Bundarrah Days

A DISTURBING report on Melbourne's Radio 3 AW Rumour File this morning claimed that national parks authorities were killing brumbies by distributing poisoned salt blocks in strategic places.

I have no evidence of my own to support the claim but I can say that the Rumour File is generally reliable with a good record of sourcing accurate reports.

Victorian Environment Minister, Twitter Thwaites and his NSW counterpart, Bob Debus, have some serious questions to answer.

You can email Twitter at john.thwaites@parliament.vic.gov.au

Both Thwaites and Debus are well aware that brumbies are regarded affectionately by most Australians and that their numbers have been relatively stable for years and that they pose no significant environmental threat. But, they still want them out so it wouldn't be surprising if they have resorted to subterfuge in an attempt to accomplish their objective.

A couple of years ago brumbies were being blamed for introducing Giardia and CryptosporIdium into the Snowy River, a hard thing for them to do seeing that they have been in the area for generations and couldn't carry the bacterium unless something else had introduced it.

Both those bugs made an appearance in Sydney's domestic water supply and there are no brumbies in the water catchments of that city.

Brumbies in the mountains have long been subjected to cruel treatment by certain people who roam the bush building wire trapyards in which many unfortunate horses have died of dehydration. For years now I have carried a pair of fencing pliers in my saddle bag and used them to cut down every such yard I have come across.

Apart from the trapyard builders other heroes use dogs to drag the horses down or else run them into ropes which they have strategically tied across tracks along which the horses are chased. Once a horse is hopelessly tangled our heroes leap down and throw a catching rope around its neck, hitch it to a tree, choke it to quieten it and then throw a halter on it.

Others give a mob a half hearted chase, wait for the little foals to drop out and then let them follow the ridden horse home. The foals do this because their mothers are gone and the riding horse is the only familiar thing they can see.

What gripes me is that national parks management gives these people the time of day, allows them access to the parks and turns a blind eye to cruel practices.

I have no objection to legitimate brumby runners who do it for the love of the chase and rope the horses fairly and take them home where they are often trained up and sold as kids ponies.

Unfortunately, the legitimate people are always the outsiders and it is the cruel bastards who are in the pocket of the parks management. The horses they take out nearly always end up in the knackery.

WITH the announcement that New South Wales is to add 21 more national parks to the 600 or so it already has we may as well concede that what was once known colloquially as "the bush" has now become a grand and stately nationwide national park.

I'm inclined to think that the bandwagon may as well roll on because with all these national parks the entire concept is under threat. A national park is just a new name for the bush. Sooner or later the resources locked up in this bush will be wanted and the fight for access will be on in earnest. So far all we've seen is some half-hearted skirmishing.

Every national park will be a legitimate target for land usage and exploitation because there will be nothing to make any particular area any more valuable than anywhere else. After all, is one national park superior to another? The argument that it can't be touched because it is a "National Park", an environmental icon of sorts, will fall on deaf ears because national parks won't be special anymore.

I may not be expressing this argument very well because the thoughts have only just occurred to me but you can see where I'm heading.

That is simply that when national parks cease being special places by virtue of the fact that they are commonplace and located around every other corner of the country people will be less inclined to assign to them any special values, particularly when they are mismanaged, neglected and left largely to the predations of imported plants and animals.

The wheel will fall off the misguided conservation bandwagon sooner or later. All such social vehicles are subject to wear and tear and the conservation movement is no different.

A good reference for anyone who wants to learn more about the connection between the worldwide conservation movement and Nazism is a book called The Green and the Brown - A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany by Frank Uekoetter, University of Bielefeld, Germany.

The book is described as "the first comprehensive discussion of conservation in Nazi Germany.

"It analyses the roots of conservation in the late 19th century, the gradual adaptation of racist and nationalist language among conservationists in the 1920s and the inner distance to the republic of Weimar. It describes how the German conservation movement came to co-operate with the Nazi regime and uncovers the complex lines between the conservation movement and the Nazis on both an ideological and a practical level. Uekoetter further examines how the conservation movement attempted to deal with a troublesome past after the War, and the lessons that today's environmental movement should learn from the Nazi experience. It is a story of ideological convergence, of tactical alliances, of careerism, of implication in crimes against humanity, and of deceit and denial after 1945."

