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Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow – coda in Kabul
August 22, 2021 December 24, 2021 Paul Hemphill 1 Comment
I once wrote that the twenty year war in Afghanistan was like the Hotel California: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Recent events have shown otherwise – or have they, really? I am recalling those lines from David Byrne's dystopian song, Once in a Lifetime: "same as it ever was, same as it ever was". But perhaps Burning Down the House is more apt.
Desperate people scramble to escape, over the borders and over the airport walls. Afghans from all walks of life, including officials, soldiers, and policemen, former employees of the allies, women, and human rights advocates, fear the worst, as do ethnic and religious minorities who suffered horrific abuses at the hands of Taliban 1.0. Governments, NGOs and concerned folk all over the world wring their hands in vicarious anxiety, and for some, in shame. Europe. meanwhile, braces for another flood of refugees as displaced Afghans seek sanctuary
The US president declares that the America gave most of it's all to save Afghanistan whilst the blame game as to "who lost Afghanistan?" commences, just as it did decades ago when the US 'lost China" and then, Vietnam. The Chief Security Adviser says there's no way of knowing how much American military hardware has been gifted to the Taliban, but it looks like a veritable bonanza.
America's allies ponder the reliability of its erstwhile protector, fearing that the giant might have feet of clay – in choosing to give up on Afghanistan in order to confront China, Biden might actually have undercut America's position everywhere. China and Russia, always happy to see America squirm, but always anxious about instability in neighbouring countries, eye up economic and strategic opportunities. And extremists all over the world, of all colours and creeds, are emboldened as yet another apparently rag tag militia humbles the world's mightiest military power.
As Afghanistan slides into insolvency and famine, necessitating enormous amounts of aid, the question facing foreign governments is whether or not to recognize the new regime and to release the funds so urgently required. The appetite for isolating Afghanistan on human rights ground is diimishing. Pretty much all of Afghanistan's neighbors are also guilty of the principal human rights violations that the Taliban are accused of. Minority rights have long been violated with impunity Pakistan and much of the Arab world, and most of Central Asia has been a showcase for ethnic nationalist authoritarianism for decades.
On the ground, and away from the besieged air[port, with the Taliban now well equipped and in control of the main towns and cities, many of the old politicians and warlords have chosen to work with them in the hopes of creating an inclusive transitional government. Former presidential aspirant and reconciliation council leader Abdullah Abdullah, disingenuous former president Hamid Karzai, and that vicious and powerful old warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, have formed a council that seeks a political settlement with the Taliban, rather than join any nascent budding insurgency.
The old Afghanistan, divided along tribal, ethnic and religious lines, and governed by deals, compromises and the divvying up of the spoils may even reassert itself. All that is old might be new again!
Meanwhile our mainstream and non-mainstream media is awash with coverage and commentary , including contributions from a good number of Afghanistan/Iraq hawks – the ones who brought us those twin disasters in the first place _ who have been called on by major media organizations to offer their sage assessment of the current situation. Whether it's retired generals who now earn money in the weapons industry, former officials from the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations who in many cases are directly responsible for the mistakes of the past two decades, or war enthusiast pundits with an unblemished record of wrongness, we're now hearing from the same people who two decades ago told us how great these wars would be, then spent years telling us victory was right around the corner, and are now explaining how somebody else is to blame for Afghanistan.
As a counterbalance to all this, In that Howling Infinite republishes below two excellent pieces by commentators of repute.
Sarah Cheyes, a journalist and political adviser with long experience in Afghanistan, identifies four elements contributing to the failure of America's Afghan Project: corruption at the highest levels of government which the US chose to ignore – it also ignored the many billions of dollars ended up in the bank accounts of American arms manufacturers and contractors (a recent government report found that between 2011 and 2019, the US spent nearly $100 billion on private contractors); the role played by Pakistan's intelligence organization, the ISI, in creating and nurturing the Taliban – and the allies refusal to call out Pakistan encouraged its impunity; the dubious maneuverings of former America's onetime-favourite and former president Hamid Karzai, who appears to have a foot in both camps ; and America's self-delusions about these and other matters.
Commentator and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen is always worth reading – and below is his latest piece for The Australian. Whilst Cheyes looks back to determine how it all came to this., Kilcullen ponders where it will it will go. But first, he denounces the blame-shifters and buck-passers: "Those pinning the entire blame for the collapse on the Afghan military should hang their heads in shame. The Afghans have been fighting desperately to survive, losing thousands killed every month, ever since President Joe Biden's withdrawal announcement in April kicked off the final campaign. They have been carrying the main combat burden of the war since late 2014, losing close to 70,000 casualties in that time against a few dozen on the coalition's part".
None of the elements identified by Cheyes and Kilcullen is new news. Old Afghanistan's hands like Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn, and many others have been saying this for decades. The big question, which I am sure will be answered soon is whether Taliban 2.0 will be an improvement on Taliban 1.0 vis a vis women, human rights and even modernity.
But Kilcullen does not see the war as a misbegotten and forlorn hope. Far from it:
"Some will say the war was unwinnable, that it could never have succeeded. But deep down we all know that is not true. We were sustaining the effort with minimal expenditure and zero casualties, and could have continued it forever had we chosen to do so. We did not. The war was winnable, but we did not win it. Rather, we screwed it up and we have been defeated".
That much is true. And with an America smarting from humiliation and a China swaggering with hubris. What could possibly go wrong now?
An old friend, Charles Tyler, wrote to me apropos this post:
"The last couple of weeks have certainly seen major shifts of power, but things are so very far from being settled, and probably never will be. Indeed. events as they unfold will defy all predictions, as they always do, and the commentary, informed and shallow, will continue as always. And all will need revision in the light of what actually transpires.
As several commentators have noted the US is now likely to become closer in military and strategic cooperation to India, while China and Russia will become closer to Pakistan and Afghanistan, with all the risks these shifts entail for every country involved. But in this three-dimensional chess game the field of military and strategic action is just one layer. The layers of religion, tribalism, ethnicity, nationalism and plain human emotion – not to speak of even broader considerations like climate and demographic change and economic development – overlay and play into every other field, and can only be controlled or manipulated or predicted so far. So the consequences of moving any particular chess piece are unknowable".
Well said, Charles!
For the history buffs, we also republish below an excellent history lesson from American academic and author Priya Satia; and in In That Howling Infinite, read also: The Ghosts of Gandamak; The Devil Drives, and One Two Three what are we fighting for?
Taliban 2.0
The Ides of August
Sarah Chayes, August 15, 2021
I've been silent for a while. I've been silent about Afghanistan for longer. But too many things are going unsaid.
I won't try to evoke the emotions, somehow both swirling and yet leaden: the grief, the anger, the sense of futility. Instead, as so often before, I will use my mind to shield my heart. And in the process, perhaps help you make some sense of what has happened.
For those of you who don't know me, here is my background — the perspective from which I write tonight.
I covered the fall of the Taliban for NPR, making my way into their former capital, Kandahar, in December 2001, a few days after the collapse of their regime. Descending the last great hill into the desert city, I saw a dusty ghost town. Pickup trucks with rocket-launchers strapped to the struts patrolled the streets. People pulled on my militia friends' sleeves, telling them where to find a Taliban weapons cache, or a last hold-out. But most remained indoors.
It was Ramadan. A few days later, at the holiday ending the month-long fast, the pent-up joy erupted. Kites took to the air. Horsemen on gorgeous, caparisoned chargers tore across a dusty common in sprint after sprint, with a festive audience cheering them on. This was Kandahar, the Taliban heartland. There was no panicked rush for the airport.
I reported for a month or so, then passed off to Steve Inskeep, now Morning Edition host. Within another couple of months, I was back, not as a reporter this time, but to try actually to do something. I stayed for a decade. I ran two non-profits in Kandahar, living in an ordinary house and speaking Pashtu, and eventually went to work for two commanders of the international troops, and then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (You can read about that time, and its lessons, in my first two books, The Punishment of Virtue and Thieves of State.)
From that standpoint — speaking as an American, as an adoptive Kandahari, and as a former senior U.S. government official — here are the key factors I see in today's climax of a two-decade long fiasco:
Afghan government corruption, and the U.S. role enabling and reinforcing it. The last speaker of the Afghan parliament, Rahman Rahmani, I recently learned, is a multimillionaire, thanks to monopoly contracts to provide fuel and security to U.S. forces at their main base, Bagram. Is this the type of government people are likely to risk their lives to defend?
Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with U.S. fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints. By 2007, delegations of elders would visit me — the only American whose door was open and who spoke Pashtu so there would be no intermediaries to distort or report their words. Over candied almonds and glasses of green tea, they would get to some version of this: "The Taliban hit us on this cheek, and the government hits us on that cheek." The old man serving as the group's spokesman would physically smack himself in the face.
I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were. Note: it took me a while, and plenty of my own mistakes, to come to that realization. But I did.
For two decades, American leadership on the ground and in Washington proved unable to take in this simple message. I finally stopped trying to get it across when, in 2011, an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate of all our efforts. That's when I knew today was inevitable.
Americans like to think of ourselves as having valiantly tried to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Afghans, so the narrative goes, just weren't ready for it, or didn't care enough about democracy to bother defending it. Or we'll repeat the cliche that Afghans have always rejected foreign intervention; we're just the latest in a long line.
I was there. Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that's what we stood for.
And what did we stand for? What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules.
Is that American democracy?
Well…?
Pakistan. The involvement of that country's government — in particular its top military brass — in its neighbor's affairs is the second factor that would determine the fate of the U.S. mission.
You may have heard that the Taliban first emerged in the early 1990s, in Kandahar. That is incorrect. I conducted dozens of conversations and interviews over the course of years, both with actors in the drama and ordinary people who watched events unfold in Kandahar and in Quetta, Pakistan. All of them said the Taliban first emerged in Pakistan.
The Taliban were a strategic project of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. It even conducted market surveys in the villages around Kandahar, to test the label and the messaging. "Taliban" worked well. The image evoked was of the young students who apprenticed themselves to village religious leaders. They were known as sober, studious, and gentle. These Taliban, according to the ISI messaging, had no interest in government. They just wanted to get the militiamen who infested the city to stop extorting people at every turn in the road.
Both label and message were lies.
Within a few years, Usama bin Laden found his home with the Taliban, in their de facto capital, Kandahar, hardly an hour's drive from Quetta. Then he organized the 9/11 attacks. Then he fled to Pakistan, where we finally found him, living in a safe house in Abbottabad, practically on the grounds of the Pakistani military academy. Even knowing what I knew, I was shocked. I never expected the ISI to be that brazen.
Meanwhile, ever since 2002, the ISI had been re-configuring the Taliban: helping it regroup, training and equipping units, developing military strategy, saving key operatives when U.S. personnel identified and targeted them. That's why the Pakistani government got no advance warning of the Bin Laden raid. U.S. officials feared the ISI would warn him.
By 2011, my boss, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Taliban were a "virtual arm of the ISI."
And now this.
Do we really suppose the Taliban, a rag-tag, disjointed militia hiding out in the hills, as we've so long been told, was able to execute such a sophisticated campaign plan with no international backing? Where do we suppose that campaign plan came from? Who gave the orders? Where did all those men, all that materiel, the endless supply of money to buy off local Afghan army and police commanders, come from? How is it that new officials were appointed in Kandahar within a day of the city's fall? The new governor, mayor, director of education, and chief of police all speak with a Kandahari accent. But no one I know has ever heard of them. I speak with a Kandahari accent, too. Quetta is full of Pashtuns — the main ethic group in Afghanistan — and people of Afghan descent and their children. Who are these new officials?
Over those same years, by the way, the Pakistani military also provided nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea. But for two decades, while all this was going on, the United States insisted on considering Pakistan an ally. We still do.
Hamid Karzai. During my conversations in the early 2000s about the Pakistani government's role in the Taliban's initial rise, I learned this breathtaking fact: Hamid Karzai, the U.S. choice to pilot Afghanistan after we ousted their regime, was in fact the go-between who negotiated those very Taliban's initial entry into Afghanistan in 1994.
I spent months probing the stories. I spoke to servants in the Karzai household. I spoke to a former Mujahideen commander, Mullah Naqib, who admitted to being persuaded by the label and the message Karzai was peddling. The old commander also admitted he was at his wits' end at the misbehavior of his own men. I spoke with his chief lieutenant, who disagreed with his tribal elder and commander, and took his own men off to neighboring Helmand Province to keep fighting. I heard that Karzai's own father broke with him over his support for this ISI project. Members of Karzai's household and Quetta neighbors told me about Karzai's frequent meetings with armed Taliban at his house there, in the months leading up to their seizure of power.
And lo. Karzai abruptly emerges from this vortex, at the head of a "coordinating committee" that will negotiate the Taliban's return to power? Again?
It was like a repeat of that morning of May, 2011, when I first glimpsed the pictures of the safe-house where Usama bin Laden had been sheltered. Once again — even knowing everything I knew — I was shocked. I was shocked for about four seconds. Then everything seemed clear.
It is my belief that Karzai may have been a key go-between negotiating this surrender, just as he did in 1994, this time enlisting other discredited figures from Afghanistan's past, as they were useful to him. Former co-head of the Afghan government, Abdullah Abdullah, could speak to his old battle-buddies, the Mujahideen commanders of the north and west. You may have heard some of their names as they surrendered their cities in recent days: Ismail Khan, Dostum, Atta Muhammad Noor. The other person mentioned together with Karzai is Gulbuddin Hikmatyar — a bona fide Taliban commander, who could take the lead in some conversations with them and with the ISI.
As Americans have witnessed in our own context — the #MeToo movement, for example, the uprising after the murder of George Floyd, or the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — surprisingly abrupt events are often months or years in the quiet making. The abrupt collapse of 20 years' effort in Afghanistan is, in my view, one of those cases.
Thinking this hypothesis through, I find myself wondering: what role did U.S. Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad play? And old friend of Karzai's, he was the one who ran the negotiations with the Taliban for the Trump Administration, in which the Afghan government was forced to make concession after concession. Could President Biden truly have found no one else for that job, to replace an Afghan-American with obvious conflicts of interest, who was close to former Vice President Dick Cheney and who lobbied in favor of an oil pipeline through Afghanistan when the Taliban were last in power?
Self-Delusion. How many times did you read stories about the Afghan security forces' steady progress? How often, over the past two decades, did you hear some U.S. official proclaim that the Taliban's eye-catching attacks in urban settings were signs of their "desperation" and their "inability to control territory?" How many heart-warming accounts did you hear about all the good we were doing, especially for women and girls?
Who were we deluding? Ourselves?
What else are we deluding ourselves about?
One final point. I hold U.S. civilian leadership, across four administrations, largely responsible for today's outcome. Military commanders certainly participated in the self-delusion. I can and did find fault with generals I worked for or observed. But the U.S. military is subject to civilian control. And the two primary problems identified above — corruption and Pakistan — are civilian issues. They are not problems men and women in uniform can solve. But faced with calls to do so, no top civilian decision-maker was willing to take either of these problems on. The political risk, for them, was too high.
Today, as many of those officials enjoy their retirement, who is suffering the cost?
My warm thanks to all of you who have left comments, for taking the time to write, and for the vibrancy of your concern. A number of you have asked some excellent questions. Please have the kindness to stand by. I will try to provide what answers I can when I can.
After the fall: what's next for Afghanistan
Much as the Taliban may like to claim the war is over, it is far from finished. Afghanistan is collapsing in real time and a new bloodbath beginning. Now the world has a choice to make.
By David Kilcullen, Weekend Australian , August 21, 2021
Taliban fighters sit over a vehicle on a street in Laghman province on August 15. Picture. AFP
Afghanistan is collapsing in real time. Two decades of effort down the gurgler, trillions of dollars and many thousands of lives lost, and a new bloodbath beginning inside Afghanistan. US credibility – like that of every American ally, including Australia – is on the line.
Approaching the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we are back to square one. What happened? Describing the full debacle would take more space than I have, but let me try to answer some obvious questions: Why did we fail to foresee the fall of Kabul? What is happening on the ground and what does it mean? What will others do now, and what should we do next?
I promised a mea culpa, and here it is: I was dead wrong about the fall of Kabul. I am on record just weeks ago saying "it would be a stretch to imagine the Taliban capturing Kabul anytime soon".
Of course virtually every other analyst got it wrong, too, but I can speak only to my own thought process. Thinking it over, examining my conscience, I realise my lack of imagination rested on a critical but flawed assumption.
I simply could not credit the possibility that the US government and the entire international community would just abandon Kabul overnight without a fight, leaving their own evacuation plan in disarray and surrendering both the Afghans and many thousands of their own citizens to the mercy of the Taliban. I took it as given that the US, UN and global institutions (all of which repeatedly promised ongoing support to Afghanistan) meant what they said. I mistakenly believed our major ally possessed a modicum of moral fibre and basic competence, and would muster the will to fight rather than see decades of effort down the drain.
I was wrong, and I apologise.
In the end Kabul fell as described in my last piece and the world's response was to do – nothing. Not one airstrike; not a single attempt to blunt the Taliban offensive (even as guerrillas gathered in the open on Kabul's approaches, presenting the juiciest target since 2001); not even a harsh tweet. Instead we saw excuse-making, blame-shifting and victim-shaming of the most nauseating kind from many (not all) American military and political leaders, and hand-wringing impotence from the UN.
A baby handed to the US army on the perimeter wall of Kabul airport, Aug 19. Omar Haiudari
Those pinning the entire blame for the collapse on the Afghan military should hang their heads in shame. The Afghans have been fighting desperately to survive, losing thousands killed every month, ever since President Joe Biden's withdrawal announcement in April kicked off the final campaign. They have been carrying the main combat burden of the war since late 2014, losing close to 70,000 casualties in that time against a few dozen on the coalition's part.
The Afghan forces – which the coalition built to our own specifications – were like a stack of Jenga blocks in which certain critical pieces, by design, could be provided only by the US. Principal among these were air support, intelligence, logistics and maintenance. Suddenly in early May, with no warning, we whipped away these pieces, having promised Afghans for a decade that this was exactly what we would never do.
