White Beech: The Rainforest Years (12 page)

I was silent, thinking about a valiant revegetation project that had been undertaken by schoolchildren just outside Alice. They had cleared a degraded road verge and planted a selection of native grasses and woody shrubs on it; a year later the whole site was supporting only two species, a buffel grass and Ruby Dock.

The next morning Janet and Don took me to see Delny. In the paddock between the house and the road, there was an old wooden mustering yard bleached silver by the sun, as well as a good deal of machinery quietly rusting down into a sea of overgrown buffel grass. The house stood on a distinct rise, which the floodwaters of the Bundey River never reached, judging by the soundness of the reinforced concrete shell that had been built around the original one-roomed stone house. In its time, the house design had been revolutionary. Rather than the ubiquitous pitched galvanised iron roof that would collect rainwater and channel it into freestanding tanks, the house had a flat roof that was dished so that rainwater would run into a shallow rectangular concrete tank built into the ceiling. Even without any glass in its tall louvred windows and without any water in the roof-tank, the house was cool and spacious, and full of the red mud nests of martins. I could see at once how you could extend it with open colonnades and enclosed courtyards, that would connect in a series of versatile breezeways, so you wouldn’t need air conditioning. There was ample scope for solar power, which Don was already using to run the bore pumps for his cattle troughs. The trees around the house were few and scrawny, a Hakea or two, a Mallee here and there, and something else growing out of what must once have been a septic tank. At first I thought it was a She-oak, but it was darker, denser, different. Beyond it, between the house and the invisible river, there were more.

That evening I e-mailed Jane a photograph of the mystery trees, and asked her what they were. She called back at once.

‘Tamarisks,’said Jane. ‘
Tamarix aphylla
, one of Australia’s worst tree weeds. You’d have to get rid of them.’

‘What’s wrong with Tamarisks?’

‘Everything. They put down a massive taproot that doesn’t branch until it reaches the water table, and then sends out hundreds of laterals, to suck up all the underground water that supports the native vegetation on our old watercourses in the dry season. They also absorb salt from the soil and then excrete it through their leaves. As the leaves fall the salt builds up on the surface of the soil. And they’re fire-prone. They’re a bloody disaster.’

‘Aren’t they some sort of pine?’

‘They look it and they’re sometimes called Athel Pines. Americans call them Saltcedars, but they’re angiosperms, in a family of their own, the Tamaricaceae. What look like needles on these ones are actually very small leaf-scales, which is why their species name is
Tamarix aphylla
. In 1930 somebody imported
T. aphylla
into Whyalla, for shade trees or something. At first it seemed ideally adapted to Australian conditions, so they planted it round Alice – for erosion control, I think. Now it’s infested 600 ks of the Finke River. The salinity of the water has increased twenty-fold.’

I told Don about the Tamarisks and the Finke River. He was silent for a few minutes. The Finke River is possibly the oldest watercourse in the world, and the Tamarisks are well on the way to killing it. At length he decided to reject my gloom and doom.

‘Well, what’s wrong with that? If the river gums can’t compete, it means they’re unfit. They won’t survive.’

I was aware that I was beginning to make a nuisance of myself. If I wanted Delny this wasn’t the way to get it. My face grew hot. I began unsteadily.

‘Fitness applies to a whole ecosystem, rather than a single species. If any single plant species becomes a monoculture, it becomes vulnerable. You only have to think about what happens in plantations. Without a very high level of disease-control inputs they collapse. If plant relations are out of balance with other factors, the eventual result will be a rampant monoculture and then annihilation by a combination of pathogens.’

‘And another species steps into the breach. That’s life.’

‘I don’t believe that biodiversity must inevitably be reduced. I don’t think that the end product of evolution will be the destruction of most species.’

‘What would you do about the Tamarisks?’ asked Janet.

‘I’d poison them.’

‘You can’t spray them because they’re on a watercourse.’

‘I know. I’d inject them, so they died nice and slow.’

‘Inject them?’

‘You drill into them just far enough to reach the cambium and then you put in the poison, undiluted glyphosate or maybe something nastier, whatever it takes. If we leave the trees to die and then gradually rot, we avoid causing more disturbance and destruction. But you’d have to be prepared to do it again and again, because Tamarisks will resprout if the huge root system is not entirely dead. And if the Tamarisks have caused salination, native vegetation might not be able to re-establish. We’d probably need a few good rains to wash the accumulated salt away.’

