CHARLES WOOLEY
Last week it rained in places it hasn’t rained for a decade. In parts of the NSW central-west they got 25mm50mm of wet stuff falling from the sky to the amazement of some school kids who had never before seen such a sight. The dust turned to mud and the mud was soon turned into pies on morning television.
In Bourke, one of the driest places I’ve been to in the past couple of years, overnight they got 90mm. It was also wet in Dubbo, Broken Hill, Griffith and Brewarrina.
It wasn’t the end of drought by a long shot, but it did demonstrate for those in understandable doubt, that it still can rain.
The night of that big drench I was in Sydney for Graham Richardson’s 70th birthday bash at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It wasn’t raining in Circular Quay but it certainly wasn’t a dry evening at Richo’s party. Veuve Clicquot, Tasmanian Pinot noir and beers by Peroni flowed like the creeks of Bourke.
Don’t expect a too obvious line here about the Great Divide that separates the city from the bush, because truth is, we all love our farmers.
We are incredibly romantic about them. We all want to contemplate “the sunlit plain extended” from under the shade of an Akubra. Or think we do.
In a bad drought back in the early nineties I was out back of Dubbo with a third-generation farmer. His family had kept weather records since the 1880s and this was the driest they’d experienced.
Back then I had a two-acre prickle farm down at Cygnet in the green Huon Valley, so I was garrulous enough to tell the farmer that as a kid in rural Tassie, I had always fancied the farming life. And maybe still did.
The old bloke, pretty much broken by the drought, sifted the dust from a driedout dam through his work-worn hands.
He gave me a long look. “No, you don’t Charlie. No, you don’t.”
I’ve covered my fair share of droughts. In half a century of journalism it’s always been a dry argument. Are droughts getting longer and more severe?
What crops are better suited to our climate? How can we more fairly share our rivers? And more recently of course: are we actually causing the drought? Then there is always the toughest of questions, which seems almost too cruel to ask: When do we call time on a doomed enterprise?
Barnaby Joyce recently questioned the economic sense of farming in the hard places and suggested farmers who have struggled to make a quid in the past decade of drought should consider doing something else for a living.
He told Queensland farmers who had been on the $489 fortnightly farm household allowance: “People who have not made a profit in the last 10 years really need to seriously think what are you doing with your life and what are you doing on the land?”
He questioned not so much the expenditure but the prolonged pain. “We don’t want to keep people in perpetual poverty,” the former Nationals leader said.
The Labor opposition is not generally what you would consider “farmer friendly”, but suddenly they were. The ALP’s federal agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon got stuck in. “It is offensive for Barnaby Joyce to say, ‘tough luck, get off the land’,” he said.
Joel was not slow to put in the RM Williams boot. The last thing Labor wants is that Barnaby should get back up on his feet and take back his old job again.
“Farmers everywhere today will be just shaking their heads and feeling bewildered over Barnaby Joyce’s remarks,” chided Fitzgibbon. “This from a guy who once claimed to be their champion, but he has deserted them in their hour of need.”
But if anyone in regional Australia could pronounce such tough love with any credibility it must be Barnaby. His recent fall from political grace had little to do with being out of touch with the bush.
He grew up on a family farm in tough country and attended a tiny weatherboard and iron primary school. Later in life he was an accountant in St George, Queensland, where farmers are no strangers to tough times. Barnaby the bean counter must know only too well the huge collective distress of farmers going broke on the land and the agonies of rural ledgers that never balance.
The Government has announced a $100 million assistance package for droughtstricken farm households on top of a staggering $7 billion already set aside for drought relief funding. But with major inland towns like Tamworth, Dubbo and even Orange running out of water, the scale of the problem is so great, all of that money might evaporate like a spring shower in the arid landscape.
If the grimmer prognostications of climate change are correct, then we might eventually be spending even more money on rescue and relocation schemes. And if they are a false alarm, then is it just back to business as usual?
In the drought of the nineties a wheat farmer’s wife told me: “It just breaks my heart to see him out there all day long ploughing the dust in the hope of rain that never comes. And then at night when he gets in, we spend hours at the kitchen table on figures that just never add up.”
The farmer showed me the books and how thinly spread were the good years. “Out here we just get by if we get one good year in seven,” he told me. “But now it’s been eight years and it still hasn’t rained.”
When the drought finally broke, they sold the farm and moved to the coast. Who could blame them? After all, that’s where three quarters of Australians prefer to live.
Long ago I lost touch with those farmers, though I still think of them. I have often wondered, were they entirely happy away from the land?
Or, despite their history of hard times, did they sometimes miss those big cloudless skies and the shimmering hot, flat horizons of wheat country?
Could the gentle and breezy contemplation of Pacific vistas, from a beach somewhere, really guarantee a much happier prospect than that once-in-sevenyears glorious vision of a golden sea of waving grain?