EXPERIMENTS IN THE RANGELANDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 103

It is almost a treeless country . . . and absolutely level. The surface soil becomes
pulverised by the traffic into an impalpable red dust, and the slightest agitation
of the wind raises it in heavy clouds. It tinges everything around; in fact it is
one of those places where every prospect displeases, and all but man is vile
(Anon, 1884: 14)
The scrub was increasing in density, it was closing over, and it was rejecting the
European settlers. What is it about scrub that attracts suspicion and mystery? For
Australian writer Ross Gibson the Brigalow scrub in Queensland is one immense
crime scene, Australia's own badlands. It is a 'lair for evil' where 'malevolence
flourishes naturally', or has been 'shoved in there since colonial times' (Gibson,
2002: 13). Scrub is unknown, unseen, unpopulated, and secret. The scrub is always
silent. Historian Michael Cathcart provided a fascinating account of the symbolic
importance of silence in The Water Dreamers , arguing, 'the silence expresses the
moral condition of the land - the lethargy and stasis of a primordial forest. The
silence is a dimension that exists before time' (Cathcart, 2009: 59). Only the arrival
of whites could animate or bring time and history to the land. Scrublands received
scorn from a society that was beginning to turn its gaze from the fertile and
picturesque coast to the hostile and deficient interior. Perhaps it was predictable
that the scrub itself became the problem, and not Australians' relationships with
their environment. Was it inevitable that agriculture, as the new tool of social and
environmental correction, would be called on to deal with the scrub problem?
Scrub-clearing was hard work. Men toiled in 40º heat using axes to fell and
ringbark some of the hardest timber in Australia. Pastoral landholders would order
their scrub-cutting gangs to cut a shallow ring around the outer bark, from as small
as a single line that did not remove a chip, to about six inches wide. The trees lose
the ability to send sugars to their roots and with this method take about three years
to die. The landholders would leave the grey trees standing in the paddocks. Ring-
barking for cultivation was even harder. Farmers or their workers would cut deep
through the bark and sap-wood into the darker coloured heart-wood. If done this
way, some species of the semi-arid woodland trees could die within a few months
(Peacock, 1900b).
Chinese immigrants had provided labour for the pastoral industry from its
earliest days and much ringbarking and suckering was carried out by Chinese
scrubbing gangs (Campbell, 1923; Rolls, 1984; Bonyhady, 2002). The New South
Wales Minister for Lands, Joseph Carruthers, was keen to see the Bogan scrub
populated and agriculturally productive. He was also an advocate for federation of
the colonies 'for the sake of white Australia' (Ward, 2006). Soon after the gold
rushes of the 1850s, the New South Wales Colonial Government placed some
restrictions on Chinese immigration. In 1896, the same year that the unemployed
were sent out to the Bogan scrub, the New South Wales Government passed
legislation which did not just restrict Chinese immigration, but banned all
'coloured' immigration. Without the option to exploit Asian and Islander workers,
who would carry out the manual labour to prepare the ground for agriculture?