The Cattleman's Daughter Page 17

  Hang the fines, Emily thought. The land mattered more. Before taking on the last steep ride into the valley the group stopped to take photos of the Hereford cattle rubbing their sweaty ears on the treated pine posts of a Parks sign that read: Welcome to Wonnangatta National Park – No firearms, no domestic animals permitted.

  ‘The cattle can’t read,’ Emily joked and they all laughed, but she could feel the group’s nervousness. The men and women astride their horses weren’t law-breakers, or troublemakers. They were just passionate about the land.

  Emily had thought guiltily of Luke as she watched the cattle lumber forward into the designated Parks zone.

  Flo reined her horse to the left to hasten the mob as they slowly pushed through the overgrowth.

  ‘I remember when there were bridle trails all over these hills,’ said Flo.

  ‘All gone now,’ Rod answered, as he slid down an embankment on his horse, twisting out of the way of a branch. He turned in his saddle so Emily could hear. ‘You were just a little tacker when I last came in here on the drive to take the cattle out. Just shows you how quickly the scrub gets overgrown.’

  ‘And there hasn’t been a fire in here for decades, by the looks,’ Emily said, touching one of the clean, upright trunks of the eucalypts with her fingertips as she rode past.

  Rod twisted his mouth to one side.

  ‘Makes me nervous just bringing people in here. If I were Parks, I wouldn’t let the public near the place. Alight, it’d be a deathtrap.’

  Emily pulled her horse to a halt at the top of a rise and looked down across the massive valley that ran as far as the eye could see.

  The river flats were yellow with Saint John’s Wort weeds. The dirty-blond swathe of tall, rank grasses, which whispered in the wind inviting fire, were only interrupted by large darker-leafed domes of blackberry bushes dotting the plain. In places, particularly near the winding creek bends, the blackberries had joined in clumps, some as high as a house.

  Her father pulled his horse up next to hers and followed her gaze.

  ‘That is a National Park?’ Emily said amazed. ‘We’re going to be hard-pressed to drove the cattle through that. The weeds are as high as the cows’ horns!’

  Emily could see the Parks contractors had slashed a small area of grass around the site of the homestead and camp grounds. They must’ve made the cumbersome journey over the tracks with a ride-on lawnmower tied to the back of their ute. What an absurd thing to do when there were thousands of acres of overgrown valley flats. Getting a tractor in would be a nightmare, but if cattle weren’t used to control the overgrowth, tractors and chemical sprays were the only options.

  Emily looked at the site of the homestead that had been built by the pioneering family who farmed the area over one hundred years ago. The house was all but rubble now, burnt down by vandals over the years. Now composting toilets and neat Parks signage dotted the small area for the comfort of holiday makers. Tents sprung up in summer for idle days at a place where men had once toiled and tilled and women had birthed and raised children in the hard slog of life that comes from isolation.

  Emily felt like crying. This once-beautiful property was going to ruin. The massive overgrowth was testimony that government money and a handful of staff couldn’t manage land properly alone. Couldn’t everyone see, simply by looking at this land, that this country needed the help of the cattlemen and their grazing animals to manage it? The vista that spread out before Emily confirmed all she had heard about the ‘lock it up and leave it’ approach of public-land management.

  ‘Dad,’ Emily said, ‘doesn’t anyone care? Are they that heartless?’

  Rod shook his head. ‘I don’t think it’s about lack of care. You know some of the Parkies are really good fellas. Take that Luke. I reckon he’s all right. But I think they’re all constrained from the top down. Both money and mindset.’

  Emily felt a buzz run through her, hearing her dad say Luke’s name.

  Rod talked on. ‘The Parks boys on the ground are already stretched. They’re relying on funding to trickle out from Melbourne for sprays, staff and equipment. While they wait the weeds are taking hold. Darcy said the last straw for him was when the funding policy changed. Because some clown in Melbourne deemed there wasn’t enough money to do anything about the huge blackberry problem, they made another weed a “higher priority”. Darcy couldn’t believe it.’

