Combaning Creek waterhole, September 2011

Two weeks ago I visited Condobolin to give a presentation about the walk from Lake Cowal to Combaning (see from ‘Creeklines ~ day one’). Condobolin town sits beside the beautiful Lachlan River. 

The Waterhole Project will soon be coming to an end, and the visit was a good opportunity to report directly on what I’ve learned. After the presentation we sat outside for lunch. This photo shows local writer Merrill Findlay (see her website here) and Condobolin Local Aboriginal Land Council members Mark Guudama Powell and Rebecca Shepherd.

That afternoon I drove southeast to Lake Cowal. An immense pile of waste rock and earth generated by the Lake Cowal gold mine rose above the grassy plain.

The old homestead of Lake Cowal station, now owned by Barrick Gold, stood empty beside the lake.

Lake Cowal was brimming with the abundant floodwaters and creek flows of 2010.

The next morning, dense fog blanketed the lake and its surrounding paddocks.

Mal Carnegie from the Lake Cowal Conservation Centre took me out to see the pale green islands of lignum. Thousands of white ibis pairs had finished rearing their young here only a month previously. 

The fog didn’t lift and the morning air stayed cold. Mal joked that it was like sailing the North Sea. With the shoreline invisible and even the sun obscured, he followed the bright yellow buoys marking the edge of the mining lease back to the lake edge.

Gilmore knew well the country around Combaning. She had relatives downstream from the Combaning waterhole, on Morangarell station. The typewriter on which Mary Gilmore prepared manuscripts for publication is displayed in Landmarks in the Wagga exhibit, alongside the original manuscript of ‘Native Sancturies’, a chapter in Old Days Old Ways: A Book of Recollections, first published in 1934.

‘Native Sanctuaries’ describes regulatory systems developed by Wiradjuri people to maintain particular areas as animal and plant sanctuaries. Wiradjuri law banned hunting, fishing and harvesting in these protected areas, thereby promoting biological diversity and abundance beyond sanctuary borders, ensuring ecological resilience, and securing productivity in a climate that often delivered intense droughts and powerful floods. She records the use of Lake Cowal, north of Morangarell, as one such sanctuary (see ‘Creeklines ~ day one’).

Today, as our climate turns increasingly chaotic and we struggle with droughts, fires and floods, Gilmore’s descriptions of Wiradjuri systems of tending land suggest the value of ecological production methods, a value that Wiradjuri people understood after many generations of paying close attention to the patterns of their country.

Curraburrama, September 2010

During the walk from Lake Cowal to Combaning (see from Creeklines ~ day one) I started thinking about the particular contributions that museums can make towards shaping useful responses to the crisis of climate change. It seemed to me that by enabling encounters with the material particularities of places and their objects, museums allow a way of knowing that differs from the abstractions and generalisations that often characterise modern, scientific knowledge.

The Waterhole Project, for example, doesn’t present the Combaning region as a case study, as a key to abstract, generalised forms of knowledge. Instead, readers are invited to engage with the unique particularities of things, of place, people and other species. I think that museums have a rare capacity to generate accessible, democratic forms of knowledge by enabling visitors and readers to generate understandings through the engagement of their own sensing bodies, as well as their minds, with materiality.

The philosopher David Abram argues that: ‘We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honouring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things—of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil—seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what’s worth knowing. According to assumptions long held by [western] civilization’, he continues, ‘the deepest truth of things is concealed behind the appearances, in dimensions inaccessible to our senses.’ (Abram, Becoming Animal, 2010, p. 4)

Over time, cultural processes that devalue the local and the particular have served industrial development at great cost. The material terrains our bodies directly experience, ‘rippling with cricket rhythms and scoured by the tides’, writes David Abram, ‘is the very realm now most ravaged by the spreading consequences of our disregard.’ (Becoming Animal, p. 6)

Freya Mathews, another philosopher whose thoughts are useful here, argues that the adoption of a universal perspective, a framework that retreats from the particularity of things, denies the subjectivity of others and refuses dialogue. ‘This is because the subjectivity of others is communicated to us via particulars’, she writes. ‘Communicative cues reside deep within the particularity of things: communicative intent is recognizable only at the level of the particular instance, at those junctures at which behaviour departs from an anticipated norm.’

