Drought: The Red Marauder

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about war but I had come fortuitously to war history. I had completed a doctoral thesis in the field of religious history, but studied the churches responding to war; a social history of the Australian people in the Great War and then a senior position at the Australian War Memorial. I would take the Memorial’s important visitors on guided tours of its galleries, explaining Gallipoli and the Western Front. I engaged with other historians and curators in the renewal of the Memorial’s galleries and read more and more of the intimate stuff of war held in the Memorial’s rich archives. I travelled, as the historian, on the government-sponsored veterans’ return visits to Gallipoli, the Western Front and the Australian battlefields of the Second World War. It was an enormous privilege to travel with these veterans, to see the battlefields through their eyes, to listen to their stories. I have stood on the beach at Anzac Cove and pondered the bravery of men slowly making their way to the unknown shore. I have looked at the flatlands at Fromelles, I THOUGHT I KNEW

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in northern France, and pictured in my mind’s eye one of Australia’s best commanders, Pompey Elliott, weeping for his troops, as a remnant struggled back to the Australian lines, after one of the most murderous and inexcusable ‘feints’ in the story of that terrible war. I have stood at Pozières with the letters of Alex Raws running through my mind, reminding myself that he, an educated, sensitive man, lost his mind, as did thousands of others, as the shells rained down relentlessly for seven weeks, while the Australians measured their advance against the German frontline in metres only. Then in a library, as I had moved from war to drought, looking at a different aspect of the Australian experience, I was reading a contemporary account of conditions in Victoria’s Mallee country. The journalist had chanced upon a soldier settler prepared to talk to him. Soldier settlers, I knew, would be thick on the ground in the Mallee in 1931, but doing it tough. It was a tragedy, in large part, the Australian soldier settlement scheme, but understandable for all that. Revolted by the authority and incompetent leadership that had put men through Fromelles and Pozières, and a dozen equally appalling battles, the Australian soldiers returning home wanted an independent life. They were shot of bosses, they thought. Couldn’t handle, they said, a lifetime of someone else telling them what to do. The governments, state and federal, understanding the impulse, and wishing the best for these brave and gallant men, fell in with their dreams and opened up vast tracts of land for small-scale farming. Good land? In some cases certainly, but in most cases no. Marginal land, and small blocks, too. We will meet some of these settlers later in this book. A man gassed in France, destined it seemed to die 2

Introduction

too young, his lungs forever weakened, but who made a go of his land, and of his life. Decorated at war, and honoured by his community. An inspiring Australian story, but, frankly, hardly representative of the soldier settlers. It was of another Mallee farmer I was reading that afternoon in the library, a soldier settler yarning to a Melbourne journalist, trying to explain drought and depression to him. ‘I would sooner do ten years at the war than one at the Mallee,’ he said. What? I re-read the sentence just to make sure I had not got it wrong. I was truly shocked, as historians rarely are by the records they read. This man was saying that the drought was ten times worse than the Great War, which my training, knowledge and experience of the veterans, had convinced me, and indeed anyone who even briefly knew its story, was one of the great disasters of human history. The journalist and the farmer were yarning just before Anzac Day, that time in April each year when Australian thoughts irresistibly fly to war. A special time of remembrance for this soldier settler, no doubt. The First World War was just terrible, unimaginable to us now in its horror, degradation and suffering. This man had been through it, in all likelihood had seen mates die, had possibly been injured himself. They didn’t give soldier settler blocks to blokes who had desk jobs or were on a transport ship on the way to war when the Armistice arrived. We can’t know, but I’d suspect that this man knew a great deal about war. Yet life in the Mallee was ten times worse? Was the drought really as bad as that? And if so how could I possibly write a book that would get that remarkable fact across. Drought, it seemed to me, was not just about business, family or personal failure. It 3

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was like war. It was about despair, depression, powerlessness, a sense of the unfairness of it all, of life so unpredictable and cruel that it would force fathers to suicide, mothers to depression, children to acute anxiety. And about survival, determination, courage and mateship. In war, from time to time, the soldiers would be relieved from the frontline and would live again for a while before, for them, the terrible war resumed. As on the land, eventually, of course, it would rain for the farmer and hopes would revive, and drought would be forgotten—until the next time.1 And the soldier settler in the Mallee, at Kulwin, in his drought and depression in 1931, nevertheless told the journalist that he would be staying on, hoping. He had been there, he said, since about 1920, eleven years, which means that he had begun working his soldier settlement block almost as soon as he had returned from war. There was too much invested personally in that land for him just to walk away. From the context of the story, it seems that this farmer was unmarried, and that would be a blessing, giving him more freedom to struggle on. And what a struggle it was. Live in a cardboard box? No, of course not. But can we think of real poverty and hardship anymore without looking over our shoulders at Monty Python mockery? You’ll have to try to if you are to read this book. Our soldier settler was still living in a hessian humpy, after eleven years, for goodness sake; for blankets he had ‘Waggas’, wheatsacks sewn together; he had bought no new clothes since he’d been working his land. I’d bet that khaki predominated still in his ‘wardrobe’. He worked from daylight to dark and lived on just a little more than ten shillings a week. As a soldier he had been paid six shillings a day. He thought he 4

Introduction

owed more than £3000 to the government and the bank. A decade ago there had been a soldier’s deferred pay for him in the bank. Just one story. The journalist moved on to other stories for his article on the Mallee: of near-naked children, makeshift housing, scarce and monotonous food. ‘A woman fainted in the streets of Manangatang not long ago,’ he reported. ‘She admitted she’d had nothing to eat for two days.’ The wife of a soldier settler perhaps, the farmer burdened with debt, worry for the land, and the terrible shame of not being able to provide for his family. Drought had done this. But even as I read these stories I was still haunted by the words that had shocked me: ‘I would sooner do ten years at the war than one at the Mallee’. In telling the story of drought in Australia I must be partial and selective. Is there any year, really, when some pocket of this country is not in drought? The Australian Bureau of Statistics in its Centenary of Federation Special Australian Yearbook classified three types of droughts: the ‘most devastating’ in terms of lost production: 1895–1903, 1958–68, 1982–83 and 1991–95; ‘major droughts’: 1864–66, 1880–86, 1888, 1911–16, 1918–20, 1939–45; ‘severe droughts’: 1922–23, 1926–29, 1933–38, 1946–49, 1951–52, 1970–72, 1976, 1997–2000. Australia is, obviously, a dry continent; drought is one of its biggest problems. But look at those years again: 24 years in a century and a half of ‘devastating drought’; 22 years of ‘major droughts’ and 23 years of ‘severe droughts’. For nearly half the years since records began, across the country there has been some type of significant drought. It is the Australian story. And let’s not be misled by that list of years, either. The Bureau of Statistics is 5

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classifying significant drought across large areas of Australia. I think it can be fairly said that there is hardly a year in the story of Australia when some, perhaps small, part of the country, region or locality is in drought, emerging from drought (and that can take years) or going into a dry that is the prelude to drought. To repeat: drought is the Australian story.2 However, I must stay with the bigger droughts, the droughts that even now instinctively many farmers’ minds go back to. But I can’t just tell you what happened in each drought, for that story would be repetitive and wearisome. To read, chapter after chapter, that it began to get dry, then became drier, that paddocks lost feed, then became as if like bitumen, that stock lost condition, then life itself, that men and women grew worried, then frantic and depressed, that some lost their properties, or their sanity, or accumulated debts that would take years to repay, or destroyed stock and prized horses that had been bred to perfection over generations of careful breeding, breeding stock that would take years to renew, if ever, and that then it rained and we will move on to the next drought. If each chapter of this book was like that, I would be telling the truth of drought but I doubt if you would be reading on. So my method here has been to find issues that the different droughts threw up. Should we pray for rain? Should we raise money for our own and give charity to sturdy, independent Australians? Should we learn to harmonise with the land, and recognise that centuries-long European experience might be quite inappropriate for Australia? Were there ethical implications in allowing millions of sheep and cattle regularly to starve to death, or die of thirst—appalling, slow and shocking deaths? 6

Introduction

As I will explain in the body of the book, this history of drought in Australia is also a partial account because of the fragmentary nature of the records. Writing of soldiers at war is easier, I have discovered, because the records were claimed for the nation by intelligent, passionate librarians and archivists, knowing that historians would be able to use them forever more. A glimpse at the catalogue at the Mitchell Library in Sydney or at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra will show that we can know of the lives of thousands upon thousands of individual soldiers, sailors and nurses, through their diaries and their letters home. Drought, of itself, throws up no such records. Too often in this book a character will enter briefly upon the pages, when a journalist discovered him, as in the case of our Mallee soldier settler, or when a fragment of farm diary or an individual’s letters washed up on the shore, who knows how, of some archive or library. Later you will meet a Gippsland farmer’s wife driven near to madness by the life she lived on her remote and marginally profitable farm. You will read of her writing, near enviously, of the death of another farmer’s wife, a neighbour, as if death was a release from suffering. Moving though this diary is, it is but a fragment of a life, and in this book we will have glimpses of lives lived more often than coherent whole-of-life narratives. Drought must have been a constant in all the phases of the human occupation of this land, but official records of rainfall and weather only began to be accumulated in the 1860s, nearly a century after the beginning of the white occupation of the continent. We know of drought in the early years of European settlement and of the surprise that this engendered. At Home it may have stopped raining for a couple of weeks, a month 7

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perhaps, rarely longer. To go without water for years was unimaginable. The early droughts, though, are not recorded in the detail we will discover for the later droughts. Did drought intensify in Australia as the effects of the pastoral age extended? Probably, as the land’s natural defences surrendered to the greed, overgrazing, inexperience and ignorance of the first settlers. The Mallee was as bad as it was by the 1930s because the removal of native vegetation exposed its soils to the elements. Dust storms, in effect the topsoil of this fragile land being removed, became a pattern of most droughts of the twentieth century. They infuriated farmers and townsfolk alike for their pain and discomfort as well as for the evidence they provided of the destructive nature of the settlement that had occurred. The dust storms challenged the notion of the perfecting progress of the white settlement of this ancient continent. Did the removal of the trees accelerate drought, nineteenth-century farmers asked. Is it God who is withholding the rains from us, or our own ignorant and short-term actions that have produced these increasing dries, they wondered, but cautiously, anxious not to upset the prevailing belief in progress. Aboriginal Australians knew about drought and feared it. And they were good at predicting drought, better, far better, than the long-range forecasters we will meet later on. An Aboriginal man in 1978 reported to a white friend that he had seen the insects, particularly the ants, working harder and storing more. He noticed, too, that the trees were starting to change colour, but it was a hardly perceptible change, unseeable to white eyes. This man, an old man, well trained in his people’s ways, could see drought coming. By 1982 Bourke, where this man had 8

Introduction

seen these things, was in the grip of one of the worst droughts recorded. He had read the signs correctly. From the earliest days of white settlement the farmers realised that to know what the seasons would bring in advance of the rain or the drought would be to make their lives and work so much richer. But they did not think to ask, or rather perhaps, they scorned to ask, the people who might have told them. And so they blundered on. The National Farmers’ Federation, in the 1982 drought, just before the bicentenary of white occupation of this land, suggested that farmers would better respond to drought if they lived more in harmony with their land. What a slow-learning people we are. Some did listen. Writing in 1858, Charles Edward Strutt reported being told by ‘Blacks of the Murrumbidgee’ of a great drought about 120 years ago. ‘It persisted so long,’ he reported, ‘that the Murrumbidgee became perfectly dry, which events reduced the Natives to the utmost distress, as there was no water nearer than the Murray.’ Many were fearful of trying to reach the Murray, because of the hostility of the peoples whose land they would have to cross, and many of the older people and women and children died, not wishing to risk the journey. Those who reached the Murray found it to be but a chain of waterholes, as we will observe also in the drought of 1914–1915. ‘The tradition says,’ Strutt concluded, ‘that a large multitude of blacks perished during that frightful visitation.’ Did white people also die in drought in Australia? They most certainly did. Look at Jill Ker Conway’s remarkable memoir, The Road from Coorain. She tells of her father, born in the early 1890s, destined, therefore in all likelihood, to war. He enlisted and served on the Western Front; a country boy, he was a good soldier, a fine shot. 9

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Exhausted by Passchendaele, he was invalided home in early 1918 and angered to find that as a single man in his corner of the world, unlike the Mallee, he was ineligible for a soldier settlement block. He managed properties in the west of New South Wales, married a nurse and, at last eligible, took up a soldier settlement property more than 100 kilometres from Hillston, a railway town halfway to Broken Hill. Partners, he and his wife inspected the property in 1929, in drought, so they knew what they were getting into. It was marginal land, what they called Coorain. Had a soldier settler already failed there by 1929? It seems probable. There were two boys, and then Jill was born in 1934. Jill emerged into memory in the good years on Coorain. She remembers a very wet year in 1939: everywhere one went on the property was a vision of plenty. Dams brimmed with water. Sheep and cattle bloomed with health and nourishment. It was clear there would be an abundant crop of wool, whiter and longer than any we had ever grown . . . My parents were jubilant . . . full of plans for the future.3

And then it started to dry out. There was little rain in 1940, less in 1941. By 1942 it was apparent that this drought would be serious. It will be like that in all the droughts we look at. Drought never arrives with a bang; there is a slow drying out, perhaps over several years, but when crisis comes things deteriorate quickly. ‘Drought sneaks up on you’, as we will discover, and suddenly there are all sorts of questions to resolve, anxieties to conquer. The biggest question is whether to gamble money and time on feed for the sheep or cattle, trying to keep them alive. This will quickly become expensive and may well be money 10

Introduction

thrown away, as the drought endures and the stock die anyway. So it was on Coorain. A deliberate and careful joint decision to gamble on hand-feeding the stock. But each week the bills mounted and there was no sign of rain. Jill Ker Conway writes of a ‘household consumed by anxiety’. The boys would return from boarding school, brimming with life, but at Coorain the mood was different. Jill tells of how her father’s ‘usual high spirits declined with the state of the land’. He lost weight, the warinduced nightmares came more frequently, he withdrew from his family. After a pathetically small shearing in June 1944, everyone knew that unless spring rains came the gamble was lost. Instead of rain, there were horrendous dust storms, lasting up to three days.4 ‘It has to rain some day,’ Jill’s mother would tell her father. ‘Our children are healthy, we can grow our own food, what does it matter if we lose everything else?’ ‘She did not understand,’ Jill continued, ‘that it mattered deeply to him . . . as he sank into deeper depression, they understood one another less.’ There was an inevitability to this man’s end. Strung out to breaking point by the sights and smells of the failure of his dream, he was a man of obsessions, increasingly poor judgment, excited by even minor problems. There is no place to hide on a property in drought. Every day, every hour of that day, you are working with dying sheep, confronted with greater loss; there is no escape. Jill remembers the horrible stench of dead sheep everywhere and the flocks of carrion birds, the only sign of life on this battered land. Going alone, a weak swimmer, in early morning to fix a damaged pipe in a dam while his two sons, strong swimmers, slept at the homestead, there was an ‘accident’ and Jill Ker Conway’s father 11

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drowned. It is the inevitability of this tragedy that makes the reading of it so disturbing. An isolated incident? I do not think so, but it is so terribly hard to quantify the extent of droughtinduced death. As we come, as a community, to learn more about the cost and loss of depression and anxiety, we will have, I suspect, a greater awareness of what drought has done to individuals and families in this country.5 The records of such deaths as that on Coorain, as well as so much else about drought, are hard to come by, but death was not very far away when drought was about. My method in this book will be to tell you the stories of some Australians caught up in drought in the hope that they have a representative tale to tell. We will meet farmers and station owners, station managers and shearers, drovers and itinerant workers. We will meet too a few shopkeepers, and accountants, stock and station agents, and all the other members of the rural community, whose lives are affected by drought, but who do not figure in the lists of those supported or subsidised because, as ever, it is the front-line soldier that the historian fixes on, and the record supports, rarely the nurse back at the base hospital. There are, however, glimpses, of the wider effect of drought on townspeople and traders. In his moving book Letters from Irish Australia, Patrick O’Farrell includes a long chapter following the fortunes of a migrant family from the Bangor district in Ulster. Some of the family went onto the land; James Maxwell, a younger son, went into the hardware business in Bendigo. In 1895 he had moved into a new shop, closer to the centre of the town, drawing on town trade as well as that of the farmers. He was delighted with the prospects of his business, ‘although I 12

Introduction

suffered a good deal of worry and anxiety after moving into the new shop’. Two years later his business was in ruins. The last two years has been very trying on everyone in and about Bendigo owing to the severe drought. Farmers in Bendigo and Northern districts are simply in a state of insolvency, consequently shopkeepers suffered as they had to give credit in the hope that things would improve after the first year but as things did not improve and as I was one who gave a little credit, I could not make a sufficient return and could not get my money in when wanted to meet my bills and as the prospects for the districts mentioned are very black . . . there is not a blade of grass in the Northern districts. Sheep have died by the thousand, cattle by hundreds and are dying daily. In the face of this I thought it would be simply putting off the evil day.

And so James went under. As did thousands of other shopkeepers and traders over time. Even in the drought of 1982, the shire clerk at Yass, in New South Wales, reported that businesses in the town were closing down each month. Such failures are a constant of drought in this country, although it is hard to hear the voices of these shopkeepers and traders ruined by drought. But they are a part of the story.6 To some extent this becomes a book about rural Australia and its people rather than a book about a lack of water. I wish I had the ability to tell the story of these Australians with the detail and emotion it deserves; to expose and explain the spirit and the determination of these remarkable people. They rarely told us, in the records they did leave behind, how they felt or what anxiety they suffered. In the Australian way, they were 13

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more inclined to make light of their difficulties, or to believe that the other fellow was doing it even tougher. It is hard to recreate their story if they have not told it to us. I think of the family on the black soil plains of western New South Wales, at last defeated by drought. With no money coming in and no prospects, with the banks and other creditors clamouring for their money, with even the best breeding stock destroyed, and no seed wheat for a coming planting, there was nothing for it but to load up a wagon with what goods remained, board up the place against marauders, and set off to make a new life somewhere else. And as the family moved from the homestead on the long drive to the main road, across their now deserted paddocks, it started to rain. In fact it poured. And there they were trying to get off the land but stuck fast in the bog that the rain had quickly created. You’d need to be able to laugh. For historians the issue we always grapple with is how do we let people know of lives they haven’t experienced and may not be able to imagine. Soldiers at war faced the same dilemma. In their letters home they struggled—those who tried at all—to give some idea of what it was like fighting at Gallipoli or on the Western Front. How to explain the unimaginable? One man who had been in the fighting at Bullecourt tried to tell his mother about it. It was a terrible battle, too, soldiers going forward without the benefit of covering artillery, walking indeed into deadly machine-gun fire. Only four of us, he told her—from among his mates that is—came back unscratched. The battlefield, now a pleasant wheatfield over which I have walked many times, was covered with the bodies of dead and dying Australian soldiers. How to tell his mother? ‘To try and describe a battle14

Introduction

field to you would be impossible,’ this soldier conceded, ‘but if ever you saw a sheep camp in time of drought you will know how many sheep die in one night; our men are lying about just the same only a drop of blood spilt to show where they are hit.’ War and drought—they tell us similar things about Australians. From drought, the red marauder, we can learn more about our nation and its people. If war intrudes too frequently, forgive me, for it is what I have spent a long time writing about. But it is here too because so many of those who settled the land in twentieth-century Australia had once been soldiers. If the hardship of that life at war was preferable to a life lived in drought then drought is something we should take seriously. Jill Ker Conway’s father came home from war with a weakened heart and memories of terror that would re-emerge as nightmares. He dreamed of independence on the land; of a good life for himself and his family. For a time he was happy and prosperous. But at the end he was a man in deep depression, anxious, difficult to live with, uncommunicative. He died a tragic death. Drought had done this.


Let me tell you about the themes that you will encounter in this book, and let me say from the start that this is not a technical history: you will find little of science and economics in it. But we will need to start with a definition of drought. Drought is not just a lack of water. The Bureau of Meteorology defines drought as a ‘prolonged dry period when lower than normal water supplies impact on users’ needs’. So drought is, first and 15

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foremost, a people thing. It is when the farmer or the town-dweller does not have enough water for normal, everyday living. We will come across towns running dry of water; of people describing the water they were supposed to drink as no better than the mortar that they might use for the brickwork on their houses. We will meet farmers with insufficient water for their stock and crops, travelling long distances to sources of water and carting it home, just to keep a few things alive. It is drought’s impact on people that I will tell you about. To be technical, though just briefly, experts will tell you of a lack of rainfall—that is a meteorological drought; of a lack of soil moisture—that is an agricultural drought; and of a reduced stream flow and dam storage—that is a hydrological drought. We will meet all three in the course of this book, without introducing each by name every time. For what we want to know is how they impacted on people. Central to my story is the fact that Australia is the driest continent. This book grew out of a holiday in Provence and northern Spain in early 2003. I had left Canberra just after the terrible bushfires; brown and black were the predominant colours of the place where I lived. On holiday we discovered an abundance of water everywhere. Fast-flowing, wide and unremarked rivers; rain; water at every turn. We don’t see water like that in Australia. Ours is the driest land. We can all accept that now. It was that difference between Europe and Australia that fascinated me, and an issue that dominates this book is why it took the people who came to Australia so long to wake up to that fact. And by ‘wake up’ I mean fully come to terms with it in their own lives. To live life, in the city or the bush, knowing that water would be forever scarce and precious. To accept, as 16

Introduction

a matter of practical living, that Australia is the driest continent. There was a severe drought in the first years of the white settlement at Sydney Cove; debilitating, crop-ruining, life-threatening drought. Settlers even then might have said, ‘so that is what it is like in this strange land; we will have to live here accordingly’. Instead they thought of providing for their lives as their ancestors had done in England, Scotland and Ireland, in the certainty of steady, regular and enriching rain. Albert Field, selector, will be among the first of those whose lives we will study in this book. He came to Australia in 1873 and went on the land. Drought hastened his end; brought about the destruction of his hopes and expectations. No-one, though, warned him about drought, or explained the need for a different way of farming in a country where water could not be guaranteed. Because no-one yet thought in those terms. And yet by the time Albert Field came here, people had been living with this knowledge for nearly 100 years. Drought came again and again to Australia, long after Albert Field had passed on. Devastating drought in 1983, 110 years after Albert Field first arrived, nearly 200 years since Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet landed. I will argue that the drought of 1983 may have been the trigger for real drought-awareness in this country and the first time Australians were prepared for drought, alert to it, and able to take preventative action. Thus I am arguing that it had taken us 200 years to wake up to the simple fact that Australia is the driest continent. ‘Cultural baggage’ is what historians call the ideas, prejudices and beliefs that migrants bring with them to a new land, a new life. In Australia the cultural baggage was so heavy, so great, that it took nearly 200 years to shift it. Like me, 17

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probably, you’ll scratch your head in disbelief when yet again drought comes and everyone remarks that the people who are most affected by it are so little prepared for it. ‘Indignant surprise’ was, until very recently indeed, the usual response to drought in Australia. As if a sensible, mature, alert person was regularly surprised by the annual arrival of her birthday. We all should have come to expect it. And, I’d suggest, we do now, at long last, expect drought in Australia and prepare for it. So that is the first and most important of the themes that I tackle. The second is closely tied to it and relates to the city–country divide that has prevailed in Australia since the first cities were established here. It is not an easy theme to get a handle on. In the last chapter you will meet John Cain, former premier of Victoria, coming to power during one of that state’s worst droughts. Son of a bush boy himself, but leader of a political party in power without any rural seats, John Cain and his government wanted to help the bush. And he began to observe that the city he depended on for political power had also begun to understand the interdependence between the city and the bush. Hang on, you’ll say, didn’t we hold strong to the idea, through much of the twentieth century, that ‘Australia lived on the sheep’s back’. To depend on the bush in economic terms is not what John Cain was talking about. Rather he had in mind, I think, a spiritual or cultural interdependence that said, and meant it, ‘we are all in this together’. The interdependence that men in battle found—for in Australia drought is battle. What had brought about this increasing sense of interdependence between the city and the bush in Australia? Greater ease of travel was John Cain’s first explanation. As a boy he’d 18

Introduction

enjoyed trips to the bush on a regular basis because his own father was a leading politician; few of John Cain’s boyhood mates were so lucky. The environmental movement from the 1970s onwards may have been influential too; the ‘greenies’ constantly telling us to be careful in our use of the land and its resources. For we needed to know that there is a dependence on the land that we must acknowledge and understand if as a people we are to survive. People have said that not until we embrace true reconciliation with the First Australians will we, as a people, properly be Australians. In saying this, and our former Governor-General, Sir William Deane, has been at the forefront in so saying, people have been stressing the need for a spiritual dimension to our national life. ‘Holy Billy’, his narrow-minded opponents called the Governor-General, sneering at the spiritual values of which he spoke, and which were embodied in his own life. But to those who would listen he touched deep chords. We must open ourselves to this land, he said, and to those who have so opened themselves to it before us, and live in harmony and reconciliation with the land and its original inhabitants. Live in harmony with the land, the National Farmers’ Federation was advising members confronted by terrible drought in the 1980s, and it was a message for all Australians. So the city–bush divide in Australia may have been significantly lessened by a growing sense of the importance of the land in all our lives. This book catalogues the mistakes made in using the land without respect for its fragility. Why did the Mallee dump tonnes and tonnes of soil on Melbourne in that devastating dust storm of 1983? Because from first settlement the farmers had been ripping 19

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out the roots of the predominant scrub there, roots that bound the soil and kept it in place. The city then had no interest in what the ‘cockies’ were doing to the bush and little sense that it mattered in their lives. One of the issues I tackle is whether or not we should accept some responsibility for the lives of those who were doing it tough on the land. Appeals for money for our own folk rather than for the victims of some ‘Indian famine’? It was a lively question and there were a variety of answers. Those he described as the snobs and toffs of Sydney became the targets of an angry newspaper editor in Goulburn, in southern New South Wales, during the Federation Drought; they have no care for us, he wrote, they don’t understand how much they depend on us, how much they need us. It is not just a matter of getting the milk to the city’s breakfast table, the meat to dinner, though country people always resented the easy assumptions the city made about that. Rather it was a sense of sympathy, an alertness to interdependence, that grew through the course of the twentieth century, and that may still be growing. The idea of the fragility of our lives on this dry continent, city-dweller and bushie alike. Australians may yet emerge as a wiser, more spiritually alert people, and if they do, it will be because they are more closely attuned to the land. This book looks at that emergence, that maturing. If, through a realisation of the horror and suffering caused by war, people become revolted by it and vow to end all war, so through the suffering of drought, the greatest and most recurring natural disaster in Australia, a wiser people may emerge. This book also traces a growing sense of responsibility for the land and the stock they placed on it among those who live on 20

Introduction

the land. People no longer accept the large-scale death of stock as an ‘act of God’, a public official wrote in the drought of the early 1980s. Up till then they did, though, and we will read here of the millions of sheep, cattle and horses that died horrible deaths in the droughts that so regularly visited the continent. The suffering was dreadful and moved those who saw it to grief, anger and frustration. Though born here, but now a visitor to her own land, the singer Dame Nellie Melba was shocked and disgusted by the suffering she saw during the Federation Drought. As were any who saw such sights. Hand-feeding might keep stock alive for a while, but it was a gamble, as we have already seen on Coorain, and will see again and again. For some, with resources, stock could be moved to better pastures, go to where the feed was. Or owners would employ drovers to take stock into the ‘long paddock’, along the roads of the country to eat the grass that grew there because in the good times it was never grazed. But the long paddock, hand-feeding, were temporary expedients, often, aimed at keeping only some stock alive. Millions and millions of animals, across time, died of hunger or thirst, rotting in the paddocks that had once supported them. Gradually the mentality that tolerated this changed with farmers taking greater responsibilty for the land and its stock. This, too, represented a maturing in the way people related to the world around them. Droughts, as you will see, cause all manner of suffering in Australia. And two of the most significant aspects of that suffering I touch on only briefly here. The first is the dust storms that now invariably accompany drought. That is, after all, the meaning of ‘the red marauder’. At its most literal, it means, as it meant 21

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for Henry Lawson, the rolling, swirling red dust of the dry interior that is blown into every crack and crevice of homesteads, town houses, city dwellings. We will read of a farmer who feared he had lost all his sheep; no, they were just buried, briefly, in the dust. We will read of a person claiming not to be able to see across the living room of the house, so thick was the dust from the drought. Perhaps you will think that I do not give enough attention to these dust storms that caused such misery and hardship. They would last for days; people would invariably describe the truly awesome sight of a mountain of dust moving down on them. Of day turned to night, of the near impossibility of even breath itself. Please take careful note of the times I mention dust in this account, because it is a constant of drought in Australia. But a dust storm, of itself, is not an easy thing to write about. Assume terrifying dust storms, for days on end, in each of the droughts we examine. And bushfires. Fire is so obviously a consequence of the land drying out. I do not think that personally I had experienced a worse day, in terms of climate and weather conditions, than 18 January 2003 in Canberra. The heat was stifling and there was an evil, hot wind, soon to become a gale, blowing. Two moments of that day still stand out in my memory. I was on our front verandah, patrolling for embers. Ah good, I thought, help has arrived, as I heard what sounded like the biggest pantechnicon— truck—driving down our street. But this was no truck, it was hot air, being sucked, I suppose, into the fire in a valley two or three kilometres away. It blew over heavy pot plants on our verandah and had the boughs of a big tree on the edge of our front yard touching the ground. But that can’t be right, I’ve later thought, 22

Introduction

because the tree would have snapped in two, but that is my memory. The noise was amazing. Later, or was it earlier, I was inside and heard a sound on the roof like heavy rain. ‘Thank God,’ I exclaimed, as I rushed outside to welcome the downpour that would save us all. But it wasn’t rain. The noise was that of embers flying in front of the fire, rushing up the hill in the reserve at the back of our house. There was work to be done. Few Australian droughts come and go without bushfire in some form or other. The most severe, just like cyclones, we recognise by their names. The Ash Wednesday Fires will forever recall those dreadful fires in Victoria and South Australia in February 1983 that killed more than 70 people and caused immense loss and personal suffering. The Black Friday Fires of 13 January 1939 in Victoria, too, killed 71 people and saw more than 1000 homes lost. The causes of the fires were extreme temperatures and prolonged drought. As was the case with the Canberra Fires of 2003. Each of these fires resulted in major investigations, royal commissions, coronial enquiries and the like. They have been the subject of extensive study and there are several important books about them. To tell you about bushfire that so often accompanies drought would take this book, I think, beyond manageable proportions. But again, the title Drought: The Red Marauder, is intended to take your mind to the fires as another consequence of living in the driest continent. When I talked to friends of the writing of this book an immediate assumption often expressed was that I would be looking at the cultural significance of drought. Will you be writing about Henry Lawson, someone would ask, aware that Lawson’s bleak view of the Australian bush was largely forged in his time out 23

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west in New South Wales in the early 1890s, a time of significant drought. Will you discuss how Sidney Nolan redefined the way we think about the Australian landscape, someone else would ask. Not really, I would reply. My book is about the impact of drought on the lives of people in eastern Australia. It is about rural communities and their struggles to make a go of it in this dry place. And if it adds to our perceptions of the true nature of this land then it will have done its work. The people you will meet in these pages are, I believe, admirable people, people of hard work, some faith, and a great deal of grit. They remind us that coming to grips with this continent has never been easy, and that we need constant vigilance to ensure the continuing prosperity of the land.

24

1 ‘The worst thing we could have entered upon to make money by’ ‘The worst thing we could have entered upon to make money by’

in nineteenth-century Australian history could drive teacher and student alike to near despair. It all seemed so boring. Convicts, settlement, exploration, the riddle of the rivers, colonial democracy. And then the achievements of the colonial parliaments: free, secular and compulsory education, and land selection. ‘Spare me days’, as someone might have said. You could, I suppose, make the story of land selection interesting, ‘busting up the big estates’, if you actually entered into the lives of the selectors. Henry Lawson did that. Picture the life, the grinding hard work, the challenges and successes, the failures. The selectors were gold-rush immigrants largely, men of optimism and endeavour, prepared to give it a go. But with the surface gold exhausted and companies dominating mining, these adventurous immigrants seemed destined to lives in the cities just as they may have had at Home. They saw themselves THE OLD FAMILIAR TOPICS

25

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as wage slaves, most of them. But they wanted more: freedom and independence; space for their families to grow; something real to pass on to their children. They wanted land. At least we think that is who they were and what they wanted. How can we know? Historians are mute without records; for the land selectors the stories are there but it takes a mighty lot of work to find them. Some of the selectors kept farm diaries and some of these have made their way into the nation’s libraries and archives. Many of them, laboriously kept over many years, are tedious and dull, a daily accounting of work done; never, or rarely, of how it felt, or what it meant. Compared to the diary of a soldier at war, these work diaries seem mundane and commonplace. With a practised eye the experienced historian can quickly establish whether the diary just handed over the desk, which sounded so enticing in the listing in the library catalogue, is going to offer a glimpse of a lived life. My heart rose when I met Albert Field, in his letters home, for the first time at the State Library of Victoria. I hesitate to offer him to you as the typical Victorian selector but at the very least his story can tell us much of the work, the achievements and the failure of these hopeful Australians. I would love to hear Albert Field interviewed by one of those professional oral historians, skilled at asking the right questions, gently, nonjudgmentally. But his letters home in fact do some of the interviewer’s work for us because Albert Field was very open in showing us what he had done, and why, and with what consequences. If his life was a television documentary you’d sit back at the end while the credits rolled and say, ‘You poor bastard’. But Albert Field would not want your pity. He was a man of faith. 26

‘The worst thing we could have entered upon to make money by’

Before we turn to his story I need to give you something of the background that will explain what Albert and thousands like him were doing as new chums on the land in the 1870s and 1880s in the colonies. The gold rushes produced a demand for land and for freedom from factories and the emerging cities. But for all the dreams about closer settlement and the creation of intense Australian agricultural communities there was precious little clear thinking about the realities of Australian weather and land. There was a lot more agitation about the arrogance and wealth of those who had been here first to take more than their fair share of the land—the squatters. Historians have explained the relative failure of the first land selection acts in New South Wales and Victoria in the early 1860s by pointing to the confusion of aims that gave rise to the legislation in the first place. Massive public agitation in both Melbourne and Sydney pressured governments to make farming land available to ordinary Australians. But the land selection acts were only secondarily about land use and new settlements. The agitation for these laws came principally from the urban areas; land selection was intended to smash the social and political power of the squatters, who had so far dominated colonial life. There was not much knowledge of the land or interest in the free selectors among those agitating for land reform. People assumed that land could be worked as it had been worked at Home with similar benign results. Without records of rainfall and experience of Australian conditions, how could the agitators know any better? Land selection was social engineering without the benefit of knowledge and understanding. Those who embraced a rural, agrarian dream, disappointed gold-seekers, largely, who 27

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wanted independence, simply believed that they would succeed once they had land. Australia, for them, was untapped wealth and opportunity. The man prepared to work hard, to give it a go, would succeed. What for them of patient study before committing their capital, and a prudent approach to vastly new conditions? They, and their successors, would spend a century of trial and error in discovering how to work with the Australian conditions. If a man as gentle, as cautious and as good as Albert Field could simply jump in head first, why do we need complex explanations for the motivations of others? There was land, now, it was available; a man would be independent working it; would make money, create a community, and it was a good life. Why not? It proved difficult indeed to devise legislation that would achieve the ends of the complex social revolution that free selection represented; in Victoria it was only the third attempt at legislation in 1869 and only on better land that saw some success in placing some small, independent settlers on the land. For these winners in the land lottery this was the fulfilment of the Australian dream. A few favourable years had convinced the settlers that agriculture would provide prosperity for themselves and their families and true independence. The land selectors were brim full with confidence that the pastoral age in eastern Australia would give way to agriculture, that they would live a life of honest toil and, as pioneers, would open up new lands, create new towns and villages, and replicate European-style closer settlement in the vast Australian bush. Urban Australia wanted the land selectors to succeed; probably initially, at least, still resentful of the dominance and 28

‘The worst thing we could have entered upon to make money by’

arrogance of the high and mighty squatters, but happy enough, too, to go along with a dream of closer settlement and independent rural producers. Few stopped to consider the costs. To governments the cost of infrastructure, of railways everywhere, of new towns and villages and facilities like schools, police, roads and water. To selectors the cost of back-breaking labour, and the use of all of their capital; and the greatest cost of all, the cost to their health and their futures entailed in the risk of failure. There was a dream and few, in the good years, believed that it might become a nightmare.1 The coming of the railways encouraged the agriculturists. The gold rushes had brought a large new population to the eastern colonies and South Australia had fed these new arrivals. There wheat grew successfully in coastal regions, making its transportation much easier than in Victoria and New South Wales. But the railway meant that wheat grown in the northern regions of Victoria and the western districts of New South Wales could now successfully find a market in the capitals of their respective colonies and compete with South Australian wheat on level terms. So two factors were pushing selectors onto the land: legislation that would successfully open up some of the land at last, and the railway age. These combined to make small farming—that is, selection—a realistic option. Without the railway the agricultural age could never have dawned in Australia; settlers agitated for the railway everywhere. And so the 1870s saw thousands of selectors taking up their small farms of around 320 acres (130 hectares) in dozens of new regions where no farming had been attempted before. There was optimism, a confidence that these people would succeed. New 29

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towns sprang up by the dozen—but some of the places I will write about in this period may now not even be dots on a map. They arose in the 1870s in a burst of civic pride and confidence, and sank, often without much trace, by the middle years of the next century. It is not uncommon, driving in rural Australia now, to come across a church or a mechanics’ institute, on its own, remote and unattended. It is a reminder that once a village with shops, hotels, a school even, stood here. That closer settlement once brought many families to the land. Only to see them go away again. The failure of these villages, the collapse of these farmers, may have been dragged out over several decades, but the selectors’ hardships fell on them almost from the start. In part the problem was lack of experience and lack of knowledge of a type of farming designed specifically for the Australian environment. In part it was lack of capital. But in very great part it was lack of water. The end of the 1870s and the early 1880s were remarkably dry in eastern Australia. The drought of the early 1880s was one of the most severe in modern Australian history and, in its consequences, possibly the most disastrous ever, though we’ll hear that claim for almost every drought we look at. Farmers entered the drought of the 1880s almost totally unprepared. They had no idea that water could simply vanish from their land. Their expectation, fashioned from a few decent years and no collective memory, was that there would always be rain for their crops and their stock. They did not store water; they simply expected that it would rain. This drought would come as an enormous surprise to all of them. It should have changed forever the way they, and the politicians and the 30

‘The worst thing we could have entered upon to make money by’

planners, thought about Australia. But they were slow learners; was this just an aberration, they wondered. This drought’s one good outcome was to force the survivors to start thinking about water and its storage. Few farmers before this drought had proper dams; few had even attempted to sink wells. There was always so much more urgent work in the first years of settlement: fences, houses, ringbarking the trees and clearing the land, sheds and equipment to provide; water was a given, like the land itself. The new towns lacked reservoirs, most drawing their water directly from a river or creek. Where the water kept flowing these towns could provide for domestic needs. Where the water stopped flowing people were left largely without an alternative supply. There was a disaster here, waiting to happen. It would be tedious indeed to list in detail the rainfall in all these regions to try to portray the extent of the dry of the 1870s and the drought of 1881–1882, its peak years. It is enough to say that in north and north-western Victoria, and in central and south-western New South Wales, it virtually stopped raining for most of 1881 and for all of the first half of 1882. That might not seem too bad, now, but with little to no water storage facilities then, any extended dry period would prove ruinous. It rained heavily overnight in Canberra—a dry place—as I was drafting this chapter. We received more rain that night (and this was only heavy rain, not a flood or a downpour) than the northern Victorian town of Kerang received from the beginning of October 1881 to the end of March 1882; 2 inches in their terms. Settlers were neither mentally alert to the possibility of such a dry period, nor, on their properties, had they taken, in most cases, even the most rudimentary precautions to prepare for it. In late 1881 they 31

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might start digging wells or scooping out dams in their paddocks; wells might help a bit but the dams would only be useful after rain. And that, it seemed, might never come. As reliable rainfall records had only been gathered in Australia since 1860 there was not a sufficient pattern to enable people on the land, and governments assisting them, to make reasonable forecasts about future weather. The optimism generated by gold and a booming economy flowed over into rural areas so that people saw life on the land as inevitably prosperous, if perhaps a bit uneven. Yet on what basis were people talking about prospects? How could they be sure that it would always rain? Most of them did not even think of it as an issue. There were more pressing problems. Albert Field was a most unlikely farmer; a religious man, but that is no bar to the farming life; more a weak man physically, and inexperienced. Yet he had capital and will and he thought the farming life would be good for him. He wrote modestly about his life, minimising his trials, underplaying his achievements. But thankfully he wrote in detail, thoughtfully and with a humanity that remains just as attractive more than 100 years after he first wrote to his family and friends at home. Here was a man prepared to have a go, in the way Australians admire. Albert Field knew nothing of sheep, of shearing, of growing crops when he started, but he believed that he could learn. He would work hard; his God would guide him; thus he would achieve a modest prosperity and comfort. Albert Field can stand now for thousands of selectors who came to the job with the same confidence, determination and drawbacks as he. Albert Field’s story is the story of land selection in Australia in the 1870s. It is an Australian tragedy. 32

‘The worst thing we could have entered upon to make money by’

Lack of water profoundly affected Albert Field’s chances of making a success of the land he worked, for in his brief time in Australia he struck a particularly dry patch. It was bad luck, this part of Albert Field’s life, but I suspect he would not have seen it that way. Through all his troubles he seemed to remain a contented man. He took up his property with his eyes wide open, knowing that drought could bring him ruin; yet he ploughed on. ‘In former times,’ he wrote just three months after he had begun life as an Australian farmer, ‘seasons of drought have been the greatest drawback to the prosperity of Australia and some people are now fearing there is 2 or 3 seasons in store for us of that type.’ This was in 1874. Ten years later, as he lay dying, he would look back at almost uninterrupted dry seasons in his farming life.2 Albert Field, his wife Mary, his son and daughter arrived in Melbourne in 1873. Born in 1832 in Skelmanthorpe, West Yorkshire, Albert had never given any thought to leaving his home, his village, his people. In business, in the rag trade, he seems to have prospered. At church he was a devout and committed member of the Primitive Methodists, with deep family and friendship connections to his village; he had, therefore, no reason to move. He had married Mary Wainwright from his village in 1861. There were two children; the elder, a boy, cannot have been much more than ten years of age when the family reached Melbourne. In the early 1870s Albert caught a ‘severe cold which settled on his chest’ and all the medical opinion was that he would die unless he moved immediately to a warmer climate. ‘He felt it very much to leave the old country,’ one who 33

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knew him noted, ‘but it had to be done in order that his life might be prolonged.’3 On arrival in Melbourne in March 1873 the Field family did not stop there for more than a couple of days; instead they went to stay with Albert’s uncle on a farm four miles out of Avoca in central-western Victoria. To reach the farm they took the train to Maryborough, not yet adorned with one of the grandest country railway stations in all Australia. It would be 1891 before that remarkable structure, a fiesta of woodwork and tiling grand enough for the finest metropolitan station, would open to desultory trade. There were ambitions and visions in the bush, even if Maryborough never justified such public extravagance. After the train to Maryborough it was horse and cart to Avoca and beyond, driven by a Chinese, a gold-seeker almost certainly. Albert wrote: The day was hot, the road sometimes very bad and always dusty. Most of the roads are simply tracks through the bush, and would be impassable in English climate in a month . . . Imagine you see us with a wonderful drought on us all, laden with dust, fighting incessantly with flies, the air like a snowstorm with flying grasshoppers, driving over roads like that across Stocksmoor but always threading between bush and trees.

Yet there was a hearty welcome awaiting Albert and his family from the only relatives they knew in the colony and there was much to see: ‘as we arrived in the dry and hot season everything looks fried up and there seems to be nothing for the cattle’. Yet, he reported, the condition of the stock looked good and with wool prices high ‘the country seems to be prosperous’.4 34

‘The worst thing we could have entered upon to make money by’

It is pretty country around Avoca, with low hills and gentle slopes; it could work its charm, perhaps, even in a dry season. But the Field family needed to find their own feet before settling permanently and Albert could not be sure if business or farming beckoned. He stayed with his uncle for about three weeks, then moved to Geelong for more than a year. A man just into his forties when he arrived in Victoria, who had married comparatively late at 29, and with only two children to support, Albert Field had obviously accumulated some capital before setting out for the colonies so he was in a position to make choices. At the end of his life he knew that he had made the wrong choice, confessing to the failure of his enterprise: Farming has been a fairly good business in the colony at one time, but since we became farmers, it has been the worst thing we could have entered upon to make money by; and during the last few years I think there has been more money and labour lost in it than all the other business in the colony put together.5

After their time in Geelong the family returned to Avoca to take up a selection of 320 acres (130 hectares). Wool had been doing well for the colony in the 1860s and early 1870s and Albert made a close study of prospects. ‘Money here is extremely plentiful at present,’ he wrote in late March 1873, ‘there has been two or three good wool seasons.’ Two months later to a cousin Field reported, ‘at present wool a fair price, pastorage abundant, the squatters are doing well . . . the squatters make fortunes in 1/2 dozen good years [although] one or two dry seasons ruins many’. He was listening; was he learning? By the end of 1873 Field announced to family at home that he would go on the land: ‘my 35

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intention is to keep sheep . . . the land will keep about one sheep to the acre when we have rung the trees’. But even at this stage he knew that 1000 sheep was the minimum number ‘that [would] pay . . . 300 or 400 will I trust do something as I am not sure I could manage more at present’. It was a doubtful business plan to know from the start that he would have less than half the minimum number of sheep he needed to make money. Still, it was a decision taken with an eye to his health and the life he wanted for himself and his family: With sheep there seems to be less labour and trouble than any other 6 sorts of farming, and it will perhaps suit health better than anything else. No splendid opening before me, no prospect of riches looming in the future. The land will take all our capital to pay for it, to fence it, clear and stock it, build a house and if I have good health and the seasons be favourable, return me a little year by year to live upon.6

Modest hopes, with everything depending on the seasons. The letters home become a saga of work and setbacks. Albert took possession of his land on 1 September 1874 and immediately went into a contract of £100 to fence the property: In a week or two, if all goes right there will be 6 men, 8 bullocks and 2 horses employed in the work . . . a log fence is made of trees with the boughs knocked off, big at the bottom, small at the top. The bullocks draw the bottom logs. The horses the other. They make good but rum looking fences.

Soon after the contractor had finished the fencing, Albert was burning some tree stumps, the fire got away and ‘could have 36

‘The worst thing we could have entered upon to make money by’

caused great damage but the wind changed just in time’. Even so he lost £40–50 worth of fencing. Nearly half of the work just done, in fact. Albert had been hoping to put about 200 of his cousin’s sheep on his land straight away, agistment for a little bit of money, ‘but the hot weather came and dried up every drop of water in my land. We cannot now expect any [water] before next winter and to prepare for it I commenced digging a water hole’. Already the dry was affecting him; no income there.7 Admitting that ‘as the newness, strangeness or difference of things here has passed away, I shall have nothing to write about that shall be of interest to you’, perhaps he did not notice how water and the dry seasons had soon become so dominant in his letters. ‘The heat we had to endure from Monday to Friday,’ he wrote in late January 1875, ‘was a caution. Said to reach 145°F [62°C; presumably the thermometer was in direct sunlight]. None of us could do anything . . . tea put away in the teapot from dinner to tea time was still hot enough to use.’ The hot weather continued into April: Farm labour such as I have to do has been at a standstill now for some months, as the ground is so hard for want of rain, that it would take two or three days to perform one day’s work such as grubbing and trenching and the same might be said about ringing trees, as the bark won’t come off at present.

So there was nothing doing: ‘we are waiting rain to come and grass and wool to grow’. Yet even this inexperienced farmer knew what a fine line it was between success and failure in his part of Australia: ‘if there had been a day’s rain a month or six 37

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weeks ago there would have been pastorage the winter through’. He would have needed, I think, a little more than a day’s rain.8 To his brother in August 1875, not yet a year on the land, Albert Field admitted that he needed more money. He was clearing another 40 acres (16 hectares) he had bought as he now knew that sheep alone were not enough for him to make a go of it. But clearing the land and preparing it for sowing would cost ‘between £200–300’. How so? ‘I am in want of a good horse,’ he continued, ‘there is all sorts of farming implements wanted and they are very dear . . . if you hire your work you are no better, and the work worse done (ploughing is more than £1 per acre).’ 9 ‘This new bush land does swallow an immense sum of money,’ he confessed in April of the next year, ‘and I do not see as clearly as I could wish yet this comfortable living except we had more land [and yet] our money is about done.’10 It is a sad tale, and surely not an uncommon one, but it is important to recognise that Albert Field was no ‘whingeing Pom’, sorry for himself and the circumstances in which he had placed his family. Partly it might have been his intense religious faith, perhaps an ingrained optimism, but his letters give every impression, despite the difficulties of the life, that he was enjoying it. In August 1877 Albert admitted that he had not prospered as he would have hoped because of his health, ‘my lack of experience’, and a bit of bad luck like the fire. ‘And yet,’ he concluded, ‘we can see abundant reason to hope on.’ For rain? Albert recognised that as the key to prosperity: 38

‘The worst thing we could have entered upon to make money by’

Having a sufficient rainfall is very necessary thing for the welfare of this colony, not only are the cattle and sheep without grass, when hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of them die, but if the ground does not get thoroughly saturated . . . there is not sufficient moisture to sustain wheat, oats and other crops during the great heat of summer.11

After five years on the land Albert was still optimistic: In comparison with trade, farming is slow, but we must not overlook its advantages, and as far as I am concerned some are important ones. It is a healthy employment and other things make it doubly so to me. The climate is mild, and without the worrying cares and anxieties of business life.

