35 The Inland Starts Here Part 1
Amanda spends a few days hanging out in station country with the Jones. The land of Boogardie Station, out of Mt Magnet, is getting a restorative and rehydrating make-over. At the same time as a wild dog and grazing-animal proof hub is being constructed with neighbouring stations, the brothers are introducing erosion control through the use of earthworks. All they need is for the coming hot months to produce a cyclonic strength rain event to test their landscaping efforts…..
HEADING FOR STATION COUNTRY
On the way to visit the Jones I took a picture of the sign that is on the road to Yalgoo about 120ks short of the town of Mt Magnet and my destination, Boogardie Station. It reads THE OUTBACK STARTS HERE. And it does. As the last miserable looking agricultural paddocks with their stunted crops recede in the rear-view mirror, and Pindar, the old railway siding with its big old granaries is behind us, the dirt is red.
We’re in mulga country.
KIM MAHOOD
At the time of this journey I had been immersed in Kim Mahood’s book, Craft for a Dry Lake where the author revisits Mongrel Downs, a pastoral lease founded by her family in the Tanami Desert near the WA and Northern Territory border. It is a memoir and a travel tale of a woman trying to come to terms with her relationship with her father, to the land and to the First Nations people who belonged to this part of the desert.
The sign, improved and updated
Kim grapples with the concepts of the ‘Outback’ versus the ’ Inland’, describing them as ‘myths of extroversion or introversion…both being deeply embedded in the cultural psyche of this country…..’
She points out that the extrovert myth, reflected in the word ‘Outback’ is currently out of favour, being subjected to the scrutiny of post-colonial interpretation.
For whitefellas the Outback is the land of the brave pioneer, the world of the explorer…the Inland, on the other hand, speaks of the journey inward, the search for the sacred that is apparent in sense of space, an extraordinary silence, and the vastness of a land lying still under a clear blue sky.
WHITEFELLA COUNTRY?
Of the two, the’ Inland’ has more relevance for me. Every time I pass this sign I feel like defacing it – now I know I could institute a gentle sort of vandalism, I would merely change THE OUTBACK to THE INLAND starts here - give the tourists a bit of a different slant on things.
Kim notes, and this was the point that made me sit up: this introvert myth is still intact, but is becoming progressively confused and conflated with the Aboriginal attachment to country.
I can relate to that. Whitefellas simply don’t have the language, do we? We have taken so much from First Nations’ people, that for Whitefellas to appropriate the language of custodianship, at least without the support and invitation of First Nations people, is beyond the pale. The Noongar word for land, for example is boodja – the same word that is used for a pregnant woman. This is not the way non-indigenous tend to express connection to land, we cannot claim 50,000 years of continual occupation bound by intricate networks formed in relationship to every aspect of this country. In fact, contemporary Western culture, the language and pathways of economic growth and progress seem designed to keep us separate from, rather than part of, the natural world.
AND YET
And yet – how to articulate the powerful pull this land has on its inhabitants, those who have lived here since the early 1800s and those who have arrived since then?
At Boogardie Station there is no ‘outback’, or ‘inland’ and any talk of ‘post-colonial interpretations’ or the like will be met with a sceptical silence. Here there are thousands of acres of mulga country that Henry and John Jones call home - along with brother Paul and his wife, their mother Josie and a roving band of nephews and nieces. They are the fourth generation to inhabit Boogardie – breaking news – Josie has just got her first grandchild, make that five generations - it is in their blood and it is hard to imagine them thriving anywhere else.
THE HUB
Henry and John are involved with a fencing program that involves Boogardie and three other adjoining stations in the Shires of Yalgoo and Mt Magnet. There is Murram Station, also owned by the Jones, Edah Station, owned by the Nicholls brothers, and Mumbinia, a small station sandwiched in between Murrum and Boogardie that has long been in the hands of the Morrisey family.
This small group, with the help of Rangeland consultant Greg Brennan and Kane Watson (at the time, working for Rangelands NRM) talked the Department of Primary Industries and Resource Development out of enough money to buy the materials required to build 180 kms of dog proof fences around a 230,00 hectare cell formed by enclosing parts of these four stations. The deal was the Government paid for the materials if they did the work to build the fence.
From Henry’s brief: The proposal is about demonstrating, on a commercial scale, cost effective methods of using cell fencing to control wild dogs. And…it is about demonstrating that rangeland condition can be improved while maintaining a profitable pastoral business.
