The Wooleen Way: renewing an Australian resource

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1

THE START

As I started getting a fire going, the birds were already about their business, announcing their intentions for the day. The sun was preparing itself on the horizon, somewhere below the outline of granite boulders that made up the oldest landscape on earth. I placed some twigs on the fire, and set the billy onto them.

The ashes from the previous night indicated we had lit a fire that was a bit too big. It was a little disrespectful, I thought, to have a fire that big — disrespectful to the country. We had taken more than we needed from the landscape. But, for the English backpackers who were with us, campfires were a big attraction of camping, and they had revelled in the big fire. So, admittedly, had I.

Suddenly, a sound swept over the landscape, rolling over the mulga trees in the ancient Wajarri campsite. I looked towards Frances’s swag, and her sleepy head poked out from under the covers with a look of wonder on her face. I grinned at her and then looked in the direction of the sound, but saw only the mighty granite curve of Budara, the resting place of the elder of two brothers who had been killed by evil spirits in the Dreamtime. But then it appeared — first the top of its head, and then the rest of its body. It trotted over the smooth rock until it saw us and stopped, but it was not surprised. It paused to look down on our little camp with the ashes and the billy smoking. Silhouetted on the granite dome in front of a sun that had not yet risen, the dingo lifted its head and howled again. It was a moment when I realised that the landscape had all the answers. I was just here to give it a chance.

Perhaps my very first memory is of Wooleen. I remember a steep, winding section of road, a large Bardi bush on the right, and a homestead nestled in a valley in the distance. It is significant that this memory includes a landscape and a particular geological feature that I have now devoted my life to protecting — the Wooleen Lake. It is also the memory of a house, one that my family would long for, move into, love, grow in, move out, paint, and paint again.

My family used to visit Wooleen regularly because my father was best mates with the bloke who owned it at the time, Chris Sharpe. Also, we lived quite close (by Murchison standards) — a mere half an hour away. My father had been coming to Wooleen since he was about the same age as I was when I formed this memory. His parents were good friends with the Sharpe family, and Dad would visit during school holidays. We still have the original visitor’s book where he wrote his name on an early visit, aged seven. Then his family moved to Melbourne.

In 1972, Dad returned to Wooleen as a jackeroo and worked his way up to become the bookkeeper for three stations: Wooleen, Twin Peaks, and Billabalong. It was at Billabalong station that Dad first met Mum, where she was working as a house girl. In those days, there were many people working on each station, and there were regular parties, tennis, picnics, and general get-togethers for social interaction. Now we just have Facebook with a slow internet connection.

In 1976, Mum and Dad moved to manage a station called Doorawarrah near Carnarvon, which today is only a few hours up the road from Wooleen. Back then, it took an endless half-day of bone-shaking corrugations in a Ford Customline station wagon that had been given to Mum and Dad as a wedding present. When they went to social occasions they took great lengths not to be seen arriving in it. My brother, Richard, preceded me by 18 months, and I arrived on the scene in 1980. Dad was offered a job with a pay packet he couldn’t resist as shire clerk (CEO) for Murchison Shire, and so back to Wooleen we all went.

I say back to Wooleen, because the Murchison settlement is surrounded by Wooleen station, and it was a pretty isolated place. The term ‘settlement’ probably conjures up images of sunburned Englishmen trying to trade beads with Aboriginals, but the term actually refers to the fact that Murchison was then, and remains today, the only shire in Australia without a town. It was from the Murchison settlement that my family used to visit Wooleen, 37 kilometres away. Or, if you’d prefer to consider it, the second house on the left.

When we arrived in Murchison, ours was the only house, and one room of it was designated the shire office. The shire administration team consisted of Dad, as shire clerk, and Mum, as his personal assistant. As buildings went, there was also the sports hall, and Mum and Dad were expected to provide a large degree of organisational assistance to make sure that the facilities were ready for community functions. The rest of the community lived a long way away — some, a distance of over 200 kilometres. Sport was limited to polocrosse, and clubs from around the state would converge for one weekend of the year. The next closest polocrosse club was at Mullewa, 200 kilometres away by dirt road. We also had an annual cricket match. It’s still held every December, when it is 45°C in the shade (and, of course, there is none of that on a cricket field). There is no grass, either — just bare red dirt and a strip of concrete down the middle for a pitch.

