… among all forms of the epic there is not one whose incidence in the pure, colourless light of written history is more certain than the chronicle…
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’
For in fact, of course, what the early travellers found was that, with the partial exception of the Murray, the country was not characterised by purposeful rivers.
Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay
There is an emerging formula to the recitation of Australian history. The scene opens anecdotally, situating us in the present alongside a personage who voices a judgement that plunges the historian into the past. Between bookends of the present’s timely conjuncture, the historian must acknowledge—like the many formulaic acknowledgments that open any event—the depth of Indigenous belonging, then transition somehow to European colonisation, dealing with the ‘explorers’, the squatters, the Protectors and the pastoralists at the frontier of control over territory. Once the borders are established and Federation looms inexorably on the horizon, the historian can relax into recounting policy decisions—all fateful in their consequence—and drawing on the archives of increasingly familiar kinds of experts to narrativise the particular dilemma under consideration.
The Murray–Darling Basin has become one such dilemma taken up by historians, which adds to the formula an environmental component in an obligatory tone of lamentation. To this palimpsest of works, Quentin Beresford adds Wounded Country: The Murray–Darling Basin—A Contested History. Beresford’s history is the product of the online availability of newspaper archives, and it takes them as its primary sources. It has the whiff of the screen, and the endnotes are a sort of unwitting tribute to newspaper proliferation on the consolidated frontier. Yet this singular reliance on these sources seems to lend the history a peculiar style that I would like to characterise as a ‘chronicle’.
The chronicler, for Walter Benjamin, ‘recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones’, and a chronicle recounts, chronologically, a sequence of occurrences whose unity is constituted in two ways. On the one hand, Benjamin argues, it is based on ‘a divine plan of salvation’, translated in secular terms via the model of moral judgement, as Joan Scott asserts. On the other hand, its unity is governed by the contingent fact of the present, which marks the end of the chronicle and so provides its concluding note. Combined, the chronicle risks a moralised presentism, which summarily condemns events of the past that do not meet the high moral standard the historian sets himself. Beresford’s narrative incurs this risk with lashings of dramatic irony, in which fateful decisions in the past ominously forebode the dire state of the Basin’s ecology and politics in the present.
Beresford rather predicably concludes by advocating for ‘listening to Aboriginal voices and values, a respect for science, and the abandonment of top-down political and administrative responses’, as Margaret Cook summarises in her review of Wounded Country. Yet these strident calls for justice, framed in the bland progressive terms of the present, replace the historian’s central task of doing justice to the past and thus teach us little about how history takes place in this vast region. To Kurt Johnson, the moral, historical and technological framework of Wounded Country suggests the way ‘city-living Australians’ visit the regions ensconced in 4WDs, an image also evoked by Melinda Hinkson when describing the usurpation of farmers with ‘grounded knowledge’ by corporate managers.
Landscapes of the past
In Ground Truthing, Paul Carter distinguishes between an aerial, GPS-like view and a grounded mode of seeing that involves
learning how to descend into a darkness in which the calls of the galahs, the scent of wattle and the speechless certitudes of the ants shine out with a night knowledge even in the middle of the shelterless day; and then, with no less deftness, climbing back up the rungs of generalisation, and insisting on the principle of care at a distance.
Somewhere between the aerial and the dark ‘speechless certitudes’, we might find what Carter describes as the ‘middle-air of speaking and listening’. Perhaps Beresford imagines he can capture such a level of narration by amassing newspaper sources and stitching them together. ‘History is the starting point in dealing with the unfolding tragedy of the Murray–Darling Basin’, he insists. Yet he begins in the present, and the ‘unfolding tragedy’ is described in textureless, journalistic terms, indentured under headline-style subtitles such as ‘Calls to halt the scheme unheeded’.
