Desert

What I really wanted was desert. For twenty years I had been roving back and forth over central Australia, hunting for my own patch of ground. Whether stony, rocky or sandy, pink, vermilion or blood-red, whether bald, furred with native grasses, or diapered with saltbush and spinifex, I wanted it. For years I have gorged on the life that pounds within what we were taught to call the ‘dead heart’, from the sudden glitter of dawn, when kangaroos sprang in front of me and emus loped beside me, with my ears tuned to the electric sizzle of the finches’ song against the limitless silence, to the creeping violet fingers of evening. The white heat never seemed all that hot to me, because the desert winds freeze-dried the sweat on my body. Zero humidity and I were made for each other. The more I saw of semi-arid Australia, the more I yearned for it.

This falling in love began when I first drove the Birdsville track from Bourke to Alice Springs in 1970 and camped in the deep warm pink sand of the dry Todd River. I had never had an Aborigine’s-eye view of my country before, and what I saw I loved, until the police raided the beer garden of the Alice Springs Hotel and took most of my fellow campers to jail. After I had followed the sequence of injustices through the magistrate’s court on Monday morning when all my new friends, who had committed no offence, were given custodial sentences, some of them as long as six months, there was no time to venture out of the town and discover the inland for myself. I flew back to Sydney and eventually back to England, but the feel of that warm sand in the dappled shade of the river gums under the cobalt sky never left me. Whenever I found myself in Australia, I took every opportunity to escape from the endless sprawl of suburbia into the vast blue yonder.

Literary description of semi-arid Australia always dramatises its pitiless emptiness. Nicolas Rothwell, who followed the tracks of the explorers for his book Wings of the Kite-Hawk, recycles all the clichés. Why do I not feel ‘the stillness of the bush, pure and uncaring’, or the ‘dull monotony of tree and scrub’, in this ‘inhuman’, ‘unnatural’, ‘alien’ ‘world of suffering, exhaustion, danger and death’, ‘the cruellest and most inhuman world that it was possible to conceive’ under the ‘empty blueness of the sky’? I don’t feel the desert as an ‘empire of formlessness and death’; what I feel in the desert is deep comfort. Only in suburbia do I begin to feel frantic and hopeless, suddenly back where I was in my teens, imprisoned, heartsick, revolted by the endless roofscape, desperate for life to begin. Maybe the claustrophobia I inherited from my father, that has disqualified me for life in the brick veneer bungalow on its quarter-acre block, hemmed in by fences on all sides, is quieted only in the desert, where I can wrap myself in the same kind of euphoria that lures divers to their deaths at the bottom of the sea. I am never frightened in the desert, not even when I’m well and truly lost, and God knows I should be. A silk dress and a car key are unlikely to get you out of trouble, should you strike it, but I take a delight in following the example of my forebears who went bush during the Great Depression, with nothing but the clothes they stood up in and a bicycle. If Aboriginal people can get around the bush without four-wheel drives and spare fuel- and water-tanks and air conditioning and roo bars, then so can I. I have never felt that the country was harsh or unforgiving. Whitefellas have always seemed to me the most dangerous animals in it.

When you travel all day through the ranges you become aware that with every minute change of light and orientation the character of the country changes. Different elements become visible and others fade or are burned out. Fissures in rock can turn from blue to purple to black. Depending on the time of day the very colour of the air changes, from magnesium white to misty blue or honey gold or peach pink. When it rains everything is transformed. I have seen Uluru in rainy weather, and it was blue. One of my fantasies has always been to lie in my own bed and watch the desert landscape slowly turn violet while fat yellow stars pop out in the inky sky and owlet-nightjars shake the still-warm sand through their tawny feathers. Or to watch the storms as they ride over the scarps, sending their white-hot feelers raking down the ridges and exploding in sheets of coloured light. I have driven the backroads of the Pilbara when flames were popping all around, and the saltbush and scribbly gum were bursting in showers of sparks that fell in front of my tyres, and still I wasn’t afraid. It’s not that I trust the desert not to kill me; it has killed better people than I. It’s more that I don’t mind if it does. Better a swift agony in the desert than my mother’s long twilight in a seaside nursing home.

Thousands of other people too find the desert comfortable, and far safer than the town. Anmatyerre women will take off barefoot for a day’s hunting, with no more protective gear than wash-cotton dresses plus the full complement of respectable underwear, armed with nothing but a crowbar and a hatchet, with their children and dogs gambolling around them. No boots, no hats, no sunblock, no sunglasses. I was lucky enough to spend a day hunting with them once, because my hired four-wheel drive was just what they needed to get them far enough out in the scrub to find a big goanna. Goanna fat is the essential bush cosmetic; it is the basis for the scented unguents that the women use to keep their skin soft and supple and the insects at bay. To help me recognise the goanna’s track one of the women drew it for me in the sand. She tucked three fingers under her palm, and as she pulled her hand across the sand she rocked it, so that the thumb and little finger made the marks of the scurrying feet on both sides of the trace of the dragging tail.

