Revisiting the Wild Acres

I grew up near and often in the great forests of the New South Wales lower north coast; our house was less than two miles from the edge of the Myall State Forest, and four more large state forests lay within the ambit of my childhood. My father had been a bullock driver and timber-getter in those forests before he married and started dairy farming—and yet even I was almost seduced by the myth of the alien bush as I began learning to write poetry.

The part of the bush I grew up in is mentioned in Eric Rolls’ book A Million Wild Acres, as he describes the surveys carried out by Henry Dangar to find suitable country for the newly formed Australian Agricultural Company:

The one area left that seemed likely to contain the company’s grant lay between Port Stephens and the Manning River. In February 1826 Henry Dangar made a thorough reconnaissance. And he found good land. There is beautiful cattle country around Stroud, Dungog, Gloucester and Taree. Further east, though it was obviously not the rich farm land that Dangar would choose for himself, there was fair open grass land. It was not the wooded tangle of today.

The poor grassland country down around the Myall Lakes, now all under eucalypts and red-barked angophoras and great tracts of paperbark forest standing in rushy grass on white clay soils, was deemed suitable for fine-wool sheep, and the world of the local Aborigines was destroyed to accommodate them. Within a few years, footrot and the soils’ deficiencies in copper and cobalt, defects unknown to nineteenth-century science, had wiped the sheep out. And with the Aborigines no longer there to burn the country over continuously, the lonely Myall Lakes scrublands we know today, with their tremendous wealth of wildflowers, began to cover the grassland over. Back in the hills I come from, north-west of there, the rainforest which had always withstood the Aborigines’ fires in moist gullies began to expand as the settlers and cedar-getters usurped the black people, then retreated again before the white man’s axes and crosscut saws.

The scattered clumps of sclerophyll forest, never large or dense in Aboriginal times, began to surge outward, spreading down off the ridges to cover the valley flats which had carried only a few trees to the hectare in pre-European days. When my father was a young man, he and his brothers could ride everywhere in ‘the State’, as they called the vast forest reserve near their home, seeking the giant timber trees that stood among the younger spindlier growth. As my father told me recently, ‘You hardly had to make roads for the bullocks then. You could see through the bush for hundreds of yards.’ Now, you could barely get a horse through most parts of the Myall State Forest, among the vines and wattle thickets and dense stands of young trees which flourish there after eighty or ninety years of mill logging and sleeper cutting.

It is Eric Rolls’ controversial and perhaps revolutionary contention that the forests of Australia as we know them are no more than a hundred to a hundred and thirty years old. Apart from the tracts and patches of rainforest that follow the eastern face of the Dividing Range from far north Queensland down almost to Victoria, and a few large pockets of sclerophyll forest mainly in areas of high rainfall, he contends that Australia bore the appearance in pre-European times of a vast parkland kept open and well grassed by constant burning off. It was a paysage humanisé and moralisé which the Aborigines had maintained for untold centuries; the wilderness we now value and try to protect came with us, the invaders. It came in our heads, and it gradually rose out of the ground to meet us.

Rolls’ general theory of the Australian forests is anchored in the particular story of one forest, the Pilliga (from Kamilaroi peelaka, a spearhead), which lies beyond the Dividing Range in New South Wales and extends from Narrabri in the north to Coonabarabran in the south. Its eastern extremity is close to the village of Baan Baa and in the west it peters out around the small town of Baradine. It is characterised by a mixture of eucalypts, acacias and callitris trees, usually known by the collective name cypress pine, and is enormously rich in birds, animals and flowering plants.

Slowly, with a leisurely accretion of detail from sources that range from printed books to previously unread family diaries and Lands Department archives, Rolls tells the story of how European animals, plants and humans spread northwards on each side of the Dividing Range and took over this belt of sandy country. It is not purely human history, but ecological history he gives us, showing how the real explorers were as likely to be escaped cattle and introduced grasses as men. By the time the hard men of the infant colony and their convict slaves arrived to take up new country, cattle had usually preceded them and begun compacting the ancient spongy soils with their hoofs, driving out the native ground-plants with the chemical and light-occluding properties of their huge droppings. He is unsparing of the rapacious human land-takers, but will not take the easy course of repudiating them. As he writes:

*The tormented community generated its own men. Some hard gobbets indeed were thrown up. Those attracted later as settlers were the same type—capable, adventurous, and extraordinarily adaptable, difficult, crude, vigorous, dishonest, selfish, violent. They differed only in the extent to which each of these qualities was developed. Some were more violent than others, some less adaptable. They developed Australia.

If these men had remained in Britain they would have had no influence on their times. Society would have restrained them. In Australia they moved outside the law. It is no use wishing they were different. To do so is to dispense with our culture. No other men could have done what they did. Australia might have been abandoned as a British settlement.*

The story of the Pilliga forest is one of advance, disappointment and retreat by pastoralists and then by small farmers. It is possible that we have never had so penetrating a study of the realities of settlement before; certainly I do not know of one that interrelates the human and non-human dimensions so intimately. Also, and it is a country man’s point, Rolls realises that more of Australia’s history took place outside the law than within it, and more attempt was made to hide than to record it. He has a knack, born of sympathy and human knowledge, for detecting the outlines of concealed knavery even a century old. History is not just the propaganda of dominant groups, but also the public record of approved classes of human beings, and there is a way in which country people in Australia are apt to miss out on their due by being neither acceptably upper nor recognisably proletarian, and their wary reticence compounds this still further. Given rapid changes of ownership of runs, by chicanery, bad luck, disease, opportunism or poor judgement of country, and changes in government policy such as John Robertson’s Selection Acts of the 1860s, few were able to amass large stable fortunes. Dynasty and great wealth are features of many parts of the New World of European settlement, but are far less important in Australia, and the difference sets us off from many apparently comparable societies.