Plan for The Hub on the wall in Henry’s camp
THE HUB AND THE WHEEL
Henry calls the area to be fenced a Hub, and uses the analogy of a bicycle wheel to describe how this hub sits in the centre of a bigger circle created by the State barrier fence. I checked out this larger fence online and found that it describes a 480km diameter fence - or it will, when it is finished.
This State barrier fence is run by a statuary body set up in 1963 to look after the original n rabbit proof fence that was completed in 1907. Without getting stuck on its long history– it seems we are onto the third extension of this vermin proof fence and about 100 kms of the proposed 480km length has been built.
Henry sees the four-station Hub as being complimentary to, and not in competition with, this State fence. The fact that the Government gave Henry and his cohorts the money to build their Hub might seem to back the thought that they approve this idea and plan to allocate money to finish the outer barrier. Some pastoralists have long been agitating for the finances to complete this leg of the fence. So far, the lack of Government action in this space has led to accusations that the Southern Rangelands has been written off as an economic basket case by successive governments. With some justification.
Maybe Henry and his cohorts’ argument that public funding will increase the pastoral industry’s capacity to attract private investment has been taken seriously? The Hub and the outer fence will as Henry explains ‘be cost effective by simply being a physical barrier for pastoralists to build from in the first instance’.
He continues the bicycle wheel analogy by drawing hypothetical spokes of the wheel between the Hub and the outer State barrier fence. The 53 station owners enclosed by the State barrier will certainly find it easier and cheaper to be able to build off the inner and outer ring , creating their own small cells, thereby investing in their own futures.
WHAT IS POSSIBLE IN THE RANGELANDS
Is it possible to run a regenerative sheep business on this country? Henry is convinced the potential is there. The theory is that by controlling grazing pressure as well as the dog population, proper monitoring can be done and ecological repair tackled. Wild dog predation has created a downward spiral of the existing pastoral businesses that have, as Henry writes in his brief ‘gradually been beaten down to a state of negligible income and little cash reserves.’
The Hub is a demonstration of what can be achieved by a small group of highly motivated pastoral owners if they are backed by public money. The men at Boogardie and Edah bring a different mindset to the Rangelands. Times have changed and this generation has had the opportunity to access a lot of new thinking and understanding around issues like grazing pressure, sheep nutrition, water function and erosion control – they need support to change direction.
THE BUILDING OF THE HUB
The 100 kms of fence of the proposed 180 km hub that the Jones men, along with the Edah crew have already completed since they started in 2017, is a thing of beauty. John is a meticulous craftsman. Trained as a carpenter he is equally at home with most construction and the kilometres of fence he is in charge of are a solid achievement. I was particularly taken with some lengths of fence that have an added curtain of chicken wire at their base and have been constructed to swing out to release large amounts of plant debris pushed up against the base by flooding water. Apparently, this is an innovation that is popping up in other parts of the Rangelands – John made no claim for originality but has fashioned his own version of the idea – a clever and functional solution to the particular conditions that occur in this area.
Henry demonstrates John’s swinging fence
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Now we get to the heart of the matter. Alongside this fence run the roads, the arteries of station life, and it is in the remaking of these roads where the meat of this story lies. It is about seeing the land with new eyes, dealing with historical damage and developing a project that has the capacity to reverse the ecological, social and economic decline that has kept the Southern Rangelands pastoral industry on its knees.
CHANGING ATTITUDES
I asked Henry to track how he had come to understand the land differently. He said it had been clear to him that there were problems – but he didn’t see any solutions – an uncomfortable space to dwell in.
Henry recognises a new consciousness started stalking the land from the early 2000’s when he and other pastoralist were offered workshops with renowned landscape ecologists Hugh Pringle and Ken Tinley. Their insights into land management are captured in a system called Ecosystem Management Understanding (EMU).
David Pollock in his book The Wooleen Way also credits meeting Hugh and Ken at these workshops as a step towards his education in landscape literacy. He wrote that this was the first time many pastoralists had been exposed to a deep understanding of some of the landscape processes that hold the land together and make it productive in the long term. ‘ p82
There was certainly something stirring in the Agricultural and Pastoral scenes at this time. Peter Andrews’ work on hydrological processes was getting nation-wide traction and Henry and John started reading, talking, sharing information and attending workshops that kept asking questions of established management techniques to do with Rangelands operations.