The Anmatyerre women were as much at ease in the ‘inhospitable’ landscape as if they were grand ladies presiding over their tea tables. They picked clear gum off a small mulga tree and gave it to me to chew, with as much grace as if they were handing around the cucumber sandwiches. ‘Bush lolly’, they called it. It had a faint aromatic sweetness that was enormously refreshing. We dug up the roots of the witchetty bushes and extracted the fat white grubs that are the greatest of all bush delicacies. One of the women used her hatchet to cut an oval of bark to use as a coolamon, sealing it off at the edges with red mud so that the harvested grubs wouldn’t fall out. The children could hardly be dissuaded from wolfing the grubs raw. We followed the flight of native bees to their holes in the eucalypts, and stole their honey with impunity because they have no stings. To me the native bees are a perfect emblem of the gentleness of a country that, instead of lions and tigers, has kangaroos and koalas. Not for the first time I asked myself why the white explorers had felt it necessary to ‘discover’ a country that its inhabitants already knew like the backs of their hands and could manage with minimum effort.

I had met up with the women at Alhalkere on what used to be Utopia Station. When I first heard of Utopia the Aboriginal people had just acquired the leasehold with the help of the Aboriginal Land Fund Commission. I asked an old Aboriginal stockman in the Alice Springs Hotel how the Aboriginal people were getting on with their cattle. He looked at me with narrowed eyes.

‘Ate ’em.’

I was shocked. That was twenty years ago. I wouldn’t be shocked now.

Utopia came to the attention of the rest of Australia in the Seventies when the Anmatyerre women began producing silk batiks. In 1990 or so I went there to see their work for myself. When I got to Alhalkere the people had all gone bush, so I hung around for a bit, hoping that they’d come back. It was while I was cooling my heels that I realised that I was surrounded by a breast-deep sea of silky blond grass with feathery tops that swung in the slightest breeze, the like of which I had never seen before. Nowhere else in the Northern Territory had I seen unmunched, untrodden vegetation or clean waterholes where people could drink, rather than acres of trodden mud. Then I knew why the people had killed and eaten all the cattle. In the paintings by the women of Utopia you will see again and again the streamer patterns of the sacred grasses that are the glory of the place. The Anmatyerre are now the freehold owners of their land, and even the hundred or so head that Cowboy Louie Pwerle used to run for his own pleasure are no more. From the Anmatyerre I learned what I would do with any piece of central Australia I might get my hands on. I would leave it to recover from nearly two centuries of misguided exploitation.

Some graziers in the Northern Territory have agreed to set aside small areas of their lease for Aboriginal people to use as campsites; I wondered if Aboriginal people might not do as much for me, but as far as I could see no precedent had ever been set. As freeholders the people of Utopia should be allowed to sell any part of their 180,000 square kilometres, but whether they would be wise to do so after the long struggle they had to acquire it is another matter.

Again and again Aboriginal people showed me the beauty of country. In 1982 I had just wandered out of Port Hedland, going north on the one and only sealed road, the two-lane blacktop that rejoices in the name of the Great Northern Highway, with the intention of observing the mining operations in the Pilbara, when I came across two Aboriginal girls hitching by the side of the road. They said they wanted to go to Derby, but after a while it turned out that they really wanted to go to Marble Bar, where somebody who was important to them was in the lockup. I was only too happy to turn the rental car off the highway and plunge off ahead of a two-kilometre plume of blood-red dust on the unsealed road to Marble Bar, famous for generations as the hottest place in Australia. The girls were as reticent as Aboriginal people usually are. Most of the little they said to each other was murmured in language, but I eventually learned that they were supposed to be at school at a Catholic mission near Cap L’Eveque.

‘Do they know where you are?’

‘Nuh.’

‘Didn’t you tell someone?’

‘Nuh. Just shot through.’

Fleeing from Catholicism. I could certainly relate to that.

We were eighty or ninety kilometres down the unsealed road, at the point where the Marble Bar road crosses the Coongan River, when the girls asked me to pull over. Without a word they jumped out and ran fully dressed into the mirror of water which burst around their skinny dark figures in cascades of opaque turquoise flakes. Nothing I had ever read about inland Australia prepared me for the radiance of that water reflecting the white colonnade of great River Red Gums, or for the dance of the light prisms that veiled the girls as they busily washed their legs and arms, drank thirstily from their cupped hands and tossed the water sequins over their heads. I felt as if I could have broken out my swag and camped on the red rock-shelves under those ancient eucalypts for the rest of my life.

It was inevitable that, with all avenues on the south coast of New South Wales exhausted, I would give in to my deepest longings, and fly to Alice Springs. There I took a charter plane northwards to Delmore Downs, to visit the Holts. If there was anything for sale in the Northern Territory they would know about it. They might even be prepared to let me buy something of theirs, but it was a slim chance. Don and Janet Holt have been important facilitators of the artwork of Utopia and principal patrons of the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Don laughed when I asked him whether he thought his daughters would marry the kinds of men who would choose an uncertain livelihood in the cattle industry.

‘I’m a cattle-breeder. I want to keep my own progeny by me and I will if I can.’

‘Are you going to restore the house at Delny?’

Delny was the title of another of the Holts’ leases; it had belonged to Don’s grandfather who had begun to build there one of the first concrete houses in Australia. The house was never finished. When their youngest child died of gastroenteritis, the family threw in the towel. I’d seen the half-built structure every time I’d driven the sand track up to Delmore, and something about it attracted me, its uncompromising rectangularity perhaps, its huge windows. It didn’t have to remain an emblem of defeat, or so I thought.

‘Restore Delny? I don’t think so. Why?’

‘I thought I might have a go. You could sublet it to me maybe.’

‘Why would you want to?’

