36 The Inland Starts Here Part 2
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Part 2: The Jones brothers, inspired by Col Stanton, are introducing erosion control, land interventions at Boogardie Station, out of Mt Magnet, in WA. As Henry gets serious about documenting the work, Amanda finds synergies between the Jones and the Pollocks efforts on Wooleen Station. She gives voice to the conviction that coming generations in the Southern Rangelands will be able to run livestock businesses that are successful on economic and ecological grounds - if the Government holds its nerve and opens up the public purse to support landscape repair.
COL AND THE HEAVY MACHINERY
It was a revelation for Henry and John to see how Col worked the land. Col is hands on - he has spent a lifetime working with dozers and graders in arid land and endeared himself to both of the men by jumping without fuss or comment on the Jones’ beloved and antique heavy machinery. He worked with rough strokes directly on the land, pushing soil around to demonstrate the kind of earthworks needed to slow and direct water flow.
In the years since Col left, Henry and John have refined what they learnt from him. By applying the principles he demonstrated, they taught themselves how-to pick-up dirt over a big area, gathering a delicate shaving of topsoil that could be shaped into earth mounds at intervals across the road without creating marks that could turn into gullies down the track.
Earthworks at Boogardie Station
They learnt to keep the water high in the landscape – and to take the velocity out of the flow in incremental steps. They designed mounds so that water hit these impediments, lost speed and was directed to spill gently and harmlessly over large areas. Practise has enabled them to judge how high and wide dirt mounts need to be. They try not to create ‘speed humps’ that are annoying impediments to a fast passage down a dirt road, but introduce smaller interventions at closer intervals to take the sting out of the water flowing down a slope. Any vegetation taken out in the creation of a road or fence-line is used to pack gullies, adding another chance for water to settle, sediment to drop and plant life to take hold.
GETTING ONES EYE IN
This is flat land scattered with big granite rocks outcrops - staring out at the ever-distant horizon it is hard for the uninitiated to work out which way the ground slopes. After I left the station and sat down to look at the dozens of pictures I took I realised I didn’t take any of the many earthworks the brothers had constructed. I think this was a measure of my confusion, my inability to see this landscape as Henry does, in 360 degrees, in 3D, as a series of intersecting plains. You need to get your eye in.
Henry told me they used a laser to judge levels in the land, but quickly found it was much faster to do it by eye, and they found themselves in agreement about what needed to be done in terms of moving earth and placing interventions.
John and Henry work in tandem. Henry has become the dozer operator. He knocks out vegetation and creates rough banks leaving John to follow up; doing the polishing work with the grader, smoothing surfaces, shaping mounds. They also use a drag – an old steel grid dragged behind a ute that helps to smooth areas and dig up roots snapped by the dozer and for extra compaction run a multi-wheeled road roller over areas to simulate lots of heavy traffic.
BIGGER WIDER ROADS
A big part of their new approach to road and fence building is to make the roads they amend or construct wide enough to get away from the two-wheel ruts that lead to compaction and carve deep wounds into the land. So all the roads they re-make will avoid the creation of grooves that shortened the life of many a narrow bush track from the past.
JUST ADD WATER
The Murchison has not seen much rain for the last three seasons. After a morning spent checking out earthworks, I commented to Henry that they needed a really good downfall to test their erosion control techniques. He stated: We’re quietly confident.
It’s all a learning curve. He and John are keen for a big rain so they can get out on country to see how their earth interventions hold up - to learn how to improve the work that might be vulnerable to wash out, or simply in need of a bit of a tweak.
THE MINING ADVANTAGE
It is advantageous for the Jones’ that they have strong connections with the mining industries that operate on their doorstep. On one huge, scoured plain we stopped to look at a zone where plant debris was pushed up and lying behind a long parallel line of slatted boards. ‘Some kind of privacy fence to do with employee dongas’, Henry explained. ‘We have about a 100 of them’ and they are likely to all be repurposed to do landscape work. And they were working. Despite an extremely dry season on top of several dry seasons, small saltbushes were pushing their way up between the slats. Maybe the goats and roos didn’t fancy treading on the boards to get a feed – either way, this patch was a vigorous endorsement of Henry and John’s methods.
With help from the local mines and their ‘waste’ material
Salt bush, signs of life
THE PRACTICAL PERSPECTIVE
After a few days with Henry I started to see where he was coming from…while I was banging on about rehydrated landscapes, the trapping of water, biodiversity and ground cover etc, I saw how functional and effective his way of approaching the solutions to the problems of erosion is. The roads are the crucial infrastructure on the station. Without workable roads, without clear and easy access to water sources, paddocks, different parts of the station and access between stations – the whole operation is rendered a lot more inefficient, even dysfunctional.
Earthwork interventions on roads are also great in terms of a fast feedback loop. You get pretty quick results that can then be adjusted as rain events and vehicle use test what has been done.
And it is also a manageable way of dealing with a problem that could easily be considered overwhelming. To look out over tens of thousands of acres and hundreds of eroded spots ranging from small scratches in the earth to ravines that could easily house a truck - is to be daunted.
The task of fixing erosion on Boogardie and Murram Station is analogous to that old joke – how do you eat an elephant, in this case, a herd of elephants?
One bite at a time.
THE JONES’ DREAM
Looking at the program they have set up, within a few years, not only will the Jones’ and the others involved in building this hub have excluded wild dogs and unwanted grazers from their paddocks, they will also be seeing improvements in fertility as water stays longer on the land and plant, insect and bird diversity is re-established.