  Emily wondered how Luke would fare in the midst of such a system. Would he be absorbed into the culture of the giant organisation and swamped, like her dad said, by the mindset? She knew he’d be pressured by locals to do more burning off, but fires were also controlled by the heavy weight of bureaucracy.

  When the winds and the temperature were perfect, the opportunity for a safe, cool burn was often lost because of the official process required. To start any burn-off Luke would need the go-ahead from Melbourne. It was so costly once they got dozers, fire trucks and men on the ground, plus helicopters on standby, that only a small portion of burns ever took place.

  Gone were the days when men like her grandfather would expertly feel the air temperature on their skin, the breeze on their face and cast an eye around the bush to see if the time was right. Then her pa, riding along on his horse, would puff on his pipe and drop a match here and there and let the slow trickle of flames do their work. In her grandfather’s day, one person was able to effectively manage thousands of acres of healthy bushland, rejuvenating it the way nature intended. Gently, with expertise and care, like the Aborigines had done. Now in the hands of a giant bureaucracy, burning-off cost millions and its effectiveness was disputed and doubted by academic ‘experts’.

  Emily realised how close they were to being locked out of their own high-country station. Seeing Wonnangatta filled her with despair.

  ‘So, is this what our land on the high plains will look like?’ she asked her father, her voice cracking with emotion.

  Rod reached out and gently pulled the rein of his daughter’s horse. The gelding took a step nearer him and Rod laid a hand on Emily’s knee.

  ‘C’mon, Em,’ he said gently. ‘They’ll have to see sense. This place proves what we’ve been saying to the bureaucrats, politicians, scientists and public all along. How can they not see grazing helps manage land like this?’

  ‘But what if they don’t see, Dad? What then?’

  Emily mirrored her father’s sad expression. All his life he had lived with the discrimination that came from being a Flanaghan, a cattleman. It hurt to see his daughter go through the same distress.

  ‘It’s okay, Em. You just pull your hat down tight and keep on riding. That’s all we can do.’

  ‘But why are they so quick to condemn us, Dad? Like we’re just a bunch of uncaring old ratbags and rednecks raping and pillaging the mountain country? Seems they’re quite happy to have hydro schemes, ski villages, logging and tourism all over the mountains, but they’re making our grazing cattle a crime. The government gives its blessing to bulldozers and chainsaws up here, but not our cattle.’

  ‘It’s just how it is, Em. You can’t let it get to you. It’ll consume your life.’

  ‘Like it has yours?’ Emily’s eyes sparked, challenging her dad, who she knew had all but given up. Resigned to his fate, she could tell he was just going through the motions on this protest ride. His heart was no longer in it.

  ‘C’mon. We’ve got to keep moving,’ Rod said, pressing his horse away with his heels.

  As they rode closer to the valley floor and the cattle eagerly made their way to the flatter, grassy creek flats, Emily looked back to where they had come from. The track had the steep pitch of a church spire. Some riders were leading their horses down, half sliding and hanging onto the branches of trees. There were calls of excitement and laughter in the air, knowing they were almost safely down. Clipped to Rod’s belt the two-way radio crackled to life.

  ‘This is the Mansfield mob. We’ve sighted you Gippslanders. Can you see us?’

  Far off
to the north, against the backdrop of a giant mountain, were the tiny specks of cattle and riders.

  ‘Welcome to Weed-angatta, Mansfield mob,’ Rod said. The riders let out whoops and cheers. To their left on the steep bank came another call. There, the Licola riders were picking their way down the hill on a treacherous zigzag track, letting their cattle find their own way down.

  ‘Weed-angatta, here we come too!’ the Licola group called on the radio.

  As the sound of the helicopters throbbed overhead a crowd was gathering near the ruined homestead on the valley’s floor. Four-wheel drives appeared from the hills. Campers, too, made their way over and gathered, all looking skyward as the helicopters descended.

  As the choppers landed, they stirred the air and whipped the heads of grasses back and forth in a manic dance like eddies in a flooding river. The crowd of bushmen, campers and cattlemen watched the media crew tiptoe their way through the grass. Women in office clothing and dainty shoes, men in white shirts with ties. The crew, wearing standard arty black, lugged camera tripods, boom microphones and heavy shoulder-bags. The media pack looked so at odds with the landscape that some people laughed.