‘I’m looking for a good place to put my archive. Somewhere dry and not too weedy. Somewhere I could manage as a nature reserve. I’d only need ten hectares or so.’

Even as I said it I could feel the feasibility drain out of the idea. This was cattle country. There were still a few native animals about but an isolated ten-hectare reserve wouldn’t be much good to them.

‘Jeez, Germaine, that hardly makes sense. You’d be in the middle of cattle country, hundreds of ks away from any other wildlife reserves. The only wildlife you’d come across would be reptiles.’

‘I don’t mind reptiles. But it’s the vegetation I’d be concerned about. I’d like to restore the original plant associations. If possible.’

‘Even that might be difficult,’ said Don. ‘For one thing, the native grasses are gradually dying out. We’ve never seeded this property with buffel grass but buffel grasses are taking over, and just as well, because you’d never grow cattle on the native stuff.’

The first buffel grasses to come to Australia arrived in the 1870s as packing in the saddles of the camels that were the first mode of transport available in the inland. Botanists now disagree as to whether buffel grass is a burr grass in a separate genus Cenchrus or whether it should be included in the genus Pennisetum. It is thought that some of the grasses spreading across the Northern Territory now are the Afghan species, Cenchrus pennisetiformis and C. setigerus. Cenchrus ciliaris, native to Africa and south-western Asia, was imported in quantity into Australia in the 1950s to provide superior forage in areas of low rainfall, and also to stabilise soils destroyed by overgrazing. The United States Soil Conservation Service began experimental seedings of buffel grass in the 1930s to control erosion; they began to spread in the 1980s and buffel grasses are now serious weeds of the Sonora Desert. Now that buffel grasses have spread across more than half of the Australian continent, where they have all but overwhelmed the native grasses, it is far too late to attempt to control them. In the sandy gidgee country north of Alice, they thrive as nowhere else. Although buffel grasses have been identified as major environmental weeds in the Northern Territory, there is nothing to stop graziers seeding the new varieties that appear on the market every year. Cattle prefer to graze on immature buffel grass; the mature tussocks that are often left standing have a larger, tougher and deeper root system than native grasses. As a consequence when grass fires come through, the buffel grass tussocks burn much hotter and for much longer than the native grasses, with serious consequences for other types of vegetation. Buffel grasses will regenerate after such hot fires; the native vegetation will not.

‘Buffel grasses are the most drought-tolerant pasture grasses in the world. And they’re damn’ good fodder as well,’ Don went on.

‘But what if the ecologists are right? They’re saying that because buffel grasses burn so hot and so long, the soil heats up to a considerable depth and mulga and witchetty are killed. The River Red Gums that have survived millennia of grass fires won’t survive the scorching of their root runs.’

At Delmore visiting blacks camped in a dry channel of the Bundey River, under huge River Red Gums. Don had grown up around that camp and under those trees, and I knew he’d be distraught to lose them. I didn’t want to play the prophetess of doom, but the case had to be made, so I forged on.

‘Once we exclude the cattle and control the buffel grasses, we’d probably get hundreds of species coming back. You wouldn’t know till you got a botanist to do a survey.’

Don was unimpressed. ‘Well, you’d have mulga, gidgee, witchetty bushes, Bush Orange, Bush Plum, Corkwood, She-oak, Cypress Pine maybe. Nothing special.’

‘I don’t want special. If I managed to get all those acacias to re-establish, we’d get some nitrogen back in the soil, and you’d start to see the wildflowers coming back again.’

Mulga, gidgee and witchetty are all acacias, fabaceous plants which with the help of associated bacteria fix nitrogen in the soil. Mulga is the common name for a group of Acacia species including Acacia microneura and A. aneura, not imposing trees but remarkable ones, that can live for a hundred years before achieving their full ten-metre height. The gidgee is A. cambagei and the witchetty is A. kempeana. I thought there might be a few more Acacia species as well, maybe Ironwood, A. estrophiolata, and Cooba, A. salicina. To minimise water loss through transpiration most desert species have greatly reduced leaves or phyllodes, more like needles or spines than leaves. Others have waxy coverings that reflect back the sun’s radiance, or silvery fur, or turn their leaves side-on to the sun. Whatever the strategy the result is very little in the way of shade; rather than block the dazzling light the desert vegetation filters and patterns it. Most elegant among the desert trees is the She-oak, Allocasuarina decaisneana, that tends to grow with no other trees but its own kind, making a forest full of light. The White Cypress Pine, Callitris glaucophylla, which is actually blue, is rather less translucent than the She-oaks but much more so than the other species in the genus. If I acquired a strip of central Australia I would have them all, as well as the Honey Grevillea, Grevillea juncifolia, ssp. juncifolia, that drips nectar in golden strings through its narrow leaves. Its flower is a loose burnt-orange affair; its big sister G. striata, the Beefwood, may provide less in the way of nectar, but has ten times as many flowers, almost more flowers than leaves, and they are white. After every trip to the centre I planned and unplanned my bush garden, crammed it with woody Hakeas, known in these parts as Corkwoods, and Mallees, Emu Bushes, Saltbushes, every shade of silver, jade and turquoise borne on purple shadows against the blood-red ground under the black-opal sky.

‘Once you had the acacias, you’d get the dedicated butterflies, and the mistletoes, and with the mistletoes the Mistletoebirds. And all the other birds. And the wildflowers.’

