Selling the Farm - by Nicole Gill
ISLAND | ISSUE 147
They’re selling our family farm. And I don’t think that I can stop it.
I find out second-hand, from my brother. My mind skips over emotions like a stone across water – denial, anger, straight over bargaining, and into depression. How can this be?
The Van Diemonian squattocracy ain’t what it used to be. Gone are the days of our family lording it over swathes of East Coast granite, swimming cattle across Great Oyster Bay to graze Schouten Island’s salt-seared shores, and trading in thylacine scalps at one pound apiece. Bought when I was two and named for my mother’s natal croft, this small farm is a relatively new acquisition, and is the land on which I was raised.
Sorell was once known as the granary of Australia, but by the time my family moved there, its grain-growing days were long past. Its susurrations of wheat, triticale and rye subdued by cattle and sheep, and later, by asphalt and concrete, it had become a place where people could buy a little land within striking distance of Hobart, Tasmania’s capital city.
Our family ran a small mob of merinos over a hundred hilly acres on the outskirts of town. My parents also ran a variety of small businesses, which must have provided them with most of their income. Our sheep produced excellent, fine-crimped fleeces, but in the early ’80s, the wool market was still depressed. To my father’s mind, the sheep’s main job was to act as volunteer fireys – to gnaw at the bush until it was sufficiently subdued. He’d fought the ’67 fires in Sorell as a teenager with little more than wet potato sacks, and had no desire to repeat the experience.
The old farmhouse had somehow escaped the flames that had engulfed the rest of the hill. When we moved into that house, I was a toddler; my middle brother, a baby; the youngest, not yet born. I doubt my father was tardy in knocking up the wooden fence that encircled the yard, but it didn’t keep me out of the bush for long.
While my parents worked long hours at their various jobs, I spent most of my spare time outside exploring. The landscape was hardly the stuff of wilderness calendars. With its vast, vicious boxthorn complexes, mangy pastures and piles of rusting rubbish, parts of it were downright ugly. But I didn’t see that as a child. The muddy waterholes harboured little red water beetles, and tadpoles, which I’d capture in jars and haul home to my fish tank, to grow into tiny frogs for later release. Some of the steeper hillsides provided refuge for grassy white gum forests, their understoreys dotted with the blue stars of wahlenbergias and pink bells of blushing bindweed. I had a designated book-reading tree, a sprawling gum with easy-up limbs, well suited to the reading of Willard Price books, propped in an ant-scented crook between bole and bough.
Once, in the top gully paddock, I found a smooth-sided, scallop-edged stone tool, chipped from foreign rock, left there who knows how many years prior by a people who’d lived in this landscape for more than two thousand generations. I was told not to mention where I’d found it. I turned the tool over and over, considering it; a question in my hands.
Occasionally, the outdoors came in to us. When I was three, I sat, feet up, on my low child’s chair, and watched a young tiger snake wind her way into our kitchen, and across the paisley swirls of the lounge room carpet. I never thought to mention her visit to my parents. It seemed right that a small snake might consider our house part of her territory, as I considered her bushland to be part of mine.
“It seemed right that a small snake might consider our house part of her territory, as I considered her bushland to be part of mine.”
But they’re selling the family farm. Apparently, they can’t afford not to.
In the early ’80s, much of eastern Australia was suffering through a major drought. No one talked about climate change then. Regardless of duration or frequency, droughts and fires were considered part of the deal.
Our farm sat on black cracking clays, and the drought broke them open like the shell of an egg. Even a child could see the land was thirsty. I spent hours, unobserved, cross-legged on the ground next to the rain gauge, pouring water from the garden hose down the cracks.
“Our farm sat on black cracking clays, and the drought broke them open like the shell of an egg. Even a child could see the land was thirsty. I spent hours, unobserved, cross-legged on the ground next to the rain gauge, pouring water from the garden hose down the cracks.”
More than two decades later, environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht published a paper in the Australasian Psychiatry journal, introducing the concept of solastalgia. Albrecht coined this term to describe ‘the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment’. It is a queasy, mixed emotion where the comfort of the known is disfigured by the awareness that something is horribly wrong. The word itself is a portmanteau – solace spliced with algia (pain) – the homesickness you can feel without ever leaving home.