This is a topic which has disturbed environmentalists for quite some time which is why they will go to any lengths to avoid discussing it. Frank Uekoetter's book is based on extensive archival research.

This silly editorial appeared in that irrelevant rag, The Age, in 2004. I thought I'd reproduce it here and follow it with a more pertinent version.

Mountain cattlemen and bush riders need to appreciate theirs are not the only interests.

Gather a bunch of stockmen to the fray. Mount them on horses and parade them defiantly, Australian flags flying, to the steps of parliament or outside the office of the national parks authority. Alert the media. Encourage an old digger, preferably in lighthorse uniform, to talk about city "bastards" taking rights from the true inheritors of the bush.

It is a tried and tested stunt, a little tired perhaps, but almost guaranteed to get coverage on the evening news and the next day's newspapers.

It is one thing to be proud of Australia's bush heritage - remote as it has always been from the daily lives of most in city-dwelling Australia, one of the most urbanised nations on earth.

But there is something almost shameless about misusing the romance and imagery of the past to prop up the claims of a handful of graziers to a lucrative hangover from the century before last or a right of access for recreational trail riders to alpine national parks.

That is not how the small number of graziers currently being denied access to Victoria's alpine areas see it, of course. Arguments about "heritage rights" and "caring for the high country" are raised, but increasingly these are being exposed for the rhetoric that, for the most part, they are.

The National Trust put it rather bluntly last year: the mountain cattlemen are not as culturally important as the environment their activities damage.

Similarly, the recent inquiry into the 2003 bushfires in Victoria found claims that grazing in the high country helped reduce the risk of bushfires to be largely illusory. "We conclude that there is currently no scientific support for the view that grazing prevents blazing in the High Country," the report found, recommending that any decision about the future of grazing in the high country should not be based on the argument that grazing helps fire management.

Not unreasonably, a scientific panel late last year advised the Government to extend a ban on cattle grazing in bushfire-affected areas for at least another two summers to allow the bush time to recover.

The Government has said it will examine the longer-term future of high-plains cattle grazing in the next few years. Up to 8000 cattle graze in the mountains each summer - a lucky few of the 4 million head across the state.

As an economic issue, it scarcely rates, except to those few fortunate graziers for whom the high country access is a handy source of cheap feed. The good old days when the bush was simply there for all comers to be exploited for timber, for grazing, even for recreational pursuits such as shooting and fishing are long gone.

Exploitation of such areas must now meet criteria that are sustainable, especially in complex and fragile environments such as the high country.

Bush lore and romantic tales about what went on in the past must give way to more rational, scientific assessments if there is to be a future in such areas for anyone.



Bushwalkers and green editorial writers need to appreciate theirs are not the only interests.

Gather a bunch of greenies together. Dress them up as cockatoos, echidnas and platypuses and watch them trying to walk the walk outside Parliament or the national parks authority. Encourage a radical lesbian feminist complete with a cocky's crest to talk about red necked bushies carving up the delicate feminine environment.

It's a tried and tested stunt, a little tired perhaps, but guaranteed to touch the hearts of left wing politicians who remember fondly their infant years in state sponsored childcare.

It's one thing to be fond of our native flora and fauna - remote as it has always been from the daily lives of most in city-dwelling Australia, one of the most urbanised nations on earth, but the condition of Urban Psychological Derangement blinds the green tinged townies to any true knowledge of the Australian environment. Any UPD sufferer knows that you can learn more about the environment in a university lecture room or a study lab than you can by living in it.

There is something almost shameless about using the imagery of the environment to prop up ignorant and uninformed management practices and Nazi based ecological ideals which are no more than a hangover from old and long forgotten pagan religions and guarantee exclusive use of national parks and conservation reserves to their practitioners.