EYES OPENED
Henry credits Hugh with opening his eyes to the land. These new ideas triggered him to carry out his own research and he started to study the landscape; learning to decipher what exposed rocks, the patterns left by leaf litter, the small indents in the earth, the little steps in the soil, could tell him about how water flows across the land. These signs were indicators about where to start the work that would help the water to slow down and become a productive and creative, rather than a destructive force.
Soon after, Henry and John started using scrub packing in some of the worst gullies to try and take the sting out of the water flow – but found that this ultimately had little effect in the face of strong rain. Tougher measures were needed.
REAL-EYES-ATION
When I was at Edah Station I spent a few days with Dr Hugh Pringle and a bunch of locals. I can testify to the effect seeing the land with new eyes can have. For the first time I saw erosion, not as something that came with the territory, but as something that humans create when they build roads, fences and other infrastructure without understanding the way our landscape functions.
This kind of knowledge is galvanising – it wakes you up and is not something you go backwards from. A small example: looking at the head of a gully, I had assumed the water rushed up the gully and swished back on itself to dig deeper into the landscape – I had it backwards. The water flows from the opposite direction, coming from higher ground, not always easy to see with untrained eyes on a vast plain. It drops off into what start as small indents or marks in the land, roils around, and digs deeper into the channel, gaining speed and energy from the drop as it flows on.
Head of a gully (with the water coming from the top of the picture to drop into the gully)
It occurs to me now that I might have noticed this before if I had stood in the rain often enough and actually watched the way the water moved – but– I do have numerous examples of my ability to not see the truth of a matter. When a mind is burbling happily along untroubled cultural pathways there are basic questions that you simply never think to ask, until something or someone wakes you up. Paradigm shift.
KILLING TWO BIRDS
The man who really kick-started Henry and John’s passion for fixing landscape function was a bloke called Col Stanton from Alice Springs. A few years ago, Col was booked to come to Boogardie to spend a week with the Jones and interested locals working with heavy machinery to tackle erosion.
Scoured land
Just before Col Stanton turned up to run his workshop the Jones’ had been pouring over maps trying to decide which of the many eroded zones would be best to work with. It all fell beautifully into place when the brothers realised they could bring the Hub project into line as well as tackle erosion by concentrating on rebuilding the fence and the back road running along the fence, between Boogardie and Murrum Station.
The Jones had bought the lease to Murrum some years before. The dirt road connecting the two stations is a crucial artery for their sheep business and is also the quickest route to the bitumen road that heads west to the coast. It has borne traffic from the earliest days of the horse drawn and camel wagons to the Toyota 4-wheel drives of contemporary ties.
OLD MINDSETS
The scarring in the land created by years of use of this old station track is a clear example of the old mindset. Up until the last generation, the thinking was that a road was created where it was needed by clearing away the bush with the hope that it would last at least two or three decades. Over time these bush tracks became marked with wheel ruts from the regular traffic. These ruts would fill with water and get severely cut up by vehicles attempting to swerve around the boggy bits and sinking into the softened sand near the gauged earth. These trouble spots are easy to see and lie logically at the lowest points in the land.
BASIC PRINCIPLES
As Henry and John spent time with Col they learnt a basic principle. The worst erosion, like these wheel ruts, manifests at the lowest point in the landscape. The solution was not to intervene at these points but to start at the highest spot above the problem area - which might be hundreds of metres away. The rain hits the top of the slope and starts its downward run - this is where the remedial work needs to start.
SOIL AND HUMAN HEALING
It’s been a while since I drew a comparison between soil and human health. This is an irresistible opportunity for a segue-way. There are synergies between intuitive and complementary health techniques concerned with human health and the type of land rehydration work the Jones’ are doing. In energy medicine, the pathway from perfect health to dis-ease or imbalance in the body is seen as one of ‘downward causation’.
As the harm starts high in the land, so it starts ‘high’ (I’m using air quotes) in the human body, in our mental state. Our senses are the way we perceive life, these perceptions feed the mental filters established by our unique life experiences, that feed our belief systems and associated attitudes. With both land and human health, the theory is that you can be most effective by intervening or influencing events at the causal point, which for humans is at the mental level, before the physical symptoms have a chance to become chronic. End of segue-way.
And end of Part 1. Next week, we’ll hop into the work the Jones have been doing in more detail and connect more dots in this story of regeneration and rehydration. And here’s some homework should you choose to accept it. Get a hold of The Wooleen Way by Dave Pollock and read it – it details the problems faced by pastoralists; AND provides practical solutions that will ultimately be of benefit for all Western Australians.
Henry Jones
