Lessons from the outback

My trip to the outback of New South Wales and South Australia took a month and gave me just a taste of that vast arid flat country, edged by fantastic rocky ranges. So very different from my east coast green and wet landscapes, about which I will now stop complaining.

I mainly chose to keep those ranges in view, and I know it was an atypically ‘good season’, after rain, so I didn’t see it at its worst, but I saw plenty of the rangeless horizon-to-horizon flatnesses on the long straight roads like the Barrier Highway that were necessary to get me over there.

It was a revelation in many aspects, and its lessons will remain indelible, partly why I chose not to venture further south into ‘civilised’ South Australia, not wanting to mar the impressions of the outback. 

I needed to make that trip, to lift the veil a little on my own ignorance.

1. The First People: I am overwhelmed with admiration for the indigenous people who had worked out a sustainable system of survival for tens of thousands of years in such harsh environments… until we interfered with our land grants and fences and sheep. 

It had to be nomadic to follow the seasonal or ephemeral food and water sources; smart, working with the landscape not against it.

It was full of knowledge and experience, and of a spiritual history, the stories of how it all came to be.

In comparison, the ‘explorers’ and ‘pioneers’ were in reality, and with hindsight, ignorant and arrogant in their foolhardiness; the Gorder Line was a misleading tragedy. Hard to celebrate their achievements, although I know their lives would have been dreadfully hard; all the historic markers I saw related to them.

2. Ferals: I am also overwhelmed by the unfortunately highly successful feral invasions that were in such great evidence: the millions of heedless and happily breeding feral goats, too smart to become road kill, too many to ever be eliminated; the hectares of Onion Weed, and the Patersons Curse, replacing what ‘wildflowers’ may have been there before the sheep and goats ate them out.

Introduced plants like Ward’s Weed, beloved by sheep, have adapted only too well to suit.  Even in national parks, they were all there, and on the more fertile edges I could see flashes of yellow from the canola crops gone rogue! 

Archie Roach sang it: ’The Australian bush is losing its identity’.

I could no longer tell what was once tree-covered, albeit low trees and shrubs, and had been cleared, and what was naturally treeless.

I no longer asked what widespread plants were, as they kept turning out to be introduced weeds.

The impact of we human ferals is everywhere.

3. ROCKS: I had said that the Western Tiers in Tasmania were extremely rocky, as they were, but I can now say that the Ikara/Flinders and Vulkathanha-Gammon Ranges are ROCKY. Of every shape and size and colour and geological history, in their uncountable trillions, rocks rule here. Native plants do grow in such conditions, seemingly not needing actual soil, happy to put down a root between two rocks. Amazing.

I kept being surprised that these places had been left to their rocky wildness, kept expecting a politician to suggest a business to market these rocks; there are so many, who’d miss a few million?!  I did see many abandoned, roofless fettlers’ huts built of rocks and in the towns many stone or rock buildings still stood, often empty, as the old narrow gauge railway line had ceased and so had the mines.

4. Emus: Weird and wonderful, graceful and awkward, proudly erect and hopelessly floppy. I am surprised but glad that we still have them wandering wild in our drier lands, unlike the extinct Tassie one. I will miss seeing them about.

5. River Red Gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) are absolutely astonishing. I had no idea of the extraordinary ways in which they survive floods and fires, struggling on with a fraction of their roots or trunks, burnt out or washed out, yet hugging the creek lines over the landscape, holding the banks, supporting a living branch or two still, providing hollows and homes still. 

And they are beautiful as well as admirable! In ever-varying shapes and patterns and colours. Love them.

I read that they were cut down to be slowly burnt for charcoal to fire the smelters for the copper mines… until their true value was realised.