lament for the lost australia
I have been on a short camping holiday. Nothing extravagant, just a week away living in a tent. I ended up spending the last night on the Deau River which gave me something to reflect on. I have been a visitor to the Araluen valley for close to 40 years, in that time the nature of the windy narrow goat track and the immediate surrounding bush hasn’t changed a lot, what has changed fairly dramatically however is the nature of the country that one travels through to get there and of course the river itself is starting to show the inevitable signs of upstream farming.
Traveling east from Canberra, the bush used to stretch pretty much uniformly from the back of Captains Flat across most of the upper Shoalhaven valley with the exception of the river flats and then close back in as you approached the escarpment. The river itself had a healthy tributary flowing from the western end of the valley which prolonged drought and farming has now reduced to a dry bed of stones. Heading onto Moruya was very much an adventure into a land that time seemed to have forgotten.
The 70’s saw a number of counter culture communes established in the valley, some people imagined eaking out a permaculture existence on the small alluvial flats that occur in the valley. Homes were built, gardens created and in a few instances, communities actually flourished. Of course the area is no stranger to population movements, gold was discovered and mined in the 19th century, and farming continues to wax and wane. Still there is something quite sad about the number of abandoned buildings that litter the roadside.
The south coast of NSW has withstood the human onslaught better than the north, no doubt people find the winter just a little too cold. But it is immensely crowded these days, especially at holiday time. The wilderness sanctuaries that littered the far south are pretty much gone, visit Tuross Heads and there are thousands of houses where once only fishermen camped, before that the aborigines would feast on the coastal bounty. Catch a fish these days and if you are lucky it might be barely bigger than the minimum size. Head further south to Bega and Eden and witness the desolation of the forests harvested first for the wonderful spotted gum, then pulped for paper. Where farmers have built dairy businesses, the emerald green fields look postcard pretty, but the cost to the water quality of the district and the changes to local weather patterns have further marginalised the remaining native habitat. Look for a river that isn’t polluted or overloaded with fertiliser, they are hard to find.
I guess what I find hardest to accept is not so much the destruction of this wonderfully unique part of the world, but the complete lack of shame that we seem to have about it. Some people are even proud of the state of affairs. Wilderness doesn’t come out of a bottle and no amount of money will built it from scratch. Once its gone, it gone for good. The fragile nature of our land has never been fully appreciated by white men, they come and conquer but after a while they find no peace within and no life without so they move on to despoil the next patch. It’s not something I can be proud of.