The ecological result in the Pilliga was that neglected runs and failed selections went under surging masses of gum and cypress pine seedlings by the 1870s. Cypress pines came up ten thousand to the hectare, and soon there was no room for grass to grow. Foxes and competition for grass destroyed the rat-kangaroos that had previously kept the seedlings nibbled down, and the disappearance of the Aborigines meant that burning off was no longer regular and cyclic. Happening occasionally, sometimes as a result of lightning strike or accident, fires had the opposite of their historic effect: they now induced the appearance of millions of seedlings. The blue-green peelaka spearheads of cypress pine trees filled up the country. Rabbits, arriving soon after the first great spurts of growth, tended to keep the forest in check to some extent, until myxomatosis in the 1950s wiped the rabbits out, and bush fires in the same decade were followed by soaking rains. After the fifties, the Forestry Department, which had assumed that milling in the Pilliga would eventually cut the timber out, began to think in terms of sustained yield from the region. And unless the periodic threat of a new international airport in the Pilliga ‘scrub’ becomes a reality, the area may at last have reached some sort of natural balance of human and non-human life. Not that such balances last forever.

I think Australian readers have already come to see Rolls’ book as genuinely representing a broad rather than a sectional sensibility, however, and existing on a plane we instantly recognise as common Australian property rather than the atmosphere of an elite. I have heard conservationists growl at Rolls, and call him ‘that old fraud’, but I can’t see how he damages their cause; he may, indeed, have burnt off a derivative form of ecological consciousness and let one more truly adapted to Australia spring up. He gives an originally imported notion the ‘sound’ of common acceptance, partly by freeing it from overtones of a mandarin desire to reform and civilise us. And so there is no strain of intimidation in our assent to his book.

The ruling literary culture of our time exhorts us to many disobediences. Very many of these are fraudulent or by now worn out, but there is a disobedience I value and call the golden one—and that is disobedience of the dominant literary sensibility itself. It is often wise, in the New World, to write literature as it were against the grain of Literature, because then you avoid the resistance that literary claims very often provoke, perhaps at a deep level, in the minds of readers whom Literature as usually understood in late colonial societies often seems to threaten with relegation if they resist its assumptions. We have grown used in recent years to highly mannered forms of prose fiction, many of them derived in this country from Patrick White’s method of dabbling small exacerbated qualifications of extreme sensitivity over narrative and character alike in ways that constantly threaten to snub us if we do not render abashed assent. Few writers, perhaps, have followed White’s other trick of inverting ordinary snobbery and transposing it into mystical election, but myriad other transformations and inversions of snobbery are around, to the point where the marks and shibboleths of enlightenment and competitive modernity have become a study as intricate as the quarterings of European heraldry encountered by Voltaire’s Candide.

But even playing tricks on a divisive and alienating mandarin tradition is not the same as discovering new styles and departures in art, and perhaps freeing it to reflect more of reality than a received sensibility allows. In its steady ‘middle’ voice, Rolls’ narrative seems to be attempting nothing less than a complete account of its large subject. The whole truth, with no let-outs of polemic or withheld sympathy or portentousness or even of the chic brilliances that often disguise hollowness of vision. In its very different tone, and in a context of half-personal documentary rather than fiction, Rolls’ enterprise may be seen as Proustian. But only tangentially, because in achieving his effect of completeness Rolls has done something that the aristocratic literary traditions of Europe make hard even to conceive: he has penetrated to the condition of the best ‘primitive’ art. In painting, the term primitive refers to art executed by people without formal training; in literature, where it is much rarer as a genuine and productive thing, we may take it as meaning unaware of the received sensibility. Rolls’ own early ‘Sheaf Tosser’ poems had a comparable ‘primitive’ quality that impressed many good judges who could see beyond the roughnesses and repetitions. It now seems that this essence in his early poems has stayed alive in Rolls and kept him from conformities, so that he might consummate it three decades later in a prose masterpiece.

Claims have been made that Rolls’ Million Wild Acres will be seen as one of the great books about Australia, rivalling Voss, Such Is Life or Capricornia as the ‘ultimate statement about national experience’. The book has a larger scope, perhaps, than any of those, but I am unsure of the precise meaning of that term ‘ultimate statement’. Rolls’ history probably contains as much poetry, in the wide sense, as any of them, without their dimensions of fiction, and none of its poetry consists in ‘purple’ writing.

To cut through alienation by simply ignoring the received sensibilities which produce it is a form of what I call the Golden Disobedience, and that disobedience seems at the moment to be available to nonfiction writers in greater measure than to other writers of literary texts. Poets may come next as writers to whom the Golden Disobedience is available. Novelists and playwrights, with honourable exceptions, seem to come a poor third. Rolls sidesteps all the received literary manners and tells ‘people’s’ history in a way which belongs to them rather than to most these days who would speak of the People. And in doing so he creates a great work of art in which a central native tradition is renewed, altered and immeasurably deepened.

This was first published as the Foreword to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of A Million Wild Acres: 200 Years of Man and an Australian Forest by Eric Rolls, published by Hale & Iremonger, 2011.

Copyright Les Murray and Hale & Iremonger 2011