Busting the Toad Busters

 There are shades of guava pink in the clouds at dusk tonight and you can be satisfied just by looking at the Kununurra ridgelines. But it is not all sweetness and light in the Kimberley, not all sunsets and G-and-Ts. There is a tension here in the frontier air, and it seems as if history is repeating itself, that mistakes of other times and places are happening here now. The specifics and people are different but there is unnecessary conflict due to misunderstanding and lack of respect for history. For when the sun goes down, when darkness comes, we will be out looking for cane toads and the satisfaction of this moment will seem a lifetime away. This is work we should never have had to do if others had read their history books and governments did what was asked of them. It is conservation work that no amount of G-and-Ts will soothe.

I am not a misplaced urbanite in search of some romanticised noble savagery. I am just a community member lamenting government mismanagement, anti-democratic not-for-profit organisations (NFP) and a lack of citizen support. And it has led me to ask—what has happened to my beloved Australia?

My family has had a connection to the Kimberley for fifty years. My aunt and uncle had the first pastoral lease on a Gibb River Road station—Beverly Springs. My uncle named it after his sister when he returned from the Second World War. He met my aunt when she was working for a regional airline. It was a time when men were decent and respectful and air hostesses were glamorous and well treated. It was nothing like the fly-in-fly-out culture of today where men are drunk on a Monday morning and air hostesses mince sullenly around the cabin arguing with passengers.

My uncle put my aunt on a horse behind him and they rode for three days to get to their station. It was a brave decision for both of them and they worked the land up here for twenty years. He was often out bush for months at a time tending their cattle and crossing vast tracts of land while she stayed at home baking bread from scratch for the ringers that came in. They built their own houses—three times because of two big wet seasons—and made do with what passed through. It was back-breaking work and it sent them broke. They returned to Perth and he retrained as a welder to see the kids through school. When they won $10,000 in the lottery they bought a caravan and breathed a sigh of relief. Their first trip was back to the station, back to the Kimberley where they first fell in love. My cousins and I have been up this way on several occasions. And two of us have been here longer-term.

But compared to the Scott Virtues we are but fresh blood to the frontier, and compared to Mr Ben Scott Virtue we are but city kids. The Scott Virtues are a formidable Australian family. On his mother’s side—the Scotts—Mr Scott Virtue can trace a direct line from Mary Queen of Scots down to settlers along the Blackwood and Scott Rivers in the early days of the West Australian colony. Mr Scott Virtue’s mother, Lee, has continued in that pioneering spirit—three degrees in archaeology, the first tourism operator in the Bungle Bungles and a single mother who raised three sons in Fiji, Samoa and all across Australia.

Mr Scott Virtue, her eldest son, tells a story that encapsulates their relationship. When he was a boy his mother took him on a walk through Lake Mungo and he tripped on a stone axe. That axe was 37,000 years old and is now displayed in the National Museum. It is from his mother then that Mr Scott Virtue has inherited an enviable sense of adventure and place. And since tripping on that axe he has caught crocodiles with Malcolm Douglas, almost died from king brown snakebites and once covered himself in spiders to overcome his arachnophobia. In addition to a vast knowledge of the natural world Mr Scott Virtue has inherited a sense of playful performance from his father, who runs the Warrandyte Arts Association, along with roguish good looks. Given these talents he would make a better than Bear Grylls adventure conservationist with a sense of larrikin humour to boot. If I was from Hollywood I would hire him in a second and tell Baz Luhrman to keep Hugh Jackman.

Mrs Scott Virtue is the kind of woman that built Australia and her son is part of a dying breed of true Australian bushman. And since 2005, they have been running Kimberley Toad Busters (KTB)—the only on-the-ground organisation dedicated to stopping the cane toad. At their main depot in Kununurra there is Australian-made recycled paper in the printing tray, photos of native mammals and frogs on the walls, dot paintings, and a host of awards on the book shelves. These include two Banksia Awards and a 2010 United Nations World Environment Day Award. On the surface it resembles a “green activist” office, but it is decidedly not one. For it is an efficient, pragmatic outfit that genuinely cares for country and community, rather than being a hysterical ego-driven machine that prefers advertising itself to a latte lifestyle set in East Brunswick for want of good poetry. KTB does not leverage a minority of votes into legislation, does not simply lobby and complain to government to do the job. KTB is doing the job of government here instead, doing the work rangers from the Department of Environment and Conservation are supposed to do.

KTB busts toads every night along an expanding frontline that extends for a thousand kilometres from Cleanskin Bore in the north to Nelson Springs in the south along the Western Australia–Northern Territory border. This front line takes in Keep River National Park and Lark Argyle. Like a general fighting a forgotten war Mr Scott Virtue points out current hotspots on a wall map to his volunteers: grey nomads who stay for a couple of days; long-haired, long-sleeping backpackers in search of a free camp, but who should be recognised for giving it a go; various offenders performing community service (and for which KTB receives no compensation); and a number of very committed locals. KTB has even had federal MP Mr Barry Haas out here until 3 a.m. with torch in hand catching toads near waterholes and rivers.

That is the basic nightly work of KTB—we catch and bag cane toads and their metamorphs, gas them, record how many have been caught, and bury them.

In addition to these nightly busts, KTB runs three programs. The first is their “Iconic Species” program, which is dedicated to pioneering world-class biodiversity research. Its data has been shared freely and used by a number of university academics such as Sean Doody and Jeremy Russell Smith. Mrs Scott Virtue complains that some academics have failed to credit KTB and have placed too much emphasis on “peer review proofs” rather than local work. The second program is “What’s in Your Backyard?” which engages local schools and educates people on how to deal with cane toads when they arrive in their community. The third is the “Nicholson Station Rejuvenation” project, which aims to resuscitate an icon from Australian pastoral days to its former glory. Like running a station then, it is all hard grass-roots graft from the ground up. In the words of Mr Scott Virtue, “We are not simply pushing shit uphill, but nailing diarrhoea to a wall.” This is because of the way the cane toad debate has been handled politically. The bureaucratic processes surrounding it defy belief. And this is where it seems as if history is repeating itself in the Kimberley today.