‘To initiate communication [with the world at large]’, she continues, ‘we must address it at the level of particulars. This requires awareness of intricate patterns of unfolding, attunement to the minutest details in the order and sequence of things; we must be prepared to pay attention to things in their infinite variability.’ (Mathews, Reinhabiting Reality, 2005, p. 16)

It seems to me that museums are uniquely positioned to foster the sort of attunement to particularity that Mathews advocates. By enabling encounters with particular, material things, and with the people, places and other species to which those things are connected, museums enable dialogue. Within dialogue lie opportunities to respond, to build the social and ecological links that provide resilience and hope in a time of crisis.

Others might disagree! What do you think? Do you have any ideas about the possible contributions of cultural institutions in promoting constructive responses to climate change? Feel free to join the dialogue by adding your comments below.

I jumped the fence and walked up a driveway to the home of Chris and Merran Goesch. Around the kitchen table, Chris explained that he was the fourth generation of his family to farm in the district. His great grandfather, Charles Goesch, came from South Australia in about 1910 and established Spring Farm, named after permanent springs found there, and held today by his cousin.

Chris described how climate patterns and farming had changed over the past decade. As the land had dried and lost its capacity to moderate temperature, frosts had become heavier and more frequent. Frosts in spring had devastated flowering crops. Chris and Merran had bought extra land to the north at Barmedman, where the clay soils could hold more moisture and sustain production.

With three farms leased, they now farmed 10 000 acres, and had never been so busy.  Many farmers had leased out or sold their land, Merran said. Agribusiness companies were using overseas money to buy and amalgamate family farms. There were fewer kids about, fewer school buses on the road:

‘Down Ferguson’s Lane for example, ten families used to live down there. Now there’s only one. That’s happening everywhere.’

On the issue of climate change, Chris didn’t trust the scientific community. ‘Fifteen years ago, if you wanted a research grant you just had to mention ‘salinity’ in the application’, he said. ‘Now it’s ‘climate change’. It’s a bandwagon.’

Before leaving, I asked if I could take their photograph. Chris suggested that they stand beside the creek. ‘Narraburra Creek is just great’, Chris said. ‘I feel sorry for places that don’t have a creek.’

A few paddocks upstream, a white ute turned onto the farm track that ran beside the creek. The ute stopped and I introduced myself to Neil Mills and his son James. I’d spoken to Neil on the phone a few weeks before. Neil asked me up to his house for morning tea.

Inside, Neil offered slices of home baked cake and told me that his family had been farming around Temora since 1881. He ran sheep and grew wheat on 1200 acres, and did engineering work for mining companies to supplement his farm income. I asked James if he was keen to take over the property one day. ‘He’s wanted to put me into Greenstone, the retirement village in town, ever since he was eight’, Neil exclaimed in reply.

Then I asked Neil and James about their thoughts on climate change. ‘It’s just a drought’, answered James, before admitting that he didn’t have firm views on the matter. ‘Yeah, there’s got to be something in it’, Neil said.

Neil described the extraordinary regrowth of red gum and yellow box trees in the paddock outside, where Combaning Creek enters the Narraburra, after the intense drought of the early 1980s had bared the land. Most farmers had killed the seedlings with herbicide, but Neil had let his grow. After years of heat and dust, he’d welcomed growth and the promise of shade. ‘It’s bloody beautiful there now’, Neil said.

We stepped into the spring sunshine and walked a short distance to meet Combaning Creek. At the confluence, a giant yellow box stood nearby, its solid form holding centuries. Neil pointed. ‘That’s the biggest tree on the place’.

Towards midday, the channel of Combaning Creek vanished into grassy swampland.

Nardoo grew in abundance, its pale fronds floating.

On the other side of the swampy land stood sheds and a house. ‘Sunnyside’ was the name of the farm, according to the map. I walked up to the garden gate and introduced myself to Brad Booker and Jane Cummins, a young couple who were painting and renovating the old home. Brad and Jane were the only landholders I’d not managed to contact when I’d arranged the walk, and they were somewhat surprised to see a  man walking through their paddocks and towards their house.

