Grey Nomads

Posts Tagged ‘kevin rudd’

The changing winds and shifting sands of ones fortune are often caused by man-made errors in judgement, others by nature, sometimes it is by the decissions thust upon us by bureaucrats or worse still a committee thereof, but in Australia they are also likely to be created by the impact of an introduced species.

In the Australian vernacular “Back of Bourke” implies a very remote location. In the past four weeks we have been to the back of Bourke and beyond.

Six months ago, on Christmas Eve 2009, the town of Bourke was in the midst of one of it’s longest and most sever drought in years. The flat lands around Bourke had been in the grip of drought for almost 10 years. They were on the verge of evacuating the town as the sadly depleted water supply had all but dried up.

The next day, Christmas Day 2009 up to 100mm of rain fell as an Ex-tropical Cyclone tore across bringing the heaviest rain falls in a decade to centres including Nyngan, Coonamble and Bourke.

The big wet has brought good fortune to many in the outback. Apart from the obvious benefit to the farmers, almost every country town is booming from the influx of domestic tourism. The rains have encouraged many people to visit the outback to see the Darling River flowing again. The region has experienced an increase of over 30% in tourism.

Visitors are flocking to see South Australia’s Lake Eyre full of water and combining their voyage with trips up the Darling to NSW towns such as Lightning Ridge, Broken Hill and White Cliffs, and with visits to national parks such as Paroo-Darling, Gundabooka, Mutawintji, Kinchega and Mungo.

I made a poor judgement when I decided we would spend the night in Gundabooka National Park just 40km south of Bourke. We had spent the day enjoying the marvellous vistas of the red cliffs and gorges and thought we would camp in the park for the night. Of course when I made the decision I was unaware that it was to be the coldest June day in over 100 years and after we departed the campfire we had shared with two other travellers, Ken and Len, for the confines of our caravan, spent the rest of the night shivering. Although we had climbed into our beds fully clothed we could not keep warm. Being a National Park, we were forbidden from firing up the generator to power our heater and awoke to discover the temperature outside had plummeted to minus 4.1 degrees C and was minus 0.4 inside. But spare a thought for poor Ken and Len who had spent the night in tents.

As the crow flies, less than 300km south-west Bourke lies Wilcannia; a town that has seen an enormous shift in fortunes, it has benefited little from the boom in tourism, many drive through without stopping. Wilcannia had a rich and vibrant history. Once known as the “Queen City of the West”, it was the third largest shipping port in Australia boasting a population of over 3000 and 13 pubs in its hay day.

During the boom years of the 1880’s sandstone was quarried locally for the beautiful buildings many of which still stand today albeit in varies states of disrepair. Just over 120 years since those heady days, virtually the only people left in this dilapidated town are the remnants of the original inhabitants.

The traditional Aboriginal population, the Barkindji people have been calling vast areas in and around Wilcannia home for some 40,000 years. They had lived in sync with nature preserving their environment and resources. Their world was turn upside down with the arrival of the white man. A large percentage died from illnesses that arrived with the white man; illnesses to which they had little or no immunity. Many that did survive the illnesses suffered annihilation at the hands of the settlers. The remnants of the once great tribe were placed in Missions where they were taught white-man ways. Those still living in the area today have lost their traditional way of life and been left to fend for themselves in this now derelict backwater.

Our arrival in Kinchega National Park, South of Menindee, coincided with the winter solstice. The waters were still flowing into the Menindee lake system, which is now 85% full after a decade of laying empty after little or no rain, though much to the chagrin of the residence down stream, little has been released into the river system.

Kinchega-Kars pastoral lease covered 800,000 hectares and extended all the way from Menindee to Broken Hill.

In 1861 Robert Gow headed north-west from Menindee in search of new grazing country. Parts of the west Darling plains and ranges that Gow explored later became Kinchega station. He crossed wide expanses of saltbush, herbs and grass. This ‘wilderness’, predicted Gow, ‘will become a land flowing with milk and honey … this enormous tract of country I have been examining… is fit for occupation and is well supplied with pasture. Horses, cattle and sheep will roll in fat if they can get water’.

At the time, he was probably unaware that two years earlier, across the border in Victoria, the pompous fool, estate owner Thomas Austin, wanting a bit of sport, released Twenty-four European Rabbits onto the unsuspecting native flora and fauna.For years, a flourishing wool industry bloomed at Kinchega. They built a substantial shearing shed, “built to last a life time”

However between 1894 and 1899 the number of sheep shorn in the district plummeted from 136 000 to 31 000. It had taken just 45 years for those 24 rabbits to bread like….well, like rabbits and infested the station eating them out of feed in what was already lean years. The majority of the sheep starved to death.

The Kinchega station has closed and a large portion was handed over to the NSW National Parks in 1967 and although it has been over 33 years since the last clip the woolshed, which has stood the test of time, still emits the unmistakable scent of lanolin.

Australia has the dubious reputation of having sent 23 bird, 4 frog, and 27 mammal species into oblivion since European settlement of Australia. It is worth making special mention of the three great human-introduced killer species: the European rabbit, the European Red Fox, and the domestic cat. Although many other introduced species have played a destructive role, so far these three have been far and away the most significant.

South of Menindee on the dirt road from Pooncarie we had a yarn with a station manager who we met while we were parked on the side of the road to have an espresso. He has seen the station weather years of drought. Surprisingly we learnt that another introduced species, the feral goat, was the only thing that kept the station afloat during the tough years. Brought into the country with the first settlers they are now estimated to number over 3 million mostly in the semi-arid west. This station of over 58,000 hectares musters over 1,000 goats a month, and ships them off shore, predominantly for the overseas meat market.

More recently another introduced species has reeked havoc in Australia. The Welsh, red-crested, pinched-face, back stabber introduced in the mid 1960’s. It has turned out to be like a cuckoo in the nest of the Australian Labor Party and has caused the demise of the former Prime Minister K.Rudd. Luckily the only specimen in the wild is a non-breeding female so should be easier to contain than the dreaded cane toad.