I was asked to accompany the Scott Virtues to a Cane Toad Stakeholder Response Group (SRG) meeting on October 29 hosted by the West Australian Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC). In retrospect it was a dubious invitation, though to be fair the perils of such a meeting were indicated to me beforehand. The meeting was notionally chaired by DEC’s Mr Daryl Moncrieff—a mid-level manager straight from Yes, Minister who took seven phone calls during this hour-and-a-half meeting. He looked as if he had never seen sunlight, and was the opposite of the Australian ruggedness and settled-in sense of self of the Scott Virtues. Yet it would be too easy to dismiss him as an irrelevancy. He controls huge amounts of our tax dollars.

What was once a dedicated government effort at conservation has become a process-obsessed obstructionist exercise. For example, DEC recently spent $10,000 retraining a dog and handler whose intended use was to check for hitchhiker toads on freight loads. The concern is that the handler has taken a new position and so the dog is simply out of work. Moreover, there are limitations on the practical uses of this dog because it can only access freight that stops in Kununurra. So, if a truck is bringing produce into Western Australia, from say Darwin to Broome, it could be carrying toads that no one picks up for the length of its journey because it does not stop in the Kununurra depot. This government initiative is now a feel-good PR exercise not worth its weight in toads.

In addition, DEC has used KTB data and co-opted the strategy plan of Stop the Toads (another NFP). In fact at the SRG Mr Moncrieff’s deputy, Ms Corrin Everitt, gave a presentation on behalf of the Perth-based Stop the Toads, who were unable to attend. Although KTB’s major complaint is about government processes, they are also critical of Stop the Toads. Stop the Toads’ approach has not been responsive to history, for they advocate the use of fences. Fences have never worked for invasive species—not for cats, foxes or rabbits. Australia has wasted millions of dollars and lost countless beautiful native species because of the opportunity cost involved in them. Moreover, in the words of Mr Scott Virtue, “Cane toads differ from most other ferals in how they travel along water corridors. At least a cat is on land and you can eat it when the going gets tough, but you would need a lot of glass to close any waterhole off from a toad.” It is not simply that KTB differs from Stop the Toads in their approach, it is that they cannot understand why the government has given preferential treatment including presentations at SRG meetings and free labour regarding fence maintenance to an NFP that only began its operations this year.

If the DEC had presented on behalf of Wesfarmers you can guarantee Bob Brown would have commissioned a Senate inquiry into the incident before he could tweet a victory gloat to his troops at Salamanca market. As it stands though, Stop the Toads has received inside running for funding while honest battlers like the Scott Virtues are left holding their hats, scratching their heads and asking where their slice of the pie is. Quite simply, how can a rival NFP who musters 30,000 toads for one month a year receive $204,000 from the government when KTB only receives $200,000 for working over 300 days a year and has busted over one million toads?

The answer is that KTB have been hoodwinked. The government and its bureaucrats have been taken in by the aggressive tactics of individual activists backed up by celebrity conservationists. The telegenic Ms Kim Hands has worked wonders for Stop the Toads, batting her eyelids to the bureaucrats in Perth while they cough up the money at the expense of ordinary Australian taxpayers and long-term local residents like the Scott Virtues. Whatever happened to Perth being a big country town with friendly freckled faces and families picnicking by the Swan River and helping out the bush when it needed it?

What rankles even more is that Ms Hands has used a good man from another rural region as leverage over us here. Ms Hands has used Mr Tim Winton’s name as a form of endorsement and legitimation to promote her organisation in competition with KTB. Although Winton’s books sit on my shelf and I consider Cloudstreet Australia’s best novel since Voss, I do not think he needs to teach KTB how to bust toads, just as I would not be teaching him how to read in Albany. KTB welcomes help, but needs recognition of our primacy here within diligent processes that are local, open and accountable.

The questions surrounding cane toads in the Kimberley are similar to those of others in regional communities across Australia. It is not just cane toads or the management of water in the Murray-Darling that is up for debate, but government processes themselves, especially in rural Australia. There are implications for democracy qua democracy when politicians and bureaucrats do not listen to the community and are cosying up with recently arrived celebrity activist organisations or foreign companies or other special interests. Small NFPs like KTB struggle for funding, do all the hard work and fight the government for the right to do so.

If only people would read about past eras, when governments simply did their jobs, we would not be in this mess. It is not a question of small versus big government. It is about working efficiently with what you’ve got so you can get on with the job and then spend time doing what you love—in my case stopping the cane toads reaching a waterhole so I can have a fish with some mates. Now though, it seems the process is all busted up, that we are being prevented from our work by unnecessary government procedures due to the political capital of talking as if you care about rural Australia.

So while Premier Colin Barnett blames the federal government and Prime Minister Julia Gillard sits in Canberra ignoring the problem and talking with the Greens, KTB are hard at work fighting cane toads and bureaucrats. We are trying our level best to prevent damage to farms, national parks and quarter-acre backyards.

The Kimberley is the last frontier, the last refuge of the Australia that my family holds dear. The Kimberley is full of decent, trustworthy, community-minded, entrepreneurial people who know how to care for country and community without being a bunch of do-gooders seeking the spotlight. And that community is what keeps us going, keeps Mr Scott Virtue and his volunteers nailing diarrhoea to the wall each night when they would rather be on the porch having a yarn and watching shooting stars fall after all the G-and-Ts one could drink had been poured.