I explained that the purpose of my project was to find useful ways to imagine and respond to the globalised issue of climate change by taking a particularly local perspective. What did the monumental issue of anthropogenic warming mean for people here, for the future of this productive place, and for the future of those connected to it?

Brad told me that his great grandparents had established Sunnyside. Knowledge of the patterns of this place, gathered over generations, informed his understanding of the changing climate. Brad’s father had always said that if rain didn’t arrive by May, a tough winter would follow, as the intense cold of the winter months prevented growth. But recent winters had been warmer, and sheep fodder would grow despite a late break. ‘Something is definitely happening’, Jane agreed. ‘The seasons aren’t as reliable.’

We talked about the distrust towards climate scientists and their findings that seemed to be common amongst rural dwellers. Brad felt that people with more conservative mindsets probably wouldn’t accept the science until they could see physical evidence of climate change in their local area. And many believed that the extreme drought of the previous decade was merely a natural event. Brad suggested that the physical complexities of the situation, whereby climatic changes induced by industrial activity may have amplified the familiar Australian phenomenon of drought, provided grounds for confusion and skepticism.

I left Brad and Jane to their house painting and crossed the Burley Griffin Way and the Lake Cargelligo to Cootamundra railway that runs alongside the busy road.

The creek passed through a paddock cloaked in a dense crop. Beside the waterway someone had planted a kurrajong. A brisk easterly pushed the sapling against its wire mesh guard.

Further upstream I passed a group of old grey box trees. On the creek bank lay scorched clay and stone flakes. The curved blue form of Gundibindyal lay low in the east.

I stopped walking. Stillness. A sense of deep time.

Past a brilliant yellow sea of canola I found an intriguing metal badge, possibly once attached to a long decayed object of timber or leather.

Fences enclosed Combaning Creek on land belonging to the Sinclair family. Inside the enclosure, birds darted through healthy stands of young wattles and eucalypts.

I crossed Sinclairs Lane and entered Glengarrie, a property owned by Wendy McCrone (see Creeklines ~ day five) and her husband Bill. In the distance I could see Glengarrie woolshed. The afternoon had warmed. I followed a sheep track along the bank of a dam, and walked cautiously around a large brown snake lying on the path of trodden red clay.

Wendy arrived on her four wheeled motor bike, waving. She passed me a bag of fresh fruit then puttered away with my heavy backpack, sheep dogs following.  

After dropping my pack at the site of the old Combaning school, Wendy returned and walked the last kilometres with me, across her farm.

We paused beside an old dam surrounded by ancient red gums, and stood in awe before a venerable yellow box, its multiple trunks stretching across the creek.

A wheat crop, green and flowering, blanketed the gentle slope. It was dense with seed heads, their grains swelling towards ripeness. Wendy said how much her father would have admired the crop, its density and even surface, the absence of weeds.

At the bottom of the slope Wendy and Bill had fenced Combaning Creek and planted hundreds of eucalypts. Rushes lined the waterway, and the saplings grew tall.

We reached another old dam, probably built in the early years of pastoralism, when these paddocks were part of the Combaning squatting run. In the shade of massive red gums, Wendy said that it was her favorite place on the farm.

Beyond the dam we stepped over a fence into a travelling stock reserve. Through the trees, the late afternoon sun cast long shadows.

Past the site of Combaning school. Past the remains of Combaning homestead and its outbuildings.

At the waterhole, the creek ran gently, murmuring its origins in dark, scrubby hills nearby. I bent down to feel the water, the mud beneath. One banjo frog, then another, began calling from the edge. Singing a song of Combaning waterhole, and its creeklines.

I turned onto the Grogan road and walked up to Narraburra Hall, an abandoned, corrugated iron relic of generations past, when more people lived beside the blue hills of Narraburra, when roads and cars didn’t carry people so fast and so far.

I jumped the fence and cut through the paddock, past another empty, crumbling home, back to the creek.