Written in May 1878, that must have been in a moment of relatively good rainfall and temperature, otherwise it is hard to understand how he could write of the ‘mild climate’. Or have claimed to be worry free. But perhaps Albert was comparing Avoca with the bitter winters of Yorkshire; perhaps, too, the fire of summer had receded from his mind; or maybe he just accepted, as from the hand of God, whatever might come his way. Odd though it may seem, it will be one of the features of this account of drought across a variety of periods, that once over, it seemed almost as if it were entirely erased from the minds of its victims. Fatally so, it would seem, because in the good times few were interested in preparing for the next, inevitable, drought.12 Apart from the constant concern about the ill-health or weakness of both his wife and his daughter, Albert’s really great sadness was the absence of family and friends. He missed his 39

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past life and associations fearfully and often wrote about that as the greatest drawback to migration, even while always recognising that had he remained at home in all likelihood he would have died. There was constant reference to the past in his letters; occasionally an eloquent reminder to his readers of what he and his family had given up. Try to place yourself . . . in a strange country . . . everybody for scores of miles are strangers to you except your own family and 2–3 more; and I living in your native village surrounded by relatives, friends, acquaintances and other connections concerned in your trade, religion, politics, in your marriages, births and deaths, and I might go on to say your village news, village progress and village scandel . . . [instead I am] separated from every connection and familiar object of 40 years formation.

This was in February 1877; two years later he writes again of a desire to see the friends and family of home: particularly of a Sunday. When quietly in our house we sit, seldom seeing any but our own family do we look at the assembled congregation in Skel[manthorpe] and in imagination often do we step into the midst of them . . . we proceed to single you out one by one . . . but too much of this sentimentality does not do, and we have to arouse ourselves from any day-dreaming to stern reality.13

A great joy to Albert, to balance all this sadness, was that his son, at first always referred to as Joe Willie, but later just Joe, had ‘rapidly jumped into a big man’. There was now less need for hired labour and pretty soon Joe took over the main work around the place. By late 1881 Albert was reporting that half 40

‘The worst thing we could have entered upon to make money by’

his income was coming from his crops and half from grazing. He had about a dozen cattle and 500 sheep. He and Joe tried shearing their flock for themselves for the first time in 1878, surely a difficult thing to learn, when Albert needed to cut costs further. ‘We are learners so the work would be long in our hands.’ Albert had bought more land about four miles away and that had to be cleared before it could be worked: ‘we’ve had our breakfast by daybreak, me, Joe and the man, and drive four miles in the spring cart to our work . . . we are home just before dark’.14 And still the rain stayed away. In April 1879 it was the familiar refrain: There has been no rain worth speaking of these 5 months and more and the ground is so baked that we cannot plough . . . in this locality there has been three poor seasons for the farmers, but this last one has been much the worst . . . the result is that many have been compelled to sell out.

Reading these letters with hindsight can be unnerving, for we know that worse was to come, culminating in the disaster of 1881 and 1882. By the end of 1881 Albert Field wrote of the water trains that the government was sending all round Victoria to try to keep farmers and stock going: ‘rain is much wanted here at present, some parts of the colony are in dreadful suffering for want of water, and have to travel great distances for the precious fluid. The Government are also running water trains for them’. It was an innovative measure, taking the water to where it was desperately needed, and surely it did some good. But think of it: water delivered by train, dumped into open drains at stations and sidings, laboriously scooped up by the farmers onto their own 41

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carts and carried back to their farms. Inefficiency and loss of water; but some relief anyway. In April 1882 the stock on Albert Field’s land were in poor shape, by July Joe was carting wood to the mining claims just to make a bit of money. By August wheat was dearer in Melbourne than in London; ‘the government prevented a great amount of suffering and no doubt saved many lives by running water trains for several months to every available point’. But it was now too late for Albert Field.15 Whether it was the property in extremis or just the relentless hard work and the inevitable passage of his illness, by April 1883 Albert Field was reporting home that ‘my physical labour is about over . . . my health has gone from worse to worse and now I am a mere wreck’. On what I think was his first trip to Melbourne since his arrival in 1873—the railway had come to Avoca and made travel in his weakened condition feasible for him—a specialist doctor advised that Albert’s right lung was done for but that he could live for a while yet on one lung. It was not to be. Albert Field died on 21 October 1884, in the middle of the shearing season; which, Joe observed in letters home, ‘makes me very busy’. ‘Death to him held no terrors’, his pastor wrote in an obituary, and Albert spoke of a ‘sweet peace’ and ‘a sureness that Jesus loved him’. A year later Joe reported a good season although wool prices were down. Perhaps it was the first really good season they had seen around Avoca since Albert took up his selection in 1874. It was a harsh life that Albert Field had lived uncomplainingly and he died not yet 52 years of age. It all came down to water in the end.16 42

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I cannot tell you what became of the Field family after Albert’s death. The paper trail cuts out. A novelist might take over from me but the material is not promising. The wife and daughter were never strong; the farm marginal even in the good times. Maybe Joe struggled on Tree of Man-like with a wife of his own and children; maybe he even prospered. Avoca is good country and Joe Field came from good stock. He would have ten good years to establish the property and then the great dry of the 1890s would strike, culminating in the Federation Drought of 1901–03, and all bets were off. Joe Field would have been around 50 when the Australians landed at Gallipoli in 1915—and in the midst of another drought. If he was still working the farm his father had bought in 1873 he would now be revered in the district as one of the pioneers. Too old for service himself, perhaps he had a son or sons with the Australians at war to add to his worries. There are 29 persons with the surname Field on the Australian War Memorial’s Roll of Honour for the First World War. None come from Avoca or close to it; none of those for whom next of kin are listed have a father named Joe. You see how frustrating history is without the records? Short of detailed research which this story does not justify, I can think of no other way of telling you more about the family of Albert Field. Let Albert Field stand for the story of free selection in Australia and the hazards of taking up land in such a dry country. But he alone cannot give you a feel for the first drought that we will consider. About 200 kilometres to the east of Avoca, at Shepparton, selectors had also taken over from the squatting interests. Indeed, as the local newspaper cleverly observed: 43

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The complete change which has come over the Goulburn Valley could not be better illustrated than by the curiosity excited at the sight of a couple of wagons loaded with wool passing through Shepparton to the railway station . . . It is truly a surprising fact that this vast plain was so short a time ago in solitary occupancy of the squatter, now teeming with activity of a different order of things. The pastoral staff had yielded place to the ploughshare, destined to make the Goulburn Valley the granary of Victoria.

That was the way of country newspapers then. Local patriotism required the boosting of the region whenever possible, for the locals were proud of their new towns and vastly confident about their booming future. It would be death to the four-page broadsheet, filled with advertisements, a little local news, opinion and the obligatory serial, to find serious fault with the region to which all these newcomer selectors had come. It was permissible, expected perhaps, to find fault with the local politicians, but boosting of the region held sway in all the other columns in the papers. Most of these rural papers tried to run a few correspondents from the surrounding hamlets, to improve local coverage and to tell a few good stories. The Shepparton News was one that excelled at this. Its columns are made much more interesting and more lively with reports of the problems and issues in surrounding villages.17 Shepparton in 1881 was frontier territory, as lands were just opening up for the selectors. Barely ten years old with a population of 33 people in 1871, by 1881 the Shepparton News was boasting: ‘from the geographical position of Shepparton it was impossible that it could be less important than what it is . . . the 44

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majority of our visitors never fail to express surprise at the appearance of progress . . . and the size to which the town has grown in the last three years’. The newspaper claimed 10 000 readers. Keen readers they were, too, if the correspondent who asked for a correction is typical: ‘[in] the list of prizes, for potted butter at the late Shepparton show you said that the 3rd prize was given to Mrs Grieve of Kialla—in fact it went to Mrs Grace of Shepparton’.18 Belief in the inevitable march of progress and the material prosperity of the Australian colonies was commonplace in most Australian communities in the 1870s and early 1880s, and especially so in Victoria, so wealthy from gold and new immigrants. There were dry periods out in the bush, as Albert Field knew to his cost; people knew that, but nothing could dim the onward march of the selector and progress. Or could it? Was this optimism really a case of whistling bravely in the dark, a determination not to confront or even contemplate the problem that would undermine almost every effort towards closer settlement in this country? The problem was water. It was as if, in the expectation, or rather the hope, of progress, that no-one wished to upset the fragile confidence that fed upon itself, and no-one, therefore, could even bear to mention the word ‘drought’. Throughout 1880 the Goulburn Valley region of Victoria was drying out. Perhaps imperceptibly at first, but all too obviously soon after, drought was a reality for these newly arrived selectors. The granary of Victoria simply could not survive without water, no matter how much locals boosted its potential. The Shepparton News would not countenance defeat or a blighted future, that would be disloyal, and thus it steadfastly 45

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refused to mention what was the topic of conversation of all: the failure of the rains. And then the crisis burst into its columns when it could be contained no longer. The shire council discussed the issue for the first time when there was an estimated three weeks of water left in the Broken Creek, feeding into the Goulburn River, and when the village of Wunghnu, tiny as it was, was entirely out of water. ‘It is a misnomer,’ a correspondent from that town reported, ‘to call the thick, muddy, clay-coloured, cattle-trodden, pig-wallowing slush, that lies stagnant in sundry holes, by the name of water; it is more like mortar fit to plaster with.’ People would have to travel four miles to Numurkah for drinking water if ‘we don’t wish to be poisoned’. But later in the year, at Numurkah, drinking water was at such a premium that one correspondent predicted that it would soon be advertised ‘in the pubs’. As early as January 1881 the situation was precarious: ‘something must be done to save the stock of the district from perishing—possibly human lives too’. Ploughed dry land produced dust that would be a common feature of almost every serious Australian drought thereafter: ‘it is something alarming,’ the Shepparton News reported, ‘the immense volumes of dust that are daily sweeping over the town . . . the inhabitants of Shepparton have undergone a process of martyrdom’.19 Did this drought, so unexpected, such a roadblock on the path of progress, spell the end of the agricultural remaking of the district? Was it possible that the day of the selector was over just as it was dawning? That deep-seated fear now surfaced as the drought took hold. There was a fragility in all this selection business, this new land-use system, that may be obvious to us when we consider the newness of what was being attempted and 46

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the inexperience of the farmers attempting it, but was certainly not obvious at the time. There were fears and problems out there, largely unspoken, and possibly that same hope, too, that had sustained Albert Field. Still the question needed to be asked by people on the spot: were all the plans of putting the small man on the land just so much eyewash? It was telling that the number of farms going to auction had increased significantly in even the first months of this drought. Were people already walking away from what they had hoped would make them independent and prosperous? Was it all too hard? The Shepparton News was alert to these fears and doubts, reporting that some affect to see [in these auction sales] the beginning of agricultural decay in the Goulburn Valley and the ultimate repossession of lands by the squatter . . . [some say] it is only a question of time when agriculture will give way to sheep . . . [yet] it was never expected that everyone who had embarked in land selection could hold out against reverses of seasons and their deteriorating influences.20

Albert Field had seen the same thing. In one of his last letters, he recalled: When we came here the farmers from the southern parts [of the colony] were rushing into this district as settlers. Scarcely a day but several families . . . were passing our place on their way north . . . It has proved disastrous to most of them. They left good but small farms, had a year or two of fair season and then a number of dry ones culminating last year [1882] in a complete water famine and loss of stock.21 47

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Many of them, he believed, had just given up. But was it only the drought? The Shepparton News was inclined to put some of the blame onto the selectors themselves. ‘Unsuccess,’ the editor believed, ‘is [as] generally due to defective organisation as to bad seasons, or trade influences. Most men have noticed the spasmodic industry of some people [while other selectors have] a manifest lack of knowledge in one’s calling.’ It was never the intention of the selection acts, the paper seemed to think, to make land available to the lazy or the ignorant: ‘farming requires capital, industry, economy, prudence and knowledge to ensure success. How many selectors have this union of talents?’. So let us not bemoan the auction sales, the paper concluded, rather let us rejoice, ‘the incomer as a rule being a man of means; the outgoer a broken down man’. This was a tough doctrine in time of drought but belief in progress required a certain social Darwinism: the fittest would survive and the dream of closer settlement would survive too, regardless, almost, of the seasons. The right type of selector must prevail; the community must have faith in progress; that was the doctrine. But perhaps as the drought intensified that faith in progress would be severely tested.22 A bit of rain put an end to the speculation about progress and the future and delayed further consideration of the right type of selector. There is a feeling, even in the midst of this drought, that the lack of rain was remarkable, a 100-year event perhaps; not something to be factored into every calculation of the viability of these free selectors. ‘Timely and seasonable rain . . . has created quite a jubilant feeling among the farmers,’ the Shepparton News reported in May 1881, ‘ . . . there is abundant moisture in the 48

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ground now to last for several weeks . . . pasture is looking well.’ And so the crisis in confidence passed; it had been a temporary setback after all. The cycle of the seasons resumed. The Bishop of Melbourne arrived on time for his annual visitation and conducted confirmations. The regular pattern prevailed.23 Imperceptibly, however, in the Goulburn Valley the dry soon returned. There had not been nearly enough rain in winter and spring and by early November the farmers were facing the same predicament they had faced a year earlier. And this dry spell, on top of last year’s, promised to be even more devastating. At Katandra, a correspondent reported, ‘selectors suffered [so badly] last year which makes their heart fail at the prospect of this; for trying as last season was the supply of water did not fail them till well advanced in summer, whereas this year, [in late October] privations have already begun to be felt’.24 At Nathalia farmers spent most of their time carting water from the Goulburn. One farmer recalled filling a 200-gallon (900-litre) tank, carrying each bucketful of water himself up the bank. To get in one day’s water for the plough horses and for domestic use took this farmer half a day’s work. It was a poor return on his labour, and made productive work, like preparing his land for when the rains came, impossible. It was a permanent dilemma, though, until tractors replaced horses. If you lost your working horses to thirst and starvation, you lost the means of working when the good seasons came again. But to keep your horses alive you might need to suspend almost every other farm activity. It was a battle for survival, with difficult choices in every direction.25 49

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Two hundred farmers, some travelling considerable distances, met at Knull’s Range in early November to discuss their plight. The situation was critical already, they said. All round the district, one reported, the cry was ‘water, water’; they might as well be living in Egypt, another said. They could live without gold, said a third, without railways, without wheat, but not without water. Some were travelling 10 to 15 miles (16–25 kilometres) every day to cart water home for their stock. Others admitted that ‘they deliberately drove their cattle miles from home, in order that they might be lost, rather than see them lingering under the tortures of death by thirst’. What were the people to do, the Shepparton News asked. Abandon their holdings and cross the border? What if an epidemic broke out? Already there was fever at Tregowel from people drinking polluted water. The government must act to prevent an exodus of selectors. The dream was under threat once more. At Khull’s Range the meeting wanted a water scheme, a form of irrigation. It was the only way.26 Irrigation presupposes water and is merely a means of delivering water from where it is to where it is needed—a superior form, if you like, of the water trains the government had been running round Victoria; more permanent. In many parts of Australia irrigation is not possible because, in drought, or dry seasons, the water dries up completely. There is no river or dam from which water might be taken. So it was in the Mallee region of north-western Victoria. Albert Field had watched a steady procession of selectors moving along his district’s roads in the 1870s. The land movement towards the Mallee only began in 1874 when selectors began to move there from the Ballarat region—former gold-seekers in all likelihood, still yearning for 50

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an independent life. A historian of the Mallee reports that they took the old goldfields road to Maryborough and Avoca—and passed Albert Field therefore—and then on to St Arnaud. On 10 July 1877, 50 town lots were put up for auction to create the town of Kerang on the edge of the Mallee, another 20 in October. This, like Shepparton, was real pioneering territory.27 The people moving into the Mallee were not experienced dryland farmers. Indeed, in advance of a visit from James Moorhouse, the Bishop of Melbourne and a self-proclaimed expert on irrigation, settlers at the improbably named Durham Ox forwarded a request that he take irrigation as his theme for the public lecture he was to give there in March 1882. The Kerang Times’ Durham Ox correspondent explained: Our farmers want information on the subject. The greater part of them are novices in agriculture, and those who have been brought up to the business have experience only of the humid climate of Great Britain or the western districts of the colony, and have the vaguest possible notions of the practicality of irrigation for the plains.

Novices to agriculture on 320 acres (130 hectares); it was asking a great deal to expect these settlers to be profitable within a few years, even in the better seasons. Yet that is what land selection implied, with its carefully gradated schedule of repayments of the purchase price of the land. Lower payments in the first years when production would be low; then higher payments implying steady seasons and good returns.28 Throw in a drought within the first years and the scene is set for disaster. For the six months from October 1881 to March 51

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1882, that is, within five years of the first sale of town lots, Kerang received just 2 inches and 2 points of rain, just over 50 millimetres. Reports of conditions there are frightening to read even now, and while this account of drought would become tedious if tales such as these were repeated endlessly, as they could be, the Kerang story is important in allowing us to see just how devastating this drought was. It might have changed the way people thought about Australia and land use. If it did, the drought might have performed a useful service. But that recognition was many years off yet.29 By March 1882 the Kerang Times had given up trying to pretend that the extent and tragedy of the drought was being exaggerated by its victims. The surface of the country, the paper reported, ‘has become pulverised’ because all the moisture had been taken out. Grass had long since disappeared. The plight of the animals was horrendous, an early indication of the responsibility the settlers had for the stock they had so optimistically introduced to this marginal land, but were now evading. Cattle and sheep were simply starving to death, ‘staggering listlessly about . . . The muddy bed of the Loddon puts the climax to their sufferings. They go to the water but from sheer weakness are unable to extricate themselves from the mud.’ At Reedy Lake the shire council employed men just to pull sheep out of the mud: ‘a selector living close to Kerang can count 17 of his small flock of sheep standing in the mud erect, but dead’. A cow standing in the mud was alive but ‘stuck immobile . . . the surface being caked so hard that it could only be broken with a pick’. Carcasses were rotting in what water there was ‘and this is the water that we have to drink’.30 52

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A selector at Boort, south of Kerang, wrote of having to cart his water from Lake Leaghur, 16 miles (25 kilometres) away: In other words, we drag our horses 32 miles [50 kilometres] every day to obtain water for ourselves and the little stock that we have not given away for less than half value. The past season averaged two bushels to the acre [15 would have been good], and we use the little [crop] we obtained to keep our horses alive till rain comes. I and two others sank a well 110 feet [38 metres], twenty feet [6 metres] of which was through solid hard sandstone. We got water so salty nothing will drink it.

Yet, he complained, the government still demanded the rents owing for the selection: ‘the upshot will be that we who have lived hard and worked harder for eight years will be compelled to throw up our land and swell the ranks of the unemployed’.31 The Kerang Times was mindful of the same point, expressed with an editor’s passion: In travelling through the northern agricultural areas, it is noticeable that the selectors as a rule, constitute some of the best men of the colony. Their action in leaving the haunts of civilisation, and settling on what was a wild wilderness, shows the indomitable will and energy with which they are possessed. Their coming with capital, whether great or small, speaks volumes for their past industry, and is a guarantee of their honest intentions . . . Some have left permanently, others have barricaded their windows and doors and retired for a time. Can no public works be started whereby they can get assistance? Are these men not as valuable 53

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to the state as the loafers about Melbourne and its suburbs? Our selectors need assistance.32

Was Melbourne listening? There was simply no water, apart from Kow Swamp, nothing in the whole region from the Campaspe River in the east to the Murray in the north. And yet rain clouds tantalisingly appeared, if not regularly, certainly often enough: ‘heavy rain clouds appeared [on Friday] but by Saturday morning they had all disappeared. Since then the weather has become exceedingly hot’. It was a common story. The farmers were at their wit’s end to know how to get in the seed for want of water. Some of the plucky ones have looked the difficulty straight in the face, carting water a distance of from 14 to 20 miles [21 to 31 kilometres] three days a week, and devoting the remaining portion of the week to scarifying in the grain.

Others were driving their cattle to the swamp for water: ‘here are to be seen the hardy sons of toil with elongated features plodding along the highways choked with dust, and not a drop of clean water to moisten his parched lips, following their cattle to water’. How long could stock last on this pattern of life?33 At Cohuna, within striking distance of the Murray, the Kerang Times correspondent suggested that he needed [a] new word to express what the weather was like . . . the weather has been hotter than it was ever known before. It has become a usual thing for people many miles from the creek to bring down their clothes and spend a day on the banks of the creek washing. 54

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What things will be like if rain does not come soon it is impossible to say.

That was in early February 1882. A week later the correspondent was a little confident about a change because ‘rain clouds are prevalent’. A week after that nothing had happened. Carting water meant that ‘to do any farm work is altogether out of the question’.34 At Durham Ox the correspondent admitted to being ‘sick of the weather’ and went on: What are we to do for water? Our cattle are perishing before our eyes, our wives and children are longing for what cannot be got, a draught of pure water, and the unwholesome liquid we are compelled to drink is, in conjunction with the hot weather, causing a considerable amount of sickness, and in some cases death . . . If heavy rain does not come soon the position will be a terrible one.

This, too, was in early February. Later in the month the correspondent was writing of the horrors of the water famine . . . of such a nature as to tax the credulity of anyone not residing in the district . . . the man who could listen with indifference to the cries of thousands of dumb animals slowly but surely perishing of hunger and thirst must be an inhuman monster.

Humans, too, would soon be experiencing the direst problems from the unwholesome water ‘unless a kind providence sends relief from the heavens’. For this man the drought was a ‘national 55

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calamity’ and he could not understand or countenance ‘the coldblooded tone in which the Argus [Melbourne’s leading newspaper] cants on the subject’.35 People had already died. In late January the extreme heat had been so unbearable that ‘just before the change four infants succumbed within twenty-four hours, and had the extreme heat continued, no doubt the mortality would have increased’. In January, according to the Kerang Times, the drought had entered a new phase. Throughout 1881 it had been dry; no autumn rains made life difficult for the graziers; lack of winter and spring rains ruined agricultural prospects as well as grazing. No feed for cattle, no crops to garner, [it] seemed as if the worst was reached. But it was not so. No rain falling, the fiery sun and unbearable dust storms soon evaporated what little water had been artificially stored for domestic purposes . . . now commenced what may be termed a struggle for existence . . . seventeen miles for water is a long journey, but it has now to be travelled or life cannot be sustained.

‘Yesterday’ the paper reported, ‘was a regular brickfielder [a hot wind], the temperature at 3pm was 110°F [43°C] in the shade’. A struggle for existence; it’s more what we expect to hear in time of war.36 Selectors discovered that a lack of water and the hot and terrible days were not the only trials this harsh land held for them. Drought invariably brought dust storms. The dust travelled great distances in billowing clouds; few who had not experienced them could appreciate just what a trial the dust storms were. The Kerang Times reported on one in mid-January 1882: 56

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A disagreeable, unbearable day. From appearances early in the morning of that day, viz: close weather, a cloudy sky, a north wind blowing, and a rapidly falling barometer it appeared something unusual was going to take place. As the hours passed by the wind increased in violence; at ten o’clock blowing quite a gale, and bringing with it thick clouds of dust. At twelve o’clock the wind, which had increased to a hurricane changed more to the west, the dust rising mountains high, and was so thick that for a few minutes the township was completely buried . . . the dust continued to blow with scarcely any intermission, and at two o’clock appeared at its height . . . we may state that at this time it was almost total darkness while indoors objects two or three yards away were hardly discernible . . . at four o’clock [the storm] had ceased, the only vestige being large heaps of sand on the road, similar to snowdrifts.

Perhaps at least some of the Kerang Times readers remembered snowdrifts from the old country; those memories might now have seemed almost from another planet.37 What to do? At Numurkah, some 37 kilometres north of Shepparton there was also dust: ‘the hotel keepers gasped, swallowed beer and did a roaring trade’. But then Numurkah must have been ‘a paradise for the toper’. The Shepparton News had earlier reported that the town had ‘about sixty houses, tents and huts included, and two hundred and thirty inhabitants. Prior to Thursday last this happy district was blessed with ten public houses, one licensed colonial wine shop and two grocer’s establishments licensed to sell spirits’. Then on Thursday two new licences were granted, ‘one for every fifteen inhabitants’. But now 57

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Numurkah was ‘eternally enveloped by a semi-transparent canopy of dust’. It would drive you to drink.38 The owner-editor of the Shepparton News went out to look at the regional situation for himself. At Nathalia, the people in the township were in utter destitution, having to use a species of mud, and, by imagination, consider it water. Farmers tell us that they have to drive cattle 8 and 10 miles [to water], and to knock the calves on the head, in order to save, if possible, the cows.

He left Numurkah feeling very much depressed: ‘the sole source of supply is a shallow well and a large bog hole’. Until seen, people really could not envisage how the drought was forcing people to live. It was a constant theme in this and subsequent droughts: people do not understand what we are enduring; they will not listen to us; they should be helping us. Parliamentarians in Melbourne, and the newspapers there, took a long time to wake up to the true situation while country people seethed with a sense of the obligation that they believed the city owed them. Observed the Shepparton News: A few years ago the favourite electioneering cry was ‘settle the people on the lands of the colony’. That has been done, but those who used the phrase most frequently lost sight of the want of water. The people were placed on the land irrespective of water supply.

The water trains helped, and earned for the government in Melbourne more than grudging gratitude from the people who benefited from them. The further north one travelled, however, the greater was the need for water, and in 1882 the railway had 58

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not penetrated to those parts. The water trains were a great boon to those they reached, but the free selectors also wanted the city to understand what was happening.39 Perhaps the whole idea of settling a large number of people on the land was misguided. Perhaps the land was simply not capable of supporting closer settlement. It was a heretical notion to those who believed in the inevitable march of progress, but some, supporters of the squatting class probably, were now encouraged to find their voice. A correspondent in the Melbourne Argus, calling himself Sylvanus, questioned whether the gratitude for the water trains had been misplaced. Giving a picture of the ‘misery, suffering and wretchedness’ that had been widespread over the land, he noted that ‘sheep and cattle when they die by thousands create, at the most a nine days wonder, but when human beings perish from thirst and destitution, perhaps they may also create a small sensation’. Sylvanus believed that the selectors had been kept alive by the generosity and liberality of large landholders, the squatters, who had allowed them access to water. It was all the fault of the Land Act, in this man’s eyes, ‘in addition to [the selectors’] want of common sense and capital’. None of the northern plains were suited to agriculture, Sylvanus insisted, but the people were led blindfold to their ruin by alluring land laws which did not and do not compel them to make the slightest provisions for water supply . . . a treeless, arid, waterless region was favoured by nature with a few good seasons and, deceived by these and their own over-weening confidence . . . [people] commenced to occupy what has since proved to be a desert’. 59

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Force these people to make dams and sink wells, Sylvanus concluded. This drought did force people to re-examine fundamental propositions. That the small man should be on the land; that progress and prosperity was merely a matter of good laws and hard work; that Australia could replicate British and European land-use strategies. The drought of 1881–82 threw all these propositions into question. It demonstrated that the battle between the selectors and the squatters was far from over; indeed, it had decisively shifted the balance in favour of the squatter. In May 1882 the dream of closer settlement was looking much more improbable than it had a decade earlier. But with rain at last falling, and the grass again growing, would people begin to make provisions for future droughts, or consign the fading disaster to a part of the memory not to be regularly searched? Would drought, once again, become a word not to be spoken and would ‘over-weening confidence’ in man’s ability and the goodness of God replace plans for the best protection from the next disaster? 40

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2 ‘Don’t pray for rain, dam it’ ‘Don’t pray for rain, dam it’

Primitive Methodist but did he go anyway to listen to the Anglican Bishop of Melbourne when that renowned ecclesiastic was on his country visits? You would think so, if as much for the novelty and diversion that the bishop’s visit caused as for the spiritual message. In 1881, 35 per cent of Victorians described themselves as adherents of the Church of England, but the structure of the church, heavily dependent on hierarchical leadership, was slow to adapt to growth. Initially the Bishop of Melbourne took responsibility for all the Anglicans in the colony; then in 1875 the new diocese of Ballarat was created, relieving Melbourne of responsibility for Victoria’s western district. Even so, the Bishop of Melbourne still presided over a vast area that took in places such as Shepparton, Numurkah, Nathalia and Kerang—a trip he annually made of more than 650 kilometres—as well as Melbourne and all its suburbs. There were many other such country visits. Until 1875 the Bishop of Melbourne had a flock of 800 000 souls, slightly fewer thereafter.1 ALBERT FIELD WAS A

61

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The second Bishop of Melbourne, appointed in January 1877, was the elegant, urbane and learned James Moorhouse, born in Sheffield, England in 1826. He smoked a pipe and walked a bulldog. Each year of his tenure in Melbourne he spent two to three months travelling around the backblocks of his diocese, following the selectors to their new towns, rudimentary churches and proud, but ill-stocked and raw, mechanics’ institutes. The reason for his travels was to confer confirmation on candidates; but James Moorhouse also relished keeping in touch with isolated clergy and seeing for himself the condition of the people, these selectors and storekeepers who were attempting so much. Moorhouse left Melbourne for good in 1886 to become Bishop of Manchester, saying that his duties in Melbourne had just about exhausted him. When he died in early April 1915, knowing nothing therefore of the deeds of the Australians at Gallipoli, a campaign heavily involving the sons of the selectors he had so encouraged, he left an estate valued at £54 000, a fortune.2 In 1882, as usual, Moorhouse made his way to the remoter parts of his diocese. What he saw profoundly shocked him. He started his visitation in Kerang on 14 March 1882, at the peak of that terrible drought, and spoke wherever he went throughout the region. That was his pattern; church services at all the little townships on his route, but public meetings, too, at the mechanics’ institute, or the local public house, for the bishop was something of a celebrity. There was a ‘tea meeting’ at Durham Ox and the Kerang Times was a little disappointed at the turn-out, ‘considering the fame the worthy bishop has acquired for eloquence . . . the attendance at the tea meeting was comparatively meagre’. The correspondent put this down to the ‘anxiety and labour 62

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consequent on the scarcity of water’ and at Kerang, later, blamed another small attendance on ‘possibly the rather high charge for the tea’. But Moorhouse was already notorious for his views on praying for rain. ‘Don’t pray for rain, dam it’ was a joke that had reverberated around the colony, although Moorhouse denied the quickness of mind to come up with such a quip. But the sentiment was his. He could not, he said, justify a special day of prayer for rain. Most likely the selectors of Kerang and Durham Ox were not sufficiently theologically literate to follow the bishop’s close reasoning and so perhaps they believed he was just another blow-in from Melbourne not sufficiently sympathetic to their plight. By this stage they would have been prepared to try anything to make it rain; even atheists might think of prayer. To the selectors the bishop may have seemed heartless, uncaring; city people, well-spoken bishops even, just did not understand.3 The Argus followed the bishop to Kerang and listened to him at the mechanics’ institute there, publishing a detailed account of his address. Moorhouse acknowledged the ‘present distress’ but also reported that the age of miracles was over. Miracles had been necessary in the apostolic age, he said, to confirm people’s faith, but the seasons were now regulated by God’s unchanging laws and it would require a ‘monumental reason’ for God to interfere in those laws. How could God do this under ordinary circumstances now, the bishop asked, ‘without deranging the whole course of our life and making foresight, industry and prudence impossible’. It was a nice point; if God were to intervene on this occasion, why should selectors bother to work hard, 63

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or to prepare their farms for the hard times? God would not do the selectors’ work for them. We have shown prudence, industry, and as much foresight as our novice condition would allow, the selectors might have murmured in reply. Couldn’t God pull us out of this jam, they might have asked, just this once, while we adjust to the new circumstances and learn the ways of a new world? We may occasionally have to suffer [the bishop responded] and suffer severely, because of this regularity of natural phenomena, but we would suffer ten times more if this regularity could not be relied upon . . . Prayers for rain may indeed be pressed out of my heart by anguish . . . but I cannot say, because I do not think, that such a prayer is that of an instructed and spiritually-minded Christian.

Have you heard the cries of the dying animals stuck in the mud, someone in the hall might have called out. Isn’t there something we can do? Well yes. Through this drought we can move closer to God, the bishop said. If, therefore, this great drought shall teach us to humble ourselves for former neglect, to submit calmly and patiently to what is hard to bear; and above all to pray that if our store becomes smaller, we may become greater, more wise, more truthful, more pure and gentle, and humble and Christ-like, then the loss which will be inflicted upon us, will have been converted into an eternal gain.

They would say that when war came, too. Through this war God is calling us to a more spiritual path, the bishops then said. Piffle, the soldier in the trench might have replied. Look at the 64

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rats getting fat on human remains in No Man’s Land; look at me, knee-deep in mud, freezing and terrified. God is making me purer and more spiritual through that?4 It was a harsh doctrine to put before the man who knew that his wife and children panted for a draught of pure water, the man who watched his land lose all of its productive capacity for this season and the next, the man knocking his calves on the head in the hope that a few of his cows, at least, might survive so that gradually, over the years, he might build up his herd again. These people wanted help now; the bishop was offering them a spiritual path of hardship to eternal glory. He might have confirmed the faith of Albert Field, whose belief in a merciful God was as strong in the terrible times as it was in the good, and who never stopped hoping; the bishop might not have convinced those who wanted a little more out of life right now. Certainly James Moorhouse was well aware of the suffering all around him. Travelling from Raywood to Kerang on the edge of the Mallee country, the bishop said he had witnessed such a scene of desolation as I pray God my eyes may never more rest on. As I drove in the heat and glare and dust, I have seen plains almost as bare of green grass as the high road; houses deserted and the windows nailed up; vast stretches of country without traces on them of man or beast . . . I love Victoria [and yet I am so troubled by] such signs of suffering in the dull, staggering skeletons, that I was obliged to turn away my eyes for relief.

No doubt the bishop could understand why people would ask him to beseech God to send the rain that alone could end 65

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this dreadful suffering. Theological rectitude forced him to decline.5 What hope, therefore, could the bishop offer? That the joke ‘don’t pray for rain, dam it’ became so well known is testament to the force of Moorhouse’s unfailing argument for irrigation and water conservation. This was not God’s problem, he insisted, it was man’s. Man must find the solution. Moorhouse promised, he said, never to cease ‘to lift up my voice against indolence and wastefulness’. Victoria must embark on proper water schemes that would at least minimise the terrible effects of drought that had so disturbed him. The selectors, he seemed to be saying, all Victorians, really, needed to learn how to survive in this new and different land. They needed to understand that the old ways learned in England, where water was plentiful, would never do in Australia. They would have to study the land and the harsh conditions and learn to adapt. People should have taken more note of James Moorhouse; his advice would go largely unheeded well into the next century. The bishop’s refusal to countenance a day of prayer for rain sparked a heated theological argument in the colony. The Catholic position was well argued by Dean Slattery, an Irish-born priest, whose working life was spent in rural Victoria before being promoted to the senior Catholic post in Geelong in 1870. Embroiled in controversy in 1875 over his objections to ‘free, secular and compulsory’ education, Slattery’s arguments then had been described as ‘over-simplistic’ and advanced with ‘a grating authoritarianism’. Perhaps Slattery learnt from the embarrassment he caused to ‘Catholics and non-Catholics alike’, for in jousting with the Anglican bishop about prayers for rain he 66

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treated his opponent with possibly exaggerated respect, writing of the bishop’s ‘exalted position’ and ‘deservedly great literary reputation’. But why, he asked the bishop, did the Bible teach us to pray ‘give us this day our daily bread’, and why did the bishop’s own church have in its prayer book, ‘from lightning and tempest, from plague, pestilence and famine, O Lord deliver us’? Dean Slattery detected ‘modern sceptical and rationalistic theories’ in the bishop’s theology which would produce, in Slattery’s view, ‘calamitous consequences’. ‘By this lamentable process’ of scepticism and rationalism, Slattery warned, ‘many have already come to deny the very existence of God’.6 This was a reasonable concern: if God would not help us in our afflictions, did we need God at all? ‘The sayings of the Bishop have taken me by surprise,’ an eloquent selector wrote, ‘and upset my ideas about prayer.’ But there was more to the selector’s letter to the Argus than that; indeed, the letter neatly captured the confusion that this drought had caused generally. This was not just a theological argument; probably it would have no place in this book if it were just that. Drought forced people to think through their positions and beliefs: in a benign God, in the prospects of the little man against the big, in the point and purpose of material prosperity. There was now much confusion in the land because of the drought that threw into doubt notions of progress, of the equation that linked hard work and prosperity, of the glorious and unstoppable future of Australia. The selector wrote: When I plough and sow my seed by day, and say at night ‘give us this day our daily bread’ the rain does not fall, my labour is 67

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lost, my cattle are starving, my children in want. My human nature craves for help. I add to my prayers: ‘O Lord give us rain’. I have ploughed, sowed and waited, and now must all this be lost. It rained last year about this time. Why if it rained last year does it not this year? I feel the need for rain and I ask my neighbours . . . to join me in prayer for rain, which is only another prayer for daily bread. We are ignorant and we ask the head of our church to write us a prayer and he says ‘No, it is of no use, rain comes by fixed laws, which prayer cannot alter’. All I can say is, my human nature and sympathies are against him.7

Another equally sceptical man, calling himself Pluvius (rainy), asked any reader with the necessary leisure to search the Argus files ‘to look up the previous occasions on which prayers have been offered for this purpose, and the period which elapsed between such prayers and the descent of needed showers’. In other words, forget the theological niceties; did prayers for rain ever work? Some other practical people even recognised that God had duties beyond those He owed to the farmers. Another writer, and the issue was attracting many of them, suggested prayers of thanksgiving for the dry weather that had prevailed for so long since the entry of smallpox into New South Wales. With dry weather, it seemed, God was protecting the people from the disastrous spread of disease. ‘Surely it was better to see,’ this writer concluded, ‘sad though the sight, the water trains than the dead cart.’ It only needed someone to say: ‘God works in mysterious ways’.8 Signing himself J. Melbourne in that curious Anglican way destined to set Catholic and other teeth on edge, the bishop 68

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responded at some length to most of his critics. If nothing else he was a hard-working man. And that was his message: Let a man be ever so righteous and prayerful, if he neglect to comply with the order of nature, he will be unprosperous. Let him be ever so selfish and earthly, yet if he does comply substantially with that order, he will be successful . . . the coming of rain is strictly a natural event.9

And, in the Australian colonies, settlers were beginning to learn, it might also be a rare event. As one wrote to the Shepparton News: My experience throughout nearly every ‘settled’ portion of Victoria compels me to earnestly urge upon the clergy and our legislators the great necessity that exists for general enlightenment on the ‘unreliability of the seasons’ . . . for notwithstanding our Bishop of Melbourne’s recent commendable suggestion to conserve instead of to pray . . . we may continue in our present suicidal course until there will be little or no water to conserve.

Selectors, it seemed, needed to know much more about the land they were working and the conditions that prevailed here, so different from what they had known at Home.10 If the selectors were doing it tough, and they were, and deserved at least the sympathy of J. Melbourne, spare a thought for those a rung lower on the ladder, the itinerant rural workers, the swagmen. If Albert Field can stand for the selectors, let Joseph Jenkins stand for the swaggies. In hearing his story, we can learn something of what these people endured in this great drought. Joseph Jenkins’s Diary of a Welsh Swagman has become 69

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an Australian classic since it was first published in 1975, 77 years after its author’s death. ‘Jo’ Jenkins led an extraordinary life. Born in Cardiganshire in West Wales in 1818, with five brothers and six sisters, Jo prospered as a farmer; he married at 28 and had nine children. In 1857 his farm was judged to be the best in his county. But in 1869, at age 51, he suddenly migrated to Victoria—alone—and spent the next 25 years in the colony, returning home only in 1894 to die in 1898. It was an unhappy marriage, most thought, that drove Jo Jenkins from his home, and even when he returned to Wales his wife showed him little companionship. Still, he had been away a very long time. In Victoria Jenkins was just a worker, scraping a living in good times, surviving in bad. There were many like him. For them the selector was the boss, not the little man, and not much liked as a boss, either. What set Joseph Jenkins apart from the rest was his writing. He began his diary for the new year 1882 with the extraordinary boast that this was his forty-third annual diary without a single blank day. ‘My care and labour, and often under great disadvantage, to write down for every day is not an ordinary thing to do for a hard-working man.’ He did it to ‘nurse [his] learning through life’. To learn to write in fact, to force himself to reflect and to think, to make more of himself. For these reasons, then, had Jenkins begun his diary; after that he had just kept on going. Joseph Jenkins became such a fan of the value of writing a diary as a means of learning that when he looked at the Victorian system of compulsory education he wondered if it was achieving all that was intended for it. To complete the job, Jenkins thought, the government should hand out a ‘blank 70

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diary for every person male and female to fill out regularly’. That would keep people learning for life.11 And the libraries and archives of the nation would be swamped and historians would be pleased. For in the collections of the State Library of Victoria this diary stands out as a rare, almost unique, document of the life of a working man in the 1880s. Joseph Jenkins’s grandson, William Evans, edited the Victorian diaries for publication, and the originals came to the State Library only many years later. Evans claimed that he allowed his ‘grandfather to tell his own story’. He admitted that there were abridgements, of course, but ‘otherwise the complete script is in my grandfather’s own words and his telling’. If only it were so. Throughout the published version of the Victorian diaries the grammar is ‘improved’, the language tidied up, the rough edges smoothed out. The result is still intensely interesting, but nothing like as compelling as the original. When Joseph Jenkins called a spade, well, a spade, his grandson tut-tutted and sharply wielded the blue pencil. How disastrous was it in Victoria towards the end of 1881? ‘There is not enough grass in the bush for a man to wipe his back parts,’ Jo Jenkins wrote; and again early in 1882: ‘there is not enough feed for a lean goose around here’. Neither comment found its way into the published version.12 Jenkins was in Maldon, in central Victoria, during the drought of the early 1880s; his diary captures the unfolding disaster. Maldon was a mining town, and the local paper, the Tarrangower Times, unusually for a rural paper was not much interested in the farmers; it was a miner’s and townsperson’s paper. Even so, by 1882 the paper was reporting that the town and the district were fast running out of water. So widespread was the notoriety 71

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of the Bishop of Melbourne’s comments that this fact was wrapped up with the question, ‘What would Bishop Moorhouse say?’. The editor also made the interesting point that too much fuss had been made about extending the railway to almost every conceivable spot in Victoria, taking enormous investment to do so, when the money might have been better spent on water storage. In February 1882 the shire council turned off the water trough in town because the selectors were bringing as many as ten or twelve cattle at a time to water there, damaging town amenities. But the townsfolk had no water in their tanks and the council had to reverse the decision. When the water came on again at the municipal trough, ‘the rush of water carriers with their buckets on Wednesday evening was rather astonishing, at the same time pitiable to be made aware so many residents are destitute of supply at home’. There simply was no water in the homes. There were deaths, too. Five children in the town had died of diphtheria within a month; one man lost his only daughter and his eldest son within a couple of weeks of each other. Was it the corrupted water supply, people asked, or some other cause?13 By July 1881, Joseph Jenkins was recording that ‘the crops are looking backward. The cattle are looking poor and on the point of starvation for want of grass and winter fodder . . . in fact they eat each other’s dung’. Maldon, he reported in October, was ‘one of the most barren and hungry places in Victoria’. It was ‘miserable’ to look at the cattle and a ‘pity’ to hear them ‘bellowing for feed’. And it was hot: ‘after breakfast I went to the bush. Too warm to work hard’. In January 1882, on one particular day ‘[I] lost more sweat today than any day but one 72

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since my arrival in the colony’, and a week or so later ‘it was a regular and severe hot windy day only one I remember equal to it since my arrival here. It was nearly unbearable’.14 In February Jo was threshing wheat but could not work for four hours in the middle of the day for the heat. Last Sunday, he recorded, it was 115°F (46°C) in the shade: ‘the surface is looking hard and bare’. ‘No life without water,’ he reported, and couldn’t even find enough to wash his clothes: ‘nothing will be left after tomorrow’. A town without water. Up again early and in good health and spirit. Sign of another scorcher. The hot winds began early and has continued all day. The atmosphere became overcast. Very sultry and hot [this in mid March]. Having tried to split wood but could not go on for the heat.

Watching the cattle that were so weak and lean that they could hardly move, hearing them bellowing piteously for feed as they starved to death, Jenkins reflected on the response of the townspeople. ‘They blame the state of the weather and its author of course. I do not consider that a wise and safe plan as the Bishop of Melbourne said. It is wiser to make dams and preserve the waste water’. As late as mid-April there was still no relief: I wonder very often how the cattle stand such scarcity of feed and water. And wonder even more how the cattle stand over their legs when so lean and skeleton like . . . There is not a blade of green grass anywhere for them. The butter is at 2/6 per lb already and the 4 lb loaf [of bread] is 8d. 73

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He would have had to work most of the day just to buy a loaf of bread.15 Jo had been doing a variety of work during this debilitating time—getting in whatever wheat there was, threshing it and bagging it. When that work ran out he resorted to timber-getting in the nearby bush. The worker, in this case, was self-employed, buying a licence and doing what he could to provide timber for the mines. Working for wages as an employee of the selectors shows how tough life was, and Jenkins remarked that ‘thousands’ were leaving the colony for lack of work and the wretched wages. In early 1882 Jenkins commented: My employer on this farm is a miner and he is obliged to appear at the Golden Reef at 7 o’clock am then to work 8 hours underground—wages £2.5.0 for every six days nearly a shilling an hour. He obtains men to work on his farm at [twopence ha’penny] an hour and better men than himself on a farm.

There was not much liking for this man: ‘my employer will be here tomorrow in his carriage, of all my employers through life I really think the present is beyond comparison to them all in crushing and enslave his employes’. It was a buyer’s market: I was out bagging wheaten chaff before the sun came to sight. I had 50 bags filled before 8 o’clock. About ha’penny a bag was the price. Not a bad job but there is no sign of another job for Jo. I went round the farmers but without a shadow of success. Paying a shilling for my bed at Mr Brown’s Hotel and a shilling for every meal. It cannot last long like that. 74

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One of the selectors who had previously employed Jo got a job ‘burning dead cattle along the Common at 5 shillings a head. Any job like that the selectors always snatch it from the poor man’s chance’.16 But the selectors badly needed such money, as a moment’s reflection would have shown him. They had heavy costs, including regular payments to the government for their land. They were now just hanging on, most of them, or teetering over the edge. When 60 points (15 millimetres) of rain fell at Kerang in early April most people ‘secured three or four weeks supply of water’. They could go on a little longer but it was too late for some. ‘I am sorry,’ the editor of the Kerang Times wrote, ‘to see the selectors in this shire leave one by one, James Mulley, farmer, was the last who has left this neighbourhood.’ Some had simply run out of money. Others were depressed beyond their strength or ill in other ways: bad eyes caused by the dust; stomachs cramped from bad water; all of them hungry. They were exhausting themselves carting water and had no hope of putting in their crops. Indeed those who had nothing but their crops to depend on were in a ‘deplorable position’. They had no seed because of last year’s failure and the ground was rock-hard, impossible to plough. ‘What, then, are we to do?’ the writer cried out in anguish. ‘For if they do not sow they cannot reap, and they cannot remain on the land without crops.’17 Maddeningly, throughout most of Victoria late March and early April 1882 saw black clouds massing, in some cases bringing passing showers. There were heavy clouds at Kerang, for example, and a steady downpour looked on the cards. But there was not 75

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much in it; it rained for only a couple of hours. At Ninyeunook, near Kerang, in early April black clouds built up and wherever a house was passed there could be seen the inhabitants preparing their tubs and tanks to catch the precious fluid, which they hoped would soon be poured in torrents upon them. But, alas, many were disappointed, for the storm was of but short duration, the rain even in the most favoured localities only lasting about a quarter of an hour.

In mid-April some rain fell generally, ‘not a great deal, but more than we have had for a long while. After the long drought it was a pleasure to lie in bed and hear the rain pattering on the roof, and to think how cold it was outside’.18 And then it started to rain seriously, on 22 April to be precise; it rained all night and there was a heavy flood in the creeks. Joseph Jenkins’s diary entry would bring joy to any serious student of rural Australia: ‘farmers begin to complain of too much rain already’, just two days after it had started to fall. On 26 April, ‘the grass begins to grow and the surface is looking green already’, but Jenkins knew enough to recognise that there were still troubles ahead; in early May he was saying that winter feed might be plentiful, but at the moment there was nothing for the cattle and the farmers were still ‘obliged to give them straw’. The rain beginning on 22 April was general across Victoria and in some cases falls set new records.19 Three inches (75 millimetres) had fallen at Kerang in three days and water was lying on the ground, a sight ‘that had not been seen for a long time past . . . Crabholes, tanks and dams are filled to overflowing. Grass has already commenced to grow’ 76

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and those who already had their crops in were very happy. But it was too late for many of the sheep and cattle, ‘many being either dead or so far gone as to be past recovery’. It was the heaviest fall of rain at Pyramid Hill for the past seven years, the correspondent for the Kerang Times reported jubilantly, and the paper also noted that ‘the farmers appear years younger than they did a month ago’.20 At Durham Ox they were wondering to whom they should give thanks for this generous end to the drought. Wrote the merry correspondent to the Kerang Times: If the Bishop is right in regarding prayer for rain as a childish act I suppose giving thanks to God for the much needed downpour . . . is also childishness. I am inclined to think that very many who applauded the right rev. gentleman’s utterances on the subject, would nevertheless have joined heartily on Sunday morning last in singing the doxology. There is something to be thankful for . . . without question it is the best fall of rain we have had for years . . . we expect to see a flood in a day or two.21

A more sober editor later wrote on such occasions: we have forcibly impressed upon us the value of water. What penman could calculate in gold the wealth showered upon the earth during the past week? . . . the public revenue of Victoria would not equal it. The value is simply incalculable. The late rains were the equivalent of salvation to thousands of settlers; and not to them alone, for we are all dependent upon the earth . . . poor and rich alike have reason to rejoice.22 77

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Now people could resume their normal lives with its patterns of planting, harvesting, shearing; caring for crops, flocks, the land itself. The selectors had been badly shaken and only in this drought had they realised how precious indeed the water was. Now would they make plans for better storage? Now would the government take seriously its responsibility to promote water trusts and to secure town water supplies? Now would the full weight of the Bishop’s quip, ‘Don’t pray for rain, dam it’, come into force? Or would this terrible drought be passed off as an aberration, a ‘once-in-a-hundred-year’ event to be talked of when things became a little dry, but truly pushed to the back of the mind where terrors always lurk? Bishop and swaggie, they had done their best to better understand this new land. Were others following their thinking?