Of course the Afghan army collapsed – it was designed by us to function only with the parts we provided. To quote British explorer and author Rory Stewart, blaming Afghans now is like removing the wheels from your car, then complaining that it can't drive.
Once the air support, intelligence and logistics were gone, the Afghan forces rapidly began to lose ground in an accelerating collapse of control across the countryside. As each successive district garrison fell, the government grew weaker and more isolated while the Taliban gained weapons, vehicles, defectors and ammunition. More than 200 such garrisons were lost in May and June alone. The loss of assets was bad enough but the blow to morale was deadly – no more so than early last month when US forces bailed out of the vast Bagram air base without even bothering to tell their Afghan partners, who woke up to find the Americans gone.
By early this month, the first provincial capitals began to fall. Within a week multiple provinces were falling each day, and by last Friday Kabul was the only major city in government hands.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, meeting politicians in June, scoffed at the need to evacuate at-risk Afghans who had worked with the coalition, saying: "We are not withdrawing. We are staying. The embassy is staying … If there is a significant deterioration in security, I do not think it is going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday."
He was right: it happened from Friday evening to early Sunday afternoon. That is cold comfort for the 86,000 at-risk Afghans now running a gauntlet of Taliban checkpoints to reach the sole remaining runway at Hamid Karzai airport (soon to be renamed, one would think) in downtown Kabul. That multi-runway air base at Bagram we abandoned last month would be nice to have right now.
Taliban enters the presidential palace in Kabul. AP
Like many other veterans, I have received hundreds of messages and dozens of frantic calls for help during the past few days from Afghan friends now stranded – some being hunted house-to-house by the Taliban. There will be time to be angry about this later. For now, it's most important to share their perspective as objectively as possible. So, what is happening now across the country, and what does it mean?
In Kabul, a Taliban delegation in the presidential palace is negotiating with Hamid Karzai and other leaders, seeking to form a transitional government. On the streets, Taliban forces are securing government buildings and patrolling in green Afghan police trucks or captured armoured vehicles.
While Taliban leaders have announced that they seek no revenge, they have put the security of Kabul under the control of Anas Haqqani, known for his deadly 2018 attack on the Kabul Serena Hotel and other civilian targets.
Civilians are being disarmed, since according to the Taliban the war is over now so nobody needs a weapon. In fact, special Taliban units have been going house-to-house, "disappearing" former military, intelligence and government officials.
Some have been shot in the street, others tortured to death. Taliban checkpoints are stopping all Afghans, and witnesses say they have pulled special-visa holders from the airport queues and beaten them with chains. Remnants of the Afghan army and intelligence service are hiding from death squads or trying to make their way to the Panjshir Valley, 160km north of Kabul. Some stragglers, and a few formed units, are still fighting outside the city.
In the Panjshir, first vice-president Amrullah Saleh, citing the escape of former president Ashraf Ghani, has declared himself acting president and is rallying opponents of the Taliban to join a government in internal exile. (Ghani has appeared in the United Arab Emirates, living in an expensive hotel and claiming he was forced to flee to avoid lynching.) In the Panjshir a coalition of local militias and army remnants is forming to defend the valley. Their size and capability are still vague.
Afghan people line up outside the Iranian embassy to get a visa in Kabul, on Aug 17. AFP
Access to the valley is easy – for now. One Afghan officer, in plainclothes, made it from Kabul to the Panjshir on Monday carrying a message, then turned around and drove back to Kabul, unmolested by the Taliban. As any soldier knows, just because a district is Taliban-controlled does not mean there is a Talib on every square metre of it. In fact, Taliban forces have flooded into the cities, leaving parts of the countryside relatively open. Those cities will be a handful to control.
Already there have been deadly protests – met by brutal beatings and Taliban shooting of protesters – in several towns, and reports of 1000 trusted fighters from Helmand and Kandahar heading to Kabul to help secure it.
What this means is that, much as the Taliban may like to claim the war is over, it is far from finished. Afghanistan is still at war, and revolutionary regimes that are at war and facing potentially disloyal populations are legendarily lethal. It also means the international community has a choice to make.
This choice will strongly influence what others do now. Pakistan – despite a history of some elements in its intelligence service backing the Taliban – is looking warily at the potential for mass refugee flows or spillover of violence. Central Asian states such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are stepping up border security. Russia is working with these states, activating a military base in the region, but simultaneously attempting to shape Taliban behaviour by dangling the possibility of recognition, aid and trade if the regime shows moderation. China's leverage is more economic, with discussions on trade and investment starting as early as Monday when the Taliban held a press conference calling for an international donors' conference and foreign direct investment.
Taliban fighters Herat, Afghanistan's third biggest city. AFP
America's European allies have been stunned and alienated by the speed of the collapse, and offended by Washington's unilateral withdrawal, on which they were not consulted. French, German and British politicians have all criticised the US this week. The UN Security Council has strongly condemned the violence, calling for respect for women and human rights (presumably such harshly worded statements were what the UN meant when it promised "ongoing support").
What, then, should we do next? Initially, the answer is crystal clear: save as many Afghans as can be saved. The evacuation is the critical activity of the moment and the only way to salvage some self-respect from this debacle. After a horrifically chaotic start, the airport is finally under control, though the Taliban maintains an outer cordon preventing civilians getting through. This is creating a massive logjam, with crowds surging around the airport perimeter and few getting through. Many evacuation aircraft have departed almost empty as a result.
More important, the crowds are a tempting target for terrorists such as Islamic State-Khorasan, the local ISIS group, which hates both the Taliban and Westerners, and deplores Afghans who have worked with foreigners. It is only a matter of time before a suicide bomber or a truck bomb gets in among the crowds and stops the evacuation in its tracks. Clearing the backlog is thus a humanitarian as well as a strategic necessity.
Inside a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III Aug 15, evacuating some 640 Afghans from Kabul. AFP
Allied commanders recognise this, but political constraints – the US government has promised the Taliban its troops will not leave the airport, according to sources in the State Department – have prevented them expanding the perimeter or pushing the Taliban back.
Creating landing sites away from the airport, from which evacuees could be flown by helicopter over the Taliban checkpoints, is another obvious military move that will likely be blocked on political grounds. Beyond the obvious humanitarian imperative, resettling refugees (many of whom initially are being flown to Qatar) will be a huge and protracted task, one for which many countries are stepping up to assist, though few seem prepared to take anywhere near the number of evacuees needed.
Bigger choices loom. Should the International Monetary Fund release Afghanistan's funds to an interim government that will be dominated by the Taliban? Should the US support Saleh's government-in-exile in the Panjshir and back his fighters, or accept defeat and deal with the Taliban? Should airstrikes (so conspicuously absent when they could have made a difference) now resume against terrorists and, if so, who on the ground is left to spot and designate targets? Should there be a post-mortem to analyse what went wrong and allocate (or evade) blame, or should we move on?
All this will become increasingly important in coming weeks, but for now the focus needs to be the humanitarian crisis – and potential bloodbath – unfolding on the ground.
To Understand Afghanistan's Future, Reckon With the Region's Colonial Past
Priya Satia,Foreign Policy August 19, 2021
Last weekend, as the Taliban advanced across Afghanistan, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared Aug. 14, the eve of Indian independence from British rule in 1947, "Partition Horrors Remembrance Day"—a day to remember the violent Partition of British colonial India into the separate countries of India and Pakistan, which produced the largest migration in human history. Millions of people died or lost their homes, livelihoods, and ways of life and suffered rape and other atrocities in harrowing months of sudden displacement as Sir Cyril Radcliffe drew a largely arbitrary border dividing Punjab and Bengal. But Modi's pronouncement, made with typical blindsiding precipitousness, was also deeply disingenuous.
It is lost on no one that Aug. 14—the day chosen for this gruesome remembrance—is the day Pakistan marks its independence. (Independence came to British India at midnight on Aug. 14, with India marking its independence on the 15th and Pakistan on the 14th.) Modi's designation of Pakistan's Independence Day as an anniversary for Indian mourning is calculated to deflect blame and serves to aggravate rather than heal old wounds. It elides the reality that the violence of 1947 was not the work of neighbors in villages and towns turning against one another but of well-armed paramilitary groups bearing the imprint of Western fascism—including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a group that Modi joined as a child and that remains a pillar of support for his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government.
His call to remember Partition's horrors appears decidedly cynical against this historical reality. But its coincidence with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan created an unintended opportunity for more honest reckoning with one often forgotten aspect of this haunting past. 1947 marked not only the creation of a new border between Pakistan and India but also, equally disastrously, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. As Afghans flee across borders today, remembrance of the dotted line from that past to our present, of the continued reboot of colonial-era partition, is essential for South Asians and for meddlers in Afghanistan, past and present.
Before the Radcliffe Line, there was the Durand Line. The British, having seized territory from Afghanistan during the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1878-80 and annexed it to British India, dispatched Mortimer Durand to formalize those gains with a treaty in 1893. Afghanistan was not fully sovereign: The British controlled its foreign affairs in a semicolonial arrangement common to British practice in many parts of the world. The treaty was thus coercive (and possibly duplicitous under the cover of faulty translation), as was often the case with colonial-era British treaties. Indeed, the Durand Line was drawn just shortly after European powers had, with similar arbitrariness, etched borders across the map of Africa.
The line divided a large region inhabited by Pashtuns, many of whom Afghanistan had permitted to remain self-governing, with a western half included in an Afghan sphere of influence and an eastern half in the British sphere. The British took direct, formal control of the most eastward districts and informally influenced those abutting the line, like Waziristan, by providing tribes there with subsidies and arms. Since the line was not a physical border but a demarcation of spheres of influence, considerable freedom of movement persisted. But it was disputed by those on whom it was foisted, prompting an uprising in 1897.
After putting down this rebellion (a young Winston Churchill took part), the British reasserted control over disputed parts of the demarcated area and worked to stop the flow of arms into the region. In 1901, they incorporated the directly controlled eastward districts into the North-West Frontier province of British India. That year, a new emir came to power in Afghanistan and again questioned the British partition of the region, prompting the British to attempt to renegotiate arrangements in 1905. Still the line remained disputed. That year, the British also partitioned Bengal on India's eastern frontier along religious lines with a view to undermining intensifying anti-colonial sentiment there. (By 1911, anti-colonial pushback forced the undoing of that partition—though Radcliffe would partition the region again in 1947.)
During World War I, Indian and Afghan affairs remained entangled, with anti-colonial activists establishing an independent Provisional Government of India in Kabul, plotting with the Turkish and German empires to free not only India but all Islamic countries from British rule. Its members worked with Bolsheviks, Pan-Islamists, Pan-Asianists, and other anti-colonial activists as far away as California, embracing humanistic ethics of internationalism and love. They saw this joint struggle as an end in itself, regardless of its political results.
Having encouraged these anti-colonial forces, Afghanistan also asserted its own full autonomy after the war and attempted to retake the disputed areas abutting British India, including Mohmand and Waziristan. The resulting Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, however, again left the issue unresolved. Anticipating the U.S. drone strategy of today, the British resorted to the new technology of aerial policing in the region, which Chief of the Air Staff Hugh Trenchard deemed suited to "the psychology, social organization and mode of life of the tribesmen and the nature of the country they inhabit."
Indian anti-colonial activists with wartime ties to Kabul remained influential in the massively popular postwar Indian anti-colonial struggle. But while they dreamt federal dreams, the British practice of drawing hard lines to divide peoples acquired new force and purpose. Partition was asserted as a "solution" to political conflict between different groups across the empire—the division of Ireland in 1921 as the price of independence (Northern Ireland remaining within the United Kingdom) became a template for recommending a similar "solution" for Palestine in the 1930s. By the 1940s, partition was a standard part of Britain's decolonization toolkit. And the British justification for colonialism in South Asia—that its Hindus and Muslims constituted distinct nations requiring a mediating presence—had been built into the society's political fabric in the form of separate, religiously based electorates that encouraged separate political movements as Indians incrementally wrested greater autonomy from the British. A push to partition British India into Muslim and Hindu states emerged, predictably, but struggled for support among many Muslims. These included the Pashtun Khudai Khidmatgar movement in the North-West Frontier, a nonviolent anti-colonial organization closely allied with the Gandhian Congress movement and staunchly opposed to partition.
When the plan for partition was announced in June 1947, the Khidmatgars—a word that means servant—feared that geography would automatically dictate their membership in Pakistan, whose creation they had vehemently opposed on principle. They pushed instead for an independent Pashtunistan, as did the Afghan government. After August 1947, as Punjabis and Bengalis fled for their lives across the new Radcliffe Line, the Pakistani government defended the ever contentious Durand Line, too, as Pashtuns and the Afghan government denied its legitimacy and rebuffed Pakistan's claim to the Pashtun areas abutting it. Despite Pakistan's strenuous efforts to crush the Pashtunistan movement, it survived, finding loyal support from Afghan President Daoud Khan in the 1970s.
Pakistan's U.S.-backed support of mujahideen against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan was aimed, in part, at solidifying the border at the Durand Line. (The communist governments during the Soviet occupation refused to recognize the Durand Line as the border.) But even the agents Pakistan cultivated to intervene in Afghanistan refused to serve that end. The border was more or less moot during the conflict itself, but the mujahideen, recruited primarily among Pashtuns, maintained loyalty to the Pashtun position against the Durand Line. So it went with the Taliban: Pakistani backing didn't trump the Taliban's Pashtun loyalty to historic opposition to the Durand Line.
Pashtuns on both sides of the border deny the validity of the Durand Line, but the Pakistani government, in the hands of a Punjabi elite perhaps hardened by the violent partitioning of their own community in 1947, has relentlessly repressed the Pashtun desire for unity and autonomy. It has clung with increasing desperation to the principle of territorial integrity, especially after losing the Bengali half of the country, now Bangladesh, in 1971. The colonial U.S. presence in Afghanistan has abetted this effort. Of late, Pakistan is disrupting cross-border life by building up the frontier in a manner that is likely to rival the India-Pakistan border to the east—a border so fortified that it is one of the few man-made structures visible from space. In holding on to Pashtun land claimed by Afghanistan, the Pakistani government, with U.S. support, has extended the outlook of the past British colonial government toward the land and its people, twisting a knife in the wounds of 1893 and 1947. Meanwhile, the Modi government, in stoking the notion of the Muslim "other"—both inside and outside India—also twists a knife in the wounds of 1947.
In a region characterized by syncretic cultures that are the product of long intermingling, both colonial and postcolonial governments have engaged in endlessly destructive efforts to partition people into boxes defined by language, religion, and ethnicity, rather than afford them the freedom of coexistence fostered by the looser, federal structures that many anti-colonialists proposed. But the intermixing persists. Afghan refugees reside in Pakistan by the millions, and the specter of an undetectable Pakistani and Bangladeshi presence fuels the Modi government's bigoted policies for proving citizenship. Who is Indian and who Bangladeshi? Who is Pakistani and who Afghan? The difficulty of answering such questions stems from the artificiality and violence of the hard lines that have been drawn between people entangled in what the Congress leader Maulana Azad called a "composite culture," in which nonviolent anti-colonial struggle easily encompassed both Muslim Pashtuns and Gujarati Hindus.
India's Punjabi farmers have been challenging the Modi government's assertion of the central government's authority for a year now in what has been one of the biggest protests in history. All around South Asia's borderlands—from Kashmir to Kerala, from Bengal to Pashtunistan—we see resistance to the centralizing power that is a legacy of colonial rule and struggles for greater local governance, federalism, and layered forms of sovereignty promoting coexistence with the other, as envisioned by the anti-colonial thinkers and activists of the Provisional Government of India in Kabul, the Khidmatgars, and Mahatma Gandhi.
While the Cold War helped spur the federal unification of a Europe reeling from the horrors of nationalist violence, the neocolonialism it unleashed simultaneously abetted South Asia's fragmentation into fortresslike nation-states sustained by the continual demonization of enemies within and without. Still, as the masses of farmers encamped at Delhi show us, alternative futures are never foreclosed. South Asians can still dream beyond those fortresses and promote enduringly composite cultures focused on the shared protection of water and land that is critical to survival in our time. As memory of the horrors of colonial partition fuel fascist Hindu nationalism in India and the Taliban's expansion in Afghanistan, it has never been more important to remember and amplify the khidmatgars of anti-colonial coexistence.
Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance professor of international history at Stanford University and the award-winning author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East and Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution. Her most recent book is Time's Monster: How History Makes History.
Tel as Sabi' – Tarkeeth's Anzac Story
April 24, 2021 November 5, 2021 Paul Hemphill 1 Comment
The 25th April is Anzac Day, Australia's national day of remembrance, honouring Aussies and Kiwis who perished in foreign wars from South Africa to Afghanistan. It takes its name from the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign – on this day in the spring time of 1915, Australian and New Zealand soldiers landed under heavy fire from Ottoman forces entrenched in the heights above what was later to be called Anzac Cove on Turkey's Gallipoli peninsula.
The Anzacs were just part of a wider campaign devised by British Secretary of the Navy Winston Churchill to knock The Ottoman Empire out of the war with one decisive blow by seizing the strategic Dardanelles Strait and occupying Istanbul, the capital. It do not go well. The Ottoman soldiers commanded by Mustafa Kamal Pasha, the future founder of modern Turkey, Kamal Atatürk, held the high ground and fought stubbornly and bravely, and ultimately, victoriously.
The bloodshed ended in stalemate. The Allies withdrew eight months later leaving behind over eight thousand dead Australians and nearly three thousand New Zealanders (along with over thirty thousand English, Irish, and Frenchmen, Indians and North Africans, and close on ninety thousand Ottoman soldiers, Turks and Arabs, Muslims and Christians), without, historians say, having had any decisive influence on the course of the First World War.
The rest, as we say, is our history.
The Anzac Trail
Whenever we visit Israel, our friend and guide Shmuel of Israel Tours drives us all over tiny beautiful and vibrant country (travelling through the West Bank, we use Palestinian guides). During the pandemic year, most Israelis had been locked down three times and like in many countries, the all-important tourist trade barely has registered a pulse. When permitted to travel beyond his home in Jerusalem, Shmuel has spent the year exploring and learning, visiting places he has never guided to before. He believes that he has exited the plague year a better guide, and we are already making plans for our next Israel adventure, including recently excavated Herodian palaces and further travel in the Negev Desert.