A well used track crossed the waterway and I followed it to a modern brick house. Despite my calls towards the house and sheds no one appeared. I continued along the creek until the buzz of a motorbike carried across the paddock. I introduced myself to its driver, Philip Tier. Philip turned off the engine and I asked him how long his family had lived and farmed here at Narraburra.

More than a century ago, Philip said, his great grandfather, Carl Gustav August Heinrich, journeyed overland to the Narraburra district from South Australia, on a horse drawn wagon loaded with furniture and tools. Philip suggested I speak to his mother, the family historian, for more details.

I explained to Philip that my research sought to understand global climate change, and how we might respond to the issue, in relation to this productive place where he lived, its history and present day realities. He talked about the tough years of the previous decade, how the weather had often turned hot and dry around the middle of September, just when his crops needed moisture and mild weather to fill the grains. 

Philip didn’t think the climate was changing. The intense drought was a cyclical event, like the the dry times of the 1940s, and the big Federation drought. He explained how local farmers had modified their practices in response to the lower rainfall and increased heat. There’d been more direct drilling of seed into stubble, a method that preserved organic matter and soil moisture. The spacings between crop rows were wider, enabling the earth to absorb more rain, and promoting efficient water use by plants.

‘Everyone’s chasing the cracking year, the pot of gold’, Philip said. ‘And those blokes with lots of debt need lots of cracking years.’ Philip suggested I have a talk with his neighbour, Daryl Williams, who taught agriculture at Temora High School, and pointed across the green paddocks towards a house and sheds beside the creek.

Daryl was home. We stood on the verandah and talked. Daryl’s grandfather had acquired a small farm here in 1906. On the verandah of the house built by his grandparents, Daryl told a familiar story about the loss of people and community activity. The school at Narraburra had closed in the early 1950s. When he was a kid, thirty people would fill the small Anglican church on the other side of the creek, built on land donated by Daryl’s father. Still, there did remain opportunities for gathering, for maintaining and honouring connections between people and this place. A visiting minister held church services a few times each year, and the tennis club remained alive.

Climate patterns were changing, Daryl was convinced, and he didn’t doubt the research data produced by climate scientists. Darrell thought there were good reasons why many rural dwellers were skeptical about the science of global warming. ‘Wild media claims’ of impending climatic catastrophe bred distrust, as did talk of carbon trading, judged by many farmers as a money making system designed to benefit others.

Upstream another empty home, white paint peeling, silent sheds accumulating dust and rust. In the front garden, the awkward form of a buloke  sapling stood inside a stone edged flower bed, an indigenous reclaiming of place. Around the back, a collection of stone tools gathered from the paddocks lay in the rain. Here, beside the vacant house, amid the wet grasses and quiet, it seemed that commercial and cultural forces of displacement had completed their brutal work.

Later I passed a set of brand new sign posts and a frame, recently installed beside Narraburra Creek, at a T junction on the road to Morangarell.

When I called in to see Helen and Richard Hayden, who lived nearby, they explained that the Temora Shire Council were erecting signs with historical information and photographs at different sites around the district. Over delicious sandwiches prepared by Helen, Richard explained that the Narraburra Hotel had stood at the site I’d passed. The old brick house in which they lived was once home to the local publican and his family.

Helen showed me a pamphlet promoting an upcoming ‘pub crawl’ to hotel and post office sites at Morangarell, Grogan and Narraburra:

‘Bus leaving Paleface Park at 11.30 am to Narraburra Tennis Courts for a sausage sizzle (provided by the history group) then on to each of the pub sites from 1 pm, where we’ll toast the past, and unveil commemorative panels which detail the histories of the hotels and post offices at each site.’

Marking sites of significance, passing together through country, telling stories about places.

The creek channel wove past the community tennis courts and through a timbered reserve for travelling stock. Beyond the land began to swell and roll. In the afternoon light, on a hillside to the east, appeared the bright yellow of canola in full bloom. The bush cloaked range of Gundibindyal, where Combaning Creek begins, rose in the distance.

