rates and the relationship to dust storms in Australia in the twentieth century see: C. H. McTainsh et al., ‘Wind Erosion in Eastern Australia’, Australian Journal of Soil Research 28 (1990). Australia’s population in 1933 was 6.6 million. The population of the Great Plains in the United States in 1930 was 5.6 million. (There was no census in 1930 in Australia.) See: Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, vol. 29 (1936); Geoff Cunfer, ‘The Dust Bowl’, ed. Robert Whaples, EH.Net Encyclopaedia (2004), http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-dust-bowl (accessed on 1 February 2014). Libby Robin, ‘Ecology: A Science of Empire?’ in Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, ed. Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (Edinburgh; Seattle, WA: Keele University Press; University of Washington Press, 1997), 70. These are figures drawn from a paper by Graeme Davison, which are in turn based on the work of economic historian David Merrett. See: Davison, ‘The Exodists: Miles Franklin, Jill Roe and the “Drift to the Metropolis”’; D. T. Merrett, Australian Capital Cities in the Twentieth Century, Monash Papers in Economic History No.4 (Clayton, Vic.: Department of Economic History, Monash University, 1977). H. W. Arndt, ‘Economic Development: A Semantic History’, Economic Development and Cultural Change 29, no. 3 (1981): 462. Robin, ‘Ecology: A Science of Empire?’ Matthew James Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 127; John Boyd Orr, As I Recall (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1966). Death of Mr F. L. McDougall, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, 15 February, 1958. McDougall Papers, NLA, MS 6890.

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6 REEDS

In the summer of 1944, one of Australia’s great environmental reformers toured the Macquarie Marshes on horseback. William McKell would have breathed the hot and humid air between tall stands of cumbungi, while reeds rustled and cracked against the weight of the horse. He would have sloshed through watercouch and felt the gentle splash of shallow, slow moving streams; he would have emerged from rushes to find open-water lagoons teeming with herons, spoonbills, pelicans and ducks, all feasting on thirty different species of fish. He would have camped under a sky that, by day, was blackened with the outstretched wings of tens of thousands of ibis. McKell was the Premier of New South Wales. He was so impressed with the marshes he declared the Crown Land area of it a National Fauna Reserve. He said the marshes were of interest to scientists of world renown, and that they were a vital sanctuary for Australian and northern hemisphere birdlife. The marshes, he said, were to be preserved for the Australian people, for posterity, for all time.1 McKell is remembered as a champion of environmental protection and resource conservation. During his election campaign in 1941 he said he could see the soil ‘slipping away, slipping away, slipping away’, and that if you were going to save New South Wales and if you were going to save Australia, then ‘we must save the soil!’2 He forged the New South Wales Department of Conservation in 1944 – bringing together the ‘holy trinity’ of forests, soil and water – the first of its kind in Australia.3 In the early 1940s he created the Kosciusko State Park and started the process that would expel the graziers from the High Country. A prestigious environmental award, the McKell Medal, is named in his honour. How odd for him then, to announce – on the same day that he rode the marshes – that he had divided the state’s newest National Fauna Reserve into twenty-one grazing blocks. It appeared a contradictory set of policies to declare a fauna reserve and then allow cattle and sheep to graze and trample one of the most sensitive

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areas of the wetlands. It would be strictly regulated, said McKell, using the Kosciusko Trust model, and the scattered rookeries in that 44,000 acres of wild marshlands could be fenced off. McKell went back to Sydney and less than two years later passed the Burrendong Dam Enabling Act, the dam that the New South Wales Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission and scientific authorities said would significantly reduce the size of the marshes, leaving the waterbirds no option but to ‘depart to other areas’.4 McKell even went out to the site of the proposed dam and turned the first sod with a bulldozer. This is no surprise really, because in McKell’s 1941 election campaign, he promised to divert the water from the Snowy River inland for irrigation. He said the Snowy spoke to him, and it said, ‘I can work for Australia’.5 He promised to build large dams on the Hunter, Murrumbidgee, Tumut, Lachlan, Darling, Macquarie, Namoi, Gwydir, Peel, Macintyre and Dumaresq Rivers. This environmental reformer began the programme that would degrade the inland river systems of south-eastern Australia.

Boilermaker to premier William McKell was born in a small town on the South Coast of New South Wales in 1891. When he was 8 years old his father lost his butchery business, sold all their possessions and moved the family to the slums of South Sydney. Two years later his father abandoned them. McKell and his mother, brother and two sisters moved to the industrial inner-Sydney suburb of Redfern. At 10 years old, McKell took on the role of head of the family. When he turned fifteen he became an apprentice boilermaker, one of the toughest and least desirable of the trades. In his twenties he joined the union movement and in 1917, at the age of 25, won the seat of Redfern for the Labor Party. McKell hadn’t received any formal schooling since he was 13 but he borrowed law books from friends and other politicians and studied at night by the light of a kerosene lamp. He passed the bar exam two years later. He served in justice and treasury portfolios and travelled overseas to secure loans for the state. He moderated some of his radical views and by 1939 he had replaced Jack Lang as leader.6 It would be hard to find a more archetypical ‘rise of a working-class boy’ story. It was McKell’s experiences living in a poor community, and being at the mercy of factory-owners and landlords, that shaped his political thinking and his desire for social justice. In an interview later in life, he said it ‘helped form my resolve that the whole social system was unfair’.7 Some of his proudest achievements were improving the working conditions for coal miners, reforming tenancy laws and developing public housing.8 According to McKell, his interest in the land also had its origins in his childhood. The Snowy and Kosciusko, the whole area, meant so much to him because he was born down south. He would go out with his father over that country to get stock for the butchery.9 By 1933 he had saved up enough to ‘realise a long-held ambition’ and bought a farm near Goulburn, not all that far

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Portrait of William McKell in 1922. Sir William McKell was a great statesman and environmental reformer, but his efforts to improve the lives of rural people cost the rivers. His environmental bureaucracies pitted production against protection instead of integrating them. FIGURE 6.1

Source: ‘William John McKell, ex-Minister for Justice, 13/4/20 to 12/4/22’, State Library of New South Wales, GPO1–16884.

from the Monaro country to which he was so attached.10 The property was severely eroded and over the years McKell worked on improving it. From the opposition benches in 1938 McKell supported a Bill for a Soil Conservation Service introduced by Roy Vincent of the Country Party. The architect of the Bill was Department of Agriculture employee Sam Clayton, an evangelical advocate of soil conservation who had trained under Hugh Bennett in the United States. McKell warned the ‘dead heart’ of Australia was creeping towards the coast, and praised Clayton as ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’.11 In the 1941 election campaign McKell handpicked the candidates and Labor trounced the unstable coalition of conservative parties. McKell and Clayton formed a strong partnership. Clayton, as head of the new Soil Conservation Service, was passionate about his work, but his determination, conviction and brashness often alienated people. McKell, on the other hand, was tolerant, generous and a natural leader. Clayton provided the energy and expertise, while McKell brought the politicians, the bureaucrats and the people of New South Wales with him on conservation.

Managing environment and people After McKell announced his vision for soil and water in 1941 he won more country seats than the Country Party. McKell claimed the Country Party, and even the people of rural New South Wales, did not know they wanted soil and water

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conservation until he put it to them. ‘You see,’ he told interviewer Neville Gare in 1978, ‘they hadn’t got to the stage where they were thinking of those things.’12 That was not quite true. The Burrinjuck Dam was completed in 1927 and irrigators were already growing produce in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area. Other districts petitioned for water conservation. On the Macquarie, for example, small farm settlers had lobbied for river regulation and irrigation works since the late nineteenth century. The first proposal for a large dam at the river’s headwaters was mentioned in the 1885 Lyne Royal Commission. In 1905 a deputation of residents from Wellington, Dubbo and Narromine met with the Minister for Works to present their case for water conservation on the Macquarie River. A member of the deputation said he had visited irrigation works in the ‘United States, India, China and elsewhere’ and that in his opinion, the west was ‘ideal’ for irrigation.13 Residents asked why development was not being pushed on the Macquarie as it was in the south on the Murrumbidgee River, insisting ‘all that the west required were men and water’.14 The Minister pointed out that drought was the ‘normal condition’ of their region and this was unlikely to change. He acknowledged that this appeared to be a good reason to conserve water; however, he reminded the delegation of the fact that ‘people had been induced to embark capital in pursuits – chiefly pastoral – they thought they could rely upon, and, unfortunately, had gone down’.15 The west still carried the stigma of the collapse of the pastoral industry in the 1890s. The Government wasn’t about to risk money on speculative irrigation works. The small landholders on the plains around Narromine continued to lobby for dams and irrigation until the Burrendong Dam was completed in 1967.16 Perhaps what McKell meant was that no one had seen this as the fundamental responsibility of the state. No one in Australia saw the need for integrating the management of people and environment for a better world, to ‘improve the human condition’, as James C. Scott might have put it.17 The idea of the benevolent state – the welfare state – was a relatively new one, and Labor man McKell was inspired by this international ideology. His social reforms and his environmental reforms were intertwined; they were complementary parts of the same project. The genesis of McKell’s dam-building programme was in the continuation of labour-movement advocacy for closer settlement combined with his desire to address the social and environmental crisis of the 1930s. When McKell announced the dam-building projects in 1941 he was not acting as an irrigation booster. The plan was to stabilise, modernise and increase the population of existing rural towns by creating small irrigation industries. It was a continuation of the left’s agenda to break up the large estates and support closer settlement of small farmers and technical workers. In 1941 the Minister for Lands, Ted Horsington, gave an example of what the Government expected irrigation to achieve. He told parliament about a large property in western New South Wales at which eight men were employed, saying, ‘if the land, with river frontage for 7 or 8 miles, were made available, eighty families could be established on small areas’.18 Some predictions were optimistic, but not boosterish. The conservatives were less enthusiastic about

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irrigation. The Labor member for Monaro, John Seiffert, said this was because closer settlement, irrigation and decentralisation meant ‘industrial activity in the towns and, therefore, there would be more industrial votes’.19 It was not about greening the interior or massive transfers of water across thousands of kilometres. In 1946, when McKell drove a bulldozer into the ground at Burrendong in front of 300 onlookers to officially mark the start of the dam’s construction, he said the stored waters would bring into ‘full fruition’ a few hundred thousand acres.20 He did not overstate the case by much: today the regulated waters irrigate just over 200,000 acres.21 Closer settlement was an aspirational commitment popular with the public. The main motivation for McKell’s state-wide programme for soil conservation and dambuilding projects was the need to respond to the agricultural 1930s. Agriculture would become a corrective project again. This time, however, the big fix was solving problems the previous system of agriculture had caused. In a speech he delivered in 1941, he argued, ‘Rural policies in the past, have been simply opportunist in conception and practice, designed only to meet immediate crises and ignoring entirely the needs for long-term planning.’22 He criticised the short-term policies that had little to do with agriculture itself but were more to do with saving markets: the policies that saw produce withheld, forming large surpluses, and causing plummeting prices and instability. McKell said in an interview that his plans for soil and water conservation weren’t based on Roosevelt’s New Deal: he had developed his ideas before learning about the United States, he claimed.23 The Soil Conservation Service wasn’t his creation, however, and that was directly modelled on the United States service. In 1945 McKell toured the Tennessee Valley Authority but on his return reported to parliament that it was ‘not generally adaptable’ to Australia and the model provided ‘no special advantages’. He did, however, see value adopting its ‘organising methods and techniques’.24 He was interested in management of population and resources. It wasn’t just land, water and soil that McKell saw as inseparable – it wasn’t just these environmental and natural resource bureaucracies that should be integrated – it was everything to do with rural livelihoods and society’s relationship with the environment that needed to be managed together. ‘No one rural problem was isolated,’ declared McKell in 1944. What was required was a ‘general scheme of rural re-organisation’.25 McKell wanted his reforms to prevent dust storms coming from the plains and soil washing down the slopes and mountains, to diversify agricultural production away from its risky dependence on one or two commodity crops, to ensure decisions to grow crops were informed by scientific research as well as economic and marketing research, to modernise rural Australia and improve the poor standards of living in the bush, to encourage farmers to ‘adopt improved practices’, to secure natural resources for long-term development, and to protect unique ecosystems for their aesthetic, recreational and intrinsic values.26 The struggle to achieve all these is evident in the political and bureaucratic decisions concerning the Macquarie Marshes and the Burrendong Dam.

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‘Preserved to the people for all time’ The area of the marshes that McKell declared a National Fauna Reserve in 1944 had already been a protected area for the previous fifty years. In 1882, part of the southern marshes was designated ‘Water Reserve No. 300’, and in 1900 40,000 acres was proclaimed a game reserve.27 At some stage occupation leases to the reserve were granted to seven landholders. When Labor won government in 1941 it was under pressure to find ways of implementing the closer settlement philosophy that was part of its election platform. It was also looking for ways to increase production during war time. In 1943 the Government decided to divide the reserve into twenty-one lease blocks so that more landholders could use the same area. McKell assembled a committee to determine how the leases should be managed so that more intensive use of the land did not threaten the birdlife. The Macquarie Marshes Advisory Committee acknowledged that ‘very often . . . serious overstocking’ had already destroyed reed beds and bird breeding grounds in the reserve.28 The Department of Lands had already been forced to cancel the lease of one grazier for degrading the land.29 The committee recommended a trust oversee the reserve and outlined strict conditions for the leases. The Government agreed but said the trust would be postponed until after the war. In November 1943 Minister for Lands, John Tully, told parliament the leases would be granted for the duration of the war, and ‘for a maximum of two years after’. It was important, he said, that ‘such areas will be preserved to the people for all time’.30 In December McKell announced the bird life would not be disturbed and the rookeries would be fenced off.31 The trust was never established, the breeding grounds weren’t fenced, and the leases weren’t revoked until grazing was banned in the nature reserve in 1990.

The ‘melody of living waters’ Everyone who goes to the Macquarie Marshes seems to be captivated by them. It’s hard to explain why. Look at a photo and you would see a typical wetland – a struggling one at that. Every pamphlet or guide or report on the marshes describes them in the first few lines as an ‘internationally recognised’ wetland. That’s important for the people who are trying to protect them: parts of the marshes are listed under the Ramsar Convention. In 1971 delegates from around the world met at the Iranian city of Ramsar and agreed to adopt principles to protect the habitats of waterbirds. Local or national acts alone could not guarantee their protection because birds don’t need passports: they’re not constrained by geopolitical boundaries. ‘Internationally recognised’ is a strategic term. It doesn’t convey much about the marshes though. The marshes have always been a special place for the Wailwan people, who held large bora ceremonies there.32 The Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi and other people from across the plains journeyed to the marshes to participate. Men at the bora ground cut symbols and patterns into the black soil clays, some represented bird’s nests, fish, emus, snakes and, later, wild pigs; others were abstract and their

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meanings secret. They also heaped the earth to build a giant figure of the creator Biaime. In 1893 the amateur anthropologist Robert Hamilton Matthews recorded oral descriptions of a recent bora ceremony. The chief of the Mole tribe sent messengers carrying bullroarers wrapped in skin to present as invitations to the leaders of the Castlereagh, Bogan and Barwon River people. In the pre-ceremony, men made seats from saplings that were pulled from the ground and pushed back into the earth with their roots upwards. Men pierced their gums or tongues and

FIGURE 6.2

Aboriginal Bora, ‘Arrival of the King’, 1898.

