The Bush by Watson Don

Author:Watson, Don [Watson, Don]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781742537870
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2014-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

In 1840 no European had been in the Big Scrub with an axe, and in 1860 none had been there with a plough. By 1900 it was a bleak ruin, gone forever. The rainforest flanking the Clarence River at Grafton, Shirley Walker says, is now frequented by ‘gangs of predatory boys who build tree houses, rob birds’ nests, beat snakes to death and stage savage inter-gang wars with sticks and stones, shanghais and bows and arrows’. Close contact with nature can do that to boys. That great enthusiast for rural mateship and the cleansing effects of life in the bush, E. J. Brady, declared the contact made real a man’s physical and intellectual potential: ‘Hacking down the primal bush, firing, planting, cutting first crops – these things give physical life and overflowing interest; while mental life is stimulated by anticipation and interested by chance.’ Another school might say that predatory boys and men who hack at the bush are governed by the same impulse.

The selectors in the Big Scrub were, as they had been in Gippsland, the founders of the new: the first of our people, our Genesis. The forest was destroyed so calves could be born and suckled, corn raised, the light allowed to shine on growing children – native children, ‘born of the land’, the new indigenes. The virtue was self-evident. They were ‘clearing’; the word comes from the Latin clarus, meaning light or brightness, which is the condition of seeing the truth and the way forward. They were letting in the light, even God’s light, letting it shine brightly. The word also suggests improvement – the removal of impurities and obstacles – which was the (government-enforced) condition of their existence as selectors.

In fact there had been clearings before they arrived: frost hollows which had been hunting grounds and ceremonial places for the Aboriginal people. It was the cedar-getters who called them grasses – Chilcott’s grass, Dan’s grass, Dorroughby’s grass – because they were essential fuelling stations for their bullock teams, and made good staging points for their forays into the Scrub. The selectors were making more clearings, more grasses, letting in more light. They were making the whole of the Big Scrub a clearing. But this ‘virtuous’ activity had ruinous consequences, for with the light they let in the settlers attracted ferocious creepers like Madeira vine, morning glory, kudzu, cat’s claw creeper and lantana, a declared Weed of National Significance and one of the world’s ten worst. Their privet hedges escaped. Their camphor laurel trees, planted for shade, went feral. They let in asparagus fern, crofton weed, fireweed, groundsel, Koster’s curse, Mysore thorn, blackberry. A lot of the selectors’ clearings were soon uncleared by these weeds, some in the first generation, some in the second, some, as with camphor laurel, most destructively just forty years ago, when the dairying and banana farms wound up.

There is, as well, a sense in which these clearings concealed as much as they revealed. Any new culture will soon take up myth and denial.

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