That's not how they state their case, of course. They claim they care for the environment but increasingly these claims are being exposed for the rhetoric, that, for the most part, they are.

The National Trust says the environment is important but spends more money preserving the mansions of long dead millionaires.

The inquiry into the 2003 bushfires in Victoria was designed to absolve the wrong doers and the negligent land managers. A Royal Commission into those fires would have been more appropriate, more open and more transparent.

As an economic issue green environmental management doesn't even rate unless you count the cost to the community of billions of dollars in destroyed timber resources and the costs of rehabilitating an environment that will never again be as it was.

The good old days when the bush was managed sustainably by Aboriginal people and then by bushmen who followed their example must be studied and management policies reflecting those practices must be implemented..

Management criteria supportive of the religious sensibilities of green UPD sufferers, the reproductive cycle of socially infertile radical feminists and the proliferation of noxious weeds and feral animals must be abolished if there is to be a future in such areas for anyone.


NOTE: Thanks to Mike of SOS Forests for the information on UPD.

THE Australian cultural cringe is alive and well in the world of horses.

If it comes from overseas it must be better. Thus we have a constant stream of international "experts" visiting Australia to teach us how to ride and handle horses.

It's not as if we haven't been doing it as well, if not better, than anyone else for 200 years. It's because at some stage we lost our pride in our own abilities despite a record in international competition that far surpasses any other nation, particularly when our small population is taken into account.

For example, we won an Olympic gold in our second attempt at the equestrian competition. We've produced some of the world's greatest horsemen, among them the legendary Lance Skuthorpe.

Our Light Horsemen carried out the most successful horse charge in history at Beersheba on their home grown Walers and turned the tide of war in the Middle-East in World War 1. The Desert Corps, commanded by Queenslander, Harry Chauvel, was the greatest mounted force the world has ever seen.

And yet, here we are paying homage to a variety of self appointed experts from the U.S. and Europe at the expense of our own unsurpassed horsemanship.

The American gurus, Monty Roberts and Pat Parelli are out here every other day it seems teaching us how to suck eggs. Parelli even had the cheek to stick his beak into the high country and advise the locals about how to best handle brumbies.

It's a thankless task trying to promote Australia and Australian ways, to celebrate our history and defend our heritage. It seems like we're beseiged from all directions, under assault from slick international marketing and imported green ideas that result in the locking up of vast areas of the bush at the expense of both the country and the traditional activities undertaken there.

And now that our old and respected advocates of the Australian bush like R.M. Williams have gone who is going to champion the cause?

Even the much vaunted Australian Stock Horse isn't truly Australian these days, but more a facsimilie of the American Quarter Horse to which it owes much of its bloodlines. I should point out here that The Australian Stock Horse as referred to here is a new breed, not the traditional Aussie stock horse, once known as the Waler, which was a Thoroughbred based station horse with a touch of pony and a few other bits and pieces.

I notice that Tourism Australia, stung by the failure of its advertising campaign entitled "See Australia In A Different Light" using our latter day arty and poetic types to entice people here has reverted to a more traditional Aussie approach accompanied by the tag line, "So, where the bloody hell are you?"

Rather than ask that question of potential overseas visitors maybe that question should first be asked of Australians........ yeah, where the bloody hell are yers?

In a wider context the failure of that "different light" campaign reflects the overall failure of the arty cum academic power mongers in our midst to accomplish anything positive in advancing Australia other than burn our country, turn our kids on to drugs and indoctrinate them with whatever fashionable lunatic philosophy might wash up on our shores.

Back in 1912 Lance Skuthorpe attracted 110,000 people to the Sydney Showgrounds for a display of Australian bush skills and horsemanship.

That was bigger than a Grand Final or a Melbourne Cup crowd at a time when our population was a quarter of what it is now.

Back then there was no cultural cringe. We were proudly Australian.

I did manage a small victory for Australian culture. Back in 1989 I dreamed up the idea of bringing Banjo Paterson's Geebung Polo Club ballad to life in the high country and organised the first Geebung Polo Match at Horsehair Plain near Omeo and Dinner Plain on Easter Sunday that year. It was an outrageous success, so much so that these days it's billed as the biggest Polo Match in the Southern Hemisphere.