Here, the dark ranges gather water and cast twisting creeks through paddocks. As daylight faded, Narraburra Creek seemed a sinuous path of indigeneity bound to its native hills. The paddock spaces beside the creek, grazed and ploughed for generations, were different. There, hovering and powerful, I sensed the presence and operation of cultural energies that arose in other times and places, in the industrial and scientific revolutions of western Europe, in modern urban centres and corporate offices. 

A divorce, a tension, seemed to exist between the creekline and the paddock. As we face the looming and interconnected crises of climate change, peak oil and peak phosphorous, is our greatest challenge to imagine a convergence of our bodily needs for nourishment and warmth with the ecological needs of our productive terrains?

From the campsite I followed the flow of the muddy water downstream, under the concrete mass of the new bridge, towards the point where the Narraburra Creek flows into the Bland.

It felt like walking with an old friend for the last time. In minutes I’d turn up the Narraburra and leave behind the Bland, its banjo frogs and swamp wallabies, the flowered expanses of its travelling stock route. Black jays called mournfully from red gums. 

As does the Bland, the Narraburra only flows during particularly wet seasons. I reached the confluence, where a steady flow entered the Bland from the Narraburra, and turned left towards Combaning.

‘Morangarell’ means ‘the nesting place of the waterfowl’, noted Mary Gilmore, ’and in the 1860s and 70s the coming of the then self-governed blacks to the station was as regular as the coming of the birds and their moon’ (The Passionate Heart, p. 319). Although it was springtime and wet, I found no nests in the grasses and rushes of the Morangarell gum forest.

The Barmedman to Quandialla road crosses Narraburra Creek at Morangarell, over a bridge named in memory of Lyal Mangelsdorf, a local farmer and father of Wendy McCrone (see Creeklines ~ day five). During dinner beside the Bland the previous night, Wendy had mentioned the bridge, and her father’s tragic death in a bushfire about ten years before.

Narraburra Creek soon revealed its character. While the red gums were smaller than those of the Bland, they grew here too. And between the creek and crops, beside the remains of earth ovens, grew vanilla and bulbine lilies, and a distinct variety of white daisy, the same traces of indigenous lives and ecologies I’d encountered each day since leaving Lake Cowal.   

Just beyond the Barmedman to Quandialla road, a maze of earthworks and drainage channels sent me up the wrong waterway, a tributary of Narraburra Creek. A couple of hours passed before I realised my mistake. With my heavy backpack and sore feet I cut across paddocks to rejoin the Narraburra, cursing the extra miles.

Late in the afternoon, I noticed a white ute on the other side of the creek, and smoke rising from the bank. I called out and walked over. Standing in the creek, repairing a flood gate, was Ashley Granger. His son James, in gumboots, was playing along the bank, accompanied by sheepdogs. Ashley and James were burning the branches that the recent high flow had stacked against the flood gate. Ashley took a break, and sat down with James on a log.

Ashley told me how much he loved the creek, ‘the old red gums, the beauty of it all’. Sometimes on a Saturday night, Ashely drove with his family down to the creek, to light a fire and cook dinner. Ashley and his wife Sharon had bought this farm and moved here with their two kids from a smaller property on the tablelands further east, five tough, dry years ago. Summer had started too soon each October, Ashley explained, preventing the maturation of their grain crops.

I asked Ashley about his thoughts on climate change, half expecting in response some variety of the climate skepticism often encountered in the bush. ’It’s a big problem’, he replied emphatically. ‘The weather’s gone crazy’. Ashley talked about local ecological patterns shifting with the climate. Warmer winters were inducing grasses to flower and seed before spring. He thought that in the future, an increasingly erratic climate would make Australian farming even more challenging.

James retrieved a packet of shortbread from the ute and we kept talking, Ashley tossing me biscuits across the channel. Few of Ashley’s neighbours shared his views that the climate was changing in response to industrial activity. I asked him why so many farmers rejected the science of global warming. Ashley suspected that a sense of powerlessness in the face of such a vast, globalised issue underlay the skepticism, combined with a fear that farmers might be blamed for contributing to the problem, due to the dependency of industrial agriculture on the heavy use of oil and chemicals.

