Page Turner 2010

Honorary Mentions -
Life in the Country  by Peter Bishop

Last year we came back  to live in the house where I grew up, an old sprawling house on  black soil flats the far side of Halls Creek, a little creek that winds down out of the Liverpool ranges, finds its way into the  Goulburn  below Sandy Hollow and into the Hunter between Denman and Jerry’s Plains.

Down where it joins the Hunter the water is slow and fat, but up in the hills it can be so wild and muddy nothing can cross it, or trickling clear, or dry – like it is now.
It was dry all through The War – when I was a very small boy. I can remember brown dust clouds building up over Black Mountain, sweeping down in a thick dry storm, leaving a couple of inches of fine brown dust on the back verandah. And I remember  the day Mrs Vines who did the milking found a fat brown snake taking its ease in that soft bed of dust up against the tin wall in the warm sun.

The snake caused a bit of excitement amongst the women, most of the men being off at the war, until Jack, the gardener with one bad eye, attacked it with a burr hoe, raising long splinters from the verandah boards. Even hanging over the back fence, the sharply disjointed rope of its body continued to twitch.
‘Won’t die until sundown – ’

Five years of drought we had during The War, back then it was just drought.   

But now the dryness carries a new significance –GlobalWarming.

There are hedgehogs under our house – these days they wear the more environmentally aware name of echidnas – but we called them hedgehogs when we were kids.

The house sits close to the ground and at night you can hear them scraping their bristles against the joists under the floors, sometimes it sounds like people opening and closing drawers under there.

The house is made of tin and cardboard and parts of it are old.

Some of the cardboard is Caneite, Some of the cardboard is fibro, and some of the cardboard is lath and plaster, which cracks when the house moves, which it does frequently because the hedgehogs undermine the ironbark stumps that were used for foundations.

Some of the cardboard is finely moulded plaster ceilings eleven feet high, and some of the cardboard is tongue and groove cypress pine, the white-ants having long ago eaten anything that wasn’t cypress.

The roof is corrugated iron, in some places just corrugated paint, ringed with gutters that catch the rainwater and leaves and deliver a surprising amount of rainwater to storage tanks, although sometimes the leaves win.

There are many verandahs low on the ground, just right for hedgehogs. They burrow under the edges and scrape their way in to whatever dark mysteries lie under there. I watched one of them burrowing into an anthill the other day – sank into the ground like a little mining machine – god knows what they’re doing under the house.

No wonder it sags.

Three of them were ambling across the wide front lawn in single file early yesterday morning, their spikes all neatly laid down their sides, ridged along their backs, waddling like little four-legged tanks. They were not fast, but they didn’t move as if they had much to fear. When they do become alarmed they dig into the ground until only spikes are showing, behaviour I did not wish to encourage on the lawns.

Not that the lawns are all that flash – but it’s something to see a small string of hedgehogs wandering across a hundred yards of mown grass on their way down to the creek. They fossick around down there after ants and other hedgehog delicacies and then amble back beneath the fence, across the lawns and home under the house.

I don’t know how many live under there, I saw a bunch of five of them  nestling cautiously one against another out beyond the verandah  behind the Virginia Creeper.

But I’m not going to do anything to interfere with them, sagging house or no.
Following them across the grass I nearly trod on a baby blackbird . Blackbirds move in groups of maybe a dozen – the twelve apostles – and they don’t breed particularly well. They all gather around the clumsy chicks they  do manage to raise, making alarmed noises while the chicks flap awkwardly into bushes just off the ground. Wide pink beak, white crest on the head which vanishes in the adult– an animated untidy black feather duster– bite sized for a fox.

And blackbirds ferret through all the mulch my wife has  carefully arranged around new plantings, scattering the hay for yards. They have no idea how hard I work to defend them from lethal prosecution, nor what a strain their defence puts on our marriage.

There was a clutch of cats living under the house when we came, but judging by the increase in the rabbits and the birds, we’ve got rid of the cats.

The garden has its share of cockatoos who strip the walnut tree of its green walnuts, the olive trees of their green olives, the apricot tree of its green apricots and the lemon tree of its green lemons. When they’ve got nothing else to do they shred the young leaves and the bobbles from the plane tree that hangs over the back of the house and drop them on the roof, all the time holding loud and unintelligible conversations.

The rosellas, king parrots, and currawongs, while partial to fruit and berries, are no match for the cockatoos.

