[00:00:00] You've tuned into Radio Northern Beaches. We live stream on rnb.org.au across the northern beaches of New South Wales, Australia and all over the world. You can also catch us local on 88.7 and 90.3 FM. Our podcasts are available at your convenience at rnb.org.au or rnbpodcast.com.au.
[00:00:28] Don't forget to check out our social media, Facebook and Instagram, which you can access from our website rnb.org.au. So you and your friends don't miss any episodes. Don't forget to follow and share. Now here's our latest podcast. This is Radio Northern Beaches. I'm Michael Lester. And today on my show, I'm continuing our inquiry into the Federation of Australia. Why did we federate? How did we federate?
[00:00:56] And what we end up with as a federation when we came together as a nation with a new constitution in 1901? I'm delighted to welcome a very special guest for our discussion on this topic today from a particular point of view. It's the author, historian and ecologist, and as she says, honorary Wombat, Jackie French. And Jackie has written a truly marvelous history of Australia called
[00:01:26] Let the Land Speak. And it's a history of Australia about how the land created our nation. So welcome to Radio Northern Beaches, Jackie. First of all, just at a broad personal level, what inspired you to write a book about the history of Australia turning on the central role of the land that we'll be discussing today in the federation of the country?
[00:01:52] Do you have particular close ties yourself to the land? Yes, very, very much so. Walking the land, being able to predict what will happen from season to season. It's a bit like a wombat. When a wombat sees the land by the way it smells. But when a wombat sees the land, it's probably as it's been for about six months or even years and possibly even includes some predictive factors.
[00:02:22] When the wombats have a lot of young, then you know it's going to be a rush year. When they don't have any, beware. So I have to say, the wombats only predict the weather for their valley. Wombats really don't care what's happening to the rest of Australia beyond the reach. So be careful of that one. But, you know, I think the beginning of this book actually was a goat. I was trying to find out for another book.
[00:02:51] Who had the most publicity? Was Sir Joseph Banks, not Sir then? A publicity hound and did he do poor Captain Cook out of his due reward when they got back again? And to my surprise, I discovered that in fact Captain Cook's goat got most of the publicity. Not Banks or Cook. What was the goat doing there? She gave milk for the entire three years of her voyage.
[00:03:17] But in researching the goat, I discovered that the endeavour was more like a floating ark. They had pigs. They had a herd of cattle. The ship's boats were filled with chickens. So every time they were going to go to a shore, first of all, remove the chooks, wash out the manure, let it dry and let the officers in. It was a completely different view of history.
[00:03:43] But also I suddenly realised, reading Cook's log and the diaries of the men aboard, the first thing they did whenever they came to shore, cut grass. Get water. Cut grass. Cut grass. Cut grass. So that the grass could dry and be hay for the animals. And I suddenly saw the colonial history of Australia in a completely different way. Why we hadn't been colonised.
[00:04:14] Australia at that time did not have good grasslands along the coast. It had many species that gave very good seed to make breads for indigenous eaters. But not for sheep and cattle and pigs. They were more like ground covers. Australia has got very few large rivers that you can conveniently sail up. They've often got sandbanks or they're hidden.
[00:04:45] Cook, in fact, sailed past Sydney Harbour without going in. He didn't realise that those narrow heads contained such an incredible harbour. We had the Great Barrier Reef. Known for a very long time. But of course there are spices in Australia, native spices in Australia. There's expensive woods in Australia like cedar. There was land that probably had gold.
[00:05:15] Australia should have been right for colonisation. But until Cook actually saw Botany Bay and the Endeavour River, no one had thought it was really viable. I have to say, Banks' report of Botany Bay, which led to the colony, was completely and utterly inaccurate. He said there was plenty of grass, because we saw timber, etc.
[00:05:39] So in fact, even though they tend to say for a report that was wrong, but by great good luck just up the coast, there was good fresh water, there was good land. And so we've got the nation of Australia we've got today. Now, Jackie, I think we can hear already from the way you're speaking, not least your reference to the goats' role in the history that you provide us.
