Land of flowers
Since European settlement many parts of this continent have been routinely dismissed as wasteland. Up until twenty years ago Cape Range was one of them. So was my home turf, the triangular swathe of country between Geraldton and Esperance. Even now I hear it called ‘rubbish country’ because it’s so infertile and resistant to Eurocentric notions of beauty. At the friable, windblown western edge, the contours are modest, beaten down, scoured by gales. The climate is Mediterranean but the rainfall is increasingly unreliable. From the limestone reefs and white beaches to the grey and yellow sands of the coastal plain, it’s usually dry and gritty. If anything, the country beyond that is harsher still. Visitors like the coast well enough, but they find the interior unappealing. For half the year I live in the margin, between sea and interior, in a district of tawny cap-rock, sandy tracks and grasstrees.
The low grey scrubby heath that people often turn their noses up at is called kwongan – it’s akin to Californian chaparral or the fynbos of South Africa. At its coolest coastal periphery, this country is fragrant with olearia and it bristles with hairy spinifex whose tumbleweeds snag in sedges and the flowering scaevola downwind. In the lee of the dunes mats of succulent pigface and Rottnest daisies thrive, but only a few hundred metres inland conditions are harder and hotter and the vegetation is rough and spiny. Bereft of the cooling sea breeze, the valleys are stifling but they grow thick with zamias and spear-headed grasstrees that predate the rise of mammals.
It’s tough country to move through. The plants are armoured and tick-infested. Clenching sprawls of banksia repel walkers with sandpaper bark and breadknife leaves. But there’s plenty to see, if you’re game. Big western grey kangaroos lounge together in the precious shade of Callitris and thickets of gnarly moort. Like scorched shrubs afoot, scruffy emus traverse the ridges in single file. The wattlebirds are brash jokers murdering spiders and moths with casual glee. Goannas appear metallic, galvanized by sun; inert as bush junk, they stir when you encroach, holding their ground, flashing their gums like drunks eager to brawl. At rare, hidden soaks, sheltered by stockades of dirty-shanked paperbarks, tiger snakes laze between feasts of bush mice. Overhead honeyeaters lace the air in pursuit of insects and new blossoms.
Apart from the lurid blue of the sky, the dominant summer colours seem relentlessly austere: khaki on grey over charcoal. But as the autumn arrives you begin to see the arcane spectrum of greens within the foliage. In winter there’s white-green, grey-green, orange-green, turmeric-green. Out in the farthest distance, as if suspended in an ether of melaleuca breath, an intense blue-green haze softens the demarcation between land and sky, and at times this looks overworked, a bit artificial, as if added with a spray gun by some addled stoner who couldn’t resist a final flourish. In spring the wattles hum yellow. Pigface beds are studded with gaudy pink blossoms. And later, as summer arrives again, the heavy finger-flowers of Nuytsia floribunda transform the frumpiest tree on the plain into golden glory. All year the white noise of cicadas is matched by the working drone of bees in a trillion tree blossoms and wildflowers.
No, you wouldn’t call it picturesque. At first glance the old home range looks parched, monochrome, monotonous, and upon returning from a holiday somewhere lush, some locals feel downhearted looking out at it. It’s always been hard to approach and difficult to understand. Even Charles Darwin struggled to come to terms with it.
In colonial days, explorers climbed points of elevation to ‘see what lay before them’. They captured it with their maps. By simply being there, by the act and acquisitive intention of their looking, they claimed it for empire, and in the two centuries since settlement this deep-rooted colonizing instinct endures among those who regard landscape as property, territory, tenement. Otherwise it’s open space, a species of vacancy, another form of untapped potential awaiting discovery and exploitation. The implication of such a mindset is that there is no intrinsic value to the earth beneath our feet. Any status must be conferred by an enterprising human and the only standard he or she will recognize is market price, which, despite sounding rational and authoritative, is based on ephemeral and arbitrary perceptions and therefore subject to fluctuation, or what the market touchingly calls ‘wildness’.
