Love In a Sunburnt Country (21 page)

‘The nomadic movements, which are still celebrated and still partly there, were movements in response to where the water was in the landscape. The conflicts of first contact between Indigenous and European Australians were about water,' he says.

He tells this not just as an interesting historical fact but as something for us to think about, as less and less rain falls on the land. There are many puzzles in the Australian landscape. Yes, less rain is falling, but that does not entirely explain the increasing ferocity of our bush fires or the speed at which farmed land degrades.

‘I'm a follower of what Bill Gammage outlines in his book
The Biggest Estate on Earth
,' he says. ‘We're going to see more fire because the modern practice of suppressing and minimising fire creates a very different and volatile environment.'

I also admire this author's work. Early Australian landscape artists recorded vast open grassy plains and, like many Australian schoolchildren, I was taught that these paintings revealed only the limitation of the painters. Their European childhood meant that they could not see what was really in front of them. I was encouraged to pity these first visitors, who were not ‘real Australians' and had painted idealised portraits of parkland instead of the rough Australian bush. It was children like me, who had been born here and knew the land in a way those artists couldn't, who were the real Australians, and who saw the bush as it truly was. This was a lesson taught not just by teachers but by some of my favourite writers, such as Ethel Turner. Our generation would certainly not suffer from the Eurocentrism that had so clouded the visions of those first landscape artists, and we could be proud of that. I swallowed all this hook, line and sinker.

This story undoubtedly fed our nationalism. After all, there is an added sense of possession and belonging when you feel part of a group who has knowledge denied to others. But the story wasn't true. Those painters had simply documented what they saw, and since that time the land had changed. It seems that in our wish to forget that Australia was inhabited before those portrait painters stepped ashore, we didn't consider another and more obvious explanation for the scenes shown in those paintings. Hundreds of years had passed, the land was no longer cared for in the way it had been and the Australian landscape had altered.

In
The Biggest Estate on Earth
historian Bill Gammage adds to these paintings the extensive written work of the early explorers and farmers and proceeds to destroy the false story we were told. His work reveals that Australia was a vast estate, managed cooperatively: the enormous plains on the best soil had been brought into existence by fire-stick farming. Those open, grassed landscapes that greeted the admiring gaze of European artists were created by Aboriginal people's purposeful, planned, strategic use of fire.

That is not all historians can tell us. The puzzle of just why land degraded so rapidly is being answered, too. How could the early settlers possibly have put such high stock numbers on properties that within fifty years couldn't carry half or a quarter of that number? The conventional wisdom is that they, too, were ‘too European' to assess correctly the carrying capacity of Australian land. (Those of us who have farmed Australia in recent years said to ourselves that we'd never have made that mistake.)

The modern agriculturalist had fallen for the myth that, if not uninhabited, this had not been cared-for land at the time of colonisation. That no-one had worked it. We didn't believe the stories of early generations that the soil had been friable, deep and fertile, that grass had grown in thick mats upon it. Previous farmers hadn't known vulnerability when they saw it, and had simply, blindly overstocked the country.

In his book
Dark Emu
, historian Bruce Pascoe outlines the agricultural practices of Aboriginal people. In just one example, grain was harvested, planted, irrigated and the seeds from the best plants were traded. There existed a ‘grain belt' stretching across Australia. So, in fact, there had been plenty of feed for sheep and cattle: the stocking rate set by early farmers was a response to that cultivated abundance. When the cultivation practices stopped, that supply rapidly declined. In short, the reason that agricultural land degraded so fast is that Aboriginal people were no longer able to continue the practices that had supported its abundant fertility and our grazing practices didn't change to match.

Voices like those of these two historians, voices like Steve's, of people who are concerned with the puzzles of the Australian landscape that ‘hide in plain sight', who can interpret it for us, are increasingly important. The tasks of reversing erosion, producing safe food, storing more carbon and simultaneously preventing fire, all require Australians to understand our continent better.

What has prevented us from seeing the careful cultivation of land by Australian Aboriginal people in the thousands of years before colonisation? This is a question that Kath, particularly, has asked herself. She has also asked herself: ‘How do I act with love to change this?' On arriving in the Bogongs she was horrified to find a group of rocky peaks with the official name of Mt Niggerhead and known locally as the ‘Niggerheads'. She wrote in protest to councils, to newspapers, to government departments. A storm of controversy broke out in response to her request that the name should be changed. Should the name ‘Niggerhead' instead stand as a testament to racism endured? If it was changed, which of the Alpine traditional owners should have naming rights? Was a name change a contribution towards reconciliation, or was it simply ‘political correctness gone mad'?

It is in discussions like these that Australia is slowly finding its soul, but if soul-searching is painful individually, it is far worse collectively. There are so many more competing versions of the past and investment in each of these is deep. After all, as George Orwell wrote: ‘He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.'

In the end Kath, like most people, heard about the name change some time after it had occurred. The Victorian Government consulted with local Indigenous groups and the peaks are now known as the Jaithmathangs, and the central peak as Mt Jaithmathang. More powerful than the name change is the story of that change: Indigenous people in the present were allowed to shape the story of the past and with that given ownership of the future.

In 2007, as the naming controversy Kath had unleashed raged on, Kath's mother fell ill.

‘I nursed her here. We had the most amazing special time, I'll never regret one minute of it. Mum said to me, the day before she died: “You are just both the most incredible people.” She was holding our hands and we said, “We love you, too, Mum.” Her death was so peaceful, I can't think of it without feeling love.'

But after her mother died Kath's anxiety went up another gear, and this time, for the first time, she couldn't bring it back under control by staying busy and loving harder.

