The vision splendid

Farming is central to the Australian ethos. Though Australia is no longer an agricultural economy, the spirit of the land and of those who work it is ingrained into our image of ourselves.

Australia’s greatest poet, Banjo Paterson, evoked in the great Australian countryside ‘the vision splendid’, comparing it to the ‘foetid air and gritty of the dusty dirty city’. Australia may today be one of the most urbanised countries on Earth, but it is Australia’s farmers, graziers and rural communities that embody the Australian spirit and way of life.

This view is not so far removed from reality. Many of today’s city dwellers do not realise the extent to which the modern country they live in has been shaped by agriculture and those practicing it. The search for farmland drove the early explorers to cross rugged mountains and endless plains, and the need for a more efficient food chain was the driving force behind many important Australian inventions.

In the 19th century, Australia’s financial and transport systems grew to service the country’s booming agricultural industries. The Gold Rush helped, but it was agriculture that really opened up the land. Australia grew wealthy from the produce of its farms, from the golden fleece and the bountiful fields of grain.

Also enriched was the Australian character, known the world over as laconic, resilient and resourceful. The Australian farmer is the embodiment of this national persona, of the way the world views Australia and the way Australia sees itself.

When you travel the backroads and byways of rural Australia you see the way the land has been shaped, how the countryside – sometimes harsh, sometimes lush, always beautiful – has been adapted to serve man’s needs. Sometimes we went too far and the land took back what was hers, but after hundreds of years we have found equilibrium with nature. Australia’s farmers are custodians of one of Earth’s most ancient landscapes, and have built upon it an agricultural industry of unrivalled efficiency and great variety.

The great paradox
The Australian character comes from the soil, but one of the great paradoxes of modern Australian life is that those who work that soil are so misunderstood. Or, more often, that they are entirely unknown. Many Australians have very little appreciation of what it is to be a farmer, or of the lives farmers lead. The urban dweller at once identifies with, and yet is often alien from, those who live in the vast expanse of rural Australia.

This disconnect is at the heart of modern Australian life. Australia’s great cities are home to many millions of people who have never set foot on a farm and who rarely leave the confines of their urban environment. Perhaps for this very reason, city dwellers very often have a view of rural life far removed from what it is really like.

The countryside and those who live in it are idealised, but the image is very different from the reality. This means that Australia’s farming community is probably more misunderstood than those in many other countries that do not have such a romanticised image of rural life.

In most nations, city and country are not as far removed from one another as they are in Australia. In most of the developing world they are very close – in China, for example, farmers are regarded as the most important of the three classes of civil society (the others being artisans and merchants). It may be the case that farming is idealised in many Western societies – images of the bucolic French countryside or the stolid English yeoman farmer are stereotypes – but it is in Australia that we see the extremes of this dichotomy.

And Australia’s evolution into one of the world’s most multicultural societies has not been reflected in the farming community, which notably still lacks diversity. There are exceptions, such as the strong Italian communities in the Riverina and on Queensland’s Atherton Tablelands and the Chinese market gardeners near Sydney and Melbourne, but farming in Australia is essentially an Anglo-Celtic pursuit.

This has remained the case as agriculture’s share of the economy declines and the farming population falls. Few newcomers are entering the field, which has also seen the average age of Australian farmers rise. Family farms are still the norm, but it is becoming more and more difficult for farmers to persuade their sons and daughters to follow in their footsteps.

The number of family farms is declining and holdings are being consolidated as agribusiness is taking over. But it’s a slow process – even the smallest farms are run very professionally, negating economies of scale.

Australian farmers are among the most efficient and resourceful in the world – they need to be, given the vagaries of the climate, the fragility of much of the soil and the lack of government protection that exists as the norm in many other countries. Australian farmers are self-reliant, and they have been from the start.

The first Australian farmers
Agriculture has been an integral part of Australian history since European settlement. The first farmers arrived on the First Fleet, along with the nation’s first farm animals and over a thousand mouths to feed. The new colony was expected to become self-sufficient in food as quickly as possible.

When Captain Arthur Phillip sailed into Port Jackson on 26 January 1788, his first and most important job was to find a place to build a settlement. And the key determinant of that location was a steady supply of fresh water. Australian agriculture was born on the same day as modern Australia.

