2003
Native forests, broken up by grazing land, surround the town. The forests are of the open-woodland dry sclerophyll variety in which brittle gum and red stringybark are the dominant species. There is an understorey of native shrubs and grasses. Red gum dominates on the hard rocky ridges, and white box and long-leaved box grow on the steep hill slopes that run south of the town down towards the Turon River. There is a small patch of savannah-type woodland on Bald Hill, where long-leaved box and red box grow.
Notwithstanding the sense of natural equilibrium and timeless continuities that the forests convey, they are in fact largely regrowth forests. The mallee-type growth form adopted by many of the eucalypts, with clumps of multiple trunks, is the result of continual cutting back of trees during the gold rushes. The district was heavily timbered before the discovery of gold, but by 1872 the forests around Hill End had been cleared for building (timber slabs for walls, wattle and mud for filling, and stringybark for roofing), to line mine shafts and tunnels, and to fuel the Cornish boilers that powered the stamper batteries. Deforestation became so severe by the early twentieth century that even miners – with an eye to long-term supply – voiced alarm at the wholesale ‘destruction of timber’ on the tablelands and along the Macquarie and Turon Rivers. The Hill End council recommended tighter controls, warning that all the remaining stands of timber near the town were being destroyed . . .
Not only does the legacy of mining endanger people, it continues to degrade the landscape itself. Most of the local district is characterised by mild to severe sheet erosion, and severe gully erosion. The former has been exacerbated by grazing, the latter by mining. Erosion has scoured out gullies to depths of 15 metres and more in some places. Russell Drysdale’s photographs and paintings of Hill End during the late 1940s and Donald Friend’s diary sketches of the town during 1948, starkly reveal the severity of gully erosion at Hill End in the middle of the twentieth century. The alarming scale of this erosion was confirmed in a series of state government photographs, taken in 1952 as part of its soil conservation programme. Friend’s oil painting Hill End Landscape (c. 1951) probed this eroded landscape with spectacular effect, as did later works by Jean Bellette and Paul Haefliger during the 1950s, David Strachan during the 1960s, and – perhaps most evocatively of all – Brett Whiteley during the 1980s. It was estimated in 1981 that erosion had removed over a million tonnes of soil from the main mining areas around Hill End.
European weeds have colonised the mullock heaps and cleared ground. Gorse is widespread. Blackberries grow rampant around the shafts and grey mullock piles of the old Cornelian and Patriarch Mines. In mid summer signs warn: ‘NPWS / Blackberry spraying in progress / DO NOT PICK’.
Measures to control the spread of blackberries can be traced back to at least the early twentieth century. Complaints about thistles growing in the streets and allotments, and council orders to property holders to have them cut down, had been common since the 1880s.
Introduced fauna has also significantly affected the Hill End environment. Sheep and cattle exert the most profound and widespread impact, closely rivalled by rabbits. Foxes and wild goats are also endemic. Indeed, efforts to control goats date back to the late nineteenth century . . .
Prospecting on its own could not sustain a family. Subsistence mining combined the quest for gold with odd jobs around the district, and rabbiting. The rabbit industry emerged from the Depression as a core element of Hill End’s local economy, and remained so for some twenty years. Its eventual decline during the 1950s, a casualty of spreading myxomatosis virus, was a major blow to Hill End’s subsistence economy. Rabbiting significantly augmented prospectors’ earnings. Digger Hocking, who started rabbiting in 1927 when aged seventeen, remembers, ‘In good years they could put enough aside during the season to help them over the rest of [the] year.’ It provided a welcome second income for wage earners. Cud Denman, who earned a wage as a truck driver after the Depression, doubled as a rabbiter: ‘On wages you were lucky to get £4 per week in those times. Rabbits when they were good would make you £60-£70 per week. No tax[;] you sold them as Bob Menzies, Ben Chifley or anybody’s name.’ Rabbiting was also a shot in the arm for local farmers. When wool prices were low, many graziers kept their properties going by trapping. Ronald Kimm, who helped his father Billy run a small sheep farm, recalled that during the Depression ‘It was the rabbits that kept us alive’.
Hill End: An Historic Australian Goldfields Landscape,
Melbourne University Press, 2003