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3 ‘They have come to the bottom of the flour bag and do not know how to replenish it’ ‘They have come to the bottom of the flour bag . . .’

visited Australia until 1954, but in 1902 Australia had a glimpse of what such a tour might be like. For the first time since she left her homeland in 1886, Madame Melba, the international celebrity and world-renowned singer, returned. She arrived by ship at Brisbane on 14 September 1902, and travelling by train in the State coach used by the Duke and Duchess of York for the Federation celebrations a year earlier, reached Sydney on 19 September and Melbourne, her home town, on 21 September. It was a royal progress. Crowds stood by the train line along the route, waving and cheering. At every stop there were large crowds, flowers and, of course, speeches. ‘For newly federated Australia,’ a biographer has written, ‘Melba represented glamour, success and international acceptance.’ Since she had secured her place as the world’s greatest singer in the late 1880s, Australians could only read of Melba. Now they could see her and hear her remarkable voice. ‘Is it too much to NO REIGNING BRITISH MONARCH

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say’, the Argus asked on her death in 1931, ‘that she was the greatest Australian?’1 Melba saw more than the cheering crowds from her royal train. ‘I had noticed out of my window,’ she wrote, ‘the carcasses of sheep and cattle lying dead and rotting under the gum trees whither they had crawled to eat the leaves. And when they could reach no more they dropped dead.’ Eastern Australia presented a terrible spectacle by September 1902. Drought had been a constant in the land on which Melba travelled for several years already. But 1902 was the worst year. She saw the trees with the dead and dying animals beneath them; not a blade of grass; paddocks as bare as if they were roads; dust, in huge billowing clouds, everywhere. The Federation Drought, they called it, the worst natural disaster the country had yet known. In the Mallee, at a place later to be known as Nyah West, William Pearse, son of a Ballarat miner turned farmer, had begun farming in 1895. In 1901 his farm receipts were £142.12.8 for 165 bags of wheat carted to the nearest station. In 1902 Pearse received only £46.9.10 for 64 bags of wheat. And in 1903, thanks to the drought of 1902, he took just £3.19.1. This turned his credit balance of £6 at the bank to a debit of £123 which might take years to work off. Pearse also lost five horses in 1902, too much sand entering their stomachs along with what little feed they could find. One of the horses he reckoned was worth £30. Pearse’s disaster, and we will know him in more detail later, stands not just for the Mallee wheat farmers but for all those whom the drought of 1902 either bankrupted, or nearly so, destroyed hope and life, or nearly so, demented, or nearly so.2 80

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Melba had not seen her father for more than a decade and she had long anticipated their reunion. Of all the men she had known, she later said, her father, David Mitchell, meant the most to her. Eager to see her also, he had travelled to Albury to meet his daughter’s train on its way to Melbourne. But at Albury Mitchell had a slight stroke and when Melba arrived they had to give her the news that her father was ill. She fainted from the shock but recovered to visit him and found that his condition was not too bad. She recovered sufficiently to be feted in Melbourne. At a civic reception at the Town Hall the singer was standing receiving people until late into the night. Slumping into a chair when this was done, she announced it was ‘very nice to see all one’s country folk, but just a trifle tiring’. The combination of the rapturous welcome, the awful scenes of rural desolation, the emotion of her father’s illness, and the wild scenes in Melbourne when, it seemed, the whole city turned out to welcome her, determined Australia’s greatest celebrity to do something for the country people beyond merely entertaining them. No-one, she believed, could be unmoved by their plight.3 Yet Melba did not rush her philanthropy. It was not until early November that the Argus described what she had decided to do. ‘I have seen with my own eyes,’ she said, ‘the brown, burnt paddocks extending for hundreds of miles, with no vestige of grass upon them. I have seen the starving sheep leaning against the fences too weak to move.’ She wanted to help the ‘starving settlers’. She might have held a charity concert, she thought, but that would not have raised enough money. Finally she hit on her solution. She knew personally, she said, most of the world’s best-known wealthy people. ‘She has addressed to each 81

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of them,’ the Argus reported with wide-eyed admiration, ‘a pathetic appeal for assistance in the present grievous crisis in Australia’s history.’ About 30 of Melba’s richest friends received her cabled cry for help. While she herself could give only £200 (although her jewellery, keen Argus readers would have remembered from an earlier piece, was valued at over £100 000), her friends, she knew, would respond with the greatest generosity.4 At several points in her career Madame Melba ran into trouble. Though married, at law anyway, as a young singer she had damaged her reputation with a too-public dalliance with Philippe, Duke of Orléans, and her husband began divorce proceedings on the grounds of adultery. She learnt the importance of discretion. She would learn that lesson a second time now.5 The day after the report of her appeal to the wealthy, the Argus, which had naively welcomed the diva’s intervention, reported that the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce had held an emergency meeting to announce that it ‘strongly resented’ her appeal and its assumption that Australians could not look after their own. The Argus got the picture quickly. Mused the editor: Now and then there are appeals made to the wealthy men for relief for some sorely-smitten community; but such a community is never one highly elevated in the social scale . . . these appeals are of the Indian Famine order where a poor population is face to face with starvation.

Most emphatically, the Argus now believed, this was not the situation in Australia. ‘Even if a man were to lose his stock and station he does not enter the ranks of those to whom alms from abroad 82

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can be so much as offered . . . Pioneers,’ the editor continued, ‘are no feeble, indolent race predisposed to accept assistance.’ The Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, was quick to intervene too. He cabled London to correct any view that Melba’s appeal was made on behalf of Australia as a whole.6 The Prime Minister? That seems a little over the top but there was then a view, as a Victorian minister put it, that the appeal might have done ‘immense harm’ to Australia’s credit rating. Shooting off one’s mouth asking for help, for charity, might, the politicians feared, reduce the new nation, in the eyes of the civilised world, to the level of an underdeveloped country. Investors might look on Australia differently, as much lower down the social scale than they had earlier thought; as a nation unable to care for its own. Investment funds from abroad might therefore dry up, so that the drought would have a double impact on the people. It was tricky, though, to criticise Madame Melba. As another politician said, ‘it seemed ungracious’. But, they knew, best-loved Australian or not, the damage she had caused must not run on. Within the space of another day, Melba herself had got the message and had accordingly withdrawn her appeal to her wealthy friends. ‘I had no idea,’ she said, ‘that what I did could possibly be regarded as a reflection either on the credit of the Commonwealth or on the ability and generosity of Australians themselves to alleviate the present temporary distress.’ The Argus was delighted: ‘we think she is entitled to greater applause for having withdrawn’. After all, it was ‘her keen womanly sympathy’ which induced her to take the quickest means for securing aid. Surely no-one would think less highly of her. She would inform 83

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her friends, Madame Melba had said, that the local response will render outside contributions unnecessary. She might then have watched with some interest and possibly some hurt pride the progress of the local appeal for funds. For possibly Melba’s appeal abroad had been inspired by a new phenomenon: fundraising for our own.7 The Argus had started its own appeal a week or so earlier, at the end of October, and within a few days there was over £1000 in the fund. Melbourne’s Lord Mayor, Sir Samuel Gillott, got into the act with his own appeal; within a week it stood at £2915.2.6. Public charity for the pioneers was new territory in Australia for until then the rule had been that if you were in need, you fended for yourself or tried to find a spot of organised and immediate charity, a soup kitchen, for example. Some people prospered, others lived in poverty; it seemed a rule of life and why would anyone interfere? You took your chances and if you wanted work you should go where the work was. In the disastrous depression of the 1890s which saw the collapse of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, tens of thousands of Victorians had migrated as far away as Western Australia looking for work. The authorities might hand out soup, or make up work with roads and railways, but every man was essentially on his own when it came to looking after himself and his family. There had been earlier appeals for the victims of terrible disasters, the collapse of a mine for example, but never for those victims of recurring natural disasters, of which, of course, drought was the most common.8 That is until people began to find out for themselves more about conditions of life in places like Victoria’s Mallee. The 84

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Mallee is marginal country in the north-west of Victoria, covered with a ‘persistent eucalyptus scrub characterised by stunted trees, with multiple stems arising from a resilient underground root stock’. The Mallee had been settled only in the last decade of the nineteenth century, when it became possible through the combination of better strains of wheat, more sophisticated land legislation, better agricultural equipment, and the spread of the railways. Some of the settlers, at least, were refugees from the economic collapse in Melbourne, anxious to make a new start and keen to be directing their own fortunes. By 1902 they were facing a new nightmare.9 It was not that this extraordinary drought year burst upon them unheralded; bad season had followed bad season since the middle of the 1890s. William Pearse took up his selection in 1893 but did not begin to work it for a while. His diary begins in 1895 when he is 30 years of age. He has already cleared some of his land and built a rudimentary log cabin. He lives alone. On 4 January 1895 he takes 34 bags of wheat to Nyah and camps there overnight. He has a swim in the Murray the next morning, buys some fish and goes home. The next day, his diary tells us, Pearse carts four loads of water from the waterhole before loading his wagon with 27 bags of wheat. It is ominous that as early as 1895 Pearse needs to be carting water. The rains have already failed.10 Writing of such selectors in 1902, the mayor of Bendigo told Argus readers that: they are worthy of all the aid that can be rendered to them. It is admitted by one and all who know them that they include numbers 85

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of the best type of fearless, industrious and self-reliant Victorian pioneers. But the Mallee is a variable quantity, and since these men set out to combat the wilderness the seasons have been steadily against them.

Was that, in itself, enough to justify the community opening their wallets to these people? Ought not the settlers look out for themselves? That had been the Australian way. They were living on bran and treacle, the mayor reported, they had no money for food and clothing; they were ‘our own flesh and blood . . . can a substantial sum be obtained for them? . . . It is not merely a drought which is to be faced’, the mayor concluded with a dramatic flourish, ‘we perhaps better understand the situation when we obliterate that word, and speak instead of famine’; starvation, it seemed, stalked the land and we could not let our own starve.11 There was a large element of hyperbole in the appeal for funds at a public rally in the Melbourne Town Hall in October. The appeal presented a dilemma. While anxious to avoid sinking to the level of an ‘Indian Famine’ appeal, speakers had to present the crisis gravely if people were to open their wallets and purses. No-one had thought of giving money to Albert Field (or Jo Jenkins, for that matter), and the drought victims had not thought to ask. It was, well, demeaning. Yet the situation was now so dire that the settlers must be helped. So speakers at this rally had to assert the independence of the Mallee settlers, while at the same time seeking help for them. The State Governor led the way. Sir George Sydenham Clarke was an intelligent man, a military engineer, widely published— 86

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he had five books to his name—with substantial administrative experience. Clarke was 52 years of age when he arrived in Melbourne at the end of 1901; he has been described as ‘able but opinionated’. Of the Mallee settlers he said: ‘these men had gone into the wilderness and worked unceasingly for years . . . they had not the opportunity of tasting the pleasures of town life; they scorned delights and lived laborious days’. As did most Victorians, probably. That has ever been the lot of the working man with a family to care for. ‘Now in the time of their adversity they exhibited a marvellous uncomplaining spirit.’ Careful words, those—‘wilderness’ and ‘adversity’—calling on emotions; drawing a picture of victims to whom evil was done, not having brought it on themselves. ‘The spirit of true brotherhood,’ the Governor continued, ‘existed among the people of the state, and which would yet carry them through greater difficulties than even this.’12 More practical men than the Governor arranged emergency measures such as the transport of starving stock from the north to better pasture in Gippsland at concessional rates. If the railway had been instrumental in opening up the Mallee lands to agriculture and pastoralism, it was now important in rescuing at least some of the endangered animals. The numbers seem impressive; on 22 October 1902, 21 trains passed through the Bendigo railway yards heading south, carrying 12 000 sheep and 400 cattle. The next day Bendigonians expected to see 24 trains pass through. Of course, land for agistment at the other end was not cheap and only the better off, not your true Mallee selector, could afford this scheme. Mr James Barry, from Nathalia, for example, sent 300 store cattle to Mr Thomas Strickland’s 87

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property near Warragul. Mr Barry needed to lease 600 acres (243 hectares) for at least six months at £600. The cattle, Mr Strickland noted, were in ‘very poor condition’.13 The newspapers gave some of the story of the terrible conditions in the Mallee, and Victorians responded as the Governor had predicted they would. Towards the end of December 1902 they had subscribed £11 450.7.5 to the Lord Mayor’s Fund and £2655.14.4 to the Argus fund. Ordinary folk had certainly become involved, as a letter from ‘Mite’ testified: In talking over the trials of the up-country farmers at our evening meal yesterday I suggested that our sympathy would not be very much valued unless it took a practical form. I offered half-acrown, my wife responded with a like amount, others followed with their smaller sums, and herewith I send you 7/6 . . . I have not a big salary.

This was not charity, the Governor had insisted, for ‘the Mallee farmers were not the sort of men to accept charity’. Is it fair to ask, though, if ‘Mite’ were to have lost his job through, say, economic circumstances, whether an appeal would be established to assist him and his kind? Did living in the bush bring special privileges?14 Some complained that the focus of the appeal was too narrow. What of the labouring classes in the bush, the shearers, the itinerant workers, the storekeepers even, all of whom depended on the farmer for their livelihood? ‘Scores of labouring men and their families [in the Mallee] are in a state of semi-starvation,’ one of them wrote. Their average weekly wage had not exceeded 12/6 throughout the winter, the writer reported, and with the total 88

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failure of the crops there would be no work in the Mallee whatsoever during the summer. It was assumed, however, that these people, not tied down by land-owning, would move to where the work was. And so this drought saw thousands of people ‘on the wallaby’ (on the move and looking for work), whole families often, and while they might not be eligible for organised cash grants, not charity of course, they would be given a few pounds of flour and tea by good people as they made their way about the state. Not a living by any means, but no-one wanted to see someone, a family particularly, starve.15 The Australian colonies had federated in 1901, a joyous event, and already they were calling this the Federation Drought. In fact federation had not made much immediate practical difference to Australian lives, the former colonies taking little real notice of their neighbours and tending to go about their own business in their own ways. Federation was for defence, for the elimination of border tariffs and customs duties. And a handy name for a drought, it seemed. The people of Victoria apparently knew little about what was happening in New South Wales, for example, or in Queensland, and so on around the nation. But the Federation Drought knew nothing of state boundaries and was ruining lives and incomes across eastern Australia. And responses were consistent across the board, too, even though people did not publicly refer to initiatives elsewhere. James Carruthers was born in Sydney in 1848 and entered the Methodist ministry in 1868. As was the Methodist custom, Carruthers had served in many parts of the state and understood something of rural life and its hardships. President of the New South Wales Conference in 1895, Carruthers toured rural areas 89

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extensively and was looked up to by his fellow ministers and church members as a true leader. Presumably because of this prominence, a brother minister wrote to him at the parsonage in Stanmore, Sydney in late 1902, appealing for funds for a ‘stricken’ and ‘drought ruined’ family. Now afflicted with scarlet fever and diphtheria, the two eldest children dead, the family was in ‘great need’. Carruthers at once sent off some money of his own, but he knew that there was ‘great and poignant distress’ and he wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald, suggesting that there might be some public movement to cope ‘in an adequate way with the many cases of distress that must exist’. The Herald published his letter in the first days of 1903.16 Joseph Anderson, correctly but challengingly describing himself as a colporteur (one selling religious tracts and books), travelled throughout New South Wales for the British and Foreign Bible Society. He had seen the ordinary people’s misery at first hand: ‘the best food that many had was tea, bread and treacle; milk, butter and meat—with the exception of rabbits—out of the question; and in many homes not as much as one shilling in money’. If the people knew the facts, Anderson predicted, an appeal for relief funds would be warmly supported.17 Writing from Merrool, near Narrandera, in the south-west of the state, farmer A.G. Humby claimed that he had ‘fought the fight for eight years’ and would speak the plain truth. For 20 years people around his property had had 20 inches (500 millimetres) of rain a year; it was regular and reliable; then the rains stopped and he and his mates lurched from one bad season to another. The current drought was the worst he had ever seen. ‘One thing is certain,’ he reported, ‘many are obliged to throw 90

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up the sponge . . . unless help comes the country will be depopulated . . . they have come to the bottom of the flour bag and do not know how to replenish it.’ Storekeepers had finally been obliged to stop the farmers’ credit, and the banks too; there was no work for anyone, the paddocks were as bare as Sydney streets, yet in the good times the grass was so high ‘that I could only see the backs of my sheep’. The farmers in the region were hanging on for a return to the good times, for what they understood as a return to normality. But they needed help now if they were to stay on their properties.18 The Herald reported that ‘a gentleman who has recently travelled through the Temora and adjacent districts’, not too far from Narrandera and Merrool, wrote that people elsewhere could simply form no idea ‘of the appalling ruin and desolation which meet one everywhere’. The Herald had been running these stories and observations for nearly two weeks and at last there was some official response. The Lord Mayor, Thomas Hughes, would call a public meeting to see what could be done. Hughes was Sydney’s first lord mayor—the title had been changed from mayor in 1902—and was ‘an imposing figure with dark hair, parted in the centre and a waxed moustache’.19 It seemed pretty obvious to most that the citizens of Sydney would help if only they could be made to understand just how terrible it was out in the bush. Perhaps this puts the lie to the notion that until fairly recently Australians all had bush connections. That back then the city met the country in the country on school holidays and at family gatherings. That in those days Australians were all bush folk at heart and that children in Pymble or Brighton all knew, until just a few years ago, that milk 91

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came from cows and not from cardboard cartons. The truth is that in 1902 those people who wanted to raise money to help the bush knew they had a problem describing the disaster to city people. One man from Jerilderie tried the analogy of war: The men who have fought the drought for the last five or six years have gained an experience that will be of lasting benefit to them and the State. They are veterans, have fought a good fight, and thoroughly deserve the fruits of victory . . . they have fought a desperate battle against King Drought, and, still unconquered, they are prepared to again join battle if the Government and the people supply the sinews of war.20

Australians had been living with the Boer War since 1899 and with troops returning during 1902 a mood of war was still current in the community. We cannot know, of course, whether the analogy worked for the Herald’s readers, but recourse to talk of war shows how important people believed it to be that the tragedy of this drought was imaginatively understood by those remote from the bush. Then, as now, it was the graphic picture that counted. Melba’s description of sheep leaning against the fences, lacking the strength to stand unaided, stayed in the mind, as did a report from Narrandera that some farmers were putting their horses in slings, trying desperately to keep them upright and alive. The Herald supported the call to arms, but somewhat grudgingly. This question of looking after those at home was, after all, new and the Herald had never been first among those to propose change. Looking at the Victorian example of help to the Mallee settlers, the Herald supposed that something might perhaps come 92

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of an appeal to the community, particularly if there was ‘no unreasonable expectation of results beyond the power of the community and its government’ and no exaggeration in the telling of the tale of woe. No exaggeration in the telling of the tale? Was there a fear, even then, that people in the bush might come across as whingers, or worse, as lead-swingers?21 Again the question of getting across the truth about the bush intruded. How to obtain a realistic understanding of the impact of the drought? Could city workers ever really understand? At the public meeting called by Lord Mayor Hughes and attended by about 260 people, Mr Humby, the letter-writer from Merrool and now a principal organiser of the fundraising campaign, said that he had gone out to the Riverina in 1891. At that time the place had been a Garden of Eden, but he had not known a really satisfactory season since. The farmers in his region had been suffering silently in the face of great difficulties for several years, he said, but now conditions were so bad it was hard even to keep fowls. There was nothing; no feed, no water. People in the bush did not want charity, he insisted; but while this was not a begging meeting, city folk ought to recognise that if the farmer went under, the city would follow pretty soon thereafter. In his district there were already abandoned homesteads and perhaps more tragedy would follow. This was not an appeal from the ordinary unemployed, he said, but from the genuine farmers on the land who were the pioneers of the country. Another country speaker, from Bourke, surely one of New South Wales’s driest regions, called for relief for men who had fought the ‘battle of the land’. It was hard to get the right tone in this speech-making business. Recourse to war images might succeed; distinguishing between 93

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noble pioneers and (less worthy?) ‘ordinary unemployed’ might not.22 Another speaker, W.N. Willis, the member for the far western seat of Barwon in the New South Wales Parliament, was one of those characters who delight those who love history with the richness and complexity of their stories. Born in Mudgee in 1858, the son of a blacksmith, Nicholas Willis left school at the age of nine to help support his mother—his father had deserted the family and run off to California. A shop assistant in Dubbo briefly, Nick was soon working as a hawker along the Macquarie, Darling and Bogan rivers. That was hard work for a boy but helpful in teaching him to understand the bush and its people. He did not find it hard to convince electors in Barwon that he was the man for them, and he first entered the colonial parliament in 1889. Willis prospered as a businessman, owning stores in four outback towns, and also won and lost several fortunes as a pastoralist. Described as a ‘rowdy, hard-drinking gadfly’ who used Parliament for his own ends, he was also a ‘ready, fluent, forcible speaker’. A founding proprietor of the scurrilous Sydney paper Truth, Willis would flee to South Africa in the face of land scandals in 1906, only to be brought back to Sydney in police custody. Two separate juries failed to agree with the Crown’s case against him and he walked from court a free, if tarnished man; prudently, he removed himself to London about 1910 where he died in 1922, penniless and intestate. When he rose to speak in 1903 at the Lord Mayor’s meeting he was probably greeted as a man of great outback experience who would know what he was talking about. Disgrace was yet to come.23 94

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Willis attacked those who were not at the meeting. Twentyfive thousand rushed to the bike races last Monday, he roared, pointing to the couple of hundred who had shown up at the Town Hall. Hundreds paid their guineas to listen to Madame Melba, he complained; where were they today? Where, too, were representatives of the Government, the Opposition, and the Labor Party, he asked. You could be sure that they would turn up to do honour to a great cyclist or a famous rower, Willis thundered, but if the meeting was just to hear of the distress and misery of settlers they would stay away. Women and children in the bush were walking miles to cut scrub to keep stock alive, or other miles just to get a bucket of water. Sydney was on the edge of a volcano and simply did not realise it. It was shameful, Willis concluded, that city people were so apathetic, so careless, so heartless. He gave 10 guineas to the cause; the meeting raised £130. This was a good sum for a town meeting, but hardly evidence that the drought and its victims had captured the imagination of a city.24 Someone on the organising committee might have appreciated that abuse was no way to open purse strings and soon the Sydney papers were flooded with stories of genuine distress in the bush. Remembering the Herald’s strictures against exaggeration, we can only hope that these stories are genuine, for they do give readers so far removed in time the best chance of understanding the effects of this terrible drought. The Narrandera newspaper wrote of ‘women weeping, children starving, and animals and birds dying’. But this was not good enough. Case studies, real life stories, alone would do.25 ‘Bread and low-priced jam, half-starved mutton, and black tea made from stagnant water, do not comprise a luxurious diet 95

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at any time,’ George Maiden, a Sydney businessman, wrote. Maiden had made a lot of money from the bush as a middleman, merging his own business with the pastoral giant Goldsborough Mort. ‘The number of deserving families verging towards starvation is steadily increasing,’ he reported, and what a disgrace it would be for a civilised society ‘in these days were one death to be accorded to starvation’. Verging towards starvation, if not an exaggeration, demanded the community’s response. It worked, wrote one of the managers at the city firm of Weaver and Perry, sending a donation of £25. We had not subscribed before, the manager explained, because we thought the fund would require millions of pounds to make a difference. Now that we can see it is for those who are deprived of the necessities of life we can make a difference: ‘we feel it our duty and pleasure to add our mite’.26 A letter from a settler in the Trangie district of central New South Wales tried to clarify things for those still missing the point. His place was valued at £1800 and he had made £1200 worth of improvements. He had a mortgage of £277 a year and he had no money at all for Christmas. He had shot dead six of his plough horses because he could not feed them and now had only four. Then he decided that he must sell one of these horses simply to provide food for his wife and children. All there was in the house when he went to sell the horse was a little rice. He walked the horse to Dubbo, more than 100 kilometres away, and when he set off from home he did not have a penny in his pocket. ‘Could anyone imagine what my feelings could be that Sunday riding away with the only strength I have left to put in my crop?’ He sold the horse for £15 when it was worth at least £30. Last 96

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year his wheat crop was worth between £500 and £700 and this year he had no crop at all. He was now ploughing, only in hope however, and had two shillings and sixpence left in money, 50 pounds of flour and 2 pounds of tea. Nothing else in the house. The storekeeper had closed the local store but had a promissory note over this man’s furniture. His wife and five little children were starving. And his wife was only 25 years old. If there was some money for food he could stay on the property and get on with the ploughing. ‘If I cannot stop at home now to finish putting my wheat in we are all lost.’ Exaggerated? Genuine? The organising committee in Sydney telegraphed the Trangie police, who replied: ‘the family are actually in want of food’. The Herald accepted the Trangie story: ‘a genuinely unexaggerated statement of a condition by no means unique’.27 The Sydney Town Hall meeting which had inaugurated the Lord Mayor’s Fund was held on 22 January 1903. A little less than a month later donations totalled £1889.11.6. The Herald did its bit to encourage donations with daily columns headlined ‘Distress at Gunnedah’, ‘Distress at Warren’ and so on. At Warren, for example, the local doctor reported that ‘most of the cases he was professionally attending were due to starvation through the inability to purchase proper nourishment’. People were starving in the bush in this most respectable of British communities.28 ‘Some years ago,’ the Herald remembered, ‘we [Sydney] were invited to subscribe to the Indian Famine Relief Fund—or the Martinique calamity—and people responded more generously then than now.’ The Victorian example of relief for the Mallee began to haunt the organisers of Sydney’s Lord Mayor’s Fund. Victorians had already subscribed more than £15 000 for the 97

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relief of the Mallee settlers, even though there was ‘less pressure of drought and less resources for liberality’. We are richer than they, and in greater strife, and yet we still hold back; that was the Herald’s message. ‘We know so well the self-respecting and self-reliant character of our people [and so] there is some difficulty [still] in realising that matters in certain drought-scourged regions are so bad as they actually are.’ But we have been told, the Herald reminded readers, that in some places people are ‘verging towards starvation. This says the last word on the subject’. Sophisticated societies do not allow their people to starve to death, was what the Herald was saying. Hmmm, wondered aloud parliamentarian Frederick Winchcombe, a founder of the woolbroking and stock and station agency Winchcombe, Carson and Co Ltd. Was there a danger that the appeal could damage the credit rating of the state and drive up interest rates, he asked? Best to keep the appeal securely within state boundaries, he advised, to avoid unnecessary risks. Winchcombe would die in Bombay in 1917, en route to England to visit his two sons in the AIF; his ship hit a mine and, rescued, he had died of pneumonia. The son of a Melbourne quarryman, Winchcombe left an estate valued at £56 109.29 In late February 1903 the Herald sent a special reporter out to the drought areas to see for himself. The reporter’s eyewitness accounts and yarns with farmers confirmed what the letters coming in to the organising committee had been saying. The reporter met with two farmers at Narrandera, ‘steady, industrious, energetic men who a few years ago were very comfortably situated’. Last year one of them had 1000 acres (405 hectares) planted with wheat, trying to make up for recent bad seasons: 98

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‘we did not take a single straw off the whole one thousand acres’. Both had taken ‘grubbing, scrubbing and fencing contracts’ to provide for their families, but all such work had now dried up and there were scores of men walking about the town trying to find employment. They and their families were living on bread and treacle, with occasionally a little lean mutton. Neither could see where their next bag of flour was coming from. The bank manager told of a settler of ‘too independent spirit’ who was discovered ‘on the very verge of starvation and without ordinary clothing’. Last year 30 000 bags of wheat had been railed from Narrandera. In 1903 not one bag was despatched.30 Then the reporter hit the road to Whitton, in the direction of Bynya, still in the south-west of the state. He travelled for mile after mile, he wrote, without seeing a ‘solitary blade of grass or an animal of any kind . . . you may listen in vain for the chirrup of a bird’. Talked to a woman in Whitton whose husband had gone off in search of work; that day neither she nor her children had had anything at all to eat. A man of 68, with ten children, the oldest of them seventeen, had ridden 700 miles (over 1100 kilometres) on his bicycle looking for work. A woman near Yanco declared that neither she, her husband nor their five children had tasted good food in four months. They had lived on bread and treacle, or pollard and boiled wheat. At Bogan Gate a storekeeper said he was owed about £3000. On 23 February 1903 the Lord Mayor’s Fund stood at £3527, just to put things in perspective. The storekeeper at Urana, Mr Hodgkinson, the name given by the reporter for the sake of authenticity, stated that in ordinary circumstances ten cases of treacle in his store would have lasted five months, but now less than five weeks. 99

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Ten cases of condensed milk would have lasted three months, now less than three weeks. Before, 20 or 30 people a week would have driven to Urana for their stores. Now only one settler had been able to keep his horse alive and he generously took out the stores to some of the others. Other people were walking up to 10 miles (16 kilometres) for their supplies. People at Urana had applied to the Lord Mayor’s Fund but had not heard back yet.31 Mr Gordon Johnston at Murrumbateman, near what would become Canberra, told of a man who called in asking for work, accompanied by his wife and two children aged eight and five. Johnston had no work but he did give the family enough tea, flour, sugar and meat for three or four days, as they intended walking on to Bungendore, about 60 kilometres. But clearly their wanderings were much greater than that. ‘They are absolutely destitute and starving,’ Mr Johnston reported; their horse had died at Cootamundra; the man had sold his rifle, with which he might have scored a few rabbits, for food. He and the boy were barefoot and sore, the woman and girl badly shod. Perhaps someone might send money to the post office at Bungendore for them. Or perhaps not, if it might damage the credit rating.32 Paddy Crick was appointed New South Wales Minister for Lands in April 1901 after a brief period as Minister Without Portfolio. It was easier to reach ministerial rank in the state parliaments then because many of the talented in the colonial parliaments had moved on to the federal parliament. But Paddy Crick had a wide intelligence and a great presence on a platform and might have been promoted to the ministry without the desertion of the best to a higher sphere. On the other hand, perhaps not: for he was a shocking drunk and a pugnacious 100

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parliamentarian, once removed from the New South Wales lower house (the ‘Bearpit’) for calling certain members ‘bloody Orange hounds and thieves’. He was a Catholic, you see. Born in South Australia, his father a labourer turned farmer, Crick grew up in the bush near Wellington in central New South Wales. He identified with the rural poor although his family had become well-off selectors. He had teamed up with Nick Willis to launch Truth upon Sydney and it was Crick, as Minister for Lands, who became embroiled with Willis in the scandal of acting corruptly in the allocation of leases. Willis, we saw, fled to South Africa and eventually London. Crick stuck it out in Sydney but he resigned from Parliament in 1906 before they could expel him. He died in 1908, a debauched and ruined man.33 Tied to Willis in many ways, yet Crick would not follow him in supporting the appeal for victims of the drought. On the contrary, speaking at Erskineville on the day that collectors roamed city and suburban streets rattling the tin for the bush, Crick denounced ‘Drought Saturday’. He told his listeners that ‘this drought relief business was all rot and humbug’ and he would not give ‘a farthing to it’. If people wanted to find real distress, Crick continued, they should look in the centres of large populations—like Erskineville? The bush could look after itself, he thought, but already the government had extended time for payment of debts and had allowed the carriage of stock and fodder on the state’s railways at reduced rates. He held a rural seat, but perhaps Crick thought that people in the bush did not read city newspapers. Later, speaking at Blayney, near Bathurst, he wriggled—he said that his controversial speech had been ‘shamefully misreported’. Despite Crick, the street 101

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collectors raised £1570 and were ‘jubilant’; the Lord Mayor’s Fund stood at over £10 000. Then Madame Melba announced that she would donate the proceeds from her farewell Sydney concert to the cause. All, ‘as it were [for] a handful of rice’, as Paddy Crick had sneered. Two thousand eight hundred people attended Melba’s concert and she donated £600 to the Fund.34 Rain, and plenty of it, was what the bush really needed; although, of course, money would lessen the possibility that the worst off would starve. Rain, some still believed, as if they had not heard of Bishop Moorhouse, came from God; and so in late March the Protestant churches organised a special day of humiliation and prayer for rain. In phlegmatic Sydney the day did not arouse any theological controversy about the workings of ‘the natural law’. Rather, some saw the closest connections between the state of behaviour of the people and the condition of the country. Speaking at the Marrickville Congregational Church, Rev. Dr Roseby wondered if God was permitting the drought to go on to bring people to their senses. Life in New South Wales, he thought, was pleasure bent and past sins might be catching up with the people. ‘There might be,’ he said, ‘such a thing as confession or humiliation for public and national sins [such as] the recent pugilistic exhibitions, and of Australia’s ill-treatment, from the beginning, of the Aboriginal race.’ Would it rain only when the nation had washed away its sins? That was a tough doctrine. In fact rain was already falling when the day of humiliation and prayer took place. It continued to fall. By late April the drought was over in New South Wales, with some excellent falls recorded. Naturally, though, many 102

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people still lived in extreme poverty, and they would wait a year or so to sell their newly planted wheat.35 The Lord Mayor’s Fund for New South Wales Drought Relief officially closed on 31 December 1903, and later produced a report and financial statements. There had been three treasurers of the fund, two secretaries, a general committee of 94 and an executive committee of 25. The appeal had got off to a shaky start, the report admitted, because people did not understand the real situation in the bush. ‘When, however, the committee, with the powerful aid of the daily press, made known the actual position, the people responded to an extent which has enabled the actual needs of every worthy applicant to be relieved.’ The fund set up local committees to assess the merit of the various requests for assistance and to authorise orders on the stores for food and other goods. No cash money ever went directly to applicants in case they spent it unwisely or used it to pay off earlier debts. If the people were starving they must be fed; that was what the fund was for. Narrandera easily had the greatest number of persons assisted by the fund; there were 1903 of them; then followed Condoblin 875, Narromine 825, Dubbo 800, and then a number of areas with 500–700 inhabitants benefiting from assistance. Even the village of Bungendore, whence the hapless wandering family was making its way when last we heard of them, supported 406 applicants. Some 10 109 letters were received by the committee; unfortunately none of these ever made their way into the City of Sydney Archives.36 There were 87 local committees, and their surviving reports give some insight into the relief work that was carried out. At Angledool, to start at the top of the alphabet, ‘case after case of 103

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actual starvation has come before our local committee’; at Berrigan, ‘some cases of absolute destitution have been relieved’. At Boggabri, ‘in some cases we were told by the distressed that they had gone for a week at a time without tasting meat’. At Balranald they believed that the fund ‘has actually preserved the lives of many, as the obvious starvation must have produced diseases fatal to them’. And so on through the alphabet of New South Wales towns. It is, I suppose, possible that reports of ‘actual starvation’ might have been exaggerated by local secretaries in writing their reports in order to show how necessary a thing the fund had been. But that would be to suggest collusion between the local committees on a grand scale. The frequency of the claim that people were really starving is too great to suggest invention. I suspect that when local committees wrote of real or impending starvation it was precisely what they meant; as at Mossgiel, way out west on the road to Broken Hill: ‘the poverty here was very great . . . it was next door to starvation for them’. And yet even so there was an overwhelming reluctance to ask for help or even to accept what was offered. From Narrandera, for example, where there were so many applicants, the secretary reported: ‘I have witnessed men and women weep when applying for relief, the humiliation being so great’. Ah well, he concluded, ‘now we have had magnificent rain, the best for many years. Our prospects are bright, and things never promised better’. The fund raised £23 454.8.2—all up, a very creditable effort. After disbursements and expenses (£639), £289.14.9 remained to be donated to country hospitals.37 The appeal and the operation of the fund, beyond its inherent interest in developing our understanding of the Federation 104

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Drought, also demonstrated the city–country divide quite nicely. Putting aside the arguments about the rights and wrongs of giving money to appeals when independent men might stand on their own two feet, it was clear that even in early 1903, after several disastrous seasons and a year of extreme drought, the city had no real understanding of the suffering in the country. This did not augur well for the hope that surely Australians would soon begin to understand the implications of living in a rain-deprived country. Several more national and disastrous droughts would occur before that idea gained currency. Nor was the bush particularly happy with the city in 1903. Goulburn, south-west of Sydney, by 1903 was a substantial place with some fine public buildings, churches and homes, a prosperous community. The drought had not, apparently, devastated Goulburn as it had nearby Yass or Bungendore. Yet when Sydney’s Lord Mayor asked Goulburn’s council to authorise street collections for his appeal, Goulburn thought a public meeting was needed to thrash the matter out. Goulburn was doing it tough, one of its newspaper editors thought, especially as ‘loafers and sundowners have been driven out of the back country [by the drought] and have come east to live on a guileless population’. If the winter rains were to fail, Goulburn would need all its money reserves to see itself through. In any case, wrote this editor of the Goulburn Herald, a man apparently well prepared to call a spade a spade, the fund had so far raised only about £5000, and that was distinctly not good enough. Wealthy men in Sydney, he believed, had given pounds when they might have given hundreds; indeed, ‘a selfish metropolitan population will continue to take from the country all that can be got . . . the 105

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main business of the man on the land is to work in order that the middleman and merchant in Sydney may make money’. When the man on the land ‘has no more blood to be sucked’, the editor concluded, then ‘he is a nuisance and the good rich people of Sydney carefully button up their pockets’. Far from the Lord Mayor’s Fund provoking a sense that the people of New South Wales were all in this together, a ‘true brotherhood’, as the Victorian governor had put it, for some at least, it would seem Sydney provoked thoughts of blood-suckers making merry at the hard-working country man’s expense. Two public meetings called to discuss whether to hold a public collection in Goulburn failed for want of interest among the citizenry; the second attracted only the mayor, two aldermen, two private citizens and ‘one apparent sufferer by drought’.38 It was hardly surprising that Paddy Crick’s outburst in Erskineville provoked even greater despair and anger from Goulburn’s pre-eminent wordsmith, who might, it seems, have meditated too long on the Old Testament, and asked his readers to: Picture the condition of mind of the old settler, who, having made his home and reared his family, sees hope fly away and black despair brooding over his ruined homestead . . . sheep and people may die like flies in the west, but not a word must be said lest the London investor be scared . . . and so the smug selfcomplacency of the dweller by the beautiful harbour is not disturbed.39

Did people starve to death in the Federation Drought? There is some evidence that they did, although people dying ‘like flies 106

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in the west’ is hyperbole. The other Goulburn newspaper, the Goulburn Evening Penny Post, announced in January 1903, just to take a random example, that two more cases, probably three, must be added to the already long lists of deaths in the bush. Mr Goukrodger, manager of Katandra station, near Hughenden, Queensland, reported to the police on Monday morning that he had found two men dead near the station woolshed . . . They evidently died from thirst.

You would need to scour the country newspapers for reports of other such incidents; certain it is though, that a number of people, particularly young children, died from heat exhaustion and the general weakness associated with this long drought. Others suffered fearful depression; others again simply walked away from long years of hard labour. It might easily drive you to rage to think that the complacent people in the harbour city just did not care what was going on. That thought hit a tender spot in Goulburn.40 The 1902 drought was Australia’s greatest natural disaster to that date. An understanding of its impact and ramifications is and was no easy thing. The Lord Mayor’s Fund, in its evident do-goodery, may have inclined people to a rosy view of the New South Wales’ sense of community: we were all in this together, pulling together; the city helping the bush as best it could. Of course there was truth in that; but it is not the whole picture. Life and history are more complicated than that. The military historian who sees only the heroic, and misses the mud and abject degradation of men, is missing the reality of war. The historian of rural Australia who sees only adversity in 1902, and 107

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a measured, good-hearted response from city folk, is just as certainly missing the reality of the drought. City and country conflicts emerged, and there were, of course, a variety of conflicting interests also in the bush. As our Goulburn Herald editor soberly concluded, ‘the man in the country who has always paid, and can no longer pay, lifts tired hands to the skies of brass, and dimly wonders what it all means’.41

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that commanded respect in the north-east of Victoria. Bontherambo homestead, outside Wangaratta, was a grand house that would not have looked out of place among the very best of the squatters’ mansions in the Western District of Victoria. But Bontherambo was more than a homestead; it was a village in its own right, boasting a cooper, a blacksmith, a miller, a market-gardener and other skilled workers. Until the late 1840s the Bontherambo community was more populous than nearby Wangaratta.1 Such wealth revealed the advantage gained by the squatters who were in on the ground floor. Joseph Docker, born in England in 1793, was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1818; after a decade of ministering to parishes in Lancashire he and his wife Sarah sailed for Sydney. The first of their 11 children, Mary Jane, was born on the voyage. Appointed rector of St Matthews, Windsor in June 1829, the fundamentalist fervour of Samuel Marsden and his ilk was not to Docker’s liking and he DOCKER WAS A NAME

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left the priesthood in 1833, taking up land at Richmond on the site of the present Air Force base. Excited by the glowing reports of Major Thomas Mitchell about Australia Felix to the south of the settled districts, Docker packed up his wife, five children, servants, a flock of sheep, cattle and a boat. In 1838, in covered wagons and carts they passed through Goulburn and Yass, settling on the Bontharambo plains in an abandoned squatter’s hut left by George Faithfull, who had fled the land on the slaughter of his shepherds by Aborigines. Docker demonstrated that he would live in peace and harmony with these people, and the two groups, black and white, enjoyed the continuing use of the land.2 Surviving the depression and drought of 1842, by 1844 Joseph Docker was prospering sufficiently to build a larger slab house for his growing family. A few years after that he began building the large stone mansion that would show to all who saw it the growing wealth and influence of his family. He needed 400 tons of granite for the house’s foundations alone, brought from nearby Beechworth; this was a major enterprise. When Joseph Docker died in April 1865, survived by six of his children, he could claim to have truly settled his land. Unusually among the squatters before 1840, he had taken his family with him to the new land he would work. Docker’s determination to create a place for his family allowed him to look on Bontherambo not as a temporary home to be exploited for whatever wealth it might bring quickly, but as a place to be as carefully nurtured as if it were an estate at Home. By the time Joseph died the Dockers were, in every sense, local gentry. 110

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Frederick George Docker was the second son of Joseph and lived at Bontherambo all his life. Married, he was not to have children. At one stage the Bontherambo holdings in the northeast extended over some 200 000 acres (81 000 hectares). Although the Dockers fought selection rigorously and largely successfully, the holding nevertheless diminished over time. This large family would see to that. By the 1880s, some 20 years after the first Docker’s death, the family had diversified in several directions, most of them profitable. They had made a substantial fortune, for example, in wine and, among other things, providing wooden blocks for Melbourne’s roads. But the call of the land was always insistent and in partnership with Robert Smith and George Clarke, Fred Docker began looking much further afield. In 1883, with £20 000, the partnership bought Redcliffe Station near Hughenden in western Queensland. As far as I am aware, none of the partners ever went personally to look at this sprawling 200 000 acre property. What type of land was it? On their own admission, variable. In 1903, when they were seeking some relief in rent from the Queensland government—the land was leasehold—the partners described the station as 230 square miles (596 square kilometres), an enormous holding. But much of the land, they wrote, was unavailable for grazing for either sheep or cattle, and in the ‘bad country’ vermin proliferated, especially dingoes.3 I do not know what it was that impelled Docker, Smith and Clarke to make this purchase. There had been a series of good seasons for pastoralists following settlement in western Queensland, which had been opened up partly as a consequence of the searches that took place for the lost explorers Burke and 111

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Wills in 1861. If that expedition took in any lesson at all, surely it was of the harsh and parched nature of the country over which the explorers had passed. Well, perhaps—for we now know that better bushmen than the expeditioners could see possibilities in the land of which the hapless Burke, at any rate, had no inkling. So the rescue teams reported good land, and pastoralists took it up. But in the backs of their minds, even down in usually lush Wangaratta, the fear of dry land such as had killed Burke and Wills must occasionally have intruded. For their £20 000 Docker, Smith and Clarke secured their large but uneven parcel of western land. They also acquired 14 000 sheep, 40 cattle and 25 horses. The departing owner, John Luckman, negotiated the use of ‘such horses, saddles etc as he may require to take him to Charters Towers but to be returned by him to the station’. It was such isolated country that there was no other way for John Luckman to make his escape—if that is how he saw his release from Redcliffe. Again I do not know, and the record cannot help us, but in view of the subsequent history of Redcliffe it is fair, I think, to guess that the departing John Luckman saw it as a land of little comfort or ease.4 The partners appointed Henry Elliott manager of Redcliffe when they assumed ownership on 1 October 1883. As they required their manager to send them a weekly letter on the work of the station, its condition and prospects, and these letters continued until the partners eventually sold out in 1907, we have a great opportunity for a marvellous and sustained account of the management of marginal Australian land during a time of considerable hardship. Now safely housed in the State Library of Victoria, this small part of the Docker collection, the ‘inwards 112

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correspondence re Queensland properties’, provides an insight into station management. The role of station manager is not a subject to have caught the imagination of historians. If we think of the pastoral history of Australia at all we think of the owners and entrepreneurs, and the dynastic lines that have attracted historians. The Chirnsides, the Duracks, the Russells, the Clarkes, the Whites and so on, almost to the horizon. The Dockers of course fitted into that class, but the Queensland property was always in the hands of a manager, as were so very many Australian holdings. My mother’s only sister married a man who wanted to work on the land. He had trained as a wool classer, one of the roads to station management. When I first came to remembered knowledge of this uncle he was managing Highlands, a smaller Victorian Western District place just outside Coleraine. I remember searching with his only daughter, my cousin, for fairies in a paddock near their home, but I have no other memories of that place. How long thereafter it took my uncle to move to a larger property I cannot now recall but it might have been five years or so. It was at this property, Koolomurt, that I began to learn something about the status and work of a station manager in Australia. This was in the late 1950s but I doubt that the work, the responsibilities, and the habits of mind of a station manager then had changed much from those prevailing in the early years of that century. If the way we come to know a man is partly through his smile then I can say, with perhaps allowable pride, that my uncle was distinguished by a warm, inviting, generous smile that never seemed very far from the surface of his broad, brown face. Such 113

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attractive generosity drew me to Koolomurt as a child, in summer with all the anxiety about fires and a possible shortage of water, in May with the rains freshening up the grass that was just returning to its Western District sheen, and in September, gloriously, for the shearing. A manager is not an owner and he must always know his place. My uncle’s owner loved his land and spent a fair amount of time, with his wife and three children, in the homestead. But the family made their home in Melbourne, and the children in their boarding schools. Like the successful businessman that he most certainly was, this owner trusted my uncle’s knowledge and experience, and though he would question and comment, things were left very much in the station manager’s hands for the decisions. The wool cheque, each year, I think I am right in remembering, was turned back to my uncle for improvements. We had everything on Koolomurt, even two-way radios for each vehicle on the property, and night lights for the landing strip, so that the owner could drop in whenever he chose. I loved going about the property with my uncle, bouncing around in the Land Rover, a rough beast indeed in those days. He enjoyed my company, I remember, and had a test that I unusually but invariably passed. We would drive for a long time over the paddocks, down gullies, through creeks, assessing, observing. Point in the direction of the homestead, my uncle would say, perhaps hours into our morning’s work. Few could do it; this was a big place. I always could and felt some pride in that. Maybe I was a bit like one of his kelpies, rewarded for being there, and adding, in my case, just a very little bit. 114

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Once not far from home we passed an ancient gum—they grow magnificently down there. ‘I’d like to be buried under that gum,’ my uncle said quite unexpectedly, and I knew then how he saw the years to come. This property would do for him, do him for the long haul; nothing else, he was saying to me, not even his own little place somewhere else, could ever give the satisfaction of Koolomurt in his eyes. And when he was too old for the hard work of the manager’s life, perhaps a smaller house would be let to him, some odd jobs offered, and he would see out his days there, content. A manager isn’t an owner, but there is nothing in the contract to say that he cannot fall in love with the place he works. A manager knows that place better than any other: the land and its tricks and triumphs, its folds, its moods, how it should be treated, rested, used. The stock, sheep and cattle at Koolomurt, their bloodlines, their potential, the ways of getting the most out of them. And the people. At Koolomurt in the labour-intensive 1950s, a small village of them. The men whom the manager directed to work each morning; their families whose needs the manager had always to think about. Provisioning them. Keeping them happy. Koolomurt even ran its own schoolbus each morning and afternoon, and the owner showed movies, pictures we called them then, on Sunday evenings in the school holidays for all the people on the property. As a nephew of the manager, in the homestead dining room, our temporary cinema, I had a better seat, some deference, a little higher standing than the other children; at least I thought so. For to the others on the property the manager was an important man. A man not to be trifled 115

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with, to be respected anyway, although my uncle would always have won respect quickly, in any company. The manager’s house had a fine verandah, facing in the opposite direction from the work areas and the cottages, looking over the rich paddocks of Koolomurt towards the Pigeon Ponds road, miles off. There my uncle delighted to sit after the day’s work was done, a beer to relax with, at peace with his family and the land, satisfied with his rich life, rightly proud of all he surveyed. For it was he, and those who worked with him, who made this land profitable, prosperous. He did it for another, who bore the financial risks to be sure, small enough for pastoralists in the lush 1950s, but always to be considered. There was an ambivalence, always, at the heart of the manager’s position. Bonded deeply to this land, its people and its stock, in a way an absentee owner could never be, but subject still to all the whims and disloyalties of employers everywhere. I do not know how formal the contact was between my uncle and his owner. There was the telephone, of course, in any emergency, but the owner was on the property every few weeks or so and he may, from time to time, have issued written instructions. On Koolomurt even in those days there was plenty of paperwork for the manager’s office. Communication between the owners of Redcliffe Station and their manager was vastly more formal and a great deal slower. In any emergency there the manager must have absolute power to make decisions, for it took about two weeks to receive a reply to a letter from Queensland to Victoria. There was the telegraph, of course, but only for brief messages, as it was expensive. For all the normal matters of 116

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station life on Redcliffe the decisions were suggested to the owners by letter and usually confirmed by them by return mail. Letterbooks were used then, big, formal, leather-bound ledgers. The copypage, the page remaining with the writer, was made of the flimsiest rice paper, the like of which I have only ever previously seen used for Bibles, where compressing the size of that lengthy book was the prime consideration. The carbon paper used for the copy was of a kind I have not seen before either, brown, tending to gold. Not all that easy to read. Several years of letters are accumulated in one of these letterbooks, running to a nearstandard 500 pages. Opening a new letterbook suggests to the researcher quite a test of stamina, and if the handwriting is poor only the most stout-hearted will be game enough to read on. Fortunately Fred Docker, who conducted the correspondence from the Victorian end over the partnership’s 24-year-long ownership of Redcliffe, wrote with a good hand, easy to read; and he wrote briefly. Hardly ever more than a page a week. But his end of the correspondence is not the most interesting. ‘Yes, we agree that selling most of the four-tooth wethers would now be opportune’ is the kind of comment that Fred Docker invariably makes. As the owner, he supports most of the decisions offered to him, and suggests ideas only when he is particularly concerned to keep costs down. The handwriting of the first manager at Redcliffe, Henry Elliott, is not easy to read but his tenure there was, on the whole, among the good times. Except at the beginning, which might have been a harbinger of what was to come. Elliott took over the property for Docker, Smith and Clarke on 1 October 1883. On 1 November he reported that ‘the dry weather still continues 117

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but there is every appearance of rain and I hope to get some soon’. On 25 November, Elliott wrote that ‘Mr Grey of Hughenden Station tells me this is the driest season he has ever seen—he has been out here some sixteen years’. I am assuming that the partnership sent Henry Elliott to Redcliffe from one of their properties in Victoria; it would make good sense to put into such a position of trust and responsibility a man whom you had already had the opportunity of observing and judging. If so, Elliott would indeed need to have been talking to his neighbours to try to get a feel for the land and a feel for what might be in store. Rainfall records for Redcliffe seem to have started in 1885, to go by the Docker papers, although, of course, there might have been earlier records to which Elliott had access and which were passed on to the next manager each time the property was sold. Local knowledge, though, would have been precious and perhaps hard to come by. Mr Grey’s 16 years might have been about the limit of pastoral experience around Hughenden.5 1884 was hardly a better year at Redcliffe, as the manager remarked in February, ‘it is very hard that the worst season I have ever known should come just after your purchasing out here’. In March there was relief: ‘the rain fell in heavy torrents the creek was so high water went over part of the embankment’. But local knowledge would have warned Elliott that the useful rain in that part of Queensland would fall, must fall, in DecemberJanuary; almost monsoonal rain, if you like. Failure in the summer would set up what might well be year-long failure. So it proved in 1884. In October Elliott wrote: ‘there is I am sorry to say very little sign of rain and people are calling out in all directions’. It is what I have seen before, this idea of the people calling/crying 118

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out. We will meet it again. Was it a dramatic Australian rendering of the type of response to the plagues and pestilences falling on the Israelites in Egypt, for it is hard to imagine that people were standing in the paddocks around Hughenden calling out for rain. There was good rain at the end of the year, two and a half inches (65 mm), but 1885 was dry, only ten and half inches (267 mm). Rainfall returned to normal for the next decade or so—21, 22, 23 inches (533, 559, 584 mm), sometimes more. Except in 1892, when only just over seven inches (178 mm) fell. But as the previous year had been exceptionally wet, 47 inches (1194 mm), we can assume Redcliffe survived 1892 without too much difficulty.6 Throughout all these years the station ticked along; sheep numbers grew substantially and labour issues, not rainfall, caused Henry Elliott greater concern. It was the time of the shearers’ strikes and the mighty clashes between the shearers’ union (the Australian Workers Union) and the Pastoralists’ Union. Elliott was not on the side of the workers, though he might have been, as an employee, who even had to ask permission to marry. Writing in October 1884: I wish to ask you if I might marry and bring my wife to Redcliffe. Of course I do not mean at once but perhaps after the next shearing [the middle of the following year?] if the season should prove a good one. I would not put the station to any extra expense for servants or anything of that kind. I would require to come to Melbourne but would not waste any time.