Mt Hotham Ski Resort says of it: "A spectacle not to be missed, this is an event that is held at Cobungra each year. The traditional “Cuff ‘n’ Collars” vs “Geebung Polo Club” contest is the biggest polo match in the southern hemisphere and is highly recommended if you are here at Easter."

It draws crowds of up to 5000 - a long way off Lance Skuthorpe's record but it's a start!

NOTHING much has changed in the management of the Victorian bush since the days of the imported experts used by the early Forests Commission to manage our forests.

We still have ignorant foreigners in control but the modern ones are of the home grown city variety.

Environmentalist (as opposed to greenie) Tim Flannery believes that people are shaped by their environment and I agree with him. I had formed that opinion myself years ago marvelling at the similarities between people who had spent long years working in the bush in isolation.

The problem we have with public land management in these early years of the 21st century is that it is city-centric with no real knowledge, understanding or practical experience of the unique Australian environment.

One city is much the same as another wherever one goes in the developed world and it's quite possible that urban Australians have more in common with their peers in New York, London and Los Angeles than they do with country Australians. Telling it the way it truly is is saying that urban dwellers have become foreigners in their own land. They've never given Australia a chance to shape them.

The streetscape forms their world view and although the bush is handy for the occasional day trip, weekend away or even a short field study such a part-time presence hardly equips them for a role in managing our unique environment.

It seems ridiculous to any intelligent country person that growing up in the suburbs and attending three or four years of university lectures is a superior grounding for land management than years of practical experience and observation. Yet Parks Victoria is turning out rangers fresh from suburban Melbourne who are instant experts on Australian ecology and universities are producing callow youths who advise governments on land management courtesy of the impressive letters that follow their names.

Listening to the business suit clad activists of the Victorian National Parks Association such as Charlie Sherwin and Phil Ingamels wax lyrical about "the science" is enough to have the mildest mannered bushman grinding his teeth. These people are indeed foreigners trying to force foreign land management ideas thinly disguised as science on to the Australian environment. Such green activists may be expert at manipulating opinion polls but their bush skills are about as polished as a cockies boot.

They are interlopers with alien ideas. Consider national parks, for example. The concept of national parks was borrowed from America and it was never even considered whether it could be successfully applied in Australia. Nevertheless, the idea was imposed from on high and it continues to enjoy administrative support even though it has been a manifest failure.

Reserving land for conservation purposes and public enjoyment is a fine ideal. But this is Australia and we need to develop a process appropriate for Australian conditions. Lock it up and leave it doesn't work here.

There seems to be an impression in the minds of the urban dwelling public that a magical transformation takes place when bushland is incorporated into a national park. Suddenly it ceases being the bush and becomes part of a fragile eco-system with countless communities of diabolically threatened flora and fauna.

The stark truth is that once it is declared a national park and subjected to green management guidelines it becomes more threatened than it ever was before.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating and national parks and foreign management has not benefited public land in the least but has worked to its detriment. Enough has been destroyed.

Unlike Norman Lindsey's Magic Pudding there's a limit to how much neglect the Australian bush will stand before it makes its own emphatic statement.

Judge Stretton, back in 1939, recognised the struggle between bush people and imported land managers. He came down on the side of the bush and made recommendations which should have been followed uniformly.

Instead we now find that the mistakes of the past are being repeated over and over again.

ONE of my leading critics has been the editor of a site called Grods Corp. Who knows what a grod is? I don't.

Anyway, this editor, who shall be given the courtesy on this blog of not being named, has this to say about himself on his website:

"In his (little) spare time The Editor enjoys offering his body to medical science in exchange for $100 and a cabcharge".......

Figure that one out. From the little information provided, however, could it be that the consequences of the Grod's editor's income producing activities might be a knock at the door in a decade or so and a "hi Dad, we've finally met."