  As the crew set up their gear, each party of drovers was given the cue to move the herds forward. As the three small herds came together the cows were too weary and hungry to bother much with pecking orders. They all grouped as one and began to graze as the horsemen ringed round them. Rod rode forward carrying a microphone and the Australian flag upon his tall chestnut horse.

  With the cameras rolling Rod delivered his heartfelt speech. Emily wondered just how many passionate words had been spoken or written over the years, with no changes to the outcome. She fingered her leather reins as she listened to her father’s words.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Average have it so good that they don’t worry much about tomorrow. Well, I think Mr and Mrs Average need to take heed of what’s going on. The approach that we can turn on the telly for our entertainment, drive to the supermarket for our sustenance, keep up the consumer spending, use fossil fuel as if it were there forever, needs to be addressed.

  ‘Up until now the public conscience has wanted someone else to do something. They say the government should do something. This has resulted in government policies that are conceived to placate the voter. Kicking a few cows off the high country fits comfortably into this approach for many politicians. But we say an uneducated majority of voters has no right to allow the “lock-it-up and let it burn” approach to public land management. This approach will result in massive flora and fauna decimation with the hottest holocaust of bushfires to come – and with certainty, they will come.’

  Emily shivered. She had seen her fair share of firefighting in her young life, though never anything too serious. But as the years rolled past and the bush around them never saw the gentle lick of a cool-flame burn, she wondered when that mighty fire would arrive. Now it was autumn, they had most likely survived another year, but all the bushmen knew this was a disaster waiting to happen.

  Redgum shifted his back leg and rested a hoof, and Rod paused again until his horse stilled.

  ‘How is it that early mountain cattlemen families survived fires when the only fire control they had was a hessian bag, a bough off a tree and a box of matches? The Aborigines before them had even fewer control measures. They knew how to use fire at the correct time. They did not put out all the natural fires until the fuel build up was so massive. Now look about you! Look at this mess. All the Elvis helicopters available, the thousands of well-trained firefighters with millions of dollars worth of state-of-the-art firefighting gear, cannot be effective here once this gets underway.’

  Emily felt her eyes sting with tears. She had witnessed her own country going that way with cool-burn bans and now, having seen Wonnangatta, she could foresee the Flanaghan station in the same state – a riot of weeds and fallen-down fencing with just the rutted wheel marks of four-wheel drives through the guts of the country. She backed her horse up and rode away, keen to simply be on her own for a time, overwhelmed by how hopeless she felt. She thought of her girls at Evie’s house and wished she could hold them close now for comfort.

  A woman reporter with a notebook and shiny patent-leather shoes stepped in front of her, wary of her horse.

  ‘Having a good day?’ she asked. Emily looked down, noting that her face, although pretty, was covered heavily in make-up and there were sweatstains on her white blouse. Her streaked blonde hair looked windswept and no longer chic.

  ‘It’s not exactly a picnic, but it’s close enough,’ Emily said, trying to be cheerful.

  The reporter looked about. ‘This place is beautiful, isn’t it? Look at the flowers and all that grass.’

  ‘Beautiful?’ Emily wondered aloud. This setting? Yes, the setting was beautiful, but the management of the land was shocking. Appalling. Heartbreaking even. Didn’t this woman see it too?

  Emily looked at the woman’s smiling, squinting face and realised she didn’t see it. She just saw trees, grass and space. It looked pretty to her. Emily suddenly realised that people with no knowledge of the land couldn’t see – not even when it was staring them right in the face.

  They saw green so they thought there was no drought. They saw grass and flowers but they did not see weeds. They saw creeks and steep hills but they did not see erosion and dull lifeless water. They saw cattle in amongst high-country flowers and thought it was bad. They didn’t realise that over thousands of years the grass had evolved for grazing, offering up the sweetest bits in their leaves so they were mown by the animals to exactly the right length.

  They didn’t realise the cattle were time-controlled and lightly stocked on the area so the plains had months and months to rejuvenate. Emily saw for the first time that they didn’t know what they were looking at and they even didn’t know what they didn’t know!