The owners eventually approved but they had kept him waiting a bit, not replying to this letter until mid-December and then 119

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suggesting that he would need to add a verandah to the manager’s house ‘with a bathroom under the same roof’.7 From time to time in the course of this regular correspondence to and from Redcliffe a third voice is heard. This belongs to a nephew of one of the partners, George Clarke. The nephew, possibly an accountant, seems to have been sent on personal inspections just to make sure of things, although occasionally the nephew needed to hurry up to Redcliffe when some crisis threatened. It was an arduous trip; by train from Melbourne to Brisbane, by boat to Townsville and then by train and buggy to Hughenden. On his inspection in August 1888 the nephew had some worrying news for the partnership: ‘Elliott is undoubtedly in delicate health, and quite unfitted for hard and dusty work . . . in summer when the rains come, the moist atmosphere is too much for him’. The nephew advised Henry Elliott to spend the next summer in Victoria: ‘the change might do him a lot of good, otherwise he might not last long’. But the partnership needed a reliable and experienced manager.8 I do not know when Henry Elliott and his wife left Redcliffe Station but in June 1890 there was another crisis there. The new manager, Richard Gaunt, had died when his horse threw him, saddle and all, as he was riding into Hughenden. Again George Clarke’s nephew was despatched to Queensland from where he reported that Mrs Gaunt ‘takes her loss very sensibly’. The nephew further reported that though he had been ‘inundated with applications’ for the position of manager at Redcliffe Station, he had given the post ‘to a man called Frith’ who was about 28 years old with ‘a good deal of experience in Queensland . . . He seems a practical sort of fellow’, the nephew wrote, and sober 120

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in his habits: ‘so many [of the other applicants] liquor up in this thirsty country’. John Oliver Frith was appointed at £250 per annum, with six months’ notice on either side. But if the partners were satisfied with him at the end of twelve months his salary would be increased to £300. Four days later the nephew finalised his report on Frith: ‘[he] seems a shrewd practical sort of fellow with a fair amount of common sense. He seems also to know something about wool’. That was helpful; in his first report in September 1890 Frith reported that Redcliffe had just finished shearing 23 634 sheep.9 While the Docker records are in many ways revealing it is disappointing that they contain so few personal details of the people we meet in this story. We would like to know, surely, much more about this man who would manage Redcliffe Station for the next 17 years, giving it, as he later wrote, ‘the best part of my life’. It is frustrating to read a weekly letter from a man over several years and yet to find out so little about him. He had a brother, we know that, managing an adjoining station and it is likely that Frith was working there when Redcliffe called. There or thereabouts. So he knew the country and at 28 years was ready for responsibility. He will be 45 years of age when he leaves Redcliffe; a difficult age, perhaps, to find a new place. I do not know what later became of him. Frith was unmarried in 1890 when we first meet him, but well enough educated to write, in a fair hand, a good letter. Whoever had taught John Frith, wherever he grew up, had drilled grammar and spelling admirably, though not punctuation. Appointed by the nephew, there is no evidence that Frith ever met any of the partners face to face. He made very few trips and very rarely had a holiday, or even a 121

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few days off. I cannot find evidence that he ever went to Victoria. His brother, he remarks pointedly, was given six months leave to go to England on full pay; but this partnership would never run to such generosity despite what Frith described as his long years of ‘honest service’.10 Things ran smoothly enough throughout the 1890s if rainfall records are enough to go on. I cannot pretend that I have read every year of John Frith’s correspondence. A historian writing a history of the Dockers or of Redcliffe Station most certainly would read every letter, but my interest must be narrower. Despite the business-like nature of the correspondence, and the understandable formality in the light of never having met personally his readers, there is a charm to the letters which kindles a strong desire to know more about this loyal, hardworking and, ultimately disappointed man. John Frith, his letters tell us, was a good man, good at his job, steadfast, thoughtful. The bad times on Redcliffe began in December 1899, a month when, for the first time on record, no rain fell. In that year Redcliffe had received only 121⁄2 inches (318 mm); the next year it would be just on 8 (203 mm); then 121⁄2 again; then only 31⁄2 inches (89 mm) in 1902, the Federation Drought. Rainfall in the average range of the mid-20 inches deserted Redcliffe until 1906, but the partners had by then given up, finally selling the station in 1907. These years of loss wiped out whatever profits had been accumulated in the good years of the 1880s and 1890s. We never made any money, the partners would lament to Frith as they sold the property, selling for not much more than they had paid for it 24 years earlier. For Docker, Smith and Clarke, Redcliffe proved to be a poor investment. ‘We did not 122

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buy the station simply as a means of giving employment,’ Fred Docker wrote bitterly to Firth in 1907, ‘but rather with the hope of getting a fair return for the money invested in it (but you know with what result).’11 This long and terrible drought was not just about money. It was about learning how to work this difficult land; experimenting, testing, evaluating. It was also about the frustrations and anxieties of the manager, of his careful management of the stock, of a diligent search for the best ways of doing things, and of perseverance in spite of terrible odds. And for the partners too. It is bad enough opening one letter that you think might contain bad news; to be opening a weekly letter across four years announcing that your fortunes continued to slide must surely have been a great strain. The sequence of bad news started in January 1900: We have had any amount of cloudy weather since I wrote to you last week but no rain beyond a few drops which fell this afternoon, it’s the most trying season I have known here, we do not even get a shower to keep the sheep out from the water for a day . . . I will not fail to wire you when we get a good fall of rain.

In February John Frith was speculating: I was going to say it is hardly likely the winter would come without more rain but the seasons have been so eccentric and disheartening of late that I do not know what to expect . . . I estimate our loss [of sheep] at 10per cent more than half of which I attribute to dingoes especially when you take into consideration that they 123

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take nothing but the fattest and best, and the drought takes the poorest and worst first.

By March there is a note approaching fear: We were never in a worse condition to approach the winter . . . there are thousands of sheep on the roads, Manuka has sent away every sheep, [?] I hear have already lost 50 per cent of their sheep . . . I will do what I think best without consulting you as to have to wait for your reply in such matters may be fatal . . . Plenty of clouds come up every day and clear away at night.

By April still nothing had happened: ‘all prospects of rain seem to have gone . . . if no winter rain falls I do not know what the result will be’.12 In the midst of all this, in late February John Frith married and had a brief honeymoon in New Zealand: As you say it’s not a favourable time for an introduction to Redcliffe. Mrs Frith was however in Queensland in 1885 and again in 1892 [two bad drought years] so she’s not a stranger to Queensland droughts, I doubt if Queensland was ever so drought-stricken as it is today . . . I never saw the country so dry.

On return to Redcliffe as a married man, John Frith sought the partners’ permission to employ a housemaid at 15 shillings a week, as befitted his new status. It may not have been a wise time to ask, but might not the partners have had some sympathy for a man who was doing it so tough? No; rather they suggested that Frith might like to pay for the housemaid himself. In the strength of his reply we do see something of the real John Frith: 124

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Even in Mr Elliott’s time there was not half the sheep, half the men or half the country to look after; a housemaid was allowed; surely I am not to be punished for past economy, already I have to pay for a portion of your house, I sleep on my own bed, use most of my own furniture, linen and plates which I venture to say no other manager in North Queensland does. I cannot help comparing my treatment with that of my neighbours.

One manager, he continued, had his salary increased by £100 when he married, another received a £100 Christmas box, another kept ‘a cook, housemaid, a boy to clean knifes, boots, chop wood’. Having to pay his housemaid’s wages, he argued, ‘would be tantamount to a reduction in salary’. They could not lose their manager during this crisis; by mid-June the partners had conceded.13 John Frith brought the shearing forward to May in 1900 in the hope of either then selling the sheep or giving them a better chance of survival. By 6 May he was reporting that they had shorn 15 078 sheep and had pressed 191 bales of wool. The wool was light in the drought and the search for water relentless. Others were putting in bores at considerable expense but Frith had doubts about the worth of this, as cattle would have to cart the water to the sheep ‘and they may be too knackered to do it’. He thought that there was not one sheep left on many of the surrounding stations, Katandra, Vindex, Manuka, Gondooroo, Cassilis, and he observed that, of course, it was out of the question trying to sell sheep. So far the stock were surviving on Redcliffe: ‘I really think its best to do all we can to save them at Home . . . but of course things are getting worse every day, every 125

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mouthful eaten is so much less—there is nothing growing to take its place’.14 Perhaps to cheer up his manager, Fred Docker observed that the drought of 1884 might have been just as bad. Frith would not have a bar of it: Anything worse than the present season I cannot imagine. Many stations are completely deserted and stock are being kept alive at enormous cost. I will give you one instance and not the worst by a long way; ‘Barunya’ has 10 000 sheep near Prairie [just 50 kilometres east of Hughenden] running on an 8000 acre selection for which they are paying £50 per month, there is no water on it and they have to drive the sheep about three miles to Prairie Bore to water, the water costs from £20–25 per month then they have to pay a drover £2-15-0 per thousand per month to look after and water them.

Frith did not spell it out for the owners but Barunya was paying at least £100 a month just to keep the sheep alive. On Redcliffe ‘we are cutting a little scrub here and there to try to educate the sheep to eat it’.15 Back in Victoria, no stranger either to drought in these terrible years, the owners were struggling to get a fix on the extent of stock losses on Redcliffe, suggesting that if Frith’s figures were anything near correct (and of course there was always a problem with mustering the sheep outside shearing time to get an exact count), then ‘the losses must have been much greater than we anticipated’. John Frith, sensitive no doubt, took this as a criticism and replied: 126

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We here have been complimenting ourselves on pulling through so well. About seven months ago I reported to you an estimated loss of 10 per cent and since then we have had some months of the worst drought I believe ever known in Queensland during which time I believe she has lost 30 per cent of her sheep—in the north at any rate.

There were, he wrote, just under 30 000 sheep on Redcliffe and he had lost 4651. Given that most of his neighbours had moved their sheep to the coast or down south, at considerable cost, could not the partners see that this manager was doing very well indeed?16 That was at the end of August. Six weeks later, The weather keeps dry; its heartbreaking work fighting this terrible drought. After nursing stock in every conceivable way to see them die in the end is more than discouraging. I saw a man the other day who said the only luck he’s had this year was when a couple of cold nights killed one third of his sheep. The weakest went first and he said they were bound to have died later, and he would have been at considerable expense in trying to save them. We are not losing sheep [yet] . . . but they are all falling away.

By December with lambing coming on Frith feared a heavy loss of sheep: ‘all I can do is spread Ewes out as thin as possible and pray for rain’.17 Redcliffe had received just under 8 inches (200 mm) of rain in 1900 but John Frith stuck to his estimate of stock losses at under 10 per cent. His poor wife had become pregnant during this worrying time and in his letter on the last day of 1900 the 127

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manager allowed the partners to know that ‘Mrs Frith is in Townsville expecting a Family event to come off in a few days’. Frith went to Townsville too and, deep irony, reported that it rained all the time he was there; they had 6 inches (150 mm) one night and 5 (125 mm) another. What he would have done for that rain on Redcliffe where in January, their wet season too, they had 52 points (13 mm) in two falls. But there was some good news; on Federation Day, 1 January 1901, while all the celebrations were going off in Sydney, ‘Mrs Frith presented me and the nation with a fine son’.18 Joy for all, but of the drought there was no end in sight. On Redcliffe, January rainfall had averaged 51⁄ 2 inches (140 mm) over the last 10 years. The lowest fall in January during this period had been 21⁄2 inches (65 mm). In 1901 only 93 points (23 mm) fell: ‘this coming after two awful years is sickening’. Frith admitted to feeling despondent and was ‘at a loss to know what to do’. At the end of March it was ‘beastly dry’. There had been some rain but ‘where the ground is hard it nearly all ran off and on the loose Downs it disappeared down the cracks which are 4–5 ft deep or more’. By April the sheep were just holding their own on the little spinifex and scrub about the place. The manager finally conceded that he had to move some of the sheep, 5–6000 he thought, and then he ‘could rub along with the rest for some time’. But he thought it would cost at least £15 per month per 1000 to feed them elsewhere.19 In the event Frith found a 17 000-acre (6900-hectare) paddock at Olio, just over 200 kilometres away, but on the train line, so that the sheep could be trucked there ‘cheaper than we could 128

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drove them’. ‘It’s lovely to look at this country after ours,’ he wrote, ‘but oh! The flies! They are awful.’ With those sheep gone some of the pressure came off the sweeping paddocks at Redcliffe.20 In April, Frith was telling his owners that the stock losses in Queensland would be dreadful. The manager at Ashton had told him that he had returned 86 000 sheep to that property in January, expecting a return to normal conditions, no doubt, but had now only possibly 30 000 of them left now, or maybe nearer 20 000. In a few months, that is, more than 50 000 sheep had perished on this one property. Did the owners take this with a grain of salt, fearing that Frith might be preparing them for heavy losses themselves, or did they take him at his word, congratulating themselves that they had a fine and prudent manager, keeping the losses as low as possible?21 But now John Frith did rack up heavy losses. By mid-1901 he thought he had lost about 35 per cent of his stock and, admitting that it was a very big loss, he continued: ‘I doubt if anyone in the district can show a lower percentage of loss’. The nephew was sent up to Redcliffe to see for himself and he reported that indeed things were grim; ‘Who,’ he asked, ‘would buy a station now except at a low rate, with the uncertainty about the lease, the certainty of ever recurring droughts, and the low prices of wool?’ Were the partners already considering pulling out? It was hardly surprising. And then in the December of this dreadful year it was time for the ewes to lamb again. They had never had a better lambing on Redcliffe, John Frith thought, but he knew that they would lose most of them: ‘this drought is enough to 129

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break one’s heart, do what you will it’s all the same. You cannot successfully fight the elements’.22 In 1901, nearly 13 inches (330 mm) had fallen, and stock losses were eventually heavy. In 1902, incredibly, Redcliffe would receive just 3.70 inches (94 mm). No-one could believe it. Irony, by now, was lost on John Frith. Fred Docker had written to him, sympathetically surely, that ‘the state of affairs on Redcliffe is not cheering’. ‘Yes! I know,’ the manager wrote back in evident frustration. Throughout 1902 he struggled to give his owners a clear understanding of just how bad things were. To live through it must have been terrible: ‘I hardly closed my eyes last night although I camped outside, tonight promises to be even worse; surely the end of this terrible drought must be close at hand; really it’s a wonder there are not more mad managers; do what you will it’s all the same’. Though they never appear in his letters, surely John Frith was even more concerned for his wife and one-year-old son than for himself, or the stock and the station.23 Battling on, he had to try to keep costs down. The agistment of sheep at Olio was costing the equivalent of the wages being paid on Redcliffe, and it cost more to feed the horses on Redcliffe than it did to feed the people. ‘Expenses—it’s impossible to keep them down,’ he lamented.24 It is the personal nature of this struggle that will impress anyone who reads these letters. When he broke his collarbone in a fall from a horse in 1900, John Frith had been able to think of others: ‘many a poor soldier fighting in S[outh] A[frica] with much worse’. There were few, he now seemed to believe, who could understand what the people of western Queensland were 130

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enduring. In March he reported: ‘if we do not get rain this month or early next month I am sure I do not know what we shall do’. It did rain in March, 37 points (9 mm), enough to keep the dust down, they would have said. They would not see rain again on Redcliffe until November, if they saw it at all then, for it registered just 6 points (1.5 mm). This year, too, the drought was more general throughout the state, meaning that there was very little relief country available for agistment.25 In August they started shearing at Redcliffe. That was when the numbers would come in. Frith had, he believed, some 14–15 000 sheep spread over 200 000 acres (81 000 hectares) of scrubby country. The ewes were weak and terrible to muster. ‘It will be of the nature of a miracle if we get a clean muster.’ And getting the wool away? There were only eight or nine draught horses fit to work so taking the bales to the rail line would be very slow work. Leave the bales in the woolshed, the partners advised; the cost of transport could not be justified until some rain came. In the event they appear to have shorn 9682 sheep, with 119 bales of wool pressed.26 ‘Heart-breaking’ is a word that comes into these letters very frequently now: ‘this is heart-breaking country’; ‘it’s heart-breaking to me to await what seems to be the inevitable doom of a splendid lot of lambs and a big percentage of our Ewes’. Could you not kill the lambs, the partners asked. Not a good idea, Frith replied. It would entail expense in horses and men ‘and it would knock the ewes about terribly’ from having to muster them. In June he could report that the sheep were ‘hanging on wonderfully’ but he had four men cutting scrub and by then the sheep had taken to it. There was nothing else. In October Frith remarked that 131

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some managers were feeding sugarcane to the sheep as an experiment. It did not work. In mid-November there was still no rain and the scrub was now a long way from the water. The weak sheep did not have the energy to walk to the water. ‘A weak starving sheep is I think one of the most difficult animals on earth to deal with they do all sorts of things seemingly to hasten their own end’—such as walking into the boggiest place in the dam. Some would catch a front foot in one of the many cracks in the earth and starve where they stood. No wonder John Frith reported that ‘Mrs Frith is going south for the summer’. The heat was too much and the sights and sounds dreadful. ‘None of the sheep are dying very fast,’ Frith noted ‘but there is a continual gradual melting away.’27 And the heat. From 22 December 1902 onwards for fourteen days the maximum temperature was never under 103°F (39.4°C), the top being 114°F (45.5°C); every day of the next week saw the maximum temperature consistently over 100°F (38°C). The wet season should have arrived with this heat but the January rains failed again in 1903. At the end of January, Frith was dreaming of rain: ‘dams full, creeks running, frogs croaking and grass growing—when I woke I was quite confused’. Olio was not an option in 1903, instead he hired a drover to move 5500 sheep to Bowen Downs, nearly 300 kilometres away. In June he reported the fate of Mr D’Evelyn of Landsborough Downs: ‘I have just handed over the station to Goldsborough Mort and Co,’ Mr D’Evelyn had written, ‘after 21 years hard graft and over £18 000 we put into it of our own.’ Was Frith softening up his own owners for the continuing bad news? He was keeping expenses as low as possible by making do on the station with only four men and 132

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a married couple, but he was paying £8 per month per thousand at Bowen Downs.28 Rain did come at last. It always does. Nearly 14 inches (356 mm) in 1903; not up to the station average of rain in the mid-20s, to be sure, it would take until 1906 for that, but 10 inches (254 mm) better than 1902. It was not until November 1903 that John Frith was able to bring the sheep back from Bowen Downs. Two days after Christmas he sent his owners a wire: ‘3 inches in 3 days’. It would take years, he knew, to bring the sheep numbers up to the level of 1899; buying would be impossible, with any sheep available commanding very high prices. Until the numbers of sheep grew the station could not be profitable. In other words, the effects of this drought would be carried by Redcliffe for several years yet.29 In February 1904, so Fred Docker informed John Frith, the partners had had a meeting about Redcliffe. From 31 October 1902 until 31 December 1903, in addition to the decrease in the numbers of sheep, accumulated losses for the partnership had grown from £5778 to £6497. Even if they sold the property for what they had paid for it, their losses therefore would be significant. Docker was quick to point out that the partners in no way blamed their manager: ‘you have done your best to save the stock’. But they asked him to look closely at expenses. Then in April 1904 the partners demonstrated what a keen eye they were now directing to Redcliffe. The men droving the stock from Bowen Downs back to Redcliffe were paid 25 shillings per week. In Victoria, Fred Docker wrote, ‘any number of capable young men [are] willing to go on the roads @ 15 shillings per week with very scant appliances for their comfort . . . Northern Queensland 133

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appears to be a paradise for the working man’. The writing was on the wall.30 Two days before Christmas in 1906 John Frith sent the partners an ambitious letter. He knew that they had been trying to sell Redcliffe for most of that year without success. ‘Will you give me the offer at the lowest price and best terms?’ he wrote, ‘I should have to get assistance from [the] Bank and I haven’t approached them yet.’ Fred Docker had replied to this on 16 January 1907 and John Frith sent his response back almost as soon as he had their letter: ‘my idea of value, not coinciding with yours, I have to refuse your kind offer’. They had put a price of £20 000 on Redcliffe. Frith reminded them that there had been nothing in the way of improvements on Redcliffe since the drought and thought that there was need for at least £1190 worth of improvements immediately, which he itemised. Redcliffe by then was carrying 22 000 sheep but 4000 of these, Frith believed were very old and worth very little. The return per head of sheep, Frith calculated, was 3 shillings, or £3300 per year. He thought the property could not be worth more than £16 000. ‘I probably take a pessimistic view,’ he conceded, ‘but anyone who went through the last drought is apt to take alarm quickly.’ And it was drying out on Redcliffe again.31 When they had first started talking about selling the partners had asked their manager to stay on until the sale was concluded. If he did this, they told him, they would give him a half a year’s salary as a bonus; it was in their interests, for a station without a manager would be a very hard station to sell. Frith had agreed readily enough in 1906, expecting that Redcliffe would sell fairly quickly. But the further it fell into dry weather, 134

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the less likely it was to sell. There was a good prospect who was almost certain to buy, but at the very last minute the purchaser withdrew, unable to arrange his finances. The agent was clearly annoyed; the partners disappointed. John Frith, too: ‘I do not anticipate with any pleasure another shearing or another drought’.32 It was a big thing to ask Frith to go on indefinitely at Redcliffe; his own life was on hold. In March 1907 he told the partners that he wanted to start making plans for his own future, that he had had offers of employment elsewhere. ‘May I rely definitely on being able to get away by say September [after the shearing],’ he asked. ‘We were much surprised at the latter portion of your letter,’ the partners replied. ‘Of course if you elect to give notice you will not be entitled to any pay in advance’ as they described the bonus they had offered if he stayed until the sale was completed. They could not say when Redcliffe would be sold, but it might be some time ‘as we don’t intend to sacrifice it’.33 This last Frith took for the kick in the guts that it was. He was being asked to stay on indefinitely to suit the partners’ convenience, regardless of whether he would find work easily thereafter. This provoked only the second really critical letter that I have seen from John Frith in this lengthy correspondence. ‘With one or two exceptions I have been perfectly satisfied with the way you have treated me,’ he wrote, ‘and in return have given 17 years of the best part of my life in honest service to you.’ It still angered him that he had been required to pay £69–17–0 out of a total cost of £289 for the manager’s new house. ‘I never even suggested building the House,’ he wrote, ‘this is the only case I have ever heard of a manager of a station having to pay 135

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for the building of the Station House.’ His brother, he wrote, was paid £100 more per year to manage the adjacent property, and was then on six months’ holiday on full pay in the Old Country. He continued: For years (quite contrary to custom and perhaps foolishly) I have paid the housemaid’s wages, you did consent to pay these but when the drought and bad times came I paid and lightened your expenses in the bad time . . . This country is killing to my wife, does not agree with the children and I certainly at times feel I have been too long in this tropical clime.

He would not put his wife through another summer, he wrote, and he could not afford to run two households. ‘The only course open to me,’ he concluded, ‘is most regretfully [underlined] to tender you six months notice from the 1st Prox [1 May 1907] of my intention to leave your service.’34 Redcliffe, perhaps unexpectedly, sold on 1 July 1907 to B.H. Richards of Neutral Bay, Sydney, of the Riverstone Meat Company, with extensive pastoral interests in New South Wales and Queensland. Richards advised Fred Docker that ‘we have secured a good man to take Mr Frith’s position as soon as the shearing is over’. The station was provisionally handed over on 10 August 1907. During these final weeks John Frith had kept up his weekly letter to his Victorian owners, writing at the end of July, ‘we have lovely rain last night’, such he had once been forced to dream of. In October the partners placed £250-5-3 in Mrs Frith’s bank account in Brisbane, which might have been Frith’s last wages and the working-out of his notice, or it might have been a bonus for staying on until the handover.35 136

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John Frith then disappears from history’s record. We do not know where he subsequently worked, for how long, with what success, or in general how life treated him. There was another savage drought in eastern Australia in 1914–15. I would like to think John Frith had no reason, then, to be scanning the skies of brass anxiously looking for signs of rain. A fellow manager, probably, a Mr Crombie, writing to John Frith after the sale of Redcliffe had been announced, put it very well: ‘these drought years incline us all to let some other fellow have a turn’.

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not to be able to find out what happened to John Oliver Frith and his family after Redcliffe. And for the first time in my life as a historian I have experienced an ongoing frustration with a large proportion of the records I have been consulting. I think of myself as a social historian, interested in the ‘ordinary people’. I have spent a proportion of my professional life wondering how best to discover the thoughts and feelings of people who, traditionally, have failed to attract history’s attention. At my worst moments I have thought myself just a gossip or a busybody. Am I too interested in the obituaries in the newspapers, the gossip columns, even? Do I read too many biographies? I love the detail in the story, the unusual. I love reading a whole life from beginning to end. Do I call this work? Historians are tied to the records; they cannot know anything without them. But John Frith was not keeping a record of his life, as so many Australian soldiers did in their diaries at the front. John Frith was managing a business and his records survived IT IS FRUSTRATING

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only as business records. If he kept a personal diary, as he might have done, we do not know where it is. When he was no longer part of the Docker business he had, for the historian, no existence. His records were Docker records, only retained as such. And so it was with many of those we have already met in this story of drought or are yet to meet. Maybe someone kept a diary for a few years, and it has survived. Coming to drought from the point of view of the farmer, the farmer’s wife, the storekeeper, the itinerant worker, not the scientist, the politician, the government, I was interested in those personal diaries, those fragments of lives. Normally, I suspect, people want to know the story of the diarist, the letter-writer, from the beginning to the end. But with these fragmentary records, surviving perhaps by chance, we cannot always know how things ended; the labour of completing the story for each person mentioned in this book simply would not be possible. In the course of my research I came to know a number of people, in the records that do survive, whose stories give significant insights into drought and its impact on people. But these records are fragmentary and cannot form a coherent narrative. By way of contrast, think of Bill Gammage’s First World War book, The Broken Years. He used the letters and diaries of Australian soldiers with skill and sensitivity to tell us what happened to the Australians at war. Take Fromelles, for example, that disastrous battle in July 1916 when, overnight, the Australians lost 5500 men, killed or injured. Look up Gammage; yes, here is Sergeant Martin telling us what happened to him in the battle; or Private Bell; here is Company Sergeant Major Arthur Brunton, writing to his wife: ‘this may be the last entry 139

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in this book’, he noted glumly as he prepared to go into the battle. Mercifully, Brunton survived that and other battles and returned to Australia in September 1918. His diary lives on as a precious record in the collections of the Australian War Memorial. At least we know that he returned to Australia and to safety. We could, possibly, find out more.1 The Broken Years moves from Gallipoli to Pozières, eventually to Mont St Quentin and the Australian victories of 1918. It has a narrative structure imposed on it by the events. Bill Gammage uses the diaries and letters to flesh out and enrich the story. In contrast, the people I came to know through their diaries or their letters lived out no such narrative. Many of the records I consulted are work diaries, recording year in and year out what was done on the farm. Some of these diaries give glimpses of the writer as a person; then they tell us something important, perhaps; something unique. They give us a slice of each life, not a narrative; they do not give us the whole person, just some moments in a few life journeys. So let us take some time out from the chronological narrative to learn something about drought from these personal narratives. We can return to the historian’s love for chronological order later. We do know the whole-of-life story of Colin Campbell, who came to Australia in 1839, because he was deemed worthy of an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Readers so admire that monument to Australian historical scholarship and love the headwords that writers give to the life to be described; spare but so often colourful and tantalising. Pastoralist, politician, educationist and cleric is the imposing list at the top of the entry for Colin Campbell, but he joins us here for two insights 140

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about squatting life at the start of recorded history in Victoria. Writing of Black Thursday, terror hitherto unknown in the colony, the culmination of drought and bushfires, on 6 February 1852, Campbell commented on the amount of grass lost in the fires: ‘the animals had a bad time of it afterwards and if you wore a straw hat the cows would run to you’. Campbell is worth a place in this book for that remark alone. But having looked at the selectors earlier it is useful to consider their enemies, the squatters, if only briefly. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, Colin Campbell wrote that the calibre among the early Victorian squatters was ‘mixed but educated men were in the majority . . . some had a little farming experience at home which greatly helped their fortunes. But most of us were single men aged from twenty to thirty years who had to purchase our knowledge and experience by a series of mistakes’. Like the selectors, really. Dying in suburban Melbourne in late 1903 and possibly taking great interest in the ruinous drought that had come to an end only a few months earlier, Campbell reminds us of the short span of time since he and his kind were feeling their way as pioneers in Victoria.2 These new-chum settlers, buying their experience through their mistakes, could not have envisaged drought as it was to be experienced in Australia. Drought lasting for years, not weeks. There were no rainfall records, obviously. No forecasts either. Men like Colin Campbell merely looked to the skies. Only late in the twentieth century did Australians learn to expect drought as a normal part of their environment. There had not been much time at all to learn about drought, land use, and what could be 141

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expected of this surprising place. So people were more comfortable in the cities or, rather, their suburbs. Margaret McCann’s Australian life began in the city, but she was soon translated, unhappily for the most part, to the country where she, too, bought her experience dearly. Born in Ireland in 1867 or 1870, Margaret McCann would die on her husband’s farm in 1919. A teacher in Sydney, she had married John McCann, a farmer at Stradbroke in Victoria’s Gippsland, 24 kilometres from Sale, towards the sea. Paradise Beach, a part of Ninety Mile Beach, is not far from Stradbroke. Margaret McCann would have smiled if she had ever heard the name Paradise Beach. Incongruous, she would have thought. We do not know how she met John McCann, why she married him, or how she felt about living in the bush, after the probable refinement of a private girl’s school in Sydney. We do not know who her own family were, why they migrated, how she grew up. Her only moments in history are recorded in her farm diary for the years 1894 to 1910. The diary is both a record of her work and a record of her growing unhappiness. Does it speak for other farm wives? Probably, but we must not push it too far, without evidence.3 When the diary begins Margaret McCann is an important contributor to the farm work, and the farm’s profits. And so she remains throughout. She milks, makes butter for sale, cares for crops and stock and, of course, manages the house. Her first child, Tommy, is born in 1894. Coral follows soon after in 1895. Margaret would like more time for herself, time for sewing, she writes. Already she is growing to hate her life and to resent her drudgery. 142

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Gippsland is a wet place compared to some of the regions mentioned in this book. Indeed, part of John McCann’s profits came from buying sheep in dry areas and fattening them on his lusher paddocks. Even so, Gippsland did experience dry spells, drought even, though the historian of early settlement there, Don Watson, sees drought as driving men to Gippsland from the dry interior, rather than away from Gippsland. But the weather in Australia can be so erratic. Just look at the mixture in Margaret McCann’s diary. In February 1896 she recorded how hot it was and how badly water was wanted: ‘so hot we can hardly breathe’. Her brother-in-law on an adjacent property lost two of his cows; she was digging potatoes, but it was a very poor crop because it was so dry. By June the weather was getting on her nerves: ‘I have too much to do, the baby doesn’t sleep . . . it’s work, work, work, from morning to night, no rest’. Ten days later: ‘water everywhere’. In November: ‘very dry and windy, want rain badly the wind dries up the grass and moisture out of the ground’. But, inexplicably, less than a month later: ‘it has been a splendid season in Gippsland this year, but very dry up north’.4 In January 1897 Margaret has a holiday in Sydney, taking baby Coral with her but leaving Tommy in the care of his father. Though no more than 30 years of age, she has all her teeth drawn while on holiday and buys a set of false teeth. A small thing, I suppose, but a little reminder of the inconveniences of life in the remote bush; toothache without relief could be unbearable, better then to remove the possibility of pain. In April her husband is away for three weeks buying sheep and Margaret is milking eleven cows for 14 lbs of butter a week. The weather was dry, the cows were drying up, and she noted on one day that 143

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she did not finish the milking until ten in the morning. And she was doing this work heavily pregnant, for in July of that year her third child, Pearl, was born. Only a week before the birth Margaret had been delayed at church by the wet weather and ‘did not get home in time to get up sheep, most of them at the mercy of dingoes, John very cross’. In August, a month after the birth, John again left her in charge of the farm for three weeks; she finished planting her potatoes in mid-November but in early December John was unable to leave the farm for long: ‘I am too ill to do the work’. It was hot again, of course, and John was carting water from the creek; there were bushfires about and so much smoke that ‘we had to strike a match to see in the kitchen, hot and dry’. Later, in January 1898, she noted that ‘during the hot days a number of young children died’. She was kept ‘very busy . . . the baby will be nursed and I am in a muddle all day long. I have a struggle to get the washing done. Can’t get any sewing done at all, but I must be patient, the baby will not always need nursing’. But at the end of that year there was another baby, Arthur Harold, born on 1 November.5 In her diary in the middle of all that comes a statement of farm income. Through the sale, agistment and shearing of sheep Margaret and John made £192 (but half of that was shared with her brother-in-law); fowls returned £4.7.0; the butter she sold earned £43.0.6 and her cheque (annuity) brought in £45. With an income a fraction over £300 they had an outlay of £103 for a profit of £197, remembering that part of that was going to the brother-in-law. This seems a fair return but the work is hard and seemingly unending. In November 1900 she reports: ‘we are milking 19 cows for 41 lbs of butter. I am kept very busy. I wish 144

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we could do without cows. I have 12 calves to carry milk to, it is too much for me’. It only got harder. In March 1901: I milked 17 cows and fed 19 with maize—3 hours work my arms ached cutting so much maize. It is hard work here, is there no end to it? I am a veritable house drudge I love the children so nothing I can do for them is too much, but the cows, the churning, the slopping about is too much. I am sick of it. I wish I had £200 I would buy a house in Sale and give this sort of life up. I can’t get out to buy some clothing I need, and the distance is too great for the children to go to school.

In November of that year they put on a boy at 41 shillings and board for the first year: ‘he can milk’. You suspect that John gave only grudging agreement to the extravagance.6 Then comes the drought of 1902. ‘We are having a bad time for want of rain. Our sheep are dying and the lambs are doing no good. Our cows 13 we are milking are going dry. I sent in only 10 lbs of butter . . . our cows are cripply and very poor.’ But Gippsland, being Gippsland, by 26 March 1902: ‘it rained for a day and a night never stopping’. How the rest of eastern Australia would have liked to see this drought cleared by then. Though for Margaret McCann the year did not get any easier. In October: ‘Today, Friday, I fed 17 calves cooked the dinner, washed up made 15 lbs of butter, and I have just left the kitchen at quarter to three to make the beds, what slavery! . . . I made 59 lbs of butter for sale this week’.7 In July 1903, Margaret reported that her neighbour, Mrs Hill, had died: ‘she has done feeding pigs and milking cows and feeding calves, done with the drudgery. She is buried only six weeks 145

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after [another neighbour] Mrs Lucas’. A month later Margaret had a holiday, a week at a hotel in Sale; she looked around to buy a house. She fell pregnant soon after her holiday but lost the baby at six months and was in hospital for more than two months. ‘I liked being there,’ she wrote. She was still in poor health in September: ‘John has to do my work and his own’. The diary tails off after this. Margaret still writes of dry weather, of fires, of good rain too. In September 1906, seven months after ordering it, her piano arrives and her husband makes a woolpress out of the discarded case. By 1910 Tommy is at school in Sale at £35 per year. Margaret goes to see the doctor; she is sick with indigestion and lack of sleep. He tells her she has a growth. The diary stops abruptly then, but a note attached to it suggests that Margaret McCann died in 1919. John, apparently, died in 1951, seven years short of his hundredth birthday.8 We last met William Pearse counting his annual income in 1902, all £3 of it. He lived the rest of his life on his Mallee wheat farm, dying at age 83 in 1947. He had taken up his selection in 1893 with capital of just £40. He lived alone on his block for six years, until aged 32, when he married Violet, the daughter of a neighbour; there were six children, two girls and four boys. Violet was nineteen years old when she and William married. Although she might have visited Ballarat once or twice, Violet also lived on the farm for the rest of her life. The first trip that William Pearse made to Melbourne that I can trace is in 1914, and then it is to take horses to agistment in Gippsland, rather than for a holiday. I can find no evidence that Violet ever went to Melbourne after she married. Yet right at the end of Pearse’s life, his third child, Alice, flies to Swan Hill from Melbourne. 146

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Pearse notes that the journey took Alice just an hour. And she rang him up to tell him when she had arrived. He would remember the isolation of his first years in the Mallee, the almost hermit-like existence, and though on his death he would be hailed as ‘a highly respected and esteemed pioneer of the district’, only readers of his diary would know something of what that meant.9 In 1901 William Pearse was carting water; in March ‘away for water at 5, home at 1’. If he was carting water from the Murray, as I suspect he was, it was a near 50-kilometre round trip. In May he was off for two loads of water; in July he was bringing in his fortieth load. In December the work diary only records the weather and the water trip; there was no productive work at all, just ‘hot, water . . . cool, water . . . rough and dusty, water’. By March 1902 Pearse has so far collected 23 loads of water for the year, so at least a couple of loads a week. To keep the horses alive—they are the only means of his remaining a producer—in January 1903 he takes them to the Cucumboo Tank and camps four miles from the tank. For the next four weeks all he can do is water his horses at the tank; once they broke away from him and he was wandering the bush for nearly six hours until he found them. In the middle of all this he learns that Violet has fallen very ill and, leaving the horses, no doubt in the care of a mate, Pearse dashes home. Splendid rain falls in April 1903 but by August he is carting water again and not until November does he get soaking rain.10 If water and the weather is a constant theme in William Pearse’s diary, so also is religion. Pearse was a Methodist lay preacher with a job to do each Sunday. Meticulously he records the text used as the basis for each week’s sermon, and the place, 147

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but never the content. He makes no comment in his diary on the lack of water or his hard life, as if all came from the hand of a beneficent God. But then he comments on nothing but work, except that he does notice the outbreak of war in 1914. His entry is succinct: ‘War!’. In November of that year he and his oldest son Edwin, possibly fifteen, take 10 of their horses to Gippsland for agistment, to a paddock in Coalville, about 60 kilometres from the McCann’s Stradbroke, as the crow would fly. Returning via Melbourne he takes in three services at Wesley Church on Sunday and ‘went moving pictures [another] night’ for sixpence. He does not tell us what he saw. Without the horses, of course, there is no planting and therefore no harvest, so he spends his time cutting and burning mallee, a constant occupation on these blocks, because the roots, underground, continually send shoots, shrubs, to the surface, which must be knocked out for ploughing. It rains eventually, of course, and with Edwin’s help, in 1915 he has 400 acres (162 hectares) sown. From this harvest he sends away 1224 bags of wheat, all stripped, bagged, loaded and unloaded by himself and Edwin. In 1916 he promises to take shares in a local co-operative store that was being proposed, ‘on condition that wine and spirit licence is done away with’. In 1917 the family makes a rare intrusion into this work diary when Pearse’s second son George, then fourteen, rates a mention: ‘George went football’. To this point, apart from a few trips to his parents in Ballarat, I had seen no evidence of holidays or enjoyment for anyone on this farm, the uncharacteristic trip to the movies excepted. But again in late 1917: ‘boys went Swan Hill in Algies’ car to Patriotic carnival’.11 148

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Possibly on the strength of the good harvests of these last few years, in 1917 William bought a house at Eaglehawk, near Bendigo, for £227 and paid some men £122 to erect it on his land at Nyah West. At last the family, eight of them, are out of the log cabin that he put up when he first took up his selection. With tax problems, he is in Melbourne in 1918, and has a look at Cole’s Book Arcade, the Eastern Market, goes out to the Barracks (does he mean the Army camp at Broadmeadows?), and sees a military tank. He takes in a ‘splendid patriotic address’ at Wesley Church, from the Hon. John Adamson of Queensland, and hears, too, that night, a fighting lecture from the Rev. T.E. Ruth called ‘Why blame Peter for the Sectarianism of Rome?’. Ruth’s ‘red hot addresses’ at the Collins Street Baptist Church lead some in his congregation to form a bodyguard lest Mannix partisans try to assault him. What William Pearse made of all this he does not record in his diary. Mannix and Ruth, it is said, ‘sometimes met genially in private to savour each other’s brisk company’. But publicly Melbourne was in the midst of sectarian warfare. By 1923 Pearse was a delegate to the annual Methodist Conference, thereafter spending two weeks in Melbourne each year. In 1923 he took his daughter Alice with him and they did the sights, including the War Museum at the Exhibition Buildings, but he does not tell us what he thought of it. In August 1938, Violet died, aged 61, ‘just two years after she first went to the doctor’; Pearse noted that there were 100 at the funeral and 38 cars at the cemetery. At the time of his own death in 1947, only one of his offspring still lived in Nyah West. One was near Bendigo, the other four lived in Melbourne; there were seven 149

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grandchildren. He had made a go of his farm over a tough life, but the diary shows how capricious the seasons could be.12 Stability is the striking thing about William Pearse’s life; it is almost as though he had taken the Benedictine vow to stay put in the one place thereafter. Another collection of letters shows a different aspect entirely of rural life: the need to move about to scrape together a living. William Webb was not an itinerant worker, to be sure, but he was a man often on the look-out for work. Born in England in 1860, Webb spent his first fourteen or so years there, going to school in Chester. He spent the next fifteen years as a jackaroo in Queensland, then was a station manager for about eighteen years, tried his luck as a blacksmith and wheelwright, went back on the land as an owner, and ended his days in a country town, just getting by.13 When we first meet him, in his letterbook in 1885, Webb is at Euroombah Station, near Roma in Queensland, but is preparing to move back to Adelong in southern New South Wales, where his cousin Charlie is managing Ellerslie Station. He reports to Charlie: The country [at Roma] is terribly dry now. The working horses are like rakes fifty per cent worse than they were when you were here . . . the cattle are getting as well as crows . . . If the country were not so God damned dry should tackle to ride overland all the way and take some horses with me for sale but there is a serious want of grass and water.

At Adelong there is plenty of water, ‘the country here is beautifully green and the stock looking splendid’. He has no work, though, and is thinking of going shearing.14 150

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Webb writes to his mother and father, in alternate weeks, and to his sister regularly, all of whom live together in Melbourne, but in the early years of this collection of letterbooks there are also letters to mates he has made working around outback Queensland. You would expect to find a difference in the style and content of the letters, depending on the recipient, and so it proves. To one mate he boasts of a ‘sleeping partner’ in ‘the younger Watson girl’, to another he asks for ‘two or three french epistles as there is a young lady here who is frightened of the calf but not the bull and I should like to reassure her’. To his mother he complains that he is beginning to think that he was born for something better than monotonous station life, never remembering the bush seeming so dull. Two months after this letter, in late 1886, he tells a mate that he has ‘slung the bush for good’ and has settled down in Melbourne as ‘a full blown watchmaker’. He has come to the conclusion, he writes that ‘the bush is a fraud’.15 At the start of March the next year he confesses that ‘my biz is much more likely to be up a wattle than a front shop. The trade has simply gone to hell’. ‘Keep out of citys,’ he tells another, ‘rents and taxes will kill you. The man on wages is far and away the most independent take my tip.’ If he can find a manager’s or an overseer’s billet ‘I am off like a shot. I am not worth 30/now was never so pushed in my life’. A month later, in April 1887, he is writing letters of application to try to find a station manager’s job. He sets out his work experience: started station life at fourteen and is now 27; was seven years at Ellerslie, and then had half a share in a Queensland station on the Dawson ‘but for want of means’ was compelled to sell. He had eighteen 151

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months on another station (Euroombah) with 25 000 head of cattle; ‘am single and likely to remain so’. He is looking for a salary of £200–£250 for the first twelve months. Though he had replied to ‘about 5 million advertisements’, nevertheless ‘my luck seems dead out’. To Charlie at Ellerslie he reckons he has lost about £550 in the last year. He turns down a job there at £2 a week but in August is back: ‘The Lord knows this is my last resource. I could not stand idleness in town any longer’. But he did get his weekly wage up to £3. He is droving cattle to Wodonga.16 By 1889 he was on Womamurra Station near Jerilderie and for once in this account of Australian rural life it is pleasing to record that it was wet. ‘There is nothing doing on account of the wet weather,’ Webb reported to his mother. ‘We cannot stir outside the door without being wet-footed; even on horseback the water is more or less up to the horses’ hocks.’ Charlie died suddenly on Ellerslie and Webb found himself, unexpectedly, manager. He was pleased enough but commented to his mother that it was ‘sixteen years since I first started to work for myself . . . tis time I had a show [of my own]’. The owner and his daughter stayed with Webb on Ellerslie for a few days in September and were ‘very complimentary’ about his work. But the muster and shearing were a disaster; Webb was apparently about 1700 sheep short. Although he was working very hard— he said he had not been off the station for five weeks—and ‘can hardly find the time to read the newspapers’, nevertheless at the start of 1891 he was sacked, told he was not competent to carry on managing Ellerslie; he handed over the station at the end of February.17 152

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In April 1891 Webb was appointed to the management of Tooma Station, bordering the Australian Alps, at £200 a year. He took over in mid-June only to find a month later that the owners were being forced by the bank to sell: ‘I think this is a bit of a crusher on top of the new arrangements so lately made’. A year later the Bank of Australasia is the owner of Tooma; the bank seeks to appoint a manager from one of their Queensland properties and offers Webb that man’s former position at Beechal in Queensland. Webb goes to Melbourne for discussions in April 1893 and is appointed, unexpectedly, manager at Tooma. He has to wait around to see the relevant bank people and admits that he is ‘sick to death of Melbourne’. With an appointment at the bank on 1 May 1893, Webb finds to his astonishment that all the banks have been closed by order of the government to bring to a halt the run on the banks that the turbulent and depressing economic conditions had caused. Victoria is in the depth of the land-boom depression and Webb is lucky to have a job at all. While in Melbourne Webb marries Jannie, a girlfriend of several years, who was waiting patiently because he believed that he could not marry her until he could see some permanence in his position. Returning to Tooma, he calls a meeting of all hands and tells them that they will have to accept a 10 per cent cut in their wages; three of them decline. When shearing began that year he calls the roll and finds more than 100 hands present, 18 of them permanent. Tooma was a substantial property, Webb now a man of some importance. The property comprised 100 000 acres (40 500 hectares), carried up to 40 000 sheep, perhaps 12 000 cattle and 300 horses. But after seven and a half years on Tooma, Webb has a falling out with his bank 153

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supervisor and is dismissed. By 1900 he is in a cottage in Adelong with his wife and three children, desperately looking for work.18 He still dreams of his own place but admits that in ‘such a terribly uncertain season . . . to lose my all now simply means ruination to self, wife and family’. ‘Man with limited means,’ he recognises, ‘cannot do much battle against drought.’ He is not prepared to take on the risk, especially as his father has twice been reduced to bankruptcy in Melbourne. Webb can see the consequences of failure. It is a sad family in many ways. His sister, on the death of her parents, opened a boarding house in Melbourne but, an alcoholic, she would lose it along with her life in 1906. Webb battles on but prospects for married station managers, he finds, are woeful during the Federation Drought. ‘There are many stations in New South Wales and Queensland,’ he reports, ‘that only have a caretaker to mind the homestead.’19 Webb then takes a manager’s job at Ten Mile Creek, near Germanton (which would become Holbrook during the First World War) in southern New South Wales; he also starts a stock and station agency which fails, and buys the Woomargama hotel as an investment. He loses the liquor licence. Ten Mile Creek is in the grip of drought, but it is a ‘wonderful little place’, 10 000 sheep ‘and barely a blade of grass, and yet they live’. Webb is felling box trees for the sheep and in mid-1902 is predicting ‘another bad year’. In March 1903, ‘drought and desolation are still the order of the day here’ and, writing to his sister, he confesses ‘I do not think I was ever so hard up for money for the last twenty years as I am today and do not know where the end will be’. His partner in the stock and station agency ‘could not leave the drink alone and eventually turned out a very bad egg’.20 154

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Writing to a cousin in England on his sister’s death in 1906, he says that he bought a blacksmith and wheelwright’s business about eighteen months ago: I admit I would much rather be on the land but lack of capital to buy a property prevents this. There is little hope of obtaining another management, married men are not wanted. All stations are now worked under the strictest economy and nearly all are governed by banks or big companies.