HAD a quiet couple of days here. Thursday was sad. We had to put down one of our old horse mates, Bushfire, due to a huge sarcoid - a kind of non-malignant but very aggressive tumour.

We kept him going for as long as we could but it was turning septic and would have killed him soon enough.

That knowledge didn't make it any easier though. The last few days before the vet came we locked him up in a small paddock with his best mate, Koroi, and spoiled them a bit.

But when it came time to lead him away for his final injections I felt like an executioner.

Waiting for the vet to arrive I had a dejavu experience. I s'pose everyone gets them occasionally but I hadn't had one since I was a kid.

Standing there holding him, then comforting him as he went down and watching the light die in his eyes was lousy. We have to do these things sometimes but they're never any easier.

Goodbye Bushy Boy! We're glad you were part of our family!

I WAS so fascinated to read this piece by Dr Tom Griffiths, the Senior Fellow and Convenor of the Graduate Program in History at the Australian National University that I decided to reproduce it in full.

It's interesting that Dr Griffiths, as a historian, has interpreted the opinions of Judge Leonard Stretton, the Black Friday Royal Commissioner, in much the same way as I have.

Dr Griffiths says:

"I am fascinated by how well bush settlers understood the distinctive ecology of the ash in the 1930s. In the Royal Commission we see a struggle between different forms of knowledge: between the folk knowledge of forest workers (who had to live with fire and ash) and the imported understandings of educated urban people (many of whom still hoped to eliminate fire entirely from Australian forests). Judge Stretton, proud of his own rural affiliations, does what he can to empower the voice of the bush."

Below is the full text of Dr Griffiths article.

Fire seems to be entirely a natural element, yet it is also a cultural artefact, and so you need both science and history to understand it. When you are studying fire and forests, it is sometimes hard to say where nature ends and culture begins. I was intrigued to find that Judge Stretton and many of the witnesses at the Royal Commission were also challenged by that question: Was Black Friday natural or cultural?

When I was growing up in Melbourne in the 1960s, I remember my parents taking me for drives in the mountain country and talking about Black Friday. We could see the effects of Black Friday all around us. There was something vaguely sinister about the stark trunks of dead giants rearing above the regenerating forest. I knew 1939 as the year of the great fire well before I knew it as the beginning of the Second World War.

Then, a couple of decades later, I got to know the mountain ash forests intimately. In the late 1980s I had a wonderful job as Historian in the Historic Places Branch of the Victorian Department of Conservation. I remember the excitement of walking through what felt like a wilderness of ferns and discovering the foundations of a century-old settlement, or the boiler from a mine or sawmill. It was then that I knew I wanted to write a book about these forests – and about the fire that so encapsulated their dramatic history.

When we visit these forests today, they are mostly uninhabited at their heart. We enjoy their beauty and remoteness and we walk along tracks that snake into their centres, sometimes forgetting that these beautifully graded paths were once the timber tramlines, the lifelines of remote bush settlements. These isolated sawmill communities were terribly vulnerable to fire. On a hot summer’s day, with a northerly wind whipping the tree-tops and the smell of smoke in the air, these men, women and children had no-where to go but down … into the dug-outs that should have been provided at every sawmill.

The story of the 1939 fires is so bound up with the fate of these communities? Did they realise their extreme danger? Were they prepared? How did they behave when the fires bore down upon them? Some of the most powerful stories from that January come from these communities, because these were families at the mercy not only of the elements, but also of a society that had them working in high summer in the most dangerous forests in the world. Black Friday eventually led to the removal of sawmills and their communities from the heart of these forests.

The Black Friday bushfires of 1939 were a long-term natural rhythm exaggerated by a period of intense human utilisation. Post-war ecological research, especially by David Ashton, revealed that mountain ash forests perversely needed periodic holocaust fires to reproduce; they need Black Fridays. But history and ecology also combine to reveal just how unusual that particular fire was.

