The Pilliga and Beyond

It is forty years since A Million Wild Acres was published by Thomas Nelson in 1981. Forty is a good biblical number and invites this new review.

A Million Wild Acres is a remarkable Australian prose work and is as significant today as in 1981. It should be on a serious Year 12 and university syllabus, for several reasons. Indeed, it has been a text on courses in Australian environmental history. Given that many of us have not read widely or at all on the environmental history of New South Wales, this book has the credentials and content to be an entry point to the discussion of the risks and opportunities that lie in this continent’s environment.

I say this having just read Roger Underwood’s item “The Failure of Yet Another Bushfire Panel” at Quadrant Online. His comment that “there were long-unburnt, heavy fuels, meaning that any fire would quickly become so intense that control would be difficult” is not only a fundamental datum that needs no royal commission to discern, but provokes a “through longer time” question. What happened with accumulating fuel loads across the longer history of pre-colonial life and colonial life? This is where Eric Rolls (1923–2007) has worked in detail and put up a testable thesis about the changing environment in response to land-use since British settlement.

One could begin with a side reference to the early apocalypse of the Black Thursday bushfires of February 1851 in Victoria where 50,000 square kilometres burned. Contemplation of William Strutt’s evocative 1864 painting is commended, and says as much but more powerfully, more focused as a participatory symbol, than the endless iterations of anonymised file footages of fires that fuel national television today in its voracious news cycles. Perhaps the impact of the 1851 fires was swallowed up by the discovery of vast amounts of gold at Ballarat later that year. Perhaps it really was the first exposure of the unprepared Europeans to the thermonuclear equivalence of the Australian landscape and should be accorded greater empirical study.

Rolls is interested in the colony of New South Wales. His book gives a holistic ecology of the Pilliga Forest or Scrub, which lies a little more than 600 kilometres north-west of Sydney. The book is never held together simply by descriptive lists of plants, animals, soil and water types or geomorphy. There is plenty of that (as first-hand description and research by the author) in the final chapters of the book, and the text is crammed with detailed and accurate knowledge of these things. Were the book simply a compilation of interesting lists it would fascinate some. It would be a totally synchronic handbook or ecological survey of a region; a snapshot in time rather than a study through time of a living and highly complex system. But Rolls’s work has a masterly diachronicity that begins with the First Fleet and leads ultimately to the Pilliga by way of detailed personal and ecological stories from settlement, through exploration, to the then present time of the 1970s.

Rolls maintains that the Pilliga is not what is left of an original forest, a reductio to what is left of a primordial reality, but that the Pilliga is a creative reaction and ornamentation within nature, a response to the complex, subtle and at times brutal impact of colonial arrival and subsequent settlement and land usage. Rolls describes the Pilliga as a largely emergent reality or a reaction statement by nature to what has happened in this 5000 square-kilometre domain. It is about a more rather than a less. I add the word contrarian here.

My use of contrarian is apt. The Wikipedia article on the Pilliga uses the word remnant: “The Pilliga Forests … constitute over 5,000 km² of semi-arid woodland in temperate north-central New South Wales, Australia. It is the largest such continuous remnant in the state.”

Rolls’s thesis would not rest easy on remnant and I take him to argue for emergent. He is sensitive to the changing meanings and power of words, as his discussion of variant meanings in words like forest and scrub shows. Emergent is better because it captures the sense of dynamic complexities within nature as core factors interact. These include the breaking up and dispersal of settled Aboriginal communities of the region. The consequent cessation of annual or regular cool burning of the vegetation, a practice in time immemorial, becomes an emergent factor. This point is consistent with Roger Underwood’s point above. Cool burning regenerated endemic plants and grasses that were the food source for native animals that ate out the understorey and prevented massive fuel-load build-up; the animals themselves becoming a primary protein source for humans.

