The Waterhole Project

Last month I travelled to Temora to meet Bill Speirs, curator of the Temora Rural Museum, and look through the Museum’s extraordinary archival collection. One especially fascinating item Bill showed me was the transcript of a diary penned in 1877 by a man called John Ross. During that year Ross journeyed to the Temora district from Adelaide and worked for nine weeks as head gardener on Temora station. Temora homestead stood beside Walladilly Creek,  just to the north of where Temora town lies today. The diary entries made by Ross, rich with detail, demonstrate his capacity for observation and writing, and the extent to which walking through country enables a person to encounter and witness the life and particularities of the land.

Ross, then 60 years old, left behind in South Australia seven children and his second wife. ‘My present wife is anything but a good wife to me’, he wrote. ‘No love, no attachment whatever and live with her I cannot and will not.’ Ross began his trip by ship, landing in Melbourne. He then took a train to Wodonga, where the railway track terminated beside the Murray River. From Wodonga, Ross walked north to the Murrumbidgee River and Wagga, and set course for the wool town of Bourke, far away on the banks of the Darling River. He yearned for news from his unhappy home: ‘After a good night’s rest and Breakfast, went to the Post Office in Wagga for letters and to my great horror and disappointment got none.’

Travelling by foot, carrying his bedding and clothes, Ross was one of many hungry swagmen on the road: ‘The settlers are so poor they cannot afford to give a feed to a traveller and of whom there are plenty looking for employment and there is none to be got.’ Past Junee, plodding north towards Bourke, Ross found the job on Temora station by chance, when he took a wrong road and sought directions from a man stripping bark from callitris pine to make fencing rails. Ross told the man he wanted a job, and learned that the owner of the station needed a gardener.

Ross knew this country. In 1837 and 1838, as a young man, he’d lived beside the Murrumbidgee near Wagga, employed by George Macleay as manager of the Borambola sheep flock. During the 1830s, after about a decade of pastoral development, Murrumbidgee squatters and Wiradjuri were fighting a bloody war. In a letter titled ‘War by the Blacks’ published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1833 (letter dated 17 March), an absentee owner of one Murrumbidgee station described an uprising of Wiradjuri along 50 miles of the the river downstream from Darbalara, a station near Gundagai. Wiradjuri were spearing cattle and stockmen, and stockmen were shooting Wiradjuri. The squatter called for the colonial government to protect ‘the people who have ventured to those remote districts with their property’ before ‘the men in charge of that property be allowed, or be under the necessity, for self preservation, to take the law into their own hands, and avenge themselves against these savages’. One thousand Wiradjuri people, the landholder estimated, lived in the area.

‘The aboriginal natives have disappeared’ wrote Ross in his diary forty four years later, on the 26th of June, as he walked through country north of Junee. On arrival at Temora station Ross noted, ‘I have not seen an aborigine native and is told there were only five natives, went last Queen’s Birthday for their blankets.’ These few survivors of a desperate struggle for control over productive terrain may’ve been the same people remembered by Harry Kavanagh, who in the early 1870s lived as a child at Sebastopol, a gold mining area between Junee and Temora (Temora’s Jubilee Souvenir, JA Bradley, Temora, 1931). Kavanagh remembered a group of about ten Aboriginal men and women living in the Sebastopol area. The men worked as shepherds. Some sold settlers sheets of bark stripped from eucalypts for hut walls and rooves.

In the winter of 1877 Ross walked droughty terrain, almost emptied of Wiradjuri, stocked with hungry sheep and cattle, home to a handful of squatters and impoverished selectors. On the Murrumbidgee near Wagga:

‘Grass, very short and stock of all kinds are in the most wretched condition. Sheep are seen dead in every direction. Horses are the most miserable of any I have seen in any country and are very small. I have seen but very little land in cultivation. The roads are in a very bad state.’

Beyond Junee and ‘a few stray miserable huts’ Ross saw a high range to the east, probably the bush cloaked Ulandra range, visible here beyond the railway line, just north of Junee:

On his acceptance of the job of gardener, Ross reveals the scale of the pastoral enterprise under development on Temora station:

‘Take possession of an empty bark hut some distance away from the men’s kitchen. I am here alone for sleeping. My meals are taken with the men in the kitchen. The supers [superintendent's ?] house is a little distance away from the other buildings which are numerous and for various purposes, such as House Kitchen, Hen house, stores, stables and coach house, shed for chaff and hay. Milk house, piggery and all apparently of recent construction. Mr Greaves is married and his wife with him, also a nurse girl or servant. A man cook for house. A large number of men employed by the station principally at fencing, ringing trees’.

After nine weeks of working hard to build a productive fruit and vegetable garden beside Walladilly Creek, Ross decided to head home to Adelaide. Ross, it seems, was a troubled, obstinate fellow. ‘Told Mr Greaves about having received telegram and would refuse to go back to SA’ he wrote on July the 27th after getting a telegram from his wife. One month later Ross announced his resignation and hit the road.

