White Beech: The Rainforest Years (13 page)

The owners accepted my offer. Their lawyers immediately set about drawing up their lease, which was to be granted at the same time as I acquired the freehold. If I had been more clued up I’d have insisted on vacant possession, and then agreed the lease separately. In the meantime the situation had changed. Massive flooding in the channel country had suddenly increased the demand for hay, and prices had soared. The pressure was off the owners who began playing hard to get, and refused to reduce the area of land they would reserve for their own use. In September I came back to Alice to clinch the deal but it was already falling apart.

When I met Jane at the airport, she read my face.

‘You didn’t really want a hay farm, did you?’

‘One of the problems is that the back portion of land doesn’t extend far enough into the range. If I could get tucked into the hills I mightn’t hear so much of their noise; the way it is I reckon I’d get double the racket. I’d hear it first-hand and reflected back by the scarps as well.’

Jane nodded. ‘Thing is you’d be paying top dollar for the least valuable land, and at the same time you’re making it possible for the owners to extend their operations and further reduce the amenity. There has to be a better way of spending $350,000.’

Ever mindful of my sister’s common sense, I dropped the idea of the lucerne farm there and then. I was back where I started.

‘Can we do some tourist things? And some botanising?’ asked Jane.

We drove the Tanami road north to Yuendumu, came back and took the back road west to Haast’s Bluff. We did the gorges, Glen Helen, Redbank, Ormiston and Serpentine. We took Larapinta Drive to the Mereenie Loop and King’s Canyon. We drove down to Erldunda and turned west along the Lasseter Highway, past the carcass of a huge black steer that the night before had been standing in the middle of the unlit unpaved road, invisible to the woman driver who was approaching at speed. She died on impact. I renewed my vow never to drive unfenced cattle country by night as we made our way to Uluru.

When I first came to Uluru it was called Ayers Rock. In 1985 the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples (nowadays more often called Anangu) were granted the freehold of what had been an Aboriginal reserve; because they realised how many tourists were already visiting the site, the elders immediately leased it to the Director of National Parks and Wildlife, while they retain the right to live unmolested nearby in the Mutitjulu community. Because the site is important to many Aboriginal peoples who visit it periodically for special ceremonial observances, the elders have moved to limit the amount of intrusion. Some parts of the rock may not be photographed and others not visited by the uninitiated, but the elders have not yet felt able to forbid the climbing of the rock. Long ago steel posts were drilled into it to carry a chain handhold. Signs point out that the traditional owners would rather that tourists did not make the climb; others commemorate the people who have died on the rock, which for Aboriginal peoples is the worst desecration imaginable.

Jane and I walked the base of the great monolith, which always strikes me as one of the holiest places in the world. At its foot we found native grasses aplenty, Cymbopogon and Tripogon species, sedges of different sizes, spinifex, Emu Bushes of different species growing side by side, as well as different kinds of Cassias, Acacias and Eucalypts, depending on the soil type. Every aspect of the rock displayed different associations. As I walked along in the lee of the great rock I prayed through clenched teeth to the tutelary spirits for country of my own, but I knew even as I did it that there is no country in Australia that I could ever really call my own. I was knocking on the wrong door. I relieved my feelings by pulling out a clump of Ruby Dock. Some tourists, who saw me do it, protested loudly.

‘This is a weed,’ I said. ‘Pretty, if you like that sort of thing, but a weed.’ Just about everywhere the soil is disturbed in the inland, Ruby Dock,
Acetosa vesicaria
(better known to older botanists as
Rumex vesicarius
), moves in and takes over. In 1999 a group of mining companies invested $80,000 in developing a Ruby Dock management scheme, but I never heard that they got anywhere. I have seen Ruby Dock thriving along the track of the Trans-Australian Railway all the way across the Nullarbor, all through the Pilbara and in the heart of the Simpson Desert.