But journalism, even in the days of regional and local papers, maintains an abstracted style of reportage that can pitch ecological calamity and the catastrophic effect of European colonisation on Indigenous nations and people at the same level. Both form part of a national story whose fabric it is the indelible job of journalism to weave. As Jessica K. Weir writes in Murray River Country: An Ecological Dialogue with Traditional Owners:
The Murray-Darling Basin has also been characterised in Australian national identity in stories of progress and nation building, stories in which human skill and ingenuity have created a vast agricultural heartland. In this story flowing rivers of liquid gold have supplied the economic resources for vast amounts of agricultural produce and the country towns that have thrived with this economic growth.
This is largely the narrative spun by Beresford—just updated, like most books about the Murray–Darling Basin (and perhaps regional Australia more broadly), by being written against a background of what Weir calls ‘enormous ecological devastation’. Environmental histories, as Libby Robins suggests, must contend with the fact that ‘relations between the old nature and the new nation are tense, at times even violent’.
For the Murray–Darling, fish kills have become a repeated sign of this violence, interrupting the complacent physical and ontological occlusion of the regional, the rural and the agricultural that, as Lauren Rickards and Melinda Hinkson argue in Arena, characterises ‘hypermodern capitalism’. This occlusion is so clearly a symptom of capitalism, but as Hinkson demonstrates, the rural, and particularly the figure of the ‘stoic hard-working white male farmer’, is so heavily mythologised as to obstruct a proper reckoning with this fact. It is as if we were to treat banking as primarily the business of storing ordinary people’s money in safe deposit boxes. Hinkson suggests that the mythology is sustained not only by conservative politicians, but also by progressive environmentalist organisations like Farmers for Climate Change. The updated image of the farmer becomes one that is ‘efficient, technologically savvy, opportunity seeking, committing to increased productivity and growth’, and thus perfect for integration into multiple global and financialised markets, from water to wheat.
By contrast, the staid historical journalism of the chronicle has no way to analyse such complex imbrications. It stays at the level of reported events, never dipping down to sample the waters, tread the dry earth or chance the empyrean heights of the latest scholarship that might, for the price of a timely abstraction, afford a glimpse through the ceaseless recounting of chronology. Beresford arrays his factions in neat sides, with aggrieved and dispossessed Aboriginal people alongside indignant ‘small farmers’ who ‘curse the rapid rise in water prices’, allied against the ‘big irrigators’—lobby groups and politicians dutifully in tow—and incompetent administrators. This latter group Beresford implicitly accuses of being responsible for the ecological and human costs of what he has earlier called ‘an engine of national economic wealth creation’. Despite the divisions, however, Beresford’s narrative is ultimately united under the sign of the nation: ‘Both profiteers and the poor worked to fulfil the dreams of nation-builders’.
Factional enclosures
The threat to this narrative comes in the shape of what Beresford refers to numerous times as ‘vested interests’—a generic agglomeration only partially defined as an alliance of water traders, large cotton growers and agricultural corporations. The term ‘vested’ replaces the need to detail how some claims to property ownership are justified and others are getting too big for their boots. The conflict in Beresford’s narrative, as so often in reporting on rural affairs, takes place between two factions of property owners, and sometimes a third party of dispossessed ‘traditional’ owners. Labour plays no role; it is too transient, or inconsequential—too fraught against the scale of corporate competition. The ordinary, propertyless worker is represented as a thing of the past in the agrarian ‘utopian ideals’ embodied in failed schemes like irrigation communities and soldier settlement programs.
The failure of such visions to materialise, in Beresford’s chronicle, is traced back to fateful decisions made by colonial administrators to allow squatters to consolidate property stolen firstly from Aboriginal people and secondly from the Crown. Land grants and land grabs expanded the power of pastoralists, who ran roughshod over both legislative attempts to curb their influence and ecosystems in what Beresford characterises—somewhat uncomfortably following a chapter on the Frontier Wars and massacres of Indigenous people—as a war on nature and a campaign of extermination. Such pastoralists gradually merge with corporate agribusinesses such as Cubbie Station and Webster Ltd, whose foreign ownership and ruthless management styles mark them out as quintessential ‘vested’ interests.