[00:06:04] And you certainly do in the book that we're discussing, Let the Land Speak, a very unique and very different behind the story, behind the accepted history story of the country and lots of the most wonderful, readable anecdotes, too, I must say. Your chapter in particular that I'd like to focus on is titled How a Drought Made Us a Nation. And it's basically the story, which I think you tell so vividly, as you do in all your writing,
[00:06:33] of how we were brought together as a nation in the great Federation drought, as it's sometimes called, that ran from 1877 to 1903. What is that thesis of yours that you explore in this chapter? Until the drought, most people were actually fairly happy with a divided Australia.
[00:06:59] In fact, we've still got, of course, the conflict between state and federal governments. But the drought made a difference for so many people. And that drought, too, it was not that it just went on for so long. There were so many other factors in it as well. So many factors, it's actually very hard to know where to start. Look, to begin with, when I call it a drought, we're talking the whole of Australia.
[00:07:28] So in some places, it actually did rain, a little bit at times, but not enough to soak in and refresh the groundwater. Records are very sketchy. They're often not accurate. And no one knew anything about sort of the soil dryness index.
[00:07:45] But we do have so many vivid indicators of how bad things were, that more than a metre of topsoil was lost in that period from the farming areas that have been mentioned. That over and over in the newspapers, you see that Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane be covered in red dust.
[00:08:15] So thick, you actually have to dig through it to actually get to your garden. That ships at sea during the day wouldn't be able to keep on going because there was no visibility, because the soil was growing away. That in Melbourne, on so many days as well, you couldn't go anywhere because of the thickness of the soil that was growing away. You had rabbits.
[00:08:43] You did not have the refrigeration and transport today. But mostly, too, we didn't have the protective gauze. So things excavated. Excavated. And even in the drought, too, I think you write that we faced increased fire hazards and even diseases through this drought that disrupted the whole society and economy. Yes. From polio to baku rot, etc.
[00:09:14] Diseases, a lot of diseases like Pallagra associated with non-nutrition, including starvation. So farmers, for example, could not afford to pay their shearers or their workers as much. They lowered what you got per sheep. Shearers couldn't lead on that. It goes to the shearer strike. That led to the Labour Party and also agitation for a federation.
[00:09:38] Well, that is interesting, isn't it, how the drought, I guess, by your story, emphasizes to us that that, in a sense, first and foremost hit the people who are out farming. And, of course, there are a lot more people out on the land relatively compared to the city perhaps then.
[00:09:55] And, as you say, this, through an interesting chain of causality, led to the formation of more militant workers' organizations and the trade union movement, which, in a sense, underpinned the growth of – was one of the elements underpinning the growth of federation, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
[00:10:12] You've also got people like Henry Parks, constitutional lawyer, but a lot of businessmen, realizing that Australia would be in a far better trade position, being able to lobby as one nation, rather than individual states competing with each other. Getting rid of the trade barriers between the states would mean, if it got easier for the economy, there'd be a lot less paperwork.
[00:10:38] Standardizing the railway gauges, et cetera, simply as a way to survive economically. And remember, by the 1890s, there were soup kitchens in all of the major cities. Banks were going bust, and when banks go bust, it meant that people richly lost everything they had put into – So this severe economic depression that you're describing, in a sense, too – Extraordinary, yes.
[00:11:08] The times that Henry Mawson wrote about, where women and children were starving. His wonderful poem, Past Caring, about a woman on the land like that. But also Henry Mawson's stories, which aren't as well known as his poetry now, paint this extraordinarily vivid picture of what life was like in the films.
[00:11:32] Particularly, child labor in places like what he called Grinders, Grinders Abbey. Because of much cheaper to employ children rather than adults. So there was an enormous child employment and adult unemployment. But children as young as eight worked in factories where literally they never saw blue sky.