The shire had seven employees, but at that stage they didn’t have houses because they lived in caravans that travelled with them as they repaired roads. Communication, if there was any, was by radio. One of the grader drivers was a chap called Don Ketteringham, who was so tanned that his tattoos didn’t show. He had a bough shed with a bed and a deep freezer in it close to our house, and we kids spent a lot of time over at his ‘house’. I guess if I had a grandfather figure early on in my life, it would have been him. He also had a ‘missus’, an Aboriginal woman called Daphne Flanagan, but she wasn’t there all the time. Or at least she didn’t seem to be.

Sometimes we all used to go looking for bush tucker. Bush tucker is essentially what the Aboriginals had been eating for thousands of years. I’m not sure if it was because of his tan, the bush tucker, or Daphne, but it was 12 years before I found out that Don wasn’t Aboriginal himself.

He had a fondness for booze, and before we had been at the Murchison very long, Mum got a call on the radio from Don saying that he wasn’t feeling too good and felt a bit dizzy. Mum assumed he was dehydrated and told him to keep up his fluids, but little did she know that the main fluids Don kept on his grader was a box of 750-millilitre King Brown beer bottles which he sipped warm all day. The other shire workers thought it was hilarious that someone would tell Don to keep up his fluids. But he must have found some water somewhere, because he survived. He quit alcohol not long after, because the doctor said he wouldn’t be able to do so, and he didn’t like being told what he couldn’t do. He was a grand old chap.

I suppose it was a good place to grow up for my brother and me, fossicking in the bush for edible plants, teasing trapdoor spiders by brushing the apron of their trapdoor with a leaf, and drinking out of muddy puddles after rain, being careful to clear the floating sheep poo aside first. That’s probably why I don’t have any allergies now — my immune system would have had a good workout early on. We rode everywhere on our bikes. We were healthy.

Mum convinced us that sultanas were Smarties. The only reason we found out about the existence of Smarties was because one of the kids on the School of the Air radio bragged about having some. Mum convinced us that we also had Smarties, and gave us sultanas instead. So we were kept away from lollies for probably as long as it is possible to keep a kid away from them. Her cover was blown, however, when the fuel truck driver started to bring us a bag of lollies once a month when he delivered the fuel. I remember Mum berating him in the headlights of the road train, telling him how bad lollies were for children. But it was too late by then — we knew that sultanas were just sultanas, and that lollies were delicious.

School of the Air came through a large radio that we would use to talk to other isolated children within a 500-kilometre radius of Carnarvon. There would also be a teacher who would ask questions like, ‘What did you do yesterday?’ Every now and then, some child would come back with a classic reply about how yesterday their mother had gone to town and their father had spent most of his time in the house girl’s room, so it had been a very boring day. This would keep all of the other parents amused, as usually the parents were the principal teachers getting the kids to do the school work. The radio was just for social interaction with other kids.

We had a couple of horses that we used to ride. Icecream, who was a lovely sweet-natured mare, belonged to my brother. Her foal, Topping, was mine, and while he probably also had a sweet nature he was part Arab racehorse, and so all I remember of him is receiving an arsefull of prickles and watching his dust as he galloped off. Maybe it’s because of this that I’m not really a horsey person.

While we were there, the shire council built a new office, houses, and a roadhouse. Building the roadhouse was particularly fun for us kids, especially when they were blasting the hole for the underground fuel tanks. The chap in charge of the explosives mentioned to Dad that because the nearest neighbours were 10 kilometres away, he could blast the hole all at once, rather than detonating smaller charges at intervals, as they usually did. Dad was all for it, so the charges were laid, and we watched from the safety of our house about 800 metres away. It turned out that this wasn’t far enough, though, because when the charges went off, there was a huge cloud of dust, and baseball-sized rocks landed on our roof. It was great. Mum wasn’t so impressed.

My brother and I also learned to drive at Murchison in a Morris that Dad had found somewhere. In truth, Richard was the only one who learned to drive, as he was a year and a half older than me. But I was an indispensable part of the team, because I got to push the pedals when we needed to change gears. He couldn’t see over the dashboard and push the pedals at the same time. This worked fine for us, but not for the shire employees. We would come back with stories of how terrible they were at driving because every time we approached them on the road they would drive off into the scrub (trying to keep clear of us). Eventually, we crashed into the chook shed, and Dad disconnected the battery so it couldn’t be driven.