No one really knows what this country is capable of delivering when under a management system that enhances natural ecosystem services. This will be a chance for the land to develop resilience against the inevitable floods and long dry periods that mark the seasons of the Rangelands. And it will hopefully usher in a new era of research and monitoring that reflect a changed attitude to practises that are about using grazing animals as tools to manage grasses and plants in an arid landscape.
ALL MARKS MATTER
Col Stanton’s teaching was about “constructing roads that don’t become tomorrow’s creek’. Henry is quick to point out that it is not just ‘roads’ that can become tomorrow’s creeks. The land carries the scars of historical use - thousands of criss-crossing tracks, and it is not always possible to know what caused the damage or when it happened.
Henry points out that a water course he and his brothers played in as children might have been caused by a horse and cart taking supplies to a fencing crew over a 100 years ago. In this brittle landscape he knows that all marks matter, and is keen to make sure that what he and John build in the way of infrastructure will not become a headache for future Jones’.
To this end Henry has an eye on some markers on the station that will be useful as a teaching tool to indicate generational damage. A gate put in by his father in the 1960s, before Henry and John were born, now dangles in mid-air, its concrete footings exposed, as it opens over an eroded gully deep enough to bury a few cars in.
Henry Jones Snr, 1960’s gate and failed roads
DOCUMENTATION
Henry is getting serious about documenting the erosion work. Michael is a friend who owns a drone and camera and is interested in supporting the project. Henry and Michael have started placing old tyres marked with white paint in spots that will direct the taking of ‘before’ and ‘after’ footage of the earthwork interventions as the seasons progress.
He and John are convinced that it is entirely feasible to repair and rehydrate the Rangelands – they are living the solution and want to get the pictures together to prove that what they are doing, works. Ultimately, Henry hopes to be able to persuade the Government that this is a project worthy of access to the public purse.
WHO PAYS?
Some of Henry’s arguments intersect with David Pollock’s observations concerning ecological and financial restoration solutions laid out in his recent book, The Wooleen Way.
Mulga country
Both men put forward compelling arguments for public money to be used to fix the problems faced by land managers in the Southern Rangelands. The solutions are there and being successfully modelled, but it is unrealistic to expect a handful of pastoralists to revitalise a region crippled by ecological and economic problems – all while trying to keep their head above water, financially.
David uses the Fishing Industry as an example where good governance has helped protect fish stocks, ocean health and created sustainable industries – good stewardship needs to be supported in the Rangelands so all Western Australians can reap the benefit of an area the size of France being returned to health and productivity. (I am not doing David’s book justice – read it to get a good overview of a potential way forward for the Rangelands)
THE WOOLEEN WAY
David also backs Henry’s observation that part of the problem about recognising ecological damage has been that it has happened incrementally over generations.
A deterrent to facing the ecological damage David addresses, is the neglect that the Rangelands has suffered under successive governments who have stripped the relevant departments of funds needed to maintain monitoring, research and the development of management strategies for ecological health. David’s research also reveals how on-country bodies set up to oversee the health of the Rangelands; the Pastoralist & Graziers Association and the Pastoral Land Board have not lived up to their mission statements. In many cases, especially to do with goats and wild dog management, they have opted for short term gain over ecological health, as they struggle to support their own pastoral businesses in a climate of ever falling returns.
THE LAND OF PLENTY EROSION
There is still a mindset out there that both Henry and Dave talk about – those of the ‘old school’ who believe that the problems the Rangelands are experiencing now are all caused by drought.
With hindsight, Henry sees that bumper seasons he experienced as a young man on Boogardie in the 1990s could be said to have created a false economy. Big rains produce plenty of feed and water for stock and potentially, financial profit. But summer rain events also exacerbate the problems huge rains bring to land already showing the gauges and barren areas of unaddressed erosion. A good season can bring carpets of everlastings and an incredible explosion of annual greens giving the impression of a wild abundance - while hiding the structural damage.
Signs of life - returning ground cover to a scoured plain
For Henry and John, a new sensitivity to the land they are responsible for has bought with it a sense of disbelief that they were blind to the damage that has been done by infrastructure built without a knowledge of landscape function. Henry is adamant: he thinks it should be mandatory that anyone taking up a pastoral lease should have access to the heavy machinery necessary to begin the work of landscape repair that is essential to rebuilding the economic and ecological viability of the Rangelands.
The best part of all this is that after years of living with the problems endemic to the Rangelands John and Henry can now see solutions and the way ahead.
Henry and the small crew working out of Boogardie, Edah, Murrum and Mumbinia station are trying something different in the Southern Rangelands. Like the Pollocks at Wooleen Station, they are working hard to restore and rehydrate huge tracks of land that ultimately belong to all West Australians – they need your support.
AFTERWORD
There’s an afterword here. I had a break while recording this story and browsed through the local newspaper, the Midwest Times. A headline, Taking Fences to Wild Dogs, caught my eye. It announced the completion of the first 50 kms of 360 something kms of fence to enclose 800,000 hectares of pastoral land in the West Gascoyne. And mentioned that The Rangelands Cell Fencing program, backed by State and Federal funding, was also supporting three other pilot cells in the Murchison and the Goldfields.
Hallelujah, let’s hope this news heralds the start of something good, not just for Rangeland’s sheep enterprises, but also for land that supports them.
Blue wren near Henry’s camp