For years I had been photographing Northern Territory wildflowers, Boobiallas, Everlastings, Mulla-mullas, Scaevolas, Potato Flowers, Desert Roses, and a good many weeds as well, and I still hadn’t found time to identify them and label my photographs. With a sliver of land I could study the plants and their associations properly, instead of just taking their picture in their party dress and moving on.

‘And the native grasses, like Lemon-scented Grass, Kangaroo Grass and, best of all, spinifex.’

‘That’s the last thing we need,’ said Don. ‘More bloody spinifex.’

I’ve never understood the hatred of spinifex that seems almost universal in white Australia. The pioneering botanists, who couldn’t decide if the genus was Plectrachne or Triaphis or Triodia, or what family it was in, gave the species contemptuous names, pungens, irritans, hostilis, molesta, inutilis. Even now botanists cannot make sense of the exclusively Australian genus which at the present count consists of sixty-seven species. Admitted, spinifex is nothing like lawn. You can’t play croquet or cricket on it and it’s no good as pasture, but it is the characteristic dapple that softens the scarps and the sandhills of a fifth of the Australian continent. It is the dot in dot painting. Its name sounds aggressive, and you can’t actually sit on it or run over it barefoot, but spinifex doesn’t grow in dense swards. The hummocks don’t connect up and in the sheltered spaces between live hundreds of ephemeral wildflower species. As the hummocks age the centres die out and the domes become rings; tree seedlings that sprout within a spinifex ring are the only ones in most parts of Australia that will be safe from introduced rabbits. Spinifex provides the habitat for the world’s richest lizard fauna, and for tribes of tiny mammals. Aboriginal peoples pounded its seeds and baked the paste in the coals to make nutritious bread. Its resin, which was melted and used to glue together weapons and tools, was traded up and down the continent. The rhythm of spinifex hummocks growing up and over sandhills or carpeting the plains is the heartbeat of Australia.

When conditions are right the Delmore spinifex makes an apple-green dome of quilled leaf sheaths out of which radiate thousands of fine silver flower spikelets, in a shimmering nimbus, like the guard hairs on some precious fur. There would certainly be space for it on any land of mine.

‘Look,’ Don went on, ‘I run cattle at very low density, probably not much more than one beast per square mile. This land, compared to the Barkly Tableland, for example, is clean. We don’t have Parkinsonia; we don’t have Noogoora Burr or Mesquite or Prickly Acacia. So we’re ahead of the game.’

Parkinsonia, Mesquite and Prickly Acacia are thorny shrubs and trees that were deliberately introduced into Australia to provide shade and control erosion. All three will form impenetrable monospecific thickets that greatly reduce the carrying capacity of the land, and obstruct the watering and mustering of cattle. Sheep straying into these thorn thickets are likely to be trapped by their wool and will die. Parkinsonia aculeata was introduced into northern Australia from central America as a hedging plant in the late nineteenth century and has now taken over more than 800,000 hectares. Mesquite or Prosopis is the dominant genus in the vegetation of the semi-arid south-western United States, where its seeds formed the dietary staple of the indigenous peoples. The species that has colonised huge tracts in the Northern Territory is Prosopis pallida. Like the other Mesquite species, it is long-lived, with a taproot twenty metres long, and tolerates an enormous variety of cultural conditions. Prickly Acacia (Acacia nilotica ssp. indica) from Pakistan has spread from Queensland across northern Australia as far as the Kimberley. Cattle and most other herbivores readily eat the pods of these three species and excrete their seed undamaged; the occasional flooding that is typical of the Australian inland climate carries the seeds to every watershed in the top end.

Noogoora Burr, a species of Xanthium, is an exotic prickle bush that in its immature phase is poisonous to stock. It probably came to Australia in the 1870s as an accidental contaminant in shipments of cotton seed from the Mississippi delta; its common name recalls Noogoora Station in Queensland, where in 1897 200 hectares were found to be infested. If Don hadn’t found Noogoora Burr on his land in 2001 he may well have found it since, as it has travelled further along the watercourses deep into the territory. To control its spread in the Kimberley, all pastoral leases along the Fitzroy River, from Fitzroy Crossing to the river mouth, have been quarantined. Any traveller found ignoring the keep-out signs may be fined up to $1,000.

‘Don, you’re lucky not to have these weeds yet but, if Australians don’t wise up to what’s going on, you soon will. Landholders become conscious of these infestations only when they destroy the profitability of the land. By the same token, they’re not fighting them in places where the cost of eradication would exceed the production value of the land, which ultimately means that the weeds must win. We know that a handful of introductions can end up taking over millions of hectares, yet we think that destroying a few plants in one place while millions thrive elsewhere will somehow contain the problem. There’s no awareness that Australian biodiversity is in jeopardy.’

Don frowned. ‘What’s so good about biodiversity? Species that are better adapted to survival will replace species that aren’t. That’s how nature moves ahead surely. I don’t run dozens of different breeds of cattle, because there’s no point. I stick with the one breed that is best adapted to my conditions. Droughtmasters are quiet; they tolerate the heat; they’re highly fertile and calve easily. They inherited the best characteristics of the breeds that went into them, so I stick with them.’

‘That’s just it,’ I said, feeling a good deal less certain than I sounded, ‘you need the other species to get your hybrid. The Droughtmaster’s what? Brahman and what?’