Ross walked east to Cootamundra and took a room in a hotel: ‘A very good dinner and afterwards a good sleep. Cloudy in the afternoon and indications of more rain tonight. The Railway has extended to Cootamundra, but not yet open to traffic.’

The agricultural and economic development enabled by the arrival of the Great Southern Railway at Cootamundra, and its extension south to Junee and Wagga, is recorded in the elaborate Victorian facades lining the main street of Cootamundra:

 

Before leaving Cootamundra the next morning, Ross had a boot repaired, and he bought some sugar, tea and bread for the road. Towards Junee, he marvelled at the railway construction project: ‘Some tremendous cuttings through rock and in other places very deep levellings. A very large number of men employed and at different places along the line tents and canvas fixed in different fashions seen everywhere and bark huts for working men and their families.’

He’d encountered the workers in ‘very rough country of granite and iron bark ranges’, possibly the in the hills around Bethungra, where I took this photo a few weeks ago:

‘My feet getting a little sore’, Ross wrote at Junee. ‘One of my boots is becoming undone and fear will not last to get to Wodonga for the train to Melbourne’, the weary walker later noted.

Early next month I’ll cross paths with John Ross. Well, with the path he took from Temora station to Cootamundra on his way home to Adelaide. I’m walking from Lake Cowal to Combaning, following the waterways. The walk will take about 8 days. Along the way I’ll be talking to people about the challenges they’ve faced during the hot, dry years of the past decade. Walking promises encounters and understandings that faster methods of transport deny. As did Ross, I’ll find things unexpected. Stay posted.

Nestled within the Gulf of Saint Lawrence on the Atlantic coastline of southeast Canada lies a crescent shaped island of red clay. The local Mi’kmaq people call the island Epekwitk. In 1798 British colonists named it Prince Edward Island. Recently I had the privilege of visiting the island to attend a workshop organised by the Institute of Island Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island and the Network in Canadian History & Environment. Participants encountered this place, its particularities, people and stories, and contributed to discussions about its future. Here was an opportunity, the organisers explained, ‘to learn what a place can teach us.’

On the first day, at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown, Mi’kmaq elder Albert Marshall gave a formal welcome to the week long gathering. He talked about Mi’kmaq worldviews, in relation to the themes of the workshop. Albert expressed his hopes that our ‘carbon and ecological footprint’ will remain small enough today to allow our grandchildren to survive tomorrow. He spoke of the rights of nature, and the responsibilities of humans to protect the land, a precious gift. Albert explained the Mi’kmaq concept of ‘two eyed seeing’, whereby ‘knowledge of the physical is not separated from wisdom and the spiritual.’ This notion of matter infused with meaning and spirit, of an integrated way of seeing the world, resonated with the audience, and later resurfaced in the presentations of several other participants. Albert closed with a discussion of the ‘Myths of False Security’ that the industrial revolution had instilled in our minds, those dangerous and powerful narratives that deny our embeddeness within, and dependence on, dynamic natural systems.

We boarded a bus bound for Lennox Island, a Mi’kmaq reservation on the northwestern edge of Prince Edward Island. Along the way, Mi’kmaq representative and fisheries expert Randy Angus explained how climate change was threatening Lennox Island. The rising sea level is gradually making the island smaller, while the resident Mi’kmaq population is steadily growing. Furthermore, the community draws its drinking water from a freshwater aquifer, a source increasingly under threat from saltwater intrusion. 

Inside the Lennox Island EcoCentre, Gilbert and Tiffany Sark sang a traditional song to welcome our group. John Joe Sark, Keptin of the the Mi’kmaq Grand Council, spoke of the history of Prince Edward Island, and his concerns about the wellbeing of his people and their land. Pesticides and herbicides used on local farms, he asserted, were causing cancers they’d never known. Changes made to the land and the forests since the onset of colonisation contravened a long established Mi’kmaq law, John Joe explained, that prohibited the destruction of anything not created by people.   

I took this photo of Gilbert holding a map of Lennox Island:

As we walked towards the new lobster processing plant on Lennox Island, the first such facility owned and operated by a First Nations group in the Atlantic provinces of southeast Canada, stickers across the rear window of a much loved red pickup truck caught my eye:

There’s pride here, and resilience. The resilience of the land and its biological community is striking too. Only 10 000 years ago, we learned, Prince Edward Island lay beneath a glacier one kilometre thick. Trees colonised the red clay as the Ice Age and its glacier retreated. Freezing conditions return each winter, when snow blankets farms and forests. Kathy Stuart, a life long resident of Prince Edward Island, described to me her sense of the vitality of local living systems, of the latent energy that enables life to reawaken as warmth returns each spring, a process that suggests an inherent invulnerability. People are awed by the swift reclamation by forest of paddocks left uncultivated and ungrazed. Prince Edward Island is ‘a farm trying to be a forest’, someone remarked through the week. 

