Thirst - by Rick Morton
ISLAND | ISSUE 160
By the end of 2004, when I was graduating from my regional state high school, a person could almost walk clear across the dam that supplied our entire region with water.
Boonah, a small town in the eastern valley of Queensland’s Great Dividing Range south-west of Brisbane, had taken on shades of desiccated browns and yellows. You could hear them crackle just by looking at them. Moogerah Dam, which feeds dozens of towns and villages, had fallen to 3 per cent of its capacity. People came with metal detectors to discover old coins and fishing rods long buried in the lakebed. Others made the drive just to witness the disappearance of a thing, to define its absence.
In many ways, I was a child of drought.
On the cattle station in the far west of the state where I spent my earliest years, the best job was checking the rain gauge. It was the best job precisely because the occasions it needed checking were vanishingly rare.
Back then, our father made us give him the readings in points; a system of measurement officially abandoned by the Bureau of Meteorology in 1974 but never relinquished by the hard men and women of the bush who feared change as much as an endless blue sky.
I slept as long as I could in those days. And deep, too. If it had rained overnight I knew it first by the smell that seeped from the earth and blended with the sweet scent of mulga shrubs channelling the moisture to their extensive root systems. As a boy not even in school of distance education yet, I understood nothing of how vast cattle stations were run or how much feed the beasts needed over the thousand square kilometre expanse. But I knew the rich aroma of rain and in my belly I recognised its total vitality.
Stepping to the rain gauge at the back of the homestead was, therefore, an exercise in bridled hope. Moods could turn swiftly on the number.
I recognised much of my early life in Steinbeck’s withering masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath. In that novel, he spares us nothing of the 1930s Oklahoma dustbowl that forced sharecroppers from the land and into a brutal, transient survival halfway across the continental United States of America.
The children stood near by, drawing figures in the dust with bare toes, and the children sent exploring senses out to see whether men and women would break. The children peeked at the faces of the men and women, and then drew careful lines in the dust with their toes. Horses came to the watering trough and nuzzled the water to clear the surface dust. After a while the faces of the watching men lost their bemused perplexity and became hard and angry and resistant. Then the women knew that they were safe and that there was no break ... Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole.
Wherever the ground was thirsty, we associated it with a longing so ripe and palpable it was as if we were made of the stuff. We were built of yearning, really, and only water could quench our minds and bodies.
I found out years later there is a name for the scent of a moistened earth, a phenomenon that is particularly sharp in arid parts of the world like the country on which I was raised. It was discovered by CSIRO scientists Isabel ‘Joy’ Bear and Richard Thomas, who published their findings in the journal Nature in 1964. It is called petrichor and we have it thanks to trace amounts of oils released from the earth’s surface – clays, minerals, all types of different substances – when they become slick with moisture. Even humidity can announce the coming rain by triggering this process, but the effect is strongest when the skies open.
In their paper, Bear and Thomas wrote:
It is primarily in arid regions where the comparative absence of organic matter in the soils and the frequent preponderance of various types of outcropping rocks in the terrain are characteristic features, that this odour is most widely recognized and is frequently associated with the first rains after a period of drought ... There is some evidence that drought-stricken cattle respond in a restless manner to this ‘smell of rain’ which may drift with the wind for considerable distances.
For the longest time, anyone associated with the land, anywhere in the world, was aware of the notion of rain scent. We just didn’t know what to call it, or how it arrived on our noses so. Later research shows that human beings likely evolved an innate appreciation of petrichor as it went straight to the core of survival; the migration of animals, growth of plant life and, naturally, water to drink.
I’m not sure there is a precise opposite, though the sensations of drought and parched country are so elemental because they threaten continuance on this land. In the same way the fresh hit of rain can enliven the senses, there is something about the bone-deep thirst of drought that blunts them.
The mulga shrubs of my childhood were the most common feature on an otherwise flat and Martian interior. They dominated through an elegant minimalism. Though some grow quite tall, their leaves are thin and needle-like, and almost always point straight up into the air like little soldiers standing to attention. When the midday sun comes at its harshest, belting down in vertical columns from the sky, the rays strike the smallest possible surface of the shrub.
Mulga roots stretch deep into the earth where they can tap sources of groundwater or moisture. A network of thin and shallow fibres make the best use of even the faintest rain drop on the surface.
