EXPERIMENTS IN THE RANGELANDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 104

Would white people work for low pay, and perhaps more importantly, were they
physiologically capable in the interior's heat and dust?
The white men doing the work of 'coloured' people soon found public
sympathy in newspapers and in the labour movement. W. T. Goodge, a writer of
light verse, wrote a poem about the plight of the 'struggle-for-lifers' for The Bulletin
in 1899. These two verses illustrate some of the key concerns that emerged from
the Bogan scrub experiment:
Oh, come with me to the Bogan, boys,
To the Bogan scrub so gay,
Where our brethren toil on a hungry soil,
At an Indian coolie's pay!
...
For the damper's tough in the Bogan, boys,
And the beef's as hard as rocks,
And the bull-dog ants get into your pants
And eat your Sunday socks!
No sinful pleasure is there, my lads,
No wickedness there you know.
The scrublands have been a place of murder and massacre, a place where sin came
easy, but where sin could be purged through battling the land, a place of perverse
biological and corporeal reckoning, of environmental degradation and moral
redemption. The scrub was no longer just a place in need of correction; it could
also correct the defects of the unemployed through tough physical work. New
ideas in biology created an obsession with the body and physical fitness. It is no
surprise that 1896 was also the year of the revival of the Olympic Games. Towards
the end of the nineteenth century physiological sciences such as anthropometry
and phrenology could supposedly explain a range of physical and mental char-
acteristics and health issues: 'symmetry of the body was thought to reflect phy-
siological - even spiritual - fitness' (Park, 1994: 62). The men's labour was
reshaping their bodies as well as reshaping their minds. All the while they were
reshaping place.
In a survey of key texts on the history of masculinity and morals, J. A. Mangan
and James Walvin argued that by the end of the nineteenth century ideas about
'manliness' had shifted from earlier ideals of the gentlemanly and Christian concerns
of 'selflessness and integrity' to 'stoicism, hardiness and endurance' or 'neo-Spartan
virility' (Mangan and Walvin, 1987: 1). In Australia, settlers felt the Aboriginal
people and native animals were not worthy opponents. The 'kangaroos and other
marsupials did not offer the classic challenge of the wild animals of Africa', wrote
historian Libby Robin in How a Continent Created a Nation (2007: 42). The settlers
killed both in great numbers but it did not bring honour. Robin argued that by
the start of the twentieth century 'battling the land' stood in for the traditional
challenge. Perhaps scrublands had taken on a symbolic, even hero-making, role.