There is not much to be said for driving along a red dirt track a hundred miles back of Bourke at two on a December afternoon. The sun stands directly overhead, so the light is white and hard while the shadows under the scraggy trees are black and impenetrable. The heat shudder dims the distant prospect. My only intention was to make Bourke before nightfall, for unfenced cattle country is not good to travel by night.
I had gone about sixty kilometres when ahead of me on the track between borders of low scrub I saw what looked like a white curtain. At first I thought it was dust raised by passing cattle, then that it might be smoke from a grass fire. Then I was in it and it was neither. It was ice. Sheets of ice being blown sideways across the road. The hailstones, of all sizes, rang on the metal coachwork like shot. The Holden rocked and bucketed in the wind which dragged whole bushes across the road ahead of me. On either side I could see bright orange rivers coursing the same way that I was going. Which meant I was going downhill. Into a floodway, perhaps. If I hit a confluence of stormwater racing into a depression, the car would be thrown up and over and over like a cork until it lodged in a tree fork or against a rock. I checked my seat belt.
I was thinking too hard to be frightened. I could stop; that would mean that I would not actually drive into a floodway, but as I couldn’t see I didn’t know whether I was in one already, in which case sitting there would mean that I would eventually be overtaken, perhaps in a matter of minutes. Besides, if the ground underneath me got waterlogged, I would not be able to drive out. There was a remote possibility that something was on the road ahead of me. I turned on the headlights and kept rolling, so that the car did not settle. As long as the corrugations were clanking underneath me I was in good shape. At least the shallow sloping shoulder of the roadway was still taking most of the run-off. I dismissed the idea of turning around; the storm, my own personal storm, had come up to meet me from the south-east. To turn back in a north-westerly direction would be to travel with it and prolong the ordeal. I concentrated on keeping the car steady on the crown of the road. The wind kept lifting up her tail, urging her to slide off into the racing vermilion mud of the storm drains. Leaves, twigs, and even branches clanged off the doors and fenders. I hoped the windscreen would hold. On and on I drove, blind and deafened in that howling, clanging frenzy, hoping the storm-system was not more than a few miles across.
Suddenly it was daylight and black-opal-blue sky above me. The harsh sunlight flashed off tinkling droplets and sheets of bright water reflected the sky’s burning blue. The air was loud with birdsong. I put down the window. Behind me I could still hear the muffled roar of the storm. Every kind of animal and bird was frolicking in the water but I had to hurry if I didn’t want night to overtake me on the track. Navigating on these broad stock routes is easy enough by day, but by night you can be sidetracked, literally, and drive many miles in the wrong direction and find yourself at a bore-hole in the middle of nowhere with insufficient petrol to get you on the road again. I drove as fast as I could and hoped I would not collide with any of the bandicoots and kangaroo rats and goodness-knows-whats that were leaping and skipping and dashing about in all directions. All went well until I came up to where two kangaroos were washing their faces in a puddle, an unusual sight at three-thirty in the afternoon. The female looked, turned to part the fence-wires with her little hands and hopped through. The male kangaroo pricked his ears aggressively and then jumped the wrong way, right across my road. I stood on the brake and pulled the wheel around, hoping I wouldn’t broadside him.
Kangaroos are in general impossible to avoid under these circumstances, because if you swerve to avoid the leading end you usually hit some part of the tail, which whips the creature around and slams it into the car. Any broken bone and the kangaroo is doomed. Generally it’s better to hit the leading end and kill the animal outright than condemn it to a slow death, flyblown and gangrenous and savaged by pigs. The worst thing to do is to risk your own life by braking and swerving and kill yourself and the kangaroo as well. But I did it just the same. I didn’t have much choice, after all. If I’d hit the ’roo without ’roo bars, I’d probably have smashed the radiator, even if I didn’t end up with the ’roo through the windscreen and in my lap.