Magpies, kookaburras, finches, blue wrens, topknot pigeons, butcher birds, thrushes and the odd furtive owl all have their places in the garden, but yesterday evening when I walked out onto the back verandah there was a very big goanna.
Five feet of him, hard bright eyes in a head questing side to side, belly big as my calf, long hard tail striped dirty black and yellow, claws scratching on the verandah. The blackbirds had been making alarmed noises, but they’re always crying wolf.

Like the hedgehogs he couldn’t see particularly well, but he could hear, working his head side to side he could sense my presence, and his forked tongue flicked in and out as he tried to smell me. He was so big I followed him with a camera until he slithered under a separate part of the house. I bolted the gauze door that night – and I wondered about the gauze.

The paddocks were dry during the war – we kids had to walk the milkers a mile up a dusty track to the Lucerne paddock, where there was a little green pick along the creek.  The paddocks remained dry for several years. Most of eastern Australia was dry then, as it often is.

It was dry this last Winter, Spring, early Summer, the plains-grass tussocks looking like worn toothbrushes, rocks poking their way through the crust of black earth, the only green things saffron thistles and gum-trees. And gum-trees – eucalypts – do not have green leaves except after rain. They are mostly bluish-grey, so when they look green it’s because everything else is so brown.

We sell what cattle we can as the season weakens, and give the cattle that remain molasses and urea in licker drums, and the urea enables them to eat the dry grass. They don’t fatten on it, but they survive. The molasses /urea mixture is poisonous if they drink it, but with licker drums they just get a little bit, enough to help them, not enough to kill them.
If the drought goes on long enough, even the dry grass runs out.
Henry Lawson knew about that. More than a hundred years ago Henry worked on Tourallie Station, and at that time he wrote:

The skies are brass and the plains are bare,
Death and ruin are everywhere.
All that’s left of last year’s flood
Is a shallow trickle in the grey-black mud.
The salt springs bubble and the quagmires quiver,
And this is the dirge of the Darling River.

Penny Wong, the minister in charge of Water and Climate Change, seems to think the Darling River is dry because irrigators have sucked it dry.

She should have listened to Henry, but no, she actually bought Tourallie Station so the water stored there could be released back into the Darling. She paid $23 million of taxpayers’ money to some very happy sellers.

But there was no water there.

Then she bought water rights from Twynam Pastoral Company for $300 million of your money and mine. Twynam set up irrigation operations on several major tributaries of the Darling in Western NSW in the 1970’s, but they haven’t been able to irrigate for some years because there hasn’t been any water.

It’s quite true to say the water from the Darling system has been over-allocated. The authorities allocated water that was never there.

Penny Wong has bought back water that was never there. There’s nothing behind the Twynam weirs but air, and air won’t make any difference to the level of water in the Darling.

On the other hand the owners of Twynam Pastoral Company will be smiling, especially when they consider the prices they paid for their several properties thirty odd years ago. And they’ve still got the land, and still got stock and domestic water usage.

I can hear you saying don’t be so childish – when it rains and that water is allowed to flow downstream instead of being trapped behind weirs – then you’ll see some results.

Well yes – you will. The Darling will flood again, probably just after some shiny bum in Canberra rises from a polished seat to declare that because of Global Warming we will never see the Darling flood again.

And when the Darling does flood it’s my guess people will wish they’d close the sluice gates and ease the flooding.

The point of all this being that the Darling is a thoroughly unreliable river system, and all the water buybacks in the world won’t make it run until it gets fed by what Henry referred to  as Queenslan’ rains.

Or until part of the excess flows of other rivers are diverted into it.

The Clarence is such a river.

There’s something about the geographical features of the Clarence basin that captures rainstorms – in October 2009 Bellingen received 400 mm in 24 hours. That’s about 16 inches in the old scale, cutting roads, flooding houses. Before that they had 550 mm (at the time it was called a one in 100 years rain event) on April 5, and before that Bellingen was isolated by floods on February 17. That was just last year.

The Clarence pours 5 million megalitres into the Pacific Ocean each year, and when The Clarence floods it does a lot of damage. Design work has already been done for a dam on the Mann – a tributary of the Clarence, to divert one million megalitres into the top of the Darling via a tunnel into the Beardy.

One million megalitres is more than currently flows out the mouth of the Murray /Darling, the Coorong.

The cost would be small compared to recent Cash Splashes by the Federal Government, and such a project would make a splash of a more enduring nature.
Dams and river diversions are frowned on by environmentalists at the moment.