In 1907 there are signs of another drought and William Webb discovers the truth about a rural business; in poor times people cut back spending drastically, or simply cannot pay their bills. He leases his shop, eventually, to his former employees. But he does buy a property, finally, in 1911. Little Billabong has ‘570 sheep, 29 cattle and 1 million rabbits’. He has 1400 acres (567 hectares) and is prepared to do all the work himself: ‘all duties of a farmer, an orchard and garden, a certain amount of sheep and cattle work, rabbit poisoning etc etc’. Life did not suddenly become any easier, though. Webb endured the 1914 drought; his son Stanley went to war in 1916 and fortunately returned; his wife died in Holbrook in 1931; then living in town, doing odd jobs, Webb wrote to the editor of True Story Magazine in London offering to write his own life story: ‘Would you demand it written in ink, or would indelible pencil suffice?’ It would be a tough story to write, with all the trials William Webb experienced. But for drought in 1902 he might have been a more substantial property owner, and his story does tell us how tough it was to make a go of it in rural Australia.21 155

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There is another side to the coin, of course. Eighty or so kilometres to the west of Holbrook lies the little village of Urana. Ernest Whitehead was the manager of Butherwah Station there, reporting to a firm of solicitors, executors of the estate, much as John Frith reported to Docker, Smith and Clarke. Whitehead arrived as manager in early 1897, just as the dry seasons were coming in. I cannot tell you where he was born, or when, where he was educated or how he came to be manager at Butherwah. I can tell you that he died in June 1953, at Butherwah. Writing in March 1897 to Mrs Rose Grant, who inherited the property from her husband, Ernest was at his most formal: ‘I am very sorry to tell you that the season is turning out very badly. We have had no rain yet, grass is all gone and the water is drying up very fast’. An adjoining property was sending away 20 000 sheep as there was no water for them; Ernest feared for his lambing— without rain it would be ‘a complete failure’. ‘The country has a most desolate appearance,’ he reported, ‘and if it is your intention to return before the rain you will get a very disagreeable shock at the appearance of it.’ It was still dry in 1899, when he was attempting to sell 10 000 sheep, and possibly move others ‘to the mountains’. In February 1900 he was feeding the breeding ewes with 50 tons of oaten hay at £3.10.0 a ton. He would have to move more sheep off the property, he reported: ‘I was quite confident we could hold these sheep but the recent dust storms have done an incalculable amount of damage and there is no telling when they will cease’. Then in March he exulted in a telegram: ‘one hundred and seven points [27 mm] of rain yesterday now fine’.22 156

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Hope springs eternal. There was some rain by June 1900 and Whitehead predicted that the season ‘promises to be one of the best experienced in this district for many years’. It was not to be. The dry weather returned with a vengeance in 1901 and Butherwah struggled through the difficult days again. He described 1902 as ‘the worst year we have had yet’. In October he was starting 12 000 sheep for Victoria; in November ‘the country is very dry and there is no grass worth mentioning’. It was worth mentioning, though, that in July 1902 Ernest Whitehead married Mrs Grant, the owner of Butherwah.23 Good seasons returned and there were reserves at Butherwah to tide the estate over the very lean years. Part of the correspondence in the carefully maintained letterbooks from Butherwah relates to the hiring of servants. In 1913 Ernest outlines the work the cook is expected to do: breakfast for the men at 6.30, at 7 for himself, the bookkeeper and maids; lunch and dinner at 12.30 and 6.30 respectively. The cook has to make the butter; the milk is separated for her; ‘she will have to scrub one verandah once a week’ and there is no bread to make. Still looking for ‘capable servants’, he explains the establishment: he wants a cook, a housemaid, and a laundress to assist the housemaid. There are three men to do for in the kitchen, five in the house, wife, two children and governess. There would be three boys, eventually, two of them educated, briefly it seems, at Xavier College in Melbourne. The second son, Paul, was in the Air Force in the Second World War and killed in New Guinea in October 1943. Before then, and after Xavier, there was a home tutor, ‘definitely gifted as a teacher’, this young man’s father had written, 157

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confirming the position the tutor was to have: ‘I suppose he should bring along his dinner suit’. That was at the end of 1926.24 Butherwah must have been a pleasant place to live. Also in 1926, Ernest was on his way to Sydney and would stay with Jack Carmody, a former Urana resident, who had possibly been the teacher there. Your letter, [Carmody wrote, confirming the arrangements] transported me in spirit back to Urana and I seemed to see the old familiar faces and scenes of long ago—cricket matches, tennis tournaments, euchre parties, etc. I seem to get a whiff of the hot westerly wind and to see the whirling dust storms or the shimmering mirage as of old.

It was dry again, he knew from the papers: ‘this state of affairs reminds me of the years 1897 and 98 when all the water required had to be carted from Old Man Creek near the Murrumbidgee, 18 miles off’.25 Dressing for dinner, tennis tournaments, cooks and maids, a certainty of survival even in the worst droughts was the other side of life in the country, unknown in the Mallee, unusual surely even in Gippsland. There was an annual letter from the shearing contractor from Bathurst, always confirming arrangements, and always written in a friendly and personable style which speaks of an Australian egalitarianism as it once existed. Writing in 1942, for example, the contractor says how dry it was in Bathurst: ‘the water restrictions are still on and the morning bath water has been prohibited’. And there are jovial letters from Mick Martin, a mate who shares Whitehead’s passionate interest in horses, 158

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always addressed ‘Dear Earnie’. So life at Butherwah was never too stuffy. Ernest Whitehead died in 1953.26 Readers of Brisbane’s Courier in the early federation years may have noticed two heartfelt letters from Duncan MacGregor of Durham Downs, near the Queensland/South Australian border. If readers had looked at a map to find Durham Downs they would also have found the MacGregor Ranges running through the property. Duncan MacGregor had been an explorer in the 1860s and then a pioneer pastoralist. Writing in 1901, MacGregor described the Federation Drought as ‘one of the very worst drought calamities that have ever visited Australia’ and predicted that ‘without the remote and unsubstantial hope . . . that they might make a return . . . many of the Western landholders would abandon their runs with a curse’. In 1902, writing in the same paper, MacGregor’s vision was even more apocalyptic: Shattered in mind, body and spirits, without money or credit, denuded of stock, and seeing around us nothing but bleached bones and rotting hides, we cannot even in this hour of extremity surrender our last chance . . . we have endured hunger and thirst, labours incessant and prodigious, and in the midst of them all, a loneliness and sense of desolation, that would have broken the hearts of many other strong men long before now.

What good did it do the pastoralists, MacGregor asked, all this work in those terrible conditions? They owned nothing and had prospered little. ‘Simply,’ he concluded, ‘we have spent our lives as serfs of the Crown [and] how much did the Crown ever do to assist the redoubtable pioneer?’ It might have surprised Duncan MacGregor’s readers to know that he wrote these searing words 159

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about life on a remote Queensland station from Victoria; the ‘cabbage patch’, as non-Victorians then referred to the southern state that outback Queenslanders would have laughed at.27 That is not to say that MacGregor did not know what he was writing about. Apart from exploring that wild, remote country, he had also established sizeable holdings there in the 1870s and had worked the properties himself. But by the 1890s his sons John and Donald, and his nephew Farquhar McDonald, had responsibility for the MacGregor Queensland holdings. The old man knew how bad things were because his sons, in their regular letters, told him. But, in fact, he now lived most of his life in a pleasant house in Coburg, with money-making properties near Romsey, north of Melbourne, and Koo-wee-rup in Gippsland.28 The best letters in the MacGregor collection relating to Queensland are from the boys’ mother and their sister, Fran. The anxiety of these two women for the awful times that Donald and John experienced on Durham Downs in the late 1890s and early 1900s shows that the anguish of drought spread far beyond those living through it personally. John MacGregor went to Queensland first; his brother followed in the late 1890s. John reported to his mother that Donald ‘has taken to the work very well he did not like it at first but he is getting used to it now’. Was there an element of conscription in this family’s division of labour?29 Durham Downs had been a magnificent property and might have secured the family’s fortunes. It was central to their operations. In 1893 it carried 96 000 sheep, 26 000 cattle and 4000 horses. There were other holdings in Queensland, too, notably Yanko, Melba Downs and Mimosa in the Gulf country, with 160

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stock holdings totalling perhaps 25 000 cattle and 42 000 sheep. As managers, the brothers and their cousin were separated for long periods at a time. In April 1899, Farquhar wrote to John who was in Melbourne: ‘I wish you were back I have got the white ants bad. Since you left I have no-one to have a petch too. Old Scott seems to have the blues too’.30 And who can blame these young men; as isolated and remote as any on Australian properties, in blistering heat, with the properties and the stock mortgaged since 1895, and thus staring at disaster, and still it would not rain. John, writing to Farquhar on Boxing Day 1899: ‘Just a few lines to say that the woman at the hut that was working died yesterday from the heat; she got the [Christmas] dinner for the men and was dead in two hours . . . I never felt the heat so much as I have this year’.31 Only a month before John wrote this sad but totally unsentimental letter he was close to despair. Normally a good writer, his spelling collapses in one letter, perhaps a sign of the stress he was experiencing: I have got the stud sheep over hear now they were dying out there and I do not know where to put them as I have not got any water any were. The cattle are dying as fast as they can all over the place . . . I am up to my neck in it but we must make the best of things till rain comes.

By late 1901 the situation was even more desperate: ‘The wool looks very dry and dead and very dirty and will only bring a second class price. Everything will now depend on the rainfall and present appearances I am sorry to say are all in favour of a continuance of the dry weather’.32 161

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Letters to ‘Jack’ from his mother tell of the family carefully reading the newspapers for any reports of rain and constantly anxious about the boys: ‘I am looking in the papers every day to see if rain has come . . . Oh! How I do wish it will rain’. Again: ‘I only hope you have had some rain, poor Papa seems dreadfully worried . . . it really is very serious’. Or: ‘am still deeply grieved to think you are still badly off for rain, it is really dreadful, you can see by the papers the state of the country in New South Wales, it really could not be worse’. These letters were from the early years of the drought, and we know that things are only going to get worse. By 1900 Jack’s mother must have been looking for new ways to express her anxiety and to show support for the Queensland contingent. In August 1900: We often speak about you, Farquhar and Tommie and wonder how you are getting on. What a dreadful time you have had, I cannot fully express how much I feel for you . . . I suppose if you had [rain] now it would be of no use, for it must be too late, all the sheep and cattle must be dead or nearly so, it does seem a sad ending to a life of hard work’. [And a month later]: About the drought I am not going to say anything it is far too terrible to think about I can only say I do feel deeply . . . but you and Farquhar have had so many years of it’. [A month after that]: Sorry sorry to hear the bad news, I cannot tell you how [grief stricken] we all feel for you dear Jack you must be having a dreadful time. Papa feels it more than I can tell.

When I first read these letters in the quiet of the manuscript reading room, it struck me that the nearest I had seen to the tone and mood of them was in the rare letters we have from 162

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mothers to soldier sons on the Western Front in the First World War. There is the same sense of helplessness, of deep anxiety, of fear.33 Fran MacGregor, known in the family as ‘Goodie’, wondered in an early letter in this drought if ‘it will ever rain again’. ‘Here,’ she reported, ‘the people are crying out dreadfully, what must it be with you . . . we have had just awful weather, last week was just a cooker I never felt anything like it.’34 Goodie was a practical person and she had made up her mind that the family’s Queensland venture was simply not worth the effort and worry. She knew that only John and Donald, on the spot, could convince their father to pull out of Queensland to concentrate instead on the Victorian holdings. She set herself to achieve that aim. It was a powerfully argued letter, written in July 1900, and possibly effective, for the MacGregors finally abandoned their Queensland holdings, piled up as they were with debt. The suspense and worry at home, Goodie told her brothers, was ‘just awful’. Papa was looking very thin. ‘It seems more than hard to see his life-long struggle go for nothing. I just look at it this way. Why should he fight on perhaps for another 10 years and get not 1/- out of it and he does all the worry and work and the Banks reap all the benefit.’ She assumes that her brothers will complain that she does not know what she is talking about; she had never seen the Queensland properties. She concedes that, but she insists that all Durham Downs has produced in the last few years is loss, worry and anxiety and cheek from the brutes who are reaping the benefit [the banks] . . . How long will it take to stock up 163

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again, and no guarantee of good seasons? . . . It is a crying sin to have a man worried into his grave . . . and why should you Boys be slaving . . . to get nothing out of it.

‘Serfs of the Crown’ was how Duncan MacGregor had described the Queensland pioneers; we can only assume he was, eventually, somewhat happy to be released from his bondage. Duncan died in 1916, survived by his wife and six children, who then disappear from history’s pages.35 I began this chapter with the suggestion that we would look at the lives of some of those who make but a brief appearance in the records and who throw some light on the ways people lived through drought and the hard times. The last story in this miscellany of people and places takes us to Victoria’s Wimmera, just south of the Mallee. I came across Robert Geddes almost by accident as I was turning the pages of the Donald Times, researching the drought of the 1940s. I saw a small paragraph that intrigued me. ‘Adversity draws people together’, the story began; ah, I thought, a nice story about community involvement, and I read on, searching, as ever, for what will throw light on how people lived with drought. ‘District friends of the late Mr R. Geddes will essay to strip the 240 acres of wheat on his family’s property. This will represent the product of his labours prior to his untimely passing’, the paragraph announced. Work would commence as early as possible, two days before Christmas 1943. Those who helped out, the paper suggested, ‘will feel amply repaid’.36 On I read, for a glimpse of neighbours helping out at Christmas. At school we had learned ‘The Fire at Ross’s Farm’ 164

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from the Fifth Book of the Victorian Readers series, published by the Victorian Education Department, and thus read by every boy and girl at school in Victoria in Grade 5 from 1930 to possibly 1970. I had never forgotten the last two lines of Henry Lawson’s poem: ‘Two grimy hands in friendship joined/ And it was Christmas Day.’ Why was Christmas Eve an appropriate time to make peace, the notes at the back of the Fifth Book asked us. They did not ask that question at Geddes’s farm in 1943. They simply knew that it was the right thing to do. The Donald Times would tell me that work started at ten in the morning and finished at five. More than 50 men helped and ‘the ladies provided lunch’; by the end of the day 1000 bags of wheat had been harvested. Robert Geddes had died on 1 December 1943. His family’s Christmas would be just that little bit better for this community generosity.37 In an obituary the Donald Times also published I found that Robert Geddes was only 51 when he had died, too young for a fit farmer, that he had been born in Morayshire, Scotland, in 1892 and had come to Australia in 1912. He had first worked in the Wimmera as a farm boy, then in Gippsland, and had then enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force, in the 39th Battalion. Robert Geddes had returned from the war wounded and gassed, and so to a shortened life, but had come home too with a Military Medal and Bar—he had been highly decorated at war for two acts of bravery. He returned a sergeant major. I do not know if he visited family on leave in Scotland, or if he debated whether he should come back to Australia. He probably had few ties here. Yet he did come back and he took up a soldier settlement block, for how else might a poor immigrant from Scotland have 165

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become a landowner, and farmed successfully ever since? Geddes, the obituary told me, won the respect of his neighbours and community for ‘courtesy, uprightness and hard work’. In 1925 he married a local farmer’s daughter and he and his wife had five children, four daughters and a son. The oldest must have been under 20 years of age when their father died. Robert Geddes had been a member of the North Laen Presbyterian Church for many years and a member and president of the Rich Avon East School Committee. It was that type of obituary. Helpful, but I wanted more.38 There is a history of the 39th Battalion, I found, with a nominal roll of all members of the battalion. Robert Geddes enlisted on 31 March 1916 and returned to Australia on 6 September 1919. Eighty-three members of the battalion were awarded the Military Medal; only three had the Military Medal and Bar. Raised in Ballarat, the 39th Battalion reached England on 18 July 1916 and crossed to France on 24 November 1916 in time for the terrible fighting in Belgium in 1917. Indeed. Battle honours for the 39th are: Messines, Ypres, Broodseinde, Passchendaele, the Somme (1918), Mont St Quentin, Hindenburg Line, St Quentin Canal. The battalion history does not say how Robert Geddes came to be decorated, nor does the Commonwealth Gazette. Officers receiving the Military Cross, on equal standing with the Military Medal, had their exploits in winning it written up in the Gazette; soldiers, however, an inferior caste, were unremarked in their bravery. Perhaps a history of Donald, to tell me more about soldier settlement? This led me to an unlikely book entitled Country for Heroes: Rich Avon Soldiers’ Settlement and Rich Avon Cricket 166

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Club. I was well served. There I read that the three daughters of the first settler of the quaintly named Rich Avon, just outside Donald, in the Wimmera Mary, Ethel and Ella Guthrie, determined to break up 4803 acres (1945 hectares) of their land to reward returning soldiers with settlement blocks. The Closer Settlement Board took some time to agree to the women’s proposal but eventually approved it and received 37 applications for the fourteen blocks. Preference would be given, the Board announced, to those who had worked in the district before. A lucky break for Robert Geddes. The men who appeared before the Board, the Donald Times told us, ‘were a fine, sturdy, determined looking lot of men’ who would, no doubt, all make good settlers. Each block was divided into four paddocks with one dam in each. But there were no buildings, the land was timbered and covered in tussocks of grass. As wheat country it had a long way to go.39 There was a Royal Commission into soldier settlement in Victoria in 1925, so disastrous had it proved in some parts of the state. Four soldier settlers gave evidence when the Commission sat in Donald in August 1925. Eight of the original settlers, apparently, had already sold up. It would be nice to think that Robert Geddes was one of those giving evidence, already a leader in his community. We have no diary from this soldier settler to make more of his story. He must have built a house, he married, fathered a substantial family, prospered at least modestly I hope, but all in the space of just over 20 years. He did live through trying times on his block; the Depression when farm prices crashed. He was probably lucky to have put in a crop at all the year he died, because in 1943 drought had 167

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come back to the Mallee in terrifying form yet again. But this soldier settler stuck it out until death claimed him far too soon. It was the fate of many who served in the Great War, part of the Australian story that these few examples illuminate. A brave soldier, Robert Geddes, and he deserved a rich and comfortable old age. But like so much in this book, and in the story of rural Australia, what one deserved was not often what one received.

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6 ‘Drought sneaks up on you, but so does war’ ‘Drought sneaks up on you, but so does war’

IN MARCH 1944 ,

with the nation’s attention still largely consumed by the horrific world war in Europe and the Pacific, the Horsham Times reported that a deputation of local farmers had held a meeting with Victoria’s Minister for Water Supply, the Honourable John McDonald. Thirty thousand sheep, in just these farmers’ immediate small parish at Banyena, out from St Arnaud in the Wimmera, were at risk of dying from thirst within a matter of days, the farmers told the Minister. At best, the sheep had 10 days to live. Farm dams had run dry for the first time in 30 years, and the farmers were at their wits’ end.1 We can be sure that the Minister listened to their stories with concern and deep empathy. He might have told them— but being a reserved Scotsman he probably did not—that he had been there and done that. For Jack McDonald’s life had been profoundly affected by both drought and war and his story provides a good introduction to the twin themes we will explore in this chapter. 169

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Born at Falkirk, Scotland in December 1898, Jack was the second child of Donald, a licensed grocer, and Annie. By 1912 Donald McDonald had died and 14-year-old Jack migrated to Australia with his brother, two sisters and widowed mother. The family settled near Shepparton in central Victoria and started their lives anew as dairy farmers. Jack’s older brother was about sixteen or seventeen; and there were two younger ones, sisters, remember, to feed and educate. Dairy farming was a risk. And so it proved. In the terrible drought of 1914 the family lost their entire dairy herd, and thus, of course, their income.2 It is not possible to say how many others around Shepparton lost everything, for stories at the individual level are hard to come by. But the McDonalds were certainly not alone. William Reigth, of Caniambo, not very far out of Shepparton, the Shepparton News reported, sent his dairy herd of 21 cows to the Melbourne markets in October 1914. He received an average of just £1 per head for them, choice beasts which had cost him between £5–£7 a head to buy earlier in the year. Was the McDonalds’ loss of similar or greater proportions? I do not know. But things were serious. The paper reported that there was little grass around Shepparton and that sheep were already beginning to die. In this drought, again, stock would die in great numbers.3 There are many reasons, we know, for a man to take the decision to go to war. ‘King and country’ sounds good, but like most slogans it is superficial at best. In 1940, at the Sydney Showgrounds, a man was called to the pay sergeant’s table, having recently enlisted in the AIF. To the amazement of all he shot out his arm in the Nazi salute, bellowing, ‘Heil Hitler!’. Asked what on earth he thought he was doing, the novice soldier 170

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replied: ‘I’ve been out of a job for two blinking years. This is the first blinking pay I’ve had in two blinking years.’ Hitler, it seemed, had done this bloke a favour. He was, some might have said, an economic conscript.4 So it was with Jack McDonald in the earlier war. He enlisted in March 1916 when he was just seventeen years old. Jack put down on his attestation paper that he was eighteen years and two months, but he would not turn eighteen until December 1916, by which time he would be in the front line. Jack’s mother might have connived in the deception that under-age enlistment involved. Or did she? We do know that he put her down as his next of kin. By March 1916 everyone in Australia understood the murderous cost of war; Gallipoli had taught them that. Day after day the newspapers printed the lists of those killed or injured—thousands of men. When Jack’s battalion left Melbourne, the battalion historian later wrote, the crowds found the departure ‘no happy business. The terror of war had begun to burn deeply into the hearts of the Australian people . . . the soldier himself did not care to look too far into the future’. With what anguish did Jack’s mother surrender her son to the army? Did she see him off when he sailed for war (there was a large crowd of well-wishers on the wharf at Port Melbourne—could she afford to make the trip from Shepparton?); did she pounce on his letters home when he described the journey to war? The point was, of course, that Jack could allot some of his AIF pay to his mother, and the family would then have at least some money coming in regularly. Drought had done this.5 Jack McDonald served with the 37th Battalion, a part of General Monash’s brilliantly trained 10th Brigade. The battalion 171

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sailed from Australia on 3 June 1916 and prepared for war for nearly five months on the Salisbury Plains in England. The battalion historian estimated that 63 per cent of its members were under 25 years of age. Jack, we know, was not yet eighteen when the 37th crossed over to France; he reached the trenches on the Western Front in November 1916. But he was not there for long. On 27 February 1917 he was shot through the chest and had a lung removed in hospital. He was now eighteen years old. Discharged on 4 January 1918, Jack returned to Shepparton, and started up as an orchardist with his brother. It would be many years before he told anyone that he was living on only one lung.6 McDonald was a born organiser and it was not long before he was in the thick of farmers’ lobby groups and local politics. He won a by-election for the seat of Goulburn Valley in the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1936. (He had married four years earlier.) In September 1943, McDonald achieved what he expected was to be the peak of his political ambitions when Premier Albert Dunstan appointed him Minister for Water Supply. For McDonald, with his background, it was the only job that counted. They said of him that ‘he would talk water at the drop of a hat’. And it was this job that brought him to the meeting with farmers near St Arnaud just six months later. How many of the farmers will be pushed off their farms, Jack might have wondered in 1943, how many pushed into the army, just to provide for their families, as he had been? It was this wretched drought. Jack’s 37th Battalion, raised in Melbourne, the northeast of Victoria and Gippsland, would have had many farmers’ sons in its ranks. How many had told Jack that the drought had sent them to war too? 172

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Surely it was cruel that in Australia the arrivals of the two world wars coincided with two severe and depressing droughts, 1914–15 and 1943–45. War meant, for farmers, among many other anxieties, extreme labour shortages. Combine that with drought and you have another dreadful rural story. Yet they never learn, the Minister might have thought, about wars, or droughts. Some said that the 1914 drought was as bad, possibly worse, than the Federation Drought at the end of the last century, the beginning of the new. In 1914 at Swan Hill, the Murray River, Australia’s greatest river, ran dry. You could walk from New South Wales to Victoria across the river border. You could not do that in 1902. Then, there was always a bit of water in the river. Not in 1914. There were bad droughts, too, in the late 1920s and late 1930s. And then the drought of 1943–45. Still we do not take precautions, the new Minister for Water Supply lamented. A Victorian parliamentary colleague had begun campaigning for drought alertness, preaching the value of permanent preparation. As he told the parliament in 1944, a farmer he had been talking to admitted, ‘It’s a peculiar fact, but when a drought is over we forget all about it.’ In 1944 even, after all that history of misery and loss.7 It was the same in 1914, only a decade or so after the calamitous Federation Drought. We cannot say, the Ararat Advertiser admonished its readers, that we have followed Milton’s advice to be ‘provident for the future’. Instead: We have, most unhappily, shown an almost criminal want of care in making provision for the exigencies of recurring seasons of drought. We have failed to foresee what must in the ordinary course 173

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of events occur . . . Today we are face to face with a period of severe drought. Such occurrences are not singular.8

People should have begun to expect drought as a part of a recurring cycle in Australia but there was still, in 1914, only a limited amount of information with which to try to predict what the weather might bring. When the McDonalds bought their dairy farm, how much detailed information did they have on likely rainfall? Did any of their neighbours think to mention to these new chums that Shepparton had almost entirely run out of water by 1903? That farming in that region, without irrigation, was always going to be a risky business? Or were they, new arrivals from Scotland, unable to comprehend a circumstance where rain might not come for weeks or months on end? The drought of 1914 began to make its presence felt when, throughout much of eastern Australia, the winter rains failed after a long, dry summer. Older residents of the Maroona district, near Ararat, at the gateway to the Wimmera, claimed that June 1914 was about the driest on record, but that was the way droughts in Australia were always announced. There was no dramatic, cataclysmic event like a bushfire or a flood to announce the beginning of a drought. To be drought-alert, people could only rely on local stories, local accounts, what an older settler might be able to remember; for there simply was not enough record-keeping to suggest when drought might re-emerge. And in 1942, fearing invasion, or some real advantage to the enemy anyway, the federal government proscribed weather maps and weather forecasts everywhere. Nothing in the papers about the weather; nothing on the radio. 174

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Farmers who had just begun to rely on scientific information took to scanning the skies again, as they had been doing in Australia for most of the nineteenth century, without real records or reliable interpretations of the weather. ‘Drought sneaks up on you,’ the Ararat Advertiser remarked, ‘but so does war.’9 A better understanding of Australia’s weather by 1914 might have inclined people to make better preparations for the possibility of a prolonged dry. More dams might have been scooped out of the ground, more hay stored. Instead, farmers seemed just to hope for the best and only began to take action once drought had really settled in. One of the most predictable responses to drought was the movement of stock from dry pastures to better pastures, movements that would tell folk the dry was getting serious. And it was the local town paper that would give the reader the information from a range of sources that bad times were approaching. ‘Two mobs of horses passed through Ararat yesterday’, the local paper reported in October 1914, the larger mob stretching out over half a mile along the Port Fairy road. That was a lot of horses; something was wrong. Or anecdotes from those who had been travelling, letting readers know what was going on beyond the local region. Someone who had just been through the Mallee, again in October 1914, reported that conditions were simply deplorable . . . dead sheep could be seen lying about all the paddocks . . . horses were being sold at any price. [A mob of] thirty good farm beasts, which could not be disposed of at one sale, were taken away at night and shot . . . Within the last few 175

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weeks over 300,000 sheep and cattle have passed over the bridge at Echuca by road and rail for southern pastures.

There was a stirring in the bush. Something was up. Drought, like war, sneaks up on you.10 Agisting stock on someone else’s land was expensive, but so too were top breeding stock. For 184 acres (75 hectares) of agistment at Bamawm, near Echuca, one Western District farmer in 1914 was paying £200 per month and had contracted to take the land for six months. Either that or his stud sheep would die. That was unusual, as it was reasonably rare for the Western District to run out of water. But in 1914 the Glenelg River at Casterton was just a ‘trickle . . . state of affairs unique in the history of this district’. In Australia, drought could strike almost anywhere.11 But the movement of stock would happen in every drought; farmers were still agisting horses in 1944. Again from Casterton, in Victoria’s Western District, three farmers sent their horses to Lucindale, not so far from Naracoorte in South Australia. They would pay 4 shillings per head per week. But when the Casterton farmers later went to Lucindale to see how their horses were getting on, the farmer there reduced his price to two shillings a week. ‘You’re having a bad spin,’ he told them, ‘and seem to be decent sorts. I want to help you.’ Even so, agistment was a kneejerk solution to a permanent problem.12 Once drought came, it seemed to come in a rush. It was as if people missed the significance of the failure of the winter rains until it was too late. At Tatyoon, near Ararat, by September 1914 people were already carting water ‘long distances’ for domestic 176

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purposes and the Ararat Town Council had put water restrictions in place; water was to be used for domestic purposes only. There was to be no water for the cleaning of carriages, horses and stables. Why weren’t people making better preparations?13 All the talk in the newspapers, though, was of war. Of the cheering crowds in the capital cities; of men rushing to the recruiting depots, again in the capital cities; of news from the front in the expectation of a swift and stunning victory. All this was newsworthy, of course, but in the bush there were other pressures too. The failure of a family was public knowledge; how could it be otherwise in these small communities? In Horsham in September 1914, people witnessed the ‘sad spectacle’ of a destitute Rainbow district family proceeding along the main street with all their belongings. Driven off the land that could no longer support them. People would wonder who they would see next in a similar predicament. Failure preyed on their minds. The pressures got too much for Daniel Hewitt, a sharefarmer at Woomelang, near Hopetoun in Victoria. Married with seven children, in April 1915, as the Australians were in the last stages of preparation for their assault on the cliffs of Gallipoli, Daniel Hewitt went into his chaff-house and shot himself dead. ‘The heavy cost of putting in his 1915 crop,’ the local paper reported, ‘seems to have unhinged his mind.’ Over at Mooroopna, near Shepparton, the 13-year-old son of Charles Morey found his father hanging from a rafter in the cart shed. ‘Last weekend,’ the paper reported, ‘during the very hot weather [deceased] had the misfortune to have his house and its contents destroyed by fire.’ Morey had been questioned by police regarding the fire and his sons Charles and Harold noticed that he had then become very 177

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depressed. Morey had lived in the district for many years, was married to the daughter of a highly respected settler and ‘the deceased personally was highly esteemed, and much regret is expressed at his untimely death’.14 We know that the drought sent Jack McDonald off to the war, but those who have written about recruitment to the first Australian Imperial Force, or those who have written about the impact of war on rural Australia, do not waste too many words on drought as an influence in the decision to enlist. I think that they are wrong but until we have a section on a future recruitment form asking ‘Why have you decided to enlist?’ we will never know with any certainty why citizens choose to fight in war. Every historian who has tried to describe the reasons for enlistment has been engaged in speculation. We do know that a significant proportion of Australian soldiers in the First World War came from rural areas, and we do know that their enlistment caused worrying difficulties for those left behind trying to make a living from the land; but we cannot say with any certainty why their sons and brothers and neighbours went off to war. The stories of drought and hard living already covered here may provide much of the answer, however. The adventure, excitement and romance of war might have induced some to leave the farm, with all its hard labour and uncertainty. At least until the terrible cost of war became apparent. But in leaving they made life so much harder for those who stayed behind. Their fathers, wives, a brother maybe. It is the exemption courts, established to test the claims of those who objected to the government’s call-up of men for compulsory military service in 1916, that show us how severe 178

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was the rural labour shortage under the impact of mass enlistment. Prime Minister Hughes, shocked at the extent of Australian losses on the Somme from July 1916 onwards, decided that conscription offered the only means of reinforcing the troops on the Western Front. Recognising that his Labor Party-controlled Senate would not pass legislation in favour of conscription, Hughes decided on a massive Australia-wide plebiscite, which he described as a referendum although no constitutional change was involved, to force a change to his party’s mind. Hughes was in no doubt that the people would vote in favour of conscription. Indeed, so confident was he that the government issued a call-up to young Australians even before the vote was taken. The exemption courts sat across Australia from the second-last week of October 1916 and the referendum was held on 28 October 1916. It was woeful timing. Prime Minister Hughes might have been worried when he heard how many rural Australians were seeking exemption. In South Australia, for example, of 8548 men passed as fit for service by 12 October, 6065 immediately sought an exemption from service. Or at the local level: at Border Town 94 men were passed as fit, 87 then sought exemption.15 In many cases the applicant to the exemption court stated that he was his family’s sole support and the only person remaining to maintain the family farm. The trouble was that under the regulations, magistrates had no freedom to allow exemptions for such claimants, for only a religious objection to war was an allowable reason to evade the call-up. In many cases, though, families had made hard-headed decisions: ‘Me and Jack will go, so long as you’ll stay behind to keep the farm going’. An only son was exempted from the call-up, but not families making sensible, 179

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necessary arrangements for the maintenance of what gave them their livelihood and over which they may have slaved for a couple of decades. Add conscription, earlier labour shortages and drought into the mix, and the pressures in rural Australia intensified. It was the same in the next war. Despite attempts to manage the workforce and not to allow wholesale enlistment, the rural labour force was quickly depleted. Take the case of Brigadier Arnold Potts and his wife, Doreen (Dawn). Born in 1896 on the Isle of Man, but migrating to Western Australia with his family in 1904, Potts enlisted in the AIF in 1915, and served on Gallipoli and the Western Front. He was awarded the Military Cross. After the war he took up farming (though he was classified as 20 per cent disabled) at Kojonup, almost halfway between Perth and Albany. When war broke out again Potts, Cincinnatuslike, turned from his farm. He soldiered in Syria with distinction and then mounted the Australian defence of Port Moresby along the Kokoda Track. His achievement in slowing the Japanese advance was remarkable and Arnold Potts proved himself one of Australia’s greatest soldiers. For this he was sacked by General Blamey but, still a brigadier, he would not return to his farm until late 1945. The strength of Potts’ biography, Warrior of Kokoda, lies in the biographer’s access to the letters the soldier wrote to Dawn, regularly, with detail, and from every place from which he served. Apparently his wife’s letters in reply have not been preserved, easy to understand in the light of the appalling conditions that even brigadiers endured on Kokoda, for example. Yet what a source Dawn Potts’ letters might have been. From the time of 180

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Arnold’s enlistment in 1939 until his return in 1945, Dawn was in sole charge of the farm. A city girl, essentially, though her father did own a farm near Kojonup, on which she spent time during holidays and long weekends. Dawn had thirteen years of married life observing her husband before she took over the management of the property. She had to keep it going until after the war; it was their livelihood. A daughter said of her: ‘Mum was a city girl and though she probably fell short in the mechanics and techniques of farming, she had a good business brain’. She also had the help of three Italian prisoners of war, but it must have been tough going nevertheless. She was just one of the thousands of women who had to do this for their husbands and their families.16 There was a sense, in both world wars, that the farming community was engaged in work of national importance; that theirs too was a national service. John Curtin said as much: the war, for Australia, he said in 1943, would be won as much in the factories and on the farms, as on the battlefields. President Roosevelt agreed: ‘food is a weapon of total war’, he had said, ‘fully as important as guns, planes and tanks’. Why then, a woman like Dawn Potts might have wondered after the war was over, do I not march on Anzac Day alongside my husband? He is honoured for the courage and determination of Kokoda; should I be honoured for the courage and determination of keeping the farm going, producing for the soldiers? Except that farmers liked to keep complex thoughts like these to themselves; no-one in Australia, then, much liked a big-noter.17 Yet this sense of a national service was in the minds of the people of rural Australia almost from the beginning of the First 181

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World War. The Swan Hill Guardian was a modest paper, but lively in defence of local issues. News that the Australians had at last joined in the fighting only reached the nation’s newspapers on the last day of April 1915, and even then there were only hints that ‘our boys’ were in action. On Saturday 8 May, Australians opened their newspapers to read the thrilling account by British journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett of the landing at Gallipoli. There had been a few casualty lists already, however, out of any context and hard to understand. Twenty-two names of the wounded on 2 May; the next day the names of several killed. On 7 May, 238 casualties and on 8 May, the day of the first real news, a further 473 names of those killed and injured. A significant number already. Yet less than a week later, on 13 May the Swan Hill Guardian could claim that the men who were sticking it out in this fearsome drought ‘in a sense are doing as much for their country as those who are now fighting at the front’. There was a battle in place on the home front, it seemed, but as the Great War grew to dominate the news across Australia very few, other than those living through it, had more than a sketchy idea about this other war with King Drought.18 How bad was this drought? Well, at Yarraby near Swan Hill, by May 1915, just as the drought was about to break, although no-one would have known it then, one farmer shot six of his horses and likened it to cutting his hand off; another had let his property and was off with his horses in search of work and water; there would be a general exodus from the Mallee soon, someone predicted. A farmer wrote that he had spent every penny he could raise on feed for his horses and sheep. To no avail; it was all gone. ‘We can’t even get a bit of tea or sugar,’ he wrote, ‘without cash. 182

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We have not a sheep fit to kill. Two horses dead, nearly all the sheep, and even the fowls won’t lay.’19 It was what Nellie Melba had seen in 1902 and what by now we are familiar with as the general picture of drought in Australia. All the accounts make it clear that the agony, grief and suffering of drought was just as acute in this new manifestation in 1914 as it had been previously. Of course there are sidelights. By 1914 the railway was an expected and necessary part of bush life. Yet even the railways, replacing horses and bullocks in so many jobs, could not cope with drought. The engines needed water and plenty of it. In March 1915 the Victorian Railways announced that it would be necessary to start cancelling services unless good rains fell. The water being pumped into the locomotives was muddy in appearance ‘and contains a large quantity of foreign substance’ that was causing problems. The train from Hamilton to Ararat was late on three days last week, the Ararat Advertiser reported in March, an hour, nearly two hours late, on different days. To keep the trains running in the Ararat region the railways needed 25 000 gallons (114 000 litres) of water a day. The trains had been in trouble since late 1914.20 Was this the worst drought ever, the Shepparton News asked in October 1914. ‘In a few instances, on fallow ground, a little crop is left, but otherwise not a scrap of vegetation is to be seen.’ At Pomonal, near Ararat, an orchard that usually packed 7000 cases of apples for export had, in early 1915, packed just 200 cases. Many farmers around Shepparton had lost stock, especially cows, by October 1914: ‘even those that have been turned into wheat paddocks have succumbed to the effects of the dry season. Cows seem to get weak in the legs, fall off in condition, 183

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stop eating and die’. This, no doubt, was what Jack McDonald and his brother had watched in agony as their dairy herd die in front of them.21 As early as September 1914 the Railways had announced that staff would hand out promissory notes for fifteen months for those who needed to send horses south. That is, the farmers would still have to pay the freight costs, but just not yet. Announcing this, the Minister for Public Works, Frederick Hagelthorn, who knew the Mallee and Wimmera well, and who was personally responsible for opening up land in the Mallee and encouraging settlers to give it a go, said that ‘the settlers in the Mallee are suffering severely today and unless relief comes quickly their position will be quite as bad as, if not worse than, that of the men at the front’. But this was early in the war, before the true horror of the conflict became widely understood.22 As early as June 1914 there was a sense that the season was on the turn; a fear that the farmers were in for a drought of unusual severity. The water in the dams was very low, the grass dying off. Steady rain was needed: ‘all the farmers are anxiously looking for rain’. It was so dusty in Swan Hill in July that the council watered the streets to keep the dust down. This had never happened before in July. With the exception of three, June was the driest month in Swan Hill in 26 years. The stories started to come in. ‘I passed on the road today,’ a correspondent wrote, ‘a pair of buggy horses scarcely able to stand—sheer skin and bones—trying to keep themselves alive by nibbling at the dry stunted saltbush.’ The Weather Bureau reported that ‘so complete a failure of the winter rainfall [in the Mallee, Wimmera and northern districts] has never been known before’. The Mallee 184

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had received just 60 points (15 mm) from the start of June to the end of September 1914. By December the dust storms were so fierce that at the races at Swan Hill it was impossible to see the horses running: ‘in fact in some instances the horses had passed the winning post before the public were aware that the race had started’. Good for the bookie or the punter? Well, in one race, ‘members of the ring were crying out the odds after the horses had passed the post’.23 The Weekly Times, a newspaper aimed at a rural readership but written and printed in Melbourne, had an unusual angle on this new drought. Yes, it was bad, the paper admitted, but settlers had to understand that drought was just another of the business risks farmers faced, and they would certainly come through it if they persevered. The Weekly Times pictured Mallee men now living in retirement at Geelong, Portland, even Melbourne. There was a sense of prosperity in this picture, feet up on a verandah, overlooking the ocean, the hard work done, retirement paid for and enjoyed. But they had known drought, these men. The terrible Federation Drought, for one. As the Weekly Times wrote: They saw their horses die and their crops vanish. Their capital had long ago turned into an apparently hopeless mountain of debt. Some of them actually clothed themselves in sheep skins and old bags. Many of them lived for weeks on rabbits . . . just fur and bones.

But they stuck to their jobs. They began to understand that drought was just a ‘passing phase’, that ‘the drought, the personal suffering, the accumulation of debts, the hopes deferred, were 185

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(and are) looked upon as business risks’. Men need to understand, the Weekly Times thought, that even now the prospects for the Mallee were ‘bright’. We all do need to know, in times of adversity, that there must be hope, but the writer of this encouraging epistle might have turned his prose with equal Pollyanna-rism on those about to go into battle. In his hands, ‘rally chaps’ could have sounded truly comforting. At the Nek, perhaps.24 Symbols are all, in war and in drought too. ‘Never before in the history of the country’ had people seen a practically dry Murray. It was worse now that some people were relying on irrigation, a solution seized on after the Federation Drought, a panacea, or so they had thought. ‘The scheme of closer settlement under the application of water to the land is on the verge of breaking down,’ the Swan Hill Guardian reported in March 1915. The whole cause of the trouble was that the river had given out. The Murray had become a series of waterholes, so stagnant that its water was unfit for domestic use. Yet men had paid high prices for this land when they had been told that irrigation would put them beyond the reaches of climatic change. At Tooleybuc, just on the New South Wales side of the Murray, near Swan Hill, the Murray had given up the ghost on the last day of January 1915. Worse, the channels used to carry irrigation water to the farmers had quite filled with sand, and it would take a great deal of money to clear them out and make them flow again.25 In all of this, hardly anything annoyed the farmers more than the allegation, rumour maybe, or fact, that Prime Minister Andrew Fisher had spoken of these trials dismissively as ‘this little 186

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drought’. Did Fisher really say that? He might have done, although I cannot find evidence of it. By early 1915 Andrew Fisher was a tired and worried man: so tired, indeed, that he went to New Zealand in January, ostensibly for war talks, but, so a biographer wrote, ‘to recuperate from what seems to have been a nervous collapse’. The war took its toll of Andrew Fisher and he resigned as Prime Minister on 30 October 1915 to become High Commissioner in London. His second prime ministership was overwhelmed by the war; perhaps in all his work and worries he might have given more attention to this terrible drought, but he was not alone in Australia in concentrating on the war to the exclusion of almost everything else. The farmers were on their own.26 There was more to it than that, though. The community was not herded off into separate compartments, farmers and their drought in this section, fathers, mothers, wives, children waiting for news of a loved one at war in that section. They were all mixed in together. The cocky scanning the skies for any hint of rain might have just been reading of his son’s dry bit of land carved into some dugout below Quinn’s Post, marvelling at the beautiful Aegean Sea but without water himself for even essential needs like washing and shaving and drinking. Water-carriers struggled up Gallipoli’s sharp hills with two kerosene tins of water, linked together with leather or rope, uncomfortably heavy on the neck and shoulders. They knew that they must go on; their soldier mates could not survive without water. Chaplain Bill McKenzie, a Salvationist, watched these water-carriers struggling and slipping on the shaley soil. Overnight McKenzie cut out steps on the slope to make the water-carriers’ work easier. 187

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He was that kind of man; it was that kind of place. The irony was that some of these water-carriers, in all likelihood, were from those parts of Australia that had known drought, that had carted water for long distances, to keep stock and crops with a chance for as long as possible.27 In rural Australia war meant shortage of labour and shortage of materials. Before the Second World War there were 416 000 permanent rural workers in Australia; by 1943 there were 284 000, a loss of 32 per cent. Some, of course, had taken jobs in the expanding factories in the cities, but many more had joined the armed services. Every one of these men and women left behind others who were worrying; anxious wives, parents and siblings. Even in rural Australia people could see the dangers of war. There was an air base at Narrandera in southern New South Wales, and an even bigger one at Tocumwal, just down the road. Narrandera held its first military funeral in March 1943. Two Tiger Moth training aircraft had collided just above the aerodrome, killing four servicemen. The funeral procession wound through the streets of Narrandera, the coffins on gun-carriages, and there was a large turnout of townspeople to mourn and reflect.28 And like people elsewhere in Australia, rural folk waited for news. In February 1943, twelve months almost to the day since the fall of Singapore, Mr and Mrs C. Parfrey of Narrandera learned that their son Private Thomas Parfrey, previously reported missing in Malaya, was a prisoner of war. They still knew nothing of the fate of their other two sons at war, George and Les, reported missing at Singapore. They were like the families of 20 000 others who became prisoners of the Japanese, desperate 188

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for any sort of news. Each day living in hope and fear; driven almost to madness, some of them, waiting for any glimpse of what might have happened. For the Parfreys it was a long wait. Early in October 1945, the war having ended in August of course, the local paper reported that ‘two of the Parfrey boys have been liberated, but one is still unaccounted for’. A week later it was reported that ‘George and Les will arrive back in Sydney today . . . but no word has been received of their brother Tom’. It is incredible to record it, but it was not until 24 November 1945 that the parents received word to say that Tom Parfrey would not be coming home. He had been murdered at Sandakan on 10 June 1945. A keen sportsman, good at football, tennis and cricket, Tom Parfrey would have been 36 the next January. He was the eighth son; there were ten remaining brothers and sisters. An older brother, Bill, had died in the First World War. Just a small rural story, easy to pass over perhaps in reading the local paper, but let it stand for the family anxiety and grief that every part of rural Australia experienced even while coping with those terrible wartime droughts.29 Whenever I was reading the letters and diaries of men on the land in the Federation Drought, for example, I worried for the sons they would so proudly write about. They’ll be of an age for war, I would find myself thinking; there may be further trouble ahead for this family—it’s not just drought. Take John Smith, a prosaic man with a prosaic name. A station manager for much of his life, down in Victoria’s Western District, on one of the best properties. Beautiful country. John Smith came to Australia with his father and the rest of his family in 1852. The father was already an old fellow, born in Scotland in 1801. John’s 189

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mother was younger, somewhat, born in 1812. John himself was born about 1850 and could remember nothing of Scotland. His father got land in 1863 at Ballochile, five miles from Coleraine, but he died in 1874. We can assume that John grew up working that land. He was managing at Mt Noorat by 1882, Niel Black’s property until his death in 1880, boasting one of the Western District’s finest mansions. In 1882 Smith reported drought to the owner, A.J. Black and his mother, holidaying in Scotland, possibly seeking to come to terms with the older man’s death. ‘Hoping your mother is alright again,’ John Smith wrote in March, ‘and that I will soon hear of you all leaving Scotland for Australia.’ It was a substantial property; he hoped to sell 1000 fat cattle and 10 000 fat sheep at the Ballarat sales, so long as their condition held up.30 By 1895, when he was reporting to a cousin in Scotland, John Smith was married to Euphemia (Phemie) and had three sons, the oldest born in 1882. This boy, Duncan, is probably going to miss the war. But the others? John Smith sent Duncan off to Geelong Grammar School in 1896: ‘we all miss him very much’, he wrote, but let us not read too much sentiment into that: ‘he was beginning to get useful about the place after school hours’. In 1909 he let his brother know that his second son, Norman, was engaged to be married and he intended to build on his portion of Ballochile, run by his brother as a partnership, inherited from their father. The partnership would have to be dissolved. Marriage might keep this lad out of the war too.31 It was the third son, Eoin, who might run into trouble. He was at Geelong Grammar in 1909; it was then that his father 190

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sent him a cheque for £8, going off for a rowing regatta to Adelaide: ‘I want you to be very careful with your money and not to spend a penny more than that you will require’. John Smith had always been careful with his money. Writing to his brother in 1896 he says he has received the brother’s cheque for £2 for a service for a horse. He explains that the fee, in fact, is two guineas: ‘the two shillings I will get from you some other time’. By July 1909 Norman was managing ‘Miss Henty’s portion of Merino Downs’, another fine property, but at a distance from home: ‘and I miss him very much . . . I don’t intend to send Eoin back to school after his mid-winter holidays’. Did he want the company? Keeping his youngest at home?32 Eoin Lindsay Smith enlisted in the AIF in January 1915 and wrote his first letter home from Broadmeadows Camp a few days later. He had met up with some former school chums. At Geelong Grammar three schoolboys had enlisted as soon as news of the war reached the school; the school magazine, the Corian, published a picture of 11 current students leaving school to enlist in 1915. There were many old boys in the AIF too. ‘I hope to get into the thick of things before long’, Eoin had written from Broadmeadows, and ‘I am very glad to have Barney Briggs for a mate’. He was in the 8th Light Horse and was 24 years old when he was killed in action at Lone Pine on 27 June 1915; he was buried in Ari Burnu cemetery, for many years the place for the Anzac Day Dawn Service at Gallipoli. There were 60 000 Australians, all up, killed in this war; rural Australians a good many of them. Eoin Smith had described himself as a station manager when he had enlisted. Like his father.33 191

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‘When I was a girl in the 1944 drought,’ Heather Carter remembers, ‘Dad and I were in the old ute.’ They lived on a place near Hopetoun, edging into the Mallee from the Wimmera: We were herding sheep along the road and we could see the dust storm coming. It just came in a wall and we had to put bags over our heads because you couldn’t breathe otherwise. And the sheep all lay down—or we presumed they did—in the table drains and the dogs got in with us. We waited for about an hour till we could see. When we could see there wasn’t a sheep in sight—nothing. Dad said, ‘Well, that’s fixed it.’ Then the dogs jumped out of the ute and ran along the road, and all these sandhills stood up. Dad and I just looked at one another, couldn’t believe it.