Source: Photo published by Charles Kerry & Co. Powerhouse Museum Tyrrell Collection.

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FIGURE 6.3

Aboriginal ceremony, ‘The Sick Warrior’, 1898.

Source: Photo published by Charles Kerry & Co. Powerhouse Museum Tyrrell Collection.

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FIGURE 6.4

Aboriginal ceremony, ‘Lying in Wait’, 1898.

Source: Photo published by Charles Kerry & Co. Powerhouse Museum Tyrrell Collection.

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let the blood flow from their mouths over the saplings. Women sang late into the night and the following day threw handfuls of leaves like confetti as the boys to be initiated walked past. The boys disappeared into the bush with the men for days. In the final ceremony nine boys were painted all over in red ochre and grease, and swan feathers decorated their hair, ready for initiation at the bora grounds. Bullroarers, firesticks and smoking green leaves left the audience in awe. Some of the meanings of the symbols were revealed to the boys.33 In February 1846 Thomas Mitchell was in the marshes. He met two mounted policemen who informed him a flood was coming down the Macquarie; the men said they had travelled 20 miles with it the day before. Mitchell wrote the Macquarie was ‘so dry and silent’ where he was camped that he could ‘scarcely believe the flood coming to be real’.34 He stationed a man upstream with instructions to fire his rifle when the waters approached. Night had fallen before the camp stirred to the sounds of nearing flood waters. The following is an abbreviated version of Mitchell’s account of the flood’s arrival: At length, the rushing sound of waters and loud cracking of timber, announced that the flood was in the next bend. It rushed into our sight, glittering in the moonbeams, a moving cataract, tossing before it ancient trees, and snapping them against its banks. It was preceded by a point of meandering water, picking its way, like a thing of life, through the deepest parts of the dark, dry, and shady bed, of what thus again became a flowing river. Here came at once abundance, the product of storms in the far off mountains, that overlooked our homes. My first impulse was to have welcomed this flood on our knees, for the scene was sublime in itself, while the subject – an abundance of water sent to us in a desert – greatly heightened the effect to our eyes. More than an hour after its first arrival, the sweet music of the head of the flood was distinctly audible from my tent, as the murmur of waters, and the diapason crash of logs, travelled slowly through the tortuous windings of the river bed. I was finally lulled to sleep by that melody of living waters, so grateful to my ear, and evidently so unwonted in the dry bed of the thirsty Macquarie.35 The plethora of government and scientific reports written about the marshes today could do with just a little of Mitchell’s extravagant prose. Mitchell wrote that he had ‘witnessed nothing of such interest in all my Australian travels’.36 When William McKell rode on horseback through the marshes in January 1944, the country made a great impression on him. He declared that the reserve which he had divided into grazing blocks a month earlier would become a National Fauna Reserve. It’s not clear if this forced extra conditions on the leases. It was, perhaps, symbolic. He became drawn to the marshes like everyone who went there.

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Even in dry conditions McKell was struck by the uniqueness of the marshes as a breeding ground for waterbirds. This was the place his dam at Burrendong was going to diminish. McKell returned to Sydney and pressed the various land and water departments to investigate ‘whether certain provision could be made to augment the natural water supplies’.37 He wanted further measures to protect the birdlife. This was significant for the marshes and the water on which they depend. It would become the foundation for the ‘wildlife allocation’, or Australia’s first environmental flow.

‘Maximum preservation’ Two months after McKell passed the Burrendong Dam legislation in 1946 the National Parks Committee asked the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission whether the dam would have adverse impacts on the wildlife at the marshes. The Commission replied the dam would affect the small and medium flows vital for bird breeding, and ‘the diversion of water for irrigation under licenses will doubtless greatly reduce the quantity of water passing down the river to the Marshes’.38 In 1948 the Minister for Conservation, George Weir, appointed the Macquarie Marshes Investigation Committee after a conference in September that year, at which the Department of Conservation, the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Lands and the Australian Museum decided on the need to formulate ‘a plan designed to afford the maximum preservation of the values of the area known as the Macquarie Marshes consequent upon the construction of the Burrendong Dam, on the Macquarie River’.39 By this time McKell was no longer Premier of New South Wales. The year before, McKell resigned from the Premiership to accept the position of Governor General of Australia. The committee acknowledged it owed its existence to McKell, and the former Premier was still influential in the conservation departments: James Roy Kinghorn of the Australian Museum, the only scientist on the panel, was included at McKell’s insistence. The committee members toured the marshes in 1949, much of it on horseback, just as McKell had five years earlier. Lance Peacocke, the experienced local Department of Lands surveyor, was a member of the committee and guided their inspection. They carried out interviews with landholders. In the course of the committee’s meetings and their correspondence with the departments the following year, it became clear the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission was resistant to the idea of allowing releases of water from Burrendong to reach the marshes. The committee said it was aware ‘the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission has announced that it would not favour the utilisation of stored water for maintaining supplies in the Marshes’.40 It argued they should not maintain this position. The committee said that, at the public’s expense, the irrigators were going to receive ‘something better than they have been accustomed to get’, so it was reasonable to allow some of the stored water to be provided to the marshes.

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It even suggested that because the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission knew Burrendong Dam would degrade the marshes it would be violating the Fauna Protection Act of 1948 if it did not use stored water for the reserve area.

Maintaining the marshes at a ‘desirable level’ Landholders, ecologists and members of the public with an interest in the marshes cautioned that the reed beds would shrink and that there would be heavy losses to the large bird numbers and breeding grounds. In 1952 the New South Wales Government postponed construction at Burrendong Dam and supporters of the marshes were elated. In the Land Annual, J. Cassell wrote, ‘on the day the lifegiving waters of the marshes are threatened, men and women on the land in their thousands will rise, as one body, as the birds’ protectors’.41 As historian Libby Robin demonstrated in Defending the Little Desert, the 1950s and 1960s saw growing popular opposition to ‘development’ works – long before the environmentalism of the 1970s.42 In 1962, as construction of the dam continued, there was renewed criticism of the scheme. The Sydney Morning Herald published a letter that warned ‘these marshes are now threatened with extinction’.43 The author outlined the likely economic, cultural, aesthetic and ecological consequences of river regulation. Four days later the Secretary for the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission responded in the Herald with assurances, contrary to the Commission’s own reports, that the dam would be no threat to the marshes or its wildlife. The Secretary stated that the Commission was investigating the best ways to ‘maintain the marshes at a desirable level and utilise to the best advantage the water to be allocated to them annually’.44 The Commission announced it would allocate 50,000 megalitres per year for the marshes – eleven years after the original recommendation.45 Who would decide what constituted a ‘desirable’ level, and how could that be matched to a specific volume of water? The Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission said, ‘with the completion of the Burrendong Dam, their existence [the marshes] should be assured for all time’.46 The Commission’s undertaking to preserve the marshes was a consequence of McKell’s requests in the 1940s, and of wildlife and nature conservation advocates in the 1950s and 1960s. Its main responsibility, however, was to develop the dams and irrigation projects McKell announced in 1941 and to oversee the management of water to ensure farmers became wise water users, that their produce was more varied, and that their industry became more stable. In 1972 the Commission constructed a large channel and embankments to divert water around the marshes so that the water could be used in irrigation downstream instead. The Commission argued that although the regular flow from the dam would be far lower than natural conditions, it would be better for the marshes because it would balance out the variable flows.47

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After agriculture The confluence of the Macquarie and Cudgegong Rivers, in undulating country at the base of the Eastern Highlands, had long been recognised as a potential dam site. From the 1880s surveyors and irrigation advocates had identified the valley where the two rivers met as a feasible site for the construction of a large dam. The first proposals were for a concrete wall but because the valley was not very narrow it meant the cost of pouring enough concrete made governments baulk. It wasn’t until the United States developed earth-fill techniques that a dam on this scale at Burrendong became an option. Between 1958 and 1965 teams of up to 1,000 workers cut a 1.1 kilometre scar into the alluvial valley floor. With heavy earthmoving equipment they moved 1.3 million cubic metres of rock and dirt to strip the ground to bedrock. Giant tyres on rock buggies lasted a month before they were worn bare. Workers quarried a further 1.4 million cubic metres of river gravel from an ancient stream bed and heaped this with more locally excavated material to form the Burrendong Dam: a 6.3 million cubic metre pile of rocks, clay and gravel.48 That is around 50,000 B-Double road trains worth of material, which, parked from end to end, would reach from Sydney to Adelaide. Since authorities started regulating the Macquarie, the river has changed the work it does on the floodplains. It used to spread easily across the plains, depositing rich nutrients. Now with constant low flows, the river erodes channels in the marshes so that much more water is needed to fill the stream beds over their banks to allow water to spread.49 The outlet works, where water is released from the dam, is a small cement structure at ground level that looks similar to the discharge pipes of urban storm water drains. The outlet pipes have a capacity to release 8,200 megalitres per day, which is not a large enough volume to replicate the sustained flooding of the Macquarie’s past – this can only happen now when the dam’s level is high enough to reach the spillway. The outlet works pipes release cold water from the bottom of the dam into the Macquarie. This is thermal pollution and it is a major cause of degradation of river ecosystems in regulated rivers around the world.50 Water in dams stratifies into layers that are warm at the top and very cold at the bottom. Water released from the bottom layer is dense, up to 12°C colder than river water in natural summer conditions, and contains little saturated oxygen. This disrupts the breeding patterns of native fish and other aquatic creatures. It destroys life at the very bottom of the food chain. The shock of a sudden temperature drop and low oxygen can be enough to kill native fish outright. In an experiment conducted just below Burrendong, researchers from New South Wales Fisheries monitored the response of juvenile silver perch (Bidyanus bidyanus) to the dam’s cold water. Nineteen out of the twenty silver perch in natural water temperatures of around 24°C survived, while only five out of the twenty fish survived in the water from the bottom of the dam. They found that the effects of cold water pollution extended 300 kilometres

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downstream from the Burrendong Dam outlet works.51 Native fish populations have collapsed in the Macquarie.52 Before Burrendong Dam was completed the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission conducted daily tours of the site and in less than two years 33,500 people had visited it.53 At the outlet works, with no views and no opportunities for swimming, fishing or boating, the picnic area was established to bring visitors to see the dam wall as a monument. It is a place to be awed by the grandeur and promised security of such an engineering feat; it is a place to take comfort in the human power to bring order and balance to nature on a grand scale. The changes in the river and the marshes, after the introduction of stock and the development of agriculture, are complex, interrelated and wide-ranging. Pesticides, herbicides and nutrients from agricultural and urban run-off have led to a deterioration of water quality. Nitrogen and phosphorous, combined with increased turbidity from dam releases, have contributed to toxic blue-green algae blooms.54 The northern bypass channel has altered the floodplain hydrology so that forests of red gum and coolabah have died because of constant inundation, others have died due to lack of water, some of the ground is waterlogged, in some areas salinity is occurring and sediments have been deposited which alter the floodplain further.55 Clearing in and around the marshes has reduced the filtering function of wetlands and possibly contributed to raising the saltier groundwater table. Irrigators extract salt-laden groundwater to water their crops. Dryland salinity

FIGURE 6.5 Macquarie Marshes from the wildlife viewing platform in July 2008. The viewing platform overlooks a forest of dead trees. Many of these trees died as a result of too much water after the dam and earthworks altered floodplain flow patterns.

Source: Cameron Muir.

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upstream of the marshes is increasing the salt load of the Macquarie. There are red gums in the marshes that are gnarled and stunted because of the salt. Many just die. Conservation biologist Richard Kingsford led research that showed the flooded area and reed beds had shrunk by up to 50 per cent by 1993 and waterbird populations were in decline.56

The ‘maximum production’ of ibis The ancient Egyptians venerated the ibis; it was a sacred bird associated with creation and fertility.57 Ibis lived in marshlands and along the Nile in an environment that gave rise to the earliest forms of agriculture. Followers of ibis cults would visit the temples and purchase mummified ibises for use in votive offerings. The ibis cults became so popular priests had the birds bred and reared onsite, especially for mummification. In the Serapeum in the city of Saqqara, archaeologists discovered 500,000 mummified ibis in stoppered ceramic pots, and 4 million were reported to have been found entombed in the city of Tuna-el-Gerbel.58 In the lignum swamps of the Macquarie Marshes, hundreds of thousands of ibises would flatten the wiry lignum shrubs to create vast colonies of rookeries. When the white and black birds took flight they crowded out the sky. It was the public’s recognition of the marshes as a unique and special place for ibis and the other species of waterbirds that bred there that made the Macquarie the first of Australia’s regulated rivers to be provisioned with an environmental flow.59 Egyptians believed ibis warded off flying serpents and pestilential flies. Landholders on the plains surrounding the marshes believed ibis ate millions of locusts a day and prevented plagues.60 Eric Rolls suspected their insect-eating properties were the real reason the Egyptians revered the ibis.61 In the 1950s, as construction of the Burrendong Dam began, the New South Wales Government asked the CSIRO’s Robert Carrick to investigate the locust-eating potential of ibis. It wanted to know if the wildlife allocation could be used to ‘promote the maximum production of young’ ibises annually to coincide with locust outbreaks.62 Carrick’s observations suggested they did not prevent outbreaks.63 Realising the Water Conservation and Irrigation’s interest in the wildlife allocation and the preservation of birdlife seemed to depend on this economic contribution of ibis, Carrick argued in a second paper there were plenty of other good reasons to conserve the ibis. He said there was scientific and ‘practical’ value in studying their ecological adaptation to the ‘special environmental conditions’ of variability, of drought and flood. Carrick also argued for the importance of preserving whole ecosystems, not just single species.64 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the most water that the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission released in one year for the marshes was 18,500 megalitres, never the 50,000 it said would be provided as part of the wildlife allocation.65 For thirty years Richard Kingsford has studied the marshes and surveyed populations of waterbirds such as egrets and ibis. In the 1980s, Kingsford’s surveys averaged 20,000 waterbirds from more than twenty species; in the 1990s

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it dropped to 5,000 birds from thirteen species, and since the year 2000 they averaged 600 birds from only nine species.66 In 2007 his team did not see any waterbirds in an aerial survey of the northern marsh. In 2010 Australia experienced its first ‘Big Wet’ since the early 1970s. So much rain was soaked up by the parched outback that scientists believed it caused the world’s sea levels to drop by a few millimetres.67 The marshes burst into life. Birdwatchers told me it was the ‘best the Marshes had ever been’.68 The twitchers, however, don’t have memories of the marshes before the dam was built and before landholders increased the number of earthworks that modified flow patterns. This is the phenomenon of ‘shifting baselines’ in perceiving the health of the environment. They are comparing the latest ecological ‘boom’ to memories of an already degraded environment. A previous generation of birdwatchers would have a different view on ‘best’ conditions. The Southern Marsh is still in a state of collapse. Environmental managers continue to decide which parts of the marshes to save with environmental flows and which parts to let go. The birds came back – and will continue to do so – but never in their former numbers. The Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission’s emblem was a rising sun over a lake, in the centre of which stood an ibis.

nsw

irrigation commission

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FIGURE 6.6 The Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission emblem. The emblem features a rising sun over a large body of water such as a lake or wetlands, with an ibis prominent in the centre.

Source: ‘Souvenir card Blowering Dam’, courtesy National Museum of Australia.