Albrecht spoke with communities in rural New South Wales who were living in landscapes desolated by drought. The damage had gone beyond the land. It had seeped into the psyches of the people who lived there. These people were not sentimental greenies – many were farmers, living in and making a living from the land – but as their stock died, and their crops and household gardens withered to dust, they spoke of a pain that went beyond concern for their foundering businesses, to the distress they felt at the damage to the land itself.
When our farm dried to a grassless crisp, we kept the sheep alive on scraps; first on rat-shit-tainted wheat, and later, on out-of-date thickshake mix, courtesy of Sorell’s new McDonald’s. The sheep slurped at the faux strawberry slop with pink-rimmed mouths. They were sucking the land dry.
On sleeting winter mornings, we’d rove the paddocks, and scoop up near-frozen orphaned lambs. We’d stuff them under our coats, and carry them back to the warmth of the house, where we’d shove rubber teats between their chilled lips, and force colostrum down their gullets, before laying them in hay-filled cardboard boxes in front of the fire. In extreme cases, my mother would turn the oven on to its lowest setting, and place the barely breathing lamb onto a tray inside. It would stay there until either its core temperature rose, or it died. I’d hold the survivors close, inhaling the scents of milk, hay and lanolin, my fingers buried in the curlicues of their birth-crusted wool.
You could never tell which ones were going to make it. Some of them would be carried in conscious, and would lie shallow-breathing a while on the hay. They’d look okay. But then, their long-lashed eyes would close, and their legs would start to run. They’d start pedalling, like they were gearing up for some kind of race, around an imaginary waterhole perhaps, as the healthy ones did at sunset. They would get faster and faster and faster, and then suddenly slow. I don’t know what we did with the bodies.
Sorell’s primary school sat within sight and scent of both a Ramsar wetland and the local chicken-processing factory. I kept a notebook on the birds I saw outside my third-grade classroom window, and learnt the word ‘eutrophication’. The near-raw sewage that entered Pittwater–Orielton Lagoon from Sorell and Midway Point was kept bottled in the water body by the causeway connecting the two towns. The excess nutrients caused algal blooms, which would periodically die off, and the stench of their rotting would blend with the chicken factory’s emissions to form a foul miasma, which ensured a brisk real-estate market on the road between the factory and the lagoon.
After years of complaints, works were finally done on the causeway to open the lagoon to the sea. A colony of rare sea stars that grew on the bridge was relocated by hand, to the great amusement of the township. Unusually for a sea star, these small, orange, biscuit-shaped creatures give birth to miniature replicas of themselves. Lacking a free-floating larval stage, their offspring do not disperse far from home, which renders them vulnerable to localised threats. I was pleased to see them rehomed once the works were completed.
As I grew older, the farm began to shrink. The far-flung town paddock, with its willow-ringed pond, was the first to go. Child-me was horrified. What about the tadpoles? The pretty trees? The water boatmen and the zippy little red bugs?
All evidence of their existence was soon tucked under a blanket of bricks and bitumen. The chief builder erected himself a mock-Tudor mansion at the edge of the erstwhile pond, and slept untroubled by the creaking of frogs.
Then the back paddock went under. It had been no wild Eden either – a scuffed-up slope of cocksfoot and thistles, hemmed in by boxthorn and briar rose – but it held my two favourite waterholes. ‘Sowing the last crop’, they call it; the subdivision of prime rural land for houses. In beige brick and colorbond, they sprung up like monstrous pumpkins off an asphalt vine.
“‘Sowing the last crop’, they call it; the subdivision of prime rural land for houses. In beige brick and colorbond, they sprung up like monstrous pumpkins off an asphalt vine.”
At university, I studied the environment from the micro to the macro: aquatic botany, field botany, geology, geography, zoology, and mycology. Ecology, rooted from the Greek oikos, is literally the study of the house, of home in its broadest sense. I learnt a new language. Ecotone. Pyrophilic. Epicormic. Coprophagous. Palimpsest. Moraine. Cirque. Scree.
Draped in new words, every landscape I walked, drove or swam through was remade. Subalpine heathlands, wet sclerophyll forests, the littoral zone – my circle of home expanded to include them. But with this expansion came increasing exposure.
‘One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.’ Aldo Leopold, ecologist, forester, tree-hugger and wilderness philosopher, understood this better than most. His A Sand County Almanac presaged Albrecht’s solastalgia by more than fifty years, and foreshadowed a special subspecies of emotional pain reserved for those who dared admire the ecosystems beyond their back fences.