It was on again, of course, drought and war.34 Or not. The Ouyen Express, in the deepest Mallee, found another linkage with drought—election years. ‘It is a remarkable coincidence that election years generally bring a drought. Who remembers 1940 and 1929? They are but two examples. Is the dry atmosphere in the Mallee the result of too much political “hot air”.’ It was a nice theory, just one of many. There were those who still looked to God as the source of all that happened. There should be prayers for rain ‘at every meeting until God answers’, a Christian wrote to his local paper. ‘On every hand we hear of shortage of feed for poor semi-starving animals and I am sure all agree such a plan is very necessary. God delights in the prayers of his children.’ There was a special service at the Church of Christ in Horsham with pastor C.W. Jackel taking as his text: ‘and there was a great rain’. His was a mechanistic, some might have said a simplistic approach. In an earlier drought, 192

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unspecified, Jackel said several congregations had prayed for rain. In the afternoon, and in some districts, the next day, there were bountiful falls of rain. All who understand Bible teaching, the pastor concluded, knew that God had the power to make it happen. Yet there was no substantial rain in Horsham for many months to come.35 Well, of course not, Inigo Jones might have said. There are observable phenomena at work to make it rain. Not prayers. Inigo Jones was Australia’s most celebrated long-range weather forecaster. Curiously, perhaps, long-range weather forecasting came into its own during the Second World War, possibly because the government prevented the publication of the daily weather map and forecast. Inigo Jones had trained under that remarkable character of Australian weather forecasting, Clement Wragge, known behind his back as Inclement. Wragge himself had trained as a meteorologist in England and had been appointed to the Queensland service in 1887. Issuing forecasts from what he called the ‘Chief Weather Bureau, Brisbane’, Wragge antagonised his counterparts in the other Australian colonies, and perhaps it was no surprise, but even so an enormous disappointment to him, that he was not selected to head the Commonwealth Meteorological Bureau when it opened in Melbourne in 1907. He did have, however, the glory of having trained Inigo Jones. Born in 1872 in England, with his family Jones had migrated to Queensland two years later. Instead of going to Sydney University, as he had planned, in 1888 Jones joined Wragge and became interested in long-range forecasting based on the influence of sun-spots. It was on his parent’s farm, at Crohamhurst north of Brisbane, that Jones pursued his hobby of forecasting while 193

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helping his father with the farm. In 1923 he correctly predicted the end of a dry spell and became something of a celebrity. From 1929 he was writing long-range forecasts for several Australian newspapers.36 Long-range forecasting depended on reliable long-term records, carefully studied to seek to discern a pattern or cycle. Additional influences, such as the changing levels of the Caspian Sea, the alignment of the planets, the activity of the earth’s magnetic field, and sun-spots, were used by different forecasters who often came up with different results. Inigo Jones, writing in February 1944, drew attention to those patterns and influences. There was a drought in Australia about every twelve years, he wrote, ‘when Jupiter crossed the path of the sun’s advance’. Or another explanation: ‘when the magnetic fields of Saturn and Uranus coincide with Jupiter as in the historic drought of 1902’. Or another: ‘when the equators of the sun and the earth come into line’. There was plenty to choose from. Should anyone actually have ever found the key to reliable long-range predictions in Australia they would have made a fortune. Farmers were desperate to know in advance what the season would bring. But as general weather reporting and recording had only become common in the last part of the nineteenth century, the discernment of patterns only became possible from the 1930s onwards. So longrange forecasters had nothing much to work with before, except their theories.37 The long-range forecaster has to display confidence; the language must always be certain and clear. Here is Inigo Jones in April 1944 while much of Australia was still experiencing severe drought: 194

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The dry season was the result of the repetition of the 81-year cycle according to my theories and meant that the conditions of 1859–60 that ended about 21 March after which good conditions maintained well into the next year. Therefore although the change is not bound to come the very same day, though it sometimes does to the very hour, [even so] I expect you will have some good falls during April and then on fairly well distributed dates until November.

Specific and confident. That was in the Finley Mail in April 1944, a forecast specific to the district. It was wrong.38 Finley, in southern New South Wales, just north of the Victorian border, had a terrible time of it in 1943 and 1944. Total rainfall for 1943 ‘as recorded at the Finley Post Office’ was just 10.17 inches (258 mm); there had only ever been three lower totals in the previous 36 years—1914, 1938 and 1940. The combination of the weather and the labour shortage caused by the war meant the wheat harvest was one of the lowest on record. The dry weather continued through the summer with December 1943, January and February 1944, being the driest three months for 47 years, or as far as records went back; only 14 points (3.5 mm) of rain fell—virtually nothing at all. By August Finley had received only 5 inches (127 mm) for the year and conditions on the land were described as ‘only fair’. Conditions around other towns in the region, such as Jerilderie, Darlington Point and Urana, where Ernest Whitehead was still presiding, were ‘really bad’. To add to Finley’s troubles, a Melbourne long-range forecaster, ‘Mr Vickers-Willis’, predicted that the severe drought in the Riverina and the Mallee would break somewhere between 195

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10 and 15 September when 4 inches (100 mm) of rain would fall generally; ‘needless to say’ the Finley Mail observed, ‘residents hereabout will hope he is right’.39 He was not. Finley received 6 points (1.5 mm) of rain in August and the dry weather stayed on. After that the paper was reporting that the district ‘was in for a catastrophe that will exceed that of last year’s visitation’. At year’s end the Finley Post Office tallied up just 9 inches (228 mm) of rain for the year; the fourth lowest total ever recorded. The drought forced the cancellation of the Berrigan show, just down the road, in September: ‘old man drought had nullified [the organisers’] efforts’. In November the paper was speaking of weather that was ‘well-nigh unbearable’ with a pall of red dust everywhere and scorching winds. On one memorable night the temperature was still over 100°F (38°C) at midnight. None of the wheat silos opened for the 1944–45 season; the best that the farmers could hope for was seed wheat. Would western New South Wales become a sandy desert like North Africa, the Finley Mail wondered. ‘Another record drought in ten years and we can write off the western district of New South Wales’, a writer in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph predicted. ‘It will be of no use to anyone except future archaeologists who will have to dig under sand hills to find the remains of an extinct civilisation.’40 To cap it all off, in a severe dust storm just at the end of the school year the school bus collided with a Water Commission truck on the Tocumwal road. The students walked to Mr Johnston’s house where Mrs Johnston gave them afternoon tea ‘which steadied their nerves’. Finley was not a place that either Inigo Jones or Jim Vickers-Willis would want to have visited at 196

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the end of 1944. Or did anyone really remember the forecasts? There were always sceptics; ‘anyone who attempts to forecast for more than 48 hours is only guessing’, the Narandera Argus believed. (It is a curiosity, by the way, that this newspaper spelled the name of the town from which it took its name differently from the way the town itself spelled it.) The Horsham Times, in early 1945, described Inigo Jones as ‘the only one of the weather prophets on whom much reliance is placed nowadays’. Not in Finley, if they kept back copies of the paper. Nor in Horsham. The weather prophet had promised ‘good general rain in March’ 1945; there were 8 points (2 mm). ‘And good average falls thereafter throughout the year’; rainfall was only 14 inches (355 mm), below average.41 Yet people relied on the forecasters and paid them money, it seems, for a personalised service. In 1942 ‘Sydney grazing interests’ contributed to Inigo Jones’s Long Range Weather Forecasting Trust and the Colonial Sugar Refining Company paid for the observatory building at Crohamhurst.42 Anyone could set up in the business. It was the ‘disastrous drought’ of 1902, ‘which caused untold losses in Australia’, that had sent a then 12-year-old boy, living on his father’s property near Castlemaine, Victoria, along the path to meteorology. ‘That same boy is today Mr S.H. Ebery of Black Rock, whose success in making seasonal weather forecasts has impressed many graziers.’ A grazier himself until recently, the Age reported, Mr Ebery had sold his property to give all his attention to weather forecasting; he worked for up to fifteen hours a day at his new job and more than 100 graziers subscribed to his service. Recently a community in Queensland had telegraphed him asking for a forecast 197

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because conditions in their district were ‘most serious’. Mr Ebery admitted that long-range forecasting was not an exact science but reckoned he was right about 80 per cent of the time. He used a French ‘nephoscope’ which was ‘like an upturned rake’ to measure cloud movements in the upper atmosphere. He had recorded upper-air movement for the last 30 years so he believed he had enough data to fall back on. Ebery had correctly predicted that the Victorian drought would break on 19 February 1919, or so he claimed. His supporters suggested that he should receive a government grant to get on with his work, but nothing seems to have come of that. Unlike Inigo Jones, Mr Ebery did not become a household name.43 The Victorian government might have been slow to fund Mr Ebery, but parliament was taking the rural crisis of 1944 very seriously indeed. The agriculture minister, Norman Martin, who while serving with the AIF on the Western Front in 1917 had been badly gassed at Passchendaele, told parliament in September 1944 that the State ‘is now facing the most desperate condition that has ever come before it, due to lack of man power, shortage of fertiliser supplies, and drought conditions’. A farmer before he went to war and eventually the owner of four properties in the Cohuna district of north-west Victoria, Norman Martin knew what he was talking about. As did Frank Old, another parliamentary Mallee farmer. The 1902 drought had forced Old off his property for a while and he took work building the Mildura railway line. He was then 27 years of age. In his 25th year as a parliamentarian in 1944, he reminded the House that in his first speeches in 1919 he had argued against putting soldier settlers on green Mallee land. He had gone to the Mallee with his two 198

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brothers when he was sixteen and knew all about the harsh conditions there. ‘I have had the privilege—if it can be so termed—of carting water 14 miles [22 kilometres] to a block . . . and we carted wheat a similar distance.’44 On this occasion Frank Old had risen in the House to urge the government to do something to help farmers keep their horses alive during the drought. ‘As a practical farmer’, he asserted, ‘I am satisfied that the day of the draught horse on the farm—and particularly on the wheat farm—has passed’, yet many farmers were unable to buy tractors and so they had to keep their horses going. But, he said, ‘it is not an economic proposition to import chaff and feed draught horses’. The drought and the war together would see the end of the horse as the mainstay of Australian farms. Over in Western Australia, Dawn Potts was replacing her horses with a Massey Ferguson tractor. It was happening everywhere. ‘The young man of today will not drive a team of horses’, said the ‘tall and powerful’ Frank Old; and that was that. The Australian horse population had been declining for many years, in Victoria at the rate of about 10 000 a year since the early 1920s. In 1914 there were 560 000 horses in Victoria; in 1944 just 277 000. People did not want to see the end of the horse on the farm, largely for sentimental reasons. But agistment was expensive, even if the government was offering free or subsidised transport. Under the Victorian government scheme that saw horses moved from the Wimmera and Mallee to Gippsland, trucking and three months’ agistment would cost over £3 per head. It was not economic to keep feeding the horses on the farm, very costly to agist them; tractors—when available— 199

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could do the same work and possibly do it better. The situation for the horse was grim. Shooting old horses was ‘becoming general’, the Chairman of the Debt Adjustment Board in Victoria reported in 1944: ‘farmers do not have enough feed to carry them any longer’. A report from the Nathalia district summed it up: ‘one farmer finished cropping with his team of horses, used them to pile up a pyre of logs, and then shot them’. They had helped in their own cremation. War and drought had done this.45 The Duke of Gloucester took over as Australia’s eleventh governor-general at the end of January 1945 and opened Parliament on 21 February. Drought featured in his speech: Unhappily, many areas of Australia have been laid waste by drought. Crops have failed and fodder reserves have been depleted to a dangerous level. For the first time since 1914, the Commonwealth is importing grains. It is my fervent prayer that rain will soon relieve the gallant men and women in the stricken areas.

‘Gallant men and women’ in wartime was a phrase usually reserved for soldiers and nurses. It struck a chord; work on the farm was war work.46 None of the signs indicated that the Duke’s prayer would soon be answered. In a dust storm in Finley, people could not see from one side of the street to the other. These were standard streets; you could have a conversation across the road without having to shout. In Wagga Wagga, in southern New South Wales, times were so bad that one of the hotels in the town did not take up its weekly allocation of 23 18-gallon (80litre) kegs of beer as the hotel already had ‘a considerable number 200

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[over] from last week’. Beer was heavily rationed in wartime Australia and the publican’s cry of ‘beer’s off’ had become one of the many annoyances of rationing and wartime shortages. Men, everywhere in Australia, queued for hours for bottled beer, always in short supply. But not in Wagga Wagga. This ‘brings home forcibly the serious economic effects of the dry conditions’ on farmers who ‘could not afford a “pot” or two when they come in to town’. Graziers in the Bollon district of south-west Queensland asked Brisbane’s Manpower office, the government’s labour-organising force, for 35 men to help as scrub-cutters. ‘The district has been without rain for almost two years.’ The men would cut mulga ‘which, as everyone knows, is the only fodder remaining for sheep’. The retiring president of the Graziers Federal Council of Australia, Mr J. Hunter, in July 1945 described the last season as the most disastrous in Australian history. He estimated that 20 million sheep had perished.47 Alan Mason, a Riverina farmer, put those appalling figures into a personal perspective. He gave up his farm. ‘Last December [1944], when the dams and rivers dried and dust storms swept Riverina sheep sickened and died like flies,’ he said. He hitchedup his 20-year-old horse, Ginger, and with four kelpies left Finley for Albury and beyond with 1100 sheep. He cooked and camped where he happened to be, shooting and trapping meat for himself and the dogs. His worst time, he said, was two slow months crossing the ranges to Mansfield. The sheep lived on dry leaves and sucked moisture from fresh gum leaves. In a dust storm outside Myrtleford the sheep panicked and scattered and it took three days to round them up again. Mason reached Melbourne in June and herded his sheep at Camp Pell (Royal Park) before 201

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taking them to the Newmarket saleyards. His dad, Alan claimed, had broken in horses for the Kelly gang. They had been on the land for a long time. But when he had sold his sheep Alan would look for a city job. ‘Sheep farming and the Riverina,’ he said, ‘are all washed up. You just can’t beat the drought.’48 By happy coincidence, as the war ended so did the drought. You can imagine the joy in rural Australia. The end to the anxiety, the waiting, the fear of war, and good steady rain on the roof. ‘Made to order rain’ as the Finley Mail described it. On 8 August 1945 the paper reported that ‘seasonal prospects are excellent’ and on 15 August Japan agreed to surrender. The weather maps and weather forecasts had reappeared in the papers from July. And the young men started to come home. There was a workforce again. Every country newspaper across the country began reporting the good news of the returning soldiers, airmen and sailors. Let one simple account stand for them all. In late October three young men returned to Finley: Pat Mallon, a prisoner in Germany, and Keith Scoullar and Harry Westerdale, prisoners of the Japanese. Keith, locals read in their paper, ‘looks remarkably well, while Harry who was only 17 when he enlisted, appears to have grown but is somewhat thin. Pat looked as fit as ever’. The good times were back. It would take years, if ever, for local folk to discover the story of the experiences of these prisoners of war; the former prisoners, everywhere in Australia, were encouraged to forget about it and get on with life. There are some points of convergence here with drought, although I would not like to push the analogy too far, haunted though I am by the former soldier who said that ten years on the Western Front would be preferable to one year 202

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of drought in the Mallee. Drought played out in its victims’ minds too, and each one responded in different ways. Those of us whose livelihoods have not depended on good or fair seasons cannot understand the fear and the uncertainty of scanning the skies for a break. Will it be this week, this month or this year? Will I still be here to make something of the better times when they come? Or will debt, my dying stock, and the despair of my family force me to look elsewhere for work and income? And when rains come, will I, too, try to forget the immediate past, to push it into a corner of the mind rarely accessed, and get on with things of the present? Australian farmers had been doing that for a century, and they had not beaten drought that way. Yet perhaps the combination of war and drought was the cruellest of all in the story of rural Australia, and we can understand if country people looked to peace, prosperity and growth, with a cast of mind that pushed the horrors of the recent years into oblivion. And yet there was Jack McDonald, premier of Victoria and treasurer since 1950 to inspire them, if only they had known his story. In 1923 he had signed for the British War Medal and the Victory Medal as his memento of three months at the front. Drought had pushed him to war and he had come back badly damaged. He got on with his life as the Australian way prescribed and here he was in the top leadership position in his community. But Jack McDonald had every reason to remember drought and war.49

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in 1945 heralded something of a golden age for Australia. A booming economy, full employment and rapid population growth brought a prosperity that few Australians had known since before the First World War. The hard years, it seemed, were finally over. For much of rural Australia the 1950s and the early 1960s were grand times. Good season followed good season, prices, particularly for wool, were high or at record levels. I well remember the lush conditions in Victoria’s Western District and the excitement at shearing time as new records seemed to be set each year. My uncle’s owner simply handed over the wool cheque to allow the property to become even more efficient and more prosperous. They were good times. Yet we must be careful about generalising for the entire country. Eastern Australia was largely drought free during this lush time from 1945 to 1965 (though, of course, there were always local droughts) but it seems there must always be serious drought somewhere in this vast country. So it was that the

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Northern Territory experienced a savage drought in 1952—but the Territory, then to most Australians a place even more remote than Europe, hardly entered the consciousness of the majority in the south. Keen to show what was happening right next door to Queensland, Colin Bednall, the managing editor of the CourierMail, Brisbane’s leading daily newspaper, asked the emerging Australian artist, Sidney Nolan, to travel the Territory to illustrate the drought for his readers. ‘In our opinion,’ Bednall wrote to Nolan, ‘no artist could apply himself better to such a project than your goodself and [we] feel that your drawings would help greatly in bringing home to the public of Australia the tragedy and waste of this disaster.’ Nolan received 150 guineas, and expenses, for this commission. There was a precedent; the Sydney Morning Herald had commissioned Russell Drysdale to accompany a reporter looking at the 1944 drought in outback New South Wales.1 Nolan readily accepted, and flew into Darwin on 14 June 1952. Nolan, his wife and daughter were at Wave Hill, a cattle station in the Victoria River district in the far west of the Territory, on 17 June where the artist began to photograph and write about what he was seeing. The plight of the animals, drought’s perennial victims, attracted and appalled him: ‘shortly afterwards we pass a dead horse . . . a quite extraordinary sight. This elongated carcase, dried & frail & flat like paper, standing poised as if ready to take off in flight’. Or again: ‘four or five baby calves irregularly scattered. Jack Jones collected them by taking one leg and dragging the stiff dried carcase to a heap, stacking them in the manner in which a wheat stack is built’. By 6 July Nolan was at Avon Downs station, 45 miles (72 kilometres) from the 205

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Queensland border. There he saw one of the most heartwrenching scenes of the trip: ‘cow with head and horns caught in 4-strand wire fence around bore tank; trying to get at green grass growing down side of overflow trickle from dam’.2 The Courier-Mail featured Nolan’s drawings in the Saturday editions of the paper, 23 and 30 August 1952. Described as one of Australia’s ‘best and most provocative artists’, Nolan drew ‘more than the camera sees’. The Northern Territory drought of 1952 was ‘one of the greatest Australian tragedies of all time’, the Courier-Mail claimed, ‘and already 1.25m head of cattle had been lost worth £25m’. Yet Sidney Nolan’s depiction of the drought was not universally popular with readers. While one found the drawings ‘invigorating’, another asked the editor why ‘it has not occurred to you that some of your readers are adults of, at least, normal intelligence, otherwise you would not waste valuable newsprint publishing such utter bilge as the Nolan sketches’. Nolan, for this reader, had revealed ‘an utter ignorance of perspective, form and line’. Perhaps his drawings were simply too confronting.3 These sketches, though, and his subsequent outback paintings, began to define for many Australians the gruesome aspects of drought. Had we ever given much thought to the sufferings of the animals? Possibly not. Nolan’s drawings shocked those who might not have thought much about drought at all; who might have been complacent. Sure, people might have thought, the artist has exaggerated the grotesque aspects of the animals’ bodies to highlight the awful impact of death from starvation and thirst. We pass somewhat glibly over figures such as a million and a quarter of the Territory’s cattle lost to production. But for that 206

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read ‘starved to death’. A terrible death. Is there not an ethical dilemma in this? Remember Nellie Melba in her luxury railway carriage appalled to see sheep leaning against the fences, too weak to stand without support. Remember Joseph Jenkins, the Welsh swagman, horrified by the cries of cattle, thirsty beyond endurance, and dying horribly. Remember the Western District new chum, in the 1830s at the dawn of the pastoral age there, reporting the cattle rushing at the cabbage-tree hats of shepherds and squatters, so ravenous were they. If we think those were the primitive times of white settlement in Australia and that history since has been a progression to enlightenment and to better standards of care for the sheep and cattle on which Australia’s prosperity still depended, then we need to study Sidney Nolan’s 1952 drawings carefully. His images, grotesque, entered the way we began to think of drought. In a later drought a government official would say that people in urban Australia would no longer tolerate the mass deaths of stock that drought had previously entailed. Had Nolan exaggerated the sufferings of the animals he drew, as his critics certainly thought? The exhibition ‘Sidney Nolan Desert and Drought’ at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2003 brought together, memorably, Nolan’s photographs from his 1952 trip and his sketches and paintings. Demonstrably, Nolan had not grotesquely exaggerated the shapes and sufferings of the animals for effect; the artist had depicted what he had actually seen. The photographs are truly horrible; drought is far more than human suffering and loss. Drought had done things to these ravaged animals such as few Australians could bear to contemplate. 207

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Nolan’s commission had been to alert Australians to the ‘tragedy and waste’ of the Northern Territory’s disastrous drought. How can we tell how successful this had been? Graphic images, careful writing in a newspaper might change the way some thought of drought; for others it might just have been another page-turner. Editor Colin Bednall, a remarkable journalist himself, and one of the best of Australian correspondents in the Second World War—he told the story of the air war over Europe by himself flying with aircrews—might have been disappointed that the ‘people stories’ of the drought still remained hidden. Had people forgotten about drought in these happier times for southern Australia? It would seem so. That ‘indignant surprise’ that has characterised Australia’s response to almost every drought the nation has experienced was manifestly in evidence when drought came again in 1965. Drought was again, quite literally, a shock. People seemed not to remember that drought is a constant in Australian history. Bert Castellari was 80 years of age when I interviewed him in April 2004, a gentle man, shy, and genuinely modest about his working life and its achievements. ‘The best reporter I knew in my time on the Herald’ was how one of Australia’s leading public intellectuals described Bert Castellari when I told him that I was intending to interview him. I passed that comment on to Bert as we settled down to the interview, but it provoked nothing more than a wry smile. ‘Why did the Herald send you out there?’ I asked. It was a big commitment, Bert agreed, himself as a general reporter, Doug Denham, the agricultural reporter, Alan Purcell, a photographer, and Harry Palmer, the driver. Four staff and they were to 208

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be on the road for nearly three weeks, looking at the drought of 1965 in New South Wales that covered much of the state. A general reporter, Bert told me, went to almost any story with a great desire to find out. That was my education, he said, to be interested in everything. Bert had left school, the Randwick Intermediate High School, at fifteen years of age to become a copyboy on the Sydney Sun and was there for about two years. Then in 1941, when the Daily Mirror started, Bert joined that paper as head copyboy. He had a front-row seat for the ‘riproaring afternoon newspaper war’ which now broke out in Sydney. But there was also the real war for Bert, the Army in January 1942, discharge in January 1947. A trooper, wireless operator in a tank crew, in New Guinea, Borneo, and the occupation force in Japan. The tanks eventually made him near deaf. Bert had his first hearing aid in the late 1970s. The chief of staff at the Herald in 1965, Dixon Falconer, was a country boy, originally from Murwillumbah. Perhaps that was why he wanted the drought covered in extensive detail, Bert thought. Or maybe drought was so unusual by 1965 that readers would respond with real interest. But it was not out of character for the Herald to be interested in the drought, for this was a major news story. The shock of the new. Bert was not a country boy so he came to the drought with a lot to learn. His natural curiosity helped. As a copyboy he had covered the Homebush stock saleyards; that was how he had proved his worth for a cadetship that would lead to reporting. The saleyards were important to Bert, watching and listening to the auctions, talking with country stock and station reps, chatting, when he could, with a quietly spoken bush veteran, just learning to yarn in the understated 209

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country way. His wife’s sister had married a grazier from Warren. Another brother-in-law was in pubs. Bert would run the pub for a week or two, to give the family a bit of a break. Good training, probably, for a journalist interested in a yarn. In the Army, the ‘military melting pot’ as he remembers it, there were plenty of blokes from the country towns and the bush; he learnt to listen and to learn. People were to be the focus of Bert Castellari’s coverage of the drought. But how did you find them, I asked him. ‘You’d just see what was in front of us.’ See a swaggie on the road to Dubbo and you’d stop and talk. Or you’d go to one of the town’s organisations, perhaps its newspaper, and ask about; people would say, you need to go and talk to so-and-so. She’s got a story. Harry Palmer, the driver, helped—he was from the bush. Bert worked with notebook and shorthand out there, then with a portable Remington typewriter back in the hotel—a different hotel each night—with the help of a ‘rusty nail’—equal parts of whisky and Drambuie and then some ice. He’d write the story with one eye on the Herald’s closing time of 10 p.m. ‘I could write a good story in an hour,’ he said; some stories might take longer, others wrote themselves. You’d phone the stories back or try to put them on the wire, he said, but communications in those days were very primitive. And how would you get people to tell you their stories, I asked. We were reporters from the Sydney Morning Herald, Bert said; that carried a fair bit of clout. In the bush there was the usual mistrust of journalists, just as there was in the city. But the Herald represented authority; it was something of an institution and people respected it. So they would talk to the Herald’s men. But 210

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the big factor, Bert recalled, was the idea that someone was listening. They were glad someone was interested; drought’s victims wanted to let city people know what it was like. People did open up to us as outsiders. We were listening. Of course the stories competed with all the other news for space and some of the time Bert did not get a run. The Menzies Government had just introduced conscription. The first recruits arrived at Kapooka, near Wagga Wagga, and at Puckapunyal in Victoria in mid 1965. There were front-page pictures of needles and haircuts. It was ‘breaking-in day for clerks, salesmen and students’, the paper reported. There was a war on, too, in Vietnam. The 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, arrived in Vietnam while Bert was out in the backblocks. Three of its soldiers had been killed in a sad accident before Bert was back in Sydney. Sir Robert Menzies, the Prime Minister, was meeting with United States President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in Washington while Bert was trying to interest his readers in the drought. Then Menzies was in London for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference. Vietnam dominated all these meetings: ‘we are at war, make no mistake about that’, Menzies had told Australia. Drought had to compete with all that. Bert Castellari remembered a very good story at the Dungog butter factory—the dairy industry was in terrible strife— but it didn’t get a run. News-gathering is extremely competitive, and after about three weeks the Herald called its drought team home. It had been fun, Bert told me—we were a most compatible group of people—but there were no thanks when they got back to the office. ‘I just picked up something else right away,’ he remembered.4 211

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Despite all these competing pressures, the Herald’s drought team did have a good run for a while. Thirteen stories with Bert Castellari’s byline between 11 June and 23 June, four of them on the front page, two of them the lead story. John Pringle, already something of a legend at the Herald, was back as editor and bylines were just coming in. So Bert’s stories stand out. It is harder to identify Doug Denham’s stories as they were published without a byline. The photographs that Alan Purcell sent in were increasingly given generous coverage; a spread of three photographs on the one page—when photographs then were used much more sparingly—was not unusual. So the Herald certainly saw news value in the drought. With some fanfare, on 11 June 1965 the Herald had announced the first of its ‘on-the-spot’ reports from the New South Wales drought from its ‘special team’. There would be, the Herald promised, ‘day-to-day factual accounts’ and ‘authoritative comment from people whose lives are vitally affected’. The team had sent their first report from Walgett in the far west. ‘Hundreds of thousands of sheep had already died on the roads,’ Bert Castellari reported, ‘and there is not even a “crew cut” height of growth in the grass.’ Hand-feeding had been going on for months. Graziers, he reported, were taking a multi-million pound gamble on the drought. They were spending heavily on hand-feeding or on putting their sheep on the road in the hope of keeping them alive until the rains came. The gamble would fail, Castellari wrote, if the drought continued. In the north-west alone, he explained, across 9400 square miles (24 300 square kilometres), hundreds of thousands of sheep had already died. Slowly, painfully, dreadfully. 212

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The ranger for the Walgett and North Walgett Pastures Protection Boards said that ‘if there is no rain in three months I don’t think anybody will be worrying much. There will be nothing left to worry about’. Neville Williams, of Coonamble, on the road for three months with 2000 sheep, said he could last until the end of June—‘but after that I don’t know’. The Castlereagh area, Castellari reported, ‘is a dismal sight. The Castlereagh River is dry, showing its channelled bed, and the weeping willows along it are yellowing. The creeks are dry, the dams are dry and the sun is glaring’. In normal times fodder was between £10 and £15 per ton; in Walgett a man was selling lucerne from the back of his truck for £28 per ton but expected it to go up to £50. Someone had sent a fodder order to Victoria two months ago and would have to wait another three weeks, at least, before receiving fodder. The owner of one big station had paid more than £7000 on feed since February. The alarm in the bush was palpable, Castellari had found, the gamble a cause of deep anxiety.5 The drought report was on the Herald’s front page the next day, too, alongside the news that the Beatles had received ‘gongs’ in the Queen’s birthday honours list. Each of the ‘Fab Four’ received the MBE, instituted in 1913, the Herald explained, with the motto ‘For God and the Empire’. There was controversy over the awards, with one British newspaper labelling them ‘preposterous whimsy’. It would not be long before the papers were reporting outraged vicars in Surrey and agitated majors in Sussex returning their own honours to Buckingham Palace in protest over the honour to the Beatles. None of this probably mattered to Cyril ‘Cubby’ Burke, 34, who had been on the road 213

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for nearly twelve months trying to save 5100 sheep from extinction. ‘I met “Cubby” during my drought survey of the Walgett area,’ Bert Castellari wrote. ‘He was squatting on the Castlereagh Highway.’ Burke had started from Carinda, 43 miles (69 kilometres) south-west of Walgett on 28 June 1964, after a year of drought already. ‘We’ve had it tough, it’s been grim,’ he remarked. Cubby travelled along the stock routes to Moree, Gurley, Narrabri, Burren Junction, Collarenebri and back to Carinda—along routes that had some feed on them. It is an easy journey to plot on the map, but day after day, week after week, it must have begun to take its toll on the drover. Part of the gamble. Now, Burke said, there was no feed left on the stock routes, just brittle clumps of grass and stems of rape. ‘I can see about a month ahead now,’ Burke reported, ‘after that the sheep will just die.’6 Yet a few pages later in the same edition of the Herald Castellari reported that the mood in Dubbo was more optimistic. ‘The town is busy, the traffic is heavy at times, and there is still money about.’ All over the state, he explained, this had been described as the worst drought since 1902. ‘In meteorological terms,’ he continued, ‘this is true, but the vast improvement in rural methods over 63 years will stave off complete disaster for some months. Scientific management has been the rule on many central-western properties.’ As drought had become apparent owners had stored fodder, reduced stock levels drastically, and were now holding onto stock strictly for restocking purposes. Graziers in the central west, Castellari discovered, were watching their position closely, but were not yet in desperate straits. ‘You should go north,’ they told the Herald, ‘it’s really bad out there.’ Although this drought was the first serious dry in much of New 214

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South Wales for twenty years, some farmers and graziers, it would seem, had begun to learn the need for ‘drought-proofing’ their properties.7 Yet not all by any means. The new Deputy Premier of New South Wales—there had been an election in May 1965—and leader of the Country Party, Charles Cutler, had said that ‘too many farmers rely on luck, their neighbours or on the Government to overcome the problem of the drought’. This was tough, but was it fair? If Cutler was right the history of rural Australia over the last 100 years had counted for little. After the Federation Drought farmers pinned their hopes on irrigation— but Bishop Moorhouse had been preaching that in the 1880s. When drought came again in 1914–15 these farmers found that irrigation had depleted the rivers badly and sand had silted up the irrigation channels that were not being used. Could Australian farms and properties be made drought proof? Or would farmers just continue to hope for rain and then turn to the government when hope gave way to despair? Would they breed up and spend up in the good times, then watch excess stock die lingering and painful deaths when the dry came? Criticism of these simple habits and unthinking ways could perhaps only come from Country Party politicians. But even their home truths and plain speaking would upset the cockies. A letter-writer to the Herald, Mrs G.E. Taber, of Menangle, was quick to point out that the University of Sydney’s experimental farm at Badgery’s Creek, just outside Sydney, had run out of water and that its professor, H.J. Geddes, overseeing operations, had admitted failure. Professor Geddes, the correspondent reported, had ‘every facility of the Government at his command 215

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and grants of money to carry out the carefully planned farm to beat all droughts’, yet the drought had beaten him. So what chance did the ordinary farmer have who had to make his farm pay, educate his family, and meet all the rising costs? Mrs Taber went on: After 35 years of farming, conserving fodder, building dams and rejuvenating tired eroded soil . . . we rely on solid, hard work 16–18 hours a day, including the Sabbath, never taking wages or holidays . . . quietly taking adversity and rejoicing in the fruits of our labours . . . There is no easy way to fight the natural elements.

Luck, neighbours and governments were not part of this woman’s mix. The experimental farm appeared to have shown that there were some fights that just could not be won. They were both right, of course, the deputy premier and the farmer’s wife. Much more could be done to prepare and plan for droughts, but a dry and fragile country could never be relied upon. After 100 years of droughts the lessons were only beginning to be learnt. Public education was important and the Herald was doing its best, placing the drought team’s story on the front page again on the holiday Monday in June, with three dramatic pictures of stock that would have shocked most readers. There was a picture of a pile of smouldering sheep carcasses and another of a ‘stricken steer’ trapped in a dry waterhole, waiting for death. The pictures were confronting and graphic and somewhat at odds with Castellari’s last, rather upbeat, story from Dubbo. ‘We travelled the stock routes, the death routes today,’ Bert Castellari began in this latest report. ‘We travelled more than 100 miles, crisscrossing the drought country of the Pilliga, in the north-west, 216

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and our journey ended at a funeral pyre of dead sheep.’ For seven months drover Athol (Andy) Albert had tried to keep 5000 sheep travelling the tracks; when the Herald team came upon him he was desperately trying to keep just one sheep on its legs. It had come down to that; the survival of each animal mattered now. The drover had seen 1400 sheep die in the last three weeks and Bert had found dead sheep scattered along the track he was travelling. ‘I’ve been on the road all my life,’ Andy said (he was 32) ‘and I’ve never seen it worse . . . I wonder when it is going to finish.’ Castellari highlighted the personal anguish in Andy Albert’s story, his real grief for the suffering sheep. Several of them were staggering about blindly in the last throes of a horrible death from starvation: ‘he tried to help the sheep as it staggered only a few feet’ and Andy was distressed at his own inability to do more for it. ‘I’m sick to the neck of it,’ he said. ‘Four or five times I have been going to chuck it in, but they could not get another drover to take over.’ The drover looked along the dirt to an uncollected carcass, a sad and worried man. With good times in the bush since the end of the Second World War, drought would have been a new experience for this young bushman. But was there no folklore that might have prepared him for this? Do people, even drovers, not listen to old-timers’ tales of woe? There was to be a ghastly barbecue, Bert Castellari told his readers, 50 sheep piled up waiting to be burned.8 The Herald team then travelled from Walgett to Narrabri, finding the country deteriorating further with every few miles travelled. The Pastures Protection Board’s stock inspector, Albert Noble, who had lived in the area all his life, found the situation critical. ‘If rain did not come soon,’ he said, ‘everybody 217

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would have real trouble.’ Bare paddocks, dust storms, were all that Bert Castellari could see, a ‘bare claypan appearance’. At Pilliga, Lindsay McDowell told the reporter that he had been paying a drover £100 a week for seventeen weeks to keep 3000 sheep on the road. It would have cost him £750 a week to keep the sheep on the property, he had estimated. McDowell still had 400 sheep on his 2000 acres (810 hectares). He was just hanging on and looking each day, increasingly anxiously, for rain. Bert Castellari’s method in finding people to talk about their drought experiences is captured in another report from Pilliga that found its way into the ‘News for Women’ section of the Herald. ‘From the road,’ Castellari began, ‘they were two figures on an old red truck creeping across a pavement-hard paddock, spreading oats and hay for the sheep.’ After a ‘half-mile trot across the paddocks’ Bert caught up with them: Mr and Mrs Jack Hyde. Up early, and breakfasted, they had put their two children on the school bus at 8 a.m. and then had begun hand-feeding their stock. Mrs Hyde talked as she steered the truck from its running board: of carting water, of the availability of fodder, of the plight of other properties, of early shearing. The sheep would have to get used to wheat, she said; after that it was scrub, ‘there’s not much to cut, just a bit of coolibah’. Mrs Hyde said that she had trained as an industrial chemist and had spent five years with a pharmaceutical company in Sydney. That is where she met her husband, Jack; he was the works engineer there and was new to the land—‘he’s only been on it ten years’. Having decided to take up farming, Jack studied rural science by correspondence. Mrs Hyde grew up in the Pilliga district and said she was happier outdoors than working in the home. There was no sense of 218

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impending doom from these two, just happy to tell their story when the journalist wandered over. ‘You city fellers don’t know what goes on out here,’ a bloke from Bourke told Bert. Tony Gurner, 37 miles (60 kilometres) from Brewarrina, said that if he had to go on hand-feeding it would cost him £1000 per week, but, ‘we are going to carry on and get these sheep through no matter what it is going to cost’. The southern end of his 75 000-acre (30 400-hectare) property had had no rain for two years but a freak storm across a milewide northern strip in January had sent him 31⁄2 inches (89 mm) of rain, allowing him to sustain 12 500 sheep, the backbone of his commercial flock. He thought that his property would take three years to recover once the rains came. Tony Gurner’s neighbour, Greg Wills, a man of 34, talked of his property named Marra Downs: ‘I think it should be Sahara Downs; I’ll be interviewing the butcher before long the way things are going’. John Turner, a Brewarrina shearing contractor, said that seven properties in the Brewarrina-Bourke district had already lost £42 000 in wool-clip earnings. (The average price of a Sydney house then was around £5000.) Castellari described John Turner as ‘a lean, quietly spoken man of the sheds’ with three children aged four to eleven years. On average, properties were seeing a reduction of about 100 bales in their wool clip, John Turner said. Last year, he explained, graziers received between £80 to £100 per bale; this year they were receiving about £60. They were therefore losing a lot of money—fewer bales and lower prices. The dust was affecting the quality of the wool very badly, Turner reported. ‘Many sheep are dying as they are shorn,’ he said. ‘We saw 1000 die of 1700 [shorn] 219

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in one lot.’ And then there were the shearers. Each man’s average income—he had 11 shearers in his team—would be down by £500 for the season, again a substantial sum of money.9 And then the Herald team moved on to Tamworth and Armidale in northern New South Wales before making for the coast. One dramatic headline underlined the seriousness of this drought: ‘Two crops in nearly 2000 miles’. The team had seen and photographed the land prepared for sowing but no rain had meant that only two properties they had passed had been able to sow wheat. It was expected, said a member of the Wheat Marketing Board, that the New South Wales crop would yield no more than 35 million bushels, against last year’s 140 million bushels. The loss of income to wheatgrowers would be in the order of £40m. A grazier in the Tamworth area told Bert Castellari that the repercussions of the drought would be ‘greater than the Depression’, a catastrophe 30 years and more ago but still living on in the minds of Australians as the single greatest economic disaster their country had known. It was something indeed to liken this drought to the Great Depression, but this grazier believed it was so bad that ‘there will be a lot of people who will take a lifetime recovering’. Bill McCarthy, a soldier settler at Mawarra, near Armidale, told Bert that he had taken up his property only six years ago. Bill had four children aged twelve to eighteen, including one girl the family had recently adopted because her mother had died of cancer. Without a new deal in finance, McCarthy thought, he and so many others would soon 220

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have to walk off the land. And he had put so much hard work, he said, into trying to improve the pasture. Bill McCarthy showed Bert slides of his property in the good times; panoramas of rye grass, lucerne and clover. ‘Those dots in the slide are 900 sheep eating in the paddock,’ he reminisced proudly. Although McCarthy admitted that his income was ‘done to the bone’, nevertheless Castellari found no self-pity in the McCarthy home. ‘They are people of the land,’ he wrote, ‘stoic, practical and eager to get on with the job of running their property.’ ‘The good times will come again,’ Bill McCarthy insisted, ‘at least we have each other and we are all together.’10 It was the real lack of preparation for what the Herald team found that is the most surprising feature of the 1965 drought. Editorially, the Sydney Morning Herald had not been surprised. ‘Drought of course is a regular visitor to Australia,’ the editor had written. ‘Yet during the good years, too many men on the land are apt to forget that it is the one certainty of their way of life. Overstocking and failure to conserve fodder and water are only too frequent.’ The debate continued about drought-proofing; there might be no answer. But no-one could dispute the facts. The figures were terrible, leading the Herald to proclaim at one stage: ‘it’s the worst drought on record—that’s official’. A few snapshot statistics should give some idea of what was happening in Queensland and New South Wales—for once, Victoria had been spared. As the Herald team had seen, less than half of the New South Wales wheatfields were sown, which would mean a loss of £40–50m to wheatgrowers. Without rain in the north of the state in July and right through the spring, there would be no wheat crop at all. The meat industry in New 221

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South Wales was facing its greatest-ever crisis, with wholesale prices jumping 100 per cent. Ten per cent of the industry’s workforce had lost their jobs—that was 1500 men. Australia had not seen unemployment since the early 1940s. At Homebush they were used to slaughtering 600–800 cattle a day; it was now down to 90: ‘this is what the disastrous and prolonged drought has done’. Already 39 butcher’s shops across the state had gone out of business. Milk production dropped 28 per cent; and 5100 dairy cows had already died by January 1965. It was the driest for 63 years in some parts of New South Wales, the weather bureau reported, harking back, reflexively, to the Federation Drought.11 In Queensland they called it ‘the worst drought for 50 years’. Butter production was down, with some dairy farmers starting hand-feeding as early as January. ‘We are always full of optimism,’ the general manager of the Downs Dairy Association reported, ‘but if this continues it will result in an absolute catastrophe. Surely,’ he continued, ‘the law of averages must be running in our favour. It has to crack soon.’ Was that it? Was this all about gambling, as Bert Castellari had suggested in his first report for the Herald? Spend in the good times and hang on for as long as possible in the bad? And then go to the government for help when the bad turned to disastrous? Queensland’s Premier, Frank Nicklin, another of those soldier-settler farmers to have made his way to the top job, made a quick drought inspection in 1965. And then came drought relief for sugar growers and loans for dairymen, with the premier predictably calling for Commonwealth assistance. But there were a few voices calling for new ways of tackling drought, particularly 222

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through the build-up of fodder reserves: ‘until disaster strikes no-one worries’, an ex-dairyman wrote.12 People might have been surprised by this drought but the responses eerily mimicked those of earlier years. In June, Sydney’s Cardinal Gilroy directed that prayers for rain be recited at all masses except on the most solemn feast days, and there was to be a special petition for rain on Sundays. He described the drought as ‘extreme’. But no Anglican bishop rose to tell him that such prayers were an affront to God and man, as Bishop Moorhouse had once done. When the Lord Mayor had called for prayers for rain in Hobart in 1951, a Congregational minister had asked why ‘God should be treated as a water diviner when he asks to be our Saviour, Lord and King’. And although Hobart then only had 50 days of water left, a Presbyterian minister said that pipelines and irrigation could have been provided with the money Tasmanians spent on buying liquor and financing gambling. Did Cardinal Gilroy appreciate what dangerous territory he was entering by calling for prayers for rain?13 Perhaps, too, Australians should have proscribed visits from world-famous but homegrown opera stars. Nellie Melba cannot be said to have caused the Federation Drought, but her visit, as we have seen, coincided with it. Joan Sutherland returned to her native Sydney in June 1965 at the height of another terrible drought. Sutherland had not been home for fourteen years, and was mobbed just as Melba had been 63 years earlier. Girls from her former school, St Catherine’s, pressed orchids on her at a brief stopover at Sydney airport on her way to Melbourne. But so long had she been out of the country that La Stupenda did not recognise the girls as her own until a journalist pointed them 223

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out; the school had changed its uniform while Sutherland had been away. Brought to Australia by J.C. Williamson’s and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, Sutherland’s visit was foremost a commercial venture. Joan Sutherland commanded high prices for her performances; tickets for the gala opening night in Melbourne reached seven guineas although prices dropped back when Australia’s own was not on the bill. For Luciano Pavarotti and other lesser lights of the day, opera lovers could find bargains in the ticket prices, but even so as few as 300 would turn up if Sutherland was not singing. In this sense the season was a failure for its promoters. But equally, in Melbourne or Sydney, Joan Sutherland herself had them packed to the rafters. In Melbourne, for the gala opening—the Federal Treasurer, Harold Holt, was there in full evening rig, white tie and tails—Sutherland took 33 curtain calls and had 1600 people cheering and stamping their feet. The ovation at the end of the performance lasted seventeen minutes, with people shouting ‘bravo’ and ‘welcome home’. When Sydney’s turn came the Herald calculated that it was ‘exactly 14 years, 4 months and ten days’ since Sutherland had last sung in Sydney. Then it had been at the Town Hall and ticket prices had started at three shillings. Now for her Sydney opening in 1965, 1650 people cheerfully paid either 10 guineas or 7 guineas to see and hear the diva. The paper remarked sorrowfully that only about one in ten men wore full evening dress and that there were only one or two tiaras to be seen. And unlike Melbourne, there were only seventeen curtain calls.14 I can find no evidence that Joan Sutherland was as deeply affected by the drought as Madame Melba had been, but planes 224

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had replaced trains for the latter’s travel throughout Australia and she just would not have seen enough of the country. Certainly there were no calls for assistance to wealthy overseas friends. There were, however, public appeals for help in 1965, as there had been in 1902. Labor had been in government in New South Wales for 24 years by 1965, although the Premier, Jack Renshaw, had only succeeded to the top office in April 1964. Renshaw was a country man, the eldest of eight children; he had been forced to leave school at 11 to take over the family farm after his father was killed in an accident. How often have we seen such things in this account of rural Australia? If not drought, then illness or accident could always put a family at risk in the bush. So it was still in 1965, when city folk may have thought that the welfare state had put everyone beyond the possibility of financial ruin. Renshaw’s country links, though, and his empathy with the battlers of the bush were not enough to save his government, which lost office—in a very close contest—to the Liberals’ Robin Askin. Born near Orange in central New South Wales, Askin had lived in Sydney for most of his life and had been a bank officer and soldier before he entered politics. Sworn in as premier on 13 May 1965, one of the most pressing problems facing the new man was the severe and deteriorating drought.15 A little over a month after he became premier, Askin wrote to the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Harry Jensen, who doubled up as a Labor member of the State Parliament. Askin’s letter was remarkable for its cynicism. The Premier invited the Lord Mayor ‘formally to launch a Lord Mayor’s Drought Relief Appeal’, although his relevant minister—for Agriculture—had already 225