‘Brahman gives you the heat- and drought-tolerance and Shorthorn or Devon and Shorthorn give you the other characteristics, more or less. The selection of the best strains goes on continually.’

I was a bit unsure of my ground, because these are breeds rather than species. ‘But you do see that you need to keep all that genetic variability or you’ll have nothing to breed from.’

‘The whole Devon breed is descended from one red bull and three red heifers that were taken to New England by the Pilgrim Fathers,’ said Don, with a grin. ‘If buffel grasses replace native grasses, it’ll be because they’re better grasses. Just as beef cattle replaced the bison. If spinifex tries to fight it out with buffel grass, buffel grass will win.’

I was silent, thinking about a valiant revegetation project that had been undertaken by schoolchildren just outside Alice. They had cleared a degraded road verge and planted a selection of native grasses and woody shrubs on it; a year later the whole site was supporting only two species, a buffel grass and Ruby Dock.

The next morning Janet and Don took me to see Delny. In the paddock between the house and the road, there was an old wooden mustering yard bleached silver by the sun, as well as a good deal of machinery quietly rusting down into a sea of overgrown buffel grass. The house stood on a distinct rise, which the floodwaters of the Bundey River never reached, judging by the soundness of the reinforced concrete shell that had been built around the original one-roomed stone house. In its time, the house design had been revolutionary. Rather than the ubiquitous pitched galvanised iron roof that would collect rainwater and channel it into freestanding tanks, the house had a flat roof that was dished so that rainwater would run into a shallow rectangular concrete tank built into the ceiling. Even without any glass in its tall louvred windows and without any water in the roof-tank, the house was cool and spacious, and full of the red mud nests of martins. I could see at once how you could extend it with open colonnades and enclosed courtyards, that would connect in a series of versatile breezeways, so you wouldn’t need air conditioning. There was ample scope for solar power, which Don was already using to run the bore pumps for his cattle troughs. The trees around the house were few and scrawny, a Hakea or two, a Mallee here and there, and something else growing out of what must once have been a septic tank. At first I thought it was a She-oak, but it was darker, denser, different. Beyond it, between the house and the invisible river, there were more.

That evening I e-mailed Jane a photograph of the mystery trees, and asked her what they were. She called back at once.

‘Tamarisks,’said Jane. ‘Tamarix aphylla, one of Australia’s worst tree weeds. You’d have to get rid of them.’

‘What’s wrong with Tamarisks?’

‘Everything. They put down a massive taproot that doesn’t branch until it reaches the water table, and then sends out hundreds of laterals, to suck up all the underground water that supports the native vegetation on our old watercourses in the dry season. They also absorb salt from the soil and then excrete it through their leaves. As the leaves fall the salt builds up on the surface of the soil. And they’re fire-prone. They’re a bloody disaster.’

‘Aren’t they some sort of pine?’

‘They look it and they’re sometimes called Athel Pines. Americans call them Saltcedars, but they’re angiosperms, in a family of their own, the Tamaricaceae. What look like needles on these ones are actually very small leaf-scales, which is why their species name is Tamarix aphylla. In 1930 somebody imported T. aphylla into Whyalla, for shade trees or something. At first it seemed ideally adapted to Australian conditions, so they planted it round Alice – for erosion control, I think. Now it’s infested 600 ks of the Finke River. The salinity of the water has increased twenty-fold.’

I told Don about the Tamarisks and the Finke River. He was silent for a few minutes. The Finke River is possibly the oldest watercourse in the world, and the Tamarisks are well on the way to killing it. At length he decided to reject my gloom and doom.

‘Well, what’s wrong with that? If the river gums can’t compete, it means they’re unfit. They won’t survive.’

I was aware that I was beginning to make a nuisance of myself. If I wanted Delny this wasn’t the way to get it. My face grew hot. I began unsteadily.

‘Fitness applies to a whole ecosystem, rather than a single species. If any single plant species becomes a monoculture, it becomes vulnerable. You only have to think about what happens in plantations. Without a very high level of disease-control inputs they collapse. If plant relations are out of balance with other factors, the eventual result will be a rampant monoculture and then annihilation by a combination of pathogens.’

‘And another species steps into the breach. That’s life.’

‘I don’t believe that biodiversity must inevitably be reduced. I don’t think that the end product of evolution will be the destruction of most species.’

‘What would you do about the Tamarisks?’ asked Janet.

‘I’d poison them.’

‘You can’t spray them because they’re on a watercourse.’

‘I know. I’d inject them, so they died nice and slow.’

‘Inject them?’

‘You drill into them just far enough to reach the cambium and then you put in the poison, undiluted glyphosate or maybe something nastier, whatever it takes. If we leave the trees to die and then gradually rot, we avoid causing more disturbance and destruction. But you’d have to be prepared to do it again and again, because Tamarisks will resprout if the huge root system is not entirely dead. And if the Tamarisks have caused salination, native vegetation might not be able to re-establish. We’d probably need a few good rains to wash the accumulated salt away.’