Sometimes, we shrink ourselves as an act of survival. To recoil from the elements, when they are at their least forgiving, is a necessary conservation effort. Beautiful in its own way, though we know we are meant for more.
“Sometimes, we shrink ourselves as an act of survival. To recoil from the elements, when they are at their least forgiving, is a necessary conservation effort. Beautiful in its own way, though we know we are meant for more.”
When the high school farewell speeches were finished in the late November heat, my classmates and I officially entered a quasi-adulthood that coincided with the driest countryside in our living memory. The Millennium Drought had us in its teeth.
These incisors were dry and chalky, like the earth, and it was difficult to imagine a way to grow in a world where little else did.
*
When settlers attempted to wrest the continent from First Peoples, it was water that soured relations between them as they pushed farther afield from the fledgling colonies. No other resource mattered as much in Australia as water, and nothing was as terrifying as the thought that it might not last.
It is a measure of the hate of some frontiersmen that they would quite often kill Indigenous people by contaminating precious water stores. In the Riverina region of New South Wales, just outside the town of Narrandera, there is an especially long roadside sign that marks the location of Poison Waterholes Creek. Wiradjuri oral history records what happened here, as do some accounts of white settlers who describe drums of poison being poured into the waterholes alongside the Murrumbidgee River to wipe out local men and women. There are strong suggestions that the leader of the 1928 Coniston massacre, police constable William George Murray, would later murder some 100 or more Aboriginal people east of Alice Springs by either shooting them or lacing the soakage of the Sandover River with strychnine, a poison usually reserved for butchering dingoes.
In the 1920s, it was another oppressive drought so soon after the great dry of Federation that further enmeshed settlers and local mob in a fight for resources. Water, of course. As the continent broke open in brittle dehydration, anger rose at the cattle and sheep mowing clear through the native grasses, guzzling the water stores and walking heavily across the earth.
I recall the moments as a boy when I was deemed to have wasted water, and the thundering response from my father. His own mother had so wanted to grow flowers on the 6600 square kilometre Pandie Pandie Station south of Birdsville but was forbidden by her husband because it was a use of water that produced nothing of any value. Instead, she secretly planted blooms beside the vegetables and fruit trees. My grandfather didn’t venture into the vegetable patch so these were her secret protests under a perishing sun.
These were not the coloured fields of a palace garden but, like the mulga shrub, my grandmother reduced herself to the bare minimum in order to live.
*
It’s not just great cities that formed on water. Our planet is the only one we’ve managed to find with enough hydration to support more than a relatively complex organic molecule. And as we continue to heat the atmosphere, we are greeted by a new kind of all-consuming insecurity. The risk now is not that we pollute a river or exhaust the contents of a creek and thrust ourselves into hyperlocal uncertainty, it’s that we do it on the largest scale possible.
At the start of 2020, whole towns I knew well actually ran out of water. Not just for some of the residences on the outskirts of towns (like in 1995 when our rented weatherboard near Mt Alford had to have water trucked in) but for all of them. In the apple town of Stanthorpe, on the Queensland side of the southern border, the dam ran dry in early January.
In the dystopian nomenclature of the modern water grid, this is known as ‘day zero’. Stanthorpe went beyond this, tipping into the new calendar of ‘post water’. The Queensland state government began paying $800 000 a month to cart in supplies. Around the same time, a NSW public servant was put in charge of working with towns that had less than a year’s worth of storage left – about ninety of them in that state alone.
I’m not ignorant of the science behind our changing climate but, like most things in life that demanded my cognitive resources beyond the immediate moment, I tried to avoid thinking about it. I knew, for example, that there were hundreds and hundreds of emus on the property where I grew up but this alone could never compare to the joy I felt at seeing them anew each time. The same rationale applies to interrogating the things about which we are afraid.
So it was that I came across an interactive climate change exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in March this year and felt the pulse of true understanding that only comes with internal confrontation.
It was a rich display but one chart in particular caught my attention: a simple bar graph with the global temperature each year recorded as a variation from the 1901–2000 world average. From 1880 to the late 1930s, every year’s disparity sits between 0.1 and half a degree colder than the century average. Things get a bit spotty from the 1940s (war, and what have you) and then from the late 1970s the chart switches from blue to a literal code-red.