Paradoxically, as Hinkson and Rickards point out, what makes the interests of these corporate agribusinesses specific is precisely the fact that while they may be invested, they really have no interest in place. They are, like capital itself, distributed abstractly through ‘many points of connection in the world’. The implication that they are an entrenched group of profiteers, while partly true, belies the fact that capital takes flight as much as it lands. The term comes to serve as a generic accusation, endorsing the centrist anti-corruption position characteristic of the political ‘teal’ wave. It fails to complicate, even simplifies, politics in regional Australia.
Managing the Basin
A ‘third’—to adopt Anthony Giddens’ sense of the term—faction in Beresford’s distanced portrait of Basin politics is the scientist/expert, often found calling as if from the sidelines a forlorn warning or some unheeded advice. Beresford offers an implicit account of this group’s historical development via the confluence of ornithological and other amateur scientific societies and non-commercial hunters, fishers and ultimately conservationists. In the mid-twentieth century, such groups formed expert organisations and institutions, including the Australian Conservation Foundation in 1964. Similarly, organisations primarily concerned with agricultural and economic matters such as the Murray River League and South Australia’s Agricultural Bureau offer signs of proto-ecological awareness, albeit often framed in terms of the sustainability of natural resources for exploitation.
During the same period, between the 1950s and the 1970s, water use more than doubled, and it grew steadily through to the 1990s, with licenses handed to property owners in the river system ‘allocating more water than it was possible to take out of the system with little concern to the graziers downstream, the environment in general, and the impact on Indigenous peoples’ cultural rights’. This increased extraction took place alongside an increasingly abstract management of water resources through dramatic interventions in the hydrological landscape, from irrigation channels and pumps to dams and weirs; as if to illustrate the point made by Hinkson, Carter and others, Weir illustrates Murray River Country with an image of a sign on Frenchman Creek warning that the ‘inlet regulator’ there is ‘remotely operated’.
Beresford’s identification with the figure of the scientist-environmentalist, and sense of outrage that government policy should fail to follow in lock-step with ‘the science’, or that ‘the science’ should be politicised—as in the case of the Murray–Darling Basin Plan’s precursors and successors in attempting to curtail water extraction—is of a piece with the remoteness of his narrative voice. While farmers and corporates own the land, and Aboriginal people own moral righteousness, in Beresford’s account scientists own truth and are ‘iconoclast[s] prepared to tell’ it. One unusual feature of his narrative is its excursions to the United States to provide a model for ‘visionary’ leadership. This model contrasts with Australian politicians’ lack of ‘necessary vision, boldness and purpose to tackle the unfolding soil erosion crisis’. Beresford grieves that there ‘were no recognisable heroes like President Roosevelt … Australia seemed marooned in its cultural narrative’.
Beresford is most regularly failed by Alfred Deakin, who in Wounded Country as in most conventional accounts first devised the irrigation scheme on the Murray in consultation with those dubiously credentialed entrepreneurs, the Chaffey brothers. Deakin thus attracts the thickest doses of dramatic irony. He ‘failed to ask deeper questions’—questions that the present-day historian can now apparently answer. The intellectual failures of historical figures are constantly filled in by the present’s overwhelming certitude about its correctness in terms of ‘long-term vision and environmental awareness’. It makes for a strange contradiction that the Basin’s political and ecological condition is so clearly as parlous as it ever was, yet the historian’s hindsight works so effectively to inject clarity into their moral judgements.
Timeless wonderings
Beresford may resolve this contradiction via another odd feature that interrupts the narrative on occasion to provide a psychological explanation for phenomena ranging from Major Mitchell’s violent streak in dealing with Aboriginal people—attributed to his military experiences in the Peninsula War—to irrigators’ reactions to the Plan’s attempt to claw back water for the environment. He treats squatter violence and frontier massacres as not specific historical events, but symptoms of a ‘universal dark side of humanity … a colonial version of a phenomenon known throughout history: ordinary people becoming killers’. Such unsatisfying explanations seem rooted in a naturalising popular psychology account of inter-group conflict: ‘Violence was inevitable because competition over resources is recognised as the root of intragroup violence’. Such violence is also attributed to a protective instinct among ‘rugged individuals’ determined to ‘protect what they perceived was theirs by force’. While some individuals may have had psychopathic streaks—an explanation Beresford throws into the mix with little discussion—he suggests that this protective instinct carries into the ‘understandably natural reaction’ irrigators had to the Plan, since ‘humans are used to prioritising their own needs without fully appreciating the interdependence between us and nature’.