Back in Alice we visited the Desert Park, where for the first time I met Bush Stone-curlews (
Burhinus grallarius
) and wondered how well-behaved you would have to be to be allowed to live with such beguiling creatures. We checked our botanical identifications at the Botanical Gardens. We went down the old track of the Ghan, past the ruined stations of Polhill, Ooraminna and Rodinga, and took the sand track to Chambers Pillar, through some of the most floriferous uplands I have ever seen anywhere. For hours we photographed Isotomes, Wahlenbergias, Indigo, Smoke Bushes, Butterfly Bushes, Satiny Bluebushes, Smooth Spider Bush, Milkmaids, Parrot Peas, Sea Heaths, Parakeelyas, Olearias and Mint Bushes. The more we saw of the centre the more I longed to protect such brilliant galaxies of niche plants from the onward march of the exotics.

Back at our hotel I complained to Jane. ‘I think I’m just going to have to give up. We’ve been hunting for some land for me for more than two years, and there just isn’t any.’

‘How about one last shot?’ asked Jane.

‘Like what?’

‘The James Range is the sort of country you want, isn’t it?’

‘That, or something like it.’

Jane brandished the prospectus, where she had found an account of the original rescission of the lucerne farm from the parent property. ‘The James Range bisects the Orange Creek property. They’ve got a total of 560,000 acres, and they’re only running 3,000 to 3,500 head, so they’re certainly not using it all. Maybe they’ll let you have a bit.’

Jane made some calls; we drove back past Stuart’s Well for the umpteenth time, to the Orange Creek homestead. The muster helicopter was standing by, so they let the pilot take me up for a good look at the range. As we pulled up and away from the red-earth helipad, the livid green disc of the lucerne farm slid beneath us, and I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t mine.

‘What did you think?’ asked the grazier when I got back.

‘I love it.’

‘It’s a bit rugged.’

‘Rugged is good.’

‘You’d need to make an access road, and it’d have to be properly engineered. That comes out expensive these days, because you have to observe all the environmental regs about drainage and dust and run-off. A single kilometre of graded road costs thousands and you’d need a lot more than one, because you’d have the easement to do as well. If you want to stick a house in the range somewhere you have to think about availability of water and power, and getting someone to build it for you, way out there.’

Graziers’ houses are built as close as possible to main routes; only Aboriginal people deliberately choose outstations hidden in the hills. My mountain retreat would be the only thing of its kind in the centre.

‘I’ve got a builder who’s game.’

‘The real problem,’ said the grazier, ‘is getting land excised from the lease for your use. We could sublet to you, in theory, but you’d be mad to spend a lot of money improving land on my leasehold. I don’t want a house out there in the hills, so when your lease was up or when you wanted to move on, all your hard work and energy would just be left to rot back into the ground. I wouldn’t let you do it, even if I could without infringing the conditions of my lease.’

‘So what if you managed a freehold excision from the lease, the way the old owners of Orange Creek did with the lucerne farm?’ asked Jane.

‘That was for horticulture. The government is mad keen to develop horticulture in the centre. There’s a plan to make lots of freehold excisions of ten hectares each along the Finke and the Hugh, because there’s underground water really close to the surface, but the prices are going to be somewhere round $10,000 a hectare.’

‘That’s a lot of watermelon,’ said Jane.

I’d been told that the grazier had acquired his lease for less than $3 million.

‘What do you as the landholder make out of this?’ asked Jane.

‘Nothing. We water the cattle with bore water anyway, so we don’t really need the river frontage, and we can’t expect much in the way of compensation. We’d rather just hang on to the land, for conservation reasons apart from anything else.’

‘Would it be really expensive to arrange for an excision of really arid land, like the rangeland? That wouldn’t be anything like $10,000 a hectare, would it?’

‘What you have to understand is that for a freehold property to be created on land at present covered by crown leasehold, the lease has to be rescinded, while the boundaries are resurveyed and redrawn. It’s not worth doing, unless there’s a fair bit of money involved, because the legal costs will be high. You won’t find leaseholders prepared to do it at all if the potential winnings aren’t high, because there’s a risk involved.’