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suggested that such an appeal would not make much difference to ‘material relief . . . in individual cases’; nevertheless it would give a psychological boost to those in ‘stricken areas’ to know that people in the city were thinking of them. It would also make city people aware ‘of the seriousness of the effects of the drought on the whole economy’. Window-dressing for the bush; justification for a tough budget for city folk. That was what this appeal was about. Premier Askin was right about the limited impact of such an appeal for drought-devastated people. In the event the Lord Mayor’s Appeal ran from 1 July 1965 to 27 June 1966 and raised only $8806, disbursing $6130. (Australia had introduced decimal currency in February 1966.) By way of contrast, in the annual appeal for the Freedom from Hunger campaign in New South Wales in 1965 the target was £300 000 and by early June £230 450 had been raised. For us, the interest in the Lord Mayor’s Appeal lies in the staggering pictures of poverty and hardship that applicants for funds disclose in their letters for help. The files of the appeal are another one of those small windows that allow us to see, at first hand, some of the effects of the drought and to show us that life in rural Australia could be terribly fragile even as late as 1965.16 Shortly after receiving Askin’s letter, Lord Mayor Jensen put out a press release saying that he was inaugurating an appeal to help drought’s victims. Jensen described the current situation ‘as the most extreme drought with a severity never before recorded in the history of this State [which] has brought hardship and suffering to many of our neighbours in the country areas’. Drought amnesia is usually accompanied by hyperbole for the current 226

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drought. There is a logic, I suppose. Jensen’s letter nevertheless contained some truth, as Bert Castellari’s reports had been testifying. Despite his alarming claim, neither the Lord Mayor nor his officials seem to have done much more to publicise the appeal, perhaps accepting that it was all window-dressing. Indeed, officials at the South Sydney Juniors Leagues Club, having given £1000 to the appeal within three days of the Lord Mayor’s initial press release, wrote two months later asking for their money back as they had seen no evidence that the appeal was progressing. No, we have received £3724 so far, officials at the Town Hall replied, and we have sent out £1280 in aid. So they kept South Juniors’ gift. And the £2/16/- sent in by the Albury Methodist Youth Fellowship—the result of a dance—and the three postal notes for £1 each from a man from Oatley, a Sydney suburb, who wrote that he would like to make it more ‘but being on the Pension tightens the purse strings somewhat’. They also kept the £6/17/8 from Northmead Primary School and £2/2/- from a woman who confessed that she was on a very slender budget: ‘Having lived through a drought in Hay I know what it can mean. Just off the cuff I work at the [Castle Hill nursery] and at 78 years I cannot do a full job’. The State of Victoria also sent £1000. Clearly the appeal did not capture the public’s imagination; just the interest of a few.17 Leon Punch, who eventually became deputy premier of New South Wales, was member for Gloucester in the Hunter Valley region in 1965. He had entered parliament in 1959. He wrote that his constituents were suffering the worst of the drought and that many ‘throughout this area are in most necessitous circumstances’. Perhaps Punch had not been told that the Lord Mayor’s 227

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Fund was largely for psychological purposes; he was asking for real money for real people. The fund would send money to local committees, he learnt in reply, who would then distribute it to needy cases. This had not been made clear, apparently, and the files in the archives contain some very sorry letters from people needing help. Drought was bad enough; allied with any other problem, mainly health, drought’s victims could become mired in poverty.18 One woman, living near Gloucester, wrote that her husband had died in June 1965; but he was six weeks in hospital before that, and with doctors’ fees, funeral expenses and probate that she could not pay, this woman had severe financial problems. Her son was working on the farm with her but he had married last Christmas and his wife had given birth to twin girls, also in June, only one week after her husband’s death. The babies were five weeks premature and needed hospital treatment for four weeks. Another woman wrote that her husband was in hospital and would not be able to work for several months. There were nine children to care for, aged between two years and eighteen, but as the eldest two were girls they were not able to do too much heavy work around the farm, she wrote. The property, near Armidale, was 2800 acres (1134 hectares) and already 150 cattle had died. They were hand-feeding the rest but these would probably die too. This family owed the banks £12 500 and had another £1000 worth of debts. They had received no income for eighteen months. Asked to check the truth of this near-unbelievable tale of woe, the shire committee confirmed the story. Indeed, the man’s health had been affected by the worry ‘and he has only recently 228

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been discharged from hospital after a nervous breakdown’. The fund sent the family £100 and later followed this up with £50.19 From Brookfield via Dungog came the story of a family of eight children, six of whom were going to school; the other two were doing correspondence school as the parents could not afford to send them to Dungog High School. The eldest two had eye problems which required operations but there was no chance of this. ‘We sometimes have to wait for the milk cheque before going into town for groceries . . . we can’t possibly carry on like this much longer,’ the farmer wrote. But he was fatalistic: ‘it will be some time before I can look forward to making enough to cover all expenses. In the meantime I don’t know how I’ll be able to manage’. It is not clear whether this man received help from the fund.20 Where bad health or bad luck were not making things worse, many applicants to the fund gave a picture of such small holdings and such grinding poverty as to make the reader wonder if we had slipped back to the nineteenth century, to the very first years of the colony. Yet this was 1965, when Australia was at war in Vietnam alongside the most sophisticated and technologically superior nation the world had ever known. It is hard to reconcile that sterile sophistication with these tiny examples of poverty and simplicity. Tenterfield Shire in northern New South Wales, for example, gave the details of two cases of concern. In one a farmer had bought his property just a year ago and had had no time to accumulate fodder reserves or to improve water storage. His 450-acre (182-hectare) farm ran 1100 sheep; by August 1965 he had already lost 500 of them and ‘future prospects are grim indeed’. The man was making £6 per week selling wood 229

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but he could not do much more and still look after his sheep. Six pounds a week was about the level of the old age pension; this man had four children, two at school, two younger. Tenterfield asked for £100 for him. The committee in Sydney conceded £25. The other case involved an orchardist; he had been receiving £7 per week food relief which was now being withdrawn. He was not eligible for social security payments unless he put his name down for employment and if he did that, Tenterfield Shire asked, how could he continue to care for his orchard. There was nothing coming his way from Sydney.21 From Gilgandra, north of Dubbo, a man wrote in October 1965 that he had lost one-third of his stock, that he owed his wool firm £3000 and that he had no prospect of a harvest that year. In fact his next income of any kind would not be until May 1966 when he would receive payment for last year’s wheat crop. In the meantime, he wrote, ‘I have to feed and clothe six children and wife and self and transport children to school ten miles away. All of this,’ he wrote with no sense of exaggeration, ‘is no mean expense.’ What was he to do? From Gulgong, near Mudgee in central New South Wales, a farmer wrote that he had bought his property three years ago and owed nearly £9000 to the banks. He had 1000 sheep but would now shear only 600: ‘I might as well get something off them before they die in the paddock’. This man had taken a job with the local council but would not be able to restock without money. What was he to do?22 The Stroud Shire Council put out a form for those seeking assistance, from the responses to which it is very clear that those with small farms and small stock holdings had placed themselves at greatest risk. There was a man with a wife and three children, 230

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boys aged sixteen and thirteen, a girl aged eighteen. The man’s income was £7 per week. There was no cash in the bank. The farm was of 243 acres (98 hectares), there were 27 head of cattle including calves; there was also a draught horse, their small house and furniture. Liabilities included debts of £355, including £30 to the local store, £120 on hire purchase, £60 to the milk factory. This man had lost income from his pea and bean crop of £100 and he estimated the loss of sixteen head of cattle at £500. The council recommended a grant of £20. Another man had six children, the oldest fifteen and the youngest two; he had 24 cows and four heifers and had lost thirteen cows. He owed the Rural Bank £1620. He, too, received £20. From nearby Upper Bowman a man reported that his 1965 income had been: May, £5; June, £3; July, £2. He owed the grocer £20, the butcher £30 and the baker £10; as well as the garage £70, the shire £80 and the bank £450.23 All these cases were, of course, quite hopeless. The pittance that the Lord Mayor’s Fund was able to dole out would fend off starvation and possibly prevent these families from walking off their land for a few weeks at most. We would say, in the comfort of our hindsight, that these people had no right to be trying to win a living in such pathetic ways. Big companies, in all likelihood, would eventually swallow these small holdings, and governments would perhaps pay some of the families to move on. Where? To the cities? To country towns? To more of the same in the elaborate debt cycle. Drought had brought such people to their knees, but even in the good times such as the bush had known for a couple of decades now, some of these farmers were extremely marginal players. Some had only just come on to the 231

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land. Was the Australian rural dream still playing in 1965? Few of those in the Lord Mayor’s files, we can be sure, survived. Perhaps they should have been told that drought would at some time bring them undone before they tried to make a go of it in the bush. Although there was, as always, another way of looking at things. From Currabubula, near Tamworth in northern New South Wales, J. Ainsworth-Smyth wrote emphatically: Let’s cut out all this talk about the cockies walking off their farms, and the need for Reserve Bank action and all. It’s dry alright, damn dry, but we’ve had 20 years of good seasons and good prices, and sold all our wheat to the Commies. The first cocky who does walk off will be killed in the rush as his neighbours fight each other to buy the place.24

Bert Castellari’s last report from the drought regions for the Herald was from Armidale. The last image we have of him on his long trip is sitting in Bill McCarthy’s lounge room in an ‘isolated but not remote’ house ‘on the brow of a rock strewn tawny hill’. There with his host he looked at coloured slides of the property as once it had been, remembering the good times. Perhaps it took three years or so to return that property to prosperity. Perhaps less. Bert Castellari returned to Sydney by the end of June and drought dropped from his paper’s perspective. On 8 July 1965 the first Australian was killed in action in Vietnam. The Herald would be drawn to its war coverage over the next weeks and months and rural Australia became less important. The drought broke in many parts of New South Wales about a month after Bert Castellari returned to general 232

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reporting duties. Indeed, parts of the state experienced heavy flooding with consequent stock losses. It must always be like that, those not living through it might have commented, perhaps less than sympathetically.

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ELECTIONS IN VICTORIA ,

for the State Parliament at least, seemed almost pointless for some voters from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. Time after time, since the Labor Party split into two irreconcilable camps in the 1950s, the Opposition mounted a case with as much enthusiasm as they could muster, and the voters returned the conservatives. The sense of hopelessness that pervaded Labor politics in Victoria began, imperceptibly, to change in the 1970s. Still, the last Labor premier, John Cain, had lost office in 1955. It was such a long time ago. Another world, really. Was it an omen when his son, also John Cain, took the leadership of Victorian Labor in 1981 just as victory at long last seemed achievable? The polls predicted a Labor landslide in 1982—and for once the polls were right. With a sense of pride and excitement, the second John Cain sat at the head of the cabinet table in the premier’s office. The times were hardly propitious for the new government. The Victorian economy was in strife, unemployment at record highs, manufacturing in the 234

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doldrums, and Malcolm Fraser’s government in Canberra seemingly powerless to bring about any improvement. As the Victorian governor’s speech had it in opening Parliament with a Labor team at last on the Treasury benches: ‘the number of unemployed in Victoria at the end of March stood at 118 700, an intolerably high level both in economic and social terms’. A drover’s dog, retiring leader Bill Hayden said, could lead Labor to victory federally. It was that bad. On top of it all another prolonged dry had set in. We will soon be importing wheat, people whispered, as yet another drought arrived. The Old Treasury Building, they call it, an elegant Victorian landmark, not yet a hotel, as it would be in Sydney. Or a casino, as it might be in Adelaide. It is a museum in Melbourne, in fact, available to all, a jewel at the top of Collins Street, to match the parliamentary jewel at the top of Bourke street. Melbourne prides itself on that; history and heritage. These days John Cain, no longer premier, has an office on the second floor, along a wide corridor, deeply carpeted, the walls in heritage colours. The office opens directly onto the corridor, no outer office and inner sanctum here, just a former premier at work, door open, welcoming all comers. He seemed pleased to see me; we had met only once before earlier in 2004, but John Cain, you’d think, is the sort of person who could talk, with genuine interest, to anyone. They have to be like that, if they are going to be any good in politics. And to make Labor electable in Victoria and to steer the party to victory showed that John Cain had been a highly proficient politician. ‘This [1980–83] drought was a watershed,’ I said; a careless pun which, mercifully, he did not seem to notice. I stumbled on: 235

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‘At long last, from this drought onwards, people seem to have begun to understand that we have to do things differently in Australia.’ John Cain showed cautious interest in the idea I was trying to develop. The pattern that we have been investigating in this book, of surprise and shock at the arrival of drought, increasingly of government support for farmers caught in drought and, with luck, making it through until it rained again, by 1982 no longer seemed enough. A reforming government, with no experience at all of the responsibilities of governing, hitting a severe drought even before arriving on the Treasury benches— surely, I reasoned, they would look at things differently. Did you have a rural policy, I asked. I wanted to see this drought through John Cain’s eyes, even 22 years later, as he mildly protested. It was not long into the discussion before I began to realise what a role the father played in his son’s thinking. It is not remarkable, I suppose: father and son Labor premiers in a markedly non-Labor state; it was such an unusual double that surely the son might be expected to see his father as an important role model. They had been close and although John Cain senior died in 1957 when his son was only 26, Labor’s longest serving Victorian premier still frequently refers to him in conversation. Did you consult much in the bush, I asked, did you talk to the farmers doing it hard in this drought? I’d take regular trips, John Cain said, three days at a time, meeting with farmers, local councils, our own people. I could talk to them, he said; my father came from the land. Indeed he did. John Cain senior’s father, Patrick Cane, came from Ireland, a farmer. Patrick drowned in 1890, depressed and of unsound mind, when his son was only eight. His wife remarried and as he never got on with his 236

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stepfather, John Cain senior ‘bolted out pretty quickly’, as his son put it, from home and school therefore, at thirteen, to work in the bush. ‘He didn’t inherit a farm or anything; he was just a labourer around farms in the Goulburn Valley.’ The first John Cain, after this tough beginning, earned a reputation as an exceptionally good worker. There were the mechanics, institutes, too, to make up for the lack of formal education; he was ‘a widely read man’, his son said.1 The thing about drought, however severe, is that it will always end, and with the return of rain we put away the foolish thoughts we had that it might never rain again. It poured in Victoria and throughout all the other drought areas in the autumn and winter of 1983. It was Bob Hawke, some said, just elected as prime minister, Australia’s new messiah. Just his luck and Australia’s too; the bloke could make it rain. It was Charles and Diana, others claimed, on their first celebrity-driven visit. Bringing bounty. The harvests were phenomenal, John Cain remembered, so much wheat that they were storing it ‘Egyptian style’: digging big pits in the ground, pouring the wheat in and covering it with tarpaulins. The silos could not cope, there was so much of the stuff. In all this plenty you could forget the years of drought that had preceded it. This glut, this massive return to prosperity in the bush, coloured John Cain’s recall of the previous year. Bad at the time, but passing. Just an aberration. In discussion we wandered around that drought, severe as it had been, cautiously. In a long line, the squatters and selectors, then the Mallee farmers, Queensland station managers, coastal dairymen, people on the land everywhere, have left a precious legacy to those who came after them. The gift they gave was a slowly increasing 237

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knowledge and experience of Australian conditions. By the 1980s, farmers and graziers, and the shopkeepers, bankers and accountants who depended on them, had at least 120 years of records of rainfall and weather behind them. They had long anecdotal and recorded experience of drought. That experience should have told them that drought was a constant in Australian life. They should have expected it, and prepared for its return. While we will sympathise with Albert Field up there at Avoca in the 1870s, thinking that he could become a profitable farmer simply by buying the land, fencing it and putting sheep on it, we will not sympathise with a successor on Avoca’s rolling countryside in the 1980s who has made no preparation for the return of drought. But experience was not enough. Individual preparations for drought were not good enough either. By the 1980s drought was a national issue requiring governmental involvement, education and reform. And that required rural organisations to push bush issues in the capital cities. Around Australia since the severe drought of the 1960s there had been moves for fewer, but more powerful voices in the rural lobby. Rural Australia could no longer simply be grateful that a Bert Castellari would come out to the bush to listen to tales of hardship and report back to his city readers. It had dawned on the bush that there was a message to sell to a predominantly urbanised country and that the message should be sold professionally, with skill. Rural interests, increasingly, wanted to speak with a united voice. So in the 1970s and 1980s, reworked or entirely new organisations sprang into being to lobby governments and to present rural issues to city-based Australians. This organisational reform was as important to the 238

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bush as the formation of the Country Party had been in the 1920s. Rural politics were set to again become important on the national political agenda. Victorian farmers and graziers joined forces, organisationally, in April 1980, in the Victorian Farmers and Graziers Association, to speak with a united voice. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, himself a Victorian grazier, attended the first meeting of this new lobby group to show his support. Inaugural president Des Crowe said: ‘Drought was the fickle enemy of our pioneers, and as Australian farmers know, it has played its role with varying intensity down through the years.’ Natural disasters, like drought, he continued, required governments to look to their funding. In time of drought the man on the land would require strong financial support from government to see him through and a strong rural lobby to hold governments to their responsibilities. That was new. Farmers would have to begin carting water, the president continued. And with hand-feeding they might not have the time to do it. There was now a subsidy for carting water more than 16 kilometres; reduce that distance, he said, the farmers need help. Yet they had done it for themselves in earlier droughts without subsidy, even as water trains criss-crossed the state. The trains were much appreciated but the farmers themselves had to turn up at the station or siding to collect the water and cart it home; or travel miles to a dam or river, day after day. There were no subsidies then. Why now? And who should pay? The perennial question in Australian politics. Peter Nixon, Country Party, the federal minister for Primary Industry, turned on the newly elected John Cain: ‘I find it impossible to believe that Mr Cain can be so ignorant [of the need to support his farmers]. He 239

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should wake up to himself and to reality and begin providing urgent financial assistance to farmers.’ When had this become the norm?2 Has there been a major drought in Australia since the time of European settlement not to attract the headline or the comment, ‘the worst drought on record’? At first the frequency of this amused me. ‘You can’t have a drought,’ I’d tell anyone bothering to listen, ‘that isn’t the worst, the biggest, the driest.’ So, researching, I duly and happily noted the National Australia Bank’s Monthly Summary of March 1983 headline: ‘Worst Drought in 100 Years’. Worse than the Federation Drought that broke Nellie Melba’s heart, worse than the 1914–15 drought when the Murray stopped flowing and people could walk from New South Wales to Victoria? The last drought that we will look at in any detail, the drought of 1982–83, will have to be a humdinger to win the title ‘the worst’. And if it was the worst, would it attract the biggest subsidies? The Monthly Summary presented what might be called a banker’s view of drought. That in itself is significant; the lobby groups were already showing their worth. But the writer used expressions like ‘below average rainfall’ and ‘rainfall deficiencies’. A farmer might have said, ‘It stopped raining in April.’ And it did: across central and south-west Queensland, across most of New South Wales, and over northern Victoria. By the end of August 1982 the drought had extended to cover most of South Australia and all of Victoria. Even Tasmania was experiencing severe drought. By the end of December 1982 there was an unbroken area, over which the rainfall from April onwards had been the lowest on record, that embraced central and eastern 240

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New South Wales, northern Victoria and the settled parts of South Australia. The lowest rainfall on record across such a swathe of arable land; there was fear in the air again, anxiety, and a mournful look to the skies. Elsewhere in Australia, by the end of 1982 there had been a little rain, to be sure, but drought was still dominant. The National Australia Bank thought the situation was dreadful.3 And the bank was right, as detailed weather reports, even just for Victoria, indicated. Rainfall for the four months between June and September 1981 had been among the lowest 10 per cent on record in all areas in Victoria. There had only been two drier Septembers in North Wimmera (1918 and 1914) and only three drier in the South Mallee (1951, 1938 and 1914). Rainfall for the year so far in Victoria was also among the lowest 10 per cent on record. Eye-glazing stuff for most readers, probably, but an indication, too, of the value of these now long-held records. Even so, unlike the long-range forecasters of an earlier era, the professionals in the Weather Bureau recognised the unhelpfulness of records when it came to making predictions. ‘We really don’t know what lies ahead,’ sighed Don Lee, the supervising meteorologist in Melbourne, ‘but if we could know, even one month ahead, better still three months ahead, the economic benefits of that would be astronomical.’ True, but the Bureau was not in the long-term prediction business. Each Thursday the Melbourne office sent a drought report to the Prime Minister’s office in Canberra. It was immediately relevant to the assessments of the need for drought relief, Canberra believed, and ‘has wider economic and political implications’. If drought hurt the bush, would the bush be casting about for whom to blame? Canberra 241

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has always been a convenient target. Would the drought hurt the government?4 Cumulatively, these reports from around the country must have made grim reading for Malcolm Fraser. Perhaps more so than they might have done for a city-bred prime minister, for as an experienced grazier Fraser would know of neighbours doing it tough and desperate for rain. He would know the urgency of the decisions required; whether to gamble on hand-feeding and all the expense of that; or to sell off breeding stock, carefully nurtured over generations; or perhaps to seek more capital from the bank manager in Casterton, say, a man with now too many farmers spilling out their tales of woe. All with the same message: ‘it must break soon; surely there’s rain on the way’. Malcolm Fraser would see the human implications of the terrible figures his staff laid before him each Thursday. That was in 1981. We know, with hindsight, that it would be just as bad in 1982. Politicians needed empathy if they were to convince urban Australia that the bush was a special case, needing special assistance. ‘Australia is now well into what may be the worst drought since European colonisation’, Australasian Farming reported at the end of 1982. ‘Already more than 80 000 farms—60 per cent of the national total—have been stricken’. Many areas were chalking up their fourth year of bone-dry conditions. There was a fear that the raw earth would blow away ‘in a repeat of nightmare episodes from Australia’s past’. There were reports of locust plagues and mice plagues and, of course, the fear of bushfire. On top of this, to rival those droughts in time of war when labour shortages compounded the hardships, there was the world-wide economic recession of the 1970s and 1980s, the continuing 242

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burden of high interest rates, and record unemployment. Farms, and the shops and businesses that depended on them, were already at risk from these economic conditions, and drought could spin them into catastrophe. Australia had lost $2200m in farm produce since the drought started, Australasian Farming reported in November 1982; the drought threatened to ‘bring Australia to its knees’. There was a prediction of a decline in real net farm income of 50 per cent in 1982/83. Ralph Hunt, a farmer and grazier from Rowena, mid-way between Moree and Walgett in New South Wales, and acting Minister for Primary Industry, in November 1982 described ‘the current drought affecting half Australia [as] probably the worst, the most widespread this century’. It was drastically reducing primary production and creating heavy financial burdens, not only on primary producers but on ‘rural business undertakings, on employment, and on economic activity generally’. By then, he said, about half of Victoria and a quarter of New South Wales had experienced the lowest rainfall on record.5 The National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) was deeply disturbed. Disturbed enough to prepare a special drought report for presentation to governments. The NFF, formed only in 1979, and now flexing its still-new muscles, was not a ‘bleeding heart’ organisation and there were no individual stories of horror or tragedy in its report. Rather, the NFF concentrated on the economic circumstances of the drought and the consequences for the nation. This was new. Don’t talk individual suffering; talk economics. For too long those affected by drought had sought to make a special case for help based on their sufferings, the need to sustain farmers and their families, the importance of the rural 243

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lifestyle to the Australian way of life. When a New South Wales politician had said that he was not putting his hand in his pocket on ‘Drought Saturday’ during the Federation Drought, he was putting forward a view that farmers did not deserve special assistance. They could make do, he was saying then, just as the factory workers did whenever there was an economic downturn. The NFF wanted to broaden the way city-dwellers looked at drought. For two years, the report said, the farm rate of inflation had been higher than the general rate of inflation in Australia. ‘Conversely, in the United States, the farm rate of inflation has been below the general rate’, and in any case, inflation was lower there than in Australia. The Australian dollar had been moved down ‘to a more realistic level’ in recent months, but it should float, the NFF asserted. There should be wage restraint, too, accepted by unionists, employers and tribunals, to keep inflation down. ‘Every one per cent by which the farm rate of inflation can be reduced is equivalent to an $80m annual saving by farmers.’ The NFF wanted to look strictly at the economic implications of the drought. It may be worthwhile to take a breather from this doomsaying, accurate though it was. Note the change that has come over the discussion since the last serious episode of drought in the mid-1960s. For commentary now we look to banks and national farmer journals. There is a national picture available, where in the past I have been constructing the story at the local level, with the help of papers like the Donald Times or the Narandera Argus. There is now a recourse to the language of economics. National organisations, a national picture, expressed 244

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in the language of the economist, not the language of the farmer, one of whom told ABC radio: We’re not good enough at maths to handle this. It’s not like the old wood stove days. In the droughts I’ve been in, you could always guarantee inflation would help you. After the drought, if you kept your stock, you knew you would get an equal or better price. This isn’t happening today.

Since when had drought required expertise at maths? This was a new world. It was a question of the cost of capital, commentators seemed to think. In Melbourne’s Age, finance editor Ken Davidson blamed farmers’ access to government-assisted cheap money for their troubles. As a result of the availability of cheap capital, many farms were over-capitalised, Davidson wrote, and less efficient than they should be. They had equipment lying idle in the paddocks for three-quarters of the year; they should be hiring it or sharing it. Also in the Age, agricultural writer Geoff Wilson was inclined to blame the taxation system for the farmers’ economic woes. The tax system, he believed, did not encourage farmers to prepare for drought. There should be tax averaging, Wilson suggested, but showed he was a practical man, too, by calling for the large-scale planting of exotic or native fodder trees on farms, or on public land, including roadways. ‘The ubiquitous “long paddock” is left for dead when the drought breaks,’ he wrote. There is a subtle change here, too. Farmers were no longer seen as victims, as deserving sympathy in the face of a natural disaster. Or help from wealthy friends from overseas to prop them up. Farmers were seen as business people, taking risks, 245

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making decisions, lobbying as business people do. Their god, like the god in the cities’ factories and offices, must be efficiency; there could be no other. Still, I liked the agricultural reporter’s hankering after the ‘long paddock’. Practicalities still counted for something, even in the globalised world of marketdriven efficiency. The NFF had some practical ideas too. Its report claimed there was ‘an urgent need’ for advice to farmers on how to handle the drought, and called on the government to provide advice on the best ways of drought-feeding livestock and on strategies to minimise wind erosion of the soil. Education; even after so many droughts they still needed to be told what to do. Government hand-outs were no longer the only solution. The NFF’s economist, David Michael, perhaps somewhat gratuitously, said that while the government could do a lot of superficial things, ‘the onus is on the farmer himself to adapt to the conditions of his own farm’. It was essential that governments not interfere with good farm management, but even so, Michael asserted, not enough farmers ‘know how to harmonise with the realities of the land’. As a farmer reading this you would have wanted to throw the papers and the reports across the room in despair. It is 1980; Australia is fast approaching the bicentenary of European settlement. And still the answer to drought, when it is not wrapped up in economic jargon, is to tell farmers to adapt to the conditions of their own farms and to harmonise with the realities of their own land. Had we all learnt nothing about Australia and land use in nearly 200 years?6 Australia’s historians had begun preparing for the bicentenary perhaps earlier than many others. Under the leadership of 246

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two senior professors, Frank Crowley and Ken Inglis, we were beavering away at putting out ten large books on the history of this land. There would be narrative volumes, concentrating on Australia at 50-year intervals since European settlement, and facts volumes—statistics, a gazetteer, chronology, encyclopaedia, and geography. We were busy in the planning in 1980, making new friendships, contesting ideas, fearing it might prove impossible to pull off, excited by the opportunities. I was working with new colleagues on the facts side. We felt a little looked down on by the creative people on the narrative side, a bit country cousinish, but we were enthusiastic and hoped to be ‘cutting edge’. And in the Historical Dictionary, of which I was one of the three editors, in less than 350 words we covered droughts across Australia since the 1860s, including that of 1980–83. We handed out a few palms for the ‘driest on record’ or the ‘most severe’. The ‘slice years’ in the narrative volumes were not, coincidentally, times of significant drought. As historians we were not drought conscious. Few in the cities were, even then. So it was a curious mix across the board in the 1980s; new ways of looking at rural Australia, coming from national farmers’ organisations even, and yet the same old practical problems. If there was to be a new way of looking at drought, then the drought of the early 1980s might indeed prove the most important yet. A sign of the ways in which people’s thinking about drought might have been changing was the new seriousness with which metropolitan newspapers now wrote about drought. The national papers, the Australian and the Australian Financial Review, led the way with serious and thought-provoking series on the implications of the drought. Other papers, more aligned with their 247

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local communities, looked still, as Bert Castellari had done, at the human consequences. They were all helping to shape a new drought consciousness. Let’s skip ahead, though, to the defining, and remarkable image of this drought, one of the great newspaper photographs in Australian history, as iconic as some of the great images taken by Damien Parer on the Kokoda Track. Most Australians alive at the time will remember the photograph. 8 February 1983: the city of Melbourne, modern and progressive, a thing of substance, about to be engulfed by a tsunami-sized wave. An image of terror. The might of nature. An enormous wave, soon to crash to the shore, hurling, churning and upending everything in its path. Except that this wave is not of water but of dust. Not an unlikely tsunami from Port Phillip Bay but a huge mountain-cloud of fine soil, from Victoria’s Mallee probably, released on the city by drought. Dust storms had driven country people mad for a 100 years; it was so dark, inside the house, that you could not see three feet in front of you, someone had reported in an earlier drought. Now Melbourne was to experience a dust storm of extraordinary proportions. Truly had the bush come to the city. That photograph would do more to raise drought consciousness in Australia than 100 years of ups and downs in the bush. This was serious. ‘It had darkened Melbourne,’ a government official reported.7 It was the damage done by those who had gone before that had caused this awful loss of soil, this wasteful, extravagant consequence of drought. It was, as an Australian headline had it, ‘The Legacy of Careless Farming’. How so? Up at Swan Hill, where we have been before, Tom Speedie, regional soil conser248

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vationist for the Victorian government, was talking to Maurice Batcheldor, journalist: ‘the early croppers were—and to a large extent their descendants remain—ignorant of the damage wreaked’. Before cropping commenced throughout the region, the mallee, the bush scrub, Tom Speedie explained, had formed a canopy over the gently duned earth, the roots of the bushes holding the soil together. Take away the scrub and there was nothing to bind the soil. ‘With prolonged drought,’ Tom Speedie reported, ‘and broadacre, long-fallow cultivation, the gentle but exposed dunes are raked by the winds across fences, across roads and into the air.’ In a good year, he concluded, about 8 per cent of the region’s soil was blown about; in a drought year that might leap to 50 per cent. There were major dust storms in the MalleeWimmera region on 7, 9 and 26 January 1983, and 8 and 16 February. The damage was massive. Soil is a finite resource, the journalist observed in the article, and time was running out for farmers—fast. Remember the back-breaking work of William Pearce, the Methodist lay preacher, taking up his selection in the Mallee in 1893, grubbing out mallee roots, preparing his soil for sowing. And grubbing them out, again and again each year as they doggedly returned. Unknowingly, Pearce was the first in a chain that would send this Mallee soil in a great cloud over Melbourne nearly 100 years later.8 ‘You know it really screws me that the State Government can give $50 000 to a gay Mardi Gras when what we need is a massive campaign to change farming practices,’ said Tom Capell, a ‘towering, silvering New South Wales farmer’, at Trundle, west of Parkes, in the central west. Capell had identified soil erosion as a huge problem in his district, but he met resistance and 249

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ignorance when he sought to confront his neighbours with the consequences of their farming practices. Work on his own properties showed what could be done; reduced farming costs, improved pastures. And what he was advocating, contour ploughing, was simple enough and had been known of for ages. In 1981 the New South Wales government had spent $30 million on soil conservation and Tom Capell’s neighbours received subsidies and loans to follow his good example. You can applaud Tom Capell’s passion for good farming methods, but was it a bush thing to complain about the way governments spent money in the cities? The strange thing was, in any case, as in the Mallee, that such farming reform should be reaching the bush so late. Drought had again shown the need for better ways of working the land, ‘harmonising’ with it, as the NFF had said.9 It has been a theme of this study of drought, but hard to explore because of the lack of records, that the bush is not peopled just by farmers and graziers. Local businesses, shopkeepers particularly, but accountants and stock and station agents too, doctors and machinery suppliers, all suffered when farm income dried up. And local governments. Services needed to be maintained but the landowners, most of them, on whom local governments depended for their rates, sought rate holidays, or simply could not pay, and council income collapsed. This led to putting workers off, increasing unemployment and spiralling towns into depression and the loss of population. There were other problems too, as a round-up in the Local Government Bulletin indicated. In the Hay Shire the drought had forced the council to act ‘the role of cowboy’. Disillusioned drovers in the long paddock had been abandoning weak and starving sheep when there was simply no feed left for 250

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them. In November, 272 sheep were found wandering the council’s roads; they were rounded up, cared for and sold for 5 cents a head. Then another 143 were brought in, but these were in such bad condition that they were just shot: ‘they were too thin to be any good as meat’. Then another 250 were brought in and destroyed. It was brutal and costly work for the council. In Victoria, 275 000 unsaleable sheep were slaughtered and disposed of in municipal facilities.10 Narromine Council had been spending $100 000 annually on sealing dirt roads. In 1983 not one cent was spent on this program. More unemployment. And the use of social welfare services provided by councils was increasing as the drought bit deeper. Particularly financial counselling. ‘By the time people come to see us they are desperate,’ the City of Orange’s social planner said. ‘All they are talking about is survival. Many are workers who have been put off the farms. They come to us with no money to buy food.’ He suggested that councils should consider giving their retrenched workers small cash sums for food and other essentials. At Yass the shire clerk reported that businesses were closing down every few weeks, caught in the double bind of drought and recession. ‘The farmers are simply not buying from the shops,’ the shire clerk reported, ‘and the struggling retail trade means we will collect less in rates.’ By early January 1983, government payments to farmers in New South Wales were said to be running at $4 million a week. Some of this, councils hoped, would find its way into local businesses to generate employment; but most of it, they recognised, would go to pay for fodder or agistment elsewhere.11 251

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A study of the City of Swan Hill, in Victoria’s north-west, found that 63 staff had been retrenched by Christmas 1982 from shops and small factories in the city, which ‘extrapolates to 300’ if extended to all businesses in Swan Hill. There was a 30 per cent downturn on average, with vehicle sales down 33 per cent and the sale of home appliances down 45 per cent. The study calculated that 50 per cent of the value of gross farm production was normally spent in the local region. The value of the Mallee’s farm production was $150 million which would mean, on this calculation, that $75 million less would be spent regionally. But allowing for ongoing essential spending that would be drawn down from savings, the real loss to the Mallee’s businesses was put at $50 million. No wonder there was unemployment and business closures in Swan Hill. It was a tough time for everyone.12 As early as August 1982, with the failure again of the winter rains, there were stories in the newspapers of hardship and the possible loss of farms. But it is important to remember that ‘drought sneaks up on you’, particularly in the consciousness of urban Australia. In the Cooma region, by 1982 farmers were entering the fourth year of significantly lower rainfall, the fourth year of drought. One or two years they could now cope with; the rest of us, the city-dwellers, become aware of drought only when it enters its third or fourth year—but by then even seasoned and experienced farmers are facing calamity. So how had farmers around Cooma, in the Monaro, coped with virtually no rain since May 1979? Firstly, they had reduced stock drastically, ‘virtually gone out of business’, as the Financial Review put it. It was the standard immediate response to drought now, or should have been if government subsidies did not get in the way. Keep the 252

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best breeding stock, and hand-feed them, but sell off all other stock, even if lambs are fetching only 10 cents a head, as they did at the Cooma saleyards. To hand-feed breeding stock is expensive; agronomists estimated that Monaro farmers had spent more than $2.6 million on fodder in the 24 months to January 1982. They had spent another $1.5 million on agistment, taking stock away from the water-starved Monaro, to Gippsland mostly. Anyone on less than 1600 hectares in the Monaro would now be working off-farm as a shearer or shed hand, according to Peter Crowley, a shearer turned farmer. They desperately needed the income to pay for fodder. A stock and station agent at Nimmitabel, Peter Curlewis, thought that the region was carrying only 35 per cent of the cattle it would carry in normal times. The sell-off started more than three years earlier when the region started to go dry.13 The situation was little better in the grain-growing areas of New South Wales, though it was a feature of this drought, at least around Moree, that there was occasional rain, isolated and quite localised, so that one farmer might have good rain while his neighbours missed out entirely. I heard of a farmer in the Ardlethan district of central New South Wales, entirely destitute of water, with no chance of ploughing and reduced to hand-feeding what stock remained, who could sit on his verandah in the evening, looking across to the horizon at his neighbour’s land, pleasantly green. The thunderstorm that had so nourished the neighbour’s land had stopped, he said, almost as if along his fence line. You need a sense of humour in the bush or truly it would drive you mad. Because of some patchy rain for the lucky few, the silo at Croppa Creek, 65 kilometres from Moree, was 253

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expecting to take in 30 000 tonnes of wheat—against a normal harvest of 100 000 tonnes. One man in the district, Max Fowler, the Financial Review reported in September 1982, had just ploughed in all 125 hectares of his winter wheat crop; he was willing to take the punt that there would be good spring rains to allow planting of an early summer sorghum crop. If not, he would hope for Christmas rains to allow for a late sorghum planting. Failing that, he would prepare his land for planting for a wheat crop next year. The lucky farmer, most people in the district thought, was the one who hadn’t sown a crop. At least he’d saved the cost of the diesel fuel, fertiliser and seed.14 The statistics for Victoria were just as depressing. The total production of field crops there (cereals, grains, legumes and oilseeds) was 610 000 tonnes in 1982/83, or just 18 per cent of what it had been in 1981/82. Wheat yield was down 84 per cent in Victoria and 46 per cent nationally. Oats down 68 per cent, 47 per cent nationally; barley down 84 per cent, 46 per cent nationally. Crop losses in Victoria caused a reduction in the gross value of farm production of $140 million. Numbers of beef cattle in Victoria fell by 25.1 per cent, which represented 650 000 head. Sheep numbers showed a relatively smaller reduction of 11.1 per cent, or just over 2 million head. This might suggest that sheep had become more adaptable, perhaps developing a taste for the scrub that had now been fed to them for more than 100 years during recurring droughts. Many farmers in Victoria entered 1982 with relatively low feed reserves resulting from heavy winter feeding in 1981, when the dry was already biting deeply. So all forms of hay became expensive, leaping to $4–6 a bale, when in normal times $1 a bale was the average.15 254

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Some farmers had prudently begun to reduce stock in 1980, as soon as they noticed that a dry was building up, but the loss of such numbers as the records show could not have been achieved by sale alone. There had been a change in attitudes to animal welfare since the last big drought of the 1960s. It was no longer good enough to allow sheep and cattle to starve to death in the paddocks or to die an agonising death from thirst. The sounds and sights of the bush in drought that had so disturbed Nellie Melba and Joseph Jenkins, sheep staggering, half-blind from starvation, cattle bogged fast in dried dams and creek beds, bellowing in fear and suffering—none of this was any longer acceptable. ‘The general community,’ wrote an officer of the Victorian Agriculture Department, ‘no longer accepts animal deaths in a drought as an act of God.’ So the Department ensured that slaughter and burial were humane and efficient, and prosecuted in a few cases where this was not done. During October 1982, in Victoria alone, 50 000 sheep a week were being destroyed. Community standards had at last caught up with decency. To an extent. A cold snap in December 1982 saw the death of 50 000 sheep in western Victoria; most deaths were of droughtweakened sheep within fourteen days of shearing. It was cruel but Victorian weather is, at best, unpredictable.16 Most of the farmers interviewed by the Financial Review said that they felt most sorry for those among them who had started farming in the last few years. They would have the highest level of debt. All agreed that this drought was horribly intensified in its effects by the hazardous Australian and world economic conditions; high interest rates, low commodity prices and low demand, high costs and continually rising inflation. One man who could 255

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put all this in perspective was Campbell Cochrane, in the Bega region of the far south coast of New South Wales, who had been farming there for more than 70 years, now helping his two sons to operate the dairy business. Campbell Cochrane thought that the drought of the 1980s was not as bad as that of 1923, when he was unable to bring fodder in or ship stock out. His memory, his experience, could take him back that far. A valuable farm asset. His sons would now spend $50 000 on extra irrigation equipment to make up for the lack of rainfall, pushing their farm debt to a level ‘that would make my father cry’, Campbell Cochrane said. ‘If it wasn’t for the drought a dairy farmer could live quite well.’ He had the experience to know what he was talking about; 70 years himself on the land, his father on it before him, his grandfather before that. ‘If it wasn’t for the drought.’17 A man of lesser, but nevertheless lengthy experience was John Emery of Cowra, two hours’ drive from Canberra, the source, he thought, of many of his troubles. Emery’s 810 hectares property, Jerula, had been in the family since his father purchased it in 1934. Jerula had river and creek frontage and weathered most drys quite well. By December 1982, however, John Emery faced a triple whammy: no water, no fodder, little stock. In 1976, a good year, Jerula had grazed 1100 Aberdeen Angus cattle, cultivated 32 hectares of lucerne and held 40 000 bales of hay in its sheds. In the four years since the drought began, Emery had spent $200 000 on purchased hay, had just 2500 bales of his own left, and was feeding his remaining 460 head of cattle 120 bales every second day. But just the other day, he said, he had 256

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arranged the sale of another 100 head of his prized breeding stock, a ‘heart-breaking decision’.18 It was the federal government and the bureaucracy in Canberra that aroused John Emery’s ire. But who could you blame for the lack of rain? The perennial question. Not God, though some were still organising prayers for rain. Best to turn your attention to those with responsibility for helping the nation’s farmers. There had to be someone to blame. At the end of August 1982 the government announced a drought relief subsidy scheme. The Minister for Primary Industry, Peter Nixon, a Gippsland farmer and grazier himself, made all the right noises. ‘Since the last catastrophic drought in Australia in the mid-1960s,’ he had said, following a Cabinet meeting in Adelaide, ‘farms have become larger and more capital intensive, and carry more debt.’ Hence the government had decided to help with an interest rate subsidy, and a subsidy on purchases of fodder.19 Introducing legislation for these measures into Parliament in Canberra in September, Nixon went further: ‘we are now facing potentially the worst rural disaster in our history’. The measures would assist ‘the nation’s full time farmers to stay on their properties throughout this difficult period’, but would not give assistance to ‘Pitt and Collins Street farmers . . . we are not in the business of helping part time farmers who also have outside incomes’, said the Minister’s press release. The Commonwealth would spend $356 million on these subsidies. There are currently 100 000 farms across Australia that are drought affected. Of these an estimated 75 000 farms are carrying livestock to the tune of 48 million breeding ewes and nearly 6 million 257

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breeding cows. It would be disastrous for the nation if the drought was allowed to cause a major exodus of farmers from their properties, or a serious depletion of sheep and cattle breeding stock.20

Tell that to John Emery at Cowra. He had already sold most of his breeding stock and had been looking to buy further fodder supplies the day before the Minister’s first announcement at the end of August. Inspecting hay in a grower’s paddocks, Emery had been quoted a price of $2.50 a bale. Two days later, returning to complete the deal, Emery discovered that, post Peter Nixon’s announcement, the price of hay in those same paddocks was now $3.80 a bale. Effectively, the subsidy had simply put the price up. Worse was to follow. Graziers would later learn that the 50 per cent subsidy Nixon had offered applied only to grain purchases and that hay, graded according to nutrient value, would be subsidised to a ceiling of 25 per cent of the purchase price. It paid to read the small print coming from Canberra. Though announced at the end of August, farmers received no payment on the fodder subsidy scheme until early December. That was, therefore, further debt that they carried. The Department in Canberra set up a special task force to handle the schemes and there was a telephone hotline operated by ‘drought relief experts’ to tell farmers what to do. They were trying to be helpful, I suppose, but there was a four-page, ‘daunting’ form to be filled in which required a declaration of all assets and income. It was tax time all over again. The interest rate subsidy scheme would pick up the tab for all rates above 12 per cent for full-time farmers. There were forms for that, too. There had to be a better way, farmers thought. But the government was looking 258

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for the efficient and effective use of ‘taxpayers’ money’. In Victoria it was found that a great deal of the personal counselling time offered by the Agriculture Department was taken up in ‘completing fodder subsidy application forms which many farmers found difficulty filling in correctly’.21 ABC rural radio reported that even the farmers themselves were divided about the worth and justice of fodder and other subsidies. Beyond pushing up fodder prices, the subsidies angered those farmers who felt that they had been discriminated against because they had attempted to drought-proof their farms. These farmers had built up substantial fodder reserves, or income reserves, to tide them over tough times. The various subsidies, the ABC report argued, ‘most benefit those farmers who had put themselves at greatest risk by managing their farms with high debt levels which attract interest subsidies, and high stocking rates which attract fodder, cartage and agistment subsidies’. It was a tough argument and it was coming to the fore more frequently in the 1980s. The solution to drought, some now argued, was not simply to throw money at the cockies. There had to be a better way. It was becoming more scientific, of course. When did we first hear the word ‘agronomist’ in Australia? Agronomists were in most of the universities and were increasingly employed by state governments and farmers’ organisations to promote the more scientific, more efficient use of the land. At a major conference on land use in arid Australia in September 1981, the agronomists were out in force. In paper after paper, the experts argued that government support rewarded the poor managers. ‘Pastoralists who reduced numbers while cattle were in a saleable condition 259

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and those who continued to turn-off a reduced number of fat cattle by better management of stock and pastures received less assistance than poor managers,’ two of the speakers asserted.22 ‘Are drought relief schemes desirable?’ asked another. In the last two decades hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by governments in Australia on drought relief schemes. In some cases the droughts were simply periods of below average rainfall—part of the normal cycle of the seasons which semi-arid Australia experiences. Too many people expect more of our climate than is reasonable. Consequently we are doing serious damage to our pasture and soils by running excessive numbers of animals during dry seasons.

Fodder subsidies kept these animals on the land when it might have been safer to have removed them. Money, the experts argued, should rather be spent on incentives for early destocking and late restocking in dry years and on facilitating the sale or size increase of uneconomic holdings. No doubt there were other initiatives that governments could sponsor beyond putting money into the hands of the inefficient or the imprudent. But it was full circle, really. Governments were slow to assist individuals in the nineteenth century and then slowly came to their aid with water-trains and transport subsidies for moving stock to agistment. And gradually increased those subsidies through the twentieth century to the point where people began to argue that they hurt the bush more than they benefited it.23 It comes down to people in the end. There are good managers and bad managers; good farmers and bad farmers. The Victorian report on the 1982–83 drought, quoted earlier in this chapter, 260

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observed that ‘better managers made realistic decisions early in the drought at least cost, were better placed to make strong recovery in the post drought period, and kept good morale’. The other side of the coin was tarnished: ‘weaker sections of the rural community tended to suffer whether because of age, financially weak situation, emotional ability to sustain stresses caused by drought, or inability to plan for early recovery’. But was that not a bit glib? There are winners and losers, in life as in drought. Well, yes, but what to do? Drought is unpredictable; farming life in Australia is a gamble. Don’t blink if you want to survive.24 Most farmers accept drought philosophically [the report concluded] and set out to make the best of it. However, heavy strains on farmers and their families occurred because of the high additional costs, constant workloads, and uncertainty as to the length and intensity of the drought. Many found the constant dust, shortage of water, sight of dry creeks, bare paddocks, dead gardens, and lean stock depressing.

It had been this way since man first turned to farming and grazing in Australia. Even at the end of the most technologically advanced century that humankind had ever known, stock were at risk, and people too, when it just would not rain.25 Eric Kent was Minister for Agriculture in John Cain’s first government. The former premier described Kent as ‘a staid, dour old farmer . . . but nevertheless a bit of a realist . . . he brought a down-to-earth farmer approach, I suppose’. Kent had farmed in Gippsland, a place of which John Cain’s father had said that people did not buy land there, they bought rainfall. As the son told me this my mind flew back to Margaret McCann, exhausted, 261

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raising her family and doing all the farm work, her husband away for weeks at a time buying up stock in drought-ravaged parts to fatten them in Gippsland’s lush pastures. But Margaret McCann feared drought, and experienced it, even in Gippsland, and they knew it again in 1982. John Cain remembered: I used to fly around the wheat towns [shortly after taking office]’, John Cain remembered, ‘I remember that first trip up there, there wasn’t even enough crop, enough seed to make provision for next year. Just nothing. It was just sand dunes. I think that convinced me very early in the piece that we had a large, longterm job on hand.

But what to do? Sympathise, of course; and having an agriculture minister who had been a farmer himself helped. Take a whole-of-government approach too, with social security, counselling, small business assistance, all kicking in. Help the towns, the local councils to find work, talk to the families. Jobs, John Cain thought, were the key to it all. ‘We were generous to a fault’, he thought, and even rural-based opposition members found little to complain about. But John Cain’s government could do more. Encourage the Agriculture Department to train and teach farmers to manage better. Every minister, he remembered, had a role in the bush, not because there were votes in it—his government held no genuine rural seats beyond seats in the provincial towns around Geelong, in Ballarat and Bendigo. We targeted rural seats, John Cain recalled, but never successfully. The Rural Finance Corporation, ‘archaic as it might seem in name and concept still was seen as the farmers’ friend, was generous with money, was generous with interest rates . . . so all those things 262

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didn’t do us any harm in the eyes of the country voter, I think’. Why bother? A sense of community, probably: It was more that than the political clout of it all; there weren’t many country seats we were winning or were capable of winning so we couldn’t be accused of pork-barrelling . . . we slipped back in ’85 although we’d picked a few we might win, Narracan, Ripon . . . we never broke through in the Western District . . . we didn’t win any of those . . . we were never able to get through the rural barrier . . . we found that the swings in the bush were much less volatile . . . it does take something very severe for a country person to change their vote’.