When I was five, Dad took the job of shire clerk in the adjoining shire of Shark Bay, and we loaded up our horses and moved to the coast. This put us 347 kilometres away from Wooleen, and there were no more visits for a while. But we weren’t worried, as there was plenty going on in ‘the Bay’. My brother and I continued our fossicking in the wilderness on the mostly deserted beaches near our house. We were mainly looking for interesting new species to add to our fish tank. Our very great preference was for species that were dangerous — ideally, something fatal to humans. For example, we managed to catch a blue-ringed octopus in a bucket and transfer it 600 metres from the sea to our house to release it into the fish tank. How happy were we! Blue-ringed octopuses have enough venom in one bite to kill 26 fully grown humans. We were the only people we knew with a pet blue-ringed octopus. Mum was a bit nervous about our prize catch, however. She was even more nervous the next morning, after it became apparent that it had escaped during the night by pushing aside the glass pane on top of the tank. That’s how we found out that octopuses can survive out of water. It was assumed to be lurking in the house somewhere, possibly under the cushions. We never saw it again. Perhaps it made its way back to the sea 100 metres away.

We also found a baby stonefish one day. For anybody not familiar with the stonefish, it is a fish that looks like a rock, has a mouth that takes up half of its body, and has 13 piercing spines backed up by venom so toxic that it is considered the most venomous fish in the world. It goes without saying that we were ecstatic to have found one. We also felt sure that it wouldn’t be able to lift the lid off the fish tank.

We reasoned that because the poisonous spines were located on its top, it would be safe to pick it up from underneath. Also, it was only a baby. So we transferred it to our house in the palm of a hand — my hand, to be exact. Richard was in charge of making sure the 600-metre path was clear. This went off without a hitch, and we soon had our very own stonefish gracing the waters of our fish tank. In a few days, however, it became apparent that it was the only living creature in there: we came to the conclusion that it had eaten everything else, including the only marine animal that we had ever bought, a tank-cleaning shrimp that had cost one birthday’s spending money.

We decided to put fish in the tank that would be too big for it to eat. There were plenty of fish in the sea. But no matter how big the fish we put in, they never survived more than a few days before they, too, were devoured by the stonefish. Eventually, we took it back to the sea, because everybody thought it was a rock and asked why we didn’t have any fish in the tank. Mum made sure we took it back in a bucket.

Shark Bay was not a big town by any means — probably as sleepy as a town gets — but it did have a real school that we were apparently obliged to go to for most of the day. This was a considerable impost on us, because with the School of the Air we had set work, and Mum would let us go as soon as we finished it. (If something interesting was going on elsewhere, schoolwork sometimes took us less than half an hour.)

Shark Bay Primary had two classrooms, and nobody wore shoes, which suited us just fine. Sometimes we just rode our bikes home for lunch, but sometimes we got money to buy a pie and sauce from the general store, which was much better.

Compared to the Murchison, Shark Bay was positively abuzz with things to do and things going on. We organised mock battles in the sand hills behind our house with other kids, or went down to the town jetty and caught squid by torchlight. There were fishing trips that involved us hurtling across the mirror-calm bay in our 21-foot boat, the sea spray beautiful in the sun, until we got to our top-secret fishing location. Then we would spend half an hour pulling up fish as quickly as we could bait the hooks, until our eskies were full. Inevitably, the ‘sea breeze’ would come up, and within 10 minutes it would be blowing a gale. We’d then spend two or three hours huddling, seasick, in the shuddering, lurching hull of the boat on the way back, and half an hour cleaning the boat on the lawn. Mum was usually the sickest, and I’m sure she wouldn’t have come if she didn’t think it necessary to make sure we didn’t fall overboard. She didn’t even like eating fish. Neither did I.

Every now and then, we’d go camping in the boat, which was a much more pleasurable experience, because if we left early we could usually get to our destination before the dreaded sea breeze came up, and go ashore before it got rough. We would collect oysters off the rocks and bring them back to Dad, who would sit by the campfire, cooking and eating them. Nobody else really liked them. Then, a few days later, we could hopefully get back home in the morning when the water was glassy-smooth again.

I only ever remember the waters of Shark Bay as being either absolutely calm or too rough to wade in. In 1988, Cyclone Herbie passed directly over us, and, considering our house was only about 50 centimetres above high tide, it made for a very interesting morning. The sea was crashing 60 centimetres up our full-length front dining-room windows at one stage, and they were bowing with every wave and gust of wind. We were in the back of the house on top of the bed, having placed some towels at the base of the front door. Dad, as shire CEO, was also in charge of the State Emergency Services, and he was off somewhere, presumably helping someone else. Our street had been cut off from the rest of the town, and he couldn’t get back.