‘Native title,’ said Jane.

‘Exactly. As soon as a crown lease is rescinded, the land becomes vulnerable to a native claim. It wouldn’t necessarily be successful, but it’s practically certain to be made and defended. The lawyers have a field day. It costs everyone money, and you could end up with nothing.’

In the car on the way back to Alice, Jane said, ‘You wouldn’t contest the validity of any Aboriginal land claim, would you?’

‘No.’

‘Never? No matter what?’

‘Never. No matter what.’

‘So that’s that?’

‘That’s that.’

And that was that.

The Bird

Logan City lies twenty-five kilometres or thirty minutes south of the Brisbane Central Business District. Described as ‘young, dynamic and booming with growth’, it has sister city and friendship agreements with cities in China, Japan and Taiwan. Many immigrants disembarking for the first time on the shores of the lucky country wind up in Logan. They bring with them all the baggage of the uprooted – disorientation, grief, confusion, anxiety, exhaustion. Their suffering is compounded by the difficulties they encounter, in finding decent work, in gaining decent pay, and in accommodating and adjusting to the Australian way of life. Deracination is felt most keenly by women who are too often housebound and bereft of female kindred, entirely dependent upon the whims of their husbands as their mothers were not. The extent of physical and psychological illness experienced by first-generation migrant women is massive and largely undeclared. In 1992, with no funding from state or federal government, feminist activists in Logan set up a women’s health centre to be run by women for women. In 2000, desperate for cash, the organisers contacted me, asking what I would charge for a lecture that they could run as a fundraiser. I wrote back and said, ‘Nothing. Hire a hall, sell tickets and pocket the profits.’ When the desert project fell over, it was time for me to make my way to Logan, to fulfil my part of the bargain.

It was a great night, as we say. As we were chatting afterwards, I told the organisers how I had been searching for a house in the centre. Many of them had worked with Aboriginal groups and many more knew careworkers in the centre. They promised to send a message on the bush telegraph asking if anyone out there could help me find a bit of land. Then someone said, ‘What about Ken’s place?’

‘You mean Ken’s mother’s place.’

‘Yeah. Ken’s really keen to sell that. It might be what you’re looking for.’

‘Where is it?’

‘About an hour away, mebbe a bit more.’

Ken is Ken Piaggio, a psychotherapist who worked at the women’s health centre. Next morning he and his wife Jane-Frances O’Regan turned up at my hotel, to take me to see the property. I hadn’t asked where it was. I hoped it was out to the west, beyond the Dividing Range, in the Darling Downs perhaps, but we were driving south, down the Pacific Highway towards the Gold Coast. My heart sank.

At Nerang we left the highway, crossed the Nerang River and headed south-west through aspirational suburban developments towards the hinterland. The houses became fewer as the road began to climb into the hills, through fire-scarred sclerophyll forests. As we skirted a cutting Ken pointed out the high-rise buildings of Surfers Paradise, clearly visible against the grey-blue ocean. We passed a signpost that said ‘O’Reilly’s Plateau’.

‘O’Reilly’s? Is that Green Mountains up there?’

Green Mountains
was a set book at my convent school. I read my copy to pieces, longing to experience the country it described. It was written by Bernard O’Reilly, the man who in February 1937 set out alone from the family farm on the Lamington Plateau in search of a missing aircraft, convinced that it had to be where his sharp eyes had identified a single burnt tree amid the dark green of the rainforest. The story of how he picked his way through rugged jungle to find the crashed plane, with the two out of seven men aboard who were still alive, has gladdened the hearts of generations of Australian schoolchildren.

‘Yep. But it’s a long way round. O’Reilly’s is due west of where we’re going, only a few ks away as the crow flies. Door to door the trip’s about 100 ks.’

So maybe the country we were heading for wasn’t sumptuous like Green Mountains at all. I could see caravans and parkhomes on a site above the road.