Shmuel recently told me that he had visited Tel Sheva, Tel as Sabi' in Arabic, in the Negev, five kilometres east of the city of Beer Sheva, a site inhabited since the fourth millennium BC. The ancient fortified town dates from the early Israelite period, around the tenth century BC. The walls, homes, storage warehouses and water reservoir system have been excavated and opened to the public. Today, Tel as Sabi' s also known as the first of seven Bedouin townships established in the Negev as part of the Israeli government's policy to plant the once-nomadic Bedouin permanent settlements.
It was from the foot of this stark desert hill that the Light Horse Brigade launched its famous charge towards the Ottoman lines at the strategic rail-head and wells of Beersheva on October 31st 2017.
Today, it is the ninth (not seventh) stop on The Anzac Trail which traces the route of the Light Horse Brigade from Gaza on the Mediterranean coast to Beer Sheva. For obvious reasons, it begins beyond Gaza's wire and concrete encirclement and trail culminates at the Anzac Memorial Centre In Beer Sheva, inaugurated on the 100th anniversary of the battle.
Tel as Sabi' to Tarkeeth
As we commemorate Anzac Day this Sunday, few folk in Bellingen Shire would know that there is a link between that hill in the heart of the Negev and Tarkeeth on the north bank of the Kalang River just six kilometres west of Urunga as the crow flies.
In A Tale of Twin Pines, the first of our Small Stories, I wrote of how researching the history of the Urunga area where we live, I came across Lloyd Fell's story of the Fell Family Farm. This was located close to the present Twin Pines Trail, just east of Fells Road on South Arm Road, and west of the Uncle Tom Kelly motorway bridge over the Kalang River. Click here to access TwinPinesStory.pdf
Lloyd tells the story of how in 1926, New Zealand farmer, solo-yachtsman, and returned ANZAC Chris Fell first saw the land that became the family farm, purchasing it from a deceased estate for a thousand pounds. Chris was impressed by the two mature hoop pines that stood on either side of the track leading to a rough timber house that already stood there – and these gave the farm its name. He cleared the bush, felling and hauling timber until he had sufficient land and capital to run cattle. In time, he built up a prosperous dairy business and cattle stud where he and his wife Laura, a Sydneysider from a well-to-do Vaucluse family, raised their three children. The house has long gone, but the two magnificent pines are still there.
On October 31st 1917, Chris Fell and his comrades in the New Zealand Mounted Infantry fought on Tel as Sabi'.
Tel as Sabi 1917, showing Ottoman trenches (AWM)
Chris Fell and the battle of Beer Sheva
As told in Short Stories – a tale of Twin Pines:
in his ebook The Twin Pines Story, Lloyd Fell tells how his father served as a mounted machine gunner with the New Zealand forces in the Gaza campaign of late 1917. His war record reports that he was one of the machine gunners who fought through the day before the famous charge to knock out the Turkish machine guns on the strategic Tel al Saba, east of the strategic desert town Beersheba.
The strong position the Ottomans had established on the hill was a key obstacle to the conquest of the town and the ANZACs had to seize it before storming Beersheva itself. The Ottoman soldiers fought valiantly, and it was only at around 3 p.m. that the fighters of the New Zealand Brigade, primarily the Auckland regiment, succeeded in capturing the hill in a face-to-face battle. Had these fortifications not been overrun, the Light Horse would have been prevented from advancing on the wells. Afterwards, the machine gunners and their Kiwi mates took part in a bayonet charge against the enemy.
As Jean Bou wrote in The Weekend Australian:
"The New Zealand brigade was sent against Tel el Saba', but this steep-sided hill with terraced entrenchments was formidable. The dismounted horsemen, with the limited fire support of their machine-gunners and the attached horse artillery batteries, had to slowly suppress the enemy defences and edge their way forward. Chauvel sent light horse to assist, but as the afternoon crawled on, success remained elusive. Eventually the weight of fire kept the defenders' heads down enough that the New Zealanders were able to make a final assault. The hill was taken and the eastern approach to Beersheba opened, but nightfall was approaching"
Major-General Harry Chauvel, the ANZAC commander faced a dilemma. The light was fading and there wasn't enough time to properly regroup to assault the town. An unsuccessful attack would mean withdrawing far to the south, whilst delaying ng the attack until morning would deny him the element of surprise and and also give the Turks time to destroy the town's vital wells. He decided to attack, and assigning the the mission to the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade.
The 31 light horsemen who fell are buried in the Beersheba War Cemetery along with 116 British and New Zealand soldiers who perished in the Beersheba battle. There are 1,241 graves in the military cemetery, soldiers being brought in from other Great War Middle East battlefields. We visited it in May 2016. It is a tranquil, poignant, and beautiful place in the Negev Desert, where the bodies of young men from Australia and New Zealand and from the shires of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales were laid to rest. "Lest we forget"
See also, : The Taking of Tel el Saba
In In that Howling Infinite, see also, Tall Tales, Small Stories, Obituaries and Epiphanies, The Watchers of the Water, and Loosing Earth – Tarkeeth and other matters environmental
Read in In That Howling Infinite more stories about Israel, Palestine and the Middle East: A Middle East Miscellany
Small Stories – Crossing the South Arm
April 20, 2021 April 20, 2021 Paul Hemphill 2 Comments
In days gone by, the journey from Bellingen and Coffs Harbour to the south side of Kalang River, and thence to Kempsey, Taree and Sydney, was a torturous one. The crossing had to be made by a slow and ponderous ferry. It is remembered today by the existence of Old Punt Road, on the right hand side of Giinagay Way in the seaside town of Urunga on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales – if you are heading south from Coffs Harbour, it is on the right hand side just before the present day Kalang Bridge.
We republish here the story of the old punt and the construction of the first bridge over the Kalang (since replaced by the steel meccano bridge we see today) as retold in the now dearly departed Bellingen Courier Sun.
But first, a tale of the South Arm in the days of the Shire's early settlement:
Europeans entered what was to become Bellingen Shire in 1840 when stock-man William Miles led a party into the Bellinger Valley to ascertain the abundance of much prized, avidly sought (and rapidly depleted) Red Cedar in the area. They came on foot, all the way from Kempsey – a trek of some one hundred kilometres through virgin bush. Such was abundance of the "red gold" that Macleay Valley government surveyor Clement Hodgkinson financed and supplied Miles to take him there the following year to see for himself. Arriving at the estuary of a large river, they headed west along that very ridge walked by the Gumbaynggirr for untold centuries. Following a stream that descended southwards from the ridge, they encountered another large river that the Gumbaynggirr called the Odalberrie …
… Further exploration revealed that the Odalberrie was the southern arm of this larger river, named the Bellinger – derived from the Gumbaynggirr name for the spotted quoll, a totemic and now endangered marsupial. It's southern sister was unimaginatively christened The South Arm
Back in the day, there was no road along the northern bank of The South Arm. Access to the farms that were established along the river was by small jetties. Farmers and their families would travel by boat to visit the estuarine port of Urunga and to visit each other. In the late 19th century, Moses Lacey, the first selector, ran a store on the rive bank …
Whilst the river became the Kalang, after the Gumbaynggirri "galanga" – the native tree known as white beech, now uncommon although we have reintroduced scores of them on our property – the road kept its name.
From Small Stories – the Schools of the Tarkeeth
For other tales of Bellingen Shire in In That Howling Infinite, see: Small Stories – A Tale of Twin Pines and Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land – a poet's memorial to a forgotten crime
Crossing the South Arm of the Bellinger
Susan Lloyd, April 4th 2017
Travelling by foot in Olden Days.
As you travel at 110kms along the new Urunga bypass, spare a thought for the travellers of bygone years, because in 1888 it was a much slower journey.
At this time there were only three ferries available for crossing the Bellinger River's North and South arm (now called the Kalang River). One was at Fernmount, one at Raleigh and one at Urunga (the South Arm), the latter being on the mail route to the Macleay and had the greatest amount of traffic
The new bridge blocked by asteamroller until the Official Opening Party arrive.
By 1911 tempers were on the rise about the ferry service and a meeting was called on the 31st March 1911 at the Urunga Hotel with the Minister for Works (Mr Griffith) and a deputation of residents, to discuss the problems associated with the ferry crossings.
The Minister was presented with a signed petition asking the Minister for an oil launch to be put on the ferries at South Arm and Raleigh. Mr Arnold, a spokesman for the community, pointed out that "great inconvenience and delay were caused through the slowness of the ferries"[i]
By 1925 the members of the Bellingen Chamber of Commerce are wholeheartedly behind the Urunga Progress Association in the endeavour to secure a bridge over the South Arm. Mr W J Hammond (President of the Bellingen Chamber of Commerce) said that for 30 years, to his knowledge, the agitation had been going on. He said "the present punt service was a disgrace, it was antediluvian and shocking inconvenience was occasioned to persons who were obliged to use the road"[ii] He instanced one delay recently when a doctor, hurrying to an urgent call from the other side of the river, was held up from 5am till 1pm through a breakdown of the punt.
Travelling by car in days gone by.
By 1928 the battle was won and the Urunga Ferry contract for working of the punt expired on the 30 June 1928. On September 29 1928 the punt was replaced by a timber bridge built by the Department of Main Road at a cost of $19,000.
The Engineer (Mr Baird) broke the ribbon at the entrance and drove his car over the bridge. He had with him Mrs Gale (wife of the Bellingen Shire President) and Mesdames Atherton and Bushell, two of the oldest residents of the Bellinger. It was noted that the ceremonies were not elaborate, as the Shire Clerk, Mr Witt put it "it was a case of no champagne by request as the Council is rather hard up at present".
The Raleigh Sun reported on the 2 October 1928 that the opening was an important Milestone in the progress of the district. Mr Gale (the Shire President), in a fine speech, expressed the wish that it would not be long before another bridge at Raleigh would be on its way and that, with the bridges to be built over the Nambucca at Macksville and over the Clarence at Grafton, there would be no more punts to cross for hundreds of miles along the main North Coast road.[iii]
The bridge transformed the trip in 1928 but was eventually replaced by a new bridge in March 1972 at a cost $1.13 million.
The Minister of highways, the Hon P Morton, in his opening address, said that the new bridge was an example of the recent trend to avoid visual pollution. He added that this was as it should be in conformity with the beautiful district and a shire which was full of contrasts of scenery, which made it a delightful mecca for the tourist.
There are many more stories about the history of the Bellinger Valley available at the Bellingen and Urunga Museums. If you would like to become involved in the Bellinger Valley Historical Society as a volunteer or a Friend of the Museum please call Susan 0418 415 032 or drop in to either of our Museums. Also visitors to the Bellingen Museum can view the collection of the Museum for a gold coin donation during the upgrading of the Museum.
[i] Raleigh Sun Mar 31 1911
[ii] Raleigh Sun Aug 7 1925
[iii] Raleigh Sun Oct 2 1928
Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land – a poet's memorial to a forgotten crime
March 22, 2021 March 22, 2021 Paul Hemphill 2 Comments
… they were standin' on the shore one day
Saw the white sails in the sun
Wasn't long before they felt the sting
White man, white law, white gun
Solid Rock, Goanna 1982
The Great Australian Silence
Archaeologist WEH Stanner wrote in 1968 of "the great Australian silence – it was almost as if there was a "cult of forgetfulness". And indeed, white historical memory is like a sieve. Give it a good shake and only the big chunks are left. For a long time in Australia, the story of our frontier wars was not one of those. But in recent decades, an ever-widening crack has let the light in.
The first hairline fissures appeared in the early years of settlement as a small number of humanitarians voiced their concerns, although not with enough impetus to cool our pioneer fervour. Henry Reynolds, acclaimed historian of the frontier wars, quotes one such: 'How is it our minds are not satisfied? What means this whispering in the bottom of our hearts?'
I touched upon this paradox in a review I wrote of historian Peter Cochrane's novel The Making of Martin Sparrow: – Martin Sparrow's Blues:
"The country into which most characters venture is not, as we now acknowledge, an empty land. It was a peopled landscape, a much revered, well-loved, and worked terrain, its inhabitants possessed of deep knowledge, wisdom and respect for "country" …
… Whilst many colonists, particularly the soldiery, regard the native peoples as savages and inflict savage reprisals upon them for their resistance to white encroachment, others, in the spirit of the contemporary 'Enlightenment' push back against the enveloping, genocidal tide with empathy and understanding …
… "It's the first settlers do the brutal work. Them that come later, they get to sport about in polished boots and frock-coats … revel in polite conversation, deplore the folly of ill-manners, forget the past, invent some bullshit fable. Same as what happened in America. You want to see men at their worst, you follow the frontier". "I don't reckon we're the Christians … We're the Romans. We march in, seize the land, crucify them, stringing 'em up in trees, mutilate their parts".
… They knew in their hearts that this ancient people and its ancient ways are helpless against the relentless tide of the white man's mission civilatrice. "It might be that the bolters have the ripest imagination, but sooner or later, an official party will get across the mountains and find useful country, and the folk and the flag will follow, that's the way of the world. It's a creeping flood tide and there's no ebb, and there's no stopping it. No amount of … goodwill".
At Bellingen's Readers and Writers Festival in July 2019, we attended a powerful "conversation" between Reynolds and indigenous activist and academic Marcia Langton. Reynolds reminded us that these wars raged for decades from Tasmania in our far south to Queensland's far north. It was a story of vicious raids and reprisals.
In August 2019, in a piece called The Frontier Wars – Australia's heart of darkness, I wrote:
"Australia at the time of first settlement, and particularly on the frontier, was a brutal, violent place. It was colonized by soldiers and convicts, most of them young men chock-full of testosterone and aggression, bitterness and prejudice, greed and ambition. The conflict, which in Queensland, endured into the last decades of the 19th Century, was a war of conquest and extrajudicial killings – or more bluntly, murders. The subdued territories were patrolled by the native police – effectively paramilitary forces. The wars were waged by an outgunned people on the one hand, and, on the other, what were effectively robber bands raised and provisioned by the local magnates and squatters intent on seizing, holding and expanding their often enormous landholdings. There were to be no ceasefires, no parlays and no treaties. And no recognition of indigenous rights. None were ever on offer – not that that would've made a difference".
We have come a long way in a short time; but we're not there yet. There exists still a darkness at the heart of our democracy that we struggle to come to terms with; and in these divisive days, it doesn't take much to reignite our "history wars" as we negotiate competing narratives and debate the "black armband" and "white blindfold" versions of our national story.
'A sorry place'
We live in heart of the Tarkeeth Forest which lies between the Bellinger and Kalang Rivers in Bellingen Shire the mid north coast of New South Wales. Traversing the ridge just north of us is the east-west Fernmount Range Trail. In the days gone by, it was an ancient highway called the Yildaan Dreaming Track and Trade Route which linked the plains beyond the Dorrigo massif to what is now the seaside town of Urunga, known then to the Gumbaynggirr people as a "place of plenty". The first people would descend the spurs on the north and south flanks of the range for fishing and ceremonies on the riverside. The Tarkeeth Forest contains areas of significant indigenous culture, recalling song lines and stories of the Dreamtime, places of ceremony, of birth and burial, and of atrocity.
We have been told that the Gumbaynggirr regarded Bellingen and its environs as a "sorry place", one of discrimination, expulsion and worse. But Bellingen Shire is just one of many places that have a dark history of which most residents are unaware.
Three historic massacre sites committed against Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung people of the Coffs Clarence region have been recorded on the Aboriginal massacres map, created by University of Newcastle researchers. have been listed near Bellingen, modern day Coutts Crossing and near Seelands and Ramornie. [See below]
The scenic Waterfall Way linking Armidale to the coast is a drive we never get tired of as it winds along riverside meadowlands and climbs through world heritage rainforests to the Dorrigo Plateau with its windswept escarpments, clear creeks, and just off the beaten track, magnificent waterfalls, landmarks like Cathedral Rock, and stunning views. But, in the words of activist and academic and Ambēyang man Callum Clayton-Dixon, this highway conceals signposts to a bloody past. [We republish his article below]
One of these signposts points the way to north of Point Lookout on the New England Tableland, where, jutting out from the plateau and dropping in sheer cliffs into the thick rainforest below, is a place once known as Darkie Point.
Judith Wright was the first white Australian poet to publicly name and explore the experiences of its Indigenous people. Through her poetry, and especially in her later histories, Wright sought to confront the violence in Australian settler history and to re-imagine it through the eyes of the first Australians. Her words breathed sorrow and compassion into the early encounters between settlers and Indigenous people, evoking the tragedy of the Australian frontier. Her love of the New England highlands was bound to a creeping uneasiness about its past. As Billy Griffiths wrote in in his story of archaeologist Isabel McBryde, she lived in "haunted country." In an early poem, Bora Ring(1946), she mourned the passing of a dynamic world:
The hunter is gone; the spear
is splintered underground; the painted bodies
a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot.
The nomad feet are still.
She lived on New England tablelands and camped at Point Lookout with her father, as he had with his mother. "She remembered being mesmerized by the splendour of the cliffs, the mystery of the thickly forested valley and the "the great blue sweep of the view from the Point to the sea." But she saw a darkness here, too. To the north of Point Lookout, jutting out from the plateau and dropping in sheer cliffs into the thick rainforest below, is a place once known as Darkie Point. It is just north of Ebor and the scenic Waterfall Way linking Armidale to the Coast via Dorrigo and Bellingen.
Wright's father told her the story of how it got its name: how, "long ago," a group of Aboriginal people were driven over those cliffs by white settlers as reprisal for spearing cattle. Their sickening plunge was re-imagined in one of Wright's early poems, "Nigger's Leap, New England", published in her first collection The Moving Image (1946). The story was later revealed to be an "abstracted and ahistoricised" account of a documented event. It was, in fact, August 1852, that scores of Aboriginal people were chased to the edge of a cliff, shot and pushed over. Some in this day and age may be offended by the use of what is now a forbidden word – but Wright chose it specifically for its shock effect, commemorating as it does what was then a forgotten crime. "Did we not know", she asks, "their blood channelled our rivers, and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?"
