It is no accident that the periods of most intense political interest in the Bradfield Scheme — the late 1930s and early 1940s, the early 1980s and, most recently, the 2000s — all coincide with periods of major drought across Australia. Most rural Australians have been aware for many decades that periodic droughts, sometimes lasting five years or more, are an endemic occurrence in most parts of inland Australia. One would think that the prospect of drought would be too familiar to provoke undue panic or despair. However, over the past century or so, a number of politicians, journalists and other opinion leaders have shown a recurring tendency during major droughts to become the harbingers of a future nightmare scenario in which a state of permanent drought will be imposed on inland Australia as a form of divine punishment for the heedless and selfish ways in which we have used resources such as water, soil, forests and native grasslands.
This type of thinking first came to the fore during the Federation Drought of 1895 to 1902, which triggered the collapse of a high proportion of the pastoral enterprises in far western NSW and many other inland areas. The most immediate causes of the catastrophe were the absence of rain for several years, the impact of plagues of rabbits and dingos, and the accentuation of land degradation due to the overstocking of many properties. However, it is likely that an equally important cause of the collapse of many pastoral enterprises was the inevitable bursting of an investment bubble, fuelled by a flood of funds from around the world, which had promoted the over-capitalisation of the sector.
We might, therefore, with some justification, choose to interpret the economic and social catastrophe in the inland during the Federation Drought as being largely the result of a combination of natural causes, undue optimism and inexperience. However, some contemporary observers preferred to adopt a harsher and more judgemental position, tinged with a vision of apocalyptic doom that could only be averted through grand gestures of redemption. One of the foremost of these observers was the journalist C.E.W. Bean, who covered the aftermath of the Federation Drought in the inland for the Sydney Morning Herald and who later achieved greater fame as a war correspondent and official historian of World War I.
In an article about the region around the Darling River, which was given the lurid title ‘The Rape of the West’, Bean wrote of how:
… by 1895 the rabbits and the sheep had got to their work, and the drought was over the land. A series of terrible, lean years saw the West turn into nothing else than a desert. The sheep were held on the runs, in the hope of rain, till they were too weak to travel. There was not a blade of grass on the surface; but the stock walked over it until it was worked into a hard crust. Over parts there swept a loose sand which covered up even the fences, and actually turned patches of grass land into sandy wilderness. When the rain came, it beat off the hard ridges as it sweeps a galvanised roof. Such scrub as the sheep had left, the rabbits ringbarked. Every station was reduced to a tithe of its stock.[21]
Bean, whose appreciation of environmental issues was advanced for the time, argued that the solution to these problems was for Australians to develop a better understanding of the physical characteristics of the inland, and to adopt farming practices more sympathetic to its cycles of change. However, many of his contemporaries preferred to seek salvation in grand gestures: for instance, the South Australian Parliament, as we have already seen, briefly revived the earlier proposal to flood Lake Eyre with water from the Spencer Gulf. The Burrinjuck Dam and the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area were also products of the prevailing mentality of this era.
The pastoral industry of the eastern interior had largely recovered from the ravages of the Federation Drought by the time Bradfield was dreaming up his Scheme in 1937, but another major drought began in that year and persisted across much of the country until the mid-1940s. Once again, a strong flavour of much contemporary public debate was that the drought was to a significant extent the result of unsympathetic and unsustainable human uses of the inland. The spectre of the ‘dust bowl’ that engulfed many North American crop-growing areas from 1933 to 1939 was frequently raised, as was the fact that Lake Eyre and the major rivers feeding it (Coopers Creek, the Georgina and the Diamantina) had been largely dry for many decades.
This was a period in which the first glimmerings of what were to become the Australian environmental movement could be detected in the pages of magazines such as Walkabout and Wild Life. Intellectuals and scientists began to express concern about the role played by deforestation in promoting salinity and soil erosion, and Bradfield himself began to refer to these issues in his public speeches, as well as becoming increasingly preoccupied with a rather fanciful notion that, because the palaeontologic record of the eastern interior showed that much of it was once covered by a vast inland sea this, rather than desert, was its natural state and that his Scheme therefore represented nothing less than a means of restoring the inland environment to its authentic state.[22]
Bradfield always presented his views in measured prose, but his supporters and fellow travellers — particularly Idriess — could at times work themselves up into a state of hysteria. The Great Boomerang contains many instances of such purple prose, but my personal favourite is the following evocation of an Old Testament prophet in the form of a shepherd who allegedly spoke to Idriess during the dark night of the western plains of NSW:
… the shepherd says ‘Listen!’ There was no sound. ‘It is too small for an ordinary man to hear….A few of us hear it. It is what is going to move a thousand leagues of sandhills. To make a sea of sand and dust to smother a generation to come … Teeth … millions and millions of teeth. And the years go on. And millions and millions more teeth are born eating, eating, eating. Eating down into the scanty grass-roots, killing the binding that binds the sandhills together. And every year the winds keep on blowing.’[23]
Bradfield, Idriess and some of their contemporaries had convinced themselves that the impact of grazing in the interior had turned marginal land into permanent desert that could only be redeemed by vast irrigation works. This pessimistic perception was dispelled by the impact of several years of heavy rain in the late 1940s and early 1950s, which filled Lake Eyre several times and submerged large areas of western Queensland and New South Wales for periods of six months or more, following which the formerly arid lands bloomed with grass, wildflowers and other flora. This was the prelude to three decades of above average rainfall and high fertility in the eastern interior during which the Australian wool industry reached its economic apogee.
This golden post-war era for the inland began to draw to an end in the late 1970s and was largely extinguished in the short, but severe drought of the early 1980s, at which time the Queensland Government and others chose once again to promote the Bradfield Scheme. Then, during the more prolonged drought which commenced in 2001, Alan Jones, Richard Pratt, Peter Beattie and others once again raised the idea of ‘turning the coastal rivers inland’ to ‘drought proof this great brown land’.