The Holden did not hold the road well at any time. On loose sand and gravel it was usually sliding without the benefit of locked wheels. This time it whipped itself round and danced back up the road in an imitation of the prince’s solo in Swan Lake. I have never liked ballet, and I didn’t enjoy this performance, except for the part where I saw the kangaroo’s astonished face flash past me as he bounded over the wire fence and off through the scrub. The Holden finally came to rest half-way up an embankment. I looked out of my window at the red gravel a foot away and hoped the car would not crown her gymnastic performance by tipping all the way over. I had to think for a moment to work out which way I was facing. I was going south-south-east, therefore I had been driving away from the sun. At first the car wouldn’t start, and I thought I’d knocked out the transmission. Then I remembered to put her in park. She slid down the embankment, agreed to turn round in the road after some argument, and we were off again to Bourke.
I had done it. I had broken the primal elder’s curse. I hadn’t hit the kangaroo. Nor did I hit anything else until the Holden climbed up on to a tarmac road just north of Bourke and I increased my speed. A flock of galahs feeding beside the road rose and flew directly towards me. One hit the windscreen right between my eyes and bounced off dead as a doornail in a storm of pink and grey feathers. I had a chip out of the windscreen to remind me that it was back to square one. It was just like the witches in Macbeth, I thought. Though my bark could not be lost, yet it could be tempest-tossed. The old boy’s trying his best to put me off, but he won’t let me come to any real harm. And so he didn’t, but by the time I reached the sea at Lake Tyers I had accounted for three wagtails, seven galahs, a yellow finch-like thing, three peewees and a large black dog. I think the large black dog must have been an apparition, because it shot out of a suburban garden to bark at my wheels, but its brakes failed and I hit it fair and square with my off-side fender. It rolled and bounced over and over, wriggling in mid-air. I was sure I had broken its back. Then it got to its feet and ran off. I reversed back up the road but there was no sign of it. No sign of it at all.
As I sat staring into the gateway the black dog had shot out of, I remembered a strange thing Daddy did once. A dog had run out of a gateway to bark at our car, and Daddy had jerked the wheel so the back of the car swung round and clipped the dog on the muzzle. ‘Teach that dog a lesson he’ll never forget,’ said our father as we children sat horrified and silent, never to forget the soft scrabbling thump and the dog’s screaming. We never had a dog when I lived at home, and I have never been at ease with dogs. My brother had a dog, but then my brother had everything. My brother got into Daddy’s bed every morning of his life until he was at least twelve years old. Daddy mightn’t have been able to hug me, but he had no difficulty doting on my brother. Perhaps my brother was a lapdog, and I was the kelpie.
Sidetrack
My soul saith: I have sought
For a home that is not gained,
I have spent yet nothing bought,
Have laboured but not attained;
My pride strove to mount and grow,
And hath but dwindled down;
My love sought love, and lo!
Hath not attained its crown.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, ‘I WILL LIFT UP MINE EYES UNTO THE HILLS’
There was of course no sign of Reg Greer in Queensland, even though I had stopped asking after him by name and begun using a photograph. ‘Do you know this man?’ I wrote on the back of a picture of him taken not long after the war, in a Prince of Wales tweed suit, holding a cigarette with the burning end cupped in his palm. I read somewhere that men who have been in prison smoke in this furtive way. People suggested that I send the picture to the Stockmen’s Hall of Fame, where it would come
to the attention of all and any who had handled cattle or sheep in the Australian outback, but I spared myself this embarrassment. Instead I wandered off on a strange pilgrimage to Greer territories, in southern Queensland, in far inland New South Wales, dropping down through the wine growing district to Rutherglen and across to the coast at Eden.