[00:12:01] They worked every day except Christmas. In some cases, they weren't paid in money. They were simply fed something like bread and jam. Often they didn't give until they were 20. They skipped on the dirt floor of the factories. They were wizened and malnourished. There are a lot of paintings of some children in their rags that you'll find of that period.
[00:12:23] And it was because of this that groups like the women's suffrage and the women's temperance movements gained so much strength in Australia. Now, it's very easy to poke fun at the ladies of the temperance movement. As people who didn't want anyone to have a drink or sex or a good time. But on the contrary, they had a very, very good case.
[00:12:52] When things are very bad, it is very tempting to turn to alcohol. There was no breathalyzer or anything like that then. It was quite common, even celebrated in songs like Pecto the Shears, that a man would actually get his pay. And then the first pub would come to, then we'll have a spree. And anyone who comes along is come and drink with me. I'm forgetting, of course, that that Shearer was supposed to be sending a large part of his pay back to his family.
[00:13:20] So kids were literally starving. They were working in factories. And the women of the suffrage and temperance movements, yes, they wanted the vote for women. They wanted things like women to be able to have custody of their children if there was a divorce. But one of the things they were most passionate about was abolishing child labor and universal education.
[00:13:49] And they thought that if women had the vote in a new federal parliament, then those scores would be passed. Because women, being more compassionate, would vote for things like that. So it seems like on your telling that the drought, which went through for this considerable period of time and across the country, really put a huge stress on the whole fabric of the society and the economy.
[00:14:16] And politicians reacted in one way, unions reacted in another. And you've got this strong social reaction, too, from the temperance and suffrage women's movement. I mean, underlying that seems to be a certain element of idealism and hope placed in federation as some sort of way to a better life out of the sort of life that they could see exposed by the drought. Is that the story? Look, I think very much it is.
[00:14:44] It's very difficult for us to even imagine how horrendous it was. You can romanticise swaggies walking the roads. But in reality, these were lines of starving men walking the road, hoping to get a meal at the next farmhouse. And they were desperate. The families they left behind were desperate.
[00:15:06] It was quite horrendous. These days, look, at the moment, we're in a crisis. We've got a pandemic. But we've got government giving Social Security to ameliorate at least part of that. And we've got the hope of a vaccine. We've got the hope that science is going to come to help us with the bushfires.
[00:15:35] We were looking at things like helicopters, etc. Back then, you don't get a vaccine for a drought. There's no refrigeration. There's no piped water. There's no even air conditioning. In some areas, the death rate was up by 20% in some summers simply because of the heat. But in a time like that, you can have ideals.
[00:16:03] Ideals don't cost anything. You can have solidarity. The Shearers meeting together to form a union. The Labor Party getting together with ideals. The women of the suffrage movement. The women of the temperance union. Women like Louisa Lawson starting their magazines. These were things that required little or no money, but a great deal of idealism and hope.
[00:16:31] And planning and hoping for what is a possible better future is something that keeps you going. And yes, it was possible. It may have seemed impossible in 1880. But by 1901, they had actually done it. And one of the first, not the first goal, the first goal passed in Australia was to get rid of the Pacific Islanders working in Queensland and northern New South Wales.
[00:17:01] And that too was one of the reasons for federation. Yes, I should say that was yet another strand driven by this drought driven, if you like, depression, economic downturn. Listeners, Radio Northern Beaches, I'm speaking with our guest Jackie French, one of the very best known Australian authors of fiction and non-fiction documenting the stories and history of our country and its natural history.
[00:17:28] And her wonderful book, Let the Land Speak, a history of Australia and how the land created our nation. We're particularly discussing about the impact of the great drought, federation drought on the creation of a nation in the form of federation of the six colonies. Yes, you were mentioning, Jackie, about the workers. Yes, there was. So there was a lot of unemployment. And on the one hand, the unions developed and the strikes.