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Water management, history and irony In 2001 Premier Bob Carr agreed to officially open the Wildlife Observation Platform on the Gibson Way between the southern and northern marshes. According to the locals there was no water in the marshes so bureaucrats rushed around to organise a release from Windamere Dam. The water would flow down the Cudgegong and into Burrendong Dam, and from there they would release it down the Macquarie in an effort to improve the appearance of the marshes. One of the local landholders who told me this story was making the actions for pulling levers as he spoke. To the locals this was evidence of the cynicism of water management: the government could find water for a Premier but not for the marshes.69 The Macquarie River could be so degraded by 2020 that the water at major towns such as Dubbo and Narromine will be unfit for human consumption 30 per cent of the time.70 By 2050 the salt load could be so great that biodiversity will be reduced and the river will support few if any agricultural products.71 After that, the river’s resilience to modification will have broken. It’ll be a new system, one that does not support anywhere near as much life as before. In the previous chapters I have tried to focus on the minor players, the people who left no more than two or three column inches in a discontinued newspaper. I have tried to emphasise ideas and places instead of personalities. There are good reasons for the exceptions: Robert Peacock was someone who spoke for the place, for the vegetation, for the climate, for the evolutionary history of the semiarid woodlands at the Bogan; the idea of restructuring agriculture and the world economy based on nutrition was intimately tied to McDougall’s originality and advocacy. McKell, on the other hand, has always presented a puzzle and that is why I have tried to understand his story. The contradictions intrigued me. How was it possible to urge for the protection of the marshes because of their uniqueness and then graze them? Why did it make sense for McKell’s conservation bureaucracies to say they would dam the river, which would threaten the breeding grounds of the birds at the marshes, but that they would also make provisions to use the water to save the wildlife? It’s not a narrative of historical irony that I want to create – although, perhaps this is unavoidable. The southern marshes have collapsed. There is a big gap between what McKell and his contemporaries wanted to achieve and the outcome. In Something New Under the Sun, John McNeill argued most ecological changes have been good for some and bad for others, and that this is true even for the deforestation of the Amazon. In rare cases, though, some change was ‘bad for virtually all life forms’.72 In McNeill’s view, Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin is an example of this. It is degradation, despoliation, destruction. Whatever the tone, the ideology or the narrative frame a historian chooses, sometimes things really are just devastated. I don’t want to make easy moral judgements. I don’t want this to be about sneering at the naivety of the people of the past. Nor do I want to suggest, however, that people didn’t understand the potential consequences of their actions, that what

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happened to the rivers was inevitable. To do so would deny the people of the past capacity for intelligence and folly and for the complexities of inconsistency and disagreement. Debates over irrigation and environmental protection in the so-called ‘development’ era were just as divided and hard-fought as they are now, perhaps more so. To say that people of the past did not know any better, but we are more enlightened, with more knowledge, makes us feel better about ourselves, but ignores the potential consequences of our own actions. In her 1999 Boyer Lectures, Inga Clendinnen called this type of history a ‘nursery’ version.73 It is stripped of awkwardness and messiness, and is deployed to support the institution or group that’s telling the story.

Agriculture and the ‘environs’ The history of William McKell – of all his efforts to prevent soil erosion and overexploitation of environmental resources, to protect iconic ecological sites such as the Macquarie Marshes, to improve farming practices, to raise the living conditions of rural people, to stabilise the rural economy after the crisis of the 1930s and to increase the population and develop resources in the name of national security – is the culmination of an older history, of a culture and science that separated agriculture from the rest of its environment. How people view the living world is significant for understanding the failure at the marshes. In the seventeenth century, argued historian Carolyn Merchant, the Western worldview began changing from a religious and mystical understanding of nature, to nature understood through an early mechanistic science.74 It was a world that could be predictable if one had enough knowledge. Rules for collective agriculture became rules for maintaining a general kind of predictability, for moving away from accepting ‘the hand that the fates dealt’ farmers.75 Agriculturalists ‘sought to simplify the level of caprice they faced, and relegated those areas too complex to control to the “environs”’, wrote historian Paul Warde. For the first time there was agriculture, and the environs. It was a split between production environments and natural environments. This conceptual split was readily entwined with a deep cultural understanding of the ‘balance of nature’. From the Greek philosophers of classical antiquity to natural theologians in the sixteenth century, the idea of the balance of nature was a fundamental metaphor for understanding how the living world worked.76 All forms of life were in harmony and were interdependent with each other. If one species suddenly expanded its population, something would occur to bring it back into check. For some, this perfect order meant that no creature could become extinct, because this would be a radical breach of the harmony – and particularly so if it was divine harmony created by God. This view of a harmonious balance was altered in the nineteenth century. Darwin’s evolution by natural selection and Malthus’ writings on population growth, scarcity and the competition for resources suggested a far more high-stakes game of balance, one characterised by the struggle for existence. Order in nature could be disturbed, and the consequences could be dire.77

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This idea of the balance of nature could be used by supporters of ‘wise use’ and environmental protection or by supporters of resource development who wanted to use industrial knowledge and technology to ensure the balance favoured humanity. In 1951 the New Zealand-born chemist and physiologist Sir Stanton Hicks gave a public lecture on soil fertility, in which he condemned industrial agriculture for ‘being at war with nature’. The desire to rid the agricultural field of the variables of nature upset the balance of nature and could have unexpected consequences. ‘When man, by his intervention, altered this balance, the new situation must either be one of equilibrium or imbalance, and the conquest of nature meant imbalance’.78 Soil erosion was one such consequence, in Hicks’ view. He suggested the new appreciation of ecology might restore the balance. Others took a different view of how to manage the balance of nature. An editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald criticised the lack of irrigation projects in Australia, commenting, ‘lack of foresight throughout the years has prevented our establishing the balance that Nature has failed to provide’.79 Balance was a slippery cultural notion. Nature in this case was lacking. Dam-building could provide the balance that Australian nature so miserably failed to provide. In the twentieth century, the metaphor of the ‘balance of nature’ and the conceptual split between production landscapes and natural landscapes shaped natural resource management. The ecological idea of ‘equilibrium’ became mixed up with these to give a scientific basis to the need for environmental management. The role of the ecologist, wrote one newspaper, could ‘help restore the balance in a way best suited to man’s needs’.80 Production was pitted against protection: one cancelled the other. Sam Clayton had the Soil Conservation Service removed from the authority of the Department of Agriculture because he saw their philosophy as too production-focused.81 McKell’s trinity of soil, water and forests bureaucracies did not integrate the management of environment as much as it institutionalised the split between production and protection. If governments believed their only option for policies dealing with people and their environment was a choice between production and protection, which would they choose? Geographer and historian Joseph Powell argued McKell’s trinity ‘became linked with national patriotism’.82 After World War II, McKell’s dambuilding agenda appeared to be less concerned with addressing the social and environmental problems of the 1930s and became more to do with national security. McKell’s original plan to turn the Snowy River inland, or pipe the water to Sydney for the city’s water supply, expanded into a national development scheme jointfunded by the Federal Government. The ambitious engineering project would provide irrigation water for the inland plains of the southern Riverina to boost the rural population; it would provide hydroelectricity and create jobs for an expanded immigration policy that accepted migrants from all of Europe. Immediately after the war, newspapers expressed the renewed fears of invasion by hungry Asian hordes. In November 1945 Melbourne’s Argus published a full page map of the Asia-Pacific region, with the caption, ‘The Orient Looks South’.

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Nearly half the population of the world is crowded into the lands north and north-west of Australia. In the past, disunity, military weakness, and lack of industrial power have combined to form a dam to hold back 1,000 million poverty-stricken people struggling for existence in the densely packed areas of Asia . . . AAJtCHURI»

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With black bars it represented the population of Asian countries such as China and India relative to Australia’s population. A text box next to the map warned:

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‘The Orient Looks South – Seven Million Not Enough!’ Fears of hungry Asian hordes returned after World War II. The article asks, ‘Could we, with 7,000,000 people, hope to hold Australia as a White Reserve against the coloured masses of the Orient?’ FIGURE 6.7

Source: ‘Seven Million – Not Enough!’ Argus (Melbourne), 17 November 1945, 1.

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Could we, with 7,000,000 people, hope to hold Australia as a White Reserve against the coloured masses of the Orient?83 In 1950 Dr L. C. Birch, Senior Lecturer in Zoology at Sydney University, gave a public lecture on ‘Man and the Balance of Nature’. ‘The ghost of Malthus . . . has returned,’ he declared. The world had a ‘plague of people’. Birch viewed Hitler’s Lebensraum and Japan’s expansionist goals of the previous decade as having been informed by Malthusian principles. He called for ‘a science of population ecology’ to replace ‘uncritical ideas’ which ‘clog up the mind of the layman’. He provided the analogy of grain beetles, advising the nation to remember that humans are just another species – that, ‘we are the beetles and at present the grain is scarce’.84 The most Australian aspect of the Snowy Scheme, argued Powell, was anxiety to address ‘strategic vulnerabilities’ of the underpopulated inland.85

Command and control McKell strived to pursue order and stability on one hand, and ‘the demand for intensifying production on the other’.86 In the early and mid-twentieth century, colonial governments throughout the British Empire, in Africa and Asia, struggled ‘between raising colonial living standards and welfare, and responding to the pressures

Macquarie Marshes Nature Reserve. There was a travelling stock route here once and overgrazing left the area vulnerable. The scald was littered with small clusters of charcoal and fossilised fat – the old campfires of the Wailwan. FIGURE 6.8

Source: Cameron Muir.

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of metropolitan needs; between maintaining soil fertility and conservation, and exploiting colonial resources’, wrote Joseph Hodge in Triumph of the Expert.87 By the time McKell was riding the marshes and the High Country, the institutionalisation of the separation between production and protection had already started. The Soil Conservation Service, which was informed in the beginning by a real land ethic associated with American Progressivism, was absorbed into the development agenda. Its main function soon appeared to be ensuring soil erosion in the catchments did not ruin dams with silt so that irrigation could continue to be developed. The scientific understanding of how the natural world functioned, an equilibrium model, seemed to align with the cultural metaphor of the ‘balance of nature’. It produced a management regime that has since been labelled ‘command and control’: one that worked according to the idea that you could remove the variables from the field, while protection meant getting the balance right between humans and nature, and that declaring a section of an ecosystem a reserve could somehow protect it in isolation from the ecosystem within which it is embedded. The silence of the marshes today speaks of the failure of development as a means of mediating the instability and extremes of capitalism, the silence speaks of failure of the industrial model of agriculture and of the idea of ‘balance’ for understanding and managing the living world. What would McKell think? He was a statesman who introduced strong social reforms for workers and the poor. He said his lifelong work was ‘the improvement and betterment of the conditions of the people’.88 The people and environment at the marshes both stand diminished.

Notes 1 ‘Macquarie Marshes as National Reserve’, The Standard weekly: official organ of the Australian Labor Party, 6 January 1944, 4. 2 McKell was recalling his election campaign. Sir William McKell, interview by Neville Gare, 30 October 1978. Audio cassette. Oral History and Folklore Collection, National Library of Australia. 3 Judge Leonard Stretton coined the term ‘inseparable trinity’. See: Libby Robin, Defending the Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in Australia (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 34–36. 4 Department of Agriculture (New South Wales), ‘Report of Macquarie Marshes Investigation Committee, 1951’, in Agriculture special files, 1889–1981 (Kingswood: State Records of NSW). The Australian Museum contributed to the report and agreed with the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission assessments, as did the CSIRO a few years later. 5 McKell. Interview by Neville Gare, NLA. 6 Christopher Cunneen, William John McKell: Boilermaker, Premier, Governor General (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000), 5–33. 7 William McKell interviewed by Bob Carr, 1980–81, in Cunneen, Boilermaker, 25. 8 McKell. Interview by Neville Gare, NLA. 9 Roland Breckwoldt, The Dirt Doctors: A Jubilee History of the Soil Conservation Service of NSW (Sydney: Soil Conservation Service of NSW, 1988), 96. 10 Cunneen, Boilermaker, 106. 11 Breckwoldt, Dirt Doctors, 47–48. 12 McKell. Interview by Neville Gare, NLA.

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

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‘The Macquarie Waters’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 May 1905. Ibid. Ibid. There is a comprehensive account of all the deputations and lobbying in: Norma Meadley, A History of the Narromine/Trangie Irrigation Scheme (Narromine, NSW: Narromine Irrigation Board, 2002). James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Agrarian Studies. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). New South Wales, ‘Parliamentary Debates’, (Legislative Assembly 1941), 448. Ibid., 459. ‘Work Begins on Dam’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 December 1946, 4. 85,580 hectares in 1990 (211,473 acres). Murray-Darling Basin Commission’s ‘Wetlands’ web page. www2.mdbc.gov.au/nrm/water_issues/wetlands.html (accessed on 1 February 2014). William McKell, ‘Rural Policy Speech. Delivered in West Wyalong, NSW. 23 April, 1941’, (Sydney: Australian Labor Party, 1941), 3. McKell. Interview by Neville Gare, NLA. ‘The Tennessee Valley Authority’, report to New South Wales Parliament, 1945. Sir William McKell. Papers, 1917–1985. Mitchell Library (NSW), MLMSS 4603, 23. William McKell, ‘Rural Policy Speech. Delivered in Scone, NSW. 12 May, 1944’, (Sydney: Australian Labor Party, 1944), 4. This is a summary list of his aims, the evidence for them is the parliamentary debates, speeches and other material cited throughout the chapter. The quoted reference to ‘improved practices’ is from ‘Rural policy speech (Scone, NSW)’, 4. Kay Masman and Margaret Johnstone, Reedbed Country: The Story of the Macquarie Marshes (Tamworth, NSW: Macquarie Marshes Catchment Management Committee, 2000), 155. Report of Macquarie Marshes Investigation Committee, 1951 (Annexure C). Agriculture special files, 1889–1981, SRNSW, NRS 54, 8/1633. Ibid. New South Wales, ‘Parliamentary Debates’, (Legislative Assembly 1943), 991. ‘New Reserve in North-West’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 December 1943, 4. ‘Bora’ is a Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay word for the fur string belt worn by initiated men. R. H. Mathews, ‘The Burbung of the Wiradthuri Tribes’, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 25 (1896). Two excellent sources for more information about the Wailwan people are: Masman and Johnstone, Reedbed Country; Steve Miller and Tamsin Donaldson, Sharing a Wailwan Story: Education Kit (Ultimo, NSW: Powerhouse Museum, 1999). Thomas L. Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia, in Search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848), 57. Ibid., 58–59. Ibid., 59. Report of Macquarie Marshes Investigation Committee, 1951. Agriculture special files, 1889–1981, SRNSW, NRS 54, 8/1633. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. J. Cassell, ‘Home of a Million Birds’, Land Annual, 7 October 1953. Robin, Little Desert. A. B. Cuthbert, ‘Dam’s Threat to Wildlife’, in Sydney Morning Herald (1962). A. J. Quilty, ‘Wildlife Not in Danger’, ibid. It said 40,000 acre feet, which is 49,339 megalitres. William John Johnson, ‘Adaptive Management of a Complex Social-Ecological System: The Regulated Macquarie River in South-Eastern Australia’ (Masters Thesis, University of New England, 2005), 98.