There was no time for further talk, because the helicopter had radioed that the cattle were coming in and it was all hands to the drive. The jackeroos and Don’s daughters were revving the engines of their trail bikes. Don was at the wheel of the Land Rover. I hopped in beside him. As the cattle came swinging through the trees we had to direct them towards the chute and into the muster yards, where they would be guided down different alleys into separate enclosures to be held until they were branded or branded and castrated. Dry cows went to one pen, to be eventually trucked away for slaughter, unless they were pregnant, when they stayed with the wet cows; unbranded steers went another way; branded ones were either let go, or sent to a holding pen to be collected when the cattle train came by. It was Don’s job to drive the Land Rover flat out through the scrub to head off any bulls that took it into their heads to lead their harems away from danger. I had barely time to strap myself in before we wheeled and went rocketing through the scrub after a huge brown bull. The transparent screen of vegetation fell before the four-wheel drive with little more than a creak and a sigh, as hootin’ and hollerin’ we came alongside the big bull and, sliding with all four wheels, broadsided him back into the drive. The kids on the trail bikes with their bandannas tied across their noses under their sunglasses to protect them from the dust shot in and out, yelling to us to follow on the track of the runaways. I found myself hanging out of the window, pounding on the side of the Land Rover, yelling ‘Come ORN’ to the white-eyed animals that snorted around us. It was great fun, I have to say.

What came next was not so much fun. One by one the unbranded steers were pushed along a narrow alley that ended in a sliding gate. The boys liked to get the frightened animals to move forward by twisting their tails up tight; the girls got the same result without. When the gate was slid back and the end steer popped out, he stepped into a steel clamp that was locked shut and lowered onto its side, so that the branding iron that was heating in the fire could be applied. As the red-hot iron hissed on its flank, the animal would scream in shock, terror and pain and all the others would join in. A smell of scorching skin and hair filled the dusty air. While the steer lay helpless amid the din and panic, one of the girls would slip up with a small sharp knife and swiftly remove its scrotum. Then the clamp was righted, the beast released and shooed off down another alley. I was taking all this in good part, because after all I am partial to Northern Territory beef, when a calf who was too small for the clamp to hold darted straight through it. The kids grabbed him. He flung his small brown body about so wildly, fought so hard and broke free so often, that they eventually gave up and let him go, a cleanskin, to be branded and castrated next time. Over and above the clamour of the branding came the cries of the wet cows, calling for their babies. They would go on uttering those terrible cries all night. One of the factors I had to take into account was that the Delny house stood within earshot of the mustering yards.

The next day I drove back to Alice with one of the girls who was going in for supplies. Just as we came up to the bend in the track at Delny, we caught sight of something hanging on the fence. It was a young kangaroo. She had caught a toe in the top strand of barbed wire as she was trying to leap over it; her body had swung down and smacked into the fence, while her weight twisted the top strand of wire round a lower one, trapping her by the foot. She had hung there upside down until she died. I’m not superstitious, but the kangaroo hanging crucified upside down like St Peter added to my impression of Delny as a difficult place for any animal, including me. By the time the four-wheel drive had left the sand track and climbed up onto the highway, I had decided that, regardless of any deal the Holts might offer, Delny was not for me.

Fresh out of ideas, I wandered into a real estate agency in Alice Springs, to ask one last time if they had any rural properties on the books.

The person who dealt with rural properties was Maureen O’Grady. ‘Well, there’s a mango farm up at Ti Tree,’ she said.

I knew about the mango farm, which had been on the market for months, with less than ten hectares and 1,000 mango trees for $260,000. The owners’ reason for wanting to sell it, that you can’t make money out of growing mangoes in central Australia, was everyone else’s reason for not wanting to buy it. Because the property had been ‘improved’, the price per hectare was exorbitant. There would have been no point whatever in paying such a high price for a piece of land only to turn it back into spinifex and sand.

‘Anything else?’

She shook her head. I wasn’t surprised. When graziers decide to surrender their leases the word is out on the bush telegraph long before any real estate dealer can get to hear of it. The agency, which had offices all over Australia, dealt in suburban properties, in brick veneer, manicured lawns, swimming pools and carports. The occasional hobby farm might show up from time to time, but that was it.

I was almost out the door when Maureen came running out of her office.

‘The lucerne farm! I forgot the lucerne farm!’

She thrust a prospectus into my hand. ‘Hugh River Holdings’ it said on the cover.

I knew the country well. The Hugh River is a broad channel of deep red sand between a double file of old Ghost Gums that crosses the Stuart Highway about ninety ks south of Alice Springs, at a place called Stuart’s Well, between the James Range and Chandler’s Range. Sometime in the Seventies a man called Noel Fullarton set up, just off the highway on the north bank of the Hugh River, what he called a ‘camel farm’, which became a must-see for passengers on every tourist vehicle travelling north or south. On the south side of the river is Jim’s Place, where you can get a snack and fuel or a room or a campsite, and enjoy the performance of Dinky the singing Dingo. Nobody ever mentions the chainwire-fenced enclosure or ‘sanctuary’ where trapped emus, wallabies and kangaroos wait for death, while the tourists video and photograph them. Australian animals react badly to captivity. The life expectancy of kangaroos and wallabies in cages is no more than a few weeks.

I slid into a seat in a pavement café, ordered a coffee and started to read the prospectus. The lucerne farm was directly opposite Jim’s Place, on the other side of the highway, behind an electric kangaroo-proof fence. What the owners were trying to sell was their business, which was raising boom-irrigated lucerne for fodder. The land had been acquired as an excision from the lease of the surrounding Orange Creek Station. Originally the owners had tried to grow the lucerne over two circles, but the existing bores didn’t draw down sufficient water for two circles so one had been shut down. By dint of being harvested twelve times a year the remaining circle produced 30,000 bales a year, to be sold at $8 a bale more or less, with production costs about half that. The prospectus made reference to ‘partnership problems’ and ‘lack of capital for further development’. What interested me was that the cultivation used only 32.4 of the property’s 135 hectares. I could buy the property, so solving the owners’ cash-flow problem, and lease the farm back to them. They could go on growing their lucerne, with me and my archive safely housed up the back in the foothills of the James Range, within an hour’s drive of Alice Springs airport. The asking price was $400,000, with a four-bedroom house, a large hay shed, an implement shed and various pumps, booms and what have you thrown in.