Often, it’s the market value assigned to land that most devalues it. A classic example of this applies here in the south-west corner of Western Australia. This area, the size of England, was once an uninterrupted combination of kwongan heathland and native woodlands unlike any other in the world. But the soils of this great triangle of country are remarkably infertile and were considered useless. That is, of course, until the arrival of superphosphate. Once the magic dust turned up, government agencies and farmers waged what long-serving Director of Agriculture for the state, George Sutton, proudly declared ‘a war on the wilderness’. He admitted that ‘in common with other wars, there have been some casualties which are greatly regretted. But it has been an achievement in statesmanship, in courage and energy comparable with anything of a like nature in history.’11 Sutton is remembered for producing a new standard for wheat. Before this, ‘Fair Average Quality’ was the best the nation could aspire to. But thanks to western vim and a bit of innovation, the market could look to the purity and superiority of ‘WA White’. A more emblematic name could scarcely be imagined.
Agricultural warriors and generals like Sutton oversaw the transformation of enormous swathes of land. Once it was cleared this ‘waste country’ became the mighty West Australian Wheatbelt, as famous a grain-growing hub as Ukraine, a national asset and a source of pride. Over the decades, agriculturalists pressed further into the semi-arid transitional country beyond, and its value too rose from ‘rubbish’ to ‘arable’. But then the soils were beset by salination, a direct effect of all that land-clearing, and rainfall began the steady downward trend it’s been in ever since. Broadscale wheatlands lost value and whole tranches have proven themselves toxic investments, to be shed as quickly and quietly as possible. The communities that sprang up mid-century are shrinking steadily. Broadacre farming is now so heavily mechanized it’s a neglible source of employment. Western Australia is still a major grain producer but its dependence upon chemical inputs only increases and its exposure to drought remains acute. Along the eastern fringe few operations are profitable and throughout the whole Wheatbelt, in a farming cohort that is aging and sometimes bewildered, rates of suicide are infamous.
Without underlying intrinsic value, the preciousness of land is momentary and destructive. A brief flurry of interest transforms negative space into prime country and then leaves it positively worthless. Consider the city-sized pits, the slagheaps and arsenic ponds of all the played-out mines on this continent. There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we’ve created ourselves.
Of course great slabs of Australia have been dismissed as badlands without any help from the market or human endeavour. It’s not uncommon, even in the twenty-first century, to hear the continent’s interior referred to as its ‘dead heart’. It seems that despite what we have learnt about the ecology of arid ecosystems, this cultural trope never fades. Closer to the coast, not far from our cities, some of them toiling on gamely with the life support that desal plants afford, the Eurocentric view of earlier times still deems immensely rich and unique ecosystems to be ‘rubbish country’.
Happily, though, the kwongan heath region of the south-west is being rescued from ignominy by botanists and ecologists who’ve taken the trouble to look more closely, more carefully and more openly at what is present in here. The most prominent of these reformers and rescuers is Professor Stephen Hopper. Former curator of Kew Gardens and the Millennium Seed Bank in London, Hopper is an Australian botanist who specializes in conservation biology. In the 1980s, having grown up with the assumption that the region was sparse and insufferably dull, he and his collaborators began to see this vast tract for what it is – a veritable subcontinent of rare and precious vegetation. What locals had largely looked upon
as marginal country turned out to be an island of flowers. This ecoregion is so species-rich it’s completely redrawn the botanical status of the area. In subsequent decades, Hopper and many other scientists have come to find that over seven thousand species of higher plants exist here. Half of them are endemic. There are more plant species present per square kilometre than can be found in many rainforests. And every year new species are discovered. The Southwest Australian Floristic Region is now considered one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.12 This gives it equivalent standing to Brazil’s Atlantic Forest and Madagascar’s dry deciduous forests. Not only is it home to a singular suite of plants, it is vital habitat for creatures like Carnaby’s black cockatoo, Gilbert’s potoroo, the woylie, and my old boyhood totem, the western swamp turtle.