I studied coastal weeds, and tracked the march of botanical invaders across Tasmanian beaches. While my friends unfurled their towels and raced off into the surf, I would skulk about, scowling at sand dunes, scuffing at weeds with a vindictive toe. The dunes rose up overhead, pushed to unnatural heights by invasive marram grass, which formed virtual monocultures as it shoved aside the native spinifex, herbs and birds. I learnt more words. Ruderal weeds. Transformer species. Allellopathic. Everything felt ruined.
But my ecological education also revealed value in unexpected places. Growing up, trees provided structure for most of my adventures. They afforded materials for building, challenges for climbing, and most importantly, sites for animal spotting. The ‘bird tree’, an immense, solitary blue gum, hosted a cackling, squawking, squabbling mass of feathered scrappers, fighting for access to nectar and nest hollows. Soft-eyed possums poked their heads from the turrets of derelict gums, while echidnas snoozed in the bases of burnt-out stumps. The paddocks were just something you ran across to get to the trees.
Shortly after my mother died, two government employees came to the farm to check on the progress of some fencing we’d promised to do to protect some of the remnant bush. They’d given us rolls of sheep-and-lamb fencing, star pickets, corner droppers and gripplers, but our progress had been modest at best.
As we strolled across the top gully paddock with the government botanist, we crossed a patch of native grassland. Native grasslands are precious in Tasmania, surviving at only one per cent of their pre-European coverage, and require a measure of disturbance to flourish. On the gentler slopes, most of them had been converted to ‘improved pasture’, but here, intermittently grazed by sheep, the indigenous grasses still thrived.
‘This is probably more valuable than the bit you’re fencing off.’ Impressed with the sheeps’ work, the botanist recommended that they continue their conservation management activities, and recast the top gully paddock as a place of value.
A few years later, a botanist myself, I checked up on similar fencing projects on farms across the state. I met men in their sixties, so rooted in the chocolate soils of Tasmania’s north-west they’d never made the five-hour drive to the state capital. I admired their fencing skills; they nodded their approval at my correct identification of their sheep, and half-jokingly enquired as to my marital status.
Over Scotch Fingers and instant coffee, I spoke with some of them about the invasive willows growing on their creeks. The older men had planted the willows themselves, but seeing how they’d choked the watercourses, they were keen to rip them out again. But their sons, who’d only ever known the land with willows, were against it. I rarely heard from their daughters or wives.
If Albrecht had done his study ten years later, he would have spoken to families like these as they grappled with the expansion of coal seam gas mining. The primary producer vs environmental activist dynamic traditionally played out in the media was wavering, with even right-wing shock jocks promoting direct action to protect the land. Farmers across mainland Australia locked their gates against companies who would drill, tenure-blind, through native forest and agricultural land alike.
These disputed landscapes were not wildernesses either – most were so denatured by ravenous stock, rabbits, centre-pivot irrigators and ploughs, it was a miracle any trace of the underlying ecosystems remained. I came to recognise our farm’s decrepitude; graze over graze overlaying scar tissue, a thick-crusted scab picked too many times. But still, there were skerricks, crumbs of what was here before the land became a farm, some only visible through an ecologist’s prism. The tufty native wallaby grass seed heads, dancing like ballerinas on the upper slopes. Rare lemon beauty heads, glaucous stems topped by yellow pompoms, blooming briefly, before falling victim to the neighbours’ straying horses.
“I came to recognise our farm’s decrepitude; graze over graze overlaying scar tissue, a thick-crusted scab picked too many times. But still, there were skerricks, crumbs of what was here before the land became a farm, some only visible through an ecologist’s prism.”
I worked further afield, surveying Marrawah’s windswept coast, where the mallee-form stringybarks grew short and twisted from the coastal scrub. I collected seeds from the living dead – scraggy clusters of eucalypts adrift in threadbare paddocks, their trunks ringed by silver cummerbunds of possum-proof metal – all dressed up with nowhere to go. I embraced hundreds of trees for science, measuring diameters at breast height of white gums in the Central Highlands, and encircling giant, venerable conifers on Mount Anne’s precipitous flanks. At Mount William, I grovelled in ephemeral bogs amidst hordes of leeches to harvest dust-like seeds from pygmy sundews, and sat eyeball to giant bulging eyeball with a young leopard seal, who lolled at the cusp of the evening tide.
“I saw things go wrong. But I thought most of it could be fixed.”