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47 Ibid. 48 New South Wales Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission, The Burrendong Dam: Water Conservation in the Macquarie Valley (Sydney: Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission of NSW, c.1967), 9. 49 Kerrylee Rogers, ‘Water Requirements of Biota, Geomorphology and Climate Change in the Macquarie Marshes’, in Ecosystem Response Modelling in the Murray-Darling Basin, ed. Neil Saintilan and Ian Overton (Collingwood, Vic.: CSIRO Publishing, 2010), 158. 50 In the northern hemisphere thermal pollution is often hot water discharged from power generation plants. 51 K. L. Astles et al., ‘Experimental Study of the Effects of Cold Water Pollution on Native Fish’, in NSW Fisheries Final Report Series (NSW Fisheries Office of Conservation, 2003). 52 This is due to a range of pressures, such as competition from invasive species, smaller river regulation structures throughout the course of the river and its tributaries, agricultural run-off and so on, combined with thermal pollution. 53 ‘Burrendong Now in Final Stages of Completion’, Narromine News and Trangie Advocate, 15 January 1965, 1. 54 NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service et al., ‘Information Sheet on Ramsar Wetlands (Macquarie Marshes Nature Reserve and Wilgara Wetland)’, (2000). 55 Philippa Brock, ed. Macquarie Marshes: Land and Water Management Plan (Dubbo, NSW: Macquarie Marshes Catchment Committee, 1997). 56 Richard T. Kingsford and Rachael F. Thomas, ‘The Macquarie Marshes in Arid Australia and Their Waterbirds: A 50-Year History of Decline’, Environmental Management 19, no. 6 (1995). 57 Geraldine Pinch, Handbook of Egyptian Mythology (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002). 58 Arthur C. Aufderheide, The Scientific Study of Mummies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 399–400. 59 Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s there were small releases of a portion of the wildlife allocation. In 1986 the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Department of Water Resources developed a Water Management Plan. It made the 50,000 megalitres a ‘high security’ allocation, which was ‘the first formal commitment to provide environmental flows to a wetland ecosystem by a state government in Australia’. NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service et al., ‘Ramsar Information Sheet’, 7. 60 Report of Macquarie Marshes Investigation Committee, 1951. Agriculture special files, 1889–1981, SRNSW, NRS 54, 8/1633. 61 Eric Rolls, ‘Marshes Endure Misplaced Stress’, Sun Herald, 28 November 1993, 43. 62 R. Carrick, ‘Breeding, Movements and Conservation of Ibises (Threskiornithidae) in Australia’, CSIRO Wildlife Research 7, no. 1 (1962): 82. 63 See: ‘The Food and Feeding Habits of the Straw-Necked Ibis, Threskiornis Spinicollis (Jameson), and the White Ibis, T. Molucca (Cuvier) in Australia’, CSIRO Wildlife Research 4, no. 1 (1959). 64 ‘Conservation of Ibises’, 80. 65 Ibid. Note: in 1976 the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission became the Water Resources Commission. 66 This paraphrases a Kingsford/University of New South Wales press release. University of New South Wales, ‘Birds, Water Vanish from Macquarie Marshes Wetland’, Connected Waters, www.connectedwaters.unsw.edu.au/news/birds.html (accessed on 1 February 2014). 67 John T. Fasullo et al., ‘Australia’s Unique Influence on Global Sea Level in 2010–2011’, Geophysical Research Letters 40, no. 16 (2013). 68 Pers. comm. 2012. 69 Phil and Myra Tolhurst at Willie Retreat were the first to tell me this story. 70 Murray-Darling Basin Commission, The Salinity Audit of the Murray-Darling Basin: A 100Year Perspective (Canberra: Murray-Darling Basin Commission, 1999), 31. 71 National Land and Water Resources Audit, ‘Australian Dryland Salinity Assessment 2000: Extent, Impacts, Processes, Monitoring and Management Options’, Natural Heritage Trust

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73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

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(Australia), www.anra.gov.au/topics/salinity/pubs/national/salinity_contents.html (accessed on 1 February 2014). John R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the TwentiethCentury World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), xxv. Inga Clendinnen, True Stories: History, Politics, Aboriginality (Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2008), 14. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1980). Paul Warde, ‘The Environmental History of Pre-Industrial Agriculture in Europe’, in Nature’s End: History and the Environment, ed. Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 77. Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), 482–83. This paragraph draws heavily on ibid. ‘Man Must Learn to Live with Nature Again’, Camperdown Chronicle, 26 June 1951, 4. ‘Water Conservation’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 January 1941. ‘The Balance of Nature’, Argus, 18 August 1945, 26. Sam Clayton believed the Department of Agriculture had to accept some responsibility for soil erosion. Breckwoldt, Dirt Doctors, 41. J. M. Powell, ‘The Empire Meets the New Deal: Interwar Encounters in Conservation and Regional Planning’, Geographical Research 43, no. 4 (2005): 350. ‘Seven Million – Not Enough!’ Argus, 17 November 1945. ‘The World Has a Plague of People, Says Scientist’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September 1950, 2. ‘The Empire Meets the New Deal’, 350. Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 231. Ibid. McKell. Interview by Neville Gare, NLA.

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7 COTTON

Early in October 1991, graziers Malcolm and Alister Fraser were going about their usual station work when they discovered dead cows and calves in a paddock beside the Darling River.1 There were no signs of injury or any other clues to what had killed them. Not far away they saw several of their merino rams lying dead in the yellowing grass. Something strange was happening on their river block. There had been hardly any rain for the past nine months and everyone knew drought was setting in but conditions were hardly dire. The previous year the region had seen its largest floods in nearly twenty years. In all, the Frasers counted 30 dead Brahman cows along with their calves, and about 140 merinos. The surviving cows were so weak that many had to be helped to their feet.2 The week before, the animals had been fine, and now they were dead or distressed. What was killing them? Why had they died so suddenly? Malcolm was well into his eighties. He’d seen plenty of droughts and there wasn’t anything remarkable about this one. He knew sheep survived a long time into the dry, picking at every last remnant of vegetation. They didn’t just drop dead. Something wasn’t right. Then the Frasers noticed a stench coming from the river and saw a thin green film had begun to form over its surface. Eventually it spread over the length of the Darling, running past their three properties between Bourke and Louth. It unsettled the Frasers. Their family came to the Darling in 1857 and none of them had witnessed or heard stories about anything like what was happening to the river.3 Big clumps of slime half the size of an esky began floating past their 50,000 hectares. A few weeks later Malcolm told journalist Peter Bowers that he had turned one of the clumps over and it stank ‘like a calf with the scours’. On some days the smell was nauseating.4 The Frasers began to suspect the river itself was the cause of the deaths. They took their stock back into the red soil country and cut mulga scrub for feed. The only thing different about this drought, in Malcolm Fraser’s view, was cotton. There was no green slime before the irrigators came.5

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American know-how Cotton arrived in Australia on 18 January 1788. Captain Arthur Phillip, leading the First Fleet, had collected seeds in Rio de Janeiro along the way.6 In the eighteenth and nineteenth century cotton became a prized global commodity, with Britain’s mechanisation of textile manufacture one of the biggest drivers of its industrial revolution. ‘What Britain really wanted from its Australian colonies was a cheap and reliable supply of raw cotton,’ wrote Ted Henzell. ‘What it got instead was wool.’7 Cotton is a tropical plant and the first attempts at growing cotton in Australia were in the north of the continent. It was difficult for Australian growers to attract capital for cotton because investors believed the labour costs would be too high: everywhere else in the world cotton was grown with the cheap labour of slaves and colonial plantation workers. The Queensland industry grew during the American Civil War, after the Union blocked the Confederates’ ports, but collapsed soon after. In the 1920s Australia abandoned efforts to grow cotton for Britain and attempted to supply the domestic market.8 The Government put tariffs on cotton imports and offered subsidies to growers. A book on cotton growing published in 1923 came with the recommendation: ‘I heartily commend Mr N. D. Healy’s book to all Australians who realise the importance of filling up this continent with White People, so that it may forever remain the homeland of them and their descendants.’9 It wasn’t until the 1960s though, after large dams were completed on the New South Wales western plains rivers, that cotton became established in Australia. It was Americans who showed Australians what to do with the new irrigation water. The J. G. Boswell Company is the world’s largest private farm enterprise and the United States’ biggest cotton grower. In the 1960s, James G. Boswell II owned most of the irrigation land in California; he had a notorious reputation for being ruthless in securing water rights and disregarding environmental laws: he busted unions and bankrolled a political organisation to advance his interests in California.10 Boswell ended up in Australia in the 1960s after he lent money to two of his business associates who were trying irrigation at Wee Waa and Narrabri on the Namoi. At that time no farmer could own more than 400 acres of irrigation land because Australia still had laws designed to promote closer settlement. Boswell’s partner in Australia, Jim Blasdell, set up twenty-two ‘straw men’ and put together thousands of irrigation acres. ‘We broke every law in the state,’ he said later.11 It wasn’t uncommon. On the Macquarie, local Water Conservation and Irrigation officers told landholders how to apply for extra licences by creating companies in the names of family members.12 The New South Wales Labor Government, which hadn’t been out of power since William McKell was Premier in the 1940s, needed big irrigation to justify its dams. After only a few years Boswell’s partners went bust but he said he would forget the money if they gave him all the water licenses they had acquired. Most Australian cotton farmers in the early 1960s grew 25 acres or less;13 in the first year, Boswell planted 5,000.

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In 1966, just as the Burrendong Dam was being completed, Boswell’s Australian arm Auscott paid over a million dollars to secure water rights for 5,600 acres at Nevertire, near Warren.14 The limit was still supposed to be 400 acres per occupant.15 A resident from Narromine – a town that had lobbied for fifty years to get the Burrendong Dam – wrote a letter to the local paper saying young men weren’t fighting in the tropical hell of Vietnam to have Americans buy up all the water: ‘I state that the citizens of this community will not tolerate the plundering of their heritage by the arch enemies, King Cotton and Vested Interests.’16 The State Member for Dubbo, John Mason, said he approved of the ‘straw man’ practice and that it was the only way the district could be developed to its maximum potential.17 In 1968, Mason’s Liberal/Country government, under Premier Robert Askin, passed legislation that allowed the transfer of closer settlement leases totalling 7,491 acres at Narrabri to Auscott.18 Closer settlement was over. Auscott became Australia’s biggest cotton grower and Australia had an export cotton industry at last. The Boon and Buster families brought cotton to Bourke in the late 1960s. They followed relatives from California who had helped set up large-scale irrigation at Wee Waa. The Boons and Busters established a Christian commune at Pera Bore right on the spot where the New South Wales Department of Agriculture had tried growing cotton at the start of the twentieth century. There are no suitable places for a dam on the Darling, but Jack Buster was attracted to the plains because ‘there were no trees, lots of land, a big river, it didn’t rain so much’.19 Jack ‘fell in love’ with Bourke when he saw the plains for the first time in the drought of 1965: ‘there was nothing there, it was shocking conditions, horrible – but it still looked like paradise for farming,’ he told historian Siobhan McHugh.20 Cotton evolved in tropical and sub-tropical environments; it favours high temperatures and heavy soils. The western plains could provide black clay soils along the river and hot summers – they just didn’t have the rain. Irrigation was a suitable substitute; in fact, it was better: rain just got in the way. If the rain fell elsewhere and came down the river to them they could precisely control the application of water. American-style cotton growing appeared the perfect model to suit the management philosophy of ‘command and control’: of excluding the variables, of optimum yield, efficiency, and maximum production.

The ‘scientific use of water’ In March 1965 the head of the Narromine Burrendong Dam Association, K. R. McLachlan, attempted to pre-empt accusations of parochialism when calling for the water entitlements to go to the Narromine area instead of Nevertire and Warren, 60 kilometres further north. He wanted to appear above the petty politics of selfinterest, and claimed that he was motivated by nothing less than the benefit of the nation, with the venturesome statement: ‘and when I think nationally, I consider that Narromine is the place where the waters should be used, rather than the Nevertire or Warren area.’21 McLachlan explained that only two-fifths of the water that flowed past Narromine reached Warren.

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‘Buddah Lakes’ scheme. Irrigation pumps at ‘Buddah Lakes’ near Narromine in 1969, which drew water from the Macquarie River. Irrigators described their use of water ‘scientific’ in contrast to the ‘haphazard’ graziers downstream. FIGURE 7.1

Source: Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Australian National University: McKillop and Sons Pty Ltd, Z376, CD ROM, ‘Buddah Lake pumps 1969’.

In employing the metaphor of ‘river efficiency’ he conflated scientific observation with economic language. Compared to an irrigation channel, the river itself could be deemed too ‘wasteful’. This smoothed out an apparent contradiction in an argument at the meeting, namely that Nevertire, Warren and Nyngan were too far from the dam, yet the Narromine residents argued that all the water could be diverted to the Narromine area, even to properties far from the river, because with channel construction ‘distance was no object’.22 The irrigators made similar arguments against allowing any water to flow to the Macquarie Marshes. Pastoral landholders at the Macquarie Marshes had opposed damming the Macquarie since it was first proposed in the nineteenth century. They relied on regular small-to-medium floods over their properties to provide pasture for their stock. In 1933 the New South Wales Government investigated the feasibility of water conservation works on the Macquarie. It interviewed landholders at the marshes and most expressed concerns about the impact of the dam on their ‘flooded country’.23 One landholder ‘asked the Government to leave nature alone’.24 As the Burrendong Dam neared completion in the 1960s, and the protests of the lower Macquarie landholders became louder, residents of the towns advocating irrigation described the marshes as wild and ‘unimproved’ and the farming methods there as ‘rough and ready’ and ‘haphazard’.25 This was in contrast to ‘the skilful and experienced large-scale irrigators . . . who make scientific use’ of water.26

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The language of environmental management of the plains ecology became dominated by mechanical and engineering terms. The artificial divide between production and protection became wider. Describing a river as too ‘wasteful’ with water denies its ecological connectivity. Whether or not it’s going to become too salty to grow anything, or whether or not the river could continue to support birdlife at the Macquarie Marshes, was easily overlooked. There was no language to account for ecological realities in this discourse. Those conversations happened elsewhere, in the realm of ‘protection’.