Well actually that’s putting it mildly – but hasn’t the time come when those attitudes ought to be reviewed? Surely a self-renewing dam is better than an electricity gulping desalination plant.

And that attitude review might include diverting a small part of the tropical outflow from our northern rivers. Did you know that 160 million megalitres, 60% of our total rainfall runoff, flows into the oceans north of the tropic of Capricorn?

Just think what harvesting 6 million megalitres of this vast runoff and piping it down the Darling would do for Adelaide and the Coorong, to say nothing of the 40% of Australian agricultural production that comes – or did when there was water – from the Murray/Darling basin.

In all the water buy-backs to date, nothing has been said about the economic prospects of the regions from which water has been bought.

And nothing has been said about the effect on food production of  buying back water from farmers to make the rivers run to the sea.

The Secretary of the Treasury said recently we face a population of 35 million by 2050.
Well if we don’t provide the water to grow the food, what are all those extra people going to eat? Food and water will be increasingly valuable as populations grow.

People are leaving rural Australia as the economy leaves, and that exodus is more or less irreversible. How will you lure them back – to shutting shops, closing schools, departing doctors and understaffed hospitals?

The people remaining in the bush are an irreplaceable asset – they know about things agricultural, the breeding and care of sheep and cattle, pigs and poultry and the planting and growing of crops – skills foreign to urban Australians – but vital to their living.

Take away the water from the people of the bush and you take away their life – many have left – others will follow – and what will you do for dinner then?

Since I was a child water has been an issue. 

Back then we collected rain from the roof in tanks for drinking water, and washing water because the well water was too hard. If you heated the well water in a boiler it scaled up the pipes. We were careful with every drop – cleaned our teeth as kids with half a glass of water, shared the same bathwater – flushed the toilets with well water – never let a tap run.

But there were more people in the house then, and the tanks were smaller and sometimes the tanks ran dry. Then we’d cart water from the shearing shed tanks – water laced with tincture of dead possum.

We pumped water from the well with a windmill, supplemented by a kerosene-powered Farm Pumper engine when the wind didn’t blow. The Farm Pumper was one of those engines with all the working bits on the outside,  complete with oily rocker arms and valve stems that quivered in their coiled springs, an oil soaked cog wheel that ground its way around as it pushed the pump rods backwards and forwards, and a hand cranked flywheel with a folding pipe handle that could backfire.

Break ya fucking arm that handle will.. but nobody washed Jack’s mouth out with soap. Aunty Joan, who stayed with us for the duration of the war, washed our mouths out with soap and we only said damn and shit and christ – I found the carefully pencilled list the other day. We ate lemon tree leaves to kill the soap, but they were almost worse.

The Farm Pumper was an erratic engine – it fired only when the revolutions of the flywheel fell below a certain speed – so you could walk away with the engine firing on an irregular climbing excitement – followed by a dying cascade of spinning machinery – and never be quite sure if it was going to keep running.

We’ve changed now from windmills to electric pumps because electric pumps work when there’s no wind, are cheaper, pump more water and rarely break down. We still have windmills in remote paddocks, but the pump-buckets go or the pump- shaft breaks, or the wind drops, especially on hot summer days when the cattle gather around the troughs to drink bellyfuls of water.

Water is still an issue – both rain to make the pastures grow and water for the livestock to drink. We have dams and creeks, but they are dry about two thirds of the time, so we rely on bores and pumps.

We don’t have enough water to irrigate pastures, so as you now know, in droughts we sell most of our cattle, give urea/molasses supplements to the remainder while we can, and then more or less shut down. And of course by the time we have to sell the last of the cattle they’re hardly worth selling...

You might ask why don’t we feed them?

And one answer is the longer a drought lasts the dearer the cost of feed, and if the drought lasts long enough the feed costs more than the animal is worth.

And there is no way of knowing at the start, how long a drought will last.

Our bore water is very hard, six hundred and seventy parts per million of dissolved calcium salts, and now we inject it at the borehead with soap precursors from China to stop scale forming in the miles of underground pipes.

The result is that our water costs us a lot of money, and we pump from underground aquifers that may or may not run out. Our electric pumps suck out more than windmills ever did and every drought there’s the threat of bores and wells running dry.

Are the droughts getting worse?  I don’t know – each and every one of us on the land asks that question every day of every drought – and the answer is – it’s impossible to tell.

If I’m forced to respond I’d say probably not.

And we’ve had good rain since the Summer rains began.