In her short story, On Reading Nigger's Leap, Teacher and writer Anne Vince asks her class – and us, her readers – to imagine what Wright did describe in words words:
'Local aborigines were driven over the falls. Stockmen from neighbouring stations rounded them up like cattle and beat them to the cliff's edge. Mothers leapt, leaving their babies clinging to shrub roots. Some tried to hide their children in the burnt out husks of the giant gums that used to grow around here. After a while the riders would release their dogs…There is such a silence my words falter before tumbling forward. I have to breathe deeply to continue, to remember … How do we know this? Hard evidence. Skeletal remains at the bottom of the cliffs – and, yes – they are human remains. And, of course, oral history… Judith Wright had heard these stories.' [We republish Vince's story below]
Nigger's Leap, New England
The eastward spurs tip backward from the sun.
Nights runs an obscure tide round cape and bay
and beats with boats of cloud up from the sea
against this sheer and limelit granite head.
Swallow the spine of range; be dark. O lonely air.
Make a cold quilt across the bone and skull
that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff
and then were silent, waiting for the flies.
Here is the symbol, and climbing dark
a time for synthesis. Night buoys no warning
over the rocks that wait our keels; no bells
sound for the mariners. Now must we measure
our days by nights, our tropics by their poles,
love by its end and all our speech by silence.
See in the gulfs, how small the light of home.
Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers,
and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?
O all men are one man at last. We should have known
the night that tidied up the cliffs and hid them
had the same question on its tongue for us.
And there they lie that were ourselves writ strange.
Never from earth again the coolamon
or thin black children dancing like the shadows
of saplings in the wind. Night lips the harsh
scarp of the tableland and cools its granite.
Night floods us suddenly as history
that has sunk many islands in its good time.
'On Reading "Nigger's Leap" by Judith Wright' by Anne Vince
Judith Wright knifes the scab off an old, unhealed wound.
In the classroom I explain that this poem is set in their own backyard – at the local falls – where three generations ago white men, squatters and landowners alike, regularly went 'hunting' and it wasn't for kangaroos.
A snarl sweeps across the pig-shooter's son. 'Supposedly,' he interjects.
I'm stunned. Not because it's the first time I've heard four consecutive syllables from this boy – it's the ferocity of the denial. There's a history here, a hint of blood knowledge.
Under this remark I can hear the lazy slam of a fly screen door, the indignant scrape of a chair rasped over cracked, worn lino.
'Yeah…' drawls another student. Then another. The heat in the room builds. Even the incessant flies hesitate. 'Well…?'
A sea of sun-scorched faces, eyes ready to pass judgment, stare.
To gather my thoughts, I glance outside. Massive cumulus clouds the colour of dark bruises roil and tumble over each other, mocking the scrubby horizon, piling higher and higher in the expectant sky.
I have to be careful. These are children well versed in suspicion. I know anything I say will make it back to shoddy verandahs and the town's single, stainy-tiled bar.
I want to tell them their disbelief makes them complicit but that would mean slipping a fingernail under that lino, scraping at the decades of dirty reasoning and the trampled effort of surviving in a place like this.
The class waits – a collective held breath willing the relief of a reply.
I look at their hands. Some of them are men's hands, thick-knuckled from weekend labour or cutting horses in low rent rodeos. Most of these students are already helping shoulder the burden of overgrazed, drought-stricken farms, riddled with dieback. They are tough kids from decent families who believe they've been given the whole country for their own.
'No,' I finally say. 'Local aborigines were driven over the falls. Stockmen from neighbouring stations rounded them up like cattle and beat them to the cliff's edge. Mothers leapt, leaving their babies clinging to shrub roots. Some tried to hide their children in the burnt out husks of the giant gums that used to grow around here. After a while the riders would release their dogs…'
There is such a silence my words falter before tumbling forward. I have to breathe deeply to continue, to remember.
'How do we know this? Hard evidence. Skeletal remains at the bottom of the cliffs – and, yes – they are human remains. And, of course, oral history… Judith Wright had heard these stories.' This is what I tell them.
I don't tell them that swimming one afternoon in the dark pools of the falls, just as the sun slanted shadows through saplings at the water's edge, I met those shrill, anguished spirits. I don't tell them of the high-pitched keening and tortured wailing that filled my ears each time I dived, or of the roaring bush silence that greeted me when I emerged, clean-skinned and gutted. I don't tell them how I choked, sick with sudden comprehension as I lay on the hard granite, resisting the pull of those blood channelled ghosts to join their sway and wander in the waters far under.
Now, Slessor they will understand. White man's words. White man's war.
They are excused by the bell.
To me it is the sound of alarm
Myall Creek, New England
At Myall Creek Station near Inverell, in 1838, twelve armed and mounted stockmen rounded up 28 unarmed Wirrayaraay people – largely women and children – and, without provocation, hacked them to death. This story, the Myall Creek massacre, is relatively well known because of John Plunkett's heroic prosecution of the stockmen – several were hanged for murder – but numerous other, similar incidents in the area are less well known. These include the follow-up murder of thirty or so remaining Wirrayaraay men and killings of sometimes hundreds of people at sites such as Slaughterhouse Creek, Waterloo Creek and Terrible Creek.
Few locals know that Dangar Falls in Dorrego, Dangarsleigh, and Armidale's Dangar Street were all named in honour of Henry Dangar, a squatter known for his role in the attempted cover up of the atrocity, and for trying to pervert to course of justice in the subsequent trial.
We recently republished extracts for William Lines' Taming of the Great South Land regarding the eradication koala and other wildlife in the earthy twentieth century. Here is what he had to say about Myall Creek and other massacres.
The Myall Creek Massacre
Most squatters abhorred the Aborigines. They resented their "wandering propensities", their independence, their pride and their unwillingness to accept the hierarchical authority Europeans equated with enlightenment. For 50 years Aborigines the civilisation Europeans
had sought to impose on Australia, Their inclination towards independence of action and refusal to accept the values of the invaders invaders greatly exasperated the British. Their disdain for European habits marked them as barbarians and supplied the Europeans with an antithesis – civilisation versus barbarism – highly useful as a rationalisation for aggression. To counter aboriginal resistance, the squatters appealed to the government to clear the land. When the colonial authorities equivocated, the squatters adopted at their own solutions.
At mile Creek, 650 km north of Sydney, shortly before sundown one day in June 1838, a group of mounted stockmen with muskets, swords and pistols, rounded up 30 or 40 aboriginals encamped at a sheep station. The Horseman roped the men, women and most of the children together and force them to march 4 kilometres into the bush. The untied children, crying, followed their mothers, who carried those too young to walk. One of the stockmen snatched up an untied boy of about seven ( a favourite of his), placed in behind a tree and told him to remain there until later. The child, however, ran back, crying "no, I will go with my mammy". He was then fastened with rope to the adults.
A few days later the station manager became curious as to the whereabouts of the Aborigines previously camped in the area. The hovering at Eagles, hawks and other birds of prey, directed him to a spot where he discovered the mangled and half burnt remains at least 28 people. For the most part, heads was separated from bodies, and fire marks appeared on the disjointed limbs. Charcoal and burnt logs indicated an attempt to efface all evidence. The manager, however, recognise 10 to 12 small heads he took to those of children, and a large body which he believed belonged to "Daddy", an Aborigine know for his remarkably large frame.
When the government laid murder charges against the men responsible, squatters and the press screamed in outage at the absurdity of indicting civilised man for the deaths of creatures on the lowest rung of creation. A few of those associated with squatting have not killed aboriginals and they continued to declare their right to clear the land of an inferior race. One squatter boasted that he "would shoot a Blackfellow whenever he met him as he would a mad dog. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Once juror explained:
"I look to the blacks as a set of monkeys and I think the earlier they are exterminated, the better. I know well [the accused] are guilty of murder, but I, for one, would never consent to see a white man suffer for shooting black one".
The government eventually obtained a conviction at a second trial. Before their execution , the seven condemned men acknowledged their guilt but stated in their defence "that in destroying the Aborigines, they were not aware that they had violated the law, or that it would take cognizance of their having done so, as it had been so frequently done in the colonies before".
The Myall Creek massacre became notorious, , Not because of the murder of the aboriginals but because of the conviction and punishment to the murderous. It was only the second and the last time in Australian history that Europeans were executed for the murder of aborigines. Henceforward squatters acted with impunity; the Myall C Creek trial only encouraged them to be more secretive and thorough. One recommended that, where the firearms failed or became too obvious, poison in the form of strychnine or arsenic mixed with flour be given to the aborigines.
Squatters believed that the £10 license fee and entitled them to the exclusive one of their use of the runs – a right which justified the violent expulsion of the original residents. In February 1840 the Whyte brothers took up their Kooning-wootong run in the Western District. A month later they hunted down an aboriginal group suspected of stealing 127 sheep and killed between 20 and 30 of them. Although the Whytes admitted to the killings, the government failed to prosecute, and a month later the brothers pursued and killed members of another group of aborigines. In 1841 a party of seven settlers shot dead 51 aborigines on the banks of the Glenelg River near the South Australia-Victoria border, for abducting 50 sheep. Long after, according to a local squatter, the bones of the men and sheep lay mingled together bleaching in the sun at the Fighting Hills.
Taming The Great South Land – a history of the conquest of nature in Australia, William J Lines (Allen and Unwin 1991) p78-79
What to do with signposts to New England's bloody past?
By Callum Clayton-Dixon: The names of various creeks, streets, parks, and pastoral properties across the Tableland hark back to New England's violent colonial origins. In this unprecedented time of truth-telling, is taking down these symbols of past injustices enough?
Majors Creek, near the village of Ebor, named for squatter Major Edward Parke.
Travelling along Waterfall Way, not far from the village of Ebor, you'll drive across Major's Creek, and nearby there's a signpost for Major's Point Road which takes you towards Major's Point bluff. These places were named after Major Edward Parke, who took up Guy Fawkes Station in the mid-1840s. Ebor itself has a Major Street, and a Parke Street. Parke, an ex-military man, acquired a reputation for his brutal treatment of local Aboriginal people. A profile of the New England district published by the Singleton Argus in 1883 referred to how Parke "established such a reign of terror…that for twenty-five years no Aboriginal would approach his run, although through it ran their favourite and most prolific fishing streams".
"The name of the gentleman in question is held in awe by the darkeys till the present day, and to mention it is sufficient to induce any stray Aboriginal to make back tracks to the nearest shelter." — Singleton Argus, 12/12/1883, p2
The Darkie Point Massacre illustrated by Narmi Collins-Widders
Just east of Major's Point is Darkie Point. According to the well-known pastoralist P.A. Wright of Wallamumbi Station, this particular bluff was the site of a massacre —in August 1852, a large group of Aboriginal people were chased to the edge, shot and pushed over. An article about the history of the Dorrigo Plateau printed in the Dungog Chronicle in 1932 talked of Edward Parke's involvement in this atrocity: "A great number of them were shot by Major Parke and other residents of the district who had joined the chase". It's likely that Michael Clogher of Bostobrick Station, a former convict and constable with the New England Border Police, was involved in the Darkie Point massacre as well. That same month, Clogher led a posse of settlers "in pursuit of the natives" on the Aberfoyle run, and "followed them to Paddy's Land, where they shot down as many as they could". Joshua Scholes' account of this incident appeared in a 1923 issue of the Uralla Times; Scholes was a long-time resident of the Tableland "with a wealth of knowledge of the early days". I suspect Clogher's Creek at Nymboida is named after Michael Clogher, who was also notorious for terrorizing Aboriginal people; he would ride into camps brandishing his cavalry sword, and apparently didn't hesitate to use his pistol or carbine.
"The name [Terrible Vale] was derived from one of the men working on the place in the early days and known as 'Terrible Billy', being a terror to the blacks." —Uralla Times, 03/05/1923, p2
Terrible Vale, south of Uralla, took its name from William 'Terrible Billy' Stephenson, the head stockman during the mid-1830s. Elizabeth Gardner's history of the Station documents a story "passed down through some people who worked on the station…that a large number of Aborigines were killed near the creek on Terrible Vale", and it was Terrible Billy who shot a great many Aboriginal people there. Then there's Macdonald Park in Armidale, which is named after the district's first Crown Lands Commissioner George James Macdonald. Commissioner Macdonald commanded the New England Border Police, and over the course of two days of skirmishing on the Beardie Plains in March 1840, his troopers shot dead nine Aboriginal warriors and wounded a tenth. In reporting this to his superiors, Macdonald justified the slaughter, claiming that it had been "absolutely necessary…to check the boldness and daring of their attacks".
Dangar Falls, Dangarsleigh, and Armidale's Dangar Street were all named in honour of Henry Dangar, a squatter known for his role in the attempted cover up of the infamous 1838 Myall Creek Massacre, and for trying to pervert to course of justice in the subsequent trial. On the Macdonald River run — named after Henry Macdonald, Station manager there in the mid-1830s — colonists poisoned local Aboriginal people by giving them milk containing arsenic. This is, in all likelihood, why a waterway on the outskirts of Bendemeer is called Poison Swamp Creek.
Most New Englanders would be completely oblivious of the horrific history to which these signpost names point. Why? Wilful ignorance in some cases. Complete denial in others. Most have no idea because they've never had the opportunity to learn about it. But the thick fog of the great conspiracy of silence is lifting as the push for truth-telling advances. Bolstered by the global Black Lives Matter movement, calls for the removal of statues and place names honouring those who contributed to the violent colonization of Aboriginal lands and lives are gaining momentum. However, there are a whole raft of questions and issues that arise from this crucial conversation.
What, if anything, should replace these symbols of past injustices? Plaques acknowledging the atrocities committed by the likes of Major Parke? Memorials recognizing the pain and suffering endured by Aboriginal people at the hands of the New England colonial project? Or monuments to the warriors who laid down their lives to protect kin and country? After all, the massacres, the poisonings, and the campaigns of terror were often carried out in response to our ancestors' fierce resistance to the invasion. Their courage and sacrifice must also be remembered.
And what shall replace names like 'Macdonald Park' and 'Dangar Falls'? One of the most common suggestions has been to use words from the local Aboriginal language (Anēwan) for this purpose, thus paying respect to the traditional owners, and contributing to the revival of our ancestral tongue. But symbolic acts alone aren't enough, nowhere near in fact. Symbolism has to be, in my view, accompanied by commitments to real change, tangible change.
The savagery of Parke, Clogher, Terrible Billy, and their ilk was foundational to the development of New England as a thriving pastoral district. So were government agents like Commissioner Macdonald, overseeing ruthless police repression, and administering the carving up of the Tableland into hundreds of stations. We have to go beyond statues and signposts to conversations about redress for the protracted dispossession and decimation of Aboriginal communities. Substantial reforms to the education system are, of course, a given. Let's talk about the return of stolen lands. Let's talk about reparations. And it's vital that these conversations (and the actions they give rise to) take place locally, as well as at the state and national level. Truth and justice, from the ground up — a shattering of the colonial status quo, not a tinkering.
Callum Clayton-Dixon is an Ambēyang Aboriginal man whose people come from the southern end of the New England Tableland in New South Wales. He is the author of Surviving New England: A History of Aboriginal Resistance & Resilience through the First Forty Years of the Colonial Apocalypse (2019), and a PhD candidate at the University of Technology Sydney, working to develop a dictionary and grammar of his ancestral language.
The Colonial Frontier Massacres Map
The Coffs Coast Advocate reported in November 2019, how stage one of the project has recorded 172 incidents across Eastern Australia between 1788 and 1872. About 97% of people killed in these massacres were Aboriginal men, women and children Massacres became more violent, systematic and calculated over time. The average number of Indigenous deaths increased over time, before declining in the 1900s, but massacres continued up to 1928. At least 65 massacres of Indigenous people were in retaliation for the killing or theft of livestock, or theft of property
Darkie Point, Bellinger River, near Ebor
Ten people were killed at Darkie Point on the Bellingen River in May, 1841 with settlers and stockmen using firearms and muskets to attack a local Baanbay Aboriginal tribe in an act of reprisal. The narrative by the Colonial Frontier Massacres research team reads. "Following the brutal murder of three shepherds on Eldershaw's outstation in the north eastern part of New England and the taking of 2000 sheep by Bundjalung, Eldershaw organised a 'pursuing party' of ten men (including Eldershaw, three neighbours and six stockmen) … 'Well mounted and accoutred' and set off with ten days provisions for the south branch of the Clarence. According to Eldershaw they shot the entire group – 'a great number' in daylight.'
Orara River, near Seelands and Ramornie
More than 20 people were killed on the Orara River, near Sealands between April 1, 1841 and April 30, 1841. The attackers included colonisers, a government official and settlers and stockmen. "In response to stock theft, from Ramornie station, CLC Oakes of Clarence PD swore in stockmen as special constables to surround a Bundjalung (Ngarabal? speakers) camp at night and at daybreak charged and killed indiscriminately Aboriginal men, women and children." A man named Lynch was later charged with the stock theft.
Kangaroo Creek, near today's Coutts Crossing
An estimated 23 Gumabynggnir people were killed on November 29, 1847. "In February 1848, Crown Lands Commissioner, Oliver Fry, was told by a stockman and an Aboriginal man at Grafton that squatter Thomas Coutts had poisoned 23 Aboriginal people by offering them flour laced with arsenic at his station at Kangaroo Creek." Fry set off for Kangaroo Creek Station to investigate. He found human remains, but they were too decomposed for analysis. Coutts was arrested and taken to Sydney where he was bailed for 1,000 pounds, but was discharged in May for lack of evidence.
The agony and extinction of Blinky Bill
February 11, 2021 February 11, 2021 Paul Hemphill 2 Comments
In 1991, Australian publishers Allen & Unwin, the Aussie buyout of the antipodean subsidiary of the venerable British publisher that gave us JRR Tolkien, published an original political and environmental history of Australia: William J Lines' Taming The Great South Land – a history of the conquest of nature in Australia.