‘More dangerous than cyanide’ In November 1991, three weeks after the deaths on the Frasers’ property, the Dubbo office of the New South Wales Department of Water Resources issued its first official warnings. The office had received reports of large quantities of blue-green algae on the Darling below Bourke. It advised landholders not to drink the water, to avoid contact with it and to keep stock clear of the river. Local officials at Bourke wanted to know exactly what they were dealing with and what they needed to do to ensure people and stock were safe. On Sunday 3 November, locals took water samples from the Darling and sent them to the Department of Health labs in Sydney for analysis. While waiting for the results, Bourke shire’s health officer, Terry Pearce, made ‘increasingly frantic’ calls to government departments in Sydney for advice on how to handle the looming health crisis.27 He couldn’t get any clear answers. On Tuesday 5 November, Bourke Shire President Wally Mitchell and health officer Terry Pearce received the results of the tests. Immediately Mitchell broadcast an emergency message on Bourke’s local radio station warning of the ‘extreme danger’ to humans and stock: ‘we don’t want to alarm people . . . [but] the toxin from blue-green algae is, in fact, in pure form more dangerous than cyanide.’28 Wally Mitchell then hatched a plan to spray vast tracts of the Darling with an agricultural algaecide. The New South Wales Pollution Control Commission refused to grant permission for the aerial spraying but Mitchell said he would go ahead anyway; the Commission warned they would sue him personally if he did.29 That wasn’t going to stop ‘The Mouth from Louth’. Wally Mitchell procured 600 litres of a copper-based algaecide. A large cotton irrigation firm offered to donate the use of one of their crop dusters and a pilot. When residents in Bourke heard of the shire’s plans for aerial spraying of the chemical over their water supply a group formed to try and halt the action. The chemical had never been used for this purpose and wasn’t approved for use on open water. Concerned residents called the New South Wales Pollution Control Commission, who assured them the spraying would not go ahead.30 On Sunday 9 November, Mitchell had the crop-duster pilot track the ailing Darling over 40 kilometres, releasing the deep blue liquid algaecide onto the water and black soil plains below. The pilot commented that ‘zigzagging along the ever-twisting Darling was an interesting change after the repetitious runs spraying cotton’.31

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The National Parks and Wildlife Service opposed the use of the chemical. Ian Smalls, the principal scientist of the Department of Water Resources, said if he’d known he would have strongly advised against its use. Copper-based algaecides work by attracting algae with its nutrient content. The algae absorb it through their cell wall and a digestive enzyme breaks down the algaecide and releases copper into the cell, killing the algae. The algaecide itself is not toxic to humans when used as directed. However, the reason so many authorities objected to its use – apart from it being untested in such circumstances – was that the algaecide causes the dead algae to release their neurotoxins into the water immediately.32 Smalls said the effect was ‘like putting pins in a balloon, releasing other materials’. According to the manufacturer’s website, these toxins could persist for twentyeight days. Authorities feared mass fish kills could result, as well as the potential for poisoning of stock and humans.33 One Bourke resident wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald asking if the Darling River was being ‘used as a guinea pig for experimenting with chemicals’ and accused Mitchell of using ten times the recommended concentration.34 Mitchell didn’t see his actions as a massive gamble; he claimed he had verbal permission from the Department of Agriculture in Orange and that the spraying had been a success. The Department refuted this, telling the Herald, ‘We were waiting for Wally to get back to us to obtain official permission. He never did.’35 For Wally Mitchell, a grazier himself, responsible for the safety of the shire’s people and its economically valuable stock, and getting nowhere with urban authorities, the dangers posed by a rapidly growing toxic algal bloom must have outweighed the risks of using the relatively benign algaecide. To some of the residents, however, it seemed as if some of the primary producers of the region had taken on the cavalier and reckless culture that they said the foreign-owned cotton firms had introduced.

‘The river runs backwards’ In the late 1970s Jack Buster did a ‘real nasty thing’. The new cotton growers at Bourke had been given permission to form a self-regulating Water Users Association. When an agreement between irrigators went wrong and there was no water left for Buster to pump, he placed 400 siphons on the town weir. The community was facing a dry period and Buster was stealing water from the town’s only supply. When the local official from the Department of Water Resources finally discovered the pipes six to eight hours later, he told Buster to remove them or face legal action, as well as ‘the wrath of “three thousand townspeople, all wanting to get him by the throat” ’.36 The Water Resources official told historian Siobhan McHugh that trying to enforce the rules was hopeless. Irrigators openly flaunted regulations, regularly pumping without permission, and had set up elaborate means of avoiding detection. The actions and values of the irrigators were straining social relations in small towns across the plains. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the Bourke irrigators really became established and started expanding their operations. They were soon eclipsed by Clyde

Source: Cameron Muir.

FIGURE 7.2

Empty water storage cell near Bourke in 2007. When the Darling reaches a certain height, irrigators pump the water into these private water storages. This one is 2.4 by 1.2 kilometres. The sky is clouded with dust.

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Agriculture, a subsidiary of the British conglomerate Swire Group, who started buying thousands of hectares and building enormous off-river storage cells. The cotton irrigators established a ‘new order’ in a region in which pastoralism had dominated for the past one hundred years.37 Historian Heather Goodall observed the social and environmental upheaval going on in the course of her long-term work with Aboriginal people of the upper-Darling. She wrote eloquently about the oral testimony of townsfolk and graziers who were worried about the new agricultural developments. Residents had begun to tell a story about how the ‘the river runs backwards’ whenever the irrigators turned their pumps on. Whether it was true or not, the phrase expressed their anxieties about the power of the irrigators’ machinery to interfere with the plains environment as they had come to know it. Goodall reported that whenever the story was told it always sounded the same, ‘spoken in a worried, uneasy tone, or with a disgusted shrug’. It was ‘no admiring boast of the power of modern technology’.38 By the late 1980s pastoralists were no longer ‘kings in grass castles’ where irrigation was possible. Although they had benefitted from improved pastures and reasonable demand through the 1970s and 1980s, the pastoralists were still carrying out low-capital operations. Goodall noted that the economic shift reflected shifts in political power. In cotton towns like Bourke, members of the cotton families began to hold ‘significant numbers in local government’. That the irrigators displaced the grazing families only explains part of the ‘open tension’ between them.39 A far greater cause of hostilities has been a battle over how they have seen each other’s attitudes and production activities in relation to the degradation of the plains and its rivers.

A ‘severe breach of human rights’ When the Darling River turned green in 1991, many people – from local residents and pastoralists, to observers in the cities – started to blame cotton for the unprecedented algal bloom. The river had been low and slow before, and temperatures were always hot out on the semi-arid plains, but there had never been an explosion of algae like this one. Communities downstream from the big cotton developments felt desperate and neglected. The Wilcannia branch of the National Party sent a letter to its political enemy, the Labor Party, then in opposition, pleading for reform that would make water management more socially equitable and prevent degradation of the environment. It read: Our river is a mess. Over recent years the deterioration of the quality and quantity along the unregulated section of the Darling River has increased significantly . . . We believe the philosophy that the stored water in the dams at the headwaters of the Darling-Barwon system belongs totally to the irrigation valleys around these dams is so wrong as to border on severe breach of human rights.40

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People living downstream from irrigation correlated deterioration in river health and flows with the increase in extractions from the river. It seemed the water authorities had handed the river to the irrigators and there was no compensation for everyone else who depended on water. The problem of ‘clientism’ persisted in the restructured Department of Water Resources; this was the successor of the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission established in 1916, whose task it was to develop new irrigation projects. In the 1980s the Department basically functioned as a rural supply authority.41 Some claimed active collusion between the public servants and irrigators was still part of the culture in the 1990s. After the algal bloom hit the headlines a former owner of some small cotton properties in western New South Wales wrote a letter to the editor suggesting there had been ‘some very close liaisons between some Water Resources officials and large irrigators’.42 He said the Darling was a ‘national disgrace’ and that the brazen and domineering culture of cotton meant that although ‘many people in Darling River towns had been aware of the problem for years’ they were ‘intimidated into silence’.43 Even Department of Water Resources staff who were outsiders to the local cotton culture felt intimidated. When Allan Amos moved from Newcastle to Bourke in the mid-1970s, his wife began to fear for his safety when he started trying to enforce water laws. The local police wouldn’t offer protection, telling him until someone had ‘taken a shot at [him] with a rifle, they were not going to get involved’.44

‘We’re all to blame’ By the start of December 1991 the toxic algal bloom had grown to cover an astonishing 1,200 kilometres of the Darling River. It forced the New South Wales Government to declare a state of emergency, while the Federal Government rushed to mobilise the army. Rural communities and landholders living along the river were warned not to touch or drink the water for fear of severe eye and skin irritations and ‘horrendous internal injuries’.45 Stories circulated of people going to extraordinary lengths to source clean water. The owner of a pub in Wilcannia didn’t have any tank water left so he had to borrow 20 litres from the local church.46 One family who lived on a property near Louth drove 100 kilometres each day for their evening shower and to wash their 1-year-old’s nappies.47 Another family were reported to have packed up and moved to Dubbo on the Macquarie River after their baby broke out in a skin rash.48 The New South Wales Government established an emergency taskforce comprised of ten senior scientists to investigate how to manage the bloom, what caused it and how to prevent it from happening again. The exact cause of the unprecedented bloom is still unknown,49 but the scientists on the panel and most investigators afterwards agreed it was a combination of excess nutrients and climatic circumstances. Phosphates built up in paddocks and on the banks as a result of run-off from pastoral and agricultural fertilisers, and from town sewerage releases into the river. Overstocking and ploughing destabilised the soil and when the largest

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floods in almost twenty years came through in 1990, all those phosphates were washed into and suspended in the water.50 The blue-green algae, which are not technically algae but belong to a genus of cyanobacteria called Anabaena, are endemic to the river and hatch from cysts in the mud in summer. After the floods came a series of dry months, and the next summer the river flow was low and slow, making perfect conditions for the algae.51 The entire management of the inland rivers and their catchments became the subject of intense scrutiny and public debate. The algal bloom occurred ten years after the Murray stopped flowing to the sea for the first time since anyone could remember. These events showed the power of the Australian environment to surprise and perplex a society still trying to adapt to its unique characteristics.52 Ian Causley, a National Party politician who was Minister for Natural Resources in New South Wales at the time, said, ‘I don’t like to claim world records, but experts are saying that it’s probably one of the greatest disasters of blue-green algae we have seen in the world.’53 People all over the country seemed to evoke a collective shame, asking in the plural, how did we let things come to this? Health metaphors to describe the condition of riverine ecologies and the idea of dying rivers entered the national consciousness. One scientist at an algae crisis taskforce meeting said the Darling had suffered what amounted to ‘a massive heart attack’.54 Addressing the immediate crisis meant admitting the long-term failure of river and land management. The Minister for Natural Resources in the New South Wales Liberal–National Coalition Government acknowledged it had ‘taken decades to get to this stage, and it may possibly take decades to overcome it’.55 The head of the taskforce advised, ‘there’s no triple bypass, no miracle cure, just a long haul back’.56 Letters to the editor poured in to the leading newspapers expressing concern for all the inland rivers. They suggested the problem was a national culture that didn’t respect the workings of Australia’s natural systems. It was not a natural disaster but: ‘an act of man – the result of inadequate respect and care for our inland waterways. This is not natural.’57 The letters suggested ‘we’re all to blame’.58 A year after the algal bloom, Prime Minister Paul Keating gave a speech in which he promised to restore the health of the Murray-Darling, replacing ‘a matter of national shame with a cause for hope and pride’.59

An unlikely alliance Concern didn’t just come from the so-called ‘urban-greenies’. Some of the loudest voices belonged to rural people whose livelihoods and identity depended on a ‘healthy’ environment. Whatever your politics, whatever your values towards the living world, whether you were an environmentalist or not, it seemed everyone believed something had gone appallingly wrong in the way Australians were managing their role in the environment. In 1995 a consortium of cotton growers from Warren and Nevertire, on the Macquarie River, purchased a property called ‘Currareva’ on Coopers Creek, in the Channel Country of western Queensland, with plans to develop it for irrigation. Environmentalists, scientists and graziers

Source: Cameron Muir.

FIGURE 7.3 Bare cotton fields near Nevertire in 2007. The distinctive corduroy furrows of cotton fields.

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were outraged that one of ‘the world’s last great unregulated river systems’ was going to have 40,000 megalitres of water diverted to grow cotton.60 They formed an unlikely alliance. Barcoo Shire Chairman Peter Douglas said, ‘the history of irrigated cropping in Australia was one of scant regard for the future with numerable examples of river systems destroyed by over-harvesting and chemical contamination.’61 No one wanted to see what was happening to the Macquarie Marshes occur in the Channel Country. Scientists employed health metaphors again, saying ‘the wetlands and watercourses of Cooper Creek are the ecological arteries of the Lake Eyre Basin’.62 The Currareva dispute became one of the biggest conservation battles of the 1990s. In 1998, a new government took power in Queensland and, in response to the campaign, rejected the development application.63 Strong social partnerships stopped agriculture being carried out in a way that was unacceptable to the local community. They prevented the potential degradation of a wild river. Despite tensions between graziers and irrigators, and the public relations battle they were fighting, the fact that the rivers were over-used and over-allocated was hardly in dispute. The big problem was how to prevent the existing water licenses in the Murray-Darling Basin from being developed to their full potential. In the 1960s and 1970s, when most of the irrigation licenses were granted, water authorities weren’t too concerned that the rivers were ‘over-committed’.64 No one had pumps big enough to extract as much water as they were permitted to take. By the late 1980s, even though in many basins no new licenses had been issued, better technology, wider gauge pumps, bigger private water storages and more capital meant the amount of water being diverted was continuing to increase. In 1995 the Murray-Darling Basin Commission – an independent body established by the States – managed to set a limit on further water diversions in cooperation with the States and irrigators. This was called ‘The Cap’ and its purpose was to act as a first step towards major water reform.

‘A scandal of generational proportions’ The years since the 1991/1992 toxic, blue-green algae bloom have seen a constant churning of amendments, new legislation and restructures in preparation for further reform. The most recent – The Murray-Darling Basin Plan – the centrepiece of a 10-billion dollar river regeneration strategy, suggested government water authorities would need to make significant reductions to irrigation water allocations to improve the health of the rivers. A consensus on the need to reduce diversions fell apart. On 13 October 2010 irrigators from the town of Griffith burned copies of a report known as the ‘Guide to The Plan’ and shouted abuse at public servants who had met for a town hall meeting. It made national television news headlines. History reveals some of the motivations of the irrigators in fighting the latest river reforms. The battler myth holds less currency now, and many sections of Australian society – from environmental activists to farmers struggling with debt – have asked what the social benefit of agriculture is. Landholders are losing their identity; they are losing the sense of what their role is, and what their value is, to

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Australian society. In this context river reform became a top-down process that discarded the notion of fostering community involvement in the years leading up to the release of ‘The Plan’. Irrigators were cast as the problem and not part of the solution. Their anger should not have come as a surprise. The irrigators’ aggressive response to the proposed plan rattled the Federal Government who distanced itself from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority whose advice it had commissioned. The head of the Authority resigned and the Government appointed a former politician in his place. State governments, in a combination of political and budgetary opportunism, withdrew funding necessary for implementing the plan. The science suggested that the least risky option for ensuring river health was to reduce overall entitlements by 7,600 gigalitres and that the riskiest option was 3,000 gigalitres.65 The Federal Government passed legislation in 2012 with the aim of reducing water entitlements by 2,750 gigalitres. The Wentworth Group, an independent group of scientists whose members have included Tim Flannery and the late Peter Cullen, accused the Federal Government of caving in to ‘extremists who are hell bent on destroying water reform for political reasons’.66 More money has been budgeted for subsidising the irrigation industry’s infrastructure than water buybacks. The Wentworth Group fears the large transfer of wealth from taxpayers to industry in the form of property rights and subsidies has the potential to become ‘a scandal of generational proportions’.67 The new head of the Authority, Craig Knowles, used the language of ‘resilience theory’ and ‘adaptive management’ to propose the possibility of ‘adapting’ the plan in the future to reduce the already inadequate 2,750 gigalitres figure.68 This is the ongoing ‘slow violence’ of ‘natural resource management’.