[00:17:53] But there was a concern about the immigration, wasn't there, on the basis that people would come over and take the jobs that weren't there. And that was an important strand that went through the federation movement and into white Australia beyond, didn't it, for a long time? Yes. Yes. I mean, the Pacific Islanders, sometimes they knew what they were doing. Often they did not know when they signed the labor contracts. In fact, a lot couldn't write. So just put their mark there.
[00:18:17] Once they got to Australia, they were paid only a very small fraction of what someone else would be paid. But in many cases, they weren't even paid that. It was slave labor. And there was an argument. There was an enormous fuss when it looked as though the federal government was going to pass the law that would expel all Pacific Islanders,
[00:18:44] including those who'd actually been born in Australia and lived here all their lives. There was an enormous fuss about that because the owners of the sugar plantations and, to some extent, the banana plantations, claimed that it would be impossible to grow sugar in Australia if they had to pay standard wages. They could only do it with the Pacific Islander small wages or no wages.
[00:19:13] That, in fact, turned out not to be the case. In fact, it thrived with regulated wages. And what about the role of the Chinese in all this at the time? Because there'd been a lot of Chinese come across for the gold rush years that were good, that fed the land boom and the speculative boom. What happened at this point when the drought hit also with the Chinese? That's very difficult to work out.
[00:19:38] The argument was that the Chinese would actually work for much smaller wages. I can't actually find much evidence of that. What you do find evidence of is that the Chinese were actually extremely good business people, furniture factories, other factories. Certainly with market gardens, a lot of towns simply would not have survived without the market gardeners
[00:20:01] because the Chinese were experts at irrigation and gardening with very, very small water resources. It seems more likely that, in fact, it was Chinese competition that people were more worried about. But, again, as I said, it's actually very difficult because there don't seem to be statistics. And there was a heck of a lot of rhetoric at the time.
[00:20:30] Though, added to that, not in all areas. I mean, the area I live in, the Bradwood area, the Namchongs, for example, were extraordinarily valued members of the community and providing a lot of employment to many people. So, when we talk about racism, it's worthwhile remembering in Australia that it wasn't in every place at every time.
[00:20:57] There have been periods and places that were surprisingly non-racist. And an important strand that you've alluded to of the stress that was manifest out of the great drought was economic, as you alluded to briefly earlier, and did lead, particularly from the politicians and the states,
[00:21:20] to an awareness that economically, perhaps, they could operate a lot more efficiently as a single nation than as six states. They all had tariffs and excise duties on business between their states, didn't they? And so, how did this issue manifest and resolve itself under the stresses? I think, reading the newspapers, when you said it was an ideal, I think that is exactly what it was.
[00:21:50] Rationally, economically, federation was a very, very good thing. But voters often don't vote entirely for economic, rational reasons. And to federate, there were enormous barriers. There had to be a referendum in every state to agree to join the union. And before there was a referendum, there had to be petitions getting enough signatures.
[00:22:17] And this was a problem, because while for a lot of people it's one for ideal, most people, I think, were just simply trying to get by. They weren't politically interested. And that's where the women of the suffrage and the temperance movements came in. And I've got some of their newsletters. And they're glorious. They are fascinating.
[00:22:44] Except in South Australia, where women did have the vote, very unusually for the planet, women weren't allowed to sign the petitions to call for a referendum. But they could collect signatures. And looking at these newsletters, they came up with a plan. The women would go to pubs only with their hat pins. And those hat pins were important. And they would wait until the men were too drunk to know what they were signing.
[00:23:14] And they got tens of thousands of signatures. We're very happy to think of being the sons and daughters of Henry Park's constitutional lawyer, the father of Federation. But for every speech Henry Park gave, the women of the temperance and suffrage movements gave a hundred or a thousand. And they were the ones out there with their hat pins collecting those signatures. And they did it.