There was no time for further talk, because the helicopter had radioed that the cattle were coming in and it was all hands to the drive. The jackeroos and Don’s daughters were revving the engines of their trail bikes. Don was at the wheel of the Land Rover. I hopped in beside him. As the cattle came swinging through the trees we had to direct them towards the chute and into the muster yards, where they would be guided down different alleys into separate enclosures to be held until they were branded or branded and castrated. Dry cows went to one pen, to be eventually trucked away for slaughter, unless they were pregnant, when they stayed with the wet cows; unbranded steers went another way; branded ones were either let go, or sent to a holding pen to be collected when the cattle train came by. It was Don’s job to drive the Land Rover flat out through the scrub to head off any bulls that took it into their heads to lead their harems away from danger. I had barely time to strap myself in before we wheeled and went rocketing through the scrub after a huge brown bull. The transparent screen of vegetation fell before the four-wheel drive with little more than a creak and a sigh, as hootin’ and hollerin’ we came alongside the big bull and, sliding with all four wheels, broadsided him back into the drive. The kids on the trail bikes with their bandannas tied across their noses under their sunglasses to protect them from the dust shot in and out, yelling to us to follow on the track of the runaways. I found myself hanging out of the window, pounding on the side of the Land Rover, yelling ‘Come ORN’ to the white-eyed animals that snorted around us. It was great fun, I have to say.

What came next was not so much fun. One by one the unbranded steers were pushed along a narrow alley that ended in a sliding gate. The boys liked to get the frightened animals to move forward by twisting their tails up tight; the girls got the same result without. When the gate was slid back and the end steer popped out, he stepped into a steel clamp that was locked shut and lowered onto its side, so that the branding iron that was heating in the fire could be applied. As the red-hot iron hissed on its flank, the animal would scream in shock, terror and pain and all the others would join in. A smell of scorching skin and hair filled the dusty air. While the steer lay helpless amid the din and panic, one of the girls would slip up with a small sharp knife and swiftly remove its scrotum. Then the clamp was righted, the beast released and shooed off down another alley. I was taking all this in good part, because after all I am partial to Northern Territory beef, when a calf who was too small for the clamp to hold darted straight through it. The kids grabbed him. He flung his small brown body about so wildly, fought so hard and broke free so often, that they eventually gave up and let him go, a cleanskin, to be branded and castrated next time. Over and above the clamour of the branding came the cries of the wet cows, calling for their babies. They would go on uttering those terrible cries all night. One of the factors I had to take into account was that the Delny house stood within earshot of the mustering yards.

The next day I drove back to Alice with one of the girls who was going in for supplies. Just as we came up to the bend in the track at Delny, we caught sight of something hanging on the fence. It was a young kangaroo. She had caught a toe in the top strand of barbed wire as she was trying to leap over it; her body had swung down and smacked into the fence, while her weight twisted the top strand of wire round a lower one, trapping her by the foot. She had hung there upside down until she died. I’m not superstitious, but the kangaroo hanging crucified upside down like St Peter added to my impression of Delny as a difficult place for any animal, including me. By the time the four-wheel drive had left the sand track and climbed up onto the highway, I had decided that, regardless of any deal the Holts might offer, Delny was not for me.

Fresh out of ideas, I wandered into a real estate agency in Alice Springs, to ask one last time if they had any rural properties on the books.

The person who dealt with rural properties was Maureen O’Grady. ‘Well, there’s a mango farm up at Ti Tree,’ she said.

I knew about the mango farm, which had been on the market for months, with less than ten hectares and 1,000 mango trees for $260,000. The owners’ reason for wanting to sell it, that you can’t make money out of growing mangoes in central Australia, was everyone else’s reason for not wanting to buy it. Because the property had been ‘improved’, the price per hectare was exorbitant. There would have been no point whatever in paying such a high price for a piece of land only to turn it back into spinifex and sand.

‘Anything else?’