Water as a gift: a Ngemba perspective In April 2010, Aboriginal people of the north-west rivers, including the Darling, Macquarie and Bogan, formed an alliance in an attempt to have their views on river management heard. The Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations group represents twenty-two Aboriginal nations.69 Phil Sullivan is a Ngemba traditional owner who has worked with environmental managers in co-managed National Parks, consulted on Aboriginal cultural heritage and – over the last five years – on Aboriginal perspectives regarding river system health. In Phil’s view, non-indigenous society views water as a material resource to be divided among various consumers and stakeholders. In contrast, Aboriginal people see water and its ecology as a gift.70 As Phil explained: Water to me is the essence of life. And I’ve got to respect life, and I’ve got to honour life. If I don’t honour it and look after it, then it’s going to take my life away from me. It’s going to take the very essence of who I am away from me. So that’s why I honour the river, the water, and give respect to it. Because in the end if I don’t look after that . . . then me and my family

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and my tribe and the gift that’s been given to us is going to be whittled away. I got to give honour and I got to give respect to that, first and foremost. And then everything else will fall into place. It’s like a bit of a foundation. As a member of Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations, Phil has worked on a research project to collect and publicise Aboriginal values for water. He is ensuring that Aboriginal people have a say in the management of rivers, because ‘water is life’. For too long, he says, non-indigenous culture has separated the human world from nature.71 He is working to restore relationships of care and mutual benefit. Stories are ways of ensuring people retain the knowledge for how to allow life to flourish. So even though the Darling River is in ‘poor health’, even though local Aboriginal and non-indigenous people observe ecological degradation, there is still the potential for renewal. According to Phil: In a traditional setting, if there was nothing there, there’s still something there . . . Yes, it still flows. That place I’m talking about. The spiritual place. It’s always there. There’s a story that the river will always flow, it never stops. In spirit it flows. However, without respect for the river and respect for the gift, without respect for each other, the story is diminished and so is the potential for life to flourish. If the story is lost so is the river. Losing that close knowledge and connection with the gift takes away your ‘very essence’, according to Phil. Similarly, Jessica Weir documented how the Yorta Yorta equated the death of the river with the death of a people.72 For many indigenous people, the health of country is ‘inextricably linked with human health’.73 This is markedly different to Western knowledge and practices which have predominantly kept research and policy for the environment separate from human health.74 If indigenous people are unable to fulfil their obligations to look after country then people and environment become sick. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority has consulted with Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations but, according to Phil, many Aboriginal people still feel they haven’t been heard. Very few Aboriginal people hold water entitlements. In Slow Violence, Rob Nixon challenged the lack of environmental justice for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.75 Slow violence is a powerful metaphor for describing Aboriginal people’s gradual loss of their land and water, and the way they are structurally locked out of management decisions that affect their country, their health and their lives.

Slow violence and broken promises The concept of ‘slow violence’ offers a useful way for interpreting the lack of attention to the drawn-out decline of the plains rivers. Slow violence refers to environmental catastrophe that occurs incrementally and without ongoing public interest. It is also an effective way to understand the stories of those who seek to

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make a living in the wake of the broken promises of agricultural ‘progress’. The slow violence of the western plains is present in the lives of almost all who seek to grow food and fibre in this landscape. It is ingrained in the social structures of these rural communities. Take Neville Simpson: he is not your typical cotton farmer. He doesn’t hold a university degree, nor does he command tens of thousands of hectares. He doesn’t have time for cotton industry PR, and he doesn’t talk fast. He’s not American or British, and neither is his business. He lives where he farms, on the Darling River near Bourke, and this alone tends to set him apart. He’s elderly, softly spoken, with a slight western drawl, and takes any opportunity to make a self-deprecating aside about his farming expertise. The shape of his story is familiar. It is common among Australia’s family and small farms. I was introduced to Neville by chance. A local pastor, interested in history, offered to take a colleague and me to meet one of his parishioners. He said the parishioner was a long-time resident and farmer in the district and would be a good source of stories and information about changes in the Darling environment. The pastor called ahead. Neville was attending a wake but would be home soon and the pastor assured us that visiting wouldn’t be a problem. On the way out of town, we noticed a police car parked on the lawn in front of a weatherboard house, red and blue lights flashing, prompting the pastor to express concern about trouble in Bourke. On the highway, we drove past bleak rows of citrus tree stumps, cut in an effort to save them during the drought. There was scarred earth nearby, where others had been ripped out. Then we made our way into the distinctive corduroy fields of cotton country, their laser-levelled furrows converging in the distance. Our initial awkwardness at arriving after a funeral was overcome when Neville’s wife introduced herself, asked us in and offered homemade lemon cordial. At the back door we stepped around a knee-high pile of lemons. We took chairs on the front veranda, overlooking the black soil plain and a line of red gums marking the banks of the Darling. We all held tall glasses, sipping the sweet, cool drink. The hand Neville used to grip his was arthritic; the skin on his face was flecked with sunspots, red capillaries and other marks. His appearance spoke of years of hard work. It wasn’t long before he started telling stories about his life and about farming in dry country. His mother was born in a boundary rider’s hut, and his parents worked a run in the red country between Bourke and the Queensland border. A ‘starvation block’, he called it. Wool prices declined steadily after the Korean War, and grazing in that dry scrub country was too much for Neville. He sold up with just enough money to move to town and when he had the opportunity to purchase land on the Darling in 1970 he jumped at the chance. It was a smaller block than he’d been on before, but it was rich, black soil and close to the river. These characteristics, he thought, would ‘drought-proof ’ his farming. His idea was to grow feed for cattle, as beef was doing much better than wool. He planted lucerne but most of it didn’t come up, and what did was no

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more than an inch high. He had no experience of cropping or irrigation. ‘I made every mistake in the book,’ he said, chuckling. Americans had recently bought land next to Neville, but they couldn’t get a licence to irrigate the cotton they wanted to grow. They saw Neville struggling and said if they could lease some of his land and water they would teach him how to irrigate. That’s when Neville was introduced to cotton. In the 1890s, a government experiment farm had trialled cotton irrigation with artesian water at Pera Bore, 20 kilometres west of Bourke, but not in commercial quantities. No one else was irrigating the modern way in that region, treating cotton like an annual, and there was a lot of trial and error. They would benefit from a generous bounty that the government was paying to encourage farmers to go into cotton production, but they had to get a decent crop first. While they struggled to develop the cotton, Neville did contract farming for Edgell, the premium food company. With Bourke’s climatic conditions being different to traditional horticultural areas, Edgell could ‘keep the factory running all year round’, providing supermarkets and consumers with the same commodity foods regardless of season. Neville and his family planted potatoes, but the bagging machine designed for European soils couldn’t distinguish between a potato and a clod of black soil-clay. It bagged more clods than potatoes. He tried tomatoes and grew a lush crop, but after they were packed, the western heat turned them to mush and they ran out of the bottom of the crates. Neville’s wife was heavily involved in their melongrowing venture, shipping 100,000 cases a year, but the market changed and labour costs were high, so it became unprofitable. When cotton started paying in the 1990s – with the right varieties, technology and prices – it brought in a lot of cash. It became the saviour of Bourke. The British-owned Clyde Agriculture built massive off-river water storages and irrigated tens of thousands of hectares of cotton. Irrigators joined the ranks of community leaders and, as historian Heather Goodall notes, displaced many pastoralists.76 Neville and his neighbours expanded their cotton operations. Bourke was no longer running on welfare. That was until everyone upstream wanted to get in on cotton, too – that was, until this drought. When I spoke to Neville, the drought had been going for five or six years, and he hadn’t received any income for the past two. ‘Now we’re broke again’, he said, with his palms out. He managed a grim smile, but there was sadness in his voice. His family had had enough, but no one wanted to take on their property. Once conditions were good again, they’d look at selling. Neville illustrated his story with a worn sepia photo of wool being carted on a massive dray at his father’s run, an almanac of Australia with the years that Bourke was in drought carefully bookmarked, and a thin sheet of fax paper with the daily cotton prices, which he still monitored even though he didn’t have a crop. Later, I read in a collection of Aboriginal oral history from the Bourke district that Neville had earned respect among the labourers and cotton chippers who worked on his property. One worker spoke about Neville giving his precious household rainwater to the chippers, commenting that he was the ‘only cotton

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grower’ who did that.77 Perhaps Neville wasn’t as distant or ruthless as corporate cotton growers; perhaps farming isn’t just about money. Neville Simpson’s story maps the fortunes of Bourke. Cotton ended up like all the other commodity industries that promised wealth and ended in ruin: first, squatting and wool, then the meatworks, which took over for a while, but whose factory building stands derelict at the edge of town. Locals give different reasons for cotton’s demise. Some agree with Senator Bill Heffernan when he says the water stops at the Queensland border now; others say it was never going to last long when dependent on a river as variable as the Darling. Neville doesn’t blame Queensland, or any other upstream irrigators lured by the promise of cotton. Instead, he says, ‘When it rains, the river flows’. As we were preparing to leave the property, Neville, his wife and the pastor stood under the carport and spoke gravely. ‘Looks like we had a suicide in town today,’ one said. That’s what the police had been attending when we saw them earlier. The conversation moved on to the hardship of mental illness and the need to ensure the community received the support it requires. The owner of the motel I stayed at on a subsequent trip to Bourke mentioned she was sad about another suicide. The black dog stalks Bourke.

Coda In February 2009, Bourke received 200 millimetres of rain in one day, two-thirds of its annual average. The town flooded, not because of a rising Darling River, but because of the sheer volume of rainfall. The footage on TV, two months later, showed the country around Bourke in the best condition I’d seen it for years. I thought about Neville Simpson; it was a good time, it seemed, for him to sell up and move on. I called Neville to see if he had made a decision; he sounded weary over the phone. Just before the heavy rainfalls the bank had forced his family off the farm. The New South Wales Government had changed the way it accounted for river water diversions – it moved licences from a fixed maximum extraction amount to a more flexible system based on moving averages of past water usage. Depending on how you compared the old system to the new, it could look as if there were dramatic cuts to licenses. Irrigators saw a 63 per cent cut, whereas in reality, because no one had ever had the capacity to use their theoretical maximum, the reductions were between 5 and 12 per cent. Even some of the banks didn’t understand it.78 Neville had his ‘paper entitlement’ of 12,000 megalitres reduced to 4,600 and the bank withdrew its backing. At 80 years old, Neville walked away with no assets. He had put every cent he made back into the property. ‘It was bad management on my part: I should have bought a unit on the Gold Coast,’ he said wryly. Before the last drought the farm was worth around 10 million dollars; now he was homeless and living on the pension. Fortunately a family friend offered temporary accommodation for Neville and his wife at their property 30 kilometres outside Bourke.

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I went out to Bourke again in October 2010. There was no question now: the drought had broken. It was the Murray-Darling Basin’s wettest October since 1976. For the previous four months most of eastern Australia had received above average rainfall. Last time I came out everyone was in despair and the country was brown and exposed. This time everything was green, wildflowers covered the plains, and even the woody weeds looked good with weeping myalls and turpentine bushes in bloom in the red country. I saw Neville again. Neville’s son, who had also lived on the farm and had shared the debt, managed to get a permanent job with the shire council. He took out a loan to build a house in Bourke. The family live together again now that the house is finished. On the day I visited Neville he’d spent the morning with his grandchildren inspecting the wildflowers. We talked more about his life in farming and the current state of politics in Australia. His thoughts turned to family. Tying his livelihood to the vagaries of global commodity agriculture had been tough and tumultuous and cost him nearly everything he owned, but he loved the land itself and was grateful for having been able to share that love of land with his wife and children and grandchildren. He had found security in old age. In a soft voice, he said: ‘This is about as good as it gets.’

Notes 1 Not the former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who had pastoral property in western Victoria! 2 Peter Bowers, ‘Farmers’ Last Blow: A Poisoned River’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 November 1991. 3 ‘It’s True Blue, Drinky Die and Pioneer Knows Ooze to Blame’, ibid., 23 November. 4 ‘Farmers’ Last Blow: A Poisoned River’, ibid., 8 November. (‘The scours’ is a general term for the various diseases that cause diarrhoea in calves.) 5 ‘It’s True Blue, Drinky Die and Pioneer Knows Ooze to Blame’, ibid., 23 November. 6 Nicholas Dillon Healy, Australian Cotton: Its Growth and Consequence (Sydney; Melbourne; Brisbane: Australasian Publishing Co, 1923), 143. 7 Ted Henzell, Australian Agriculture: Its History and Challenges (Collingwood, Vic.: CSIRO Publishing, 2007), 205. 8 Ibid., 213. 9 Foreword to Healy, Australian Cotton. 10 See: Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman, The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (New York: Public Affairs, 2003). 11 Ibid., 306. 12 R. F. McKillop, Into the Golden West: The Mckillops of Buddah, 1782–1974, 1st edn. (Castlecrag, NSW: MWA International, 2007). 13 Henzell, Australian Agriculture, 213. 14 ‘Auscott Buys Winderemere Farms’, Narromine News and Trangie Advocate, 30 May 1967. 15 Licences at that time were based on an area of land, not volume of water. 16 ‘An ex-digger’, in Narromine News and Trangie Advocate (1967). 17 ‘Auscott Buys Winderemere Farms’, ibid., 30 May. 18 ‘Australian Political Chronicle: The Commonwealth, January-April’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 14, no. 2 (1968): 248–49. 19 Siobhan McHugh, Cottoning On: Stories of Australian Cotton-Growing (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1996), 92.

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20 Ibid., 92–93. 21 ‘Private Irrigation Could Use All Water Available’, Narromine News and Trangie Advocate, 2 April 1965, 1. 22 Ibid. 23 Flooded country is land that is inundated in floods; it is not constantly under water. It could be dry for years without seeing a flood. The Macquarie Marshes had ‘core’ wetlands, which received regular inundation, and the rest of the wetlands, which received less regular flooding. 24 Water Conservation on the Macquarie River: Report of Committee Regarding the Proposed Construction of Burrendong Dam and Other Matters, 1934. National Archives of Australia, A6184. 25 ‘No Surprises in Conservation Minister’s Decision on Water from Burrendong Dam’, Narromine News and Trangie Advocate, 23 December 1966, 3. 26 ‘Is Burrendong Water to Grow Reeds or Food?’ Narromine News and Trangie Advocate, 25 March 1966, 1. 27 Peter Bowers, ‘No Easy Cure as a River Slowly Dies’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 November 1991. 28 ‘Farmers’ Last Blow: A Poisoned River’, ibid., 8 November. 29 ‘No Easy Cure as a River Slowly Dies’, ibid., 30 November. 30 Bill Cameron, ‘Is the Darling a Guinea Pig?’ ibid., 15 November. 31 Peter Bowers, ‘100km Is Too Far to Drive for the Evening Shower’, ibid., 11 November. 32 Ruth Consolidated Industries, ‘Coptrol Algicide Questions Answered’, www.coptrol. info/CoptrolInformation/CoptrolFrequentlyAskedQuestions/tabid/449/Default.aspx (accessed on 1 February 2014). 33 Asa Wahlquist and John Stapleton, ‘Officials Fear Spread of Darling River Algae’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 November 1991. 34 Bill Cameron, ‘Is the Darling a Guinea Pig?’ ibid., 15 November. 35 Peter Bowers, ‘No Easy Cure as a River Slowly Dies’, ibid., 30 November. 36 McHugh, Cottoning On, 96. 37 Heather Goodall, ‘The River Runs Backwards’, in Words for Country: Landscape & Language in Australia, ed. Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002). 38 Ibid., 31. 39 Ibid., 46. 40 New South Wales. Legislative Assembly. Debates. ‘Blue-Green Algae River Infestation.’ 10 December, 1991, 6202. Available online at: www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/ parlment/hansart.nsf/V3Key/LA19911210027 (accessed on 1 February 2014). 41 William John Johnson, ‘Adaptive Management of a Complex Social-Ecological System: The Regulated Macquarie River in South-Eastern Australia’ (Masters Thesis, University of New England, 2005). 42 Max Bolte, ‘The Darling Is Now a National Disgrace’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 December 1991. 43 Ibid. 44 McHugh, Cottoning On, 95. 45 ‘Rural Water Crisis’, Sun Herald, 24 November 1991. 46 Stephen Skinner, ‘Taskforce to Fight Killer Algae’, ibid. 47 Bowers, ‘100km Is Too Far.’ 48 McHugh, Cottoning On. 49 Daniel Connell, Water Politics in the Murray-Darling Basin (Annandale, NSW: Federation Press, 2007), 19. 50 The problem of bank erosion might have been exacerbated by a decision taken soon after the Greiner government came to power in 1988 to change Crown Land legislation on riparian buffer zones. The amendments made it easier for landholders to access those riparian zones. 51 During the floods in 1990, Bob Wasson, a senior scientist in catchment geomorphology who was working at the CSIRO at the time, predicted a major algal bloom would occur the following summer.