It was, and remains, an eye-opener and a page-turner. All our past, present and future environmental hotspots are covered. Squatters and selectors, rabbits and real estate, hydro and homosexuals, uranium and aluminum, environmental degradation and deforestation, and the trials of our indigenous fellow-citizens who who up until a referendum in 1967 were classified as fauna and excluded from censuses.
Behind many of the names that are attached to our suburbs, our highways, our rivers and our mountains are the names of dead white men who were aware of, even witnessed, and were often complicit in "dark deeds in a sunny land". Perhaps I shall write more on this at a later date, but meanwhile, the following is what Lines has to say about our iconic wildlife, and particularly, our endangered koalas.
At the beginning of white settlement, it is believed that there were millions of koalas across Australia. But their' perennial paradox and their doom has been that they and humans covet the same habitats – good land and good soil. We have always sought to acquire, clear and develop the land they like for timber, for farmland and for development. Research by the World Wildlife Fund has shown that eastern Australia is one of eleven deforestation hotspots in the world, the only OECD country on the list.
Lines writes that at the turn of the twentieth century, state governments were less concerned with planting trees than with "how to kill a forest quickly". "Elsewhere in Australia, "settlers regarded native animals an obstacle to development, the equal of native trees. The morality of development sanctioned virtually unlimited increases in the quantity of humans and tolerated virtually any decrease in the populations of other life forms – except animals directly useful to humans, such as sheep and cattle".
Settlers and professional hunters therefore shot anything that moved in the bush. Around the turn of the century, encouraged by an international demand for fur – primarily for the fashionably consciousness in Britain and the US – hunters began killing large numbers of koalas. In 1908, 58,000 koalas passed through the Sydney markets. In1924 over two million were exported from the eastern states. By the late twenties, the total total nationwide is reckoned to have been about eight million.
By the end of the Great War the koala was extinct in South Australia. Other native animals survived, however, so in 1920, SA removed the brush-tailed possum from the protected list. Within four months, hunters trapped more than 100 000. As a consequence of hunting and habitat destruction, over 70 percent of native land mammals in South Australia are now extinct, extremely rare or uncommon and endangered.
In 1927 the Queensland government declared open season on possums and koalas. The eradication of wild animals, the government believed, promoted closer settlement. Despite widespread protest the government persisted the slaughter, and within months 10 000 trappers disposed of over one million possums and 600 000 koalas – more than the total number of koalas which remain alive in the whole of Australia today. The carnage caused the virtual elimination of koalas from Queensland.
Four years later New South Wales declared open season on possums and during June and July 1931, hunters and trappers brought over 800 000 possum skins to market. To avoid offending the sensibilities of city nature lovers, merchants marketed possum as chinchilla and koala skins as wombat.
Efforts to protect the koala have and remain a matter of "one step forwards, two steps back". To burnish their dubious environmental credentials, governments broadcast their good intentions, announce inquiries and censuses, and then withdraw discretely in the face of all-too-friendly fire from political and industrial interest groups and their lobbyists. A WWF scientist has remarked that "drop bears have more teeth than of the (National Koala Conservation and Management) Strategy". It was not just on the Big Rock Candy Mountain that the cops had wooden legs and the bulldogs, rubber teeth.
In her masterful and lyrically beautiful "Fathoms – the the world in the whale" (Scribe 2020), – the Sydney Morning Herald called it a "a marvelous work of haunted wonder" – Australian author Rebecca Griggs notes how we earthlings anthropomorphized the leviathan of the deep as the symbol and indeed monument to our fall from environmental grace and our quixotic hopes for a return to Eden. Writer and author Stephanie Wood attaches a similar symbolism to Australia's iconic marsupial in a well-written feature on our koalas' dire straits. We reproduce this in full below.
"Whenever people are upset about protecting animals, it is usually because they've got a financial stake in not doing so", she writes. Echoing Griggs, she asks: "if we can't save koalas, it's unlikely we'll be able to save ourselves".
See also In That Howling Infinite: Losing Earth – Tarkeeth and other matters environmental
Featured photograph: In the thirty years we have owned our property in Tarkeeth Forest, much of which has been designated primary koala habitat, we have heard koalas in the surrounding forest, but , we have never seen one – until the day after Christmas last year. Meet Chrissy Dunggir (that's Gumbaynggirr for koala).
How good were koalas?': A national treasure in peril
Dwindling habitat. Climate change. Mega-bushfires. Koalas face dire threats, yet politicians continue to obfuscate.
Stephanie Wood, Sydney Morning Herald 6th February 2021
Kangaroo Island, South Australia: "They were lying defeated on the ground, desperate for water. Usually they'd be doing all they could to get away from us." Ricky Carioti, Washington Post/Getty
Every summer for a decade now, the curious photos have surfaced: a koala gulping water from a firefighter's bottle, a koala drinking from a watering can, another on its belly trying to slurp from a swimming pool. By late 2019, images were popping up daily: a koala clinging to a bike as a cyclist tipped water into its mouth, another drinking from a pot of water while a dog stood nearby. In northern NSW near Moree, one was photographed in the middle of a road after rain, its curling pink tongue licking a puddle.
The comments came from around the world: "OMG, so cute" and "How adorable!"
But there was something unsettling about the images; koalas don't drink water, they get the moisture they need from gum leaves. Don't they? Even scientists and koala experts who knew the species was in peril were unlikely to have realised just how portentous the images were.
In spring 2019, the fires started.
There was nothing cute about the new images, which came in a flood. Koalas with bandaged paws and scorched ears nestling in laundry baskets in a wildlife volunteer's lounge room. A huddled koala trying to drink from a Kangaroo Island dam, the charred carcass of another nearby. A woman stripped down to her bra running out of a blaze near Port Macquarie holding a koala in her shirt; if you watched the video, you heard the koala mewling in pain as the woman doused it in water.
As the imagery spread and the world's attention focused on this devastating escalation of the koala crisis, the animal became a global symbol of environmental grief and fear. Prayers and messages of love rained down. So did money. Port Macquarie's Koala Hospital created a GoFundMe account with a $25,000 goal and got nearly $8 million. From Kazakhstan to Kentucky, people sewed mittens for burnt paws. A cosmetics firm made eucalyptus-scented, koala-shaped soap to raise funds. A little boy in Massachusetts moulded the marsupials in clay and his parents gave one to every person who donated more than $50 to the cause. A friend in London couldn't stop crying. "You're not looking at koala pics again, are you, Mum?" her daughter asked.
We say we love them, but in the 230 years since the arrival of the First Fleet, we have systematically and thoughtlessly killed koalas. In June 2020, a bipartisan NSW Parliament upper house inquiry into koalas declared that without urgent action, the marsupial would be extinct in the state by 2050. The federal government is assessing the NSW, ACT and Queensland koala populations for uplisting from their current "vulnerable" status to "endangered". (A vulnerable species faces a high risk of extinction in the wild; an endangered species has a very high risk. The koala is not listed as vulnerable in Victoria and South Australia, where there are complex factors including inbreeding and over-population.)
At the time of white settlement, it is believed there were millions of koalas across our continent. Two centuries later, before the 2019-20 fires, the most authoritative study available estimated 331,000 koalas remained in the wild nationally, 79,000 of which were in Queensland and 36,000 in NSW. But koala counting is a notoriously difficult exercise and the 2012 study, led by University of Queensland conservation biologist Dr Christine Adams-Hosking and drawing on the research of a number of koala experts, noted that in Queensland, population estimates ranged from 33,000 to 153,000, and in NSW from 14,000 to 73,000.
But if the numbers aren't firm, one thing is: even before the fires, koala populations had been declining precipitously. Studies carried out in 2020 by Dr Steve Phillips, principal research scientist at environmental consultancy Biolink, found that in the past two decades, Queensland had lost half its koalas, and NSW a third. Experts are still trying to tally the full extent of Black Summer's carnage but University of Sydney research found 61,000 koalas nationally and 8000 in NSW were injured, displaced or died during the fires.
We did this. Since settlement, our needs have always trumped those of koalas. We needed the land their trees were on. Sometimes we shot them to eat. In an article in The Sydney Morning Herald in June 1851, the author noted that Aboriginal people called the creature a "kola" and settlers described it as "the native bear or monkey". It was an animal with a "singular aspect", he wrote, "its appearance is a sort of caricature upon gentlemen of the legal profession with their wigs on. It is said to be good eating, but is not frequently met with …"
"The response to the majority of recommendations were 'Support in principle' or 'Noted', which to me is saying, 'We're doing nothing'."
We wanted their furs. From the late 19th century to the end of the 1920s, hunters slaughtered up to eight million koalas nationally to supply a voracious international fur market. Most went to England and the US, where they were described as "wombat fur" and often became part of that Jazz Age wardrobe essential, the fur collar wrap coat. By the late 1930s, the animal was considered extinct in South Australia and critically depleted elsewhere.
Still we wanted more: more land for farms and tree plantations and highways and developments of massive houses with manicured gardens. Developers saw dollar signs, their bulldozers kept moving. With all that came fast cars, feral animals, family pets and disease. A submission from a koala activist in northern NSW's Ballina to the NSW parliamentary inquiry listed in wretched detail the fate of some local creatures: "Healthy breeding female, hit by car"; "Female, dog attack, dead"; "Male, retrovirus, ulcers in mouth and throat, hadn't eaten for probably [two] weeks, maggots down throat while still alive, found sitting on a road after a storm".
Above all else, our insatiable needs have led to the greatest threats koalas face: climate change and its handmaidens, more extreme droughts and bushfires. But despite the international spotlight the 2019-20 fires threw on the urgency of the species' plight, one year on, governments have taken little meaningful action to protect the marsupial and its habitat.
The NSW Environment Minister, Matt Kean, says he wants to double koala numbers in the state by 2050 but in January his government announced it would fully commit to only 11 of the upper house inquiry's 42 recommendations designed to protect koalas. Conservationists and koala scientists were horrified. "It's really disheartening that the response to the vast majority of recommendations were 'Support in principle' or 'Noted', which to me is saying, 'We're doing nothing'," Port Macquarie Koala Hospital clinical director Cheyne Flanagan says. "In koala circles, everyone's disgusted."
Meanwhile, for months through 2020 the koala became a political football after the Deputy Premier and National Party Leader, John Barilaro, staged a failed rebellion against his own government over koala policy. The result of the subsequent political wrangling was that, by the end of the year, policy to protect the species was weaker than it had been at the start.
Experts also point to the federal government's shilly-shallying. Key national measures to protect the koala are either out of date or yet to be completed. "The koala was listed as a vulnerable species by the federal government in 2012; seven years later, we're still waiting for a national koala recovery plan," says Biolink's Steve Phillips.
Related Article – Why is Australia a global leader in wildlife extinctions?
And what of the three billion other animals killed or displaced by last summer's fires? One million lumbering wombats. More than 100,000 echidnas. Millions of kangaroos and wallabies; bandicoots, quokkas and potoroos. A terrible number of birds, lizards and frogs. The uncounted pretty beetles, butterflies and bugs. Well, it's hard to spare too much emotional energy for a frill-neck lizard. But a koala … we can mourn a koala.
Scientists who study other species despair at the attention the koala gets. But a koala is emblematic; we feel in our bones that it says something important about us as Australians. "Koalas are woven into the narrative of Australia," says Danielle Celermajer, professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Sydney and the author of the recently released book Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future. Dr Kellie Leigh, a koala scientist in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, offers an anthropomorphic explanation for why they have such a profound place in our psyche. "The whole thing about koalas is the head shape, with the forward-facing eyes and the big round head that instinctively reminds people of a human baby," she says, adding that mobilising resources for koalas is not a single-species approach.
"They get people engaged in conservation who otherwise wouldn't be." The koala is also an "umbrella species", depending on a broad range of habitats which are home to many other species. Put measures in place to protect koalas in the wild and other creatures will also be saved.
Given that fact, perhaps we should ask an inverse question: if we can't save koalas, what can we save? And if we can't save koalas, can we save ourselves?
A rolled-up towel serves as a tree-trunk substitute for this sedated koala during ANU research into the impact of bushfires. Micheal Weinhardt
Kellie Leigh names many of the Blue Mountains koalas she studies after gods "because we're on the Mount Olympus for koalas … we've had Medusa, Mars, Athena". The Greek mountain is the home of the gods and famously biodiverse. The Blue Mountains is – was – home to a surprising and remarkable population of koalas.
The mountains were long thought not to be propitious koala habitat, although records show there were at least some in residence. In a letter to the Sydney weekly The Catholic Press in 1921, a reader described a "shooting expedition" to Hazelbrook, during which her uncle shot a koala. She added that at one time, her family had kept at their Paddington home in Sydney four "tame native bears", which had been captured in the mountains. After a month, one by one, they died. The last survivor sat in a backyard peach tree crying all night until the family decided to liberate it and "one evening at dusk we took it to Bellevue Hill". The fur trade was believed to have knocked out any remaining in the mountains.
In 2013, during the devastating Blue Mountains bushfires, three koalas were seen emerging to seek water around the town of Winmalee. Another climbed a pole in a backyard near Mountain Lagoon. "It was like, 'Hey, there are koalas … they haven't been on record for a long time, what's going on?' ", says Leigh, executive director of the not-for-profit Science for Wildlife, which in 2014 started to survey koalas at five sites in the mountains.
Leigh now believes that, pre-European settlement, there were large numbers of koalas within what is now the World Heritage-listed Greater Blue Mountains Area. She theorises that, because parts of the one-million-hectare wilderness are so remote, a remnant population of koalas started to re-establish itself when the fur trade ended.
This koala,Medusa, is being monitored by Science for Wildlife in Kanangra-Boyd NP, the
Blue Mountains, NSW. Dominic Lorrimer
Their significance could not be understated: they were largely within national park boundaries so developers could not get near them, they seemed to be breeding like rabbits and, most importantly, a study with which Leigh was involved found they had the highest genetic diversity within a koala population of any in Australia. Darwin 101: genetic variation individuals in a species allows for its adaptation to changing environmental circumstances and so ensures the survival of the species. Leigh dared to hope that the Blue Mountains koalas might one day help recolonise the broader World Heritage area.
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But genetic variation is of no assistance to a koala in the event of a mega-fire. In late October 2019, Leigh's teams were surveying sites in Kanangra-Boyd National Park and in the Megalong Valley when lightning ignited a blaze 100 kilometres or so to the north. That fire, dubbed the Gospers Mountain fire, or "the monster", would become Australia's largest ever. In the days that followed, it raced in from the north, licking up Leigh's survey sites in the south-east Wollemi National Park and on Newnes Plateau. Leigh pulled her teams out of the bush.
She floated an idea with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service: could she attempt to rescue some of the koalas at the Kanangra-Boyd site? "At the 12th hour we got a 'yes'. " Within two days, a Victorian climbing team had flown in and volunteers had started to track the radio signals coming from the koalas' collars and scour canopies for creatures without collars. Two days after that, 12 koalas had been temporarily moved to Taronga Zoo.
It was a small triumph in a great tragedy. Only one of Leigh's study sites – in the Lower Blue Mountains, near where residential areas were protected by firefighting efforts – was unaffected by the fires. She estimates that 80 per cent of the mountains' koala habitat was burnt and perhaps 1000 animals died, and is now madly working to assess what koalas remain and what potential there is for them to recolonise. "It totally changed this little picture of hope we had," says Leigh. "It was like, 'Okay, it's not a source population any more.'"
Pockets of optimism remain. In November, I followed Leigh and a VHF signal along a ridge line within the Kanangra-Boyd site looking for Kali, one of the 12 koalas which had a Taronga Zoo holiday. The lovely hum of the bush in late spring: rising warmth, birdsong, a darting dragonfly. Only months ago, soon after the 12 were rescued, fire raced through here; the trees are blackened still and there is a subliminal scent of something burnt. But the young epicormic shoots are lush and our feet crunch over new bracken fern and lomandra grass. And there, high in a narrow-leaved peppermint gum (Eucalyptus radiata), is Kali.
"Kali" is the Hindu goddess of death and destruction but is also associated with motherhood and rebirth. There could not be a more appropriate name for this creature half-concealed behind branches above us. Leigh "pouch-checked" Kali for a joey when she was rescued and was surprised not to find one. "I was like, 'That's unusual, she's having a year off breeding.' " When Kali was returned to the wild in late March, a joey was in her pouch, that bonus baby peeking out now from her position snuggled on her mother's back.
Leigh has tracked Kali for nearly four years. "If she was a person, she'd be sitting there with a crocheted rug and a cup of Earl Grey tea watching over the kids," says Leigh. "She's a homebody; she breeds every year, has a joey every year and doesn't go far; she has one of the smaller home ranges of those we have tracked." But for a homebody, Kali is a rule-breaker, as are the other koalas on the mountains.
Koalas are generally known to like trees on richer soils, but the mountains are sandstone country. Generally, the rule is that they live below 800 metres in altitude, but two of Leigh's sites, including Kanangra-Boyd, are above 1000 metres and often white in winter. It was not thought that the silvertop ash (Eucalyptus sieberi) was a food source but here, they eat it delightedly. Additionally, the Kanangra-Boyd population is one of only two NSW koala populations to be chlamydia-free. "So it seems to be, or was, a thriving, growing population in an area that's above the climate envelope for koalas, using tree species they shouldn't," says Leigh. "Yeah, they're just a bunch of rule-breakers."
The story of Kali and her compatriots is just one of dozens of koala stories to have emerged from the fire grounds. Taken together, they shed some light on the challenges of saving the species: there are hundreds of stakeholders working in the field, from wildlife rescuers to scientists and multiple points of disagreement; the science is dense but there are still big gaps in knowledge about the creature; and, depending on where they live, koalas have varying behaviours and face different threats.
Some of the most gut-wrenching images came out of Kangaroo Island, where tens of thousands of koalas are believed to have died from a pre-fire population of about 50,000. Evan Quartermain, head of programs for the Humane Society International Australia (HSI), travelled to the island to help with rescue attempts. "They were lying defeated on the ground, desperate for water. Usually they'd be doing all they could to get away from us."