The first half of the twentieth century produced a dramatic concertina effect of change in the forests of mountain ash. The 1939 fire occurred after decades of intensive sawmilling in the Victorian mountain ash forests, and was the culmination of serious fires in 1898, 1905, 1908, 1914, 1919, 1926 and 1932. This rapid succession of fires meant that Black Friday burnt a human forest legacy, and it was more ferocious as a consequence.

The peculiar fire ecology of the mountain ash is, I believe, one of the keys to understanding Black Friday. There is a fatal and intriguing paradox that we must explore: it is that such impressive natural vegetation can be so prone to self-destruction. These noble forests, however magnificent, can be described as ‘transient fire weeds’.

I am fascinated by how well bush settlers understood the distinctive ecology of the ash in the 1930s. In the Royal Commission we see a struggle between different forms of knowledge: between the folk knowledge of forest workers (who had to live with fire and ash) and the imported understandings of educated urban people (many of whom still hoped to eliminate fire entirely from Australian forests). Judge Stretton, proud of his own rural affiliations, does what he can to empower the voice of the bush.

In the spring of 2002, I gave a number of talks about the 1939 fires in or near the forests where they wrought such destruction. It was a hot November following a dry winter – the same pattern as 1939 – and bush residents were anxious about what the coming summer might bring. They welcomed the chance to talk about Black Friday and to make the parallels with today. I was struck by how history is a kind of therapy – that is, people wanted to hear about 1939 so that they could better confront their own fears about today. The audiences included many distinguished and thoughtful experts on forests and fire, and they used the discussion of history to respectfully educate one another about how to better prepare for the immediate and worrying future.

I COULDN'T let this go unanswered.

Victorian Premier, Steve (Fire Bracks) who has presided over the loss of more forest land in Victoria than any other premier since 1939, boasts that Victoria's current fire laws could have prevented Black Friday. The idiot.

He says:

In 2003, we had probably the closest we’ve ever had to the conditions of ’39. We had a continual dry period for five years before, and we had temperatures approaching 40 degrees. We had strong northerly winds, and that was occurring regularly. It wasn’t as bad in terms of climatic conditions, but it was very close, and I think we were much better prepared.

The best indication has been the ’39 Royal Commission report, which showed there was nothing that could be done at that point in time. With the existing laws, we could have prevented those fires occurring. They were the strongest fires Victoria has ever had, but the systems weren’t in place properly and appropriately to deal with them."

What this fool of a premier neglected to concede was that he couldn't prevent the fires of 2003 which started and burned in conditions that were benign, to say the least, in comparison to Black Friday. And what's more they burned unimpeded for a couple of months.

The conditions on Ash Wednesday with extreme temperatures and gale force northerly winds were far more reminiscent of Black Friday conditions.

CSIRO Principal Research Scientist and Australia's leading bushfire expert Dr Phil Cheney says:

"In absolute terms, the combination of drought, temperature, relative humidity and wind speed that makes up the (McArthur) fire danger index of 100 has been exceeded on Ash Wednesday in 1983."

There's the proof that Fire Bracks hasn't got a clue.

The only comparison that can be made between 2003 and Black Friday is the intensity and extent of the burning but 2003 was born not from dangerous weather conditions but from the fuel burden.

At The Bundarrah in 2003 we knew the fire was going to come but it took its time. We were waiting for a week before it decided to roar down on us from three directions.

If, as Fire Bracks claims, we were much better prepared in 2003 I'd like to know why a million hectares of alpine Victoria were burned out. I'd also like to point out what would have happened to towns like Omeo, Mitta Mitta, Bright, Swifts Creek, Mt Beauty and Tawonga if the conditions had been commensurate with Black Friday.

It doesn't require a vivid imagination.

I'll close with a final comment from Dr Cheney:

"Nevertheless, the weather conditions of January 1939 still remain as a benchmark for the worst possible weather conditions. There were three days of extreme fire danger that occurred within a week. We have not seen such a prolonged period of extreme weather in 100 years of weather observation. We do not know the frequency at which these conditions will recur. What I do believe is that these conditions will happen again, and when they do, any bushfires that happen to start will be just as extensive and just as severe as 1939."