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52 See Daniel Connell on altered land-use regimes, the Darling River, and surprises: Connell, Water Politics in the Murray-Darling Basin. 53 Mark Coultan, ‘Army to Help Fight Algae’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 December 1991. 54 Peter Bowers, ‘No Easy Cure as a River Slowly Dies’, ibid., 30 November. 55 Mark Coultan, ‘Army to Help Fight Algae’, ibid., 3 December. 56 Peter Bowers, ‘No Easy Cure as a River Slowly Dies’, ibid., 30 November. 57 Michael Reid, ‘Letter to the Editor’, ibid. 58 Peter Smith, ‘We’re All to Blame’, ibid., 5 December; Julie Cunningham, ‘Stop the Duckshoving over the Darling’, ibid., 30 November. 59 Michael Gordon, ‘PM Set to Take the Green Pledge’, Sunday Age, 20 December 1992. 60 Murray Hogarth, ‘Cooper Creek Cotton Project “Too Risky”’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 September 1996, 4. 61 Brian Williams, ‘Water Harvest Battle Back On’, Courier Mail, 31 July 1998. 62 Hogarth, ‘Cooper Creek Cotton Project “Too Risky”’. 63 Bob Morrish, ‘Protecting Coopers Creek: The Currareva Dispute’, text box in Libby Robin et al. eds, Desert Channels: The Impulse to Conserve (Collingwood, Vic.: CSIRO Publishing, 2010). 64 Johnson, ‘Adaptive Management.’ 65 Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Guide to the Proposed Basin Plan (Canberra: MurrayDarling Basin Authority, 2010), 57; Quentin Grafton, ‘What’s the Science Behind Revised Murray-Darling Environmental Flows?’, The Conversation, http://theconversation.com/ whats-the-science-behind-revised-murray-darling-environmental-flows-1509 (accessed on 1 February 2014). 66 Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, ‘Statement on the 2011 Draft Murray-Darling Basin Plan’, (Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, 2012), 2. 67 Ibid., 3. 68 For example, see: ‘More than just a volume of water’, MDBA Media Youtube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHH0yMLKwLk (accessed on 1 February 2014). 69 The twenty-two groups are: Barkindji (Paakantyi), Githabul, Mandandanji, Barunggam, Gunggari, Mardigan, Bidjara, Jarowair, Murrawarri, Bigambul, Gwamu (Kooma), Ngemba, Budjiti, Kunja, Ngiyampaa, Euahlayi, Kambuwal, Kwiambul, Wailwan, Gamilaroi, Maljangapa and Wakka Wakka. 70 See: Jessica K. Weir, Murray River Country: An Ecological Dialogue with Traditional Owners (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2009). 71 Deborah Bird Rose et al., ‘Wounded Rivers’, Ecological Humanities, www.ecological humanities.org/woundedrivers.html (accessed on 1 February 2014). 72 Weir, Murray River Country. 73 Donna Green et al., ‘Disproportionate Burdens: The Multidimensional Impacts of Climate Change on the Health of Indigenous Australians’, Medical Journal of Australia 190, no. 1 (2009). 74 Fay Johnston et al., ‘Ecohealth and Aboriginal Testimony of the Nexus between Human Health and Place’, EcoHealth 4, no. 4 (2007). 75 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 76 Goodall, ‘The River.’ 77 Gillian Cowlishaw and Robert Mackay, Bourke: Our Yarns, (Ultimo, NSW: UTS ePress, 2008), http://hdl.handle.net/2100/54 (accessed on 1 February 2014). 78 The new system reflects the realities of living with one of the world’s most variable large rivers. It also prevents water diversions from increasing to the theoretical maximums as irrigators purchase higher-capacity pumps and build larger storage dams. The new system allows licensees to carry over a portion of unused entitlements into the next year, something that they could not do before. Peter Tyrell, a former employee of the NSW Department of Water, said one irrigator did the right thing and told his bank about the changes, but said it was a 63 per cent cut, and the bank took his farm and water licence. The bank manager rang Peter to ask what sort of asset the bank owned now, and when Peter explained it, the manager said, ‘So this is actually very valuable!’

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CONCLUSION

In the book Heartland, historian George Main argued society should acknowledge the ‘painful history of suppression, fragmentation and disorder’ of industrial agriculture, while moving towards a regenerative agriculture, in which, ‘connectivity is acknowledged and nurtured’.1 Doing so will depend on the histories we tell, the language we use to understand the living world and our commitment to improving social relationships. In the past few decades researchers have explored how poor understanding can result in strained social relationships in communities. It is more uncommon to argue the reverse – that poor social relationships can have adverse consequences for ecologies. Take, for example, the case of chronic environmental lead pollution in the farwest mining town of Broken Hill. In the late 1990s social scientist Tara McGee interviewed residents about the problem. People reported being afraid to speak out about lead contamination affecting their children. They depended on mining for their livelihoods and did not want to risk anger from other locals or reprisals from the company.2 In an article for Science, Jules Pretty demonstrated divisions within communities can result in environmental damage, but good social relationships based on trust and reciprocity contribute to ‘the development of long-term obligations between people’, and these in turn support ‘positive environmental outcomes’.3 At Broken Hill, social relations broke down between neighbours, mine workers and the company, leaving continuing environmental degradation without any strong community resistance. War fosters multiple breakdowns in social relations, and wars have had devastating effects on the environment, as American environmental historians Richard Tucker and Ed Russell argue.4 There is a dimension of ‘war’ about the way settler Australians have approached their land – understanding it as ‘mongrel country’, rather than a functioning ecosystem poorly adapted to the expectations of Western agriculture.5 Historical sources reveal myriad complex, interrelated and

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subtle ways that connect the way people treat each other with the way they dwell in their environment. The same society that executed massacres caused ecological degradation on the nineteenth-century grasslands. Ordinary taboos and social constraints broke down, disrupting Aboriginal burning, which in turn caused woody native vegetation regrowth that devalued pastoralists’ land. Landholders failed to learn from Aboriginal people about the variability of the climate in the interior. Financial stress and disregard for the suffering of animals encouraged a culture of overstocking that permanently degraded the vegetation of the plains. For Sir William Crookes, food was a strategic asset – not for a single nation, but for a race of superior people. Scientific research into improving agricultural yield needed to be carried out urgently, not to improve the condition of humanity, but to maintain the superiority of the ‘bread-eaters’ and ensure the civilisation of the white race. From World War I to World War II the Australian Government funded agriculture as a means of populating the country with white people. Wheat was its handmaiden. Yet the very agriculture that promised to stabilise rural society introduced cultivation practices that failed to preserve the soil for the long term. The economic policies of the nineteenth and early twentieth century that favoured the producers, or the owners of capital, culminated in an over-supply of agricultural commodities for markets and the economic depression of the 1930s. Governments tried to hold back surpluses to raise the prices people would have to pay for food. Western nations engaged in a tariff war that did raise prices and which only encouraged more production surpluses. As commodity prices dropped, some farmers were pressured to extract more from their land to compensate for their loss of income. In the 1950s, rural development works, such as the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, showed Australia continued to value agriculture as a means of increasing its population to defend against perceived over-population in Asia and the threat of invasion. Agriculture was a strategic tool for national security in the 1950s and 1960s in a range of western nations, who believed the hungry developing world was susceptible to totalitarian communist influence and feared their increasing populations. The United States led the race to develop higher yielding grains. The Western nations’ actions echoed William Crookes’ calls to save the bread-eaters: this was agricultural policy motivated by fear. Again, in proposing a technical solution to ecological and social justice problems, it failed to address the inequitable distribution of food and the long-term health of the environment.

The world the ‘neo-Europes’ created What kind of food system did the dominant food exporters help to create? Marcel Mazoyer, a professor of agronomy at France’s National Agricultural Institute and the author of A History of World Agriculture, writes that international agricultural commodity markets are ‘residual markets glutted with surpluses that are often difficult to sell’.6 They are only a small share of world production, so they are not true global markets, but they have flow-on effects in local markets, and global

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ramifications. Australia participates in a system of agricultural commodity trade between rich nations that disadvantages the poor and the hungry. Real food prices, despite the spike in 2008, have been at historic lows – yet 850 million people suffer severe undernourishment, meaning they don’t have enough food to cover basic energy requirements. Counter-intuitively, low food prices worsen the situation of the world’s poorest people. This is because, according to the FAO, threequarters of the world’s undernourished are farmers or rural workers and the lowering of world food prices through public subsidies for agriculture in rich nations pushes these farmers into extreme poverty. Farmers in developing nations struggle to compete with highly subsidised commodities dumped on international markets. It becomes more difficult to raise enough money to maintain the family farm, to replace necessary equipment such as shovels and hoes. Often, desperate farmers try to extract more from their land and resources and revert to low-capital methods of cultivation such as slash-andburn, that lead to environmental degradation. With deteriorating tools and declining resources their surpluses diminish and farmers are often forced to sell much of the food that they would normally keep for their family.7 Eventually, these farmers lose their land and join the remaining third of the world’s hungry: the urban poor. The current system of agricultural commodity trade creates a situation where low prices are detrimental to two-thirds of the world’s undernourished people, while high prices are detrimental to the other third in urban slums. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) forecasts that if food prices spike again as they did in 2008, this will improve the income of farmers, agricultural workers and local economies as a whole in countries with large agricultural populations such as India, Peru, Kenya and Sri Lanka. But countries such as Egypt, Nigeria and Haiti, with less agriculture and high populations of urban poor, will suffer.8 A spiral begins – of social and family breakdown, environmental degradation and landlessness, poverty and hunger. In this system, markets alone are ineffective in combating historical inequity and injustice. There was a brief moment, in the middle of the twentieth century, when it seemed agriculture was going to be about feeding the world. Frank McDougall, the apricot grower from Renmark, almost convinced the West to restructure its economies around nutrition. He almost married agriculture with health. It is difficult to imagine how different the world might look if nutrition had been the driving force for agriculture. To some extent, those whose stories I have focused on – Sir George Gipps, Robert Peacock, Frank McDougall, Sir William McKell and Phil Sullivan – have all worked against the prevailing culture of their time in efforts to create a fairer world. The weight of historical injustice, the power of vested interests and our flawed relationships with non-human nature can overwhelm us. However, the American farmers Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton, in A Nation of Farmers, argue that wealthy nations have an obligation to begin changing the current structure of agricultural production and the global commodity trade. They argue:

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Beginning from the assumption that greater equity is impossible naturalises disaster – it says that the reason people starve is because we can’t do anything about it, and it makes it easy for us to wash our hands of the whole project of justice.9 Global poverty and hunger, the stresses faced by farmers both rich and poor, and environmental degradation caused by the way we do modern agriculture, can seem such a complex and large-scale problem that action is impossible. History opens up new perspectives and new conversations, borrowing insights from times past. If things weren’t always as they are now, if the things we know come from a particular place and time, then it is possible to see that things might be otherwise. History offers spaces for change in the future; it counters the slow violence wrought on people and the shadow places.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

George Main, Heartland: The Regeneration of Rural Place (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005), 245. Tara K. McGee, ‘Private Responses and Individual Action: Community Responses to Chronic Environmental Lead Contamination’, Environment and Behavior 31, no. 1 (1999). Jules Pretty, ‘Social Capital and the Collective Management of Resources’, Science 302, no. 5652 (2003): 1913. Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell, eds, Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of Warfare (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2004). Libby Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007), 209. Marcel Mazoyer, ‘Protecting Small Farmers and the Rural Poor in the Context of Globalization’, FAO of the United Nations, www.fao.org/worldfoodsummit/msd/ Y1743e.pdf (accessed on 1 February 2014). Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis (London: Earthscan, 2006). Loek Boonekamp, ‘Food Prices: The Grain of Truth’, OECD Observer 2009, no. 267 (2008), www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/2609/Food_prices:_The_grain_ of_truth.html (accessed on 1 February 2014). Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton, A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil (British Columbia: New Society, 2009), 218.

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EPILOGUE

It’s late afternoon and Bourke artist Andrew Hull is punting lanterns down the Darling River in a dinged-up ex-military boat. This will be his last rehearsal before tomorrow’s performance of ‘Remembering the River’. Five pelicans fly low in front, between steep banks, tracing the river. The sun is about to dip and the evening cool presses against our faces as the boat powers us downstream. For Andrew this is all about the light. Andrew will float 200 lanterns on the Darling at Bourke. It’s not a simple exercise and will involve two boats and a host of volunteers. The lanterns aren’t storebought objects of wispy fabric on thin wire frames. These are custom built by Andrew and his family, made with pine boards, dowel rods and screws, and are closer to the size of an old street lamp than a dainty silk lantern. These are solid bits of kit whose heft seems to cast doubt in the minds of some of the others here. ‘And these will float?’ one person asks. ‘Didn’t the prototype have more foam on the base?’ Andrew is busy manoeuvring the boat and examining the conditions he expects for the main event – there’s only the slightest breeze and no current because the river is barely spilling over the town weir. When the river is flowing, the lanterns can spread and glide by the huge three-tier wharf at Bourke from which people will view the performance. No flow means the boats will have to get much closer to the viewing area. Even a gentle breeze could send the lanterns away upstream. ‘That’s the river for you,’ says Andrew. ‘It’s always changing. You have to work with it, live with it.’ The Darling has one of the most variable flows of any river in the world.1 In the dry it can become little more than a series of ponds, but when the water comes down from the north-east it spreads over the plains and fills anabranches and billabongs, creating a river 50 kilometres wide and encouraging an explosion of wildlife. The boom and bust ecology here has shaped the lives and economies