I saw things go wrong. But I thought most of it could be fixed. I walked Tasmania’s wild south-west beaches, wrenched ocean-going weeds from their primary dunes, and feasted on sea celery, pipis and crayfish, hauled from frigid pools at the ocean’s edge. In the Parks’ hut at Melaleuca, I listened to scrubwrens buzz their tiger snake warnings, and watched critically endangered orange-bellied parrots feed their chicks in manmade nest boxes as I washed the dishes. In that same hut, I sipped tea with a retired Parks manager, and pored over local fire maps, which sketched a patchwork of vegetation stitched by flames. Most of these fires had been deliberately lit, some by the man I sat with, in an attempt to mimic the Aboriginal burning patterns these ‘trumped up corellas’ relied upon. My companion pointed at one especially large fire scar; ‘That one was what we like to call an “overachievement”.’ Despite mistakes, there was still a feeling that land management was improving – that scientists could work with land custodians, both Indigenous and pastoral, to restore, conserve and protect landscapes, both wild and tame.
But they’re selling our family farm. Apparently, it’s falling apart.
When we still lived there, my father would engage in his own particular brand of conservation burning. Pipe in one hand, and a box of matches in the other, he would wander about, puffing contentedly, flicking matches into dry patches of grass, burning any desiccated tussocks left unnibbled by sheep to provoke an outburst of fresh, green growth. Now, left unattended, the sheep laugh at the slack-jowled fences, and wander at will. Nothing is burnt, and the lemon beauty heads are gone. The top gully paddock grasslands have been buried under mounds of weed-capped spoil from the nearby subdivision, which, even now, creeps towards the homestead on heavy feet.
Last summer, Sorell’s four-legged fireys had an overachievement of their own. They ate the land down to the dirt. Two years earlier, a bushfire tore through the nearby townships of Forcett and Dunalley, and then on to the Forestier Peninsula, wiping out dozens of houses, killing thousands of stock and countless native animals. To those who’d fled the flames, fought the fires, or surveyed the aftermath, the unseasonably hot, dry weather did not go unnoticed. Nobody was really surprised when by mid-January, dozens of separate, uncontrolled fires lit up the state like a heart-shaped birthday cake.
“Nobody was really surprised when by mid-January, dozens of separate, uncontrolled fires lit up the state like a heart-shaped birthday cake.”
But we should have been. Traditionally, bushfires in Tasmania are a direct result of human action – an inadequately extinguished campfire here, a spot of recreational incendiarism there. Normally, Tasmanian lightning comes with drenching rain, but these fires, sparked by dry lightning, started far from human settlements, and went unquenched. They smouldered through unusually dry sphagnum bogs; through star-flowered isophyses, tiny creeping pines and cushion plants; through pencil pines, who wore their centuries lightly; through subalpine plant assemblages who’ve watched glaciers come and go, clinging on in fireless refugia. These plants belonged to a clique of ancient lineages, clustered together in the densest concentration of relictual plants on the planet. Most Tasmanian plants love a burn. Most of the plants in these ecosystems do not. And they were on fire.
Photos of the damage leaked into the media like smoke from under the door of a burning room. Aerial shots of the landscapes around Lake Mackenzie on the Central Plateau looked quite similar to those of fire-tolerant landscapes after fire, but close-ups of incinerated cushion plants and copper-toned conifers gave the photos unsettling context. Beloved, fought for, and protected by law, these ecosystems were supposed to have been safe from human harm. But now, it appeared they were not.
*
By the time we reach Lake Mackenzie, the Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed that Tasmania has seen its hottest summer since white colonisation. At the dam face, the fire has torn back the veneer of vegetation, exposing a cremated wasteland beneath. Bottles, smashed and sparkling; beer cans, delaminated by tongues of flame; abandoned camping chairs, twisted and mangled among the charred stumps. A plastic plate here, a disposable coffee cup there, a beer bottle turfed into the all-absorbing ‘wilderness’ – she’ll be right, mate.
It takes us a while to find the base of the path that leads up to the main area of burnt-out pencil pines. Hidden amongst thick scrub, the track dips and weaves through the vegetation like a fugitive pademelon. It’s not ’til we reach the plateau that we see how bad the damage really is.
The path, so hard to find before, is now clear – it is the only thing that remains unburnt. In this country of peat-rich, organic soils, bushwalkers’ boots have pressed tracks deep into the landscape, forming a network of miniature river courses and muddy puddles. Human footprints now appear as a green thread, woven through the scorched subalpine mosaic. Little else here has escaped.