Rolls regards the impact of the cattle and sheep that arrived with the colonists in increasing numbers as a long-term generator of ecological change. The softish humus of the Australian soils was in symbiosis with the light feet and selectively sharp teeth of the kangaroos and wallabies. Native grasses were soon exploited towards their vanishing point as hoofs compacted the soil and tilted the probabilities of new growth in favour of less useful plant types and then of imported plants. To this mix, he adds drought, bushfire and flood, which together cause a largely uncontrollable germination of seed for which there is no matrix of management by human or animal intervention. I find convincing his chapters that compare numbers of native cypress pine and ironbark at settlement versus the 1950s.

Reading Rolls affects the way the novice might view the country landscape in any part of New South Wales and ask questions about it. These are the kind of questions that reading Rolls provokes in me. Is there an optimal number of larger trees per hectare for sustainable grazing and cropping? Am I looking at a remnant old forest? Are these dense clusters of tall trees with impenetrable understorey good to leave alone or are they fuel for the next conflagration? Is a natural forest able to be left alone as “natural” or is that code for an approaching cataclysm? It seems that mass germinations can lead to new scrub and enforestation. Rolls’s contrarian view is that in some places and in some cases, plant densities have increased, and increased with danger and menace since settlement. Humans of course seek best outcomes—but what is best in these situations?

Rolls tells the stories of the arrival of animals in the colony with as much interest as he accords the human arrivals. By the time he has described the cattle and the sheep (and subsequently the rust-prone wheat types and response to that) something real is known. The animals come from Britain, Africa, India and Spain and are cross-bred. His book debunks any idyllic view of “sheep may safely graze”. His account of the large-scale rendering and boiling down of sheep and cattle in times of oversupply and drought, to extract some commercial value from the otherwise worthless carcasses, is confronting.

One can say the same about the detail with which Rolls introduces the settlers of the first century and later. As schoolboys even in Western Australia we learned about Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson and the crossing of the Blue Mountains. But that bald fact is all we knew. Rolls’s characters come alive with a few strokes of the pen and in painterly detail. They appear, as in the old and useful phrase, warts and all, and with a vividness that is strangely compelling and quietly sensory. One senses ghosts walking on stage for an encore. At times one can almost smell what he is describing—“stinking black balls of smut in the seed head”.

I have met this anamnetic power before in Rolls where it gave his poetry the sensory force of an essential oil. I returned to A Million Wild Acres after immersion in his poems of light and shadow that recall the Papua New Guinea of his war service. He has the power to draw the past into the present, almost to recall the ghost of the dead as living flesh. This gives The Green Mosaic an enduring power. It is one of the great books of Australian poetry. Not all poetry fascinates, but Rolls holds the reader in his poetry and his prose.

A Million Wild Acres presents a major thesis on directionality and growth in the Australian landscape, as well as on what has been destroyed in the same landscape. Rolls writes also about the disintegration of Aboriginal life in the face of colonial settlement and land-use practices. He writes in more detail about some of the black–white explosions into violence. Rolls as inquirer exemplifies minute attention to sources. He writes as inquirer and researcher and writer and farmer and man living in and by a forest. Les Murray, who likes his work, begins his foreword to the thirtieth anniversary edition, “I grew up near and often in the great forests …”

Fire in the Pilliga is not confined to the nineteenth century or to controlled burns. A simple search shows major fires occurring regularly. In early 2018 almost 600 square kilometres were burnt and reports in 2015 show three fires burning in the Pilliga which at the time of reporting had burned 15,000 hectares. Major fires occurred in 1997, and in 1951 when 370,000 hectares of cypress pine forest burned. Mass germination of cypress pine seed after fire and rain, and without animal predation to remove seedlings, is a motif in Rolls’s theory of enforestation.

I commend Les Murray’s foreword and his essay “Eric Rolls and the Golden Disobedience”, from which I quote his concluding remarks:

And so, almost behind the back of our learned proprieties, we welcome time and again books of non-fiction, books which articulate even some part of our deep experience as people, and speak to us in a level, balanced, undecorated voice we “hear” as our own. To cut through alienation by simply ignoring the received sensibilities which produce it, is a form of what I call the Golden Disobedience, and that disobedience seems at the moment to be available to non-fiction writers in greater measure than to other writers of literary texts. Poets may come next as writers to whom the Golden Disobedience is available … Rolls sidesteps all the received literary manners, and tells “people’s” history in a way which belongs to them rather than to most these days who would speak of The People. And in doing so he creates a great work of art in which a central native tradition is renewed, altered and immeasurably deepened.