The Eden Greers were part of a network that had spread out from Bombala in the Kosciusko High Plains. I went from the Southern Ocean up over the Great Dividing Range through fifty miles of state forest, where the bees worked loudly in the gum-blossom. Gum-blossom is not like other blossom. For one thing it has no petals, but only a froth of stamens like a star-burst from the rim of the calyx. Those stamens can be any shade from the milkiest cream to arterial or even venous red, and always the green of the leaves is the perfect complement, black green to foil mother-of-pearl pink, blue-grey green for the corals and mahogany green for the brightest reds. You may see eucalypts growing all over the world, but you will not see these flowering mountain gums anywhere but in their own land.
Eucalypts cover most of northern Portugal and carpet the hills of Minas Gerais in Brazil, where they provide charcoal for the smelters; eucalypts provide all the firewood that is left in northern Ethiopia; eucalypts are grown in reafforestation schemes all over India; eucalypts shade the swimming pools in Beverly Hills. Cheap, fast-growing and inedible, eucalypts are exacting Australia’s revenge for the despoliation and corruption of her territory. As fast as the human inhabitants can chop them down, the single species favoured for government forestry schemes coppice and creep on until miles and miles are covered with nothing but them. They drive out all native species and establish a dreary monoculture of one grey green in which the native creatures can find nothing to like.
The fact that Ethiopia has a fixed capital is directly due to Eucalyptus globulus. The Emperors had been in the habit of moving on when their huge entourage had exhausted local supplies of firewood. A Frenchman, Mondon Vidaye, suggested to Emperor Menilek that he could establish a permanent court at Addis Ababa if he planted Eucalyptus globulus, the Blue Gum, which would coppice faster than his entourage could use it up. He did not explain that in order to grow so fast Eucalyptus globulus uses up all the moisture in the fragile topsoil. It has now lost its place as tree of choice for reafforestation schemes, too late to save the landscape. For many miles in all directions radiating from Addis Ababa the hills are dressed in uniform drab military green. The gums are easy to propagate; people in desperate need of firewood are increasing the area under eucalypts, despite government policy. The native forest has been driven out forever; in place of hundreds of species there is now one, that every year eats up more hectares, dries out more topsoil and accelerates the disintegration of the Ethiopian ecology.
In the Kosciusko High Plains a single eucalypt species does not march like a cloned army over the slopes. The species that grow on a western slope are quite different from those that face them on an eastern slope; the species that grow at the bottom of the ravine are quite different to the ones that defy the winds on the ridges. The species that grow in sand are different from those growing on rock or in mud. There are tall gums, squat gums, straight gums, contorted gums, gums with smooth silver trunks, gums with cragged coats of iron grey, paper barks, and gums with boles redder than blood. Beneath the trees the papery Helichrysums glisten like blobs of fresh chrome-yellow paint.
I passed a wombat, who had foolishly desired something on the other side of the good metalled road, which is a short cut to the white beaches that stretch for two hundred miles along the Gippsland coast. Occasionally a battered old gas guzzler, crammed with naked boys and piled high with surfboards, barrelled past me, bouncing from side to side as it hit the capricious camber which is a feature of Australian road building. The wombat, who travels at half a mile an hour, never had a chance.
For more than an hour I tooled along the switchback road, eating nectarines and gaping into the scribbles and scrolls of bush. Over-arching branches broke the glare of the white summer sky to a soft dappled gloom that hummed and buzzed and rustled with activity. Then the car climbed the last slope and shot out on to the plateau. I stood on the brakes, blinded by sun-dazzle.
The tangled coat of vegetation was gone, torn off, wrenched out, burnt off, grubbed out. The blunt peaks of the ancient hills of the Great Dividing Range were nude; the dimples and groins between them were open to the sky, as obscene as shaven crotches. The curves of the exposed earth were criss-crossed with linear scarifications where some giant machine had gashed the ground into long cicatrices pimpled with green. The raised dots in this obscene tattoo were hundreds of thousands of shiny infant trees. I knew their parents well; they were millions of descendants of the Pinus radiata that can be seen in vast tracts of dead black-green at Cape Otway, battening on the rains that blow year in year out from Antarctica.