“Fire has carved off the brilliant emerald curves of the cushion plants’ upholstery to expose the woody stems within; like ruined furniture, we see now how they are sprung.”
Fire has carved off the brilliant emerald curves of the cushion plants’ upholstery to expose the woody stems within; like ruined furniture, we see now how they are sprung. The ancient pencil pines, so familiar from the photographs of Dombrovskis, Blakers and Truchanas, huddle around what remains of the ruined tarns. Some still show some green, but their roots are burnt through. They will be dead by year’s end.
For many of us, climate change has been a phantom until now. An environmental bogeyman, used to scare naughty children into turning off the lights, into washing their clothes on the cold water cycle, into walking to work one day a year. Climate change has been something that affects other people – brown people, poor people – living in other places; Pacific Islanders, their coconut groves awash with saltwater; Bangladeshi farmers, wading in rainbow-bright saris through rising floodwaters. Climate change was not something that happened to the rich, or to the landscapes that fell under our protection. Until recently, we’ve been able to look the other way. But that time has passed.
They’re selling our family farm. And I can’t afford to stop it.
In early autumn, we tread water in unseasonably balmy seas. Another report comes in, this time, showing footage of the Great Barrier Reef. More than 90% of it has been bleached by the unusually warm ocean, and there is no avoiding the finger-pointing. This is climate change writ large in burning white across a fading neon canvas. There is a flurry of public outrage, then we return to our Facebook feeds, our coffee shops, our workaday concerns.
“This is climate change writ large in burning white across a fading neon canvas. There is a flurry of public outrage, then we return to our Facebook feeds, our coffee shops, our workaday concerns.”
When I last visited the farm, the white gums had started to bleed. Reports from the northeast say that this illness is moving through the land. For those trees affected, their bark ruptures, and they begin to ooze a lurid orange sap, a kind of botanical stigmata denoting only one possible ending.
I don’t like to visit it now. It’s like watching a loved one die. You know you should visit more often, but it’s just too painful to watch.
One day, when I was small, our dog appeared with a baby rabbit in its mouth; squealing, terrified, damaged beyond repair. My father snatched up the sodden bundle, and bashed its brains in with a shovel.
To let go of anything of value – a person, a species, a landscape – requires a certain coldness. You need to be able to step back.
“To let go of anything of value – a person, a species, a landscape – requires a certain coldness. You need to be able to step back.”
Ecologists are hopeless at stepping back. Every one of them has their own beloved ‘thing’ – a fading gum, a moribund parrot, an obscure orchid they just cannot let go of. In an ideal world, they should never be asked to. But in a world where money is both the question and the answer, they will be asked, repeatedly, what it will cost to save their darlings, why their pardalote should live while another bird dies.
This is why one of them invented ‘ecological triage’ – an economically rational decision-making process, to help weigh up the pros and cons of spending limited resources on threatened species or landscapes. It is designed to prevent wastage on hopeless causes; species surely on the brink of collapse regardless of the time, money and effort poured into their salvation.
I have loved our farm. It brought me up, and taught me to see the land for itself. But I can let it go.
I’ve begun spending time with other landscapes, broader landscapes, landscapes enmeshed within the global farm that stretches from pole to pole, marked by human hands from the depths of its clear-felled oceans to the bottle-strewn heights of its Himalayan peaks. I think they need me more.
Because they’re selling that farm too. And we can’t afford not to stop them.
*
Except …
Solastalgia was not born alone. Albrecht gave her a sister – soliphilia – a love of place, and ‘a willingness to accept, in solidarity … with others, the political responsibility’ for preserving the earth. It is her voice that whispers to ecologists not to let go – to keep fighting for what is of value, regardless of what the accountants say. Soliphilia says that the little things are not little at all, and Leopold would have agreed. They’re what the bigger picture is made of, and as intelligent tinkerers on the planet we call home, we’d be best advised to keep all of the pieces.
Fenced off from the sheep alongside our shearing shed is a small, untended garden, where the ground is hardened and choked with weeds. It’s not huge, but it is big enough to grow a reasonable crop of garlic. I call my father, and promise him a share of the crop in exchange for permission to farm the cracked black earth.
The forests are still burning. The reef is still dying. The glaciers are still melting.
They might still sell the family farm.
But I’ll be damned if I don’t make a stand to stop them. ▼
This article appeared in Island 147 in 2016. Order a print issue here.
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