When the eye of the storm passed over us, things got eerily calm, and our neighbour came out of his house to inspect the damage. I remember Mum yelling at him to get back inside. Sure enough, the wind picked up again, and it wasn’t long before bits of tin were flying in from the other direction. Although pretty small for a cyclone, Herbie still managed to do a fair bit of damage, tearing off a few roofs around town and beaching some boats on the main street. The horse yard at the back of our house was turned into a swamp, and Icecream and Topping were pretty miserable about it.

Richard and I would spend a great deal of time in the sand hills behind our house building cubbies out of bits of wood and tin that we scrounged from the town rubbish tip. It got to the stage that the sand hills were dotted with our little forts, and people started to complain that they were an eyesore. No doubt, Dad, as the shire CEO, claimed no responsibility for this, even though it was his kids who were the main offenders. Eventually, we got the news that the area was to be developed, and they cleared the entire sand hill, including our cubbies. We left soon after, anyway, to go back to Wooleen.

Dad had always promised Mum that they would have their own station one day, and they had talked of buying Twin Peaks station, next to Wooleen. They had never considered buying Wooleen itself, because it had been in the Sharpe family since it was founded in 1886 and it seemed destined to stay that way. Twin Peaks was in between Wooleen, where Dad’s good friend Chris Sharpe lived, and Billabalong station, where another friend, Keith Scott, lived.

However, in 1985 Chris Sharpe died suddenly, and the lease was put up for sale after having been in the Sharpe family for 99 years and six months. My parents tried to buy Wooleen at this time, but were unable to, as they didn’t have enough money. They were determined to buy it when it came up for sale again five years later, but they still didn’t have enough money, despite selling pretty much everything that they owned, including a beautiful old beach house in Guilderton with a lovely Norfolk Island pine in the backyard. So they took on two partners, and were eventually able to buy the 465,435-acre property for $1.05 million.

Now, you might think that’s not much money to pay for such a large piece of land, and you’d be right, except that they didn’t own it. In fact, nobody in Western Australia owns much pastoral land. It is nearly all owned by the state government and leased to pastoralists for the purpose of grazing animals. All the infrastructure belongs to the state, including the houses, sheds, windmills, fences, and cattle yards — everything except that which can be driven off, such as vehicles and stock.

People get the impression that pastoralists own the land, because leases are usually held for a long time (up to 50 years), and pastoralists will usually say something like, ‘I own Wooleen.’ But what they really own is the lease, not the actual land. Also, I think pastoralists don’t really like admitting that they don’t own the land, because they feel like they do. Especially when it’s been in the family for generations.

2

THE SOUTHERN RANGELANDS

Wooleen is just one of the 285 pastoral properties (known as stations) and connecting land that make up the Southern Rangelands. If you’ve never heard of these rangelands, don’t worry — you’re not alone. The Southern Rangelands are about the size of New South Wales and Tasmania combined, and have been in ecological trouble for a long time. In order to understand why, we have to go back a bit.

When Europeans settled in Australia, they didn’t have much of an idea what they had come to, or what was over the next hill. Also, they very much needed food, and places to grow it. They were much too haughty to take notice of the food-production systems the local inhabitants had perfected over the previous 50,000 years, so the government encouraged people to go forth and try to find a piece of land on which to produce something a bit more European. Under British law, they could only do this if the land was uninhabited. Plainly, it wasn’t, because there were Aboriginal people everywhere. And yet it was proclaimed to be ‘Terra nullius’, which is Latin for ‘Nobody’s land’. With a stroke of a pen, somewhere in a continent far away began the great Australian hoax that the Europeans had not stolen the land from its original inhabitants. While this may seem to be a bit of ancient history, in fact it is still very relevant. As we will see later on, the sustainable management of Wooleen is closely linked to this longstanding issue of native title.

As the early settlers marched toward the centre of the Australian continent, they took up increasingly larger areas of land. They were mostly pastoralists — people who raise animals for a living — and with them went their herd of sheep and cattle. There was a rush by anybody with the means to explore and claim the best country for themselves. In many cases, the land was not even sighted before it was leased from the government. The government leased the land at a pretty low rate to people in order to facilitate this colonisation.

The pastoralists were granted a pastoral lease for five or 10 years. If the land was particularly good, such as along a river floodplain with a good water source, eventually someone would want to own it outright. All he had to do was to wait until the pastoralist’s lease was up, and apply to the government to buy the land. He would pay the going purchase rate, and then he would have his very own freehold farm, giving him and his family greater security over the land and the structures that they built.