On Lennox Island we walked through this maple and fir forest, impossibly green and moist to eyes from the dry inland of southeast Australia:

Some particularities of Prince Edward Island suggest an intense vulnerability. Like the beautiful cliffs of red clay formed where paddocks and forests meet the gentle Atlantic waters of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Without the protection offered by the landmasses of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, this place would surely just wash away.

The following day, Prince Edward Island forester Bill Glen outlined projections for the island’s forests as the climate warmed. White spruce makes up sixty percent of the forests here, their distinctively pointed tops a familiar sight. By 2080, Bill expects, all white spruce trees on Prince Edward Island will be gone. After lunch, Doug Sobey, a local biologist and forest historian, led a walk through Strathgartney Provincial Park, a rare forest remnant of mature beech peppered with hemlock and sugar maple trees. Doug talked about the vulnerable of some forest species, especially white birch, to the increasingly wide temperature swings associated with climate change. As winter draws to a close, birch trees begin to extend their shallow and fibrous root systems. If the weather suddenly turns cold again, the fragile roots suffer irreparable damage, and the trees slowly die. Doug fears that as the local weather patterns become more unstable, white birch trees will vanish from the island.

I took this photo at the point in the beech forest where Doug paused to talk:

We then followed the path downhill to the banks of the West River, where I took this photo, moments before a bald eagle swept low across the water:

Later in the week we visited a new museum of local agricultural history at Orwell Corner. Many times in Australia I’ve encountered historic tractors inside agricultural museums. But the juxtaposition of old tractors with horse drawn sleighs was a novel sight:  

A cartoon by beloved local cartoonist Wayne Wright appears on a T-shirt printed for workshop participants. The chosen cartoon reflects on processes of rural decline and depopulation. A couple have pulled up their car beside a farmer who leans on a timber fence. The pointed tops of white spruce trees rise in the background. The farmer gives directions to the bewildered couple: 

The old MacDonald place? Well, you follow this road on up past where the school and post office and the church used to be, until you come to where the little community hall once was, and then you go over the hill where the old drive-in movie screen blew down & the big restaurant burnt up, until you drive over what’s left of the railway track past the old fox farm beside the dried-up brook where we used to catch trout, and you can’t miss her… unless somebody’s bought her & hauled her away.

As in the Combaning area, and throughout the Australian agricultural belt, on Prince Edward Island patterns of human engagement with farmland changed profoundly during the twentieth century. Inside the Orwell Corner museum, introductory text explains that between 1901 and 2001 the number of farms on the island dropped from 14 000 to 1800, and the proportion of the population who lived and worked as farmers fell from 75 percent to 6. On the bus Kathy Stuart had explained how, until the late 1960s, Prince Edward Island had about 300 local school districts, the boundaries of each set by achieveable walking distances for children. Beside each school stood a white timber church or two, and the community revolved around these institutions. The 300 rural schools on Prince Edward Island and the one teacher school that stood beside Combaning Creek vanished at the same time. On Prince Edward Island and at Combaning, the same globalised market forces and ever intensifying technological systems erased people from the land.

One of the last field excursions was to Sweet Clover Farm, an organic enterprise run by Gary Clauseheide. Gary has maintained the use of relatively traditional, small scale farming methods within fields bordered by tall hedgerows. Sweet Clover Farm covers only 65 acres. The boundaries of Gary’s property enclose a strip of land running back from the road. Old maps show early farms in the same configuration, with narrow strips extending back from roads and from waterways accessible by boat. Pamela Courtenay Hall, who has lived on Sweet Clover Farm for a number of years, explained how this configuration of narrow farms enabled the forging of community bonds. A neighbour’s field and a helping hand were always in easy reach. With the expansion of farm sizes and loss of people from the land, ‘farming has become a very lonely enterprise’, Gary remarked.

This photo shows Gary talking to the group before one of his potato fields:

And here Gary stands with Pheonix, his massive Clydesdale mare, whose parents pulled ploughs and other equipment through the fields of Sweet Clover Farm:

Before we reboarded our bus, I asked Gary and Pamela whether the organic methods developed and applied on Sweet Clover Farm might offer some resilience to climate change. Pamela thought so. She talked about the capacity of soils rich in organic matter to hold water through dry times and to drain more effectively when excessive rain fell. The diversity of production on the farm, and the ecological relationships that bind diverse farm elements together, instilled strength and flexibility, Pamela explained. Gary responded differently, his answer perhaps informing the broader purpose of our workshop. ‘If we’re going to be resilient in the face of what’s coming’, Gary said, ‘we’re going to have to find community.’