1999
The Evans were conservative farmers in the best sense. They had spent three generations cutting, burning and knocking down mallee like everyone else to plant wheat. But by the 1950s they were setting aside old growth, concerned about the loss of breeding habitat for parrots. In 1971, father Tom upset some in the district by stating the obvious – “the northern Murray Mallee is definitely marginal land due to the uncertain seasons”. In 1983 when they signed their Heritage Agreement, they were denigrated locally as “The Greenies”. But times have changed. As other States still grapple with – and largely fail to grasp – the nettle of land clearning, South Australia has moved on to set up a pioneering model of government and property owners cooperatively managing lands for production and conservation. For example, with significant patches of the Murray Mallee now protected under Heritage Agreements, John and his son Michael Evans are part of a group of 15 landowners who have joined together to control foxes, rabbits, feral cats – and protect the increasingly threatened mallee fowl.
I was 13 when I started really cutting. There were dozens and dozens of others that were doing exactly the same thing at the same age. Everyone had to do it for a living, that was the way it was. That was the time of the bad drought that started in 1943. All our draught horses had to be shot because there was no feed. Out of 850 sheep, all that came through was 200. We were cutting wood to pay the store bills, rent, and rates.
The best I ever cut was three ton in a day. My brother Les could cut quite a bit more than that, but don’t worry, we didn’t average that every day.
It was a pretty sickening job, especially when you were young. It wasn’t the sort of thing that you thought farming was all about, but still it had to be done. The whole district was on cutting wood. At that stage too, what we call the mallee stumps, or mallee roots, they became prime firewood. In previous years, there was no sale for the stumps – I’m going back to the early 1920s. A terrible lot had to be carted off the ploughed ground. People built horse yards, sheep yards, and even stables with stump walls to get rid of them. In the late 1940s when mallee stumps became valuable, a lot of those old stables and horse yards were pulled down and the stumps sold.
A lot of them just had to pack up and walk off. Most of those people that went, the community would get together and hold a dance and give them a farewell. The hat would be taken around and a collection taken up. They’ d be given whatever money they could collect, which wouldn’t amount to a lot, enough to get them a train fare to somewhere . . .
My grandfather had been in the country since the end of 1909. If you’re what I call a true person of the land, you develop a feeling for your property. I think that becomes instinct to you, to preserve what you think is the better part. You have to clear enough to be viable. We cleared what we thought was the least attractive part and retained anything that we thought had some historical value attached to it, plus for the bird life and especially the mallee fowl. We never, ever cleared any that had mallee fowl mounds that were active in it.
One of the main reasons that helped us decide not to clear first growth was the birds. We still had quite a lot of Major Mitchell cockatoos here and, of course, they nest in the hollow mallee. We have far more galahs than we would like. But there were also the ringnecks, the grass parrot, the blue bonnet [parrot]. Not a lot of the lorikeets, but there are some. And in some years – there haven’t been a lot in the last 10 or 15 years – the shell parrots [wild budgerigars] come down from the north. In the 1940s and 1950s, we had them here in the thousands and thousands, in mobs. When the season is dry in the north, they come down here to feed on the speargrass, on the seed. There’s been that many here that there wasn’t enough hollows to nest in, they’d fight over the hollows.
When he was first woodcutting, Evans remembers shell parrot eggs falling out of the hollow logs as they were loaded onto the railway wagons. He estimates some big old growth mallee trees to be at least 1000 years old. “I don’t really know, but just a feeling, the size of the stumps on them. They may even be older than that”. He’s seen regrowth mallee at least 100 years old showing no sign of developing hollows. “It might take 200 or 300 years.”
The year before he died in 1984, Tom Evans – along with his two sons, John and Les – signed the second ever Heritage Agreement on private land in South Australia. It bound the family – and subsequent owners – never to clear agreed areas on the property.
I know we were discussed by others in the district and perhaps looked upon as bits of fools, but that never worried me, because I had the same feeling in reciprocation. Because it was voluntary, it did cause a lot of controversy. We were dubbed ‘The Greenies’. It never came to blows, arguments, but it did create quite a bit of feeling. I think what it did cause was the sense that the writing was on the wall, that there was going to be control put on land clearance. They felt it was their right to do as they wanted with the properties. Our opinion was that we were only leasing the land, we weren’t the sole owners and no one ever will be.
It was through my father’s influence that we realised that we didn’t live forever, that there would be other generations who would have the land and if someone didn’t start preserving parts of it, eventually we would have nothing to show what it was like when white man first saw it. Apart from the conservation side of it, there were areas that should never have been cleared. The land was too fragile.
The People’s Forest: A Living History of the Australian Bush, Gregg Borschmann (ed.),
The People’s Forest Press Foundation Ltd, Blackheath, NSW, 1999