The first settlers built their small town on an inlet Phillip named Sydney Cove, after Lord Sydney, Secretary of State for the Colonies. He chose it because of a small rivulet, the Tank Stream, which flowed into it. The infant colony’s first farm was established on the shores of the next bay, which was named Farm Cove. It is still called that today, and on its shores stand Sydney’s Botanical Gardens.

Three months after the arrival of the First Fleet, a census counted the total numbers of livestock in the colony: seven horses, six cows, 29 sheep, 74 pigs, five rabbits, 18 turkeys, 29 geese, 35 ducks and 209 other fowl. It was not an auspicious start.

Early attempts at agriculture were not successful. The soil on which the young colony was built was sandy, and crops had trouble growing. The first winter was tough, and soon after the colonists looked further afield for good farmland. They found suitable soil near Parramatta, 25 kilometres from Sydney but easily accessible by boat. The land there was rich and fertile. The first farmer of the new lands was a convicted burglar, James Ruse, who prospered as the colony grew. He was successfully growing crops of corn and wheat a year after the colony was founded.

An important figure in the development of Australian agriculture was John Macarthur, an argumentative ex-soldier who established Australia’s sheep industry in the early 19th century. Macarthur saw Australia’s great potential, as did the many who followed him.

After a slow start the colony grew quickly, especially after the opening up of the vast interior of the continent. Sheep and cattle grazing become important industries as ex-convicts and freemen took up new lands in the fertile inland across the rugged coastal mountains. Many of them did not wait to be granted land – they simply ‘squatted’ on it. For many years these farmers were called squatters, a word that survives today.

Others followed. Towns popped up to service the growing agricultural industry. Bullock drays and paddle steamers carried the produce to market until, in the late 19th century, the railways began to follow the spread of farmland. In the Queensland tropics, across the wheat belts of southern Australia, in fertile coastal fields and the dry sheep and cattle country of the inland, modern Australia came into being.

The land and its people
There was a time in the history of most countries when agriculture employed the majority of the workforce. Since the Industrial Revolution and the growth of urbanisation that number has fallen, but the importance of agriculture to the economy persisted longer in Australia than in most other places.

As a result, the farm sector has had a disproportionate effect of Australian society. Consider how much the following advances owe their existence to agriculture:

Banking and finance: Australia’s first financial institution, the Bank of New South Wales, was formed in Sydney in 1817 as a response to the colony’s first depression and to help finance its growing agricultural industry. For many years Australian agriculture was dependent on foreign (mainly British) investment, a relationship that necessitated the development of a sophisticated financial system surrounding the agricultural sector.

Politics: Democracy came early to Australia, with legislative assemblies formed in all colonies well before federation in 1901. Farmers’ interests were well-represented in all legislatures, and were institutionalised at the federal level with the formation of the Country Party in 1920.

Now called the National Party, it has been a dominant force in Australian politics for nearly a century, usually in coalition with the centre-right Liberal Party. Today the National Party remains a strong force, and is a vocal representative of the rural sector.

Transportation: Historian Geoffrey Blainey coined the term ‘the tyranny of distance’ to describe not just Australia’s distance from Europe and the rest of the world, but the vast size of the land itself and the difficulty of traversing it.

As agriculture spread across the Australian countryside, so too did transportation. Primitive bullock carts and muddy tracks gave way to roads and railways, which followed stock routes and the paths opened up by early farmers and graziers.

Science and technology: Australians are an inventive bunch. Many of the technical innovations Australia has introduced to the world owe their origins to the necessity of overcoming the harsh and distant environment faced by Australia’s early farmers.

An early example of such innovation is the stump-jump plough, invented by Richard and Clarence Bowyer Smith as a way of cultivating land that had not been entirely cleared of deep tree stumps. Mechanical refrigeration was pioneered in Australia, by Geelong engineer James Harrison, to enable clipper ships to deliver frozen meat to European markets. The combine harvester, invented in America, was perfected by Hugh McKay in Victoria is the 1880s. Even Qantas, Australia’s national airline and one of the world’s oldest, was born in 1920 to service the rural community of the Queensland outback.

These are just a few of many examples – Australia is perhaps the world’s best example of a nation rising from the soil and built by those who live by it. Australia’s history is largely built on the nation’s relationship with the soil, and its present was forged by it. In the 21st century, as the world changes faster than ever before, Australian farms and Australia’s farmers are entering a new era marked by advanced technology, innovative business practices, new markets and new horizons.