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But it was a tragedy of animal welfare rather than species decline. In the late 19th century, three koalas were put on French Island in Victoria's Western Port in an attempt to rescue the species from the fur trade's devastation. Descendants of those koalas were later used to repopulate areas in Victoria and South Australia, including Kangaroo Island. But despite a widespread misconception that the island's koalas can be used to replenish depleted mainland populations, they have issues resulting from inbreeding. "Their genetic diversity is very low," says Sydney University associate professor and ecologist Mathew Crowther. "They're a very bad source population."
Additionally, before the fires, koala numbers on the island had ballooned to the point that they were putting unsustainable pressure on the environment. Some proposed culling. Likewise, in parts of South Australia and Victoria, introduced koala populations breed so prolifically that they put untenable pressure on native vegetation. In 2015, The Age revealed that wildlife officials secretly culled 600 koalas in Victoria's Cape Otway area. The animals were starving as a result of over-population.
The complexity of the subject matter is matched only by the confounding nature of koala politics and bureaucracy across federal, state and local levels. Federally, there's a National Koala Conservation and Management Strategy but it's out of date: it was developed before the east coast koala population was listed as vulnerable in 2012 and does not take into account updated predictions about climate change. "Drop bears have more teeth than the strategy," conservation scientist Dr Stuart Blanch from WWF-Australia says.
Similarly, a recovery plan to bring koala populations back to health, a legislative requirement that followed the koala's 2012 vulnerable listing, was to be finalised two years ago but remains undone. In June last year, federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that the government had been waiting on the states' draft plans. In November, Ley announced an $18 million koala package, which will include a national audit of populations, health research and habitat restoration. But within days, 23 conservation groups had signed an open letter slamming the audit as a diversionary tactic and a waste of money. Research scientist Steve Phillips agrees. "It's garbage … The numbers don't matter, it's about the rate of change that's occurred. We already know what that rate of change is and the science is very strong that the animal is very clearly on a trajectory towards extinction."
Meanwhile, the skirmishes that occupied the NSW government through 2020 showed the complexity of legislation governing environmental planning policy over koala habitats at a state level and the extent to which conservative ideology plays a role in the debate about saving the creature.
In September 2020, NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro threatened to move his MPs to the crossbench over the State Environmental Planning Policy (SEPP) that, among other things, increased the number of tree species identified as koala feed and habitat trees from 10 to 123. Many described his move as a "dummy spit" but, seen in context, it was more understandable: since 2016 the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party has grabbed the heartland state electorates of Orange, Barwon and Murray and the Nationals are struggling to remain relevant. In claiming the policy was an assault on landholders' property rights, Barilaro was appealing to his base (two-thirds of NSW's koalas are on private land). He backed away from his threat but the political wounds were deep: a week or so later, the Nationals MP for Port Macquarie, Leslie Williams, defected to the Liberal Party. In a statement, Williams said her community rightly expected that policy should overshadow politics.
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The machinations continued through spring as a bill amending the Local Land Services act (LLS), which regulates native vegetation management on private land, was passed by the lower house of Parliament but blocked in the upper house when Liberal MP Catherine Cusack crossed the floor to vote with Labor, the Greens and other crossbenchers. She told the chamber that she had never seen "such poor integrity of processes" which had "zero to do with protecting koalas". She said: "It is to try to patch up a political disagreement … Far too many mistakes have been made already, many buried in regulatory complexity. But the trends, the science and the outcomes are very clear. We are failing, and this bill cannot possibly assist."
During the state's hottest November on record, the Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, sacked Cusack as parliamentary secretary for voting against the government and announced she would scrap the SEPP and revert to its predecessor – a weaker, 25-year-old koala habitat policy – until a new one was developed.
Kellie Leigh, at right, surveys the koala population in Kanangra-Boyd NP, NSW. Dominic Lorrimer
Kellie Leigh's koalas might be rule-breakers but, mostly, koalas and people like the same habitats: good land, good soil types. "We always want to develop the land koalas like, that's where we can grow our vegies and crops," Leigh says. According to WWF international research, eastern Australia is one of 11 deforestation hotspots in the world, the only OECD country on the list.
Multiple koala experts I spoke to for this story noted that despite layers of bureaucracy and multiple koala plans and strategies, the hard decisions needed about the most important measure to save koalas aside from reversing climate change – habitat protection – are still not being taken. Port Macquarie Koala Hospital's Cheyne Flanagan notes that the NSW government is taking some positive steps, including the development of a new koala strategy due to be released this year. But she says legislation to protect koala habitats is not tight enough.
"It's still rape and pillage and open slather with regards to removal of habitat," she says. NSW Greens MP Cate Faehrmann, who chaired the upper house inquiry into koalas, says that successive governments have made koala protection policies "complex and overlapping, but ultimately there's hardly any of it that actually stops koala habitat being cleared".
Meanwhile, Evan Quartermain from the Humane Society International Australia believes there is an untold element to the habitat loss story: "It's the cumulative effect of smaller developments … death by a thousand cuts." They don't get much attention but they're happening everywhere, all the time. Often, what is lost is the critical "corridors" koalas need to travel across the land.
But the overarching threat to koalas is climate change. Ahead of a firefront that ravaged the NSW Southern Tablelands in January 2020, more than 40 koalas were rescued and taken to the Australian National University for sanctuary. Scientists were appalled to discover that most were starving to death. "They were in that condition because of the extreme heat and the drought that set up those conditions for the fire to happen. The climate was killing them before the fires even got there," says Dr Kara Youngentob, an ANU ecologist. Youngentob says she has now seen eucalypts, trees adapted to one of the driest climates in the world, dying from moisture stress. "Before this past summer happened, I had a hard time believing that eucalypts could get that desiccated … [they] can't handle the type of climate they're now experiencing."
Conventional wisdom has long been that koalas don't need to drink water because gum leaves provide all the moisture they need. But a new study led by Dr Valentina Mella, a research associate from the University of Sydney, captured koala drinking behaviour in the wild for the first time: researchers observed koalas licking water running down smooth tree trunks during rain.
Usually, koalas get enough hydration from gum leaves. A scene like this in Gunnedah, NSW "really tells you there's something wrong".Kate Wilson
So what should we make of all the photographs of koalas drinking from humans' water bottles and bird baths and pools? "That is very incredible behaviour; that really tells you there's something wrong," says Mella, who has preliminary data showing the moisture content of eucalyptus leaves is declining. "No wild animal would approach a human unless there was something to get from it … these animals can't find water anywhere else." (Experts caution against giving koalas water from a bottle because when they tip their head back to drink, water can get into their lungs, potentially causing aspiration pneumonia.) Youngentob says when koalas in the care of ANU during the fires drank a lot of water, it was an indication they'd sustained physiological stress. "Drinking is kind of their swansong," she says. "When you see a koala drink a lot, it's on its way out."
"It's about climate change … these extreme temperature differentials that are just beyond the koala's ability to adapt to."
Sometimes people try to tell Biolink's Steve Phillips that the decline in koala numbers is primarily due to disease. "Oh, bullshit!" he replies. "Every time I see somebody try to hijack the koala conservation argument and mention disease as one of the driving factors, I go, 'No, no, no.' It's about climate change, and the drying out of the landscape and these extreme temperature differentials that are just beyond the koala's ability to adapt to." Phillips has seen the climate envelope for where koalas can survive shrink dramatically. During surveys in the mid-1990s, he found thousands of koalas in the Pilliga forests of north-central NSW. He returned in 2019 and surveyed 108 sites. "We did not find one single bit of evidence of koalas being alive." East of the Pilliga, the "koala capital" of Gunnedah had a koala population of nearly 13,000 in 2012. Phillips says that, by 2019, estimates were that about 90 per cent had gone. "This wave of extinction moving through from the west has taken out the Pilliga animals and now looks like it's going to take out the Gunnedah population."
What he says next makes me shiver. "I could go out into the Pilliga at night 15 years ago and drive along the road with a spotlight and see four koalas and three brushtail possums and a couple of ringtails and possibly a carpet snake and various other things. Now I can do that and I see nothing." A night in the Australian bush, and there is no life.
Kellie Leigh releases Lakshmi and her joey, Ra, in Kanangra-Boyd NP in NSW March2020. The koalas had been evacuated to Taronga Zoo to escape the Gospers Mountain fire.Ian Brown
Why do we place so little value on the glorious, pulsing, sweet-smelling beauty of our landscapes and the creatures rustling within them? Why do we argue with what scientists tell us, scientists whose research is not published until it has undergone rigorous, peer-reviewed assessment? Why do we imagine things will go on as they always have?
Is it about greed and self-interest? HSI's Evan Quartermain observes: "Whenever people are upset about protecting animals, it's usually because they've got a financial stake in not doing so."
Is it about priorities? Kellie Leigh's mad scramble to save some of the Blue Mountains' koalas was done without assistance from authorities. "All the firefighters were out protecting people and property," she says. "There were no resources for wildlife." Firefighters call it "asset protection" – protecting people and property.
"Whenever people are upset about protecting animals, it's usually because they've got a financial stake in not doing so."
But we diminish ourselves and imperil our own future when we take such a narrow, short-sighted view of assets and self-interest. Professor Danielle Celermajer wants people to recognise "we're all earth beings … We are woven in relationships with other earth beings: animals, rivers, forests, rainforests, gum trees." She rejects the idea that humans are in a different realm. "It's a very pernicious fantasy we continue to indulge that everything else can go but we'll be okay."
Related Article: 'Of one thing we can be certain, the fires will return': Greg Mullins'
On November 30, The Guardian published a story noting that international lawyers were developing plans for a crime of ecocide: criminalising destruction of the world's ecosystems. On Twitter, Matt Haig, the acclaimed English author of the 2016 book Reasons to Stay Alive, posted a link to the story with the comment: "Ecological destruction is ultimately self-harm."
The day before The Guardian story was published, a video of a koala under a lawn sprinkler in Bowenville, near Dalby in south-east Queensland, travelled around the world. "Even the koala bears are coming up with ways to stay cool there," a perky TV presenter in Oklahoma City said. "That's pretty cute."
Dalby's average maximum November temperature is 30.6°C. In November 2020, the maximum average temperature was 33.9°C. On November 29, the day the video of the koala under a sprinkler was shot, the thermometer hit 38.5°C. Watch the video. The koala is guzzling from the sprinkler head.
In December 2019, as an apocalyptic haze of smoke blanketed Sydney, thousands of people marched through the city demanding action on climate change. An image of one person's placard pinged around social media: "How great were koalas?"
The Crown – the view from Down Under
November 23, 2020 Paul Hemphill 1 Comment
Having luxuriated in series one to three of The Crown, the fourth is deliciously seditious – particularly if one is a republican – and an Australian republican at that.
Pheasants and peasants, dead trout and salmon, trekking the wilds in tweeds and wellies, and the stalking of a wounded stag. When Uncle Dickie gets blown to smithereens, it feels like some karmic comeuppance. This is even before we get to witnessing the making and breaking of "the people's princess" in what transpired to be a fractured fairytale.
There was plenty for us antipodeans to enjoy in an episode ironically titled Terra Nullius, a phrase that is particularly potent in our ongoing "history wars". The Australian scenes were actually filmed in Spain, but never mind. There was Richard "Cleaver Green" Roxburgh as our larrikin Prime Minister, the late Bob Hawke, remarking that Princess Di had set back the republican movement for decades. The "silver bodgie" is cast as as an impatient republican, but in reality, he did not forcefully agitate for a republic during his early years in office.
On matters Australian, series four offered up a couple more events that have contemporary echoes.
During the royal couple's trip to Australia in 1983, Diana tried and failed to scale our iconic Uluru – it was called Ayers Rock in those days, the site of the tragically famous "a dingo are my baby" saga. Our government has only recently conceded to the wish of the traditional owners that climbing the sacred megalith be forbidden – to the chagrin of many, and the joy of many more.
There is also the presence of Sir Martin Charteris, the Queen's private secretary. Though long gone to his maker, and retired well before his fictional appearance, his name and reputation have been brought into critical review with revelations of the role he played in our Governor General's dismissal of Labour Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on Remembrance Day 1975 – an event that resonates still nearly half a century on. Whilst it has been shown that Queen Elizabeth did not have foreknowledge, it has also come to light that Prince Charles gave retrospective encouragement to Sir John Kerr, who was enthusiastically pushing for the Crown Prince succeed him as Governor General.
It is said that Australians' affection for Wills and Kate has an impact on republican sentiment DownUnder similar to that of Princess Diana – though The Crown's unflattering portrayal of Prince Charles, fresh on the heels of the release of "the Palace Letters" might lead folk to contemplate that when Her Maj goes to meet the saints, will we Aussies might declare that "it's time!"?
For further reading on Australian history and politics in In That Howling Infinite, see; Down Under and The Frontier Wars – Austrtalias Heart of Darkness
Call yourself a Republican? Then why are you bingeing The Crown?
Jacqueline Maley, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 November 20207
The television show The Crown presents a unique dilemma for republicans. How can we maintain our disdain for the monarchy, our assurance of its irrelevance, while we are bingeing on its depiction, lapping up every detail of its costume, marvelling at the strong hairline of Princess Margaret and delighting in Diana? Even the corgis who have walk-on parts compel us with the sureness of their stride.
As a friend of mine put it in our defence: I don't like murderers, but I like watching shows about serial killers. Tolstoy knew how interesting unhappy families were, and there is plenty of personal misery in the fourth and latest season of The Crown, even though the only person the creators give us any sympathy for is Diana, Princess of Wales.
The power of her celebrity, two decades after her death, defies gravity. We only really want to watch the show because of her – the scenes which just feature the self-absorbed, self-pitying Prince Charles are the only ones that drag.
This mirrors the central problem of Charles' life – the public was never very interested in him. What he doesn't understand, at least according to the show (yes, I know, I know, it's fiction), is that nobody is actually obliged to find him interesting.Advertisement
The Real Life Charles is reportedly very cross at the characterisation of him as a cruel husband who moons around Highgrove enunciating his pretentious gardening philosophy ("There will be no straight lines, Mummy," he tells the Queen when she comes to visit).
I find myself straining to care when I read articles where "sources close to the prince" tell us such-and-such an event never happened that way, or that the depiction of Charles as smug and insecure is mean. So what? Fiction portrays truth far better than documentary, and that is the genius of the show.
Besides, the most outlandish parts of the story are all true – the fact that two of the Queen's first cousins were locked away in an institution for life because their disability might have caused people to believe the royal bloodline was "tainted". The fact that a princess was so unhappy before her wedding that she tried to disappear herself through the misery of bulimia. The fact that the Queen's children have to make appointments to see her.
I remember reading a defence of Kate Middleton – who was accused of not welcoming her sister-in-law Meghan Markle into the royal family – in which it was indignantly stated that Kate had even invited Meghan to her home once. This sort of weirdness is the second-generation iteration of Diana's loneliness – in the show, the breeding mare/child bride Diana (she was 20) has been chosen to provide an heir, then locked in a palace to learn the rules.
She is the key to the monarchy's survival, yet when she rings the Queen, and her fiance, over and over, neither will take her call.
In a recent essay on the pandemic, British novelist Zadie Smith writes that "suffering is not relative; it is absolute … it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like 'privilege'."
This sums up the Diana dynamic perfectly, and explains why millions of people loved her, or thought they did, for her vulnerability and her sadness, even though it was attended by servants and played out on the plump couches of Kensington Palace.
Here is another partial defence for republican viewers: the locations. Who is not dreaming of salmon-fishing in the Icelandic wilderness, walking the beach sadly in Mustique, a la Princess Margaret, or roaming the highlands of Scotland on a jolly hunting party (maybe minus the animal suffering)?Advertisement
The scenes of Balmoral, when Margaret Thatcher comes to stay with her husband Denis, are a fascinating portrayal of the clash between the low-born, broom-sweeping neo-liberalism of Thatcherism, and the fusty conservatism of Establishment Britain.
The Windsors look down on the shopkeeper's daughter who doesn't know how to dress properly for hunting. Seen through Thatcher's eyes, the royal family are a ridiculous tribe with funny costumes and arcane habits.
Thatcher's partially-sympathetic portrayal should be more controversial than Charles' unsympathetic one. The bleakness of Thatcher's Britain is shown but not focused on, and the only victim of her recession we see is Michael Fagan, the intruder who famously broke into the Queen's bedroom in 1982. Fagan tells Liz "the system" is broken and complains about PM Maggie. The Queen is sympathetic and they have a moment together before he is whisked off by security.
Emma Corin as Princess Diana
But nothing happens, because the monarchy can't make a material difference to any of its subjects' lives, not that many of its members have shown an inclination to do so.Advertisement
Then there are the sons – Charles is self-pitying, Edward is a bullied boy turned bully, Andrew is charming but spoiled (perhaps a future series will explore the protection racket the royal family ran for the prince who refuses to answer police questions about his pedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein).
The Queen's children, Diana, and even the Queen herself, all desperately need the validation of popularity, usually via the medium of the press, because it's too sticky to get involved with one's subjects personally. They are all jealous of the attention the others are getting. They all believe their misery to be worse than others'.
That, finally, is what the show brings out – how needy the royals are, and perhaps that's the best republican take on The Crown.
That the act of divesting ourselves of the monarchy, when it eventually happens, will feel less like unshackling from a colonial power, and more like shaking off a clingy partner: the relief that comes with the end of a relationship you have simply grown out of.
Arguments of Monumental Proportions
June 10, 2020 September 18, 2021 Paul Hemphill 1 Comment
Our historical memory is a motherland of wishful thinking. Ulrich Raulph
There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind…The opening of the film Gone with the Wind
The past is another country – they thought things differently there; and if the past shapes the present, the present also shapes the past.
With the spread of Black Lives Matter protests around the world, in response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the defacing and destruction of monuments to dead and dubious white men is back in vogue – not that the practice has ever actually gone out of style.