On the basis of this, scientists in 2015 began the push to have the ecoregion put forward for World Heritage listing. But even as that happens plans are afoot to clear another two hundred thousand hectares north of Esperance to make way for more agriculture. After the Wilderness Society gained access to documents under Freedom of Information, Steve Hopper expressed his alarm at the development, saying it posed ‘a very high risk’ to the integrity of this ecosystem. ‘We’re still finding new species,’ he said. ‘It just reflects how much more is out there that we don’t know about.’13
Of the 18.3 million hectares cleared in Western Australia last century, most were here in this refuge between desert and sea. That the region still has 6 million remnant hectares intact in a single continuous swathe is something to be grateful for. And clearly it’s something precious that deserves protection from the momentary enthusiasms of the market. Until recently we literally did not know what we had underfoot and all about us. Ignorance and incuriosity made us strangers in our own country. The steady, painstaking work of botanists, ecologists, painters of natural history and photographers has worn a breach in this ignorance. This research isn’t only a scientific advance, it’s a mental step forward, an emotional deepening.
It takes humility and patience to see what truly lies before us. A different kind of seeing comes, Hopper says, to those who ‘stay longer and look with open hearts and minds’. We need not search merely in order to capture. Our fresh gaze yearns to understand, to bring knowledge inward – not just to catalogue it, but to celebrate what we encounter, to nurture and protect it.
Georgiana Molloy (1805–43) is perhaps the classic West Australian example of a newcomer who learnt to see this place with an open heart and mind. A settler in the raw southern outpost of Augusta nearly two centuries ago, she came to this strange country with the tastes and sensibilities of a Georgian lady, an officer’s wife. And like other colonists, she found much of what she saw bewildering, even repulsive. She and her neighbours regarded the country as a monotonous wasteland to be dominated and transformed, and a good deal of her pioneering experience was mean drudgery and brutal disappointment. For a woman of her era and class, botanizing was a hobby, something with which to pass the time and gain a little respite from her labours. She began gathering seeds and flowers diffidently. In fact she had to be encouraged by Captain James Mangles, an amateur botanist who asked her to send specimens to him upon his return to England. Mrs Molloy turned out to be an excellent and fastidious collector, although she was not exactly seduced by her environment as some others were. Her epiphany seems to have had its roots in tragedy. Deranged by grief over the death of a child, her mind and her heart were rent open. During her long recovery she returned to botanizing. She grew more confident, more passionate. She saw ‘such flowers of the imagination’ that she was transformed. When she followed her husband north to the Vasse district she was aided in her collecting by the knowledge, hospitality and curiosity of Noongars, and many of her later encounters with these people seem to have been a source of pleasure as well as enlightenment. Georgiana Molloy’s years of botanizing were brief. She died in her thirties, after the birth of her seventh child. Her collections are still at the herbarium at Kew. They’re catalogued under a man’s name, James Mangles.