[00:23:42] And so, yes, there was an enormous amount of misery. But I think it was more that idealism and the dreams of a few people that carried it. Yes, as you say, driven perhaps out of a sense of desperation and awareness by, I think it's a wonderful story you tell about the very important role, not often or usually recognized, of the mothers of Federation in the way you've been speaking, as distinct from the fathers, who perhaps we do speak about, but not as often even in practice.
[00:24:08] I got a lot of that from my grandmother and my great-grandmother. You do? And my great-grandparents. Oh, yes. They lived through all that. Well, great-grandmother did, but great-grandmother did. And great-great-grandmother did. Yes. And they also, of course, had stories of their mothers who were absolutely passionate about Federation. It would be idealistic that when women got the vote in a new federal parliament, things would change.
[00:24:37] But as we move to the end, that's right. You've got a phrase there or subheading, dreams, the dreams came true, brackets, but still no rain. But still no rain, and in fact, still a lack of opportunities, and still, in fact, I think it wasn't until about the 1970s that there seems to be any evidence that women voted differently from their husbands.
[00:25:03] Getting female suffrage doesn't really seem, until you got the women's electoral lobby, and women having more independent guys to their own. It didn't really change politics terribly much, I think. Nor did it bring rain. Nor did it bring instant economic relief. It was that widespread rain. Around about, by August 1903,
[00:25:33] most areas of Australia had had enough sustained rains. The problem with rainfall records is that you may have got, well, 60 inches back then of rain in a year. But if it falls all in two days on hard, packed ground, the soil won't be wet. In fact, it will just cause a lot of damage. The thing you really need to look at is the soil dryness index.
[00:26:00] Yes, it just runs off and floods and erodes. Oh, yes. I still remember when the 78 to 83 drought broke here, in this monstrous storm on the 1st of January 1983. You couldn't breathe outside. The rain was so heavy, it built up even on a slope to about a metre, even on flat ground to a metre. I've never seen rain like it.
[00:26:29] It lasted for about an hour and a half. And then when we went outside to actually try and dig drains in case more rain came, the ground was still dry. There was only about a millimetre of wet soil. And underneath, it was still too hard and dry to be able to dig a drain. There was a massive flood, but no wet soil. Now, as we move to conclude here on Radio Northern Beaches, because time always runs out on us,
[00:26:58] it seems to me anyway, just as we're getting into some sort of stride. But you have some wonderful words by conclusion of your chapter about how drought gave us one nation and a federation. And we've talked about elements of that. But your conclusion, or one of them seems to be along the lines of, we need to listen to our land. We can understand it. If we listen to the land, we can understand the past, but we need to listen to it for our future. Is that your message in this?
[00:27:29] Well, at the moment, we're in the middle of an entirely predictable pandemic. In fact, I do predict it, and it's vector in Bedford-in speak. We have had, we're only at three months of extremely well-predicted bushfires. As we saw with federation, politicians can't make a gore to make it rain. They can, however,
[00:28:01] that will lead to the bushfires, and also to things like the pandemic we have got at the moment. The pandemic we've got at the moment is because we have got too many humans. Humans moving into wild animal habitat, humans eating wild animals. It is so much easier now for these diseases to pass from animals to another animal to human beings and spread.
[00:28:29] We're seeing not just more pandemics, but more different pandemics as this one is. And it was the same with the bushfires. These were the worst, probably, that the nation of Australia has seen, and we have seen some duties. And yet, they were predicted and governments reacted by decreasing the funding to the bushfire organisations and brigades
[00:28:59] and decreasing the numbers. And I have to say, we still have not actually seen anything get any better. Well, Jackie, as I say, I think, thank you very much for sharing your wonderful perspective with us from your book, Let the Land Speak, How the Land Created Our Nation, in particular, about the important role that the Federation drought had in stirring the society, the economy, the politicians into significant change and hope and idealism
[00:29:29] through the creation of Federation. And I hope that we can learn to listen to our land as you advocate. Thank you for joining us on Radio Northern Beaches. It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Don't forget to follow, like and share. Stay safe and I'll catch you next time.