She shook her head. I wasn’t surprised. When graziers decide to surrender their leases the word is out on the bush telegraph long before any real estate dealer can get to hear of it. The agency, which had offices all over Australia, dealt in suburban properties, in brick veneer, manicured lawns, swimming pools and carports. The occasional hobby farm might show up from time to time, but that was it.

I was almost out the door when Maureen came running out of her office.

‘The lucerne farm! I forgot the lucerne farm!’

She thrust a prospectus into my hand. ‘Hugh River Holdings’ it said on the cover.

I knew the country well. The Hugh River is a broad channel of deep red sand between a double file of old Ghost Gums that crosses the Stuart Highway about ninety ks south of Alice Springs, at a place called Stuart’s Well, between the James Range and Chandler’s Range. Sometime in the Seventies a man called Noel Fullarton set up, just off the highway on the north bank of the Hugh River, what he called a ‘camel farm’, which became a must-see for passengers on every tourist vehicle travelling north or south. On the south side of the river is Jim’s Place, where you can get a snack and fuel or a room or a campsite, and enjoy the performance of Dinky the singing Dingo. Nobody ever mentions the chainwire-fenced enclosure or ‘sanctuary’ where trapped emus, wallabies and kangaroos wait for death, while the tourists video and photograph them. Australian animals react badly to captivity. The life expectancy of kangaroos and wallabies in cages is no more than a few weeks.

I slid into a seat in a pavement café, ordered a coffee and started to read the prospectus. The lucerne farm was directly opposite Jim’s Place, on the other side of the highway, behind an electric kangaroo-proof fence. What the owners were trying to sell was their business, which was raising boom-irrigated lucerne for fodder. The land had been acquired as an excision from the lease of the surrounding Orange Creek Station. Originally the owners had tried to grow the lucerne over two circles, but the existing bores didn’t draw down sufficient water for two circles so one had been shut down. By dint of being harvested twelve times a year the remaining circle produced 30,000 bales a year, to be sold at $8 a bale more or less, with production costs about half that. The prospectus made reference to ‘partnership problems’ and ‘lack of capital for further development’. What interested me was that the cultivation used only 32.4 of the property’s 135 hectares. I could buy the property, so solving the owners’ cash-flow problem, and lease the farm back to them. They could go on growing their lucerne, with me and my archive safely housed up the back in the foothills of the James Range, within an hour’s drive of Alice Springs airport. The asking price was $400,000, with a four-bedroom house, a large hay shed, an implement shed and various pumps, booms and what have you thrown in.

I tore down the Stuart Highway for a preliminary recce and then called Maureen. ‘Let’s go see them tomorrow morning, early, because I’ve got a flight out in the afternoon.’

We were at the farm for breakfast putting my proposition to the owners, who probably thought I was mad. Why anyone would sink so much money in a farm and then not farm it was a conundrum they couldn’t solve, but at length they understood that I was serious. Back at the office I made an offer, $350,000, cash. My flight to Darwin took off to the south; as we banked to turn northwards I could see the deep emerald-green disc of lucerne beyond the jagged crests of the James Range.

When I had finished reading the documents included with the prospectus I understood the situation rather better. The enterprise had been set up in 1982–3, when the property was still part of Orange Creek Station, and from the beginning it had been a struggle. The owners’ licence to extract water from the Mereenie Sandstone Aquifer originally covered four bores, each ninety metres deep. One had sanded up. Another was a ‘crooked hole’ in which a pumpshaft had broken off; both bore and pumping gear had been abandoned because the cost of retrieving the gear was uneconomic. The third bore was working; it was driven by a six-cylinder diesel motor housed in a steel shed which was open on one side. The fourth bore was pumped out by an identical motor, housed in a shed that was missing two sides. This was beginning to sound like a lot of noise battering the desert silence, and that was before I realised that the pivots were run by another four-cylinder generator that also served the house, a total of sixteen cylinders thudding away day and night. Twelve times a year there would have been the added commotion of the cutting and turning and baling of the lucerne, a fifty-four-hour process. The real reason the second circle was not being cultivated was because in 1991 the central pivot irrigator had been blown over and smashed, and the owners hadn’t had the money to repair it. As soon as they had money, it was London to a brick that the pivot irrigator would be repaired and the second circle brought into action. The thirty-three or so hectares under cultivation would become sixty-six. Or more.