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of the western landholders and towns. Learning to live with uncertainty is a constant and demanding process when ‘extreme’ climatic conditions can persist for a decade, or almost half a working life. We’ve reached the wharf and it’s time to do the test run with the lanterns lit. Andrew tells us he has noticed three distinct transitions in the changing light. At the beginning of sunset the lanterns appear an opaque milky white; in midtwilight the warm glow of the candle seems to make the lanterns appear solid; and by dusk the lantern lenses become translucent, revealing stories and illustrations marked on them. Over several months Andrew collected the drawings and stories of school children living on the Paroo, Warrego, Culgoa and Darling rivers. The children wrote on the translucent paper of the lantern lenses. The stories are illuminated and reflected in the surface of the water. It’s a hybrid work of story, text, visual aesthetics, community cooperation and public performance. The floating lanterns and their messages meld memory, place and time. The performance emphasises people’s shared connections to the river that has shaped their land, home and lives. This bringing people together, creatively and compassionately, is critical after years of division that have plagued the river towns of western New South Wales. People were distressed about the changes to their home environment and concerned for their own well-being. They had no real say over the changes that were taking place. Environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a word for this type of feeling: ‘solastalgia’.2 It combines solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain) and in contrast to nostalgia – the melancholia or homesickness one feels when separated from home – it refers to the distress one feels when the environment of home itself changes. As Albrecht explained: ‘It is that feeling you have when your sense of place is under attack.’3 The cotton industry drew fire even when it wasn’t the only cause of the poor ecological conditions that were apparent in the Darling. The lives of the people around Bourke are deeply embedded in the commodity industries that have dominated the region. It was the most visible industry affecting the western rivers. It brought an assortment of new chemicals, large machinery and different values for managing the environment. It arrived at a time when there had already been so much change, and people were worn with change fatigue. Andrew invited the residents of Bourke to come down to the old three-tier wharf on Saturday 6 July 2013. Here townsfolk could write their own stories on the remaining lenses. By mid-afternoon, on a clear and warm winter’s day, people begin sitting at park benches writing down their memories and stories inspired by the river. Volunteers plunk away with mallets, tapping the lids on the finished lanterns, while crowded markets sell everything from cake stands, fudge and second-hand books. A band is setting up on the lawn-covered levy, children hold red, yellow and aqua balloons, and there are at least nine prams just on this side of the tree. Here is a community coming together to pay homage to their river. Andrew didn’t want a stand-alone artwork, but something that was more of an open dialogue with people in his community, and with the broader public who

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might see the work online or on a lake in Canberra when it is re-presented there. He says: If we can get them to come down to the river and they have a look at it, and they write something on a lens for their own lanterns, they start to think . . . well I’m part of the river, this is my country. Overwhelmingly, the words were dedications to family, and many were to loved ones who had died. For the participants, imagining the lanterns floating down the river invoked deep cultural associations with memory, loss, and honouring. To Opa, Thinking of you every day. We miss you. Dad xxx A true Bourkite, RIP. The power of art and story is in its recognition of how our emotional connections with place shape our ecological relationships. This is what has been missing from the top-down, project-managed reforms of river management and legislation. It’s in a different realm to bureaucratic consultation meetings with ‘stakeholders’. Andrew sees the art project providing local people with agency, with an intense and intimate connection with the river. It provides people with a voice at a time when conversation and connection has been lost. Its focus is on bringing people together by exploring their common interest in the river. At five o’clock around two or three hundred people have gathered for the welcome. Ngemba traditional owner Phil Sullivan stands on the levy and addresses the crowd. ‘Today we celebrate not just my story, or your story, but our story about the river,’ Phil says. Andrew slips away to meet his helpers down at the boats. The crowd moves across to the top of the old wharf. Now at twilight, gathered on the pale surface of the Darling, are 220 softly glowing stories. Tranquillity spreads through the crowd. No voices shouting over others here. No contrived outrage. No privilege for the well-resourced few. Just the dusk chatter of roosting birds, the shuffle of 300 townsfolk, the awesome stillness of river red gums, gilded by the last light, and the stories – stories sharing the river. One of the most important moments for Andrew was just after his team had floated the lanterns and they were sitting in the boats and heard the crowd go silent. An old friend from Bourke in the boat downstream from Andrew said, ‘From this day on, we’re all river people.’ That encapsulates the heart of this art project. They are not irrigators or environmentalists, mountain dwellers or city people: they are river people. Is this an elegy for a river, or a new communal beginning? Andrew Hull hopes the project will evolve and become an annual event. People will celebrate what unites them. New generations will grow up with shared values for the river. You can’t protect a place if no one cares about it.

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For years Phil Sullivan has been urging people to create a ‘foundation’ for working with caring for rivers. Andrew’s project is one way of contributing to that foundation.

Notes 1 2 3

Emily O’Gorman, Flood Country: An Environmental History of the Murray-Darling Basin (Collingwood, Vic.: CSIRO Publishing, 2012), 82. Glenn Albrecht, ‘“Solastalgia.” A New Concept in Health and Identity’, PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, no. 3 (2005). ‘Solastalgia: The Origins and Definition’, http://healthearth.blogspot.de/2008/01/ solastalgia-history-and-definition.html (accessed on 1 February 2014).

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INDEX

Aboriginal people 39, 62–63, 144–48 expropriation of 18–19, 92–93, 102–03 values 176–77 violence against 10–16, 20–25, 102–03 Western perceptions 73–74, 89–91 agriculture: corrective project 47–49, 100, 143 environs 156–59 global vision 42–44, 125–28 social purpose 3–5, 175–76 see also scientific agriculture Albrecht, G. 189 algae 164, 168–69, 171–73 Allen, W. J. 55–56 Allman, J. J. 10 Anderson, W. 74 Arndt, H. 132–33 Arthur, J. 66 Ashwin, A. C. 91 Asia 97–98, 118, 157–59 Astyk, S. 186–87 Australia: dust bowl 128–33 identity 5, 72, 100–03 balance of nature 156–60 Baracchi, P. 109 Bashford, A. 117, 119 Bellanta, M. 66 Bennett, H. 128

Bentham, J. 45 biodiversity 7 biology 63–65, 69, 73–74, 119 see also eugenics Birch, L. C. 159 birds 144, 149, 153–54 Blainey, G. 3, 9 blood rain 109–10 Bloxham, E. J. 39 Bogan River 62 Bolton, G. 17, 30–31 Bonyhady, T. 30–31 bores 39–42 see also Pera Bore Boswell, J. G. 165–66 Boultbee, J. W. 41 Bourke (NSW) 38–41, 49–56 Bourke, R. 16 Britain 48, 92, 96–99, 122–28, 165 Broome, R. 16 Bruce, S. 122, 125, 133 bureaucracies 65, 78–79, 141–43, 149–55 Buster, J. 166, 169 Canada 75 capitalism 74, 94–95, 104–05, 160, 185 Carr, W. 12–13 Carrick, R. 153 Carruthers, J. 68 Cathcart, M. 68

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cattle 25–27 Causley, I. 173 cereals see wheat Chalmers, G. 18–19 civilization 9, 15–17, 96–103 degeneration of 45–49 Clayton, S. 141 Clendinnen, I. 15 coal 96 Collins, E. J. T. 99 colonial governance 44–45, 47–48, 65 conservation 28–30, 42 propaganda 100–2, 112 racism 16–21, 68–74 command and control 156–60, 166 commissioners 16–17, 28–30 community 188–91 Conrad, J. 46–47 conservation 81–84, 128, 139–43, 149–50 colonial governance 42 soil 112, 128, 141–43, 160 water 28–30, 142, 149–50 Coolabah Experiment Farm 75–81, 84 Corbett, J. 94 cotton 164–66, 169–75, 178–81 Crookes, W. 96–97, 100, 104, 185 Crosby, A. 2–3 Cudjenmoly 13, 25–25 Cunningham, R. 62–64 dams 140, 142–43, 150–52, 165–67 Darling River 12, 27–28, 38, 53, 62–63, 94, 140, 164, 168–81, 188–90 Darwin, C. 73, 115 Darwinism 49, 73–74, 115–17 Davenport, C. 118 Davis, W. W. 40 Dening, G. 7 Department of Agriculture 42–43, 47–48, 53–59, 75–76, 99–100 depression 26, 65–66, 104–05, 111 development see environmental management diet 90, 99 Dokuchaev, V. 81 Donohue, K. 120 drought 26–28, 51, 76, 79–80, 179–81

dry farming 99–100 Dubbo 21, 27–29, 38, 71, 76, 80, 110, 112, 129, 142, 155, 166, 172 dust storms 109–11, 128–33 ecological: imperialism 2–3, 91–93 relations 157, 176–77 see also social-ecological relations economic conditions 4–5, 97–98, 120 depression 26, 65–66, 104–05, 111 food system 126–28, 185–86 labour 68–74, 91–93, 112–14 see also trade Edwards, G. B. 72 Elder, B. 16 Eldredge, N. 7 Empire Marketing Board 104, 123–24 environment: effect on society 9, 15–17, 45–49, 69–70 social reforms 142–43 whiteness 74–75 environmental degradation 55–58 birds 144, 151–54 grass 25–32, 77–79, 81–83 rivers 155, 171–76 soil 128–33 environmental management 150, 156–60, 167–68, 176–77 see also production/protection equilibrium 156–60 eugenics 116–19 Europe 2–3, 92, 97–98, 111–12 experimentalists 55–56, 75–81, 96 extinction 7, 30 Farrer, W. 75–76 Fife, D. 75 fish 151–52 flood 148 Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) 111, 121, 126, 186 food system 119–22, 126–28, 185–86 Fraser, A. 164 Fraser, M. 164 free trade 72–73, 120, 123 see also liberalism; trade frontier culture 12–17, 20–25, 93–95

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Gammage, B. 89–91 Garrard, J. 70 Garton, S. 117 gender 114 see also maternalism Gibson, R. 67 Gipps, G. 12, 17–21 global trade see trade Goodall, H. 63, 102–03, 171, 179 Goodge, W. D. 69 grass 26–30, 89–90 Great Depression 125, 129 Great Grain Invasion 75 Griffiths, T. 2, 46, 64, 116 Hassall, T. H. 93 health 125–26, 168–69, 172–75, 177 Heart of Darkness 46–47 Heathcote, R. L. 30 Henzell, T. 95, 165 Hicks, S. 157 Hodge, J. 159–60 Houston, W. 65–66 Hull, A. 188–91 ibis 153–54 immigration 68–69, 71–75 imperialism 46–47, 55, 98–99, 122–25 ecological 2–3, 91–93 irrigation 40–42, 141–43, 150, 165–76 Karskens, G. 31 Kerr, A. 12–13 Kingsford, R. 153–54 Klippart, J. H. 98 Labor Party 72–73, 140–41, 144 labour 68–74, 91–93, 112–14 laissez-faire see free trade land: ethic 6, 160 ownership 66, 91–94, 102–03, 165–66, 177 sale of 26–27, 44–45 Larson, E. J. 64 Lawson, H. 46 League of Nations 126 Lee, W. 10–12, 17, 21

Leopold, A. 6 Levine, P. 117 liberalism 72–73, 115–16, 120 Lindqvist, S. 46–47, 73 Livingstone, D. N. 58 Locke, J. 92 Lunney, D. 30 Macarthur, J. 17–18 MacDougall, D. 49–51 McDougall, F. 122–28, 133, 186 McGee, T. 184 McHugh, S. 166, 169 McKell, W. 139–44, 148–50, 155–60 McLachlan, K. R. 166 McNeill, J. 7, 155 Macquarie Marshes 10, 25, 27, 56, 89–90, 93–94, 139–40, 143–56, 167–68, 175, Macquarie River 10, 27, 112, 142, 149, 155, 172–73 Main, G. 184 Malthusianism 104, 156, 159 management see environmental management Mangan, J. A. 69 Marcus, A. 48 markets see trade marshlands 90–91, 144–55 masculinity 69–70 maternalism 114–15, 117 Matthews, R. H. 145 Mazoyer, M. 185 Merchant, C. 156 mice 76–77 Miles, W. A. 74 Mills, R. C. 45 Mitchell, T. 10, 17–18, 22–26, 46, 62–63, 73, 89–90, 148 Mitchell, W. 168–69 morality 5, 15–16, 46, 120 Morrison, G. E. 71–72 Narromine 93 national interest 126–28 nationalism 47, 72, 157–59 nature 98, 156–59 Neidje, B. 6 New Arcadia movement 65–66

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New South Wales: bureaucracies 65, 78–79 conservation 139–40 water management 40–43, 166–69, 172–73 see also Department of Agriculture Newton, A. 186–87 nitrogen 56, 104, 152 Nixon, R. 6, 177 Noble, J. C. 79, 81 noble savage 73, 90 nutrition science 112, 125–26 O’Brien, J. B. 123 Orr, J. B. 125–28, 133 Ottawa agreement 124–25 overstocking 27–28, 83 Parkes, H. 47 pastoralism 9–10, 25–30, 44, 130–31, 171 see also squatters Peacock, R. 75–80 Pearce, T. 168 Pera Bore 38, 41–42, 49–56, 166 Pierce, P. 67–68 plant-breeding 75, 117 Plumwood, V. 5–6 Pomeranz, K. 98 population 44–45, 118–19, 157–59 poverty 104–05, 185–87 Powell, S. 115 Pretty, J. 184 production/protection 157, 159–60, 166–68 progress 115–16 propaganda 102, 112, 122–25 property 92, 102–03 see also land ownership protectionism 123–24 racism 18–22, 118, 157–59 scientific 68–75, 96–99, 104–05 Ratcliffe, F. 83 religion 92, 97 rivers 151–53, 166–75, 188–91 slow violence 176–78 Robbin, L. 150 Robin, L. 5, 70, 131, 133

Rolls, E. 25–26, 153 Roosevelt, F. D. 119–21, 126 Roosevelt, T. 113 rural conditions 112–14, 130–33, 178–81 Russell, E. 184 saltbush 79–81 Schomburgk, R. 27 scientific agriculture 4–7, 42–43, 53–56, 81 biology 64–66 corrective role 10, 31–32, 47–49, 95 scientific theory 79–80 equilibrium 156–59 mothering 114–15 racism 68–75, 96–99, 104–05 water 166–68 scrub 62–71 semi-arid plains 55–56 shadow places 5–7 sheep 9, 25–30 Simpson, N. 178–81 slow violence 6, 176–81 Smith, A. B. 73 social: ideals 42–45, 48–49, 65, 115 relations 104–05, 169–71 social Darwinism 49, 73–74, 115–17 social-ecological relations 6–7, 30–31, 184–86, 189–91 state programmes 142–43, 159–60 sociology 113–15 soil 112, 128, 141–43, 160 speculation 26, 95 squatters 16–21, 26–27, 41, 93 Staples, A. 126 state 111, 115, 119 intervention 131–33, 142, 175–76 stockmen see squatters Sullivan, P. 6–7, 176–77, 190–91 Sutton, G. 80–81 Symmonds, R. S. 56 Taylor, E. B. 47–49 thermal pollution 151–52 totalitarianism 119–20 trade 4–5, 55, 122–25, 165, 185–86 wheat 75, 94, 97–98, 104–05 Tucker, R. 184

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UN 120–21, 126–28 urbanization 112–14, 131 US 40–41, 114–15, 126–28, 143 cotton growing 165–66 Dust Bowl 130–33 experiment stations 48, 75–76 utilitarianism 44–45 Vattel, E. 18–19, 92 violence: frontier 12–17, 20–25 slow 6, 176–81 Wakefield, E. G. 44 Walsh, E. 22 Walvin, J. 69 war 184–85 Waring Jr, G. E. 48

water 38–42, 165–69, 171–75 Aboriginal people 176–77 conservation 28–30, 142, 149–50 waterholes 10–12, 25–26 Watkins, D. 72 Weir, J. 177 welfare state 111, 142 Wentworth Group 176 Western world 111–12 wheat 75–77, 80–81, 89–95, 104–05 and civilisation 96–103 whiteness 71–75, 96–103, 118 Wilkins, W. 4, 42–43 Windschuttle, K. 22 World Food Board 126–28 world’s fair 42–43 Worster, D. 1