Through it all, it has been Australia’s farmers that have shown the way and shouldered the burden. Farming is among the most difficult, and the most honest, ways to make a living, and nowhere is this truer than in Australia’s unforgiving environment. Australia’s farmers, we salute you.

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Aboriginal land management
The original inhabitants of Australia were hunter-gatherers, and did not practice agriculture as we define it today. But they were masters of land management, using techniques we are only now beginning to understand as we become more aware of the importance of sustainability and the need to properly manage scarce natural resources.

Aboriginal communities used a technique called ‘fire-stick farming’. They would deliberately burn off tracts of land and leave other areas unburnt, to encourage native animals to congregate in areas where they were easier to hunt, or to encourage the growth of useful plants in certain areas. Over many centuries, Aboriginal people were able to shape the landscape to better suit their lives while also ensuring maximum sustainability.

To the early settlers accustomed to the European countryside, fire was an enemy. Burn a tree in England and it stays burnt. Burn one of Australia’s hardy perennials and it comes back green and renewed the following season. It took generations for many Europeans to understand this.

Bill Gammage’s remarkable book about Aboriginal land management – The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia – describes the Aboriginal concept of The Law: it is an “ecological philosophy enforced by religious sanction” that ensured Aboriginal people cared for their country, and were even compelled to do so.

Their chief tool was fire, applied selectively and carefully. Aboriginal people also altered watercourses, damming creeks and draining marshes to help mould the land to their advantage.

“What plants and animals flourished were related to their management,” writes Gammage. “As in Europe land was managed at a local level. Detailed local knowledge was crucial. Each family cared for its own ground, and knew not merely which species fire or no fire might affect, but which individual plant and animal, and their totems and Dreaming links. They knew every yard intimately, and knew well the ground of neighbours and clansmen, sharing larger scale management or assuming responsibility for nearby ground if circumstances required.”
Gammage details the intricacies and sophistication of Aboriginal land management in Australia, how they used essentially simple techniques in a complex manner to optimise the abundance of the landscape to suit their purposes, while at the same time imposing “a strict ecological discipline on every person.”

Early European settlers, and many since, knew nothing of the way the Aboriginal people had shaped the Australian landscape. What they thought was wilderness was not wild at all – it had been moulded and changed by human hand over many millennia. Many of the techniques Aboriginal people used, and perhaps most importantly the philosophy of stewardship they developed, are only today being properly understood. Australian farmers are increasingly realising that they are but custodians of the land, and that it is up to them to ensure its continued viability for the generations that follow. That is the Aboriginal way.

‘The Earth Abideth Forever’ was the title of the fourth volume of Charles Manning Clark’s masterful history of Australia. It is a quote from the Book of Ecclesiastes, but it may as well have been taken from Aboriginal legend. The fragile Australian landscape, so abundant in good times and so unforgiving in bad, must be carefully managed to ensure its enduring legacy.

The Aboriginal people knew this eternal truth. Modern Australia is still discovering it.

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Here’s to the Aussie farmers, the men and women of the soil
Here’s to their pioneer spirit, and their hard unceasing toil
Here’s to their quiet achievement, the way they’ve tamed the land
They’ve done more to build this nation than we will ever understand.

Australia is a hard land, from the mountains to the plains
The poets they write of struggle, and of droughts and flooding rains
But there’s more than that, there’s what you need to tame this distant shore
Half a world away from where they came and what they knew before.

When first they broke the soil and when first they tended sheep
They were young and the land was old, they woke it from its sleep
They crossed the mountains and the rivers, they found the great Outback
They found a land and made a stand without ever looking back.

But the soil was thin, the land was dry, the bush was hard to tame
They persevered through rough and smooth and learnt how to play the game
They worked out how to grow food as good as any you can find
It’s grown with care, and sometimes a prayer, it helps feed all of humankind.

The land yields orchards full of fruit, and wheat and wool and wine
And sugar cane and bags of rice, and meat of every kind
Beef and pork, and lamb and chook, and fish from out the sea
All done in a way, it’s hard to say, but so … efficiently.

So here’s to the Aussie farmers, and the way they work the land
The way they’ve built a country with the work of their own hands
Here’s to the Aussie farmers, there’s none that can compare
With what they’ve done, and how they’ve won, a land so hard and bare.

Graeme Philipson is a contributing editor to Boundless Plains to Share and an award-winning journalist and poet. He was born on a grazing property in the Riverina and grew up in Tamworth in northern New South Wales.