I think the Australian historian Alan Atkinson was compassing this area in The Commonwealth of Speech (2002) where he locates the folk voices we recognise as our own and listens to them to form an idea of the Australia in which we participate. Rolls is deeply sensitive to language and nuance, and the section on the Kamilaroi language is compelling because he has gone to the trouble of exploring “its intricate and gutturally musical language”.

Rod Moran’s Massacre Myth is also a work that raises the question about the apparent contrarian who commits time to the detailed documentary research needed to reach likely conclusions. At least, in the shorter term, the uncritical tendency to accept any or all “testimony” as true is blocked. We need to find a proper place in discussion for the legitimate “I am not sure yet’ and “I will commit one way or another to further research”.

When Rolls began, he was aware of what he did not as yet know. “I knew nothing of the plants when I began looking at the Pilliga forests. Chapter eight should make it obvious how carefully the National Herbarium answered my questions.” The final words of his preface speak to this process, a process that burned his time:

All one can do is read everything there is to read, add it to one’s own experience, then pick the way through a maze of stories. But with the most contentious story, the growth of Australia’s modern forests, there was no doubtful choosing of the way, no stories at variance. There was one clear documented path that only a forgotten few have taken before me.

Rolls writes about the folly of re-stuffing the past with respectability. “William Cox was an important man. He was also a rogue. In the biography written by his great-granddaughters he was disembowelled and restuffed with all the qualities thought fitting in an ancestor.” The perils and costs of the white–black encounter are neither glossed nor exaggerated.

I read the chapter “The Breelong Blacks”, about Jimmy Governor and his murderous acts and eventual execution, with increasing interest. It is almost a stand-alone essay. But it fits, and provokes new thoughts, as it has gone on provoking. It is the same story that informed The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith. From here, one can cross over into Les Murray’s poems and find “The Ballad of Jimmy Governor” from his 1972 collection Poems Against Economics. A stanza from “The Ballad of Jimmy Governor” locates the source of Jimmy’s rage and deadly violence in embedded attitudes on race and identity and marriage, in an anger that burns against the wrongs he feels have been done to him. It is a theme Murray returned to in many settings, from adolescence to gun violence in America.

But a man’s not a rag to wipe snot on,

I got that much into their heads,

Them hard white sunbonnet ladies

That turned up their short lips and said

My wife had a slut’s eyes for colour.

I got that into their head.

Tom Griffiths in “The Writing of A Million Wild Acres”, his contribution to the thirtieth anniversary edition,says of Eric Rolls:

Just getting the right pioneers into the right places at the right time was a demanding and arduous job. He recalled: “I lined all the men up against one wall—37 men—each had a pile of papers, each named, all their years, and then I had the map at the other end of the room. I’d pick up a pile and march the man across the room to his place on the map … You had to see him getting there.”

… the environmental historian and philosopher George Seddon later described the early chapters of the book as “like the Book of Genesis, with its endless ‘And Joktan begat Almodad, and Sheleph and Hazarmath, and Jerah’. There is a walk on and walk off cast of thousands, and the detail is numbing—but this is the Pilliga Book of Genesis, and I think the author was right to put it all in.”

I began this review with a reference to the biblical forty and I close by giving the book the highest possible recommendation to get and read this year.

A Million Wild Acres: 200 Years of Man and an Australian Forest
by Eric Rolls
Hale & Iremonger, 2011 (thirtieth anniversary edition), 496 pages, $34.95

Ivan Head was Warden of Christ College in the University of Tasmania, and Warden of St Paul’s College in the University of Sydney, where a major building now carries his name