I left Clare relatively early, pedalling happily through soft rain. Going towards Yacka and Gladstone, I was now entering a wheat and sheep district, where any occupation that had no connection to either grain or wool seemed to have been banned. l was passing through an important section of South Australia’s wheat and wool factory. During the 19th century these two products were virtually all that South Australia’s farmers produced. Even today, with the increased importance of fruit and wine-production, wheat and wool still make up about 40% of the value of production within the state. While South Australia’s number of sheep is low, only about 12% of Australia’s sheep, its wool-yield per head of sheep is highest in the whole of the country: average fleece-weight 6,55 kg per head figures from:Griffin/Mc Cashill, “Atlas of South Australia, p. 73).
What enormous efforts must have gone into transforming this region of the Mid North into such an important farming area which presented itself as a slowly rolling countryside, long drawn-out hills, a near endless ribbon of a road whose visible “bends” were sometimes 3 miles long. This was open country, only here and there a small group of trees, no hedges, no ditches. As I cycled through it, not much imagination was needed to understand how, in dry conditions, wind would easily lift up tons of unprotected top-soil and carry them away in huge dust storms. At present, while the first green shoots of wheat were peeping through the heavy, damp soil, still being sprinkled softly from above, there was no danger of this happening, but the months of March or April, after a dry summer, could present a totally different picture. What surprised me on the way to Yacka was the definite evidence of water erosion: some runaway water had cut gullies which, at 2 – 3 metres deep and a few metres wide, were meandering aggressively through fields. It transpired, that those gullies were one item of strong evidence that changing the balance of a region will cost dearly, if one has a limited knowledge of the country and therefore miscalculates certain effects:
The ‘Report of the Soil Conservation Committee’ in 1938 mapped the extend of soil erosion by wind and water. However, the committee was reluctant to identify as the cause the decades of too-frequent cultivation and excessive bare fallowing of wheatfields. The practice of bare fallowing had been promoted by the Department of Agriculture’s scientific advisers in the mistaken belief that it conserved a season’s rainfall for the next season’s crop. In the following two decades, much of the Department’s effort was to be directed towards the promotion of new conservational farming to arrest gully erosion and wind drifts. “
(ibid, p. 27)
While Australia’s farming history may be full of dramatic mistakes due to a lack of understanding of the nature of the continent, big efforts are made today to rectify earlier mistakes and manage farming in a way that at least does not destroy its very basis.
“The use of remote sensing techniques in the management of rangelands is already being demonstrated in two states. Western Australia has claimed eight badly degraded pastoral stations in the West Kimberley region, and is using Landsat information about patterns of erosion and vegetation to restructure them into…. more viable holdings. South Australia has developed a rangeland package of information for the pastoralists of its arid hinterlands about grazing patterns and the distribution of feed.”
Vandenbeld, “Nature of Australia”, p. 276
After lunchtime the weather-Gods decided to give me a better time. At first they eased the pressure a little, allowing me to hop from one patch of blue sky to the next one and if clouds did pass over me they mercifully kept their floodgates closed until they had rushed further south. The rapid change of cloud and sun all around me delivered the most spectacular light show. Fields and pastures turned into floodlit centre-stages and then into nearly invisible dark blots within minutes. “Sticks” of immature rainbows popped up, grew out of the land into proud, solid arches and faded away again. Dark beams of pouring rain, particularly to the west, were marching and gliding continuously southwards, following the track of Highway 1, while the north-east of the country grew gradually brighter. From my prime position, travelling in open country, often along elongated hilltops, I gladly indulged in this superb act of rays of light, which, at about the time when I crossed the Morgan-Whyalla-pipeline shortly before Georgetown, reached its glorious, finishing peak: an impeccable blue sky. Once I had passed Mt. Misery to the east the damp, windy morning had vanished. Even the road, as if willingly adding to the comforts of sunshine and subsiding winds, led me mainly downhill, first into Georgetown, then, after a short climb around Mt. Herbert, towards Gladstone’s charming palm-trees along the railway-line to Sydney.
The towers of Gladstone’s grain-silos leave no doubt about the commercial backbone of the area. With a holding capacity of 82.500 tons, they are South Australia’s largest inland storage- facility. Pastoral activity around here had began in the middle of last century with the establishment of the “Booyoolee Run” and later with the opening of the railway-line between Port Pirie and Gladstone. In 1877 Gladstone’s importance as a grain-collection-centre became established. While the restructuring of Australia’s rail-network deprived the town of its function as a railway-centre, it nevertheless left it on the Perth – Port-Pirie – Sydney railway-line as well as leaving it with a lasting piece of evidence of early rail-network-confusion: Gladstone’s railway-yards display a junction point of three different gauges, interlaid together in one siding. One of the world’s few junction points of this kind.
From the balcony of my hotel, overlooking the railway-line, its palm trees and the crossroads, contemplating life around here in its early days, then known as the “Far North” by city slickers in Adelaide, I watched the ‘country fellows’ making their way to the bar downstairs. One car after another pulled up outside the hotel. As darkness fell, the rising laughter and talk left no doubt that the evening was going to be a more jolly event than the matter-of-fact-one, depicted by C.J. Dennis’ “Country Fellows”:
Country Fellows
When country fellows come to town and meet to have a chat,
They bring the news from Camperdown, Borchip and Ballarat.
Wisely they talk of wheat and wool from Boort and Buninyong,
From Warragul and Warnambool, from Hunee and Geelong.
Ted tells them how the crops are now wellup round Bullaroock,
And Fred describes the champion cow he bred at Quambatook.
If rain comes soon ’twill be a boon, says Clive of Koo-we-rup.
‘Too right’says Nick of Net-no-goon,the grass wants fetchin’ up.
from: Kramer, L., “Australian Poetry & Short Stories – 200 Years” Vol. 1, p. 529
View Larger Map