At Myrtleford during the Depression gangs of men were employed in a beneficent public works project to rip out the native hardwoods that clothe the Australian alps and replace them with commercially valuable timber. Into the exposed earth they stuck Pinus radiata. The creatures that fed on the eucalypt and its berries withdrew before the rage of the loggers. They did not venture into the plantations where the sun blazed down and the winds tore and the rain dug. The pines grew, tall and very close together. Under their sparse black branches the fallen needles accumulated but nothing grew in the dry darkness. Even the spiders moved on, for where there is no nectar and no pollen no bugs fly.
This field of blood, one of many scattered around south-eastern Australia, is called Rockton. Between the scarified squares, yellow roads had been gashed out. There are no weeds, no birds, just wheel tracks and the huge indifferent sky, which stretched down below eye level on every side. Beside the naked hectares stood hectares clothed in six feet of bottle green, and hectares clothed in twelve feet of greenish black. As the Holden scuttled down the creases of the hills, the sky line would show pinked like a saw blade against the white sky. They say that before the graziers tore off the natural vegetation so that Australia could live on the sheep’s back, there was no frost in these parts. Orchids lived safe in the forest and bees worked all the year round.
Stupefied I asked myself why no native timber had been found for commercial use. Perhaps if we grew some natives in places like Rockton the environment would not die so utterly. Perhaps then there would be flowers in the forest and honey. Stupid of me. Of course the native trees would be accompanied by creepers and undergrowth and the creatures who dwell in forests. Loggers do not want triple canopy. They want uniform, upright, Teutonic trees that grow fast and straight and do as they are told. Native trees like native people do not understand or care for the profit motive. They are not clean and tidy. They drop their bark and bleed rich gums and harbour bees and termites and small furry things that sleep all day and carouse all night. Loggers want tall, fast-growing straight-grained trees that will neither blunt their axes, nor split. As I crept out of this sad place with its blind regiments of foreign trees growing desperately towards the light so that in their finest hour they could be chipped, I wondered why the Aborigines did not bring their firesticks and burn the lot.
The primary purpose of these dreary plantations of Monterey pines is to provide the newsprint for the worst newspapers in the world. My father’s old boss, Sir Keith Murdoch, pioneered their development. The woodchip industry does not demand Monterey pine evidently, for the Japanese firm of Harris Daishowa would be perfectly happy to clear fell three million hectares of Australian forest, wildflowers, wombats and all. So happy are they at the prospect they gave $10,000 donations to the electoral campaigns of both sides at the last election. When the Labor government decided to declare the forest a World Heritage area, the Japanese asked for their money back, which was embarrassing because the ALP president had forgotten to declare the gift, as required by law.
I found my Greer, the founder of a dynasty of boat-builders, fishermen and poor farmers, resting in B
ombala graveyard under a sober white marble stone. I did not find a stone that said ‘Emma Rachel, beloved wife of Robert Greer’ or any other Greer memorial. I did find bright pink oxalis, and pinker bell-bine. I found Lychnis coronaria in both kinds, the white-flowered and the magenta. I found the orange pimpernel and Soft Urospermum that made a clock as big as a grapefruit. There were two kinds of verbena, the kind called Paterson’s Curse which has ruined great tracts of grazing lands, and the creeping kind that makes purple mile after mile of central and western New South Wales and southern Queensland. Only a handful of native plants grew in that upland meadow. Their clear china blue seemed almost grey among the bright stars of the European flowers, hot yellow, magenta and purple as they were. My Greer had left no descendants in Bombala, but the escapees from his wife’s flower garden had made the entire district their own for ever more.
In the Australian alps I found dells filled with lupins, bearing huge panicles loaded with perfect flowers that would win prizes at Chelsea, just as European girls naturalised in Australia have won the Miss World Competition. In other dells I found Martagon lilies. These were welcome immigrants, perhaps, but the sweetbriars, blackberries, gorse and teasel that came with them have ruined thousands of miles of parkland.