This would have been pretty inconvenient for the first pastoralists, as the farmers took all the best bits out of their property, leaving them with leases of land looking like a Swiss cheese. So the pastoralists moved further out and ran their sheep there instead. Soon enough, some farmers came along and liked the look of their land, and took the best bits out for a farm again. And so the pastoralists moved further out again. Eventually, the pastoralists took up land that was too far from anything to be wanted as a farm, because the climate was too dry for crops to be grown. This is generally what differentiates farms from stations today — the climate needed for growing crops. Pastoralists graze animals on the natural vegetation over large areas, whereas farmers (mostly) till the soil, grow crops, and/or raise animals on a smaller area. After a while, the government realised there was too much paperwork in renewing the leases every few years, so they made the leases much longer, which is how we got to the 50-year leases of today.

Wooleen was founded in 1886, and while there were plenty of problems associated with starting a station in the wilderness, labour wasn’t one of them. The Aboriginal people who lived on the land were rapidly seconded to work in a variety of different roles in the emerging industry. And it wasn’t long before the industry was making big money. Wool was in high demand, especially when Australians were sent to war in colder climates. In 1918, our beautiful homestead, which is four times the size of the average Australian house, was constructed. The cost of building such a home in such a remote area must have been truly enormous. Australia was said to be riding on the sheep’s back at this time, but under the weight of their cloven hooves the landscape was being degraded at a rapid rate.

The Southern Rangelands covers 850,000 square kilometres of Western Australia. Pastoral stations cover about 85 per cent of this area, a land mass that is bigger than France.

It is a very large resource. It is supposed to be a renewable resource, but this is only true if we manage it in such a way that it can replenish itself faster than we degrade it — which, quite plainly, by any measure you care to choose, we have not done since the introduction of domestic stock. Effectively, we have been mining the pastoral resource through erosion of the topsoil over the past 150 years. With a continual loss of soil and plant diversity, we are making the land less and less productive for future generations. We can relatively easily halt the decline if we so wish, but it may already be too late for many of the best bits.

There are many diverse rangelands throughout Australia and the world, but the term ‘Rangelands’ as it is used in this book refers to the Southern Rangelands, unless otherwise specified.

The clearest indication of what was happening to the landscape during these early days comes from the reports that were written during the various droughts. It was only during these times that the reality became too stark to ignore. While the disintegration of the landscape was not always specifically described, the condition that the animals were in often was, which told the same story in a different way.

In 1897 (six years after stock arrived in the area), the commissioner of lands noted:

In May a message was sent to the Premier pointing out that, owing to the long-continued drought, the loss of stock would be heavier than in the years 1891–2 [roughly the year stock arrived] … The reports from the country showed stock everywhere to be in a low condition and dying fast.

There was another drought around Wooleen in 1910, and again in 1921–23. The rangelands are so big that it’s rare for the whole area to be in drought, but it does happen every now and then.

Enter the 1930s drought. It was so devastating that afterwards there was a royal commission into the economic and financial position of the industry, covering most of the state. The royal commission didn’t really explore environmental degradation, because that was barely a concept back then, but it did mention that more than four million sheep died of starvation between 1934 and 1939. The drought didn’t even finish in 1939 — it continued for another two years in some parts.

A pamphlet published about Wooleen in 1928 with the grand title of Pastoral Homes of Australia, describes Wooleen as being ‘safe, sound, and drought-resisting sheep country’ at the time. According to Wooleen’s profit-and-loss statements for that year, it was stocked with the equivalent of two times the now-accepted sheep-carrying capacity of the land in an average season. But the years ahead were not to be average seasons — the drought made them very bad seasons. By 1939, the sheep numbers had been reduced by half through starvation, although the property was still carrying what would be considered today to be its maximum stock number, immediately after one of the worst droughts Australia had ever seen. This meant that when the drought eventually did break, the land was never given time to recover. It still had too many sheep on it.

The royal commission reported that, region-wide, 75 per cent of the highly productive perennial saltbush shrubs and 25 per cent of the moderately productive acacia had been wiped out. In some areas, 90 per cent of the plants had been destroyed. The commission had this to say of the dust storms throughout the area:

The dust storms in the north-west and goldfields have always been a cause for a certain amount of discomfort and damage, but during the past five years in the drought affected areas, the extensive disappearance of all ground feed, and the generally dead nature of the trees, scrub and bush, have greatly accentuated this problem.