  ‘Want to have a ride?’ Emily said. The reporter hesitated. ‘He’s very quiet.’

  Emily was off, out of the saddle, grabbing the reporter’s bag. Offering her up the stirrup. ‘On the count of three,’ she said, bunking her up before she had the chance to say no. Then she led the woman across into the deep grasses.

  ‘See this grass here?’ Emily said, running the palms of her hands over the tops of the seed heads. It was well over waist-high. ‘This will all fall over and rot. It’s all one species. All the native grasses have been buried alive underneath. They don’t stand a chance if this other stuff isn’t kept in check. That’s what grazing does. And see this yellow stuff? Pretty though it is, it’s a weed. Saint John’s Wort. Toxic and highly vigorous. No native orchid stands a chance when this stuff’s about. And you know blackberries, don’t you? Just look at that creek over there. That dark vegetation, all blackberries. You can’t even get to the creek.’

  The woman began to nod.

  ‘Yes, I see.’ She looked across the valley. ‘It’s everywhere! This grass, those weeds, the blackberries …’

  ‘Not so beautiful really,’ Emily said.

  ‘Well, no. Not when you point it out like that,’ the journalist said. ‘Now I see what you mean.’

  Good, thought Emily. Another seed sown.

  Twenty-three

  Luke sat uncomfortably in the back seat of the Parks four-wheel drive next to Kelvin Grimsley. While Luke’s Heyfield supervisor, Darren, tackled the last steep pinch on the track into the Wonnangatta Valley, his workmate, Cory, continued to play with the satellite navigation equipment in the front passenger seat. Through the canopy of leaves, on the saddle of a giant hill, they had seen the TV news helicopters arriving.

  ‘We’ll wait until the television crews have left,’ Kelvin said. ‘The less potential for confrontation with the cattlemen, the less airtime the story will get.’

  Luke knew the government’s media department had given Kelvin a clear brief should they get caught by any reporters or journalists. He had watched Kelvin rehearsing his statement over and over on the trip into the Wonnangatta. He didn’t seem to
be taking in the bush around him at all.

  For Luke the trip had been amazing. The river crossings they drove through had been gouged deeply by four-wheel drives over time, but the beauty of the ribbon-like river winding its way through the valley was staggering.

  Now up on the crests of hills and with only a few short steep kilometres into the Wonnangatta, Luke felt his excitement rising. He was getting paid to do this! His first days on the job had been like one big adventure. The only downside was that he would no doubt run into Emily and her family. He didn’t want to see her in this context but what was he to do? He had a job now. He had a house in the township. He was aware how clouded things were between Parks and the cattlemen and he knew now it was best to leave things well alone with a cattleman’s daughter. But still he longed to see her. Just one glimpse.

  ‘There they go now,’ said Darren, pointing to the helicopters lifting up from the valley floor. ‘Leaving just in time to meet their broadcast deadlines. Looks like you won’t get your mug on telly after all, Kelvin.’ Darren glanced at Kelvin in the rear-vision mirror, smiling. Luke could tell Kelvin was disappointed.

  ‘There’ll probably be newspaper journalists travelling with the cattlemen,’ Kelvin said. ‘But only I’m to give the statement, okay?’

  ‘Right you are,’ said Darren, winking at Cory.

  Kelvin checked his watch.

  ‘With the choppers gone, now’s the time to find the cattlemen’s camp and get a count on the cattle.’ He swung about to see if the police four-wheel drive was close behind them. ‘Thank God we’ve got the Bairnsdale boys to back us up if things turn nasty.’

  Nasty? Luke wondered. He had seen the worst of the cattlemen, Bob Flanaghan. Angry and rude though he was, Luke didn’t think Bob would be violent. Still, Kelvin had been at this job for decades. Perhaps he had seen nasty.

  As they drove into the Wonnangatta, Luke was shocked to see the level of flammable vegetation that covered thousands of acres. He’d heard the Parks boys recounting their journey in bringing a slasher over the goat tracks and for an instant he wondered why they hadn’t burned or grazed the area. It would be much cheaper and faster. He saw the weeds and alarm bells began to ring in his head. The place was a shambles.