Ashley and James decided to walk with me upstream and have a look around the site of the homestead and outbuildings of Narraburra Creek station, one of the early squatting runs in the Temora district. Ashley didn’t know about the site. James splashed through the creek, undaunted by the hole in one gumboot. The dogs swam across. Ashley used the fence as a bridge.

I carried a copy of a survey plan for the Narraburra Creek run, sketched by a visiting surveyor in the summer of 1871. The plan showed the location of a cottage, kitchen and garden beside a sharp bend in the creek, a few hundred metres past the boundary of Ashley’s property. As we neared the site of the station buildings, the channel spread out beneath sturdy red gums. ’I haven’t seen the creek this wide anywhere’, Ashley remarked. ‘It’s like a river’. James ran down towards the water, then climbed back to show us a large fragment of earthenware he’d found on the slope.

We walked into the crop, towards the point where the plan showed a cottage and kitchen. Ashley looked down at a stone, then kicked it with his boot. ‘This is granite, it’s not from here, it’s been carted in’, he said. Rusted metal fragments and more ceramic pieces were scattered amid the turned earth and wheat plants. Ashley decided to return in February, when the paddock would be bare.

With daylight fading Ashley and James headed back to their ute. I followed the winding channel upstream and found a campsite where a thick stand of Paterson’s curse, thriving in soil enriched by crop fertilisers, blocked access to the creek. As darkness fell a banjo frog began calling from the water, offering its gentle, halting song of night air and timber, of creeklines and continuity.

Abandoned and derelict, the ancient woolshed on Curraburrama stood as a fragile monument to the skilled bushmen who built it, and to the generations of workers and sheep that had strained and sweated beneath its tin roof.

Near the centre of the building, where flooring had vanished, the stump of a tree, probably a white cypress pine, rose from the earth. The shed and its floor had protected the stump from so many years of sunlight and moisture. Axe marks on the stump looked almost fresh, undermining any sense of the passage of time. 

Since the early decades of colonisation on the Bland, Curraburrama woolshed and its shearing technologies had represented pastoral progress and prosperity. Inside the dilapidated building, the stump and its fresh cuts seemed to disrupt modern concepts of linear movement from primitive pasts to industrial futures. Here, the past was present.

Walking away from the woolshed, back down the dusty track towards the creek, I thought about the talk given by Mi’kmaq elder Albert Marshall at Prince Edward Island (see the earlier post Epekwitk). Marshall had explained the Mi’kmaq concept of ‘two eyed seeing’, whereby wisdom and meaning is bound to knowledge about places and things, in contrast to the sharp divide between mind and matter that often characterises western thought. It struck me that by walking through country, by attending to the local materiality of our lives, we may generate a form of  knowledge especially useful in these times of climatic and ecological disorder.  To draw meaning and guidance from the local and the particular defies modern systems of knowledge that privilege understandings abstracted from place and the personal.

The desire to trancend earthly constraints of time and place through the extraction and application of buried, fossilised energy has a cultural foundation, a basis in powerful stories and beliefs. If we tell ourselves, if we believe, that our places are more than a backdrop to modern life, that they are rich with stories and biological diversity, that our very bodies are woven into the ecological fabrics of terrains near and far, then we begin to undermine the imaginative, cultural basis to the wounding of our living systems. The questions arise: what do our places need to stay productive and strong? How might we respond to those needs?

On the other side of the creek a track ran beneath padlocked gates towards another empty home. On this property grew genetically modified, ’Roundup Ready’ canola, a promotional sign revealed.

Nearby, signs declared that Corporate Cropping Australia owned this land, and warned against entry without consent.

The empty house,  its locked gates, and the signage asserting corporate ownership and tight control over land made a strident statement of boundaries and exclusion.  

I followed the wide stock route to Morangarell, where the path opened into woodland. Water lay beneath box trees, and flowers rose from the sodden earth.

Morangarell was the site of an early squatting run, and later a village. Here the Narraburra Creek joins the Bland. In about 1879 Mary Gilmore visited Morangarell station, then owned by her relations, and witnessed a gathering of around 300 Wiradjuri people:

‘It was only half the number expected, as those from the Lachlan could not get across in time, owing to drought. There I saw the last Gundagai chief.  The blacks had called the meeting of the localised tribes, expecting and knowing it would be the last they would ever hold.’ (Gilmore, Old Days: Old Ways, p. 138)

In the travelling stock reserve, elderly grey box trees bore scars. 