… Evidence submitted at some of the stations indicated that last summer the dust storms were occasionally so high and thick that the sun was obscured and visibility perhaps in the middle of the day reduced to a few yards …

In some areas where drought, followed by soil erosion, has so powdered and loosened the surface, the heavy dust storms have caused losses of stock, particularly when they have been in weak condition. In such areas as these also the frequent cleaning of the water troughs is necessary.

What they meant was that it was so dusty that the weakened stock couldn’t even breathe, and the troughs were filling up with wind-blown sand.

On erosion:

Certainly there are indications of the shifting of the surface soil on many stations in the drought affected areas, bare or ‘scalded’ patches on the flat open country have increased in size, small waves and hillocks or ridges of sand have been created by the wind, and with the scrub dead in appearance and no ground feed, it may reasonably be presumed that if the drought continues much longer the grazing value of the country so affected would be very greatly and permanently reduced.

The drought continued for another two years in many areas. Despite this picture of an outback Armageddon, the royal commission recommended that the government assist in restocking after the drought. Fortunately, there wasn’t enough money available, due to the onset of World War II. But it does give a good indication of how Australia was viewing the problem at the time. That is, the general consensus was that all the country needed was some decent rainfall, after which pastoralists would soon be back on track again.

This idea still seems to prevail among a great deal of the Australian population and quite a few pastoralists. Maybe this is because when it does eventually rain after a drought, there is a profusion of little green plants that spring up and produce wildflowers, and everything looks lovely again. Few people remain into the summer to see all the wildflowers dry up and blow away into the heat haze, leaving only unprotected red dirt, ripe for erosion again.

Something was lost from the landscape in the 1930s drought that hasn’t been replaced. Remnants of the original vegetation can still be found, but often it’s only a few plants in a remote corner of the paddock, where animals rarely go due to lack of water. These understory remnants are perhaps best represented by the bluebush family, the sentinel guardians of the river flats and breakaway slopes.

It was not known back in 1930 how old these plants were, and it was assumed that they would just regrow after rain. But some of these plants were hundreds of years old, growing just millimetres in a year, if at all. Fully grown, they are only knee high. Some of the ones that we can see today would have been around during the great 1930s drought, and have persisted through 130 years of gross overstocking up until the present day. Like most things out here, they are nothing if not tough.

But the overstocking of the 1930s coupled with an extreme drought killed most of them within a few years, because they are the preferred food for stock in dry times. (I like to think of them as the cow equivalent of a Lions Christmas fruit cake.) That was when the landscape lost its protective vegetation covering in key areas such as the river floodplains. They are no longer present to slow down the floodwaters that now spread across the flat landscape. As the water moves faster and faster, it begins to dig into the soil and create gullies, concentrating the water and making it faster still.

In many areas, water erosion has now washed away all the soil entirely. But that came later, as water erosion wasn’t as prevalent during the 1930s drought. At the time, they were more concerned with wind erosion, lack of stock fodder, and cleaning the dust out of the water troughs. Many people look at the old photos from that time, and comment on how awful the land looked back then, and that, thank goodness, it generally doesn’t look like that now. But this was just the start of the destruction of the rangelands. What can’t be seen in the old photos is the pervading web of gullies that have formed since then, stealing the precious water from the landscape. I think we are worse off now.

In 1961, there was severe flooding in Carnarvon. Some thought there was too much water coming down the river, and that this might be due to degradation of the catchment upstream. Eight years later, the government sent a team to identify the cause: D.G. Wilcox, of the Department of Agriculture (who went on to become a world-leading rangelands scientist) and E.A. McKinnon, from the Department of Lands and Surveys. They spent two years compiling ‘A report on the condition of the Gascoyne Catchment’, a region the size of the Republic of Ireland.

There are eight points in the summary of this pioneering work, and they are all worthy of mention:

‘13 per cent of the Gascoyne catchment were badly eroded and would become irreversibly degraded unless they are removed from the available grazing area.’ [This never happened].

‘46 per cent was degraded and had some erosion.’ Careful use was recommended if they were not to degrade further. [This ‘careful use’ also never occurred.]

‘28 per cent was in acceptable condition.’ [It was noted this area was mainly ‘hill and stony short grass country’, which is significant because these are areas that the sheep didn’t really like, and consequently didn’t use much.]

‘The eroded areas are those which have soils in susceptible to erosion and are capable of supporting palatable and durable pastures.’ [Essentially, the most severely degraded areas were the areas that used to be the most productive.]

The way the state calculated the sheep-carrying capacity of the country was flawed, and needed to be modified.

A better way of calculating the sheep-carrying capacity in different seasons was needed, as all estimates assumed an