These strange effusions of armchair psychological theorising about universal human tendencies collide with Beresford’s deference to Aboriginal ways of inhabiting Country and ‘approaches to nature’, which he contrasts rather indistinctly with ‘Western’ ways. Their relationship to Country is almost a timeless exception to the historically contingent attempts of European settlers to comprehend or master nature in the account. Despite relatively little engagement with the meaning of Indigenous nations’ connection to specific parts of the Murray–Darling Basin region, Beresford, as Julie McIntyre writes, piously concludes by ‘positioning First Nations as sustainable land managers capable of healing a wounded land’. In his review of Wounded Country, however, Cameron Muir follows Deborah Bird Rose in differentiating ‘broken’ from ‘wounded’ country, with the latter ‘a reminder to afford nature its potential to heal’.
The danger of Beresford’s universalising and naturalising psychology is that it implies a rupture in the human relationship to nature that can either be reconciled or become a permanent diremption. Without an explanation of the specific cause of the rupture, the remediation will appear generic and undifferentiated. As Paul Carter writes, ‘white settler culture has always associated harmonisation with the reduction of difference: to harmonise is to regulate and render uniform’, and Jessica Weir warns that ‘Rather than just one story, each language group has its own stories about how their country was created … Such stories tie people to their distinctive part of the river in a potent, spiritual way’. Confronting the Murray–Darling Basin should involve disaggregating and loosening the hold of the harmonising and naturalising schema.
A pastoral chronicle
Such a project must not only differentiate between Indigenous nations’ distinctive relationships to river Country, but also leaven the contradictions between the factions of capital dominating the Basin. We need to understand, without becoming entranced by, the abstract configurations of financialisation that have bundled water along with agricultural products, land and cash into the bucket of assets that circulate in and through the regional landscape. Such a landscape itself must be layered, its geography and hydrology given their due. This means disambiguating ‘the science’ into its component parts: the grounded and the aerial, the instrument of capital and the ally to environmentalists.
Finally, as Melinda Hinkson and others such as Madelaine Moore suggest, environmentalists need to be interrogated for their commitments. The property-owning ‘Lock the Gate’ variety may not prove to be bold allies with Indigenous people and communities who have been, as Beresford argues, ‘cut out of water trading markets through their historic exclusion from owning land when water entitlements were distributed’—an odd way to frame the exclusion, and one that is eerily consistent with the ACCC’s and other pro-market bodies’ emphasis on market participation as the measure of inclusion.
Wounded Country may belong in the genre of the pastoral, as defined by John Kinsella in Arena as a way of forgetting ‘how we got to crisis’ by distancing ourselves ‘from the damage as much as it is ironised, lamented or celebrated’. The chronicle’s flattened retelling of events mirrors the farmer’s ‘conventional poetics that elides and merges the “rural” (colonial agricultural) with Nature’ and wraps ‘climate damage, land toxicity, extinction through clearing (flora and fauna) and mass fire events’ in the reformist frame of ‘the “necessity” of food production and even a colonial-generational relation to landholdings’. The whole frame of the region as a Basin system may need to dissolve; it has been too caught up in the lingering perception that the Murray is a ‘purposeful’ river, a gathering force that can be harnessed for the nation and capital. Let it splinter and crack, stagnate in pools, disappear into the earth in seasonal cycles; let its water pool and eddy in variations of colour and cool; let one tributary pay tribute to another rather than always doing service to the singular story.
Reimagining Regional Relationships
Lauren Rickards, Melinda Hinkson, Dec 2020
…wheat exists in the world not only as a plant, a seed or even a material such as flour, but as ‘futures’ and other fictions traded on the Chicago Stock Exchange…