I tore down the Stuart Highway for a preliminary recce and then called Maureen. ‘Let’s go see them tomorrow morning, early, because I’ve got a flight out in the afternoon.’

We were at the farm for breakfast putting my proposition to the owners, who probably thought I was mad. Why anyone would sink so much money in a farm and then not farm it was a conundrum they couldn’t solve, but at length they understood that I was serious. Back at the office I made an offer, $350,000, cash. My flight to Darwin took off to the south; as we banked to turn northwards I could see the deep emerald-green disc of lucerne beyond the jagged crests of the James Range.

When I had finished reading the documents included with the prospectus I understood the situation rather better. The enterprise had been set up in 1982–3, when the property was still part of Orange Creek Station, and from the beginning it had been a struggle. The owners’ licence to extract water from the Mereenie Sandstone Aquifer originally covered four bores, each ninety metres deep. One had sanded up. Another was a ‘crooked hole’ in which a pumpshaft had broken off; both bore and pumping gear had been abandoned because the cost of retrieving the gear was uneconomic. The third bore was working; it was driven by a six-cylinder diesel motor housed in a steel shed which was open on one side. The fourth bore was pumped out by an identical motor, housed in a shed that was missing two sides. This was beginning to sound like a lot of noise battering the desert silence, and that was before I realised that the pivots were run by another four-cylinder generator that also served the house, a total of sixteen cylinders thudding away day and night. Twelve times a year there would have been the added commotion of the cutting and turning and baling of the lucerne, a fifty-four-hour process. The real reason the second circle was not being cultivated was because in 1991 the central pivot irrigator had been blown over and smashed, and the owners hadn’t had the money to repair it. As soon as they had money, it was London to a brick that the pivot irrigator would be repaired and the second circle brought into action. The thirty-three or so hectares under cultivation would become sixty-six. Or more.

The owners accepted my offer. Their lawyers immediately set about drawing up their lease, which was to be granted at the same time as I acquired the freehold. If I had been more clued up I’d have insisted on vacant possession, and then agreed the lease separately. In the meantime the situation had changed. Massive flooding in the channel country had suddenly increased the demand for hay, and prices had soared. The pressure was off the owners who began playing hard to get, and refused to reduce the area of land they would reserve for their own use. In September I came back to Alice to clinch the deal but it was already falling apart.

When I met Jane at the airport, she read my face.

‘You didn’t really want a hay farm, did you?’

‘One of the problems is that the back portion of land doesn’t extend far enough into the range. If I could get tucked into the hills I mightn’t hear so much of their noise; the way it is I reckon I’d get double the racket. I’d hear it first-hand and reflected back by the scarps as well.’

Jane nodded. ‘Thing is you’d be paying top dollar for the least valuable land, and at the same time you’re making it possible for the owners to extend their operations and further reduce the amenity. There has to be a better way of spending $350,000.’

Ever mindful of my sister’s common sense, I dropped the idea of the lucerne farm there and then. I was back where I started.

‘Can we do some tourist things? And some botanising?’ asked Jane.

We drove the Tanami road north to Yuendumu, came back and took the back road west to Haast’s Bluff. We did the gorges, Glen Helen, Redbank, Ormiston and Serpentine. We took Larapinta Drive to the Mereenie Loop and King’s Canyon. We drove down to Erldunda and turned west along the Lasseter Highway, past the carcass of a huge black steer that the night before had been standing in the middle of the unlit unpaved road, invisible to the woman driver who was approaching at speed. She died on impact. I renewed my vow never to drive unfenced cattle country by night as we made our way to Uluru.

When I first came to Uluru it was called Ayers Rock. In 1985 the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples (nowadays more often called Anangu) were granted the freehold of what had been an Aboriginal reserve; because they realised how many tourists were already visiting the site, the elders immediately leased it to the Director of National Parks and Wildlife, while they retain the right to live unmolested nearby in the Mutitjulu community. Because the site is important to many Aboriginal peoples who visit it periodically for special ceremonial observances, the elders have moved to limit the amount of intrusion. Some parts of the rock may not be photographed and others not visited by the uninitiated, but the elders have not yet felt able to forbid the climbing of the rock. Long ago steel posts were drilled into it to carry a chain handhold. Signs point out that the traditional owners would rather that tourists did not make the climb; others commemorate the people who have died on the rock, which for Aboriginal peoples is the worst desecration imaginable.

Jane and I walked the base of the great monolith, which always strikes me as one of the holiest places in the world. At its foot we found native grasses aplenty, Cymbopogon and Tripogon species, sedges of different sizes, spinifex, Emu Bushes of different species growing side by side, as well as different kinds of Cassias, Acacias and Eucalypts, depending on the soil type. Every aspect of the rock displayed different associations. As I walked along in the lee of the great rock I prayed through clenched teeth to the tutelary spirits for country of my own, but I knew even as I did it that there is no country in Australia that I could ever really call my own. I was knocking on the wrong door. I relieved my feelings by pulling out a clump of Ruby Dock. Some tourists, who saw me do it, protested loudly.

