Mona Henry

1988

During our first few nights in Birdsville, we saw rats in the hospital, half a dozen or so, each night. They were not the domestic variety – they were wild bush rats, which multiplied during good seasons.

One night, instead of the usual half dozen, they arrived in hundreds, and swarmed through the building. They ate their through the wooden laundry door, as though it were cheese. It was the only wooden door on the outside of the building. A sympathetic neighbour nailed a piece of tin across the base of the door, but it was time wasted. The rats burrowed under the iron, and continued their nibbling on the wooden door.

Having gained entrance through the laundry, they proceeded to eat everything edible, in their eyes. They knocked tins off the pantry shelf, usually loosening the lids. They ate their way into the linen press, and even into our wardrobes. They ate soap, and even the labels off the bottles. My new felt slippers, left under the bed overnight, had large holes eaten in them by morning. Lillian’s new leather shoes had a hole the size of a shilling in one toe.

Sitting in the lounge at night, we had our feet bitten, especially if we wore toeless sandals. Drovers and stockmen were frequently outpatients, having treatment for infected rat bites. One man, leaving his dentures in a cup overnight, found them missing in the morning.

The old hands told us that the rat plagues followed two or three good seasons. This was the third good season, and the second year in succession, that the Cooper had run into Lake Eyre, covering the Birdsville-Maree Track for the second time in thirty years. According to Butcher, the last severe rat plague was during his childhood some sixty odd years ago.

The local residents and the station folk, trapped the rats in 44 gallon drums half buried in the ground.They placed wheat in the bottom of the drums, and in this way caught hundred each night. The next night there would be hundreds more to replace them.

The small patches of grass growing around the rain water tanks, disappeared overnight. We heard the rats digging among the roots – the noise they made was like a herd of goats grazing. In the morning the ground had the appearance of a ploughed field. There remained not even a root, and the grass never grew there again, during our stay . . .

At first we shrank from the rats, not daring to attempt to kill them, but as their numbers increased, we realized that we would have to try and reduce them. We protected the baby’s cot with a wire gauze cover, made by the newly arrived police sergeant, Sg’t Barlow . . .

We made no further attemps to eradicate them, until the rat traps arrived. Then, open warfare was waged once more. We set traps at all entrances from the laundry inward, and caught an average of twenty per night. This would be an hour’s catch. At first we left the traps set overnight, until we discovered that the rats caught in the traps, were eaten by their cannibalistic companions . . .

Tom, ever ready to give advice, was only too pleased to offer suggestions.

“Chuck ’em to the crows,” he said, “They’ll get rid of ’em quick smart.”

We were rather doubtful of his advice, but could find no alternative; so the rats were thrown on to the gibbers over the fence. Five minutes later, we witnessed an astonishing sight. From out of the sky, dozens of hawks and crows appeared, diving toward the rats as though they were magnets. In five minutes, there was not a rat to be seen – only a cloud of birds flying overhead, on the alert for anything they could scavenge.

I hated those birds, particularly the crows, which ate the hens’ eggs, and fought the fowls for their food. They picked the eyes out of goat kids, straying from the herd, and made miserable the life of any calf mauled by dingoes. Their cruelty, their raucous squawks, and their squabbles with the fowls, were a constant source of irritation.

“If them crows are annoying you, I’ll get rid of them,” said Tom.

After a conversation with one of his visitors, he informed us that he had “fixed them crows”. Some time later, we saw his visitor hang a dead crow on the fowl yard fence.

Half-an-hour later, every crow in the district was there. They covered the fence, and the ground became a black, wailing mass of crows. Gone were the short, raucous squawks. In their place, was a long, wailing dirge, ending on a lower key. The crows, no longer squabbling with the fowls, fluttered around the dead bird, or stood with wings outspread, as they sang their mournful requiem.

Hour after hour the dirge continued. I realized with a feeling of guilt, that these birds could show more tenderness to their own kind, than many of our own race.

As the day wore on, and the numbers increased in the feathered choir, I regretted my rashness in accepting Tom’s offer to “fix them crows”. If the squawks had been irritating, the wails were even more so.

I began to rehearse my next conversation with the practical joker, who had invited every crow in the district to spend the day with us. The speech I prepared, was guaranteed to wipe the joyful smile from his face. When delivered to Tom, it should also have the same effect. However, before I had a chance to do so, the wailing ceased. I looked across at the fowlyard, and saw only the dead bird. The crows had vanished in a black cloud, leaving only their dead comrade, hanging on the fence.

It was weeks before they returned to the fowlyard. It seemed as though the place was haunted by the spirit of their dead . . .

Lillian and I, after that first demonstration of the crows as garbage removers, decided that we no longer required their services. As a goodwill gesture, we donated our rats to a citizen, to use as a fertilizer for the roots of his young shade trees.

He received a good deal of fertilizer before the rat plague subsided. After some months, when they had eaten bare the countryside, we found blind and semi-comatose rats in odd corners and crannies. Finally they disappeared overnight.

What havoc they wrought during their stay! What devastation they left in their wake! The channels of the Diamantina, once covered with lush green herbage, were bare, even the roots of the hardy drought-resisting plants being destroyed. The rat plague was partially responsible for the heavy stock losses, during the drought which followed their departure . . .

At that time, nearly nineteen months ago, Mayfield had been surrounded by water, and five thousand sheep lay drowned in the paddocks.

Now, as the plane circled the homestead, I saw the parched earth, patterned with gaping cracks, winding across its surface. The Cooper channels had long since dried into bogs, while a tangled mass of grass and lignum lined its banks. The rats had not crossed the Cooper, so the vegetation had grown undisturbed, during that first year of heavy rain.

Now it was thick and long, but dry as tinder. It needed only a flash of lightning to set the country aflame for hundreds of miles. This happened a few days before my arrival, and the fire was still raging.

The unfortunate animals ringed on all sides by fire, died by the thousand. When the fire passed, leaving only the charred remains of vegetation, many sheep were standing, still alive, with their thick wool gradually smouldering away. It was a pitiful sight, as they stood with their eyes closed, waiting for merciful death.

The kangaroos, blinded and burned black, stumbled and rolled, as they moved aimlessly over the blackened earth. The horses maddened by fear and pain, did not have the lingering death of the other animals. They crashed into gullies and fences, and many of them broke their necks. The valuable stud horses and polo ponies, in their especially reserved paddock, all lost their lives in the flaming horror let loose amongst them. A fire is truly a terrible enemy . . .

Joe and I became firm friends, and he told me many stories of the past. He also passed on to me, some of Nature’s weather signs. These aboriginal observations, according to the inlanders, are infallible.

According to Joe, the birds would meet high in the trees or on high ground, well above flood level, if much rain were to follow. Similarly, swallows and other birds nesting low in the mudbanks of the river channels, were a sure sign of drought. The instincts of the birds, warned them of the height of the next flood levels.

Wild ducks, usually nesting along the river banks, would, before a heavy flood, build their nests up to seven miles from the channels. As infallible were their instincts that the floodwaters would be a few yards from the nests, when the ducklings were ready to swim.

The flood bird, similarly, was regarded as an infallible sign of approaching floods. Inlanders, hearing its harsh cry, would expect water in the channels within a short time. Though there may be no rain in the district, the flood bird, travelling from the head of the river, would screech its warning of the approaching floodwaters.