My father was raised at Margaret River and as a kid I grew up playing with my cousins at Vasse, and camping at Augusta. Later, as a teenager and adult, I surfed the beaches and coves of the region every chance I got and felt a real kinship with the place. I was familiar with the Molloy name because of Molloy Island, at the junction of the Blackwood and Scott rivers, but I was thirty-four before I learnt, thanks to William Lines’s biography, An All Consuming Passion, who Georgiana Molloy was and what she’d done. Hers is not the conventional pioneering story of endurance and triumph. Her legacy is scientific, of course, but her most important contribution is a matter of sensibility. She was an outlier, one of the first and perhaps the most unlikely, among those who saw in this strange new place the sorts of riches that grasping, toiling settlers were to overlook for the best part of two centuries. It seems hard to credit that scientists like Steve Hopper are still finding these treasures and redeeming country from ignorance, contempt and misuse. The gap between what we see and what we know may not be as wide as it once was, but the temptation to assume we know more than we do remains. To many of us country is no longer just real estate. Now and then, thanks to those prophetic voices, we see the world, in the words of David Mowaljarlai, as ‘everything standing up alive’.14
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Dodnun, 2006
Chapman’s drunk when we arrive to collect him, and my heart sinks. Outside his house in the back streets of Derby his nephews and their mates are reeling. At the kitchen bench, beleaguered but stoical, his wife Dorothy chops meat in a welter of flies while Chapman sits on his bed nearby. He’s bare-chested and wizened and it’s been many days since he last shaved. He greets us warmly but he looks dazed and a little disoriented. He only dimly remembers our arrangement and seems to have been caught out by our sudden arrival, but Dorothy is unfazed – in fact she’s excited in her gravely shy way. They don’t have a car and they haven’t been back on country for a long while. After a few minutes of oblique and disjointed conversation, Chapman stirs himself, finds a shirt and comes out to the vehicle. If we’re truly going, he says, as if he hasn’t let himself believe it until now, he’ll need to bring his grandson. And so we go searching through the town for the boy, but every house, lane and creekbed we try is a dead end. Chapman is hapless and befuddled, but slowly, over the course of the day, he sobers up, and though he’s tired and disheartened some of his characteristic dignity returns. He’s keen to find the lad and get on the road, and now he’s thinking more clearly our hunt gains a sharper focus, but the day is getting away from us. Eventually, a jaunty urchin with scabies and a paperclip for a toothpick tells us Isaac is at Mowanjum. Given the lateness of the hour we all agree to go out and get him tomorrow. Then we’ll head north.
Next morning when we return with an extra Land-Cruiser, Chapman’s up and ready. The only thing he’s carrying for the week away is his tobacco tin. He still looks ragged, but he’s clear-headed and full of purpose. Despite her best efforts, Dorothy cannot suppress her delight at the prospect of being homeward bound. She’s brought her granddaughter, a pretty, sheepish girl of fourteen. We drive out to Mowanjum, just beyond the outskirts of Derby, where the magnificent boab trees give way once more to acacias and snappy gums. An indigenous community of about three hundred people, it was established after the demise of the Kunmunya Mission in 1956 when the closely allied Ngarinyin, Worora and Wunambal peoples were separated from their ancestral lands in the north Kimberley. Mowanjum is not the traditional home country of these peoples, but after many years of forced removals it has become at least, as the name suggests, ‘settled ground’. Just outside the gate, near the highway, the buffel grass glitters with aluminium cans, and a Woolworths bag flaps like a crippled cockatoo at the base of a eucalypt. Halfway down the drive the flash new arts building is almost finished. A five-million-dollar project, it’s a source of pride and promise, though for the moment it looks incongruous with the streets and houses that lie t
rash-strewn and becalmed beyond.
Negotiating car wrecks and twitching dogs, we pay our respects to frail elders and milky-eyed lawmen and as we wend our way from house to house we run into many familiar faces. There are hugs and tears and plenty of gossip. Eventually we locate young Isaac who climbs into the back of the troopy without hesitation. But when we ask if he’s had breakfast he just shrugs. Chapman sends him to the canteen and a few minutes later he returns with a pie and a Coke and finally we turn for the highway. Somehow, without conferring on the matter, we’ve arranged ourselves according to gender – males in one vehicle, females in the other – and as I brake at the turn-off the high, raucous laughter of girls and old ladies carries on the hot wind.
Chapman’s first name is Paul, but he usually goes by Chapman or Jadman. He’s a short, wiry fellow with an impish sense of humour and he wears his authority lightly. In towns and roadhouses, where whitefellas run everything, he’s just an inconsequential little old man with enigmatic English, but among the Ngarinyin he’s a heavy lawman. He’s responsible for certain male initiation rites, but that sort of business isn’t up for discussion today. We stick to fishing and hunting and football, which of course in our part of the country can only mean Australian Rules. I’m a Dockers man. Chapman follows the Eagles. For a few kilometres we sledge each other’s teams, teasing and laughing good-naturedly, though we agree there are players whose skills surpass any sort of team loyalty, and for nearly an hour we list them off and count their many virtues. The fact that every one of them is a blackfella goes unremarked.