‘This is a weed,’ I said. ‘Pretty, if you like that sort of thing, but a weed.’ Just about everywhere the soil is disturbed in the inland, Ruby Dock, Acetosa vesicaria (better known to older botanists as Rumex vesicarius), moves in and takes over. In 1999 a group of mining companies invested $80,000 in developing a Ruby Dock management scheme, but I never heard that they got anywhere. I have seen Ruby Dock thriving along the track of the Trans-Australian Railway all the way across the Nullarbor, all through the Pilbara and in the heart of the Simpson Desert.

Back in Alice we visited the Desert Park, where for the first time I met Bush Stone-curlews (Burhinus grallarius) and wondered how well-behaved you would have to be to be allowed to live with such beguiling creatures. We checked our botanical identifications at the Botanical Gardens. We went down the old track of the Ghan, past the ruined stations of Polhill, Ooraminna and Rodinga, and took the sand track to Chambers Pillar, through some of the most floriferous uplands I have ever seen anywhere. For hours we photographed Isotomes, Wahlenbergias, Indigo, Smoke Bushes, Butterfly Bushes, Satiny Bluebushes, Smooth Spider Bush, Milkmaids, Parrot Peas, Sea Heaths, Parakeelyas, Olearias and Mint Bushes. The more we saw of the centre the more I longed to protect such brilliant galaxies of niche plants from the onward march of the exotics.

Back at our hotel I complained to Jane. ‘I think I’m just going to have to give up. We’ve been hunting for some land for me for more than two years, and there just isn’t any.’

‘How about one last shot?’ asked Jane.

‘Like what?’

‘The James Range is the sort of country you want, isn’t it?’

‘That, or something like it.’

Jane brandished the prospectus, where she had found an account of the original rescission of the lucerne farm from the parent property. ‘The James Range bisects the Orange Creek property. They’ve got a total of 560,000 acres, and they’re only running 3,000 to 3,500 head, so they’re certainly not using it all. Maybe they’ll let you have a bit.’

Jane made some calls; we drove back past Stuart’s Well for the umpteenth time, to the Orange Creek homestead. The muster helicopter was standing by, so they let the pilot take me up for a good look at the range. As we pulled up and away from the red-earth helipad, the livid green disc of the lucerne farm slid beneath us, and I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t mine.

‘What did you think?’ asked the grazier when I got back.

‘I love it.’

‘It’s a bit rugged.’

‘Rugged is good.’

‘You’d need to make an access road, and it’d have to be properly engineered. That comes out expensive these days, because you have to observe all the environmental regs about drainage and dust and run-off. A single kilometre of graded road costs thousands and you’d need a lot more than one, because you’d have the easement to do as well. If you want to stick a house in the range somewhere you have to think about availability of water and power, and getting someone to build it for you, way out there.’

Graziers’ houses are built as close as possible to main routes; only Aboriginal people deliberately choose outstations hidden in the hills. My mountain retreat would be the only thing of its kind in the centre.

‘I’ve got a builder who’s game.’

‘The real problem,’ said the grazier, ‘is getting land excised from the lease for your use. We could sublet to you, in theory, but you’d be mad to spend a lot of money improving land on my leasehold. I don’t want a house out there in the hills, so when your lease was up or when you wanted to move on, all your hard work and energy would just be left to rot back into the ground. I wouldn’t let you do it, even if I could without infringing the conditions of my lease.’

‘So what if you managed a freehold excision from the lease, the way the old owners of Orange Creek did with the lucerne farm?’ asked Jane.

‘That was for horticulture. The government is mad keen to develop horticulture in the centre. There’s a plan to make lots of freehold excisions of ten hectares each along the Finke and the Hugh, because there’s underground water really close to the surface, but the prices are going to be somewhere round $10,000 a hectare.’

‘That’s a lot of watermelon,’ said Jane.

I’d been told that the grazier had acquired his lease for less than $3 million.

‘What do you as the landholder make out of this?’ asked Jane.

‘Nothing. We water the cattle with bore water anyway, so we don’t really need the river frontage, and we can’t expect much in the way of compensation. We’d rather just hang on to the land, for conservation reasons apart from anything else.’

‘Would it be really expensive to arrange for an excision of really arid land, like the rangeland? That wouldn’t be anything like $10,000 a hectare, would it?’

‘What you have to understand is that for a freehold property to be created on land at present covered by crown leasehold, the lease has to be rescinded, while the boundaries are resurveyed and redrawn. It’s not worth doing, unless there’s a fair bit of money involved, because the legal costs will be high. You won’t find leaseholders prepared to do it at all if the potential winnings aren’t high, because there’s a risk involved.’

‘Native title,’ said Jane.

‘Exactly. As soon as a crown lease is rescinded, the land becomes vulnerable to a native claim. It wouldn’t necessarily be successful, but it’s practically certain to be made and defended. The lawyers have a field day. It costs everyone money, and you could end up with nothing.’

In the car on the way back to Alice, Jane said, ‘You wouldn’t contest the validity of any Aboriginal land claim, would you?’

‘No.’

‘Never? No matter what?’

‘Never. No matter what.’

‘So that’s that?’

‘That’s that.’

And that was that.