‘I ended up with horrendous psoriasis. I could not squeeze a lemon as my hands were so badly affected. There was now all this fear overtaking me. I'd be out on a pack trip and my hands would be slippery with sweat. I could not walk out the door without feeling like an actor, like I was in a play, everything felt surreal. I had tried a lot of medication before, but it had taken away my passion. I'd rather have passion than not have anxiety, so I'd stopped them.

‘People said, “You must be stressed. Your liver must be stressed, try a liver tonic.” I tried a liver tonic, acupuncture, everything. Then one day I went to the hairdresser's. I thought, “I'm even anxious about coming into the hairdresser's, what sort of idiot am I?” My hairdresser, Kate, just hugged me and said, “Kath, by this stage your brain would have changed with all these years of stress, your brain is a mess. If your doctor doesn't give you this drug you can come and see my doctor.”

‘Well, I went to see my doctor and I told him what Kate had said and he said, “Well, that's funny, because that was the drug I was thinking of for you.” For the first three weeks I felt a bit drugged, then I had another anxiety attack and they upped my dose and I haven't had a panic attack since. I feel this enormous weight has been lifted.' She still feels anxiety, but she is, she says now, liberated, almost a different person. This is just as well, because they have all, Lin and Clay, too, continued to lead exciting lives.

Adventure, freedom, art, observing, fixing, making do, packing, designing, cooking, compassion, cleaning, listening, storytelling, being part of a team even when you were only little—learning all that, helping their parents the whole way, the Baird boys, both with Steve's dark hair and Kath's dazzling, life-affirming grin, completed school and went to university. Lin studied multimedia, Clay filmmaking, and then, at the start of the 2000s, they left Australia. They set off, in true Baird fashion, to have adventures (and to take notes as they went). They worked in horse outfits from California to the United Kingdom as cooks and expedition leaders. Not until the late 2000s did they come home to become formally part of the thirty-year-old and multiple-award-winning family business.

There's none of the women's-work-versus-men's-work divide here, and that is just as well. It is now clear to the whole Baird family that it is around their family tradition of open doors, hearts and conversation that their business will grow. This means cooking more meals, growing more food, building more places to accommodate the growing number of trainees and paying guests, breeding more horses, and everyone is involved with everything. Their little property, Spring Spur, from which Bogong Horseback Adventures departs and to which they return, is being developed to reflect this. In 2003 Steve's mother, Pat, wrote a verse which captured that dream, and those words inspired the design of five-star accommodation for their adventurous guests.

The resulting new building was created to reflect the genius of this place: horses, theatre and tradition, the Alps and adventure beyond, the family with their door wide open, and at Kath's long family table, good conversation and nourishing food. Every single Baird helped in the design and Steve's architectural mind and experienced hand drafted the plans. They describe the resulting structure as ‘Showground Pavilion' style: and it is a big, peaceful building that sits gently on the land.

On the walls hangs Steve's art. He is making more time for it now.

‘Artists develop their own vocabulary. I don't have patience for details, I'm not drawing the landscape but the story within the landscape,' he says. Many of Steve's trees and plants have a wistful curl and humanlike quality that remind me of Leunig, but Steve also compartmentalises land types or parts of a story as many Indigenous artists do. Most recently he has been painting two series which feature the companion horses of the explorers.

‘Billy was Burke's famous dapple-grey horse. You see him in the early newspaper illustrations enjoying the departure party they threw for Burke and Wills. He's high-spirited and bold. Then you see him labouring, becoming a good little workhorse. He reaches Cooper Creek with them, and then the Gulf of Carpentaria, but then on the way back, they eat him.'

Each of these paintings is a story fragment that forces us to think again about how we treat the animals in our lives, about what is humane and what is not, to empathise with the horses, the explorers, the Aboriginal people and the water-starved, sunburned, story-laden land itself.

‘People say to me, “You are living the dream.” But you don't plan these things. Life unfolds,' says Kath.

Often though, life unfolds in response to how we live it. Kath and Steve's story began with love at first sight and has grown into a shared life's work. I thought at the outset that their life's work was the building of a family business in the Australian High Country around the restoration of the packhorse tradition. But their life's work is living the most radical of ideals. All their actions—to empathise, to rehabilitate, to preserve, to give, to take turns, to strengthen, to allow, to set free and to make safe—spring from their dedication to that revolutionary ideal. Their shared life's work is love itself.

Like a River

Rebel Black and Michael Matson, Lightning Ridge, New South Wales

To reach Lightning Ridge you have to drive through the NSW plains country. It is blue-chip farming land, but fences aren't well maintained, there are towns of empty shops and paddocks with good feed but no stock, which is often a sign that the farmer cannot afford to restock. The east coast of Australia is so much richer than the west, despite the mining boom, so I had not expected to see rural areas with such a denuded look.

Lightning Ridge is home to Rebel Black and Michael Matson. They have a story to tell of a life and love that runs deep, one that is tied to the land where they live. Rebel directs me by mobile to their house in the opal fields—there is no standard signage here. Rebel grew up on a property east of Coonabarabran, a property similar to those that we are driving through, but her family's interests and reach went well beyond the gates of the family farm. Her paternal grandfather, Roderick Black, a giant in rural politics, believed that rural media was vital to rural voices being heard, and that in turn was vital to creating and keeping prosperity in the bush. He had no faith in the market to deliver these things—he believed in market controls to ensure prices that would allow people to keep growing their products. As Australians currently mourn the sale of farm land to overseas buyers, it is clear how very prescient he was: without reliable prices that include a margin for profit, farmers have steadily slipped further into debt, making selling the farm inevitable. This desire to keep what is earned in the bush working for the people who live there has become Rebel and Michael's passion, too.