Across the top of one scar, a distinct line of axe marks recorded the removal of a sheet of bark, perhaps used to build a station hut. When Mary Gilmore visited Morangarell as child, the Chisholm family held East Bland station downstream. A station ledger from East Bland, part of the Charles Chisholm collection at the Mitchell Library, records payments made in 1872 to ’Murray, blackfellow’ for more than 500 bark sheets.

Towards the creek, peppercorn trees and a brick chimney memorialised the village of Morangarell.

I crossed the Bland over a new steel and concrete bridge and found a camp site where the wiry flower stems of chocolate lilies twisted towards the darkening sky, amid the deep prints of a cattle herd that had passed a few weeks before, when the grey soil was wet. Tracey Robinson, a local farmer and community liaison officer with the Lachlan Catchment Management Authority, had generously offered to provide a barbeque dinner by the creek. Tracey soon arrived in a white ute with her kids Cassidy and Drew, their puppy Jack, and Tracey’s friend Wendy McCrone.

Drew and Cassidy lit a second fire near the creek as Tracey started cooking the meat. I talked with Tracey and Wendy about the potential damage to flowering wheat crops from the frost that had descended the night before. ‘Don’t worry’, Tracey had told her husband, ‘What the frost hasn’t got the grasshoppers will.’ Early in the twentieth century, German migrants established a Lutheran community at nearby Trungley Hall, where land had become available for closer settlement. Beside the smoky campfire, Wendy and Tracey recalled the rural German traditions of their childhoods. Wendy remembered delicious sausages prepared by her grandmother from the head of a pig and cooked over an open fire. She’d wasted no part; the brain, eyes, tongue and cheeks were minced together and cooked with rice and herbs. As we talked, the pup sat by a chair, alert, watching firelight dance on the trunks and branches of red gum trees.

After a hearty dinner my hosts drove away; headlights illuminating box trees, tail lights casting a red glow through grasses, the horn tooting farewell into the dark. The creek whispered. A solitary mopoke called from a tree branch.  And in the distance a truck laden with livestock grumbled through the night.

The night before I’d talked with Jeremy and Kirsty about East Bland, its history and local significance, and the methods of management and production they’d developed and implemented in recent years. Jeremy remarked on the extraordinary diversity and productivity of native grasses that grow on the property. He suspected that a vast bank of grass seeds, held by the heavy clay soils, enabled the swift and bulky growth of native pastures during spring and summer. In winter the cattle grazed oats sown directly into the paddocks of native grasses. A company based in Japan owned all the Angus steers on East Bland. Steers arrived when they were aged between 7 and 12 months old, stayed for about 6 months, and then were trucked to an export feedlot in northern New South Wales.

Kirsty and Jeremy mentioned the concerns held by locals about agribusiness companies buying and amalgamating properties in the Bland Creek area. Funded from outside the region, the vast holdings became highly industrialised, and few employees were engaged. More people and families departed, with unfortunate consequences for local schools and businesses, and the wellbeing of the local community. Corporate managers seemed not to recognise or value the historical significance of the newly acquired stations, their old buildings and graves.

In these turbulent times, as climatic and economic forces drive people from the land, perhaps stories arising from place can lend strength to those wanting to stay. When Jeremy and Kirsty moved to East Bland, they began talking to old timers. They learned stories of the historic property; they discovered its memories. The historical society at nearby Quandialla was particularly active, Kirsty explained. People in the district knew the significance of East Bland as one of the early pastoral runs. When Kirsty first approached builders about renovating the old homestead, they’d advised her to bulldoze the building and start again. It would’ve made sense, financially. ‘But we couldn’t live in this community if we demolished it’, Kirsty said. ‘How could I drop my kids off at the Quandialla Central School each morning?’