The exhibit allows the user to turn a dial and a little musical scale, played on a xylophone, rises sharply in pitch as record after record is broken each year. It produces one of those rare moments when the existential crisis of the world (per the chart) harmonises with the anguished inflection of bodily understanding taking place in your own sinew. If you turn the wheel fast enough, the pitch and intensity of the noise reaches a crescendo at the exact moment your nerves do.
For anyone who isn’t easily won over through visual learning, the display helpfully points out that 18 of the 19 hottest years on record have occurred since 2001. These are not new discoveries, of course, but they find their way into our consciousness the same way the big droughts do, slowly at first. There is a window during which we think this can’t go on forever or this will come good next year and then, over time, what was a single dry year and then two dry years becomes a new thing; a noun with its own dimensions and physicality. I have become obsessed with how to live in the space between the single data point and the concerning trend.
And there is a part of me that is convinced the increasingly mercurial nature of our emerging reality is connected to our departure from the wilderness.
*
One of my favourite anecdotes in Gabrielle Chan’s brilliant Rusted Off – a meticulous work looking at disaffected voters in regional Australia – is from the city-born young daughter of her friend who visits Chan’s country property outside Canberra for the first time and asks, ‘Who knocked all the houses down?’
Chan remarks on something I’ve known since I was a child but which makes no sense to most urbanites. It is a deep knowledge taken from Indigenous people and deployed today by those who manage the land well; graziers, farmers, rangers and so on.
‘Farmers refer to a section of land as “country”,’ she writes. ‘It might be a paddock, or a group of paddocks that have a particular characteristic. For example “the country over by the creek has never grown a decent crop of canola”.’
The psychological attachment to this life-giving thing is not particularly well understood by most non-Indigenous Australians, who live almost exclusively along built-up coastlines, which is just one of the many reasons they struggle or refuse to engage with the fact of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dispossession. But it is, ultimately, everything.
I want to return to Steinbeck again, because he too manages to provide a sharp account of this in Grapes as the banks and managers forced the sharecroppers off the land to replace them with machinery:
The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.
This isn’t a sermon. My failings are the same as most everyone else. It has become so easy to write off the future at the hands of a messy present. But you feel it too, don’t you?
A few years ago the Washington Post ran an article about the explosion in indoor plant cultivation among a restless, lonely and economically insecure younger generation. The headline tickled my fancy: ‘Millennials are filling their homes – and the void in their hearts – with houseplants.’ In the same piece, I learned that the first wave of ‘urban jungles’ took off during the Industrial Revolution, when countless workers moved to crowded cities for the work of machinery and the factory floor.
Without even realising it, we make pilgrimages of the mind back to the natural order. Or bring it to us incrementally.
Climate change is at least, in part, the final insult from more than a century of our natural disconnection. We did not tally the cost of all that zipping convenience, nor take account of how our unearthly desires silently set the clockwork motion of our own minds to hurt for the thing we can’t quite articulate. It sits there as a vague notion that we are missing out on something, perhaps something as simple as watching rivulets of water form on the newly wet earth. The solace of it. Perhaps the faint register of petrichor is a threadbare anchor to a past life, a feeling in search of its origin.
“It sits there as a vague notion that we are missing out on something, perhaps something as simple as watching rivulets of water form on the newly wet earth. The solace of it. Perhaps the faint register of petrichor is a threadbare anchor to a past life, a feeling in search of its origin.”
Now, as the air heats year-on-year and climate patterns go haywire, we are left with the distinct impression that our collective unease is attached to something more complex and harrowing than a single dry season.
The risks now span season after season, year on year and one decade after another. Though ultimately we still crave certainty. We want to know the dam still has water in it and that it always will.
We cannot know.
*
Mum still sends the rainfall updates from my hometown, in a group message to my sister Lauryn and me. I wonder how much of this behaviour springs from an urge to measure this world. To contain it. The simple readings bring a genuine sense of calm.
Forbidden, my grandmother still found her patch of beauty in the dirt. With so much beyond her – and our – control, I like that my own mother has learned to sit with these piecemeal rainfall reports. A few millimetres here, a dozen there. To old sticklers like us, these readings turn into inches over time. The small thing becomes big, and bigger. A flood.
As we understand this gentle progression, so must we recognise that few great calamities are upon us all at once.
These, too, move by degrees. ▼
This article appeared in Island 160 in 2020. Order a print issue here.
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