Fallen Idols
There is a certain historical irony that the statue of a 17th century slave trader (and on account of his wealth, philanthropist) Edward Colston has been consigned to the watery depths of Bristol Harbour from whence his ships sailed. He'd built his fortune as an influential member of the Royal African Company, a private company which branded its initials on the chests of some 100,000 men, women and children before shipping them to the Americas and the Caribbean. Thousands never made it, tossed into the ocean after drawing their last breath in the filth below decks. Ted and his fellow slavers have a case to answer. In the hundred years after 1680, some two million slaves were forcible removed from their homes in West Africa to the work camps of the West Indies. By 1750, the numbers of slaves had reached over 270,000 per decade, and by 1793, Liverpool handled three fifths of the slave trade of all Europe.Historian Peter Ackroyd wrote in his History of England: "No more than half of the transported slaves reached their destination; some plunged into the sea and were said to hike up their arms in joy from the brief sensation of liberty before they sank beneath the waves".
Bristol owed its past prosperity to the slave trade – as did Liverpool. The statue had stood in the city centre for 125 years with a plaque that read: 'Erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city'. Streets and buildings were also named after Colton though most townsfolk have probably never have heard of him.
Activists have drawn up a hit list of 60 monuments in the United Kingdom that "celebrate slavery and racism". London mayor Sadiq Khan paves the way for the legal removal of many of historic statues in the British capital and the changing of street names. Slave owner and West India Docks founder Robert Milligan has already been taken down. On the same day, Belgium's bloody King Leopold, whose rule of the Congo – it was his private property – became a byword in colonial barbarity, was removed from his plinth in Brussels
As an Aussie and a Brit of Irish parents, and as a history tragic, I find the long running monuments furore engrossing. Statues of famous and infamous generals, politicians and paragons of this and that grace plazas, esplanades and boulevards the world over, and their names are often given to such thoroughfares. They represent in visual and tangible form the historical memory of a nation, and as such, can generate mixed emotions reflecting the potentially conflicted legacies and loyalties of the citizenry.
It is about the control of history – and who controls it. We all use history, incorporating perceptions of our national story into lessons that guide or confirm our present actions and outlooks. Our history is written not only in scholarly narratives, but also, in commemorations, in statues, flags and symbols, in the stories that children are taught about their country and their community from their earliest school years, and in the historical figure skating they are taught to remember and honour. History, it is said, is written mostly by the victors – but not always. So the inevitable tensions between different versions of the past fosters tension and conflict, and grievance and offense in the present. Particularly in onetime colonialist and settler countries, and the lands these once ruled and exploited.
Juxtaposing controversial British statuary, and those of American Civil War generals, against the empty plinths of the former People's Republics of Eastern Europe, and the images of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein, I have always contemplated our own monuments to reputed bad boys past.
There are statues of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell all over the place in England where his legacy is still debated. He stands authoritatively outside the Houses of Parliament and is remembered as one of the godfathers of that institution. And yet, when he died, and the monarchy he deposed restored, his body was disinterred and hanged. In Ireland, for so long "John Bull's other island", however, he is reviled. He did, after all, march through the land with "fire and fury", to borrow Donald Trump's hyperbole, and killed quite a number of Irish folk. In my southern Irish mother's day, people would put his picture upside down, facing the wall. This may be apocryphal, but whatever.
Oliver Cromwell, Parliament Square
A statue of Lord Nelson stood in O'Connell Street, Dublin until March 1966 when the IRA blew him up, celebrated by the Clancies in the song below. The IRA also blew up that other famous English mariner, Lord Louis Mountbatten, inveterate pants-man, victor of the Burma campaign and facilitator of Indian Independence). It wasn't that Horatio had inflicted anything unpleasant upon the Irish, but rather his renowned Englishness that earned him the TNT. And yet, in the wake of intermittent US monuments barnies, beady British eyes were always focusing on the admirable admiral and his ostensible racism (not a word in use at the turn of the eighteenth century) and support for the slave trade. After Colston's dip in Bristol harbour, it won't be long before Horatio is harangued – not that anyone actually believes that Nelsons Column should be evicted from iconic Trafalgar Square, and it would be damn difficult to paint-bomb his myopic visage. The British attachment to Lord Nelson is long and strong. In Birmingham, my hometown, the city centre around the Bullring has been refurbished, redesigned and reconstructed numerous times during my lifetime, but the immortal mariner and his battleship stand still on their plinth of honour – as in the featured picture.
The ongoing controversy in England over statues of Cecil Rhodes, colonialist and capitalist, and ostensibly an early architect of apartheid, still rages with respect to his African legacy, with many demanding that he be demolished. his statue in Cape Town, South Africa, was removed after extensive protests in 2015. as As I write, Cecil may not survive the week. There is a statue in Parliament Square, close to Cromwell and Winston Churchill (who some also abhor), of South African soldier and statesman Jan Smuts. His Boer War (on the enemy's side) and segregationist sympathies were outweighed by his military and diplomatic record in service of the British Empire, and to date, none has called for his eviction. Perhaps he will be spared as he did not have a pariah state named for him, as it was with Cecil. Nor was he associated with the apartheid regime as it was decades before his time – although this wouldn't satisfy some iconoclasts. But most likely, he is safe because most folk have never heard of him.
Cecil Rhodes, Oxford University
Winston Churchill gets a paint-job
I have heard mumblings, however, of doing for General Smuts, and also for his Parliament Square neighbour Sir Winston Churchill, who has now been graffitied. Now, he might have saved Britain from Hitler's hoards, but he did not like the Irish, nor Indians (and Pakistanis for that matter), and said some gross things about Arabs and Jews. And we Aussies, and Kiwis too, still blame him for the disastrous Dardanelles campaign – although he did give us our indefatigable and untouchable ANZAC legend and a long weekend. And whilst on the subject of the Middle East, an equestrian Richard the Lionheart stands close by. He did dastardly things to tens of thousands of locals – Muslim, Christian and Jew – during the Third Crusade, almost a millennium ago. Watch out, Dick and Dobbin!
Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the world scout movement, of which I was a relaxed and comfortable member for half of the sixties, sits on the seafront in Poole, Dorset, under twenty four hour CCTV protection. In a 2007 poll, he was voted the 13th most influential person in the UK in the 20th century. But critics say that he held racist views, and in 2010 declassified MI5 files revealed he was invited to meet Adolf Hitler after holding friendly talks about forming closer ties with the Hitler Youth. If old "bathing towel" as he was once affectionately called by us Boy Scouts, becomes persona non grata, what will become of Baden Powell Park in Coffs Harbour, our regional centre? It sits behind the Dan Murphy's liquor mart, one of the town's most popular retail outlets, and provides an opportunity for our discussion to segue DownUnder.
Dark deeds in a sunny land
In this strange, copycat world we live in, politicians and activists call for the removal of statues of our Australian founding fathers for the parts they played in the creation of our nation. In his challenging revisionist history of Australia, Taming of the Great South Land', William Lines tells us that if we look up the names of the worthies who've had statues, squares, streets and highways, building and bridges, parks and promontories, rivers and even mountains named after them, we will uncover a dark history of which few are aware. Try it sometime; you'll be surprised.
There has inevitably been much fuss about Captain James Cook, the renowned and courageous navigator who "discovered" the place two hundred and fifty years ago (notwithstanding that the Aborigines, Javanese, Dutch, Portuguese, and French had been here first). His "discovery", many argue, led to genocide and the dispossession of our First Peoples (Columbus no doubt also gets more than pigeons shitting on him!). And also, there's Lachlan Macquarie, fifth and last of the autocratic governors of New South Wales, who laid the economic and social foundations of the new colony. He is in the cross-hairs as responsible for initiating the 'frontier wars' and for ordering the massacre of Aborigines.
The captain, his chopsticks and his lunch. James Cook, Whitby, Yorks
Lachlan Macquarie, Hyde Park,Sydney
Inevitably, right-wing politicians, shock-jocks and commentators, came out swinging, venting against political correctness and identity politics, defending what they see as an assault on our "Australian values". When Macquarie got a paint job three years back, for a moment it seemed that our intractable history wars" were on again – the "whitewash" brigade versus the "black arm-band" mob. Statues were vandalized, voices raised and steam emitted as opposing sides took to their hyperbolic barricades. But once the graffiti had been removed from the statues of Cook and Macquarie in Sydney, and The Australian got it off its chest with a week of broadsheet history and a swag of indignant opinion pieces by the usual suspects, things appeared to have calmed down.
But not for long, perhaps.
All sorts of emotions, hopes and fears lie behind our various creation myths. No matter the source of our different "dream-times" we are all correct in one way or another. People wheel out the wise old "blind men and the elephant" story to illustrate how blinkered we are; but in reality, if those blind men were given more time, they would have expanded their explorations and discovered a bigger picture.
For more on our Aussie worthies, see, for example, from The Guardian, on Australia, Statues are not history, and regarding former Soviet monuments, Poles Apart – the bitter conflict over a nation's history. Below is a review of Alex von Tunzelmann's recent book Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History
And, in In That Howling Infinite, read also: The Frontier Wars – Australia's heart of darkness, and America's Confederate legacy, Rebel Yell
Fallen Idols: up they went and down they come
Jim Davidson, Weekend Australian, 17 Sept 2021
A statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the slopes of Devil's Peak, Cape Town, South Africa.
For as long as there have been statues, says Alex von Tunzelmann in this new book, they have been subject to attack. The Egyptian pharaohs regularly disfigured or smashed images of their predecessors. And so, what we have witnessed over the past few years, for all its urgency, in one sense has been a recurrence.
Von Tunzelmann demonstrates this very well by the way she has shaped her new book, Fallen Idols: it may end with the statue of George Washington being pulled down in Portland, Oregon, but its first focus is the statue of George III pulled down by New Yorkers. This occurred immediately after a public reading of the Declaration of Independence.
Attacking statues is as old as the United States itself.
Von Tunzelmann has been fascinated by statues for years. She challenges the notion that statue attacks are aimed at "erasing our past in its entirety" and she is sceptical that a man of his time (for they are nearly always men) can hold, say, racist assumptions, and yet be justified by good works. She says orderly removals are all very well, but the process is protracted and cumbersome: street action is sometimes necessary.
"Statues do not have rights," she says. "They stand at the pleasure of those who live alongside them."
The book examines 12 case studies. Each culminates in attack or removal, when statues had functioned as instruments of dominance. The massive Stalin statue that loomed over Budapest – 25 metres high – was partly constructed from melted-down Hungarian ones, and people were enjoined by the Communist Party to go and respectfully converse with it. Friendly little Stalin – and yes, he was in fact quite short, and sensitive about it.
Worse (in some respects) was Rafael Trujillo, who graduated from outright criminality to becoming police chief, supervising an election so that he came to power and stayed there. He employed state terror to rule the Dominican Republic for 31 years, peppering the place with statues and public busts – nearly 2000 of them. Almost certainly a serial rapist, he gloried in what he saw as his virility: a couple of his column-centred monuments were in-your-face phallic. In case people didn't get the point, at one unveiling his vice-president spoke of Trujillo's "superior natural gifts". All these statues came down, with others like them. In India as in Eastern Europe they have been put in special statue parks, where they stand largely neglected. A relatively benign relegation, sometimes leaving behind blank spaces. In one way, the recent attacks are a reversal of the statue-building mania across the Westernised world that accelerated through the 19th century. In 1844, London had 22 statues; by 1910, there were 10 times as many. The attacks are perhaps best seen as part of the reset following through the implications of the collapse of the European colonial empires. Hence the speed with which the Black Lives Matter movement spread: 13 days after George Floyd's murder in Minnesota, a crowd in Bristol, England pulled down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston and threw it in the harbour.
The book also gives a highly contextualised account of the "Rhodes must Fall" movement. It is shown how deeply – indeed brutally – racist Cecil Rhodes was; how his belief in the superiority of the British race led him to conclude that it had a right to occupy those lands "at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings".
So the first statue to go, after it had been smeared in excrement, was that at the University of Cape Town. Oxford, where he gazes down at the High Street from the facade of Oriel College, has proved a tougher nut to crack. The college has prevaricated – people threatened to withdraw bequests if it moved to take Rhodes down – so he is still there. But the agitation has led to some improvement in Oxford practice, including the appointment of the first black head of a college.
Toward the end, Von Tunzelmann retreats a little from a generally abolitionist stance when it comes to statues, admitting that she is quite fond of a few. As are the British public, polls show. Certainly, some statues should be statements of what the people who live around them admire, but some are needed to remind us of who we, as people, were, when they went up. There should always be room for that: in the recent frenzy in America, a statue celebrating an antislavery abolitionist was toppled, as was another celebrating women's rights. For there is a broader problem: the technological imperative has brought with it a flattened sense of the past.
Jim Davidson's book, Emperors in Lilliput: Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland, is to be published by Melbourne University Press next year.
Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History, Alex von Tunzelmann (Headline 2021)
Australia's choice – survive by respect or die by stupid
January 26, 2020 January 26, 2020 Paul Hemphill 1 Comment
Normally, the weeks preceding our national day see social and mainstream media, posturing politicians and personalities and cultural warriors of all our tribes caught up in argument and invective about its meaning and significance. And then, it's all over. Calm is restored as summer winds down, the kids return to school, and the working year starts in earnest – until the next national shibboleth lumbers into view – Anzac Day in late April.
This year, however, things are unseasonably quiet. As a nation and a community, we are too preoccupied with Australia's unprecedented bush-fire crisis to wage our customary wars of words.
The fires have dominated the media space, with harrowing photographs and video footage of their impact on people, property, and wildlife, stories of heroism and resilience, and circular debates and divisions, political posturing and finger-pointing. They have crowded out others news and reportage from around Australia and overseas where much is happening, be it the US' assassination of Iran's foremost general, ongoing protests in Beirut and Baghdad, the continued pounding on tons and villages in Syria's beleaguered Idlib province, devastating floods in Indonesia, and volcano eruptions in the Philippines and and Zealand – and, less catastrophic but infinitely entertaining, Britain's imminent retreat from Europe, and Harry and Meghan's divorce from the royal family.
The fires have also crowded out the predictable argy-bargy over our national identity. It's as if the partisans and opinionistas right across our political spectrum have holstered their weapons in deference to our collective pyro-purgatory.
There is one piece, however, that I deem worthy of republishing in In That Howling Infinite insofar as it encapsulates perfectly a cognitive and cultural dissonance at the heart of our national identity that I touched upon recently in How the 'Lucky Country' lost its mojo.
Sydney journalist Elizabeth Farrelly is always worth reading for her perspective on our identity, our culture and our natural and built environment. On this Australia Day 2020, she asks the perennial rhetorical question: what does it mean to be Australian? Her observations are illuminating. Here is my summary – you can read it in full below.
"As the fires rage on, bringing little but anti-green and pro-coal propaganda from our governments, we have a choice. We can go on pretending that exploitation is a sustainable way of life. We can pursue this culture of denial, where truths about nature, climate, women and Indigenous peoples are held in contempt. Or we can smarten up …
Australian culture has always relied on easy exploitation. From the moment white people arrived, we've been kidding ourselves that arrogance and theft add up to a lifestyle with a future. We dig stuff up and flog it, no value added, no questions asked. We grow food in the most destructive possible manner – clear-felling, mono-culturing, irrigating and overgrazing; destroying soil, desertifying land and belching carbon. We crowd to the edge of the continent, gazing out to sea, chucking our trash over our shoulders, pretending it won't come back to bite.
Even now, our Indigenous peoples are being displaced three and four times over. Last year we extinguished native title for Adani's foreign coal-mining interests, making the Wangan and Jagalingou people trespassers on their own land. We relentlessly export such coal, helping drive temperatures in central Australia beyond the habitable, exiling people for a second time from their ancestral homelands. Then, should anyone dare critique this mindlessness, as Bruce Pascoe obliquely has, we label them non-Indigenous and set the federal police onto determining their ancestry.
And we apply this domineering denialism, this refusal to listen, across the board. In agriculture it says, we don't care what naturally grows here. We're going to poison the insects, suck the water from ancient caverns and nuke the living daylights out of the soil with petroleum-based fertilizers. We're going to burn oil and coal, and if we get fires that destroy our townships, we'll clear the forests too.
In politics and at home it says, if our women are troublesome, we'll ridicule, intimidate and beat them into submission (with one woman murdered every week by her current or former partner and our political sphere internationally recognized for its misogyny).
In sport, it says it's fine if our cricketers – so long as they don't get caught. And in social relations, if people insist on different hierarchies – if they demand gender fluidity, or optional pronouns, or same-sex marriage or voluntary race-identity or anything else that questions our superiority we'll come down on them like a ton of bricks.
It's the arrogance we came with, two centuries back, but it's getting worse, not better … God gave us white guys dominion and we've weaponized it. We'll show this country who's boss.
Forget the Aussie flag, the flag of dominion.
This we should carve on our hearts: there is no economy without ecology".
See also: We got them Australia Day Blues; and Down Under – Australian History and Politics
Survival-by-respect or death-by-stupid: your choice Straya
Elizabeth Farrrelly, Sydney Morning Herald 26th January 2020
It's invasion day again only, this time, the eyes of the world are upon us. Under headlines like "Australia shows us the road to hell", the world is wondering if our economy isn't every bit as fragile as the landscape it routinely exploits. It's wondering about our tourism, with massive cancellations already from China and a US travel warning putting Australia on par with Gaza and PNG. It's asking how long Australia will be habitable. But beneath those questions lies another. What, at this crossroads, does it mean to be Australian?
The first three are questions of both fact and perception. As such they may be partly addressed by Scott Morrison's $76m commitment to beef-up Australia as a brand. But the last is a question for us. Who are we, as a nation, and who do we wish to be going forward?
The tourism industry has lost some $4.5 billion as overseas visitors cancel trips over bushfires.
As the fires rage on, bringing little but anti-green and pro-coal propaganda from our governments, we have a choice. We can go on pretending that exploitation is a sustainable way of life. We can pursue this culture of denial, where truths about nature, climate, women and Indigenous peoples are held in contempt. Or we can dust off our angel wings and smarten up.