Not drought, at least not for John Cain. It was an unusually warm Melbourne winter day when I spoke to John Cain and he had the office window slightly ajar for a bit of fresh air. Later, replaying the tape of our conversation, I find it punctuated by the clanging of tram bells as the trams turn into Collins Street for the run down to the retail strip and the banks and offices that make up Melbourne’s centre. Opposite the Town Hall the Collins Street trams pass the massive statue of Burke and Wills, moved about Melbourne at the planner’s whim, but now in a place of prominence again. The Victorian Exploring Expedition, with its 26 camels, 23 horses, nineteen men and six wagons, had reached Essendon, just a dozen kilometres or so from the site of the statue in central Melbourne, on that first day’s march. It was August 1860. These foolish, ill-led adventurers had little to go on in striking out for Australia’s north coast. Little real understanding of the land they would traverse, no 263

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knowledge of the weather they might expect, no rainfall records to warn them. The statue is a constant reminder of the failure of Burke and Wills, of the Victorian Exploring Expedition. It has represented for more than 100 years the hopelessness and tragedy of the Australian bush. It has told city folk that it is different out there, dangerous and unpredictable. A place of drought, and of flood, to be sure. Where the good years will always be followed by a dry; where someone will always be doing it tough. John Cain, back in his office, with the comforting sounds of the city around him, took a more optimistic view. As premier he saw farmers getting smarter, finally, possibly as a consequence of the drought of 1980–83. ‘The whole approach to farming is much more sophisticated, in every way, I think . . . they were better educated, the agricultural colleges were more influential, research was better . . . farmers were better informed by those sorts of resources than they had been earlier.’ But it was more than that, John Cain also saw an acceptance by the urban population that they were all part of the same community, that the city–country divide had broken down. People in the suburbs recognised that they shouldn’t be wasting the resources, shouldn’t be wasting water; he believed: the community became more united . . . you became more attuned as city-dwellers to what was happening in the bush and more sympathetic to it . . . When I was at school very few kids got a trip in a car in the bush as I was fortunate enough to have.

The bush that John Cain’s father had known, and had worked in from the age of thirteen, was unrecognisable in the bush that 264

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a young Australian would experience today. Australians, John Cain believed, anyway, had learned better to live with their land.


And then in late March 1983 it rained. Heavy rains across the country created a mixture of ‘pandemonium and ecstasy among Australians’, the American journal Newsweek reported: They honked automobile horns, guzzled even more beer than usual, stood cheering in the downpour and held their drenched children high on their shoulders . . . we’ve got kids here who have never seen this much rain . . . the country has endured the worst drought in its history.26

Australians as exotics. It is possible a Newsweek reporter observed such a scene as this. But when Nellie Melba tried to interest the rest of the world, through her super-rich friends, in an Australian drought, the nation froze, fearful that the exposure might damage the country’s credit rating. Whether the Crocodile Dundee description of the end of another Australian drought better suited those who worried for Australia’s reputation is open to debate, I prefer to think of Jo Jenkins’s selectors, after years of drought, beginning to complain after just two days of rain. Being Australian was never easy.

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asked two friends, both in their fifties, both born and raised in Canberra, if it had ever been drier here. I’d first come to Canberra in 1968 to furious heat and what I thought of as the ugliest city imaginable. The paddocks that seemed to creep right into the heart of the city itself had no grass. The air had no moisture at all; even at night the temperature never seemed to retreat to the comfort zone. ‘Worse now than it has ever been,’ the two men chorused. Even worse than 1968, I persisted. ‘Much worse,’ one said, and much longer. Another friend, a visitor to Canberra, was driving north to Sydney on the morning of 18 January 2003. Smoke haze hung around a city that we all still thought could not, surely, be at any real risk from the bushfire in the hills. ‘It can’t really get a hold down here,’ he thought, ‘there is absolutely nothing to burn.’ The paddocks he saw resembled the bitumen road on which he was driving. Hard, compacted soil, not a blade of grass. He would not have known then that likening the paddocks to IN MID-2004 I

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bitumen has been a constant in describing drought in Australia across most of the twentieth century. ‘A book on drought,’ my second daughter Jane said, incredulous, envisaging the boredom of the project. ‘Dad, with your luck, when the book is published the country will be in flood and no-one will remember drought.’ Insightful, and dead lucky. She could not have known then that forgetting drought as soon as the good times return has been another constant across most of the twentieth century. Yet in the nearly two years it took to research and write this book, the drought has not broken around Canberra, it has intensified. In those terrible days after the Canberra Fires of 18 January 2003, while the whole city braced for a second whack from the worsening weather conditions, we could not believe that rain would not come soon to save us. But 2003 remained dry, and it was drier again in 2004. I have been watching my front lawn die, with shrubs and even mature trees at risk, while I have been writing this book, and our water restrictions show no sign of ever, perhaps, being lifted. Flying to Sydney, as I had to do regularly in the winter and early spring of 2004, I watched with fascinated alarm the view of Warragamba Dam drying out, the dam on which all of Sydney depends. Water became the topic of everyone’s conversation. It is too early for a historian to document and interpret the drought which still afflicts much of eastern Australia in early 2005. We do now accept, though, the reality of living on a continent without a secure, assured supply of water. All Australians are now wiser about water than they have ever been across the two centuries of European settlement. We are nearer now to a 267

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national water policy and a national drought policy than we have ever been. We will conserve water more wisely, use it more carefully, store it more cleverly. And it will rain again, soon, surely, but when it does, as a people we will not simply forget drought. It will remain a constant in our thinking. This most recent drought—and it is certainly not over as I write—has shown, as never before, that drought has moved from the bush to the city. Australian cities have been critically short of water, and people have begun to understand the ramifications of this. Initially the drought of 1998–2005 (?) provoked the types of responses we have seen across two centuries of the Australian story. Tales of families doing it tough, pictures of bitumenised paddocks, arguments about the causes of drought and predictions of its patterns. There were prayers for rain in churches and mosques. And people raised money for battlers in the bush in the most organised and successful way ever attempted. Opened in October 2002, the ‘Farmhand Drought Appeal’, with principal sponsors including News Ltd, Channel Nine and Telstra, raised $24.5 million which it distributed to 18 000 families in ‘helping hand’ grants ‘for the basics of day-to-day living’. This took ‘rattling the tin’ for drought to new levels. Governments also helped, as had become expected, with all sorts of loans and subsidies and tax relief. But the ‘Farmhand Drought Appeal’—does that word ‘farmhand’ have a slightly American feel for you?—also sponsored research into ‘drought mitigation’. As the Chairman, Bob Mansfield, then of Telstra, wrote in his final report: ‘We continue to be reminded the hard way that we live in the driest inhabited country on the planet and that we cannot continue to use 268

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water as we have been doing these past two centuries.’ Most Australians, in the cities or the bush, would now agree with him. In Australia droughts usually end with a bang, not a whimper; it is either feast or famine in this remarkable country. I was not surprised, therefore, to hear that on 2 February 2005 Melbourne recorded its wettest day ever—150 metres in 24 hours—three months’ average rainfall. It has always been thus. But in the old Australia people would mop up the mess the deluge caused, moan a bit, and then watch with joy as crops flourished and stock fattened. They would forget about drought and greet the next one with ‘indignant surprise’. No longer.1 The experience of our 200 years here has finally been put to some good use. We have finally woken up, I think, to ‘Australia, the driest continent’. In telling the story that began with Albert Field and took us to far west Queensland, Gippsland in the south, the west of New South Wales, much of Victoria, perhaps I have done just a little to reinforce that understanding. Drought, the red marauder, drought and dust storms, drought and bushfire, will return to this vast land. They really never leave it. But we, I like to think, are now so much better prepared than Albert Field and Jo Jenkins and Margaret McCann and all of the others could ever have been.

269

Acknowledgments

as an idea for our then weekly history chat on ABC 702 Sydney. Ian Bowring of Allen & Unwin heard us talking on the radio and suggested a book on drought. It had never occurred to me as a topic for study. I thank both James and Ian for two years of interesting and challenging work. The Council of the State Library of Victoria established Creative Fellowships at the Library to begin in 2003. I was lucky to be awarded an inaugural Fellowship which sustained me there for months. The collections of that superb institution form the backbone of this book. Friends provided accommodation and hospitality in Melbourne and Sydney without which I simply could not have spent the long hours in the State Libraries of Victoria and New South Wales. I thank Lesley and Robin Jeffrey, Margaret Scanlan and Philip Wallbridge, and Anne-Marie Schwirtlich and Stephen Yorke in Melbourne; Louella Kerr Windsor and Gerard Windsor JAMES VALENTINE SUGGESTED DROUGHT

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and Diane and David Ede in Sydney. All these people also took a lively interest in the book (I probably talked about little else while staying with them) and helped in innumerable ways. I thank too Louise Burmester, Shane Carmody, Ros Casey, Stephen Foster, Bill Gammage, Jim Griffin, Gabrielle Hyslop, Matthew Kelly, Brendon Kelson, John McQuilton, Paul Macpherson, Cheryl Mongan, Jock Murphy, Geoffrey Pryor, Richard Reid, Madeleine Say, Malcolm Stacey and Peter Stanley. At a conference at Galong, New South Wales, Chris Woodland suggested the title. I thank him for his quick thinking and generous suggestion. I rejoice in the support and love of my wife, Michalina Stawyskyj, and my daughters, Katherine and Jane McKernan.

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Introduction 1 Argus, 25 April 1931. 2 Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001 Year Book Australia, Canberra, 2001, p. 17. 3 Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain, New York, 1990, p. 32; different states had different rules for eligibility for soldier settlement blocks, being unmarried was no bar in Victoria. 4 Conway, The Road, p. 55. 5 Conway, The Road, pp. 70–2. 6 Patrick O’Farrell, Letters from Irish Australia 1825–1929, Sydney 1984, pp. 206–7.

Chapter 1 1 John McQuilton, The Kelly Outbreak 1878–1880, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1979, pp. 25–6. 2 Letters of Albert Field, State Library of Victoria (SLV) Ms 10690, 1 January 1874. 3 Spectator, 27 March 1885. 4 Field letters, 3 February 1873. 5 Field letters, 10 November 1881. 6 Field letters, 28 March 1873; 17 June 1873; 4 December 1873; 6 January 1874. 7 Field letters, 7 September 1874; 29 December 1874. 8 Field letters, 22 April 1873; 21 January 1875; 1 April 1875. 9 Field letters, 9 August 1875; 1 April 1876. 10 ibid.

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Notes 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Field letters, 1 August 1877; 4 August 1876. Field letters, 19 May 1878. Field letters, 21 February 1877; 3 June 1879. Field letters, 1 November 1881; 1 October 1878; 8 July 1878. Field letters, 13 April 1879; 1 November 1881; 24 April 1882; 12 July 1882; 1 August 1882. Field letters, 1 April 1883; Spectator, 27 March 1885; Field letters, 1 November 1884. Shepparton News (hereafter SN), 11 November 1880. SN, 14 April 1881; 4 August 1881; 11 November 1880. SN, 6 January 1881; 3 November 1881; 6 January 1881; 13 January 1881. SN, 24 March 1881. Field letters, 12 February 1884. SN, 24 March 1881. SN, 12 May 1881. SN, 3 November 1881. Gillian Hibbins, A History of Nathalia Shire, Hawthorn Press, Melbourne, 1978, pp. 124–5. SN, 3 November 1881. Allan E. Keating, And Then the Mallee Fringe, A.E. Keating, St Arnaud, 1983, p. 33. Kerang Times (hereafter KT), 10 March 1882. KT, 24 March 1882. KT, 24 March 1882. Keating, And Then the Mallee Fringe, pp. 62–3. KT, 17 March 1882. KT, 7 March 1882. KT, 3 February 1882; 10 February 1882; 17 February 1882. KT, 3 February 1882; 24 February 1882. KT, 27 January 1882. KT, 13 January 1882. SN, 8 December 1881; 15 June 1882; 12 January 1882. SN, 15 December 1881; 24 February 1882. Argus, 4 April 1882.

Chapter 2 1 Ian Breward, A History of the Australian Churches, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1993, p. 74. 2 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1974, pp. 281–3. 3 KT, 17 March 1882; 21 March 1882; Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2000, p. 292.

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4 Argus, 23 March 1882; Michael McKernan, Australian Churches at War, Studies in the Christian Movement and the Australian War Memorial, Sydney and Canberra, 1980, passim. 5 Argus, 20 March 1882. 6 Argus, 27 March 1882; 3 April 1882; Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 6, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1976, p. 135. 7 Argus, 14 April 1882. 8 Argus, 8 April 1882; 13 April 1882. 9 Argus, 5 April 1882. 10 SN, 16 April 1882. 11 Diary of Joseph Jenkins, SLV, Ms 13267, 1 January 1882. 12 William Evans (ed.), Diary of a Welsh Swagman, Sun, Sydney, 1999, p. xvi; Jenkins diary, 26 October 1881; 26 February 1882. 13 Tarrangower Times, 22 March 1882; 13 February 1882; 25 February 1882; 8 April 1882. 14 Jenkins diary, 29 July 1881; 18 October 1881; 24 October 1881; 18 January 1882; 29 January 1882. 15 Jenkins diary, 3 February 1882; 23 February 1882; 11 March 1882; 1 April 1882; 16 April 1882. 16 Jenkins diary, 18 January 1882; 18 February 1882; 20 February 1882; 13 April 1882. 17 KT, 14 April 1882; 7 April 1882. 18 KT, 31 March 1882; 7 April 1882; 14 April 1882. 19 Jenkins diary, 24 April 1882; 26 April 1882; 2 May 1882. 20 KT, 25 April 1882; 28 April 1882; 2 May 1882. 21 KT, 28 April 1882. 22 SN, 26 October 1882.

Chapter 3 1 Argus, 20 September 1902; Jim Davidson, ‘Melba’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 10, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 475–9. 2 Nellie Melba, Melodies and Memories, Nelson, Melbourne, 1980 [first published 1925], p. 141; W.A.J. Pearse, Diary, 1893–1947, SLV, Ms 12961, diary 1902. 3 Davidson, ibid; Argus, 9 October 1902. 4 Argus, 3 November 1902. 5 Davidson, ibid. 6 Argus, 4 November 1902. 7 Argus, 5 November 1902; Herald, 3 November 1902. 8 Argus, 30 October 1902. 9 Graeme Aplin, S.G. Foster and Michael McKernan (eds), Australians: Events and Places, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Sydney, 1987, p. 426. 10 Pearse diary, ibid.

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Notes 11 Argus, 22 October 1902. 12 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 8, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1981, pp. 13–14; Argus, 29 October 1902. 13 Argus, 23 October 1902. 14 Argus, 24 December 1902; 24 October 1902; 29 October 1902. 15 Argus, 24 October 1903. 16 Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 5 January 1903. 17 SMH, 7 January 1903. 18 SMH, 10 January 1903. 19 SMH, 15 January 1903; Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 9, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1983, p. 392. 20 SMH, 17 January 1903. 21 SMH, 20 January 1903. 22 SMH, 24 January 1903. 23 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 12, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 512–13. 24 SMH, 24 January 1903. 25 SMH, 29 January 1903. 26 SMH, 12 February 1903; 14 February 1903. 27 SMH, 17 February 1903; 19 February 1903. 28 SMH, 19 February 1903. 29 SMH, 12 February 1903; 23 February 1903; Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 12, p. 536. 30 SMH, 26 February 1903. 31 SMH, 2 March 1903; 10 March 1903. 32 SMH, 12 March 1903. 33 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 8, pp. 150–2. 34 SMH, 16 March; 19 March 1903. 35 SMH, 23 March 1903; 27 March 1903. 36 NSW Drought Relief Lord Mayor’s Fund, Reports, Financial Statements [State Library of New South Wales], passim. 37 Reports, ibid. 38 Goulburn Herald, 2 March 1903; 11 March 1903. 39 Goulburn Herald, 18 March 1903. 40 Goulburn Evening Penny Post, 6 January 1903. 41 Goulburn Herald, 18 March 1903.

Chapter 4 1 Brendon Kelson and John McQuilton, Kelly Country: A Photographic Journey, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2001, pp. 48–50. 2 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 1, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1968, p. 311.

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3 Docker papers, SLV, Ms 10437, 1363/1, letter 30 August 1903 to the Minister for Lands. 4 Docker papers, 1363/1, letter 8 September 1883. 5 Docker papers, 1363/1, 1 November 1883; 25 November 1883. 6 ibid, 9 February 1884; 1 March 1884; 12 October 1884; rainfall records at 1374/3. 7 ibid, 23 October 1884; reply 13 December 1884. 8 ibid, 3 August 1888. 9 Docker papers, 1366/2, letters 25 June 1890 and 12 July 1890 (nephew); 7 September 1890. 10 Docker papers, 1374/3, 25 April 1907. 11 Docker papers, 1346/11, nd [1907]. 12 Docker papers, 1371/1, 1 January 1900; 8 January 1900; 5 February 1900; 25 March 1900; 16 April 1900. 13 ibid, 22 April 1900; 1 May 1900; 18 June 1900. 14 ibid, 6 and 18 May 1900. 15 ibid, 24 June 1900. 16 ibid, 29 August 1900. 17 ibid, 7 October 1900; 12 December 1900. 18 ibid, 31 December 1900; 16 January 1901. 19 ibid, 28 January 1901; 1 February 1901; 30 March 1901; 26 March 1901; 10 April 1901. 20 ibid, 14 April 1901. 21 ibid, 20 April 1901. 22 Docker papers, 1371/4, 8 July 1901; 23 August 1901; 9 December 1901; 2 December 1901. 23 ibid, 15 January 1902. 24 ibid. 25 Docker papers, 1371/1, 22 January 1900; 1371/4, 10 March 1902. 26 ibid, 17 August 1902; 1346/11, letter 8 September 1902. 27 Docker papers, 1371/1, 17 March 1902; 4 April 1902; 4 May 1902; 6 June 1902; 20 October 1902; 11 November 1902; 30 November 1902. 28 Docker papers, 1372/3, letter 4 January 1903; 11 January 1903; 25 January 1903; 25 March 1903; 7 June 1903; 20 September 1903. 29 ibid, 27 December 1903. 30 Docker papers, 1346/11, letter 5 February 1904; 11 April 1904. 31 Docker papers, 1374/2, 26 January 1907. 32 ibid, 27 March 1907. 33 ibid, 27 March 1907; outwards correspondence, 1350, 12 April 1907. 34 Docker papers, 1374/3, letter 25 April 1907. 35 Docker papers, outwards correspondence, 1350, letter 8 October 1907.

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Chapter 5 1 Bill Gammage, The Broken Years, Penguin, Melbourne, 1975, p. 32. 2 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 3, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, pp. 343–4; Colin Campbell Reminiscences, in Buangor Park Records, SLV, Ms 12611. 3 All quotations from Margaret McCann are from her diary; hereafter date references only. Diary of Margaret McCann, 1894–1910, Stradbroke Station, Gippsland, SLV, Ms 9632. 4 McCann, 17, 18 February 1896; 14 November 1896; 5 December 1896. 5 McCann, January, 1897; 19 April 1897; 25 July 1897; 18 July 1897; 27 August 1897; 15 November 1897; 4 December 1897; 12 and 25 January 1898; 1 November 1898. 6 McCann, 25 November 1900; 22 March 1901; 30 November 1901. 7 McCann, 10 February 1902; 26 March 1902; 17 October 1902. 8 McCann, 14 July 1903; 12 August 1903; 8 April 1904; 30 September 1904; 21 September 1906; 10 March 1910; 19 March 1910. 9 Lesley Scholes, A History of the Shire of Swan Hill: Public Land, Private Profit and Settlement, Shire of Swan Hill, Swan Hill 1989, pp. 73; W.A.J. Pearse, Diary 1893–1947, SLV, Ms 12961, 4 November 1914; 25 September 1947. 10 Pearse, entries for 1901, 1902; the horses: 24 and 27 January 1903; 8, 15 and 20 February 1903. 11 Pearse, 4 and 9 November 1914; 1 May 1915; end 1915; 15 November 1916 (shares); 26 May 1917; 28 November 1917. 12 Pearse, 24 January 1918 ‘men finished house’; Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 11, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, pp. 485–6 (Ruth); Pearse, March 1923; 28 August 1938; Swan Hill Guardian, 7 November 1947; Spectator, 12 November 1947. 13 WCC Webb Papers, SLV, Ms 8544; letterbook. 14 Webb, letters, 4 August 1885; 18 August 1885. 15 Webb, letters, 19 September 1885; 4 August 1886; 23 August 1886; 23 October 1886; to another mate he uses the word ‘cunt’ in a joke; in all the soldiers’ letters I have read I do not recall such earthiness elsewhere. 16 Webb, letters, 1 March 1887; early March 1887; 22 April 1887; 1 May 1887; 8 August 1887. 17 Webb, letters, 16 June 1889; 7 June 1890; 21 September 1890; 12 December 1890; Diary, 3 January 1891 and 7 February 1891. 18 Webb, Diary, 10 June 1891; 14 July 1891; 15 July 1891; 9 January 1893 (Beechal); 20 April 1893; 27 April 1893; 1 May 1893; 7 June 1893; 17 June 1893 (10 per cent); 2 November 1893 (shearing); letterbook 2, letter to a possible employer, 26 January 1900. 19 Webb, letterbook 2, 4 February 1900; 8 August 1900 (caretakers). 20 Webb, Diary, 20 June 1902 and letter 20 June 1902; Diary, 3 March 1903; letter 22 March 1903; 21 October 1903.

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21 Webb, letter, 13 June 1906; letter 23 July 1911; letter 12 May 1912; letter 13 October 1930; diary note. 22 Whitehead family papers, SLV, Ms 10210, letters 28 March 1897; 27 February 1900; 17 January 1900; telegram 3 March 1900. 23 Whitehead papers, letter 7 June 1900; letter 2 August 1902; 15 October 1902; 9 November 1902; letter 2 August 1902. 24 Whitehead papers, letter 28 October 1913; 23 March 1913; letter from Father E. Frost, SJ, 24 March 1926; Greg Dening and Doug Kennedy, Xavier Portraits, Old Xaverians Association, Melbourne 1993, p. 110; letter from (?) Lane, Melbourne Church of England Grammar School, 9 November 1926. 25 Whitehead papers, letter from J. Carmody, 6 March 1926. 26 Whitehead papers, letter from Mick Martin, 30 May 1944. 27 Brisbane Courier, 26 January 1901; 25 October 1902. 28 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, pp. 157–8. 29 MacGregor papers, SLV, Ms 12914, John to his mother, 30 October 1899. 30 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, p. 158; Farquhar McDonald to John MacGregor, 23 April 1899. 31 John MacGregor to Farquhar MacDonald, 26 December 1899. 32 John MacGregor to Duncan MacGregor, 30 November 1899; 1 November 1901. 33 Mrs MacGregor to Jack, 3 September 1896; 27 January 1897; 10 June 1897; 1 August 1900; 27 September 1900; 11 October 1900. 34 Fran MacGregor to Jack, 10 February 1898. 35 Fran MacGregor to Jack, 4 July 1900. 36 Donald Times, 21 December 1943. 37 The Victorian Readers Fifth Book, H.J. Green, Government Printer, Melbourne 1930, pp. 44–8, 197; Donald Times, 4 January 1944. 38 Donald Times, 4 January 1944. 39 L.B. Kirk, Country for Heroes: Rich Avon Soldiers’ Settlement and Rich Avon Cricket Club, History and Natural History Group of the MLA Society, Donald, 1984, p. 4, pp. 6–10; Donald Times, 2 April 1920.

Chapter 6 1 Horsham Times, 3 March 1944. 2 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 15, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 191–3. 3 SN, 29 October 1914. 4 Michael McKernan, All In! Australia and the Second World War, Nelson, Melbourne, 1983, p. 20.

278

Notes 5 Defence Service Records, National Archives of Australia, B2455, item number 722; N.G. McNicol, The 37th: History of the Thirty-Seventh Battalion AIF, Modern Printing, Melbourne, 1936, p. 9. 6 McNicol, The 37th pp. 3–9; Defence Service Records, National Archives of Australia, B2455, item number 722. 7 Victorian Parliamentary Hansard, 29 November 1944, pp. 2503–4. 8 Ararat Advertiser (AA), 12 September 1914. 9 AA, 4 July 1914 and 1 August 1914. 10 AA, 15 October 1914 and 6 October 1914. 11 AA, 15 October 1914. 12 AA, 17 September 1914; Horsham Times, 24 October 1944. 13 AA, 17 September 1914. 14 Phil Taylor, Karkarooc: A Mallee Shire History 1896–1995, Yarriambiack Shire Council, Warracknabeal, 1996, p. 117; SN, 2 November 1914. 15 Michael McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War, Nelson, Melbourne, 1980, pp. 197–8. 16 Bill Edgar, Warrior of Kokoda, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999, p. 280. 17 Narandera Argus, 19 February 1943. 18 Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, Penguin, Melbourne 1990, p. 13; Swan Hill Guardian (SHG), 13 May 1915. 19 SHG, 13 May 1915. 20 AA, 23 March 1915. 21 SN, 26 October 1914; AA, 25 March 1915; SN, 8 October 1914. 22 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 9, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1983, pp. 155–6; Argus, 28 September 1914. 23 SHG, 11 June 1914; 13 July 1914; 31 August 1914; 5 October 1914; 4 January 1915. 24 SHG, 14 December 1914. 25 SHG, 25 February 1925; 29 March 1915. 26 Clem Lloyd, ‘Andrew Fisher’ in Michelle Grattan (ed.), Australian Prime Ministers, New Holland, Sydney, 2000, p. 83; ‘this little drought’ is mentioned ironically in many rural newspapers in 1915; see SHG, 8 April 1915. 27 Michael McKernan, Padre: Australian Chaplains in Gallipoli and France, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986, p. 82. 28 Narandera Argus, 2 April 1943; 19 March 1943. 29 Narandera Argus, 17 February 1943; 2 October 1945; 9 October 1945; 30 November 1945. 30 John Smith Papers, State Library of Victoria, Ms 10761, letter to John Currie, Scotland, 15 April 1895; to A.J. Black, 14 March 1882 and 27 March 1882. 31 Smith papers, to his cousin, 8 February 1896; to his brother, 8 February 1896 and 27 October 1909. 32 Smith papers, to Eoin, 4 April 1909; to his brother, 4 January 1896; to Stuart Black, 15 July 1909.

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33 Michael McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War, Nelson, Melbourne, 1980, p. 58; Australian War Memorial, Roll of Honour (awm.gov.au/database/roh.asp). 34 Quoted in Peter Hicks and Rick Martin, One Wondrous Kind, Hopetoun Arts and Crafts Group, Hopetoun, 1988, p. 63. 35 Horsham Times, 31 July 1943; 11 June 1943; 2 July 1943. 36 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 12, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 576–7; Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 9, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1983, p. 515. 37 Finley Mail, 5 February 1944. 38 Finley Mail, 19 April 1944. 39 Finley Mail, 12 January 1944; 8 March 1944; 16 August 1944. 40 Finley Mail, 15 November 1944; Daily Telegraph, 4 November 1944. 41 Finley Mail, 6 September 1944, 20 December 1944, 13 September 1944, 13 December 1944; Narandera Argus, 4 February 1944; Horsham Times, 6 February 1945, 8 May 1945, 5 October 1945. 42 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 9, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1983, p. 515. 43 Age, 13 March 1945. 44 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 15, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 318–19; Hansard of the Victorian Legislative Assembly, 21 September 1944, pp. 1096–7; Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 11, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 76–7; Hansard of the Victorian Legislative Assembly, 29 August 1944, pp. 626–8. 45 Horsham Times, 28 November 1944; 29 September 1944; Finley Mail, 20 June 1945. 46 Senate, Hansard, 21 February 1945. 47 Horsham Times, 2 January 1945 (reporting Wagga Wagga); House of Representatives, Hansard, 27 April 1945; Finley Mail, 4 July 1945. 48 Finley Mail, 27 June 1945 (quoting the Melbourne Herald). 49 Finley Mail, 8 August 1945; 24 October 1945.

Chapter 7 1 Geoffrey Smith, Sidney Nolan: Desert and Drought, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, p. 95. 2 Smith, Sidney Nolan, pp. 95, 96. 3 Courier-Mail, 23 August 1952; 3 September 1952. 4 Interview with Bert Castellari, Canberra, 27 April 2004; SMH, 2 July 1965 (conscripts); 9 June 1965 (1RAR); 28 June 1965 (soldiers’ deaths). 5 SMH, 11 June 1965. 6 SMH, 12 June 1965. 7 SMH, 12 June 1965.

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Notes 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

SMH, 14 June 1965. SMH, 18 June 1965; 19 June 1965. SMH, 22 June 1965. SMH, 1 June 1965; 24 June 1965; 14 July 1965 (wheat); Sun Herald, 5 September 1965 (meat); SMH, 7 June 1965 (milk); 4 September 1965 (bureau). Courier-Mail, 15 June 1965; 10 June 1965 (Nicklin); 8 June 1965 (relief); 16 June 1965 (new ways). SMH, 17 June 1965; Argus, 17 February 1951. SMH, 18 June 1965; 16 August 1965; 1 September 1965; Sun Herald, 11 July 1965. Ross McMullin, The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party 1891–1991, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991, pp. 297–8; Heather Radi et al, Biographical Register of the New South Wales Parliament 1901–1970, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1979, pp. 9–10. City of Sydney Archives, Lord Mayor’s Drought Relief Fund, File 3805/65; letter from the Premier and Treasurer to the Lord Mayor, 24 June 1965 [note: as all the references to the Lord Mayor’s Fund are found in this file henceforth I give only date of correspondence]; SMH, 9 June 1965 (Freedom from Hunger). Fund, Press release 25 June 1965; Souths 28 June 1965 and 13 August 1965; 16 August 1965; 5 August 1965 (Methodists); 29 June 1965 (Oatley); 26 August 1965 (Northmead); 10 August 1965 (Castle Hill). Fund, 8 July 1965 (Punch). Fund, 26 August 1965 (Gloucester); 19 August 1965 and 27 September 1965 (Armidale). Fund, 1 April 1966 (Brookfield). Fund, 4 August 1965. Fund, 8 October 1965; 20 July 1965. Fund, Stroud Drought Relief Committee forms undated; 22 August 1965. SMH, 25 June 1965.

Chapter 8 1 Interview with John Cain, 16 August 2004. 2 Press release, Peter Nixon, 18 August 1982, ABC Rural Department, Victoria, in cuttings, State Library of Victoria, Ms 12453, Box 3321. 3 National Australia Bank, Monthly Summary, March 1983, pp. 17–18. 4 Bureau of Meteorology Press Release, 30 September 1982, in cuttings, ABC Rural, State Library of Victoria, Ms 12543, Box 3321; Bulletin, 17 November 1981.

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5 Australasian Farming, October-November 1982; Minister for Primary Industry Press Release, 25 November 1982, in cuttings, ABC Rural, State Library of Victoria, Ms 12453, Box 3321. 6 Australasian Farming, October-November 1982. 7 W.I. Hamer, A review of the 1982–83 drought, Department of Agriculture, Victoria, March 1985, p. 7. 8 Australian, 1 March 1983; Hamer, A review of the 1982–83 drought, p. 7. 9 Australian, 1 March 1983. 10 Local Government Bulletin, March 1983; Hamer, A review of the 1982–83 drought, p. 21. 11 Local Government Bulletin, March 1983. 12 Hamer, A review of the 1982–83 drought, p. 57. 13 Australian Financial Review, 14 September 1982. 14 Australian Financial Review, 15 September 1982. 15 Hamer, A review of the 1982–83 drought, pp. 18–22. 16 Hamer, A review of the 1982–83 drought, p. 35. 17 Australian Financial Review, 15 September 1982. 18 Australian, 4–5 December 1982. 19 Press release, Minister for Primary Industry, 31 August 1982, in cuttings collection, ‘ABC Rural’, SLV, Ms 12453, Box 3321. 20 Press release, Minister for Primary Industry, 16 September 1982, in cuttings collection, ‘ABC Rural’, SLV, Ms 12453, Box 3321. 21 Australian, 4–5 December 1982; Hamer, A review of the 1982–83 drought, p. 31. 22 K. Shaw and G. Bastin, ‘Drought freight subsidies in the Northern Territory and their implications for the preservation of rangelands’, in Australian Rangeland Society 3rd Biennial Conference, September 1981, p. 152. 23 R.G. Silcock, ‘Are drought relief schemes desirable?’, in Australian Rangeland Society 3rd Biennial Conference, p. 163. 24 Hamer, A review of the 1982–83 drought, p. 49. 25 Hamer, A review of the 1982–83 drought, p. 56. 26 Newsweek, 4 April 1983.

Postscript 1. See Farmhand Home Page at www.farmhand.org.au.

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Aboriginal forecasters 8 Aboriginal reconciliation 19, 102 Aboriginal reports on drought 9 Adamson, John 149 Adelong 150, 154 Age 245 Agistment of stock 175–6, 251 Ainsworth-Smyth, J. 232 Albert, Athol (Andy) 217 Albury 81, 201 Anderson, Joseph 90 Angledool 103 Anglicans 61, 223 Ararat 174–7, 183 Ardlethan district 253 Argus 63, 67, 68, 80, 81–5, 88 Armidale 220–1 Ashmead-Bartlett, Ellis 182 Askin, Robin 224–5 Australasian Farming 242–3

Australia agricultural strategies 27–8, 30, 52, 60, 141, 175–6, 214–15, 238, 246 dryness of 5, 16–18, 33, 216, 269 organisational reform 239–40 Australian 247 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 5 Australian Dictionary of Biography 140 Australian Financial Review 247, 252, 254–5 Australian War Memorial, Canberra 1, 7, 43, 140 Australian Workers Union 119 Avoca (Victoria) 34–5, 39, 43, 51, 238 Avon Downs station 205–6 Badgery’s Creek 215–16 Ballarat 50, 61, 80, 146, 148, 166, 190, 262

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Ballochile 190 Balranald 104 Bamawn 176 Bangor district (Ulster) 12 Baptist Church (Collins Street) 149 Barry, James 87–8 Barton, Edmund (PM) 83 Barwon, seat of 94 Bathurst 101, 158 Beatles 213 Bednall, Colin 205, 208 Beechal 153 Beechworth 110 Beer shortages 201 Bega 256 Bendigo 12–13, 85, 87, 262 Berrigan 104 Bishops of Melbourne (Anglican) 61–2 activities relating to drought 49, 51, 61–6, 68–9, 72, 77–8 Black, Niel 190 Black Rock 197 Blamey, General 180 Blayney 101 Boer War 92 Bogan Gate 99 Boggabri 104 Bollon district 201 Bontherambo 109, 110–11 Border Town 179 Bourke 8–9, 93, 219 Bowen Downs 132–3 Brewarrina 219 Broadmeadows 149, 191 Brighton 91 British and Foreign Bible Society 90 Broken Hill 10, 104

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Brookfield 229 Brunton, Company Sergeant Major Arthur 139–40 Bungendore 100, 103, 105 Bureau of Meteorology 15, 193, 241 Burke and Wills 111–12, 263–4 statue 263, 264 Burke, Cyril ‘Cubby’ 213–14 Burren Junction 214 Bushfires 22–3, 144, 242, 269 Ash Wednesday 23 Black Friday 23 Black Thursday 141 Canberra 16, 22–3, 100, 266–7 Butherwash Station 156–9 Cain, John (first) 18–19, 234, 236–7, 261, 264 Cain, John (second) 234–6, 239–40, 261–5 Cain, Patrick 236 Camp Pell (Royal Park) 201 Campaspe River 54 Campbell, Colin 140–1 Canberra 266–7 fires 16, 22–3, 100, 166–7 Caniambo 170 Capell, Tom 249–50 Carinda 214 Carmody, Jack 158 Carruthers, James 89–90 Carter, Heather 193 Castellari, Bert 208–14, 216–22, 227, 232, 238 Castlereagh River 213 Casterton 176 Catholics 66, 68, 101, 223 Church of England adherents 61, 109

Index Churnsides 113 City–bush divide 18–19, 58, 91–2, 105–8 Clarke, Sir George Sydneham 86–8 Clarkes 111–13, 120 Coburg 160 Cochrane, Campbell 256 Cohuna 54–5, 198 Coleraine 113, 190 Cole’s Book Arcade 149 Collarenebri 214 Compulsory education 66, 70 Condobolin 103 Conscription 179–80, 211 Conway, Jill Ker 9–10, 15 The Road from Coorain 9–11, 15 Cooma 252–3 Coonamble 213 Cootamundra 100 Country Party 215, 239 Courier-Mail 205–6 Cowra 256 Crick, Paddy 100–2, 106 Crohamhurst 193, 197 Crombie, Mr 137 Croppa Creek 253 Crowley, Frank 247 Crowley, Peter 253 Cucumboo Tank 147 Curlewis, Peter 253 Currabubula 232 Curtin, John (PM) 181 Cutler, Charles 215 dairy farming 170–2, 211, 256 Darlington Point 195 Davidson, Ken 245 Dawson River 151

Deane, Sir William 19 deaths 7, 9, 12, 15, 56, 72, 106–7, 177–8 Denham, Doug 208 depression 3, 4, 11, 15, 107, 250 diphtheria 72, 90 Docker collection 112–13, 118, 121, 139 Docker, Frederick George 111–13, 117, 123, 126, 130–6 Docker, Joseph 109–11 Donald 166, 167 Donald Times 164–7, 244 drought 3–5, 10–13, 208, 243, 269 banker’s view of 240–1 consciousness 247–8 classifications 5, 16 definition 15–16 duration 141, 195 iconic images 205–8, 216 records 5, 7, 26, 32, 174, 194, 238, 241, 250 strategies 6, 10–11, 173–4, 212, 215, 223, 236–9 subsidies see government subsidies war and 177–80, 186–8, 192, 202–3 drought periods 5, 16 1870s–82 drought 30–76 1890s drought 24, 43, 84 Federation Drought 20–1, 43, 80, 89–138, 154, 159, 173, 185–6, 215 1914–15 drought 9, 137, 170, 173–80, 182–7 1943–45 drought 173–4, 188, 194–8, 200–2 1965 drought 209–32

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1982–83 drought 13, 17, 19, 21, 240–65 1998–2005 (?) drought 267 drought relief 241, 257–9, 268 appeals see fundraising desirability of 260 Drysdale, Russell 205 Dubbo 94, 96, 103, 110, 214, 216 Duke and Duchess of York 79 Duke of Gloucester (governorgeneral) 200 Duke of Orleans 82 Dungog 229 Dunstan, Premier Albert 172 Duracks 113 Durham Downs 159–64 Durham Ox 51, 55, 63–4, 77 dust storms 8, 11, 19–22, 56–7, 185, 196, 200, 248, 249, 269 Ebery, S.H. 197–8 Echuca 176 economics, impact of 244–6, 254–6 Ellerslie Station 150–2 Elliott, Henry 112, 117–20 Elliott, Pompey 2 Emery, Kohn 256–7 Erskineville 101, 106 Euroombah Station 150, 153 Evans, William 71 faith in God 65 faith in progress 48 Faithful, George 110 Falconer, Dixon 209 farm management issues 260–2 farming, effects of 8–9, 21, 249 Federation celebrations 79, 89

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Federation Drought 20–1, 43, 80, 89–108, 145, 154, 159, 173, 185–6, 215, 223, 240, 244 naming of 89 Field, Albert 17, 26–8, 32–43, 47, 50, 51, 61, 69, 86, 238, 269 Finley 195–7, 200–1 First Fleet 17 First World War 1–3, 14, 43, 62, 139–40, 163, 166, 168, 171–3, 177–82, 181, 191, 204 Gallipoli see Gallipoli Hindenburg Line 166 reasons for enlisting 171, 178–80, 191 Western Front see Western Front Fisher, Andrew (PM) 186–7 Fowler, Max 254 Fraser, Malcolm (PM) 239, 242 Frith, John Oliver 121–39, 156 fundraising 85–88, 90, 97–101, 225 Argus appeal 84, 88 ‘Farmhand Drought Appeal’ 268 Indian Famine 82, 86, 97 Madame Melba, by 80–4 Melbourne Lord Mayor’s fund 84, 86, 88, 97–8 Sydney appeals 97, 99–105, 225–32 Gallipoli 1, 14, 43, 62, 171, 177, 180, 182, 187 Anzac Cove 1 Quinn’s Post 187 Gammage, Bill 139–40 Gaunt, George 120 Geddes, Professor H.J. 215–16 Geddes, Robert 164–8 Geelong 35, 185, 262

Index Germanton 154 Gilgandra 230 Gillott, Sir Samuel 84 Gilroy, Cardinal 223 Gippsland 7, 87, 141–6, 158, 165, 172, 199, 253, 257, 261–2, 269 Glenelg River 176 Gloucester 228 gold rushes 25, 27, 29, 132 Goldsborough Mort 96 Goukrodger, Mr 107 Goulburn (NSW) 20, 105–8, 110 Goulburn Valley (Victoria) 44–50, 172, 237 Katandra 49, 125 Kialla 45 Knull’s Range 50 Numurkah 46, 57–8, 61 Wunghnu 46 government subsidies 241, 257–9, 268 relevance of 259 Grant, Mrs Rode 156, 157 Gulgong 230 Gurley 214 Gurner, Tony 219 Hagelthorn, Frederick 184 Hamilton 183 Hawke, Bob (PM) 237 Hay Shire 250–1 Hayden, Bill 235 Hewitt, Daniel 177 Highlands 113 Hillston 10 Historical Dictionary 247 Hobart 223 Holbrook 154, 155, 156

Holt, Harold 224 Homebush 209, 222 Hopetoun 177, 192 horses, replacement by tractors, 199–200 Horsham 177, 192–3, 197 Hughenden 107, 111, 118–20 see also Redcliffe Station Hughes, Billy (PM) 179 Hughes, Thomas 91, 93, 94, 105 Humby, A.G. 90–1, 93 Hunt, Ralph 243 Hunter, J. 201 Hyde, Mr and Mrs Jack 218–19 Indian Famine fundraising 82, 86, 97 Inglis, Ken 247 Irrigation 50–1, 215 Jackel, C.W. 192–3 Jenkins, Joseph 69–76, 86, 207, 255, 265, 269 Jenson, Harry 225–7 Jerala 256 Jerilderie 92, 195 Johnston, Gordon 100 Jones, Inigo 193–7, 198 Katandra station 107 Kelly Gang 202 Kerang 31, 51–7, 61–3, 65, 75–7 Kojonup 180 Kokoda Track 180, 181, 248 Koolomurt 113–16 Koo-wee-rup 160 Kow Swamp 54 Kulwin 4

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Lake Leaghur 53 land clearing 8, 20, 36, 38, 201, 249 land selection 25, 27–8 criticism of system 30, 48, 51, 59–60 purpose of 27–8 land selectors 25–60, 75, 237 employers, as 70, 74 Landsborough Downs 132 Lawson, Henry 22, 23, 25, 165 Lee, Don 241 Little Billabong 155 Loddon 52 long-range weather forecasters 193–8, 241 Lucindale 176 Luckman, John 112 McCann, Margaret 142–6, 148, 261–2, 269 McCarthy, Bill 220–1, 232 McDonald, Farquhar 160–2 McDonald, John (Jack) 169–72, 174, 178, 203 McDowell, Lindsay 218 MacGregor collection 160 MacGregor, Donald 160 MacGregor, Duncan 159–60, 164 MacGregor, Fran 160, 163 MacGregor John 160–2 McKenzie, Chaplain Bill 187–8 Maiden, George 96 Maldon 71–3 Mallee 2–5, 8, 10, 19, 50–7, 80, 84–8, 97–8, 158, 164, 175, 184–6, 192, 195, 198–9, 203, 237, 241, 248–9, 252 Boort 53

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Kerang 31, 51–7, 61–3, 65, 75–7 Kulwin 4 Nyah 80, 85, 149 proposed good farming methods for 250 Mallon, Pat 202 Mansfield 201 Mansfield, Bob 268–9 Maroona district 174 Marra Downs 219 Marrickville Congregational Church 102 Marsden, Samuel 109 Martin, Mick 158 Martin, Norman 198 Martin, Sergeant 139 Maryborough 34, 51 Mason, Alan 201–2 Maxwell, James 12–13 Melba, Dame Nellie 21, 79–84, 92, 183, 223, 224, 240, 255, 265 Melba Downs 160 Melbourne 27, 33, 34, 57–9, 61–2, 79, 81, 149, 185, 193, 248 Chamber of Commerce 82 Lord Mayor’s fund 84, 86, 88, 97–8 ‘Marvellous’ 84 National Gallery of Victoria exhibition 207 Town Hall meetings 81, 85 wettest day, 269 Menangle 215 Menzies, Sir Robert (PM) 211 Merrool 90–1, 93 Methodist Conference 149 Methodists 33, 89, 147–9 Michael, David 246 Mildura 198

Index Military Medals 166, 203 Mimosa (property), 160 Mitchell, David 81 Mitchell Library, Sydney 7 Mitchell, Sir Thomas 110 Monaro 252–3 Monash, General John 171 Moorhouse, James 51, 62–6, 68–9, 102, 215, 223 Mooroopna 177 Moree 214, 243, 253–4 Morey, Charles 177–8 Mossgiel 104 Mt Noorat 190 Mudgee 94, 230 Mullee, James 75 Murray River 9, 54 , 85, 147, 173, 186, 240 Murrumbateman 100 Murrumbidgee 9, 158 Murwillumbah 209 Myrtleford 201 Naracoorte 176 Narrabri 214, 217 Narrandera 90–1, 95, 98–9, 103, 104, 188 Narromine 103, 251 Nathalia 49, 58, 61, 87, 200 National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) 9, 19, 243–4, 246, 250 Nicklin, Frank 222 Nimmitabel 253 Nixon, Peter 239, 257 Noble, Albert 217–18 Nolan, Sidney 24, 205–8 Northern Territory drought 204–8

Nyah 85 West 80, 149 O’Farrell, Patrick 12 Old, Frank 198–9 Orange 224, 251 overstocking 221 Palmer, Harry 208, 110 Paradise Beach 142 Parer, Damien 248 Parfrey family 188–9 Parkes 249 Pastoralists’ Union 119 Pearce, William 80, 85, 146–50, 249 Philippe, Duke of Orleans 82 Phillip, Arthur 17 Pilliga 216–18 Pomonal 183 Port Fairy 175 Portland 185 Potts, Brigadier Arnold 180–1 Potts, Doreen (Dawn) 180–1, 199 Presbyterians 166, 223 Pringle, John 212 Pulvius 68 Punch, Leon 227–8 Purcell, Alan 208 Pymble 91 Pyramid Hill 77 Railways 183–4 Rain, praying for 63–9, 77–8, 102, 192, 223, 257, 268 Raws, Alex 2 red marauder 15, 21–3, 269 Redcliffe Station 111–12, 116–39 Reedy Lake 52

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Reigth, William 170 religious attitudes to drought 61–9, 192–3 Renshaw, Jack 224 Rich Avon 167 Richards, B.M. 136 Richmond 110 Riverina 93, 195, 201–2 Riverstone Meat Company 136 Roma 150 Romsey 160 Roosevelt, President 181 Roseby, Rev. Dr 102 Russells 113 Ruth, Rev. T.E. 149 scarlet fever 90 Scoullar, Keith 202 Second World War 1, 157, 165–6, 169, 180, 188–9, 193, 198–202 enlisting 170–1, 180 shearers’ union 119 Shepparton 43–50, 57–8, 61, 68, 170, 171–2, 174, 177 Slattery, Dean 66–8 smallpox 68 Smith, Eoin Lindsay 190–1 Smith, John 189–91 Smith, Robert 111–12 soil conservation 250 soil erosion 248–50 soldier settlers 2–5, 7, 9–10, 165–8 Royal Commission (Victoria) 167 Speedie, Tom 248–9 squatters 27, 59, 60, 141, 237 squatting life 141 St Arnaud 51, 172 Stanmore 90

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State Library of Victoria 26, 71, 112, 270 station managers 113–18, 120–139, 150, 156, 191, 237 stock losses, acceptance of 21, 52, 129, 169, 201, 212, 217 change in attitude 255 Stradbroke (Gippsland) 142–6, 148 Strickland, Thomas 87–8 Stroud Shire 230–1 Strutt, Charles Edward 9 Sutherland, Joan 223–5 swaggies 69, 78, 207, 110 ‘on the wallaby’ 80 Swan Hill 146, 148, 173, 182, 184–6, 248–9, 252 Sydney 7, 10, 27, 90, 95, 102 fundraising see fundraising Lord Mayor 91, 93, 94, 105, 225–7 Lord Mayor’s Fund 97, 99, 103–07 Sydney Morning Herald 90–2, 95, 97–8, 205, 208–22, 224, 232 Sydney Showgrounds 170 Sylvanus 59–60 Taber, Mrs G.E. 215–16 Tamworth 220, 232 Tatyoon 176–7 Temora 91 Tenterfield Shire 229–30 Tocumwal 188 Tooleybuc 186 Tooma Station 153–4 Townsville 128 Trangie 96, 97 tree clearing 8, 20, 36, 38, 201, 249 Trundle 249

Index Truth (Sydney) 94, 101 Turner, John 219–20 Upper Bowman 231 Urana 99, 156–9, 195 Vickers-Willis, Mr 195–6 Victorian Farmers & Graziers Association 239 Vietnam War 211, 229, 232 Wagga Wagga 200–1 ‘Waggas’ 4 Walgett 213, 217, 243 Wangaratta 109, 112 Warragamba Dam 267 water shortage (current) 268–9 water storage 72, 175, 221, 267 water trains 41, 50, 58–9 Watson, Don 143 Wave Hill 205 weather forecasts 174–5, 193–8, 202, 238, 241 weather maps 174, 193, 202 Weaver and Perry 96 Webb, William 150–5 Wellington 101 Westerdale, Harry 202 Western Front 1–2, 9–10, 14, 139–40, 163, 166, 172, 179, 198, 202 Bullecourt 14

Fromelles, northern France 1, 2, 139–40 Messines 166 Mont St Quentin 140, 166 Passchendaele 10, 166, 198 Pozieres 2, 140 the Somme 166, 179 Ypes 166 Whitehead, Ernest 156–9, 195 Whites 113 Whitton 99 Williams, Neville 213 Williamson, J.C. 224 Willis, Greg 218 Willis, Nicolas 94–5, 101 Wilson, Geoff 245 Wimmera 164–5, 174, 184, 192, 199, 241, 249 Winchcombe, Carson and Co Ltd 98 Winchcombe, Frederick 98 Windsor 109 Woomelang 177 Woomargama hotel 154 World War I see First World War World War II see Second World War Wragge, Clement 193 Yanco 99 Yanko 160 Yarraby 182 Yass 13, 105, 110

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