Instead, they modified and moved into an old timber and corrugated iron shed (later revealed to be the pre-1909 East Bland homestead), and started planning the renovation and extension of the brick homestead. This photo shows Jeremy and his children outside the modified shed:

Below is a view from the tower of the East Bland homestead, probably taken soon after builders finished erecting the home in 1909. This photo is in the Miriam Chisholm collection at the National Library of Australia. Note the garden surrounding the earlier homestead, its sturdy fence, and the station outbuildings (click to enlarge).

I climbed up through the homestead roof, onto the tower, and took this photo of the shed and its surrounds:

Soon after resuming my walk along the creek, I noticed that I had unwittingly attracted some fellow travellers. The dogs ignored my demands that they return home, cheerily accompanying me for an hour. 

Banjo frogs emitted their erratic melodies from the tangled debris of recent floods.

From the east came the drone of a crop dusting plane. White wings caught the sun, the Weddin Range hazy and blue behind. The plane swooped low before releasing a long cloud of fungicide. Stripe rust had thrived on crops this wet spring.

On the creek bank, scorched clods of heat retaining clay marked the precise locations where family groups had gathered beside ovens dug into the earth, where people had talked, laughed, and sang the songs of this place. In the photo below, there’s a stone flake in the lower left corner (click the image to enlarge):

On the opposite bank, between the trunks of red gums, afternoon sunlight brightened a flowering canola crop. A westerly breeze carried fresh scent from the yellow canola through the moist creekside shade. I neared Curraburrama, where Burrangong Creek enters the Bland. The single channel lined with redgums gradually became a forested swampland of islands and minor billabongs.

Sara Hawkins was born in 1862 on Curraburrama station. As an elderly woman, she recalled ‘days of prolific seasons’ in her youth, when ‘the waving grass on some places on the Bland would completely hide a horseman’ (Pink Hats on Gentle Ladies, Clift family history notes, State Library of NSW). Hawkins remembered Curraburrama as a wet and lively place:

‘Emus and Kangaroos were numerous and there were plenty of wild fowl and fish. Blacks would come to the homestead with fish strung on green rushes and ask for food and tobacco in exchange. They were rather numerous then, and wore possum rugs and blankets pinned round them with wooden pins. They carried their war weapons and always had a number of dogs.’

In the grey earth at the edge of the Curraburrama swamp, an array of stone flakes, ceramic shards and a rusted horse shoe evoked the times remembered by Sara Hawkins, when Wiradjuri and colonists lived together on the Bland.

Lawrence Struilby and his wife Selina bought a pastoral run near Curraburrama in 1843 (John Graham (ed.), Observations and Experiences during Twenty-Five years of Bush Life in Australia, Longman, London, 1863). Before their departure for the station, Struilby prepared for the building of workable relationships with resident Wiradjuri:

‘The blacks were there encamped within two hundred yards of the hut. I had brought a brass plate, and put it on Jemmy Curraburma [sic] as the acknowledged king of the place and people.’

Struilby’s memoirs offer rare glimpses of Wiradjuri people and settlers sharing experiences on the pastoral frontier:

‘When next I had cattle for Goulburn, I bought twelve mahogany chairs at an auction by a Jew. They were hair-bottomed and excellent, twenty-four shillings a-piece; the first ever brought into the Bland Bush. They were the surprise of Selina, and the admiration of neighbours. They were the subject of wonder, laughter, and jabbering to the blacks for weeks after. They would peep in and look at us sitting on them, and then disappear shaking with laughter, and imitate us in fantastic style to the tribe.’

An agribusiness company had recently bought Curraburrama. The old station buildings weren’t in good shape.

I walked across a rickety timber bridge to the site of the old Curraburrama schoolhouse. A few months before, when the new owners were burning stubble, the schoolhouse caught fire and burned to the ground.

Beside the creek I found a small stone tool with a ground edge.

I carefully returned the tool, then made my way back over the bridge and past the empty homestead. Back at East Bland, Kirsty had suggested I have a look at Curraburrama woolshed, one of the oldest buildings in the area. I walked along the track towards the sheds as the sun faded, and set camp within a scattered clump of yellow box trees.

Unfortunately the recent heavy rain and widespread flooding has caused a lot of crop and infrastructure damage throughout the region.