Illustration: Simon Letch
And sure, to some extent, that's just colonialism. Colonialism is inherently macho, and inherently denialist. But it should be transitional. Now, as the NY Times argues, our political denialism is "scarier than the fires". Smarten up? It's time we grew up.
This is Australia's moment of reckoning. It's time we lost the attitude. Time we made a clear, rational and collective choice between survival-by-respect and death-by-stupid.
On top of Auckland's Maungakiekie, the volcanic Māori pa also known as One Tree Hill, stands an obelisk. The land was bequeathed to the city in the mid-19th century by the beloved Scot Sir John Logan Campbell, who designed the obelisk as a permanent record "of his admiration for the achievements and character of the great Maori people". That was then – now, New Zealand has Jacinda. And yes, these dots are connected.
Australia has shown no such reverence. Indeed, unable even to express genuine remorse for our repeated attempts at genocide and erasure-by-other-means, we're still doing arrogant displacement. And we, as a result, have Scott Morrison, who must live with the disparaging epithet concocted by the lads at the Betoota Advocate – Scotty from marketing – because many Australians believe there is a ring of truth to it.
Morrison who responds to bushfires by wanting to clear more land. Who thinks hazard reduction is climate action and more advertising can persuade them back to a charred continent. Death by stupid.
It's the arrogance we came with, two centuries back, but it's getting worse, not better. Even now, our Indigenous peoples are being displaced three and four times over.
Last year we extinguished native title for Adani's filthy foreign coal-mining interests, making the Wangan and Jagalingou people trespassers on their own land. We relentlessly export such coal, helping drive temperatures in central Australia beyond the habitable (Alice had 55 days above 40 degrees last year, and recorded street-surface temperatures between 61 and 68 degrees celsius), exiling people for a second time from their ancestral homelands. Then, should anyone dare critique this mindlessness, as Bruce Pascoe obliquely has, we label them non-Indigenous and set the federal police onto determining their ancestry.
As if that very ancestry, those very records, hadn't been, for two centuries, the subject of our energetic erasure. As if being Indigenous had always yielded some special right to speak, instead of the precise opposite. As if the speaker's genetic makeup validated or invalidated his speech. What?
And we apply this domineering denialism, this refusal to listen, across the board. In agriculture it says, we don't care what naturally grows here. We're going to poison the insects, suck the water from ancient caverns and nuke the living daylights out of the soil with petroleum-based fertilisers. We're going to burn oil and coal, and if we get fires that destroy our townships, we'll clear the forests too. That'll show them.
In politics and at home it says, if our women are troublesome, we'll ridicule, intimidate and beat them into submission (with one woman murdered every week by her current or former partner and our political sphere internationally recognised for its misogyny).
In sport, it says it's fine if our cricketers cheat – so long as they don't get caught. And in social relations, if people insist on different hierarchies – if they demand gender fluidity, or optional pronouns, or same-sex marriage or voluntary race-identity or anything else that questions our superiority we'll come down on them like a ton of bricks.
God gave us white guys dominion and we've weaponised it. By golly we'll show this country who's boss. Then if things get really rough, we'll pop to heaven. Let's hear it. A recent street poster picturing Morrison declaring Pentecostals for a Warmer Planet! may seem extreme, but Meritus Professor of Religious Thought, Philip C. Almond, explains why Morrison's faith means "reducing carbon emissions … may have little intellectual purchase with the PM" – because world's end means the second coming and, for the chosen, salvation. It's also why Morrison's beloved Hillsong church can happily advertise its coming conference, called Breathe Again, with Bishop T D Jakes saying "it's amazing how God can strike a match in Australia and the whole world catches on fire". As if the fires were God given.
That's choice A, Scott Morrison's choice. Business as usual but with extra cheesy advertising. Choice B, survival-by-respect, recognizes that even cheese can't sell a pile of ash.
Survival-by-respect means just that: respect for Indigenous peoples, for nature and for women. It means knowing that listening is no weakness, but a path to greater strength.
On the ground, the shift would be dramatic but not impossible. Zero carbon cities would become an immediate priority: solar vehicles, green roads, every surface productive of food or energy. It would mean ending coal production. Investing in renewables. Creating whole new industries.
This would mean listening to people who've spent 60,000 years here. Not copying, necessarily, listening. And listening, above all, to nature, heeding the fires' overwhelming lesson. Forget the Aussie flag, the flag of dominion. This we should carve on our hearts: there is no economy without ecology.
Sure, we can stick with lazy old Plan A. We can bow to Brand Australia and trust our grandchildren's futures to the Rapture Hypothesis. Good luck with that, and happy Straya Day!
Bare Dinkum
Elizabeth Farrelly is a Sydney-based columnist and author who holds a PhD in architecture and several international writing awards. She is a former editor and Sydney City Councilor. Her books include 'Glenn Murcutt: Three Houses', 'Blubberland; the dangers of happiness' and 'Caro Was Here', crime fiction for children (2014).
Small Stories – the schools of the Tarkeeth
January 5, 2020 November 3, 2021 Paul Hemphill 10 Comments
Remember the days of the old schoolyard
We used to laugh a lot, oh don't you
When we had imaginings and we had
All kinds of things and we laughed
And needed love…yes, I do
Oh and I remember you
We live in Bellingen Shire, some ten kilometres west of the seaside town of Urunga on the mid north coast of New South Wales. Tarkeeth forest lies between the Bellinger and Kalang Rivers, and these are connected tidally to the ocean at Urunga – the only place in Australia where two rivers meet the ocean together. The forest rises from the rivers on either side of the Fernmount Range, the easternmost extension of the Great Dividing Range that spans the eastern edge of our island continent. Above and between the two rivers, it is a rain-harvesting, filtration and stabilization ecosystem vital to the waterways and wetlands around them, and is a habitat for bird, reptilian, mammalian and marsupial wildlife, including koalas, wallabies, echidnas, quolls, goannas, owls, fruit doves and cockatoos. The east-west Fernmount Range Trail is an ancient highway called the Yildaan Dreaming Track. It led from the plains beyond the Dorrigo massif to what is now the seaside town of Urunga, known then to the Gumbaynggirr people as a "place of plenty". The first people would descend the spurs on the north and south flanks of the range to fishing and ceremonies on the riverside. The Tarkeeth Forest therefore contains areas of significant indigenous culture, recalling song lines and stories of the Dreamtime, places of ceremony, of birth and burial, and of atrocity.
As I wrote, two years ago, when retelling the story of the Fells Family and Twin Pines, "One of the pleasures of moving to the Australian bush and living in Bellingen Shire is discovering its often overlooked history". Here then is another tale of the Tarkeeth, and an echo from it's past.
Bellinger beginnings
This is a copy of Hodgkinson's "Aboriginals spearing fish on the Bellinger" from his 1845 book. The original watercolour is believed to be in the National Library
Let's begin at the beginning – the white man's beginning, that is. The Gumbaynggirr have been travelling through these lands for centuries. Europeans entered what was to become Bellingen Shire in 1840 when stock-man William Miles led a party into the Bellinger Valley to ascertain the abundance of much prized, avidly sought (and rapidly depleted) Red Cedar in the area. They came on foot, all the way from Kempsey – a trek of some one hundred kilometres through virgin bush. Such was abundance of the "red gold" that Macleay Valley government surveyor Clement Hodgkinson financed and supplied Miles to take him there the following year to see for himself.
Arriving at the estuary of a large river, they headed west along that very ridge walked by the Gumbaynggirr for untold centuries. Following a stream that descended southwards from the ridge, they encountered another large river that the Gumbaynggirr called the Odalberrie. Ascending the ridge once more, close to present day Tarkeeth, they descended the northern flank of the range through dense red cedar-rich forest to another large river that had cut a steep and deep course through forest meadows of swamp mahogany.
Further exploration revealed that the Odalberrie was the southern arm of this larger river, named the Bellinger – derived from the Gumbaynggirr name for the spotted quoll, a totemic and now endangered marsupial. It's southern sister was unimaginatively christened The South Arm. A draftsman's transcription error led to Boat Harbour, the settlement established on the Bellinger River during the 1860s, being renamed Bellingen. In subsequent decades, the deep and wide Bellinger River was navigable as far as Bellingen although one wouldn't know it from today's wide, shallow and gravelled-up successor.
Back in the day, there was no road along the northern bank of The South Arm. Access to the farms that were established along the river was by small jetties. Farmers and their families would travel by boat to visit the estuarine port of Urunga and to visit each other. In the late 19th century, Moses Lacey, the first selector, ran a store on the river bank.
Tarkeeth's mighty Odalberrie – Kalang
A quarry was established at Tarkeeth in 1892 to supply stone for the construction of the breakwater at Urunga. The stone was loaded onto lighters at Tarkeeth and carried down the South Arm to the harbour at Urunga. South Arm Road was constructed primarily to serve the quarry. Whilst the river became the Kalang, after the Gumbaynggirri "galanga" – the native tree known as white beech, now uncommon although we have reintroduced scores of them on our property – the road kept its name, just one of many South Arm Roads on our north coast. [On a side note, we traveled right to the end of the nearest if these just this week, into the heart of the Dunggir (koala in Gumbaynggirri) National Park, to visit a friend whose house was miraculously saved during the recent and devastating Kian Road bushfires. His land, sheds, and machinery were destroyed, but he and his dogs and chooks were spared. Others weren't so lucky – eleven nearby homes were lost and a neighbour perished when his ute rolled over a long drop]
South Arm Road by the Kalang and the Tarkeeth Forest
The Quarry was abandoned in 1901, and new one opened across the river on the north side of Pickett Hill (about 250 metres past the junction of the old Pacific Highway – now Giinagay Way, "welcome" in Gumbaynggirr) – and Martells Road. You can still visit the Tarkeeth Quarry – it's just west of the junction of South Arm Road and Fells Road – if you're game – it is overgrown with treacherous pits and venomous residents.
And this is where our story of the schools of the South Arm begins.
Loading stone onto the Steam Drogher Matilda from the South Arm Quarry for the Urunga breakwater (c.1900). From With Luck and a Fair Wind – Bellinger Shipping 1843 to 1933, Garry Barnett, Bellinger Valley Historical Society
Tarkeeth quarry blacksmith shop c.1900. Charles Thompson, 2nd from left ;Daniel Thompson,5th from left. Daniel was foreman. He died in 1905 in an explosion at the quarry (Scott Thompson)
In the late 19th Century, it was customary in remote areas for quarry management to establish a school for the children of its employees, and when a quarry was worked out, or outlived its usefulness, it was closed down and operations moved to a new location. The school would close move also. And so it was with the Tarkeeth Quarry.
To facilitate clear-felling and plantation re-establishment of the Tarkeeth Forest at Twin Pines, the Forestry Corporation of NSW cut a a new forest road linking the old Twin Pines Trail with Eringtons Trail, and called it Old School Road. By design or happenstance, some planner or surveyor sounded a historical echo.
As with most history where there are no longer any traces left on the ground, there is conjecture. Col Sutton of the Bellingen Valley Historical Society advised me that it refers to the Barrieton School – named for the contractor who worked the old Tarkeeth Quarry between 1892 and 1901. . Ian O'Hearn, who like Col, has a deep knowledge of our local history, has reported that the Old School Road refers to the first Brierfield School called Fernmount South, and that the road connected up to the Old Brierfield Road which crosses the Fernmount Range and joins Waterfall Way between Fernmount and Bellingen at Marx Hill. This school was relocated to the southern side of the river in 1906.
Barrieton School
Barrieton School c. 1895. Scott Thompson:"William Thompson 2nd from right later became a school teacher at Bellinger Heads; my grandfather Charlie Thompson, 6th from right resided in Urunga his whole life.
The Barrieton Provisional School was established on 2nd April, 1896 and it closed in 1901 when the quarry was closed down. But another school called Nessville was opened on the south side of the river, off Martell's Road, and near the quarry at Pickett's Hill. People still remember the old Nessville school, some referring to it as "the rainbow house". After the school closed, the property was owned by a well known local affectionately called Brad the Donkey Man. Frances Wit recalls: "My best friend lived there for years. He painted the house all different colours in the late 1990s and had donkeys named Eeyore and Kinoki. He'd walk to town with his donkey and grocery-shop then walk back".
The "rainbow house", site of the old Nessville School, Giinagay Way
We would imagine that although the Barrieton School was established for the quarry-men's youngsters, other children of the South Arm would have attended also; and it would have have been a mighty inconvenience when the school closed and they now had to walk or ride to Fernmount, Brierfield, Nessville or Urunga.
There was, therefore, considerable local pressure to establish the Tarkeeth School in the nineteen twenties. The folk of the Lower South Arm had to crawl over broken glass and put their hands in the pockets to get that. They petitioned the Inspector of Schools in distant Kempsey on the need for another school in Tarkeeth:
"To ensure an education for the children … both Brierfield and Nessvikke schools are a considerable distance" claimed the parents of twenty two children of school age. "Some of the children on the west end attend Brierfield, the Kruckows in the centre attend Fernmount, and the Dallaways on the extreme east attend Nessville. Those pupils attend badly, arriving at 11 o'clock, leaving early, and missing generally two or three days a week. The children therefore practically receive little schooling" (from The Bellinger Valley Historical Society's The History of the Tarkeeth School).
And so it came to pass: delayed at first, due to a lack of government funds, the Tarkeeth School was built a little further down South Arm, opening in 1923 as South Arm Road Provisional School. By 1923, some twenty to thirty pupils were in attendance, and on January 1st 1927, it was deemed to be permanent school and gazetted as a public school. Not long afterwards, the education department asked the parents to come up with a more distinctive name for the school – its location was often confused with the South Arm Roads on the Bellinger and Nambucca rivers – and at a public meeting, they settled on Tarkeeth School.
Small country schools never had it easy. Public funds were forever hard to come by, and improvements to buildings and amenities rare and hard-fought for, often through parents' own efforts. Tarkeeth School's requests for an all-weather shelter to protect the children from the heat and cold and the wind and rain were continually rejected by the education department, as was a proposal to build a tennis court out the back. The locals held fundraisers to get these done. But as the years passed, the department was more forthcoming. When the shelter's roof was blown off by a severe gale, it stumped up the cash. When the water tank was deemed unfit to drink, the department found money; it paid for repairs and maintenance over the years, and as world war approached in 1939, even had air-raid shelters constructed.
Numbers fluctuated over the years, and the school's status was therefore perennially tenuous, but the Parents and Citizens were a determined bunch and continually lobbied to keep it open. The history records how card parties were held at the Fells' home, and bonfires and other entertainments were held in the school grounds.
And so the school endured for fifty years. That's almost two generations. Many, many children passed through and moved on. Quite a few still live in the Shire and fondly recall their "days in the old school yard". Until, at last, it closed in May 1972 when declining school numbers made it unviable.
Tarkeeth School – the class of '68
The school was sold to an Erik Johannsen who lived there for many years with a collection of animals. Tragically, he ended his own life after setting fire to the school.
The school building is no more, and few recall its actual location. Adèle and went exploring and door-knocking, and rediscovered it. There is now an ageing weatherboard house on the site. But some of the old outhouses stand still. The children's outdoors shelter survives, albeit somewhat worse for wear with white ant damage, as does the adjoining chuck shed and the girls' lavatory. All that is left of the boys' toilets are an old stone urinal trough which is in remarkably good condition. And you can still see where there was a small tennis court to the east of the school building.
The house now where the Tarkeeth School stood
Formerly, the school's tennis court
The stone 'trough' of from the boy's toilets
The remains of the weather shelter and girls' toilets
The forest to the north of the school grounds
Schools of the Shire
The first public school in the valley was opened at Boat Harbour late in 1870 and as settlers spread further west along the river the village developed in the 1880's when stores, a hotel, and churches were established, and by the turn of the century Bellingen had become the main town in the valley. The postal name Boat Harbour had preceded Bellingen and continued to be used until 1890 when the official postal address was changed to Bellingen.
Over the years, many schools large and small were established in the Bellinger Valley. local Kay Saunders has listed the following: Bellingen 1870, Fernmount 1871, East Raleigh (Repton), 1879, South Bellingen (Quinn's, Fernmount South), 1883, Raleigh 1887, Urunga 1889, Thora (Beattie's) late 1890s, Barrieton (South Arm Quarry) mid 1890s, Baradoc (Joyce's) late 1890s, Nessville 1901, Hyde's Creek, 1914, South Arm Road/Tarkeeth 1923, Thora 1923. Between 1900 and 1969, schools were established at Orama, Three Bridges, Best's (Scotchman Kalang), Gordonville, Glennifer, Pine Creek, Snarebrook and Valery. The featured photograph is believed to be of Best's in Kalang, in the early 1900s.
References and acknowledgements
For the story of Twin Pines and also, the Tarkeeth School, Small Stories – a Tale of Twin Pines
Read more about our farm in The Country Life
Read the full story of Twin Pines here in Lloyd Fell's small but captivating book.
Here is the The History of the Tarkeeth School – 923-1972. It can be obtained from the Bellingen Museum.
John Lean's The Settlers of South Bellingen and the Lower South Arm, for the Bellinger Valley Historical Society.
Photographs: Best's School, John Gibson; Barrieton School, Ian O'Heane: Tarkeeth School Class of 68,Beverley Ferguson Crompton. Pictures of Tarkeeth and Nessvile Schools today, Paul Hemphill.
Read read more about 'Bello' on wikipedia.
Lean about the Gumbaynggirr language here. Our local indigenous language is still spoken from the Nambucca river, up along the Nymboida to the west and along the Clarence river.
Many thanks to present and former Tarkeeth residents, to alumni of Tarkeeth School who shared stories of the So You Are From Bellingen FaceBook page, and, Col Sutton, Ian O'Hearne, Lloyd Fell, and the Bellinger Valley Historical Society.
For other posts in our Small Stories series of ordinary folk doing extraordinary things, see: The Odyssey of Assid Corban, the story of a Lebanese migrant to New Zealand, and The Monarch of the Sea, the rollicking tale of an unlikely "pirate king".
No Bull! a true though somewhat overwrought local saga of battling bovines – set in Bonville, not far north of us.